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How Coloring a Tree Landed Me in the Doctor's Office

My mom flipped through the small ring-bound book and pointed to one of the pages. “What number is that?” “Uh, 7?” I guessed. “Are you sure?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “What about this one?” She flipped to another page and showed it to me. I glanced at the disk of differently sized colorful bubbles. “There’s nothing in that one,” I said with confidence. While waiting for the doctor to call us into the exam area, my mother and I continued perusing the book. Some of the colorful bubble pictures had numbers in them. In one, a seven made of blue disks stood out against a background of green disks. In another, a red four amidst purple bubbles. Other pages were just fields of different shades of the same color with no recognizable pattern. My mother was clearly flustered by my answers. She stopped at one of the numberless pages. “You really don’t see anything there?” “Nope.” “It’s a three, Daniel.” “What?” “There’s a 3 right there. It’s green. You can’t see it?” she asked, in
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What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth

Hi, friends. This post breaks the usual theme of my blog. I'm writing to let you all know that I contributed a guest post to another blog. The guest post started as a Facebook comment in a thread discussing J.K. Rowling's stance on trans rights, and the FB friend whose page it was invited me to expand what I wrote into something he could put on his blog. Six hours of writing later, I ended up with a monstrous piece of writing that could have served as a chapter in a book on the delinquency of Rowling.  He was kind enough to publish it, despite the length. The post is here:  What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth The piece goes into detail regarding the repercussions of two specific aspects of Rowling's views on transgender people. I go over the consequences associated with excluding trans women from women's spaces and some of the consequences for spreading the myth of transness as a social contagion in young people. I wrote that piece for people who do n

Unplugging From Gender

 “That’s ugly dude. You gotta shave.” I put my hand over my chin and blushed as the other boy laughed. “Why do you have that? Just shave it off,” he said, rubbing his chin and then pointing to mine. “I don’t know,” I said, dropping my eyes. “Leave me alone.” “Jeez,” he muttered as I stormed off to class. I gingerly touched the single, inch-long hair coming off my chin and felt nauseous. I had been putting off asking my dad how to shave. For the last few months, little hairs had started coming out of my face. I had tugged at the longest one, thinking that maybe a could pull it out. It hurt terribly, so instead I tried to ignore it. I could not ignore it. The thick dark hairs were there every time I looked in the mirror. There were only maybe 5 very noticeable ones, but lighter fuzz was beginning to cover my jaw like mold growing out of an old loaf of bread. I stared at them in the mirror, and, with a sense of horror in my gut, I touched one of those hairs just enough to feel resis

How Do I Look?

“Hey, Juniper! It’s good to see you!” I gave Ollie a hug and smiled up at him. It had been months since I had seen him, and we were finally able to make a lunch hangout work. We sat, and I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Tell me about what’s going on with you? How’s Amy doing?” I asked. “She’s doing well. Actually, great! We’re expecting a baby this spring!” “Congratulations!” I inquired about how the pregnancy was going, and then we chatted about work. Ollie and I are both data scientists. We used to work together, spending a lot of the day talking about everything from politics to machine learning algorithms. Back then I didn’t have boobs. If I had, our work relationship might have been regarded with suspicion that it was more than it was. It wasn’t and wouldn’t be. After transitioning, I staked out a site in the gay camp, and I can’t imagine abandoning it. On the other hand, I wasn’t helping with the potential optics problem. I had made myself up as cute as I could manage. My

The Little Tramp Comes to Dinner

As a child, I was terrified of being in awkward and embarrassing circumstances. Little has changed, and even today I will sometimes choose to not do something rather than risk an awkward interaction. Back when I was presenting male, this was interpreted as a very masculine trait, since one of the consequences was that I was loath to ask for directions. I’m sure on some level I was concerned about maintaining an appearance of competence and self-reliance. Mostly though, I was avoiding talking to people for fear that they would make fun of me for being lost or end up being berated for bothering someone. Why? Who knows. Maybe because, as a kid, that’s what it seemed like everyone did when I asked for help or admitted to not knowing something. Were they doing that to teach me self-reliance? Were they trying to teach this little kid to hold his own when bantering with the guys? I have no idea, but it left me with a life-long aversion to potentially awkward situations (or situations that I

Gender Confusion in the Capital

I went to the Bans Off Our Bodies march alone. I guess no one is really “alone” at a protest march. There were lots of other people there, but I felt alone, even being surrounded by so many people. A stage had been constructed on Constitution at the east end of the National Mall. I sat by myself in the grass with the Washington Monument to my back. We all had our backs to the monument—the massive phallus jabbing into the sky—as we listened to the women on stage tell stories about their lives. A middle aged woman told us about when she decided to abort a pregnancy—a child they had wanted—in order to spare the rest of her family. The child would have been born with a heart condition that would not have allowed him to live very long, and the child would have required constant and expensive care until he died. Caring for the child would have consumed all of the family’s time and wealth. Her 7 year old son would have been left to fend for himself for years as the adults busied themselves w

Dear Little Juniper

A Letter to Myself  My therapist suggested I write a letter to my younger self as part of the process of grieving the parts of myself I had to abandon for the first part of my life. In the process of writing the letter, it hit me how much I had lost. The difficulty I experienced due to gender dysphoria on a day-to-day basis was really astounding. I had no idea what was going on, but it affected me on a deep level. I was not OK for most of my life. I powered through and made it work, but I was definitely not OK. I think part of coping with having to not be myself was denial of both the root problem (gender dysphoria) and denial of how bad my mental health was. Coming to terms with my gender dysphoria was fairly easy. The realization of how much I've lost in the past 40 years because of my depression and other mental health issues has been much more traumatic. Writing this helped me to come to terms with some of it. There really was no way around it, as I point out to my younger self