Stained Glass Woman

Remixing Research as a Technical Writer-Advocate for Trans Liberation

Foreword: This presentation was delivered on 4/12/25 at the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication.

To be completely honest, I’ve never struggled to write a piece of scholarly work as much as I’ve struggled to write this presentation. When I pitched it in April of last year, the idea of talking about how effective public technical communication can push back against the rise of fascist hate rhetoric and work towards trans liberation sounded hopeful, powerful, a dream of a better tomorrow that we could just begin to see peeking over the horizon. A future, I believed to the deepest parts of my heart, that we had only to work for. Today, that hope seems quaint, to say the very least. I don’t think I’ve met a queer person who’s really, truly okay in months. I’ve been stuck in my own scholarly and creative work, unable to create much of anything because of the seeming-futility of it all.

And that, of course, is the point. Authoritarians work hard to create regimes of terror, to overwhelm those most at risk–and make no mistake, if you’re here, in this room, you are among those most at risk. The people in control of the federal government today see professors, queer folks, and educated people at large to be public enemy number one. But as real as the terror is, the despair and the futility aren’t–and the concerted efforts of those in power to destroy us are proof positive of our power to stop them.

I need to pause for a moment here to make sure I say something as clearly as I possibly can: no act of technical writing can deradicalize a hardened bigot of any kind. Sartre really said it best almost a century ago, when focusing on antisemites in the wake of the second world war: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge… They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” Every scrap of sociological and psychological research we have says that there’s only two routes to deradicalization. First, a bigot must actively choose, for their own reasons, to deradicalize. This usually happens when they see in a rush just how monstrous they and their friends have become. Second, they are exposed over a long period of time to the target of their hatred, and find themselves unable to keep believing the myths that bigotry spews to propagate itself.

We cannot–cannot–achieve either of these two ends with technical communication, and the path to trans liberation does not and cannot include the idea that these people are simply ignorant or unaware of who or what they are. They know. They know. Rather, we must empower ourselves and, in a Bitzerian sense, seek those who are persuadable. To quote Erin Reed, trans liberation was always going to be a generational project.

Research tools

So, let’s talk about how we’re going to approach this problem. I’m going to be a little brief here in the interests of time, because most of these are very well-established in their various disciplines. I take a clean hands/dirty hands perspective on moral political change, influenced by Walzer’s research in philosophy and ethics. The heart of Walzer’s work, and the work that’s stemmed from it, is that, effective political change requires some people who take illegal or politically-unpopular action–folks with dirty hands–and who are allied with those who either protect them or who are the political figure that a political system must eventually negotiate with–folks with clean hands.

Specifically, I take a four-lanes perspective, as described by Hunter, which further subdivides clean hands/dirty hands work into the four broad categories you see here. By focusing on the type and lane of work a given activist is best at, they can more effectively achieve social change without getting in the way of other activists doing parallel work towards the same ends.

Second, I rely on principles of public rhetoric influenced by Rivers and Weber’s ecologies, and Jones’ trans technical rhetorics. This presentation directly answers Moggenberg et al’s call to “engag[e] in activism in technical communication… to propel [queer] communities forward.” Finally, I consider transness as a whole in the context of a centuries-long global gendercide, and epistemicide, of which we are dealing with one particularly scary spasm, and which was drummed up to justify the global racist, cissexist colonial project, as described in Gill-Peterson’s germinal work, A Short History of Trans Misogyny.

That project is not meaningfully resisted by trans-inclusive feminism because largely-white, largely-affluent feminists continue to be some of the main beneficiaries of the American cisheteronormative racial caste system Wilkerson describes so well. I take a broadly intersectional perspective on her work, which describes the American caste system as a tool of terroristic violence that white patriarchal society uses to enforce its social hierarchy along many axes, race foremost among them. Gill-Peterson scathingly rejects white feminists for their racist “flaccid trans misogyny.” She argues that “trans cultural visibility and its liberal politics thrive on the disavowal, theft, and destruction of our ways of life, and of our dreams… When [those] movements claim to act in our name… it is often to imagine a world where trans womanhood is implicitly obsolete,” and while she focuses on trans femininity, make no mistake that the eradication of all other expressions of transness would follow shortly behind the obsolescence of trans womanhood. In short, trans voices, telling trans stories about trans ways of life, are an indispensable part of trans liberation.

Organized transphobic pseudoscience

One of the most important and effective tools that transphobes have is a large network of organized transphobic pseudoscience, which is designed to mimic the legitimate research on trans realities that scientific fields at large rely on. They work to manufacture the shadow of a scientific debate on our existence in basically the same way that oil companies manufactured the debate on climate science. The most prominent of these are, GENSPECT, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, and the American College of Pediatricians, all recognized hate groups. They produce article after article of junk science to give cover to other hate organizations and politicians aligned with them in their quest to “eradicate transgenderism entirely.”

You’ve probably heard of their junk science, even if you didn’t know it at the time. Social contagion, for instance–the disproven theory that being trans is a cognitohazard–is what Elon Musk is talking about specifically when he talks about his “woke mind virus.” He was fully radicalized after his daughter, Vivian, transitioned, and openly acknowledges that his rage over her gender is why he bought Twitter and everything that came after. In a similar vein, I’m sure you’ve all heard of Britain’s Cass Report, which has gotten so much traction that the United States Supreme Court repeatedly referenced its findings in the recent oral arguments of US v Skrmeti. All this despite the fact that the Report has been condemned as atrocious science by every major national and international health organization, and has been directly repudiated in the recommendations of all three other national reports on youth transition authored since its publication.

Just like the manufactured “debate” over the climate crisis, the objective is simple: muddy the waters, persuade moderates into inaction and doubt, and capitalize on any significant figure they can hoodwink into believing their garbage.

Stained Glass Woman

So, how can we push back effectively, learning from where climate scientists failed? I’ve found myself on the front lines of this effort in recent years. In 2022, I started a Substack newsletter called Stained Glass Woman to explain, in plain language, the science that was coming out on trans bodies and lives, because biomedical English can be so impenetrable. I quickly found that my plain language approach sidestepped the rhetorical folly that climate scientists fell into, as they had drowned the public in graphs and “trust me, bro’s.” The use of plain language autoethnography has instead galvanized both trans and cis readers into strong rhetorical resistance to transphobic pseudoscience. While Stained Glass Woman has been on hiatus for several months now, it saw around sixty thousand readers a month before that hiatus began, and still sees around thirty thousand a month with no new content. Today, I want to look at two articles as examples for how effective plain language technical communication can be highly effective at bolstering trans peoples’ belief in our right to exist, and in rallying persuadable cis people to directly support us. Both are among the most widely-read articles I’ve written.

Much of the trans experience, from a biomedical standpoint, is desperately underresearched, and it leaves trans people at the mercy of a lot of enforceable prejudice–such as the idea that there is a strict, clear delineation between male and female, genetically speaking. This myth is used as the basis for many laws restricting trans bodies, whether from bathrooms, sports, and even from receiving lifesaving medication. And to be clear: from a genetics perspective, simple X or Y chromosomes are not remotely sex-deterministic.

How HRT Rewrites Your DNA, was published October 23, 2023, tackles this myth head on, spurred by then-just-released research on how taking HRT causes over 10,000 methylation sites on the human genome to toggle on or off, changing how the human body reads and processes the genetic instructions we all carry in massive ways.

The article, like almost all articles on Stained Glass Woman, links constantly to top-level research that illustrates its points, is interdisciplinary and autoethnographic, and connects the science with its human impact using a bit of creative nonfiction. First, it opens with an autoethnographic segment, which ties the subject matter to the realities of trans daily life. Then, it dives into the science of epigenetics and methylation in the plainest possible language, by using non-trans examples–for instance, that identical twins have different fingerprints–to show how genetics is only a starting point for a human body, and one which cannot be truly relied upon to predict how that body will develop. In the most essential way, the article argues, taking HRT really does change a person’s sex at every level, from bone marrow to hair. Today, the article is one of the most popular and widely-read on the site, and its plain language presentation of this research has given trans people the language, research, and confidence to push back against trans-exclusionary rhetoric.

But rallying trans folks isn’t enough. We’re a small minority, probably between 1.6-5% of the total population, which means that we need strong cis allies and supportive families to secure our liberation. For that reason, I’ve also written a number of articles for those allies, despite the fact that Stained Glass Woman was always written for trans folks first. Among the most successful of these is Oh, shit, my partner just told me they’re trans, published April 1, 2024.

As you might guess from the title, it’s a plain language explainer built to answer many of the most common questions a trans person’s partner might have when they first come out–questions like “Why the hell didn’t they tell me they were trans?!” and “Won’t they leave me for a man?” The article takes, again, a sympathetic and plain language approach, supported both by examples from pop culture and a lot of the highest-quality research. It works hard to answer those questions, offer support for those cis partners as they’re going through one of the hardest moments a relationship can go through, and help them understand that their partner’s coming out, at its heart, only exposes more fully the person they’ve been in love with all along.

In both articles–widely throughout Stained Glass Woman, I’ve found–the melding of the autoethnographic mode with plain language is highly effective in connecting readers to the very technical information that underpins trans realities, whether we’re talking about the biological, psychological, social, or practical realities of our lives, and it makes sense from a theoretical perspective. Autoethnography is itself founded on the theory that a researcher’s positionality and research interests are inextricably linked, and that openly owning those links both enriches the research and helps readers connect with it. Plain language works to make the inaccessible accessible, and leave users with a greater ability to analyze and internalize new, complex information. The main rhetorical weaknesses of each–that autoethnography typically veers into arcane academic language once story-time is done, and that plain language is usually dry and impersonal–is remixed in the synthesis of the two, making the combined approach particularly useful for public rhetoric.

Put plainly: people reading about trans oppression, trans or cis, are under a lot of pressure. They need comfort and hope for a better future, they need to be able to identify with other people going through their same struggles, and they need reliable information in a sea of myth and prejudice. Any public rhetoric approach working for trans liberation needs to address each of these needs centrally.

Authoritarianism is a machine that eats people. It does not–will not–can not stop until it runs out of people to eat, and that only ever happens one of two ways: either there are no more marginalized people to eat, or those marginalized people stand up and dismantle it. Make no mistake: unless we accomplish the latter, it will not so much as pause after it’s done consuming trans people, and its ravenous maw will turn to those newly at the furthest margins of society. As technical writers and queer scholars, we have a unique ability to communicate both the existential danger it represents and work directly to dismantle that danger through personal, plain public rhetorics.

---

Bibliography

Clift, B, Hatchard, J & Gore, J (eds) (2018), How Do We Belong? Researcher Positionality Within Qualitative Inquiry: Proceedings of 4th Annual Qualitative Research Symposium. University of Bath, University of Bath.

Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste. Allen Lane.

Nick, C., de Wijze, S (2023). 50 Years of Dirty Hands: An Overview. J Ethics 27, 415–439 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09459-0

Gill-Peterson, J. (2024). A Short History of Trans Misogyny (1st ed.). Verso.

Hunter, D. (2025, January 7). 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won. Waging Nonviolence. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/

Holmes, Andrew Gary Darwin. “Researcher Positionality - A Consideration of Its Influence and Place in Qualitative Research - A New Researcher Guide.” Shanlax International Journal of Education, vol. 8, no. 4, 2020, pp. 1-10.

Jones, N. N. (2016). The Technical Communicator as Advocate: Integrating a Social Justice Approach in Technical Communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(3), 342-361. https://doi-org.ferris.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0047281616639472 (Original work published 2016)

Luneau, D. (2023). Extremists at CPAC laid bare hatred at root of vile legislation targeting trans people. Human Rights Campaign.

Moeggenberg, Z. C., Edenfield, A. C., & Holmes, S. (2022). Trans Oppression Through Technical Rhetorics: A Queer Phenomenological Analysis of Institutional Documents. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 36(4), 403-439. https://doi-org.ferris.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/10506519221105492 (Original work published 2022)

Southern Poverty Law Center. (2023, December 12). Group Dynamics and division of labor within the anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network. Southern Poverty Law Center.