Last updated: 5 April 2026
I've been very interested in and activated by (in good ways) others' writing a lot in the last few months, so I want to start keeping a list of some of the pieces that have affected, radicalized, aroused, or taught me the most.
Read This Shit Right Now On the Internet
Against Safety/Towards Bleed - The Garden Below- about the dangers of safety in transfemininity and tabletop gaming
The Palette Grid - Jay Dragon - what if safety tools were good?
Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning - Eclipse Dot Gay - incitement to make unapologetically horny games. This follow-up post builds on it; read both.
Priestess - Gray Levesque - very lyrical and trans short story. There's a lot of good stuff published in The Temz Review (including this) but I think this is my favorite piece from it so far.
Go Buy This Shit in Book Form (or Loan from Your Library) And Read It
I Hope We Choose Love - Kai Cheng Thom - essay collection covering transfemininity, "mental illness", racism, queer and activist spaces, and more. Her fiction is also very good.
Bad Habit - Alana S. Portero - the novel that has, to date, gotten the strongest emotional reaction from me.
Stag Dance - Torrey Peters - short stories & novella, all extremely transfem from wildly different angles, all extremely good.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed - Mariana Enriquez - very Argentine short stories. All her collections are great, but this is my favorite.
The Collected Schizophrenias - Esme Weijun Wang - nonfiction about living with our culture's most stigmatized "mental illness."
How to be an Antiracist - Ibram X Kendi - I feel like this is mainstream enough I probably don't need to platform it, and it looks like low-hanging fruit to say "look how woke I am!" but it did really leave a mark on my worldview; the emphasis on judging systems and beliefs over individuals. And if you're white and haven't examined your white fragility at all, it's a very (too?) gentle first step toward fixing that.
Before Gender - Eli Erlick - nonfiction about trans people alive between 1850-1950, pretty much all of whom were fully erased by history for reasons that I'm sure aren't evil at all. It also covers MULTIPLE trans-led riots pre-stonewall. Effie Smith is my favorite, and my new role model.
Subject to Change (Anthology) - poetry by trans authors, mostly of color, along with interviews of them. Not all of them are my cup of tea but several are now among my favorite poets.
Read This Shit in Book Form, But It's Okay if You Pirate It Because It Was Written by a Cishet White Man (It's Still Good I Promise)
Crazy Like Us - Ethan Watters - Journalistic nonfiction about the irreparable harm the white supremacy and imperialism inherent to psychiatry and big pharma has done worldwide.
Saving Normal - Allen Frances - nonfiction; the author was the lead writer of the DSM-4 so he's awful and has many awful takes through the book (for example, "the DSM-4 was totally fine"), BUT it documents the ways things got even worse with the DSM-5 very thoroughly.
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber & David Wengrow - big long list of prehistoric and ancient cultures that were way less evil than what we've gotten stuck with today; a counter to the dominant narrative in archaelogy/anthropology/history etc.
Shardik - Richard Adams - the guy who wrote Watership Down wrote a fantasy epic for grownups. No speculative elements, big fuckoff bear, child slavery, what more could you want?
Jerry Cornelius series - Michael Moorcock - My favorite Moorcock books, even above Elric (where this blog's namesake comes from). It's like if James Bond was severely fucked in the head and extremely queer, and with pornographic illustrations.
The Prisoner - Patrick McGoohan - yes it's a TV show; it's important to me, shut up. Extremely 60s, weird allegorical sci-fi, way ahead of its time and our time. Watch it, then watch the documentary so you can understand why I'm crediting this show to one guy, and worry for me that I relate to him so much.
Collected Works of Otto Gross - understanding academic writing from the 1910s is almost impossibly hard, even as someone who loves long, pretentious words. But I've persevered because Gross was one of the founders of psychoanalysis, as influential as Jung from what I can tell, but he's been erased from the history of the field for being a communist about it. He's far from blameless, but fascinating, and he does have some good takes. I hate him way less than Freud, Jung, Rogers, et al for sure.
Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges - Borges was Latino, but he's dead so you don't need to worry about pirating him. I dunno what to say other than that his work is deeply weird in wonderful and influential ways. And he conveys a love of books that is very specific and relatable.
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino - fiction without narrative; just sheer weird imagination.
