While oceans of ink paint trans women as a monstrous threat or pitiable curiosity, trans women themselves have often remained locked out of the publishing world as both writers and presumptive readers — spoken of but not to.
Traditional publishing can flatten the diversity of queer experience as a whole, homogenizing it for the benefit of presumptively cisheterosexual readers — the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey 3.0 reveals that over two-thirds of the industry’s workforce is cisheterosexual white women, and fewer than 1 percent are transgender. “Our stories simply don’t get published,” says M Zakharuk, a fellow author of lesbian fiction, of discussions she’s had with acquiring editors. “It’s quite common to give high-quality lesbian and transfem manuscripts an R&R—that’s ‘revise and resubmit’—and when they resubmit, do it again, and again, hoping the author gives up and you never have to explain yourself.” Some transfem authors may make it through this gauntlet — but in a hostile environment exacerbated by the overall high rates of unemployment, impoverishment, and disownment that trans women experience, it’s a difficult path.
In the face of these institutional barriers, online communities of trans women have turned to a powerful workaround: self-publishing. Online marketplaces have streamlined the process of making a manuscript available for sale — with print-on-demand even allowing authors to sell paper copies — while fandom spaces and informal publishing platforms like Scribble Hub and AO3 enable authors to find their audience or their niche much more easily than in the past.
Alyson Greaves, author of the transfem cult hit The Sisters of Dorley, talks about how crucial cultivating an engaged online audience has been to her success. “My first audience was in fandom,” Greaves says. “When I started publishing original fiction to ArchiveOfOurOwn, much of my fandom audience followed me and started to spread my fiction to their friends.” Using social media in this way to build an engaged, evangelizing audience proved vital to Greaves’ success.
Pegged as “dark academia”, The Sisters of Dorley is about a mysterious organization operating out of Dorley Hall that kidnaps “troubled young men” and forcibly transitions them in a torture dungeon as punishment — which is still better transition care than Britain’s NHS currently provides. Equal parts biting satire and character exploration, Dorley allows Greaves to portray aspects of transfeminine culture that rarely, if ever, receive any attention or reach. While this includes reflecting on the deleterious impact of existing in a transmisogynistic society, Dorley also gives space to transfeminine internality, to the psychological toll of growing up in a culture that refuses to name you as anything but a fetish or a monster, and the damage we suffer as result of denying ourselves our truth.
While still dependent on finding the right audience and community, there is nevertheless a certain degree of freedom in self-publishing to write about topics that would normally be subject to editorial mandates and mass-market trends. Callisto Khan, a fellow desi trans lesbian with some experience in acquisition teams, talked to me about how it can be challenging to publish something brand-new in an industry that insists on looking back.
“Even if they are open to transness, getting it past an acquisitions team requires really basic things,” says Khan. “I’d have to try to find a comp (a book published within the last couple of years whose sales represent a reasonable expectation of the new book’s sales). This is basically impossible to do with queer books in general as there aren’t enough of them in the market.”
Khan’s own first novel, The Zeus Constant, actually exists in a fictional universe, Gunmetal Olympus, created by other self-published queer authors, who allowed fans to monetize derivative works. Such a gesture is emblematic of the collaborative and communal nature of this space, because of how much online popularity relies on word of mouth, audience participation, and cultivating a strong sense of community and collective effort. Khan’s book was received well enough that she was invited to join the Gunmetal Olympus writing team in an official capacity to work on the upcoming installment, The Persephone Effect.
It can be challenging to publish something brand-new in an industry that insists on looking back
Gunmetal Olympus is a staggering beast of a universe, an eclectic merger of “feminist” Greek myth retellings with the mecha genre. It features an almost completely genderbent all-lesbian pantheon, who preside over a walled city besieged by monsters. Its first book, The Hades Calculus, is a retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone that makes Persephone the protagonist and grants her a degree of agency even modern retellings deny her.
“Oddly, a lot of Greek retellings these days somehow give their female characters less agency than Ovid did,” Khan tells me, discussing her approach to the genre. “Women become matrimonial prizes to fight over and sometimes contend with more sexual assault than the original myth featured! But it’s still called ‘feminist’ just because a woman is the POV character. Personally, I think a story needs to clear a higher bar than a female perspective to earn that label.”
Khan’s work seeks to directly deconstruct and challenge the tropes of mythological feminist revisionism set forth by writers such as Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller, rather than hewing to them as closely as possible for “marketability.” She thus benefits immensely from self-publishing’s lower barrier to entry.
A lower barrier to entry is also beneficial to non-Western queer people such as Khan and Zakharuk, whose stories and viewpoints are even harder to come by (though there is an outsize anglophonic bias). Zakharuk’s novel, Imago, is a “dystopian gothic” set in an authoritarian society trying to harness the poorly understood magic that underlies its world. Grisly murders, monstrous entities, and the body horror of human experiments plague its main characters, who are both nonbinary transmasculine lesbians.
Zakharuk, herself queer and Ukrainian, is drawing from a literary history that remains relatively obscure in the West, while at the same time grappling with her own culture’s attitudes toward gender, queerness, and noncompliance with mandates of heterosexuality.
“There is an insularity to Western stories—queer or not—that I find emblematic of things created from within empire, in that they do not envision themselves to be anyone’s Other and they operate within a shared language of tropes and styles they assume to be universal,” Zakharuk says. “It can be frustrating as someone outside of this cultural context to have your entire existence reduced to less than an afterthought.”
However, despite all the positives, self-publishing remains a difficult path to success. Many physical bookstores do not typically carry self-published books, and authors are left to do much of the legwork themselves, which includes securing covers, finding reviewers, finding proofreaders, and self-promotion. There’s no publisher to offer an advance on a book, taking on some of the financial risk.
“There’s often a degree of labour exchange between authors, including when it comes to editing,” Zakharuk explains. “It is possible to hire a freelance editor, but it isn’t financially feasible to do so for every project. Most people, if they do it, treat it as an investment with hopes of a book breaking big, or do so with hopes to improve as an author and avoid needing as much editing in the future.”
Zakharuk writes and promotes her work alongside a primary transfeminine writing collective, despite not being a trans woman herself. She also notes that even in self-publishing spaces, there is a degree of insularity and hostility that trans women have to contend with.
“I’ve observed that transfem authors are markedly absent from even most self-pub communities, and largely congregate in transfem-majority self-pub spaces,” she remarks. “It’s something that is treated as if it’s accidental and incidental, even though it’s obviously a replication of the same tendency that exists in all of publishing. I found myself in such a space by offering editorial help to a transfem author. I wasn’t deliberately angling for an invitation, but it seems the barrier for entry is caring at all.”
Commercial viability, already difficult to attain in traditional publishing, is also a significant concern for authors who self-publish. Several, such as Greaves, have adopted a serialized model, where they release their works on a chapter-by-chapter basis to paid subscribers on platforms such as Patreon. While this can provide a steady stream of compensation, it makes writers even more dependent on reader goodwill and word of mouth.
Greaves’ early audience, she says, “didn’t just comment on my work, but they followed me on social media, too, reblogging and retweeting and helping to grow my audience outside the fiction sites of AO3 and ScribbleHub.” A high level of grassroots marketing meant that Greaves didn’t have to pay for advertising and could more easily build a steady income.
“The barrier for entry is caring at all”
Such a model still does not mean marginalized authors have full control over their art. Authors exist at the whims of companies who own the online marketplaces where their writing is sold, as well as the social media platforms where it’s marketed. This leaves private corporations with the power to de facto censor content with no accountability, a fact that leaves trans and queer creators in a precarious spot.
Dr. Michael Ann DeVito, a professor of human-computer interaction, expert on social networks, and a trans woman herself, has studied how content moderation policies tend to negatively impact marginalized creators and specifically trans women, often working to silence and limit our visibility.
“There’s a solid body of research across Computer and Information Science that has demonstrated, over and over again, that marginalized folks like trans women face far more and far harsher moderation and censorship than most users across pretty much every major platform,” she says. DeVito studies how online platforms simultaneously moderate transfem users and creators harshly, while being more lax toward hate speech, harassment, and doxxing attempts directed at us that are explicitly against the rules. Trans women, routinely forced out of the formal economy, end up dependent on these hostile platforms that may arbitrarily destroy their livelihoods with little warning.
“The choice for trans women that need social media for the kind of visibility that helps build communities and provide career and creative opportunities is horribly stark: you either deal with the constant, traumatizing abuse, or you abandon all the work you’ve done and the goals you were pursuing,” DeVito concludes.
Now, even this access is in jeopardy. While trans existence has always been considered innately “sexual,” “obscene,” and “inappropriate for children” by conservatives, the attempts to legally enshrine this equivocation and effectively ban trans people from public life have escalated recently in both the US and UK. This has coincided with an intensifying moral panic about “children’s safety” that has seen payment processors compelling platforms like Steam and Itch.io to delist and censor queer content. While both platforms are best known for games, Itch.io is also home to a variety of self-published transfem books, several of which were pulled.
The reason that conservative regimes seek to limit and set the terms of discourse about marginalized populations is to control how we are perceived, to destroy our ability to organize, advocate, and seek community and solidarity. Trans women creators did not sign up to fight a reactionary anti-trans propaganda wave, but the intensifying anti-feminist and anti-queer sentiments mean that it is more vital than ever for our voices to be heard. It is an extraordinary feat to reach your audience despite every institutional barrier, yet the current political climate would indicate that this will only become more difficult in the future, not less.
