Introducing Artemis Press

Artemis Press is a new online literary platform started by a group of trans women from the stolen land referred to as Australia. We began this project upon finding that countless other LGBTQIA+ organisations are lacking in courage and ability to center critical issues faced by trans feminine people, and we decided that this was a gap in the literary and advocacy space that urgently needed addressing.

At Artemis, we understand the rights of trans women underpin the human rights of everyone. We understand that we are represented in every marginalised culture and every type of struggle against the colonial and capitalist system. Because of this, Artemis intends to stand against not just transmisogyny, but against the wider system which forms the foundation of the oppression that affects every human being. As such, we intend to platform and empower voices of transmisogyny affected trans people from all kinds of backgrounds and showcase the stories of as many lived experiences within our community as we can.

We understand that the primary issues affecting trans justice are also shared wider struggles, such as healthcare access, welfare access, housing access, and disability rights, and we want to provide a safe place where trans people can explore these issues freely in relation to our transness. We believe if trans people can speak openly about our lived experiences, knowing that our voices will not be silenced or diluted in the process, then we can prove that trans liberation is not in contradiction with wider human rights. In fact, our shared goals are all inextricably connected.

Our hope is that this will also create a space which can help cultivate a growth of not just trans activism, but trans literature and trans art in general. We know that trans women are often ostracised from and alienated by the various academic, literary and artistic communities, and that these communities fail us by refusing to appreciate the value of our work and by treating our perspectives as niche and performative. This is why we also want to platform trans artists of all kinds and backgrounds, and will endeavour to assist writers with submissions from their conception to print by collaborating and communicating with the people who submit ideas or content to us. We hope that this process will hone the skills of trans artists and produce radical trans art in its highest quality form.

We also hope that by showcasing and promoting trans stories in a variety of different media that we can foster a community through which trans people can easily connect with our own art, and artists themselves might also be able to connect with each other. We have noticed that it is not just people from outside our community that fail to understand the trans feminine experience, we also fail to understand ourselves. We rarely get opportunities to document our communal understanding of our healthcare, our transition timelines, our passions, our relationships, our day to day livelihoods, and much more, and the effects of this can be seen in both cisgender ignorance and community infighting. We aim to be part of the solution.

Our community mindset:

Artemis is an independent community project and we intend it to remain as such. We do not exist for profit, and whilst we do intend to share content on philosophy and science, we recognise that the academic system is a part of the structure of oppression and thus we will remain separate. Our position as a community project means that we see ourselves as members of our audience, not above our audience, and therefore we are constantly open to criticism. We have been deeply flattered with the level of interest our project has gained in such a short space of time both within Australia and abroad and we realise that this is a big undertaking. We are a small group of Gen Z trans femmes from one southern continent and we will make mistakes.

We do not tolerate harassment of our team or contributors. We recognise that trans women are often subjugated to an intense level of scrutiny by both our ideological opponents and by our own peers, but we do want to encourage good faith interactions with anyone who notices flaws in our content or issues we fail to cover properly. We understand that the trans experience is limitless, that there are countless trans women who are in desperate need of platforming, and that representing all of us perfectly is an impossible task. Nonetheless, we believe that any attempt is better than none, especially given we need Artemis now more than ever, and we hope that at the very least our project can inspire many more to follow. We also believe criticism is an act of love, and we are very much making this up as we go along, so any support is greatly appreciated.

Our aim is to make our content as reliable as possible, so therefore we intend to be as open as we can about who we personally are, what our track records are, and what our biases may be. We represent multiple ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic and education backgrounds, and ideologies within the leftist sphere, but even so, we recognise that simulating objectivity with what we publish would be dishonest and so we will not do that. We will instead aim to communicate with our audience not as authority figures, gatekeepers, or pretentious self-indulgent pricks, but as flawed members of the trans femme community ourselves and focusing on the shared realities between our individual existences.

We want to make our content as friendly for all age groups as possible too, but given that trans women are marginalised on the basis of our bodies, gender and sexuality, a substantial amount of our website will be adult-orientated. We recognise that this limits our reach but we believe that being sex-positive, drug-positive and uncensored is the best approach to achieve our wider goals. We believe that representation and discussion of our full lived experiences is crucial for community empowerment and this includes unfiltered discussions about our dating lives, sex lives, experiences with sex work, the violence we experience, and everything in between. We will be mindful that a lot of our content may be confronting, upsetting, triggering, or even invalidating for some our readers, and we do support occasional use of content warnings to promote community safety, but we also believe that censorship is mainly used as a tool to silence marginalised people, that it deradicalises spaces, and that it works against the values we aim to promote.

And while we're on that subject...

Our view on content warnings:

We strongly encourage our readers to prioritise self-care and take responsibility for your own limits when it comes to the content you can engage with and the way it affects you.

We seek Artemis to be an open space for radical trans femme community dialogues of all kinds, from the heartbreaking, depressing, infuriating, thought-provoking, sweet, joyful, cute, gay, sexy, wholesome, funny, insane, and above all else,  the empowering. We plan to feature full unfiltered content from the bleakest corners of our community, as those people deserve to have a platform, but we will never intend to make our readers feel hopeless and defeatist. We will also feature content that inspires us, motivates us, excites us, and enlivens us. 

Likewise, though we know a large portion of our readers may be triggered by content discussing drugs, sex, sex work, relationship abuse, mental illnesses, etc, we recognise the sensitivity of these issues and we will never publish this content for the sheer sake of riling up controversy. We also plan to declare means through which our readers can seek support to the best of our ability so these issues can be normalised within our community.

In general, we believe that safe space culture, language policing, hugboxing, and the “tenderqueer politics” of self-victimisation and competitive oppression has negatively affected progress for queer liberation in a severe way. Artemis is committed to the concept of class liberation as a core component of the liberation of all marginalised communities, and we do not tolerate rainbow capitalism, the corporatisation of our protests and history, or the hyperfocus on shallow identity politics and the narcissism of minor differences. These have contributed to a toxic classist, racist, transmisogynistic, and generally unsafe culture within queer activism as a whole.

Artemis seeks to dismantle the broad perception from outside the queer community that we are against freedom of speech, in denial of reality, incapable of personal growth, and that we seek control over the development of language. None of this is true, and it completely misunderstands what our struggles are and what our ultimate goals are. We do not approve of defamation, prejudice, personal attacks, or misinformation, but we do encourage open and broad discourse, complete representation of facts, science, and philosophy, and content which pushes at social respectabilities and boundaries.

Artemis is on the side of the facts. The facts are that trans people are suffering, that this can be fought against, that trans rights are human rights, and all of this is, at its foundations, a class war. Those are our principles and that is the underpinning of all of our goals.

Our views on transmisogyny:

Artemis uses the terms “TMA” and “TME”, which mean “transmisogyny affected” and “transmisogyny exempt” respectively. These are both terms which enable trans feminine people to describe ourselves in a way that highlights the systemic prejudice that specifically affects us, and which enable us to stand in solidarity with other people who are affected by this prejudice so that we can act against it.

Our decision to focus on transmisogyny, as has been commonly discussed in the past, comes from the view that our voices are particularly silenced and degraded in mainstream discourse. This is not just due to the onslaught of Terfism and wider conservative queerphobia, but also due to the refusal by progressive organisations to consider transmisogyny as a legitimate form of structural oppression as well as TMA people lacking understanding and language to accurately describe their lived experiences. 

Transmisogyny is not just a mixture of transphobia and misogyny, it is a complex structure of oppression that intends to isolate, demean and subjugate trans feminine people. It exists in both wider societies and within queer spaces and affects people differently based on country, presentation, position in society, ability to conform, and many other intersectional factors just like every other type of oppression.

Fleeting and conditional exposure to transmisogyny is not the same thing as experiencing the continual structural impact of it. TMA people are impacted at an extreme level by transmisogyny and it affects every part of our lives and every space we exist in, particularly queer spaces, due to the narcissism of minor differences. The high uptake of queerphobia in the Western mainstream media has primarily targeted and affected trans feminine people, already the most oppressed demographic within the queer community, and we rely on the platforms that serve us to respond and protect us. They have failed us in this regard, both in refusing to adequately allow us the right to respond, but in many ways contributing to the systemic oppression either indirectly or directly. This needs to change.

However, we will not silence or refuse to platform TME voices. We have a central code of values and these revolve around inclusion and opening a full, constant dialogue rather than exclusion. In particular, we understand that trans masculine people have more in common with trans feminine people than what sets us apart, as do trans lesbians with cis lesbians, and trans women of colour with cis women of colour, and that our struggles and goals are aligned. We aim to deconstruct the narcissism of minor differences rather than play up to it. We hope that by extending good faith and sharing these values, that we gain good faith in return.

Final thoughts:

It is also important to keep in mind that because our team is entirely from Australia, our voices will largely be contained here too. We aim to represent a global trans femme experience but this is a limitation of our position and one that we are choosing to embrace. People from Australia are so rarely represented in international publications and our unique experiences need a space to be showcased. This continent was invaded and colonised, sovereignty was never ceded, and the struggle for decolonisation continues. Artemis aims to play a part in that fight, given that transmisogyny is a colonial construct and that we are fighting for liberation from the same colonial system. Trans liberation is First Nations liberation.

You can expect us to source commissions primarily from trans feminine people from this continent, but we are seeking an international readership and international writers as we expand. If you are from abroad, we hope that you understand the situation as it currently is and we hope you will still value our content regardless. 

Regardless of your background, we hope Artemis can teach you something new, deliver in terms of trans femme representation, show you some great boundary-pushing art, and help show you ways you can make a practical difference to our increasingly subjugated world. Our stories and the ways they are told are important to us for many reasons and we hope that will come across. Even today, there is a dire lack of trans femme representation in mainstream media and culture which equates to a lack of knowledge to describe what being trans means. The increasingly visible nature of our community might allow for more people to find us, but it also makes us much more open to attack and censorship.

All of this equates to a period in history in which trans people from all generations are suffering in their own ways, and this needs to change. Let’s create somewhere anyone can go to learn more about trans issues, where trans artists can be regularly platformed, and where closeted trans people can find out how easy it is to be the truest version of themselves.

Artemis is a part of a community, its aim is action, and its goal is liberation. Thank you for reading this, and we hope Artemis represents those qualities for you too.

Love from Natalie, Chloe, Layla, Amy and Arianna <3