I Gotta Find Myself

This story begins before people wrote down their stories.

This story begins with the birth and flowering of language and imaginative thought for our species, more than 100,000 years ago. In a time before cities, before agriculture, when humans lived in bands of hunter-gatherers.

In this time in human prehistory, there are so many unknowns. We don't know for sure how early humans organized their bands. Did they have some kind of hierarchy? If so, what was it based on? It's a myth that men evolved to hunt and women to gather, an understanding which leaves more questions than answers. We don't even know how people identified in terms of their sex and gender -- did they too construct identities based on sex and gender? Or did they do something totally different? While certain things like ancient burial sites do give us clues, we don't know for certain.

There's so much that is unknown about human prehistory, our earliest social structures, and identities, that it leaves the door open to imagine countless possibilities.

It leaves the door open for truths.

For the First Time

I am 10 years old when I first write about a trans person.

I have no language for it. I don't know what a trans person is, at least, not in so many words. I just know this person is "different", that he was born "female" but lives as a man. He's a minor character who appears for a page and then never resurfaces.

He continues to haunt me, however, and as I rewrite and revise the novel, I expand his role. He becomes the partner of the main character, another man, who never bats an eye over the character's trans-ness. They even have children together.

This is his story for years. It becomes frozen in stasis, because I eventually shelve the novel and the character to work on other things.

But then, the day comes when I finally recognize that I am trans.

They Put a Bounty on My Soul

Modern U.S. and Western cultures use and abuse the notion of history constantly. We often use the idea of "historical precedent" to say "it's always been this way" in order to justify atrocities and injustices in the present. Everything from sexism and racism to Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, and transphobia, and beyond, are justified through the lens of historical precedent in some way, shape, or form.

Westernized notions of sex and gender are also frequently justified by the idea that "binary" sex and gender have "always existed" and are therefore "common sense".

In January of 2025, the Trump regime declared that "the biological reality of sex" is "immutable" and cannot be altered or changed. (Never mind that the genital mutilation of intersex children persists in the U.S. in order to maintain this rigid and non-existent "biological reality".)

Following this declaration in 2025, there was a record number of anti-trans bills in the U.S. -- 1,022 to be exact -- legislation written explicitly to curtail or altogether erase the rights of transgender citizens.

One of the most vile and devastating pieces of legislation, which came into effect in Kansas in late February of 2026, invalidated the driver's licenses of over 1,000 Kansas trans folk overnight. By invalidating their driver's licenses without warning or ample time to get a new form of ID, trans citizens of Kansas risk jail time and fines if they continue to drive with their invalidated licenses. Never mind that many of these people need to drive to the DMV to get a new license, at their own expense. This legislation also enacted a bathroom ban in which Kansas citizens are allowed "to sue trans people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages". This potentially includes private restrooms.

While anti-trans legislation and sentiment like this has been on the rise for the past decade, it's accelerating at an alarming pace -- and is, in fact, a form of genocide. The Lemkin Institute, which monitors for genocide across the globe, issued a third red flag alert for trans genocide in the U.S. on March 11, 2026.

Bans against gender affirming care for youth and young adults have become rampant under the guise of "protecting children". But a recent court ruling in West Virginia basically says it's OK to deny gender affirming care to adults as well.

And in March of 2026, the Trump regime ordered federal prisons to discontinue gender-affirming medical care for trans inmates. Instead of hormones, trans inmates will have to undergo therapy and take anti-psychotics and antidepressants as part of "treatment" for gender dysphoria. These adults are being forcibly detransitioned, which is a cruel, violent, and inhumane act.

This is merely a bullet-point summary, I'm afraid. A more thorough survey would not only be time-consuming and exhausting, but redundant. It's clear that the Trump regime and its allies are interested in eliminating trans people from not only public life in the U.S., but from even existing.

As if that is even remotely possible.

I Gotta Be a Man

I tried hard to be a woman. For about 25 years, a quarter of a century, I fought tooth and nail to be a woman. When I finally said "enough" and allowed myself to relax into my male identity, I discovered being a man was much, much easier than being a woman.

It wasn't because the pervasive sexism in my culture made being a woman difficult, either. It was simply because I was no longer fighting with everything I had to be something I was not. I could simply be myself.

A few years after I started testosterone and began to pass, I remembered that novel and the trans man I had started writing when I was 10. I went back through old manuscripts and journals, rediscovering this character as I was rediscovering myself. I was delighted by his presence in my earliest work, a sort of confirmation that I had always been trans and known what that meant to some extent, even when I didn't have the language to describe it.

I decided the trans character was much more interesting than the original main character of the story, so I made him the protagonist and begin reworking the story idea. I gave him a new name: Sivas. I don't remember what it was originally intended to mean, only that I knew he chose this name for himself. I have never known his deadname, and I aim to keep it that way, since it is irrelevant to his character.

Build an Army of My Own

I primarily write speculative fiction these days, a type of alternate history in which I reimagine gender, sex, sexuality, race, identity, language, and culture. I have since I was 10 years old, in fact, conjuring worlds and histories like -- and unlike -- my own.

I have a passion for prehistory and prehistoric cultures especially. Anything older than 1 AD is my jam, particularly paleolithic and mesolithic, but I also enjoy dabbling in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, various areas where there was a "Bronze age", ancient cultures of the Americas (the Inca Empire and the Anasazi) -- heck -- pretty much any ancient culture.

I also gain assistance and understanding by studying the stories, histories, and cultures of indigenous people from around the globe, such as the Sámi folk of Finland, the Nenets of the Russian tundra, the San of Southern Africa, and beyond. Studying these cultures gives me an idea of what a culture outside of Western colonialism might look like. (It's . . . complicated to say the least, simply because many accounts of indigenous cultures and their stories are written by colonizers.)

But it is here, in the visages of early human culture, with all of its dazzling unknowns, that I feel most alive as a writer. I wonder: how else can we express identity, such as gender and sex? How can we understand a world in a way that is not violently patriarchal, or not consumed with racism, sexism, queerphobia?

The possibilities are breathtaking.

Hold My Fire

I have a vivid memory of sitting in a workshop and having another writer defend the sexism in the medieval fantasy novel we were critiquing, saying it "made sense" because of "historical accuracy".

I told them that it was fantasy, and that in the fantasy genre, things are made up. Including the sexism.

I don't remember if anyone listened, or cared, but I do remember being incredibly incredulous about the whole thing.

Now I look back on it and recognize the moment for something else: a failure of the imagination. The original author of the medieval fantasy, and the writer who defended him, both had such limited imaginations they could not fathom a made-up (Western) medieval world without sexism.

This is profoundly sad. And not unusual. Because we constantly preface the limits of our imaginations with statements like "it's always been this way".

Only, we have no reasonable way of knowing that. If we go back, back far enough, we can only glimpse vague outlines. The rest? The rest is up to our imaginations, which, while blunted by the limits of our contemporary cultures, can nevertheless become a beacon for alternate visions.

For this reason, I write speculative fiction, or, more simply, fantasy. I intend to rewrite history as we understand it by challenging the status quo of gender, sexuality, and gender identity. I intend to put trans people back where they belong: in history. Extending back, back far enough, to the beginning of human imagination and language. Back to a time when we unquestionably existed, though, using different words than we currently do. Because one truth is that we have always existed and always shall.

* * *

Sivas is one of the protagonists in my current novel-in-progress. He has been a soldier, a translator, an ambassador. He is fluent in six languages. He has been shipwrecked and found himself in a strange culture on distant shores. He has one son who he has raised with his dear friend. In the course of the novel he becomes pregnant with a second child, which he decides to keep. In the current timeline of the story, he has been adopted by a mesolithic, hunter-gatherer type culture which uses the bountiful waterways of their land to travel between summer and winter camps.

In this world, which is teaming with different cultures, different ways of being and identifying, Sivas makes a home for himself where-ever he lands.

I'm Gonna Say Goodbye

This concludes issue 9 of Wellspring. My next newsletter will come out in June 2026.

Until then, you can find me on my website, BlueSky, and Facebook, and read past issues of Wellspring in the archives.

Take care and have a lovely spring if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, enjoy your fall.

PS. The title of this newsletter and the headers comes from "A Million on My Soul" by Alexiane. You can listen to it here on Youtube and here on TIDAL.