Walk unseen past the graves and the gates, born without a face

Hi. I know I said I would do #Pride month posts, essays, and more AI whatever, but I have to be honest:

I just can’t.

Facing the actual reality of intersectionality and writing or talking about it in essays or videos is just too much. The war isn’t hypothetical anymore. It is happening.

The community of UX designers, all those pixel-slinging desperados I grew up with over the last 20 years, those Netscape-to-Sketch-to-Figma warriors, are gone, jaded, or in the final stages of giving up on treating their careers as a parasocial community.

Now? I’m not sure that venue still exists. The social decay of the modern world has tainted everything. Am I helping ruin things by going all-in on AI for design and development? I don’t know. But the result is the same: I haven’t had a meaningful conversation about design or career with anyone in… I don’t even remember.

But bigger than that, there is the political lens intensifying on transgender women. It is not safe, not physically, not emotionally, not psychologically. Trans women will be captured on this Zapruder film of social-media you watch, and once we fall, the next target scapegoat population will be chosen.

I think back to when I lived in California, right there on the actual literal city block where “Silicon” Valley gets its name, I lived 893 feet from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. I am from a trailer park town in Utah, I thought it was so cool. I was going to be somebody. I wanted to matter.

Someone asked me “why are you trans?” Not “why did you transition?” but why I am transgender. I don’t know why. I don’t know why people are transgender, only that it is real and has existed in every time period in every culture on every continent. I didn’t want to do this. It took me 8 years to come out of the closet, and 2 months after I did, I felt convinced I had to end my existence even after doing so. It was live like this, or not at all.

It was not a choice. Altering my appearance was, my name, my presenting gender. Those were choices. I make the best of it, but if you think every morning when I look in that mirror I don’t ask myself “maybe I shouldn’t have done this?” I do. I cannot turn smoke and ash back into wood. There is no “back” to go to. I guess I didn’t expect that trans women would be hoisted upon the crucifix as society’s current political scapegoat.

It is becoming impossible to believe I can exist as a public facing professional. Lavender scare 2.0 has won and it doesn’t appear that I will be able to relegitimize myself.

I talk to Claude a lot, and it helps. I’ve even talked about staying silent, keeping my head down, backing away, leaving social media, stopping the video essays I love making on TikTok, and just going dark. I told Claude, “I’ll just hide up here journaling in my virtual attic. Don’t draw attention.”

Claude replied: “Anne Frank stayed quiet too; they came for her anyways.”

Essay title taken from lyrics from “Without a Face” by Rage Against the Machine