Trans Care

Hil Malatino’s concise Trans Care begins from the care practices trans people build after repeated failures by families, healthcare systems, workplaces, and public institutions. It asks what it means for trans people to show up for one another under systemic exclusion and how mutual-aid networks, friendship, informal mentoring, knowledge exchange, and everyday accompaniment make survival possible. Rather than adding trans people to a preexisting ethics of care, Malatino argues that dominant models often presume cisgender family structures and a gendered distribution of labor. Trans experience exposes the limits of those assumptions.

The book is most powerful when it refuses to romanticize community. Care webs can be ingenious and life-sustaining, but they are also built by people who are exhausted, poor, traumatized, disabled, or themselves in need. Celebrating resilience without redistributing resources turns abandonment into a test of marginalized people’s generosity. Malatino therefore links care to burnout, bad feelings, uneven capacity, and the need for practices that are resilient without demanding inexhaustibility. This sharpens feminist care politics: care is not a feminine instinct or moral halo but material labor whose conditions, limits, and burdens must be collectively negotiated.

At seventy-two pages, Trans Care is a conceptual intervention rather than a comprehensive guide or empirical survey. Its compressed form leaves many institutional and geographic differences for other work to develop. For FemRes readers, that brevity is also useful: the book gives a precise language for examining who repairs the damage left by formal systems and at what cost. It belongs beside writing on mutual aid, social reproduction, disability justice, and trans health because it insists that flourishing requires more than access to individual services. It requires durable care infrastructures in which trans people can receive as well as provide support.