How you are going to make it
I want to tell you a secret, and then I want to tell you a story.
The secret is this: You already know who you are. I know that's scary, which is why I also brought the story, which is as follows:
I figured out I was a girl when I was 3, but I only really accepted it in March of 2018, a little over a year into Donald Trump's first term as president. The act of self-acceptance – of finally admitting I was trans – felt like it took forever. I had been building up to it for over 30 years, and the agonizing process of finally getting there in those early weeks of 2018 made it seem as though time had ground to a halt.
Yet those handful of days before I came out also felt like a race against time. The day I finally said, "I want to transition" out loud – to my then-therapist – I was very nearly late to my appointment. I had been interviewing Louie Anderson for my podcast, and I hit absurd traffic on the way to my therapist's office. If you listen to the interview, you will hear my desperation to just get outta there. I knew if I didn't tell my therapist that day, I was going to re-closet myself for maybe another month, maybe another year, maybe another decade. I didn't know if I had another decade in me.
But I beat the traffic, and I got to therapy late, and I said the words, and now, I am sneaking up on a time when I will have been publishing under the name Emily almost as long as I did that other name. It feels good, and here, in the first few days of Trump 2, it tastes like ash.
I am trying to remind myself that I have been here before. I don't know if I ever could have gotten to self-acceptance if I hadn't been facing down an administration so utterly dismissive of my right to exist that it made noise about essentially ending federal government recognition of trans people's right to self-determination the literal day after I started HRT (as chronicled here). I had so many doubts about HRT those first few weeks – mostly stemming from my certainty that the pills were doing nothing – but the second I read those headlines, which were as big a "OKAY, THIS IS GOING TO SUCK SOMETIMES!" sign as the universe possibly could have given me, I felt no desire to abandon my plan. Whatever I lost, it was worth it to gain myself, even if only temporarily.
Emily St. James
I came out publicly in June 2019, and for a few months, I felt myself getting in touch with the kind of woman I wanted the world to see me as, which was "bisexual megachurch mom who runs a vlog where she reviews candles." In high school, a friend had helped me with makeup tips, and I got reacquainted with those. I started to grow out my hair and wear more feminine things. I met several of my very best friends across that brief span of time.
Increasingly, I have come to understand that period as one driven entirely by momentum. I was outrunning a huge amount of bad programming in my brain that wanted me to eschew anything feminine or queer-coded. It was as though when I forced myself to go to that therapy appointment in 2018, I knew it was the first time I would ever have a running start. But I always knew a time was going to come when I would have to reckon with the fact that the kind of woman I am – the sort of girl you'd bring home to your parents, and they'd say, "She's what? A second-grade teacher?" and you'd say "No, she reviewed TV for a long time," and they'd say, "What a waste of a perfectly good second-grade teacher!" – is the kind of woman I had spent most of my life forcing myself not to be. The muscles of femininity I was learning to flex were muscles that would atrophy in favor of ones that did not want me to take joy in my very self and wanted me to live cowering in fear.
The Covid-19 pandemic and attendant lockdowns, followed by me actually becoming a bisexual Episcopal mom (who used to run a website where she recapped TV shows), led to that atrophy. I had gotten my nails professionally done a few days before lockdown, and over the next two weeks, the polish very slowly fell off. I felt an immense grief as this happened because I knew I was never going to have a running start ever again. To get back to where I had been would be a lot of fucking work. I fell into a rut of wearing lots of athleisure. I almost never wore makeup or did much to my hair beyond brushing it. Dreams I had had of, like, learning how to do a high ponytail died on the vine. I simply felt I was too old, too boring, too mom for any of it.
I spent most of 2024 feeling a deep, agonizing certainty that it was too late for me, in a way that felt like a close cousin to all those years when I was sure it was too late for me to come out and transition. Except in this case, I felt like it was "too late" for me to start presenting the way I wanted, "too late" for me to finally set foot in a store with designs on buying clothes that would make me feel good about myself. I would watch fashion influencers in their 20s and feel an increasing sense of my own mortality that only increased my paralysis. My friend who has been coaching me through this with an eye toward an eventual shopping trip encouraged me to make a Pinterest and start putting clothes I liked on it. I opened the app maybe two times, and then the thing in my brain that keeps me from feeling pleasure shut that shit down.
My therapist tried to help me understand that all of the reasons I felt it was too late for me were self-inflicted, defense mechanisms I had erected in order to stay safely hidden away in my boy shell as a child. Intellectually, I understood she was right; emotionally, I would open Pinterest, and I would freeze, and I would shrug on the same clothes I had been wearing for years.
But guess who was there to save me again? Ol' Donny Trump himself! After his re-election, as we all became acquainted with his plans to not just completely wreck the trans community but also – potentially – the global economy (via tariffs), I realized that I was going to have to get over myself yet again. So this past weekend, my wife, my kid, my mother, and I went to a Macy's that is going out of business. When I walked in, I almost had a panic attack, but I got through it. I walked out with a lot of clothes I liked, and I spent almost all of today wearing this (in olive) and my favorite boots, and I felt real in a way I can't entirely explain. (Except I also wanted a chunky belt.) Somewhere amid my terror about what might be coming, the same woman who grabbed my hand and pulled me up toward freedom in the first Trump term was there again, except this time, I better understood that she was me. Even still, I'm going to have to keep learning that lesson.
Taken in a vacuum, this is a very strange moral. "Emily bought a dress she liked" isn't exactly a battle cry that will reverberate through the halls of power, a clarion call that will guide us to a better world. Except consider how many people in my life – people I have known well, people I've only known briefly, utter strangers on the internet, an entire political party – haven't wanted me to buy a dress I liked. And consider, then, that one of those people who was most sure I shouldn't buy that dress all those years was me. Except I did, and I looked great in it. For the first time in a long time, I remembered that self-care only works if you have a self to properly care for.
This is why I wanted to tell you the secret. Whoever you are, whatever you fear, you think there is something you are simply not strong enough for, and all I would say to that is: You cannot know until you try. Inside of you is someone who is either strong enough or angry enough or spiteful enough (take your pick; they're often the same thing) to get out of this thing alive, and that person deserves to live their best life, don't you think? Thousands upon thousands have come to understand this before you, and if you can't understand that in the abstract, perhaps you can understand it from me, the woman whose words you are reading right now. I was there. Now, I'm here, not dead yet and learning better how to be myself every day, even if I have only a handful of days left.
Know this: What those who would destroy you do not understand is that their crucible is not guaranteed to forge you into an exact replica of them. They lack the imagination you have, and they lack the spirit. What if, instead, you became someone the fire might someday consume but could not burn? What if you let yourself live? What then?
Preorder my novel! Woodworking, my debut novel, is out for preorder right now. It follows Erica Skyberg, an English teacher and recently out trans woman in Mitchell, South Dakota, who decides to start asking the only other trans woman she knows for advice. Except that woman is Abigail Hawkes, one of her high school students, who would rather do anything else. And all the while, an election looms on the horizon...
Woodworking has starred reviews from Kirkus ("pristinely characterized") and Publishers Weekly ("a must-read"). Remarkably Bright Creatures author Shelby Van Pelt calls it "an ode to authenticity and a must-read in our current times." Nevada author Imogen Binnie says it's "one of the most heartfelt, funny, and moving portraits of transition I’ve ever come across."
It's out March 4, and yes there is an audiobook coming! Preorder with the buttons below.
This week's reading music: "Badlands" (Live at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ - November 1980) by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. Paid subscribers also have access to the weekly Monday Rundown. This newsletter is written by Emily St. James and Libby Hill. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).
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