Blogging on Marti Abernathey

My Blogs on Micro.blog

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:52:47 +0100

I have four blogs here on micro.blog. My main site: Martiabernathey.com Tpartypodcast.com Stillnottrans.com.

Martiabernathey.com is my personal website. Tpartypodcast is set up to be like my own Linktree to social media sites.

StillNotTrans is an idea that I’ve thought about doing for a while. It’s a blog where I will post cisgender predators that are the real threat, rather than the made up by transphobes. Trans people are more often victims of sexual violence than cisgender people.

Abbey Asks a Very Good Question! What is POSSE?

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 10:59:35 +0100

My mutual Abbey (OpenBookShelf), asked on TikTok what “POSSE” is. POSSE stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”. You start with your website. For me, I start with my blog on Micro.blog, but you can use WordPress too. You can cross post or “syndicate” yourself automatically to most sites (you can find this post on Mastodon, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, Tumblr, and Nostr) You can spin up your own social media sites like Mastodon (think Twitter) or PeerTube (think YouTube/TikTok) yourself effortlessly. My tutorial on that is here:

With Mastodon (like Twitter) or PeerTube (like YouTube/TikTok) where YOU decide your own the moderation policies. This is possible because you are running the software on your own servers. The formatting with PeerTube when it comes to TikTok style content is a bit wonky, but even that has a decentralised (meaning running your own servers) answer on the horizon. Presently, you can post short form video content like this

over on the Loops app that is very similar to TikTok.

All of it can be tied back to Mastodon (or any other ActivityPub ran social media site that is under your control. There are no content guideline violations (CGV) on Mastodon/PeerTube.

Abbey mentioned Substack. Much has been written about the controversy over there. The bottom line with that is that any platform that controls/hosts your content, also can control your moderation. With POSSE, there’s no algorithm to throttle your content, and you’re leveraging existing social media applications that lead people back to YOU.

With this strategy, can go as light or as heavy as you want it to. There’s so much depth to it. It’s flexible and fun, and it’s ultimately bringing users back to controlling their content. You’re no longer the harassed/censored product.

If you blog at a place like micro.blog you can expand to things like your own podcast hosting, sending out newsletters of your content, telling people what you’re currently reading

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Enemy Feminisms
by Sophie Lewis
Playing the Whore
by Melissa Gira Grant
Recovery from Narcissistic Abuse, Gaslighting, Codependency and Complex PTSD (4 Books in 1)
by Linda Hill
Revolutionary Suicide
by Huey P. Newton

and more. They’re innovating with new & improved services all the time (like micro.one for example). The sky is the limit. POSSE opens up all kinds of possibilities that are centred in ethically getting people’s voices back to the masses without monetizing their work for the benefit of social media corporation’s shareholders.

2024 You Were Mostly Shit, But I Learned A Few Things

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 08:10:48 +0100

I don’t really like doing New Year’s resolutions, for a few reasons. A. I don’t see the new year as the beginning of something. Yes, it’s a chance to reflect, but there’s nothing “new” about the year apart from the year I’m printing on forms. B. I save resolutions for when I get depressed. Even then, it’s not really resolutions, it’s more like goal setting. When I get depressed, I feel like I don’t see a way out. Setting goals helps me to keep going even if I feel bad.

That being said, I don’t mind self-reflecting on the previous year. So with that…

Things I realised in 2024

I miss writing. I found this blogging platform Micro-blog thanks to Zoyander Street. WordPress is becoming a lot more feature rich, but at a price. I couldn’t justify spending £20 a month on blogging, but £7? Yes, please. I already have my own Mastodon instance and my own Peertube instance. With that in mind…
Again, thanks to Zoyander Street, I found a name for the practice I’ve been pointing myself to regarding social media, namely POSSE. You can’t just remove yourself from popular social media apps without impacting your reach. But you can focus on creating a space that’s your primary base. That’s what my website is.
2024 was a lot about waiting. Waiting or my bariatric surgery. I’ve been on a steady decline since needing to have my lap band removed in 2021 due to slippage. Since I had surgery in October 2024, I’m 68 pounds (ca. 31 kg) down, with about 119 pounds (ca. 54 kg) to go to get into a “healthy” range. But I’m getting there.
How old I am. So much of the things I grew up with are fading away. The biggest realisation is a funny one, in Phil Collins (but I’m guessing not for him). Collins was a constant in the music of my life. Collins is 73. He retired from music in 2022, and the recent documentary shows how frail he is.

It really set in stone how much time, even if I’m not struck away with some disease, that old age is close. There are no constants in life. I’m about 16 years younger than Collins. Yesterday I had a concert of his on YouTube pop up from 1997. I remember 1997.

The concert from the Live and Loose tour in Paris has him dancing and smiling and being the Phil Collins I remember. The Collins in the Drumeo documentary is the harbinger of what is to come. For everyone, but especially for me.

I have more years behind me, than I do in front of me. Nik, my son, is in his 30s now. He’s got his life, and he’s making the most of it. I’m very proud of the man he’s become. I don’t intend on sounding like this is the end for me (or hell, even for Phil). Even if the bells aren’t ringing for me yet, I can hear them in the distance. It reminds me to always keep myself in the moment. I’m grateful for all the wonderful moments I’ve had so far, and am ready for more.

This year I got married to my wife. She really doesn’t realise how much that she means to me. I think that’s probably more my fault than hers. It’s hard unlearning 50 years of taking care of others and letting someone in to see you and take care of you. She doesn’t think she does that, but she really does. I am truly grateful for her love. Finding Marcele was at the right time, it allowed me to be the best version of myself that I know how to be.

I feel like 2025 will bring plenty of changes to my life as well. Marcele will finally be home, and we can start building a life together. I’m sure I’ll continue to lose weight. If I lose weight at the same rate I’m losing now, I’ll be at goal in June. There’s a lot to look forward to. 2024 felt like I was running in place, waiting for surgery. Now it feels like I can do things that will improve my life. I’m hopeful for 2025.

Debating Sex Work: Centering Real Experiences

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 10:56:10 +0100

I see countless videos on TikTok and YouTube saying things like “is sex work, work” or “is sex work empowering?” without platforming sex workers themselves. If sex workers respond in comment sections, content creators often block them. If they make response videos, they often get deplatformed.

I'm not a sex worker myself. But I am not trying to build a platform by speaking over sex workers for clicks and views. They are considered debate topics, rather than human beings with lived experience. This is commonplace on algorithmically driven video social media applications.

As a transgender woman, I understand the experience of having my life legislated and regulated. These actions are often based on fear and disgust, rather than the people at the center of the debate. Lawmakers should listen to those affected by the legislation and regulation.

If you're going to debate sex workers and their industry, include them in on the conversation.

[peertube.martiabernathey.com/w/snvNygA...](https://peertube.martiabernathey.com/w/snvNygAtir66SGw8Kj8FSV)

Reactionaries, TERFs, and Bodily Autonomy

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 14:11:46 +0100

A couple of things have been stewing in my brain for a while, and I can't stop thinking about them.

First off is a term that describes people who don't believe in the right of individuals to make decisions about their own lives and bodies. Radical feminists (TERF or not) don't think that sex workers have that right, in much the same way that US Republican conservatives. Whether drug use, transition care, sex work, assisted suicide or abortion, the resistance to it being allowed in society is that the person doing it cannot or should not consent. They want to impose their values on the lives of people they don't know or care about. Reactionary kind of fits, but not really.

The other thing is that the resistors of bodily autonomy are rarely honest in their assessments/debates. They will use a rhetorical trick of treating a systemic issue as an individual issue and vice versa. A good example is the issue of mass shootings. The fact that cis white men commit the majority of mass shootings routinely gets treated as a "lone wolf" or as a "mentally ill" rather than it being a systemic, societally based issue.

On the other side of this trick, TERFs use individual trans people being awful that have no systemic/institutional/societal base at the root. TERFs will claim that self-identification of gender will cause harm, say this is a "valid question", and repeat it ad nauseam. But they never respond when the question is answered and that their "valid question" hasn't resulted in the systemic harm they claim in the 18 countries where it's the law (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Switzerland and Uruguay).

And that's just it; the people at the centre of the question never want to answer it. Like Young Earth Creationists, they have a belief that is centred and anything that agrees with it is true; anything that counters it is false. It isn't a debate, as it is a propaganda campaign that tries to get more people to try and command other people's bodily autonomy.

Reflections on Blogging: Lessons Learned Since 2008

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 15:29:54 +0100

This blog is back to where it was around 2008. I actually lost the domain because I forgot about it and someone snatched it up and basically wouldn't let get until the SEO rankings dropped.

Needless to say, a lot has changed since I owned this URL back in the day. Blogging isn't so much of a thing as it used to be. I live in the UK now, I'm no longer the editor of the Transadvocate, and the world has fallen apart more than I thought it could back in the day. After using different social media platforms, I've decided to come back to this platform (personal hosted WordPress blog).

I mostly have returned to it, because social media has turned into something I can't stand. Everything is monetized, even Twitter and Facebook. You don't have much reach these days unless you're outrage farming on social media for someone else to profit off of. That's not who I am, and not what I want to do. Mostly what I want to do here is write from the perspective of the life I've lived.

I've got a lot of cleaning up to do just to get this to look how it did previously. I might have a professional do an upgrade at some point but right now I just want to get this back to what it was. I've recently moved from Twitter to Mastodon, and I plan on centralising everything I do online here.

What's New is Old Again

Wed, 08 Oct 2014 06:48:35 +0100

I took this blog offline for a while and I’ve deleted a lot of the posts that don’t make sense being here, but I still feel the need to write. I look back over my writing and my life and see and feel where I was at the time.

In this life I’ve experienced a lot of pain, heartache, and disappointment. But I’ve also loved, and been loved in return. That’s probably the one thing in life that I value most. Being loved, and loving others, is really the only thing that I find has any lasting value. Even if friendships fade, the memories are something I treasure. Someone recently said to me:

"I loved reading your story. You have had a lot more passionate romance in your life than I have."

I never really considered it before, but it's true. I've had some really painful times of late but as much as I've been hurting, I don't regret the love and the passion. I can honestly say if I died tomorrow, I'd be happy with the life I've lived. I've been in very low places, but the question always comes back to

"do I want to walk into oblivion, to rid myself of this pain?"

The answer has been a consistent no. So I march forward. I know where I've been, but I'm not sure where the future will take me. But I'm grateful for today, for now, for this.

The Rumors Are Not True... Elvis and I LIVE!

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:36:07 +0100

Hey there! Long time no see! :) You may have wondered why I’ve become silent for so long… or maybe you don’t give a shit ;) … but you’re gonna hear about my life anyways!

First of all, there’s Nik. Nik moving in with me (he’s lived with me since August) has drastically changed my amount of free time to blog. Not that I’m complaining, as I’m very proud of him. He turns 16 on June 10th. Wait, that can’t be…29 - 16=….NEVERMIND.

ahem

He’s adjusted pretty well, all things considered. We’ve got one year of school down, three to go!!! He’s about the most out teenager I’ve ever known, and he does it with (seemingly) little shame or guilt. He and his boyfriend went to the Homecoming dance, he’s fairly popular in school, and he’s not had any issues with being intimidated at school (that I’m aware of). He’s talking about going to school to become a Radiologic Technologist, like I am (and my mom before me). It pleases me to see this. He’s very aware of the level of security that his grandma and I have had because of our career choice and I think that has influenced his decision. So ya, he seems to be happy and heading in the right direction.

The second reason is that I’m developing my podcast, “The Fat Tranny Circus.” Ya, ya, I know that you guys voted overwhelming for “Every Nook and Tranny,” (I’ve decided to use that as the title of my autobiography) but after some consulting with fellow podcasters/broadcasters, I settled on the FTC. It encapsulates everything I want in a name. It’s funny, it’s catchy, and It’ll stop people in their tracks and say “what the hell is that?”

I’m going to start the FTC design this weekend. The awesomeness that is Shae, has already designed my logo. She did an AWESOME job!

Now I just need to build a template to use in wordpress using this great logo. I’ve already recruited two news correspondents for the show, Jerri Stance and Roadkill Rhonda. Their contributions to the show will surely make for some interesting segments. I have a vague concept for the show, which I’m going to work on more this weekend. In conjunction with The FTC, I’ve decided to rebuild TransSister Radio. I’m not at liberty to discuss the particulars, but I’m working on the site now. I’m going to try and finish the structure of the site this weekend. I’m setting a goal for July 1st as a launch date for The FTC and August 1st for TransSister Radio.

Another cause of bloglessness is my health. In August I had a sleep study that confirmed I have sleep apnea. My doctor switched my narcolepsy medicine so that my sleep patterns would even out and that has helped regulate my sleep. I’m being fitted for CPAP as we speak and I’m due for another sleep study soon.

Between last August and now, I’ve gained close to 60 pounds. Last May I stopped doing Atkins and my weight slowly crept up until August. After Nik and I moved in October my eating and exercise habits changed drastically. I eat out more often, I walk less, and I ride my bike less. This weight gain and lack of physical activity has taken its toll on my health. My cholesterol is sky high and I get short of breath easily. The only bright side is that my breasts are bigger ;). I also found out I’m anemic, and I have a heart condition. Yes, a heart condition. According to my echocardiagram I have an enlarged left atrium (the left upper chamber of the heart) and the cardiologist suggested I be tested next year for any change in size. I’m not sure how this will effect my life, or the seriousness of it. I plan on talking with my primary care physician more about it next week. As far as my weight goes, I’ve been put on a year long medically supervised weight loss program.

The doctor that is overseeing my plan is Dr. Eve Olson of the St Francis Medical and Surgical Weight Loss Center. I’ve worked with Dr. Olson in the past (as a male) but she hadn’t seen me since my transition. On my first visit she said, “I know you but I’m not sure from where.” I said, “well, I used to be thinner and I used to live as a man.” I know she was a bit stunned, but she took it all in stride. She even joked with me about my job covering my SRS surgery. She set me set up with weekly visits with a dietitian and an exercise planner. For the first time in my life I feel like I’m not dieting. I feel like I’m eating healthy, nutritious meals that will help me lessen my health problems.

Another side effect of the weight gain has been that I’ve become somewhat of a hermit. I put off going out with friends and dread public outings. I am embarrassed at how much weight I’ve gained. Oddly enough, it hasn’t really affected my passing ability. I very rarely have anyone referring to me with male pronouns. Most of the people that do use male pronouns are people that knew me before transition. I would say at least 98 percent of those that don’t know my history, use female gender pronouns. Most of my feelings have to do with the shame of being this fat, not gender issues or fears.

Lastly, I’ve been sucked into the world of Second Life. If you want to see me in SL, email me and I’ll send you SL name. Second Life is a way for me to explore aspects of my personality that I couldn’t explore “in real life” (IRL). I’ve met many new people from around the world and friended a few more. It’s a little bit chat room, a bit theatre, and a bit video game. I’m definitely hooked.

All in all, there have been many changes in my life that have caused me to not be able to blog. Once I have my diet and exercise regimen settled, I am going to sit down and figure out how I can post regularly to all three of my blogs. I miss writing so much. I hope that you see many more thoughts, opinions, and ideas from me for a long time to come…

at least that’s the plan.

I love ya, Marti Abernathey

Writers Block

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:11:35 +0100

Ug. I have writers block and it sucks ass. I’ve been trying to write a piece since Tuesday and it just alludes me. I can’t even put together a good intro. This happens when I am asked to write something, not something that comes up out of my soul. I HAVE to be able to get through this crap.

At least I can write a damn blog entry.

Sheesh.

Blog Issues Be Gone!

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 07:43:36 +0100

Well, I think I’ve solved my blogging issue. For the longest time I have wanted to be able to blog/post to my website but it’s a pain in the ass to then go over to LJ and reformat the post…then put in any LJ coding and then finally post! I was using Movable Type and an LJ crossposting script, but it wouldn’t let me post the personal posts “friends only” on LJ. Well that little problem is solved. gifted me a version of Pmachine (which I really appreciate) but it had the same LJ limits as far as crossposting. For some reason I went back and messed around with my WordPress install and actually found a plug-in that will allow me to pick all the variables that I have on LJ and post straight to LJ from WP. So now I just need to recode my pages into WP. The next job after that is to move all my domains over to miss ’s servers. She’s taught me so much about shell access and I truly appreciate it. Thanks Marina!

There is still many things to manipulate, but I think this is gonna work for me!

Wish me luck!

Lola....laaa laaa looola

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:58:41 +0100

I went to the Southside Animal Shelter and immediately fell in love with this pretty little thing.. ;)

The fact that her name is Lola is just an added bonus. I have a theory. The people at shelter said she was “altered”, not “fixed.” IMO, she used to be a boy kitty….now shes just a post op tranny kitty.

She is sooooooooo lovey dovey. :)