Michael Scott Monje Jr.'s Blog

TW: Rape, CSA, Internalized Guilt

It’s that time of year again. When I was raped, it was not what you normally expect. I wasn’t penetrated. I was forced to penetrate. For a trans woman, that can be worse. I wasn’t on HRT yet, but I was out and I was presenting.

I’m not a “good” rape victim. That’s why I waited almost a week to tell anyone, and it’s why I didn’t tell anyone how it happened for almost six months. I am, if anything, the straw victim that most rape apologists look for. I not only...

TW: Abusive relationships, dysphoria, transphobic language, internalized transphobia, coming out terror, sexual abuse, dissociative identity disorder

This post is going to piss a lot of people off, but I have been needing to talk about this for a while. The issue started to burn under my skin about two years ago around National Coming Out Day, which is also the anniversary of my first coming out about being trans to someone other than my partner. It happened 5 years ago this year, and I told...

This past week, I have seen some really shitty things being said about trans people in general and trans women in particular. Amid all of it, I saw something that I didn’t expect to see after the community tried so hard to put it to bed, and that was the revival of the “socialized as a woman”/”socialized as female” trope. For those of you who don’t understand the shorthand, I’m referring to the phenomenon whereby bigots like trans exclusive radical feminists (TERFs) dismiss trans women for no...

There are two dominant narratives that one tends to find when reading memoirs and blogs about transgender experiences, especially those of trans women. One is a narrative of confusion and questioning, one that explains the sometimes-long trip to coming out in terms of having to realize, against all cultural expectations, that your body is not the one conventionally assigned your gender, and vice versa. Often, people who invoke this confusion talk about not even knowing transition was an optio...

When I first began writing about Clay Dillon more than eight years ago, I began with a novel that has yet to see the light of day, one that had Clay depicted as a lost, horny 14 year old stealing pornography and smoking anything he could get his hands on to deaden the pain of his existence. It’s good that novel never saw the light, because I was still grappling with talking to myself about many of the same obstacles that Clay was unable to perceive in the manuscript.

While that collision in t...

I’ve been out as bisexual/Queer (depending on my company and the makeup of my system host) since I was a teenager. When I came out, most of my friends told me flat out that it was a phase. My girlfriend threatened to break up with me if I didn’t recant. My father’s violently homophobic rhetoric around the house kept me from even trying there. It was a mess. It forced me back into the closet, and coupled with the policing I was starting to receive as I branched out into skirts and women’s wear...

I haven’t written much in a while. I spent a lot of time sick after my burst of energy that led to a few posts in April, and the fact that my living situation and family situations are in flux didn’t help me spare the energy to stay caught up on the blog. One of the things that I did that took so much energy was wading through Mother’s Day. To give you an idea how traumatic it is, I’m just now able to write about it after having processed it all.

One of the things that happened that weekend w...

During the time when I retreated from my gender, I lost touch with a lot of the things that helped me keep my head above water as a young trans girl. One of them, Ranma 1/2, has come back around to me recently as a Hulu recommendation. As I’ve been working my way through a lot of the old scripts I picked up when I was still hiding and I’ve worked to get back to a mode that is sustainable as a disabled woman and a trans girl who spent a long part of her adult life on the other side of a dissoc...

I don’t hate you, anymore. I don’t spend my nights imagining what my life would be like if only you died, and I no longer fantasize about having a family, let alone having a family healed of the rifts created by your convictions and schemes. I no longer believe you are purposefully torturing me, or that you secretly knew what was happening when I was 15 and I started dressing in leather skirts and eschewing sleeves.

I don’t believe you were capable of understanding that when you stroked my ha...

Note: This takes place after the short story “Firewall,” which appeared in Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber – Clay

On Another Planet, Athena Typed:

Monday sits at her computer, penning another Kink Talk column as she tries to find a way to discuss the process of exorcism in terms that her readers would find sufficiently metaphorical. After thinking and stopping for a half hour, she finally settled for:

All the explanations in the world would not convince people who have no sense for the unseen tha...