trans girl suicide museum is described by the its author as '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'.
Broadly, then, Hannah Baer's book is a kind of memoir or record of experiences, one that 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 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.
