Emily St. James

Parks & Rec or Community

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE

Stealth is over; please check out my new newsletter!

There's been an influx of subscriptions to Stealth in the last few weeks -- probably because I have a link to it as a pinned tweet, so that would make sense -- but I'm no longer regularly updating this newsletter! I have a new one over

Final girls

You only live twice

I'm out

I loved TV criticism until I didn't

Dead name

If I'm finally me, then where did I go?

We know we belong to the land

And the land we belong to is grand!

Is that all there is?

Mad Men, one of my favorite TV shows ever made, begins its final stretch of episodes with a melancholy reflection on impermanence. Don Draper, who has just learned of the death of a woman who might have been the love of his life, but for all of the ways his

Full time

I didn't mean to go full time. I just did. This is the opposite of almost everything else in my transition, which has been carefully, rigidly planned, sometimes down to the literal second. I knew which friends were going to find out when, and I picked the date

Threshold of revelation (with apologies to Tony Kushner)

When people ask me, "When did you know you were a woman?" my answer tends to come in three parts, which are sort of a nesting doll. The easiest answer is "In March of 2018." That was when I was forced out of the mental closet

So who were you?

There's been some small degree of debate on trans Twitter (which, really, why would you go there?) about a topic that seems easy to answer, until you realize it's twisting you in knots: Before you came out and/or transitioned, who were you? This seems like

Undergoing renovation

A couple of weeks ago, I had to lay down on my bathroom floor and cry for about 15 minutes. Never mind what got me there, or what happened after. Just live with me in that space for a second, the concrete floor hard and cold, and the towel I

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