What is a stained glass woman, anyway?

A place to begin, and a life made of light.

When I was in Barcelona, before my facial feminization surgery, I had one and only one absolute must-see: the Sagrada Familia. Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you haven't. It’s a gorgeous cathedral, absolutely massive, but… it looks kinda funny, from the outside, like one of those corn cob palaces you see in Nebraska or the Dakotas.

It’s been under construction for a hundred years, and they’re finally getting close to finishing it. It’s gorgeous and enormous, and covered in cranes and scaffolding as its spires grow higher and higher.

But the exterior isn’t why the Sagrada Familia is famous.

Broken things

I am a survivor of terrific abuse.

The kind of abuse that makes a child hide in her bedroom every day, reading dozens and dozens Sweet Valley Kids books instead of going outside to play. And then, once she learns the hard way from other kids that she’s not supposed to read those books, Goosebumps books. Even though she hates horror. Even though the other kids still won’t accept her. Even though they never do.

The kind of abuse that leaves her so isolated that she goes three years being unable to read the blackboard before a teacher checks with her, and everyone realizes her vision is so bad that she can’t read the E at the top of the eye chart.

The kind of abuse that leaves a young teenager curled in a ball on the floor of a darkened middle school storeroom, sobbing amongst the dusty bristles of brooms used too infrequently and unmarked brown cardboard boxes full of something long forgotten, a bewildered teacher silhouetted in the doorway, paralyzed with confusion and indecision.

The kind of abuse that so few children like me survive that there isn’t much guidance for my therapist on how to help me. Making it to adulthood beat the odds. Getting married beat steeper odds. Not dying to addiction or drinking before I was 30 beat steeper odds.

Maybe I’ll tell you about it someday. It’s a long story, and not much fun.

But nobody makes it through that kind of life in one piece. I am broken. I was broken by the choices of others, shattered into uncountable pieces, and scattered like stardust against a blackened night.

Transitional Statement

I am transgender. I love being trans.

I never knew I was trans growing up. There was too much hurt from too many places, too many good explanations for what was going on. I didn’t have any sisters, and my mom was an army gal—no dolls or dresses to be found. By the time I was an adult, I had eighteen years of no meaningful access to femininity of any sort walling me off from the vocabulary and context I needed to be able to know.

I wouldn’t realize who I really was for another seventeen years.

Transition hasn’t been easy, but I’ve been through so much worse that was so much harder. The hard parts? I know how to deal with hardship. I’ve got a lifetime of experience at that.

But the joy? Oh, the joy.

Stained Glass

What makes the Sagrada Familia special is its stained glass windows. Now, I’m sure you’ve seen stained glass before, maybe at your church when you were growing up. Hackneyed cartoon representations of Biblical stories meant to keep little kids believing. So, when I say that the Sagrada Familia’s stained glass windows are special, maybe you think back to your art history classes, and imagine the older, greater Gothic inspirations, wheels and discs of colored glass, a bright spotlight in grim darkness.

The Sagrada Familia isn’t like that either.

It makes light itself come alive.

The cathedral itself is positioned so that the Spanish morning and afternoon sunlight for most of the year is captured and magnified. I shot these pictures myself, on a smartphone. Honest to God. Imagine how they’d look with a real camera.

And this? This was just another Monday in May. It was even a little cloudy outside. The light could’ve been better.

The Sagrada Familia is a magnificent piece of architecture, but it was built for these windows, this light. It exists to turn sunlight into magic.

Stained Glass

Nobody ever really thinks about how you make stained glass—they just think of the end product, whatever the form. But before the light and the living, writhing stone, somewhere, someone lays out lead piping in a frame with care. And then, they take sticks of colored glass, and they break them. And then they break the broken bits, and crush and grind the shattered shards of colored glass until they’re small and evenly-sized.

Only then are the glass shards set into the leaded frames.

Only then are the frames baked in a kiln until the lead melts and fuses, until the broken glass liquifies and runs together, making color and gradiations it never could have had before. And then the window is set into the cathedral wall, tall and strong—so strong that its stability, like the stone around it, holds up the tons and tons of stone above it, arching into impossible heights.

Only then does it catch the light, spinning it alive, while silently holding weight that nobody but the architects could ever imagine.

A Stained Glass Woman

I am a trans survivor of abuse. I have been broken. I have seen a darkness in people, and in the world, that I wish I had never known.

That’s why I try to bring the light in it to vivid, swirling life—a light strong enough to make even the dead, cold stone of the everyday seem alive from its vitality.

Transition, for me, has been joy in its purest form. It has remade me into something more beautiful and vibrant than I ever could’ve been before, and I love sharing that with everyone I can.

I will never stop being grateful that I’m trans.