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The last few weeks have been rough. Rough in such a variety of different ways that I feel like my skin’s been ripped off by the coarsest sand paper. Like my inner core is bare and unprotected. Like I’m feeling everything new and pin point. Like it all fucking hurts.

I said last week that sometimes it feels like I’m being honed into a vicious knife. And sometimes it feels like that knife is made of glass. And sometimes, like this week and weekend, it feels like that knife has shattered and I’m suddenly covered in sharp broken shards.

And I’m not going to pretend there haven’t been moments of joy. Even in the depths of distress at the state of the fucking world — at the harms being unleashed on my communities – those of immigrants, people of colour, the queer community, and of the queer community, specifically the trans community — I have felt cared for and loved by my wife. I have seen my friends and eaten good food, and drunk good drinks, and felt whole and reveled in the fact that I am me, and I have friends and community and live with the woman I love.

I have a house, and 5 extremely entertaining chickens who amuse me with their chickeny antics.

But at the same time, I’m clinging to keeping myself intact. I’m desperately fending off the thousands of tiny and not so fucking tiny cuts the world is seeing its way to inflicting.

Work – the nursing work – has been unutterably vile. The department has been busy, beyond that, it has been packed. It has been a constant battle to keep actually seeing patients as rooms clog with patients who should be admitted, or who’re waiting for investigations, and who have no-where to go. I cannot express the degree of exhaustion the flu season has wrought, and the change in attitudes that happened through COVID where people seem to feel obliged to have their respiratory viruses diagnosed.

Every day I hear “Well, I’ve been unwell for a few days and I’m not better.” And while I don’t think we have a specific policy that disallows me screaming at them, “No, of course you’re bloody not.”, I strongly suspect it would be frowned on. And so we work them up, and swab them and then tell them that “No, you have rhinovirus. Go home. Drink fluids. Rest. Take antipyretics and fucking grow the fuck up.”

But on top of that the flu vaccine not being a great match is an onslaught of patients we wouldn’t normally see. Patients who still need assessment, and who often this year seem to be developing post-influenza pneumonia. And on the march goes, patients pouring in, with us still having nowhere to put them.

So every shift has been that way.

No.

That’s a lie.

Some haven’t, but they’ve been filled with patients who’ve been rude, abrasive and entitled. Who’ve expected to be treated like they’re the only patients in the department and that I’m some kind of serf, there to meet their every need. It’s exhausting.

Frankly, it’s been disorienting when people have been polite. Someone was actually friendly and I was left wildly confused for several minutes. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s always been the case; at least for the two decades I’ve spent in the ER; that nurses in the ER get abused. We get sworn at, spat at, hit. We get kicked, insulted, and denigrated. It’s ‘part of the job’. It shouldn’t be. I still push against it, but at the end of the day if a patient is sick they still need treatment even if they’re being a shit. And so you still have to treat them. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t have to go the extra mile to make the ER visit less traumatic. But you still end up around them and it wears at you like sand in grease.

So there’s that.

And then on Thursday last week Tumwater School District had a meeting about trans kids participating in sport. I was never so naïve as to imagine that the festering rot of bigotry around trans people wouldn’t come to our side of the state. Wouldn’t encroach from the rural areas where its seeds are frequently sown in the fertile soil of republican hatred. I wasn’t so stupid as to think that we wouldn’t have to address it here.

But listening to the middle-aged white woman justify exactly why she had to pass fascist rules and harm trans kids both made me angry – a rage I cannot express because I can’t be the angry brown tran lest I get utterly excluded from society – and cut into my core in a way that I cannot really contain. I don’t know why I hoped for more. Why I hoped they might listen to the kids or the adults or the fucking research.

I don’t know why I hoped they might have some moral core.

I learned at school that the vast majority of nazi’s were ‘normal people’ who just looked the other way or excused their behaviour as simply following the rules. Who allowed terrible things to happen — supported and engaged in the terrible things happening — because, well, it wasn’t affecting them.

But still I am a creature who persists in hoping. Sometimes I want to crush that hope and burn it and excise it and fucking stuff it down into the molten centre of the earth. Because every fucking time that hope has led me to this despair.

Anyway, eventually, after insomnia that made me utterly feckless on my shift on Friday (I literally dropped something pretty much every time I opened an IV pack. I forgot things. I fucked up stupid little tasks) — in the hope of allowing me to actually sleep, last night I submitted a much trimmed letter to the editor of the Olympian. Last time I did this I got a fucking bigoted headline, but maybe someone will read it.

The original letter was too long:

Last week I watched bigotry and discrimination’s direct transition from our leaders to the community without input from congress, or the rule of law.

That’s because last week I witnessed Tumwater School Board passing into its rules discriminatory anti-trans-student policy. In the process the board chose to violate both existing state and federal laws. They stated that their new segregationist policy for trans kids was necessary because, they claimed, executive orders require it. Apparently having failed to take high-school civics, where you might learn that executive orders are not laws, and are instead, mostly just how the president wants existing laws to be interpreted. So even when President Trump is allowed to play with his best crayons, what he writes on the toilet paper isn’t a law.

When they passed the rule, the board ignored student and public testimony, the scientific consensus that trans students hold no athletic advantage, and that trans students face abuse and harassment overwhelmingly more often than they perpetrate it. Most alarmingly, they dismissed the well-documented harms of such policies, including skyrocketing rates of self-harm and suicide among trans youth in states with discriminatory laws.

Instead, they endorsed a “Separate and Unequal” policy, prioritizing an illegal executive order over the well-being of their students.

Beyond my anger and disgust at their behavior, I’m left with a burning question: Will they ever draw a line?

If the administration demands trans students be identified with markers – perhaps pink triangles – will the board comply?

If they demand lists of trans or gender-nonconforming students, will the board say yes?

If they demand segregated classrooms or drag them to camps, will the board cooperate?

Because based on the cowardice demonstrated by the board, and the unwillingness to protect every student, the answer is they will acquiesce to any demand, however illegal or immoral. However harmful and damaging.

The job of the board is to protect every student, and Tumwater’s District School Board failed utterly to do so. I encourage other districts to boycott games with Tumwater until such time as they rescind this illegal and discriminatory policy and allow trans girls to play sport. And if they fail to do rescind it, I urge the parents, families and students of Tumwater School Board to call for a vote of no confidence in the board. They are manifestly unfit to serve.

It’s a small thing. I was there, when they protested, but had to leave to attempt to sleep for work — hence the first night of insomnia. I’m going to speak at the next meeting if I can get a slot. I have words for them. They’ll be polite, because I’m good at that. I’m good at crushing my anger and vitriol into polite words that can be said to people without being thrown out of a room.

They’re not the raw throat shredding wail that I feel like giving them. The scream of anguish for the pain of all the people they’re hurting. They’re not the torment they fucking deserve. But they’re here.

Anyhow. So there was that.

And then to round off the week – this weekend Kathryn and I were scheduled for a business workshop. I’m thinking of starting a business and Kathryn is being amazing and supportive and wonderful. Unfortunately, the workshop “did not go well.” I’d been looking forward — I’d been really excited about doing the 8 week workshop that follows it, in which you build your business plan.

But instead I’ve come away from it angry and frustrated and having to e-mail the organizers to say “This person should not be teaching this class.” Given that it’s for underserved minorities — explicitly for People of Color, Women and Queer folks having a white guy with no fucking ability to adjust his teaching style, no respect for anyone who’s not white, and utterly patriarchal in his world view is… Well let’s say it’s problematic. And so between that and my ongoing distress from the whole Tumwater thing, I got a whole 3 hours of sleep last night.

Which didn’t make today’s class any better than yesterday’s, let’s say.

So now we need to find some different resources to help with business planning and I have to find some more superglue to stick myself back together again. Because I am so fucking tired, and this week has been too fucking much.

Most of my childhood I read about white men. In part there was a degree of boys don’t read about girls (even when they’re not boys). In part that was because what was published while I was growing up, particularly in the genres I liked to read, was heavily skewed towards male writers with male leads. In part it’s because – being seen as a boy – people bought me books about boys.

It wasn’t that it was all I read; I avariciously devoured a copy of Nancy Drew that I found in our attic. I absolutely sprinted through every V.I. Warhsawksi book. She’s the first book character I really remember seeing myself in. I absolutely wanted to be her. That possibly should have been a hint. Funny that my dad introduced me to Sara Paretsky’s writing. And there were a number of other books with iffier representation of women, often written by men, but mostly, mostly it was men.

And when I started to work out I was trans, before even, when I was desperately seeking something that reflected me; that said I wasn’t alone; there was (sotto voice) Fictionmania. For those lucky folks who’re unfamiliar, uneven doesn’t adequately describe the nature of the content. There were (and actually, are) some diamonds in there, but there were a lot of brainworms written by probably closeted or repressing trans women who’d sucked down a diet of relentless societal transphobia, or they were written by cis-men with – usually subjugation fetish – and who saw femininity as shameful.

It was a rough time to want trans fiction, and I kinda left that world during and after I transitioned. There weren’t a lot of trans voices in the mainstream – and some of the voices that there were tended to repeat the cis view of what transition is, and what our experiences are, and… the bits I occasionally found lacked diversity or often lacked joy.

And then there was a little trickle. It happened about the time I was starting to want to read again. It’s not that I exactly stopped. I’d just not read near as much. I was very burned out, I’d been working a ton – in a job where I had to read a lot for work – and I’d internet’d my brain so my concentration span wasn’t great.

And I can’t remember which book it was that started me really reading again. I’d already made the decision I was broadly done reading men. Like I will, if there’s a really good reason. But it has to be a damn good reason. And male leads written by men? Eh. You’re really going to have to come up with a fucking spectacular reason for me to read that.

But reading was still sporadic. I missed it, but also just felt kind of disconnected from a lot of it. And then I hit Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves. It more devoured me than I devoured it. I’d been super cautious about it because my experience of forcefem was, well, uneven also doesn’t really cover that. As a genre it brought forth those memories of old stories from Fictionmania and I was wary. I actually read her unfinished work, Glow, Worm, first. And then I was like: Fuck, she really can write. I must have more. And I got sucked into Dorley Hall. I don’t remember exactly when, but I do remember it was early enough that I had to *wait* between chapter 24 and chapter 25. If you’ve not read it, then, uh, imagine that if you ever do. Because 24 is rough, and 25 is some catharsis and fuck do you need it.

Anyhow, seeing myself reflected. Really reflected – not just “oh there’s a woman who’s a lead” or “oh a lesbian who’s a lead” or very excitedly, “gosh, there’s a brown lesbian side character!” but fully reflecting the trans part of my identity. Of my experience? That did things. It prompted me to seek out more – Zoe Storm’s wonderful series’, a delightful novella called Waystop of the Lost, by K.S. Sharron. It led me to finding more queer works, like Harrow/Gideon/Nona. It led me to finally actually sort out the problems in the novel I was writing at the time (which is now slowly being edited by my ever patient and wonderful wife).

And the reason this comes up to me today is that I’ve been reading a bunch of queer and trans fiction – there’s actually so much great trans fiction out there now. Some of it professionally published. Some of it on Scribblehub or AO3. And I was reading a mainstream novel that – well, it’s woman led – and I’ve been struggling to get into it. Which is funny, because it’s been recommended by a bunch of people I like and respect. But eh, sometimes a work doesn’t click. And it has a lot of cis-hetness in it, which eh, fine, I suppose.

And then a queer character is introduced and I’m suddenly way more invested in finishing it.

So uh, apparently that’s the way to get me to read again. See the diversity of the world and reflect it.

There’s this whole running joke I have about the trans agenda. About the terrible things that I’m doing to enact the trans agenda, recruiting more people into the trans degeneracy, and, of course, collect enough points for the toaster oven. Although you’d think by now – having run a support group for years – I’d at least have scored a “we recruit” tee-shirt, or like a ballpoint pen, or something. But apparently not.

I mean in all honesty my trans agenda is pretty dull. I like to get nice food, travel, spend time enjoying reading, music and art, drink some really fucking bougie tea and coffee, and just be reasonably accepted and respected in my community (as in the place I live and work). I want to get to enjoy time with the woman I love, take time to see my friends and family. I want healthcare that’s respectful and evidence based. I want to occasionally pet the chickens.

I mean that literally. I mean, Louise is realistically the only chicken who’s going to allow it. But still, they’re fun to pet.

One day I’d like to get a cat again.

That’s the majority of it. I also like to y’know, more specifically enjoy art that sometimes reflects my experiences. I like to hang out with folks that have similar experiences too, sometimes.

And I say this now because I was struck by the utter devastating sadness a couple of times that increasingly I doubt that I will get to be a mother. Every time I unintentionally touch that live wire I have to hold the thoughts at bay that attempt to follow. But we’ve been on the adoption list for a long time. Long enough that I doubt it will happen, especially in the current climate where I’m painted as some kind of predator. The irony of a sexual assaulting felon painting the nurse of nearly 20 years experience as the bad person is not lost on me, even as it saps my soul.

So here I find myself soaked in melancholy. My wife had some stuff she did today about her career. I’ve been seriously looking at starting a bookshop. That’s my fucking trans agenda.

I’m so tired.

But I have love and someone to fight for. And something to fight for.

All they have to fight for is bigotry and hate.

I know which will lose.

Well, it’s a little bit my fault. Roughly 50% my fault.

Also, I need to practice more.

The world’s on fire. At least, the little bit of world folks like me inhabit. The government in the US is very vocally out to get us – not that I think Mango Mussolini actually gives a shit about us (I wrote this meaning trans people, but he doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. So for clarity, I mean that his actions against trans people are just because the right wing spent decades making us target of division number one and so we’re convenient to rail about and cry about decency and degeneracy in a way that’s not at all reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Not at all.) – and yes, to an extent the current swathe of anti-trans executive orders, along with the rest of the orders all written in crayon by a man with less intelligence than any single one of our chickens will end up in court.

And yes, many of them will get struck down, or are written so badly as to be unenforceable. But the chaos and the exhaustion of us all is part of the plan. Not Trump’s plan, obviously. The man couldn’t plan his way out of a paper sack – all he has is avarice. No, the plan of his Project 2025 backers who would like the US to become some kind of christofascist oligarchy. Well, more of a christofacist oligarchy.

Anyhow, that’s not where this is planning to go — but what I write rarely goes where I plan, so why should a blog post be any different?

Thing is, a couple of days ago, after the drive-more-trans-kids-to-death EO, I was trying to sleep, and failing. Instead, after listening to the quiet whirr-click of my 1960s flip-clock whiling away the morning minutes for a while, I conceded defeat and hauled myself out of bed and tried to place my anger into a box. Or maybe a storage unit – or perhaps a disused factory. Something large enough to hold it out of the way it so I could try and do something less awful than lying there thinking dark thoughts about the future. And I tried to write.

And I did, a bit. I wrote and chatted online. And then around 5am I tried to sleep again and failed. And at 8am I gave in and got up because I had a singing lesson and wanted to get at least something done before then. Y’know, breakfast, morning ablutions, that shit.

And then I rolled through the day in my sleep deprived haze until I got a triple shot latte as a fuck I’m so tired treat, and then, of course, wrote. Not a ton. Like my ADHD is still bad enough since I only medicate when I need to actually get shit done – and I’m not talking about the triple shot of caffeine. But despite my tiredness I threw down like 600 words. Then kinda exhaustedly sat. Then sat and watched half of Rent with my wife, who had an urge to watch that.

And then as the evening wound down and as my prog took its effect I was like – right – shower and ready for bed. And I step out of the shower and of course my brain promptly fills with an entire bloody scene, dialogue and all. This conversation is playing out and I’m like “I’m going to have to write this down or it’ll be gone and every time I’ve tried to just write notes I get to the morning and it’s like pulling teeth.”

So there I am, my brain warring with my physical exhaustion, perched on the sofa rattling of another 600 words in an hour. Which eh, it doesn’t sound like much. I can write a 600 word blog post pretty quickly, but I’ve not been “””””good””””” about my writing. I’ve been very distracted. So I’m both pleased and peeved, because y’know, I’d like to sleep.

But it does lead me to wonder what it is about that time of night, because often just as I am falling into bed, or getting ready, that’s when my brain will fire up. Then or when I’m in the middle of a run (which less so at the moment since my knees are sulking and my run is currently six minutes, not thirty). Both of which are inconvenient times for me to be like “oh I need to write.” Because contrary to my brain’s opinion in these matters, I do, in fact, need to sleep. And also I can’t carry even my MNT Pocket Reform when I’m running.

And working out what it is about that time – something about where my brain’s at – it’d be really handy for getting me to writing at other times. So if anyone has any idea do let me know.

Content Warning: Historical suicidal ideation.

So for years and years I did an update at the turn of the year. I can’t remember how long I did it for. I mean this site has been around in some flavour or other since 1997 – not here, exactly, I didn’t get this domain until 2002, apparently. But first on geocities – or possibly tripod – or maybe angelfire; then on a server running on a subdomain on an ISDN line, then on an ADSL line, and then eventually I sprung for actual factual real hosting.

Back in those days it was zesthost, who’ve gone the way of the dinosaur. So has the hosting provider that I switched to when they got bought, and now on a third provider, here the site sits. Not exactly unchanging, but a weird little outpost from the web of the thousands. My personal blog and random shit I put up here. Beholden to no-one and lurking here. No one to control the content but me. No sales pitch, about three visitors a decade (that’s a lie, but it’s not many) and yet I continue to post.

I’m going to be honest – back in 2000 before I transitioned I didn’t imagine that I would be alive in 2025. I could barely see to the next week. Often I couldn’t see to the next day. Sometimes the next hour was pretty fucking impossible. I had passive suicidal ideation pretty much every fucking day. I remember really, really clearly standing in the biochemistry tower and realising that the windows could fairly easily be made to open far enough someone could jump.

That I could jump.

And every day I’d line up outside labs or lectures and think about just ending the pain.

I remember walking across the canal bridges and locks as a kid – remembering my dad’s admonishments to be careful because of the currents around locks and that if you fell in it would be easy to drown. And constantly wanting to just be sucked into that darkness and let the suffering go.

It’s really distant from me now. It’s something that I can remember, and I can feel, but it belongs to a different version of me. To a girl so traumatised by her body, by her experiences, that any future seemed unattainable. To a girl who a quarter of a century ago decided fuck it, I’m going to take estrogen — not because I was sure I was trans. Because I wasn’t. I barely accepted myself. I barely accepted transness – because patriarchy, because misogyny, because racism, because Section 28.

Despite the blunt fact that I was so fucking trans it was visible from space.

I took it because I could see no other option where I might survive.

I’m so tediously stereotypical for the trans story that I basically fit every soap opera stereotype. Quote unquote cross dressed as a kid, other parents were always telling my mum I was so well behaved that I was more like one of the girls — and how did she get her ‘son’ to behave so well, I was ‘mistaken’ for a girl fairly frequently, etc, etc, et-fucking-c.

And yet I would desperately try and convince myself that I could be ‘happy’ without being trans. With maybe just being me at home, and being alone forever because I was some special weirdo. And of course since I couldn’t – since I was so fucking dysphoric I couldn’t deal with that I basically just lived hour to hour waiting for death to come. And then I got linked to the trans community. And I came to accept who I was. Not well. Not without a shit ton of self-loathing. Not without some serious internalised misogyny and patriarchal bullshit. Stuff that’s taken years to work through. Stuff that’s messy and unpleasant.

But I remember starting estrogen. I remember popping the pills from the pack of Ovran and how quickly – how insanely quickly it felt better. How utterly ridiculous it was that a tiny sugar coated tablet of shit-for-you synthetic estrogen could make my brain actually work. And it wasn’t like it was y’know, magic. I still had – and still have – trauma to work through. Being a trans-lesbian (mostly*) in a cis/het society is inherently traumatic. Those little round pills – the ones that were high risk for clots, and which in the end screwed my liver (well along with the alcohol), well… they were life saving.

It never fails to stun me how I went from a suicidally depressed male-ish-presenting thing, to someone who looks at the world and wants — hopes — to live a long fucking life. Who has joy and happiness and laughter and love and is such a fucking cliche about her wife. Who built a fucking house, more or less, and a career, and y’know plays bass in a band and sings and writes books and does all this shit. And thanks, pretty much in its entirety, to some little tiny pills prescribed by a doctor who was almost struck off because he actually treated trans people like fucking adults.

Which brings us to 2025. And more, I suppose, for the subject of the post: 2024.

2024 has been such a weird dichotomy of a year for me. Because in my personal life it’s been amazing. My work life’s been split in two between great and shite, and politically…well.

But 2024 has seen me making more friends than I’ve made in – well, decades. I’ve got closer to my existing friends here – and let them in more. And I’ve made queer friends, too. People I can not mask with. People I can just share all of my messy, untidy internal self with. And that’s been utterly amazing. I can’t really express how it’s felt to make friends again. I kinda thought I was broken on that front. Such a weird outlier of a human that making friends was…yeah. Let’s just say I hadn’t made friends.

No, let’s not. Let’s be honest. I thought that my weird confluence of interests and queerness and brownness and personality made it really hard to make friends. That I was a strange little human and the fact that I’d found someone who loved me was astonishing for someone so…otherwise apparently unlikable.

Anyhow, I’m not going to say this is all Alyson’s fault, but in 2022? when I started reading Welcome to Dorley Hall I didn’t realise the impact it would have on me. It made me look at myself a shit ton more than I had. It poked me to look at my transition and conclude that I’d let shit slide. It made me open my little gollum head up and take out the pieces of paper that my ex had dropped in there an look at them critically and toss them mostly into a fire. Because fuck that noise. But spiraling off from that one thing – one – I got to see an utterly awesome human get one billionth of the recognition she deserves (because she’s a phenomenal writer and deserves all the awards and plaudits and acclaim) and, two, I made a bunch of friends.

Partly I think because mentally I was in a better place. I like myself much more now. Oh, I got FFS in 2024 so I’m happier with how I look and I have a scalpel to stab the brainworms with which is nice, but also I grew my hair out and changed the way I dress, and exercised a shit ton, and improved my diet, but most importantly I improved what’s going on inside my head. I joined a discord server for Alysons’ books, and then for Zoe Storm’s books (she’s also awesome), and between them I ended up both making a nice little group of friends at least some of whom I hope to get to see this coming year, and also a place I practiced not being quite so self-deprecating. Because that’s one of the server rules.

I practiced accepting compliments.

I practiced…talking to people.

And yes, yes, I can do a good impression of talking to people. I do it for work all the time. But actually opening up and just chatting with folks? That’s led to some new and unexpected friendships that’ve made a big difference. Enormous, actually, because without them I wouldn’t have been screened for ADHD – and wouldn’t be being a billion times nicer to myself.

Because I was being a bitch to me – and now I am…not.

It’s so funny because it’s as blatant as the trans thing. Like I told people after I was screened and they mostly were like: “Well, yes.” and “Oh, you didn’t know?”

And no, I didn’t, because a fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, I guess. That’s just the way my brain works and I assumed it was how everyone’s brain worked. And knowing it? Understanding that aspect of myself? Knowing I’m not broken and useless? That’s been… really startlingly impactful in ways I didn’t expect at all.

And obviously, last but really the most, like, I cannot mention 2024 without mentioning how utterly awesome Kathryn has been. I cannot imagine how hard it’s been, the hot mess I’ve been at points with the political situation, and with the trauma my friends have gone through, and with how bleak I’ve felt about the future at times. And she has always been there to hold me up. But also she’s always been there providing joy and love. And yes, I am fully aware that I’m still revoltingly in love and sickeningly adoring of my wife. But she’s phenomenal and I genuinely don’t know how I’d’ve done 2024 without her.

Oh, and bonus points – in 2024 I wrote most of a second book (I mean, it’s book-length, but has some significant issues and I will be tackling that in 2025. I also started on a third book; I mean, why not?). Kathryn’s been very sweetly editing her way through Lies Unmake Us. I hope to get that to ‘published’ by whatever means that happens in 2025. I’d really like it to be published by an actual company, I’d like to find an agent and have it y’know, hawked to appropriate small presses (the word ‘commercial’ doesn’t really apply to my writing). But failing that, when she’s done (she’s about 1/3rd the way through) I can put it on Amazon and itch as a self-pub.

So like I say, 2024 has been personally good.

Politically and socially it’s been horrific. I don’t need to re-litigate the awful fucking shit said about and attempted to be done to trans people in the last year. The stuff that makes me think back to all the bleakness at the beginning of this entry. I talk about that more, now, because inflicting that harm on kids when we have ample fucking evidence that giving trans kids just the one appropriate puberty using blockers and the right hormones for who they actually are is the least damaging option. And it sickens me that cis society is so anti-trans that the concept that one cis child might be marginally uncomfortable is worth risking the lives of every trans child.

It sickens me that fascists are in a position where in some places they get to make the rules.

And 2025 is going to be more of that, and more fighting and more bleakness as the environment is ripped to shreds by people who don’t give a shit.

And I find it hard to be optimistic about all that. I’m not without hope, because that’s just not the kind of human I am. I am periodically pretty fucking bleak and dispirited. But I’m also the sort of human that fights. I fought fucking hard to be here. I overcame barriers that the fucking tories put in my way, that homophobes, transphobes and racists threw up in front of me. I’ve done it before and I will fucking do it again.

But honestly, what I’d like for 2025 is just to quietly enjoy our nice house for a bit. I’d like to play games with my friends, visit with some of my other friends, travel a bit, and drink some really nice tea.

And y’know what – like my mum said when she talked about her experience of the extreme racism when she got to the UK? The best way to show them how wrong they are is to live a good life.

And y’know what? I’ve got good friends, a nice house, I’ve spent a quarter of a century – more than half my life – getting to be me, and I’ve had nearly two decades with the most wonderful woman in the world. That’s doing pretty fucking well.

* Theoretically I have come to accept that I could like boys. Like they’re sometimes kinda attractive and I think I’ve got over the whole penis thing – although it’s still bloody ugly. But since I’m very happily married, and the vast majority of the men I’ve ever met have the problem of really not having dealt with their own internalised misogyny and patriarchal values then eh. Probably wouldn’t, even were I single. But y’know, know thyself.

President Biden,

Back in 2022 you told transgender Americans: “Your president has your back.” Apparently, rather than meaning that you would protect us, you meant instead to stab us. It must be disappointing for you, who claimed to fight for civil rights, that likely the one legacy of your presidency that will be left intact after you proprietously hand power to a fascist, will be your implementation of the first piece of federal anti-LGBTQIA legislation in nearly 30 years. And while it’s disappointing for you, it’s deadly for my brothers and sisters.

It always feels deeply ironic to me that the Democrats attempt to claim the high ground on LGBTQIA issues. While advancements have pretty much invariably come from Democrats, Democrats have also rarely defended those polices, and have also been happy to vote to remove them. It was a Democratic President that passed the last piece of federal anti-queer legislation enacted in the US – The Defense of Marriage Act. And today it was a Democratic president that stripped healthcare from trans kids.

At the end of the day it seems the Democratic position is the same as with virtually every other significant minority issue. Democrats avow themselves protectors of minority groups until the moment when they’re challenged from the right. At that point the majority of the Democratic Party will, instead of defending policy positions, lurch violently in the direction of the criticism.

The Democrats have done little to undo Republican’s horrific actions on the border and deportation. If anything, both yourself and President Obama legitimized right-wing anti-immigrant acts: funding internment camps and border actions that have horrific impacts for those fleeing violence. And it is the Democrats who have continued to fund the militarization and built the power of a deeply racist police force which has shown utter unwillingness to reform.

And at the end of your presidency we find ourselves here: We know that more than forty percent of trans youth will attempt suicide. We know that states that passed anti-trans legislation have seen increases in suicidality of, in some cases, more than 70 percent. And yet just two years after you promised you had our back your legacy is increasing the number of trans kids and adults who’ll attempt to kill themselves. Your legacy is politely rolling out the red carpet to a fascist who would and will attempt to legislate us out of public life, and whose policy platforms are encouraging our deaths. Policies where the cruelty and divisiveness is the point. And that’s the policy you signed into law on December 22nd.

124 Democrats had sufficient strength to stand up against these attacks in the house, just ten in the senate, and apparently you lack the strength or willingness to defend us.

So it seems fitting that your abject failure will be your legacy.

Trigger warnings: Discussion of suicidal ideation and self harm.

I don’t know how to express how I feel today. That I’ve resorted to listening to my dad’s favourite record because what I want is to hear him again. To hear him tell me I am loved. That it doesn’t matter that I’m trans, I’ll always be his child and I’ll always be his daughter, if that’s who I am.

Because back in 2000 when I came out that’s what he told me. 24 years ago, before most people knew what trans people were beyond the horrific caricature portrayed on TV and in film. If they even knew that. When I prepared to come out with a pile of quietly printed inkjet printer pages to explain. When I sat down with my parents having arranged somewhere to run to if my parents kicked me out – I had a bag packed ready and a friend who’d agreed to take me in at least for a few days – because so many of my friends had experienced homelessness after coming out.

But while my mum was still struggling to come to terms with the ‘loss of a son’ and hadn’t got used to the fact that she’d gained a daughter. He was the one who made clear that it would be okay. Immediately, and without restrictions. He supported me and I knew I was still loved. And I knew it would be okay.

But it’s not okay.

Because the UK just banned puberty blockers for trans kids. Not for cis kids – oh no – it’s fine for cis kids with precocious puberty to get them. But you know, just because nearly half of trans kids attempt suicide, that’s not enough of a reason to provide the treatment that we know works. Because ideology is more important than trans lives.

Because cis people – in general – don’t understand how it feels to have your body betray you. How it feels to feel a continuous and inescapable discomfort-to-hatred of your skin. Don’t understand the pain. Don’t understand how traumatising it is to go through the wrong puberty and despair every fucking day.

To be clear, I had passive — and sometimes active — suicidal ideation pretty much every day of my late childhood to early adulthood. Until I got on HRT and blockers and started to find my brain actually working again. I would look out the window of the biochemistry tower and think “I could just jump and I’d be done, and I could just stop this pain.” I’d look at trainlines when I was out with my few friends as a kid and just think about waiting for a train to wipe me from the earth. I’d wonder if I could drown myself in the fucking canal. I would hurt my body, because it was hurting me. I’d plead with the universe to let me wake up a girl, or not wake at all.

It’s so distressingly common among trans kids.

But we can stop that pain. We can treat it.

The science is on our side.

It’s really clear — really fucking clear — that what works is blockers and HRT. It’s so blindly fucking obvious that the treatment success rate is basically 100% – which y’know what that tells me as a scientist? It tells me we’re missing a bunch of people we should be trying the treatment on. Because it should fail some of the time. We should be seeing kids that we think might be trans, trying it, and they go “uh, ick, no.”

But we don’t.

Because so many cis people are so fucking scared that we might traumatise one cis kid with HRT that they’ll sacrifice every fucking trans child to that trauma rather than risk it.

Because so many cis people think being trans is the worst thing that can happen to a kid. You know what? No, cis society is the worst thing that happens to a trans kid. Being trans – actually fine. Trans culture is awesome. The vast majority of trans people I’ve met have been the best fucking people ever. They’ve been weird and interesting and had to deal with so much fucking shit that they’ve come out to be wildly cool. But it terrifies cis people.

So today was already rough. And then to put the icing on the “let’s kill trans kids” day, my house representative, Marilyn Strickland, voted for the “let’s kill trans kids, oh and also fund massive camps to deport people” military funding bill today. I went out and door knocked for her. I fucking called people. I broke my fucking mental health – because I’m tired – I’m so fucking tired of this shit – but I did things I hate – so that I could support her reelection.

And this is what she chooses to do with that.

That bill has passed the house. Who knows whether my Senator will vote against it – or enough senators will vote against it to stop the deliberate and malicious harm, and frankly killing (because once again for the people in the back – untreated trans kids kill themselves with horrifying frequency), of trans kids.

So while I’ll find my strength to find fight again, today I’m just letting myself cry for the kids who will die because so many cis people keep choosing hatred over love, and don’t have the compassion of my dad who just got that trans people needed support and love, and fucking blockers and HRT.

So I’ve joked for the longest time that I’m ‘probably neurospicy’. I can’t remember where I stole the term from, and I can’t entirely remember when I realised that my brain probably didn’t work in a neurotypical way, but genuinely for the longest time I presumed that it was pretty marginal.

Like “eh, maybe I’m a bit neurodivergent but probably not at a level that’s diagnostic.”

Ha.

Ha ha.

Ha ha ha.

So over the past few months – years, if I’m honest (which I said to my therapist yesterday and she was like “well, yes, this is therapy, the point is to be honest.”) I’ve noticed a… shall we say, a deterioration in my work performance.

Like I’m still doing okay in the ER – clearly – like I’m still running the department fine – but unless we’re hammered and I’m entirely adrenaline I don’t feel like I can focus to the degree I used to. I have to keep going back and finding the threads of what’s going on to make sure stuff is happenening and yes – I get shit done – because it’s the ER and I need to, but I don’t feel the level of total understanding of what’s going on I used to. I used to know where every patient was in their journey, what the plan was, and so on. And part of that is the difference in culture between the US and the UK – I talked a lot more with the doctors about the plans in the UK. And I was a lot more in control of the plans in the UK. It was my responsibility – here the doctor is much more in charge. But I blamed that feeling on being burned out.

And literally, as I’m writing this I’m having more realisations.

Fuck.

This is just how it’s going to be for a while. So the realisation: there was a bit of time when I started feeling like I was doing better. I was feeling closer to my old self. It was when Biden was elected. And suddenly I felt a bit less stress and was more generally copic. It wasn’t the burn-out improving, was it. Well it might have been. But it was also…not feeling constantly attacked by the entire mechanism of the US government. It was my stress levels dropping and me being more able to focus.

Wow.

Okay.

Anyhow. To return to what I was going to say before my unscheduled realisation.

What I’d noticed recently was that I was increasingly struggling to focus on anything. To focus on writing scripts, to focus even on writing my fiction stuff, to get any project over the line to actually finished. And I was on the discord (for the work of the awesome writer Alyson Greaves, you should read her stuff), and having a nice chat about something or other and someone posted something about their ND traits and I muttered something about y’know, at some point maybe I should get checked because I feel like whatever coping strategies I had are not working well anymore. And a couple of my friends popped into my DMs with a quiet “yeah, maybe you should.”

And I flailed around for a few hours. Cried a bit — not because I was upset about being neurodivergent – that’s been pretty fucking clear for a long time – but because it’s just one more thing, and right now the last thing I felt like I needed was one more thing.

But it turns out that is what I needed.

Because I sat down with my therapist, and she pulled out the screening questions, and I just laughed.

Because it was literally like this (thanks to another friend for this link, it’s perf):

Like the first question is do you have trouble finishing projects…

And right at this moment I’m sat in our house which is an 8 year long unfinished project. Opposite me is a CD player that still needs some capacitors changing – but it works enough – and a record deck that needs a bunch of stuff done – but it works enough – and next to me is a piano that I never finished restoring and… and.. and…

And like all down the list it was so fucking obvious.

And I just laughed.

I just sat and laughed.

Because all this time.

All this fucking time I could have done something.

I can be shitty to myself.

I’m the first to admit that (except when I’m joking with my wife about how I’m always lovely to me). And it turns out a bunch of the stuff I’m shitty to myself about is ADHD traits. Stuff that, well, is just the way my brain works. And yes, I need to continue to work on ways to support myself and scaffold success or whatever the current terminology is. But the fact I’m fucking atrocious at finishing things? The difficulty getting started on things? The distractability when it’s a repetitive job? The trouble following people when they’re talking? The inability to relax?

Fucking hell it’s so obvious it kinda hurts.

In fact if one more person says to me “Oh, I thought you knew.” I am going to run into the forest and scream. Because no, I didn’t. I’ve just been “Well this is how brains work”ing my whole life.

I got in the shower yesterday and mid-shower realised that in the two-step process of turning on the heated blanket so it’d be cozy when I got in bed I’d failed to achieve step two of turning it on, after step one of plugging it in. And again, back to laughing.

My life has just constantly been full of these ‘I get half way through a process and get distracted’, and christ on a bike it was so fucking hard to study. I did okay and then when my dad got sick I just wasn’t able to – and I put it down entirely to grief. But actually, now, looking back I know I was so wildly unable to do it because me and stress are not good friends.

Stress in the moment – the adrenaline dump of the ER being on fire – that I can do. The way I’ve been getting scripts out the door is the “oh fuck I need this for tomorrow I need to write it right-fucking-now.”

And hilariously, the way I got the last round of trim done was the anger and adrenaline coursing through me the day after the election.

But the rest of the time?

Not been so much.

Anyhow. Imma get some drugs and see if that helps with focus.