The histories of the trans and sex worker rights movements are closely intertwined and, particularly in the UK, it's rare to find a carceral feminist who isn't also a rabid transphobe. What does it mean to write as part of a community that is under attack? Where, in fiction, is the line between exploring harmful ideology and humanising it? In Morbid Obsessions Alison Rumfitt and Frankie Miren explore these questions and talk about the crossover in the ways they chose to approach them in their novels Tell Me I'm Worthless (Cipher Press) and The Service (Influx Press), covering the pornographic interest in sex workers and trans women, online violence, moral panic, creative representation, and paying tribute to sex worker and trans activism through fiction. Frank, funny, and hopeful, and featuring two new stories, an introduction by writer and historian Morgan M. Page, and an interview with Natalia Santana Mendes, Morbid Obsessions is an urgent and vital conversation about making art as collective struggle. All proceeds (after production costs) from the sale of this book will be donated to Babeworld, a collective which seeks to create a more representative art world, and will go into direct grants to marginalised artists.

Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don't Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected. More than two decades after its original release, the film has become a lightning rod for contemporary debates about the representation of trans lives and deaths on screen. Representational possibilities for trans people have changed dramatically since 1999. Morgan Page and Chase Joynt approach the accumulated tension with a spirit of curiosity about the limits of these historical returns. They argue that new visibilities of transness on screen require us to re-engage earlier portrayals: Boys Don't Cry is central to conversations about casting, violence against gender non-conforming people, and the borders between butch and trans identities. Acknowledging a younger generation of queer and trans people who are straining against the images foisted upon them, including this film's egregious violence, and an older cohort for whom it remains a formative, if complicated, touchstone, Joynt and Page revisit the original contexts of production and distribution to unsettle the overdetermined ways the work has been understood and interpreted. Boys Don't Cry ultimately relocates the film in a way that attends to the story's violence and values, both on and off screen.