I am back at the beginning. Back where it all rebegan.

The last seven years of my life have felt like seven interchangeable days. The same thing happens over and over again, and I don’t even know what the right order is anymore. Like Billy Pilgrim, I have come unstuck in time1.

It’s 2019.

I’m spending my first night in my new apartment. Aside from the just-delivered bed, there is hardly anything in it, besides some of my clothes and me.

The Love-of-my-Life has thrown me out a week before Thanksgiving. My stepchildren hate me. My soon-to-be-ex resents me. I have been crashing on a friend’s couch for over a week, unable to sleep or eat. Unable to understand what has happened.

I swear never to love again.

It’s 2020.

I’m sitting in my office on a Zoom call. My divorce is finalized via video conference because of lockdown during COVID-19. The Now-ex-Love-of-my-Life is the only person without her camera on. She is too angry to be seen. Or maybe she spitefully refuses to let me see her.

Regardless, it’s over. We have settled. We have gone our separate ways. My life belongs to me again.

It’s 2022.

My father has died. I spent the last three weeks of his life with him. I was at his side as he passed. We talked before he left this Earth. I showed him how my career was at last beginning to take off. He told me how good it made him feel that things were stabilizing for me. He was satisfied and filled with hope for me. We were close at the end.

But I do not tell him I am trans. In the three weeks I am at my parents’ house, I am masking, dressing androgynously rather than fully femme. I regret not sharing my truth.

I am also relieved. Now that he is gone, I no longer have to hide. I can fully transition.

It’s 2019.

I confess to my mother that I am trans. I tell her that this is one of the reasons I am getting divorced. I ask if I should tell my father. She strongly suggests I don’t. She says he will not understand. He might disown me. I keep my silence.

Two days later, she buys me new clothes to help me girl-ify my appearance. She tells him the clothes are for me, not her.

It’s 2025.

I have posted an essay to my new Substack, Writing While Trans. I am telling the story of how I cannot go back to my home country, because the bigoted, fascist administration has threatened trans people, attempted to erase them from the national narrative, and is launching an effort to prevent us from getting life-saving healthcare. The would-be dictator is using the language of genocide, and so I ex-patriate to Spain with my family.

An internet troll comments, “Good riddance!” He proudly adds that “AmeriKKKa” doesn’t want me. I am shocked. I have never before seen the “AmeriKKKa” tag used unironically.

It’s 2024.

I have enjoyed breakout success with Accidental Mystic and its two sequels – the paranormal women’s fiction trilogy I wrote loosely adapting the events of my divorce. Accidental Mystic becomes a #1 Bestseller in three categories. For three consecutive months, I set a new personal record for sales. I have found the success I’ve been chasing for 13 years.

Three months later, I make plans to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico. My royalties are strong enough to secure an apartment with no additional sources of income. This is a major achievement for me. At the end of the year, I am able to quit my Editor-in Chief job and become a full-time author.

It’s 2020.

My soon-to-be-ex refuses to allow me to use the insurance on which I am still a beneficiary to have the rotator cuff surgery I have been putting off for four years after she was fired, plunging us into economic crisis. Her reasoning is that I am a game store manager, and that is a low-paying job, so I might stick her with the bill. She ignores the fact that I have another, better-paying job as a book description writer and that I am a rising star at the company. A year later, I will be named Editor-in-Chief at this firm.

A few months afterward, I quit the game store, soured on how the rest of management treats me and having secured enough other work that I can easily replace that income.

It’s 2021.

I publish Accidental Mystic on Christmas Day. After a few days, it is selling stronger than anything I’ve ever published. Three weeks later, I experiment with new ad techniques. The book explodes in a way no previous book I’ve published ever has.

It’s 2019.

The meticulously researched urban fantasy series I published is not selling. The covers are on-point. The snark is strong. But the main character is Black and bisexual. She tells it like it is. Readers pass. The series I thought was going to make it happen for me is sinking.

It’s 2026.

Accidental Mystic is no longer selling. My sapphic romantasy series I successfully relaunched on Kickstarter has failed to gain traction in retail. I am hemorrhaging cash, and I don’t know how to fix it. If I can’t come up with a solution fast, I will run out of money, and we will have to leave Spain. I am terrified of returning to the U.S. I am terrified of being homeless in a foreign country.

I don’t want to live anymore. I don’t want to rebegin again. I don’t want to cope with having it all and losing it. I don’t want to deal with the anti-trans bigotry I will surely face in the States. I promise my spouse I will stay alive for them. They do not want me to die. I do not want to hurt them. So I continue to live, despite my desire to just rest at last.

It’s 2025.

The rhetoric from the Trump administration makes it clear that nowhere in America is safe for trans people. I realize I must rebegin again.

My mother died three years ago, and I have a strong inheritance to help support my future. My books are selling well. After thorough research and hiring an immigration law firm to assist me, my family and I expatriate to Spain a mere seven months after starting over in Santa Fe.

It’s 2022.

My mother has ceased speaking to me. She is angry I have changed my name. She is resentful for a lifetime of imagined crimes I have committed against her. She only makes contact after she is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.

I attempt for several months to reconcile. She refuses. Her last instructions to my brother are that I am not allowed to attend her deathbed and that I am to be arrested if I defy her. Wondering what kind of person evokes such a reaction from their mother, I fall into deep depression and wonder if it would be better for everyone if I were dead.

It’s 2019.

I have learned my stepchildren hate me. One has lied to me so often and effectively I was completely unaware anyone felt like this. I realize I have misinterpreted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of interactions with my wife and kids. I am horrified with what they think of me.

I love them so deeply, I believe I must be a terrible person. Overcome with regret and guilt, I attempt suicide.

It’s 2022.

My father is dying. He has been reading Accidental Mystic. He and my mom and I are sitting up at three in the morning, because he is struggling to breathe. He asks me to tell him how the book ends, so he will not miss the conclusion before he’s gone.

Two weeks before, I contemplate telling him I am trans. My mother begs me not to. She says she cannot predict what he would do. He has become more prejudiced the closer he gets to the end.

Four months later, in the middle of an argument, she tells me that she outed me to him and blames me for it.

It’s 2023.

My mother has died after refusing to reconcile or see me. I am hurt and angry, but also relieved. Now that she is gone, she cannot hurt me anymore. I am finally completely free to be my authentic self without judgment. Though I will struggle for years with this ultimate rejection, I understand what it is to be happy for the first time.

It’s 2026.

I have changed my comment policy on Substack, restricting comments to subscribers only. I publish a lengthy essay describing transitioning as an act of affirmation, not one of change. I support my arguments with scientific data and the positions of the major American medical associations.

A TERF subscribes to my newsletter solely so she can tell me I am a man and a fetishist. She deliberately calls me, “sir,” and says horrible things. I ban her. She finds one of my Notes and comments similarly. I have to block her.

It’s 2024.

The Ohio legislature has become aggressively hostile towards trans people. I explore immigrating to Canada, but the only program I qualify for is on pause due to a four-year backlog.

My girlfriend and I are walking to pick up our dogs from daycare. A man in a passing car leans out the window and shouts, “Faggot!” at me. I realize I must rebegin again. We choose Santa Fe, because it is a sanctuary city.

It’s 2026.

I launch the trans fairytale trilogy I’ve been planning for three years on Kickstarter. It is the most successful of the three campaigns I have run. Its income sets a new record month for me. My instinct that queer readers are looking for books like these is confirmed.

But the damage to my finances from the wrecked U.S. economy and the market disruption of AI search tools is too severe. Despite my record success, I must rebegin again.

It’s 2023.

My girlfriend betrays me as badly as the Ex-Love-of-my-Life. I swear again never to love or trust another person.

It’s 2019.

I am lost in downtown Chicago, looking for the El station I need to get to my destination. I am miserable. It is hot. I am dragging a suitcase. I am scared. The skyscrapers are blocking my cell reception, so I cannot use my phone to navigate to the right place.

I am sick of all this suffering. My urban fantasy is failing. My author career is circling the drain. I want to throw myself in front of a bus and be done with it. But I remind myself that The Love of my Life would be devastated if I died. I force myself to continue.

Six months later, the woman I chose to keep living for throws me out like so much trash.

It’s 2024.

My girlfriend and I have reconciled. Against all odds and my personal vow to the contrary, I have fallen in love again. My girlfriend proposes in April on the day of the total solar eclipse. We marry six days before moving to Santa Fe in the fall. I have rebegun again.

It’s 2026.

My spouse and their brother and I enjoy Paella Valenciana and watch the total solar eclipse, with the Mediterranean Sea at our backs. I realize this is the last great experience we will have in Spain.

I don’t want to rebegin again. I just want it all to be over for good. Let this eclipse be the sunset. But I remember my promise to my spouse to keep living.

It’s 2025.

I have successfully jumped through all the immigration hoops. My family and I are awarded a three-year visa to Spain. I cry with relief at finally feeling safe.

It’s 2026.

We’re on a flight to Chicago from Madrid, returning to the U.S. I am low-key frightened I will be harassed at Customs for having an “X” gender marker on my passport and being obviously a trans woman.

Unprompted, my spouse reaches over and kisses my cheek while I am writing this essay in my head.

It’s 2026.

I am back in the U.S. I am back in Ohio. I am living in the same complex. Our new home is two doors down from my old apartment where my life rebegan.

I am unstuck in time. It has been seven years. Not a day has passed.

I rebegin again.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. Her latest project is a trans space opera serial launching soon on Substack.

(I’ve loved rom-coms my whole life, and honestly, this should have been another early clue that I was trans. What can I say? My self-ignorance was deep.)

But as fun as the breeziest romances are, they do have one fatal flaw. They end on a happily-ever-after. Indeed, the fairytale finale is the whole point of the story. And as anyone who’s ever been in a real marriage knows, “I do” is just the beginning.

I’ve failed at marriage twice, so I have some experience in this department. And the second long-term romantic disaster of my life featured my trans awakening. It was this extraordinary moment wherein I committed one of my biggest mistakes ever.

Not coming out. I’ve never regretted that, and my life has been so much better since. No, the huge fuckup on my part was not understanding what I was expecting of my now-ex:

I tried to make her queer, too.

The Lie I Didn’t Know I Was Telling

She, quite understandably, thought she had married a cis man. At the time we began dating, I didn’t understand my queerness. As I’ve written in this space before, I knew I was different. I was not like my more masculine friends, although I pretended to be. I was passionate about my Cincinnati Bengals fandom. I drove a pickup. I had a beard. I loved James Bond movies. I looked for all the world like a scholarly literary dude, who’d been driven by life into an accidental career in marketing.

That said, I adopted a lot of traditionally feminine roles.

My ex is a fiery, career-driven woman determined to provide. So, when I was laid off, I played homemaker, raising the children, taking them to activities, making lunches for school, and cooking dinner for everyone. In my previous marriage I had been one of the “moms” to my daughter’s Girl Scout troop. I was the parent who looked after the friend group, walking everyone home from school and hosting sleepovers. I was volunteered to organize the third-grade Valentine’s Day party. So, when I married into two stepchildren and subsequently found myself out of work, staying home and taking care of them while I was just starting my career as an author seemed perfectly natural to me.

Even though no man I was friends with would have done the same.

The programming I’d received growing up and from the environment in which I lived kept me ignorant of the fact that I was trans. I told myself I was an extraordinary man, unlike the average dude-bro who thought changing diapers and buying tampons were off his to-do list.

But the questions I’d been asking my whole life and the pain they caused never went away. And due to my stepchildren’s friend groups and the schools they attended, I was exposed to a lot more queer, gender-nonconforming, and neurodivergent kids than I ever had been before. My ex also had a social circle with LGBTQ+ folks. Both of us were staunch allies when we entered our marriage, but being in that world started chipping away at the walls of my egg.

And when I had a trans employee at my job, who transitioned over the time I worked with her, I found myself learning a whole host of things I didn’t know and working to unlearn prejudices I didn’t realize I had. That’s when my egg really started to crack.

Alone Time

By the summer of 2019, our marriage was crumbling. I’d done a lot of damage I was unaware of, and I wasn’t feeling any happier with the state of things than my ex. We were putting up with each other, both of us sort of trying to figure out how to fix something we knew was broken but couldn’t understand how to repair. A lot of this was my fault.

But during that summer, we had become two strangers sharing a life. Our youngest wanted to go to Columbia for college. She harbored dreams of ending up on Broadway. Short on cash for plane tickets and me working retail, we decided the most cost-efficient thing to do would be for my ex and stepdaughter to drive to New York City and stay at an AirBnB. She had paid vacation time that I did not, so this girls’ road trip made financial sense in addition to bonding time between mother and daughter as the end of having children at home neared.

That left me alone a lot. My stepson was out of town with his dad, so I had a lot of quiet time.

And an overthinker like me spends that time exploring the deep mysteries of everything wrong with themself.

The growing distance between my ex and I, coupled with having the house to myself had me questioning my identity. With unlimited time to explore the cracks in my egg’s shell and the burning desire to finally understand what was different about me, I spent hours taking myself apart, trying to see what made me tick.

But that patriarchal, binary-gender programming was still so powerful, I could not see what was right in front of me. I could not admit I was under the LGBTQ+ umbrella without a fresh set of eyes.

Eventually, I talked to my trans employee about these things I could not understand. Despite being vulnerable about my “strange feelings” for the first time, I was still defensive. I told her I didn’t feel like I was a woman, despite the things I was thinking about. I said I was comfortable in my body (Ha!) and didn’t want to transition.

She walked me through the complexities of gender identity, teaching me that it was not binary, and that where one fell on the spectrum determined a lot of whom they are. From that conversation I concluded I was nonbinary (I still needed that I’m-not-fully-a-woman crutch, because it took a while for me to fully embrace my transness).

I was elated. I was relieved. Finally, I had an answer to why I was different.

I was also terrified, because I knew I had to tell my then-spouse.

I’m just not a Lesbian

When I came out to her on a Sunday morning, I tried to present the whole thing as not that big a deal. I assured her it didn’t change anything between us. I was still the person she married, and I was in love with her.

But I was locked into that rom-com thinking. Hell, the theme of our wedding had been “happily ever after.” True Love would conquer all. Even me being trans.

And of course, it changed things. It changed everything. Because the fact was, she now had a queer husband.

And if her husband was queer, then she would have to become queer to stay married.

Though the coming-out speech itself went okay, the remaining days of our marriage were awkward and strained. She said to me only a day later, “I’m just not a lesbian.”

I was vaguely offended by that. It made no sense to me. What did lesbianism have to do with me being nonbinary?

Two days later, she confessed she’d been talking to a friend, trying to figure out what to do. The friend had suggested we have an open marriage, and she said that was not an option.

Once again, I was stunned. I’d not suggested anything like an open marriage. I figured we had a lot to work out, but I wanted to do it with her. But she was evidently seeing everything through a sexual lens.

What those separate incidents told me was that my marriage was over. I knew, listening to her reactions and the things she was telling me, that this was the hurdle she could not get over, the story beat she could not get past. It didn’t upset me so much as disappoint me. I was in love, and I was deluded that my family loved me. I wanted to make this work. I wanted it to be just another rom-com complication.

But even if my marriage didn’t die in a nuclear meltdown that I never saw coming over things that had nothing to do with my coming out, it wasn’t going to survive. Because I needed something she couldn’t give: I wanted her to become queer.

To be married to a nonbinary individual who wanted to lean hard into the femme side of their identity they’d denied for over fifty years, would require her to explore lesbianism or pansexuality. She would have to be proud to be seen in public with her spouse wearing women’s clothes. She might be asked to explore sex acts she had no interest in. She would be in a queer relationship, even though she was cis-het.

Suddenly, our personal romantic comedy wasn’t funny anymore. The dialogue was no longer witty.

A Huge Request

I did not understand this at the time I was making the ask. I was so focused on exploring the identity I had finally discovered, I was only marginally aware of how it would impact the other people in my life. I was as-afraid of coming out to the kids as I had been to my ex. My stepdaughter and I were not getting along, and I irrationally feared telling her I was queer would give her another reason to hate me. Indeed, the argument that finished our marriage was over whether and when to come out to her.

Because my marriage ended apocalyptically over years of anger and misunderstandings, I did not even consider this wrinkle to my trans awakening. After all, I knew my divorce had nothing to do with my being queer. So I blew off, “I’m just not a lesbian,” with an eyeroll.

But as I replay that moment in my head, I can hear the desperation in my ex’s voice. She was trying to tell me something important, and I didn’t listen.

I don’t exactly feel guilty about this. I have a right to my identity, and it would have been unethical to keep it from her. Secrets destroyed that marriage enough, as it was.

Awareness grows, though. And I’m seeing another angle of my trans awakening that had been invisible to me before.

Married trans folks aren’t just asking their spouses to understand and accept. They’re asking their partners to change, too. That’s not part of the happily-ever-after formula.

It’s a huge request, and I wish I’d understood that better when I came out.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. She creates strong, thoughtful heroines and pens tales blending high-octane action with literary themes and characters who truly come into their own. Her latest project is Cataan’s Claw, a trans space opera serial launching soon right here on Substack.

Doing it as a trans author adds another layer of difficulty. As a trans woman, I’ve got a different perspective on the world than a cis author, and since all writers bring their worldviews to their work, I can’t help but infuse being trans into my fiction, however subtly I manage to do it.

And you might have noticed that trans folks aren’t exactly everyone’s favorite minority.

So, if I make the work “too queer,” “too trans,” the criticism rolls in like rainwater. “Why couldn’t the characters be straight?” “Why are you pushing an agenda?” “The story’s good, but it was too political.”

But here’s the thing: I don’t try to hide it. I don’t try to bury my trans perspective or themes. I lean into them.

I’ve mentioned in this space in the past that I am an Enneagram Type-1, “The Reformer.” I want to save the world, or at least change it for the better. And once I discovered I was trans, I had my focus, my mission. Mind you, I’m also interested in representing other minority voices in my fiction. And I’m dead-set on calling out the patriarchy, its inherent racism and misogyny, and the danger of organized religion.

But in the vein of “write what you know,” I tell stories about queer folks. My carefully constructed, GEO-optimized bio begins:

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters.

It’s a mission statement. I want to give representation. I want my people to see themselves in heroic roles and believe they belong there. Our stories matter.

But it paints a target on me.

It also still requires me to come up with the plots, imagine the situations trans and other queer characters find themselves in. I have to figure out how, in a fantasy world, these characters fit into the milieu, and how to reflect the experience of being gender-nonconforming both in the setting and the real world.

Like I said: challenging.

Finding One’s (Re)Purpose

One of the publishing industry experts I think is really smart is Russell Nohelty. He runs a coaching and author-education service called Hapitalist (happy capitalist). He’s all about recognizing the realities and stupidities of late-stage capitalism and finding a place where an independent creative can be happy and successful.

Among the principles he teaches is to constantly repurpose old material. In other words, take something you’ve published or otherwise developed in the past and reuse it in a new way today. This could be as simple as offering backlist books as add-on’s on a Kickstarter. Or it could be collecting a series of essays you’ve published into a book. Or maybe, it’s pulling a partial manuscript out of the abandoned files and integrating it into a new project.

Nohelty’s thesis is that even something that failed in the past can succeed in the future if it’s repurposed in the right way or to a better audience.

And that is where I find myself. Back in 2018, before I realized I was trans, I published a space opera serial, Empire’s End, under a pen name. Short-form and serial-fiction models were having a moment, and I experimented with trying to ride that wave.

I wrote a 13-episode season, centering a Black main character and a conspiracy to destroy the human race that very much read as an indictment of white supremacy. Each episode was approximately 13,000 words in length, and I published them regularly each as a 99-cent eBook, until the entire first season had been released.

It was a commercial failure.

The reasons for this were numerous. First, Amazon was not really set up to feature serial fiction. Their visibility algorithm was still focused on new releases and high demand. Though I had regular new releases, I was not getting the high sales needed to surface the work of a brand-new pen name.

And that was because, secondly, space opera had become a genre largely serving white male readers, at least in the mainstream (which is where you are competing on Amazon). Those readers were not especially interested in a Black man telling it like it is and a plot showing how the privileged class use their power to oppress minorities. And because Amazon’s discovery algorithm only featured popularity and did not offer a meaningful way to reach niche readers, the people I wrote the series for struggled to find it.

That last point is bigger than it seems. Discovery is the lifeblood of any author – trad or indie. If the book is not consistently found by its target audience, it doesn’t just sink; it never takes off to begin with.

Finally, while the moment seemed right, it actually wasn’t – not for that project anyway. Lots of people were trying serials, but few of them were really succeeding at it. Radish, Serial Box, and Galatea were making the model sort of work, but how much the authors were benefitting is questionable, and few of the platforms survived.

Everything about Empire’s End was executed imperfectly, and its inability to find an audience was inevitable and even (if I’d had better vision) predictable.

Which is a shame, because it was really good. The story featured an independent merchant crew framed for a political kidnapping. As it went on, we learned more and more backstory about several of the crewmembers that made escaping their predicament increasingly difficult. There were mysteries and conspiracies and hidden relationships that kept the crew continually on the run as a dark plot to destroy humanity gained momentum.

The setting was also retro-futurist, pulp science fiction. I tried to create an homage to the science fiction of a time before we landed on the moon while also crafting a contemporary space opera. It was a fun marriage of styles.

But the timing was all wrong … until now.

Meeting the Moment

I’ve suffered a number of setbacks in my publishing career this year. The e-retail market has been completely disrupted by AI-discovery engines as opposed to algorithmic ones. That’s also impacted advertising for indie authors, since both Amazon and Facebook ads are now driven by AI targeting. In short, all the things that worked as recently as 18 months ago are no longer reliable or even functional.

There is a mad scramble happening right now in indie publishing to understand the new rules of advertising and discoverability, and no one has fully cracked the code yet, despite claims by some.

As a result of this seismic change, I’ve seen my monthly sales shrink to the point of no longer being viable. Even my lucrative backlist, paranormal women’s fiction series has fallen off a cliff. When I analyzed the bestseller lists where it used to be a near-permanent fixture in the Top 100, I discovered very few PWF titles. The subgenre seems to be in decline.

At the same time, I’ve run two successful Kickstarters this year. The first was an anniversary edition of the aforementioned PWF. The second was for my forthcoming trans fairytale, which resulted in my best-ever month of income from writing. Direct-sales platforms have proven to be reliable markets for me.

But I can’t run a Kickstarter every month. They’re too much work to organize, run, and fulfill for a sole proprietor like myself. I just can’t do all that labor (nor can I afford the necessary art as often as that would require) on a monthly or even bimonthly basis.

However, serial fiction is having another moment, and it’s happening right here on Substack. Authors are writing serials, and they are getting read. And because those installments are delivered straight to readers’ inboxes, they’re better primed to create engagement and loyalty.

Plus, Substack actually has a discoverability engine to connect writers with the readers who will enjoy their content. The problem with Amazon has always been a lack of granularity that makes it easy to target the right people for queer fiction. The LGBTQ+ umbrella is incredibly broad, and unless it’s romance, it’s hard to get more than a generic category label on your queer novel.

Not here. Post queer stuff, get liked by people who like queer stuff, get shown to more people who like queer stuff.

A Trans Space Opera

Which brings me full-circle. Representation in adventure fiction is my raison d’etre as an author. Repurposing old content that may not have been right for the moment and audience it was published to is a potential means of succeeding from a previous failure. Discoverability is one of the single most-important factors getting fiction read. And timing is everything.

I’m reviving Empire’s End as a trans space opera.

Mind you, I’m not taking a cis/het story and slapping a trans character on it for opportunity’s sake. Not only would that turn a good story into a shit one, it would violate my own mission. Representation isn’t enough. It has to be authentic.

I’m making the main character of this series a trans woman. That changes everything about it. She has a different perspective on every event that happens now. Her motivations aren’t the same. And her interactions with the other characters are different, because of how she is perceived.

Plus, there are lots of things to consider. What does transness and transitioning look like in a galactic empire with advanced technology? What is the prevailing attitude towards it by the alien races that make up this futuristic civilization? And how does being trans sit with the people who knew our protagonist before she began her transition?

The story may be the same, but this is a whole different series than the one I published eight years ago. I’ve been getting really excited as I’ve reworked the material to tell an authentically trans story and to fit the Substack serial model.

I haven’t set an exact launch date yet. I’ve still got work to do and details to work out. But Empire’s End will post weekly on Fridays, with regular Writing While Trans essays continuing on Mondays. I’ll be sharing more info about this project soon.

Writing while trans is a challenging vocation. It isn’t easy telling authentic gender-nonconforming stories and then getting them into the hands of their target audience. I’m really looking forward to this new opportunity to achieve both goals.

There is still time to back Phoebe’s trans fairytale project on Kickstarter. Late Pledges are currently open. Learn more here.

Given the material they write and the phrasing of the question in their original post, I believe their intentions are pure. There is a genuine desire to understand while also debating the very real issue of patriarchal misogyny that is internalized by men and women alike. So, for that reason, I’m not going to tag any of the original posts or name the author. I don’t want to send any inadvertent hate their way, especially since honest engagement should be encouraged.

Instead, I want to unpack one of the basic assumptions of the original post. Though they ultimately conceded they had misphrased their point, I think it’s worth a broader discussion about the nature of transition and what it ultimately means.

There is a much larger question embedded in this conversation, and it is the one that has been driving the TERF hatred of trans women and the larger agency-stripping misogyny of the patriarchy in which TERFism sits:

What exactly is a woman?

Bigots (and, yes, I’m including TERF’s under that umbrella1) want to make it a purely biological question2. A woman has a uterus and Fallopian tubes. She has a vagina. She has XX chromosomes.

This sixth-grade understanding of basic human biology is all they believe they need to know to define womanhood. Never mind that it’s utterly simplistic and fails to account for a number of anomalous human conditions that may or not may not be detectable at birth. That may or may not express themselves during puberty. That may be realized in childhood or much later as an adult. Or that gender and sex have little to do with each other.

Patriarchy needs an ironclad distinction between the sexes to maintain its basic tenet that women are inferior to men and in need of their protection. Following from that false premise is the idea that men must be in control. It’s a subtle form of misogyny, and its brilliance lies in how it is internalized by men and women alike.

Women in thrall to the patriarchy believe trans women are men, so they need protection from them. TERF’s believe trans women are men, so they need protection from them (and also that trans women are not part of the club3).

It’s important to point out at this stage that, owing to the toxic masculinity embedded in the patriarchy, women do in fact need protection from men. And it isn’t men who can or should provide it.

But that is beside the point. Because the strict, binary definition of a woman is wrong. Trans women are not men.

The science backs this up. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that trans women have brains that are neurochemically closer to cis women than cis men. That is, they don’t start life with a typically male brain and then decide to change genders at some point in life. Their brains are neurochemically different from cisgender men.

Intersex individuals really muddy the argument. It is possible, for example, to be born with both a uterus and a penis. It’s further possible not to discover that at birth. It’s especially difficult to detect the presence of XXY or XYY chromosomes at birth. Nature has a lot of variations4 that make a binary definition of sex laughable.

The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association5 all recognize transgenderism as a variation on human existence, not as an abnormality or mental illness.

A trans woman is not a man. A trans man is not a woman. And a nonbinary individual is neither man nor woman in the traditionally understood sense, no matter what sex they were assigned at birth.

Gender and sex are not the same thing. Reproductive organs do not determine or define destiny.

Transitioning is not putting on a dress after years of wearing pants. It is not about changing one’s hairstyle or wearing makeup. And though hormone therapy and surgical procedures may be involved, the act of transitioning is not changing from a man to a woman or vice versa.

Transition is an act of affirmation.

It is a complex process of altering one’s appearance and social presentation to reflect who one is. It looks different for every trans and gender-nonconforming individual. There is no minimum level of transition required to be considered fully trans.

There are trans women I follow on Substack of whom I’m deeply jealous, because they present more traditionally femme than I do. They almost certainly had different circumstances than I did. They may have started transition sooner, or had more supportive families, or had different genetics than mine, or had surgical procedures I have not. But I’m no less of a woman than any of them.

And this is where another huge variable comes into play: access to care and support is not the same for every trans person. A person could know from the time they were five that they are trans, but having an unsupportive or abusive family, or living somewhere where gender-affirming youth care is illegal, or knowing being out will cause vicious bullying can all impact whether that person gets to develop as the individual they are or must wait for some time in the future when it may be safe – if indeed such a moment ever arrives.

And people who have gone through puberty and reached the age of 25 have an uphill battle to make their body align with their gender. They are working against a mature, skeletal frame for the sex assigned at birth, and in the case of AMAB people, their larynx has dropped, lowering the register of their voice.

(Among the things that drive me insane is being on the phone with customer service reps and, despite giving them an obviously feminine name, they call me, “sir.”)

But regardless of the state of transition or physical appearance, a trans woman is a woman. A trans man is a man.

However, that was not the question the OP intended to raise. They fear that some trans women have not deconstructed patriarchal conditioning. They see them as still acting like men, trained to be misogynists by the system in which they were raised.

Roughly, this translates to, “They used to be men, so they have to unlearn that behavior.”

I do not dispute the fact that having been socialized to be a man influences how one sees the world. Though we must accept trans folks as falling on the nature side of the Nature-vs-Nurture argument, it would be naïve to suggest psychological conditioning has no impact on how any individual interacts with and moves through the world – regardless of whether they are trans or cis.

But the argument falls apart due to the author’s own inclusivity. They readily admit that there are cis women with internalized misogyny from the patriarchy they need to deconstruct. And if that’s the case, then trans women unlearning patriarchy is no different than cis women engaging in the same task, because trans women are women.

Separating trans women from cis women for the purpose of deprogramming patriarchy suggests there is something not womanly about trans women. And that leads us straight back to the patriarchal definition of men and women being different, that women are weaker and inferior, and that men need to be in charge. That’s misogyny.

Saying trans women aren’t women is misogyny. Saying trans women have more toxic masculinity to unpack than cis women is misogyny. Because it affirms what patriarchs want us to believe, despite evidence to the contrary.

No one chooses to be trans. Like every other aspect of human biology, it is a condition of birth. And that reality coupled with a hostile environment writ-large for transgenderism creates a lived experience and social conditioning that is different from those of cisgender men and women.

It’s not that trans folks are immune from holding toxic, misogynistic beliefs. It’s that we suffer under them the same as everyone else.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. She creates strong, thoughtful heroines and pens tales blending high-octane action with literary themes and characters who truly come into their own. Her latest project is a trans fairytale trilogy. Late Pledges remain open on the Kickstarter campaign. Learn more here.

Wow. We’ve had ourselves quite a week here on Substack, haven’t we? We’ve got longtime contributors leaving the platform, rampant accusations of enshittification, mass unsubscribes from newsletters due to creators’ reactions, and a generally angry and mean atmosphere throughout my notes feed.

Good job, Substack. Way to build community.

Naturally, all this is over the Bogeyman of the Moment, generative-AI. In an effort to distinguish itself from LinkedIn (as if the differences in the platforms weren’t already clear), Substack announced on July 21 that it had partnered with notoriously bad AI-detection software company, Pangram, to make every fucking post going forward scannable for AI content. That way it could “preserve human voices on the internet” or some similar bullshit reason.

Honestly, I don’t know why Substack decided to foist this on us with zero advance warning or consent, but I’d be willing to bet the advice of former FBI deputy commander W. Mark Felt, aka “Deepthroat” from the Watergate investigation, to “follow the money” is where the answer lies. This is, after all, a deal between tech bros.

A day or two later, we got another post from headquarters with cherry-picked responses from writers on the platform praising Substack for the decision, as well as a disingenuous selection of sample statements to transparently reveal how you use gen-AI in your process, if you’re one of the many people who employ it.

Let me just say that the self-congratulatory stroke piece was not reflective of anything I’ve seen in my notes feed. In fact, in addition to the anger of the pro-AI people, I’ve also witnessed a number of anti-AI folks proclaim that using Pangram’s faulty AI program to detect AI is just as bad as using AI in the first place. Yes, even a portion of the crusaders think this is a hella bad idea.

Over the last few days multiple authors have shown just how easy it is to defeat Pangram. Move a few words. Change some punctuation. Suddenly a 100% AI piece is 100% human. Or vice versa. Horrifically, the anecdotal evidence suggests that introducing grammatical errors to the piece is the most surefire way to get identified as human instead of AI. Great. As if we’re all not bad enough at English grammar to begin with.

Other writers have scanned pre-2021 works – master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, novellas and short stories – and had them come back 100% AI-generated. Heated Rivalry, published in 2019, was accused of being AI-generated. An AI detector declared Frankenstein – published in 1818! – was 100% AI.

And of course, Pangram was infamously used to destroy the career of Mia Ballard, despite any clear evidence she had used AI to write her breakout novel, Shy Girl.

Here is the truth: Pangram, like other AI-detection programs, sucks. It’s easy to fool in either direction, and Substack itself as much as admitted this in the rollout post when they said that the program had no ability to detect how much human craft and decision-making went into the final piece. All it does is flag things it’s been trained to identify as AI constructions.

Do I need to remind everyone that gen-AI was trained on human writing? That an LLM is a probability machine? That it makes decisions based on the content it was fed in its programming?

One of the common “gotchas” of the anti-AI mob is em-dash usage. I’ve edited several manuscripts that used Claude in the drafting process. What I can tell you is that the vast majority of the em-dashes I’ve seen are used incorrectly. That’s not a reflection on AI writing so-called “slop.” It’s Claude having been trained to use the controversial punctuation by human beings who themselves don’t know how to use it.

And now the way to demonstrate your work is authentically human is to write worse? WTAF?

We’ve reached the ludicrous stage in this argument. AI may be making humans dumber, but it’s the people fighting it who are driving the race to stupidity.

I’m not going to extol the virtues of AI usage. I’m not here to convince anyone it’s good or essential.

I’m also not going to spend time refuting the faulty objections or debunk every myth about how gen-AI works. Instead, I’m going to make a simple statement:

AI is a tool, and every creative has to decide for themselves if they can use it ethically in their art. Some will eschew it for reasons of principle. Others will choose to employ it in some capacity that makes sense to them.

Regardless of your opinion on the validity of those choices, you don’t get to tell someone else how to make art. Even if you think the tools they use disqualify it as art. I’ve written in this space before how anti-AI lynch mobs are no better than anti-trans bigots, and using Pangram to “out” someone creating “AI slop” is the same kind of hatemongering.

Especially since the “detection” tool doesn’t work for shit.

Shame on Substack for employing an unreliable program and for fostering an environment where mob justice is encouraged.

So, I’ll be opting out of having my work scanned. I’m not going to be crucified for using proper punctuation, sets of three, endashes, or any other imagined proof that I’m a slop peddler. If you’re actually interested, here’s what you need to know about me.

I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in 1991. I studied for a Master of Arts in English Literature but withdrew from the program in 1993. I’ve been a professional editor and copywriter since 1996. I began independently publishing fiction in 2011. Over the past 15 years, I have developed a distinct voice that happens to include an obsessive fixation on proper grammar. I break the rules for effect but adhere to them in general. I’ve got my own set of familiar constructions. I’ve written two bestsellers – one in fiction, one in non. I am a competent and accomplished author.

And it is none of your business whether or how I use AI in my work.

So, there’s my position statement. I’m going to continue using the process I’ve evolved over the past 15 years. If you think it’s slop, you can opt out of reading it. But I’m not going to consent to being judged by a program that, as my late father used to say, doesn’t know shit from Shinola.

Let’s opt out of harassing artists for how they create and turn our attention instead to preventing the advance of fascism, attacking racism, and maybe electing some people interested in feeding and housing everyone, not just the privileged.

The world needs more good conflict, not more self-appointed cops.

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Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. Her latest project is a trans fairytale. Though the Kickstarter campaign ended, late pledges are still open. Learn more here.

Somewhere along the way, though, writing became work in the bad sense of the word. Writing and publishing are work. Even writing fan fiction for your own pleasure is work. But it should be fun. As Rachel Aaron put it in 2k to 10k, “if writing isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong.”

I was doing it very wrong.

Authors write for a lot of reasons. Some of us dream of riches and bestseller lists. Some of us have stories burning in our heads we have to get out. Some of us hope to write something important enough to be studied in future literature classes. Others of us hope our stories entertain or speak to just one person.

We all have our own motivations for picking up the metaphorical pen and putting words to electronic paper. But we all have a common hurdle to clear: How to write the damned thing in the first place.

If you’ve never done it, crafting a full-length novel is no easy feat. It requires discipline, keeping track of who said what to whom in which chapter, creating complications that don’t break the narrative structure, making sure things come together more or less neatly in the end, and a whole lot of coffee (or wine).

All this happens in stages. There’s the inspiration – the mysterious and unknowable thing that happens in our brains to think of the story idea in the first place. There’s the optional plotting stage. (Not optional for me – I’ll get lost and never finish if I don’t have a roadmap.) And then there are the multiple rounds of drafting.

The first draft, where you vomit out the words into something you hope is vaguely cohesive.

The second draft, where you desperately plug the plot holes and wonder why you ever thought you could do this.

The third draft, where you start shaping and crafting it into something that starts to make you proud.

And maybe a fourth draft, where you go through the manuscript trying to catch all the typos. Spoiler alert: You will fail.

Somewhere in there, an editor gets involved, and they make you feel like you know nothing about writing contemporary fiction. Or even constructing a sentence.

But as torturous as all this may seem, we love it. Or we love parts of it. Perhaps we’re all masochists, but every author I know has something about this process that really excites them. Every author I know also has a stage they absolutely loathe.

It varies from person to person, but I personally love plotting and second-drafting. I enjoy third-drafting as well, because that is when I really get to shape the story and the sentences into well-polished gems that make me happy. Craft is my favorite part of the process.

(What can I say? I was an English major.)

But the part I hate? The stage that feels like insects crawling inside my clothes? It’s first-drafting.

You know, the actual writing part.

I’m not alone in this. I’ve recently discovered other authors, who also hate that initial drafting phase. But it’s a small minority. Because why would you become a writer if you hate writing?

See, though, it isn’t that I hate writing. I’m passionate about it. I enjoy telling stories.

It’s just that first-drafting is tedious. Because craft is my favorite part of the process, I am constantly overthinking each word as I write. I want it to sound just right. I want to make sure the prose is well-constructed. I want the big moments to land.

And that’s anathema to first-drafting. The purpose of the first draft is to just get the damned story out of your head and into the computer. The fun part, the fixing and shaping it, comes later. But I can’t seem to make myself ignore typos and missed words and badly written turns of phrase. All the writing advice in the world says just get it down; polish later. But I can’t make myself do that.

For years, I said I needed a co-author. I could plot the story, hand them the beats, let them write the first draft of the book, and then I’d shape the subsequent drafts. It sounded like an ideal arrangement. Except for the part where I never found anyone willing to work with me.

So for a year, I experimented with generative-AI. It was designed to do the part of the job I hated. I could feed it my notes, give it instructions, and it would spit out a first draft, according to my design. And it would do it much faster than I could, in theory allowing me to publish more swiftly.

The idea of writing faster was extremely appealing. Part of my problem as a publisher, is that I write slowly. I can only get two to three books out a year, four if I’m really lucky. And in a marketplace with a lot of churn and where long series and their read-through is the key to profitability, that put me behind the pace.

I tried everything that came along. I scheduled writing sprints. I read 2k to 10k and followed Aaron’s advice to track my word count in different places and times of day, so I could find the ideal time for me to write when I was most productive.

I switched from typing to dictation, investing in Dragon under the theory that you can speak faster than you can type. I combined that tactic with the optimized writing time, so that I would be able to maximize my word count.

None of it helped. Even at my best moments, I still agonized over the words. Dictation did not improve my speed. (Although it did save my wrists some carpal tunnel.)

So, the idea of an LLM being able to do what I could not – get the damned words down on the page for editing – was appealing. If it worked like I wanted it to, I would be able to publish faster, creating deeper read-through and more profitability. Being an indie author is more than writing books. It is a whole business, and I was looking for ways to grow.

When I first started prompting in Claude, I was blown away. The quality of the text was much better than I’d expected. It was rough around the edges, but I thought I could work with it. This was what I’d been looking for – a first-drafter who could give me the story I’d plotted quickly, so I could get to shaping it into a work of art. Like I was a sculptor, Claude gave me clay to work with.

But after a while, I began to get frustrated. Not all of the prose was actually good. A decent chunk of it needed a LOT of work.

At the end of the day, an LLM is a random-generation machine. It chooses words based on the most likely follow up to the one it just used. It makes decisions based on its training in a particular genre, and because it was trained on other people’s books, it followed my script while writing in someone else’s voice.

After fifteen years of writing and publishing, I have developed a voice that is uniquely my own. You know when you’re reading a Phoebe Ravencraft book just by the turns of phrase and the things I actively avoid doing in my prose.

Claude could not figure that out.

So suddenly, the second-draft phase that I loved became a lot more work. It took longer to complete and caused me frustration.

I fed it whole manuscripts of my books, so it could learn my style. I spent hours upon hours, writing and refining skills when Claude Co-work became available, trying to teach it to write like me. I followed the instructions from experts in the field, who were having the kind of success with Claude that I was seeking.

But though the quality of the writing improved, it never got close to what I needed. It continued to sound like someone else. Many of the constructions made me cringe. And it took considerable time to correct those first drafts so that they read like a Ravencraft novel.

Before long, I began to question whether Claude was actually saving me time. I wasn’t writing any faster than I had before. If anything, I was slower. My attempt to increase my output was working against me.

And so, I abandoned generative-AI for novel-writing. Maybe one day, it will be good enough that I can try it again. The leaps forward in the technology are staggering in their speed. For now, though, it just can’t write like me, and that is slowing my process to the point of stagnation.

I tried to return to dictation. But like any skill, you have to keep practicing it for it to stay sharp. I hadn’t dictated a novel in more than a year. I found myself able to speak less than a sentence before I would freeze up and hit pause. Switching from prompting to dictating was not nearly as easy as going the other way.

With a deadline to meet and frustration in my heart, I dragged out my laptop and went back to the Old-fashioned Way of typing.

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And something magical happened. For the first time since graduate school, I found myself enjoying first-drafting. I had my notebook with the story beats in front of me, and I wrote. I struggled with getting the words down the same way I always had. I still agonize over word choice and turn of phrase.

But it doesn’t feel tedious anymore. In fact, I’m battling depression right now, and the only thing besides my spouse that makes me happy is writing the book. I can lose myself in the process of getting the story out of my head and into the computer.

Writing is fun again.

That whole journey has made me realize something. In my desire to publish successfully, I had lost the pleasure of actually writing. I was so focused on trying to improve my speed, on producing more words per session, and hitting a goal each day, that my inability to write fast caused me anxiety and to hate first-drafting.

I remember writing a novel in graduate school. It was a crappy adaptation of a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign, but the thing is, I looked forward to writing it. I was studying for a master’s degree and working part-time, but I made time every day to write at least one chapter. If I was feeling particular creative and had the time, I would write two.

I haven’t been that excited to write since then. And I think this rush to produce, to rapid release, to deepen the catalog as swiftly as possible, to maximize the read-through and the income, is partially responsible for that.

Because I just don’t write fast. I care too much about the way the words sound, and I am unable to ignore what I consider mediocre prose as it is landing on the page. And so, first-drafting is tedious.

Or it was. As I mentioned, I’m in the throes of a dark depression. When I am feeling my worst, I grab my laptop and work on my novel. It takes a bit to get into it, usually 300-500 words. But soon, I’m lost in the story, enjoying the sensation of pounding keys, focusing on a fairytale realm instead of the real world.

I can only get 2000-2500 words a day. My average is 2200. But in my anguish over my life, penning a couple-grand words feels like an accomplishment. I write every day, not because I’m concerned about a deadline or deepening my catalog, but because it is medicine. It works better than the antidepressants.

For the first time in 34 years, I look forward to first-drafting each day. I can’t say I’ll feel this way in the future after I emerge from this darkness. Maybe one day I’ll return to the desire to publish as quickly as possible. But for now, luxuriating in my own slow-but-steady process is giving me much-needed joy.

And I’m deeply grateful for that.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. Her current project is a trans fairytale trilogy. It’s live now on Kickstarter, and you can back it here.

I can’t think of any better way to sum up this 250th anniversary.

The Fourth of July

So, here we are on the Fourth of July.
The patriots are out under the darkening sky,
Waiting to see the fireworks display –
The perfect end to a perfect day.

They’re here to celebrate this great land of ours
That we won with our blood in twelve bloody wars.
There’s a smile on their face, and they feel good inside.
And when they think of their country, they swell up with pride.

They think life is good in America –
They’re sure we’re on top of the world.
They stand to salute freedom in America
Every time Old Glory is unfurled.

But there’s poor on the streets with no place to live.
And we’ve got lots of money, but we’ve got none to give
To those who are lost, those who are in need.
We fought for our freedom but got conquered by greed.

And the bigots are assembling in America.
They want to destroy anyone not like them.
Lady Liberty is weeping for America,
With the blood of the innocent staining her hem.

Now the sun has set, and the fireworks begin.
There’s a rain of light over a land filled with sin.
As much as to say, “Hey, turn on a light,
“So we won’t have to know how dark is our night.”

And I sit here and ponder just what we’ve become –
Our ideals are lost, and the wealthy have won;
Hate’s conquered our country, so I wonder why,
Why do we celebrate the Fourth of July?

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. Her latest project is a trans fairytale. It’s live on Kickstarter right now at this link.

Unless, of course, you’re actually LGBTQ+.

For us, the fight has to go on. Because the battle for equality is not settled and never has been. Especially for trans folks. Though it was we who started the revolution, we’ve largely been left behind in the struggle.

And now, we’ve got our backs against the firing squad wall, as the relentless push from fascists in the U.S. government and TERF’s in Britain seek to destroy us. Without the same legal protections our cis queer siblings won for themselves, the night just keeps getting darker for gender-nonconforming individuals.

But there is reason for optimism. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is funding gender-affirming clinics and programs in defiance of the bloated narcissist in the White House. Viktor Orbán’s far-right government in Hungary was toppled earlier this summer and lawsuits against Pride organizers dropped. Progressive candidates supporting trans people are defeating in their primaries multi-term centrists willing to throw queer folks under the bus in the name of electability.

And beyond that, gender-nonconforming people continue to exist. Out loud. Conducting our lives with the dignity available to us. We’re showing up. In literature, pop culture, social media, television, and film. Though the haters try to erase us, we don’t go away. For us, the Pride flags continue to fly. The queer identifiers don’t get packed away. The specially branded merch stays on the shelves.

There is strength in that resilience. Hope. Determination. Purpose.

Though the battle goes back underground for mainstreamers whose attention turns to other “holidays,” those of us in it continue the fight. Because it isn’t over. Fifty-seven years after Stonewall, we’re losing ground.

But we don’t give up. We keep fighting for ourselves and for our posterity.

That’s the lesson I take from the end of Pride. Keep existing in public. Take up space and demand a seat at the table. Eventually, we will get there.

Happy Pride – today and every day.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. Her latest project, a trans fairytale, is currently live on Kickstarter. Learn more and back at this link.

Today is Fathers’ Day in the U.S. That’s not really what this article is about either, but Happy Fathers’ Day to all the dads out there.

No, today’s edition of Writing While Trans is more of a timing issue. I’m launching my most daring literary endeavor ever a mere two days after Fathers’ Day, which is a complicated holiday for a transwoman such as myself.

I have a daughter. She still calls me, “Dad.” I can be wearing a dress, and she’ll introduce me as her dad to her friends. I don’t know what it means in terms of her acceptance of me as a trans woman, but she always compliments my outfits and tells me when I look pretty whenever we Facetime. As with many things in queer life, we exist in a state that finds comfort somewhere outside the boundaries of traditional gender roles.

But it’s not my relationship with my daughter that’s making this particular Fathers’ Day feel odd. It’s the one with my late father and the aforementioned book launch.

The Foundation

Prior to my spouse, my dad was always my biggest fan. When I was in middle and high school, he was always impressed with my ability to sing and dance. When he would drop me at a concert, he would always say, “Sing like a boid!” before I got out of the car. In college, as I began writing music, he would listen to all of it. He had copies of my basement tapes he kept in the car to listen to.

After I left the music program to pursue a degree in English, my attention slowly turned to writing fiction. I penned numerous short stories of questionable quality as I found my voice and honed my craft. He read them all. He would tell his friends, “The kid has the happy faculty of putting words together.”

He read all of my novels, published or otherwise (unlike my mother who never read anything I wrote, including the book I dedicated to her). He was reading Accidental Mystic, the first book in my PWF series, when he died. A few nights before his demise, he had made it about two-thirds of the way through, and he asked me to tell him how it ended, because he knew he didn’t have much more time. He didn’t want to DNF the last book of mine he read.

In many ways, I became a writer because of him. He was a voracious reader. The latest Stephen King novel in hardcover was always a reliably good birthday or Christmas present for him.

When I hand-wrote my first novel (a bad adaptation of a worse D&D campaign) into a notebook, he used his leverage as a college professor to get me time in the computer lab. There, I typed the book into an Apple IIc, using Bank Street Writer, and saving my work on a 5.25” floppy disk. He saw it as teaching me to use emerging technology (a reason, I suspect, I would grow up to be a futurist).

But for me, it was encouragement to pursue my ambition as a creative. It was teaching me how to be a writer. Until I left the U.S. for Spain, when space was a major consideration for what I brought with and what got left behind, I kept that hand-written novel as a memento – a reminder of the gift he had given me.

The Flipside

Now, the problem with this nostalgic remembrance, is that it glosses over one very important aspect of his personality. My father was not very progressive when it came to issues of identity and race.

More to the point, he was a bigot. And a misogynist. He said racist shit for most of my life. He objectified women, twice expressing his opinion that women’s sports would be more fun to watch if they played nude.

And he had little love for LGBTQ+ folks. Despite being a biologist, he refused to believe homosexuality was natural. You couldn’t point to the occurrence of homosexuality in multiple species in nature as evidence. You couldn’t remind him of the truth of evolutionary mutation and how, combined with social structures that shamed being gay, the gene could be quietly passed down through generations of closeted queer folks. He would only conclude that if homosexuality were natural, the species practicing it would die out.

He didn’t believe in trans or nonbinary people either. He saw them as fools, denying their biological truths, choosing to live as something they were not. Admittedly, the recent research demonstrating chemical and genetic predispositions toward being trans hadn’t all been published before his death in 2022. And he wasn’t exactly keeping abreast of breaking science in his final years. But I don’t believe he’d have been convinced, given his resistance to the idea of inherited sexual attraction.

So, when I discovered I was queer at age 51, I knew that it might be rough sailing with my dad. I came out to my mom (which turned out to be a huge mistake), and she immediately discouraged me from telling my father. She did not believe he would accept me. Given what I knew, that seemed like a sound position.

But a little over two years later, when he was dying, I contemplated reversing that decision. He was not long for this world, and it seemed to me that it was pointless to keep secrets.

Once again, I consulted my mother. She begged me not to tell him. She told me it would be a huge mistake, that she didn’t know what he would do. She posited he might throw me out of the house or even disown me.

So, I held my tongue, and my father went into the Great Beyond without me telling him I was trans.

But here’s the thing: My mother had outed me to him almost a year before. She made no mention of this to me, until we had an argument a few months before her own death. She blamed me, saying I had left her the unwelcome task of revealing my truth to him.

So when I asked if I should tell him, he already knew!

Yet my mother cautioned me against sharing with him this information he already possessed. Four years later, I don’t what that means. Was she trying to protect me? Did she rightfully believe that this would be the road my father would not walk? Would it have cost me my relationship with him before he died?

Mom was a paranoiac. She saw danger everywhere, imagining nightmare scenarios for everything and assigning much greater probability to them actually happening than they were due. This behavior frustrated my dad throughout their married life.

So, was she overreacting? Was she spinning yet another doomsday plot that was extremely unlikely? Was she protecting herself, making certain Dad wouldn’t tell me Mom had outed me? Was she just trying to avoid potential conflict in my father’s final weeks?

There is no way to know the answer to those questions. The people with the necessary information are dead. And, to use a literary term, my mother was an unreliable narrator, so I can’t be sure how much of what she said to me was true.

The Fairytale

Which brings me back to that trans fairytale I’m launching on Tuesday. It’s a three-book portal fantasy, wherein a trans woman from our world travels to a fairytale realm. There, she is asked to break a curse on the daughter of the land’s lesbian queens. She has less than a year to discover the magic that will save the princess before she dies.

Our trans heroine has been rejected by her bio-family. She is divorced from her wife of nearly 30 years and estranged from her three adult children. She carries the baggage of all that sorrow, the sting of her parents’ separate-but-equally-devastating rebukes. And she has to overcome the self-loathing that those denials of her true identity engendered to access the magic she possesses.

Over the course of her journey, she is accompanied by a female centaur warrior secretly in love with the princess, a raven with the power of prophecy, a talking Boxer dog, and a shapeshifting, genderfluid pixie. Though it is definitely not my first foray into creating LGBTQ+ main characters, it is unquestionably, the queerest thing I’ve ever written.

So, how would the man who proudly read all my novels and short stories feel about this unabashedly gay and trans tale? How would the father my brother charitably described as “socially conservative” accept this deeply progressive explosion of the patriarchy?

Much like the question of whether I should have come out to him before he died, I have no way to know what his opinion would be. Maybe he would have decided that I’d finally taken total leave of my senses, that my morality was so fundamentally broken that we could no longer be family. In my darker hours, my mother’s paranoia rises in my heart, and I believe this is a highly likely scenario.

But there remains the tiny flicker of hope that he would have been proud. He was always impressed when I stood up for what I believed in, despite the risks. He told me more than once he was impressed that I spent so much time volunteering at the local level for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president. Despite being a woman, Clinton’s politics aligned much better with his vision of a just society (he believed in the FDR approach to government caring for its people) than the fascist piece of shit she ran against.

So would he have come around if he were still alive? Would he have at least accepted me for who I am, even if he thought it was bullshit? Would he be rooting for my trans fairytale to succeed, even backing it on Kickstarter?

I just don’t know. I would like to believe we could have come to the same sort of complex relationship I have with my daughter. That he would still be proud of the kid who has the happy faculty of putting words together.

But what’s important is that I am here because of him. He had a strong hand in shaping me towards becoming an author. He made sure he was able to finish my latest book before he died. And though he passed before I became truly successful, he was there as that novel he was desperate to finish was taking off toward becoming a bestseller. And he told me how happy he was that it was finally happening for me.

So, in the end, it doesn’t really matter if he’d have liked my new project or not. He indirectly helped make it happen. And this Fathers’ Day, that’s what I choose to hold onto.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy centering sapphic, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters. Her latest series, a trans fairytale, launches on Kickstarter June 23. You can follow the campain here.

“If you went to school in the ’70’s, ’80’s, or ’90’s, how many classmates did you know who suffered from gender dysphoria?”

The question is deliberately designed to produce a single answer: “None.”

And the “logic” that this predetermined answer is meant to invoke is that gender dysphoria is a new thing. Following from that, it must not be real. And following from that, it is yet another sinister plan by the libs and the so-called Alphabet Mafia to undermine the very framework of society and God’s law.

It’s always a little bit cute and even charming when people with no meaningful understanding of science try to position themselves as expert social scientists or zoologists with years of study on the human animal. It’s adorable when they forward arguments that violate the most basic rules of logic and act as though their conclusions are “obvious.”

And by “cute,” “charming,” and “adorable,” I mean, “really fucking dangerous.” Because not only do these uneducated bigots get to vote, they spread their ignorance to like-minded fools, and enough of them believe it until innocent people get hurt.

The latest example is Marlow Trottie, a trans woman found murdered in Alexandria, Louisiana on June 8. During Pride Month.

So allow me to explode the false equivocation and casual fallacy of this genuinely stupid and dangerous argument.

Ignorance of a Fact Does not Make it False

Let’s start with the basics. Whether or not you personally knew anyone with gender dysphoria when you were growing up does not mean gender dysphoria doesn’t exist or is a new thing. As hard as it is for human beings in general and conservative Americans in particular to grasp that their own personal experience is not universal, not knowing a thing in the past, does not mean it isn’t true.

When I was eight years old, I didn’t realize that Egypt was in Africa. I didn’t understand that plants made food from water and sunlight. I did not know that virtually every town and city in my state had a name derived from French or a Native American language, and that the contemporary residents of said state mispronounced the hell out of those words, so that they were nearly unrecognizable from the original.

My ignorance of these facts did not make them false.

Moreover, to employ a cliché, you don’t know what you don’t know. I have no idea how many of the people I knew in my childhood and youth were experiencing gender dysphoria, but I did know one: Me.

And none of my friends and associates knew. They might have thought I was weird. In high school, they might have thought I was gay (since I was into music and theater). But no one knew I was experiencing gender dysphoria. Not even my parents.

But I was, and that leads to the less basic, more complex issues of being a kid in the Seventies and a teen in the Eighties. The language to speak of these things did not exist in my world. I didn’t know I had gender dysphoria, because the experience I was having had not yet been named. I just knew I was different.

And I was strongly encouraged never to speak of it.

Forced Silence

My childhood was spent in a Southern Baptist church that taught an especially toxic version of masculinity and faith. Obedience was a very big thing in that church, and I was the goodie-goodie kid who absorbed and internalized that. For the most part, I did what I was told, especially since the consequences for stepping out of line in my house were terrifying and retributive.

But it wasn’t just church. School expected me to follow social rules, too. Not only was I expected to be a good and obedient student, I had to conform, to fit in with the other kids, especially the boys.

And though I tried very hard, I couldn’t pull it all the way off.

I was weird. I liked comics at a time when that wasn’t cool. I became obsessed with Star Wars and science fiction. I read fantasy novels. And I expressed these interests on the playground, where they were not appreciated by those who conformed correctly.

I was bullied emotionally and physically for being different. I was the butt of everyone’s joke until high school. I tried to bring these complaints to my parents, and they were largely dismissed. My dad’s solution was to tell my brother he had to protect me from the bullies. My mom’s was to tell me to blow it off, act like it didn’t hurt, like it wasn’t crushing to be relentlessly teased for being my authentic self.

At home, being different was a source of misery. My mother did not tolerate weird. She made fun of me for being into what she considered strange hobbies. She did not want these things expressed in public. If I wore what she thought were the wrong clothes, or talked about my interests to other adults we knew, she would be overcome with embarrassment. She practically apologized to the community for having a weird child.

This was not an environment where I could even begin to wonder if I might be a girl. It was not one in which I could acknowledge that being defined as a boy and man did not sit comfortably with me. The message was: That would be weird. And being weird is bad.

But that did not change the fact that I am trans. It only meant that I was not allowed to understand or explore that reality. It wasn’t safe.

Oh, yeah. Science is real.

So, bringing this back around to the meme, the new phenomenon is not that there suddenly more gender-nonconforming kids. It’s that, unlike for my peers and I, it is now safer to express these things, AND there is better science to understand them. There is acceptance of a broader diversity of humanity and gender (at least among those who believe in science – biological and social) than there was when children like me had questions they didn’t dare to ask, feelings they knew were dangerous to express.

Let me state emphatically that this is a Good Thing^TM. It is not moral rot. It is not the unraveling of society. It is coming to a more-perfect understanding of humanity and the society in which we live.

I know it causes discomfort for the people for whom this represents a significant change. I know it is different from the world in which they were raised. But the simple truth is it does them no harm. At all.

But the wrongheaded, belligerent attacks they make against it do cause harm. Marlow Trottie is only the most recent proof. We were still getting out minds around Juniper Blessing, when Marlow became the latest victim of this illogical, inhumane stupidity.

Let me be clear: You don’t get to claim scientific certainty, when you don’t believe in evolution but do believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted at the same time in ancient history. Those positions forfeit any right you have to argue against science with ignorance. If your position requires logical fallacies to support it, your so-called truth is bullshit.

So please, let’s let the real biologists, zoologists, psychologists, social scientists, and medical doctors make the arguments about what is real and what isn’t with regard to gender dysphoria. You know – the ones who submit peer-reviewed research that is held to the highest standards of academic rigor. Not the pseudoscientists. Not the fire-and-brimstone preachers. Not the laypeople whose understanding of scientific research and knowledge ended in sixth grade.

I know a lot of people that I did not know were queer when we were in school. It is a near-certainty that you did, too.

Our ignorance does not change their reality. Or mine.

Author’s Note: I recognize that this is not the usual tone I promised to take in this space. But frankly, it’s Pride Month, so I’m in a bit of a brick-throwing mood. Moreover, the willful ignorance that these brain donors are pushing is literally killing people. Sometimes, the truth needs told like it is.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy fiction. Her latest project, a trans fairytale, launches soon on Kickstarter. Click or tap here to follow the campaign.

I had my first girlfriend at the age of six. We were deeply into each other. I wasn’t concerned about being interested in girls at an age the other boys thought they were gross. We were unabashed in our pleasure in each other’s company.

Our relationship ended not with a breakup but with a move. My family relocated to a different part of town, ending any chance for us to be one of those fairytale couples who fall in love as children and grow up to get married. Such is life.

As an out and fully transitioned trans woman, I have felt my lesbianism drift a little towards pansexuality. The spectrum of people I consider attractive has definitely broadened, though I still can’t imagine myself with a cis man.

But these flirtations with extra-lesbianism notwithstanding, my preference largely remains girls. And this sapphic predilection was recently confirmed for me by pop cultural writer Jill Gutowitz. In her 2022 memoir-style collection of essays, Girls Can Kiss Now, she asserts (among many other things) that the very definition of lesbianism is yearning. She dedicates an entire chapter to this concept, and after I finished reading it, I was fully convinced of my own lesbianism.

Because, oh, do I yearn. Yearning and I have shared an intimate (and potentially toxic) relationship for more than fifty years.

It began with those superheroines in toddlerhood. Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl on the old Adam West show that I saw in reruns after school dazzled me. Wonder Woman – first on Superfriends and then on her own TV show with Lynda Carter – was so cool, because most of her adversaries were men, and she could defeat them easily. I was struck both by their beauty and by their power. They were everything I yearned to be.

But they were largely forgotten in the wake of my introduction to the ultimate beautiful superhero: Princess Leia Organa.

May the Yearn Be with You

Seeing Star Wars for the first time at the age of nine changed my life. The spaceships and laser pistols and action-adventure all lit my brain on fire. But there was a singular force around which this magnificent space opera revolved.

It wasn’t Luke Skywalker. Sure, he’s the main character. But nobody I knew wanted to be Luke. He was whiny and insecure and unaware of his potential. Even as children we all recognized these things about him on some subconscious level and eschewed him as the character to admire.

It wasn’t Han Solo either. He might be handsome and cool and clever, but he was a pirate. He constantly had to be persuaded to do the right thing. He twice tries to put the Rebellion in his rearview with the Empire about to destroy it.

No, the heart and soul of Star Wars, the character around which everything orbited was Princess Leia. She is the very face of the Rebellion. She risks everything, including her life, time and again to fight tyranny. She always did the right thing, no matter what.

And she took shit from exactly no one.

Leia metaphorically spits in Darth Vader’s eye when she is captured in the opening sequence. She tells Grand Moff Tarkin where he can step off, even though he’s just signed orders for her execution and is about to destroy her home world. And of course, after her rescue, she puts Han Solo in his place. Repeatedly.

My young, lesbian heart fell head-over-heels for this perfect woman. Sassy, beautiful, confident, steely, and determined to bring freedom to the galaxy, she was the very model of the woman I wanted to be. What more could a girl want?

And so, the yearning began.

I got the Hildebrandt Star Wars poster, hung it on my closet door, and stared at the (over-sexualized) image of Leia for hours. I collected Star Wars trading cards and delighted in each pack that held a card depicting the heroic princess. Hers was the first Star Wars action figure I bought when they began appearing in my local ShopKo. I imagined all sorts of adventures she and I would have together.

We were inseparable, Leia and I. My admiration for her was the closest thing to love I had ever experienced. I had no ability to understand this crush. It was obsession of an innocent nature. It was yearning so deep and powerful I could only imagine it as being in love.

Gutowitz maintains that “yearning is an inherent part of the queer female experience.”1 She claims that yearning used to be everything for her, and I’ve rarely felt more seen. When I was a child, I lived in the yearn. I wanted Princess Leia to rescue me from my dull, suburban life and whisk me into adventure, where we fought evil, restored freedom, and stood side-by-side through danger and triumph alike.

It’s possible to dismiss this claim of lesbianism as being the typical behavior of young boys seeking to be heroes. But how many boys do you know who wanted to have their adventures with a woman? How many boys wanted to be the strong woman in those scenarios? None that I knew.

No, this was the yearning that defines lesbianism by the Gutowitz Standard.

And it was all just a warmup, a training sequence for the real thing. Yearning for a fictional character is one thing. But the IRL experience is so much more intense, so powerfully sapphic.

Eighth Grade

Outside of Princess Leia, I crushed on a few real real-world individuals. The feelings my aforementioned first-grade girlfriend and I had for each other were as real as six-year-olds could manage. In fifth and sixth grade, I carried a torch for a classmate named Jean. We hung out at school all the time. The attraction between us was obvious. But at ages 12 and 13, we didn’t dare to speak of such things. We simply yearned.

But eighth grade would teach me the true shape of IRL yearning. I fell for a classmate named Pam solely because she cheered for me when I caught a pass during a football game. I’d thought she was attractive from the moment I met her in sixth grade. So when she showered me with verbal praise for three seconds from the sideline, my silly, sapphic heart went into full-time yearn-mode.

Of course, I never dared to really speak to her. She was so much cooler and more popular than I. I was much more comfortable wishing for us to be an item than I was risking making it happen.

The closest I ever came to acting on my feelings was buying her a necklace for Christmas. Of course, I couldn’t dare to take credit for such a thing. That would be too forward. That would reveal that I liked her. So I slipped it into her locker with no note. I believed she would be moved by this powerful gesture and begin asking around, wondering who might have thought enough of her to buy her a pretty necklace. She would eventually learn it was me, and we would live happily ever after.

Instead, she assumed it was from her Secret Santa. I never even got on her radar.

Disappointing though that was, it is the very essence of yearning. Could anything confirm my lesbianism more?

Yes. Yes, it could. Eighth grade wasn’t done with me.

As summer began, a friend held a graduation party. The feature event of this soirée was slow-dancing to popular love songs in his garage. And in that darkened environment, Tracy draped herself over me while Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” played through the speakers.

I’d danced with my most of my classmates at our official graduation dance and at my friend’s party. But being good, little Catholic-school kids, we left plenty of room for the Holy Spirit between us.

Tracy didn’t give a good God damn about the Holy Spirit. She held me closely, her arms flung over my shoulders so far, they dangled completely against my back. I felt another person’s body against mine for the first time and was blown away by the sensation. All Pam had ever done was cheer for me catching a pass. Tracy acted like she didn’t find me repulsive. She was willing to press herself up against me.

Naturally, my lesbian yearning went into overdrive. Tracy and I lived in the same neighborhood. We saw each other frequently over the summer. We swam in a friend’s pool. We shot baskets in my driveway. We rode our bikes around town together. I dreamed of her at night.

But once again, I could never bring myself to say I liked her as more than a friend. That might ruin the perfection. She might not like me back. And I worried all the time that this was the case. Better to have an ache in my heart akin to a twisting knife than experience the true heartbreak of rejection.

Eventually, I started dating. Though I yearned for Tracy throughout the first year of high school, I did eventually have real girlfriends. I dated a variety of young women. None of those relationships lasted more than a few months, and I mourned only briefly when they ended.

But all that was before Sherri. Despite my experiences with Princess Leia, Pam, and Tracy, I had no idea what real yearning was until it happened during an actual romantic relationship.

Tremble When We Touch

I was 16 when we met. She was two years younger. We were both in the chorus of an entirely awful school musical (No, No, Nanette). Consequently, we spent a lot of time together in the seven weeks of rehearsal and performances. I found her charming and funny. We clicked.

And then the show was over, and I didn’t see her again for months.

But for Valentine’s Day, student council was selling candy that you could send with a note to another student. And I got one from Sherri.

This turned the mild crush I’d been feeling into a full-blown yearning. She was thinking of me. She’d made a gesture, and this wasn’t a random cheer from the sideline. This was deliberate.

For a month, I did what my previous yearnings had taught me to do. I thought about her constantly. I dreamed about her regularly. I replayed every encounter from No, No, Nanette in my mind, looking for the clues that might mean this tiny bag of candy was a romantic gesture.

Finally, my brother got sick of listening to me pine for her while refusing to do anything about it. (He had, after all, seen this pointless strategy at work multiple times.) One afternoon, he looked up her number, called her, and forced me to take the phone.

I thought I might die. I couldn’t talk to her on the phone! That’s what people who were dating did! It wasn’t safe!

But I couldn’t not talk to her either. The phone was in my hand. She answered. Oh, God, what was I to do?

Obviously, I spoke to her. We chatted for half an hour, the conversation flowing as easily as it had in person. Towards the end of the call, I asked her out. She accepted.

That first date was one of those nights that changes you forever. I’d invited her to my show choir’s big cabaret. I was performing, of course, so it gave me the excuse of making her one of my three friend-guests (most of each student’s table at the event was reserved for family). In this way, I had the safety of it not exactly being a date-date, so that if my feelings were unrequited, it had just been a fun night of music.

But after the show, I somehow found courage I’d never had before. I didn’t slip an anonymous necklace into her locker. I didn’t ride my bike around town with her like we were just friends. I actually confessed my feelings.

And to my enormous relief, she reciprocated them.

After I drove her home that night, we lay on her living room floor wrapped in each other’s arms. We spoke of how we couldn’t believe this was happening. We discussed how we’d been secretly crushing on each other but never dared to do anything about it. We reveled in the pleasure of simply being together.

But something else happened that night that would turn this moment into the greatest yearning of my life – the thing that would confirm my lesbianism on the Gutowitz Scale. As I held her, with her head resting on my chest, she trembled. Another woman actually trembled with emotion for me.

At the time, Survivor’s “I Can’t Hold Back” was a big hit on the radio. It instantly became “our song” for the line, “I can feel you tremble when we touch.” This deeply emotional and physical connection was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Like my previous relationships, this one lasted only three months. But during that glorious quarter-year, I was in love. I’d never been in love before, and it was the most intoxicating thing I’d ever felt.

Now, it’s not like I didn’t have friends at school who were in love. A few of my classmates managed to date the same girl for four years. Whether that was love or habit, I couldn’t say. But all my guy friends were much more invested in being cool than in love.

I, on the other hand, expressed my feelings like the girl I hadn’t yet realized I was. I wrote her initials all over my notebooks. I drew lovey-hearts around them and next to her name. When we weren’t together, I thought of her. We spoke endlessly on the phone. I was not the casually cool dude, keeping her at arm’s length so she wouldn’t think I was too serious. I was all-in the way my female friends wanted to be with their boyfriends.

So naturally, I was devastated when she ended it. And unlike previous yearnings, this one persisted.

It took me awhile to get over the pain, but I did eventually. I went back to dating. I had two more girlfriends my final year in high school, and several in college before meeting the woman who would become my first wife.

But despite all those relations, my heart was really just marking time. Sherri and I reconciled as friends a few months after the breakup. She began to see me as an older sibling on whom she could rely for advice and comfort, and I embraced that, because at least she felt something for me.

We attended the same college, and when she broke up with her longtime boyfriend, she showed up at my door in tears. I held her as she cried, running her makeup onto my white sweatshirt. Though I yearned to have her for myself now that we were both available, I instead gave her what she needed – true friendship, an older sibling she could run to when things went sideways.

We didn’t get back together like I desired. But the yearning followed me for years. For a long time, I refused to give up on this life-changing yearn that had so thoroughly confirmed my lesbianism. I dreamed of her into my thirties.

And the funny thing about it is what we had was next-to-nothing. There was nothing special about our relationship when we dated. We went out a few times. We talked on the phone. Afterward, she kept me at arm’s length while simultaneously trusting me with her fears. In no way did we have one of the Great Love Affairs of All Time, even by high school standards.

This is what yearning is. It’s manufactured by a simple gesture that’s not nearly as significant as it seems – a cheer for catching a pass, kicking the Holy Spirit out of the dance, even a girl trembling in your arms on a cold night in March or ruining your sweatshirt as she cries over her broken heart.

Yearning is the energy of being lesbian, according to Gutowitz, because it is wanting something we’re certain we cannot have. We’re queer. The objects of our desire are unattainable. We want so desperately for reality to work differently than it does. But what we want cannot be.

The After-yearn

I don’t yearn anymore. I found everything I wanted in my current spouse. Everything I’d been looking for is right in front of me now that I have learned to stop wanting and simply be.

Sherri is no longer a part of my life. Occasionally, she comes across my Facebook newsfeed – usually by commenting on a mutual friend’s post, occasionally as someone “I might know.” I never friend her. She is a part of the past, a yearning I no longer need or desire.

But this is how I know I am a lesbian. I experienced the energy that all sapphic women know, the yearning for things that cannot be. The feeling, so deep it seems as though you might drown in it, that in another, better world, you could be the person you wish you were, have the things you desire.

And what cures this pain, the salve we all seek, is love. When you find it, the yearning finally stops. The distance between hope and peace closes. And you’re still a lesbian, because that is how you got here. That essential nature brought you to the promised land.

I like to believe Jill Gutowitz would agree.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy. She writes here about life as a trans woman, seeking magic, and how those things intersect with philosophy. Her latest series, a trans fairytale, launches soon on Kickstarter. Follow the campaign here.

Pride, of course, is not a party, though the age of Rainbow Capitalism (which feels officially over) would have had us believe it was. Pride is celebrated in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. Trans folks literally had to turn to violence to start a revolution for queer acceptance. June is a not a celebration of being LGBTQ+. It’s an annual renewal of the fight for a seat at the table, to be treated with dignity, for basic human rights. As a popular meme states: “Pride is a riot.”

And yet …

Joy is an important piece of the observance. After all, the very name of the holiday was adopted to suggest we should be proud of who we are, not ashamed. We should be visible, not hide. Because – and this is the most important part – we should be happy to be LGBTQ+, because it is our truth. We are, to use a pejorative, “normal.”

And if we are to be proud, we have to seek joy and express it.

This is no simple thing to do in the current climate. It’s never been easy to be queer. It’s always been difficult to be trans. But we are the bugbear of the moment, the false villain for all the evils of society. And with a fascist regime in the U.S., and a children’s-author-turned-hatemonger in the U.K., the cultural zeitgeist of the moment is hostile to queer folks in general and gender-nonconforming people in particular.

How does one feel pride when bigots paint us as groomers? How does one love oneself when conservative states push the narrative that gender-affirming care is child abuse? How does one stand up to be counted, when being trans in public is enough to get murdered?

These are not questions that foster happiness. Rather, they encourage two reactions – hiding or fighting.

But the fight just isn’t worth it without the joy and dignity we’re battling for. In the end, there has to be something that keeps us going.

This bliss is found in the everyday. As always, it is the little things that make life, especially a queer life, worth living.

I like pretty things. Lace and ribbons and flower prints and cute shoes and dresses. I’ve loved these things forever. And now that I have discovered I’m trans and am out, I can indulge my love for them. I don’t have to deny myself or enjoy them vicariously by admiring them on other women. I wear them myself, and I feel cute and even pretty.

Speaking of which, I love the way I look now. I battled dysmorphia for a few years. Once I knew I wanted to start HRT, the changes couldn’t come fast enough. And it was a long, slow slog to transform from my AMAB body into my femme one.

But four years later, I’m much happier. I have curves. Women’s clothing looks like it belongs on my body. And it does, because I am a woman. Flowy sleeves and full skirts, paired with matching shoes and headband or ribbon not only look good on me, they make me happy. I like what I see in the mirror, and it shows in the smile on my face and the light in my eyes.

The compliments I receive make my day. My spouse is always telling me how pretty I am. A friend here in Spain told me recently, “I look at you, and I see a woman.” A dear friend and colleague of mine, who knew me before I transitioned, said, “I think of Phoebe as just one of The Girls.” At a conference last year, another friend and colleague escorted me to the bathroom every time I needed to go, so I would feel safe. And none of the other women batted an eye at my presence.

The validation I receive from others who see me as I am is a kind of elation that is difficult to describe. We all yearn to be seen. When I am accepted as the trans woman I am, my heart skips a beat.

I’m also happy to have shrugged off the yoke of societal expectations. They never fit comfortably on me, and I adhered to them, because I didn’t realize I had a choice. Free of patriarchal standards, I am comfortable in my own skin for the first time.

These are all major victories, even though they seem innocuous. And they are the things I lean into when this dark, bigoted world inflicts its hate on me. The transphobes want to make me disappear. But the things they revile about me are exactly the sources of my joy.

I have a lot of regrets. There are so many things I’ve done that I wish I could change. I engage in self-loathing on the regular, like any person prone to depression.

But I do not hate myself for being queer. I have no regrets about transitioning. Living authentically is one of the consistent drivers of my overall happiness. I am proud to be who I am.

And so, I look forward to Pride every year. I celebrate my identity as publicly as possible. Because trans joy is resistance. It is as much a part of the revolution as social activism, legislative advocacy, and remembering that we had to throw bricks to get this started.

I exist as publicly as I can, so that others will feel comfortable to do the same and to help bend the arc of history toward justice.

I need to make a couple things clear. First, to my closeted LGBTQ+ siblings, I am not calling you out. The closet may be a terrible place to live, but it exists for safety. If you are not safe being out, there is NO shame in remaining as you are. The mission of Pride is to win the fight to make it safe for all of us to live authentically, not just those in a position to take that risk.

Secondly, I have a lot of privilege. I was fortunate enough to be in a financial position to move to Spain, where LGBTQ+ rights and protections are enshrined in the constitution. Many folks in the U.S., U.K., and other places around the world do not have the means to move to a friendlier state, let alone another country. I can be as trans as I want to be, and that is not necessarily the case for others reading this piece.

More importantly, I am White. I may be persecuted as a trans woman, but I don’t have to bear the additional prejudice of queer People of Color. Black and Brown trans women suffer a significantly higher rate of scorn and violence. The quest for LGBTQ+ equality has to be inclusive, and it needs to keep in mind we White folks still carry a degree of social protection that our POC siblings do not.

It’s easy to say, “Live out loud and be proud of who you are,” when you exist in relative safety. It’s a different choice altogether, when living authentically is dangerous.

But that doesn’t change the reality of queer joy. Whether we’re out or closeted, safe or threatened, the private pleasure we take in our identity is how we survive the darkness. It’s the resistance we all can claim, regardless of circumstance.

I encourage all of us to perceive the special magic of being LGBTQ+. We’re roughly 10% of the human population, which makes us uncommon. And just like left-handers and Highly Sensitive People, that makes us different, not abnormal. Feel the unique awesomeness that is you, even if you have to do it alone or undercover.

The rest of us can throw bricks at the patriarchy. There are enough of us to be visible and present and active. Those of us out and loud can prosecute the campaign for all of us to have basic human rights and dignity.

We all celebrate Pride as best we can. But pride is believing in your own basic goodness and celebrating the things that make you who you are.

However you observe this month, Happy Pride!

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy. She writes here about the experience of being a trans writer here. Her newest series, a trans fairytale, launches on Kickstarter this month. You can follow the project at this link.

As I got older, I saw her as more of a flawed god. More like one of the immortals from the Greek pantheon than a paragon of perfection, but mighty, nonetheless.

In the end, this almost divine reverence I held for her would cause me no end of harm. But I couldn’t see that while it was happening. Indeed, I didn’t recognize the damage it had done until it was far too late to undo the apocalypse my blind devotion wrought.

But all this began in my infanthood. Evolutionary biology went to work on me, and I failed to overcome its effects.

The Science of Attachment

Human attachment is among the most important aspects of living. We’re hard-wired to be part of a community – even if we’re introverts, have social anxiety, or generally just don’t like people. (My most pessimistic and antisocial friends still treasure the few, truly meaningful relationships they have.)

This programming begins from the time we are born. There are two attachment phases in early life. The first is in infancy. The baby is hungry, or needs to be changed, or is sick. They have a need. Having no more sophisticated means to express themself, they cry until the need is met.

Through this experience, the child comes to trust their caregivers. The baby learns that if they signal a need, the people they live with will fulfill it. This creates attachment to those people.

The second phase occurs in toddlerhood. As the brain develops, desires increase. But the only experience our young individual has had to date is to make a demand and have it met. Two- to five-year-olds haven’t learned to distinguish between needs and wants. It’s all the same to them.

So it comes as an utter shock and a profound betrayal, when a parent says, “No.”

This is what makes the Terrible Two’s so terrible. When a demand is not met, the child reacts in the only way they know how: They have a meltdown.

Over the course of healthy toddlerhood, children learn that all their needs will be met, but not all their wants. And the sense of betrayal that comes from hearing, “No,” is healed by the trust that needs will be taken care of, even if whims might not.

This is how children come to revere their parents as gods, who always know what is right and best for them. It’s a biological imperative designed to ensure they make it to adulthood: Trust the caregiver; they will protect you.

But evolutionary biology does not take into account modernity. The survival skills of hunter-gatherer and early agrarian societies are not always germane to the complexities of 21^st-century life. Survival in a contemporary capitalist social system requires a different skillset.

Consequently, not everyone is well-equipped to be the ideal parent under those pre- and ancient history conditions.

What happens when needs aren’t met? Or when the difference between a need and a desire is indistinguishable?

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Bilbo Baggins is the ultimate archetype for this theme. He’s a soft, fussy hobbit who doesn’t know the first thing about danger or adventure. He’s practically dragged out of Bag-End to be the dwarves’ burglar despite having no experience.

Yet he outwits Gollum to get the ring of invisibility. He frees his companions from being eaten by giant spiders. He spots Smaug’s weakness, enabling Bard to kill the dragon.

The tiny, unqualified hobbit becomes a hero, and he self-actualizes along the way.

We see this same dynamic at play with the Chosen One trope. Buffy Summers is an ordinary, high-school girl. But only she can prevent demonic apocalypses. Luke Skywalker is a bored farm boy. But only he can face Darth Vader and defeat the Emperor.

The Chosen One is rarely prepared for their role in whatever cosmic drama is unfolding. Yet they self-actualize and become the hero everyone needs in The Moment of Truth.

The appeal of this trope is easy to understand. If anyone can become the hero, then the reader can, too. And given the attraction of fantasy literature as an escape from a dull, abusive, or stressful world into one where goodness matters and evil can be conquered, a narrative supporting the every-person protagonist is especially potent.

No subgenre captures this desire better than the portal fantasy. A person from our world crosses into an enchanted realm and is expected to fight whatever diabolical force threatens to destroy everything. This individual is thrust from a world where they don’t matter at all into one where everyone counts on them.

That creates a powerful sense of actualization for a reader. And the conceit of the main character coming from Earth makes the insertion of reader mind into the magical land all the more immersive.

I’ve loved portal fantasy for decades. They were my favorite type of novel to read in middle and high school. I’ve finally written one myself, and it’s sort of surprising that it took me so long into my career as an author to do it.

So as I get ready to launch my own trilogy next month on Kickstarter, I thought I’d share three key elements of a portal fantasy protagonist necessary to maximize the opportunities in the genre.

The Unbeliever

This is the most basic aspect of a portal fantasy lead character. They come from Earth where there is no magic. They lead a boring or inconsequential life. However they make it to the magical realm, they struggle to believe this is real.

Stephen R. Donaldson practically defined this trope with his Thomas Covenant series.1 His main character suffers from leprosy. He’s been assured there is no cure for it and any hope for that to change is pure delusion. He guards his sense of reality aggressively, fearing it could lead to an accident or greater harm.

So when he arrives in The Land, he is convinced he is hallucinating. Though he allows himself to be led through the adventure by the people convinced he is the Chosen One, he refuses to believe any of it is really happening.

In C.S. Lewis’s classic, The Chronicles of Narnia, only Lucy believes in Narnia and in getting there through the wardrobe, at first. Peter and Susan are convinced she is making everything up. And Edmund, despite having been there himself, encourages this interpretation.

Once everyone is there and finds it real, Edmund resists buying into it being wonderful, because he has been seduced by the White Witch’s lies. He will not accept that Aslan is good, and his jealousy of Peter prevents his believing the prophecies that the four of them are here to end the evil woman’s reign.

For my new series, A Song of Elysée, the main character is a 55-year-old transwoman. Her entire family has betrayed her in one sense or another due to her being trans, and her mother has instilled such a sense of self-loathing in her, that she struggles to believe anyone could want her. She sees herself as an ongoing failure simply for whom she is.

So, when she learns she has been summoned to a fairytale realm to break a curse because she is believed to be a powerful enchantress, she refuses to accept that. She doesn’t believe magic is real, let alone that someone like her could have it. The quest that dominates the series occurs largely because she believes they will have to save the princess some other way.

Seeing the World Anew

Because the protagonist is a stranger to this world (in my series, she is labeled an “Outworlder”), they are the perfect vehicle to bring the magic to the reader.

Lucy is our principal POV character for this purpose in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Her tea with Tumnus gives us the background of what is happening in Narnia, along with the fear most creatures have for the White Witch and her sinister secret police.

But Edmund also gives us a view into the world. Found by the witch herself and tempted with Turkish Delight, he allows us to see Alsan’s foe as the scheming villain she is, especially when she turns on him in the later chapters.

In the first Covenant trilogy, our unwilling hero has lost two fingers to leprosy, causing some of stewards of The Land to see him as a reincarnation of the legendary figure, Berek Halfhand. We learn of Berek’s folly and how it has put everyone in danger in the present. The Lords do not have access to the same magic their predecessors did, so when Lord Foul announces his intention to destroy everything, no one knows how he may be defeated.

Likewise, my MC, Melody Robertson, is brought to Elysée, because she has been identified as the person who can break the curse plaguing the princess of the realm. It’s not until she learns the young woman is aging at five times the normal rate and will die on her next birthday, that Melody realizes she has no idea how to save her.

When she agrees to join a quest to consult first a sphinx and then a mysterious immortal known as The Weaver of Fate to find a solution, she discovers the history of the land and how the princess came to be cursed (as well as all the failed attempts to solve the problem prior to her arrival in Elysée).

In each case, our Outworlder character is the lens through which we see the magical realm and learn of the history impacting its current events.

The Development of Hidden Magic

No matter what the main character believes about themselves, they always have a kind of hidden magic they must develop along the way to resolve the series conflict. It is almost always the reason they were brought to the realm in the first place.

Thomas Covenant still wears his wedding ring, despite being divorced. The ring is made of white gold, which is a metal that does not exist in The Land. Consequently, it has wild magic he has no idea how to summon and virtually no ability to control.

Edmund’s magic is subtler. The prophecy cannot be fulfilled and the White Witch defeated, unless two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve sit on the thrones of Narnia. So the witch demands his blood as a traitor. If he dies, the good guys are one short, and she continues to rule forever. To ensure Edmund will survive to fulfill his destiny, Aslan purchases his life with his own.

(I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that, in writing his Easter allegory, Lewis chooses to redeem rather than condemn his Judas character.)

Melody’s magic first appears in dramatic fashion. With she and her companions surrounded by bloodthirsty goblins and moments from certain death, her desperation triggers a burst of power that turns the goblins into frogs.

Like Covenant, she has no idea how she summoned the sorcery nor how to replicate it. But like Aslan’s sacrifice for Edmund, her magic is transformative. She can make one thing become another, and she spends the rest of the series trying to understand her ability, so that she can break the curse.

Taken together, these three traits are defining characteristics of the portal fantasy subgenre. By having a person from Earth with hidden magic, disbelief, and acting as our window into the world, readers are brought fully from their chair into the mystical land begging to be saved. And they are able to see themselves as being capable of serving as that desperately needed hero.

In a real world currently beset with darkness, that’s a role we all need to envision for ourselves.

Phoebe Ravencraft is an author of queer fantasy fiction and a recovering English major. She adores digging into themes and tropes in her favorite books. Her trans fairytale trilogy, A Song of Elysée, launches next month on Kickstarter. You can follow the project here.

I spent last summer finding us a temporary place to live, relocating to València instead of our intended Cádiz, and working on getting us visas. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

It was also entirely necessary.

Though I had hoped for nothing more than financial fuckery from the newly elected proto-fascists in the U.S. government, they made it clear from the outset they were coming for trans folks. My spouse and I had moved from Ohio to the sanctuary state of New Mexico only months before. But we realized after just a few weeks of the new régime’s machinations that nowhere in the United States was safe.

A year later, with the exception of trans people being interred in concentration camps, everything I foresaw has come to pass. Given that, last week, Homeland Security named “radical pro-transgender activists” as one of three groups it would focus on in its counter-terrorism strategy for 2026, I’m still not convinced the pink triangles aren’t coming.

I’m angry about a lot of these things. We loved living in New Mexico. We were building a life there, when we had to disrupt it. I’ve spent the majority of my savings to get us to Spain, get us set up, and keep us afloat. We tried to immigrate to Canada first, but we were not approved. Things weren’t that bad yet, so I was unable to get us to a place where we could still speak English, where we would be able to work.

But as furious as I am with the U.S., as difficult as this year has been, it has also been one of the most amazing years of my life.

I have fallen in love with Valencian culture. Life moves at a different pace here on the Spanish Mediterranean. It is slower and more inclined to appreciate the simplicity of watching the day go by.

The food is outstanding. Oh, we still have burgers and pizza on occasion to keep my special-needs brother-in-law happy. When I can find mac-and-cheese for a reasonable price (no easy feat), I’ll buy it as a treat for him.

But I have learned to cook with traditional Spanish spices and ingredients. I’ve made things I never would have in the States (rabbit stew, for one). I continue to try to figure out how to make a paella a Valencian would consider authentic. And on the rare occasions we go out to eat, I try things I’ve not had before.

I’ve been learning to speak Spanish. It is a beautiful language, and I love the way it sounds. It has been difficult – learning a new language in one’s late 50’s is challenging. But it also has the benefit of keeping my neural pathways strong and helping me stay intellectually engaged.

I would never have witnessed Las Fallas were it not for having to leave the U.S. It’s one of the greatest spectacles I’ve ever seen. This summer, I will attend one of the largest Pride celebrations in the world. And I won’t have to be afraid while I’m there.

This was not the life I envisioned for myself. It has been harder than any previous experience of my life. But I cannot ignore the simple beauty of being alive, being trans, and living in an ancient city with extraordinary customs. I’m not sure València fully feels like home, even after a year. But it is where I want to be, and every day here is a treasure.

I think a lot about my trans siblings in the United States. I worry about them, and I grieve for how they are unnecessarily forced to fight for their right to exist and to human dignity. I recognize that I’m lucky. I had the privilege and the resources to get out.

So, whatever happens next, I reflect on this year and hold it close it my heart. The evil perpetrated by over-privileged cowards did a lot of damage to me personally. But it also opened an opportunity I might otherwise never have had.

As annual reviews go, those are pretty high marks.

The Myth of Sisyphus became like a bible to me. I underlined so many passages in blue ink, it looked like that’s what the publisher intended. La Peste (The Plague) is my number-two all-time favorite novel behind Frankenstein. I was so interested in Camus’s oeuvre, I took French for my foreign language in graduate school, hoping I would be able to read his original manuscripts instead of the English translations.

Yeah, I was that nerd.

Though he wrote numerous novels, his most famous remains L’Étranger or The Stranger. It is short, and it is the one every philosophy student is assigned to read when they study existentialism. It also has one of the more famous opening lines in all of literature:

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.”

Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, is unmoved by the death of his mother. It seems to have no impact on him whatsoever. After he shoots and kills an unarmed man, his murder trial focuses not on the details of the case, but on the fact that he did not mourn his mother. Convinced he is an unfeeling monster, the court condemns him to death.

Most of Camus’s novels are pretty depressing, especially if you only look at the events of the plot. They are tragedies. But his genius is how he deconstructs the falsehoods of polite society and finds a kind of meaning and hope in the aftermath.

Today is Mother’s Day. Annually, it is one of the hardest days of the year for me.

My mother died in 2022. Unlike Meursault, I know exactly what day (in a last, ironic bit of cruelty, it was the anniversary of my coming out). I remember what I was doing when I received the news – I was about to teach a class. And I grieved when she passed.

But not for the reasons you might think.

I spent my entire life trying to be like my mom. She was a powerful woman. Though I never heard her express support for or interest in the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s lib, she lived that life. She made more money than my dad. She rose to leadership positions in every job she ever had. She was driven and ambitious.

In her retirement, she served relentlessly on charity boards. She used her disposable income to buy goods to donate and to support individuals in need. The last Christmas I spent with her, we drove all over town on the 24th, buying a Christmas tree and a feast for one of the families she supported. Until she was sent to hospice care, she was fighting to settle a Ukrainian refugee in the U.S.

She was the epitome of using her power to do good in the world. She was the first superhero I knew, and I modeled myself after her, trying to do acts of good in my community and fight for justice.

But I did not grieve because the inspiration of my entire sense of right and wrong had died. Instead, I was devastated, because she turned on me at the end of her life, and her death marked the moment when there was no longer any hope of fixing it.

My mother ran our family with an iron fist. She was just as driven at home as at work. Everything had to be the way she wanted it. There was a right way to do things, and God help you if stepped out of line.

The standards were high and immovable. We went to a fundamentalist church every Sunday. There, the principles of discipline and righteousness were reinforced. Do what was expected, or else.

It was only when the church’s blatant misogyny insisted she quit her lucrative job to be a stay-at-home mom that we stopped attending. Not that the rigid authority of the Southern Baptist Convention was abandoned at home. My mother refused to kneel before a man solely because the patriarchy demanded it, but she did not lose her faith or the basic tenets of evangelicalism. She tossed aside the sexism and the bigotry and kept the rest.

Mom hated Camus. In part, this was because I had all the irritating enthusiasm and conviction of a young academic. Like Alexander Hamilton, Karl Marx, and countless other revolutionaries, I shouted my beliefs from the mountaintop.

And because she had raised me in the church I felt had lied to me, I wanted to be in dialogue with her. I wanted to talk to her about what I had found and why I believed it was a better way forward.

She dismissed it all as nonsense. The same way she dismissed the Rock ’n’ Roll music I loved and the anti-establishment songs I wrote. The latter hurt. I was finding my voice as an artist. I was protesting homelessness and spending on war instead SNAP benefits and all the things she herself preached. Yet somehow, when I was expressing these ideas, they were silly at best and dangerous and embarrassing at worst.

My mom acknowledged that the system was terrible. But she rejected my desire to burn it down and replace it with something better.

Desperate to prove I was like her, to show her that I was worthy of her praise and approval, I adopted more and more of her attitudes. Though I was softer and much more evolved in my approach to parenting, I emulated her rigidity. There was a way things needed to be done. If they were not done that way, something was wrong with you.

And eventually, my blind adherence to these ideas cost me a marriage and the love of my children. While I was married, Mom criticized my parenting. After my divorce, she blamed the kids and my ex.

It wasn’t until she turned on me that I fully understood that I had unwittingly turned out exactly like her, that the complaints my family made against me were the same I’d experienced growing up. No one ever knew what would make me angry. No one could figure out how to live up to my standards. Everyone was judged for their performance and found wanting. The words of Harry Chapin haunt me to this day:

“My boy was just like me.”

As I explored my newly discovered identity, I could not seem to do it to her satisfaction. I came out to her that same Christmas we played Santa for families in need. She strongly advised me not to tell my father, then outed me to him a year later and was angry with me for “making her do it.”

But I had no idea she’d betrayed my trust. Shortly before he died, I asked again about telling him. She told me he could not know, even though she knew that he already did.

I went to my first Pride in 2022, three years after I discovered my identity. COVID-19 canceled the two before that. It was one of the most joyous experiences of my life. But when I tried to tell her about it, she was angry. I told her how amazing it was to see so many people like me, to feel comfortable in my own skin in public for the first time.

She interpreted that to mean I was rejecting her.

The final straw between us was my changing my name. Because I adopted as my identity the pen name I’d been writing under (which was always an homage to my birth name), she concluded I didn’t want to be a member of the family anymore and ceased speaking to me. Once again, the rigidity of her beliefs trumped all reason. I was not queer the way she believed I should be. I was not allowed a name that fit who I was inside while also carrying professional credentials. So, after spending her life defending LGBTQ+ people and their rights, she turned on her trans daughter.

And when she died after four days in hospice where she was completely non-verbal, there were no more chances to fix it. She went to her grave resenting me. She passed from this world with hate in her heart for her eldest child, condemning me to live the rest of my life with the grief of never achieving the one thing I’d wanted desperately: her approval.

I still have not figured out how to forgive her.

Over time, I have come to understand our relationship better. I see now how no one could meet the standard. That I was always playing a fool’s game – a version of Three-card Monty there was no chance to win. And I recognize that was her failure not mine.

But it still hurts. It wounds me that she never wanted to me meet where I was, that she was so convinced of her own rectitude she wouldn’t even listen to me. It infuriates me that she always made sure I knew I was never good enough.

And I’m angry at myself for dancing her twisted tango for so long, trying to get the steps right at any cost. Because the price was astronomical. I hurt the people I love the same way she did, all while swearing I would be a better parent than she was. I’m furious that my need for her approval blinded me to the harm I was causing.

So, I’m not the unfeeling monster Meursault is accused of being in The Stranger. But that doesn’t absolve me of my crimes.

Still, the work of Albert Camus is useful here. The essential thesis of his particular brand of existentialism is that meaninglessness does not equate to despair. Our actions determine the meaning of our lives.

My mother’s relentless rigidity (and likely undiagnosed mental illnesses) caused her to abuse me. Her refusal to find some sort of peace with me at the end of her life made her the ghost that haunts me to this day.

But to every person she helped and inspired outside our family, she was the hero I imagined her to be. She left a legacy of good to countless strangers, even as she betrayed her daughter.

What does that mean? Whatever you want it to, I suppose.

For me, what I’ve taken from this is that I need to be less like my mom, not more. I need to be more forgiving. I need to meet people where they are. I need to treat my family as precious, not as attachments.

I am a better person than I was while my mother lived. I am a better wife than I ever was a husband. I cannot fix the harm I sowed, but I can make amends as best I can. I can evolve. The meaning I give to my life and hopefully those around me is one of wisdom and kindness.

Camus writes at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” He intends for us to understand that happiness is something we can determine for ourselves.

I am happy. I have a family I love, and I treat them with the care they deserve. I live in Spain, where I feel safe and where I love the culture and lifestyle.

But Mother’s Day is still hard. I keep hoping that next year, I’m finally going to be at peace with all this.

So far, no joy.

Like fairies, we live outside the mundane, prescribed world. Our existence breaks the expectations of the patriarchy. It defies the logic of the social order we’re all raised to believe in. And thriving in that environment requires remaking our lives.

To do all that, we cast spells. We draw on our innate powers, granted us at birth. We develop our arcane knowledge to exist fully as we should.

Queerness invokes three magical traditions. Some of it is physical sorcery; some of it is spiritual sight. But it’s all a type of enchantment that is inseparable from the state of being LGBTQ+.

Alchemy

In the ancient and medieval periods, magicians sought the power of transmutation. They attempted to transform base metals into gold, brew the Elixir of Life, and discover the key to all change, the Philosopher’s Stone.

Queer folks have mastered this ancient art.

It starts with the simple alchemical reality of same-sex attraction. It is the result of a chemical reaction in the development of the individual. A complex combination of genetics, in vitro hormone exposure, and environmental factors drive the development of homosexuality. It is an inherited trait.

That is magic! In surveys, 93% of men and 87% of women identity as completely heterosexual. That leaves a significant portion of the population that experiences some level of same-sex attraction. Those feelings may never be acted upon, but they are there. Seven percent of men and 13% of women possess the alchemical magic to transform reality and expectation.

Gender-nonconforming folks engage in an even deeper form of this enchantment. Hormone Replacement Therapy (ironically developed to improve the lives of cisgender people) has become a kind of modern Philosopher’s Stone. Through HRT, it is possible to transform one’s body into the sex that matches the inner vision of the individual. Gender-affirming surgery can further enable a trans individual to alter their physical form.

That’s the very definition of alchemy. Especially since, it only takes a year of HRT for a person to become chemically indistinguishable from a cis member of their sex. From the view of a trans individual, this is turning lead into gold. The base metal of their assigned-sex-at-birth becomes the precious substance of inner truth given physical form.

This is true magic in the 21st century. Queerness is the power of transformation, of altering the basic building blocks of life into something new and exciting and beautiful.

Divination

While divination is often interpreted as the ability to see the future, it has broader meaning. It’s really about perceiving and discovering unseen truths. An oracle interprets omens and signs. They seek insight into situations, personalities, and behavior in a quest to understand a reality obfuscated from everyday sight.

The very act of understanding one’s queerness is divination.

To be LGBTQ+ is to have an identity different from the societal norm. And the structure of our culture is so heteronormative, so driven by the value of conformity, that recognizing the essential truth of being queer requires magic.

Most LGBTQ+ folks know who they are from an early age. Those with same-sex attractions figure it out pretty early. Most trans individuals know their assigned-sex-at-birth does not reflect whom they really are. This sort of inner sight in the face of a world insisting there is only one way to be is magical, especially for children, who rely on adults to tell them what it is real.

Indeed, I had the opposite experience myself. Raised in a hyper-masculine, fundamentalist church, in a world that reviled queer folks, and a household with rigid rules of behavior, I was unable to divine the truth of my identity for decades. I knew I was different. But with the social and familial messaging I was getting, my True Sight was blocked, as though a curse had been cast on me to keep me in the dark. All I understood was that I was not like others.

Eventually, other queer folks would share their magic with me, so that I could see who I was, at last. And that is the very definition of divination. They didn’t use tarot cards or crystals. They asked me questions, leading to the opening of my own third eye, the mystical element that sees beyond the mundane and into the spiritual realm where truth may be observed.

The greatest expression of this type of magic is nonbinary, genderfluid, and genderqueer individuals. They are the ones who most clearly see gender as the social construct it is. They perceive that gender exists on a broad spectrum, not a simplistic binary. And they exist on their own particular location in it, moving freely as best suits them.

Genderfluid folks can shift from one space on the spectrum to another, remaking themselves like a Heraclitean river – always the same, ever-changing. Being able to see themselves in this way, as existing outside of the cis-normative world, is divination of the highest order. It’s magic most people can barely conceive, let alone perceive.

Likewise asexual, aromantic, and demi people view truths foreign to the assumed biological imperative of procreation and the socio-normative expectation of romantic partnership. They divine a reality wherein sex and romance are not the principal drivers of happiness. Where platonic friendship, autonomy, and individualism are ideals, not problems or consolations.

Queerness is seeing beyond the limitations of ordinary sight. It is finding the hidden truths of the universe and expressing them through one’s unique identity.

Healing

Magic has always been sought to heal. From Reiki and massage for physical ailments to blessings and even exorcisms for spiritual wellness, among the primary purposes of magic is to make a person better.

Queer folks have a lot of wounds. It is the rare LGBTQ+ individual who grows up in a fully supportive environment. And even those who do must still endure a society of rejection and hatred for being different. Being magical is not always met with acceptance or love.

But the flipside of that coin is that accepting queerness is its own type of healing. When I at last understood that I was gender-nonconforming, the sense of relief I felt was profound. At last, the mysterious truth of why and how I was different was revealed. I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

When my marriage ended and I didn’t have to navigate how to live this reality with my spouse and children, I was able to accelerate my exploration of my true identity. After my father died, I believed there was no one left to hide from, and I started living fully out.

And this simple act of existing openly as a queer human being healed so many of the wounds I’d been carrying most of my life. I wasn’t ashamed anymore. I wasn’t confused. I didn’t lie awake at night trying to figure out who I was. I knew. And that made me happy.

I’ve yet to meet an LGBTQ+ person who wasn’t happy to be living authentically. It isn’t easy. We live in a world that hates us. But hiding from our truths, living a lie, is damaging. And choosing to be whom we are, to embrace our queerness, invokes healing magic that nothing else can. It is an enchantment of delight that salves the wounds of hiding from truth.

Magic in a Dark World

Being queer isn’t a prescription for happiness by itself. We do not yet live in a society that appreciates magic. We marvelous fey creatures are still hunted by those languishing in the misery of mundanity.

But magic is special and having it is cause for celebration. The alchemy of changing to reflect inner identity outwardly, the divination of seeing beyond simplistic perceptions of gender and attraction, and the healing poultice of self-acceptance all bring enchantment to queer existence. We possess rare magic, and we are beautiful as a result.

That is light in the darkness, and it is a beacon for us all.

Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy, who discovered her identity later in life. Writing While Trans chronicles her life as an LGBTQ+ creator, her ongoing quest for magic, and her fiction. Her latest book, The Black Mage, is available for preorder here.

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Hitting a bump in the road could move the needle a smidge, and then you either would get static interference with the programming or lose the station altogether. Then you were fiddling with the dial again, trying to bring it back, when you were supposed to be paying attention to the road.

I feel like I’m back in those old, analogue-radio days right now.

I believe in the Law of Attraction – that concept that we attract things to us which are in alignment with the energy we’re putting out. If you expect good things to happen, they will. If you expect every good thing to be taken from you, it will. Partly, it’s the universe working on you, but mostly it’s either opening your eyes to possibility or closing yourself to it, so that failure becomes destiny.

Right now, my finances are shit. For various reasons – some related to a mad, would-be king in the White House, some due to mistakes on my part – my book sales are really hurting. I rely on royalties for my income, so when I don’t get them, I have to dip into my nest egg to keep us going.

When we moved to Spain nearly a year ago, I was making a sustainable living from monthly royalties. I had a boatload of money in the bank to get us through any lean times, and I was confident that once I was safe, I could continue building my business.

But the aforementioned mad tyrant and my own mistakes have contributed to those royalties becoming unsustainable and the lean times going on with little end in sight. So I’m staring down the barrel of an existential financial crisis.

That would cause anyone to panic. But I keep returning to the Law of Attraction. If I want to run out of money, the best way to do it would be to worry about it non-stop.

So, instead, I’ve been practicing magic. At night, I play chakra music to try to keep myself in alignment and attuned to the universe. Sometimes, it’s root chakra music to make me feel grounded and stable. Sometimes, it’s heart chakra music to soothe my emotions, or throat chakra to allow me to speak my vision into existence, or third-eye chakra to be able to see solutions more clearly. And on occasion, I’ll even dip into solar plexus to inspire creativity or crown chakra to connect myself fully to the universe.

And it’s been working.

My mind is open to possibility. I can hear the universe speaking to me through colleagues, Substack articles, my writing, and multiple other sources. I can feel the solution to my financial struggles reaching for me, tapping me on the shoulder, trying to get my attention.

But it’s like I’m trying to tune them in through an old, analogue radio.

The needle isn’t quite sitting in the right place on the dial. There’s a signal, but there’s a lot of static around it, making the message hard to make out. I keep adjusting the knob slightly left, a bit to the right, trying to find the precise location to make it come in clearly.

And every time I hit a bump, I lose the signal again. A trauma trigger, a news story, an unexpected bill – they all move the needle, leaving me frustrated and angry as I try to find the station again.

But the signal doesn’t fade completely. I can still hear it through the static. The magic is working. It’s just hard to comprehend – like the Spanish I struggle to speak in public. I understand enough to shop at the grocery store, to order at a restaurant. But most of the sentences are only 30-40% comprehensible to me, meaning, I really don’t get what people are saying. And, damn, they speak so fast.

But I keep listening, keep fiddling with the tuner, trying to bring in the signal.

Because just like the Spanish, it’s not wholly indecipherable. Snatches of clarity come through.

The message I am certain of is that I need to leverage the value I bring. Yeah, the universe talks to me in business-speak sometimes. This is what happens when you follow successful writers who discuss improving your authorpreneurship.

But corpspeak notwithstanding, the value proposition I bring is a unique queer voice. I’m trans. I didn’t figure that out until I was 51. I lived inside privilege for decades before I understood it. And I was rejected by my mother on her deathbed. That gives me a perspective that is unique.

I’m also passionate about queer representation in fiction. I’m a sapphic woman, so I write about those kinds of characters, and I’m trans, so I bring gender-nonconforming perspectives to my work. There aren’t a lot of authors doing that, and those that are, don’t have my unique take on things.

And so, as I try to save my ass from financial ruin, I find myself running towards that queer voice, seeking ways to shout it from the mountaintop. This Substack is a piece of that. On the one hand there is the potential for paying subscribers that would boost my income.

But beyond that, writing about my queerness, magic, and fiction not only amplifies my vision, it keeps me in constant dialogue with it. It keeps me listening to the universe, seeking how to find my sustainable place in it.

More importantly, I’m making daily decisions on what best accomplishes my goals of turning that unique queer voice back into an asset that sells books. I’ve been working a lot on the Kickstarter for my trans fairytale this summer. Not only is this the project of my heart, it’s also the principal strategy for turning my income around. And it checks all my boxes for writing meaningful literature that provides LGBTQ+ representation in ways I think are important.

I’m working very hard on finishing Book Four in my sapphic romantasy series. It’s my signature work at the moment, and a new release gives me the opportunity to reinvigorate it. Plus, I’m in the stage of things I enjoy the most – editing and reshaping the text until it’s the book I want it to be. That makes for a happy workday, and happiness is one of the keys to making the Law of Attraction work.

The signal remains fuzzy. I’m only getting about 30-40% of the message. But I am fiddling with that dial, casting my spells in search of full clarity. I’m confident I’m going to get it. Because the universe is speaking to me.

And I know how to listen.

Phoebe Ravencraft writes queer fantasy, with an emphasis on strong female characters and LGBTQ+ empowerment. Her sapphic romantasy series, Shadows over Alfar, is available through Amazon. Tap the link to learn more about it and preorder Book4: The Black Mage.

I studied literature in college and grad school, so I’ve always been more interested in my main character actualizing and the themes I’m working with, but I do love me a good villain. Whether they’re larger than life like Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West, quietly scheming like Professor Moriarty and Shakespeare’s Claudius, or downright cruel like Nurse Ratched and Judge Frollo, memorable fiends make for legendary stories.

My current work draws heavily from the tropes of classic James Bond movies. Shadows over Alfar is a sapphic romantasy epic that marries 007-style espionage with Tolkienesque fantasy and a slow-burn, lesbian love affair, so its villains have to measure up to Auric Goldfinger and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. To do that, I’ve followed the larger-than-life model:

Book 1, The Dark Legend, features a megalomaniacal war hero with a messiah complex. Convinced only he can save his elven homeland, he orchestrates a coup while partnering with a terrorist group to assassinate the rest of the government.

In Book 2, The Rogue Dragon, a woman who is part of a secret project to create dragon-shifters turns traitor, sabotages the program, and attempts to destroy the country that betrayed her grandfather. Hell-bent on revenge, she doesn’t care how many people have to die to sate her anger.

And in the third book, The Rose Assassin, the world’s greatest assassin, a man who uses magic to look like anyone, is hired to murder key members of the elven government. Our heroes struggle to stop a killer, when they have no idea who he really is.

All three fit comfortably into the tradition of Bond villains with a master plan that has earth-shattering consequences. They’re nigh-impossible to defeat, have near-unlimited resources, and their morality is twisted into a sinister form that allows them to justify committing evil. Each one is deadlier than the previous, raising the overall stakes in the series.

So, with Book 4, The Black Mage, I had to be able to top the previous bad guys, while keeping things within the realm of believable. No one accepts a cartoon villain anymore – the evil for evil’s sake type of foe who is solely personification of darkness.

Or do they?

The truth is, human beings commit no end of atrocities without any infernal influence. So-called “relatable” villains are easy to find simply by turning on the news.

And honestly, that’s one of the themes of my work.

In all three books to date, I’ve seeded the subplot that the individual bad guys in each story are not the true villain. A mysterious, supernatural entity, known only as “the Master,” has been pulling strings behind the scenes. He’s a manipulator, a schemer in the tradition of Moriarty or Emperor Palpatine. Those working for him do not know his true motives. The heroes don’t know he exists.

Among the themes of Shadows over Alfar is the fall of a once-great culture. The enchanted land of elves suffered a vicious civil war, driven by a religious schism, a decade ago. What was once a vast realm of vibrant, arboreal life, is now decaying. A mysterious blight rots the land from within, sectarian violence plagues its capital city, and the politics are divisive. Elves of every stripe believe they have lost their way as a people, and they all blame someone else for it – a religious sect different than theirs, an ineffectual and divided government, the presence of humans and their desire for elven magic. There’s always a scapegoat.

The real tragedy of this destruction is that elves were once the happiest people on Earth. Masters of magic and believing themselves to be God’s Chosen People, they saw it as their mission to bring other species to enlightenment – to share their sorcery and their happiness, so that others could become as joyful as they. Elves believed in sharing and benevolence, in a God who encouraged caring for others and celebrating life. They were not conquerors, but an open society that welcomed the stranger and the friend alike.

Now, they’ve become insular, angry, and protectionist.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is impossible to disentangle the life of an author from the fiction they create. There is no such thing as “simple entertainment.” It is all a reflection of its time and the lived experience of the writer.

So, it’s hardly surprising a queer author like myself is writing about this sort of thing in the guise of an action-adventure fantasy world and a star-crossed love affair.

In the past 10 years, I’ve awakened to the reality that my homeland was never the “shining city on a hill” I was raised to believe in. I understand systemic racism and patriarchal oppression in ways I didn’t prior to the events of 2016 and beyond.

But I still revere the implied principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Much like I adhere to the basic tenets of Christ’s message despite being an atheist, I believe in the idea of America I was raised with, even if I know it doesn’t actually exist in that form. Seeing the words of the founders as aspirational allows us to recognize how we’ve failed as a people but are striving to get better.

So having Alfar act as a stand-in for my idealized version of my native country, doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that mythic history and actual events don’t necessarily match.

The Master has been working for a generation to turn elves against each other. He’s whispered lies in countless ears, stirring resentment, magnifying imagined grievances, and corrupting those who were supposed to be caretakers of their people.

His motivation for ruining paradise on Earth is simple: ambition. Largely, he does it, because he can.

But here’s the lesson buried in the cartoonish evil of his achievement. It cannot be accomplished without cooperation. For darkness to truly take hold, ordinary people have to approve it. When explaining his scheme, the Master is offended at the suggestion that he is solely responsible for the fall of a civilization. He tells the heroes:

I won’t spoil the details of how the series villain has been accomplishing his ends, but his wickedness is unable to operate in a vacuum. He needs help. He needs participation.

A few years ago, I read Kristen Kobez du Mez’s excellent Jesus and John Wayne, which details the rise of evangelicalism in the U.S. over the twentieth century, how it appropriated the biblical Christ into a warrior figure, how it gave rise to Christian nationalism, and how the Trump administration is the natural outgrowth of that movement. It’s a fascinating read that I highly recommend, and it hit home hard for me, since I was raised in an evangelical household.

The biggest takeaway for me is that religious figures interested in power and control changed the essential message of the gospels, influencing their flocks to turn toward the exact kind of intolerance and hostility Jesus opposed. Reading it, I began to see Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston and others as akin to the Pharisees trying to trip up Christ with all sorts of tests.

Evangelicalism turned the gospel story of Jesus saving the adulteress (“Let those without sin cast the first stone.”) into the Old Testament tale of God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah.

They replaced the parable of the Good Samaritan with King David’s conquests.

The Sermon on the Mount seems only to be noteworthy for the concept that they shall someday inherit the earth.

My villain has done the same. His strategy was to twist the principles of faith into the dogma of exclusion.

But though my fictional land of elves is based on real-world villainy, it is not without heroes. The main characters are a human superspy (basically, lesbian James Bond without the misogyny) and the elven Captain of the Elite Guard, the nation’s chief security officer. They are flung together in Book 1 by a common foe, and over the course of the series, they fall in love. Their interspecies relationship is a source of discomfort for many of the conservative faction in Alfar, but it serves as a beacon of hope for others.

Together, they continually defeat those who would bring Alfar to its knees. And through their love, they heal each other’s trauma. Alfar is a dark place, because it’s based in large part on contemporary America. But it’s also a place of hope, because there are heroes fighting evil. And love is a light that inspires and heals.

Just like in real life.

Between Project 2025 and the Epstein files, we are learning that so much of the dysfunction in our society is deliberate. It’s pre-planned and orchestrated by wealthy manipulators interested in little more than their own enrichment. It’s about consolidating power in the hands of a few, so they can operate with impunity.

But as long as we keep fighting for a better world, when we take off our blinders and look carefully at what’s really going on, hope and love have a chance. A happy future is ours to make if only we will fight for it.

The world needs heroes, and there is one in each of us.

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Shadows over Alfar is a story of love in an age of darkness. Book 4, The Black Mage, is available for preorder here.