hannah baer
trans girl suicide museum

"I had a dream once where I found a hyper-cube that was also a book. It was opalescent and glistening, with gold edges. I couldn't figure out how to read it because I didn't know how to read in four-dimensional space. I had the sense that if I could figure out how to read this book it would change the way I lived. And then, years later, when I first read tgsm, I felt like maybe it was this hyper-cube-as-book of my dreams: twisted, shimmering, demented, and messy; but forgiving, hopeful, and saturated with meaning and feeling in the way I imagine hyper-life might be. I wish an anonymous messenger had left tgsm on my pillow when I was 16, so I could have envisioned another sort of life for myself, as a gendered being, a political subject, and a friend." —Cyrus Grace Dunham

one part ketamine spiral, one part confessional travelogue from the edge of gender, tgsm is a hallucinatory transmission on sex, identity, the internet, and the flickering wish not to exist in a given body in at a given point in time.

tgsm raises questions with which we have begun to negotiate broadly as a culture: what is actually happening to someone when they transition? how should we understand or describe such processes? what is the role of drugs, of hallucination, of imagination, in transition? is being a trans person in this moment in history—when the identity is ever more carefully traced [and tracked] by larger cultural forces—more liberated than before?

drawing its source material from chance encounters—wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms—to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don’t know how they work, tgsm is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.

hannah baer runs the meme account @malefragility on instagram, and studies clinical psychology in new york city.

ISBN 978-1-948434-06-5
Soft cover, perfect bound
130 pages, 5.375 × 8.25-inch
Sixth Edition
US $13 Retail

Also available from Asterism Books