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I am glad that in 2026 I find out about twitter from tumblr.

I did not "dance around" the manic pixie dream girl. I sought to write books exposing the dangerous lie that a person is more than a person. The romanticization (mostly by boys) of the Romantic Other is extremely dangerous, and that was a central theme of my first two books. If people read them as MPDG books, then I failed at my first and most fundamental task and I'm sorry.

Warning (Jenny Joseph, 1961)

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Advances in weaponry meant that, for the first time, men were coming home from war with literally half their faces blown off, on a regular basis. This was not only traumatic— there were cases of men cancelling engagements or being afraid to see their families, because of their disfigurements— but also caused problems with every day tasks like speaking and eating, in which your face plays a pretty key role.

Gillies arranged for a whole ward, and later a hospital, to be dedicated to the treatment of these men, and took steps to ensure that all soldiers who received these kinds of injuries on the battlefield would be sent to him directly. He developed methods for applying skin grafts so that larger portions of the face could be repaired.

He continued his work treating wounded soldiers throughout WW1 and WW2, and when both wars were ended— just in case he hadn't done enough to establish himself as a full on hero— he was then approached by a medical student named Michael Dillon, a trans man, and was able to use the same techniques he'd developed to reconstruct the penises of wounded soldiers to give him a phalloplasty. The first one ever performed on a trans man. He even diagnosed the guy with a condition to explain the frequent operations, so as to avoid outing him.

Dillon later wrote a book about trans-ness, which inspired Roberta Cowell, who became the first British transwoman to get a vaginoplasty, also performed by Gillies.