A woman named Camille Kiefel sued the therapists who provided her with a letter for top surgery after 2 sessions. She reached a confidential settlement days before the trial. She thought she was trans, she was 30 years old when she got the letters, she ended up regretting top surgery and detransitioning. We don’t know how much the settlement was, although she asked for 3.5 million originally.

This is interesting for me to think about, as someone who regretted an elective mastectomy she got at the age of 23. I know a lot of people draw the line at adulthood — that’s when you’re ready to be responsible for whatever you choose to do to your body. And yes, I believe this is legally true of something like a tattoo. But gender transition, with its medical sign-offs and therapeutic assessments, hems closer to “agreeing to a psychiatric treatment” than “choosing to dye your hair.” To wit: it’s not something you just do on your own for its own sake — it’s to an end. It’s therapeutic. It involves the practice of medicine.

You can read about Camille’s case from Benjamin Ryan’s paywalled Substack post on the topic. There are some interesting details — yes, she was 30, and also, she had serious mental health issues that were evidently not managed. And yet the therapists signed the letters for her surgery anyway.

Now, a settlement, as I understand it, is not a legal acceptance of blame. However, it also involves the insurance company paying money to the detransitioner. So in some sense, she got some restitution for her pains. And, I assume, if enough people did this, it will give pause to therapists who practice this kind of therapy. So, she has created a consequence for her therapist.

So: is this right? Is an adult justified in suing a provider for helping her get a surgery that she thought she wanted, and then came to regret? Does the therapist bear a responsibility for not seeing the red flags of mental illness and refusing to approve the surgery? Is it wrong that the deeply American machinery of lawsuit-driven-accountability has now ruled another case in favor of “if you got your gender medically affirmed and now you’re traumatized, you may be entitled to financial compensation!”

Camille’s story is her own. Ultimately, only she and her therapists know what went down. But my thoughts turn to myself. My own therapist. My own doctor. My own responsibility.

By the way, I never sued anyone. But I’ve done a lot of thinking.

There was this doctor who did my testosterone prescription. Let’s call her Dr. Baker. That isn’t her real name.

Dr. Baker was, by all accounts, a sweet lady. She just wanted to help people. She spoke with a soft, lilting voice, and smiled beatifically when you entered the room. She diagnosed me with gender dysphoria on the first visit to her clinic. I came back for my T prescription a week later, when the blood tests were clear. She gave media interviews talking about how impactful it was to be providing gender affirming care to the underserved rural Midwest.

When I told her I had detransitioned, a year or so later, she was extremely willing to meet with me and talk it over. Again: a nice lady. I took her up on it, because I had this intense desire to let everyone know how deeply wrong it all could go. And although our meeting started with mutual warmth, I had some questions for her that I think were more pointed than she expected.

I asked if she followed the WPATH standards of transgender care when she gave me my gender dysphoria diagnosis, which is as close to a “best practices” as the field has. She said yes. When I asked her why she hadn’t given me the mental health screenings laid out in the WPATH standards of care from the time, she recoiled and said that it just wasn’t her priority. She was aggrieved and unhappy to hear that I had been hurt, but affirmed that her standard was to put up “as few hoops as possible.”

I left reeling from the revelation that I probably should have had earlier: there was no diagnosis happening there. She was operating on the “tattoo parlor” model, come in and ask for what ever you want, and the diagnosis she gave was just a formality. Of course, when I got prescribed testosterone, I realized I hadn’t been assessed. It’s just that at the time, I just thought that was good. But now, soberly navigating the fallout, I was like: really? You’re a doctor and this is how you chose to practice?

I walked past a Reiki table on my way out. She liked new agey stuff like that. She used to be a doula. You probably know the type of liberal white lady — dangly earrings, fun glasses, gentle tone of voice. You can just sense she has a beautiful well kept garden and one of those yard signs: “In this house, we believe in kindness.”

I left the conversation upset at what a sham it had all been. But also, seeing her cringe and wilt in response to my anger, I felt bad for her. Even though she was the established doctor and I was the disheveled flat-chested fry cook, I could tell that my questions wounded her. She didn’t really budge on how she had practiced, but she did say she was sorry I was hurt. She was just so nice.

I also had a therapist. Let’s call her Bridget, also not her real name. She was also a nice lady. She had overcome some issues of her own. She told me about her alcoholic daughter. When I asked if she served LGBT people on the phone, she told me she didn’t specialize, but she was comfortable working with anyone.

We had some sessions together, and then I went in to get a top surgery consultation. The surgeon told me exactly what kind of letter I needed and provided a template. I forwarded the template to my therapist. She followed it to the letter.

I checked out the notes from our therapy recently. I asked her to send them after I detransitioned. It’s a painful read. Reading the notes, it’s like wow, I had all these issues. And then she said “ok, sounds good, go ahead and get that surgery”. The doctor didn’t know about any of my issues, really, didn’t ask. But the therapist did. In her notes from our meeting, she didn’t think I was doing well and didn’t think I was particularly improving.

But she wrote me the boilerplate letter, just as the surgeon’s template dictated, saying “The disorder is not a symptom of another mental disorder” and “ The transsexual identity has been present persistently for at least two years.” She hadn’t been seeing me for two years, just for a couple months, and I don’t think we did any kind of formalized investigation into whether the disorder was a symptom of another mental disorder. In our patient notes, she had a laundry list of other problems I was going through.

She wrote the letter. I think some of the things in it may basically constitute lies.

But let me take her side — I asked for it! And that was what everyone thought you were supposed to do back then! She wasn’t the only therapist to do this kind of thing. Not even close. She wasn’t some negligent lone-wolf amongst a tradition of careful, cautious therapists — at least as far as I can tell from my informal survey of the time period.

So maybe we can’t blame her, if she was just doing what any other gender therapist would do. Maybe it is all on me. Everyone knew that the therapy sessions were just a formality, a white lie for the insurance.

But then again…

I find there is something spineless and unsatisfying about this defense. “It’s what everyone was doing.”

Sure, humans are mimetic creatures. It doesn’t absolve me, but it certainly plays a part in understanding why I made the decisions that I did - I was following the accepted trans community logic of the day, wherein obsessing over being trans and even a sudden desire for physical transition was proof enough, where investing other causes was suspect, where “internalized transphobia” was reason enough to explain away all doubts. It was a simple enough heuristic, reassuring and totalizing. It was a bad idea.

As I said, I’m not suing my therapist. Like my doctor, on some level, despite it all, I feel bad for her. And I think I still feel like it was basically my fault. Or at least that the circumstances that led to that disastrous surgery were just inescapable, and the product of my own hubris. I was 23. I came at her like one of those Manson devotee girls, totally in thrall to the beliefs I had internalized, leaking my desperation for a fix and my fervor and anxiety all over the therapeutic relationship. She and I were both laboring under the shared belief that her role was the unconditional enabler of my magical gender journey. How can I blame her for consulting the day’s scripts and giving me the approved fix? But then again, maybe that’s not granting my therapist enough respect. She was a woman in her 50s, after all. Wasn’t she an adult?

So then we come back to Camille and to me. She was 30, right? She got the surgery, she realized it was a mistake. Same thing happened to me, at 23.

And as the critics say, sure, maybe there was some bad advice out there, but in the end, the choice was ours, right? We didn’t HAVE to take that advice, did we?

Joan Didion says that to have self-respect, you need to accept your choices and the consequences and not be shocked when things don’t turn out right. There’s nothing in life without risk. This is all true.

We’ll bear the scars forever. Accountability writ across the body: at some point, I let this happen.

But doesn’t that also apply to the therapists? After a little research, it seems like patient complaints are common enough that most therapists have malpractice insurance. Clients may sue a therapist for a variety of complaints, from misdiagnosis, psychological harm, inappropriate behavior - there’s some standard that therapists seem to be held to.

Scars, like lawsuits, are markers of rupture. The skin was broken, a wound occurred, a new and tougher web of collagen knits up the gap in the broken skin as fast as possible. The lawsuit is the immune response that says: something has gone wrong in the therapeutic relationship. The legal system’s immune response produces outcomes: maybe you settle out of court. You get some money. Like scar tissue on normal skin, things aren’t the same as they used to be, but there is some attempt at repair.

I guess that’s why they offer the malpractice insurance. And hey, therapists: you got the masters degree and decided to let people pay you to talk about their problems. It’s your job. And maybe it was popular to do affirmation-only then, and you thought it was a good idea. You may have some very valid complaints to make to the advocates that recommended you practice in that way.

And listen, you did sign that stupid letter. And the letter probably said some things that weren’t exactly true. And yes, your patient asked for it. But how I felt looking at those notes from my therapist, describing me at the lowest point of my life (so far!) and then comparing it to the letter where she recommended me for top surgery and had no complicating mental health factors - like, you’re a psychologist and you saw no red flags there? Or, more likely, you did, but you put them aside because you wanted to be a good trans ally, wanted to be nice, wanted to give me what I wanted?

On an emotional level, it feels like if I had asked her to be like “yeah, Grace needs her left foot chopped off, I don’t see any problems with that” or something. Just total endorsement of senseless self-mutilation. And yes, yes, we viewed it from a different perspective back then. But that’s how it felt in the aftermath, when the fantasy of the Transgender Affirming Journey To My True Self revealed itself to be nothing but a mirage of feeling that dissipated and left a bunch of serious scars.

So, yes, I think those women were trying to be kind and helpful. I think they thought what they were doing was for the best. I think they were nice people. And I think that they chose the coward’s way out - to smile and give me what I wanted, rather than push back and face anger. It feels good to be an ally. It feels good to say yes. It feels good to be nice. The affirmation approach is affirming for both of us: they get to be the hero.

There’s this great line from Into The Woods, where the mean Witch is telling off all the villagers.

You’re so nice
You’re not good
You’re not bad
You’re just nice
I’m not good
I’m not nice
I’m just right

---

“The Last Midnight”, Stephen Sondheim

It’s nice to be nice. But niceness does not, on its own, constitute the basis of competent medical or psychological care. People who mean well can put themselves in positions of responsibility and do enormous amounts of harm with nice.

The affirming, no-questions-asked response to people seeking gender medicine is still a popular approach. But it’s not the posture of a rigorous professional, someone who thinks critically, someone who believes their job has real stakes. It is the attitude of an enabler.

We were all caught up in the affirmation zeitgeist: me, Camille, the therapists and doctors who got to be the affirming saviors for a while and deliver the hormones and the surgery approval and receive gratitude and praise for our progressiveness. And I, the witch, am here to say that probably, it may have actually been risky to sign all those papers saying “I did a professional diagnosis on this person” and “I audited this person for mental illnesses and she’s good to get surgery” when you really didn’t. And if that goes wrong, you might get sued.

Part of the deal when you get professionally licensed and take money for your services is that, some people might not be happy with the results of how you did it. There was no guarantee you would never have angry clients. There was no “I promise not to ever sue you” letter signed. I’m sorry, but that’s life, that’s being a professional, that’s being an adult, as intractable as anything else.

I’m sorry if that’s not nice. I’m a little bitter. But I think I’m right. To the doctors, to the therapists: Honestly, why wouldn’t you be responsible for your part in the process? You wrote that letter, didn’t you?

After I showed him the first Knicks fanvideo set to Hamilton, he said, “you know what? I think you’re right, I’m not going to like this.”

@lfg_metsTHE RIGHT HAND MAN #knicks #nba #oganunoby #spurs #nbafinals

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But by then, it was too late. The fever was upon me.

Why basketball? Well, I read this essay about how Henrik Karlsson and his wife were very tired after they had 2 kids and she just wanted to garden but he thought it was boring. But he missed talking to his wife, so he made a big effort to figure out how gardening could be interesting to him. Happy ending: they both enjoyed talking about gardening.

It was relatable. My husband and I lead pretty separate lives besides parenting our kids — I’m at home, he’s at work, we’re exhausted and don’t even have time to even watch a movie together before collapsing to bed.

But then lately, even despite our three years of cumulative sleep debt, he had been staying up watching these basketball playoff games. Why? Why??? He said our NYC team, the Knicks, were doing rather well.

Our marital chitchat of late had mostly been about pediatrician iCal appointments and night wakings. Sad! Where’s the spark? But these Knicks… they had spark. I decided to take a page out of Henrik’s book and try to find a way to enjoy basketball on my own terms, so I could understand why my husband loved it so much.

There was one fact working against me: I’m from a family I would describe as “aggressively uninterested in sports.” In fact, so out of the loop am I, when I ran into another IU alum in the wild, I was like “hey, IU! I also went there!” And she was like “It’s been such a great time for IU!” And I was like “Is it? THEY’VE BEEN DEFUNDING THE HUMANITIES LIKE CRAZY!”

(My parents both worked at IU, and they didn’t ever mention the football wins to me either. As a general rule, our family dgaf about anything sports.)

Although I wasn’t a sports fan, it wasn’t my first time trying to take an interest my husband’s favorite game. In the past, I would sometimes try to watch the game broadcast with him, but inevitably my attention slid off within minutes, if not seconds.

If something exciting was happening with the little figures running around on the television screen, I could not tell. The medium sapped any magic away. After all, I’ve seen all kinds of great stuff on tv: dragons, explosions, Bob Odenkirk. The basketball game was just: Ball goes back and forth, guys run, who cares. Boring.

The first step to “getting it” was going to see the game in person. Now, I’ve seen some people complaining about bandwagoning Midwest transplants becoming fans of Knicks during their triumphant season, and I guess I’m one of them. I know, I know, not a real New Yorker, fake fan, etc.

But listen, actually: I just checked my camera roll, and we’ve gone to Knicks games in person at Madison Square Garden, starting in 2021. (Pro tip: you can get incredible seats for cheap if you lurk SeatGeek until 5 minutes after the game started). So actually, I’ve been hanging very loosely on the bandwagon for a few seasons. I have photos to prove it, as well as a commemorative Knicks™ Basketball-Shaped French Fry bowl that we use as a bath toy.

Here’s the first thing that struck me about watching basketball in person, and you’re going to laugh because it’s really basic: The players were very, very tall. On tv, I can’t say that the sheer magnitude of their tallness came across. Each of them cut a Herculean figure, and each team also has an even taller guy who comes across as some kind of primordial Titan or something. (First basketball fact I remember learning is that guy is the center). Second thought: “How are these men possibly still running and jumping around after this long?” When you’re there in that stadium, breathing the same air as they thunder across the boards right in front of you, colliding brutally with each other and falling and smearing so much sweat across the floors that a little Sweat Towel Lackey has to scurry in and mop up — it’s intense.

Look, I’m girly. I really like live musicals. I’m always blown away by the triple-threat performers - they sing like angels, they dance like satyrs, they contort their faces like silent film stars, and it’s all live. No edits, no cuts, no redoes. The fact that they’re there on the Broadway stage means that they’re the best of the best of the best in a very competitive field.

And so it was with the basketball players. Even with my untrained eye, I recognized rare, fire-honed human excellence unfolding in front of me. A big man bursts past one, two, three other big men, vaults into the sky, slams the ball into the net. Triumph. The crowd explodes. I could get that. Exhilarating, even for me. But when it came to the details beyond the score, I didn’t really know what I was seeing. I knew ball went in basket, but why the fouls, why the timeouts, why did the crowd groan or cheer for certain non-goal moments? I was clueless.

So, fast forward to the finals. Everyone’s abuzz, my husband has never been so excited watching the games, I've had a taste of the fun but still don’t really know much about it. But I want so bad to let the power of the Knicks compel me! I want to feel it! As Cat Marnell noted in her recent dispatch from the NYC party zone: “I don’t blame band-wagoners: who the fuck wouldn’t want to be part of so much happiness and revelry?”

So, because my parenting schedule didn’t really allow me to join the parties, I began to study instead. I started to read David Halberstam’s The Breaks Of The Game (recommended as the best basketball writing of all time) in order to get an in-depth look at the different human and commercial forces at play in a basketball team and season, and then The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac by the FreeDarko blog collective so I could catch up on some of the mythology, the most famous faces, the important dynamics. I also kept up a rolling AI chat so I could ask such embarrassing questions as: “I Know It’s Good To Be Big And Fast, But What Other Specific Skills Do Basketball Stars Have?” and “What constitutes ‘The Paint’ and how exactly does one ‘go hard in it’”?

The other thing that helped me get up to date, of course, was the online media and the memes. And when I say memes, I mean the overwhelming firehose of Knicks content that began to spray me nonstop when the hair-trigger X algorithm detected a whiff of interest.

There was lots of fun stuff:

• Wemby slander

• hyperbolic promises to burn down the whole city if the Knicks win

• hyperbolic promises to burn down the whole city if the Knicks lose

• hype reels

• bootleg merch

• old embarrassing footage of the players in high school

My most guilty pleasure of my new media diet was the corner for X that I would classify as “Knicks: For Her.” I’m not talking about boring NBA merch that’s been through the “pink it and shrink it” cycle. I like the content that emerges from the beautiful women’s fandom hive mind, flavored with the same blissful obsession that animates us the K-Hive and Ariana Grande stans. Ya now, things I can get into as a woman who logged 9000 cumulative lifetime hours on Tumblr.

Internet fandom provided an easy on-ramp to the juiciest elements of the narrative of the season. X memes are how I learned that OG Anunoby is the most deadpan man in the league with a penchant for scarves, that Josh and Jalen and Mikal have been friends and teammates since college, that Karl Anthony Towns has an irrepressibly expressive face, that Jose Alvarado is the pint-sized (for basketball) hometown hero, that Knicks’ secret weapon is The Power of Friendship. I also got to rewatch certain highlight clips over and over, algorithmically selected for maximum juice, and start to see what fans and social media accounts considered the most impressive moments of the game.

And then there was the in-person fervor: it’s so fun to join in when everyone on the street is discussing it, every bus driver is wearing a Knicks cap, when there’s finally a no-brainer conversation starter with the other playground parents that isn’t “so how old is she?”, when the whole city is holding their breath for the next game.

I was holding my breath too. I wanted vengeance for that nasty no-foul head-shove that Wemby did to our pookie Jalen Brunson. I was ambushing my husband with my iPhone and making him watch videos of OG Anunoby trolling his teammates. I was replyguying fanart posts on X.

As a really good blog post by John Salvatier put it once, reality has a surprising amount of detail. And so does basketball. Let me compare it to something much more boring that I’m really good at: Knitting.

When I look at a piece of knit clothing in passing, because I know so much about knitting, I am have this BBC-Sherlock style overlay of details that I instantly perceive like: “ok 1x1 rib, hand knit plausible due to thick yarn gauge but the cast on edge gives away that it’s machine-knit, 2x2 cables, seed stitch panels, inspired by Guernsey sweaters but a toned down commercial version.”

So when I first started watching basketball, like I said, I was just like “they’re running with the ball.” But after my studies, I might see a little more of what’s going on. The feint that Brunson used to fake out Wemby and get past him, the way that the ball zips between the players but always finds its way back to the best shooter unless time has run out, and then whoever has it takes the shot, the things that do and do not upset the players (a little shove and posturing and staring? Whatever. Going for the knee or getting in the landing space? Very angry).

There’s still so much texture I don’t understand. But I’m starting to pick up little pieces. I’m starting to get more of a handle on the skills at play. And, maybe even more compellingly, I’m starting to see the underlying human drama. It no longer seems arbitrary and meaningless. How does Jalen Brunson do it when he’s so small? Are the Spurs, in their youth, perhaps a bit hubristic? Which players are overestimating themselves and making mistakes? Who loses their cool when the game is close and the stakes are high, and who is clutch?

I greeted playground parents in Knicks caps with banter about how the hell we were all going to survive staying up that late. I tried unsuccessfully to buy a Knicks hat over the course of a week, stymied at every turn by massive lines of people who had the exact same idea. I considered and discarded the idea of wearing the aforementioned Knicks Commemorative French Fry Bowl on my head, and ended up knitting a little spirit scarf and lacing my blue shoes with orange laces instead.

Finally, it was time to watch game five with my husband. I resolved to stay up for the whole thing. I had gone to bed at halftime for game four, after googling “can the Knicks come back from a 27 point lead” and not liking the results. Reasonable choice as a parent, terrible choice as a beginner Knicks fan. Not again. To quote the bards of X, “My cream cheese was chive, my Knicks in five.”

The Spurs took the lead as usual, but we kept the faith. And oh Captain, my Captain - Jalen Brunson brought it back in the clutch, securing the championship and winning MVP.

My husband and I jumped around, yelling (quietly, not to wake the kids up) and celebrating. When the game was won and the stoic Jalen Brunson put the towel over his head, overcome with emotion at winning, and Hart came to clap him on the shoulder, I was overcome with emotion too. Josh and Jalen hugged, husband and I hugged, we went to bed buzzing with excitement and with no hope of a good night’s rest. The next day we were deliriously tired but thrilled.

I’m not going to pretend I’m Monica McNutt here. Just yesterday, I asked my husband: “Wait… what’s a rebound again?” But I had a lot of fun jumping on the Knicks bandwagon alongside him. And I’m looking forward to watching the new season — with eyes unclouded by anti-sports snobbery or ignorance — beside my husband.

In the end, I got what every bandwagoner wants: a chip, a lot of fun with my husband and my city, and a new appreciation for a beautiful game. And a hat. Did I mention I finally got my hat?

There has been a lot of ink spilled about Mac Barnett lately. The National Ambassador for Young People's Literature wrote a very neat little book, titled Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, about what makes children’s literature great. And then he ruffled some feathers — he had a line about how “94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud,” riffing on the “Sturgeon’s Law” quip about how “90% of everything is crud.” As covered in the NYTimes, some of his fellow children’s books authors took this as an attack on kid’s books during a time of censorship, a betrayal, or a dogwhistle. But if you talk to any parent, or look at the comments, you’ll hear a different response:

”He’s absolutely right.”

I’ll get back to Mr. Barnett. But first, I have a confession to make, and it may make me seem like a bad mom.

I started out reading to my eldest, Max, a lot, but after a while, he started to get bored and just crawl away. I didn’t really push it, and started to not try as much. And suddenly, we weren’t reading that much together at all. I felt a little guilty about it, though. And when he was a little older, I went to a pediatrician appointment and she was like “hmm, is he talking? Is he following directions?” and she seemed quite concerned at his level of speech.

And that was how I learned my son had a speech delay. Now, maybe the books-laziness thing on my part was just incidental, and he would have developed language a little slower anyway. I don’t know. But it gave me a scare — what was going on with my son? I dove into reading books about speech therapy in order to figure out how to coax him into talking and listening. And one of those things you’re supposed to do is, duh, read books. But it can’t just be any book, and it can’t just be read any way. You need to engage your child. You want to capture your child’s interest with voices, cartoonish voices, silly voices, surprising voices — like baby talk. That’s part of Ms. Rachel’s secret of success — her high, attention-getting cadence.

Now, previously, I think I had some bias against baby talk after reading some book about how French moms talk to their kids like adults and they just learn to talk, unlike American moms who humiliate themselves running around doing goofy voices and narrating every little thing. But the speech delay scared me so bad. I needed a new game plan. So I resumed reading books, but this time, I tried to make my voice as animated and hilarious as possible. French moms be damned.

Before I was a parent, I thought the most important thing was that children’s books should be beautiful. I bought a few books because they were beautiful, or by authors that I liked. For example: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Cat Dreams. It has lovely illustrations of cats, and it’s by Ursula K. Le Guin. (I’m very big into both.) This is what I imagined kids would be nourished by: calm, beautiful books about things that our family likes.

But when I started reading books to my son, I realized that the things that appealed to me and the things that appealed to him were very different. Prime example: Sandra Boynton. At first blush, I’ll admit, I was not crazy about her illustration style. It’s a bit cartoony, goofy, simple. But there was something about her. First of all, it always rhymed and was fun to read. Second of all, she seemed to understand kids. For example, consider Banana Bop.

There’s a lot of elements in this example page that make it perfect for her read-aloud young toddler audience.

1. Banana (funny word that kids love to say)

2. Repetition

3. Surprise

4. Goofiness

Pretty soon, my son was filling in the blanks. I would say, “Banana, banana, banana-” pause and he would fill in “bop” with glee. Another early speech win was another book of hers that followed the same formula.

He got the rhythm and started saying “oops.” It’s silly, sure! Is the art something I would hang on my walls? No. But she really understands kids, and knows what they like. And that meant that I liked it, too. These two books were early wins that coaxed words and joy out of him.

That started my journey of really considering what kids like in a book. And as it turns out, I started to develop some opinions on that.

So, to return to Mr. Barnett, I was intrigued when I heard there was a book on exactly that subject — what makes a good story for children? I hadn’t read any of his kids books at that point. But if I had started to have some intuitions about what kids liked in a book, he had it down to a science.

Barnett has a claim that most children’s books fail because they are less interested in giving children an engaging, enriching story than in telling kids what to do. They don’t respect kids as equals. They’re a form of propaganda for messages that may well be wholesome: “be kind” is one example. But they aren’t good stories.

After all, do you like books that treat you like an idiot who needs to learn a basic lesson? Are the great tv shows and stories of our time about perfect role models who always do the right thing? Or are we, in fact, enthralled by complicated and naughty characters who make big mistakes and navigate the fallout?

In the words of Mr. Barnett, from his book:

The children’s writer must have the same talents that all writers, in varying amounts, possess — control of language, a sense of rhythm and pace, appreciation of beauty, a knack for character, a strong point of view — and, on top of all that, the ability to connect with kids. It’s this last skill that’s most mysterious. We know what makes a writer good, but what makes someone good at writing for children?

All the great children’s writers I’ve met have had either a direct line to their own childhood or a deep sympathy with actual kids. Some have both. Neither trait is preferable or has any bearing on quality or content of work produced. Either gives you what you need: a vantage point that afford a clear and unsentimental view into childhood.

And isn’t that Sandra Boynton to a tee? She understands kids. She knows what will draw them in, she knows what will make them interested.

He really had me on board when he said that just as pediatricians are held in higher esteem than general doctors: they have to everything doctors do, after all, but also understand developmental milestone AND have a special way with kids — we should also hold children’s books to a higher standard. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically says: “alas, if only there was a true genius devoted to books for kids…. Oh wait, THERE IS! RICHARD SCARRY!”

That’s when he totally sold me. Richard Scarry is INCREDIBLE. My wiggly kid will sit and look at the illustrations for ages. Of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, I have remarked to my husband: “This is better than an iPad.” There’s so much richness, so much detail, and so much chaos. Barnett is adamant that chaos and mischief are important in kids books, because these are the things that create interest in stories and interest kids. Richard Scarry injects a large amount of silliness into every page. And indeed, when I was a girl, I was also obsessed with Richard Scarry.

Barnett also goes on at length about Goodnight Moon, one of the weirdest and greatest picture books of all time. The full book is saying “Goodnight” to things around the room, yes, but then there’s the page at the end: “Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.” So there’s those elements again, also in Boynton: repetition, then surprise. Plus, “mush,” like “banana,” is one of those silly words that kids like.

Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children made the ingredients of a good kids book much more clear and legible to me. Gratifying.

So, as I searched for books that would hold Max’s interest, I look for: silliness, technical skill (do the rhymes rhyme? does the rhythm scan?) and also books abut topics that kids care about. Another thing about him is, that much like other toddlers, he’s a sucker for any kind of vehicle: car, truck, train, it doesn’t matter. He loves to roll toy vehicles around, he loves to ride in them, and he loves to read about them. I amassed a truly staggering collection of books just about trains.

I live in New York City, and we are blessed with a really good library system. But the most beloved authors are often not in stock. I’ll always check out a Sandra Boynton. But those books are really popular, and are usually in short supply. I also realized that almost more than anything, Max liked books about trucks and vehicles. I went to the NYPL seeking more of Byron Barton, a master of colorful, fun books about vehicles.

“He’s really popular,” the children’s librarian said with a grimace. “We may not have any of him in stock.”

The library had bins of books on different themes. The singular “Things that go! 🚙” bin was very light on books, presumably because they were all checked out. Meanwhile, there were tons of bins of books on topics that are important to adults, but I don’t think are of natural interest to most kids in the way that Bananas and Trucks tend to be. They’re on potty training, cultural sensitivity, behavior, etc etc. And I think that kind of thing is important and people want books on the topics for a reason. But are these the books that kids go crazy for? Do they delight them? Well, of course, if they’re well written, funny, a pleasure to read out loud, they just might. But still - obviously there should be more books about trucks, right? Those are the ones that toddlers request again and again, right?

(Although I do wonder about my own hypothesis: were they low on vehicle books because they don’t have as many in stock as I think they should, or is it because they have a lot in stock and people have just checked them out anyway?)

Anyway, Mac Barnett had a lot of opinions I agreed with. But I still hadn’t actually read any of his picture books. Sure, he was a critic, but did actually, truly he have what it took to thrill young readers? So I decided to check one out from the library and see if he really was that good.

I got The Future Book. And wow, I have to admit it: he knocked it out of the park.

After reading his explainer on the craft, I saw a lot of his points echoed — a “Goodnight Moon” style repetition: In the future, day is called night, night is called day, moon is called sun, sun is called moon, bananas are called apples, and apple? SURPRISE! They’re called nothing, because there are not apples in the future. He sets up the reader, who knows will get the concept and start to fill in the joke, and then lines up a surprise.

He really understands kids. He knows a friendly but didactic narrator from the future is funny. He knows it’s funny to pretend that in the future there’s a new color called “blorange,” and it looks exactly like “orange.” It’s clear here that he does, because again, he talks about things kids like. For example, in the future, instead of saying “goodbye”, people say “you smell like a baby.” This is exactly the kind of thing that works for kids as a joke. First of all, kids think babies are funny, but also worth of derision. Observe the 2 year old who looks at another 2 year old on the playground and says “What’s That Baby Doing Here?” There’s nothing funnier than calling out other kids for being babies!

His other book that I read, Jack Blasts Off, is about a straight up antihero, a rabbit named Jack. This rabbit is so naughty that the little old lady he lives with SHOOTS HIM INTO SPACE with only enough fuel for a one way trip. While in space, he meets an alien, messed up his ship, gets exiled to the dark side of the moon, almost gets eaten by a monster, and then the alien brings Jack back to the little old lady and says “you have to take him back or I will blow up the earth.” The lady reluctantly agrees. No lessons were learned. There’s a kind of moral satisfaction in that the lady who sent Jack to space had to take him back and he immediately starts annoying him again, and the long suffering alien gets rid of his rascally roommates. But the main character Jack really never gets less naughty, never learns his lesson, and escapes his fate of exile only by being so annoying that the aliens in space literally force earth to take him back on pain of death.

But it’s a good story! And it’s funny. And if I may extrapolate Mac Barrett’s point a bit, I think if you accept that children are not little receptacles for moral lessons but are full humans, just a different age, we can draw an unlikely comparison between naughty characters like Jack the rabbit, for instance, or “Noisy Norah” who wrecks her house when she doesn’t get attention, or the rambunctious Max from Where The Wild Things Are, and the antiheroes and complex protagonists that we love in literature. Isn’t there a small — or large — naughty streak in the most iconic characters in literature? Emma is a vain stinker and a bully, Gatsby has delusions of grandeur and a terrible obsession, Raskolnikov ditto plus he’s a murderer… we love messy complexity in our protagonists. Why wouldn’t children?

Anyway, now Max is three, and while he’s still behind his peers on talking, when he was re-assessed, they found he no longer needed therapy. And he’s picked up a LOT of lines from books. The other day, I watched him flip through Mac Barnett’s The Future Book, mouthing along with the jokes. When he watches Cars, he calls Mater “The Old Jalopy” (a phrase he learned from Steve Light’s book Cars Go, and after reading about freight trains carrying “heavy loads” in Gail Gibbon’s Trains book, he now uses “heavy” as a kind of synonym of “big, large, long,” asking variously for “heavy pants” instead of shorts, a “heavy treat” instead of a small one, and “Mama/Grandma/Dada, are you so HEAVY,” which is always popular to hear.

It’s great to see the artifacts of our reading habit littered across his speech. I can tell our efforts are working. I love seeing him absorbed in books. We’re putting together a collection that truly interests him, and he sits and reads aloud to himself. I am really glad for authors like Mac Barnett, who care enough to take the genre seriously. If he spoke too harshly with his little quip about 94.7%, I think it’s because he knows that children deserve good books and good stories, just like the rest of us.

If you have toddlers, or remember being one yourself - what books are you loving? What are your pet peeves in kids books?

As I posted in last week’s essay, I got breast reconstruction surgery last week. A combination of recovering from surgery and also my toddler’s morning school ceasing for the summer (my precious writing time!!!) has meant that I struggled to put together something very coherent this week! Whoops! I hope you won’t begrudge me a chattier, more informal post this week.

Recovery Is Weird

Part of what was so terrifying about trying to get surgery is, of course, that you can’t get your old body back. You can get a new experience: implants! It’s been weird to adjust to. I got under-the-muscle implants, under the muscle because there’s no breast tissue to keep the implants from sliding around. They feel extremely bizarre, like little… stress balls, or squishy dinner bowls, under my skin. My chest feels very tight and weird (this part, I’m told, will get better as the muscles relax and stretch for their new reality). When I’m showering, the sensation of the water on the skin over the muscles over the implants is very alien.

But this isn’t my first shocking change of physical state. I’ve been through this rodeo before in a certain sense. I know that I’ll adjust to some extent.

And there’s one good thing that struck me right away: I like how I look in clothes! I feel like the old me, which is weird. I think I’ve lived longer post-top-surgery than I had post-puberty. But I guess I never stopped feeling bad when I looked in the mirror, like that chapter of my life was still haunting me. And now I don’t have that painful visual reminder.

So that’s good.

But if there’s a horrible complication, I will certainly be kicking myself.

I will write out a more comprehensive analysis later, when I have really lived with it. I don’t want to declare it a success, or a failure, or anything until a lot more time has passed. So right now, let’s just call it weird, but cautiously: good, I think.

Insurance thoughts
The first time I called my insurance to see if they would cover breast reconstruction, it was not long after the initial surgery. I described my situation to the phone operator. She sounded unhappy with me. As I remember it, I tried to ask her, and, in a bored and unhappy tone, she told me they couldn’t cover trans reversal surgeries. I started to ask if that was really right, or something like that, and she actually said “No” and hung up the phone.

I was very shaken up by this. Maybe this makes me sound kind of like a weenie, but I didn’t bother trying again for many years. I just felt so stupid. The “no” was so definitive. And it was a big change from the first go-round, where there were clinics set up with soothing, affirmative clinicians, where everyone’s responded to your Gender Journey in hushed tones. Where all the insurance went through without a hitch. And it’s not that I blame them. We were all in it together, back in 2017 or whatever - everyone was excited to be affirming and were working stuff out.

Well, things have changed a lot since then. I remember when I posted about this on twitter, some people were like “healthcare costs are already THIS HIGH and now you want to add insurance for surgeries BACK AND FORTH?”

And look, I get it. But also, it really fills me with some rage. You think I’m doing this for funsies? And also, more selfishly: so much of insurance spending is for things that are, at least partially, due to lifestyle choices. If you break your leg skiing, they don’t say, “Okay, no insurance for you, skiing is known to be dangerous.” Why draw the line at detransition?

I think it would be reasonable that, if transition surgery continues to be considered medically necessary, detransition and reparative surgery does too. I also think it would be reasonable to establish some gatekeeping on either side.

Good Surgeons Vs Bad Surgeons

One thing I liked about my surgeon is he wasn’t much of a salesman. The woman who did my first surgery, was super flashy, always making TikTok’s of herself flouncing around in dresses and joking about cutting boobs off and such. My new surgeon was a serious guy, very no-nonsense, kinda gruff. Yet his walls were encrusted with awards and professional accolades. I’m not some surgery connossier, but I felt like I was in more serious hands. He didn’t hit me up afterwards to ask to use me for promotional material on his instagram, either, unlike my top surgeon. I liked him. If you’re a detrans women in the NYC area looking for a recommendation, hit me up for details. I’m not going to post his name because I don’t want him to be punished for his good deed of helping me out.

Breast Reconstruction Coverage Is Weird

The Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act, or WHCRA, put into law that any insurance company that covers mastectomy must also cover reconstruction. As the name suggested, the law was created to ensure women who get mastectomies for cancer prevention can access reconstruction. Yet this document provided by the US Department of Labor specifies:

Despite the title, nothing in the law limits entitlement to WHCRA benefits to cancer patients. If an individual is receiving benefits in connection with a mastectomy and the group health plan covers mastectomies, then the individual is entitled to WHCRA benefits.

Also, despite the title, nothing in the law limits WHCRA entitlements to women.

What’s interesting to me about WHCRA is how it came about: A 32 year old woman had a mastectomy and her insurance refused to cover reconstruction. Her plastic surgeon did the procedure for free , but he was so outraged that he started a quest to make sure any insurance that covered a mastectomy would cover reconstruction.

It’s one of those questions. It’s not exactly medically necessary for like, basically survival, in the sense of like, your knee being replaced - right? But then I guess it’s just considered so psychologically important that it was made medically necessary.

So, in theory, this should be covered by insurance that covers mastectomies, and available to detransitioned women who are seeking reconstruction. In theory. In practice, that doesn’t always work out. But, as times change, it seems like it’s becoming possible again.

When I started talking to doctors again more recently, most of them expressed that they hadn’t seen as many cases for reconstruction and they would have to just submit the insurance pre-authorization and see what happened. And, as it turned out, we got the authorization.

I’ve been keeping my ear out on the topic. I’ve talked to some different detrans women who got reconstruction covered. I’ve also talked to some who were not able to get it covered, and paid out of pocket. These are just anecdotes, of course, but I think it shows how piecemeal and disconnected the landscape is for reversal surgeries for detransitioners. Could the surgery perhaps be billed as another sex-change surgery, once again, to combat gender dysphoria? Does the WHCRA law apply to it?

On the other hand, Medicaid in several states explicitly forbids reversal surgeries from coverage (12, as of 2022 according to this study). As another very anecdotal point: I remember hearing some women telling me their private insurance specifically forbid reversal surgery a few years ago. A lot might have changed since then, though, as detransition advocacy makes more of an impact.

As an additional note: I don’t really know much about other types of reversal surgeries, and if they might be covered by insurance. I think some recent bills have been introduced to try to ask insurance to cover them, but it’s a politically spicy topic and really varies by state and provider. Will electrolysis and shaving down the vocal cords be covered for detrans women looking to undo the physical changes of testosterone? From my informal knowledge of the field, I don’t think so, but please let me know if you’ve heard anything to the contrary.

Anyway

Sorry for being so informal and disorganized here. I’ve been running on fumes a little - partially from the surgery, which happened last Monday at 4am, but truthfully also because of the playoffs, which happen at 8:30pm which is a crime against parents everywhere. Anyway, go Knicks, and I’ll see you next week, hopefully with something a little more coherent.

I got my mastectomy, a.k.a. “Top Surgery,” like 8 years ago or something. Wow, time flies! And, yesterday, I got breast reconstruction surgery. I have boobs1 again!

(For new readers, the tldr on that is: I thought I was trans, Female-To-Male, and I took hormones and had my boobs cut off when I was 22-23. In fact, it was just a post-college mental health crisis and a Big Fat Mistake.)

I wanted to undo the damage as much as possible. I thought about reconstruction immediately. But after the disaster of the first surgery, I was extra-super-cautious about getting another one. So I put off deciding about reconstruction, keeping it a “maybe,” for a while. A long while.

However, all these years later, I never really moved on. I was still radically conflicted about getting surgery... until recently. But why did I take so long to decide? Shouldn’t it have been a no-brainer to “get my boobs back”?

The Case for Staying Flat

I could have just not gotten any more surgery, and remain flat-chested. This option has a lot to recommend it, such as:

• easy (no maintenance surgeries, no revisions, no recovery period with lifting restrictions)

• safe (there are many known side effects that could occur from breast reconstruction)

• totally free (duh)

And let me be clear about that “side effects” thing, because it sounds so breezy, doesn’t it — oh, sure, it’s an effect, but just a “side” effect, not a “main course” or “entree”… At least, that’s how I felt going into surgery as an idiot in my 20s. But any surgery, any opening up the skin and rummaging around in the body, is serious business. Sure, thanks to modern medicine, it’s pretty safe. But if there’s even a small risk of a very bad consequence, I knew I needed to consider that It Could Happen To Me. When I was trying to decide if I should transition, I took a lot of comfort in the “only 1% of people detransition” stat, and, well… turns out that was a bad strategy. Could I live with breast implant illness? Could I live with one of the implants developing a scar tissue capsule that contracts and moves it somewhere weird on my body?

And then there’s another piece, which is the idea that it might ultimately be productive, spiritually nourishing, to accept my body as it is, modified, and just continue to do the work of living with it. To realize that living with mistakes with dignity is better than grasping after things that are, truly, long gone. In the eight years since I have had the surgery, the regret and pain has lessened a lot. Who is to say I couldn’t learn to live with it and find peace in my flat chest? Isn’t that the mature option?

But I Don’t Want Hard-Won Acceptance of My Mistakes! I Want Boobs!

It’s so hard to live with a regretted trans mastectomy. I hated the weird, artificially prepubescent look of it. I still had a disturbing, persistent feeling of missing parts of my body. It’s like a “check oil” light blinking on your dashboard, but for missing the body parts that were removed — the nerves are dead but my nervous system is still looking for them. It’s a hard feeling to transmit in writing. It vexed me after the surgery, sometimes mildly, sometimes a lot, but never ended.

And I’m in my 30s. I have (hopefully) a long life remaining in front of me. I like fashion, and it never really stopped hurting when I tried on a dress and saw the empty sockets for breasts gaping out over the empty space and scars on my chest. Moreover, there’s the constant visual reminder of my folly. It was a temporary madness, but a permanent disfiguration.

And at least among women who had mastectomies for cancer reasons, it’s pretty widely known that having your breasts removed can cause emotional pain, a feeling of de-feminization, sensations of unattractiveness. For this reason, breast reconstruction is generally covered by insurance as “medically necessary” since the psychological benefits are strong.

People don’t like this word, but I think it’s fair to say it about myself: I feel mutilated. I do. Torn apart. There’s a heavy, heavy Adrienne Rich poem describing a woman who had a mastectomy, her “scarred, deleted torso.” She is unable to sunbathe topless with the other women because it’s just too painful for her to see her wounds laid bare. It’s a poem about cancer, I feel sheepish quoting it - I know my situation doesn’t remotely compare - but there’s so little writing on the emotional texture of having a mastectomy, and I couldn’t help but relate to certain lines. And one particular part of that poem just returns to me every spring when everyone comes out in their beautiful spring dresses and my mastectomy scars ache dully in the sun under my T-shirt:

“You hadn’t thought everyone

would look so perfect

unmutilated”

- A Woman Dead in Her Forties, Adrienne Rich

It’s kind of a mind bender to think about reversing a surgery that I got for aesthetic reasons (although, you know, it’s complicated). Where did the gender dysphoria go? It was a symptom of a bigger problem. It was a passing thing, or if I feel strains of it from time to time, it is very mild. I think I separated out my former distress into its real sources, no longer scapegoating the body and therefore desiring to micromanage people’s perceptions of its sex.

But the changes remain. I’m no longer pretending to be a man. But I am, actually, permanently, a woman with no breasts. That remained true.

Realistic Expectations

One of my biggest concerns was managing expectations. There are some things that, having given them up, are permanently off the table. The old dead nerves in my chest will not re-knit and come alive again, for example. My nipples, having been cut off and grafted back on, will still be weird stiff FrankenNipples with stitch marks on the sides. And, obviously, the implants will not produce milk so I can feed and soothe my children with breastmilk from my own body.

In these ways, and others, I cannot ever “have my breasts back.”

This is all pretty obvious. But it was useful to tally it up because I was trying to be very realistic about what this surgery could and couldn’t do. I was scared that if I didn’t think very hard about what I was actually signing up for, I might go in with secret hopes that I haven’t admitted fully to myself - and then be crushed when they didn’t come true. Of course I want my old body back. But I can’t have it, any more than I can rewind to being a baby-faced 22 year old. So what could I actually do?

The Options

There are two basic options for breast reconstruction, broadly: there is implant-based reconstruction, and flap reconstruction -the flap being a piece of tissue from elsewhere in your body: thigh, stomach, buttock. If you want to learn about these options in exquisitely helpful detail, The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has a thorough and detailed list available on their page Breast Reconstruction: Know Your Post-Mastectomy Options.

The silicon implant reconstruction is an easier procedure - you can do whatever size, too. However, it requires ongoing maintenance, it’s an artificial implant in your body, and possible side effects include encapsulation (scar tissue grows around the breast and seizes it up), infection, implant bursting (ee gads!), and breast implant illness.

The other version is flap-based, where they slice some bits off you and refashion them into breasts. This has the benefit of having the breasts be “real” in a sense, but it’s also a much, much harder procedure than implants. More scars, more chances for flesh to become necrotic. And there’s the little matter of “donor flesh.”

I sent my picture to a DIEP-flap reconstruction surgeon and he told me that I was too thin to get much of a breast going. Maybe an A-cup, he said, if he took flesh from my bottom. When I looked at his website at the skinny patients, the ones who had parts of their buttocks turned into breasts, the idea became less appealing to me. Surgery scars are pretty painful, and the idea of having them on my, erm, sitting flesh, did not appeal. Plus, I’m not so hard up for breasts that I’m ready to maim my poor bottom. It didn’t do anything wrong.

For implants, there’s only so much you can fit without tissue-expanders. These sit beneath the skin and stretch it so you can accommodate more of an implant. My original cup size was something like 30D, which is a little bigger than I can really get without expanders. But doing the tissue-expanders and then taking them out and putting in implants is two surgeries, and that’s very difficult for me on account of two adorable little logistical complications called MY CHILDREN.

That Fearful Asymmetry: Nipple Issues

During a masculinizing FTM mastectomy, the nipples sometimes get moved around. I know mine were - the surgeon cut them down smaller and put them kind of off-center and down, more where a man’s would be. They were also a little crooked, I think, but that probably wasn’t on purpose. My surgeon said he couldn’t reposition those during the first surgery, they might be wonky, but maybe a follow-up could be done. I don’t want the nipples to appear weird and off-center. But I also don’t want to get more surgeries - again, I am responsible for children! I guess my real question was - how bad is it going to be? Were my implants and FrankenNipples going to look totally cockeyed and insane?

Recovery Period Difficulties

My surgeon told me there would be a strict ban on lifting heavy things (over 10 pounds) for five-weeks post-surgery. This presented a real problem for a stay-at-home-mom such as myself. I have a toddler and a baby, they are both strapping lads well over 10 pounds, and they both require lifting many times a day: onto the changing table, into the crib, into the stroller, out of the playground, etc. When it comes to surgery, if I do go ahead and lift things, the consequences could be quite severe: blood vessels rupturing, causing blood to collect with no escape, possibly necessitating emergency surgery to remove the implant. Not good.

So I would need 5 weeks off of lifting them. I have no family nearby, and my husband works in an office for long hours. As it turned out, my parents were down to come fly in and help me out for the full 5 weeks. We sublet an apartment for them. But it was a lot to ask of them, and otherwise, we would have had to pay for a nanny.

This is one reason I started to wish I actually hadn’t waited as long. Waiting a long time to be sure I’m ready is all well and good, but once little kids are in the picture, it becomes much more complex. On the other hand, I didn’t have a well-paid job with insurance until like 5 seconds before I got pregnant, so, whatever. But just something to consider for prospective mothers who may be in my shoes.

So Anyway, I Did It

I found a very good plastic surgeon who had heard about detransitioners and wanted to help. He helped me submit paperwork to get my insurance to cover the procedure, and it went through! But it only was pre-authorized through July of 2026. And I have good insurance through my husband’s job, but it’s an uncertain economy and I’ve been laid off a time or two and know that you can’t take that for granted. And my mom could come stay and help out. If my mom moved to Spain or my husband became a monk or I got pregnant again or the pre-auth expired and couldn’t be renewed (insurance is mysterious), it wouldn’t be anymore. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be doable.

I know there can be side effects. But ultimately, I decided I was willing to take the risk. And I hoped that I could find some peace and no longer have that constant blinking “Hey Where Did My Boobs Go” wounded animal sensation in my body, no longer wince when I saw myself in the mirror. Was I taking the immature way out? You could say that. But I decided to be a little bit selfish, to inconvenience my family quite substantially, and to give myself the gift of saying “this could help. It’s worth a try.”

I had a strong fear that I would be punished for trying again. There was so much shame from last time - I had been so stupid, so naive. And here I was, going for another surgery? Didn’t I learn my lesson last time? I was worried. But there were so many post-mastectomy women - most from cancer, but some detransitioners - who seemed to genuinely find the reconstruction satisfying. And it wasn’t politicized in the same way that transition was 10 years ago. And I had really, really tried to be realistic about it.

A trip to the hospital always gives me bad dreams. The same thing happened before the breast reconstruction surgery. I couldn’t sleep, and when I finally did, I dreamed an invader came into my home and tied up my children, and I ran out and slashed him with a knife, over and over and over again, wincing with horror at what I was doing. And then my husband came out and said “What have you done?” and the vanquished home invader had turned into a little child. (Any Jungians in the audience want to take a swing at that one?)

There’s a feeling of finality. A feeling of dread. You walk up to the crucifix-shaped operating table. You lie down and give yourself over to the artificial darkness. What happens next is totally out of your control. It’s horror.

And then I woke up!

It’s too soon to tell you what I think of the results. I’m still healing, so I don’t really know what they are. I can’t even take the sports bra off my aching chest. (In the post-op debrief, the surgeon casually fired off that he decided to move one of my nipples after all, which was nice of him). I am in good spirits and am cautiously optimistic that I made a good choice, a thoughtful choice, a choice I will not regret. But it’s impossible to say until I’ve healed and lived with it.

I can’t guarantee anything about what comes next, except this: I will follow up about how I’m doing, once I figure out exactly how that is, and I will do my very best to be honest and helpful to other detrans women who might be considering this surgery.

Until then, I’ll be drinking smoothies and gingerly patting my children on the head. I’ll leave you with another lovely little fragment from Adrienne Rich.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

-Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

There are a lot of ways to do it. You can make the cake healthy or serve fruit instead or order it from the bakery. You can say “no gifts” although it turns out people usually still bring gifts, which I found out after awkwardly not bringing gifts to a couple and feeling like a real jerk - dang you, knuckleheaded tendency towards literalism! You can host it in the park or in your house or in any one of the fine for-rent children’s play establishments, which would also be happy to furnish you with pizza, cake, decorations, and a cheerful MC who is doing this for a day job while she becomes an actress. But that last option will cost you, big time.

I decided to do a low-cost, low-key playground birthday for my 3 year old. This is a great way to do it, because it’s free and the kids can really run around and get wild. Since I’m a stay at home mom and tend towards the DIY side anyway, I figured I could handle it. Max is super into rockets and space, so it would be a space party. And since I wasn’t shelling out for a hosted party at a play place, it seemed like a no brainer to spend a comparatively small sum on Themed Crap From The Internet.

There is no end to the amount of Themed Crap From The Internet. You can search “Kids Cowboy Party” or “Kids Princess Party” and there’s just all kinds of single-use goodies available on Amazon. Especially, you’ll notice, balloons and balloon arches. And here is another part where the granola, thrifty, non-consumerist part of me fights with the part of me that wants to create a fun, temporary, exciting spectacle that will make toddlers squeal with delight. I know balloons are made of plastic and last 9000 years in the landfills and will be unearthed by future civilization’s anthropologists who will say “Wow, these guys sure used a lot of multicolored condoms” or something. I know that balloon arches are maybe a little played out. I know that every adult has the same thought and buys the same multi-pack of flying-saucer shaped foil balloons and galaxy-print napkins and alien-shaped cake toppers. The parents will be impressed that you put together such a fun creative party, but the creativity is an illusion. The party delivered to you in a box.

But am I going to hand-sew an upcycled cotton Waldorf style reusable bunting with embroidered astronauts and spaceships in linen thread kettle-dyed at home with turmeric and red cabbage and avocado pits? No. So am I going to have a laid back, undecorated, minimalist party? Also no.

And maybe you don’t know this, but balloons are really cool these days. Metallic balloons, planetary orange swirled balloons like the surface of Jupiter, celestial translucent blue balloons, adorable little foil astronauts. We blew up balloons until we were blue in the face. Paired with a little cheap party disco light and some streamers, it looked very festive.

People bemoan the huge avalanche of stuff that flows both inwards and outwards at a birthday party - each guest bringing more toys into a house that may already be overflowing, and then coming away with a goodie bag packed with freeze-dried ice cream, fun-size snickers bars, pretzel baggies, spaceship erasers, little buckets of slime, slap bracelets, tiny plastic watches, novelty glasses or hats, party blowers, bouncy balls, and all other manner of goodies. Of course, it’s a thrill for the kids to enjoy those little items for a minute, which is why we do them. I wanted to find a middle ground, still send the kids home with something but not something that parents would feel burdened by. I went for a bouncy ball with a planet inside, a clementine, a mini bag of goldfish, and a small container of bubbles (with an astronaut on top - thereby making them Space Bubbles) for our goodie bags, which I put in little galaxy-print paper bags. Then, later, when people were fighting on twitter about this, I realized that an even classier move would have been to put in a single book and a single consumable.

I also got a couple rocketship tents, which I thought would be a fun prop to our playground party and which several of my friends assured me had been a great buy that lasted a few years. Well, we were rained out, so we had to move the party into our apartment. And while the kids may have been too distracted by the playground to truly go ham on the tents outside, inside, the rocket tents were in heavy use.

Have you ever seen a tent with four toddlers in it? The thing was shaking and shimmying like that one failed SpaceX test launch. At several points, accompanied by cascades of giggles, the whole thing would tip over, with flashes of ecstatic chubby-cheeked toddler faces viewable through the mesh window. They were a lot of fun, yes. But by the end of the party, the thin fabric was ripping and the tent poles were poking through the top of the rocket. Oh well. They were cheap. They weren’t really designed for such a large crew of astronauts. And in the end, I can’t say I was upset.

The day before the actual birthday, having been worrying about the party all month, I realized that I hadn’t really bought my son any presents. So, at the last minute and with no particular plan, I went out to the toy store to see what I could get a 3 year old who loved space. And then I saw it, the thing I knew he would want. It was the biggest, funnest, hugest “Rocket Play Set” with two astronauts, a moon rover, 2 ramps, a clear top so you can see your astronaut in the pilot’s seat, and an internal elevator. Plus sound effects. It was huge. It was expensive. It was shiny and colorful and very very plastic.

And again, I had an inner conflict. I want my home to be full of beautiful things with natural materials. I do! I want the play silks and the serene faceless Waldorf dolls and the heirloom wooden blocks passed down from my grandfather.

But I remember being a little kid. I remember what truly thrilled me at Christmas - seeing a huge box and opening it to reveal not a bike helmet or a book collection or a sensible set of socks but the Big Shiny Play Set. And later I got more use out of the helmet and learned more from the books, but in the moment, on the morning, that 3-Story Animal Hospital Play Set or whatever provided the biggest thrill. It delivered the props and set for an enticing world of play. It filled my childish heart with an unparalleled glee and promise.

Last year, when he turned 2, he opened up all his presents from me hopefully saying “look, a new train!” each time. And most of the time, it wasn’t. I realized I hadn’t really got him what he truly wanted. And given his current space obsession, I just knew that if I wanted to thrill my 3 year old, this was the toy that he would be most happy to open.

Reader, he loved it. He flew it around the room hitting the little button that makes it count down and then flicker red to simulate a blastoff. His brother and he fought over the two included astronauts.

And just as the Waldorfians said would happen, having exhausted the possibilities of the toy, right now it sits in the corner among the post-birthday rubble, now invisible to them. I don’t know. If I put it away for a while and bring it back out, they’ll probably get a version of the thrill again and have another afternoon with it. Just like the diesel train that thrilled him before, and the city bus before that. A toddler’s love for a vehicle may be fickle, but it burns so bright.

I’m not trying to say this is right. I think it’s probably wrong to optimize for temporary thrills for my toddler. But if it is within my power to give it to him, on special days like his birthday, I love to give him a shiny present and see him fill with glee. I do not write this as a lifestyle recommendation. It is a confession.

I’ll admit something else. I felt a little uneasy about this. After all, I’m not really celebrating buying junk, I’m celebrating celebrating, right? While yes, I admit, I did it in a somewhat lazy and consumerist way.

Anyway, I was wrapping up this draft, I started to feel really guilty. As a form of penance, and to maybe scare me straight for next year, I looked up how long balloons take to decompose. I expected to find out it was one billion years, and they would outlast human civilization.

It turns out most balloons are latex, not plastic, and actually decompose after like 10 years max in a landfill. I wasn’t expecting absolution, but… that’s actually better than I expected. The dilapidated rocketship tent and the carcasses of many balloons are mocking me from across the room, but I have to be honest. My lesson was absolutely not learned. See you next year, at Max’s Bulldozer and Also Kiki’s Delivery Service Themed Year-4 Birthday Jubilee!

A few people replied along the lines of “I’m sure you’d heard him before, his music is everywhere!” (I really hadn’t. He’s big on TikTok, but I don’t go on TikTok. It’s amazing what you miss when you’re not on TikTok.).

But my favorite reply came from user EmoTeen23830:
”Even me that is in Africa knows him”

OWNED.

Look, I’m a millennial. I’m in my early 30s. I knew on some level that I was not the cultural vanguard anymore — I live near a college campus, and the students appear more babyfaced and childlike to me every single year. But sometimes the reality of my situation hits me a little harder. It’s not that I’m old. It’s that I’m, to quote another Gen Z thing I had to look up, unc.

So, how am I so out of the loop that, despite having a screen time that makes me shudder and living in ostensibly one of the great cultural capitals in the world, I have never heard of Jvke?

I don’t think any of us finds it comforting to slip out of the warm, affirming glow of Being Young And Cool. It’s hard to accept that you’re getting older at all. After all, it is axiomatically true that we all start out in life profoundly young, and so of course our youth is one of the first things we understand about ourselves. First we’re a child, and then we’re a teenager, and these facts define the shape of our days — parents, school, all the restrictions we are faced with. Then, finally, we’re an adult. And as adults, we first are the cultural vanguard, the cool young adults. We wear the current fashions. We listen to music that’s up-and-coming. We are marketed to. We are used to older generations tut-tutting about what is wrong with us, what our slang means, how we’re all messed up from the phones.

Like all teens, my peers and I were preoccupied with coolness in its different forms. It seemed to me to be of utmost importance, and I expended a lot of energy trying to put together a cool, edgy, attractive persona. My friends tutored me about the mall, where you should buy a t-shirt with the money you got from your mom. (My crew was mostly Hot Topic people, but most of whom I privately considered the “cool kids” wore Abercrombie or Hollister).

From the vantage point of a young person, I found the adults around me incredibly, painfully uncool. The grumpy, frumpy math teacher who got visibly upset when I came to school with blue hair (not compliant with school dress code!) was the worst of the lot. But almost every adult and teacher and parent and parent-of-friend was, on some level, almost a different species in my eyes. I couldn’t understand them. They were just there, dictating our lives, occasionally getting upset about what seemed like dumb things and ruining all the fun. They seemed so unreasonable, their motivations too opaque. Why can’t they just be chill about you going to the sleepover? Why won’t my mom let me go out with my friend late at night? Why is grandpa so un-fun and strict always warning against staying in school? Why is Emma’s mom so stressed and clipped and rushing around and why is her dad always just slumped there on the sofa starting at the tv? You get the sense that things beyond your understanding are happening, upsetting things, but you cannot really grasp them.

To be old and uncool was as unimaginable as death. I think this is why a lot of young people seem to have a fantasy that they’ll die young — not because they’re serious about it, but because it’s just so dang hard to imagine yourself at 40 when you’re 17. It doesn’t feel like something that can happen to you. How could you, vibrant, cool, young you, let yourself become such an unappealing creature?

I have to admit, it used to get under my skin seeing Gen Z making fun of millennials. Sometimes I would see them even saying stuff like “If you’re 30/40/a parent, what are you doing on reddit/Tumblr/social media?” I want to say: “Same thing as you!! Futzing around! What, do you think we switch to reading papyrus scrolls after some age cutoff?”

But as with all things, I have only to wait. Their smugness in their youth may be annoying, but it’s also tragic. I remember the insecurity of being young and fearing aging. Without your youth, what do you have left? Well.. you’ll find out. The years start coming and they don’t stop coming, to quote the bard. And then before you know it, a new generation will be arising and making fun of you! So watch out!

It happened to me.

You see the new style of jeans and think: “uh, that looks terrible, why would I change from the obviously correct option, the style that was in fashion when I was 21?”

You look on Spotify, and there are all these new artists. They have more streams than Paul Simon, somehow. And they’re like 20 years old. And you’ve never heard of them before now, because you don’t go on TikTok.

Now, none of this is a given. I know plenty of people who remain on the cutting edge of cultural relevancy well into their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Some adults remain cool til the day they die, especially those with fashion and art careers. But I think it’s fair to say that for most of us, we just kind of move on.

Nothing has concretized my status as unc, hurled me over the line from “still more or less young and cool-ish” into “definitely 100% adult with too much on my plate to keep up with fashion” more violently than becoming a parent, though. I do not own barrel-leg jeans, one of those scrappy Balenciaga City Bags, or a pair of Salomon’s. The children have rerouted all my energy that would go to exploring most trends. Some mornings, I cannot even find the time to brush my hair. So no, I don’t know who Jvke is. And sure, I could investigate, but at this point, I know what I like. And here’s what teen me could never understand — life brings other pleasures besides looking cool. The interior life of an adult is different, but there are many advantages. I have more money now, I’m better at doing stuff, I have hobbies and interests that I know I enjoy spending my time on. So I prioritize those. I know I’m out of touch, but at this point, I’m okay to live with that and keep listening to The Shins.

And now, with my new milk-stained vantage point, I am going to have to utter a sincere apology to the adults who I wrote off, sneeringly, as out of touch and so terminally, unappealingly uncool.

Because now I see those parents from my youth and realize they were just like me — scared, untrained, with some experience under their belt but no particular way to ensure that the hard-learned lessons wouldn’t befall their own children. This is going to sound a bit grim, but life and its responsibilities really wear you down, til coolness is a distant luxury you simply don’t have time for. The teachers and parents I grew up around were mostly normal, stressed people doing their best, making ends meet, worrying about work, concerned about their kids, navigating health scares and divorce and money troubles and all the other quotidian humiliations that come along and kill the vibe as we age.

I look back on a college ex-boyfriend’s dad. He was really strict, and always talking about money and how his kids could maximize their earnings. He hated alternative culture, so when this ex-boyfriend and his sister got a septum piercing, they would flip them up into their noses so he wouldn’t see. I really didn’t get along with this guy. I think he could tell that I was an influence in a direction he didn’t approve of. And I didn’t understand why he was so strict, so worried, so hardline about small manners of self-expression, like a septum piercing!! I knew he had been poor when young, and was burdened with the responsibility of caring for his family from a young age. But I still didn’t get it. He just seemed like a jerk — how could he cramp his kids self expression? Why was he always lecturing them about needing to make more money, when they were clearly bright kids with a good future ahead of them?

Now, this is all the distant past. But I recently found myself looking back on that stressed, strict dad with a renewed wellspring of compassion. He had to struggle from a young age to ensure his kids grew up in middle-class comfort. Sure, he overdid it about the septum piercings. But on his anxiety that his kids not fall into the poverty he escaped — the strictness that was not just about controlling them, but about setting them up to succeed as adults — I realized maybe I had been too harsh. At 18, I flattened him into another killjoy adult, a stock character from a teen movie. I did not understand the depths of his fear, or yet see the love. Now I see it.

Yes, adulthood and parenthood makes uncool, scolding, balding dorks of us all. Some sooner rather than later. I’m not ready to succumb totally. I have my eye on a pair of Salomons. They’re actually very practical for the playground, I hear. But like death and taxes, unc-ness cannot be avoided, only uselessly resisted or accepted gracefully.

I recently hired a Gen Alpha 13 year old to help around the house. One morning, even though I knew I sounded like grandma reminiscing about the Olden Days, I couldn’t resist telling him:

“You know, it’s funny seeing you, because when I was your age, the memes were about, like, cheeseburger cat image macros. So I still somehow associate that meme with your age group. But that meme is ancient history to you. You guys must have all different memes now.”

I then asked him to pray tell me what memes the kids were into.

He described something involving replacing characters from The Odyssey with products that share their names, like Ajax Detergent. I didn’t really get it. But then again, I don’t think he expected me to.

I’ve always had a talent for rumination and anxiety. Reincarnate me in 13th Century Mongolia and I would be the one Steppe nomad gnawing my fingers to nubs over the upcoming horseback raid. But as it actually happened, my college years and early 20s overlapped neatly with what Matt Yglesias called “The Great Awokening” - that heady time from about 2014-2020, an era of mainstream leftist activism where identity politics loomed large, Tumblr was still letting us know that Your Fav Is Problematic without a hint of irony, and my friends were thrilled by the 98 new neopronoun options available on Facebook, a sure sign of the brighter future to come. And boy oh boy, was I on board!

However, the groundswell of activism and energy came with an undercurrent of anxiety. As we all learned, the personal is political, you grew up in the toxic stew of oppression we all live in, and we constantly either reify or dismantle it with our every choice. So, you know, no fucking pressure.

I was big into fighting the systems of oppression, and so were all my friends. But doing so required constant self-surveillance for various internalized -isms, which I understood to inhabit all of us like vengeful spirits from our ugly past, constantly threatening to take control. Were my words problematic? Were my thoughts bigoted? Had I, in my vast ignorance, uttered a Microaggression? I used to audit my thoughts and words constantly, the process thrumming like an anxious background hum. When I did misspeak, and one of my friends’ faces turned sour and serious to indicate I had Fucked Up (TM), the anxiety would spike into a full-body bloom of shame and panic. Abort, abort, go back, stammer out an apology and think on your sins!! Even the presence of this anxiety was, of course, a form of White Woman Guilt, which I knew to be a toxic and counterproductive thing - how could I be preoccupied with my own stupid anxiety from my position of privilege? My awareness that my anxiety was toxic only made me feel more anxious.

My forays into “Am I Really Transgender And What Kind” were only an extension of this moral-purity-fueled thinking. Every element of the decision making process was shot through with self-auditing for internalized transphobia, dismissal of doubts that could be seen as “cis-normative”, and otherwise backed by a frantic fear that meant my head was never cool. Predictably, the results were a disaster.

But I didn’t come here to rehash my transtrender phase. Nor did I come to administer one last beating to the dead horse of Ill-Advised Tumblr Leftism.

I came here to talk about Computer Science.

They say every neurotic obsession protects the sufferer from their real, more painful fear. Maybe my navel-gazing on gender identity and internalized -isms subconsciously protected me from facing other, scarier questions.

Such as: “What job am I going to have?”

And: “Am I socially off-putting enough that it’s causing me problems, and if so, how do I stop?”

And, increasingly: “Is my lifestyle as a bohemian layabout going to slowly become more and more full of squalor and chaos until I am actually a full-blown adult failure-to-launch who didn’t realize it until all her high school friends had already finished up Law School?”

After I hit rock bottom, I swore two things. One, I would never let things get this bad again. Two, I would get the hell out of the restaurant industry and get a more enjoyable job, something interesting and well paid, and ideally where I got to type on the computer, which was my favorite thing to do in all the world.

“Every harried renter, driver, and suitor you see around you as you go through a typical week is essentially reinventing the wheel. They don’t need a therapist; they need an algorithm. The therapist tells them to find the right, comfortable balance between impulsivity and overthinking.

The algorithm tells them the balance is thirty-seven percent.”

― Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, from Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

One of the first things that drew me back into tech was this book called “Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions.” The basic thesis was that computer science has a menu of well-established algorithms (a set of steps that solve a discrete problem) and heuristics (techniques to approach problems without a defined correct answer) that are used to make things happen, and they work surprisingly well for regular life decisions, too. While this may sound lizard-brained and unappealing, it was actually a breath of fresh air compared to my previous heuristics of “audit myself mercilessly for Bad Thoughts and try not to think them” and “ruminate endlessly on worries with no real action plan.” The book proffered computer-science-inspired strategies for diverse human problems ranging in profundity from “when should I park my car” to “who should I marry.” And it also offered this curative against further anxiety:

“Even the best strategy sometimes yields bad results—which is why computer scientists take care to distinguish between ‘process’ and ‘outcome.’ If you followed the best possible process, then you’ve done all you can, and you shouldn’t blame yourself if things didn’t go your way.”
― Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, from Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

The idea that problem spaces could be knowable and there were understandable techniques I could use to solve problems was immensely reassuring. It also intrigued me - maybe the field was more approachable than I had initially thought. And so began my second education and romance with the World of Computers. And this time, I vowed I would go deeper than my adolescent adventures in hotlinking blinking Neopet gifs. This time, I would Learn To Code.

One of the first online courses I took was by a woman who herself was a career changer - Angela Yu, a model-turned-doctor-turned-developer. She reflected on how frustrating the broken software systems in the hospital were, how inefficient the systems, how badly everything seemed to work with no apparent solution. She said learning to code helped her make things that worked, and that was satisfying.

The next thing I did was a programming retreat at Recurse Center, a community where programmers of all levels got together and focused on their craft. I was an extreme newbie, and showed my ignorance easily. However, the culture of Recurse Center was explicitly warm, friendly, non-hierarchical and encouraging. “Pair-programming,” where you share your screen and work together on code, was encouraged. Experienced, brilliant coders would happily walk me through my dinky little problems. No one ever made me feel bad about being a beginner. Mentorship was a big part of the culture, and not only that, it seemed like a lot of these people took genuine pride and pleasure in mentoring others.

Maybe part of what made it work was the economic environment: It was a time when it seemed like anyone could learn to code, get a good job, become upwardly mobile. People took pleasure in helping each other out, it wasn’t a zero-sum game. Whatever the cause, it was genuinely a pleasure to be in such a supportive environment.

Through a connection from Recurse Center, I eventually found out about a paid software apprenticeship program at a consultancy with a very similar ethos. Mentorship was a huge value, and even their highest-level employees were encouraged to set aside their valuable time each week to teach the new crop of apprentices. I was blessed with a highly brilliant and kind woman as a mentor. This was the luckiest professional time in my life, the last wave where a fairly bright liberal arts grad could pick up a copy of Uncle Bob’s Clean Code, take some online Javascript courses, and tech firms would give her a chance.

In college, we talked a lot about empowerment. Well, my software apprenticeship was empowering in a very real way - it gave me the power to set goals and achieve them. On the computer, sure, but still. What was so satisfying about learning to code is that the problem space was finite and knowable. We are not trying to figure out how to reorder the world and society in a better image. We are trying to connect to a HTTP server. I can’t control the world. But I can control my code. If all else fails, and I gave it a really good try, I can ask the helpful senior engineer, and she will definitely know, and she won’t even be mean to me about it.

And the mindset that I began to develop from this practice was a different one from my interpretive, subjective, expressive writing mindset. I learned about concepts such as debugging. Your thing isn’t doing what it is supposed to do. You have to find out why. Where is the bug? What is the problem? Don’t just throw up your hands in despair, this isn’t solving global warming, you wrote the code - go back and trace through it. There are various approaches. You can take different tactics. But you will know if you’ve done it. The test will pass, the socket will connect, the HTTP message will arrive with its headers intact and the proper formatting. No, it’s not solving the big problems in the world. But it’s something. And it can be used to make something useful.

Wow. Sweet relief. To be faced with limited problems that I can sometimes solve was great. Even when the problem was hard, eventually finally solving it provided something I never got while pondering the Systemic Problems of Society’s Stratification: Closure. Payoff. The satisfaction of saying - I GOT YOU, BUG.

Another important principle was Test-Driven Development. This started out embarrassingly simple. You would assert, in computer language:

“When I run the function AddTwoToAnyNumber, which adds 2 to whatever number you give it, and I give it the input 4, I expect it will return 6. If I input the word “Cheeseburger”, I expect it to throw an error, since you can’t add 2 to a cheeseburger in a way that makes sense to a computer.”

And then, having established your expectations, you write the function. And the test passes. And you continue building this way. Although each function should do a small, understandable discrete job, complex and vast systems can be built out of these blocks. I came to understand that precision and specificity were very important. Every complex software system was built out of understandable blocks. Our job was to assemble the code in ways that solved the problems we needed to solve, as elegantly and simply as possible.

I watched my mentors go through huge codebases, totally incomprehensible, and make things happen. At my first look, it was all equally inscrutable to me. I was like, there’s no fucking way that can be understood. And then I started to understand, little by little. That’s a function, we can click through to where it is defined and see what it’s doing using the power of VSCode, and little by little, we begin to get an idea.

The other thing that blew me away was the way that the experienced engineers had vast backlogs of hard-earned experience to reference. I was having a hell of a time getting Ruby installed on my Mac (real ones understand) and had to have my mentor work it out. She pulled up the terminal and was clacking away, zooming around the files and debugging. I was like “How do you know what to do here?” And she was breezily like “oh, you know, I have a lot of experience and I’ve seen some of the same things before.”

No one has perfect total knowledge of a large production codebase. You may not know immediately why your app crashed when you tried to build it (although hopefully you’ve set it up so that the errors give you some pretty good clues). But through patience, testing, and methodical thought, you can probably figure it out.

That didn’t mean the bugs weren’t frustrating. I can’t tell you how many times I was sitting, unable to understand Why Doesn’t The Stupid Thing Work, banging my head. But coders actually have some built in practices to dissipate the mental fog that builds from working on a problem too long. One of them is rubber-ducking - you describe your understanding of the problem (to a rubber duck, in the original concept) and often come up with new ideas or holes in your understanding as you do so. Another one is literally walking away, taking a phone-free 10 minute walk and letting your subconscious cook a little bit. I can’t tell you how often I have an “aha” moment when I am no longer forcing the issue in a frustrated, anxious state.

It’s interesting how managing your emotional state is actually a skill that’s taught for the intellectual work of programming. It’s applicable to a lot else, too. But in a job where keeping a cool, rational head is literally a prerequisite to success, it makes sense that these tricks of the trade end up being shared. It made a nice change from the anxious, ever-present ruminating that I partook in during my college activism days. Turns out it’s just not all that helpful to, well, anything.

I didn’t become some kind of analytical Spock. That was never in the cards for me. But I no longer let my neurotic impulses run away into ruminative spirals unchecked. I’m not working in tech right now, but I try to keep the useful practices of coding alive. My feelings brain looks at a hard problem and gets overwhelmed, feels shame, doubts if she has what it takes to do something so out of the ordinary. Engineer brain thinks “well, maybe I need more information about the problem space, but a lot of other people manage to do this, so probably it’s doable if I figure out what steps they took.”

And the big problems, the systems, the political forces outside of my control: it’s not that I don’t care about them anymore. I do, often. But I think, to re-purpose another programmer’s phrase, I’ve established a separation of concerns. Anxiety and helplessness about the state of the world should be met with a brisk 10-minute walk and a new plan for doing what’s under my control, not an endless hopeless scrolling session.

I’m not a careful woman. I’m just not very good at following directions correctly on the first try.

I’ve also never met a social contagion that I wasn’t tempted by. So during the great sourdough craze of the pandemic, I fell in love. The tradwife aesthetic was still exotic and marginal, not overplayed, I had been stuck in my squalid NYC ground floor one-bedroom without a whiff of outside human contact, and I craved tactile beauty and accomplishment. I wanted to greet my husband at the door (not that he left the house either) in my long Hill House knockoff dress holding a golden artisanal loaf.

“Wow,” he would say in my fantasy, biting into a slice covered in melting Kerrygold butter. “This is so much better than anything you can get at the store.”

“I know,” I would say coyly, my daisy-print puff-sleeves fluttering fetchingly in the fetid draft from the nearby subway. “You know why? It’s because it’s made with love.”

My parents mailed me beautiful loaf-rising baskets and clay bakers for my birthday. I dutifully mixed the slurry of flour and tangy starter and water, let it sit in the swirled basket (“hmmm, not rising much, maybe it’ll rise in the oven”, I thought to myself, optimistically), and then into the baker - and what emerged was sorry indeed. Dense, grey, shapeless. It was sour, at least, but bread? I don’t know if it qualified.

I still don’t know what went wrong with the sourdough. The starter must have been dead from the start, or I waited too long for the rise, or else not long enough. Hell if I know. Disappointed but not deterred, I tried again. But each loaf was flat, gross, tragic. I try to be plucky and persistent, but there’s only so many times I can rally in the face of overwhelming failure.

After too many disappointments, I bought a foil packet of quick-rise yeast and tried another recipe. Sourdough starter is fussy, temperamental, romantic, following its own whims. But the industrially produced yeast knew what it was there to do and got the job done. The recipe lacked the romance of the sourdough - no witchy starter goo, bubbling in the fridge like an arcane potion, and the loaves it produced were a lot more pedestrian. But the little yeast loaves were cute, golden, hot, fresh, and delicious. It scratched the itch. Good enough.

It wasn’t the original plan, and it took way longer than it would have for a careful woman, but I am not a careful woman. You can tell from the scarred-over piercings on my ears, crack in my voice, the bruises on my thighs: I sometimes have to learn things the hard way.

More recently, I heard someone talking about Japanese Milk Bread and fell in love again. It looked lightly sweet, dense, and golden. The soft pillowy texture looked entrancing. And there was something about the way it was made with milk and cream that made it feel fortified, healthful, good for children.

I found a recipe that the author assured me had been perfected after months of trials. Well, the first time I tried, sure enough - failure. Not her fault! I let it rise too long, the yeast was exhausted, and when it baked in the oven, the rolls were tough and dense. And the second time, I somehow did even worse. Distracted by my toddler, I forgot the salt, rendering the batch totally bland! (I rescued the second half of the dough by smothering it in garlic butter and salty cheese to make monkey bread).

But the third time, I made sure to add all the ingredients. I kneaded the dough in the Kitchenaid for a very long time. In a little flash of inspiration, I added a generous spoonful of powdered vanilla to the sweet milky dough. Then I let it rise on the radiator. The fragrant orb of dough that I found 2 hours later was perfectly round, domed, white with little vanilla speckles. When I brushed it with one fingertip, it was as soft as my infant son’s cheek.

That batch was sublime. The baby went to work on it with his little teeth in the way he does all bread: methodical, thoughtful, producing vast quantities of crumbs. I was pleasantly surprised that the toddler liked it too. He usually doesn’t go for bread, but he scooped out the soft white innards and left the golden chewy rind behind. My husband ate his normal egg sandwich on it - a huge improvement from an English Muffin. Finally, success. I glowed, simpered, gave away half loaves to friends so they would compliment me on my baking acumen.

As I write this, my kids are sleeping and my next batch is baking in the oven. I added vanilla again, but it’s taking much longer to bake than I expected. I hope it turns out okay, but I don’t know - maybe I forgot the stupid yeast this time. What can I do, but put it back in the oven and cross my fingers?

Bread recipe appendix:

Milk bread - this is really good. If you follow the instructions, you will be rewarded.

Easy Perfect Yeast Bread - this is indeed easy. All the satisfaction, none of the pain.

So, as most readers of this blog know, during my gender transition attempt, I got “top surgery” and had my breasts removed. Later, I had 2 kids. And, no big surprise, I couldn’t breastfeed them.

When I first started to think about having kids, I had this horrible sense of doom about not being able to breastfeed. In my internet and in-person social spaces alike, everyone is very pro-breastfeeding — with good reason, of course. It has a lot of health benefits, it keeps you connected with your child in a very primal way, you get to nourish your baby with your own special milk tailored to them, with different hormones and antibodies at different times of day — it’s a magical process. And formula just doesn’t compare, even just aesthetically. It’s from a can, it’s full of seed oils (this was very declassé a few years ago, btw), it smells kind of weird.

I thought not being able to breastfeed would be really, really hard. Actually, once my first baby was born, the really big sorrow never came. I was too busy taking care of my baby to wallow.

I’m not here to argue that breast isn’t best. I know there are a lot of benefits, and it’s better to do it. But I guess what I’m saying is — you know how there are certain fears that are worse than reality? Well, whatever I was worried was going to happen when my kids were not breastfed — I’m not sure exactly what it was — but they were fine. The formula was sufficient to let them grow healthily. Maybe secretly I had internalized the breast-is-best thing so hard that I secretly expected formula to cause some obvious nutritional deficiency, or like my baby would look at me and be like “Mommy, yuck, this has seed oils!! How can you poison me thus?”

Actually, though, they just guzzled it from the bottle no problem and then fell asleep milk drunk making little sip-sip-sip mouth motions for several moments after I removed the nipple. Not the primal breastfeeding experience, but still very sweet and heartwarming.

My dad was formula-fed in the days where they just mixed together condensed milk and corn syrup, and he grew up strong and tall and got many advanced degrees. Of course, to say “my kids turned out fine” is not to say “they wouldn’t have benefitted.” Maybe they would have 10 more IQ points or not have gotten sick ever or some other benefit. I’ll never know. I can’t access the other universe. And I still feel a pang when I hear other women describe how wonderful breastfeeding is — it seems truly profound, to feed your child from your own body, to feel the milk let down in response to their hunger signals. But listen: we’re okay. My children were and are smiling, interested in the world, lovable, and seemed totally fine. There is plenty of love between us.

But there was one thing that became apparent quickly. They were not very good at sleeping.

Most of my peer parents did the same time-tested solution: cosleep and breastfeed. When the baby starts to stir at 5am, pop a breast in the mouth, snooze til 7 or 8. Impossible for me. I experimented with different approaches: first mixing up a formula at 3am, which worked on until one day I didn’t screw the cap on and rained sticky formula down over the whole bed when I shook it. Then, I got a Baby Brezza, which mixes the bottles for you but makes an industrial “BRRRRRR” noise and constantly runs out of powder without any indicator. I landed on a bedside mini-fridge, which can actually be gotten for quite cheap, mixing up bottle before bed and dispensing them thru the night with no prep. This was the best solution, but still a far cry from “pop a boob in baby’s mouth and doze off.”

The sleep situation got pretty dire, and stayed that way, for many years. Max started sleeping through the night a few months after Sammy was born. We had to sleep train Sammy. It seems like my kids just wake up at 5am for their entire first year of life — maybe the breastfeeding snooze button would have made the difference. Then again, maybe not. I myself was breastfed and a terrible sleeper — my own mother got up with me though the night til I was 3 and my sister was born. It’s hard to pin down definitive answers with babies. What’s genetic? What’s environmental? They’re so mysterious, those little bastards!

I was bitching about this while hanging out with a hilarious and too-the-point mom friend as she nursed her baby in a restaurant and she was like - “Hey, can I say something? I’m not trying to minimize your feelings or anything but… you kinda got off easy. Breastfeeding really sucks.”

She was struggling with the hormone swings, the 24/7 pressure to feed that landed all on her, the pumping. I think these things vary woman-to-woman, but especially for energetic ladies who have things they’d rather do, the physical tax of prolonged breastfeeding takes a real toll. I hadn’t really considered this at first, but some women genuinely dislike the process. But the more I talked to other women candidly, the more I heard of these kinds of challenges.

“Oh yeah, I get this huge swell of rage when the milk comes down,” said one mom friend nonchalantly. Whoa.

I am always astounded by the everyday feats of physical endurance my fellow parents pull off. When it’s your own kids, even the most frustrating, grueling struggles are suffused with a sense of purpose. All this to say - I don’t mean “phew, breastfeeding seems too hard, so I’m glad I can’t do it.” Just as other challenges of birth and raising babies were worth it, I would have liked to take on the challenges of breastfeeding. But it’s good to remember, also, that I’m not necessarily missing out on some easy-breezy experience.

My second child Sammy is almost one, which means he’s graduating from formula! No more dispensing little scoops of powder on the playground benches, just good old cow milk and rubber plates full of berries and pasta and chicken and whatever else I can get him to try. He only has 4 teeth, so his chewing skills are still a little rudimentary. Yesterday I gave him a piece of baguette for breakfast, which he chipmunked into his cheek for a minute or so and then retrieved, sodden but intact. He waved the moistened bread around for a moment and then, with all the clunky precision of Larry Bird in his prime, slammed the bread across the table onto my husband’s plate.

“Oh, that’s okay, I don’t need that,” said my husband with a wince, handing the soaked bread back to him.

"Da,” said Sammy, and hurled the bread back onto his father’s plate, where it landed once again with astonishing accuracy. Formula-fed or not, he’s shaping up to be a real troublemaker.

There are many charming sights available to the people-watcher in New York City, but to me, none quite so charming as a really well-turned-out grandpa. There are some older gentlemen who just really have that shit on. Why are they so singularly delightful - their rarity, their individuality, the gratifying reminder that it’s possible and enjoyable to keep taking aesthetic care of yourself into your golden years? Little of each, maybe. In any case, I’m always happy to see them. I love giving fashion compliments but rarely give them to men, since the flirtation subtext is always lurking. I make an exception for a stylish grandpa. I figure the generational gap plus the baby and toddler permanently affixed to my body clear up any possible implication that I may be angling for an age-gap relationship.

First, the Borzoi guy. There’s a guy who walks around with two Borzoi dogs, one on each side, as calm and orderly as if they were trained for a tsar. The dogs are the most striking part — they look like beautiful fairytale horses — but he also dresses so incredibly well. In the summer, he’s usually in a two-piece linen suit and a straw fedora. Not the terminally unfashionable m’lady-ish kind, the wide-brimmed classic kind. In the winter, he switches to one of those Russian-style fur cylinder hats and, no joke, a leather motorcycle jacket. Once I said “beautiful dogs!” and he replied without missing a beat “Thank you. Beautiful baby!”

Perfect answer. Very classy.

Then there was the plaid coat train guy. It was late March, I was sitting there blabbing to my baby as usual. I noticed his coat was made of an unusually fine looking tartan material - light blue wool, I think, with green and yellow threads forming the stripes. It didn’t cross over into gaudiness - the colors were heathered and somewhat subdued - but it stood out with verve and springiness in the sea of black puffer jackets on the subway. I liked it so much. But he wasn’t making eye contact. I chickened out, and went on babbling to Sammy and Maxwell in my usual way. Then, I decided to go for it.

“I like your coat,” I said cheerfully.

“Huh?” He said, confused, extracting an AirPod.

I was embarrassed to have interrupted, but had to land the plane. “I like your coat! It’s a beautiful plaid.”

He burst into a wide smile. “Thanks. Hey, Sammy’s my name too. I raised two kids in the city. You take care.”

Very nice.

The third one was too cool to compliment. He was on the subway, standing despite open seats, thin as a rail with fluffy, wild hair. He was wearing those bulbous Yeezy sneakers, and had on a leather jacket. He looked like one of those members of a rock band that’s still performing 50 years later - just incredible amounts of swagger. But I wasn’t sitting close enough, and his rocker vibe gave him an air of non-approachability anyway. So I just watched in distant appreciation. Some people are still cooler at 70 than some others ever manage to be.

More recently, I was walking around a touristy section of 5th Avenue with my toddler, when I saw a grizzled older man in a kilt. Very fun, very Outlander. Another cool guy for the collection - maybe he’s Scottish and visiting, I thought?

But then a curious thing happened.

A few blocks later, I saw another man in a kilt. Huh. Now, here in NYC, you might see many different unusual outfits. I once saw a man in full facial mime makeup (but only the face, no striped shirt or beret) buying a camera case from retail employees who betrayed not a jot of surprise. But it is unusual to see two such outfits in disconnected parties. And then, I shit you not, I saw a third one. Maybe there actually was an Outlander-style magic stone bringing in Scottish men from the past, who somehow were also wearing sneakers.

And then, a few blocks later, I saw a large pop-up stand for Walker’s Shortbread Cookies being put up, complete with red-and-black tartan check in the background, and noticed some police officers starting to cordon off the street with the little fences they use when parades are happening.

And then, with the embarrassing lateness with which such realizations usually come to me in these sleep-deprived days, I realized.

“It must be some kind of kilt parade today.”

Actually, it was the 2026 Tartan Day Parade, an annual tradition, it turns out.

And the guy from Outlander — the main one — actually was there, leading the parade. Go figure.

I will continue to enjoy observing the nonstop fashion show from the subway seat or behind the stroller, and I expect I will be pleasantly surprised again. There is much to reward my attention, if I can remember to look up and give it. And a tip of the Panama hat to all the debonair grandpas - you really do make my day.

When I started out as a parent, I was like “I will never let my child glance at a screen. Even FaceTime seems unwholesome.” but pretty quickly renegotiated down to “We will watch movies, but only on the projector, and only things that have aesthetic value and are not annoying, except if we’re on an airplane, and then it’s an iPad Paw Patrol free for all.”

So, in that vein, we have been rewatching some Disney classics. Many of them hold up well. We watched Mulan with our kids recently, and I enjoyed that great scene - I’ll Make A Man Out Of You - where the soldiers start out pathetic and hapless and fail over and over again at their tasks, until slowly they figure it out and start karate-chopping fish out of the water and somersaulting across rivers and shooting flaming arrows through tomatoes. It’s awesome.

There should be a version of the song called “Be a mom.” I can see my own personal montage now: It starts with me sitting helpless at the top of the stairs to the subway with my stroller, unsure what to do. Or maybe I’m crashing out from hunger after an active morning chasing a wailing toddler. Or perhaps I’m getting woken up by a wailing baby at 12:30, then 2:30, then 4:30, then falling asleep in my coffee as the baby plays nearby at 5:15 a.m. Then slowly, you’d see me start to figure it out.

“You must be swift as a coursing river” the song would sing as I dart forward to snatch an unchild-safe piece of wire out of my baby’s mouth.

“With all the force of a great typhoon,” as I firmly say, “Goodnight!” to both boys and shut the door with no crying.

“With all the strength of a raging fire,” our heroine boldly folds her stroller at the top of the subway step, walks down with the baby on her chest and the toddler holding her hand.

“Mysterious as the dark side of the moon” : a mom on the playground says admiringly, “I don’t know how you handle both of them all day,” and I say with a cryptic smile, “Oh, you know, you work out certain routines.” Cut to us all collapsed on the couch watching My Neighbor Totoro.

—

I used to be so in my head. I used to laugh at how badly I ate, how messy I was, how clumsy I was. It was so funny, I was like a little rom-com heroine, tripping through life haphazardly, living in my artistic little room with posters and clothes on the chair and old mugs of tea molding in the corner. But the stakes have risen significantly. You can’t go around tripping and bumping into things when you’re holding a baby. And if you slack on the dishes in the morning, by evening, a sentient pile of laundry and crusty bowls and Magnatiles will have assembled and be wreaking havoc in your house. And if you skip breakfast and have a granola bar for lunch, the version of you that faces the afternoon witching hour will make you understand that evil lurks in every soul and is alive in yours. So as much as I’m capable of, I’ve had to get my shit together.

—

When I was in high school, I carried around a lot of bags, such that one high school teacher called to me in the hallway like “Hey there bag lady,” which I wasn’t offended by, because I didn’t know what “bag lady” meant. But then my friend told me. And then I realized that I must look kind of crazy with my knitting bag and my purse and my crossbody messenger bag (this was cooler than a backpack in 2009).

But now, hauling around giant bags of stuff is no longer a personal choice. It’s non-optional. We have no car, so everything needs to be taken either by stroller or by hand. I experiment with different diaper bags. I hate the custom-made diaper bags, even the “cool modern” ones have a palpable whiff of cheugy mom-product-ness. Lately, I’ve been using a huge zip-top LL Bean Boat n’ Tote. If I’m truly going to go out on a multi-hour outing with both kids, I need a pair of backup pants and socks and a little portable potty seat for Max, diapers and wipes for Sammy, formula and a bottle with pre-measured water for Sammy, a nose-and-spitup wiping cloth, a few snacks for Max, a water bottle for me, a few toys for Max, my phone, my keys, my wallet.

Actually, I got a little wallet-pocket for my phone lately, so that saves a little bit of time. Whee!

Leaving the house makes me think of that Navy SEAL saying - Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. If I galavant out the door without a thorough think-through of all the equipment we need, I’m sure to either run back into the house 3 times (“Oh shit!! The diaper pouch!!”) or worse, end up at the playground covered in formula spit-up with no dabbing cloth. I am slowly getting better at this. But it’s never perfect.

Just today, on the bus ride back from a visit to The FireTruck museum, Max got hungry. I gave him the rest of the freeze-dried bananas, and the packet of apple sauce. But it wasn’t enough snacks. We were too close to lunch. He started to melt down. Old ladies were huffing sighs and looking askance at us. We were on the slow bus crawling back uptown, and hitting every Red Light. Max was demanding I produce an additional treat out of the Baggu Reusable Bag I had crumpled at the bottom of my tote, and I unfolded it for him to show it was empty, and he just demanded more. Disaster.

Luckily, our fellow toddler parents had packed a little more sensibly. They produced apples, grapes, little containers of cashews and peanuts. Max ate 7 grapes, 1 cashew, and turned back into an angel for the next 40 blocks. Crisis averted. This time.

I add mixed nuts and grapes to my next grocery order.

—

In the vein of “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” another saying that has become all too relevant is something my mom — a very high achieving woman both professionally and family-life-wise — would say. “Good is better than perfect, and done is better than good.” I recounted it to a veteran coworker while we were trying to kludge together some very busted old legacy code, and he quipped, “Who is your mom, General Patton?”

Homemaking does not come naturally to me. But in the spirit of General Patton/my mom, I’m trying to violently execute chores today instead of waiting for the perfect plan next week. When I have the energy, I take on a kind of manic tidy-as-you-go attitude to try to contain the chaos. I do not want to live in a terrible house full of clutter. Children are magnets for clutter. I’m a slob myself. It’s a disaster. I’ve been manically throwing children’s clothes into laundry bins, dropping huge trash bags of old belongings in my stroller to any church that will take them, the “Buy Nothing” group members, or if all else fails, the actual trash. I try not to pass through a room without picking something up to put it where it goes. I am in a war against chaos that I can never fully win.

My house is really, really mediocre. But it could be a lot worse. It could be hoarder levels. It could be wall-to-wall toys. That kind of chaos is well within the realm of possibility. But I beat it back, day by day, with the manic intensity. Violently executed, now! Get back in the laundry bin, peanut-butter-smeared pants! Surrender, disgusting ketchup-crusted plate! Round up the Montessori Play Food Set and THROW THEM IN THE BRIG!

—

As I write this, it’s almost 9pm. I want to stay up browsing credenzas. I want to make pixel-art flowers. I want to knit a sock. I want a little bit of wine. I want to text my sister a detailed accounting of everything I considered purchasing on Poshmark today. But Sammy sounds his morning reveille at 5:30am sharp, and lately I’ve been getting kind of serious about sleep. So instead I’ll just throw some dishes in the sink, wash my face, and go to bed.

Can I be honest about something? I’ve been struggling a little bit with my choice to be a stay at home mom.

I’m worried I present an overly simplistic picture on this blog like “Oh, here’s my inspiring story, I used to be a big mess, and now I’m this wholesome mom and I’m totally contented.” And listen, my life is miles better than it used to be. I’m much, much happier. My worst day today is way better than my worst day then, thank goodness.

And also: there’s a lot to love about being a mom, and a stay at home mom in particular. It feels right to keep my kids close at this age, and we get to have these sweet little wondrous adventures whenever we want. Relaxed mornings at the playground chatting with my mom friends, riding the subway downtown on a whim to pick up croissants, taking an epic stroller walk with a podcast and taking in the beautiful architecture. Plus, the chores would not stop being there if I worked full time, they would simply have to be crammed onto the weekends. Me being at home right now creates peace. And even to be able to do it at all is an economic privilege — one that I don’t take for granted. But still, I struggle with certain elements.

I think it really comes down to the floor noodles.

My kids are at an age where eating meals routinely creates showers of noodles — or rice, or salmon flakes, or whatever else it is they’re eating. I put the baby in his high chair, prep littles plates for both of them, and they eat with gusto. It’s really cute. But the baby really makes it rain, and the toddler isn’t much better. So after the meal, there’s tons of food to clean up. And then as soon as that’s cleaned up, a few hours later, there’s another meal. And although I may sing the cleanup song and wave the broom in my toddler’s direction, he doesn’t really get the memo. So there’s this eternal tedious war against mess that I can never truly win.

And another problem with being a stay at home mom is there is very little feedback, so I can’t tell if I’m doing a good job. Well, in one sense, my kids give me a lot of feedback. But also: my toddler shrieks like a Nazgul if I put spinach in his rice. And he does the most adorable little happy dance when I give him extra chocolate chips. Do you see how that’s not the most disinterested feedback to be taking? If I wanted good feedback, I would just let the Cadbury eggs flow and put Kiki’s Delivery Service on loop.

I’ve had this low-grade angst about it even as I enjoy my children’s company. I guess I also felt like I was missing some intellectual stimulation, some sense of achievement. I fretted on and off, annoying my husband — is my career gone for good? Should I go back to work? Am I putting our family in peril? He tries to reassure me, but the nagging thoughts perplexed me. Does he think I’m an adequate mother? Does he understand how hard this is? Is he telling me I’m doing a good job enough? My love language is words of affirmation, please affirm me!! Please tell me it’s all worth it!! I’m insecure about letting go of my career!!

Some clarification has recently arrived. I’ve been reading this book Passionate Marriage by Dr. David Schnarch, and there’s this concept in the book that comes up again and again called “differentiation.” It’s where you understand yourself, accept yourself, and take responsibility for your own desires. The theory is that if you are differentiated, you are — paradoxically (it seemed to me at first) — more able to have honest, authentic relationships based on mutual desire and understanding. It made me realize that my stay-at-home-mom insecurity was not something I could expect my husband to fully soothe me on — nor should I. And then that reminded me of that amazing Joan Didion essay that I come back to again and again — On Self-Respect. Schnarch’s emphasis on “differentiation” seems almost identical to Didion’s idea of self-respect. They both include assessing yourself honestly, taking stock, and having ownership of your choices.

Didion speaks of self-respect in terms that exactly mirror Schnarch’s ideas of why “differentiation” is good for a marriage:

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.”

Now, I know a thing or two about being in thrall to people’s false notions of me.

—

I think one of the main mistakes at the center of my disastrous gender transition was thinking that changing how others people saw me would provide some kind of fundamental change in my life. I think I was particularly delusional about this, but I remember when I finally started to pass to strangers, it was like — oh. Is this it? I guess on some insane delusional level I thought that it would re-make me to receive that affirmation as a man, that it would allow me to thrive. In retrospect, this was super foolish.

Even still, I held out hopes that the surgery would have more dramatic results. Gender-affirming care, right? What’s more serious than surgery when it comes to affirming ? But for whatever reason, the magic spell didn’t work. My gender identity was not affirmed and strengthened — I was just cast into depression and physical shock from the gruesome surgery. The pain and loss felt as meaningless as if I had gone to the doctor and asked them to just bash me on the head a couple times with a rock as a fix for my depression and listlessness — the disillusionment was total.

It’s only in these brutal moments, when our comforting delusions get stripped away, that we have any hope of getting real with ourselves. So I tried to build myself back up, this time into a person that I could respect and be happy with.

—

And then just as the dust settled from that, I embarked on another self-image shakeup, although happily, this one involved no bodily harm and was even sometimes pretty enjoyable. After I was interviewed about my detransition on 60 Minutes, I got a lot of public feedback. A lot of it was incredibly nice. But I also had the disquieting experience of my reputation being totally destroyed among other factions. It really stressed me out - and it destabilized me. Was I a brave selfless hero for coming forward with my detransition story? Or was I, in fact, a rank bigot, hatefully trying to destroy trans people’s lives?

Of course, I was neither. I was a wounded, outraged young woman who had been through this awful experience and could not stand the lies and the obfuscation and the lack of responsibility that anyone in the medical establishment was taking at the time. I felt totally gaslit by the people around me and I wanted to scream about it to anyone who would listen. I was bitter, yes, and I was hurt. And of course, it was kind of exciting to go on the tv shows. I’ll admit to that! There were moments that were really fun.

But a hateful bigot or a grifter? I guess it gave me a twang of confusion and hurt feelings because I was like - hey, I basically am trans in a lot of ways. I mean, I’m not living as a man, but I have had so many experiences that trans people have - I don’t hate the community.

And then there was the opposite reaction - people thanking me for my bravery, showering me with praise, saying how wise I am - and of course, I loved that part! It was SO NICE. Do you know that JK Rowling retweeted me? Do you know how amazing that made me feel? I stayed up all night reading the Harry Potter books each time one came out!! I was on Cloud Nine!

Ah, how sweet the nectar of online validation! I ended up kind of craving more, more attention, more praise, more compliments. It was like a drug. It gave me a high. (Please don’t take this as rebuke if you were someone who said nice things to me. I love it if you said nice things to me. Thank you for saying nice things to me and please feel free to continue to do so. It’s just that being on the internet kind of messes with your head.) You start to be like - wow, am I actually soooo amazing?

So, it was kind of a trip. I spent - maybe wasted - a lot of time trying to defend myself from the criticism - “look, guys, I know I have my flaws, but I’m seriously not just a hateful bigot, okay??”

Shockingly, no amount of blog posts could have prevented a bunch of internet strangers being mad at me for complaining about gender transition. Eventually, the feedback was so intense that I had to step away. I think it could have literally made me insane. I feel a bit better now. No one hits me up for podcasts anymore, sure, but also, I haven’t had a smear piece written about me in Gender-Fluid Daily Tribune, so that’s good. And after the smoke had cleared, I think I was able to come to the conclusion that we all have to come to: I’m neither so bad nor so good as people think I am. And also, crucially, that other people have their right to disapprove of me. And some of them might even have some valid critiques from time to time.

But as Didion says of reputation and approval:

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

I am trying to have courage.

—

So this brings me back to stay at home motherhood.

I think that on some level, I needed to confront that head-on and then make my choice. I stayed home with my kids for a few years. I’m going to try to do things to keep my skills up so I can get back to work. I know it will be an uphill battle to become employed again. Them’s the breaks. I think I can accept it because to me, it’s worth it to be home with my kids. And in the meantime, I need to try to be the best mom I can be.

So I’ve had to kind of develop criteria for myself. What’s a good day at home with the kids? We go outside. Ideally, the toddler gets to play with a friend at the playground. They eat some square meals instead of having croissants on the go for lunch (we are all addicted to croissants on the go). I read them some books. We snuggle. Hopefully everyone’s in a good mood when their dad gets home. I don’t have total control over this. But there are things I can do to make the good outcome more likely.

And the other piece of it, the part of me that misses using her brain and mourns her lost tech career — it turns out there was something I could do other than just be bored and complain about it. You’re seeing! It’s restarting my blog. I think my commitment to publishing one piece a week will keep me on track, and it gives me something to think about while sweeping up the floor noodles.

On a really personal level, what disappoints me with my detransition saga was the way I took the easy way out, and I didn’t listen to those little voices in my head that came up with doubts, the twist in my gut as they wheeled me into the surgery room. I willfully let myself be in a fog until the price of my self-delusion culminated in catastrophe. It’s higher stakes now- I want to look my sons in the eye and be proud of the choices I made - to stay at home with them and raise them the best as I can, but also to maintain my interests and my ability to make money in a way that balances with the needs of the family. I think the balance I have struck makes sense, but I’m going to keep re-assessing as I go forward. I don’t know what the future looks like, maybe I’ll get re-cancelled and have to start a stupid trauma podcast called Detransition Cancelled Mommy Keeps It Real. But I hope to navigate the decision with my eyes open.

What can I say, Shagbark? I feel your pain! I have been there. Many years ago in my Indiana state college, I found this amazing fitted leather red trench coat at Goodwill. It fit me like a glove and I was so thrilled.

I wore it out for the first time one evening, walking down the street to some little house show or another, and I passed a drunk group of young men in basketball shorts. “Going out hunting vampires?” one of them hooted. The others laughed at me.

And as Shagbark also noted, the fact that a bunch of men dressed in the Midwestern frat brother uniform of daytime pajamas felt the need to publicly shame my Sartorial Choices, was pretty rich. Maybe the squishy-faced 19 year old version of me didn’t really pull off the Buffy look - I can’t quite remember, but I’m sure it was paired with some not-quite-right combo, like leggings and beaten up Docs and some extremely patchy Manic Panic hairdye. But there’s no need to be a dick about it.

The red leather trenchcoat has been tragically lost to time. Mortified by my public shaming, I think I never again dared to wear it.

But I’m going to admit something. Even as the State School greek life kids judged me, I was judging them back. What was the point of their clothes - so slovenly-seeming, not at all edgy or tough? The girls wore Uggs in the winter and North Face puffer jackets, the guys wore t-shirts and sweatshirts and sweatpants with their sports team affiliations on them. I didn’t get it - it seemed so boring, so basic. Nothing about it appealed to me. Which, of course, was kind of the point.

We were of different sartorial tribes. The basketball shorts boys had a good likelihood of being Greek life brothers, whereas I was unambiguously part of the Alternative crew, identifiable by our wacky asymmetrical haircuts, facial piercings, oversized flannels worn over skinny jeans, etc, etc. This is what I’d call my Edgy Girl In Indiana Phase. The general vibe was “Pay attention to me!!!! but be intimidated. But pay attention!!”

I wanted to be like Lizbeth Salander, the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, mysterious, skilled, scary, competent. This despite having the manically chirpy personality of a midwestern middle class white girl and no particular acumen at hacking beyond making HTML fanpages about a cool horse I met on vacation. No matter how short I shaved my head or how many piercings I got, I never really felt like the cool, mysterious, tough girl that I wanted to be. It was all a front. I was an insecure young woman trying to cargo cult confidence with my septum piercing.

After my wannabe punk phase, I had my Trans Phase, where I dressed in embarrassing patterned button-down short sleeve t-shirts and bought men’s jeans and high-top sneakers and beanies and generally looked a sad hairless hobbit. Then I detransitioned, yadda yadda, longtime readers already know the story. There was not really any fun fashion of note at this time.

A few years later in my mid-20s, post-detransition, I followed my boyfriend to New York City. And if Indiana could be a little small-minded about clothes, NYC was a nonstop street style catwalk. I had never seen so many beautifully dressed women and men. I still remember this woman with this gorgeous French-twist hair, a pencil skirt, a silken blouse, a structured handbag, walking down the sidewalk in heels - she looked like a celebrity. I had never seen anyone looking that chic outside of a movie screen. I myself had just contracted a stomach bug and vomited after climbing a long set of stairs, and was as disheveled as she was put-together. She inspired and tantalized me. I wanted that look.

The other thing about New York City street fashion was that these were not amateurish outfits arranged around a Goodwill find, like my tragic leather trench outfit. These were stylish, cohesive, gorgeous outfits. They signaled taste, self-knowledge, and let’s face it - often, money.

Fashion Items That I Swore Would Fix Me

There’s a great Meghan Daum book called “Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House.” (It’s really good, you should read it). The title itself is so great - who doesn’t know that feeling of obsession, wanting, the desire for The Thing That Will Fix Everything? For me, more often, it’s like “Life Would Be Perfect If I Had That Coat/Those Boots/That Purse/That Matched Set.” Clothes are easy for me to obsess over because they’re so evocative. There’s something talismanic about them. A specific coat promises a whole new persona, a new version of myself.

Clothes brands are genius at creating these fantasies with their ad spreads and clothes lines. And the kicker is - it’s not just frivolous, it’s not something you can or should just ignore. Your clothes and style telegraph real things about you to the world, and it’s worth paying attention to and curating thoughtfully. Of course, it’s possible to go overboard. And I certainly have.

In my life, I have fallen in love with certain items. It’s usually a kind of obnoxious statement piece, and it’s always connected to whatever fantasy self I want to portray at the time. Following is an abbreviated list:

1. My very first Fashion Obsession were Galaxy Print Black Milk Leggings. It was the 2010s, the heyday of the Tumblr Girl, and this item was as iconic then as it has become cringe now. If you’re younger than 30, you might just have to trust me on this one.

2. The Coach Willis Garden Party Bag - a little leather purse covered in tiny fruits and vegetables and flowers. Part of the reason my Lisbeth Salander look didn’t really work out is that I’m actually a goofy sucker for twee nonsense. It’s maybe unbecoming in a woman of my age, but I’m afraid the little blue embroidered mushroom still really does it for me. The dream self - a whimsical, unencumbered version of me who skips through life like the protagonist of a perfume commercial, shopping at Farmers Markets and sipping a pistachio latte.

3. The Burberry Trench: It just kind of made me feel sophisticated and preppy and grown up, like one of those meme “Old Money” outfits. I bought a totally trashed coat on Ebay for a $200 and got it repaired. I actually still wear this one. And the other day I was out in Central Park wearing it, and this woman was like “Is that a Burberry? I’ll trade you my dog for it!!” Plus, it reminds me of Claire from Fleabag, my favorite anxious girlboss. If she thinks it’s shorthand for success, who am I to argue?

4. Chanel Flats - This was closely tied to Burberry Trench Coat in the category “things I think of rich people as wearing that no one really actually wears unless they’re 70 years old.” But at one point, I was watching a lot of Gossip Girl, and kind of coveted that Blair Waldorf preppy style as an antidote to my own sloppy and disorganized vibe. These are too expensive.

5. J. Crew Cocoon Coat in Light Blue - it just had that twee magical look. Light blue is my favorite color, and the high collar reminds me of Sherlock Holmes or whatever, if Sherlock was a girly girl who spent all his time listening to Taylor Swift.

6. Artipoppe Monogamy Carrier - It’s too expensive. Don’t look up how expensive it is. But I’m afraid the little swans charmed me completely (remember what I said about twee?) At some point of sleep deprivation with baby #2 I looked at my tattered grey baby carrier and thought “oh what the hell, I deserve a treat.” The fantasy of the Artipoppe is in their marketing - gorgeous models who just have their baby tossed on as another part of their outfit.

Revenge of the Uggs

I may have been a classic Tumblr bisexual transtrender edge lord in my youth. But I’m a mother now, and my sartorial priorities have shifted. I don’t need to intimidate people on the street. I don’t want to keep up a complicated hairdye routine. I don’t even need all that much attention1. I want comfort. I want high-tech leggings that feel like I’m wearing nothing and allow me to break into a spontaneous jog with my stroller on the way back from Trader Joe’s. I want a matching Lululemon set that says “this is legally an outfit, but I also have to emergency-football-carry a toddler pretty often, so it’s also workout clothes”.

I’m not going to lie, though. I’m a bit of a fashion outlier when I wear my stretchy pants. The moms at the playgrounds are far from a slovenly bunch. Everyone dresses pretty great, and with their own distinct style. I have one friend who always wears classic long dresses and ladylike brimmed hats with beautiful matching accessories, another mom has an edgy platinum blonde bob and a selection of tiny ear piercings and stacked rings, another who has a beautiful wardrobe full of natural fiber sweaters and kimonos in vibrant earthy tones, an acquaintance who wears only maximalist patterns, another who rolls up in Issey Miyake pleated dresses along with those split-toed tabi flats. I love the variety on display. It’s a good reminder that you don’t have to give yourself up on self-expression to become a mother - although it certainly can become a challenge to find the time to do so.

I have a baby and toddler now, though. Comfort is a must. And now, in my 30s, I look back on the sorority girls who wore Uggs and puffer jackets and t-shirts and leggings, and I realize that actually, they had it all figured out. They were in style for their crew, and they were a million times more comfortable than I ever was in my Doc Martens and denim jackets. I’m sorry for feeling superior, ladies.

It’s nice to prioritize the ability to move and be comfortable. But I admit, even with my new, stripped-down wardrobe of leggings, the Shopping Fantasy Monster starts to whisper, beckoning new Fantasy Selves for me to try to embrace. The other day walking by Nordstrom, I saw an athleisure outfit I can only describe as “Ballerina Ninja From The Future.” It was impractical as hell, yes. But it beckoned me softly, with fantasies of pirouetting down hallways of lasers instead of yanking my toddler away from the cup of coffee I left out on the counter for the 19th time this month. Wouldn’t it be sick to be the kind of person who wears that?

But I try to restrain myself these days. The pink leotard would get so grimy on the playground. And I know I’d still be me, anyway, and the ballerina-ninja outfit wouldn’t cure my terrible posture or my carelessness or my inability to get out the door without at least one variety of children’s bodily fluid getting on me. But I can’t resist the fantasy, it bubbles up within whatever practical barriers I try to put on my lifestyle. There’s always some item seducing me with the better version of whoever I’m trying to be.

I still think the red leather trench was pretty cool, though.

But somewhere in the middle-to-top of the regret spectrum was the voice change.

When your vocal cords thicken from testosterone, the tone of the voice gets deeper, but it doesn’t just shift down evenly. Just like teenage boys, so goeth the female-to-male testosterone voice. You go to make a sound you used to be able to make, moving the vocal muscles in the old way, but they act unpredictably. They crack or rasp or wobble. As someone who used to regularly belt along to full musical soundtracks, wailing with Eponine or Christine Daaé, this really bummed me out. I had this girly flute-like soprano, nothing special, not even that on-key, really, but it disturbed me to try to sing a note and produce a croak. It was like I had lost control of a fundamental part of myself, because I had. So I just stopped singing for years. It was too painful.

As the years went by post-transition, my vocal cords started to settle. My voice was still low, it vibrated deeper, but it wasn’t as uneven and it sounded a little higher and lighter than it had immediately post-testosterone. Once Max was born, he wasn’t a great sleeper. He needed a lot of attention and soothing. One thing that helped when he was wailing was pacing back-and-forth and singing a song. My baby had no concept of the fact that my voice had taken on a rough unpleasant quality it didn’t used to have. It was the only way he knew me, and indeed, was the first voice he ever heard. He has been hearing it ever since it came vibrating through my internal organs when he was a baby in utero, and it calmed him all the same, so I sang and sang. I sang lullabies and pop songs and show tunes on repeat for minutes and hours, until his heavy head finally drooped against my chest in slumber. Quicker than expected, I regained a lot of control of my voice. I familiarized myself with the new ways my vocal cords moved. I could even reach some of the high notes again, although not all of them.

So I got my voice back, more or less. But I had to do it every day, and I had to get over the embarrassment and shame that was keeping me from singing to myself. I needed to sing a lot. I needed someone else who needed me to sing.

—

Max is almost 3 now. He loves listening to music, and he also loves singing. He started with “Wheels on the Bus,” then got into “Naatu Naatu”, but his repertoire is rapidly expanding. My favorite is his version of “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles. He usually sings it something like this:

“We all, we all, Lellow Submarine! We all, we all, Lellow Submarine!! We all, we all -” (gets distracted momentarily and starts over) “- WE ALL, WE ALL, LELLOW SUBMARINE!”

This can go on for some time. He will probably learn the verses one day soon, but until then, he has a handle on the important part.

Well, well, well, how the tables have turned. Detransition has become a mainstream concept, Chloe Cole is testifying regularly before Congress, Jojo Siwa is straight again or something, the vibe has thoroughly shifted. So much has changed.

And as for me, well.

I’ll admit, I tried to pick back up on this blog a few times, and found myself uncertain. What more was there to say? I spilled some really personal stuff on here, partially for catharsis, partially out of a hope it would help other people, that my suffering could take on new meaning, be redeemed, be connective, be more than just the long long never-ending bummer of some very serious mistakes.

I am willing to share a lot, being the child of lifelong writers who often text me to say “hey, this would be a great essay.” But at a certain point, the gory details, the regret, the persona of the detransitioner - it begins to feel too sad. I have been wounded, I have made mistakes, yes, I have serious grievances, but who cares? How long am I going to be stuck on that?

So the blog sat. I don’t want to write trauma porn here. And even for an over-sharer like myself, there’s a limit on how much of my psychological guts I’m willing to spill under my government name. Perhaps the initial urgency has faded, and in its place has come a little bit of reticence.

So anyway, the baby

I took a dose of testosterone for a relatively short period of time — 9 months in total, perhaps. I worried I had messed up my fertility.

Part of detransition for me has been a serious feeling of “oh shit, wait, maybe I wanted that!” All the things I thought I was throwing away — womanhood, motherhood, femaleness - it was so much more deeply ingrained in me, so much more inescapable. And it turned out that the decisions I made while depressed, strung out on internet addiction, rotting in my room, hating myself and being self-destructive — that version of me was not making choices that I was going to be very happy with long-term. So I tried to salvage what I could. I grew my hair very long, long enough to cover my scars, in what I have since dubbed the “Detransition Cope Hairdo.” I backpedaled from the edge lord trans aesthetics, took out all my facial piercings, spent several years dressed in sedate J Crew officewear.

And I considered being a mother. Although most of my old friends are still not parents, I noticed that I knew one or two people in my age cohort who were having babies. Not many, and not most — It was the countercultural ones, the creative ones, the beautiful artistic girls who pushed the boundaries in every way. They were the ones diving into motherhood. And that intrigued me. If most of my mid-20s friends were eschewing motherhood, but the most cutting edge artistic woman I knew was bouncing a baby — could it be that this was not, in fact, necessarily the realm of the boring default, but could in fact be an extraordinary adventure, a source of great meaning?

I know that sounds shallow. But you have to admit that among the millennials, motherhood has a branding problem. Motherhood smacked vaguely of minivans, suburbia, The Patriarchy, Karen-ish frosted bobs, and other such unstylish associations. Not to mention the very real logistical and financial hurdles. So it intrigued me to see certain friends who I knew to be smart, self-assured women going for what passes for early-ish motherhood in our extremely-kid-shy millennial set.

But watching a few of our peers stalwartly embrace parenthood, seeing them feed their round, giggly baby spoonfuls of grits at our trendy brunch place — it intrigued us. “Why did they have to wait til after his nap to meet us, like, how much can his nap schedule possibly matter?” We wondered to ourselves, extremely child-free-ly. Experienced parents will wince in secondhand embarrassment, as we do now, looking back. You morons! The nap schedule is EVERYTHING!

So very shortly after marriage, I went off birth control and we decided to see what happened. And luckily, we got pregnant quickly. We welcomed our first child in 2023. I left my software engineer job and became a stay at home mom. And I entered a very intense phase of life, dragging through pregnancy with a toddler, speech delays, forming alliances with neighborhood moms, and more. A second child came in 2025. I’m still home with the kids now.

There will be more to say about that. It’s difficult to find the right balance to protecting my children’s privacy but also not pretending they don’t exist — I’ll call them Maxwell and Sammy, here, and hopefully they will not begrudge their mother for jotting down some notes related to their lives.

I have benefited a lot from motherhood. It took me out of my head, made me focus on some of the most worthwhile work possible, and removed my ability to stew on neurotic unending introspection. I like this new version of me, the woman who stuffs her wiggling toddler into the stroller and wheels him out to the playground instead of rotting inside on her phone feeling vaguely bad for no reason. But there’s balance in everything, and over the past few years, I’ve been missing the intellectual satisfaction of writing. I started up my Twitter again in order to connect, but there’s only so much that the slot-machine rush of firing off two-sentence tweets can do. It’s time to work on something a little deeper.

All this to say: I’m firing up this blog again, but the focus will no longer be on just detransition. I will write about motherhood, womanhood, my various interests, and perhaps throw my hat into the ring on some of the hot takes of the day. I have rigged up a challenge on Beeminder, so you should be hearing from me every Tuesday from now on. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, so if you’re not interested in this new Hormone Hangover Variety Show, no hard feelings. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to subscribe, comment, like, or share my blog posts over the years. This blog has changed my life in all kinds of ways, and I can’t wait to see where it takes me going forward.

“Look, no matter how much you want to be Y, you cannot be reborn as him. You are not Y. It's okay for you to be you. However, I am not saying it's fine to be 'just as you are'. If you are unable to really feel happy, then it's clear that things aren't right just as they are. You've got to put one foot in front of the other, and not stop.”

― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

“If people who transition feel like they are dying and being reborn… how do I know which parts of myself am I killing righteously, amputating to heal? God, I am lost in a wilderness. 

It’s brutal to think that all my body mods are permanent. I was brave to do all of this. Brave and courageous. Yet also careless. Also reckless.

Can’t believe how much the body seems limiting and enslaving. 

This hell is something I cannot pull out of, dissociate my way away from. Not if I want to ever get any self-knowledge. I must face everything head on.”

- my Journal, 1/23/17 (shortly before I detransitioned)

Some people act like transition and detransition is a simple mistake, a simple bad judgement call that should be spoken of seldomly, and then, only with shame.

I do not agree. 

I think that it is nothing less than part of the defining search for self-understanding that all of us embark on in our various ways. It is not like picking out the wrong hair dye at the store. It’s a serious commitment to a course of action, and when that goes wrong, there’s inevitably a lot of fallout.

So when I write about detransition, I’m not just writing about gender for some quick political slap fight points. I’m trying to write about the human experience as a whole.

—

Some people transition and are happy with their choices and live their life. That’s all good. This blog probably is not going to be that useful to them, although, who knows.

But some of us make the leap and commit to transition, hoping to find - what? New freedom? Permission to be ourselves? Physical safety? Comfort? Community? 

There’s a rush of euphoria, a feeling of joy and fulfillment, an expectation that things are finally clicking into place. And maybe for a while they are! 

And then for some people, some while later, they realize it’s not what they thought. The initial rush faded and the old problems are still there. 

Or it solves one problem and more crop up. 

Or life just continues to go on and you continue to subtly and inevitably change in the way that we all do.

Life is messy. Transition is messy. There’s a tendency to take trans identity as a self-evident internal state. You realize you’re trans, you medically and socially transition, things are good. But what is it to be trans? This is a major divide in the so-called gender critical vs trans framework. Is being “trans” an internal state consisting of a gender identity that is innate, unquestionable, offensive to try to unpack? Or is it more accurate to speak about experiences of “gender dysphoria,” which could represent a whole range of symptoms and causes?

—

I had a great conversation with Bridget Phetasy on her podcast recently. I remembered listening to her podcast earlier in my detransition and being so touched by her stories of struggling with sobriety. She spoke about it with a wry but brutal honesty. I was riveted as she described her struggles. I remember a time where she was talking about how much better her life was after getting sober, and how much she was grateful. But she then confided that she still had dark, dark struggles sometimes. Her voice thick with tears, she described a hard period she had had. “Sometimes it’s all I can do not to jump in front of the train.”

If there’s something that moves me, it’s that. Someone who has lived through an awful time, and who sometimes feels a darkness still threatening to consume her, but continues onward anyway. I love the way she had made meaning out of her struggles. Since that podcast, she’s gotten married, gotten pregnant. I’m really happy for her. 

I can’t wait til the release of that podcast. It’s a beautiful conversation. (She also has a great blog. Take this piece, “A surplus of psycho”. Extremely good.)

Anyway. Everything is to a purpose, even our self-destructive and self-deluding actions. Maybe you can’t relate to wanting to transition, but probably you can relate to feeling uncomfortable in your skin, in bouts of self-loathing, in wishing you were an idealized other person. I think they all reflect a universal human struggle.

My friend Helena recently wrote a magnificent essay about her transition and detransition. It was about gender, yes, but also about coming of age, about struggling with indoctrination, about family relations, about all kinds of things.

I like writing that’s maybe, on the surface level, political, but also goes so deep into someone’s human experience that everyone finds some commonality there. 

So in that vein, let me recommend some writing on detransition I’ve been enjoying recently:

Ținând de Mâinii Strigoii-lor

Chronicles of male detransition.

By Limpidă

Some Nuance, Please

"Some Nuance, Please" is a blog written by a detransitioned woman reflecting on her experiences of gender and transition.

By Michelle Alleva

Song of the Lark by Jules Breton

I’ve been on a twitter break, since my best friend gave me a little bit of a “come to Jesus” intervention style talk. I’ll be back after Christmas. My life has taken on a very different texture being out of the loop. I used twitter to fill in a lot of gaps in my time. But the reason I got off of it was I had begun to see myself falling into my old Skinner box internet addiction habits with it.

Twitter has been a kind of mute button for my emotions. (Well, any social media site. But it’s Twitter for me right now.) Has anyone been in this situation: you feel bad, wretched even. There’s a miserable feeling, a knot in your stomach. You know you need to cry. 

But you don’t want to go into it, and you don’t even know how. So instead you hit the dopamine button. Tweet, or instagram, or whatever else. It’s like the rat hitting the heroin lever. 

It’s like you have a wound on your flank festering, but you don’t know what to do with it. But you do have a giant pile of lollipops. And you really don’t like to look at the wound. It’s gross and horrifying and might be getting gangrenous. You really hope it’s not, and honestly you’re scared to look. So you just keep crunching on the lollipops, each tiny burst of flavor providing a momentary distraction. And the wound, it just keeps rankling, the sour and undeniable undercurrent that will have to be faced eventually.

—

So, no Twitter. Maybe because of this, or maybe because of some events in my personal life, or because I have media appearances coming up, I’ve been feeling extra tender over transition regret lately. On twitter, I have a social reality built up to process the  emotions of detransition. I feel something, I post it, it’s a little exorcism. Now, I’m mostly alone with the thoughts. 

  I’m moving along in my life in a lot of ways. I have big milestones coming up. The lengthy part of my life spent with my identity wrapped up in trans/queer subculture is fading away. I’m feeling more confident, more grown up. The proverbial green hair has long been grown out, I’m eating better, I can walk to the coffee shop and buy myself a latte with no financial anxiety. It’s the little things in life.

But of course, the scars remain.

I can feel myself growing stronger and moving past many of my old insecurities. But this will never be over. When I made that decision, I put myself in a rarified class. I will never not be detransitioned. Maybe I won’t think about it as much, but these scars will never go away.

But, in another very real sense, regret is boring. 

I wake up every day and one of my first sensations is “oh yeah. No boobs.” My stomach twists. The feeling of the scars aches, pressed against the mattress. It’s been about 4 years now, and the sensation in my chest are:

A. numbness

B.  something unpleasant. 

I look in the mirror and I feel disappointment when I see my skinny, asymmetrically-scarred chest, the surgeon’s mockery of a male chest. 

But the ache of regret is part of the background of my life. It used to be a knife twisting in me, driving me mad. I used to think there was no way I could survive it.  Every night, I would be ripped by sobs, clutching my chest, my boyfriend holding me as I once again broke down under the heavy weight of the cruelty I had inflicted on my innocent flesh. It was like being possessed with madness, the pain was so intense and undeniable. 

I felt like the Job of the Gender God, wretched and forsaken.

That’s all long in the past.

 Most days, I don’t vividly remember the drama and hope of transition, or the ripping pain of detransition, when I feel these things. I remember that I used to have a whole and unaltered body. Not that I really appreciated it at the time. I was always worrying at myself anyways. Chewing my fingernails til they bled, piercing my ears over and over again, and now this. Cut off your breasts. Sure, why not, dumbass.

I regret it every day. But it’s not the killing knife-stab of regret, at least not most of the time. It’s an old, tattered regret. I am a different person now. The Grace who might have gone down a different path - I don’t know her as well anymore. Back when I was first detransitioning, it felt so recent that I should be able to unspool a few years of time and claw back through time and save myself. Now I’m grimly settled in, having reached acceptance. 

When people read my story and react with extreme horror and pain, it gives me an uncanny feeling. Oh yeah, I guess it was pretty bad, huh? It was. It was bad.

So, of course it gets better. But some things don’t go away. A ledger of pain and regret will build up for each and every one of us as we grow. This is part of mine.  Womp womp womp. 

There’s something else looming. I sense that the worst of my big regret is, in some ways, still to come. If I have a baby, I will have to reckon with my youthful follies affecting the next generation. I am not sure what that will be like. I am scared of how bad I am going to feel, how much shame I might feel at affecting my offspring. However, as Sufjan Stevens said - the past is still the past, the bridge to nowhere. 

—

Something else I’ve been thinking about is - I don’t really want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be exposed as a loser freak who makes mistakes. I don’t want to expose that to the world because it’s too raw, too personal. I’ve been off twitter and I’m glad. I don’t want to be contacted. I don’t want to do it. It’s too much. 

I’m actually a really sensitive and agreeable person. I don’t really like to fight. Whenever I have a conflict with someone, I feel sick about it for weeks. Not just because of their anger, but because of some churning guilt I feel at having entered a conflict. No, really, physically sick. I have one of those classic female pathologies where I will swallow anger for ages rather than speak harshly. The wrong tone sets me on edge.

So, when I started talking about detransition, I was really anxious. I knew that it would not be popular.  I had previously been just the sort of person who would loudly denounce someone for being a bigot. (There’s an element to this experience that feels like karma. I was an annoying  proto-woke Tumblr girl, and now I am counted among the most reviled of its ranks)

 Lately, I’ve had a couple more personal conflicts  related to my detransition that shook me a lot and affected people that I care about, not just me. I don’t want to go into them more, but it’s much worse to experience personal rejection from people you knew and got along with before.

—

The first time I went on TV, I was sick to my stomach with anxiety for days. But it had the feeling of unreality. It was the feeling of: This is something that will change my life, and I will be scared, but all I have to do is just live with that feeling and the thing will happen and then I’ll deal with what happens as it happens. 

And I didn’t really know what that would be like.

Now I do. 

It looks like new friends, it looks like hearing some of the most horrifying stories of medical malpractice possible, it looks like meeting brilliant and amazing people, it looks like childhood heroes knowing your name, it looks like a lot of people hearing you speak candidly about the worse moment of your life and being like “god, this woman fucking sucks.”

Weird world.

Signing off,

Grace

This article was inspired in part by some conversations with Katherine Dee, who has some good thoughts on the subject of thinspo and pro-ana communities, as well as some recent posts by Helena @lacroicsz.

Dysphoria Tiktok 

I was looking through Tiktok the other day and came across what I can only describe as high-production dysphoria fuel. In it, a beautiful gender fluid female teen (pronouns he/they/she, I will use she for now) with that fetching Zoomer-perm is standing and mouthing along to an Olivia Rodrigo song. She is lit with dramatic blue-pink lighting and her dewy eyes are filling with tears, her whole body quaking slightly with sorrow.  She is bare-torso’d except for a nude bandeau. She mouths along the anguished growl of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Jealousy” - I’m so sick of myself / rather be, rather be anyone else.  Over her breasts are superimposed flashing images of sculpted male chests. Images of beautiful, androgynous men’s faces appear above her. The tiktok has over a million likes. 

My stomach twisted. The struggle with the body is on full display. If there was anything designed to twist the knife of dysphoria in deeper, it was this - the difference between the actual and desired body was made excruciatingly clear. 

But there was also something undeniably compelling about the whole display. Here was dysphoria portrayed artistically, put to music, made tragic and beautiful. Even as it depicted suffering, it depicted it artfully, like a scene in a movie. The heroine/hero, even as she suffers, looks androgynous and winsome. The whole thing is cathartic and compelling.

The Seduction of Pro-Ana

When I was a younger teenager, I used to spend a little time on “pro-ana” (Pro-Anorexia) Tumblr.  The images and the romance of the pro-ana blogs left a deep impression on me.  The women were waifish and beautiful. I remember, in particular, a hypnotic obsession with particular traits. The thigh gap, the delicate protruding collar bone, the doll-like bony arm. The photos that people passed around were also often shot in a moody, desaturated color palette. It was dreamy.

The imagery of the pro-ana world had a simplistic appeal to it. Here, the diffuse, never-ending discomforts of daily life faded away. I could take in a steady fantasy of control, beauty, and disciplined agony. Here, young women engaged in fantasies about how good their lives would be once they were just thin enough. They conjured up the kind of dreamy, aesthetically pleasing scenarios you might see in a perfume commercial.  

I remember bathing in the feeling of the pro-ana blogs and wishing to inhabit the world. Life in high school felt unlovely. Fluorescent lights, concrete-block walls, tedious classes. I wasn’t an exceptional social outcast, but I nonetheless suffered from the excruciating self-consciousness, self-doubt, and shyness that all teenagers are tormented with. But while reading these blogs, I could fantasize that I could cross over into this dreamy world, float through like a lovely model, graceful and unaffected, if I just reached some mystical level of thinness.

I wasn’t a teenage anorexic. I lacked the twisted resolve or incipient madness to truly restrict myself, and any day I did so much as skip lunch, I ended up binging on spoonfuls of peanut butter, feeling deep shame, that next night. But I enjoyed checking into the fantasy.

The appeal of the agony of change, the romance of self-hate

The gender dysphoria tiktok had a similar emotional tone to the pro-ana blogs I used to read when I was 15. The particularities are different, but the basic components are the same. Aestheticized self-hatred, beautiful suffering, a public display of deep unhappiness, set to music. 

The moodiness and despair is laid out in a way that makes it pleasurable to wallow in. It says: we’re suffering, but it’s in pursuit of something beautiful. I will convert my pain to control.

After coming across the TikTok and reminiscing about my past experiences with Pro-Ana and gender dysphoric internet culture, I came across this article called The Six Seductions of Anorexia, by Emily Troscianko. In it, she writes about how anorexia provides certain psychological comforts, including making you feel special and providing  a “partial suicide” where you can annihilate the parts of yourself you hate while continuing to live. 

I appreciated this because it put something into sharp perspective - the seductiveness of the obsession with changing the body. When I “realized I was trans”, I had been wallowing in a miserable, self-hating depression for some time. But then, it was like a path was clear in front of me. I had the steps to be happy again. Sure, it would be brutal. But I was up for it. To distance myself from my disgust with my wretched female self, I was willing to spill some blood and make some sacrifices.

There’s a relief to take formless misery and sharpen it into a laser pointing at a hated body part. At least then we know what to target, what to change. Pro-anorexic Tumblr lionizes certain body parts. So did pro-trans Tumblr. The thigh gap - or the flat, male chest. The bony ribcage - or the straight, masculine hips. If I only dabbled in the pro-ana world, I fully immersed myself in this one. 

Self Hate And The Dream of Better Life Through a Better Body

If you scroll through Tumblr, that fertile blue Pandora’s box from whence all our troubles began, you can find a lot of pro-ana stuff. You can also find a lot of material written by young trans men. You’ll find things like fundraisers for surgery, #genderenvy posts depicting the ideal look that the user wants to inhabit, text posts about gender dysphoria, and pictures of trans men with thousands of notes. 

Both trans and anorexic communities indulge in rumination about the desired body states. 

Some of it is hopeful and dreamy:

“inspiration: in a year I will be skinny. I will look good in everything. I will wear oversized sweaters and look adorable instead of fat.” 

“Why I want top surgery: To be shirtless in public. To look good in a t-shirt. To not have to bind. To be able to hug closer.”

 Some of them are roiling with self-hate: 

“I’m so fucking disgusting, I’m so fat, I can’t believe I ate.”

“My dysphoria is like a gaping hole between my legs, like I’ve been ripped apart.”

The violent, visceral discomfort with the body contrasts with the pastel-colored images of the ideal, transformed body. There is a salvation of the body, and it can be saved, but only through transformation.

There’s also posts under the “FTM thinspo”  tag that combine both genres. 

“I need the thin thighs that cis boys get naturally. I want to wear oversized sweaters and look perfect. I want to be the small, adorable man held tight by his strong, huge boyfriend.” 

(These examples are all written by me as examples of these types of Tumblr posts, since lots of people make them and I didn’t want to put unwanted attention on one random blogger by screenshooting their post. If you are curious, you can find more examples of these on Tumblr yourself.)

I distinctly remember something I reblogged on Tumblr a long time ago. I wish I could find the exact post. It said something like: “Goal: In 5 years, my top surgery scars are faded, I’m in a cute apartment full of plants, I’m sitting under a comfy blanket listening to the rain, I’m content and happy.” 

As I approach my 5th year anniversary of my surgery, I look back on this ruefully. My top surgery scars are faded. I am listening to the rain. Of course, the surgery plunged me into a brutal depression, and I regret it every day. I should have joined a different cult. At least then I’d still be able to breastfeed. But — we live and learn.

Imagery: Thinspo, Gender Envy

I talked about thinspo. On the trans corner of Tumblr, there’s a similar genre of post under tags like #genderenvy, #gendergoals, #malespo (this one is for male thinspo). These are the forms that young trans men want to look like. Some of these #gendergoals are more burly and masculine, but when it comes to Tumblr, there’s an overwhelming theme (As @lacroiscz on twitter pointed out):

More often than not, for young teen trans and nonbinary people, the ideal form is skinny, androgynous men. A lot of people wanted to look like Harry Styles, or Gerard Way, or an anime drawing of a wizard. This is especially true for the many blogs run by trans men with eating disorders. 

A lot of the “#malespo” imagery is almost identical in tone and imagery to the female thinspo. Desaturated, bony, pale people in skinny jeans looking gloomy and romantic and tragic. The pro-ana ideal is a beautiful, waifish female figure, the Tumblr trans community often idolizes beautiful, waifish men. If you squint just a bit as you scroll, they start to blend together into a parade of indistinguishable doll-like slender bodies. 

Wannarexia, Transtrenders

The anxiety over being “really trans” and “really anorexic” is similar. I think people in both communities are often struggling with the idea that people who go farther and change their bodies more severely are more “valid.” What valid means is up for interpretation, but I always thought it represented an intensity and purity of purpose and feeling. To be a real anorexic is to starve yourself brutally. To be a real trans person is to go under the knife, or at least do hormones. You feel bad? Do something about it.

Don’t get me wrong, people pass around posts like “nonbinary people who don’t plan to get surgery are valid.” But the fact those posts even needed to exist betrays the underlying anxiety that some people are more real. 

I mean, who feels more like a true anorexic- the person who reblogs skinny women in Tennis Skirts, or the person who starves herself down to a skeleton?  Who seems “more trans” -  the person who tepidly asserts she/they pronouns without a hint of gender nonconformity, or the person going under the knife to scrape away the female secondary sex characteristics?

To be clear. I’m not saying that these things are good. I’m just saying they signify some hardcore commitment to the belief system. 

I want to show you that I’ve been suffering horribly, and that I’m strong enough to go through the suffering and master myself. I hate how things are now, but I have a beautiful vision for how things will be once I master myself and my body.

The All-Consuming Quest 

In The Six Seductions of Anorexia, Emily Troscianko says that one thing that makes anorexia so appealing is that is acts as a “Rosetta Stone: Giving you readymade meaning.” 

This was kind of my experience of transition. In a time when I was floundering, depressed, and had no path forward, it gave me one. That was like a liferaft being thrown to me in my personal little ocean of angst. 

In the bios of pro-ana people, you often see something like this:

H: 5’3 SW: 150 CW: 130 GW1: 120 ✅  GW2: 110 UGW: 95

This stands for height, Starting Weight, Current Weight,  Goal Weight One, Goal Weight Two, Ultimate Goal Weight. Sometimes people use check marks to indicate they have reached one of their goals.  There’s an inexorable march towards the Ultimate Goal Weight. Maybe some of the earlier GW’s are checked off, to indicate the progress that has been made towards the Ultimate Goal. 

This echoes a common format of the the bios of trans people, you often see transition dates laid out, checked off like so:

Ollie, 23, he/him. T-date 4/28/17, Top surgery 9/29/17, Hysto 3/1/18.

There’s a series of steps, a series of goals. They are legible and tangible.  You move through them, celebrating each step that takes you closer. Everything else falls away. You’re on the right path.

I remember talking to a detransitioned friend of mine who used to go to a trans support group. She said “There were trans men there who had been transitioning for a long time, and every meeting, they would still say ‘I’ve been on T for 4 years, 8 months, and 15 days.’ Like they were still counting down the days even then. Then I started to realize that you’re never finished, you can never just stop thinking about it.”

The End of The Dream

The dreamy fantasies of the internet can only be imperfectly manifested into the world. No matter how skinny you get, life will still contain humiliations, discomforts, and disappointments. There is no Ultimate Goal Weight after which your life shifts into a fashion-shoot styled dream.

As Emily Troscianko says, “All of anorexia’s solutions come with expiry dates. The hunger high tends to degenerate into chronic gnawing unpleasantness. The depression embeds itself to make life feel nearly unbearable…The specialness reveals itself as nothing more than the winning of a competition whose prize was misery.” Once the honeymoon phase is over, the body starts to break down, and death is a possibility. 

The end of my transition felt similar. The hope and excitement began to dissipate. I realized that whatever peace and wellbeing I thought was coming, wasn’t happening. The asymptotic and ever-more-taxing quest to become a man was not giving me the emotional wellbeing and sense of wholeness that I thought it would.  The romance of transition had its own expiry date for me as well. You can read about that in my other writing.

I know many people don’t feel the same way about transition. You should read their stories, too. My main point is that there’s a lot of overlap in the kinds of ideation and obsession that take place in the online communities around anorexia and transition. In the realm of the online, we can curate a vision of the type of person we would rather be. How far we’re willing to go to achieve that ideal - and how gratifying it will really be if we do - is another question entirely.

Further Reading

If you want more reading on Tumblr, check out this article by Helena (you can also find her on twitter) and Default Friend’s entire journalistic project.

Also cited:

The Six Seductions of Anorexia

When you publicly post on the internet, especially about your personal failings, especially on an incendiary political topic, you run the risk of generating a little pushback. Some of it is well-reasoned and polite, some is cruel and trolling. There are opportunistic journalists and faceless anonymous trolls and gigantic KiwiFarms threads and random people dropping by to give their opinions in a slightly harsh tone. This is how it is. I expect it. I just keep posting and writing anyway. 

But I have to admit - I do spend some time thinking about these internet strangers and their criticism. The conservatives who think I’m a gender-studies-brain-melted-wokescold who got her comeuppance, the trans people who say I’m purposefully giving ammunition to people who want to destroy them. 

I was rewatching my old transition video diaries the other day and I found one towards the end, when I was really starting to grapple with the fact that I had made a bad mistake, but was still a firm believer in most of the ideas that spurred me to transition. I was fretting about what I was going to do, and how I could talk about my pain without giving ammunition to “transmedicalists or transphobes.”  

I had to chuckle ruefully. My former self would be shocked at how openly I criticize the ideas I once believed in. And she wouldn’t be alone - a lot of trans people are very suspicious of detransitioners, especially those who speak negatively of transition. 

“Just because it didn’t work out for you doesn’t mean it won’t work out for other people.” “You’re drawing attention to something that’s really rare and it’s putting the rest of us in danger.” “Detransitioners like you tell your stories in manipulative ways that you know are going to gin up transphobia, you’re crypto-TERFs.” 

These are loosely adapted versions of things I’ve heard, either directed at me or at detransitioners at large. I understand where these people are coming from, because I used to be 100% on board. I thought detransitioners were insignificant, isolated incidents, and while they deserved pity, their stories should be carefully managed to avoid besmirching the good reputation of transition.

“You don’t speak for trans people and the things you say hurt trans people.” 

I understand that what I write is painful for some trans people to read. I’ve been personally told that on several occasions. It’s not my aim. But I have the right to talk through my experiences, my beliefs and how they have changed, and why. Maybe it will help some people to avoid my pain. And if not, I still hope I can provide comfort to others who went down this path and found it wasn’t what they thought.

Lately I’ve been exposed to a different critical perspective: from conservative people who are scornfully derisive of my entire journey. They can’t believe I ever bought into this trans stuff and have little sympathy for someone who would be so foolish. What did I expect, cutting my tits off? That would make me a man? “You must be crazy, I have no sympathy for you. What did you expect?”

Should I have known better? I wish I had. But hey! I never claimed to be a wise person! I was a depressed 22 year old making decisions with the information I had from my friends, 7 years of nonstop Tumblr use, and a course of university study with a heavy emphasis on queer theory. I know, I know, the jokes write themselves, it’s such a stereotype. 

And then there’s the people who say to me - “you were an adult when you transitioned, what are you complaining about? You got what you wanted.” 

And I have to say, yeah, I got what I thought I wanted. And I have to take responsibility for my choices. If it makes you feel better, I’ve suffered deeply because of them, haha! 

But I also think there’s a larger problem, with the doctors, with trans ideology, with the marketing, with the double-talk and confusion around the whole issue. And I’ve seen other people get sucked into it and get hurt. And while I did make mistakes  -- I’m not the only one. I want to add my voice to the discourse so we can get to a saner understanding.

One last criticism. Last week on twitter someone was accusing detransitioners: “You’re just doing this for attention!”

Aah, doing it for attention. In this social media colosseum, who isn’t doing things for attention? I’ll admit it. I like writing. I like showing people my writing. It is nourishing to know that some portion of people find my work comforting, illuminating, or interesting. I can’t pretend I’m not putting my writing out there in hopes of it finding an audience - of course I am. 

Let me end with this: my intentions are good. I am writing to process what I went through. It helps me, and I hope it will help other people. I am sorting through things as honestly and frankly as I can. I will try to criticize my own faults as well as the medical professionals that I feel let down by.  If you think I come across as annoying, self-serving, self-pitying, narcissistic, stupid, or otherwise morally impaired - you could be right. I’m a deeply flawed person. Thanks for reading anyway.