PhD #trans girl! She/Her, thing explainer and technical writing scholar interested in trans usability studies and design theory. Gender questioning folks are very welcome to message me! ⚢ Married. Opinions mine.
Okay, I'm doing one of those anonymous AMA thingies! I'm using Google Forms instead of that one app, but it's still 100% anonymous, and I'll be checking and posting replies over the course of the day.
Gender dysphoria is one of the most poorly-understood parts of being trans, despite a century of research and the heroic efforts of trans activists.
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we're going to look at a new model for understanding gender dysphoria--one that offers hope for healing in transition, and not just from transition, in Shattered, the first article of Grinding Glass, a series on trans trauma and post-traumatic healing.
The first part of healing from trauma is going back over the causes of trauma, so we can understand it and reprocess it in a safe environment. It's hard. Its incredibly painful. And we often learn things about ourselves that are hard to live with for a while.
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we're going to talk about Growing Up Broken--how just existing as a trans kid is inherently, and terribly, traumatic.
Holy shit. I just talked a cis guy on the internet down from "Let kids be kids" and got him to see why gender-affirming care for teens absolutely cannot wait.
This is one of my greatest achievements. I have a legitimate urge to take a victory lap.
I've been getting a somewhat mysteriously increasing number of Reply Guys on my Stained Glass Woman articles lately, so:
A little about me.
I'm a tenured, PhD-bearing professor of technical writing with a specialization in biomedical communication. When I was hired at my current university, the very first thing I was assigned to teach was a graduate-level research writing class for pharmacists. It was, on day one of my employment, my responsibility to train--
THE EARLY INSIGHTS FOR THE 2022 US TRANSGENDER SURVEY ARE OUT! THE CORPUS IS FOUR TIMES THE SIZE OF THE 2015 USTS!!! IT'S BY FAR THE LARGEST TRANS STUDY EVER COMPLETED!!!
I haven't been very worried about AI, even though I'm a writer.
Why?
Because it takes a while for the law teams employed by the titans of old media to rumble to action, but it was always clear they were coming. These are the teams that don't sue other companies unless they're certain of winning.
And today, the New York Times sued OpenAI for several billion dollars.
I encountered something off of Mastodon that I want to talk about a little.
A trans woman got bottom surgery which, YAY FOR HER! So she's in her recovery, and said this offhandedly at one point:
"I need to reprocess my whole body now that I'm not a fetish category anymore."
That is the worst possible way to talk about that emotional work, and something that can cause a lot of harm to people. If you're someone getting bottom surgery, please, I beg you--find other ways to say that.
I've been struggle-bussing a bit over the last few days about struggling to find a home for my novel, and a lot of people have expressed interest. Obviously, since I'm trying to publish it, I can't share.
I started a different novel shortly after finishing it. About 10,000 words done, but shelved indefinitely because I've got SGW and other stuff to write. I like it a lot, but I don't and won't have time in the foreseeable future to keep working on it.
Of all the comings-out we have to do as trans folks, telling our parents is one of the very hardest. What it even means to be trans has changed so much that it can be incredibly hard to even get them to understand what your gender is.
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we've got "Oh, s#!t, my child just told me they're trans," a guide meant to be handed off to parents of trans teens and adult children, to help them get there.
Seeing yourself in the mirror is one of the most fundamental little joys of existence, and it's one that trans people very commonly have to live without.
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we're going Face First into a comprehensive look into what Facial Feminization Surgery is, how it's done, and how it can change trans peoples' lives forever. Come on by and learn about one of the most complex--and simple!--transition surgeries there is.
Scientific research on people is weird and random and chaotic and unpredictable because people are weird and random and chaotic and unpredictable.
But that also means that where we don't have lots of rich research, especially on trans folks, myth and community lore creep in. This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we're going to look at What We Know About Trans Brains, and talk about how we build scientific knowledge along the way!
One of the things I really struggle with this time of year--the beginning of the legislative season--is how deeply the hatred in all these anti-trans bills and from the people behind them hurts me. I try hard to create a space with my feed and with SGW where people can engage with transness without the specter of that hatred haunting them, at leary in this place.
Sometimes it feels like I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, though, and part of that comes from within the community.
There's a very specific piece of gendered violence that the trans community rarely talks about, and which was inflicted upon us by WPATH (before WPATH was WPATH) and the APA, and which I will never forgive them for.
By requiring trans people to go stealth after transition, to pretend that there had never been a transition, by effectively making generations of us a shames of who we were, these organizations have robbed us of our elders. Of the people we can look to to see the future we...
I stumbled across this flowchart by GrumpyTG elsewhere, and I'm just kind of stunned at what a good job it does. Like, the only notes I'd even offer is to add a line from "I like to imagine life as a girl" to wanting to change presentation, below, and to tweak the phrasing of "I don't feel comfortable in my body" to be more inclusive of social dysphoria.
I want to say something. And yes, it's spurred by something that's happening elsewhere, but it's something I've always felt. I'm just taking the opportunity to share it now.
I don't ever want Stained Glass Woman to Get Big. I don't want people to look up to me. And I will pull back, or walk away entirely, to make that happen.
You've read my stories. You've seen some of my past. I have jagged edges, and I could not survive the scrutiny that comes with that level of attention.
One of the hardest parts of recovering from trauma is realizing--really facing--that our trauma doesn't end until we choose to end it. We carry it with us, reinflicting it upon ourselves, because the pain becomes so familiar.
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we face the truth of how we use Slivers of our own trans trauma to keep that pain alive in ourselves. Forever, unless we choose to stop.
I mentioned I started Sisters of Dorley Hall earlier today. I've been made aware that the book includes--and defends--forced genital surgery, which trans characters, written by a trans author, ultimately decide are villainous but okay in an ends-justify-the-means way because they like how they end up.
I'm sorry, but no. We're better than that.
I get that it's supposed to be a psychological horror thriller, and I love those. I've heard wonderful things about the text having a lovely, tender--
I manage a very small, closed social and support space on Discord. People work through stuff there, get support for the hardest things they're going through--that sort of thing. And, this morning, someone said this there:
"This server exists in the liminal space between "I'm home" and "GeT mE tHe FuCk OuT oF hErE!1!!""
There's a few odd things in transition that deep, deep parts of me very longingly want in a very sex and gender way, but which are flatly impossible, with no prospects of ever becoming possible. Like, hard sci fi levels of not possible.
And sometimes I really don't know what to do about them.
You've probably heard from transphobes about how "you can't change your DNA," so nothing you do in transition really matters. "Basic biology," they whinge. Well... what about intermediate biology?
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, come and see How HRT Rewrites Your DNA by just plain turning off the parts you don't need and turning on the ones you do! Now with more wedding photos, from another queer wedding.
