Writing badly journal

is a new journal of letters on the topic of transmisogyny and transfeminism.

Writing badly magazine

is by and for trans women.

Badly writing journal

is a titular invitation to ask what transfeminist writing practices could be, an invitation to an écriture transféminine, an insistence on occupying position as literary method. is an invitation to transfeminine studies. is an invitation to a transfeminist philosophy. is a belief in the fruitfulness of trans female subjectivities. is a home, with posterity, for transfeminist texts. is the paper branch of a transfeminist movement.

Badly writing magazine

is next released in print on March 20th, 2025.

We tried hard to issue positive invitations, defining what we’re about without saying what we’re not about. This came out of a well-intentioned desire to make space for a diversity of submissions. However, a clearer picture of what we’re about could emerge by saying what we’re not about. Here are some things we’re not about.

NOT

Water-based lubes.

HOT

Olive oil. Eating pussy the way a dog would eat a bruschetta.

NOT

Navel gazing the assumed radicality of trans.

HOT

Get real.

NOT

Trans inclusion in feminism debates.

HOT

Are any of you doing feminism?

NOT

Almost all writing about terfs.

HOT

Writing that thinks from here.

NOT

“People”

HOT

Women

NOT

This toilet has been temporarily liberated of gender.

HOT

Nothing is truly gender-neutral. Plus, it’s got piss on the seat.

NOT

Essays which are just long descriptions of the abuse of transgender women with like maybe a little bit of thought at the end.

HOT

Strategies for resistance, building resilient communities, for fighting back. Writing that makes any of that possible. Global, class-conscious perspectives.

NOT
Wrought personal naval gazing. Middle-class anxieties. White myopia.

HOT

*taping the James Baldwin sign* I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to be in direct proportion to their sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There's an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society.

Feel free to send us sad personal writing, but it needs a point. Do embodied practices of textualities. Do earnestness and love in suffering. Do something other than tell me the sky is falling because you don't know what to do at your first time being a broke minority.

NOT

Writing as performance of fear. Fear as suffering. Suffering as worth.

HOT

Writing as grieving. Grieving as the first touchstone of all liberations.

NOT

Terse text. Playing it straight.

HOT

Experimental writing. Building a practice. Relationships to writing that are exactly as weird as the trans women I know in person.

NOT

Photography. This is a text-centred journal. Apologies. This has more to do with money than it has to do with what we think about photography. We intend to do a photography issue one year but no schedule.

HOT

Scholarly work. Essays. Letters. Methods. Reports on transfeminist work. Poems. Prose. Drama. Experimental forms. Nonsense literature. Elegies. Dispatches. Anecdotes. Vignettes. Letters to the agony aunt.

NOT NECESSARILY NOT BUT NOT NECESSARILY HOT EITHER

Why are we like this? Why are they like that?

HOT
What happens when we try to change that? How can we change that? Strategies for resistance.

NOT NECESSARILY NOT BUT NOT NECESSARILY HOT EITHER

Why are we like this?

HOT
Writing that gives avenues to care and be cared for as trans women.

NOT

Conceptual analysis until my eyes turn square.

HOT

Materialism

NOT

Oh but one more abstraction…

HOT

Strategies for resistance.

NOT

Water this. Hydrated that.

HOT

Mug of tea at the gym :)

NOT

“I wouldn’t call myself a feminist because [several lines of ‘sometimes they’re mean to me’]”

HOT

Feminism because the world still turns on exploited reproductive labour and all the guttural violence to enforce that. Antiracist because the walls of Fortress Europe and all its guttural violence are still everywhere.

NOT

Things that could conceivably be published under the generic heading of “trans.”

HOT

Things a trans publication would not touch with a barge pole.

NOT

Gorpcore.

HOT

The same clothes but styled to look like a lesbian at a climate camp and not a 30-year-old marketing middle manager who jacks off to the idea of living in Colorado.

NOT

Instagram, Bluesky

HOT

My love looks so amazing in the light of the blue sky that is outside.

NOT

Rights and access as liberation. Trans box on the census. An ever-closing envelope of gazes and administration.

HOT

No, like seriously, why has trans entered into something like a Foucauldian biosubjecthood like this and right now, and can we do feminist materialist analysis about this (beyond Jule Gill-Peterson’s brief essays The Cis State, which, in reference to this question, feel fundamental but incomplete). What does it mean that this has come (at least in major cities and online communities in the first world) with a personal-politic separatist turn amongst trans people? Like every grouping of women on earth we should be asking; how, and why are these our men? How did they become our men?

NOT

Asking your mum’s new boyfriend for advice.

HOT

Asking the WBM agony aunt for advice.

NOT

Keeping the peace. Playing nice.

HOT

Having a bad attitude.

NOT

Employment

HOT

Thinking about Tracy Chapman’s shoulders.

NOT

She used to be a man. Isn't that weird?

HOT

“Across” (as in across sex, trans-gender) is the most overtrodden (and perhaps least interesting) preposition in a transfeminist relationship to space and spatiality. If you want to talk about crossings and transfeminism then (like everyone else), I have a gender fundamentally coloured by coloniality and that is a much more original starting point for thought than how much I was a man, and how much that’s changed. (Leah Tiger’s The Gender Refugee is perhaps a first point of departure, for the sincerely interested).

NOT

Oh, well I read some opinionated copy from the head editor and I disagreed with it so I’m not going to submit.

HOT

Hi WBM, I want a different editor for my great piece which I’m attaching to this email.

NOT

I couldn’t possibly send off this piece until it’s perfect and to be perfect I need to read everything relevant to it that’s ever been written and I can’t write it until I do that and think about the pieces and *never does anything*

HOT

Hi WBM, I understand the level of scrutiny in the outside world for trans women who dare to have opinions is insane, and have allowed myself to get over that and be wrong amongst friends in a safe environment. I understand that you’ve worked very hard to make a form of publication which counters that. As such, I attach my goat essay from my chad mind. (How do you do fellow kids). I spent one day on it rather than several weeks because getting a first draft down is 100 times more important than literally anything else. I await your feedback eagerly because I understand that all of the editors at WBM will not monster me or talk down to me.

NOT

Middle-class t-girls moving to the big city and becoming willing gentrifiers.

HOT

Big bushels of herbs from the arab grocers. Estates. Bumpkins. Ends. Rednecks. Teuchters. Culchies. Edgelands. West Belfast. Small city drag queens. Sink estates. Schemes. Border squatters. Sink estates. Marshes. Margins. Insolence. Chavvy transgender women. The working class.

NOT

More personal writing about your transition.

HOT

As a trans woman, the fact I have transitioned (or am transitioning, or maybe most accurately am designated as a transitioner) is perhaps the least interesting part of my life and perhaps the least productive lens under which to consider my class and personhood. All groupings dependent on sex, including where to change it, must be under profound scrutiny as (actual) feminists. There’s no embargo on submissions about transition per se. However, sincerely hold ‘transition’ as a concept to account; why is it here, what is it doing, and who is it serving? The answer to the lattermost is rarely transfeminist consciousness. Dysphoria too. Can we think about these words - clinical words - in other ways? What are their material effects on transgender women? Does trans serve to obfuscate, rather than reveal? Ask yourself seriously: does the liberation of trans women necessitate a trans negativity? A philosophy of rejection of the conceptions of trans and its downstream ideas, in pursuit of materialist outlooks and real change? Who and what am I annoying when I say I am a trans woman, but I am not trans.

NOT

Oh, but a little bit of fluffy and conventional writing about transition wouldn’t hurt.

HOT

No seriously, philosophers have hummed and hah’d for yonkey’s dears about what what a trans epistemology could be. Most recently Matthew J. Cull -an advocate for ‘pluralism’ in gender, rather than abolition or KYLR-ing - called quits on what he saw as multiple failed attempts at trans epistemology. But why should a trans epistemology have even worked? Sex was never a level playing field, and transitions are not equal and opposite movement, and disparate trans peoples have little materially shared history: why should have a big-tent trans epistemology have worked? It seems contrary to the grain of feminist epistemologies and what gender is (or perhaps, what trans isn’t).

NOT

in/out lists

HOT

hot/not lists

NOT

European ethical logics

HOT

Revenge

NOT

Apologies that you’re not an academic.

HOT

Apologies that you’re an academic. Anti-institutional politics. Ignatievian treason.

NOT

Apologies.

HOT

Putting your head above the parapet.

-Head Editor xoxoxo