The trouble started in November when the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation announced its plan to build a privately funded, nature-themed children’s “play area” at the historically queer nude beach.

by Vivian McCall

Basil Mayhan stands at Denny Blaine Park before a tangle of Himalayan blackberries. The blackberries like to grow along the shore of Lake Washington and intermingle with native wild roses, but they’ve got to go. So does the English holly and the English ivy scaling a nearby fence bordering the park. Mayhan calls this trio the “Axis powers” as he rips a handful of leaves from the fence, executing a plan approved by the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department to replace the park’s invasive species with native plants. Besides, “It’s stupid to have a spiny plant around naked people,” he said.

Mayhan instructs the ten or so volunteers carrying dirt-covered shovels and loppers not to harm the native roses, which may be replanted elsewhere.

It’s a bright, breezy day–cold enough for the pants and long sleeves needed for crawling into the spiny brush, but warm enough that people are lounging near the water.

The summer that seemed like it may never come for Denny Blaine Park was nearly here.

The trouble started in November when the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation announced its plan to build a privately funded, nature-themed children’s “play area” at the historically queer nude beach. The department said the neighborhood didn’t have a playground within walking distance of the park, and their plan would fix that.

People went ballistic. The day news broke, thousands signed petitions demanding the City kill this plan. Activists formed Save Denny Blaine, a loose coalition of queers and naturists. Emails flooded the inboxes of public officials, and the City would decide to call the whole thing off in December after activists packed the MLK Fame Community Center with signs, slogans, and nearly 400 bodies telling the City to keep its hands–and its playgrounds–off the beach.

Absolutely nothing about the reaction was surprising.

Denny Blaine has been a gay, nude hangout for at least 40 years. It was once commonly referred to as a Dykekiki for the topless lesbians. The beach is packed during summer, and people say it’s one of the last authentically queer places left in Seattle where you can go without spending money. Like most gay beaches in the country, it’s not the crown jewel of the waterfront. That’s how queer people claimed it in the first place.

Aspen Coyle, who was hacking at a blackberry plant during our interview, remembers the first time she came to Denny Blaine, newly out as trans and six months on estrogen. She was freaked out until she heard a group of trans girls chatting about chess. They invited her to a group chat where she met her closest friends. She sees Denny Blaine as the genuine trans spot in a city that’s becoming more trans as people stream in from states where they’re no longer welcome or legally safe. (The person next to us chimes in and says, “Don’t forget about Kremwerk.”)

During public discussions about the proposed playground, queers felt the City’s plan amounted to an eviction notice with a sick twist. We’re living through a far-right crusade against transgender rights and an escalating moral panic about queer people “grooming” kids by merely existing. Building a children’s play area at Denny Blaine at this moment seemed like a trap and an attempt to subvert Seattle’s permissive nudity laws, which have allowed us to trounce around naked since 1990.

After the loud December meeting, Parks decided to sit down for several stakeholder meetings with both sides of the struggle. The Seattle Parks Foundation-affiliated Friends of Denny Blaine took one side, and neighbors who lived next to the park took the other.

They hashed out a solution to divide the park into two zones: a naked one down by the beach and a clothed one past the small parking lot. Both sides hated the plan for different reasons.

The park users thought it gave neighbors undue power when the law says nudity is okay.

The neighbors, who started a group called Denny Blaine Park for All and hired Lee Keller of The Keller Group to handle public relations, said in a statement that, in this “wait and see” period, they support guidelines that address the Park’s “serious problems” and enforce existing laws and policies so it can be a respectful place for “everyone” to enjoy.

Keller said neighbors are concerned about drug use, public indecency, garbage, traffic, and more, and they are urging the City to address those concerns. She added that their concerns do not lie with the LGBTQ community.

“Our concerns, however, ARE about lewd harassing behavior and open sex — behavior that overflows into the park and onto neighborhood streets,” she said. “… Sadly, as it stands now, the park is a public nuisance.”

At a May meeting, Parks employee Justin Hellier said neither neighbors or activists supported public sex (which is not legal anyway), but they disagreed on how often it happened. Coyle said the occasional leering creep is there to harass queer park-goers. Friends of Denny Blaine is currently seeking a City grant to fund an anti-masturbation campaign.

Parks had initially planned to present the proposed guidelines to its board on May 23, but they rescheduled the meeting for June 13. (Public comment closes tomorrow if you’re cracking open this newsprint on June 5).

At press time, it is unclear which version of the policy the board will get, but I saw evidence that at least one part of the department’s plan is advisable: an idea to install a sign informing visitors that Denny Blaine is clothing-optional.

Such a sign could be useful. In May, I witnessed one man ask his dog if he saw the puppy by the stairs. Then he looked up to see a bunch of naked bathers. He froze, turned around, and said aloud, “That was not the beach we thought it was.”

The dust is still settling on the debate, but a couple things are clear: Parks lost major trust with the community over this fiasco, and the City gave credence to the belief that poor Seattleites have less say than rich ones like Stuart Sloan, the 80-year-old businessman and philanthropist who KUOW identified as the mystery donor last month. Keller also represented Sloan and told the public radio station that he was not the only person willing to pay for the playground, and that the playground had been the City’s idea, not his.

KUOW also reported that before any plan had gone public, Sloan had texted Mayor Bruce Harrell’s private cell phone to complain about Denny Blaine. A few months later, Parks employees and Harrell’s staff met with Sloan.

Harrell maintained he didn’t know the donor’s identity, even after The Stranger asked about the two in-person meetings we discovered. The two men first met to discuss the issue in November of 2022, and later on December 9, 2023, the day after the City nixed the playground plan. In the first meeting, they apparently discussed trash and safety. In the second meeting, the Mayor wanted to personally update Sloan on “progress being made on these issues” after all the media attention. You can’t buy a public park, but you can try.

As I left the beach that day in May, a volunteer yelled with excitement. They held a tuberous nexus of roots that Mayhan called “the heart” of the blackberry bramble. Removing it is the only way to stop the plant from spreading; it’d grow back otherwise. The volunteer threw it on a growing pile, nicknaming it “Mr. Potato Head.” They cheered.

The Stranger

SassyBlack will host a reading of her new musical, Emerald Jett, on August 9 at Northwest Film Forum.

by Catherine “SassyBlack” Harris-White

When I moved to Seattle from the Big Island, Hawaii, in 1997, was 10 years old and expecting to go to school and live a life not unlike Lisa Turtle’s in Saved by the Bell. I thought I would be a cool kid. I didn’t even realize Seattle was a real place until I moved here, I thought it was just a made-up city used as a backdrop for Sleepless in Seattle. The unknown made me feel limitless.

But whoa, I was way off.

On the first day of school, I was clowned by everyone after they assumed I was a substitute teacher. Didn’t help that I was dressed like a 40-year-old and already fully developed. I stood out in all the wrong ways and wanted to flee back to homeschool.

Weird to say, but the bullying was a godsend—I worried less about being the next Lisa Turtle and instead focused my energy elsewhere, on music, theater, and writing. I would write songs and poems and make up characters with all these different personality traits. And it got me on stage at a young age. I won my first prize for a poem about Martin Luther King Jr. at age 12 and was in the ensemble every summer for a performance piece called The MAAFA Suite (later Sankofa Theatre) at the Moore. 

Kids stayed cruel—I felt like I was an oddity with my afro, low alto/tenor voice, and unique style of clothes—but their cruelty fueled my creativity. I would write in my journal about my future as a famous singer and actor and practice my signature regularly. It wasn’t long ’til I found my first little crew of weirdos who were into a lot of the same things I was. They staged annual Shakespeare in the Park performances and hung on Broadway on Capitol Hill. I was around 12 years old and I remember how exciting it was to see adults (though mostly white) out and proud. In these small circles, I discovered my attraction to not only boys but girls, too. It’s where I learned the term bisexual and I was too excited to proclaim it. Although it felt freeing, I still longed to make these realizations alongside Black kids.

By high school, I had drifted from my little friend group. I was their only Black friend and they didn’t understand when I called them out on the racist things they would say in passing about me or other Black kids. Around the age of 15, I got into activism with the Quaker organization American Service Friends Committee. Not only was it ethnically diverse, but it was also LGBTQIA+ friendly. From 15 to 19 years old, I organized, marched, and protested as part of Youth Undoing Institutionalized Racism and Queer Youth Rights.

It was wonderful to have found another safe space, but it came with its own issues. Seattle felt progressive, but I saw how much it took as a young person to make positive change in a city that was more interested in commercial growth. The form of activism I was pursuing took a lot of my energy, and at the end of my senior year of high school, I was at a crossroads: Activism or artistry? I decided to do both, but my way.

While attending Cornish College of the Arts, I still dealt with people’s ignorance about my sexuality and my Blackness, but I was keeping myself occupied with my creative pursuits. I was still acting, was in a couple of bands, and, in my senior year, formed my psychedelic, space rap jazz group THEESatisfaction with my partner at the time. We made our debut at my senior recital, and it was then that I found some of my closest friends who understood me and all my complexities.

My music career took off—THEESatisfaction played countless shows at venues like Neumo’s, the Crocodile, and Nectar, and toured North America, Europe, and China. We opened up for Erykah Badu, Big Freedia, Little Dragon, and Black Star and we signed to Sub Pop in 2011. I was in a whole new world. I knew Seattle wasn’t ready for something as experimental as two women in a relationship, rapping and singing together about being Black, being queer, and dealing with oppressive systems at large, but hell, we did it anyway. And we felt some pushback. Some people loved us but often assumed we were sisters, and some of the people who knew we were a couple hated that and tried to keep us from opportunities or mispronounce our names when we hit the stage. And after a while, there was also internal conflict. 

It was quite painful when the group officially ended in 2016. I knew it was time to do what I had journaled about as a child and launch a solo career. It was time to introduce the world to SassyBlack, the High Priestess of Psychedelic Soul & Hologram Funk. 

<a href=”https://sassyblack.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-mahogany-gold”>Ancient Mahogany Gold by SassyBlack</a>

SassyBlack was born in 2013. I deemed myself SassyBlack because the name was relatable, catchy, and raw. I could be my fullest self with this name, which became a double-edged sword, but one I wasn’t afraid to parry with. At first, it was new and rough, but I loved it because it was all me. It wasn’t until my second EP, Personal Sunlight, came out in 2015 that it really hit me. I felt a wave of energy like nothing I’d ever felt. Each project that followed spoke to my Blackness, queerness, womaness, and otherness. And with this new stage name came a flood of new ideas. I felt renewed. I returned to writing short stories and creating characters like I did as a kid, but this time it was based on my life and my travels. Especially the lessons I learned—some the hard way. SassyBlack became the first character I would bring to life, making way for Emerald Jett.

Emerald Jett’s story started as a theme song and was inspired by shows like Living Single, Broad City, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Flight of the Conchords. She was a weirdo Black girl like me but with powers. I wanted to flesh out her musical world but never had the time. In 2019, everything changed. I was in a car accident and suffered from intense neck, shoulder, and back pain, making it impossible to go on my tour for my third album, Ancient Mahogany Gold. I was devastated. I didn’t know then, but that would be my last chance at touring for years to come.

During lockdown, I got an email from the 5th Avenue Theater about an opportunity to compose for a one-woman show. There it was again, storytelling calling me in a new format. I took the gig and asked to be on the list for more opportunities like that. 

A few months later, I heard they were accepting submissions for First Draft, a musical development program that supports new plays from marginalized communities. Emerald Jett’s time had come. I knew for sure her story would be a quirky musical about someone who needed a change as desperately as I did with a sci-fi funk twist. I was accepted into the program and received guidance, funding, and script readings with a cast. It was life-changing.

I’m hosting my first public Seattle reading of Emerald Jett on August 9 at the Northwest Film Forum as part of my 10 Years of SassyBlack celebration. Producing a musical is expensive, so I’m creating new ways to bring it to life while I continue to revise the script and fundraise.

These past 10 years have been a huge shift in the way that I work, create, love, and live. Growing out of my overly excited, fast-paced self into a more aware, focused, and well-positioned artist has been exhausting. I’m still feeling the growing pains, and I don’t think those feelings will ever go away if I do it right. Through writing and composing projects like Emerald Jett, I can get to the core of my feelings and be more present. I learned to cherish my uniqueness and use it as a superpower. The things that made me an outsider also shaped my artistry and gave me the courage to be SassyBlack and, more importantly, myself.

The Emerald Jett Reading with SassyBlack is Friday, Aug 9 at Northwest Film Forum, 7 pm, $12-$15. Learn more about her upcoming projects at sassyblack.com.

The Stranger

More Is NOT Better When Dealing With Anxiety

More is not better when dealing with anxiety. Science provides a clearer path for marijuana to provide the right support.

The post More Is NOT Better When Dealing With Anxiety appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Promising drugs being developed at the UW could expand HIV treatment—if we get out of our own way.

by Vivian McCall

As Sidney Adjetey laid on an exam table at Harborview Medical Center with his T-shirt hiked up, research clinician Phoebe Bryson-Cahn examined injection sites on either side of his belly button. In April, University of Washington researchers at the UW Positive Research clinic injected Adjetey with about a teaspoon of a new and experimental long-acting HIV treatment as part of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. They’re monitoring him to learn how long this medication lasts in his body and whether it could effectively suppress the HIV if the virus had been present.

Adjetey doesn’t have HIV, nor do any of the 12 participants in Phase I of this proof-of-concept clinical drug trial. At this early stage, researchers are evaluating dosing and safety because the drug has never been used on humans before. They’ll determine efficacy in Phase II, but that could be years away.

Injectables are a thrilling trend in the field of HIV, with drugs such as Lenacapavir and Cabenuva already available on the market. Unfortunately, the rollout has been slower than physicians hoped, and barriers like the expense of these drugs keep them out of reach for many. 

This new shot combines three commonly used oral medications into one lipid-bonded nanoparticle the researchers call a “nanolozenge.” A shot of the nanolozenges could theoretically keep HIV in check for a month or longer, replacing 30 to 90 daily pills.

Dr. Rodney Ho, the principal UW researcher who developed the drug and co-founded UW’s Targeted, Long-acting and Combination Antiretroviral Therapy Program, called it an “impossible marriage” of fat- and water-soluble drugs that took years to figure out.

Named for its oblong shape and diminutive size (roughly a million times smaller than a chicken egg), the lozenges are injected beneath the skin into a fatty area like the belly. Then they travel to the lymph nodes via the bloodstream. The lozenge analogy ends with their shape, though, because they don’t just dissolve. Instead, they journey through the lymphatic system like a city bus, stopping at nodes to drop off a specific concentration of antiretroviral drugs. 

This approach targets the virus far more efficiently than daily pills, which bathe our GI tract in medication and contribute to wear and tear. Scientists have successfully developed nanoparticle drugs to treat illnesses such as leukemia, but this experiment represents a new strategy for treating HIV.

The study’s leader, Dr. Rachel Bender Ignacio, said the researchers aim to formulate and bring to market a similar drug with three other compounds–tenofovir disoproxil, lamivudine, and dolutegravir, aka TLD, the most common frontline treatment of HIV in the world. She said that an injectable version of this drug cocktail could change the lives of the 19 million people already on TLD worldwide, which works out to almost half the number of people with HIV on Earth. 

Though we may see cheaper drugs in the near future there are a number of good reasons to create alternatives to pills. Some people with HIV struggle to get pills and to take the ones they’ve got. Unstable housing situations or addiction can stymie access, and some people may be too sick to swallow. Some agricultural and migrant workers can’t access a continuous stream of medication, and pharmacies may have trouble stocking them. A daily pill can be a painful reminder that you have HIV, and traveling with pills is a hassle, comes with stigma, and can be dangerous. Also, pill fatigue is real, and some people just forget.

Over time, skipping daily meds can be fatal. In February, study participant Adjetey’s half-sister in Ghana died from a bout of typhoid fever related to her HIV infection. Not taking viral suppressant medication weakened her immune system, and the fever killed her in two days. They weren’t close, but participating in the study gives him the opportunity to honor her memory, he said. 

Even if UW’s new approach works, Dr. Bender Ignacio said the fight against HIV/AIDS will never end. Viruses mutate, and HIV is particularly “leaky,” many times craftier and mutable than the flu or COVID-19. That said, from a biomedical standpoint doctors can easily treat HIV with current tools. Patients take two or three pills to prevent “breakthroughs.” Think of a medieval city with multiple defensive walls. If one falls, more remain. The walls are sturdy and in many ways sufficient. 

What we can’t seem to figure out is the human element: poverty, homelessness, individual behavior, geographical barriers, our convoluted medical system, etc. A miracle in the lab won’t undo systemic problems. Nine million of the 39 million people with HIV are not virologically suppressed. In the US, a third of people with HIV don’t have the medications they need, and they are often our society’s most vulnerable people. 

Dr. Monica Gandhi, who teaches medicine at University of California – San Francisco and who directs San Francisco’s “Ward 86” HIV clinic, said HIV treatment reached a point of stagnation six years ago after the advent of Biktarvy, a complete, once daily HIV regimen that included an integrase-inhibitor, which targets an enzyme HIV uses to replicate. It should be easy to take one pill, but it isn’t for everyone, and that’s why long-acting treatments are all clinicians like Dr. Gandhi can talk about now. 

She works with HIV-positive people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. When Cabenuva first entered the market, clinicians hesitated to prescribe it to patients who took pills inconsistently. Doctors worried these patients would miss injection appointments and expose the HIV virus in their bodies to trailing levels of the medication, pushing the virus toward drug-resistant mutations.

But Dr. Gandhi’s patients showed up, and experiencing viral suppression for the first time motivated them to return. The clinic did not have to chase people down like they thought they might. Dr. Gandhi explained that because people with the highest viral loads are more likely to transmit HIV, treating them with the best drugs we have available should be a priority if we hope to end the epidemic. Now 290 people, or 10% of her clinic, are on long-acting medications.

The director of King County’s sexual health clinic Dr. Matthew Golden, said their unpublished randomized control trial also showed that injectables worked better than pills for patients facing homelessness, poverty, and drug-addiction. Golden said that incentives for study participants likely helped, and if we were smart, our public health system would offer benefits for regular treatment, too.

If UW’s drug ever hits the market, that goal could be even easier to achieve. UW’s shot has the potential to be cheaper and more widely available than any injectable we have now. If or when that happens depends on what researchers find in the lab and whether funders come along, cash in hand. Science is expensive.

The Stranger

Big gay cities like ours change, and so do their gayborhoods.

by Rich Smith

Seattle’s gayborhood, located on Capitol Hill spiritually if increasingly less so demographically, certainly isn’t what it used to be in the early 2010s, which wasn’t what it used to be in the early ‘00s, which definitely wasn’t what it used to be in the ‘90s, or the ‘80s, or the ‘70s. And before that, the gayborhood wasn’t even on Capitol Hill! It was in Pioneer Square. And how dare we forget about the lesbians of the University District in the ‘70s–we’d never, and we won’t start now!

The point is that big gay cities like ours change, and so do their gayborhoods. Rather than dwell on its past for the 50th anniversary of Seattle Pride, this year I wanted help envisioning its future. So I asked five bright brains with connections to the neighborhood to look into their crystal balls. Please allow me to introduce them.

Andrew Grant Houston is an architect and urban designer who runs House Cosmopolitan, an innovative architecture and design firm. Joey Burgess runs many of the Hill’s growing and foundational institutions, including The Cuff Complex, Queer/Bar, Grims, and Elliott Bay Book Company. Among many other things, Cynthia Brothers founded Vanishing Seattle, a media project that documents the city’s fading cultural institutions. Manish Chalana is an associate professor in the University of Washington’s Urban Design and Planning department. Yes Segura founded Smash the Box, an urban planning and design firm.

The Seattle Times reports that the LGBTQ+ population of Seattle is dropping but still pretty strong–do you think Capitol Hill will still be seen as the gayborhood in 2074? If not, where do you think the next one will be?

Andrew Grant Houston: Yes, unless by an act of God we all become rich and join the rest of the homo homeowners who are building up some cool communities in the South End and White Center. Symbolically, Capitol Hill will always be the gayborhood, but if we want to ensure the neighborhood stays queer in truth and not just in name, then we need to provide more housing options for people in all walks of life—especially those who are a part of our nightlife community. The dual-income dog daddies and the badass enby bartenders both deserve to live here in housing that works for their lifestyles and budgets.

Joey Burgess: I think the Hill will forever be the queer bedrock of Seattle. In a perfect Seattle, though, every neighborhood would have queer bars. Imagine a bunch of queer waterholes becoming as common as your neighborhood corner store–that would be a dreamy future.

Cynthia Brothers: As much as I would love for Capitol Hill to retain a strong, unapologetically queer character, based on the way things have been going I think there’s a huge risk that queer residents, businesses, and cultural and subversive spaces could be displaced to cater to more hetero, mainstream, and economically dominant tastes by 50 years or much earlier … unless there’s some political and financial interventions from City leaders to supplement the efforts of the LGBTQ+ community to maintain their presence. Rainbow crosswalks may last 50 years, but if queer culture isn’t embedded in the neighborhood anymore, they’ll be more a memorial than an affirmation.

Manish Chalana: Seattle’s gayborhood has shifted from Pioneer Square to Denny Triangle and then to Capitol Hill, so another move isn’t out of the question. However, Capitol Hill now feels deeply established. While multiple queer districts are likely to emerge (as they already are), Capitol Hill will remain the mothership.

Yes Segura: Give me a second as I scream this into the void: RENT SHOULD NOT BE THIS HIGH! Looking at how America has treated queer landmarks like Stonewall … No, I don’t think Capitol Hill will be the queerborhood then. But, at the same time, I like to think that by then everyone will realize that they are queer.

Do you think the Hill will still serve as the center of the city’s nightlife in 50 years? Which venues, shops, and restaurants do you think will still be around?

AGH: I hope we’re not! Yes, gay clubs play great music, but I’d love to see some more clubs across Seattle because density for housing is great but for dancefloors it is not. As for other spaces, what I hope will be around here again is a big gay coffee shop. Losing both Gaybucks (I know) and Kaladi means we don’t have a larger community gathering space the way we used to.

JB: Out of all the businesses on the Hill … I hope to see The Wildrose open, alive, and thriving when I’m 91. I hope that my husband and I can take our 54 and 52-year-old daughters to Taco Tuesday and play some Indigo Girls on a vinyl jukebox. Maybe after we can head over to Elliott Bay Books and toast to its 100-year anniversary?  Fingers crossed.      

CB: I think as long as Capitol Hill continues to attract a mix of younger folks, bars, restaurants, and businesses, then it will be a nightlife “hot spot”—for better or worse. The question is what that nightlife will look like, and who it is for. It’s wild to think that Neumos is one of a very small handful of live music venues left in an area once teeming with clubs and musicians (so I’m guessing Neumos, as a heavy-hitter, will still be around). I’d be happy to see longtime legendary places like Wildrose, Pony, Neighbours, The Eagle, Club Z, Harry’s Bar, The Crescent Lounge, Madison Pub, The Mercury, City Market, CC’s, Century Ballroom, Trendy Wendy, Elliott Bay, and DeLuxe still around. Plus, it’s heartening to see new clubs like Massive resurface/reclaim space (RIP R Place). Also, more gloryholes, please. A Seattle without gloryholes is certainly not one I want to live in.

MC: Yes, mostly, but other neighborhoods will continue to become “more gay.” West Seattle and White Center will be in full competition by then. I mostly hang out in Diesel and CC’s, so I hope they’ll still be around. But honestly, I bet it’ll be Club Z—that place seems like it could survive Armageddon!

YS: For sure the Hill will be the center of nightlife in 50 years–as long as it continues with the density of its restaurants, bars, and its Arts District. Honestly I would like for all of these places to still be up, though what the neighborhood needs is more local Queer Transgender + BIPOC-owned spaces. PERIOD.

Do you think the housing will be denser, or abandoned, or pretty much look the same as it does now?

AGH: Definitely denser. I expect a high-rise tower or two next to the current light-rail station, though hopefully in less monochrome motifs. I’d also love to see a balance of building heights and public space akin to another global gayborhood, Le Marais. There, public cruising–aka walking around at all hours of the day and night–is prioritized over space for cars.

JB: Hopefully much denser, with residential and commercial rent control in place.

CB: I’d guess denser; doesn’t seem like it’s been slowing down in the last 20 years.

MC: Denser, probably; affordable, probably not. Sure, US cities experienced a big population decline once, as they went through deindustrialization and suburbanization. But my money is safe betting on a city like Seattle to keep on growing in the long term. And if the city’s growing, then the inner core is growing in all but the weirdest of times. And who knows—by then maybe there’ll even be a second light rail station in Capitol Hill.

YS: How we assess the value of property needs to be dismantled. I’ll leave it at that.

Do you think Pike/Pine will ever become pedestrianized, like a Barcelona-style superblock? Do you think it should be?

AGH: Yes and yes. One motto to keep in mind in Seattle is “never say never:” whether by organizing or a fluke, some changes in the city happen when you least expect. Funnily enough, as part of the comprehensive plan the City has to create a subarea plan for Capitol Hill/First Hill, which will be an opportunity in the next year to push for the superblock to happen.

JB: In a dreamworld this would be heavenly. I believe a new generation of leadership in local politics might be up for this challenge one day in the not-so-distant future.

CB: I can see urban planners here trying to jump on that. Hopefully not implementing them in a way that would exacerbate gentrification and already stark income divides, which is one of the criticisms of superblocks.

MC: Not Barcelona-style superblock morphology per se, but Pike/Pine’s emerging urban form could strive to embrace principles of superblock planning, emphasizing livability shaped not just by density, safety, and walkability, but also by equity and social justice.

YS: We should pedestrianize Pike/Pine, but we should also pedestrianize the same Cap Hill pocket areas that temporarily close off streets for events. For example, On the Block: 2nd Saturdays closes off 11th Avenue and E. Pike Street/E. Pine Street. CLOSE IT OFF. Capitol Hill Pride closes off Broadway from Roy to John. CLOSE IT OFF. There are many more examples in the neighborhood. This outdated mindset that we must have cars on every street is one that is draconian and degrades society’s health. Other countries have figured it out, why can’t we?

Today I still occasionally see the jester skipping through the streets, the colorful wizard on walks, and Mohammad walking the streets selling his bundle of roses. What sort of characters do you imagine on the streets of Capitol Hill in 2074?

AGH: These three are icons, so it’s hard to guess, but our next characters will also be unique. I could imagine a bear furry that sells smoked salmon, a daylight drag queen doing impromptu numbers on street corners, or someone moonwalking up Broadway in a spacesuit. In short, they’ll be queer and out of this world.

JB: I imagine Bosco will be occasionally spotted in the corridor looking forever young and forever gorgeous, living by the words of Lisle Von Rhuman, “This is life’s ultimate cruelty. It offers us a taste of youth and vitality, and then it makes us witness our own decay.”

CB: I love the Skipping Jestress and Mohammed! Those sightings make me happy. In 2074 Capitol Hill, there might be some kooky “characters” that are actually AI-generated hologram personas reciting the classifieds of The Stranger issues from the 1990s. But if it was a hologram of Slats, Mama Tits, or Lady Krishna, I could get into it.

MC: Crazy fringe people who dare to explore the urban fabric in front of them instead of keeping their cerebrally implanted iPhone 669s on all of the time. Someone without any tattoos? Community robots in rainbow underwear doubling as traffic police?

YS: I imagine by then we will have flying cars that will help us crusty elder millennials to be out and about. Those free-spirited characters will both be in their flying cars and down on earth being themselves. For real though, where are our flying cars?!

The Stranger

That Stranger article gives an incomplete impression of who I am in large part because of how I represented who I was when Herzog interviewed me.

by Ky Schevers

Originally published in Reclaiming Trans.

Back when I was still a detrans woman, I was interviewed a few times by journalists for articles on detransitioning. An article in The Stranger written by Katie Herzog drew the most attention and the strongest reactions. Many trans people and their allies found the article offensive and transphobic, and they reacted to it in outrage. Many also wrote critical responses.

That Stranger article gives an incomplete impression of who I am in large part because of how I represented who I was when Herzog interviewed me. Now I want to uncover the parts of my life that I kept hidden at the time, and to discuss the deception I was engaging in but unaware of.

In doing so I do not mean to excuse my actions or argue that my lack of awareness made them any less harmful. I believe it’s important for people to know my state of mind; I was more a cult member than a con artist.

In the months before the interview, there were many signs that my detransition wasn’t working out, but I was keeping all of that almost entirely to myself. I’d been living as a detrans woman and using “alternative treatments” to cope with dysphoria for around four years at that point. When I look back on my journals from that time, I find myself talking about how I still had trouble relating to my female body; it still felt weird, and I felt uncomfortable with my breasts and reproductive parts in particular. I could accept that I had those body parts, but it took work to do so, and I didn’t feel especially positive about them or connected to them. I also talked about wanting a cock and how that seemed more appealing than having a cunt. In one journal entry, I wrote that I still wanted a male body on some level and “[i]f I woke up with a male body, I think I’d be ok with that as long as it wasn’t radically different, just the male version of my current body.”

I wrote about how I still felt like a dude sometimes, like a kind of “female man.” I talked about how I “became a woman” when I detransitioned and about how much work that involved.

I wrote about how I found myself wishing that I had gotten more out of detransitioning than I actually did, how I had wanted it to fix more problems in my life.

I talked about how “I made myself into a lesbian feminist,” how I had really wanted learning to accept myself as a woman to heal me and make me whole, and it just hadn’t lived up to my expectations. Some of it helped me heal from past trauma, but not as much I was hoping it would, and I felt let down.

I talked about how hard and stressful it was to live as a woman. I was beginning to question both my motives for detransitioning and just how much it had helped me.

I wrote about how both my detransition and conversion to radical feminism now looked like they were at least partially a response to conflict and trauma I had experienced in a radical queer collective house I used to live in. I talked about how I had joined the radical feminist community because of how I’d been hurt in the radical queer community. I’d been looking for a better, safer place to belong. That’s not what I’d found, not at all. In fact, I found the same kind of hurtful behavior and abusive people in the radical feminist scene.

I still had a very critical view of transitioning and tended to see trans identity as a response to living in patriarchy, but I was growing increasingly frustrated with the way most radical feminists viewed trans people and transitioning. I was questioning more and developing my own views based on my experiences and research into the history of trans people and medical transition. I was fed up with how cruel many radical feminists were towards trans people, how they talked about transitioned bodies with disgust, and how so many of them treated trans people as if they were freakish and inferior. I was opening up to the idea that for some people being trans was the most authentic way to exist in this present society, and that transitioning actually helped some people, though I still worried a lot about people being pushed to transition or to identify as trans.

This thinking marked a big shift for someone who had previously believed that all trans identity was a harmful coping mechanism, and that transition was inherently harmful, a person who wanted to stop as many people as possible from transitioning and to encourage people to detransition or desist. I didn’t get to believing in transphobic ideology all at once, and I couldn’t disengage from it all at once, either. It was a long process that took years to fully unfold.

At the time, I was conducting research for a book on “female gender dysphoria” that I was planning to write. I wanted to talk about gender dysphoria in female-assigned people as a result of life under patriarchy and discuss the different ways people managed this dysphoria.

When I began my research, I saw both medical transition and radical feminism as ways to respond to “female gender dysphoria,” the first being contaminated by false consciousness while the latter got to the true root of the problem.

My views ended up shifting dramatically over the course of my research. What I learned about the history of trans peoples’ interactions with medical professionals ended up challenging a lot of my beliefs, but initially I twisted what I read to fit my pre-existing theories and eagerly shared my “findings” with others, offering up “proof” to back up the radical feminist interpretation of transmasculinity and transition.

It was hard for me to totally break free from radical feminist ideology, in large part because of the kind of people I was spending most of my time with. During that period of my life, I lived in the East Bay, where I participated in a community of transphobic radical feminist lesbians, a few of whom were also detrans or re-identified. I was dating and living with a member of this community.

While hanging out among ourselves, the other younger members of this scene and I would jokingly refer to ourselves and to each other as “TERFs”, reclaiming a word we viewed as a slur. Many of us got a kick out of having a secret life in a subculture outsiders (correctly) viewed as a hate group.

We thought such people were ridiculous and misogynistic for seeing us as hateful, and we frequently mocked them, acting as if they were ignorant, misled and/or overly sensitive. We would gather at a lesbian-owned coffee shop and complain about how trans activists were a threat to lesbian culture, talk about dangerous and disgusting “autogynephiles” trying to infiltrate “female-only” spaces, and the social forces supposedly pushing lesbians to “dis-identify from femaleness” and identify as trans.

Generally, we were much more sympathetic towards transmasculine people than we were towards transfeminine people. We were especially harsh and hateful towards trans lesbians and other transfeminine people who were attracted to women. We also hung out with older lesbians, who were happy to find younger dykes who shared their particular transphobic interpretation of lesbian feminism. I recall one of these older women talking about how Big Pharma was funding the trans movement and tricking butch dykes, femmy gay men, and other gender nonconforming people into transitioning.

I had made the choice to move to a city with a radical lesbian feminist subculture and attempted to live up to my separatist views and values. I spent years working with other women to build the detransitioned women’s community and had become an influential detrans writer and activist. One of my essays had been published in an anti-trans anthology called Female Erasure, alongside influential transphobic thinkers such as Cathy Brennen, Sheila Jeffreys, Leirre Keith, Jennifer Bilek, and Gallus Mag.

I had plunged into the life I thought I wanted, but it didn’t seem to be working. Nevertheless, I kept my doubts, questions, and disillusionment hidden inside my head and in my journals. In private, I wrote out my criticisms and disillusionment with radical feminism, but among my friends I still voiced the same concerns about trans people, and I still made the same arguments. I went back and forth between acknowledging that my detransition hadn’t really worked and struggling to make it work. I switched back and forth between recognizing that I still found much in common with trans men to writing out all the reasons I couldn’t identify as trans. I tried to treat my dysphoria using the methods I’d promoted for years, doing my best to “accept myself as a woman” because I couldn’t see how I could give it up at this point. My consciousness was fractured into the parts that knew the truth and the parts that still wanted to uphold the ideology I’d bought into. There was the persona I’d created–that of a detransitioned radical lesbian feminist–and there was a messier reality that I tried to keep hidden, even from myself.

I was a trans person who spent most of my time with lesbians who didn’t believe trans people existed and didn’t want them to exist, who treated trans people as a threat to their own existence.

To participate in this community, I had to deny my own feelings, hide many of my thoughts, and distort much of my reality. I had to pretend that I wasn’t who I was every single day. There was no way to be a part of this group without engaging in constant deception. My social life depended on it. This is who I was, and this is what my life was like when Herzog interviewed me.

On the day of the interview, before my phone call with her, I wrote in my journal:

“I have a phone interview with a journalist this afternoon. Should be interesting. Not totally sure I’m the person to do it because I’m having doubts if I really count as a detransitioned woman anymore. I detransitioned, that’s true. Am I sticking with that though? Did I just need to try out living as a woman because I didn’t get the chance to before? I don’t think I need to make anymore changes to my body. I’m also not sure I’d really be happy living full-time as a man. I probably am more in-between than anything but I have a lot of trouble accepting that. I don’t know why I’m like this but I’ve been this way for most of my life now. Able to see myself as a woman or a man. ”

I kept these feelings hidden just as I was hiding so much else. I was still very invested in the role I’d performed as a creator and representative of the detransitioned women’s community.

Once the interview actually happened, I found it easy to slip back into the role I’d perfected by that point. I’d given multiple workshops, written hundreds of pages of blog posts, made videos, and talked to numerous people about what it meant to be a detransitioned woman. I had my story down, and I knew which parts to emphasize. I believed in the story I was telling and thought I was doing important work.

I spoke not only for myself but for my community. Part of my job was to represent detransitioned women and make our stories visible to others. I had ideas I wanted to communicate, but I was largely focused on talking about my lived experience. I wanted other detransitioned women to know they weren’t alone. I wanted people to see that living as a detransitioned woman was possible, to make us seem like real people, not something theoretical or a scare story. I don’t think all my intentions were bad, and I do think greater visibility would help detrans people.

My intentions, however good, don’t change the fact that my understanding of myself was grounded in transphobic ideology and was a distortion of my own reality. I was telling the story I thought should be my truth, not actually describing my reality. There’s a lot I used to believe about my own life that I now see as a manifestation of self-hatred, and I worry about the impact my story could’ve had on other people.

In the article for The Stranger, Herzog, for instance, describes me as being merely sympathetic to radical feminism. In reality, I was far more of a radical feminist than I came off in the article, and I think Herzog inaccurately reflects the relationship between the detransitioned women’s community I belonged to and radical feminism. She mentions non-detrans radical feminists trying to use our stories, but she didn’t discuss how many detransitioned women themselves use their experiences to advance transphobic radical feminism. Many detrans women I knew were committed radical feminists who believed all trans identity was rooted in internalized misogyny and trauma. We didn’t like it when other radical feminists objectified us or treated us primarily as a way to win arguments with trans people, but we shared many of their views and political goals.

The way Herzog described my politics and the relationship between the detransitioned women’s community and radical feminism is partially a result of how I represented myself when she interviewed me. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I intentionally moderated my views when talking to most people outside of the radical feminist subculture I belonged to. My views were in the process of changing, and I had gotten a lot more open-minded about transitioning and trans people. At the same time, I was still hanging out with self-identified TERFs, and I held a lot of transphobic beliefs.

I can’t imagine that I was entirely forthright with all my views. I focused largely on promoting the idea that trans identity and transitioning could be a manifestation of trauma, dissociation, and internalized misogyny, and I used my story as a way to demonstrate that. I framed what I was doing as working for detransitioned, re-identified, and dysphoric women instead of against trans people. I didn’t see myself as being dishonest when I hid my more extreme views, I saw myself as being practical. I saw most people as being unready for “the truth,” and there were serious consequences to openly calling into question the entire notion of trans identity, and I wanted to avoid that.

I presented Herzog with a more moderate version of my detrans radical feminist persona, completely omitting my more transphobic views and my connections to anti-trans lesbian feminists as well as my raging dysphoria and my disappointment with womanhood. I slipped into the character I’d perfected and forgot about the feelings and doubts I struggled with. I put the well-being of the detrans women’s community ahead of describing the real details of my life. I didn’t even feel like a woman when I gave that interview, but I felt like I had to be one anyways or I would be letting down my whole community.

The story I told to The Stranger was a fabrication, one that I believed in and fought for. It was a story I got trapped in for years, one that swallowed up my actual life. I can’t say it’s entirely false–after all, it includes events from life that did indeed happen, but I don’t believe in this story anymore, and I don’t want it overshadowing my life. It confined and trapped me for years, and I’m concerned about the impact that it had on others.

I’m concerned the story I told could’ve led other trans people to deny or distort themselves. I fear that it encouraged cis people to dismiss trans peoples’ identities or reinforced their transphobia. I was a trans person with a distorted view of myself, magnifying that and projecting it into the larger culture, inflicting my own wounds on other trans people. I am deeply sorry for any suffering I have caused others. I am sorry for participating in transphobic subcultures and engaging in what I now see as noxious and hateful behavior.

I can’t change the past, but I can describe what my life was actually like at the time and make visible the parts I left out or hid. I want people to know that detransitioning didn’t work for me, that it stopped working for me even as I was presenting myself as if it had. I want people to know that I belonged to transphobic communities that encouraged me to deceive myself and others. I want people to know that journalists can be fooled when they hear a story that lines up with what they may be expecting to find. So many people who question trans identities take the stories of detrans people  at face value, never considering that there could be more to them than meets the eye.

I’m a trans person who converted to a transphobic ideology, surrounded myself with transphobic people and worked against my own people. I struggle with grief and regret over many of the choices I’ve made.

I commit myself now to be as honest as I can be. I can’t know how my views, feelings, and perspectives will change over time but I can do my best to represent my life and my beliefs as openly and clearly as possible.

Writing about that particular time in my past is difficult because I had a lot of contradictory parts and impulses pulling me in different directions. I can remember what it was like, but I worry others will find my descriptions of it confusing. That time in my life was confusing to live through,  and it’s surreal to look back on. I read my old journals and can’t imagine that I shared many of these thoughts and feelings with the lesbians I was friends with. I didn’t even share most of them with my partner at the time. I knew I kept a lot from other people, but it’s intense to realize just how much.

At the same time, it’s a relief to write about this now. Back then, I existed in so many different pieces. I can finally bring all the parts together, connect them to create a more honest description of my past, and make myself whole. 

The Stranger