While oceans of ink paint trans women as a monstrous threat or pitiable curiosity, trans women themselves have often remained locked out of the publishing world as both writers and presumptive readers — spoken of but not to.

Traditional publishing can flatten the diversity of queer experience as a whole, homogenizing it for the benefit of presumptively cisheterosexual readers — the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey 3.0 reveals that over two-thirds of the industry’s workforce is cisheterosexual white women, and fewer than 1 percent are transgender. “Our stories simply don’t get published,” says M Zakharuk, a fellow author of lesbian fiction, of discussions she’s had with acquiring editors. “It’s quite common to give high-quality lesbian and transfem manuscripts an R&R—that’s ‘revise and resubmit’—and when they resubmit, do it again, and again, hoping the author gives up and you never have to explain yourself.” Some transfem authors may make it through this gauntlet — but in a hostile environment exacerbated by the overall high rates of unemployment, impoverishment, and disownment that trans women experience, it’s a difficult path.

In the face of these institutional barriers, online communities of trans women have turned to a powerful workaround: self-publishing. Online marketplaces have streamlined the process of making a manuscript available for sale — with print-on-demand even allowing authors to sell paper copies — while fandom spaces and informal publishing platforms like Scribble Hub and AO3 enable authors to find their audience or their niche much more easily than in the past.

Alyson Greaves, author of the transfem cult hit The Sisters of Dorley, talks about how crucial cultivating an engaged online audience has been to her success.