As I was reading Trans Girl Suicide Museum, I would catch myself thinking various things I'd put in a review, once I was done, various things I would say when discussing this book, or recommending it to friends. So I stared a document and jotted these things down, and here they are in no particular order. I'm AFAB, nonbinary, white, and a first generation immigrant whose first language isn't English and who doesn't come from a Western country originally, so these takes are probably at least somewhat a product of all of that. The review is long but this book makes you think long-windedly for a bit. 

1. When confronted by bigots asking me for scientific evidence of something LGBT-related that hasn't been studied in depth (asking me to dissect myself for their amusement) I find myself bringing up the burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft during the Holocaust. We lost a lot of research then, and have been too busy surviving to conduct much since. There isn't adequate funding, and there isn't adequate need, according to conservative institutions, since we are collectively a scam made up by the far left. 

This is why books like this are important. Trans people don't often get to sit and think and write about the human condition - we are too busy working paycheck to paycheck with no familial support, dodging attacks on our identity, and trying to engage in activism and education when all we really want to do is lay down. 

Baer's use of her privilege to write and publish a set of what I'd call (albeit unconventional) philosophical essays on transness deserves to be celebrated. Philosophy is a field largely dominated by cis white men, and this book is a refreshing (and much needed) reminder that there are marginalised people out there capable of the same, and that their understanding of being human is just as worthy of analysis and discussion, even if they haven't had an expensive education, or the means to go on spiritual retreats, or the support of institutions to do their thing. 

2. Though Baer knows that she writes from a position of privilege (being a white rich trans girl with relative familial support), and is largely open about this in her writing, I think the one area she doesn't really realise or acknowledge it is her romanticization of ketamine. I speak as a white trans person too, but also as a first generation immigrant: committing a crime, for me, could mean deportation. Not just arrest, or a fine; my whole future in the country I live in could be over. To throw around phrases like "ketamine made me more trans", thanking the drug, borderline exalting it, feels to me almost irresponsible, an act of this strange pseudo-peer pressure, even if it isn't intended in that way. 

It can be hard, from what I've noticed here in Canada, for Western trans people who aren't immigrants, or poor, or marginalised in other ways, to imagine a life that doesn't contain any recreational drug use or other petty criminal activity, so they talk about it like it's factual, because they and their friends all do drugs. The idea that one could get high every day, as Baer claims she was doing, is impossible to envision for me: I work a 9-5 in a field I do actually care about (and again, losing my job on a work visa could mean deportation in the long run). There's something to be said about finding oneself on the fringes of society and turning to drugs - not because you grew up around them or because you went down a bad path as a kid but because you felt like making that active choice one day, to get drugs - and forgetting that there are further fringes, who can't just go and do that.

I don't know where I was going, with that. The ketamine romanticization threw me off and I feel that it needed to be said, because this book is written with a specific niche of people in mind and it's so weird to me that one can be incredibly versed in the fact that transition doesn't look the same for everyone, and talk about people's different transness experiences so eloquently, and then just forget that not all of us would do drugs. I've seen trans people in queer circles online, in their 20s, call other trans people "losers" for never trying drugs, unironically. It's strange how much less Western white queers are penalised (by institutions and by society) for not having their shit together, for having messy apartments and messy lives and being able to talk about it, not even as a brag, but matter-of-factly. Maybe a part of me is a little jealous of that.

3. The Transness-As-A-Decision narrative isn't popular in modern queer circles, but it's one I feel like more trans people need to critically engage with. Really sit with it. Discomfort is part of growth sometimes, and maybe more of us need to talk to each other about the varied ways in which we experience our transness, and engage with those discussions rather than shutting them down or going to sit in a corner because it made us uncomfortable or dysphoric. The cisheteronormative world already puts pressure on us to conform, and we don't need to be doing that to each other (or ourselves) too. What we all need to do is read some queer theory together. 

4. It's really funny to me how I'm reading other reviews for this book and all of them are sounding a bit like Baer: that stream-of-consciousness, descriptive style that's run-on and yet oddly eloquent. She's transforming our writing a little, y'all. I think that's neat. 

5. There's that meme where on one side it's "discussing gender with trans people" and there's a picture of two Greek philosophers, and then on the other side it's "discussing gender with cis people" and there's a picture of a woman and a baby playing with building blocks. That's what this book felt like, in part.

6. I still don't think I truly understand what the museum is. I have this little mean joke with myself that I'm "too busy for suicidal ideation" - which isn't true, in practice, but it's something I used to say when people asked me how I managed to graduate with honours while working two jobs (so I had money for rent and groceries) on top of my full-time degree. Maybe that's why I don't get it. Or maybe it's because I'm one of the "cis-passing non-bi-
nary people with septum piercings and asymmetrical haircuts" Baer is seemingly frustrated by in parts of the book (though the haircut is more symmetrical than it had been in my teens, and I've had top surgery and been on hormones - see, even now I'm trying to assimilate, albeit with the trans community as opposed to cis people, othering myself from the "shrill" genderqueer people Baer mentions). Maybe that's my suicide museum. What I'm trying to say is that this book is raw in a very distinct and honest way, and it's made me consider the way I approach my own gender identity and the way I present it to others, as well as the way binary trans people look at me, what they think. How much of it is a product of hyperindividualism in a consumerist society. 

TL; DR: go read Trans Girl Suicide Museum. It might make you uncomfortable. That's ok.