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@assignedmedia.org
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An independent news website about trans issues, by trans journalists. assignedmedia.org Support our work: www.assignedmedia.org/support

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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 29/09/2026
If you click on the little guy in the bottom right corner you can adjust the site to meet your needs <3
A figure of a human with arms outstretched in white on a blue circle
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 29/09/2026
If you click on this little guy in the bottom right corner you can adjust the font!
A stylized figure of a human with arms outstretched in white on a blue circle background
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 27/09/2026
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social With Reps in battleground states running on trans issues, CNN poll finds once again that it runs dead last in voters' concerns after elections, crime, tariffs, etc. Good for them for finally positing a question other pollsters still ignore. [Live screen grab]
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/09/2026
One hundred years ago, a trans pool shark traveled the country to show off her skill. @piperbomb.bsky.social brings you the story here in this month's Clippings!
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
As for Alice herself, she eventually obtained a master’s in psychology and counselling, and spent her later years providing counselling and mental health support for trans folk like herself. Her time working for the Samaritans left quite an impression on her, as did her own experience with suicidal ideation and community isolation, and she spent her days helping make sure no one else ever had to feel the way she did. As she would later recount, “I started to cope with the pain -one day at a time, instead of seeing the rest of my life ahead as simply one of endless misery. The joy of the natural world is my drug, a real delight, and good friends do really help.”
Alice was eventually awarded the Order of the British Empire (hence the O.B.E. after her name) for her services to the British trans community. The Beaumont Society still exists to this day, providing outreach services, a Discord server and Facebook group, the Beaumont Magazine, and in-person meetups to help folk like us feel a bit less alone in this world.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
An older woman wearing glasses and a necklace stands in front of a bookshelf.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
A pile of magazines.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
The Beaumont Society, as they called themselves, would publish their own home-grown UK counterpart to Transvestia, called The Beaumont Bulletin, which featured tips and advice for aspiring femmes. They would later add a companion fiction-focused magazine, Beaumag, as well.
And in 1974, members organized the first academic conference centered around gender identity and organized by trans folk in the UK. The Transvestism and Transsexuality in Modern Society conference, held at the University of Leeds, wasn’t the first – the First International Symposium on Gender Identity was held in 1969 in London – but it was the first organized by trans folk and about trans folk.
Alice Purnell would eventually go on to organize and hold the GENDYs conference throughout the ’90s and ’00s, providing trans folk in the UK with an academic forum of their very own; perhaps the Chevaliere, with her own large personal library and countless writings, would have been proud of this, too.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
London, Soho. A young person finds their way into a shop of ill repute, and finds a copy of a small hand-bound zine on a magazine rack. If you’ve been reading Clippings for long enough, or you know your trans history, you might recognize the name; Transvestia, published by Virginia Prince’s Full Personality Expression.
A few pages in, and a door opened in that young person’s mind. This magazine was written by people like them, for people like them. They hadn’t quite had a name for it before, but now they did; and now, they knew they weren’t alone.
And, in the mid ’60s, Alice – taking her name from Lewis Caroll’s Alice In Wonderland – and three other European members of FPE decided to found their own off-shoot. Somewhat poetically, this French-speaking Brit and her new friends decided to name themselves after a certain France-born Brit, and the Beaumont Society was born.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
The front of the magazine: Transvestia
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 10/08/2026
A hundred and fifty-five years after the death of the Chevaliere d’Eon de Beaumont, a group of friends–one of whom spoke the Chevaliere’s language–would find their own camaraderie. @piperbomb.bsky.social brings you this story of trans history in this month's Clippings!
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 05/08/2026
Enjoying Riki's regular posts of trans news stories as they break? Then consider following her at @rikiwilchins.bsky.social or checking out her book: "When Texas Came for Our Kids: How evangelical extremists launched a war on transgender teens." www.amazon.com/dp/1626016712
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 09/07/2026
The Chevalière is the only subject of this strip to date where it is impossible to piece together how they fit into our modern gendered language. Zagria of *A Gender Variance Who's Who* classifies them as a "cross-dreamer", and historian Peter Farrer refers to Charlotte's biographies as "very nearly cross dressing fiction, a century in advance,", due to the sheer number of liberties the Chevalière and her biographers took in describing her life.

There's also significant reason to believe that the Chevalière herself started the rumors that she was born a woman. Whether it was to drum up an elaborate reason to return to France with her life and debts reset, or because she genuinely wanted an excuse to present herself as she pleased, is a reason only known to her.

Whatever her intentions at the time, her persona as the crossdressing Amazon of Orleans would find a very different life and following nearly a hundred years after her death....but we'll talk about that next month. Stay tuned.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 09/07/2026
Illustration: A still life, featuring a dragoon's rapier, a French lady's summer hat, a rose, some papers, and a feather.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 09/07/2026
Illustration: A portrait of the Chevaliere d'Eon (a stocky transfemme wearing a very elaborate feathered cap) as Pallas Athena. The hand-lettered annotation explains that the drawing in question is based on an engraving by N. Pruneau, made in 1779.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 09/07/2026
Expected amount of jeers at the Chevalière's (and France's) expense notwithstanding, the public did not reject the concept of a cross-dressing French woman, turning her into a Joan-of-Arc-esque folk hero. An engraving by illustrator N. Pruneau bore an enscryption which compares her to the fearsome Greek goddess and guardian of Athens, Pallas, adding, "For a long time she has been feared, and now she is loved". 

Despite being publicly retiscent to give up her dragoon coat and sword for a dress, the Chevalière eventually settled into a more quiet life, She took up fencing for a while to pay the bills, leaning into her Amazonian image. But, racked with her own debts (due, in part, to the French revolution sending her employers en masse to the guillotine and rendering them unable to pay,) she died a spinster in England, devoting herself to writing on Christian feminism and an autobiography of her life as a woman forced to live as a man, which was ulitmately never published before her death.

But, upon her death in 1810, her housemate made a startling discovery. The Chevalière didn't entirely lie. She *did* spend half her life as the wrong gender. Just not in the way she told everyone.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 09/07/2026
In 1776, King Louis XVI of France made a public announcement. A trusted French servant in London, one of the spies and ambassadors that made up the intelligence service known as Le Secret du Roi (The King's Secret), had pulled one over on the crown. This individual had served as a liason in Russia and a negotiator in Britan, one of king's most loyal men -- or so they thought. Rumors started to come around. Things were getting out of hand. 

And so, by order of King Louis, the bets were off. Charlotte d'Eon de Beaumont was a woman raised as a man to pay off her father's debts, or so the King was told. But this soldier was coming home to France; a hero, and -- now, legally in the eyes of the Crown -- a woman. She was to be relieved of her dragoon's uniform (only to be worn by men, naturally), and gifted a new wardrobe more fitting of her gender, fitted by the royal couturière in service of Marie Antoinette herself.

Somehow, no one at the fitting for that wardrobe bothered correcting the Crown.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 09/07/2026
In 1776, it was revealed that a French spy pulled one over on the crown. @piperbomb.bsky.social brings you the story of this historic trans person in The Triple-Cross of the Chevaliere d'Eon!
Illustration: A large sailing ship flying the French flag sails through a vast ocean.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 11/06/2026
FOR ASSIGNED MEDIA MEMBERS: Right now you should already have an email to help you RESUBCRIBE to our new site. To leave Squarespace we were forced to cancel all existing memberships. This is a huge risk, so we need all of you to go find that email and RESUBSCRIBE so your membership doesn't lapse.
the original, extremely janky Assigned Media logo, a photo of a spyglass on a background of trans blue white and pink stripes going diagonally across
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 04/06/2026
There is one other thing Monica Helms did, and even if you never heard of her name before reading this strip, you’re more than likely very familiar with it. On August 19, 1999, a week after a conversation with the creator of the bisexual flag, Michael Page, she woke up with an idea in her head. In her autobiography, More Than Just A Flag, she describes her thought process:
“The design I’d subconsciously come up with had five equal-sized stripes going horizontally across the flag. The top and bottom stripes would be light blue, the traditional color for baby boys. The two stripes inside of the blue stripes were pink, the traditional color for baby girls. The center stripe would be white for those either in transition, those who have a neutral or undefined gender, or those who identify as bigender or agender.”
Speaking to Elliot Owen of The aBay Area Reporter in 2015, she stated, “No matter how you fly it, it’s always correct, which signifies finding correctness in our own lives.”
“It’s important to note that the flag only represented how I felt about being trans…But I told myself that if other people wanted to use it too, they could. And apparently, they did.”
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 04/06/2026
An older Monica Helms (drawn after photos of her at the New York City World Pride celebration, which she was grand marshal at) wearing a trans pride t-shirt and a hat that says NAVY holds a trans pride flag high in a parade. People are marching in the parade behind her.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 04/06/2026
A mid-40s Monica Helms stands in front of a crowd of trans women, smiling at the viewer. The American and trans pride flags are flying behind her, and the US Capitol building is visible in the background behind them.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 04/06/2026
Monica Helms didn’t just form Alpha Zeta. In her twenties, she served in the US Navy as a submariner, and ended up a member of the US American Submarine Veterans Group. After her transition in ’97, she re-applied under her own identity, but was refused. She persisted, and eventually was re-admitted, becoming the first woman–cis or trans– to ever hold membership in the organization. She would eventually found It’s Time Arizona, an org dedicated to helping trans veterans gain equal protection and respect for their military service, and co-found TAVA, the Transgender American Veterans Association, which exists to this day.
Monica’s fighting spirit and activism didn’t stop there. Her time as a union organizer at Sprint in the ’90s and her experience forming Alpha Zeta would eventually lead her to Washington. She was part of a delegation to lobby Congress for equal rights for trans folk in 1999, and eventually would become part of the first trans delegation at the DNC in 2004. And, after moving to Georgia in the mid-2000s, she worked with and eventually became the executive director of TransAction, an org which lobbied Georgia homeless shelters to accept trans folk.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 04/06/2026
Summer, 1983. Two AV technicians at a video duplication startup in Arizona are hard at work building their new workspace, with a TV on in the background to keep them company. One day, the Phil Donahue show comes on. The guests are members of the Chicago chapter of Tri-Ess (check out our August 2025 strip for more on them), talking about their organization for cross-dressers. One of the technicians has a breakthrough, and writes down a contact number broadcast at the end of the show.
She had known for almost a decade at this point. As she would later write, “in the year 1974 I had no easy access to information about gender identity. Only a few doctors in the world performed sex-change operations, they received limited publicity, and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Standards of Care wouldn’t be written for another five years.”
But she called that number, and would later help found the Arizona branch of Tri-Ess, Alpha Zeta. Four years later, at a meetup called Holiday En Femme, attendees were videotaped by a member of the Arizona chapter and asked to introduce themselves. When the camera turned to her, she did just that. “Hello, my name is Monica Helms.”
As for the name, as she would later recall: “it sounded simple, so that must be why I picked it.”
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 04/06/2026
A person with ‘80s permed, curly hair glances at a television set behind them, which has two figures talking on a daytime talk show setup.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/06/2026
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Enjoying Assigned Media's daily feed of trans news stories as they break by Riki WIlchins? Check out her BlueSky feed at @rikiwilchins.bsky.social or her new book from Bloomsbury... www.amazon.com/Lets-Not-Tal...
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 07/05/2026
Sadly, despite clamouring for her portrayals of women, the industry writ large never seemed to understand Jones’ own womanhood. Her own autobiography page and a stream-of-consciousness “A Recollecting Remembrance” page on her website talk openly about her gender identity and struggles. Despite this, multiple obituaries from her own peers refused to remember her as herself. The Comics Journal’s Steven Ringgenberg insisted upon making a “deliberate choice” to misgender her throughout their recap of her early career. Fellow illustrator Steve Pratt chose to commemorate Jones’ life by pairing photographs of Jones in a dress with a story where Jones asks Pratt, “How does it feel to have your friend become a lesbian?” Despite his clearly deep respect for Jones and her work, Pratt does not refer to Jones as “she” a single time in the post.
Jeffrey Catherine Jones was a personal influence of mine and many others. Her art distilled something subconscious about the trans experience and overtly about life itself–the wistfulness, the longing, the deep, rapturous want–and piped it through oil and ink in a way all her own, crafting brushstrokes into clouds, and love without fear.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 07/05/2026
A drawing of a woman facing away towards a wooded path.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 07/05/2026
A drawing of a pair of comic books.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 07/05/2026
Despite originally studying to be a geologist, Jones’s early career found her in New York, where she found her footing doing cover art paintings for Vampirella and pages of comics for Wally Woods’ Witzend, and Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie. Eventually, she found her way into the underground comix scene, and published the recurring strips I’m Age in Heavy Metal Magazine and Idyll in National Lampoon. (Her 1973 solo book, Spasm, is preserved on the Internet Archive, and I highly recommend giving it a look.)
Eventually, her and her wife divorced, and she moved into a small flat with Barry Windsor-Smith, Bernie Wrightson, and Michael Kaluta. Known collectively as “The Studio,” the space the four of them shared and the work they produced would eventually become the stuff of legend amongst illustrators, with their work compiled into a 1979 volume of the same name. As illustrator George Pratt states in the book, “Jeff was one of our gods…his (sic) work blew me away. He (sic) was our Rembrandt.”
But Jones did not stick with illustration–after many years of being paid dirt and mistreated by the publishers of the day, she eventually declared “It is my firm opinion that illustration is immoral” and forged her own path. Eventually, she found success selling her paintings to private clients who clamoured for her unique vision, soft, glowing landscapes, and dreamlike female figures. “The female form just reflects light so simply and beautifully,” she once said.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 07/05/2026
In 1998, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century illustration world decided to stop living in fear.
Jeffrey Catherine Jones had spent a life at the drawing board painting her favorite subjects, imbuing them with life through lavishly colorful brushstrokes and expressive, soft linework. Legendary draftsman Frank Frazetta reportedly called Jones his “favorite living painter.” But, at the age of 55, she realized that she couldn’t just live vicariously through her paintings of women anymore. She had known from the age of 5 that she was one, and she couldn’t hide herself any longer.
As she put it on her website, “In the south, in the ’50s there were no gays and no lesbians, and certainly no one like me. So I became secretive. In my own mind I became ashamed, guilty and worthless…After many years of therapy, and many years of trying to drink away the shame, I arrived…I decided to stop the denial and start living as a woman.”
“People have also said to me how brave I must be. If I understand courage to be self-possession and resolution in the face of fear, then there is certainly no bravery here. I had no choice, really. There is certainly no fear of being female.”
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 07/05/2026
In 1998, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century illustration world decided to stop living in fear. Read about Jeffrey Catherine Jones here in this month's Clippings by @piperbomb.bsky.social
A drawing of a woman in black looking over her shoulder to the right.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
Her penchant for performance was a survival strategy as much as it was a livelihood. She lived stealth for most of her life for safety reasons, apart from the greater trans and queer community, even hiding her identity from her husbands.
But she eventually came out, releasing her autobiography and outing herself in the process in 2001. Aleshia granted several interviews and released a follow-up biography, The Woman I Was Born To Be, before her death in 2017,
In her interview with Monika Kowalska, she offered advice to the new generation, saying: “It’s never an easy journey, but each plateau along the upward path offers its own rewards. I would never presume to tell others how to best live their lives; I can only hope that those so inclined will find their dreams fulfilled.”
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
An older Aleshia Brevard, with bright white hair, a boat-neck top, and a shining pearl neckless, smiles fearlessly at the sun and clouds above her.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
Aleshia Brevard, as Gigantia – wearing a cavewoman one-shoulder dress and with a great big goofy smile on her face – talks to the actor playing The Atom, who is very tiny and sitting on a stack of books, gesticulating wildly.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
Despite giving her a job and a start in California, the management at Finnochio’s nor the AGVA was not happy with her departure. As she recounts in her biography, The Woman I Was Not Born To Be, her union representative told her, “If you do not sign a new contract with Mr. Finocchio, I’ll see to it that you never work again.”
But depart she did, finding herself on the operating table for one of the first SRS operations. She changed her name to Aleshia, and despite the threats from both management and her crooked union rep, she found work.
She starred alongside Don Knotts in 1969’s The Love God, portrayed a cigarette girl in an episode of The Partridge Family, and found herself in Rod Sterling’s criminal roster in a 1972 episode of The Night Gallery.
And, nearly fifty years before Nicole defied the possible in her role as Dreamer, Aleshia took the villain’s role as the first trans actress to play a superbeing, portraying (ironically) Wonder Woman’s arch-nemesis Gigantia for two episodes of Legends Of The Superheroes.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
On October 14, 2018, the Supergirl episode “American Alien” aired on the CW network. For the first time, trans folk saw one of their own in a superhero uniform, as actress Nicole Maines took the screen as Nia Nal, the first trans superhero to ever make it to television.
But, while Maines has the honor of being the first hero, she wasn’t the first superbeing to ever hit the airwaves. And, perhaps fittingly, before we were ever allowed to play the hero…society first had us play the villain.
Born in rural Tennessee in 1937 and eventually ending up hitchhiking to San Francisco, Aleshia Brevard’s transition first found her under a stage name: Lee Shaw. She performed as a “female impersonator” (or, as we now call it, a drag queen) at Finnochio’s, a revue and nightclub which “glorified the American boy.”.
Aleshia was not interested in staying a boy, however; eventually, she found access to female hormones and into the patient room and client list of Dr. Harry Benjamin.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
In 2018, Nicole Maines became the first trans person to play an explicitly transgender superhero on television. Fifty years prior, another trans femme quietly took on a role on the opposite side of the coin. Read this month's Clippings by @piperbomb.bsky.social here!
Two femme figures stand side-by-side, both bathed in starlight and with spotlights highlighting their faces. On the left is Nicole Maines, wearing a low cut leather top with a lace-scalloped hem and with her long brown hair unfurled around her neck. On the right is a younger Aleshia Brevard, wearing a country-western button-up with very flashy earrings, her hair done up in a ’60s style.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 02/04/2026
For those following this story, an interesting new tidbit on where the New York Times may have erred in a story from the Advocate. (from this: www.advocate.com/health/trans...)
“In this case, the New York Times relied on a quote that was itself sourced from another outlet,” they said, describing an “echo effect” that distorted the AMA’s underlying policy framework.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 26/03/2026
The American Medical Association directly responds to New York Times coverage mischaracterizing their posiiton on gender affirming care for trans young people. cloud.e.ama-assn.org/newsletter?u...
In recent days, AMA communications to the New York Times have requested a correction on their part to reflect the actual language the AMA used in response to their inquiry. Additionally, a letter to the editor has been submitted requesting a public correction—this was neither a policy change nor was it an endorsement of a position taken by another medical society. In addition, during Congressional testimony in mid-March, I had the opportunity to set the record straight stating to the Subcommittee on Health of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that there has been no change in AMA policy with respect to access to and provision of gender-affirming care. This will appear in the Congressional Record.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 03/03/2026
Despite the Nazi's crushing defeat, their hatred lived on. The Allies' own censorship and anti-gay laws helped erase the queer dead from the record and kept the living hiding or imprisoned To quote the Auschwitz Memorial's own website, "embarrassment is the reason that scholars remain silent about Nazism's homosexual victims". 

In the decades since, many queer stories from the era have been unearthed, and many read as losses upon losses. John Topham's photographs of the battery in drag were banned from publication in the UK. Queer men like Alan Turing were subjected to chemical castration. Christine and Roberta both spent their lives as outcasts, hounded by the press and, in Christine's case, dened her own marriage due to the court ruling her a man and her union sodomy. 

I do not need to point out the parallels. I *do* need you to help us ensure that this history is not allowed to repeat itself.

LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND. --piper
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 03/03/2026
(Image description: the gates of Auschwitz, with two train tracks leading towards the ominous looking building and a road on the side for trucks.)

But for the handful of trans women we know survived the war and went on to complete their transition in a brave new world, hundreds if not thousands more were murdered in the camps...and many were kept there jailed long after the camps were liberated. 

When the Allies took Germany, they forced the broken-up German states to repeal nearly all of the Nazi-era laws. They did not, however, require them to revise or repeal Paragraph 175 of the criminal code--the one which criminalized male-on-male sexual acts, and which many self-desribed transvestites found themselves running afoul of. As a result, gay and trans folk were often simply moved from the camps to another jail cell, and as researcher Wolfgang Röll puts it, left to be "deliberately suppressed and forgotten in both postwar German societies".
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 03/03/2026
(Image description: A portrait of Roberta Cowell -- a strong-faced woman with very curly hair and a headband wearing a checkered blouse top and pearls -- and Christine Jorgensen -- a very dainty and well-dressed woman with an off-the-shoulder dress and flower earrings, with well-permed hair)

Statisically speaking, there were very likely trans folk affected by these policies, some of whom likely participated in those drag shows. The trans folk we *do* know about from this era, though, only came out in the years after WWII, if they survived at all. 

Christine Jorgenson, for instance, left her job at RKO Pictures and served in a clerical capacity during the war before recieving her landmark sex reassignment surgery, and the UK's Roberta Cowell served as a pilot in the No. 4 Squadron of the Royal Air Force before returning home and beginning her own gender transition.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 03/03/2026
This doesn't mean that the military, or the public at large, were anywhere near A-OK with queerness outside of the stage revue. Aggressive screening and discharge policies were commonplace, and as Allan Bérubé put it in _Coming Out Under Fire_, "In combat, gay GIs pointed their guns at enemy soldiers. But some gay servicemen also found American guns pointed at them".

Dishonorable discharge was, for many queer soldiers, the most lenient punishment they could hope for if they were discovered, or if they made the mistake of asking for help. Discussing their situation with military psychiatrists hoping for guidance often ended up with them being reported to their CO, with some being "interrogated about their sex lives, locked up, physically abused, and subjected to systematic humiliations in front of other soldiers."
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 03/03/2026
(Image description: several GIs in shepherd girl dresses dance a goofy ragtime dance on stage.)

Those weren't shepherd girls by any means; John Topham just happened to be working on a project to document the rehersal of that particular troop's concert party revue. The men were rehersing a drag number when the siren sounded, and had no time to change into something less fabulous. 

Revue shows like this were quite common in both the UK and the US during the first two world wars, providing the men with laughs on the front lines and an escape from the despair and dreariness of war. Despite homosexuality and cross-dressing being outlawed to various degrees in both countries, the shows were popular enough to get the silver screen treatment even after the war, with films like _This Is The Army_ and _Splinters_ both portraying men in uniform donning dresses to entertain and delight.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 03/03/2026
The 1940s were not a good time to be gay, and an even less stellar time to be trans. But we were there; on variety show stages, on the front lines, and strapped into the cockpit of the bombers. Read this month's Clippings by @piperbomb.bsky.social
(Image description: A man in a GI's helmet and a shepherd girl dress directs an artillery battery to fire upon a target off in the distance. Two other men, also in frilly frocks, push the barrel of the battery around to face the target.)

Christmastime, 1940. All's quiet on the shore--until the sirens go off and a flurry of men run to the Mk. VII mounted on the battery. As photojournalist John Topham would later write, "‘Jerry’, like Time, waits for no one".

Thing was, whichever Jerry would have been on the scope for the Nazis must have been mighty confused that day....because, as sure the devil was the fascist's witness, he must have sworn he was looking down the glass at a squad of shepherd girls in bonnets aiming the turret in the seconds before the shrapnel pierced his skull.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 05/02/2026
Some may ask why, of all the stories I could be telling right now, I'm choosing to give a historical recounting of a brave trans man, in a society who didn't accept him, doing what he thought was right and putting his life on the line to take the fight to a bunch of racists who threatened to rip the United States apart.

(Image description: A list of the individuals killed by ICE so far this year. The list reads as follows: 
Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres - Jan 5, died in custody
Geraldo Lunas Campos - Jan 3, murdered in custody
Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz - Jan 6, died in custody
Renee Nicole good - Jan 7, murdered in the streets
Parady La - Jan 9, died in custody
Víctor Manuel Díaz - Jan 14, presumed suicide
Heber Sánchez Domínguez - Jan 14, presumed suicide
Alex Jeffrey Pretti - Jan 24, murdered in the streets)

Oh, y'know. No reason in particular. Just seemed timely to pay respects to veterans who fought to make the world safe from thugs and fascists, and the Union boys taking a stand against slavery and a divided nation was just on my mind today. Anyways, tune in next month, where I write about queer folk taking the fight to Hitler. That also seems topical.  

MORT AUX FASCISTES. CHINGA LA MIGRA. 

--piper <3
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 05/02/2026
Sadly, like many trans stories in this era, Cashier's also ends in medical malpractice followed shortly by public fiasco. Despite being sworn to secrecy when he was admitted, someone in the home eventually leaked that the old boy soldier wasn't born male, and it did not take long for the local papers to find out and have a field day with it.

(Image description: Albert Cashier's grave.)

The other men in his regiment stuck by him, however, and reportedly often visited him in the home. They brought him newspaper clippings of his valour to remind him of the times they had shared, spoke highly of him to the press, and even requested he be buried with full military honors upon his passing in 1958.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 05/02/2026
Fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln later would refer to the siege of Vicksburg as "the key to the war" and eventually, the Union took it, in no small part due to the valor of the men of the 95th Illinois. Albert's name is still on the Illinois section of the memorial at Vicksburg today, commemorating he and his men's role in this important siege. 

(Image description: The Illinois memorial at Vicksburg, MS; a large domed mausoleum with granite stairs leading up to it.)

The war eventually ended, and Cashier returned home to Illinois. He made his way doing odd jobs, keeping to himself until he broke his leg in 1911 and found himself disabled and living in he Illinois Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy, IL.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 05/02/2026
The claim that trans folk cannot serve with honor or valor falls apart when examining the service records of many queer troopers, and Albert's is no exception. In the battle to take Vicksburg, MI, in 1863, Cashier 'ran to the front, mounted the trunk of a tree, and waved his hat and yelled, “Come on, all you damned rebels, so we can see you and get a shot at you.”'

(Image description: Albert Cashier hangs off of a tree trunk, flying his hat in the air. The Union line stands behind him in the distance, and smoke billows from the battlefield.)

At one point, Cashier found himself captured by Confederate forces. He responded by stealing a gun from one of the guards, knocking him one, and escaping.
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