We're excited to share this letter from Monica Helms, an excerpt from the book To My Trans Sisters. Edited by trans activist Charlie Craggs, To My Trans Sisters gathers letters from 100 trailblazing trans women, inluding Laura Jane Grace and Isis King.   Monica Helms is the creator of the transgender pride flag. She donated the flag, which she created in 1999, to the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex. Monica served in the US Navy for eight years and is the founder and former...

    Tis the season to get spooky fa la-la-la la-la la-la-AAAAAAARGH. Now call me old fashioned, but there’s nothing nicer than curling up with a ghostly short story in front of a fire. BOOOOOOO MUTHAFUCKERS! Traditionally, in Britain, ghost stories are a Christmas activity, with those morbid Victorians telling their most chilling tales whilst roasting chestnuts on an open fire (so the song goes), and if the BBC doesn’t show a ghost story drama over the festive period, it fucking ruins Christmas for us. BUT, we also love...

  I remember when I first heard the term “menstrual equity.” It was in February of last year, while writing a feature for Broadly. At the time, New York City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras-Copeland wanted to make tampons and pads free and accessible to public school students in the five boroughs. My article delved into her efforts, and why it’s vital that students who menstruate have easy access to personal hygiene products. And it was for that piece — one of the first in a series I...

I first read Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic in middle school, and I’ve read it multiple times over the last fifteen years. The film version — “adaptation” would be giving it too much credit — was a disappointment. While the film has gradually grown on me as a relic of late '90s witchy pop culture (which certain corners of the internet have embraced wholeheartedly), it simply never captured the heart of the source material. In many ways, The Rules of Magic feels more like a prequel...

Children might not listen, but they hear everything. And they certainly repeat most of it too. We’ve seen many of the photos online, but now we can see what those conscious kids actually think in this miniature children’s book, “The Little Book of Little Activists.” It’s a curated selection of inspiring photos of children, alongside quotes that explain their understanding of equality, democracy, and other social issues from recent demonstrations across the country. The overall message is clear: you’re never too young to care about...

Growing up, my days were spent immersed in books and comic books. And my favorite comic book character was Wonder Woman. I was inspired by characters like Hermione Granger, but Wonder Woman always represented a dual side of feminity that I rarely saw. She was kind, empathetic, powerful and ferocious, two sides of the coin in a time when girls are taught they can be feminine or ferocious, but never both. As a girl who cried when she read a sad story but also punched...

Photographer Elias Weiss Friedman literally has the best job ever. Having caught “canine nostalgia” upon moving to New York, he needed an excuse to meet other people’s dogs. He decided to create a new account called The Dogist in 2013, inspired by The Sartorialist, a fashion blog that highlights style on the streets of NYC. Four years later with more than 25,000 dogs photographed, Weiss Friedman has garnered 2.7 million followers on his Instagram account, and the recent release of his second book, The Dogist...

  When she was 12, Sarah Perry was convinced that the solar eclipse she saw with her mother was a sign of good luck. Two days later, her mother was brutally murdered, while Sarah hid in her room. In her memoir After the Eclipse, Perry explores her mother’s life while also recounting the years leading up to the killer’s arrest and how she found her footing after the axis of her world was shattered. In the midst of getting ready for publication, Perry found time to...

  Batwoman. Not Batman, not Batgirl, not Batlady. Batwoman is here and ready to take on Gotham and the world. Batwoman is also the central character in a mostly female cast in Frank Miller’s graphic novel, Batman: The Dark Knight: Master Race. Miller has always been a feminist and has written tons of strong female characters, and Dark Knight: Master Race — the third in the Batman: The Dark Knight series — is no exception to that. BUST recently had the opportunity to speak with Frank Miller about Batman, current...

  If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of "Guys We Fucked: The Anti Slut-Shaming Podcast," you are in for a wild ride. The hosts, comedians Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson, started out by — you guessed it — interviewing guys they’d slept with about sex and relationships. The podcast became so popular that listeners began emailing in their own questions and stories about sex, which ranged from funny to heartbreaking and everything in between. Eventually, Fisher and Hutchinson branched out into discussing...