Cis people who only have one trans friend and use them in every argument. Cis people who say I don’t even think of you as trans, as if that is the compliment. Cis people who congratulate themselves for the pronoun. Cis people who go quiet when the gender critical aunt starts up at the dinner. Cis people who say let’s hear both sides. Cis people who treat the question of whether I exist as a debate they can sit out. Cis people who consume drag, consume the dolls, consume the aesthetic, and disappear when one of us dies. Cis people who require us to educate them, then resent the education. Cis people who require us to be calm, then read our calm as cold. Cis people who require us to be soft, then read our softness as begging. Cis people who require us to be legible—to themselves, family, editors—and then explain, kindly, that we are still not legible enough.

Cis people who fetishise. Cis people who chase. Cis people who tell you they are an ally on the dating app and ghost when you say what you want. Cis women who critique another woman’s surgery at the dinner table while you sit there with yours. Cis women who think their oppression cancels yours. Cis women who write we and mean not you. Cis men who confuse you for a fantasy. Cis men who confuse the fantasy for a politics. Cis editors who say house style. Cis editors who say legibility. Cis editors who add the words you would not have written and call you ungrateful for raising concerns.

I have been hurt by cis people and their normative perspectives my whole life. It’s in the texture of every room I have ever walked into. Their innocence has cost me, daily, in time and love and peace and joy and I’m fed up.

I’m over it. Ya’ll are fucking freaks. Fuck off.

*

The reason I cannot be cis is not the reason cis people might imagine. They imagine that the reason is my body, that I cannot pass into cis womanhood because the body refuses to be passed into, that the throat or the hairline or the wrist betrays me in some way, that the obstacle is technical and could in principle be addressed through better surgery or better hormones or better luck. My body is not the reason. My body is, on the contrary, a face I love, beautiful tits, and a cute stomach I had to fight for, and that I admire in the mirror with a kind of astonishment most mornings. I’m really grateful and happy about who I am and what I have become.

The reason I cannot be cis is that I came out of the conditions of my own production, as anyone does, and the conditions were: queer transsexual. There is no cis person inside me waiting to be released or exorcised into palatability. There never was, there never will be. The fantasy that there might have been is a cis myth, and like most cis fables it has been projected onto trans women so often and at such volume that we have been required, in order to remain employed and housed and in possession of our friendships, to act as if it were our own and true.

Sandy Stone, in 1987, in a manifesto written in furious response to a book that had described trans women as rapists and frauds, argued that the demand to pass was a demand to silence the voice that had been struggling, against considerable medical and cultural odds, to learn how to speak in the first place. Which hits so hard. To pass, Stone argued, was to enter cis womanhood through the back door of indistinguishability and, having entered, to pull the door shut behind one; to refuse to speak as the person one had been before passing, in case the speech should give one away. God forbid. Stone called the refusal of this demand the posttranssexual position. Sadly, she wrote the manifesto thirty-nine years ago. Sad because: the argument has not aged, a timeless little treacle. Hooray. The only thing new is that it has, on the contrary, become more urgent, because the contemporary culture we live in is invested more in our disappearance than it was in the 1980s, more than anyone could plausibly have imagined then.

I think about Stone when I am told, as I am told weekly, in some form or another, that I would be more legible if I were less particular, strange, odd. I think this advice is offered with care, from well meaning people who have no material reality or stake in my wellbeing. It’s something along the lines of, very subtly, being asked to be a smaller version of myself so that I will be more easily received or to make whoever I am with more comfortable. Though what I have found is that, once I am a tiny little tranny, that structure of a self (myself) becomes the version against which all subsequent versions of me are measured. It’s taken as the real me, which is such a deviation of my actual confident and beautiful personality. If I am to reach for a smaller baseline, becoming and constructing a more acceptable version, it would mean the complete and utter annihilation of myself; the moment of my self-erasure. Get fucked.

*

I went to a dinner with a bunch of cis-gals a while ago. We were eating a salad with pomegranate seeds and feta. Someone had brought a cake from a Turkish bakery down the street. It was cute.

The conversation turned, as conversations among cis women so often do when there is no man in the room (we love a cheeky goss hun) to the question of another woman’s face. One of the girls encouraged another to search for a picture of some famous woman online, and once it was pulled up in seconds, she started presenting and pointing at the botox sites on her face: we looked at the brow, the temples, the perioral lines and the lips, zooming in with excruciating detail. Some of the women were really cruel, which I think is a response to having grown up victim to the same scrutiny they were now applying to this woman’s face. But I was mostly surprised at how virtuosic they were, as if they themselves had never been the object of such enumeration. What I found even more disarming was that some of these women, who I really love, did not really consider, in that moment, to look at my face, which is also a face that has been surgically altered, in fact quite drastically; a face that, to be honest, has become a bit of a record of my own survival.

I sat still, stuffing my mouth full of pomegranate. I think they didn’t really include me in the conversation because 1: I was honestly struggling to offer anything, but also because 2: they knew it was a dissection and that if they motioned for my opinion I would hold them accountable for being, in that moment, really ugly. The irony was that a few of the girls in the room had work done too. I didn’t get why they were so enthusiastic to slate another woman. Real girls-girls, eek!

I waited for the conversation to end, though it took a while. I bit my tongue for the rest of the evening and excused myself at the end of cake. I walked to the high street and stood at the bus stop, watching cars pass by, feeling like I was going to vomit. When I got home, I crashed out on my bed without taking off my boots. I don’t really remember sleeping.

I have thought about that dinner since and the thing I have come to is this: those ladies are my friends, I love them. But what I have had to learn is that the structure I am living inside—that being the oppression of trans women—is not only held in place by cis strangers, or by cis enemies, or by the gender critical within public discourse, but also by the cis people who love me, who would say if asked that they love me, who do in fact love me, and who do not understand, because they have never been required to understand, that their love costs them nothing and can sometimes cost me a great deal.

It’s not always visible to them, I realise I have a responsibility in holding them accountable, to poke an elbow into their ribs and say: hey, you’re being shit. But if I’m constantly having to do that work, what do I become? What does that make me? Things are constructed in such a way as to not be visible to them, they are constantly protected. But should that mean my work and life as a trans person is to be subservient to the cycles of educating them when they have shit behaviour? Again, fucking forget about it.

*

Baldwin’s argument about whiteness, the argument he made and remade across four decades of essays and letters and televised interviews and pieces written for magazines that were paying him less than he was worth, was that whiteness depended on a certain innocence, and that the innocence depended, in turn, on the maintenance of a not-knowing which was itself a form of work. Chew on it.

The white American, Baldwin argued, did not know what had been done in their name. This, as we know, is not accidental; in fact the ignorance is a way of structurally erasing; is a position; is the thing that separates and shields white Americans (in a political-historical sense, which Baldwin was interested in) because to fully know what had been done in one’s name would have been to lose access to the position from which the ignorance could be performed. Which is to say, was the position of being white; further, being an ignorant fuck was, and very much still is, violent.

The version of Baldwin that is in current circulation, who is the inspirational Baldwin in a gif, with a pull-quote, has been smoothed for cis liberal consumption in much the same way that trans writing has been smoothed at the level of the line. The Baldwin I read is a more difficult writer than that. The Baldwin I read makes a claim that is not, in fact, easy to live with, which is the claim that there is no innocent position from which white people can encounter Blackness, and that the demand for an innocent position is itself the form the violence takes when it presents itself as goodwill. To require an innocent position is to request, structurally, that the pain continue to be paid by someone else. I appreciate that Baldwin didn’t spend his life succumbing to the softening of this, at whatever cost it demanded.

Cisness, I want to argue—respectfully, aware of the divergences, slippages, convergences between the historical specificities between transness and Blackness, and the experiences of those who offer such vivid insight of living with/in both identities—is structured by a comparable innocence. The cis person, in the present, does not know what is being done in their name. This is performed daily, at considerable rhetorical and emotional expense, by cis people for whom the ignorance is the precondition of their ability to continue moving through the world as if they were not implicated in the violence being legislated, currently, in parliaments. The thing I find most disgusting, and humouring if you catch me in the right mood is: if a cis person was to lose access to their vile ignorance, it would mean they would have to give up access to a position of cis comfort entirely. Meaning, they wouldn’t be able to attend a dinner and discuss another woman’s face and not feel oneself implicated in the long history of which the discussion is gross and pathetic.

*

Jules Gill-Peterson, in her short and devastating book A Short History of Trans Misogyny, makes an argument I would like, however briefly, to retail. Trans misogyny, Gill-Peterson argues, is not a derivative compound of transphobia and misogyny. It is not the sum of two adjacent prejudices. It is its own political formation, with its own history; colonial and racial. This history runs through nineteenth-century vagrancy laws that criminalised gender non-conformity on the public street, through the policing of feminised people of colour in twentieth-century American cities, the medical pathologisation of effeminacy, to the second-wave trans-exlusionary feminisms (stinky terf cunts) that organised in the 1970s—Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys—to slice trans women out of the category of woman as a feminist achievement.

The current British gender critical movement, which secured in April of last year a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the word woman in our Equality Act refers, for the purposes of the Act, to biological sex assigned at birth is the most recent iteration of a political formation that has been refining itself, with serious institutional patience, for the better part of two hundred years.

Within days of the Supreme Court ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission—the body whose remit is the protection of minorities under the very Act being narrowed—issued interim guidance advising that trans women should not be permitted in single-sex women's facilities, by which they meant in toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, gyms, leisure centres, schools, and so on. This guidance has been challenged in courts, yet in February of this year the High Court ruled it lawful.

Three months later, in May, the EHRC published a draft Code of Practice that extended the principle further; that authorised, in effect, the policing of single-sex spaces on the basis of appearance, by which is meant that any woman whose face or voice or gait or hairline departs, in any direction, from the security guard's (or anyone’s really) mental image of a woman can now, with the law behind her interrogators, be asked at the entrance to essential spaces whether she is a woman. The guidance will acutely force trans women out of public spaces and anyone, quite frankly, who deviates from a normative femininity that the law has now licensed everyone to enforce.

What is new, in the present, is not the structure. What is new is the way the structure has succeeded, in the last five years, in making its argument respectable. It’s everywhere: all over the radio, signed into law not just here but forcefully everywhere, legible in the editorial of newspapers and magazines whose editors I have, in some cases, met. The argument has been laundered, through the patient labour of foundations and lobbyists and self-described feminists, into a position that can be held by reasonable people at dinner parties without those people feeling themselves to be participating in a political project whose endpoint is the elimination of trans women from public life. This is sadly where we’re at.

*

I have worked with two publications recently who have tried to rewrite my voice. I was really vocal about it on my Instagram stories a week ago, that I had found words in a piece, authored by me, that I had not written. It was a critical piece about trans and queer making, the colloquial and canonical use and understanding of the word dolls for an exhibition, and some of the additions were argumentative moves that were poorly phrased and attributed to me. I really hated finding these.

When I queried the changes, I was told the original had not been house style enough. When I queried what house style meant in this instance, seeing as I had worked with them before and been praised for how beautiful the writing was, for a piece I had been commissioned to write because of the particularity of my voice, I was told that house style was under the discretion of the editors and that they retain the right to make all changes before publishing; without the collaboration of the author, in this case me, to approve of anything changed.

I am sometimes asked, by people who would like me to be larger about this, why such a seemingly small incident sends me off the deep end. It’s because it’s not accidental and it’s so fucking formulaic; this is what people believe a normal cis editorial relation to be with a trans writer: commission the trans voice for the trans particularity and visibility and inclusion; subdue the trans nuances at the level of the line; deliver the resulting product as evidence of the publication’s commitment to trans voices; decline to be questioned about the gap between the two, a process excluding the voice it aims to embolden. It’s essential for things to stay this way too as there is a financial responsibility interwoven, that being the publication can advertise their inclusiveness in producing work from trans people, though in the process of editing can remove or alter their voice so distinctly as to not ruffle the feathers of donors, advertisers, whoever the money is coming from, so that they can continue producing the same placid publication they did before hiring us. My response to this is, if the house style is so important, don’t hire me unless you want to collaborate with me.

Susan Stryker, in My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage, addresses the medical establishment as Frankenstein and addresses herself, the trans woman speaking from inside the medicalised body, as the monster Frankenstein made and then disavowed. The monster has things to say to its creator. The monster’s rage, Stryker insists, is not a failure of self-regulation, but is instead the only adequate response to having been brought into being by people who, having brought one into being, refused to recognise what they had made. I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster, she wrote. To me this sentence feels like one of the most generative sentences we have in the trans canon because it refuses the demand to perform a kind of simplicity for the comfort of the people whose peace has been built on the monster’s (my) silence. The alternative is a fucking trap if I have ever seen one!

Boo!

*

I want to talk about the unspoken labour of being trans. Hil Malatino, in Side Affects, calls some of it affective labour and some of it care work and some of it simply getting through. This type of labour, Malatino argues, is of producing one’s own affect, in cis rooms, in a texture that the cis room can metabolise; further meaning the trans woman must monitor her own face, voice, gestures, laughter, readiness to weep, in order to ensure that none of these modes exceeds, at any given moment, the bandwidth of the cis people present. What I find most disturbing is that this labour has to be performed even when the trans woman is, in her body, exhausted or grieving. More so, the cessation of this produces, in the cis room, a kind of social emergency for which the trans woman will be held responsible, regardless of her stated reasons.

Malatino’s argument, against this, is that the negative affects of trans life—the rage, fatigue, dysphoria, envy, melancholy—are not pathological. They are not symptoms of insufficient self-care or deficits to be remediated through better breath-work and a more curated Instagram and a meditation app subsidised by one’s employer. They are appropriate responses to the political conditions that produce them, and the demand that we manage them, individually and silently, is a demand to privatise what is in fact a structural problem. To translate one’s own experience, constantly, into terms the surrounding population can accept without choking, to me, feels diabolical.

Dr. Joy James (who I interviewed for Issue 7 of Worms Magazine) has written for many years about what she calls the captive maternal: the conscripted labour of producing care for systems that consume a person. James’s work is rooted in Black feminism (not the bell hooks kind, I suggest reading her critical take on hooks, I personally loved it) and is not directly addressed to trans politics, though I am aware from our conversation it is submerged in her work. As such, the analogy that I draw here, carefully still, is to do with the level of structure. Hear me out: the trans woman in the cis room performs the captive maternal labour of producing the room’s good behaviour by being patient with its bad behaviour. This care work is then extracted, described as a kind of inclusion. If you’re a bad trans woman who refuses the labour, you are described as difficult. If you’re a good trans woman who performs and is attentive to caring for long enough, you develop what Malatino describes as side affects: you get tired, this state of tiredness becomes a deep settled fatigue, it produces a kind of permanent flicker behind the eyes that the cis people in your life will sometimes notice, in passing, and ask about, though you will say, when asked, that you are fine, knowing well enough that you are not at all. You crumble, buckle under the pressure of more than you can hold…

*

David Wojnarowicz wrote in Close to the Knives, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, that he wished he could take the bodies of his dead friends and lay them on the steps of the people who had refused to act. He wished, he wrote, to do this as performance, to make the bodies of the dead visible. He wrote in fury and grief, through prose that has not, in my lifetime of reading, been matched because the conditions that produced his prose have not been the starting points for most writers; the rage in it is the despair of someone who has decided that the language of polite explanation is no longer available to him.

I guess… I am thinking about Wojnarowicz now because the present rhymes, in ways that should not need to be argued for, with the present he was describing. There is a population of trans women currently dying at a rate the state has decided not to intervene in. This population of intelligent, careful, thoughtful trans women, my sisters, are being harassed by the state with its disinterest in creating a strategy that would save them. The opposite is harrowingly true, they rather us die. That we have to ensure this level of legislative discrimination, and play nice around a dinner table, is really destabilising. The cis people I am being asked to be patient with, in this present, are the cis people who perpetuate the problem and are voting in the elections that are producing and upholding these strategies. Right in front of my salad.

I am interested in the material consequences of the law, which are that I am, by act of court, no longer a woman in the eyes of the state in which I live and work and pay tax and have built every adult relationship of my life. The state has now, formally, on the books, removed me from the category whose conditions I have spent my adulthood inhabiting. This is the current moment, a political time in which I am being asked, by certain cis acquaintances and by certain cis editors, to recognise that the discourse has become heated and that we should all, perhaps, try to lower the temperature.

*

There is a temptation, in essays of this kind, to turn the prose, near the end, toward a horizon; to redeem the damage, the part of the essay where the writer permits the reader to feel that the reading has been worth the time. I am suspicious of that turn in my own writing and in the writing of others, because I think it perpetuates (almost always) the infantilisation of trans futurity that has been used, for the entirety of my lifetime and my ancestors before me, to defer the question of trans liveability into a future I am not certain I will live to see.

José Esteban Muñoz wrote a book about queer futurity that I have read a lot, and the book has been deployed, in the years since his death in 2013, by a great many readers who would like trans women to wait. In some reviews I have reviewed, the book has been read as an argument for patience, and has been pulled from to suggest that the not-yet is coming, that we must build it together, that the building is, by implication, slow. I want to say, if I can be so blunt, that I don’t think this what Muñoz argued.

To me, Muñoz argued that the not-yet was a present-tense condition. The not-yet, in his account, is something we touch in the present, in moments of queer encounter, dance, sex, art. The not-yet is here, I think, in flashes. I believe the deferral is what has been done to Muñoz’s argument by readers for whom the immediacy of his claim was politically intolerable. The actual claim is more brutal: the present is unliveable, and a different present is being lived, in patches, by people who refuse to live in the conditions set out for us.

What this means for trans women in the present moment is that the trans women I love are, right now, in the patches of the not-yet. They are not waiting for it, but conducting it in their flats, work, in their writing for no money, in the care they are taking of each other, in the dinners they convene at which no one critiques another woman’s surgery. They are conducting it now, in the time that has been written off, by the cis public, as the time before the future; which is quite frankly bullshit. I want to live more thoughtfully in those patches, I really need it and I need cis people to be responsible for providing these spaces.

*

I have realised, in the course of writing this essay, that the magazine I have been editing for the better part of five years is the longest job I have ever held. I have quit, at this point, so many other jobs on the basis of incidents which involved cis people perpetuating larger problems for me that I found intolerable. Worms feels different.

Worms has, since its founding, included trans writers as a matter of editorial constitution rather than a matter of generosity. We have not had to make ourselves legible to a cis house style because the house style has been shaped, from the first issue, by writers including trans writers, which is not the same thing as a magazine that includes trans writers. The twelfth issue is almost in print. It contains the largest proportion of trans contributors of any issue we have made, none of which have been asked to adhere to any certain style of writing, or to make themselves legible to a cis audience. Fuck that. They have been asked to write what they wanted to write, and they have written what they wanted; the result, in my opinion, is the best issue we have made.

I feel compelled to write this here because I want you to understand what becomes possible when the editorial labour is not extracted from trans writers but distributed among them; to understand that this is actually something Worms has built by comparison to the vile and on-going structural issues I have to deal with in my personal freelance work. To me it seems a very simple ethic to adopt. Which is to also say: yes, those of you who remove this ethic from your structures are maniacal. Mwah x

xo
pea

This week has felt like a collision between the global and the granular. I’ve been oscillating between the heavy weight of politics and the hollow, soulless gaze of Tyra Banks; between the high-mindedness of hydrofeminism and the very real, very un-motherly screaming of the pipes in my flat.

My gut is currently a battleground of 500ml coffee pots and BBQ Popchips, a physical manifestation of the tension I’m finding everywhere else. While I navigate a life of writing (which is mostly just an elegant way of saying panicking about commissions while ignoring my major projects), I’ve been trying to find where the scars are kept. On land, they’re easy to spot. In the water, and perhaps in ourselves, they’re harder to pin down.

What follows is a scrappy inventory of the things that kept me tethered—or spiralling—this week. It’s a mix of the profound, the pathetic, and the background garbage. From the fracturing of the Iranian diaspora—with mental health and theoretical resources attached—to the simple, entertaining relief of Koestenbaum’s prose, Maximum Ride, and the practice of returning to childhood books to process grief, this is where I’m at.

Read more

psa: i’m all right, honestly, there’s no need to worry. i’d been carrying the urge around for days, a tightness beneath the ribs, and now that it’s had some air i feel, if not exactly lighter, then at least less followed by it. it came to me in that in-between place, somewhere along the seam of sleep and waking. i haven’t been sleeping properly, so the idea didn’t so much arrive as insist: it had to last eight minutes, and the voice had to break. not gently, but properly. holding a scream like that shows you how much feeling the body stores. the throat becomes more than a throat; it carries grief, memory, fear, and a strange, almost holy kind of exhaustion. i’m grateful i did it—grateful, even, to the dream that told me how long it should be—though, in the middle of it, there was a flicker of real fear in seeing it through.

i like making these videos. i would watch this with your headphones at a suitable volume for loud screams throughout. i guess i’m learning something at the moment through the expression of these emotions and words, that they need voice, or emotions just need sound, so here is the sound of me feeling something really guttural. i keep thinking about what it would be like to just scream at a reading or something and to be fully understood, if that’s even possible.

i’ve been taking the bus to different parts of the city every night this week, or grabbing a bike from the street and riding in the rain, to places i have never been, each and every night, really late, and when i get to these new places sometimes there are only a few establishments open, and so i go inside, grab a cheap late night espresso and i sit with my notebook, i write about being a sculpture, a monument, and the little sculptures i have in my room, such as the ‘gum on the soap box’ sculpture i currently have festering on my desk, of every single piece of gum i have bitten into this week, (picture below, the one in my mouth right now will go there soon), and it’s helped me recently realise that this is all we are right; a collection of the fragments we collect and make and that’s the sculpture, not some refined and carved in stone fucking polished marble beauty, but all the fucking discarded little bits you have around you, and the boundaries you erect or don’t to savour yourself from scrutiny or not, and how far someone can slip into or out of those, and i think a part of being an artist is playing and constructing and orchestrating those fragments into a dialogue with one another, which is where these videos come in. i’m nothing but the sum of me my gum my screams and i can’t see myself fully if i don’t stop to let the totality of each expression breathe.

tbh also been kinda angry lately.

xo

pea

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more at @pierceeldridge or @sissyanarchy

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more at @pierceeldridge or @sissyanarchy

Open Call for Submissions:

CROOKED is seeking contributions for its inaugural issue. While our name carries the weight of the gnarled, the non-linear, and the defiant, we are purposefully raw. We are not looking for work that fits into a neat box or a pre-determined prompt. Instead, we invite work that exists in its own right: raw, unfiltered, and unapologetically itself.

We are looking for voices that mirror the “crooked” nature of our existence: those living outside the lines of suburban conformity, those navigating the tension of regional landscapes, and those practicing trans-anarchist resistance in the everyday. Whether your work is a quiet reflection on rural queer life or a loud, transgressive critique of the colonial status quo, we want to see it.

We encourage submissions across a broad spectrum of radical expression:

• Experimental & Long-form Prose

• Visceral Poetry

• Visual Art & Photographic Essays

• Anti-colonial Critique & Queer Theory

• Underground Dispatches

We are particularly interested in perspectives that bridge the gap between urban centers and the regional fringes: stories of survival, thriving, and anarchy from the “off-grid” corners of so-called Australia. Send us your most authentic deviations.

Eligibility:

To ensure your work is considered for CROOKED, please confirm you meet the following criteria before submitting:

• Location: You must be currently living/working in Australia.

• Community: You must be an active subscriber to the SISSY ANARCHY Substack (free subscriptions are here: https://sissyanarchy.substack.com/subscribe).

• Focus: We prioritise voices exploring the intersections of queer/trans identities, anarchist philosophies, and underground narratives.

Dates:

• Pitch Deadline: Pitches are open until 19 February 2026, 23:59 AEST.

• Notification: Contributors will be notified of the outcome by 26 February 2026.

• Final Submission: The deadline for completed pieces is 26 March 2026.

• Publication: the inaugural issue will be published in June 2026.

Please note: We are unable to provide individual feedback for rejected pitches. Kindly inform us if you are submitting a simultaneous pitch to other publishers or if you are proposing a piece that has been previously published.

Rates:

We believe in fair compensation for queer and trans creators. For long-form pieces (short stories, essays, etc.) we can offer $250, and for anything smaller (poetry, etc.) we offer $100.

Submit to the Open Call

If you can’t access the button above, please use the link here.

Open Call for Writing Workshop:

CROOKED is looking for opinionated queer and trans people, and allies, based in Gurambilbarra / Townsville to join our new Writing Workshop. If you have something to say about trans and queer life here—whether that’s about art, community, politics, nightlife, or daily survival—we want to hear from you.

We are now looking for 8 members to join the club and commit to the following:

• Attend 4 evening workshops led by writer and publisher P. Eldridge (founding editor of SISSY ANARCHY).

• Explore different ways of writing, reflecting, and sharing opinions about trans and queer life and culture in the region.

• Work towards producing a piece of original writing (poetry, essay, or fiction writing) to be published in the first issue of CROOKED.

A Creative Maintenance Allowance (CMA) will be offered to all 8 members to cover the time and expenses associated with attending the sessions, doing light homework in between, and producing a final piece for publication. The allowance is set at $50 per session, totalling $200 for attending all 4 sessions and submitting work.

Workshops will take place via Zoom on Wednesday evenings, beginning late February/Early March (dates to be confirmed). If you are selected, dates will be sent for your confirmation.

Please ensure you are available to attend all sessions before applying.

The aim of this Writing Workshop is to capture a range of trans and queer voices and experiences from Gurambilbarra / Townsville. No experience is necessary, just a willingness to speak openly about what queer life here means to you.

Join the Writing Workshop

If you can’t access the button above, please use the link here.

Before you go, please consider sharing this post (screenshot it, share the instagram post here, do what you want) so the word of this new opportunity can reach all your cool pals.

CROOKED TEAM: MICHAEL SMITH, CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN, P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy or @crooked.magazine

As some of you who have been following since the jump will well and truly know, SISSY ANARCHY has always been a living organism. It’s never been just one thing: it’s a mood, a protest, a messy, beautiful collision of identities. It bends around new concepts and formats like water. From the local foundation of our home in London to international streams, we’ve always tried to exceed expectations by pushing into the spaces where we aren’t “supposed” to be. We’ve done the high-art thing, the DIY thing, and everything in between.

Since we kicked off in 2023, the trajectory has been a bit of a fever dream. We’ve produced books, zines, workshops, and journals that I know are sitting on your bedside tables or stuffed under your pillows as dirty little secrets. We’ve been featured in white-cube galleries, book fairs near and far, and even made a splash at the Venice Biennale. But as much as I love the global playground—and have needed the necessary time off from production—there’s a specific kind of hunger that comes from moving further and further away from the soil that actually made you.

That’s where CROOKED comes in. This project isn’t just a new chapter, it’s a homecoming. It’s about taking everything we’ve learned in the metropole and bringing it back to so-called Australia; the place that grew me, the place that raised me. But we aren’t going to the “big” cities. We’re going rural. We’re going back to our roots in a place almost as quaint as its name: Townsville, or more importantly, Gurambilbarra.

But let’s be real about why we’re going rural right now. We aren’t just looking for a change of scenery or a quiet place to hide. We are living through a global pivot toward the hollow and the hateful. Whether it’s the rising tide of fascism across the West, the relentless machine of war, or the live-streamed genocide of the Palestinian people, we are witnessing a coordinated attempt to narrow the world; to decide who is human enough to speak and whose life is “culturally sensitive” enough to ignore.

Look at what just happened in so-called Australia. A major writers’ festival imploded because the board decided that a Palestinian author, Randa Abdel-Fattah, was a “risk” to the comfort of their audience. They used the language of “cultural sensitivity” to mask a blatant act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship. When they silenced her, they didn’t just hurt one writer, they exposed the fragility of the “liberal” arts world. It proved that if your “anarchy” or your “art” only exists within the safe, curated walls of a city institution and programme, it can be switched off the second it makes anyone—the state, directors—uncomfortable.

CROOKED is a refusal of that silence. We are returning to the rural because the “centre” is rotting. In the city, we are often fighting for a seat at a table that was built to exclude us. But in the regional, in the beauty of Gurambilbarra, we are forced to reckon with the actual ground we stand on. To talk about rurality in this country is to talk, first and foremost, about colonialism. You cannot look at the scrub or the coastline without seeing the ongoing occupation. You cannot talk about the displacement of Palestinians without acknowledging the stolen land right beneath our boots. Indigeneity isn’t a footnote here, it is the foundation. By moving SISSY ANARCHY to the regional for our collaboration on CROOKED, we are stripping away the polish of the metropole to look at the raw mechanics of power: how it occupies land, how it polices bodies, and how it tries to sanitise our histories.

Zooming into the local landscape we’re stepping into: we now have Nick Dametto as the Mayor of Townsville, a man who transitioned from the populist right of Katter’s Australian Party to lead this city with a “back to basics” brand of hyper-masculinity. Dametto has built his image on being the “Minister for Muscles,” a bull-riding, shirtless-selfie-taking avatar for the kind of “rugged, pioneer” politics that has always tried to chest-beat its way over queer and marginalised identities. While his campaign catchphrase of “putting boots on the ground” focuses on a blue-collar push for infrastructure and trade jobs, it also sits alongside a much sharper edge; one that points toward a thinly veiled threat of increased surveillance and policing against anyone who doesn’t fit the mould of his “orderly” city.

Beyond the tough-guy posturing, Dametto’s political lineage and public stances carry a weight of queerphobia and exclusion that makes a project like CROOKED a literal necessity. When the leadership of a city is obsessed with “boots on the ground,” they aren’t looking for community; they’re looking for control. They are creating a climate where being different is a liability and where radical, queer expression is something to be “cleaned up.”

By bringing CROOKED to Gurambilbarra, we are putting a different kind of house-down-sissy-kinky-boots-on-the-ground (lol, I had to, excuse em moi). We aren’t here to police or to perform safety for the state; we’re here to plant seeds of dissent and joy in a soil that the local government wants to pave over with its own brand of populism. We are reclaiming the space from those who use their platform to punch down. If the mayor wants to talk about boots, then let’s talk about the heavy boots of the sissies and the anarchists who have always been here, surviving in the margins. We are here to show that Townsville isn’t just a backdrop for his theatre; it’s a site of queer vitality and resistance that refuses to be trampled by anyone’s “order.”

We are going back to the roots, not to escape the world’s horrors, but to find a more honest place to fight them. We are choosing to be “crooked” because the narrow path leads to complicity. We are choosing the rural because that is where the resistance is quietest, deepest, and most necessary.

Though, this isn’t a solo mission. SISSY ANARCHY has always thrived on collective energy, but CROOKED feels different because of the lineage and the shared heart behind it. Last year, I sat down with creatives Michael Smith and Caitlin McLoughlin to begin the conversations that would eventually become this project.

Working with Michael and Caitlin has been a masterclass in what happens when you stop trying to “curate” and start trying to commune. We spent hours deconstructing what it means to bring a queer, anarchic sensibility to a regional landscape. How do we honour the specific beauty and grit of Gurambilbarra without polishing away the edges and its histories?

Michael brings a perspective that challenges the way we look at space and legacy. His ability to see the architecture of a feeling is what gives CROOKED its structural integrity. Caitlin is a heartbeat, bringing forth a very specific design approach and an intuition for storytelling through a deep connection to the nuances of local identity; ensuring that we weren’t just “dropping in” on a location, but rather listening to what the land and the community are already saying.

Together, we realised that SISSY ANARCHY in London is a different beast than SISSY ANARCHY in North Queensland. In London, the anarchy is often about finding space in the crowd; in Townsville, it’s about finding the subversion in the stillness, the heat, and the histories.

We chose the name because there is so much beauty in the off-kilter. To be “crooked” is to refuse the straight line: the straight narrative, the straight history, the straight identity. It’s a nod to the way the scrub grows, the way the heat waves shimmer off the bitumen, and the way our community survives in regional areas by leaning into each other.

CROOKED is our attempt to bridge the gap between the international “Art World” and the visceral, dusty reality of the places that shaped us. It’s about recognising that the “roots” we talk about aren’t just a metaphor; they are the dirt, the saltwater, and the specific queer resilience required to thrive outside of a capital city.

This project has pushed us to rethink our roles as creators. It’s not just about making a zine or an installation; it’s about the labour of being present. Michael, Caitlin, and I haven’t just been planning an output; we’ve been building a bridge.

To those of you who have been with us since those first zines in 2023: thank you for letting us grow. Thank you for following us from the canals of Venice, through London, and now into the tropics of Gurambilbarra. CROOKED is for the rural kids, the ones who felt like they had to leave to find anarchy, and the ones who stayed behind to start their own.

We’re going back to the start, but we’re bringing the whole world with us. Welcome to CROOKED.

xo
pea

CROOKED is a defiant queer publication born in the dust and heat of regional Queensland. It carves space for the bent, the broken, and the beautifully out-of-line. Rooted in transgressive queer realities and shaped by the rugged landscapes of so-called Australia, CROOKED rejects assimilation, embraces distortion, and celebrates the art of deviation.

The word “crooked” calls up everything queer bodies and lives are accused of being: twisted, wrong, not straight. It’s a slur without being a slur; coded, sly, and subversive. It holds the pain of being called unnatural, and flips it. It’s pride oozing.

In a regional context, “crooked” also evokes a relationship with landscape: gnarled trees, winding dirt roads, the off-grid, rural life. Nothing neat. Nothing suburban. Everything real. It hints at criminality too, “crooked” like corrupt, dangerous, outside the law; a nod toward trans and queer anarchy in a settler colony where laws were never made to protect us.

Who we are:

Born from the creative minds of artist Michael Smith and SISSY ANARCHY‘s P. Eldridge and Caitlin McLoughlin, CROOKED is a powerhouse collaboration funded by the City of Townsville and Arts Queensland via the Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF).

The project bridges local innovation with international prestige; while gaining traction in underground queer archives, CROOKED joins forces with SISSY ANARCHY, the London-based press celebrated by AnOther Magazine and recently showcased at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale. Together, they push the boundaries of trans-anarchist philosophy and queer identity.

Our tenets:

Drawing from perspectives across urban centres and regional fringes, and grounded in the lives of trans and queer communities who inhabit, resist, endure, and thrive in regional spaces, CROOKED continues the legacy of queer resistance through storytelling, visual art, poetry, critical essays, and anti-colonial critique.

CROOKED is independent and radically committed to showcasing the voices of trans and queer people surviving and thriving beyond the cities.

Submission Windows & Local Workshops:

We are so stoked to finally open the gates for you to join us in building this first issue.

Starting January 22nd, we are launching two distinct paths for involvement; both of which are paid opportunities.

First, for the local people in Gurambilbarra, we are offering a Writing Workshop hosted by P. Eldridge. This is an intimate space—only 8 spots available—for local trans and queer folk to spend four weeks together (Wednesday evenings throughout February, AEST) honing a piece specifically for the first issue of CROOKED.

Parallel to this, we are launching an Open Call for Submissions for all queer and trans people living, working across, or from so-called Australia. We are seeking submissions across a broad spectrum of expression, including: Experimental & Long-form Prose, Poetry, Visual Art & Photographic Essays, Anti-colonial Critique & Queer Theory, Underground Dispatches, and more. We are particularly interested in perspectives that bridge the gap between urban centers and the regional fringes: stories of survival, thriving, and anarchy from the “off-grid” corners of so-called Australia.

Both the workshop applications and the open call for submissions will be handled via Google Forms, where we will ask you to share details about yourself and how you’d like to contribute; no more than a few hundred words with a sample of your work, be that your artwork, photography, or writing (just so you’re prepared).

All the links, prompts, and finer details will be sent out directly through the SISSY ANARCHY Substack, so please be sure to subscribe to receive this information (for free here) by January 22nd.

Offt, I know… a lot going on here. But before you go, please consider sharing this post (screenshot it, share the instagram post here, do what you want) so the word of this new opportunity can reach all your cool pals.

SEE YOU HERE ON JAN 22.

CROOKED TEAM: MICHAEL SMITH, CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN, P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy or @crooked.magazine

In this stillness, I have been keeping company with ghosts and architects, the teachers who sit on my nightstand like a row of silent adjudicators. I look to Patti Smith’s Devotion—that slim, obsessive treatise on the ‘why’ of the work—and I wonder if my own devotion has become a form of penance, a ritual of staring at a cursor until it burns a hole in the retina. Smith writes of the necessity of the obsession, the way the artist must become a vessel for the task. But what happens when the vessel is cracked? What happens when the spirit is willing but the mitochondria are in revolt? Then there is Rachel Allen’s God Complex, which cuts through the sanctimony of survival with a blade so sharp it feels like a caress, reminding me that the ego is often the first thing that must be broken to let the light in. Allen’s work suggests a terrifying kind of honesty, a dismantling of the persona that I find both aspirational and devastating in my current state of depletion.

Of course, then, Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma. Carson teaches me that the fragment is the only honest shape for a life in pieces; she suggests that the ‘wrongness’ of a thing—a life, a body, a syntax—is often where its holiness resides. In her world, the error is the entry point. To read Carson while my own body fails is to recognise that the wrongness of my fatigue is not a defect, but a different kind of grammar. It is a refusal to participate in a syntax of constant production that serves only to obscure the real, raw work of being alive. These teachers suggest that the struggle to write is not an obstacle to the text, but the text itself.

While I negotiate with the cursor, the state negotiates with the dead. The news of ICE’s recent killing arrives not as a shock, but as a dull, recurring thud against the hull of the morning. It is the sound of the machinery of ‘the border’; that imaginary line we have turned into a sacrificial altar, a place where the law ends and the hunt begins. We live in a world that treats the movement of human breath as a forensic violation, where the search for safety is met with a cage or a shroud. This violence is a mirror to the genocide of trans people currently unfolding in the belly of the empire. It is a quiet, legislative erasure; a dismantling of the self through the slow withdrawal of the right to exist in public space, a redactment of the soul. To be trans now is to be an etymology that the state is trying to un-write. We are being asked to justify our presence in our own skins, to turn our joy into a deposition for a court that has already decided our guilt. It is exhausting to be a ‘topic’ when one is trying to be a person, to be a debate when one is simply trying to breathe.

The fatigue I carry is not separate from this political landscape. It is the exhaustion of the hunted. It is the cellular weight of witnessing the unmaking of my peers, the systematic stripping away of healthcare and dignity. When the state decides that your body is a problem to be solved, my body responds by becoming a fortress of tiredness. It retreats. It shuts the gates. I read Carson’s fragments and I see the reflection of our fractured legal status, the way we are forced to live in the gaps between the ‘Right Normas’ of a society that views our existence as a grammatical error.

Then, the phone rings from another hemisphere, and the world narrows to the size of a pill bottle. Stage three. The diagnosis is a sudden border wall erected in the middle of a mundane conversation. It turns the Atlantic into an impossibility, a vast, salt-choked distance that no amount of longing can bridge. When you live ‘away’—separated by thousands of miles of iron-grey water—grief becomes an exercise in digital haunting. I am a pixelated daughter, a voice through a fibre-optic cable, trying to offer a comfort that requires the physical pressure of a hand.

Carson’s Wrong Norma feels particularly sharp here, in the context of a body being eaten from within. Sickness is the ultimate “wrong norma,” a deviation from the expected script of aging and continuity. It introduces a jagged, irregular meter into the family history. How do we inhabit the role of the ‘present’ when ‘there’ is a different time zone, a different season, a different life? The guilt is a low-grade fever that never quite breaks. I move through the supermarket here in London, picking up fruit and checking the labels, while across the ocean, the people who gave me my name are navigating the fluorescent purgatory of oncology wards. I am learning that love, in the diaspora of illness, is a series of frantic, silent prayers sent across the waves, hoping the signal is strong enough to hold someone upright. It is a love that must exist in the fragments, in the three-minute voice note, in the photo of a sunset that serves as a surrogate for a hug.

This distance is its own kind of chronic fatigue. It is the energy expended in the constant translation of worry into action, of fear into FaceTime calls. I think of Rachel Allen’s exploration of power and the divine; there is a god-like helplessness in watching a loved one suffer from across an ocean. You want to reach through the glass, to heal with a word, but you are reminded of your own finitude. You are reminded that you are just a body in a room, thousands of miles from the frontline of the family’s pain. The ocean is not just water; it is a delay in communication, a gap in the record, a space where the worst news can sit for hours before it reaches you.

Managing the fatigue, then, becomes a matter of triage. I have to decide which ghosts to feed. Do I give my energy to the book, which feels like a debt to the future? Or to the family, which is a debt to the past? Or to the struggle, which is the debt to the present? Usually, the fatigue decides for me. It pulls the covers over my head and insists on a moratorium on meaning. In those hours, I am neither a writer, nor a daughter, nor an activist. I am simply a biological fact, waiting for the storm to pass. This is the ‘wrongness’ Carson speaks of; the state of being out of sync with the world’s demands, finding a strange, quiet power in the refusal to be functional.

Perhaps the book is not coming because I am trying to write it in the language of the whole, when I am living in the language of the broken. If I am to follow Carson, I must accept the ‘Wrong Norma’ of this year. I must accept that my devotion looks like a nap, that my politics looks like a mourning, and that my family is a ghost I chase across a flickering screen. To write with nuance is to admit that these things are inextricably linked. The cancer in the family is not separate from the cancer in the state. The border that kills is the same border that separates the sick from their children. The fatigue is the common denominator, the tax we pay for being awake in a century of collapse.

In Devotion, Patti Smith speaks of the ‘sacred task.’ I am trying to find what is sacred. Is it sacred to finish a chapter? Is it sacred to spend three hours trying to find the right words to say to a weeping loved one over a laggy internet connection? Is it sacred to protest in the streets? Is it sacred to survive the night in a body that feels like a cage? The struggle to remain coherent when the world is dissolving is some form of…

The Atlantic—that great, churning aorta—carries the ships and the cables and the memories. It is the space between what I was and what I am becoming. It is the distance I have to travel every time I pick up the pen or the phone. And though it is vast, and though I am tired, there is a strange comfort in the water. It is a reminder that everything is in motion, that even the most solid-looking grief is subject to the tide.

The struggle to write is, perhaps, the struggle to remain human in a time of dehumanisation. Every word is a protest against the exhaustion that seeks to silence us, against the borders that seek to divide us, and against the illnesses that seek to consume us. We are all of us navigating these oceans of salt and grief, trying to find the shore. And if the shore is not there, we will learn to swim in the dark, carrying our ghosts and our fragments like precious cargo, refusing to let the weight of the world pull us under.

xo
pea

Share SISSY ANARCHY

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

Share SISSY ANARCHY

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

Share SISSY ANARCHY

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

Over the weekend in Ireland, I moved through a geography that felt almost instructional in its abundance. Coastal edges that refused straight lines. Dunes reshaping themselves in real time. Midlands opening out into long-held quiet. Highlands that asked the body to slow down. A mountain range that made language feel optional. Each shift happened without announcement. One moment salt on the tongue, the next exposed roots underfoot. I was reminded that continuity does not require sameness. That movement does not require violence.

This year has taught me to pay attention to transitions. To the way land teaches without sermonising. To how quickly we forget that we, too, are terrain; eroded, layered, weathered by history. In Ireland, I felt how land remembers even when people try to forget. Colonisation leaves scars not just in archives but in soil. You can feel it in the silence of certain fields, in the stubbornness of stone walls, in the way beauty persists without apology.

My learning about transition has also been surgical, intimate, written directly onto my face. Undergoing FFS forced me to reckon with the body as landscape in the most literal way: bone reshaped, swelling like weather, tenderness that demanded patience. Recovery taught me that transformation is not instant revelation but slow negotiation with pain, time, and care. There were days my face felt unfamiliar, like land after excavation, and days it felt astonishingly right, as if something long-buried had finally been allowed to surface. Surgery clarified what I had already been learning from the land; that change does not erase history, it rearranges it. That tending to oneself is not vanity but survival. That choosing alignment, even when it costs blood, rest, and vulnerability, is an act of love. My body remembers everything. And still, it heals.

Love, I am learning, is not a soft thing. It is not neutrality. Love is alignment. Love is staying with what is uncomfortable long enough for it to change you. bell hooks wrote that love is an action, a choice, a commitment to justice. adrienne maree brown reminds us that what we practise grows. Audre Lorde warned us that silence will not protect us. Ursula K. Le Guin taught us to imagine otherwise, because imagination is a material force. Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us to listen to the intelligence of the living world.

When I think about Palestine, I think about land that has been made to suffer abstraction. Reduced to maps, borders, security language. But land is not an idea. It is olive trees and wells and breath. It is people whose relationship to place has been interrupted by force, whose love for land has been criminalised. Nature, in its indiscrimination, exposes the lie at the heart of supremacy: that some lives are more aligned with the earth than others.

What I have learned this year is that love without courage becomes sentiment. And courage without love becomes cruelty. To love Palestine—to love any people under occupation—is to refuse the story that their suffering is inevitable or justified. It is to insist, again and again, that no one is disposable. Nature does not discard entire populations. It does not flatten cities and call it necessary. Violence is a human invention, not a biological one.

In Ireland, walking through landscapes shaped by famine, resistance, exile, and return, I understood something quietly radical: land does not forget who cared for it. It responds differently to those who listen. This is true of people too. What we are witnessing now is not just a political crisis but a relational one; a failure to recognise ourselves in one another.

This year has stripped away my tolerance for distance. For the idea that we can observe suffering without being implicated. Learning, I’ve realised, is not accumulation. It is alignment. It is deciding what you will no longer look away from. It is choosing love that costs you something.

And so, as the year turns, I offer this not as resolution but as practice:

*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺⋆ Grounding for the New Year ⋆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
(Inspired by adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

1. Begin with the body
Before analysis, before opinion: breathe. Place your feet on the ground. Name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear. Grounding is not avoidance; it is preparation.

2. Practise love as a discipline
Ask daily: What does love require of me here? Not comfort. Not approval. Love may require you to learn, to speak, to withdraw consent, to stay present.

3. Read beyond your certainty
Return to writers who expand possibility. Read poetry alongside theory. Let language soften and sharpen you. Remember that imagination is a tool for survival.

4. Follow the lineage
You are not the first to feel this grief or rage or hope. Learn whose footsteps you are walking in. Honour elders, organisers, poets, and ancestors who refused erasure.

5. Refuse false neutrality
Silence is not empty. It sides with power. Choose where you stand, knowing that standing is an ongoing act, not a single statement.

6. Stay with complexity without losing clarity
You can hold grief for all life while naming injustice precisely. These are not contradictions. They are ethical muscles.

7. Let the land teach you
Spend time outside. Observe how ecosystems repair, adapt, and resist domination. Apply these lessons to your relationships and your politics.

8. Write it down
Journal what you are unlearning. Write letters you may never send. Language is a way of metabolising truth.

9. Commit to something larger than yourself
Choose a cause, a community, a practice of solidarity. Return to it even when it is inconvenient.

10. Remember: love is not passive
Love moves. Love interrupts. Love insists on life.

Carry this with you into the new year; not as a checklist, but as a way of walking. Like land under changing weather. Like love under pressure. Like truth that refuses to be buried.

Additionally, I have included an end of year writing task inspired by the greats mentioned above, here for you:

*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺⋆ Writing Task: An Ethics of Belonging ⋆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚

Time: 30–60 minutes
Materials: Paper you like, a pen/pencil that feels good in your hand
Posture: Sit somewhere your body can soften

˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ 1: Arrive in the body (adrienne maree brown)

Before you write a single word, place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Take five slow breaths.

Write one paragraph answering:

Where am I writing from: physically, emotionally, historically?

Name the room. The weather. The lineage you carry. Do not interpret, just observe. Let this paragraph be factual, tender, unpolished.

˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ 2: Love as a practice (bell hooks)

Write a letter (unsent) that begins with:

“When I say love, I mean…”

Address it to:

• a place you love

• or people you are in solidarity with

• or a younger version of yourself who didn’t yet have language

Do not make this letter gentle for the sake of politeness. Let love be rigorous. Let it include anger, grief, devotion, responsibility.

Ask yourself:

• What does love demand of me that comfort does not?

• Where have I confused love with silence?

˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ 3: Imagine otherwise (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Now shift into speculative mode.

Write a short scene (500–700 words) set in a world where:

• land cannot be owned

• borders are temporary agreements, not weapons

• care is considered infrastructure

Do not explain how the world came to be this way. Just show one ordinary day inside it. Focus on texture, gesture, language. Let politics live in the background, like weather.

˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ 4: The erotic as truth (Audre Lorde)

Return to yourself.

Write ten sentences that begin with:

“I refuse to…”

These refusals should be bodily, political, intimate.
Refuse numbness. Refuse false neutrality. Refuse the stories that shrink you.

Do not justify your refusals. Let them stand as declarations.

˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ 5: Listen to the living world (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

Go outside, or to a window. Observe one non-human being: a tree, a bird, a body of water, the sky.

Write a dialogue between you and that being where:

• it teaches you something about survival

• you ask it a question you’re afraid to ask a person

Let the voice of the non-human be wise but not sentimental. Let it interrupt you.

˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ 6: Integration

End by writing a single paragraph that completes this sentence:

“The practice I am committing to carrying forward is…”

Make it specific. Make it livable. Make it something you could actually return to on any ordinary day.

xo
See you in the new year ˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆
pea

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

You come to me anyway. You come across the city on a bicycle after you’ve already given your muscles to the day, after you’ve dragged yourself through the gym, through work, through the endless low-grade performance of public life, and you still show up with that bright, stubborn softness in your face, the kind that feels almost indecent in a place that trains people to harden; you step inside and the air changes as if the room has been holding its breath, and I can smell the outside on you—heat, tarmac, wind that’s been filtered through traffic—and there’s a particular look you get when you’re exhausted but refusing to become numb, as if your body is protesting on your behalf, as if your nerves are saying: not yet, not yet, I still want, I still feel, I still have appetite, not just for food but for contact, for laughter, for the simple miracle of being held without having to earn it. You make a joke about your own depletion and I don’t laugh because it’s clever, I laugh because it’s honest, because you don’t turn tiredness into shame, because you let it be what it is: a body that has been used, a body that is still here.

There’s romance in the way we plan around the body, around its limits and its hungers, the way we speak to each other like we’re building a shelter out of hours and logistics and small mercies: what time, what route, what we’ll eat, whether we’ll swim, whether we can make space for rest; it isn’t glamorous but it’s devastatingly intimate, because it says I’m thinking about your comfort the way you think about mine, because it says I don’t want you only in your most impressive form, I want you when you’re wrecked, when you’re sleepy, when you’re unguarded, when the day has chewed you up and you still have the courage to come and lay your head down near mine. You ask about a picnic blanket, you ask about a morning start, you leave your bike like it belongs here, and something in me recognises the quiet seriousness beneath those simple gestures: we are making a life in the margins of the city’s demands, we are making a life that doesn’t ask permission.

The Sunday we go out east the heat arrives like a dare, absurdly high for London, turning the city’s grey into a kind of shimmer, and on the train everyone looks slightly unreal, as if the temperature has loosened the seams of their composure; you stand close to me with that steadiness you have when you’re running on too little sleep, and I watch you read, watch you listen, watch you keep yourself tethered by words and music as the carriage lurches, because you understand something I’m still learning; that movement can be a kind of truth serum, that travel changes the chemistry of the mind, that being carried somewhere loosens what you’ve been clenching all week. When we finally reach the edge of the city the air changes in increments, less exhaust, more green, and Epping takes us in with that damp, ancient smell that makes the body soften without negotiation, the light under the trees broken into gentle shards, the ground cool beneath the heat, and you talk about water the way people talk about places that saved them: still water, pond-water, cold streams that shock you into presence, the sea too wide and sometimes too frightening, the nervous system preferring what it can hold in its gaze. I love the specificity of you, the way your memories live in textures and temperatures rather than slogans, the way you don’t generalise your own life, you catalogue it; and when we find the spot near the water and decide to swim, it isn’t postcard-beautiful, it’s brown-green and honest and alive, it smells faintly of algae and mud and sun, and stepping in is like being told the truth by your own nerves—breath snatched, skin tightening, the mind briefly blank because sensation is louder than thought—and then you laugh, not performatively, not politely, but the involuntary laugh of an animal shocked into the present tense, and I laugh too because for a moment there’s nothing to be other than alive.

Afterwards we sit damp on a blanket, clothes sticking to skin, hair going strange in the heat, and the intimacy isn’t in any grand declaration, it’s in the way your shoulder keeps angling towards mine like instinct, in the way you keep checking my face as if you want to stay connected to the moment while it’s still here, in the way the day slows down into honest sensations: gooseflesh fading, sun warming our arms, insects hovering at the edge of hearing, the city held at bay by trees and distance and the small choice to keep breathing. I find myself thinking about how many rooms you’ve had to move through, how many eyes have tried to fix you into something legible, and how you still have this tenderness in you that hasn’t curdled into cruelty, this capacity to be gentle without becoming small; it makes me feel protective in a way I don’t fully trust, because I don’t want to turn you into something fragile, I know you’re not, I know you’ve survived things that would hollow out most people, but I also know how hard-won softness is, how much discipline it takes not to become the thing that hurt you, and I want to keep you safe the way you keep your own heart safe; carefully, intelligently, without lies.

When we come back to London the machine of it reasserts itself in stages—noise first, then crowds, then advertisements selling better versions of the self—and I can feel the old anger rise, the familiar disgust at how the city will happily take your rent and your labour and your nights and still act suspicious of your tenderness if it’s too visible, too unashamed, too queer, too alive; but inside the flat we build a different atmosphere, domestic and soft, a small counterspell made of showers and food and a bed that doesn’t demand anything from us except honesty. You put on music that’s dark and lush and aching, and I watch your shoulders drop as if the sound has given you permission to stop bracing, as if you’ve found a frequency where your intensity isn’t automatically read as danger; you talk about how a certain kind of music can flip the whole nervous system from panic to okay, and I understand because I’ve lived my own versions of that switch, because I know what it is to be mid-spiral and suddenly held by a song, as if the song has hands.

Blade drifts in like a small shadow with opinions, all black fur and bright eyes, weaving between us as if he’s the third resident of whatever we’re building, and you watch him with real tenderness—no performance, no irony—just that pure attention people give when they love something that cannot be reasoned with; there’s humour in the way he can be cute and brutal in the same movement, there’s something almost sacred in how animals insist on the present tense, and then, underneath it, there’s the quiet worry that comes with care, the looming appointment, the fragile fact that love always includes the possibility of loss. I say something fierce and protective and half-joking, the kind of violence people speak when they’re helpless, and you meet it with that particular calm you have when you’re trying to keep your head above water—someone will look after him, he’ll be safe for tonight, the world won’t end in the next hour—and it breaks my heart a little, how you can be anxious and still practical, still generous, still capable of steering yourself through fear rather than letting it steer you.

Later, when the lights are low and the city is reduced to distant churn—sirens, tyres on wet road, laughter spilling from somewhere it shouldn’t matter—the conversation slips, as it always does when people stop performing, into the tender infrastructure beneath the day: family, grief, the parts of life that don’t wait for your calendar to clear. You speak about visiting someone you love as often as you can, because soon you won’t be able to, and the vulnerability in it is plain, not dramatised, not polished into a lesson; it sits between us like a living thing, that anticipatory grief that weighs down the body because putting it down feels like betrayal. You talk about trying to stay grounded while something you can’t control keeps shifting, and I feel the old impulse to fix it with language rise in me, the desire to say the perfect sentence that will make it all lighter, but I stop myself because I don’t want to turn your pain into a problem to solve, I want to honour it as a reality to witness, and I realise that the most loving thing I can do is stay, listen, hold you, let your fear be present without demanding it become neat.

You talk too about the work you do to remain accountable to yourself; the rooms where you speak even when you don’t want to, the slow practice of becoming someone safer to love, and there is something quietly erotic in that kind of honesty, not because it’s a performance of goodness, but because it’s the opposite of avoidance, because it says I know my patterns, I know my edges, I know what I’m capable of, and I’m choosing tenderness anyway; the city tells us to treat intimacy like a risk-management strategy, to keep our hearts behind glass, but you keep stepping into closeness with your eyes open, and it makes me feel both relieved and terrified, because relief is what happens when you finally stop bracing, and terror is what happens when you realise you have something to lose.

In the half-sleep before morning you reach for me without fully waking, as if your body believes in us before your mind is ready to speak, your hand finding mine with that simple, unconscious certainty, and the gesture is so small it almost disappears, but it changes the whole room; it makes me think of all the details that have been accumulating without fanfare—forest light on your face, cold water shocking laughter out of you, the soft domestic choreography of feeding each other, the cat insisting on being included, the way you show up after long days and still have the nerve to be gentle—and I understand, with a clarity that feels almost rude, that love is often not a single dramatic moment but a thousand small returns, the choice to come back to the same door, the same bed, the same person, again and again, and each time to arrive a little more real.

When I try to hold you in language afterwards, it isn’t your body that comes first, though God knows I want it, it’s your atmosphere; the particular way you make the room safer without claiming to, the way you can be exhausted and still kind, frightened and still honest, horny and still tender, the way you carry devotion without turning it into a performance; and I want to tell you, without ceremony, without turning you into a symbol, that being with you makes me feel less like a collection of fragments reflected in glass and more like a person who has arrived, whole enough, here, now, with you, in this imperfect city, building something gentle inside the machine.

Love, I’m learning with you, isn’t the glossy mercy people sell when they want you to stop asking for more; it’s not a cure, it’s not a halo, it’s not the sort of feeling that arrives and absolves you of the life you’ve already lived. It’s quieter and stranger: a discipline of attention, the decision to keep looking without trying to edit what you see, to let another person be complicated and still stay; it’s the way your hand finds mine in half-sleep like muscle memory, the way you make room for my fear without treating it like a flaw, the way you carry your own grief without offering it up for consolation, and how all of that—so unadorned, so practical, so human—makes tenderness feel less like a performance and more like a place I can actually stand, barefoot, in my own body, without bracing for the moment it becomes unsafe.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

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The house, in its first address, taught her that Nature’s kindness is an artless fraud. It did not smite; it insinuated. From the first evening she perceived a diminishment that could not be accounted in any ledger save that of air. No pain announced it; pain is a rude herald and this visitation was courtly. Rather, the integument that had from infancy vested her—so long the discreet custodian of blush and pallor—suffered minute defections: a mote unhooked from the cheek-bone; a pale dust lifted from the wrist; a bloom, less than a breath, revoked from the throat’s column. Each particle seemed to recollect her name in the act of departure. The atmosphere accepted these surrenders with the manners of an ancient host, and the room, possessed already of odours of pewter and old leather, commenced to harbour the faintest sweetness; no perfume, but the ghost of albumen, the memory of flesh sublimed.

She had long believed herself acquainted with dissolution, having kept company with graves and the appurtenances of science; yet she discovered that the world unmans us not by stroke but by arithmetic. Salt vanishes in the common tea and makes the draught more itself; thus, she thought, the self is best consumed by communion. Her mind—well tutored in those modern temples wherein glass, spirit, and electricity meet—could assign no reagent to name the trespass. The pulse did not scandalise; the mercury maintained its composure; yet the body’s superficies abandoned its allegiance by hexagon and hair’s breadth, as if the cuticle were a careful tessellation yielding to a subtler geometry than man has yet conceived.

The orchard beyond the south wall, those penitent trees like gallows in retreat, became her catechism. She walked there at hours the sun abased itself, when the horizon lifted purple engines and the rooks argued in black tribunals. The wind in that precinct came doctrinal, tasting of quinces and damp hay, with a grey savour of iron such as precedes the bridal of lightning and cloud. It touched her not as vagrant caprice but as a deliberate editor: it read the poem of her skin and removed redundant words. She felt herself translated into a more general tongue.

Within doors she contrived confinement, as penitents will: every casement shuttered; every flue stuffed with wool; the curtains weighted with a coarse thread tinctured by lead until the room hung like a chapel before its grief. She wore a muzzle of gutta-percha whose odour awakened in her the toy-shelves of childhood and the workshop where coils hissed like discreet serpents. Yet even thus sequestered, the house respired through her, and took its tithe. Where she placed her hand, the polish of the chair assumed a circle of new porcelain; where she reclined, the mattress accepted a plume so faint it was scarcely more than a refusal to be seen. The mirror, once loyal to the flattery of glass, now wept in its silvering, and Beatrice’s image wept with it, each becoming a courteous asthma of light.

The habitation contained a relic of latter days—an engine of brass and glass flasks, valves and delicate levers—contrived by the late Mr Vale, who had chased comets and recorded their temperature as if stars themselves bled degrees. It persisted like a widower awakened at inconvenient hours by habitual sorrow. When wound, its needles trembled as though compelled by a barometer set not in the sky but in Beatrice herself. She came to suspect that the registering of a soul’s pressure might be achieved more faithfully by brass than by prayer; and yet even the instrument fell, as all mortal industry must, into a graceful inadequacy. Its finest filament extended, faltered, and at last rested an inch from her shoulder, acknowledging an atmosphere that had begun to consider her an ingredient.

Her recollections ceased to arrive as histories and returned instead as weather. She stood by the sealed sash and felt, with a particular coolness, the schoolroom’s chalky constellations; with a dark warmth, the lane where rain steamed off hay; with a faint sting, the laboratory’s sacrament of blue ruin when a fuse expires. Memory, she understood, is not housed in the brain’s cabinet alone: it abides in pressure, in scent, in the very temperature of rooms, and waits only on the body’s porosity to be admitted. The speculation did not comfort her; consolations are unpersuasive when spoken by drafts.

As she diminished, she exercised that stateliness which is the final property of a spine. Furniture kept its tyranny of weight; she grew ceremoniously light. Gloves hung from the fingers as from exiled bones. She measured corridors the way air does; seeking the colder corners, apprehending the resentful rooms. The long gallery, where portraits with gildings more opulent than the lives beneath them kept a practice of silent judgement, received her without alteration; yet in passing, she felt their varnish recoil, as though the canvas foresaw its own removal into the general element.

No conversation could be compelled from her circumstances without degenerating into a vulgarity of syllables; and thus she embraced a stricter eloquence of thought, roaming the house by inward light as one might pace a cloister excavated from night. She considered whether the malady belonged to her or to the world. The question split as soon as formed and multiplied like spores. Was she virus to Creation, rubbing it raw to the nap; or was Creation, having entered her like an august miasma at birth, now reclaiming its debt; particle by respectful particle. She had read the new physicists who preach exchange, and the old naturalists who sermonise decay; both schools concurred that borders are a polite superstition. If so, then sanctity must be a pressure and sin an over-warm room.

The day of conclusion announced itself with instruments upon the horizon, as if a great orchestra of violet had been set in motion by an unpitying baton. The hedges shivered their small verdicts; the hens gave themselves the dignity of magistrates; the air took in its mouth the taste of tin. Beatrice stood beneath the lintel long enough to learn the figure of the storm; then she descended into the orchard as into a nave. She did not tremble; trembling is a spectacle, and she had exhausted performances. The wind advanced in editions; each revision was exquisitely argued. Hexagons unlatched with courtly patience; the upper bloom of the face resigned its office; the rents left behind resembled not wounds but permissions. About her head, minute vortices formed with the tidy reverence of attending orders; the earth answered with root-sighs from below, and the very bark of the trees received her like a sacrament their theology had awaited.

She perceived herself, not as a woman made specimen by glass, but as a temper: the chalk, the hay, the perished rubber of a childhood toy, the blue breath of extinguished wires, the bitter prayer of winter at a sash-window; all these reassembled without solicitation, and she, who had for years practised the severe art of boundaried grief, found the outline of her person no longer an argument but a courtesy, and one easily withdrawn. The gaze, last faithful emissary of the self, diffused into midges and attention; and attention, that noble labour, enlarged until it could no longer be kept by two eyes. The conclusion was not a violence; it was a syntax, and the sentence knew how to end.

The place where she had stood preserved, for a handful of heart-beats, a pressure with the manners of a soul, scented equivocally of loam and pewter, of apple-pip, of a book shutting upon counsel, of lightning regarding its own doctrine. Then the air, which endures all gossip, folded the news into its general brief, and Hawstead resumed its reputable ruin. The automaton in the parlour, unfed by any further crisis, allowed its needles to settle to that stoic zero machines achieve when they at last consent to be mortal. A coolness travelled the stair, knowing already the measure of the rise; the mirror, relieved of its obligation to flatter, tarnished out its tears.

Afterwards the house respired on, as houses do that have learnt to survive their saints. At times a sheet upon the line lifted with the grave architecture of a spine, then collapsed into mere cloth; a lamp-flame inclined, attentive to an address no lips owned; a pane admitted rain sharp with iron and washed away a name it had never been written to bear. Those who came later essayed enquiries; where she had gone, by whose authority, into what estate. They found no coordinate, and the instruments consented to no narrative. She had not left. She had become distributable.

If, in some bare hour before dawn, a cheek should discover upon itself a patch of preternatural smoothness, a porcelain audit exact and clean; if the corner of a room should keep a cold nebula disobedient to thermometers; if the orchard should receive, in a wind without rain, a remembrance of the stairs, these are not fictions but proprieties. The world, which had afflicted her and was afflicted by her, has written her in a finer hand. She is atmospheric: sovereign and shared, indivisible and unseizable, a presence no fingers can retain, no scripture can cite, and yet exact and incessant as breath. In this consummation there is no comfort; comfort is too coarse a fabric. There is, instead, the antique decency of physics and the stern charity of air: that all which ever was body shall be pressure and odour and weather again, and that the ledger of selves, kept so zealously in flesh, will, in its last accounting, be entered in wind.

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and then something shifts just slightly just enough to go unnoticed by anyone else but enough that I feel reality exhale wrong like the air misses a step and suddenly the world feels tilted a fraction too far to the left my balance slipping inside my own body and the rosy heat on my cheeks is no longer about stage lights or nerves but something else something watching me from the edges of the room with a patience that feels like hunger not the physical kind but the kind that waits for cracks the kind that knows how to slip into the seams of a person without ever touching them and when I step off the stage it follows not with footsteps but with intention the air tightening behind me the way a hand might flex before reaching for a throat

my cheeks stay warm but the warmth is different now less blush more fever something rising from under the surface like my skin is remembering something before I do and the night peels itself open as I walk home the forest at the end of my street leaning in with that almost-human curiosity the branches twitching in the wind like fingers learning the idea of language and the path darkens even though the sky hasn’t changed and I tell myself it’s fine that I’ve walked this way a hundred times but the air feels thick with some unnamed presence that wants to know me too closely wants to rearrange me wants to understand what I look like on the inside without ever asking and every step feels like descending into a mouth slowly deciding how wide it can open without breaking something essential

my cheeks are still rosy but now it’s the colour of someone caught in the act of realising they are not alone the colour of panic simmering just under the threshold of recognition the colour of being studied by something that does not have eyes in any conventional sense but sees me anyway sees too much sees the softest parts of me like a map laid out on a table ready for someone to press their palms into and leave impressions that stay long after the hands are gone and I try to breathe normally but the air feels rearranged around me like the forest is inhaling first deciding how much of me to take with each breath and the branches quiver like they’re holding back a word too sharp to say

and then the presence arrives fully not as a figure not as anything I could point to but as an intrusion a violation of interior boundaries a sharp psychic pressure pushing into the spaces that should be private that should be mine the way a nightmare presses into a sleeping mind before the body can defend itself it comes as a thought that isn’t mine arriving inside me as though it has always lived there whispering with no voice and no mouth but somehow still speaking you are open you are open you are open and the heat on my cheeks turns into something unbearable a flush of helplessness of being permeated by something that doesn’t care about the borders of the self something that slips under my skin like water through cracked plaster filling hollows it shouldn’t know exist and I feel myself fragment in quiet slow-motion like a building shuddering under an unseen impact the foundation groaning the structure bending reality inside me bending and I want to run but my body forgets the idea of movement stuck in that frozen hinge between fear and recognition

the forest pulses around me like a huge slow heartbeat beating under the earth under the roots under my feet and I feel myself pulled apart not physically but in the deeper way the way that leaves bruises on thoughts instead of skin the way that rearranges the architecture of a person without leaving a mark anyone else could see and I stand there in the dark swallowed by the sense of being occupied by something nameless something ancient something that moves like a shadow learning to become a second body inside mine and my cheeks are burning because fear has become a living tempo beneath my skin thumping out warnings I can’t translate fast enough and I think this is what it feels like not to be touched but to be trespassed to have the borders of selfhood rewritten without consent to have something rewrite its name across the softest place in me and claim it as an afterthought

and when the presence finally withdraws or dissolves or simply loses interest I am left alone on the path but not truly alone because the echo of it stays like a fingerprint pressed into the inside of my mind like a word etched into bone like a memory I never agreed to keep and my cheeks cool slowly too slowly as if the heat has sunk deeper travelling down into the quiet trembling machinery of the self and I walk the rest of the way home unsure if the body I’m walking in is still mine unsure if the forest let me leave or just changed the terms of my belonging and the night hums behind me with the soft wet breath of something that didn’t finish what it started something that will wait as long as it needs to wait something patient enough to find me again the next time my cheeks bloom rosy and unguarded under the weight of being seen

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Thank you for reading SISSY ANARCHY. Over the next few months, I will officially become a paid newsletter.

I’m so happy with what has grown here and I’m really proud of how much my writing has evolved with a growing audience who cares about trans voices, literature, poetry, love and all the messy in-betweens.

Going paid means I can keep making work that refuses to compromise to a growing media landscape that would rather trans voices silenced. You will find no mindless poetry and no viral garbage here. Instead, I will continue filling this space with — mine and guest writer’s — raw and unfiltered literary scribblings; words you can actually get lost in with your coffee or in bed, while the world’s algorithms choke on their own trash.

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P.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

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Share SISSY ANARCHY

Hey friends,

Thank you for reading SISSY ANARCHY. Over the next few months, I will officially become a paid newsletter.

I’m so happy with what has grown here and I’m really proud of how much my writing has evolved with a growing audience who cares about trans voices, literature, poetry, love and all the messy in-betweens.

Going paid means I can keep making work that refuses to compromise to a growing media landscape that would rather trans voices silenced. You will find no mindless poetry and no viral garbage here. Instead, I will continue filling this space with — mine and guest writer’s — raw and unfiltered literary scribblings; words you can actually get lost in with your coffee or in bed, while the world’s algorithms choke on their own trash.

If you join as a paid subscriber, you’ll get:

• Monthly columns and essays

• Feverish uploads of poetry and prose

• Reviews and reading recommendations

• And features from guest spotlights, highlighting new and emerging writers and artists you should know about/be reading

I’ll still send free posts now and then, but if you’ve loved being part of this, and you’re in a place to support it, I’d love to have you along.

All my love,

P.

Subscribe now

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

Share SISSY ANARCHY

Hey friends,

Thank you for reading SISSY ANARCHY. Over the next few months, I will officially become a paid newsletter.

I’m so happy with what has grown here and I’m really proud of how much my writing has evolved with a growing audience who cares about trans voices, literature, poetry, love and all the messy in-betweens.

Going paid means I can keep making work that refuses to compromise to a growing media landscape that would rather trans voices silenced. You will find no mindless poetry and no viral garbage here. Instead, I will continue filling this space with — mine and guest writer’s — raw and unfiltered literary scribblings; words you can actually get lost in with your coffee or in bed, while the world’s algorithms choke on their own trash.

If you join as a paid subscriber, you’ll get:

• Monthly columns and essays

• Feverish uploads of poetry and prose

• Reviews and reading recommendations

• And features from guest spotlights, highlighting new and emerging writers and artists you should know about/be reading

I’ll still send free posts now and then, but if you’ve loved being part of this, and you’re in a place to support it, I’d love to have you along.

All my love,

P.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

When she first called herself a mother of the community, I admired it. I believed in that kind of care; the soft, weathered kind that holds everyone, even when it’s exhausting. She had the patience of someone who had been broken open and rebuilt; she knew what it was to patch others back together. I loved her for it. Maybe that’s why her silence now feels like a verdict.

I keep replaying the last few months before she left. The small domestic frictions, the uneasy kindness. We were both trying to keep something intact but neither of us knew what that something was anymore. When I told her she should move out, I thought I was being gentle, pragmatic. She had somewhere else lined up. I thought it would be better for both of us; less tension, less confusion about who owed what kind of tenderness to whom. But maybe I said it wrong. Maybe it sounded like exile.

I’d started seeing someone then, too. A love, a quiet connection that felt like safety. I didn’t hide it, but I could feel something shift in her. She became quieter, more contained. She asked fewer questions. There was a part of me that wanted her blessing — as if friendship required sanction — and when it didn’t come, I tried to convince myself I didn’t need it. But I did. I wanted her to be happy for me, to see that this wasn’t a rejection, just a rearranging.

I wonder now if she saw it as abandonment. She had held me through so much — my insecurities, fears we both experienced in our transition, shared nights when I was terrified of the body I was becoming. She didn’t always get it right, but she was there. And perhaps in some corner of her mind, she thought I owed her a permanence I couldn’t give. That by choosing someone else, by asking for distance, I was ungrateful.

These are the small violences of care; not the great betrayals, but the subtle, unintentional ones. The moments when you draw a line to survive, and in doing so, you wound someone who thought they were safe inside your radius.

I still remember the last meal we had together before everything felt strange. We ate in near silence, the air thick with unsaid things. She looked tired. I asked if she was all right, and she said she was fine, always fine, the way people do when they’ve already begun to detach. I wanted to reach across the table, to ask her not to drift away, but I couldn’t find the words. It’s ridiculous, really; two people who’ve spent years talking about love and community, unable to articulate the simplest truth: I still need you, just differently now.

Sometimes I think the hardest part of loving anyone is realising that care isn’t symmetrical. We rarely want the same things at the same time. She needed closeness when I needed air. I needed reassurance when she was retreating. We were always half a step out of sync, circling the idea of comfort but never quite finding its centre.

I used to think care meant showing up no matter what; that if you truly loved someone, you absorbed their need until it became your own. That’s what she taught me, or what I thought she taught me. But that kind of care is a slow erasure. You start to disappear inside it. I don’t know if she ever realised how much of myself I gave up trying to keep her steady. How much of my own exhaustion I disguised as grace.

When the surgery came, I expected her to be one of a special few to hold me. She had promised she would. But she didn’t come. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I didn’t need her, that I could mother myself through it. But the truth is, I felt abandoned. It wasn’t anger; it was a dull ache, the kind that seeps in when you realise someone’s love has limits. I never asked her why she stayed away. Maybe she had her reasons. Maybe she thought she was giving me independence. Maybe she simply couldn’t bear the sight of me vulnerable again. Maybe she thought I didn’t need her.

That’s the thing about love that isn’t romantic: we never talk about the boundaries until they’re broken. We assume endlessness. We assume care will always be available, like air. But it isn’t. It runs out.

Since she left, I’ve caught myself rehearsing apologies I’ll probably never deliver. I’m sorry I made you feel unneeded. I’m sorry if my happiness looked like betrayal. I’m sorry for all the ways I tried to protect myself instead of you. But even those apologies are self-serving. They’re an attempt to make sense of something that may not have a single cause. Maybe she just changed. Maybe I did. Maybe this is what growth looks like: not a rupture, but a slow drifting until the other person becomes a story you tell yourself about kindness and its expiry.

I think of Didion often when I try to explain it; her way of observing loss without sentimentality, the refusal to tidy grief. She would have seen the whole thing as inevitable, the natural unravelling of two people who believed in care as ideology rather than practice. And yet, there’s a part of me that still wants to believe it could have been different.

Sometimes I imagine bumping into her at a market, a café, somewhere neutral. We’d talk politely, maybe even laugh. I’d tell her she looks well. She’d say she’s been meaning to reach out. There’d be a flicker of the old warmth, and for a moment, I’d believe we could start again. But I know we wouldn’t. There are distances you don’t come back from.

I’ve stopped calling her a sister. I doubt how the word “mother” clings to her in the community. I don’t think she failed at it; I think I misunderstood what it meant. Motherhood — at least the way she embodied it — was about nurturing the audience, not the individual. It wasn’t personal, it was aspirational. Maybe that’s on me.

To live sometimes means stepping back from the people you love, even when it feels like betrayal. It means letting go of the ones who shaped you, not because you stopped caring, but because you finally learned how to.

I don’t think she’ll ever know how much of her still lives in me. The cadence of her voice when she comforted people, the way she laughed when she was finally tired enough to stop performing. Those small details have embedded themselves in my body. Care is like that; it leaves residue even after it’s gone.

If she ever reads this, I hope she understands that it isn’t an accusation. It’s a record of my own confusion. A way to make sense of the distance between loving someone and being able to keep them. I don’t blame her for leaving. I don’t blame myself for asking her to. Sometimes two kinds of care can’t coexist.

I suppose this is what Didion meant by “the ordinary instant” — that moment when everything shifts quietly, and by the time you notice, it’s already over. You carry on. You make new rituals, find new tenderness. But every now and then, the ache returns; not sharp, not punishing, just a low hum of what was once possible.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe loving someone, even imperfectly, is its own form of endurance. I cared for her as best I could. I hope she knows that.

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

There are roses in a turquoise vase across from me on the floor, opposite side of the bed. Six of them, red, thorns still intact, water already turning cloudy with that faint green rot smell of cut stems gasping. The vase is painted with cherry blossoms, willow trees, figures swirling in celebratory dance, the kind of image that feels centuries old and too alive all at once. The bed is a mattress directly on the ground, no frame, no elevation, just pressed into the floor of a tiny flat. I am in Paris. I am eight days post facial feminisation surgery and I feel like the size of a house, a cathedral swelling in slow motion.

My face is not a face right now, it is a landscape of swelling and stitches. Flesh stretched over bone that has been broken, sanded, rebuilt. I dream of drills, the metallic whine lodged in the deepest part of my skull. I wake tasting blood, tongue swollen, lips cracked, nose aching. The surgeons’ hands are ghosts inside my head, prising me open, hammering, shaving, digging. I can feel them still, like a phantom occupation. Every blink feels mechanised, eyelids straining over swollen ridges, pupils floating in a balloon of flesh.

Outside this flat Paris parades itself as if mocking me, vibrantly alive and noisy – teenagers laughing with espressos in their fists, tiny dogs in neckerchiefs trotting across cobblestones. Café chairs all turned outward, rows of eyes waiting, daring me to walk past. I wrap bandages around my nose—to the pharmacy, a cafe, a little park for fresh air—wear Saint Laurent glasses that minimises my swelling, and still people stare. A man mutters something sharp as I pass, spit flying. I keep walking, turning to look at him. I hear him, Mademoiselle, suce ma bite. My face won’t let me answer back. My face is still an unassembled mask.

Inside, survival is sleep; spoons bent at their spines from pressing too hard into soup; yoghurt cups piling in the bin. Painkillers chalking my tongue every six hours, rattling through my body like dice. I piss opium, I piss out blood, piss out my old self in slow trickles. Each morning is a funeral. Each morning is a birth. I imagine the air smells faintly of disinfectant, stale cigarettes on the sheets, and of my own sweat.

On the surgery bed, paper gown against my skin, lights too bright, I looked up at the doctor and asked him, “What is it going to be like when I wake up?” He stood above me, hands surprisingly gentle, separating strands of my hair, braiding them so they would not tangle while he worked on my skull. He said, “This is a pause, not a sleep. You will wake up thinking about what you go down with. So, let’s spend time thinking about the things you love as I prepare your hair.” And so I told him. His hands weaving my hair, his cheeks crinkling into a smile as I spoke my odes. He brushed a few tears from my face, cupped it and said, “You’re already doing so well, you’re one of the brave ones,” and I went under thinking not of scalpels or bone dust, but of everything that tethered me here.

*

There is someone here with me. A lover. His body folded against mine in this wreckage. He smokes cigarettes on the sill and flicks ash into the Paris air. He kisses my forehead when I shake awake at 4am. He places a hand across the swelling of my stitched-together-head as if it were the most natural place to rest, as if I am not grotesque, not fragile, not broken. He does not flinch. He looks at me like I am not in ruins.

I hadn’t expected this. I thought I’d be alone here – my podcasts, my self-pity, the silent companionship of pain. But there is something holy about his presence, something violent about his tenderness. I didn’t know love could thicken the air like this, drown out the antiseptic, make even the bruises tolerable.

But holding it together has its limits.

The night I broke I had been pretending all week: answering with more strength than I had, smiling crooked through the intolerable throbbing of my skull. I thought I was proving something, that I was tougher than the pain. But then it split. My body cracked in half. I started sobbing, ugly and wet, convulsing like an animal. My face, already swollen, ballooned further with each breath. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t stop.

He didn’t panic. He led me into the bathroom, tile cold under bare feet, light unkind and merciless. The mirror above the sink was a weapon I couldn’t bear to look into. I sat on the edge of the shower shaking, snot and tears spilling freely. He turned on the tap, filled his hands with water, and let it run through my hair. Slow. Gentle. His fingers combing through tangles, brushing over stitches as I cried harder and harder. Salt water from my face mixing with tap water, dripping into one, my whole body flooding itself out.

I thought I’d dissolve. I thought I’d vanish into that bathroom, my body collapsing under the weight of grief, of the realisation that surgery doesn’t save you from yourself. I thought he would recoil. But he didn’t. He kept washing me, kept untangling strands, kept whispering soft syllables that didn’t need meaning. Just vibration. Just his presence holding me tethered to this world.

That was the moment I realised survival was not solitary. It was in his hands as much as mine. My body, swollen and stitched, was still a body he wanted to touch, to soothe, to wash. That tenderness was more violent than any surgery. That tenderness shattered me.

*

I grieve the old face. She comes to me in dreams, walking across bridges at night with hollow eyes. Sometimes she flashes in the mirror, a split-second ghost staring back at me. She hates me. She mourns me. She is proud of me. All of it at once. She whispers that I betrayed her. She whispers that she carried me here. Both are true.

The aftermath is not transcendence. It is boredom, it is pain, bandages, bruises. It is hair washed while crying. It is roses rotting in a turquoise vase, petals curling inward, water stinking faintly sweet. It is survival reduced to tasks: eat, rinse stitches, change gauze, medicate, sleep.

And still. The aftermath is a lover pressing against me in bed, reminding me I am not a corpse. The aftermath is his yes spoken again and again in presence, in touch, in refusal to leave. The aftermath is roses even as they rot. The aftermath is being loved while undone.

*

I look at Paris and it doesn’t matter. The museums, the boulevards, the postcard clichés. I don’t want any of it. What I have is this flat, this bed, these dying roses, my lover watching me breathe. My world is narrowed to these square metres and this one body, swollen and stitched, refusing to stop healing. The city doesn’t notice me and I don’t fucking care.

Surgery doesn’t save you. It doesn’t deliver a finished face to wear like armour. It doesn’t end dysphoria, doesn’t end grief, doesn’t crown you queen of anything. It gives you new angles, yes, a new starting point maybe. But salvation is not in the surgeon’s scalpel. Salvation is in the moment someone stays. In the moment someone kneels in a bathroom and washes your hair while you collapse. In the moment someone says you are still you, even when you are swollen and broken and haunted by ghosts.

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

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[Eyes closed]. Breath detonates inside me. A body is always gamble, always ransom note, always some trembling skin held hostage by somebody else’s gaze. Writing risk makes me think of stakes hammered through ribs, not symbolic, not metaphorical, but real puncture, real hazard. What if my body is only scaffolding for somebody else’s monument, what if every touch is exposure, what if love is the most corrosive element in the room – burning, unstamped, smuggled inside my chest. There should be hazard tape around my ribs. There should be gloves. But there are no gloves, only nerve endings. I’ve got your breath inside me like smoke that refuses to dissipate.

Transdermal application: needle, gel, molecule tunnelling under dermis. Reverence in the pause before it absorbs. Alone. I pull intimacy apart like fabric splitting at the seam. Neighbours hammer and drill their illusions next door, and I fabricate mine from chemicals, from flesh, from sentences that throb. Tools stacked in drawers like silent conspirators. Parcels stamped with names that belong to ghosts. Birth dates belonging to strangers who still breathe through me. I stand between mirrors that make fugitives of my reflection. Fugitive because the image never holds. Fugitive because completion is a mirage. A person will call themselves whole unless transitioning. Wholeness is an alibi. I don’t have that alibi. I live in the never-ending tense of alteration. Change as oxygen. Mutation as pulse.

When does one become transitioned? Trick question. Never, always, both. The word is a chokehold. A finish line painted over quicksand. I am only unfinishedness, uncompleted construction site, scaffolding shaking in wind. And then you. You arrive like breach charge. A detonation that rearranges the rubble into shelter.

We walk together and I slip into the hallucination of your stride: your worn boots, your knotted hair unravelling in the wind, your mouth with its flawed geometry already rewriting scripture. Illusion of permanence cracks the moment my fingers slide into the open chamber of your chest. Not illusion, not hypothesis, but impact. A crash site. We lock.

I thread my fingers through your sternum. Into your muscle, into your shadow, into everything you are holding. The word risk stops being abstract and instead becomes skin. Risk is the electricity running across my knuckles when I reach for you, it is the scar that glows after you pull away. Risk is not a lesson; it is a wound. Risk demands attempt. To risk is to throw the body forward knowing it may never return intact. To risk is to agree to be remade.

Fear is stitched into the attempt. Not the kind of fear you name easily, but the subterranean kind, asbestos in the marrow, impossible to exorcise. We don’t know our bodies enough to know where fear even nests. I touch your shoulder and my arm vanishes into you as though our bodies were two broken halves of a sculpture left in a junkyard, but somehow when we meet the fracture closes.

Everyone paints risk dark. Hazard warnings. Dismay. Dread. Why not paint risk ultraviolet, phosphorescent, the colour that burns inside the retina long after the flash. Risk as bloom. Risk as soil wet enough to raise something other than rot. They said no risk, no reward, but I say: no you, no world. Dating was always negotiation of risk – who gives, who takes, who crumbles. With you there was no arithmetic. I wanted to risk obliteration. I wanted to risk being erased by the force of being seen. I wanted to risk becoming unrecognisable, because in your sight unrecognisable was the only kind of beauty that mattered.

Rejection was always parasite, gnawing. Every word I spoke carried its shadow. The bar soundtrack flayed me open, every beat an incision, every bass note a knife in cartilage. But then you appeared. And all of that machinery broke down. Not welcome but seizure. Not hospitality but raw takeover. Not an invitation but possession. You overflowed the frame. You arrived without borders.

We don’t talk; we write. That’s what you told me, traced into my phone like secret code. Writing as safer than air. Writing doesn’t stumble, doesn’t betray itself in stammer. Writing means fragments can live, even broken. Writing means I can hand you shards of ribcage and you will know instinctively how to assemble them into cathedral. You wrote me into existence. I wrote you into ignition.

Love with you is not romantic. It isn’t decorated. It is raw terrain seized by insurgents. Fierce, feral, incandescent. Love with you rips sheetrock off the walls, wires buzzing exposed, foundations quivering. This is not candlelight; this is blackout poetry scrawled in blood across condemned buildings. Desire as survival, tenderness as weapon, devotion as manifesto. If they bury us, it will be with our mouths pressed together, a fossilised kiss in the ruins of empire.

Sole once tried to tether me. Tu vas créer tout un son d’elle qui ne correspondra jamais à la réalité. Their words failed because you are not reducible. You are not chartable. You are seismic fault tearing atlases in two. Reality is small. You are enormous. You are what reality could have been had it chosen tenderness instead of control.

Risk is lexicon, expanding daily. My hand glancing against yours in public like a flare. Eyes crawling over us like cockroaches. Your laughter flaring in a room that wanted silence. My body sculpting itself unconsciously toward the curvature of yours. Risk as devotion, not deterrent. Risk as currency I spend until there is nothing left, gladly.

Once you asked me my subject. I should have said: you, you, always you. Instead I camouflaged the truth in sterile vocabulary: exile, speculation, surplus. As though I wasn’t burning to press my mouth against the corner of your jaw until it rewrote history. Now I know: the subject is not exile, the subject is home, the subject is the way your shoulder blazes against mine when we walk, the subject is my blood galloping each time you appear. The subject is community grown in derelict factories, fungi insurgencies sprouting through cement, spores rewriting infrastructure the way our love rewrites the body. The subject is your body altering mine, mine responding, both of us refusing to be private property. Love as shared resource, love as common ground.

Sometimes I imagine us projected on broken walls, a film reel eating itself, each frame stuttering between risk and revelation. But reality is not neutral. Reality is graffiti written in muscle fibre, reality is vandalised tenderness. Reality is us refusing silence. Reality is us amplifying each other until no one can ignore the sound.

I whisper it to the glasses sweating on the bar, to the spectral crowd that never leaves: I have found my one true love in the whole world. They grin like accomplices. They already knew.

The risk is not rejection. The risk is not hazard. The risk is not dismay. The risk is that you have altered my trajectory beyond repair. The risk is that without you, the body collapses into archive, unlit. The risk is that I cannot ever again pretend to be incomplete. You make me dangerous to the idea of solitude. You make me volatile to the myth of safety. The risk is that love has carved itself permanent into the marrow.

I take it. I take all of it.

[Eyes closed]. Breath contracts into syllables of your name, repeating like a pulse that won’t stop banging on the door of my chest. I inhale and it is you.

Everything before you was rehearsal footage, discarded takes, background noise. You are the ferocity that makes me articulate. You are the architecture that emerges from the wreckage. You are the incantation etched into scar tissue. You are the one for whom I would hazard body, exile, memory, myth. You are not risk alone, you are the explosion that rewrites the definition. You are not bloom alone, you are eruption. You are the only subject that can still rearrange the world.

I am, I am, I am. And in you I am without border.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE for Ève-Gabriel Chabanon’s exhibition “THIS CHAPTER BEGINS TWICE” at KRONE COURONNE.

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

& by mispronunciation

& by silence, too

it knows me in the shadow of buildings where my mouth won’t open

it knows me in the blur of traffic /

in the grocery aisle /

in the pause before I reach for something & change my mind

I swear the sky leans

like it’s tipping its blue shoulder toward me

small adjustment, minor shift,

but enough to catch me when I slip on my own thinking

when the ground decides to tremble inside my chest

& I lose the sentence I was holding—

yes, even then

the world writes my name in dust

on the glass of bus windows,

on receipts crumpled in pockets,

on the backs of strangers’ hands I’ll never touch

sometimes I stumble / sometimes I crash

like a dropped glass full of echoes

but the world is quick with its broom

gathers me up,

shards & all,

& sets me back on some shelf

not quite where I was, but near enough

the world holds me close

like a parent, like a rumor,

like a city that refuses to forget its own ruins

& I am folded into that refusal,

this archive of falling / of almost / of not quite yet—

look:

the street tilts to catch my step

the tree bends further into the wind so my path is clear

a bench waits with its empty lap

as if it had always been mine

my name moves through the world without me

it drifts on lips I’ll never hear

it scribbles itself in margins,

it tattoos itself on the underside of clouds

& when I stumble

I stumble into it

my name catching me,

a net woven from every time I’ve been called

or almost called

or wanted to be called

still, I test it—

I fall harder,

I lean heavier,

I drag my feet in deliberate resistance—

& still, the ground holds

still, the world pulls its fabric tight around me

like a blanket I didn’t ask for but need,

always need,

especially in the cold unlit hours

when the only thing that feels true

is how easily I could disappear

but I don’t—

I am known here

the world knows me

it shifts & shifts again

a choreography I never rehearsed

& it is imperfect, awkward, a little too loud—

but it’s mine

& when I stumble—

(again, again, always again)

the world folds over me,

not to erase, not to hide,

but to carry—

my body against its endless shoulder,

my name pressed into its unsteady heart.

there is a tremor that never leaves my hands

a pulse too fast for rest

streets glitter with broken glass & fast food wrappers

& I walk through them as if through the ribs of some animal

that died trying to house me

every corner holds a fragment of my voice

dropped, torn, carried in a gust between buses

I almost hear it, almost reclaim it

but it slides away like oil on rainwater

language turning slippery in my mouth

I think of the bodies that came before mine

their names rubbed out by paper masks, by syringes, by law

their hunger lingering in alleyways

their laughter still sticky on the walls of bars long demolished

I think of how the world bent for them, too,

even when no one noticed—

the way a bed sheet softened beneath fever

the way a tree bent its shade over their heads

the way the ground refused to let them vanish all at once

I fall into that inheritance

a tenderness that is not soft but stubborn

a kind of gravity with teeth

sometimes the world holds me like smoke

like I might vanish if it loosens its grip

sometimes it crushes me flat against its surface

until I am only outline, only stain

sometimes it sings through my bones

a note too deep for anyone else to hear

the holding is not always kind

kerbstones mark my knees purple

railings cut my palms open

but I am still caught

the blood becomes proof

that my weight is real

that my skin is still a map the world reads

foxes scream outside the window at 3am

the shriek scratches through my sleep

bin bags scatter down the road, burst,

spill entrails of packaging & bones

somehow it feels like devotion

this ordinary wreckage

a reminder of how even ruins insist on presence

I wake, drag myself to the mirror,

see a face swollen with tiredness

but still here

still written into the surface of things

my name smudged across the glass

my mouth shaping a sound I cannot quite finish

rage runs through me like an artery

burning & endless

I want to smash the billboards,

peel the adverts off bus stops with my teeth

I want to claw the indifference out of strangers’ eyes

until they see me glowing with all my ruin

until they choke on the fire in my throat

but tenderness runs beside it,

a twin I cannot abandon

it slips bread into my hands,

lifts my hair away from my wet face,

writes small poems on scraps of receipt paper

& tucks them into my coat pockets

so I’ll find them when I need them most

the city rearranges itself around me

a bench waiting where I need it,

a door swinging open when I thought it locked,

a stranger moving aside at the exact moment my knees give way

these are not miracles, not accidents

but the dance of being known

the earth shifting its spine to absorb my weight

I want to believe this is love

but love is too simple a word

this is more like a conspiracy,

a pact between matter & breath

that I am not to be erased

not yet, not here

so I fall again, & again

into arms that are concrete & air & memory

into the persistence of pavements & dust & bus windows

into the archive of my own name

scattered but unbroken

I am held

not safely, not gently

but undeniably

I am carried in the machinery of survival

& when I close my eyes

I feel the world pressing my name

over & over

into its restless skin.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

Subscribe now

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy