The Edge and the Mirror: On Tala Brandeis, Trans Womanhood, and Erotic Truth
Nothing to Prove, Everything to Claim
A zine-style reflection on Tala Brandeis’s 1996 essay “Dyke with a Dick,” trans embodiment, neuroqueer resistance, and the radical power of claiming womanhood on our own terms—then, now, and still.
Introduction
I came across Tala Brandeis’s Dyke with a Dick by accident, if there is such a thing. What I encountered was not just a piece of writing—it was an artefact of truth, handed down like a scorched offering from a world I recognise intimately yet never knew existed. Originally published in 1996, Brandeis’s essay is part personal testimony, part erotic manifesto, part scathing indictment of a culture that still cannot make space for trans women—least of all those who dare to centre desire, agency, and perversion on their own terms.
Reading her words nearly thirty years later felt like being pierced—not by pain, but by recognition. There was no cautious preamble, no polite overture. It begins with sex and doesn’t let go. And yet what lingers most is not the sex but the soul: the unspeakable loneliness of inhabiting a body the world refuses to name correctly, the tender rage of being cast out by those whose liberation one might have fought for, the stubborn joy of still loving, still fucking, still claiming space. The quotes that follow struck something visceral in me—not as decoration or citation, but as echoes of my own experience. This reflection is my attempt to speak back.
Fragments of Recognition
What follows are the quotes that arrested me—lines that lingered long after I’d closed the page, echoes that felt stitched into my own history. In each fragment, I found not just recognition, but revelation. Brandeis wrote these words in a time when the language of trans feminism was still emergent, when support systems were threadbare, and when being a “dyke with a dick” was more likely to get you ostracised than embraced. And yet—her words live. And in these fragments, I speak back.
“To a great degree, female hormones made it possible for me to communicate with the world.”
There’s a deep, aching resonance in this line. I remember reading it and stopping, completely undone. For those who have never experienced the gulf between inner truth and outer legibility, this might read as metaphor. But for me—for many of us—it’s not. It’s chemical. It’s cellular. It’s the difference between silence and voice, between being perceived as incomprehensible noise and finally being heard.
Before HRT, everything I tried to say came out crooked—too loud, too quiet, too intense, too much. My body betrayed the words before they formed. I couldn’t be still enough to be understood, nor animated in the ‘right’ way. And when I did manage to speak, I was almost always misread. Female hormones didn’t erase my struggles, but they restructured the architecture of my expression. I could breathe without bracing. My voice changed a bit, yes—but more than that, the world’s response to me changed. And that shifted everything.
As a gestalt processor, language isn’t a linear tool I wield—it’s something I swim through, touch, taste. After beginning HRT, as you’ll know if you’ve been with me for a while, I found myself more able to access words that had previously eluded me. Emotions stopped clattering into me like freight trains. I could name them, sometimes even in the moment. My communication didn’t just become easier—it became possible.
Brandeis captures this transformation in a single sentence: the way hormones can act not as an escape from the self, but as a portal into it. To communicate with the world is not a given—it’s a miracle born of alignment. And for trans women like us, that miracle often arrives in the form of tiny pills or injections, each dose a step closer to coherence.
“If you make the leap and identify me as female, then, in fact, my genitalia are woman’s genitalia.”
This line sings like heresy in a Calvinist world. It is defiant, sacrilegious to the gatekeepers of flesh, and yet it is precisely correct. Our culture clings to the idea that womanhood can be verified through a checklist of body parts and historical performance. But I will not bend to their dogma. I am not here to pass a purity test drafted by those who would rather I didn’t exist.
At my height—nearly seven feet in my work boots—no one will ever confuse me for a cis woman. No matter how I move, how I dress, how soft my face becomes or how lyrical my voice may sound, the world will always regard me as anomalous. Not woman enough. Not invisible enough. I do not get to slip by unnoticed. And yet, I am no less woman for being noticed wrongly.
The trousers I wear are women’s trousers because I wear them. My tunics, my boots, my glasses, my walk—none of it requires external certification. They become women's clothes through the very act of embodiment. Like Brandeis, I refuse to accept that my body must conform to someone else’s misinformed taxonomy to be real. If you meet me where I am—if you take the leap—then you will find you’ve been in the presence of a woman all along.
And if you can’t? That says everything about you, and nothing about me.
“In fact, no one accepts transsexuals as female, pre- or post surgically. If a transsexual is willing to be castrated, some people may be willing to refer to her as female in her presence.”
This one stings. Not because it’s cruel, but because it’s honest in a way that most people are too cowardly to say aloud. There’s a transactional nature to how womanhood is granted to trans women: perform the pain, sacrifice the parts, and maybe—maybe—you’ll be called what you’ve always been. But the respect comes with conditions. You must be compliant. You must be altered. You must be sterile.
Some trans women do get bottom surgery. Some desperately want it. Others do it because spironolactone becomes intolerable, their bodies unable to cope with the side effects any longer. I won’t fault them. Spiro is bothersome for me too—dry mouth, crashing blood pressure, that endless feeling of imbalance. But even with that, I know this: I won’t pursue surgery. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Not because I doubt my womanhood. But because I’ve lived through the violence of medicalisation before. I was an athlete. My body’s been torn, stitched, and reconstructed more times than I care to count. The thought of voluntarily inviting more surgery into my life feels like opening an old wound and asking it to sing. No thank you.
I don’t need a scalpel to prove I belong. I don’t need to exchange parts of myself for conditional recognition. And I won’t cleave myself to appease the gaze of people who only understand womanhood through absence. My body is not a performance for their peace of mind.
“I was a feminist prior to my decision to come out as female. I developed a feminist consciousness as a result of struggles alongside other women. Living female has given me the gestalt of feminism.”
This one felt like it was written for me. Feminism was not something I adopted after transition—it was the soil I was raised in. I grew up alongside my grandmother, a fierce Scottish woman shaped by the Red Clydeside tradition, a Marxist raised by a Marxist, expelled from Scotland for being too radical even for the radicals. She taught me that the struggle wasn’t abstract—it was in the home, in the wages, in the streets, and in the silences women were forced to swallow. She didn’t just teach feminism. She lived it. And I listened.
Long before I came out, I knew where my allegiances lay. Not with the men who dismissed my difference, nor with the liberal centrists who begged for incremental change. But with women—especially working-class women—who understood what it meant to live with their backs against the wall and still make a world out of nothing. My feminist consciousness didn’t begin when I transitioned. It began many decades ago at the kitchen table, with the sound of my grandmother railing against injustice in a West Highland brogue that could split granite.
But something did shift when I came out. I’d always known the politics. I’d read the books, shouted at the telly, marched in protest. But living female—being gendered by the world, being rendered visible and invisible in equal measure—added a whole new dimensionality to that knowing. It wasn’t intellectual anymore. It was felt. Feminism stopped being a framework and became a full-body knowing—a gestalt. I was no longer just reading history. I was walking through it.
“Strange, the twists in identity one gets into when one steps out on the cutting edge of gender.”
There’s something almost wistful in this line—like a nod to the absurdity and beauty of trying to live honestly in a world that punishes ambiguity. When Brandeis wrote these words in 1996, she was speaking from the edge of something jagged and unwelcoming: the lesbian community didn’t want her, mainstream trans discourse barely existed, and even naming desire in a trans feminine body was a political risk.
It’s nearly thirty years later, and I’d love to say the world has changed. In some ways, it has. We have language now—terms like “transfeminine,” “nonbinary,” “gender expansive.” We have support networks that didn’t exist back then, mutual aid groups, zines passed digitally instead of on photocopied paper. Some of us find community, even if it’s stitched together across time zones and platforms rather than neighbourhoods and drop-in centres.
And yet—the twists remain. The violence remains. The confusion, the erasure, the constant demand to prove you belong somewhere. If anything, the visibility we’ve gained has sharpened the backlash. I’ve stepped out onto the cutting edge of gender, too—and I’ve been sliced by it more than once. Sometimes I wonder if the edge is a place we survive on, or a wound we never stop reopening.
There’s no clean arc. No settled identity. Just movement—spiral, twist, return. Tala’s words remind me that living truthfully isn’t about reaching a final form, but about staying alive in the flux. The edge may not always be kind, but it’s real. And it’s where so many of us find one another.
“Not all transsexual women have strong support systems, especially women-only support systems. There are many lesbian transsexuals for whom there are no support systems.”
This line feels almost prophetic. Written in 1996, it captured a truth that still claws at the margins of our lives: support is not guaranteed—especially not for those of us who live in the interstices, the unsanctioned identities. Lesbian trans women have always occupied a deeply uneasy place in the queer ecosystem, welcomed conditionally, if at all. And whilst some gains have been made since Brandeis wrote those words, we are watching them erode in real time.
Since the election, it has become increasingly dangerous to be openly trans—full stop. But being a lesbian trans woman, in particular, has become a kind of existential threat. Not because of anything intrinsic to our lives, but because of what we symbolise to a world obsessed with preserving boundaries: gender boundaries, sexual boundaries, historical boundaries of who counts and who never did. The backlash has sharpened. The rhetoric has become more violent. The laws more brazen. The silence around us more chilling.
I watch former friends retreat into liberal equivocation. I hear the same tired debates resurface under new language: Who is woman enough? Who gets to speak in women’s spaces? Whose desires are too inconvenient to be respected? I see lesbian spaces buckle under transmisogynist pressure, again, casting women like me to the edges—sometimes politely, more often not.
And when support vanishes, it’s not just about safety. It’s about belonging. It’s about whether your grief will be witnessed, whether your joy will be recognised as real. Brandeis knew what it was to build her own scaffolding, to survive without the net that cis lesbians took for granted. And we still know it. We’re still stitching together community from fragments and hopes, still choosing one another when the world does not.
“Specifically, I was to challenge the lie that anatomy is destiny. Our culture lies to us. Every deviant who has been denied privilege knows this with a certainty. We've been programmed to view different, deviant, as sick, weird, or perverted. We've been taught to view the 'sickness' of difference as needing intervention by mental health, medical and law enforcement professionals. This seems insane to me. Without perverts, there is only creativity, no difference, no ability to see, feel, or hear anything new. Anyone different is by necessity perverted and deviant. Therefore, any thinking people must be deviants, perverts.”
This is the one that made me want to stand up and shout. Not in outrage—but in recognition, in holy deviant celebration. Brandeis understood something that I’ve only come to grasp fully in recent years: that being cast out is not a failure, but a signpost. It means you are touching something true.
I live at the intersection of transness, autism, and queer neurodivergence. And I have watched each of these identities become medicalised, pathologised, turned into codes and criteria in systems that were never built to understand us—only to contain us. The DSM codes my autism as a disorder, my gender as a dysphoria, and grants me “treatment” only if I perform my difference in a way that satisfies its gatekeepers. I have a diagnosis for both—enough, for now, to access hormones and to qualify for accommodations. But I have never forgotten the violence of having to prove myself to systems that doubted I should exist at all.
There is something radical in self-declaration. In saying, I am this, without waiting for permission. That’s what I love about both trans self-identification and autistic self-diagnosis: they queer the entire medical framework. They refuse the diagnostic gaze. They say, “You don’t need to confirm me. I confirm myself.” And in that refusal, there is freedom.
Our culture cannot tolerate difference unless it is neutralised, assimilated, medicalised. But I do not exist to be explained or repaired. I exist to disrupt. To challenge. To bring difference into the room and ask it to stay.
Brandeis names it beautifully: any thinking people must be deviants, perverts. And I’ll wear that with pride.
On Otherness
There’s no escaping the overtly sexual nature of Dyke with a Dick—nor should there be. Tala Brandeis refuses to sanitise her desire, her body, or the politics of her pleasure. The entire piece reads like a radical kind of sex education—one I never received and didn't know I needed until it was already rewriting me.
When I first entered the gender clinic system, I was handed clinical descriptions of what to expect: hormonal effects on genital tissue, delayed orgasm, changes in arousal patterns. It was all spreadsheet language, emotionally barren. Nowhere in those leaflets was the possibility of joy, or hunger, or the strange alchemy of learning to touch yourself in new ways—not just physically, but with recognition. Nowhere was there space for celebration, for the intimacy of awkwardness, or the sheer delight of wanting. Tala gives us that. She gives us sexuality not as something tragic or awkwardly ‘adjusted to’, but as a luminous, messy, fully alive part of womanhood.
She also speaks truthfully—perhaps more than anyone I’ve ever read—about the male gender role. Not just the role as performance, but the embodied power it grants: physical strength, mass, presence. She names it as a “chartered life,” and I understand that deeply. Long before my transition, I had moments when my size and strength had to be used to protect myself or others. What terrified me wasn’t the violence of the world—it was how quickly that same violence could emerge from me, how available it was, how unthinking. My body could become a weapon on demand, and the shame of that capacity still lingers in the hollows of my muscles. I never wanted to be read as dangerous. I never wanted the armour.
In relinquishing the male role, I have not become weak—I have become mine. There is power in softness, in delay, in learning to live in a body that responds slowly, unpredictably, sensually. There is power in pleasure that takes time, in arousal that arrives like weather, in orgasms that unfold like long novels or not at all. Tala’s work doesn’t just inform—it invites. It says: this, too, is a woman’s body. This, too, is erotic. This, too, is allowed.
Final Thoughts …
Tala Brandeis wrote Dyke with a Dick from the core of a community that was itself an act of defiance. The San Francisco leatherdyke scene of the late 20th century wasn’t just subculture—it was resistance, ritual, reclamation. It was a space where desire could become political, where bodies could speak in ways the outside world tried to suppress. I was tangential to that world, drifting through the Bay Area intermittently in those years, orbiting its edges without yet understanding the gravity it held for me. I wish I had found her then.
She was born around the same time as my mother. That fact hit me unexpectedly. I think about the world she inherited, the violence she survived, and the way she carved truth into skin—as a writer, a photographer, and a tattoo artist. And then I think about how easily her name might have been lost. How little our culture has done to preserve the memory of women like her—women too queer, too sexual, too deviant, too honest to be safely archived. That’s why finding her work in The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader felt like discovering a flare in the fog. It wasn’t just a story—it was a life, a testimony, a reminder.
One line of hers stays with me like an ancestral chord: “We all start out female. Men are the modified ones, and it takes a ton of testosterone.” In that truth lies an indictment. Patriarchy is not only violent—it is forgetful. It buries its origins. It mocks the feminine whilst drawing life from it. What rank disrespect, to build an entire order of power atop the thing that made you. Tala knew that. She understood the sacredness of what patriarchy devalues: softness, fluidity, embodiment, erotic truth.
And so I write this as both a tribute and a torch-bearing. Tala Brandeis should be remembered—not just for her courage, not just for her raw, luminous prose, but for the way she held space for women like me to exist before we had words to do so ourselves. This zine-style reflection is my way of keeping that space open, of saying: you were here. You mattered. We see you now. And perhaps someone else—someone younger, someone struggling, someone looking for themselves in the mirror of another’s story—will find Tala’s words and know they are not alone.
Goodbye, Tala. I wish I’d known you. I’m so glad I found your story. And I hope others will, too.