home
posts --
When I was 18, I got a job on a military base (the prior Military Hospital at Headley Court), working between the kitchens, cafe and bar area. I grew up around this type of infrastructure and so found it easy talking to people and sharing experiences. There is a barrier of jargon between forces personnel and “civvies” as they call them. It can be hard to understand the cultural references, talking points and hierarchies of those structures without having been embedded in it.
Part of this embedding took place throughout my childhood, growing up inside of and around the infrastructure of military bases, both in the UK and outside of it. But this also came about through my own reckoning with my place inside of it. At 14, I was sent to a military boarding school as part of the Continuity of Education allowance. A structure that provides large subsidies to forces personnel sending their children to one of these schools, ostensibly to allow for a more stable upbringing. In reality, it seems more of a somewhat self serving exercise in carrying on the British tradition of the “military family”. Where service is passed from generation to generation and provides candidates already indoctrinated and primed with an understanding of its social intricacies.
While at this school I had a crisis of faith, feeling pushed to take seriously the implications of a proposed military career that had been pushed on me from an early age. I became fascinated with the Iraq War and its ripple effects. Part of that helped me understand that I couldn’t bring myself to find peace with a life that involved killing (or adjacency to it). It terrified me (and still does). Through that, I became interested in alternative structures and social models, leading to an early identification with anarchism, but thats irrelevant to this story. Beyond the fear, I honestly don’t know what helped me make that choice. It worries me that I don’t know, but I am grateful to my past self for making that choice.
Recently, I’ve been considering my placement along this political borderline. Raised in the military’s strange form of socialist-fascism (with its co-operative stores, general community centred structure and politics of mutual aid) and my current identity as a anarcho-socialist with strong left leaning beliefs. I still know some people adjacent to the military. I still love some people despite that adjacency. But I’m struggling with that love and how to express care and love, while feeling a deep requirement to beg for them to understand the harm their adjacency enables.
I felt inspired recently by the work of the Avant-garde artists of the 1960s-70s in their attempts at trying to reach and converse with soldiers carrying out colonial wars. Their attempts to use empathy to explain how they were also suffering through the horror they were being shipped off to carry out. Their convictions in trying to speak to those in our society so desperate that they turn to power and killing to make a living. How do you tell them that there is another way. That there must be another path forward. That the community they seek can exist outside of these boundaries.
While I worked the bar at Headley Court, I spoke often to soldiers who were awaiting discharge, both from the hospital and the military in general. Their safety net had burst. Most of them hadn’t even seen active conflict, simply had an accident while carrying out their day-to-day and were now facing their entire life structures crumbling around them. They felt abandoned and scared. They had come to the military as a place to escape poverty, provide a stable income and find a sense of belonging and community. Now all of that had gone, many seemed to realise how unrealistic that promise was in the first place. I couldn’t help but feel their grief with them.
I particularly remember two guys who were there almost everyday. They’d met through the hospital but had a care for one another that was touching. One man’s foot had been crushed while working in a supplies warehouse and through that, could no longer serve in the military. If I remember right, he had never once seen active conflict. I don’t know how the other man had sustained his injuries but they were more sever. He had a persistent tremor that had led to him needing crutches to walk, but also meant he could barely hold a drink without it spilling and struggled to speak. Both men were sweet and while one needed more help physically, the other clearly found a deep emotional comfort in their friendship. Coping with the anger and grief of his life collapsing due to an accident of his own making.
I don’t think a socialist revolution without a place for these people is truly socialist. We can’t simply convince or force people to conform to a model that we think will make the world a better place. To paraphrase Paulo Freire, socialism cannot (when carried out authentically) embody the dynamics of oppressor - oppressed that pressure freedom. So what of these peoples freedom. How do we work with and reach people in these systems, to collectively dismantle them? The horrors of the Iraq War linger in UK politics and despite anti-war efforts of the past 100 years (and longer!), there has been little shift in dismantling the military industrial complex. However, this does not mean there has been no victories in this fight. We don’t often get to hear of them but they are there. I had the lucky opportunity last summer to hear of the organising happening within BAE systems factories. Headway is being made, but slowly.
So how do we translate this to an actionable resistance against war. As observed by David Graeber and David Wengrow “Revolutions are rarely won in open combat. When revolutionaries win, it’s usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuse to shoot, or just go home”. The potential of this quote wells within me a deep desire for it to be true. I don’t believe in there being forgiveness for all acts, let alone the atrocities committed by soldiers working on behalf of their government. But part of me deeply wants there to be. Maybe selfishly, as part of my own entanglements. But also as an end to a cycle within which someone feels trapped by the horrors they commit. A hope that they can find a place outside of the shame and self hatred that conjures. Maybe socialism can try offer a place for this. Somewhere to find a sense of community away from the trauma bonding of a system that pushes you towards murder as a way of earning economic and social stability.
Often we can be quick to call for an abandonment of such people to the fates they have chosen. We all have a choice after all. But I think many haven’t truly held the weight of that decision. Felt the social pressures of being told that there is an easier route. On a day when I am less angry, I can feel some compassion and sadness for those that chose the other side. I don’t think they are truly happy with their choice either. At least, the statistics regarding mental health issues and suicide for those coming out of the armed forces don’t paint a picture of happiness and fulfilment. Doing some research around this, I came across the Veterans For Peace organisation. I want to direct people there for those looking to see good work being done in the space of de-militarisation.
In writing this, I’m not looking for or proposing a simple solution to this. It’s easy for me to advocate a position of extending compassion to those working as agents of fascist regimes (let’s be honest, that is what we are currently existing within) and be done with it. Their actions often don’t directly impact the quality of my life. It’s not my home they are bombing. But I also see a way forward in still trying to extend empathy and trying to reach those who fell into a darker path in life. If we want to end war, we have to imagine a place for those who took that path and must then come back from it. We have to help them come back from it. We have to care, even if it’s hard.
10.01.2026 - speaking to the soldiers
a supermarket in california -- 08/12/2025ahhh i moved house, was made redundant and had my partner’s birthday. so it’s been a little busy, hence the blog delay!
this week i’m going to talk about my initial forary’s into game making. recently, i’ve been playing around with non-linear writing, partly as an extension of some recent work with radio but also a long time facination with non-linear storytelling.
(i think) my first video game was pokemon ruby. while fairly linear in the story it tells, mainline pokemon games include a potentially game changing decision at their start. which pokemon do you chose as your first? now this decision doesn’t change any ledigble narrative details of the story, but as a 6 year old with a big imagination, this choice defined my experience.
i picked treecko for people interested
starting with a core choice like this decides so much of the emergent narrative of the game. similar to a character creator, it introduces you to the idea that the game is about your relationship to the world. pulling you into a feeling of agency over who you are in this setting. you’ll spend the rest of the game making choices about the pokemon you use, so what do your pokemon say about you? what do they say about your taste and the character you are inhabiting.
reflecting on my childhood
this year i’ve been making games as a hobby. my starting point was twine, an open source software utilising html to create branching narratives. the first twine game i played was Raik. Raik is an interactive story presenting a twin narrative of a fantasy hero on a quest and someone existing with severe anxiety and depression. one narrative is written in scots and the other in english, using translation as a narrative tool. at the time i was reading a few different books in scots and stumbled upon it (i highly recommend!).
the first game i finished this year was a small game for my partner and I’s anniversary. at the time, we were both travelling around for work and while in berlin for a show, i decided i wanted to give myself a side project to work on.
‘you’re really feeling it’ is a little choose your own adventure narrative, following a night out. i added little stat checks (thank you sugarcube!) and even mini games. i had fun but visually the game was all text.
just because its only text, doesn't mean it isn't pretty
so the next game started from character design. i doodle a lot while i’m working, just something to keep my hands busy while i’m thinking. from this, i designed a little mushroom character and began thinking about what it would take to have him move around. so i drew some movements.
hop!
that quickly spiraled into a tutorial with GameMaker (another development software) and the idea of adapting one of mine (and my partners) favourite poems, allen ginsberg’s “a supermarket in california”. i already had the idea of setting a majority of the game in a supermarket and it felt fun to play around with adapation as a way to focus on the mechanical aspects of things.
a little note about making games on a Mac. don’t. just don’t do it. if it’s your only method then i guess please do, but you are better off buying a cheap pc (thinkpad t480’s are both cheap and great for their age). this isn’t because of the graphics card or the ram requirements or anything like that. it’s simply because Apple are money hungry assholes and to explore games made in most major game engines, you have to pay a “developer fee” to Apple just to export out. this isn’t GameMakers fault. its Apple’s. fuck Apple.
title page
GameMaker is brilliant. i shopped around first but lanned on GM partly because its free, but also its blend of node based design and code, allowing you to get into the guts of how it all works. i would be more opinionated on it but honestly, it being free and fairly quick to get to grips, got me invested pretty quickly.
now full disclosure, i code fairly recently, however, i’ve never really touched animation (other than Jitter) or anything where characters need to move around, so 2D seemed like a good introduction to this type of code. GML (GameMaker Language) is pretty straight forward in this respect and movement is based on a relative x / y axis of the room with actions being taken on a clock set to trigger every x number of seconds. this movement system was a little fiddly but handily, GM runs a terminal updating you on bugs and crashes making it much MUCH easier to identify whats going wrong with your code.
"aisles full of husbands! wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"
the game feel i was aiming for was something between a flash game, with it’s handdrawn assets, and the works of Stephen Gillmurphy (i highly recommend 10 Beautiful Postcards, don’t question it, just experience it). he also writes really well, talking at length about game making and design, but also reflections on life. he was my first exposure to the “landscape of desire”, a concept i’ve been a bit obsessed with since.
the game follows your little character “Mushma”, with the aim to basically just explore and read all the excerpts of the poem, enjoying some light visual humour and the disjointed animations of some silly little characters. it’s fairly barebones, with your only interactions with the world being your capacity to move around and be followed by certain npc’s, but i felt it captured the kind of meandering tone of the poem pretty well.
again, this one was made as a gift (for Agnes’ birthday this time), so it’s filled with little jokes and references, but i plan to spend the winter working on something more broader. giving myself an excuse to learn a little more about game making while enjoying some rest time from my main art practice.
the game is set to a midi keyboard version of Harvest Moon by Neil Young
it’s not the only way i’m playing with non-linear mediums and methods of story telling and there will be more info on that soon, but i think i plan to play with game making a little more. if only for the fun of learning its languages and eccentricities. more and more the world feels fractured, disconnected and bity, so i’d like to try play with that texture (and its absense) in my work. additionally, we exist in a time where we are surrounded by choices, but also stifled by them. constantly asked to define ourself in relation to capitalistic commifications of identity. where best to explore this in my own work, than with a medium that was nearly purpose built to confront questions of choice and agency.
bye for now!
08.12.2025 - a supermarket in california
self genealogy -- 23/11/2025self genealogy
recently, i’ve been thinking about the construction of my current self. how the present me came to exist, in addition to their relations to the versions of myself that came before. part of this felt relational to a kind of genealogical destination of selfhood. that i exist as something passed down and spawned from a legacy of former selves, each with their own quirks, traits and struggles. alongside this i’ve recently been confronting questions around fertility and around my own placement in a genealogy. i wonder if i’ve been constantly birthing myself anew, each cycle producing another form of self-hood and representing another confrontation with desire.
the family free of Louis III, Duke of Württemberg (thank you wikipedia)
Deleuze and Guatari posit an idea of schizoid behaviour (splitting) as a confrontation with unfiltered desire, then maybe this desire plays into the cycle. to revert to freudian analysis, the desire for the mother can play into self birth. reconceptualising the parental dynamic internally, we recast ourselves as both parents, the father and (the object of envy) and the mother (the object of desire). so through the envy of my former self - the idealised vision of a past away from current stresses - and the desire for the mother (self-actualisation), a new self is born, one that inherits the traits of the nostalgic self and the current self.
framing this personally and using transness as an easy view through which to understand this, i’m going to introduce four of my former selves Drew, Andrew, Drew 2 and Dee. Drew was the name i mostly went by prior to transition, he was sweet and silly, pretty childish but is an avatar i associate with being fairly joyful and carefree, he came prior to Andrew. Andrew was my full legal name growing up, however, only really became something i went by as a teenager. he was colder and more emotionally closed off, but also confident and professional, driven by the idea that if he worked hard enough and gave as much of himself as possible, he could achieve whatever he set his mind to.
at a later point, i returned to Drew a second time (Drew 2 from here on). they were kind of a middle point between Drew and Andrew, both funny and confident but also lost in their anger at institutional structures and the their newly marginalised status as a trans person. and then you have Dee. Dee was soft and a bit childlike. desperate to fit in and settle within her gender, she was fairly conformist, while being completely burned out from employment rejections and emotional baggage from childhood. obviously these explanations are simplified and it’s hard to narrow a few defining traits that overlap years of change and development but for the purpose of this explanation, these will do.
just a tree
so to start with we can use a freudian understanding of the oedipal relationship to understand the movement from Drew to Andrew. i moved from a childhood self into a the pursuit of adulthood that characterises an ideation of the father. something more professional and driven, born from a desire for adulthood fairly typical of most teenagers. but then the movement from Andrew to Drew 2 is a little different. this follows something closer to a envy for Drew’s childlike playfulness and reintegrated that was aspects of Andrew’s confidence and drive (even if somewhat dampened by their own frustration and anger at systemic problems). but then we move to the movement between Drew 2 to Dee and see a slightly different dynamic. there is an envy for Drew’s (1) childishness that see’s a regression to a self that, while more emotionally available in some ways, was more malleability and conformist and that lost the confidence and fire of Andrew and Drew 2.
birthchart.png
this brings us to Kat (hi!), the current avatar of self (in this simplified analogy). born from a desire for Andrew’s confidence and drive, mixed with some of Dee’s capacity for emotional vulnerability and processing her feelings, she fits firmly in relation to these two selves.
from here i began thinking about to what extent these former selves still live, spiritually but also emotionally. do they die in the process of self birth? are they constructs that are always present and can become emotionally resonant when re-emerging through this dynamic? is there something within this that can explain the hold nostalgia can have on us? and can we artificially manufacture this process with an awareness of it?
i’d don’t have a great deal of confidence in the stability of this theory of self, but it opens up some interesting questions. it makes me wonderful who Andrew would be now without this process. what choices he would have made differently and, if we could communicate, what we would say about his relation to myself as an alternate self, birthed as a product of an idealisation of his identity.
i want to explore this a little more in the future, maybe in something more artistic. maybe looking into the type of work he would have made (if he also followed on to be an artist). or even his politics, had he followed the path laid out by my upbringing, and became an RAF pilot. a career that i have a host of moral issues with and find hard to stomach as an alternative path i almost went down. but thats something to talk about another time, with my only commentary on it being: i grew up on military bases and was sent to a military school, it was hard to avoid the propaganda of it all entirely, however, i made my choice not to and became staunchly pro-disarmament and anti-military.
maybe we are all mothers to the selves that will come after us. nurturing who we will become next and what aspects they will carry forward. maybe through dynamics of self parenthood, we can explore a more compassionate relationship to change and moving forward. one not fostered in admonishment for what we lack but in the breaking of generational patterns and giving the future versions of ourselves more leeway to disengage from the baggage of our pasts.
23.11.2025 - self genealogy
topping from the lap -- 16/11/2025sex, games and transexualism
(disclaimer: i use the term ‘transexualism’ as, to me, it describes the radical and jagged edges of gender, that incapsulates its political and revolutionary potential. for me, ‘transgender’ feels too comfortable, too malleable and too marketable as a term built in response to transness entering public discourse. i am non-binary and my use of this term is not a commentary on anyones identity or others use of the word ‘transgender’)
there is something magical about the game Hardcoded. it’s an indie game by Ghosthug games about fucking trans people, among other things. i first came across it in a Rock Paper Shotgun article, where the amazing Astrid Johnson, wrote a piece exploring trans sex in video games.
you play as HC (an abbreviation of Hardcoded), a trans android on the run from the authorities, who is taken in by a small community of non-android trans femme’s representing different archetypes. around the same time, there is a city wide outbreak of horniness that sets the pretext for why everyone is interested in fucking you in particular.
the structure is episodic with each day giving you a choice of scenes to play through, normally (but not always), including a sex scene or an introduction to another potential sexual partner. in between these scenes you can roam a small city, meeting people, finding casual encounters and customising your outfits and apartment.
each in-game night, you dream
it’s relatively standard fair for the genre, all be it with 90% of the characters being trans (or generally beyond gender binaries), however, its made me cry almost as many times as i’ve gotten off to it. the writings good but i don’t think its solely the writing that’s responsible. something about the combination of trans sex, melancholy and empathy, give it a particular beauty that opens me up.
describing from memory (potentially inaccurately, but intentionally so, as this has lived with me for years now), in one scene you go back to a characters apartment (a cis woman) after being at a convention. you go for a shower and begin making out, but instead of something sexual, you wash each other, interacting tenderly and with a sweetness offset by your characters thoughts about the differences between your two bodies. the way in which her feet are smaller than yours, the texture of your skin. she doesn’t seem to notice, instead looking at you with affection and comfort, seemingly just enjoying being close to you. the first time i saw it, it left me sobbing and naked but without being able to fully articulate why. thinking on it since, it mirrored an interaction i was all too familiar with. the feeling that i’ve had to get over regularly since coming out. of having sex with cis women and finding myself fixated on the ways in which my body didn’t conform or match theirs and scared that they would only be seeing that too.
people don’t often describe the feeling of difference that can crop up during sex when your body is atypical from what is considered conventional. how it locks you out of the experience and can limit your pleasure. left over considering, its hard to really totally give yourself over to the experience, without just focusing on the other persons. the “if they are having fun then i must be”, etc. it’s why i have such a love for Mira Bellwether’s “Fucking Trans Women”, a zine that explains (in detail) how best to go about pleasuring a trans woman. written both for trans women and for our sexual partners. it gives a casual language to trans sex that can help bridge that gap. getting people to think about and navigate their own pleasure, without just falling into fawning.
peak aesthetics
don’t get me wrong, liberation won’t come from solely from depictions of trans sex, but something gets lost when we take that away. while we are capable of more, sex leaves us vulnerable but honest. allowed to cum, our pleasure is allowed to be taken seriously and, in addition, our humanity. it allows us to be voiced outside of the sanitised expectations of a culture that would rather we were sexless, harmless and inert. something that is useful when arguing why we should be given sympathy, but lacking in engaging with a truer sense of empathy.
my favourite piece of trans feminist writing is Julia Serano’s Love Rant. it’s short, but punchy and epitomises the honest, radical and political edge of transsexualism, that made me feel comfortable to embrace the rougher edges of my self. it talks about depression, anger, love, joy and penis’ and acts as a rallying cry for the types of dialogues we should be having. with ourselves, but also with others. please go read it.
love rant
in lack of much of a conclusion, i guess i want to generally rally for more open conversations around trans sex. or just sex in general. and more media brave enough to depict it. i’m bored of seeing these very marketable and ‘family friendly’ takes on trans identity. yes “trans joy is resistance” but only when properly contextualised with everything else. my joy matters because its happening around an understanding of how brutal it can be to wake up nearly everyday to news stories about how dangerous and threatening you are. how that can warp your sense of self. how it can damage your understanding of yourself. that joy becomes radical because its a sign that, despite how i can fear my own body, when given the space and acceptance of those closest to me, i stop feeling dangerous and scary. i feel joy.
16.11.2025 - topping from the lap - sex, games and transexualism
politics / friction / trans identity -- 18/09/2025I’ve taken a pause in recent years from discussing or really commenting on my transness on public platforms, mostly from an exhaustion with the ways in which its dominated my adult life, but also because I’ve not really known what to say or how to comment on things. Reading Shon Faye’s recent eulogy for the “trans rights” movement, I feel compelled to say something. The movement is dead, however, it never held the capacity for progress in the first place.
My day job, outside of art making, is in a trans healthcare. We regularly see some of the worst affects of news cycles like this, young trans people, either coming to adulthood or just making steps to coming out, facing an overwhelming terror at the future thats currently ahead of them.
When I first came out in the mid 2010’s, the job market for working class trans people was dire. I spent most of my adult life struggling to get employment at supermarkets and clothes stores, let alone in anything that paid a stable wage and allowed me some fulfilment. Towards the late 2010’s this changed with the increased visibility of trans people in public debate pushing companies to up diversity in an attempt to cash in and market themselves as morally virtuous.
As any trans person can tell you, these jobs have and always are precarious. Often they are underpaid but come with an expectation to not just carry out your employment but also participate in educating and advocating for your own equality in the workplace. They mostly don’t come with opportunities for economic advancement and often lead to burn out, depression and before long, another round of unemployment/ job hunting. It was the rhythm of my 20’s.
Alongside this the art market is particularly fickle. You either get lucky (like in some ways I did) and find a group structure to work (hide) inside of, or your work comes with a pressure to commodify your transness. Again this is precarious, however, like with other aspects of employment, also a necessity.
Recently, this has felt less necessary, with the capacity to split my practice from personal aspects of my identity feeling like something thats still commercially viable. It’s easier to get artistic employment that doesn’t relate to or rely on my identity being at its forefront.
Reading Wendy Carlos’ talking about how much of her professional life was plagued by this (interviews focusing solely on her gender rather than her work), I’ve feel particularly privileged and thankful for how this has eased up recently. Ironically, it’s allowed me to engage in my gender far more internally and authentically than I have in the past.
However, all of this is precarious and I fear the last year of escalating transphobic legislation and politics have shown the limits of systemic recognition. Our rights and freedoms are on the decline, with dominant cultural trends having commodified parts of our culture to sell back at us, stripped down and without our involvement. The recognisable parts of our otherness, stripped away to make it more palatable to a cis audience, echoing the erasure of trans people from electronic music, a trend thats been happening cyclically ever since it’s invention.
Systemic capital is good at digesting otherness and filtering out the parts that challenge its politics of a frictionless system. In this, transness, as a philosophy of self identity that is directly othered from dominant societal norms, has always proposed a difficulty. It’s a form of identity that directly challenges structural legibility and contains an inherent friction that must be overcome to both acknowledge it or exist within in.
While markets have tried to assimilate transness, there is a core part that both cannot be removed, and cannot be digested. While this is why we make such valuable targets for exclusion, it’s also why we persist. Our identities have had to consistently occupy a space of opposition to societal norms.
This gives me some hope among things getting harder. Despite movements towards nostalgia and frictionless consumption (identified deftly under studies of Hauntology), otherness persists, all be it in sparse places. As a culture we’ve existed outside of legal, cultural and social lines of legibility and will continue to do so.
Though maybe the breathing room of the last few years has allowed us to further establish our own support networks and survival strategies, leaving us somewhat less isolated. Additionally, more people are publicly out than ever before. More people have to encounter us in everyday life. They have to acknowledge and confront (on some level) what we represent. That the unknowable/ illegible exists in the mundane, but more importantly, that they are also illegible to themselves. That friction is common in any network, regardless of the comfort provided by the known. Worse yet, that the unknowable is alluring.
In writing this, I wish to provide a change of outlook on the current despair present in the community. Not to say it isn’t valid. Things are scary and sad and overwhelming. But maybe this was inevitable when banking on recognition. I stand hopeful, though it’s a struggle at times, that we can building something out of that incompatibility, just as we have before.
18.09.2025 - politics / friction / trans identity