Transgender Liberty

You have probably heard all of these: "Liars can't look you in the eye." "Their truth, your truth, and the truth." "Imposter syndrome." "I don't belong here." One of them is simply false, and it does real damage. One of them is useful, if you are willing to follow it all the way down. Two of them are lies we tell about ourselves — and they were handed to us. Let's take them one at a time. "Liars Can't Look You in the Eye" This one is the worst, because it is both universally believed and flatly wrong. Start with how widespread it is. A team of ninety researchers surveyed people across 75 countries and 43 languages, asking an open-ended question: how can you tell when someone is lying? The dominant answer, everywhere they looked, was that liars avert their gaze. Roughly 64 percent of respondents named it, and the belief held steady across languages and age groups. About 70 percent of non-English-speaking ...

I have spoken before about destiny... and some weird feelings of destiny that have circled me my entire life. Read Fate , 12 Monkeys , The People Upstairs , and Final Frontier if you want to know more about that weirdness that has followed me. Yet... it ties into my life. Recently I was out for a walk (alone), which I try to do daily. I find solace in the woods — the quiet, the sentinel trees, the animals that for the most part are just themselves, living and mostly alone. Rabbits, Squirrels, Birds (many kinds), Hummingbirds, Ducks, Nutria, Cranes, Owls, Raptors, Fish, Frogs,Snails,..Deer even. Ducks seem to be the most social, and even then they kinda do their own thing, loosely tied to the group. Anyway, I was walking along and saw a shadow float quickly across the ground past me, and above me on a branch 60 feet up landed what I believe was a young raptor — a hawk or a falcon. I walked under it, turned, and looked up, and it just sat there looking around and observing. Later I thou...

The Letter On My Passport My birth certificate says F. My Driver's license says F. My Real ID says F. A court of law looked at my life and signed its name to it: F. Yet.....My passport says M. Every level of government that has actually examined who I am agrees. The federal government is the only one that doesn't — and it's the one whose document I have to hand across a counter at a border. I've written about this before: People Are Not Things — And More On Passports — August 15, 2026 Why SCOTUS — The Supreme Court Is Rotten — August 1, 2026 So why the M? Not accuracy. State X corrected my birth certificate. The State I live in corrected my license. A judge signed the order. If the federal government wanted the accurate answer, it has four documents telling it the accurate answer. Not identification, either. A marker that contradicts my face, my name, and every other ID in my wallet makes me harder to identify, not easier. It doesn't help the pe...

One Year Later This one is personal. It's my truth, my side. Other people in this story will tell it differently, and they're entitled to that. But this is what I lived, how I see it, and where I think I'm going. Maybe it gives you hope. Maybe insight. Maybe a gasp or a laugh. We'll see. Keep reading. I've written it here over and over: most of my life I was confused. Out of sync with myself. Out of resonance. Out of focus with the world, and never able to explain why. If you want the long version, it's in Sparkly Purple Bicycle.. and pieces never fitting . The label for that is transgender. Most of my family walked away when I told them. They couldn't believe it, because their experience of me was the version I let them see — the version that coped like a functioning alcoholic. I lived hetero, normal, presentable, and a wreck underneath. Nobody knew. Nobody wanted to know. Not even the partner I was with. I wrote about what that wreckage actually looked lik...

They Did It in Daylight: Kansas SB 244 and the People Who Voted for It  On February 23, transgender Kansans opened their mail and found a letter from the Division of Vehicles. Their driver's licenses would no longer be valid as of February 26. Three days. Not "renew at your convenience." Not "at your next scheduled renewal." Surrender the license. Get a new one that says what the state has decided you are, regardless of how you look, how you live, or what happens to you when you hand it to a stranger. I recently wrote a post called People Are Not Things , about the dehumanizing I see everywhere right now — the demonizing, the hate, the intolerance, the total absence of empathy or basic decency. In Kansas, that dehumanizing has a bill number. What SB 244 actually does It is called a bathroom bill. It is much more than that. It voids existing IDs. Kansas driver's licenses and birth certificates that reflect a transgender person's gender are invali...

People Are Not Things ** I was browsing the Internet and came across this picture This is my journey to get my passport and WHY Civil rights and fighting for them are so important.  I am not a thing, I am not a number I am a person just like you.  "It May Be Too White" That was the first thing she said to me. I had been standing at the counter for maybe ninety seconds. I handed over my DS-11 and my passport photo, and she held the photo up and told me it might be too white. What does "too white" even mean? It was a decent photo. It was as good as the one on my driver's license. I had gone to a listed provider to get it taken — FedEx, in my case, and I hate FedEx — precisely so this wouldn't happen. She hmm'd and haw'd. She suggested I go get another one, and warned me that if she submitted this one it might get rejected. I told her to submit it anyway. Then she moved on to my birth certificate. She studied it. Then my driver's license. She studie...

As a transgender woman, I face a lot of challenges that cis men and cis women take for granted, or flat out abuse. In this post I want to talk about four forms of toxic behavior I deal with, why they're damaging, and why they need to be recognized. Edit: I want to add here that as a transgender woman I forgive and look past much. Yet, there are times when you can't. Writing about the failings of myself and others helps me in some therapeutic way and I hope helps you too. Please read on with this in mind  Misgendering First is misgendering. I run into this from time to time. Last night I was at New Seasons. I'd gotten my food and was checking out when the register malfunctioned — the receipt mechanism popped out and paper went everywhere. An older woman waiting nearby leaned in and said, warmly, "Oh, it's been doing that all day. It's not your fault." That was kind. She didn't have to say anything. She saw a stranger standing in a small mess and decided...