Thanks, Luck, Curses, Goals, and Contents

♀ Editor ♀

Thanks to every trans woman I’ve met, read, known, or existed in the world with. Among other lessons, thanks to my mum, for teaching me to cultivate a disinterest in excusing men. Thanks to every woman since. Thanks to all our contributors, their submissions, their work in editing with us, patience, humility, earnestness, bravery, incredibly hard work and so on. Thanks to many friends with ears who have patiently listened to my takes about editing and typesetting; correct, benign, and incomprehensible alike. (Quotation marks are fascist.) Thanks to those dear friends who have sat with me with so many pieces, especially those who spent their entire New Year’s Day going through submissions and chilling with me. Thanks to Pauline and Hystériques & AssociéEs for letting us bring translated extracts to our audience and this issue. Thanks to Jacqui Shine for permission to be quoted extensively in Notes Towards a Transfeminist Consciousness Raising Circle. Thanks also to Professor Tauri for permission to be quoted extensively in Restorative Counter-Insurgency. Thanks to our donors, whose faith in this issue is a huge compliment. Best of luck to Miriam, who is starting her PhD journey, to the writers in this issue, and to the various projects which have crossed paths with this issue.

Curses to the cost of printing. Curses being a minority in an economy of scale. Curses to typesetting nerds. Curses to those who have devalued, scared off, made verboten or spoken over transfeminist interlocution in their milieu, and in doing so, killed off the Writing Badly-style journal that could’ve been made before this one. Curses to you for what that does to trans women, but, more pressingly to me at this moment, as I typeset 150 pages of disparate text, someone else could’ve done it earlier and saved me the job.

My prime role as editor is to find my replacement. I will be here for 2026, and hopefully for years after that. I hope to expand our pool of editors and writers, and that someone in there will have an interest in making me increasingly redundant. I hope I can get some good writers paid for good texts which wouldn’t be possible elsewhere. I hope to enact the wishes of the annual writers’ and editors’ meeting, who set the monetary plan for the issue they appear in in a cooperative-style; in this issue this means the sale-price being set by their consensus and a variable fee. I hope that, to the reader, I am good company for the ride, and an approachable voice to which letters may be written.

Reassessing the problems of transfeminist interlocution, we republish our Invitation to Submit for 2025. Pseudonymous Val Travesti’s article is in the first slot, People’s Army or Women’s Army, which is sure to reframe the latent marxisms of many readers.

French writer and translator Thalya, in Pauline Clochec and French Materialist Feminism, introduces us to Clochec’s work in new, invited English translations for Writing Badly. I’m super excited for the discussions this one will produce.

In Reading for Trans Women in Zadie Smith, Miriam takes us on an exciting journey through how transmisogyny has constructed theories of authorial intent, and reassesses how trans female readers should approach authorship. Beyond the questions of how a such-doubted people may read and be read, her response is an exemplary text of what I hoped for when I have written that [WBJ is] an insistence on occupying position as literary method. Is an invitation to transfeminine studies and so on.

A number of texts emerging from a growing Scottish transfeminist scene are presented here. In Presentation for The Third Masonry, I reprint a text given to welcome participant-facilitators of a transfeminist consciousness raising circle. Women on Paper, emerging from the second, presents the case for paper-based organising as transfeminists.

Shorter letters are bunched together in all their eclectic and brief passion, including some poetry I can’t, nor do I want to get out of my head. Shae Ross’s Letter After Two Nights in a Men’s Prison gives no space for liberal readings. Neither does Lucy’s Towards a Trans Negativity, which gives a powerful case for the reactionary character of trans, and the necessity of a philosophical and pragmatic trans negativity.

Beyond self-medication, Autumn reminds us that we are creative epistemic agents of our bodies. In A Transfeminist Hormone Routine, she gives a method and argues for more closely following menstrual cycles in hormone routines.

One of the lessons of female communists has been that it will come as a triumph of the domestic. In The Household, Jane approaches the centrality of the domestic to the communist project with fresh eyes, reassessing what a bachelorised people like ourselves should do when approaching household and community building.

Returning to consciousness raising directly, organising principles for transfeminist consciousness raising circles are given in the deeply story-logged Notes Towards A Transfeminist Consciousness Raising Circle. Autumn provides further guidance in Maison Rituelles.

In fiction, Anemone gives a vignette of a relationship stymied. Eye Contact is a look at barriers in knowing and being known as a trans woman which will no doubt be read and reread by many.

After one too many vegan “”””””curries”””””” at the “””””autonomous””””” space, “”””radical”””” space, and worse than going hungry, the horrible feeling that someone, invariably someone not-white, felt she ought to bring something good out of a mix of guilt and pity, I knew I had to print this one. Cooking for Community Events provides a fat bag of advice in the hope that the grunt work of community organising is less of a chore, and shared more fairly.

Writing with a strong voice and remarkable clarity, Restorative Counter-Insurgency. from the late sofie brings critiques of restorative justice into the scene in which she organised against abuse. It is presented with words in memoriam from her comrades.

I did not expect to have to ask myself questions about obituaries and posthumous publication, whether you can edit the work of the dead, and where the line between typesetting and editing is. After calls and emails I have been so thankful for, I was handed an obituary of our friend, Hayley Dunning.

Beyond the normal women’s aid set of questions for identifying abuse, Domestic Abuse of Trans Women collates experiences of trans and queer scenes to ask how we might better identify the abuse of trans women. It contains a number of challenges to scenes, and places abuse more firmly in social reproduction.

With incendiary extracts from her forthcoming book Androcide: The Politics of Betraying Manhood, in The Breakup, Sarah revisits the work of the fledgling trans movement and the histories it wrote, casting them in new lights to reveal deeper intentions.

Desiring a transfeminist method for health and community, I collate a number of questions for transfeminist organising in Questions Before Transfeminism. Finally, two pieces, Trans Girl Union, and Trans Women Need Power present an organising method I am excited to see in action. Have fun, and thanks for opening issue 1.

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I hope you enjoyed this extract from WBM#1 and I’ll see you on publication day, June 1st 2025. :)

- Editor xoxo