Joyful Birthday Reflections!

Today's my birthday and there's SO MUCH GOOD NEWS TO CELEBRATE!

Hey!! There are a lot of new people here! As of a few days ago we crossed the threshold of 14,000 subscribers. I am so completely humbled by the trust you all have put in me to bring you joy, week after week. I’m SO glad you’re here!

This week and next, I’m taking a bit of time to travel for the Jewish High Holidays (Shana Tovah to all the lovely jews here!!), for St. Louis Pride (come say hi to me in Tower Grove!!) and for my birthday! This week’s newsletter is going to be a combined Good News Roundup and a reflection on what it means to me to get another year older as a trans person.

Since it’s my birthday, I’m doing a special discount for annual subscriptions until the end of the month! As a reminder, half of all new subscriber revenue will be donated to PROMO Missouri to support their amazing work on the frontlines of trans rights.

Want to know how old I am? I wonder if that discount link will have any revealing information 👀

My Top Good Queer News Stories!

• A judge in Rhode Island has just ruled that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is not allowed to rescind or deny grants based solely on “promotion of gender ideology” after being sued by the ACLU on behalf of multiple queer theater groups. This is a HUGE win for queer theater, artists, and freedom of speech! (Playbill.com)

• This November, a fantastic and queer-led organization called PregnantTogether is hosting TOGETHER: A Queer Family Building Conference, the first virtual summit designed exclusively for LGBTQ+ families, solo parents, and the professionals who support them.

• Gordon Guyatt, one of the creators of the concept of “Evidence Based Medicine” and one of the most high-profile faces of the movement to ban gender affirming care, has come out with a public statement disavowing the use of his research to advocate for bans on care. His full public support for gender affirming care for transgender youth is causing a major meltdown in the anti-trans movement, and hopefully will be an opportunity for some folks to expand their perspectives and change their minds! Read the full letter and follow-up interview with him in Mother Jones.

• Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) have filed a bipartisan bill to restore and protect funding to the 988 suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth. (The Advocate)

• If you need a little extra hope in the idea that people can and do decide to change and grow to support their loved ones, check out

  Uncloseted Media
  reporting on an evangelical pastor learning to support his trans daughter!

• A group of transgender patients in Pennsylvania are suing UPMC for terminating gender affirming care treatments for patients under 19 years old! (Pittsburgh NPR)

  “There is no federal law banning gender-affirming care and there’s no law in Pennsylvania banning this care, We do have a law in Pennsylvania that prohibits places like hospitals from discriminating and UPMC is doing that.” - Elizabeth Lester-Abdalla of the Women’s Law Project

Check out this awesome video from a coalition of State Attorney Generals letting trans youth know: we have your back!

Also, a dear, dear friend of mine (who is trans in a very red state) is so close to meeting her gofundme goal for leaving the country and reuniting with her spouse, who lives in Ireland. It would be the best birthday present of all if y’all could help me help her meet her goal :)

Birthday Reflections: Back to the Start

Transitioning as a teenager in small town Connecticut a decade ago was challenging, as you might expect. In order to understand the joy behind my reflections today, it’s important that you know about the core of these challenges. I think the internet certainly isn’t lacking for posts about Sad Trans Teens™, so I’ll keep this part short.

As a trans kid who had never seen a trans adult before, I didn’t think it was possible for me to grow up. Every moment, even the joyful ones, felt borrowed at best and doomed at worst. So why would I be particularly invested in staying alive? Don’t get me wrong: I was much happier than I was before I came out when I was decidedly not interested in staying alive, but I didn’t have the tools to genuinely envision a future after high school or college.

With my future uncertain, I turned all my focus on the present. I grabbed on to every moment I could to find reasons to smile, to play, to laugh. Even the most terrible situations I found myself in were quickly turned into a rousing stand-up comedy set for my friends the next day.

If I didn’t have many dreams for the future, that also meant that I didn’t have anything to gain by holding back. I made a practice of telling my friends how much I love them at the end of every phone call, and I knew that if I had limited time I wanted to use it to experience and share as much love as possible.

A photo shoot that a friend held for me in high school. I pulled together the handsomest outfit I could think of, snap buttons and all.

Year after year, I surprised myself by continuing to live, every year adding on to the proof that I might be able to stick around. The more of life I got to experience, the more attached I became to wanting to live. Slowly, detached thoughts of “I wonder if I’ll make it to next year” became a hopeful cry: “I’m not done yet”.

I graduated and moved halfway across the country to live with my partner in Missouri, and then the anti-trans legislative panic came into full swing. Then in 2024, the election did not go the way we hoped and these attacks seemed to grow exponentially.

This brought many moments of doubt and fear along with it. In those moments, I had to choose to want to stay alive. And I did. Every day, I made that choice. As I got more involved with advocacy, built a stronger community, and found a fantastic therapist, I came to realize something very important:

Joy is not a destination you can arrive at, nor is it a one-time reward you can earn. Joy is a choice you have to make every day. Joy is a muscle that needs training and recovery.

The doubts didn’t go away. At least, not completely. As a trans person, I’ll always need to be aware of my safety and the threats against my community. But every day, I decide that I want stay alive, and that I want to continue to fill my world with love for the people around me. I decide to look for reasons to be joyful in my life and in my community. I still think of my time as precious, but now instead of viewing it as borrowed or stolen, I think of it as a gift.

A picture of me and my wife at our wedding in 2023. How much more joyful can you get?

You might be thinking: ok Ben, cool it with the homegoods block-print cliches. But can you blame me for being a little corny?

I’ve been out for over ten years. For half that time, I’ve been hearing people say things like: “you’re the oldest trans person I’ve ever met”. I’ve even been called a “trans elder”. Now, I’m not going to tell you how old I am, but I know you’ve probably done enough math by now to be able to tell that I should be nobody’s elder.

Yes, I know that there have been trans people for as long as there have been people on this planet, but so many of those stories have been cut short or erased from history books and TV shows. So many of us spend years coming to grips with the possibility that there isn’t anything out there for us because we’ve never seen it before.

But staring down the barrel of that possibility, I wake up every day and choose to become the person I wished I could have seen so that others can see me and have a few more ideas for their own dreams. I’m so lucky that I’ve been able to build a life centered around being that person, and that I get to fight every single day to build a world where that’s true for as many others as possible. I dream of a world where we all get to grow up, find safety, and find love.

If you like these reflections and want to think a bit more about how to apply them to your life and your own advocacy, I highly recommend checking out this article I wrote a few months ago:

If you know someone who could benefit from a bit more hope, I’d love it if you could share this with them. If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, I’d love it if you stuck around!