Through a Gauntlet, Indeed -- Thoughts on Transition and My Return to Poetry

Many of you may remember me by my dead name, and the work which was published under it. And you may remember my dramatic, kind of explosive departure from the world of the literary arts.

I remember, as well. And it turns out there was a lot more swimming under the surface than I realized at the time. And there's always more to discover, but this is why poetry is ultimately so important to me.

Let's start from my brand new beginning:

What I didn't know at the time was that I didn't need a departure. I needed the isolation of my disappearance from public life to more deeply explore myself without the distraction of likes and shares and marketing and maintaining professional relationships with others (though my friendship with my colleagues endured, of course, with plenty of "please keep writing" requests, mostly from my good friend Nelson W. Pyles). But things obviously needed to change.

Something massive--mountain-shifting--was hiding in me. A big part of me knew it was there the entire time. But social conditioning, horrific bullying at any sign of femininity during my formative years, my upbringing, and the resultant fear from that combination had trained me over thirty-three years to hide it and deny it so well that I'd become utterly convinced otherwise. Until May 31st, 2025.

After many secret rendezvous with people from a variety of gender identities and instances of being in-and-out of the closet throughout my teen years and my twenties, my pansexuality was something I'd begun truly coming to terms with and being more open about in 2023. So roughly two years later, I decided to go to my first ever pride, opting to march in the parade as a pansexual individual.

That's when it happened. The woman inside of me caressed my face with her delicate fingers and whispered, "I am you, sweetie. I've always been you." And I heard her, unobscured this time.

I found myself surrounded by thousands of people unashamed to be themselves. They were proud and full of joy. I certainly can't speak for the people I was near or their experiences, but they certainly didn't seem to be worried about the thoughts of their pseudo-Christian, alt-right parents with a misguided interpretation of a single verse in Deuteronomy, re-written in the 1940s, like I had been all this time.

And I saw trans women. Lots of trans women. I'd seen trans women before, of course--I've been intimate with trans women before. And I don't know what it was about this moment that spoke to me in this way. Maybe it was the unashamed queer joy. But I realized that they were everything that I ever wanted to be. And my insides twisted with excitement and fear and an incredible concoction of conflicting internal reactions.

And dominoes began to fall in my head. They fell that day, and they fell over the next few months while I battled with myself, trying again to bury something that had always been there. But that something was winning.

I remembered a transgender woman walking down my grandparents' street as a kid. My pap was saying transphobic things that I don't want to repeat. But I didn't agree with them. I remember the excitement at the idea of changing your gender. And that same feeling would arise when my parents made transphobic jokes.

And I remembered every moment where I connected and felt safe in femininity. I remembered looking down the concave curve of my waist on my skinny boy's body in the privacy of the bathroom and thinking I would look amazing if I presented female before brushing the thoughts off. I remembered experimenting with makeup as a teenager and how badly I wanted to learn to use it to doll myself up. I remembered using the "scene kid" era of the mid-2000s to wear girl's pants and feel like myself in them. And I remembered every female character that I saw myself in in every piece of media I had ever consumed.

And it still took me a couple more months to finally accept who I was and schedule myself for gender-affirming care. But I did, and, after months of weekly estrogen injections and follow-up appointments, I have never felt more indescribably free. I am soaring.

But the world is dark and terrifying right now. Especially for people like me, and I am still fortunate in some aspects in light of who is currently being targeted by mad men and their sycophants now proven to be everything they have ever accused us of. So I returned to poetry to express those fears and hopes and feelings of rage.

Candace Nola of Uncomfortably Dark Horror, who had previously published my last two books under my dead name, was sweet enough to re-release In All the Ways, a Drowning as authored by Rei Alyssa Murray. And I am considering that to be the final crack in my egg. The symbol of my new beginning as who I truly am, regardless of who likes it or not (because it only matters that I like it anyway).

She offered to also re-release Where the Dead Don't Die, an anthology of stories that are ultimately about the horrors of abuse, which was understandably misunderstood by many of its initial readers. But I'm not sure if I'll resurrect that one, even as the Author's Preferred Text with clarifying notes as she suggested.

I just obviously was not able to convey what I wanted to truly convey through those pieces. And if I ever decide to write narrative fiction again, I will likely just write all new material.

Thank you to everyone still standing at my side after these many changes. There are many more of you than there are those that left. And I love you and look forward to bringing you back into my thoughts and leaving you to interpret them and apply them to your own experiences as you wish.