I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019)

★★★★★

A collection of essays about fracture, harm, and healing in queer and trans community.

I bumped this title up on my list after coming across the author’s thoughtful article about disposability culture in Everyday Feminism, and I’m glad I did, because I needed this. Thom’s writing style is warm and accessible, inviting the reader in even as Thom shares about incredibly vulnerable experiences. I teared up within the first few pages, where she describes a set of terrifying crises she experienced at twenty-five, then goes on to say:

All around me, the people I loved were also in crisis—psychological, financial, medical, interpersonal. When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, and activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. Among trans women, a life expectancy of thirty-five is the norm.

I lost my faith in community. I lost hope—in social justice, in revolution, in the world.

At time of reading, I was coming off the tail end of my own crisis: I had recently joined a collective of leftist housing activists, and had been through a set of exhausting experiences where I’d learned that—even in as radical a community as this—deep hurts still happen, and healing can seem impossibly far away. Hearing my experience reflected in Thom’s words touched me deeply.