While the question is not directly asked in the text, multiple disappointments and betrayals are on display, and I pictured Orlando entertaining a question many trans people have asked themselves: “If this implicit gender performance I’ve been providing does not serve my happiness, why not just be myself?”

In What It Takes To Heal, Prentis Hemphill joins the renaissance chorus of voices who are singing us out of the dark ages of pathologizing the impacts of trauma, that age-old and expiring practice of making an individual wrong/bad for having perfectly reasonable responses to the oppressive systems they are tangled with.

Young, confused queers, sympathetic incels, BDSM polyamorists, asexual lesbian-porn directors, empowered exiled teenagers, psychiatrists riddled by their own humanity, non-verbal autistic children and their maxxed-out parents, as well as one dying grandmother take the mic in Frumkin’s work.