(Im)perfection

People, heroes, and human failure

Foreword: This is not a typical Stained Glass Woman article. And my therapist is going to have an absolute field day with it, I’m sure.

Cut me in half, and I'll bleed ink.

Words have always been my life's blood. I was reading chapter books by the second grade, and still have tender memories of marching to the school library, little legs in lockstep, to check out Ursula K. LeGuin’s Catwings for the ninth time, as the elderly librarian smiled down at me, crow's feet crinkling the corners of her eyes. By the time I was in middle school, I was devouring entire novels in a day, or two at the outside, and my parents finally had to put their feet down at the sheer volume of trips to the bookstore and library I was begging for once I found Ranma 1/2. A stack for those manga would last me maybe a day or two, and then it'd be back to the bookstore for more.

So, I did what many of us did in the late ‘90s. I found the Fanfiction Mailing List, and a year or two later, Fanfiction.net.

And then I started writing my own stuff.

It's still out there, if you know what to look for, and what my pen name was. I won't link you. It was… well, it was everything you might've expected from a deeply depressed teenager who was wrestling with her gender without knowing it. Most of it is awful. All of it is embarrassing.

And at one point in my fanfiction writing career, I added a rant at the end of a chapter that railed against m/m slashfiction. I was angry because I felt, with all the righteous indignation of an angsty ace-spectrum teenager, that these ‘fics were deliberately mischaracterizing established characters so people could, as it were, get their rocks off vicariously.

It was absolutely homophobic. Shameful, no matter how I look at it, even now.

A few years later, I pulled it down, then reposted my work with an apology, having grown up a little. I remained deeply ashamed, though. I still am, even if I understand why I did it a little better these days, and offer my younger self a little kindness because of it.

I only ever wrote one more story before I left fanfiction forever. I can't even read it these days. My own rage and inability to understand myself ruined it for me, and even today I’m too ashamed to be able to enjoy a mode of writing that was once an everyday part of my life.

One cold February evening

Recently, I ran into a group of trans women around town. I’d met most of them before, earlier on in their, and my, transition, but not all of them. We talked, as trans folks often do, and once I took off my mask—B— is immunocompromised, so COVID is very much not over for us—they recognized me right away, even the ones who I’d never met.

And all of them read Stained Glass Woman. There’s a good chance they’re reading this article.

It was surprising, discombobulating. Sure, it made sense to me that the folks who I’d talked to and helped earlier on would remember me, but they all did, as we stood outside in the cold-but-too-warm-for-February evening, none of us dressed quite right for the weather because this weather isn’t the kind of weather you’re supposed to get in February in Michigan. And they all had some pretty incredible things to say about me, and about this Substack.

These things made me very uncomfortable, and I said as much—that I don’t like to be looked up to, admired, held up as an example of anything. That if the things I’d written, the words I’d sent off into the ethereal nothingness, had helped them, then I was deeply, deeply glad, but that my writing was a thing in and of itself, separate from me.

That I am broken. That I cannot stand up to that level of scrutiny.

They didn’t listen.

They wanted me to be the heroic figure, giving voice to things they felt and thought. Maybe needed it.

When I eventually let them down, it will hurt them terribly.

When I was early on in my transition, I found heroes to idolize too. Girls a few years ahead of me who seemed light-years away, whose beauty and style would occasionally even give me bouts of fantastic dysphoric despair, because I thought I’d never be able to measure up to their examples. That I’d never look like them in the photos I’d take of myself. That they were braver and smarter than me, and… well, they turned out to be human, just like me.

The crash when that sunk home was… rough. They say to never meet your heroes, and I get that now. The real version of a person can never live up to the version that lives in your head. Flesh and blood always disappoints.

Have you ever wondered why Stained Glass Woman is named what it is, aside from the more obvious metaphor I’ve touched on many times? Why I write under a pen name, itself a reference to a pair of books I adore, even though my real name is easy to find? Ever wonder why I don’t do podcasts or videoessays or TikToks or any of the other far more successful forms of communication? Why I stick to old, slow and deliberate, long-form essays, which I barely even promote?

I don’t want to be famous.

I do what I do so I can write these things that seem to help people, and at the same time I fight as hard as I can to stay out of the limelight. Despite all that, I’ve consistently had a readership that ranges from 35,000-40,000 per month for the last six months. By any standard, Stained Glass Woman has become pretty big—far bigger than I imagined it every might become when I started writing it last year.

And I’m going to be honest: I really don’t know what to do about any of this.

It’s worse than that, in some ways. I know for a fact that some of the things I’ve written in Stained Glass Woman are wrong, even if I have no clue what they are yet. Scientific knowledge has a half-life. When I state things here as researched fact, I know that a good chunk of them will be found to be untrue as we continue to grow and learn more, and that those untruths, those unknowing falsehoods, will have hurt people in real, tangible ways.

That’s how science works.

I wish I could say it in a way people understand. Today’s truth will turn out to be tomorrow’s common misconception. But the other path, where we don’t take anything as true, leads to even more harm. In the case of Stained Glass Woman and other writings about the trans experience, it leaves people alone and in the cold, not knowing what these things inside them are. And it leaves me, as a science writer, in an impossible bind: write, and cause harm, or don’t, and cause more through my inaction.

I do my best. I fail. My failures hurt people.

That’s just… life.

Heroes

We live in difficult times, whether we’re talking about trans lives or anything else. The world often feels like it’s pulling apart at the seams. It feels so impossibly big, so overwhelming, that we feel like nothing we can ever do will change things, save us, give us the comfort and safety we need.

And in the midst of it all, for the last decade or so, superheroes have kind of been Having A Moment.

I’m going to be frank: I don’t generally like superheroes very much. They feel deeply fascistic to me, the symbol of a genetic perfection, an idealized megahuman whose very willpower converts their might into authoritarian law. They are the distillation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, an idea that has caused almost incalculable harm time and time again.

But the heroic urge makes sense. We desperately want someone to save us from this… whatever-you-want-to-call-it that we’re trapped in right now, that we all feel so helpless before. If Superman could just show up and punch the antidemocratic assholes that are dragging us all kicking and screaming toward the end of everything right in their populist mouths?

Wow, that’d be pretty neat, wouldn’t it?

But the problem is, that’s the exact thing that they’re doing. We sit here longing for a revolutionary leader to come along and save us, and it’s exactly what we’re railing against because it poses such a massive existential danger to us.

I hate these symbols.

So… why did I choose one as my pen name? After all, in the Dreadnought books, Doc Impossible is a hypertechnological gynoid with frickin’ laser beams in her arms.

Un-heroes, im-perfection

If you haven’t read Dreadnought—and you should, because it’s fantastic—you’re going to need to go in with different expectations than in most superhero stories. When people die, they stay dead. Heroes are… incredibly un-heroic. They’re uncertain, broken, prejudiced to the point of true monstrousness. Even the very best of them—and Doc Impossible is arguably the best of them—cause terrible damage when they fuck up, and they all fuck up terribly.

Every.

Last.

One.

Doc Impossible is introduced as a chain smoker, and almost the very first thing she does is out Danny, the main character, as transgender to the rest of her super team. How can a gynoid be addicted to nicotine, you might wonder? Addiction.ini. She’s programmed herself with an addiction to it to be more human, with all of the failings that come along with it. In the second book, Sovereign, she’s traded her chain smoking for alcoholism for reasons I won’t spoil, because they’re core parts of the plot for both books. In her drunkenness, she messes things up for Danny over and over again, sometimes in critical ways. Ways that cost people their lives.

Even before that, before the very first book begins, Doc has stepped back from hero work. She regrets having chosen the life of a hero, because in her words, “you will do things nobody else can even dream of, but you’ll never be able to do almost everything normal people take for granted.” The costs of being a hero have so totally outweighed the benefits that it is, without a doubt, what Doc considers to be the single greatest mistake of her life. A colossal mistake.

But then, Danny herself is just as perfectly imperfect, wounded and failing and holding things together in ways that don’t really work.

In many ways, Dreadnought isn’t a superhero novel. It’s a novel about a girl who happens to be able to survive orbital re-entry, but that’s a side effect of the fact that her powers gave her the body she always needed.

And that’s why Dreadnought, and Doc Impossible, resonate with me. They’re not heroes. They’re people, who try to do their best, and fail.

Queerness and failure

Here’s a statement that’s going to be controversial.

Many, and maybe most, people who were raised evangelical and later leave the faith never really leave the faith. What makes evangelical Christianity what it is is an unflinching, brutal drive toward moral perfectionism not just in one’s own self, but demanding it of everyone around them too. It, like American evangelical Christianity, is one of the most fundamental parts of the fabric upon which white supremacy is built. And if you look in a host of groups of people, from American atheists who roll around “debating” people in an attempt to convert them to atheism (or de-convert them from evangelical Christianity, if you want to be pedantic) to far-left queers who will turn on their own with the most vicious brutality the moment they don’t live up to morally-perfect ideals. You see it in harsh, demanding orders to do this-or-that of followers, or inversely of people who walk up to people and demand that they change this-or-that to satisfy the speaker’s sense of moral perfectionism.

It’s all evangelical witnessing. All the way down. All these people have done is swap out one faith for another. It’s the same tactics, social dynamics, and ways of being as the evangelical churches they grew up in, and it re-enacts the same vicious harm those churches enacted on them.

People are imperfect.

Stop. Go back and reread that.

People are imperfect.

We have bad days and bad takes. We have shameful parts of our history. Hell, we have shameful parts of our present. And holding them to anything like standards of perfection is to commit a profound act of violence against them.

That most emphatically includes me.

Queerness, at its heart, is the art of failing so spectacularly badly at one thing that you accidentally succeed at something completely different, and I fucking love that. It is to embrace the broken and fallible and nonsensical and sometimes even the mad, to welcome it as a friend and as part of ourselves.

I am queer. Obviously. I’m trans, demisexual, sapphic. But beyond that, I am queer—I am failure. Not a failure. Failure. And I embrace it.

I’m a messy, fucked-up, broken assemblage of weird and nonsensical and impossible bits and bobs and I’m about the farthest thing from perfect as it gets. I try to catch typos and poorly-worded garbage in every article I write and then proudly protect those same typos and poor phrasings once they’re published, even though I notice them again and again, because they’re imperfect.

Because they’re queer.

I am broken. I am queer. I cannot stand up to the level of scrutiny that Abigail Thorn, for instance, can. That level of examination would destroy me. I’m a disabled woman who, like Danny and Doc, is holding things together as best she can, and making it all up as she goes. Put that kind of weight on me and you’ll find out firsthand why I can’t be that sort of figure for you. I have days where I simply can’t anything, where my disabilities get the best of me, and the best I can do is wait them out. I have gut reactions and responses I’m ashamed of. My trauma has not made me stronger—while I have found strength again, of a sort, it’s not the same as I might’ve been before.

I cannot be anyone’s hero. But more importantly, I don’t want to be.

And that’s why I’m Doc Impossible on Substack, and not Zoe. I can do something a lot of people can’t or, at least, I seem to be able to do it better than most. That doesn’t make me a hero, same as Doc in the books. And, like Doc, I don’t want to be held up as an example for the things I can write.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t help folks.

Just… please, let them stand on their own.