“Now is the time for you,” the chiropractor said.   “It’s time for you to take care of yourself.”

His answer, of course, was that I should take care of myself the same way he takes care of himself, by taking care of my body.   Follow the guidelines for proper eating, exercise, take supplements and have all the treatments that can help.

I do know that most people lead an embodied life.   They ran and jumped and played, they followed their physical desire, worked to stay fit, polished their appearance and even picked a fight now and then.

That’s not my experience.   Between my disembodied parents, my need to retreat into my big brain, and my transgender nature, my body always followed along, a practical requirement rather than defining me.   From my earliest days, I was clear that I was spirit living a human life.

Is this my time now?   Is now, a time in life when so many others are starting to understand that they are not their body, time for me to enter my body, reshape my body, experience my body?

I always seem to have lived life out of order.   I was adultified early, needing to TP take care of my parents, being the one who brought context to the family.  I was scapegoated for that, “Stupid” becoming my name, but I knew someone had to do the work.

Are old souls just a way some kids are born, or is that phenomenon a way some kids need to survive?  Do our very early relations with our parents change the way we think, demanding that we come out of skin based mode and find strength somewhere else?

My kindergarten teacher wanted me to skip a grade, mostly because I had at least third grade reading skills.   The principal asked me to stand on one foot and I almost fell over, or so the story goes, showing that I didn’t have the physical maturity to move forward.  Studies show, though, that kids can’t read until they have body control; how did I accomplish such a feat?

In high school, I was without training and with a concealed heart, so dating was always strained and strange.  Looking back, I see the patterns of a femme, but at the time, I was just lost betwixt and between.   I just wasn’t cocky enough to be a guy, but being a girl was always beyond the realm of possibility, no matter how I listened to Harry Benjamin and Virginia Prince.

My trans path has also been unembodied.  I knew early that my passing distance would always be close, that my puberty is writ very large in my bones.   I decided on a “transnatural” way, not using hormones or surgery to try and female my body to some extent, not imagining that I could hide away my biology and history.

This is an unusual path, as most transpeople want to assign magic to hormones and modifications.   I had to trust the magic in my heart.

I know that many people are particular about what they eat — vegan, organic, gluten free and all that — and love their exercise/fitness classes, everything from spinning to yoga.

For them, I suspect, part of this is reclaiming and regaining the vitality of their youth.  They know what being embodied felt like and want to regain some of that power.

For me, that historical record, that feeling in my bones just isn’t there.   I don’t have it to call back, don’t have it to trust, don’t have it to support and lift me.   There is nothing to reclaim; anything has to be made new.   I may have dreamed of being a dancer, but between denial and a few moments on stage, that was as hollow as most of my wishes.

To become embodied, with whatever benefits that can bring at my age, I need to embrace a whole different paradigm, a new way of being in the world.  I know that can’t just be being hidden and healthy, rather I need to be more exposed.   And if I am more revealed, I need to be more rewarded, which has always been the challenge for me.

I have the need to have the feeling that it is good to be alive,” a banner of Charles Schulz’s Linus said in my high school bedroom.

In the end, it is a sense of joie de vivre that makes humans appealing.   We want to be around people who are exuberant and positive.

How does becoming more embodied peel away barriers to delight?

I was told years ago that the first place you lose weight is in the face, allowing people to see at a glance that you are more revealed, more present.

Does becoming more embodied allow you to stop focusing on the demons around you, the people whose fear leads them to act out, and let you start celebrating the angels around you, those whose love embraces and illuminates others?  Does it allow you to attract those smart, open and aware people in a new and better way?

I certainly use my words to express myself, to pursue my own therapy.   My Jonathan Winters energy, though, all those voices and manifestations have to be freeze dried to be captured in text, removing almost all the vitality.   People who even talk to me on the phone, experiencing me as an interactive radio show, know that I am more sly, more funny and more vibrant by voice.

Beyond that, in image and in person, there is even more, more that I don’t share because I am used to people finding me overwhelming, baffling, off-putting, too much and just plain weird.

Going back to reclaim the embodiment I missed and gaining the benefits that accrue from that seems like a lovely idea.  I question, though, if it is a practical or achievable idea, wondering what the cost for even trying it might be.  Is the support there now for me to overcome blocks that stopped me when I faced them at the time most people gained embodiment, a time when I was young and fit?   Does anyone really get my challenges in a way that lets them help?

Focusing on maintaining and using my body is far from a bad idea.   Doing so has certainly helped many, many people get vigor and focus back into their lives.

For someone who never really achieved embodiment, though, somehow it is hard to imagine it coming now.


Incantations are magical.  There have always been magic words spoken by healers that invoke the power of the mystical to prompt and promote the belief that healing is within our grasp.

Today those words mostly appear scientific.   When we see an actor playing a doctor on television, we expect them to pump out barely comprehensible jargon laced with drama to invoke the power of healing.   Our belief in God is spoken of as our belief in science (1999).

The creation myths healers spin today take old concepts and wrap them in medical jibberty dash.   Rather than looking at the tea leaves in left in the cup, for example, we untwist DNA to reveal the deeply coded messages of our creator.  Rattling off phrases that start with science and seamlessly segue into belief makes the belief much more digestible to people who want to believe they are logical while they still crave the magic that healed their ancestors.

I believe in the power of shamans to motivate change by using the power of perception.   I know that unless we commit to healing on an emotional level, we cannot really use the full power of transcendence in our own lives.

Merely poking holes in the practice of a healer does not prove that they can not and do not provide powerful healing with their tools.   Their tools may have some intrinsic power, even if it is not magical, but the use of those tools may well invoke extrinsic power, the power of our mind to move beyond sickness and claim new ways of being.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.  Belief has always been at the root of healing.

Healers project their own power and authority because that projection is at the centre of taking others to scary places beyond their current state.  The more we believe their capacity to invoke healing the more we can give ourselves over to their prescriptions,  letting go of the old and making room for the new.   When we see them as powerful we trust them to take us beyond our own fears.

To be effective as a healer, you have to believe in what you are selling, be it snake oil or science.   Every healing technique is a blend of the two, a heady mix of proven effectiveness and hopeful belief.  It is the balance in that mix which divides fakirs from doctors.

For the supplicant, trying to separate the mumbo jumbo from the practical magic is almost a pointless exercise.  That may be the goal of double blind studies, looking for real effects beyond placebo, but it doesn’t play well in actual healing.

In a new show on Fox, “The Grinder,” an actor who played an unbeatable lawyer on TV (Rob Lowe) comes home to work with his real lawyer brother (Fred Savage).    Together they try and find the balance between emotional theatrics and solid legal principle in creating success, with much tension and hilarity.

The joy of the show, of course, is how these approaches compliment and support each other.   No either/or binary can be as effective as a blend between thought and emotion, between fact and belief.

Hard, repeatable science is good stuff.   The process of science lets us separate the good from the bad in approaches.

Magic, however, even the magic of incantation, is good stuff too.   Getting high levels of compliance with best practices always takes commitment and that commitment requires belief.

The art is always at least as important as the science, for the huge mass that is still intangible and unquantified can only be affected by art.

For someone who has always been a doubter, looking for the intention and techniques behind the surface — the smoke and mirrors — has always been part of my process.  I needed to understand what was going on.

Watching closely let me understand the tricks, adding many of them to my own tool bag.  Owning the claptrap means that I own my own response to it.   Rather than being swept in by the pitch, swayed by the assertion of power and authority, I feel the sway while remaining an observer, always with an eye for what is just behind the curtain.

The simple delight of being swept away by belief, of surrendering my own agency for someone who announces belief with force, wrapped in beautiful claptrap isn’t something I have ever been able to partake.  This creates a barrier between me and so many new age practitioners, who, while believing deeply in their practice, need others to also believe for maximum effectiveness.

This has challenged many healers who find me fascinating as I reflect them in a very different way from run of the mill clients, but also find me very difficult to pull in.   I pose very interesting questions that show I am listening closely, but I don’t accept pat answers.

A comedy rule is “If they buy the premise, they will buy the bit.”   IF the audience doesn’t enter into the reality offered, accepting the idea, there is no way they will ever get to the payoff.

We use our incantations — our claptrap — to sell the premise, to get others on side, to have them embrace the mindset.   It’s a powerful tool of persuasion, of leadership, of healing.

And it usually works even if the words don’t have real, deep verifiable meaning. A bit of misdirection often helps people fake it until they make it, giving them the strength to make dreams become possible.

We all need a bit of magic, a bit of belief in our life, even if it is belief in our own hard boiled skepticism, calling out others on their bullshit.

Examine magic too closely, though, and it tends to disappear, taking with it the emotional energy to commit to transformation.  Don’t examine it enough and you are left with sensation without consideration, thoughtless commitment.

Unspeakable Terror

Lives there any human who doesn’t hold somewhere inside unspeakable terror?

To whom do we speak the unspeakable?

I speak a great deal.   I write and I write and I write, detailing the horrors and the hope that I hold.

Mostly I speak into a void.   I know that no one is listening, no one is engaging what I say.   I know that people shy from my words, sky from the meaning I try to convey with them.

But somewhere, beyond all that I reveal, there are places inside of me of unspeakable terror.

These places are not rational.   They are not subject to logical elucidation, to sensible addressing.  They are places of unspeakable terror.

Much of this terror is of bits that most people take for granted, the terror of being exposed to a system where functionaries hold your choices in their hands.   This is the system of compliance which most people accept and submit to.

I can tell my stories, lead you through my experience.  I know, though, that you will only get shards of those tales, will only be able to understand what you can comprehend, and not everything that I share.    This is frustrating but true.

The stories I can’t tell, though, the ones that hold my dread, the unspeakable terror of erasure of my inner core, well, those I can’t even give breath to so they will never pass my lips.   Just saying them out loud invites them inside me where they can wreak wordless and violent damage on the parts of my soul which are so primal that they are without language.

Mothers often understand these terrors in their children, seeing the breathlessness in their eyes.   Helping their loved ones find language for these deep, bogie man fears is the first step to overcoming them.

I know how much I help others when I bring their fears up into the light, letting them see the monsters are not invincible.   By revealing the dragons I have faced, they can start to imagine moving beyond their own demons.

The terrors which still are unspeakable to me, though, are not wraiths that most other people have knowledge of, let alone the language to make them exposed and surmountable.

I code my own fears in symbols, asking for the kind of vision which can help me face and handle them.   Finding any, though, who go deep enough to understand and cradle my terrors, well, that always feels like an impossible task.

“If you can do what is very hard for me,” people seem to say, “then obviously you can do what is easy for me.”    This is false and twisted thinking, the extension of their own mindset into me rather than the willingness and ability to enter my own presence of mind.

Making my own experience explicit, working so hard for so long to reveal the shadows which haunt me, had not made the unspeakable terrors inside me visible to others.    I strive to explicate them and they just keep tormenting me.

The terrors that I can lay bare are horrors that I have slain, ones that I own, although at a significant cost to me.

It is the unspeakable terrors that still trounce me, terrors which may seem banal to most but which reach down into the deepest pits of my existence.

Asking me to simply tell you about them is missing the depth of them.   To me, to me, to me, they are unspeakable.

How do we engage and transcend the unspeakable?   I know that I have spent decades finding words for what I face, what I see other people face, so their terrors will no longer be without words and unexaminable.  I bring out the experience so it can be owned and put in place.

For me, though, there are still terrors I cannot speak.   These terrors are around being invisible, voiceless, without power, unseen and unheard.   They reach into a very, very deep place where I know that I have no language to defend myself and no loved one to hold, protect and guide me.

They are unspeakable.

Every human has unspeakable terror.   We all look for others to recognize and assist with those terrors.

Even, I struggle to tell you, me.

Success From Failure

How would you define a successful emergence into the world as transgender?

What are the things you want out of announcing you are trans and changing your own gender identification and expression in the world?

Sure, having the power to wear what you want to work is a fine thing.    We can be much more free, assured and emotionally comfortable when we believe that we look good and feel congruent in the world.

Is just being able to wear certain clothes all you want, though?  Is there more?

Do you want to be able to be seen as something other than a guy-in-a-dress (1999)?  Do you want to feel affirmed in making the choices of a woman?   Do you want to connect with women as another woman?

Do you want to be a hot chick, a powerful businesswoman, a tender mom?

In other words, do you want to shift the way people see your gender, not just the way that they see your clothes?

What does success look like to you?   Is it being able to wear what you want and demand that people use the pronouns of your choice?   Or do you want something different than that, something more than that?

You can’t tell people how to properly see and think about you.  Would you let other people tell you the only correct way to think about them?     Do people just get to claim to be whoever they want and you have to believe them, or do you require something to back up their assertions, some kind of substantiation (1997)?

People see what you show them.  What you show them is the sum total of your choices in the world.   Humans have come to understand that the essence of other people are revealed by their choices, especially the choices that we don’t consciously make.

Your choices, even the choices you make by habit, expose your thoughts, your feelings, your concerns and your priorities in the world.

It’s not the big sweep of an outfit that tells us who you are, for example, it is how the details come together, the fit and finish, the quirks and counterpoints.   Are you wearing the outfit, beauty coming from the inside out, or is it wearing you, a kind of costume that attempts to conceal parts of you but that may reveal much more than you expect?

Women learn how to be women by observing other women, by cribbing choices to build their own unique feminine expression.  Until you can see the tricks and techniques other women use to build their expression, you don’t have the tools to build your own.

Women learn to be women in a sea of social pressure.   They get feedback from everyone around them, formal comments and informal views of how others react to them depending on their choices.   Going through high school can be brutal for girls who learn early the costs and benefits of facing the judgements of those around them.

What would make your emergence as trans in the world successful for you?

Do you want to be seen as queer, boldly claiming a role past gender?    Or do you want to be seen as something other than that?   What is it?

If you want to be seen and accepted as a woman, understanding how the choices of a woman are shaped and seen in the world is vital.  Those are the cues you need to take to shape your expression in the world.

Our gender expression advertises who we are to the world, what roles we are trained and willing to accept (1999). What do you want to advertise with your new gender expression?   What roles are you trained to play, what roles are you willing to play?

“It is truly a lifetime job, this learning to be a woman,” as May Sarton said.   You will never have mastery of every womanly art you need on your first day.   It takes years of practice to become centered and powerful.

Taking the time to do some of this work, polishing your act so it begins to get you the results you want before you emerge as “full-time” can be important.   It’s much better to fail in front of wise, forgiving, transient audiences before you tke your show on the road in front of paying crowds, like your current workplace.

Girls learn early that you have to try on a lot of different looks, attitudes and choices before you can consistently be a winner.   Trying and failing leads them to wisdom and mastery.

What kind of success do you want to have from your transgender emergence?   Where you you want to fail first to begin to own the skills you need for that success?

Is it enough for you to wear what you want and demand people use appropriate pronouns?

Or do you want something more to mark success?   If you do, what are you willing to polish to make that success happen?

When we fail to prepare, we prepare to fail.   Don’t do the work and you set yourself up for failure.

What do you want?   What will make you satisfied enough, make your emergence successful?

Once you know that, you can start to do the work to prepare for the success you desire.

Marginalized Margins

The most important thing to know and understand about the marginalized in this culture is that we have much narrower margins than normative people who live in the lap of comfort.

The fact of our narrower margins is simple: we have to be much more circumspect, play our lives much more close to the vest, take smaller risks and always make sure we have what is vital to us protected.

People who live in the middle, deep in the heart of average, have plenty of room on each side to miss the mark, to take the blows.  They can get hit, swerve a little and have lots of space to recover stability, to get back to baseline.

Those of us who have been pushed to the margins, though, know that one or two swift hits and we are in the ditch, beyond recovery. We used up our margin of safety just to get where we need to be, so from here on out, it is a delicate and tender operation.

Trust is the first thing to go.   We can’t just let people in, make ourselves vulnerable to other people and then be sideswiped by them.   We have had that happen before and know how it almost pushed us over the edge.

It’s very hard to explain to mainstream people why we protect ourselves from taking what they see as just a mild and ordinary tap.  Why do we avoid the everyday thumps of life, the ones they take so easily and without any loss of footing?

We don’t do that because we are marginalized.   Society has told us that we have already given up seven lives just to be who we are, and the next one that we lose feels like it will be our last.   We feel, well, extraordinarily marginalized.

Even the most robust and celebrated among us understand the price of their marginalization.  The fact that they have fans and followers does not change the reality of marginalization.  Rather it just reminds us that it only takes one or two angry people to push us over a final edge.

The explicit training that tells you you are beyond the bounds, that you are overwhelming to most people, tends to stick with you for your entire lifetime.  You always have it in mind that you are just one step from disaster and destruction.

The sensation of swirling around the rim, just an instant from being flushed away, is one that very much sticks with you. Trying to explain it to someone who has never experienced it, well, that just seems to be impossible, which just intensifies the awareness that trying to find allies is far from possible.

We know what it is like to be so overwhelming, so intense, and so outside expectations that we are shut down before we even start.   It shouldn’t be surprising that knowledge affects our choices.   Being marginalized by those around us has an affect, a long term and profound affect.

The marginalized have the experience of being on the margins, away from the safety of the centre.   This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but for people in the mainstream, this truth is well outside their stream of consciousness.  The truth of our experience is well and truly on the margins of their awareness, you might say.

The marginalized feel pushed to the margins, without any space for grace or safety.   We learn to stay circumspect and protected, even the most beautiful and capable of us.

Is that any surprise?


The book “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” by Steve Silberman has gotten some very bad reviews on Amazon.

They are from people who just completely disagree with the author’s take that we shouldn’t work to make people on the autistic spectrum “normal” but rather to see their differences as just a way some people are, focusing on ways to open society to be more diverse and supportive.

The reviewers think this is just an asshole position, that autism means broken, that a cure is required or nothing but suffering will occur.

In the book, there is a telling line.   The wife of one of the original neurodiversity advocates chooses not to talk to the author because she is “sick of the infighting” in the communities around autism.

Infighting, it seems to me, is what humans love to do.   I have been reading some spaces on the internet discussing Christian belief and they are filled with infighting.

It has been ever thus, from the early pre-canon days of Christianity to Martin Luther and well beyond, different sects have different beliefs, splintering off on the basis of what can seem to an outsider to be small and irrelevant differences.

Even if the underlying reason for the fracture is personal power grabs, individuals wanting to assert power, even slight differences in doctrine allow for identification of an in group and an out group, setting up an us versus them battle line that feeds on identity politics and separating right from wrong, good from evil.

Infighting is powerful because those who don’t really want what we claim to have just don’t care about our assertions.   Nobody outside of the communities around autism really care much about how it is defined, but those inside have a fierce need to be correct and powerful within that space.

The victims of identity politics are mostly not the people we see as needing to understand what we are saying, they are the people we see as those who should be our allies but who are sabotaging the cause by their wrongheaded actions.   We become crabs in a barrel, not working together but rather infighting, using our energy to make sure others don’t get ahead of us in any way.

It’s easy to become sick of the infighting.   In fact, this is one of the premises of infighting, to clear the power field of those without the will and the bottle to battle for control of our structures.  Sure, this may, in the end, weaken our structures, damaging them so much they are ineffective, but for the winners of the infighting, they don’t care about the size of the heap, they only care that they are on top of it.

Infighting is by definition separating rather than connecting.  It paints those who want to be our allies as enemies, traitors to the cause who have to be re-educated or be purged.    It enforces doctrine over inclusion, detail over intention, fractionating power to let small people hold on tightly to their own small pieces of it.

Preachy Preachers find infighting a great path to status and power, assuring their followers that they are the virtuous ones and the more they are attacked, the more right they are. They carve out a space not by converting those they attack but by drawing in those who agree with their attacks.

I saw self-posted video of a “street preacher” standing in a parking lot haranguing a gay pride event, appearing to shout through a bullhorn to tell the gays and lesbians inside that they were going to hell and damnation unless they repented and followed his version of Biblical behaviour.

Needless to say, this harangue didn’t call one person to come to Jesus, renouncing their hard won pride and the love they had found for the harsh judgement of a raving preacher.   What it did do, of course, is let him cast the gays as sinners and himself as virtue incarnate, giving them what for.

Even as people cried out from their cars telling him to shut the fuck up, he could identify himself as martyred by those who refused to see the light, proving their essential wickedness and his saintliness.

His actions were to show him as a powerful infighter, willing to expose himself for the status of his church, facing down powerful sinners with only a bullhorn.   Huzzah and Hallelujah, our brother boldly preached the gospel to those horrible gays and survived!

When people gain status from infighting, from separating the right from the wrong and purging evil, they live in negative identity.   Instead of leading by example, drawing people to them with positive energy, they lead by decimation, separating out challenge and living in the negative, declaiming where others are wrong and sick rather than where they themselves are right and whole.

In the interlocking communities around trans, infighting has pushed more good people out from standing as allies than anything else.

If all we are going to get when we try to connect with other transpeople is being caught up in the infighting, being told where we are wrong and having to surrender our voice to the group, why bother?

Nobody goes through all the shit about emerging as trans in the world to simply fall in as the member of one sect or another.   We want to claim our own power, even if that means we end up becoming the leader of a sect of one, infighting our way in the world by railing about how everyone else is doing it wrong.

It’s very, very easy to be sick of the infighting.   Unless you want to be a part of it, tying your identity to declaiming other as evil, infighting is horribly wearing and alienating, removing benefit from being present.

Infighting keeps us small, weak and divided.  And that’s just sad.

Your Expectations

From my exile, I tell you this.


















The reality that I experience is not necessarily 
the same reality that others know, 
nor is the reality that they experience anything that I know.  
Knowledge is a search for correlation between all our realities.


Even from yourself.