Intro
In December 2010, a young woman emailed me and we became fast friends. She was already in the process of applying to the Thiel 20 Under 20 program which has since been renamed The Thiel Fellowship.
She almost certainly realized the same day I did that a self-made millionaire of our mutual acquaintance was crushing on me and failing to successfully chat me up. Her goal was to push us together so he would owe her and help her escape her family.
I knew her six weeks when I realized she was being horrifically abused and I decided to get her out. I told my two sons and no one else. I didn't even tell her because she realistically had one shot at this and her parents had her on medication "for mental health issues" and weren't even telling her what it was, so she was a walking, talking information security disaster zone a mile wide.
She was bright and socially savvy and good at chatting people up. She already had an impressive list of wealthy, accomplished contacts helping her but they were business people and academics. None of them had any idea how to orchestrate a surgical extraction.
I'm a former military wife and I briefly was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. I was the victim of incest as a child and I attempted suicide at age seventeen and won but turned down a National Merit Scholarship.
So, like her, I had been a bright but troubled youth trying to escape my abusive family and I succeeded, but not via my impressive academic background opening doors. I got married to a guy who said his only ambition was a military career.
Marrying a man to escape her family simply wasn't an option for a pre-op trans youth who mostly was compelled to hide her gender identity and I was crystal clear that simply helping her physically move out wasn't going to resolve her problem. It wasn't going to magically protect her from her abusive parents.
She needed to leave under circumstances that cut her parents out of her life.
So she would have some half-baked idea and I would talk with her about making it happen and like, Elliot in Bedazzled, she would get what she wanted with my help and then go "I could have done this myself. I even had to pay for it. I didn't even get any fries."
I got her out and she spent a few days homeless under circumstances that could be glossed over as "moving." As soon as she no longer needed me, she burned me. And then I ended up homeless a few months later and she and her rich buddies didn't come to my rescue, though she did email me to lecture me about how I needed to try harder or something which made it clear she was stalking me.
I was on the street nearly six years. Because I was not getting the kind of help she was getting. My life still hasn't recovered from this debacle.
Because she was very bright, she dumped a lot of resources on me in short order. Years later, I participated on Metafilter which was a "trans friendly" space and it became clear to me I knew a great deal more about trans issues than most people on Metafilter and that probably meant I knew more than most people in the world thanks to a brief but intense relationship to a girl I named Genevieve.
I don't really know why she burned me. I've always assumed she simply had trust issues and genuinely didn't think I contributed that much. But today I'm wondering if there were other factors, such as:
1. She really just thought she could whore me out to a rich man as a piece of ass and didn't actually expect me to be competent, much less a woman with self respect who has never sold it and gets jiggy with men I like and not for money.
2. Maybe my competence scared her. All these movers and shakers with money had probably already invested more than a year in trying to help her with nothing to show for it. I got her out about six months after deciding I would.
3. Maybe she felt bad about blatantly planning to use me and then I was genuinely kind, caring and supportive. Maybe she decided to throw in the towel on trying to pimp me to a rich man to secure her safety and couldn't think of any other way to drop her cover story that he was the father she never had, I was the mother she never had and she wanted us together to create the happy family she never had.
I grabbed this URL years ago thinking I would write about global warming and probably political and social crap related to that and never really did anything with it. I decided to repurpose it for this project and the previous About page tries to force fit an explanation for what the name might mean to you.
Reality: I was tired just thinking about trying to name this project.
I think I know more than a lot of people about trans issues. I think a bright trans youth dumped a truckload of information in my lap that is more than a lot of trans people know. I think I successfully helped her escape a bad situation when a lot of bright, accomplished, monied people couldn't figure out how to get her out.
No, I don't want to be your mommy. I probably don't want to hear from you. I'm trying to figure out how to pay my bills and this is probably not it because everyone expects me to care about them while they don't give a flying fuck about me.
I wish you would leave a tip or support my Patreon, not become psycho stalker obsessed with how you need a total stranger to "love" you because no one has ever been so good to you, so obviously the only response that comes to mind is CRUCIFY Doreen Traylor.
But that's, in a nutshell, why I think I am qualified to do this project. And part of why it may never be more than a few pages.
Helping other people has gotten me NOTHING but burned. I desperately want to make money and tell you "Fuck you, got mine." Because that's the attitude you people actually deserve in my experience.
Footnote
Public Notice of my opinion of transphobes. TLDR: Get THERAPY you losers with bigger personal issues than the trans community.
No, I'm NOT trying to smear the mutual acquaintance. Please don't go there.
2 July 2026
The first round of fellows, based on applications made at the end of 2010, was announced in May 2011.This friendship was doomed from the start. She was a MtF trans youth and was trying to escape her abusive family. I was being played by someone in desperate straits who saw me as a means to an end.
She almost certainly realized the same day I did that a self-made millionaire of our mutual acquaintance was crushing on me and failing to successfully chat me up. Her goal was to push us together so he would owe her and help her escape her family.
I knew her six weeks when I realized she was being horrifically abused and I decided to get her out. I told my two sons and no one else. I didn't even tell her because she realistically had one shot at this and her parents had her on medication "for mental health issues" and weren't even telling her what it was, so she was a walking, talking information security disaster zone a mile wide.
She was bright and socially savvy and good at chatting people up. She already had an impressive list of wealthy, accomplished contacts helping her but they were business people and academics. None of them had any idea how to orchestrate a surgical extraction.
I'm a former military wife and I briefly was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. I was the victim of incest as a child and I attempted suicide at age seventeen and won but turned down a National Merit Scholarship.
So, like her, I had been a bright but troubled youth trying to escape my abusive family and I succeeded, but not via my impressive academic background opening doors. I got married to a guy who said his only ambition was a military career.
Marrying a man to escape her family simply wasn't an option for a pre-op trans youth who mostly was compelled to hide her gender identity and I was crystal clear that simply helping her physically move out wasn't going to resolve her problem. It wasn't going to magically protect her from her abusive parents.
She needed to leave under circumstances that cut her parents out of her life.
So she would have some half-baked idea and I would talk with her about making it happen and like, Elliot in Bedazzled, she would get what she wanted with my help and then go "I could have done this myself. I even had to pay for it. I didn't even get any fries."
I got her out and she spent a few days homeless under circumstances that could be glossed over as "moving." As soon as she no longer needed me, she burned me. And then I ended up homeless a few months later and she and her rich buddies didn't come to my rescue, though she did email me to lecture me about how I needed to try harder or something which made it clear she was stalking me.
I was on the street nearly six years. Because I was not getting the kind of help she was getting. My life still hasn't recovered from this debacle.
Because she was very bright, she dumped a lot of resources on me in short order. Years later, I participated on Metafilter which was a "trans friendly" space and it became clear to me I knew a great deal more about trans issues than most people on Metafilter and that probably meant I knew more than most people in the world thanks to a brief but intense relationship to a girl I named Genevieve.
I don't really know why she burned me. I've always assumed she simply had trust issues and genuinely didn't think I contributed that much. But today I'm wondering if there were other factors, such as:
1. She really just thought she could whore me out to a rich man as a piece of ass and didn't actually expect me to be competent, much less a woman with self respect who has never sold it and gets jiggy with men I like and not for money.
2. Maybe my competence scared her. All these movers and shakers with money had probably already invested more than a year in trying to help her with nothing to show for it. I got her out about six months after deciding I would.
3. Maybe she felt bad about blatantly planning to use me and then I was genuinely kind, caring and supportive. Maybe she decided to throw in the towel on trying to pimp me to a rich man to secure her safety and couldn't think of any other way to drop her cover story that he was the father she never had, I was the mother she never had and she wanted us together to create the happy family she never had.
I grabbed this URL years ago thinking I would write about global warming and probably political and social crap related to that and never really did anything with it. I decided to repurpose it for this project and the previous About page tries to force fit an explanation for what the name might mean to you.
Reality: I was tired just thinking about trying to name this project.
I think I know more than a lot of people about trans issues. I think a bright trans youth dumped a truckload of information in my lap that is more than a lot of trans people know. I think I successfully helped her escape a bad situation when a lot of bright, accomplished, monied people couldn't figure out how to get her out.
No, I don't want to be your mommy. I probably don't want to hear from you. I'm trying to figure out how to pay my bills and this is probably not it because everyone expects me to care about them while they don't give a flying fuck about me.
I wish you would leave a tip or support my Patreon, not become psycho stalker obsessed with how you need a total stranger to "love" you because no one has ever been so good to you, so obviously the only response that comes to mind is CRUCIFY Doreen Traylor.
But that's, in a nutshell, why I think I am qualified to do this project. And part of why it may never be more than a few pages.
Helping other people has gotten me NOTHING but burned. I desperately want to make money and tell you "Fuck you, got mine." Because that's the attitude you people actually deserve in my experience.
Footnote
Public Notice of my opinion of transphobes. TLDR: Get THERAPY you losers with bigger personal issues than the trans community.
No, I'm NOT trying to smear the mutual acquaintance. Please don't go there.
2 July 2026