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Audio readings of TRANSlating Everything content and wacky discussions!
Folks, I’ve written a lot of memoir shorts over the last couple of years. I wrote so many of them that I collected them into an anthology. They’re basically a book. Except they’re available for free online — but only if you use that link.
Now from my perspective, the anthology means that all of you should already know who I am and how I got here, but the fact is — that’s a lot of reading! Even the shorter biographical articles I’ve written aren’t all that short and only cover certain parts of my life.
selfies
So I wanted to give everyone the fastest rundown of my life I’ve ever put down on paper. Or podcast. Or video. Or whatever way you found this.
Note: this article is also available as a video
A brief history of events
1983: Stephenie is born in Jackson, MS
selfies
1983: me and my twin brother Charlie are born via C-section in Jackson, MS; I am born as thirteen people in one, what will be misdiagnosed as schizoaffective disorder and won’t be properly diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder until 2022
1984–1994: raised in a cult, home schooled, lived in absolute poverty, no stable housing or income or food or even electricity; incest was rampant in my home (from my parents AND my siblings), and the only way I knew to feel safe was to shrink, shrink, shrink
At home, the abuse and the incest remained almost sustainable. My parents frequently split me up from my brother because he, like our dad, became consumed with sexual urges at a young age. And he, like our dad, felt entitled to do whatever he wanted to the women around him. And he, like our dad, hurt me if I dared to tell anyone what the men in our home were doing to me.
Trauma is like a time bomb. You disarm it by healing it, or you’re just waiting until it explodes.
They tried sending us to school at Southside Assembly of God. That fell apart in second grade.
The problem, you see, was that I wouldn’t shut up.
I kept telling everyone what my family was doing.
Southside Assembly of God in Jackson, MS, where I went to kindergarten and first grade
1994–1998: sent to hospitals for anorexia; hung out a lot at the arcades, comic book stores, and bookstores in the early to mid 90s; mastered X-Men vs Street Fighter and will still kick your ass; as abuse escalated at home with my brother and his friends, my sister and her friends, as well as the grown men from the arcades who said they were my friends; I became consumed with anorexia and nearly died from starvation; the state intervened and institutionalized me
1998–1999: when the state let me out of the hospitals, my dad had a new wife and we moved to Texas, where they had decided in conjunction with the hospital that the only way to protect me was to forcibly convert me into a boy; I tried to see The Matrix but couldn’t get past the armed cops guarding the entrance into the auditorium (WTF) so watched Ten Things I Hate About You with my sister instead (Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles ftw)
Ten Things I Hate About You (Disney)
2000: after a failed year in Texas, we moved back to Mississippi but this time to Clinton, MS and a third attempt at a public high school; dad and that new wife split up (compulsively); me and my brother finished high school by going to the Education Center, where we could finish our degrees at our pace, and so we finished our junior and senior years in a few months
2000–2001: for an extremely brief period, my brother and I finally moved out of our dad’s house and lived with our sister, but that did not last long; we moved back home when we couldn’t pay the rent, then moved out again and went to Hinds Community College starting in Fall 2001
2001–2004: my brother graduated and progressed to University of Southern Mississippi, but I stayed at Hinds for years and thought I’d be a lifelong student; now that I was out in the real world, I wanted to be a real person, and that meant I was going to say fuck you to everything my parents had tried to force me to become and simply be ME; I grew my hair back out, I let people see me as queer, I pursued friendships and career and fulfillment; it didn’t work
2005: lived in Hattiesburg, attended University of Southern Mississippi, made friends but felt out of place pretending to be a boy and hoping no one would notice the truth; moved back to Jackson and lived with my brother; wondered if I should give up; instead got a job at Borders Books and Music, met a woman who was so much like my brother that I stayed with her for ten years
2005–2014: moved to Georgia, went to graduate school at University of Georgia/UGA, earned my Master’s in Journalism, and got my foot in the publishing door; marriage fell apart
2015–2016: tried to find peace in Vegas by going ALL IN on being a man; joined and excelled in a men’s fitness community (powerlifting total of 1130lbs at 180lbs bodyweight)
2016–2017: moved to Vegas to live with my sister (uhoh); dated a lot and began to understand my asexuality; volunteered at The Center, which serves as a hub of LGBT resources and pride near the Fremont area of Las Vegas; I politely refused to answer any questions about what, if anything, made me queer beyond being an Ally
2017: once again facing suicide, reached out to my brother and accepted his invitation to live with him in Colorado for a while; I joined Adult Children of Alcoholics and Co-Dependents Anonymous; I worked the steps in each program
2017–2018: my brother, now a sophisticated predator and sexually violent con artist (by then using many different aliases and pseudonyms), brought me into a new arrangement reflecting the same kind of fucked up erotic dynamics he’d been guiding me into since we were kids; he’d done it with my first love Robbie (who I later learned was also a trans girl ❤ ❤ ❤); he’d done it with Patrick, the son of my dad’s best friend; my brother had done it when it was just us alone; and now he did it again with one of the many girls he was currently abusing
2018: terrible bicycle accident without a helmet; the accident left me not just disabled but D-I-S-A-B-L-E-D and unable to hide that “I” am actually “We” (remember I was born this way with DID), a collection of thirteen individual identities that have been present since birth; my understanding now is that all people begin like this, but intense and sustained trauma at a young age can disrupt the process of identity integration (and once disrupted can never be repaired, only negotiated into a “system”)
2018–2021: the girl who would become my wife refused to let my brother continue to manipulate and abuse his disabled sister (me) as a tool and conduit for his sexual pleasure; we followed guides for how to escape abusive narcissists and never told him we were leaving, but instead let our echoes slowly fade until his attention found someone new, leaving only his resentment and addictions where we’d once served as his fuel
2021-2022: moved back to Vegas and lived with my sister for a while, but when that proved as toxic and sexually traumatizing as every other attempt at living with either of my siblings, we found a place of our own and built a life together
2023: My partner already had a daughter, so now I have a daughter, too! She’s my daughter and I’m her mother, and it’s everything me and Robbie used to tell each other it could be. At nearly seven years together, we may not have had the start I expected, but the life we’ve built is beyond anything I dared to dream.
Commentary on my twin brother
My brother is still out there, of course, using countless pseudonyms and fake identities. I won’t restate them here. They’re too well known now to need to list them anyway.
I can’t stop him. It’s not my job to even try. I’m not strong in that way. It’s hard enough for me just to tell the truth about what he did and how it affected me.
Excerpt from my memoir short “I am Trash” (altered images from Personal Photos)
So I just tell my story and speak truth to the things he and the rest of my family spent decades using abuse to silence from me and in me.
I remind myself each morning that this is worth it. That I lived in fear of my brother’s abuse for almost forty years. That I spent nearly forty years helping sustain his lies. That I will not live the next forty years in anything less than the truth.
What’s next!
Now that’s of course skipping over a lot of things, least of all the badass career in publishing, media criticism, and trans activism I’ve had during all of that traumatic stuff.
Here’s a video of me telling the story of my life inside the mental institutions as a teenager.
If you want to know more about the nitty gritties, check out this anthology of memoir shorts: From 5 to 40 — My Life In Photos