Inconvenient Truths
The Atlanta Compromise in Gender Paint
An Inconvenient Truth about the Cost of Concession
Valerie
The woman behind PITT, writer and researcher. Through essays, satire, and evidence-based critique, her work deconstructs the narratives that harm trans people and explores paths toward liberation.
Inconvenient Truths
When Critique Meets Power: A Field Guide to Being Pressured Into Silence
Read this first This piece is about a tactic, not a person. It uses one recent exchange as a worked example, but the point is portable: it is meant to help activist writers, bloggers, and organizers recognize a specific pressure pattern the next time it is aimed at one of
Inconvenient Truths
The Inconvenient Truth About Advocacy Disguised as Analysis
The Curious Case of Laura Targownik There is a curious form of intellectual dishonesty that reveals itself not in what someone says, but in the distance between what they have said and what they are doing. It is the dishonesty of someone who knows better but has decided that knowing
Satire
Opinion: We Don't Need Any More Cishetero Visibility—And It's Time Someone Said It
A recent social media exchange has brought back the arguments that "Pride isn't needed" and that it is somehow "too much" and "shoving it down our throats" again. This inspired the following satire. I am considering a series of satires for Pride
Essays
I Dare To Dream
On this eve before Pride Month 2026 begins, we cannot celebrate our pride, community, equality or successes in the face of the increased oppression targeting our trans community. Yes, "pride is a protest" is a nice aphorism that simultaneously is true and de-fangs the bite that is pride.
Inconvenient Truths
A Brief Study in Rhetorical Coercion
An analysis and response to Brianna Wu's comment on my essay "I Will Not Make That Trade" Brianna Wu left a comment on my last essay that I want to take seriously. Not because it landed, it mostly didn't, but because buried inside the
Inconvenient Truths
I Built a Resource to Dismantle Transmedicalism
Here's Why. About every ten years or so I find that this debate rears its ugly head. A little over a decade ago, some professional trans folks took up the challenge and deconstructed, debunked, and documented some of the debate and core issues. As things in the US
Essays
I Will Not Make That Trade
Transmedicalism and the Refusal of Victimhood The Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) and transmedicalist [1] trap is perfectly designed because it works in two directions at once. It reaches inward and outward simultaneously, and both movements depend on the same broken premise: that victimhood is the price of legitimacy. Inward, it
Standing with: What Solidarity Means
A reflection on the International Day of Pink In 2007, at Central Kings Rural High School in Nova Scotia, Canada, two high school students, David Shepherd and Travis Price, witnessed a classmate being bullied for wearing a pink polo shirt to school. Shepherd and Travis Price, witnessed a classmate being
Essays
When We Choose Each Other
A Manifesto for Liberation Now The Fact of Our Binding James Baldwin wrote: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." But there is something else Baldwin understood, something that sits beneath every essay he wrote, every warning he
Essays
The Quiet We Endure
The Quiet We Refuse There is a trap built into the floorboards of being trans. You feel it every time you smile at a stranger who stares too long, every time you soften your voice to keep the peace, every time you say "it's fine" when
Essays
The Price Is Us
The Cruelest Arithmetic The world is not our only oppressor. Watch what happens when oppression does its work long enough, effectively enough: you begin doing it to yourself. Not because you're weak, but because you've learned the lesson too well. You absorb the cisheteronormative logic so