Trans Central Station

'No, I was not trapped in the wrong body. I was trapped in the wrong universe. In order to become who I was, I had to break the world open.'
Trans Central Station reflects on a trans life lived before the language to name it. In this luminous autobiographical essay, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and tarotist Rachel Pollack moves between personal memory, history, science fiction and myth to consider how words can both restrict and liberate.
From Schrödinger's cat and science-fiction portals to magic, early trans activism and comics, Trans Central Station breaks the world open to 'both completely new and unknowably ancient' possibilities of desire, joy and revelation. Situating trans existence within deep time, Pollack connects modern experience to shamanism and rites of transformation, insisting that trans people have always existed - and have often been understood as sacred figures. In this meditation on freedom - from rigid social structures, from fear and shame, and from history itself - to be trans is proof of ancient and ongoing cosmic power.

Rachel Pollack (1945-2023) melded the literary, the political and the spiritual in her own unique way. An award-winning SF and fantasy author, her many books include Unquenchable Fire, for which she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award. A progressive voice in the transgender community, she created the first transgender superheroine for DC Comics. She is the author of several books about the tarot, including Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. She taught writing at Goddard college in the Masters of Fine Arts program for over a decade.