My Obligatory Transgender Life Story

Preface

The following is a collection of loosely chronological stories about growing up as a transgender girl and woman. I’ll add to it as find the time and strength to drudge up my old journals, notes, and memories. There is more to my life than these stories, but these are the stories people want to hear from me these days, and they deserve to be heard.

I want to thank all of those beautiful queer and transgender people that came before me, my sisters, my true friends, and partners, that have helped me see in myself the beauty they could always see. You have helped me down from a place of fear and shame to one where I can heal myself and others instead of just hurt.

Yes, This Story is Obligatory, but Why?

It seems that every transgender person has a ready narrative of when they knew they were transgender or at least different. Their story follows their lives from those earliest moment of gnosis in regard to their gender, minimally through what they may consider the completion of their social and medical transition. They might seem rather polished, and even wrote at times. If you’ve ever wondered, it isn’t an accident that we all have these shiny little narratives ready, even if we don’t all write them down. We are required to you see.

If you are not transgender, that is cisgender, and are reading this, you need to understand that you are most likely here to judge my life, and are participating in the oppressive societal requirement that transgender people must prove, and continue to prove that we are valid; that we are not mentally ill because we are transgender, that we are not sexual deviants, perverts, groomers or pedophiles, that being transgender isn’t infectious, and that it isn’t a fad or a phase. You probably don’t see being transgender as a favorable outcome, even if you don’t invalidate us. The truth is that in order to even remotely participate in society, nonetheless receive life saving medical care, a cisgender approved narrative of transgender lives is required at minimum by cisgender people at large who hold all the keys and lock all the gates.

If you’re cisgender I encourage you to stop reading and calm down because you’re cisgender fragility is showing through time and space, and you’re probably feeling defensive. Just walk away, and wait until you are ready to feel and think through this with an open heart and mind if you read it at all. Reconsider why you clicked on this link, and if you need to know these sorts of details about me, or any other transgender person in order for us to be valid, in order for us to live with dignity, in order for us to enjoy the same rights and opportunities that you do, in order for us to receive medical care, or for any other reason that isn’t supportive and pure. There are valid reasons for you to read this, but you need to know ya’ll so rarely hold those in your hearts when you inquire about our lives and histories, which by the design of your kind, because of your kind’s prejudices and bigotry, are filled to overflowing with pain and trauma.

That being said, if you are transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, or questioning this is written for you as much as it is written for me. Remember there is no one way to be transgender, and no correct narrative, no matter what the system tells you. I’ve intentionally included the kind of detail that might invalidate me in the eyes of cisgender people, although I do still keep some of my secrets. These stories are as intentionally messy and real as my queer life has been. You are always welcome here, and if you see some of yourself in my story, and it helps you feel a little less strange or alone, that makes me happy.

A Very Special History for Very Special Cisgender People

If you happen to be a medical provider for me that is in charge of gate keeping access to gender affirming care, or some other professional, legal or other oppressor who holds power over my bodily autonomy, economic, or social well being I have created a facile and cisgender approved story suitable for consumption by a person of your prejudices and good standing in cissupremacist society. If you are this person, please consider 20220707001347 “A Very Special History for Very Special Cisgender People” as a preferable and shorter option to reading any further on this page. Enjoy!

Trigger, Content, and Tone Advisory

This narrative contains a lot traumatic memories which may particularly resonate with and possibly be triggering for other transgender people, especially transgender women and AMAB femmes, as well as survivors of abuse, sexual assault, and rape. There will be frank, but not overly explicit talk of Christian religious abuse, homophobia, biphobia transphobia, deadnaming/intentionally using the wrong pronouns, other slurs, gender dysphoria, emotional abuse, mental health, suicidal ideation, attempts, and completed suicide, eating disorders, body parts, detailed medical talk/surgery, miscarriage, sex, sexual abuse/predation, drug/alcohol abuse, violence, violent assault, sexual assault, rape, death, and murder. In this piece I may use slurs in a manner to reclaim them, or to highlight their usage and the points of view of myself or others at the time of the writing. Please don’t construe this as an endorsement of homophobic and transphobic slurs. There’s also good stuff sprinkled among the heavy stuff, probably even a few cringey laughs, but consider yourself duly warned. Pervasive heterosexual and cisgender supremacy makes for a tumultuous life, and challenging read.

I Found Myself in the Closet

It’s difficult to determine what your earliest memory is. For me, my earliest memories exist in a pool, denoted more by the strong visual sense of their geographic locale than an adult perception of time. It just so happens that my family moved around a lot growing up, so I can place many of my earliest memories in and around a trailer home, off a gravel road, somewhere outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. My mother has helped me fill in the years when I’ve recall these memories, the descriptions of the rental homes and yards combined with her linear time oriented adult memories have been enough to put a date on them. Therefore I can say with some certainty, that the following memory, one of my first, is from mid 1987, around the age of three and a half years old.

I found myself sneaking into the closet in the bedroom I shared with my older sister during a moment of quiet in the trailer. I remember the emotions of danger and anxiety as I slipped in between the hanging clothes, and slid the cheap prefabricated door shut as stealthily as I could. I melted back into and behind the garments in the small gap afforded between two children’s wardrobes and the back wall. I practically held my breath to still it, I was breathing so heavily, and waited, listening. I had to know, was anyone coming? Was it safe to do what I wanted to do next? Little did I know that I would have decades of similar petty but dangerous deceptions ahead of me. It felt like I was still for an eternity, my heart beating too loud in my chest and ears, before I summoned the courage to start oh so quietly picking through my sister’s clothes. I’m sure there were plenty of choices, but I had my mind on a simple white dress my sister would wear to bed often. I found it! Off came my boy clothes and on went her dress. I stood there, happy, and terrified. “I am a girl!”, I thought. Yet, I already knew I wasn’t, or so they said. I grew up country enough, and already knew about the birds and the bees. It’s hard not to when there are animals around. Yet, I absolutely knew I was a girl despite the obvious. How could two things be true at once?

This was the first time I can remember the internal conflict between my gender, and the gender I was assigned at birth. As a bit of an aside, I don’t use the term gender identity, outside of dealing with certain legal definitions, because cisgender people do not “adopt preferred gender identities” or any other invalidating nonsense like that, they just have genders that come from the same type of gnosis I had in that closet. Without the conflict transgender people experience I believe this normal early gender gnosis just isn’t the stuff of early childhood memories.

The joy and sheer euphoria of plainly stating my gender, even if only in my mind, and of looking down and seeing myself in a dress, as the girl I was, was overtaken by the terrifying thoughts swirling in my head, and the reality that I was wearing my sister’s dress. The other thing I absolutely knew, not from gnosis, but from experience was I could under no circumstances be caught like this. Part of me desperately wanted to be caught so I would have to tell my parents what I knew, and how I felt, but other parts of me had already understood the score and were sounding all of the alarms to keep me safe! I didn’t strip in a panic and rush out though. I stopped, stayed still, listened, then carefully removed the dress, and hung it exactly back up on the hanger it came on, in the position I found it in. Donning my old clothes, I creeped back out of the closet, and left the closet door ajar in the same manner it was before I ventured inside. No detail was missed, because I had thought this whole thing through. I was a precocious child, but that doesn’t explain this level of preparedness. My first remembered experience with dressing in a way to express and acknowledge my gender wasn’t an impulse or compulsion, but rather a planned operation. I had no way of knowing this at the time, but the fear I felt, and the lengths I went to for a child is near universal in transgender narratives. As a good transgender friend once put it to me many years later over a drink as we shared stories of our ludicrous operations, “We are some sneaky bitches!”

Why though? Why would such a young child go to such deceptive lengths? When I reflect on it, it’s many things. To be denied such a central part of your identity, gifted from the divine, in name, pronouns, recognition, and expression is a kind of suffocating child abuse, that parents are so rarely aware of, especially when their children feel unsafe, and find themselves in a literal or metaphorical closet. The lengths we went and still go to hide who we are, out of a need for love and safety, which are the same things in a child’s mind, become ammunition for our detractors when we come out, as those people who thought they were closest to us refrain “there were no signs!” Oh, there were family and friends, but you were too dangerous, and the world was too dangerous to know. Moreover, cisgender people rarely recognize the signs even when they see them. They don’t want to believe that their child or any child could be transgender, or until very recently, even know that it is possible for a child to be transgender.

How could I know of the danger though? I already knew at that tender age that women were less than men, girls less than boys, and that the worst thing for a man or boy to be was like a woman or girl. We didn’t have a lot of contact with people. We had a few family friends, some far flung neighbors, three channels of television, and I wasn’t yet in preschool or school! Where does this come from? How did I know that a feminine man or boy was considered vile and less than human? How did I know that they were weak, limp-wristed, light in the loafers, sissies, fags, queers, and homos? How did I know that those things were bad? I couldn’t tell you specifically from a place of childhood memory, but I have to assume that I got the message of misogyny, femmephobia, and homophobia and had already internalized it by the time I found myself in the closet. It’s easy to say that patriarchy was the norm, it still is, but these were the Reagan years in which LGBT folks had been specifically targeted for political gain, and the AIDS epidemic turned societal and governmental eugenics project, was in full swing. If it wasn’t coming from my parents, which I have to assume it was to some degree, it was certainly in the air we all breathed.

What I didn’t know at the time, was how bad it was, and would have likely been if I had made myself known to my parents. This was a time in which being transgender, which is a more modern term, was medically classified as a mental illness and a kind of paraphilia, or sexual perversion. It included various diagnosis that included terms like transvestic fetishism and transsexual. We were literally lumped in the same category of paraphilia with pedophiles. Historically, this was a political move from the right to re-stigmatize LGBT people, as homosexuality had been declassified as a mental disorder in 1974.¹ At the time, treatment for transgender children was most commonly an attempt at conversion therapy, an absolutely discredited and deadly practice. Children who did not desist and recloset themselves were often heavily medicated or worse. I have peers my age that walked out their transgender closets, and were thanked by their loving parents and doctors for their vulnerability and authenticity by being put on heavy doses of lithium or lobotomized. Those were the lucky ones. Those were the ones that survived.

In 1987 I found myself in the closet, and I knew in my heart I could never come out and be loved. I made a choice to play a character that my parents could love at three and a half years of age, if you can call such a commitment to survival a choice, and such a love for a lie to be love for your child.

Knowingly in my closet, utterly alone, I would choose to stay there for another thirty years.

The Princess and the Golem

“A golem is an animated anthropomorphic creature from Jewish folklore, usually made of clay or mud. In the Talmud, Adam was initially created as a golem when his dust was “kneaded into a shapeless husk”. Like Adam, all golems are created from mud by those close to divinity, but no anthropogenic golem is fully human.”[^2]

Once upon a time there was a child born to a Queen and King. The Queen and King had already had an older daughter and had hoped for a son. However, the Queen, in her pregnancy knew by the intuition that all mothers have the gender of her child, and she knew her child was a girl. That is until she held the babe in her arms and could see clearly that she had birthed a boy with her own eyes. With much rejoicing, the royal couple welcomed their first son into the world, or so they thought.

Whether by the curse of a witch, or the strange whims of divinity, the new child was not a boy, despite what her bodily form suggested. As the child grew in age, she grew into an uneasy understanding, a gnosis that she was no prince, but a princess. However, there was no convincing her parents that she was such a princess. She was raised as a prince, and when she indulged in her true self and nature it was met with scorn. Such girly desires and behavior were unfit for a prince after all. She longed for the love and approval of her parents, as all children do, and feared their disapproval and wrath.

At first, she tried to play the part expected of her, but she was unsuited to it, and it hurt her deeply to keep up the masquerade. She hated herself so much for not living up to their expectations. She wished that she could be what her parents wanted so she might have their love, but no amount of wishing upon a star could undo her and give her parents that which they desired, a true son.

The deception became unbearable for the princess, and from this place an idea formed. What if she could find a boy to live in her place? What if she could make that boy? Her sister had once taught her that imagination was so powerful that she could make a pie from mud, with sticks, straw, and worms obviously poking from the dried crust of the dirt, and yet with enough imagination she could convince the children they played with to eat and enjoy it. It was a powerful lesson, a magical one. The princess thought, “If a mud pie can be made real by imagination, why not a boy?”

In great need and desperation, the princess summoned her imagination, and began to work. In her mind, she traveled to a sparkling mountain stream and collected cool water which she poured on dusty earth. She then mixed it with her hands into a thick mud, all the while envisioning the boy she would craft with it, the boy that her parents would love, the boy that could stand in for her so that she might retreat from her tiring and dangerous impersonation. Her little hands worked the clay, and the sculpture took a lifelike shape. The beating sun baked his skin into a durable earthen carapace, and when he finally dried and looked the part she plucked from her mind a piece of her, something of great power, the boy’s name that her parents had given her. She pinned that name to the forehead of her new creation and stepped back to admire her work.

It didn’t move. What did she do wrong? She wanted to shake it, to wake it up, but she worried it would crack and fall apart. She cried, she sobbed, and she pleaded, “Wake up you dumb thing! I need you! Wake up!” It didn’t move, but she remembered, she had given it her old name, a name now dead to her, and by her old name she would breathe life into it! She leaned forward, salty tears still streaming from her eyes, and with a kiss she said his name aloud. She jumped back as the creature lurched to life in a most unsettling way. It’s eyes slowly opened as if it had awoken from the longest sleep, and she rejoiced!

“There you are! Oh, thank the gods!” She grabbed its hands and yanked the dull thing from its stupor. “I have so much to show you, so much you need to know if you are going to help me.”, she said as the lessons began on how to act and behave as the boy her parents expected. Soon enough she had taught him what she had already learned, and then she opened her eyes. The boy of mud, her golem, wasn’t there to be seen in front of her, but when she looked down at herself, she no longer saw her skin. No, it was tinged a bit brown, and smelled ever so slightly of earth. Her vision was clouded as if looking through a greasy lens. She had hoped for something more, but her spell had worked, if in an unexpected way.

She quickly found she could retreat into her mind, away from her old skin, farther away from the flesh of the golem that was her old body and could look out the dingy windows of her soul at a distance or ignore them entirely if she so wished. Sound was much the same, muffled, and distant, yet comprehensible if she focused on it. She could make herself big and press herself back up against that skin and her old eyes to engage with the outside world, but she didn’t have to. Her golem was standing in for her as she had created it. She had safety now, and a place in which she could rest, assuming her golem could fulfill the task she set it to. The directive she gave it above all else was simple. Be the son my parents and the world will love, to keep me, the Princess Without a Name, safe.

Two Dogs and One Hope

In the pool of my earliest memories, at the time in my family’s trailer in Alaska, I remember two dogs. I believe our closest neighbor was renting from the same slum lord we had, given the state of their home and proximity. They had a fancy place. It was a single wide, smashed up with a double wide in a big T. It was cobbled together with some corrugated steel, and no small amount of bailing wire and duct tape. It was god damn palatial from my point of view. They had two boys, and two dogs. None of them were ever on leashes, although they probably all should have been! Me and my sister played with them of course, those boys and those dogs. My cat, who was a veritable lawn tiger, also had a relationship with them. Our cat’s relationship, was mostly a relationship of antagonism, as he had the kind of lightning fast nose shredding claws you find on a cat that can survive an Alaskan winter.

However, I had a very different relationship with these dogs. I was afraid of them, and they chased me sometimes. One of them in particular was quite aggressive, and would occasionally decide that I was as capable and as serious of a foe as my cat. He never bit me hard enough to draw blood, but it sure did seem like he came close a number of times.

Yet, it wasn’t just fear I had for them. I had a dream, a daydream, and a hope that the big one would attack me, and bite a part of me clean off. Yep, it was that part, which I’ve been assured by various transphobes is a totally normal reoccurring hope for a young cisgender child to have, and is in no way indicative that I was transgender at that age. In my mind this injury would result in a trip to the hospital. Surgeons would intervene, and I’d have little choice but to live as a girl. Problem solved! I would pretend to make the best of a bad situation to my parents, while secretly thanking the stars that the wrongness of my birth had been righted.

I had no idea that bottom surgery, namely vaginoplasty was a thing that existed, nonetheless that transgender people existed, but I had already imagined a seemingly far fetched, but hopeful medical solution to what was the very real hatred for my genitals, and the gender dysphoria that I was already living with.

The specific daydream would change over the years. Sometimes it was an animal attack, an assault, car crash, etc… always with a very specific wound. Such dream variations would follow me until I learned about the existence and details of vaginoplasty as a teenager. That’s when they shifted to medical mix-ups. I’d hope to get tonsillitis, or appendicitis, and need surgery only to wake up with a welcome but surprising vagina. My fear continued to keep me from truly considering that it was something I could pursue myself, nonetheless actually do what needed to be done to make it happen.

Birthday Wishes and Dreams

4yo on

Carousels of Envy

4-6

Dress Up and Violent Barbies

4-6

Welcome to Oklahoma! Land of Steers and Queers!

1st

You’re the Man of the House!

1st

Oh Gawd, It’s God!

1st, 2nd grade

You Throw Like a Girl!

1st, 2nd grade

A Student of Boyhood

1st, 2nd

Daytime TV Revelations

1st, 2nd grade

Thoughts and Prayers and Tears

1st, 2nd grade

Yeth, I Had a Lithp

2nd grade

Death Wish

3rd

Gifted and Talented, A.K.A. Queer and Neurodivergent

A Refuge and Punishment for Queerness and Neurodivergence 3rd grade

Fantasy

the fantasy and science fiction books of escape

Walk Like a Man!

3rd, 4th grade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzoIvwNqKpw

Forced Feminization

3rd, 4th grade

Aaaalrighty Then!

ace ventura is hell

Overcompensating in Academia

4th

Through Gender Tinted Glasses

Everything is gendered. Growing conformity to gendered norms, and the impact of putting everything through the scrutinizing lens of gender

Roll Call, Humiliation, and Euphoria

all of grade school, but especially the 4th

Satanic Jack-O-Lanterns, A Girl Pretending to be a Boy in Tights, Queer Bashing and Religious Abuse

5th grade

Smear the Queer: My Only Team Sport

6th grade

Trauma and My Memory Hole

perennial, grade school, middle school, high school, beyond

Nice Singing Voice You Got There Kid… It’d be a Shame…

6th grade

Betrayed by Puberty

6th, 7th

The Golem Gains Autopilot

Of Course! I Like cough want to be cough Her!

7th

Dudes, Porn, and Hustling

7th

I Really Want my Period

7th discussion on infertility, and magical thinking… a kid shouldn’t be dealing with these feelings…

The Golden Days of Dressing

7th, 8th

Shed Tits

7th, 8th

It Truly Would be Best if we Fought

7th confronting a bully with force for the first time… the rage…

Girls Keep Forcing me Into Makeup

7th

The Internet or Oh Shit I’m Definitely a Transsexual

8th

Please God Let me be Just Gay!

8th

I Don’t Know How to Masturbate

A/S/L?

I could be a dog on the Internet. A girl isn’t that far fetched.

I’m Never Ever Thinking About Sex Again

8th

Tweezers

8th

God is Dead, Hail Satan?

8th

Louisiana, Loss, and Retrofitting the Golem

8th, 9th

I Have No Clothes, and I Must Scream

9th

A Girlfriend! What am I Going to do With a Girlfriend?

9th

I’m Just Horny Mom

9th

Return to Jesusland

10th, 11th

Raging Against the god of Small Minds and Absent Hearts

an atheist in Oklahoma

We Live in Our Separate Closets

11th, 12th

Pit of Despair

11th, 12th, … to 21yo or so, the worst of the depressive episodes

Groomed

11th, 12th, and on

Hippies Can Have Long Hair

11th

I’ll Kill Myself by Twenty, Twenty-Five, no Thirty

the perennial escape hatch of suicide, and setting a year

Felonious Sodomite

12th

Gay for Now

12th

Yoga and Anorexia

19-21

Loose Lips Sink Ships

spies don’t drink…

I Will Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night of Baldness!

Herb

you thought this was going to be about weed? Nope… let’s talk about herbs desperate trans women take.

My Penis is Supposed to go Where?

The Golem Approaches Sentience

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Black Market Mones!

Manning Up

In Harms Way

the death wish levels up

Self-Pathologization is Easy

A P.O. Box and Illicit Breasts

I Can’t Call the Cops

the abuser pushes his way back into my life

Raped

Call me Star

Drinking to Numb

Marriage, You Must be Mad

Suicide

Kind of Coming Out

bisexual coming out

Adios Abuser

The Revenge of the Eating Disorder and Black Market Mones!

Hurting Myself and Others With the Manosphere

A Jagged Little Red Pill, Tinder and Anorgasmia

A Soft Butch Bisexual Warms My Cold Heart

Over Thirty and on Borrowed Time

depression and suicidality… what to do with a life I never thought would or could last this long

The Cisheteronormative Siren’s Song

Disassociative Sexual Projection

Baby Crazy

Cracked Egg and Gin

A recipe for transitioning… the fault lines are showing… texts with a friend that had come out as transgender

Scotland

As Good as it Gets Isn’t Good Enough

the in between time after Scotland and before therapy

Fighting the Golem

Therapy

Desiring Transmedical Certainty

Transcendence

that wild weekend, the lifting of the disassociative fog, bodily integration, pain, and acceptance

My Fairy Transmother

Failing the Cisgender Quiz with Flying Colors

my official gender dysphoria diagnosis

I’ll Give it Five Years or Fifty

Discovering my Lost History and Transfeminism

Finding my Lost Voice

Coming Out

Friends

Brian, Marcy, others… that party at Ambers

Family

Extended Family

Corresponding with my Golem

Transcribed from a journal entry written some time in September 2017 The original letters used my deadname, but it has been substituted with Golem, capitalized.

Dear Stephanie,

I’m truly deeply sorry. You know what for. We both do. There you’ve been all these years trying to show me the way, trying to lead me out of my misery. You lashed out at me on some occasions, and I don’t blame you… After all I deprived you of your place in the sun. I denied you, I robbed you of decades of your life. I caused you harm, and yet you stand before me ready to forgive me. With love for yourself, somehow not snuffed out by everything I’ve put you through. With compassion for me… tenderness, and understanding. It is a different tactic, I’ll give you that, and with no small amount of fear about releasing you from the bondage I have set you in, I’ve removed your chains and I accept the consequences.

I know what you have to do. I have no place in this world as my only job was to jail you, knowing that your release would mean my death. I thought at first that I was protecting you from a cruel world, and to do so it was best to lock you away. As you know though I have long realized I was wrong and I was self preserving to both of our detriments. I was not made for this world, but you were.

I am yours to use, and when you decide that you are done with me, I am yours to kill. My life is forfeit, but yours is invaluable.

Sincerely, Golem

Dear Golem,

You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. After all I made you, and we are one and the same. You were never supposed to be in service this long. I’ve been thinking of you as my golem for the last ten days. A boy made of clay conjured by a terrified girl who couldn’t handle her situation. It was a cruel twist of fate that you even came to be and more was required of you than could have ever been expected. Living just under the skin now of the body I compelled you to move the through the world in… Jesus. You did what you had to do to; keeping the lights on. It’s a wonder that you made it this far without being any more self destructive than you have been. I think it is fair to believe that we would both be dead without you, and for that I owe you an unpayable debt. Thirty years of service, twenty-four-seven. You’ve earned a retirement, and we’ve learned so much together. You are right though. The future is one without you, but you’ve made an indelible imprint on the thrust of my future.

I love you Golem. You are an imperfect being, a runaway conjuration, but you are the closest thing I’ve had to a true friend until this point in my life. You’ve shouldered my burdens, and acted in accordance with what I asked of you. A better golem, a girl could never hope for.

Love, Stephanie

Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

We Don’t Treat Your Kind Here

transgender healthcare in Oklahoma.

No Hope for a Genetic Future

Boobs or Bust! My Third Time with HRT is a Charm

checking the boxes, taking the pills, making that choice six times a day

A New Friend, A New Sister

No Person’s Land

reflections on being a visibly transgender person of indeterminate gender

My Real First Love

dancing, kissing, being held, and seen… how did you know to touch me like that, fucked like a woman

She Won’t See or Hear Me

my exes behavior and an indication of what’s to come

The Patriarch’s Birthday in Drag

I can Pick Flowers

The 1st Trans Employee at the 3rd Largest Employer

Unsafe Everywhere

hellooo deary… a typical day in retail followed to my car… attempted break in at my house by neighbor

Second Puberty: Like the First but with Zero Cisgender Grace

Abandoned by Friends

Passing and Failing

Fear and a Delirium

saying goodbye to my grandpa before he ever knew me

Transgender Community

A Transgender Liaison, Independence Day, and the Freak Show

coming out at work

Professionals are Not Professional

professional network, conferences, loss of professional history and reputation

Ride or Die

I Can’t Hire You Because You’re Trans

My Grandpa’s Funeral as Myself

More Than 2nd Puberty, Rather Delayed Identity Formation

Why fake it ‘til you make it isn’t a thing when it comes to doing the internal work of developing a concept of self. The delayed concept of self that this trans woman, and many others experience. Socialization as an ongoing process. What it is like. The difficulty of doing the work when your only way of interacting with the world has been to fake it via the Golem for your whole life.

Disowned

Nearly Homeless

Seeking Validation in Men

Hate Chicken

My First Pride

Fighting Insurance

Trans Women Pack Heat

and knives, and pepper spray, and fuck knows what else

Depression Cured?

a cure? certainly not, but it can help… trading one thing for another

I Have a Boyfriend

It Takes Real Balls to Get an Orchiectomy

Lifting the Fog

Spiro megadosing. The blessed return on my mental clarity, the internalized misogyny of thinking it was because of my feminized brain and Estrogen

The Suicide of a Transgender Lover

What’s in a Name?

Fuck my Period

Street Legal Tranny

Loss of Community

Worked Out

Healing Trauma Doesn’t Work in a War Zone

Going Stealth

The Bank Job

Pandemic Jesusland

Prepping

IFS and Multiplicity

Exodus Jesusland

Mistakes Were Made

not being out at work in Seattle and the stress that put me under

Pandemic Seattle

From Friend to Live-in Girlfriend in a Month

Agoraphobia or a Learned Survival Response

My Hair is Falling Out

More Letters More Cisgender Nonsense

Vaginoplasty isn’t for Pussies

Losing a Brother

They’re Attacking the Children

A Murdered Trans Sibling

Finding My People

My Path to Healing Sure as Hell Ain’t a Straight One

T4T sapphic love, giving up on men, giving up on cisgender people romantically

Genderfuckery

queering myself

Preparing to Flee Again

Ding, Dong, the Abuser is Dead!

Real Pride

Out of the Shadows and Into the Light

An Uncertain Path Forward

it’s a me, princess peach video games, mario 2, playing the girl

prostitute my only career choice, also drug addict, and dead woman

birthing myself the only child I may ever have is myself

biopic why do we, especially trans women, seem to write biopics? Setting the record. Combating harmful narratives of socialization. Meeting cisgender standards. Getting it out of our heads. Creating a cohesive narrative for a disjointed life. No equivalent of tomboys. Showing that we were the girls that led to the women that we are.

lifting the trans away getting big, and farther away from myself… but I actually like this iron… oh my T.

deception pays acting, hacking, performance magic, information security, social engineering, physical security, consulting, etc… everything I do aligns with the primary skill i practiced in my youth, deception. I absolutely hate this.

Sick of the lies, all the lies I don’t have time for bullshit any more. Truth teller.

Grieving? You’re grieving the Golem?!?

I’m Somebody New, Treat me as Such The real problem with people from your past. Mental models, and the people that love and can’t change them.

Love and Forgiveness Am I finding Jesus again?

I Don’t Go to TDOR

Tending the Fire Keeping the Altar stumbling across a shrine in memory to our fallen, and a night of tears

Single Sex Cis Spaces

Where We Don’t Fit In the transgender community and its lack of spaces

Community, What Community?

Transgender Picnic probably one of the largest single gatherings of transgender people in history

Transgender Beach Day The fear.

Men Only Love Men and sometimes Transgender women. A Pet theory on why, and how we are the “best of both worlds” to them if they can both see us as women and men at the same time.

Just Tell me You Want to Wear my Panties men who aren’t men, or who are…

I Ain’t Gonna Be Your Down Low Girl it’s never going to happen boys

My Mom has ALS

I’ll Never Approach Cisgender Women, Trans Men, or AFAB Non-Binary People cuz the narrative is that we are predators…

Flirting with Death on the dangers of flirting when people don’t know you’re transgender

I Can’t Open This Pickle Jar Loss of strength, and the incredibly weak and monstrously strong trans woman myth.

Hold Your Children Close Fascist

Maximizing Transgender Harm with Meta

The Feminine Penis

Butt Stuff

Strap-On’s are Great!