I’m adding “NECESSARY” to the badges this paperback wears on its cover. 

Between Queers, this book is a necessary cathartic cry with a friend who gets it. Comforting. Loving. A cool drink of water or a cup of hot tea. Being seen. 

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.