What in the holy mother of Jesus is happening in this photo? Why is it a doll? Who is the creepy man in the background, and why is he holding a very large camera? What is the contraption on the right that looks like part of an army obstacle course? WHY IS IT A DOLL

I have no idea how these ads work - does someone just feed an instruction into AI and leave it to do the rest? But if they’re paying for ad space in the New York Times, surely there must be a human involved somewhere? How could they possibly think this image would make anyone want to learn more? Where would that link lead anyway—straight to Hell?

I’m only asking because a few weeks later, a second ad appeared:

In the eloquent words of highbrow writer Sabrina Imbler, “Scary scary no no no! Make it stop!”

Part of me thinks this is my punishment for continuing to subscribe to the New York Times, which if you’re trans is a cancellable offense. Or am I now being haunted by stills from a pending horror movie by Ari Aster, in which evil middle-aged white people at benign-seeming tag sales start turning people into life-sized dolls? Why do their expressions make me think sex is involved? Is it a warning? Can anyone else see these ads, or is it just me? Am I inside the horror movie already? Am I going to wake up one day to find a china grannie lying in bed next to me? Could she actually help fix my achy shoulders? I am a side-sleeper, so these are obviously targeted ads, but for the love of God—how do they know how I sleep?!

These are the important questions we should be asking: not whether AI is going to take our jobs, but whether it’s going to turn us all into giant porcelain animatronics. When it starts happening, you can say you heard it here first. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Love, Oliver

Frighten the Horses

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK.

What I’m (temporarily) trying to escape from is the state of trans rights, which is utterly grim right now. Almost harder than the endless updates about which piece of anti trans legislation has been passed on any given day, or which of our rights has been rescinded, is the realization that public opinion is slowly turning against us, in particular against trans women and kids. I’m an optimist by default, and assumed that things would go on getting progressively better for queer and trans people, but over the last couple of years that optimism has been severely tested by the reality that we’re being pushed farther and farther into the margins. Even people in whose allyship I had absolute belief are now starting to let us down.

And yet… here I am, sitting in the garden of a house I once thought I might not be welcome in anymore once I revealed my queer identity, surrounded by more love than I know what to do with. If you’ve read my memoir you’ll know I was terrified about coming out to my parents, but to say they surprised me—and have gone on surprising me ever since—is an understatement. Not only did they accept me, but they were determined everyone else should too, and have been continuing to advocate for trans rights around the English home counties for the last fifteen years, in an equal-parts admirable and adorable attempt to change the world one upper-middle-class English white person at a time. They’ve been so effective that when my father hosted his own mini-book launch for the UK edition of Frighten the Horses last year, over forty of his friends showed up, which is definitely not something I could ever have predicted. I can’t abandon all hope when I have family like this: people who were raised in a white, colonial, racist, homophobic, transphobic society and have managed to overcome all their prejudices simply because they loved one of their children enough to do the necessary work. If they can do it, anyone can, and I will take that belief with me to my grave.

I wrote the first half of the poem in the video above in 2011 as a sort of thank-you to my parents for their support, since my mother was getting fed up by all of her friends telling her how terribly sorry they were that I turned out to be gay. I’ve been meaning to write the second part ever since, but never found good reason to sit down and put pen to paper (too preoccupied with the *serious* work of trying to write a novel) until the fabulous Ariel Martinez asked me to read something new at her queer monthly reading event, Perfume Is Gay, which was just the excuse I needed.

My parents celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary this year, so it seems fitting that I dedicate my Pride newsletter to them, in gratitude for their love and commitment to each other, to me, and to trans rights. The poem is written/performed in the voice of “Lady Fitz-Waterford” (a composite character) FaceTiming one of her friends with the latest gossip.

Disclaimer: I AM NOT A POET. There is no Transition-with-Dr-Seuss style book in the pipeline. This is the one and only time you will ever be subjected to a poem written by me, I promise.

Love, Oliver

Frighten the Horses

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK.

Back in 2020, after I’d established that I wanted to move to Brooklyn, I bought a book called When Brooklyn Was Queer by the historian Hugh Ryan. Given that I tend to come to everything late (my sexual orientation, my gender identity, Brooklyn itself) I’ve developed a tendency to use books to fill in my own un-lived back story, and so was delighted to discover that someone had written a book which promised to tell everything I never knew I needed to know. The book did exactly what it said on the tin, but what I remember most about reading it (and his subsequent book, The Women’s House of Detention) was constantly having to turn to the back cover to check that the author was cisgender, because neither book sounded like they’d been written by a man. I couldn’t quite explain why, other that I’d just transitioned and was still trying to figure out my own place on the trans spectrum—a spectrum that had turned out to be considerably wider than I’d originally understood it to be—which meant I was seeing signs of gender-variance everywhere I looked, my antenna constantly raised for cues of gender nonconformity. I was also researching my first book of essays, Adult Human Male, in which I questioned whether people transitioned in a linear sense, or whether it was more accurate to say that we aligned our external presentation with our internal identities, which I felt opened up more possibilities for more people and unstuck us from this problematic issue of some people feeling like they weren’t trans enough to qualify as trans, and other people feeling like if they wanted to dial back their transness to a more comfortable spot that they might be accused of detransitioning and therefore letting the side down, so to speak. Anyway, in this state of constant trans arousal (intellectually speaking) I could hear a certain transness radiating out of the pages of When Brooklyn Was Queer, despite the author being quite clearly a bearded, cis, gay man.

A few years later I’d just got home from the Provincetown Literary Festival, where I’d been promoting Adult Human Male, when I got a DM from Hugh, who said he’d been sitting in the audience, liked the way I thought, and would love to meet up. So we made a plan to go for a walk in Prospect Park. There are few times in my life that I’ve connected on an intellectual level with someone so instantly, but I had a total emotional hangover after that first meeting with Hugh, and I think we only spent an hour together. I’d just sold my memoir, Frighten the Horses, and he was just starting to write his memoir, My Bad, and we were talking about the inherent problems of writing about gender combined with the intense vulnerability of writing about our personal lives, and I can’t remember exactly where we were in Prospect Park, only that it was by some dumpsters, when I stopped and said to him, do you think you might be a little bit trans? And he said, yes, but it’s complicated.

Hugh was the first writer I’d met in person who was having the same kind of complex thoughts that I was about gender, and who was able to help me translate those thoughts into words that made sense. It was something about the combination of his own gender nonconformity (which is so non-conforming it lives outside the binary-nonbinary binary*) but also the fact that he could put it all into context because of his background as a historian. We were in a coffee shop in Williamsburg several months later, after having spent a couple of hours sitting in the sunshine in the Marsha P Johnson park, when in response to an absolute mess of ideas that I’d just thrown down in front of him, he told me that gay people hadn’t historically been considered gay until society decided they needed to be segregate from straight people, and that trans people hadn’t been considered trans until society decided they needed to be segregated from gay people, which meant that not only were gay and trans people invented, but straight and cis people were invented too.

Hugh, of course, explained this with far more eloquence than I’m doing here, but it was revelatory to me - all these terms, all these boxes we try to fit ourselves into, were just inventions. I was mind-blown. My gut feeling that we’re all just human beings trying to align ourselves more closely with our own wildly varied identities, and that the boundaries we put up around those identities are not only arbitrary and unnecessary, but can sometimes be counterproductive and oppressive, had a historical foundation. Not only did Hugh not think I was crazy, but he had years of research as a historian to back up these ideas, not to mention an innate ability to verbalize them in a way that made them not only comprehensible, but also exciting. I felt seen and understood by him in a way that felt transformative. What I didn’t know then was that it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one that is based not only in a mutual respect for each other’s work and ideas, but also in an ability to be honest and vulnerable with each other about who we are as humans. Hugh is sensitive, and kind, and thoughtful, and on top of all this he is also very funny, which has always been the quickest way to my heart.

I mention this, because on May 26th you too can now enjoy all this brilliance and humor, when his third book, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond, hits the bookstores. I had the good fortune of being allowed to read an early draft, and then got my hands on a galley of the final edited manuscript, and all I can say is that this book is an absolute ride. It’s part memoir, part apology, part gender analysis, part queer history, and it’s also wild, chaotic, page-turning, heart-breaking, and occasionally jaw-dropping, and imbued throughout with Hugh’s fabulous sense of humor.

The book opens with Hugh happily indulging in some nineties nostalgia repackaged in a modern TV show, until his “brain kicks in.” For a moment he doesn’t understand why his brain is being a killjoy, until he realizes: “It’s the gays. The gays. The endless fucking gays. They traipse lighthearted through the world. They’re out to all their friends. No one ever hurts them, or if they do, they apologize before the end of the episode. Their besties are never casually homophobic. They have supportive parents and romantic partners, and they know themselves so well. Bullshit, my brain snorts.”

What follows is a romp through Hugh’s queer life in the nineties, and when I say romp, this man did some shit. I consider myself to have lived many lives in my fifty-five years, but I’ve got nothing on Hugh. The stuff he got up to really couldn’t be replicated today, it’s a history of the sort of queerness that existed when homophobia was still rampant and largely socially endorsed, when there was no social media, nobody was recording what we were doing, and we weren’t all being policed by our own cellphones. Many of the stories speak to the sort of internalized homophobia (and/or transphobia) that arises as a direct result of coming of age at a time where there was very little in the way of structural or social support for queer people: the kind of deep rooted fear and shame that takes hold in the isolation of silence, which fortunately not so many people have to experience these days. Being under attack politically is not fun, having our rights systematically removed is not great, but at least we have voices now, we have each other, and we also have allies. In the eighties and nineties, before the days of the internet as we know it now, all of those things were much harder to find.

Our stories are different partly because I came of age when there was no internet at all, whereas Hugh came of age during the dawn of the dial-up connection. The shame and fear I felt as a closeted teenager swallowed up my entire identity because I was so isolated: there was nobody I could turn to, and I didn’t want to admit to anyone how lonely I was, because I was young and I thought admitting to loneliness was a sign of failure. Because I stayed silent, that shame and fear continued to grow until by my forties it had completely consumed me, making it harder to come out even as the world started to change.

I then, paradoxically, felt shame that I’d stayed closeted for so long, that I didn’t have the courage to come out earlier, as if my inability to be clear about who I was revealed some kind of moral failing on my part. Hugh’s story is almost the polar opposite of mine: where I, out of fear, did nothing, he, despite his fear, tried everything. Both of us made a bloody awful mess of it, and that’s why his book brings me so much relief: there was no right or good or noble way to do this back then, we were all just flailing blindly in the dark.

Reading My Bad, I sometimes felt as if I were being allowed to live a sliding doors version of my life vicariously through Hugh, the one I might have had if I’d transitioned as a teen, lived in America, and also happened to be super-hot. (Check out Hugh’s Instagram and you’ll see what I mean.) Whether you were in or out, cowardly or courageous, risk-avoidant or recklessly adventurous—in short, whether you regret what you didn’t do or regret what you did—Hugh’s story now exists to say, this was me, but it could have been you, and ultimately we’re all in it together. It’s a manifestation of the LGBTQ+ belief that despite our differences, somehow all our stories are interconnected, which means none of us are truly alone. This is why I still have hope for our future, because however hard some people might try, I don’t think it’s possible to reverse-engineer us back to a time where queer and trans people could be isolated out of existence.

I know Hugh was terrified of publishing this book, and I am deeply grateful that he overcame that fear, because the more our secret, silent histories are brought out into the open, the more real and defined we feel. By giving us a free pass to join his ride, Hugh has committed an act of gross generosity: as a singular record of the queer nineties, My Bad isn’t just a great book, it’s a historically important one, too. And did I mention it’s very, very funny?

Go buy a copy now.

Love, Oliver

My Bad

*Lucian Kahan, quoted by Margaret Killjoy on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

Frighten the Horses

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK.

Trans people who choose to be visible today do so at the risk of their own personal safety. Trans people who aren’t visible are probably trying to blend in so that they can get a job, an apartment, or a cup of coffee without facing possible discrimination or harassment. The choice to be visible or invisible is a personal one made based on many often-conflicting factors: since there’s no good way to live in the current world as a trans person right now, we’re all just doing the best we can and trying not to get arrested for it.

One of the fun parts of being trans in America in the present day is that the bathroom bills are back. The first bathroom bill, enacted in North Carolina in 2016, didn’t survive because people turned out to be less concerned about the issue than the Republican party had anticipated. Most people thought it was pretty implausible that men were dressing up as women in order to attack girls in public bathrooms, and nobody knew of anyone who’d been accosted in a bathroom by an actual trans person—largely because that isn’t something trans people do—so there was a giant boycott of the state by trans and non-trans people alike, all of whom objected to what was clearly a case of state-sponsored transphobia. The bill was rolled back a year later, which tells us that economic boycotts work, and also that prior to the Republican campaign against trans people, most people were skeptical of the notion that trans people posed any kind of serious threat to their safety.

This was followed by a decade-long campaign to convince them otherwise. Fast forward to 2026 and we now have 22 states in which it is a criminal offense for trans people to use their bathroom of their choice. These bills didn’t only pass because Republicans repeated “trans people are a danger to women and children” so many times that people started believing them, but also because given everything else that’s going on in the world, trans issues are understandably way down on the list of things people feel they can prioritize right now. While everyone’s attention is focused on global catastrophes, the Republicans are trying to slip as many anti-trans bills in under the door as they can before anyone notices.

Another reason why there’s been so little objection may be that many people don’t fully understand what the implications are, and if you don’t see the bill as serious then you’re probably not going to go to all the trouble of objecting to it, given how many other more pressing things there are to object to right now. Surely the problem of not being able to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender with which you identify is solved by obeying the law and using the bathroom that corresponds with your sex assigned at birth? What’s the big deal here? This isn’t exactly a life or death situation.

But consider it from this angle: this law, that claims to want to protect women from being attacked by men in single sex spaces, is actually going to increase the risk of women being attacked by men in single sex spaces. It’s just that the women most vulnerable to attack will be trans.

Let me lay out a few scenarios, to illustrate what I mean:

A trans woman walks into a men’s bathroom. Under the new law, by using a men’s bathroom she is immediately outing herself as trans. In a state that has just implicitly sanctioned transphobia by passing a bunch of transphobic laws (see Florida) she now risks violent attack or sexual assault from the very men the law was created to protect women from. The sort of man who wants to assault vulnerable women in public bathrooms has just been handed the perfect opportunity to do so.

A trans woman walks into a women’s bathroom. She is either suspected of being trans, or revealed as being trans, and is pepper-sprayed by a woman who believes the messaging that trans women pose a threat to their safety. The police are called and the trans woman is arrested and charged. If she is convicted and sentenced, she will be sent to a men’s jail where she will be forcibly detransitioned (see Georgia).

A trans man walks into a men’s bathroom. Because there is a bounty out on the heads of trans people using the wrong bathroom (see Kansas) the other men in the bathroom become suspicious of the trans man’s height, and the fact that he’s using a stall to pee. They break down the stall door, expose the man as trans, and either beat him up (if they are violently inclined) or call the police (if they are law abiding citizens.) The trans man is arrested, and if sentenced will be sent to a women’s jail where he will be forcibly detransitioned.

A trans man walks into a women’s bathroom. He is pepper-sprayed by a woman who thinks he must be one of those men she’s been warned about who go into single sex public bathrooms to assault women. The police are called and the trans man is arrested. Because his gender marker is male on his ID cards, he is taken down to the police station, where he is forced to reveal his genitals to a police officer to prove he is trans. Despite complying with the law, he has still had to spend the day acquiescing to a humiliating invasion of privacy to prove that he’s a law abiding citizen. There seems to be no way for him to avoid being arrested, whichever bathroom he chooses to use.

In addition to all this, some of these laws (see Idaho) come with a maximum one year jail term for a first offense, up to five years in state prison for a second, and thanks to the Persistent Violator Statute—otherwise known as the three-strike rule—a potential life sentence after the third. This means that a trans woman trying to protect her own safety in Idaho could potentially be jailed for life for walking into the wrong bathroom just four times. I don’t love using italics for emphasis, but honestly I think it’s warranted here.

And finally, there’s the financial incentive. I got used to peeing in men’s bathrooms once I got used to the smell—and realized that nobody cared what I was up to inside my stall because they were all minding their own business, literally and figuratively speaking—but now that people can make money by outing me in a public restroom (see Kansas, again) I feel a little more exposed. If you’re a transphobe after a quick buck you’re going to make it your business to know what I’m doing in that stall, and a thousand dollars is a lot of money. Hell, for that much I’d almost out myself.

Of course, all these are worst-case scenarios, but what I’m trying to demonstrate is that for the trans people living in any of these twenty-two states, the bathroom bill is a problem that never goes away. Every time they want to use a public restroom they have to weight up the risk of getting assaulted, pepper-sprayed or arrested. Every time they grab a cup of coffee, or order a smoothie, or try to stay hydrated during a hot day, or enjoy a glass of beer in the evening, the problem will rear its ugly head. If they’re doing a bit of shopping, or taking their kids on a day out, or having brunch with some friends, or just using public transport to get from one place to another, at some point the liquid that goes in has got to come out again, and when it does, if they can’t find a gender-neutral rest room, they risk violence or arrest. Every time.

If you want trans people to be invisible, one way to do it is to make it impossible for them to leave their homes. A trans person stuck inside their own apartment is a threat to no-one, whereas a visible trans person walking around in broad daylight is a menace to society. In an ideal world, you make life so difficult and unsafe for them that they decide not to transition, or to detransition if they’ve already transitioned, or at the very least stay hidden if they refuse to detransition. That way everyone can forget trans people ever existed. Bathroom bills don’t exist to keep us out of any specific bathroom, they exist to make us feel unsafe, to make us think twice about stepping out in public. Most trans people won’t now travel to Idaho, Kansas, Utah or Florida because it’s so unsafe to do so, and many of the trans people who live in those states are leaving. These laws are having their desired effect.

When I mentioned in my last newsletter that there might be a genocidal element to all this, an old friend questioned my use of the word. But this isn’t hyperbole. Sure, what we’re witnessing doesn’t come close to the mass slaughter of innocent people in Gaza, but the aim of the anti-trans movement is to eliminate trans people by making it as hard as possible to transition, or to live safely as a trans person, which is in itself a form of ethnic cleansing. The Lemkin Institute for Genocidal Prevention just issued its third red-flag warning over Trump’s anti-trans initiatives, so if you’re not convinced, this link is worth reading.

All this to say, we should probably put “celebrating trans visibility” on hold until we reach a time when visibility doesn’t land us in jail. Until then, I leave you with a selection of my recent favorite trans books, so if you see less of us on the streets for a while, at least you’ll still be able to find us between these sheets.

Sending love to all the trans people out there, gratitude to all the trans allies, and strength to all the trans artists.

Love,

Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK.

Buy the Book

Yesterday I heard the news that NYU Langone, a long-established provider of trans healthcare based in one of the most liberal cities in the country, has caved to pressure and will no longer provide gender affirming care for trans youth. This came a day after twenty-four people were arrested outside the HHS for protesting two proposed rules that could eliminate most transgender youth care nationwide, and the Heritage Foundation announced its intention to bring about an end to gender affirming care for all ages across all states. Yesterday was not a good day.

I haven’t written about gender affirming care for a while, mostly because I can’t keep up with the rate at which services are being shut down, but also because when I think about the effect this will have on trans kids and their families my brain starts to hurt so badly I’m useless for the rest of the day. I’m not a journalist so I can’t just report the facts in a manner that keeps me emotionally separate from it all, and when I try to write about it, I’m reminded that nothing anybody has written so far has managed to prevent this from happening, which is when the despair sets in. So if I sound a bit brittle in this newsletter you’ll have to forgive me, it’s just that I don’t know what there is left to say that I haven’t said before, or how I can say it in a way that might make any kind of a difference.

Over the last few years I’ve heard a lot of seemingly kind, rational, liberal people make the argument against gender affirming care for children. When they ask for my opinion, I start by asking them one question in return: Do they believe I am trans? If they say yes, I ask whether they think this is a disease from which I can be cured? If they say no, I ask whether this means they believe trans people are born trans? If they say yes, I ask whether they believe I should be allowed access to gender affirming care? If they say yes again, I ask whether they think I should have been allowed access to this care if I’d come out when I was a child?

That’s usually when they say they’re concerned that children are not mature enough to make these decisions. But I have always been trans, and the age at which I came out shouldn’t factor in to whether or not I receive care. The point at which a trans person needs help is when they realize they are not the gender they were assigned at birth: that didn’t happen to me until I was an adult, but that’s mostly due to lack of information and resources back in the 80’s and 90’s. For the majority of people these days it’s going to happen when they’re a kid or a teenager, and that’s when they’ll need access to care.

To ban that care across the entire country, just in case it’s given to the wrong child, is like telling someone who has cancer that chemotherapy has been banned just in case it’s given to the wrong patient. A good hospital does not give chemotherapy to a patient without cancer, just as a good hospital does not give gender-affirming care to a child who’s not trans. Everything you’ve heard to the contrary is propaganda.

The architects of this anti-trans propaganda have been carefully dripping it into the system for over a decade, spreading the fear so gradually that most people haven’t noticed it happening. If you don’t believe your fears are the result of indoctrination, take a minute to look at the regime we’re living under, the position they take on trans people, and the sheer quantity of lies they tell us every day. We know they lie to us, we know they have an agenda. If you can see through all the other lies they tell us, why do you continue to believe this particular one?

Consistence, insistence and persistence are the three things every medical practitioner is trained to look for in a child who identifies as trans. The decision to administer gender affirming care is not taken lightly: not by the child, nor their parents, their therapists or their doctors.

The propaganda says otherwise. But I ask you: do you truly believe any doctor is going to prescribe gender affirming care to a child who’s not trans? Who could possibly benefit? Not the doctor who would lose credibility, not the medical facility who could lose their license, not the trans community who are already terrified of putting a foot wrong, and certainly not the child or the parents, who will have to live with the consequences. And yet so many people believe this is a genuine risk that when the centers providing this care start closing down across the country, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, as if some crisis has been averted. The children are finally safe.

Except, of course, the trans kids are not safe at all.

I can still feel some people’s hesitation, even as I write this, because I’ve witnessed it so many times. But what if… they are saying to themselves. What if someone makes a mistake? What they can’t see is that in framing this question, they are putting the needs of cis children over and above the needs of trans children. They are putting the risk of harm to a tiny percentage of cis children who might be falsely administered incorrect medication, over guaranteed harm to very large percentage of trans children who’s lives will be ruined if they don’t get the care they need. I hate having to spell this out, because it makes me feel like I’m playing into the fear that a cis kid might be accidentally misdiagnosed, which given all the advances we’ve made isn’t a genuine risk anymore. But this is at the heart of the injustice that’s being done here: this issue is not about the needs of cis kids, it’s about the needs of trans kids, and their needs are equally as important.

And now trans adults are under attack too. The president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization responsible for the above mentioned propaganda, announced yesterday that they are now working on a plan to ban gender-affirming care altogether, for all ages, across the entire country. This is not news to trans people, who’ve been watching attempts to criminalize trans adults and their medical providers play out in proposed bills across the country for the last few years, mostly through attacking the medical facilities that provide the care. But this is the first time the Heritage Foundation has said it out loud, and they’re smart and they’re committed and they’re not going to give up easily. I don’t know whether they’re going to succeed, but what I do know is everything we’ve been reading about the power of mass resistance also applies here: we will only manage to prevent this from happening if everyone shows up to stop it.

If you’ve read my book of essays you’ll know I’m generally not big on binaries, but in this case there’s a very clear line: either you are for trans people, in which case you must stand up for trans people of any age, or you are against us. Either you believe we should all have access to gender affirming medical care, or you are against us. If we can’t get legal access to hormones, you’re going to witness the largest collective forced-detransition in history. Some might call that a genocide.

Don’t believe the propaganda. Please, I beg you. They are coming for us and we need your support.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK.

Buy the Book

I only have one New Year’s resolution, and that’s never to check BookScan again. From henceforth if anyone asks me how any of my books are doing, I will answer truthfully, I HAVE NO IDEA.

I had an interesting conversation last November with a couple of queer writer friends with whom I regularly meet for dinner in Brooklyn. I’d just got my second royalty statement from Grove, and I wanted to know how my numbers compared to theirs at this stage of their journey. They couldn’t tell me because they didn’t know: unlike me, neither of them had tracked their book sales.

I’m someone who likes to game things out. It’s a bad habit, I know, because I’m attempting to control something that’s beyond my control, but when it came to the post-publication stage of the memoir, I found it hard to figure out how much was too much and how little was not enough. I’d been told by numerous more experienced and successful authors than I that once a book is out of my hands I should let it go and move onto the next one, but I’d also been told by numerous more experienced and successful publishing people that marketing a book is becoming more and more the author’s responsibility, and I wasn’t sure how to hit that balance between “letting the book go” and “not giving it a fair chance.”

So I started tracking the book’s weekly sales through BookScan, to see which piece of promotional work I engaged in moved the dial. I wanted to understand what worked and what didn’t, and told myself I could only do this by going on podcasts or attending book fairs or sitting on panels or publishing essays, and then seeing afterwards which of these endeavors resulted in actual sales. In theory it seemed sensible: I was conducting an important personal analytical survey of the efficacy of promotional events. In practice all that happened was that I became obsessed with sales figures. What was my hardcover to audio-book ratio? Was I selling more or fewer copies via Kindle? Which territory was seeing the greatest number of sales? Would I earn-out? When would I earn-out? Was I supposed to have earned-out by now? What would happen if I didn’t earn-out? Every Friday morning I obsessively clicked on BookScan to check my sales figures for the previous week, and then compared it to the sales from the last week, or month, or year, or tried to assess through a series of intricate calculations how many people were borrowing my book from the library. It was awful. I’d reduced my post-publication experience to the equivalent of counting likes on a social media post, only with more math.

While convalescing from minor surgery last week I binge-watched I Love Dick, which I hadn’t watched before because I was put off by the name (I categorically do not love dick.) About half way through episode two, Kathryn Hahn’s character talks about the experience of sending a movie out into the world:

“It’s like, when you have the idea for a movie… in your mind, it’s huge, it’s like the whole world, it’s like your whole soul. And then you make the movie and suddenly it’s compared to every other movie that’s ever been made, and something that was so big becomes like the tiniest Russian nesting doll, like a piece of sand…” she makes a small gesture like blowing out a candle, as if her work could disappear into nothing as easily as that. Honestly, you should watch the show just for this one scene, her disillusion is so palpable and heart-wrenching. Anyone who’s ever put a piece of work out into the public domain will identify.

And yet. What Hahn’s character, in her despair, doesn’t take into consideration is that if just one person watches the movie, or picks up the book, the creator’s world suddenly expands again, like one of those Magic Grow Capsules which become a sponge animal when dropped in water. By reducing my readers to a number or a statistic, I’d failed to consider there were actual people out there who had picked up my book, and while reading it had gained access to the whole world I’d inhabited while I was writing it. What a gift: to be able to take that feeling of hugeness that Hahn speaks of, enclose it in the magic capsule of a book, and know that somewhere out there, your whole world is expanding back out to its original shape and form in someone else’s hands.

It’s good to remember this, because I’m about to dive back into my new manuscript, the first draft of which I’m a third of the way through. It’s going to be a long, hard, excruciating process, typified by a sort of rapid-bipolar-cycling through short periods of self-aggrandizement (while I’m drafting) followed by long periods of utter despair (while I’m re-reading what I just drafted). The drafting process feels like trying to squeeze bits of black, sticky tar out of my brain, I become an ogre, I’m not fit for human company, and yet it’s the best part. Revising is more satisfying, but drafting is more euphoric. I can’t explain why I love it so much, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s like turning my head into a Hadron Collider in which through an excruciating process of expansion and contraction* people and places that didn’t exist before magically appear. Maybe it’s because it’s so goddamn difficult to generate these new realities that it feels so good. This great essay in LitHub arguing against the use of generative AI for drafting says it all much better than I can: the tar has to come from your own brain, however hard it is to squeeze it all out. There are no shortcuts because this is how you write a book. Luckily all my kids are out of the house now so I can stumble blindly between irascible drafting-monster and brain-dead zombie without having to worry that it will bother anyone except the cat, who appears to like it, cats being what cats are.

It’s also exciting to be drafting a novel for the first time, rather than non-fiction. I’ve been figuring out where I want to land as a writer, and the more fiction I write, the more comfortable I become. The problem with nonfiction is it makes me feel like I’m supposed to have all the answers, and I do not have all the answers. One of my favorite poems is by Robert Graves (transcribed below) which I learned in school and has enabled me to live by a sort of Reverse Infinite Regress philosophy, whereby if each question only generates more questions—without ever really reaching a satisfying answer—then it’s within the act of asking the questions that the beauty lies. Instead of turtles all the way down, it’s turtles all the way up. This, I think, is what George Saunders spoke of last week on The Interview, where he quoted Chekov, who said that a work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem—it just has to formulate it correctly.

I also find fiction comes with less emotional pressure. I don’t have to write to win a political argument, or risk straying into the territory of propaganda (which has always been a particular concern). My characters don’t need to prove anything, they don’t have to make the right choices, they aren’t representing a repressed minority, nothing needs to get tied up in a neat ending. If I write my characters well enough, they will feel real, and if I can make queer and trans characters feel real on the page, then I’ll have done my job. As Orson Welles once said to a class of film students: “I can think of nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them. Once they are interested, they can understand anything in the world.”

Love, Oliver

* I know this is not how the Hadron Collider works

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;

I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;

Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;

Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;

When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;

I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion.

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK.

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Every time I go back to England I seem to learn something new about myself. A few days after I arrived in early November, I had an essay published in The Guardian. In the printed edition it was a full-page article, which excited my parents beyond all reason, and my father duly texted my brother telling him to run out and buy as many copies as he could find. My brother declined, on the grounds that even looking at the Guardian raised his blood pressure (I love my brother unconditionally, but there are certain things of which we will never speak, and our political allegiances are one of them.) I then went to stay with him in London and he took me to a rugby match at Twickenham, one of the few things he and I used to do together when we were both in our twenties. Back then I’d wanted to be one of the boys, and resented being perceived as a girl at these very male-centric occasions. I’d always been curious about how it would feel to revisit that experience as the person I am now, so when my brother offered to get tickets I jumped at the chance. What I hadn’t accounted for was how incredibly heterosexual the type of men who go to rugby matches are. I’d dressed to match the occasion so I blended in with the crowd, but the knowledge that people automatically assumed I was the same type of man as these Guinness-drinking, straight men around me felt almost as uncomfortable as being perceived as a woman. And yet to present as a queer trans man felt both impossible and pointless. I felt different, and then ashamed that by trying to be different I was just being difficult: that any sense of exclusion I was feeling was somehow my own fault. It felt very close to the feelings of unresolved separateness I had in my twenties, when I was struggling to accept my identity.

Shortly after I returned to America I was invited to be a guest lecturer for a group of creative-writing students. One of them brought up a concern that I’d written about in Frighten the Horses, that if I transitioned my image would “become more important than I want it to be, because everything about the way I present myself to the world is now going to be a statement about who I am.” She wanted to know whether, eight years after I started transitioning, I’d found this to be true.

Of course, it had always been true, I just hadn’t fully understood the degree to which I’d already been subconsciously projecting the image of myself that I wanted to convey. Every choice I made about my appearance before I transitioned—the clothes I wore, the hairstyles I chose, the body shape I exercised or starved my way into—was performing a strategic function, whether I was aware of it or not. Since transitioning, I’ve become much more aware of the choices we all make in our presentation, constantly looking for the cues other people are giving off, and trying to ascertain what—and to whom—they’re signaling. I don’t know why I never noticed it before, but I think I’m hyper conscious of it now because I spent so much of my life trying to present a false image of myself to the wrong people.

I saw an Instagram reel a few days ago by a woman who said she was dressing for herself, not for men. I understood the point she was trying to make, but I question whether, when anyone says they dress for themselves, they’re telling the whole story. To “present oneself” requires an audience, and as the pandemic taught us, if the audience was only ourselves we’d spend every day in pajamas or sweatpants. What this woman was more likely trying to say was that she was trying to project the image of who she is, not the image of what men would like her to be. She was prioritizing her own identity over projecting a false self to attract a mate, which was probably why she looked so great.

You know that feeling you get when you see someone walking down the street in a fedora, and you get the sense that the hat is wearing them, rather than the other way round? Usually it’s because that fedora is who he wants to be, not who he is. When I was falsely identifying as female I always felt like my clothes were wearing me. I misunderstood my vast and eclectic wardrobe from my pre-transition years as an attempt to “look good” (by which I mean attractive, stylish, individual) when in fact what I was searching for were clothes in which I could feel like myself. I didn’t find them, of course, because I was looking in the wrong section of the store.

My “adolescent phase” after I transitioned was mostly spent trying to replace my wardrobe, but after a few false (and sometimes embarrassing) starts, I’ve now found my comfort zone: a mash-up of 80s London hard-mod-revival and archetypal literary professor (I am not a professor) invoked by a combination of Doc Martins boots, turned-up Levis, and tweed or wool jackets. I favor linen shirts rolled up to the elbows to show off my tattoos and a particular brand of tortoiseshell glasses that can only be found at Fabulous Fanny’s in the East Village. I wear Velvet Orchid by Tom Ford because I haven’t been able to relinquish the desire to smell nice, and I carry my voice with pride because in New York my British accent makes people think I’m more intelligent than I am, plus the pitch of my voice implies queerness, even if it’s not immediately apparent whether I’m trans or gay.

All of these choices are an attempt to signal that I’m the sort of person whose music taste extends from The Smiths to Donizetti, who’s middle-aged but not that middle-aged, who’s favorite hobby is reading but the reading material is more likely to be Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore than Martin Amis. My whole presentation tries to combine as many of the different elements of my identity as possible—male, queer, English, writer, liberal—to give you the fullest picture of who I am in a single snapshot.

However, when I transport this picture from America over to the UK, I run into problems. Over there my image is outweighed by my accent, which in England is immediately identifiable as received pronunciation, the marker of someone who’s been privately educated. The assumption that I am both wealthy and politically conservative is made as soon as I open my mouth, because people see what they’ve been trained to see: they notice the signals they can read, and ignore the ones they can’t. English people hear my voice first, and then everything else about me is processed in relation to that, so my tweed jackets now signal conservative wealth, and once you factor in the fact that I’m white and male—and because generally speaking upper-middle class society is not a hot-bed of radical queerness—all my other signals (tattoos, tortoiseshell glasses, effeminate mannerisms) might as well be invisible. “Nobody knows I’m gay” is a popular t-shirt, but add to this “nobody knows I’m left-wing, feminist, anti-patriarchy and pro-Palestine” and you get the idea.

It’s an unpleasant feeling - not the same as gender dysphoria, but eerily close. It reminds me of how invisible I used to feel before I transitioned: not the comfortable sort of invisible I get in New York where nobody notices me because I blend into the background so easily, but the uncomfortable sort of invisible where I don’t quite feel real because I’m not sure anyone can actually see me. It’s not as bad as being mistaken for a woman, but it’s triggering just the same.

Still, it makes me realize that the concerns I voiced back in 2017 were unwarranted. My gender dysphoria is gone, and that’s much more important than whether or not I feel comfortable at a rugby match. Ultimately, the only signifier that really matters is the one that conveys my maleness, and that seems to be working fine, whichever country I’m in. I don’t think I truly understood in 2017 how comprehensively people would read me as male once I’d fully transitioned, because at the time I was afraid of taking testosterone, so I believed that if my body was still nominally female-looking (altered by top surgery but not hormones) I’d have to spend the rest of my life actively signaling my masculinity through my clothes and behavior. After almost six years on T, however, my receding hairline, visible stubble and lowered voice does all the work for me: significantly more, as it turns out, than my masculinized chest, which you can only see if you’re fortunate enough to see me in my underwear, which at the moment precisely zero people do.

So while lazy assumptions (about class and political affiliations) can sometimes be annoying, at other times (about gender) they work in my favor. Which goes back to why I have so much admiration for people who identify as non-binary, or trans people who don’t pass. They don’t have the luxury of being able to fall back on tropes or generalities to project their identities: everything about how they present has to actively work against other people’s assumptions about gender, all the time.

When I returned to New York, the first thing I did was go to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s book launch at The Strand. The utter relief of being in a room full of queer people cannot be understated: all my signals were magically working again, and I felt that glorious feeling—which will never grow old—of being seen and known and understood. This is why queer, literary New York will probably always be my favorite community in the world. Sometimes context is everything.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein

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I’m not generally someone who tends to believe the Universe is likely to respond when I ask it for favors, but I did mention to it the other day that I’d quite like to use this Substack to promote the work of other trans artists, after which I immediately got a call from someone in the publicity department at the Barbican in London asking if I wanted to write a piece on an upcoming show. I was flying to the UK this week anyway to visit my parents, and the artistic director of the show was already someone I wanted to meet, so make of that what you will. (It’s possible that the show’s curator, ILĀ, may have a more scientific explanation for the laws of coincidence than I do, but we’ll get to that later.)

Transpose Pit Party: Subverse, which runs from 12 to 15 Nov at The Barbican, is the brainchild of the multi-genre musician and writer CN Lester. In my library at home there’s an annotated, dog eared and well thumbed copy of TRANS LIKE ME, the book they published the year I started transitioning, so they were already on my wish-to-meet list. CN has always been few steps ahead of me: back when I was inching my way out of the closet in 2010, they were organizing their first anarchic, grassroots, DIY, trans fundraiser in London. By the time I had started to address my transition, they had turned this one-off event into an annual evening of art, music, performance and poetry featuring some of the best trans artists and performers in the UK. Over the subsequent years the event moved through several locations, including Tate Modern, until it found its final resting place down in the catacombs of that behemoth of Brutalist architecture, the Barbican.

Curated this year by the multifaceted artist and producer ILĀ, Transpose: Subverse will consist of four collaborative pieces by five trans artists: CN, ILĀ, Jamie Hale, Coda Nicolaeff and Ray Felix Carter. CN met ILĀ when they joined Trans Voices, part of the London Contemporary Voices family which was founded in 2010 by ILĀ for Imogen Heap’s Love The Earth concert at the Royal Albert Hall. London Contemporary Voices went on to work with multiple artists including Florence and the Machine, U2, and Jarvis Cocker, but ILĀ and co-founder Coda Nicolaeff decided to create Trans Voices as an off-shoot of the company after witnessing a moment of transphobia during the interval of a show. To say that Trans Voices was created as a “safe space” doesn’t do it full justice: the idea was also to push back against the popular idea of mindfulness, a practice that can be hard for trans people to embrace, and be more realistic about the occasional need for—and benefits of—dissociation. “A lot of trans people find that certain areas of their voices feel problematic,” ILĀ tells me. “Nobody should be made to feel they have to conquer their discomfort to be able to sing in a range that makes them feel dysphoric.” ILĀ wanted to create a group that was more experimental and improvisational, rooted in the free-flow spontaneity of jazz or folk, where the vocalists could opt in or out, or choose their pitch and timbre, depending on what they—or their voices—felt capable of each day.

“A lot can be gained by giving ourselves permission not to have to push into the core of our discomfort, to resist this pressure to be present, to be centered, all the time,” she says. “You shouldn’t have to rip off every plaster all at once.” By collaborating and improvising, the singers found they could fill in the gaps for each other, or let the empty spaces in the harmony stand as a feature of the music itself. Inevitably, the freedom from expectation led to an increase of experimentation: by releasing the singers from the pressure to perform within certain parameters, the music became more exploratory and transformative, not less.

Sitting in a brightly-lit room between rehearsals in an oversized wool sweater with no makeup, ILĀ has a face as expressive as her music and a speaking voice like Zadie Smith, a combination which feels hypnotic in the best possible way. She talks about accepting the limitations of her voice in a manner many of us who transitioned late can relate to, the pain of missing out on something that had we been born cis, or transitioned as teenagers, we might have taken for granted. “There can be a terrible grief to it, like sometimes when I’m singing in a group I can hear these incredible notes which feel crystalline or like glass, the purity of some else’s voice that I don’t have.” She admits that there’s a degree of self-soothing in her solo work, when the lack of comparison to other voices can make her own sound more expansive. When she’s singing in a group, however, she alleviates the heartache by immersing herself in the collective sound: not only allowing other voices to carry hers to the next level, but also, as an electronic artist, changing the pitch and timbre of her voice so she feels more connected to it.

She and her collaborator on one of the new pieces for Transpose, Ray Felix Carter, have also found that using technology to transform their voices can uncover hidden possibilities for how they might manifest alternate personalities within their identities. “When you hear yourself in a different way, it can bring out a different character within you… maybe if your voice sounds huge and bellowing, or two octaves lower, then what you feel able to say, and how you express yourself, actually shifts.” ILĀ likens this to the invention of early technology: “Nobody would have been able to hear the cracked tenderness and warmth in Louis Armstrong’s voice if the microphone hadn’t been invented, so technology itself changed the way he sang. We are not just our bodies, we exist in relation to everything around us, the tools we make, the society we live in. You can’t just go and figure yourself out and then emerge as some vision of yourself and expect it to align perfectly with what’s out there. In the dawn of new technologies like AI and quantum computing, you’re entangled with it all whether you like it or not, even if you never use it, because it’s shaping everyone around you. And as trans people, as marginalized people, I think it’s really important to engage with it, and contribute to that narrative as early on as possible.”

Her background in science—she studied philosophy and physics at university—informs both how she thinks and how she creates music. While studying quantum physics she was forced to accept that there’s a hard limit to our knowledge. “My naive eighteen year old self believed I could just keep going and find out more and more and eventually I’d have a complete picture of the Universe. But actually, no.”

The more we understand about quantum mechanics, she explains, the more we realize how little we know about fundamental reality, and the more we have to accept that a lot of reality is fundamentally unknowable. “I wanted to understand how things worked and why they are the way they are and how we got here, the big existential questions, only to discover in my first year of studying quantum that you can’t know everything. For example, you can’t know the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time: by measuring something, or even looking at it, you change it, you become part of it. It was frustrating because I wanted to observe something from the outside without it knowing it was being observed, so I could really know what it was. And then I realized that this is similar in a lot of ways to the trans experience.”

I ask how she manifests this idea through her music, and she explains that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which holds that observation collapses all possible realities into one branch, mirrors how we as trans people are often translated through the cis gaze: for example, “I see you as this, therefore this is what you are.” Whereas the Relative State interpretation holds that all possibilities remain open, that there can be many realities all at once, which feels closer to the truth of trans experience. “It’s fascinating to me that so many people have such certainty about our identities from the outside, and so much sureness, and you think, my God, we hardly know anything about anything, and you’ve got this great certainty about what I am and what I’m not?” However, she came to realize that if trans people are inextricably entangled with other people’s perceptions of us, then that should inform her creative process. If we are thus entangled, why not play on that entanglement with sound?

CN and ILĀ first collaborated artistically on UN/BOUND, an immersive sound installation which was part of a show at the Barbican earlier this summer. An interactive work that used auditory holograms to break down the barriers between cis and trans voices, at different moments, audience members could sing into one of four microphones positioned inside the space and—via quantum technology and a custom built ethical IA small-data model created by ILĀ—hear the voices of the Trans Chorus harmonizing with their own. This meant the audience could experience the sensory empathy of becoming part of the chorus, and the feeling of separation between trans and cis would fall away. Art is particularly good at breaking down these barriers, CN points out, perhaps more so sometimes than the spoken or written word, which can get caught in the intellectual mechanisms of the brain. Both CN and ILĀ reject the idea that trans art should be demarcated, or siloed off from an imaginary “universal” art experience, which, as CN notes, usually means cis, male and white.

The Barbican is notoriously hard to navigate, as I discover as the press officer leads us through the lower level to The Pit, a black box theater filled with set builders who are transforming it into an architecturally minimal set. Peeking into the Tardis-like storeroom next to the theater, ILĀ quips that she wished they could stage the show in there, among the shelves of spotlights and piles of unused scaffold poles. The context of place is important to how both ILĀ and CN create their performance pieces, the interaction between performer and audience being paramount. For CN, the guiding principle of Transpose has been to never make assumptions, not only about the artists but the members of the audience too, in the hope that they might react to such barrier-breaking sensory and empathetic experiences by becoming participatory creatives in their own right.

For ILĀ, it comes back to the quantum relationship between subject and object. She says the way music is released digitally on platforms such as Spotify can become “unnatural, because you feel very disconnected from the people you’re trying to reach. So it can be the ultimate form of dissociative experience, in that you’re literally not there.” In a live performance, however, she’s in an entangled state with the audience: they become one system. ILĀ extends this desire for inclusion to the location in which she performs, so that each performance becomes distinct. For Transpose they want to tap into the natural sounds that already exist deep within the labyrinths of the Barbican, so that any subsequent digital version exists purely as a consequence of this particular live experience, a way for the audience to reconnect with the event after the fact.

Of course, this makes it particularly painful that I have to fly back home before the show starts, but that just means we have to figure out how to get them to bring it over to the states and see how the sounds of New York might contribute to the work. In the meantime, if any of you live in London and can attend the show for me so I can experience it vicariously through you, I’d be most grateful. It goes without saying that supporting the arts is fairly important at the moment, and if you’ve ever wanted to be a legitimate part of a quantum AI experience, now’s your chance.

Transpose Pit Party: Subverse will be on at the Barbican Centre in London from Wed 12 to Sat 15 November. Post-show talk Fri 14, BSL interpretation Sat 15, all performances are wheelchair accessible.

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I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein

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This year, the StoryFest at the Westport Library fell on the same day as the No Kings protest, so I spent the morning surrounded by the two types of people I love best: those who are politically active, and those who like books. It was the sort of day that confirmed—if I was still harboring any doubts—that it will take a team of ICE agents to get me to leave this country. Connecticut is always at its best in the autumn, and the isolation I can sometimes feel living up here was offset by being surrounded by thousands of angry-but-cheerful people who were willing to give up a couple of hours of their day to yell at the government. The whole event was a small glimpse of what it might feel like to live in a world where we’re no longer so divided: against a backdrop of Tiffany’s (of course, because it’s Connecticut) stood a handful republicans who had broken ranks to join the protest, while in the library, straight white people who presumably lived very comfortable lives sat in hard plastic chairs to listen to Black, queer and trans writers talk about oppression. Everything in the news sounds so horrifying and bleak, and yet occasionally there are signs that people do still want to reach out across the political and social divide. Maybe the number of people who care will eventually become greater than the number who don’t, I don’t know, I can’t game this out anymore. But I do know that it makes me feel hopeful again. Or at least, it makes me remember what it felt like to feel hopeful, and that may have to be enough for a while.

Being at StoryFest took me back to this time last year, when I launched my memoir with my editor Roxane Gay. During the twelve months since then I’ve met hundreds of readers in person, but even more of you have subscribed to this newsletter - many more than I expected, if I’m being honest. I hope some of what I write is useful in some way, and please do reach out if you have thoughts you want to share or questions you’d like me to answer - it benefits me as much as it does you, since I’m back in hermit mode while I work on my novel, and hearing from you helps me feel connected.

Finally, I’m not good at the hustle, but it’s hard to make a living as a queer writer at the moment, with the DEI programs being closed down, grants being cancelled, and books being banned, so if you want to help me keep the lights on while I get this novel written, Frighten the Horses is now out in paperback. It got great reviews from the New York Times, Oprah Daily, and People Magazine, all of which can be found on my website, but I thought I’d share this new review that came out last week, because it sums up the memoir beautifully. If you could find it in your heart (and wallet) to splash out on a copy, either for yourself or for a friend, you’d have my undying gratitude.

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From Beth Johnston in Cleaver Magazine:

Frighten the Horses, Oliver Radclyffe’s poised and witty memoir of gender transition, opens in a Manhattan barbershop, as he gets a shave and basks in the scents, sounds, and banter around him. His masculine bona fides established—“I was man enough to have made it onto my barber’s Instagram page”—Oliver takes us back in time to the early 2010s, when he was Nicky, “the extrovert, charming Englishwoman who hosted the best dinner parties; the devoted wife and mother who attended school PTA meetings, well-presented and slim in expensive jeans offset with a lot of jewelry, subtle eye makeup, and a mane of long blond hair.” Nicky’s perfect appearance was intended to deceive. In reality, she was losing her hair from unarticulated anxiety, coping with mysterious aches and pains, and dropping weight without trying, all while her therapist, Henry, encouraged her to explain what she meant when she said, “It’s like a jack-in-the-box: it keeps bursting out, and I keep trying to stuff it back in again.” Nicky’s answer: “Henry, I think I might be gay.” 

At the outset of Frighten the Horses, Radclyffe knows one thing and one thing only: aside from tending to four beloved children, the only time he has felt joy as Nicky, the only time Nicky has felt like herself, was while riding a motorcycle in her early twenties with a gang of biker dudes: 

…my torso hard and muscular like theirs, skin tanned, biceps tightening under a T-shirt, shoulders flat and wide, my motorbike taking the place of the only thing they possessed that I didn’t. I was one of them, I was meant to be out there among them, a boy among men, nothing separating us except for a few inches of road. 

The explanation of how Nicky went from an art school grad and biker to mid-life matronhood—and how Oliver extracted himself from the stultifying life he’d built—kept me up all night, devouring the memoir’s pages. I was spellbound as Radclyffe deconstructed each layer of himself: separating from his husband; beginning to date women and awakening to sexual delight; trying to figure out what it means that even as an out lesbian, Nicky senses a “phantom penis”; and ultimately embracing the man he is, even as his kids still call him Mom.

Radclyffe was a diarist in his 80s-era, British-boarding-school youth, taking up the practice again in the face of those persistent questions from his therapist. The diarist’s gift for immediacy and vivid detail comes through in the memoir’s polished prose. At home with four children under ten, Radclyffe wipes noses, pours juice, delivers snuggles, and reads bedtime stories. In Manhattan and Provincetown, Radclyffe takes women to coffee, restaurants, art galleries, and bed. At queer bookstores, Stonewall, and LGBTQ support groups, he learns about the history of a movement he barely registered as a young person in the UK surrounded by casual homophobia. And in long conversations with his friends and sometimes-befuddled family, he charts his unfurling understanding of gender. Everything is intensely observed. Radclyffe notes the purple velvet smoking jacket worn to a date, the smell of cut grass in England in the summer “mingling with the scent of sweet peas and roses,” the warmth of a rocker-girlfriend’s hand inside the pocket of her sheepskin jacket, the feel of his father holding his hand when he comes out as gay.  

And the details in these scenes contribute to their deep humor, too. In one episode early on, Radclyffe’s golden retriever puppy rips up an Amazon order filled with books on lesbian identity that Radclyffe has hidden. Radclyffe and his twin daughters hold a race to see who can pick up the most shredded pages “before Daddy gets home.” Radclyffe admits to a childhood friend that sex with men was never arousing but that “I thought perhaps it was something you had to get used to, like listening to Dvořák or liking the taste of olives.” In one of the angriest—and funniest—passages in the book, Radclyffe rages at the reactions of his parents’ upper-crust friends to the news he’s trans. Learning that the friends mostly express sympathy for Radclyffe’s soon-to-be-ex husband, Radclyffe launches into a cri de coeur about the erasure and marginalization of trans people in every area—from bathrooms to health care. His rant crescendos with the complaint that “testosterone can’t give me the one thing I want, which is a working fucking penis!” In the stunned family silence that follows, Radclyffe’s father simply deadpans: “If it’s any consolation, my penis doesn’t work anymore either.”  

In moments like this and so many others, what shines through is how self-deprecating the narrator is—and how self-aware. As Radclyffe understands, that willingness to mock himself is in part a defense, honed at fancy suburban parties where Nicky mingled with her husband’s colleagues and their spouses, “throwing in bons mots . . . using humor to hide my anxiety.” 

But to skewer yourself, you have to appreciate how others see you. Throughout the book, Radclyffe shows this keen appreciation of others’ perspectives, viewing those around him with compassion. Take Radclyffe’s ex-husband, Charles, a man so obsessed with appearances that his first question when Nicky comes out as gay is whether anyone else knows. Despite being frustrated with Charles, Radclyffe shoulders equal responsibility for their years together, at one point writing: “Charles wanted a calm, harmonious relationship, so that’s what I gave him.” This pattern repeats as Radclyffe describes friends, parents, and lovers. He gives us both sides of a conflict. When his years’-long romance with a woman named Jaime breaks down, I empathized almost equally with both of them. Jaime is done with men, so her sorrow at the prospect of Radclyffe’s transition is genuine. At the same time, this is Radclyffe’s first full, loving relationship, and he tries everything to keep it from ending. The result of this comprehensive perspective is a humane memoir, one that demonstrates hard-earned love for all involved.

The author’s empathy in turn evokes understanding and compassion from the reader. While Radclyffe doesn’t have space to recount the history of anti-trans sentiments in the US or the UK, it is nonetheless the implicit backdrop to everything he writes. As he says at one point, the “whispering would end only when people like me were normalized, but the only way to normalize my identity was through exposure.” Radclyffe’s willingness to share the difficult truths of his life offers such exposure, shining a needed light on the experiences of transgender people in the United States and beyond. But Frighten the Horses is more than an important book: it is one of the most compelling of recent memoirs, a story that shows both the pain and the joy that follow when you decide to become fully yourself. 

Thank you, Beth, for such a beautiful review,

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein

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If you missed the event itself, here’s a recording you can watch at leisure. In it we discuss not only the thin line between over-reaction and denial, but also how trans people are supporting each other, the difference between biological age and trans age, code-switching as a trans person, experiencing adolescence in your mid-forties, being an embarrassing trans parent in the suburbs, writing a memoir during a period of relative safety (and then experiencing the full force of the backlash) and how silence still equals death.

We ended with a bunch of suggestions for what our listeners can do right now to help support the trans community, which include becoming a paid subscriber to Erin Reed’s Substack, Erin in the Morning, donating to the ACLU, contacting your state representatives, protesting any medical facility who threatens to end gender affirming care, and finding any grass-roots, trans-run organizations in your local area who need your support. Also, buy my memoir, which is now out in paperback!

(Apologies for the brief debacle between minutes 32 and 35 where Jerry accidentally gets cut off and I show my general incompetency in digital matters by failing to get him back on again, thank you to all the viewers who gamely stuck with us, and please feel free to fast-forward through this part if you’re watching the recording.)

Love, Oliver

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I’ve been avoiding writing this newsletter for same reason I once used to avoid writing about being trans, because there’s a part of me that knows as soon as I’ve put it down in writing, all my attempts at denial are going to fly out the window. Writing about something forces you to face it head-on, and I don’t want to give these current fears of mine any substance. But I’m trying to focus on drafting a novel, and every morning when I sit down at my desk I have to fight through this fear first, and it’s exhausting, and bad for my writing practice, so I’ve just got to bite the proverbial bullet and get it down on paper.

A few months ago I read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, and recognized my own denial in the form of the female protagonist, a mother who is bound by force of nature to her daily routine, who is still doing the laundry and buying groceries and making cups of tea as the world around her collapses. She can see what’s happening, but doesn’t want to accept a reality that is so wildly inconsistent with the future she’s planned. And so she stays, when she should leave. The end of the book is shocking, but its message is crystal clear: don’t be the frog that stays in the boiling pot.

The reality that I don’t want to face is that being trans may soon become incompatible with living in America.

I understand why people stay, why people won’t leave their homes even as the waters rise, or the forest fire approaches, or the tornado turns in their direction. This is the country where my kids are, my friends, my community, my work, my publisher, my agent, my pets, my home. I still have a British passport, but the life I’ve built for myself over the last eighteen years is here, and I don’t want to leave. It’s like that point at the end of a romantic relationship when you can see where it’s all heading, and it’s not good, but you can’t accept that the life you’ve built together might be over. You can’t quite bear to let the dream go.

I hoped for a while that Trump didn’t actually care about trans people, that we were merely a useful way to discredit the “radical left” in the run-up to the election. Once this tactic had served its purpose, I hoped he’d leave us alone. This is the sort of naïveté I can’t afford to indulge in anymore. Trump is set on destroying everyone he dislikes, and we are an easier target than most. He doesn’t even have to ban gender affirming care outright, he merely has to terrify the medical providers into not providing it anymore. If there are no providers, nobody will be able to transition, so trans people will be faced with two choices: detransition or leave.

If that happens, what will become of the trans community? Will it scatter? Vanish? What will happen to those who can’t leave? Would it be morally and ethically reprehensible for me to leave, knowing that I’m one of the few who can? What if I made the decision to stay, and faced the consequences along with everyone else? Would that be courage or madness? I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.

And yet I may be forced out. I am a naturalized citizen—which makes me less vulnerable than someone with a visa, but more vulnerable than someone who was born here—and if my identity becomes illegal then I don’t think my citizenship will count for much. The Trump administration is trying to make it a state felony to commit “gender identity fraud” by making a “false or misleading verbal or written statement” about one’s sex, which would instantly render me a criminal if I identified as anything other than female on any legal document. Given that I identify as male on all my legal documents—drivers license, passport, social security, bank account, health insurance, will—this would screw me overnight.

The government is also doing its best to make it impossible for trans people (both children and adults) to legally access gender affirming care, by asserting that use of cross-sex hormones is in violation of the FDCA. So far this tactic has been overturned by the courts, but the government doesn’t need court approval when they can use intimidation. Dozens of gender-affirming providers have already paused or shuttered their services from fear of potential financial or legal consequences, and this is only going to get worse over the next few years. I can’t risk obtaining hormones on the black market—because with an identity as vulnerable as mine in a country with a judicial system as broken as ours, engaging in any sort of criminal activity right now would be madness—and I know I wouldn’t survive detransition. So if my existence becomes criminal by its very nature, I will have to leave.

Then there’s the growing specter of political violence. We’ve been dealing with the backlash against the trans community for years, but in recent weeks it’s taken a very dark turn. Every time there’s a mass shooting the Right tries to pin it on the “trans death cult” and now the legacy media is following suit: after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the only motive the New York Times singled out in the shooter was a commitment to “trans rights,” despite the trans person in question having had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting. In a country with easy access to guns and a large militia already primed to see trans people as a threat, every time someone shines this kind of spotlight on us we become less safe. Should I even be mentioning Charlie Kirk in a newsletter? How can I write anything if it might result in my house being doxxed? I have children living at home! But once the fear creeps into my writing, then it’s my career on the line too, a career already destabilized by Trump’s attacks on educational institutions, DEI programs and arts grants.

And if all this wasn’t enough, Erin Reed reported in her newsletter yesterday that two sitting members of Congress have now called for the institutionalization of trans people. South Carolina representative Nancy Mace called us Trannies—as she always does—and stated that “these people are violently ill and should be in a straight jacket with a hard steel lock on it.” When Texas representative Ronny Jackson was asked whether “bringing back mental institutions could be on the table,” he responded by saying that transgender people have “legitimate psychiatric issues… we have to do something about this, we have to treat these people, we have to get them off the streets and we have to get them off the internet and we can’t let them communicate with one another. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus. This is a cancer that is spreading across this country.”

So if I can’t live safely or write freely in the United States, how can I stay? And yet if I had to leave, where would I go? I have dual citizenship, but England isn’t much better. JK and her cronies have effectively made us second class citizens over there, and reports of 150,000 almost entirely white and predominantly male British Nationalists taking to the streets in London last weekend don’t exactly inspire confidence. Leading UK trans writer and journalist Shon Faye revealed the levels of despondency across the pond by suggesting that the trans rights movement is over. “The fallout from [the assassination of Charlie Kirk] has shown plainly that the trans rights movement in the West, at least the liberal program of legal reform and cultural representation pursued for the past decade, is as dead as Kirk,” she wrote. “I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime.”

If this all sounds grim, it’s because it is grim. It’s hard to find a good spin on any of it, and I’m not going to try. At a reading with my editor Roxane Gay last year, someone asked me about the future of trans rights, and I said I believed things would get better. Roxane gave me a side-eye and said, “That’s very optimistic of you.” She was right, of course, I just didn’t know at the time quite how bad it was going to get.

But if there’s one thing I can cling to, it’s that I’m hardwired for optimism. I’m also monogamous by nature, and I made a commitment to this country—and all the queer people in it—that I refuse to break, whether I honor it from the US or in a long-distance relationship from a place of exile. To quote me quoting The Princess Bride in my memoir, we are in The Pit of Despair right now, and I’m not going to keep pretending otherwise. But while I’m preparing for the worst, I’m still hoping for the best, and as long as there’s a vial of testosterone left in my bathroom cabinet, I’ll be down here in the muck with my friends, looking for a way to climb back out again.

Sending love to all the trans folk out there, especially the kids,

Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein

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When I first started this newsletter, just over a year ago, my plan was simple: I wanted a place where I could write about the experience of being a writer, or being trans, or whatever else happened to pique my interest that week, without having to go through the process of modifying my ideas to fit a specific publication first. It was also a way of preventing myself from sinking back into the isolation that writing a full-length manuscript in self-imposed solitary confinement can often lead to.

One of the best parts of being on book tour was the sudden burst of sociability, which only served to highlight how unsociable I’d become. It reminded me how much I love people—like, really love them. Writing about people is one thing, but spending more time in the company of real human beings who aren’t my children made me realize how much I missed regular good old-fashioned adult conversation. Sending out a couple of essays a month felt like a good way to stay in touch with everyone I’d met—plus all of you I haven’t but who’ve read my work, or who’s work I’ve read, or who are generally interested in the same sort of things I am—while I got on with the hermitic task of drafting my next book.

And yet I haven’t posted anything in two months. I’ve tried, but I’ve failed. I don’t have writer’s block, the first draft of my novel is coming along well and I’m still writing four to five hours a day, but I cannot bring myself to write a newsletter full of casual reflections on personal (or political) issues while an entire nation is being bombed and starved to death. I just can’t do it.

I know we’re all in the same boat and we’re all asking the same questions—how do we reconcile ourselves with continuing to live our lives as normal while this is happening? How can we make unrelated art in the face of such horror?—and everyone is figuring out their own way. Mine is to take whatever action I can by way of protest and donations, and to continue working on my manuscript. Writing is my escape, but it’s also now my livelihood, so this work has to continue regardless. The personal essays, though - these I can’t write. It’s the “unrelated” part of “making art” that’s got me frozen. I’m not qualified to write about Gaza—nobody needs to hear my opinion beyond an unequivocal condemnation of the genocide—and nothing else feels meaningful enough to commit to paper, or to justify sharing, right now.

So until I can figure out some way to come back, I want to leave you with this article in The Cut which lists the mutual aid and non-profit organizations that are helping to distribute meals, clean water, and medication to the people in Gaza. Please give what you can, look after yourselves, hug your children, and pray to God there’s an end to this soon.

Love, Oliver

A couple of nights ago I was at a small library in Irvington NY talking to a very engaged group of women, most of whom were mothers of trans and queer kids. This demographic has shown up repeatedly at my book talks, probably because I stand at the intersection of transgender-person and parent-of-teenagers, and therefore am fluent in the language of both. I love talking with and listening to parents of trans kids, partly because—my God—these parents need a lot of support right now, and partly it makes me feel like I’m doing something useful, however small and localized.

Much of our conversation was focussed on the subject of the trans tipping point and the visibility backlash. Those of us old enough to be parents of teenagers mostly grew up either under Thatcher or Reagan, both of whom assumed that if we didn’t talk about queer identities they would all just quietly disappear. (It would be great if this was a system that worked, but it clearly doesn’t or I’d still have breasts.) By the time our kids were the same age we were then, Obama was in the White House, Time Magazine had announced that we’d reached the trans tipping point, and everyone, including me, assumed it would all just keep getting better from there.

Instead we’ve reached a new trans tipping point, but this one is tipping us backwards, not forwards. Transgender Europe, a non-profit group which represents 200 member organizations in over 50 different countries, recently announced that for the first time in its history, setbacks are now outweighing progress. The backlash is working.

This is partly due to the speed at which it all happened. Prior to the birth of the internet, any progress that was being made by trans people was largely invisible to the general public. In his book The Quiet Before, Gal Beckerman suggests that every revolution is preceded by a period of incubation during which the invisible army gathers its strength. This period of invisibility is necessary, but what happens when the revolution finally makes itself visible is also kind of important.

In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinski suggested that a successful revolution should follow the structure of a three-act play: “The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.” But for the transgender movement in the 2010s, at a time when the internet and social media could suddenly disseminate massive quantities of information at great speed, there was little time to engage with our audience before the backlash began.

Sarah McBride spoke about this earlier this week on the Ezra Klein Show, which I urge you to listen to. “We should be ahead of public opinion,” she said, “but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us.”

And yet we haven’t had the luxury of being able to go slow. Between Laverne Cox appearing on the cover of Time Magazine in 2014, and JK Rowling’s first vicious tweet in 2020, there was a gap of only six years. Given how much information there was to convey on a subject so few people understood, and given that trans people weren’t platformed in the public arena so had limited ways to get this information across, six years was not nearly enough. The surge in trans literature only occurred after Torrey Peters opened the floodgates in 2021, but by then the Gender Critical Feminists were already taking advantage of a publishing and media industry which favored cis writers over trans writers. So we didn’t get to have much of an act two before we were thrown into dramatic confrontation with our opponents.

The books that were published during this time illustrate the problem. Trans books are written from the trans perspective, Gender Critical books from the cis perspective. Gender Critical books prioritize the needs of cis people, and since most people react with self-interest first and social concern second, and since the general public is made up of 99% cis people and 1% trans people, the Gender Critical books inevitably had more impact on public opinion.

On the recent NYT podcast, Protocol, Jamie Reed—the woman who kick-started the legislative attacks against trans people—said she believed that in a group of sixteen kids who were being treated for gender dysphoria, the ratio of cis to trans identities would be 15-to-1. “We’re transitioning medically all of these kids with the hope that we catch this one. If these centers really cared about that one, then they also need to really care about these other fifteen because we should not be medicalizing them.”

This is the vague, gender-critical-promoted assumption which has turned much of the public away from supporting gender affirming care for trans kids: the fear that the majority of the kids seeking this care aren’t trans. And because it’s about protecting kids, once that fear has been triggered, it’s hard to push through it to logic or reason.

Of course, there is zero evidence to support the 15-to-1 ratio, it’s an entirely made-up figure. There is, however, plenty of evidence to support the 1-to-99 ratio: recent surveys have concluded that less than 1% of kids who transition experience regret, and of those who do detransition, most do so because being visibly trans in such a hostile world is so hard. The problem is that many members of the public don’t understand how it feels to be trans, so they’re instinctively skeptical about anyone who says they identify this way, and when you add that to anti-trans propaganda being pumped out by the Gender Critical Feminists platformed everywhere from The Atlantic to The Guardian to The New York Times, you’ve created the perfect environment for the Supreme Court result in United States v. Skrmetti, which ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing individual states to continue to ban gender affirming care for trans youth.

The penultimate word in that sentence is intentional. Twenty-six states in this country are now restricting gender affirming care for trans youth. Not cis youth, or confused youth, or mentally ill youth, or youth succumbing to peer pressure, or whatever bullshit reason someone like Jamie Reed would give for a kid mistakenly believing themselves to be trans, but trans youth. Kids who need this care.

I don’t know how many other ways I can say this, but I have to keep trying. Trans kids need gender affirming care or they will go through the wrong puberty, which will create irreversible changes which will permanently impact their lives if (and this is a big if) they manage to live through it. If we are concerned about the quality of the medical care they are receiving, we need to make the systems better. If we are concerned the kids aren’t getting enough therapeutic help before they decide to transition, we need to give them more. If we are concerned about the possible side effects of the medications, we need to put more money into research. All the solutions that will alleviate our fears about gender affirming care lie in expanding and improving the care, not banning it altogether. That would be like banning chemotherapy for cancer patients because chemo makes you sick. This is life saving care: you can’t just take it away from the people who need it.

There is no reason to shut down gender affirming care for trans kids, unless you are worried that the wrong kids are being transed. If you actually look at whether this is happening, you will find that it is not. The kids who are asking for this care will tell you they’re trans, their parents will tell you they’re trans, their therapists will tell you they’re trans, their doctors will tell you they’re trans. The only people telling you they aren’t trans are the ones who don’t believe in trans people in the first place, like Jamie fucking Reed.

This is called cis bias. It is your bias that makes you believe trans kids are not telling the truth about their identities, it is your bias that makes you believe the majority of these kids are cis. It is your bias, because you are cis, and so you instinctively believe that everyone else is cis too. Please, I beg of you, if you question a trans kid’s identity, ask yourself why. Check your bias, and then challenge the people around you to check theirs too.

Trans people exist. Trans kids exist. I am banging my head against my desk here. Trans kids exist and they need this care and this Supreme Court ruling is so fucked up I hardly know how to write about it.

If you are not in one of the twenty-six states that has already banned gender affirming care, please call your State Representative now and beg them not to ban it. I don’t know how long it will be before this spreads across the whole country, and covers all age-groups, but all we can do is try to hold out against it. We need to keep as many states as safe for trans kids as we can, for as long as we can. Protect Trans Youth. Yes, it’s a slogan, but so was Silence = Death, and that eventually worked. Protect Trans Youth. We need to keep saying it until the message is driven home.

Love,

Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Order Frighten the Horses Here

During the pandemic, I remember watching the music video for Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s Dancing in the Street (don’t ask me why, it was probably memoir-related) and having a visceral reaction to seeing Mick taking a swig from a can of coke that was sitting on the sidewalk. What the hell are you doing? I wanted to yell, Don’t you know that’s dangerous? Covid had made me hyper-vigilant about hygiene, even when that vigilance wasn’t necessary because the coke can was a prop and the music video had been made in 1985. I’m feeling this same kind of hyper-vigilance now, only this time it’s about free speech.

Last night I pulled David Leavitt’s Shelter in Place off my TBR pile. The book is set in 2016, just after Trump won the election, and in the opening chapter the characters are having a conversation about how much they loathe the incoming president. I found myself momentarily paralyzed with concern. How could these characters be speaking out against the president with such abandon? Don’t they know what the stakes are? Have they thought through the possible consequences? I was startled by my own reaction, the speed at which my concern for the safety of the fictional characters kicked in. The book was published in October 2020, so presumably at the time of printing both author and publisher hoped that, within a month or two, Trump’s presidency would be over. Instead, four years later, we’ve moved from living in a country where Trump was expected to be an ugly blip in our history, to living in a country where we’re afraid to speak out against him.

This is how I know we’re living in an authoritarian state. Yes, it’s also the terrifying daily spectacle of people being kidnapped off the streets by violent masked and armed men, it’s innocent immigrants being deported to foreign jails without trial or access to lawyers, it’s the lack of due process and the disintegration of checks and balances, it’s Trump taking gifts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign leaders, it’s his cronies flagrantly cashing in on his presidency, it’s the fascist rhetoric that’s issued daily from the White House, it’s the deliberate cruelty and the strategic dehumanization of the “other”, it’s the supply of arms and money to a genocidal regime, it’s the massive purge at the FBI, the attacks on the media, the overruling of the judges, the takeover of the universities, the destruction of environmental protections, the slashing of funding to medical research, and the fear that the people in charge can do anything they want and we seemingly have no recourse. But it’s also the fact that we are instinctively starting to second-guess everything we do and say, in case something we do or say makes us less safe.

I know the people most at risk right now are Black and brown immigrants and students, but unless you’re a white cis-het citizen who’s willing to stay completely silent about the horrors unfolding around us, any one of us could be next. And yet somehow, despite my hyper-vigilance, this still hasn’t quite registered with me yet. A couple of Sundays ago I was featured on Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters from Love talking about how to feel safe as a trans person in the current environment, but even as I recorded the video it felt self-indulgent. My fear for trans people is less about my own safety and more about the safety of my community, just as my fear of speaking out is almost always applied in proxy: even now, I’m not afraid of publishing this Substack, despite the horrifying footage of Rumeysa Ozturk being abducted off the street after she co-authored a pro-Palestinian op-ed. I’m worried about other people risking their safety.

I assume this is because I was brought up in a protective bubble of wealth and privilege, so I don’t have fear baked into my DNA. Bad things happened to other people, out there, not to us, in here. Yes, I was afraid of coming out and transitioning, but that was a personal fear that existed within my own short time-frame, it wasn’t a fear I saw in the adults around me. Because the people who raised me trusted the government to protect them, fear for my own personal safety is not my first response to a government-generated threat. I’ve never experienced the trauma of generational persecution, so however cautious I am now, I still cannot quite fathom that my freedom might be on the line. Whether this stems from white privilege, denial, or naïveté doesn’t matter: what matters is that I use it wisely, preferably in the service of others.

One of the things I found most interesting about David Leavitt’s opening chapter is that the conversation about the potential threat of a Trump government was occurring during a social event. White liberal-adjacent people turning current affairs into dinner party entertainment is something I’m quite familiar with. When I was younger and still living in England, the newspapers were something we read so that we had something interesting to say in polite company, a way of staying informed so that we didn’t sound ignorant. We weren’t expected to feel real empathy for whomever was currently in crisis, or take any practical action to help them. It was all experienced at a remove: the distance between “Us” and “Other People” allowing us to safe.

In the English countryside, you can occasionally come across an architectural innovation known as a Ha-ha, mostly built around the front lawns of stately homes. Designed by the famous landscape architect Capability Brown, it’s a combination of wall-and-trough that is designed to keep the cows and sheep off your lawn and in the field, while giving you an uninterrupted view of your land. Because the wall is sunken instead of raised, you can see the cattle, but they can’t get to you. It’s an invisible barrier that creates an impression of connection while offering a guarantee of safety. As long as you are wealthy enough to have a lawn—and a landscape architect—then what happens to the cattle when the slaughter truck comes doesn’t have to be any of your business.

But it is our business when the slaughter truck happens to be full of government agents. And as this cartoon in last week’s New Yorker reminds us, the illusion of safety is just that: an illusion.

In David Leavitt’s book the characters discussed what “might” happen during a second Trump presidency, but it felt like a hypothetical talking point and I didn’t get the sense that they really understood the magnitude of the threat. That was us, back then, and all of the things we speculated about are now coming true, and they are all much worse than we imagined. The novel’s ability to preserve a moment in time, to suspend it in amber so we can look back at it from the place we’re in now, has never felt so contracted. This book was published only four years ago - how can the world have changed so dramatically since then?

I’m currently writing a novel that’s set in the present day, and I’m already wondering how many of my characters’ fears will have been realized by the time it’s published. Or whether—and I still can’t quite believe I’m saying this—it will be possible to publish it at all.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Order Frighten the Horses here

A couple of days after the UK Supreme Court issued its ruling that trans women are not women in the eyes of the law, The Times (of London) published the following letter:

Sir, One of the most puzzling aspects of the Supreme Court’s judgment is that a scientifically illiterate ideology became so entrenched it needed our highest court to state the obvious. If you are born with a Y (male) chromosome you will carry it with you all your days. No amount of surgery, drug treatment, self-identification, wishful thinking or shutting down of reasoned argument will change that settled biological fact. To claim otherwise is flat-Earth territory. How someone chooses to live their life and present themselves to the outside world is a personal decision that should be met with understanding, tolerance and respect, but not at the expense of common sense.
Sir Peter Rubin, London SW1

I’m not a subscriber to The Times, but my mother is, and she forwarded me the letter attached to an email from an old family friend, a man I last saw at the London launch of my latest book, Frighten the Horses. A sometimes tragic, occasionally funny, frequently ridiculous account of how I discovered I had an invisible penis, I would hazard a guess that trans memoirs such as this are not the usual reading material of an upper-class English octogenarian, but apparently he read it cover-to-cover in less than a week.

This letter in today’s Times is key, he wrote in his email to my mother. Oliver’s book, in essence, is about the experience of discovering he was born male in a female’s body. How does he deal with the Y chromosome statement in this letter?

My first reaction to his question was to shut my computer, go outside into the back garden and get some fresh air and sunlight on my face before I either broke something or broke down. My mother said she’d get back to him with an answer, but I’m afraid it’s not going to come from me. I won’t do it, I won’t get into this argument again, I’m done. I promised myself that I would be patient with people, that I would answer all questions put to me in good faith, that I would prioritize education over my own personal feelings, but I am so damn tired of trying to explain to people why we are who we say we are. My bookshelves are lined with books that address this subject in academic language, medical jargon and layman’s terms, I myself have exposed my darkest underbelly in two books (and countless essays) trying to help people understand trans identities, and still it comes back to this: I don’t have a Y chromosome, therefore I can’t be a man.

What is a woman? is a debate that’s been raging since we first crossed the trans tipping point, and I’ve discovered through personal experience—and to the detriment of my mental health—that there’s no answer that will satisfy the unbeliever. What is a woman? is a bad-faith question, one that’s almost exclusively asked by people who want to exclude trans women from public life, and at a time when authoritarianism is rising across the globe, the threat of war is everywhere, and the earth is being destroyed by fire, drought and flood, anyone who is genuinely still engaged in this irrelevant and pointless debate must have a disturbingly defective prioritization system.

Trans people exist because we do. That’s it. That should be enough. We exist because we do. And the minute you undermine that one basic fact with arguments about chromosomes, you legitimize the actions of any person who wants to discriminate against us for whatever random reason they choose. Our survival depends on people believing that we’re human, and that we’re real, and anyone who questions either of those things is enabling these full-blown attacks on our human rights, our human bodies, and our human dignity. My current act of resistance towards the heinous levels of transphobia directed at us from the US administration is to reject this question entirely. Forthwith, I bear it no tolerance. I denounce it as falsely asked. The time for patience has passed - we can’t afford to be patient anymore.

In 2020, a total of 100 anti-trans bills were introduced into American state legislatures: in 2025 there have been over 850 in the first few months alone. In her newsletter, trans journalist Erin Reed does the impossible by managing to compress the extent of these attacks into one paragraph: “As of 2025, a staggering 867 bills have been introduced targeting transgender people across the United States. Of these, 122 would ban gender-affirming care for some segment of the trans population. Another 77 seek to bar transgender people from certain bathrooms—a threat made more tangible as arrests for alleged “wrong bathroom” usage have begun to mount. 73 bills aim to eliminate legal recognition of transgender people entirely, often by revoking updated driver’s licenses, stripping correct gender markers, and invalidating identification documents. Others target drag (and transgender people dressed in the “wrong clothes”) or require schools to forcibly out transgender students. A newer, especially chilling category would classify gender-affirming care or even social transition as child abuse, opening the door for state-sanctioned removal of trans youth from supportive homes. So far, 51 anti-trans bills have been signed into law this year, with many more advancing through state legislatures.”

Yesterday a black SUV with smoked out windows was parked outside my house when I got home from the grocery store. It stayed for about five minutes after I went into the house and then left. Even though I don’t think (please God let me be right about this) that trans people are currently at risk of deportation just for being trans, the adrenaline rush I felt as I hurried into my house is an example of the constant feeling of anxiety and fear trans people are now living under. And this will almost certainly get worse as we approach the midterms, when we become part of Trump’s political strategy—the woke wedge-issue he hopes will help keep him in power. I am white, trans-masc and debt-free, with dual American/British citizenship and an army of friends who I hope would move mountains if I were to be detained, and yet I’m still afraid. So what in God’s name must any of the thousands of trans women of color in this country, immigrant or otherwise, be feeling right now? I’m not separate from my community, I feel them in my bones—not because I’m an empath or any woo-woo shit but because I’m a normal person with basic levels of empathy—and my fear for their safety is keeping me awake at night. Trump has proved there’s no line he won’t cross, and if you are a trans immigrant there seems to be a very thin line between seeing a black SUV on the street and ending up in a male gulag in El Salvador. And that’s not my hyperactive three-am imagination: it’s real and it’s happening now.

In response to the letter in The Times (because you don’t say no to my mother) I would say that while it’s demonstrably not scientifically illiterate to believe in trans identities, it might be willfully illiterate of Sir Peter Rubin, the author of the letter, not to pick up one of the thousands of books out there written by trans people and start expanding his knowledge about who we are and how we live our lives. If he sincerely wants to treat us with tolerance, understanding and respect—as he suggests—then maybe he should stop asking us to prove our existence, and start asking what he can do to help us live safely instead.

And to all of the good, decent people out there who continue to believe in us, and are doing their best to help us fight back on both sides of the Atlantic, thank you. We couldn’t do this without you.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Order Frighten the Horses Here

Last weekend I was on a panel at the Woodstock Bookfest, which marked the end of my book tour. It was a lovely way to end since I have many friends up there, Martha Frankel who organizes the event is one of my newest favorite people, and the Golden Notebook, one of the many sponsors the festival, is my oldest favorite bookstore. But this also marks a return from being an extrovert to being an introvert again, since when one book ends, another must begin, and that internal shift I had to make from being a writer sitting at a desk to being a writer out on the road now has to happen in reverse.

The best part of promoting Frighten the Horses has been all the people I got to meet. Trans people, trans allies, parents of trans kids, regular people who just like reading, other writers promoting their own books, the various people who work in the publishing industry, the events organizers and venue staff and book sellers who make it all happen… every single person I met on this tour was utterly delightful and I feel completely rejuvenated by it all. It’s been a lot of human interaction after years of partially self-inflicted, partially unavoidable solitude, and it’s been a LOT of fun.

The hard part of promoting a book, however, is worrying about sales, which is no fun at all, and plays havoc on one’s anxiety levels. The best way to lower anxiety, I’ve found, is through intense focus on a single activity, but while writing a book is all focus and no ego, promoting a book is all ego and no focus. A perfect breeding ground for future-tripping, and not in a good way. How many people are buying the book? Will I earn out? If I don’t earn out, will I be able to sell my next book? If nobody acquires my next book, is my career over? If my career as a writer is over, what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life? Follow this to its natural conclusion and I end up dying miserable and alone. Fun stuff.

But as Jonathan Crary recently said, “Each of us is demeaned by the veneration of statistics - followers, clicks, likes, hits, views, shares, dollars - that, fabricated or not, are an ongoing rebuke to one’s self-belief.” And a lack of self-belief, as every writer will tell you, is the biggest impediment to opening up that fresh new page and starting to write again. Over and over I’ve had to remind myself that I successfully managed to write for ten years without knowing whether I’d ever get published—without knowing whether my writing was even any good—and I have to accept that process will begin again every time I start a new manuscript. There will never be any guarantees. That’s why this is such a brilliantly, insanely, terrifyingly evil vocation to be chosen by. It’s probably also why I love it so much.

So now I’m back at home, working on the first draft of my first novel, and beginning to realize how much the discipline I developed while writing Frighten the Horses is helping me stay sane through our current political situation. As the sole parent of four children, I had to schedule my writing hours every morning—and stick to them—or I’d never have finished the manuscript. During those hours I had to learn how to shut out all the external noise—my children’s needs, my anxiety about their needs—or I couldn’t disappear into that part of my brain that blindly produces words out of nothing. I had to get eight hours sleep because I know that’s the minimum on which my brain can function clearly enough to free-write, and I had to learn how to compartmentalize, to separate my writing world from the real world, and to be able to switch quickly between the two. In a strange way, being a working parent was laying some pretty good groundwork for learning to live under an authoritarian regime without losing my mind. After all, what are kids if not a bunch of wanna-be authoritarians? And what is writing if not an act of resistance, of holding on to something personal only for yourself?

In a moment of despair earlier this week I did, however, wonder whether I’d have to log off the news cycle completely in order to be able to sufficiently lose myself in this manuscript. I can’t draft when I’m anxious—when the noise in my head gets too loud and the wires feel like they’re crackling with static electricity—but what’s happening in America now is a crucial part of the novel I’m writing, so technically reading the news qualifies as research. Plus, as the trans writer Denny said yesterday in her essay for 100 Days of Creative Resistance, “I’m afraid in our attempt to protect our sanity by staying out of the loop, we are inevitably resorting to ignorance.” Somehow I have to find a balance, which I’m fairly confident I will. I’ve become pretty adept at adjusting my life to new circumstances.

In the end I sat with my anxiety for long enough to identify that I was picturing a future in which everyone I cared about was forced to leave the country, and that my whole community was about to disappear off to various different corners of the globe, never to be seen again. Aware that catastrophizing is my brain’s response to unidentified fear, and that isolation is not a terribly good cure for loneliness, I texted a friend, who immediately called me back and sweetly reassured me that, at least for now, they weren’t going anywhere. The permanent sense of impending doom/nameless loss hasn’t quite disappeared, but after this one brief conversation with someone I care for deeply, it now at least feels more manageable. I know you’re hearing this a lot from me, but it bears repeating: community is what’s going to keep us all sane through this. Caring for other people, and allowing them to care for us, including, wherever possible, real in-person, human contact, is not just important but necessary. Go hug a friend. Or your partner, or your kid, or someone else’s dog. It does help.

The book I’m currently reading, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, is also fueling my determination to keep writing. The novel is set in East Berlin in the 1980s, where the restrictions of life under a communist regime have become so normalized they’re almost unnoticeable to the characters in the story. Dotted here and there throughout the arc of an ill-fated love affair are moments when the reader is reminded that the protagonists are trying to navigate more than just their unravelling relationship:

“Han’s former lover Sylvia talks of ‘pink elephants,’ which is her term for sentences and paragraphs she writes into program scripts so that there’s something to remove. Meanwhile, it’s the shears in her head that are the real problem, she says. Hans knows she means a galloping anticipatory obedience, but still has a momentary vision of a pair of shears caught in the windings of Sylvia’s brain. In the Writer’s Union someone reads a resignation letter from a colleague justifying his leaving the Theater Group. Mind-boggling, Hans hears a woman say in the row behind him. And the abolition of the so-called approval process for literary texts—censorship to you and me—was long past due.”

These moments feel shocking, not only because they’re dropped into the narrative so casually, but because they could so easily describe a state of censorship we may soon find ourselves living under. Later in the chapter, Erpenbeck writes, “Maybe Gorbachev in his declaration regarding ‘free sovereign elections’ was recalling what Lenin wrote in his philosophical manuscripts: There is no doubt that the spontaneity of a movement is an expression of its deep roots in the masses and makes it impossible to expunge. Unfortunately, there’s nothing there about the quality of such a spontaneous movement. Hitler came in through the ballot box.” It’s uncanny how prescient that now feels.

Towards the end of her essay for 100 Days of Creative Resistance, Denny suggests that we should “write as if we have made it through to the ‘other side,’ because the ‘other side’ is just a fantasy. The truth is that we will never reach it. So why wait for things to get better, when your art is the very antidote to getting us as close to the ‘other side’ as possible?”

To that I’d add: write as if censorship is just around the corner. Because if they’re censoring our speech today, they’ll be censoring our writing tomorrow.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Frighten the Horses

A couple of years ago I had lunch with an old school friend, Wendell Steavenson, who has spent her life working as a foreign correspondent. Over the last few decades she’s covered the Iraq War, the Egyptian revolution, the Paris bombings and, most recently, the war in Ukraine. Two things in particular she said during that lunch keep coming back to me. She’d been trying to explain to me the sense that in Tahrir Square, during the first few days of the Arab Spring, nobody knew what was going on. Our current narrative of the Egyptian revolution wasn’t written until long after the events had played out - at the time it was all just whispers and rumors and bits of information amid a general sense of confusion. People had some idea that something was happening, but nobody knew exactly what it was, or what it would become.

I’m writing this on the flight back from the Tucson Book Festival in Arizona, where I spent a lot of time talking with other writers about our current political situation. Everyone seemed to be suspended in this same state of uncertainty. What exactly is this? How much danger are we in? Where is it going to go? What are people going to do? What will historians say about this time when they look back on it? How bad is this story going to get?

You’ve probably all seen Jane Fonda’s speech at the SAG awards, where she used her platform to speak directly to our current situation. “Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements, like apartheid or our civil rights movement or Stonewall, and asked yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge?” she asked. “Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs? We don’t have to wonder anymore because we are in our documentary moment. This is it. And it’s not a rehearsal.”

Fonda’s call to action reminds me of the second thing Wendell said to me over lunch, which is that when she hears of an event that might lead to some kind of political upheaval anywhere in the world, she is beset by an urgent desire to fly directly into the center of the storm. It’s this overwhelming need to be at the heart of the action that’s been the driving force behind her peripatetic and somewhat dangerous lifestyle - one that seems to have chosen her more than she chose it.

Now I understand this feeling on a visceral level. I just spent a week in England promoting the UK edition of my book, which I was expecting to enjoy as a brief respite, but instead I felt the opposite: the overwhelming urge to get back to the US. This is my home now; it’s where my kids are, my friends are, and where—despite the fact that I’m now living in a daily state of hyper-vigilance—my heart is. I recently heard that Rosie O’Donnell has moved back to Ireland to protect her kid, and I don’t blame her—mama bear’s gonna mama bear—but my desire to stay here in the US doesn’t come from a place of moral obligation towards my community, it comes from somewhere different, a place I think Wendell would recognize. Halfway through my memoir, Frighten the Horses, I tried to explain to my mother why I didn’t want to live in an ivory tower any longer. “It’s beautiful, but isolating,” I told her. “I don’t want to be protected from the world anymore, I want to be part of it.” It’s only now that I understand how deep that feeling runs.

And yet my parents are getting older, and I want to be able to visit them while I still can, but I’ve just had to cancel my plans to fly out to see them with the kids this summer because it no longer feels safe for me to travel outside the country. I didn’t know when I wrote the essay Passport Angels last December—when I thought that getting my gender marker updated would protect me—that the Trump administration would go to such lengths to make sure trans people never felt safe again. I read Project 2025 three years ago when it started doing the rounds on trans social media, so I knew the Trump administration would be coming for trans people, but I assumed that if my passport matched my appearance, I’d be safe coming through passport control. If I pass as a man, and my gender marker says male, why would anyone think I was trans? What I hadn’t anticipated was that I might end up on a government list that would out me as trans regardless.

I’m an American citizen, so I’m less at risk than those who are undocumented or who are here on visas, but I’m also part of a minority group that Trump is actively trying to expel from the country. Up until a couple of weeks ago I wouldn’t have considered myself at risk at all, but during this latest visit to England I woke up one morning to the news that yet another protection has been lifted from the trans community. A report in Bloomberg stated that the Department of Homeland Security has removed provisions which protect trans people from surveillance based on gender identity. This means that while government personnel are prohibited from engaging in intelligence activities based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, sex, religion, country of birth, nationality, or disability, they are now at liberty to conduct surveillance based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Because I’m publicly out as a trans writer, if the government is making a list of targetable trans people, eventually I’m going to end up on it. Which means that if I leave the country I could be flagged at passport control. The government website currently says that my passport is still valid, despite not reflecting my gender assigned at birth, but I no longer trust the government not to change their mind at a moment’s notice. While I’m out of the country, a new executive order could be signed saying that my passport is now fraudulent, and they could refuse me re-entry. I don’t know if this would happen, I just worry that it could.

If it does, the government won’t care that I’m the sole custodial parent to four children, two of whom are not yet old enough to raise themselves if I can’t get back into the country, added to which I might have problems finding an attorney willing to represent me, since the Trump administration is systematically attacking any law firm they consider to be a threat. Even a month ago I would have thought this all sounded paranoid and insane, but this is how trans people live now: in a fog of anxiety, uncertainty and fear.

Still, at least I have the privilege of choice on my side. I can choose not to leave the country for a while, and unless the situation escalates sharply, I won’t be in any immediate danger. But while I’m relatively safe, all over America hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants are now afraid of stepping outside of their own front doors. While all eyes are on Mahmoud Khalil and the Venezuelans, how many other less-noticeable people are silently disappearing? My friend Lev spent ten years bearing witness to the Uyghur genocide, so I don’t need to read Octavia Butler or Paul Lynch to understand how this happens. I do recommend reading Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, however, if you’re struggling to comprehend how it would feel if it happened to you, or, more importantly, if you’re struggling to believe that it ever could.

Finally, I’m aware that the more I write about all this, the more of a target I make myself, but it’s too late to put this horse back in the stable, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. As my new friend Zoe Bossier said during our panel at the Tucson Book Festival, if they wanted us to stay quiet, they chose the wrong minority group. I can only hope that if enough people continue to resist, speak up and act out, things will eventually change. But at what cost in the meantime, I just don’t know.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Frighten the Horses

I can’t write about the level of fear I had after watching the meeting between Trump and Zelensky yesterday because I can’t yet find the words, but it occurred to me while I was standing on the lawn this morning that the adjustments we’re all trying to make to this new world order are, in a strange way, similar to the adjustments trans people have to make when they transition. The old, normal world falls away, and there’s a period of wild disorientation while you try to adapt to the new one. You have to figure out what kind of person you’re going to be, what you have to give up, what you must fight for, how to take care of the people around you while you’re going through it, and how to be true to yourself. Currently everyone I know is experiencing a speeded-up version of this process, with zero preparation, against their wishes. No wonder they’re all freaking out.

Community is the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. The trans community is under attack, the trans community must band together, the trans community needs support. Because I don’t feel qualified to write about what happened yesterday, I’m distracting myself by trying to figure out my place within the trans community—not among my immediate queer friends, but in the larger scheme of things. My connection to trans history. Every time I come back to my family home I’m reminded that I come from generations of colonialists and white supremacists: my father hates hearing them called that, but that’s what they were. I love my family, but I’m not proud of my lineage. I severed myself from this line when I decided to come out as queer, but while reading Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets last year, I wondered what it would feel like to have ancestors who would understand and embrace the person I am today, to have ancestors I could pray to in times like these.

Much has been written recently about our trans ancestors—particularly this great piece from Gillian Branstetter inspired by the attempted erasure of trans people from the history of the Stonewall Inn—all of which left me wondering (not for the first time) whether this is a lineage I’m allowed to call myself a part of. Trans people don’t claim their ancestors through blood genealogy, but through shared experiences, and as a middle-class, able-bodied, white trans man, there is a limit to which I can reasonably claim to have shared experiences with people like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson, or Leslie Feinberg. These are people whose unwavering perseverance and courage in the face of almost unthinkable levels of public opposition makes any small act of defiance on my part feel like child’s play.

And yet I transitioned, which, let’s face it, is a pretty wild thing to do. At first glance I don’t look like a very radical person, but then I never saw my transition as a “radical” act in the political sense of the word, because I wasn’t trying to make a political statement, I was just trying to make myself into a whole human being. My sense of myself as the living embodiment of a political position only came later. My experience as a queer person, although arguably a story of of loss, was never one of danger. I was safe during the AIDS crisis because I hiding in my closet, and I’m safe now because I’ve fully transitioned. To all intents and purposes, I’ve assimilated. The assimilation wasn’t intentional—in order to transition I had to let go of any hope of social respectability—but it happened anyway because I pass so easily as a man. I’m a father, I live in the suburbs, and apart from a few tattoos I basically dress like my Dad. My radical interior is belied by my very ordinary exterior.

This makes me far less vulnerable than many other trans people are, as does my age, my location, and my access to resources. Which means that whenever I refer to trans people using first-person plural pronouns or prepositions—we or us—I’m aware there’s a marked difference between what I’m going to experience over the next few years, and what many other trans people are going to experience. But I’m not the same person I used to be when I lived here, in the seclusion of the English countryside, because now my concern no longer stops at my own safety: I’m not giving up until every trans person can enjoy the same levels of protection that I have. Also, I’m beginning to realize I may not be as safe as I think I am. I’m having a bit of a hard time getting my head around that, to be honest.

Either way, the truth is that I wouldn’t be here today without Sylvia, Marsha, Leslie, and all the thousands of other recognizable and anonymous trans people who came before me. I only transitioned once I saw that it was feasible, and that only happened because someone else did it first. If our ancestors can be defined as those who made it possible for us to have life, then I think I’ll give myself permission to claim these people as my own. I may be needing them to pray to in the future.

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Frighten the Horses

Over the last few weeks I’ve started writing this newsletter and then deleted it almost a dozen times. Each time I think I know what we’re up against, but then something new happens, and I have to start again. I know you don’t need me to tell you that for the last month trans people have been enduring a full-scale assault on their ability to exist, either legally or medically, but given the overwhelm we’re all feeling, I’ll try to summarize the executive orders that are specifically aimed at trans people here:

1) on January 20th an executive order was issued stating that there are now only two legally recognized genders, and that they are immutable and assigned at birth, 2) on January 27th an EO was issued proposing a ban on trans people serving in the military, 3) on January 28th an EO was issued proposing a national ban on gender-affirming care for minors, 4) on January 29th an EO was issued proposing a ban on “gender ideology” from being taught or discussed in schools, and 5) and on February 5th an EO was issued proposing to bar trans people from playing sports at any level.

I say ‘propose’ because many of these orders may not be legally enforceable, and are already being fought in the courts by organizations such as the ACLU (please donate to them if you haven’t already) so hope is not yet dead. Having said that, it’s a pretty rough time to be trans, or to be the parent of a trans kid.

After each executive order I received a flurry of emails from concerned friends. I can’t believe this is happening! Are you okay? And finally, Are you going to move back home?

I was slightly taken aback by their surprise—hadn’t they also seen this coming? Project 2025 anyone?—until I remembered that the information that gets passed around the trans community often doesn’t filter into the outside world. Now it was clearly getting through. Each executive order escalated the use of the kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that has been historically used to justify the erasure of a minority, which was horrifying but also in a strange way almost a relief: the gloves were finally off, and the pretense that the attack on trans people wasn’t rooted in violent transphobia has finally been dropped.

The last few years have sometimes felt like one of those dreams where you try to run but can’t move, or try to scream for help but can’t make a sound. While all over the media in both the UK and the US journalists engaged in endless debates with Gender Critical Feminists, Christian Nationalists and far-right Republicans about which spaces we should be excluded from, we in the trans community knew the people promoting our exclusion didn’t care about safety in prisons or fairness in women’s sports. They were simply using the time-honored justification of “protecting women and children” as an excuse to remove us from public life. It was never about who should have access to which locker room, it was about a deep fear and hatred of trans people that could only be assuaged by getting rid of us completely. We knew this. Now everyone else does, too.

I debated the question about moving back home for a couple of days. I was born and raised in England and moved to the East coast of America in my early forties, a few years before I transitioned, so I hold dual citizenship. When the first executive order came through I thought I’d start this essay with a follow up to my previous post: I wanted to thank the Passport Angels for processing my gender change application so quickly, because otherwise I’d now be without an American passport, and I have to fly to England for the UK launch of Frighten the Horses in a few weeks. I was looking forward to seeing the handful of trans people I know in the country, and hearing their personal experiences about how transphobia manifests over there, and it would have been a bummer to have had to cancel.

I had originally planned to compare the two countries by examining the differences between the Gender Critical Feminists over there and the Republican Party over here, in an attempt to decide which country is safer to live in, but obviously this is now a redundant exercise. The UK may have banned gender-affirming care for minors, but the US is attempting to ban everything for everyone. As we speak Montana is trying to pass a bill that would make it impossible for doctors to prescribe gender-affirming care for adults, and if they succeed, they potentially open a door to the forcible detransition of every trans person in the country.

And yet… I still don’t want to “go home.” England was where I was born, but America is where I found my people, and I have no intention of deserting them just because I can. There has been a lot written about how we face—and survive—the onslaught, but the one theme that everyone keeps coming back to is community. My children, my friends, my chosen family, everyone I love, is here in this country. I could leave to live in a safer place, but I’d also be leaving behind everyone I care about, all the relationships I’ve built. Creating queer community doesn’t just involve making queer friends, it means showing up for each other during the hard times as well as the good, and I would rather be digging in here with the people I love, than exiling myself from the very people who’ll help get me through all this with my sanity intact.

If you don’t have a solid community around you already, it’s not too late to start forming one now. Think small, start local. Show up for your friends, lean on them and ask them for help when necessary. Find a support meeting, join a mutual aid group, work on finding ways to weather the storm together. Love is an action, not a feeling, and while we all have physical and logistical constraints, finding one small action you can take will help you feel a little less impotent and alone. For me it’s writing and storytelling: being a full-time, solo-parent makes it difficult for me to get out into the streets, so instead I’m writing a barrage of letters to the people in positions of power. I don’t know how much difference I’m making, but at least I’m doing something.

I asked a trusted friend recently what other actions I could be taking (I think I actually wailed, “What am I supposed to do?” which is a sentiment I’m sure many of you share) and she answered, “Live according to your values.” This seemed like such a startling good piece of advice it stopped me in my tracks. Whether our inclinations lead us towards organizing, protesting, writing, caring or creating art, we can all continue to honor our own internal value systems, irrespective of what’s going on around us. And by doing so we can make a difference, we can make this country a slightly more bearable place for each other to live in, and we can help fight off despair.

Please look after yourselves, and each other too,

Love, Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now with Roxane Gay Books. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein.

Frighten the Horses