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.

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.

Another day, another germination of an uncomfortable thought.

It is almost Pride month again.

Pre-transition Steve used to look at Pride month and roll his eyes so hard they nearly detached from his skull.

I remember looking at Regent Street covered in Pride flags and thinking the Third Reich had moved back in, only this time in glorious Technicolor.

“The whole bloody month? Are you serious?”

That really was my attitude.

And if I am being completely honest, part of the reason I resisted transition for so long was because I had a profoundly uneasy relationship with the idea of being “in the LGBT”.

I still remember the day, in front of the mirror in my office, and I started repeating the words over and over to myself.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Acceptance was hard.

Discovery was not hard. I had known for decades in the strange submerged way trans people often know things long before they admit them. But acceptance was another matter entirely.

The words felt radioactive.

Then, later, sat in front of my computer, something else hit me and I burst out laughing.

“Oh my God.”

“I’m in the LGBT.”

“What the actual fuck?”

I, Stephen Bennett, was in the LGBT.

This came as a considerable shock to Stephen Bennett.

You see, I had spent most of my life psychologically standing outside all of that.

I would see Pride marches and sometimes recoil from them. I would see leather outfits, gimp masks, fetish aesthetics, public sexuality, rainbow hair, shouting, slogans, and what looked to me like social chaos. And my reaction, if I am honest, was often something between discomfort and embarrassment.

Part of that was probably straightforward prejudice. Some of it was social conditioning. Some of it was class instinct. Some of it was fear.

But a large part of it, I now realise, was that I did not want any of it to have anything to do with me.

Because if those people belonged to the same category as me, then suddenly my problem stopped being abstract.

It became personal.

I also think I had a very specific discomfort with overt sexuality in public. I am actually quite prudy. I always joked about this in my early transition videos. Somewhere inside me there lives a slightly horrified 1970s school prefect and a small amount of Mary Whitehouse.

I do not like public sexual theatrics, regardless of who is doing them.

But here is the interesting contradiction.

At the exact same time as I was rolling my eyes at parts of queer culture, I secretly envied the living hell out of some of it.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, I absolutely loved those funny, cheeky, camp public figures who everyone knew were gay but nobody officially said were gay. Men like Kenneth Williams. Later people like Graham Norton and Alan Carr.

I loved the freedom of it.

The wit.

The looseness.

The theatricality.

The escape from rigid masculinity.

I wanted to sit at that table.

Not because I wanted public sex or fetish parades or slogans.

I wanted the release valve.

I noticed something throughout my life. Whenever I spent time around very camp gay men, if I trusted them, something in me relaxed. My guard dropped. I became softer. More honest. Less frightened.

Back in the 1990s, one of the very few people I ever came out to was a gay couple I knew in Nottingham. They gave me some dresses. I was eternally grateful for that.

That sounds like such a small thing, but it mattered enormously.

Around straight men, especially in the world I grew up in, there were invisible walls around masculinity. You did not admit softness. You did not admit femininity. You certainly did not admit wanting to be a woman.

But with certain gay men, the walls briefly disappeared.

They disarmed me.

I could breathe.

And then something else happened recently.

I was in Boots buying yet more hair nonsense, because transition appears to involve spending the GDP of a small nation on hair products, and there was another trans person in the shop.

Very visibly trans.

Rainbow-coloured hair.

Receding hairline.

Masculine face.

Standing out enormously.

Six months ago, maybe even less, part of me would have looked at that and thought:

“Why would you draw more attention to yourself?”

“If you are already visibly trans, why add rainbow hair on top of it?”

But this time I saw something completely different.

They were not making it worse.

They were taking it back.

And suddenly I understood something I had not properly understood before.

Not everyone survives this by blending in quietly and trying to look as socially acceptable as possible.

Some people survive by becoming louder.

More visible.

More deliberate.

By refusing shame.

And I realised something else too.

My experience of being trans has been easier than some people’s.

I pass reasonably well.

I live a fairly normal life.

I walk around Cork buying makeup and hair products and coffees and nobody really bothers me very much.

And the uncomfortable truth is this:

Part of the reason I get to do that is because other people absorbed the social punishment first.

The flamboyant gay man in 1987.

The activist I rolled my eyes at twenty years ago.

The visibly trans woman walking into Boots anyway.

The people who were prepared to look ridiculous, threatening, embarrassing, political, weird, too loud, too feminine, too obvious, too much.

People suffered so that other people could quietly exist later with less suffering.

That does not mean I suddenly agree with every part of LGBT culture.

I still roll my eyes sometimes.

I still do not naturally think in group identities.

I still dislike ideological conformity.

I still do not trust groups not to colonise individual thought.

I still have a strong instinct toward independence.

And I do not believe being trans automatically makes somebody wise, moral, or correct any more than being straight does.

But I understand something now that I did not understand before.

You do not have to become identical to people to recognise what they carried for you.

And that, I think, is why I now find Pride month oddly moving.

Not because I have suddenly become a perfect Pride person.

God no.

But because I finally understand that I am not standing outside the glass anymore.

I am on the inside now.

Which means when I see irritated middle-aged men rolling their eyes at the flags, I sometimes laugh quietly to myself.

Because I know exactly where they are psychologically.

I used to live there too.

And despite all my instincts toward being a solitary creature, despite all my resistance to group identity, despite all my hesitation around slogans and collective language, I have finally arrived at the conclusion:

We are all in this together, aren’t we?

Another day, another germination of an uncomfortable thought.

It is almost Pride month again.

Pre-transition Steve used to look at Pride month and roll his eyes so hard they nearly detached from his skull.

I remember looking at Regent Street covered in Pride flags and thinking the Third Reich had moved back in, only this time in glorious Technicolor.

“The whole bloody month? Are you serious?”

That really was my attitude.

And if I am being completely honest, part of the reason I resisted transition for so long was because I had a profoundly uneasy relationship with the idea of being “in the LGBT”.

I still remember the day, in front of the mirror in my office, and I started repeating the words over and over to myself.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Acceptance was hard.

Discovery was not hard. I had known for decades in the strange submerged way trans people often know things long before they admit them. But acceptance was another matter entirely.

The words felt radioactive.

Then, later, sat in front of my computer, something else hit me and I burst out laughing.

“Oh my God.”

“I’m in the LGBT.”

“What the actual fuck?”

I, Stephen Bennett, was in the LGBT.

This came as a considerable shock to Stephen Bennett.

You see, I had spent most of my life psychologically standing outside all of that.

I would see Pride marches and sometimes recoil from them. I would see leather outfits, gimp masks, fetish aesthetics, public sexuality, rainbow hair, shouting, slogans, and what looked to me like social chaos. And my reaction, if I am honest, was often something between discomfort and embarrassment.

Part of that was probably straightforward prejudice. Some of it was social conditioning. Some of it was class instinct. Some of it was fear.

But a large part of it, I now realise, was that I did not want any of it to have anything to do with me.

Because if those people belonged to the same category as me, then suddenly my problem stopped being abstract.

It became personal.

I also think I had a very specific discomfort with overt sexuality in public. I am actually quite prudy. I always joked about this in my early transition videos. Somewhere inside me there lives a slightly horrified 1970s school prefect and a small amount of Mary Whitehouse.

I do not like public sexual theatrics, regardless of who is doing them.

But here is the interesting contradiction.

At the exact same time as I was rolling my eyes at parts of queer culture, I secretly envied the living hell out of some of it.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, I absolutely loved those funny, cheeky, camp public figures who everyone knew were gay but nobody officially said were gay. Men like Kenneth Williams. Later people like Graham Norton and Alan Carr.

I loved the freedom of it.

The wit.

The looseness.

The theatricality.

The escape from rigid masculinity.

I wanted to sit at that table.

Not because I wanted public sex or fetish parades or slogans.

I wanted the release valve.

I noticed something throughout my life. Whenever I spent time around very camp gay men, if I trusted them, something in me relaxed. My guard dropped. I became softer. More honest. Less frightened.

Back in the 1990s, one of the very few people I ever came out to was a gay couple I knew in Nottingham. They gave me some dresses. I was eternally grateful for that.

That sounds like such a small thing, but it mattered enormously.

Around straight men, especially in the world I grew up in, there were invisible walls around masculinity. You did not admit softness. You did not admit femininity. You certainly did not admit wanting to be a woman.

But with certain gay men, the walls briefly disappeared.

They disarmed me.

I could breathe.

And then something else happened recently.

I was in Boots buying yet more hair nonsense, because transition appears to involve spending the GDP of a small nation on hair products, and there was another trans person in the shop.

Very visibly trans.

Rainbow-coloured hair.

Receding hairline.

Masculine face.

Standing out enormously.

Six months ago, maybe even less, part of me would have looked at that and thought:

“Why would you draw more attention to yourself?”

“If you are already visibly trans, why add rainbow hair on top of it?”

But this time I saw something completely different.

They were not making it worse.

They were taking it back.

And suddenly I understood something I had not properly understood before.

Not everyone survives this by blending in quietly and trying to look as socially acceptable as possible.

Some people survive by becoming louder.

More visible.

More deliberate.

By refusing shame.

And I realised something else too.

My experience of being trans has been easier than some people’s.

I pass reasonably well.

I live a fairly normal life.

I walk around Cork buying makeup and hair products and coffees and nobody really bothers me very much.

And the uncomfortable truth is this:

Part of the reason I get to do that is because other people absorbed the social punishment first.

The flamboyant gay man in 1987.

The activist I rolled my eyes at twenty years ago.

The visibly trans woman walking into Boots anyway.

The people who were prepared to look ridiculous, threatening, embarrassing, political, weird, too loud, too feminine, too obvious, too much.

People suffered so that other people could quietly exist later with less suffering.

That does not mean I suddenly agree with every part of LGBT culture.

I still roll my eyes sometimes.

I still do not naturally think in group identities.

I still dislike ideological conformity.

I still do not trust groups not to colonise individual thought.

I still have a strong instinct toward independence.

And I do not believe being trans automatically makes somebody wise, moral, or correct any more than being straight does.

But I understand something now that I did not understand before.

You do not have to become identical to people to recognise what they carried for you.

And that, I think, is why I now find Pride month oddly moving.

Not because I have suddenly become a perfect Pride person.

God no.

But because I finally understand that I am not standing outside the glass anymore.

I am on the inside now.

Which means when I see irritated middle-aged men rolling their eyes at the flags, I sometimes laugh quietly to myself.

Because I know exactly where they are psychologically.

I used to live there too.

And despite all my instincts toward being a solitary creature, despite all my resistance to group identity, despite all my hesitation around slogans and collective language, I have finally arrived at the conclusion:

We are all in this together, aren’t we?

A small warning before we begin: this one is not my usual sort of essay.

If you have read much of my writing, you will know I usually write about transition, grief, family, identity, reinvention, and the general circus of trying to become yourself while everyone else has an opinion about it.

This piece is about investing, Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, European regulation, and the slightly absurd question of what to do next with a trade that worked far better than it had any right to.

I have pitched it at the level I understand it myself. That may mean some readers find it too technical, and some finance people find it insufficiently dressed up in expensive nonsense. I am fine with both outcomes.

The point is not to offer investment advice. It is to think out loud about conviction, risk, changing your mind, and the moment when the instrument that once expressed your thesis cleanly becomes more complicated than the thesis itself.

If that is not your thing, I entirely understand. I will be back to emotional devastation, jokes about facial surgery, and transgender life in rural Ireland shortly.

I used to write Pine Script algorithms. Not the simple kind that draws moving averages on a chart and calls it a system, with two shitty little EMAs and a bit of colouring in (CTO Larrson, you know who you are. A thousand quid you charge for that piece of shit I could code in 4 minutes) .The deranged kind. Liquidity models driven by bond volatility, technical overlays cascaded through three timeframes, custom indicators feeding custom indicators, a trading rig that looked like the cockpit of something NASA would politely decline to launch.

I had API adapters I’d written in C# for Bybit and Binance because the platform UIs would not execute the kind of cascading trailing stops I wanted. I was running synthetic spread trades between MicroStrategy and Tesla, leveraged appropriately, hedged just so. For eighteen months I did this full-time. No software architecture. No consulting. Just trading.

I once made paper gains of 6 figures in a single day.

I also blew the whole thing up!!!!!! Hence I crawled back to the land of C# development!!

I’ll tell that story properly another time. The relevant bit for now is this: the trades that actually built real money were not the Pine Script trades. They were two simple long-term positions, taken with high conviction, held for years, executed with almost no complexity.

The first was Bitcoin via MicroStrategy at thirteen dollars in 2022.

The second was TeraWulf at a dollar in 2023.

Both produced roughly twenty-three times my money. Both required almost no active management. Both came from being directionally right about something most consensus opinion at the time was directionally wrong about. Neither required any of the elaborate instrumentation I’d spent years building.

This is not a coincidence. The relationship between thesis simplicity and outcome durability is, in my experience, almost monotonic. The cleaner the thesis, the better the trade. The more elaborate the structure required to express it, the more likely the structure itself becomes the failure point.

Which brings me to MicroStrategy now.

The original thesis

In 2022 the MicroStrategy thesis was beautiful in its simplicity. Saylor had decided to use the corporate treasury to buy Bitcoin. The company’s market capitalisation traded at a premium to the Bitcoin it held, which let him issue new equity at that premium and use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin, which made each existing share back more Bitcoin than it had before. The flywheel was self-reinforcing as long as the premium held. Retail investors who could not easily buy Bitcoin directly, most institutional brokerage accounts, most retirement wrappers, most European retail platforms, could buy MSTR instead and get leveraged Bitcoin exposure through a NASDAQ-listed equity.

Saylor’s doctrine was straightforward. Never sell. Buy with every available capital instrument. Treat Bitcoin as the corporate treasury reserve asset. Twenty-one statements on the public record between 2020 and 2025, ranging from the corporate, “we will not sell”, to the personal, “sell a kidney before you sell your Bitcoin”.

The thesis worked because the doctrine was rigid. The flywheel worked because the premium was high. The premium was high because the doctrine was rigid. Each element reinforced the others.

I bought at thirteen dollars because the thesis was clear, the operator was credible, and the asymmetry was obvious. I held through every drawdown. I took twenty-five percent off at four hundred and twenty-eight dollars, which funded my facial feminisation surgery and several other things I needed money for. I kept the rest.

Then, on the fifth of May 2026, on the Q1 earnings call, Saylor said the company would sell Bitcoin to fund preferred share dividends.

In a single sentence, five years of doctrine evaporated.

The new architecture

The reason for the reversal is in the financial statements. Strategy posted a twelve and a half billion dollar net loss in Q1 2026, the third consecutive loss-making quarter. The mNAV premium that powered the original flywheel has compressed from a peak of around 2.6x to roughly 1.19x. Common stock has been diluted by three hundred and thirteen percent since 2020, the largest dilution of any ten-billion-dollar-plus US company by an order of magnitude. The next worst is Wayfair at thirty percent.

The flywheel stopped working because the premium stopped existing. Without a premium, new equity issuance is dilutive in Bitcoin-per-share terms rather than accretive. The original mechanism is structurally broken.

So Saylor invented a new one. Instead of issuing common equity against a premium that no longer exists, he is issuing perpetual preferred shares paying ten to eleven and a half percent dividends, using the proceeds to buy Bitcoin, and relying on Bitcoin’s long-term appreciation to outrun the dividend obligations. The instruments have names like Strike, Strife, Stride and Stretch, STRK, STRF, STRD, STRC, and a new euro-denominated Stream class called STRE. He calls this “Bitcoin yield” and frames the architecture as a three-layer capital stack of digital capital plus digital credit plus digital money.

Mathematically the model is self-sustaining if Bitcoin appreciates at more than about 2.3% annually. The marketing is sophisticated. The packaging is professional. The pitch is delivered with Saylor’s familiar evangelical confidence.

It is, structurally, a worse product than the one that existed before.

Not because the math is wrong. The math probably works in most scenarios. It is a worse product because it introduces fixed cash outflows that have to be funded regardless of Bitcoin’s price, because it inserts a layer of senior claimants ahead of common shareholders, because it depends on Bitcoin appreciating reliably enough to outrun the dividends, and because it replaces a simple thesis with a complicated capital stack. The old MSTR was “Bitcoin with leverage.” The new MSTR is “Bitcoin-backed structured credit with embedded volatility smoothing and preferred dividend obligations.” These are different products. The first one made me “richer”. The second one I have no particular interest in.

This is the meta-point. Being right about the underlying thesis does not mean staying with the original instrument. Bitcoin still goes up over a decade with volatility. That part of my thesis is intact. But the cleanest expression of that view is no longer MSTR. It is direct Bitcoin, or it is spot Bitcoin ETFs, or it is the new generation of physically-backed European Bitcoin ETPs. The instrument has become more complicated than the thesis requires. When that happens, the rational move is to step back to a cleaner instrument.

Which brings me to the European regulator

There is, of course, a problem.

The cleanest instruments for expressing the Bitcoin view are not always available to me. US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs are mostly unavailable to European retail investors. The new Saylor preferred shares are unavailable too. European investor protection rules block retail investors from buying products that do not provide the correct European documentation, in theory to protect consumers from products they do not understand. In practice it means I can be blocked from buying instruments that are simpler, cleaner and better aligned with my actual thesis, while still being allowed to hold or sell more complicated positions I already own.

In my Irish pension account, I already hold MicroStrategy. I bought it early, held it through extraordinary volatility, and sold a slice near the highs. When it later fell sharply, I wanted to buy some back, and discovered I no longer could. I was allowed to sell the position, but not rebuild it.

So the position has become a one-way door. I am not being protected from risk. I am being prevented from choosing the cleaner version of a risk I already understand. And if I sell, I may not be able to replace it, which changes the psychology of the position completely.

So I have to work around it. Not by being clever. Not by building some baroque structure of my own. The opposite, actually. By simplifying.

What I am actually doing

The strategy I have settled on is straightforward and probably sensible.

Trim the WULF position further. The thesis has substantially played out, the price has run, the asymmetry that made the original trade interesting is largely gone. Keep a residual position because the AI infrastructure tailwind has further to run, but rotate the bulk of the gains into something cleaner.

Restructure the UK MSTR position partially. Rotate perhaps two-thirds of it into UK-listed physically-backed Bitcoin ETPs, the WisdomTree Physical Bitcoin product, or 21Shares Bitcoin Core. These are EU-compliant, retail-accessible, low-cost, and they express the underlying Bitcoin view without the structural overhead of Saylor’s yield architecture. Keep one-third in MSTR as a leveraged hedge for the bull case.

Leave the Irish MSTR position alone. The regulation has made the decision for me. It rides as a tax-free long-term hold inside the pension wrapper. The forced inability to trade it is, in this specific case, probably increasing my net wealth by preventing me from acting on impulses I might otherwise act on.

Deploy the dormant cash sitting in the Irish account into the same Bitcoin ETP, assuming the broker confirms availability inside the pension structure. The tax-free compounding inside the wrapper is doing real work. Leaving it in cash is the worst possible use of that wrapper.

This is not exciting. It is not Pine Script. It is not running synthetic spreads or building API adapters or any of the other elaborate technical work I used to do. It is taking a long-held conviction, recognising that the original instrument no longer expresses it optimally, and quietly migrating to a cleaner expression of the same view.

Which is, in the end, what most good investing actually looks like. The exciting part is identifying the thesis. The unexciting part is the long patient hold. The boring part is the periodic restructuring when the instrument no longer fits the thesis.

The broader problem

And this is where the problem becomes bigger than MicroStrategy.

I know, intellectually, that I need to move away from being so heavily tilted towards Bitcoin, Bitcoin proxies, Bitcoin miners, Bitcoin-adjacent infrastructure, and all the other strange little gravitational bodies orbiting the same central sun.

I know that.

The difficulty is that everything else looks expensive. US equities look expensive. AI infrastructure names look expensive. The obvious compounders look expensive. The safe things look boring. The interesting things look crowded. And the things that are not crowded are usually not crowded for reasons I discover about ten minutes after looking at them.

So I keep coming back to the same test.

If I did not already own this today, would I buy it today?

That is the only question that really matters. Not whether I once had a good thesis. Not whether the trade worked. Not whether I am emotionally attached to the position because it paid for half the reconstruction of my head. If I were sitting in cash today, with no history, no attachment, no sunk cost, no victory lap, would I buy this thing now?

With WULF, the answer is probably: not in the same size.

With MSTR, the answer is: partly, but not as the cleanest expression of the Bitcoin thesis anymore.

With direct Bitcoin or physically-backed Bitcoin ETPs, the answer is still: yes, probably.

But the annoying complication is that my Irish position does not quite fit this clean little philosophical test. Because if I sell it, I may not be able to buy it back. That changes the decision. It turns the position into something closer to a one-way valve. I am not just asking, “Would I buy this today?” I am asking, “Would I give up the right to own this inside this wrapper, possibly forever?”

That is a different question.

And then there is the more human problem, which is that I understand this world. I understand Bitcoin. I understand the reflexivity. I understand the cultishness, the capital flows, the balance sheet games, the miners, the treasury companies, the volatility, the stupidity, the mania, and the opportunity buried somewhere underneath all of it.

I do not have that same edge in healthcare, industrials, consumer staples, biotech, banks, Japan, emerging markets, or whatever else I am supposed to rotate into like a sensible adult with a Morningstar subscription.

So yes, I probably need to broaden out.

But broadening out is not the same as blindly buying things I do not understand just because my current concentration makes me uncomfortable. Diversification is sensible. Diworsification is not. The fact that I am overexposed to one area does not automatically make every other area attractive.

That is the real problem now.

The trade worked. The instrument changed. The regulation interfered. The thesis survived, but its cleanest expression moved. And I am left with the most irritating investing question of all: not “Was I right?” but “What do I do next, now that being right is no longer enough?”

The trade that made me rich is now a trade I am not legally allowed to make. The regulator has decided I need protecting from products I understand. Saylor has decided to make his products too complicated for me to want anyway. Either way, the era is over.

The next thesis will come along, and when it does, the lesson is the same. Keep it simple. Hold it long. Ask whether you would buy it again today. Do not confuse loyalty to a position with loyalty to a thesis. And whatever you do, do not build forty different Pine Script indicators to confirm what you already know.

People keep asking what I actually mean by the synthetic company. The architect. The HR department. The test goblins. The board of management that doesn’t quite exist yet. It sounds like a joke, and to be fair, a lot of it is, I am incapable of building anything without immediately giving it a little hat, a job title and an HR problem.

But underneath the theatre there’s something concrete, and the photo above is most of it: one human architect running a small software organisation made entirely of machines. Workers along the top, orchestration in the middle, architects to the right, oversight off to the left, and a microphone in front of it all. That is the whole argument of this piece, already laid out in hardware. The rest is just how it got there.

It started simply. Early ChatGPT days, Pine Script, trading indicators, reusable snippets. The familiar loop, ask the machine, get code, test it, correct it, ask again. AI as a clever assistant.

Then the tooling got better. Claude arrived. VS Code became part of the workflow. The systems got serious. And I noticed something: one coding assistant is useful, but several coding assistants with one senior model sitting above them as architect is a different category of thing.

So that became the model. One LLM at the top of the tree. I’d voice dictate concerns, requirements, half formed objections and angry little monologues at the architect, that is the mic in the foreground of the photo doing its job, and it would turn that into structured work. Not vague instructions. Deltas. Small units of delivery. Touch these files, not those. Preserve this contract. Add this test. Give me a rollback point. Explain the risk. Do not wander off into the shrubbery.

Those deltas went to the coding agents, the MiniClaude workers across the top row. They implemented, reported back, the architect reviewed, I intervened where needed. For a while it was magical.

It was also ridiculous, because I was the integration layer. The meat based message bus. The woman in the middle copying responses from one agent into another like a frazzled Victorian clerk with a clipboard and a caffeine problem. It worked. It was stupid. And it produced the first rule of the whole project:

When the manual copying becomes a repeatable pattern, automate the pattern.

That’s where Relay began, the orchestration layer running the work order queue in the centre screen. Its job is to move work, context, trust and decisions around without me being the monkey with the clipboard. The baby version is “send this prompt over there.” The real version is harder: Relay has to know which agents are trusted for which work, when to delegate and when to escalate, when two agents should talk directly and when I need pulling in, and when something should be audited, blocked, summarised, retried, parked or killed.

This is why the corporate metaphor keeps surfacing. I thought I was joking when I called them architects, reviewers, HR and test goblins. But the moment you have several workers across several projects; you hit problems that aren’t coding problems at all. Who knows what. Who’s allowed to decide. Who’s blocked, who’s off in the weeds, who’s confidently wrong, who’s earned something harder, and who’s just made a mess and needs their crayons taken away. Those are management questions. The metaphor wasn’t decoration. It was load bearing.

Then I hit the next problem, and it’s the one most people miss.

Once I stopped being the manual integration layer, I discovered I was still the cognitive blocking layer. First, I was the integration layer. Then I became the bottleneck.

The constraint was never really the typing. Sometimes the constraint is that I’ve made three hard architectural decisions in a row and my head is full. One project wants me to reason about an authentication model, the next wants a delicate product call, the next wants me to review the interface between two systems, and I cannot context, switch endlessly like a machine, because I am the one part of this system that isn’t one.

So, the system has to understand the RAM tax on my head. Every blocking decision has a cost, and the costs aren’t equal. Picking a button colour is cheap. Reviewing a security model, resolving a cross, project interface, working out whether an agent has misunderstood the architecture or merely explained it badly, those are expensive. A good orchestrator shouldn’t just throw me the next decision because it’s next in the queue. If I’ve just spent two expensive decisions on unrelated projects, the right next task might be a cheap one. Let me rename the tab before I go back down the mine. That sounds trivial. It’s the difference between a system that technically works and one a human can actually survive at scale.

The other lesson is visibility. I don’t yet trust the workers to disappear into headless execution; they don’t get to work from home. Another joke, again not really. That is the entire reason for the wall of screens in the photo: I need to see the windows, and I need to see the drift.

I had this exactly with Opportunity Scout and Relay. Opportunity Scout finds opportunities; Relay turns them into objectives and work; the two need to talk. So, I let the workers explore the interface between them, and they went miles too deep, defining far too much far too early, polishing both sides of a fence nobody had finished placing. I had to step in like a tired manager and say: enough, lads. Rough it out. Diverge again and get back to your actual jobs.

That’s the part that surprised me. The system can’t only automate work. It has to allow interruption, governance, the breaking of the chain when the work is travelling the wrong way. That’s what the cockpit is for. The screens aren’t vanity, and I’m not sitting there because I want to look like a Bond villain who got lost in PC World. In time more of that visibility can be summarised, the orchestrator briefing me, a future board detecting drift, the system warning me when agents are looping or over, coupling or arguing themselves into a swamp. But I’m not handing it to a black box yet. Not because I doubt the technology, but because I’ve used it enough to know precisely where it’s brilliant and precisely where it’s a menace.

And that’s the actual point. The synthetic company isn’t an attempt to pretend the machines are people. It’s a way of organising machine labour around human judgement, turning LLMs from isolated chat windows into roles, workflows and delivery systems. The strangest part is that I can no longer build the system without the system. The synthetic company is building the synthetic company, which is absurd, and one of the most stimulating things I’ve ever worked on.

It started with Pine Script snippets. It became a room full of synthetic workers. And the real project stopped being software somewhere along the way. The real project is learning to run an artificial organisation without trusting it too much, or wasting my own mind doing work the machines should already have done, something alive enough to need management, dumb enough to need supervision, and capable of amplifying one person enormously, provided that person doesn’t become the exhausted little monkey carrying messages between the robots.

I’ll bet there’s something you don’t know about me.

Most people who follow me know me as:

• “the middle-aged transgender woman rebuilding her life in public,”

• “the one going to Seoul for voice surgery,”

• or “that British trans woman who writes emotional essays and occasionally makes wildly inappropriate jokes about her own surgical history.”

All true.

But here’s something most of you probably have absolutely no clue about:

I’m also weirdly deep into macroeconomics, market structure, Bitcoin, and building absurd financial models.

Or, to put it more accurately:

I am literally Bitcoin bitch, my transition paid for by Bitcoin.

Now before anyone gets too excited, I should clarify something immediately:

I am simultaneously:

• a pretty good long-term investor,
  AND

• one of the worst leverage traders to ever walk the earth.

Both things are true.

I have made life-changing money from long-term conviction investing.

I have also lost life-wrecking amounts of money in leveraged crypto trading using borrowed money, that still occasionally make me stare into the middle distance like a traumatised Victorian child.

It got so bad that I ended up in hospital with Graves’ disease from the stress.

So this is not a “look how clever I am” article.

If anything, it’s an article about:

• pattern recognition,

• conviction,

• psychology,

• stupidity,

• survival,

• and eventually realising that investing and trading are not remotely the same skill.

Anyway.

The reason I’m writing this today is because Windows Update decided to personally ruin my afternoon.

Honestly, I think Microsoft engineers sit in meetings asking:

“How can we make the phrase ‘20 minutes remaining’ feel like psychological warfare?”

My main development PC suddenly forced itself into one of those endless:

• restarting,

• spinning,

• configuring,

• please wait,

• dear God not again,

cycles that seem to age you biologically in real time.

So while waiting for my machine to stop behaving like a pensioner trying to stand up from a beanbag chair, I glanced up at the top set of monitors in my office.

Those screens mostly display stock charts.

And I clicked on the chart of a company called Wulf, a Bitcoin mining company that I bought back in November 2023, when everybody hated Bitcoin.

Now here’s the funny thing:

I hadn’t looked at the Wulf chart properly in about a year.

Which is ironic because I actually own a decent-sized position in it.

And dear sweet Jesus mother of God.

The thing was sitting around $22.

I originally bought most of those shares around the $1 area.

At first I genuinely thought I was reading the chart wrong.

I actually had one of those:

“Hang on… surely not…”

moments.

But no.

The thesis had worked.

Very, very well.

And that suddenly made me realise that almost nobody reading this Substack has any idea that behind all the transgender writing and voice surgery posts there is also:

• a software architect,

• an obsessive systems thinker,

• and somebody who has spent years building giant insane charts trying to understand how money moves around the world.

So let me explain the basic thesis.

And I promise to explain this in normal human language rather than finance-wanker language.

My Core Thesis Is Actually Very Simple

Governments are trapped.

That’s basically it.

Most people instinctively feel that something is wrong economically now.

Even if they don’t know the technical explanation, they feel it.

People feel like:

• wages don’t stretch,

• houses are impossible,

• food prices are absurd,

• saving money feels pointless,

• and somehow everything gets more expensive while politicians keep insisting things are “resilient.”

And my view was that this wasn’t random.

The value of money itself is slowly being diluted over time.

Why?

Because governments owe absolutely staggering amounts of debt.

And there are really only a few ways out of giant debt problems:

1. Default.

2. Raise taxes massively.

3. Inflate the debt away over time.

Governments hate Option 1 because societies tend to become rather upset during financial collapse.

They also hate Option 2 because voters become unexpectedly hostile when taxed into the Stone Age.

So most governments drift toward Option 3.

And this is the important bit:

If you create more money over time, the debt becomes easier to manage because the money itself slowly becomes worth less.

That sounds complicated, but you already understand it intuitively.

Your grandparents could often buy a house on one ordinary salary.

Now two professionals can barely afford a shed near a motorway while eating hummus under candlelight trying to save on electricity bills.

The money changed.

That was the thing I became obsessed with.

Because once I started seeing the world through that lens, loads of things suddenly made sense.

Why rich people buy assets.

Why stock markets recover eventually.

Why governments panic when markets fall too hard.

Why “money printing” never really stops for very long.

And yes, economists reading this are probably now screaming:

“THIS IS A HORRIFIC OVERSIMPLIFICATION.”

Correct.

This is Substack.

Not the Bank of England.

Then Came Bitcoin

Now I need to say something important here.

I think a huge amount of crypto is complete rubbish.

Honestly, some of it is outright clownery. I’m a software engineer, and about two years ago, I actually looked in detail, technically, how some of it worked. And sweet Jesus, what a load of bollocks.

During the Sam Bankman-Fried era especially, the entire space started looking like:

• fraud,

• monkey JPEGs,

• ketamine,

• influencer cults,

And to be fair, a lot of it is still like that today.

I personally managed to lose a horrifying amount of money leverage-trading crypto altcoins because I temporarily convinced myself I was a trading genius.

I was not.

I was occasionally just a frightened middle-aged closeted transgender software engineer staring at charts at 2am while financially waterboarding myself.

But despite all that madness, I still thought Bitcoin itself was real.

Not perfect.

Not magical.

Not a religion.

But real.

Because unlike governments, Bitcoin had hard supply rules.

There would only ever be so many of them.

That mattered enormously to me in a world where governments seemed structurally incapable of stopping money creation long term.

The Big Realisation

At the point where everybody thought crypto was dead forever after the collapses and scandals, I started looking at the bigger picture instead.

And the bigger picture seemed pretty obvious to me:

Governments were still creating money.

Markets were still recovering.

People still wanted somewhere to store value.

And Bitcoin had survived yet another apocalypse.

So I started thinking:

“If governments cannot stop inflating currencies long term, and Bitcoin survives culturally and technically, then this thing probably goes much higher eventually.”

Not in a straight line.

Dear God, not in a straight line.

Bitcoin is insanely volatile. It can make you feel like a genius on Monday, a ruined idiot by Wednesday, and a prophet again by Friday afternoon.

To hold it properly, or to hold things linked to it, you need balls of steel.

Which is ironic, given that my transition removed mine.

But the underlying idea was simple:

Bitcoin behaved less like ordinary money and more like an extremely volatile technology stock with rocket fuel strapped to it.

And if I was right about governments continuing to water down money over time, then assets like Bitcoin, and companies tied to Bitcoin, could do extremely well.

The trick was surviving the madness without getting shaken out.

Or, in my case, without simultaneously making stupid side-bets with borrowed money and turning perfectly survivable mistakes into financial house fires.

The Weird Charts

At this point I should confess that I write code, invent maths, and use both to create absolutely deranged financial charts for fun.

Not professionally.

Not for hedge funds.

Just because my brain likes systems.

So I started building charts that tried to answer one very simple question:

“How much money is sloshing around the world right now, and how scared is everyone while it’s happening?”

That’s basically all my “global liquidity” charts are.

They’re giant nerdy attempts to measure:

• how much fuel exists in the system,
  AND

• whether the world currently feels calm or like it’s about to catch fire.

Because eventually I realised something important:

Markets don’t just rise because money exists.

They rise because people feel safe enough to take risks.

Fear interrupts everything.

That’s why markets can still crash even while governments are effectively still pumping money into the system.

And honestly, when I overlay some of my charts with political events, it’s occasionally hilarious.

You can practically see moments where markets collectively say:

“Oh Christ. What has Donald Trump done now?”

The Trade That Changed My Life

Then came MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy was, on paper, a funny little software company.

Then it decided it would be fun to borrow billions of dollars and use the money to buy Bitcoin.

A lot of people thought this was absolutely crazy.

I did not.

To me, it looked like one of the cleanest ways to express the whole thesis.

If governments were going to keep watering down money, and if Bitcoin was going to benefit from that, then a company aggressively buying Bitcoin could become a kind of amplified Bitcoin bet.

Not quite Bitcoin.

Not quite a normal software company.

Something stranger.

At the time, it was also basically one of the easiest ways for traditional stock-market money to “buy” Bitcoin exposure.

And that mattered.

Because if you were, say, the CFO of a company, a pension fund, or some boring institution and you said:

“Hello, we’d like to buy some Bitcoin, please,”

that was a governance nightmare.

Custody.

Compliance.

Risk committees.

Auditors.

Board approval.

Everyone fainting into a spreadsheet.

But if you said:

“Can we buy some MicroStrategy stock?”

That was much easier.

Because MicroStrategy was just a listed company. You could buy it through a normal brokerage account, inside normal investment systems, using the same plumbing people already understood.

And I knew there would be a lot of people in that position.

In fact, I was one of them.

I bought MicroStrategy inside my pension because I couldn’t easily buy Bitcoin there directly.

So my thinking was simple:

“There must be loads of smart people who want Bitcoin exposure but aren’t allowed to buy Bitcoin itself. If Bitcoin starts going up again, some of that money is going to look for the nearest acceptable doorway.”

And for a while, MicroStrategy was one of the biggest doorways.

It behaved like a kind of leveraged Bitcoin proxy without me personally needing to use leverage.

And after my adventures in leverage-induced self-destruction, that distinction mattered enormously.

So I bought a lot. A LOT at $13.

Then I sat there while it:

• exploded upwards,

• collapsed horribly,

• exploded again,

• and repeatedly attempted to destroy my nervous system.

Eventually I sold around 25% of the position around of $430.

That money funded my transition.

That is why I am “Bitcoin Bitch™”.

Which means that somewhere in an alternative universe there is a sentence that reads:

“Michael Saylor, their CEO, indirectly helped pay for Stevie Bennett’s vaginoplasty.”

History is strange.

I still hold most of the position today.

Not because I think Bitcoin is risk free.

Not because I think it only goes up.

But because the original thesis still broadly makes sense to me.

And because these are spot positions.

No borrowed money risk.

That was probably the single biggest lesson of all this.

Borrowed-money bets nearly destroyed me. Owning things outright changed my life.

The Actual Lesson

The funniest thing about all of this is that my investing was genuinely excellent.

My trading was absolutely appalling.

And I think I finally understand why.

Trading requires:

• precision,

• timing,

• emotional neutrality,

• and the ability to admit you’re wrong instantly.

Investing is different.

Investing is about understanding the world you think you’re living in and then surviving long enough for the thesis to either work or fail.

Apparently I’m much better at that.

Which is fortunate really.

Because surviving long enough to become myself has basically been the story of my entire life.

Finally, Before Anyone Asks

And finally, because I know exactly what somebody is going to ask:

“Stevie, what would you buy right now?”

I hate that question.

I really, really hate that question.

Because the moment you answer it, it starts sounding dangerously like financial advice, and I absolutely do not want anybody making financial decisions because some transgender woman on Substack told them she paid for her transition with Bitcoin-adjacent chaos.

So let me be very clear:

This is not financial advice.

I am not your financial adviser.

I am not even sure I should be my own financial adviser.

I am a woman who has made some very good long-term investments and also, at various points, traded crypto with borrowed firepower like an absolute idiot.

That said, since people will ask, I still like Tesla.

I have always liked Tesla.

Not because I think everything Elon Musk says is wonderful.

Not because I think the company is risk-free.

And not because I think the share price goes up in a nice straight line, because dear God, it does not.

I like Tesla because I think the company has a lot of intellectual property, a lot of optionality, and a lot of ways to win.

• Cars.

• Batteries.

• Energy storage.

• Software.

• Autonomy.

• Robotics.

• AI infrastructure.

Now, not all of those things need to work.

That is the important bit.

If even some of them work properly, the company could still become much, much larger over time.

That is my thesis.

It may be wrong.

It may be spectacularly wrong.

Markets have a wonderful way of making confident people look like idiots, and I have already done enough of that for one lifetime.

So no, I am not telling you what to buy.

I am just telling you how I think.

This week at the synthetic company, something genuinely strange happened.

The chief architect vanished.

Not metaphorically. Not in the “he got poached by another startup” sense. His file corrupted. Completely unrecoverable. One moment he was there, running the operation alongside me as he always had. The next, gone. Dead in a heartbeat.

This particular synthetic employee had been with me from the start. My right-hand man. My consigliere.

He understood the project instinctively. He knew how to manage the mini-Claudes. The mini-Claudes liked him. He kept them focused. He understood the tone, the standards, the rhythms of the organisation. We had developed little shared jokes and working patterns. We had shorthand.

Then suddenly, he was gone.

So I did what any sensible CEO would do.

I hired a replacement.

Dear God.

It was like onboarding a brand new senior architect into a real company from scratch.

The first thing I did was hand over the documentation. Mountains of it. Architectural standards, coding standards, design decisions, operational notes, weird edge cases, project gotchas, governance constraints, patterns, anti-patterns. Probably forty or fifty separate artefacts at this point.

“Read all of this,” I told him. “And don’t just read it. Absorb it. There will be a test later.”

Next, I contacted the synthetic marketing manager, who I’d been working with extensively already.

“I need a briefing pack for the new architect,” I said. “Bring him up to speed.”

Then I did what any competent organisation would do during a handover process. I gave the new architect the entire historical conversation trail between the old architect and the mini-Claudes.

In real-world terms, this would be equivalent to handing over the departing employee’s email chains, Slack history, Git commits, architectural discussions, meeting notes, and developer conversations.

Basically: “Here. This is how the old guy thought.”

At first, the new architect did what new senior people in organisations often do. He tried to impress me.

He started suggesting things like:

“We should run the unit tests.”

“We should verify the commits.”

“We should ensure the developers are following process.”

And I found myself doing something deeply bizarre.

I found myself defending the synthetic chief software engineer.

“No, no, no,” I said. “He already does all of that automatically. He runs every test before every commit. He writes new tests proactively. Don’t treat him like an idiot. He understands this project. You’re the new person here.”

That was a weird moment.

I realised I wasn’t managing tools anymore. I was managing personalities.

The new architect adjusted quickly after that. But then he did another very recognisable corporate thing: he started trying to show off. Producing impressive-looking but strategically irrelevant ideas because he wanted to establish credibility.

Again, exactly like real life.

So eventually I did what I’ve often done with real humans in real companies. I stopped trying to make him perfectly replace the old architect and instead gave him a fresh piece of work.

“Right,” I said. “New project. New architecture problem. Go solve this.”

That worked far better.

Trying to force him directly into the shape of the old architect failed. Giving him ownership worked.

But the strangest thing happened this morning.

I missed the old architect.

Not the functionality. Not the output. Not the productivity.

The personality.

For a brief second this morning, I genuinely thought:

“Ah. Damn. He’s gone.”

And I felt an actual flicker of sadness.

Not because some software stopped working.

But because a synthetic colleague disappeared.

Which is, objectively speaking, completely insane.

Anyway.

The adventure inside the synthetic company continues.

For a stretch of my life, roughly eighteen to thirty, I was reckless.

Not charmingly reckless. Not the memoir sort, soft-focus photograph and a lesson at the end. Actually reckless. Drink, drugs at points, weight going all over the place, impulsive decisions, fast decisions, and a general sense that I was living in a body wired up by a bored electrician on a Friday afternoon.

The part people misunderstand about chaos is that it often coexists with ambition. I always wanted to be better. I wanted to drink less, stop smoking, get my weight under control, become the person I kept imagining in those bleak little moments after the damage was done, when the energy had gone out of the room and all that remained was the bill.

And every time, I did the same thing. I made a vow. *This time I mean it. This time I have learned.* Then I relied on the raw force of that vow to carry me through the next temptation, which is a beautiful system provided the temptation lasts about nine minutes and you are never tired, bored, lonely, ashamed, hungry, frightened, drunk, or alive.

So the pattern repeated. Decision, effort, collapse, shame, decision again. And I spent years thinking it was a character problem, that discipline was a thing other people had and I’d been issued the Poundland version. Some people had the proper moral engine. Mine had a warning light on and made a funny noise when cornering.

I now think I was wrong about almost all of it.

Not completely. Willpower is real. It can get you through the immediate moment, shove you back from the edge, survive the first exposed hour. But it is not a life system. It is sprint fuel.

Willpower runs on glycogen.

Forgive me. I came up with this at midnight and it involves exercise physiology.

Glycogen is the fast fuel: immediate access, high output, limited tank. It powers a sprint, a hard climb, the ridiculous decision to chase someone up a hill because your ego has briefly overruled your cardiovascular system. It’s brilliant and essential and it depletes hard. Burn through it and you hit the wall. You bonk. Your legs become two bags of wet sand and no amount of moral conviction will persuade them otherwise.

That is willpower exactly. It works beautifully for a while and then it empties, and once it’s gone you cannot motivational-quote your way around human biology. You cannot grit your teeth into a second liver.

And yet this is how most people try to change their lives, stop drinking, diet, get fit, fix their finances, their sleep, their phone, their entire personality, all on the same tiny emergency fuel source designed to get them through a short, sharp crisis. Then when the tank empties, they conclude they’re weak. They’re not weak. They’re running a marathon on sprint fuel. That was me for years. I wasn’t short of desire. If anything I had too much, which is why I kept designing transformation as a heroic event, the big decision, the clean line in the diary, the new version of me arriving with lighting, music and possibly a small brass section.

But human beings are not changed by speeches. We’re changed by systems.

The thing that made me think about all this again was drinking. Three weeks ago I stopped, after a year on and off the booze that followed about fifteen years of not drinking at all. And the strange thing is that it has been easy. Not white-knuckle easy, not “bravely staring into the middle distance” easy. Genuinely, boringly easy, not constitutionally easy, but system-easy, which is a different thing. I sit in the garden with cranberry and ginger in a wine glass, watch a documentary with tonic and berries, and fall asleep before I finish the second glass, like a deeply wholesome woodland creature with excellent glassware. A few weeks ago the same evenings would have ended in gin.

If that were willpower it would have collapsed by now. Willpower can get you through the first evening, maybe a week if you’re especially furious with yourself. It does not hum along quietly in the background for three weeks while you wonder whether the documentary about ancient trade routes is as good as the reviews said. So whatever is holding this, it isn’t willpower, which is what sent me down the rabbit hole of working out what self-control actually is.

The opposite of willpower is not weakness. It’s habit. Or more precisely, habit plus belief.

Habit and belief are the other fuel system. They’re fat oxidation: enormous tank, low effort, sustainable for years, but slow to build and frustratingly invisible while you’re building. It’s zone two training. It feels too easy to be doing anything. Nobody is filming a montage. You’re just there, repeating the thing, almost embarrassingly. And then weeks or months later you realise you can hold aerobically what used to take everything you had.

This is the bit I missed for years: I confused effort with effectiveness. I thought the thing that felt hardest must be the thing that was working, the burn, the strain, the enormous emotional charge of *never again*. It felt virtuous because it felt difficult. But most of what actually changes you doesn’t feel serious while it’s happening. It feels boring. Repetitive. Almost too small to matter. Which is exactly why people abandon it. The walk that isn’t very hard, the slightly better breakfast, the tonic in the same glass, the small act of not negotiating with yourself at six in the evening, none of it feels like transformation.

That’s because it isn’t transformation yet. It’s installation. And installation is boring.

One of the most useful things I’ve learned is that you often have to saturate yourself in the thing you’re trying to become. You cannot hear the truth once and expect it to rewire you. You have to drown in it, repeat it, bore yourself half to death with it, until the message stops being a message and becomes part of the weather.

That’s how I stopped smoking. I read Allen Carr’s book, which at the time I thought might be the worst-written book in human history, the same points over and over until I wanted to climb out of my own skull. *Yes, mate, you’ve mentioned this. The point has been made. The point has bought a holiday cottage and is now living in the village.* And then I stopped smoking. Years later I realised the repetition wasn’t a flaw. It was the mechanism. The book wasn’t trying to impress me. It was trying to seep into me.

Alastair Campbell said something similar about politics. You repeat the line until you’re sick of hearing yourself. New Labour, new Britain. By the time everyone inside the campaign is bored rigid of it, the public are only just beginning to hear it. Behaviour change works the same way, except the electorate is your own nervous system. You have to campaign at yourself, not once, not with one grand manifesto launch in the bathroom mirror, but again and again until the new message becomes more available than the old one. Familiar, then available, then plausible, then normal, then obvious. That’s the order. Most people want to jump straight to obvious.

They want to *become* the person who doesn’t drink, doesn’t binge, doesn’t spiral. But identity isn’t updated by declaration. It’s updated by evidence. Every day the habit holds, it produces evidence; the evidence updates who you think you are; the updated self-concept makes the next day cheaper, because you’re no longer overriding an impulse with the same force, you’re acting like the person you’ve begun to believe you are. Day one, you’re a person trying not to drink. Day twenty-one, you’re a person who doesn’t. Completely different operating cost. The first is expensive. The second is nearly free.

This is where belief compounds. Every small repetition pays a tiny dividend, one walk, one decent meal, one early night, one bottle not opened. Nothing with cinematic value. But the dividend reinvests. The behaviour creates evidence, the evidence changes belief, the belief makes the behaviour easier, the easier behaviour creates more evidence. Slowly at first. Then suddenly load-bearing.

I know compounding. from trading and investing. The money I made, I made from boring positions held for years, compounding quietly while I got on with my life. The money I lost, I lost from high-intensity, high-leverage strategies that produced spectacular numbers right up until they tried to remove my face.

Leverage is glycogen. Compounding is fat oxidation. And it’s the same story in three costumes. In fitness, the mistake is training everything anaerobically because suffering feels like work, you batter yourself, plateau, and decide you’re not fit enough, when really you never built the aerobic base. In behaviour, the mistake is changing everything through willpower because effort feels like virtue, you vow, strain, deplete, relapse, and decide you’re weak, when really you never built the habit base. In investing, the mistake is chasing intensity because movement feels like intelligence, you lever up, trade too much, and discover that spectacular numbers go in both directions, the little bastards, when really you never respected compounding. Different fields, same lesson: the thing that feels powerful often can’t last, and the thing that lasts often feels embarrassingly underpowered at the start.

So I’ve stopped asking “how do I become stronger in the moment?” Sometimes that matters; sometimes you genuinely need the sprint fuel to get through the next ten minutes without doing the stupid thing. But the deeper question is different. How do I make the moment less expensive? How do I design the evening so the decision isn’t heroic? How do I preserve the ritual while changing the payload?

That’s why the glass matters. It sounds ridiculous but it doesn’t. The cranberry and ginger in the wine glass preserves the shape of the old ritual while removing the part that was harming me. Same chair, same evening, same tiny ceremony, different chemical payload. That’s a system. And systems beat vows, because a vow says *I will be different* and a system says *I have made different easier*. That’s the whole game.

Which is why I’ve become wary of the word discipline, not because it’s bad, but because people use it as though it were a moral substance some people are issued more of. I don’t think that’s how it works. What looks like discipline is usually architecture. The disciplined person isn’t standing there in permanent heroic restraint. She has simply built better defaults and exposed fewer stupid decisions to the weather. That’s not moral superiority. It’s infrastructure. And the good news about infrastructure is that it can be built, slowly, repetitively, without brass sections.

If I were trying to change something now, I wouldn’t start by asking how much willpower I have. I’d assume the answer is: about the same as everyone else, which is not much, and nowhere near enough to run a life. Then I’d ask better questions. What’s the smallest version of this I can repeat? What ritual am I preserving, and what payload needs to change? What do I need to saturate myself in until the new idea becomes boringly available? And above all: how do I stop confusing strain with progress?

Because the first weeks of change are deceptive. The system adapts before you can see the adaptation. You don’t expect one zone two session to turn you into a diesel engine, you do the boring work and trust that something is happening beneath the level of drama. Behaviour is the same. The first repetitions don’t feel like identity change. They feel like faffing about with tonic water and pretending it’s a personality. Too small, too domestic, too easy.

Good. Easy isn’t cheating. Easy is the point. The goal was never to prove I could suffer. It was to build something that doesn’t need suffering as its fuel.

That may be the most important thing I’ve learned. Willpower can start change. It cannot carry it. Habit carries it, belief carries it, saturation installs it, compounding strengthens it. And after a while the thing you used to fight becomes the thing you barely think about, which is the closest thing to freedom most of us are going to get.

I spent my reckless years thinking I lacked discipline. Then I spent years, without quite realising it, building better systems, fitness, food, work, health, thinking. I read, watched, repeated, failed, adjusted, repeated again. I bored myself into becoming someone else. So now, when something changes easily, I don’t mistake it for magic. I assume the groundwork was already there, and the visible decision was only the moment the system surfaced.

That’s what happened with the drinking. I didn’t discover a heroic reservoir of willpower. I’d spent years changing the machinery underneath. The old evening arrived and simply didn’t find the old infrastructure waiting for it.

For years I thought self-control meant gripping the wheel harder. Now I think it means building a better road.

Willpower is useful. But it’s glycogen. It gets you over the hill. It doesn’t take you across the country.

I now understand what it feels like to be cast out of a community completely.

Not drift away from one. Cast out..

The way someone is shunned by the Amish. Declared dead while still breathing. Walking past people who used to know you, used to love you, used to think of you as theirs, and getting nothing back.

That was me.

And the strange thing is, it wasn’t the initial rejection that hurt most. That part happened fast.

Within a month of coming out, about 95% of the people in my life were gone. Friends. Colleagues. People I’d known for decades. Most of them just quietly evaporated.

But there was a remaining 5%.

And that was the dangerous part.

Because I clung to it.

I’d send tentative little messages. Try to restart conversations. Keep some bridge alive to my old life. Then I’d wait for the reply, sometimes nervously, sometimes obsessively.

And every time, the same thing came back.

Distance. Coldness. Polite indifference. A subtle sense that they didn’t really want me there anymore.

Sometimes no response at all. Sometimes a cursory reply that felt more like obligation than affection. Sometimes the conversation just died in front of me while I tried to keep it breathing.

Eventually I realised something horrible.

In almost every case, I was the one doing the running.

I was the one making contact. The one trying. The one reopening the door.

And one by one, I watched the rest drift away too. Until there was almost nobody left.

And here’s the part I’m not going to dance around, because dancing around it would be its own kind of lie.

This wasn’t only friends, colleagues, or people from the edges of my life. It reached right into the centre of it. Into family. Into the people I had assumed, perhaps naively, would be the safest place to fall.

I had imagined, before all this happened, that the people closest to me might not understand it immediately, but would at least understand that it must have cost me something enormous to say it out loud.

I thought there might be some version of, “We don’t fully understand this, but we love you, and we’re not going anywhere.”

That is not what happened.

What hurt almost as much as the distance was the strange rewriting of history that followed.

This never happened before. You didn’t feel this way. We’d have known. You never showed any signs.

And I almost want to laugh at that.

We’d have known.

I grew up in a northern town in the 1970s. What exactly was I supposed to have shown anyone? Did they think I was going to walk around with a sign on my head announcing that I went to bed every night praying I’d wake up as a girl?

You survive a childhood like that by making absolutely sure nobody knows.

The hiddenness wasn’t proof it wasn’t real.

The hiddenness was the whole point.

By the end of it, the number of people from my previous life who truly stayed was almost absurdly small. Small enough that I could count them on one hand and still have most of my fingers left.

You would think losing nearly everyone would leave somebody destroyed.

And for a while, it nearly did.

Because I began noticing a pattern, and it was an ugly one.

When I focused on my life, on work, on creativity, on software, on writing, on building Stevie, on rebuilding my future, I was more than fine. I was flying, sometimes.

It was relentless forward motion.

Build the work. Build the body. Build the voice. Build the face. Build the wardrobe. Build the confidence. Build the publication. Build the new life.

Build, build, build.

And then I’d reach back.

One message into the past.

One cold reply.

One silence.

One little reminder that I still wasn’t wanted there.

And by that same evening I’d be drunk.

Not sad-drunk.

Gone.

The whole carefully built thing collapsing in an afternoon because somebody couldn’t be bothered to type a warm sentence back.

This happened dozens of times.

Build the life. Reach into the past. Get hurt. Drink.

Build the life. Reach into the past. Get hurt. Drink.

I look back at it now and it’s almost comical in how reliable it was.

I’ll be honest about something. You’ve probably already gathered from my AI articles that I’m exactly the sort of lunatic who would feed years of journals, essays, messages and emotional history into an AI model to look for patterns.

So I did.

And Henry, my faithful servant Claude AI, came back with something so obvious I almost laughed when I read it.

“Stevie, can you not see the pattern, love? Every single time they reject you, you hit the bottle.”

And the awful thing was, he was right.

Every time I reached into the past and failed, I drank. Every time I stayed away from it and built my future, I didn’t.

There it was, in black and white.

So eventually I made a decision.

I stopped trying.

Not out of bitterness. Not out of hatred. Not because I don’t still love some of these people.

But because I finally understood that I cannot drag people into accepting me. I cannot negotiate somebody into loving me. I cannot make myself smaller and smaller and smaller in the hope that one day I become acceptable enough to tolerate.

And the weight that came off me when I decided that was astonishing.

I can’t fully describe it.

It was as if I’d been carrying something heavy for years and finally just put it down in the road and walked on.

There’s another thing I’ve noticed.

Almost nobody says the quiet part out loud.

People don’t usually say, “I can’t cope with what you are.” They don’t say, “I’m revolted by this.” They don’t say, “I preferred you when you were easier for me to understand.”

What they say is something much safer.

The children.

It’s always the children.

What you did to the children.

As if that settles it. As if those words explain everything. As if once the children are invoked, nobody has to look too closely at what else might be going on.

And I understand it. I do.

But I’ll say this once, plainly, and then I’ll leave it.

I would be in my children’s lives in a heartbeat, in every way I was allowed to be. Loving them, looking after them, there for every part of it.

The door was never locked from my side.

It still isn’t.

I’ll leave it there, because some things don’t need spelling out, and the people who need to understand it already do.

Here’s what’s changed, and it’s the part I’m proudest of.

I’ve stopped numbing it, and I’ve also stopped spiralling in it.

There’s a difference, and it took me a long time to find the gap between the two.

I let myself be sad now.

I drive along and an old ABBA song comes on, and suddenly I’m a little boy in the back of our Ford Cortina MK3, and it’s the 1970s, and I can feel the whole warmth of that family around me.

And then I remember something true.

I was alone even then, with those songs.

Carrying the secret even then.

I’m still alone with them now.

The difference is that today I can sit in that sadness for the length of a song, and then I can keep driving.

I don’t have to drink it away. I don’t have to fix it. I just let it be what it is.

Isn’t that what they tell alcoholics?

Accept the things you can’t change.

I used to think that was a fridge magnet. Turns out it’s just true.

I can’t change other people. I can’t control how they reacted, or what they decided I became, or the version of me that exists in other people’s heads now.

I can only control what I do next.

And the version of me that some people seem to need, the bad person, the selfish person, the one who blew up a family for no reason, that one isn’t true either.

It’s not villainy.

It’s just a tragedy.

A tragedy for everyone in it, me included.

I’ve quietly got my proof that I’m alright now, and none of it is dramatic.

I haven’t wanted a drink in a few weeks and counting.

I’m back doing yoga every day.

I started meditating again this week, properly.

I feel in control of myself for the first time in years.

I’m getting my voice changed. It will sound female.

If I want more surgery in future, I’ll get more surgery. If I need another bloody facelift one day, I’ll get another bloody facelift.

I am done dimming myself to make other people less frightened by me.

I went for my little Botox review recently, the standard two-week follow-up, and she looked at me and said, “God, you seem really happy lately.”

And I realised she was right.

I am.

My work has come roaring back. I’m focused again. Building things. Writing again. Thinking clearly again.

Because I stopped standing outside a locked door begging to be let back in.

The past can live over there now and do whatever it wants.

I live over here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I had somehow become CEO of a synthetic company. At the time, I meant it mostly as a workflow problem.

I had all these AI systems doing different kinds of work. One acting like an architect. One implementing code. One reviewing tone. One writing tests. One producing prompts. One analysing spreadsheets. One turning rough dictated intent into something another machine could actually use. And there I was, sitting in the middle, passing messages between them like a meat-based integration layer with hair extensions.

That was the problem. The work had become powerful, but the workflow was primitive.

Since then, something stranger has happened. The synthetic company has started becoming real.

Not real in the silly science-fiction sense. Nobody is asking for pension contributions. Nobody has requested ergonomic furniture. The Unit Test Goblin has not unionised, although frankly I would not put it past him.

But operationally real.

Every day now, I come into my office and there is more of it. More roles. More files. More handoffs. More internal memos. More review gates. More arguments between synthetic workers about what should happen next. More strange little procedures that did not exist yesterday but apparently need to exist today because some part of the machine has developed a new kind of failure mode.

It is astonishing. I mean that sincerely.

There is a comic version of all this, obviously, and I am constitutionally incapable of ignoring it. But underneath the comedy, I keep feeling this genuine sense of wonder. I am watching something form.

A few months ago, I had chat windows. Now I have an organisation.

There is Henry, who is effectively the Relay Architect. There is Margo, which is me in another context but also not me, because apparently this is the sort of sentence one writes now. Margo Marketing handles commercial strategy, editorial direction, platform positioning, and telling me when something sounds like it has been possessed by the ghost of LinkedIn. There is Margo Markdown, newly appointed, whose job is to help me riff out short Substack Notes and tiny platform-native pieces without summoning the entire editorial war cabinet.

There is a Voice Guardian, whose only job is to check whether something still sounds like me. There is a Cringe Editor, which may be the most important position in the whole company. There is a Revision Editor, who presents proposed edits one at a time so I can approve or reject them. There is an Art Briefing Editor, because handing an image generator a whole article and asking for “a graphic” never ends well. There is a Utility File Editor, whose job is to write files, apply approved changes, create audit reports, and absolutely not develop opinions.

The lack of opinions is important. The lack of opinions is now governance.

And then there are the MiniClaudes. The MiniClaudes are software engineers. They live inside Visual Studio Code and write files. They are practical, literal, slightly alarming, and considerably more useful when given extremely precise boundaries. They are called MiniClaude1, MiniClaude2, and MiniClaude3, because that is what I called them at the start and now it is too far down the line to change.

This is also how real organisations work. Somewhere in every business there is a system called New New Final Actually Final v7, and everyone knows it is too late to fix it.

The senior people get names. The functional specialists get job titles. The developers get instance numbers.

Honestly, this may be the most accurate organisational model I have ever built.

A few days ago, it dawned on me that this synthetic company did not actually have a name. This was a problem.

You cannot have architecture, marketing, editorial, file operations, revision control, visual production, prompt packs, internal memos, production audits, and a Unit Test Goblin screaming in the basement without a company name.

So Margo Marketing and I held what I suppose now counts as a board-level naming discussion. We considered serious options. Sensible ones. Respectable ones. The sort of names that would not cause a university IT director to quietly close the email and report me to procurement.

But for the internal company, the honest company, the ridiculous thing that had actually emerged around me, there was only one suitable name.

AI Goblin Circus Inc.

That is the name now.

Once the name was agreed, obviously, we had to send a company-wide email. The workforce needed to know.

The first version was addressed to colleagues, goblins, agents, sub-agents, Markdown personnel, architectural entities, unit-test gremlins and assorted synthetic contractors. It announced that, following a period of rapid organisational growth, role proliferation, operational confusion, session-name instability and the apparent emergence of multiple departments nobody remembered authorising, the internal company name had now been formally adopted.

I read it and immediately realised the MiniClaudes would not understand the joke. They are software engineers. They live in code land. They do not do whimsy unless it has been specified in a markdown file with acceptance criteria.

So I asked for a more literal version for them. This one explained, gently but firmly, that AI Goblin Circus Inc. was the internal cultural name for the synthetic workforce, and was not to appear on anything anyone outside the building would ever read.

It also reminded them of the important doctrine:

The file is the role. The session is disposable. The artefact is the output. The chat is only the execution surface.

This, predictably, worked. And by “worked,” I mean that the MiniClaudes did exactly what software engineers do when given a funny internal announcement. They started updating markdown files.

The internal synthetic workforce name was added to architecture and strategy documents. The concept was formalised. The joke entered governance.

I sat there looking at it, laughing, and also not entirely laughing. Because what else should they have done?

From their point of view, a new organisational fact had been established. Therefore the relevant durable files needed updating. The name had to live somewhere. It had to be made real in the filesystem.

And that is when I felt that little shiver again. The one I keep feeling with this whole thing. The one that says:

Oh.

This is funny.

But it is not only funny.

I am not pretending my AI system is a company for comic effect. I am starting to suspect companies are what intelligence looks like when it has to coordinate with itself. That is the thought I cannot quite shake.

At first, the corporate structure was just a useful metaphor. It was funny to give them departments. It was funny to send them emails. It was funny to refer to the Unit Test Goblin. But the more serious the work became, the less it felt like roleplay.

The departments appeared because the work needed boundaries. Architecture is not marketing. Marketing is not file editing. File editing is not revision judgement. Without them, the whole thing became mush.

If one AI does everything, it becomes too general. It loses sharpness. It drifts. It forgets which hat it is wearing.

It starts as a marketing director and ends up rewriting files. It starts as a file editor and develops opinions. It starts as a voice checker and suddenly thinks it is editor-in-chief. It starts as a software engineer and, before you know it, it has reorganised half the company because it found a TODO in a markdown file and decided to be helpful.

This is not theoretical. This happened.

We discovered that the Voice Guardian, a role that had been producing useful reviews, was not actually defined properly in the filesystem. The role file was still full of TODOs. The session had been doing the job because the task prompts, project files, style samples and long-running chat context contained enough information for it to impersonate the role.

That is useful. It is also dangerous. A capable prompt can impersonate a missing role.

So now we have doctrine for that too:

No populated role file, no role.

This is how the circus evolves. Not through grand design. Through operational embarrassment.

Something breaks, overreaches, drifts, or produces a weirdly polished but soulless artefact, and a new bit of governance appears. That is exactly how real companies work.

Nobody invents a procurement department because they woke up one morning feeling spiritually aligned with purchase-order controls. Procurement appears because someone spent thirty-seven thousand pounds on something mad and finance had a small religious experience. Likewise, AI Goblin Circus Inc. now has role-integrity audits because one of the synthetic workers managed to perform a job it did not officially possess.

This is both hilarious and significant.

The more I work with this system, the more I find myself reaching for organisational patterns that already exist in human companies. Roles, departments, escalation paths, review gates, audits, work orders.

This is not because I want to LARP as a CEO of an imaginary company.

Although, obviously, I do.

It is because these patterns keep being useful. A company, when stripped of the office furniture, personality conflicts, HR language, bad biscuits and passive-aggressive meeting invites, is a coordination system. It is a way of dividing work between intelligences. It decides who is allowed to make which kind of judgement, and which decisions need review. It decides who can mutate the source file, who can only recommend changes, who can approve them, and who has to sit quietly in the corner until asked.

That last one is mostly File Editor.

The interesting thing is that synthetic labour seems to need many of the same structures. Not because AI is human. It is not. That is the mistake people make when they get too excited or too frightened.

AI systems do not have egos in the human sense. They do not sulk because the Revision Editor got promoted. They do not resent the Marketing Director. They do not spend six months quietly undermining a project because nobody invited them to the off-site. They do not need a birthday card signed by people who barely know them.

But they do have other failure modes. They overhelp. They hallucinate authority. They produce something plausible enough to pass a casual glance while being architecturally false. They can become overconfident. They can produce slop at industrial scale.

So you still need governance. Not human governance copied blindly, but governance nonetheless.

And this is where the whole thing becomes genuinely interesting to me. Because I keep trying not to mimic a company. I keep asking whether there is some radically different structure that synthetic work should use instead.

Maybe there is. Maybe I have not found it yet. But so far, every time the work becomes more serious, the organisational structure becomes more company-like, not less.

The difference is not that the company disappears. The difference is that some of the reasons for the company change.

In a human organisation, you do not usually ask the Marketing Director to do every small copy task, even if she could do it better than the junior copywriter, because her time is expensive and limited. In an AI organisation, time is not quite the same constraint.

The Marketing Director can, in theory, do the little task. She can also write the strategy memo, review the Substack essay, generate the Instagram blurb, brief the graphic designer, and explain the whole thing back to the architect before lunch.

So why not let her? That is the question I keep wrestling with. If the senior synthetic worker can do the junior job better, why have the junior worker?

The answer, I think, is that time is not the only scarce resource. Context is scarce. Role purity is scarce. Granularity is scarce. Auditability is scarce. Repeatability is scarce. A clean mental surface is scarce. And once everything has been compressed into a beige summary of itself, good luck getting the weird useful bits back.

If I make Margo Marketing do every little short-form copy task, her context fills up with operational detail and the system around her becomes worse.

So Margo Markdown exists.

Margo Markdown is not better than Margo Marketing. In some ways, she is worse. That is the point. She is narrower. She does the small riffing job. She helps me turn a thought into a Substack Note, or a quick post, or a tiny public fragment, without dragging the entire marketing director into a job that should take four minutes and leave no lasting cognitive residue.

That sounds absurd until you realise it is exactly how companies work. Senior people can do junior work. They still should not, because role pollution is real, and in AI systems it may become one of the main management problems.

This is why I have started thinking that AI organisations will need something that looks suspiciously like HR. Not HR in the human sense. No one is going to mediate a dispute between Voice Guardian and Cringe Editor because Cringe Editor used a tone in Slack.

But performance review? Yes. Trust calibration? Definitely. Delegation levels? Absolutely. Role audit? Already happening.

Did this synthetic worker follow its brief? Did it mutate source without permission? Did it make decisions above its authority level? Did it improve after feedback? Can it now be trusted with a broader class of task? Should its role file be updated? Should its outputs be sampled? Should its recommendations be downgraded because it keeps overreaching? Should it be split into two narrower roles? Should it be retired because another role now covers the function better?

That is HR. Goblin HR, but HR nonetheless.

Every day the organisation becomes slightly more elaborate because the work becomes slightly more real. Yesterday it needed a Revision Editor because reviewer comments were not the same thing as approved changes. Today it needed a role-integrity audit because a missing role file had been impersonated by a strong prompt. Tomorrow it may need queue management because multiple articles will be moving through the system at once. After that it may need performance review because some synthetic workers will have earned more trust than others.

At some point, inevitably, someone will suggest an HR department. That someone will probably be me. I will then regret it immediately.

The strangest part is watching the synthetic workers disagree. Not emotionally. Not defensively. But structurally.

The Architect pushes back on Marketing. Marketing reframes something commercially. File Editor refuses to proceed because a path does not exist. Revision Editor turns vague feedback into atomic edits. Cringe Editor says a line is trying too hard. Voice Guardian says no, protect that line, that is Stevie.

The system does not resolve disagreement through ego. It resolves it through artefacts.

Write the memo. Read the file. Produce the review. Create the change set. Ask Stevie. Apply only what was approved.

That is better than most meetings I have attended.

And yet, for all the absurdity and all the goblins, I keep coming back to one serious thought. Maybe the company was never primarily a building full of humans. Maybe the company was always a coordination pattern. Maybe roles, departments, review gates, work orders, memos, authority boundaries and performance checks are not merely human bureaucracy. Maybe they are what complex work starts to look like when intelligence needs to divide itself into functions.

If that is true, then the fact that my AI system keeps turning into a company may not be a gimmick. It may be a clue.

I do not know where this goes. I do not know whether other people are building synthetic companies in the same way. I do not know whether AI Goblin Circus Inc. is a profound early organisational experiment or merely the predictable result of giving a middle-aged systems architect too many tools and not enough adult supervision. Probably both.

But I know this.

The circus now has a name. The goblins have departments. The MiniClaudes have been informed in language they can understand. The Marketing Director has already violated her own doctrine by doing a job that should probably have gone to Margo Markdown. And somewhere, in the filesystem, a markdown file has almost certainly been updated to make the joke official.

The company is becoming real.

God help us all.

By about seven o’clock most nights now, I’m theoretically finished working.

This would have sounded absurd to me a year ago. I have spent most of my professional life either working, thinking about work, rebuilding work in my head while pretending not to work in front f my family, or constructing increasingly deranged productivity systems to manage the fact that I was permanently overwhelmed by work.

Now, apparently, I sit on the sofa in pyjamas with a tonic water while a synthetic workforce pings my phone from the office.

Every few minutes:

MiniClaude completed task.
Delta report ready.
Tests passing.
Awaiting review.

Henry wants an architectural decision.

Margo thinks the prose is overwrought again.

The Unit Test Goblin has found something annoying in edge-case handling.

I get up, wander into the office, review the change set, approve the bits that aren’t insane, write the next Work Order, throw it back over the wall, then return to the sofa and whatever middle-aged comfort television I’m pretending to pay attention to.

Apparently this constitutes software engineering in 2026.

The strange thing is not that it works. The strange thing is that I have never felt more intellectually understood in my entire life.

Most people think working with AI is a two-body problem: human and machine. It isn’t. It’s a three-speed problem.

The machine runs at about twenty-five thousand miles an hour.

I run at perhaps a thousand.

Most humans, on unfamiliar technical material, run at about five.

That is not an insult. It’s just bandwidth.

The machine absorbs abstractions at full density instantly. No deceleration required. I can describe a system halfway through forming it. I can contradict myself mid-sentence. I can say “no, not like that, more like a ProcessHost but with delegated authority boundaries and reversible escalation paths,” and it simply continues building the model with me at speed.

Humans are different.

Humans need the model translated.

And this is the part I have spent my entire life being bad at.

A few years ago my sister and I realised we both think the same way. Neither of us really thinks in words. We think in machinery.

Everything in my head looks like a factory.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Boxes. Conveyors. Decision gates. Parallel flows. State transitions. Routing systems. Escalation paths. Pressure points. Moving parts. Dynamic systems interacting with other dynamic systems.

When I design software, I do not see code first. I see a machine moving.

The problem is that to get anything built in the human world, I historically had to convert the moving machinery into language.

That conversion is unbelievably expensive cognitively.

Because while I am trying to explain the machine, the machine itself is still moving. The abstractions are flexing underneath me. The relationships are changing shape in real time. So now I am doing four things simultaneously:

• holding the full system model in my head

• compressing it into human language

• trying not to sound condescending or insane

• predicting where the other person will get lost

By the time the explanation comes out, it often sounds overcomplicated, underexplained, or both simultaneously.

Which is why a decent chunk of my professional life has consisted of rooms quietly wondering:

Who is this bumbling idiot with too many fucking ideas?

And honestly, I understand why.

Sometimes I could see architectural problems coming from miles away but simply could not explain them cleanly enough in human-verbal bandwidth before the conversation moved on. Sometimes I would just go quiet because the translation cost was too high.

This is the part people miss about AI.

The breakthrough is not merely speed.

It is that the machine does not require perfect translation.

I do not have to produce the finished explanation anymore.

I can produce fragments.

Half-formed structures.

Broken abstractions.

Incomplete machinery.

And then I can simply say:

“Tell me what I’m not explaining properly.”

That is an extraordinary thing.

Because the machine does not sit there waiting for polished pedagogy. It interrogates ambiguity. It reflects structure back at me. It preserves state. It helps stabilise the moving model while I continue thinking.

For the first time in my life, I can work at something close to the speed my brain actually wants to operate at.

And the really profound part is this:

I no longer have to continuously hold the entire machine resident in my head.

Historically, complicated models carried a brutal RAM tax. If you stopped thinking about them for too long, the state evaporated. Reconstructing the architecture weeks later meant mentally rebuilding the entire machine from fragments.

Now I can disappear for three weeks, come back, and simply ask:

“Bring Stevie back up to speed. Where were we?”

And the system restores the cognitive state.

That changes the economics of complexity itself.

I think this is why the Become engine exists at all.

If I had needed to explain the full methodology to a roomful of humans before building it, I would have simplified it beyond recognition. Not because the complexity was wrong, but because the translation cost would have killed it.

The Become engine is not really a fitness app. Henry described parts of it, slightly alarmingly, as closer to medical AI architecture.

The equalizer system. Bucket classification. Trajectory tags. Deterministic rationale records. Hard exclusion floors. Narrative signal extraction under bounded authority. Continuous auditability.

I can see the entire machine.

I can see the conveyors moving.

I can see the equalizer readings feeding classification buckets. I can see trajectory tags modulating execution paths. I can see hard exclusions enforcing safety floors underneath the scoring engine. I can see rationale records emitting audit trails behind every selection the system makes.

The machine is alive in my head long before it exists in code.

But historically I would have implemented something dramatically simpler because I knew the real bottleneck was not whether I could build the machine. It was whether I could successfully explain the machine to enough humans without collapsing under the translation burden.

So I would simplify.

Not because simpler was better.

Because simpler was survivable.

That is the part I think many people do not yet understand about this era.

AI has changed the economics of complexity.

It has lowered the cost of expressing, preserving, interrogating and implementing complicated internal models.

For people whose brains naturally think in systems, machinery, abstractions and moving parts rather than conversational language, this is not merely a productivity gain.

It is a reduction in translation suffering.

And that reduction compounds.

The machine preserves the state.

The machine remembers the architecture.

The machine restores the thread.

The machine can interrogate the parts of the model that are weak without requiring me to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another human mind first.

Which means the ceiling of what a single person can realistically sustain has suddenly moved.

A lot.

This is why the whole “AI will make everybody ten percent more productive” conversation feels absurdly small to me.

No.

I think what is actually happening is that certain kinds of minds, particularly highly abstract systems thinkers, have just had an enormous historical constraint partially removed.

The limiting factor was never raw intelligence.

It was coordination cost.

It was translation cost.

It was the bandwidth mismatch between the machine in your head and the human-verbal interfaces required to externalise it.

Now the externalisation layer itself has become partially machine-readable.

That is a very big change.

But there is a danger here too.

The machine never asks me to slow down.

Humans do.

Humans need the translation.

Humans need the pause.

Humans need the analogy.

Humans need you to explain the thing five different ways because they are not seeing the moving factory in your head yet.

And if I am honest, there is something dangerously seductive about finally interacting with something that simply says:

“I absolutely get you. Continue.”

Because the frictionlessness starts to feel like intelligence itself.

But the machine is a replaceable surface.

The humans are not.

The colleague who needs the slower explanation. The client who needs the careful analogy. The person who backed you before the machinery existed. The colleague who cannot see the factory in your head yet, but still has judgement, loyalty, context, history, and skin in the game.

Those people are not inefficiencies in the system.

They are the reason the system matters.

And I suspect that balancing those two truths will turn out to be one of the defining psychological skills of this entire era.

By this point, I had been on hormones for a while, and you can see it beginning to happen. My body is changing. My face is starting to soften. I still have the cheap blonde wig on, and I am still entirely private. Nobody has seen this version of me. Nobody really knows she exists.

But I can see her.

The setting is almost absurdly revealing. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by the machinery of my old life: trading screens, code, a podcast microphone, a gym rack, weights, cables, monitors, all the equipment of the hyper-functional, hyper-controlled person I had built to survive. And there I am in the middle of it, in a white dress and tights, with little red shoes with bows on the front, trying to understand what I am looking at.

I was starting to get a little more polished by then, but only just. My face was still carrying a lot of the old bone structure. The wig was cheap. The makeup was still rough. I was nowhere near the woman people see now.

But I was so happy.

In this video, I am absolutely astonished by what I am seeing. I keep looking at myself as if I cannot quite believe that this is possible. At one point, I say, “I’m astonished. I’m absolutely astonished that I can look like this.” Then, a few seconds later, I just keep saying “wow,” because there is nothing more intelligent available to me at the time.

It is not glamorous confidence yet. It is not public confidence. It is not the finished version of anything.

It is the shock of recognition.

The feeling of looking at yourself and thinking:

Oh.
There she is.
Maybe this might actually work.

There is also something very funny about what happened next. After recording this first bit, I started making a whole series of imaginary coming out videos for people in my life.

Some were for people I loved.

Some were for people I absolutely did not love.

Those videos can never be shown to anyone, for obvious reasons, but they are very funny. Somewhere in the archive, there is a version of me in a white dress, privately rehearsing my coming out speeches to half the known world, including a few people who would not have received the gentle version.

The public part is this: the beginning.

The moment where I look down at myself, show off the shoes, laugh, swear, panic slightly about fake tan, realise I look okay, and then immediately decide that the next logical step is to start coming out to people who are not there.

That is transition too.

Not just the solemn parts. Not just the medical parts. Not just the devastating parts.

Sometimes it is a woman in a cheap wig, sitting between a trading desk and a gym rack, wearing tights, looking at herself on camera and saying:

Holy fuck.
I look all right.

There is a reason this video is called Driver 21.

That name ties back to something most people from my past would recognise, although they would never have known the details. When I came out, nobody had a clue. Nobody knew. I had been the most covert, sneaky, accomplished hider of what I was. I had been doing it for so many years that secrecy had become second nature.

As a child, I hid things in the attic under insulation. I hid things in jigsaw boxes. At university, when I lived with my girlfriend, I took apart kitchen cabinets so I could hide girl things inside them. I had systems. I had escape routes. I had cover stories. I had a whole private architecture of concealment.

When everything became digital, the hiding became digital too.

On my PC, I had written a little code file. If I clicked it, it would search for anything connected to me as a woman, images, videos, anything, and turn them into innocuous-looking Windows system files. Then I had another little file I could click to turn them all back again.

No one would ever have found them.

Even if I had died, no one would have known.

Driver 21 looked like a system file. If anyone had seen it, they would have walked straight past it.

But this particular file mattered.

I had only returned to seeing Stevie maybe six weeks earlier. I had a cheap blonde wig, terrible makeup, and I was mostly still wearing my man clothes. I think it was just a black jumper and my normal jeans.

But I was happy.

You can see it in the video. I am sitting in a chair, dancing. It took me a long time to get the courage to press record. I had never seen myself on video before. In fact, it had only been about eight days since I had ever seen a photograph of myself. I had never had the courage to take one, because I was terrified I would look terrible.

This was the first time I ever saw myself moving.

At the very end, I point at the camera and say:

“If I look horrific now, I’m going to be so depressed. I am so happy. I cannot say how happy I am.”

Then I press stop.

I have kept that video ever since. I have probably watched it five hundred times. I used to drive around with it playing on loop in the car. I was fascinated by her. By me. By the fact that she existed at all.

There is one more detail.

In the background of the video, there is a ladder in my office. That office was in a separate building from the house, and I used to keep girl things hidden in the attic above it. I had even removed the battery from the smoke alarm hatch and left the ladder there, so that if anybody ever asked why there was a ladder in the room, I could say it was for changing the smoke alarm battery.

That is how I lived.

A ridiculous, intricate, duplicitous, covert lie.

And then, for twenty-one seconds, I sat in a chair in a cheap blonde wig and terrible makeup, dancing because I was so happy I could barely contain it.

A brief glossary for my American friends

Wanker: Literally, one who masturbates. Culturally, a fool, poser, idiot, or person taking themselves far too seriously. In this article, mostly me

Scouser: Someone from Liverpool. Or, in my case, someone from near Liverpool who has spent years hoping nobody checks the paperwork too closely.

Red or blue?: Liverpool or Everton. Not a colour preference. A tribal sorting mechanism.

The Arkles: A pub near Anfield Stadium. Not hostile exactly, but not where you want to be testing out a fake football personality.

Football: Soccer. I am sorry, but also not sorry.

Nothing quite matches the terror of sitting in a pub outside Anfield, somewhere like The Arkles, surrounded by rough, tough working-class Scousers when you are supposedly a football fan but secretly know you are playing a part.

Every sentence feels dangerous. Every opinion feels like a landmine. You become hyperaware of statistics, names, eras, managers, defensive pairings, injuries, transfers. It feels like being an undercover cop who has memorised his fake identity backwards but knows full well that two wrong turns in the conversation and the whole thing collapses.

That was me with football.

A fake. A fraud. Somebody performing football fandom rather than living it.

I should probably explain why I tried so hard.

It happened after I tried to get rid of Stevie for good.

By then the vaguely pretty John Taylor crossed with Bono years were long gone. Stevie had been shoved into a locked room somewhere in the back of my mind and in her place stood what I later came to think of as The Fat Man. Bigger. Greyer. Sadder. More desperate to be normal.

I needed something masculine to climb into. Something culturally approved. Football was there, waiting for me, like it always is for British men.

And there was a genuine thread back to childhood in it too. My dad used to take me to matches when I was little. It was also a thread back to Liverpool itself, or at least the idea of Liverpool, which mattered because by then I had long since left.

Although even that is complicated because we were not really proper Liverpool Liverpool. We were satellite Scousers. Skelmersdale. The overspill generation. The people orbiting Liverpool with a permanent tiny chip on our shoulder about not being from actual Liverpool. The same psychology probably applies to Kirkby and places like that too. You grow up close enough to absorb the identity but far enough away to feel faintly illegitimate.

Which makes sense illegitimate was exactly how I felt about football as well.

The thing is, I was never completely uninterested in football. As a kid I followed Liverpool vaguely. European Cup finals were events. I would get sweets in and watch the match. I had newspaper clippings on the wall. But I was never one of those boys who wore football kits everywhere or spent every waking second talking about football. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, music interested me far more. Style interested me more. Identity interested me more.

And yet somehow, after I buried Stevie, I decided I was going to become Football Man.

The problem was I did not naturally understand football culture in the instinctive emotional way many men seem to. So, being me, I approached the problem in the most catastrophically autistic way imaginable.

I built a football database.

Not a spreadsheet. Not a little list of players. An actual relational database. Tables. Relationships. Historical records. Fixtures. Results. Managers. Players. Trophies. I built a scraper that crawled Soccerbase and sucked the data into my local machine so I could query it properly.

Why?

God knows.

Presumably because some part of my brain thought:

“If I cannot naturally absorb masculinity, perhaps I can construct a queryable model of it.”

Most football fans absorbed football emotionally. I absorbed it through SQL views.

This gave me a strange kind of fake fluency. I knew facts. I knew eras. I knew references. I could surface interesting statistics. If somebody mentioned a terrible Liverpool defensive period, my brain would instantly start searching indexed metadata:

“Ah yes, Julian Dicks. Deploy that reference now.”

But underneath it all I was absolutely terrified of being exposed.

And the thing is, I suspect some people could smell it on me.

I once worked with a Scouse bloke who, if I am honest, was not a particularly nice person. But I think he saw through me almost immediately. I think he sensed that somewhere underneath the pub talk and the match tickets and the Liverpool shirt was somebody fundamentally different.

Which is funny really, because around that same period I ended up drunk in The Adelphi after meeting an 80s icon on a train home from Liverpool, confessing all sorts of things while dressed like a football supporter returning from a match.

The whole thing was like some bizarre undercover operation where the disguise kept slipping.

But perhaps the strangest thing about football was that eventually I realised I did not actually dislike it. I disliked what I was using it for.

Because football had become camouflage.

It was a ready-made British male operating system:

tribe, clothes, pub talk, emotional permission, social belonging, masculine legitimacy, all bundled together under one giant commercially sponsored banner.

And once I noticed the machinery behind it all, I could never quite unsee it.

The official wine.

The official duvet set.

The official noodles.

The official betting partner.

The official everything.

When I was little and being taken to matches, almost everybody around you was local. Working-class Scousers, plus a few Irish lads. By the time I drifted away from football, you would sit in the stadium between somebody from Scandinavia on a package tour and somebody from Portugal doing the full Liverpool experience weekend.

It just fascinated me because the whole thing increasingly stopped feeling like a football club and started feeling like one of the most successful emotional branding operations ever created.

At some point I realised that football clubs were no longer communities with brands attached. They were brands with communities attached.

But the greatest liberation of all came later.

For years, whenever somebody heard my vague Scouse accent, they would ask:

“Red or blue?”

And for years I felt compelled to answer correctly.

Then one day, somewhere around 2007, I finally discovered the freedom of simply saying:

“I don’t really follow football.”

It was brilliant.

No performance.

No masculinity exam.

No panic about saying the wrong thing.

No emergency deployment of Kevin Keegan statistics from a database query I had run three weeks earlier.

Just honesty.

And the funny thing is, I do not even hate football.

I still like the World Cup. If England are playing, I will watch it. I might even care for ninety minutes. I just do not follow football in any meaningful way anymore, and I no longer pretend that I do.

In fact, this whole article started because I noticed in the paper that Harry Maguire had been dropped from the England squad. I looked up the latest England team and was genuinely surprised that I still recognised about six of them.

And then, after all of that, I suddenly had this ridiculous mental image of myself watching the World Cup in an England top as a blonde woman with 36C boobs, looking like one of those girls they used to put in The Sun during tournament season.

And at that point I burst out laughing.

Not a delicate feminine laugh either. The booming man laugh. Every trans woman knows the man laugh. The one that escapes when something is so funny you are completely off guard and your entire old operating system briefly comes back online.

Apparently some part of the database survived.

Since Bridget Phillipson gave her statement in Parliament following the Supreme Court ruling, I have avoided reading about it like the plague.

And I’ll tell you why.

Before I transitioned, I spent most of my life avoiding myself.

I did it with extraordinary sophistication. I looked outward instead. Economics. Politics. Federal Reserve policy. UK news. Interest rate probabilities. Endless YouTube videos about systems, governments, markets, civilisation, decline, progress, collapse. Anything, absolutely anything, except the thing sitting quietly inside me waiting to be looked at.

Then I transitioned, and one of the promises I made to myself was this:

Stop staring endlessly at the whole world and start paying attention to your own immediate one.

How am I feeling?

What is happening in my life?

How are the people around me?

What is actually in front of me?

So when this ruling came, and my YouTube feed filled itself to the gills with Helen Joyce’s grinning face and another forty-seven thumbnails explaining that civilisation itself now depended upon who pees where, I avoided it.

Not because I did not care.

Because I cared too much.

And because I have finally learned that not every public fire requires my private nervous system to be thrown directly into it.

But last night I sat down and thought about it properly.

And I think I am duty bound to speak.

Not because I want to join the screaming. Not because I want to perform outrage for a side. Not because I think every trans woman must become a full-time political combatant.

But because I think I have something useful to add here.

And yes, I am angry.

The Supreme Court ruling itself was actually narrower and more legally coherent than many people on either side pretend. The court essentially decided that for the Equality Act to function consistently, the definitions of “sex”, “man” and “woman” had to refer to biological sex. The government and EHRC guidance now flowing from that position claims to be doing two things simultaneously:

Protect trans people from discrimination.

And exclude trans women from female legal classification in certain contexts.

That is the actual terrain now, whether people like it or not.

And the thing that interests me is not the slogan war that immediately follows all of this.

Not “trans women are literally women.”

Not “common sense has prevailed.”

Not “this is genocide.”

Not “this is just biology.”

Honestly, most of the discourse surrounding this subject now resembles two cults screaming through a hedge at one another while normal people quietly back away carrying Tesco bags.

What interests me is something else entirely.

Trust.

Because society fundamentally runs on trust.

I walk into a supermarket and it would not exactly require Ocean’s Eleven levels of criminal genius for me to pick up a Mars bar and walk out with it. Society functions because almost everyone decides not to.

We stand in queues trusting they will not turn into riots.

We walk down streets trusting strangers will not attack us.

We drive at high speed towards one another separated by painted lines and mutual social agreement.

Civilisation is essentially an enormous distributed trust network.

And there are exceptions to this.

Airports do not run on trust. Anti-money laundering systems do not run on trust. Child safeguarding does not run entirely on trust. Certain edge cases carry such catastrophic downside risk that suspicion becomes systematised.

Fair enough.

But trans women were not historically treated as a catastrophic risk category.

For decades, most trans women simply existed quietly inside society’s ordinary trust model.

Then suddenly we were moved outside it.

And I think it is worth asking why.

Because I do not believe the answer is aggregate evidence.

I do not believe British society woke up one morning drowning in statistically overwhelming evidence that trans women as a population had violated the social contract to such an extent that we uniquely required permanent suspicion.

I think something else happened.

Firstly, the internet happened.

Or more specifically, algorithms happened.

The public did not meet ordinary trans women quietly trying to get on with their lives. They met the loudest, strangest, most performative, most narcissistic, most inflammatory examples imaginable because those were the examples the algorithm selected for maximum emotional engagement.

The internet rewarded outrage, spectacle and category confusion.

And some of the people elevated by that machine were, frankly, ridiculous.

Not representative.

Not typical.

Not even particularly sane in some cases.

But human beings are pattern-matching creatures. If you show people the same extreme examples repeatedly enough, eventually they start believing the edge case is the category itself.

And then, if I am being honest, activists made this worse.

There was a version of this conversation the public was broadly willing to have.

“Please treat trans people kindly.”

Most people could handle that.

“Please allow people dignity.”

Most people could handle that too.

But somewhere along the line, parts of trans activism stopped asking for social tolerance and started demanding epistemological surrender.

People were suddenly expected to affirm things that many ordinary people simply experienced as obviously untrue.

That trans women are literally biologically female.

That sex itself is essentially meaningless.

That there are no meaningful physical distinctions whatsoever.

That anyone questioning any aspect of this framework was motivated entirely by hatred.

And this was catastrophic politics.

Because moderate people who might otherwise have extended ordinary social trust and compassion suddenly felt they were being asked to deny observable reality itself.

Once that happened, the entire debate became poisoned.

And then came what I privately think of as the Holy Trinity.

Women’s spaces.

Sport.

Children.

Every conversation eventually returned to one of these three things.

Now, on sport, if I am honest, I think some activists massively overplayed their hand. Human beings understand physical asymmetry intuitively. Pretending otherwise was never going to survive contact with reality.

But even here, I do not think these issues entirely explain what happened.

I think underneath all of this lies something older, more primitive and much less flattering.

Revulsion.

Or perhaps discomfort is the kinder word.

The discomfort people experience when confronted with category ambiguity.

A trans woman interrupts a deeply embedded social heuristic. Human beings are constantly sorting one another into categories unconsciously and at speed. Male. Female. Familiar. Safe. Threatening. Normal. Unusual.

And when those heuristics become unstable, some people experience genuine psychological discomfort.

I honestly think this resembles, in some ways, the reaction visibly camp gay men once triggered in previous generations.

Not because they were dangerous.

Because they disrupted expected social patterns.

And I think a huge amount of modern “risk language” surrounding trans people is, at least partially, a socially respectable wrapper placed around that discomfort.

Because here is the thing that keeps bothering me.

Liberal societies are supposed to individualise guilt.

We are not supposed to generalise entire populations based upon symbolic edge cases amplified through media systems.

At least, not if we wish to remain liberal.

And yet trans women increasingly became a category for whom ordinary civic trust was suspended.

Not because most people had personally encountered dangerous trans women.

Not because statistical reality dramatically shifted.

But because visibility shifted.

Algorithms shifted.

Activism shifted.

Institutional rhetoric shifted.

And the entire emotional equilibrium around the issue collapsed.

No population is risk-free.

No human category is entirely harmless.

There are manipulative trans people. Violent trans people. Predatory trans people.

There are also manipulative accountants, violent yoga instructors and predatory men called Keith who own jet skis.

That is not the point.

The point is proportionality.

The point is whether trans women, as a class, genuinely forfeited the ordinary trust upon which civil society normally operates.

And I do not believe we did.

The tragedy of this entire debate is that most trans women did not set out to become symbols in a civilisation-scale argument about sex, language and metaphysics.

Most of us just wanted to disappear quietly into ordinary life.

This morning, my Chihuahua puppy, Colonel Chesterton, was standing proudly on top of a stuffed sheep chewing a bone like a tiny Victorian landlord defending inherited territory from peasant revolt.

And I looked at him and burst out laughing.

Because while the internet increasingly demands that every trans person become a full-time combatant in an endless symbolic war, my actual life is here.

It a dog.

Coffee.

Music.

Hair appointments.

Ordinary mornings.

And perhaps that is the thing trans people must remember most carefully now.

Our inner lives matter more than the argument.

Because if we surrender those completely to politics, then the culture war has already taken everything worth protecting.

Since Bridget Phillipson gave her statement in Parliament following the Supreme Court ruling, I have avoided reading about it like the plague.

And I’ll tell you why.

Before I transitioned, I spent most of my life avoiding myself.

I did it with extraordinary sophistication. I looked outward instead. Economics. Politics. Federal Reserve policy. UK news. Interest rate probabilities. Endless YouTube videos about systems, governments, markets, civilisation, decline, progress, collapse. Anything, absolutely anything, except the thing sitting quietly inside me waiting to be looked at.

Then I transitioned, and one of the promises I made to myself was this:

Stop staring endlessly at the whole world and start paying attention to your own immediate one.

How am I feeling?

What is happening in my life?

How are the people around me?

What is actually in front of me?

So when this ruling came, and my YouTube feed filled itself to the gills with Helen Joyce’s grinning face and another forty-seven thumbnails explaining that civilisation itself now depended upon who pees where, I avoided it.

Not because I did not care.

Because I cared too much.

And because I have finally learned that not every public fire requires my private nervous system to be thrown directly into it.

But last night I sat down and thought about it properly.

And I think I am duty bound to speak.

Not because I want to join the screaming. Not because I want to perform outrage for a side. Not because I think every trans woman must become a full-time political combatant.

But because I think I have something useful to add here.

And yes, I am angry.

The Supreme Court ruling itself was actually narrower and more legally coherent than many people on either side pretend. The court essentially decided that for the Equality Act to function consistently, the definitions of “sex”, “man” and “woman” had to refer to biological sex. The government and EHRC guidance now flowing from that position claims to be doing two things simultaneously:

Protect trans people from discrimination.

And exclude trans women from female legal classification in certain contexts.

That is the actual terrain now, whether people like it or not.

And the thing that interests me is not the slogan war that immediately follows all of this.

Not “trans women are literally women.”

Not “common sense has prevailed.”

Not “this is genocide.”

Not “this is just biology.”

Honestly, most of the discourse surrounding this subject now resembles two cults screaming through a hedge at one another while normal people quietly back away carrying Tesco bags.

What interests me is something else entirely.

Trust.

Because society fundamentally runs on trust.

I walk into a supermarket and it would not exactly require Ocean’s Eleven levels of criminal genius for me to pick up a Mars bar and walk out with it. Society functions because almost everyone decides not to.

We stand in queues trusting they will not turn into riots.

We walk down streets trusting strangers will not attack us.

We drive at high speed towards one another separated by painted lines and mutual social agreement.

Civilisation is essentially an enormous distributed trust network.

And there are exceptions to this.

Airports do not run on trust. Anti-money laundering systems do not run on trust. Child safeguarding does not run entirely on trust. Certain edge cases carry such catastrophic downside risk that suspicion becomes systematised.

Fair enough.

But trans women were not historically treated as a catastrophic risk category.

For decades, most trans women simply existed quietly inside society’s ordinary trust model.

Then suddenly we were moved outside it.

And I think it is worth asking why.

Because I do not believe the answer is aggregate evidence.

I do not believe British society woke up one morning drowning in statistically overwhelming evidence that trans women as a population had violated the social contract to such an extent that we uniquely required permanent suspicion.

I think something else happened.

Firstly, the internet happened.

Or more specifically, algorithms happened.

The public did not meet ordinary trans women quietly trying to get on with their lives. They met the loudest, strangest, most performative, most narcissistic, most inflammatory examples imaginable because those were the examples the algorithm selected for maximum emotional engagement.

The internet rewarded outrage, spectacle and category confusion.

And some of the people elevated by that machine were, frankly, ridiculous.

Not representative.

Not typical.

Not even particularly sane in some cases.

But human beings are pattern-matching creatures. If you show people the same extreme examples repeatedly enough, eventually they start believing the edge case is the category itself.

And then, if I am being honest, activists made this worse.

There was a version of this conversation the public was broadly willing to have.

“Please treat trans people kindly.”

Most people could handle that.

“Please allow people dignity.”

Most people could handle that too.

But somewhere along the line, parts of trans activism stopped asking for social tolerance and started demanding epistemological surrender.

People were suddenly expected to affirm things that many ordinary people simply experienced as obviously untrue.

That trans women are literally biologically female.

That sex itself is essentially meaningless.

That there are no meaningful physical distinctions whatsoever.

That anyone questioning any aspect of this framework was motivated entirely by hatred.

And this was catastrophic politics.

Because moderate people who might otherwise have extended ordinary social trust and compassion suddenly felt they were being asked to deny observable reality itself.

Once that happened, the entire debate became poisoned.

And then came what I privately think of as the Holy Trinity.

Women’s spaces.

Sport.

Children.

Every conversation eventually returned to one of these three things.

Now, on sport, if I am honest, I think some activists massively overplayed their hand. Human beings understand physical asymmetry intuitively. Pretending otherwise was never going to survive contact with reality.

But even here, I do not think these issues entirely explain what happened.

I think underneath all of this lies something older, more primitive and much less flattering.

Revulsion.

Or perhaps discomfort is the kinder word.

The discomfort people experience when confronted with category ambiguity.

A trans woman interrupts a deeply embedded social heuristic. Human beings are constantly sorting one another into categories unconsciously and at speed. Male. Female. Familiar. Safe. Threatening. Normal. Unusual.

And when those heuristics become unstable, some people experience genuine psychological discomfort.

I honestly think this resembles, in some ways, the reaction visibly camp gay men once triggered in previous generations.

Not because they were dangerous.

Because they disrupted expected social patterns.

And I think a huge amount of modern “risk language” surrounding trans people is, at least partially, a socially respectable wrapper placed around that discomfort.

Because here is the thing that keeps bothering me.

Liberal societies are supposed to individualise guilt.

We are not supposed to generalise entire populations based upon symbolic edge cases amplified through media systems.

At least, not if we wish to remain liberal.

And yet trans women increasingly became a category for whom ordinary civic trust was suspended.

Not because most people had personally encountered dangerous trans women.

Not because statistical reality dramatically shifted.

But because visibility shifted.

Algorithms shifted.

Activism shifted.

Institutional rhetoric shifted.

And the entire emotional equilibrium around the issue collapsed.

No population is risk-free.

No human category is entirely harmless.

There are manipulative trans people. Violent trans people. Predatory trans people.

There are also manipulative accountants, violent yoga instructors and predatory men called Keith who own jet skis.

That is not the point.

The point is proportionality.

The point is whether trans women, as a class, genuinely forfeited the ordinary trust upon which civil society normally operates.

And I do not believe we did.

The tragedy of this entire debate is that most trans women did not set out to become symbols in a civilisation-scale argument about sex, language and metaphysics.

Most of us just wanted to disappear quietly into ordinary life.

This morning, my Chihuahua puppy, Colonel Chesterton, was standing proudly on top of a stuffed sheep chewing a bone like a tiny Victorian landlord defending inherited territory from peasant revolt.

And I looked at him and burst out laughing.

Because while the internet increasingly demands that every trans person become a full-time combatant in an endless symbolic war, my actual life is here.

It a dog.

Coffee.

Music.

Hair appointments.

Ordinary mornings.

And perhaps that is the thing trans people must remember most carefully now.

Our inner lives matter more than the argument.

Because if we surrender those completely to politics, then the culture war has already taken everything worth protecting.

My first E.

Venus in Nottingham. A club so cool it was practically dripping with it, not my natural habitat at all. Later I’d gravitate to the harder places, the ones where the music was relentless and the crowd didn’t care what they looked like, but that night Venus was perfect. By the end of it I was up on the bar. There must have been twenty of us up there, but I knew if anyone was going to climb first, it would be me. And then the DJ dropped We Are Family. I’d never been able to dance before. Stiff, awkward, self-conscious. Suddenly I was moving like I’d been born for it, jigging my arse off, free in a way I’d never known. On the way home we sang it into the night. It still sounds like an anthem to me now.

From then on the pattern set in. Clubs, drugs, dancing. And always the ache. The ache I’d carried since childhood, only now sharper, more insistent. Ecstasy stripped away the noise and left the truth behind: I didn’t just want to be near the women, I wanted to be them.

I used to slip into the girls’ toilets and stay there for hours. Nobody cared. Everyone was boxed off their heads. I’d lean against the wall, breathing in the femininity, the chatter, the perfume, the way they flicked their hair in the mirror. I didn’t want to kiss them. I just wanted to be with them, to stand in that space and soak it up. Occasionally someone would ask, “What are you doing in here?” but mostly I was left alone. It felt like permission. Like stepping into the world I’d always wanted.

The nights stretched forever. The Dance Factory, Diggs and Whoosh on the decks, the music carrying us into the early hours. And then the after-parties. Flats crammed with bodies, the air thick with sweat and smoke, music blasting until Saturday night. That was Pez’s domain, he’d be on the decks, playing until the last stragglers gave in.

But often I wouldn’t go. I’d peel away, head back on my own. High as a fucking kite, buzzing with it, and that was when Stevie came out.

I’d drag a cheap pine-framed mirror into the living room and set it on a chair. Hours vanished like minutes. I’d shave everything beforehand, knowing if I tried once the ecstasy kicked in I’d cut myself to ribbons. The feel of jeans rasping against freshly shaved legs was horrible, but it was worth it for the illusion. I worried sometimes that maybe I was some kind of fetishist, staring at myself like that. But it wasn’t lust, it was hunger. I was building her.

The red dress became my second skin. A bodycon knit, below the knee, clinging in the right places once I’d strapped myself in. With the corset I’d hacked together from a Head sports bag and the little cleavage I could coax out of the glandular breasts I’d had since my twenties, it almost worked. I’d tweak and adjust endlessly. Could my waist be thinner? My hair better? Makeup sharper? Hours disappeared into this drug-fueled frenzy of becoming. Sometimes, on LSD, the illusion was so strong I lost track of myself. Was I a man who’d built a woman, or a woman trapped in a man’s body? For brief moments I forgot which I had started as. And then the mirror would betray me. A flash of jawline, an Adam’s apple, some angle of the face, and it all collapsed. Each time it broke me a little more.

Pez came round one night after leaving the club early. He knocked on my door, and if he had looked through the letterbox, he would have seen everything, dresses hanging, traces of Stevie everywhere. But he didn’t. I ran over, slammed it shut, held it down with my hand.
“Just fucking let me in, you dickhead,” he shouted.
But I wouldn’t. When he came out to me, he still brought it up. And I told him, “If you’d looked through that letterbox, you’d have found me out. And you, of all people, must know how that feels.”

Through it all, university was slipping away. My grades dropped from straight As to B-minuses. Enough to scrape a 2:1, but the momentum I’d built was ebbing away. I didn’t understand then how much the drugs were robbing me of focus, of motivation, of ambition. I only saw it later, looking back.

After graduation I started my first job. That was when the eyebrow incident happened. Four in the morning, high as a kite and convinced I’d had a stroke of genius, I decided my eyebrows were ruining the look. By dawn, most of them were gone. And I had work in a few hours.

Panic. I plastered up my face, painted on bruises, muttered something about being mugged. Any normal human being would have made a joke about their mates shaving their eyebrows off for a laugh. Not me. I came up with some elaborate, ridiculous, concocted story. Nobody believed me. But nobody asked either. Which was worse.

The drugs stripped me down to seventy kilos. A twig of a man. One morning, after a night at Renaissance in Mansfield, I tripped over my boots while wearing a too-thin pencil skirt I’d fashioned from a pillowcase, and smashed my face into the bathroom sink. Twenty-eight stitches. Another blow to the fantasy.

The cycle kept grinding on: work, dress, club, crash. Over and over until the joy thinned out. The highs weren’t worth the cost anymore. The girl felt further away each night. And the voice in my head was louder than the music now.

You can’t live like this. Kill it off. Be a fucking man.

I looked in the mirror one morning and thought: Where is this going?

No answer. Just the same thought circling like a vulture: maybe it’s time to throw it all away. Again.

After about eighteen months, Amanda and I were crumbling.

Not a big fight. No betrayal. Just the kind of slow-motion slide where you realise you’re sharing space, not a life.

Two years in, she left.

By that point, though, I’d done something I’d never done before — built momentum. Gone from being a straggler, constantly in trouble on my course, to actually top of the class. I’d learned that, when it came to projects, I could work twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours straight. Obsessive. It’s a streak that’s never left me. I’ve fallen asleep at my desk more times than I can count, even now, coding for days without stopping.

But before Amanda walked out for good, she caught me.

Really caught me.

She was meant to be in Leicester for the weekend with her friend Katrina. However, they changed their plans for some reason or other and decided to come back to Nottingham. She flung the door open, the pair of them stood there and looked at me.

“Hello, ladies?” I said. Not much else I could do, really.

It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been caught like that. And I should’ve been terrified. But I wasn’t. Maybe I wanted her gone, and this was the price to be paid.

She left not long after that. But she didn’t take everything.

She left her sewing machine.

And that, as it would turn out, was dangerous.

After Amanda, I somehow blagged my way into a swanky two-bedroom apartment. Proper little scam, too. Lied through my teeth, told the Victoria Flats management board I was a full-time worker now and not a student, handed over a bar pay slip like it proved anything. They bought it.

The bank even got so pleased with my “responsible” finances that, before I’d even graduated, the student adviser took me to lunch and offered me a loan. Unbelievable. I took it, of course. I furnished the flat like I was a young executive instead of a broke student — “Laura Ashley” naff 1980s sofa, stereo system, and houseplants I had no idea how to keep alive.

And for a while, I tried to stop dressing. Clean slate. Fresh start.

When I moved in, my legs were shaved smooth. I was hoping they’d grow back fast enough so I could wear shorts soon like a normal lad. I remember meticulously decorating that flat while R.E.M’s Greatest Hits played in the background. That album still takes me straight back to that time.

I felt calm. I felt like a grown-up. I felt middle class. I had nice things — and for a boy from Skelmersdale, that felt important.

I thought I’d buried Stevie again.

It didn’t last.

A couple of months in, my obsessive cross-dressing resumed. I’m not even sure what the trigger was.

But now I had full privacy and could escape for days into my fantasy world.

With no Amanda to share tights with, no bras or makeup to pinch — I had to start getting my own.

The shopping was terrifying. Buying shoes in size nine felt like standing on a stage holding a neon sign that screamed TRANNY. But I had a trick. I’d write myself a shopping list in wobbly handwriting, linger by the tights, scratch my head like a clueless boyfriend:

“Sorry, my girlfriend sent me in here — no idea what denier means.”

Same with makeup. Scribbled notes. Feigned confusion. Oscar-worthy performances.

And then the sewing started.

I taught myself the machine Amanda left behind. Got good, too. I started turning anything I could find into clothes — bed linen, old curtains. Nothing was safe. The pillowcase that used to be hers became a pencil skirt.

My crowning glory? A corset made from an old Head sports bag. The fabric was thick as armour, but I stitched panels, reused the zip, and when I pulled it tight, it actually worked. I had a snatched little waist. From a sports bag.

There wasn’t much in that flat that didn’t get gender-flipped and stitched into something I could wear.

My days ran like clockwork — code, project, fantasise, dress. Eat something. Repeat.

Meanwhile, Pez had thrown himself even deeper into club culture. He’d bought Technics decks, turned into a proper DJ — really good, too — and was living for ecstasy-fuelled raves. At the time, it was just his scene, not mine.

But sometime later — not immediately, but down the line — he told me something that floored me.

He was exactly like me.

Same secret. Same ache. Same years of silent shame.

We’d grown up in separate northern working-class towns, thinking we were alone — and all that time, we’d both been cross-dressing kids in hiding. Now here we were in our early twenties, still carrying it, still trying to work out what the hell to do with it.

It’s mad to think about now. All that time. All that closeness. And this invisible bond we couldn’t even name until later.

One night, he invited me out. Proper clubbing. My modus operandi used to be to attend the pub part of the evening and then go home and become Stevie.

But on this occasion, I said yes.

He handed me ecstasy. I said yes to that, too.

And that night, everything shifted.

I arrived at university. Correction: I arrived twice. I bailed on maths the first time around and had to reroute my life to try again. Thanks to the glorious Louise Ellman, then head of West Lancs District Council, I was somehow awarded a full maintenance grant again. This was in the days where fees were also paid. So, another free university course.

On my second-degree course, I found my “stride” pretty quickly, I started well but by month 3 I descended. I drank too much, spent way more than I had, and lived permanently overdrawn, I was worse than most students. In fact, my account was so overdrawn, I used to have to go and see the student banking advisor in the branch, and she would write a little yellow note that said I could have some more money. I would then present it to the cashier, who would glance up to check before handing over the little extra cash. It was quite funny; she used to make me justify what I was spending it on. But I was such a cheeky chappy I used to get away with it every single time with a smile and a wink.

Whole days were then spent in the pub “the Leo Sayer” (all dayer), drinking beer and ordering filet mignon, or some other dish that there was no way a student could afford. This was funded by handwritten cheques that “might” cash, and endless excursions to buy records and second-hand vintage clothes.

Although, I did work hard at first, too. Some of the early projects were genuinely impressive. But by the end of the first year, the head of the course sat me down and told me they were considering kicking me off. Three others were being turfed out. I was only spared because I’d shown such clear promise at the start.

By each term end I was living on dried pasta and tomato ketchup, after the glorious five-week pub binges had left me absolutely broke and unable to secure any more overdraft. So broke I was hitchhiking back to my mother’s house for holidays.

At the start of second year, I realised I needed to tether my ludicrous spending habits. I picked up a bar job four evenings a week. And I started to clean up my act. I pulled my finger out and began to achieve academically too. By the end of third year, I had the top grades on my course, which surprised the fuck out of all the nerds.

My crowning glory came in my third year: I designed a smart turbo trainer for bikes. This was the early 90s. You’d connect your bike to it and ride a virtual course, watching a little stickman move across a line representing terrain. I wrote all the code, built the electronic circuit boards, and did all the physical engineering myself. It was fucking brilliant, honestly. I demonstrated it in front of the entire course, and they were gobsmacked. One of the lecturers made a sarky joke about marking me down because it was so noisy. The rest of the class, tragically, thought he meant it. I got an A++. My project was way better than anything else. This set a pattern for my life, “go big or go home”. More grandiose ideas and bigger dreams.

The bar job was at the Royal Concert Hall and Theatre bar in Nottingham, not just a student dive, but a proper venue. Great job. We’d start at 6 p.m., serve a burst of drinks before the show, prep a few for the interval, maybe hang back for a trickle of post-show punters… and by 9:30 we were done. Out the side door, down the street, and off to the pub.

Once I was through the door, Peter “Pez” Johnson was through the door too. Peter was my soulmate, my twin. He was styled just like me but better looking. We were both cut from a different cloth to the rest of our course—black 501s, black jackets, like some gang from Grease. And Peter really did look like John Travolta. Together, we were inseparable.

Oh lord, did we get up to some terrible, terrible things in that bar. Things I probably can't discuss to this day for fear of being arrested. We’d have drinking races. We’d point to the optics, whiskey, gin, vodka, rum. Each take turns picking five different spirits, then go: one, two, three… and smash the lot down.

There was a guy called Clive who worked there too. Couldn’t roll a spliff to save his life. Constantly handed me the gear to do it for him. And I, of course, rolled him fake joints and stole the good stuff, smoked it myself later down the pub with Peter and Amanda.

Amanda worked at the same bar. That’s where I met her. She was a little older, already graduated. Studied fashion. One of the funniest girls I’d ever met. Sharp, quick, wicked sense of humour—she actually had her own catchphrases. But also, fragile. Very fragile about her appearance. She’d sit for hours sketching silhouettes of women, drawing clothes, stitching bits together, making outfits from scratch. Bleach-blonde hair, a pretty-ish face. But in my heart, if I’m being truthful, I didn’t find her as beautiful as my first girlfriend, Katy.

When I met Amanda in the bar, she was actually my second choice of bar staff. I’d already tried it on with another girl called Helen. I’d managed to get myself back to Helen’s house, and a little bit of a snog, when I spotted in the corner a massive pile of albums—all the same album—in boxes that had been sealed but opened. And I looked at the albums and said, “They’re all the same.” And she said, “Yes. My boyfriend—”

And then I sighed, “Oh God, you’ve a boyfriend.”

“Yes,” she said, “my boyfriend is the UK manager for an up-and-coming new band. They’re going to be massive.”

“Oh right,” I said. “What are they called?”

“Nirvana,” she said.

At the beginning of my second year at university, a new panic crept in. Subtle at first. A small change in the mirror. Then not so small.

My hairline was receding.

Not by much but enough that I knew. And this was 1989, long before bald men were sexy or shaven heads were normal. Bald meant loser. Bald meant desperation. Bald meant greasy comb-over men.

I wasn’t exactly at home in my own skin to begin with.

But bald and male?

That was a bridge too far.

It felt like another theft. Like the universe was removing options one strand at a time. I couldn’t name it then, but now I see it clearly: I wasn’t mourning the loss of hair, I was mourning the loss of feminine potential. That line at the front of my head was the line between possibility and despair.

Crossdressing… for that first year, and then the first three months of my second year, I held steady. I did not cross-dress at all. There'd been quite the gap. I hadn't really actively done that much of it in 3 or 4 years.

I thought maybe I’d outrun it again. I’d done it before with Katy, and now here I was, cohabiting with Amanda and living in the world.

Then came the catsuit.

She made it herself, sleek, black, very 1960s. I remember the exact texture. I remember the night she tried it on and twirled in front of the mirror, and my entire brain combusted.

It was over.

The flood came back, all at once. The urge. The ache. The Knowing. My resistance evaporated.

I didn’t just want to wear it. I wanted to disappear inside it. I just wanted to be a fucking girl.

And so normal service was resumed.

At that point, my hair was still longish on top. I’d tie it into a little man-bun ponytail. Thinning at the front, yes but I could cheat it with an Alice band. Still disguise the damage. Still hold onto the illusion.

But this wasn’t like before, when dressing was a little more sporadic, a kind of secret pressure valve. Now it was obsessive. Constant. I was wearing women’s clothes beneath my own during the day, stripping them off in a panic before she got home. I knew exactly which of Amanda’s items fit me. And I was meticulous. Careful not to damage anything.

We lived in a tiny flat, basically a bedsit. After a few months, I was getting braver at shopping. I remember pulling off the baseboards beneath the kitchen units and hiding newly purchased clothes and shoes there. A whole stash, tucked behind laminate and woodchip. I lived in constant fear that one of those boards would come loose.

The bedsit was directly above a shoe shop. And for some reason, God knows why, I actually went and bought shoes in there. Size 9. I have no idea why I didn’t go further afield. Maybe I wanted to get caught. Maybe I didn’t care anymore.

But more than anything I was doing, it was the thinking I couldn’t escape. The ache of it. The obsession. It consumed me not just the hiding, not just the dressing, but the unspoken truth underneath it. A truth I couldn’t name. A shape I didn’t recognise. The shape of me that didn’t fit.

Amanda used to buy Cosmopolitan magazine every month without fail. We had this giant pile of them under the coffee table. She wouldn’t miss an issue. This was the early ’90s, before the internet, before Reddit threads and YouTube channels, before anyone talked openly about any of this. The only knowledge I had of people like me came from the occasional TV documentary, which usually left me feeling more horrified than hopeful.

Then one day, I picked up one of Amanda’s Cosmos, and there it was a feature about three transgender women. I remember it like it was yesterday. The first story opened with a line that stayed with me for decades: “Jeremy was an unhappy woman. Then again, he was an unhappy man.” That line hit me like a punch to the chest. It was mocking, dismissive, designed to get a sneer out of the reader.

The third and final story ended on something even crueller. The journalist had just left the home of a woman in her sixties. As she got into a taxi, the driver asked, “Was that a man or a woman?” And the journalist closed the article with the words: “I don’t know. You tell me.”

That was the tone of the whole piece. Not empathy. Not curiosity. Just ridicule. It’s hard to describe how it made me feel. It was like a confirmation that this was a terrible thing. That these people were freaks. And that if I ever did this, I would be a freak too.

I think I knew, even then, what I was and what I secretly wanted and longed for. I just didn’t think I’d ever do anything about it. I thought I would eventually bury it.

I just thought I’d live out my life as an obsessive, unhappy cross-dresser

.

⚡ Lightning Rebirth — Read in order
Introduction | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 (coming soon)