Hey fam, it's me, Amara.

Welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives.

Well, sci-fi and fantasy have always been places of possibility with a long history of gender expansiveness.

From Star Trek to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, speculative fiction allows us to reimagine ourselves

and the world beyond the limitations of reality.

But as we've learned from the saga of J.K. Rowling, hold the booze. These genres are not without their complications.

And so this week I am so glad to be talking with someone whose work takes a look at magic,

technology, and queer fiction. Author A.E. Osworth. These characters I really set out to

write as people right now and as my community right now.

And to me, like, the sort of hope for the future is therefore happening right now.

But before we get to the otherworldly conversation, let's start out as always with some trans joy.

Thank you. conversation, let's start out as always with some trans joy. Sci-fi and fantasy have long offered portals to other worlds and trans writers like cat fitzpatrick are making sure that those worlds are built by and for trans people cat is the award-winning author of

the callout and glamorpus and a co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology,

meanwhile elsewhere, science fiction and fantasy from transgender writers.

And that's not all.

She's also the editrix of Little Puss Press, a feminist press run by trans women

and the director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Rutgers

University, Newark. Here's Kat to tell us more.

So the thing that we actually started that press, Littlepuss Press, to publish was a book

called Meanwhile Elsewhere, Science Fiction and Fantasy from transgender writers, which at the time

that we did it, I think, was kind of the first anthology of scipire and fantasy just by trans writers. I mean, a lot of mainstream science fiction and fantasy is very kind of adventure novel, very kind of like, we save the universe or whatever. And I feel like a lot of the stuff we got was less about we save the universe and more about like survival. And I think those questions about like, what does it mean to survive? What does it mean to eke out of space? What does it mean to produce small victories? What does it mean to like build community and find ways to love each other? I think a lot of that continues to be really highly relevant in our current moment. And so this remains a book that I think I certainly have a lot of love for, and that I think a lot of other people have a lot of positive feelings towards.

Kat Fitzpatrick, you are TransJoy.

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