In April 2014, Tranifesto celebrates five years as a blog. After a couple of shaky experimental posts, my first real blog post was Angie Zapata: A Historic Verdict, about the history-making verdict in the murder trial of Allen Andrade.
In the beginning, I posted almost every day – news items, opinion pieces, interviews, and whatever I thought was interesting or important. Pretty soon, the near-daily blogging became overwhelming, and I set up a twice-weekly schedule – Mondays and Thursdays.
And because I was getting so many questions privately, I decided to introduce the Ask Matt feature, so other people could benefit from the information and so that readers could give their input. That way, the questioner could get more than just my thoughts on the matter. While the feature started out slow, it became so popular that it’s pretty much what I’ve done on the blog for the past couple of years. I’ve loved it, and I think it’s been quite valuable. I hope that readers feel the same.
After a while, twice a week became a little difficult to keep up, and I changed my posting schedule to once a week, but with the amount of Ask Matt letters that came in, I usually ended up writing two posts anyway. I am now caught up on Ask Matt letters. If you wrote one to me and it didn’t get published, it’s because I didn’t get it. Sometimes things online can go astray. My intention was to answer every one.
So now I’m caught up, and I’m moving into the five-year mark. I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to do to celebrate five years of Tranifesto, and I finally decided – I want to take a break. At least I want to take a break from posting on a regular schedule. I doubt that I will ever take a break from writing, or from voicing my opinion on things, or from trying to help where I can. But for now, Tranifesto is staying up as a resource, and I will add new posts as the urge strikes me.
In order to make Tranifesto more user-friendly, I changed all my categories, and then I went back through every post that I have written over the last five years and re-categorized them all. I hope that this will allow people to more easily find the information they are looking for. For an explanation of the categories and links to all the posts under a specific category, go to my About Tranifesto page.
I also hope to update and expand my Resources and Links page. I know that there are many more resources out there. I just haven’t had time to gather them all and add them.
For five years, this blog has been a labor of love (the Google ads that some of you see are not mine – WordPress puts them up in order to generate revenue so that they can continue to offer a free blogging service), and I’m very proud of it. I was honored with Best Blog in the first-ever TransGuys Community Awards in 2010. I was also honored to be part of the inaugural Trans 100. I’ve put a lot of work into it and it has gone from a handful of readers to several thousand, all over the world.
But the best part of it has been the readers. My readers have come through with incredible advice for the people who have written in to Ask Matt. They have engaged in fantastic, thought-provoking discussions. And even when they have disagreed with me, or with other commenters, they have been polite and respectful of everyone’s thoughts and opinions. My readers have made this blog successful, and they are really the ones who have helped so many of the people writing in. I thank all of you so much. There are not words to express my gratitude for your support and your existence.
This is starting to sound like a eulogy! Tranifesto is not dying, and neither am I (I hope, but there are never any guarantees – I will let you know, though, if I’m given any warning). I’m just taking a break. I hope that my subscribers will stay subscribed, because I plan to continue to post – just not on a regular schedule. And this break will allow me to complete – or start – some other projects that I have been working on, or at least contemplating, so you will get those announcements as well when I post them here.
In the meantime, if you haven’t read all the posts on this blog (there are 611 of them), take some time and poke around. They are all neatly categorized now, so find the areas that interest you and see what’s there. Dig deep and you will find some of my earliest stuff.
Thanks again for all your help and support. Stay tuned. In the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator – I’ll be back.
This post originally appeared on Matt Kailey's award-winning website Tranifesto.com. Republished with permission.
