TRANSposition Podcast

Get full access to TRANSposition at billieiswriting.substack.com/subscribe

Read the original essay HERE What does it mean for fantasy to collapse? And how does one differentiate between the multiplicity of desires? These are excellent questions, and worth lingering on, since they touch some of the fundamental elements of Lacanian theory. TRANSposition is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber....

You can find the original version of this essay HERE . “They aren’t even good at it” is what I have found myself thinking more and more often since the MAGA regime has taken power. The thought isn’t in reference to Musk’s DOGE attacks on the federal infrastructure (though the application there certainly would be apt) but to the MAGA/Christian Nationalist/US-fascist attempt to embody a certain masc...

You can find Paul’s original essay in written form HERE What does it mean to be brave? Is courage simply the eradication or conquest of fear? In a world that emphasizes integrating our feelings and listening to our bodies, courage often appears as the exception—a virtue defined by overriding those very signals. To be courageous, we are told, is to deny fear and act anyway, to master what threatens...

You can find the full written version of this essay HERE This letter is written to and for Christian trans women. If that is not you then you are welcome, invited even, to listen in but know that the further you are from that social location, the less this is written “for you”. I hope that listening in our our conversation might bless you. The letter draws heavily on the work and theory of James B...

You can find the original essay in written form HERE . Paul’s introduction: Last week I reflected on how self-help culture feeds on our fantasy of wholeness, always dangling the next habit, hack, or method as the key to completion. This week I want to press further into that same restless dynamic, but from a different angle: contentment . If self-help promises freedom through mastery, consumerism...

This is one of a few essays I wrote in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. You can find the original written version of the essay HERE . In this piece I examine several of the most common reactions to his murder on the left and in the center and I argue that moral clarity and a refusal to soften the edges of this profoundly racist and cruel individual are necessary in this moment. TRANSposition is...

You can find the original essay in written form HERE on Paul’s Substack. Paul argues in this essay that self-help can’t help but fail. Its very solutions feed the problem. But here’s the twist: their failure is good news. The comfort, mastery, and wholeness they dangle before us is an impossible fantasy—one that keeps us addicted to the next promise of completion. To see through this fantasy is to...

You can find the written version of this essay HERE This manuscript (which I have taken the liberty of translating to the best of my ability) is one I stumbled across at, of all places, Moody Library at Houston Baptist University. Across the page were scrawled the words “Can’t let this get out”. Details among the marginalia as well as certain syntactical peculiarities lead me to believe this to be...

In this essay (You can find the original written form with footnotes HERE ) I use a Jonathan Chait piece arguing in favor of “reasonable compromises” on trans rights as a vehicle for exploring the difference between a trans accommodationist and a trans affirming paradigm. I explain why the trans accomodationist paradigm (while potentially well intended) is ultimately transphobic. And in the audio...

This is an essay I wrote in response to the assumption that there is anything inherently virtuous or sensible about moderate or centrist positions. I brought in a little bit of queer theory and worked to highlight the power of hiding a position. You can read the original Essay HERE Get full access to TRANSposition at billieiswriting.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first written but second part of my argument in support of trans identities using the reasoning and beliefs of C.S. Lewis. So far as I know this may be the only essay in existence which brings Lewis into conversation with Talia Mae Bettcher. Here is the original essay Here is the Glossary I mention in the essay Get full access to TRANSposition at billieiswriting.substack.com/subscribe

In this essay I explore C.S. Lewis’ understanding of the relationship between Sex and Gender. I also provide evidence that contemporary scholarship is wrong insofar as it fails to attribute Lewis as the first modern scholar to have insisted on this distinction in published work (he did it in Perelandra a few years before Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex ). Here is a Link to the original...

This is an open letter I wrote back in 2023 to the leaders of the Vineyard Movement exhorting them to recognize that the Holy Spirit is moving among the queer community and to re-think their policy of exclusion. You can find the full written essay HERE . And you can find a copy of Vineyard USA's Position Paper 7 HERE Get full access to TRANSposition at billieiswriting.substack.com/subscribe

This essay is, in some ways, the culmination of the work and learning I have been doing that has grown out of the epiphany I recounted in Episode 3. It marks something of a “jump forward 4 years” marker on all that began in the first 3 episodes. You can find a written version of the essay here: https://open.substack.com/pub/billieiswriting/p/queerness-is-a-blessing?r=1ghvoy&utm_campaign=post&utm_m...

Episode 3 is the third essay in my coming out trilogy. This essay uses the philosophical concept of sehnsucht (a longing for we-know-not-what) as a vehicle for exploring the moment that I first really integrated the truth of my own blessed queerness with the facticity of my life. It marks the third of the significant “coming out” moments for me, where Episode 1 represents my coming out to the worl...

Episode 2 is the second in my 3 part series of essays about coming out as trans. In Hidden I used my “boy mode” persona to talk about the confusion of growing up and living as a trans woman and the inner conflict involved in the “egg cracking” process. In Lazarus I pick up, in poetic form, where Hidden left off but speak from my own emerging and more complete consciousness of self. Links for this...

It seemed like a good idea to begin with my first three essays here on Substack which together recount my experience of coming out as a trans woman. This is the first of those three. 1. My Coming Out Post: https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/my-coming-out-post?r=1ghvoy 2. Hidden: https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/hidden?r=1ghvoy 3. Sehnsucht: https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/sehnsuch...

I like the audio format and was reflecting today that I appreciate it when people’s whose work I read make their work available in audio form (yes Paul and I are still working on getting an audiobook version of Eucontamination properly recorded and available). So I decided to go ahead and record some or even most of my essays and make them available as a podcast series. Get full access to TRANSpos...