Here are some events I’m doing for Bookstore Romance Day:

History is Queer: Bookstore Romance Day Online Panel
August 15 @ 12 noon EST
Virtual

Signing at Always Here Books
August 15 @ 2PM PST
Portland, OR

Bookstore Romance Day with Grand Gesture Books
Main Character Energy: BIPOC & Queer Authors to the Front
August 15 @ 5PM PST
Portland, OR

Hello, darlings. This month, I’d like to talk about Trans Representation (or Lack Thereof).

Back in July, GLAAD released their annual study of queer representation in Hollywood and the results were disheartening: zero trans characters appeared in films released by major studios in 2025. There were declines across the board from the previous year for all other kinds of queer representation, too. Plenty of queer outlets have been leading with the headline that this spells a death knell for mainstream trans characters.

But is it? In case you’re curious, which I was, I dove into the last few years of GLAAD reports. In 2025, as I said, GLAAD counted 7 nonbinary (not explicitly trans) characters along with 0 explicitly trans characters. In 2024, the numbers still weren’t great, with 3 trans and 4 nonbinary characters tallied. In 2023, there were only 2 explicitly transgender characters and 8 nonbinary characters. The best year for queer rep according to GLAAD was 2022 which saw increases across the board, with 17 trans characters and 10 nonbinary characters. Double digits, wow. (This is sarcasm.)

2021 saw a lot of increases in other areas, but only one transgender character and no nonbinary characters in the lot. (Also worth noting 2021 was a very light release year due to COVID. That skews the results. Conversely, I suspect the bump in 2022 was from a lot of films being released after being held back.)

We can gather from this that mainstream representation for trans and nonbinary characters in Hollywood films has never been robust, to put it mildly. It’s been pretty much shit, with the overwhelming majority of these characters having little screen time. But, as any queer person over the age of 35 will probably tell you, tracking this stuff isn’t necessarily about shaming Hollywood into doing better (though wouldn’t it be nice if shame still worked sometimes?), it’s about keeping tabs on the rises and ebbs of homophobia and transphobia. As GLAAD’s recent report states, despite mainstream movies stepping back from queerness, there’s plenty of evidence that shows queer-inclusive media outperforms non-inclusive projects by a fair margin. In other words, mainstream movies with queer rep are reliably profitable.

So why would Hollywood leave that kind of money on the table? The same reason it’s a struggle to get queer books traditionally published right now: even the staunchest capitalists will cheerfully take a financial loss if it means holding onto power, and holding onto power under fascism is only possible via cowardice and compliance. Ask anyone who’s tried to form a union and watched their company burn itself to the ground rather than negotiate.

Still, in light of continued censorship of queer stories, a big fat zero in the trans character category is concerning. It speaks to the fact that even the modest gains seem to be slipping away from us. So what do we do when the canary in the coalmine is telling us that trans characters are being pushed out of mainstream film like actual trans people are being pushed out of public life? What’s the answer?

1) Let’s Not Panic.

Hollywood was never going to give you a great trans movie. That’s not what it’s built to do. Its purpose is to sell popcorn to a mass audience for a 2.5 hour summer thrill ride about a character that’s already starred in a dozen movies over many decades. (Hey, I love Spidey but let’s be so real.) It’s a barometer for the zeitgeist, but it’s not the only game in town. Box office sales continue to sag far below pre-2020 numbers, so how relevant are mainstream movies anyway? Yes, this is sour grapes. But it’s also important to remember that even the divine right of kings, etc.

This is not to say mainstream movies with a trans character, however fleeting and thin that character might be, aren’t a net good. For many viewers, mainstream representation is their first introduction to transgender people. Any exposure to queerness is better than the alternative, erasure. If you grew up in the ‘90s like I did, you saw firsthand the sea change in public perception from “gay people are diseased and dangerous” to “I like those funny white gays on Will & Grace.” While I don’t think Will & Grace can be credited with changing the hearts and minds of American audiences single-handedly, it was emblematic of changing attitudes. Art is a mirror, and in the mainstream, that mirror is concerned with reflections that appeal to the broadest possible market. And at the low, low numbers of trans and nonbinary rep Hollywood delivers even in a “good” year, maybe plus or minus a handful of handful of characters don’t actually make a meaningful difference in the lives of trans people.

To paraphrase the great poet H. Melt, I don’t want a trans blockbuster; I want to see trans actors on the screen saying lines written by trans people, in costumes designed by trans people, with trans editors in the cutting room and trans people behind each camera. Looking to major Hollywood studios for trans movies is like going to a car dealership to buy a bicycle.

2) Revisit Our History to Envision Our Future.

This is something I need to get better at doing: seeking out material records of our trans past so I can more clearly see how our culture will survive into the future. Even typing that out now, “our culture,” makes me feel like a poser. I was in my late 30s when I started to transition; what right do I have to a history I have been separated from for most of my life? I wasn’t there in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when trans men were negotiating the harrowing frontiers of medical care. I wasn’t in attendance at the Harlem ballrooms. I didn’t grow up with this embedded in me, so how can I claim it?

Well, for starters, I can stop feeling sorry for myself. Then I can actually do the work of learning more about where we came from. I’m excited to see what the NYC Trans Archives will have on offer when they open physically, and in the meantime there’s a lot of things for me to dig into. August is for watching documentaries in my household, so I’ll be checking out Casa Susanna from my library.

If you haven’t signed up for access to the Queer Liberation Library on Libby/Overdrive, do yourself a favor and get that done. They have a ton of great resources, including curated lists for queer history titles, including Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.

Cis people should be seeking out these sorts of things just as much, if not more, than trans people. Studies shows that the majority of Americans think trans people deserve equal rights, but then get muddy and divided when it comes to opposing anti-trans policies. To me, this says cis people are increasingly vulnerable to anti-trans rhetoric. If you’re cis and find yourself nodding along when people say there’s no place for trans girls in sports, or that trans people shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom they want to use, or that trans kids shouldn’t get gender affirming medical care, you’ve been fucking duped. You’re drinking from a fire hose of “reporting” by exclusively cis voices who never seem to bother consulting actual trans people about policies that affect trans people. The least you can do is seek out those voices before you align yourself with policies designed to erase us.

Despite our losses, trans people as a whole will never go away. I think that’s important to remember as we’re scrubbed from the mainstream, from bathrooms, from sports, from classrooms.

3) Find Us Where We’re Thriving.

If you like trans characters, have I got news for you. Creators are somehow, despite the odds, still getting their transgender art out into the world. In my opinion, we’re enjoying a renaissance of trans indie film. I’m looking forward to the release of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a nostalgia-fueled horror flick from the same writer/director as I Saw the TV Glow. And if you haven’t seen The People’s Joker yet, get thee a view.

Last month I had the pleasure of seeing Cats: The Jellicle Ball before it closed its Broadway run. Broadway is fairly mainstream, or as mainstream as live performance gets, I suppose, and it was beautiful to sit in a theater full of (surprisingly young, for Broadway) people going absolutely buck wild for what is essentially Black and brown trans/gnc culture. There are live performances by queer and trans artists all over the country, in every corner of every state, even the square ones. Get yourself to one if you can. There is nothing else like theater. (I’ll never forget my third time seeing Hadestown, when I watched André De Shields do his closing monologue while handing a handkerchief to someone sobbing in the front row. That’s fucking theater, baby. That’s the stuff.)

And lest we forget one of the great bastions of trans art: books exist. Despite the difficulties in getting tradpub to buy and support trans books, or payment processors fucking with self-pubbed authors, or Amazon being Amazon and making everyone’s lives more miserable, or Large Language Models stealing our work and giving us nothing but trouble in return, or social media nuking attempts to reach a trans audience…there are STILL amazing books with trans and nonbinary characters out there for you to enjoy. I want to rec Mason Deaver’s Ship Happens, which comes out this month. It’s a very funny and fun romcom about exes getting back together on a cruise. It’s also, as far as I can tell, the first tradpub adult m/m contemporary romance that’s T4T, and possibly only the second tradpub T4T adult contemporary romance after my own Chef’s Choice, which came out in 2023. Progress is always slow in tradpub, but we have to count even the tiny gains.

The indie & self-pub space is, of course, not so slow or stingy when it comes to trans books. I’m a huge fan of Felicia Davin’s works and am always trying to cram more indie books with trans and nonbinary characters into the ol’ TBR. Here’s a thread on bluesky where tons of people dropped their recs, and I look forward to checking out some of them.

Trans storytelling is alive. It’s out there, waiting for you, even if it’s not at your local megaplex.

4) Don’t Stop Making Things.

If you’re a trans person trying to make art in the execrable times we are currently in—or even if you’re cis—if you are simply a person who can think and have empathy for others in an era hell bent on taking both abilities away from you—you may be having a rough time right now. I know I am. I have projects; I have ideas; I have time; I also have a horrible despair eating away at my brain, trying to get me to give up. Anecdotally, things are pretty bad in the tradpub world. Even the more successful colleagues of mine are hitting walls that weren’t there five or ten years ago, and those walls are so much higher and thicker when you’re not white or straight or cis. Writing is difficult under the best circumstances, but sitting down at the desk and actually getting things done feels impossible when that sword is dangling over your head.

But it’s a numbers game. It always has been. Just as more representation and inclusion increases the chances that someone will finally see themselves in a story for the first time, the more work we all produce, the better the odds that some of it will survive this period of decline and censorship. When I was in high school, my cohort had a saying: They can’t give us all detention. Truer fucking words, surely.

There isn’t a fascism powerful enough to eradicate all trans stories. Being pushed to the margins and into the shadows is unfair, cruel, and violent, yes. And if that is where stories have to live, then fuck it, at least they’ll live. Like their authors, some of those stories will survive if we do what we can to protect them.

I don’t have illusions about my books living forever. Even though they’re traditionally published, there will come a time when they’re quietly taken out of print, when bookstores will remainder them to make room on the shelves. If censorship of trans voices continues unchecked, that may happen faster than is natural. These books may not exist except in the personal libraries and memories of readers. At a certain point, that has to be enough.

I keep a folder on my computer of all the messages readers send me. Well, the nice ones, not the slop spam. If I have to review that folder every fucking day for the next decade to get the motivation just to write a single paragraph, I will. I can’t let grief steal my stories. I have a job to do, and I’ll do it as long as I’m able. I hope you do, too. I hope you find a way to keep going. We’re not in a void. We have an audience; they’re out there, sitting in the dark, listening for us.

Someone has to provide the handkerchiefs.

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Dog days of links:

honestly my best piece of writing advice

a librarian’s guide for cutting out ai

here is the report that amnesty international withdrew after the world’s richest terf threatened them with a lawsuit

lots of real cat pictures in this thread

a good brief explainer on queer west village history