I first heard about Gendertrash From Hell from Geyl Forcewynd, possessor of the greatest name in North America.
It was 2013. I’d recently moved to New York and discovered the trans zines of Sybil Lamb. Or, really, the concept of zines, period. I’ve never been “punk rock,” but I really love good literature, and Sybil’s work blew my mind. In fact, that was how I became a publisher: by working with Sybil to turn those zines into I’ve Got A Time Bomb, the greatest and most insane picaresque novel of the 21st century. But then I started to wonder: If I hadn’t known about these zines of Sybil’s, what else didn’t I know?
So I did what you did when you wanted to know something in 2013: I posted in a Facebook group for trans women. And Geyl called me on the actual telephone (again: 2013) to tell me I should read Gendertrash From Hell, a zine edited by Xanthra Phillippa Mackay and Mirha-Soleil Ross in Toronto; there were four issues produced between 1993 and 1995.
It took me a few months to track down all the issues. As I read them, I remember feeling more and more amazed. This zine was rewriting my entire understanding of transsexual history. Sure, some parts felt dated: the terrible poetry about sex, the shameful adverts for mail-order cross-dressing emporia, the overwrought surgery diaries. But other parts were light-years ahead of where I was up to. I wasn’t ready for the critique of queer theory, or the focus on sex work, homelessness, incarceration, race and Indigeneity. I wasn’t ready for how serious it was about organizing, liberation, struggle.
Above all, I wasn’t ready for how much it loved trans people.
I transitioned shortly after the millennium and was on the trans internet from about 1996, so I can tell you that being trans in the ’90s and 2000s was very uncool. There were a lot of pink websites, butterflies, and “true selves.” The doctors discouraged us from knowing each other, but we could also discourage us from knowing each other. If you had to be friends with other transsexuals, it meant you were not passing, and therefore you were not hot.
But that was not what Gendertrash said.
Gendertrash invited its reader, in the “Welcome” at the start of Issue 1, to “laugh with, sing with, cry with, hear, touch, feel, associate with other gender queers” (that dorky “associate with” still hits me where I live). Gendertrash called cis people “genetics” and meant it. It said “I’d rather be dead than genetic” and meant that too. It said “Theory mutilates, surgery liberates.” Gendertrash had cover girls. Gendertrash had a Hooker of the Year. Gendertrash had TS Butches.
By 2013, I had accepted that I was not hot and did need to hang out with other trans people, but I didn’t feel good about it. Except, when I read Gendertrash, I did. I felt like, fuck yeah transsexuals! I felt like maybe transsexuals are hot.
I also remember thinking, what if I had read this in 2000 or 2001? My life would have been totally different. And even now in 2025, looking at this zine again, knowing it thoroughly after all the work I put into reprinting it as a book, I still feel this way. I feel my life being changed, yet again. Maybe you will feel this too.
When I decided the small trans publishing house I run with my friends, who are hot transsexuals, should reprint the collected Gendertrash from Hell as a book, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought I did. I had been in an archive before. I'd produced short scholarly editions of archival texts. I assumed this would be just like that, except longer.
Oh boy.
Almost all of the Gendertrash materials in Toronto’s arQuives, the largest independent queer archive in the world, are confined to two boxes. These boxes, however, were dense in a way I have rarely before encountered in archival material. Usually, there is a lot of junk in there—both random ephemera (shopping lists, doodles, address books) and stuff that is relevant but dull. Usually, you are picking though it like a gleaner after harvest, searching for the odd overlooked ear of corn. Gendertrash required a scythe.
I harvested three things:
1) Background information, especially correspondence.
2) Scans of the published zines, and also of the Master layouts and preparatory materials used to make them.
3) Drafts of an unpublished fifth issue.
Each required a different response.
1) I had to work hard not to be too distracted by the letters. I scanned a lot of them, but in the limited time you get in the archives, you can’t start reading stuff.
2) I had to produce the best-quality-possible reproductions of the zines. Which, great, I had expected this. This was what I thought I was there for.
3) I had to actually edit. From scratch. Fuck.
The correspondence has a few categories:
- Commercial correspondence with people who might stock the zine or advertise in it.
- Correspondence with authors, or would-be authors (there’s a whole file labeled “goofs”)
- Overlapping with this, correspondence with other trans activists: Dallas Denny, Margaret O’Hartigan, Christine Tayleur, Jamison Green, Heike Susanne Spreitzer, Uwe Klassen, Diane Globeil ... the list goes on.
- Finally, largest of all, correspondence with prisoners. As a matter of principle, Mirha and Xanthra made the zine free to trans prisoners. Word got out, and an enthusiastic audience appeared. Many trans prisoners wished to correspond with the editors—a feeling the editors, and Mirha in particular, reciprocated. Honestly, this correspondence should be its own book.
This intense behind-the-scenes engagement with trans activists and prisoners is the secret history of Gendertrash, and it both propels and reflects the evolution of the zine across its four issues. It goes from being primarily concerned with personal transformation of attitudes (“I’m sick of this shit and I won’t put up with it any longer”) to being primarily concerned with organizing and mobilizing (“So here’s what we’re going to do about it”).
I have already quoted the “Welcome” at the start of Issue 1, that gorgeous utopian call to the imaginary harmonious trans community the zine would convene. By the time she was working on Gendertrash 5, Mirha had come to understand very differently what such convening involved. Gendertrash 2 and 3 had contained a lot of reporting on the "Camp Trans" protests against the lesbian music festival MichFest, which excluded trans women. Issue 4 then published a piece by Christine Tayleur criticizing this protest in unsparing terms as a bourgeois indulgence, “a few people run[ning] off to spend $1000 to lounge around in a hot tub,” which was “not helping the most oppressed members of our community.” Dallas Denny (of AEGIS and TransSisters magazine) then sent a defensive letter criticizing this criticism.
Mirha, who I am pretty sure had come to personally agree with Tayleur, nevertheless responded by asking to publish Denny’s letter, commenting that “I find that far too many people in our communities can only see things as right or wrong and I think your letter is a perfect example of the opposite.” This approach eschews venting or self-expressing; it exemplifies a pragmatic maturity, an idealism which has turned to the question of how to organize, and which is also doing organizing in the act of trying to answer that question. It fills me with respect and admiration. It is the comment of someone who has had to get serious.
(And not without cost. Around the same time, Mirha replied to a letter from a trans prisoner conveying how much Gendertrash 4 had meant to her by saying it was “with letters like the one you sent us that we find the motivation and faith to keep on at times when we are completely exhausted and broke.”)
The results of getting serious are clear with just a glance at the Issue 4 table of contents. To take only the first five items, they include: not one but two interviews with activists with a history of street sex work, describing their work to empower homeless, street-active and drug-addicted trans communities; not one but two texts by trans prisoners; and Tayleur’s essay arguing that we need to refocus as a movement from questions of identity and “acceptance” to questions of material wellbeing. It is clear we have come a long way from “Welcome.”
I’m not saying this to denigrate Issue 1. I love Issue 1. As a nostalgic bourgeois trans reader, Issue 1 is in some ways the part of Gendertrash that touches me most. And as a publisher, I think both tenors, the personal and the activist, are essential to what Gendertrash is. Without the first, it would be dense and inspirational, but less moving. Without the second, it would be charming and evocative, but dated.
Maybe what makes this zine so special is not that it contains either, but that it models so clearly the movement between them—the way you might get from personal frustration to organizational commitment. Gendertrash distilled hundreds of personal viewpoints into a hard-won political ethos that made itself known through coherent and moving writing. It is a model we sorely need now.
Then there were the zines themselves. In terms of what to reproduce in the book, I had a choice. Do I work from the zines, or from the masters (a set of cut and pasted pages, with images and snippets of text glued onto them, of which the finished zine is essentially a photocopy)?
On the one hand, the zines were Gendertrash as it had actually circulated. From a position of pure historical accuracy reproducing these would arguably make the most historically faithful artifact.
On the other, Xanthra and Mirha would not have known what the zine would look like when it was photocopied or printed. As Allison Parrish has argued, every transcription is a transformation. Plenty of material looks great in the masters and … less great in the zine. To reproduce the zine would involve deliberately reproducing these unintended consequences. The masters, which were amazing, were the object they could control, the object they actually made.
As I looked at what was in the archives, the answer became undeniable—this book should be not a facsimile but a remastering of Gendertrash, one that put it through a process analogous to photocopying (all colors rendered into values of black and white) without losing so many fine details or introducing so many distortions.
But again, every transcription is also a transformation. That went for my remastering too. It turns out a lot is involved in making a good reproduction, none of which I knew how to do.
I had to learn to remove the paper texture from the scans. I had to learn image retouching. I had to resize the zines, because the first two issues are 8.5 x 7 inches and the next two are 11 x 8.5 inches, but they all had to go into the same book. And once I resized it, because a lot of the printing in the masters had been done in halftones, I had to deal with the consequent Moiré effects. (Google it. Or on second thought, don’t.)
This is all technical, but it all involved choices. When I look at every page of the printed book we produced, I see multitudes of choices I made, or that Sasha Karbachinskiy, who helped me, made. But I also see, much more compellingly, the choices Xanthra and Mirha made—choices which are central, not incidental, to what makes this zine so vital.
There have been a lot of trans zines. Gendertrash was not the first (Tapestry magazine began as a completely insane mimeographed “newsletter” in 1978) and it was certainly not the only one at the time. It exists in a rich context of zine-like publications such as Riki Wilchins’ In Your Face! and Gail Sondegaard’s Transsexual News Telegraph, many of which advertised in its back pages. Notably, however, unlike Gendertrash, these publications were mostly aspirational in tone. In Your Face! calls itself “The Journal of Record of Transsexual and Transgendered Activism”; Transsexual News Telegraph calls itself “The Magazine of Transsexual Culture.”
What Gendertrash From Hell does represent, then, is one of the first appearances of a trans zine that is consciously a punk zine. Its style and attitude is more closely allied to contemporary (cis) queer punk zines like Diseased Pariah News, Riot Grrrl or Fuzz Box than to the “newsletters” and “journals” other trans activists were producing. Its collages, cut-ups, art pieces, splash pages, sexy photos: all these stylistic choices set a tone of excitement and transgressiveness which was just as influential as its content.
Maybe not that many people read Gendertrash at the time, but it sometimes seems like everyone who did made a zine. Examples include Sybil Lamb’s How To Kill Queer Scum and Anne Tagonist’s Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender. And then everyone who read those made one too. What I found in Gendertrash in 2013 was, by then, not only in Gendertrash. I realized I was surrounded by people making tranny punk zines, playing tranny punk music, writing tranny punk novels. I still am.
Gendertrash succeeded, and Gendertrash inspired, because it was not just good but also beautiful, and that beauty was an expression of love. In the punk way, its beauty came from its ability to capture a sense of activity, to let you imagine the creator, with scissors and glue, in the act of putting this all together for you, and therefore to suggest that you could do this too, right back. It was a joyous, contagious beauty.
My own processes of meticulous scanning and cleaning are, by comparison, not punk at all, and I do not recommend most readers attempt anything similar (though someone should make a book of Diseased Pariah News, come to think of it). I hope that the labor I put in does not stand between the audience and the beauty of this zine, but instead gets out of the way to let you make closer contact than ever. And I hope that once you read it you, too, go make a zine in response.
And then there was Issue 5. For various reasons, including Xanthra’s health but also how hard it is to run a small trans publishing operation based on nothing but your own dedication to the cause without any real prospect of ever making enough money to pay yourself (a topic I too know a few things about), Issue 5 was never finished. But it was started. There were even plans to print it on newsprint, like a real paper, which would have both saved money and meant they could send free copies to all the prisoners asking for them.
I had known in advance there were some Issue 5 materials, but I hadn’t expected them to be at all as copious or fully developed as they were. Some things were already laid out! Others existed in drafts. Others still existed as real-world artifacts (press releases, letters) that were to be transcribed. This unfinished material includes some of my favorite things in all of Gendertrash from Hell (the book): An extended second installment of “Trannies Speak Out,” where Mirha, under the pseudonym of Janou, hilariously interviews a random selection of trans sex workers (and one highly inebriated John); an honestly revelatory interview with my favorite neglected trans theorist, Vivian Namaste; a deeply charming interview with legendary Toronto street performer Wendy Rose; a piece called “World’s Greatest Cocksucker.”
The list goes on. Clearly not all of this material would have made it into a finished issue, or made it in the form in which it survives. But I adopted a maximalist policy. Anything that evidence suggested might have made it into Issue 5, whether because it was in a scrawled provisional table of contents I found or because it had been accepted for publication in a letter, or just because it was vouched for as a possible inclusion by Mirha, went in.
What this maximalist policy produced does not resemble the finished issues of Gendertrash. Instead, I hope it resembles the experience of encountering this material in the archive. It shows how productive the group of people contributing to this zine was, how much they were in dialogue with each other, and how Gendertrash went from being essentially the work of two people to being a project with many contributors, to being, in fact, a community. That community did not always agree, but it was bound by love and respect. For a while—a short magical period that nevertheless lasted several years—they worked hard and really did something together. I hope reading the things I have harvested from the archive allows you to feel, as I did, in touch with that magic, in touch with that sense of possibility.
To be a trans publisher is to be a community organizer. This is what Mirha and Xanthra became with Gendertrash, and it is what we at LittlePuss aim to be, too. Literature, as communication, is in some sense nothing but community: It is us (for any given us) communicating with each other, and it is the basis for us communicating with each other more. This is true for writers, who read each other and respond. And it is true for readers, who when they meet other readers, now have something shared to discuss—a culture in common and not merely an experience.
Literature does not just depict us. It is not merely (ugh!) “representation,” as if we pre-existed the depiction. It is us in the act of constituting ourselves.
Sometimes things fall apart. Sometimes communities collapse, and sometimes texts, whole bodies of work, are lost. With limited resources and access to methods of distribution, trans communities have been prone to both. I have been through a collapse for two of this sort myself. Hell, I wrote a novel about one.
Gendertrash did collapse. But collapse can be recovered from. The people involved in Gendertrash went on to do many more things. The zines themselves continue to be active as long as they are read, as long as they are loved. This zine was a labor of love for Xanthra and Mirha. It was also a labor of love for LittlePuss to reprint it.
I feel so much gratitude, so much affection, so much love for these trans people who came before me. I wish I’d known them when I was a terrified, lonely, desperate teenager (ugh!) “transitioning” in 2001. And I am so grateful I get to know them now, as a reader. I hope you, new readers of Gendertrash From Hell, will love them too: this ill-assorted, joyous, vivacious crew of beautiful misfits and freaks, the dead and the still living, our past, our present, our future.
The remastering of Gendertrash From Hell is available to order here.
