At times idyllic and supremely dramatized, often vibrant and jubilant, Marsha is a biography that refuses the usual tragedy-centered framing of historical queer and trans figures, but sometimes replaces tragedy with sainthood.

Marsha was often called Saint Marsha for her radical community care and protection, and as such, Marsha toes the line of hagiography. For some reason though, I can't bring myself to totally hate it.

Marsha is someone who is often defined by her suffering, often pushed into the role of martyrdom. Her legacy is about her activism, yes, but also the life that inevitably led her to activism: her poverty, her struggle, her death. In Marsha, Tourmaline is determined instead to center Marsha's joy.

There are plenty of books that focus on the systemic injustice dealt to trans people, that focus on oppression and violence and the more horrifying statistics and history of queer and trans people. So, much like Marsha's insistence on choosing radical joy and hope in the face of violence, Tourmaline carries that legacy through her own writing.

As much as Marsha is frequently defined by Stonewall and her struggle, it's important not to swing the pendulum too far into the corporatized smiling saint of pride-month inclusion, detached from the sex work, poverty, violence, and survival that made up so much of her life. It's a careful line to walk, to allow someone's life the freedom to be characterized as effervescent and liberated when they faced so much violence and pain.

Tourmaline's framing shines when it leans into more modern radical movements. Particularly, the passages that focused on Marsha's disabilities and placed her within the modern conversation of disability justice and crip care were incredibly expansive in how they painted Marsha's impact as so much larger than we usually see.

However, there are moments where Tourmaline's focus on joy slides into liberalism in a way that sometimes felt disproportionate to Marsha's (and by extension, STAR's) radical legacy. The writing style dips into juvenility, and unfortunately, repeatedly felt like reading a storytime picture book about Marsha rather than a biography that reckons with her flawed and oftentimes painful life.

If anything is sanitized, it's usually due to the flowery writing and saintly elevation favored by Tourmaline that paints every modern reformist change as a radical victory and every moment in Marsha's life as profound and beatific. This framing risks domesticating Marsha's more radical politics, and risks turning her into a figure who can only signify grace, resilience, and radiance.

The real Marsha is more politically valuable than the beatified Marsha precisely because her life does not reduce cleanly into either martyrdom or bliss, revolutionary icon or saint, victim or liberated ancestor. To trust the contradictions is to honor the reality of STAR's politics: radical, survivalist, messy, and yes, joyful.

It is radical and revolutionary to choose care when systems of oppression are built upon isolation and competition, to choose self-expression when those systems insist upon conformity and assimilation. The choice to center joy is not foolish, it is definitively political. It is a response to a historical record that often preserves people through death, scandal, and spectacle. But joy and self-expression are not the full picture of revolution, and not the full picture of Marsha's life.

The problem is not that Tourmaline centers Marsha's joy, but rather that joy can become an interpretive frame that dissolves contradiction, ugliness, pain, anger, addiction, psychosis, survival sex, interpersonal harm, and anti-state radicalism into flower crowns and novena candles.

Truthfully, Marsha is a biography that I found lacking. And yet, I want to forgive it for all of its lack, because it was charged with the sincerely herculean task to be at once an introduction to trans history, a celebration of life, a devotional reclamation and a political biography.

It must serve to introduce, celebrate, correct, mourn, politicize, archive, and inspire all at once. It is a burden uniquely placed on trans historical memory under conditions of scarcity and erasure. Ultimately, Tourmaline handled it with care, and her love for Marsha is overwhelmingly apparent, even to a fault.

This felt like an existential thought experiment on what it means to be human. In the absence of the things we’re used to finding meaning in, can we still make meaning? Can we still be human?

The plot is almost irrelevant, in the end, and its lack of relevance is kind of haunting. The prose is very clear and efficient. There is no filler here. You only ever know as much as the narrator, who might be uninformed but at least felt honest. You really feel what they are feeling as you’re trying to figure out wtf happened. And you feel the same as you get to realize you might never know for sure.

I’ll be thinking back on this one for a long time.