Category: personal essays

I’ve decided to do one of these! I made it my New Years Resolution last year to read more, and in 2024 I read 23 books!! Which is more than I’ve read in years! I’m very proud of myself and would like to reflect on it, so here goes! (I also couldnt find a template for these so I made up my own categories)

Favourite re-read: Blackout by Mira Grant – I’m a real sucker for the Newsflesh trilogy, as well as the side stories. I”ve always been a fan of zombie fiction, and I’ve loved these books for many many years. That love has extended to her entire bibliography, next years list will probably have Into the Drowning Deep in this exact same spot!

Favourite translated book: Butter by Asako Yuzuki – A really interesting book about a journalist getting sucked into the orbit of a convicted serial killer. It’s about manipulation and feeling trapped, and about learning how to live instead of just surviving. I loved this book, and it was easy to get swept away alongside the main character, Rika. I also got some new recipes out of it!

Favourite book published before 2000: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler – Published in 1993, this certainly isn’t the oldest book on my list, but it remains incredibly poignant. Set in a post-apocalyptic 2024 (ouch), this book goes into the themes of social inequality and climate change, and is a must-read if you haven’t already. The sequel, Parable of the Talents, is my first book for 2025 and I can’t wait to get stuck in.

Favourite book published in 2024: The Anonymous Letters of C Forestier by Felicia Davin – I hadn’t read the previous books in the French Letters series, but that didn’t hold me back in the slightest. The characters are so incredibly charming, and I absolutely adore the inclusive world that Davin has created here. I plan on diving into the rest of the series, and I recommend you do the same!

Favourite book of the year!: Faebound by Saara El-Arifi – This book really snuck up on me! It was the last book that I read this year, starting it on Saturday the 28th and finishing just before the new year! A wonderfully written fantasy, it is the first in a trilogy and I very much look forward to reading the next book, Cursebound, when it comes out!

We’re coming to the end of pride month once again. Corporate twitters will go back to their boring profile pictures, pride themed events will (mostly) come to an end, pride themed items won’t be restocked, but that doesn’t mean that pride is really over. After all, having pride in yourself should be a year-round commitment. Living through the bad times to see the good is a worthy cause to celebrate, and I, for one, am proud of myself. For surviving the hard times and for lifting up other trans people to the best of my ability, I am proud. Every trans person should be proud and we deserve to celebrate who we are unashamedly.

I love pride month. Typically, there’s a lot of lovely summer days (it being June and all), I feel more comfortable with being visibly queer, and I have an excuse to celebrate my queerness openly with the people I love. Of course, there are hardships too, especially now with the growing vitriol from mainstream media and the government, but that doesn’t mean that we should lose hope. Statistics¹ still show that anti-trans viewpoints – namely “gender critical” ideology – are not the mainstream and that the people who hold these views are a minority. The problem is simply that they are loud and often difficult to ignore because they apparently believe that the non-stop harassment of trans people will make us go away (spoiler alert: it won’t). Transgender people will never go away, we have always existed and we always will, if they won’t accept that then that is entirely their problem. I refuse to apologise for loving myself and loving being myself wholeheartedly.

Continue reading “pride?”

I’ll be honest with you. Your trans friends are tired. I’m exhausted. After months of seeing you-know-who pop up on our timelines or some hashtag about them trending I’m sick of it. Now to know that it has all led up to a transphobic, poorly written novel which was in production- or at the very least was pitched -while her publishers represented trans writers, it all seems like an elaborate hit piece on an entire group of marginalised people. So I’m sick of hearing about her or anyone who supports her and I know that I’m not the only one. Do us a favour and stop tweeting about her or sending your trans friends articles about how shitty she is (trust me, we know). Instead start boosting trans creatives. I have been seeing more of this type of thing trending, which is heartwarming, so I’m mostly reiterating the point in my own medium. The sheer frequency of this is what brings me to my topic, which is the importance of cultivating your own online experience.

This essay is primarily aimed at other trans people, but I hope that I can offer useful advice to anyone else who may be reading too. For starters, I love the internet, and I have done for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I played endless flash games. As I grew up I discovered fanfiction (I refuse to be embarrassed because it led me to my current aspirations). I have made countless friends over the years, some I no longer talk to, some I do even after ten long years. It is a seemingly bottomless pit of information and knowledge and I think that on the whole it really is an incredible thing. Without it I may not have even discovered who I really am. I didn’t know what “transgender” really meant until I learned about it online, and it was a blessing that I did. I finally had a word to describe how I was feeling, and unless you’ve felt it you have no idea what that was like. Now, however, with the ever growing focus on social media (or maybe because I feel like I’ve aged ten years with each birthday), it doesn’t feel the same. 

Continue reading “online self-care”

One of my brothers asked me to cover this next topic, and it’s something that I think about frequently. I came out as trans later in life; I chose my name when I was sixteen and started transitioning medically at twenty two. I have a lot of trans friends who also came out/started transitioning later in life, and the questions posed to me were: how do we talk about them from before they began transitioning? How do I refer to myself from before my transition? What’s the most respectful way to approach this? Obviously I am writing this from my own perspective first and foremost, but I will do my best to be as concise as possible. I will also be writing this essay in two parts. The first part will be advice for cis people on how to be respectful towards trans people and their personal histories, while the second part will be more discussion based and aimed towards other trans people. I felt that this approach would have the most cohesive result for the points I will try to make.

I want to talk about my own experiences first. As stated above, I initially came out at sixteen, and the one word that best sums up this period of my life is “confusing”. It was during this time that I began to experiment with my own idea of gender, and also when I first started to ask my close friends and family to call me “Finn”. It took a long time for me to reach a stage where I was comfortable with myself, but one of the biggest influences on that comfort was the acceptance of my friends and family. One of my brothers stopped using my deadname entirely, my cis friends would regularly check in and confirm they were using the pronouns that made me feel the most comfortable, things like that. Their initial support in these formative years of my life gave me more comfort and joy than I think they will ever realise, and I’m ever grateful for them.

Continue reading “personal history”

An introduction is a good place to start. My name is Finn, I’m trans masculine and the majority of the time I am a man. Recently I went into hospital with pancreatitis and experienced the worst pain of my life. In the subsequent days of recovery, I got to thinking. I was thinking about my experiences as a trans man in needing medical care, being a trans man in general, eventually trailing towards the overarching “what does it all mean” that I assume everyone comes to. I was thinking so much and I thought, “why not start writing it down?” Surely, I am not alone in these thoughts, and if I can open a conversation with other people about my experiences, that’s a good thing.

I’d like to talk about emotional labour as a trans person, especially when interacting online. I have made the unfortunate decision to have a presence on Twitter, which can be a hub for vitriol, especially towards the marginalised. Usually, I tailor my experience to one that suits me. I follow friends, musicians, actors, like we all do. I also follow a large amount of trans-related charities, activists and voices in the community, and the majority of what I see is trans-positive. I just have the bad habit of going into a trans-inclusive tweet and scrolling down to read the comments. This doesn’t tend to go anywhere, as I simply don’t want to expend the emotional labour that would be required to even acknowledge transphobes, but I wouldn’t be writing an essay about emotional labour if I hadn’t done something. On a trans-inclusive tweet about cervical healthcare, someone had simply commented “Women” in response to “everyone with a cervix”. I, rather foolishly, decided to engage and state the facts, that I am a man with a cervix.

Continue reading “emotional labour”