Are Straight Women Okay?

Performative heterosexuality will never not stun me into silence. And how? It’s an every day, all day experience. From a.m. to p.m., it’s engagement photos of women in camo training their rifle at their man buck this, and “lock up your daughters” bibs on your infant sons that.

But a stroll down the “his and hers” retail section will still have me on some Family Feud Steve Harvey levels of disbelief. I mean, “his and hers” towels I get. A piece of material that collects whatever excretes from a man’s skin even after he’s showered should never come in contact with another human being and I’m gonna need some stitching, some exclamations, maybe a marching band through the bathroom to alert me of one such towel. But y’all need gendered coffee mugs?

When you further investigate this phenomenon, as I did, things get real dark, real quick. The items themselves are worrying enough on their own as they reveal a prison of what women are allowed to be and should want, but then you dive deeper and the culture that lurks just behind these items reveals itself. I’ve seen the depths of this landscape and I need to ask a question: are straight woman okay? Like, not in a joking way — do they need assistance?

More specifically:

Straight women who buy this Husband and Wife Conversation Starter Game to play with the man you’ve married and have presumably known long enough to not need icebreakers but actually still do need icebreakers to engage in a conversation with the person you share a space with, are you okay?

Straight women who are married to men who need to buy a book called How Not To Be An A-hole Husband and Lose Your Wife in order to not be an a-hole, are you okay?

Straight women who so relate to the features this Inflatable Husband is meant to counter that it becomes a funny joke, are you okay?

Straight women for whom Sex Checks in order to maintain balance in the bedroom had in mind, are you okay?

Straight women who spend 31 days literally praying for a future husband, are you okay?

Straight women who are fine with less coffee because at least my husband’s cup fits into mine, are you okay?

Straight women who fetishize a trend of facial hair — that has been proven to contain ample amounts of fecal matter — and who prefer to spend their mornings looking at a man drinking out of a cup that says I LIKE HER BUTT, are you okay?

Straight women who maybe feel scared that being alone is the worst thing you could possibly be and so you confidently lean into the overbearing, possessive wife trope for some semblance of control in this increasingly terrifying world, are you okay?

ONCE FOR YES, TWICE FOR NO, LADIES!

If Women’s Magazine Covers Were Aimed at Queer Women, Pt. 3

Welcome back to covers of JKLAFGHD Mag, the Magazine for Women Who Aren’t Straight. Every so often we check in here to catch up on the latest not-straight trends, get updates on the not-straight classics, and check in with our favorite not-straight celebrities. Up next in our January through March issues are Hannah Hart, a carabiner and Sara Ramirez.

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January: Hannah Hart

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February: A Carabiner

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March: Sara Ramirez

PHOTO GALLERY: Queer in the Kitchen

Welcome to Queer IRL, a monthly Autostraddle community photo series that gathers little clips of lesbian, bisexual, queer and otherwise-identified women, trans and non-binary folks, just living our lives in 2017.

This very first gallery is Queer in the Kitchen. Nearly 200 of you sent in photos and boy are my arms tired! If I’ve learned anything, it’s that we are an incredibly attractive group of people with lots of cabinets and pets. Oh and that I’ve never loved you more.

I hope you scroll through these many, many pictures (all nine pages!) and feel like FUCK YES, WE ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE AND WE WILL NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT. And I hope you submit photos for the next gallery! (More on February’s theme and deadline soon.) Thank you so so much for making this a thing, you wild and wonderful weirdos.

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Rachel A. L. / 22 / Ithaca, NY / Psychology Lab Manager

“I really love my cow mat. I live alone, so I named her Genevieve.”

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Nani / 25 / Minneapolis, MN / Graphic Designer at Children’s Theatre Company; Art Director at Backroom Caracas

“The kitchen is also my library.”

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Casey / 28 / Vallejo, CA /  Music director, vocal teacher, registered yoga teacher, performer

“The best things to prepare in my kitchen are witchy salves and oils with my roommate, lots of tea concoctions, coffee so much coffee, and homemade vegan queso. Also it smells like so much cinnamon in there because of ants and because of never wanting to use chemicals! Winter time in the Bay Area!”

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Marie / 27 / Collingswood, NJ / Customer Service and Inside Sales Partner in Specialty Foods Distribution

“While I’m definitely super excited about those Compost Cookies I’m holding, my favorite dish to prepare has to be Eggplant Rollatini. I always feel like my Nanny and parents are right there with me as I put it all together.”

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Liz / 20 / Wellesley MA / Student

“I live in a coop on my campus with 13 other people, and I love making food to share with others. I just moved in here this year and was excited to host my annual Friendsgayving in a kitchen that felt like home.”

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Alysia Angel / 43 / Sacramento, CA / Director of Consumer Support at HealthSherpa

“I am a huge rage baker, when the systems and constructs of the world matched with the intense vibration of community woes press down on me. As of late I made cookies for the revolution, bourbon banana bread for hope, fruit pies to fuel upstarts to continue to rise up, and had a cookie decorating party for nothing other than because community and chosen family matters. I also cook savory meals in my kitchen, but baking is my passion, and it truly is one of my favorite ways to practice self care.”

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Megan / 30 / Minneapolis, MN / Raging Queer Feminist Homemaker

“My kitchen is the most inconvenient, undersized, poorly put-together and annoying room in my tiny home…and I love it. I’ve found joy in covering up its damaged walls and cupboards with wild colors, starting a spaghetti noodle collection on the chipped ceiling (you can see one or two in the photo, if you look close), and sitting down at our polka-dot covered table for crowded family meals saturated in love, laughter, fart noises, and political/social/feminist rants.”

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Dani Rose / 25 / Sunnyside, Queens / Assistant in the Entertainment Industry and Independent Filmmaker, Photographer, Burlesque Dancer on the side

“When I first saw a picture of my kitchen in a Naked Apartments listing, I immediately texted my boyfriend (I’m bi but in a relationship with a man) a picture of the wallpaper saying: “IT’S SO TACKY…. I NEED IT!” It was the first apartment we saw, and we moved in a few days later. We threw an ugly sweater party this past year and I have to say I think my wallpaper won the award for ‘ugliest.'”

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Jen / 27 / Hamilton, Ontario / Finally Not a Cashier

“I couldn’t boil a potato before my wife got her hands on me. I tell people my brain is like a well-stocked kitchen, where all the cabinets are open.”

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Megan and Alyssa Hillier-Geisler (That’s us in the picture in a popsicle frame on top of the fridge!) / 31 and 29 / Salt Lake City, UT / Innovation Manager and Communication Specialist (both at large non profits)

“Alyssa is an amazing chef with a stack of cookbooks a mile high and would be happy if she never ate the same thing twice. I basically make soup and horribly unhealthy things (all the salt, cheese, and spicy you can put together) that we call “bachelor food.” After 5 years of marriage and 4 years in SLC, we just bought our first house a few months ago. The house is microscopic so the kitchen and living room are one big room. We love that the two rooms we use the most are now together (meaning we can watch the Cubs play while we cook).”

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Sandra Londino / 41 / Ithaca, NY / Certified Nurse Midwife

“I really like cooking dishes with lots of ingredients. The more small bowls filled with chopped veggies and spices all around me, the happier I am.”

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Kait (human), Hercules (dog) / 27 (human years), 7 (dog years) / Indianapolis / Social Worker by day, Improviser by night.

“My favorite thing to do in the kitchen is to sautée EVERY DAMN THING.”

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Emma Grinde / 26 / Viroqua, WI / Food Scientist

“What this photo doesn’t capture is the smell of a hair tie burning on the bottom of my oven (how did a hair tie make it into my oven?!) and the sound of the fan trying blow away the burning hair tie smell.

PS – Like the anonymous question-asker in Some Answers to Some Things You’ve Been Asking Us #10, I didn’t know where to put my A+ sticker. I took Yvonne’s suggestion and went with the toaster.”

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Kayde Mae / 40 / İstanbul, Turkey / Artist

“Most prized kitchen item is the spice rack.”

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Amelia / 23 / Leeds, UK / Working in customer service and volunteering at a rape crisis centre

“I love cooking for family and friends — especially things they’ve never had before, so I can surprise them and let them in on something great that I’ve discovered.”

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An Sasala / 24 / Lawrence, KS / Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies PhD Student

“I fell in love with someone in this kitchen. Now, I’m learning how to be alone again.”

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Leslie Robertson / 29 / Chicago, IL / Digital Marketing Associate

“This kitchen is the main reason we got the place. I’m a pretty casual person and not confident as a cook, so I’ll usually make some kind of chicken and rice (if it’s not a frozen Trader Joe’s dinner). My most prized kitchen item(s) are the dishes I inherited from my 98 year old grandmother.”

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Amanda and Rachel Walwood + cameo from dog Willa / Amanda is 28 and Rachel is 29 (Willa is 1.5) / Amanda works in donor relations for Macalester College. Rachel is a software product manager and aspiring web developer

“Winter weekends usually mean braised meats and some combination of butter + flour + cinnamon. You can just see the top of it in the bottom right here, but our portable dishwasher is probably our most prized kitchen possession — we call it our robot butler.”

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Kylie / 27 / Lincoln, NE / Mental health therapist

“I love my kitchen especially in the late afternoon when the sun is just beginning to mellow. Beer tastes better and chocolate chip cookies smell sweeter here. It’s the cat hair.”

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Wiley Reading / 28 / Burlington, VT / City Kids (after school elementary) Lead Teacher, Personal Care Attendant

“My favorite thing to prepare is something that shows off my skills making something fancy out of super “humble” ingredients, like dumpster-dived kale or chicken organ meat. Examples: latte with foam and cinnamon dust WITHOUT espresso maker OR frother, or kheema paratha with only stuff I get from the discount veggie bin at the co-op and some pantry basics.

I didn’t take out the trash or recycling for this photo, and those pretty curtains in the window are actually in the window of our across-the-alleyway neighbors (also a queer household) #radicaltransparency”

I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah

I was working the polls on election day, handing people ballots and explaining how to fill them out properly. I made it my mission to come up with interesting uses for the removable tabs and entertain people for the 30 seconds that I had their captive attention. When 7 pm hit, people came in looking grim. “Did you hear about the polls?” they’d ask. “No,” I said, “but don’t tell me, I need to get through the next hour.” I guarded my polling location from news of what was happening because we still had to close – I still had to close – and needed to be able to focus without dealing with the sheer terror of reality.

I checked Twitter as I got in my Lyft back home. Shock bombarded and horror filled me as I scrolled through my timeline. I hoped the panic would vanish once the CA votes were counted. It didn’t. Slowly the new reality set in – the one where I wake up horrified and lose more of my basic human rights every day. The one where I wake up and am reminded that I was prepared for this, I saw this coming, I know what’s happening.

I grew up in the far-right evangelical conservative (Christofascist) movement; specifically, I was homeschooled and my parents were part of a subculture called Quiverfull, whose aim is to outbreed everyone for Jesus. I spent my teen years being a political activist. I was taught by every pastor I encountered that it was our job as Christians to outbreed the secularists (anyone not a far-right evangelical Protestant) and take over the government through sheer numbers. I was part of TeenPact, Generation Joshua and my local Teenage Republicans (TARS).

When the Tea Party rose in 2009, that was my culture. The Tea Party was step one. I was laying the groundwork for those elections in 2006. These people didn’t come out of the blue like it seemed. This plan, this Christofascist takeover of the US government, has been in the works for decades. When evangelical conservatism started becoming popular and more mainstream around the 1970s, the foundation was being laid for the tragedy playing out right now.

Evangelical conservatives started taking over their local republican parties and founding organizations like Operation Rescue, Homeschool Legal Defense Association, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, just to name a few.

Michael Farris founded HSLDA in 1983 as a way to ensure that homeschooling was legal, but what he’s been striving for is the wild west. His organization is trying to keep homeschooling away from any interference so the children he trains through his sister organization, Generation Joshua, would be able to fly under the radar. Generation Joshua started in 2003, primarily catering to children homeschooled by extremely religious rightwing adults. Its purpose was to train us to fight in what the Christofascists have been calling the “Culture Wars.” It’s a loose and ambiguous term that basically means anything or anyone that doesn’t align with this very specific view of Christianity must not be allowed to continue.

How do you do that? Well, you overturn Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, Brown v. Board of Education and Bob Jones v. The United States. Each of these decisions currently protects reproductive rights or non-discrimination based on race. As retribution, you amend the Constitution to discriminate against queers, trans people, women and people of color. Then, you make laws legislating morality. The only way to do this is to infiltrate the government; so Generation Joshua, TeenPact and other organizations exist to indoctrinate and recruit homeschooled youth who have ample free time to participate in politics. The biggest resources for teaching civil discourse are the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association and Communicators for Christ (since renamed Institute for Cultural Communicators). Through these programs we learned how to argue effectively. As students, we were taught critical thinking skills but given only a narrow view of what was acceptable to argue for. We were, after all, being trained to take over the country for Christ, literally. We knew how to perform logical gymnastics about abortion, Christianity and any evangelical talking point you could throw at us.

When we showed up to city council, local political party meetings and tours of the Capitol we asked intelligent questions, were respectful and had a vested interest in how our local political machine ran. We impressed every government official and staff member with our questions, earnesty and demeanor. In short, we were sneaky and polite Trojan horses; we had an agenda. Yes, even as 15-year-olds. It was forcefully handed to us by the adults in our lives who had been preparing for this since before we were born.

I watched the Tea Party takeover and was surprised no one saw it coming. After all, this was part of the plan. Trump being elected is also part of the plan, although not Trump specifically; the true goal is Pence.

Christofascists have been wanting someone like Pence in the White House and, until now, didn’t have a way to get one in. They know Trump is easily manipulated and will change his mind with the wind if it makes him feel more powerful and famous. Trump couldn’t care less about policy, a fact he’s made quite obvious. The Right has given a tyrant power and fame; he will do whatever they want him to do in order to keep it. This way they can sneak Pence in on a piggyback while filling Congress with even more evangelical conservative Republicans. Compared to Trump’s abrasive and terrifying behavior, Pence seems much less threatening. This is not the case. Pence has a proven track record of legalizing discrimination and acting against women and marginalized people. Those of us who didn’t leave the far Right are being elected to federal positions or are taking over states and cities. With Pence in office, even the reasonable-seeming incumbents – who have been and are still at the mercy of the Tea Party – are growing more bold in their attempts to further the Christofascist agenda: To Take Back The Country For Christ.

This was the mantra we heard. This was our mission. This is how we were to win: Outbreed, Outvote, Outactivate. Every class, every event, every pastor or guest speaker reiterated this, choosing to risk the 501c3 status of their church to push their agenda. To take back the country for Christ, we needed to outbreed, outvote and outactivate the other side, thus saith The Lord.

Meanwhile, mainstream Democrats shake their heads in confusion and fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of grassroots organizing, which is where all of this happens. Republicans have a vast network of homeschoolers that HSLDA and others have given them to tap into as a source of free labor. Republicans in state governments are lax on homeschooling oversight because their Get Out The Vote base is made of homeschoolers thanks to Generation Joshua and Teenpact.

Homeschoolers may make up a small portion of students as a whole, but they are loud, have time and can be activated with one email blast. When HR6 was brought to Congress in 1994, homeschool families realized their power. With an alert from HSLDA, homeschool families flooded the lines of Congress demanding that they exclude private, home and religious schools from the bill. They succeeded. The reach of HSLDA to activate the homeschool community has only grown since then. We are the secret no one knew about and it’s time to come to light. Homeschoolers are a huge reason for the evangelical conservative takeover we’ve seen over the last decade or so; it would be a mistake to write them off.

Self-proclaimed constitutional lawyer Michael Farris, the founder of HSLDA, and revisionist historian David Barton have spent years twisting their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as some kind of God-breathed document into the minds of parents and their families who will just believe what they say because they’re “Good Christians.” They don’t necessarily practice critical thought, are dissuaded from looking at the Constitution themselves without a law degree and don’t bother to read history from all angles, relying only on the whitewashed Christian versions of the Constitution and our founding.

If you’re thinking that declaring the nation a Christian one and turning into a theocracy is a ludicrous idea that has no basis in our constitution, you’d be correct. However, Christofascists have imbibed this theory and now believe it is their Christian duty to save the country from its secular ways in the name of religious freedom. In this worldview, any non-Christian (including Catholics and Jews) is doomed to eternal torture if they don’t convert. Thus, we are all going to hell in a handbasket if “good Christians” don’t save the country from the liberals who think people should just “do what they want regardless of what God says.” Their religious extremism is worse than any group they fearmonger over, but the irony is lost on them.

Evangelical conservatives are convinced that their agenda will save the country from God-ordained death. Pat Robertson and many others believe that natural disasters are sent from God specifically to punish America for letting marginalized people have rights and be alive. This motivates them to do everything in their power to “save” the country from the ungodly – even, maybe especially – if it involves stripping others of the freedoms they deem to be against God’s wishes. They don’t care if their war for Christ hurts humans they see as living wrongfully, because they are capital “R” Right and that’s what matters. Their Rightness, they believe, comes from God Himself. Their beliefs are callous and without empathy, prioritizing dogma over people. These beliefs are dangerous. Many of us who have come out as queer, trans, or even merely gone to college, have lost family because of this worldview. A single powerful person who is convinced of their own Rightness with no thought of introspection is dangerous. We now have a government full of them.

It is important to understand that they are coming at this from a place of passion and dedication. They have a fire in their bellies. While it looks like a bunch of backwoods hillbillies playing with guns to anyone outside, they are resilient and in it for the long haul. They want America to succeed, but in their America there isn’t room for anyone unlike them. There’s a reason Trump’s mantra stuck despite his deplorable behaviour. They think America was founded on conservative Protestant ideals because that’s what they’ve been fed, because that’s what aligns with their interpretation of the Bible and they will not go down without a fight.

They are scared of anything newer than the 18th century; you can’t logic the fear of change away from people. If you do no research and are instead predisposed to the belief that older is better, it’s easy to think the Puritans were good and wholesome. People wore funny hats, were conservative and hated science. Church was basically mandatory and women weren’t allowed to speak or be autonomous people. These are all comforting things for people who feel as though the world is against them because of their religion, rather than the fact that their views and actions are bigoted, racist and actively harmful to millions of other humans. You cannot be this version of evangelical and not force your beliefs on others. Failing to convert is a failure on you and your dedication to your faith. This religion is based entirely on fear; you can’t argue away a fear so intense that it hardens you to anyone unlike you or your tribe.

They will not be won over with sit-downs and respectability politics. This kind of dogma cannot be reasoned with; it must be fought against. Trying to convince them to come to the other side is a waste of time unless they’ve already started on that journey themselves. The ones in power, actively harming our lives, are past this point. We can only fight back.

The revolution has come and we are the resistance.

Is Love a Lie? Our Staff Weighs In

We (Stef) talk a lot on Autostraddle about whether or not love is a lie. Most often we (Stef) roll it out alongside news of a celebrity breakup, one we were just sure made sense and could never end, and in a weird way it offers some levity to the situation, because it’s the not saying something out loud that makes it true. Or we use it when like, a show we enjoyed got canceled.

We even have a “love is a lie” tag, and if you know anything about our tagging policy, which I don’t know why you would, you know that it’s a very strict tagging policy and you can’t just go making up whatever tag you want and slapping it on an article, which is just another testament to how invested we (Stef) are in this discussion.

Some of us (Stef) have given a hard yes or no on the matter, but I was curious to see where everyone stood. So, as you do around the holidays, I asked everyone on staff point blank: “Is love a lie?” After some initial, “HEY IS EVERYTHING OKAY” feedback, I got their answers. For the record, everything is okay and this is a simple question, and are YOU okay???

I gave them vague guidelines and said it could be as simple as a one word answer or a gritty breakdown, because that’s exactly the kind of rogue woman I am, and guess what? I got one word answers and gritty breakdowns. I also got an answer that compared love to wet cat food. This thing goes a mile a minute.

Also, I realize the graphics on this are confusing, like they should be swapped, and you may even feel discouraged halfway through, but remember the question’s not if love is good or bad, it’s: is love a lie?

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Mey, Trans Editor

Love is absolutely most definitely NOT a lie. For example, I love Stef with the strength of a million vampires.

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Laneia, Executive Editor

Real love is like wet cat food, Erin. Is wet cat food a lie? Think about it.

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Rachel, Managing Editor

Here’s my take: love is not a lie, it is real and cool, but love as an interpersonal dynamic between two people doesn’t address any issues or problems in a real way, whether they be personal, institutional, or cultural. At best the benefit of interpersonal love is to provide emotional support in addressing those issues, which you can also accomplish with a cat. So the idea of love as a powerful force that conquers all is definitely a lie, unless we’re talking about some larger radical love that forms the engine of a movement, in which case I’m out of my depth.

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Kaeyln, Staff Writer

My head says, “Yes,” but my heart says, “No.”

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Laura M., Staff Writer

No. Sorry, Stef.

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Erin, Staff Writer

Love is a lie. I’m sorry!

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Alex, Formally A;ex

First of all HI IS EVERYTHING OKAY, secondly, no. I can get so gritty about this BUT I WONT.

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Karly, Social Media

No. Unless it’s between two women on network TV, then yes.

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Crystal, HR Director

No.

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Carrie, Staff Writer

No, love is not a lie. It is also not magic and takes more work and dedication and understanding and listening than everyone thinks. Not easy, very real.

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Stef, Vapid Fluff Editor

Love is a lie and everyone dies alone.

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Kayla, Staff Writer

I BELIEVE IN LOVE!!!!!

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Alaina, Staff Writer

Nah, love isn’t a lie, I guess BUT IT MIGHT AS WELL BE.

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Raquel, Intern

Yes, until I’m in love, and then no.

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Nikki, Intern

Is Love A Lie:  Ugh, I was hoping that the deadline for this was done and over with.  When this question was posted, I was in the midst of texting with this really cool person and didn’t want to be like I HATE LOVE & EVERYTHING IS A LIE because I had just told this person about AS, and didn’t want to overwhelm them. My cold-dark love heart Grinchly grew 1.5 sizes in a month just texting with them. It was slowly starting to soften.

It just felt nice and not saying it was love because it was just texting with said person but it felt good. BUT. NOW. TWIST. Idk, it all ended before it even began, so now what? Because dating is the worst and I hate it. WHAT. THE. FUCK. I can’t believe there is something I am against Heather Hogan with and I think I need to journal and really think about it.

I know, I know, but Nikki, you’re the sweetest or insert whatever kind thing you want to say about me. THAT’S APPARENTLY NOT HOW LOVE WORKS EVERYONE. Because you try and you try and you try and you try and you try and you try and trying just becomes fucking exhausting. When it comes to love I think some people are just really fucking lucky.

So, is love a lie? I think when I say love is a lie it’s because I’m just fucking tired. And for me personally, it’s not always easy. I can find 100 people I would love to be friends with and can befriend a lot of people but for me to find someone I would want to start a relationship with is like one in a sea of people. (And good luck if that one person is queer, single, etc) I think that is why I joke love is a lie because it just becomes easier than thinking there is something wrong with me or that I am lesser because of my lack of love finding.

I have now scheduled when to meet new people because I can’t handle constant rejection. So, get rejected wait two months to get back out there, repeat, until death I’m guessing. Don’t even fucking tell me that someone is out there for me because you don’t know. Or at least show me a diagram. Don’t give me hope. I’m happy you found love, really I am. But don’t tell me it’s out there when you don’t know. Maybe I’m not meant for love but that doesn’t make me less. Get me that gay math equation on the amount of gay people out there.

Sometimes the writing about love is that if you’re a good person, love will be waiting for you. It will come to you if you’re deserving of love and that’s where I have to go, wait one fucking minute. So, if I never find love it just means I’m not deserving of it, LIKE COME THE FUCK ON. I know at least through friends of friends a few assholes who always end up finding someone. If you found love congrats, but don’t sit here and tell me to wait for whatever because this isn’t a fairy tale and we all don’t get the ending we want.

Let me be really real right now, I’m normally the person behind the scenes, it’s where I excel. I’m pretty sure everyone here at AS knows me as the person who gets shit done. I like to organize, make awesome spreadsheets, can make graphically pleasing things, can be counted on (usually), but one thing that I never understand because it seems so illogical is love. I can’t put logic on it. Love is not logical and I can’t make a list about it. I’m focused and determined but love is like HAHAHAHA, that’s cute. Excuse me while I fuck you up for a bit. Love either happens or it doesn’t. That isn’t saying that once you are in love that it isn’t hard: it is being vulnerable to someone else, it is opening up your world to another, it is compromise, it is letting the person have the last cookie, it is laughing at each other, it is communication, learning about your partners wants/needs, it is planning together, it is saying sorry when you messed up, it is just being there but like have your own hobbies too. I get that part, like that is logical. Finding love is even harder and makes no fucking sense.

So, is love a lie?  No, it is illogical and that is why I hate it. Luck is illogical. Love is illogical. Love = Luck = Illogical. Please note that if I am lucky and find someone, JUST WAIT 2 SECS for this to all go out the window. Just watch me go from Stef to Heather in like a blink of an eye. (Hi, I love you both.)

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Carolyn, NSFW Editor

Sometimes love is a lie you tell yourself and sometimes love is a lie you tell other people and sometimes love is the only thing in the whole world that feels real, that feels right, that feels true. We all still die alone though.

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Riese, CEO

If you’d asked me two months ago, I would’ve told you love was the truest most eternal thing of all. I would’ve OPINED. But you asked me just now instead and right now I feel like love is in fact the worst lying motherfucker of all time. Ask me in a few more months and we’ll see if I’ve evolved on the issue. G-d, I hope so.

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Sarah, Business & Design Director

If you’re lying about it it’s a lie.

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Audrey, Staff Writer

Love fails because as a species we lack imagination. We try to make love make sense, make it tangible, make it pass tests. Love doesn’t give a shit what we expect of it. We are too small for love, but we chase it anyway. Every once in a while we catch it, and even more occasionally we figure out what to do with it. I believe in love, and I believe in God, and I’ll spend the rest of my life figuring out what that means.

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Heather, Senior Editor (Y’all know she had to do it)

Two summers ago Stacy and I rescued and socialized a litter of feral kittens. It looks easy typed out like that in a single sentence, but it took hours and hours and weeks and weeks of sitting so still and so quiet on a hardwood floor, not making eye contact, coaxing, coaxing, coaxing them to trust us. And of course it did. They were born in an alley and we tricked them into a trap and took them away from the only home they’d ever known and carted them off to the ASPCA in a giant loud truck and had them neutered and spayed and ear-tipped (just in case it was too late and they couldn’t be socialized and they had to go back to the streets). They were starving and then they were in shock and then they were in surgery and then they were in a strange and terrifying new place.

A few months in, just when they’d all finally started letting us gently pet them without using food as a bribe or a distraction, they got sick. Very sick. The vet told us they had a virus that was almost always fatal to kittens, but we decided to have them treated anyway. To give them a fighting chance. They survived the first night at the emergency hospital, around the clock monitoring and IVs in their little paws. And they survived the second night too. And another.

The problem was they’d stopped eating. None of them would touch a single bite of food, and kittens are almost always hungry; kittens will eat anything. The vet called us and said, medically, the best thing for them would be to stay at the hospital, but science isn’t everything and sometimes you gotta love a kitten into living. We brought them back home in makeshift carriers: Blue Apron delivery boxes with holes cut into the side, and before we even got out of the parking lot, one of the kittens reached his white paw out through the cardboard window. He held my hand the whole way home.

Our rescued kittens were so scared of us for so long. Scared we were monsters who were fattening them up to eat them in a stew. Every baby step was such a victory. They ate with my hand on their food bowl! They put two paws onto my shoe! The day we got home from the hospital, I put out their food and they ate every single kernel, licked that plate clean. They crawled into my lap, all four of them, and went to sleep in a pile. They lived.

Stacy and I have been together six years, during which time she has never once said or done anything to deliberately hurt me. And the same is true for me. We both had childhood trauma that shaped and molded us, and when conflict happened in our relationship, that trauma manifested itself in ways that rubbed each other raw. What she needed and what I needed in the hard moments was the opposite thing and it sent us on some spirals and wrapped us up in some cycles. We cried; lord, we cried. We loved each other. We were so special together. But we couldn’t stop hurting each other in the ways that we protected ourselves.

Several years into our life together, I had my hand on Stacy’s knee while she stared at the floor and I made increasingly desperate eye contact with the therapist sitting in front of us. The therapist said, “Sometimes when we suffer trauma as children, and that trauma is triggered as adults, we react like children because in those moments we feel like children. As helpless. As scared. Without the emotional and physical resources of the adults we actually are, without the perspective of our lived experiences. In these moments, in this spiral, you’re both just terrified girls.” She was right and it changed everything. Stacy and I never get sucked into that spiral anymore. I see her. And she sees me. We reach out and we hold each other close and I can feel it in the now and I can feel it across space and time; me and her and the wounded little kids we once were and always will be.

Maybe people think love is a lie because they think love is the cheat code that lets you play life in God mode. No cliff too steep, no pit too wide, no boss too powerful. But love isn’t like that at all. I mean, it maybe feels like that for a minute, but nabbing a Super Star on level 1-1 doesn’t make you invincible for life. Love isn’t a sackful of healing potions either. Love is more of an amulet you pick up off a slain wizard you were lucky enough to trip over in a haunted forest, the kind that works like: when you’re about to experience a deathblow, the amulet shatters and fills up your health bar juuuust enough for you to get the fuck out of there alive.

The Apostle Paul said love never fails. He was wrong about that. (He was wrong about a lot of things.) Love doesn’t win every battle, but it’s how we fight the darkness and it’s why we fight the darkness. Love is a promise tucked into your armor: a little bit of hope, that talisman against your heart; the whisper of a future.

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Love is Not a Lie: 14

Love is a Lie: 3

Love is probably a lie: 3

The 100 Most Lesbianish First Names, Ranked By Lesbianism

The feature image for this post on lesbian names is a word cloud made of the first names of everybody who’s ever signed up for A-Camp, a bi-annual week-long camp/conference hybrid event hosted by our website, Autostraddle.com.

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This is a list of the most common names in the USA that the editors of Autostraddle have noted for their strong correlations with homosexual activity. So we are calling them lesbian names. If your name is on this list, you’re probably queer or gay or bisexual or whatever. If your name is not on this list, you might still be queer or gay or bisexual or whatever. My name isn’t on this list, and I like girls, so clearly there is no favoritism here.

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100. Molly

99. Jane

Jane Doe? More like Jane HOMO!

98. Ryann

Girls have two breasts, and Ryann has two “n”s. Coincidence? NOTHING IS.

97. Lainy

See also: “Lane,” which is the path that leads you from heterosexuality to homosexuality.

96. Nikki

Maybe it’s short for Nicole, maybe it’s long for “Nick.” Either way, you’re gay.

95. Going By Your Last Name As Your First Name

Generally speaking.

94. Kimmy

“This might just be in the south, but Kimmy and its variations (kim/kimberly) are like power lesbians on casual fridays”

– Erin Sullivan, Staff Writer

93. Soph / Sophie

92. Marsha

MARSHA MARSHA MARSHA YOU’RE A LESBIAN

91. Mere / Mer

“Meredith” is a lot of syllables.

90. Taylor

89. Grace

Way back in the late ’00s, Grace Chu started an entire website called “Grace the Spot” and everybody who wrote for it was psuedonymed Grace. Furthermore, I had an Intern named “Intern Grace.” She lives in Ohio.

88. Maddie / Maddy

“I have three friends named Maddie/Maddi/Maddy who are all gay and I almost picked that name for myself.”
– Mey Rude, Trans Editor

87. Courtney

Alaina, Staff Writer: [A-Camper] Courtney Kist is chilling in Portland and is a budding sex educator and like, what is gayer than that?
Riese: Also she has an undercut
Alaina: Also she’s gay
Laura, Staff Writer: I used to make Courtney and Barbie kiss all the time as a kid. I assume everyone did.

86. Gloria

85. Carly

84. Gill / Jill / Jillian

I know a butch lesbian named Jill from Pond Creek, Oklahoma. If you can find a lesbian named Jill in Pond Creek, Oklahoma, you can find a lesbian named Jill anywhere.

83. Karen

82. Zoe

According to Queen Trans Mey Rude, Zoe is the #1 most popular name for white lesbian trans women.

81. Stef / Steph

This name is especially popular amongst bisexual women. Just a tip. If you haven’t kissed at LEAST two Stefs/Stephs in your life and you’re not single, I recommend non-monogamy until you get that taken care of.

80. Ari

79. Brandy / Brandi

“the first gay girl i ever knew was named brandy and she was my best kindergarten friend”
– Laneia, Autostraddle Executive Editor

78. Dee

One “Dee” is gay, two “Dees” (aka “DeeDee”) are not.

77. Kacey / Casey / K.C.

If your last name starts with a “C” and you have a baby, the best way to make sure that baby is gay is to make sure their first name starts with “K.”

76. Rachel

The reason “Rachel” isn’t higher on this list is ’cause there are so many Rachels out there that inevitably, there are a lot of STRAIGHT Rachels out there. When I think about the name “Rachel” as a concept I mostly think about a male friend of mine in college, who was Jewish and only dated Jewish girls because you should always have your eye out for your future wife because your mother loves you and wants grandchildren. (I have never dated a Jewish girl, sorry Mom.) He would joke that he got a degree in “Rachelology” because he had dated SO MANY RACHELS. I just checked Facebook and it looks like he married somebody who was not named Rachel. Maybe all the Rachels turned out to be gay?

75. Ash / Ashley

Stef, Vapid Fluff Editor: ashley is gay but also probably kind of a bitch (sorry ashley)
i don’t think ashley who works here is a bitch
just the ashleys i haven’t met, who are bitches
Riese: ash is like a good nickname for an ashley in a YA novel about a young masculine of center lesbian who could’ve be played by Ellen Page in the film adaptation if they’d done it ten years ago
Stef: ashleigh was the name of a girl in a YA series about horses that i loved as a kid
Ashley, Staff Writer: I hate most Ashleys and I don’t know a lot of gay ashleys
Stef: nobody believed in the runty sickly foal but ashleigh did and then she won all the kentucky derbies forever.
in retrospect this was very gay

74. Jodie Foster

73. Shannon

Stef: before shannon watters there was nothing, only darkness
and now there is only the soft glow of shannon
Carolyn, NSFW Editor (shannon watters’s wife): same
Stef: carolyn please tell me you get a slack alert for shannon’s name
Carolyn: um yes sure do
Stef: i feel like i thought shannon was a pretty straight name but then shannon happened to me
Carolyn: yhat’s what happened to her too
Riese: when i hear shannon, i think “soccer”
i think “girl in a fleece jacket who plays soccer”
Stef: i see shannon smiling jauntily and saying ‘oh hey’ and probably wearing a blazer
Mey: i think “girl with cute short hair”

72. Phyllis

“Jane makes almost twice as much money as Phyllis, they jointly own property and vehicles, and they have assigned each other as beneficiaries on wills and power of attorney forms.” – Counseling Lesbian Partners, by Joretta L. Marshall

71. Shane

If you’re straight and your name is “Shane,” you should change your name.

70. Vicki / Vikki

69. Becky / Becca

“Every Becky I’ve ever known has been gay. Everyone knows a gay Becky.”
– Cameron, Cartoonist

68. Carmen

Carmen De La Pica Morales. Has a more beautiful name of a fictional character, besides “Cookie,” ever sounded so sweet? Nope.

67. Idgie

66. Marissa

“Marissa Paternoster. End of story. Queen of the Marissas.”
– Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

65. Gladys

64. Cameron

• Cameron, The Miseducation Of
• Cameron, The Esposito Of
• Cameron, The Glavin Of

63. Liz

64. Poussey

Like, objectively.

63. Lisa

“Lisa is the Jackie Warner of southern women.”
– Erin Sullivan, Staff Writer

62. Emily

“I dated two Emilys with the same first and last name.”
-Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

61. Kayla / Kaylah

60. Julia / Julie

Once I had an erotic third named Julia who had an ex named Julie.

59. Marisol

“Marisols are like, cool Mexican girls who wear high wasted shorts and flirt with you at the corner store.”
-Mey Rude, Queen Trans

58. Dusty

Remember that time in The L Word when Helena Peabody went to prison and ended up hooking up with a woman named Dusty? She was played by Ilene Chaiken’s personal trainer, Lucia Rijker, who is known as “the most dangerous woman in the world.”

57. Jordan

56. AJ

This one’s for all the Ashleys and Ariels and Amelias out there who just cannot handle being Ashleys and Ariels and Amelias.

55. Mel

It started with Mel B and now there are Mels EVERYWHERE.

54. Patti / Patty / Peppermint Patty

“I’ve had like 12 writing instructors, all named Patty/Patti, all of them lesbians.”
– Kayla Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

53. Diane / Diana

“Kathy and Diane started couples’ therapy to improve their sexual relationship. At the beginning of their three-year-old relationship they were sexually active with each other, but they had been having sex infrequently when they came into therapy.” – Lesbian Psychologies: Expectations and Challenges, by the Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective.

52. Brittany / Britney / Brittney

51. Brittani

50. Amanda

Stef: i know two amandas who are married
Riese: to each other?
Stef: yes
and one took the other one’s last name
they’re queer porn stars

49. Chris / Cris

48. Kelsey

“you’re practically turning your daughter gay if you name her kelsey. you did that to her.”
-Laneia, Executive Editor

47. Brianna / Brianne / Bri / Bre

We have so many Briannas at A-Camp I can hardly keep them straight, BECAUSE THEY’RE ALL GAY.

46. Lauren

“have we talked about how gay all laurens are? there are at least five gay laurens in austin. I don’t know if that says something about laurens or austin.”
– Intern Raquel

45. Alaina / Alanna / Alainna / Alana

You know one. We know you know one.

44. Morgan

Once upon a time I wrote a screenplay with my friend Carly, who as you can tell by her name; is gay. The lead character of our screenplay was named “Morgan.” I always wished that my name was Morgan, but it isn’t, so. That’s why I picked it.

43. Kristin / Kristen

Last year “Kristen” came in at 76, but this year it jumped many spaces because Kristen Stewart is out and about with her girlfriend St. Vincent. (There was no list last year)

42. Erin

41. Sarah

This would’ve ranked higher but it seems like there might be a lot of lesbians and bisexuals named Sarah because there are a lot of PEOPLE named Sarah. I didn’t want to have to fight with a commenter about this.

But! I will say that we have had so many Sarahs work here that at one time they were all assigned numerals for easy identification. For example we have published works by Sarah Palmer, Sarah Croce, Sarah Hansen, Sarah Hall, Sarah Fonseca, Sarah Sarwar, Sara Wiseman, Sara David, Sara Century, Sarah Rosenblatt and Sarah Szabo! I COULD GO ON.

40. Amy

“speaking of first girls, amy is gay
amy is almost always gay
aimee, less gay but still probably gay”
– Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

39. Anna

38. Nat

37. Cheryl

If you’re a social worker and your name is Cheryl, you’re probably gay.

36. Sarah Waters

I know of two lady-loving-ladies named Sarah Waters. How many do you know? DM me.

35. Abby

34. Jess

“Lesbian Jess has been made a synonym of Lesbian Jessica. Works and bookmarks tagged with Lesbian Jess will show up in Lesbian Jessica’s filter.” – Archive of Our Own

33. Alice

What does bisexual author Alice Walker have in common with bisexual TV character Alice Piesecki? Their first name. It’s “Alice.”

32. Jo

31. Del

30. Kai

“i’ve almost dated 8 kais
all the kais were slightly masculine of center, wore glasses, had dreadlocks.
also, i have a type
lmao”
-Alaina Monts, Staff Writer

29. Jamie / Jayme

Jamie and Jessie are not together, but they’re still gay.

28. Christie / Chrissie

What do you get when you take a Christina and you teach her how to scissor? You get a CHRISSIE!!!!

27. Carol

26. Cara / Kara

Stef: oh circling back to jill, another jill i know tried to make out with me AT her wedding to a man. jill, you’re gay.
Alaina: There was a Jill in my a cappella group who’s only goal was to date someone in the a cappella group…she did it. Now they’re married
Stef: Kara was the girl i DID make out with at jill’s wedding, i made jill’s new husband take her home
Alaina: STEF THE JILL I KNOW MARRIED A KERA!
Stef: wow

24. Gabrielle / Gabriella / Gabby / Gaby

This name is so queer that FIVE lesbian, bisexual and/or queer women by that name have written for Autostraddle.com! Can you even?

23. Danielle with one “n”

GAY

22. Dannielle with two “n”s.

GAYER

21. Dani

GAYEST.

20. Robin

19. Kelly

Kelly has the van, Kelly will drive to the show, everybody it’s cool, don’t worry, Kelly has got this on lock. Kelly brought Gatorade for halftime, okay? She’s ready.

18. Tiana

17. Sue / Susan / Suzanne / Suze

She who Suzes
Never loses.

• Lesbian Proverb

16. Meghan / Megan / Meagan

15. Dana

As we mourn the loss of Dana Fairbanks, we remember all the Danas who are still with us.

14. Tara

There were so many queer Taras in my life in the late ’00s that we had to start developing code names for ease of conversation. This was unfortunate for my first Tara, who was given the nickname “DevilKitty” ’cause when you pick “DevilKitty” for your myspace handle in 2005, nobody should ever let you forget it. It was fortunate for Tara #3, who was somebody’s wife, I believe. They’ve since divorced.

13. Heather

Our Senior Editor Heather Hogan could’ve nominated herself for this position, but she didn’t have to because I already had “Heather” on the list.

12. Kate / Cait / Katie / Cat

“There were four Katies in my first A-camp cabin.”
– Laura Mandanas, Staff Writer

Is it short for Kaitlyn? Is it short for Katherine? Kathleen? Catharine? Caitlyn? You don’t need to know the answers to these questions, you just need to be her friend, even if she changes her name to “Kade.”

11. Alexis

10. Al

This is short for the #1 most  popular lesbian name “Alex” which is short for “Alexandra,” or else it is short for the #9 most popular lesbian name “Allison” or else it is short for the aforementioned “Alexis.”

9. Allison / Allyson

See “8”

8. Ali / Alley

When people ask me what kind of folks attend A-Camp, I usually say “people named Allison or Allyson, who often go by “Ali” or “Al.” I’m not lying. That’s who goes to A-Camp. The “A” is for Allison.

7. Nancy

If you were a lesbian feminist in the ’70s or ’80s, you probably went to a women’s music festival with somebody named Nancy.

6. Barb / Barbara

“One day, Lore looked Barb in the eye and said, ‘You are a lesbian.”
-Michael S. Kimmel, The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts

5. Jen / Jenn

Remember Jenn? From Field Hockey? She’s gay now.

4. Deb

“Every Deborah I’ve met over 45 has worn well pressed jeans and button ups tucked into them, but still gets their nails done. She’s a very specific kind of woman.”
-Alaina Monts, Staff Writer

3. Ellen

Ellen DeGeneres, the world’s most famous lesbian, is named “Ellen,” which inspired the website named AfterEllen. Ellen Page is also named “Ellen” and she is the namesake for our website right here, AfterEllenPage.com.

2. Sam

If you give birth to a lesbian, you might want to save yourself the ink and not bother naming her “Samantha” because she’s gonna drop that “antha” like a hot potato / her middle school boyfriend, who was also named Sam. Isn’t that cute? They were both named Sam!

1. Alex

Whether you’re gay, kinda gay, or just know gay people — you know a gay person named Alex. See also: Top 5 Queer TV Characters Named Alex.

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Okay, time to yell at us about how wrong our list is! What names are egregiously missing? WHO HAVE WE WRONGED TODAY. Remember to use all-caps, lots of punctuation, and language that expresses vitriolic incredulity if you want us to take you seriously. Threats to our livelihoods and well-being are encouraged.

[ETA: I’d like to pre-emptively apologize to all ye Hannahs and Lauras out there. You were in an earlier draft but something happened between then and now, and I lost you. I’ll make it up to you next year.]

Now More Than Ever: Navigating the Heteronormative Patriarchy in a Post-Trump World

Welcome to What I Wore, a series where I explore fashion as shelter in traditionally heteronormative and patriarchal spaces.

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Election Day in the South at a Church

When I got my voter ID card it said my polling place was on my street, which was convenient, but also that it was at a church. I don’t know, that feels weird right? Not a super unbiased spot?

I wanted to harness a femme energy that would make me feel my most centered so as to ward off whatever foolishness I was about to encounter, so I went with a silk nightgown as a dress, a long peacoat, a pastel hat and some tall shoes.

The old ladies definitely hated me on sight. I saw one woman hand the man in front of me a pen to sign in and when it was my turn to sign in she kept it next to her hand, unmoved. She made me reach for it. A power move.

Then I made my way to the machine and the woman standing next to it peered around to look at the screen and lingered there as I began the process, talking about, “Do you know how it works?” Lady, the machine looks like it was made by NASA, you’re somewhere around 95 years old, I’m already two questions in, and I’m sending an email on my phone as I’m doing this. I got it.

For one brief, shining moment, I felt in control.

Success rate: 5/5

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The Day After The Election, Anywhere

Safe to say none of us were doing well that day. I cycled pretty quickly to the rage portion of this particular grieving process, something that was triggered by the white men I saw walking past my window. They had this… bounce to them. Now some of you may be thinking, “That isn’t fair, maybe that had nothing to do with Trump winning,” to which I will tell you: I pass Confederate flags on my street to get to my house.

Unfortunately, I had to leave the house that day, and so I was faced with an important decision that morning. What would ground me in my rage in a way that would help me best express it to those around me?

I went with a black turtleneck crop top because life obviously has no rules anymore and some black baseball pants (Hey, by the way? Go to the boy’s/men’s athletic section at a thrift store and get baseball pants) to secure a “woman who’s been slighted and is in training mode” movie montage vibe.

In hindsight I should have gone for a calming effect, I definitely should not have been driving, and no one won that day.

Success rate: 1/5

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Another Day After The Election, Anywhere

A strange thing happens when you read 65 articles a day, all of them bad, in terms of motivation to leave your house. Rather than leave it, your brain goes, “No, stay here and read more of them.” When you’re finally forced to face the real world, it can feel daunting.

Instead of facing our particular hellscape head on, I instead opted for: escapism. I call this a Texas tuxedo – which makes way more sense, @ me if you need me to explain – but as a lot of you call this a Canadian tuxedo, I wore it to serve as a prompt for an alternate reality.

One where I was in Canada going to the grocery store rather than in America going to the grocery store. Then maybe after going to the Canadian grocery store I’d stop by the doctor’s just because it was free. By now the doctor’s caught on and knows I come by just to hang.

It’s peaceful there.

Success rate: 5/5

Top 100 Lesbian & Bisexual YouTubers & Couples List: Ranked By Channel Subscribers

We’ve been joking for years that everyone is gay, and while that’s not exactly true, everyone on YouTube is gay. Okay, fine. That’s not really true either, but an awful lot of YouTubers are lesbian, bisexual, and otherwise queer-identified human beings. Their channels are about makeup, parenting, television, coming out, mental health, politics, fashion, music, you name it. And week after week, year after year, they create content centering their queer experiences for millions of viewers. In fact, if you add the subscribers of the top ten names on this list, queer YouTube is more watched than Game of Thrones.

This is a list of the 100 most popular lesbian and bisexual YouTubers, and the amazing thing is, this isn’t even all of us! I didn’t include any non-English speaking channels, for example. (Sorry Carla and Cynthia!) I didn’t include channels with under 10k subscribers. And I’m very certain that I didn’t find every lesbian/bi/Autostraddle-relevant channel with over 10k subscribers; there are just too many of us these days. So you guys will have to fill in the gaps by sharing your favorites in the comments.

Watching the many hours of YouTube videos required to compile this list has given me a really interesting glimpse of a cross-section our community. So many people were driven to self-reflect and realized that they were gay while watching Glee, you guys! And so many more people were devastated by the shooting in Orlando. And so many people found the courage to come out after Ingrid Nilsen did.

The list below is ranked by number of subscribers at the time of writing.

My sincerest hope is that the figures recorded become immediately irrelevant as you all subscribe to new favorites.

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100. Fiona / neonfiona – 10k subscribers

Fiona is bisexual and excellent at sarcasm. She describes herself on Twitter as a “literal witch and very famous internet celebrity,” which, you know, #goals. Her channel consists of social justice banter, collaborations, and (if you dig way back) quickie travel videos/life updates.

Fiona lives in London.

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99. Jing and Monica / Jing & Monica / FACOG COLLAB – 10k subscribers

Jing and Monica are a lesbian couple who have been posting to YouTube for the past four years, sharing their weddings (a ceremony under Prop 8 in California in 2010 and a simple legal wedding in Washington in 2012), TTC journey, pregnancy, birth, and parenting experiences. They currently have one adorable daughter, Estelle, and are looking to conceive for the second time later this year.

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98. Desiree Daviana / MissDesiree Daviana – 11k subscribers

Desiree is a bisexual vlogger. She’s made popular beauty FAQ videos on her experiences with lip injections and box braids 101, as well as opening up about battling depression and getting over breakups.

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97. Cydney Alexandra / Keeping Busy with Cydney – 11k subscribers

Cydney makes videos on the things she loves, including her girlfriend, slutty brownies and minimizing waste. She’s gay and St. Louis-based.

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96. Kale and Jess / Kale and Jess – 11k subscribers

Kale and Jess started their channel in March, and so far have primarily been posting vlogs and challenge videos. They’ve recently taken a break but do expect to resume making videos.

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95. Marisa Eaton / Marisa Eaton – 11k subscribers

Marisa is gay and Christian. She posts makeup tutorials and occasional videos with her cutie girlfriend Nicole.

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94. Danielle / Dani’s Dish – 12k subscribers

Danielle is a lesbian with an absolutely mesmerizing lipstick collection. She is the founder and creative director of Elle and Mane, where she sells hair products and a skincare line. Nearly 12k subscribers watch Dani’s style diaries, beauty hauls, and vlogs.

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93. Madison Clark / Madison Clark – 12k subscribers

Madison has been posting on YouTube for the past eight months. She’s a lesbian who vlogs authentic feelings and emotions on her channel. She also works for Dreamworks as a consultant.

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92. Rowan Ellis / Rowan Ellis – 12k subscribers

Rowan is a queer-identified femme cis woman. She makes thoughtful videos critiquing pop culture media from an intersectional feminist point of view. She is sick of straight people, has lots of feelings about queer witches, and you will absolutely love her.

Rowan runs the fortnightly #femtubechat and has been commissioned by Google’s YouTube Space in London to run a “Women on YouTube” workshop to facilitate collaboration and mentoring on the platform.

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91. Heather Lee Fazz / LezGetIt – 12k subscribers

Heather is a lesbian vlogger and DJ. She got her start on YouTube with LezBeOnTalk, a couples channel that was taken down post-breakup. Heather is now happily engaged to Chrissie, who frequently makes appearances on LezGetIt.

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90. Brittani Nichols (Writer) / Words With Girls – 13k subscribers

Words With Girls was a scripted comedy written by Autostraddle writer Brittani Nichols, starring Brittani and Hannah Hart (#3 on this list). It ran for seven episodes in 2014.

Since making Words With Girls, Brittani has gone on to write, produce and star in Suicide Kale, the feature length dark comedy demolishing the competition at film festivals around the country. She appeared as a recurring character on Season 2 of Transparent, and currently hosts Brand New Podcast with Ariana Lenarsky and Hamilton: The Podcast with Khalehla Rixon.

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89. Frankie and Tiaa / Frankie and Tiaa – 13k subscribers

Frankie and Tiaa! Oh my goodness! These two are such cuties. Watch them doing the girlfriend tag, taking the chicken nugget challenge, and conquering Las Vegas. They live in Los Angeles.

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88. Kelsey Canonaco / Kelsey Canonaco – 14k subscribers

Kelsey is a lesbian with really cool piercings and tattoos. Subscribe to her channel to watch her dye her hair bright red and teach you how to stretch your ears.

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87. Tayler / Tayler Made – 15k subscribers

Tayler started her YouTube channel four years ago to share her experiences as a single, pregnant teenager. Since then, she’s given birth, fallen in love, gotten married, and made over 100 videos along the way! The channel now follows Tayler as she raises Sawyer as a stay at home mom and settles in to her new apartment with her wife Mindy, who is in the United States army.

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86. Sarah Amann and Rachel Benson / Sarah & Rachel – 15k subscribers

Sarah and Rachel are a lesbian couple from Des Moines making vlogs, challenges, taste tests, and travel videos. They have been meat-free for the past year, and run a podcast called Between The Sheets.

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85. Sarah and Jamaica / Sez & Jez – 16k subscribers

Sez and Jez are a cute lesbian couple based in Brisbane, Australia. They look at each other with so much love and adoration that you’ll forget heartbreak even exists in this world.

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84. Riley J. Dennis / Riley J. Dennis – 16k subscribers

Riley is a polyamorous lesbian who delights her almost 16k subscribers with videos about feminism, politics, and vlogs about social justice and her everyday life. She’s genderfluid and identifies as non-binary and also a trans woman. She’s fantastic at breaking down confusing topics into clear, concise explanations. She’s also committed to improving accessibility on YouTube by correctly captioning all her videos — a service to her audience which is a) very uncommon to see within YouTube, b) not the easiest thing to do, and c) seriously awesome!

Outside of YouTube, Riley is a tech writer and Android editor for Make Us Of, author of young adult fantasy trilogy Through The Portal, and a writer for Everyday Feminism.

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83. Torey Tomsovic / Torey Tomsovic – 16k subscribers

Torey is gay and has learned a lot in her early 20s. She’s resolved to keep the channel an individual channel from now on, regardless of her relationship status.

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82. Yasmin Estrada / Yasmin Estrada – 17k subscribers

Yasmin is a bisexual makeup artist and stripper. She’s full Guatemalan and likes kissing her girlfriend. Subscribe for makeup tutorials and frank discussions about sexuality.

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81. Button and Bly / Button and Bly – 17k subscribers

Remember that time last year when Button and Bly wrote about their travel show on Autostraddle? Here’s what they said:

We started Button and Bly’s Travel Show about a year an a half ago, after leaving our jobs in production (Button a camera operator, Bly a sound mixer) so we could backpack all over Europe. It started with us just documenting our travels for friends and family. Everywhere we went we were always on the lookout for new people, experiences, and the girl-on-girl culture in other countries. It was virtually impossible to find quality travel videos created by and for queer women, so we wanted to make sure we gave everyone a front row seat. In these past couple of years, the show has evolved into a LGBTQ-friendly travel/adventure/inspiration show, and here we are today!

Most recently, Button and Bly have been visiting Benidorm, Spain; Mallorca; and Belgium.

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80. Red and Ashley Johnson / Mrs & Mrs Johnson – 18k subscribers

What’s neat Mrs. & Mrs. Johnson is that you can literally watch them build a family together in real time, from Red’s sweet proposal to their wedding, pregnancy announcement, birth of their son, and buying a new house! Almost all in the past two years! Check out their channel for couples pranks and vlogs about their daily lives.

Mara Wilson Knows Your First Crush Was Miss Honey: The Autostraddle Interview

Although Wilson is formerly famous, and now Twitter famous with 300 thousand followers, her writing feels deeply relatable to me as a twenty-something with a mish mashed career and a cloud of dreams.

And there’s also this — a few days after the Orlando shooting, Wilson came out as Bi/Queer on Twitter. Though in the book she describes herself as straight, there’s plenty of queerness in these pages (did I mention show choir?) for us to discover.

My Virtual Brunch With Dolly Parton

“Dear Editor: You are cordially invited to have brunch with country music icon Dolly Parton this Sunday, August 7th.”

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Hard Candy Christmas (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas Soundtrack, 1982)

We own three records: Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which I’m not allowed to listen to after dark; Chicago’s Greatest Hits, which has a scratch that makes it skip sometimes — you’re the reason, you’re the reason, you’re the reason in my life; you’re the inspiration — and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which Jenn tells me we’ll only get to keep if I never, ever ask anyone in our family what a whorehouse is.

It’s what we listen to the most and the loudest. “Hard Candy Christmas” when Dad tells us to go to our bedroom because the police are here to talk to Mom about writing bad checks and she’s locked herself in the bathroom again. “Hard Candy Christmas” when he’s telling her to be reasonable and she’s telling him why doesn’t he just take her out into the woods and shoot her. “Hard Candy Christmas” when we’re both stuck in the bedroom giving each other chickenpox. “Hard Candy Christmas” when Jenn assures me it’s okay if I put Ken’s clothes on Barbie. “Hard Candy Christmas” when she paints a pair of boobs on the inside cover of her Snow White coloring book with the watercolors we “borrowed” from Sunday School and we laugh until we can’t breathe. “Hard Candy Christmas” while we play Candyland and my mom scream-cries from her bedroom like death came to visit.

“Hard Candy Christmas” the first time our parents tell us they’re getting divorced.

We can’t know it won’t stick. That when they really get divorced 15 years later, it’ll seem both inevitable and impossible. My dad will announce it next year after picking us up from school and taking us for ice cream, and the next year on the night before Easter. The year after that my mom will tell us while accusing my dad of cheating with a woman named Donna from his work and the next year she’ll say he took away her credit card because he doesn’t want her to have any money.

They tell us it’s not because of us, that sometimes grown-ups just don’t get along even if they love each other. They promise we’re still their number one priority, that we’re still a family.

Jenn had an announcement. She’s the top reader in her grade. She’s the top reader in my grade, and I’m a year ahead of her. We tear little pieces of Kraft singles into squares and put them on Ritz crackers. We cut up some pickles. Elegant hors d’oeuvres to celebrate her big day. My parents tell us about the divorce and I tell them to get out of our bedroom.

Jenn’s not crying, but she won’t look at me. She won’t talk to me. Thirty minutes pass. An hour.

“Hey, maybe I’ll dye my hair,” I say.

She shrugs.

I say, “Maybe I’ll move somewhere.”

She shakes her head.

“Maybe I’ll get a car. Maybe I’ll drive so far that I’ll lose track. Me, I’ll bounce right back.”

She smiles just a little and puts on Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and when it gets to the part about “I’ll be fine and dandy” she cries. She doesn’t make any noise when she does it, and it’s only for the length of the B side, one time through. We eat the cheese crackers without saying anything, and when we’re full, she starts “Hard Candy Christmas” over again. This time, she sings.

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Islands in the Stream (Eyes That See in the Dark, 1983)

Somehow Jennifer and I come into $40 on a flea market day. Two crisp twenties. A fortune.

Unlike a trip to KMart, which always yields us the same flimsy knock-off toys from the dollar bin, only heaven ever knows what kind of treasures we’re going to find at the flea market. Lava lamps, video games, Swiss army knives, baseball gloves and baseball cards, contraband fireworks, comic books, Baby-Sitters Club books, Care Bears, Lite-Brights, water guns, Micro Machines, a Li’l Miss Singing Mermaid for fifty cents.

We make a pact to pool our opulent wealth together and take one entire lap around the place before we spend even a penny. We don’t make it. Halfway down the first row is a vendor selling roller skates. White roller skates with purple wheels and purple laces. A man in a cowboy hat peddling heaven. We decide if we can’t afford two pairs of skates, we’ll get one pair that’s a little too small for me and a little too big for her and share them.

Jenn is the first thing I remember. She arrived in the world the moment I started remembering the world, and this is our way. When I get a nice pair of pajamas for my birthday, I keep the shirt and give Jenn the pants. When the mean kids on the playground charge me too much money for a friendship bracelet, she marches across to their fortress and ascends to the top of the slides and demands a full refund and forces them to make me an extra bracelet, in my favorite colors, for free. I take her punishments from our afterschool teachers, and she helps me hide the food I’ll get in trouble for not eating. Only she understands that onions are the Devil’s vegetable.

Something I can’t name is changing between us. Boys are starting to notice her and I’m starting to notice that I don’t notice boys. When Josh and Greg come over to play basketball, she and Greg sometimes decide to just stay on the porch and talk. I’m scared of roller coasters and she always sits them out with me, but when Greg’s at Six Flags with us, she gets in the Scream Machine line and doesn’t even ask if I want to share her Cherry Berry popsicle. Mom knows what Greg likes on his pizza.

Today is a flea market miracle, like the time we got a pack of playing cards with completely naked ladies on them. We can afford two pairs of roller skates with five dollars to spare.

When I suggest choreographing a doubles ice skating routine to “Islands in the Stream,” Jenn happily drops our last few bucks on the cassette single and spends the rest of the weekend with me in the garage saying things like “arabesque” and “lasso lift” and “swizzle” while Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers croon away on our boom box.

Over dinner Jennifer asks to go to the all-night skate at Skate Country with Greg next weekend. Mom and dad won’t even have to pay for skate rental, thanks to our flea market bargain. They say sure, and I can go too, but I don’t want to go to stupid Skate Country with stupid Greg. Friday night is a brand new episode of Hey, Dude, and it’s taco night, and we’re not even finished choreographing our ice skating routine!

Before I go to bed, I take everything in my closet that belongs to Jennifer out of my bedroom and throw it all in a pile in front of her door, our new “Islands in the Stream” cassette tape sitting right on top.

On Friday night, I eat both of our helpings of tacos, and Princess Peach has thrown enough Mushroom Blocks at Fryguy to turn him into a dozen Small Fry Guys when I feel Jenn plop down beside me on the living room floor. I glance over. She’s wearing lipstick. “Fryguy’s harder to beat than Clawgrip,” she says. “I thought you were staying out all night at Skate Country with Greg,” I say.

Jenn asks if I want to work on our routine. I tell her I’m too old to play pretend Olympics, and it feels like the truest thing I’ve ever said. I’m one hundred. I’m as old as the sun.

Princess Peach is all the way to the last Mask Gate in the dream factory when I hear Dolly Parton in the garage. One more hit and she’ll be through the gate to Wart, my first Super Mario Bros. 2 playthrough on one life. The last Mushroom Block connects and the gate opens. I chuck the controller in the basket in front of the TV and flip off the Nintendo. Wart’s not going anywhere and Jenn’s right: We need more practice if we’re going to bring home the gold.

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My Tennessee Mountain Home (My Tennessee Mountain Home, 1973)

I don’t know I have a southern accent. Everyone in my tiny town in the north Georgia mountains sounds just like me, and when we go on vacation, I only ever talk to my sister. The year my dad says I’m old enough to travel with him and do things by myself while he’s busy with work, I am overcome with visions of my own sophistication. It’ll be Oregon first. We’ll fly to Portland and drive to Ashland and while he’s in meetings I’ll do outdoor sports and we’ll attend the Shakespeare Festival and at night we’ll dine out with his co-workers and I’ll find out what life is like outside of my high school, where football players casually use racial slurs and abuse our teachers and everyone whispers that I’m a dyke.

The night we arrive on my Very First Grown-Up Trip, I order sweet tea at dinner. Dad says they don’t have sweet tea in Oregon, so I ask for a Coke instead. As the server is walking away, one of the men from my dad’s office drawls “swaaaayyyt taaaay” and everyone laughs. Dad puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “Come on, Steve.” Steve giggles and says it again: Hillbillies love their swaaaaayyyt taaaaay.

It’s not just my accent that’s wrong. I’m as out of place here as I was back home and not because I’m twenty years younger than everyone else. My acne is still impossible here. My left eye is still lazy. The only clothes I own are off-brand jeans, sneakers, and University of Tennessee Lady Vols t-shirts. It’s what I want to wear, but it’s not any more stylish in the shadow of Mount Hood than it was in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I don’t look right. I don’t feel right. And now, I realize, I don’t talk right.

“I didn’t know sweet tea is only in the south,” I say to my dad on our way back to the hotel. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”

My dad is not embarrassed. He says Steve is an asshole and everyone hates him.

“Why’d they laugh at him then?” I ask, and he smiles sadly at me. Because sometimes grown-up life isn’t that much different than high school, is what his face says.

We’re listening to the Lady Vols mix CD I brought with me and Dolly Parton is singing to us about how Tennessee is her mountain home. Sittin’, she says. Playin’. Talkin’. Lookin’. Holdin’ hands. My dad is forever trying to get me to add the -ing sound to the end of my words, but my mouth won’t do it.

“Do you think Dolly Parton’s accent is real?” I ask him.

He says, “Absolutely.”

I don’t ask him what I really want to ask him. I don’t ask him if anyone’s ever going to love me for who and what I am.

I go rafting all the way into California and hike down to Crater Lake. I see the Pacific Ocean for the first time and splash my feet right into those frigid waves. We watch Much Ado About Nothing and I laugh until my insides hurt. I rent a bike from the hotel and zip around town like I own the place. We spend the last two days driving up the Pacific Coast Highway where I try (and fail) to reach around the Redwoods.

On the flight to Georgia my dad says it’s the best trip he’s ever taken. I tell him it’s my favorite one too.

I never drink another glass of sweet tea.

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Travelin’ Thru (Transamerica soundtrack, 2005)

I kiss a girl the first time for Jesus, to practice for our husbands. I kiss a girl the second time because I want to. She’s very out. I’m very closeted. She has a girlfriend. I’m married to the Lord. She’s working on her PhD in gender studies. I’m working my way through an in-depth study of the Old Testament tabernacle. Her dad is my boss and she’s only here for the summer and when she looks up at me over the beer she’s drinking the first night we see each other outside of the office, I know what’s going to happen. Well. Not everything. I don’t know that I’ll quit my job and leave the country and backpack around Europe and come back and come out and begin a career as a professional writer. I only know the part up until where we kiss.

“This song was the free download on iTunes today,” I tell her, on our drive back to the office. “It’s from Dolly Parton and it’s about how we’re all just poor wayfaring strangers on the road toward Jesus.”

“Hmm,” she says. “Pretty sure it’s about a transgender woman on a road trip with her son.”

We kiss: in the parking lot, in my truck, in her car, in my office, in her dad’s office, in the breakroom, in the bookstore, in a pub, in a parking garage, in a tent, in a swimming pool, on the tennis court, under the bleachers, and in the kitchen of my Baptist church.

When she leaves to go back to school, I press a Bible into her hand and she presses a copy of Stone Butch Blues into mine.

“That Dolly Parton song is about being queer,” she says.

I say, “It’s about being a Christian.”

She kisses me one more time, thumps me on the bicep, smiles, says, “Maybe it’s about both.”

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9 to 5 (9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, 1980)

My old pickup truck doesn’t have an iPod input or even a CD player, so my nephew is always at the mercy of the radio when he’s with me. Johnny Cash doesn’t interest him. Neither does George Strait. Or the Oakridge Boys or Merle Haggard or Charlie Daniels or Waylon Jennings and especially not Willie Nelson. He adores me when I’m not forcing him to listen to Country Gold Saturday Night. I let him say butt as the punchline to every joke and always have a couple of extra dollars for a treat. The day he found out his first name is the same as my last name, he fell out of his chair.

When the staccato piano of “9 to 5” starts up after a particularly egregious drive featuring back-to-back George Jones dirges, Hogan springs to attention and, seemingly of its own volition, his foot starts tapping against the seat.

He says, “Who’s this?”

I say, “Dolly Parton.”

His head is bobbing.

“Dolly Parton wrote this song for a movie she’s in. She works in an office and her boss is a real jerk.”

“What does he do?”

“He yells at her and her friends and takes credit for their ideas and never hires women to be the bosses of the company, only other men. He’s also secretly stealing money.”

“What does Dolly Parton do?”

“She kidnaps him and ties him up in his house until she can find evidence that he’s a bad guy.”

It always been his favorite story: The underdog takes on the bully and triumphs through hard work and Being Nice. Tuck Turtle was his favorite Wonder Pet and he never liked the way Gordon the Big Engine (locomotive number 4) treated Percy the Small Engine (locomotive number 6), just because he was younger and had a simple 0-4-0 tank design. He prefers Beast Boy to power-hungry Robin and often names his favorite Lego creations Little Guy.

“Does Dolly Parton win?” Hogan asks.

“Always,” I answer. “She is the queen of her own creative empire, in a universe ruled by men.”

Hogan looks like my sister and brother-in-law, split right down the middle, but I recognize traces of my own genetic jackpot inside him. The frantic energy that comes out in a stutter and a million spilled drinks. The battle between reality and imagination. The tidal waves of empathy. The weirdness. He likes the color pink and wearing fingernail polish and one time when my friend Joe sent him a letter addressed To: Hogan From: Batman, his ecstasy was immediately replaced with crushing worry that my feelings would be hurt that Wonder Woman hadn’t ever written to me. Hogan didn’t sleep for six months after he learned about slavery in school and constantly tells his friends and cousins the reason boys don’t hit girls isn’t because girls are fragile; it’s because they’re human beings.

I can’t replay “9 to 5” once it’s over, so I turn off the radio and feed him the lines. Tumble out of bed and stumble in the kitchen. “Stumble in the kitchen,” Hogan echoes. Pour myself a cup of… “Ambition!” And yawn and stretch and try to… “Come to life!”

His lanky body sways and staggers to our a capella beat. He claps. He adds in some ninja-punches. By the time we get to the chorus, he’s singing out the window to the tree frogs and the crickets, his little hand whooshing against the Georgia summer night. “You got dreams they’ll never take away.”

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Jolene (Jolene, 1974)

We have 13 jars of jam in our refrigerator. 13 jars of different kinds of jam. We have the standards: blackberry, grape, strawberry. And the standard combinations: strawberry-rhubarb, apple-cinnamon. And we have weird ones too: lemon and fig chutney, mango-habañero jam, four-berry pepper jelly. If there’s artisanal jam in a store, we’re leaving with a jar. It’s New York City. There’s always artisanal jam in a store.

I’m washing dishes when Stacy shuffles downstairs in her grandpa slippers with sleepy eyes and disheveled morning hair. She pads into the kitchen and slips her arms around my waist, rests her head between my shoulder blades. “Morning, sweetheart,” she mumbles into my back. She turns her head to face my iPod. “Morning, Dolly.”

I turn and wrap her up in a hug that becomes a swaying embrace. Stacy visited me in Georgia for years before I agreed to move to New York City and start a life with her. Sometimes she’d fly in on Saturday morning and out on Sunday night, and we’d eat key lime pie for breakfast. I held her on my shoulders on a playground while she tied a net to a basketball goal so she could enjoy the swish sound when we shot hoops. We went to the planetarium to watch movies from the ’60s about our inevitable lives on Mars. Now we share a refrigerator that houses 13 jars of jam. It’s like pie, Stacy says. Toast pie.

“Jolene” isn’t a loved-up, Sunday morning slow-dancing song, but it doesn’t matter. Tradition’s not the boss of us.

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Never Not Love You (Pure & Simple, 2016)

“Dear Editor: You are cordially invited to have brunch with country music icon Dolly Parton this Sunday, August 7th.”

It’s a conference call. I’ve participated in ten thousand of them. You call into a phone bank with 50 other reporters and queue up and hope you get a chance to ask a question in the 30 minutes the celebrity’s PR people have carved out for you. I never say yes anymore because you’re only ever copying and pasting exactly the same soundbites as every other gay website on the internet.

It’s Dolly Parton. I immediately reply: “Thank you for this opportunity.”

The virtual brunch is celebrating Dolly Parton’s Pure & Simple tour, during which she will unveil songs from her forty-third studio album. Her publicist sends us a free copy of Pure & Simple and I fall asleep listening to it four nights in a row. It’s old-school Dolly. Stripped down, bluegrass, love, love, love. I write down 27 questions to ask her. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to ask one, and I want it to be the smartest thing anyone’s ever said to her.

On Sunday, I dial in the second I’m allowed to, fidget in my seat for ten minutes while she finishes up on her tour bus (she’s answering questions for a different group of reporters), and then she’s there. On my phone. Dolly Parton is on my phone. She’s warm and she’s generous. She’s funny. She keeps asking journalists what they think of the album and when someone correctly notes that a song from Pure & Simple is a reworked tune from a classic album, her joy with us is complete. “Yes!” she says. “Yes, it is! Yes!” Dolly Parton’s accent is real, just like my dad promised me it was.

Time is moving faster than it ever has. Dolly is flattered that she’s a gay icon. She’s never had writer’s block. She’s going to produce and star in at least one TV show next year. She doesn’t have any grand marshal duties lined up for any Pride parades, but she’s thankful for the invitation. She wrote all the songs on Pure & Simple by herself, in her little apartment. The moderator says Dolly can take one more question. I nod. I tell myself it’s okay. I didn’t think I’d get to ask her anything anyway. And who knows, maybe one day, somehow, some magic will bring me this close to her again.

“Heather Hogan from Autostraddle,” the moderator says.

Dolly Parton says, “Hey, Heather.”

I lunge for my phone, unmute it, press my face right up to the speaker. I’m 37 years old, sitting at my kitchen table in a house I share with the woman who will be my wife. I’m seven years old and my parents are getting divorced. I’m 16 and I’m gay and I don’t know it. I’m 27 and I’m standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and wondering if maybe that song really is about being queer and being a Christian. I’m 30 and my nephew is gazing at me like I painted the moon up there, just for him.

I’m supposed to ask her a question about her album or her tour. Those are the rules the PR lady repeated when the call began. I have my 27 questions memorized. They’re good questions. I don’t ask one of them.

“Dolly,” I breathe. “It’s an honor to talk to you. You’ve been puttin’ so much love into my life since I was a little girl, and I just wanna know where you keep findin’ all this love you put into the world for all of us.”

Dolly Parton says, “That’s very sweet. I grew up in a very spiritual family. My grandpa was a preacher. My mama was very open. We were taught to be good to our neighbors, we were taught to love people. I think it comes from that open-hearted faith… I’ve always had a good time in this world. I don’t know what we’re all here for, but I’m going to find out. And part of that is loving people for who and what they are.”

I tell her thank you. I mean it, but she can’t know how much I mean it. I rush upstairs and bury my head in Stacy’s chest and cry. Did you get to ask her something? I nod. What’d you ask? I shake my head.

How do I explain that I asked Dolly Parton what I have always been asking Dolly Parton — to show me the way.

Soggy Bottoms: Baking a Prinsesstårta Can’t Be That Hard, Right? (It Is)

Welcome to Soggy Bottoms, where, lacking a tent in the British countryside, Autostraddle writers attempt to bake things inspired by The Great British Bake Off in their own homes, to varying degrees of success.

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This is literally the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted to do.

I’m a very proud person, and when I do a good job at something just once, I think that I’m an expert at it. So since I’ve successfully baked some cookies and a cake and Hasselback Apples that have been hits at parties, I thought I was a great baker. I’m not. I thought “oh, this cake is cute. I’m a princess. I deserve this cake.” Also, honestly, I wanted to bake something really impressive. I love impressing people and I love feeling good about myself, so I thought “this will be a great way to do that.”

I didn’t think “oh, I have to make sponge cake, custard, jam, whipped cream and marzipan including a freaking rose all from scratch.”

Also, I had forgotten that in the actual episode where they make the prinsesstarta, they talk about how it’s super difficult, first of all because it’s 26 ingredients and 24 fucking steps. Paul Hollywood straight up says to Mary “I think you’re cruel, Mary, I really do. This is a particularly difficult challenge,” when they’re talking about the cake. Oh well.

I used Mary Berry’s actual recipe, the one they used in the GBBO episode for the technical challenge, but with a few tweaks. I accidentally didn’t buy enough almonds, so my marzipan was a wet, sticky mess (Sue Perkins would probably make a cheeky pun about this). I had to add a ton of powdered sugar and even some flour to it in order to make it work. I also used modeling chocolate to make the rose instead of ready to roll icing and I caved and bought pre-made jam because my mom said this was already going to take all day (it actually took me two days). It took me forever and I didn’t understand what I was doing a lot of the time, but I had a ton of fun.

Anyway, onto the cake! First I made the custard, because my mom wisely told me this should be a two day process. My first steps, before the actual start of the recipe, were to separate the egg yolks and to make the castor sugar. I’m already falling apart. I couldn’t get the food processor to work. This is where I realized that not only is this going to be harder than I thought, it’s going to be a lot harder than the harder that I thought it was going to be. It turns out I had the top on backwards. But I did find out that I’m actually pretty good at separating eggs! As I scooped vanilla seeds out of a bean that cost two and a half dollars I realized how ridiculous this all is. I felt like freaking Gwyneth Paltrow, which is not ever a feeling I want to have. I’ve spent an hour on this cake already and all I have is custard and ground almonds. But honestly, my custard is delicious and I feel like a freaking Star Baker already. Legit, Sue Perkins would come over, taste my custard and make a joke about it. We would laugh and it would be great. I’m already feeling like a Queen.

The next day I woke up and showered and ate some food and got back to baking. First I made the sponge, which was probably the easiest part (or maybe making the whipped cream was the easiest part because it was just whipping cream?). It also smelled ridiculously good and looked so gorgeous and fluffy that I can’t believe I don’t make these all the time! I think making the sponge and having it turn out so well really boosted my confidence and gave me what I needed to to make the rest of the cake. In the episode Mary says this is a difficult sponge to make, but I did a really, really great job. My mom even said “The sponge has a good consistency” when I gave her a slice of the finished cake.

While I was baking the cake, I started on the marzipan, which, like I said, I really struggled with. I took the ground almonds and added the sugar and eggs and stuff, but it took me a while of adding extra things to make it actually work. Also, I’m pretty sure on the show they had almonds that didn’t have the skin on them? Because mine did and the marzipan was brown before I added the green food coloring and still had brown speckles in it afterward. But it still looked and tasted pretty dang good.

Assembling the cake was definitely the hardest part. I tried rolling out the marzipan but was again wildly unsuccessful (I think marzipan is my baking Achilles’ Heel), so I had my mom step in and do it. It turns out, she’s a total pro — and I’ll admit that she did the hardest step for me. She found out that the trick is to cover the mat with sugar, not powdered sugar, and that way it won’t stick. Still though, I honestly feel so freaking cool about the fact that I cut a sponge cake into three pieces, successfully stacked the layers and placed some marzipan over the top, with a pretty freaking nice modeling chocolate rose, all that I made myself. I’m fancy-ass.

I mostly just Gryffindored my way through a lot of this process, using my supreme confidence in my skills as my guide. They say cooking is an art and baking is a science, but I hate science, so I treat baking like it’s an art too, and I seem to do pretty dang well.

This cake was fucking delicious. I think I would’ve come in second place in this challenge, and that’s just because my marzipan was made with almonds that had their skin on, so it ended up being speckled with brown. I mean, I know they only had two and half hours, so really it’s no comparison, but I’m going to compare myself to them because that’s the point of this whole thing. After I looked at my cake and tasted it, I thought about entering a TV baking competition and then that night in bed I seriously considered a career in baking. I know that there are like, a hundred steps and a hundred ingredients, but jeez, I did a great job.

Actually, now that I’m done with it, it wasn’t that difficult at all. Like, sure, it took forever and had a million steps and took two days, but I feel like I kind of effortlessly aced it. But after baking this, I realized that I’d be a terrible GBBO competitor because every time I successfully did something I shouted out “I’m a fucking all-star!” or “I’m a boss ass bitch!” Ignore what I said at the beginning of this essay, I’m a fucking impressively great baker. I rule. I am a Star Baker and I’m pretty sure Mary Berry would be proud of me.

What We Mean When We Say “Femme”: A Roundtable

Femmes. We live in different places. We’re different ages. We have different gender identities. Some of us are people of color, some of us are white. In this representative sample, we are Autostraddle writers, or artists, or musicians, or educators, or all of these things. The only thing we have in common is that we’re queer and that, in our own deeply personal way, we breathe life into the word femme. But like so many other differences, we don’t agree on what the word femme means to us. This is the beauty of gender fluidity. We live in a world where it is totally possible to claim the same word as someone else and completely disagree on what the word means.

In organizing this roundtable, I did have some questions in mind, like: what does the word femme mean to you, personally? Do you think there is a generational difference in how people think the word should be used? Do you tie your experience of femme to emotional labor, or care work? What are your femme roots? And do you lean on a queer femme aesthetic to signal your queerness, and if so, do you think this aesthetic has been co-opted? The answers revealed the exciting ways the queer world is living the word femme, right now, in this moment. Spoiler alert: we’re more visible and resilient than ever before.

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Rudy 

There was a time when I could have identified as femme, but I didn’t know any other femmes, and no one told me that it was okay to be femme.  When I started being openly queer, I was really femme, but people kept saying: “nobody knows you’re queer.” Eventually, I thought that I couldn’t look femme and also be queer. I thought it was impossible to be both at the same time. But I started to feel entitled to reclaim femme after finding out about people like Leah Lakshmi. I saw her and thought, “Oh my god, this is a brown person, a disabled person, and a person who is into witchy things.” It was huge to find people who were interested in all of these different things that resonated with me.

None of the ways I describe femme are based on how someone looks. When I re-discovered femme, it was really linked to witchy things, and spirituality, and care work. Femme is connected to emotional labor and healing. It’s based on the energy you put into the world, the connection you make with people and the care you have for them. It’s allowing a particular kind of tenderness to be part of your identity. That might sound really woo-woo, but it’s true. It’s not just an aesthetic. Having something based on just aesthetics is really dangerous because it removes the politics from things.

There are people today who are angry, they think that only women should call themselves femme. They think that if you’re not a lesbian or bisexual woman and you’re calling yourself femme, you’re contributing to an erasure or appropriation of the history of lesbian and bisexual women. These people are talking in a really binary way. In my observation, it seems to be a generational thing. But the people who are most affected by these opinions are trans women or transfeminine people, and I feel like if trans women and transfeminine people are telling you that you’re doing something fucked up, cis women should listen to that. Also, all of these people who have identified as femme over the decades, who knows if they would have identified as women if they had the language then that we have now? Maybe some of those people would have been like, “yeah I’m femme, but I’m also non-binary.”

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Aja 

My metrics for gauging femme were imprinted on me in the San Francisco queer scene in the early 2000s and I’d never lived anyplace else. It’s hard to understand what that was like unless you lived it, but even on my tippy toes there were always femmes flying much higher than me! Those glorious creatures are why I’m still reticent to identify as high femme; It took living out of state for four years to fully understand that my San Francisco reality was rarely reflected anyplace else.

I’ve finally come to sort of queasily embrace myself as high femme, or at least high x hard femme, but I have a really hard time committing to any single aesthetic. I don’t get dressed to tick off boxes or be sorted into a category; I get dressed to capture a very specific hyper-feminine feeling that isn’t quite complete until the last lash is lacquered. If there’s an overarching theme beyond that, I genuinely can’t see it. The “hard” part comes, I suppose, from being a strident feminist with high standards for longer than I’ve been a queer. Though I’m significantly tougher and infinitely less fussy than I look, I’d rather die than change how I dress in order to effectively communicate those things. People tend to assume things about women who look like me — that includes fellow queers — and the last thing I need is to feel like I have to constantly prove myself to strangers. Thank god for Resting Bitch Face and tattoos, the latter of which can help somewhat in artfully signaling being both femme and feminist. 

I associate being femme more with vigilance than with emotional labor or self-care. That’s the energy I put into the world and that I feel from other femmes. The emotional force in my life comes from the quality of relationships I seek, not from being femme.

On the idea that an older generation of people think only women should claim the word femme: I’m 36 years old and I find that kind of restriction on “femme” to be abhorrent and willfully cruel. No femme friends of mine — and I’m lucky that they are numerous — believe anything like that, and many of them are my age and older still. If they did, I’d dump them on the spot! The “erasure of lesbian history” narrative is weak and fearful, that’s all. If it takes you longer than a millisecond to know the answer to Do I want to be weak and fearful or do I want to be kind?, then I haven’t got time for you. 

On a more positive note, I think of femme today becoming more inclusive as an acknowledgment of what already was rather than a new reclamation. It always feels new once you realize who you are and choose not to hide it! I’d love it if we all welcomed non-cis femmes into the light with open arms and a friendly “What took ya so long?” knowing full well the answer, and knowing how brave you have to be as a femme in this world.

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Mey

My version of femme is Bruja Femme, but this summer I’m also moving toward Pop Witch Femme, as inspired by True Gay Icon Carly Rae Jepsen. It looks like dark red lipstick and winged eyeliner without caring about any other makeup. It looks like stars and outer space and Our Lady de Guadalupe. It feels like connecting with the long line of Mexican women and witches that I come from and want to be more like. I definitely think that for me, my femme-ness is tied a lot to my emotions. I use it to find myself and center my mind and my heart and, in a way, be my truest version of myself. If I’m not being a femme, I’m hiding more than just my fashion or my attitude or my personality, I’m hiding my essence.

My femme roots include a lot of other trans women of color. When I was first coming out on the internet, I made a lot of twoc friends and they really helped me figure out who I wanted to be and who I am and how I wanted to be that person. I’m absolutely going to cite Luna Merbruja as one of my main roots. And this is like, totally cliche, but Paris Is Burning really opened my eyes to a whole new world of femme possibilities. Also, and I know this is nerdy, but a lot of comic book characters like Batgirl, Catwoman, Zatanna and Storm, who really showed me that being femme can also be super powerful. Oh, and definitely Ronnie Spector and Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

As far as femme visibility goes, I definitely think about how the queer femme look is more visible in mainstream media. I feel like for me, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Boy Problems” video is the peak of this in a lot of ways. Everything in that video looks so fucking queer, but it’s hard to tell how many of the people in it actually are queer. I think part of that comes from the way younger people are identifying, with studies showing that the younger you go, higher and higher percentages of people ID as not straight and/or not cis. I think it’s cool, and hopefully that’s a good thing for the future of femmes.

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Erin

Honestly, my femme experience is entirely tied to my appearance and not at all how I would identify my personality. I say Utility Femme, which to me means I CONTAIN MULTITUDES. Like I’ll be made up and then wear some sensible shoes, or I’ll make sure I have on like eight necklaces and then definitely be able to replace your car’s front bumper. So to me, it feels less like a brand and more like an aesthetic. But you know what? When I see other femmes and femmes with femmes it makes me want to get in a car and drive with the windows down while I blast an air horn out the driver’s side because of how pumped it gets me. 

I don’t associate femme with emotional labor at all, and actually, I don’t really associate femme with tenderness! I equate Femme with being able to ruin someone’s life IN A GOOD WAY if you wanted to, this bubbling-just-beneath-the-surface strength. Not that strength and tenderness are mutually exclusive, but maybe it’s that their approach feels different.

On the idea that an older generation of people think only women should claim the word femme: I’m afraid I don’t even get that argument, possibly because I’m not super smart but also possibly because that argument is bananas? Cis men are described as “butch,” so does that invalidate an entire self-identified group within lesbian history? No? They get to keep that one? It’s almost like the femme identity… is invisible. Sorry. No, kidding, but I think femme has always been relevant. I don’t think we’re reinventing or reclaiming the word, I just think it’s not been seen. Like it’s been this thing confidently moving through a crowd looking for a familiar face and everyone’s finally like, “Where’ve you been we haven’t seen you all night!” and it’s like, “You’ve spilled your drink on me twice and told me to move?”

I also love that younger people are abandoning a traditional approach to gender and sexuality and that everyone is becoming so indecipherable that the inclination to label yourself or someone else is pointless. I think it adds a richness to the femme identity, really, that we’re more complex than a separatist identity.

My only femme roots are that I remember thinking Aaliyah was the best-dressed person I’d ever seen and then later realizing I was also in love with her. It’s still confusing when this happens.

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YAT/TA

I am attic femme. Boxes full of punk dreams, old VHS dance videos, altar candles, glitter raffia femme. I’m the type of femme that is Aries Armor and unafraid to tell you that I cried on the leather bag of the guy in front of me at the Benjamin Clementine concert, because I was tired of not being famous. I definitely think femme is tied to emotional labor. Femme labor looks like creating soft rooms of satin for your lovers, and laying underneath the carpeted ground as they roll around with their newly remembered, healed, and transformed selves. As you side-eye them (lovingly…) like, “you’re welcome.” 

Femme labor is silently sewing your mouth shut, as you lift your lover’s ego high enough that you can both float away to the planet that you’ve been building together… all the while praying that your held breath and your heavy heart can stand to hold the both of you. Femme means that you’ve got some sensitivity that doubles as strength and you are down to aestheticize it, commune over it, or fucking fuck about it.

My femme roots are in my ancestors, who whisper the textures and sounds that create the most powerful vibrations; my musical mothers — Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse, and some that are still living; and in my femme friends, who are honestly gifts to the planets that orbit them.

Yatta’s photo in the feature image was taken by Nancy Musinguzi.

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Cecelia

The word femme, for myself specifically, is a departure from traditional femininity. I see femme as the rebellious teenage daughter of femininity. Femme is the process of taking the feminine words that were placed in my body, words like “soft, weak, quiet” and transforming them into: “wild, loud, confident.” Thinking about femme in this way is complicated. When I broke up with femininity and embraced femme, I felt strong and confident and powerful, but I was left with certain desires that I couldn’t find room for in myself. What was I supposed to do with my desire to nurture, to care, and to love something deeply?

This is why magic and other healing practices are so necessary to how I identify as femme. I use witchy things to care for myself and show other people that I care for them. Reading someone’s tarot is a way to remind them (and myself) that vulnerability is a measure of growth and strength. Lighting a candle and saying a spell for another femme is a strategy that reminds me how important it is to comfort and protect each other. When I didn’t have a personal understanding of the word femme and only understood my caring process through the traditional femininity I inherited, I felt fragile and lost. The differentiation between the two is, in many ways, totally arbitrary — but by taking the word femme on as a project, I was forced to actively investigate and take apart the ways that traditional femininity lived in my body. Claiming femme made me feel like an agent of my own experience, not a passenger.

It’s really exciting to see how a queer femme aesthetic has emerged in the past few years, and I know from experience that forming an aesthetic helped femmes signal queerness more visibly in public spaces. I think of the queer femme armor I wear, like purple lipstick and scrunchies and too much glitter and baby pink harnesses and chokers and five shades of rainbow hair and iridescent combat boots. I want to be optimistic and say that femmes had some very specific combination of adornment to signal our queerness for a brief, beautiful window of time. But, as the historic narrative of queer appropriation into mainstream culture goes, the queer femme aesthetic is now super trendy. So we have a new obstacle for femme visibility, but you know what? The greatest skill I have as a femme is not waiting for you to figure out if I’m queer. When I’m going out, gathering my hair in a perfect top knot is just as important as gathering the sparkle required to make eye contact, approach you directly, and be the first to say that I want to make out.

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Alaina

My femme is tomboy femme/hausboi femme/femme prince. It’s feminine and utilitarian. It’s full of hearts and stars and silks and velvets and glitter, and always includes a good shoe that still allows me to run full speed across a field of flowers and do a cartwheel. It’s baking cakes for people I love from scratch in a kitchen I cleaned myself. It’s adding a peter pan collar or a huge flower broach to an otherwise menswear-inspired look. Femme for me feels like I’m finally settling into the way my body wants to be seen. When I first came out as queer, I butched it up big time, because that’s what you do when you’re a 16-year-old baby gay. And then I realized, that I love the way my thighs look in a dress, that I feel like I can take over the world when I do my makeup, and that glitter will cure all ills. I want to be the one who gets to ride on the horse and “save” the princess, and I want to do it in a skirt that does the Thing when I spin around.

If my femme identity were tied to any kind of emotional labor it would be nurturing. All of my femme role models have been mothers, aunties, grandmothers, and other caregivers who had hardened calloused hands from working so hard, but could and would still stroke your back with all the gentleness in the world if you were hurting. When I think about being femme, it’s tied to taking care of my community. It’s tied to holding folks in the light and uplifting my community with love and care.

Femme invisibility is still very real, and extremely difficult to navigate. And I do think that a lot of it has to do less so with any sort of purposeful femme erasure in queer communities (although that is extremely prevalent), and much more to do with the fact that it’s an identity being co-opted by folks who aren’t queer. I think a lot of our discussions around femme invisibility in queer spaces center around masculinity, and those are valid and important discussions, but I’d love to see the conversation change and try to look at the ways our identities have been taken by straight (white) women who want cool points. And so, as I think happens often when the majority gets its hands onto something that minority groups have been doing for a while, we lose our ability to say, “Hey, this is ours!” Part of me wonders if femme invisibility has less to do with us being mistaken as straight and more to do with the fact that straight people are trying to be us. It’s like, they steal our aesthetic, they steal our identities, and they steal our ideologies… but they water them down. I think femme-ness is directly tied to queerness, though; it’s a resistance to traditional femininity and it’s tied to the heteropatriarchy, even if it sometimes mimics it. That’s what makes it powerful. That’s what makes us resilient.

Every Major “Law & Order” Character Ranked In Order Of Lesbianism

27. Senior Detective Alexandra Eames

Is seemingly able to withstand extended periods of time (all of it, all the time, every minute of time) with #1 Mansplainer Robert Goren, so. Generally doesn’t ping.

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26. Junior Detective Megan Wheeler

Literally everybody on Criminal Intent bugged for me.

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25. Junior Detective Amanda Rollins

Can’t be a lesbian because her and Carisi are MTB. But she could be bisexual and have an affair with her babysitter. Olivia Benson wouldn’t like that but Olivia Benson isn’t the boss of Rollins’ personal life.

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24. Judge Lena Petrovsky

Has a deeply adversarial history with Alex Cabot, so probably she is homophobic.

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23. Assistant District Attorney Kim Greylek

Vaguely emenates a cylon vibe.

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22. Police Psychiatrist Paula Gyson

I have no memory of this character but if I did, it would be a memory of her driving away from her ex’s house on a motorcycle.

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21. Junior Detective Nina Cassady

Who? Statistically speaking, is probably gay.

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20. Junior Detective Monique Jeffries

Never truly fleshed out or given time to shine, leading her to be replaced by Ice-T. Also used to work out at my gym in Union Square. That has nothing to do with anything besides spandex in general.

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19. Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Borgia

Has “relatives in Venice.” Is brutally murdered.

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18. Assistant District Attorney Sonya Paxton

Elliot Stabler considered her “hungry for power.” Alcoholic. Lives by her own rules. Is brutally murdered by somebody else’s stalker.

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17. Assistant District Attorney Jamie Ross

Her name is “Jamie.” Lesbian haircut. Intense custody battle with her ex.

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16. Medical Examiner Dr. Elizabeth Rogers

Longest-running recurring character in various Law & Order universes due to absolutely zero fear of commitment. Butch business casual. Easily frustrated by men.

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15. Judge / Bureau Chief Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Donnelly

“The ballsiest character the franchise has ever invented – male or female” –  Susan Green & Randee Dawn, The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit Companion

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14. Junior Detective Nola Falacci

Lesbian voice, bad with people, broad shoulders, wears tank tops to work.

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13. Assistant District Attorney Connie Rubirosa

“De La Garza is, per the show’s distaff tradition, obliged to have Rubirosa scissor her legs around the DA’s office.” – Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

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12. Lieutenant Anita Van Buren

That’s the same face she makes at the hospital when they’re like, “I’m sorry you have to be legally related to the patient in order to be granted visitation rights.” Nope, not today. NOT ON MY WATCH.

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11. Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid

Lesbian voice. Pro-choice feminist, Scully haircut. Died in a car crash while helping a drunk detective get home from the bar.

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10. Interim District Attorney Nora Lewin

First female DA. Definitely a kinky top who sleeps on a pile of money. Probably does “in contempt of court” role-playing.

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9. Junior Detective Carolyn Barek

This is a trick question because in addition to playing Carolyn Barek, this actress also played a lesbian in “ALTO – A Lesbian Romantic Comedy starring Diana Degarmo Of American Idol & Annabella Sciorra,” AND she played a lesbian in The L Word, and everybody who was in The L Word is gay now.

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8. Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael

Was on the track team at the University of Texas. Overall moral situation leans Log Cabin Republican.

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7. Psychologist Elizabeth Olivet

Blazer.

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6. Assistant District Attorney Casey Novak

Lesbian voice. In her first appearance on the show as ADA, lesbian doyenne Olivia Benson comes to Casey’s office to yell at her and finds Casey IS ALREADY CRYING. This is a unique lesbian trait, crying in anticipation of being yelled at by Olivia Benson. Also: plays softball, troubled ex, tense relationship with her former lover/mentor Elizabeth Donnelley.

In her former life as a straight woman, appeared as a witness in a case involving everybody’s favorite procedural topic, autoerotic asphyxiation.

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5. Medical Examiner Melinda Warner

Knows her way around a body, strategically buries the lede. Is the Heather Hogan of Law & Order in that every time she walks into a room I think, “Oh good, somebody has arrived to make sense of things.” Looks good in a lab coat.

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4. FBI Special Agent George Huang

SORRY IT’S TRUE.

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3. Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot

Lesbian voice. Has an off-screen fan-created deeply implied romantic relationship with Olivia Benson. The Ciara song “Like a Boy” was inspired by Alexandra Cabot, I think. In a press call, as reported by AfterEllen, Stephanie March said of Olivia/Cabot being in love, “I’m not saying we’re not… I’m not saying we’re not in love.” CLOSE ENOUGH.

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2. Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn

Good news here is that Serena Southerlyn, in addition to having my middle name as her last name but with the Southern term “Southern” in front of it, is actually a lesbian. We know this because HER LITERAL LAST LINE ON THE SHOW FOREVER was after she got fired and asked, “is this because I’m a lesbian?” We all know the answer to that is always yes. (Technically her last line is “good… good” after Branch says she’s not being fired for being a lesbian. But she is being fired for being too emotional about her cases, which is basically the same thing.)

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1. Olivia Benson

Straight girls hate her butch haircuts. Is Olivia Benson.

105 Trans Women On American TV: A History and Analysis

Until about five years ago, it was nearly impossible to find even a mildly positive portrayal of trans women on American television. This widespread defamation has absolutely impacted the national perception of trans women as a group. It certainly had an impact on me growing up — not knowing any out trans women in real life, all I knew about them was what I saw on TV and in the movies. Trans women were pathetic, violent, disposable, or the butt of a joke. They endured misgendering and slurs from their loved ones and laughed along when humiliated. They were violently outed and interrogated about their penises, and this was considered okay. If any cis people in the story had a change of heart by the end of the episode, it was considered a positive portrayal, no matter what they’d already put the trans woman through. Trans women were treated as inhuman, basically. It remains acceptable, even today, to be openly transphobic and transmisogynistic on television.

This legacy of disrespect is what prompted an intense fan backlash when Pretty Little Liars revealed that its six-season villain, the mysterious “A,” was a trans woman named Charlotte, who the characters had previously known as Allison’s friend CeCe. It turned out that Charlotte was actually Allison’s long-lost sister, cast out of her family for being trans and subsequently gone bananas. Charlotte embodied every negative trans stereotype possible: she was deceptive about her trans status to a romantic partner and everybody who knew her, she manipulated and murdered innocent people, she wore disguises, she had mental health problems, she was referred to as “she/he/it,” she devoted her life to malicious and vengeful behavior and, after being outed, immediately turned suicidal. When the show returned in 2016, Charlotte lasted just long enough to embody one final trope: she got murdered.

The bar for positive representation is so low that in 2010, Seth MacFarlane described the following Family Guy storyline as “probably the most sympathetic portrayal of a transsexual character that has ever been on television, dare I say”: a main character’s parent comes out as a trans woman and then sleeps with another character who, when told about his lover’s trans status, vomits for 45 uninterrupted seconds.

So, I set out to do a thorough and comprehensive analysis of trans female representation on American television. Partially I’m motivated by wishing I’d had something definitive to point at when people argued the Charlotte reveal was no big deal, or that Caitlyn Jenner’s existence has summarily ended the misrepresentation conversation. But the deeper I got into the material, the more I just felt like this information needed to be gathered and presented in its entirety, because the repetitive tropes at play here are both truly horrible and rarely discussed. I was also unable to find any singularly comprehensive reference book for this topic, which surprised me.

Methodology:

Using The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV, Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television as well as Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Wikias, imdb, message boards and recaps, I was able to discover 105 characters who seemed to be, either overtly or subtextually, trans representations. [ETA: The comments on this post are filled with stories of other characters — many that could’ve been included here if I’d found them myself, and some that wouldn’t be but are interesting thoughts anyhow — so read those after you read this!] The majority of these 105 characters were one-episode appearances, and over the course of six weeks, I logged over 50 hours of television watching and reviewing. If I couldn’t find the episode anywhere online or at the library, I used the aforementioned sources to describe the episode. We did not include sci-fi/fantasy/supernatural characters, because that gets a little confusing/tricky, and it was hard to know where to draw the line there.

In some cases, it was difficult to discern who was or wasn’t a trans character because the language we use to talk about trans people (and even how trans people describe themselves) has evolved so rapidly and changed so dramatically over the past five decades, and many early portrayals were categorized as “cross-dressers” or “transvestites.” Some of those roles I left out, but some I included because regardless of terminology, those images contributed significantly to how people perceive trans women and I wanted to include at least a few.

This report is in two pieces, in the first I will discuss broadly what I discovered, and the second is a list of every trans character I looked at and a brief description of their role.

I. Data

By and large, trans women are rarely seen on television, and when they are, the context is either tragic or farcical. Trans women on TV do these things: they die or are dying, they kill other people or are killed, they are your old pal from college who presents as female now, they are in the hospital, they’ve come down to the station for questioning. They always wear dresses and lots of makeup, they usually date men, they’re usually white, and they’re rarely portrayed by actual trans women. They are remarkably understanding when potential partners are disgusted by them, and patient when friends make jokes about them. They speak openly about penises and any surgeries they may or may not have had to anybody at all who wants to know.

When GLAAD looked at ten years of trans male and female representation on television in 2012, they found 54% of the 102 episodes containing trans folks were categorized as containing negative representations, 35% ranged from “problematic” to “good” and 12% were considered groundbreaking, fair or accurate. 40% of the characters played a “victim,” 21% were killers or villains, 20% were sex workers, and hate speech appeared in at least 61% of the episodes.

Representation has definitely improved over the last five years, but it’s still nearly impossible to find a character who’s trans identity is an incidental element of her inclusion on the show. Still, the majority of trans characters are written by and played by cis actors, and were it not for Transparent, Orange is the New Black and Sense8, which not-so-coincidentally employ actual trans people to play parts and sometimes even to write words, the landscape would remain pretty barren. The only one-off episode I watched that really impressed me was the most recent episode on this list, from a show called Royal Pains.

This infographic, compiled for me by the fantastic Heather Hogan, presents an overview of compiled data. However, the characters from Bob’s Burger included in the appendix are not accounted for in the infographic, as they were added after the infographic had gone through so many tiny updates that we no longer had the mental or emotional capacity to proceed.

In Part II, I will walk you through the entire history of trans female characters on American television. I used the terminology used in the programs themselves, rather than updated terminology, to accurately reflect what was said at the time.

Thank you to our Trans Editor Mey Rude, who edited and vetted this entire piece and also helped me fill in some of the shows I wasn’t familiar with. LOVE YOU MEY.

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II. Appendix

Nurse Betty Ames, Alfred Hitchock Presents “An Unlocked Window,” 1965

Cis male actor

Nurse Stella Crosson is shocked to discover that their new nurse Betty Ames is not a nurse at all! In fact, she is the infamous nurse-killer on the loose! Betty poses as a victim and then tries to attack Stella. They pull off her wig for THE BIG REVEAL. This episode was so popular that they remade it in 1985!

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Beverly LaSalle, All in the Family, 1975-1977

Cis gay male actor

Archie is shocked to discover that Beverly, a performer who passed out in his cab, is “really a man.” They pull of her wig for the BIG REVEAL! Archie freaks out and unleashes a torrent of hate speech. Beverly eventually wins the Bunkers over with her winning personality and willingness to participate in jokes made at her own expense. Everybody continues using male pronouns for Beverly. Eventually she is beaten and killed by gay-bashers.

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Pat Caddison, Medical Center, “The Fourth Sex (Parts 1 and 2),” (1975)

Cis gay male actor

*Robert Reed, a closeted gay HIV-positive actor best known for playing Mr. Brady, won an Emmy for this role.*

Pat’s family is shocked when Pat, a surgeon, comes out as a “transsexual” and announces his intent to get surgery in Los Angeles, conducted by her old pal Dr. Gannon. Pat’s family freaks out and feel betrayed. Everybody continues using male pronouns for Pat. Pat delivers a compassionate appeal for understanding. Nobody supports her transition. Doctor’s wife suggests he get psychological help instead of surgery. Attempts suicide. Has surgery. Post-surgery, tells fellow doctors to consider being compassionate towards patients with their “psychological condition.”

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Al, Barney Miller “Vigilante” (1975)

Cis male actor

Al, a teamster held for arrest at the police station for “wearing a disguise,” functions as comic relief for the officers dealing with other crimes. Jokes about wigs! Jokes about girdles! Jokes about penises! Male pronouns! She plays along.

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Charlise Parker, Police Woman, “Night of the Full Moon” (1976)

Cis male actor

Pepper is shocked when the murderess she’s been chasing, Charlise, turns out to be “a man dressed as a woman.”

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Edie Stoke, The Jeffersons, “Once a Friend” (1977)

Cis female actress.

**GLAAD noted this episode as “one of the first positive portrayals of a transgender woman in entertainment media.”**

George is shocked to learn that his old Navy buddie “Eddie” is a “transsexual” and now goes by “Edie.” George freaks out and makes a lot of jokes. Eventually he comes around. Edie tells George to stop calling her “Eddie” and using male pronouns. He reluctantly agrees. The show ends on a hopeful note!

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Niki Gunter, Westside Medical, “The Mermaid” (1977)

Cis female actress

The doctors at a Los Angeles hospital are shocked when East German swimming champion Niki Gunter’s x-rays reveal that she is “transsexual.” Niki delivers a compassionate appeal for understanding — specifically, understanding that she cannot return to East Germany, where the East German government is preventing her from being socialized as a female. She confides in a female doctor about feeling like a “freak” inside and tells a male diver who’s crushing on her that she’s trans, which totally weirds him out. Reluctantly the Germans agree to be nicer to her.

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Linda Murkland, All That Glitters (1977)

Played by Linda Gray, cis female actress

**First recurring transgender female character on television.**

This short-lived but delightfully subversive sitcom featured a world with reversed gender roles — women took power positions, their husbands were secretaries and stay-at-home Dads. Murkland, who came to the company when they needed a “rugged and strong” image for the company’s new cigarette line, was the first transgender character to be a series regular on network television. The show was cancelled after only six episodes.

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Nikki, WKRP in Cincinnati, “Hotel Oceanview” (1980)

Cis female actress

Herb is shocked when the woman he’s about to make out with says “I used to be a man.” Furthermore, she’s actually his old buddy from high school. But that guy was so athletic! How could she be a woman! Herb feels betrayed. Sick to his stomach, he flees the room.

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Margo, Charlie’s Angels, “Angel on the Line” (1981)

Cis male actor

The Angels are shocked to learn that Margo, a killer they’re tracking down, is “really a man” in a wig! They rip off her wig and she cowers, bald, in a puddle of mud.

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Rachel Johnson, The Love Boat, “Gopher’s Roomate” (1982)

Cis female actress

Gopher is shocked to learn that his roommate from college, who used to present as male, is that lady he thought he recognized on the loveboat!

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Too Close For Comfort, “For Every Man There’s Two Women” (1982)

Cis male actor

A man is raped by two women, both of whom are “easily over 200 pounds and terrifying” and one of whom is identified as trans. His sexual assault is played for laughs. The episode never aired in syndication and no footage of the episode is available to the public.

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Bob, St. Elsewhere, “Release” (1983)

Cis male actor.

“Well, you may have convinced your wife, but not me, buddy. I know you too well to agree to anything so disgusting.”

Craig is shocked to learn that “Bob,” his athletic friend from college, has come to his hospital for a “sex change.” Craig feels betrayed. Bob delivers a compassionate appeal for understanding, but Craig, sticking to male pronouns, refuses to do the surgery. Craig’s friends urge him to reconsider while making penis jokes. Craig says he will never trust anybody ever again!

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Melissa, Gimme a Break!,“Melissa” (1983)

Cis female actress.

“You know when you told me being with Melissa was like being with one of the guys? Well, you were.”

Nell is shocked to learn that the woman she set Carl up with, Melissa, “used to be a man.” When Melissa tells Nell, in hopes that she’ll break the news to Carl before things get too serious, Nell repeats her birth name “Harvey Wallace” over and over in a trance. But Nell can barely stop laughing when she tells Carl, who freaks out and says he can’t believe he was going out with “a man”! And that he liked her, too!

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Charlene, Night Court, “Best of Friends” (1985)

Cis male actor

“I mean, so she has her life to lead, fine, but she doesn’t have to come here and rub YOUR face in it.” 

Dan is shocked to learn that his athletic lothario college buddy “Chip” is a woman and that her name is Charlene. Dan freaks out, especially about Charlene having her penis removed. She delivers a compassionate appeal for understanding but Dan continues freaking out, feeling sick, using male pronouns, and feeling betrayed. Nor will he attend her wedding! Charlene punches Dan so he’s face-down in the salad bar! Dan’s friends implore him to be nicer to his buddy while making jokes at her expense. Dan eventually comes around, but keeps on joking about penises!

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Georgette, Carol & Company, “Reunion” (1990)

Cis female actress.

Laurie is shocked to learn that her old flame the football player — who she considers the “love of her life” — is “now a woman.”  “Sex-change operations are 100 times as common on TV as they are in real life, but it’s a credit to Carol & Company that this one is played tenderly and melancholically, as well as for the usual broad laughs,” wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer. I bet!

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Denise Bryson, Twin Peaks (1990)

Played by cis male actor David Duchovny

When DEA Agent Denise Bryson shows up in Twin Peaks to help out on the case, the fact that she’s no longer presenting as “Dennis” isn’t a big deal to her colleagues.

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Susan, L.A. Law, “Speak, Lawyers For Me” (1991)

Cis female actress

“First he’s a guy, now he’s a girl, he or she or it deserves to get fired.”

The beauty company that employed model Susan Convers is shocked to learn that she is transgender. They freak out and fire her, causing her to take them to court, employing a lawyer who misgenders her and criticizes her dress and appearance. In court, she agrees that she hid her trans status from her friends to avoid them being “repulsed.” She delivers a compassionate appeal for understanding. Eventually the lawyer comes around in order to successfully argue her case, and wins.

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Louise, Picket Fences “Pageantry” (1992)

Cis female actress.

“She teaches gym! She goes into the showers! Why haven’t you arrested it? Is she a man or a woman?”

The citizens of Rome and especially Sheriff Jimmy Brock are shocked to learn that Louise, Rome’s beloved drama teacher, “is a man” who got her job with a phony resume. They’re livid. Jimmy’s wife, Louise’s doctor, implores him to reconsider. In court, Louise’s ex-boyfriend testifies that he was repulsed to learn that he “put his tongue in the mouth of a former man.” On the stand, Louise is forced to share her history of suicidal thoughts and describe her “sex change operation” in precise detail. The judge admits that she makes him “extremely squeamish, if not ill,” but that it is not okay ‘to indulge our own personal distaste at the expense of someone else’s civil rights.” Still, the parents oppose her performing in the pageant. Luckily, Rome’s children are more progressive than their parents and they revolt: they halt their performance to call out everybody for being an asshole to Louise and call her up to play her role. They’re dressed like angels! I cried a little.

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Rena, E.R.,“ER Confidential” (1994)

Cis male actor

The doctors are shocked to discover that their apparently female patient has a penis. Dr. Carter is visibly angry at his patient, ignoring her as she monologues about how friends and strangers are disgusted by her and it takes three hours to put her makeup on. “Maybe they’re right,” she concludes. “Maybe I am disgusting.” Apropos of nothing, she escapes to the hospital roof, tells doctors that she’s too old now to pass as a woman, and then jumps off the roof.

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Ginger, Evening Shade, “The Perfect Woman” (1994)

Cis female actress.

Diahann Caroll plays a “transsexual” who Ponder’s friends set him up with. Ossie Davis played Ponder.

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Thad, Married…With Children, “Dud Bowl” (1995)

Cis male actor.

Al and his co-players are shocked when their Dud Bowl quarterback, Thad, shows up presenting as a woman. Thad now speaks with a distinct “gay lisp” and is playful when jokes are made at her expense, even when Al lifts her skirt in front of the boys to inspect her genitals! She’s still a great quarterback, though! And isn’t that really all that matters, in the end.

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Vicky, Diagnosis Murder, “All-American Murder” (1995)

Cis female actress

Mark is shocked to learn that Vicky, the foxy neighbor he likes watching run down the beach, was formerly known as “Victor,” a US Marines recruit who was bullied non-stop for three weeks, causing her to leave the military. Turns out she was killed by her ex-girlfriend when she found out that Vicky had transitioned.

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Azure C. Lee, The City (1995-1997)

Cis female actress

First recurring trans character on a soap opera

The first recurring transgender character on an American soap, Carlotta Chang played fashion model Azure Lee on the short-lived Morgan Fairchild vehicle The City. Apparently she was “revealed to be a male-to-female transsexual in 1996, much to the shock of her Latino fiancé Bernardo.” The Sun-Sentinal promised the episode would “serve up a shocker.” According to The Lavender Screen, trans activists found the role a sensationalized ratings tool, that of “a flamboyant gay male cross-dressing.”

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Annie, Chicago Hope,“Informed Consent” (1995) and “Women on the Verge” (1996)

Cis actress

“If you’d told me you’d been married I could handle that sure. If you had a criminal record? Sure. But you tell me you had a penis? A penis? Forgive me for being just a little bit thrown.”

Bill is shocked to learn that his girlfriend, Mia, is a trans woman and that she was his best friend / hockey teammate in high school while presenting as male. He freaks out, is horrified he had sex with her. A female doctor tells him to reconsider and explains what it means to be transgender.

Bill: “You really think I could look at her without puking my intestines out?”
Doctor: “Just give this thing a chance.”
Bill: “That’s the problem — I don’t know what this thing is. A freak?  A mutant? You tell me. How could I possibly be with that?”
Doctor: “Funny. I was feeling bad for her, but now I kinda feel sorry for you.”

Ultimately, he can’t get over it and continue their relationship. In a later episode, she’s a patient at the hospital and she’s diagnosed with a tumor and a condition related to her hormones. If she wants to survive, she has to stop taking hormones. She kills herself instead. Bill is devastated.

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Crystal Clark, Married With Children, “Calendar Girl” (1996)

Cis female actress

Bud and Al Bundy are shocked when Crystal, the cover model for their calendar, announces on television that she was “born a man.” Bud, who’d kissed her, and the boys, who’d mooned over her calendar, flee the room to throw up.

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Stephanie, Ally McBeal, “Boy To The World” (1997)

Cis queer actor.

“This boy needs help. He is the most fragile person living in the harshest of worlds. He is obviously not well.”

Ally McBeal is shocked to learn that her client, Stephanie, who has been arrested for solicitation, is transgender. Behind her back, everybody misgenders Stephanie and discusses her need for psychological help. Ally hires Stephanie to work at their law firm to save her from doing prison time, but she’s murdered before she has a chance to start her new job.

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Simone Dubois, Nash Bridges, “Javelin Catcher” (1998)

Gay male drag queen actor

RuPaul plays Simone Dubois, a representative of Transsexual Sex Workers, who helps an investigator work undercover in drag for a crime involving a gangster attempting to pick up “transsexual prostitutes.”

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Becker, “He Said, He Said” (1999)

From IMBD: “Becker is visited by a friend of an old friend who turns out to be the old friend.”

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Inez, NYPD Blue, “A Whole In Juan” (2000)

Cis male actor

The cops find a dead baby in a trash can, and soon discover that the child’s mother, a “crack whore,” left her baby in the care of a trans prostitute for what she said would be a few hours. A few days later, the Mom hadn’t shown up, so Inez left the baby alone to go to a check-up with the doctor who installed her “feminine equipment.” While she was gone, the baby choked on its own vomit and died.

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Haley and Jackie, Law & Order SVU, “Transitions” (2000)

Cis male actor and cis female actor

The detectives are shocked to learn that Hailey, the “son” of their assault victim is female, and the assault victim is estranged from Hailey and Hailey’s mother for refusing to accept Hailey’s gender. The NYPD Psychologist, perfect human BD Wong, explains to the detectives what it means to be transgender. Although a group of radical hormone-stealing trans activists she runs with aren’t good for it, it turns out that her school counselor did. On the stand, the prosecutor pushes Hailey’s guidance counselor Jackie ’til she reveals that she is trans and shares her own stories of assault, abuse, suicide attempts and misery. The father sees the error of his ways and asks the DA’s office to drop the charges, but they can’t.

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Cindy McCauliff, Ally McBeal, “Girls’ Night Out” “Two’s a Crowd” “Without a Net” (2000)

Cis female actress

“I have nothing against transgender people, I really don’t, but no one should ever touch one, much less — [makes noise of disgust]”

Fish and Ling are shocked when their client, who is battling a discrimination lawsuit over a mandated physical, tells them, “I’m really a man.” Turns out she’d avoided the physical to avoid her penis being discovered. She’s forced to describe her entire medical transition. Unaware of her trans status, she starts dating Mark, but Fish is OBSESSED and FURIOUS that Mark’s in the dark. When she does tell Mark, he feels betrayed, calls her a man, and is sick to his stomach. He apologizes, they reunite, but ultimately he just can’t date her because Penis. His friends make jokes at her expense.

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Louise, Dark Angel, “Out” (2000)

First trans woman to play a trans character on television.

“The part of Kings Road where she lives is very genderfluid. It’s where all the Mister Sisters reside. The lesbian mind can get hella tampered with in that neighborhood.”

Normal’s friends are shocked when they discover that Louise, the girl he’s going on a date with, is a trans woman. They anticipate an entertaining reveal, only to find that Normal’s unconcerned with her trans status. Unfortunately, Louise realizes that she’s a lesbian, and wants Normal to set her up with Original Cindy. Original Cindy declines because she doesn’t want to date a trans woman.

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Family Law, “Are You My Father” (2000)

A transgender woman fights for the right to see her child.

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Brandi, Just Shoot Me!, “Brandi, You’re a Fine Girl” (2000)

Cis female actress

“He had boobs. Two of ’em, big as yours. And God knows what’s going on downstairs.”

Finch is shocked to learn that his dear ‘ol buddy Burt is that girl “Brandi” he’s been hitting on at the bar. Finch freaks out, thinks it’s a joke, and screams running from the bar. Finch’s female friend/co-worker tells him to reconsider. Eventually he realizes they can still do dude-bro shit together despite her transition and so they do, and then he realizes he’s got feelings for her. He tries to kiss her several times and she rebuffs him with martial arts several times and says she’s not into him like that, she just wants to be friends.

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Cindy McCauliff, Ally McBeal, “Hats Off To Larry” (2001)

Cis female actress

The lawyers of Cage & Fish, but especially Mark, are shocked to learn that Cindy, Mark’s transgender ex, has a fiancé with whom she’d like to sue for the right to marry despite being, in the eyes of the law, a same-sex couple. Mark can’t believe that anybody would love a woman with a penis. In court, Fish refers to their partnership as a “gay couple,” but Mark interrupts with an inspirational speech about how Cindy is a woman.

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Helena Handbasket, Friends (2001 – 2002)

“Don’t you have a little too much penis to be wearing a dress like that?”

Cis female actress.

Monica encourages Chandler to reunite with and accept his father, who, according to Chandler’s childhood memories, has presented as a woman full-time since her son’s childhood, although he refers to her as a “drag performer” and everybody uses male pronouns. Everybody makes jokes at her expense and she plays along.

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Sasha Wilmer, Judging Amy, “Between the Wanting and the Getting” (2001)

Cis male actor

“Maybe Sasha is transgender. Maybe he thinks that his mother or his grandmother or the Powerpuff Girls represent good qualities that he wants in his personality… or maybe he just likes girls’ clothes? At this point we can’t know any more than this child can. It’s just too soon.”

Amy is shocked to discover that the eight-year-old child who Child Welfare Services say is being neglected by their parents says that she is a girl despite being “born biologically male” and only being eight years old. Her parents allow her to dress and present female, which led to bullying, which led to them pulling her out of school. Amy rules that she can remain with her family but recommends that she dresses as a boy.

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Valerie Thomlinson, Gideon’s Crossing, “Freak Show” (2001)

Cis female actress

A husband is shocked when his wife of twenty years, who is dying of cancer, reveals that she is transgender — a revelation she’s forced to make ’cause her estrogen is feeding the cancer and she’s gotta stop taking them to begin cancer treatment. But she tells doctors she’d rather die a young woman than an old man. Her husband leaves her, she tries to kill herself, and then her husband decides he’s gonna try to be her husband again.

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Erica, The Education of Max Bickford (2001-2002)

Played by cisgender actress Helen Shaver

**The first TV show to include a transgender character as part of the regular cast.**

Max is shocked when his best friend Steve comes back into his life as Erica, a transgender woman, but he’s cool with it. Although largely praised as a respectful characterization, her primarily storylines consisted of: “Erica’s boyfriend (Boyd Gaines) accidentally learns that she was once a man,” “Erica’s ex returns to town, unaware that her former husband is now a woman and Max refuses to tell her the truth” and “Erica starts dating a man who tells her all about his past, but she can’t bring herself to tell him that she was once a man.”

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Cheryl, Law & Order SVU, “Fallacy” (2002)

Cis queer female actress

“My problem is this he/she and her lies is the reason we have two bodies on our hands.”

Stabler and Benson are shocked to learn that Cheryl, a victim who allegedly killed her boyfriend’s brother for trying to rape her, is transgender. They refer to her as a man and out her to her boyfriend, who freaks out, feels betrayed, calls her a “freak,” gets sick to his stomach, and then goes ahead and KILLS HIMSELF.

The attorneys are sympathetic to her plight, thanks to the expertise of perfect human BD Wong. It’s clear she’s been assaulted and bullied all her life but because in this case, it wasn’t physical self-defense but fear of being outed that inspired her to attack, she’s sentenced to prison — a men’s prison, of course. On her first night she’s beaten and gang raped.

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Sofia Lopez, Nip/Tuck, “Sofia Lopez” and “Sofia Lopez II” (2003)

Cis male actor

“It’d be wonderful if we could look beyond the wrapping for the real person inside. But I work in  a plastic surgeon’s office, I know more than anyone that doesn’t really happen.” 

Sofia needs a her tracheal shave fixed, and the doctor eventually agrees to do it despite being disgusted by her transsexual status. Later, he’s called to the ER to help a friend of Sofia’s with botched “sex change” surgery, when he learns his prior mentor is performing unsanitary surgery on trans clients while drunk, so he shuts the old doc down. She returns for “SRS,” but after a hook-up with a lesbian nurse, she questions her desire to undergo surgery, claiming a “sexual preference crisis.” It’s never explained why falling for a lesbian would make her hesitate to live as a woman, which literally makes zero sense. Anyhow, she eventually gets the surgery, so.

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Lois, Karen Sisco, “Nobody’s Perfect” (2003)

Trans female actress

The U.S. Marshals are shocked to learn that the fugitive murderer and thief they’re hunting down, Louis DiMarco, is a transgender woman named “Lois” who stole $300k for her surgery.

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Morgan, E.R., “Next Of Kin” (2003)

Cis female actress

Pratt: A 12-year-old cross-dresser?
Harkins: All I know is that, anatomically, she’s a he.
Pratt: And you’re sure about that?
Harkins: I’ve seen my fair share of penises.

Doctors are shocked when they learn that Morgan, a 12-year-old girl who’s just been in a car accident with her father, has a penis! This inspires the doctors to ask her “what’s the deal,” refer to her as his “son” and use male pronouns exclusively. Her father dies, and her mother — estranged from the fam due to her refusal to let Morgan present as female — shows up to chop Morgan’s hair off so she’ll be presentable to her new stepfather and calls her “my little boy.” The one doctor on Morgan’s side shows up too late to stop her from taking Morgan away. This episode is devastatingly depressing.

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Julia Smith, Veronica Mars, “Meet John Smith” (2004)

Cis female actress

“So it turns out my Mom is a liar and my Dad is a circus freak.”

Justin is shocked to discover that his father, who his mother always told him was dead, is a woman named Julia living with her husband in San Diego. He freaks out. Turns out she’s the one who’s been visiting his video store every weekend just to see him for 45 seconds even though he never knew it was her, which Veronica Mars points out is pretty dedicated so maybe he shouldn’t be an asshole. He comes around.

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Wendy, Mamosa and Mona, CSI, “C-C-Changes” (2004)

Cis actresses.

“We all get work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s up top or down low, pretty is pretty.”

The detectives are shocked to discover that their murder victim, Wendy, is “a transsexual” and the “Walter” her car is registered to. Over the course of their investigation, the detectives find an underground silicone-injection operation operated by sex workers, a group of cis and trans showgirls bragging about getting work done, a “how to act feminine” class seemingly attended by actual trans female actors, a beautiful dancer named Mamosa who tells Gil it’s hard for trans girls to find love and that everybody thinks they’re psycho and a trans female doctor lying about her identity who performs “sex change” surgery without a license, which led to a girl dying in her care, and then her Trans Ally husband going out to murder Wendy to keep her quiet. “Killed by someone in our own community,” Mamosa laments to Gil. “As if we don’t have enough enemies.”

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Theresa, Judging Amy, “Slade’s Chophouse” (2004)

Cis male actor

Bruce is shocked when his old priest friend Father Ted shows up and comes out as Father Teresa, explaining that she’d been saving up her salary for a “sex-change.” Along with the recent priest-abuse scandal, Bruce says this piece of news is shaking his faith. Teresa tells him, “if you can hold on to your faith, you’ve got some hope that it’ll all make sense in the end.” Bruce says he’ll come around eventually.

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Daniela, Cold Case, “Daniela” (2004)

Cis female actress

Chris’s Dad is shocked to learn that his son Chris’s girlfriend, Daniela, is transgender, and demands Chris not take her to the prom. Daniela kills herself and Chris buries her, then throws away her dress and corsage.

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Kiki, Queer As Folk (2004-2005)

Cis gay male actor

Kiki, “formerly Kenny,” is a waitress at the Liberty Diner who takes over when Deb retries, but she’s not very good at it. After announcing “I’m a tranny on the verge of a nervous breakdown!” Deb saves her from a brutal lunch rush and eventually returns to her position, with Kiki returning to waitress. In the finale, she brings her “tranny support group” to a political rally.

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Ava Moore, Nip/Tuck (2003-2006)

Played by cisgender actress Famke Janssen

Ava was in love with heterosexual surgeon Barrett Moore, and asked him to “transform Avery into Ava” so they could be together, which he did. The two had a child via a surrogate, and the evening before the surgery intended to make her “artificial vagina deep enough to pass as biologically natural,” she kidnapped their 12-year-old son and began a sexual relationship with him, believing he’d be too young to notice the difference in her vagina. We meet Ava when she shows up in Season Two, a life coach hired by Sean to help his wife.  Sean is drawn to Ava, and unable to see that she is a devious and sociopathic sexual predator. She begins a relationship with 17-year-old Matt. She also attempts to have sex with Christian Troy, who calls her vagina “the goddamn Hope Diamond of transsexuals.” Then her husband performs surgery to give her a deeper vagina. She begs her son to run away to France with her, but instead he stabs himself to death and dies in her arms. She leaves him and flees. In later episodes, Matt deals with the “trauma” of having been involved with a transgender woman, which includes trolling bars for a trans woman who, when he realizes she is pre-op, beats her violently, which brings us to….

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Cherry Peck, Nip/Tuck (2004)

Cis gay male actor

Matt is shocked to learn that Cherry Peck, a trans woman he picked up at a bar, has a penis, and results by beating her savagely. She and her friends go to his high school, chase him out, beat him up, and pee on him. She goes to Dr. McNamara, Matt’s father, demanding he fix her face for free. Her and Matt become friends. Matt’s ex-girlfriend’s father kidnaps and tortures them and forces them to perform sex acts for him, but they escape and shoot their captor.

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Carmen, It’s Always Sunny (2005)

Played by cis actress Brittany Daniel

A guy who’s attracted to Carmen is shocked to learn she is transgender, but he maintains his pursuit of her in order to be “first in line” when she gets sexual reassignment surgery. According to the It’s Sunny Wikia, she “displayed an obvious bulge in her pants until she had her penis removed.” The guy hides his ongoing relationship with Carmen from his friends to the point where they suspect he is a serial killer. After her surgery, though, she decides to date a different guy who wasn’t such a jerk.

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Ms. Mitchell, ER,“Skin” (2005)

Trans female actress

Ms. Mitchell’s doctor is shocked to hear that his patient requested a different doctor due to the fact that, as the different doctor tells him, “she is a he and she didn’t feel comfortable telling you that.” She’s diagnosed with testicular cancer but is okay with it ’cause she was “getting rid of the equipment anyway.”

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 Stephanie, Without a Trace, “Transitions” (2005)

Cis female actress

Stephanie’s boyfriend is shocked to learn that Stephanie is trans and responds by freaking out, feeling sick to his stomach, and pushing her onto the floor. She goes missing the next day. We learn that her family shunned/disowned her, she abandoned her wife and kids, and since then she has moved from place to place, changing her appearance to “keep her secret.” Turns out it wasn’t her ex who murdered her — it was her ex-wife’s transphobic and abusive husband!

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Zarf/Zoe, All My Children (2006)

Played by cisgender male actor Jeffery Carlson

Bianca is shocked when Zarf, a glam rock star she’s agreed to go on a date with, shows up for their date in a dress and comes out to her as Zoe, a transgender lesbian. This is really good news because Zarf is a terrible name. She thinks Zoe is mocking her lesbian sexuality, but nope. Also, she’s in love with Bianca. The rest of the town doesn’t take to Zoe all that well, ranging from distrusting her to misgendering her to accusing her of being a serial killer — then the actual serial killer attacks her. GLAAD and trans activists worked with the show to ensure Zoe’s character was treated with respect and accuracy, even including a scene with a trans support group featuring actual trans people. (This might be becoming its own trope at this point? We don’t wanna cast trans actors, but we’ll get about 10 of them together for a support group scene!) Eventually her and Bianca left for Europe at the same time and grew apart.

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MILF, Veronica Mars, “Ain’t No Magic Mountain High Enough” (2006)

Cis female actress

Dickie is shocked when the hot Mom he’s hooking up with in a car outside the carnival — a woman his friends found online to hook him up with — turns out to have a penis. He stumbles from the car, sick to his stomach, spitting all over the street while his friends — who knew she was trans — laugh at him.

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Donna, Grey’s Anatomy, “Where the Boys Are” (2006)

Trans female actress

Meredith Grey is shocked to learn that they have a patient undergoing gender confirmation surgery, but Mark is really politically correct and educated and kind when explaining the situation. The patient’s wife says she’ll miss the penis. It turns out Donna has breast cancer and will need to stop taking her hormones, which’ll make her “become a man again.” She goes ahead with the surgery anyhow.

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Alexis Meade, Ugly Betty (2006-2008)

Played by cis female actress Rebecca Romijn

Alexis, the daughter of the founder of MODE magazine, fakes her own death, transitions, and then comes back and takes over half the magazine. Her colleagues misgender her and anti-trans jokes exist in abundance. At one point she connects with a man at a bar only to have him laugh in her face and say he was only flirting with her as a dare. She pushes a pregnant woman down the stairs and goes to jail and then gets off and moves to Europe.

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Regina Dunn, Psych, “Who You Gonna Call?” (2006)

Cis male actor

Shawn and Gus are shocked to learn that the person haunting their client’s home isn’t a ghost — it’s the client’s other two personalities, one of whom is a trans woman named Regina, who was in the process of seeking transition-related medical services when the third violent male personality thwarted her efforts by killing her doctor. Shawn and Gus make vomiting noises discussing the possibility of her “removing her parts.” Robert, dressed as Regina, makes another doctor’s appointment in order to kill yet another doctor and stop the surgery.

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Carmelita, Dirty Sexy Money (2007-2009)

Played by trans female actress Candis Cayne

Patrick Darling is in love with Carmelita, and has nothing but respect for her despite the fact that his friends and family call her a “she-he” and a “tranny hooker” and seem to believe his relationship with her suggests homosexuality despite the fact that he is completely heterosexual. (As he later argues when another gay guy says he must be a little gay to date a transsexual, Carmelita “had female parts.”) Initially Carmelita is portrayed as pathetic — begging him not to leave her, as his family wants him to in order to save his marriage and political career — but eventually she emerges as a strong and powerful woman over the show’s run. Patrick’s wife Ellen discovers the affair and attacks Patrick, only to be killed by him in self-defense. Later, Patrick, against his family’s wishes, insists she accompany him to his inauguration as senator, where she is shot and killed by Ellen’s brother.

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Patty, Bones, “The He In The She” (2008)

Cis female actress

Forensic anthropologists are shocked to discover the skeleton washed ashore contains both male and female indicators, leading them to realize their victim is transgender. The female scientists school the male scientist on how to respectfully talk about trans people. They theorize she was killed when her trans status was revealed, but they turn out to be wrong. In the end, her evangelical son returns to honor her by joining the church where she worked as a pastor.

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Lois, ER, “Tandem Repeats” (2008)

Cis female actress

Lois’s Mom is shocked when she’s called to the emergency room because her child is very sick and the son she expected to see is a daughter. She’s sick mostly due to the black market hormones she’s been taking, and needs a liver transplant that Dad is VERY hesitant to provide.

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Joanna, Eli Stone, “Two Ministers” (2008)

Trans female actress

Alexandra Billings plays a member of a support group attended by a male transgender Reverend who Keith is representing in a lawsuit for wrongful termination. They hope the group will help Keith overcome his intolerance of his client. She talks about how her boyfriend and her family left her.

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Alexis Stone, Nip/Tuck, “Alexis Stone” and “Alexis Stone II” (2009)

Trans female actress

The plastic surgeon who sleeps with Alexis is shocked to hear that she is a “male-to-female transsexual” who would like surgery to “become a gay man.” The character then returns after realizing that they’d like their boobs back to better attract straight men. Although this means she’s not really a transgender character, this characterization embodies so many damaging tropes that I wanted to mention it even if it’s not part of the statistics we tallied in the infographic. Those stereotypes include: that being trans is really about being gay, that people who get surgery often regret it and are wrong to feel they require it, and that it’s a cosmetic choice.

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Georgette, The Closer,“Make Over” (2009)

Cis male actor

“Just because Empty Pants here won’t bite the bullet and put on the clothes that he was born to wear doesn’t mean that we can’t have somebody read his testimony in court.”

Louie and the other detectives are shocked to learn that Detective Andrews, his old buddy and former police partner, is transgender. Everybody freaks out, calls her a man, asks her about her genital surgery, and determine her trans status prevents her from being a reliable witness for their case. She eventually wins people over with her willingness to present male for an interrogation and her ability to gamely handle jokes made on her behalf. The character is a lesbian, which is rare.

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Auntie Momma, The Cleveland Show (2009)

“Her real name is Kevin. And she’s been hiding the candy for 36 years.”

Cleveland is shocked when he sees Auntie Momma in the bathroom and notices that she has a penis. He vomits for about 45 seconds after his father and Auntie Momma have sex. Later, Cleveland tells his Dad that Auntie Momma is a man with a penis, and his Dad vomits for 45 seconds.

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Ida Davis, The Family Guy, “Quagmire’s Dad” (2010)

cis male actor

“What are you gonna name it, eh? What are you gonna name your he-she father-mother?”

Quagmire is shocked when his Dad, who his friends think is “super fucking gay,” comes out as a trans woman. She has surgery and is immediately good-to-go. At dinner, Lois throws out the crumble Ida brought (nothing makes me sadder than people throwing out un-eaten food somebody brought to a group meal!) and the Griffins quiz her about her surgery and how to make a vagina out of a penis. Quagmire tells Dad he just can’t accept her, so she goes for a drink at the Marriot, where she meets Brian and they hit it off. The next day he learns that she’s transgender and vomits for a solid 60 seconds and screams in terror. But! Quagmire apologizes to his Dad and tells her that he loves her. But! Then we cut to Brian scrubbing himself vigorously in the shower.

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Allison Webb, Drop Dead Diva, “Queen of Mean” (2010)

Trans female actress

Grieving widow: She was everything to me.
Her Dead Wife’s Mom: You did this to yourself.

The lawyers are shocked, but react professionally, when Allison reveals that she and her wife married when she “was a man.” Now Allison’s wife has died in a car crash without a will and her parents are challenging her right to her estate now that Allison has transitioned. It has a really sweet ending.

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Cha Cha, Glitter and Marbles, Bob’s Burgers, “Sheesh! Cab, Bob?” and “Lobsterfest” (2011)

Cis male actors

These are three sex workers that Bob picks up in his taxi when he gets a second job as a late-night cab driver. When we first see them, the camera zooms in on their adam’s apples, hairy faces and hairy arms and the characters repeatedly call them “transvestite hookers.” Other than that, they are largely treated with kindness and respect and treated as women. Glitter makes a joke about living in a “town full of doctors who refuse to cut off your penis” and after Marbles and Mort kiss, Mort looks confused and disturbed and says that he kissed a boy. Cha Cha had an unspeaking cameo in another episode.

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Marshmallow, Bob’s Burgers (2011->)

cis male actor

Another trans sex worker who first appears in the same episode as Glitter, Cha Cha and Marbles, Marshmallow has made several reappearances, being in seven episodes in total. She’s treated with kindness and respect by Bob and the other characters, but her deep voice and appearance embody the “humorous trans woman” trope. She usually only has a cameo, but the show has a running gag where Bob always greets her with “Oh, hey, Marshmallow” and she’s become something of a fan favorite.

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Amanda Knott, Harry’s Law, “Send In The Clowns” (2011)

Cis gay male actor

Adam and Jenna are shocked to learn that their client, Amanda, is “anatomically male” and that she’s been fired for having an affair with her cis male boss! Jenna calls her a “he-she” and a “man-woman.” Amanda’s unlawful termination case fails, though, due to the fact that she’s had plenty of offers from other clubs but only wants this job to stay close to the boss, who she has called 20+ times in the last three days begging to get back together. She cries about having a penis.

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Geraldine, Necessary Roughness, “Dream On” (2011)

Trans female actress

Jeanette is shocked, but not upset, when the hot blonde girl she’s talking to at her high school reunion outs herself as Geraldine, who Jeanette knew in high school as Gerald and was hoping to run into at the reunion to reconnect and ride off together into the sunset. They catch up, everything is fun and light, and Geraldine confesses that she was in love with her in high school, loved her “effortless femininity,” and wanted to be her, and then kinda did her best to live that dream, which makes Jeanette feel really good about herself.

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Kyla, Hung, “What’s Going On Downstairs?” and “Money on the Floor” (2011)

Trans female actress

“The woman Ray’s on a date with is a man. She’s a man.”

Ray is shocked to learn that Kyla, the girl who hired him as an escort, “is really a man.” He learns this ’cause his booker is so disturbed to learn this info that she tracks them down at a skating rink and chases him around wildly until she’s able to tell him the truth. He freaks out and ends their date prematurely and backs out on the next date — to her high school reunion — despite having had an amazing time with her. When a competing escort is given the job, Ray wants the gig back … but refuses to dance with her and lays low as she’s outed to her classmates. He just sits there at a table full of guys making trans jokes while she stands alone on the dance floor, crowded with people whispering about her. Forced to leave the dance floor in tears, he finally gets up, tells her she’s beautiful, and asks her to dance.

Real talk: This episode broke my heart and pissed me off in a way I wasn’t expecting. Part of a sex worker’s JOB is to make the client feel sexy and desired, no matter what they look like, how repulsive their personality, even if they smell like a sweaty gym locker. That’s as big a part of the job as the sex itself is, and that’s why we see storylines on TV all the time about people perceived as “undesirable” hiring sex workers and enjoying themselves. Never before have I seen a storyline like this where the sex worker refused to do his job because of something relating to his client’s body. She paid him $1,000 to come to her high school reunion and he refused to even dance with her, or even defend her when the guys at his table realized “who she was.” Sure, he came around in the last 30 seconds, but I’m sorry, no. The message here, that even a trans girl who is as normatively attractive as Jamie Clayton can’t even PAY for it…. Jesus Christ. Disgusting.

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Mia, Hit or Miss (2012)

Played by cis female actress Chloe Sevigny

“You look really nice, Mia…. not bad for a cock in a frock.”

The audience is shocked when a figure in a dark hoodie kills someone, goes home, removes her hoodie — she’s a woman! — and then removes all of her clothing — she has a penis! — and gets into the shower. The woman herself, Mia, is shocked about five minutes later to learn that she has a son, sired by her ex who has recently died of cancer. The short-lived Direct TV series is an intersection of these circumstances: Mia’s job as a contract killer, her new duty as a mother to one child and three step-children and her pursuit of a romantic life — which includes, of course, a potential love interest being repulsed when she comes out to him. Luckily, he does eventually have a change of heart.

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Sophia Bursett, Orange is the New Black (2012->)

Played by trans female actress Laverne Cox

Sophia is a hairdresser and former fire-fighter imprisoned for credit card fraud, which she perpetuated largely to fund her surgical transition. Her straight wife struggled to accept her and tried to be a good sport, but her son got angry and embarrassed about it. Once in jail, Sophia’s wife leaves her for a man. For the first two seasons, she’s one of a few characters who rises above the manipulative, reckless and territorial behavior exhibited by other inmates but things take a turn in Season Three, a storyline which leads to her being attacked and beaten by a group of inmates. The prison deals with this conflict by putting her in solitary confinement.

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Venus Van Damme, Sons of Anarchy (2012-2014)

Played by cis male actor Walton Goggins

Venus was raised with an abusive mother who pimped out her child and also made and distributed child pornography. She plays a sex worker who develops a romance with one of the mean guys on this show that I guess is about people shooting each other and riding motorcycles.

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Sally, Fugget About It, “The Broadfather” (2013)

Jimmy is shocked when a woman he meets is like, “Hey, I’m your father!” She tells Jimmy how she killed and stole to protect her secret, then faked her own death and got surgery. She also smashes Jimmy’s face into her breasts, which gives him a hard-on.

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Lucette, Mike & Molly, “The First and Last Ride-Along” (2013)

Cis gay male actor

Lucette: I have nothing to hide.
Carl: To hell you don’t! You managed to hide it for three hours and a carriage ride!

Molly is shocked when the beautiful woman who sent a milkshake to her husband’s partner (as in; police partner) turns out to be “a he,” according to everybody besides her. Molly asks her questions about penis-tucking while Carl gets defensive about a kiss they shared on New Year’s Eve. What’s better? The show already got in trouble with GLAAD for joking about the NYE kiss six months earlier, described as “the shemale incident of ’08.”

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Paula, Two and a Half Men, “Numero Uno Accidente Lawyer” (2013)

Cis female actress

Alan is shocked to learn that the woman he’s dating, Paula, is transgender. He has a lot of questions about her genitals, mostly ensuring she won’t sprout a penis and become undateable. In her review, Mey Rude wrote that, “This episode was still filled to the brim with insulting “jokes” and problematic lines directed at the expense of not only the character of Paula, but all trans women who might see, or even hear about, the show.”

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Ms. Hudson, Elementary, “Snow Angels” (2013)

Trans female actress

Here we have a trans woman played by a trans actress and her trans status is not the focus of her story or relevant to the plot! What a revelation! As Mey wrote, “she’s just another person in Sherlock’s life.”

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Jess, Grey’s Anatomy, “The Face of Change” (2013)

Cis male actor

Brian’s father is shocked to learn that his child is having top surgery and that his girlfriend, Jess, is also trans. Jess enables Brian and his father to reconcile.

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Marlena, Love That Girl, “What He Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Him” (2013)

Cis female actress

“Well listen, MISS MISTER, you better tell him, because if you don’t, I will.”

Latrell’s gay roommate Fabian is shocked to learn that Marlena, the girl Latrell’s about to go on a date with, is a woman he once knew as “Marvin.” She begs him to keep her secret, so Fabian recruits their friends to follow them on their date to “save” Latrell from unknowingly dating “a man.” At least fifteen penis and balls jokes are made. None of Latrell’s friends are capable of telling him that Marlena is trans, so instead his old flame hooks up with him for the night (after watching The Crying Game) in order to stop him from going back to Marlena.

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Unique Adams, Glee (2013-2015)

Played by cis gay male actor Alex Newell

Unique is a talented singer who joins the McKinley High Glee Club. She’s frequently ridiculed and teased by classmates and teachers, catfishes the boy she has a crush on (who is repulsed when he discovers the true identity of his online girlfriend), is bullied and is subject to a really fucked up bathroom-related storyline. Over the course of the show she eventually bonds with the other girls but is the only female cast member to never get a romantic storyline.

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Angelique, Penny Dreadful (2014-2015)

Played by cis gay male actor Johnny Beaucamp

Dorian is not shocked when Angelique, the prostitute he sought out after meeting her earlier that day, disrobes to reveal her penis. The two enjoy an unpaid fling and seem to really like each other. Dorian throws her a ball so others may “gape at [their] uniqueness.” Then he basically leaves her for another woman. When Angelique discovers one of his secrets, he kills her.

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Transparent (2014 ->)

Maura Pfefferman, played by cis male actor Jeffery Tambour

Maura’s family — her ex-wife, two daughters and one son — is shocked when she comes out to them as transgender and begins presenting as a woman full-time. Maura deals with coming out and handling her selfish and also very queer children as well as a myriad of other issues, thoughts and feelings, over the course of this show that you probably have already seen!

Davina, played by trans actress Alexandra Billings

Davina becomes Maura’s “trans mentor” and has a boyfriend in jail who gets out and moves back in with her midway through Season Two. She is HIV-positive, a former sex worker, and currently works at the LGBT center.

Shea, played by trans actress Trace Lysette

Shea is another friend of Maura’s. She is a yoga instructor. In the second season, her role gets even bigger and we get to see that she has a rich, full life where she volunteers at a suicide hotline, sleeps with sexy Marines and hangs out with her trans friends.

Eleanor, played by trans actress Zackary Drucker

Eleanor leads the support group that Maura joins when she first comes out.

Gittel, played by trans actress Hari Nef

Gittel is an ancestor of the Pfeffermans who lived in the famous Hirschfeld Institute in Berlin and transitioned against the wishes of her mother. Gittel was arrested by the Nazis for being trans and eventually died in the Holocaust.

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Maya Avant, The Bold and The Beautiful (2013->)

Played by cis female actress Karla Mosley

**The first regular transgender character in the history of American daytime television.**

Maya’s boyfriend Rick is shocked when she comes out to him as a trans woman after he has proposed to her, and he freaks out. They eventually reconcile and do get married. Maya’s character, which came to the show in 2013 (she came out in 2015), has always been ruthless and manipulative, and Rick is pretty shitty as a human too. Other crappy stuff happens: her sister blackmails her and outs her before she tells Rick, her trans status is leaked to the press, her Dad calls her wedding a “freak show,” etc.

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Adele, Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce, “Fantasyland: A Great Place To Visit” (2015)

Trans female actress

Lt. Adele Northrup is a former award recipient who gives a speech at the Family Equality Council ball to introduce this year’s winner of the same award. The beginning of her speech is somewhat overpowered by a group of cis straight white women fighting at their table about divorce-related anger.

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Avery, Law & Order: SVU, “Transgender Bridge” (2015)

Cis male actor

When we first see Avery, she’s topless, which is super weird thing for a 15-year-old girl to be on primetime TV. Things only go downhill from there, as she’s bullied and called “he-she,” “tranny” and “freak” while a group of teenage boys pulls at her skirt to try to see what’s under there. One of the boys pushes her off a bridge, and she eventually dies from the wounds. She’s misgendered throughout the rest of the episode, both by the boys and by police officers and detectives.

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Sheena, The Mindy Project, “What to Expect When You’re Expanding” (2015)

Trans female actress

Sheena, the cousin of Mindy’s friend Tamra, comes to visit and helps inspire Mindy to feel better about her body and regain the confidence she’s lost since getting pregnant. Tamra tells Mindy to listen to Sheena because “She had to overcome a lot to be the beautiful woman she is today.” When Mindy replies “Like what? Having too hot a face and body?” Tamra and Sheena exchange a knowing look. This was a pretty great episode.

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Jill, How To Get Away With Murder, “Two Birds, One Milestone” (2015)

Trans female actress

Alexandra Billings, a trans woman, plays a trans female professor who is friends with Annalise and goes to her for help when she kills her abusive husband. Mey called it “…the best Very Special Trans Episode of a show that I’ve ever seen.”

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Rosalind, Grey’s Anatomy, “The Great Pretender” (2015)

Cis male actor

Ben is shocked when his wife Bailey tells him that his brother, Rosalind, is transgender and is taking hormones after 25 years of lying about who she is. Ben freaks out. Bailey implores Ben to stop being an asshole.

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Jordan, The Carmichael Show, “Gender” (2015)

Cis male actor

“Transgender? You mean he like to dress up like a little mini RuPaul?”

Jerrod is shocked when Jordan, the mentee he’s been assigned in the Big Brother/Big Sister program, comes out as gay… and then admits that she isn’t actually gay, she was just testing the waters for the real reveal: that she’s trans. Jerrod freaks out, but after a long talk with his family and some reckoning, he comes around. While Jerrod and his family misgender Jordan a bit, Mey said “it was maybe the most slept on piece of trans media of the year.”

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Whiterose, Mr. Robot (2015)

Cis gay male actor

Whiterose is a legendary computer hacker obsessed with time. When accepting the role, perfect human BD Wong was clear that he did not “want to be a man disguised as a woman trying to get away with something” and playing into the “deceptive” stereotype, that he only would take it if he was assured the character was a trans woman. We’ve only seen a little bit of Whiterose so far, but she will return for Season Two.

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Gisele, Blunt Talk (2015)

Trans female actress

Gisele, a trans sex worker who’s just been released from jail, has a nice catching-up dinner with Captain Picard, during which she says she’s leaving sex work and is in a really awesome relationship.

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Nomi Marks, Sense8 (2015)

played by transgender actress Jamie Clayton

Nomi is a political blogger and “hacktivist” living in San Francisco with her girlfriend, Amanita, who is very supportive of her and stands up for her in front of transphobic bullies. Nomi was bullied as a child and still has scars from where she was burnt in a scalding hot shower by a group of boys. Her family is not accepting of her transition, including her mother, who continues to misgender her.

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Liz Taylor, American Horror Story: Hotel (2015)

Played by gay male cis actor Dennis O’Hare

Once upon a time, Liz Taylor was a married salesman with kids, only letting her real self out in the privacy of hotel rooms. In this particular hotel, Elizabeth walked in on her, announced “you look like a man but smell like a woman” and enabled her to live her true self forever, working there as a bartender and leaving her family. When she’s bullied by other hotel workers, Elizabeth kills them. She falls in love with a male model who worries that being with her makes him gay. Elizabeth kills him too. Liz and Iris decide to kill themselves and then change their mind and decide to kill other people. Etc.

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Charlotte, Pretty Little Liars (2012-2016)

Played by cisgender female actress Vanessa Ray

In 2015, Charlotte is revealed to be a criminal mastermind who has manipulated, tortured, and been involved in the murders of numerous people, mostly women. In 2016, she is murdered.

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Anna, Royal Pains, “Prince of Nucleotides” (2015)

Trans actress

This episode was fantastic. Anna’s experiencing pains and shortness of breath that suggest a blood-clotting problem, exacerbated by the hormones she’s started secretly taking. Her doctor is patient, respectful and caring, and comes to her aid when she’s outed at camp and punched by another camper. He talks to Anna’s parents for her, and although he initially told her he couldn’t start her on HRT with her condition, he comes back in the last scene of the episode to tell her that he’s going to figure out a way to make it work so that she can start HRT without risking her health. This episode is probably the best one on the list.

Autostraddle’s Ultimate Infographic Guide to Dead Lesbian Characters on TV

In the eight years I’ve been a lesbian TV critic, I’ve never seen anything like the response to Lexa’s death on The 100. As I noted in this week’s Pop Culture Fix, in a matter of three short weeks, The 100‘s queer fandom has raised an astronomical amount of money for The Trevor Project and, through broad and relentless social media activism, forced mainstream media outlets to acknowledge the larger cultural ramifications of the ubiquitous Bury Your Gays trope for the first time ever. That pressure even coerced an apology out of The 100‘s showrunner, Jason Rothenberg, yesterday afternoon.

Riese’s overwhelming list of 148 dead lesbian and bisexual TV characters has been instrumental in driving home the frustration and helplessness queer women feel when we’re subjected to this trope. As her list spread around the internet, so did the pleas from our readers to dig even deeper and provide more context and stats about Bury Your Gays, so, with the help of TV Intern Karly, that’s what I’ve spent the last many sleepless nights doing.

To make it onto the infographic below, a character had to meet two requirements: 1) She had to be on more than one episode of a show, and 2) the show had to be available to American TV audiences, even if it wasn’t produced in the United States. (Lost Girl, for example, came to U.S. TV via Syfy and Skins did the same through BBC America.) It took weeks to compile all of this data (years, really, because more than half of it is just stored in my brain), and we didn’t have the time or resources to dig into the full canon of international TV. Those two qualifications account for the differences between Riese’s list (which includes all characters, including single-episode ones, from every country) and this one.

I’ve been beating this drum for almost a decade and I’m going to keep on beating it until I am shot through the eyeball with a stray arrow. Story is, in the words of the late great Alan Rickman, an ancient need. We need it like we need food and water, we need it like we need to breathe. Just like early explorers stitched together stars to make constellations out of the night sky, humans are constantly grappling for unrelated points of light to make stories out of our own lives. Stories guide us, they comfort us, they inform our understanding of who we are and where we belong in the world. Stories give us a safe space to explore every facet of our identities, and to engage with the unknown and render it a little less scary.

Stories exist in imaginary worlds but they are consumed in the real world, where, just this week, North Carolina passed sweeping and unprecedented anti-LGBT legislation. And where three presidential candidates don’t believe gay people should have the right to get married. And where a gay person can be fired simply for being gay in most states. And where LGBT youth homelessness is rampant. And where LGBT bullying occurs with alarming regularity in schools.

We need hope in stories. We need light in stories. And we need stories to work their magic in the lives of the people who would oppress and persecute us because we’re gay. Stories are fatal to bigotry.

To care about story isn’t to ignore the darkness of the real world; to care about story is to put your hope in something that changes the real world, more than anything else. There’s a reason all religious texts are made up mostly of stories. There’s a reason the same-sex marriage approval rating in the U.S. rose in direct proportion to the number of gay characters on television. Story gets inside us and changes the alchemy of who we are.

Here’s Graham Swift, one more time, and then you can have this infographic:

“Man — let me offer you a definition — is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall — or when he’s about to drown — he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”

I know it will be an impulse to snag this graphic and paste it everywhere but here. Please don’t. Please link it and visit it right here on this page at Autostraddle dot com, so we can continue to make money to pay our staff so we can keep doing this work that matters. And if our work these recent weeks in the wake of Lexa’s death has helped or empowered you, please consider joining Autostraddle Plus. It’s the main way we support ourselves!

What I Wore: Navigating the Heteronormative Patriarchy, Pt. 2

Welcome back to What I Wore, a column about fashion as shelter in traditionally heteronormative and patriarchal spaces.

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Extended Family Gatherings

As the only queer identified member in a pretty large southern and religious family (not counting gay uncles who moved out of state decades ago), I represent a very exotic, unstable bridge to another world whenever I return home for birthdays, weddings, new babies (so many babies) or holidays. This is a fairly new development for some of them, so it’s understandable that they’re still reconciling the image they had of me five years ago, their assumptions of what gay people look and dress like, their hopes for me based on “potential”, and the actual image they have of me now. That being said, I love to mess with them.

In their eyes I got two things right with this outfit: long hair without much body or movement and shoes with tall heels. So, wearing an oversized, shapeless shirt with cotton lounge shorts as the main ensemble is no doubt frustrating for them. Also horizontal stripes?? You’re doing nothing for your figure! Maybe she doesn’t know about things like that, because of the gayness. To ensure a mixed conclusion to that query, I make sure the wings of my eyeliner are so far-reaching and symmetrical that life for them no longer makes sense.

Success rating: 5 out 5

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The Straight Bar

Usually it follows that you build accessories around an outfit, but when you want to draw focus away from the clothes that might attract the wrong people, you build your outfit around your accessories. And there is nothing more terrifying or confusing to straight men than black lipstick. Pair that with some dusty sneakers and a unisex jacket straight out of Ally McBeal, and any appeal that flowing pearl skirt had is voided.

Success rating: 4 out of 5

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Brunch

I think the reason so many straight families go to brunch is because it’s like date night without having to get a babysitter. Fair! And while I respect the game and know many lovely straight families exist, add being affectionate with your girlfriend into the mix and you just never know what those little rascals are going to say!

To a casual viewer, this might seem like a down home, girl-next-door outfit. Oh, just some casual slip-ons, a jersey top, cut-off jean shorts and a baseball hat. I’m basically Connie Britton in Friday Night Lights. Hey y’all! But then it’s like, oop, nope, that’s just a bra. Mesh, the gayest fabric, combined with overexposure is enough to steer any straight family away from your table. Also, I wear that Atlanta Braves hat ironically, (I wrote off the Braves when I was nine after meeting one of their star pitchers, Tom Glavin, in a Boston train terminal where he proceeded to ruin everything I held sacred – THE BRAVES – when he sighed and stood next to me in a picture like he was being held at gunpoint) so if anyone would have been like, “Hey, Atlanta, nice,” I would have gotten to be like, “NO, INCORRECT.”

Success rating: 4 out 5

Labels: For Jelly Jars, For Lesbian and Bisexual People, Or For Both?

Hey! Guess what there’s an article in ELLE Magazine today that asks if a “post-LGBT era” has arrived. I would definitely say “oh lord no” to that question, but the article contains more than just that question, it has other thoughts and ideas inside it. It starts out just talking about celebrities, which is confusing, because, well — non-heterosexual celebrities refusing to label themselves has been pretty popular for quite some time. Furthermore, celebrities, who have tightly managed public images, and orchestrated ways of speaking about themselves and evading personal questions, are dealing with a whole different set of pressures than Kids These Days when it comes to sexuality labels. So I don’t really know that Miley Cyrus and Kristen Stewart are setting a trend.

But, despite what its accompanying graphics would suggest, luckily this article talks about more than just celebrities! It goes on to surmise and then ask:

The thought of discarding it like an outdated dress feels more untethering than it does liberating, which is why I stumble on the thought that we’ve truly reached a new point in sexual liberation, where asserting an L, G, B, or T has grown obsolete. Are we really in the primordial stages of a post-coming out era? Or is this a fashionable way to stay in the closet? It is a step forward or a step backward?

Firstly — the article is pretty focused on sexual orientation, not gender, and “T” is not the same kind of “label” as L,G, or B, and shouldn’t be discussed as one. That aside, there are some interesting quotes from some interesting people in this article. Today in Slack we learned that the piece is a big conversation starter. Maybe it’s a conversation a lot of you would like to have, even!

So, we thought we’d get started by talking about how we identify, and why. I’ve got no clue if not identifying as literally nothing is becoming popular outside of Kristen Stewart refusing to grant us the honor of a headline with “Kristen Stewart” and “Lesbian” in it, but it definitely seems to be true that young people are more likely to identify as the perceived-as-more-expansive “queer” now than they used to, as data from our own Reader Surveys suggest:

So, this is how the Autostraddle team members who were in Slack at 5PM EST today identify! I put it in order by age.

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Alaina, 24, Staff Writer: I used to call myself a lesbian (sometimes), but I now almost exclusively call myself queer. I use it because of the revolutionary political implications I associate it with, but also I use it because it makes straight people so uncomfortable. They have no clue what queer means — neither for themselves nor for me. It forces straight people to look at me and sit in the uncomfortableness of not knowing who or how I fuck and demands that they respect me regardless of that. I also use it because I’m a little confused about my sexuality — it’s not stagnant, it’s always evolving and changing. And as a non-binary person, queer fits me in a way other things don’t. Because of the constraints of language, grammatically it feels weird to call myself a lesbian sometimes, and gay feels too…normative? I associate ‘gay’ with the HRC, marriage, and an obsession with proving to straight people that I’m just like they are, so pretty please don’t deny me my rights! So I like using queer because it’s non-specific enough to confuse straight people and allow me to figure myself out in the midst of all that confusion. It has it’s downfalls that I’m trying to negotiate — primarily the class/education privilege I’ve found to be associated with it — but for now, it fits.

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Maddie, 24, Staff Writer: I identify as queer because it makes me feel good and it also is accurate because I’m attracted to people of various genders. I don’t really care if people call me gay or lesbian, but I like it better if they say that while at least knowing that my sexual orientation is a little more complex than those words’ direct meanings.

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Carmen, 25, Straddleverse Editor: I identify with lots of words / ideas: lesbian, gay, queer being the most prominent. I struggled for hella long when I realized I wasn’t straight to pick a label that fit, and the finality freaked me out — but lesbian felt right nonetheless. after all, that’s what I am! A gay chick who likes gay chicks. (And look! There’s the “gay” thing. You can call me gay, that’s cool. It’s not just for dudes anymore. Maybe.) I also revel in IDing as “queer” because i think it aligns a lot with my self-perception as a fringe-y weirdo outsider who also has some leftist policies, and also because it reminds me that I’m one of many brilliant shining stars who experience their sexualities similarly and differently from me but are still my companions in this strange world.

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Audrey, 25, Staff Writer: I identify as bisexual because it best describes my sexual and relationship behavior and because it feels crucial to speak out from a bi position given that bisexual people face the most violence and get the fewest resources in the LGB community. I identify as queer because queerness  is at the root of my community, my politics and my gender. I sometimes say that I was born bisexual and choose queerness.

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Yvonne, 25, Senior Editor: I’m a woman who loves women. I most identify as a lesbian because it deliberately rejects men from my association —which I like very much — and most importantly it centers women in my identity. I also like to reaffirm the lesbian identity because it’s usually associated with older generations who aren’t inclusive so I like to show people that lesbians are radical in their politics and worldview and want progress for the entire queer community.

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Raquel, 27, Intern: I identify as queer and sometimes as bisexual if I feel like being political about it but apparently the kids these days prefer pansexual and I have a lot of feelings about that but also I feel a lot of shrugs. Specifically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Rachel, 27, Senior Editor: I identify as both as bisexual and queer — I tend to use “queer” more often in straight or mixed straight/LGBT spaces when I mostly want to indicate that I’m not straight, and bisexual more in majority-LGBT spaces when it’s more useful to indicate “what kind” of queer I am. I also fit the definition of pansexual in that I’m attracted to people of multiple different genders, but that also overlaps with the definition of bisexual that I use — “attracted to the same and other genders” — and I identify more with the history and activism around the label “bisexual.”

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Erin, 29, Staff Writer: I identify as gay and qualify that as having no interest in cis men.

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Laura M, 29, Staff Writer: I identify as “queer,” “bisexual misandrist” and also “lesbian.”

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Mey, 29, Trans Editor: I identify as a lesbian but I also identify as queer. I like lesbian because it makes it clear I’m in no way interested in men and queer because it sounds political and radical and it makes old people feel weird.

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Stef, 32, Music Editor: I guess I identify as queer or “equal opportunity” but usually when people ask me how I identify I say I don’t.

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Laneia, 34, Executive Editor: I mostly call myself queer. I like that the word itself is off-putting to most straight people, and I like that the dictionary definition of queer is “weird,” because that’s something I’ve been called since Kindergarten. I embraced my weirdness early on, so after embracing my big ol’ gayness, I decided I felt most connected to queer. I love that this one little word encompasses so much of who I actually am: a happy, unapologetic lesbian who enjoys making normcore heterosexuals feel uncomfortable and out of the loop.

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Riese, 34, Editor-in-Chief: I sometimes say that I am bisexual by birth, lesbian by choice. Or something. On the day-to-day I don’t really care — queer, lesbian, gay, whatever. If I had to pick one, I’d pick “queer,” because it honors who I was (bisexual) and who I am (lesbian) and it’s a weirdo word and I’m a weirdo. But the more I get into studying lesbian history, the more I find myself drawn to “lesbian.” So many women fought so hard to live openly as lesbians and to find pride in that identity and I don’t want to reject/disregard that history, I want to embrace it and understand it and build on it, not against it. (I also like that it’s a word men can’t use.) I feel weird about people saying they “reject” labels — like, you can say that labels aren’t for you, personally, without acting like labels are suffocating or retro. In straight spaces, I usually just say “gay” / hope that nobody talks to me.

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Aja, 35, Beauty Editor: I identify as a lesbian, married w/ child.

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Heather, 37, Senior Editor: I identify as a lesbian because I’m a woman who is primarily attracted to and only interested in having romantic relationships with other woman. And while I also label myself as gay and queer, I prefer lesbian because it’s a word that struck terror into my heart for so long because of my religious upbringing and I distanced myself from it as far as possible for two decades of my life —  but after I came out and embraced it, I found that “lesbian” didn’t seek to alienate me, but rather to connect me to a sacred and powerful history of women (women, women, women, and only women) just like me.

What I Wore: Navigating the Heternormative Patriarchy (Part One)

Welcome to What I Wore, a series where I explore fashion as shelter in traditionally heteronormative and patriarchal spaces.

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The Hardware Store

If there is one thing I am unwavering on it is this: I will die in a hardware store before I ask a question. Also, why am I going to hardware stores so much that I have a steadfast rule about them? I don’t know, but if every experience I had at a hardware store were a Vine it would be a shot of someone peeking around the end of an aisle asking if I was finding everything okay, then a shot of someone jumping up from behind a counter asking if I needed any help, then a shot of someone peering through shelving from another aisle asking if they can help me find anything, then a shot of someone driving by on a pallet lifter asking if someone’s helped me, on loop, forever. I’m confident that when I walk into a hardware store by myself as a woman a silent alarm is set off by the benevolent front desk attendant, so to ward off unsolicited questions I go full rogue – butch it here, femme it there, volunteer at your local cat hotel here, dunk on your grandma there. The brain scrambler of outfits.

Except nothing is confusing enough to stop an orange vested hardware employee from asking if you need help. Nothing.

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The Auto Shop

Going into an auto shop as a woman not knowing exactly what the issue with your car is can be daunting, not to mention expensive. I hoped this outfit consisting of bike shorts, a loudly printed turtleneck, an old soccer hoodie, granny boots and a ball cap would say, “Hey, this girl knows sports,” and also, “She’s bananas.” I thought it might afford me the assumption that 1) since I know what sports are I also might know about cars and 2) attempting to upsell might be dicey. For good measure I mentioned the water pump and the power steering fluid reservoir as possible culprits, which is a classic move.

I was given a price that matched the average repair cost I’d found online and even had the taxes taken off. This all could have been easily explained by the fact that I looked/look about 17 and they felt bad for me, but I’m going with fashion!

Also, if I may, for those of us that explore traditionally femme channels of expression who may also be of the mind that things involving the automotive world are beyond our reach: if we have the ability, patience, skill, and steady hand to ombre our eyebrow hairs, we can fix anything on our cars.

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The Straight Bar

When I want to go for a drink at a bar where I know the crowd will be overwhelmingly straight, I take great strides to ensure a look that says I’m both sexually unavailable and attempting to convert you to a new religion. That way, even if my body language doesn’t speak for me, my outfit does. Of course, the best way to communicate these two separate but not necessarily unrelated ideas is monochrome pairings. One night I wore a shade of white (the ultimate monochrome palette) close to chiffon, a high collar, and a modest up-do that together screamed Guilty Remnant.

This outfit was a success and I was able to watch HGTV on mute in peace.

Lesbian Bars I Definitely Made Up But Probably Exist

Illustrations by Rory Midhani

Slice

Slice is the number one search result on Google when you move to a new city and look up “lesbian bars (your city).” Slice’s aesthetic is a little bit like stepping into a lava lamp. Lots of pink and purple hues, and furniture is maybe floating? The music is so loud that the bartenders are already furious at you for even trying to order a drink. You won’t be getting the additional water you ordered, and shame on you for coming here tonight.

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Liquor Boxx

Here’s a moment in my life that continues to break me spiritually: I’m driving with my mom — a virtuous woman — and we’re stopped behind a truck at a light with a sticker that reads “Liquor Box.” This light? This light is so long. So long that both of us take the time to let our eyes wonder, train them on the sticker, ponder it silently, and unsatisfied with how our internal monologues are interpreting its meaning, begin to repeat it to each other, out loud. “Liquor box,” my mom says with the cadence of pouring a cup of tea. “Liquor box,” I say, unsure both of the word “liquor” and “box.” “Liquor box.” “Liquor box.” “Liquor boxxxx,” my mom hums. My sister-in-law is in the back seat, internally screaming. My mom and I both, “liquor box” one more time, and this one hits for me — and while I will never know, based on the landing I assume for my mom as well — right around the “box” part. The only sound in the car that remains is the clicking of the blinker. This bar is a little like that!

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Bar Batch

Hey, is the the plural of a butch a batch? It seems like a fun word for a fun group. Bar Batch is where you go when you want to watch 13 different TV screens at the same time, drink appropriately priced drinks, and attempt an almost impossible night of trivia. Bartenders and servers call you “baby” and it feels right.

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The Lounge Lounge

I don’t know what it is about lounges that validate the gay experience, but we do love a lounge. There’s one here in Nashville called — of course — The Lipstick Lounge, and there’s a permit there that makes it illegal to dance if both feet aren’t on the ground. Good thing I already dance with the Lord in my heart! The Lounge Lounge allows dancing of all kinds and it even has a room upstairs that’ll turn a blind eye to whatever you might do upstairs at a bar!

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Yearn

Yearn is honestly a little too much. Yearn is the bar equivalent of Marina’s voice on Jenny’s voicemail that one time when she’s like, “Jenny. I was just… thinking about you.” Marina! Just trying to get a couple drinks here. Yearn has a bunch of sex music on, the same music you might hear in a Hilton after hours lobby, and yet no one is dancing or talking. Even friends that came together are just silently sitting around a table.

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Moist

Moist has become the most popular queer night even though literally every single person besides me hates their name. These tongue in cheek go-getters leave no triangle design unturned. Triangles are everywhere. Do other shapes exist? Interesting thought, but no. The location changes each month and progressively building codes become less and less an issue. Eventually there’s one Moist event where you look around and you realize you’ve all broken into a vacant home.

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Now you too can make your lesbian bar dreams come true with this paper play set! Print it out and create your own.

View From The Top: I Started As A Bottom

Feature image via Shutterstock.

I started as a bottom.

When I was in high school and starting to discover sex, and kinky sex, and the internet (it was 1993) and the alt.sex newsgroups with 3.3 million users, it didn’t take me long to also discover that boys on those kinds of platforms were very, very eager to talk about sex. With me (or anyone, really). And, because boys have something to penetrate with and I had something to penetrate, I, like the vast majority of us, fell into the assumption that that meant I had to be the bottom. The “submissive.”

It would take me years to uncouple those identity alignment assumptions, and to figure out that my own path was one of topping, dominance and mastery.

I spent six years with my high school boyfriend. I wanted to do everything with him. He was really into the idea that I was into women, so that was a bonus for me. It was just a hot fantasy we would talk about during sex, that occasional whisper: Wouldn’t you like it if another woman was here, what if you were licking her pussy, what if she was licking yours. And that, for a little while, was enough.

Until, you know, it wasn’t.

But meanwhile, we tried everything we could think of — blindfolds, silk scarves as restraints, anal sex, sensation play, wax, ice. We didn’t really know what to do with ourselves, and something was missing, but I knew I liked rough sex. I could never quite place why it was that I still wanted… more. Something else.

Meanwhile, I was still writing online, sharing my life through the growing communities of LiveJournal and Diaryland. I made many bisexual feminist friends, other young women also sharing their lives, many of them writing about trying to figure out how to get out of their relationship with their boyfriend so they could go be gay. That was my story, too. We talked every day, sharing our action plans and our fantasies about women.

I left him because I was gay, or at least that was the reason I gave. Though I’ve known since middle school that I was into women, it wasn’t until I left him when I was about 19 that I came out as queer and started focusing on dating women. I’d taken a break from school between high school and college to figure out what life outside of Alaska was like, and shortly after the break up I went back to school and started discovering academic women’s studies, feminist texts and queer theory.

In college, rooted in a lesbian feminism philosophy that I was devouring, I was definitely into the egalitarianism of I-do-you-you-do-me sex. We’d take turns, neither above nor below each other, and each of us would get something we wanted.

Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to work.

But I still craved kinky sex. I still craved the spankings and the sex toys that my ex and I had experimented with. I fell in love with my best friend (as one does) in college, and because she attended sacred sexuality weekend retreats with the Body Electric School, I started to explore that, too, and found some of my most cherished teachers.

That’s about when things got complicated, however, and evolved so that I was much more interested in topping. I’ll never forget a workshop I attended — titled “Power and Surrender” — where I learned how to tie a meditative rope harness covering from shoulders to pussy on another woman, and how to throw a flogger. That workshop changed me, opened up a sense of empowerment, authority and strength that I had previously repressed.

And then there was the little issue of my budding sadism: I knew that sometimes deep release was necessary in order to break through to the next stage of development, and when women would cry — and I mean really sob, really break down and wail — during the workshops, I would get incredibly, incredibly turned on. Hmm, I thought. There’s something going on here.

I went out and bought a three-foot-long leather flogger the next day.

But it wasn’t just that easy, not really. I agonized over the position of topping women, of dominating them. I had eaten up all that feminist theory (much of which, now, seems so incredibly outdated!) about how all forms of penetrative sex are rape, and that kink is inherently demeaning to women, and that violence in any and all forms is wrong, wrong, wrong. But is kinky sex really “violence?” I had to dig deep and figure out how the violence really came in lack of consent, and that with consent, activities become “intense sensation” instead. It took me many dozens of conversations with dozens of lovers who explained things to me (patiently and kindly), and talked about agency, and care, and safe words, and all the smart techniques kinksters use to explore deeply vulnerable play.

If someone had told me then, I never would have believed that I’d end up in the relationship I’m in now, with a 24/7 trans boy who identifies as a slave, and I as his master. I never would have expected to have occasional lovers on the side. I hadn’t guessed I would have let go of monogamy, or of partnering with femmes (though that does remain the gender I am primarily attracted to). It took a long time to figure out how to go from a playful bisexual bottom to the queer genderqueer butch dominant that I am today.

So how’d that happen? How did that transformation take place over the last fifteen years? How did I go from being so hesitant to slap a girl across the face, even when she was asking — begging! — for me to do so, to now being able to use erotic humiliation and extreme sensations in my sex life? How did I reconcile my feminist beliefs, which sometimes seemed completely at odds with my carnal desires for rough sex and crude fantasies?

I’ll tell you.

Welcome to View From The Top.