🎁 2025 Valentine's Gift Guide for Trans Folks & Allies
I'm calling the Code Red (Ribbon)
The best gift you can give a trans1 friend right now might just be a quick text message or so.
“How are you doing?”
“It’s been a h*ll of a long 25 days, how are you holding up?”
“Just wanna let you know I am thinking about you and I care about you and if you need a Valentine, I’m yours.”
“Let me know if I can do anything or even just listen sometime.”
Look them in their little face and make eye contact and use their proper preferred name and pronouns and ask them how they are. Don’t f*ck around.
And if you are trans++, I want to say that I do see you out there. I want you to imagine me (I am serene and powerful) saying your proper name and introducing you to others with your proper pronouns. If you need a Valentine, I’m yours too!
So, for those just catching up, over the past 25 days, just to give you three examples, I have witnessed the following strange events:
On a work Zoom just a few days into the new administration, a colleague posted that because their employer runs contracts for the federal government, they have been asked to remove their pronouns from their email signature and Zoom name.
The federal government has been removing the “T” (and “Q” and “I” and “A” and “+”) from references to “LGBTQIA+” on some public websites, and taking other pages down altogether. This pair of screen grabs of a State Department site posted by Erin Reed from NBC News pulled me up short (old on the left, new on the right):
The CDC insisted that all medical and science journals remove banned terms such as, “gender, transgender, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female” and more from articles in their queue to be published.
You can dismiss these stories as “who cares, just words,” but I see something far more unsettling.
And then I bet it hurts trans++ folks even further when their own dearest loved ones and colleagues just keep conducting business as usual rather than opening their eyes to the damage that is already being done.
A simple acknowledgement from you to your person that this is all wrong might be welcome right about now.
Of course, I also love sh*t you can buy, so I will recommend some more tangible items of value you might send to the trans folks & allies in your life. They might need to hear from you. You can also buy this stuff for yourself all day long 🌻
Greeting Cards
It’s a great time to send someone a big fat Valentine’s card ($6.50):
This amazing card and many more are available from Louise Lauret on Etsy.
Art #1: Prints
I absolutely love the artist ossocavo on Etsy and this print ($24.00) is my absolute favorite. On the back it explains the meaning of the different flowers:
KING PROTEA: Change and transformation
DAFFODIL and DAISY: New beginnings and rebirth
HYDRANGEA: Gratitude for being understood, sincerity
Yes, please, I want the whole bouquet right now!
In addition to the Transgender colorway, these gorgeous flowers are offered in six colorways including Nonbinary (pictured below), Genderfluid, Agender, Genderqueer, and Intersex.
Make a loved one feel seen by sending them this print in recognition of who they are. Heck, buy one for yourself, it looks awesome! I have one on every floor of my house!
Art #2: Commission a Portrait
Speaking of art, imagine sending your loved one a portrait of themselves like this:
I know the person in this painting and this painting looks exactly like her.
Jhina Alvarado works from photographs and believe it or not you can commission a portrait from her today! Just go here right now: https://www.jhinaalvarado.com/commissions
Put Pride in Your Cabinets
I can’t seem to stop raving about the Pantone mug in Pride colors ($30):
But this is my first time talking about this adorable little flock of Pride espresso cups ($120):
Apparel
I also can’t seem to stop posting this photograph of myself:
This tank ($20.00, marked down from $30.00) is exceptionally unflattering but that’s how you can tell how much I love trans++ people, I wear this frumpy thing absolutely everywhere!
Get your shirt and other pro-trans++ garments here:
https://store.crooked.com/collections/leave-trans-kids-alone-1
If you or your trans++ friends have a pet, you can even get them a pet bandana with this message on it! $10.00 marked down from $14.00.
Everyone is different so I can’t get too specific with this next recommendation, but please consider buying your friend a gift card for a gender-affirming apparel or beauty or sporting goods brand. If your person lights up at the sight of that little black ‘n white bag from Sephora, please take note and buy them a Sephora gift card the next time you have any plausible reason to gift them something! It’s Friday! It’s Valentine’s Day! It’s Galentine’s Day! They definitely deserve a gift. Get after it.
For Your Rainbow Bookworm
I will *NEVER* understand why my favorite art exhibition of the past ten years did not sell an enormous poster version of this painting, Trans Forming Liberty by Amy Sherald (2024):
I would have bought this poster by the hundred! I would have been papering my walls with them. Look at it, the colors alone!!
And you can’t even buy your person the exhibition catalog to make it up to them for not getting them the poster, because this painting is not in the catalog, either!
But actually, you *can* buy them the exhibition catalog, and you should, because Amy Sherald is my newest favorite painter of the century, and her f*cking SPECIALTY is making people visible.
You are looking at her people, they are looking at you. I have never seen anything like it.
Your loved one will not be disappointed: American Sublime, Amy Sherald, get it right now ($41.85, marked down from $45.00). It’s big and heavy like you mean business.
Special Section of the Bookshelf for Trans++ Partners
The Reflective Workbook for Partners of Transgender People: Your Transition as Your Partner Transitions, D.M. Maynard ($30.99). On backorder but worth the wait.
Love Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge and Resilience, edited by Jordon Johnson and Becky Garrison ($23.99).
For a Dear Little Trans++ Child or Preteen You Know
It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book about Gender Identity, Theresa Thorn ($18.59, marked down from $19.99). This mom of a trans++ kiddo created this book to help her child understand their own identity and to help the larger world understand the whole notion of gender identity. I buy it by the bushel! I give it to every single teacher at my kids’ elementary school. I will give it to you if you ask nicely enough!
The Trans Self-Care Workbook, Theo Nicole Lorenz ($20.41, marked down from $21.95). Super good for peeps who are just starting to figure stuff out. Also has satisfying coping mechanisms like "Internet Troll Bingo."
Watership Down, Richard Adams, adapted and illustrated by James Sturm and Joe Sutphin ($25.10, marked down from $26.99). Little rabbits in search of a home, following Hazel, their unconventional leader, this might be a story a little lost kiddo needs to hear right now. It’s a graphic novel so you can read it out loud and talk about the pictures and see what else you accidentally start talking about.
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin ($12.08, marked down from $12.99), a different kind of story about finding your way home, also potentially very relevant right now. This is one of my favorite books of the past several years and by the way Grace Lin illustrated it herself and is one of my new favorite artists too.
Acts of Service & Devotion
And actually you don’t have to buy anything. To quote Dolly Parton, as I always do, it might be time for an act of service & devotion, instead or as well.
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Anne Lamott’s memoir about raising her kiddo among the slings and arrows and colic of life, includes the following story I’ve never forgotten. Sam is the baby son with colic:
Then something truly amazing happened. A man from church showed up at our front door, smiling and waving to me and Sam, and I went to let him in. He is a white man named Gordon, fiftyish, married to our associate pastor, and after exchanging pleasantries he said, “Margaret and I wanted to do something for you and the baby. So what I want to ask you is, What if a fairy appeared on your doorstep and said that he or she would do any favor for you at all, anything you wanted around the house that you felt too exhausted to do by yourself and too ashamed to ask anyone else to help you with?”
“I can’t even say,” I said. “It’s too horrible.”
But he finally convinced me to tell him, and I said it would be to clean the bathroom, and he ended up spending an hour scrubbing the bathtub and toilet and sink with Ajax and lots of hot water. I sat on the couch while he worked, watching TV, feeling vaguely guilty and nursing Sam to sleep. But it made me feel sure of Christ again, of that kind of love. This, a man scrubbing a new mother’s bathtub, is what Jesus means to me.
Now, I understand if the religious aspect of this story doesn’t appeal to you.
What interests me is this man’s decision to show up at her house and do this act of service for her and her baby.
I’m counseling my clients to let things slide housework-wise if they need to find extra time in the day to keep up with and process the news and do the self-care that will help them keep going. On the other hand, if folks around you might be changing how they manage their time like that, perhaps you can address the gap? If you have the time and energy to do so, would you be willing to ask your dear loved one what they would ask a magical fairy to do, and then do that thing for them?
Could be cleaning, could be shopping, could be researching therapists or residency rules, could be making the dental appointments or helping with kid drop-off or pick-up. I challenge you to ask folks about their needs and try to meet them if you have the bandwidth and spoons to do so.
KK, team, thank you for taking a moment to consider what you can do, and how good a friend you can be to someone right now. Happy Valentine’s Day, may your walls be decked with flowers, may your bookshelves swell with loving books, may you enjoy a moment of true eye contact with a dearly beloved person today. Let me know how it goes.
And don’t go it alone,
Genevieve 🍒
Or nonbinary or genderfluid or agender or two-spirit or questioning or intersex or another identity just emerging, I’ll just say “trans++” to be super-inclusive 😍 However you might identify, this article is written with you in mind.