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.
