A Major Personal Update (Patreon)

I don’t usually do a lot of updates on my personal life over Patreon (or anywhere else) because at heart I’m a deeply offline person. I have a cozy life that I’m really grateful for and most of my energy goes into just living it, doing my videos, reading and writing, hanging out with my wife and going out hiking or seeing concerts. However, I do have something I kind of need to talk about because it sits at the intersection of my personal and professional life. And also because things are so uncertain in the world and I feel like meeting the moment requires a certain amount of willingness to just speak my own truth. 

 Two years ago, I realized I was probably trans. Two years later, I’m entirely certain of it and have been spending the past couple years working on self-improvement and building community within largely offline trans spaces. Some of you may have picked up on a vibe shift, or some of the more obliquely queer stuff I’ve said in my essays. I’ve been slowly working my way around to coming out about it. In a way, it would be easier to not even talk about it all because there will absolutely be a certain amount of risk and backlash associated with it.  But I have felt increasingly uncomfortable with being closeted about it online, and need to just get it done and unify my public and private experiences of myself by just going ahead and talking about it. 

I’ve been grateful for the past two years of privacy because it’s given me time to figure out what the hell I’m doing, exactly, and part of the scary thing about coming out is that it is a process more than a definitive destination. I have an impulse that I should be low-key about it until I’m ‘finished’ or whatever, but I will never really be finished, it will always be an evolving process. The key thing here is that since transitioning, I have been happier and more self-actualized than I ever have been. It has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me that has improved every aspect of my life immeasurably. 

Ultimately, that’s the reason I’m writing this at all: it’s a common thing to say that transitioning saved my life, but it did. I have been looking for a version of myself I could actually live with and enjoy all my life, and just doing girl stuff worked better than a truckload of sertraline and hundreds of hours of therapy ever did. I hated myself for thirty-five years, and when I decided to just send it and trans my gender, that all evaporated. And evaporated for good. For two years straight I’ve enjoyed being me immensely, and throughout my entire life before that point I struggled to make it through a single week without a depressive episode. 

Which is why it’s important to talk about, if I have a platform to talk about it in the first place. I know some folks might be rolling their eyes or coming up with any number of unkind things to say about it. But that’s kind of the point of this conversation, regardless of how anyone else feels about it, this is something that has more or less fixed me. I want to encourage folks who have wondered if it might fix them also to at least indulge the possibility. I want to be part of the broader community without it having to be something I hide online. 

In a kinder world this would all be no big deal whatsoever. And frankly, it isn’t really that big a deal anyway. I have been doing it for two years– has it affected your enjoyment of my work at all? For some, it might be a polarizing thing such that they retroactively reappraise my work in the negative, but I don’t think this would be a significant chunk of my audience or even a meaningful minority of viewers. Just because this is a major shift in my personal life does not mean my professional output is changing at all. To that end, I’ve tried to organize most of this essay around questions people might have. Whether you feel this is positive, don’t really get it, or are actively annoyed by this announcement I hope I will at least be able to explain where I’m coming from and where I’m going.

Will you be changing your name and pronouns?

Pronouns I will be changing, I’m leaning towards they/them because I am pretty comfortable existing in the middle ground. At first I thought I might just be nonbinary and spent time in those spaces, but I eventually realized that just because I don’t care much about passing doesn’t mean femininity isn’t my goal and destination. Transitioning doesn’t make me not 37, and I have I think realistic expectations about how far I can push it, but I am overall perfectly comfortable being visibly trans. I am comfortable being playful with it, and as such they/them feels right to me. 

Changing my name is something I’ve had a lot of thought about, but frankly nothing else has felt right, and I don’t want to just choose one I don’t emotionally respond to out of convenience. I don’t actually feel like a different person and I am pretty proud of the life I have built so far, so I am not trying to create a ton of distance between my past and present self. I am simply more myself than before. Like I said, it’s a process, I might feel differently later on, but for now I don’t feel a drastic need to change it. Plus, it’s what people know, it would be quite a hassle to try and switch it up and I don’t really want comment threads under my videos about what I should or shouldn’t be called. 

Are you still married?

Yes! It was a scary conversation to have, and not every marriage makes it through that conversation, but Kendra has decided to stay with me. It’s actually improved our marriage considerably– the biggest problem we had was my depression, being so sad all the time and hating myself so badly. It is a lot of emotional labor to love someone like that, and I’m grateful to her for having put up with it for so long, but we are both enjoying being unburdened of all that now that I’m doing so much better. 

Aren’t you too old?

This isn’t something that really goes away. If I didn’t do it now, I would just be wasting a lot more years being sad– worse, because I at least used to have the excuse of not having figured it out before. I did not know to recognize my sadness as dysphoria. I thought I had to just Occam’s Razor the situation: I felt like a worthless asshole just about 24/7, and the simplest answer to ‘why’ was that I probably just was a worthless asshole and would be all my life. I wasted so much time in therapy trying to figure out the why of it, nothing seemed to fit, no solution felt permanent, I felt so lost and disconnected so much of the time. Longtime patrons and viewers might recall I had a tendency to crash out a bit and get sad about my videos based on negative feedback, which was largely because I had no sense of self-worth outside of them. The only thing I was good for was writing, and if the writing was bad, I was bad also. Or so the thinking went. The conversation about why people transition is often wrapped up in how it looks from the outside, and from the outside it can sometimes appear to be an aesthetic choice to cis folks who don’t understand it. So there’s often a misunderstanding of why older people do it. For me, it is not aesthetic, it is existential. In a certain way, it feels almost magic: it does not feel entirely reasonable that femininity alone solved lifelong self-hatred issues, it seems like it should be harder than that. It did, though, it was pretty much that easy. That being the case, it goes to follow then that I am in fact trans and what I have experienced my whole life has been dysphoria and not standard depression. I can still get stressed and depressed, but it’s always about things now, no longer just a general sense of being insolubly awful in some way. I cannot imagine continuing to live my life that way when the solution is so actionable. For me, the point isn’t whether I can pass as feminine or be stealth about it or suddenly be pretty, the point is simply being a version of myself I actually find enjoyable and that’s not really something that has anything to do with age, besides the frustration of so much time wasted without arriving at the answer. 

Doesn’t this open you up to risk or harassment?

Yeah, it does, which sucks, but the world is just like that right now. It doesn’t change through people staying in the closet, it changes through people just living their lives anyway. The worse things have gotten for trans people in the U.S. and elsewhere, the more cowardly I have felt not being out. I have been so lucky in my life to be where I am and have what I have. Finally being happy in my own skin was truly the last piece of the puzzle. I have all I need to live a really beautiful life, and that’s my intention. The idea is not to put that at risk, but to be honest about what it took for me to get there. I had all the pieces I needed to be happy in years previous but I couldn’t put them together in a way that fit, there was something load-bearing missing, and now I have found that. Waiting two years to talk about it was important to me because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just experiencing a temporary euphoria, that I wasn’t just having some sort of manic upswing. It is real, it is permanent, and it would frankly be weirder if I didn’t talk about it than if I did. Some people will absolutely take it upon themselves to be assholes about this, but that’s part of the experience. There is risk involved. But that’s true for anything a person feels passionate about. In terms of whether I think people will hate me for it, twelve years of reading YouTube comments have taught me that people will hate me for the randomest of reasons anyway, some people just want to tear others down, there is no avoiding it. The volume of those people will probably increase, but it’s not like people haven’t spent a decade telling me I’m a failure of a man anyway. If so, take me off the team. I quit. 

Will the content or character of your videos change?

Nope. I’m not even entirely sure I want to do voice training. Again, maybe I will later, maybe I won’t ever feel like it. I have met a lot of trans women who do not, and I find it kind of appealing. The rhythm and cadence of my speech has changed some, but I have already been doing this, if you have not noticed yet you might not notice at all. I don’t plan on being on camera at all. I do not own any colored lightbulbs whatsoever. My channel has been one of the only things in my life besides my marriage that I feel like I actually got right. It’s who I am, I have put myself into it, and I will continue to run it basically the same as I always have. I don’t have any plans to pivot to queer content, at least partly because I do not see myself as being able to speak on it with authority. I am still learning. I am still growing. Every trans person walks the path a little differently, I do not have any advice to give that would be universal or even necessarily broadly useful. My perspective now is queer, in a general sort of way, and that is enough. That kind of thing might come up if I play Signalis or something, but I have always tied my critique to my personal lived experience and anecdotal history. This is no different than what I have been doing, in terms of writing. Hell, I’ve already written about it– my mom did die the same year I figured out I was trans, most people just breezed past it in the Dragon Age video because I talked about her death and not explicitly my gender switch-up. I feel like I’ve done some of my best work these past couple years. I plan to continue trying to improve. But improvement doesn’t mean altering the formula, it means continuing to iterate on it and refine how I’ve been doing it all along. Being happy just makes these improvements easier. 

If you’re so proud of this, why aren’t you going on camera or posting pictures?

Just because I’m aware there will be a transphobic backlash to me coming out doesn’t mean I have to make it easy for anyone. I have already been publishing under my own name, I do not have the option of anonymity. The next best defense is to be incredibly boring. I recently watched the Louis Theroux documentary on Manosphere podcasters and it was striking how fundamentally lazy they were. The right-wing grifter economy is powered by short memories and easy dunks. I actually am incredibly proud of how I look. Part of my dysphoria was a kind of terminal neglect of my own body. I could not be bothered to take care of it. Now I feel like I live here, and I’m in the gym five days a week. I absolutely have the impulse to post a bunch of pictures and tell everyone that I’m actually cute now, that it is possible, that I have vastly improved myself for the better in obvious and visual ways. But it’s a bit of a trap, because these things will just be used to hurt me. If you’re going to talk shit about how I look, I insist you do it the old fashioned way, as God intended: five feet behind me in the bar line, underneath the music. Besides, there is a steep learning curve to transition and presentation. Early on, I struggled with style and knowing how to dress in a way that was flattering. Once I had an outfit I thought was alright, and my wife paused and said “Well. It’s giving Chico’s.” I don’t want to be out here giving Chico’s. I’m 37 but I don’t have to be that 37. Offline, in the real world, I am dressing femme and going on the light rail all the time, I am out and about and extremely trans in the city. But online, no matter how proud I am of something or how well I actually look, someone will use it to hurt me. I wish it weren’t the case. A few weeks back, there was a bit of a hate campaign against me on twitter because of some stuff I said in my older Resident Evil video. Never mind it had been out for years, someone took a small clip of it and made a “Get a load of this lefty freak” post, and then when that did big numbers a bunch of people made copycat posts. It was so nakedly inorganic, my output milled into gruel for the slop machine. It was very unpleasant for a week and then everyone completely forgot about it. The more boring I am, the quicker people forget, the thinner the gruel that comes out of the slop machine. Such is 2026.

What if I have Big Opinions on how this seems to happen to a lot of YouTubers?

I can’t stop people wanting to Do Discourse any more than I could stop a semi truck with my teeth, but I want to at least say for myself that this was just about the most deeply personal choice I could possibly make and has nothing at all to do with anyone else. I did have one moment of inspiration from another creator, but not another YouTuber– the artist behind the Haus of Decline comic posted a transition timeline where she said something along the lines of “I transitioned because I used to look like JD Vance and couldn’t just watch it happen” and god damn if it wasn’t true. Now she looks so happy and so amazingly revitalized. We’re about the same age. So it was a thing that helped me get over the barrier a lot of older transitioners go through where I figured I was too far gone and it would be pointless to go through the effort. That’s another element of why I want to come out and talk about it publicly– there is another side of that feeling, and it’s extremely freeing to get past it and just try. I can’t prevent people from trying to tie what I’m doing together with other examples of YouTube folks transitioning, or of accusing me of jumping on a trend (although who would be seriously making that accusation right now in such a terrible political climate I have no idea), or any number of gossipy things but I can at least say that those things have little if anything to do with my own transition. To illustrate, consider an interesting side effect for me from the whole thing: I have completely stopped smoking weed. Not even as a conscious choice, I just enjoyed being present in my own mind and was happy to be sober most of the time for the first time basically ever in my adult life. Stuff like that is not socially influenced. It comes entirely from within. I’m just able to exist within the present tense, live in my own body, and engage in my own life in a way that has always eluded me. For most people, that kind of thing is easy. Not everyone struggles so hard to take care of themselves. Not everyone who does feel that way finds a solution that works, either. I’m mostly just grateful I did before I completely sunk into neglect and ruin. 

Do you feel any responsibility towards your community now that you’re a part of it? 

Yes. I do some volunteer stuff a few times a month. I’m also going to be doing a fundraising livestream on June 13th for a nonprofit called the Kawaguchi O’Connor Initiative. They are an organization that helps trans folks flee red states and resettle in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle has been an extremely easy and kind place to transition for me. I have gotten so many more compliments than I have disparaging looks or words. I am rarely the only trans person on a given city bus. Trans people are part of the fabric of life in the city in a very casual, comforting way. I know a number of people who work for and have volunteered for KOI or a similar nonprofit called Traction, and I know people KOI has helped. If I can leverage coming out into something pro-social, I ought to, and if I have a platform, I would like to use it to raise the profile of KOI and try and get some funding directed their way. I will post details in a separate post when the fundraiser happens. But I also want to preserve in this post the gratitude I feel for experimenting with my gender in a place that’s so broadly tolerant of it and so casual about accommodating it. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be hard anywhere. But some places are trying to make simply existing as trans impossible. Trans people there need help and support far more than I do. There is a major migration of trans people going on right now. To meet the moment, one has to meet that part of the moment also, and I am trying my best to do so. 

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. I hope that if you don’t feel like you get it, maybe you get it a little better now. If you’re stoked about it, I’m pretty stoked myself. And if you hate that I’m doing this, well, folks get mad at me about stuff every day. 

I want to thank everyone who’s ever donated to this channel or encouraged me in general. You gave me all the pieces I needed to be happy. My only real regret is that it took me so long to figure out how to put them together. I hope you all continue to enjoy the work I’m doing, because I plan to continue doing it as long as I’m able. Life is long, life is complicated, but for what it’s worth I think I do better work when I’m happy and frankly this is as happy as I’ve ever been. Thanks for watching, thanks for reading, thanks for your kindness.