Crossdresser // Accept Yourself Or Die

Two books published back-to-back in a single volume for a double gut-punch of heartfelt, angry, and funny reflections on transfemme coming of age. Imogen Reid's Accept Yourself Or Die: From Mormon Missionary to Trans Punk travels from small-town Northern Ontario, to the Missionary Training Centre in Provo, Utah, to basement shows in Ottawa. It's a story about staying stubbornly human in a world that wants to destroy you, and also about how weird it is going door-to-door trying to convert people to Mormonism. Crossdresser: Growing Up Trans in the 1990s and 2000s, by Kat Rogue, explores what it does to a closeted trans girl to grow up saturated in the transmisogyny of 1990s pop culture and to come of age online, and how she managed to build her own relationship to femininity despite that. It argues that crossdressing, femme, and transness are more closely linked than some people think, and that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective really could have been great without all the transmisogyny.