Changing my name on here is one of the first steps in my transition.
So, I’ve gone by the name Ellie Rebecca for quite some time, but after deliberating on it for the past few months, I’ve decided to change it. I need to start going by something more masculine-sounding in order to combat the intense gender dysphoria I’ve been feeling lately.
I’d like to be called Danny or Daniel from now on.
I’ve felt uncomfortable being perceived as “a girl” for my entire life. I knew there was something different about me, but I just couldn’t articulate it for the longest time. When I learned what gender dysphoria was at about age nineteen…
They save trans kids’ lives, and banning them will have dire consequences
As visibility for trans people has increased in recent years, so too has transphobic bigotry. Conservative American lawmakers have been introducing anti-trans legislation left and right. The latest of these is Arkansas’ bill outlawing gender-affirming medical treatment for trans youth.
Under this bill, doctors would not be able to provide trans-related care, including hormones and puberty blockers, to trans people under the age of 18 without the risk of losing their license.
To me, at least, it seems as though bills like this were created from a place of extreme ignorance in addition to bigotry.
After all, the bill is…
It’s actually not that different from dating someone of any other gender.
Dating as a nonbinary person can be…interesting, to say the least.
I’ve had potential dates tell me that the singular “they” is not grammatically correct (despite the fact that it totally is). I’ve had people tell me that because I was assigned female at birth, I’m a woman and I have no say in the matter. I’ve had people tell me that I was a special snowflake who gets triggered at just about everything.
All of that makes me so glad that I’m in a relationship now and I don’t have to worry about dating anymore.
Trans folks don’t need to undergo medical procedures in order to be valid.
A few years before I fully realized I was trans, a close friend of mine came out as trans. We were twenty at the time, and I had known her as a “guy” since middle school.
Of course, it took a while to adjust to her new name and pronouns, but she was still the same person at heart. She didn’t even look that different from before, with the exception that she now had long hair and had developed breasts as a result of being on HRT (hormone replacement therapy) for several months.
Still, before I invited her over for…
A horror-ish puzzle-platformer that tests your wits and ability to survive a ruined world
Upon first glance, Lifeless Planet: Premiere Edition for the Nintendo Switch is a tough game to categorize into a single genre. It contains elements of sandbox exploration, puzzle platforming, Cold War-era science fiction, and just a dash of horror. It’s a little of everything, and I think that was by design. The player is meant to stay on their toes, always guessing at the true nature of the game and the world inside of it.
The film was more about the insidiousness of internalized prejudice than overt racism.
[Warning: Heavy spoilers for Get Out (2017) below.]
I was lucky that when I first watched Get Out in late 2017, in a college class called “Race & Gender in the Media,” I was going in completely blind. I had somehow managed to avoid hearing any details about the ending. That, coupled with the fact that I saw it in an auditorium filled with dozens of other people, gave me the full, unspoiled cinematic experience.
People, myself included, “oooh’d” and gasped at just the right moments as the tension built over the course of the movie. …
The disaster in Texas proved that many liberals in other states don’t care about Southerners.
All things considered, I’d thought February was going to be a pretty great month.
After being in a long-distance relationship for more than a year, my girlfriend was finally able to move in with me at the end of January. I’ve been taking steps to plan out my gender transition. I’ve been taking on special projects at my job that will make me look better to the higher-ups at the company I work for.
Then, everything changed when the Water Nation attacked.
In other words, Texas got hit with the worst winter storm I’ve ever seen in my 20 years…
Well-meaning but tone-deaf cis people sometimes end up doing more harm than good.
The other day, I was scrolling through Twitter, minding my own nonbinary business, when I came across this tweet.
It features a short video of an Etsy seller, a presumably cisgender man who goes by the username SassyCentaur, who sold more than 1,200 gender-neutral bathroom signs in 2019. Most of these signs consist of silhouettes of various creatures, like mermaids, centaurs, and octopi, with text saying, “Whatever, just wash your hands.”
When I first encountered signs like these a few years ago, I didn’t see a problem with them. Recently, though, as I’ve gone through my own process of figuring…
Let’s explore this symptom common in ADHD, autism, depression, and many other mental illnesses.
Dirty dishes and food wrappers pile up on my coffee table. My sink overflows with cups, plates, and silverware that desperately need washing. Unclean laundry spills out of the top of my hamper and onto the hardwood floor.
These are all things I keep meaning to do. Logically, I know I should do them, and soon. The time during which it’s socially acceptable for my apartment to look like this is running out. Or maybe it already has run out. To my brain, that time seemingly has no endpoint.
Having a mental illness, especially multiple comorbid conditions as I do…
And yes, it is in fact grammatically correct.
Whenever words like “gender-neutral” or “pronouns” come up in conversation, transphobes poke their heads up like meerkats, ready to launch into a tirade about how the rise of these terms indicates the onset of society’s downfall.
Okay, maybe not all of them are quite that dramatic.
However, many of them claim that while established gendered pronouns like “he” and “she” are fine, the English language doesn’t really have any gender-neutral pronouns. Or at least one that is grammatically correct. But that’s just not true.
In fact, if you’re a native English speaker, chances are you already use a gender-neutral pronoun…
Danny Jackson H.
They/he. The writer formerly known as Ellie Rebecca. 25-year-old nonbinary trans guy-ish.
