Essays & Features

Here’s the other page with my full list of clips with pictures. Go here for my audio work. Go here for my own newsletter, What’s Helping Today.

Catskill Crew

• Monthly Garden Report column for the popular local newsletter (ongoing; started Aug. ‘25) Here was the first. Here was the second, third, fourth and fifth.

Assigned Media

• “Surviving the Holidays as an Estranged Person” (Dec. ‘25)

• "As A Brown University Alumnus, Let Me Say: Fuck This” (Aug. ‘25) personal reflection about my closeted days on campus, in light of recent politics

• Opinions essay: “Diagnoses like “Gender Dysphoria” May Not Be Medically Real — But They Sure Are Politically So” (July ‘25)

Lit Hub

• Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning with My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person (Dec. ‘25)

• Coming Out Alongside My First Book (Feb. ‘19)

Equal Access Public Media

• “Transphobic Misinformation has been a gateway drug” (Sept. ‘25)

The Boston Globe

• Op-ed: “Brown’s ‘deal’ with Trump administration sacrifices trans students” (Aug. ‘25) Paywalled; click here to download PDF.

Eater

• “The Delicious, Life-Saving Joys of the Trad Trans Lifestyle” personal essay, (June ’25)

Cosmopolitan

• ”A Lifetime of Avoiding Public Bathrooms Damaged My Bladder—Now, As a Trans Man, I’m Finally Letting Go” personal essay (May, ‘25)

The Believer  

• “A Brilliant Cure But We Lost the Patient”: a 10,000-word, deeply-reported feature on electroshock/ECT in our society and culture (Oct. ’24)

Esquire 

• “Into the Woods with 150 Trans Men” (now paywalled; free link); a personal essay about attending a summer camp for people like me (Aug. ’24) Read for Apple News+.

• “How to Talk Like a Man” (now paywalled; free link); an essay on working with a speech pathologist even after my second, “male” puberty … (June ’24) Read for Apple News+.

• Personal essay: “Mourning the Boyhood I Never Got” (June ’23)

The Cut

• “It’s Not Just Britney”: article commissioned on psych patient civil rights (June ’21)

Them 
“Between the Binary” column, several personal essays about my being gender-nonconforming … and the small and large discomforts and pleasures thereof …

• “On the Gratitude I Feel for My Chosen Family” (Apr. ‘20)

• “How Yoga Helped Me Long My Body — and Myself” (Jan. ‘20)

• Dear Brands: Consider Selling Me Stuff (Dec. ‘19)

• “A Farewell to Boobs” (Oct. ‘19)

• “My Gmail Won’t Stop Deadnaming Me” (Sept. ‘19)

• And on how Marie Kondo helped me sort out my gender (Feb. ‘19) My first essay for Them.

Bon Appétit’s Healthyish

• “My Friendsgiving Isn’t a Trend. It’s a Lifeline” July 2018

• “I Run to Silence my Demons” Nov. 2018

CNN Opinion

• “This toxic lie about gun violence hurts society’s most vulnerable” Feb. 2018

BuzzFeed (News)
I wrote many features and essays of my own during my time on staff as Deputy Features Editor, and a few after. (’13 – ’18). Highlights include …

• “How Simple Is That?: At Home with Ina Garten” Nov. 2016 full-access profile of the iconic cookbook author …

• “I Was the Best Fake Attorney in America” (Aug. 2015) A part reported, part-memoir piece about having been the winner of high school mock trial (attending the competition as a journalist ten years later)

• “The Trials of Teresa Sheehan: How Police Became Our Nation’s Mental Healthcare Workers” July 2015 a long investigative feature written in conjunction with two data journalists

• “Apocalypse Noir: How Climate Change Will End Wine As We Know It” Nov. 2014

• “My Giantess: The Sad, Strange, True Story Of Sandy Allen, The Tallest Woman In The World” (July 2014)

• “Tig Notaro And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Yet Somehow Completely Amazing Year” Aug. 2013 full-access profile, once year after her famed Largo set … (BF’s link lacks photos now; click here to read PDF.)

The Paris Review (online)

• Reading In Patagonia In Patagonia - long travel essay on Chatwin’s classic book and the lines between truth and fantasy (May 2013)

Other bylines include: Guernica, Pop-Up Magazine, Electric Literature, Gay Magazine (Roxane Gay, editor), a brief essay about the dawn chorus for in Wildsam’s Hudson Valley and Catskills guide … and other older ones, like this one for my own defunct online literary magazine, Wag’s Revue, on a time I nearly lost an eye.