all about a custom trans resource zine commission!
I'm so excited to share with you another Secret Project from earlier this year! This project was this custom transgender info and resource zine commissioned by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Akron. This was a very different lane than my other Secret Projects, more writing and research-heavy, and it brought me back to my grad school days for sure. A little about the UUCA, in their words: "our church community is a place of love, acceptance, and service where people with different beliefs and diverse spiritual paths come together to seek truth and meaning, to support one another through life’s joys and struggles, and to reach out to the local community and the wider world through acts of justice and compassion." I am not a religious person myself, but I'm all about any loving community that accepts its members as they are and seeks to better the world, and I was excited to create a resource for this community to use and enjoy.
I was tasked with creating informational resource zines on all things transgender for the church to both sell as a fundraiser for their church's LGBTQ+ group fund, and to give away as a free resource at their city's Pride celebrations in August. These zines needed to both be accessible and approachable for non-transgender people who were curious and looking to learn more, and be full of useful and actionable resources for transgender, nonbinary, or questioning members of the community. We decided on a full-length zine that would be more info-dense, and a minizine that would be more basic. Both would include resources local to the Akron, OH area, and beyond. The primary focus of the zines was education: some basic definitions to common words, myth-busting the most frequent narratives we hear about the trans community in popular media today, and empathy-building with transgender people through the sharing of personal anecdotes.
This project took me a LONG time: several weeks of research, outlining, drafting, editing, editing, and more editing, before I finally was happy with the end result. There is SO much to say and to include, even though the zines are just meant to be a starting place. I dove deep into the Northeast Ohio LGBTQ+ community, and was very pleased to find a robust community with lots of resources and support networks! I ended up curating a list of continued reading, as well as included a full list of sources for the info in the zine, which the church hosts as a separate document and includes a link to on the zine so they can make sure it stays up to date as their community evolves.
The color scheme was inspired by the trans and nonbinary flags, and was intended to be bright and eye-catching, as well as friendly and inviting. We kept the illustrations minimal, just some fun doodles, to allow for the majority of the space to be taken up by text. The fonts were kept large to ensure accessibility for older members of the congregation, specifically. I hand-wrote the cover using Procreate and drew all the doodles and color backdrops myself.
This was a fun project, a labor of love for sure, and I'm pleased to report that the zines were apparently a big hit at the Pride events in August! The congregation is already finding them to be useful and enjoying them very much. I'm so happy to hear this, and I hope they continue to be helpful for a long time. My main takeaway from this project is that as much as there is hate and bigotry in the world, there are also always good people in your community who are like you, who want to work for a better world with you, and all you have to do is look for them. I felt very hopeful after making these zines, even though the climate is increasingly hostile in Ohio for transgender people specifically. I hope that folks in Akron and beyond reading these zines come away from them knowing that they are not alone. If you are someone in Ohio who is interested in copies of these zines, please reach out to the folks at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Akron directly (office@uuakron.org)!
If you're interested in a similar zine resource tailored to your community, or else would like a custom zine made for you, please reach out! I'm currently open for new commissions this fall & winter and would love to work with you to make something by hand that is special and unique!
