The woman I knew best, of course, was my own mother. I could see my hips, legs and breasts becoming hers, and I heard her every self-abasement as my own. She’d take up walking regimes, or cut out bread for a month, and then on weeknights I’d come into the kitchen to find she’d caved and drunk an entire bottle of white wine. It was a cliche, a stock-standard Electra complex, but there was no way in hell I was going to become her.

It is supposed to be a good time to be single and trans. We’re hot property, after all – the flavour of the month. We’re on magazine covers and winning civic and cultural awards. We’re mostly allowed to use the bathroom in public, and you can even marry us in any number of uncomplicated ways.

The summer I arrived in Berlin, in 2015, it was uncomfortably (and, what I now know, uncommonly) hot. I spent those days daydreaming – lying drenched in sweat in the park, at Tempelhofer Feld, at the swimming pool or in my Airbnb room, sometimes writhing in discomfort – about the person I could still become. I thought about the book I would write and the praise I would receive in its published wake.

Cameras and IKEA renovations aside, it gives us the impression that we are witnessing something real, vital and transformative. Queer Eye is a display of empathy and empowerment. A focus on personal growth and confidence in the revamped version of a reality stalwart shows the potential for complexity within the genre.

I have finally finished shredding my novel. It had been the work of many days, feeding it into the machine sheet by sheet and watching the pages re-emerge as linguine. It’s not surprising the story was bad. I wrote it soon after my husband died, leaving me with three young children, so the raw ingredients by weight were exhaustion, desperation, false hope and uncertain talent. It was a testament to one thing only: the discipline of writing every day.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 book On Revolution, surmises that hypocrisy is the worst of all vices since it destroys integrity, the only thing that allows the individual to reclaim their incorruptible self: ‘Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.’

We, hundreds of thousands of us, supporters of BDS and human rights throughout history all over the world join together in memory of Sharpeville and Wounded Knee and Lidice and Budapest and Ferguson and Standing Rock and Gaza and raise our fists in protest. We hurl our glasses into the fire of your arrogant unconcern, and smash our bracelets on the rock of your implacable indifference.

It was when I found the album of photos from our time as refugees in Germany that something stirred. In a small album bursting with photos piled on top of each other, I found an image that I hadn’t seen in a long time: my mother, standing gawkily in red pants and a black blouse next to a life-sized poster of Jon Bon Jovi. Standing in the bare room beside the smiling rock star, she looked awkward.

For those of us seeking to write politically conscious fiction it should be clear just how important Le Guin is. This was what drew me to make the pilgrimage to Portland a little over fifteen years ago as I was researching my PhD. Le Guin suggested a hotel for me to stay at and I took a bus out from the city to find her house with ‘the red door’ as she described it to me.

I first read this poem, which prefaces Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy story A Wizard of Earthsea, when I was twelve years old. As with all her writing it has stayed with me for my whole life, gaining depth, translucency and wisdom. And now, after hearing of her death, I’m reading it again, with a new dimension of sorrow and joy. It helps and it doesn’t help. Her flight remains vivid, but now the sky is empty.

This is very resonant with fiction for me, and something I think many writers neglect to consider deeply: what shape is your story, and why is it made this way? I often reread Ursula Le Guin’s essay, ‘The carrier bag theory of fiction’, which talks about the issue of narrative form as a radical project – and the idea of using the story as a container for something.

Every Saturday at one, we are fiercer, braver, stronger. We fade down the Go-betweens track the show before us, ‘Brisbane-line’, has used as their outro. We play soundbites of our SoulJah Sistars: Nina Simone, Betty Davis, Marlena Shaw, Koko Taylor, Rosetta Tharpe, Aunty Ruby, Aunty Wilma Redding, Aunty Ila Watson, Aunty Mary Graham, Rita Marley, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison and Rosa Parks. Women who shape the world as we see it.

The demolition of the Manus Island centre is set to begin in one week, which means the water supplies are steadily decreasing, resources are diminishing, and power is being progressively shut off. The men are being smoked out, but they don’t plan on leaving. As Aziz (Abdul Aziz Muhamat) said in a recent mini-episode of The Messenger, ‘we are determined to go ahead with our resistance and we are not going to give up’.

Darl. My boyfriend says ‘darl’ a lot. He’s older than me. In his 40s. Twice my age, in fact. He jokes about us getting married and he flutters his eyelids and I say by the time this vote is over, you’ll probably be dead, and I accept his proposal. To him, Priscilla acts as a marker for how his life, and the lives of the queer people around him, changed. His life can be divided neatly into periods of ‘before Priscilla’ and ‘after Priscilla’.

The problem is less that these new ways of organising society have been radically successful than they’re being run in a way which is exploitative and undemocratic. Since 2008, Scholz has been considering the ramifications of the internet for labour. As the trends to platforms became more pertinent, he shifted his focus from cognitive work to labour in the more traditional sense. ‘In the United States in 2016, 24% of workers had worked on some kind of platform. Every third person is a freelancer – fifty five million people. How do you make an intervention in this kind of work?’

All my doctors counsel me against being open about having a serious mental illness. Finding ways to massage the truth to people – and explain away periods of absence from the workforce – has become second nature to me. But, as a gay man who has been open and proud about his sexuality, I can’t help but feel a bit conflicted. Is the counselling to stay secret actually denying people their proper supports in society and jeopardising mental health?