What the Hell Is Going On With Donna Briggs?
on our periodic TikTok "race reveals," a coupon + tomorrow's call-in show
I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every email. I’m Katherine Dee. I'm an amateur internet ethnographer and professional Art Bell fan. One of my big projects is interviewing people about how they use the internet. I hate to blow smoke up my own ass here, but I think my interviews explain our present moment better than anything else out there. You can read the transcripts under the case studies tab. Consider a paid subscription (or at least helping me move up the leaderboard):
Good evening Deeists,
Austin’s been on my mind a lot lately.
Not Austin in 2025—if you read my blog, you know that I live in yesterday’s rooms—but Austin in 2019, right after I got divorced. The Dawn of the Default Friend Era.
I lived in an orange casita by the University of Texas. Two floors and two rooms, a little balcony where I could see the professor’s house in front of mine. I had an African print chair that I think about every day. Every morning, there’d be roach shit in the bathtub. Every evening, I’d walk up a hill to a strip mall convenience store. I’d buy boxed wine, carry it back down like groceries. Mornings, I’d spend money I didn’t have on breakfast at some too-hip place, believing somehow the universe would provide. Maybe it was just coffee, I don’t remember.
There was something so relaxing about that life, though lonely, so lonely.
At night I’d fall asleep in front of an open window, air thick and humid, listening to old episodes of Coast to Coast AM. I lit candles for love spells and dreamed about ghosts. One of the ghosts was named Alma—I always thought that was a sign. Sometimes I’d get so drunk I’d start convincing myself someone would break into the house. I’d make little videos and post them on Twitter for no one in particular.
Lots of hipster porches with Christmas lights. Hipsters play cool music, they have records and play zamrock and Khmer psychedelia and Nancy Sinatra. I’d drink until the room spun, once my body gave out entirely—hospital, IV drip, two days of throwing up on my ex-husband.
I wholeheartedly believed in magic then.
Not abstractly, but with my whole heart. At X.’s parties—my life coach, $75 a session, who’d been to jail and thought maybe I should be coaching her—everyone had done ayahuasca. She thought everyone was a starseed but me. I believed all of them, desperate for the world to crack open. Desperate for someone to look at me and tell me I was an alien, too.
For six weeks I dated a 9/11 truther who didn’t like me very much, or at least wasn’t attracted to me. He called me fat but maybe that was just an excuse. Years later he’d text that he’d “always been in love with me.” I told him he was just lonely. He gave me a signed Jim Marrs book that’s still in the purgatory of my Austin storage unit.
What a perfect place. I really loved the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Texas and if we lived in a world that never changed, I could die there. I hope you know what I mean. Everything humming with possibility. I could feel it like electricity under my skin, like something good was always about to happen.
The saddest thing about getting older is I don’t think I’ll ever feel that way again.
THE PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY WERE BORN THE WRONG RACE
You’ve probably seen Donna Briggs on TikTok or Instagram Reels. My For You Page has been non-stop Donna and Donna deep dives for months.
But if you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s one of these things that’s better shown than described:
There is something off about Donna.
It’s her plastic surgery, but then, it’s not her plastic surgery. We’re used to bad plastic surgery at this point. There’s just something about her. And lots of people have picked up on that something—lots of them.
And thus came video after video after video like the ones below:
The Big Reveal is that Donna Briggs used to be a black woman. If you’re a connoisseur of fringe identity like myself, you’ve probably seen this phenomenon discussed before—”transracialism”—but the usual explanations feel incomplete. It’s either “mental illness” or “we’re all products now” whether the critique is coming from the left or the right. Fair enough, but I think there’s more to the story.
There has to be something deeper driving people to make such radical transformations. And I think we can explore this without being exploitative or cruel. That’s what I tried to do in my latest piece for Pirate Wires — take a look at transracialism and the people who pursue it. You can read it here.
And please share it, so they ask me to write more 👍
You can read my previous writing about transracialism here:
TOMORROW’S CALL-IN SHOW
Submit missed connections, personals, and advice questions to me directly or on Tellonym. I am also always accepting writing submissions.
Holy shit I was not ready for the dog! And what is going on with her arm? It looks lie she has a second elbow up by her tricep.
I'll also just add to what some others have said: your memoir writing is probably your best stuff. I remember those twitter stories you wrote, especially the one about a hungover hazy morning in Florida, another about your time in New York and another prior one about being lonely in Austin listening to the radio: so evocative so honest and so free of self serving bullshit that can weigh that type of writing down. Good stuff Kathy!
The austin part is beautiful. That sort of writing is my favorite, of the sorts of things you write
Donna Briggs, on the other hand, I'm content to remain ignorant of :)