Identity Current: Writer Guidelines

December 2024

A current can be fluid or electrical, and there’s more than one way to have an identity.

Please submit nonfiction essays about human identity.

Specifications

I can read (and publish) in English or Spanish.

There’s no hard minimum or maximum word count. Go deep, but be efficient. Write something meaningful and be true to the story you’re telling. Consider the attention span of your online readers.

Please don’t worry too much about formatting. I can help you figure it out. That said, please start off your story with a title, subtitle, and main image. Caption the image to credit where you found it. If you forget these basic things, I’m not mad, but we can’t move forward with publication until we have them.

No AI. I have feelings about AI. We’ve all been scraped by AI, and it’s bad news. Yes, Medium grudgingly allows AI-generated text and images if you label them as such, but my own rule for Identity Current is stricter: No AI. Just do not send it to me. I will AI;DR it.

Add your story draft to the publication

Click the 3-dot menu at the top of your story draft in Medium. Choose “submit to publication” and select “Identity Current.” For more technical advice, see Medium’s help page on submitting to publications.

Generally, what sort of writing does Medium wish to feature?

Read Medium’s Boost guidelines for writers and Boost guidelines for nominators. Those are Medium’s guidelines, not mine. Sometimes the stories published in Identity Current do get Boosted, but I’m not an insider to that process.

Reprints of essays published elsewhere are fine

If you’ve self-published an essay here on Medium: Use the 3-dot menu to edit the story and again use the 3-dot menu to submit it to Identity Current. (Don’t copy the text into a new draft, as Medium may penalize your account; see the rule against “duplicate content.”)

If you’ve published your article elsewhere, e.g., your blog on Substack, Ghost, Patreon, Google, social media, your personal website, someone else’s website, a defunct website, etc.: Copy it from the external site into a new Medium draft and submit it to Identity Current.

About the former editor

Amethysta Herrick founded Identity Current in January 2023. She’s now running The Purplepaw Clan (not on Medium) for gender and identity exploration. Check out her blog! It’s a cool project.

In March 2024, here on Medium, Amethysta turned over Identity Current to me.

About the name change

Amethysta called it The Identity Current. I ditched the definite article “The.” I just call it Identity Current now.

About me

Usually, I avoid describing myself with lists of adjectives. Yet I must let you know to whom you’re submitting when you submit to Identity Current, and adjectives are a quick way to do that.

If you meet me in the street, you’ll perceive me as a white man, English-speaking, abled, average weight, in my 40s, owning my home and walking my dog. Those perceptions are accurate. People use he/him pronouns to refer to me.

If you get to know me, you’ll learn: I’m Jewish and atheist, in an interracial gay marriage, have arthritic feet, wrote a memoir of a brief mental illness, am 27 years post-gender transition, a U.S. citizen living in Colombia, and you can speak Spanish in my house.

— Tucker Lieberman Follow the publication: Identity Current Follow me: Tucker Lieberman Find me elsewhere on the web: tuckerlieberman.com