Where I Say What I Think: The Commentary at Brianna Austin

If the Reference Library at briannaaustin.com is where I keep the facts, the Commentary is where I say what I think about them. Two different jobs, and I try very hard not to let them bleed into each other. A definition that argues with you is useless. An essay that refuses to commit to anything is worse.

There are twenty-six pieces there now. They fall into about four conversations.

Coming out, and what it costs

The most personal work on the site is also the most read. Reflections of Coming Out is about honesty, belonging, and the particular freedom of stopping the performance. A Practical Guide to Coming Out is the unromantic companion piece — the logistics nobody writes about. From Closet Crossdresser to Clarity and The Road To Oz trace the longer arc, the decades version, including the parts that do not flatter me.

The community looking at itself

This is the group I get the most mail about, usually disagreeing, which I take as a good sign. Victim or Villains asks whether we have grown too comfortable in the role of the perpetual victim, and it uses a night in a Chelsea bar in 2003 to ask it. Why Be Someone Else? takes apart the premise buried in the question itself. Boxes Defining Transgender People is about the categories we accept from other people and then enforce on each other. The Words of Others is about letting someone else's vocabulary do your thinking.

Law, politics, and what was actually decided

When a court rules or an administration acts, reporting usually tells you who won and almost never what the ruling said. The Least Sympathetic Plaintiffs in America Just Won covers a Supreme Court order on prison medical care and why a right that protects only people you would invite to dinner is not a right at all. States' Rights, Until a State Disagrees and California Court Rejects Federal Bid to Bar Transgender Athletes cover the same fight from two angles. A Solution in Search of a Problem asks the question I keep coming back to: what exactly is being fixed?

Definitions, and who gets to set them

Defining Womanhood, Born That Way, Truth or Dare, and And They Burned Witches Too are the arguing pieces. They are where I am most likely to lose a reader, and I would rather lose one honestly than keep one by hedging.

The rule I write by

I try to give the other side its best argument rather than its worst, and I say so in the piece when I think the other side has a point. Not because it is polite. Because an argument that only defeats a strawman has not actually been won, and anyone reading carefully can tell.

Sixty-nine years have taught me that the arguments made in public and the arguments that decide things are rarely the same arguments. The Commentary is my attempt to pay attention to the second kind.

Read the full Commentary archive, or start with the Reference Library if you would rather have the facts first.

The Guides at Brianna Austin: A Reference, Not an Argument

There is a difference between an argument and a reference, and for a long time my writing did only the first. I had opinions. I had stories. What I didn't have was a place to send someone who wrote to me and asked, plainly, what any of this actually means.

So I built one. The Guides sit inside the Reference Library at briannaaustin.com, and they are deliberately the least opinionated thing on the site. No hot takes. No conclusions you have to accept before the next paragraph makes sense. Just the ground floor, laid out so you can stand on it.

Four guides, four different questions

The Gender Guide takes on the word itself. What we mean by gender, how sex and gender are related but not the same thing, the difference between gender identity and gender expression, what the medical and psychological understanding currently holds, where legal recognition reaches and where it stops, and how other cultures have handled all of this for far longer than we have. It closes on why language and framing matter, which is not a throwaway — most public fights on this subject are fights over vocabulary nobody agreed on in the first place.

The Terminology guide is the shortest and the one I expect to use most. Sex assigned at birth. Gender. Gender identity. Gender expression. Gender role. Gender binary. Cisgender. Transgender. Each one defined in plain words, without the hedging that makes a definition useless. If you have ever nodded along in a conversation while quietly unsure which word meant what, start here and stop pretending. I did my share of nodding too.

The Identity Guide asks what gender identity actually describes, how people come to understand their own, and why self-definition matters more than the category it lands in. There is a section on what happens when the language keeps changing, because it does, and treating that as a scandal rather than ordinary linguistic life has never helped anybody.

The Politics Guide is the one I rewrite most often, for the obvious reason. It covers what the law does, why it varies so wildly from state to state, and — importantly — where the guide stops. It is not legal advice, and it says so. Underneath it sits a working record of Transgender Executive Orders and Federal Law, which I keep current when a federal action lands and everyone needs to know what was actually signed rather than what the headline implied.

What the guides refuse to do

Each guide answers common questions at the bottom, and one of those answers, in the Politics Guide, is simply: no, the guide does not take a side. That is not fence-sitting. A reference that argues with you is not a reference, and if you cannot trust the definitions, you will not trust anything built on top of them. I have plenty of places to argue. This is not one of them.

The Reference Library holds three more rooms alongside the guides — History, Research, and the FAQs — and together they are meant to be the thing you send to a parent, a sibling, a co-worker, or the version of yourself from ten years ago who had questions and no safe place to ask them.

That is who I wrote them for, if I am honest. Her especially.

Start at the Guides, or browse the whole Reference Library.