Real Girls' Talk: Transfeminine Precarity Across U.S. Places and Spaces, 2024-2025

Trans women are women, so why does their womanhood seem to be under such constant dispute?

Why hasn't feminist struggle yet afforded trans women relief from the abuses of patriarchy?

If trans women are women, what does that mean for patriarchal society-- that someone endowed with patriarchal citizenship would choose another path?

Through data, narrative, and trans women's words, Real Girls' Talk definitively demonstrates trans women's precarity.  Precarity- a term used in social science to describe a specific economic condition- is used in this book as the opening act to a research study that can crack the ascendance of patriarchy itself.

Real Girls' Talk goes over interviews with trans women in the United States in the first half of 2025, as well as the results of a quantitative survey with over 100 trans women from across the US. Artemis discusses their fears, their joys, and the challenges they face. This book is the final product of an original research project that took 18 months to complete - using the radical but simple methodology of "ask trans women about their lives and believe them.

A professor once told me that "Precarity only applies to migrant populations", and challenged my desire to understand transfeminine precarity by claiming it couldn't possibly exist.

That professor was wrong.

Praise from advance readers:

"'Real Girl's Talk' is the first book of its kind to bring quantitative analysis to the study of trans people.  It was written from the ground up to understand the struggles we are going through."

"Weaving together personal narratives and cold hard data, Artemis weaves a compelling and tragic narrative of transfeminine precarity, transfeminine alienation and transfeminine loss, driving towards a single, simple in statement but tremendous in implication - society must change, or be changed, to overturn the social hierarchies and political structures which keep transfeminine people as second class citizens."

About the Author:

"Artemis T. Douglas, a transfeminist scholar and journalist– both expert in news and adept in social sciences research, reveals the risks, harms, and unsafety trans women face in the US using trans women's own words. Combining real women's words with hard, empirical data, Artemis shows the world what precarity is for trans women– and makes an argument about how to undo it."