Resilience

The Resilience Anthology is a collection of poetry, essays, and short stories sourced and curated by American writer, educator, and activist Amy Heart. The book includes work from thirty-two writers, each of whom identifies as transgender. The writers address a broad range of topics related to their struggles as transgender people in a society that considers them aberrant. Their writings illuminate the capaciousness of trans identity, which intersects with virtually every other aspect of identity, from disability, race, interpersonal relationships, sexual health, and law. It also gives its readers a crash course in some of the nuances of transgender bodies and sexualities.

In her preface to The Resilience Anthology, Heart states that the mission of the collection is to illuminate the many ways in which trans people struggle to stay alive. She asserts that the trans community depends on the voices of its own members, as well as their allies, to enact social and political progress. An explicit intention of the book is to acknowledge that these members come from virtually every walk of life. Heart places special emphasis on including the voices of transgender youth, as well as non-binary people, and people who were assigned male at birth, or “AMAB,” but do not identify with their medical classification.

The anthology includes non-white trans writers and writers who belong outside the middle class and academia. Many of the stories touch on the unfortunate fact that transphobia (including transmisogyny), racism, and other forms of systemic oppression prevent the full spectrum of trans identity from being represented even in liberal environments. The book’s theme of resilience saturates every story, essay, and poem. All of the trans writers acknowledge that society routinely dismisses their legitimacy, rejects them from social life, and discredits their ability to perform roles in the workforce, artistic world, romantic world; even, to become parents. They challenge the notion that transgender women are unnatural just because they are rare and defy normative social categories. In fact, this regressive view of transgender people is based in a long legacy of mistruths about masculinity, femininity, and gender that have only recently begun to be corrected with political action and progressive theoretical frameworks. Many of the stories acknowledge the sad reality that it might take humanity just as much time to unlearn these mistruths as it took to learn them.



Though the book constitutes an attempt to be as politically progressive and radically accepting as possible, the writers in The Resilience Anthology acknowledge that no one is exempt from the danger of reinforcing systemic oppression. Heart’s collection suggests that this imperfection is a source of power more than it is a liability. If the majority of individuals began to accept that no single person’s version of reality is truest, or most complete, we would make faster strides towards obtaining social acceptance and legal equality. The Resilience Anthology is an artifact aimed to bring the voices of trans people into public life, and to inspire tolerance and self-acceptance in future generations.