E10: Centring the Trans; S5: Lived/Deaded (Finale)

This one starts with a headset, a wireless mic, and a person pacing around their house trying to think out loud without deciding what they think first.There are ribs in an Instant Pot. There are potatoes that may or may not be timed correctly. There is a puppy tangling itself in cords and demanding to be acknowledged as the central organizing force of the universe.And somewhere inside all of that: a youth health centre in Abbotsford.A plaque on a City Hall wall. A signature that meant very little—until it didn’t. A phone call. A doctor who didn’t tolerate bullshit. A room where people started asking a simple question: what would it look like if young people who don’t trust systems could actually walk into one and not get dismissed?That question becomes a place.And that place—almost incidentally at first—becomes a hub for trans youth in a region that didn’t necessarily set out to “centre” anything except access, dignity, and not being talked down to about smoking when you came in with something else entirely.From there, the episode does what the mind does.It wanders.Into early activism. Into being a teenager in Southern California. Into AIDS-era organizing, borrowed language, and the strange inheritance of ideas about identity—who gets to claim it, who gets to question it, and who gets told to shut up about it.Then forward again: pandemic internet. Comment sections. The moment you realize you are out of your depth in a conversation that seems to demand certainty. The emergence of frameworks—TERFs, trans discourse, competing claims about what is fixed, what is fluid, what is social, what is biological, what is real.And underneath all of it, a quieter thread:What does it actually mean to “centre” someone?Is it about language? Ordering letters? Deference? Silence? Infrastructure? Proximity to power? Or is it something more mundane and harder to argue with—like building a place where someone can walk in and not get turned away?This episode doesn’t resolve that.It circles it. It interrupts itself. It forgets what it was saying and remembers something else. It admits confusion in real time. It contradicts itself. It keeps going anyway.Also: 12-step identity. The idea of being “born” something. The moment that identity stops fitting. Grooming, memory, and the unreliable archive of how a self gets constructed in the first place.Nothing is cleaned up. Nothing is finalized.It is a recording of a mind trying to hold competing models of reality while making dinner and stepping over a dog toy.Set to music, because apparently that’s how we get through it.