Detransition, Baby

This latest issue of Worms invites readers into a bold and tender exploration of love in all its messy, political, and transformative guises.

Set against the backdrop of state-sanctioned transphobia in the UK and US, ongoing genocide in Gaza, and a litany of global injustices that see us staggering under the weight of collective and personal upheaval, this issue reckons with thinking and writing about love in a time of crisis. How do we take seriously the seemingly frivolous demands of love, devotion, beauty—in all their myriad and sometimes painful forms—when basic needs and rights are stripped away.

Featuring voices from at home and overseas including Shon Faye, Torrey Peters, Melissa Febos, Constance DeJong, Sarah Aziza, Precious Okoyomon, Carmen Maria Machado and Constance Debré, as well as contributions from rising stars in experimental literature, we ask: How can we continue to love someone who refuses to change? Is writing about sex still strange – or have we done and seen it all? What do you do if you fall in love with your sperm donor?

From the resilience and fierce creativity of trans writers, the challenges and ethics of telling love stories that are not our own, to the guts and gristle of motherhood, pet love, age-gap relationships and getting off on poetry, Worms 10 is a testament to the power of writing, and of love, as acts of resistance, reclamation and truth.

FEATURING: Shon Faye, Jackie Ess, Precious Okoyomon, Constance Debré, Melissa Febos, Torrey Peters, Carmen Maria Machado, Sarah Aziza, Constance DeJong, Sophie K Rosa

CONTRIBUTORS: Caitlin Hall, Zara Joan Miller, Devki Panchmatia, Lu Rose Cunningham, Gabrielle Sicam, Aimée Ballinger, Mimi Howard, Enya Ettershank, Sufjan Bile, MK McGrath, Amie Corry, Dizzy Zaba, 2ly (Molly Cranston, Safiye Gray, Hanako Emden, Sophie Florian, Johanna Maierski), Jemima Skala, Fariha Róisín, Summer Moraes

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Minu, Dozie Kanu, Jen Dessinger, Karla Monroe, Sophie Williams, Ellen Stewar

ILLUSTRATORS: Rifke Sadleir, Chloe Sheppard, Charlotte Pelissier, Leomi Sadler

EDITORS: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Clem MacLeod, Arcadia Molinas

DESIGN: Caitlin McLoughlin

“Een thematisch nummer maken over trans*esthetiek riskeert trans*heid meteen als iets aparts te signaleren, als iets wat niet simpelweg kan zijn; hoe stel je ‘gewoon’ een special issue samen?”

Het nummer werd samengesteld door Dagmar Bosma, Hans Demeyer en Sven Van den Bossche.

Met bijdrages van: Ada M. Patterson, Camille Pier, Sven Van den Bossche, Alara Adilow, Nour Helou & Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Mariken Heitman, misha verdonck, Dagmar Bosma, Hans Demeyer, Torrey Peters, Kato Trieu, Valentijn Hoogenkamp, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Lieks Hettinga, Kalib Batta, Kopano Maroga, Hannah Chris Lomans en Nele Buyst.

Après la naissance de sa baby girl, Sophie T. Lvoff tente de faire son come-back dans l’art contemporain. Elle doit se rendre au vernissage de son exposition dans un Kunstverein en Allemagne. Juste avant, elle emmène ses étudiant·es à Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer en Camargue pour prendre des photos de flamants roses et de couchers de soleil mais rien ne se passe comme prévu…

After the birth of her baby girl, Sophie T. Lvoff tries to make her comeback in contemporary art. Before heading to the opening of her exhibition at a Kunstverein in Germany, she takes her students to Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer in the Camargue to photograph flamingos and sunsets, but nothing goes as planned…

A manicure would be a good thing to do for her international comeback, but perhaps that could happen in Munich later.
(I'm Back, Baby!)

Carie, comme le trou qu’on bouche au plomb, est une collection de textes courts et moyens qui se glissent dans la poche. Chaque livre (la dent) de la collection (la bouche) est troué (la carie) et cerclé d’un œillet métallique (le plombage).

Carie, like the hole filled with lead, is a collection of short and medium-length texts that slip into the pocket. Each book (the tooth) in the collection (the mouth) is holed (the cavity) and circled with a metal eyelet (the filling).

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation.

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

"This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name."—Anna Zett

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.

Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .

After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.

With an introduction by Colm Tóibín

Flawless comic timing. —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

All Lynn’s phobias, aversions and hang-ups make her exaggerated but real . . . The great triumph of this novel is that DeLynn has captured the way adolescents felt, talked, and behaved during the early 1960s. —San Francisco Chronicle

A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness. —Reba Maybury