Author: Jadzia Axelrod

The Eagles won the Super Bowl, which is great for everyone living in Philly. There is a type of mania that envelopes the city when one of our teams gets close to a championship. It stops being about sports entirely, and is instead a city-wide celebration of communal excitement. Maybe that’s why we say “Go birds” instead of “Go Eagles;” its no longer about the Eagles. Its about all of us, all the birds in city. And then to toss a colossal win on top of that? That’s a party no barricade can hold back. You cannot contain all the the birds in the city. You just have to let them fly.

Hawkgirl knows this. I’m certain she was celebrating on the Justice League Watchtower Sunday night.

Last week on the Patreon I started Scoesby Cuts a Rug, a comic I began over a decade ago and am now, finally, finishing. Or will be finishing, in a couple of months when we hit the end of its 36 pages.

Scoesby Cuts a Rug is about a well-to-do raccoon named Scoesby who can’t quite get his life together. In tone, it sits somewhere between Walt Kelly and P.G. Wodehouse, as Scoesby is beset upon by the often conflicting demands of friends and family in the midst of idyllic Southern environs, trying to figure out what he wants and why he isn’t satisfied just being himself.

The old me could not figure out a reason for Scoesby’s internal struggle, but it was no problem for my current self to see the trans metaphor in this poor raccoon’s quandaries. At the risk of giving away (part of) the ending, Scoesby turns out to be a trans girl. I know, you’re all shocked. But sometimes we write stories we’re not even aware we’re writing. It isn’t until we read them back years later that we finally have the words we knew were missing but couldn’t find.

It’s interesting, continuing a piece of art long…abandoned isn’t the proper word. Set aside, perhaps, to be fished out of drawers and files, to be looked upon and inspected and imagined what might be done or might have been, if I had the time now or if I had made the time to continue what I had started. In the end, the result is a conversation with the me who started this story, who was so confident on how it should begin, but could never quite place how it should end. He couldn’t do that. And so it falls to me.

Here’s the first page. The second is already on the Patreon.

I had to have emergency gastrointestinal surgery back in September, and had to switch to a vegan diet during recovery. I’ve decided to stay vegan, and have been enjoying learning new ways to cook and eat. I don’t miss meat and dairy as much as I thought I would. My doctor is very pleased.

One thing that gets me about eating vegan, though, is how it’s almost impossible to feel satisfied. The emotional quality of satisfaction of a meal well-dined. As someone who has spent a lifetime overeating, chasing that feeling of chemically-triggered happiness long after my stomach was full, this good thing. I need not lean on my dinner plate for mood regulation. I can’t be satisfied after eating vegan food, but I can not be hungry anymore. And isn’t that the most important thing?

It’s like being trans, in a way.

There is a hunger to being trans. To being given a body that, for whatever reason, doesn’t click with who you are. A primal desire with you for something that you need, you don’t why, you just need it. Not having it makes you sadder than anything else in the world, weighted down by a need you can’t explain. Once you name it, and take your first steps toward aligning your body with your head and your heart, the euphoria is immense. Like eating a banquet after starving for your entire life.

I am no longer hungry when I look in the mirror. I’ve been at this for nearly a decade, and it feels right in a way that nothing did before I started. HRT has been good to me, giving me a body and a face that feels more correct, more accurate to who I am. I’m not hungry, but I’m also not satisfied.

I might be, one day. Surgery can do miracles, as some of my trans friends can attest to. I don’t know if they’re satisfied, though. Maybe none of us can be. Maybe no one is.

When I was a child, I would eat until I was physically uncomfortable, desperately savoring the endorphins that came with each mouthful fully aware they would dissipate with each swallow. I was so hungry then. No amount of food could sate me. Because it wasn’t food I was hungry for.

I’m not hungry anymore. Which is the important thing.

While we’re on the subject of the importance of gender-affirming care, I made a comic about my experience speaking about it in front of the Philadelphia City Council.

I already talked about this in my last newsletter, but getting involved locally can lead to real dividends, even if just for your peace of mind.

This week on the Patreon starts a 36-page story about funny animals and gender feels. It’s journey. And it starts, as so many journeys do, on a boat.

It’s a story I started years ago, and I’m excited to finally finish it. Hope you’ll come along on the ride.

As you may have read in the Philadelphia Gay News, I gave testimony at a Philadelphia City Council meeting to speak up about the importance of protecting gender-affirming care. I made a comic about it; you can read it on my Patreon.

Giving testimony is a strange endeavor; it’s important to alert lawmakers to your concerns, but it feels meaningless. How can I express everything I’m worried about in less than two minutes? The architecture of government buildings, designed for pomp and grandeur, can make you feel very small when you’re inside them. It can make what you have to say feel unimportant. It can make you feel unimportant.

You have to remember that you are important, that what you have to say is worth saying, and that you can and will say it with your whole chest. And to treat that time limit seriously.

If nothing else, coming to the City Council meeting reassured me about the immediate future. Things are not heading in a good direction, and I do not trust all of my elected officials. But hearing the testimony of others, especially those representing larger organizations in the city who have plans with how to deal with the recent attacks on immigration and LGBTQIA+ rights. I’m not alone in my concerns, and that knowledge was worth the trip all by itself.

I think in the coming years, it would behoove us all to get more involved in local government. And small ways like giving testimony at open sessions is great way to start.

Here’s the comic for this week. BRICKS was something I’ve been tossing around for awhile now: What if DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR but also Hergé and about trans people? I’m not sure if all jives, but I think there’s enough there that its worth developing further.

I wasn’t planning on writing about the inauguration, but when there’s a member of the president’s inner circle throwing Nazi salutes while Trump himself is pardoning everyone who tried to overthrow the government four years ago, ending birthright citizenship and setting the stage for undoing every legal trans protection we’ve gotten in the last 20 years, everything else seems inconsequential.

The point of fascism is to rule utterly, to perform horrors with no consequence and to deny that they are horrors at all. It is the power that comes from control, not just political control but narrative control. They define the truth is, even if what they say flies in the face of what you witnessed with your own eyes.

Now, I have studied fascism, but I cannot claim to be a political expert. I am, however, a narrative expert. I can claim that one. So believe me when I tell you that the most important things you can do to armor yourself in the coming years to remember one thing: they get off on your despair.

Gross, right? Good. These horrible little boys with old men’s faces wearing their father’s ill-fitting suits are going to try to convince us they are invincible, they are inevitable, that they are somehow than human, or at the very least more human than we are. They will get into our heads. But not if we know what sick little puppies they are, desperately jerking off to the sadness and panic they create.

I know its ridiculous, but we live in ridiculous times. And if telling myself that by not dissolving into sadness I am denying a disgusting power-grabber from getting an erection keeps me from succumbing to despair, maybe it will do the same for you.

Another thing you can do is quit Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and TikTok, as it has become quite clear that they intend to be the propaganda arm of the new regime. I’m just down to Bluesky, but I’m prepared to leave that, too, if needs must. Get the phone numbers and emails of the folks you want to stay in touch with, and delete your accounts. Keeping our minds clear is going to be hard enough as it is, without the manufactured outrage that is these services stock and trade.

Here’s a comic about mice with swords. Seems silly to post it now, but we also need silliness in our lives.

I’ve been reading Brian Jacques’s REDWALL series to my daughter, and while it is just as delightful as I remember from when I read it at her age, I can’t fail to notice that the girls don’t do anything as cool as what the boys do. This is lessoned somewhat in the later books, but it’s still a boy’s world. That got me thinking about a fantasy world full of female mice who are funny and clever and others who wield swords, and what if those two of those mousemaids were in love?

So, that’s COWSILK. I haven’t thought of a larger story with Cowsilk and Mayblossom yet, but I already love these characters, so I imagine one will come to me.

Over at my Patreon, there’s something completely different, an riff on Alison Bechdel and Hergé about being a trans woman in 2025. Maybe you should check it out.