Hi there, I'm Kate Alexandria.

Politicians and judges say I'd make a good lawyer. Doctors and nurses tell me I should go to med school. But following centuries-old rules "just because" and being good at math aren't my strong suits, so I lucked into becoming a writer instead. As an ex-child prodigy with a knack for trouble, I've shared my life in radically honest personal essays, reported intimate takes on the struggle for social justice, and created commentaries on culture & current events. 

Check out my featured articles below, or scroll down for a full listing of my pieces and interviews I've done. Questions? You can learn more or contact me hereLastly: if you appreciate my stories and advocacy, the author gratefully accepts tips on Venmo. :) 

A UCLA Surgeon Almost Killed Me, but I Can’t Sue

I agonized over the red flags in the days before the procedure. Despite my concerns, I chose to go through with it for uniquely American reasons. It was the end of the year, I’d have the chance to recover over the holidays without missing work, and my deductible was about to reset, meaning the surgery would be much more expensive if I waited. I rationalized my uneasiness because it wasn’t just some random clinic or some random surgeon...

I Was A Child Prodigy. Here’s The Dark Truth No One Ever Talks About.

Stories about highly ambitious kids are told in fairytale terms, but in reality, being a young prodigy can be a nightmare. We desperately want our kids to be top achievers, but we don’t have the infrastructure to support them as they reach for increasingly unattainable ideals. Plenty of officials have started to sound the alarm on this. The U.S. Surgeon General called free-falling adolescent mental health “the crisis of our time.” The CDC recently found that teen girls, in particular, are “engulfed in trauma,” even at a time when young women are being pushed to achieve more, more, more and go higher, higher, higher in academia. But the trophies aren’t worth the price we’re paying for them.

This FDA Program Is Collecting Birth Control Data from Teens

A federal program is collecting a trove of intimate monthly birth control data on hundreds of thousands of patients, many of whom are teens, including the results of mandatory pregnancy tests. In the post-Dobbs world, where anti-choice actors are aggressively hunting down data about women’s reproductive health and teenagers are sentenced to jail time for seeking abortion care, the “iPledge” program stands out as a unique risk to the privacy rights and freedom of young women and AFAB people.

Disabled Women Face Sexualized Fallout From Visibility

One in 13 people in the United States are developing long COVID-19 that ranges in severity from inconvenient to outright debilitating. What’s more, women are 22% more likely to wind up with long COVID than men are. The community of young women who speak out about life with a disability — increasingly on TikTok, but also through Facebook, Instagram, and the hashtag #NEISVoid on Twitter — has provided a sense of support and strength to people on many different disability journeys, including long COVID patients. It can be transformative and empowering to pass on wisdom and hear collective experiences. But for young women and femmes of all identities, visibility of any kind frequently comes with a unique type of sexual harassment, and that has been true in this community as well.

Fawn Or Fight: The Debate Community’s Disdain For #MeToo Is Worse Than You’ve Heard.

Last week, the Huffington Post ran an expose about the prevalence of sexual misconduct in competitive debate, with a specific emphasis on high school students who are fighting for protections and reforms. The world of high school debate is rife with abuse, some of it committed by high school competitors but a disturbing amount of it inflicted on minors by the adults who are supposedly in charge of them...

Full Portfolio

My complete portfolio is below, with my most recent work listed first. I've written about pressing sociopolitical issues like sexual violence, mental health, medical gaslighting, institutional corruption, and more.

I dreaded men standing up for me in public. This guy changed my mind. (Guest Post-Mortem for Emi Nietfeld's Substack)

I partied alone a lot in my early 20s, for better and for worse. If you’re a woman or fem-read person, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that my tendency to frequently drink solo meant I dealt with a lot of harassment – groping, gross comments, the works. So theoretically, it sounds like it’d be a good thing whenever a man called out this behavior from one of his fellow dudebros, right? Nope. I watched too many men unnecessarily, awkwardly escalate situations in the name of supposed chivalry or even try to “nice guy” their own way into my pants after ‘saving me’ from creepy comments or handsy jerks at bars and parties. But credit where credit is due – one man not only proved me wrong about this curse of bystander intervention; he profoundly changed how I think about standing up for people to this day. I feel like everyone should follow the example of this nameless stranger the next time they see a woman getting harassed in public – something that still happens so fucking frequently that I guarantee this advice will come in handy at least once or twice. If I could bottle up an example of “how to be an ally 101,” it would be this moment. Let’s break down why this situation was so quietly revolutionary.

A prominent trauma surgeon once said amputations would “never” happen without anesthesia. What happens when “never” arrives?

When the line of “never” is crossed, the bare minimum we owe to ourselves, the healthcare system, and humankind is to respond. If we do not commit to atoning for our betrayal of basic humanity, dedicate ourselves to supporting the patients of Palestine, and make it very clear that the sanctity of care must never be crossed again, I’m afraid that one day, we’ll know what it’s like to be behind a blockade too.

Nex Benedict and the Violence of ‘Real’ Girls

Nex, a child of Native ancestry, died on stolen land at the hands of girls upholding zealous Christian colonial ideals of gender. In 2024, our society still wants women to consume and be consumed in specific ways, shushing the ways genderqueer women and people have existed throughout history in Native cultures and beyond. It is Barbie feminism, not bell hooks feminism. Gatekeeping the bathroom and girlbossing genocide, not guarding against fascism.

How Getting an ADHD Diagnosis at Age 23 Improved My Mental Health

I’m navigating the aftershocks of getting an adult ADHD diagnosis after it was missed during my childhood, and I know I’m not alone. Over the past few years, many women and fem-presenting people with ADHD have started sharing their stories, which is helping to break decades of predominant discourse that over-centers ADHD in boys and leads to other cases being misdiagnosed or missed altogether. Getting an ADHD diagnosis can be life-changing — I know it was for me when I was diagnosed at age 23. Here are some of the unexpected ways that my ADHD diagnosis (and subsequent treatment) have impacted my mental health and well-being.

3 Tips for Dealing with Difficult Doctors and Medical Gaslighting

Chronically ill or medically complex patients face all kinds of discrimination and uncooperative attitudes from our medical system. This especially goes for women, queer individuals, and BIPOC, who deal with institutional oppression, gaslighting, and medical bias that ranges from infuriating to deadly. If you’re just starting out on the journey of being chronically ill or managing a disability, it can be incredibly daunting and demoralizing to see how uncooperative medical systems are.

The System Didn’t Give Me Justice After My Assault. I Did That Myself.

When I think about the times I’ve reported, I not only don’t think of justice: I think of active harm done to me for my trouble. I think of the time that a police officer threatened to have me arrested and sent to juvenile hall for the night when I was sitting in a hospital bed with bloody underwear. These are not unique anecdotes. Survivors are harassed by police, investigators, and lawyers. Many of these interactions happen in back-room settings, a tactic that certainly seems to enable people to get away with doing bad shit to survivors and not having to publicly account for it. Survivors are tasked with making an impossible choice. We have to choose something so consequential in a system of bad options. It is an imminent and pressing question for us to develop alternative ways of seeking “justice” and fundamentally reshaping our cultural discussions about it.

Working from Home with a Disability: 5 Essential Strategies & Tips

Work-from-home policies are not a blanket solution for the financial and institutional pressures that disabled people face. Working from home is still working and comes with its own unique stressors. It is not a solution that will work for everybody in our community, and we shouldn’t stop striving for an equitable safety net, including modernized SSDI guidelines to protect disabled people when they can’t work. But if you’re considering working from home as a disabled person, you might be curious about how you can set yourself up for success, reduce stress and burnout, and find balance and stability.

It’s Made Up Until Isn’t: Dysautonomia and Medical Misogyny

The medical sexism dysautonomia patients face is a well-documented source of frustration and harm in the community. Many of us have spent years being dismissed at every turn while our symptoms worsened. I’m not mad about the new attention and funding directed at dysautonomia; we need it desperately. But we’ve needed it for decades. When the problem was pervasive but mostly impacting young women, it was apparently not worth attention, funding, or validation. Now that it is a literally contagious issue — now that our suffering can be caught by men — it is a revolutionary priority in the medical and public health fields.

Ahsoka Tano Is a Star Wars Hero for a Generation of Dissenters

Earlier this summer, the buzz for the upcoming show Ahsoka was palpable at the Star Wars Convention in Anaheim. Due to be released in 2023, the show has been teased as a critical piece that will lay the groundwork for a major crossover event among the Star Wars shows that Disney+ currently streams. The excitement for the show marks a radical new chapter for the titular character, Ahsoka Tano. Now more than ever, Ahsoka’s journey — and the evolution of the public’s perception of her — offers a blueprint for young women who seek to do good and be honest in their resistance and activism amid increasingly chaotic, violent, and corrupt times.

This Ghost Story Is a Cutting Commentary on Rape Culture - Women’s Media Center

“There is a big difference between things being fair and things being set right.” So says Galaxy “Alex” Stern, the protagonist in beloved fantasy author Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. Bardugo, a well-known writer whose Shadow and Bone trilogy was adapted into a hit Netflix show, presents a supposedly formulaic ghost story that ends up revealing a cutting commentary about rape culture and a metacriticism of the male-dominated fantasy genre.

What It Was Like To Unexpectedly Get Open Heart Surgery At 21

In late May 2018, about two weeks after my 21st birthday, I got news that changed my life: I urgently needed open heart surgery. On July 2nd, I woke up in the ICU on a ventilator with a broken sternum, my aortic aneurysm grafted in plastic, a titanium valve clicking away in place of my bicuspid aortic valve. Now, nearly three years later, I’m just beginning to accept the impact that July 2nd, 2018 had on me — the gifts, the curses, the blessings, the frustrations, and the ever-present sound of my mechanical heartbeat.

Their Only Power Is Pretending You Don’t Have Any: How Speaking About My Secrets As a Survivor Set Me Free - Women’s Media Center

Their Only Power Is Pretending You Don’t Have Any: How Speaking About My Secrets As a Survivor Set Me Free In early October, the Huffington Post published an exposé about pervasive sexual violence in the elite high school debate community. After reading it and watching it make the rounds on social media, I decided it was time to tell my complete story so that other survivors wouldn’t be trapped with their abusers for no other reason than that they feel alone and fear they won’t be believed. So

I dropped my lawsuit against the California Democratic Party so I could write this.

I currently serve as Digital Director at the California Democratic Party. Up until last Friday, I was also one of three plaintiffs participating in a sexual harassment & retaliation lawsuit against the Party. But last Friday, I dropped out of the lawsuit (which, if you haven’t already, you should look up and read in its entirety, or the excerpts published on Twitter.) I didn’t drop out because any of the allegations I made (or the allegations that my co-plaintiffs made) are untrue. In fact, I vigorously defend every allegation that has been made in that case against the Party.

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