The word "transmedicalism" has lost all meaning and should be retired. Also you should put your head in the toilet and flush, since I can't be there in person to do it for you today. Schedule conflict, you understand.

We actually should not have empathy for people who subjugate children to their own torturous personal beliefs. These children suffered just as much pain and permanent disability as if they had been severely physically abused. This is not an innocent mistake. A functioning society cannot allow this.

Changing the system from the inside, famously a thing that works and actually happens

It does not have to be this way. We have the ability to make it better. We can spare ourselves and each other and the world this needless pain. But only if we want that more than we want the erasure that comes with drunkenness.

Alcohol is an unvarnished evil. Treat it as such.

And sometimes they succeed, and it's wonderful. Those husks come back to life and they're able to do and to care about and to love all the things that really matter to them, which mean so much more than alcohol ever should have. It's inspiring and beautiful. But it's a constant struggle.

Years spent in meetings and hospitals and therapists' offices, cycles of recovery and relapse, ruined finances and shattered families, and through it all, those last fading embers of those brilliant beautiful people struggling to reignite themselves, to overcome the addiction and be again.

I wish I could show you the struggles of recovery, of people having seizures from withdrawal or struggling through medical detox. People who want so badly to get well, but who stumble, again and again, back into the claws of alcohol. I wish I could do this, so maybe you'd never take that first drink

I wish I could name them all for you. I wish I could tell you exactly how they died, and how it could have been prevented. I wish I could introduce you to the people whose lives are consumed with it now, who are on that path to an early and miserable death, but who are struggling to get off it.

Where you're never more than ten minutes from a liquor store, or a bar, or a shop that sells booze alongside the bread and vegetables like it's not poison for the soul, like it's just a normal product. Where taking that first drink, and then the next, and the next, is so horribly easy.

People killed or mained in car accidents. People who prioritize the drinking for so long that some other, preventable or treatable death sneaks up and kills them. So many of them. And I live in a state and a country which glorifies drinking, which treats drunkenness and its consequences as a joke

Parents reduced to helpless invalids, being cared for by their young children. Musicians whose instruments gather dust under a pile of empty bottles. Young people dying alone, decades before their time, confused and helpless. People whose organs shut down, or who choke on their own blood.

One of the best purchases I ever made was a hand-operated drain auger. Clears that crap right out, although cleaning it off the cable can be a chore.

I would choose no other path.

It simultaneously feels like this whole journey began yesterday, and like I never lived any other life. I can no longer clearly remember what it was like before, beyond broad strokes. And thank God. Literally I thank God for making me trans and for giving me the strength and supports to transition