No, seriously. Every time I look at the page I see some ignorant rant about “woke culture" and it’s got thousands of claps. Maybe 25… — No, seriously. Every time I look at the page I see some ignorant rant about “woke culture" and it’s got thousands of claps. Maybe 25 responses mostly telling the guy off. People are getting paid to write this shit. Not much but a hell of a lot more than I…

So, because I'm sure somebody else is reading this: no, I'm not blocking you because I'm a coward, I'm doing it because arguing with trolls… — It's not responsible at this point for me to continue giving you a platform on my own Medium page, especially considering that the vast majority of the harm that's being done to trans people right now won't touch me; I got mine, basically, I am physically safe, and that's why…

Gift giving, gender roles, and parent-child trust — Growing up as a young closeted trans boy I received a lot of traditionally feminine gifts: Always that cheap, generic perfume and body wash set you get at the drug store because you can’t think of anything else. The more visibly masculine my presentation became, the more often I got that sort of gift: I could never tell if it was thoughtless or malicious. An attempt…

How I Learned to Cook Filet Mignon From Garbage — We get to the usual spot and start feeling the bags. We’ve got on gloves and headlamps. We can tell what’s in the bags, to an extent, by the texture and weight of the outside, but anything curious gets untied. Carefully, if possible. It’s important not to make a mess. We don’t want to give the owners a reason to shoo…

About being trans, wearing clothes, and being a tiger — There was a post on an old queer messageboard I read as a teen, written by a trans masc person, that will always stick in my mind. “I feel really threatened by FTM-vectored folks in male spaces/male-focused leather scenes. Like they were tigers or something” I read the message board and didn’t post because I was intimidated, too, by other queer people. …

Yeah, it’s still OK to feel things about the little problems. — Content warning: graphic description of suicide When I was a small child, I accidentally let go of a balloon that I was holding while I was in the car on the way home from a trip to Disney World. It escaped through the moon roof, into the humid Florida night. As an adult, I found my roommate dead in her bed, naked, surrounded by kitchen knives, suffocated by a plastic bag. …

How to kill a mouse when someone you love is watching — Content warning: animal cruelty in the form of misguided attempts at humane pest control My apartment had mice. The slumlord who owned the place clearly wasn’t going to take care of it. Getting mice in your apartment is a true test of a relationship. See, I’d been living alone, while the man I was…

The nonviolent benefits of violent rhetoric — Content warning: Casual ableist language, descriptions of real and fantasy violence. TL;DR: Nothing in this essay condones violence, but discusses the use of violent rhetoric as a tool. The resources I had when I was first coming out as transgender were not by any means radical. The ideas that my online communities held about what it meant to be trans were old-fashioned, even, though we looked down on…

It is and isn’t a big deal — Content warning: descriptions of my herpes For context, because I am gonna start talking about my dick and some bad things that happened to it, I am a trans man. So, the first time I got an STD it was pretty traumatic. Most folks consider it more appropriate now to…