There are moments you build up in your mind that can never live up to the image in your head, and then there are moments that loom so large in your mind that you don’t know what to do with yourself once they are over. Things that occupy your every waking thought and action for such a long time that coming back to the rest of reality after they’ve past leaves you directionless. Moments that, as large as they are, are over almost before they’ve even began and before you can process them, and so it’s hard to even process that the moment has passed. You’re still there – either because you’re still wanting more and don’t know how to let go, or because the moment has changed you into something new, and now the reality you have returned to must itself be changed to fit the new you.
I didn’t take first place at the Powell Street Sumo Competition. I went into it “wanting to win” in the sense that I wanted to sincerely try my hardest. I didn’t want to give in at the first sign of tough resistance or choke in a key moment, and I can say that I didn’t do either of those things. But I didn’t *really* expect to win. I, a relative upstart in sumo, with a whole 4 months of serious grappling training couldn’t *really* think I could win multiple rounds against larger, stronger, more experienced competitors without enduring a single loss.
That’s the thing about sumo: it’s over in an instant. If anything other than the soles of your feet touches the ground, you’re out. One hand, one knee, the top of one foot, and you’re out. Not to mention that ring is not very big – it only takes a few steps back and you’re at the edge, and before you know it, you’re out.
An entire Summer of training. Doing 3 to 4 different training sessions a day, often with a nap in between. Pushing myself harder than ever before and achieving new abilities I can safely say I’ve never possessed, all backed up by my incredible coach, Sony Sahota of Praxis Gym, some awesome training partners, so many wonderful friends, and, of course, my beautiful and ever-supportive wife. I basically got to play at being a professional athlete this Summer, and I truly feel like this has been one of the greatest Summers of my life.
And in an instant it was all over.
Poor Miele keeps getting matched up with me. Thanks to cartoonist, James Lloyd, for snapping this photo!
My first match was against an opponent I had faced back in the Spring. A skilled grappler who, granted, is a little smaller than me, and but is also long-time member of the Sumo Sundays Club. But my single-leg takedown game was just too polished this Summer, and in the blink of an eye, I seized an opportunity to snatch up their leg and then it was all over.
But my next match, well, that was up against the previous winner of the “Super Heavyweight” division at the Spring Basho, so I, uh, hehe, couldn’t move him even an inch. Before I could find a moment to snatch up his leg, or even get my bearings, he had pushed me to the edge of the ring and I came down on my back – pulling him with me, but that makes no difference in sumo.
I am glad to say that my disappointment was only momentary. Even before I found out at the end of the competition that I would win the “Fighting Spirit” award, I knew I wrestled my best and stuck to my game plan and proved that my had training paid off. When I lost, it was clear that no amount of training I could have done in that time period could have allowed me to go all the way and take first place this year. The competitor who won really deserved it. He’s the head of the Sumo Tigers team here in the city and he’s been training hard to win Powell Street for a good 5 or 6 years. As strong as I am and as experienced as I am in other martial arts, and as much as I was living and breathing training this Summer, someone like me isn’t going to just walk into a competition and take 1st against someone who’s been living and breathing this for literal years. It was a humbling experience wherein I saw just how far I had come, but also how much further I could still go. The best outcome from a period of intense work and preparation.
Honestly, even if I had won, I would be feeling much the same way as I am now. This moment I had been building towards for so long, over in the blink of an eye. Now what?
BE the competition!
During training, my grappling coach said something to me that stuck with me (partially because it happened to line up with my Tarot reading). He said that for a brief period you need to become the competition. You have to be one with the moment, the situation, all the dynamics going on, and respond to it naturally, honestly with exactly the energy that is required to fill in the space left by the shifting tides in and out of the moment. But when it’s over, you need to separate yourself again and come back to life.
I think this is the real change that occurred in me: for a brief period of time I was the competition. I lived for training, all I thought about was training. The was no separation between myself and the moment I was preparing for. Until, I suppose, I was knocked out out of it by, as the wonderful announcer put it, “losing a battle with physics.” I metthe moment ahead of me and gave myself to it as much as I was able to. And when that tide receded, I was able to smoothly and calmly let it slip away beneath my toes. That doesn’t mean I know where I’m going next, just that I can be ready to receive whatever the next tide holds.
I wrote in my last post about where I want my training to go once these challenges I have been building towards for so long are over, but I really can’t just be focusing on training. Living like a professional athlete is great, but a professional athlete I am not.
I know I gotta get back to making art again, whatever that looks like in this modern digital hellscape. But I also know I can’t go back to how I had been living prior to this period of training, which had me largely artistically treading water, just trying to survive. I need purpose. I need something that drives me, not just in my physicality (which is easy to find) but in my artistic output.
Christ. 2019?? I’ve been sitting on this WAY too long.
Actually returning to my comic, StarfistGemini, is certainly on the table for a long-term art goal for me, but having a concept of a project isn’t enough. Powell Street wasn’t the vague concept of “sumo wrestling”, it was a specific, defined event. A date I had to be ready for, with specific parameters of how I needed to be ready. The primary thing that has held me back from actually pulling the trigger on returning to Starfist is a lack of a defined plan for its release; a lack of a defined outcome for working on it. In the past, I could just put comics on social media and that would result in views, likes, Patreon, book orders – all the things needed to sustain an art career. But social media doesn’t work the way it used to (and I hate it and it was killing me), and long-form, full-page comics meant for print don’t read super well online, and unfortunately, it’s not the easiest thing to tuck into working all day long on a comic without revenue. What I need to do if I’m serious about doing graphic novels is actually pitch them to publishers – I’m just gonna have to get over my fear of rejection for this project that is so close to my heart. Hopefully, my meeting of the moment of Powell Street has taught me that I can meet the moment required of me in order to make the art I want to make happen.
Truly, what this is going to take is some soul-searching on my part to understand what I want to accomplish as an artist.
Just who am I now that this moment has passed?
Oh right! I’m Buff Aunt Bria!
If you live in Vancouver, don’t forget to come my FREE Queer and Trans Karate class! Mondays at 6:30 PM at 825 Pacific Street! All bodies and abilities welcome!
Please help me to live and keep making and doing good things!
There are moments that you build up in your mind for so long that, when they finally come, there is no way they could ever live up to whatever your idea of them was.
I remember reading trans people’s depressed accounts of not feeling “different” post-transition – it’s not that transition wasn’t a powerful and necessary process for them, but that after years and years of yearning for something that seemed impossible, they expected to feel fundamentally different once they had “crossed the threshold”. But the truth is, even after the process is over, you are still you. You may not have been previously recognized, or been allowed to fully express yourself, but the core person that you are has always been there. Any changes that have occurred along the way throughout the process will have been so gradually built up that they will be almost imperceptible to you, even if they have all built up to be something quite great.
On this past Saturday, I finally had my black belt test in Karate.
I have been training in martial arts for 25 years, and for over 20 of those years I’ve had my brown belt (the rank typically below black belt) in Shotokan Karate. I took martial arts training with the seriousness of a neurodivergent transfemme desperately trying to fill the bottomless pit in my heart with anything other than admitting the terrifying truth about my gender. But despite my rigorous training, and the incredibly harsh treatment I put upon my poor, tender, adolescent queer heart, I never felt “good enough”. My body never looked ‘right’, and my skills and physical abilities were never high-enough level. I was a fat kid, and martial arts training helped me to lose weight… culminating in me picking up an eating disorder in my later teens, that was itself only “addressed” by taking up bodybuilding.
In retrospect, it’s so obvious that this was an expression of unaddressed dysphoria, but at the time, I just felt like a perpetual failure – an underlying sense that I can see I have carried with me on some level ever since, even after transitioning. You become so used to feeling bad, that it becomes definitional to your sense of self. You and anything that comes from you, is, by default, not as good as somebody else.
I was ready for my black belt when I was 18. All I did was train – I didn’t go out, I didn’t see much of my friends, and dating was absolutely out of the question. All I cared about was training. But as the date of when my test would be approached, I got word that the curriculum was being changed. Trying to be humble, and not wanting to mess up on what I certainly would have viewed as the most important moment of my life up until that point, I decided not to test at that time, but I did go to the seminar at which the belt tests were being held, as would be necessary if I wanted to test later on. That’s how it works; you go to a seminar to train with the senior instructors, and if they approve, then six months later you can go to another seminar and test.
I went to the seminar and saw that the curriculum had been changed to something easier than what I had been practicing – it was more akin to what I had just done for my brown belt previously a few years before. I also saw that there were people testing for their Shodan (1st level black belt) and even their Nidan (2nd level) that I felt were not as good as I was. Whether or not this was actually the case, it is hard to say 20 years later – in my experience, teenagers often have an inflated sense of their abilities, and a sense of time and scale that lacks the perspective only age and experience can give. But nonetheless, this was a supremely disillusioning experience.
While I didn’t give up on martial arts as a whole, I did have reinforced in my mind my teenage sense that authorities were not to be trusted and institutional titles and recognition were largely meaningless.
I went away to university, and while I did continue to train on my own and with friends, I didn’t bother pursuing any kind of organized training with a dojo or put any thought to testing for a black belt I wasn’t even sure I believed in anymore. But everywhere I went, once my deep interest in martial arts inevitably came up, I would get the question of “What belt are you?“, and I would have to tell the above story that I quickly came to loathe having to tell people.
Worse still, I would frequently encounter people who would respond with something like “Oh neat! I got my 2nd degree black belt in Taekwondo when I was 12!” I don’t want to shade Taekwondo, because it actually has a very cool origin based in anti-imperialist resistance against the Japanese occupation of Korea, and there are many Taekwondo practitioners today with incredible skills, but modern Taekwondo has an even worse reputation than Karate for giving out black belts far too easily (any black belt you get at 12 really can’t be worth much). It would take all of my restraint to not undercut these people by telling them their black belts don’t mean jack shit, as I knew I would largely be just taking my own frustration and inadequacy out on them. It hurt seeing so many people have something so easily that I felt I couldn’t have myself.
Five years later, I graduated university (another meaningless title I didn’t really care about) and moved back home with my girlfriend to fix up an old sailboat. During that time, my old Karate teacher encouraged me to test for my Shodan, and since I was in even better physical shape with a much higher degree of ability than I was at 18, and, more importantly, I was so sick of telling the story of “why I don’t have my black belt“, I jumped into training with the goal of testing. I got approval to test from the local senior instructor and went to the next town over to train with him on a regular basis. As the date of the test approached, I started to experience a collection of symptoms, including severe (and I mean SEVERE) back pain at night. Despite their painfulness, the test was important enough to me that I shrugged the symptoms off as over-training and resolved to properly address them if they continued after the test.
The night before the test, my mom, my girlfriend, and I drove to the town it would be in and got a hotel room. But on the morning the seminar was to begin, I was informed by a very sheepish senior instructor that, after talking it over with the other senior instructors, they decided that I should have to wait for the next seminar in six months time, since I hadn’t technically done the whole “go to a seminar, and then test at the next one six months later”. I wanted to be humble, and not act entitled, so I swallowed my disappointment and continued with the seminar, resolved to finally test at the appointed time.
The thing is, those symptoms I had shrugged off as over-training, it turned out they were stage-IV cancer. The back pain? That was the cancer splitting my vertebrae apart from the inside!
The next year of my life revolved around a new challenge; battling cancer. I kept up what training I could, as the medical evidence showed that moderate exercise during cancer treatment improves treatment outcomes and quality of life. I got through lengthy chemo infusions and MRI scans by meditating – visualizing myself performing katas (patterns of movements that make up the curriculum of Karate) or defeating an impossible foe, such as my sensei. I had to go through four different treatment protocols over the course of a little over a year – 6 months of one type of chemotherapy, 3 months of another (worse) type of chemo, a bone marrow transplant (which involves a MASSIVE dose of chemo), and then a month of radiation. My strength and muscularity helped me to handle higher doses of chemo, so as soon as a treatment protocol was completed, I would immediately begin training to build myself back up in preparation for the next treatment. After all the treatments were complete, since there was no guarantee that my cancer was defeated for good, I set into training as hard as I could, achieving higher levels of physical ability than I ever had before.
During the course of dealing with cancer, I finally began grappling with my trans feelings – almost dying has a way of making you re-evaluate your life. In that time, I was on the verge of transitioning on more than one occasion, but it wasn’t until after moving to Thailand after beating cancer that I made the decision to finally go through with it.
I remember one night, riding my bicycle home across Phuket island after my regular Muay Thai training. Muay Thai is the kickboxing tradition of Thailand and it is the most respected striking-based martial arts discipline in modern combat sports due to the high amount of sparring and competition that has shaped the style’s techniques and training methods, keeping the style “live” and un-abstracted, unlike the way much of modern Karate has become. I learned so much about martial arts in my time in Thailand, and I loved the training I received at a community-oriented/non-tourist gym from my personal coach – who seemed hopeful that I might consider competing in the future. There are few better feelings than riding your bike home in the warm evening air after an exhilarating training session, but on my ride, I found myself trying out my female vocal practices I had engaged in during my previous furtive attempts at transition. I figured I had moved past such “frivolous” things, and I practically tried them out as proof of that. But I found in them an even more exciting joy than kicking pads in a grimy boxing ring with a private coach. Here I found myself in a beautiful place, with a cool job, in the best shape of my life, after just having beaten stage IV cancer – I should have been on top of the world, and yet, I still wasn’t happy. The choice was terrifying, but obvious.
Those next few years saw me training in a new way – trying to alleviate dysphoria and shape my body into a more ‘feminine’ form by melting away my hard-won muscles through lengthy cardio sessions performed on an empty stomach. This training, too, included martial arts, which took on a much greater relevance to me now that I was presenting as a woman, and as trans – one of the most hated minority groups in society.
I once again was presented with an opportunity to test for my Shodan, this time by my friend and head instructor at Kumakai – two of his students were preparing for their Shodans and he thought it might be nice if I finally did mine, too. I thought about it, but in addition to my previous experiences with testing, the experience of coming out as trans and challenging the patriarchal order of our society via snarky webcomics really had me in a mindset of not caring about authorities and institutions. So declined my friend’s offer, and largely turned my back on martial arts outside of occasional, casual workouts on my own for the next few years. As far as I was concerned, the #1 threat to my health was dysphoria, so I was mainly interested in training that would help alleviate that.
It wasn’t until 2021, when I was promoting my graphic novel, Coming Out Again, on a live-stream where I did some Karate moves, that I once again realized how important martial arts were to me. I trained for several months after that, in preparation to make a silly Power Rangers video that I had hoped might lead to some kind of Youtube career of building puppets and doing Karate moves. While I got into incredible shape, not too long after, I experienced increasing total body joint and muscle pain, stiffness, and numbness. I’ve written before about how I think this was caused by a combination of my stressful work as an online creator, returning to training after a period of relative inactivity, and going on ADHD medication known for causing muscle clenching and stiffness. But as simple of an explanation as that was, it wasn’t an easy process to reverse it. For a time, the pain and stiffness would only continue to get worse – I couldn’t even hold a pencil without pain – and I really thought that my life as I knew it was over.
One day, my partner wanted to cheer me up, so she put on Karate Combat, the current, most well-rounded full-contact striking-based league in combat sports. I was so inspired by what I saw that I remembered how I used to be – strong and vital. I missed the old me and didn’t want her to just wither away without a fight. I began doing just a little bit of training every day – 10 squats when I brushed my teeth, maybe a few kicks and punches during a Karate Combat match, before the pain would become too much.
I acted in a play near the end of 2022 – In My Day, which was about the AIDS crisis in 1980’s Vancouver. Working with this heavy material every day required something to ground me, so I started doing Karate on my lunch breaks, and before too long, also in the evening after rehearsal. The training built up more and more, the joint pain reduced, and my fitness improved, until about a year later, my friend, the head instructor at Kumakai, asked me if I would be interested in teaching with the club. They had taken over a large club out at UBC that would require more instructors to adequately cover all the students and give them the necessary amount of attention required for them to grow and progress. Early on in this process I decided that I would like to finally try testing for my Shodan, as I knew that having someone at the club training for their black belt would bring up the energy in class and help inspire and motivate the students.
But these things take time, even when they’ve already been a long time coming. It took a year and a half more of training to polish my skills – I had forgotten nearly all of my katas, and after training in Thailand and then so many years of more informal training on my own or in small groups, my way of moving was more like a kickboxer or Muay Thai fighter, which is fine, but not exactly what might be looked for on a Karate back belt test.
I gave myself many tests and challenges along the way. Punching out a candle. Punching a hole in a newspaper. Breaking boards. Repeatedly shoving my fingers into a bag of rice, then beans, then rocks. My Sumo wrestling training I’ve engaged in this year is also part of the test – Karate finds its roots in Shima, traditional Okinawan wrestling that is almost identical to Sumo, and I really feel this training has massively improved my fighting ability as well as my understanding of Karate. Probably about 3/4 of movements in katas are, in fact, wrestling moves, rather than strikes.
But then finally, after all of these years of struggles, tests, and training, I finally got my chance to test this past Saturday.
I really didn’t feel I was at my best. I was all banged up from Sumo training, which held my usually powerful kicks back in particular, and after the seminar was over, it became clear to me that my house guest staying with me that week had given me some kind of minor cold. I wasn’t able to do many things I had hoped I would be able to do on or before the test – my full side splits haven’t quite returned to where they were when I was younger, I haven’t worked up the courage to break four boards yet like I had planned to in my training (I really didn’t want to hurt my hand right before the test), and my best friend and usual sparring partner has been out of commission for the past several weeks with a back injury, so my sparring ability was not nearly as sharp as I had hoped it would be. But I knew I had to go into the test letting go of perfectionism. I needed to let go of my self-doubt and that sense that anything that comes from me is definitionally no good.
Despite whatever shortcomings I might feel I have in terms of my own high standards, I can say that I didn’t choke under pressure. I kept my composure and performed as well as I possibly could have.
Typically, a black belt represents that the student knows the basics of the style, and now the real training can begin. But this black belt, that has been so long coming for me, is so much more than that.
As I opened this piece with, this moment couldn’t really ever live up to all that pressure of 20 years of struggle and training. Did I really deserve this? Had I really trained enough in the last few months to polish everything up? Were my friends and colleagues just being nice to me when they signed the document awarding me my black belt? This same doubt has plagued me in everything I’ve done for most of my life. But while I felt these things briefly after receiving my belt, I definitely have felt a shift in myself. I feel as though a deep wound has been healed.
I told myself for years that I didn’t care about institutions, or titles, or recognition by authorities, but it is clear to me that I have been carrying a shame and stigma around ever since my teens. Much like transition, as long as this was unresolved, I was always going to be held back in life. As long as I had this hanging over my head, I was always going to, on some level, feel like I was no good, and that I couldn’t trust others.
While we shouldn’t define ourselves by the views of others, which we have no control over, being seen and recognized for who we are is vital to feeling safe and connected within our communities. I’ve carried anger around with me for 20 years towards those institutions who gate-kept me from being recognized. But much like how my relationship with cancer has changed from one of antagonism with the illness that nearly killed me, to gratitude to the crisis that caused me to re-evaluate my life and come out as trans, my feelings after this weekend have shifted from anger at being held back for 20 years, to gratitude that I got to receive my black belt (and the certificate for it, which carries my name) as my true self.
If I had gotten my black belt 20 years ago, it might have just been one more burden from my old life I wanted to be rid of. But now this time I got to be tested not by a cadre of old men who, frankly, I don’t have much respect for, but instead by my peers, all of whom I respect, admire, and love. This black belt means far more than any black belt that I could have gotten in my teens. I might view such a black belt today the same way I view those black belts given to 12 year olds. On my test, I even got to teach a real, bonafide Karate Combat fighter a thing or two about kata – he came up to me and asked me to teach him!
So what now?
For the second time in my life, I once again find myself feeling like that transfemme icon, Conan the Barbarian, after having completed the lifelong quest of vengeance that consumed and defined him, sitting on the steps of Thulsa Doom’s temple contemplating what he will be now that it is over. This test has occupied my mind on some level for decades, and the past several months in particular have been completely consumed by training. On days off from training I practically don’t know who I am.
I have no intention of stopping training, even as I know I have to return to doing other things in life (when was the last time you saw new art from me?), but the question remains: what for?
Well, first of all, I still have one more challenge on the horizon that I consider to be the final part of my black belt – the secret last boss to this period of training that comes only after you’ve completed the main game’s story (and only if you did it correctly).
The Powell Street Sumo Wrestling Competition is less than a week away as of my writing this, and I have signed up to compete in the “Competitive” bracket. I have no idea what to expect. My understanding is that some pretty powerful competitors sometimes show up to Powell Street, but you never know who actually will. If I’m being honest, I’ve been training harder for Powell street than I did for my Shodan – partially because of the excitement of live competition, and partially because my wrestling coach has recently been disrespected by his dojo to the point of him publicly resigning from the club. I feel so angry on his behalf and I want to win to show to these fools just what an incredible teacher they have so carelessly spurned!
I go back and forth about my chances of winning – there are some pretty big, strong, experienced grapplers out there. But I did win my last competition fairly easily, and I’ve been doing well in training, so… who knows? While, yes, I want to win for my coach and I want to prove that after all these years of training I might actually know something, the point of competing isn’t to win, it’s simply to do it. We have these life experiences and we take them seriously and sincerely simply for the sake of having a full and meaningful life. Whatever happens, the process of preparing for Powell Street has made my Karate stronger and my black belt more meaningful.
Kudo, the space helmet Karate
But beyond that, I had a new idea knocked into my head during my test. The final challenge on the test was a Bogu round with our head instructor. Bogu simply refers to protective gear, and historically has mostly been used in reference to the armour worn by Kendo practitioners. But sometime in the 1980’s, the Kyokushin Karate off-shoot, Daidojuku Karate, began using a form of bogu helmet to allow for full-contact strikes to the head while minimizing CTE, the bane of modern MMA fighters. In the 90’s, Daidojuku changed its name to Kudo (Karate + Judo), and while it still hasn’t received widespread popularity in the West due to the prevalence of MMA, it is massively popular in Russia and Japan, and it has become a robust and vibrant competition circuit that allows the martial artist to test themself in a full-contact environment with some amount of consideration for long-term health. There are people competing in Kudo into their 70’s!
I had a hell of a time fighting in that bogu round. Because of the space helmet protective gear, headbutts are allowed in Kudo, and so when Kyle headbutted me during our match, I headbutted him right back! The next day, my neck was sore from taking hard punches to the head, but I went to sleep that night with images and sensations from our fight swirling in my mind. Our club, Kumakai, is currently moving to become the primary Kudo representative on the West Coast in Canada, and I could easily see myself training to compete in Kudo in the very near future!
Like I said with Powell Street, competing isn’t for the sake of competing. It’s to test ourselves and have life experiences that make us stronger. The world is swiftly becoming a scarier place than it seemed to be a few years ago. I want to be able to use my many years of martial arts training to protect myself and my community, and to pass on those lessons that I learned from martial arts which allowed me to stand strong in myself and find out who I really am. Competition in something like Kudo is just the thing to test my skills and show myself that what I might teach the next generation of Transgender Karate-ka is actually based in something real, rather than the “because I said so” of some old man gatekeeping martial arts.
“Scorpion & Leopard Society” is the current working name for my new 2SLGBTQIA+ Karate club.
Which brings me to the final next thing on the horizon for me in the martial arts. Starting Monday, August 11th, I will be teaching Queer and Trans Karate classes at 6:30 PM at the 221a Arts Association on 825 Pacific Street in Vancouver.
No experience is needed, classes are free, and are open to anyone who self-identifies as trans or queer.
Martial arts is who I am, and I am beyond excited to being this next chapter in my journey, sharing my skills and experience with my community, which I can now fully feel like I can be seen by and participate within.
I originally came up with the concept for this week’s comic probably about 10 years ago, and while I have long kicked myself for leaving it on my massive pile of unfinished projects and unrealized ideas, I am thankful that I never published it before now.
When I first wrote it, this comic was, in my mind, about feminism. It’s commentary was meant to be something about the asinine misogynist line of “Well if women want equal rights, does that mean we get to hit them now?” (barf)
Not to explain my own punchline here, but the whole idea hinges around the proportionality of a threat. In the view of any reasonable person, and, y’know, also, like, the law (supposedly), any kind of abuse, spousal or otherwise, is always wrong, regardless of the gender of the person committing it, and the only acceptable use of violence is in self-defense, when you feel that your life, or the life of another, is under threat.
Get yourself a girl who can do the Dim Mak
So, if you are 6’2″ and 250 lbs, and your 5’2″ 120 lb girlfriend hits you because she’s mad at you, while it does sound like you may be in a toxic relationship dynamic, unless she is some kind of kung-fu master of the dim mak, can you really say that your life was in endangered by her hitting you enough for you to hit her back? Can you really claim that you would be acting in self-defense? Now, if your partner is a pro MMA fighter, regardless of if you weigh anything close to her weight, you may be under real threat of being harmed should you suffer abuse by her, and you may need to resort to some form of violent resistance just to survive her onslaught.
In any case, arguing whether or not roughly half of humans deserve equal rights around how you think it’s acceptable to hit your spouse pretty much just proves the point of why women need and deserve equal rights. The whole argument is asinine in the end, for to even entertain such a ridiculous sexist statement with a counter-argument is just giving too much oxygen to trash that isn’t worth anyone’s time.
But that’s just it…
Why are we giving so much oxygen to nonsense in public discussions?
At foremost in my mind today is the continual insistence of Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself” as counter to any admonishments of its war crimes and genocidal actions. Any condemnation of Israel’s actions brings the demand that you condemn Hamas, or to invoke October 7th as a justification, or swear that you affirm Israel’s right to defend itself.
Looking at the situation through the lens of the comic, how does the dynamic between Israel and Gaza stack up? Who has the potential to present the greater threat to the other?
Israel is a nuclear armed nation that gets hundreds of billions of dollars every year in weapons and military aid from the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, and many other Western nations. This includes top of the line missiles, drones, fighter jets, weapons, and sniper scopes. Their air force budget alone is so massive that, if they had to pay for it themselves, it would take up all of their education, health, and social programs spending combined. Israel could not function as it currently does without massive foreign subsidy. That’s why protesters in Western countries focus on criticizing Israel over other repressive regimes around the world – our tax dollars are funding this apartheid and genocide, so conceivably we might actually be able to influence our own governments to put a stop to it. Short of going to war, what pressure could we put on Iran or North Korea that isn’t already being done?
But I digress.
Israel uses this massive defense spending to control every single border crossing into Gaza, and to hammer its people with more bombs in the last 20 months than were dropped in all of the Vietnam War (which was itself more than in all of World War II). By the way, we are talking about a strip of land roughly the size of New Jersey.
What does Hamas get? Well, they do have backers from around the Arab world. But since Israel controls every border crossing, there’s not a lot of material aid that can get into the area. Israel bans the entry of all construction materials and anything they say could conceivably be used to manufacture explosives – including cruel and ridiculous items like toys, candy, and sugar (wouldn’t want children to have any joy! They could make bombs out of it!) Virtually all of the explosives and rockets that Hamas and the Al-qassam brigade launch against the IOF and targets in Israel, are themselves unexploded ordinances that Israel launched into Gaza.
They are literally lobbing the scraps of Israel’s own genocidal bombing campaigns back at them.
What else can they do to defend themselves?
“But Hamas started it on October 7th!”
OK, so even if you ignore the fact that the Al-Aqsa Flood was the action of a generation of orphaned youths from previous Israeli bombing campaigns who had lived their entire lives in an open air prison, watching their people be slowly extinguished, if you ignore that the destruction of Palestine and its people has been an ongoing process of almost 80 years that has culminated in an apartheid system which persecutes and disenfranchises Palestinians in an effort to drive them out so Israel can occupy the entire region, and if you ignore that the Israeli government has intentionally empowered Hamas over the past 20 years so that they could have a more belligerent adversary in Gaza that they could use as an excuse for military actions – even if you ignore all that, these children on dirt bikes and kites managed to sneak through the concentration camp walls – past what is supposed to be one of the most powerful and expensive militaries in the world – and killed somewhere around 1000 people (about 200 of the 1,200 Israeli death toll that day were killed by the Israeli military in its clumsy counter attacks) and took about 200 people hostage.
I’ll do my due-duty here and condemn the killing of civilians. That’s not cool. I’m never going to say that is a good thing to do.
But I also can’t really get too worked up about this in the face of the death toll of Israel’s response, which has lasted almost two years, encompassed more bombs than the entire Vietnam war, destroyed every single university and almost every hospital in Gaza, and killed what any honest estimates put at well above 100,000 people. The low-end estimates of the children killed in Gaza alone is above 16,000. Almost 15x the total death toll of October 7th. The highest cohort of killed children? 6-12 year olds – can’t run as fast as adults, but too big to carry. This is to say nothing of the massive number of wounded, the psychologically scarred (can you imagine losing your entire family? or digging mutilated children out of rubble?), and the long-term poisoning of the land by chemical weapons and depleted uranium bullets (babies are being born without brains in Gaza now!)
So even if (and that’s a pretty big if), you give everything to Israel, and grant that this whole conflict started with Hamas’ aggression on October 7th, and totally wasn’t at all a provoked revolt against the keepers of a concentration camp, it seems as though Israel has paid back retribution in spades (can you say over 100 to 1 dead?) With their massive power imbalance, can what they’re doing be in any way reasonably called “self-defense”?
By the way, none of this even mentions the starvation of Gaza being enacted right now by Israel’s blockade on the region, or of their occupation in the West Bank, OR of the apartheid system within Israel proper, in which Arab-Israeli citizens are second class citizens. OR of their frequent invasions into Syria and Lebanon.
How does any of that fit into “self-defense”?
Of course, defenders of Israel will say that if Israel doesn’t do all of these terrible things to all of their neighbors and to their own citizens, then they will become the victims of a genocide by the surrounding Arab nations. They will say that protestors calling for the end of the occupation and destruction of Gaza, of the apartheid system in Israel and the West Bank, and for Israel to become a true democracy with equal laws and representation for all people living there, Jew and non-Jew alike, they will say calling for all that is somehow a call for the destruction of all Jews. This is extremely similar to what the White Afrikaners in South Africa said during the global campaign against their apartheid regime. Aside from the fact that this did not happen to the White Afrikaners (despite what Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Grok might say), to do an evil thing, and then justify the doing of the evil thing by saying you fear the consequences of having done the evil thing, is not self-defense. It is cry-bullying, and we live in an exceptional era for it (future blog post on that to come). No person rallying for Palestine is calling for the destruction of Jews in Israel (or anywhere) – a great many of them are Jews themselves, and many more are members of persecuted minorities who know first-hand the pain and terror of ethnic cleansing. These people are simply calling for justice, for international law to be upheld, and for an end to senseless violence.
In traditional Okinawan Karate, one was not ever meant to use their karate in violence. The true purpose of karate training was to strengthen one’s body and one’s moral character, so that they could confidently approach any situation in the spirit of non-violence. Even should the other party assail them with blows, they would not resort to using the incredible violence that they were capable of, and their strong bodies would be able to withstand the attack until they can convince the other party to stop and be reasonable. Many, more modern martial arts masters have affirmed that, should they be robbed by a mugger, they would willingly give them their wallet, as there is nothing within it that is worth doing another person harm.
To be truly strong is to be in a position to show kindness and patience. To resort to violence is to lose control of a situation or to succumb to fear, anger, or selfishness.
True self-defense can never involve retribution for the sake of inflicting punishment, and it can never include gratuitous violence. What Israel is doing is no more self-defense than punching a toddler who slaps you in a tantrum. They hold this population in the palm of their hand, and any violence that occurs in this situation is ultimately on them.
What is amazing is just how resilient the Palestinian people are. Though, that they have to be is a failure on our part. This isn’t something they trained for, it’s something that was foisted upon them by people in foreign lands.
Maybe they will be resilient enough to withstand Israel’s blows until they are willing to be reasonable and work for mutual justice, rather than greed and domination?
One can only hope. (And protest, and fund raise, and have difficult conversations, and
I NEED YOUR HELP!
I can continue making art and writing only with the support of my readers! I need to make rent this month and I am definitely going to come up short if I don’t ask a little more aggressively than I normally would.
Supporting my work with a monthly pledge to my Patreon is a HUGE help.
Buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or contributing directly to my PayPal also help out immensely.
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Any support you are able to give during these lean times is greatly appreciated!
I honestly can’t remember if I ever posted this comic before. As I’ve written before, I have so many comics that I’ve done and then just sat on, I can’t always keep track of what’s been put where.
Yeah… I could have checked if I posted it anywhere, but…. nah.
Luckily, greed and evil are evergreen content!
During this time of terror and uncertainty in the face of rising fascism in the United States and their Genocide Colony, Israel, so many people are hurting and in need of help. And yet, the priority of the US government this week has been to cut healthcare not just to over 150,000 transgender Americans explicitly, but also to countless others on Medicare and Medicaid, all in service of further cutting taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations on Earth. This is just one further step towards their goal of creating a society based entirely around the power of the wealthy (truly, we’ve been there for a long time, but now they’re just dabbing on us).
Any time you protest or complain or ask for help in the face of any of our society’s cruel policies, you are admonished for failing to live up to their standard of how a human being should live:
“How could you be so irresponsible?“
“Why don’t you work harder?“
“You should have gotten an education.“
or better yet
“You shouldn’t have wasted money on that education!“
Their answer to how people should live their lives, how society should be structured, and what should be valued within a person’s accomplishments, always just so happens to align with what benefits them. Money always ends up being of prime importance, as well as “personal responsibility” and “work ethic” – always in service to those who just so happen to have the money to pay you.
As if they are so good with money! Donald Trump himself has gone bankrupt, like, five times, and let’s not forget the 2008 market crash that resulted in the biggest banks on Earth getting bailed out by the Obama government.
I frequently think of the Kurosawa film, Rashomon, and the short story it was based on, In a Bamboo Grove, which details the investigation of a murder and the questioning of all of those involved. The main takeaway of the story: Everyone lies. From the suspect, to the witnesses, to even the victim (as channeled by a spiritual medium). Everybody tells a version of events, whether they mean to or not, that just so happens to align with their interests. When we’re talking about an individual in their day to day life, this really doesn’t matter too much, most of the time. But if you have a disproportionate amount of wealth and power and your decisions and actions have profound, sweeping consequences for millions of people, yeah, it kinda matters if you are being truthful with yourself and others and whether your guiding beliefs are rooted in something resembling reality.
These Silicon Valley psychos take mushrooms or go on a yoga retreat and then become zealots for “Longtermerism” or “Effective Altruism” or whatever anti-human philosophy they latch onto to justify why they deserve their position in society and why they don’t have to feel bad about anything they do. Spiritual experiences, whether pharmacologically facilitated or not, can be quite profound, but it is vitally important to not just allow yourself to be swept away by whatever it is you want to hear. To be of any value, any kind of spiritual or philosophical pursuit requires a practice of honest and emotionally mature inquiry into one’s own thoughts and behaviors. It requires self-reflection and a willingness toward self-critique. If all you’ve ever done is solve your problems with money, if all you have to do is pay people and they will do whatever you ask of them, if everybody around you will always tell you what you want to hear because you hold the power of life and death over them, then how likely do you think it is that such a person would be in the habit of genuine self-reflection?
Because, no, the people in charge of all of our lives don’t care about honesty or truth or what is actually good for anybody. They just want to keep on being rich, and keep feeling good about being rich, even as the world burns around them.
The same goes for any oppressor authority.
Cis people would believe in the validity of cis genders, but not trans ones, wouldn’t they?
Straight people would believe in the validity of heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Men would believe in the primacy of “males” over “females”.
White people would believe in the supremacy of their race over all others.
This, of course, is not to say that every member of any such group believes such things. But any time a member of such a group believes such a thing and demands that you do, too, well…
How. Convenient. For. You.
The good news is we can nakedly see the invalidity of their values. The society they’ve built and demand we toil and die for serves virtually nobody. The wicked deeds they do become increasingly obvious and demented.
Ah yes, my favourite philosopher, “The Matrix” lol
One of the values of growing up trans is having a sense from my earliest memories that there was something wrong with how everything was organized – no matter what lies they told me to justify things being how they are, I had an intrinsic sense within myself that this was all bullshit. Seeing events fairly early on, like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and then later the 2008 market crash, only solidified the sense that this order was built on evil.
I imagine the kids growing up today seeing the likes of Donald Trump and all his evil friends stripping the USA for copper wire, and the ghouls in Israel hiding behind the Holocaust to get away with doing a Holocaust of their own (all with the support of the politicians of the west) really only undermines their faith in the societal order even further. But with the rise of Right Wing Zoomers and the embrace of a kind of ruthless, cynical grifter culture based in generative AI and online dropshipping, I fear that the cultural undermining has gone too far and in an unhelpful direction. If people lose too much hope and belief in society, then they become truly just for themselves. They might not believe in the fairy tales of work ethic and toiling for a rich old man, but they also don’t believe in helping anybody besides themselves. This, too, is a kind of self-serving lie. One perhaps built out of fear, and a need to survive in an increasingly non-functional and contradictory system.
It frankly seems all too inevitable, sadly.
I’m reminded of being a kid in highschool, seeing the cracks in the authority of the flawed human beings in charge of my life for six hours a day, the dysfunction of the class room, the pointlessness of activities that were demanded we take seriously, and the kids who were getting away with bullying and misbehaving while others were arbitrarily singled out for punishment for far lesser offenses, and I remember just… checking out. Not caring about any of it anymore and just doing whatever I wanted to. None of it seemed to matter, so why waste a single bit of energy following the rules? Why be invested in the validity of this institution that claimed total control over years and years of my life?
A certain amount of this is very healthy and necessary. Don’t waste your life being trapped in some horrible person’s self-serving fiction of how the world works, toiling in a system that benefits them, but not you! But don’t replace that fiction with another selfish fiction that just so happens to tell you whatever you want to hear.
Left Wing ideas about socialist programs are depicted as lazy people who want free hand outs, but the truth is, it’s not about getting free stuff, it’s about getting the stuff that you have already earned, but currently goes to others who did absolutely nothing to earn it. Creating a truly equitable society would require that we as a society take a painful look at many of the things we value and whether or not they actually serve human flourishing – like, say, the right to own as many homes as you can afford to buy or the right to reap the benefits from other people’s labor because you own the business they need to work at in order to survive. We’ll have to let go of comforting myths of personal exceptionalism and accept the fact that nobody accomplishes anything truly on their own. If you have any aspirations of being above others, or if you are invested in yourself as being exceptional and deserving of more than other people, well, you’re going to have to let go of that if you want to make a better world. Many people online who fancy themselves as Left Wing activists are sadly still invested in a self-serving lie of personal branding and celebrity. Their activism is really about them and their own personal success rather than whatever cause they claim to champion. If you want to make real change, you’re gonna have to let go of that soothing lie you tell about yourself. That you are better than others, that you deserve to have more than them.
I am somebody who is never not working hard in my life, and I have accomplished a great many things in my close to 38 years on this planet. But I constantly fight against any impulse that I deserve anything more than others, or that the things I have are entirely because of my own efforts. Everything I have is because of the kindness of others. Whether it’s my supporters on Patreon, or the love and support of my wife, or the publicly funded healthcare system that saved me from cancer, or my parents who read to me from a young age and opened up my imagination, any opportunity I have had to work hard and have my hard work pay off is an immense privilege that has been gifted to me by the hard work and generosity of others.
It would be nice if others in our society who have benefited even more greatly from the work of others would be willing to take a look in the mirror and recognize that.
So next time some authority demands that you adhere to their values and their view of how the world works, just think: How convenient for you.
Don’t spend your life trapped inside the limitations of someone else’s mind.
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As an artist, I survive by the support and generosity of others. If you get value from what I put out in the world, please consider either supporting me on Patreon, tipping me on Ko-fi, or contributing directly to my PayPal.
I am also currently accepting art commissions! Character sketches and headshots as low as $20! Send an e-mail to lifeofbria at gmail.com for all inquiries!
Well, I won! I took home the big bag of rice from the 2025 Vancouver Spring Sumo Basho!
All of my three whole weeks of training paid off! I couldn’t have done it without the help and support of my coach, Sony, over at Praxis Grappling, and the Kensington Judo boys, as well as the loving support of my wonderful wife, and the help and support of my best friend and long-time training partner, Jazz.
My division – the “Heavy Lightweights” – was pretty stacked. I was up against the former champion (who is also head of the Vancouver Sumo Club), a co-facilitator of the sumo club (who is also a skilled judoka), and the wife of the head of the Rain City Sumo Club from Seattle (who was a total powerhouse!!) But I swept the division without a single defeat across multiple matches against each opponent! (although, I had one draw in my very first match, which was against my Seattle opponent, but which resulted in a rematch that I handily won)
Thank you, Aaron sensei, for bringing Uechi Sanchin to our club and to my practice!
Truthfully, I didn’t feel like I had to work very hard. While I competed under the name of “Buff Aunt Bria”, and made a big show of flexing my muscles, I came into this competition not wanting to win by strength, which I don’t think would have even worked against my opponent from Seattle. So I wasn’t charging and pushing super hard the way my opponents were. I focused on using a solid stance and posture, taken largely from the Uechi-ryu Sanchin kata that we teach at Kumakai, and combined it with tai chi push hands skills to neutralize my opponents’ awesome force and keep them from controlling my hips, shoulders, and elbows. In the end, they practically threw themselves by their own efforts to unbalance me. There were a couple of times where I had back to back matches, and I was asked if I needed a moment to catch my breath. I did not, as I wasn’t pushing and struggling the way everyone else was.
Many, many people came up to congratulate me and compliment me on my martial arts skills. My favourite by far was the elderly Japanese woman who emphatically told me she loved watching my “fighting spirit”. So, evidently, my performance seemed impressive to observers. Sweeping a stacked division without a single defeat in a sport I was competing in for the very first time after three weeks of preparation? Not too bad!
And yet, I wasn’t happy.
While I did win all of my matches, I didn’t have the time or wherewithal to use any of the techniques I had been drilling. I had been focusing on hitting single leg takedowns, foot sweeps, using arm drags to get to side control and pick my opponents up, and even fireman’s carry throws – all things that I had hit in sparring against larger, more powerful judoka. But I didn’t get even close to using any of that in the competition, primarily because people were pushing and charging too violently for my competition-noob brain to process how to enact my plan. My mistake was, because I had heard that strong judoka may show up to the competition, I primarily trained against judo. But a judoka wrestles much differently from a sumo specialist. They will be much more technical, trying to get grips and set up takedowns, instead of the power charge of forward momentum that is favoured by the rule-set of sumo.
So, despite my win, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in myself.
In my melancholy, I was reminded of an episode of the fighting anime, Kengan Ashura. The villain, Kanoh Agito, a musclebound powerhouse who was heavily favoured to win the series’ titular tournament, is as skilled as he is proud, and so he insists that he be capable of beating his opponents at their own game, rather than doing the actual thing you typically must do in fighting, which is to employ a suitable strategy to disrupt your opponent’s strengths and fight them where they are weakest. In his match against the god-like Thai Boxing champion, Kaolan Wongsawat, Agito is unable to out-box his opponent, and is forced to beat him by countering his style with grappling. After his victory against such a legendary opponent, as soon as he is alone, this hard, fearsome man who under most circumstances shows almost no emotion and is regarded as a god of violence by virtually everyone around him, begins to cry. He starts beating up on himself for his inability to win the way he thought he “should have”.
There’s no way two different fortune-telling methods put together could be wrong!
I thought of this big, evil beefus having a little tantrum at himself over such a silly, prideful reason, and my feelings of inadequacy started to melt away. I remembered all of the things I have laid out in this post so far and decided to stop being so hard on myself. As a fortune cookie fortune that I keep on my altar alongside my Tarot cards told me “No one is happy who does not think himself so.” My feelings about my performance are entirely up to me – especially if my misgivings are entirely about not “winning the right way”. I could sit and stew and beat myself up, or I can feel proud of my effort, analyze my performance, and begin work to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is I would like to try doing next time.
Truly, though, in grappling, as in life, you don’t actually get to call the shots. You can’t go into a match and say “I’m going to hit a fireman’s carry throw on this person”. Like, maybe, if the situation arises. Grappling is about receiving an opponent’s energy and taking it where it wants to go. You don’t throw them, they throw themselves. My real failure wasn’t in not being skilled enough to do the techniques I had planned, it was in my hubris of believing that was even in my control in the first place.
I’m gonna keep this win-train going, babyyyyy(apologies for Trump-inclusion)
I was sore the next day after the tournament, but less so because of the tournament itself, and more because of the workout I did that night after. I immediately began training for the next one! The Powell Street Festival is in August, and they have a sumo tournament there, as well. I’ve heard even stronger opponents often show up to that one! A little over two months of preparation is a lot more than three weeks, and I’m excited to see what I could do if I apply myself over a longer period of time. The only hiccup is that I also must be training for my Shodan (black belt) exam in August as well, which will call for a very different skill-set than sumo. If I want to balance these two somewhat contradictory training protocols, I’m going to have to think about employing a different strategy in the August tournament. Either way, I’m excited to test myself further in competition, and after competing in sumo once more, I would like to try out other competitions, like judo, karate, kickboxing, and eventually, kudo – a full-contact MMA-like competition circuit that primarily consists of a combination of judo and karate (hence the name, kudo) and that our karate club is moving towards being affiliated with.
Kudo is known for it’s specialized protective headgear. But that’s expensive. So I opted for the TEMU-DO headgear!
Finally, of all the things I have to be proud of in my first real tournament experience, I am most proud of this:
I made this art for my coach, Sony, who I had heard is a big fan of 90’s comics. If you ever go train at Kensington Judo (and I highly recommend that you do), you may just see it framed and hanging on the wall. I planned the composition out digitally and then used my new projector I had been gifted to transfer it to paper by tracing the projected image in blue pencil, before finishing the art in ink.
I’m showing this partially because, I gotta be real, I need money.
Training this much has really taken my focus away from work, and I have basically a week to make rent. Yes, you can tip me on Ko-fi, support me on Patreon, or donate directly to my Paypal, but really, what I would like best is to make some more art for people!
Would you like some art from me? Please let me draw something for you!
I can do you something like I did for Coach Sony for $150 (either digital or as physical art). Or a simple headshot for $20. I’ll make more posts about opportunities to get art from me, but if you are interested, please e-mail me at lifeofbria at gmail.com, and we can get going right away!
Please help me keep this Win Train going by helping me find a bit more Work/Training balance in my life!
Just living your life the way you want it to be is winning – and you must pursue this goal relentlessly!
MAN am I beat. I’m used to high volume, hard training, but this training to prepare for the upcoming Vancouver Amateur Sumo Tournament is seriously something else! Between judo, Greco-Roman wrestling, and then the actual sumo training sessions themselves, I am being thrown into the deep end of new activities that are intense in ways I haven’t ever fully experienced or appreciated.
Intensity aside, whenever you do something you’re not used to doing, you will experience much more difficulty doing it, and much more fatigue after having done it, regardless of your level of physical fitness and ability at other activities. I have come to appreciate the great difference between striking and grappling in terms of how each respective discipline fatiques your body. I’m used to the rhythm of striking – the breath, the expansion and contraction of your muscles, the moments of relaxation vs the moments of explosive action – I can navigate these things with my body in a way that feels so natural I could throw out kicks and punches practically all day long without gassing out. But grappling fatigues the muscles in very different way. The rhythm of the breath is very different as well, and the relaxation and tensing of muscles required for effective grappling is not something I have years of intuitive understanding of, so I am no doubt tiring myself out prematurely by my inexperience and lack of understanding of when to relax and when to use strength. But most of all, while my Karate practice has always involved some grappling, there is a world of difference between doing a take down on an opponent at the end of a few punches, and doing dedicated grappling practice against an uncooperative opponent who trains that discipline full-time.
The great strength (and perhaps also weakness) of grappling is that it pretty much innately must be practiced with another person. You can shadow box or hit a bag far more easily than you can “shadow wrestle” – although there are champion judoka who claim to owe their success to shadow wrestling imaginary opponents. But it is often said that the most advanced piece of training equipment you can use is another human being. So whether striking or grappling, it is always when practicing with another human being that you will learn the most – especially if that practice is more “alive” by being performed in a spontaneous, minimally constrained manner against an uncooperative opponent i.e. sparring. Having an experience of something hits far more more deeply than being taught a lesson about something. Too many times in my martial arts career I’ve been training a student and told them again and again and again to keep their hands up to protect their head, but it is only when I give them a gentle little tap on the head with my focus mitt or muay thai pad after they’ve let their guard down while punching, that the lesson magically seems to stick. So, too, when you spar with an opponent, perhaps in a constrained manner so as to put you in a particular situation which you must then solve, you will learn lessons far more deeply and intuitively by experiencing a situation and then having to use your body to navigate it – often very quickly and spontaneously without any opportunity to “think it through”. It is your muscle memory and limbic system that is learning, more than your conscious mind.
Thoughts move fast, but nerve activation at the site of the action being performed will always be faster than the time it takes for a conscious thought to be processed into a motor nerve impulse and travel down the spine to tell the muscles what to do. There is certainly a time and a place to teach and drill techniques, but none of those drills or techniques are really going to stick until you’ve experienced using them in a “live” manner. If I just tell you “If your opponent does this, then you do that” it really isn’t going to matter until you’ve lived it, so to speak.
And OH BOY am I living a lot of “experiences”.
I am going up against all these experienced wrestlers and judoka, most of whom are men who weigh at least 20-50 lbs more than me, but all of them have a great deal more experience at dedicated grappling practice than me. While I’m not completely helpless out there thanks to my solid karate stance, my tai chi/kung fu sticky hands training, and, of course, my big, big muscles, but many of my rounds against the higher belts just involve me getting thrown or foot swept with impunity, or at the very least, me fruitlessly struggling against an opponent, maybe resisting his take downs, but not scoring any of my own. If I’m lucky, and I’m up against someone who isn’t too much bigger or too much more experienced than me, I might actually have a chance to score one of my comparatively clumsy take downs on them!
Now, in fairness to me, this is actually a pretty good level of performance for a “beginner” in this discipline, and I have definitely improved over the course of this training period. The judo boys all seem very impressed by my performance – they asked me the other day after training “After the tournament is over, will you still come back to train with us?”, and my heart melted. But at the same time, for somebody like myself who has been training and teaching for as long as I have, this has been an immensely humbling experience. It would be very easy for me to respond to taking so many Ls in training right before a competition as discouraging. I might even avoid doing such training to preserve my ego – I think I certainly have at various points in my life. But every single one of these rounds where I’m getting tossed around, I’m learning. I’m seeing my vulnerabilities, I’m realizing what opponents might do to me in the ring, and I’m getting an intuitive understanding of why we do the things I’m being taught to do – both here and in Karate class.
My beautiful face at the end of every judo match, coming back stronger!
In my experience, it is always to your advantage to train with people who are “stronger” than you are – whether “strong” means physical strength or technical ability and experience. I’ll never forget the times I trained at the gym with this guy who was a good 100 lbs heavier than me, and who was immensely strong. Just a big beefus! I was pretty young, and pretty strong myself, but this guy was just on another level of strength from me. He was the first person I had ever met who could do the full 300lb stack on the lat pulldown machine. Before meeting him, I never even really fathomed that this would be a possibility for a “normal” person. But he showed me it was possible, and so I became inspired in my training, and it wasn’t long before I could do the full stack, too.
Going up against more experienced opponents in judo and wrestling shows me what is possible to do, while going up against bigger, stronger opponents is like lifting weights in that it is preparing me to overcompensate and be able to dominate the comparatively smaller opponents I am likely to be matched up against, come Basho-Time.
It might feel like I’m losing again and again, but my motto in this training has become “Losing is Winning”.
I don’t think you can really be the guy on the top until you’ve been the guy on the bottom – many, many times.
Imagine if my preparation for this tournament just involved me doing things I’m comfortable with and only facing opponents who didn’t challenge me. How prepared would I likely be to face real competition in the tournament? Furthermore, would I be psychologically prepared to lose if my training only involved me winning?
My own psychological demons, which have often pushed me to hide away and avoid physical and emotional discomfort, also frequently take the form of bemoaning the burden of being born transgender. This world simply isn’t a fair one, to many people, including transgender people. So it is easy for us to fall into self-pity and to wish for a better life free of the painful memories and social hardship of being different from most of the people around you. It is true, this world can and should be a better, more fair one, but it does us no good personally to be trapped in wishing it were so, or that our own circumstances were different so we might avoid the painful unfairness. I am only snapped out of these feelings by remembering those people who seem to get everything they want in life. People who have never known any hardship and who always get whatever they want, invariably suck. These are your typical conservative elites, your rick kids, the assholes who have no compassion for others and who sit smugly in their belief of their own superiority. They’ve only ever experienced getting what they want and they chalk it up to just how great they must innately be, rather than, say, because they were born into money and privilege and were given everything they needed to succeed, including insulation from the consequences of their failures. Rich people talk down to us poors as though our poverty is a personal failure and their wealth a personal virtue, and not predictable results of systemic inequality. Most people eat a diet high in junk food, but only some people have the unlucky genetics that makes them get fat from eating junk, and then those who eat junk but are still skinny look down on fat people and tell them their failing is a lack of will-power. It’s like that study where Monopoly players were given unfair advantages over their competitors and who consequently came to believe their success at the game was due to their incredible Monopoly skills, rather than all that extra money they started with.
As much as it sucks to lose, you don’t want to be that person who has only ever won. That person is incredibly fragile, or at the very least, they suck to be around and everybody hates them. It’s far better to be an honest loser than an undeserved winner – spiritually, if not for your dental health. Of course, I would prefer to live in a fair and just world where everybody gets what they need and the concept of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is largely obsolete. But even in such a world, I think it would still be necessary for humans to experience difficulties and challenges, and to not always get whatever they want all of the time.
If I hid away from training with powerful judokas, my martial arts would not only be limited, but worse, I would be living in a fantasy where I had no idea how fragile and vulnerable I would be against a truly skilled grappler. If I win this tournament, great! All my training paid off. But if I lose, that’s almost better. Losing just gives me information about what I need to work on for next year. If I win without facing significant challenge, will I really be prepared for future challenges? Of course I want to win, both to know that my efforts can yield results, and because cultivating the experience of trying your best at something is important, so I must go into this tournament with a serious intention to win. But what I want most of all is to be the strongest version of myself. If that requires losing, then I’m willing to pay that price however many times it takes. And after having gone through this process of training, I can confidently feel that, if I do lose, whoever was able to beast me must have really earned it, and so how can I be upset?
Whatever comes in this tournament, as well as whatever comes in this crazy, shitty life that continually seems to throw Ls towards trans people’s way, I feel more confident facing it having looked in the mirror and seen my own limitations, as well as looking to people stronger than me and seeing just how far outside of those limitations I could travel, if I’m willing to be uncomfortable for a time.
Training for this tournament has taken up a lot of my time and I need to make some extra money before the end of this month to meet all of my expenses.
If you value what I do or care about trans athletes, and if are able to, please consider tipping me onKo-fior supporting me onPatreon.
If you follow me, then you no doubt are aware of my propensity to disappear. Almost every post I make on any given platform is likely to start with some variety of “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while”.
So, uh, yeah, sorry I haven’t posted in a while.
I don’t want to blame everything in my life on my ADHD, but it is true that is definitely a major factor in my disappearances that affects me in multiple ways. (HORSE TIME BABYYYYYYYYYYY)
However, the reason that lies far deeper at the heart of why I so frequently disappear is a far more universal one than my own individual neurodivergence. And that is…
Social Media Sucks and it is Bad For You
I don’t need to belabour this point. I’ve written about this plenty of times and we pretty much all know it by now. Like smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol before it, social media has become a socially acceptable health-destroying facet of modern life, only less cool and fun than those other things. From melting our attention spans to destroying our self-esteem to breaking down the social connections between people, all in service of enriching and entrenching the societal power of the wealthiest and worst men on Earth, social media as it currently exists just flat out is not good for us.
As someone who made her career off social media, it’s been an ongoing challenge reconciling with how I am linked to something that can be fairly conclusively linked to the destruction of our personal health and civil society. I feel a sense of guilt for posting, regardless of what I post, because I feel like I am only encouraging people to continue to engage with these toxic platforms. As I most likely have written in a blog post before, I often describe being an “online content creator” as “smoking brain cigarettes in order to sell brain cigarettes to children, for no guaranteed pay, and also the brain cigarettes turn you into a nazi“.
While I have ranted and grumbled about this both in private and in public for years, I only fully realized just how bad for me the social media environment was and is. I have written a few times about the total body joint pain I had to deal with in 2022, and which caused me to change a lot about my life. That situation undoubtedly arose from a build up of chronic stress from working as an online creator, and one key thing which I only recently realized the significance of, was how during that time, if I was upset or startled or surprised, or experienced any kind of sudden shock, including things as simple as sneezing or tripping over something, I would experience a kind of tingling itchiness all over my body. This feeling was very similar to the histamine reaction I would get all over my body when I had cancer. Histamines are usually associated with allergic reactions and the cancer I had was a cancer of the immune system (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma). So, for my body to respond to even minor shock and stress with an immune reaction, while at the same time experiencing severe joint pain and stiffness all over my body, I can only conclude that the stress of my life at that time was causing my body to attack itself in an effort to curb a perceived, omnipresent threat.
The past few months I simply haven’t been on social media. I deleted it all from my phone and closed all the tabs on my browsers (yes, even Bluesky). And, I have to say, it has been wonderful. One thing in particular I have noticed after taking this break is that I no longer feel that tingling when I’m startled. My body and mind have been able to calm down in a way they most likely could not have if I had continued to engage online.
Sadly, that blissful period must come to an end.
I am, at the end of the day, an artist, and an artist must put herself out there into the world, and the #1 way to do that in this terrible, digital age is via social media. So the apps are back on my phone, the tabs are opened in my browser, and I must now return to “digital panhandling”, as my haters used to refer to what people in my profession do. So keep an eye out for more posts from me, as I have a lot of exciting projects coming down the pipe that I will be talking about.
What have I been doing though?
The little kids I teach fight over who gets to hold my hand when we make a circle and I get called ‘mommy’ by somebody most weeks. It’s a good life.
Well, I have been teaching a whole lot of karate. I run the Kumakai kid’s class now, and just recently I was running a week-long “Super Hero Camp”, where kids make art and practice martial arts. Next month, I will be teaching a week-long series of karate classes as part of Pride Month celebrations. I am also in the process of setting up my own LGBTQ+ Karate Club, but it has been a slow-going process of registration and bureaucracy, so I’ll keep you posted on the progress on that and maybe we will be able to train together sometime 🙂
Truthfully, a very large amount of my time has been spent in my training. I train almost as much as a professional athlete. One thing I have always been embarrassed to publicly admit, given how long I have trained in karate, is that I never did yet get around to testing for my black belt. I had various points in my life where I had planned to test, and it is a number of long stories I am very tired of telling as to why I never did, some of which led me to feel disillusioned with martial arts organizations and the notion of belts at all (I don’t even really like training in a dogi anyways, to tell the truth). But this Summer I will change that and finally test for my Shodan! I have little doubt that I will pass, but given how long a time it has been coming, I want to really pass. I want my black belt to mean what I think most people think a black belt means, which is a symbol of a high level of proficiency, if not mastery, rather than what it typically means in most martial arts, which is that you have an understanding of the basics and are now ready for the “real” training. I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been training for 25 years, and I’ve taught for 20 of those years. I’ve achieved elite levels of physical ability at different points of my life, and I know fourth degree black belts who are intimidated by me, so at this point I really want my own black belt to mean something when I finally get it.
You’ll just have to take my word that I broke these boards by punching them. I’m up to two with one punch!
So I’m training every day. Usually between 3 to 5 hours each day. On the day of the Canadian election, I managed to stress workout for six hours straight without realizing it. Recently, I took up sumo wrestling and I will be competing in the Vancouver Sumo Basho later this month. It feels so exciting to be training for a competition, and I can feel the excitement of those I am training with as they help me to prepare for this purpose. I would like to compete more, not just in sumo but in different combat sports. At nearly 40 years old and in an era where trans participation in sports is being increasingly restricted, it may seem like a bad time for a struggling artist like myself to style herself as some kind of competitive athlete, but the way I see it, this is basically my last chance to see what I can seriously do before I get too old or the environment gets too unfriendly. Who knows? Perhaps my competing can even serve some useful purpose for advancing trans acceptance.
To be fully honest, spending so much time training really does take a toll on the ol’ income, especially while being on hiatus from social media. This month in particular, with the Basho coming up and no large karate workshops scheduled, I need to make up some extra income to pay all the bills come June.
Any contribution my dear readers can make to my ko-fi will go a long way in helping me to maintain my progress and momentum on this journey to become the next trans ambassador in combat sports and martial arts.
Similarly, anyone who is able to support me on Patreon will be massively contributing to my ability to continue what I do on an ongoing basis. I know my public output has been lacking, so I supremely appreciate all of those who have continued to support me.
I am also opening up commissions and will be selling off some pieces to make up some income. Send me an e-mail at lifeofbria at gmaildotcom to inquire about commissioning me, and keep an eye out for posts about upcoming art sales.
My very first landscape on canvas. Thanks for the donations, Amy!
My true artistic passion these past several months has been my landscape paintings. I began painting watercolours as a means of improving my backgrounds and environments for graphic novels, but it has since evolved into an art practice and passionate obsession unto itself.
I started with simple watercolors made with dollarstore materials back in 2023, these grew in sophistication over 2024, and in 2025, thanks to donation of canvases and an easel by a friend who was moving out of town, I have graduated to painting at a much larger size on canvas with acrylics.
I don’t think the photos I have been able to take really do them justice, but I really am very proud of this new kind of work. I intend to have a gallery show later this year, and I will write in greater detail about my past painting work in a future post, but suffice it to say, this has been a major focus of mine during my offline vacation. I average about one painting per month. I’d like to go faster so I can have enough pieces for a show sooner, but I should be encouraging myself to find balance rather than Horse-Timing it 😉
While there are a number of other secret projects that I will be able to talk about in future, the most exciting new development I will share with you today is that I have been cast in what is my largest theater role to date!
Since 2018, I have been involved in local Vancouver theater productions as an actor, and since 2022 I have been involved in workshop readings of a particular play that I think for now I’ll leave unnamed just in case the production team are not yet ready to make public cast announcements. This year that play is going to a full stage production, and I was invited to audition for the role I had read for during the lengthy workshop process.
Unfortunately, I did not get that audition.
I have an idea of what I did wrong in the audition, despite being a shoe-in for the role. I think I held myself back in the audition in the same way that I have often held myself back out of fear of being too much, fear of crossing boundaries, and fear of rejection. I often haven’t posted art because I feared rejection. I would build things up in my mind and assume failure before I ever tried. Walking away from social media was more than a much needed break for my health or a statement about my ethics, but also a way of playing into my fears and preemptively avoiding rejection and failure by an algorithm that doesn’t exactly value the same things I do. I have been sitting on a mountain of paintings I am immensely proud of that I have shown to nobody because I’m afraid of those being rejected. I stopped trying to test for my black belt because I feared the rejection of authorities about something that was central to my identity. I avoided all competition because I both feared losing but also feared crossing boundaries and taking up too much space by doing what it would take to win.
You can’t fail if you don’t try, right?
I think this is a very common problem for trans people. We hide our true selves from the world and learn very early on that expressing our true selves will bring trouble. We spend years telling ourselves that we can’t have what we want and that we are wrong for wanting it.
This past weekend I was visiting my mom, and she brought out a silver medal from a judo competition from when I was nine years old. I was a fat little kid who hated everything, and who especially hated being told what to do (funny what effect assigning the wrong gender to a child will have on their behaviour). But as a fat little kid who was practically wider than I was tall, I was really good at judo, despite hating it like I hated everything else people made me do.
At this little tournament that was held at the end of the training season, I was not wanting to participate in my typical fashion, and so in my first match I just refused to do anything, and I was thrown, pinned, and consequently, I lost. But then one of the instructors explained to me how, if I hated it so much, I could get it over with without having to be thrown and pinned by throwing and pinning my opponent. And so I did, and I easily won every match and got a silver medal. I did so well, it was clear I would have gotten gold if I had just tried from the get-go. My mom had hoped this victory would encourage me to stick with judo, but unfortunately for my future combat sports aspirations, I was still a lazy little kid who hated everything, and so I did not stick with judo – arguably one of the best foundations one can have for combat sports.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with coming in second place, but now I have this silver medal that basically stands as a testament to the time I held myself back from a victory that could have easily been mine.
So now I’m tired of holding myself back.
I’m extremely lucky. I’m not sure what happened, but despite initially being rejected for the part in that play, I have since been offered the role! I hope all is well with whoever was initially given the part, and it certainly doesn’t feel great to be second choice for something, but I will not turn down this incredible opportunity.
I’m tired of assuming I won’t be good enough or that my attempts to be the best I can be will cross boundaries and bring another form of rejection. I’m not holding back in my training, I’m not holding back in competition to test my training, I’m not holding back in my art, and I’m not holding back when I go out on stage and perform this Fall.
My main take away from the past few months: Don’t Hold Back!
Don’t Hold Back
Again, any contribution my dear readers can make to my ko-fi is greatly appreciated, doubly so to anyone who is able to support me on Patreon.
I feel self-indulgent writing this out during the long telegraphed implosion of the western world, but then that’s exactly what our problem today is, and where the subject of this piece began; selfishness.
10 years ago at this time of year, when I first came out as trans, I felt supremely selfish. There was no question in my mind that I needed to come out, I looked ahead at my future and I could tell that to stay living as a man would lead to my death within 5 to 10 years. I couldn’t look ahead and see anything I felt was worth living for, but at the same time I felt that I had been selfish for choosing my own life over continuing to play the role I had played for so many people who loved that person I was pretending to be. Even as she supported me, I knew I had hurt the woman I loved and had been in a relationship with for nearly 7 years – virtually the entirety of my 20s. I had numerous students – both as a karate teacher in Canada, and as an art (and also karate) teacher in Thailand – all of whom loved and admired the old me. Was I robbing the people around me of that person?
The conversations around trans people today are quite different from 2015 – for both better and worse – and such notions of trans people being selfish are more popularly dismissed by narratives of trans joy – as they should be. But I think this barrier of selfishness is something that is still experienced by most trans people. We must push past the sense that we are being selfish, or rather, in my case certainly, I felt I had to consciously decide that I was going to be selfish in order that I might live.
Transition was perhaps the first major time in my life that I did something purely for myself. Since the rest of my life was just some role I played for others, I easily picked up the habit of people pleasing and self-sacrifice. I continually shrunk myself down and deferred to others. Despite, or perhaps because of, being a big muscle man with big hair and a big personality, I always felt I had to be the ‘bigger person’ and usually let others have their way. I tried to always be helpful, avoid conflict, and just couldn’t say ‘no’ to people. I suppose I finally reached my breaking point and said ‘enough is enough’ and did the one thing I always wanted to do but didn’t feel I was allowed to have.
Why should I have to sacrifice myself all the time?
Why should everyone else’s feelings always matter more than mine?
Why should I be so concerned about taking care of everyone else if I don’t even get to be happy?
I stepped through the door of selfishness and gave myself the one thing I truly wanted, and from then on I focused on myself. I developed and curated the new person I wanted to become – or, more accurately, I peeled the way the layers of protection I had built up to survive my old life, revealing my new “true” self within. The one who was struggling for breath under the accumulating weight of a life she didn’t want and never asked to lead.
Bon Jovi played everywhere in public in 2015 Thailand, where I first came out. So this became my Transition Anthem.
There is so much that can go into even just the outward facing aspects of a transition. New clothing, makeup, and jewelry. Attaining healthcare and document changes. Hair Removal. Voice training. Shaping my body through diet and exercise away from the muscular man I lived as into a more slender and traditionally feminine form. Excitedly tracking the progression of HRT’s effects. Feeling fear, inadequacy, and dysphoria. By necessity, the self becomes the primary focus as it is reconstructed.
Trans people are often accused, primarily by bigots, of being self-absorbed. But the reality is that we are feeling joy in ourselves for the first time and we are thrilled in our growth and exploration of a wondrous new world that gives our lives the color and meaning that we had always been told our lives should be, even as we felt gray and empty inside.
But then there comes the barrier. It varies from person to person, depending on what their transition goals are and the levels of access they have to attaining them. For me it was around three years into transition. The process had definitely begun much sooner, perhaps one and a half years in. But after I felt I had generally attained all of my transition goals in 2018, I began to feel lost. So much of my life in the previous years had been driven by my reconstruction of myself. So much of how I had operated had surrounded a sense of forward progression. Every day I was out there, working on that gender. Even at my lowest points, I looked ahead to the future and the hope of attaining my lifelong dreams. But once I had reached that point and felt at peace in my body and in my life, what now? I had to reassess how I operated and what I was living for. Was I purely to focus on my career in a similar “selfish” fashion as my transition had began? Luckily, by this time, I’d connected to other trans people and become active within some aspect of the broader trans community. I once again felt that responsibility to care for others.
The full embrace of caring for community after being hurt by community takes time. I grew up wary of the notion of community – it always seemed to be, at best, a burden of meaningless, one-sided obligations, and, at worst, a vehicle for brainwashing, group-think, and distrust of outsiders. These days I always say “You can’t really be a part of community if you can’t be yourself in community.” As self-sacrificing as I was, I always felt disconnected from the people around me, with rare exceptions. As long as I was living as someone I didn’t want to be, I was always going to feel like everything I did regarding other people wasn’t for myself – but in a way that fostered alienation rather than connection. It felt coercive rather than voluntary. Just as it is a long process to rebuild the self, it is a long process to heal the self. This cannot come purely by focusing on the self. It comes by relearning trust and by regaining a sense of investment in something beyond the self. The wounded self protects itself by cutting itself off from others. Coming out of that shell is difficult and scary and it takes time, but once you are able to stick your head out and see that it’s not so scary and that there are others out there who you can trust – that’s when the healing really begins.
I’m old now, getting close to 40. I’m not going to be the hot, young Superstar who’s the center of attention. Just as I’m not going to be facing the brunt of the hardship that is very soon to come for our people. But I do have a lot of experience and a lot of skills and, dare I say, some wisdom. I’m so fortunate to be a mentor and godparent to so many wonderful, young trans people. Seeing them thrive, and doing what I can to help them gives me so much joy and hope for the future. I feel almost like I have been transported back to the beginning of my transition, but this time, it’s not about me, it’s about us.
I love all of my kids and I’m not going to let them take a single God damn one of them. I’m going to protect these kids at all costs. I will keep living for them, just as I would die for them, if it came to that.
But even outside of such dire things, I feel greater ease and comfort in my more casual role as a karate teacher. I also feel a deeper connection and investment in my students. I liked being a karate teacher before I came out, but I feel so much well better as a female karate teacher. I feel like I’m truly able to shine and thrive and give everyone my best self now that I am myself.
You can only be in community if you can be yourself in community.
(OK I can’t help but make this a little bit political)
There’s a lot of reasons why the transphobes hate us, but not the least of them is that they do not want anyone to have an investment in community. To care for the vulnerable among us, to have compassion for others who are different from us, to feel connected to one another across racial, gender, and class bounds; these are not things they want us to have. They want everyone alone so they can’t fight back and so they can sell them things. Almost ubiquitously across the pre-colonization world, what we today call trans and queer people across cultures occupied some kind of religious or spiritual role. Perhaps a person who in some way bridges the separation between men and women, bridges other boundaries? Perhaps such people are connected to other worlds of possibility? They may try to use us as a means to divide people, but we need to keep doing what we do best and bridge the gap between worlds.
I feel like the reason why Western Society is at the place that we’ve come to now in 2025 has to do with a similar limit that people have come up against. The limit of selfishness. The limit of focusing upon your own personal gain. The system has reached a breaking point and people are being told empty promises of how they can Make Selfishness Work Again. If you just keep doubling down on helping yourself and hurting others, then maybe the rich people who own everything won’t have to give anything up, either. Many of the people around us have never felt fully happy in their lives, even as they occupy more privileged positions, no doubt because our society is practically selfishness incarnate, and the “community” that we all live within is of the sort that just takes, while not allowing its members true freedom to live as they please. Liberal elites, who serve the same corporate masters the vile racists who now run the United States also serve, cynically offloaded the system’s contradictions onto everyone else under a twisted guise of some kind of community-minded morality – scolding and lecturing people for being racist or sexist or homophobic, and then in the last few years, transphobic, while not actually *doing* anything about these, or anyone else’s problems. Don’t get me wrong, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are all grievously serious issues that are now only getting worse, but there is something profoundly alienating in being blamed for the ills of your society by the people who hold the reins of this society that increasingly exploits you. I’m frankly not surprised many people gave into the temptation of selfishness and said ‘enough is enough’ and voted to brutalize their neighbors so that they might somehow prosper. It’s disgusting and terrifying and incredibly misguided, but it’s not surprising. These are people who haven’t moved beyond selfishness, and unlike the wonders of genuine self-expression found in transition, they are likely to not find what they are looking for within selfishness. If there is a way out of this, it will be through enough people transitioning out of Selfishness and into Community.
My hope for any trans person reading this, if you feel scared and alone or at the limit of what you can do, is to look for others to be invested in. Whether it’s your fellow trans and queer people or some other community of value and meaning to you, be out in the world heal your wounded and untrusting heart. It is time to transition out of Selfishness and into Community. Show others that you live and that they can live too, if they wish. Plant a garden and help it grow. For whatever difficulties the future holds will be easier together.
My other Transition anthem from the Halcyon days of early transition in 2015 Thailand. We can make, together.
If you get value from my art or writing or the voice videos I put up for free on Youtube, please consider donating to my Patreon or Ko-Fi. I have a really hard time asking for money during times such as these, but every little bit of support helps this trans woman artist survive.
I’ve been sitting on this comic since December because I was worried the second guy looked too much like a certain Italian folk-hero and the message would be undercut by confusion.
At the beginning of this year, I celebrated a major milestone in my life: 10 years on HRT. I have a lot of thoughts on what I’ve learned in that time that I will release in a post perhaps later this week, but to accompany this comic, I thought I would write today about the more political side of what has happened in those 10 years (*eye-roll*). 2015 was another friggin’ universe, not just when it came to trans people, but just in regards to how many of us in the “West” thought about our society and its institutions.
I have often talked about how martial arts was and still is a very important part of who I am, and I remember in the early days of my transition thinking that perhaps I was foolish to put so much time and effort into training for self-protection. On the one hand, I felt that, as a woman and as a trans person to boot, martial arts and self-defense might now be more relevant to my life than it was before I came out (oddly enough, not many people want to fight you when you are presenting as a muscular dude). But on the other hand, I naively thought that we were increasingly moving towards an era of peace and prosperity. It was the Obama Age, and online social justice activism was shining daylight, the “greatest disinfectant of all”, upon every form of ignorance and injustice. It seemed like only a matter of time before society became a relative utopia of social progress. People seemed to be getting overall more tolerant, technology was making life easier and bringing people together, violent crime was on the decline and the wars of the past were probably only going to become increasingly rare, right? RIGHT???
This was an era that gave rise to online “slacktivism” and an attitude that social change could be real and meaningful even when it was largely something you performed online for social clout. The political beliefs people held increasingly became consumer identities that had more to do with what products you consumed and what social media accounts you interacted with than they had to do with any actions you took. Cis, white feminism reigned supreme with a kind of smug assurance of inevitable ascendance, and the most important issues to fight against were things like “manspreading”. The T-shirt slogan “The Future is Female” comes to mind as an emblem of the rhetoric of the era. There was simultaneously a belief that things could change if you liked, shared, and argued in the comments enough, while at the same time a kind of learned helplessness that things couldn’t really change under the system, so all you could really do is fight intellectual battles online in order to win hearts and minds. This is what I like to call “Plucking Leg Hairs“; actions that feel meaningful, but are actually just a waste of time.
And, yes, I firmly blame The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for the mindset of this era.
Due to my naive belief in online social activism and the complex interactions of my different feelings around “gender”, I decided that martial arts training wasn’t the best use of my time, and that in order to reach my full-potential both in my new life and in this new, more tolerant world, I should focus on my art and in fighting the last remaining “social battles” that would be waged and won (and they most surely would, inevitably, be won) with words, not violence.
Clearly I was never *that* naive, because this old, cringe 2015 Bria Comic remains correct, unfortunately. Also, what’s with how I drew my chin back then? I must have had a shit load of face dysphoria in those days!
But it took barely one year after I came out for the seeds of what would *actually* be the new world (same as the old world) to sprout and bear fruit. The first bathroom bills came into law in 2016, then Donald Trump, then increasing year-after-year conservative hyper-fixation on attacking trans people and blaming us for everything. It’s easy to put the blame on one orange man as the turning point that soured an otherwise upward trajectory, but the truth is, as I often say in so many words in these posts, we were always living in this world.
They were always going to find someone to blame for everything.
After WWII, the West needed to enact social programs and government spending to placate legions of returning veterans and build societal prosperity in order to ramp up for the next war with the Soviet Union. Additionally, they needed to enforce rigid gender roles in order kick the women who had been working to keep the war economy afloat out of the factories and into the home to have children to become good little soldiers to fight the commies. The USSR largely did the same; banning being gay after WWII in no small part to encourage sexual reproduction and rebuild the absolutely devastated Soviet population. The social safety net and the gender norms went hand-in-hand; well-paid and well taken care of workers allow for single income households, which allowed for child-rearing, which allowed for a fast new generation of soldiers.
Ever since that time, the corporate powers in the West have been fucking pissed and have been doing everything they can to claw back those hard-won workers’ rights and destroy the social safety net that aggrieves them so much. The gender role stuff, aggrieved them less so. While a case can be made that Women’s Liberation did help set the precedent for two-income households becoming the norm, which makes price increases and reduced wages easier to pull off, I hardly think it’s fair to blame the destruction of worker’s rights on the desire of 50% of humans to not be obligate domestic servants. Far more relevant is the fact that workers that are cared for don’t need to rely on their employer for everything. Such workers can demand fair wages and better working conditions, and they can strike or sue or quit when they don’t get them. Can’t have that!
Enter Neo-Liberalism.
It is somewhat reductive and not fully-accurate to say that the hollowing out of society in favor of privatization of social services and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy began with US president Ronald Reagan, but, yeah, basically everything bad in Western society today can be traced back to his policies and the conservative precedent he set. As much as Canada, the UK, and the rest of “the West” like to pretend we are separate countries from the USA, the fact is that, as the biggest swinging dick in the Capitalism, US policy effects everywhere else. When a policy or strategy works there, everyone else tries it. And when a political faction holds the reigns of power, it sends its money and influence elsewhere to elect governments that will enact policies favorable to its ends. The sad truth is that “Western Democracy” has been captured by capital from the get-go, and the fat cats have no intention of giving up power, even if they were temporarily set-back in the middle of the 20th century by the existence of a powerful socialist bloc and a population of angry young men who had been trained to fight.
Ever since Ronnie in the 80’s, and then Bill Clinton in the 90’s, policy has increasingly moved towards increasing corporate power and diminishing the returns of government to the people. Services have gotten worse, regulations have been weakened, and politicians have become increasingly in the pocket of corporate lobbyists. Government has become calcified into mostly a matter of shuffling things around. Nothing can ever really change because that would cost some awful, rich, old man money, and any politician who defies that and tries to enact real change will be smacked down and have their career permanently torpedoed.
So what do you do as a “leader” in a society that is being strip-mined for parts? How do you placate the people who elect you without actually giving them anything to improve their lives? Why, you find somebody else to blame for their problems, of course!
Another ever-relevant Classic Bria
This week’s comic, in particular, was made after I read last month about the state of Alberta’s Conservative government. Did you know that Alberta premier, Danielle Smith, lost over $80 million on some kind of hair-brained scheme to buy unregulated Turkish off-brand Tylenol? Most of the product was never delivered, and what did get delivered, was less effective and was subsequently recalled. It sounds like people are pretty pissed about it. That combined with numerous other fuck-ups regarding privatizing pensions and healthcare might have a government trying to do better, maybe give people something to restore their faith in their elected leaders? No. Far easier to, when confronted, issue attacks at trans people. Why waste time and money enacting policy to fix your fuck-ups when you can drown out the narrative and pretend you never did anything wrong by enacting the worst anti-trans policies yet put forward by any government in Canada?
The worst part? It seems to mostly be working (for now). People are so propagandized that doing culture war BS is a viable strategy to cover up your own incompetence/social vandalism. We see this in governments all over. They tear society apart in order to sabotage public services for their masters, and then cover up what they’re doing by attacking minorities or “wokeness”. There are, of course, many targets – from migrants to Muslims to feminists to China – but LGB and most especially T and Q people are some of the easiest to stir up hatred towards. We are a relatively small part of the population that many people don’t understand/dislike, and for trans people, our existence is largely dependent upon access to healthcare, social services, and legal structures that allow us to officially affirm our identities. We’re a completely low-effort target that basically delivers the best divisive bang for your buck.
Back in my more naive days that I began this long diatribe with, I used to believe that sufficient evidence and argumentation would win the day over bigotry. That if we could just educate people on the realities of trans peoples’ lives, they would abandon their hateful beliefs. Now I fear that bad faith Right Wing actors know full-well what trans people are. They know we are innately the way we are, that we won’t ever fully “go away”, no matter what hateful policies they enact. That even hateful policies they put forward but get defeated still serve their ends because the important thing is for them to be seen fighting for what their conservative constituents have been told to want. They want a permanent population of hated outcasts they can continually demonize and punish. Just as abortion was a political football that was passed back and forth in the US for decades without any meaningful progress one way or the other, LGBTQ issues can be a new intractable issue that is battled over. The new pinata to hit.
The online slacktivist social identity of the 2010’s has come full-circle. Now conservatives can also have a performative political identity based around laugh-reacting to trans people’s profile pictures and tranvestigating celebrities. Given the rhetoric of many of these people who have made transphobia their entire personality (something which most certainly did not exist in any meaningful numbers back in the halcyon days of 2015), the sheer totalitarian evil of what would be necessary in order to police trans people – gendered dress codes, washroom policing, restrictions on name changes – would be nakedly bad for cis people, too. Already, numerous cis women have been physically attacked in washrooms because they were suspected of being trans, cis women have been thrown in men’s jail because their jailers were convinced they were trans, and cis female athletes (always of colour, interestingly) are having their achievements questioned on the basis that they may have had the advantage of being a “biological male” – with no evidence whatsoever, of course, other than looking a little muscular, due to, you know, being athletes. Anti-bullying programs that include educating students at an age-appropriate level on the reality of the existence of LGBTQ+ people – you know, the programs that conservatives are obsessed with destroying – overwhelmingly help cis and straight students. How are most kids bullied? By being called “gay” or by saying they are not performing their gender well enough. By reducing the stigma around queer and gender non-conforming people, you reduce the avenues by which cis/straight people can be bullied. Can’t have that!
I’m frankly amazed that more people are not outraged on principle that the government would have control over who you are and how you present. So many people supposedly in favor of “small government” are apparently fine with a police state that dictates your very identity to you. I guess they just see it as not effecting them. “I’m never going to not conform, so why should I worry?”
We’ll see how long it takes for that to change.
In the meantime, I guess the fat cats will just keep getting away with their agenda of social vandalism, and everyone else can enjoy their Two-Minute’s Hate they get each day from social media. After all, hating on somebody who can’t fight back – either because they are a tiny minority or because they just exist as an image on your screen- is a whole lot easier than actually doing something to improve society.
As for me? I miss 2015. I miss when I lived in the fantasy that things were just gonna keep getting better. I miss being able to at least somewhat trust our institutions. But I can’t keep living in the past, hoping for a future that so far hasn’t materialized. So I have returned to training in martial arts. Because I have no intention of not fighting back. 10 years after I came out, we are living in a new world that is not the one I thought I was coming out to, but I still intend to fight like hell to defend the wonderful new life that I found within it.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say with this cartoon.
I guess I’ve been thinking about how out of touch the upper echelons of society seem to be. From the complete lack of awareness of just how many people recognize the genocide in Gaza for what it is and are outraged that their governments are supporting it, to the utter disbelief that Kamala Harris would lose to Donald Trump by running solely on preserving a system that fails so many, to the absolute legions of everyday people cheering on the assassin of a health insurance CEO responsible for countless deaths – media figures, politicians, and business leaders continually show themselves to be out of step with the circumstances and beliefs of everyday people.
I’ve been interested lately in this apparent phenomena of those who succeed in spite of any mistakes or failures they’ve made along the way, taking their current success as validation of all their beliefs and actions – including their mistakes. They come to believe that they succeeded not in spite of those mistakes, but because of them.
Donald Trump spending $200,000,000 in anti-trans ads is being taken by both Democrats and Republicans as evidence that anti-trans attacks work – despite all other election data showing that it’s a losing issue. It’s awfully convenient to be able to blame a scapegoat like trans people when it covers up your own failure to run an effective campaign. This goes for both Harris and Trump.
Harris lost not because she was “too woke” – she ran a completely unwoke campaign that refused to push back on any identity politics based attack that Trump took – she lost because she offered nothing to nobody except more of the same as what has been screwing people over for the past… all of American history. They just took it as a given that Americans would want to preserve their precious institutions and would vote purely on their fear of a second Trump presidency.
Meanwhile, Trump won far less because of people’s investment in his bigotry, and more because the was a loud, famous strong man saying he’ll change things.
Both these sides are taking Trump’s victory to mean that what he says must be what people want. And they will be acting accordingly.
These same people are now telling people that they shouldn’t want health insurance CEOs to face repercussions for their evil business practices. They seem to have been caught completely off-guard by so many people having this much animosity towards a system that has been openly discussed across the culture and media for over 20 years as being broken and inhumane.
When they enact their policies based upon the assumption that what Donald Trump says is broadly popular, I wonder if they will be just as caught off-guard when people don’t like the results?
