<taps mic slightly nervously>

Well, erm, hello. It’s been a while. Yes, I know pretty much every post on this blog has begun with some sort of variation on that theme for the past several years, but this one is a bit different. Trust me. Though, heaven knows, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t. That’s if anyone out there is still looking at this blog. Or blogs in general, even, if you haven’t all just wandered off to TikTok and long-form videos on YouTube.

It’s a little bit hard to know where to begin with this post because what it’s going to say feels rather like old news and anyone who knows me in real life, is a friend on Facebook or has followed me on TAFKAT (the app formerly known as Twitter) or Instagram will already know it. But I haven’t announced it on here nor made the changes it requires me to make to this site so, if you don’t fall into any of those categories, you can be forgiven for not knowing what I’m talking about.

About two and a half years ago, after a lifetime of questioning my gender identity, I finally accepted that I am transgender. That obviously had huge ramifications for my life and my family, which I’m not going to detail on this forum. A few months later, I started living as my authentic self. I began by quietly coming out to close family, individual close friends and immediate colleagues then gradually widened the circle and changed my legal name to Amy Joanna. So now I’m Amy Jo and have been for more than two years.

There’s obviously a huge amount I could say here but I’m not going to regail you with it all. That would make turn this from a blog post into a full-blown memoir, really, and I don’t want to strain your eyes or your patience. It’s been a rather haphazard pattern of coming out but, as I’m out in the poetry world (having already done two readings and published one poem¹ under my chosen name), it’s high time I made it clear on here what’s happened.

Life has been challenging over the past couple of years to say the least. But for all that it has involved much pain and grief and struggle and frustration (oh, so much frustration on so many fronts), it has also been full of joys that I never dared dream would be mine.

As with blogging, there had been a significant hiatus in writing, but that all changed earlier this year and I’ve been more productive than I have been in a long time — perhaps a decade. I’m excited about the new work I’ve been producing. Naturally, most of it deals with my transition in one shape or another. I’ve already read a good chunk of it in public and I hope that it will start to find its way out into the wider world in some form over the next wee while.

So, watch this space. Things are happening and, hopefully, there will be stuff to tell you in the nearish future. And there will, of course, gradually be changes in the site.

Thanks for reading. And thank you for staying with me.

Amy Jo

1. Page 14 of Issue 2 of Eemis Stane ↩︎