coming out as a trans man has been one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done but also one of the most challenging. all of your relationship dynamics change so fast and trying to navigate it blindly is super fucking hard. I wish I could articulate it well

transmisogyny-exempt people do the most insane handwringing about how trans women who say ‘egg’ are Predatory Toward GNC Men and Assuming Genders and Reinforcing Gender Roles or whatever (this is just the TERF argument that trans women are nefariously trying to Convert gnc cis men)

whether you like it or feel Uncomfy or not, the fact is, the following is a very common experience for trans women:

a trans woman makes a friend who at the time self-describes and presents as a man; who seems to be seeking out as many trans women as they can (maybe surrounding themself with trans women if they're able to and/or following their trans women friends around like a duckling); who seems somewhat uncomfortable around men and especially with being treated by them as a Fellow Man; who is very aware of and interested in trans issues; who maybe talks or asks about various aspects of transitioning; and maybe has other interpersonal mannerisms that don't mean anything on their own and don't even necessarily mean anything in context. but yes, then that friend eventually comes out as a trans woman to the trans women she's close to, maybe after having only recently come out to herself

this is something I've personally experienced: this is roughly what I did when I was starting to figure things out (seeking out trans women online). this is also basically how one of my close RL friends made friends with me, and eventually came out to me. I was one of the first trans women she met in real life

and yes, before my friend came out to me, I did Wonder. I didn't assume, and I didn't do anything to push or prod, because it wouldn't have been helpful: it would likely have just made her uncomfortable. I figured the best thing I could do in any case was just being there, and being worthy of trust to talk about anything when/if she wanted to

(said friend is actually now in a similar position wrt one of her siblings, who has talked about how it would be better to be a woman and wear women's clothing among other things, but for now still self-describes as a guy. We'll See)

and yes, sometimes when trans women are in this position—having a friend like this whom we wonder about—we might refer to having a friend who may be a closeted trans woman or an ‘egg’ when in private conversation with other trans women, or when speaking in an anonymous and non-identifying context. this isn't outing anyone, and doing so is not Assuming Someone's Gender or Trying To Convert A Man or Force A Gender On Someone

we might also refer to ourselves in the past tense as having been “eggs” when talking about our experiences growing up, figuring things out, getting to know other trans women, questioning and coming out to ourselves, etc. (again, I myself did seek out other trans women online etc. before I knew I was trans—again, this is all pretty common!)

we are not hunting down any cis man who enjoys baking or whatever and forcibly declaring them to be an Egg. we do not have the social power to do this even if we wanted to, which we don't. even if you did encounter such a hypothetical trans woman, she would be annoying on an interpersonal level, but again, probably not in a position to commit real harm. and if YOU were to fixate on and rage about The Nefarious Trans Women Assuming People's Genders, that would say infinitely more about you than about us or about some purported Serious Social Problem with the term “egg”

any transmisogyny-exempt person who has a problem with any of this is welcome to eat shit

History anon here with appreciation and a couple clarifications:

The worst thing *I* could be was a trans man, not the worst thing *anyone in the world* could be. I realize I didn't write this super clearly, so that's on me, but I was talking about the worst felt sense of identity I specifically could have. Like, being a murderer would be worse, but you don't come to be a murderer by keeping yourself up at night, wondering whether it best describes who you are. I thought I could force myself to hold a different identity, one that wouldn't be betraying the feminist values I was surrounded by and looked up to.

I didn't say anything about how my experience compares to trans women, though for the record, they were also treated terribly in the spaces that hated me, and I also stood up for and worked with them. Most of my academic scholarship has been focused on trans men because that's the area where I'm most passionate and qualified, but that's my personal work right now, not some sideways way of putting others down.

I didn't know you'd been hanging out in trans masc spaces in the early 2000s. High five for guys who survived those days.

I don't use Tumblr, so I don't have an @ to give you. This account I'm posting from? It's technically a work account I set up for a job almost a decade ago that decided it didn't want the page after all, so it's still linked to my email. There's no other way for me to reliably contact you that I know of, but if you think of something, I'm totally open.

Hey there, thanks for the clarifications, and sorry to have mischaracterized what you were aiming to convey in your first message. You have a lot of experiences and knowledge that I'd love to learn from more to the extent you are fine with sharing.

I have a friend who grew up in the SF Bay area in the early 2000s and was a trans guy then, and from them I've gathered little threads here and there regarding how trans men were seen and treated at the time (all the trans guys were expected to be bottoms, not just for the reasons that's such a Thing today, but also because in feminist spaces it was seen as the appropriate position for a trans guy to be relative to a cis woman, within the community hierarchy)... there are certainly big elements of the scene and regional differences that I know next to nothing about, when it comes to trans guys experiences at the time. I think the Midwest queer/feminist scene was probably very different in a lot of ways. It certainly was very sex negative. I'd be curious to hear a lot more about the ambassador program pushing for trans male inclusion at the bathhouses that you mentioned, and more about where you're from in general.

For all that I challenge contemporary complaining about "trans male invisibility," it really is true that gay trans men were completely excluded from the communities I was around back then, and I didn't really feel that we could exist (though I had known some bi trans guys at that time). That certainly kept me from transitioning for far longer than I otherwise would have. And I feel like I have witnessed the canonization of Lou Sullivan happening in real time here on Tumblr... even more recently than much of the advocacy that you shared about. He just was not on my radar or someone that anyone in my circles was talking about until a few years ago. But I guess it's not surprising that radfems who considered gay men to be privileged perverts weren't speaking about him. Man Columbus Ohio sucked dick

I'm not sure how best for us to get in touch, then. My twitter DMs are open too. I keep most of the rest of mine shut for lots of reasons. Funny that your account is a brand account on here...are you the Dennys tumblr account

obligatory warning that terfs/”gender critical” folks and other transphobes are not allowed to debate me on this post. go watch fox news or something.

hi i’m going to be loudly and annoyingly transgender for a second about the whole “alternate treatments for gender dysphoria” thing.*

*a quick note: although this post describes gender dysphoria in relation to transness, i am not a transmedicalist and do not think that gender dysphoria is required to be trans. i support people’s right to self-identify how they see fit as long as it’s in good faith.

i’m a trans guy, pre-t and pre-op. i’ve identified as trans for about 3-4 years now and, although i still have questions about my identity, i’m very sure that being a guy is right for me, and makes me overwhelmingly happy. 

a little while ago, a consistent and scary experience with some transphobes caused me to wonder whether being trans was right for me - not because i didn’t like being trans, but that these bad experiences couldn’t possibly be worth it, even to garner small joy from positive trans experiences.

so i started looking into TERF and “gender critical” stuff.

now, i won’t get into all of it, but those short experiences made me feel intense anxiety about my identity as a trans guy. i thought, for a bit, that i was “betraying womanhood,” or that i was just a “confused girl being tricked by the patriarchy,” or the rest of all those bullshit arguments.  i tried detransition for a bit, personal and online detransition.

it made me fucking miserable.

every day was plagued by constant anxiety, fear, anger, depression, and overall mental anguish. every single time i looked in the mirror, i was wracked with dysphoria. i tried being a butch woman, because masculine clothes made me feel better, but being a butch woman didn’t feel right to me either. i was confused, scared, depressed, and anxious. even after a while, when i started becoming numb to the dysphoria - i was miserable. i stayed in bed for hours at a time. i wouldn’t shower for days because the stress and intense wrongness of seeing my body and calling it a woman’s body hurt so badly.

TERF and gender critical circles told me all women and girls felt this way.  i talked to one of my friends about it. she’s a cis girl, a devout feminist and a loud and proud hater of the patriarchy, one of my coolest friends. she’s experienced misogyny in her life, as almost every woman and afab person has. i asked her whether she hated being a girl and if so, why. her response?

“i don’t hate being a girl - i like it, i like what it means for me. gender’s different for everyone and random for everyone, and what being a girl means to me is comfortable. i hate the way some people demean, infantilize, dislike or are just violent against me for being a girl, but i don’t hate being a girl. if we eradicated the patriarchy - which will take a long fucking time, but if i was alive when we did - i’d choose to be a girl over and over and over again.”

i understood, and i didn’t understand. i understood because that’s how i felt being a boy, being a man, and i didn’t understand because how could one love being a girl? i hated it, for reasons i couldn’t discern.

i thought about it again. i thought - i don’t think women feel like this. i looked at all my friends and family who are women, and i watched and experienced their ease with their gender, and i thought…why am i forcing myself into this? when i know, over and over and over again, that it doesn’t work for me? that i get angry and stressed and numb and depressed and feel so so bad?

the thing about gender dysphoria is that we don’t really have a concrete idea for  why it happens. there’s theories, some more solid than others. it’s likely a mixture of a bunch of factors, from genetics to socialization to environment to a shit ton of other things. and the “gender critical”/TERF groups i looked at would cite that as a reason why we shouldn’t treat it or alleviate it.

as you can tell, from countless fucking studies and anecdotal evidence and experiences and medical professionals and the trans community advocating for it over and over and over again, it’s bullshit. it’s fucking bullshit. not knowing the concrete reason for why something happens is not a reason to ignore it, dismiss it, or make it worse.

there are plenty of complicated or difficult-to-explain things in the world. gender dysphoria is one of them. that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be alleviated. i fully support people with gender dysphoria who identify as cisgender and/or want to  treat their own dysphoria with ways other than medical transition, provided they’re not being pressured into it. but forcing detransition and “alternate treatments” onto other people does not work. insisting that it’s something everyone needs to try or do does not work. discrediting the many studies that have been done and the medical professionals vouching for it as well as the experiences of people who have gone through it does not work.

but, obviously, these people don’t actually care about making people’s lives better, or healthier, or happier, or more comfortable. they just don’t like trans people and what we do with our bodies, no matter how small. from a 7 year old trans girl growing out her hair to a 35 year old trans man getting phalloplasty and testosterone, all of it is scary and predatory and strange and destructive and disgusting and wrong.

in my opinion? there is nothing more wrong than denying yourself comfort because other people find it bad.

and yes, being trans still hurts me sometimes. it hurts a lot for some people and doesn’t for others, but for me it can. i still get insecure and dysphoric about my voice, or my height, or my face shape. i still get emotionally drained and exhausted from meeting transphobic relatives. i still feel uncomfortable and frustrated when i get gendered incorrectly by strangers. i feel sad and numb when i see another dead trans person in the news, when i see people calling me and my community disgusting.

but all of that is outweighed by the joy. the joy of having friends like me, friends who understand my identity and are there for me. the joy of going to a pride parade or a queer cafe and meeting people like me. the joy of wearing clothes that i like and cutting my hair how i want and doing my makeup in a way that makes me feel good. the joy of looking in the mirror and knowing that, while some things still aren’t where they’re supposed to be, i still have my short messy hair and my hairy legs and my trans-taped chest. and i can love myself, in a way that makes me feel good. the joy of thinking about my future and seeing transformation instead of torture.

it still hurts sometimes, but it hurt so much more when i was trying to force myself to live in a body that wasn’t right for me, and doing nothing to alleviate it. 

so i hope this post reaches someone out there, someone who’s going through the same thing i went through back then. you do not have to deny yourself comfort and happiness for other people. there is nothing wrong with who you are or how you’re living. you are allowed to exist in a way that makes you comfortable in your identity. and you are not responsible for molding yourself to fit other people’s expectations. you aren’t hurting anyone - you’re just trying to exist. trying to live. 

and there is nothing wrong with that.

Ugh, great. Tumblr is making me sad now too lol.

I knew there were terfs and radfems, but I didn't expect there to be SO MANY. You just see transmeds, radfems and terfs literally on NEARLY EVERY POST trans women will talk about their experiences, even if it has NOTHING TO DO with them, even if they're asked to not interact.

I straight up saw and had to block a bunch of radfems and terfs on here calling a nonbinary person a NARCISSIST just for talking about their experience exploring their gender identity over the years, and saying they just "wanted to be special". ????

Then I saw them dunking on another trans woman who was talking about this phenomenon transphobes often do where they project their feelings of cis men onto trans women (which I think was worded very well and it helped me really understand why a lot of transphobia occurs, and I'm super thankful she could explain it in a way that made sense), and all the comments were misgendering her and calling her crazy and delusional, and acting like she was forcing them to be into her when literally all she was saying was just "don't lump us in with how you feel about cis men cuz we're not the same and not even all trans women experience sex the same way". She never, at any point, demanded you be into her, she just asked to not be treated with disrespect. And I don't understand how all these radfems act like they get to tell her she's wrong when, hello, you're not trans? She is?? She knows the trans experience and other trans people? Who are you to act like you get to police that?

It just makes me really fuckin depressed and anxious, especially thinking about all my trans friends and my partner who probably have to deal with disgusting people like this, whether they're transfem, transmasc, non binary, etc. Radfems don't care - they just want a reason to hate on someone and use them as scapegoats and it sucks. It fucking sucks.

They even tried to speak for bi women when it's like? No?? I'm a bi woman and I'm not a transphobic jerk?? As someone who's a bi girl and is also afraid of most men to an extent, I'm not going to use my past trauma in order to be hateful because 1.) That's a shitty thing to do, 2.) Even if my nb partner had a dick i would still love them all the same bscause they are kind, caring, and listen so much better than anyone else I've been with, 3.) You're not going to solve misogyny with even more misogyny and bigotry.It makes me so fucking afraid even if I'm a cis woman because, damnit, I just want my fucking friends to be happy without hateful people like this.

Hell, I even saw them accusing CIS WOMEN of "not being real women" when they didn't approve of them. I saw some blogs rb some shit like " 'some women don't produce eggs--' are you sure they're real women?" And that just made my fucking blood boil. Because it just fucking PROVES they don't care about women. If they did they would understand plenty of cis women want kids, plenty of them want families but can't have them, plenty of disabled women aren't able to produce eggs due to their illnesses, plenty of women from other ethnicities like Hispanic women might have features they consider masculine like more visible body hair (something that, as a Hispanic woman, made me feel very icky and gross until I accepted body hair was not a gendered thing, no matter how much society pushed it to me as one.)

And I will never, ever understand how you would push these stupid expectations on women everyone, trans and cis alike, when you know damn well how fuckin hard and painful it is to constantly be forced to meet society's standards. If you REALLY want "liberation", why are you oppressing people even further? If you really want equality, why are you beating people down? Why are you forcing us all to fit in boxes?

They act like they're so woke and big brained to hate on trans people like this but really, they're just hateful and contributing to the hate non-men everywhere have had to endure for ages just for not being men. And I will never, ever accept someone that does things like that as a feminist.

You are NOT a feminist if your activism is limited only to women you personally like and approve of.

And if non-binary were a stepping stone

Disclaimer: I'm only speaking of my experience here as someone who's questioning where I'm at with my use of labels. Non-binary people are very real and my individual experience does not discredit their existence. Wherever I end up in my life I'll forever hold the label and community dear to my heart for allowing me to explore my gender in the first place.

TW: Internalized transphobia, insecurities over masculinity

I started seeing a psychologist with experience with trans people like 2 weeks ago and in our second session I brought up the recurring questioning I have around whether I'm non-binary transmasc or a trans man, that it's all blurry and I'm not sure where I stand in there (though I've previously told her I'm non-binary transmasc). She asked me what made me think I'm non-binary and with little explanation on my part it's like she saw right through me and suggested that I seem stuck on the non-binary label out of fear and because I don't feel valid enough, because of internalized transphobia.

Realistically I know ultimately it doesn't really matter what label I use and that I can just switch it up as I please to suit my needs in any given moment, that I don't have to box myself in, but I guess there is things to be questioned about why I use the labels I use if not because "I feel they describe my actual gender feelings best". Of some of the reasons I explained to the psychologist I never considered they could be related to my fears or internalized transphobia. So it's kind of eye-opening in a way.

My whole transition has been taking baby steps further and further coming into masculinity. For a while I did truly feel non-binary, not exclusively a man or woman, because that gave me freedom to step out and explore while keeping a foot in what I've always known. Being gendered feminine always felt bad and being gendered outright masculine always felt strange. I used to say that if gender were space with planets, I was floating in orbit of a "masc" planet, but not the "man" planet.

Before starting T I feared losing the connection I have with women that makes it easier for me to be friends with them. I feared that they wouldn't see me as a safe person anymore and because I don't feel safe around cis men and struggle to connect with them, I would just end up completely isolated. I still fear the same and especially so if I were to affirm myself as a man.

After being on T and presenting more masculine I started feeling completely invalid around other men, that I don't measure up to them, that I'm not masculine enough, that I'm not man enough. That if I were one of those men who knew me pre-transition and saw me now I would laugh in my face, because there's no way I could ever be a man. I still feel this way. These feelings of insecurity were very confusing at first though because I wasn't actively and consciously seeking to /be/ a man, so why would I be hung up over whether I "measured up" to other men in the first place?

In hindsight I figure that perhaps I felt this way because subconsciously I knew I always wanted more, that perhaps manhood was what I always wanted to achieve, and that reflects in the characters I always connected with or the people I looked up to.

As time passed and T masculinized my body more, I've started to be able to see myself as just a guy going about my daily business and nothing has felt better than that. I've started relating less to non-binary people. I've started to grow distant from they/them pronouns and feel alienated whenever I'm treated as separate from men. I often think to myself that I love being masculine so much it's painful. I now find myself closer to the "man" planet than ever I might as well land, and that's terrifying for me.

And so even if non-binary doesn't suit me as well anymore, I still find myself dragging the label and introducing myself as such with they/them pronouns alongside he/him to people I know in real life because even if it doesn't feel entirely authentic anymore, at least it gives me temporary safety. It gives me relief to know that maybe it makes me easier to "digest" for others and won't entirely change my relationship with them. It gives me relief that I can't be invalidated in my masculinity because non-binary encompasses everything. It gives me relief because it makes myself easier to "digest" to myself, because the idea of being a man terrifies me, even if I know too many things point to me being one.

So I know that from the start I've essentially barred myself from manhood because it's too confronting on my fears and insecurities/internalized transphobia. And god knows how deep the internalized transphobia runs as it took me 2-3 years of baby steps into gender exploration to even admit I was trans. I thought I was over it so it was a shock when my psychologist suggested it, but it's not all that surprising really.

I'm not necessarily at a point yet where I'm ready to let go and be comfortable saying that I'm a trans man, for all I know maybe it's not the case and I obviously still have to work through internalized transphobia towards being either a trans man or non-binary (on that perhaps I would just be forcing myself into a binary identity out of convenience). I don't know.

I know people could be reading this and thinking it doesn't have to be that hard and that I can just identify how I want as I please and I know that, but it's much easier said than done because for as long as I don't work through my fears and insecurities, affirming that I'm one label over another won't feel real or authentic but strange because of the mixed feelings I have, which I may have mistaken as dysphoria in the past.

Being able to just see myself as a guy when I catch my reflection in windows walking around the city, being confident about it and actually feeling euphoric is only a recent development of the past month or two. I fucking love it, and I'm so stoked about it. But like everything else in my transition I need the confidence to feel the euphoria and for words to feel right, and that takes time.

So yeah. I don't really have a conclusion to this. For now I'm just a masculine person and that's that. Maybe one day I'll open up and be comfortable as a trans man, and maybe I won't, and maybe I'll reaffirm I really am non-binary and feel non-binary, or I'll grow comfortable saying I'm both at once which isn't the case at the moment for whatever reason. But for the moment I'll just be.

hi! ive been scrolling through your blog and i agree a lot with the intersection between gnc/transmasc experiences, but i think you seem to disagree that cis women can meaningfully oppress trans men? if im wrong correct me, but you did argue this idea a couple times in a few different posts, though i don't know how old they were. cis women do oppress us in many many ways, particularly cis white women; if you look to the TERF movement and the way they talk about trans men is like they're trying to put us thru conversion therapy. cis women have been extremely predatory to me because of my trans status, have used their cis privilege to demean me and silence me and so on, and cis women are proponents of some of the most infamously anti-transmasc literature and general ideas out there (like "irreversible damage" by shrier). cis women celebs and activists have been much more publicly anti-transmasc than ive ever seen of cis men. TERF/transphobe cis lesbians and sapphics, for example, laud gnc cis women but demonize and delegitimize trans men - this is extremely common sentiment within TERF circles, bc gnc women don't "betray" womanhood but trans men, to them, do. and.. well. bc cis gnc women aren't trans lol.

gnc women are absolutely still oppressed, but they're not being oppressed on account of them being cis. cis gnc women can & do treat trans men extremely harshly or they treat us like women with self image problems and so on. i especially know this because i transitioned from a cis butch lesbian to a trans man and watched many of my friends break off from me or reject me from their circles entirely. just food for thought; the intricacies of oppression are called intricacies for a reason.

I think there is a lot of conflation of different things in this anon. I will start by laying out my most pressing points of pushback here, because you seem like a person who's capable of discussion and not like a person who's just throwing nonsense at a wall and hoping some of it will stick. I honestly don't think I've ever directly addressed the question of power relations between women and trans men, but you're correct that I don't think either of these groups is oppressing the other.

My first and most major point of pushback is that I absolutely do not believe that women experience anything you could call "cis women privilege," even a little bit. In order to buy the concept of that privilege, I would need to see not just individual instances of women putting down other kinds of individuals, but I would need to see largescale material oppression of other groups of individuals, from which women were specifically benefitting. And I would need to see that benefit outweigh the massive social pitfalls of happening to be born female in a world where female people are generally not valued very highly- it would need to outweigh everything from honor killings to the wage gap to menstrual huts to rape culture to having proper understanding of medicine dosing- and I have to say that, if women are really privileged then we're making very poor use of that privilege. I'm not going to labor this point for too long, but I will say that I have never seen any convincing evidence that women are in a wonderful position relative to literally any other group of people on earth, let alone that women are collaboratively oppressing trans men. So, when you ask whether I believe that "cis women can meaningfully oppress trans men" my answer is no, I don't, because I've never seen a shred of evidence that women are materially benefitting from and intentionally acting in the oppression of trans men. Are women organizing in large enough groups that they could be said to be speaking for women and then advocating for laws that keep trans men out of housing, out of employment? HOW are women oppressing trans men? When you say that "gnc women are absolutely still oppressed, but they're not being oppressed on account of them being cis," that kind of doesn't give me much to actually respond to. So what if they're not? What does that mean about their relationship- understood here through the lens of actual power, the ability to name things, the ability to set agendas, to make calls by which other people have to abide, the ability to enact violence on other people- to trans men? I've read a lot of truly horrifically misogynist and heinous things written by trans men, like truly indefensibly misogynist ways of thinking about women, and I wouldn't say that, because those trans men were engaging in misogyny, they were enacting power over me. Basically I don't think there's any metric by which women are oppressing trans men, but by which trans men aren't oppressing us, and obviously I don't believe the latter. How do you respond to the general concept that trans men are privileged over women, or over other transgender people? To be perfectly clear, I also find those assertions (that trans men are rolling in male privilege, etc) to be absurd when considering the general state of trans men as a group, and I think of this assertion very similarly.

My second point of pushback is that I can't in good faith assent to referring to Abigail Shrier's book as "anti-transmasc" in any meaningful way. I want to be very clear- I think it's absolutely batshit insane bananas that she chose the title and cover she did, knowing full well that fence sitters were going to be inherently put off by the genuinely deeply uncomfortable framing of the whole text. I also don't think that Shrier is a feminist, which is an obvious major point of contention I have with her, and I think it shows in her particular framing of women and of femininity and of the goodness of growing into potential mothers. There's a lot of the framework she's working in that I don't like and find deeply distasteful. But Shrier's book itself is not about adult people making an informed medical decision about what they want to do to help alleviate gender dysphoria, it's about the spreading of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls and the fact that the professionals to whom parents turn for help with their children's emotional distress very often immediately affirm the child as factually nonbinary, or factually a boy, etc, and start them on a path toward lifelong medical treatment for a psychological problem whose roots are often left totally unexplored by professionals. Teen girls are notorious for memetic communication- when one girl in a group develops an eating disorder it is not uncommon for her female friends to pick it up, same with several self harm behaviors, etc. There's NOT NOTHING there, and it's amazing to me that Shrier couldn't kind of keep the conservatism in her pants long enough to just do the job she set out to do and nothing more. I have not even read more than excerpts from it myself, and I am not someone who shies away from wrongthink or from reading things I are disagreeable or wrong or even morally outright bad, but her framing simply leaves me disinterested. IF you can stomach it, I would strongly recommend you listen to an interview with Shrier because she comes across remarkably like a regular person who would have known better than to pop an alarmist title and creepy cover on a book she allegedly wanted lots of people to read.

The best doctor I had was a cis man. At first appointment, he talked to me like he was talking to a man, even though at the time, I barely could formulate the words as to whether I was one or not. He went over my informed consent not like he was telling me what I was going to be doing, or like he was telling me what I was, but what *we* were. He informed me about hair loss by pointing at his receding hairline. He was the only doctor I ever had who I felt like if I had some problem that affected some part of myself that made me dysphoric, I could tell him, because even my body as it was that first day, pre-t, was a man’s body. It felt good. It helped me be able to fall into myself as being something like a man, because I saw it in his eyes, and I loved being talked to like that.

That’s the funny thing about ‘we can always tell’—it’s not cis people able to undress us down to our chromosomes, it’s us, always aware of the subtleties in speech and behavior that tell us how others see us. On the train the other day, a guy got on drunkenly ranting a bunch of weird, sometimes bigoted, mostly nonsensical shit. He touched my arm and told the train, “See this guy? Don’t fuck with him. You fuck with him, you fuck with me.” I got off immediately after that—I didn’t want to be included in the shit he was saying—and as I wandered downtown to find another way home, I thought about how easily I knew he’d genuinely thought I was a man—he touched my arm with the back of his hand. That quick, firm tap, nearly a hit—how many times have I seen one man touch another man that way? How many times have I been touched by a strange man with his whole palm on my arm and shoulder, because that’s how cis men touch women?

I know when someone sees me as “girl with they/them pronouns.” The nice thing about an anonymous blog away from people who know me in real life is that I can say, I remember every time my trans friends have stumbled to include me with them. And it’s odd now that they don’t, that the act of transitioning did change something in how they talk to me, and the conversations they include me in, even though I’ve always been here. The only reason my partner and I even have a relationship is from the very beginning, they never saw me as a woman. They don’t know how to see me as one. They find other people misgendering me just as jarring as I do.

And it’s clear to me that my current doctor—a trans man himself—holds some kind of “gender is different than sex” approach, because that’s how he treated me: like I was trans, but I was also female. Like ‘female’ still contained within it an acceptable amount of medical misogyny (which literally no one should have to deal with), and the trans was simply a modifier, an overlay. I don’t know if that’s how he sees himself. I don’t know if this is about me being non-binary vs. him being fully a man. I don’t know if he’s just a shit doctor who dehumanizes all his patients, and the transphobia is just an outgrowth of an uncaring, uncareful way of treating his patients. I don’t know.

I don’t know that I really have a point in writing all this—just thinking about how the doctor I was wary of turned out to be the best doctor I ever had, and the doctor I thought I could trust turned out to be, as my partner calls him, ‘the testosterone dispenser’ where I figure out how to deal with him as minimally as possible. Thinking about how the gendercrit crowd acts like cis men will only ever see trans men as broken girls, and any kindness toward us is pitiful compassion, but the first person (outside of my partner & *very* close friends) to treat me easily like a man was a cis man. That I have more experience with trans people treating me like I’m a silly girl, a pretend trans, something utterly unlike them.

I can tell how someone sees me. And I would give anything to be seen again the way that doctor saw me, to have a man look at me again—cis, trans, non-binary—with that kind of recognition, with that sense of a shared ‘we.’

Hey, y’all. 

First of all, thanks so much for your kind words and support in my inbox regarding the situation with my mother. She’s... still not doing great, at all. But I’m remaining hopeful everything will turn out alright soon. Keep those positive vibes coming though. Could use them.

Secondly, regarding all the SG craziness... honestly, the only take I have given how exhausted I am right now: I’m not worried about any of it. Maybe that’s a mistake and proves wrong, or maybe that’s just me being ‘over’ this mess. 

To me, it all just feels like the 100th 2.0 with the same shoehorned cameos due to nostalgia, behind the scenes agreements to benefit certain people, etc. People are shocked the producers mislead them by saying he wouldn’t come back, but they’ve often done that. They tend to make promises they don’t deliver on and deny things that wind up happening. Time and again. It’s partly why they have such an unhealthy dynamic of toxicity and mistrust with their own fans. Some may say they do that to protect themselves from fandom outrage, but if one’s perspective is “We can’t let fans know what we’re doing because they’ll hate it and tune out.” perhaps they should read that again slowly, and realize then that the wrong decisions are obviously being made. 

Same thing for people being annoyed that Mon-El is at the front and center of the battle alongside Kara, as if the show hasn’t often pushed its actual series regulars, women, people of color and canon LGBTQs to the back in favor of highlighting straight (usually white) cis men every chance they get? Come on. 

I’m personally not concerned about it because I know what this is all actually about in the macro. So I don’t look at the little micro and panic because no matter the outcome of it all, whether I’m wrong to shrug it off or not, well... look, we’ll get into all that at a later time, as I do not have the energy right now.

Ultimately, Kara deserves a happy ending. And a happy ending is NOT leaving her sister, best friends/family and world all behind for a guy she dated for a few weeks 3+ years ago who by her own admission mostly treated her like crap then tried to turn her into the other woman in his marriage. They abandoned that messaging years ago because it was so harmful. Returning to it, ending the show on it, making that be Kara/Supergirl’s legacy: yikes. 

So, I just personally doubt it. But if I’m wrong and they go there? So be it. In which case I wish them all the luck with the epic backlash they’d have to deal with. But truly, I hope they make the right choice for their own sake as well as for Kara, for the actors, and for the largest majority of the fans they have left who have stuck by them for so long... despite often being given every reason not to. 

Bit late and random but it's the anon you leave food out for here to give away I am also bi and I think exactly the same as you about bi val pretty much, every time Derek offers me representation my reaction is to slowly, hesitantly take it and say "thaaaaaaaaanks..." while rolling my eyes, in much the same way one accepts their least favourite flavour of sweet from an annoyingly enthusiastic uncle-type-individual. Ironically I feel I had more in common with her before the bi shit started up.

What I find really amusing is that Landy actually did reasonably well at representation when (and only when) he wasn’t trying. 

Oh god, this got long, anon, my ass rambled.

tldr; I'm glad actual bi people dislike bi val (or how Laundry handled bi val) as much as me, this will probably offend at least one person but i don't really care, Dirty Laundry wrote better rep when he didn't mean to write rep at all, and if he ever starts trying to "represent" groups I'm part of I'll take him out back like a dying horse and shoot him.

Like, yes. He had stupid and potentially offensive shit - I say potentially because what offends one member of a group won’t necessarily offend all of them. His attitude to mentally ill people is, frankly, disgusting. We’ve had “Skulduggery can’t be abused, he doesn’t have feelings”. We’ve had “eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY”. We had Ping, who seemed to be pretty much universally offensive. And that's what's always going to happen when a straight, cis, white, wealthy, male author tries to write marginalised groups he doesn't know shit about, because inevitably he's going to fall back on stereotypes.

But we also had:

SEXUALITY REP: Phase One's nonstraight characters were treated like the straight ones, and like, isn't that the whole point? There was no need for a massive Coming Out Story TM to grab for those sweet sweet Woke Points, because sexuality isn't supposed to be important to mages. I never understood why Val needed that whole Coming Out Panic storyline. Like...Des and Melissa are ridiculously supportive, encouraging, loving parents. They accepted you dating a ~19 year old when you were ~16. They accepted you revealing you could do fucking magic and that you'd been lying to them for like seven years. They took your undead buddy in stride and the most pressing question your dad had was whether magic toilets exist. There is zero reason to think that "I'm bisexual" is gonna be the thing that makes them flip and throw you into the streets in disgrace, Valkyrie. Come on.

Tanith had girlfriends and it was just mentioned casually, because it's normal.

China had massive UST with Eliza. That was an opportunity right there to not only include a f/f relationship, but also to bring back one of the few precious surviving characters from Phase One, using characters and a relationship that already had several books' worth of setup and tension and interest from fans.

The Monster Hunters have a casual conversation about which one of the Dead Men they'd date.

Ghastly has a conversation with Fletcher about the pain he's been through being in love. He never uses any pronouns.

It was confirmed at one point re: the Dead Men that at this point, after 300-odd years, everyone's been with everyone else at some point.

Thrasher is gay, and while Scapegrace's...everything...is treated as a joke/comedic relief, Thrasher's love for him isn't. He's completely devoted to Scapegrace, and that in itself is not played for laughs, even though the rest of the scene usually is. Thrasher's description of their first meeting is essentially a love-at-first-sight situation for him.

"ABNORMAL" RELATIONSHIP REP: Age gap relationships are normal for mages. Off the top of my head, using only canon, canon-implied or almost-canon ships:

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

If you include fan ships, there's also things like Mevolent/Serpine or my Mevolent/Vile, which are both ~600 year minimum age gaps based on the timeline, or Valdug (and its variations) which is ~400 years.

Now, whether you consider this kind of rep positive or negative is up to you, but it’s there.

MENTAL ILLNESS REP: more like "Which characters in this series don't have a mental illness or a personality disorder?" I have some of these issues, but not all of them, so this is just how I read it, but:

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

Schizophrenia (or similar): Valkyrie & Darquesse, Valkyrie "seeing" Darquesse's ghost thing in Phase Two

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

Trauma/PTSD/CPTSD: Skulduggery, Valkyrie, China, Ghastly, Erskine...pretty much everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. People struggling with trauma are spoilt for choice of characters to see themselves in.

TRAUMA REP: This series is a trauma conga line, but everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. I see little bits of myself in more than one Phase One character.

Childhood Abuse (of varying degrees & types): Skulduggery, Carol & Crystal, Omen, Fletcher, Ghastly, China, Bliss, Sanguine...

Estranged Family: Skulduggery abandoning his crest, Fergus & Gordon, China & Bliss

Bad Romantic Relationship: Skulduggery is also very clearly an abuse victim. He’s got a solid history of romantic attachments to women who manipulate, use and gaslight him for their own agendas.  There's a whole paragraph in SPX about how Abyssinia broke him down, isolated him from his friends and preyed on his desperate need to be loved, all classic abuse tactics.

And I’m personally a huge fan of this backstory for two reasons:

1) Society likes a plucky victim in media. The "My suffering made me stronger" type of victim. And it's not always like that in real life. Not all survivors come out of their abuse stronger or kinder or more understanding. Some of us come out cold and fucked up. Some of us end up as emotionally stunted, bloodied-nails-and-bared-teeth survivors, broken in ways that can't be fixed and sustained by enough rage to power a small sun. But society doesn't like to tell the story of that kind of survivor, because we're not usually a likeable protagonist. When we're shown in media, we're usually the sympathetic villain, or maybe the antihero. But Skug is someone who's done awful things and lost pretty much all his faith in humanity and been burned more times than he can count, and he still makes the conscious choice to try and be the good guy when he could so easily go Evil Supervillain on the world, and I don't know about any of y'all, but I've modelled myself on him in that. I've made the choice to do something good when all I really want to do is just become a horrible, shrivelled ball of nastiness and revenge. And that's because I saw him do it and realised that I could do that too.

Skug is an incredibly capable, strong, masculine Man's Man. He gets in fights all the time, and he usually wins. He's military, an industry that's Really Bad for stigmatizing weakness and mental illness, and he's right up at the top of the hierarchy. Almost everyone is afraid of him. He's a straight up cold-blooded killer. Skulduggery Pleasant is precisely the type of person who's not normally portrayed as a victim of anything. Nothing about him screams "victim" at all. But his abuse history is insidious. He's so conditioned to respond in a certain way to abuse from the women in his life, probably from a very young age, that despite all that strength and capability and stubbornness and ego, he just goes along with it. And it's an established pattern going back hundreds of years. He keeps going back to China, even though he knows she's bad for him and his friends keep telling him to stay away from her. Abyssinia latched onto him when he was traumatized and vulnerable and weaponized it against him to make him easier to control - and when she reappears, hundreds of years later, she jumps straight back into using, tmanipulating and gaslighting him and not only does he let her, he doesn't even seem to realise that behaviour is abusive. He thinks it's normal! That's how he's always been treated by his long-term girlfriends, with the notable exception of Wifey. Even when Val is being fucking nasty to him in the first couple books of Phase Two, sniping and lying and blaming him for everything under the sun, he just takes it. There's no attempt to tell her she's being unreasonable, no telling her to fuck right off and give her head a wobble, no defending himself even when she's bitching over something that isn't even his doing. And this is a man who has an absolutely gleaming steel spine the rest of the time; Skug has no problem saying no to anybody else, but he can't get past the way he's been taught to treat the important ladies in his life. Skug is a walking reminder that anyone can be a victim of abuse, even the ones who seem least likely to be susceptible.

GENDER REP: This one is the most iffy out of the bunch and definitely was not done very well in the eyes of the people who matter most, but I'll include it anyway because it mattered to some.

So there's Nye, who's...agender? Genderless? And uses "it" pronouns? Nye was generally considered horrible rep because it's also a war criminal and experiments on people and I've seen people say "Well I don't want to be seen like that" but? It's still possible to be a war criminal and also genderless. I never saw the two things as being related or relevant to each other.

There's also Mantis, who's in exactly the same gender/pronouns boat as Nye and always seems to be forgotten about, which sucks because Mantis is a war hero. It fought for the Sanctuary during the War and they never lost a battle when it was in command. It's called out of retirement to fight for the Supreme Council in LSODM, ends up fighting alongside Skulduggery during the Battle of Roarhaven, and ultimately dies attempting a very brave, very risky strategy. Mantis is, unreservedly, one of the good guys. It was also my introduction to sentient beings using "it" pronouns, and did it in a way that felt natural, so when I met my first person online who used "it" pronouns and hated to be referred to as he/she, it was...weird, but not as weird as it would otherwise have been, because I was like, "Oh yeah, like the Crenga. Okay."

And then there's the Scapegrace sex change plotline, which...I might have an unpopular opinion on this one. From what I’ve seen, trans people don’t seem to think was handled well or with any sensitivity at all. I’m not trans, so if the trans community says he was being offensive to them, I’m not going to claim otherwise. But...I first read the Scapegrace plotline as a young teenager in a tiny rural school with zero diversity, going through a period of being deeply confused about my own gender identity. He was more or less my first introduction to the idea that genitals =/= gender. I was relieved, at that point in my life, to read someone having a lot of the same thoughts I was having about being in the wrong body. So while it may have been badly done and yeah, the series would probably have been better without it, it did make at least one kid suspecting she might not be cis go “Huh! So there are other people who feel like this.”

Thrasher is also implied to be legitimately trans/gender-questioning, and that's not played for laughs either.

So? Phase One, while it absolutely had faults and issues and things that were just "Oh god why", was actually full of rep, at least compared to the other series that I read as a child/teen. But? As soon as Dirty Laundry started trying to be woke? He fucking sucks ass at it. Aside from confirming Phase One's hints that Skug has a background of abusive relationships, every single attempt at shoehorning rep into Phase Two is Bad.

The painfully OOC, forced, badly-written awkwardness of Val suddenly being rabidly horny for women out of fucking nowhere. The stilted, forced cringiness between her and any of the women she's flirted with - contrast that with Sorrowscorn's interactions, full of natural chemistry that had us all like 👀 I mean, I never shipped Val/Melancholia, but I could always see why people did - they had miles more chemistry than Val/anyone in Phase Two.

The fucking mess that is v*litsa, because if someone says "I'm really not interested in friendships/relationships right now", clearly the route to true love is to bulldoze their boundaries and forcibly insert yourself into their life and proceed to treat them like a delicate soft uwu flower, completely ignoring the horrible things they've done, while gleefully damning their best friend as an irredeemable monster for the exact same things, which is. You know. Gonna affect your so-called love's self-confidence and self-esteem because she knows she's no different to him. Y'all know I love an angsty ship, an unhealthy ship, a ship with fucked power dynamics, but I literally cannot roll my eyes any further back in my head at this shit. I never read Demon Road, but from what I've heard from friends who did, it does seem like every time Laundry tries to write an f/f ship, he comes up with a cringey abusive/manipulative caricature and tries to call it rep, and he needs to Stop.

Val's Mental IllnessTM arc. It's funny how he wrote Skulduggery as a wonderfully complex character with deep-rooted psychological damage and long-lasting trauma, but believes he wrote a character with "no feelings" - but when he tries to delve into the damage the world of magic has done to Val, he turned her into a weak, whiny drug addict who treats everyone around her like garbage and is so selfish and dislikeable that I? Honestly can't even reconcile Phase Two val with Phase One val. They're two completely different people. He's shown on Twitter that he doesn't have any respect for mentally ill people, and it shows. Other mentally ill people might see it differently, but the whole thing just makes me go "yikes".

Never, who has no personality outside of being genderfluid, and whose pronouns make no sense. I'm sorry, I have never met an nb person who insists that you change from male to female pronouns multiple times in a sentence, every time you refer to them. It's confusing as fuck. Now I have been told that Never has apparently received some character development in the last couple books, and if so, fair play, but I quit reading after Midnight, and Never and the rest of the personality-less new characters introduced in Phase Two who just seemed to be 2D Stereotypes to snag Woke Points were a big part of why, so. Development too late, I'm afraid.

(Now, if anyone is looking for a well-written genderfluid character, I recommend the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb. I have a lot of issues with her as a writer, and unfortunately I hate her POV character which puts me off the series as a whole, but she wrote the Fool/Amber/Lord Golden and their gender identity/approach to sexuality with so much more respect and realism. That is the kind of rep nb people should be getting: 3D, complex, realistic characters whose gender is only a tiny fragment of their personality, not the be-all-and-end-all of their existence. You know. Like cis people get. Nobody wants to be represented by a 2D cardboard cutout stereotype.)

Anyway idk how much sense this makes it just really amuses me that Laundry would include all this rep completely unintentionally and then go on Twitter and remind us all that actually he's a massive asshole via insensitive/offensive tweets about the groups he'd actually done a fair job of including (i.e. Skulduggery has no feelings, mentally ill people should find another series to read, the bullshit about Val being "heteromantic bisexual" on Twitter and then spouting all the "the woman she loved uwu" shit in the books (proving he has no idea what he's talking about), eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY. He can only write half-decent rep when he's not trying and he inevitably outs himself as having a really shitty attitude towards those people anyway, proving that ultimately it's all either unintentional rep or performative wokeness.

Favorite Books of 2020

I wanted to put together a list! I read 74 new books this year, and I keep track of that on Goodreads - feel free to add or follow me if you want to see everything! I’m going to focus on the highlights, and the books that stuck with me personally in one way or another, in approximate order. Also, all but two of them (#5 and #7 on the honorable mention list) are queer/trans in some way. Links are to Goodreads, but if you’re looking to get the books, I suggest your library, the Libby app using your library, your local bookstore, or Bookshop.

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, illus. by Ned Asta (originally published 1977). I had a hard beginning of the year and was in a work environment where my queerness was just not welcomed or wanted. I read this in the middle of all of that, and it helped me so much. I took this book with me everywhere. I read it on planes. I read it on the bus, and on trains, and at shul. I showed it to friends... sometimes at shul, or professional development conferences. It healed my soul. Now I can’t find it and might get a new copy. When I reviewed it, in February, I wrote: “I think we all need this book right now, but I really needed this book right now. Wow. This book is magic, and brings back a sense of magic and beauty to my relationship with the world.” Also I bought my copy last July, in a gay bookstore on Castro St. in SF, and that in itself is just beautiful to me. (Here’s a post I made with some excerpts)

Once & Future duology, especially the sequel, Sword in the Stars, by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy. Cis pansexual female King Arthur Ari Helix (she's the 42nd reincarnation and the first female one) in futuristic space with Arab ancestry (but like, from a planet where people from that area of earth migrated to because, futuristic space) works to end Future Evil Amazon.com Space Empire with her found family with a token straight cis man and token white person. Merlin is backwards-aging so he's a gay teenager with a crush and thousands of years of baggage. The book’s entire basis is found family, and it's got King Arthur in space. And the sequel hijacks the original myth and says “fuck you pop culture, it was whitewashed and straightwashed, there were queer and trans people of color and strong women there the whole time.” Which is like, my favorite thing to find in media, and a big part of why I love Xena so much. It’s like revisionist history to make it better except it’s actually probably true in ways. Anyway please read these books but also be prepared for an absolutely absurd and wild ride. Full disclosure though, I didn’t love the first book so much, it’s worth it for the sequel!

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum. This book hurt. It still hurts. But it was so good. It took me on a whole journey, and brought me to my destination just like it intended the whole time. The author’s note at the end made me cry! The sheer NEED from this book, the way the main relationship develops and shifts, and how you PERCEIVE the main relationship develops and shifts. I’m in awe of Ancrum’s writing. If you like your ships feral and needy and desperate and wanting and D/S vibes and lowkey super unhealthy but with the potential, with work, to become healthy and beautiful and right, read this book. This might be another one to check trigger warnings for though.

The Entirety of The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. I hadn’t heard of this series until this year, when a good friend recommended it to me. It filled the black hole in me left by Harry Potter. The political and mystical/fantasy world building is just *chef’s kiss* - the complexity! The morally grey, everyone’s-done-awful-things-but-some-people-are-still-trying-to-do-good tapestry! The ROMANCE oh my GOD the romance. If I’m absolutely fully invested in a heterosexual romance you know a book is good, but also this book had background (and then later less background) queer characters! And the DRAMA!!! The third book went in a direction that felt a little out of nowhere but honestly I loved the ride. I stayed up until 6am multiple times reading this series and I’d do it again.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. I loved this book so much that it’s the only book I reviewed on my basically abandoned attempt at a book blog. This book is haunting, horrifying, disturbing, dark, but so, so good. The character's voices were so specific and clear, the relationships so clearly affected by circumstance and yet loving in the ways they could be. This is my favorite portrayal of gender maybe ever, it’s just... I don’t even have the words but I saw a post @audible-smiles​ made about it that’s been rattling in my head since. And, “you gender-malcontent. You otherling,” as tender pillow talk??? Be still my heart. Be ready, though, this book has all the triggers.. it’s a .

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. This book called me out on my perspective on love. Also, it made me cry a lot. And it has two different interesting well-written romance storylines. And a realistic coming-into-identity narrative about a Black trans demiboy. And a nuanced discussion of college plans and what one might do after college. And some big beautiful romcom moments. I wish I had it in high school. I’m so glad I have it now! (trigger warning for transphobia & outing, but the people responsible are held accountable by the end, always treated as not okay by the narrative, and the MC’s friends, and like... this is ownvoices and it’s GOOD.)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. My Goodreads review says, “I have no idea what happened, and I loved it.” That’s not wrong, but to delve deeper, this book has an ethereal feeling that you get wrapped up in while reading. Nothing makes sense but that’s just as it should be. You’re hooked. It is so atmospheric, so meta, so fascinating. I’ve seen so many people say they interpreted this character or that part or the ending in all different ways and it all makes sense. And it’s all of this with a gay main character and romance and the central theme, the central pillar being a love of and devotion to stories. Of course I was going to love it.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom. “Because maybe what really matters isn’t whether something is true, or false. Maybe what matters is the story itself; what kinds of doors it opens, what kinds of dreams it brings.” This book was so good and paradigm shifting. It reminded me of #1 on this list in the way it turns real life experience and hard, tragic ones at that (in this case, of being a trans girl of color who leaves home and tries to make a life for herself in the city, with its violence), into a beautiful, haunting fable. Once upon a time.

I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. I need to reread this book, as I read it during my most tranceful time of 2020 and didn’t write a review, so I forgot a lot. What I do remember is beautiful and important nonbinary representation, a really cute romance, an interesting parental and familial/sibling dynamic that was both heartbreaking and hopeful, and an on-page therapy storyline. Also Mason Deaver just left twitter but was an absolutely hilarious troll on it before leaving and I appreciate that (and they just published a Christmas novella that I have but haven’t read yet!)

The Truth Is by NoNieqa Ramos. It took a long time to trust this book but I’m so glad I did. It’s raw and real and full of grief and trauma (trigger warnings, that I remember, for grief, death (before beginning of book), and gun violence). The protagonist is flawed and gets to grow over the course of the book, and find her own place, and learn from the people around her, while they also learn to understand her and where she’s coming from. It’s got a gritty, harsh, and important portrayal of found family, messy queerness, and some breathtaking quotes. When I was 82% through this book I posted this update: “This book has addressed almost all of my initial hesitations, and managed to complicate itself beautifully.”

Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro.  I wasn’t actually in the best mental health place to read this book when I did (didn’t quite understand what it was) but it definitely reminded me of what there is to fight against and to fight for, and broke my heart, and nudged me a bit closer to hope. The naturally diverse cast of characters was one of the best parts of this book. The romance is so sweet and tender and then so painful. This book is important and well-written but read it with caution and trigger warnings - it’s about grief and trauma and racism and police brutality, but also about love and community.

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden.  This is a sci-fi/fantasy/specfic mashup that takes place in near-future South Africa and has world-building myths with gods and demigoddesses and a trip to the world of the dead but also a genetically altered hallucinogenic drug that turns people into giant animals and a robot uprising and a political campaign and a transgender pop star and a m/m couple and all of them are connected. It’s bonkers. Like, so, so absolutely mind-breaking weird. And I loved it.

Crier’s War and Iron Heart by Nina Varela.  I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVED the amount of folktales they told each other with queer romances as integral to those stories, especially in Iron Heart. A conversation between the two leads where Crier says she wants to read Ayla like a book, and Ayla says she’s not a book, and Crier explains all the different ways she wants to know Ayla, like a person, and wants to deserve to know her like a person, made me weak. It lives in my head rent-free.

Queen’s Shadow by E.K. Johnston @ekjohnston . I listened to this book on Libby and then immediately listened to it at least one more time, maybe twice, before my borrow time ran out. I love Padmé, and just always wish that female Star Wars characters got more focus and attention and this book gave me that!! And queer handmaidens! And the implication that Sabé is in love with Padmé and that’s just something that will always be true and she will always be devoted and also will make her own life anyway. And the Star Wars audiobooks being recorded the way they are with background sounds and music means it feels like watching a really long detailed beautiful Star Wars movie just about Padmé and her handmaidens.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story by Jacob Tobia. I needed to read this. The way Tobia talks about their experience of gender within the contexts of college, college leadership, and career, hit home. I kept trying to highlight several pages in a row on my kindle so I could go back and read them after it got returned to the library (sadly it didn’t work - it cuts off highlights after a certain number of characters). The way they talk about TOKENISM they way they talk about the responsibilities of the interviewer when an interviewee holds marginalized identities especially when no one else in the room does!!! Ahhhh!!!

Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie. Disclaimer for this one that the author was rightfully criticized for writing a Black main character as a white author (and how the story ended up playing into some fucked up stuff that I can’t really unpack without spoiling). But also, the author has been working to move forward knowing she can’t change the past, has donated her proceeds, and this book is really good? It has all the fanfic tropes, so much delicious tension, a totally unexpected plot twist that had me immediately rereading the book. This book was super fun and also kind of just really really good Star Wars fanfiction.

How To Be a Normal Person by T.J. Klune. This book was so sweet, and cute, and hopeful, and both ridiculous and so real. I had some trouble getting used to Gus’ voice and internal monologue, but I got into it and then loved every bit after. The ace rep is something I’ve never seen like this before (and have barely read any ace books but still this was so fleshed out and well rounded and not just like, ‘they’re obsessed with swords not sex’ - looking at you, Once & Future - and leaving it there.) This all felt like a slice of life and I feel like I learned about people while reading it. Some of the moments are so, so funny, some are vaguely devastating. I have been personally victimized by TJ Klune for how he ends this book (a joke, you will know once you read it) but it also reminds me of the end of the “You Are There” episode of Xena and we all know what the answer to that question was.... and I choose to believe the answer here was similar.

You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. I wish I had this book when I was in high school. I honestly have complicated feelings about prom and haven’t really been seeking out contemporary YA so I was hesitant to read this but it was so good and so well-written, and had a lot of depth to it. The movie (and Broadway show) “The Prom” wants what this book has.

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth. I never read horror books, so this was a new thing for me. I loved the feeling of this book, the way I felt fully immersed. I loved how entirely queer it was. I was interested in the characters and the relationships, even though we didn’t have a full chance to go super deep into any one person but rather saw the connections between everyone and the way the stories matched up with each other. I just wanted a bit of a more satisfying ending.

Honorable Mention: reread in 2020 but read for the first time pre-2020

Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I couldn’t make this post without mentioning this book. It got me through this year. I love this book so much; I think of this book all the time. This book made me want to find love for myself. You’ve all heard about it enough but if you haven’t read this book what are you DOING.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan @sarahreesbrennan​ . I reread this one over and over too, both as text and as an audiobook. I went for walks when I had lost my earbuds and had Elliott screaming about an elf brothel loudly playing and got weird looks from someone walking their dog. I love this book so much. It’s just so fun, and so healing to read a book reminiscent of all the fantasies I read as a kid, but with a bi main character and a deconstruction of patriarchy and making fun of the genre a bit. Also, idiots to lovers is a great trope and it’s definitely in this book.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book is forever so important to me. I am always drawn in by how tenderly Sáenz portrays his characters. These boys. These boys and their parents. I love them. I love them so much. This is another one where I don’t even know what to say. I have more than 30 pages in my tag for this book. I have “arda” set as a keyboard shortcut on my phone and laptop to turn into the full title. This book saved my life.

Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book hurts to read - it’s a story about trauma, about working through that trauma, healing enough to be ready to hold the worst memories, healing enough to move through the pain and start to make a life. It’s about found family and love and pain and I love it. It’s cathartic. And it’s a little bit quietly queer in a beautiful way, but that’s not the focus. Look up trigger warnings (they kind of are spoilery so I won’t say them here but if you have the potential to be triggered please look them up or ask me before reading)

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.  When asked what my all time favorite book is, it’s usually this one. Gail Carson Levine has been doing live readings at 11am since the beginning of the pandemic shut down in the US, and the first book she read was Ella Enchanted. I’ve been slowly reading it to @mssarahpearl and am just so glad still that it has the ability to draw me in and calm me down and feels like home after all this time. This book is about agency. I love it.

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman @chronicintrovert . I’ve had this on my all-time-faves list since I read it a few years ago and ended up rereading it this year before sending a gift copy to a friend, so I could write little notes in it. It felt a little different reading it this time - as I get further away from being a teenager myself, the character voice this book is written in takes a little longer to get used to, but it’s so authentic and earnest and I love it. I absolutely adore this book about platonic love and found family and fandom and mental illness and abuse and ace identity and queerness and self-determination, especially around college and career choices. Ahhh. Thank you Alice Oseman!!!

Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray @claudiagray​ . I have this one on audible and reread it several times this year. I love the fleshing out of Leia’s story before the original trilogy, I love her having had a relationship before Han, and the way it would have affected her perspective. I also am intrigued by the way it analyses the choices the early rebellion had to make... I just, I love all the female focused new Star Wars content and the complexity being brought to the rebellion.

(1/2) With a rise in young children expressing gender nonconformity being sent to gender clinics, being taught about gender dysphoria and being ‘born in the wrong body’ in schools, being guided towards pubertal blockers and medical transition, I was wondering if I could ask for your more knowledgeable input please. When treating such children and adolescents, why is the underlying assumption that the dysphoric feelings are valid and the body is what needs fixing? Why is APA/psychologists

(”2/2) allowing medical decisions to be made based on outdated mind-body dualism? We don’t affirm anorexia and offer liposuction, or the delusions of schizophrenia for instance, so why is this the only mind-body incongruence that’s treated this way? Does GD in a developing child really warrant medicalizing them for the rest of their lives? Since we’ve scientifically concluded gender is a spectrum, shouldn’t we instead be promoting gender diversity no matter what sexed body we’re born in?”

There are a lot of things to unpack and understand here. 

1. The underlying assumption is not that “the body needs fixing.” Medical transition is not the first step for children, adolescents, or adults with gender dysphoria. From 2004-2016, only 92 total children and adolescents out of six million total patients younger than 19 seen in the sample received a hormone blocker for a transgender-related diagnosis. Even among adults, current estimates for the United States are that between 25-35% of trans and non-binary adults complete any kind of gender affirming surgery (this means, even enough those who have surgery, it may only be one type of surgery and may not impact all relevant body parts). Getting access to trans-affirming medical care is very difficult, and structural inequalities like racism impact access to care, leading some trans people, especially Black trans women, to have to buy hormones from non-medical sources. That’s one of the reasons why the APA has come out to support trans folks and gender affirming care: because otherwise, these folks don’t get any care, or they get mistreated. The point here is to ensure that everyone gets equitable access to high quality medical and mental health care. That includes hormones, hormone blockers, and/or surgery for some people, but not everyone. 

2. All feelings are valid- dysphoric or otherwise. Sometimes feelings don’t fit the facts, or acting upon them doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t take away from their validity. The question is not whether the feelings are valid for kids with gender dysphoria, the question is how to understand that dysphoria better and how to identify what to do about it, both in terms of gender identity and in terms of coping, support and improving overall mental health. This is a great place for a therapist with expertise to step in and help the child and their family figure it out. 

Sometimes the child or adolescent has known literally or essentially their whole life, and that may mean no dysphoria (which is great!). From Katz-Wise et al., 2017: 

For some youth, primarily but not exclusively those ages 7–12 years, indication of transgender identification occurred early and was described as “immediate.” One father of an 18-year-old trans boy from the Northeast noted, “It was so immediate that it was just, you know, it wasn’t like he was seven and he said, ‘Oh my god he thinks of himself as a boy.’ It was just kinda always like that with him.”

For other youth, it is a more gradual process, and may take some time to sort out. Some youth also don’t have dysphoria while they are doing that so there may not be a reason to seek out therapy unless there is some other mental health issue they are facing. But if they do have dysphoria, or are otherwise experiencing mental health symptoms related to their gender identity, then seeing a therapist can help. 

3. Supporting a child to identify as trans or nonbinary or some other non-cis gender is not “medicalizing them for the rest of their lives.” Hormone blockers can be removed, and hormones can be stopped- but I disagree that these are “medicalizing” in any case. A person cannot be reduced down to the medications they take or the treatments they receive. Is a woman with cancer “medicalized” because she undergoes a hysterectomy? Are the children on puberty blockers for medical reasons “medicalized” (>2000 of them in the study I cited above, but no one seems concerned about them)? What about those people with delusions who are put on antipsychotics, which are known to have severe side effects including higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, seizures, tardive dyskinesia, overwhelming sleepiness impacting ability to work or drive, weight gain (I’ve seen clients gain >70 lbs in 3 months), and more? 

I would encourage you to read either of these great studies by Katz-Wise et al: 1 or 2 to understand this better. When you ask trans youth about themselves, the medical aspect is such a small part- they are talking about their whole selves, their hopes for the future, their families and friends, and their wishes to be able to be loved and accepted for who they really are. Some of it is about their bodies, sure, and that can mean that some decide to use hormones and/or hormone blockers or undergo surgery (although we’ve seen that those rates aren’t super higher ). But they’re also just talking about being called the right name and pronoun, getting to wear the clothes that make them feel authentic, getting to date and marry and have sex, and: getting to live. Not being ostracized and assaulted and killed. Like this 8 year old who identifies as a girlish boy worrying he’ll never be able to get married AND be his true self (from the second Katz-Wise et al):

An 8-year-old youth participant who identified as a “girlish boy” similarly worried about other people's reactions related to gender norms in the long-term future, as told by his mother,

He said [to me], ‘But I'm not going to get married, because if I married a boy I'd want to be the bride...I would want to wear a dress and people would laugh at me because I'm marrying a boy and I'd be wearing a dress.

He is 8 years old and these are his worries. As a mental health professional, my immediate thought is that he deserves any and all support that makes sense to him and his family so that he doesn’t have to worry like this. So that he can be 8. 

4. Finally, and probably most importantly: gender dysphoria is different because treating it with hormone blockers, hormones, and surgery is literally life saving. 

As high as 42% of trans people have attempted suicide at least once. For comparison, the lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts in the general population is 3%.  

Study after study has shown that there are three primary factors that reduce suicide risk: 1. Timely medical and legal transition for those who want it; 2. Family acceptance and general support from friends and loved ones; 3. Reduced transphobia and internalized transphobia. (1 2 3 4 5). 

Psychologists want to help people live, and live well. Living well means having a life you enjoy and find meaningful. If medical transition means someone’s suicide risk decreases and their mental health improves, then they can pursue the life they want. Being affirmed in their gender means they can have that part of the life they want. It might also help them get to other things they want (like having the marriage and wedding they envision, like that example). These are things we as psychologists prioritize. Period. 

It’s not the same as anorexia because providing a liposuction for two reasons. One: It would not resolve the dysphoria. People with anorexia who lose weight do not feel better about themselves and their bodies. That’s the dysphoria: people with anorexia (and other eating disorders, sometimes) often cannot see their bodies as they really are. Changing the body won’t help. Unlike in gender dysphoria, where changing the body- either in presentation or actually medically -actually does help. Two: Liposuction for an underweight person with anorexia could kill them. As we’ve discussed, gender affirming surgeries for trans people can save their lives. These are not comparable. 

The comparison to delusions doesn’t work very well because there isn’t really a “medical” intervention you would do to affirm someone’s delusion. But, since you may not know this: we sometimes do affirm people’s delusions, and it’s not necessarily psychologically helpful to try to change someone’s mind about a delusion. Delusions are not bad all on their own, and: sometimes things we think are delusional, actually aren’t, so it’s super important not to assume we know someone’s life and experiences better than they do. (Just recently a nurse assumed a patient was delusional, but actually they were quite rich and owned several expensive cars. People can be rich and have a significant mental illness.) So anyway- I don’t know how that applies. 

Overall: we as a field are still understanding the full spectrum of gender identities and how to do good treatment and good science in relationship with that. But what’s clear is that medical transition is sometimes a part of a good treatment plan for both youth and adults, and that it can save people’s lives. It can make their lives better. I am 100% about saving people’s lives, so I am 100% about a medical transition when appropriate and gender affirming care in general. 

References: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

(email me at academic.consultant101 gmail.com if you need full texts)

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If this is too personal please feel free to just ignore this ask but I was wondering if you would ever consider talking more about being non-binary/ discovering that you were non-binary? I am only just at the point of beginning to accept myself as a baby enby so I love hearing other people’s experiences but I completely understand if that’s not something you’re comfortable talking about. Hope you have a great day either way and good luck with the firefighter :)

Hey friend, I’m more than happy to talk about it! Let me start by saying welcome to the enby club, and I’m so proud of you for exploring this part of yourself! I know it can be A Lot, and sometimes pretty scary, so I applaud you for the self examination and the bravery it takes to get to this point. It took me a long time to get to where you are. I was 26 when I got drunk (for the first time bc I’m a late bloomer whee) and told a group of friends that I thought I might be nonbinary. I was openly pretty hostile towards enby folks up until that point, and I hadn’t realized that this was the gender equivalent of really entrenching yourself in homophobia because you really wish you weren’t gay. It was another six months after that before I confided in a partner about it (sober). She asked if there was another name I wanted her to use, and then proceeded to never use it. Another six months and a breakup later I took some time to consider how that’d made me feel, and I came to the conclusion that it was at the very least time to change my name. I am still figuring out the rest. In retrospect there were a few signs. As a teenager my church held a coming of age ceremony split by gender and I didn’t know where to go. A church member asked me if I was trans - meaning, was I a boy - and I said no. I’ve always been pretty clear on that. They sent me to the women’s tent, but that didn’t fit right either. I was pretty clear about that too, but since I wasn’t a trans man I thought there was just something wrong with me that I was uncomfortable with womanhood.

For a while I thought maybe it was a body image problem. If I were prettier, I would feel more like a woman. If my teeth were straighter. If I lost weight. I put myself in the hospital running track and not eating because I was desperately trying to feel ‘right’ in my body. Spoiler: that did not work. It only made things more difficult.

Then I thought maybe I was just aggressively homosexual, that the part of being “female” that I was rejecting had to do with heteronormativity. But there were things touted as universal female experiences among the queer community that fit awkwardly too, and the word ‘lesbian’ chafed. I didn’t want it applied to me even though it described me. I couldn’t explain why not. A good friend of mine came out as nonbinary a few years back. They described it as knowing that they could play the roles of male or female poorly, or they could step into a role that was right for them and live to the best of their ability. That absolutely resonated with me (and scared the heck out of me at the time) and it’s something that I still hold up when I’m struggling with my identity. Does this identity fit me awkwardly? Then it might not be right for me, and that’s okay.

The question people ask me a lot is whether I’m “really” nonbinary, or whether I just don’t want to be perceived as a woman because society treats women so badly. Whether I’ve just internalized a negative image of womanhood, and whether in a more just society I wouldn’t feel that way. And to that I say... sure, I guess maybe that could be a thing. But we don’t live in a hypothetical just society; we live in this one, and in this reality that label doesn’t suit me.

I’m still really struggling to figure out pronouns - they/them isn’t wrong but seems like a political choice, but she/her isn’t right, and he/him is right but also implies a trans binary identity which isn’t right - and I’m constantly afraid that this is Another Reason it will be difficult or impossible to find a compatible life partner. I worry that presenting too masculine or too feminine will invalidate my identity. I worry that people read me as just wanting attention and won’t take me seriously. It’s some scary stuff. It would have been easier to stay in the closet and pass as cis. But then we wouldn’t be ourselves, and that’s more difficult in some ways.

Anyway, I’m not sure if that’s what you were looking for. If you have specific questions I’m more than happy to answer them! And you can always shoot me a message if you just want to chat/vent about enby things. Always here to support baby enbies, in or out of the closet. Sending you much affection and solidarity, and I hope you are keeping safe and sane out there!

Hey lovely Anne, I've been questioning my gender lately and could use some advice if you have any. I have always considered myself a cis woman but lately I'm struggling to work out if the feelings of discomfort I get about being perceived as a woman are because being a woman is inherently uncomfortable (b/c objectification, sexualization, etc) or because I'm not a woman at all. I also think I'm probably autistic which could be influencing all this. Basically it's all a big gray mess in my head and I don't know how to untangle it all. I've seen advice saying to consider what would make me happy, but what would make me happy is being a woman or something close to it in my own head, but not being perceived as a person at all in public, which obv isn't really realistic lmao. How on earth do I make sense of that? If you have any words of advice for me on how you found your own identity, I would be forever grateful <333

Hi!! I'm sorry that figuring this out has been difficult for you <3

If you have a spare $17 (or library access), You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery by Dara Hoffman-Fox was incredibly helpful to me and I recommend it to anyone wanting to nail down their gender experience.

My advice is to try not to worry about whether you fit perfectly into a label (even the umbrella trans label, if you're still not sure about that) and focus more on what you want from your body/gender expression/the language people use for you. Or—if you're anything like me—keep worrying about the right label because it's impossible not to, but also try to figure out what you want that's more tangible.

Hopefully you'll stumble on the right word(s) for yourself down the line, but in the meantime, not knowing shouldn't prevent you from being the most yourself and the most comfortable you can be.

So what do you want? Sure, it's not an option to not be perceived as a person in public, but it's not like your only 2 choices are "whatever you're currently doing" and "what you can't have". What's the closest you can realistically get to what you're wanting? What can you change to help yourself feel more comfortable being perceived? Are there pronouns that you could use which would signal that kind of "otherness" you may be seeking? Do you think it might help if you aimed for ~confusion~ with your gender expression?

Give it thought. Make lists. Experiment! There's a reason why Questioning people are part of the community. It takes time! It's not clear cut for everyone! It sucks, but you're not alone. We're all here for you <3

As for the whole "Am I trans or just uncomfortable with how women are viewed/treated?" thing...I think we've all been there. It was easier for me to determine because I have so much dang dysphoria, but I know that's not a great compass for everyone. I'm afraid I don't have a neat formula for figuring it out; I think you've just gotta sit with it for a while.

I wish it were easier. Try things out, ponder, get your hands on that workbook, ask friends to use different names/pronouns if that appeals to you, and just...give it time.

“The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly” - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

The Basics:

Name: Harvard Hargrove III

Nicknames: Harvey, Harv, Goldie, Veevee

Age: 19

Birthday: March 31st, 1979

Gender: Cis man

Pronouns: He/him/his

Sexuality: Straight

Major: Business

Former school: UCLA

Job: N/A, his dad still completely supports Harvey financially

Faceclaim: Jacob Elordi

Personality Positives: Magnetic, extroverted, athletic

Personality Negative: Wrathful, duplicitous, destructive

About:

YOU'RE THE GUY EVERYONE WANTS TO BE. QUARTERBACK, POPULAR KID. THE FACADE LOOKS PERFECT ON THE OUTSIDE, BUT INSIDE YOU'RE CRUMBLING. YOU'RE GETTING ANGRY AT THE WORLD IN A WAY THAT YOU'VE NEVER BEEN BEFORE. YOU GO OUT LATE AT NIGHT LOOKING FOR FIGHTS; CRAVING THE FEELING OF GETTING YOUR FISTS WET WITH BLOOD, BUT YOU'RE DOING EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO HIDE THAT PART OF YOURSELF FROM EVERYONE AROUND YOU. YOUR FATHER GROWS MORE DISAPPOINTED BY THE MINUTE, AND EVERY SINGLE DAY YOU THINK ABOUT RUNNING AWAY. BUT NOW THAT EVERYONE YOU LOVE IS BACK IN TOWN, HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO LEAVE? YOU AND LUX WERE CHILDHOOD NEIGHBORS. YOU GREW UP MAKING MUD PIES, AND SNEAKING OUT TO PARTIES TOGETHER. LOOKING IN THROUGH HER BEDROOM WINDOW GETS HARDER EVERY SINGLE DAY. YOU KNEW SHE WASN'T PERFECT, BUT YOU WERE OKAY WITH THAT... NOBODY IS PERFECT. BUT SOMETIMES YOU WONDER IF YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE WHO KNEW THAT SIDE OF HER. YOU KIND OF HOPE YOU WERE.

Secrets:

The Small Stuff: At UCLA, Harvey found his way into an underground fight club, which he quickly grew to adore. Rising through the ranks with remarkable speed, Harvey learned that the best way to stop someone looking at you funny is to make sure he can’t see straight. Now, back in Cherry, his entire body itches for a fight he can’t find a release for.

The Big Stuff: YOU WERE ARRESTED FOR AGGRAVATED ASSAULT AT YOUR LAST COLLEGE, AND SHOULD HAVE FACED JAIL TIME. THANKS TO YOUR FATHER'S MONEY, THE PROBLEM WAS HIDDEN IN THE SHADOWS AND YOU WERE ALLOWED TO QUIETLY TRANSFER... BUT YOU KNOW IT CAN'T BE THAT SIMPLE. YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE IN THE GANG WHO WAS PLANNING TO COME BACK TO CHERRY ANYWAY, BUT YOU'RE NOT GOING TO TELL ANYONE. IF EVEN ONE PERSON FOUND OUT ABOUT WHAT YOU AND YOUR FATHER DID, IT WOULD END YOUR CAREER BEFORE IT EVEN STARTED, AND COST YOUR FATHER HIS OWN. AKA, YOU WOULD BOTH BE ROYALLY FUUUUUUUCKED. NOT TO MENTION THE FACT THAT NOBODY WOULD EVER LOOK AT YOU THE SAME.

The Interview:

“HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW THAT EVERYONE IS BACK IN CHERRY?”

The grin that stretched across Harvey’s face was wide and bright and he leaned forward in the chair, that one too-short leg of it rocking forward to hit the ground as Harvey leaned forwards towards Clarissa. Only someone that knew the boy well would have caught the tension running along the sides of his eyes that pulled on the smile, making it appear just a touch brittle. “Oh it’s great,” Harvey said, voice carrying easily through the small room. “This is where we all came from, this is what made us all who we are and now…” Harvey trailed off, swallowing around a lump in his throat. The smile had faded entirely but with effort, Harvey managed to bring it back, though it was a pale shadow of its original form. “With Lux gone, I think we’re going to need each other. Or, well, most of each other. There are some people I could have gone my entire life without seeing again!” A light laugh punctuated that statement, but the creak of wood underneath Harvey’s hands as they gripped the wooden arm of the chair with a white-knuckled tension spoke louder than the laughter.

He consciously relaxed his hand, before bringing it over to smooth down a non-existent wrinkle in his pants. He knew coming here without a drink or three was a bad idea. Harvey didn’t think about the bags that had remained unpacked since he had gotten back to town that now lay scattered along his dorm room like soldiers on a battlefield, quietly saying that tomorrow, surely, he would leave. He didn’t think about the ever-growing hole in the plaster he was hiding in his closet. It had formed when he heard the news, that everyone, everyone minus Lux was back, for better or for worse. The worse, Harvey had reflected in those rare moments of peace that he only ever found in the moments after a punch was thrown, seemed far more likely, given the fucking bullshit of the past few years. No, Harvey didn’t think about any of this, and just smiled at Clarissa instead. “It’s definitely going to be interesting.” And that was the most honest thing he had said thus far.

“WHERE DO YOU SPEND MOST OF YOUR FREE TIME?”

“Well,” Harvey began, leaning towards Clarissa with an expression well-known in town forming across his face. It was the look he got when he was flirting and was supposed to make him look mysterious and yet approachable. Whether or not it actually did that, Harvey had no idea. No one had ever bothered to tell him. It seemed to work often enough for him to believe it had some validity. “If you’re wondering where you might find me for a bit of fun, you can always check the track. I’m usually there in the mornings before class. If that doesn’t work, you can probably find me on the beach, or at the best party in town.” He winked. “I know how to have a good time. If you’re ever looking for one, hit me up.”

That all was true. Harvey wasn’t in the habit of lying to beautiful women, after all. Not if it meant some fun could be had in the future. Lying about everything else? Yeah, sure, that’s fair game, but not that. It just fit too well with the rest of how people expected Harvey to be for him to not take full advantage. Plus, it was fun. But even though it might have been true, that didn’t make it fully honest. Harvey would never tell anyone, though, just how much time he spent in The Pit, or how the sounds of The Garage provided a steady pounding noise that focused Harvey like nothing else as he hung around it hoping to one day ask for a job. But that wasn’t the charming athletic party boy his father had told him to become, or else, and so those places, the places that saw more of Harvey than anywhere else, remained a secret.

“WOULD YOU CALL YOURSELF POPULAR?

It was the first genuine sound Harvey thought he had made during the entire time he had been in that room, and it punctured the air like a pin through a balloon. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Harvey hedged, using his hands to make his point, “I don’t exactly have a huge friend group and there’s a few people in town now that I’m pretty damn sure aren’t my biggest fan.” Harvey shrugged with one shoulder, the hand of the other going up to scratch behind his ear in a nervous gesture he never quite managed to break. “But yeah, I guess, if you wanted to, you could call me that. I was quarterback, you know, and definitely never had problems getting any dates to the dances. If that’s all popularity is, then I guess you could call me a popular kind of guy.”

They never ask what all that costs, Harvey reflected. The thought sent a bolt of fury, bright and true like lightning, straight through his body into his gut. He shifted slightly in the chair which rocked with the movement. Harvey shifted again and it rocked back. He decided not to move again any time soon. The noise of it made that burning in his chest that much stronger and he could feel his jaw clenching with the effort it took to appear unaffected. Not for the first time, Harvey thanked his lucky stars he had as much practice with that as he did. He also cursed them in equal measure, for forcing his shoulders to learn to carry that weight without crumbling. But what was it that Dad always said? ‘No one expects you to change anything, Harvey. All we ask you to do is soldier through to the other side’? Words to live by, apparently. He couldn’t stop the snort that escaped at that thought, but he waved off Clarissa’s curious look. “Sorry. Old joke from the locker room. Nothing you’d want to hear.”

“DO YOU REALLY THINK LUX KILLED HERSELF? ”

“I do.” The words came easily, without thought. Harvey knew he had thought about this a lot, considered it while laying in bed or while driving to the next party. It forced its way into nearly every moment of his life, and though he had done his best to drown it out, Harvey hadn’t managed to yet. “I lived next door to her, right? Our bedrooms were right across from each other and I knew she wasn’t perfect. I think she knew I wasn’t perfect either. But I saw things, overheard things.” He shrugged again, this time with both shoulders. “It wasn’t easy on her and I think she just took the fastest way out she could.” The smile that came across Harvey’s face now was tinged in heartbreak and the weights he felt ties to his shoulders every day. “I kinda get why she did it, too. There’s only so long you can tread water before your arms and legs just give out and you drown.” He shifted backwards and the chair moved with him. “I’ve seen it happen. I’ve had it happen.”

Headcanons:

While Harvey is majoring in business, this is entirely because this is what his father expected of him, and as he’s spent his entire life living up to those expectations, it seemed easier, at the time, to just go along with it. He doesn’t like it though.

That old muscle car Harvey drives is the last thing he has of his mother, who died when he was seven. She willed that car to him and he treats it better than he treats some people. It is his most prized possession.

Harvey knows that in order to leave town like he desperately wants, he needs a job to get his own money. But getting a job would lead to questions from his father, from people around town, everyone. He can’t have that. Harvey has a reputation to maintain after all, and so he feels as if he’s in a form of limbo right now.

Lux and Harvey used to sneak out through their bedroom windows, sometimes helping the other get across the roof or down onto the pavement below. Harvey fondly remembers those times, how it all felt like a secret he was in on that no one else knew about. There was a unity in it, an understanding that they were both running away from something. Now that Harvey wants to leave Cherry for real, he almost feels an obligation to do it for Lux.

The man is heterosexual, almost to a fault. He has absolutely forgotten to attend get-togethers with friends or to finish up homework in favor of a date with a beautiful woman.

His favorite subject in high school, much to the surprise of all that knew him, was English. He really enjoyed discussing the books. Writing the papers, however, was a real drag and his work never really reflected his understanding of the material. This only lead more to the perpetuation of the “dumb jock” stereotype as he talked a lot but got horrible grades. Despite this, he bought a copy of every book they read and kept them.

Harvey’s favorite kinds of movies are action-comedies. His favorite movie is Ghostbusters but he has a secret soft-spot for movies like The Dead Poet’s Society and Sixteen Candles. He would, however, break the nose of anyone that shared this piece of information.

He failed his driver’s test three different times because he kept blowing through red lights.

He is allergic to strawberries. This was discovered back in Kindergarten with a snack that had strawberry jam. It caused his throat to swell up and for him to be sent to the hospital. This was the first time Harvey was at the center of the school’s focus but it wouldn’t be the last. Harvey grew to love the idea of being at the focus of everything and turned to sports to fulfill that desire.

Pinterest

april reading

oh yeah this is a thing. anyway in april i read about uhhh.... first contact (twice), murderers on skis & victorian church politics

the yield, tara june winch a novel about indigenous australian identity and history (now and throughout the 20th century) in three narrative strands. imo the narrative strand that consists of a grandfather writing a dictionary of his language (wiradjuri) in order to prove a claim to some land is by far the strongest, but overall i liked this quite a lot. 3/5

land of big numbers, te-ping chen a solid short story collection focused on modern china and young(ish) chinese people, both in china and the diaspora. i particularly liked the stories that had some slighty surreal or speculative elements, such as one about fruit that strongly evoke emotions when eaten and a group of people stuck in a train station for months as the train is delayed, which imo use their speculative aspects in effective (if not super subtle) ways to talk about society. 3/5

the pear field, nana ekvtimishvili (tr. from georgian by elizabeth heighway) international booker prize longlist! a short, fairly depressing read about a 18-year-old girl at a post-soviet school for developmentally disabled childred (but also orphans, abandoned children & other random kids) who is trying to get a younger boy adopted by an american couple. there seem to be a lot of novels set at post-soviet orphanages etc & imo this is a well-executed example of the microgenre, with the pear field full of pears that are never picked bc they don’t taste right as a strong central image. 3/5

the warden, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #1) ah yes, a 6-part victorian series about church politics in an english town, exactly the kind of thing i’m interested in. not sure why i committed to at least the first two entries of the series but here we are. despite this lack of interest (and disagreement with most of the politics on display here) i found this quite charming; trollope has a gift for an amusing turn of phrase & making fun of his characters in benevolent ways. 3/5

the lesson, cadwell turnbull first contact scifi novel set on the virgin islands, where an alien ship arrives one day. the aliens seem benevolent & share helpful technology, but also react with extreme violence to any aggression. they claim to be on earth to study.... something, but it’s never entirely clear what. the book makes some interesting choices (like immediately skipping over the actual first contact to a few years in the future, when the aliens are already established on the islands) but i thought much of it was kinda disjointed and confusing. 2/5

the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers look, i get it, it’s all about the isolation & alienation (& dare i say loneliness) of 4 miserable characters projecting their issues on the central character singer, who is kind and patient and also deaf and mute, thus making him the perfect receptacle for their issues without really having to connect with him as a person and how that isolation hinders them socially, artistically, emotionally, politically, but like... i didn’t really like it. i didn’t hate it but i just felt very meh about it all. 2.5/5

acht tage im mai: die letzte woche des dritten reiches, volker ulrich fascinating history book about the last week(ish) of the third reich, starting with the day of hitler’s suicide and ending with the total surrender (but with plenty of flashbacks and forwards), and looking at military&political leadership (german and allied) as well as prisoners of war, forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners, and everyone else. very interesting look at what kästner described as the “gap between the not-anymore and the not-yet.” 3.5/5

firekeeper’s daughter, angeline boulley) i’ve been mostly off the YA train for the last few years, but this was a really good example of contemporary YA with a focus on ~social issues. ANYWAY. this is YA crime novel about daunis, a mixed-race unenrolled ojibwe girl close to finishing high school who is struggling with family problems, university plans, and feeling caught between her white and her native familiy when her best friend is shot in front of her and she decides to become a CI for an fbi investigation into meth production in the community. i really appreciated how hard this went both with the broader social issues (racism, addiction) and daunis’ personal struggles. there are a few bits that felt a bit didactic & on the nose (and the romance... oh well), but overall the themes of community, family, and the value of living indigenous culture are really well done & i teared up several times. 4/5

the magic toyshop, angela carter i love carter’s short stories but struggle with (while still liking) her novels so far. this one, a tale of melanie, suddenly orphaned after trying on her mother’s wedding dress in the garden, coming of age and awakening to womanhood or whatever. carter’s really into that. it’s well-written, sensual as carter always is, and the family melanie and her siblings are sent to, her tyrannical puppet-maker uncle, his mute wife and the wife’s two brothers, both fascinating and offputting (& dirty) make for an interesting cast of characters, but overall i just wish i was reading the bloody chamber again. 3/5

barchester towers, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #2) (audio) lol tbh i still don’t know why i am committing to this series about, again, church politics in 19th century rural england, but it’s just so chill & warm & funny (we love gently or not so gently - but always politely - mocking our characters) that i’m enjoying it as a nice little trip where people do some #crazyschemes to gain church positions or fight over whether there should be songs in church or whatever it is people in the 19th century fought about. it’s very relaxing. there also is a lot of love quadrangleyness going on and that’s also fun. trollope has weird ideas about women but like whatever, i for one wish mrs proudie much joy of her position as defacto bishop of barchester, she really girlbossed her way to the top. 3.5/5

semiosis, sue burke (semiosis #1) i love spinning the wheel on the “first contact with X weird alien species” & i guess this time we landed on plants! plant intelligence is interesting and the idea of plant warfare is really cool. i do like the structure, with different generations of human settlers on the planet pax providing a long-term view but this allows the author to skip over a lot of the development of the relationship between the settlers and the plant and locating the plot elsewhere, which i think is ultimately a mistake. i might continue w/ the series tho, depending on library availability. 2.5/5

one by one, ruth ware a bunch of start-up people go on a corporate retreat to a ski chalet in the alps, avalanche warning goes up, one of them disappears, presumably on a black piste, the rest get snowed in & completely cut off when the avalanche hits and then they get picked off *title drop* (altho really not that many of them). nice fluff when i had a miserable cold (not covid) but fails when it tries to go for deeper themes... like an attempt to address classism and entitlement sure... was made. also like what kind of luxury skiing chalet does not have emergency communication devices in case internet/phone lines are down...  i’d have sued just for that. 2/5

fake accounts, lauren oyler the microgenre of ‘alienated intellectual(ish) probably anglophone person has some sort of crisis, goes to berlin about it’ is my ultimate literary weakness - i almost never really like them, they mostly irritate me & yet i can never resist their siren call. this one is p strong on the irritation, altho at least the narrator does not ascribe much meaning to her decision to go to berlin after she a) discovers her boyf is an online conspiracy theorist (probably not sincerely) and b) gets a call that said boyf has died, it’s really just something to do to avoid doing anything else. but other than that it’s so BerlinExpat by the numbers, like she lives in kreuzkölln! put her somewhere else at least! there is one scene that elevates the BerlinExpat-ness of it all (narrator asks expatfriend for advice on visa applications, expatfriend assures her that it’s really easy for americans to get visa, adds “especially now” while literally, as the narrator remarks, gesturing at the falafel she’s eating) other than that, the novel is.... fine. it’s smart, but not really as smart as it thinks it is, which is a problem bc it thinks it’s just sooo incisive. whatever. 2/5

the tenant of wildfell hall, anne bronte this is reductive but: jane eyre: i could fix him // wuthering heights: i could make him worse // wildfell hall: lmao i’m gonna leave his ass anyway i enjoyed the part that is actually narrated by the titular tenant of wildfell hall, helen (which thankfully, i think, is most of it) because the perspective of a woman who runs away from her abusive alcoholic of a husband is genuinely interesting and engaging, while gilbert, the frame story narrator who falls in love with helen, is.... the worst. i mean he’s not the worst bc the abusive husband arthur is there and hard to beat in terms of worseness, but he’s pretty fucking bad. imagine if helen had found out that gilbert attacked her secret brother over a misunderstanding, severely injured him & LEFT HIM TO DIE & then (when dude survived & the misunderstanding got cleared up) apologised like well i guess i didn’t treat you quite right! she’d have to run away from her second husband as well! poor girl. 3/5