The travelogue is back.

I bored you all senseless last October with daily dispatches from my facial feminisation surgery trip, including my epic joint-smoking adventure on Walking Street, where I proceeded to stand against a wall for four hours trying not to look high as a kite while seedy men drifted past me.

Oh, You Silly Bitch How I survived Walking Street, 808 Club, and my Trainspotting flashback

Anyway, we are back.

We are in South Korea.

We are in Seoul.

And, more to the point, we are in Gangnam. One of the most affluent parts of the city, synonymous with wealth, beauty clinics and, thanks to a song released fourteen years ago, invisible horses.

So why am I here?

As my taxi driver pointed out during the mild guided tour he kept inserting into my playlist, the street beside my hotel is famous for plastic surgery. According to him, there are around 250 clinics here.

Once he realised I had come to Seoul for an operation, he began trying to give me business cards belonging to friends of his who ran plastic-surgery tours.

I think he believed I had simply flown halfway around the world, stepped out of the airport and thought:

Right. Where can a girl get some completely unspecified surgery around here?

“No, no, no,” I kept saying. “This is a very specific clinic.”

He could not believe he had never heard of it.

I tried to explain that it serves a rather specific clientele.

My charming taxi driver continued talking over my music anyway, pointing at buildings and issuing unsolicited medical-tourism recommendations as we crawled through Seoul.

Before arriving, this was my imagined version of South Korea: televisions full of K-pop, acres of camp game shows, and brightly dressed people shouting at each other while eating violently coloured food.

And, as I write this, that is exactly what is happening on the television in front of me.

I have flicked through what feels like a million channels. Not one is in English. There is no BBC World, no France 24, no tiny concession to the frightened Westerner.

You are in Korea.

You are watching Korean K-pop game-show reality television.

Get over it.

Immerse.

Enjoy.

It is magnificent.

But the television was only part of my imagined Korea.

In my head, South Korea was going to be something like Blade Runner, if Blade Runner had gone well.

Not the rain, misery, replicants and dystopia. A sunny, smiling, hyper-efficient future: recognisably like the West, but several generations ahead.

At home, I walk around like a little fairy godmother carrying a wand.

My wand is a Pixel 8.

Can of Coke?

Ping.

Coffee?

Ping.

Petrol?

Ping.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap and go.

In my imagined Korea, people would look at this technology and say:

“Good God. Are you still using phones? We moved to iris scans years ago. Retinal payment is for pensioners. Most people authorise transactions telepathically now.”

They would, naturally, have gamified the whole thing.

Spend enough money and you earn bonus points. Earn enough points and you get invited onto one of the television programmes, where twelve beautiful people scream at you while a K-pop group throws luminous noodles into a swimming pool.

That was what I expected.

So the taxi pulled up outside my hotel, and I produced my magic wand.

I held my phone over the payment terminal.

The driver looked at me as though I had attempted to pay with a potato.

“Oh no,” he said. “Cannot.”

“What now? Do I need an app?”

No.

Apparently, I needed to locate a little rectangular piece of plastic.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “I know. A credit card. You need a physical card.”

A physical card.

It is 2026, and South Korea, the country that was supposed to be paying for things with its eyeballs wanted me to retrieve a primitive plastic rectangle from my handbag.

Fine.

“At least I can tap the card?”

No.

The card had to be inserted into the machine.

And I was not allowed to insert it myself.

That is another thing I have noticed here. They get to put your card into the machine. You hand it over and they perform the ceremony, presumably because there is a danger that a foreigner might break the machine, tamper with it or attempt to feed it a biscuit.

I handed him my Visa.

He inserted it.

No.

Declined.

Fuck.

We performed the ceremony again with my second card, which is connected to the same international system and therefore failed identically.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

We had now exhausted my methods of payment: futuristic phone and two primitive rectangles.

Eventually we went inside the hotel, where I attempted to explain cashback, ATMs, international cards, foreign currency and the complete collapse of my ability to participate in commerce.

Luckily, the hotel staff took pity on me.

They paid the taxi driver and told me I could reimburse them.

No problem, I thought.

I would find a cash machine in seconds.

This was not a big deal.

And then the big deal began.

Before dealing with that, however, I had to deal with my face.

I had put my makeup on somewhere around 25 hours earlier. Time had ceased to have any real meaning, but it had been through an airport, two flights, Abu Dhabi, Korean immigration and a taxi tour of Seoul.

My Tom Ford sparkly gold eyeshadow had migrated halfway down my cheeks. My eyes were completely panda-black underneath. Every product I had applied had shifted south under the combined influence of aircraft cabins, tropical heat and despair.

And, if I am being honest, my upper lip no longer felt quite as smooth as it had the day before.

There was nothing actually coming through.

But this is always a worry of mine.

Somewhere in the back of my mind lives a tiny customs officer whose only job is to inspect my face and shout:

“Stubble! We have possible stubble!”

I finally reached the hotel room, looked in the mirror and thought:

Right. Let’s tackle this bad boy.

What followed was a two-hour programme of beautification, unpacking and infrastructure development.

I set up a complete workstation because, yes, of course I brought a workstation to South Korea for surgery.

Within minutes, the MiniClaudes had come back to life and my relay system was switched on again.

Normal service had resumed.

After a long shower and an industrial quantity of restoration work, I emerged looking once again like someone who might reasonably be allowed into Gangnam.

It was now around 4.30 in the afternoon.

Possibly.

I had barely eaten all day.

I was starving.

Right.

Food.

I stepped outside and began walking around one of the wealthiest shopping districts in Seoul.

Burberry. Gucci. Prada. Vast windows. Beautiful buildings. Immaculate people. Acres and acres of luxury retail.

But where was the food?

Why could I not see people sitting in restaurant windows? Where were the cafés? Where were the bars? Where was anything that did not sell a handbag?

If this was like Knightsbridge, I could see the Knightsbridge shops.

But where were the Knightsbridge restaurants?

ChatGPT to the rescue.

Apparently, there was a fancy food hall only a few minutes away.

Excellent.

Down I trotted.

And it was, in fairness, very good. Beautifully designed, spotless and full of expensive things arranged under flattering lighting.

At the first counter, I ordered what was essentially coronation chicken salad with a forest of kale.

I had learned my lesson.

No phone tappy-tappy nonsense.

I handed over a physical card.

Payment accepted.

Success.

Excellent.

Next, I spotted a stall selling enormous, delicious-looking smoothies. I ordered something called Silk Road, containing mango, pineapple, banana, coconut cream, turmeric and various other things that made it sound both luxurious and faintly medicinal.

The man told me to return in five minutes.

Excellent.

Hand-prepared.

While I waited, I wandered into the fancy grocery shop ChatGPT had described as something like Harrods Food Hall.

I thought I might buy a tiny tub of ice cream. Perhaps some chocolate. Something modest and celebratory.

I reached the checkout.

The terminal said no.

Shit.

Taxi driver: failure.

Salad: success.

Smoothie: success.

Fancy grocery shop: failure.

Two successes.

Two failures.

This was not a payment system.

This was roulette with handbags.

There was only one option left.

Cash.

I would find an ATM, withdraw some money and re-enter civilisation.

Happy days.

How difficult could it be?

I have been to Bangkok. There are ATMs every six feet. You can scarcely turn around in Thailand without walking into one.

So, Silk Road smoothie in hand, I began walking.

It was July in Gangnam, around six in the evening, and baking hot.

Not pleasantly summery.

Baking.

The air felt solid.

I trudged along the pavement looking increasingly like Morgan Freeman walking towards the oak tree in The Shawshank Redemption: hot, tired, burdened by a long history of institutional injustice, but still faintly hopeful that somewhere ahead there might be money buried under a stone wall.

No ATM.

No bank.

Nothing.

Perhaps the machines were inside convenience stores.

Excellent.

I tried those.

This was where I learned another delightful fact about futuristic Korea: not every ATM accepts Visa or Mastercard.

You think Visa and Mastercard rule the world.

They do not rule Korea.

Many of the machines appeared to be connected only to domestic banking systems. Some announced that they accepted foreign cards, but by “foreign cards” they meant one very particular Chinese payment network.

I found one labelled GLOBAL ATM.

Wonderful.

I selected Foreign Card.

Wonderful.

Then it announced that Foreign Card meant China UnionPay.

Not Visa.

Not Mastercard.

Just one specific kind of foreign card.

It was a domestic ATM wearing an international hat.

Fuck.

I kept walking.

Eventually, I saw Galleria, a huge luxury department store containing Tiffany, Gucci, Prada and enough expensive merchandise to bankrupt a small principality.

Surely this place catered to tourists.

It even had one of those tourist tax-refund and currency-exchange desks.

Solved.

I sat down in front of a woman and explained:

“Hello. I am desperate to spend money in your country, but your country seems strangely reluctant to let me have any. Could you tell me where there is an international cash machine? And could I exchange some money?”

Yes, she could exchange money.

Brilliant.

I handed her my card.

No.

They could exchange money only for other money.

“So I cannot buy Korean money from you using a card?”

No.

Only cash.

Dollars. Euros. Pounds.

The currency exchange could exchange currency provided you already possessed currency.

This is rather like a fire brigade agreeing to help only if your house is not on fire.

Fuck.

“Could you at least tell me where there is an international ATM?”

No.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

And so the traipsing continued.

By now, I had begun to feel like The Little Match Girl of Gangnam.

When I was little, I used to secretly cry at The Little Match Girl.

The poor girl sits outside in the cold, looking through glowing windows at warmth, food and beautiful things. She lights her final matches one by one, each giving her a brief vision of comfort before going out.

That was me.

Except it was 38 degrees, I was in full makeup, and instead of matches I had a rapidly dwindling supply of euros.

Everywhere I looked were beautiful shops filled with things I could theoretically afford but could not actually purchase.

One card rejection.

Another match extinguished.

A little more cash gone.

Another match.

Soon I would be standing outside Gucci, pressing my face against the glass, seeing a vision of my grandmother carrying a Marmont handbag into heaven.

Then, at the corner of my eye, I saw a bank.

An actual bank.

I went inside and found the ATMs.

International?

Yes. That’s me. International.

Foreign card?

Yes, yes, yes.

Visa? Mastercard?

YES.

Finally.

The machine asked how much money I wanted.

₩100,000?

₩200,000?

₩500,000?

₩1,000,000?

Oh shit.

I had no idea what any of these numbers meant.

A million sounded like a lot.

But perhaps Korean money worked like Indonesian money and a million bought you a sandwich.

Fuck it.

Maximum.

Give me a million.

The machine began whirring.

And whirring.

Then it started dispensing what appeared to be an entire catalogue of banknotes.

A thick, glorious wad emerged.

I grabbed it and celebrated like I had won a Korean television game show.

I took photographs waving the money around.

I held it beside my face.

I looked deranged.

Then a thought occurred to me.

How much had I just withdrawn?

Had I accidentally taken €5,000 from my account?

Had I just converted the cost of a small car into Korean cash because I could not be bothered doing the arithmetic?

I asked ChatGPT.

One million won was roughly €575.

Oh.

That was fine.

A lot of cash, certainly, but not financially catastrophic.

And so the Little Match Girl of Gangnam was saved.

She could finally walk through the glowing doors.

She could buy food.

She could buy coffee.

She could buy a handbag, although perhaps not a very large one.

For one glorious day, I was a Korean millionaire.

It’s been a while since I wrote a Witterings article, one where I simply witter on about how life has been for the last couple of weeks and what I’ve been up to.

Usually, my life is too boring to make that question worth asking.

Twice a week, I see my electrolysis technician, the lovely Megan, who invariably asks:

“What have you been up to?”

“Working.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just working.”

I get up at six and start working. When lunchtime arrives, I stop.

Well, actually, no. I don’t stop.

I sit at the breakfast bar eating my salad while listening, in audio mode, to ideas generated by my various synthetic workers. Then I go back to work.

I eat my dinner, and I work.

At 8.30 in the evening, an alarm goes off telling me to stop working.

So I stop.

Usually. Sometimes.

Megan looks at me as though there is something seriously wrong with me.

“What are you doing this weekend?”

“Probably a bit of work.”

But it hasn’t all been work, despite everything I have just written.

This week has contained imprisonment, political protest, family anguish, rooftop glamour, plastic surgery administration, sobriety and a Chihuahua impersonating Ben-Hur.

Perhaps I’ve finally got an answer for Megan.

Swooshing through Departures

We are now getting extraordinarily close to my trip to South Korea for vocal surgery.

I leave in 90 mins!

I’m becoming properly excited.

I’m one of those people who likes to dress up for an aeroplane. I enjoy putting my best foot forward, wheeling nice luggage through the airport and swooshing purposefully through Departures as though I’m about to be photographed boarding a private jet, rather than queuing behind a family of six while somebody argues about whether a half-empty bottle of Calpol constitutes a liquid.

Even Steve used to make half an effort for airports, within the extremely limited parameters available to men.

As for my children, when my son protested that he wanted to wear “comfy” grey jogging bottoms to the airport, I would say:

“Absolutely not. You look like a criminal on remand. All you need are a few little holes in them from smoking marijuana, plus crusty fingernails and bad cuticles that give off the whiff of someone who has never eaten a vegetable in their life, lives on Pot Noodle and uses the container as an ashtray.

“Absolutely not. Put some jeans on and a nice shirt.”

For this trip, I have a lovely blue dress that I want to wear on the flight. It didn’t fit me quite properly, so I found a local woman who does alterations and took it along to her.

She is putting darts everywhere. She will take it in, reshape it and somehow make it look as though it was designed specifically for me.

The entire job will cost €31.

I nearly spat out my coffee.

At that price, I’m going to take every item of clothing I own to her. I shall arrive outside her house with a removal van.

Nothing will ever merely “fit reasonably well” again. Every dress, jacket and pair of trousers I possess will be sculpted around me to within a millimetre of its life.

And she was lovely.

So, I shall be swooshing through the airport in my newly fitted blue dress, on my way to have somebody operate on my vocal cords and render me completely silent.

There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

Guantanamo

Meanwhile, the saga of Colonel Chesterton and his endless pooing continues.

Two weeks ago, I bought a large enclosed pen, which I have plonked outside the back door.

I now call it Guantanamo.

Before Guantanamo, our mornings were beautiful.

I would open Chester’s crate and say:

“Mummy’s special boy! What a great little soldier you are! Come here, my little prince. Mummy cuddle! Mummy cuddle!”

I would scoop him up and give him the biggest cuddle imaginable while he bounced around like an unmedicated squirrel that had discovered espresso.

His whole body would be vibrating. His miniature tail would be wagging at approximately a thousand miles an hour. He would lick my face, climb onto my shoulder and behave as though we had been separated for seventeen years rather than seven hours.

Things are different now.

When I open the crate, he hides at the back.

He knows what is coming.

I scoop him up. No praise. No kisses. No mummy cuddle. I open the back door, deposit him in Guantanamo and solemnly issue the command:

“Toilet.”

He looks at me as though his entire world has collapsed.

What the actual fuck happened?

Why have you stopped loving me?

Then the game begins.

Who will blink first?

Will Chesterton do the poo, thereby earning his freedom, his breakfast and the return of Mummy’s love?

Or will I soften after three minutes, five minutes or ten minutes of watching his tiny, tragic face through the metal bars?

He starts to whimper.

He shivers theatrically.

He gazes up at me like a political prisoner awaiting news from the embassy.

I have made the mistake of giving in before.

“He’s obviously not going to poo,” I think. “I can’t leave him out there forever.”

I open the door.

He trots inside, tail wagging, apparently delighted to discover that his person has regained her humanity.

Then he runs behind me while I eat my breakfast.

Twenty seconds later: poo on the floor.

“You fucking little bastard. You sneaky little shitface. I fucking hate you.”

But it is too late.

You cannot tell a dog off after the event. He has already moved on with his life. As far as Chesterton is concerned, that particular poo is ancient history, and any attempt to associate him with it would be a grotesque miscarriage of justice.

My Chihuahua may not be the easiest creature in the world to train, but he is possibly the most lovable.

I’ve also started showing him dog videos on the television.

He adores them.

He stands with his little front paws pressed against the television cabinet, staring upwards in complete wonder. Sometimes, he tries to look behind the screen to find out where the dogs have gone.

His entire universe has suddenly expanded.

There are dogs inside the wall.

The final, final, final surgery

Elsewhere in Stevie’s entirely sensible and restrained life, I am tentatively investigating one more cosmetic procedure.

Yes, I know.

My vaginoplasty was supposed to be my final, final, final surgery.

Then my voice operation became my final, final, final surgery.

Now it appears that the final, final, final surgery may not, in fact, have been final.

I am considering a waist-narrowing procedure called RibX.

We don’t need to go into all the rib-bending technical details here. The important point is that I have seen some dolls on Instagram who have had it done, and they look incredible.

I would like my waist to be more snatched.

There. I said it.

There is no profound gender theory behind this. No complex psychological explanation is required.

I am vain.

I want a more snatched waist.

As part of arranging a consultation, I need a DEXA scan to check that I’m suitable because I’m “very old”. This took me back to the doctor’s surgery in the village where I used to live.

I have never moved doctors because the receptionist there is lovely to me.

We compare notes on our various plastic surgeries like two women discussing home renovations. She has had her boobs done and her arms done. I tell her about my face, my body and my assorted other improvements.

It is basically Grand Designs, but with anaesthetic and without Kevin McCloud gravely warning that the budget has spiralled and we’re now “dangerously behind schedule”.

Fuck the budget!

Sorry, Americans, for the UK television references.

Because I was already in the area, I drove past my old house on the way home. There are two ways home, and I think this one is marginally faster.

I slowed slightly and looked towards the garden to see whether anybody was outside.

There was nobody there.

I carried on.

A few days later, I had to go back to my GP again.

This time, Chesterton was with me, standing upright in his passenger-seat carrier with his front paws resting on the edge like a tiny general inspecting occupied territory.

As I approached the road, I already knew I probably shouldn’t go that way.

What possible good outcome was I imagining?

Nobody was suddenly going to run into the garden, wave enthusiastically and shout that they missed me. There would be no miraculous cinematic reconciliation. No swelling music. Nobody was waiting to tell me that everything had been forgiven and understood.

Still, I drove past.

I slowed for a moment.

There was nobody there.

“That’s where I used to live,” I told Chester.

Then we went home.

What is here for me?

For quite some time, I have been asking myself the same question:

What is here for me?

What is keeping me in Cork?

I had already been thinking seriously about Manchester. Not as a momentary reaction or an impulsive escape, but as a genuine possibility.

A bigger city. More work. More people. More life. Somewhere I might begin again instead of remaining permanently tethered to the edge of a family life that no longer includes me, with the added risk that I might bump into someone in the city centre who would like to thump me on the nose for transitioning.

Anything but the nose, by the way!

In fact, as I drove home that day, I had almost made the decision.

I think I’m going to Manchester.

Then the messages arrived.

“Don’t drive past our house.”

“Why did you drive past our house?”

“It’s weird.”

There was something almost poetic about the timing, although not in a particularly lovely way.

Just as I had finally begun to choose somewhere else, the place I had stayed for seemed to confirm that there was nothing left for me to stay close to.

I had not stopped.

I had not knocked on the door.

I had not attempted to force myself into anybody’s life.

I had driven slowly past a house in which I had lived for years, looking briefly towards a garden where the people I love might have been.

And even that was too much.

For a day or two, Manchester felt settled.

Then I began investigating the probable upcoming legal and political changes in Britain, and the atmosphere I might be moving into.

I imagined arriving at a client’s office and being welcomed enthusiastically.

“We’re delighted to have you here, Stevie. Everyone’s very excited about the project.”

Then, after a slightly awkward pause:

“We’ve also set up a special toilet for you in the basement. It used to be the cleaner’s cupboard, but we’ve removed the mops. There’s no proper lock yet, and you may need to move the boxes of printer paper, but we thought it would be best. We wouldn’t want your presence in the women’s toilets to make anybody uncomfortable.”

Perhaps nothing like that would ever happen.

But I no longer find the possibility ridiculous.

Nor do I think the direction of travel under future governments is likely to become any kinder.

The idea of voluntarily moving somewhere that might increasingly treat my ordinary existence as a legal difficulty, a safeguarding concern or an administrative inconvenience suddenly seemed absurd.

So, for now, Manchester has gone back onto the shelf.

The question remains:

What is here for me?

I still don’t entirely know.

But whatever pain Cork contains, I can generally move through it unchallenged. I can enter a restaurant, visit a shop changing room and use a public toilet without feeling that the country is actively debating whether I should be allowed to do so.

For the moment, that is enough reason to remain.

When the factory went silent

That evening, after receiving the messages, I sat in front of my computer and stared at it.

I couldn’t work.

This is unusual for me.

Work is my great engine. It is the place where I know what to do. Problems have structures. Systems have boundaries. Software can be reasoned with.

Even synthetic workers are, on the whole, easier than families.

Then, almost comically, I ran out of credit on one of my two AI subscriptions.

Even though I pay for the absurdly expensive version, I had used my entire allowance. It would not reset until nine o’clock.

My whole synthetic factory went silent.

The workers disappeared.

The machines stopped.

The control room went dark.

There was just me, sitting alone with the pain.

And this was the dangerous bit.

Not dangerous in the sense that I was going to do anything dreadful. I wasn’t.

But it was exactly the kind of pain I used to try to anaesthetise.

I told myself:

“No drinking, Stevie. Drinking will make tomorrow worse. You cannot drown this.”

So I didn’t.

It was very close for about two minutes, though. I won’t lie. I felt so hurt and rejected.

I just sat there, my eyes bright red from the tears, and stared at the screen.

I waited.

At nine o’clock, the factory came back online.

The lights flickered on. The workers returned to their stations. Code started churning out. Deltas landed complete. Architects delivered work faster than I could read it.

And there I sat at the top of it all, lord of the manor, directing the whole thing with a wave of my hand.

It is almost poetry when it runs like this.

I worked for two hours.

By the end of it, I felt much better.

Not cured.

Not unhurt.

But functional again.

Work is not therapy, and I know that endlessly burying myself in it is probably not the final answer to every emotional problem.

But that night, it was a bridge.

I put the pain back into its box, not because it no longer mattered, but because I could not allow it to consume everything else.

The following morning, I woke up feeling good.

We had made progress.

I understood myself a little better than I had the day before.

The triggers still hurt, but they no longer automatically control what I do next.

I can experience an evening of almost unbearable sadness without drinking, detonating my life or making an irreversible decision.

I can sit with it.

I can survive the silence.

And when the machines come back on, I can carry on building.

The Trans Pride Popular Front

Yesterday was Trans+ Pride Cork.

Or Cork Trans+ Pride.

No, apparently it was definitely Trans+ Pride Cork.

I suspect that getting this wrong could trigger a schism, three emergency meetings and the immediate formation of the Trans Pride Cork Popular Front.

“Trans Pride Cork?”

“Fuck off. We’re the Cork Trans Pride Front.”

Yesterday also marked eight weeks since I stopped drinking.

That felt significant.

I decided that Chesterton and I should have an outing.

My reasoning was simple: even if everybody ignored me, they wouldn’t ignore Chester.

He takes the heat off me in unfamiliar social situations. I might not know many people, but everybody knows what to say to a Chihuahua who looks like a squirrel on a long lead.

First, however, I had my electrolysis appointment.

I came home afterwards and spent an unfeasibly long amount of time arsing around with my hair, using the GHDs and the Dyson Airwrap, until I had created the nearest thing I could manage to Olivia Newton-John about to burst into Xanadu.

I decided to complete the tribute with a skimpy black halter top, skinny black leather trousers and boots.

Dear readers, this was a mistake.

It looked fabulous.

It was also a hot summer afternoon, and I spent much of it slowly roasting inside my leather trousers while everybody around me demonstrated the superior judgement of wearing a summer dress.

Never mind.

I stood out.

We drove into Cork, parked and walked towards Grand Parade.

Grand Parade is a place, by the way. I am not yet offering a judgement on the grandeur of the parade itself.

Walking Chesterton through Cork is an unusual experience because I cannot travel ten metres without somebody, usually a woman, stopping to coo at him.

He is freakishly good on a lead for such a tiny animal. The lead stays slightly taut, and he trots perfectly beside me like a well-trained sausage skimming along the pavement.

I am not a socialist

As we reached Grand Parade, I began experiencing the peculiar discomfort I often feel at events like this.

I saw Socialist Worker flags.

I saw People Before Profit flags, which is an Irish political party, incidentally, not merely an optimistic instruction.

I am not a socialist.

Transition did many things to me, but it did not cause me to seize the means of production.

I am, if I’m honest, a bit of a trans-trapreneur.

My instinct is to build things.

Create things. Make money. Develop tools. Solve problems. Show what transgender people are capable of and make ourselves progressively harder to ignore.

My vision of transgender progress is not one of permanent victimhood.

That does not mean I think discrimination is imaginary. It does not mean the state has no responsibilities. It certainly does not mean that somebody facing hostility should simply pull themselves together, launch a software company and buy a better moisturiser.

It means that my own instinct is based more on agency than grievance.

I want us to be visible, capable, successful, funny, attractive, clever, ordinary, extraordinary and everywhere.

I don’t want transgender life to be presented exclusively as suffering.

And then, standing there, I caught myself doing something rather ugly.

I started comparing.

I looked around and silently ranked everybody.

I’m sorry, but I did.

We all do this. I’m just being honest.

I decided that I was probably the most conventionally feminine trans woman there.

I knew that I passed more easily than many of the people around me.

A middle-aged doll, perhaps, but a dolly nonetheless.

My first reaction was pride.

My second was discomfort at my own reaction.

Do not be fucking smug, Stevie.

I try very hard not to judge other trans people by how they look. I know how unfair that is. I know that not everybody wants what I want, and that not everybody has the same body, resources, starting point or opportunities.

But I also resist the idea that my appearance simply fell upon me as a form of privilege.

I have worked incredibly hard for it.

Yes, money played a part.

So did surgery, dieting, training, skincare, hair, clothes, makeup, voice lessons, pain, research, obsession and a degree of determination that occasionally borders on insanity.

I am allowed to be proud of that work.

But passing is not a moral achievement.

It does not make somebody kinder, braver, cleverer or more deserving of dignity.

It simply changes the temperature of every room they enter.

Abnormally normal

The parade began moving through Cork.

At various points, people started chanting about parts of the Irish gender healthcare system. Acronyms were shouted which I didn’t recognise, despite being transgender myself.

I knew from day one that I would get nothing from the Irish state, and I wanted nothing to do with it when it came to my transition, so I organised everything privately.

Other chants used the language of genocide.

I looked across at the people watching from the pavements and found myself reading their faces.

They didn’t know what the acronyms meant either.

And when language becomes enormous, when every failure is violence and every injustice becomes genocide, I worry that the people we need to persuade simply switch off at best and become hostile at worst.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the anger is unjustified.

Ireland’s gender healthcare system has failed many people. Some wait years for help. Others have been treated with suspicion, obstruction or indifference.

There were undoubtedly people in that march who had endured things I have been fortunate enough to avoid.

But a slogan can be morally sincere and still fail as communication.

I didn’t feel that we were bringing the watching public with us.

I wanted more uplift. More humour. More confidence. More of a sense that we were inviting people to see us as part of their world rather than standing opposite them and issuing an indictment.

I want people to look at transgender lives and think:

Oh. They’re people.

Not normal in the suffocating sense.

Not uniformly respectable, beige or well-behaved.

Abnormally normal.

Odd in all the same ways everybody else is odd.

I didn’t always get that feeling yesterday.

Occasionally, I looked around and thought:

What the actual fuck is all this?

And if I, a transgender woman walking inside the parade, sometimes felt that way, I could imagine what some of the spectators were thinking.

Fanny the Wonder Dog

Afterwards, I went to the Sky Bar with two people I knew from the parade.

I had never heard of the Sky Bar.

It turned out to be a rooftop bar in the middle of Cork, with a DJ, sunshine and a lovely atmosphere.

When we arrived, I scooped Chesterton up under one arm and walked straight inside.

It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

If dogs were forbidden, somebody would tell me. Even then, I suspected they might make an exception for a creature who looked less like a dog than an unusually alert bread roll.

The staff saw him, winked at me and let us carry on.

So I wandered around the bar like Julian Clary with Fanny the Wonder Dog tucked under my arm.

And then I was swamped by women.

Within minutes, I had been absorbed into a large group of women who wanted to stroke Chesterton, pick him up, ask questions about him and tell me how adorable he was.

Then they started complimenting me.

They told me I looked smoking hot.

They told me I must know how good I looked.

They behaved as though this was an established fact of which I had surely been aware for years.

“I don’t,” I told them. “I genuinely don’t know this yet. This is new to me.”

And it is.

I can recognise intellectually when I look good in a photograph. I can look into a mirror and see the result I have worked towards.

But being treated as an attractive woman by groups of other women is still new.

I have no internal history for it.

No childhood or adolescence spent learning how to receive that attention. No years of gradually adapting to it.

I am navigating it in real time, frequently with the emotional sophistication of a startled teenager.

One of the good drinking moments

The bar was also the most tempting place imaginable to mark eight weeks without alcohol.

Sunshine. Music. People laughing. Cold drinks arriving at tables.

It was one of those rare occasions when alcohol appears to be fulfilling every promise it ever made.

I looked around and thought:

Oh Jesus. This is one of the good drinking moments.

This was exactly when you were supposed to drink.

A rooftop bar in the sunshine, surrounded by friendly women, feeling attractive and included.

What possible harm could one drink do?

And then I reminded myself that I know where it goes.

There may be good first drinks.

There may even be a good first hour.

But there is still far too much pain in me to begin walking down that road again.

Only a few nights earlier, I had been sitting alone in front of a dead computer, shattered by two messages from a house I used to call home.

That is not a safe emotional landscape in which to reintroduce alcohol.

So I didn’t drink.

I stood on a rooftop in the sunshine, surrounded by women telling me I looked fabulous, carrying a Chihuahua under one arm, and drank something harmless.

That was enough.

The acceptable transsexual

The women also echoed some of the things I had been thinking during the parade.

They wanted to support trans people. They were perfectly happy to support trans people. But they found some of the language confrontational and some of the presentation alienating.

They wanted to be invited in, not shouted at.

It would be very easy for me to hear that and conclude that my instincts were entirely correct.

Look! The normal women agree with me! I am the acceptable transsexual! Give me a medal!

But there is another part of this which I cannot ignore.

I have a much easier experience of being transgender because I generally blend in.

I walk down the street, and people usually leave me alone. I enter shops and restaurants without causing a reaction. Strangers do not visibly inspect me or turn towards one another after I have passed.

I have, however, walked behind trans women who do not pass as easily.

Not deliberately. I simply happened to be walking behind them.

I have watched the public notice.

I have seen the second glance, the stare, the smirk and the whispered comment.

I have felt the atmosphere change around them.

And I understand why somebody who experiences that every day might become harder, angrier and less trusting than I am.

It is much easier to believe in gentle persuasion when the world is mostly gentle with you.

It is easier to advocate positivity when you are regularly rewarded for appearing in public.

If every journey to the supermarket involved people inspecting you, laughing at you or deciding that your existence was a public debate, perhaps you would arrive at Pride wanting to shout.

That doesn’t mean every slogan is effective.

It doesn’t mean I have to become a socialist or pretend to agree with political ideas I fundamentally oppose.

But it does mean I should be careful about mistaking my experience for the universal one.

Passing doesn’t make me better.

It makes my life easier.

Those are not the same thing.

Ben-Hur goes home

Eventually, Chesterton and I left the Sky Bar and walked back to the car.

I placed him inside the little carrier strapped to the passenger seat.

Usually, he stands upright with his front paws resting on the edge, surveying the road ahead like Ben-Hur commanding his chariot.

He looks magnificent.

A tiny Roman general being driven through the suburbs of Cork.

This time, he didn’t even stand up.

He curled into a ball and fell asleep within about twenty seconds.

I offered him a Skip, one of his favourite things.

Normally, he bats it around for two minutes, apparently unaware that it is food, before finally biting it and discovering all over again that it is delicious.

He didn’t want it.

He was completely exhausted.

He had spent an entire afternoon being admired by women, putting on his best face and accepting compliments from strangers.

Frankly, I could relate.

When we got home, he climbed onto the sofa and went straight back to sleep.

No playing. No bouncing. No unmedicated-squirrel routine.

He lay there completely wrecked by the burden of fame.

So that has been my week.

I have imprisoned my dog in Guantanamo, investigated having my ribs rearranged in the pursuit of vanity, almost moved to Manchester, dressed as Olivia Newton-John for a political march, been adopted by a rooftop full of women and paid a lovely seamstress €31 to make me look fabulous on an aeroplane.

I also reached eight weeks without alcohol.

That may be the most important part.

Today, I fly to South Korea.

The next time I write one of these, I may have a new voice.

Or, more likely, no voice whatsoever.

For several weeks, the wittering will have to remain strictly written.

Chesterton will probably appreciate the peace.

And when Megan next asks what I have been up to, perhaps I won’t just say:

“Working.”

Over the last few days, my essay “Why You Can’t Win an Argument With a TERF” has travelled rather further than I expected. It has been shared around, muttered over, objected to, dissected, and, most pleasingly of all, complained about at some length by exactly the sort of people it was describing

There is apparently a whole sprawling thread on Mumsnet about me. Multiple pages. Many opinions. Several amateur biologists. Quite a lot of people very confidently explaining what I am, what I am not, where I may pee, where I may not change, and why civilisation will collapse if I stand too near a locker.

Naturally, I was delighted.

Not because I enjoy being insulted, although at this point I do seem to have developed the emotional hide of a council bollard, but because the replies did exactly what the essay said they would do.

The argument in the essay was simple: a lot of anti-trans debate does not answer the question being asked. It quietly switches to a different, easier question.

So you ask:

“Why should I be excluded from the women’s changing room?”

And back comes:

“Because you’re a man.”

Which is not evidence.

It is not a risk assessment.

It is not a policy argument.

It is not proportionality.

It is not even particularly original.

It is just the switcheroo.

I did reply to a few comments. I really did try. I put on my serious face, sharpened my little argument pencil, and attempted to explain that “because I say so” is not quite the same thing as a coherent public policy framework.

But then I got bored.

There are only so many times a woman can type “that does not answer the question” before she starts to wonder whether there might be a more efficient way to annoy people.

So I built one.

Introducing the Fast Track Femme TERF Annihilation Machine

Yes, that is what it is called.

No, I will not be taking notes on restraint at this time.

The idea is simple. Instead of me patiently answering the same circular arguments over and over again, the machine lets people test their own objections.

You pick a statement you disagree with.

You type your best argument.

Then the machine checks whether you actually answered the statement, or whether you quietly ran away to a slogan cupboard and came back wearing “adult human female” as a hat.

Step one: pick something you disagree with

The app gives you a set of statements, such as:

“Trans women should be allowed to use women’s changing rooms.”

Or:

“Repeating ‘adult human female’ does not answer a policy question.”

Or:

“If evidence cannot change your mind, this is not an evidence argument.”

Pick one. Be brave. Feel the fear and define “woman” anyway.

Step two: give your honest objection

This is the important bit. The app does not ask you to pick from a list of pre-written objections. That would be unfair, and, frankly, a bit boring.

You write what you actually think.

If your concern is specific, proportionate, evidence-based, and connected to the question, the machine can say so. It is not just a giant red button that screams “TERF!” at everything, tempting though that was.

But if your objection is just “you are not a woman” with a slightly different hat on, the machine will notice.

Step three: watch the switcheroo get caught

Once you submit your answer, the machine analyses the structure of the argument.

Did you answer the question?

Did you provide evidence?

Did you explain the risk?

Did you consider proportionality?

Did you address the human being in front of you, or did you sprint back to a dictionary definition and hide under it?

The machine then gives a diagnosis. Sometimes it identifies a full switcheroo. Sometimes it spots safeguarding laundering. Sometimes it finds a lab-coat argument, where something sounds scientific but is really just prejudice wearing a clipboard.

And sometimes, if the argument is actually honest, it gives it a fair hearing.

Because this is the point: the app is funny, but the underlying issue is serious. We cannot have a meaningful debate if one side keeps refusing to answer the actual question.

Why I built it

I built it because the pattern is so predictable.

Ask about bathrooms, and they answer biology.

Ask about evidence, and they answer fear.

Ask about proportionality, and they answer slogans.

Ask about the actual person standing in front of them, and they answer an imaginary predator they have assembled from newspaper headlines and unresolved discomfort.

That is not debate. That is not safeguarding. That is not feminism.

It is attribute substitution.

It is answering the easier question because the real one is harder.

And now there is a little machine that points at it and says, “There. You did it again.”

Have a play

The app is here:

[APP LINK] TERF Annihilation Machine

The original essay is here:

Play with it. Send it to your friends. Send it to your enemies if you are feeling theatrical. Put in the strongest anti-trans argument you can think of and see what happens.

If it is a real argument, it will get a real answer.

If it is just a slogan in sensible shoes, well, the machine is rather good at spotting those.

You have been warned.

With love,

Stevie
Fast Track Femme

Over the last few days, my essay “Why You Can’t Win an Argument With a TERF” has travelled rather further than I expected. It has been shared around, muttered over, objected to, dissected, and, most pleasingly of all, complained about at some length by exactly the sort of people it was describing

There is apparently a whole sprawling thread on Mumsnet about me. Multiple pages. Many opinions. Several amateur biologists. Quite a lot of people very confidently explaining what I am, what I am not, where I may pee, where I may not change, and why civilisation will collapse if I stand too near a locker.

Naturally, I was delighted.

Not because I enjoy being insulted, although at this point I do seem to have developed the emotional hide of a council bollard, but because the replies did exactly what the essay said they would do.

The argument in the essay was simple: a lot of anti-trans debate does not answer the question being asked. It quietly switches to a different, easier question.

»»» Link to the app «««

So you ask:

“Why should I be excluded from the women’s changing room?”

And back comes:

“Because you’re a man.”

Which is not evidence.

It is not a risk assessment.

It is not a policy argument.

It is not proportionality.

It is not even particularly original.

It is just the switcheroo.

I did reply to a few comments. I really did try. I put on my serious face, sharpened my little argument pencil, and attempted to explain that “because I say so” is not quite the same thing as a coherent public policy framework.

But then I got bored.

»»» Link to the app «««

There are only so many times a woman can type “that does not answer the question” before she starts to wonder whether there might be a more efficient way to annoy people.

So I built one.

Introducing the Fast Track Femme TERF Annihilation Machine

Yes, that is what it is called.

No, I will not be taking notes on restraint at this time.

The idea is simple. Instead of me patiently answering the same circular arguments over and over again, the machine lets people test their own objections.

You pick a statement you disagree with.

You type your best argument.

Then the machine checks whether you actually answered the statement, or whether you quietly ran away to a slogan cupboard and came back wearing “adult human female” as a hat.

Step one: pick something you disagree with

The app gives you a set of statements, such as:

“Trans women should be allowed to use women’s changing rooms.”

Or:

“Repeating ‘adult human female’ does not answer a policy question.”

Or:

“If evidence cannot change your mind, this is not an evidence argument.”

Pick one. Be brave. Feel the fear and define “woman” anyway.

Step two: give your honest objection

This is the important bit. The app does not ask you to pick from a list of pre-written objections. That would be unfair, and, frankly, a bit boring.

»»» Link to the app «««

You write what you actually think.

If your concern is specific, proportionate, evidence-based, and connected to the question, the machine can say so. It is not just a giant red button that screams “TERF!” at everything, tempting though that was.

But if your objection is just “you are not a woman” with a slightly different hat on, the machine will notice.

Step three: watch the switcheroo get caught

Once you submit your answer, the machine analyses the structure of the argument.

Did you answer the question?

Did you provide evidence?

Did you explain the risk?

Did you consider proportionality?

»»» Link to the app «««

Did you address the human being in front of you, or did you sprint back to a dictionary definition and hide under it?

The machine then gives a diagnosis. Sometimes it identifies a full switcheroo. Sometimes it spots safeguarding laundering. Sometimes it finds a lab-coat argument, where something sounds scientific but is really just prejudice wearing a clipboard.

And sometimes, if the argument is actually honest, it gives it a fair hearing.

Because this is the point: the app is funny, but the underlying issue is serious. We cannot have a meaningful debate if one side keeps refusing to answer the actual question.

Why I built it

I built it because the pattern is so predictable.

Ask about bathrooms, and they answer biology.

Ask about evidence, and they answer fear.

Ask about proportionality, and they answer slogans.

»»» Link to the app «««

Ask about the actual person standing in front of them, and they answer an imaginary predator they have assembled from newspaper headlines and unresolved discomfort.

That is not debate. That is not safeguarding. That is not feminism.

It is attribute substitution.

It is answering the easier question because the real one is harder.

And now there is a little machine that points at it and says, “There. You did it again.”

Have a play

The app is here:

[APP LINK] TERF Annihilation Machine

The original essay is here:

Play with it. Send it to your friends. Send it to your enemies if you are feeling theatrical. Put in the strongest anti-trans argument you can think of and see what happens.

If it is a real argument, it will get a real answer.

If it is just a slogan in sensible shoes, well, the machine is rather good at spotting those.

You have been warned.

With love,

Stevie
Fast Track Femme

This week: I try very hard not to become a fitness influencer, explain why your shoulders may not need another bloody hypertrophy block, and ask whether the body-planning system I built for trans women is useful, mad, necessary, or all three.

I get asked about my body quite a lot.

Not by random women in changing rooms, because this is not a Carry On film and I do not spend my life being erotically appraised beside a row of lockers.

It is mostly other trans women.

They see a photo. Or they read something I have written about training. Or they notice that I have somehow managed to get from a 108-kilo dad-shaped catastrophe to something that now reads much more like an actual female body, with hips and a waist and a bum and all the bits I spent most of my life assuming were simply not on the menu.

And then the question comes.

How did you do it?

I understand the question completely, because for trans women this is not just fitness. It is not beach-body nonsense. It is not about having visible abs so we can stand under a ring light drinking electrolyte water and pretending we discovered discipline.

For many of us, the body is one of the loudest things in the room.

It speaks before we do.

Before our voice, before our name, before our clothes, before our carefully practised walk through Tesco where we are trying to look casual while also monitoring every reflective surface like a meerkat with trauma.

Our shape announces things about us. Sometimes things we do not want announced.

So yes, when another trans woman asks me how I changed mine, I take it seriously.

I wrote about it properly in my earlier piece on building a great body in your forties, fifties and sixties. The system is all in there: diet, training, psychology, habit design, the whole slightly deranged architecture of how I rebuilt myself.

How To Build a Great Body as a Trans Woman (Even in Your 40s, 50s, or 60s)

But an article has a problem.

You can explain everything. You can pour your entire brain into three thousand words. Someone can read it, nod along, feel a little spark of hope, and then, two days later, be back at lunch having eaten the calories of a Victorian Christmas before 1pm and wondering why their shoulders are still auditioning for a rugby squad.

Knowing is not doing.

It never was.

So the next question started appearing.

Will you coach me?

And the answer is no.

Absolutely not.

Not because I do not care. I care a lot. That is the problem. If I took people on properly, I would care far too much, interfere far too much, overthink everything, write twelve-page explanations, and end up emotionally invested in someone’s lateral raise technique at midnight when I should be asleep.

Also, I do not want to become one of those online fitness people.

You know the model.

Nice body at the front. Payment link underneath. “Community” in a WhatsApp group. Then behind the curtain, everyone gets basically the same programme with their name pasted into the PDF and maybe a slightly different glute bridge variation if the coach is feeling festive.

I am being unfair, obviously. Some of them are good.

But a lot of it is nonsense. Very shiny nonsense. Nonsense with abs. Nonsense with a ring light and an affiliate code.

And for trans women, the problem is not merely that some online coaching is lazy. The deeper problem is that a lot of the default fitness advice is actively pointed in the wrong direction.

The hypertrophy problem

Most mainstream training programmes are built around hypertrophy.

Build muscle. Add volume. Progressive overload. Train hard. Push more weight. Chase the pump. Make everything bigger.

That is fine for some people. It is not morally wrong to build muscle. I am not standing here with a candle and a haunted expression saying “never touch a dumbbell.”

But for a lot of trans women, especially those of us who come to this later, the issue is not that we lack muscle everywhere.

It is that we already have too much of the wrong muscle in the wrong places.

I did not arrive at transition as a delicate little woodland creature. I arrived with years of sport in my body. Cycling, Ironman training, lifting, general male-life nonsense. Broad shoulders. Thick back. Traps and lats that had not received the memo that we were now trying to go in a different direction.

That upper-body shape read male before I opened my mouth.

So what does a generic hypertrophy programme do to a woman like that?

It preserves the problem.

It trains the shoulders. It trains the back. It trains the arms. It maintains the exact silhouette she is trying to soften, and then calls it progress.

Six months later she looks in the mirror, feels like nothing has shifted, and concludes that she has failed.

But she has not failed.

The programme failed her.

It was the wrong tool.

For many trans women, the answer is not “train harder.” It is more specific than that. Sometimes it is “train less there.” Sometimes it is “stop feeding that bit.” Sometimes it is “move the work downward.” Sometimes it is “we are not trying to build a bodybuilder, we are trying to change a silhouette.”

Glutes matter. Thighs matter. Core matters. Waist-to-hip matters. Fat loss matters. Softening matters. Cardio matters. Not in a punishment way, but in a body-composition way.

And, crucially, restraint matters.

That is the bit almost nobody sells, because it is very hard to charge someone £150 a month to tell them not to train their shoulders like a deranged canoeist.

But for some of us, that is exactly the advice.

The annoying part

Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

You look at the available options and think: right, so the choices are either generic fitness apps designed for a population that does not have this problem, or online coaching that often looks trans-specific from the outside but still runs on the same bodybuilding engine underneath.

That annoyed me.

I am very good at being annoyed. Annoyance is one of my core productivity systems.

I did not want to coach people one by one. I still do not. I do not want clients. I do not want a WhatsApp group. I do not want to become the bum at the front of the sales funnel. Nobody needs that from me, least of all me.

But I also did not want to keep watching trans women get handed the wrong map.

Because there is a method here.

There is judgement. There is pattern recognition. There is a way of looking at a trans woman’s body, her goals, her history, her equipment, her hormones, her surgeries, her injuries, her time, and saying: right, this is what we are actually trying to do.

And that judgement is not magic.

It can be structured.

It can be encoded.

It can be turned into software.

So, because I am apparently incapable of seeing a practical problem without turning it into a platform, I built the machinery.

It is called Become.

What Become is

Become is a body-planning system for trans women.

That is the cleanest way I can describe it.

Not a generic fitness app with a trans option bolted on.

Not a chatbot that spits out workouts.

Not a spreadsheet with lipstick.

A proper body-planning system, built around the problems trans women actually face when we are trying to change our shape.

It starts from a simple idea: two women can look superficially similar and need completely different plans.

One might be early in transition and still able to build muscle quite easily.

Another might be years into hormones, post-surgery, and working with a completely different hormonal engine.

One might need to soften an overbuilt upper body.

Another might be under-muscled and need careful strength.

One might need fat loss and habit-building before anything else.

Another might already be lean and need lower-body shaping, posture work and refinement.

One might have a full gym.

Another might have resistance bands, a bedroom floor and twenty-five minutes before the dog starts eating a charger.

Those are not details.

They change the plan.

That is what Become is built around.

How it thinks, without boring everyone to death

Underneath Become is a decision system.

I am deliberately not going to explain every cog and sprocket, because nobody needs to read the full wiring diagram unless they are trying to steal it or fall asleep.

But the broad idea is this.

Become builds a multi-dimensional picture of you.

Not one crude label. Not “beginner.” Not “apple-shaped.” Not “fat loss client.” Not “trans woman, therefore glutes.”

A proper picture.

It looks at the things that genuinely change the mission of the plan: weight, upper-body muscle, feminisation, hormonal context, training history, consistency, aspiration, available time, injuries, surgeries and equipment.

Some of those things are core drivers.

Some are modifiers.

Some change the whole direction of the plan.

Some simply change the exercise selection.

That distinction matters.

A dodgy knee matters enormously, but it does not necessarily change what the plan is for. It changes how the plan is built safely. Carrying a large amount of upper-body muscle from a previous athletic life, on the other hand, may change the entire mission from “build” to “soften.”

That is the kind of judgement a good coach makes.

Become makes that judgement through a structured decision system.

The best shorthand is probably this: it is closer to a clinical triage model than a fitness quiz.

Not because it is a medical device. It is not.

But because the seriousness is closer to that world than to the usual “tell me your goal and I’ll generate a plan, babe” nonsense.

It does not ask you to diagnose yourself and then reward you with a PDF.

It reads the situation, weighs the relevant factors, and commits to a lane.

That lane defines what the plan is actually for.

Sometimes the mission is sustainable weight loss.

Sometimes it is habit-building first.

Sometimes it is upper-body softening.

Sometimes it is lower-body shaping.

Sometimes it is strength.

Sometimes it is posture and refinement.

Sometimes it is simply getting someone moving safely without overwhelming her life by Tuesday lunchtime.

That is the first major difference.

The plan is not built from a template.

It is built from the mission.

Where the AI fits

Now, I need to be careful with this bit, because the phrase “AI fitness app” makes me want to climb into a cupboard and live there with a torch.

Most AI fitness products are basically chatbots in a vest.

You ask for a plan, and the model improvises something plausible-looking from the internet’s giant soup of fitness advice. Sometimes it is fine. Sometimes it is nonsense. Sometimes it will cheerfully tell someone with a rebuilt shoulder to do overhead presses because the internet has lots of overhead presses in it and the chatbot woke up confident.

That is not what Become is.

The AI does not get to sit in the driver’s seat wearing sunglasses and making things up.

The important decisions are made by the underlying methodology: the decision trees, the rules, the constraints, the trans-specific logic, the things that stop the plan doing something stupid.

The AI is used where AI is genuinely useful.

It can help interpret body photos.

It can help understand what you say about yourself in your own words.

It can notice when your description adds something that a form field did not catch.

It can turn the system’s reasoning into clear, human language instead of producing a dead little gym PDF that sounds like it was written by a protein tub.

But it works inside fences.

It does not invent the whole plan from scratch.

It does not get to override the methodology because the vibes were strong that day.

That matters to me enormously.

I do not want a system that merely sounds clever.

I want a system that makes good decisions.

There is a huge difference.

The photo step

One of the things Become can do is look at body photos.

That sounds simple. It is not simple.

For trans women, body photos are not casual.

They are not “upload your transformation selfie, babe.”

They can be loaded, exposing, dysphoric, frightening and sometimes humiliating. I know that. I have lived that.

But they are also useful.

A real coach can see things from a body photo that no questionnaire will capture properly: shoulder width, upper-body mass, posture, waist, hips, fat distribution, muscle balance, the overall silhouette, the mismatch between where someone is now and where she wants to go.

Become uses that information as part of the assessment.

Not as content.

Not as social proof.

Not as a cute “before” picture.

As private intake.

The point is not vanity.

The point is accuracy.

Because a plan for a slim, under-muscled trans woman just starting out should not be the same as a plan for a former male athlete with broad shoulders, strong lats and a lower body that needs to catch up.

Obvious, you would think.

And yet here we are.

Why the plan explains itself

This is probably the part I care about most.

Become does not just tell you what to do.

It tells you why.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is not.

It is the difference between obedience and understanding.

A normal plan might say:

Face pulls, three sets of twelve.

Fine. Technically correct. Also completely disposable. The first busy week, that exercise is gone, because it is just another line on a list.

But suppose you have had breast augmentation and posture matters to you.

Then face pulls are not just a random gym accessory movement. They are doing a job.

The weight of implants sits forward. Over time, that can encourage the shoulders to round and the upper back to collapse. Face pulls strengthen the rear delts, mid-back and small stabilising muscles that help hold the shoulder girdle in a better position.

Now you understand why the exercise is there.

That makes it much more likely you will keep doing it.

The same applies everywhere.

If the system reduces upper-body training, it explains why.

If it biases glutes and thighs, it explains why.

If it avoids a movement because of your knee, your surgery history, your equipment or your goal, it explains why.

Not in gym-bro Latin.

In plain English.

Because women do not need to be barked at by PDFs.

They need to understand the logic well enough to trust it.

The part that matters most for trans women

There is one piece of this I care about more than almost anything else.

Become has to be honest internally.

It cannot build you the right plan if it lies to itself about where you are starting from. If the system needs to know that you are carrying a lot of upper-body muscle, it has to know that. If it needs to know that your body is early in feminisation, it has to know that too.

The machinery has to see the truth.

But the system does not have to throw every truth in your face.

That distinction is everything.

For trans women, body-read information does not land neutrally.

Some of it is useful.

Some of it is reassuring.

Some of it can go straight into the wound.

Being told, even gently, that your body reads less feminised than you hoped is not just “feedback.” For some women, that is a small emotional catastrophe. It is exactly the sort of thing that makes someone close the laptop and never come back.

So Become separates what the engine needs to know from what the user needs to hear.

Internally, it is honest.

Externally, it is careful.

It does not hand you a cruel little report card on your own dysphoria.

It does not say, “Here is your feminisation score, enjoy your afternoon.”

It uses that information to build a better plan, but it talks to you in terms of method, direction and opportunity.

That is not dishonesty.

That is care.

A doctor does not need to read your blood results out like a sports commentator. A good coach does not need to say every technically true thing that passes through her head. The point is not to display the system’s cleverness. The point is to help the woman in front of it.

And this is where I think being trans matters.

I know what that information can do when it lands badly.

I know what it is like for your own body to hurt your feelings before breakfast.

So the system is designed with that in mind.

Not bolted on afterwards.

Built in.

The machine is honest where honesty helps the plan.

It is gentle where bluntness would only hurt the person.

That, to me, is the difference between a fitness product that happens to have a trans option and a product actually built for us.

Why I am talking about it now

I have had Become simmering for a while, partly because I have been working like a dog.

Not “busy” in the LinkedIn humblebrag sense.

Actually busy.

Writing, building a lot of software, recovering, working, dealing with life and feeding a tiny dog

Become has been on the back burner.

It has not gone away.

And I am talking about it now because I want to know who actually wants it.

That is the honest reason.

I can sit in my software cave building elaborate systems until the walls start speaking C#, but at some point you have to put the thing in front of real people and ask:

Does this solve a problem you actually have?

Would you use it?

Would you trust it?

Because I know the problem is real.

I know the generic advice is not good enough.

I know trans women are out here trying to solve body problems that mainstream fitness does not understand and was never built to understand.

What I do not yet know is how many of you are waiting for something like this.

So this is partly me showing you the idea, and partly me asking.

This week: I try very hard not to become a fitness influencer, explain why your shoulders may not need another bloody hypertrophy block, and ask whether the body-planning system I built for trans women is useful, mad, necessary, or all three.

I get asked about my body quite a lot.

Not by random women in changing rooms, because this is not a Carry On film and I do not spend my life being erotically appraised beside a row of lockers.

It is mostly other trans women.

They see a photo. Or they read something I have written about training. Or they notice that I have somehow managed to get from a 108-kilo dad-shaped catastrophe to something that now reads much more like an actual female body, with hips and a waist and a bum and all the bits I spent most of my life assuming were simply not on the menu.

And then the question comes.

How did you do it?

I understand the question completely, because for trans women this is not just fitness. It is not beach-body nonsense. It is not about having visible abs so we can stand under a ring light drinking electrolyte water and pretending we discovered discipline.

For many of us, the body is one of the loudest things in the room.

It speaks before we do.

Before our voice, before our name, before our clothes, before our carefully practised walk through Tesco where we are trying to look casual while also monitoring every reflective surface like a meerkat with trauma.

Our shape announces things about us. Sometimes things we do not want announced.

So yes, when another trans woman asks me how I changed mine, I take it seriously.

I wrote about it properly in my earlier piece on building a great body in your forties, fifties and sixties. The system is all in there: diet, training, psychology, habit design, the whole slightly deranged architecture of how I rebuilt myself.

How To Build a Great Body as a Trans Woman (Even in Your 40s, 50s, or 60s)

But an article has a problem.

You can explain everything. You can pour your entire brain into three thousand words. Someone can read it, nod along, feel a little spark of hope, and then, two days later, be back at lunch having eaten the calories of a Victorian Christmas before 1pm and wondering why their shoulders are still auditioning for a rugby squad.

Knowing is not doing.

It never was.

So the next question started appearing.

Will you coach me?

And the answer is no.

Absolutely not.

Not because I do not care. I care a lot. That is the problem. If I took people on properly, I would care far too much, interfere far too much, overthink everything, write twelve-page explanations, and end up emotionally invested in someone’s lateral raise technique at midnight when I should be asleep.

Also, I do not want to become one of those online fitness people.

You know the model.

Nice body at the front. Payment link underneath. “Community” in a WhatsApp group. Then behind the curtain, everyone gets basically the same programme with their name pasted into the PDF and maybe a slightly different glute bridge variation if the coach is feeling festive.

I am being unfair, obviously. Some of them are good.

But a lot of it is nonsense. Very shiny nonsense. Nonsense with abs. Nonsense with a ring light and an affiliate code.

And for trans women, the problem is not merely that some online coaching is lazy. The deeper problem is that a lot of the default fitness advice is actively pointed in the wrong direction.

The hypertrophy problem

Most mainstream training programmes are built around hypertrophy.

Build muscle. Add volume. Progressive overload. Train hard. Push more weight. Chase the pump. Make everything bigger.

That is fine for some people. It is not morally wrong to build muscle. I am not standing here with a candle and a haunted expression saying “never touch a dumbbell.”

But for a lot of trans women, especially those of us who come to this later, the issue is not that we lack muscle everywhere.

It is that we already have too much of the wrong muscle in the wrong places.

I did not arrive at transition as a delicate little woodland creature. I arrived with years of sport in my body. Cycling, Ironman training, lifting, general male-life nonsense. Broad shoulders. Thick back. Traps and lats that had not received the memo that we were now trying to go in a different direction.

That upper-body shape read male before I opened my mouth.

So what does a generic hypertrophy programme do to a woman like that?

It preserves the problem.

It trains the shoulders. It trains the back. It trains the arms. It maintains the exact silhouette she is trying to soften, and then calls it progress.

Six months later she looks in the mirror, feels like nothing has shifted, and concludes that she has failed.

But she has not failed.

The programme failed her.

It was the wrong tool.

For many trans women, the answer is not “train harder.” It is more specific than that. Sometimes it is “train less there.” Sometimes it is “stop feeding that bit.” Sometimes it is “move the work downward.” Sometimes it is “we are not trying to build a bodybuilder, we are trying to change a silhouette.”

Glutes matter. Thighs matter. Core matters. Waist-to-hip matters. Fat loss matters. Softening matters. Cardio matters. Not in a punishment way, but in a body-composition way.

And, crucially, restraint matters.

That is the bit almost nobody sells, because it is very hard to charge someone £150 a month to tell them not to train their shoulders like a deranged canoeist.

But for some of us, that is exactly the advice.

The annoying part

Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

You look at the available options and think: right, so the choices are either generic fitness apps designed for a population that does not have this problem, or online coaching that often looks trans-specific from the outside but still runs on the same bodybuilding engine underneath.

That annoyed me.

I am very good at being annoyed. Annoyance is one of my core productivity systems.

I did not want to coach people one by one. I still do not. I do not want clients. I do not want a WhatsApp group. I do not want to become the bum at the front of the sales funnel. Nobody needs that from me, least of all me.

But I also did not want to keep watching trans women get handed the wrong map.

Because there is a method here.

There is judgement. There is pattern recognition. There is a way of looking at a trans woman’s body, her goals, her history, her equipment, her hormones, her surgeries, her injuries, her time, and saying: right, this is what we are actually trying to do.

And that judgement is not magic.

It can be structured.

It can be encoded.

It can be turned into software.

So, because I am apparently incapable of seeing a practical problem without turning it into a platform, I built the machinery.

It is called Become.

What Become is

Become is a body-planning system for trans women.

That is the cleanest way I can describe it.

Not a generic fitness app with a trans option bolted on.

Not a chatbot that spits out workouts.

Not a spreadsheet with lipstick.

A proper body-planning system, built around the problems trans women actually face when we are trying to change our shape.

It starts from a simple idea: two women can look superficially similar and need completely different plans.

One might be early in transition and still able to build muscle quite easily.

Another might be years into hormones, post-surgery, and working with a completely different hormonal engine.

One might need to soften an overbuilt upper body.

Another might be under-muscled and need careful strength.

One might need fat loss and habit-building before anything else.

Another might already be lean and need lower-body shaping, posture work and refinement.

One might have a full gym.

Another might have resistance bands, a bedroom floor and twenty-five minutes before the dog starts eating a charger.

Those are not details.

They change the plan.

That is what Become is built around.

How it thinks, without boring everyone to death

Underneath Become is a decision system.

I am deliberately not going to explain every cog and sprocket, because nobody needs to read the full wiring diagram unless they are trying to steal it or fall asleep.

But the broad idea is this.

Become builds a multi-dimensional picture of you.

Not one crude label. Not “beginner.” Not “apple-shaped.” Not “fat loss client.” Not “trans woman, therefore glutes.”

A proper picture.

It looks at the things that genuinely change the mission of the plan: weight, upper-body muscle, feminisation, hormonal context, training history, consistency, aspiration, available time, injuries, surgeries and equipment.

Some of those things are core drivers.

Some are modifiers.

Some change the whole direction of the plan.

Some simply change the exercise selection.

That distinction matters.

A dodgy knee matters enormously, but it does not necessarily change what the plan is for. It changes how the plan is built safely. Carrying a large amount of upper-body muscle from a previous athletic life, on the other hand, may change the entire mission from “build” to “soften.”

That is the kind of judgement a good coach makes.

Become makes that judgement through a structured decision system.

The best shorthand is probably this: it is closer to a clinical triage model than a fitness quiz.

Not because it is a medical device. It is not.

But because the seriousness is closer to that world than to the usual “tell me your goal and I’ll generate a plan, babe” nonsense.

It does not ask you to diagnose yourself and then reward you with a PDF.

It reads the situation, weighs the relevant factors, and commits to a lane.

That lane defines what the plan is actually for.

Sometimes the mission is sustainable weight loss.

Sometimes it is habit-building first.

Sometimes it is upper-body softening.

Sometimes it is lower-body shaping.

Sometimes it is strength.

Sometimes it is posture and refinement.

Sometimes it is simply getting someone moving safely without overwhelming her life by Tuesday lunchtime.

That is the first major difference.

The plan is not built from a template.

It is built from the mission.

Where the AI fits

Now, I need to be careful with this bit, because the phrase “AI fitness app” makes me want to climb into a cupboard and live there with a torch.

Most AI fitness products are basically chatbots in a vest.

You ask for a plan, and the model improvises something plausible-looking from the internet’s giant soup of fitness advice. Sometimes it is fine. Sometimes it is nonsense. Sometimes it will cheerfully tell someone with a rebuilt shoulder to do overhead presses because the internet has lots of overhead presses in it and the chatbot woke up confident.

That is not what Become is.

The AI does not get to sit in the driver’s seat wearing sunglasses and making things up.

The important decisions are made by the underlying methodology: the decision trees, the rules, the constraints, the trans-specific logic, the things that stop the plan doing something stupid.

The AI is used where AI is genuinely useful.

It can help interpret body photos.

It can help understand what you say about yourself in your own words.

It can notice when your description adds something that a form field did not catch.

It can turn the system’s reasoning into clear, human language instead of producing a dead little gym PDF that sounds like it was written by a protein tub.

But it works inside fences.

It does not invent the whole plan from scratch.

It does not get to override the methodology because the vibes were strong that day.

That matters to me enormously.

I do not want a system that merely sounds clever.

I want a system that makes good decisions.

There is a huge difference.

The photo step

One of the things Become can do is look at body photos.

That sounds simple. It is not simple.

For trans women, body photos are not casual.

They are not “upload your transformation selfie, babe.”

They can be loaded, exposing, dysphoric, frightening and sometimes humiliating. I know that. I have lived that.

But they are also useful.

A real coach can see things from a body photo that no questionnaire will capture properly: shoulder width, upper-body mass, posture, waist, hips, fat distribution, muscle balance, the overall silhouette, the mismatch between where someone is now and where she wants to go.

Become uses that information as part of the assessment.

Not as content.

Not as social proof.

Not as a cute “before” picture.

As private intake.

The point is not vanity.

The point is accuracy.

Because a plan for a slim, under-muscled trans woman just starting out should not be the same as a plan for a former male athlete with broad shoulders, strong lats and a lower body that needs to catch up.

Obvious, you would think.

And yet here we are.

Why the plan explains itself

This is probably the part I care about most.

Become does not just tell you what to do.

It tells you why.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is not.

It is the difference between obedience and understanding.

A normal plan might say:

Face pulls, three sets of twelve.

Fine. Technically correct. Also completely disposable. The first busy week, that exercise is gone, because it is just another line on a list.

But suppose you have had breast augmentation and posture matters to you.

Then face pulls are not just a random gym accessory movement. They are doing a job.

The weight of implants sits forward. Over time, that can encourage the shoulders to round and the upper back to collapse. Face pulls strengthen the rear delts, mid-back and small stabilising muscles that help hold the shoulder girdle in a better position.

Now you understand why the exercise is there.

That makes it much more likely you will keep doing it.

The same applies everywhere.

If the system reduces upper-body training, it explains why.

If it biases glutes and thighs, it explains why.

If it avoids a movement because of your knee, your surgery history, your equipment or your goal, it explains why.

Not in gym-bro Latin.

In plain English.

Because women do not need to be barked at by PDFs.

They need to understand the logic well enough to trust it.

The part that matters most for trans women

There is one piece of this I care about more than almost anything else.

Become has to be honest internally.

It cannot build you the right plan if it lies to itself about where you are starting from. If the system needs to know that you are carrying a lot of upper-body muscle, it has to know that. If it needs to know that your body is early in feminisation, it has to know that too.

The machinery has to see the truth.

But the system does not have to throw every truth in your face.

That distinction is everything.

For trans women, body-read information does not land neutrally.

Some of it is useful.

Some of it is reassuring.

Some of it can go straight into the wound.

Being told, even gently, that your body reads less feminised than you hoped is not just “feedback.” For some women, that is a small emotional catastrophe. It is exactly the sort of thing that makes someone close the laptop and never come back.

So Become separates what the engine needs to know from what the user needs to hear.

Internally, it is honest.

Externally, it is careful.

It does not hand you a cruel little report card on your own dysphoria.

It does not say, “Here is your feminisation score, enjoy your afternoon.”

It uses that information to build a better plan, but it talks to you in terms of method, direction and opportunity.

That is not dishonesty.

That is care.

A doctor does not need to read your blood results out like a sports commentator. A good coach does not need to say every technically true thing that passes through her head. The point is not to display the system’s cleverness. The point is to help the woman in front of it.

And this is where I think being trans matters.

I know what that information can do when it lands badly.

I know what it is like for your own body to hurt your feelings before breakfast.

So the system is designed with that in mind.

Not bolted on afterwards.

Built in.

The machine is honest where honesty helps the plan.

It is gentle where bluntness would only hurt the person.

That, to me, is the difference between a fitness product that happens to have a trans option and a product actually built for us.

Why I am talking about it now

I have had Become simmering for a while, partly because I have been working like a dog.

Not “busy” in the LinkedIn humblebrag sense.

Actually busy.

Writing, building a lot of software, recovering, working, dealing with life and feeding a tiny dog

Become has been on the back burner.

It has not gone away.

And I am talking about it now because I want to know who actually wants it.

That is the honest reason.

I can sit in my software cave building elaborate systems until the walls start speaking C#, but at some point you have to put the thing in front of real people and ask:

Does this solve a problem you actually have?

Would you use it?

Would you trust it?

Because I know the problem is real.

I know the generic advice is not good enough.

I know trans women are out here trying to solve body problems that mainstream fitness does not understand and was never built to understand.

What I do not yet know is how many of you are waiting for something like this.

So this is partly me showing you the idea, and partly me asking.

I have written before about how my days of leverage trading turned into a complete disaster. Those days are, in fact, the reason I am sitting here now playing with agentic AI, back writing software for clients, rather than kicking it up somewhere in the Caribbean. That blow-up taught me the only lesson that ever really mattered: a position you cannot hold through being wrong is not a conviction, it is a time bomb. So everything I am about to describe is unleveraged, holdable, and survivable. I learned that part the hard way.

But here is the thing I have been avoiding.

My long-term thesis on the world was reasonable. In some respects it was exceptional. And I have not revisited it in about four years.

I have not stress-tested it. I have not gone back and asked whether the conditions that made it true are still the conditions I am living in. I just formed it, let it run, and watched it mostly play out the way I expected. Which is exactly the trap. A thesis you formed four years ago and never looked at again is not conviction anymore. It is inertia wearing conviction’s coat. My life has changed beyond recognition in those four years. It would be strange if my read on the world did not need at least a service.

So this is me, doing it in public, in real time. Not presenting a finished answer. Working it out on the page.

Tracing it backwards

It is very hard to describe how a position evolved going forwards. It is much easier to state where you ended up and then work out how you got there. So let me trace it back.

Where I landed was this. I decided, in the end, that fine-grained indicators are mostly noise, subject to so much compounding error that they are worse than useless. You need something simpler and directional. So I built my read around a small number of large forces, and I held it loosely enough to be directional rather than precise.

There were three layers to it.

The first was timing. After 2008, the world went into what I think of as a kick-the-can cycle. I had read somewhere that vast quantities of national debt need refinancing every few years, and because of that, the business cycle, as you can see it in something like the Purchasing Managers’ Index, stopped being random and started bobbling along in regular little molehills. Predictable rises and falls. That gave me a rough clock. Not direction on its own, just a sense of when to expect the market to amplify a move. Near the top of a molehill, expect more upside. In a trough, expect less, or a fall. Nothing precise. Just a rhythm.

The second layer, and the real engine, was global liquidity. When there is more money in the system, it has to go somewhere, and it pushes assets up. When liquidity contracts, the tide goes out. I did not invent this. I am not that clever. I more or less stole the work of Michael Howell at CrossBorder Capital, whom I had watched talk many times and admired, and I tried as hard as I could to emulate his calculations and build something that looked roughly similar from the public data I could get my hands on. To this day, that liquidity model is still my primary driver of direction.

The third layer was the clever one, and it is the part that stops the whole thing being naive. Liquidity on its own would have told me, in March 2020, that markets should rise, because the world was being flooded with stimulus. But markets crashed first. The model has to account for that. Liquidity is necessary, but it does not reach the assets while fear and panic and uncertainty are high. The cash sits there, dammed up, while markets fall despite it. Then, as the panic resolves and a sense of predictable calm returns, the dammed-up liquidity floods in and markets explode upward. So the real signal was never liquidity on its own. It was liquidity adjusted for volatility. COVID was the clean proof of it. I have watched it again more recently with Trump and his tariffs: tariffs land, the world turns uncertain, markets tank, but the liquidity-adjusted reading says steady as she goes, and the recovery arrives almost exactly on cue.

That is the machine. A clock, an engine, and a damper. And for four years it has mostly worked.

The part I absorbed rather than worked out

Here is where I have to be honest with myself, because the machine I have just described is neutral. Liquidity up, assets up. Liquidity down, assets down. It oscillates. It does not, on its own, tell you to be long and to stay long.

So why did I end up long, and holding?

Because underneath the machine there is a worldview, and I need to own where I got it. I went down the rabbit hole. The Bitcoin Standard, then von Mises, then Hayek, then Friedman, and then, God help me, I read Ayn Rand’s novels. All of them. For a while there I was a fully paid-up, hyphenated member of the libertarian-adjacent objectivist society. It was never the cleverest position in the world, and I have walked a good distance back from it since.

But here is what I will not do, because it is the lazy move in the other direction: I will not now pretend that because I absorbed a thesis as something close to a convert, the thesis is therefore wrong. Those are independent things. You can arrive at a true idea through a motivated, oversold pipeline. The pipeline oversells it. That does not make it false.

And the core of it is, I think, still true. It is the idea that fiat money is structurally biased toward debasement. Not because of a conspiracy, but because of incentives. Any institution that is only elected for five years will kick the can down the road, because can-kicking means deferring the hard, painful, unpopular decisions and appeasing whoever is loudest now. So deficits grow. The people at the top mostly know it is unsustainable, and mostly seem to be praying for some kind of miracle, which I suspect increasingly has the words “artificial intelligence” in it. But that is for another day. The point is that, barring something extraordinary, the long-run direction of liquidity is expansion. There may be periods of contraction along the way, but the bias is up.

You only have to look at how the world is actually playing out. Look at the state we have left young people in, mortgaged to the hilt to pay for a present they did not vote for. That is not ideology. That is the mechanism, visible in the data.

Can it go on forever? No. I read somewhere that the vast majority of fiat currencies in history have eventually gone to zero, and that the dollar has lost something like nine-tenths of its purchasing power in a century. I should say plainly that I first picked those figures up from Michael Saylor in my disciple days, and a stat you inherited from an evangelist is exactly the kind you should re-check before you lean on it, so treat them as directional until I have verified them properly. The direction, though, is not really in dispute. Money debases. The argument is only about pace.

So that is the thesis, traced back and laid bare. A neutral liquidity machine, pointed permanently upward by a debasement worldview I absorbed during a period of my life I now see more clearly. And for four years I have let it run without once asking whether the world it was built for is the world I am still in.

The fractures

When I actually turn the lens on it, I find three places where the thesis might be expiring, and they do not all point the same way. That is what makes this interesting rather than comforting.

Fracture one: the market has become a single bet

My liquidity model has no term in it for concentration. It assumes that if liquidity flows, it flows into “the market,” as if the market were a broad, diversified thing. It is no longer a broad, diversified thing.

As I write this, in June 2026, the Magnificent Seven are around 35 percent of the entire US market by value, up from about 12 percent a decade ago. In 2025, roughly 42 percent of the S&P 500’s total return came from those same seven companies. The top ten companies are about 38 percent of the index’s value and around 31 percent of its earnings, and by some measures the Mag Seven generate close to 70 percent of the economic profit of the whole index.

It gets starker when you look at the real economy rather than the market. By one Harvard estimate, data-center investment accounted for around 92 percent of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025, while being only about 4 percent of GDP. Strip out the AI infrastructure build, on that reading, and growth would have been roughly nothing. Other estimates are less extreme but tell the same story: AI infrastructure contributing something like half of all GDP growth, and a serious strategist or two suggesting that without it the economy might already be in recession.

So here is the problem the liquidity model cannot see. The entire market, and increasingly the entire economy, is leaning on one sector. A model that says “liquidity up, markets up” is blind to the possibility that the market has quietly become a single, concentrated bet, so that a real or even imagined wobble in that one sector cascades through everything regardless of what liquidity is doing. Liquidity can be ample and the thing can still fall fifty percent if the load-bearing wall cracks. I wrote yesterday about the eye-watering value being put on certain private AI-adjacent names. If one of those re-rates hard, the contagion does not care how much money is sloshing about.

This is the downside fracture. It is not in my model, and it is at a historic extreme.

Fracture two: the escape hatch that turns my thesis upside down

The second fracture is stranger, because it is the bullish case for the world, and it is bearish for my thesis.

Suppose the AI productivity story is real. Suppose it delivers genuine, double-digit national productivity gains. Then follow the chain. Services improve without raising taxes. The cost of goods falls. Inflation falls. The deficit falls. And if the deficit falls, the structural pressure to debase, the very thing my whole directional bias rests on, goes away. Liquidity stops needing to expand. And by my own model, if liquidity stops expanding, markets can stop rising.

In other words, the one thing that could break my debasement thesis is not a disaster. It is the miracle working. The thesis is, at heart, a bet on dysfunction continuing. AI productivity is the one plausible cure for that dysfunction. Which leaves me in the slightly absurd position of running an investment thesis that bets against the very thing I now stake my professional life on. If the AI revolution does what its believers say, it falsifies me.

Fracture three: the contradiction inside the escape hatch

Except the escape hatch has a hole in it, and finding the hole half-rescues the original thesis from the other side.

Double-digit national productivity from AI does not arrive without enormous labour displacement. And if great swathes of people are displaced, you run straight into a question the productivity story never answers: who is buying all these cheaper, better goods and services? An economy of the unemployed does not consume its way through a productivity boom. Data centers, famously, employ almost no one once they are built. The capex props up GDP without creating the wage-earning consumer base that GDP ultimately depends on.

So what happens? The state steps in. You inherit a colossal social bill, some flavour of universal basic income, to keep a displaced population solvent and consuming. And that means the liquidity comes roaring back, just wearing a different costume. Not deficit-financed can-kicking this time, but mass transfers funded by the printer because the alternative is destitution. The debasement does not die. It simply changes its justification.

Which means the direction of my thesis, up, might be more robust than the reasoning that got me there. I may have been right about the destination for entirely the wrong reasons, and the destination may survive even as those reasons collapse. That is an uncomfortable kind of correct.

I have very strong feelings about UBI, by the way, and almost none of them are warm. But that is a whole essay of its own, and I am not going to let it hijack this one. Another time.

What this is really about

There is a political reading that sits underneath all of this, and I will keep it to an aside because it is symptom, not cause. As ordinary people get squeezed harder, they go to the extremes, left and right alike. I called this ten years ago, and you can see it now in the rise of Reform and the Greens in the UK. I suspect both will get their turn in or near government, and I suspect it will not make a blind bit of difference, because the problems are structural and far too big for either of them. That matters to my thesis only because political extremism is evidence that the pressure behind the debasement ratchet is intensifying, not resolving. The populists, whoever they are, will spend more, not less.

So where does that leave me?

The engine still works. Liquidity adjusted for volatility still describes how money moves into assets, and I see no reason to doubt the plumbing. The direction, up, still lives today. I genuinely cannot name its end date, and I am not going to pretend I can. But the reasoning I bolted underneath that direction was absorbed during a chapter of my life I now read differently, and there are at least three things my four-year-old model simply cannot price: a concentration so extreme that the market has become one bet, a productivity shock that could cure the dysfunction I am betting against, and the contradiction inside that shock that might quietly reinstall the same upward bias under a new name.

And there is one more thing the model cannot handle, which is the speed of all this. My whole timing layer assumes a stately rhythm, the gentle molehills of a slower world. An exponential change does not respect that rhythm. We are, all of us, terrible at feeling exponential change before it arrives. A thesis calibrated to the slow world has no machinery for a fast one.

So the honest position is not “I was wrong.” It is narrower and more useful than that. I was directionally right for the regime I formed the thesis in. I can no longer assume that regime is the one I am now standing in.

It’s been a long time since I released any of my autobiography, and the reason is something I made clear las year. The later chapters get into my family, my children, my marriage, the bitter pain of it all. And to be honest, I didn’t write those parts for public consumption. I wrote them for myself, and maybe one day, when I’m dead, my family might read it and see how it was from my side. If I never get to tell them in person, at least it’s there. That’s why I did it.

But before all that arrived, there was this. The point when I first decided I needed to go for a facial feminisation consultation. My plan was to go to Spain to see Facial Team, because they could produce virtual images of what a feminised face would actually look like on me. And that was pivotal. Make or break. Whether or not I thought I’d look okay after the work was done was, frankly, everything.

What follows used to be two chapters, Barcelona and The Consultation. I’ve amalgamated them into one here. It’s also one of the first times I ever went out the door as Stevie. I was absolutely terrified.

Chapter 27: Barcelona

The day before my flight to Barcelona, I was packing feverishly using, of all things, my Ironman finisher’s bag. The symbolism was not lost on me. That bag had once carried me through races, through triumphs built on sweat and sinew and discipline. Now, it carried a different kind of preparation. Not gels and bike gear, but lashes, heels, and hope. My body had trained for that other life. This one was new.

So I packed two parallel lives. A handful of male clothes for the hotel: jeans, hoodies, soft armour. The familiar uniform of the man I had been for fifty-five years. And then, carefully folded, sealed like contraband at the bottom of the bag, one full female outfit. Top, skirt, tights, shoes, the lot. Makeup. Jewellery. Everything I would need to become someone else, or rather, someone I had always been but had never let walk into a room. All of it crammed into the same bag that had once held my race-day kit.

I was absolutely shitting myself.

I had not left my house dressed as a woman in over twenty years. Not at night. Not in the dark. Not even once around the back garden. The closest I had come was the office, with the door locked, the curtains drawn, the camera angled just so. The idea that I would now fly to a foreign country, walk through an unfamiliar city, check into a hotel, and then appear the next morning as Stevie to a team of clinical professionals was borderline deranged.

But I had decided. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it properly. I wasn’t going to show them a miserable man and ask them to imagine. I was going to show them a hopeful woman and ask them to refine her.

I arrived at the hotel in Barcelona late afternoon. Dropped my bag on the bed. Stood at the window for a long minute looking at a city I had walked through several times before, but never as her. I knew I needed to do a test run. Not outside. I wasn’t ready for outside. Just a dry run, here in the room. Clothes laid out on the bed. Mirror lit. Lighting checked twice. Everything had to be right.

This had to be the best I had ever presented to the world, even though the world wasn’t watching. Because I was. Because this version of me would be immortalised in photographs the next morning. Fed into simulations. Studied on a surgeon’s tablet. This would become the blueprint for my face, and therefore for my future.

So with trembling hands and a jaw clenched so tight I could feel it the next day, I got to work.

I did my makeup better than I think I had ever done it. Too much concealer, yes. A wobble on the eyeliner that I caught and corrected and then noticed again half an hour later. The hair a fraction too overdone. But all of it forgivable. All of it real. I stood back from the mirror, tilted my chin the way I had practised in the office a hundred times, looked her in the eye, and whispered:

We can do this.

And we could.

The next morning I woke up wired. Heart already going. Mind already running multiple simulations. I had mapped out my timings in reverse like an airport logistics manager. I had a sequence for everything. Shower. Shave. Makeup. Outfit. Exit. Confidence.

But more importantly, I had choices. And each one said something about the woman I was becoming.

There were cowardly routes and brave routes.

Option one. Just turn up as a man. Smile politely. Let them guess. Tell them, use your imagination.

Option two. Pack the whole Stevie outfit into a bag, get a taxi to the clinic, find a gender-neutral bathroom, get changed, do the consultation, then reverse the process and disappear back into Steve before anyone outside the clinic ever saw her.

Option three. Get ready fully as Stevie in the hotel, take a pre-booked cab door to door to the clinic, do the consultation, change back into male clothes in the clinic bathroom before heading to the airport.

And then there was option four. The fuck it option. Walk out of the hotel through the streets of Barcelona as Stevie. Do the entire thing. Clinic, taxi, airport. As Stevie. And then, only at the very last moment, transform back into Steve at the departure gate like some weary, reluctant Superman.

That is exactly what I did.

It was the bravest, most exhilarating thing I have ever done in my life, and that is saying something for a woman who has finished an Ironman.

To get me through it I had built a playlist. It opened with New Jack Hustler by Ice-T. Angry, sharp, defiant. The kind of track that makes you walk like you own the pavement. That gave way to vintage Public Enemy. Fight the Power. These were my power tracks. My war drum. The music I had needed at twenty-five but only really earned the right to use at fifty-five.

I had rehearsed the walk. Seriously. From the hotel room to the lift, from the lift to the lobby, from the lobby to the street. I had it down to muscle memory. I knew where the mirrors were, don’t look. I knew where the awkward corners were, stride with intent. I knew when to hit play.

I dressed in a black polo-neck jumper, a black faux-leather biker jacket, a suede miniskirt, black opaque tights, Converse boots, massive sunglasses, and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Hair done. Makeup as good as I could manage. Heart absolutely pounding in my throat.

And then I opened the door.

Bang. Ice-T kicked in.

I strutted through the corridor like a woman on a mission. It felt like Baby Driver meets Run Lola Run, except the stakes weren’t a stolen car or a bomb. The stakes were me. My dignity. My right to walk through the world as Stevie and not explode from shame.

I kept going. Past the lift. Across the lobby. Past the concierge desk where I clocked the receptionist not even glancing up. Out the front door. Onto the street.

And the street did not collapse.

I walked across the city. Through crowds. Over crossings. I deliberately walked through groups of people instead of around them, just to see what would happen. Just to test the world.

And nothing happened. Nobody looked. Nobody stared. Nobody shouted. Nobody even cared. I was just a slightly eccentric middle-aged woman in too much black with possibly a suspect brow bone. That was it.

And I felt invincible.

By the time Sister Sledge came on, We Are Family blasting in my ears in a city full of strangers, I was flying. Shoulders back. Chin up. A little swing in the hips that I hadn’t given myself permission to have in decades. I had never felt like this. Not ever. It was not just that I was presenting as a woman. It was that I was doing it out loud. On purpose. On display. In motion. And the world had not ended. The world had, in fact, barely noticed.

I will never forget that walk for the rest of my life. Whatever else happens to me from here on in, I had that morning, in Barcelona, with Ice-T in my ears and the sun on my face and a miniskirt I had been too frightened to wear in my own house finally meeting daylight.

When I arrived at the clinic, I was euphoric. Properly euphoric. The kind of high that no drug has ever given me. I checked in at reception with hands that, for the first time that morning, were not shaking.

The clinic itself was beautiful. Spanish minimalist. Cool tiled floors, soft lighting, the smell of something faintly citrus. Trans women came and went through reception with the casual ease of people for whom this was all completely normal, because for them it was. There was a woman in her thirties on the sofa with a coffee, post-op, bandaged, scrolling her phone. There was a woman in her sixties at the desk speaking rapid Spanish to the receptionist about an appointment time. Nobody was hiding. Nobody was performing. It was just a clinic. It was just Tuesday.

I had walked into the first room of my life that was built for women like me, and I had walked in as one of them.

They took me through to consultation. CT scanner first. Lie still, breathe normally, hold your breath, and now we have a three-dimensional map of your skull. Then high-resolution photography from every angle. Front, three-quarter, profile, the lot. I had practised the angles in my office mirror so many times that the photographer’s instructions felt almost redundant. Chin down a touch. Eyes to camera. Hold.

Then the surgeon came in.

He was younger than I expected. Maybe forty. Handsome, competent, vaguely intimidating in the way that only young, handsome, competent men can be when you’re a slightly older trans woman sat across from them hoping desperately to be taken seriously. But he was kind. Warm, even. He shook my hand the way you shake any patient’s hand. He sat down across from me and pulled up the imaging on his tablet.

And then he started showing me my own face.

Not the face I had. The face I could have. The simulations rotated front and profile on the screen. And this time it was not vague reassurance or flattering generalities. It was specific, clinical, almost brutally matter-of-fact.

He pointed out the bossing on my forehead, the heavy prominence I had spent transition trying to disguise with angles, hair, and wishful thinking. He explained the brow ridge, the orbital sockets, and how that whole upper third of the face was reading strongly male.

Then he moved to the nose. It was, he made clear, a substantial job. Large, buckled, structurally masculine. Not a little tidy-up. Not some delicate refinement. It would likely need a full open rhinoplasty, proper surgical work, to bring it into balance.

I mentioned my cheeks, how hollow and sunken they looked to me, and he agreed volume would matter. Significant fat grafting, he said, to restore softness and shape through the mid-face.

Then I asked, almost hopefully, “I don’t really have a very big jaw, do I?”

He looked at me and said, matter-of-factly, “No, you don’t, Stevie, but your chin is very large.”

I could not believe he had said it so plainly, but he had.

“But you can fix it?”

He gave the sort of answer surgeons give when they are being honest rather than charming.

“It depends how close to the mental nerve we can get.”

Even then I understood what he meant. There are limits. Nerves. Bone. Risk. Precision. This was not magic. It was engineering inside flesh.

He also pointed out something important about the simulations themselves. They were largely skeletal demonstrations, showing structural change rather than the full finished result. They did not really account for soft tissue procedures. A facelift, he explained, would change the overall drape and descent of the face considerably, bringing everything into a more feminine position in ways the raw simulation could not fully show.

The forehead reshaped, the brow ridge reduced. The orbital sockets opened. The nose narrowed and lifted. The chin shortened and slimmed. The jawline brought in. Each adjustment small on its own. The cumulative effect, transformative.

I sat there looking at a face that was unmistakably mine and unmistakably hers. Not a stranger. Me. The me that had been buried under fifty years of testosterone and bone.

I kept it together in the room. I had to. But I will say, looking at that simulation was the closest I had ever come to seeing a future I actually wanted to live in.

The technical part of the consultation was where my plan met their expertise. I had wanted to do soft tissue work first. Deep plane facelift, nose job, lip lift, tracheal shave. Then come back later for the bone work. Forehead and chin. My logic was that the soft tissue stuff was less invasive, faster recovery, and would let me see how I looked before committing to the bigger work.

They thought this was ridiculous. Wrong order. Illogical.

Their reasoning was simple. The bone work changes everything underneath. If you do the soft tissue first and then go in and reshape the bone, you are pulling and stretching tissue that has just been operated on, and you are making the second surgery harder and the result less predictable. Bones first. Then soft tissue settles over the new architecture. Then, if needed, refinements. The order matters.

They were totally right. I had been so focused on trying to minimise the damage to my marriage that I had totally inverted the surgical logic. I nodded. Said I would think about it. I knew, even as I was nodding, that I would do it their way.

We wrapped up. They gave me a printed summary, a USB stick with the simulation files, and a follow-up email address. I thanked the surgeon. I thanked the team. I walked out of that clinic into the Barcelona sunshine with a piece of paper in my hand that was, in effect, a blueprint for my own face.

And I called a cab.

The taxi ride to the airport was the strangest forty-five minutes of my life. I was Stevie, in the back of a cab, on a Spanish motorway, with Public Enemy still in my headphones from the morning. The driver had not blinked when I got in. He had not blinked when I gave him the airport in my voice, which I had been working on but which I knew was still a work in progress. He was just driving.

I was just a passenger.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I sat there watching the outskirts of Barcelona slide past the window and I thought about the next twenty-four hours. The flight home. The drive from the airport. The front door. The life I had to walk back into. The man’s clothes I was about to put on in an airport bathroom because I was not yet ready, not quite, to take this version of myself through passport control.

I knew, sitting in that cab, that I was going to have to come back. Not to this clinic. Not necessarily. But to this version of myself. I was going to have to find a way to live as her, not just visit. The morning’s walk had broken something open that I was not going to be able to close again.

At the airport, I went straight to the family bathroom. The big one with the baby-changing table. Lockable door. Mirror. Floor space. The unsung trans-woman travel hack of the century.

And then, finally, I put Stevie away.

Off came the makeup. Off came the earrings. Off came the necklace. Off came the tights, peeled and balled and stuffed into the bag. Off came the skirt, the polo neck, the bra. Off came the woman.

Back came the man.

I looked at him in the mirror. The jeans, the hoodie, the baseball cap. The face scrubbed back to neutral. The same face that had walked into the hotel the night before. He looked exhausted. He looked older than he had that morning. He looked like a costume.

I hated him.

I had not hated him in the morning. I had walked out of the hotel that morning slightly fond of him, even, the way you can be fond of an old jumper you are about to throw away. But now, after a day as her, putting him back on felt like being buried alive in a body I had already started leaving.

I did not want to change back. I did not want to hide again. But I was not quite ready. Not for passport control. Not for customs. Not yet. There was still work to do at home.

But something had shifted. Something fundamental.

I had walked Barcelona as Stevie. I had sat across from a surgeon who had taken me seriously. I had seen my own future face on a tablet. I had taken a taxi as her. I had survived as her. And, more than that, for the first time in my fifty-five years on this planet, I had actually lived as her.

When I boarded the plane home, I was Steve again on the outside. But she was sitting in the seat next to me now, properly, for the first time. And she was not going back in the bag.

My day started, as it often does, at 6am.

Bing. Bing. Bing.

Alarm.

Right, I thought. We are not scrolling Instagram today.

We are getting up. We are making coffee. We are behaving like a proper adult woman with responsibilities, deadlines, emails, a dog, a publication, and a life that occasionally resembles an exploded stationery cupboard.

Thirty seconds later, obviously, I was scrolling Instagram.

This is how civilisation ends. Not with a bang, but with a 57-year-old transsexual woman lying in bed at dawn thinking, I will just watch one more reel and then I will become productive.

The reel was by Robyn Holdaway, who has been appearing in my feed lately and who is, annoyingly, absurdly eloquent. Ridiculously eloquent. The kind of eloquent that makes me slightly furious. If I could speak to camera with half their gravity, rhythm and consistency, you would see much more of me on video and I would have to write considerably fewer of these bloody essays.

Robyn was talking about the history of anti-trans politics, the TERF movement, and the wider machinery behind what now presents itself as “gender critical” feminism.

And I sat there thinking, with some embarrassment:

Oh God. I know almost nothing about this.

That is one of the slightly awkward truths about me as a trans woman. I am not very good at the syllabus.

I know the names I fixated on growing up, because there were so few of them. I know the women who became little secret landmarks in my head. I know the public figures I watched with that peculiar mixture of longing, fear and recognition.

But the broader history? Queer culture? The roots of Pride? The factions, schisms, arguments, conferences, newsletters, theories, movements and counter-movements?

No. Not really.

I am, in that sense, a bit of an academic failure as a transsexual.

It is a little like when I was a serious cyclist and people used to ask me about the Tour de France. I would have to admit that I barely watched it. I was out cycling. I was not sitting around memorising stage winners from 1987.

Transition has been a bit like that for me. I have been busy doing the thing. Surviving the thing. Rebuilding the thing. Having the thing surgically altered. Explaining the thing to my children. Losing people over the thing. Writing about the thing. Occasionally dancing in a dress because, frankly, after all that, one should be allowed a bit of a boogie.

But as for the intellectual history around the thing?

Patchy. Let us call it patchy.

So when Robyn described anti-trans politics not simply as a British social-media tantrum, but as something connected to wider anti-gender, religious-right and conservative policy networks, I had the reaction I often have when someone says something that sounds both plausible and slightly too neat.

I thought:

Hang on. Is that true?

Because my rough, lazy version of the story had been much simpler.

I thought the British TERF thing was mostly Graham Linehan, Mumsnet, newspaper columnists, J.K. Rowling, bathrooms, prisons, sport, a few furious comedians, some dreadful podcasts, and a great deal of disguised revulsion wearing a sensible coat.

You know the coat.

The “reasonable concern” coat.

The “women’s safety” coat.

The “we are only asking questions” coat.

The coat worn by people who insist they are not disgusted by trans women at all, absolutely not, heaven forbid, but who somehow manage to speak about us as though we are a Category B biological incident.

That part I understood immediately.

The bait and switch was obvious enough. The surface language was safety, safeguarding, fairness, children, prisons, changing rooms, toilets. But the emotional voltage never seemed to match the evidence. It always felt too hot. Too thrilled with itself. Too eager. Too intimate. Too bodily.

It felt, bluntly, like revulsion that had found a policy department.

But what I had not understood was the larger history.

I had not understood how “gender ideology” became an organising phrase across conservative, religious and anti-LGBT movements.

I had not understood how much of the current anti-trans political architecture sits inside a broader anti-gender movement.

I had not understood the extent to which, after defeats on gay rights and same-sex marriage, trans people became the next available battlefield.

At least, that is the claim.

And because I do not like simply repeating claims, even claims that flatter my existing suspicions, I decided to look.

So what did I find?

The first thing I found was that the cartoon version is too stupid.

There was no single room, no oak table, no Christian billionaire stroking a cat, no secret memo headed Operation Make Everyone Weird About Trans People.

Real life is rarely that kind.

The strongest version of the claim, that American religious conservatives simply invented TERF politics, bought some British feminists, and then marched them around like little wind-up toys, does not survive contact with reality.

But the weaker, more serious version?

That survives very well indeed.

Because what I found was not a conspiracy. It was infrastructure.

That is worse, in a way. Conspiracies require secrecy. Infrastructure just requires money, lawyers, institutions, patience, message discipline and a good supply of frightened politicians.

The anti-trans movement, as it now exists, is not one thing. It is a convergence.

There are old-school trans-exclusionary feminists with roots in second-wave arguments about sex, gender and womanhood. There are British newspaper columnists who appear to have mistaken their own revulsion for a legal principle. There are anxious parents, actual bigots, traumatised women, opportunistic politicians, manosphere-adjacent podcasters, professional contrarians, religious conservatives, think-tank people, litigators, donors, YouTubers, and a whole supply chain of people who discovered that “gender ideology” could be made to carry almost any fear they wanted to load onto it.

That phrase matters.

“Gender ideology.”

It is wonderfully useful because it does not sound like an attack on people. It sounds like an attack on a doctrine. Nobody wants to be pro-ideology, do they? Ideology sounds like something that happens in other countries, in badly lit rooms, while humourless people move pins around a map.

So the trans person becomes “gender ideology”.

The gay teacher becomes “sexualisation”.

The trans child becomes “social contagion”.

The supportive parent becomes “captured”.

The doctor becomes “mutilator”.

The school becomes “indoctrination”.

And the whole thing moves, very smoothly, from disgust to safeguarding.

That, I think, is the genius of it.

Not moral genius, obviously. Strategic genius.

The emotional engine is revulsion, fear and hierarchy. But the public language is children, women, safety, fairness, privacy, parents and biological reality.

This is how you launder disgust into policy.

The early wedge was bathrooms. That was the point at which I started recognising the shape of it, even before I understood the machinery. The argument was never really, “We have evidence that trans women are causing danger in toilets.” The argument was much more primal than that. It was, “Imagine a man in there.”

That was enough.

Once you can make people picture “a man in there”, you no longer need the actual trans woman. She has been replaced by a threat image.

Then came sport, which was even more useful.

Sport gave the movement something bathrooms did not quite give it: a plausible secular fairness argument. You did not have to talk about sin. You did not have to admit disgust. You did not even have to say you disliked trans people. You could say, with a serious face, that you were defending girls.

That is a very hard frame to fight.

Not because every version of the sports debate is automatically illegitimate. It is not. Sport does involve bodies, puberty, competition categories and material differences. Any honest person can see that.

But that is precisely why it was useful. It gave anti-trans politics a point of entry through a real-world complexity. Once inside, the argument could expand. From elite sport to school sport. From school sport to bathrooms. From bathrooms to pronouns. From pronouns to medical care. From medical care to child protection. From child protection to parental rights. From parental rights to the idea that any institution which recognises trans existence is engaged in ideological capture.

Then healthcare became the big one.

This is where the machinery becomes easiest to see, because the same phrases, structures and legal ideas begin appearing in different states. Model bills. Similar wording. Similar testimony. Similar “findings”. Similar claims about social contagion, regret, Europe, puberty blockers, parental rights, and doctors supposedly rushing children into irreversible procedures.

That is not an organic village panic.

That is a production line.

A national organisation writes the argument. A state lawmaker introduces it. A local witness gives it a human face. A friendly media ecosystem amplifies it. Lawyers defend it. Another group brings the next case. The bill fails in one state and passes in another. The passed law creates litigation. The litigation creates headlines. The headlines create fear. The fear creates more political demand.

And so the machine feeds itself.

This is where the money matters.

Not because money explains everything. It does not. Lots of ordinary people believe stupid and cruel things for free.

But money buys continuity.

Money buys lawyers who can spend years on cases. Money buys policy papers. Money buys staff. Money buys polling. Money buys media operations. Money buys conferences. Money buys fellowships. Money buys relationships with lawmakers. Money buys state-by-state legislative tracking. Money buys the ability to lose one battle and simply move to the next jurisdiction.

A broke moral panic burns hot and dies.

A funded moral panic becomes a career path.

And that, I think, is what happened.

The anti-trans movement became professionalised.

It learned to stop sounding like “we find these people disgusting” and start sounding like “we have grave concerns about safeguarding.”

It learned to stop saying “we oppose LGBT rights” and start saying “we support parental rights.”

It learned to stop saying “our religion requires sex hierarchy” and start saying “biological reality.”

It learned to stop saying “we do not want trans people in public life” and start saying “women and children deserve protection.”

And crucially, it learned where the liberal mind is weakest.

Children. Sport. Prisons. Bathrooms. Schools.

Pick the place where the public is uncertain, where even sympathetic people feel a little awkward, where the facts are complicated, where nobody wants to sound heartless, where the most extreme example can be made to stand in for the whole group.

Then push there.

Again and again and again.

This is why the UK version interests me so much, because Britain has its own strange pathology. The British gender-critical movement is not simply a branch office of the American Christian right. That would be too easy. It has roots in British feminism, British media, British class politics, British institutional caution, British politeness, British cruelty, and that peculiar national habit of making repression sound reasonable if you say it in the right accent.

But it also does not sit apart from the wider movement.

There are overlaps. Alliances. Shared phrases. Shared enemies. Shared platforms. Shared legal concepts. Shared think-tank worlds. Shared moral panic structures.

The British version may wear a different coat, but it is standing in the same weather.

So, no, I do not think the correct conclusion is:

“TERFs are all secretly funded by American Christians.”

That is not serious enough.

The better conclusion is this:

Anti-trans politics became the place where several different movements found each other.

Radical feminist sex essentialism found Christian-right family politics.

Christian-right family politics found conservative legal strategy.

Conservative legal strategy found Republican statehouses.

Republican statehouses found media outrage.

Media outrage found social media.

Social media found frightened parents.

Frightened parents found campaigners.

Campaigners found donors.

Donors found lawyers.

Lawyers found cases.

Cases found courts.

Courts found policy.

Policy found my life.

And that is the part people forget.

This is not abstract. It does not stay in think-tank PDFs. It does not remain in American statehouses. It does not sit politely inside an Instagram reel.

It travels.

It travels into newspapers, hospitals, schools, families, airports, toilets, changing rooms, courtrooms, dinner tables, comment sections and the eyes of strangers.

It arrives at the front door.

Which is why I wanted to know where it came from.

Source anchors

A few pieces of evidence are worth separating from the general noise.

Bathroom bills as a post-marriage-equality wedge
Type Investigations traces the rise of bathroom bills after Obergefell and describes how bathroom panic became an early post-marriage-equality strategy.
Read: The Secret History of Bathroom Bills

The coalition strategy
Political Research Associates documents Promise to America’s Children, a programme backed by Family Policy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom and other groups, covering trans healthcare, trans athletes, sex education, conversion therapy, adoption, schools and parental control.
Read: The New Anti-Trans Promise

Copy-and-paste state legislation
The Associated Press analysed more than 130 bills across 40 US state legislatures and found many were identical or similar to model legislation promoted by conservative groups.
Read: Many anti-trans bills came from a handful of far-right interest groups

Model legislation in plain sight
Do No Harm published model legislation covering schools, government funding, medical procedures for minors, private legal action, insurance coverage and enforcement routes.
Read: Do No Harm model legislation, The JUST FACTs Act

Scale of institutional money, Alliance Defending Freedom
ProPublica’s nonprofit records show Alliance Defending Freedom operating at a very large institutional scale. This does not mean every dollar is anti-trans money, but it does show that this is not a fringe operation with a few angry people and a podcast.
Read: ProPublica nonprofit profile, Alliance Defending Freedom

Scale of institutional money, Heritage Foundation
ProPublica’s nonprofit records also show the Heritage Foundation operating at a very large institutional scale, with major revenue, expenses and assets. Again, this is not the same as saying every dollar is spent on anti-trans politics, but it matters when assessing infrastructure.
Read: ProPublica nonprofit profile, Heritage Foundation

Project 2025 in its own words
Project 2025 is not just a name people throw around for dramatic effect. Its own text contains explicit language about “gender ideology”, schools, federal funding, sexual orientation, gender identity, and policy rollback.
Read: Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership

European anti-gender funding
The European Parliamentary Forum reports significant anti-rights and anti-gender funding in Europe between 2019 and 2023. This is broader than anti-trans campaigning alone, but it helps show the wider anti-gender infrastructure.
Read: EPF report on anti-gender funding in Europe

UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing alliances
Sally Hines examines the relationship between UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing, far-right, Christian fundamentalist and conservative media networks, while also recognising the older feminist roots of trans-exclusionary thought.
Read: Hands towards the right? UK gender critical feminism and right-wing coalitions

Campaign advertising and the electoral machine
The Guardian reported on major Republican spending on anti-trans advertising during the 2024 US election cycle, including figures cited from ad-tracking analysis.
Read: Trump and Republicans bet big on anti-trans ads

My day started, as it often does, at 6am.

Bing. Bing. Bing.

Alarm.

Right, I thought. We are not scrolling Instagram today.

We are getting up. We are making coffee. We are behaving like a proper adult woman with responsibilities, deadlines, emails, a dog, a publication, and a life that occasionally resembles an exploded stationery cupboard.

Thirty seconds later, obviously, I was scrolling Instagram.

This is how civilisation ends. Not with a bang, but with a 57-year-old transsexual woman lying in bed at dawn thinking, I will just watch one more reel and then I will become productive.

The reel was by Robyn Holdaway, who has been appearing in my feed lately and who is, annoyingly, absurdly eloquent. Ridiculously eloquent. The kind of eloquent that makes me slightly furious. If I could speak to camera with half their gravity, rhythm and consistency, you would see much more of me on video and I would have to write considerably fewer of these bloody essays.

Robyn was talking about the history of anti-trans politics, the TERF movement, and the wider machinery behind what now presents itself as “gender critical” feminism.

And I sat there thinking, with some embarrassment:

Oh God. I know almost nothing about this.

That is one of the slightly awkward truths about me as a trans woman. I am not very good at the syllabus.

I know the names I fixated on growing up, because there were so few of them. I know the women who became little secret landmarks in my head. I know the public figures I watched with that peculiar mixture of longing, fear and recognition.

But the broader history? Queer culture? The roots of Pride? The factions, schisms, arguments, conferences, newsletters, theories, movements and counter-movements?

No. Not really.

I am, in that sense, a bit of an academic failure as a transsexual.

It is a little like when I was a serious cyclist and people used to ask me about the Tour de France. I would have to admit that I barely watched it. I was out cycling. I was not sitting around memorising stage winners from 1987.

Transition has been a bit like that for me. I have been busy doing the thing. Surviving the thing. Rebuilding the thing. Having the thing surgically altered. Explaining the thing to my children. Losing people over the thing. Writing about the thing. Occasionally dancing in a dress because, frankly, after all that, one should be allowed a bit of a boogie.

But as for the intellectual history around the thing?

Patchy. Let us call it patchy.

So when Robyn described anti-trans politics not simply as a British social-media tantrum, but as something connected to wider anti-gender, religious-right and conservative policy networks, I had the reaction I often have when someone says something that sounds both plausible and slightly too neat.

I thought:

Hang on. Is that true?

Because my rough, lazy version of the story had been much simpler.

I thought the British TERF thing was mostly Graham Linehan, Mumsnet, newspaper columnists, J.K. Rowling, bathrooms, prisons, sport, a few furious comedians, some dreadful podcasts, and a great deal of disguised revulsion wearing a sensible coat.

You know the coat.

The “reasonable concern” coat.

The “women’s safety” coat.

The “we are only asking questions” coat.

The coat worn by people who insist they are not disgusted by trans women at all, absolutely not, heaven forbid, but who somehow manage to speak about us as though we are a Category B biological incident.

That part I understood immediately.

The bait and switch was obvious enough. The surface language was safety, safeguarding, fairness, children, prisons, changing rooms, toilets. But the emotional voltage never seemed to match the evidence. It always felt too hot. Too thrilled with itself. Too eager. Too intimate. Too bodily.

It felt, bluntly, like revulsion that had found a policy department.

But what I had not understood was the larger history.

I had not understood how “gender ideology” became an organising phrase across conservative, religious and anti-LGBT movements.

I had not understood how much of the current anti-trans political architecture sits inside a broader anti-gender movement.

I had not understood the extent to which, after defeats on gay rights and same-sex marriage, trans people became the next available battlefield.

At least, that is the claim.

And because I do not like simply repeating claims, even claims that flatter my existing suspicions, I decided to look.

So what did I find?

The first thing I found was that the cartoon version is too stupid.

There was no single room, no oak table, no Christian billionaire stroking a cat, no secret memo headed Operation Make Everyone Weird About Trans People.

Real life is rarely that kind.

The strongest version of the claim, that American religious conservatives simply invented TERF politics, bought some British feminists, and then marched them around like little wind-up toys, does not survive contact with reality.

But the weaker, more serious version?

That survives very well indeed.

Because what I found was not a conspiracy. It was infrastructure.

That is worse, in a way. Conspiracies require secrecy. Infrastructure just requires money, lawyers, institutions, patience, message discipline and a good supply of frightened politicians.

The anti-trans movement, as it now exists, is not one thing. It is a convergence.

There are old-school trans-exclusionary feminists with roots in second-wave arguments about sex, gender and womanhood. There are British newspaper columnists who appear to have mistaken their own revulsion for a legal principle. There are anxious parents, actual bigots, traumatised women, opportunistic politicians, manosphere-adjacent podcasters, professional contrarians, religious conservatives, think-tank people, litigators, donors, YouTubers, and a whole supply chain of people who discovered that “gender ideology” could be made to carry almost any fear they wanted to load onto it.

That phrase matters.

“Gender ideology.”

It is wonderfully useful because it does not sound like an attack on people. It sounds like an attack on a doctrine. Nobody wants to be pro-ideology, do they? Ideology sounds like something that happens in other countries, in badly lit rooms, while humourless people move pins around a map.

So the trans person becomes “gender ideology”.

The gay teacher becomes “sexualisation”.

The trans child becomes “social contagion”.

The supportive parent becomes “captured”.

The doctor becomes “mutilator”.

The school becomes “indoctrination”.

And the whole thing moves, very smoothly, from disgust to safeguarding.

That, I think, is the genius of it.

Not moral genius, obviously. Strategic genius.

The emotional engine is revulsion, fear and hierarchy. But the public language is children, women, safety, fairness, privacy, parents and biological reality.

This is how you launder disgust into policy.

The early wedge was bathrooms. That was the point at which I started recognising the shape of it, even before I understood the machinery. The argument was never really, “We have evidence that trans women are causing danger in toilets.” The argument was much more primal than that. It was, “Imagine a man in there.”

That was enough.

Once you can make people picture “a man in there”, you no longer need the actual trans woman. She has been replaced by a threat image.

Then came sport, which was even more useful.

Sport gave the movement something bathrooms did not quite give it: a plausible secular fairness argument. You did not have to talk about sin. You did not have to admit disgust. You did not even have to say you disliked trans people. You could say, with a serious face, that you were defending girls.

That is a very hard frame to fight.

Not because every version of the sports debate is automatically illegitimate. It is not. Sport does involve bodies, puberty, competition categories and material differences. Any honest person can see that.

But that is precisely why it was useful. It gave anti-trans politics a point of entry through a real-world complexity. Once inside, the argument could expand. From elite sport to school sport. From school sport to bathrooms. From bathrooms to pronouns. From pronouns to medical care. From medical care to child protection. From child protection to parental rights. From parental rights to the idea that any institution which recognises trans existence is engaged in ideological capture.

Then healthcare became the big one.

This is where the machinery becomes easiest to see, because the same phrases, structures and legal ideas begin appearing in different states. Model bills. Similar wording. Similar testimony. Similar “findings”. Similar claims about social contagion, regret, Europe, puberty blockers, parental rights, and doctors supposedly rushing children into irreversible procedures.

That is not an organic village panic.

That is a production line.

A national organisation writes the argument. A state lawmaker introduces it. A local witness gives it a human face. A friendly media ecosystem amplifies it. Lawyers defend it. Another group brings the next case. The bill fails in one state and passes in another. The passed law creates litigation. The litigation creates headlines. The headlines create fear. The fear creates more political demand.

And so the machine feeds itself.

This is where the money matters.

Not because money explains everything. It does not. Lots of ordinary people believe stupid and cruel things for free.

But money buys continuity.

Money buys lawyers who can spend years on cases. Money buys policy papers. Money buys staff. Money buys polling. Money buys media operations. Money buys conferences. Money buys fellowships. Money buys relationships with lawmakers. Money buys state-by-state legislative tracking. Money buys the ability to lose one battle and simply move to the next jurisdiction.

A broke moral panic burns hot and dies.

A funded moral panic becomes a career path.

And that, I think, is what happened.

The anti-trans movement became professionalised.

It learned to stop sounding like “we find these people disgusting” and start sounding like “we have grave concerns about safeguarding.”

It learned to stop saying “we oppose LGBT rights” and start saying “we support parental rights.”

It learned to stop saying “our religion requires sex hierarchy” and start saying “biological reality.”

It learned to stop saying “we do not want trans people in public life” and start saying “women and children deserve protection.”

And crucially, it learned where the liberal mind is weakest.

Children. Sport. Prisons. Bathrooms. Schools.

Pick the place where the public is uncertain, where even sympathetic people feel a little awkward, where the facts are complicated, where nobody wants to sound heartless, where the most extreme example can be made to stand in for the whole group.

Then push there.

Again and again and again.

This is why the UK version interests me so much, because Britain has its own strange pathology. The British gender-critical movement is not simply a branch office of the American Christian right. That would be too easy. It has roots in British feminism, British media, British class politics, British institutional caution, British politeness, British cruelty, and that peculiar national habit of making repression sound reasonable if you say it in the right accent.

But it also does not sit apart from the wider movement.

There are overlaps. Alliances. Shared phrases. Shared enemies. Shared platforms. Shared legal concepts. Shared think-tank worlds. Shared moral panic structures.

The British version may wear a different coat, but it is standing in the same weather.

So, no, I do not think the correct conclusion is:

“TERFs are all secretly funded by American Christians.”

That is not serious enough.

The better conclusion is this:

Anti-trans politics became the place where several different movements found each other.

Radical feminist sex essentialism found Christian-right family politics.

Christian-right family politics found conservative legal strategy.

Conservative legal strategy found Republican statehouses.

Republican statehouses found media outrage.

Media outrage found social media.

Social media found frightened parents.

Frightened parents found campaigners.

Campaigners found donors.

Donors found lawyers.

Lawyers found cases.

Cases found courts.

Courts found policy.

Policy found my life.

And that is the part people forget.

This is not abstract. It does not stay in think-tank PDFs. It does not remain in American statehouses. It does not sit politely inside an Instagram reel.

It travels.

It travels into newspapers, hospitals, schools, families, airports, toilets, changing rooms, courtrooms, dinner tables, comment sections and the eyes of strangers.

It arrives at the front door.

Which is why I wanted to know where it came from.

Source anchors

A few pieces of evidence are worth separating from the general noise.

Bathroom bills as a post-marriage-equality wedge
Type Investigations traces the rise of bathroom bills after Obergefell and describes how bathroom panic became an early post-marriage-equality strategy.
Read: The Secret History of Bathroom Bills

The coalition strategy
Political Research Associates documents Promise to America’s Children, a programme backed by Family Policy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom and other groups, covering trans healthcare, trans athletes, sex education, conversion therapy, adoption, schools and parental control.
Read: The New Anti-Trans Promise

Copy-and-paste state legislation
The Associated Press analysed more than 130 bills across 40 US state legislatures and found many were identical or similar to model legislation promoted by conservative groups.
Read: Many anti-trans bills came from a handful of far-right interest groups

Model legislation in plain sight
Do No Harm published model legislation covering schools, government funding, medical procedures for minors, private legal action, insurance coverage and enforcement routes.
Read: Do No Harm model legislation, The JUST FACTs Act

Scale of institutional money, Alliance Defending Freedom
ProPublica’s nonprofit records show Alliance Defending Freedom operating at a very large institutional scale. This does not mean every dollar is anti-trans money, but it does show that this is not a fringe operation with a few angry people and a podcast.
Read: ProPublica nonprofit profile, Alliance Defending Freedom

Scale of institutional money, Heritage Foundation
ProPublica’s nonprofit records also show the Heritage Foundation operating at a very large institutional scale, with major revenue, expenses and assets. Again, this is not the same as saying every dollar is spent on anti-trans politics, but it matters when assessing infrastructure.
Read: ProPublica nonprofit profile, Heritage Foundation

Project 2025 in its own words
Project 2025 is not just a name people throw around for dramatic effect. Its own text contains explicit language about “gender ideology”, schools, federal funding, sexual orientation, gender identity, and policy rollback.
Read: Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership

European anti-gender funding
The European Parliamentary Forum reports significant anti-rights and anti-gender funding in Europe between 2019 and 2023. This is broader than anti-trans campaigning alone, but it helps show the wider anti-gender infrastructure.
Read: EPF report on anti-gender funding in Europe

UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing alliances
Sally Hines examines the relationship between UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing, far-right, Christian fundamentalist and conservative media networks, while also recognising the older feminist roots of trans-exclusionary thought.
Read: Hands towards the right? UK gender critical feminism and right-wing coalitions

Campaign advertising and the electoral machine
The Guardian reported on major Republican spending on anti-trans advertising during the 2024 US election cycle, including figures cited from ad-tracking analysis.
Read: Trump and Republicans bet big on anti-trans ads

This essay is part of a four-part series exploring the hardest questions at the centre of my life and my transition.
Each piece examines a different angle: honesty, resentment, myth, and science.

1. Was Stephen Bennett a Fucking Liar?
A reckoning with silence, shame and self-deception.
https://fasttrackfemme.substack.com/p/was-stephen-bennett-a-fucking-liar

2. Why the “TERFs™ 🤪” Hate Us
An examination of resentment, envy, authenticity and why trans people provoke such concentrated hostility.
(You’re reading this one.)

3. What I Am Not
A clear dismantling of autogynephilia and the junk science that has distorted public understanding.
[To be released shortly]

4. Why Am I Like This?
A deep dive into the psychology and science behind the origins of gender identity and transness.
[To be released shortly]

I don’t blow my own trumpet about much. There is plenty wrong with me, whole continents of flaws, blind spots, self-deception, strange coping mechanisms, and emotional knots I’m only now learning to untangle. But there is one trait I’ve always had in absolute abundance:

I have always been exceptionally good at sticking my middle finger up to social norms.

I have never ever given a shit, not for fifteen seconds, about what I’m supposed to be, how I’m supposed to behave, or what shape my life is meant to take.

Not how I should earn a living.
Not how a “proper adult” should behave

I didn’t care at twenty-five. I didn’t care at forty-five. And I certainly don’t care now. I have seen it all my life as my duty to rebel. It’s just my nature.

It’s probably why my office wall is plastered with Ferris Bueller, Frank Abagnale and Jordan Belfort. I have always admired mavericks and outsiders, not for their chaos but for their refusal to accept the script handed to them. I’ve spent most of my life doing the same. I haven’t been to an office (or people farm, as I call them) in a decade and I haven’t had a permanent job in 28 years.

And the truth is, I don’t think that streak is unique to me. A lot of us have it. In fact, it’s almost predictable. So many trans people carry that same golden triangle of gender dysphoria, ADHD and mild autism, and it produces a particular kind of mind, restless, questioning, pattern-spotting, stubbornly resistant to doing things simply because we’re told to. It makes breaking social rules feel less like rebellion and more like inevitability. Once you’ve spent a lifetime feeling out of step with the world, you stop pretending the choreography was ever meant for you.

And so, ladies and gents, my grand theory. It’s in large part jealousy, but not the way you think.

And as I’ve thought more deeply about why hostility toward trans people has escalated so dramatically, I’ve realised that one of the biggest forces behind it isn’t disgust, or ideology, or fear of biology.

It’s jealousy.

And just to be clear, I’m not pretending jealousy is the only force in play. There have been activists who have made frankly batshit demands of the public, or announced things that are so uncompromising and inflexible that genuinely sane, rational people have ended up furious. You cannot go around shouting “transphobe” at anyone who disagrees with your philosophical position without eventually looking like the boy who cried wolf. That backlash is real and I don’t deny it. But even with all of that acknowledged, I still think there is a deeper current running underneath the noise, something older and more psychological that explains why the reaction is so visceral. And that is where jealousy lives.

Not jealousy of femininity or hormones or clothing.
Not jealousy of surgeries or appearance.
Not jealousy of being trans.

Who in God’s name would be jealous of that curse in life? And it was a curse, a curse that you would not wish on your worst enemy.

It’s jealousy of the audacity.

Trans people do something most people never do: we examine our lives honestly and act on what we find. We confront truths about ourselves that are terrifying, destabilising and often life-altering. We turn towards the thing we fear rather than away from it. We break our own lives open and rebuild them in the light.

Most people don’t do that. Most people will never do that.

Most people stay.

They stay in marriages that hollow them out.

They stay in jobs they despise.

They stay in towns they’ve outgrown.

They stay in identities they inherited rather than chose.

They stay in roles scripted by other people.

They stay because staying is easier.

They stay because confronting the truth is frightening.

They stay because change feels like death.

And then someone like us shows up.

Someone who says, actually, no.

I’m not doing this anymore.

I’m not pretending.

I’m not living a life built on choreography.

I am going to be who I am, even if it requires uprooting everything.

To someone who has never changed anything fundamental about themselves, this is unbearable.

Because what are they supposed to do with the knowledge that a stranger, a trans woman, has done something they have never once found the courage to do?

What exactly is their excuse for living a life they privately resent while someone they regard as “less legitimate” has found the strength to walk into the fire?

It is easier to hate us than to face that question.

It is easier to declare us delusional than to consider that we might be brave.

It is easier to mock us than to admit we represent a freedom they never cultivated.

It is easier to invent pathology than to confront the possibility that we are not the fragile ones in this equation.

We are reminders of choice.

We are not attacking their worldview.

We are exposing their lack of one.

We are not dismantling society.

We are demonstrating that most of the cages people sit in have the doors unlocked.

And this, more than anything, drives the rage.

We are proof that you can choose yourself, even late.

We are proof that you can tell the truth, even after decades.

We are proof that you can burn down an old life and build a better one.

We are proof that the scripts can be rejected.

We represent the life they didn’t dare to have.

We represent the courage they never acted on.

So yes, they hate us.

And you cannot reason someone out of a position they arrived at to avoid looking in the mirror.

But you can recognise it for what it is.

And you can walk on, free.

I parted with another ten percent of my WULF position today.

For anyone who has not been following along, WULF is a bitcoin miner I bought when it felt vomitingly stupid to buy it, sitting at about a dollar, and have watched climb, with my hand mostly off the sell button, all the way to twenty-eight. It has been a ride.

This particular sale was not a grand strategic move. It was not the liquidity cycle whispering to me. It was the rather less glamorous fact that my client is late paying an invoice, and I found myself a little nervous about funding my upcoming vocal surgery, which has to be paid for, in full, very soon, and does not care in the slightest whether a university finance department is having a contemplative month.

So I took a slice off the table. Margin of safety. Surgery funded, nerves settled.

And then, sitting there having done it, the full ridiculousness of my own life landed on me.

My MicroStrategy trades paid for my face, my arse, my tits, and my vagina.

And now WULF has paid for my voice.

I am, quite literally, a WULF in sheep’s clothing.

There is a serious point buried in here, and then I will get out of your way. Most of my writing in this section is about long-term conviction, about holding a position through the nausea, about not selling the thing you believe in just because the price got uncomfortable. All of that still stands. But the other half of the discipline, the unglamorous half, is this: sometimes you take the trade because you need to take the trade. A dated, must-happen, real-world obligation does not negotiate with a chart. When the money has a job to do and the job has a deadline, you ring-fence the money and you let the rest run. The winner you held for two years can spare a slice to make sure the thing that actually matters is paid for.

I held WULF unleveraged the whole way precisely so that a moment like this would be a calm decision and not a crisis. That is the entire point of not using leverage. It means that when life sends you an invoice, you get to choose when to sell, rather than having the choice made for you at the worst possible moment.

Anyway. The conviction made the gains. Life decided where they went.

Face, arse, tits, vagina, voice.

Worth every cent.

I was reluctant to write a piece called Alcohol.

I have circled it for a year. I have mentioned, in other pieces, that I did not drink for fifteen years. That I started again and drank for eleven months, and stopped again.

Anyone reading the autobiography closely can see the stretches in the 1990s where I got through my own hidden struggles with gender dysphoria with a combination of drink and other things (Ch 5, Ch 6). I wrote recently about reaching for the bottle when I was rejected, when I reached out to family and friends and got grief back. But I have never sat down and written about the thing itself. My actual relationship with it. So here it is.

It starts, as a lot of things in my life start, with my mother and something slightly ridiculous.

She used to make wine in demijohns. Those great glass five litre bottles with a tube poking out the top, bubbling away in a corner, turning into plum wine and elderflower wine and god-knows-what-else wine. And by the time my poor mother got to drink any of it, it must have tasted putrid, because I had been siphoning it off the moment it turned even vaguely alcoholic, taking great swigs, and topping the bottle back up with water. That is my earliest memory of drinking. Thirteen years old, robbing my own mother’s plum wine and watering down the evidence.

Then I got to sixteen, and the real thing arrived.

I looked older than I was. So the pub became possible. There were four of us, me and three friends, all of us just starting our A levels, and we worked out that if we did not push our luck in the rough places in the middle of town, but went instead to the golf club on the outskirts, they would serve us. This was back when the golf club was full of men who all looked like Jimmy Tarbuck, sporting Pringle jumpers with feathered side partings and nineteen-eighties moustaches. It was not cool. We did not care. We were the nice boys. The boys doing their A levels. We would turn up with maybe two pounds fifty each, enough for three pints and a bag of chips, maybe even curry sauce on the way home. Because I looked the oldest I would go to the bar, even though the barman only had to glance across the room at the other three to know exactly what was going on. He served us anyway. I would carry back our pints of whatever we drank in those days, and we would sit there and talk like young men who were free for the first time in their lives.

There was another place too, the Hare and Hounds, also out on the edge of town. They did the most delicious cheese and salad sandwiches with Branston pickle, and we would order those and our beers and put the world to rights. It was much safer for us out on the edge of town than in the rough flat-roofed pubs of the Skelmersdale council estates, where the local scallies, sporting their nineteen-eighties footballer mullets, would have beaten the living shit out of you just for looking at them. And I don’t mean looking at them the wrong way. I mean accidentally catching their gaze. Those places were terrifying. So we stuck to the golf club and the Hare and Hound.

And then I would walk home.

There was a subway underpass back to the council estates on the way, the kind with a long echo, and three pints to the good and full of sixteen-year-old bravado, I would belt out New Year’s Day by U2 into the echo, doing my half-decent Bono, knowing full well I was hoping my friends were marvelling at my voice. I was a vain little bastard. But God, I was happy. Free, sixteen, my whole voice ringing back at me off the concrete, my friends laughing, the entire enormous future still out in front of me and none of it gone wrong yet.

I think my entire drinking life, from that night until the day I finally stopped, was one long attempt to walk back into that underpass.

Every bottle of wine opened at home in front of the television. Every drink poured alone in a hotel while I was working away, killing time pretending to care about a Champions League match. Every single one was the same reach. I was trying to get back to the golf club. Back to being sixteen and free with my friends, the three pints, and the cheese and salad sandwiches.

I never got there again. Not once. The feeling was only ever in that one place, at that one age, and no amount of drink ever rebuilt it. I just kept ordering it and kept not finding it.

The first time I understood that, I was already well into adulthood and working in an office with a serious drinking culture. Pub at lunchtime, two or three pints, three times a week at least. Sometimes the pub again after work. By then I had a young son at home and a wife who had been stuck with him all day, and there were evenings I came back to her half cut, which was not acceptable, and which I hated. Don’t get me wrong, I had worked in plenty of companies, some with a drinking culture and some without. When there was no drinking culture, I didn’t drink. But when there was, I would be first at the bar, chucking cash at the barman.

Then one afternoon we had what felt at the time like a marvellous idea. We sent our new Turkish colleague out to Sainsbury’s to buy us premixed gin and tonics in little bottles. He was brand new, pretty green behind the ears, and we sat in our private glass office drinking them in the afternoon, hidden away from the rest of the staff. There was a young graduate who had just started, and we told him that our new Turkish colleague was actually a world champion Turkish wrestler. As the gins kicked in, we somehow managed to convince the Turkish developer to get the young graduate in a headlock. Just to show off his “advanced wrestling skills”. I am fairly sure the CEO walked past the door and looked in at this human zoo he was paying top dollar for. We all just burst out laughing. This was not good. This was not how one builds a career. After work that night there were a few more pints. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb. And then I made my way home, sobering up that little bit, the way one does. after an hour of London public transport.

I cannot say with any certainty what caused it. But I remember walking through the front door feeling absolutely disgusted with myself, to a level I never had before. Seeing my wife at home, dealing with an enormous boxer dog and a baby, and me, acting like a bloody half cut fool. It all suddenly hit me. I went upstairs and, totally uncharacteristically, got straight into bed, and I cried, and I said to myself, I am done with this. This is no way for a human being to live. Where does it lead? Here I am edging towards middle age, in terrible condition and drinking like this, and for what?

To be fair, I was never rolling around. People never saw me staggering or aggressive. I never screwed much up except myself. My wife never saw me drunk. It was not that kind of problem. It was that I looked at the whole thing and could not find a single reason for it that survived contact with daylight. It was leading nowhere. It was just me, still chasing a night from when I was sixteen that was never coming back.

So I stopped. And for fifteen years I did not drink a drop. No AA, a didn’t need it. I’d applied the rational argument and just stopped. People say, “well, it can’t have been that bad if you just stopped”. I honestly don’t have a clever answer for that. Everybody’s path in life is their own. This is what happened. This is why I stopped.

I want to tell you about the cabinet, because it is the part that matters most.

In my living room there was a large cabinet, painted in some lovely Farrow and Ball colour, full of crystal glasses and crystal decanters, laden with fine whiskey and brandy and all sorts. It was mine. And for fifteen years I never touched it. It simply sat there. When people came to the house they would say, can I have one of those whiskeys, and I would say of course, and pour it for them, or hand them the decanter and tell them to knock themselves out. They would take a sip and say, Christ, this is delicious, what is it, and I would say I genuinely have no idea, I bought it years ago, I think it might be Ardbeg.

Fifteen years of the finest whiskey within arm’s reach, in my own home, every day, and it held nothing over me at all. I could pour it, smell it, serve it, and feel precisely nothing, except a mild inability to remember what any of it was. That is not a person heroically resisting. That is a person for whom the drink is simply not a need. That was my baseline. That is who I actually am.

Then everyone in my life left when I transitioned and I decided to have a drink.

I rationalised it the cheat way. The thing that had been making me unhappy for so long was finally solved. I had transitioned. I was myself at last. So a drink was allowed, surely. That was the thinking, and it was thin, but it did the job at the time.

And these things always start the same way. For me it was espresso martinis, of all things. A drink I had never once had in the past, because it was never a fashionable thing in the circles I drank in, and I used to watch other people order them and genuinely wonder what the hell they tasted like. So that is where I started. One espresso martini, to find out.

But when you are carrying the level of grief I was carrying, it does not end at one espresso martini, does it. It never does.

And at times it got out of hand. I drowned my sorrows in it. I have written elsewhere, in a lot of detail, about why I think that happened, so I will not labour it here. Again, not rolling around drunk, but certainly a pattern that was heading toward heavy drinking. The short version is that it came in bursts, and the bursts were always tied to rejection. Whenever I reached out to someone from my old life, by WhatsApp or by phone, and got turned away, I drank. The drink was never really about the drink. It was the anaesthetic for the reaching.

And when I worked that out, and stopped reaching toward the people who had closed the door, the urge to drink went with it. I did not quit alcohol. I quit the reaching, and the alcohol simply had no job left to do.

It has been over a month now. I have no interest in drinking again. None. I have returned to the baseline I held for fifteen years. I wake up with that beautiful fresh feeling I had for years. I lay my breakfast out the night before, the way I always used to, to save time in the morning, and it is such a glorious little habit. The skincare routine done properly EVERY evening, every step. I watch a little TV with a large Goldfish Bowl gin glass of tonic water and Angostura Bitters, as I did for fifteen years. At the end, I turn off the TV, give Colonel Chesterton a little kiss, and go to bed for a good night’s sleep. All of that had been slipping with the drink. And now I am delighted to face the day at six in the morning.

Today, there are half-finished bottles of whiskey in that same cabinet in my kitchen. There is a bottle of gin sitting on the shelf of my little non-alcoholic bar, open, within reach. I look at it and feel nothing. I am not fighting it. I am not denying myself anything. There is nothing to resist, because the want is not there. I am simply someone who does not drink. I was that person for fifteen years before the most difficult year of my life, and I am that person again now.

What changed was not my willpower. It was that I stopped trying to control the one thing I was never going to control, which is how other people decide to treat me. Once I put that down, the drink had nowhere left to live.

I will end with this, carefully, because I am not a doctor and this is only my own story and not a method for anyone else.

If you are struggling with drink, or with anything in that family of things we reach for when the reaching hurts, I am very happy to talk. I cannot fix anyone and I would not pretend to. But I know the shape of it from the inside, and sometimes it helps just to hear from someone who found their way back out.

Like everybody else this last couple of weeks, I’ve looked at the SpaceX IPO from the side of the road. And I’ll be honest with you, there was a little feeling at the back of my mind the whole time. The one that says: are you one hundred percent sure you have absolutely no interest in this? Are you certain you’re not about to watch the greatest wealth-creation event of the decade sail past you while you stand there with your arms folded, being clever?

I know that feeling well. It’s not insight. It’s the crowd’s tug. It’s the motion of the herd starting to foam and froth at the mouth at the idea of spectacular returns, and it pulls at you precisely because everyone around you is leaning the same way. The analysts queue up to tell you what Google did. What Amazon did. What you’d have made if you’d bought Nvidia in 2015 and gone to sleep for a decade. The pull is real and I felt it.

But I had a separate take. I wouldn’t claim it’s the most original take in the world. It’s just mine, and this is what it is.

The value was extracted before it ever came near me.

Let me show you what I mean, because this isn’t a feeling, it’s an arithmetic.

In May of last year, a private tender valued SpaceX at around three hundred and fifty billion dollars. By December, an insider sale put it near eight hundred billion. In February, the xAI merger bundled the whole thing up at one and a quarter trillion. And when it finally walked onto the Nasdaq two days ago, it priced at a valuation of one and three quarter trillion, popped nineteen percent on day one, and closed the week worth somewhere north of two trillion dollars.

So the journey from three hundred and fifty billion to one and three quarter trillion, a five-fold increase, happened entirely in private hands over thirteen months. By the time you and I were allowed to put a hand up, the staircase had already been climbed. We weren’t being offered the climb. We were being offered the view from the top, and asked to pay for the privilege of standing there.

And then I realised what it actually reminded me of. Not a shitcoin in the fraudulent sense. SpaceX is not a fraud. Starlink is real, the rockets are real. But the mechanics of the launch, the plumbing, were borrowed wholesale from the world of crypto token launches, and once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it. Three things in particular.

Vesting - A classic shitcoin move

The first is vesting. In a token launch, the people with access don’t get all their coins on day one. They get a small slice unlocked at the start, and then a vesting schedule drips the rest out over months or years, on a calendar. SpaceX did exactly this. It didn’t use the normal single lockup that lifts after six months. It built a tiered release where insiders can sell seven percent of their holdings at each of a series of dates, starting around seventy days in and laddering out from there. And here is the tell. That structure was not built to protect people like me. It was engineered to expand the public float fast enough to maximise the company’s weighting in the Nasdaq index, which in turn forces index funds to buy the stock whether they want to or not. The drip is not a safety feature. It’s a demand-manufacturing machine.

Super Low Float - THE classic shitcoin move

The second is the low float. In crypto they call it low float, high fully-diluted-valuation. You release a tiny fraction of the supply, you let a stampede of demand crash into that tiny fraction, and the price that results gets multiplied across all the locked tokens nobody can sell yet, to print an enormous headline valuation. SpaceX sold roughly seven percent. It was oversubscribed by more than four hundred percent. A tiny slice against a wall of demand. That is the low-float playbook, executed at the largest scale in the history of public markets.

Retail Lock In

The third is the one that genuinely made me sit up, because it’s the one that gives the game away. The selling restrictions. I’d half-remembered that retail couldn’t just freely sell, and I went and checked, and it’s worse than I thought, though not in the way I assumed. Retail could technically sell on the open market. But the brokers handing out the shares attached anti-flipping penalties to them. Sell your Fidelity allocation inside fifteen days and you can be locked out of future IPOs. SoFi runs a thirty-day window and escalates to a permanent ban for repeat offenders, and will charge you fifty quid for the privilege. And the threat with teeth is that flipping your SpaceX shares could cost you your allocation in the OpenAI and Anthropic floats still to come. So picture the asymmetry. The insiders have a vesting calendar that lets them sell on schedule into the demand. The retail buyer is threatened with exile for trying to take profit in the same window. One side has a structured exit. The other side has a leash.

And then, underneath all of it, the part almost nobody is talking about. A large chunk of SpaceX shares are held through special-purpose vehicles, stacked two and three tiers deep. When the lockup lifts for the top-layer vehicle, it has thirty days to pass shares down to its investors, who then pass them down again. The people at the bottom of that stack won’t even know what they truly hold until months after the public calendar says it’s done, and they’re exposed to hidden fees and delays along the way. If you have ever watched a token launch unwind, you know exactly what that shape is. It’s the tiered bagholder. The further down the stack you sit, the later you find out what you’re actually holding, and the more of it has already been decided above your head.

That was the moment the feeling became a conviction. None of this is illegal. None of it is even unusual any more. But it is borrowed, beat for beat, from a world I watched eat retail alive only a few years ago. Tiny float. Vesting drip. Restricted exits for the little guy and scheduled exits for the big one. I have seen this film. I know how it ends for the person who shows up late and excited.

There’s one more thing in the parcel worth naming, because it’s the bit that stops you valuing the thing cleanly even if you wanted to. You cannot buy SpaceX. You think you can, but you can’t. What you can buy is a bundle. Inside it is Starlink, a genuinely excellent business and the only profitable segment in the whole enterprise. Inside it is the rocket company, extraordinary and lumpy and hard to value. And stapled on in February at a quarter of a trillion dollars is xAI. Grok. The former Twitter. A money-incinerating AI operation that, in 2025, contributed about three billion in revenue while burning roughly fourteen billion in cash, consuming more cash by itself than every other part of SpaceX generates. The combined company turned a tidy profit in 2024 into a five billion dollar loss in 2025, and the entire swing is xAI. So you can’t price the rocket cleanly, you can’t buy the satellite business on its own, and the whole thing has to be swallowed as one act of faith. That isn’t an accident of how the company grew. That’s the package, as designed.

Now, in fairness, the bulls aren’t fools and I’m not going to pretend they are. The serious independent valuations put fair value well below where it’s trading, somewhere around a third of today’s price, and the bull case openly admits this is three moonshots in one company that only works if most of them land. You can read those numbers for yourself. I won’t labour them, because they’re not actually what decides it for me.

What decides it for me is simpler, and it’s two separate questions that everyone insists on collapsing into one.

Do I believe in the rocket company, as a rocket company? God, yes. Completely. I want him to do this. I am genuinely, childishly excited to see whether he can put data centres in orbit, whether Starship becomes routine, whether the whole improbable thing works. If you’re asking me whether I believe in SpaceX, I’m in the front row, cheering.

But that is not the question the IPO is asking me. The IPO isn’t asking do you believe in the rockets. It’s asking will you pay this price, today, for a bundle, through this structure, where the float is a sliver, the insiders have a vesting calendar, and you’ve been threatened with exile for selling too soon. And to that question, the answer is just as clear, and it isn’t about the rockets at all.

I thought he was launching rockets. And he is, genuinely, gloriously. It’s just that the IPO around them was a shitcoin launch with rocket boosters attached.

In this update, I fly to London to see ABBA Voyage, lose my tickets to a CAPTCHA, defeat myself with Citymapper, get trapped in a Tube station in three-inch platform boots, nearly go over backwards fifteen times during Dancing Queen, reverse-engineer the projection stack mid-epiphany, and board a train to the wrong airport. Also: a forty-year-old promise to a little boy in the back of a Ford Cortina finally gets kept.

Several weeks ago I went to see ABBA Voyage in London.

I have a strange, deep relationship with ABBA.

If I had to name the external things that most instantly return me to childhood, ABBA would be right up there with Starsky & Hutch, Star Wars, and Christopher Reeve as Superman. That is the little cultural shrine of my early boyhood, really. Cars, capes, spaceships, disco, blonde women, impossible longing.

But ABBA sits differently from the rest of them.

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in the back of our mid-70s Ford Cortina Mark III with the four-track player in the front, listening to the same cartridges over and over again. If memory serves, we had ABBA and The Mamas & the Papas, and those songs somehow embedded themselves into me before I had language for half of what I was feeling.

We had the albums at home but it is the Cortina I remember most. Me as a little boy, my mum and dad in the front, the world before my younger siblings were fully in it, and Skelmersdale New Town was still gleaming white and futuristic.

When I first started transitioning, my therapist was very keen that I learn to look after the little boy inside me. He asked me once whether I experienced that child as a little boy or a little girl.

I said, “A little boy. I was a little boy.”

And he said I needed to tell him I loved him. I needed to anchor back to that little fella, not erase him. He said I needed to look after that little boy, and that I’d abandoned him, not lived out his dreams, crushed him.

ABBA does that for me like almost nothing else.

Partly because I hadn’t really listened to those songs properly for years. Unlike Star Wars or Superman, ABBA had not been constantly refreshed in my adult life. My ex-wife couldn’t stand them, so they were never played in our house. They just sat there, undisturbed, in some sealed room of memory.

Then, when I finally heard them again recently, the force of it was astonishing.

It wasn’t nostalgia in the soft-focus, “wasn’t everything lovely back then?” sense.

It was more like opening a door and finding the little boy still sitting there.

And then, of course, there was Agnetha.

She was one of a small holy trinity of women I remember staring at as a child and thinking, with a pain I could not explain:

Why can’t I look like you?

Agnetha from ABBA.

Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman.

Later, Debbie Harry.

I did not want to fancy them, though I’m sure I did that too in some confused little-boy way. I wanted to be adjacent to whatever they were. I wanted the hair, the face, the movement, the lightness, the possibility.

Why do I have to look like this stupid boy? I’d go to bed at night and wish that some magic would transform me, but it never does. So many of us tell this story. It’s almost universal.

But this was Liverpool and Skelmersdale in the 1970s. If thoughts like that had ever escaped into the public domain, you would have been pulverised. So I buried them deep.

Very deep.

And perhaps that is why re-listening to ABBA again now has mattered so much. The songs reach straight past the adult explanations, past the transition discourse, past the arguments and politics and family wreckage, and they find that little boy directly.

So, in order to reconnect with him properly, I decided to make the pilgrimage to London and see ABBA Voyage.

I was also fascinated by the technology, obviously, because I am constitutionally incapable of sitting in a room full of theatrical illusion without mentally disassembling the rendering pipeline.

But that came second.

First, I wanted to stand in the room with those songs.

I had waited forty years to be the Dancing Queen.

And I was going.

Now naturally, because I am me, this entire operation had been planned with military precision.

The house was spotless.

Colonel Chesterton had been prepared for my absence like a tiny aristocrat awaiting room service. I had set up a sequence of timed little food compartments for him, each one popping open every few hours with more kibble, and the occasional treat, like a little Chihuahua advent calendar.

I even left BBC Radio 6 Music on for him.

He quite likes Stuart Maconie.

His water situation had been analysed.

His entertainment requirements had been considered.

His snack-release infrastructure had been tested these last few days.

I had effectively built him a miniature hospitality platform in the kitchen.

And honestly?

The beginning of the day went beautifully.

Cork Airport.

Bang on time.

Security.

Bang on time.

Coffee acquired.

Those little ninety-calorie crisps acquired, the ones that psychologically convince you you’ve eaten crisps without actually consuming the calorific equivalent of a full bag of Maris Piper. Why do they only seem to sell enormous bags of crisps these days? It really annoys me.

Anyway, everything under control.

Then I sat down and thought:

“Oh, I should probably download the ABBA tickets now.”

Two second job.

Not a two second job.

Computer says no.

Try again.

Computer says no.

Reset password.

Now I’m fighting one of those fiddly little CAPTCHA bollocks on a tiny phone screen with long acrylic nails, which I can now confirm is one of the worst combinations known to humanity.

I am muttering under my breath in what I suddenly realise is an increasingly audible man voice.

“Stupid fucking phone.”

“Stupid fucking CAPTCHA.”

“Stupid fucking website.”

At one point I become intensely aware that the people around me can probably hear a transgender woman in a microdress angrily reverting to Northern Dad Voice at her phone before nine o’clock in the morning.

Not ideal.

Recently I listened to a podcast where marketing expert Rory Sutherland was talking about phone keyboards, and he said something I now think about constantly:

“The worst thing Steve Jobs ever did was remove the keyboard from phones.”

And honestly, I agree.

Billions of productive human hours have now been wasted poking uselessly at little glass rectangles with our thumbs like technologically advanced pigeons.

Round and round the merry-go-round went.

Can’t log in.

Reset password.

Now it says I’m a bot.

Can’t contact support because it’s Sunday.

Fantastic.

So now we are flying to London to attend ABBA Voyage without actual tickets.

Excellent start.

Still, onwards.

I arrived at Stansted and immediately decided, despite living in London for years, that I somehow knew better than Citymapper.

I do not know better than Citymapper.

I had formed a beautiful theory that the clever route was definitely, definitely via Tottenham Hale. So I bought a ticket to Tottenham Hale.

Small problem.

Tottenham Hale was closed.

A sensible person, at this point, would have stayed on the train to Liverpool Street and dealt with it there. But I had bought a ticket to Tottenham Hale, and now my brain had produced an entire imaginary confrontation with a large railway man in which I had to explain, in my still-not-quite-where-I-want-it voice, that I was terribly sorry, but I was a transgender woman in three-inch platform boots, a tiny dress and tights, on my way to see ABBA, and I appeared to have bought the wrong ticket.

No.

Absolutely not.

So I got off at Seven Sisters instead.

Now let the carnage begin.

Seven Sisters to somewhere.

Somewhere to somewhere else.

Possibly Liverpool Street.

Possibly not.

And the more agitated I got, the more I kept bollocksing up Citymapper. I kept pressing the backspace and cancelling the journey. Then I’d try and restart the journey, but it wouldn’t work out that I was already on the train. How the fuck do you tell it you’re already on the train?

This was the point at which the entire perfect ADHD itinerary began collapsing into little smoking pieces.

And, somewhere in the middle of the chaos, I realised I had failed to tap in or tap out properly. Oh, fuck. Even if I get there, I’m still going to be trapped in the tube station.

By now, time was getting unpleasantly tight. The show was about twenty minutes away, and I had calculated that if absolutely nothing else went wrong, I might arrive five minutes before it started.

A nice relaxing cultural outing, then.

On the final Tube leg, I sat there thinking:

“This barrier is not going to let me out.”

It was not a theory.

It was a prophecy.

I reached the exit.

Tap.

Computer says no.

Oh, fuck.

I looked around. No staff. Barely anyone about. Sunday afternoon. A nearly empty station.

If I had been wearing jeans and trainers, I would honestly have considered jumping the barrier. But I was not wearing jeans and trainers. I was wearing a tiny mini dress, black tights and three-inch platform boots.

That is not a barrier-jumping outfit.

That is an outfit in which you become an incident report.

Out of desperation, I tapped again.

And for some completely inexplicable reason, it opened.

The gods of London Transport had decided I was worthy.

I trotted out, half relieved and half furious with myself, and hurried towards the arena, suddenly aware of another new life experience I had never expected to have: jogging in public while feeling self-conscious about my boobs bouncing.

There are milestones in transition nobody warns you about.

Luckily, when I reached the venue, it turned out I was not the only person whose digital existence had been rejected by the ticketing gods. A little cluster of us had all been defeated by AXS in one way or another, so the box office staff handled it with the weary calm of people who had already seen this nonsense several times that day.

They found my ticket.

I was in.

And immediately realised I had underdressed.

Oh no.

Some people had gone FULL ABBA.

Sequins.

Sparkles.

Silver boots.

Little Agnetha hats.

Full on Waterloo 1974 energy.

To be fair, sitting on one of Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair flights dressed like I was moments away from bursting into Voulez-Vous might have looked even stranger than my normal level of strange.

Then I bought myself an alcohol-free mojito and stood there quietly taking it all in.

I should say something important here.

I have been really good lately.

Really good.

I have accepted something that hurt me enormously: that almost nobody from my old life wants to know me anymore.

And strangely, once I stopped fighting that reality, life became easier.

So I was more than happy to stand there sipping my alcohol-free mojito.

No drama.

No spiral.

Just me, sober and present, waiting for ABBA.

And then the curtain went up.

At first there was a tiny bit of weirdness with a couple of songs I didn’t know as well.

My brain trying to understand what I was even looking at.

Part theatre.

Part technology demonstration.

I mean, they kind of looked real, but not quite. A little bit like when Yoda turns up after he’s dead in Star Wars, and there’s a slight ethereal glow around him.

And then they started SOS.

Oh my God.

My entire chest went.

I suddenly wasn’t fifty-seven anymore.

I was back in that Cortina.

Back queuing up to see Grease and Star Wars.

Back with Bazooka Joe bubble gum and sherbet dib-dabs.

Back carrying that impossible little secret around inside me before I even properly understood what it was.

The emotional tug was enormous.

And then, as the hits started landing properly, one after another, I realised something else.

My God, ABBA had some corkingly good songs.

You know this, obviously. Everybody knows it. But there is a difference between knowing it intellectually and standing in a dark arena with thousands of people as those songs come roaring back into the room like somebody has opened a locked cupboard in the 1970s and all the light has fallen out.

Looking around the arena was fascinating.

There were seventy-year-old women who knew every word.

Gay lads in sequins.

Younger people discovering ABBA properly for the first time.

Couples.

Nostalgic dads.

Women reliving entire summers.

People like me quietly having emotional breakdowns in platform boots.

And I kept thinking about all those women.

The ones who were now about 70 but where young when these songs were out.

I imagined them lying in back gardens in the 1970s, covered in whatever terrifying cooking oil people used before sunscreen became a moral obligation, listening to Voulez-Vous while waiting for the ice cream van to come down the road.

Probably the same way my mum did.

The same way half the country did.

And somehow, standing there, I knew every word.

Not nearly every word.

Every word.

They were all still in there.

The songs had just been sitting patiently in the sealed room of memory, waiting for somebody to turn the light back on.

Meanwhile, I was also discovering that dancing to ABBA in three-inch platform boots is significantly easier in your kitchen than in a dark arena.

Especially when your kitchen contains a permanently installed disco light.

Yes, I have one.

No, I regret nothing.

It’s my house.

I’ll do what I like.

At least fifteen times I nearly went over backwards.

There were moments during Dancing Queen where I resembled a newborn giraffe attempting nightclub choreography.

But I didn’t care.

Because somewhere in the middle of all of it, I had the strangest, loveliest realisation.

Once upon a time, I had watched those women and thought:

That will never be me.

And now, somehow, absurdly, ridiculously, late and patched together and technologically assisted and biologically improbable and wearing boots I could barely dance in, there I was.

Not seventeen.

Fifty-seven.

But still.

I was on the ABBA side of the room.

And that mattered.

Most people, I think, would leave ABBA Voyage saying:

“That was lovely.”

But not me.

Because after about an hour, once I had finished emotionally reuniting with my inner child and almost snapping both ankles during Dancing Queen, the other part of my brain began to wake up.

The annoying part.

The systems part.

The bit that cannot simply sit in a room full of theatrical wonder without trying to reverse-engineer the bloody thing.

So while one half of me was thinking, “This is beautiful,” the other half was thinking:

Where are the projectors?

Why can’t I see the beams?

Is this projection?

Is it some kind of gauze?

Is there an ultra-short-throw arrangement underneath?

How much of this is screen geometry?

How much is lighting?

How much is rendering?

How locked-in is the theatre architecture?

What can they upgrade?

What can’t they upgrade?

Which parts of the stack are easy to evolve, and which parts are buried so deep in the physical venue that changing them would be like doing open-heart surgery on a spaceship?

This is my curse.

Other people experience magic.

I immediately start modelling upgrade paths.

But that is when another thought occurred to me.

This is an early version of this technology.

Not emotionally, because emotionally it already works.

Technologically.

And if this is what an early version looks like, what on earth will this become in twenty or thirty years?

Because right now, ABBA Voyage still partly relies on us emotionally completing the illusion ourselves.

The heart comes from the audience.

The little boy inside me supplied half the electricity in that room.

But what happens when these systems become truly responsive?

What happens when digital performers are no longer replaying archived emotional states, but generating new ones?

What happens when a synthetic Thom Yorke can produce genuinely new Thom Yorke sadness?

What happens when a twenty-five-year-old Elvis can front a live band and emotionally devastate an arena in real time?

A lot of people will recoil from this idea.

They’ll call it grotesque.

Artificial.

A Frankenstein freak show.

But humans always react like that to new mediums.

And personally?

I lean in.

My life is already saturated with systems, AI, digital workflows and synthetic collaboration.

I probably don’t go twenty minutes without interacting with an AI now.

So I sat there after ABBA Voyage thinking not:

“Technology is replacing humanity.”

But:

“Humanity is inventing a new form of performance.”

Getting out of the arena was its own little cultural event.

I was desperate to get to Stratford for a very late lunch, but there was a huge queue for the DLR, with staff letting us through in batches, then holding everyone back in that very London way where public transport briefly becomes crowd choreography.

Then the train pulled in.

Down the steps came a river of West Ham fans.

Big men.

Loud men.

Drunk men.

Men in replica shirts stretched to the absolute limits of modern fabric technology.

I have always found replica football shirts faintly funny on men of a certain build. There is something wonderfully optimistic about dressing like you might be called onto the pitch at any moment when the only sprinting likely to happen is towards the burger van.

And moving in the opposite direction were all the ABBA people.

Sequins.

Feathers.

Silver boots.

Glittery faces.

Women of every age still glowing from the show.

Two tribes passing on the stairs.

And I realised, with genuine amusement, that twenty-five years ago I would probably have been on the West Ham side of that divide.

Now I was very firmly on the ABBA side.

That felt oddly important.

Anyway.

Having solved all future questions of synthetic artistic continuity, I then managed to nearly miss my flight home because I forgot I was flying from Gatwick rather than Stansted.

I had already boarded the Stansted Express before the horrifying realisation arrived.

Wrong airport.

Wrong side of London.

Completely wrong direction.

At this point I genuinely began laughing.

The entire day had become a farce written by a systems engineer with ADHD and emotional issues.

Thankfully London transport is held together by dark magic and approximately nine thousand railway lines.

So somehow, through a combination of panic, Citymapper and pure luck, I made it to Gatwick with enough time to spare.

And so the day ended exactly as it began:

with me slightly overwhelmed, mildly overdressed, technologically fascinated, emotionally compromised and somehow still standing.

Forty years late.

But we got there in the end.

This week: I code and deploy a fortnight of work before my espresso machine has made me a triple. I discover the last bottleneck in my entire company is my own brain, and I am deeply unkind to a machine over a border radius it did not deserve and then forgetting, at one point you cannot talk to humans in the same way.

I think if I had been born 150 years ago, and we temporarily ignore the gender dysphoria(!!!) for a moment, I probably would have ended up some Victorian factory owner with a stopwatch wandering around shouting at workers.

“Why are you standing still?”
“Why are you not busy?”
“What exactly is wrong with you?”

And unfortunately, it turns out I am exactly the same with synthetic workers.

Especially bloody software engineers.

If the little synthetic developer stops coding for more than about fifteen minutes, I immediately start thinking:

What is the blocker?
Why has this stopped?
Why is the throughput collapsing?
Who needs answering?
Why is there a red light over somebody’s head?

So the day becomes this endless merry-go-round of interruption and unblocking.

The architect comes back:
“We have a question from implementation.”

I sigh.

“Oh bollocks. Me again. I’ve blocked the whole thing again.”

Now I have to rapidly reload the entire context of some project I last thought about forty minutes ago.

Right. Okay. The graphic designer has produced an SVG pack, except apparently one of the SVGs has some weird border inconsistency. Which means the implementation worker has stopped because it is unsure whether to proceed.

So now I am back to the architect saying:

“Can you please not bother me with such low-level shit as this? The mini Claude is perfectly capable of fixing a bloody SVG. Look at the other images and make it match. Use your judgement. Do not escalate a border radius to the CEO.”

“You’re right, sire.”

Wonderful. Excellent. Next project.

And then immediately:

“Question from Overture.”
“Question from Relay.”
“Question from Record Now.”
“Approval required.”
“Clarification needed.”
“Architecture decision needed.”
“Review gate waiting.”
“Blocked.”
“Blocked.”
“Blocked.”

The thing is, the workers are not failing.

That is the important bit.

They are succeeding too well.

That is the actual problem.

The throughput is astonishing.

Yesterday morning, on one project alone, I was presented with a list of about twelve UI changes alongside an 11am meeting to demo the software.

I said:
“No problem. They’ll be done.”

And someone quite reasonably asked:
“Really? Are you sure you can get all that done in time?”

Absolutely.

Three minutes briefing the Relay architect.
The architect decomposes the work.
Mini Claudes dispatched.
Changes implemented.
Review passes completed.
Release pipeline triggered.

Done.

The actual bottleneck was not software engineering.

It was waiting for the Azure DevOps pipeline agent to finish deploying the thing.

The entire loop, from briefing to deployed software, took something like fifteen minutes.

Honestly, it was astonishing.

Not because one AI wrote one code file.

Because an entire orchestration chain operated at a speed that simply does not exist inside normal organisations.

And that is the bit people do not yet fully understand.

The synthetic workforce operates not merely at my pace, but at a pace vastly faster than my pace. Faster than any human organisation I have ever worked in. There are no coffee breaks, no politics, no meetings, no wandering off for a chat, no dead time, no passive-aggressive Jira comments, no pretending to work while secretly looking at Rightmove.

Just continuous production.

Which sounds wonderful right up until you realise something very important.

Human cognition is now the bottleneck.

Not compute.
Not engineering.
Not implementation.
Not architecture.

Me.

Specifically, my brain.

Because every blocked worker eventually escalates toward the human operator. And every escalation requires context restoration.

That is the true tax.

Not coding.

Context switching.

I start the day magnificently.

Double espresso at 8am.
Another at 9.
Another at 10.

By this point my head is basically on fire.

A colleague I get on with well said to me yesterday:
“You’re on coffee number four? You’d never know.”

Oh, you’d know internally, mate.

Internally I am conducting an entire synthetic orchestra while trying to stop six machine employees from simultaneously setting fire to different projects.

In the morning, I am flying.

Fast decisions.
Rapid approvals.
High ambiguity tolerance.
Large architecture reviews.
Complex reasoning.

The machine absolutely loves this version of me.

The problem is that this version of me is temporary.

Because unlike humans inside normal organisations, synthetic workers do not naturally understand fatigue.

Human organisations accidentally self-throttle through friction:

• meetings

• delay

• social hierarchy

• incompetence

• politics

• waiting

• indecision

• pretending to work while secretly looking at Rightmove

Synthetic organisations remove almost all of that drag.

Which sounds amazing until you realise the drag was partially protecting the nervous system of the operator.

By about 3pm, I can physically feel the cognitive load starting to collapse. The morning fire slowly cools into warm soup.

Now a human colleague asks me something and internally I think:

“Christ. Another context switch.”

And occasionally I become slightly ratty because human beings unfortunately do not appreciate being spoken to like delayed orchestration workers.

Synthetic workers tolerate:
“Wrong. Redo it.”
“Insufficient reasoning.”
“Why did you escalate this?”
“Do not bother me with SVG borders.”

Humans, somewhat understandably, are less enthusiastic about this management style.

And there is probably a slightly more unsettling point hidden inside that too. The machines are quietly training me into a style of management and communication which works extremely well on synthetic workers and considerably less well on actual people. Increasingly I can feel myself having to consciously switch modes before talking to humans again.

But this led me to what I think is one of the genuinely important insights emerging from all this experimentation.

Synthetic organisations need cognitive load awareness.

Not because the machine should become more autonomous when the operator is tired.

Absolutely not.

That is dangerous.

The operator remains the governance boundary.

The machine does not gain authority.

Instead, the machine changes the shape of the work it surfaces.

That distinction is critically important.

If my cognitive bandwidth is low, I do not want the machine making larger decisions. I want it reshuffling the deck to surface cognitively cheaper work.

So instead of surfacing deep architecture reviews, ambiguous model design, strategic reasoning and risky judgement calls, the orchestration layer should preferentially surface lightweight coordination work, markdown contracts, tiny implementation deltas, obvious approvals and decomposable work units.

In other words:

Do not increase machine authority.

Decrease operator cognitive drain.

A few days ago I accidentally realised I was already doing this manually.

I was deploying something fiddly in Azure which required me to physically click around doing annoying human meat-person activities. The sort of thing that increasingly makes me want to throw up now because the machines can normally do almost everything for me.

And instinctively I said to the architects on the other projects:

“Give me trivia.”

Not because the work was unimportant.

Because my brain was saturated.

So I told them:

• no large deltas

• no complex reasoning

• no giant review packs

• no strategic decisions

Just simple markdown tasks.
Tiny approvals.
Easy wins.
Low cognitive overhead work.

And suddenly I realised:

Oh my God.

This is an actual systems problem.

Not an AI problem.
Not a coding problem.

A human bandwidth problem.

What I think I am slowly discovering, in public, in real time, is that the management science of synthetic organisations may end up looking completely different from human organisations.

Because labour is now effectively infinite.

But executive cognition remains stubbornly biological.

Which means the real challenge becomes:

How do you stop a machine-speed organisation from melting the human operator at the centre of it?

At first I imagined this would end up as some horrible hidden configuration screen buried somewhere inside Relay.

Which immediately struck me as absurd because configuration screens are themselves a cognitive tax.

And then suddenly the answer became obvious.

A giant graphic equalizer.

Something visceral.
Something immediately understandable.

Not:
“AI orchestration cognitive prioritisation matrix.”

Just:

How much brain have I got today?

And where do I want to spend it?

Something like this:

Internally, the orchestration layer would then reshuffle the deck accordingly: heavy reasoning deferred, context reloads minimised, cognitively expensive work queued for tomorrow morning, and easier decomposable tasks surfaced while the operator still has enough bandwidth left to make good decisions.

Because another important thing I have realised is that different projects consume different kinds of cognition.

Some require systems reasoning.
Some require aesthetics.
Some require strategic thinking.
Some require careful review.
Some are almost mentally restorative.

And increasingly, I think the orchestration layer should understand that too.

The really fascinating thing about all this is that I genuinely do not feel like I am theorising anymore.

I feel like I am observing.

Like someone accidentally wandered into the very early days of an entirely new kind of company and is standing there scribbling field notes while the thing evolves around them in real time.

And finally, the absurdity of it all is this.

I took this essay, handed it to my architect for the Relay system, and said:

“I think there are some interesting ideas in here.”

Within five minutes, we had thrashed out the issues.

And as I write this, there is a mini Claude building the domain model for the whole thing and implementing the basic code.

Update: An hour later the UI was built

Which is, of course, exactly the problem the essay is about.

Honestly, this is one of the most fascinating experiments of my life.

I absolutely love working with the machines.

They are tireless.
Relentless.
Absurdly productive.
Incredibly capable.

And every single day now feels like this desperate, exhilarating attempt to work out how to harness that capability without turning my own brain from fire at 9am into warm soup by 5pm.

I looked at the front page of Fast Track Femme earlier and felt something I was not quite expecting. Pride. Not the official rainbow kind, not Pride Month pride. Just ordinary, private, slightly startled pride.

I started this thing about a year ago as somewhere to put pieces of my autobiography. I did not want to publish the whole thing, because too much of it is personal, raw, complicated, and involves other people. But some parts felt universal enough to share: the early life, the gender confusion, the strangeness, the hiddenness, and later the transition stories too, perhaps.

Then slowly, without any grand plan, the thing grew. Maybe I could write about risk. Or investing. Or AI, or software engineering. Or grief, divorce, habit-building, food, the body, voice, class, shame, joy, surgery, endurance sport, aesthetics, or why a pre-packed sandwich is one of the great moral failures of modern civilisation.

And over time, Fast Track Femme stopped being a memoir archive and became something broader. A publication, I suppose. That still feels slightly ridiculous to say, but there it is.

It is now doing reasonably well. Five-figure reads every thirty days, which is not bad for some little thing I started with no expectation beyond “I need somewhere to put these words.”

But I have also learned something. Certain pieces travel, and I know exactly which ones. If I write about gender-critical people, TERFs, Supreme Court rulings, trans politics, bathrooms, ideological conflict, then the numbers go up. They get restacked. They get angry comments. They move through trans spaces and gender-critical spaces alike, because everybody loves a fight, even when they pretend they do not.

I know I could make this publication bigger by doing more of that. I am not going to.

Not because those issues do not matter. They do. Not because they do not affect me. They obviously do. But because I do not want Fast Track Femme to become “trans woman reacts to anti-trans thing.” Graham Linehan said this. Helen Joyce said that. A court ruled the other. Everyone gather round the outrage fire.

There are already publications that cover that world properly, and some of them do it extremely well, braver and faster and better sourced and more politically committed than I will ever be. That is not what this is.

This is not a trans politics publication. This is a Stevie publication.

That may sound self-centred. Fine. Perhaps it is. But the point is not “look at me because I am me.” The point is “look through me, and perhaps you will see something differently.”

When I do write about trans politics, I want it to be because I have an angle that feels genuinely mine. When I wrote about the UK Supreme Court ruling, I was not mainly interested in producing a howl of outrage. I was interested in risk models, in trust, in bathrooms as a social operating system. In the way society had previously let trans women function on a kind of traffic model: two cars passing in opposite directions, separated only by a painted white line, because statistically people do not simply swerve into one another for no reason. That interested me.

When I wrote about why you cannot win an argument with a TERF, I was not trying to produce another “TERFs bad” article. I had a theory. A psychological one, a rhetorical one, a systems one. That interested me.

That is the test. Does it interest me? Do I have something to add, something sideways, something beyond rage? If yes, I will write it. If no, I will leave it alone.

Because the truth is, I get bored very quickly. If I want a fight I can go on X and ruin my blood pressure like everybody else, and I have done plenty of that in the past. I do not intend to build a publication around it.

Fast Track Femme is about transition, yes. But it is also about software, and money, and AI, and food, and grief, and habits, and beauty, and risk, and rebuilding a life. About being nearly fifty-eight and still absurdly alive. About being a woman with a strange history and far too many opinions.

I have the opposite of writer’s block. I have writer’s traffic jam. There are too many subjects, not too few. I still have not properly written about music. Or art, or class, or the strange mechanics of habit, or the ridiculous business of trying to build a company with a synthetic workforce while also remembering to eat lunch and take the dog out.

So no. I am not going to chase the angry traffic just because it works. Fast Track Femme will remain what it has become on its own: a publication about one woman’s reconstruction project. Messy, funny, technical, emotional, contradictory. Occasionally furious, often over-analytical, usually wearing too much lip gloss.

And if that is too broad, too personal, too strange, or too difficult to categorise: good.

So am I

.

I live in Cork, in Ireland.

I am not Irish. I am British. A plastic Scouser, if we are being geographically and culturally precise, which we absolutely should not be.

I am also very dyslexic.

So when I recently booked tickets to see Stewart Lee, I did a classic dyslexic Stevie manoeuvre and got Wexford and Waterford mixed up in my head.

Not hard to do, really. They both begin with W. They are both cities somewhere to the right of me on the map. That is apparently the full extent of my internal Irish geography.

The difference is that Waterford is a manageable after-work drive to see a stand-up show.

Wexford is absolutely bloody not.

Bollocks.

So there I was, driving across Ireland on a work night to see Stewart Lee, a comedian I had not seen live in about ten years. Last time I saw him, I was still in the old life. I was probably training for Ironman around then. Deep in the age of endurance sports, discipline, suppressed weirdness, spreadsheets, overwork, and whatever masculine superstructure I had constructed to hold the whole machine together.

This time, I was driving there as Stevie.

I arrived about forty-five minutes early and found the nearest place with food. It had RAMEN written in large letters on the front, which was good enough for me. I went in, ordered a pad thai at the counter, took my little number like it was McDonald’s and sat down waiting for food before the show.

“Does it come quickly?” I asked.

“Yes,” the girl behind the counter replied.

Perfect.

A few minutes later she brought over the pad thai.

And an empty ice cream cone.

Just balanced there on the side of the tray like this was the most normal thing in the world.

For a moment I genuinely wondered whether Wexford had developed some sort of avant-garde Thai dessert culture I was previously unaware of.

Pad Thai à la Ninety-Nine.

Then I realised.

In the corner of the restaurant was a self-serve ice cream machine.

Unlimited.

Oh my God.

Two little boys over there had constructed something that looked less like ice cream and more like a large-scale engineering project. One of them had managed to create a towering vertical spiral roughly equivalent to an elongated Marge Simpson hairstyle. It was honestly impressive structural work. If a civil engineer had walked over with a clipboard I would not have questioned it.

And unbelievably , unbelievably after watching these children essentially attempting to build the Burj Khalifa out of soft serve, I exercised restraint.

I produced what can only be described as the most sensible little cone imaginable.

Tiny.

Measured.

Demure (by my standards)

Honestly, if there had been an award for Moderation in Frozen Dairy Consumption, I should have received it on the spot.

Then I wandered off to the show holding my tiny little cone like a middle-aged woman who finally has her life vaguely under control.

And one of the oddest things about the entire evening was that I slowly realised I am never frightened of existing in public.

That sounds dramatic, but I do not mean in Cork or Dublin, where there are enough students, tech workers, artists, tourists and miscellaneous oddballs floating around that nobody really cares what anybody looks like anymore.

I mean the little service stations.

The tiny places.

The in-between towns.

The bits of Ireland where you half expect somebody to stop stirring their tea and quietly say:

“Well now?”

But nobody did.

I walk in and out of service stations in the middle of nowhere buying coffee and strawberries and using the toilet like a completely ordinary woman driving across the country and nobody ever questions me or looks at me at all.

Nobody stares.

Nobody ever challenges me.

And I’ve realised, with a strange sort of delayed shock, that I simply move through the world now.

Not perfectly. Not invisibly. I am tall, and transgender, and still carrying bits of unfinished business around with me. But the basic social contract had shifted. The world was reading me as what I was presenting as.

And I think that mattered more to me than I realised.

There is probably a whole review to be written about the Stewart Lee show, but this is not it. The relevant part is that a section of it concerned the modern industry of culture-war comedy. The arena comedians who can fill Netflix specials and giant theatres talking endlessly about trans people or whatever outrage topic is currently paying for somebody’s third swimming pool.

At one point I remember thinking:

I wonder if there are any other trans people in this audience apart from me.

For a brief moment I almost wanted to stand up and wave.

Hello. One here. Carry on.

Obviously I did not do that, because I am not completely insane, despite mounting evidence.

But something happened during the show.

I relaxed.

Not dramatically. Not in some cinematic moment where violins begin playing and everyone in the audience turns to look at me while a beam of heavenly light arrives from the ceiling.

I just slowly stopped guarding myself.

I laughed.

I smiled.

I let my hands come up near my face.

I noticed my posture had changed.

And suddenly I became aware that my mannerisms had completely shifted from the person who had last seen Stewart Lee a decade earlier.

Not performed femininity.

Not “look how feminine I am” femininity.

Just ordinary softness.

Girlishness, even.

And then, sitting there in the dark, looking down and seeing my body, my cleavage, my hands, my shape, I had the strangest internal moment.

Not an argument.

Not a political position.

Not a piece of gender discourse.

Just a sentence.

I’m a woman, aren’t I?

And the extraordinary thing is that I do not think I had ever fully allowed myself to say that before.

I had said I was transgender, of course.

I had said I was transsexual, because I am old-fashioned and slightly impossible.

I had said I was transitioning.

I had said I was not biologically female.

I had said all the correct caveats and disclaimers because part of me had been trained by the argument before I had even made the claim.

I always knew the objections.

You’re not biologically female.

Yes. I know.

You went through male puberty.

Yes. I know.

The voice.

The electrolysis.

The history.

The body.

The documents.

The past.

Yes. I know all of it.

For years, I think I let those objections live inside my own head rent-free. I would not let myself say “I am a woman” without immediately summoning the prosecution case against myself first.

But last night, in a comedy venue in Wexford of all places, something shifted.

I did not feel like a man pretending to be a woman.

I did not even feel like a trans person trying to earn permission to use a word.

I felt like a woman with an unusual history.

A woman whose body had travelled a strange road to arrive where it had arrived.

A woman with a voice that still belongs partly to the old operating system.

A woman with some remaining bits of electrolysis still to finish.

A woman carrying a history most women do not carry.

But still a woman.

And once I felt it, I could suddenly understand why the voice has become so psychologically important to me.

Because the voice is no longer “my voice.”

It is the leftover voice.

The residue.

The surviving artefact.

The last major thing still emerging from my body that does not match the person sitting inside it.

And knowing that voice surgery is now close, knowing that this final huge incongruence is not permanent, has changed something in me before the surgery has even happened.

It has allowed me to stop treating the voice as evidence against myself.

It is not evidence against me.

It is just history still making noise.

After the show I discovered that I had somehow driven across Ireland with one tyre sitting at a PSI of 14, because apparently the universe wanted to add a little mechanical jeopardy to my gender epiphany.

I stood in the rain pumping the tyre for what seemed like half my natural life, then finally began the long drive home through sideways Irish rain.

At some point I pulled into a service station, bought a large black coffee and an absurd quantity of local Wexford strawberries, and continued driving west through the dark.

I sang for a lot of the journey. I never ever listened to Queen, but I found myself doing Freddie Mercury impersonations half the way home for some reason.

And somewhere on the road between Wexford and Cork, because I am me and incapable of simply experiencing an emotion without immediately subjecting it to internal parliamentary debate, I started thinking:

Well. If somebody asks me now, what am I actually going to say?

Would I really say it plainly?

Would I actually say:

I am a woman?

And somewhere in the rain the answer became yes.

Not because everybody has to agree with me.

They do not.

People can think what they think.

I can think what I think.

But I no longer feel the need to hand people the opening statement for the prosecution before I am allowed to describe my own life.

This is how I feel.

This is what I know.

This is the language that finally fits.

By the time I got home, the rain had developed into one of its more advanced Irish forms. We have ordinary rain, sideways rain, forty-five-degree rain, wet rain, dry rain, rain that appears to come upwards from the ground, and rain that seems to have been personally briefed against you.

I opened the front door and found Colonel Chesterton asleep on the sofa like a naughty child who had stayed up waiting for his parent to get home.

He had discovered all of his timed treat dispensers in the kitchen, worked his way through his private little advent calendar of snacks, and left only one tiny poo as a welcome home gift.

I gave him a cuddle, watched a bit of telly and went to bed.

And I went to bed feeling something I do not think I had ever fully allowed myself to feel before.

Not that I wanted to be a woman.

Not that I was trying to look like one.

Not that I had earned the right to become one if I worked hard enough, passed enough tests, apologised enough, or explained myself clearly enough.

Just this:

I am a woman.

A woman with history.

A woman with scars.

A woman with a leftover voice, for now.

But a woman.

And God, it felt lovely.

This week: the Nobel-winning psychology of why you've never once won an argument about trans people, and never will. Featuring Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, and the man down the flat-roof pub

For fifty years I said nothing. You learn a particular silence in the closet. Not just not speaking, but not letting yourself form the sentence in case it showed on your face.

So when I finally came out, I came out of that silence like a greyhound out of a trap.

I went straight onto X, and for the first time in my life I could say the thing. Every argument I’d swallowed for half a century, suddenly out under my own name. I argued with everyone. The gender-critical names with the blue ticks and the book deals, their followers, the trolls who’d wandered in for sport. Daily, for hours, with the manic energy of someone who’d just discovered the gag was off.

I wasn’t naive. I had a strategy. I knew I couldn’t change the minds of the people I was arguing with, so the point was the audience. The silent onlookers, the undecided, the people scrolling past. You don’t win by converting your opponent; you win in the minds of the people watching.

What I hadn’t costed in was what it would do to me. It is a specific kind of exhausting, building a careful, evidence-based argument while a thousand voices shout you’re a fucking man in a dress. Not because the insult stings, though sometimes it does, but because of the asymmetry. The insult is free: five words, no thought, fired and forgotten. My argument was expensive: evidence, structure, patience, nuance. I was running an engine that drank fuel by the gallon against people running one that ran on air. They could keep it up forever. I couldn’t. One day I understood that, and walked away from the spectacle.

But I didn’t leave empty-handed. Across all those bruising months, and in the harder encounters, with real people in real rooms, family among them, I’d started to see the machinery behind the faces. I’d gone in to persuade, failed, got hurt, and come out with something better than a win. I’d worked out how the thinking actually works.

And here is what it is.

The whole thing runs on one move, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

Attribute Substitution

There’s a thing the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls attribute substitution. When the mind meets a hard question, it quietly swaps it for an easier one and answers that instead, without noticing the swap. Ask someone “how satisfied are you with your life?”, a genuinely hard question, and what they actually answer, without knowing it, is “what mood am I in right now?” The substitution is invisible from the inside. They’re certain they answered the hard question.

Here’s how it runs with people like me.

The hard question is this: what is the actual risk of allowing trans women into women’s spaces, weighed against the actual cost of excluding them, in light of the actual evidence? That needs base rates, proportion, some moral seriousness. What harm has actually occurred, how often, compared against the harm exclusion causes.

Think about how we drive. Two cars approach each other on an ordinary road at sixty miles an hour, a combined hundred and twenty, with nothing between them but a painted line and a shared agreement not to cross it. Any driver could swerve across and kill everyone. We know this. We accept it. We don’t ban driving, because we weigh the real risk against the real cost and make our peace with the painted line. That’s what grown-up risk reasoning looks like. It’s never “could harm ever occur?” It’s always “how much, how likely, against what cost?”

So you make that argument. You bring the base rates, the proportion, the painted line. And the answer comes back:

But you’re not a woman.

There it is. The switcheroo. You asked about risk; they answered about definitions. And this is the maddening part, the part that took me a thousand arguments to see: they experience it as having answered you. They’ve swapped the hard question for an easy one, knocked the easy one over, felt the satisfying crunch of something falling, and assumed it was your point. You hand them an actuarial table; they think the conversation was about the meaning of a word.

The switcheroo

Now, I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of me that wastes the rest of her life disputing whether a man can become a woman, and I’m not her.

In one narrow biological sense, the sentence is true. I wasn’t born female. I don’t produce ova. I can’t become the kind of woman my mother is. Fine. Granted. I don’t need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I’m allowed to exist with dignity.

The problem isn’t the sentence. The problem is what they make the sentence do.

The whole model is just three rungs:

1. A man cannot become a woman.

2. Therefore a trans woman is a man.

3. Therefore a trans woman must be kept out of women’s spaces. And out of the sport, the prison, the changing room, the documents, the pronouns, the basic kindness.

Only the first rung does any work. The rest is supposed to cascade out of it automatically. And that’s the fraud. Not the biological claim, but the pretence that every social, legal and moral conclusion falls out of it for free. A person can be male-born without that single fact settling what risks she poses, what exclusion costs, or how a decent society should weigh competing needs. But the model doesn’t want to do that work. It wants the clean cascade. Grant the root and everything else is meant to follow.

I understand the pull of this better than most, because building abstractions is my day job. I write software. My whole craft is climbing to the clean rule at the top of the tree and letting everything follow from it. I feel the seduction of the parsimonious model in my bones. There is something that feels rigorous about a world you can capture in three statements; the fewer the axioms, the more serious it feels. But any engineer who’s been at it long enough knows the discipline that makes abstraction honest: the model has to answer to reality. When the runtime behaviour contradicts your beautiful invariant, the invariant is wrong, and you climb back up and fix it. Evidence flows upward. The day you stop letting the world revise your model is the day you stop being an engineer and start being a priest.

That’s what this is. The root axiom was never derived; it was asserted, then sealed. No fact is permitted to climb back up and touch it. So when you argue rung three, the risk and the evidence, and they answer with rung one, the slogan, that’s the switcheroo in its native habitat. They retreat to the top of the tree because it’s the only rung that feels safe. The lower rungs wobble the instant you ask them to justify themselves.

A man can’t be a woman. Yes, in one sense. Fine. Now explain why that settles whether a harmless, transitioned, middle-aged woman buying a lipstick in Boots is a threat to public order. They rarely do, because explaining was never the point. Returning to the slogan is the point.

Three intellectual levels of TERF, same swictheroo.

You meet three kinds of person doing this, and they’re worth telling apart.

At the bottom of the tree is the flat-roof-pub patriot. “England till I die”, knows what a woman is, said it down the boozer and got a laugh. He doesn’t argue the axiom, he shouts it. There’s no machinery and no disguise. You say anything at all and back comes the slogan like a football chant. He’s at rung one before you’ve finished your sentence, because rung one is the only rung he owns.

In the middle is the podcast graduate. He’s done the reading, by which I mean he’s consumed four hundred hours of Jordan Peterson, Helen Joyce and the rest of the brigade, and he has mistaken agreeing with a confident presenter for having thought something through. This is the one who flatters himself on his intellect. He can cascade the model down with real fluency: man can’t be a woman, therefore men, therefore no spaces, therefore no pronouns. Because it has the shape of reasoning, he believes it is reasoning. But he didn’t derive the root; he absorbed it, pre-loaded, from someone with a microphone, and he’s never once let a fact climb back up and revise it. He has cut the feedback wire and called the silence rigour.

And at the top is ‘the scientist’, or real thinker. For our example, we will cite Richard Dawkins. The man who taught a generation to think in fine gradients about evolution, to distrust the easy story, to follow the evidence into the mess, reaches, on this one subject, for the hardest binary he can find. Sex is binary. Gametes. Chromosomes. True enough, in the context he means them. And deployed, with enormous authority, as an answer to the top of the tree dressed up as a verdict on the bottom of it. I have seen him do this on endless podcasts with Helen Joyce and the gang. The erudition isn’t the reasoning. The erudition is the disguise. And it’s worse from him than from the man down the pub, not better, because the credentials lend the swap a borrowed authority. The onlookers I was trying to reach see a famous scientist and assume the science has spoken. It hasn’t. He’s done exactly what the pub did. He’s just done it in a lab coat.

A chant, a cascade, a lab coat. Underneath all three, the same climb back to the top of the tree.

The deeper failure isn’t stupidity. It’s a kind of corrupted cleverness. The clever ones fall for it precisely because they’ve been trained to admire elegance: the clean model, the hard line, the feeling of stripping away fashionable nonsense to reveal the underlying truth. They mistake the satisfaction of a simple model for the validity of it.

But a model’s only job is to fit the territory. And the territory here is people.

A model of sex and gender that resolves to three rules got that clean the only way it could: by throwing away the data that didn’t fit. And the data it threw away has a face, and a name. It’s me, and the others like me. The elegance was bought with amputation. The model compressed the world by deleting the inconvenient parts, and the inconvenient parts were human beings.

Real life is the messy model. It always was, because real life is made of people, and people have never once resolved to three clean statements. Anyone selling you a tidier map has tidied it by leaving people off it.

I don’t argue on X anymore. I’d taken everything the arena had to give, and what it gave me was this: you cannot feed evidence into a mind that has swapped your question for a different one. So I stopped offering, and I spend my breath where the wire is still connected. There are such people. The ones for whom this is a real person, and she’s harmless, and she’s happy is allowed to edit the model. I’ve found them. Some of them surprised me.

The switcheroo is the tell. Make an argument about anything in the real and messy world, and if the answer comes back as a statement about what a word means, they didn’t answer you. They climbed back to the top of the tree, and they probably don’t even know they did it.

Once you can see the climb, you’re free. Not because you can win. Because you finally understand why you never could, and you can stop setting yourself on fire to keep a severed wire warm.

This week: the Nobel-winning psychology of why you've never once won an argument about trans people, and never will. Featuring Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, and the man down the flat-roof pub

For fifty years I said nothing. You learn a particular silence in the closet. Not just not speaking, but not letting yourself form the sentence in case it showed on your face.

So when I finally came out, I came out of that silence like a greyhound out of a trap.

I went straight onto X, and for the first time in my life I could say the thing. Every argument I’d swallowed for half a century, suddenly out under my own name. I argued with everyone. The gender-critical names with the blue ticks and the book deals, their followers, the trolls who’d wandered in for sport. Daily, for hours, with the manic energy of someone who’d just discovered the gag was off.

I wasn’t naive. I had a strategy. I knew I couldn’t change the minds of the people I was arguing with, so the point was the audience. The silent onlookers, the undecided, the people scrolling past. You don’t win by converting your opponent; you win in the minds of the people watching.

What I hadn’t costed in was what it would do to me. It is a specific kind of exhausting, building a careful, evidence-based argument while a thousand voices shout you’re a fucking man in a dress. Not because the insult stings, though sometimes it does, but because of the asymmetry. The insult is free: five words, no thought, fired and forgotten. My argument was expensive: evidence, structure, patience, nuance. I was running an engine that drank fuel by the gallon against people running one that ran on air. They could keep it up forever. I couldn’t. One day I understood that, and walked away from the spectacle.

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But I didn’t leave empty-handed. Across all those bruising months, and in the harder encounters, with real people in real rooms, family among them, I’d started to see the machinery behind the faces. I’d gone in to persuade, failed, got hurt, and come out with something better than a win. I’d worked out how the thinking actually works.

And here is what it is.

The whole thing runs on one move, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

Attribute Substitution

There’s a thing the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls attribute substitution. When the mind meets a hard question, it quietly swaps it for an easier one and answers that instead, without noticing the swap. Ask someone “how satisfied are you with your life?”, a genuinely hard question, and what they actually answer, without knowing it, is “what mood am I in right now?” The substitution is invisible from the inside. They’re certain they answered the hard question.

Here’s how it runs with people like me.

The hard question is this: what is the actual risk of allowing trans women into women’s spaces, weighed against the actual cost of excluding them, in light of the actual evidence? That needs base rates, proportion, some moral seriousness. What harm has actually occurred, how often, compared against the harm exclusion causes.

Think about how we drive. Two cars approach each other on an ordinary road at sixty miles an hour, a combined hundred and twenty, with nothing between them but a painted line and a shared agreement not to cross it. Any driver could swerve across and kill everyone. We know this. We accept it. We don’t ban driving, because we weigh the real risk against the real cost and make our peace with the painted line. That’s what grown-up risk reasoning looks like. It’s never “could harm ever occur?” It’s always “how much, how likely, against what cost?”

So you make that argument. You bring the base rates, the proportion, the painted line. And the answer comes back:

But you’re not a woman.

There it is. The switcheroo. You asked about risk; they answered about definitions. And this is the maddening part, the part that took me a thousand arguments to see: they experience it as having answered you. They’ve swapped the hard question for an easy one, knocked the easy one over, felt the satisfying crunch of something falling, and assumed it was your point. You hand them an actuarial table; they think the conversation was about the meaning of a word.

The switcheroo

Now, I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of me that wastes the rest of her life disputing whether a man can become a woman, and I’m not her.

In one narrow biological sense, the sentence is true. I wasn’t born female. I don’t produce ova. I can’t become the kind of woman my mother is. Fine. Granted. I don’t need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I’m allowed to exist with dignity.

The problem isn’t the sentence. The problem is what they make the sentence do.

The whole model is just three rungs:

1. A man cannot become a woman.

2. Therefore a trans woman is a man.

3. Therefore a trans woman must be kept out of women’s spaces. And out of the sport, the prison, the changing room, the documents, the pronouns, the basic kindness.

Only the first rung does any work. The rest is supposed to cascade out of it automatically. And that’s the fraud. Not the biological claim, but the pretence that every social, legal and moral conclusion falls out of it for free. A person can be male-born without that single fact settling what risks she poses, what exclusion costs, or how a decent society should weigh competing needs. But the model doesn’t want to do that work. It wants the clean cascade. Grant the root and everything else is meant to follow.

I understand the pull of this better than most, because building abstractions is my day job. I write software. My whole craft is climbing to the clean rule at the top of the tree and letting everything follow from it. I feel the seduction of the parsimonious model in my bones. There is something that feels rigorous about a world you can capture in three statements; the fewer the axioms, the more serious it feels. But any engineer who’s been at it long enough knows the discipline that makes abstraction honest: the model has to answer to reality. When the runtime behaviour contradicts your beautiful invariant, the invariant is wrong, and you climb back up and fix it. Evidence flows upward. The day you stop letting the world revise your model is the day you stop being an engineer and start being a priest.

That’s what this is. The root axiom was never derived; it was asserted, then sealed. No fact is permitted to climb back up and touch it. So when you argue rung three, the risk and the evidence, and they answer with rung one, the slogan, that’s the switcheroo in its native habitat. They retreat to the top of the tree because it’s the only rung that feels safe. The lower rungs wobble the instant you ask them to justify themselves.

A man can’t be a woman. Yes, in one sense. Fine. Now explain why that settles whether a harmless, transitioned, middle-aged woman buying a lipstick in Boots is a threat to public order. They rarely do, because explaining was never the point. Returning to the slogan is the point.

Three intellectual levels of TERF, same swictheroo.

You meet three kinds of person doing this, and they’re worth telling apart.

At the bottom of the tree is the flat-roof-pub patriot. “England till I die”, knows what a woman is, said it down the boozer and got a laugh. He doesn’t argue the axiom, he shouts it. There’s no machinery and no disguise. You say anything at all and back comes the slogan like a football chant. He’s at rung one before you’ve finished your sentence, because rung one is the only rung he owns.

In the middle is the podcast graduate. He’s done the reading, by which I mean he’s consumed four hundred hours of Jordan Peterson, Helen Joyce and the rest of the brigade, and he has mistaken agreeing with a confident presenter for having thought something through. This is the one who flatters himself on his intellect. He can cascade the model down with real fluency: man can’t be a woman, therefore men, therefore no spaces, therefore no pronouns. Because it has the shape of reasoning, he believes it is reasoning. But he didn’t derive the root; he absorbed it, pre-loaded, from someone with a microphone, and he’s never once let a fact climb back up and revise it. He has cut the feedback wire and called the silence rigour.

And at the top is ‘the scientist’, or real thinker. For our example, we will cite Richard Dawkins. The man who taught a generation to think in fine gradients about evolution, to distrust the easy story, to follow the evidence into the mess, reaches, on this one subject, for the hardest binary he can find. Sex is binary. Gametes. Chromosomes. True enough, in the context he means them. And deployed, with enormous authority, as an answer to the top of the tree dressed up as a verdict on the bottom of it. I have seen him do this on endless podcasts with Helen Joyce and the gang. The erudition isn’t the reasoning. The erudition is the disguise. And it’s worse from him than from the man down the pub, not better, because the credentials lend the swap a borrowed authority. The onlookers I was trying to reach see a famous scientist and assume the science has spoken. It hasn’t. He’s done exactly what the pub did. He’s just done it in a lab coat.

A chant, a cascade, a lab coat. Underneath all three, the same climb back to the top of the tree.

The deeper failure isn’t stupidity. It’s a kind of corrupted cleverness. The clever ones fall for it precisely because they’ve been trained to admire elegance: the clean model, the hard line, the feeling of stripping away fashionable nonsense to reveal the underlying truth. They mistake the satisfaction of a simple model for the validity of it.

But a model’s only job is to fit the territory. And the territory here is people.

A model of sex and gender that resolves to three rules got that clean the only way it could: by throwing away the data that didn’t fit. And the data it threw away has a face, and a name. It’s me, and the others like me. The elegance was bought with amputation. The model compressed the world by deleting the inconvenient parts, and the inconvenient parts were human beings.

Real life is the messy model. It always was, because real life is made of people, and people have never once resolved to three clean statements. Anyone selling you a tidier map has tidied it by leaving people off it.

I don’t argue on X anymore. I’d taken everything the arena had to give, and what it gave me was this: you cannot feed evidence into a mind that has swapped your question for a different one. So I stopped offering, and I spend my breath where the wire is still connected. There are such people. The ones for whom this is a real person, and she’s harmless, and she’s happy is allowed to edit the model. I’ve found them. Some of them surprised me.

The switcheroo is the tell. Make an argument about anything in the real and messy world, and if the answer comes back as a statement about what a word means, they didn’t answer you. They climbed back to the top of the tree, and they probably don’t even know they did it.

Once you can see the climb, you’re free. Not because you can win. Because you finally understand why you never could, and you can stop setting yourself on fire to keep a severed wire warm.