Brevity’s 75th Issue: Transgender, Gender-Nonconforming, and Gender-Expansive Experience

Announcing Brevity’s 75th issue, available to read on our site as of this morning! This themed special issue features essays by writers Lee Anderson, Nic Anstett, Kay Ulanday Barrett, KB Brookins, Rivka Clifton, Mac Crane, Atlas Desmond, Melissa Faliveno, Eric LeMay, Katherine Scott Nelson, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Ocean Wei, as well as two craft essays by guest editors Krys Malcolm Belc and Silas Hansen. These 14 brief essays and meditations form a constellation of contemporary perspectives that reflect what it means and how it feels to be transgender, gender-nonconforming, and/or gender expansive in today’s world.

We Are Universal mural, Kah Yangni, Philadelphia

Each essay is accompanied by a piece of Philadelphia artist Kah Yangni’s vibrant visual work. Yangni, a screen printer and a muralist whose art has been featured in a variety of magazines, picture books, and Pride campaigns, recently spoke to the Philadelphia Citizen about the mission of their art. There, they said: “When I make the posters celebrating trans people, those wind up in queer community spaces or published in queer magazines. For the most part, those are seen by people who already support the message. [But] my murals and billboards are in public, seen by everyone. I feel like I’m part of a bigger movement to make there be room for queers and room for Black and Brown people to live. There are artists like me, but also writers and thinkers and teachers and just people out in the world claiming space.”

Yangni’s statement about the necessity of claiming space rings so true to the intention of this issue. Though Brevity has always welcomed essays from a diversity of perspectives, in this contemporary moment when so many conservative, religious, “gender critical,” and other right-wing groups are attempting to legislate trans and gender-nonconforming people out of public life as well as to institute book bans targeting works by BIPOC and queer authors, we feel that now is an especially important time to create space for trans voices to speak and be heard.

It is such an incredible honor to feature this work in our pages, and we hope to publish many more beautiful essays by queer and trans writers in the years to come. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this special issue!

—Zoë Bossiere & Dinty W. Moore

Read the introduction to the new issue here: Welcome to Our Trans Experience Special Issue