Month: August 2021

Here is the theme music to my new show.

It was a fairly warm summer day in late 1996. The setting is Hasting, Nebraska a rural city in the heartland of America. In the middle of a big field, on the outskirts of town, sits an old abandoned brick factory. As is often the case with most small towns trying to repurpose the old into new while preserving their past, this place was converted into a city park. It was called Brick Yard Park.

It was one of these big parks with lots of trees, water ways, multiple playgrounds and, the reason we went, a big walking trail that ran throughout the park and along the perimeter. I can’t tell you how many weekends were spent traversing this park. It was one of the few family outings everyone could agree on. My sisters would split off and run around the playground areas. Mom would usually walk the dog. As for me, I would take a long walk through the park with my dad. This became a habit of ours.

My dad and I rarely talked. The only activities we shared was doing yard work, fixing the car and watching basketball. The rest of the time we pretty much avoided each other at all costs. It was different on the walking trail. We were alone. There was something about the cool breeze, the fresh air, the sounds of nature all around, it made us open up. We didn’t talk often and it usually took a few minutes to warm up but those walks around the park were when we did our most communicating.

Dad would tell me about his life. The things that were important to him. Usually he’d share the latest Bible passage he was deep into studying. Then he would see a car drive by and tell me the exact year and model it was and what age he was when he owned his first whatever car it was. My dad was a big car guy of course so he always talked cars. I’ll get to that later.

Whenever we moved to a new town the first thing we did as a family was found a new park. My dad and I would scope out a new walking trail. Sometimes mom or one of my sisters would join us. Believe it or not, we were actually a very close and loving family. Most of the time it was trails like that one in Hastings, a paved sidewalk in a city space designated for walking. Sometimes we’d come across one that was really cool, like Twin Falls, Idaho. They had one that was built into the side of the canyon it was called Canyon Rim Park. Oh it was gorgeous. Talk about being in the wilderness. This was down in a crevasse in the earth, trees and water all around. It did have some paved parts but it also had dirt trails you could take into the woods if you dared. This was also a nice park with a playground, picnic area and other sights to see. As always, we were there mostly for the walking.

I remember every single walk telling my parents about whatever thing currently had me excited be it my music, breakdancing, video games, computer programming, trading cards, or my writing. They always encouraged me to follow my dreams while also keeping an eye out for a steady job to pay the bills. Each conversation was equal parts relief, joy, family bonding and dread. The dread was the voice in the back of my mind nagging me to tell my parents I was different. I never could drum up that courage though.

In the summer of 2018 my parents had returned to Jackpot, Nevada. The small town where I ended my high school career to start pursuing music full time, among other things we’ll get to later. I had recently quit my newspaper job to move back out west. I was ready to start finding out who Stephanie really was but I was too afraid to do that in Texas. I ended up moving back in with my parents. The town didn’t have much in the way of actual walking trails. Rather what we did, because it was so small, was walk around pretty much the whole town and just absorb the desert air. It was dry, mostly brown and yellow and smelled a lot different than Nebraska or Kansas that’s for sure. Side note, believe it or not Kansas and Nebraska actually their own distinct smells. I’ll come back to that someday too. Trust me my heart aches to talk more about Kansas.

As we walked up the side of the mountain along the trail we talked about our plans for the future, as we always did. And as usual my plans were in flux as I had just started my own newspaper and they were curious what I was doing with my life. I didn’t bring myself to tell them I had left my job to start transitioning into a woman. I was still very afraid to do so. Instead I just savored what would be the last walk they would ever take with their son. It was one year later I started coming out to people and two years to the month I told my mom the news I was a woman. Needless to say things changed.

Through the good times and the bad times we went for walks when we needed to clear our heads or just slow life down. I sometimes I’d walk side by side one of my sisters, one or both of my parents and even friends on occasion. It’s a fundamental part of being human. Returning to our roots is very primal.

Now, I walk alone on an empty trail. My sisters have all scattered the wind married with their own families. Two of them refuse to accept I am trans, one tries but lives a free spirited life and rarely finds the time to check in. My parents keep me at a safe distance. Even my adopted sister rejects me when I ask her to go for a walk with me despite how desperately  wish I had someone to walk with. To be fair all is not entirely lost. I have a guy friend who invites me for walks sometimes around the park, but we mostly chase Pokemon on our phones. It’s not bad but not the same.

What do you do when your heart is empty and the walking trail goes cold. Do you walk it alone and let the ghosts of your memories haunt you? Do you push forward into the unknown with nobody by your side to bounce ideas off? Maybe you sit in your bedroom in the dark at 5 a.m. typing away on your laptop in tears as you ponder what you’ve lost. I don’t have an answer. I just know even on a hot 95 degree Texas summer day that lonely walking trail feels mighty cold and alone.

I would like to introduce everyone to my latest concept. The Stephanie Bri Show.

This is a refining of all the ideas I have had bouncing around in my head for some time now. It is essentially a culmination of all the different endeavors I have pursued over the years. In other words this is the show I always wanted to do, but was too afraid to before.

In many ways it will resemble my previous two podcasts, The Spiders Lair Show and The Dark Web Podcast. In other ways it will appear fresh and new. But how so?

At it’s core this show will be more like a typical talk radio show in that it will run on the longer side. It will cover multiple areas of interest and it will give me the freedom to talk about the things that are important to me. Where it will be different is I will make it more structured. I won’t let the cat entirely out of the bag yet, spoilers and all that. Instead I want to provide a preview of what I am working on and why this is what I needed to do.

First, it will be more structured. I owe a lot of this to my big sister Robin for this part. She noticed I had potential to do great things but I really lacked focus. She helped me find my focus. The way it will be structured is I will break the show’s topics down into segments. Each segment will cover a specific topic.

Second, the show will be more focused. Like before I will have topics that focus on things I find interesting but where it will be different is they will be tied to certain topics. Not to mention the entire show will be told with a transgender slant. This will allow me to keep each segment devoted exclusively to that particular topic.

Third, it will be LGBT friendly. In other words this show is a part of my vision of living in a world where transgender people are seen as normal people. I want to produce content as a trans person other trans people will want to consume but I want it to remain accessible to those who aren’t transgender. For me it is important we have content that is trans-produced that is no different than the same content being produced by a cis gendered person. I just want it to be a show you can find entertaining whether you are trans or not.

Fourth, the show will be more polished than previously. I will have music, transitions and higher production values. I will be drawing upon all of my skills as a broadcasting major with experience in the commercial media production industry. It is important for me to treat this endeavor like a legit investment. This is what I pictured The Dark Web would be before I killed it after I came out trans.

What topics will I cover? Spoilers. No I will put it together soon enough. The first episode will drop on my birthday next month. That is something I planned when I left the Transposed Podcast. For those keeping track I left that show so I could let my sister have her show back how she originally envisioned it while I took time to refocus my energy on finding what I really wanted to do next.

Mark your calendars as The Stephanie Bri Show will drop on Sept. 7, 2021.

What about the blog? YouTube? Facebook Lives? Yes. Those are coming back but not in the same way as before. More to come on that later. Facebook will return first. The blog, obviously, is living on as it always has. YouTube will be down the road a little ways.

That is all I have for now this was my big announcement I wanted to share.

TERF. Feminazi. Dyke. These words are not all interchangeable but they are all used by the same person, an individual who hates strong women having their own independence from their male counterparts. Each word is harmful in it’s own way even if they have different meanings to the speaker.

A male calls a feminist a feminazi because he feels threatened by her power. In his world view women belong to men and it is the male responsibility to protect women. Women who “go against nature’ as he’ll claim, are broken and in need of abuse to break them down in order to put them back in their place. On the flip side in reality she is a strong woman because she as abused. Most likely she’s had enough of men telling her what to do. She’s tired of being treated like a piece of meat to be paraded around and traded by men. She isn’t fighting to suppress or supplant men, just to be treated with human dignity.

Dyke. This one carries a much stronger venom. It’s not just directed at females in the lesbian community, although it is intended to diminish their worth. At it’s core this word reminds the woman her value to the man. Her vagina is off limits therefore she is of no use to him. He calls a feminist a dyke with the intention of painting her as a man-hating lesbian who can’t get laid. In his mind it is pulling the rug out from under her. He feels threatened by this person because he can’t control them. He rarely lobs it at actual same-sex women rather choosing to use it to hurt cishet females. It’s homophobic and misogynist at the same time.

TERF is a strange one. It is most often used by trans women, trans men and their allies directed at a brand of women who mistreat trans individuals on the basis of their genitals. It is meant to put the woman on guard. But this is the only of the three terms I am discussing that is not directed at actual feminists who wish to empower women. Instead this one is often used to brand women who some classify as betraying womanhood. While I, a transwoman, am appalled there are women who share these feelings, I hesitate to use the term towards a woman who thinks she is protecting herself from men. I am not a man, and she needs to understand that I am not a threat, but I was not born the same as her and I need to accept that too.

There is a line in the trans community we often overlook in our endeavors to push back. It is the one thing we do share in common with cis females, and transmen for that matter, as in we are judged by our sex organs. Our value is based on our ability to reproduce. This is something we share in solidarity with our cis sisters. And I hope we can stand united under that wall of oppression as a means to fight back. At it’s core we’re both facing the same enemy and that enemy is quite skilled at the phrase divide and conquer. Remember it is men after all that created war and all it’s horrors in the first place. They know how to conquer, it’s in their fucking DNA.

SO what about being trans makes my experience different? I am not and will not be told I am a man emulating a woman. I was a woman born with a defective body and I was conditioned erroneously to think I was male. This caused not only intense psychological harm to my self image, it left me in a world alone without any meaningful connections with other humans.

I have had deep conversations with woman who were born with vaginas. Their experiences are different than mine. I have seen, with my own eyes, perverts lusting after my 7-year-old niece like she was dessert. It made me sick. Women do grow up in a more hostile world than transwomen do. We have to remember our privilege. We suffered, in silence and agony and woman might not fully understand that.

The best illustration is Jane Goodall. She was a human woman who lived among apes, as though she was herself a ape. She experienced life among the gorillas. That is what trans women do from birth. We are forced to disguise ourselves like the other gorillas because the world hasn’t accepted we are really unicorns. Once we shed our ape costume and find our inner unicorn, we often find solace among our unicorn sisters who were free to be beautiful from birth. So we are taken back whenever we encounter a unicorn that feels threatened by us. They see us as a wolf in disguise. One of the enemy using a tactic they created. Espionage. To the paranoid female it does appear as though her oppressor is sending in soldiers in disguise to trick them, to make them vulnerable then finish defeating them, pushing them back to where they once were.

While I do recognize men and women have fundamental differences I know much of that is cultural. The parts I can’t fully experience are things I have to grapple with. Likewise, once the cis woman realizes I am not a man trying to infiltrate her sacred space, but rather a sister that was taken by the men and was abused and forced to act like one. That is when she will see we are in desperate need of her nurturing love and support. Then we can begin to heal the rift between trans women and terfs who are most likely misinformed, but in some cases, justifiably skeptical.

I never fully understood white privilege until I have up my male privilege. I remain white but I am now an enemy to the men in power. I threaten their sense of manhood. Their understanding of women as lesser than men. They dismiss me and take pleasure in getting other women to turn on me and my vulnerable sisters as well. Remember there are women out there who throw these terms at other women too. Women who bought into the male dominance narrative and accepted their masters way of life. They are no less women than we are. They are no less oppressed than we are.

WE all need to stand together in order to defeat the enemy. I hate to say it but it’s an enemy that is stronger, better equipped, armed to the teeth and has thousands of years advantage over us. The real conundrum is what to do with our transman friends. I say we love everyone and just stop fighting. End the war by all parties saying we’ve suffered enough.

Until that time I will gladly fight, as a woman, as a feminist, as a proud queer, to end our oppression. As a woman, if it means taking on additional burden to make other women feel safe, we can talk but only politely so, and in the safety of our own community separate from the men who hate us.

I was there the day James was born. It was in the summer of 2003. The kid just turned into an 18-year-old man last week and decided he wanted to brush his family off and some see his aunt in the big city. I was so touched he drove up here to visit I cancelled my laser appointment, took him to the skate park, the mall and then we went to a hair salon, his choice, and dyed our hair. He wants to be more emo and got a haircut and a wicked cool color I am super in love with at the moment.

We reminisced about the good times we had when I was still his uncle. He asked me a lot of questions about my life and I told him what he needed to know. He proceeded to tell me all about his life. The girl he likes. His job, the car he drives, his music he is working on, and a bunch of other stuff. I started crying and he wondered why I was sad. I said I am not sad I am happy. By the end of the day he saw why I needed to move away from my family and be his aunt. Why even though he had missed his uncle he new I was still in his life but only now, I was happy.

Halfway through the day he commented wow I have never seen you this happy before. He called me his aunt all day. We took selfies together. I even stole a couple extra hugs. Then, the next day out of the blue he sent me a text saying he had a great day, asked how I was doing and said he loved me I am still crying to this very moment.

This is how you’re supposed to treat a person in your family who comes out as trans, gay, bisexual or whatever. The same as you would have before hearing their life changing news, that really shouldn’t have been life changing in the first place but I digress.

WE went shopping in the mall, shared some Wetzel’s Pretzels and did so much that day. By the end of the day I felt more alive than I can remember feeling. I enjoyed watching him do tricks on his skateboard. I listened to his song he recorded on his ipad. I gave him one instruction when he went home, to give his baby sister a hug and tell her I love her. I hope he keeps that promise. Maybe now he will go back to his family as my ambassador and help them see I made the right decision. If nothing else I am so happy to still have such an amazing nephew in my life. I love you kid and I wish nothing but good things for you