Transgender Liberty

I get up early, usually around 3 a.m., because I work East Coast hours on the West Coast. This morning I woke to the roof creaking and the wind whistling, a storm announcing that fall is here and winter isn't far behind. I made my coffee and listened to the wind whip around outside. Then, in the distance, I heard loud static snaps, pops, and booms. Uh oh. Not good. The power went out. Total dark. Luckily, I know where my flashlights are, and I keep big candles for exactly this. So I set up, grabbed my charged laptop, and sat in the dark surrounded by candlelight, typing the blog you're reading now. The outage reminded me how tied we are to our devices and to social media. I felt the itch to grab my phone, post to my "groups" that the power was out, and start doomscrolling. But honestly, why? Sitting there, I realized that turning everything off and just being alone with yourself is healthy. It lets you filter out the noise, notice what's draining you, and ...

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...