About Amelie McCoy

I was born in Poitiers, France in 1958 to an American father and a French mother. My father, Marsh Turner McCoy, was an attorney drafted into the U.S. Army at 32 for World War II. He served in the Signal Corps before moving to JAG, eventually retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Reserves. He went on to serve as a U.S. Civil Service attorney working international criminal law for the military. Between his military and civil service careers, he spent twenty years in Europe — from 1944 to 1964. My mother, Paulette Leclerc, was French. When my father retired in 1964, he moved our family to the United States. I was six.

What followed was a childhood defined by movement — 22 moves across Florida, Virginia, and Tennessee, 12 schools in 8 years, before finally landing at one high school in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where my father practiced law in his post-retirement years and briefly served as City Judge of Pigeon Forge before resigning over politics.

The family’s American roots run deep — through marriages into Quaker families and others who had been here since the 1620s, the lineage connects to the Sons of Liberty at the Boston Tea Party, to ratifiers and dissenters of the Constitution, and to officers in the Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam. Service and independent thinking are in the blood.

I grew up hunting and fishing — shooting Wilson’s Snipe off Virginia farm fields at nine with a .410 shotgun, knocking ducks out of the sky at sixty yards by eleven. Anyone who says trans people weren’t exposed to traditionally masculine pursuits doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

After a year of college, I followed my father and brothers into military service. Both of my brothers, born in France, ten and eleven years older than me, served in Army aviation. One was an Army and later civilian helicopter pilot. The other was a Huey helicopter crew chief who did two tours in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and who went on to become a fixed-wing flight instructor, a cargo plane pilot, and eventually a commercial pilot flying the Airbus A320. I enlisted and served three years, including two as a Scout Helicopter Crew Chief stationed in Alaska. I got out at 22.

I went back to college, but the 1980s were brutal. Professionally lost, knowing I was trans, afraid to express myself, having no social support, and no path forward without being dishonest about who and what I was, and knowing that any professional work would likely be dismissed. I admire those who were in a position to go ahead with themselves. I saw no such outlet without exposing myself to potential death. Nothing much has changed except the guts to be honest, and knowing there are a million younger people out there in this country who need to live their lives free of fear and danger.

By 1992, I was still near the end of my rope. That’s when I started writing The Mechanics of Mechanics, with my first physics principles taking shape by 1994. That book has since been split into two — The Mechanics of Mechanics, now complete, and The Mechanics of Gradients, still in development due to other projects. Together, they have been my central project for over thirty years. My mother supported me in those early writing years. She passed away in 2004. After that, I had to face life on my own.

I am a transsexual woman. I use that word deliberately. The shift from “transsexual” to “transgender” was supposed to be more inclusive, but it gave anti-trans forces the ammunition to reframe biological reality as social performance. If the opposition wants to go back to sex assigned at birth and deny transgenderism, then I’ll meet them on that ground — with transsexual. It’s what I am.

I told my mother I felt like a girl at four years old. I was met with total silence. It was never mentioned again until several months before she passed away. That silence — from age four until my late forties — is why I never brought it up during my teen years or later. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that the average age of first awareness is six, with most respondents not disclosing to anyone for years afterward. I was two years ahead of the average in knowing and carried a massive amount of silence.

I started estrogen in 2008 on my own, at about half the proper dosage. In 2015, I finally went to the VA, where I was put on a measured regimen. On February 13, 2018, I received my court-ordered name change and started living full-time as me. It’s been over eight years now.

I never married. I wanted to marry and have children, but I did not want to burden a family with my condition and pain from societal bigotry.

For sixteen years, I worked as an in-home caregiver. It was a deliberate choice. Someone told me in 2005 that I needed to be an author — that being associated with a lower-level occupation would keep me out of better social circles. They were right about the perception. People heard “in-home caregiver” and couldn’t reconcile it with the intellectual work. Cognitive dissonance. But caregiving let me work at night — on the book, on my research, and, for five years, producing a large collection of anthropomorphic fractal art using Apophysis. All of my clients accepted me. None outed me after I transitioned. It’s not something most people pay attention to unless their mind is on sex.

I am not a physicist or a biologist. I am a natural philosopher — in the tradition of Spinoza, Descartes, and Newton, before science divided itself into departments that stopped talking to each other. My writing blends the personal with the narrative with formal reasoning, expressed through how these principles show up in life. That style is deliberate, where I allow it.

Everything on this site comes from decades of independent thinking across physics, biology, chemistry, human sexuality, and systems design. The Mechanics of Mechanics — a comprehensive foundational physics framework — is now complete and approaching publication. The formal Principle of Evolution and the Evolutionary Laws of Reproduction and Speciation extend that structural thinking into biology. The Periodic Table of Atomic Elements reimagines how we visualize elemental relationships. The LGBT Intersex Series reframes human sexual variation within natural biological development. The Real McCoy Truth Engine applies formal contradiction testing to claims in any domain.

All work is published through Amelie Studios LLC.