Posted by h3xtacy on Aug 28, 2026
This newsletter is incredibly late going out, I try to send out a newsletter update in the middle of the month but August has been a very busy and intense month for myself and my collaborators at Skeleton House. I meant to write an essay about curation and marginalized creatives and how the curation project showcasing indigenous sacred gender, transgender, and gender diverse digital and transmedia creatives that I had to abandon after my gender affirming surgery in late 2024 is more complicated, dangerous, and necessary than when I conceived it. But, I got busy, I prioritized time with family for my father’s memorial, and I worked manual labor (the only type of jobs that will hire me in Seattle) a lot this month on top of keeping up with my current creative projects.
Maybe next year will be a Digital Indigiqueer year, which is something I’ve been saying for quite a while.
We wrapped the current iteration of the Gender Diverse Healthcare Access Map of Washington State at the Seattle Design Festival’s Block Party and while it felt like a huge success there are many lessons learned and ways I would improve on it. I was the lead instigator in taking a small Dept of Health info gathering project and turning it into a public installation and an experimental way to gather healthcare access data of transgender and gender diverse people. I didn’t ask permission of Dept of Health and I hope they understand why I and my collaborators felt it was important to continue to do outreach to our communities and collect more testimonies and stories.
Surprisingly for the USA and Seattle (which is far more bigoted than it’s reputation claims), fewer people than expected had a problem with transgender people and healthcare access. One person seemed extremely put out that our project wasn’t more broadly inclusive as if focusing on gender diverse populations somehow made healthcare less accessible to non gender diverse people.
The reality is that healthcare is a shitshow for almost everyone and marginalized people even more so.
As a nonbinary transsexual man and someone with indigenous heritage this has been proven to me directly over and over again and I hope that somehow this project helps all of us to be treated well by medical professionals and live healthier, happier lives.
I would love to be able to continue the data collection with an even larger dataset and publish the findings but my ability to work on it is dependent on my time, energy, and finances. If anyone knows of funding bodies, organizations, or individuals who would like to support this project please reach out. Also, Skeleton House is a registered 501(c)3 and monetary donations are tax deductible.
Deep gratitude to Jules Raisanen and Lisa Al-Hakim for their contributions to early data collection and the podcast (Lisa) and the gorgeous 3D printing implementation (Jules). Also the Design Festival team has been incredible to work with and I have so much respect for their goals of furthering design, installation builds, and cross disciplinary art experimentation.
Early in the month I spent a week dancing at Velocity Dance Center’s SFD+I Research Week. Dance Camp (which is what I call it) has been a yearly touchstone in my movement practice and it was wonderful to reconnect with the improvisational dance community. Thank you all for having me.
The small interactive project I did for the Seattle Aquarium also officially wrapped, I have been too busy to check in but theoretically the Aquarium’s Plankton Tow activity at Pier 58 should have my work as part of it’s educational experience. Go look at some plankton from the Salish Sea under a microscope, it’s really cool!
Upcoming:
Ending with a photo of myself and Jules Raisanen, the 3D printing sorceress for the Gender Diverse Healthcare Access Map of Washington State.
