Serrano Peppers cc-by Forest & Kim Starr
Writing badly journal
is a new journal of letters on the topic of transmisogyny and transfeminism.
Writing badly magazine
is by and for trans women.
Badly writing journal
is a titular invitation to ask what transfeminist writing practices could be, an invitation to an écriture transféminine, an insistence on occupying position as literary method. is an invitation to transfeminine studies. is an invitation to a transfeminist philosophy. is a belief in the fruitfulness of trans female subjectivities. is a home, with posterity, for transfeminist texts. is the paper branch of a transfeminist movement.
Badly writing magazine
has deadlines for submission on 31st December, every year.
is published on June 1st, every year.
is next released in print on June 1st, 2026.
NOT
Shall we be trans together?
HOT
Shall we be women together?
NOT
Thinking about submitting to WBM.
HOT
Emailing us. Talking to us. Submitting something.
NOT
“““““““Gender is complicated.”””””””""
HOT
Arm women. [REDACTED]
NOT
septum piercing
HOT
buying your friend flowers
NOT
Haha I’m so glad my barista has dyed hair and a nose ring
HOT
I’m giving you a puppuccino and if you complain I’ll pee in it.
NOT
Trans joy is so important. I feel so euphoric rn
HOT
Part of what I detest so much about trans joy as a political/sub-political slogan is that it seems to answer the question of How do we politicise a people pathologised through their malaise? with Well, I was treated and now I’m very happy! I detest how myopic that is. I detest that, in carving space for ourselves in the world, we have bought into the idea that we are, in our own special way, the liberal conception of a disabled person. I detest how questions of privilege amongst trans people get deterred through trans joy, how our middle classes, instead of having that averted-gaze guilt to women who cannot, now become proud political fulcrums. I detest how it feels shaped directly in the absence of female political leadership - a position in society which is always going to be at least a bit bittersweet, at least a bit uncomfortable. Trans joy is reactionary. Trans joy often feels more like reading self-care in a Waterstones-feminist book.
NOT
Being an “activist”
HOT
Being a good person. Having people skills. Having a web of female relationships. Being present. Preventing abuse. Helping your neighbour with her benefits application. Robin-hooding it but lowkey because some of us get more police attention than others. Knowing candour. Knowing how to apologise. [REDACTED] a [REDACTED].
NOT
Wow this zine is really impressive. It’s really well researched. It’s really well bound. It’s put together.
HOT
Listen. Female philosophers get called essayists. Female essayists get called writers. Female writers get called personal writers. And female personal writers get called diarists and journal-keepers. Female independent publishers get called zinesters now or what? The fact that, despite never having once called it a zine, WBM gets called a zine fairly regularly feels like denial of our collective ability to make a slightly larger or formal project.
NOT
Suspicion. Doubt. Gossip without love. Games of telephone about trans women. Psychoanalysing from the grapevine.
HOT
Extending trust further than what feels reasonable. Knowing you have no reason to get along with a woman who has, in principle, come to you via a random woman generator. Having your own life. Productive, community building gossip. Keeping doors open.
NOT
Befriending more men.
HOT
Befriending the single mother in your block. Befriending the old women on your street. Befriending the immigrant woman in the backroom of the cornershop. Telling them your name at least. Being there. Resisting how men isolate us.
NOT
Asking people their pronouns.
HOT
Asking people if their parents send them money.
NOT
They/themming people by default.
HOT
Treating they/themming a woman like a hate crime.
NOT
Giving takes on anything if you’re less than five years into your transition.
HOT
Letting the exhausted ten-year-in tranny speak and not calling her problematic.
NOT
Men saying the words tranny or femboy.
HOT
Men giving me money.
NOT
Spending all your time with your sisters talking about your transness.
HOT
Loudly pointing out if somebody went to private school and has no black friends.
NOT
This trans [expensive hobby] group is really a space where blah blah blah
HOT
Helping your trans gem mate commit benefit fraud, get a council flat, get paid
NOT
Discord
HOT
This chord (Edim7 (third inversion))
NOT
The internet. The tracked. The online safety act. Discord.
HOT
Preservation. Page. Word. Owning the platform. Samidzats. The floating university.
NOT
Yeah I mean she came to the social but she mostly about passing and blah blah blah some untrusting gossip about a trans woman’s politics
HOT
Like it’s literally just a randomised sample of women having a tough time mate. All you know about her is that she’s a trans woman and maybe a glance and a gossip but truly, you know nothing. You’re going to hear things that don’t make obvious sense and have to extend faith beyond what feels reasonable. People won’t gel every time because it’s a randomised sample of women having a tough time.
NOT
We don’t assume anything about anyone here.
HOT
You seem to assume I wanted they pronouns and to be looked at funny?
NOT
No I appreciate what you’re doing I just think like, you know, men experience these things too so like it would be discrimination to not let them occupy this entire space really.
HOT
I am normal and can be trusted around the gravesite of Henry Kissinger.
NOT
Talking about cis women’s transphobia ad nauseum. Joking about polycules and sexual assault and weird trans women you know a friend of a friend knows and how dangerous she was and scaring every woman around you away from.
HOT
Encouraging the women in your life to know more women, to be in community with more women, to be women together.
NOT
Lukewarm.
HOT
Piping.
NOT
We are challenging the monogamous norms of relationships. We are finding new ways to love.
HOT
What? By not taking her seriously? By having her be that thing on the side? By not showing her to your family? Give the man a Nobel prize, Jesus.
NOT
Yeah honestly even like other trans people these days can be pretty foul like it’s so hard dating we should hang out by the way do you want to come over and watch me play videogames? We can politely ignore eachother for like maybe an hour, eat a humdrum and unaffectionate meal and then I’ll initiate sex without communicating anything like we’ll kinda both be noncommittally frotting for a bit but in this way where we could both plausibly deny having sex at that moment for a really rather long time bc I don’t respect you enough to deal with my own issues about transmisogyny, agency, and rape. After a while we’ll be turned on but kinda stressed out bc neither of us is communicating and one of us will try to initiate something and it won’t go to plan and we’ll both leave feeling a bit transgressed and it’ll be massively socially deleterious to our circle of friends; approximately 20 precariously housed and emotionally stunted transsexuals with the kind of unquestionable need for moral purity in the absence of human connection that would give a cult leader a throbbing boner.
HOT
Just cos you’re a tschlur doesn’t mean your dating practices are any less transmisogynistic. Take her seriously. Sort your shit. Put your big girl pants on. Be attuned, present. Date yourself. Then date her. And do it well. Don’t waste her time.
NOT
We’re all trannies in the eyes of the state.
HOT
No you’re not, Aiden. Also you get paid more than a woman.
NOT
We’re all trannies in the eyes of the state.
HOT
Citizenship is also not gender neutral.
NOT
We’re all trannies in the eyes of the state
HOT
There’s like, nothing in how the state acts that makes that feel like the case.
NOT
We’re all tr-
HOT
In ‘68 a trans man managed successfully, whilst maintaining his privacy, to argue that he was the rightful heir of a male-only hereditary title in the British honours system, and its associated land. Because of his right to privacy, April Ashley couldn’t use his case as precedent in her case, wherein her husband sought to give her nothing in the divorce, and subsequently she failed. The same legal sex was reformed in this country largely at the behest of trans men experiencing pension discrimination (to say nothing of the women who experienced the same at the time), and women who could choose to take that financial hit. The crime of gender deception in sex was first applied to a transgender woman at the behest of her male partner. The precedent from which that crime was came into Scottish law by the lawyer of a transgender man strongarming the defence so that his (adult, trans) male client wouldn’t go down for statutory rape of two underage girls.1 I really doubt a woman could use her ’trans’ness to argue her way out of the same, let alone neo-nazi terrorism.2 I really doubt trans is a cohesive character to the state.
NOT
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience (2021)
HOT
The twanny experience is not being born in a castle you absolute scab. The idea that you can frame hereditary land disputes as a trans experience should tell you how trans is constructed on a class level.
NOT
Performative suffering at the Queer space. Performative suffering in the Autonomous Space. Suffering in a space. Performative suffering on instagram stories. Performative suffering to each other.
HOT
I don’t think you understand how bleaching it is to be around people who are reiterating that this is their rock bottom, and it is often a life not dissimilar to the one you grew up in. The most tiresome thing about being around British (most especially culturally Anglican) twannies in particular is this profound culturally Christian need to perform their suffering, and that their suffering gives them worth. It is an implicit theology that makes you not only personally insufferable, but also politically gormless, and so deeply unsexy.
NOT
Writing practices which amount to latinate rephrasings of Suffering, Joy, Across, Suffering, Joy, Suffering, Across, Joy, Su-
HOT
Having a perspective slightly more thoughtful than a LLM that was forced to learn ethical utilitarianism.
NOT
Middle class women who make it clear that their transition nightmare would be to look like the women that raised me, who sob over lives my blood family would have killed for, who make bizarre decisions until you remember she blew in from a manor in the home counties.
HOT
Pooping in the waitrose.
NOT
This queer space will show a movie, which is not good to women, and serve a meal with minimal dietary fat and salt because I, a slightly anemic queer who has not entirely unpacked my relationship to fatness, food, consumption, morality, and cultural christianity, felt that I needed to give back. I did this by giving nothing. Sorry, not nothing. Some kind of bean-and-vegetable dish with no dietary fat or salt. Serving this was deemed a better choice than any other financial model of feeding multiple people on a budget.
HOT
I am starting a trans women’s dinner club and I’m only serving the fattest cuts of Salmon. Cod supper. Real hollandaise and asparagus. Dal makhani. Maafe and fufu. A whole fucking roast dinner. Food has to feed your soul. The strength of community meals is in how well they can do that. It is no surprise that queer spaces which trans women enter and report strong pressures to be morally perfect also serve nutritionally sparse meals, underspiced, undersalted, and incredibly utilitarian. It is no surprise that they serve the suburban white people version of chickpea curry. I want to eat with my hands.
NOT
The internet. The tracked. The online safety act. Discord.
HOT
Preservation. Page. Word. Owning the platform. Samidzats. The floating university.
NOT
Meekness
HOT
I got places to be.
WBJ is sold out for now. I’ll release a few more later, maybe like 10, but genuinely that’s it for issue one for a few years at least. We printed 300 and sold around 270 so far. Well done everyone. Great run. Submit your work for issue two :)
EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 31st, 2026.