Trans Day of Remembrance 2025
This is my first Trans Day of Remembrance since I’ve come out. It is horrible that we need a day like this at all and it seems like it will only get worse in the near term.
I want to remember all of those who came before me. I couldn’t be who I am if they hadn’t led their lives proudly and outwardly so that I could see them and read about them. They died or were murdered for simply living their truth. They weren’t hurting anyone or taking anything away from anyone else. Their deaths diminish us all.
But what doesn’t diminish is us. They can kill us, or lead us into death, but they cannot squelch or deny our existence. We were here since the beginning of humanity, we’ve been in the recorded history since history started being recorded, and we will be here long after the hateful rhetoric and those who push it are reduced to ash and blown to the four corners of the earth.
🩷 🏳️⚧️ 🌹
Changing apps just to change apps?
Trying NetNewsWire again for my RSS feed reader. It’s nice on the iPhone but not quite as nice on my Mac or iPad. I normally use News Explorer, an amazing app that parses most websites. NewNewsWire still has issues with some. News Explorer doesn’t get updated often, but they did a massive update in the last year that was a game change.
News Explorer has almost too many preferences and configurations while NetNewsWire is the bare minimum. NewNewsWire is very fast but navigation between feeds/folders is handled better in News Explorer
I wonder if it’s more me being bored and wanting to try something new? I also go back and forth between Apple stock Calendar app and Calendar 366.
Let the experiment begin (again). 😊
Finished reading: Passage by Gwen Benaway 📚
Started off slow but I found many amazing poems. My favorites were: Gills, Photographs: An Auto-Biography, Kensington Series, Death, Girls, Trans, and Ceremony
Finished reading: even this page is white by Vivek Shraya 📚
Watched: Black Christmas 🍿
omg, super dark. Great flick. And I thought I’d seen it all. Wow
My poetry well seemed to have dried up for a while, but last night and most of today it seems to be producing again. Whew. Pleased with one and very pleased with another (that I’m still hacking away at right now … even though I just took a break to post to Micro.blog 🤣)
iPhone apps & layout
I am a crazy person. I like minimalism and have tried to implement that through my home screen on my iPhone. I posted before about my home screen.
I always seem to be tinkering with it. My latest was to get down to one page of apps and some widgets on the Today view page. That lasted about 4 days. I just have too many apps that I like to open and I hate folders. I hate the extra clicking and for the apps I use, I actually like their icons. And, I absolutely hate seeing a notification on a folder for one of the apps (e.g. I use Overcast for podcast listening and I have the number of unplayed episodes on the app icon). Some apps I don’t use often, but I tell you, as soon as I moved them to the App Library only, I needed them multiple times a day! 🤣
So, I’m back to 2 pages of apps, and widgets on the Today View. In case you’re wondering, I’m using the double-wide Calendar widget (I love how it shows multiple days in a nice format), a double-wide Battery widget (to see watch, phone and AirPods). Then I have small widgets for Activity and Sleep Score.
Importance of knowing your community
I loved something I heard on a podcast this morning during my walk. It’s a great podcast (sadly it finished its run a few years ago) on trans writers, and the creator/interviewer themselves are trans. I’ve read so many of these folks that it’s wonderful to get to here their physical voices and listen to an interview. The podcast is called t4t, created by Hazel Jane Plante. By the way, Plante’s own works are amazing. Check out Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) and Any Other City. They’re worth it.
Anyway, back to the quote. The interviewee was Morgan M Page, a Canadian writer, artist, historian and activist. She was commenting on a conversation she had with trans youths in Toronto and how they knew who they were in the present but didn’t know that they had a history and could be artists, writers, etc. themselves since others had blazed a trail before them. She explained a lot of this history and their eyes widened.
Page said, “Once you reconnect someone to their lineage, they no longer feel like they are adrift and alone in an empty sea. And it just has such a powerful impact on people’s lives and what they think their lives could be.”
This. This is how I felt when I started reading trans writers and watching films written and directed by trans people. I saw this whole community unfurl before my eyes. I knew I wasn’t alone before I read/viewed these works, but still, to see it physically before me, I was blown away. It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, the warmth of a home after coming in from the snow, the embrace of a true love after a hard day.
This is also why I get so angry and fight so hard to keep books in libraries and in front of kids and adults. As I’ve said in my “About” page, never underestimate the power of seeing yourself positively portrayed in popular culture.
Embodied Exegesis, Ann LeBlanc, ed.
Finished reading: Embodied Exegesis by Ann LeBlanc 📚
A good collection. There were three stories and one poem that really stood up and spoke to me.
- Lillian Boyd’s “The Repossession of Kevin’s Perfect Hair” was dark and awesome.
- Elly Bangs “Bespoke” started slow but I really enjoyed how it progressed and concluded.
- Ryka Aoki’s poem “The Woman of Water Dreams” was concise, powerful and so good. I’ve read other pieces of her work. I love her style.
- I loved Izzy Wasserstein‘s “Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition.”
It’s been an amazing week. I really need to get a longer post out but I need to find some time to do it justice. Leave it to say that I have some amazing friends who while I never doubted their support, receiving it has so deeply touched me and energized me.
Sometimes you need an album of funny nature pictures. Something to make you smile and just be a happy human being for a few moments. This set of photos from the Guardian is perfect!
Damn, I hate when my subconscious knows better than my conscious mind what I need to write and edit! This poem keeps getting better even though I keep trying to subvert it and not listen to my inner voice. The psychosis of writing! 😊
A little pride
I got this delivered yesterday. It’s a pride pendant on a really delicate and beautiful chain. The pendant is a love knot of the three colors of the trans pride flag 🏳️⚧️, pink, white and light blue.
I simply adore it. It made me tear up a little when I put it on. No matter how hard they fight against us, I can still hold my head up and say I am who I am and I’m proud of who I am. It’s little gestures like this that help me keep moving forward.
Writing doubt
When I hit a bump in my writing, it gave self-doubt a chance to peek up again. I’m forever fighting that beast. But, I do feel this time that it’s not fighting me as hard. That I’m winning this battle.
Sometimes I feel like I need to write my “Nobel book” with my first work. It’s insane the amount of pressure we put on ourselves as creatives. But, after years of confronting this, I feel stronger.
Maybe it’s because I came out and now I have nothing to fear and so much to share? Maybe because I’m blogging again so my writing is already reaching out to others? No matter what, I’ll take it.
Finished reading: Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon 📚
fantastic read. 5 stars. Perfect melding of sci-fi with trans experience. can be read either way or both ways. fast paced read too!
Finished reading: Herculine by Grace Byron 📚
A good read but glad I got it from the library. I’m not much into the demonic horror genre. The writing was good though it dragged at times. I think I could have rated this a 3 or if I was more into the genre a 4, but 3.5 sounds pretty good.
I never realized how many wonderful friends I’ve had. As I’ve unveiled myself to an ever widening group of people, the love and acceptance I’ve felt has warmed my heart and wiped away some of the sadness in my world.
Hope, no matter how small or fleeting, is still hope and I will cherish it.