By S. Bear Bergman
Paperback : 9781834050607, 2027
 
From legendary storyteller and activist S. Bear Bergman: a remarkable head-to-tail book combining a play and a long essay bridging trans history and trans futures
 
For some thirty years, S. Bear Bergman has been a leading light as a trans storyteller, activist, author, and publisher. In his first narrative book in thirteen years, Bergman explores what it means to be trans at this pivotal moment in history through a unique head-to-tail (tête-bêche) format combining a play with a long essay.
 
The play is The First Jew in Canada, a retrieval of trans history that tells the story of Jacques LaFargue—the first Jew to have arrived in Canada, according to the colonial record, and who was in fact a trans man—through the lens of Bergman's own experiences as a transgender man, a Jew, and an immigrant to Canada. The book elaborates on the play (based on Bergman's popular solo performance), elevating LaFargue to the status of trans ancestor.
 
The long essay is The Fresh End of a Long Thread, about the stories trans people tell about their lives and what they can create as a result—specifically in response to recitations of trans experiences in the mainstream that are simply trauma and misery manufactured for a cisgender gaze. The current brutal wave of anti-trans sentiment has made it harder for trans people to see themselves in the world, but Bergman reasserts the necessity for justice, liberation, and joy in their lives.
 
According to Bergman, trans people's stories make trans people real in the world, and the way they tell these stories shapes not just their experience but others' experience of trans people. Bergman has spent three decades carving out new spaces for queer and trans people on the landscape of people's imagination; his audacious new book is a moment of reckoning with the results of that work and what those results might teach trans people about how to continue.