Transgender Soapbox: The Memoir Collection

Surviving trans conversion therapy, escaping my family’s cult, and finally breaking free from the seduction guru I used to idolize

First I was a girl, then I was a boy, then I was me.

First I was a girl

It’s hard to accept just how much I’ve forgotten. How much I CHOSE to forget. How much I had to forget if I wanted to survive.

But memories, like emotions, don’t exist independently. They’re as interwoven as the different parts of our bodies are to our consciousness and sense of self.

And you know what I remember? Once, I was a little girl named Stephenie.

I came from an offshoot of a cult where a man’s reputation always meant more than any harm he inflicted to a woman.

To hide the harm those men had done, my family hid me as far from the public as they could. It doesn’t get much further than a mental institution in the deepest parts of Mississippi.

In the Fall of 1996, my dad drove me, his thirteen-year-old transgender daughter, to the mental institution I’d call home for the next two years.

No way out. But then again, no desire to leave.

After the institutions…there was Texas

But then it was back to Mississippi

Pop culture articles with memoir easter eggs

What I want to say is that comedians hurt people. And that includes the very people they proclaim they’re here to make laugh.

What I want to say is that heroes hurt people, too. And that includes the very people they proclaim they’re here to save.

It’s not that my thoughts aren’t with the people who hurt us and what drove them to do so. I cultivate empathy and compassion for anyone who acts with good intentions and then lives in denial of the equally harmful impact of their subsequent actions.

As a person active in recovery circles, I’ve been there. I’m still there often enough. Recovering from trauma is HARD.

It’s just that when it comes to where to point my empathy, I am just one person. I have limited space.

So my thoughts instead are with the people who are hurt by those heroes.

My own past has its share of heroes who hurt me.

One insists she gave up her life to take over as my mom once my real one left. But she also brought in friends who groomed and abused me. Those two things don’t cancel each other out.

Another hero used his power and influence more than once to ensure I had adequate housing, an income, an occasional person with whom to hang out. But my brother also used me and any woman I cared for as though we were drugs made first of all to satisfy his Frame (it’s a pick-up artist strategy) and endless need for validation and sex.

Grad school, best-selling books, and a powerlifting total of 1150 at 180lbs

To my old health and fitness community, I became a symbol of what a man could achieve if they stuck to the plan.

A lot of the guys helped me in ways beyond words. They accepted me as one of their own. They taught me how to train. How to thrive. Under their tutelage, I excelled to the point that I won that community’s most treasured award. It was only digital, but you’d swear it was made of Gold.

(At least until it fell to me to award next year’s winner and I gave it to a bodybuilder who was injecting more hormones than a trans girl. But come on…he worked for it!)

And as long as they didn’t find out I was a girl, I believed I would be safe.

Post-traumatic brain injury/TBI

We’ve all felt that intense screech from nails on a chalkboard. Imagine feeling that way for no reason. Imagine feeling that way all the time — with one exception.

But a strange thing happens when you’re forced to live with the intolerable. An even stranger thing happens when your mind adapts to make it safe to live again.

At its worst, grima makes me want to die.

But at its best…I’d swear that I can fly.

Finding freedom from my family’s cult, thriving after trans conversion therapy, and saying goodbye to the seduction guru I once called my brother

My fellow survivors healing from narcissistic abuse have helped me a lot over the years. For most of my life, I kept my story to myself. I only told the lies my family insisted I tell. The ones that served them are the ones that kept their abuse and the impact of that abuse hidden.

Keeping their secrets was killing me one day at a time.

Thankfully, there is hope. There is healing. There is recovery.

Finally, I have found wholeness simply from telling the truth.

Queer girl joy

I met Sydney in 2013, shortly after I’d returned from the Australian city of the same name. My ex was preparing to go overseas for a while, and we agreed I would do better with a furry friend.

I had no idea how deeply this dog would touch my life.

Get to know who I am today

I’m trans, I’m neurodivergent, and I’m proud to be one of the queerest feminist geeks you’ll ever meet.

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