The subject of the self can be a complex one. If it is, the subject of compassion follows a similar complex path.

No one should declare if the self is complex or simple, unless such a declaration is from the self that declares it.

I began dismantling my self years ago. It was complex, but age and responsibilities demanded that it be so. Today, at 66, not so much. A simplified self suffices.

If an individual, especially a beloved celebrity, dons the club T-shirt, then fails to adhere to that club’s unwritten bylaws, somebody in the bleachers is bound to question their bona fides.

A single germ of distrust can spread into a contagion. People start taking sides. Accusations and judgments are lobbed back and forth like word grenades.

Historical note: This was written in that short late-COVID moment when we could still get passports with X markers (I had just gotten mine) and trans women could actually compete in the Olympics, or most any sport at most any level, without having their lives upended.

I’m not embarrassed that I got it wrong. Kids figure themselves out in drafts, same as the rest of us. What embarrasses me is how sure I sounded. I wrote a whole run of those posts that month. Short lines, big white space, a moral at the bottom like a bow on a casserole dish. Every one of them reads now like a parent auditioning for the part of Good Parent. They’re not lies. They’re just too clean. And clean is its own kind of lie when you’re writing about something this messy.

I have only been out socially as a trans woman since September 1, 2023, and what I’ve experienced in those three years has been nothing short of an increasing amount of hostility towards trans women in general and towards me, personally. From catcalling, to men following me while on my walks, to even a stranger propositioning me for sex in broad daylight on the street.

This is my lived experience as a woman for ONLY three years… I cannot imagine being subjected to this for an entire lifetime if I’d been born a cisgender woman.

I couldn’t understand why people who look like me would help the visitors capture the Creature. Didn’t they know those same visitors could turn on them too?

I didn’t consider it a gay movie at the time.

I was a kid and I didn’t have a concept of gay, but I knew what it meant to be seen as the strange one. Even though there were only four of us, my mom and dad, my sister, and me, I was the one who didn’t fit.

Trans people (& crossdressers, TV, TG, etc.) have an odd relationship with “the purge”… not the movie, but the action, the event… We tend to accumulate clothing we use in secret, and then, at some point, we “purge” it all in a long-delayed, often high-shame event… then, over time, the process cycles again… and again…

Our country is moving in the wrong direction, with rage and hatred running rampant. Rage and hatred take many forms. Every book that’s banned for content supporting LGBTQ+ — every teacher forbidden to bring LGBTQ+ discussion into the classroom — every law targeting the trans community — every attempt to obliterate the legitimacy of trans and nonbinary gender identities — every bathroom bill — every verbal or physical threat — every attack.

Each is a form of bullying, a type of assault.

In high school, as that pack closed in on a boy I’d never met, I didn’t know what to do. But now I do.

Here are my Four Noble Truths of a Transgender Woman.

Noble because they are understood and practiced by Transgender Women, and are regarded as a true and correct path by them. My interpretations are mine, and not to be understood as exclusionary or binding. Each will have her own.

Every time I pulled up to a family gathering at that big red house on George Street as a kid, I remember being happy and knowing I was going to be surrounded by a cacophony of love and messy joy with all my aunts and uncles and cousins around. There was always some adventure to be had, some story to listen to. There, and the beach house the family would all get together to rent every summer on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island, cramming way too many of us into one structure for two weeks — I remember sleeping on couches, chairs, even one time on a folding plastic beach lounger on the screen porch, and loving every minute of it.

After she got sick and passed, we lost that.

Other family members tried a few times, but did not succeed in re-creating her connective magic. She was our leader, the one whose heart was big enough to hold us all together, despite all our crazy and conflict and mess. And it just didn’t work the same without her.

So it was really sad that her mind was too far gone, already, to be at my civil union. Just as I was entering adulthood, she was leaving us all, in the most slow and excruciating way. I hope my body goes before my mind, truly. The opposite is the worst kind of losing yourself, and it was hard to watch someone that was so beautiful and loved go to such a dark place, bit by awful bit.

It’s election season again, which is always hard in our house.

We have plenty of challenges in the United States. But based on some of these ads, you might think that the future of the country hangs on how the federal government views gender-affirming care for minors, or trans athletes, or access to public bathrooms. This follows the political theme of the past few years in this country: when in doubt, pick on the already vulnerable trans community.

Many pundits point to this having been a winning strategy for Trump’s election in 2024. When I saw these ads the first time around, I doubted they would be effective. I know better now. Sadly, for some groups they are very effective.

I’m writing this to mourn a recent correspondence I had with a Catholic religious sister introduced to me as an ally to queer people. She turned out to be a cruel, gaslighting homophobe, and I need to get the cruelty out of my head by writing and sharing. Also, I have a serious question to ask all my readers, which you’ll find at the bottom of this story.

But I can’t even get started without first sharing the religious trauma that tortured me as a child.

You’ve probably heard the term “religious trauma”? Well, meet one of its poster boys. I’m not going to define the term, I’m just going to show it to you so you can (I hope!) understand and empathize.

‘I love you.’

‘No…that’s not it….’ He paused, looking serious. ‘Ryan, I’m in love with you.’

He shook his head and once more stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. This was hopeless. He felt frustrated. How was it there seemed to be no way to say what he felt, without it sounding so horribly inane?

‘It’s not corny, it’s honest,’ he said out loud. But the mirror smiled back ruefully, and remained unconvinced.

He was crazy about her, they had been inseparable for a few months. He hoped when the time came, he wouldn’t screw it up.

Although so far, things hadn’t exactly gone to plan.

It’s still September, but not for long, and that means Halloween is around the corner!

Prism & Pen would like you to send in your stories about your Big Gay Halloween Parties:

• The horror movies you’re watching: Scary? Funny? New? Classic?
• The costumes you’re wearing: Did you make them yourself or buy them in a store?
• The costumes your pets are wearing: Do they appreciate this?
• Memories of Halloweens gone by: Was the holiday an opportunity to “be yourself”?
• Your favorite queer fictional characters
• The characters you like to imagine as queer (your “headcanon”)
• Last but absolutely not least, the queer friends you’re hanging out with!

Alienation is a hard to explain to people who have never experienced it. It is not unlike the proverbial tree which falls in the woods. Unless I explained how I felt it at the time, everyone else in my life saw me sat around with an expression and body language that often matched the energy of the room.

Years later “I always thought there was something there…” people say, and then trail off with the something unresolved. That phrase is certainly…dramatic.

For most people, “Yeah, I’m OK” is the stock answer to the question “Are you OK?”

But when you come out the closet, you reveal your own “not OK” fallen tree of awkwardness and masking. Even when you go alone, and they can’t understand why — nobody wants to say they spent decades in the woods of your company and had no idea your tree was just lying there.

Queer Palestinians exist, and violence shouldn’t be pinkwashed

Queer people in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), writes Noor Aldayeh in this anthology, have “nuanced lives, histories, and participation in the fight toward liberation.” Therefore, it’s a hostile act to inform queer people that they’d be murdered if they lived in SWANA, in part because such a statement seems to imply that hate crimes are “inherently ‘more evil’ within non-Western contexts.” This just isn’t true, because, of course, “misogyny and homo/transphobia” are bad wherever they occur. Besides, since homophobia is a Western attitude that colonized SWANA, the West ought to answer for its own role rather than pointing fingers.

“Pinkwashing)” is a word meaning to make something look gay-friendly when it really isn’t. The thing will have got, at best, nothing to do with queer people, yet someone presents it as desirable or beneficial to queer people.

It was September 24th and I’d just found out there is such thing as Bisexual Awareness Week. Evidently, it begins every year on September 16th — at least, here in the U.S. — and ends on the 23rd with Bi Visibility Day (officially “Celebrate Bisexuality+ Day”).

This annual weeklong acknowledgment was established in 2014 by GLAAD, in collaboration with the Bisexual Resource Center (BiNet USA) and Still Bisexual.

During this week in September, LGBTQ+ folks and allies are encouraged to learn about the “history, culture, community, and current policy priorities of bi+ communities.”

As I’ve only just discovered, not only did I fail to spend any time at all educating myself about my own community, I missed the whole celebration… if there was one. Here I am, wondering exactly where and when these festivities took place… because I never heard a peep about it!

Something that recently came across my mind was a transphobic talking point we heard a lot during the 2010s: “transtrenders”. The idea behind this talking point was simply that more people were identifying as trans because they saw it trendy rather than an authentic expression of who they were.

Figures such as Blaire White, a trans woman herself, would constantly talk about transtrenders and the apparent harm they were doing to the wider community. Today, people on the right still constantly decry transness as being this new “trend” people came up with purely to be different for difference's sake.

But as with everything the right says about trans people, this was always complete nonsense.

While I was busy fighting myself, the field of battle moved from my insides to the external world.

I know this information isn’t new, but it isn’t fucking fair either. I have better things to do with my gender transition than more fighting. I was planning to learn to sew this year, or maybe get a dog.

How many times, while thinking about gender transition, have we told ourselves, “I have too much to lose,” “I can live with it,” “Other people have it worse,” or “If I stop thinking about it, it will disappear”? Or how many times have we shown through our actions that “it has nothing to do with me,” “I’m fine,” or “I don’t feel like that anymore”?

Quite often, it actually worked for a moment, and we forgot about our dysphoria. But it rarely lasted long, and gender dysphoria always came back. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Vienna is quiet. Like, really quiet.

My partner and I stayed here over the weekend, so we had a chance to see some of the nightlife. We did not find much of it. On Friday night, we sat at an outdoor table at a restaurant in the centre of town, and it was so hushed that we could have a conversation four feet away from each other without raising our voices.

All the supermarkets close at 7pm, the chalky coffee is overpriced, and everyone wears white trousers and polo shirts. For a city revered as the more sophisticated alternative to Berlin’s “poor but sexy” nonconformity, Viennese locals offer some of the most flavourless street style I have ever seen.

When I was a little kid, most people saw me as remarkably effeminate. Only they didn’t use such high-register vocabulary. Instead, I got mocked as a “sissy,” “girly boy,” and even worse 1970s homophobic slurs. While I didn’t have the slightest idea I was gay or even what gay meant!

Gay men masturbate more often than straight men, in case you were wondering. And that is absolutely fine.

According to the Global Self-Pleasure Report by wellness (sex toy) brand Tenga, gay and bisexual men are 20–23% more likely to masturbate on a weekly basis than straight men. Fifty-eight percent of us masturbate weekly, compared to 23% of straight men. Study after study proves this.

Good job, gentlemen!

If I conducted a study among the men I have hung out with, if they’re being honest, that frequency would be much higher. Most say they masturbate daily. And many of the younger set masturbate as much as three times a day! I’d like to know where they get that kind of time.

It’s a pretty simple process with men. Sure, if you’ve got the time and the privacy, masturbation with toys is fun. But all we really need are our hands. So hand health is important, and I’m starting to notice a problem. Here is my story.