Thread by @SandalwoodEmily

Hey, thanks, Emily.

Let's talk about paths of least resistance!

https://twitter.com/emilyvdw/status/1318625097016516610

I made my name doing TV criticism. It's a good job. I get paid way too much money to watch stuff and say, "This is good, and this is bad!" And I think I'm pretty good at it, too.

It gives me INTENSE dysphoria, particularly when that's what people most know me for.

TV criticism was never the plan. It was just a thing that I was good at, and because of when I started my criticism career (2008-ish), it was a way for me to make enough money to live, because it was the height of the recap boom.

I think, often, trans people take the path of least resistance before coming out. If there's a way to find a gendered space in our assigned genders at birth where it feels like we can even vaguely fit, we're all too happy to hang out there.

And that's what happened to me.

Being smart about a particular pop culture topic was something people would reward me for, and it was a way to just sort of coast through life.

AND it was a space gendered male where one didn't have to be particularly masculine to fit in.

(Sidebar: It is probably notable that nearly every significant hire I made at both AV Club and Vox was a woman. I just felt comfortable around women and understood their social codes intuitively, and when I kept hiring them, people told me I was a good ally! For some reason!)

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut: Look at me in this video from 2016 (it's cued up to me speaking). I don't seem particularly happy to be there. Not in the slightest.

(Also, Libby looks SUPER CUTE, omg.)

I was on the path of least resistance, and I wanted to be on a different path, and I didn't know how to get there.

Then one day I did. And everybody was, like, "Oh, sure, you're a woman, that makes a lot of sense." It was great! Five out of five stars! Would transition again!

But I couldn't abandon a career path I had chosen to avoid having to look at my life and what I wanted from it. A remnant of somebody I had once been followed me like a phantom.

And it was ALL A LOT OF PEOPLE WANTED TO HEAR FROM ME.

It makes me feel... less valid, I guess?

To be clear: My employer has been great about this career transition. I'm getting to do some of the best stuff I've ever done at Vox, because I'm increasingly entrusted to write about many things OTHER than TV. And I still have lots of TV thoughts to share with the world!

And I have things like Arden and other extracurricular writing that give me real joy and help me express myself.

But I do feel frustrated every time I get an email that's, like, "I thought this newsletter was going to be about TV."

Like it's MY newsletter!

A tricky thing about transition is that we are the same person as before, but the person we presented to the world was not the person we were. The person we are has more clarity about what we want, about our desires, about our goals. Which can SEEM like becoming someone else!

I'm aware I'm complaining about something that is the definition of a first world problem, even for the cis. But it's broadly applicable to many trans people.

We're all just trying to get by, and we end up in lives we might not entirely enjoy because we make choices by default.

tl;dr: I like writing dumb stuff about Studio 60 but find it disheartening when that performs so much better than anything else I do, because my #personalbrand was built by a girl too scared to stand up for herself.

Love to you all, except Matt Albie and Danny Tripp.