Hello, readers. I come to you four years later, this Substack dry and dusty, with no updates in many years. It’s hard to imagine that a few years ago, I was giving podcast and TV and radio interviews, trying to get detransition on the map, complaining about how mainstream media mentioned said the word in the context of the book “Detransition, Baby,” the satirical novel about a neurotic polyamorous trans woman detransitioning and accidentally conceiving a child.

Well, well, well, how the tables have turned. Detransition has become a mainstream concept, Chloe Cole is testifying regularly before Congress, Jojo Siwa is straight again or something, the vibe has thoroughly shifted. So much has changed.

And as for me, well.

I’ll admit, I tried to pick back up on this blog a few times, and found myself uncertain. What more was there to say? I spilled some really personal stuff on here, partially for catharsis, partially out of a hope it would help other people, that my suffering could take on new meaning, be redeemed, be connective, be more than just the long long never-ending bummer of some very serious mistakes.

I am willing to share a lot, being the child of lifelong writers who often text me to say “hey, this would be a great essay.” But at a certain point, the gory details, the regret, the persona of the detransitioner - it begins to feel too sad. I have been wounded, I have made mistakes, yes, I have serious grievances, but who cares? How long am I going to be stuck on that?

So the blog sat. I don’t want to write trauma porn here. And even for an over-sharer like myself, there’s a limit on how much of my psychological guts I’m willing to spill under my government name. Perhaps the initial urgency has faded, and in its place has come a little bit of reticence.

So anyway, the baby

I took a dose of testosterone for a relatively short period of time — 9 months in total, perhaps. I worried I had messed up my fertility.

Part of detransition for me has been a serious feeling of “oh shit, wait, maybe I wanted that!” All the things I thought I was throwing away — womanhood, motherhood, femaleness - it was so much more deeply ingrained in me, so much more inescapable. And it turned out that the decisions I made while depressed, strung out on internet addiction, rotting in my room, hating myself and being self-destructive — that version of me was not making choices that I was going to be very happy with long-term. So I tried to salvage what I could. I grew my hair very long, long enough to cover my scars, in what I have since dubbed the “Detransition Cope Hairdo.” I backpedaled from the edge lord trans aesthetics, took out all my facial piercings, spent several years dressed in sedate J Crew officewear.

And I considered being a mother. Although most of my old friends are still not parents, I noticed that I knew one or two people in my age cohort who were having babies. Not many, and not most — It was the countercultural ones, the creative ones, the beautiful artistic girls who pushed the boundaries in every way. They were the ones diving into motherhood. And that intrigued me. If most of my mid-20s friends were eschewing motherhood, but the most cutting edge artistic woman I knew was bouncing a baby — could it be that this was not, in fact, necessarily the realm of the boring default, but could in fact be an extraordinary adventure, a source of great meaning?

I know that sounds shallow. But you have to admit that among the millennials, motherhood has a branding problem. Motherhood smacked vaguely of minivans, suburbia, The Patriarchy, Karen-ish frosted bobs, and other such unstylish associations. Not to mention the very real logistical and financial hurdles. So it intrigued me to see certain friends who I knew to be smart, self-assured women going for what passes for early-ish motherhood in our extremely-kid-shy millennial set.

But watching a few of our peers stalwartly embrace parenthood, seeing them feed their round, giggly baby spoonfuls of grits at our trendy brunch place — it intrigued us. “Why did they have to wait til after his nap to meet us, like, how much can his nap schedule possibly matter?” We wondered to ourselves, extremely child-free-ly. Experienced parents will wince in secondhand embarrassment, as we do now, looking back. You morons! The nap schedule is EVERYTHING!

So very shortly after marriage, I went off birth control and we decided to see what happened. And luckily, we got pregnant quickly. We welcomed our first child in 2023. I left my software engineer job and became a stay at home mom. And I entered a very intense phase of life, dragging through pregnancy with a toddler, speech delays, forming alliances with neighborhood moms, and more. A second child came in 2025. I’m still home with the kids now.

There will be more to say about that. It’s difficult to find the right balance to protecting my children’s privacy but also not pretending they don’t exist — I’ll call them Maxwell and Sammy, here, and hopefully they will not begrudge their mother for jotting down some notes related to their lives.

I have benefited a lot from motherhood. It took me out of my head, made me focus on some of the most worthwhile work possible, and removed my ability to stew on neurotic unending introspection. I like this new version of me, the woman who stuffs her wiggling toddler into the stroller and wheels him out to the playground instead of rotting inside on her phone feeling vaguely bad for no reason. But there’s balance in everything, and over the past few years, I’ve been missing the intellectual satisfaction of writing. I started up my Twitter again in order to connect, but there’s only so much that the slot-machine rush of firing off two-sentence tweets can do. It’s time to work on something a little deeper.

All this to say: I’m firing up this blog again, but the focus will no longer be on just detransition. I will write about motherhood, womanhood, my various interests, and perhaps throw my hat into the ring on some of the hot takes of the day. I have rigged up a challenge on Beeminder, so you should be hearing from me every Tuesday from now on. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, so if you’re not interested in this new Hormone Hangover Variety Show, no hard feelings. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to subscribe, comment, like, or share my blog posts over the years. This blog has changed my life in all kinds of ways, and I can’t wait to see where it takes me going forward.