I Haaaaaate How Porn-rotted Men's Brains Are. You Can't Even Have A Normal Conversation With Most Guys

I love seeing other people's ocs and getting snippets of their stories like oh my gosh there's a whole world and narrative in your head that I'm getting a small glimpse into isn't that so cool????

When I was early on in my transition I got in a Lyft, and the driver was this big country guy. I was a little nervous so I just sat quietly in the back.

After a moment he changed the music on his phone to what sounded like a Hatsune Miku song. Curiosity got the better of me, so I finally spoke up and said “is this Hatsune Miku?”

And he said “Yep. You looked uncomfortable, and I know Transgender women like Hatsune Miku, so I thought it might help.”

I think about that interaction a lot.

in the course of watching various assorted older documentaries about being gay and coming out and homophobia and conversion therapy etc it strikes me that there's a way that people talk about the relief and joy of coming out properly and accepting yourself and feeling a sense of unconditional love without shame that's very similar to the way christians love to harp on about the joys of the gospel etc. and that's not surprising bc many of these people in documentaries are (raised) christian, obviously they're steeped in that language. but it is frustrating to think that cishet christians will rant on for days about how wonderful it is that Jesus takes away shame and guilt and sin and reminds people of their value and worth with unconditional love - and then recoil at actually seeing this happen in contexts where they dont want it to. ohno. we didnt actually mean what we said. we meant taking away shame and self-hatred spiritually. get back in the closet.

such a beautiful sign of what it is to feel fully known and accepted and the goodness that emerges in people's lives when they know that they're unconditionally loved - and what greater unconditional love than the love of God? - and cishet christians would rather throw it into the trash

I hold the power of creation and none shall ever stop me

justin, i will find you

everyone is trying to take your oxford comma away from you. don't give them that satisfaction, reward, or pleasure.

Dear loved ones,

Do not listen when they tell you you cannot be gay and believe in God. Choose one, they say.

This is a blatant lie. You can be both. In his wise ways, God created you perfect in his eyes. Be gay, pray with a glad heart and thank Him for this blessing and gift. To love is a freedom given to you to receive joy and happiness in this world. You are blessed more than you know and God loves you just as you are. For He is The God of Love. You are precious and destined for good things and for a good world to come.

Ignore the imperfect writings of ancient men and listen to your heart and reason - love is the way.

Love yourself and love God. Be free from choosing and condemnation.

Lots of love,

MCL69, Student of the One

at about 10 or 11pm on the night of december 5, 2021, i arrived home to my house in LA from a show a friend of mine was playing. it had been a relatively small affair but the music was quite interesting and it was a nice opportunity to catch up with someone i hadn’t seen in awhile.

before leaving the venue i’d done something which at that point was an every day thing, using the bathroom and then examining everything about my face and body that looked slightly off in the mirror. my hair was never right, my face was an odd shape, i hated the patchy stubble jutting out of my lip and chin. for the past year and a half i’d thought about this discomfort every single day, and pushed it to the back of my mind. following that rabbit down the hole always lead to inklings of a conclusion that i didn’t feel ready to reckon with just yet.

i got home to find that some of my roommates had taken acid. at the time i lived with my brother alex, his partner, a bandmate of ours and another friend. my brother was not partaking on this particular evening but he had procured it a month earlier in san francisco when we went to go play a gig there. an old drum line coach of his from high school was living there with a much older hippie boyfriend, who gave us a 10 strip of the Real Shit when they pulled up to the show.

i tried half a tab on the drive home and confirmed that it was indeed the real shit. alex and i listened to ween (i highly recommend the entirety of the mollusk on an acid trip) and 100 gecs, laura les’ vocal performances on the latter bringing me very close that afternoon to the aforementioned conclusion i’d been avoiding.

anyways, on the night of december 5 i arrived home and a couple of our roommates were having a great time. although it was late i didn’t have work the next day and it was really good acid, so i decided to join in myself.

i have a pretty good track record with psychedelics — with a couple exceptions i’d always treated the experience with a certain amount of respect and didn’t like to overdo it. i was content to disappear into headphones and let the colors and shapes of my favorite music guide me through seussian landscapes, never really subscribing to the idea of the trip as, well, a trip unless it compelled me to do so against my will.

this time, however, before taking my half tab for some reason i decided to set an intention. i’m not sure where this came from but there had been questions bubbling underneath my ill fitting skin for some time now, and i resolved that if the opportunity arose on this night i would confront whatever it was i hadn’t been confronting. i hadn’t consciously acknowledged this mystery problem yet even though in a funny way i’d thought about it every day for over a year.

a few hours in and i was tripping pretty hard. it was a very warm and safe and colorful feeling; i put on the dijon album that had come out not long before and sank into the redwood tones of mk.gee’s baritone guitar riffs and dijon’s gorgeous voice. to this day big mike’s sounds a little extra crazy every time i hear it.

everything changed when i took my phone and opened up instagram.

death grips was a band i’d been getting heavily into over the past year alongside the presence of my persistent little mystery question, music that to me bristled with raw and determined spirituality and a deep love for the entire spectrum of the human condition. i’d already had a bit of a bizarre experience soundtracked to their music — months prior i was walking around echo park in a skirt and a full beat (for absolutely no reason haha) and saw a group of christian protesters up ahead marching against the sins of the gays and carrying signs explicitly stating this intent. worried they might see me and by proxy see trouble, it possessed me to put airpods in and put on no love, the title track from death grips’ third record. as soon as the first two bars were done i looked up and it was like the mob had despawned from reality itself with no trace. i’m not fully unconvinced i hallucinated them, but the experience tripped me out nonetheless.

death grips had been completely silent since 2018, not posting on social media or releasing any music.

fast forward to december 6 now at around 2am, and i open instagram to immediately find an image of death grips drummer and mastermind zach hill peeking out from behind the wooden door of some kind of medieval tavern, holding a bar of gold out from between the iron bars of the door as if urging me to come and take it. since i was on acid, i absolutely flipped the fuck out. in a rational sense it looked like death grips was back and that was really exciting. in a spiritual sense, i felt this gold bar was the key to the thing i wasn’t confronting.

i sat in bed giggling and writing silly poems in my notes app and marveling at the synchronicity of being alive, an alkaline sensation rising up my body through my spine. something came unprompted but not uninvited, less of a cataclysmic epiphany or revelation and more of a gentle and loving acknowledgment.

i’m trans.

i am a transgender woman.

i have been this whole time. and ive been thinking about it every single day and pushing it back into the depths to deal with later.

looking back now it’s hilarious and obvious and really dumb, but this knowledge was not fully conscious. i’d think to myself that i’d feel a lot more happy and calm and in sync if i was a woman and that there was probably something within that i needed to face head on, but i’d tell myself i’d figure it out when i was 30 and push it back down. this would all happen so fast that i never really was able to pull it to the front and examine it closely until now.

it physically felt like i’d been watching the scene from the land before time where littlefoot’s mother dies for the past 25 years, and now my own mom had materialized to give me a hug.

i will never forget the actual sensation of it, so calm and gentle and loving yet determined. there was no going back from this, no putting it in a box and shoving it into my subconscious like i’d been doing every day. i was gonna have to have some heavy conversations tomorrow, but the prospect of doing so didn’t really scare me. i laid down and pulled my covers up and drifted off to sleep as the acid wore off.

the next morning, i awoke to two things: the knowledge that i needed to tell alex and a text from alex. unprompted he’d sent me the two headed calf by laura gilpin, which to those unfamiliar goes like this:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass. And

as he stares into the sky, there are

twice as many stars as usual.

i read that several times and through a violent barrage of tears asked him to come into my room because i had to tell him something.

i told him i was trans and he said he’d kinda figured and we cried and hugged and marveled at the weird psychic synchronicity of it all. id made my peace with it the night before on my acid trip, but i think it took this sober revelation to somebody i love more than life itself for the weight i’d been carrying to finally lift.

that was, as they say, the first day of the rest of my life.

one of my roommates at the time was my best friend, someone with whom since then i’ve unfortunately had something between a falling out and a loss of contact with. i will not elaborate on that in this post. there was something they said to me once that i’m thinking about right now — i’d shared a meme phrase with them i thought was funny and topical, something about wanting to give your inner child a gun. they countered with the idea that maybe my inner child needed a hug, and that’s probably one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me.

i try to give my inner child a hug every day, but today i think writing this i’m choosing to give that hug to my inner 25 year old. she had a lot to figure out and a long road ahead of her, but the death grips two headed calf acid trip bonanza was certainly a big first step.

over the course of the next year my band would break up, the population of my house would shift around, i’d begin taking hormones and start work on what became music 2. i’d also fall in love and have some even weirder experiences thinning the veil between here and whatever lies beyond, but those are all perhaps for different posts or my own memory.

until coming out as trans i wanted to opt out of living every day. i felt like a walking mistake and my eyes looked sad and my skin hung off of my bones in a really uncanny shape. it was really hard to get up in the morning and i often just wouldn’t.

i would be lying if i said it was all sunshine and daisies from there, but for the past three years and some change i’ve woken up each day having already made the choice to live. and as the country in which i live by that choice shifts further toward the fascist right and seeks to eliminate the very existence of people like me, i cling on to that resolve harder and harder with an iron clawed grip. if they want me dead they’ll have to kill me, because i’ve seen the other side and there is no fucking way i am ever going to do it myself. i like being alive because the world is beautiful, and after viewing that beauty through the kaleidoscopic lens of being trans i am determined to fight for it until my last breath.

thank you for the gold, zach <3 i spent it on magic beans