Essay Series (2022-2025)

Gender Alchemy refers to practice of transition. It is part mythos and part science, complex experiments in identity, yielding the byproduct of the exiler of life.

In 500 C.E., an alcemist named Mary the Prophetess coined the term “solve et coagula” (to dissolve and reform) as a foundational rule of alchemy. The phrase has also been adopted by modern Satanists, and the words can be seen on the forearms of Baphomet. Solve — undo, destroy, deconstruct — and coagula — amalgamate, reform, rearrange — are also the steps of queering one’s identity. Gender transition is a giant “de-re” process, the myth of Humpty Dumpty with a triumphant plot edit.

All writing I have done since beginning my physiological transition in 2022 has informally fallen into meditations on Gender Alchemy. Loosely using the guides of autoethnography and fictocrit, I lace theory with embodied knowledge to document the wild metamorphosis of modern transness. Essays are often paired with visual work as transmedial storytelling devices.

“My experience – our experience – could be your experience.  My experience – our experience – could reframe your experience.  My experience – our experience –  could politicize your experience and could motivate, mobilize you, and us, to action.”

    –  Stacey Holman Jones and Tony E. Adams, “Autoethnography is a Queer Method,” 2016