Hello, friend!

It's April! Let's amplify some spring trans joy!

Ok, first I'll admit - things are scary out there. I had my own little freakout this week reading Erin in the Morning (bless her reporting). But you know what? They want us to be scared and unable to cope. They want us to get small, take up less space, and hope to be left alone.

In the Pacific Northwest, we have a protocol for what to do when you encounter a cougar (yes, a cougar - these woods are wild). You don't run away or cower. Instead, you get BIG. You spread your limbs and wave your jacket or water bottle in the air, taking up as much space as possible so the animal knows not to mess with you.

Inside our panicked amygdalas, we might feel small, but collectively, we are big, especially when we remember that we can breathe and expand into our rightful, gorgeous places in this world.

They don't get to have us.

As you'll see from this month's roundup, there is far more going on in our beautiful trans worlds than the media eye can perceive.

Even this newsletter is just a glimpse. For every submission I get here, I see literally hundreds more each month in my online communities, nested in circles where people feel safe to share their major news and little joys.

Thank you for being here, for trusting me to take up space alongside you. And please send some big love to our contributors, who are brave enough to share their hearts with all of us.

With care and solidarity,

Jin (he/him)

Community Joy!

"Our trans and nonbinary choir's usual rehearsals got cancelled this week due to weather, so some of us met up at a choir member's place in order to still feel the joy and connection with one another. The night ended with several of us experiencing an overwhelming amount of gratitude for this sense of belonging and community with one another. It was absolutely beautiful. The night felt full of laughter and joy and we all needed that so so much. I walked away from it with a very full heart."

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“I forgot I was wearing my packer and then we went to the bathroom at M– Beach and it fell out into a puddle and I shrieked manfully and then we walked around B– Park while I had a penis in my pocket and I couldn’t go on the zipline because imagine if my penis fell out onto the ground below what if it hit a dog or a small child I would have been a murderer and now we are back in the car trying to get to the poetry reading that was poorly advertised and my penis is a dashboard toy.”

- Sent by text message

(I swear this person should write the transmasc Nevada - who's with me?)

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"Played the cooperative storytelling game For The Queen with some queer friends, and it was super gay, so many people were in love with the queen."

(For anyone curious - there are some free variants of For The Queen on itch.io!)

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"I am almost finished with my resource guide! We are 2 Enbies with a plan to make resources more accessible and easier to navigate. We have a linktree and will be posting all over the place in our area.

Our next goal is community building with various skill shares and more.

This has been a labor of love and sorely needed.

I am just really proud of our project."

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"The flyer was joyful in and of itself. All bright blues and pinks, swirling, intertwining, translucent. TRANS LIVES IN 2025 it proclaimed. Two hours of lawyers and a doctor in the trans community sharing ways to navigate these fraught times, preceded by social time with snacks, on a Sunday afternoon.

I headed over early, as I’d never been to the hosting organization before. It impressed me so much, I signed up to be a member on the spot. Sitting in the room full of trans people of every age, gender expression, size, shape, and color, I looked around and marveled at how comforting it felt. How safe.

Twice during the presentation, I teared up - once while hearing about all the laws my state has passed to protect us from harm, and once while hearing all the ways my state has challenged the federal government in its aggressive actions to harm us. It seems like such a simple thing, to be allowed to exist. To be considered, to be protected. Sadly, it’s not at all simple these days.

But, when it happens, it invokes extreme joy! It’s exquisite!! I’m very grateful I got to immerse in that, even if only for a couple of hours. It’s important."

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contributor note: the following poem relates to trans joy in that it's about queer kinship (and the eventual loss of that)

let this undo you
after e.v. de cleyre’s “the woods are going to close.”

before time, his synaesthetic glow was unbearable.
let this radicalize you, i told him, before i closed the computer and wondered why the world shone with what could have been.
before that, i introduced him to friends as my favorite abyss and he introduced me as his loose acquaintance.
before that, i tried to tell him i had feelings, but it just came out in declamations.
before that, i found it a little concerning that most poetry reminded me of him, given the typically problematic relationships that most poetry explores.
before that, i spent a summer waiting for him.
before that, i called him my muse, but not in a good way, exactly.
before that, i took a thousand online assessments about codependency while listening to his mixtape, fully aware of the contradictions.
before that, that he told me he had a protagonist complex, and in retrospect that was some kind of warning. but that day it felt endearing.
before that, he asked me to educate him, and so i sent him a faded copy of queer ultraviolence and hoped he wouldn’t judge me too harshly.

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"capitalism cannot control my thoughts or feelings. i am free to love and experience the world."

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...Amen to all that. If you're feeling inspired, the contributor form for May is open for your joy experiences and big feelings!

Monthly Trans-Its ✨

Hey, queers! It’s me, Feebz (he/ze/zem/zir), your friendly newsletter astrologer back with your Sun and Moon transits for the month. It is a frenetic, active time of transits, but full of lots of potential.

☀️ April 19th: The Sun ingresses into Taurus. The focus for the next 30 days will be on deepening your efforts with the earth, creativity, and long-term projects. Where Aries is about beginnings, Taurus is about finding stability. However, don’t be surprised if there’s some level of challenge to that in this period. Right before this solar ingress, Mars returned to Leo, the Sun’s own sign. This puts the two at a very close square aspect, so things may get stressful, even aggressive for a little while. It may start to calm down and you’ll find your way around the end of the month. Expect to get a lot done and feel a little burnt out while doing it. Also: watch your temper, bud, especially if you have Leo placements!

🌙 April 27th: New Moon in Taurus. I’m anticipating this one to be very nice. Not only is the Moon in her sign of exaltation, she and the Sun are being ruled by Venus who is also in her sign of exaltation. Plant seeds around this time, maybe literally. If you adopt a new plant—or half a dozen, nobody’s judging—I anticipate that it will thrive! In the meantime, find your comforts and revel in what nourishes you. Because this New Moon is so Venus-centric, it’s also great for your relationships. If you find yourself flirting with someone new around this time, feel free to go all-in, especially if you’re looking for something serious.

🌕 May 12th: Full Moon in Scorpio. The Moon is considered in her fall in Scorpio, usually translating to heightened psychic sensitivity, yet she has extra power at the Full phase. Based on how she and the Sun are conferring with Saturn in Pisces—the Moon via trine and the Sun via sextile, both “easier” aspects—you’ll be digging into how to use your resources to face emotional difficulties that have been building for some time. These difficulties may be around boundaries with others, although resolution should be relatively straightforward given it’s a path you have been on since March 2023. While you do need to live in a society, stand firm with your values and advocate for yourself.

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Amplify This! Joyful Projects & Resources

Every month, we’ll amplify some wonderful creations and resources made by our talented community. All graphics and words shared with permission.

This month, we're blessed with an abundance of trans joy art! Starting with this stunning typography graphic by @tigerstooth, which took my breath away when I first saw it:

The artist says:

transness lives on, and trans joy lives on, because trans people continue to choose it every single day, simply by virtue of living. there is something electrifying about trans joy - it's wild, contagious, and immutable. it says "i'm here. can't you see me? i'm here!"

this piece is about that joy. an undercurrent of trans existence, sparked by many things; connection and community, expression, physical changes, an overall embrace of oneself, to name a few. our collective joy burns bright despite uncertainty and fear, despite the threats and fire it comes under, because it is far too strong a force to be grounded by such things.

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Next, we have this cheeky & radical TDOV piece created by @lavenderplex.bsky.social that gets to the heart of why normalizing trans joy is so important for the world!

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Now for a project that literally puts trans joy on the map...

This amazing project's creator shares:

Mapping Trans Joy is a trans-run, joy-as-resistance project to uplift narratives of joy in trans and gender nonconforming communities. We started in Louisiana in 2022, as local anti-trans bills were on the rise, and we’ve since become a global project. Our core feature is a crowdsourced map that features short stories of joy. Starting 2024, we’ve also been traveling across the US Southeast to promote and document trans and queer joy.

For us, joy is resistance because it’s life affirming at a time that so much of transness is demonized. Trans stories, in so far as they’ve existed at all, have long focused on struggle and sadness, resource-lack and despair. We acknowledge these can be element of a trans existence, but are not the full story. The narratives of joy that we collect resist these one-dimensional representation of transness.

MTJ grew out of the (now-sunsetted) Louisiana Trans Oral History Project and Last Call Oral History, and from other documentation projects, such as Documenting Resistance (and the related podcast series). Those of us working in these projects kept seeing Joy show up as a theme in all our interviews no matter the subject — Joy of community, Joy of chosen family, Joy of authenticity. We wanted to find a way to center these narratives of joy outside of longer-form oral histories. At the same time, anti-trans legislation really started to increase in Louisiana and elsewhere. We knew that anti-transness tends to have an underlying assumption that trans identities are new, are urban, and primarily are a “young person” thing. We thought the best way to resist that assumption was to geographically plot joy narratives so that we could see they come from rural as well as urban locations, from elders and those of us in middle age as well as from “young people”.

Follow Mapping Trans Joy on BlueSky!

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Last but not least, we have a gorgeous art series created by @ennayelsel, who says: "I am a disabled artist, advocate, and proud parent to a wonderfully creative trans child. Much of our time is spent making art and music together. Though my physical capacity is limited, my heart is full of drive to support the trans community however I can. Through my art, I hope to plant small seeds of change, care, and joy, especially during these difficult times."

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Upcoming events & cool things to check out!

• From April 24-26, catch the Black Trans Short Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Not in NC? Check out Comfrey Films's amazing cultural organizing work.
• The Joy Who Lived comedy & theatre festival has started, and is going through April 27th, in LA and online. Get your tickets here!
• Bells Larsen, a Canadian musician who had to cancel his U.S. tour due to visa bullsh*t, is dropping his unapologetically trans album on April 25th! Let's show our support <3
• ACLU's Freedom to Be monument featuring a trans joy quilt made by our community will be unveiled in D.C. in May!
• Check out the first global database of verified resources for LGBTQ+ folks! "InReach uplifts trans joy + connects our diverse community to safe, affirming support. ✨ For every trans person seeking to live freely."

Call for Submissions & Support

Do you have a piece of trans joy to share with us?? You can reply to this email with your submission for the next issue. Just check out the Contributor Guidelines first!

We’re also looking for trans projects and resources to amplify. If you have a lead that you think the ATJ community should know about, please reply to this email.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please please please 1) drag and drop this email to your Primary inbox tab if it's not already in there, and 2) support us by forwarding this email to someone you think would love to see it in their inbox!

(Are you the person someone forwarded this to? Get your very own free subscription to Amplifying Trans Joy!)

You can also follow us on Bluesky where we share snippets of trans joy in between newsletters.

Thanks for supporting and reading!!!

I’ll leave you with this…

Here's to more Socratic gender dialogue 😄

And a small cougar, very frightening:

Remember that our joy matters. A lot.

Till next time - stay nourished, my friends!