Trans Girl Suicide Museum

It's honestly a blast to read, meme-account turned essay collection with all the wildness that entails. It can obviously be a bit of a tough read at points it doesn't shy away from the dark parts of trans life but it's honestly fun and real. I "grew up" way more in the IRL trans scene than the online one so it feels really familiar in that way. I can see myself and most of my friends doing basically any of the things described.

It can be a little tough to read the parts where she's just cheerfully embracing substance abuse but that's a little bit par for the course with trans stuff. K is great but be careful basically lol

I both do and don't see myself very deeply in this book.

I see my experiences in Hannah's second-wave feminist mother, and her struggle to even try and grasp things. I see her mother's struggle to try and think that her prescription is love, that by merit of trans people being mistreated in society somehow any modicum of regret is immediately viewed as detransition.

I see myself in Hannah's cynicism with the ritual of trans people as something to understand, with the ritual of running around and giving out your name and pronouns. I think about this a lot, since Hazel is deeply nonbinary, and they're confined to this ritual no matter how they present.

I see myself in the view of gender as being something built over time. I think about this a lot by merit of being part of a multiple: if I was singular, if I was alone, there are a lot of choices I wouldn't make. But would I still be a girl? My gender experiences are deeply aligned with that of binary womanhood, but because I'm part of a multiple I've had deep experiences with manhood and nonbinary and proto-trans-girl while others were in front. Does that vindicate my own experience of gender? Does it makes it more stark?

I see myself in Hannah's frustration with truscum and TERFs, but in a very specific way. It's very reminiscent of my experiences struggling to fit in traditional queer spaces, especially ones filled with young people. The kind of people for who kink-at-pride "discourse" is even a thing that exists.

In a way, this book basically taught me that the questions that I ask about myself are moot. That the very notion of trying to capture these experiences itself distills them.

This book made me want to do K. Highly recommend.

At first, I wasn't sure if I was going to see this book through to the end, but I'm glad I did. It's raw, and as others have noted, filled to the brim with hot takes. Not everyone will agree with everything Baer says, but she has a lot to say and is really good at saying it. Whether she's critically analyzing Foucault, vividly describing a ketamine trip, or describing places like the suicide museum that exist only in her mind, Baer has a way of conveying exactly what she's thinking, even when she's not quite sure herself. I'm not trans, but still got something out of this book and was able to find it relatable. In fact, I think this is a good book for cis people to read, as long as this isn't their one and only look into transness. As others have mentioned, Baer comes from a place of class and white privilege, a fact that she admits to in the book more than once. She also talks about a lot of heavy issues which may be triggering to some. But overall, I enjoyed spending some time reading what Baer had to say about all her experiences.