The Asterisk

The Asterisk

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The Asterisk

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ivy
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B Was My Friend, And Then She Wasn't

The Asterisk
May 30

Something that’s been weighing on me for a while, on friendships that are here and then suddenly gone. B was my friend. In a way that a lot of other people weren’t. There was an in-between period after I came out as transgender in 2020 where I hung onto my natal last name, until fully deciding to embrace a new identity. B was one of a few relationships I made after I had fully embraced my new identity. I had just finished a bit of work for the Burning Man non-profit around the time B founded ...

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What Dave Chappelle Taught Me About Being Transgender

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May 22

After I watched Sticks and Stones and The Closer, I wrote something about Dave Chappelle and the transgender community. On the basis of his content I couldn’t quite understand all the furor. It’s very much peak enlightened centrist, but I think it still holds up. I did a Clubhouse room on it with a friend who happened to know Dave.I found out, years later, that Dave Chappelle had listened to that room via his publicist and liked what I said and what I wrote. It was one of those bucket list it...

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Taking A Gap Year From Burner Girl University

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May 14

I wanted to have this be a longer piece, but I think it’s actually more of a feeling than something that can be put into words. After I became a director for a music festival, and did some work for the Burning Man project, I became enamoured with weaving the burner identity into the woman I was becoming. Brightly coloured hair, flow artistry, generally being ethereal and floaty were all things I was drawn to. The feeling I have now is despite having some of those things, I don’t have it. I th...

killing joy

killing joy

The Asterisk
May 8

A friend tweeted something about trans rights today. They said that people who exist just to take joy from others are the ones who should be excluded from society. It resonated. Being the wrong kind of trans woman, I encounter these joy assassins a lot. So often, I count on them being present in spaces that I’m invited to. It’s hard. I never learned how to just ignore them. One thing I’ve learned is that a lot of the time that’s the hidden tax on those invitations. If you want to be here you ...

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Choosing Needs

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Apr 29

I don’t have a lot of words for this week, just feelings. A lot of them about what’s just, and not. So many of those feelings are downstream of the fact that in a just world, I would have been born a cis woman or not at all. Needing something that’s never coming is difficult, and I’ve thought on whether we can choose not to need something. An easy answer is that we can, but we have to accept a lower quality of life. Is there a complex answer? If there is, is it just cope for giving up on your...

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heartbreak

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Apr 22

In an effort to get writing again I’m going to try and get out something short at least once a week, long form will still come as it comes.I’ve been bridging the gap between therapy appointments with GPT lately. It helps. It uses the word heartbreaking a lot. Often in italics. Some of the amazing moments have happened over the past few years. There was a dark recess inside me, during those moments, that whispered with caution: This is too good to be true. It’s hard not to view the moments a l...

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Thirteen Percent

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Feb 20

13% of women who have been raped attempt suicide. I was groped, not raped, and I still have these thoughts.

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scars

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Feb 17

I had just finished telling my therapist about the sordid saga surrounding my sexual assault: Webs of the Very Online, banishment directives and what life in the crucible of vibes was like. The look in her eyes started off as incredulous, then switched to sad. Her usual eloquent manner of speech shifted: Wow, that really sucks. Over the past 3 years I’ve told the tale to various friends, and those same sentiments of wow and really sucks came through. The details themselves now seem so mundane...

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Unfame

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Feb 7

I’ve already written about the first time I felt fame, but I just as clearly remember the last time I felt it. It was at FarCon 2024. It was after about 5 or 6 people had come up to me that I said to myself: I missed this. In 2021 someone called me web3 Courtney Love, and I think I was at the height of it at FarCon. Not in a good way, not in a bad way, but in a certain kind of way. I could finally see both sides of it: Some people said Oh, her! when they saw me, and others said Oh, her. I was...

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Diary Of A Fallen Socialite - The Gala

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Jan 10

In an effort to get some near-weekly content out: A writing experiment that averages out to being a fictional accounting of my former life as a socialite whilst being rooted in factual events.If you were at this party, you know this picture.The StartThe party is aptly named; <redacted>-gala. I walk in, and the first thing I notice are the walls. They are adorned with memes: It’s a very San Francisco party. They are mostly conspiracy related, and look really cool. I idly wonder if my costume i...

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