Commentary: Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom

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“Where are all the stories about little swarthy-skinned robber Trans girls waving tiny knives made of bone? About Trans teenage witches with golden eyes who cut out their own hearts and lock them in boxes so that awful guys on the internet will never break them again? About Trans girls who lost their father in the war and their mother to disease, and who go back and forth to find where Death lives and make him give them back?”⁣

First of all: I second this list of questioning (looking at you, Publishing™️). ⁣
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Second of all: This book was my Favorite Read of 2019.⁣
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Akin to “Spirited Away” (or really any Studio Ghibli film), Fierce Femmes is surreal, violent, playful, tender and all the while insightful, making its magic so real. Mermaids beach themselves. Crocodile doctors take advantage. Statues cover up murders. Femmes dance through the frame as Witches, Goats, Skeletons, Goddesses of War. And cakes save the world. All of this surrounds our imaginative, Kung-fu fighting hero— Kai Cheng Thom— a “Dangerous Femme”. Her coming-of-Femme-ness story carries us away from her home town of Gloom, away from strict parents, into the City of Lights and Smoke, where she finds sisterhood on the Street of Miracles with other Femmes and Trans Women. A girl gang is formed to fight the cis-men who murder women like them. The fighting forces our hero to face not how she hurts others, but rather how she hurts herself. Things change dramatically from one moment to another, but the Magic never fades. ⁣
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Magic exists alongside violence and vulnerability. Trans women exist at a particularly vulnerable intersection of identities and Thom’s story never censors that truth. ⁣