As a creative writer, I explore themes of belonging and home. Early in my gender transition, I tried killing off my female past. But my deadname, Talia, fought back. She kept barging into consciousness, insisting on being seen and integrated into the man I was becoming. My memoir, Trans Bear Diaries: Calling My Deadname Home, is Talia and my story, and it goes beyond gender to explore what it means to come home.

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I won the 2024 London Independent Short Story Prize in Flash Fiction and was shortlisted and highly commended for the 2023 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. My story “Angel” won the UK’s first transgender writing competition, and my co-edited anthology Trans Homo … Gasp! was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

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As a psychologist, my scholarship centers on uncovering and combatting social contextual factors (e.g., stereotype threat), which have been documented to cause women and other minoritized groups to underperform and become susceptible to awarding gaps and lower continuation rates. My team and I published the Speaking Truth to EmPower (STEP) intervention, funded by SF BUILD, an > $17 million NIH grant, awarded to Drs. Leticia Marquez-Magana and Avi Ben-Zeev (then-SFSU multiple-PIs) in 2014.

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I have served on the editorial boards of Psychology of Popular Media Culture and the Journal of Homosexuality and authored high-impact publications in top-tier journals, such as Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Cognitive Science.