“Corset, Shame, and Cat Ears: On Transfemininity” by J. Szpilka is one of those rare books that reshapes the conversation about trans lives without asking for pity or applause. It refuses to be another elegy about violence or another manifesto pleading for respect. Instead, it insists on life, messy, sensual, awkward, intellectual, and sometimes hilarious life. Szpilka’s book is a kind of reclamation, a way of saying that transfemininity does not need to justify itself through pain. It exists, it shines, it plays video games, reads theory, shops for corsets, listens to music, and dreams of better worlds.
Szpilka weaves a deeply personal yet sharply analytical narrative that draws from feminist theory, pop culture, erotic fantasy, and lived experience. There are traces of growing up in front of computer screens, of navigating shame and pleasure, and of learning to inhabit a trans life with tenderness rather than apology. The book’s rhythm moves between theory and confession, between citation and emotion. It is part essay, part love letter, part resistance text. Szpilka does not simply talk about transfemininity as a category; she performs it on the page, with all its contradictions intact. Her writing feels like an invitation to witness the texture of being trans rather than a demand to understand it.
The author’s refusal to universalize is one of the book’s greatest strengths. She does not attempt to speak for all trans women, nor does she frame her perspective as definitive. From the very beginning, she acknowledges that her “point of view is a point, not the whole.” That modesty gives the text an unusual kind of authority. It feels grounded, precise, and humane. In a publishing landscape where “queer books” often market themselves through a mix of trauma and moral urgency, Szpilka’s essay dares to be small and exact. It does not shout; it whispers, but in a way that lingers long after you close it.
Szpilka also reclaims feminist history for trans women in a surprisingly compassionate way. She revisits radical feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Janice Raymond, not to cancel them or rehabilitate them, but to read them with complexity. She writes about the paradox of loving feminist theory even when it rejects you, calling it “cruel feminism,” something closer to longing than to logic. There’s a tragic beauty in that observation: trans women have often internalized feminist ideals that exclude them, yet continue to find in feminism a language for freedom. Szpilka captures that contradiction with the melancholy of someone who knows both rejection and admiration too well.
Her discussion of the corset becomes an unexpected centerpiece. Visiting a corset maker, she reflects on how objects once seen as oppressive, tight, restricting, ornamental, can transform into symbols of affirmation and identity. The corset becomes not a cage, but a choice, a way of shaping the self, both literally and metaphorically. For trans women, that transformation carries a special weight: to embody femininity is to navigate a minefield of expectations. Szpilka asks a haunting question, what if being a woman sometimes means embracing everything feminism once taught us to reject? She doesn’t answer it, because there is no easy answer, but she holds the tension with grace.
The book’s intellectual generosity extends beyond Poland. Szpilka introduces readers to the works of American trans feminists, often untranslated or barely known in Polish. She references figures like Emma Heaney and Finn Mackay, building bridges between Polish and international conversations. Her curation is meticulous but never showy; she cites with care, not vanity. That restraint makes her work feel intimate even when it dives into theory. You sense a writer who reads not to display erudition but to survive, to make sense of her own becoming.
“Corset, Shame, and Cat Ears” also benefits from its publication by Wydawnictwo Czarne, a house known for its high literary standards and wide reach. That visibility matters, because Szpilka’s essay deserves an audience beyond academic or activist circles. It is both personal and political, but not in the usual declarative sense. It is political precisely because it insists on subtlety, on the right to be minor, particular, and untranslatable. It reminds us that trans lives are not symbols or slogans, but intricate constellations of desire, imagination, and contradiction.
Szpilka writes about shopping trips, surgical decisions, and the strange delight of inhabiting “cat ears” as a marker of playful femininity. She gives space to trans nerds and gamers, to fantasies that might seem trivial but are deeply real to those who live them. That attention to the ordinary is radical in itself. By describing the details of a trans woman’s daily life without apology, she restores beauty to what has too often been framed as pathology.
What makes the book so moving is its quiet defiance. It refuses to let transfemininity be flattened into an academic topic or an activist slogan. Instead, Szpilka’s essay feels like a small rebellion against simplification. It belongs to that rare kind of writing that does not seek to represent but to resonate. The reader does not come away feeling they have “learned about” trans women; they come away feeling they have been invited into a conversation about beauty, shame, and the strange courage of becoming oneself.
At the end, Szpilka leaves the reader with a sense of intimacy rather than triumph. The book is small, almost delicate. Its cover shows a plush shark, its dedication goes “to the doggies,” and its tone hovers between irony and affection. Yet inside, there is something fierce, a quiet manifesto written in lowercase. It reminds us that the future of queer writing does not lie in louder declarations of importance, but in smaller, more precise articulations of life. “Corset, Shame, and Cat Ears” is not a cry for recognition. It is a sigh of existence, tender and sharp, teaching us to see transfemininity not as an argument, but as an art.
Available via czarne.com.pl
and artpapier.com
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