Too often, behavior is dismissed as “inappropriate” without truly understanding the reasons behind the behavior, particularly when it involves people who aren’t neurotypical.

All characters and events in this story are fictional. I.E. the mom, dad, and other family members depicted are not based on my family!

A Kitchen Tantrum

She’s in the kitchen, screaming at the top of her lungs.

You would think that a murder has occurred. It’s disturbing the entire family, interrupting everyone else. It’s demanding immediate attention from everyone in the house — everyone’s expected to just drop what they are doing, and come deal with this new crisis…

The news programs used a picture that showed her face beaten, swollen, and bruised. It also showed some stubble. As you can imagine, that got a lot of comments, along the lines of, “she’s not even trying, what did she expect?”

I remember early on in my gender transition talking to my therapist about what my goals were, whether they were realistic, whether I could handle transition. She wanted to know what I wanted. I told her, “I want to look like I’m trying.”

“I want to look like I’m trying.”

I didn’t expect it to be reasonable to expect…

I work from home. I wanted to be able to let my wife know, “Joelle is busy right now.”

This article will be fairly technical, but won’t give step-by-step instructions for everyone. It’s more meant to serve as an inspiration to other computer professionals — to determine how they might do something similar.

I love working from home, being able to have an environment that is set up exactly for me. Everything in my office, from the desk and chair I use, to the room’s lighting was designed to make me comfortable.

But I wanted something outside my office door…

Transgender people have never had a great relationship with medical care. Most trans people have stories about being mistreated while obtaining medical care — not just for trans-related healthcare, but also for general healthcare. It’s not unusual to be refused treatment by transphobic doctors, to be misgendered and dead-named by providers, to experience the biases the medical profession has against sex workers (whether or not we’re a sex worker), and to be subject to assumptions (without necessarily any evidence) about what gender we really are.

Sometimes the problem is intrinsic in the way medicine sees trans bodies and the research…

My doctor suggested a mammogram. That caused me to dig into the research.

I admit I wasn’t looking forward to doing a mammogram, so I was probably really looking for excuses not to do it. I was concerned about how I would be treated. Would I be treated as a human in such a gendered space? Would my femininity be acknowledged, or would I be humiliated? So I was looking for my excuse.

That got me thinking: what screenings do we need? I already knew some basics (I’ve heard something about hormones and breast cancer), but my curiosity took me…

The UK news organization, Daily Mail, reported that seeing trans people on TV caused young people to seek out medical transition.

Except, no, the actual research didn’t.

First, let me link to what I’m talking about:

• The Daily Mail story
• The actual research study

Science reporting is notoriously awful (ironically the linked paper also mentions the Daily Mail’s bad reporting of another science issue, the false link between the MMR and autism that destroyed public confidence in vaccines). There isn’t a simple reason for this, but it is worth looking at.

What did the research study actually study?

Looking at the paper, published in the JAMA Network…

What it feels like to be a trans woman…walking down the street.

I do an hour or so of walking a day, for my health. I always try to keep an eye on what’s going on around me because, well, people can be horrible.

I’ve had beer bottles thrown at my head and plenty of insults screamed at me while walking down the sidewalk. Clearly my existence bothers people. But honestly this generally doesn’t bother me much — I’d feel differently if one of them stopped, but thus far they just stick their head out the window and shout something…

Coming out as trans is hard in the best circumstances. If you have to stay home, it’s even harder. But there are things you can do!

Why now?

First, why might people come out as trans right now? It’s pretty simple: many of us have more time on our hands, which gives us more time to think about what we want out of life. In addition, the thought of illness and mortality might make us question, “Do I want to live this way the rest of my life?” …