We may seem to be in a golden age of trans books, with novels like Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater earning mainstream acclaim—but the reality of trans inclusion in media and publishing is considerably more fraught. Many trans writers still struggle to get published or paid fairly for their work, while books written by or featuring trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming individuals are being banned around the country.
It’s why Girl Dad Press, a new project from culture writer Niko Stratis and Gender Reveal podcast host Tuck Woodstock, feels so welcome at such a repressive moment. Girl Dad’s ethos revolves around allowing its authors and artists to shine in ways that don’t cater to a cis audience (to wit, the press grew out of a Lambda Literary Award-winning zine dedicated to trans readings of the Fast & Furious film franchise), but its founders aren’t here to create any kind of clichéd “trans savior” narrative. This week, Vogue spoke to Stratis and Woodstock about what they’re up to. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: What made you feel like the time was right in publishing for Girl Dad?
Tuck Woodstock: I don’t know that it has anything to do with the state of publishing. I mean, we didn’t get into this because the economic forces seemed good. [Laughs.] We made a book as a joke last year that did surprisingly well, and then won an award, and that got us really excited about the potential of not only reprinting that book, but also making more little books that potentially also start as jokes and grow into something big and fun that thousands of people can enjoy. Also, just speaking for myself, the projects that I’m the most excited about that queer and trans people make are often not projects that are easy sells to the Big Five publishers, and it just felt like there was a lot of space for more weird, freaky, queer, trans projects. But it’s not because we think it will make a ton of money in the lucrative field of independent publishing.
Niko Stratis: I remember writing about the show Jackass for Bitch magazine back when we still had a Bitch magazine. I had talked about it as, like, “Jackass is this thing that speaks to me in a trans way.” And most people were like, “That’s ridiculous.” The editorial staff at Bitch, though, were like, “Could you do this for us?” So I wrote that essay, and it went really well, and I was kind of like, how do I turn this into something bigger? When I got asked about wanting to write a book, though, everybody was like, “Well, we really want your transition memoir.” But I didn’t really want to have to do all that stuff. I wanted to write about this silly, dumb stuff that I think is an integral part of me, but I am aware that that’s a harder sell. So, like, how do you do that in a publishing environment that is very much, like, If you’re not first, you’re last?
Can you tell me a little bit about Girl Dad’s first project, the 2 Trans 2 Furious zine?
NS: Again, I feel like we’re leaning back into the “It was a bit that we saw through to the end” vibe, but we had been talking about how funny it would be to do an all-trans thing about the Fast & Furious movies, and we just never said no.
TW: Niko, [writer] Gretchen Felker-Martin, and a few other people were were all tweeting about Fast & Furious in the lead-up to the tenth movie, and many of them had never seen it before. I was watching all of these fun trans girlies talk about this franchise I had just watched over the course of the pandemic with my roommates for the first time, and I was like, if everyone’s talking about this at once, then what if we made a little classic, 20-page zine with everyone’s thoughts together, and then we put out a call for submissions, and got 60-something submissions, 40-ish of which are in the book? And then we were like, oh, this is a 160-page book, this isn’t a zine from Kinkos. Again, we never said no; we just were like, well, now it’s a book. We’re going to learn how to publish a book. We’re going to learn how to distribute a book. We’re going to learn how to do a layout of a book in InDesign. It was just really learning as we went and asking people around us, What do we do next? Which we’re still doing. LittlePuss Press has been really, really generous about mentoring us, and AK Press and Metonymy and Literary Disco have all been really generous about telling us what to do.
We put together this collection of everything from serious personal essays about transition or trans embodiment or grief or loss, as well as silly essays about, Oh, I live on a block where they filmed a scene from one of the movies. Let me tell you about that. Or, I’m a derby driver, let me tell you my thoughts on the Fast and the Furious derby race, or many different kinds of poetry and illustrations. There are a lot of interactive things, like tabletop role-playing games, bingo cards, and a 2 Trans 2 Furious name generator, which has been a huge hit. I know several people who are now using their name-generator name as either their Instagram handle or their Zoom name, and none of these are people that I knew personally. They just sent them to me. Honestly, it was more fun to think about this silly little project that we were building together than it was to think about the rest of our lives and the state of the world.
NS: Then the Lambda Awards happened, and again, we were like, wouldn’t it be fun if we won? I didn’t make it down, partially because we looked at everyone we were up against and were like, they’re all serious and we’re literally about the Fast & Furious movies. There’s no way. Then we won, and Tuck gave a great speech onstage; I was so enamored with it when I watched it, and was like, okay, so there’s an appetite for this kind of thing. That really spurred us to make it so that more people could get the zine in bookstores, and then we started talking about: Should we make a real press? Should we do more stuff in this vein that feels like we’re allowing trans folks specifically to make art about the things they love, in a way that maybe isn’t Big Five-ready, or whatever, but it has an audience and there’s a desire to read it? If not us, then who?
TW: I interviewed [writer] Casey Plett on Gender Reveal, and I asked her about what she saw the future of trans literature being, and she said something about how she felt the future was actually trans people getting involved in publishing. And I was like, “Ah, yes, seize the means of production.” I do think that put a spark in my brain somewhere, just hearing her say that, and she’s been so helpful.
You both know the worlds of indie media and self-created publishing well; are there any lessons for Girl Dad that you’re taking away from prior experiences?
NS: Don’t sell out to VC funding and disappear off the internet within six months. [Laughs.]
TW: For me, most of my jobs are the type where, instead of having one boss that gives me, you know, a salary and health insurance, I just have a lot of other queer and trans people who each agree to give me $5 to $20 to make a little art. That’s how I go about most things, and this is just another extension of that. But because community is such an important part of the way that I do my work, I do feel like I’ve thought a lot already about equitable pay structures in a context in which there is scarcity and nobody has quite enough to go around. How can we do this in a way that feels fair? How do we continue to support each other?
Something that I’m really proud of with 2 Trans 2 Furious is that every contributor got paid, I believe, $240, which is pretty good when you consider that the maximum word count was 1,200 and some of the pieces are, like, 25 words long, which means that they got paid almost $10 a word. It’s not like we’re rolling in dough and can pay everyone as much as we want, or pay ourselves as much as we want, but it is something that I’m carrying forward. How do we take a portion of this and donate it somewhere, or put it into mutual aid? How do we get at least a couple hundred bucks for all of these queer and trans people who could use it?
NS: Something I find very inspiring about working with Tuck is that we talk a lot about a sense of community-building and equity, and when we started talking about it, Tuck asked me, “Can we continue to donate a portion of the money or do mutual aid?” That’s one thing I really like that happens with Gender Reveal, and I was just like, “Of course I want that to happen here, because it feels very in line with the spirit of the project.” It’s not here to make money or be part of a larger empire. It’s here to be very clear about what its intentions are and what is happening with the money that gets brought into it.We are here to allow trans people to have a voice in ways that feel real to them at a time when that feels harder than ever to attain.
