Critical Northwest, 2024

So, my wife and I took a trip out to Critical Northwest for our 13th anniversary this year. We have been many years deep, both in attendance and in year-round volunteering (to various extents) at the various central texas burns, and really had built up a lot of burnout/cynicism/exhaustion/whatever about the whole endeavour. We bring it out, we hang out for a few days, we tear it down, we repeat. We lock into endless fights about how the thing is done, nothing ever changes. You do surveys of volunteerism and identifying the volunteering-related sustainability problems with the event, and rather than initiate a real discussion about hero volunteering and too-large lead positions, it devolves into yet more shaming about shift volunteers, using the one super-clear metric you generated.

And beyond that, just all of the time that me just being me was a novel thing that had to be explained, defended and justified. It was actually during a flipside one year, after getting misgendered one time too many, that in a huff, I was finally like “if people won’t take this enby compromise I’m offering, I’m just going to demand to be called what I am” and switched to a she/her woman in a huff. (Narrator voice: “she should have just always asked for what she really wanted”)

So, kind of with this in mind, we very reluctantly let ourselves get talked into heading out to Critical Northwest, Seattle’s regional. And, truth be told, it was absolutely re-invigorating in a variety of ways. First, I had absolutely forgotten the feeling of camping with a small, closely knit theme camp committed to bringing it. We had daily camp meals, I got to be a little espresso bar wench for everyone in the morning, and we had a comfortable lounge and a propane fire to hearth around at night. It also didn’t hurt at all that our camp, The Well, was filled with academics and academic apostates, because our camp had a daily lecture series, which brought me to:

I got my old textbooks out and I put together an honest to fuck popular level physics talk on the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson. We papered over a lot, and only got through like 80% of what I prepared, but I was able to go forward, give the discussion, explain the content somewhat coherently, and I was able to do it as both myself and having let go of so much of the anger and rage I had built up about what happened to me in academia. I could feel joy discussing these topics that were once my whole life without prejudice or rage, and having it simply feel good afterward. I got positive feedback, and somehow, SOMEHOW, I managed to discuss theoretical physics with a bunch of hippies in the woods without one single person cornering me for a five hour conversation about how they had their own personal theory of everything, and if someone who *just knew* math could go and help them, then they’d have a certain nobel prize.

Second, the culture of the place was just palpably different in a very interesting way. We wished to experience the place for a try before jumping into volunteering after our previous experience, so this is partially from that perspective than anything “backstage”, but everything there just seemed so much more focused on communal experience and expression than on individual expression. Loud trolling was virtually absent. I even had to be careful at playing my hyperbolic characters, because it freaked people out. For her birthday, one of our campmates held an event called “Shady bitches” where you threw out shade from the shade at random passers-by, but it was largely more “yellling compliments at people and/or demanding that they dance for you”, rather than the “insults with love” that I would have been used to from similar events. There was a 2 am sound curfew. Greywater rules were not only enforced, but the org provided centralized greywater receptacles. There was straight up a social norm against sound wars, against leaving music on in camp and leaving camp. It was, to use a term we used the shit out of in camp, just such a different vibe.

Third, in retrospect, kind of obviously, trans people were just everywhere. Not only was I not anyone’s first trans woman, a middle aged trans woman walking around the event was just wholly unremarkable. I didn’t have to have my guard up about my gender, I didn’t have to be careful about how much of my body I showed, I didn’t have to really be conscious of any of it. About half of the way through the event, i very much realized that I had a giant chip on my shoulder about my transness that didn’t especially serve me out there. No one even really cared or noticed me, at least for my transness in and of itself.

Fourth, and relatedly, my wife and I processed a lot about letting go, about understanding, about holding on to anger, all of it. Long talks, deep into the night. I destroyed my deadnamed doctoral diploma. We talked about the flight from Texas, we talked about our parents, we talked about our grandparents, we talked about the fabric of humanity that ties all of us together. I think I did let something go.

Because, Fifth, I performed silks on a stage again, for the first time since Flipside 2023. I choreographed my routine to Pink Pony Club by Chapell Roan, and oh, there was hurt and anger in my as I rehearsed. But then, I got up and did the thing, on the Saturday of the event, and the rage wasn’t in my body. It was joy. I got to be me, I got to live in my body, and even if things turned out the way they did with my parents, and there is never any improvement, I knew where I belonged. And it felt fucking great. And like, that got communicated to the people who watched it, I heard. And like, I was in a showcase with actual professional aerialists and didn’t look 100% incompetent.

So, with all of that, and also with the fact that I have mailed off the form to change my name and gender marker on my birth certificate the Monday before the event, I’ve put some thought into stuff, and have decided to retire the name “Dahling Sweetiepoo.” It started out as my burn name when I picked up my first ranger shift, way, way way back in the day. it was a play on a pet name a then partner had given me, turned around to be made flirty, and oh, was I flirty as Dahling. That was all tied up with the desperation for approval, particularly from queer women, that I had before I came to who I was, of course. But also, that identity did let me exist as something other than a boy. It was a crutch of an identity, but one that kept me safe and strong and alive and evolving, nonetheless. And at the beginning, I did grow. By the end, though, that identity was holding me back. Sexuality became a good for it’s own sake, not an approval token. I connected with my body, and didn’t need a lot of that. Actual sex, of course, became a lot better, but it was a thing I craved less, and was on my mind less. By the time I showed up at Critical, and people were introducing me as “Dahling”, it felt really wrong.

And so, we can see the domain name change above. My current burn name is now “Wish” (why yes, that is not a radio-legal ranger name, how interesting of you to note). I expect that I will see far less need for my burn identity to be my primary identity in the future, but I will answer to either Zoë or Wish if you see me in person. As for how I chose it, it’s tied to the points above. It’s time for me to let go of my anger and start getting back in the fucking game again. The new name is a word that is both a verb and a noun, and more than anything, it’s a reminder that the future can, in fact, be different from the past, which I think ties back to the choice to dare to transition at all. There is no guarantee that it all will work out, and there is no promise that we can fix it all, but if we don’t have that drive to at least give a fuck and try, then by fuck, none of it will ever get better at all.

So, I choose to fight, and if you see me out at a camping event, i choose to be known as Wish. Happy burn, and I love you, anyone who dared to read my ramblings this deeply down the page.

Let’s talk about Trump and political violence

So, last weekend happened.

Let’s talk about last weekend, then. Before we start (and I’ll remind you, reader, again, before we end) I will state that I am a pretty extreme pacifist. I think that violence and intimidation against people is virtually never justified, and the cases where it is involve clear cases of self defense. I believe that once one starts thinking of guns, it turns everything into a nail, and all you think about is guns. I’ve seen it happen to too many people to ignore it. I also acknowledge that this is my decision and philosophical position with my life and my risk profile and my set of experiences. I ask no one to defend me, and take my safety as my own responsibility. Also, as a transgender woman, I am vividly aware of what the threat against me is, so I will brook no condescension there.

Similarly, let’s talk about **why** political violence is especially bad. The real core reason why is, of course, the line between “picking off your political enemies” and “starting a civil war” is very, very thin. It takes the metaphorical sense of politics as warfare, and makes it quite literal. Again, your mindset becomes one of protecting your leader, and attacking your opponents leader. You devolve into teams, and conflict becomes total.

Ok, so that said, let’s talk about what happened last weekend. We don’t know a lot about motive or identity, but I would encourage you to read about the shooter, Matthew Crooks in the CBS article, or your favorite news link. Ultimately, what happened was “A registered republican took a firearm to a republican event where republicans insist that everyone be able to carry guns, and a gun did what guns are designed to do”. This is against the backdrop of past events, when Democratic congresspeople such as Gabrielle Giffords were shot, to have the attack blamed on them with verbiage about how vulnerable people are in “Gun-free zones”. Ultimately, as of this writing, we do not know anything about Crooks’ true motive in being there or in shooting Donald Trump, but we do know that Donald Trump has, in the past, been more than happy to have armed supporters at his rallies.

Kind of on this note, we cannot forget that Donald Trump, himself, is a political animal founded and perpetuated on the idea of political violence. For a stark example, I will remind you of the circusmstances around the taking of this photo:

I will remind you of the numerous times that this man has cheered on the assaults of protestors at his rallies, of the times he has offered to pay the legal bills of people carrying out violence in his name, of the promise to pardon the Jan 6 rioters, of him sitting there and inciting the Jan 6 rioters, of his perpetuation of the child abuse libel against trans people, of his violent rhetoric against immigrants, of his actual harsh actions against immigrants, of his entreaty to the proud boys to stand back and stand by, of his lukewarm, at best, condemnation of Jamestown, of his literal everything.

Because, ultimately, there is no ideology to Donald Trump. In many ways, his actual policies have subverted traditional Republican values, particularly on trade. The thing that Donald Trump represents, at his basic core, is “identifying the people out there that his supporters don’t like, and finding ways to take them down a notch.” That’s it. That’s the core of him. So of course, he dances with political violence, constantly.

So, as a transgender woman (and I bring this up only to say that it is personal, the threat to immigrants and people who might be perceived as such is even more dire) sitting here while this man runs for president for a party whose leaders have declared “the eradication of transgenderism” as a core goal, who speaks of eliminating people like they were “vermin”, I have a gigantic problem with blanket, unqualified condemnations of political violence that do not involve at least some qualification of what Donald Trump is, and the violence that dances around him and around gun culture in general. Because this man has not experienced the life of “discussing with friends and family about what the conditions would have to be like to detect your own roundup in a mass committing of people or a mass deportation of people, or any long tail of other things.” And that, my friends, is fucking political violence, too.

As a pacifist, and as a political pacifist, one must commit to not just laying down arms but to a world where arms are not seen as an option at all. That means working for a world where threats and oppression are gone and forgotten, and no one feels so desperate as to see violence as their only option. That also means that one treats state violence and stochastic violence as the same category of thing as “a guy with a gun”. Saying “the shooter was reprehensible” without connecting it to the context of “everything that Donald Trump is and stands for is reprehensible as well, because it comes from the same well as this shooter” is not pacifism. It is pro forma uttering of a mantra in the hopes that the problems before it magically disappear. And we are not going to manifest our way out of our current political moment.

The Catholic Church has declared trans people abominations

https://apnews.com/article/vatican-gender-surrogacy-abortion-pope-3f84d8eb97f045b0cfb0ec1efa4e614e

So, the vatican has release a new encyclical today, and there is some attempt at threading some sort of needle, but on balance, the thing is hard to read as anything but a full-throated slam of trans people. Some key quotations from the article above:

“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document said.

It distinguished between gender-affirming surgeries, which it rejected, and “genital abnormalities” that are present at birth or that develop later. Those abnormalities can be “resolved” with the help of health care professionals, it said.”

I handled my pre-transition body and dysphoria with as much grace and respect and care as could ever be expected of anyone. I did what I needed to exist in the body I was born in. I handled my social transition gradually and with care and grace. It took a very long time, and felt like grasping at objects in the dark.

What did I get for it? I got a bunch of destructive relationships in my 20s. I got a raging alcohol problem. I got a dysfunctional relationship with my birth family, and I got to navigate my every second of every day with this intense, searing, but extremely vague notion that I was ugly, disgusting and without worth, and that it had something to do with “being a man”. You know what could have helped me work through those feelings? A gender therapist, and gender-affirming care. But you have to know enough to ask the questions. And it was all gatekept away then, and to the extent it wasn’t gatekept away, the people I saw in public were very much depicted in ways one couldn’t identify with. At least to my memory, I wasn’t the “stealing my mom’s makeup at 3” type of trans girl. I was just extremely fussy and sensitive.

And now, I sit, at peace with myself, having chosen to change, and with a lot of privilege not affected very very many of my trans siblings, but also with the effects of several decades of testosterone damage on my body, and several decades of psychological trauma.

So anyway, to have a bunch of fucking religious people who claim celibacy and a separation from the physical world turn around and lecture me about how what I am doing for myself is a degradation of human dignity, well, it’s all I can do to just not let out a giant fucking guttural scream at it. Look at how people treat and look at me now versus how they did eight years ago and fucking lecture me on fucking dignity. How dare you talk to me about my life without talking to a single person that is at all fucking like me? Or with a medical professional who deals with people like me? What do you fucking know about any of this shit? Especially as you still sit there in your golden palaces in your dedicated nation-state, still dodging accountability for mass child abuse?

Pope Honey Badger my ass.

Written for TDOV 2024

Each day, that I put the rainbow on
And walk out in the street
you see me, that unabashed tranny
that freak, that weirdo, that thing
And you dare to speak

know that, each day that I’m out there,
wearing the rainbow, wearing those heels
standing with my head held high
I am reminded
That my transition is paid for by my dead sisters

And what that means to me
is that I don’t have the luxury of dulling my shine
Of letting myself break my shimmer
Because I owe it to them, to me
To live my life how I will

So, when you hear one of us say
“Radiate trans joy”
know that we know that this joy
comes with memory, with sadness, with rage
And that we choose to thrive anyway.

Thus, asshole: Laugh if you dare
scream if you must
but I am here, and will not go away
until the only dead sisters are those
who die the same way everyone else does.

X-posted from the great blue satan

Ok, so adam schiff giving money to Republicans is toxic and fuck him fuck him fuck him. (EDIT: I misunderstood a source here. he sent out mailers that identified who the MAGA candidate was so that he could contrast himself. This had the effect of helping to consolidate the Republican vote. Obnoxious, but not the same as funding Republicans. Penance served </edit>)

But that said, Lee and Porter did not total to enough votes to hit second place between them.

There are not enough progressive voters out there. The movement needs to grow, support needs to grow. You don’t win things in politics by being given them, you win them by taking them. If the progressive wing does not have the power to just take things, then of course dem leadership wont care what they think. And if they can’t do this in california, they cant do it.

This is also why the debate between “local organizing” and “voting” is a red herring. The local organizing creates a movement that can deliver votes. Once those votes are large enough in number that they make the leadership scared, or better yet, are enough to just take leadership, is when you win. Like, thats how labor got all the shit it wanted the first go around.

Organize harder, come back, beat the assholes. Ill use my vote to mitigate the worst outcomes in the meantime, but any november decision i make is a small, small part of my political activity. And we’d all be better off holding each others hands and facing the hard shit together than we will screaming about that.

Trans rights
Bodily autonomy
Human rights
End genocide in palestine and everywhere
Dismantle the military industrial complex
Close the jails
Abolish the police

And, as an addendum:

I’ll also add, tone-wise, that while it looks like I’m kind of speaking to progressives more than moderates here, that’s because I believe the audience that is willing to read a multiparagraph ramble from me is far more progressive than moderate.

A takeaway from this should definitely be:

this is why its toxic to say ‘the way to fix this is by voting in November’, with an implied ‘shut up about this now’ embedded in there. Voting is one part of a wide array of political activity, and the organizing you do before the election, and, in the form of speaking up and political pressure, between elections, will do as much as the vote itself.

Estranged. 22 Feb 2024

Estranged.

it’s such a funny word to me

To be rendered strange

unusual, different, lost

as if normalcy was ever an option

much less an option back then

—————–

This estrangement, though

doesn’t feel like I’ve been made other

it is just a loss, or a wound

and rather than disembodied and distant

my feelings are sadness and confusion

and above all, a rage

fueled by a not burning

but still red-hot coal

buried in my insides

Listening to Tori Amos as an egg

I picked up this 33 1/3 that is being meta talked about in this Guardian article. Read the first few pages while waiting to get my blood drawn at the clinic.

I really have trouble articulating all the feelings this album has given me over the years. It felt like a sledgehammer to the face the fist time I heard it as a sixteen year old, driving home from the St. Charles, MO Best Buy.

It’s been with me through moves and breakups, through sexual assault, and recovery, and now I’m hitting some stage of transition where it is back at the forefront. it’s on the speaker now, as I type this.

Anyway, both of the linked pieces directly talk about Tori Amos and a sense of self-disgust. I think that’s something that most trans women have something to say about. I know it’s a common part of the trans dialogue to talk about how you knew at three and you have these memories of sneaking into your mom’s heels and running around as a kid. Some of that was probably there for me. Certainly, my closest friends, from a very early age, were mostly female, and I’d also say that most of my memories until at least high school are a bit of an incoherent blur. But what was never unclear, was this sense, from the onset of puberty on, that there was something horribly, profoundly, terribly wrong with me. My sexuality was an enemy, my emotions were an enemy, my body was wrong (but I also had no real idea what was right). I would just run to the point of exhaustion and bone problems, hide behind my hair whenever I could talk my parents into letting me grow it out, and try for the best. I also did a lot of learning how to lean into my worst cringe, turn it into a performance — if other people were going to laugh at me anyway, I could at least control the tenor if it, which I see now as its own sort of coping self-harm. I guess having this album that revels in those parts of you that you would rather not be there, and that OTHER PEOPLE REALLY would rather not be there makes sense.

And of course, there’s the feeling of being a “boy” at what was at least a moderately conservative place (like, Bob Dole literally made a campaign stop at my high school in the last days before the 1996 election, remember when MO was the consummate swing state?), and having Tori Amos be your favorite radio musician. Not only was she so femme, so loud, but she was… so weird and inaccessible. While everyone surrounding me was all gaga about 311 and Nirvana and the Deftones… I had Tori. (and the Indigo Girls, and all of the ’60s folk, etc, and later, Dar Williams came into my life, her relentless earnestness being the near total opposite of Tori, but to this day, still holding such a special place for me in my heart). In those days, it was the sad, introspective, hurt songs that almost seemed to create this space where it was safe to feel feelings, especially in the long hours spent driving from place to place in those days. 

The disgust of transitioning

I’ve done a lot of processing out the intervening decades lately, and I don’t think retreading that particular trauma is useful right now, but I’d like to talk a bit about the experience of actually starting to feminize yourself, which for me was a long slow social transition, and then, at the end of a decade of that, beginning hormones. It’s very hard to describe the feeling of first starting to show up as femme in public as a transfeminine person. You live inside with this profound sense of **something is wrong**, and you finally see a light out, and start finding things that feel **right**. It feels revolution. It feels like freedom. It feels like a way out. 

And then you go into public, and you see people’s faces.

It’s so deflating at first. For a lot, you’re just *cringe*, they’re sorry for you, they stare a bit, there’s a pain on their face (btw, this is part of why most trans women take pretty deep offense at being called “brave.” We’re vividly aware of how much cringe there is tied up with the perception of us — being called “brave” is basically saying “I see how cringey you look, and I can’t believe you still have what it takes to bring your chin out and exist in public!”). In most rooms I went into those early days, there were much more sinister and angry faces. Sometimes, I could even see the face progress from a horny leer, to a recognition of what I was, to pure rage. It was terrifying, it was invalidating, it made me ashamed of myself, all of it. But once you know that the old box you were living in doesn’t fit anymore, what can one do but endure it or fight against it?

And I think you see this in trans culture all over the place. There is a celebration of the cringe, the ridiculous. It’s there, in the cat ears, the knee high striped socks, the trans flag everything, the anime talk, 100 gecs, I could go on. ”You’re going to stare at me? you think I’m absurd?! I KNOW I’m absurd. I’m going to be absurd HARDER. STARE AT ME. I ENJOY THIS, I ENJOY WHO I AM, AND NO ONE WILL TAKE IT FROM ME.” 

As the hormones did their work, and as I became middle aged, and as I learned how to dress and properly apply makeup, and as I relocated to a safer place, the cringed and violent stares generally became either neutral or smiling. These days, the daily threat assessments of those days are a thankful memory. But it is impossible to forget the intense juxtaposition of euphoria and self-disgust of those early days. 

Today, as I process through everything that has happened to me in the past year, the past decade, since puberty, and I listen to Boys for Pele, I’m stuck on Putting the Damage On, which is definitely one of the grippier and most accessible songs on the album. The direct lyrics to the thing are about excising an ex out of your life, dividing your stuff, reminiscing over what happened, and the admixture of grief and freedom that that moment gives you.

For me now, though, the song kind of feels like I’m having a chat with that 12 year old transfeminine egg that heard Silent All These Years on the radio on the way to her grandparents’ house and didn’t have the courage to yell for it to be turned up. The 18 year old that fought for long hair, but didn’t know how to express or understand what that need met, the person that survived for all of those years constantly thinking of death. As I figure out just how estranged I now am from my birth family, I’ve finally forgiven that egg version of me for waiting so long and taking such a roundabout route. They were doing the best they could, and they kept me safe, and they kept me alive, and their fear makes sense now. So I grab his things, and I divide out what is mine, and even still, he can look so pretty to me as I say goodbye and as I forgive him. Because I’ve got a place to go.

Listening to this album now, in my room as my real self, with all that I’ve done and been through, I think I’ve finally found the space to forgive myself for all of the damage I’ve done to myself. All of the damage being **him** did to myself and others. I might be cringe. I might hurt. But I’m here, and I’m blooming, and I’m thriving, and that egg figured out a way to get me to here. This post is probably getting too long, so I’ll leave it at, just this:

UwU, motherfuckers.

Processing

Hi. I’m feeling raw today, and the best thing that someone can do when raw is to sit down and actually go and write. Why write, you ask, well, 2024 has already been a big year in the story of Zoë Dahling. You see, as of December 31st, 2023, she is completely, fully and completely out. To family, to the world, to friends, to work. No more boymode, no more secrets, no more hiding. Just Zoë.

Now, this is of course a happy thing, but as with any trans thing, the happy thing comes wrapped in a bundle of miserable awful things. In this case, I was led to this point by a trip back home, as the deadname identity. This entailed a 30 minute daily routine of stuffing my body into an appropriate shape, hiding it in an appropriately baggy outer garment, and arranging hairpins to approximate a masculine haircut. It was dehumanizing, it felt awful, and it was just a gigantic exercise in self-torture in order to express a fundamental lie. Five days of that pretty much left me decided that I just… couldn’t anymore. So I wrote the family text, finalizing with what is the last step for so many people. I cannot tell you what the end result of all of this will be, but I can definitely say that response has… not been positive so far, and has involved what is now more than a week of total silence. It certainly brought out why I hid for so long, but then I realized… did I?

I have, of course, spent a lot of time lately going back over time past, and my story, and how I got to here, and I dug up this photograph, from what is now 14 years ago. This is the parking lot of a hair salon. I had gotten the haircut, and look how happy this person is. Look at the smile and glee. I’ll tell the story about what happened next, but before then, let me say that I was in the late stages of my doctorate, and I was in a very chaotic relationship time. I still had active PTSD producing panic attacks. I was drinking nearly constantly (usually at least 3 beers a day). When you perceive the above person, really do realize that that person was not happy in life at that moment. it wasn’t the darkest days, but that was mostly thanks to having finally figured out how to access distraction. Anyway, seeing a photo of just pure contentment on that face is astounding to me, sitting here today. 

So, what happened? One week after this photo was taken, that haircut and that person went home to St. Louis. That evening, they came to see their mother sobbing over the indignity of seeing their “son” in that haircut, with a scowling father sitting in the other corner, mostly silent. Discussion rolled back and forth for a week. There was crying, there was yelling. I said the word “bisexual”, I also said the word “genderqueer”, all trying to play it down, and make it end. Ultimately, I was semi-forcibly taken to a barber shop, and the above was replaced with a short masculine haircut. I can still remember the sneer from the stylist as they “asked me what I wanted” while my mother looked on like I was 12. I felt humiliated, and I also felt nearly catatonic (again, note the mental health state communicated in the previous paragraph). I didn’t cut my bangs short again until 2023 (btw, if you are a transfemme reading this, bangs are super flattering, and they are very worth considering).

Anyway, I tell this story to give myself some time to reflect a bit on all of this. I tell it to give my anger a place to go. But mostly, I tell it as a way of processing out a thing that I hear, often, from the experiences of cis people who see a loved one transition — that there is a grieving process for the lost deadname persona. That that person has to be said goodbye to in order to welcome the new person that showed up. But I guess, for me, it was never “<DEADNAME> died so Zoë could live.” It was “Zoë was trapped inside of <DEADNAME> pulling the strings, staying alive, keeping herself safe, keeping her emotions in a jar”. I was always here. He was always an act, a shield. I was inside of the mecha, SCREAMING. For years, decades. and now, I’m out, all the way out. I’m driving the ship, there is no mecha. Just me, a girl out there trying to exist, to care for her loved ones, and for her community.

And goddamn it, I am hurt, and I am fucking furious. I am also not able to be gaslit or bullied about who I am anymore. The point of no return was crossed so long ago you can’t even see it from here. My only regret is taking this long. My only desire with this stuff, and why I share so readily, is to help people down this same path. Thank you for reading. May the future be kinder to all of us than the past has been.