James Osiris Baldwin
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Surgery Fun Time and Project Status
🕑 Added 2025-10-17 04:26:42 +0000 UTCArchemi 7: about 30% complete.
Brute Force 2: 15% ish, working on a big boss scene
Faith Healer: Comic in process; nearly finished the art for the first episode, but see below.
Buckle up, because this one is long and kind of personal.
I have a major surgery coming up on November 19th, if you’re wondering about the radio silence. And therein lies a story, one intimately tied to current events.
If you didn’t already know, I am both an immigrant to the United States, and a transgender man. Neither are new developments in my life. I’ve been hormonally and socially transitioned since 2007. I moved to the US in 2015, ten years ago. I finally acquired citizenship in November 2024.
The present day is neither a good time to be trans or an immigrant in this country. I live close enough to Chicago to be continuously on edge about what is happening there. Getting my long-overdue gender affirming surgeries has also become almost impossible here, so… I am going to Brazil soon, in mid-November. In a fitting moment of serendipity, I will be getting my top surgery performed on the birthday of my oldest male character, Alexi Sokolsky.
This isn’t a post to say I’m taking a break. I’ll be bored out of my mind while I’m recovering, so I’m taking a very lightweight keyboard and a text editor on my cellphone to continue writing Archemi 7 and Brute Force 2 while I’m propped up in bed.
The Faith Healer comic is paused until I see and smell and sense the country the story is set in, so that I can do the setting justice. The fact I’m getting my surgery down in a country where I recently completed a significant work of fiction is another stunning coincidence. I was planning to go to Europe for the top-chop, but the perfect surgeon turned out to be down south. It will be my first time south of the equator since I left Australia.
You may be asking why I’m telling you any of this. I don’t need to out myself. Even without having had top surgery, I still pass 100% of the time IRL and online. But the point is that people need to know that trans people exist; that we are not just ‘others’ who lurk on the fringes of society, a legion of creeping Dr Frankenfurters. We are normal-ass people, the artists and authors who make stuff you like. And because of what is happening right now, I’m traveling, alone, to a country where I don’t speak the language to get the care I’ve needed for most of my life. At last.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that top surgery will be the beginning of the rest of my life. And I think with that burden finally lifted, I will finally be able to let go of a lot of the internal creative blockages that hold me back. The dysphoria and the shame and the sense of otherness when I restrict myself from swimming because of my chest, or peel my gym clothes off to see the livid bruises on my shoulders and ribs from my binder constricting my body while I lift weights. The rejected invitations and subliminal worry about people noticing my binder straps; the ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ feeling every time something brushes my chest.
My hope is this will finally put me to a fundamental baseline to which most other authors start: an increased sense of wholeness in my body after it has healed. My skin tends to heal very well, so in a year’s time, I expect that even the scars won’t be very noticeable. But it’s so frustrating, having to spend so much of your life having to catch up to where so many other successful people get to start by default.
I just want to make good art and not live in fear of an abusive, narcissistic shitlord for once in my life. If I’m not dealing with a parent like this, then I’m married to one. And if I’m not married to one, then one is president. If that feels too political for you… well, unfortunately for me, my body has always been politicized whether I like it or not. Right now, bodies like mine, lives like mine, are being cast as villainous and dangerous. They are wrong, and so, I will continue to write about the experience of being trans, of being an immigrant, in ways both overt and subtle.
Hector, Suri, and Rin’s struggles with trauma, apocalypse and identity are not accidental. Min-joon’s existence as an intersex man traveling time and space in pursuit of justice is not an aesthetic choice. Noodles being incarnated as an actual monster in a strange land, forced to adapt and wield his otherness as a weapon, was also not a random choice.
You were always here with me on this journey of slow metamorphosis. Thank you for your patience — and for staying on the journey.
Comments
Pete Andrews
The situation in the US is dire at the moment. I'd never have thought for a moment a convicted felon could be the commander-in-chief, let alone would I have expected the Constitution be tossed out the window. Yet here we are. Outing yourself can't have been remotely easy. The climate of fear and hate in much of the world thanks to scumbags who want to turn the world into a right-wing cesspool (and who unsurprisingly are rich thanks to having no ethics and a willingness to hoard everything they can steal) is more than enough to make anyone question themselves. And you never know if the people you have known and interacted with for so long might turn out to be closeted right-wing scumbags pretending to be human beings. Your work has always been thoughtful, well-considered, and conveying depth. Your personal story makes it that much more remarkable. I've been pretty busy with life, so don't get to interact much with people online as I used to, but I haven't forgotten. Archemi remains one of my favourite series, and I plan on reading ETU as soon as time allows. Here's to your surgery going well, and to your safe return to a nation which seems to be rejecting it's humanity every day that passes. And may the Fanta Monstrosity be replaced with a sane person soon.
