Takeaways from running a trans reading group

reading groups for either very new or very familiar experiences

In my final year at university I ran a trans reading group with my friend Leo. I had stepped back from organising more professional student groups, and wanted a year to do more normal university student things, such as reading a bunch of theory and arguing about it. It was a wonderful time.

Surprisingly few lessons from running an AI safety group generalised to our trans reading group, besides the basics (publicise what you're doing somewhere, try to bring snacks). Here are some things I learnt.

Prelude: how our reading group worked

Usually, Leo would pick the readings and a theme for the week, I'd pester them to add some particular text, they'd relent and do so, and then I'd publicise the group. I did this by going where our target audience was: Twitter. I also made some fairly ugly graphics in Canva with the readings on them. The graphics weren't intentionally ugly, I'm just bad at using Canva.

We ended up having some traction on departmental mailing lists and so on, which was a very nice surprise, given that I didn't reach out to any of them. I think part of this was due to the audience we were attracting: postgrad humanities students love reading and talking much more than undergraduate CS students. A large part of the credit here, though, should go to Leo, for their curation/text selection. I think we managed to fill a niche — interesting, accessible, texts on topics many people wanted to talk about, and where there was no natural alternative place to discuss them — and I'm thrilled it resonated with people accordingly!

If there's any lesson to extract here, I guess it's that taste matters.

Having legibly exciting themes matters more than just having exciting themes

Our biggest/coolest weeks (imo) were ones where we had a cohesive, provocative collection of texts.

• In week 1, we launched by pairing "On Liking Women" with "On Hating Men", which was both an excellent bit and useful to discuss in parallel.

• In week 2, we ran "egg theory", which got us record high turnout, and some of my favourite conversations.

It was important for themes to be both legible and interesting. For example, the week I was most excited about was week 2 of CYBORG FORTNIGHT, which was a beautiful jumble of seemingly unrelated artefacts. There is a theme there, I maintain, but it was much less obvious (and less in-demand) than egg theory. I think we'd have had greater engagement if we ran just one cyborg week, with two obviously related works max. When I write it out this feels like a truism, but there you go.

Being legibly exciting might be in tension with my other takeaway, that reading groups are a great way to get your friends to read something you're always on about. Maybe the synthesis is "try to write a 1-2 catchy hook, if that thing you're always on about is kind of obscure" — I'm reminded of this tweet:

People don't reliably do the reading...

You can link all the free PDFs you want. Mostly, people will do the reading only if they already feel like it, or they'll come chat about something similar they read six months ago, or that thing that happened to them last weekend.

However:

... and that's fine

Ultimately, I had the most fun on (and maybe got the most out of?) the weeks where basically nobody did the reading, but everyone wanted to talk about the topic.

This probably depends a lot on the group composition. Maybe the real lesson here is "filter hard by your choice of subject/aesthetics/outreach method, and then it doesn't matter what the nominal pre-reading for the group is".

This was one of the most surprising takeaways for me. I'd approached the group with a scepticism borne from frustration with previous experiences about readingless discussions. Here, the disanalogy (to other reading groups, university tutorials) was probably who was coming, and what we were talking about. Unlike at university, I think here people were pretty much always interested in thinking carefully and collaboratively about the topics. For weeks where we had a clear, cohesive theme, this meant that discussions tended to be fruitful, even without much steering (from engagement with the texts, or leading prompts from Leo and me).

I think that having a vibe of "doing the reading is optional, but everyone here will care about the topics" can also help with things like having a nice community, or being open/inviting to many kinds of people, or changing your mind easily. These were all things I cared about and felt like I got for free this way.

Unfortunately, vibes are king

The vibes of our group were made much worse by being in an pretty bad room — weird shape, not much air or natural light, made kind of deliberately uncozy by the college.

I recommend trying hard to secure a space with >1 window, nice lighting (or just throw up some warm yellow fairy lights), and ideally fairly cosy seating/nooks/low ceilings/some quiet background noise. I sometimes forget I am a person in a body who has sensory experiences, and not just a mind with a carrier — maybe a good heuristic for people like me is "spend ~20% of the time/energy you spend on curriculum/themes on environment and aesthetics".

Running a reading group on a topic you know nothing about is a great way to learn about that topic

If you run the reading group, you have to show up. You have to want to discuss, which means at minimum coming up with interesting questions and ideally having actually read the damn thing yourself. You also have to have opinions you're happy to share, which often requires sustained, careful engagement with the ideas you're discussing.

I knew very little about trans theory before this reading group. I liked ALC's work a lot (and still do, but for different reasons), and porpentine was a hero of mine (still is, for the same reasons). I now know at least some things about an academic discipline/method of enquiry very different to the one I was trained in, and I'm glad for this.

Setting up a reading group is a great excuse to hang out with your friends and talk about whatever you want

I was pretty deliberately trying not to make this reading group a whole big thing. I didn't want to be obliged to organise it well; I didn't want to have to deal with a ton of logistics; I didn't want any kind of professional presence; I didn't want to cold email. I wanted to brainstorm some fun articles I had read recently, buy some snacks, and chat and argue and learn things with the people I loved for a few hours. If you caught me off-guard, I'd probably admit that this group was a thinly veiled attempt to make my friends play some games by porpentine.

What surprised me, then, is how well this model worked. Basically regardless of turnout — whether a gaggle of masters students and interested strangers showed up, or whether it was just my friends and I on the lawn — and regardless of actual reading done, the groups were reliably a great place to talk. We'd argue about things we'd read, sometimes even including the texts for that week. I'd see some people I already knew, but also hear sharp, interesting thoughts from strangers. It felt like hanging out with my friends — the same level of informality, the same lack of process or admin — but with broader scope, newer faces.

I think starting a reading group might be a really underrated way to talk more about things you were already going to talk about. If you like to argue with your friends about something, consider telling the internet that you'll be doing that at a specific time and place, making it look group-shaped and open enough that other people want to come, and buying some snacks. It was an experience that opened me up. You might even start thinking differently.

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Postscript: our reading list, with commentary

week 1: gender and desire

1. "on liking women", andrea long chu

2. "on hating men (and becoming one anyway)", noah zazanis

This week was a banger — the theme was legible, interesting, and (dare I say) legibly interesting. Lots of provocation in the texts. In retrospect I could've done a better job at framing and setting up the discussion.

week 2: egg theory

1. "the stages of not going on T", daniel lavery

2. "egg theory's early style", grace lavery

3. "nevada", imogen binnie (optional)

Maybe our greatest hit, though the least reading-group-like in shape. We got lots of personal anecdotes from Daniel's writing, less engagement with Grace (which was a shame — I was excited to talk about it). I'm not sure anyone read Nevada for this week, though a large number of the attendees had already read it.

week 3: trans bodies and the state

1. "a cyborg manifesto", donna haraway

2. "helicopter story", isabel fall

3. "doctors who?", jules gill-peterson

I liked this set of texts a lot, and I think I dropped the ball on titling and motivating it (it sounds less immediate and interesting than the first two weeks). I wish more people had read Isabel Fall's story — after this week I tried to motivate/introduce the readings more. As with all these weeks, it's hard to tell much from the attendee numbers (small n, summer term is often busy).

In hindsight, I think two short texts is about the right amount for an optional reading group, and i should've probably substituted Haraway's work for something else.

week 4: making a woman

1. "CYBERQUEEN", porpentine

2. "my words to victor frankenstein above the village of chamounix", susan stryker

3. "did sissy porn make me trans?", andrea long chu

4. "narrative testimony", rachel fraser (optional)

My favourite week, though possibly it is actually three different weeks wearing a trenchcoat, and the best example I have here of "make people read whatever you're on about". Unfortunately, less well-attended: I think the size of the reading list scared people off.

Another provocative week. CW for CYBERQUEEN, which features (text-only) fairly graphic depictions of gore, violence, something-approaching-sex; ALC's piece is NSFW in terms of subject matter but I remember it as otherwise being pretty abstract/academic?

I love this paper by Fraser. It's rare to see philosophy which is intelligent, aiming to engage with real-world topics, and well-written in its own right, and she does all three with panache.

On the bright side, I got to talk about porpentine with my friends this week, and this was a week of sunshine where we sat outside and chatted and it felt golden, many vistas opening up.