Editorial position: This Is Not a Trans Politics Publication

I could make it bigger by chasing the angry traffic. I am not going to. Here is what this is instead.

I looked at the front page of Fast Track Femme earlier and felt something I was not quite expecting. Pride. Not the official rainbow kind, not Pride Month pride. Just ordinary, private, slightly startled pride.

I started this thing about a year ago as somewhere to put pieces of my autobiography. I did not want to publish the whole thing, because too much of it is personal, raw, complicated, and involves other people. But some parts felt universal enough to share: the early life, the gender confusion, the strangeness, the hiddenness, and later the transition stories too, perhaps.

Then slowly, without any grand plan, the thing grew. Maybe I could write about risk. Or investing. Or AI, or software engineering. Or grief, divorce, habit-building, food, the body, voice, class, shame, joy, surgery, endurance sport, aesthetics, or why a pre-packed sandwich is one of the great moral failures of modern civilisation.

And over time, Fast Track Femme stopped being a memoir archive and became something broader. A publication, I suppose. That still feels slightly ridiculous to say, but there it is.

It is now doing reasonably well. Five-figure reads every thirty days, which is not bad for some little thing I started with no expectation beyond “I need somewhere to put these words.”

But I have also learned something. Certain pieces travel, and I know exactly which ones. If I write about gender-critical people, TERFs, Supreme Court rulings, trans politics, bathrooms, ideological conflict, then the numbers go up. They get restacked. They get angry comments. They move through trans spaces and gender-critical spaces alike, because everybody loves a fight, even when they pretend they do not.

I know I could make this publication bigger by doing more of that. I am not going to.

Not because those issues do not matter. They do. Not because they do not affect me. They obviously do. But because I do not want Fast Track Femme to become “trans woman reacts to anti-trans thing.” Graham Linehan said this. Helen Joyce said that. A court ruled the other. Everyone gather round the outrage fire.

There are already publications that cover that world properly, and some of them do it extremely well, braver and faster and better sourced and more politically committed than I will ever be. That is not what this is.

This is not a trans politics publication. This is a Stevie publication.

That may sound self-centred. Fine. Perhaps it is. But the point is not “look at me because I am me.” The point is “look through me, and perhaps you will see something differently.”

When I do write about trans politics, I want it to be because I have an angle that feels genuinely mine. When I wrote about the UK Supreme Court ruling, I was not mainly interested in producing a howl of outrage. I was interested in risk models, in trust, in bathrooms as a social operating system. In the way society had previously let trans women function on a kind of traffic model: two cars passing in opposite directions, separated only by a painted white line, because statistically people do not simply swerve into one another for no reason. That interested me.

When I wrote about why you cannot win an argument with a TERF, I was not trying to produce another “TERFs bad” article. I had a theory. A psychological one, a rhetorical one, a systems one. That interested me.

That is the test. Does it interest me? Do I have something to add, something sideways, something beyond rage? If yes, I will write it. If no, I will leave it alone.

Because the truth is, I get bored very quickly. If I want a fight I can go on X and ruin my blood pressure like everybody else, and I have done plenty of that in the past. I do not intend to build a publication around it.

Fast Track Femme is about transition, yes. But it is also about software, and money, and AI, and food, and grief, and habits, and beauty, and risk, and rebuilding a life. About being nearly fifty-eight and still absurdly alive. About being a woman with a strange history and far too many opinions.

I have the opposite of writer’s block. I have writer’s traffic jam. There are too many subjects, not too few. I still have not properly written about music. Or art, or class, or the strange mechanics of habit, or the ridiculous business of trying to build a company with a synthetic workforce while also remembering to eat lunch and take the dog out.

So no. I am not going to chase the angry traffic just because it works. Fast Track Femme will remain what it has become on its own: a publication about one woman’s reconstruction project. Messy, funny, technical, emotional, contradictory. Occasionally furious, often over-analytical, usually wearing too much lip gloss.

And if that is too broad, too personal, too strange, or too difficult to categorise: good.

So am I

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