I do sometimes wonder what we’re all going to do if somehow everything works out okay and no-one was planning for that

It feels bleak out there, and Murphy's stories reflect that atmosphere of cruelty. But they also document a moment when more and more young trans people are taking the plunge, forming real-life communities, making art, and helping each other survive. There's a push/pull between those two truths in Shut Up, I Love You, and Murphy explores both the power and the limits of caring for each other in a hateful world—the act of holding hands at the bottom of a ditch, to use an image she mentioned at a Q&A in Brooklyn last week. "I kept trying to come back to, 'Someone should actually believe in the future,'" Murphy told me in August, while I was visiting Chicago.