Juno Roche - Trans Power: Own Your Gender

2019, E-J Scott, English, Glamrou, Josephine Jones, Juno Roche, Kate Bornstein, Travis Alabanza,

Full title: "Trans Power: Own Your Gender" by Juno Roche.

Juno Roche’s Trans Power: Own Your Gender is a rallying cry, a field guide, and a conversation all at once. Rather than treating transness as a bridge from one bank of the gender binary to the other, Roche insists that trans is a place in its own right, a living and liberatory orientation that refuses to be reduced to compliance with anyone else’s rules. The book is written with candor and humour, and that tone is not decoration, it is method. Roche’s way of thinking is led by feeling, and the feeling is expansive, generous, and often very funny, which is why the ideas land with such force.

 

Trans Power is built from intimate dialogues with people who have shifted culture by the force of their art, activism, and presence. Kate Bornstein appears less as a citation than as kin, a companion in the project of loosening the categories that hurt. Travis Alabanza’s insights tie embodiment to performance and to race, asking what it means to be desired or refused in a world that polices every edge. Josephine Jones’s voice brings home the realities Black trans women navigate, and insists on joy as well as survival. Glamrou threads queerness through diasporic and religious experience, while E-J Scott anchors the conversation in memory and archives, a reminder that trans futures depend on how we keep our past. The effect is not a single thesis but a chorus. You hear the seams of disagreement, the different emphases, the different loves, and that difference is the point. If trans is power, it is because trans holds multitudes without demanding a tidy ending.

 

The book lingers, deliberately, on bodies and sex. Roche wrote Queer Sex before this, and you can feel the continuity, the steady refusal to turn desire into a problem to be fixed. There are frank discussions about genitals, about who wants what and why, about the awkwardness and the ecstasy, about being looked at and choosing how to be seen. Because the conversations are so unguarded, readers are invited in without voyeurism, more like being offered a chair and a cup of tea. The rawness that some early readers noticed, the sense that you are in the room, comes from a trust in the reader and a trust in trans people to speak for ourselves. This is also a book about class, about the institutions that sort and grade and gatekeep, about the way race shapes access to safety, care, and visibility. Roche never lets theory float away from the street level where people are trying to pay rent, find love, and get through a day without being hassled. The writing keeps pointing back to a simple, radical proposition, that autonomy is not the same as isolation, that owning your gender is a collective practice made in community.

Critical response has recognised the scope of what Roche is doing. Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, describes Trans Power as a respite and a compendium of maps to a new place, a portal for seekers and makers of liberation. Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions, notes that Roche’s thought and theory are led by feeling, which is why the work is so powerful, and she points out how strong the interview choices are. Christine Burns MBE writes that trans has pupated and emerged in these pages, vibrant and beautiful in our diversity. Activists and writers like Charlie Craggs, Fox Fisher, and Owl each stress how the book’s boldness and breadth make it essential reading, for people trying to understand trans lives and for trans people trying to understand themselves. Early reader responses underline the same themes, that the book is warts-and-all, that it insists trans voices must be heard and seen, and that it leaves you wanting to do something in support. None of this happens in a vacuum.

 

For readers who want to trace Roche’s thinking across time, the 2017 interview on Heroines of My Life is a valuable companion piece, a snapshot of voice and vision that helps illuminate how these ideas grow and travel. The interview is not a source for the opening line above, and that is important, because accurate attribution matters when our conversations are so often distorted. What connects the interview and the book is not a single quotation, it is a sensibility, a way of meeting the reader with warmth, then asking for more courage and more imagination. If Trans Power feels urgent, it is because the context is urgent. The book arrives into a UK and a wider world where trans people are relentlessly litigated in the press and in policy, where access to healthcare, housing, and safety is contested terrain. Roche does not minimise hostility, and still the book refuses to be written as an apology or a plea. It is an offering. It says that despite the noise, we are already living, loving, and creating, and there is space, right now, to be ourselves.

 

Reading Trans Power, you come away with a set of usable ideas. You learn that a life can be made from the ground up, that a body can be a site of pleasure rather than performance for someone else’s rubric, that kinship is a technology for survival, and that laughter is not a luxury, it is proof that we have not been evacuated of joy. You also come away with names, histories, and lines of flight, a sense of how many routes there are to a livable life. The title promises power, and the book delivers, not as dominance, but as possibility. Roche writes toward a future where trans people are not exceptions to be debated, but authors of our own stories. That future is already here in the rooms this book opens, in the tenderness it models, in the stubborn hope it refuses to relinquish. For anyone interested in where gender is going, and for anyone who needs a reminder that liberation is made in conversation, Trans Power offers both a map and an invitation.

Available via Amazon

Photo via Heroines of My Life

 

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