#How to Grow on Substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

“From Zero to Substack Hero” Education Program Is on Udemy: Here's Your 25% Discount

Congratulations Aiden! His unique course has been published on Udemy Last week, I introduced an education course developed by Aiden, my protégé, using the audio version of my best-selling book Substack Mastery. He added attractive videos and PowerPoint slides, turning the chapters into an excellent curriculum with questions and assignments for learners. After completing the course, Aiden called…

[piastriprincess]

if  you  keep  it  just  yours ⸻ charles  leclerc  x  reader  .

featuring  charles  leclerc  ,  writer!reader  ,  fluff  ,  smau . author’s  note  requested  by  anon  !  i’m  sorry  it  took  so  long  but  i  loved  your  request  and  your  kind  words  ,  i  hope  i  did  it  justice  !  tried  to  get  this  out  today  in  honor  of  the  #chodium  .  this  is  my  first  try  at  an  smau  so  PLEASE  be  nice  …  i’m  still  not  sure  i  love  the  way  this  turned  out  but  nevertheless  we  persist  !  i  also  had  to  drop  some  ancient  charles  lore  in  this  …  rip  bawsixteen  we still talk about you .  anyway  please  let  me  know  what  you  think  and  if  i  should  keep  trying  smaus  …  i  promise  i  won’t  be  upset  if  you  hated  it  <3  title  is  from  paris  by  taylor  swift  (in  honor  of  her  owning  the  masters  again  !!!)

liked by emmachamberlain, dollyalderton and 27,054 others yourusername it’s official — i’m in my monaco era! paris will always have mon coeur but it’s time for a change of scenery. here’s to good beaches and hopefully better stories 🐚💌

user1 THEEEE modern carrie bradshaw frfr ⤷ user2 No bc I can’t wait to hear her stories about the Monaco dating scene??? user3 romanticizing your life is BACK and yn is leading the charge !! user4 already screaming at how chic this is. give me the essay collection immediately yourbff OMG I need to visit asappppp ♥ liked by author ⤷ yourusername missing you already ! user5 bienvenue à monaco! you will love it here :) user6 main character of her own european romance novel iktr  camillecharriere oh i want to be you when i grow up ♥ liked by author user7 This post feels like the opening scene of an HBO show I’ll binge 16000 times…

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to: Y/N L/N your.name@gmail.com  from: Jean-Claude Ravello jean-claude@bellevue.mc subject: Bienvenue au Bellevue!

Bonjour mademoiselle L/N, 

Welcome to your new home at the Residence Bellevue — we are so happy to have you here! I am sure you will quickly discover that Monaco is a small place, but this building is even smaller. Please, consider yourself part of the family already!

A few quick notes to help you settle in:

Waste and recycling are collected on Tuesdays and Fridays. There are trash chutes on every floor, but the recycling must be taken to the bins by the side entrance.

Wi-Fi information is included in the welcome folder. I know you mentioned you were a writer, so if you should need a stronger signal, the rooftop lounge is a favorite quiet working spot for our residents.

Your neighbors are both longtime Bellevue residents, so if you have any questions about the building that I cannot answer (or you just do not want to ask me!) please feel free to reach out to them. Charles actually grew up in Monaco and knows the city inside and out so if you need any recommendations I am sure he would be happy to help. Sharing both neighbors’ contact information (with permission):

Laura (16A): +377 08 35 19 72

Charles (16C): +377 99 42 67 01

Do not hesitate to contact me with any maintenance concerns or general questions! Wishing you a smooth unpacking. We are delighted to have you join our community.  

Welcome home, Jean-Claude Ravello Building Superintendent

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liked by jiatortellini, kikagomes and 31,652 others yourusername from me to you, a new essay on the unique magic of starting over and the way a stranger can start to feel like a story. up now on substack! let me know what you think xx

user8 “balcony boy” WE CHEERED MOTHER IS BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER ⤷ user9 Her writing isn’t just about the men she’s dating… ⤷ user8 okay congrats you read. do you want a medal?? should we throw a party?? should we invite bella hadid?? marlowetatiana Obsessed ! ♥ liked by author user10 saw the notif at brunch and opened substack immediately like sorry guys my parasocial internet bestie needs to tell me about her new crush user11 @ oprah @ reesewitherspoon @ pitbull GET HER A BOOK DEAL STAT! ⤷ user12 girl what is mr. worldwide going to do… user13 “Maybe Balcony Boy and I will never really meet. Maybe we’re destined to almost-know each other indefinitely… But still, there’s something delicious about the romance of the near miss.” WOW!!!! ♥ liked by author yourbff What did I say… I give it a week ⤷ yourusername it’s been ten days actually. this is what growth looks like! take notes! user14 i get her bc balcony boy has me in a chokehold too and i’ve never even seen him

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OUTGOING AUDIO MESSAGE ▶‖ to: bestie • 02:23  •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|။•

“Okay, so… I know I was supposed to check in after fifteen minutes and I’m really late and now I’m hiding out in the bathroom like I’m in a rom com from the 2000s because… I don’t know, I just — I just need a minute to breathe. [pause] I thought this was just a stupid little crush and I’d go on this date and get over it but he’s… Babe, he’s really sweet. He opened doors for me. He pulled out my chair. He called me chérie. He even laughed at my stupid joke about the bread basket! And he’s so — ugh. He’s so pretty and he smells so good, it’s rude. It’s actually unfair how perfect he is. [long sigh] But that’s not even the thing. Like, it’s not even that he’s cute. Okay, maybe it’s a little bit that he’s cute but — he’s smart. And funny. And curious, and he listens when I talk, like really listens, even if it’s stupid or rambley, and he asked about my writing and actually wanted to hear about it. I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but… yeah. I might be in trouble here. It feels like it could be something, you know? [pause] Okay. I really need to go back before he thinks I climbed out the window. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Love you so much.”

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@ yourusername • instagram notifications you have (1) new follow request from @ bawsixteen !

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liked by hunterh, oliviarodrigo, and 28,253 others yourusername life is looking pretty good lately

user15 is that a m-m-man ?!?!?!?! ⤷ user16 better question IS THAT BALCONY BOY ⤷ user17 It literally has to be! She hasn’t written about anyone else user15 okay i’ve gotten over my shock. who the hell is he bc his hand is fine as fuck rachsyme and you look even better! ♥ liked by author yourbff oh so we’re soft launching now… 👀 ♥ liked by author ⤷ yourusername yeahhhhh so i owe you SEVERAL voice memos user18 LOVERGIRL ERA user19 mother is boo’d up… congrats to whoever’s bouncing on it 😭 ⤷ user20 you almost got it sweetie. don’t worry. we’ll wait. bawsixteen Pretty flowers :) ♥ liked by author ⤷ yourusername almost as pretty as the guy who gave them to me :)

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to: All Subscribers everythingiknowaboutsubs@substack.com from: Y/N your.name@substack.com subject: everything i know about falling

Everything I Know About… Falling

So here’s the thing about me and Balcony Boy (and yes, even though we’re actually dating now, I’m still not graduating to using his actual name with you all!) Somewhere in between our first kiss overlooking the harbor and him learning to make me blueberry pancakes just the way I like them, I’ve realized I can’t lie to myself that it’s casual anymore. 

And that is completely terrifying. 

You know that feeling when you’re reading a really good book and you look up and realize that you’ve been on another planet for hours? Where you’ve forgotten to check your phone, forgotten to be anxious about deadlines, forgotten about every single thing except the story and the words on the page? That’s what being with Balcony Boy feels like. Like nothing matters except existing in that very moment with him. 

I’m not used to staying present like that. My mind is like a summer storm, always pulled in a million different directions. I used to think it was a strength of mine: a skill, even. It made me a better writer, a better thinker. But that constant motion was also my shield — from boredom, from failure, from getting too attached to anything. Self-preservation disguised as independence. Emotional distance disguised as something casual. 

When Balcony Boy came into my life, yes, I liked him immediately. Six feet of tan, hot, shirtless neighbor. Let’s be real. Who wouldn’t enjoy that view? But somewhere along the way, he stopped being a charming background character in my life and started being the type of steady presence that made me want to slow down. To sit still. To listen. To trust. And that is such a new feeling that I can’t help but be scared.

Here’s the truth: I’ve dated a lot of men who liked the idea of me. Men who wanted to be a muse and then flinched when I spilled my truth onto the page. Men who liked a complicated woman until the complications weren’t cute anymore. Men who wanted me to be emotionally available for them, and who never really listened in return. All of that was okay, because I wasn’t staying still long enough for the pain to be anything more than a glancing blow. 

But Balcony Boy doesn’t just like the idea of me. He doesn’t need to be the story — he just wants to make space for mine. He reads my drafts and underlines all his favorite lines. He twirls me around my kitchen when I laugh and he holds me when I cry. He listens. He shows up, quietly and without spectacle. He brings me coffee and croissants when I’ve been writing too long and forget to eat. It sounds crazy, but I'm scared of this because if I lose it, for the first time in a long time, it'll really, really hurt. But Balcony Boy tells me I’m brave when I’m terrified. And for the first time in a long time, he makes me want to believe him. 

I used to think love was about dramatic gestures, but maybe this is what love feels like when it’s real. Not the fireworks (although there are plenty of those, too), but the foundation. Not someone catching you when you fall, but someone taking your hand so you don’t have to be scared of the jump in the first place. 

So here I am. Jumping, without hesitation. And if the fall kills me, at least I’ll have had the pleasure of doing it with him. 

yours, y/n xx

next week: everything i know about long-distance - on dating someone whose job takes them away more than you’d like, and learning to miss someone properly.

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liked by bawsixteen, rachelchinouriri, and 29,311 others yourusername so in love that i might stop breathing, drew a map on your bedroom ceiling

user21 mama… mama a man behind you ⤷ user22 the launch is getting harder and harder user23 starting the investigation into balcony boy’s identity. james bond has nothing on me yourbff Happy looks sooooo good on you babe ♥ liked by author  user24 the note OH LET ME KILL MYSELF !!!!!!!!!! hunterh beautiful girl! ♥ liked by author user25 this has gone on long enough WHO IS HE ⤷ user26 She’s allowed to keep it private for as long as she wants! ⤷ user25 "keep it private" blah blah blah consider i’m living vicariously through her and i want to know :) ⤷ user27 that's definitely a ferrari he's driving in slide 3... bawsixteen Belle chérie ♥ liked by author user28 oh i just KNOW balcony boy is sooooooo fine

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REDDIT: TOP POSTS TODAY r/yourusername • crossposted to r/formula1 • 3h ago posted by u/luvleclerc

hear me out… i think i know who balcony boy is!

okay i know this sounds insane but LISTEN. i’ve been reading y/n’s substack for ages and am also a huge fan of formula one. i’m absolutely convinced that balcony boy is charles leclerc. 

EVIDENCE so yall don’t call me crazy:

so y/n moved to monaco a few months ago, and posted this photo from her balcony. she’s never said exactly where she lives but you can see the harbor in the background and we know charles lives near there. and this story he posted the other day? like not to be a stalker but tell me that’s not almost exactly the same view. almost like they're neighbors... also the timeline of her moving to monaco almost perfectly matches when charles started posting less on socials!!!

then we get into the balcony boy content, which if you haven’t read… oh my god. y/n’s writing is so beautiful that it doesn’t even make you feel bad about being painfully single. balcony boy literally feels like a romcom hero come to life. she doesn’t drop a ton of personal details about him but here’s what she HAS said:

“Some people flirt with their eyes and their smile. Others, apparently, do it by playing you a piano étude at golden hour, notes drifting on the sea breeze like a love song.” … guess who else FAMOUSLY plays piano????? charles marc hervé perceval leclerc.

balcony boy is genuinely curious about her writing and reads all her essays. this is exactly how charles is in interviews - always engaged and thoughtful with questions.

balcony boy is fine with being written about and isn’t bothered that y/n is somewhat well known. sounds like a person who already knows how it feels to be in the spotlight!!!!

“Dating a man who’s gone every other weekend means learning to say goodbye. But even when he’s on the other side of the world, he never makes me feel like he’s far away.” F1 CALENDAR HELLO…

mentioned that balcony boy grew up near where they live (“knows the streets of this place like the lyrics of his favorite song”). prince of monaco!!!! i rest my case!!!!

one last thing: her most recent posts are totally a soft launch and the guy’s hair in the 1st slide looks EXACTLY like charles's. plus there’s this comment from someone called @ bawsixteen about the flowers like he gave them to her? i checked the account and it’s private with no profile photo, but the display name says CL. cl… sixteen… it CAN’T be a coincidence!!

⬆ 16.1K ⬇  •  🗨 897  •  ➦ SHARE

TOP COMMENTS u/f1gossipgirl • 3h ago  this is the most unhinged thing i’ve ever read but you’ve convinced me ⬆ 3.4K ⬇

u/fromthedeskof • 48m ago NOOOOO PLEASEEE not my favorite microinfluencer i can’t have everyone finding out about her… she’s MY parasocial bestie ⬆ 2.5K ⬇ ⤷ u/albonnation • 11m ago it's too late she has wag allegations :( she’s about to blow up ⬆ 332 ⬇ ⤷ u/everythingyn • 9m ago rip to our cozy lil substack community, she will be missed 💔 ⬆ 597 ⬇

u/BeanbagGreg • 1h ago  This subreddit is focused on racing. Stick to discussion of driving please ⬆ 1.7K ⬇ ⤷ u/piastriwdc • 26m ago literally no one asked you to read this… how many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man? ⬆ 4.8K ⬇

u/romanticrealist • 35m ago  ok grandma let’s get you to bed ⬆ 992 ⬇ ⤷ u/sallyrooneyluvbot • 6m ago Literally like as if she would ever date an athlete?? Be so fr ⬆ 81 ⬇ ⤷ u/landoleclerc • 2m ago um have you SEEN charles leclerc? don’t you ever speak on my goat like that ⬆ 133 ⬇

u/charlesdefender • 2h ago  wait she’s sooooo pretty what’s her instagram ⬆ 689 ⬇

SEE MORE...

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@ yourusername • instagram notifications you have (8,692) new follow requests from @ leclercwdc, @ charloslover, @ f1ella and others !

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liked by charles_leclerc, bawsixteen, and 95,214 others yourusername privacy sign on the door… taking balcony boy offline for now xx

charles_leclerc Je t’aime ♥ liked by author

comments have been limited on this post

[ghelgheli]

i would actually like to hear more of your thoughts on whipping girl, whenever you feel ready enough to talk about it. i've only ever heard positive recommendations for it. i was thinking of reading it. i've read one or two introductory 101 texts on transmisogyny as well as some medium/substack posts, and always looking to read more as a tme person. ty!

thanks for asking! I'm gonna try to be concise because I'm stuck on my phone for the month, but here are my thoughts on whipping girl:

serano is at her strongest in the book in three areas: manifestations of transmisogyny in media (e.g. how trans caricatures pervade movies), the history of medical institutions developing a pathology of transsexuality (like the diagnostics of blanchard et al. or how trans people seeking healthcare were and continue to be forced into acting out prescribed expressions and manufacturing memories), and the construction of her own transition narrative (telling the reader what it was like for her to grow up desiring femininity in a way that confused her, the experience of crossdressing, the effects of hrt for her)

whenever she's just sticking to this, I think she effectively communicates a lot that the unaware reader could benefit from—even many trans women/transfems/tma people who are otherwise in tune with the history of medicalized transsexualism and our popular depictions could probably benefit from her own personal narrative, by nature of how variegated our experiences can be.

unfortunately I think the book fails at its primary—stated—goal, which is to theorize about transmisogyny. in the big picture this is a bifurcated failure:

on one branch of her argument, she remains committed to there being something biologically essential/innate about gender. this manifests thru multiple claims: that we have "innate inclinations" toward masculinity/femininity and "subconscious sex" rather than what I believe, which is that the latter are constructed categories imposed on different matrices of behaviour/expression/desire in different cultural contexts; that there is "definitely a biological component to gender" (close paraphrase) after a discussion of how she believes E and T tend to affect people (thus equivocating gender with dominant hormones!); that we have such a thing as "physical sex" which is the composition of our culturally decided "sex characteristics" (don't ask me how the dividing line is drawn) even as she says we should stop using "biological sex" as a term; that there is "no harm" in agreeing that "sex" is largely bimodal with some exceptions; that social constructionism is necessarily erasure of transsexual experiences in early childhood... altogether she is unwilling to relinquish arguments about the partial "innateness" of femininity/masculinity and gender. this is at tension with her admission on several occasions that these are neither culturally/geographically nor temporally stable concepts! but that doesn't seem to be a line she can follow thru on.

on another, intertwining branch, she engages in what I think is a deep and widespread mistake in the theorizing of transmisogyny: reducing it (mechanistically) to what she calls effemimania* or essentially anti-femininity. it is her stated thesis at the start that masculinity is universally preferred to femininity. she doesn't offer a definition of either term until one of the final chapters, where she defines them as the behaviours and expressions associated with a particular gender. but I think this reduction just misunderstands transmisogyny. it is even in tension with an observation she makes early on, that trans women are often punished for their perceived masculinity! but again, this is a thought she seems unable or unwilling to follow thru with.

my problem with the thesis is that masculinity and femininity do not float free of gender—it is not possible to speak of their valuation in the abstract. anyone who grew up as a masculine cis girl and never "grew out" of that "phase" can attest to the violence wrought upon expressions of masculinity from women. and this applies doubly so to the subjects of transmisogyny! not only are we punished for any perceived bleed-through of masculinity from our supposed "underlying male selves", those of us who are willingly masculine and thriving as mascs are punished for our failure to conform to the rules of the normative womanhood that is imposed on us (just as we are punished for any willing femininity as "false" and predatory upon cis womanhood—observe that transmisogyny is reactive degendering in every case!).

on both branches serano makes only perfunctory remarks about the intersections with race, class, and colonialism. "sex" as such was made to only be accessible to the "civilized", most of all the white european! for a racialized person and particularly a Black person navigating gender the waters are just not the same; the signifiers of sex neither available in the same way, nor granted the same medical legitimacy. what is the "physical sex" of someone who is de-sexed altogether? how can gender have a "biologically innate" component when its expressions between the bourgeoisie and the working class are at total odds with one another? this all goes for the masculine/feminine distinctions as well. what sense is there in the claim that we have innately masculine/feminine inclinations when globally (and transmisogyny has been made global!) what is feminine and masculine can be very nearly mirrored? nor is "masculinity is always considered superior to femininity" innocent of obviating race. transmisogynoir adds yet further degendering thru the coercive masculinization of someone as a Black woman—masculinization as punishment, again!

and as a final point, the account fails to be materialist. there is no attempt to place transmisogyny in its role as an instrument of political economy or, as jules gill-peterson might say, as a tool of statecraft. it is just a psychological response to the way the world is, as far as serano has anything to say about it. but how did the world become that way, and why?? serano's solution, the abolition of what she calls gender entitlement, is naive to the fact that gender entitlement is necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist state, which is structured thru patriarchy and built on colonialism. it is not possible to reskin this into something innocuous!

this is why I cannot recommend whipping girl as a work about transmisogyny except at the most shallow level. it could be a helpful critical read, but imo, it is just wrong about transmisogyny.

[malusokay]

How I Made Loneliness Feel Like a Lifestyle Choice

What it means to live inside pauses, and why I still think solitude is sexier when no one notices it’s deliberate. (from my Substack)

Everything smelled like rain, and I thought that was enough. It reminded me of the garden after someone had hosed it down. I didn't grow up around cities, but they always seemed to tolerate me. I think I liked being somewhere that didn't know my name, but still assumed I belonged.

Striped sweaters, pleated skirts, tangled headphones, clothes that made me feel like I was always en route to class. Or auditioning for a French indie film. Moving through a city of lights that buzzed louder than conversations, a dull, constant hum that never really stopped, even when the streets emptied or the shops pulled down their metal shutters. I moved through it the way you walk through static: alert, but blurred around the edges. Roaming through busy stations, empty cafés, quiet library aisles, the kind of spaces that were public but impersonal, where everyone passed through but no one stayed long enough to be noticed.

I knew the schedule of trains I wasn't taking, the smell of pastries I never bought, the sound of my own shoes across polished floors. I always wondered what it would feel like to walk in and choose something without thinking, to point at a donut, maybe, and eat it right there. Like a normal person. Like someone with blood sugar, zero shame, and no existential beef with breakfast. But I'm very strict with myself. I'd linger just long enough to let the air hit, warm sugar, butter, vanilla rising from trays behind glass—and then I'd keep walking like it hadn't crossed my mind.

I wasn't running out of anything. That's what made the slowness feel indulgent, not dangerous. Being there didn't serve a purpose, and maybe that's why it felt like a secret, like I was getting away with something small and private, a softness no one had to witness.  I came from a world that didn't use public transport. That's probably why I liked it, the quiet subversion of being somewhere unchauffeured. Sitting alone felt earned. Watching the city move without me in it felt like a choice.

I liked places where no one stayed long, where nothing stuck. Where it was normal to be alone, to be quiet, to be looking down at nothing in particular, most of it passed without detail. Just motion. Noise, breath, movement. The lift of a coat sleeve. The scratch of a chair leg on tile.

I wasn't trying to stand out. But I didn't want to vanish into the wallpaper either. I wanted to be the kind of girl you looked at twice, but never remembered why. I wanted to be looked at without having to speak. The kind of presence that makes people wonder but not ask. I think I learned that posture in school, that specific neutrality. Just polished enough to blend in with the ones who mattered, just distant enough to never be mistaken for someone waiting to belong. I walked like I knew where I was going, even when I didn't. That was usually enough. It worked 90% of the time. The other 10%, I accidentally stumbled into a linguistics conference breakroom or a storage unit filled with mannequins missing their hands, with no recollection of how I had ended up there.

No one talks about how loud fluorescent lights are until you've been under them too long. And I was under them a lot. Not because I had anywhere to be, but more because they were always on in the places I ended up. They flickered sometimes, but mostly they just buzzed, high, steady, and inescapable. You don't notice it at first. But then it's all you can hear, like the sound is inside your head, not around it. It doesn't hurt, exactly. It just presses. Constant and low, a hum under everything else. After a while, I stopped noticing until I left the building and felt the sudden quiet of normal air. Even the street seemed softer in comparison.

I think I liked that. The sudden relief. The way silence felt like something you could wear.

I miss subway lights in my eyes, the way they flickered across the windows, breaking my reflection into something softer. Less defined. Easier to look at. Not quite me, but close enough to follow with my eyes as the train moved. There was something comforting in the blur, in the way the glass doubled everything, made it all a little less certain. I could sit across from myself without having to explain anything. No smile. No correction. Just the outline of a girl who looked like she read too much and might start crying if you asked about her favourite movie.

Sometimes I'd stare until my own face went unfamiliar, my mouth wrong, my eyes too far apart, and my hair a bit too dark. It never felt dramatic. Just distant. Like someone I'd borrowed things from.

Loneliness wasn't dramatic then. It didn't lurch or shout or demand anything from me. It just sat next to me like noise, like background static, easy to ignore until everything else went quiet. It lived in the pauses. In the space between songs. In the wait before the train doors closed. I wouldn't have called it sadness. I still don't think I would. It was just a feeling I couldn't shake, one that stayed close but never really touched me. Like a bruise I'd forgotten about until something pressed against it.

That's the part that's stayed with me. Probably always will.

I moved without urgency. There was rarely a reason to be anywhere, and even when there was, I didn't feel like rushing to meet it. Sometimes I rode past my stop on purpose just to see how long I could go before anyone noticed I wasn't where I said I'd be. Sometimes I just forgot to get off. Not in a distracted way, just in that quiet, slow kind of forgetting that happens when the lights blur and the announcements start to sound the same. I always stood in the same place, by the door, leaning against the divider on the side facing forward. I liked the way the movement pressed me into it, like the city was gently holding me in place, even if just by force.

The train kept going, so I did too.

There wasn't much to say about it. Long walks that led nowhere in particular, though they usually ended at water. The kind that gathers without spectacle, canals, harbours, the quiet undersides of bridges. Places where things collect. Leaves. Bottles. Thoughts. I'd stand there for a while, coffee in hand, like I was waiting for something to surface, though I never really expected it to. I always kind of hoped I'd see a seal. Something about their vibe, fat, quiet, mysterious, felt aspirational. I imagined us nodding at each other like two girls who just get it. The coffee would go cold before I finished it, not because I forgot, but just because I didn't like it that much. But it gave me something to hold. And sometimes that was enough. It made me look busy. Like I had somewhere to be, or someone waiting. People don't ask questions when you're holding coffee. It's basically an invisibility cloak for awkward people.

Now I don't even know if I ever liked it, or if I just got used to the taste the way you get used to minor inconveniences, like blisters, or boys who say they hate small talk and then spend forty-five minutes telling you about their crypto portfolio.

Afternoons slid into evenings. Evenings into nights. The kind of hours that don't announce themselves, they just collect. Soft and weightless, but heavy if you stack too many. I stopped keeping track after a while. Someone once asked if I was lost. I wasn't. But I said yes anyway. Just to try on the softness of being helped. Some days blurred at the edges, others vanished completely. I'd look up, and it would already be dark, and I'd have nothing to show for it except a half-drunk coffee and some vague memory of walking somewhere. Sometimes I bought things, like books, mugs, bracelets, or old things. Small enough to fit in a coat pocket. I never needed them, but I always found a way to use them. At one point, I was probably one paperweight away from becoming a hoarder.

I didn't feel bad, exactly. Just delayed, like I was waiting for something to begin, only the beginning kept moving further out of reach. People always talk about time as if it's passing them by. Mine never passed. It hovered. So soft and idle, just out of reach. It felt like holding your breath without realising it until the exhale came in the form of darkness outside the window, the kind that arrives before you're ready, even if you knew it was coming. That's what threaded through. The weightless ache of not moving. Of being still for so long, the air starts to fold around you.

I miss how easy it was to let days slip by without asking for more. To let them spool out behind me like a thread. Nothing dramatic, nothing wasted, just hours layered on hours. Some light enough to forget, some heavy enough to keep. But none of them urgent. I could move through them like scenery, like I was there to notice and not to shape.

And I miss the way that almost felt like enough. Not good. Not exciting. But bearable in a way that made me believe there was something elegant about it. And sometimes, when it's late and everything smells like rain, it still does. The trains, the coffee, the blur in the window, they never really stopped. I still take the long way home. Not out of forgetfulness anymore. My mind knows where to get off. But there's something about delaying arrival that still makes sense to me.

The city feels smaller now. Familiar. I've stopped needing to read the signs. I know where the doors open. I know which step on the stairs creaks. And the buzzing, I don't notice it as much. It's in the walls, it's in the air, it's in the glow of shopfronts at night. It's less intrusive now. Almost gentle. Like background radiation. It's just part of how the world hums.

I think that's the part no one ever talks about—how some patterns don't mean anything until you realise you never left them, how stillness starts to look like stability if you don't call it by its name. It's not that I want to go back. It's just that I never really moved forward. I've stayed exactly where I was. Just quieter now. More fluent in waiting.

In Latin, the imperfect tense describes an action that was ongoing but never finished. I liked that. It felt honest, like naming something without needing to change it.

my insta -> malusokay

[dolphin-diaries]

Death Of The Woman

Originally posted on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

The following essay is not my usual fare. It’s my personal story as a detrans woman, and as such, it will lack in abstracted theory or argumentation. After this I will be publishing a special interview, and then I’ll return to my usual programming.

For now though, be advised this isn’t quite light reading material. There is some cursory description of sexual violence. If you do not feel like you can engage with that, skip from the paragraph beginning “At one point, …” to the next titled section.

Girl/Flesh

Before there is an adult, there is first a child—a not-so-blank slate, a state of being with an expiration date. Boys must be made men; girls must be made women. To the end of that becoming, childhood is a prelude and adolescence a ritual.

Contemplate for a moment, without any input from me: how is a girl made a woman?

My upbringing was rather feminist, compared to the average for my country. My mother did not take my father’s name; she earned more; they had a whole and loving marriage. A husband-and-kids were expected of me eventually, but ever nebulously and not quite yet; my own family’s example seemed perfectly encouraging. For the time being, the biggest expectation placed on me was intellectual accomplishment. You might think a boy child would be preferable to such an endeavour, but it was quite the opposite. Boys will be boys, after all: rowdy, willful, lascivious, ever in need of someone else’s care. Handed gently from the mother’s hand to a wife’s, they’re basically eternal children. But girls? Girls are born older. Mature faster—biologically, essentially, fundamentally. Girls listen. Girls obey.

By all accounts I was a fantastic foundation for such a purpose. Tallest, strongest, bursting with curly dark hair. You couldn’t possibly mistake me for a fragile doll, no, not like some other, more childish girls; I was obviously ready for responsibility. And not just in superficial appearance. Speech came to me quickly and easily; writing flowed from my fingertips with perfect calligraphy; I made art worthy of fridges and walls; I took to learning with all the energy of an insomniac puppy.

Did other kids like a fat, moustachioed girl that beat them at everything, and after class also won at arm-wrestling? Fuck no! But that was alright. I was born into intelligentsia, and envy was our natural curse, one to be proud of. At any rate, someday puberty would come. A body-shedding into something physically desirable; combined with all this accrued talent, it would ensure I’d have the pick of good men. Though I didn’t yet know men, only the irksome boys from whom they hatched. I lived for the attention of adults and for making other girls laugh—if clever ogres are good for nothing else, it’s humour. There was something transcendent in seeing someone fae-pretty and so unreachable be made happy by my effort. Even if they bullied me after. Of course, that meant I was too rowdy—oh, and too stubborn. Girls are supposed to understand the rules of the world exist for a reason; I didn’t. I needed things explained before I obeyed.

The rule I didn’t understand most of all was touch. I was brutish, and my brutishness marked me for disgust—and yet, I was constantly touched, even as I was told I’d never be touchable. My body burgeoned with entirely too much flesh, and every hand was drawn to grab it, to pinch and assess it in some unannounced Try-Before-You-Buy. Teachers, children, family members. It would not stop and it made my skin crawl, but it was also normal. The adults I liked did it. My peers did it. No one remarked on it.

When womanhood was yet a distant prospect, I dreamt of something ethereal. Power-suited. Someone that looked like mother, or like Barbie. Someone untouchable. Because surely this was all a growing pain. I was a girl, and that meant all the things that made me revolting, naive, and unruly would be purged by shed blood.

That’s not how that goes, though. How is a girl made a woman?

When adolescence finally arrived, it was rather early, eleven or so. I always was an overachiever. And I discovered I was not yet becoming something better. I was just myself, but more. More flesh. More hair, in all the wrong places. Same moustache, same swollen face, same ungainly buffoon demeanour, only now with hips bursting through trousers and a boyish deep voice.

The leering and touching did not cease—they got worse. The older I grew, the older my mother dressed me, dolling me up in heels and arse-hugging skirts with the vicarious glee of someone who got another chance at making a woman, and who was emboldened by the powerlessness of my ‘no.’ The dress-up had a goal in mind, of course. Same as my obligation to intellectual accomplishment; the only difference was, I was now failing, while the prospect of adulthood loomed ever closer. So I had it spelled out to me: it was all to ensure I could return to my family the debt I incurred with the costs of my existence. To birth them a child and uphold their reputation. If I was unfeminine, untouchable, unfuckable, they would not get a return on their investment. If I preferred girls—which, big surprise, I did—that would invite untold humiliation on the family name. That I was given to choose my would-be boyfriends, nudged to enjoy the makeup and skirts, was a just bit of carrot to the whip. If I sneered too much at the carrot, I’d get the whip.

So on I wobbled, a fleshy, moustachioed doll. Every new softness and curve invited a groping hand or a disgusting comment. Every fault of my body was bared as proof I should be happy to get this much at all. In old deformity and in newfangled woman-ness, I was just a girl.

I sought other ways of being. An escape from the barbed chain link of The Family. I had limited recourse in my small town, but the internet is a wide-reaching thing. No lesbian community existed for miles, but I could still read about the ring and the hanky code and whatever else. I could look at pictures.

(Although those were at times alarming, because all these lesbian women I glimpsed looked rather like me—whereas I had hoped that, by the time I grew up, I’d be something better.)

Regardless, I tried the codes and the cargo trousers, as much as I could—which wasn’t much. I stoked fascination in my classmates with giddy and secretive coming-outs. Only some showed me compassion and dignity, but I was even happy enough to be seen as a weirdo monster. At least they saw me. Worse was their dissecting vigilance. Their attention to the way I moved or spoke. The moment I’d do something girly, they’d cry, they knew it! I was just a girl. I did have a boy crush, and I should admit it; I was surely—as they put it—a faggot. Yes, really, literally ‘faggot,’ that word precisely. Even when I flicked my wrist like so while all dolled-up from head to toe, no one seemed to quite stomach believing me a real woman.

Giddiness over coming out doesn’t last. Disobedience brooks punishment. Through the listicles of lesbian identities and vocabulary, you dig through to testimonies. To rape. To abjected and dysphoric butches. To abuse at school, university, work, home. To the loss of all those things. To death. Elsewhere lesbians sometimes got their happily-ever-afters, loving families and the luxury of walking free, but here, we have not earned it. Visa-barred from leaving, doomed to die fighting for a future we would never live—even as far away, someone already got it just for having been born.

When I Saw The TV Glow

2011. A documentary, in all the glory of 480p. I’d heard of trans women before in concept—dear, some men just become women, it happens, okay?—but I’d never heard of trans men before. Never conceived of it.

I watched the screen like it was a revelation. A man in a white tee tucked into light jeans, cut like a Ken doll, strutting down a springtime street in low resolution.

Before then, I’d accepted that the burgeoning breasts and hips was simply something I had to contend with. That the way the boys around me were growing stronger while I was ever-groped was simply nature asserting itself. My body was proof of my place in the world.

I looked at the screen and thought, So that was a big fat lie.

The moment I knew it was possible, I wanted it like nothing else. The broad shoulders, the muscles, the dapper swagger. I wished for my body to take the shape of my being, instead of my being contorting to the body’s mould. Perhaps I could be loved for all the things that made me a deformed monster. Perhaps I didn’t need to watch every step to prove I wasn’t just a girl. Here was a place already in the shape of me, rather than a stifling lot I had to constantly fight against.

How could one go about changing sex? According to the documentary, it started with a psychiatric assessment—and so, my little twelve-year-old self took to studying the DSM. As I scoured it, I learned I could not be described by its standards as a true transsexual. I’d never before thought of myself as a boy nor had wanted to be one. Yet in the same breath, the DSM claimed no girl could ever desire physical masculinity beyond what came naturally to her. It was either transsexualism or some fetish or self-harming disorder. I had neither of the latter. My desire to inhabit masculinity was undeniable and crystal-clear, and the only kind of person that could’ve felt this way was a transsexual man—so that meant I must’ve simply remembered my life wrong. Or interpreted it wrong. If I twisted my memories this way or that, discarded one as an anomaly and repainted another in baby-boy blue, it would all make sense. It had to. Trans people online talked about a sense of mis-belonging, and I did feel like an outsider among the girls—what did it mean to feel like a gender, at any rate? I only knew what I felt like. And I felt like something sorry and misshapen.

Somewhat later, circa 2013, I did hear of weirder gender concepts in the distant West, mostly as just definitions of words. Genderqueer, nonbinary, et cetera. I comprehended them rationally but I did not understand or relate to them. Wherever I read about it, genderqueerness was described in a manner parallel to transsexuality—the sex-changing—or else as an exotic alternative to hormones and scalpels. But I desired body change so desperately, and regardless, I could not envision living as a nonbinary gender in my own country. Maybe in the West that was possible, but here nothing but derision would entail. It just wasn’t for me.

Naturally, trans men’s testimonies of hardship met and rivalled those of cis lesbian women. But the vast majority of them were concentrated on the times before and during transition. After that—sure, all of medicine reviles you and you’re at risk of a heinous hate crime. But the same has been true before; now though, when you walk down the street or meet a new friend, when you live, you’re just some guy. Your life is tinted by your queerness as much as any other sex/gender-deviant, but that constant, unabating struggle against a blistering torrent of humiliation, of being forced into the place of a woman? That seemed to end. Eventually. And then—who knows? Move to a new town, a new country even. No one need ever know who you had once been.

At that time though, I was still very young, and the thing about discovering a solution to a problem you thought inescapable is that it makes the problem itself feel that much more acute. So I did the stupidest thing imaginable: come out.

Dear reader, it wasn’t a good idea.

It is, after all, rather trivial to exact whatever punishment one desires upon one’s queer children, for children are parents’ property. It is true everywhere, but if ‘in some fucking America’ there is something called ‘child-protective services,’ here nothing short of murder, starvation, or exceptionally unsubtle and repeated rape could possibly broker an outside intervention. The debt you incurred to your parents for being born still holds, and you’ve just betrayed its very foundation. A woman still needs to be made of you. And anyway, who are you gonna call? The police? For what, total social isolation? For derision and humiliation? For the hours spent unmaking all your agency, all your desire as nothing more than delusion brought on by that damned internet? For total control over you, over every movement, every manner, every gesture, every word? For what you claim was assault? For what you claim was an attempted murder? I mean, it’s all rather sad, but it’s not a crime; not provably. Not against faggots.

I Win, Bitch

I am first and foremost a problem-solver. Even in total solitude, without access to the internet or to kindred spirits, there are plans to be made. I did not want to die, and I was still in the questionable position of being my family’s pride. Had to be. My parents couldn’t have any more children; they had to get it right with me.

So of course, if I got free admission to a prestigious university many kilometres away, and if I proved I’d learned my lesson enough to be trusted with leaving—who was to gainsay me?

Getting out was a decision I made almost the moment my abuse took on a corrective and violent turn. I knew what I had to do, even if it cost me immeasurably. Overnight I had to call quits on any remnant of childhood and learn to steal money to ensure future independence. Had to play my woman’s part convincingly. Had to look as if I’m enjoying it, convincingly. If I’d found the role stifling before, now it was as razors under my skin. Everything that ‘woman’ encompassed had been weaponised for my constant abuse, and I could not stomach a second of it—but I had to. Until I broke free.

Besides the severance of any familial support, financial or otherwise, my psyche was thoroughly shattered. All the times I’d been told, at length and for hours, that I was suffering a dangerous delusion, that I had to be forced to conform to my true nature—every single time, I knew that it was wrong. Even when I was as young as twelve, I knew I deserved none of it. I knew it was abuse and injustice. All the same it broke me. There was no pride and no resilience strong enough in me to withstand years and years of it. For a while I could barely look at women that whatsoever resembled me; the very concept, the very idea was a trigger. When it came to my own mind, I struggled to tell what was real, what I did and did not feel. Everything laid under panes and panes of ice, and that disassociation was the only way I could maintain a grip—or else everything erupted in screams.

The worst of my C-PTSD would be dealt with in the ensuing years thanks to NGO-sponsored therapy for queer patients. Unpacking pane after pane, unwinding coil after coil of the rage I had to swallow, piecing together shards of abandoned and dissociated memories. But I’d be paying mental dividends on my damage for longer still, and in ways I couldn’t even imagine.

For now though: I won.

Social transition was easy for me. It took little more than cutting my hair and swapping out wardrobes to pass as a man pretty reliably—well, a teenage boy, but I was only seventeen, so it didn’t raise eyebrows. I felt freed. Like I could walk and speak and make friends without chains attached to me. Only the softness of my shape gnawed at me, how it had shifted from despicable womanly maturity to boyish youth. I hated not having my coming adulthood recognised. Hated that other young men got to grow stronger and larger while I was stuck in perpetual pseudo-adolescence. I was free, I was no child, no property of adults; I wanted to be seen.

But it was also the first time I discovered queer spaces in person. Mixed and trans ones—especially trans ones. For the first time, I walked among people who understood. Really understood, the dysphoria and the otherness and the abuse and the whole lot. I’d found my home amongst the gender criminals; we talked feminism and activism; we braved protests despite threats of alt-right retaliation; we stumbled through relationships. Like most trans people, I harbour no nostalgia for my childhood or early youth—but for that time, I do. Not because it didn’t have its share of struggle, but because of my then-partner A. and my friends. Because it was the first time I felt the mutability of sex/gender, and breathed the freedom that entailed.

Things don’t last though, especially not in youth. Relationships fall apart; social circles reshuffle. I was leaving university to pursue a career—after all, I could not afford to be on HRT without income.

Moreover I felt… insecure, you could call it. Most of my social connections were to trans people and/or women. But I was a man. Shouldn’t I—commit? Make an effort? If cisgender men did not accept me as one of theirs, didn’t that make me a kind of impostor? I chafed in the body of an eternal adolescent, and the rift I felt between myself and cis men salted the wound.

Brain/Worms

The first problem was easily addressed with exogenous testosterone. Starting it was a euphoric experience—the rapid swelling of muscle, the spike in energy and hunger and libido. I loved the changes to my body, and I wished all traces of insidious womanhood would wilt from me.

The second issue was more difficult. I’d always felt at an arm’s length from cis heterosexual men, and never got much closer. No matter what, I simply felt other. That made sense, though. Once I re-conceptualised my gender as male, I did not identify as straight. I didn’t feel so sure anymore I was solely attracted to women, and that feeling only solidified the more I transitioned. If gender and sex were uncertain, how could I be so sure? I had no genital preference. What did it mean to be attracted to a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ anyway? Some men could be as pretty as women. Wouldn’t giving a definitive answer be a little bioessentialist? Aren’t we all, as they say, a little bisexual?

Yes, I thought, it made perfect sense that I, a bisexual man, would find no belonging among cishet men. And the more I thought about the sort of relationships I desired, the more I realised I could not possibly be fulfilled in a straight relationship. I attempted facsimiles of a straight man’s role, and they all left me feeling hollowed. The attraction and relationship calculus of straight women was an arcane language to me. The sorts of women I liked were distinctly dyke-y; sure, some of those happen to be bisexual, but if they were to date me, they’d still be dating a man. I’d hate that as much as I’d hate not having my manhood acknowledged or recognised. And that’s to say nothing of how sleazy and dishonest it felt to intrude on queer women’s dating scene as a man. Now that I lived as a man, what made me so different from cis men? Innate birth-assigned woman-ness? Misogyny-flavoured childhood trauma? The vagina? All excuses felt like pathetic, opportunistic self-humiliation. Debasing myself by appealing to someone else’s cissexism so I could appear like something I wasn’t.

So naturally, I pursued community and companionship with gay men. As any gay trans man will tell you, it is usually a thankless and annoying task; transphobia is insidious and oft-unchallenged in gay male circles. The way they treat trans men ranges from hostile to patronising to weird. But overall I had a better time of it than most, and cultivated a few long-lasting friendships. The gay men around me had more class consciousness than average. They were not shy about liking me, even after apologising for speaking ill of vaginas. It was ego-boosting. But I was still afraid that when we took our shirts off, they’d stop seeing me and find a woman in me. Fuck me like one. Erase me.

A new ghost began to haunt me. It’d coalesced from pieces that already existed within me, but never before had this shape. What were fragments of my desires and thoughts coalesced into a singular fixation that constricted all of my libido, all of my sexual being. Fantasies of being fucked into womanhood invaded my mind and would not let go of it. In them, men were personless and barely corporeal, but the women existed in graphic detail. I myself was either completely disembodied and not present, not even as a voyeur—or else oddly, vaguely within the woman, both me and not-me at once.

I was horrified. Not even by the fantasy itself; its contents were murky and not particularly original. By my singular lust for it. I felt as though I’d discovered a monster within. A violent misogynist puppeteering the woman’s image to quench a fetish for sexist humiliation. A depraved and lowly creature fed on my own abuse.

But it made a kind of sense, I thought, the horror aside. I’d experienced plenty of misogynistic violence, the sexual kind included, and I guessed I’d sublimated it. Except—

There was a problem with that interpretation. That coercive return to womanhood, what I feared men might do to me—it was not the same as what aroused me. In the fantasy, I was not returning or reverting; I was not giving in to transphobic violence, which these scenarios notably lacked; I just was.

Despite all my efforts, this creature within responded to no self-insight, no cross-examination, no rationalisation. Everything I learned from the handbooks of either trauma therapy or kink-positive thinking failed utterly. I could not unlearn shame. I could not arrive at an epiphany. Like a hungry tapeworm, the unnameable thing inside me gnawed and gnawed, and any attempts to understand my desire, to make it less dissociative, only caused it to mutate to something more esoteric. The images morphed from banal patriarchal brutality to anonymous men forcibly feminised via sex by domineering, ultra-feminine women. Once my mind arrived at image, it sank its teeth into it so completely that it began to hollow my waking life, which now paled by comparison to the fantasy. And yet the thing still resisted knowledge even as it drained blood from me. I could not comprehend what pleasure I derived from this, what desire this fulfilled. When looked upon in the light of day, beyond the haze of arousal, the monster within me became only fear, a terrifying and nameless anxiety that liquefied all efforts to understand it.

In any case, the only ‘gay man’ I ended up dating long-term was a severely closeted trans woman. I failed thoroughly at sourcing validity from gay male partners as I realised I never wanted them in the first place; it’d all been a self-delusional charade whose only purpose was to forestall loneliness and to quench the thing within. So I settled on helping a girl find her gender. My perversion remained my little secret. No one in the world could’ve possibly shared it, and if they did, it was probably for the best that I did not know them.

A strange and nameless discontent festered. Past the initial joy in well-sculpted shoulders, the more virilised my body became, the more difficult it was to differentiate myself from the Average Cishetero Man, or even the Average Gay Man (which do not, in the end, look that different)—and it felt existentially important to be differentiated somehow. Looking like that made me feel dead. Whatever ‘that’ was. I found myself confusedly wishing for jewellery and makeup and feminine fashion—things that were once violently forced upon me. So the desire itself made me squirm. At the same time though, it’d been a while since my abuse. Years. Therapy, time, et cetera. I knew it was normal enough for someone later in transition to mellow out on strict gender expression, now that doing it ‘incorrectly’ no longer threatened misgendering. I’d met plenty of people with that exact experience. So, I thought, maybe that was my damage. Desire for gender-nonconformity, which I’d repressed in a bizarre manner.

Of course, experimenting with being a feminine man in public would get my head kicked in; discovering a craving for femininity was very inconvenient for me. I wasn’t pleased to regress back to stifling my gender presentation for social security. But no one could stop me from crossdressing in private—so, bit by bit, I tried.

When I finally built up the courage to order proper womenswear and put it on, I looked in the mirror and saw a man in a dress. I did exactly as I wanted and achieved exactly what I thought I would. Except, instead of relief or joy, a wave of such profound disappointment hit me that I could neither understand nor describe its nature. I could only comprehend it as a compulsion to tear my skin off. As dysphoria.

Well, duh. I was a trans man. Of course dolling up would make me dysphoric. Especially after all that’d happened to me. What did I expect? This had all been a waste of fucking time. There was nothing to discover behind my desires. I abandoned my pursuit, resigned to the daily kaleidoscope of sexual depravity that I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning; I’d given up on understanding the source or goal of any of it; I would simply entertain it in the privacy of my head and carry it to my grave.

Or at least, I’d try.

At one point, a cis woman took an interest in me. That interest was not reciprocated; something about her person was off-putting to me. She acted towards my friends with extreme jealousy, and even though I rejected her advances in no uncertain terms multiple times, she would not stop offering. At the same time though, now that I realised I did not belong among gay men, I felt extremely alone. And revolting. How many women were out there that’d even want to touch me? I really shouldn’t look a gifted horse in the mouth.

We were drunk, and I a complete mess. I’d bristled before when she pointedly asked if I knew she was bisexual—the implication being, she wasn’t afraid of vagina—because there was nothing un-straight about a woman wanting a trans man. But with so much wine in my veins—you know, maybe I wasn’t such a trans man after all? Maybe I was—I dunno. Like a girl—like, only for sex, though. I had stockings and lingerie in my bedside drawers and shit. If you squint and turn off the light.

I remember a shift in her gaze, once it finally sank in. From giggling and alcohol-addled to something sharper. Not quite homicidally disgusted, but still vicious; like I’d been made a thing. I didn’t know what I did wrong; I didn’t tell her about any of the truly despicable things—I was still me! Wasn’t she bisexual? Wasn’t she queer? We don’t have to do it, I said, forget it.

The next thing I remember is a body forcing me down. Vicious, gleeful lust. “Oh, you’ll be a girl, alright.”

My whole body stiffened. I snapped at her to stop, tried to push her away, but she only pressed down harder, fingers sinking into flesh.

When I threw her off me to the floor, blood split her lip. She cried and shrieked. So much for a feminist man! How dared I hit her! She just did as I asked!

I yelled at her to get out, but once the door slammed shut, I thought of the unending parade of rapacious fetish in my head. Of how well I knew this woman didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and how I caved to her anyway. And, well, I couldn’t help feeling like—

Didn’t I ask for it?

Unmoored

A few years later, I found myself abroad. Far from family, and from most friends—except one. Shortly before I moved, I had met my once-partner A. from my university days and felt drawn to her all over again. Our relationship rekindled, and hand in hand, we flew westward. It was a dark time for unrelated reasons, but in a twisted way, it granted me as much of a ‘clean start’ as I could’ve ever hoped for. I was untethered from traces of growing pains I left all over the city I once called home, from the messy parts of transition—it’d been, at that point, well over five years since I started.

No one here needed to know who I’d been.

I’d never doubted it. In fact, I was then in the process of fighting bureaucracy to re-ensure my access to hormones. They were the only way I could ever hope to rid myself of that bodily displacement I’d been feeling. That was how it went with trans men; it helped them, so it should help me.

Only I’d already been on T for a while then. Whatever ‘feminine curves’ I had left, had melted away; a beard had sprouted from my face, which now increasingly resembled my father’s. Even if I stripped naked, I looked more like an intersex man than anything else. That was basically what I’d expected. I’d always been rather cold-blooded about my transition expectations and proud of that fact; I’d sourced my information from many sources and first-hand accounts, and I neither underestimated the changes nor hoped for the impossible. All in all, I got what I sought. The thing I kept waiting for had already happened.

And I felt nothing. The disappearance of features I used to despise evoked naught more than a quiet oh well. My photos seemed oddly unfamiliar. A numbness had subsumed me, as if I’d been encased in wax.

But I had more pressing problems. Relocation, unemployment, the lot. Dealing with a subtle and unnameable depression seemed like a waste of time. Perhaps there was just something broken about me—that much had been clear for a while now. If I just kept a lid on it, I could live a happy enough life. On and on years went.

Lesbians In My Phone

What to do, when you’re hopelessly unemployed and feeling like there’s a black hole inside you threatening to swallow it all? Try to find a Discord to distract yourself, of course.

E.: mostly girlies in here so I hope you won't feel too out of place! we do strive to be an inclusive place

Me: haha i hope i got here thanks to a diversity and inclusion programme

My excuse for entering a transfem-majority space was an invitation thanks to my writing and editing. I’d put out a short story myself, and I was eager to help fellow authors. Of course, I was still a community outsider on the gender side of it, so I didn’t expect to get much out of that space personally. It just felt good to be involved in something, anything.

But, it turned out, many of the women on that server were good and easy company regardless. Unfamiliar subcultures are easily learned when its members are not hostile to you; they seemed to like me.

Most of the server members were transfem lesbians writing and reading sexually explicit fiction—some of which resembled my personal nonsense kaleidoscope, if… unpacked, let’s say. It was rather surreal to see the sorts of things my mind inflicted upon me being discussed in jest or dissected for the purposes of creating more elevated, self-conscious art. When I thought about it from the perspective of a trans woman, escapism via fancies of forced feminisation only made sense. Trans women internalise what society deems to be the place of women as much as anyone else, but also, trans womanhood is violently flagellated for existing in any way whatsoever. The fantasy would then revolve around removing the element of choice from it—so you could not be punished for wanting it.

Intellectually fascinating, but why it appealed to me made no more sense than it ever had. I wasn’t a trans woman—quite the opposite. They just wanted to be women; what the fuck was my problem? Although it calmed me somewhat to see normal people have experiences so similar to mine, I still felt like an intruder, stealing away pieces of someone else’s intimate life for my own shallow pleasure. I spoke nothing of it. No one would take kindly to me skin-walking their innermost desires this way.

As I spent my time in the company of trans lesbians, silent or not, I was still exposed to a stream of art and stories and images. Their depictions of women differed drastically from what I’d seen before. Two metres tall, or tiny as a gnome, or more muscular than a Greek god, or more voluptuous than a fertility idol, or werewolf-hairy, or covered in scales, or made completely of metal. A thousand melodies in fractal variations of flesh, all desired and lauded. I was no stranger to ideas of body positivity or ‘celebrating queerness’, but that all came wrapped in stipulations and activism. Always a statement, a process of battling or quieting shame. Never before have I experienced such utterly shameless, sincere, and carnal fanfare for everyone and anyone who claimed the space of ‘woman,’ in such a way that ‘woman’ meant nothing more and nothing less than simply ‘human.’ Not for statements. Just because it made them happy.

It was as alien as it was beautiful.

It’s not that I felt like I was missing out. Or that I wasn’t sufficiently fanfared. There were other spaces that did the same for men, run chiefly by gay transmasculine people, and they seemed to be having a great time of it. I just didn’t personally care for them one bit. I wanted this.

Naturally, it was all only fantasy. Art and books. That’s great, but that’s not real. In reality I was a twink with a receding hairline. It seemed prudent to know my limits rather than get too hung up on the fact I couldn’t be a two-metre-tall lesbian cyborg.

Except that some of it is real. Not the cyborgs and werewolves, but the diversity of body; the desire for its freedom and customisation. Women discontent with taking simply what they’re given. Through acquaintance and anecdote, I met lesbians with the same ‘unnatural’ desire I’d had. Lesbians on testosterone, desiring embodiments which, according to all I’d ever known, were never meant to be. Lesbians who wished for phalloplasty or for top surgery or both; lesbians that went on T temporarily to drop their voices and grow more muscle and body hair. Lesbians that weren’t women at all. Only there was no DSM attached. No packaged deal of ‘total’ transition, no script, no chain of demands that followed one to another.

No requirement of man.

It felt like anathema—and like a revelation. Whereas before genderqueerness seemed hypothetical and divorced from my reality, now I suddenly understood it. Now that I saw it, I knew it.

And I felt only directionless, ennui-steeped anger. As if someone stole the last ticket to a train that would never again leave my station. I didn’t know—how could I have known? No shit the things that helped trans men didn’t help me. I looked at all the past incongruences I’d revised and sanded over to fit the fucking DSM transsexualism diagnosis, and found only someone groping in the dark for a path they couldn’t even imagine existed. Except this realisation was arriving some fifteen years too late. Had I been younger or born elsewhere, then sure, I could’ve been one of those lesbians middle-fingering gender and microdosing T. But I wasn’t. I was a man. And when I dared think of relinquishing my grip on manhood, memory clawed at me. The assault. The humiliation. The un-personing. What would I be asking for? And what would that even yield? Look in the mirror, idiot. You are a man.

It wasn’t a rational calculus of consequences. It was a buzzing storm inside my head, pitch-black, impenetrable. I’d long stopped seeing women in their totality as my conversion-therapy prison, but even still—to see myself attached to ‘woman’ even slightly, even tangentially, even if I wanted it—this all evoked visceral, horrible fear.

But: knowing that a problem has a solution only makes it that much more impossible to ignore. My off-handed remarks and jokes about my miseries had my transfem friends looking funny at me. As if they recognised something.

T.: do you mind if I ask what you conceptualize your specific gendered deal as, or is that invasive?

Me: great question, i’ll get back to you in 5 to 10 business years.

Although I still loved the early changes I received from my HRT, everything I’d accrued since then was undeniably eating me alive. It was becoming difficult to dismiss dysphoria as mere vanity or body image issues; through all my attempts to make peace with my flesh, nothing helped even slightly. When I stopped binding, that felt better. When I lowered my T dose, that accomplished nothing in particular, but it felt comforting in a placebo sort of way. I tried to schedule laser hair removal—and that was too much. I panicked. Too obvious. What if someone noticed? What if someone asked why? I couldn’t deal with it. What if my partner noticed? She didn’t sign up for this shit. She was dating a man. What if—

No, it couldn’t go that badly. My partner wasn’t like that. Still, I felt paralysed. If I just did nothing, it couldn’t get worse. No one needed to know.

T.: hey, what’s up with the depression beard? do we need to get you laser?

Fuck it. I understood what my friends were seeing in me now. At first I thought myself definitionally far-removed from any transfeminine experience, but now that I’d met trans lesbians in truth, I couldn’t stop noticing patterns. And I wouldn’t have treated a transfem friend with the same denial or nihilistic abjection that I reserved for myself. She would’ve deserved help. A way out.

Didn’t I, too?

Detransition, Lady

The date I mark as the start of my detransition is April 16th, 2024, although I wouldn’t be calling it that for a few months yet. It was the first time I told anyone I was not a man, and that I was a lesbian, even though I didn’t exactly feel like a woman. On the surface it seemed a small thing. I had not yet decided on any particular body modifications (except laser—god, someone flay that thing off my face), and I felt deeply uncomfortable changing my gender presentation too much. So it seemed almost a question of semantics alone. Inside me though, it was a titanic shift: I allowed myself to name that which I’d been avoiding at all cost. To voice a desire I thought would brook only disgust, humiliation, and exile.

It did not.

The reaction of my partner and friends was, across the board, positive—none of my worst fears came to pass. Apparently I’d been far too obviously depressed, despite my best efforts to hide it—and now, I was far too obviously happy and, as some put it, ‘unclenched.’ Nothing in my loved ones’ behaviour should’ve led me to believe they would ridicule and hate me; still, it felt monumentally difficult to stop seeing myself as uniquely undeserving and pathetic.

I pursued my detransition incrementally. I pinpointed sources of dysphoria and addressed them. Laser, first. When my droning bass baritone started getting on my nerves, ensuring as it was that I’d always be gendered male—voice training. Soon I discovered that, despite the kinship I felt with transmasculine lesbians, I did not quite belong with them; whereas they relished the virilisation they’d carved out for themselves, my situation was different. I’d lived as a man for far too long to experience the world the same way they did. Most of them did not share my degree of distaste and distress at getting dude’d and he/him’d; they did not quite match my flavour of alienation from ‘woman.’ They usually strove to distinguish themselves from the category that would have them stifled and consumed—whereas that category now repelled me almost definitionally, whether I liked it or not. When I braved the outside world, there was no amount of social signalling that would make strange cis women see me as akin to them, or at least as not akin to men. Often not even lesbian cis women. Markers of an androgenic puberty singled me out as something categorically Other, and I’d not yet been in detransition long enough to change that.

Only among the transfeminine was I witnessed. Trans women I didn’t know loudly and protectively she/her’d me. The pronouns I actually used at the time were they/them, and my internal gender was nil with a side of ‘dyke,’ yet I found myself unwilling to correct anyone who decided I was a woman. Trans women that did know me playfully teased me for being ‘transfem-coded.’ Beyond initial recognition of repeating patterns, I’d started to realise that of all the people I knew, I belonged with them the most.

It was… confounding. In a way, it made no sense at all. And there were clear lines that delineated us: they would not relate to my visceral hatred of my first puberty, and I would not relate to theirs; I did not share their childhood of a girl trapped among boys. My ever-unchanged legal sex now granted me a degree of protection they could never take for granted. My birth sex gave me leverage to sacrifice trans women for a shred of acceptance—to shriek that I, unlike them, was a real woman. Even when no one but them saw me as one.

But in my daily existence and in much of my psychology, I was indistinguishable from my transfem peers. I’d transitioned a decade ago, right out of school; socially, I’d once been a girl a long time ago, but never a woman. Now I danced a dance I’d only before witnessed as an outsider; longed for and imagined, never performed. I had not the same continuity of belonging that cis women did, and nor did cis women know what it was like to walk among men, a secret alien, slowly realising every step you take is wrong.

I supposed, it made an intuitive kind of sense. Transition works. Not my now-distant history, not my birth, and certainly not my chromosomes or genitals had made me somehow more innately or inexorably woman. As all transsexuals learn sooner or later, lived experiences and hormones trump the rest of sex/gender with ease. So, although I wasn’t a trans woman, when I applied the same logics to myself, it simply worked. Despite the imperfect match, all my current problems had answers from the same solution sheet, from the way I treated myself to the way others treated me.

Well, almost all my problems.

Now that I compared myself to women and not to men, body insecurity cut much deeper and bloodier. I despaired no one would ever believe I was anything woman-shaped; they barely did before I took testosterone. Which I was still taking. I looked at the small dose of T gel I’d been applying, then at the finasteride pills I’d been chasing that with. And I thought, What does this even do? What is this even for anymore?

Stasis. It was for stasis, and a little placebo. I feared that if I stopped T, I’d tumble all the way back into the spiral of dysphoria I felt as a teen and young adult. That my body—for all its flaws still mine, still fought-for, still tailor-made—would dissolve again into an adolescent blob hatefully sculpted by others into the image of a future child-bearer. Only now I hated most of my virilisation and would claw at walls if I received any more of it—and my fear was not exactly rational, was it?

I breathed out. The testosterone wasn’t going to spoil the moment I put it away. I could try, and if it didn’t work out—a short period of a second-and-a-half puberty could not be that extreme. Whatever new changes I’d cause would likely revert fast.

For a while, nothing much happened. Nothing dissolved or melted. But little by little, my skin smoothed; my face softened; my wiry limbs lost their mesh of veins. My hips and breasts, once so maligned, swelled and enveloped muscle. I didn’t look the way I used to—of course not. I was stronger and a decade older; all the things I’d done to build my own self did not vanish, but merely, well—feminised.

I’d never met myself in an adult woman’s body before. In a self-made body. Although this flesh too did not feel mine, but for a different reason; I felt as if the moment I looked away, it’d all be gone. It wasn’t mine because it couldn’t possibly be. I wasn’t allowed this, I was never allowed this—the only shape of woman allowed to me was future-husband’s broodmare, mummy’s doll. I wasn’t allowed this.

But I did want it. And now I knew I could have it. Now, that gnawing monster inside my head had dissolved like it was never there at all. No disassociation, no torment, no total death of all other desire, no compulsion to retreat from the real world into a singular fantasy. Just… me.

At almost midnight I walked into mine and A.’s bedroom rambling. What does it fucking mean to feel like something, like a category; I only ever feel like me; what does it mean when you’re a forever-outsider; what does it mean when it’s been used to fucking hurt you, how can you then feel like anything at all; but what if I want it, what if I want it anyway. What if I want to be a woman anyway, the way my friends are women. The way lesbians are women. What if I want to belong among them? How do I know if I feel it? How do I know I’m real? How do I know I deserve—

In a space where freedom is possible, how is anyone made a woman?

Blearily, A. looked up from her Crusader Kings and said, “Look, uh—it doesn’t have to be that deep. If you want to be a woman, you can just do that.”

Could I?

I knew my transfem friends could. They built new shapes of ‘woman’ to their liking, in spite of all outside insistence they cannot. I had no reason nor unkindness to believe that their efforts amounted to less or more than mine. If they could, so could I. If I saw them, they would see me. They already did.

Perhaps sometimes, what makes a woman is who she calls a sister.

Recommended Reading

On embracing the constructed nature of one’s sex/gender: Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.

On the asymmetric forces behind patriarchal gender enforcement: Talia Bhatt, Degendering and Regendering.

[weewookinard]

Imagine

Tommy helps the 118 saving Bathena and Buck has a crush™️ and the crush is bigger and bigger BUT Tommy is late for his shift so he never goes to Buck's loft and so no kiss and getting together.

But Tommy is friend with Eddie now and he's also retaking his spot in Chim's life, being invited to his wedding and spending more time with the 118 and Buck hates it but he is also always so eager to see him even though he doesn't understand why.

Turns out his first muay-thai lesson with Eddie and Tommy is an enlightenment, as well as the boner that grows when Tommy pins him on the mat. He blurts an excuse and run away.

His first action when he arrives at his place is opening Google and browsing through substacks and subreddit. After a few hours he decides to write a post titled "how do you know if a boner is caused by celibate and body proximiy or if you are just horny for your hot friend even though you are straight and he's a man?".

The post is soon to be popular, as well as reposted on twitter, Instagram, even facebook, and he panics a little but cannot talk about it to Maddie or Eddie or anyone else. He goes to delete it but his eyes are attracted by one of the new responses.

The reddit user is nice and tries to reassure him. Talks about his own experience with realizing he's gay, and how it was hard for him at first. He tells him about this man he has the biggest crush on even though he is straight, and they bond through pining and shared failures.

It takes Buck a few days before he goes to this user's account, and looks at his other posts to know more about him. The user is a man, he follows a few sports and health subreddits. He is mostly active on movies subreddits though and Buck finds his takes on romcom funny.

The more he looks at this man's publication the more he finds him endearing.

But then.

He discovers that his new friend moderates a subreddit about LAFD air operations in California and his heart stops. His last post is only from a few hours ago and it's a picture of a chopper. Tommy's chopper.

Fuck.

[r-o-s-e-f-i-r-e]

ok between evan buckley’s cultural black hole of an upbringing and his noted love of documentaries trivia research deep dives etc what i’ve been turning over in my mind palace the last few days is like

tommy logs into instagram once a week to like all of sal and gina’s pictures of baby lila and whatever memes chimney has sent him. he hits a button weird with his gigantic beautiful fingers and gets taken to an instagram reel about uhhh the irish potato famine it doesn’t actually matter what it is he just watches the first few seconds and goes !!! evan was talking about this!!!!! evan thing! thing for evan!!!! tommy immediately shows it to evan later like hey babe weren’t you just talking about this i found more Information for you 👁️👄👁️ and buck watches it and is just like what???? that’s not true. excuse me, he’s - he’s literally making shit up, potatoes are native to the americas, this is misinformation, there was food the english were just exporting it under armed guards it was starvation under colonial rule!!!! he doesn’t even bother to list any citations? that’s not what a primary source is!!!!! and then buck takes tommy’s phone and starts eviscerating some like podcast bro adjacent “real history” account (it’s a funnel into tradwife conspiracy theories and also the podcast bros MLM which evan will never realize because he doesn’t make it to the end of the video he keeps swiping and is like ALL OF THESE ARE WRONG!!! HOW CAN HE JUST LIE ON THE INTERNET LIKE THAT????)

anyway after tommy is like uh??? it eventually comes out that evan’s bubble boy childhood was the natural extension of both of his parents like. being tenured history professors at penn. the only music released after 1980 that he listened to growing up was paul simon’s graceland. they didnt own a television but he spent a lot of time sullenly swinging his feet back and forth in a corner of the special collections library while his dad gave public evening and weekend lectures about Petrarch and bookmaking and how to properly handle manuscripts and his mom edited what would become The defining collection of churchill’s personal correspondence and he Did Not Retain Much Of It out of spite but they drilled how to Accurately Research Anything into his 8 year old brain and it became a fundamental building block of his identity (and maddie’s duh) without them realizing how fucking weird they are. for examp he’s sooo annoyed he doesn’t have a date for the billy boils rodeo stampede in the hospital. the substack he found was run by a uc berkeley folklore MA who emailed buck scans of microfilms of contemporary newspaper articles abt boils & the gang after buck is like nice wiki template 🙄 tommy hears all of this and is like okay. cool. umm where do curses fit into this worldview. and buck is like you’d be a believer too if you’d had PhD students over for dinner every other week comparing traumatic field research stories while your parents nodded along sagely and said stuff like yeah that’s why you don’t fuck around in the catacombs after dark you idiots. ANYWAY that’s all thanks for stopping by

[la-fumettista]

New data shows that the majority of Americans cannot afford the cost of basics needed for a stable life.

In 2023, the bottom 60% of income earners brought in an average of $38,000, but needed to make $67,000 to afford the average cost of housing, food, transportation, and healthcare.

How does one of the richest countries in the world have this much of our population struggling to cover the cost of basics?

The US has the greatest income inequality out of any developed nation and this gap will only continue to grow if things don’t change. Especially now with the Republican budget that aims to cut programs that millions of Americans rely on like Medicaid and SNAP all to help pay for huge tax cuts for the wealthiest. This will be the largest transfer of wealth in American history.

Read more about the study and sources for this information on my Substack.

[drdemonprince]

First of all, thank your nephew for sharing with you how that he has been feeling this way. He's telling you that he is finding something challenging in your relationship, which gives you both the chance to do something about it, and that's wonderful. You’ve helped him grow into a young man who can acknowledge his feelings, and he trust you enough to share something that he must know could put you off. That is a testament to the health of your relationship.

Next, understand that what your nephew is sharing with you is DATA. It is not a moral declaration of your failure, and it is not shame. I understand that it might not be pleasant to hear that he’s grossed out, but he’s not actually telling you that what you are doing or interested in is gross. Just that he finds this particular topic really unsettling, at least when it’s attached to a relative.

Let yourself process all the feelings of shame and mortification this has kicked up for you. It’s natural that you’d feel like you’ve overstepped some line, traumatized him, made a disgusting display of yourself, damaged one of his own familial relationships, or whatever other narrative your anxieties are telling you. It’s okay to feel ashamed sometimes. You’re not a failure at candor and sex positivity.

Though it will probably freak you out to hear your nephew speaking negatively about your sex life, try to really listen at the emotional truth behind his words. You can ask him to share more about what has been bothering him, if he likes. He might be responding the way he is out of fear of sex, shame about his own desires, identity confusion, past experiences of being bullied for his own differences, prejudices he's internalized, a sexual abuse history of his own, or any other number of things. And you can respect where he is coming from, emotionally, without ever agreeing that what you are doing is wrong or needs to be hidden from plain sight.

Next, have a real conversation with your nephew about what he can control his exposure to. Keep this very practical, and focused on boundaries that you and he can set to prevent causing problems in the relationship. None of this is about changing your sexual habits or how central they are to your life. What can be changed, though, is how you two communicate about your lives, especially if he learned more about your kinky special interests through social media.

Are you social media mutuals? If it skeeves him out to see you posting sexy photos or posting about your fixations, he can just unfollow you. Or you can agree to create a separate account for SFW family updates. Being family does not mean being obligated to see everything that a person is up to in all facets of their life.

Does your nephew not like seeing kink books/gear/any suggestion of human sexuality around your house, or hearing sex talk around others? You can choose to keep the really overt stuff like floggers and sex furniture behind a locked bedroom door if you want to, but since unmasking is often about transforming our spaces and our personal presentations enough to allow us to be who we are, I’m not going to encourage to do any of that if you do not want to. Boundaries, after all, are about what we will do to look after our own well-being - and so your nephew will have to think about what sources of discomfort he can learn to live with, which ones he can limit his own exposure to, and when he needs to politely ask you for a conversation subject change.

I wrote all about negotiating boundaries with relatives while not being ashamed or masked about your sex life. You can read the full thing for free on my Substack.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Get Informed

Join the Trump Accountability War Room, which offers fact sheets on the bad actors in Donald Trump’s Cabinet and primers on their policies, and the AFL-CIO’s Department of People Who Work for a Living, which tracks how funding cuts are affecting federal workers.

Follow MeidasTouch Network, a pro-democracy news organization with a massive social media presence and a suite of podcasts. MeidasTouch personalities such as Leigh McGowan (a.k.a. PoliticsGirl) and Aaron Parnas have reinvigorated the resistance on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack.

Monitor constitutional oversteps and the legal challenges to Trump’s executive orders with Lawfare or Just Security.

Get Strategic

Explore Choose Democracy’s interactive Choose Your Own Adventure activity, which asks you to “guide us towards a better, more humane democracy.” In “What can I do to fight this coup?,” the group offers drop-down menus of resistance techniques arranged by level of difficulty. It also provides training agendas on everything from de-escalation to mutual aid.

Study Indivisible’s Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, which shares strategies for defending the democratic process against authoritarian creep and a list of tactics constituents can use to pressure their elected officials.

Review the tool kits, how-to manuals, and informational leaflets at Build the Resistance’s comprehensive, crowdsourced resource hub.

Get Outside

Check NoVoiceUnheard, which compiles peaceful protest opportunities, viewable by state or by organization, across the country. For an even more expansive inventory, look at The Big List of Protests.

Brush up on your rights at the ACLU’s protesters’ rights page, which shares information on the kinds of locations where you are protected, when you need a permit, and what to do during a police encounter. Call the Resistance Hotline at 1-844-NVDA-NOW or email gotyerback@resistancehotline.org with your questions, and you’ll get a response within 24 hours.

Enlist with the ACLU’s “grassroots army” of volunteers working to safeguard civil liberties. Visit the program’s website for a wealth of actions, including signing the organization’s petitions, that will take just a few minutes.

Get out Your Wallet

Donate to legal defense and bail funds. The National Bail Fund Network maintains a directory of pretrial bail funds and immigration bond funds.

Get on the Phone

Call Congress using 5 Calls, which provides policy guides, office numbers for your representatives, and call scripts.

Get in the Way

Flood the Office of Personnel Management’s anti-DEI tip line at DEIAtruth@opm.gov to protect federal employees targeted by the Trump administration’s crackdown. —Kate Mabus

Timothy Noah

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Free December Gift for Freelance Writers

Creating a Plan and Strategy to Boost Your Newsletters A Free Video and Audio Book Presentation of Substack Mastery Book for Your Enjoyment Dear Subscribers, Happy December! I hope this post finds you well. This month is very busy for me as I am helping our editors, updating all submission guidelines, and creating a new onboarding pack for 2025.  I will publish it soon as so many new writers…

[polystyrenequeen]

hey um. writing is a skill? like it’s an art form. and a talent. not everyone can be good at it. that doesn’t mean that you have to be good at it to do it. but it DOES mean you don’t get to undermine the talents of real people who love language and slave over their stories by filling ao3 and tumblr and substack and whatever else with your shitty chat gpt slop.

i hate the energy of “well i want to write, but i don’t know how. but everyone deserves to write, so i use AI.” girl grow a spine and be dogshit at a new hobby like the rest of us. do you think i know how to play guitar? no! will i ever be good at it? probably not!! do i feel like a fucking idiot whenever i try to read a tab? of course! but you can pry my power chords out of my cold dead hands. because i love music.

grow up.

[the-inkwell-variable]

author ask tag

thank you so much for the tag, @the-golden-comet! ooh this is gonna be fun!

i'm going to focus on my current wip, Why Should I Be Careful? I'm Going To Die Anyway! because it's still very much in the planning stages (despite how much I'm writing for it) and I have Thoughts

What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

I'll be honest, I haven't really thought that far ahead. I suppose, if there is a lesson to take from WSIBC?IGTDA!, it might be that you should always chase your goals and desires, and screw what other people think. Maybe put a little more thought and planning into yours than Aura does hers, though. I mean, she almost dies due to her recklessness. Don't be like Aura.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

Well, it's a zombie book - I love zombies, in case you can't tell - so the world is an amalgamation of zombie stuff I love. The zombies are based off of the Train to Busan zombies. This is a self-insert mess, so I'm using the town and people I know in the town as location and characters. Little tropes here and there that I love in movies and books alike. It's just a big chimera of stuff that I grab from stuff I remember and shove into it. It definitely needs polish when it's done, but I'm having a blast so far, so I'm'a keep doing it :3

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, or help the reader grow as a person?

Uhhhhhh this is a tough question. Right now, Aura is trying to make it to Roger's Grocery Mart to save her girlfriend, but most of the time, she's just trying to have a good time in the zombie apocalypse and hopefully not die. She does eventually grow into a character that (mostly) thinks things through and takes other people's situations into account, so I suppose the lesson is "the world doesn't revolve around you - be kind and helpful to others"?

As for what I'm trying to achieve... mostly, to be honest, I just want people to pick up my book and have a good time reading it. I want to write a zombie book because it's my passion and because there aren't enough zombie books out there. I guess I'm trying to inspire others? To show them that you can survive an impossible situation if you work hard and think things through?

How many chapters is your story going to have?

The only time I've written a full-length book (sorry, the only two times, forgot about Zero: ALPHA), it had about twenty-odd chapters. Z:A had...uh...thirty? That was a long time ago and I sadly no longer have that draft. This one is going to go until it's done. Hopefully more than thirty though!

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

Original content! I have no idea where I'm going to post it. I'm torn between Draft2Digital (originally Smashwords) or Substack. Thing is, I'm really bad at marketing and keywords and all that technical stuff that goes into publicizing, so I'm really hesitant to share it at all. I'm the type of person that gets absolutely morally devastated if my own self-inflicted goals aren't met, and I'm not sure if I can handle that kind of crushing heartbreak with this one lol

So yeah. Might publish, might not. Unsure right now.

When did you start writing?

My dad set up a Windows 95 computer for me in his office, his old one, and taught me the basics of using it. I was five, about to turn six. I immediately sat down and wrote a story about unicorns. I've been writing ever since.

I didn't start writing fanfiction until I was thirteen and had just binge-watched Lord of the Rings for the first time. We don't talk about those works. They were awful.

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

Write it. Oh it's cringe? Who cares? Write it. Oh, it's a rare pair? Write it. You're worried people will hate it? Fuck the haters. Write it. Writing is about having fun. Writing is about pouring your soul onto the page. Writing is about getting those ideas out of your head so they don't drive you insane. It's about reaching that one person that finds your work and loves it. Even if no one reads it - you still accomplished something. You still wrote it. And no one can take that from you.

I have so many writers in my follow list. Uhh. I have no idea how many are still active, so I'm just going to tag who I know and hope for the best lol

@idyllicocean, @keeping-writing-frosty, @bloodtiesnovel, @asher-writes, @kitswrite, @theink-stainedfolk, @karkkidoeswriting, @lavender-gloom, @orphanheirs, @aquixoticwrites, @alinacapellabooks, @marlowethelibrarian, @flock-from-the-void, @dyrewrites, @storycraftcafe, @writer-imagination, @toragay-writing, @inseasofgreen, @stephtuckerauthor, @thatndginger, @finickyfelix, @eternalwritingstudent, @drchenquill, @paeliae-occasionally, @the-golden-comet, @talesofsorrowandofruin, @watermeezer, @goldfinchwrites, @winterandwords, @badscientist, @clairelsonao3, @i-can-even-burn-salad, @leahpardo-pa-potato, @mjparkerwriting, @rowanwriting, @oliolioxenfreewrites, @emelkae, @rita-rae-siller, @rebelxwriter, @kaylinalexanderbooks, @stesierra, @francineiswriting, @sunset-a-story, @chauceryfairytales, @hollyannewrites, @jaydenswaywrites, @captain-kraken, @violets-in-her-arms-writes, @romy-thewriter, @pure-solomon, @writingmaidenwarrior, @koiwrites

go, go follow them. they're all so good and make my timeline glow.

[rubyvroom]

Silicon Valley's Parasite Culture

From Ted Gioia's substack -- and I do realize the irony of reposting a substack post about parasitical behavior as content on my Tumblr yes -- that said, I really want people to read this

...For the first time in history, the Forbes list of billionaires is filled with individuals who got rich via parasitical business strategies—creating almost nothing, but gorging themselves on the creativity of others. That’s how you get to the top in the digital age. Instead of US Steel, it’s Us steal. Instead of IBM, it’s IB Robbing U. But when parasites get too strong, they risk killing their hosts.

Recall that only ten percent of animal species are parasites. What happens if that number grows to 30% or 50% or 70%? That must have catastrophic consequences, no? This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers. It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts. When the host dies, AI-generated content can replace human creativity. Or—to be blunt about it—the host will die because of AI-generated content. And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists. It’s every parasite’s dream. The host can die, but the leech still lives on! But there’s one catch. Training AI requires the largest parasitical theft of intellectual property in history. Everything now gets seized and sucked dry. No pirate in history has pilfered with such ambition and audacity.

now, I think we are finding that there are diminishing returns on the AI training at this point (in this gen of the technology at least) such that they are not able to replace human creativity. But if they could, they would, is the point. And when we talk about AI we need to address the parasitical business models that make it an inevitability.

[dolphin-diaries]

A Conversation With Lucy Kartikasari

An interview with a fellow detrans woman and activist about her experience. Originally posted on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

Dolphin Diaries: Would you introduce yourself and describe how you identify?

Lucy Kartikasari: Hi! My name is Lucy Kartikasari. I’m twenty-eight years old, I live in the Netherlands and I would label myself as a queer, bisexual detrans woman. Aside from my normal day job, I’m an online activist for LGBTQ rights with a focus on community-building between trans and detrans people. I feel like that is very sorely needed in today’s political climate.

So, when people think of detrans people, they usually think about the medical aspects of transition first and foremost. You were a teenager when you started transitioning, and you went through the Dutch transition procedure, is that correct?

Right, that is correct. I was twelve when I started my social transition and sixteen when I started my medical transition.

What has that experience been like?

My experience of it as a teen was marked by long waiting lists—which are still part of trans healthcare in the Netherlands today. After I came out to my parents, we went to our GP, and then I spent about three and a half years on a waitlist before I could even start the diagnostic portion of the transition process. It’s all been quite gatekeep-y.

But at the same time, I don’t think the psychologists involved really understood transition and what might motivate someone like me to do it. For me specifically, the root of my transition was the idea that I’d be a failure as a woman. I couldn’t be that beautiful, thin, hairless doll. So I remember the doctors asking me, have I considered if I could just be a masculine woman? And, no. I don’t think this way anymore, obviously, but back then, for me being a masculine woman also meant being a failure. Anything less than picture-perfect cisheteronormativity was not good enough. So I felt like, I may as well be a man. And I don’t think they understand what that kind of trauma looks like.

So, based on the kinds of questions they were asking you, what do you think they were trying to screen you for?

I think, besides asking if I was just a masculine woman, they were trying to screen for things like sexual trauma. But mostly it was, like, what makes you not want to be a woman? And I would say, well, it’s my body parts. I had a lot of negative thoughts about having extra fat on my body—you know, growing up in a half-Asian household, fatphobia is very common. Only thin women can be successful, and if you’re not under fifty kilos, you’re not thin enough. And so I had a lot of negative feelings about that and my breasts in particular. Just very disinterested in having them, very unhappy with them. And I didn’t really want to be a woman, so I was like, well if I want to live as a man, I should have a flat chest, a penis, and so on. And so, because I was so dissatisfied with my body and with my breasts especially, that assured them it was really gender dysphoria. I don’t think they really understood my cultural context, either.

Would you say it was like, the doctors were aware that women might have bodily insecurities, but surely, if you were really a woman, you wouldn’t hate it that badly?

Exactly. And while I was on the waitlist, I was in therapy, but I was never in therapy with someone who specialised in gender dysphoria. They just looked at me and went, well, let’s wait four years and see if the child still wants to transition. So what happened was, I spent all that time presenting as a boy, at the time that my identity was really crystalising, between the ages of twelve and fifteen. So by the time it came to doing the diagnostics, I was already like, yeah I’m a boy, there’s nothing else to it. I’m a dude.

So it sounds like, since you had to wait so long, you weren’t really coming to a psychologist to help you with figuring out your transness? You just came there specifically to transition?

Yeah. When I first came out, it was to my dad, and I wasn’t sure then. I just said, I think I’m a boy. What would’ve been helpful for me at the time was if someone would’ve sat down with me and helped me untangle my feelings, why I was so insecure about the idea of growing up as a woman, why the trappings of a female body were so traumatising to me. Why I had so many of these weird issues of, like, my bones being too big, my wrists not being small enough. Because I was just like: I don’t want to fail, I don’t want to be bad at this; I may as well do something I’ll be good at.

So that time you spent living as a boy while not being able to access medical transition—how did that affect you?

I felt like I was a victim of my own biology. I felt like, if I was on testosterone, at least some of this fat would be muscle. I know it’s a lot of fatphobia—don’t get me wrong, I’m a gym girl now, I know you don’t have to be on T for that. But I’m still working very hard to deconstruct all these things. Back then, I looked at my unclothed body with revulsion, and I felt like a masculine body would be so much better than whatever I had going on. Going through life as a boy while simultaneously being so disgusted with myself—it was just so much easier to exist in places where I didn’t have to be physically present, like online. I learned to detach my personality from my physicality, to disassociate.

Has that affected your experience with detransition?

Well, I’m twenty-eight now. My adolescence was a long time ago at this point, so it can be hard to reconnect with the way I used to feel back then. But that ability to disconnect from my body has actually made it easier to cope with my bodily insecurities now, too. Because it’s like, even if I feel horrible, even if I were to devolve into some sort of horrific creature physically, I know I’d still be me in my mind, no matter what.

And have you needed to access gender-affirming care as a detrans woman?

Yeah, I’ve had a total hysterectomy, so I’m reliant on oestrogen HRT for the rest of my life. I have had laser hair removal on my face, since the growth there was bothering me quite a lot. And I’ve been planning to undergo breast reconstruction and a treatment for the scarring on my chest.

In terms of access to gender-affirming healthcare for detransition as an adult, what’s been your experience?

As an adult, I found that there really are no protocols in place for detransition—like, they just don’t think about it at all. Some of my interactions with healthcare professionals have been quite callous. For example, when I first approached my doctor about switching my hormones, one of the first things he said to me was, You know it’s actually really rare for people to do this. And I was kind of like, well of course it’s rare. But how is that supposed to help me now?

One of the other things I had to do is wait. I took my last dose of testosterone in September 2022, and I only got to start oestrogen in December 2022.

So that’s like, months with low sex hormones across the board?

Yeah, it crashed pretty quickly. October, I wasn’t feeling great; November, menopausal symptoms were starting to kick in. It was starting to affect my day job. Thank goodness, the company doctor was an older woman, so I just explained to her my detransition and said, look, I don’t have hormones in my body right now. And she understood.

So, for November and January, I was actually experiencing menopausal symptoms for the second time in my life. Because I’ve also been on hormone blockers and nothing else when I was sixteen. There’s some comedy there, menopause at sixteen and then again at twenty-six. Now I look back at it and laugh, but at the time it was obviously horrific.

As for the social aspect of detransitioning, I didn’t really want to tell people about it because I was essentially stealth in a lot of places, especially my professional life. So people in the workplace would see me and interpret me as a trans woman all of a sudden. To be fair, I was working in data engineering, so I think everyone was just looking at me and being like, yep, makes sense.

This dovetails into my next question: what has it been like, outside of online and queer spaces, to live as a detrans woman?

It’s been kind of a mixed bag. I think my greatest concern, or fear, or whatever you want to call it, has been triggering people’s transmisogyny, because they assume I’m a trans woman. I’ve had instances where I, like, went out partying and approached a guy, and then that guy found my Instagram. He saw my they/she/he pronouns, heard my voice. And then he was just like, You used to be a man. And we’re in the middle of a dance floor, I’m not giving him my entire gender history. At that particular club, I was with my sister and knew the security, so I knew I’d be safe if something went down, but it was scary. Dating in general is strange, intensely uncomfortable and scary. I just have to throw my entire story out there, because otherwise it’s like, what’s up with these chest scars? And you know, with single-sex spaces, I go to the changing rooms in the gym with my sister, because I’m scared that, if I speak a word, there will be a problem. Legally I’m still male and I have a traditionally masculine name, so I run into issues because of that, too.

When it comes to my friends and family, however, they’ve been really good. I’ve been so lucky. And I think it’s also because I’ve been so open about my transition and everything that went into it, that people were like, well, Lucy, we love you no matter what. It’s all good; if you want to detransition, that’s fine; if you want to retransition later, that’s also fine. There’s only one exception to that, and it’s my mum. She struggled a lot with my transition in the beginning, so it was quite hard to tell her. Even to this day, I think she still has issues with the fact I want to be a mother, in part because it will cost me a lot of money. So I waited until, like, four months on E to tell her, surprise, I’m your daughter again.

I also worry about certain expectations being put on me again, like the way I need to look, act, sound. But I feel like that’s kind of just being a woman in society, unfortunately.

Have you ever worried about coming out as detrans and unintentionally confirming people’s worst suspicions about trans people?

I find that the one way I combat this is, just by openly stating that this is my experience—I really emphasise that. If you want to take my story and run with it, I can’t really stop that. But I try to be really emphatic of my support for trans people, of my trans friends, even if it’s a little silly. Like, I still do the testosterone shots for my best friend, who’s a trans guy; I’m friends with trans girls; I’m still very much in community with trans people. When I say this so often, it might come across to other queer people as performative—but that’s the point, I need to do this performance when I talk to cis people who really don’t get it. For whom I’m just a confirmation of their worst instincts.

So what has being detrans been like for you in queer circles?

In my local communities in the Netherlands, because I’ve been involved with activism, it’s really fine as I’ve made a name for myself in being very pro-trans rights. Overall, it’s been good.

Were you involved in activism before you detransitioned, also?

I only really got involved in activism as a detrans person. Before that, I felt like there were so many people much more eloquent than me, people who already have huge followings—what could I possibly add to the conversation? But then, about six months after detransitioning, I found a tweet by Oli London [about detransition], and that was a catalyst. I thought, I need to do something about this. I figured that I could add way more to the conversation about being detrans and in community with trans people than anything else.

What would you say are trans people’s attitudes about detransition and detrans people?

I think it really depends on the age. I feel like, the younger you go, the more vitriolic the hatred towards detrans people. Young people and especially teenagers are very prone to black-and-white thinking. I think—and this is going to be controversial—that the trans kids who are incredibly vitriolic towards detrans people are the ones who are most likely to detransition later down the line, because they do not give any room for their doubts and might be reacting this way because they’re hiding something away. But generally, I’d say the older you get, the more someone has been in community with other trans and queer people, the more likely they are to look at your experience in a nuanced way. At least that’s what I observe with my followers. The only exception is—and I know this comes from a place of pain—some trans women who really hate detrans women, because they see it as squandering the gift of natural-born femininity. Like, you had this, I want it and I can’t have it—and you just threw it away.

When you describe your experience to trans people, do they recognise it as a detrans experience? Or is it usually the first time they hear something like that in regards to detransition?

I think it’s usually new to them in that context. I think the only detransition content they’ve encountered before was, let’s face it, Christofascist white nationalist content. Let’s just call a spade a spade. So the fact they’re hearing someone empathetic to trans people, who wants them to have adequate healthcare, job opportunities, everything—that’s new. They’re very quick to rip into certain well-known right-wing detransitioners, but when they respond to me with hate because I’m detrans and I just shrug it off, that kind of defangs it.

On a broader scale, would you say that detransitioning impacted the way you think about gender and sex?

Being a detrans woman just made me realise—it’s all the same thing. It’s always sexism, misogyny; it’s always hatred of the feminine, the unmet expectations of the feminine, failing to be a woman. I don’t understand how people like Chloe Cole and Prisha and whoever else can be like this, because you know they’ll treat you just the same as a trans woman. You’ll get lumped in when the chips are down. There’s so much more to gain in accepting gender fluidity, in community.

What would you say are the biggest challenges to detrans people right now?

I think it’s the fact that the organisations that have been founded supposedly to help us always have ulterior motives. For instance, I have a Brazilian detrans friend, and she complains to me it’s all very Jesus-saved-us there. I’m Australian, so I need to get all paperwork changes through the Australian government, and the only organisation that cares about detransition there is the LGB Alliance. Then you look at the US, and it’s Genspect. These organisations are usually Christofascist. So yeah, there’s never anything that offers a structured way of helping detrans people without that agenda. That would sort out your documents and your healthcare.

So what I’m surmising is, when detrans people need help with legal gender marker change or gender-affirming healthcare access, the only option they see available to them are those right-wing organisations?

Right. We need to take that power away from them.

I very much agree. Lastly, in your opinion, do detrans issues tie in with any broader issues right now?

I think a lot of the things relevant to detrans women tie in with general women’s issues. For instance, speaking as a detrans woman that has been sterilised, there’s reproductive healthcare. The Right has this chokehold on conversations of fertility; they talk about how you’ll never breastfeed, never have babies if you take T for too long, and so on. It’s about reproductive rights and control over everyone who has the capacity to bear children. And of course, there’s trans rights and the encroachment of transphobia. The Right wants to construct a very specific view of gender, of women, and in part they use detrans women to do that.

Lucy Kartikasari can be found over on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Threads. She creates content about her transition and detransition as well as trans and detrans solidarity. Find her other links here.

[krittikasurya]

Some thoughts on Krittka Nakshatra (originally posted on substack and twitter)

Krittika at its best really understands how to both simultaneously enjoy and appreciate things while also being able to give critical commentary and feedback, and I think a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this level of multifaceted behavior. In a world where black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking is common and encouraged, people often forget that two things can be true at once. Krittika natives have the creativity and flexibility to understand and implement this “two truths at once” concept into their everyday lives. People think Krittika natives are being insolent or abrasive when the native is just simply speaking on what they’ve learned, gathered, observed and experienced and being straightforward about it…taking the data they’ve accumulated and turning it into something that’s easy to digest. Absolute truths rarely exist, and Krittika exposes the complexities we experience on both a collective and individual level.

Krittika’s goal isn’t to trash things necessarily. I think the goal Krittika natives have is to help themselves and others see things in a different, profound way. Offering refreshing perspectives on many different aspects of life is something the natives take pride in. The Martian influence of the Aries portion of the nakshatra makes one very analytical and strategic. Observing and learning through action and expeirnce, the Aries side of this nakshatra knows how to take things back to the drawing board. They understand that trial and error are some of the best teachers, and that there is always room for change. The Venusian influence of the Taurus portion gives the native discernment and good taste. The discriminatory nature of Venus leaves little to no room for indifference, especially when it comes to connections, arts, and culture. Venus appreciates excellence, and Krittika will accept nothing less. Krittika serves as the bridge between the sun’s (Identity) and the moon’s (Mind) exaltation points, giving both signs vast intelligence that manifests slightly different, but one thing remains the same: The sharp, quick witted nature of the nakshatra that seeks improvement within themsleves and the world around them. In today’s society, echo chambers are growing increasingly common, creating less nuance and mental flexibility, and more groupthink. From arts to politics, the effects of all-or-nothing thinking seems almost inescapable. Mediocrity is the acceptable normal, and Krittika is on a mission to change that.

When not channeled appropriately, Krittika natives can be high strung individuals, hypercritical of both themselves and others while forgetting to appreciate the beauty of life, and the beauty within themsleves. Some constantly feel the need to “shake the table” or say what they believe others are afraid to say, not fully realizing the implications of making ego driven “critiques.” Some “critiques” can be so ego driven, that they are dowright incorrect, mean or hateful in nature. They can be prone to tunnel vision and extreme anger, especially when they feel like their way is the only way. Krittikas can be demanding, exhibiting dictator-like control over their communities which can lead to a “walking on eggshells” feeling for the people around the native. It is imperative that Krittikas don’t lose sight on what’s important: not crossing the thin line between enlightening analysis, and downright negativity.

Krittika natives experience a lot of pleasure from giving critique as well, because they believe that there’s something really cool about being able to get others to think in ways they may not have before, and introduce various perspectives on any given subject. Krittika’s shakti (power) is to purify or burn away impurities, and sharing thier critical thoughts and assessments is one of the best ways to do it in today’s world. If we as a collective are going to consume things, Krittikas believe we can and should evaluate and question what we consume. Things should be questioned more. “Impurities” should be pointed out. The status quo should be challenged in all aspects of life.

Krittika isn’t scared to point out things that are flawed and it infuriates some individuals that Krittika natives don’t just sit and “go with the flow” all the time. Krittika has a burning lust for awareness of the world we live in. Krittika knows that sometimes there will be conflict, they’ll ruffle a few feathers and invoke certain emotions that make others feel uncomfortable, but when done tactfully that has the power to change the world (however big or small you consider your world to be).