About This Blog Title

Before I do anything with this blog, I'd like to explain the title and give credit where credit is due. "The Alchemy of Practice" is a line I've borrowed from a blog post by Guy Windsor. Back in the summer of 2015, a trans woman was denied entry into a woman's longsword tournament. I honestly don't know the details; I'd picked up a sword all of two months prior and had little knowledge of the world of swordsmanship beyond my local SCA practice. But a number of fencers blogged their opinions and support, and one of them was Mr. Windsor.

One sunny August day, while helping a friend move, I came across Swords Do Not Discriminate, Neither Should Swordsmen. It's worth reading in its entirety, but one paragraph in particular caught me and hasn't left: "This is the whole point of training swordsmanship. You start out wanting to be something that you are not (yet): A swordsman. You train, and sweat, and bleed and suffer (in my classes, anyway), and through the alchemy of practice you become the person you aspire to be. For any swordsman to fail to see the similar but vastly more difficult course that trans people go through strikes me as a pathetic failure of imagination and empathy."

It's perhaps worth mentioning here that I'm a trans man. I officially came out to everyone in early 2015, began filing paperwork in May, and started medically transitioning in the early fall.  Between those last two steps, I started fencing. 

I don't know that I can fully express what that quote meant to me, coming across it when I did. Two years ago, I wouldn't have believed that I could take the step and come out to the world and be accepted as the person and gender I always have been. I definitely didn't think I had the grace or skill or physical ability to bother picking up a sword. But I've proven both of those wrong. I'm proud of everything I've done and built over the past year, and I look forward to further building up toward the best version of myself, through conscious thought and effort, and "the alchemy of practice."

So when the time came to blog about my SCA journey, which at this point is mostly the story of my learning to be a swordsman, that's the only phrase that felt right for the title, and I hope he won't mind my using it as a reminder.