The community and friendship I've found from other trans women online is hauntingly beautiful, frightening, but something I can never live without again.
Also I want to use this space to call out someone specifically
There are some messages you get that, while seemingly insignificant can upend your life forever.
Like how one of my trans heroes literally appeared in my Twitter DMs out of nowhere.
Around a year ago while depressed on assignment in my old job I set up a twitter account to tweet as a girl to see if that’s how I actually felt or if these entire gender feelings were just some weird hangup I had that was keeping me from actually being happy. I had no frame of reference that other trans people had similar thoughts, let alone that they are a common experience.
That was the first time I ever gave myself permission to be well, me and it was pretty liberating and at the same time terrifying. I remember messaging a trans friend and her immediate reaction was “welcome to this whole new world”.
Posting on that account was a gateway to a life I would soon be inhabiting, but I didn’t make that much of an effort to spend time on it because it felt like a guilty pleasure. I was still living what I thought was my true life full time, and escaping to this world where I could be myself for small moments. I tried to keep it so separate that I refused to even have multiple accounts signed into Twitter on my phone at the same time for fear of being found out by someone.
The more time I spent in that world I realized it was where I needed to spend my time and energy because that’s who I was. I finally started to make friends and speak to as many other trans and trans questioning people as possible. This spiraled out of control at times where I’d get lumped into chains upon chains of Twitter threads with 10-20 people on them, where everyone was just longing for some connection as we navigated our identities.
There was something radical in these massive piles of posts that would clog my notifications and connect me with people I never thought I would ever know to exist. Seeing double digits on your notification icon when having an account that feels so small in the expanse of Twitter is one thing, but it is another to be overwhelmed by people experiencing similar things to you when you thought you were just this lonely freak going through something your whole life.
Eventually these weird sprawling Twitter threads moved to group DM’s spawning people to invite friends of friends and grow a community out of nothing.
Making connections as a not yet out trans woman was invaluable and I was eager to join any community I could and talk to anyone who was anything like me.
I learned so much about myself in those first few days of earnestly connecting with others, but mostly I learned a truly wasn’t alone. A big reason that many trans people do not come out of the closet is that you truly do not know that the feelings that feel so out of touch with cis-society at large are shared by others. Many of the desires and wants I had throughout my life did not present as the traditional symptoms of gender dysphoria, but the more I talk with others the more I realize they were in fact common desires/wants/beliefs of trans people all over.
It was thrilling to have a space to pour all these bottled up feelings that I had been keeping from the world, and unfortunately from my partner, for so long.
After some conversation in one sprawling DM group, a new account popped up that had me stopped dead in my tracks.
I’ve always been extremely self-conscious as a journalist and felt like I didn’t belong in the spaces where I was reporting.
It has been a combination of always been extremely young, never having gone to journalism school, and eventually getting a plum assignment abroad that never should have been trusted to me that forever cemented these insecurities.
I was always one of the youngest journalists on my specific beat, a fact made possible that I was working for a trade publication with little readership due to it being behind a paywall. I worked for years trying to expand the readership, but when most of your premier, original content is for subscribers only it is hard to gain a following.
It didn’t help that most reporters I would cross paths with had decades of experience in the field, and this was my first job out of college. I received many well-wishes and advice from older scribes, but largely felt like they didn’t take me seriously even when I was the one breaking news.
I don’t think this was always the case, and many of the friends I made during my last job’s journey are still very close with me to this day and respect me. Yet, always knowing that I wasn’t who I said I was led to a lingering chip on my shoulder always trying to prove myself.
So, whenever a writer I deeply respected would interact with me online, or say they liked my work, I would cherish it deeply.
To this day I still don’t quite understand why anyone reads my writing, but I’ve been told enough that its not horrible that I keep doing it and pushing to report as much as I can. I’m deeply grateful for the experienced journalists who brought me along to this point of what I guess is called respectability, no matter how hard it is for myself to see it.
What do you do when you see one of your writing heroes show up in your DMs even though they have no idea who you are? What happens when it is an alternate account designed to hide your true identity, but you want to scream out “HI I LOVE YOUR WORK. WITHOUT YOU THERE WOULD BE NO ME”?
How do you navigate this situation?
Well, in my case I honestly don’t remember.
Within an few hours though I was in a slack channel created by this person, had their phone number, was talking through my deepest insecurities as a writer, and just glad to be seen by someone I looked up to.
Friendship on the internet is a curious thing.
I have a lot, and I really mean a lot of friends that I have exclusively met through the internet and maintain deep interpersonal relations with. So much that my partner, at times, wonders if I care more about these friendships than our relationship.
It is not a far-fetched belief, and one of my biggest regrets is how I have come to the aid of friends far away before showing willingness to help my own partner. I have not always been the best person to be in a relationship with, and that lack of trust doesn’t just go away. So, there have been times where me saying “hey I’ve made about 10 new deep online friendships out of NOWHERE,” has not been the best panacea for our relationship problems over the last year.
But, I can’t stop and I can’t give up on my friends.
Yes, it is bad I am much more able to hold a conversation online than I am in person. Yes, jumping into random internet gift exchanges while not thinking ahead of surprise my partner with a gift now and then is not the best way to maintain a healthy relationship. Yes, it is annoying to constantly see your partner laughing online to jokes that you cannot share in person.
I’m trying my best to manage, but I can’t give up on my friends.
One of the benefits of not lying to yourself every day is that you can think clearer when trying to organize your thoughts.
This is not my only newsletter.
I still maintain another one related to my old journalistic work trying to get paid jobs and cover events in 2020 that would boost my profile as a journalist.
However, it has been harder and harder in recent weeks to find the motivation to keep writing under my deadname because I am not out to the public at large.
I’ll admit I have lost the zeal to aggressively pursue stories under that name because things do not feel as new and fresh as they once did. That’s an understatement, actually. I’ve lost the zeal because I feel I am lying to myself and others by writing under that name.
The time will come when I can either merge these two newsletters or publish stories in that beat under my actual time. I know it will come, but some days it is hard to see the light at the end of this tunnel.
Meanwhile, in this newsletter any type of writing feels like a new adventure. Even the most banal thoughts can be turned into journeys to give my life greater purpose in this space. There is no path not worth checking out, no part of me not worth exploring, and not idea that is too blasé to even consider its greater meaning.
Here, anything is possible because I am still learning so much about myself, and that as a writer is refreshing. For the first time in a while I’ve considered long-term writing goals for this year that weren’t “find new stories and write them good”. I have ideas. I have goals. I have the chance to take some risks with writing and learn when they come out incredibly mediocre. I have the ability to not be bothered by any of that.
For me, the hardest part of any story was always the ending.
I think for the longest time I judged just amazing writing on its kickers, the line at the end that would linger with you and bring everything together and just make a feature pop.
Writing ledes in news was always something that came easy to me. Most of the stories I wrote, I had the first few graphs all written out in my head while organizing my thoughts. Laying out all the facts would help put me in the driver seat to write what needed to be heard and report the news that my job.
Yet, I always struggled with how to end pieces. I wanted my work to be memorable, so I’d agonize over how to end things, so much that it would tear me up if I couldn’t land that last line perfectly.
I realized after a while this was an inanely trivial thing to worry about, since the goal of news writing is to get the information you are trying to convey written as neatly as possible. Writing concise is the goal, and a snappy ending doesn’t matter.
I’ve danced around who this newsletter was about the entire time, and to end it I asked her to write a quote. Before I share it, I just want to say thank you to Emily VanDerWerff for being a great friend and helping me learn to write again. Here are her words:
Some pieces of ourselves are innate, so deeply a piece of us, whether through DNA or through something the religious might call the soul. But many pieces of ourselves are arrived at by drawing from others. We construct our identities by figuring out how we interact with the world, with family, with friends. For the trans woman who transitions in adulthood, this is a fraught process, always, but no less rewarding for happening later than it might have for a cis woman. It's a beautiful thing to wake up and realize not just that you are loved but that you are worthy of that love, and I hope this is a satisfying conclusion to this newsletter, thought Emily VanDerWerff as she wrote the final paragraph of something she had not read but was assured was about her.