I’m not sure what Dirt hopes to accomplish by combing through Maria Catt’s/Carrie Callahan’s social media presence over the past several years looking for “discrepancies” in her story. When you transition and then stop, a big part of that is a profound series of changes in how you understand yourself and your life. It shouldn’t be a big shock that there are conflicting narratives in a detransitioned woman’s account of how she understands herself and where she understands herself belonging over a period of years. That’s kinda the whole point.

Anyway, I know Carrie offline, IRL, and she’s the real deal. She definitely, really, truly, without a doubt started medically transitioning and then stopped. I am grateful and honored to have witnessed, face to face and heart to heart, parts of her life when she was in deep self-discovery and in the throes of those changes. She’s been pretty clear and open that some of the ways transition changed her are painful and difficult. And I’m not sure why someone would choose to poke at those places for sport. Likewise, I’m not sure why anyone thinks violence and love can’t coexist in the same family. I’m really not getting what the “gotcha” is supposed to consist of here–or what the significance is supposed to be.

Regardless, I know Carrie to be a woman of integrity and mega ovaries in terms of laying bare some vulnerable truths about her life–which is a whole, full, messy, rich life, not reducible to soundbites or easily contained in fundamentalist frameworks of any kind. I am proud to call her a friend and she’s well loved and supported by many other lesbian feminists and separatists, too–she doesn’t have to be a lesbian herself to belong among us in her own right. She’s a force of nature who does so much for other women–an amazon. She’s one of us, she’s with us, and we’re all right behind her.