Emily and Everything After

So you might have heard the news: I’m trans! Which is to say I’m a trans woman, which is to say I’m a woman.

You probably first got to know me as a writer named Todd VanDerWerff, but I promise you I’m so much more entertaining as Emily VanDerWerff. (Also, I’m going to be publishing under the name Emily Todd VanDerWerff for a bit — the better to teach the machines who I am — but I’m just Emily, not Emily Todd, who sounds like a 19th century society belle.) I use she/her pronouns now. I know, I know! It’s gonna take a second! But I promise we’ll get there.

But don’t worry! I’m still me! I didn’t just come out on social media or anything like that. No, I very ostentatiously wrote 3,500 words and published it on a major website in the guise of a review of a TV show!

Anyway, if you call me Emily and use she/her pronouns, I’d really like that! If you use my former name, well, I won’t like that very much.

All of the above is probably most of what you need to know, yeah? (And my thanks to Kim McCauley, a brilliant trans soccer writer, for giving me the basic format of this post.) Most of you are just going to roll with this, which I know because I’ve been coming out to people in fits and starts for 15 months or so, and the vast majority have been so, so, so supportive.

For those of you who want a little more information, read on for some FAQs, just like this is a website in 1996. I’m going to vastly oversimplify everything!

What’s a trans person?

A trans person, broadly defined, is anybody whose gender doesn’t match up with what they were assigned at birth, usually based on their genitalia. (I guess I don’t know what else this would be based on. Prevailing mood?) I am a binary trans person, which means I was assigned male, but actually, all along, I was a woman, surprise!

Plenty of trans people are non-binary, gender-fluid, or genderqueer, which means they don’t feel comfortable labeling themselves with either “man” or “woman.” They often use they/them pronouns, but many folks in the NB world will use other pronouns, too. It’s important to remember that if binary trans people are assaulting the strictures of the gender binary, our non-binary friends are really assaulting the strictures of the gender binary and are at least 25 percent cooler than us, on average.

In general, a trans person will be just fine with you asking for their pronouns. And you know what? More cis people should be okay with it, too! After all, there are plenty of people who “seem” cisgender but are actually non-binary or trying something out or experimenting or closeted, and they might appreciate the question.

All of which is to say: If you are cis and somebody asks for your pronouns, just say, “Oh, I’m a he” or “I’m a she” and don’t be a dick about it, geez.

What’s a cis person?

Cis people are literally just people who are comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth. Odds are, this includes you, reader! Congratulations! Almost all of society is set up to benefit you!

It’s important to note that gender and sexuality are separate from each other. Most people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual are still cisgender, because most people are cisgender. And if a trans woman is attracted to men, she is a straight trans woman, just like I’m a gay trans woman because I’m attracted to women. (I can’t help it! We’re so neat!)

The term “cis” derives from chemistry. There, a molecule on “the same side” as another molecule is said to be “cis,” while a molecule on the opposite side is “trans.” All of this is thanks to Latin and has something to do with mountain ranges, so if you don’t like being called cisgender, blame the Romans! I don’t know what to tell you!

Cisgender people will occasionally react as though being called “cis” is an insult, because society mostly assumes that we’re all cisgendered, and serious discussion of trans issues has only really entered the public eye in the last several years. (Trans people have been around for all of human history, but, like, the odds are that most of your Facebook friends only realized this when Caitlyn Jenner came out.) But cisgender is ultimately a completely neutral descriptor of your relationship to your gender, as neutral as the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” So if you try some shenanigans about how it should just be “trans women” and “women,” you are more or less implying I’m not a “real” woman when my Pinterest says that I am the most boring white woman in her 30s you could imagine. Anyway, again, it’s not very polite, and what do you gain from being a dick? Nothing!

I want to read more about being a trans person!

There are lots of great resources, and I love the books Whipping Girl by Julia Serano and She’s Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan (though it is very 2003). Beyond that, though, I write a fair amount about my experiences over at my newsletter Stealth and on my trans-focused Twitter account. And, really, social media is often the best way to follow trans discussions, be it trans Twitter or the many invaluable trans subreddits.

I think I might be trans.

I can’t tell you if you are, but congratulations for having this conversation with yourself, and know that I’m in your corner, even if you get down to the bottom of it and realize you’re cis. Self-examination is always good, and defining why your gender is your gender is good even if you’re not trans. I’ve had so many amazing conversations with cis people about how they “know” they’re cis, and just the process of doing that will help you be more compassionate toward those of us who aren’t.

If you do think you’re trans, try to find a trans-affirming therapist or spiritual leader. Or at the very least, find a friend you can talk to. The best thing you can do is start to do small experiments with clothing, with hair, with other elements of presentation and see how they make you feel.

The line between the societal construction of gender and whatever psychological or biological elements exist around gender is murky, and we may never understand it precisely. What’s important is finding what makes you happy — and chasing that as far as you possibly can.

Are you keeping the Twitter handle tvoti?

I’m glad you asked. Yes. It always stood for “TV on the Internet,” not my former name on the internet.

Wait, your initials were TV. Why didn’t you try to find a women’s name using T?

I did! I tried a handful of ’em, and believe me, I’m aware that switching to EV is really messing up my personal brand. But I literally chose the name Emily without realizing what I was doing when I was 7, something you can read more about here.

Why are you still “Todd VanDerWerff” on Primetime?

So, funny story, the public coming out date of June 3 was picked because it was to be the first Monday after Primetime’s first season was originally to end. When we then realized it was the first Monday of Pride Month, we got even more excited about it. At that time, we had already embarked on interviews and the like for the first season, and I had been conducting them under the name “Todd.” I felt weird running those episodes under the name “Emily,” even though I was well aware that most of the people I had talked to just wouldn’t care.

But then our production timeline slipped for unavoidable reasons, and rather than re-record a bunch of stuff with the name “Emily,” I just decided that I would rather have the first season be a matched set under the name “Todd.” It’s not ideal, but it was 100 percent my choice and not pushed on me by anybody at Vox. The first season is telling one story, and I wanted it all to be under the same name. If we do future seasons, they’ll be under my real name.

Hey, I loved your old podcast! When is TV on the Internet coming back?

Libby and I continue to live together, write together, and argue about stupid shit together, so you never know.

What about [insert other project here]?

Work on Arden season two continues apace, and I talked with the great podcast critic Wil Williams about how working on season one helped me start to think about my own gender.

The paperback edition of Monsters of the Week: A Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files, the book I co-authored with Zack Handlen, will be released this fall — and under the name Emily Todd VanDerWerff, even. I’m genuinely blown away by how quickly Abrams Books mobilized to make sure the book reflected my name.

And basically all of my other writing will continue on as it always was going to. One difference, though, is that I’ve been steadily less interested in criticism the longer I’ve been out. I think some of this is I’m just enjoying stretching the muscles of doing more reported things and some of it is that I’ve been a TV critic for 10 years now, and that’s a long time to do something. We’ll see how this shakes out as I am more myself.

(I also think that my critical self was very tied to my old identity. Now that I’m finally living freely, I’m a lot less bound up in “my opinions are correct.” Some of that is also having made Arden and having absorbed the criticism of it — both positive and negative — and having realized how many times I’ve guessed at the circumstances of a thing’s creation and gotten it completely wrong. It’s made me slightly more gunshy, I think!)

What about the newsletter?

Episodes, I honestly don’t know. I thought I was going to sunset it, but I really did love writing it, and there are topics I would like to write about that don’t fit as well in my trans-centric newsletter. Then again, maybe blending what used to be Episodes with what is now Stealth would be a good solution. Either way, please subscribe.

That’s all. Thank you so much for reading all these years, and thank you for reading this. I am happy to answer all your non-invasive questions. You can email me, or you can tweet at me at tvoti.