Submissions are always open. The cut-off is 31st December for next year’s issue.

Writing Badly is a new journal of letters on the topic of transmisogyny and transfeminism. It is a by-and-for trans women feminist publication. It wants to be a new home for transfeminine, transfeminist interlocution.

Key facts:

• We’re by-and-for trans women. We’re feminists. We’re women.

• We want to promote transfeminist interlocution.

  • To promote your project

  • To give you space to write in

  • To give you an audience who you can speak to as trans women, and ask new questions within.

  • To give posterity to new and previously published writing.

• Writers are paid based on a share of sales in arrears.

• You can workshop your ideas in our emails: editor@badly.press

• We’re a journal

  • We want to attract essays, criticism, and thoughtful pieces.

  • We want: essays, analyses, reports, research, prose, form-bending.

• We’re a magazine

  • We want to attract readable, enjoyable writing about what’s going on, what people are thinking, and how to live well.

  • We want: letters, hot or not lists, columns, reviews, recipes, lifestyle, healing, polemics, editorials, personals, organisers, how-tos, form-bending.

• You don’t need any qualifications or knowledges to write for us, other than that you’re thinking deeply and compassionately about trans female life.

• We’re a print-first publication

  • No-one likes it when you truly love women. We want to make a space where difficult or unpopular things can be written and read.

• If you plan to submit but haven’t written anything yet, a heads up is appreciated but not necessary. We’d love to send you any texts we think would help.

• The deadline for first drafts is 31st December, 2025.

• The deadline for final drafts is 28th February, 2026.

• Intended publication date is 1st of June, 2026.

• There is no word count per se.

• We like:

  • Women, making new solidarities between women, killjoy feminism, criticising false progressives, chav storytelling, lumpenart, experimental writing, risky research, stuff that doesn’t fly in a trans or queer publication, female communisms, recipes for healing, for fighting, for loving and living better, text with voice, a kind of bluntness, earnestness, the half-finished but cutting.

• We don’t like:

  • Terse prose, flashing your credentials, warmed-over pieties, white indignacy, an unwillingness to decentre men, to stop thinking about what they ‘‘‘‘‘‘’need’’’’ for five pages, liberalism, liberalism in a radical hat, liberalism in a radical queer hat, an unwillingness to try new ways of trusting women, apologising, shameful writing practices, the well-polished but benign.

Email us editor@badly.press xoxo