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Winter Solstice is drawing near and instead of trite bullshit about going into the darkness or doing shadow work I want to talk about the last year.

 

Serious content warning for suicide and medical discrimination. Take care of yourself.

 

 

 

 

I love this time of year in Seattle. The Big Dark has always held me softly and allowed me to dress and be read more like whatever gender I’ve wanted to be. The rain and the gentleness of the daylight robs us of vitamin D but allows for dreams and rest and revelry that the summer’s brightness can’t hold.

 

This Solstice is the anniversary of my most recent suicide attempt. Last year after looking at my busted and incorrect surgical records and being lied to and treated like garbage by the hospital, surgeon’s office staff, and asking for help from my support network and getting nothing back; I looked at my resources and options and asked my ancestors and ghosts if I could join them. I did not think I had the tools to unwind the transphobic, racist medical discrimination I was facing in relation to my gender affirming surgery.

 

Every trans person’s suicide is a murder by the dominant culture.

 

My request to join the ancestors was not accepted and I’m not dead yet, and I will probably live through the Big Dark this season but I almost didn’t live through the entirety of last year because every morning I woke up I remembered an all-White, all-cisgender bunch of petty, unprofessional bullies and bigots decided on a random Tuesday that I didn’t deserve bodily autonomy or to feel safe and the reality was that I had no way to fight back. To make things worse, the medical discrimination didn’t end when I left Spokane, my primary care doctor found medical record discrepancies in my chart going back years that resulted in delayed routine checkups and eventually (this year) having to be screened for cancer. Those specific records came from Bastyr and were overseen by a white nonbinary doctor who was part of the extended queer community and who I had met briefly outside of being in their medical care, albeit more than 10 years ago. There is no real way to hold them accountable, but Bastyr no longer has offices inside Seattle and therefore has less access to the marginalized people in the city.

 

Through the fallout and chaos I found a support network that replaced the one that was supposed to help me through surgery recovery but lost a lot of people I had considered friends and colleagues simply because they could not handle crisis. They thought they signed up to bring me a pot of soup and feel good and important about doing the bare minimum and ended up seeing the machine of US medical discrimination do it’s thing in front of them.

The details of what happened and how it dragged out over a year is long and not something I want to get into here simply because I don’t have the energy. All I have to say is that it sucked, it was isolating, and every org I contacted from Gender Justice League to QLaw (both never responded) to small indigenous support groups (had resources for emotional support only) and even the mutual aid org I helped found, was useless and only a small network of local herbalists, harm reductionists, death doulas, artists, and national and international friends supported me through the drawn out crisis.

Eventually a journalist contacted me and his work has been very important for a lot of people, myself included. The thoroughly researched article he wrote about my surgeon was published, serendipitously, on the exact anniversary of my surgery.

Allegations against Washington gender-affirming surgeon stir fears of backlash for trans patients

TL, DR Dr Stiller got problems.

To answer the obvious questions:

1. I was having a tittyectomy in Spokane because of insurance and money issues and because I was warned due to my past involvement in sex worker mutual aid/labor organizing and history of holding powerful men accountable that if I went under anesthesia in Seattle I might not wake up. I was also told that I should never have gender affirming surgeries of any kind because surgeons hate trans people like me. While that advice was not well meaning and also extremely vague I’m not sure it isn’t true and having surgery outside of the country was my first and best choice but it wasn’t financially viable.

2. I did not pursue legal action because my legal counsel (who is fed up with my bullshit in the kindest way possible and knows I cannot pay the type of attorney this situation requires) recommended I not pursue filing in court and to evaluate if it is worth it to have my character and work dragged through the mud because it would inevitably become Like That. Also because my hospital escort and support person caused more problems than she solved and last I checked was moving to Canada to “feel safer and work on her PhD” (leaving her teenage daughter with the kid’s abusive dad) so there is no corroborating witness.

Since the article dropped an anonymous trans person who claimed to have had a similar bad experience with the same surgeon and currently needs surgical revisions has contacted me to ask if I have connection to other surgeons, if any are helping me, and why I would expose myself to hatred from both bigots, medical professionals and other trans people for speaking out.

The answer to those questions is:

1. I don’t have any friendly surgeons in my orbit and I definitely won’t have any now, it’s entirely my hatred for injustice and desire for revenge and my need to keep others from going through what I did fueling me.

2. I’m fucking stupid and stubborn and I already live in a semi permanent state of exception in regards to access to healthcare and food and paid work and on general high alert. What’s another death threat or two? When I moved back to the United States from Germany in 2017 I felt in my gut the USA would kill me. Whether it was by cops, queer bashing, medical discrimination, poverty, or mental health related; I considered violent death almost inevitable. (I still chose that over trying to stay in Berlin.) The reality is that doctors and surgeons and medical staff can get away with whatever they want and there is almost no way to hold them accountable. Sometimes there is an actually empathetic medical professional but it’s rare. More often than not it is an accident if a multiply marginalized person has a decent experience accessing healthcare and things have only gotten worse under the current political climate. And I’m mad about it.

 

This newsletter isn’t a cry for help, just an update of the situation. I’ve been keeping most of it within a very small group of people for safety’s sake. Explaining everything over and over is exhausting. Facing people’s pity and confusion and gaslighting makes my already shitty mental health worse. So hopefully this is the first and last time I will have to talk about this here, and we can all move on to better things as the soft darkness turns into spring.

 

Although, if you are in a position to offer me paid work or buy some of my art it would help me out.

And if you need to get rid of money before the end of the year the arts nonprofit I help steward, Skeleton House, is in the process of finding places to do events and could use donations. We have been a 501c3 since 2024 and can provide tax receipts for donations. Our regular spaces for the past few years either is very small or doesn’t have an inside area so we can’t do gatherings in winter and we want to. I have been planning an event called Necromancer’s Ball that needs an early spring date, which is a very wet time here in Seattle and we will need an indoors. I am also in the process of planning summer events with some friends that include workshops and talks for those of us that are thirsty in the brain.

Please contact me for any inquiries at [email protected]

I will be taking the next month off from public events and gallery openings to work on an interactive fiction game and polish the presentations of the data a friend and I gathered in partnership with the WA State Office of Infectious Diseases on barriers to accessing healthcare for gender diverse people. I will also be plotting and planning and resting and watching the Chaos Communications Congress online.

I don’t have a list of local happenings this month but in lieu of my usual links: If you need to go into your own darkness or do “shadow work” and/or are managing traumas and mental health issues, some of the things as a harm reductionist and mentally ill person that have kept me from killing myself are (in no particular order):

Music

Acupuncture

Dance (including yoga)

Substance use (important to take breaks)

Working with medicinal plants

Growing food

Hot tea

Cooking and eating delicious food

Holding hands or cuddling with friends

Making art

Casual sex (with someone who isn’t shitty or fetishistic obvs)

Travel

Reading (books, not social media or news)

Graffiti

Walks in the rain

Actively doing harm reduction

Singing (quality of voice does not matter)

Visiting the Salish Sea

Visiting the Duwamish River

Taking care of animals

Finding cool rocks on the beach

Full moon tidepooling

Conversing with crows

 

 

May these things also keep you alive for a little longer, if you need to be. If not, rest well with the ghosts and the ancestors.