Jayna's Transgender Athletics Textbook

Chapter 0 – an introduction to the author

My childhood home.

Thanks in part to Paul Krugman (“Krugman wonks out”), I've finally figured out how to best use Substack, which is to focus on transgender athletics science. I have something approaching a draft manuscript already, but publishing is slow: it won't be on any shelves for another year at least. And it's needed yesterday. So I'll put mini-chapters here, and do my best to make them valuable. Warning: this will always be free, but also very wonkish.

With a few subscribers already (thank you!), I feel that I should introduce myself a little better. So here is a personal post (don't worry: there shouldn't be many more).

The pile of boards down and to the right of the pond in the image above was my home for the first ten years; then we moved into the “big house” (lower left) when my grandparents left during the winters. Those images say a lot: with exactly two neighbors within twenty miles and no television to distract me (not even a radio except my 50 watt ham “rig”), I spent much of my time walking in the woods. Lots of time for thinking. Now I do much the same, despite having a few million neighbors in the same radius.

Elementary school was the kitchen, although I learned to read mainly from a 1929 Compton Encyclopedia, and figured out how to do arithmetic to alleviate boredom while driving around a field all day at two mph pulling a plow. As preparation for a PhD at Stanford studying molecular motion in synthetic cell membranes using photochemistry and magnetic resonance it seems inauspicious, but it worked. The years of torment and angst in between – I'd love to forget them, but my studies in psychology (second undergrad major) taught me that I can't do that. Indeed, coming to grips with those memories writing Hanna's Ascent was sine qua non for my healing.

I knew I was transgender at five, though I didn't even know the word (“transsexual” was the standard term then) until I was twenty, reading Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, Carl Jung, and the Kinseys (yes, the Kinseys!) in an army library in Augusta, Georgia. Even Harry Benjamin's classic had appeared only one year previously, and Christine Jorgensen's autobiography was not yet written. Yet I figured it out. And was frightened nearly to death.

But not quite. I spent the next thirty-five years working on that death, a topic about which I'll say no more. Writing about Hanna put an end to it, and you have to consult her to learn more. The theme here is athletics, which in high school (in the guise of P.E.) was a nightmare matched only by those red ant hills that Hanna feared so much. In other words, I hated it. I also knew nothing about it. When I finally went to a real school in the ninth grade I literally (and yes, I mean literally) did not know what a football was, let alone the difference between offense and defense. I paid dearly for that ignorance.

You might say that's not the ideal resume for a self-described expert in the physiology of athletes. But that was all about sociology, not physiology. Out of that toxic high school fog, I took up rock climbing and notched many Yosemite “big walls” as well as test pieces like Lazy Bum and Outer Limits and technical routes on Sierra peaks and elsewhere. While I loved climbing for the internal reward, not for competition, I learned about pushing limits (and found you can always take one more step).

I enjoyed biochemistry, but after a winter at MIT determined that I wasn't going to again leave the Left Coast, and the best job I found was at Hewlett-Packard Labs applying chemistry to microelectronics. Later I took up entrepreneurship, and am still the CTO of one of the companies I started. It seems promising…

But I never forgot or lost the love of words, language and expression of emotion that I cultivated in college. That was discovered (or uncovered), ironically perhaps, in the army where I had many spare hours to read during quiescent communications center shifts, and where a boyfriend introduced me to Gore Vidal* and every (or so it seemed) museum in all of southern Germany, Austria, and northern Italy. (Sitting next to me at dinner, Vidal asked me about my favorite novel. He didn't think much of Doctor Zhivago, which isn't surprising.)

So now I've finally figured out what I want to do when I grow up… With well-honed skills both as a scientist, one foot in psychology and one in chemistry, and a writer, both expository and creative, helping a few moderately open-minded people appreciate the reality of transgender physiology is a challenge I'm ready to embrace. I've had lots of practice explaining technology to executives who haven't a clue, so I think I can do it. Feedback in the comments will be most welcome!

This Substack is free (though tips are welcome!) because I want the information to get out, and I want people to buy my novel, which is relevant and needed as never before. It's also good literature and a good read! Please check it out at https://www.bedazzledink.com/hannas-ascent.