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UPDATE 7/1/25 – Pride Month is over! We raised $3,209 directly for transfeminine authors in need, and I’m so unbelievably grateful to everyone who helped a member of our community out this month.
I’m not going to change the text of the article – however, we could totally still hit the rest of the goal! As promised, I’ll be setting my reading goal based on this – however, as it stands now, I’ve only got to read 26 books for the rest of the year! Between you and me, I was hoping for way more haha.
So here’s the deal. If we reach 4k? I’ll double my reading goal to 52 books by the end of the year.
And if we make our goal of raising $5,000 for mutual aid? I’ll TRIPLE it to 78.
Thank you so much to everyone who’s generously supported our efforts here. I’ll be matching donations over the next few days – it took a bit to tabulate and get the logistics done.
With my deepest appreciation, Beth
- No Kings, No Conquerors
- Why Direct Mutual Aid?
- TFR’s Pride Month Drive
- Support Transfeminine Authors Here
- Thank you so much!
No Kings, No Conquerors
I want to wish you a happy Pride right now, but we all know what’s happening in the United States. The National Guard was just deployed on the streets of L.A. to quell peaceful protest; yesterday, Trump declared that the state of California was in “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” This is a clear inflection point in the ongoing descent toward fascism, and the stakes are growing ever more dire.
If you’re able, I would impel you to join No Kings Day protests tomorrow on June 14th against Trump’s wasteful military parade. On the website for the day, there is a complete list of all officially planned protests around the nation, as well as general info about the approach and goals. If you don’t see your city or town on the list, please consider reaching out to friends, family, and colleagues in the area and starting your own. Now is the time for protest, and we need as many people out in the streets as we can get.
If you’re reading this article after the date has passed, I have no doubt that there are a plethora of in-person opportunities for you to protest against the growing authoritarianism of the Trump administration. Go local. Find your network. The time is now for action.
Throughout this whole mess, I’ve been championing the idea that one of the most powerful ways you can stand against fascism is to recognize your sphere of influence, pick one or two issues where you believe you can make a real material difference, and focus on those. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the overlapping nature of existential crisis, which is why now more than ever, we need people who can stay razor-focused on individual issues to help others understand the magnitude of the problem and stakes.
For me, that issue continues to be the direct impact of American fascism upon trans literature and the trans authorial community, so that’s where my focus remains.
It’s also still Pride Month! So consider this a celebration as much as a protest. Pride was a riot too.
I’m hoping to make this Mutual Aid Pride Drive a yearly tradition, even though the chaos of the moment has prevented me from going as ambitious with it as I may have wanted. I hope to celebrate Pride in 2025 by giving back to the members of our community in the greatest need of aid, especially in this moment of crisis and uncertainty. Now more than ever, we need to champion the unhoused, the unemployed, the food-insecure, those in need of transition and medical care, and those trying to leave the United States for a better future no matter their financial means.
Why Direct Mutual Aid?
Here’s a fact – I am not asking you to give me your money. I do not have the financial infrastructure to take or redistribute donations. What I am asking you to do is to contribute directly to campaigns from marginalized transfeminine authors, cutting out the non-profit middleman altogether.
Mutual aid is a basic survival tool for a lot of transfemme writers, but I know my writing reaches people outside of our immediate community who may be less familiar with the concept. So, why does this matter?
Let’s take my work as an example. I currently make about $600 dollars a month from this website, which would average out to about $7300 a year. That’s roughly half of an expected yearly salary for someone making the American federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour, for around $15,080 a year). The income I make from the blog is almost entirely reinvested back into the blog, whether I’m purchasing books or funding the digital infrastructure. Again, this isn’t a living wage; it’s not even the American minimum wage, which is already pitifully low by the standards of most Western countries. The minimum wage in DC where I grew up is $17.50 an hour. I would probably make more money in three months of retail than I would for an entire year of full-time blog work.
I spend a lot of time on TFR, and the only reason I’m able to do so is because I’m fortunate enough to have a family willing to financially support me through the process. The blog pays for itself, but only itself – all of my living costs have to come from other sources.
In her classic manifesto A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes the necessity that a (trans) woman writer have enough money to live and a private room to write in order to do her work well. Art is time and labor consuming, and a lot of the time, cultural output isn’t possible unless a writer has the ample tools to make it happen. She writes:
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
It’s a truism that transfeminine literature is scarce and fleeting, often vanishing into the ether as soon as it appears. Where are all of the trans books? Because the (trans)feminine sex (gender) is historically poor and marginalized from wealth, because in Woolf’s time women could not open a bank account without the permission of their husbands, because sexism was not just an omnipresent fact but a material reality, many women, even if they had the time and aptitude to write, were not able to publish their work, much less receive any sort of institutional recognition.
Woolf continues:
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
When trans bodies are the hot political topic of the hour; when our lives are being legislated out of existence; when powerful figures like Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling are channeling literal billions into anti-trans activisim- Trans women dominate the lives of kings. But our fiction barely finds the purchase to tread water.
Why? Economic inequality. It’s a class issue and a race issue as much as a gendered one.
For trans fiction to exist, trans authors need a room of their own. We need to be able to eat and sleep in a bed and make enough money to meet our basic needs, and the frank reality is that it’s almost impossible to make a living wage off of trans authorship alone. So the transfeminine author works one, maybe two, jobs on top of her fiction writing; she struggles to make ends meet, and the creative labor flags. Projects stretch for years. Ambition makes way for struggle.
I have an direct audience of over 15,000 people and reach tens of thousands more, and I’m not making minimum wage. And I have extensive access to both a global professional network, elite higher education, and generational wealth.
Most trans authors have none of that.
I see people describe trans fiction as ‘amateurish’ or ‘hobby writing.’ There’s some truth to that, but it’s often levied as an accusation rather than the systemic injustice we all should take it for. There is nothing ‘amateur’ about the transliterary publishing industry; but when it’s nigh-impossible to make a full time career in the industry, there is a severe lack of institutional and fiscal support for career development and book deals. A few prestige authors manage traditional acclaim, but even the trad authors are unlikely to make enough money to meet their basic needs off their writing. All creative labor suffers in a fascist economy, and trans authors often get the worst end of the stick.
But we need trans fiction, trans art, trans storytelling. It’s how we survive, it’s how we imagine a better future. Though its absence may not be registered, there is something lost when our community is unable to access our storytelling; when we cannot see ourselves on the page, on the screen. Trans fiction has kept me sane through this dismal spring, and every book I read is a product of hundreds of hours of labor and love that demands equitable compensation.
It’s not just the raw economics either.
Over the last few months, the American government has been busy stripping away as many employment and equal opportunity protections for trans people as possible. Trans labor is increasingly undesirable on the job market – it can be a challenge to get and hold a stable job while trans, which is no small part of why so many of us find ourselves self-employed. This is a pressing crisis in the publishing industry. I’ve watched transfemmes in news media and journalism lose their professional contracts and legacy jobs over the last year; it was already a severe challenge to get hired as a trans woman in journalism before Trump II, and now it’s near-impossible.
For a lot of trans authors, fiction is a crucial source of income, despite how low the wage threshold tends to be. Selling your latest book can be the difference between homelessness and having food on your table. Many trans authors are also disabled and/or estranged from family support networks, and may not have the means to do labor outside of the creative field. For a lot of transfemmes in the creative arts, fiction and the various other pursuits are a safe alternative (or supplement) to sex work, the traditional career for many trans women with no other options and nowhere left to go.
As the onset of American fascism continues to march onward, trans people will continue to be plunged into ever-deepening states of economic precarity. Now more than ever, taking Pride in the LGBT community means giving material support to trans people. When creative economies are stifled, when trans literature is forced back underground (I’m already watching it happen in real time), we need to come together as a community to support those who depend on us the most. Now is the time to act.
Direct mutual aid gives authors the tools and resources to control their own creative labor and the funds to maintain a room of their own. It offers the flexibility and trust to articulate their own basic needs. On the dollar, it provides the greatest direct investment; there is no cut for the non-profit and their employees, it goes directly to the author and their creative labor.
TFR’s Pride Month Drive
In this article, I’ve collected a number of GoFundMes and other modes of direct financial support where you can donate to transfemme authors today. This is not comprehensive, however, and any mutual aid matters, whether it’s to an author or a random trans friend or a family in Gaza.
Our goal is to get as many people involved with direct mutual aid as possible, and this fundraising drive is designed with that in mind. My major goal is to raise around $5000 dollars for transfeminine authors in need by the end of the month.
Although I won’t be collecting donations directly, I do want to incentivize people to participate, so I’ve come up with two fun rewards for anyone who donates at least $50 dollars to transfeminine mutual aid in between now and June 30th. In addition, I will be matching the first $500 dollars (most of my June blog income) to whatever mutual aid campaigns they’ve been given to.
How do I participate in the Pride Drive?
There are a couple ways that you can participate! Obviously the most straightforward will be to donate directly to a campaign, of which I’ll have several listed below. Anyone who gives $50 or more will be counted toward the reward tally. This can be to a single campaign, or it can be spread across multiple campaigns. You can absolutely donate more than $50 to help transfemme authors in need, but each individual will only be counted once to the overall tally.
Direct material support for trans authors beyond donations can also count. If you purchase $50 dollars in trans ebooks from itch.io, an online bookstore for indie trans authors, or $100 dollars in books from bigger independent marketplaces like bookshop.org or a brick-and-mortal queer bookstore, I’ll also count it toward the reward tally. Books tend to be significantly more expensive and have lower profit margins for the author when purchased through physical bookstores or in print, hence the higher threshold. If you’ve been putting off buying those trans books, now’s a great time to go get them!
Mutual aid doesn’t need to be listed in this article to count. As long as you’re helping out someone in need through direct financial aid, I’ll be flexible about it.
What DOESN’T count toward the reward tally:
- Donations to non-profit orgs like HRC, The Trevor Project, Mermaids, etc. It’s awesome if you’re donating to LGBT non-profits, but that’s not the point of the campaign.
- Book purchases from Amazon or big chain bookstores like Barnes & Nobles or !ndigo.
- Subscriptions or other ongoing payments. You should absolutely consider subbing to an author’s Patreon, but the goal here is to help specifically those who need a little extra to get through the month.
What if I can’t afford $50?
Please only give what you can afford to. The goal is to spread the wealth and help everyone, not to put stress on your bank account during an economically turbulent time.
If you’ve given to a mutual aid campaign through this drive but weren’t able to afford the threshold, shoot me an email – I can probably still count you toward the reward tally anyway. Either way, everyone who donates will still be honored in one of the rewards, so more details on that in a sec.
How should I let TFR know I’ve donated?
Once you’ve donated, send an email to mutualaid@thetransfemininereview.com with the amount you donated and where you donated it to. If you purchased books, share the receipt. I’ll be taking a running tally of total donations, so even if you can only give $5, I would still very much like to hear about it.
A few caveats – I do NOT want you to send TFR your financial information. An email or screenshot is fine. This is a very low-key thing on my end, and I’m not here to police you – if you tell me you’ve given a certain amount, I’m gonna take it in good faith and assume that you have. A specific tally is useful both to motivate others to give and to assess how effective this approach was for next year, but the most important thing is to make sure that people get the mutual aid they need.
It’s also helpful if you let me know what campaign you donated to so I can match donations if you’re in the first $500 given to mutual aid.
I will be deleting all emails with donation receipts in July. Please exercise common sense and keep your financial information and legal name private.
How long will the Pride Drive last?
From today until the end of Pride Month!
Obviously you should continue supporting trans authors in need after Pride Month ends, but I’ll only be tallying donation totals through June 30th. This also means that any donations made before June 13th will not count to the overall tally.
How will you be matching donations?
I matching the first $500 of donations to mutual aid campaigns only. If you’ve made a book purchase, I will not be matching the book purchase (as it’s likely I already own it). I will be matching 1:1 by campaign – so if one person gives $500 ten minutes after I publish the article to a single campaign, I’ll match that, or it may be lots of smaller donations to different campaigns.
As I motioned early, I’m a pretty early career writer and I don’t make that much money from this blog, so hopefully in future years I’ll be better equipped to match a higher donation threshold.
What are the rewards?
REWARD #1 – Set my reading goal for the rest of the year!
There are 183 days in between July 1st and December 31st, and with your contributions to our Pride Drive, you can decide how many books I have to read during that time! For every person who meets the $50 threshold, I will be adding one book to my total pile. If you donate $250, I’ll add two books, and if any of the wonderful people in my audience donate over $1000, I will add three.
Because my therapist very sternly told me that I was not allowed to try to read a book a day for the rest of the year, I’ll be hard-capping my personal goal at 100 books for the rest of 2025, which is a little more than a book every other day. That means that a broad goal for this campaign is to raise $5000 for transfeminine authors in need.
I think this may be a bit ambitious, but hey, I’ve been surprised in the past by my wonderful audience. If ever there were a good time to go big, it’s now.
If we somehow get more than 100 people to donate $50, I will continue to count donations to the overall tally, which will then become a communal reading challenge. That means that I will be challenging my readers to read for mutual aid! If you want to have a fun reading goal challenge for the rest of the year, then make sure to spread the word about this mutual aid drive and get as many of your friends and family to participate as you can.
REWARD #2 – Leave your permanent mark on our website!
This is the goofy reward lol.
I will be creating a permanent page on TFR to act as a blank canvas for you to put whatever you want*** up on my website! I’m inspired here by r/place – the idea is to make a fun online communal piece of art to represent our pride in 2025.
The theme of this webpage will be silly, gay, bookish, and camp. Your creativity is the limit – I’m happy to put up memes about books, rainbows, silly drawings, random JPEGs of cartoon characters, a Rick Roll, so on and so forth. This will be a permanent webpage on TFR, and I’m going for an early internet aesthetic – the more cursed the better.
***What isn’t allowed:
- You may not submit any content that violates TFR’s official policies, which you can read here.
- No advertisement, solicitation, or self-promotion. This is an art project, not a paid feature.
- No political campaigning.
- No libel or caricatures. Not trying to get sued over here lol. Let’s keep it fictional.
- No flags other than Pride flags.
- No community drama.
- No NSFW or graphic content.
- No links. Keep it to things I can permanently upload to the webpage.
- All content must be fair use – you must have the rights to any and all art or text.
- Absolutely no AI.
Ultimately I’ll be the one deciding whether a submission is appropriate for the webpage. If you want to create art or write a poem for the page, I’ll include full credit to all artists at the bottom. Please keep this fun and kind – it’s a celebration, not a battleground.
For everyone who participates in the campaign but doesn’t hit the tally threshold, I’ll be adding a star to the final artboard. Hopefully we can make some pretty constellations.
Can you add my campaign to this article?
If you’re a transfeminine author, absolutely! Just send me the links either by email or on Bluesky and I’ll do my best to add you. Do your best to follow the format below. I’m gonna be promoting this article whenever I can for the rest of the month, so hopefully even if you’re late to the party, you can still get signal boosted toward your goals :))
A personal note
If you’ve been following me on socials, you probably know that it’s a chaotic month for me. I don’t have a lot of spoons right now, but getting this out was important to me, and I really hope that it can help people, even if it’s only a little bit. I’ve never done any sort of fundraising like this before, so I’m definitely teaching myself the ropes. Hopefully I can take lessons from this year and do this again in 2026 with way more intention and impact.
Support Transfeminine Authors Here
I’m gonna be broadly trying to group these campaigns based on needs, but anything and everything counts. Any donation, no matter how big or small, can mean a lot. Thank you for reading, and I hope that y’all give me a massive TBR for the rest of the year!
Many of these writers are either early-career or very obscure, so I hope that you’ll also take this as an opportunity to check out an author you’ve never heard of before ❤
Basic Needs
A.C. Danvers
What They’re Fundraising For: Mobility scooter battery, unemployment support
What They Write: TTRPGs
Support Their Fundraiser: Ko-Fi
Purchase Their Work: Drive Thru RPG
Amanda Kauffman
What They’re Fundraising For: Social Security fuckery, dental bills
What They Write: Science Fiction, Erotica, Short Stories, Songwriting
Support Their Fundraiser: $AmandaK6647 on Cashapp
Check Out Their Work: Writing site, Band site
Elena Abbott
What They’re Fundraising For: Living expenses
What They Write: Urban Fantasy, Science Fiction, Erotica
Support Their Fundraiser: Ko-fi
Check Out Their Work: itch.io, Bold Stroke Books
Evelynn Black
What They’re Fundraising For: Disability support, unemployment support, mental healthcare
What They Write: Poetry
Support Their Fundraiser: @Evelynn-Yuen on Venmo
Check Out Their Work: Substack, Empty Mirror, Capgras
Juno Rylee Schultz
What They’re Fundraising For: Food, healthcare, publishing costs
What They Write: Literary Fiction, Poetry, Journalism
Support Their Fundraiser: Ko-Fi
Purchase Their Work: itch.io, Muckrack
Kallias Dornan
What They’re Fundraising For: Credit card debt, medical bills
What They Write: Science Fiction, Zines, TTRPG
Support Their Fundraiser: itch.io
Purchase Their Work: itch.io
May Peterson
What They’re Fundraising For: Car repairs, rent support
What They Write: Romance, High Fantasy
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Purchase Their Work: Bookshop
Taylor Nielsen
What They’re Fundraising For: Medical debt, legal assistance, healthcare
What They Write: Web comics, poetry
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Check Out Their Work: Webtoon
Escaping Fascism
Artemis T. Douglas
What They’re Fundraising For: Moving to Ireland for grad school
What They Write: Journalism, Critical Theory
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Check Out Their Work: itch.io, The Metropolitan
Eris Anona
What They’re Fundraising For: Moving to the Pacific Northwest
What They Write: Critical theory
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Check Out Their Work: Substack
Gender-Affirming Healthcare
Aria
What They’re Fundraising For: Facial Feminization Surgery
What They Write: Vetted, chose to remain anonymous
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Dee Arbacauskas
What They’re Fundraising For: Sexual reassignment surgery
What They Write: Cosmic Horror, Detective, Noir, Pulp Fiction
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Purchase Their Work: itch.io, Bookshop, Author’s website (they also do cool artisanal leatherwork!)
Fae’rynn
What They’re Fundraising For: Facial feminization surgery
What They Write: Science Fiction, Mecha
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Purchase Their Work: itch.io
nailsthatglow
What They’re Fundraising For: Facial feminization surgery
What They Write: Podfic, Short Stories, Blogging
Support Their Fundraiser: @nailsthatglow on Venmo
Check Out Their Writing: Author’s website
Tris Husband
What They’re Fundraising For: Sexual reassignment surgery, electrolysis
What They Write: Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Romance
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Purchase Their Work: itch.io
Vyria Durav
What They’re Fundraising For: Sexual reassignment surgery
What They Write: Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Romance
Support Their Fundraiser: GoFundMe
Purchase Their Work: itch.io
Thank you so much!
The transliterary community is grateful to everyone who takes the time and care to support trans authors during Pride Month. Thank you so much for your generosity and compassion, and I hope you’ll be willing to contribute to some of these aid campaigns.
If you donate, don’t forget to email mutualaid@thetransfemininereview.com so that I can track the overall donation total, potentially match your donation, and count your participation toward the rewards.
And again, if you’re an author in need of mutual aid, send me your information and I’ll do my best to add you to the article ❤
Let’s make it to $5,000!
This article was made possible by our wonderful Sponsors! If you want to contribute to essential transgender journalism like this, then please feel free to go support our work on Patreon – your contributions help us keep quality scholarship 100% free and available to the general public.
The Transfeminine Review 
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