Author: Kieryn Darkwater

I meant to write a retrospective before my birthday, but 2018 has been one hell of a year already, let me tell you. I got distracted going through my instagram account and watching the story of the last seven or so years unfold in the archives. I look so radically different now than I did…

I’ve been putting off writing for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why. Some of it is probably just burnout and exhaustion from school, processing a lot of the things that happened and got stepped on over the last semester that I didn’t have time to get to. I survived my first semester though! I…

I feel like I’m mourning/saying goodbye to a part of me that doesn’t need to exist anymore. My body isn’t familiar on the outside anymore, I don’t have hips, or a waist, or cleavage. I get sir’d and he’d more often than not – the pharmacy actually put me down as male in their system?…

I’ve started the process of getting a hysterectomy and let me tell you, has it been a rollercoaster. Apparently complete hysterectomies are somehow not part of trans surgeries. So my Doctor got me a referral to a clinic that does Gender Confirmation Surgeries, but they don’t offer 3D Printer de-embedding. They referred me to someone…

When I started this semester I knew that C/PTSD was something that counted as a disability that I could get help for on campus. I didn’t (still don’t) know exactly what the Disability Services Dept. could do to help, but I was going into specifically a non-emotional-labor intensive program in hopes to avoid the obvious…

There’s a lot of interesting politics at Laney right now. The Oakland A’s want to build a new stadium on land owned by the Peralta school district. Much of the faculty and staff at Laney are actively against the project. On it’s face, I don’t really care about the A’s stadium or understand why they…

School has stepped on a lot more things than I thought it would. Depression has been really strong this week, things build. There’s a really steep social learning curve I wasn’t prepared for. I don’t know how school settings work – I didn’t know how to pass things forwards and backwards until the first week…

It’s been almost exactly a year since returning from Burning Man. I learned a lot about myself in Black Rock City. I learned that I’m strong, capable, and so very very very trans. I had felt reserved about being more masculine for some time before becoming one with the playa last summer. I had been…

I’ve noticed myself try to be quieter as I’ve started becoming more visibly masculine. When people read me as male I feel like suddenly (in the feminist & progressive discourse spaces I inhabit) I no longer have a voice worth listening to. It’s difficult to balance the way feminist discourse at large tries to get…

I’ve been coming home from school every day this week kind of struck by how prepared I am for college despite never being in a classroom setting for ~8 hrs/day before. I hadn’t thought about how fighting tooth and nail for my education, and seeing it through myself, and teaching myself through high school would…