There are two recurring trans women named Carolina in Sloane Murphy’s short story collection, Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow. One’s nicknamed North, and the other’s nicknamed South, but nobody can seem to keep track of which is which. “Most of the time she just responds when people call her South,” one…
I do sometimes wonder what we’re all going to do if somehow everything works out okay and no-one was planning for that
It feels bleak out there, and Murphy’s stories reflect that atmosphere of cruelty. But they also document a moment when more and more young trans people are taking the plunge, forming real-life communities, making art, and helping each other survive. There’s a push/pull between those two truths in Shut Up, I Love You, and Murphy explores both the power and the limits of caring for each other in a hateful world—the act of holding hands at the bottom of a ditch, to use an image she mentioned at a Q&A in Brooklyn last week. “I kept trying to come back to, ‘Someone should actually believe in the future,’” Murphy told me in August, while I was visiting Chicago.