Blogging. A dead horse?
Starting a blog is something we’ve always discussed. I actually did start one about our trig bagging exploits (Two Triggered Trans), but it didn't get past the first post so it remains unpublished.
Life in the little flat on the top floor is quite hectic, and there didn’t ever seem to be time for blogging. I am employed full time at my current work, co-parent a 7 year old, and my wife and I are in the middle of authoring a book.
When we decided to write How To Transition, it was agreed that Phoebe would be the lead, and I would chip in with ideas, opinions and edits as little or as much as I wanted, as and when I could.
She has written many books in her previous life, but always as the sole author. I have never written anything outside of a school essay and don’t consider myself a writer—despite Phoebe's insistence that I am—so we didn’t actually know whether we could write a book together. But when we first sat down to try, something wonderful happened.
We were both working on our own laptops, on a shared document, and we quickly discovered that we were like a long-married couple correcting each other and finishing each other's sentences during the course of a conversation, except we were correcting and finishing each other's paragraphs. Words would spew forth from my brain, my one-finger typing struggling to keep up with the point I was excitedly trying to make, emerging as grammatical garbage on the screen, roughly leading somewhere with the glimmer of an idea. Phoebe would skip along behind honing the roughness, tidying the prose and wording it in a way that made it more refined and worthy of a book. Most importantly, we were having fun. This wasn’t work, it was joy. And this is how we quickly drafted out a lot of the chapters early on, feeling confident that we could write this book together. We also discussed doing a blog as we wrote to keep people abreast of how the writing was going, all we needed was time, and we had buckets of that back then.
We also knew that if How To Transition was to become the comprehensive guide we wanted it to be, we were going to need to interview other transgender people. We couldn’t just base its advice and tips on our own transitions. We needed a greater breadth of lived experience to draw upon. So we started interviewing and recording and, eventually, transcribing for easy information extraction into the book. But we also suddenly had these recordings that contained the keys others had found to transition. They weren’t only useful, they were powerful, inspirational, and at times unique. They deserved to be shared as freely as they were given to us.
These became the basis of our Transpiration podcasts at The Joy Tuck Club which, in turn, generated more interviews. All of these lived experiences form the basis of How To Transition, making it so much more relevant than if we had based the heart of the book on just on our own two journeys.
Still, these interviews weren’t enough for an actual podcast series, and so we started making filler episodes to alternate with the transpirations.
During the course of making our podcast we have discovered another thing we have in common: If we are going to do something, it needs to be done to the best of our abilities. As such, the editing and production of the early podcast episodes takes ages, even though we have thankfully managed to streamline it as we have become more experienced. It was well worth the time and effort, though, as we now have a vessel to generate interviews. All that was needed was for word of mouth to spread. We even discussed writing a blog to go with the podcast to give that a boost. Soon we’d be beating off potential interviewees with a microphone, then we’d have more than enough information to write the book. And so it goes.
You see, a podcast without listeners is like a speech without an audience. It's a creative output that exists, but it's not fulfilling its intended purpose. It neither imparts information or entertains others. It is, essentially, a monologue, lacking the engagement and feedback that comes from interaction with listeners.
So, how do you get listeners? One word: promotion. For that we needed to grow our social media presence, create a website, and maybe write a blog, too? The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, right?
We did all of those things, except the blog. Phoebe worked on the website, giving us a shop window to display our growing projects. Our podcast planning and production is fairly fast, now, and I took on the role of social media manager, a much more time-consuming role than I had ever anticipated.
For each new episode we now write a rough episode plan, research as far as we can go for an often too long list of questions, record the episode, edit it, produce a cover, write a summary (we tried AI for that in Season 1, examples are still there, but it was awful), make soundbites, create social media posts, and then promote across multiple platforms.
No complaints there. We did it all, and we love being in the thick of it. It feels so good to work on all of that with the Pheebs, and we genuinely enjoy making The Joy Tuck Club. Our efforts were also really paying off. Each episode was getting higher listens than the last, things were getting better and better, and we were riding the crest of a small but rising wave, which quickly swelled until we secured sponsorship for How To Transition from the gender affirming care giant, Facialteam. Nothing could stop us now.
“Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out
When you think everything's gone wrong
And everything blows up in your face”
Alanis Morrisette, Ironic
For all of the faults in Alanis' song Ironic (the real irony being that none of the situations she lists in that song are ironic) the one thing she got spot on was that life does have a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right.
For us, a trip to Paris blew up in our face big time. I’m not going to talk about that here, but you can listen to what happened in S02E01 of The Joy Tuck Club: Plans, Trans and Automobiles.
The impact it had on our momentum was enormous. We were forced apart for seven months, which put the brakes on any progress we were making with the podcast and the book. When it first happened, we thought we could use the opportunity of Phoebe's forced exile to our advantage, and Pheebs could frame it as a writer's retreat, using the time alone to really get some writing done, maybe write a blog, too.
But the reality was that it was much harder on both of us than we could have ever imagined. It took everything we had to just exist without each other. For me it was about keeping the home fires burning and carrying on with what was now just a meaningless daily grind, and for Phoebe it was to keep hold of the seemingly impossible belief that we would get through it, be back together and, perhaps hardest of all without me to anchor her, not get lost at sea.
In the end, surviving was all we could really do. Nothing else mattered except emerging from the living hell visited upon us by immigration, and reuniting back home in England.
Thankfully, we did exactly that after a beautiful marriage in Stockholm, and we are so much stronger for it. But there was some resulting wreckage: everything we had been building with The Joy Tuck Club had subsided. We needed to build it all back up.
At the time the thought of relaunching the pod filled me with dread. We had fallen out of the habit of recording and had gotten used to not having the constant deadline of the next episode looming over us, and having a lot more free time.
It was Facialteam that quite inadvertently got us going again. They invited us to speak at their Transgender Affirming Healthcare Forum, and that proved to be the spark we needed.
The forum presented us with a chance to meet more trans people and gave us a unique opportunity to talk to some of the leading lights in the field of gender affirming care.
We set to work in the only way we knew how, creating our Top Trans business cards as we had nothing to hand out, and a presentation that called upon healthcare professionals to help our community because of how hard it is being transgender in the current climate. In keeping with the games’ theme we created a version of Hasbro’s Monopoly (we called it Tranopoly, by Wasbro), complete with Community Chest and Chance cards that demonstrated the interminable GIC wait times and costs of gender affirming care.
The exposure we had through the forum, talking with some of the world’s leading surgeons and health care experts in gender affirming care, led us to also revise our approach to How To Transition. We had always planned to include healthcare professionals, but we have been able to give them a greater focus. The in depth interviews we conducted also formed the foundation of Season 2 at The Joy Tuck Club. The book we had planned on writing has been eclipsed by something that will be better than anything we originally envisioned, our podcast features interviews with some truly extraordinary people, and…who knows? We may even find time to write a blog as well.
Rachel