Since the publication of Cameron Awkward-Rich's The Terrible We in late 2022, much of the trans discourse has shifted in the United States, and simultaneously much has also remained the same. Trans-antagonism continues to haunt the United States, which is particularly clear in 2025, with the second iteration of Trump's administration actively targeting trans communities through legislative measures that combat “gender ideology.”1 Despite my personal embodiments of fear and existential dread as I reflect on this ongoing haunting as a transfemme scholar, it is in this very moment that The Terrible We challenges me to sit with these feelings to potentially uncover new ways of knowing, being, and experiencing the world.In this book, Awkward-Rich intervenes at a critical juncture in trans2 studies and thought, offering an expansive genealogy of the two within the US context. Awkward-Rich's genealogy offers important context to help readers understand ongoing tensions within the academic discipline of trans studies and how those tensions are also reflected in trans communities. Drawing from Awkward-Rich's affinity to disability studies, The Terrible We both illustrates and models what it would mean for trans thought to think “with, rather than against . . . trans maladjustment” (4). As a central framework for the text, he refers to trans maladjustment as “the tight, durable association between trans identity and particular bad feelings and mad habits of thought that show up again and again in transphobic and trans-affirmative discourse alike” (6). It is through this framework that Awkward-Rich navigates the transmasculine3 archive in an artful, intentional way that challenges his audience to interrogate and sit with the path less traveled.Reflective of both Awkward-Rich's background as a poet and training at Stanford University's Modern Thought and Literature PhD program, The Terrible We takes on the form of an academic monograph, where he leans into a metacritique of trans studies and its academic formations while doing so in a poetic, literary fashion. In addition to the book's introduction and four chapters, he includes an interlude between chapters 1 and 2, and in lieu of a traditional conclusion, he ends with an afterward/elegy to reflect on both the limits and implications of thinking through trans maladjustment. This synthesis of both academic prose and trans poetics affords Awkward-Rich an audience beyond the academy. By no means does this indicate that the book's theoretical work was oriented for general audiences, but rather, I find that Awkward-Rich positions The Terrible We as a foundational text for anyone looking to find an entry point into the academic field of trans studies and thought. To this end, The Terrible We delivers, and I find that its limitations are outweighed by the generative potential that Awkward-Rich provides through his analyses in each chapter.The introduction and chapter 1 introduce key historical contexts and theoretical grounding that serve to justify Awkward-Rich's choice to focus on trans maladjustment in this work. It should be noted that the introduction includes a justification on his choice of texts for his reading of the transmasculine archive, where he acknowledges focusing on “well-worn (read: white, transsexual) texts, cases, and debates” (25). Awkward-Rich offers a unique contribution through his sharp analyses of these popular and dominant texts, emphasizing his decision to (re)read the trans archive through an intentional turn toward the “bad feelings and mad habits” that constitute the creation, maintenance, and even annihilation of transmasculine subjectivities, “terrible though it might feel” (16). Rather than choosing texts because of their prevalence in the field, Awkward-Rich's intentionality plays a crucial role in his (re)construction of the trans archive, opening the door for further critique and analysis of taken-for-granted texts.Central to the book lie the author's arguments in chapter 1, delineating “trans” and “disabled” as identities that were concurrently constructed in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. He juxtaposes newspaper representations of transmasculine figures—including Evelyn “Jackie” Bross, Milton Matson, and Jack Bee Garland—to the creation of laws which both explicitly and implicitly targeted both trans people and people with disabilities, such as Chicago's cross-dressing ordinance in 1851 and subsequent “ugly law” in 1881. Awkward-Rich's choice to attend to trans maladjustment throughout this book manifests clearly when he discusses the case of Jack Bee Garland and their deployment of “disability drag” and “crip time” (49) to reimagine a new subjectivity beyond the laws that condemned both trans and crip bodies to a particular social death.In the book's interlude, “Holding Space,” Awkward-Rich offers a transition between the book's historicizing of trans maladjustment and the remainder of his theoretical interventions in the chapters to follow. He highlights a tension by contrasting trans methodological approaches to disability in Dylan Scholinski's 2013 installation, 72 Hour Hold, and Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfections. This interlude serves to also further clarify the scope of The Terrible We, where Awkward-Rich explains that “the book is not a disability studies approach to transness, nor is it a book about the overlapping experiences of transness and disability/madness . . . . Rather, it is a book that attempts to hold on to certain tools from disability studies . . . in order to open trans studies itself to different critical protocols” (65). This disclosure is central to Awkward-Rich's primary objective of rethinking trans studies and thought as he moves forward to discuss his examples of maladjustment in the remaining chapters, including the depressed transsexual in chapter 2, dissociation in chapter 3, and the trans recluse in chapter 4.Chapter 2 centers the conflict between trans and feminist studies, where Awkward-Rich critiques the drive from both trans and feminist thinkers to advance an “integrated theory of gender that is undermined by the political desires of each” (67–68). This chapter directly builds on the affinities across transness and disability advanced in chapter 1 by interrogating texts that highlight “trans” and “feminism” as incompatible. He centers these conversations around the depressed transsexual and whether they are someone to be cured (of their transsexuality) or someone to be affirmed (disavowing their depression). Important to not only his theorizing around trans maladjustment, but also for The Terrible We to model a form of trans critique that sits with maladjustment, Awkward-Rich refuses to use depression in this chapter as a metaphor to describe trans life, “but rather a set of habits of thought and feeling that are endemic to it” (74).Chapter 3 continues this analysis of maladjustment through an affective reading of dissociative trans masc poetics. Through this chapter's analyses, Awkward-Rich foregrounds the psychic consequences that arise from the “hard-to-discuss centrality of forms of feminized harm . . . and the centrality of transmasculinity to academic skirmishes around establishing the domains of queer and feminist thought” (93). Compared to the first two chapters, chapter 3 piqued my desire to further explore the implications surrounding trans maladjustment. Awkward-Rich acknowledges that “dissociation is not necessarily a livable position in the long term, though at the same time it must be” (99). Up to this point, I kept up with the book's grounding in trans maladjustment; however, this acknowledgement of “the long term” pointed me toward the material implications (i.e., the possibility and practicality) of living with maladjustment, especially given the worsening climate surrounding trans livelihood. More than halfway through The Terrible We, I was left with a feeling of discomfort as this shadow loomed behind me: a shadow which held the precarity that accompanies living with a fractured, trans subjectivity. Perhaps this was an intentional organization strategy from Awkward-Rich to allow his readers to also sit with these “bad feelings,” yet the intention was unclear, even after the book's concluding elegy.Awkward-Rich proceeds in chapter 4 to read asociality through the trans recluse. Tying together each of the previous chapters, Awkward-Rich identifies three models—“the wrong-body model, the gender-freedom model, and the queer-trans model” (120)—that constitute the affirming logics that advanced the disavowal of maladjustment from early trans thought. To counter each of these models, Awkward-Rich advances an asocial “common trans style of reading” (125) that transcends these affirming logics by acknowledging the “alone-ness” of transness. Through the act of reading and building relationalities (e.g., reading trans autobiographies, fictional characters), those who engage in this practice simultaneously produce relationalities within a trans world, a world that is constituted alone, and yet, with others. Although I appreciate the last set of analyses that Awkward-Rich provides in chapter 4, I am left with more questions than I had started. For example: What does “trans reading” mean for those who are unable to read or do not have access to trans reading materials? How does this reading of trans maladjustment ex/include Indigenous ways of knowing, ways of being, and other conceptions of gender that have existed long before the creation of the term “trans?”The Terrible We illustrates—through a combination of metacritique, close reading, and moments of self-reflection—the possibilities of trans critique that lie with maladjustment, the “bad feelings and mad habits” that appear again and again throughout both trans-affirmative and trans-antagonistic discourses. Although I harbor some hesitation when reflecting on the limitations of trans futurities explored in chapter 4, I would recommend this book to anyone who is not only interested in trans studies, but also anyone who is interested in what it means to thoroughly interrogate and be critical of the archives, to leave no stone unturned, and to take nothing for granted. As Awkward-Rich demonstrated, there is much to be found, even within the texts most thoroughly interrogated.
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