The Choice Is Real

"I find that the best kind of work is the work that can evoke a sense of longing for the text, where the work itself builds intimacy and innateness through the words that land at a truth. There were so many suspended moments while reading Jayson Keery's The Choice is Real, where I felt this, their skill at landing at truth with such viscerality and feeling; it's an uncanny ability that ran like a radiant current through the pages. There are lines in The Choice is Real that I wished I had written, and observations I felt deeply in my soul. I'm excited and in awe of how this book wields Keery's marvelous talent."
-- Fariha Róisín, author of Who is Wellness For?, Like a Bird, and How to Cure a Ghost

An odd celebration and criticism of girlhood from a transmasculine subjectivity.

Challenging the conventions of how queer and trans people are encouraged to tell their stories, The Choice is Real engages the concept of choice in queerness, trivializes the linear and born-this-way narratives, and interogates the millennial childhood media landscapes (mainly Disney) that programmed the genders of so many. In reaction to a second puberty brought on by medical transition and an unraveling of family structures brought on by the death of their step-mother, Keery regresses through a warped revisiting of foreboding childhood landscapes, and weaves in accounts of current relations, playfully flipping through and uprooting assumptions of queer relationality. Opening with the cheeky epigraph, "I love being a girl. So delicate," a quote from trans author and activist Lou Sullivan, The Choice is Real presents an odd celebration and criticism of girlhood from a transmasculine subjectivity.
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