The writer Torrey Peters, borrowing a framework from Joanna Russ, once said that marginalized literature moves through stages: “we’re just like you,” then “we’re nothing like you,” then “we have our own thing.” And then a fourth stage, the one we’re living through now — when the dominant culture starts understanding itself through terms the marginalized culture built. Cis people are learning their genders from us. The military’s on testosterone, and so are bored married women. Everyone and their mother is injecting peptides. Dolls are on the red carpet at the Met Gala. Plastic surgery and “looksmaxxing” are everywhere. We’re all transsexuals now.

This publication is written from inside that fourth stage: reported pieces and cultural criticism about how trans lives get covered, narrated, weaponized, and lived — written and edited by someone who spent years watching the machinery up close. Some of it is mine; the rest comes from our Opinion section, which publishes paid essays by trans and allied writers. Pitches are always open.

I’m Ari Drennen. I ran the LGBTQ program at Media Matters for America, tracking right-wing media and the disinformation economy built around people like me. My work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and Rolling Stone, and I appear in the documentary Heightened Scrutiny alongside Chase Strangio, Elliot Page, and Laverne Cox. I wrote the poetry collection Thoughts on Weightlessness, and I run Pink and Blue Strategies, a narrative-intelligence consultancy for nonprofits and campaigns.

Free essays land regularly. Paid subscriptions do more than keep this independent — they fund the Opinion section, which pays trans and allied writers $150 for every essay we publish. Subscribe, and your money becomes someone’s byline.