Andie’s Place observations of gender dysphoria and beyond

Yes, I am still here, 12 years on, older and wiser by a street. I ran out of steam with the trans blog years ago. After all everything had already been said, argued, confirmed and fought over. In many ways nothing has changed and the pendulum continues to swing. Trouble is, it tends to hit people before it swings back.

I have been thinking about writing on Medium or Substack instead, since they have risen in prominence and availability over the years. This blog desperately needs a tech update, and my coding skills haven’t been exercised in a while, and it costs me, whereas they are convenient, ready-made and conversational. However,  several things hold me back.

• Everyone writes so much that being heard becomes a competition. Here, I can watch the stats (interesting) without getting obsessed: what if no-one ever read? If I don’t self-promote and still get read, something other than algorithms must still be working.
• Very early on I switched off comments, and thank goodness, because the waves of gratuitous transphobia in recent years are emotionally damaging.
• I only started this blog as a way of: (a) avoiding back-channel discussion of my transition, (b) self-therapy and (c) support and discovery for lived experience to counter opinion and misinformation. It has been nothing if not authentic.

I don’t think I can contribute anything unique about the nature of being transgender because there are brilliant writers and researchers not only online, but on LGBTQ+ bookshelves in all mainstream booksellers. (If your local store is censored, they are still online, and if short of funds, look up the authors for their own sites and YouTube etc.)  I can only be myself, and I am not defined by being trans any more than left-handed people by that. I just happen to be trans, living in a world that still remembers how left-handedness is sinister.

So maybe I’ll be back here just musing and reflecting. I note at the start of 2025 how my stats are skewing to the USA. You people are in for a really rough ride (the pendulum has swung and hasn’t a whole lot further it can go) and I know how fascism is taking hold. I expect much more influence to reach into the UK too. So if you are reading, there’s all the years I wrote about which remain authentic to the experience of being trans. Stay there with your own authenticity, even if you cannot get the treatment you need, and have to keep your head down. Petitions and protests rarely achieve much (though sometimes they can) because power doesn’t work like that.

I have made two important moves since retiring as a technical author (which is all about understanding the way things work and being able to interpret and relay that). The first was to take up Qi Qong and Tai Chi as a way of increasing my self-awareness as an energetic living being. I want to go more deeply into it to understand our actions, inner actions, and interactions. The second was to begin counselling and psychotherapy training. I want to go more deeply into it to understand our actions, inner actions, and interactions. Yes, there is coherence here: to know myself better and to know better how and why people become who they are. Help myself, help others.

We become who we are in every respect; we are not born with stories in our head and we scarcely belong. We spend the rest of our lives becoming, through ingesting stories and trying to make sense of the world so that we can belong.

No-one is born ‘believing’ they are trans (or binary or non-binary, for that matter), just as no-one is born ‘gender critical’. We learn what others tell and teach us. We have to belong, because we are a social species. We become all of these social things. I didn’t become trans in 2010, but I did start becoming a woman. Everyone learns their gender, their roles and expectations and their own relationship to these. What we do to belong, what we learn to believe, can be very uncomfortable indeed. But becoming a person never ends, because better narratives exists and new ones constructed. I do not have to belong to a social group with bad constructs, though I do still feel the effects. What I must aim for is authenticity.

We were not born with ideas in our heads. Everything in there was learned. We want those ideas to be coherent, meaningful and helpful, and that is a joint enterprise. Keep the good, drop the rest. Sometimes we must leave almost everything behind. It never ends.