It begins with the very first line: “I don’t believe in safe spaces. A dark fairy tale told by a “notorious liar.” It effortlessly changes the rules, cracking open a space of freedom, the kind of freedom that can only come from entering a game already in play and breaking each played-out rule with greater and more playful impunity. I remember my little sister back in Gloom, and how escaping always seems to mean leaving someone behind.It would be hard to put it more concisely or accurately than Trish Salah does on the back cover: “The first lie is that this book is a memoir, the second is that it is not.” Another way to say it might be to use Audre Lorde’s evocative term “biomythography.” Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom is a book that uses its warmhearted critique of the conventional tropes of the trans memoir as a way to reinvent those very tropes in fabulist Technicolor.
Someday, I may swim away from here into another place. Crocodile, for the chance to leave the Street of Miracles, when all my life I have been running toward it.Īnd I think about how Kimaya is right, how fish means opportunity and privilege. I think about how strange and funny it is that there are many femmes who would kill, who would sell their souls to Dr. About how we are all so hungry for what each other has, when the truth is none of us has enough to begin with. She’s peering at herself, not liking what she sees.Īnd I think about how fish means jealousy among femmes. It is a look like I might wear-eyes narrow and lips pursed. There is a look I do not like in her expression, a hint of something that doesn’t match her sweet tone and seems totally alien for my warm, generous femme sister. “Kimaya is also looking in the mirror, and I meet her gaze there.
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