Content note: rape. Comment policy at end.

I was out and about today: going to the gym, stopping for coffee, getting groceries. Just a normal day. And every time I passed a man, I thought, “Are you one of them? There were 62 million visits to the rape academy site, in one month alone. Were you one of them? Are you, not just a rapist, but a calculating, plan-ahead rapist who conspires with other men on how to commit rape?”

I especially thought it of men in couples with women. Because the rape academy site specifically taught men how to rape their wives and girlfriends. And of course, I thought of the women I passed — especially the ones in couples with men. “Are you one? Does your husband or boyfriend drug you and rape you without you knowing about it?”

It’s really hard to sit with this. It’s hard to feel both how appalled I am — and how utterly unsurprised I am.

Comment policy: Do not try to console or reassure me. Right now that feels like gaslighting. And if I hear one whiff of “Not all men,” I will block you so hard and so fast you’ll hear the explosion on the other side of the world.

My mom used to make homemade noodles when I was a kid, and I loved them. They’re homey, filling, and delicious. I recently got an impulse to try them myself, but since I don’t have my mom’s recipe, I had to try a few different ones before I found one that worked right for me and reminded me of home. This one comes from The Joy of Cooking, with some additional notes from me. It’s just a few ingredients and only a medium hassle: the biggest hassle is rolling and cutting the noodles. (I do tend to get covered in flour by the end of the process, so keep that in mind.) (more…)

Content note: dentistry, fear of dentistry. Please note comment policy at end.

I have a serious phobia of dentistry.

Until recently I haven’t talked about this. I didn’t talk with friends about it, or even therapists. I rarely talked with Ingrid about it. I didn’t even name it. I didn’t call it a phobia. I just told myself I hated going to the dentist.

But I’m tired of not talking about it. My shame and self-judgment about the phobia has done nothing but make it worse. So I’ve decided to defy the shame, and speak up.

I’m dealing with this right now because I recently went to the dentist — for the first time in many years. Like I said, this is an intense phobia. And unsurprisingly, my teeth are a mess. My regular dentist can’t handle this task, she had to refer me to a specialty dentist. I need serious, extensive dental work, which I’m getting done under general anesthesia. I’ve had five sets of X-rays and scans in the last couple/few weeks, each more futuristic and science-fictiony than the last.

This is incredibly stressful. (more…)

I fired my psychiatrist yesterday. I thought some of you might be interested in the reasons why. Here is my side of the correspondence. (I’m not publishing my psychiatrist’s side of the correspondence, because that seems like a violation of confidentiality.)

Letter 1:

Hi. There was something you said in our last session that deeply troubled me. When I said I was depressed and anxious about world events, you said there was nothing I could do about these things. PLEASE: When a patient is depressed or anxious about world events, don’t tell them there’s nothing they can do. (more…)

(I’m only speaking for myself here, not for anyone else.)

Dear Republicans,

Apparently some of you are having second thoughts. Recent events have led you to question your commitment to Trumpism, and even move away from it. A line has been crossed for you, and you can no longer accept the direction the country is going in.

Am I glad about this? Yes. Do I want you to step away from Trump and the Republican Party, to rethink the path you’ve been on and walk it back? Yes. As the saying goes: The best time to do that was earlier; the second best time to do that is now.

But as you walk back this path, you need to realize that it’s not going to be covered with rose petals. A lot of people are extremely angry with you, and we have every right to be. You have done a great deal of harm. The Republican Party has done a great deal of harm — not just in the last month, it’s been doing great harm for a long time — and you’ve been part of that. When you’ve hurt people badly, you need to do more than just say “Oops” and expect to be forgiven. You need to work to fix the harm you’ve done. And the greater the harm, the more work you have to do. (more…)

In a world that has thoroughly sapped my inspiration for blogging and Patreon-ing, one of the last pleasures standing is toying with scammers and randos. And large language models are ruining that, too.

(more…)

Rabbit snails, Tylomelania gemmifera, might be the ultimate aquatic snails for the fish-keeper: large, visually dramatic, broadly inoffensive. Native to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, they come in several colour forms, in my case the golden variety, and they tend to be expensive compared to most other freshwater snails. Unlike the similarly impressive lava snail, Faunus ater, however, rabbit snails breed readily in captivity with the right incentives. Here’s how I made it happen.

(more…)

Comments on YouTube are closed so if you have any to share, please leave them here.

Anyway, I’m not at all a professional. I’m just an amateur make up enthusiast.

Here are the brushes I used:

Here are the colors:

The duo chrome shadow is similar to the example shown in the video.

Use whatever colors and tools you have at your disposal! Most if not all of my tools are cheap and the better stuff have been gifts/hand me downs.make up

You can be fabulous and on a budget.

Happy painting!

This post was inspired by one of my Integrative Pest Management classes that I took as part of my agriculture degree.

When it comes to various organisms, there is a population threshold that exists which prevents the population of a given species from overwhelming the environment. It depends on things like habitat space, breeding grounds, availability of food and water etc.

One of the concerns brought on by Industrial Agriculture has to do with how they have raised population thresholds for a lot of pest species by concentrating a large amount these resources in a relatively small area. For example, with monoculture crops, which create a tailor-made environment for certain pests, and which may actively exclude beneficial predators, attracting pests to the area and supporting a very large population. Still, even in this scenario, there is a theoretical max population that can be supported by that environment.

One of the things we learn in Integrative Pest Management, is to consider ways in which to manage that threshold either by finding ways to restrict availability of different necessary resources, or creating oases for beneficial predators. In general, managing the population thresholds for target pests is a successful method of managing that pest.

There is one exception though. One thing that when it occurs, renders the population threshold meaningless, because the species has developed a technique that makes it irrelevant. What is it?

COOPERATION.

(more…)

Cell cultures can be derived from a variety of different organisms. There are human lines, mammalian lines, bird lines, insect lines, and so on. I’m currently specializing in fish cells, which have a lot of interesting advantages as an experimental model.

Fish have the ability to modulate their metabolism in response to things like temperature. As a result, fish cells have a lot more tolerance for low nutrient environments. Where mammalian cells need media changes every 24-48 hours or they risk death, fish cells can go weeks, even months, without a media change. This makes them both less expensive to maintain and useful for conducting longer term experiments that require low nutrient environments.

Fish cells, with some exceptions, do not require an incubator. They can be grown at room temperatures of 18-21 °C. While we do have incubators, a large percentage of our cells are stored in drawers and cupboards throughout the lab. It does mean that the lab feels particularly cold in the summer, and I often get strange looks when I come in wearing a sweater on the hottest days of the year.

The exceptions include warm blooded fish like Tuna which require slightly higher temperatures, and some species which prefer to be stored in lower temperatures. To determine the best temperature to keep them at, we look at the species natural environment and run temperature growth studies on the cells to determine their growth sweet spot.  This is also how I found out there is such a thing as warm-blooded fish.

Some fish cells can also withstand a variety of temperatures making them useful in temperature studies. The cell lines I’m currently developing myself is one of these, and I’ve used this to help test the impacts on temperature on the relative toxicity of a common pesticide.

We’ve successfully started cell lines from fish that are post-mortem for up to three days. Since we only need small samples, we’ve also done so with scraps leftover after fish have been processed and cleaned for food. Since theoretically, some of these cell lines could contribute to lab grown meat someday, we have in essence used food waste to grow more food.

The actual process involves science, art, and a bit of luck. I’ve had the opportunity to start some cell lines from various fish I’ve caught myself. With most cells, it takes 50 passages/generations before a cell line is considered immortalized or continuous. While you still need to reach this goal to publicize it as a continuous cell line, with fish cells you can be pretty confident of success once you’ve hit 10 passages or generations. I just hit this mark with the olfactory cell line I started in June of 2023. I’m not even halfway yet with the brain cell line which involves much slower growing cells.

The most cultured fish is the Rainbow Trout. My professor has developed several cell lines from this species including the RTGill-W1 cell line which is the only fish cell line approved by the OECD and is the ISO standard for toxicology research. Live rainbow trout are also popular fish for use in research, in addition to being a frequently farmed fish in North America, which makes it readily available. In addition to gill cells, our lab has worked with rainbow trout gut cells, olfactory cells, liver cells, muscle cells, brain cells, and more.

Less than 2% of existing fish cell lines represent marine species, I want to change that.

There are currently no continuous successful crustacean cell lines. Some years ago, someone published about having succeeded in creating one, however, genetic testing done by my professor ended up revealing it was actually an amoeba. A few of us in the lab are working on trying to create one from some interesting species.

Fish, or aquatic vertebrates, are among our evolutionary ancestors. As a result, although specific processes and whatnot may differ in the details, we can still learn a lot that is ultimately applicable to humanity. Even more so, when you consider that fish make up a part of our global food supply. What affects them, will ultimately affect us as well.

As mentioned in my previous post, in 2023 I started working as a research assistant in a fish cell culture lab at my university. Some of you already know what that means, but some of you might not, so I thought I would take a moment to explain. Since science education is not consistently accessible to everyone, I will include some background information. I also welcome questions if any part if unclear.

What are Cells

If you were to breakdown living things into their smaller parts, the smallest individual part that is still considered life are cells. They are individual units of life that together make up the different tissues, organs, and parts that make up a whole organism.

Take humans for example, we are made up of millions of individual and specialized cells. Our skin is made up of different skin cells, our immune system is made up of specialized immune cells with different functions, organs like the heart are made up of different heart cells, and so on. Cells are the building blocks of life.

Types of Cells

Each cell contains our genetic information. In reproductive cells, like ovum and spermatozoa, they contain only half the genetic code and are called haploid cells. When they contain both halves of the genetic code, they are called diploid cells.  As a basic explanation, when reproduction occurs, two haploid cells each containing half the genetic code of the parent fuse to become one diploid cell containing the genetic code of the new individual – the child. This cell then splits over and over until you have a big clump of cells that then start to take on different functions and roles.

This initial clump of cells is made up of stem cells, meaning they haven’t specialized or chosen a function yet. Your DNA contains all the information about the different roles that different cells will need to play in order to become a functioning human body. A stem cell has the potential to become any other cell.

When cells start to take on a specific function they are said to be differentiated. A stem cell has the potential to become any kind of specialized or differentiated cell, which is how one fertilized cell can become a whole person with many different types of cells. They rely on different cues from their surroundings to know what sort of cell they are needed to become. This is why as long as everything is working properly you don’t suddenly end up with liver cells growing out of your eye. In most cases, a differentiated cell will stay differentiated and won’t change into a different kind of cell or divide into a different kind of cell.

Cells divide to replace aging, dead, or damaged cells, and also to provide more building blocks to make it possible for the organism to grow. Since different cells get damaged more or less frequently than others, some cells grow and divide more quickly than others. Skin cells for example, tend to grow faster than bone cells because they are exposed to a lot more stimuli and potentially harmful conditions than bones are.

Although the body needs cells to survive, theoretically cells don’t need the body to survive. As long as they can continue to access the nutrients and other components necessary for their survival, they can continue to grow independently from the overall organism. The reason you don’t end up with a new person growing out of a severed finger, is because the cells whose purpose is to bring the essential components to the cell have been separated from the cells in the now separate finger.

If you were to find a way to provide those components and nutrients to the cells of the finger, they could continue to grow and reproduce. Having been differentiated already, the cells will not then go on to grow a new person even with all the necessary nutrients provided. They just grow more finger cells. This reality is part of why we are able to re-attach severed limbs provided they can reattach the blood supply in time. The cells will stay alive as long as their own store of nutrients lasts. Placing the limb on ice (but NOT freezing them!) in this case, slows the cells’ metabolism to extend how long they can stay alive.

Interestingly, this is not the case with plant cells which can regrow an entire plant from a tissue culture, a process which is actually used frequently in agriculture.

In the simplest terms Cell Culture is the act of growing cells outside of an organism in a controlled environment.

How it’s Done?

(more…)

No shame if you don’t. I’d almost forgotten him. Monsarrat was part of Edwina Rogers’ attempts to stay relevant in the secular movement after being fired from the Secular Coalition for America (SCA). Specifically, he was the part that got rude and abrasive with local group leaders who didn’t want to sign up for Rogers’ new organization, parts of the website of which bore a marked resemblance to materials produced for the SCA. Some excerpts:

I’m starting to believe that the reason the secular movement doesn’t have more women is the women. Prove me wrong.

You don’t even have a real website. In [a large city], you have [a few hundred] meetup members. You hold some group discussions, but it doesn’t look like you are moving the meter.

You need to learn to partner with groups that have power, without the rage. You should be ashamed to have misjudged Edwina. You are wrong about her.

Thanks for threatening me. It just underscores how unprofessional you are. What kind of “ethical society” person would forward around a personal email with the intention of destroying someone personally? Ethical fuck you if that’s your approach to life.

Right. That Johnny Monsarrat, who is the same Johnny Monsarrat who has a disturbing history with private data provided to his app, who is the same Johnny Monsarrat who filed a lawsuit found to be frivolous, who is the same Johnny Monsarrat whose company was a video game pioneer. It would appear from some recent correspondence received by The Orbit that he’s pretty invested in having the record cleared of everything but that last bit. (more…)

Hermit crabs are not the only crustacean that takes another animal’s shell for its own. This behaviour isn’t even particularly rare, technically; several species of assassin bugs decorate their spiky bodies with the remains of their prey and octopuses use whatever they can find, including discarded shells, as mobile shelters. One crustacean, however, takes its borrowed shell one step farther, and that is Phronima sedentaria, the barrel shrimp.

(more…)

I had a conversation with someone last night and they asked if I turn off my TV. They asked in response to my saying I was a bit depressed with the state of the world.

Yeah, I can turn off the TV and take social media breaks. But that doesn’t stop the fascism from happening. My ignoring what’s going on doesn’t make Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s kidnapping any better. I can ignore it, sure. But my conscience wouldn’t allow me to sleep.

My therapist thinks the same. That I can take breaks from social media and self care when I’m too overwhelmed. Except, I cannot self care my way out of fascism!

Can Mahmoud Khalil? Can Rümeysa Öztürk?

I’m not saying that because these people cannot, that I shouldn’t. I’m saying that my pretending they don’t exist isn’t going to change the fact that the government is disappearing people. I cannot ignore the fact that there’s an active genocide towards trans people. I cannot ignore the genocide of the Palestinians or the Sundanese or Congolese or or or

I’m Puerto Rican and I’ve been aware of the United States’ bullshit since I became politically aware in my late teens. I’ve been struggling with my mental health since a child. I’m finally the most mentally healthy I’ve ever been.

I know myself and what I want. I’m self assured and fairly confident, finally. Only for the World to continue to become this shit.

The person I was talking to said they don’t follow politics. Well, friend, politics certainly follow you. And they weren’t white which is even more irksome.

But anyway, yes, I’ve eaten two meals today so far and washed my face and cleaned my apartment.

I have therapy in a bit and I’ll have to do some self care after because I’m doing exposure therapy.

That’s what self care is for! I have to relieve traumatic memories in therapy and then after, I watch a comfort show or eat a yummy snack. Maybe I listen to some music and just relax.

Self care is not for ignoring the fucking plight of millions while I sit comfortably in my apartment and pretend fascism isn’t right outside.

In a world where it can be tricky for nonmonogamous people to find each other, or find enough of each other, and where some people figure out their nonmonogamous nature while already in relationships, it’s natural that sometimes, nonmonogamous and monogamous individuals end up in intimate connection with one another. The results, “mono-poly relationships,” are the subject of extensive discourse, to the point of getting an entire chapter to themselves in More Than Two Second Edition. And I think that discourse gets something fundamentally wrong about what this combination is and what it means.

(more…)

Mother Jones has a great interview today with Kathryn Clancy, “a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, whose research examines the biology and culture around menstruation, pregnancy, and sexual harassment—topics all founded on a scientific understanding of sex, and the differences between us.”

Kate and I have been social media mutuals for a very long time, though we’ve only met on one, very pleasant occasion. She good people, but more importantly for the purposes of this post, she’s exactly the kind of scientific expert skeptics should be looking to for guidance when issues we care about are being politicized. So what does she have to say about defining sex?

There is no one definition of sex. For scientists, the way you might choose to define it can and should vary based on your research question. Some people will define sex around gamete size—do we produce larger gametes [eggs] versus smaller gametes [sperm]? That means there are more than two groups, because where do we put people who don’t produce gametes?

Then there are sex chromosomes. It’s not just XX and XY. There are a whole bunch of categories. Another one that people look at is neurotypicality. [Some] say there’s such a thing as a male brain and a female brain, and you’re going to get way different boundaries on those sex categories. One definition that is starting to shift right now is around typical hormone ranges. [For instance, people with] polycystic ovary syndrome can end up having androgen levels that are very different from those of most people that we might put in the sex category of female.

Genitals aren’t one of the common ways of defining sex. But the problem we come across is we often collect information on sex with a little form that says, “What sex are you?” What that’s typically asking a person is not “What’s your gamete size? What sex chromosomes do you have? What hormone levels are typical for you?” It’s asking about sex assigned at birth—a completely different way to measure sex that is based on baby genitals.

There’s plenty more good stuff in the interview. I recommend reading the whole thing, but I warn you, you’ll come away thinking sex is anything but a simple binary. And really, this should surprise no one, given how many ways scientists define the fundamental categorical schema of species.

In the meantime, however, the Center for Inquiry has not only not responded to (or acknowledged) my critique of their factually incorrect attack on their coalition partners. They’ve gone to the length of emailing that attack this morning, without corrections, to everyone who receives their organizational newsletter.

If this is what it means to oppose the anti-trans agenda of the Christian Nationalists, what would it actually look like to shill for them?

Stick with the experts, friends. Read Kate Clancy’s book, Period, for example.

Whew! It’s quite a question, but CFI asked us yesterday to consider it, so I will. Before I do, the brief backstory so you can look into all this for yourself.

As you probably know, the right wing of U.S. politics has increasingly attacked trans people, and particularly young trans people. Bathroom bans, bans on medical treatment that is considered the standard of care for trans people, mandated subsidies for conversion therapy, book bans, and even genital inspections of young athletes. All these and worse have been introduced as legislation across the country in the last few years. Some have passed.

In this political atmosphere, CFI hosted two talks at CSICon 2024 that dealt with how scientists define sex. The disagreements in the talks continued afterward in print, so you can look at the positions involved. I generally agree with Steven Novella’s point that we’re talking about a question of categorization, but you can also read Jerry Coyne’s insistence that sex is binary.

Recently, Coyne persuaded FFRF to publish a similar take, as covered by Hemant Mehta:

In case you missed it, the short version is that biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Fairly quickly, FFRF repudiated and took down the post. Shortly thereafter, a large majority of the Secular Coalition for America’s member organizations signed on to a pledge to collectively do better standing against this Christian Nationalist moral panic (pdf). Most relevantly to this post, the statement says:

Nor will we sit silently or ignore when the talking points, misinformation, and outright fabrications of anti-LGBTQ+ extremists are laundered and given a veneer of legitimacy or acceptability by those who hold themselves out as voices of reason or science.

For full disclosure: I’m on the board of Secular Woman and voted for us to sign on, which we did. This post, however, is mine only, written with no input from the rest of the board.

The Center for Inquiry was not among these signatories. Instead, they ran this post yesterday morning: “Response to Secular Groups that Claim Scientists Are Shills for Christian Nationalism“.

Biological science indicates there are two biological sexes, a fact consistent throughout the animal world of which humans are a part. There is also a more fluid concept of gender that allows for a more complex picture of human sexuality. Both things can be true at the same time. There can be two biological sexes and multiple gender identities. And when public policy is enacted, it should be sensitive to the former as well as the latter.

This appears to be an inconvenient truth in light of the response by some secular groups.

Some secular groups are taking the position that any discussion of biological facts is transphobic and a denial of civil and human rights. They posit that giving reasons for understanding the natural world as a place divided into biological male and female members of species isn’t just a scientific discussion but a cover for full-on Christian nationalism.

As you can see from the quote above, CFI is not only defending Jerry Coyne’s view of sex but also asserting it as their own position. This isn’t a surprise, given other posts they’ve published on the topic, but by identifying the organization with the scientists in question, they ask us to look at the case they present and determine whether CFI, along with Coyne, is shilling for Christian Nationalism.

(more…)

I spotted How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures on a shelf in Ottawa’s finest sex shop and knew immediately I had to add it to my collection. One does not present me, someone who has traveled to Montréal multiple times specifically to stand in the sturgeon room in the Biodome’s Gulf of St. Lawrence exhibit, with the fluorescent sturgeon on this book’s cover and expect me to leave empty-handed. How Far the Light Reaches is a collection of essays using aquatic-animal biology to explore various facets of the human condition, specifically author Sabrina Imbler’s human condition, and the diversity of aquatic life means it can do a lot with this framing device. I emerged from this book largely but not unreservedly impressed.

(more…)

For most of us, our main job however long this new government lasts is to survive and to bring people with us. Toward that end, it’s time to take inventory, now, before the disruptions start. It’s time to think about things you have that other people may need and figure out how to get them to others.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to cause a run on the banks or stockpile and hoard everything. Stability is one of the things that keep people alive. But it’s time to look at your money, while it’s yours, and figure out how much safety you can buy for people with it. Think shoring up safety nets. Think moving people from where they’re under immediate threat to the states that will fight back—and housing them when they arrive. Think purchase and repair of durable goods that will provide the ongoing means of local survival. Think building first aid and other skills.

It’s time to inventory your durable goods, because goods are about to get less durable. Consumer protections are very high on the list of things to be eliminated. The things you have now are likely to be worth more than the things people will be able to easily get in the future. Think about what you have that will last you with a bit of extra care, and about what you have that other people will be able to use. Get hooked up with your (existing!) local mutual aid groups so you can offer your stuff and hear when things are needed.

Think, too, about what you have that you can use to help others. Vehicles with some cargo space, tools, sewing machines, craft stashes, pressure canners, cooking supplies—get them into good shape and figure out what they’ll need to stay that way if supply lines get disrupted. If they’re not needed now, being hooked into mutual aid groups will tell you when there’s an opportunity to be helpful.

Inventory your skills. Don’t neglect the ones that are trivial to you but may not be to someone else, like talking to people on the phone or standing in line or being assertive in the face of obstructive bureaucracy. Think too about the ones technology has made less relevant, like researching in physical libraries or making zines.

Consider whether there are ways to make your skills more durable or transferable. Do you need a refresher course? Do you need physical manuals or reference books in case your internet is disrupted? Do you have local copies of your patterns and know how to alter them? Are your knives sharpened and your recipes written down? Do you know how to make substitutions in your materials safely and usefully?

Are you connected to an organization that can distribute the food you grow, the quilts you make, etc.? Do local tool libraries and/or maker spaces have your contact information when someone comes in who needs more than they can do themselves? Again, find that local mutual aid group that will let you know when there are needs.

Our individualistic consumer society has trained us to think of our stuff as trash in the making and our skills as hobbies to fill up the tiny bit of free time we have. Inventorying these things now will help us shake off that thinking and be ready when we’re needed—or more helpful now. Also, sitting down and making these inventories is good for shaking off those feelings of helplessness many of us have right now.

Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash

dramatically whips the dust sheets off everything in the place

chokes on the dust thrown into the air

There’s a trick to this, isn’t there?

Gimme a sec.

So, this meme is making the rounds again.

There is definitely a problem with these men, but not the one never-Muslims memers made up. A better caption would be “They think that a man who ‘allows’ his wife or sister to exist in public, where someone might see her and get turned on, is a cuck who won’t go to heaven.”

(more…)

This piece is from the book I’m still sort of writing. 

The first Nintendo game I remember playing was Pokemon Gold, which I played on my turquoise Gameboy Color at some point in the 90s when such things were played.

This was hard-won, by the way—my parents didn’t really understand the appeal of Gameboys and tended to consider them a thing for boys, anyway. They thought I should be spending my time reading and practicing my various hobbies. Which, to be clear, I definitely also did with much gusto! It’s just that in addition to that I wished to catch Pokemon.

(I might’ve had an easier time, or maybe a harder time, convincing my parents to buy me a Gameboy if I had known at the time that my mom once allegedly forgot to pick up her own son from daycare and to come home in time for her own anniversary party because she got distracted playing Tetris on her work computer back in the Soviet Union.)

Anyway, I don’t remember exactly how, but I succeeded in obtaining the turquoise Gameboy Color and the Pokemon Gold game for it from my parents. Back then, it was still possible to play a Nintendo game without immediately finding out all of its fun little secrets on the internet. You could find game walkthroughs if you knew how to search for them, but I probably didn’t. The other way to know things about games was to talk to other kids who played them, but as a freaky little neurodivergent kid growing up in suburban Ohio at a time when nerdy shit wasn’t “cool” yet or whatever, I didn’t exactly have a lot of friends, and the ones I did have did not play Pokemon. The kids who played Pokemon at my school were largely the sorts of boys who still thought that pulling girls’ hair was like, a normal and chill thing to do.

In short, just, no.

All of that is to say that I played Pokemon Gold without knowing much more about the game than I could glean from the little manual that came with the game cartridge. That means that when I got to the end of the game, beat the Elite Four, and watched the credits roll, I had no idea that after the credits, I would discover that I had literally only played half of the game and that now I got to hop on a train and go to the region from the original set of Pokemon games and explore that region and catch all of those Pokemon! My little mind was blown by this! I had just completed this amazing game, and now I had as much more game to play!

This experience might only be relatable to a very small and specific subset of the people who may be reading this, but hopefully I’ve described it vividly enough that you can sort of imagine it.

And now maybe you can imagine the polar opposite of this experience. So, instead of finishing an awesome thing and then finding out that you actually get double the awesome, you’ve just finished a horrible thing and now you’re finding out that you’re going to get double the horrible.

For example, you’ve just finished cancer treatment, and you totally thought that that was the end of the Cancer Game, except now your mom has cancer also, and now you get to experience a whole new side of the Cancer Game that you never even knew existed! It’s a lot like the first half except there are new and unfamiliar monsters here!

You might even start to wonder what happens after you finish this second shitty half of the game, and the credits roll again. Is there going to be another surprise? Is there any point to continuing to try to play and win? Does the game ever actually end?

Anyway, shittiest fucking game ever. Zero out of five stars.

In the coming days/weeks, you’re going to hear a lot about how Ukraine should accept the terms of surrender (as that’s what they are) offered by Russia—how they’d be “stupid” not to, how Zelenskyy should “do the right thing for his people” and prioritize saving lives, how peace should be the priority and we can’t always get what we want.

Make no mistake: even if Russia intends to uphold these terms once Zelenskyy accepts them, this is a terrible deal for Ukraine and a terrible deal for the world.

First of all, there’s no guarantee that Russia will respect a cease fire or peace treaty. Obviously that’s always the case with war, but it’s especially the case when they’ve already violated multiple cease fire agreements by firing on and murdering evacuating civilians, including children. So there’s your peace treaty.

Second, the terms that Russia has presented include virtually all of Putin’s actual goals for this illegal invasion (obviously “de-Nazification” and “de-militarization” were just lies à la “weapons of mass destruction,” a rhetorical tactic that really ought to be familiar to any self-respecting American leftist). Ukraine would forfeit its claim on the territories Russia has already illegally annexed/recognized, it would be forced to change its constitution (!!!) to commit to never joining any “pacts” (EU, NATO, anything else that forms in the future), and it would retain Zelenskyy as a figurehead while installing a pro-Russian actual government leadership.

This is—and I cannot stress this enough—not a “compromise” or a “peace treaty.” It’s terms of surrender. And the lesson learned here is that Russia can continue invading and terrorizing sovereign states without any actual consequences—remember, Putin doesn’t personally care about Western sanctions. He doesn’t care if his people are plunged into poverty as long as he and his cronies aren’t, and they won’t be. He’s furious about the sanctions because he finds them personally offensive and because they confirm his victim complex, not because he’s legitimately worried for his people like Zelenskyy is.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Putin has made it extremely clear that he seeks to rebuild a Russian empire. He will not stop with Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk. (And make no mistake—Luhansk and Donetsk are not independent sovereign states like Ukraine; they’re simply Russian satellites.) He will not stop with forced regime change in Belorus, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine. (And even if he did—isn’t that awful enough?) He is not “concerned about Russia’s security” or “worried about NATO’s encroachment” or whatever his extensive social media operation has you believing. He’s not concerned or worried about anything. He’s a dictator expanding his empire. He is exactly what you all feared Trump was.

I believe that this “offer” from Russia to Ukraine serves two purposes, and neither of them is to establish a lasting peace and autonomy for each country. One is to give Putin a potential way to back out of a war that has already gone much worse than he expected and cost him significantly in terms of personnel and equipment. (Not the sanctions—like I said, I don’t think he personally cares about the sanctions and in fact sees them as a political tool to use to his advantage.)

The second and more important goal is to create a way for the international community to blame Ukraine for the continued war. “If you’d just accept the terms, you could save your people and prevent nuclear war.” It’s absolutely classic DARVO tactics that, again, any progressive activist should be familiar with. “Sure, it’s not your fault he attacked you, but you shouldn’t have reported itmade a big deal of itgotten him “cancelled”made it publicetc.”

It’s not Ukraine’s responsibility to “prevent nuclear war.” Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection—protection that it has not received, although Western aid and military assistance has undoubtedly been helpful. Placing responsibility on Ukraine to accept unjust terms and illegal annexation of its land in order to “prevent nuclear war” only lends credence to the claim that only nuclear weapons can keep a country truly safe—after all, it would mean that Putin’s nuclear threats have allowed him to invade his neighbors, terrorize their citizens, destroy their resources, replace their democratically elected leaders with his own puppets, and steal their land—without even having to make any concessions himself.

So here’s my plea to my American progressive/leftist siblings. Please question what you think you know about Putin, Russia, and Ukraine. There are certainly far-right and neo-Nazi political forces in Ukraine as there are in any country, but Zelenskyy is a progressive, democratically elected JEWISH president. NATO and the EU have their (serious) issues, but they have not pressured or forced any former Soviet states to join—in fact, prior to this war, it seemed unlikely that Ukraine would be admitted. Ukraine WANTED to join to protect itself from Russia, which had already illegally annexed its land, empowered far-right groups within its borders, and forced regime changes in surrounding countries.

Putin is not an anti-imperialist revolutionary; he denounces American imperialism because it’s convenient for him politically and it keeps the American left from putting pressure on our government to divest from Russia. Sure, maybe the Democrats oversold Russian election hacking as an explanation for Trump’s win (although the more I learn about the extent of Russia’s disinfo campaign, the more I question this common leftist talking point), but that doesn’t mean that Putin isn’t bent on conquering Eastern Europe and subduing Western powers by any means necessary. This goes far beyond American electoral politics, and the answers here do not conform to American party lines. Do not fall into the trap of dismissing politicians’ statements about Putin and Russia just because you disagree with the rest of their stances.

Putin is a dictator. Sometimes it really is that simple. A former KGB agent, he came to power by staging the modern Russian version of the Reichstag fire (look up “Russian apartment bombings”), using that as an excuse to start a war and win it, and he has maintained his power through strong-arming and terror. The State Duma is entirely symbolic at this point; anyone who goes against Putin knows that they are likely not only to die, but to die horribly, just like Alexei Navalny almost did not long ago (look up “Novichok” and prepare yourself for some body horror).

I could go on. I won’t right now. But in truth, I deeply regret the fact that I haven’t done more over the past 8 or so years to disrupt the blatant Putinist propaganda I hear from a lot of my fellow progressives. I had other priorities and I didn’t give it the attention I should’ve. To be clear: nothing America or American progressives could’ve done would’ve stopped this war, only delayed it or hastened it. The war was inevitable because Putin wants to conquer Ukraine, and beyond.

So I’ll just say—please, please listen to people who fled Russia/the Soviet Union, and to experts who study Russia. The most likely threat here isn’t a nuclear WWIII; this isn’t about you. The thing people like me fear most is simply that Putin will continue subjugating, terrorizing, and ultimately conquering innocent citizens of sovereign states, and that the West will eventually just accept this as the price of nuclear deterrence.

I’m not a political scientist; I don’t know how to stop this war. All I know is that Ukrainian surrender isn’t it. Listen to Ukrainians, anti-Putin Russians, and other experts, form your own opinion, and most importantly, keep your wits about you. Not everyone in this world is a good faith negotiating partner. Some people are, unfortunately, just evil. Hitler was, Stalin was, Putin is.

(more…)

Yeah, I’ve been gone for a good bit. I can explain. Politics, the pandemic, and health crises sapped my will to write. Then the sun came out. (And there were so. many. volcanoes.) In this essay, I will ‘splain what’s been going on, and show you some of the beautiful sights we saw as we broke free from a confining year.

This was a summer of slowly learning how to adventure again.

The pandemic was rough, even for introverts. We couldn’t travel out to our favorite volcanoes, and even local outdoors walks in areas without many people felt fraught. The winter was especially tough. My partner was an essential worker, and though we never caught COVID, we risked it daily. Political turmoil made everything much worse, especially when the Capitol was attacked in January. The stress of it all caused me to withdraw and him to relapse. We nearly lost each other. Words failed me for a long time. It felt like nothing would ever be safe again.

But in spring, he went into residential treatment, and my friend M and I began tentatively venturing out. Just to nearby parks, at first. She introduced me to Union Bay Natural Area, where magnificent views of Lake Union, the Issaquah Alps, and Tahoma (Mount Rainier) provide a lovely setting for many fantastic birds. That’s when my passion for the sun was rekindled after a year of being unable to venture out.

I brought her to North Creek, where trails through the wetlands and along ponds provide many more opportunities for birding (yes, it’s become our thing), plus lovely views of the ridges that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet bequeathed to the Puget Lowlands.

(more…)

Recently I had one of those deep, rare, life-giving conversations with a close friend–“close” of course being somewhat of a flexible word these days, as I’d barely seen this friend for months, as I barely go anywhere and I barely see anyone.

Nevertheless we saw each other and we had this conversation in which we talked about each other and our friend group and what has happened to us, and how as a result we have all grown apart. Some of this was COVID-related, some of it wasn’t, but regardless it happened, and now here we are sitting on my couch processing it. My friend said that she understands and accepts the fact that everything changes, and people grow apart and leave, and et cetera, but she just wished that this particular moment in our lives had lasted longer, had hoped it would.

I agreed, and then immediately realized that I didn’t quite agree–it was more of an “I agree, and also.”

The “and also” is this:

I’m glad that our culture is starting to move towards a place of recognizing that all relationships (platonic, romantic, sexual) do not need to last forever, and that it’s not a “failure” if they don’t; that we can be glad for the good times we had with someone while acknowledging that they have moved on, or we have moved on, or both; that we should never pressure others to stay in relationship with us or to have that relationship look the same way it did before; that people can drift apart without it being anyone’s fault or responsibility; that all of this is Normal and Good and Healthy.

This is a good baseline, I think, but I would like to take this understanding some steps further, particularly in light of These Unprecendented Times.

(more…)

[ discussion of puberty, gender dysphoria, and dislike of secondary-sex characteristics traditionally associated with women. body horror overtones/undertones ]

Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post called Everything That My Tits Have Gotten Me in Life.

While I still stand by every word of it, my reading of my own words has changed a lot in the time since I wrote it. As the memes say, big oof.

Misogyny sucks, but, uh, it turns out that sublimated body dysphoria sucks, too.

(more…)

[Content note: mental illness, suicide, self-harm, ED, sexual assault, bullying, emotional abuse]

In attachment theory, “earned secure attachment” is when people who experienced dysfunctional parenting and developed maladaptive attachment patterns in early childhood are able to heal and become securely attached as adults.

I always liked the sound of that. Secure attachment: they’ve earned it.

For me, it happened the other way around.

(more…)

Ah, yes, it’s that time of year again, where the holidays bunch up like they’ve put off celebrating til the last minute and suddenly it’s time to give All The Gifts. Of course, this being 2020, and many of us being in America where the ostensible leader can’t see reality past his artificially inflated ego, this is a complicated holiday season. Many of us will be socially distancing still. Viruses don’t take holidays, even when we wish they would.

Thanks to eCommerce, though, we can still give our loved ones some nice little gifts if we don’t want to skip that part, many of which will help while away a long pandemic winter. Let’s explore!

(more…)

You know how sometimes you’re kinda sad when finishing a book, because despite having approximately 4,568,892,626,942 other books you need to read, none of them will be quite like this book? Yeah, I felt that way about Raoul McLaughlin’s The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China. There are few books that manage to straddle the line between interesting enough to keep me plugging through to the end, but soporific enough to be a reliable insomnia cure. This book struck that exact balance.

(more…)

If you’ve noticed yourself feeling more fatigued, sluggish, numb, or even down since the election, you’re not alone.

For some people, it might come as a surprise that a period of time they associate with feelings of relief, hope, or even joy could also be a time when depression symptoms show up. But it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider one compelling theory for why we get depressed in the first place. [1]

Most people will probably experience depression at some point in their lives. It’s pretty much the common cold of mental illnesses. But unlike the common cold, which is caused by a pathogen that enters the body, depression is something the body does to itself. Given how destructive depression can be, and how it can disrupt just about every facet of human functioning, why would our brains be able to do this shitty thing to us?

(more…)

Some researchers need to be reading books by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

One of the greatest joys in reading about the neurological disorders he treated, including autism, was his delight in all the myriad ways brains work. He didn’t treat people as defective. Where other people saw deficits, he saw potential, talent, opportunity, and skill. He celebrated neurodiversity before it was even a thing. Decades later, I can pinpoint specific stories he told that helped me see the ways “disorders” like Tourette’s or autism could be assets – despite the difficulties they cause in a world filled with people who believe brains should only function in certain ways.

Unfortunately, a lot of neuroscience researchers haven’t gotten Dr. Sacks’s message. They see difference as deficit if you have a disorder, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. (Prefer YooHoo to Pepsi? If you’re allistic, you’re quirky. If you’re autistic, you’re defective – and suddenly, enjoying YooHoo is an issue that needs to be cured.)

So you end up with papers like this one, wherein the authors discover that autistic folks are more morally consistent than allistic people, and decide that’s because their brains are broken:

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by a core deficit in theory-of-mind (ToM) ability, which extends to perturbations in moral judgment and decision-making. Although the function of the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), a key neural marker of ToM and morality, is known to be altered in autistic individuals, the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying its specific impairment in moral decision-making remain unclear. Here, we addressed this question by employing a novel fMRI task together with computational modeling and representational similarity analysis (RSA). ASD patients and healthy controls (HC) decided in public or private whether to incur a personal cost for funding a morally-good cause (Good Context) or receive a personal gain for benefiting a morally-bad cause (Bad Context). Compared with HC, individuals with ASD were much more likely to reject the opportunity to earn ill-gotten money by supporting a bad cause than HC. Computational modeling revealed that this resulted from unduly weighing benefits for themselves and the bad cause, suggesting that ASD patients apply a rule of refusing to serve a bad cause because they over-evaluate the negative consequences of their actions.

Huh. My parents taught me it’s important to do the right thing, even if no one’s watching, and even if doing the wrong thing meant I’d get something nifty. I guess they were defective, too.

My friend Andrew Hutsell, who is autistic, isn’t having it. They, together with friends JadeHawk and Alyssa Hillary Zisk, wrote a letter to Hu et al explaining the authors’ many critical failures. They’ve given me permission to share it here:
Have the authors considered the possibility that autistic people having moral consistency may not be a deficit?

Autistic people here are characterized as lacking Theory of Mind [ToM] or having a deficit. It would seem the authors’ ToM deficits are evident in their inability to interpret autistic behavior and decision-making.

For instance:

We show that ASD individuals are more inflexible when following a moral rule even though an immoral action can benefit themselves, and suffer an undue concern about their ill-gotten gains and the moral cost.

When I and other autistic people look at this same set of data we see it this way:

Allistics are less able to follow a moral rule when an immoral action can benefit them; they suffer from a reduced concern about their ill-gotten gains and the moral cost.

The framing here matters. The authors did not consider the existence of other valuation systems, and attributed autistic ethical valuations as indicative of a faulty cost-benefit analysis.

Autistic integrity in moral judgement could instead be interpreted as a highly developed Theory of Mind.

Theory of Mind is described in the literature as:

[…] our appreciation for people’s cognitive states, such as beliefs and knowledge. (Lane, Wellman , and Kerr, 2010)

Emotion understanding as:

[…] our ability to identify overt emotionals reaction, to predict others’ emotional reactions, and to appreciate that people have both palpable and private emotional experiences. (Lane, Wellman , and Kerr, 2010)

Given these definitions, it seems there could be a link between the development of Theory of Mind and moral integrity. Lane, et al., did find a positive link between children’s development of theory of mind and higher level moral reasoning. (Lane, et al., 2010)

Interpreting the autistic people’s choices and behaviors as a deficit is a choice the authors made according to their own lack of understanding their autistic subjects. Autism research tends to rely on a deficit model to interpret autistic behavior and traits. This model creates a bias in researchers, to the point that moral integrity and consistency is even seen as a deficit.

Allistics’ lack in understanding autistic people, and vice versa, has been termed the “double-empathy problem.” (Milton DE, 2012)

In an Expert Discussion of Autism and Empathy, moderated by Dr. Christina Nicolaidis, published in Autism in Adulthood, 2019, Dr. Milton shares that comments from autistic people regarding lack of understanding from allistic people “[…] far outweigh any comments and issues autistic people have in understanding others.” (Nicolaidis, et al. 2019)

Dr. Milton goes on to discuss how autistic people are often putting in much more effort to understand allistic people, while allistic people are not putting in the same effort. It would behoove researchers to question their biases and interpretations of observed autistic behavior.

Furthermore, the researchers assume lack of ToM as the basis for this paper, even though there is a significant lack of actual empirical evidence that autistic people lack ToM (Gernsbacher, Yergeau, 2019). In this study, they found a lack of convergence for the definition of ToM, lack of reproduceable results regarding autism and deficits in ToM in larger sample sizes, and various other issues with previous empirical findings and studies based on autistic people’s proposed lack of ToM.

References:
Lane JD, Wellman HM, Olson SL, LaBounty J, Kerr DC. Theory of mind and emotion understanding predict moral development in early childhood. Br J Dev Psychol. 2010 Nov;28(Pt 4):871-89. doi: 10.1348/026151009×483056. PMID: 21121472; PMCID: PMC3039679.
Moderator: Christina Nicolaidis, Participants: Damian Milton, Noah J. Sasson, Elizabeth (Lizzy) Sheppard, and Melanie Yergeau. Autism in Adulthood. Mar 2019.4-11.
Gernsbacher MA, Yergeau M. Empirical Failures of the Claim That Autistic People Lack a Theory of Mind. Arch Sci Psychol. 2019;7(1):102-118. doi:10.1037/arc0000067

So yeah, this is where pathologizing neurodiversity has gotten us: pretty much everything autistic folks do differently than allistic people is seen as a defect, and they assume it’s autistic folks who need to be fixed. They don’t examine their own behavior to see if maybe folks on the spectrum are the ones who’ve got it right. And they don’t question their assumption that autistic = defective, which causes them to do asinine things. Like, for instance, assuming that moral fidelity is somehow wrong.

This particular instance is unintentionally hilarious, but it exemplifies the kind of framing that leads to autistic people being punished and abused for behavior that isn’t actually wrong. It’s insidious, and it’s dangerous.

Thank you, Andrew, JadeHawk, and Alyssa, for taking the time to show Hu et al that their framing is bad, and they should feel bad.

Rosetta Stones and Dana Hunter’s Unconformity wouldn’t be possible without you! If you like my content, there are many ways to show your support.

This website is a member of the Amazon Affiliates program. I get a small commission when you use my affiliate link to make a purchase.

Thank you so much for your support!

Note: I make generous and unabashed use of the word “crazy” in this essay, in part because it describes so well what my brain feels like on the really bad days. Also, I have extensive and complicated thoughts about how we decide which words should and shouldn’t be used to talk about mental health which I won’t go into here.

Today, I unlocked a major adulting accomplishment. After at least three years of anxiously procrastinating and saying that I’m going to do it, really really really this time, I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. In 2018 and 2019, I had a therapist, but I haven’t been with anyone who could really monitor my antidepressants and change them for at least 10 years. I don’t just want to deal with my ever-present depression; I’ve become more and more certain that my wandering, unfocused brain is at least in part because of ADHD. I want to make that official and see what can be done about it.

Update 23 Dec 2020: This is one of my most popular posts ever. It looks like I’m very much not alone! I’ve added info about n-ha to the Carifree description. I’ve also added my review of Kingfisher Fennel and Tom’s of Maine Strawberry Fluoride rinse.

My latest stuck-at-home low-stakes project is finding a good non-mint toothpaste with fluoride. The extreme flavor of mint toothpaste makes me balk at brushing; what if I want to eat or drink or sleep not long afterwards? Mint sometimes is a sensory nightmare for me, so I’ll avoid it especially when I’m already stressed out. Not brushing is already easy enough to do when stuck at home without a routine and without external motivation to de-stink your mouth for others’ benefit. Having nice-tasting toothpaste — or even just not painfully-tingly toothpaste — means brushing more regularly.

Here’s the tl;dr list of not-overly-minty fluoridated toothpastes that I recommend.

• Top Overall Pick: Twice Twilight
  Though its flavor is described as “peppermint with vanilla and lavender”, it’s incredibly gentle and pleasant with very little mint. Available online or at select CVS locations.
• Truly mint-free, for special concerns: Carifree CTX4 Gel 1100
  A unique re-mineralizing formula that keeps your teeth plaque-free for an almost disconcerting amount of time. Both the Citrus and Grape flavors are fully mint-free. Available at multiple online outlets.
• A mint-free, not-too-sweet kids’ toothpaste: Tom’s of Maine Outrageous Orange Mango
  I wasn’t impressed by it but others seem to love it. Available at some retail stores and online. Be sure to get a fluoride rinse if you’re not a very young child and you plan to use this as your primary toothpaste.
• Best traditional adult toothpaste: Colgate Active Lemon & Salt Healthy White Toothpaste
  Made for the Indian market, it’s a pretty standard toothpaste but without the harsh mint. I found the lemon to be pleasant and the mint to be almost not there; I couldn’t taste the salt much at all. Available online if you’re outside of the Indian market.
• Most interesting flavor: Kingfisher Fennel Toothpaste
  Don’t buy this British toothpaste unless you know you love fennel. I love fennel, so I love this. Available online if you’re outside of Britain.
• Easiest to find: Arm & Hammer
  Though I’ve not tried it, enough people I know have recommended the brand to me that I feel fine about endorsing it. The lines specifically mentioned to me were Arm & Hammer Essentials, Arm & Hammer PeroxiCare, and Arm & Hammer Sensitive. You can find it pretty much anywhere toothpaste is sold.

Note: If you are concerned about the vegan and cruelty-free status of toothpaste, see Ethical Elephant for a list of brands. The list should include Twice as it’s both cruelty-free and vegan. Kingfisher is also listed as fully vegan on their site.

Far too many details regarding my toothpaste quest and experiences, including the ones I recommend you avoid, are below the fold.

(more…)

I’m going to be running an online trivia fundraiser for Skepticon in about a month and I need play-testers.

The only requirements are that you:

• have a Facebook account (I’m running it via private FB group)
• are capable of not leaking the content to anyone at any time prior to the event, and
• want to do it.

That’s it! You don’t even have to know what Skepticon is, be good at trivia, or anything like that.

I’m also open to your ideas for questions and topics that you think Skepticon attendees would enjoy. I’m happy to credit you for it if I use it.

Someone posted something on that endless source of schadenfreude, r/AITA (Am I the Asshole?), that made the rounds yesterday. Most of the responses I saw to the situation rubbed me entirely the wrong way. I immediately saw the situation as one arising from arranged marriage culture, likely Desi, and few to no responses seemed to take that into consideration.

I know, big surprise. Reddit, known for harboring mostly white people and coddling the worst of white men, doesn’t understand Desi arranged marriage culture. At the same time, the responses I saw on Twitter and Facebook were no better, even those from non-Desis who claimed to understand arranged marriages.

It turns out that I 100% called it. The AITA OP revealed herself to be Indian several updates in. If you’re not from an Indian or similar culture, you’re probably missing a great deal of context and understanding, and therefore misinterpreting a great deal about the post. I don’t care how many Desis you claim to know and love.

While this is just one post on the Internet, the way people interpreted it reveals a lot about the difference in mindset between typical Western dating/love marriage culture and Desi arranged marriage culture. While I wouldn’t say OP is some kind of angel, she’s not exactly the mustache-twirling villain Reddit and others decided she is.

(more…)

The result is…… something horrible. And yet, strangely beautiful. That kind of beauty that makes you stay up at night, squirming. In this case, someone combined Warhammer 40K and Thomas the Tank Engine. The result was:

Thomas the Chaos Engine

I take a particular kind of delight in this because I always kinda hated the Thomas books and TV series. Admittedly, I was entering into teenage angst and horniness when the TV series first hit, but even in my younger days, the books seemed obnoxiously cloying and bland. I can’t even imagine why these fucking things have been around since the mid-40s.

Now Thomas the Chaos Engine, that I’d watch.

And frankly, I’ve never been a huge Warhammer 40K fan, either. Too much of a focus on militarism and strategy, and not enough on character-building. So, it’s kind of a fusion of two things that I really don’t give a shit about into something that’s way cooler than either of them.

In the picture above, Thomas has been rendered as a Daemon Engine:

A Daemon Engine is a nightmarish artificial construct used by the Forces of Chaos that is a fusion of a realspace vehicle or combat walker with a possessing daemonic spirit of the Warp. Daemon Engines are gigantic war machines that prowl on mighty piston-driven limbs.

Jutting from their armoured torsos are gargoyle-muzzled cannons and heavy weapon-arms that end in murderous tools of war. To compare a Daemon Engine to an ordinary vehicle is folly, for each of these beasts possesses its own malevolent sentience rather than a crew.

Warhammer 40K Wiki

From what little I know of Thomas (and Friends) there always seemed to be a little bit of quiet horror lurking in the bland, happy setting of Sodor Island, so the idea of Thomas going from a happy, passive little worker to a nightmarish hell-machine sounds easily plausible to me.

I had a busier summer than I expected between an unexpectedly higher volume of work, some travel, and vacations. While my writing has made a comeback lately, it has not happened in this blog.

Here’s a summary of my work in the last 6-months(ish):

1. Spoke at Skepticon 11 where I
   1. Released the topline results of the Secular Voices Survey (a nationally-representative survey of nonreligious Americans about various social and political matters).
   2. Introduced the Secular Voices Panel (a monthly survey of secular Americans about the 2020 elections, visit the link, we’re still recruiting)
   3. Announced the Indiegogo fundraising campaign for the project (You can still help)
2. Wrote a few reports and analyses based on the Secular Voices Survey:
   1. Secular Identity, Belief in God, and 2020 Preferences (about candidate preferences in 2020 [In my company research blog in Medium])
   2. Voter Registration and 2020 Vote Intention (about how candidate preferences vary by voter registration status [in the Medium blog]).
   3. The Importance of Organized Secularism in Politics (about variation in political engagement by affiliation in secular organizations [in The Humanist]).
3. Started writing for Religion in Public, a collective of political science experts in religion and politics. My first post:
   1. Rising Secularism and the Vanishing Latinx Republicans (Explores how the declining number of Republicans among Latinx people is not just about “immigration politics” but also because the pool of religious conservative Latinxs is declining).
4. Started a new monthly column in The Humanist: ‘Nonedecision 2020‘ about nonreligious Americans and electoral politics. The first entry:
   1. Nonedecision 2020: Four Decades of the None Vote (analysis of how nones have voted for president since 1980.

The future of this blog

It seems that I have rearranged my writing into various camps: work-related research can be found at my company blog in Medium; more scholarly-type writing in Religion in Public; and movement-related political analysis in The Humanist. Initially, I wanted this blog to serve as a hub for that.

Instead, I will make this a more personal blog. I think it will fit better with the social justice angle of the collective. Expect rants about children’s shows. I have various theories and have spent a lot of time overthinking about gender relations in Thomas the Tank Engine, deconstructing my child’s favorite singers and bands, as well as discussions of race in the current political context…possibly about the election when these don’t fit any of my other writing outlets. Some of these will be in Spanish since many of my child’s favorite songs and books are in that language and audience-wise makes more sense.

That’s it for now….

Sponsored posts on Facebook often make me sigh in frustration or roll my eyes, but all I could say when this one popped up was — what the ever-loving actual fuck?

Transcript:

Unlike working in Silicon Valley, women in STEM at NSA enjoy the kind of work-life balance that only comes with the Intelligence Community. That’s because you literally can’t take your work home with you (it’s classified). Learn more…

Facebook, November 2, 2019

Maybe someone at the NSA has a sense of humor or something, but is there actually anyone who thinks that the solution to misogynist techbro harassment is — to become a spy? To go into the intelligence business, <sarcasm>well-known for its embrace of feminism and queer rights? </sarcasm>

I’m undecided about whether this counts as Ultra-Peak White Feminism or not, because it seems unlikely that it came from an actual feminist. On the other hand, we have groups like New Wave Feminists grabbing the handle as a way to make anti-choice politics “hip” again, so you never know. In the age of Trump, every day makes me feel like I’m on a really bad acid trip.

From Neil Armstrong and Christopher Columbus, to Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, the history taught in U.S. public (and I suspect in private) schools focuses overwhelmingly on the white people who have shaped our nations history.  That history has been spun in such a way as to overlook the many horrific acts committed by white people since the founding of this country.  In thinking back to what I learned in public school, the most barbaric event caused by white folks that I learned about was the Civil War. And that was a watered down, “the Civil War wasn’t fought completely over slavery” version (no amount of historical revisionism will change the fact that YES, it was fought over slavery). I recall learning about Christopher Columbus “discovering” this land, but not the rape and murder of Indigenous citizens at the hands of Columbus and his fellow colonists. I remember learning about various United States Presidents, but curiously, the fact that many of the early ones were slave owners was left out of teachings.  I certainly never learned about the racialized history of policing in this country.  In fact, in addition to the history of the United States being presented from an almost exclusively white perspective, it was also told in an overwhelmingly positive one.

When you look back at USAmerican history without the tinted glasses, you begin to realize that that history you were taught? It’s not so rosy after all. White people have indeed contributed to the shaping of this nation. They have performed many great deeds and been responsible for many important discoveries and inventions. They’ve also been responsible for some of the most vicious acts of barbarism one can imagine (and some you don’t want to). Given that most people aren’t taught these unsavory aspects of USAmerican history AND given that so many people whine about a lack of a White History Month, I figured what the heck. Let’s give ’em what they asked for. Again.

1. Senator James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant who became Labor Secretary and established the United States Border Patrol and worked with Coleman Livingston Blease in an effort to curtail immigration
2. U.S. Code § 1325 establishes penalties for migrants attempting to enter the United States unlawfully
3. Coleman Livingston Blease was a white supremacist and pre-Southern Strategy Democrat who worked with James J Davis to curtail immigration and establish penalties for those who migrated into the United States unlawfully
4. The Scottsboro Boys were 9 Black teens falsely accused of raping 2 white women in 1931.
5. Harry Anslinger, was the xenophobic white supremacist who led the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (precursor to the DEA) and can be considered the first architect of the Drug War.
6. No, Kansas Republican Steve Alford, African-Americans don’t handle weed more poorly than other races because of our genes.
7. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 outlawed the sale and possession of weed, beginning the racist War on Drugs bc according to Harry Anslinger, weed made Blacks and Latinx people forget our place.
8. The concept of race as a hierarchical social system based on the physical features of different groups–primarily skin color–was crafted in the late 1800s by proslavery forces to defend the institution of slavery, bc in large part, they felt they could not survive without African slaves.
9. In 1963, white high school students became the Face Of Racism when they cursed Black students on the first day Montgomery, AL public schools were integrated.
10. So many wyte people like to claim that racism no longer exists. Even if one ignores the existence of systemic racism, shit like the racist knickknacks sold at flea markets demonstrate that there is still a market for racism.
11. No more racism? Then why did a Customs and Border Patrol agent in Montana detain Ana Suda and Martha “Mimi” Hernandez for speaking Spanish?
12. On March 5, 1959, 21 African-American boys burned to death at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, Arkansas. All of them had been incarcerated there bc Jim Crow laws made anything and everything a crime if a Black person did it. Riding a bicycle owned by a white person? Crime. Soaping windows on Halloween? Crime. Homeless? Crime. Though the blaze was not caused by arson, imprisoning those boys to being with was racist as all get out.
13. Make sure you’re sitting down for this one, bc it might be shocking (he says with a hint of sarcasm). In a 1971 interview with Playboy, John Wayne (yeah, THAT John Wayne) said, and I quote, “I believe in white supremacy“.
14. For the fourth year in a row, the number of hate groups in the United States continued to grow, rising by 30% in 2018. But I’m suuuuuuure that it’s just a coincidence that this happened concurrently with the racist rapist in the White House fanning the flames of white supremacist resentment over changing demographics and immigration.
15. It should be irrelevant that James Marion Sims is the ‘father of modern gynecology’. The 19th century physician conducted unethical and immoral experiments upon enslaved Black Women. Without anesthesia. The monuments to this monster (found in New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania) should be taken down.
16. Waco, Texas. 1916. Jesse Washington, a Black youth of 17 years, was accused of murdering a white woman. He was found guilty by a jury in 3 minutes and sentenced to death. But that wasn’t enough for the mob of 1500 white people who beat, stabbed, dragged, and then chained Washington. He was then hung from a tree and burned alive as the crowd of white onlookers and participants (which had swelled beyond the initial 1500) cheered. (there are images at this link and the next one that are seriously disturbing. Reader discretion is strongly advised)
17. Photographer Fred Gildersleeve–a real piece of work–took photos of the suffering and dying body of Jesse Washington, bc Black suffering was (and still is as can be seen by Hollywood’s love affair with slave movies) a great way to make money.
18. Charlottesville, Virginia. 2017. Unite the Right Nazi/White Supremacist Rally.
19. the Proud Boys are a white supremacist, misogynistic, Islamophobic organization
20. Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes is a white supremacist
21. If you hold a pro-confederate rally (as the Hiwaymen and Confederate 901 did in February 2019), you’re racist. Also, your side lost, and you support traitors to the United States, so I hope you don’t go around waving the US flag. Bc your side literally rebelled against the United States government. Traitor =/= patriot.
22. Virginia Governor Northam. Blackface.
23. KKK hoods. Blackface. Mock lynchings. A USA Today review of 900 yearbooks from the 1970s and 1980s found a metric fuckton of racist imagery.
24. Founded in 1894, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (AN ORG THAT IS STILL AROUND) bear a great deal of responsibility for perpetuating the ahistorical nonsense that is the Lost Cause Myth. Oh, and those visual eyesores and odes to white supremacy (aka confederate monuments) across the country? The UDC is responsible for many of them being erected. To this day, this group of traitorous white supremacists fight to keep these shitty monuments in public spaces.
25. Hurricane of September 26, 1928.  A devastating hurricane (they weren’t named back then, nor was their strength measured as they are today) hit Florida on this day. In West Palm Beach, 600+ victims of the storm–all African-American–were thrown into a massive, unmarked grave. If you have to ask why this is racist, you need Intro to Racism. You aren’t going to find that here, bc here, Black Lives Matter, and I have no desire to argue in my own space why that is true.
26. Sugar Land Slave Grave
27. July 1866 New Orleans Race Riot
28. The burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum
29. Patenburg Massacre
30. Black soldiers paid less than white ones in Civil War 
31. the murder of Joseph Kahahawai

(Here are the previous versions of White History Month: V1, V2, V3)

Sometimes you think you’ve heard it all.

Police officers open fire on an unarmed Black couple after the driver tries to get out of the car and put his hands in the air, bc it doesn’t matter if you comply with orders or not, cops are going to shoot.

Emantic Bradford was shot in the back of the head, neck, and the lower back by a police officer who felt either there was imminent danger from someone running away from him or that all Black men look alike.

Willie McCoy was asleep in his vehicle in the parking lot of a California Taco Bell, and apparently he must have had some sort of mutant ability to resist a bullet or two, bc his body moved while he was sleeping and the cops unleashed a hail of bullets, killing him.

Black baby is severely injured (trigger warning for that link, bc there is a graphic image of the injured child) by a flash grenade after police officers perform a no-knock raid on a home before ensuring they knew who the fuck was in the home.

But then you hear IT. The new story of anti-Black racism from police that just smacks your gob and gasts your flabber:

Police officer arrests Black man for “trying to steal an IV and sell it on ebay”.

(more…)

Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman and its follow up WW1984 (which for some bizarre reason they are not calling a sequel), released a colorful poster for the movie on Wednesday.

By now you’ve heard: WB isn’t going to Hall H this year. We’re so sad to miss you there! And waiting until Dec. to start our official #WW84 campaign in full–  But the truth is… we can just… barely… wait… pic.twitter.com/QllFzhYRA6

— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) June 5, 2019

The sheer amount of color almost hurts my eyes. It’s just so over-the-top. It’s almost as if someone tried to steal the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, only for a leprechaun to stop them.

By beating their ass with the rainbow.

I was reminded by friends that the garishness of the colors is appropriate given the 80s setting of the movie. There’s something striking about the colors that some folks have noticed though.

I haven’t seen Jenkins elaborate on any meaning (hidden or otherwise) in the image, so its possible the colors are not meant to help convey a message. However, given that they aren’t going to start campaigning for the movie until December, and this was released in June, during the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, I’m going with “they chose the colors with deliberation”.

In viewing the color palette as a deliberate allusion to the various Pride flags, I realized that Wonder Woman is a great fictional character to show support for Pride. Whether she is queer herself as many suspect (I was reminded that the movie established her as bisexual), or she is not, the essence of her character is that of a person who would argue fiercely in support of queer rights. The following is a statement I can imagine her giving during Pride month:

(more…)

 

“But we had the best of times. The best.”

– Tenth Doctor, “Journey’s End”

 

Misha Hunter, 3/1994 —6/5/2017

Suzanne Buck, 10/15/19(polite cough) — 4/21/2017

They were a part of this cantina from beginning to end. There will never be a day when I don’t miss them. You would think that after two years I would have the words to memorialize them, but they occupied a space in my life that is beyond any words I can muster.

I will carry you with me, always. Those times with you were the greatest gift the universe ever gave.

The cantina is closed, but its posts will stay right here. Please visit the Unconformity, where new adventures will be coming soon. Adios, mis amigos y amigas. Hasta que nos veamos de nuevo…

Content Note: 

Death of a loved one

MW,

Hey little buddy.

Long time no see.

Or hear.

Or hang out with.

Or read new comic books with in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

So much has happened in the last decade (it’s hard to believe it has been nearly that long since I last saw you). A lot of it has been 31 flavors of awful, but not everything. There have been some bright spots. One of brightest of them has been the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It really sucks that you only got to see the big screen debut of Iron Man, back in 2008. Since then, wow, I really think you’d have been as excited as I have been, your inner comic book fan bursting at the seams. Scratch that. Your inner fan would have completely burst out of the seams and gone full scale cosplay (like you did for Where the Wild Things Are). I can easily picture you cosplaying as one of the Guardians of the Galaxy (a movie you probably would never have thought would get made, let alone be a financial and critical success) or even the Winter Soldier. Yeah, they made a GotG movie and incorporated Bucky Barnes into the MCU. They also made 3 Thor movies, 3 Captain America’s, 3 Iron Man’s, and multiple Avengers films. Hell, they even made a film about Ant-Man, which did well enough to get a sequel, Ant-Man & the Wasp. And that’s not all. Marvel got Spider-Man back (not completely, but enough so Marvel can use him in their movies). So he’s gotten incorporated into their fictional universe, with Tom Holland taking up the mantle of everyone’s favorite web-slinger in one movie thus far, with another coming this summer (in related news, following Disney’s acquisition of Fox Studios, the X-Men and Fantastic Four are back under the same house as the Avengers, though its gonna be a while before we see anything with them, according to Kevin Feige).

There are so many more surprises that you almost certainly would have loved. As a fan of animation, I think you’d have loved Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. You weren’t around to read about the debut of Miles Morales following the death of Spider-Man in the Ultimate Universe.  Let’s just say he gained a sizable following and eventually made the transition from the comic book page to the big screen (albeit in animated form, which I grumbled about at first, bc HEY LIVE ACTION, but after seeing it, I’m glad they went with animated, bc that shit looked amazing). Perhaps even more surprising, not only did the Black Panther make it to the big screen in his own movie, but it became a critical and financial juggernaut that went on to make over a billion dollars. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought a Black Panther film would get made, let alone be top notch, and be such a successful movie. I could copy that last sentence almost verbatim to describe my thoughts on another movie that recently came out.

Can you believe Marvel made a movie with Carol Danvers aka the first Ms Marvel aka Binary aka Warbird aka Captain Marvel? Oh crap. I forgot you weren’t around for Carol stepping up to take the title. Well, she did, and she’s done the legacy of Mar-Vell proud. And that film she starred in? Like Black Panther, Captain Marvel broke a billion dollars (and counting). And just as Black Panther shattered long held beliefs about the viability of a movie with a Black lead (to say nothing of a virtually all Black cast), Captain Marvel showed Hollywood and the world that a movie with a woman as the lead character–a superhero movie at that–can be box office smash and receive acclaim around the world.

Living where I do now, it’s not easy to get out to see any movies. After wrecking my car back in 2013, I haven’t been in the financial position to get another one. I moved from Pensacola to a small town outside of Panama City, Florida. It’s one of those “wonderful” Southern cities that plasters confederate flags everywhere (as if a bunch of white supremacist, anti-American traitors deserve to be honored). I moved out here with my aunt and cousin (great aunt, technically) to get my bearings and try to get back on my feet. Thankfully, my cousin allows me to use her car on occasion, so I’m not stuck in this house. This city is verrrry small. There’s something like 3000+ people living here. We have 2 convenience stores (one just opened up a few weeks back), 2 dollar stores, and 2 small town supermarkets.  Buncha churches too. No gym. No swimming pool. One small bar with weird hours and a dart machine that doesn’t work. There’s just really not much here. For the first few years, I worked in Panama City, driving 45 minutes to and from work 5-6 days a week. Things were on their way to stabilizing when BAM, last July, the restaurant I’d been bartending and managing at (Bennigans) closed down. We had a feeling it was coming, but it still sucked. As if to add to the suckery, the vehicle my cousin was letting me use–a 2003 Dodge Ram (with a HEMI)–started acting up and becoming unreliable, so using it to travel back and forth to Panama City on a regular basis became untenable. That left me struggling to figure out what to do for work in this town that has precious little available.

Then Mother Nature decided the least of my worries was finding a job. On October 10, Hurricane Michael hit.  It was a catastrophic hurricane that straddled the line between a Category 4 and 5. We live 24 miles from Mexico Beach, which was ground zero. The hurricane decimated this region.  By January of this year, the death toll in Florida was 47. The damage of course was in the billions. There were no deaths as far as I know in this town, but there was a metric fuckton of damage. We sustained surprisingly little damage. My aunt’s home lost some shingles off the roof and some vinyl siding. And some trees were uprooted, while others were nearly snapped in half by winds over 150 mph. But the structure of the home was fine. There were no leaks and no substantial damage. Of course the power was out. 17 days with no power really is not fun. Relief efforts came quickly, supplying food and water for the community. We had two generators so we could charge laptops and cell phones (though no carriers were up and running in the days immediately following the hurricane so we had no way to tell people were ok and vice versa). More importantly, we could keep our refrigerators cold. By the beginning of November, things slowly returned to normal, but the job situation hasn’t. There’s just not enough opportunities for anything in this town and without a reliable vehicle, I’m pretty much stuck.

But enough of that.

Last week, I had the opportunity to see Captain Marvel. The only movie theater left after the hurricane is almost exactly an hour and a half away from us (which is one reason I don’t go to the movies very often). I know this bc–and if you were here, you’d laugh, bc you know how I am–the movie played at 3:30 and I left the house at 2:05. I arrived at the ticket stand at 3:24. Of course, having been a manager in a movie theater, you know that I wouldn’t have missed the movie, since previews go for like 20 minutes. I grabbed my popcorn, a hot dog, and drink ($24–geez; but you always told me that theaters make their money on the concession stand items), found the seat I’d picked out (it’s still weird to me that we get to select our seats) and settled in. And by settled in, I mean, got reeeeeeeeeally comfortable. These weren’t the old school theater seats. They were the luxury seats. Very comfortable. Soft. Wide. No cramped spaces. Quite nice.

A few hours later, the movie finished and I rushed to my car. I had to get there before the waterworks came. I held them back during the movie with ease bc I was distracted by the film. With it over, the emotional turmoil that I’d kept a lid on was boiling over and I didn’t want to be a crying mess as I walked out of the theater. The walk to the car seemed to take forever. When I finally got there, the dam burst. In a million years, I never would have thought a Marvel movie would trigger me, but Captain Marvel certainly did.

(more…)

The United States is a shining beacon of morality, setting the standard for proper behavior the world over, they say.

The inspiration to other countries seeking to transform their societies into thriving cultures.

Our nation is a source of hope for the hopeless and for those oppressed by tyrants yearning to breathe freely.

What happens when great men come together and devise the perfect system of governance? The United States.

They say this and more about this country.

“They”, whoever they may be, are so wrong that all the money of Bezos, Buffett, and Gates couldn’t make them right.

(more…)

As it has become customary at the beginning of a new Congress, the Pew Research Center released its Faith on the Hill report.  Our elected officials at the national level have been slow to catch up to the country’s secularizing trend. The report shows only one “religiously unaffiliated” elected official, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. While New York’s Ed Kilgore is too optimistic about the religious diverity in Congress, it represent a major step forward. In the U.S. Senate, that bastion of American conservatism, there is a “none.”

But the CQ Roll Call survey of members of Congress that informs Pew’s report undercounts the secularity of its respondents. In the case of California Rep. Jared Huffman, he’s been added to the “don’t know/refused” category. Though Pew acknowledges in the text that Huffman “identifies as a humanist.”

Then there are two cases that show even more complexity. One is a current member of the House, another is a former member. Current Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) identifies as Jewish in the survey, but he also identifies as a humanist according to the Center for Freethought Equality. There’s also the case of former Rep. Pete Stark (D-California). Pew included some trends to show how faith on the Hill has changed over time. A few of those periods include the tenure of Stark who served for 40 years. Stark identified as a Unitarian during his whole career but he acknowledged late in his tenure that he was an atheist, something that is not uncommon among Unitarians. The Pew Landscape Survey of 2014 finds that nearly 1-in-5 Unitarians (and people belonging to other liberal faiths) do not beleive in God. Stark’s atheism is mentioned in a footnote in the report, but still means that people with nontheistic backgrounds are undercounted among elected officials by surveys that conflate religion with belief in the supernatural. These surveys measure belonging to a community, not necessarily what the people believe. The current way of reporting religion in Congress makes secular people even more invisible than they are in the national legislative body.

It’s been two weeks since Election Day. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that 47 openly nontheist or humanist candidates were elected into office this year. In this post I show where they are, their religious identification, and how all the candidates that were endorsed in this cycle fared.

The maps are the continuation of my project scraping the bios of candidates in the Freethought Equality Fund website. I previously ran some preliminary analysis just with the candidates running in the General Election.

Each dot in the maps represents one candidate. WordPress doesn’t allow me to embed the maps well. Click on the map picture and you will be able to scroll through the dots.  They have the following information:

1. Name
2. Office the candidate was seeking
3. State
4. Election outcome
5. Secular Identity

The dots are both colored: Green represents local offices, orange representstate legislative offices, and purple represents federal legislative offices. The darker the shade, the higher the office, for exmaple, light orange is used for US House candidates and dark orange is used for US Senate candidates. The dots also vary in size, the smallest dot represents local (board of education) candidates, the largest dot represents US Senate candidates.

One last thing about secular identity. As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, I simplified the identities of the candidates because many had very complex ones (see also Hemant’s post about the candidates before Election Day) .My broad categories are:

1. Secular/Humanist: Secular or humanist (or secular humanist)
2. Non believer: includes atheist, agnostic, non-theist, non-believer
3. Not religious: Includes nones, not religious, not practicing a religion, spiritual but not religious
4. Did not state: Person did not specify if thy had a religious preference
5. Religious ally: A person who identifies with a religion

Those who identify with both a religion and a secular identity are classified as secular.

Map 1: All Candidates

Map 2: Winning Candidates Only

Let me know what you think of the maps in the comments. I will be releasing more analysis as I continue cleaning the data.

Tomorrow is Election Day. Hopefully, most of you will be voting or (like in my case) already voted. But many people will have the chance of voting for openly secular candidates or for religious people who support and embrace the nonreligious as allies. In this post, I conduct a short analysis of the candidate endorsed by the Freethought Equality Fund, a secular political action committee (PAC) that endorses secular candidates for office. This post is the last in my pre-election series on nonreligious political involvement (Part I, Part II).

I wrote a code in R to scrape and download the biographical text of the candidates who are (1) endorsed and (2) running in the General Election tomorrow. I removed any candidates who were endorsed earlier in the year but who lost a primary. Below, you can see a series of charts summarizing some of the characteristics of these candidates. You can scroll through the charts using the dots above them.

Offices

Overall, the PAC is endorsing 219 candidates running from offices ranging from school boards to the U.S. Senate. The first chart shows that nearly three-quarters (74 percent) are running for a seat in a state house while 16 percent are running for a seat in a state senate (or in the case of Nebraska, a unicameral legislature). In other words, nine-in-ten of the candidates endorsed are running for a state legislative office.

This number of candidates is an encouraging sign. The first class of endorsements in 2014 had only four state legislative candidates. The current number is 197, and even if all of them don’t win their races, those are the makings of a pipeline of secular and secular-friendly candidates with experience.

Eight percent of the candidates are running for the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate, and the final two percent are local candidates, most running for school board seats.

(Non)Religious Identification

The Freethought Equality Fund is a secular PAC, though not all the candidates are. In the second chart, I classify the religious identification of the candidates in four distinct categories. The “Secular ID” label means that the candidates identify as secular, or humanist, or atheist, or agnostic. A few of the candidates in this group also have dual religious/secular identities (such as secular Jews). A second nonreligious group, the “Not Religious” consists of those who call themselves nones or not religious but do not have a specific secular identity. The third group is the “Religious Ally” and consists of candidates who sought the FEF endorsement but who are not secular themselves. Finally, there’s a small but not insignificant group of candidates who refused to provide any religious identification.

A plurality of the candidates are religious allies. Thirty-five percent of the endorsed candidates identify primarily as religious. However, a majority of the candidates (58 percent) are openly nonreligious: 34 percent (similar to the number of religious allies) identify as secular, while just under one-quarter (24 percent) are nones. An additional seven percent did not identify as nither religious ally nor nonreligious.

Incumbency

The last chart shows that most of the candidates running for office are challengers or pursuing open seats. But one-fifth of them are incumbents seeking reelection. A plurality of those seeking reelection are religious allies. Overall, 25 percent of them (19 of 77) are seeking an additional term in office. But a similar proportion of the candidates with secular IDs are also current elected officials (15 of 75).

Where Are they Running?

Finally, here’s a map of the United States showing where the candidates are running and how many candidates are in each state by type of office. Just mouse over the state and the information will appear.

To see the candidates and wether one of them is in your ballot, visit the Freethought Equality Fund website. Also, remember…if you haven’t vote yet: VOTE!

This month, for the first time in a couple of years, I finished a project.

If you’re reading this, you probably know who Alyssa Gonzalez is. Last autumn, shortly after launching her own blog, The Perfumed Void, she hired me to create a banner for it. As a result, I spent most of the first half of 2018 writing the same words over and over again—the act of a scolded child, or perhaps of an undisciplined designer.

Now that the banner is in place, I’m as glad of the correction as I am proud of the result.

It won’t come as a surprise to this blog’s readers—either of you—that for a long time, I’ve struggled to work. Only now, with its fifth birthday approaching fast, am I emerging from a hiatus that began shortly after this site was set up—a period of R&R that eventually risked becoming a form of self-harm.

When Alyssa first hired me, I was in the grip of what now seems like dangerously poor mental health: a period of months when seeking contact with other humans—or responding to messages—required more executive function than I had.

The first design ideas I showed her weren’t ambitious, and in hindsight are evidence that I wasn’t in a good place creatively. All the same, there is something I like about them—and as soon as I noticed that the word ‘perfumed’ almost reads the same upside down, Alyssa wanted to see more.

Like any serial victim of the words how hard can it be, I vastly underestimated the amount of time designing am ambigram for the first time would involve. Slowly, the project grew and grew, until finishing it—something that took until this month—slid further and further away.

Deceptively, once I knew I wanted the name of Alyssa’s blog to be upside-down-able, the first ninety percent of the design process happened in the first tenth of the timeframe. Everything after that—from December 2017 to July 2018—was incremental change, drawing and redrawing some forty-odd different versions. (Ambigrams, it turns out, are hard.)

Getting to know Alyssa better was one of the best parts of this. On top of extending far more patience than I deserved, she has the distinction of being by far the most exacting client I’ve designed for—someone who knows exactly and immediately what she likes and doesn’t like. (This is, in people who hire designers, much rarer than you’d expect.)

As a result, and because ambigrams tend to dictate their own design, several of this one’s unfinished incarnations hint at roads not taken—the nineties-graffiti style of one sketch above, the lighter pen-strokes of another below it, another’s horizontal bars—and these abandoned features have an appeal of their own.

The coloured background—necessary on a site with this much white—didn’t have as nice-looking an evolution, with some early versions downright putrid. But it still got there in the end.

I learnt a lot from this project: how to create something from scratch instead of combining existing shapes; how to make words read the same upside down; how to make myself work, and work with the software I had instead of pining for new gadgetry. I learnt how to keep a design client in the loop, and how to cage my own anxiety in the middle of a project.

I also learnt that I don’t want to take on many more projects like this.

For several years, my to-do list has been out of control, and I’m only just getting back on top of it. (I have one more design task due this month, and another, long overdue, to get out of the way in the autumn.) I’m good at designing visual identities—good enough, anyway, to have been hired by a decent list of bloggers alongside Alyssa. But out of all the things I’m paid to do, graphic design is the toughest, the biggest spoon-suck and the job that most tenderises my mental health. I’m good at it—but there are things I’m better at and faster at, and that I enjoy doing more, and I want to focus on them.

In the mean time, this project—and the friend behind it—finally pulled me out of a long, dangerous slump. The upshot is twofold:

One—Alyssa’s blog has a banner.

Two—I’m back.

If you haven’t subscribed to Miri‘s new podcast, 2 AM Talks, it might be time you did. Recently, I was lucky enough to be its first guest.

After both losing our hair in the last few years—blame chemotherapy and genetics, respectively—Miri and I sat down to talk about what the experience taught us, in a  conversation that spanned religion, gender, science fiction and relationship abuse.

Listen here, or read the first half of our conversation below.

M. Hi Alex!

A. Hi! Good to be here.

M. I’m so excited to finally have you on here.

You chose baldness as one of your topics. Tell me a bit about why.

A. I guess this goes back to you. You had a health thing recently that involved losing your hair, right? You’ve posted and written a certain amount about that.

M. Yes. I went through chemo. I’m better now, I guess—that’s a work in progress!

A. Glad to hear it.

M. I did lose all of my hair, and it’s now growing back, but I’m still reflecting on what that experience meant.

A. I remember you saying a little while back, in one of our Facebook chats, that for you there came a point when baldness made you feel regal and queenlike. Something along those lines?

My baldness, my hair loss, is just quote-unquote male pattern baldness. (I’m a lot less binary than that, but that’s what it’s called.) In reality, the way I experience that now and what it’s become for me, cosmetically and philosophically and otherwise, is way queerer and more complex. I’m interested in seeing where those two experiences we have join up.

M. Yeah! I’ll tell you a bit about what that progression was like for me.

Obviously, when I was diagnosed with cancer, this was at the end of October 2017. As soon as I knew I’d be going through chemo, I knew what that meant.

I wouldn’t say that I struggled with that as much as I did with many of the other aspects of having breast cancer when you’re 26, 27. But I cherished my hair so much, and part of that was because I had this haircut. It was a very queer haircut, where on side is shaved and the other is these bouncing curls, and it was just how I expressed myself.

I remember after my diagnosis, but before I lost the hair, I kept running my hands through it all the time and kind of saying goodbye to it. It was heartbreaking, in a way. Then, right before I started chemo, I decided to make the transition easier for myself. I went to the hair salon and I had it buzzed short, and I had it dyed bright purple. It felt like kind of my war paint.

That hair stayed there for a few weeks, and then chemo started to take its toll. My hair started to recede, in actually a very interesting male-pattern-baldness sort of way. First it started to recede, then it started to itch and prick me horribly, because I guess that’s what happens when hair falls out. (They did not warn me about that—I thought it would just kind of fall.) And when I would run my hands through it, pieces would come out, gradually more and more.

So one night, I was like, ‘Fuck this. I can’t stand this any more. This is uncomfortable physically and mentally.’ So I went to the bathroom and I put on an interesting podcast, and I pulled out as much of it as I could. It wasn’t anything like pulling hair out normally, because it just came right out. And then what didn’t come out, I shaved off in the shower. And I came out of the shower and I dried off with a towel, and I looked in the mirror, and there I was. You know, without hair.

It was weird. But it wasn’t—you know, I don’t know why I expected this, but I expected it to be, like, grotesque, or one of those horrible soap opera character moments, when it’s like, ‘Oh, what am I? What have I become? I have no hair!’ It was not like that. It was kind of like, ‘Alright. This is the new reality.’

And at first I felt oddly protective of it. Not in the sense that I was insecure about my appearance or anything like that. I almost felt like it was this private, modest thing that I should keep covered. And I’ve never been religious, at least not in that way. It wasn’t coming from a history of that.

At home, I usually wore comfortable hats, and when I went out, I would wear—I had almost twenty different wigs by the end of this, that I loved, and I would wear these different wigs and make outfits with them. When I would go to bed (my partner stays over most nights), I would go the bathroom when I went to brush my teeth, and that’s when I would switch from my wig to my hat. Or I would wait until my partner was in the bathroom. I did not want anyone, not even my most intimate people, to see my head, and I would sleep in these sleep caps.

Then over time, I got lazy. The caps would fall off at night. First my partner saw me without hair, then my little sister was curious what it looked like, and I let her see it, and she was just like, ‘Cool!’ I would chill at home without anything on my head, and the pizza delivery guy would come see it. So I just started to loosen up about that.

The turning point came one night when I had gone out to the symphony. I had a beautiful wig and beautiful makeup, and I came home and I was feeling good, and I took the wig off in front of the mirror as I usually do, and suddenly it was like the face of a totally new person was looking back at me.

I looked like some sort of—I think one of my friends later said ‘like a space empress’. It was this fantastical, science fictional look. I had dark burgundy lipstick and a full face of makeup, and just no hair. And I looked like someone who reigns over an empire in space and has no time whatsoever for hair, and thinks that she looks amazing as is, and everyone bows down to her, hair or no.

And it was completely transformative. And of course, being a millennial, I captured it in the form of a selfie and I put it on Facebook.

People were very surprised, because they knew how I felt about that privacy thing. They were very surprised, but they were very positive! It was one of the most affirming things I experienced during my treatment, and after that, although I continued usually wearing a wig of some sort of whatever, I never saw myself the same way again after that, and I still don’t.

A. That’s fabulous.Wigs are a thing for me as well. I’m currently staring at a long, acid green one!

There’s a lot of social norms and implicit expectations around ‘male’ baldness, and one of them is this idea that I particularly don’t like, that as soon as your hair starts falling out, you just shave it. That’s what you have to do as a ‘man’. You have to shave your head, and don’t have any feelings about it at all. There’s kind of a comic figure of the man who wears a wig—in England it’s Bruce Forsyth who’s the famous person, but Donald Trump as well. It’s not actually a wig, but the comic figure of the man in a wig, you can kind of read him that way.

Now that my whole head’s shaved, including my face and eyebrows—the lashes are the only bit of hair there—I love the way my head can be this amazing genderless blank canvas I can just put stuff on, including wigs. I wear wigs, and I wear bright green, neon pink, ridiculous ones. I’m quite into the idea of wearing them deliberately so they’re noticeable, and people look at me and go, ‘Argh, what’s going on there?’

M. I really love this imagery of the face as a blank canvas onto which you paint or design something, and it can be something different every day, and it doesn’t have to be, you know, just because you identify this way or use these pronouns, then that’s the hair or makeup or whatever that you’re gonna have.

A. You mentioned wearing hats as well.

I don’t feel this as much because we know each other, and I wouldn’t expect you to be gatekeepy, but it’s strange, me talking about just a natural process of hair loss as (supposedly) a dude, and to somebody who had breast cancer. It’s like, am I allowed to have feelings in this conversation? You know what I mean? And I know the answer is yes, but again, that’s the. You aren’t supposed to have feelings about this if you were assigned male at birth.

My hair started to go when I was 15. I’m 27 now. I’m looking at the Facebook photos of people I was at school with who made fun of me, and their hair’s just starting to recede now, and I’m here going, ‘I’ve dealt with all this. I’m fine now. I’m a glamorous bald egg queen. Look at you being all insecure! Look forward to that for the next few years.’

But one of the things I’ve found out that nobody tells you about baldness is hats. You can wear hats. Like, you can really wear hats.

I always wanted to do the hat thing when I had hair, but it never worked. I can’t really explain why, but I had similar hair to yours—it never grew downward, it just went outwards—and hats on me were just never a thing that quite sat right. Now what I’ve found, because I have the blank canvas thing and I don’t have hair, is that when you get rid of all that stuff, you can commit more to other accessories. I’ve found that I can wear brighter and louder shirts, and it doesn’t look as cartoonish because you’ve removed one element, so you can add more elsewhere.

Again, it’s the mythos of the bald man. Everybody thinks bald guys wear hats to cover up their bald heads. No. I love my bald head! It’s just hats look fucking awesome on me.

M. I didn’t wear hats as often as I wore wigs, although that had a lot to do with the fact that it was winter, and if I wore a winter hat outside, that would be too hot for inside, whereas wigs actually provided a very good level of both protection from the elements and comfort indoors.

But yeah, I definitely hat that experience with hats, and I had some interesting ones. I had some ones with beautiful designs on them that I wouldn’t have really—I never would have thought to wear that. And I had a similar issue to you where it didn’t really work with my hair, especially when I had, you know, the side-shave and then the swoosh. If I wore a hat, the swoosh part would come out, but it would be plastered to my forehead, and it just wasn’t really cute.

Also, the experience of wearing wigs resolved a lot of my concerns about having very brightly coloured hair. Because I was always curious: what would its e like to just have neon pink or bright purple hair? And then I thought, ‘Ugh, what if I wanted to wear a yellow dress that day?’ You know? But with wigs and hats, you obviously switch it out, and it’s a canvas.

Some days I would feel like I was playing The Sims, just kind of playing with their hair and makeup and clothing. And during those long, long months of treatment and generally not feeling super great about my body, that was really health for me. It was very constructive.

You mentioned having a strangely ritual feeling about it, which I relate to as well. To me it has not exactly a religious, but a cultural or some kind of historical dimension to it, because hats are a big thing in Judaism, right? Traditionally, there’s that idea of covering heads and praying, and putting a hat on has just become a nice, regular part of my day when I’m going outside. I don’t know—it’s a very abstract, de-theologised thing, but it’s nice to have that as a thing for me.

M. I really love the idea of reclaiming ritual from religion. Especially personal ritual. This is something I actually ended up doing in a much more concrete way as part of my own cancer experience. (I can talk about that later.)

You don’t have to be religious, or have any particular kind of faith, to have that kind of connection to your head or your hair; or covering parts of your body, or uncovering parts of your body. It doesn’t have either, you know, ‘There’s a commandment that I have to do this or I’m going to face divine consequences’, or ‘Fuck it, whatever, it doesn’t matter, all I care about is how it looks.’ (That’s also a totally fine approach: I was just interested in something a bit more, I don’t know, personally meaningful.)

A. I remember your posts. You had a hair removal ritual, or something like that?

M. Yeah. There was obviously the day to day ritual of putting on the wig and taking off the wig and so forth, but then I also decided to prepare for my double mastectomy, which is something I really, really struggled with on many levels in the months leading up to that. I decided to try and recognise and affirm those feelings, together with my close friends and loved ones, as a ritual that I designed with the help of my friend Rabbi Alex Braver, who is the rabbi at the synagogue I attend. (Yes, I attend synagogue even though I’m nonreligious. But that’s a topic for another episode!)

We designed a ritual that put together some elements of traditional Jewish prayer, and also some things that I’d designed or come up with on my own, or incorporated from somewhere else. The very beginning of the ritual, actually, was a prayer that—I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like, ‘Blessed is our Lord Adonai, who made me in a divine image.’ And then I took off my headscarf and remained uncovered for the duration of the ritual. And that was so fucking cool to me. It was so cool. And it really set the tone for the rest of the thing.

A. I’m into that!

I live in a very queer household, and my housemate, who also has the baldness thing going on, says ‘I always feel at my most femme when I’ve just wet-shaved my head.’ I have that thing as well. Two moments for me that were milestones were the first time I wet-shaved rather than just electrically clipping it (because first of all, it’s then completely gone—it’s more of a symbolic moment, and also, choosing to wet shave rather than clip it, you then move closer to shaving body hair in a way that’s coded as feminine), and then later, when  I, just on a whim this January, shaved off my eyebrows for the first time, and looked in the mirror and just went, ‘Ahh! Genderqueer lizard. Glamour Voldemort. Hi. I’m here for it.’

M. How did you come to that decision to shave your eyebrows?

A. Here’s the thing about shaving eyebrows: they grow back! For a variety of reasons, including disability based stuff, I’m not somebody who’s normatively employable, and therefore I don’t really have to look like it. But I just thought, ‘I’ll shave them off, and we’ll see. And if it doesn’t work, in a month’s time I’ll have them again.’ But it turned out, yeah, I was really into it.

Also, I was learning and am continuing to learn makeup—advanced theatrical, drag, prosthetic makeup, that kind of stuff—and I wanted to be able to draw eyebrows on and do stuff like that, and just have more of a versatile face. I look hilarious when I shave now! I use shaving foam like most people, but it’s on my jaw and on my head and then also on my eyebrows, so most of me from the neck up is this white, foamy moon creature.

M. That’s a funny image, definitely!

What you said about the wet shaving and what that was like? That actually makes me, for the first time, kind of regret how I went about things. You know that moment I told you about, when I finally like, ‘Fuck it, I can’t handle this, I’m gonna get rid of all this hair’? I think I needed to do that, because I remember, as I was making that decision, I was home from work and I was talking to my mom on the phone and I was crying. And I’m like, ‘I know it was going to fall out. It’s not that!’ Whatever, chemo makes you emotional. But I needed to take control of that, in the same I initially buzzed and dyed my hair. That’s why I did that, but I wish I could have been more intentional about it. First of all, I did it with the same razor that I just shaved my legs or armpits with, and I don’t recommend this course of action!

A. Why’s that?

M. It was uncomfortable!

A. Oh! That’s not a thing for me. Was it just that it was blunt?

M. Maybe I should have gotten a fresh razor for it, actually. Because it was totally fine for what I had been using it for, but for this—especially considering that my head was already kind of tender, and that I couldn’t see what I was doing, and heads obviously have ridges and bumps and things? It’s not that it, like, hurt or anything, and I didn’t nick myself. It just was, I would say, a pretty uncomfortable experience all around.

More to the point, I was just trying to get it over with. I wasn’t trying to have any kind of experience. I wasn’t trying to have any kind of ritual, in the way that I ritualised the days leading up to losing my breasts. And now I really kind of wish that I had thought ahead of time. Like, ‘How do I want to do this, and what does it mean to me, and how do I kind of honour that?’ But you know, of course I wasn’t in the best frame of mind for thinking of things in that way.

And it’s okay. It is what it is. But that would have been really special.

A. I get that. It took me a while to get there as well.

I originally tried to do the ‘just buzz it off and then feel fine about it’ thing. I will say I was never traumatic about it, or anything like that. There’s a layer, actually, of sadness about it. I’m conscious that I turned 27 recently, which is the start of the end of your twenties. You’re not a young young person any more at 27. And I’m conscious that I went through most of that time not ever looking or feeling conventionally attractive, particularly in notionally gay male culture. I never had that young-and-beautiful phase, so to the extent that my appearance is something I out time into and feel good about, it’s always slightly alternative now.

It was a couple of years ago, in late 2015, when I first got rid of my hair entirely. I just tried to buzz it off and then live like that, and not really have any investment in it or be intentional about it. Which for a while, actually, is quite difficult, because apart from anything else, if you’re just doing it electronically and shaving your head isn’t a normal part of [your shaving routine], you’ve got to do it every couple of weeks, and it’s grown back significantly by the time you buzz it off again. So that was a bit of a chore.

For a while I just decided, ‘Let it grow back and just live with it.’ One thing I actually had for a while was, there’s stuff which is hair powder that’s a bit mascara-y, so if you’ve got thin hair, it will just give it a bit more volume make it look more ‘there’. Which I wore for a while, and I had normal looking hair, and that was quite cool. One of the things I really resent the Cult of Enforced Unemotional Male Baldness about is the fact that, actually, if you’re a dude and your hair starts to go, there’s a load of different things you can do with it. You can buzz it off immediately if thats your thing, or you can just keep it short and let it do its thing, or you can wear it however and let it go.

Also, it’s worth saying: you were talking about the fact that your hair receded when you did chemo, and it did the supposedly male thing. I actually have what I consider to be the worst kind of pattern baldness. People don’t necessarily know there are different types. Some people, they’ve got it and it recedes. Like, it starts at the brow and it goes back, and eventually you get a receding hairline. Now what I had! And I didn’t have the bald-spot-at-the-back thing either. What I’ve always had is ‘diffuse thinning’, which is where across the top of your head, your hair is thin and it gets thinner everywhere at once. Which I think is the worst thing you can have, because there’s no stylish way of wearing that.

If you’ve got a receding hairline, you can have a widow’s peak, and that can look cool. There’s famous people I can think of who’ve had that look, and it’s fine. If it’s going at the back, you just keep it short everywhere you grow, like, a pompadour. There’s awesome ways to style that. There’s really nothing you can do if it’s just falling out everywhere, and so yeah, I was just left with the option of having it look a bit rubbish or nothing at all. But yeah, I’m totally pro the idea that people in general, but particularly AMAB folks and men and variations of that, should just do whatever they feel like with hair and not be shamed about it.

You’ve mentioned a few times this cultural idea that men, or people assigned male at birth, have to just not care about their hair loss. What was that journey like for you? I’m guessing at the very beginning of it, you probably definitely did care.

A. When I had hair, I was always self-conscious about it. A lot of my old selfies, I would darken in that particular area near the front, so there was a bit more shadow and the thinness wasn’t as visible. It was never particularly a massive trauma in my life. I think a lot of the feelings I have about it are ones that I’m only processing now that I’m actually making time to think and feel about my (now lack of) hair. But yeah. It started to go when I was 15, in the middle of my teens, and people did not hesitate to point that out, which was not particularly nice.

There’s a lot of ways that hair is more politically and culturally loaded than we think it is. Religion is something we’ve talked about, but I had Jewish hair as well, the whole curly thing going on. Also, I had autistic hair in that I never liked having it cut as a child, and therefore I never really worked out what to do with it. One of the things that’s really nice about not having hair any more is that I never knew how to style my hair, how to make it look the way I wanted. It was always a very fractious relationship. And now that’s not even there any more!

It’s also really nice in summer, because I keep coming inside on hot days and just going, ‘Imagine how horrible this would be with hair. Remember that?’

There’s a lot of ways in which I’ve always had reason to feel that I didn’t own my body, or wasn’t in charge of it, or it was something that was narrated by someone else. And being a bald genderqueer alien egg now is my favourite thing.

M. And you know, like you said, I have no gatekeepery feelings about this, or else I wouldn’t even have done this episode. And I really wanted to do this episode! But what you pointed out about getting made fun of for something obviously completely out of your control, and that sadly happens to many people, about lots of aspects of their bodies or situations? The thing is, when you’re going through cancer treatment, nobody can say anything negative to you.

I mean, I’m sure that happens to people who are less fortunate than I am in terms of having supportive people in my life. But everyone was so affirming, no matter what I did. You know, when I buzzed it and dyed it, or when I got rid of it entirely, and all the wigs that I wore, and when I went bald, and when I did scarves, and when I did hats. Ad obviously, what I was going through was awful, and losing my hair was by no means the most difficult part of that, but it was a thing that I had to cope with. But I had all this outpouring of support.

Compare that with someone like you, an AMAB person who starts losing their hair very early on, or any person who starts thinning with age or going bald. Being [told] ‘It’s just ageing, you’re a dude, why do you care?’ That kind of invalidation probably makes things a lot harder to cope with.

A. And the fact that the normalised way of responding to that is not even to say, ‘No, I have feelings about that. Please don’t talk about it that way.’ It’s just to disengage emotionally from the entire process.

Actually, it strikes me that you probably know way more about this than I do, but to me, in my head, one of the things that abusive partners are known for doing is impressing on people, and especially women, the idea that they shouldn’t or are not allowed to care about how they look.

M. Yes.

A. The whole ‘Don’t wear so much makeup’ thing. And culturally, that’s what we’re told. If you’re a dude, or something along those lines, and hair loss is a thing for you, not only are you supposed to not care about it, but you’re supposed to be fine with people joking about, and not care about other people caring. So I guess there’s a lot of feelings there that I’m only becoming aware of retroactively now.

The flip side of that is that getting rid of my hair—first wet shaving and then losing the eyebrows and everything else—gave me loads of gender feels and queer affirmation. If you’re somebody in that situation and you google stuff because you’re interested, there’s a load of media stuff about, ‘So you’re a bald guy. Look at these famous bald men. Look how cool they look!’ But actually, all my bald role models are femmes and women and people like that. In cinema, there’s a particular trope of the bald woman who’s evil, and that’s definitely a reference point for me.

M. I want to go back to that, because I definitely have thoughts on that. But another thing I have thoughts on that you were just saying is that I hate that our culture does this: that appearance is so important, and that it impacts so much of how you move through the world, and yet we’re supposed to not care about it. Like, you need to pick one, okay? Either appearance can be super important and impact everything about how we live, and we acknowledge that and celebrate each other’s efforts to improve and care about our appearance, or appearance does not impact how we move through the world, and we don’t have to care about it. Right? Because it’s so hypocritical.

And you see that in everything. For instance, when they do those pols. First of all, I hate the idea of polling cisgender hetero men about women’s appearance, because who the fucked asked? But they do this, and they’ll ask them, ‘What kind of look do you prefer on women? No makeup, natural look, or like, full face of makeup?’ And they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I don’t like any makeup. I like it natural!’ And then you have them pick photos of women’s faces that they like, and you have foundation, blush, mascara, eye shadow, eye liner, lip liner. That’s what they think natural looks like! And I bet you, those same men, when their girlfriend is like, ‘Wait a minute, I need a few minutes to finish my makeup’, they’re like, ‘What are you talking about babe? You look good without makeup.’ She wears that shit every day, and that’s what you fucking prefer! Urghhh!

…anyway. Sorry about that.

I’m also angry about this idea that the only reason one could possibly have for caring about our appearance is that they’re shallow, or whatever. Which, first of all—if you just like to look good, and you like people to like how you look, that’s fine! We’re social creatures. We like affirmation. That’s okay. But more to the point, when you do your looks or I do my looks, that’s not primarily about, ‘Oh, I want people to think I’m pretty.’ It is expression. Especially for a queer person or a nonbinary person, to express their gender and all the feelings that go along with that, through their hair, makeup, fashion choices, whatever? It is like a canvas. It’s creating a work of art. Of course, when I say that, I’m like, ‘Ehh, my makeup skills aren’t really that worthy.’ But still, that’s the point.

Read Part two of this post at Brute Reason.

I get my joy and hope where I can, these days. It’s hard with Trump parading around the White House as everyone pretends that he’s President. Hannah Arendt put her finger on something important when she coined the phrase “The Banality of evil,” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Trump shows us something else, though: The pettiness of evil. He’s far too flamboyant to be banal; most of the time, he seems to be trying to act out a classic supervillain who cackles and boasts to the hero about his evil plans. But everything Trump says or does is driven by a pettiness of mind, spirit, and imagination that you just don’t get from Doctor Doom or a Bond villain.

(more…)

Oh great! So she’s dead? Now what?

Back away everyone! Let me get a better look at her.

Oh shit! Did she lose an eye? Is that an exit wound or an entrance?

Does it matter? There’s no way she’s alive. That monster ripped her helmet right off.

Check for a pulse! She might still be breathing!

How the hell are we supposed to even get her out of this thing?

Oh god oh god oh god I promised we’d get there I promised I promised I promised.

She’s not dead yet, this is The One who’s going to change everything. I’ve Seen it.

You mean you hallucinated it while you were stoned out of your gourd, you old fraud!

Easy now, easy! Who has a stimpak? Med-X? Some spare gauze? Anyone?

Preston, turn that valve and let’s get a better look at her.

Let’s just see if she’s got anything on her instead.

We are not robbing her! And I can’t even turn the valve until we get this thing off and turn her over on her side. Everyone give me a hand!

I’m not doing that! It’s bad luck to touch a Deathclaw!

Only when they’re alive. Don’t be such a coward.

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

You’ve got to be strong kid. There’s more to your destiny. You’re a woman out of time. But all’s not lost. I can feel your son’s energy. He’s alive.

Mama Murphy, now is not the time.

It’s okay Preston, not everyone understands The Sight. But I don’t need you to believe me, I just need her to listen.

I can’t believe it! She’s got a pulse!

Get her out of that thing.

See if she’s got any caps.

That’s not funny! And you’re not helping. Stand back.

Give me a clean shirt and a knife. The bullet’s gone clean through but we’ve got to stop the blood loss.

What’s her type? I’ll donate mine!

She’s not a Gunner, and you don’t even know your own. Stop trying to be a hero!

I’ve got the bleeding to stop at least, but she’s gonna have a hard time pulling through.

Let ole Mama Murphy give her a boost.

What the hell is in that?

The last of my stash. Jet with a Psycho chaser and a little boost of Mentats. Nothing that’ll kill her. Trust me.

What a surprise, chems! That’s her solution for everything!

Careful there, Mama.

It’s gonna be fine, quit your fussing.

Okay everyone. Let’s see if we can carry her to that place Mama Murphy knows about.

She knows about it? You mean she ‘saw” it while she was high on chems, as usual.

You got a better idea? Anybody? Well alright then. Let’s get going before nightfall.

You were right, Dogmeat. This one’s a keeper.

We’re gonna make it we’re gonna make it we’re gonna make it we’re gonna make it.

“Well here she is already. The least resilient woman in the Commonwealth.”

I try to turn my head but there is nothing to see. In fact I’m not even sure I can feel my body or tell it what to do anymore. There is only darkness and the voices inside my head have drowned out the ones outside.

“What’s happening? Where am I?”

I know that voice. But he can’t be here, can he? Not inside my own head.

“People always hope for something better. They usually end up with something worse. This world, this life? Pain and suffering. Death is its only escape.”

Am I already dead? Is this my own personal hell? Is hell actually real?

“Who said that?”

He laughs and hacks in a way that might make my skin crawl if I could even feel my skin anymore. But there is no skin anymore. No pain. No body. Only the sick knowledge that somehow, The Man With The Scar is my only company.

“I’m the one who helped you understand what happiness really felt like. It’s only looking back, by comparison with what comes after, you ever really understand. You know you were the worst thing that ever happened to them. If it wasn’t for you, they never would have met me. But you can still try to catch me if you think you can.”

“I’m gonna murder you, you son of a bitch.”

“That’s the spirit. Better hurry, Shawn ain’t getting any younger.”

On Saturday, I got to indulge in a little bit of petty glee at the story of Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family getting kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. As predicted, there’s been much clutching of pearls and wringing of hands, even from the left wing. Rep. Elijah Cummings, who I revere as a certifiable badass, said that the Red Hen should have served Huckabee Sanders:

(more…)

October 24, 2277. A date which has become known as The Battle of Concord. At least for the new residents of Sanctuary.

It was never my intention to kill anyone except The Man With The Scar. The Man who killed Nate. The Man who took Shawn. But The Wasteland has a way of changing who you are, and what you will or won’t do, rather quickly.

After shooting a few rounds into the Mr. Handy robot-butler somehow still trimming our irradiated hedges, eventually he helped me salvage supplies and a holotape with Nate’s handwriting. “Hi Honey!”

That holotape became my only way to remember the sound of Nate’s voice. Or Shawn’s. I play it every night through my Pip-Boy like a lullaby. Proof that The World That Was was more than a dream before this waking nightmare. Hope and Happiness truly existed, once upon a time.

Codsworth gave me a direction to point: Concord. And the lone radio station within range told me where to go after that. Diamond City. “The Great Green Jewel of The Commonwealth.”

I spent the first night in an abandoned Red Rocket, clearing the place of gigantic vermin and befriending a German Shepard who looked as though he wondered out of Ms. Rosa’s backyard. I asked him if he had an owner, but he didn’t object when I locked up the station for a rough night of half-sleep.

As soon as I got to the center of the seemingly abandoned town, I could hear the ricochet of bullets and the twang of lasers. I only had a moment to decide my fate. And so I gave my aid to the man who asked for mine, although one of the men in leather managed to get away.

Sometimes I wonder how life might have gone differently if I’d refused. But once you’ve made a decision, there’s not much use in guessing what the other might have brought you.

The Museum of Freedom was now only chaos. But with their attentions diverted I managed to creep through the remnants of American History and slaughter the men I would later learn are called “Raiders”.

When my bullets got low, I used a switchblade to slit throats as the dog throttled limbs in gurgled silence. Better than using their crude pistols made out of pipes and spare bits of wood. There was no time to think between the pounding of my heart and the ceasing of theirs. Only the time to act before they could. Six lives ended in the span of three minutes.

As I approached the uppermost room I could hear the last two goons arguing about how to proceed. I pulled out the strange “laser musket” tossed down to me by the man in colonial garb moments ago. I gave the handle a crank, and the digital number behind the breech counted up to 1-2-3. I braced myself by the door to the main hall, ready to unleash whatever this weapon was capable of.

That’s when I noticed the frag grenade by my feet.

If it hadn’t been for Preston Garvey, I might already be dead. Then again, he says the same about me. I suppose that’s how relationships get started out here in The Wasteland. The ones who keep you alive, the ones who want you dead, and the ones who can afford to pay you to kill or get killed. Everyone else is just a scavver.

As the stimpak brings my vision from a dark red to a sickly brown, I begin to register who I risked my life for. An old lady high on chems. A mechanic with a greasy pompadour. A young man in the throes of a panic attack with his less-than-comforting wife. And Preston, who introduces himself as a “Minuteman”.

They say my dog is called Dogmeat. They simply call me The Vault Dweller before informing me, “Death is coming. And it is angry.”

I have less than five minutes to get into this rusted old Power Armor before a man who calls himself “Gristle” breaks down our barricades. I remind myself what’s truly important, because I know there may come a moment when I have to walk away and let the others die.

Stay Alive. Avenge Nate. Find Shawn.

Stay Alive. Avenge Nate. Find Shawn.

Stay Alive. Avenge Nate. Find Shawn.

Last Known Date. Last truly known date: October 23, 2077.

The Day which has become known as The Great War of 2077. The Day my country and another country destroyed The World That Was in less than a dozen hours. After years of fighting over territories and ideologies. Through mutually assured nuclear annihilation. It’s like my late husband said, “War never changes.”

But The World That Was, and my life, forever changed on The Day. And for every day I’ve spent in this Brave New World, affectionately known as The Wasteland of The Commonwealth by the people who inhabit it, the more difficult it becomes to remember What We Lost.

Sometimes, when the nights are quiet and still, and the illusion of safety creeps into my bed, I still dream about The Last Known Date. Because everything before that has become elusive as its relevance disappears. A story I recite like a prayer, but not one which I can truly say I faithfully remember anymore.

I was still a lawyer for JAG when we met, putting in for my career change to Psychoanalytics at CIT when we met in the lobby for his own court-martial mandated therapy appointment. We struck up a conversation, and within six months we were married so he could avoid immediate redeployment to Anchorage.

Thanks to the Sanctity of Marriage Act, we had one year after our wedding night to lead a Congressionally Mandated “Normal Life” before he returned to Anchorage. A year to settle and begin a family. And so we did, with the hopes we would eventually develop our new relationship into one worthy of the lifelong commitment we made before the United States Government.

We always knew we were living on borrowed time. But we never knew Fate would come calling in a trench coat and hat, holding a clipboard.

Would I have done anything differently if I had known this would be our last breakfast together? Would I have studied his eyes a little deeper? Told him any secrets we ran out of time to share? Or would I proceed as though it were a Normal Day, and savor that feeling of safety and certainty, rather than the details of the man I did my best to love while he was mine?

First Unknown Date. Possibly October 23, 2277.

Nate is dead. Shawn was taken. By a bald white man with a scar across his left eye. These facts are all I have now. Everything else is dead. Everything else is gone after a bright flash and a cold sleep.

I wish I’d never woken up. I wish we never made it to The Vault. I wish we just died in each others arms like the rest of the world. I wish I was dead. I wish Nate was the one left alive, avenging my own death and rescuing our son.

But that’s not what happened.

I was the one who got us into the vault. I was the one who wasn’t holding Shawn when we went into the pods. And so I became “The Backup”. That’s what the man with the scar who took my son and killed my husband called me.

The Backup for what?

The Vault doesn’t have any of the “creature comforts” that were advertised to us in the brochures that pushy salesman kept leaving with Codsworth.

There are no food replicators. No community centers. No media libraries. (Unless you count this copy of the Red Menace video game.) There’s nothing here. Nothing. They lied. Because they knew there would be nobody to answer to once the bombs actually dropped.

Nate is dead. Shawn is gone. Vault-Tec lied.

All of our neighbors are dead inside their pods. It doesn’t look like anyone has lived here for a very long time. And I’m not sure how long I can survive out there on my own. But there’s nothing here.

Except giant cockroaches. Working water fountains. Empty Nuka-Cola bottles. And thankfully, a 10mm handgun. With a Pip-Boy 4000 Mark IV, only slightly used.

My name was once Dorian.

Now I am the Sole Survivor of Vault 111.

Harriet M. Welsch is a childhood friend of mine. She’s been in my heart since 4th grade, when I began my own habit of carrying notebooks to “clear my brain like a laxative” as her Ole Golly instructs her from the age 8.

It’s because of this brutally honest portrayal, of a genuinely flawed child on the brink of puberty, that Louise Fitzhugh’s ever-popular book still winds up on Banned Book lists every year.

Often cited as a “bad example” that will encourage nastiness, lying, and sneaking. As though these are qualities children would never posses if someone did not dangle them like a carrot in front of their pure angelic souls.

There’s no question that Harriet is at times nasty, sneaky, and manipulative. The notebooks she marks “Private” are labeled as such with good reason. Harriet already knows many of her thoughts are only for herself. That’s why they’re so unabashed and even, as she describes her own thoughts at times, ugly.

Harriet the Spy is ultimately a story of learning how to be true to oneself while also bending your overly rigid moral code. But it is not Harriet’s development as a child that brought me back as a thirty-something reader. Rather, it is her own unfiltered take on other girls, women, and femininity itself.

Especially after I gained the knowledge that her own author was an out lesbian from an upper-class background not unlike her protagonist. And I believe Harriet M. Welsch is already written to follow in her creator’s footsteps.

Yes, I believe Harriet the Spy is a baby lesbian, regardless of her complete lack of any mention of attraction throughout the book. (Besides jokingly referring to her best friend, Sport, as her husband.)

Now I have already waxed poetic on my own take on lesbianism being intentionally socially separated from “womanhood,” right down to the words themselves. And in previous essays I have also pointed out how utilitarianism over fashion has been a reliable “visual cue” for sapphic women seeking out our own kind, regardless of whether we consider ourselves to be “butch” or “femme” or neither.

Yet little is ever said about how sapphic women develop as girls, or how our views of (compulsory heterosexual) womanhood, as a looming inevitability, may shape our own views of ourselves as children. It doesn’t help that girls are trained from the cusp of puberty, and arguably even younger, to see other girls as competition rather than peers and confidants.

For some girls, like Harriet, this becomes a rejection of feminine expression or interests in favor of more “serious” masculine pursuits. It is no mere coincidence that Harriet wears an old pair of her father’s eyeglasses in order to feel more intelligent while spying, or that she quotes the works of male literature even after Ole Golly no longer dispenses then.

She even insists on rescuing well-worn clothes her mother has expressly forbidden her to wear. The description of her “spy clothes” is so detailed it takes up nearly two full pages of text, and nearly every article of clothing is coded as male. Including an actual Boy Scout knife, which surely must have also belonged to her father. She carries these tools, while admitting they serve no needed purpose, and make her rattle. But they complete her as a Spy.

She already sees masculine items as useful, while viewing feminine pursuits as frivolous. According to Harriet, her father works in television and her mother plays bridge. She already shouts this distinction to the Cook before school begins:

“I do not go out to PLAY, I go out to WORK!”

This is a defiant rejection of how she already views upper-class womanhood. By choosing to work as a spy from the age of 8, in her mind she has already deliberately set herself apart from her intended role models, especially Marion Hawthorne and Rachel Hennessey.

IF MARION HAWTHORNE DOESN’T WATCH OUT SHE’S GOING TO GROW UP INTO A LADY HITLER.

I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY IF I LIKE RACHEL OR WHETHER IT IS JUST THAT I LIKE GOING TO HER HOUSE BECAUSE HER MOTHER MAKES HOMEMADE CAKE.

However, she also disparages even her own best friends for their seemingly shared social (and gendered) deviance:

SOMETIMES I CAN’T STAND SPORT. WITH HIS WORRYING ALL THE TIME AND FUSSING OVER HIS FATHER, SOMETIMES HE’S LIKE A LITTLE OLD WOMAN.

WHO DOES JANIE GIBBS THINK SHE’S KIDDING? DOES SHE REALLY THINK SHE COULD EVER BE A SCIENTIST?

This theme of gendered contempt can also be found throughout her relation to her mother and other grown women, especially compared to others (mostly men) she considers more worthy of her admiration:

“Bridge. What a bore. How can she play that fink game so much? And those finks she plays with!” He muttered away to himself. Harriet loved to hear him jabber on like this. She knew he wasn’t talking to her, so it was fun to listen.

Ole Golly and her somewhat renegade style of “parenting” has become increasingly at odds with what Mrs. Welsch believes to be most important to instill in her own daughter’s success. Namely, charm and grace befitting her upper-class background.

But Harriet only wishes to be a spy and “know everything.” Ole Golly does her best to encourage Harriet to learn how to blend in, specifically by invoking Mata Hari, but nothing can dissuade her from seeing expressive femininity as anything short of a waste of time.

Her competing models of womanhood come to a head when Harriet’s parents unceremoniously fire Ole Golly for taking Harriet out to the movies without express permission. A turn of events which absolutely crushes Harriet’s previous sense of order and predictability.

(You don’t keep your room “just so”, have tomato sandwiches every lunch, followed by cake and milk every afternoon, and follow the same Spy route every week, without a need for dependability.)

But courageously, she presses on without much disruption to her routines. It is only when she begins to practice being an onion for the school play that she begins to think about herself as something different from who she already happens to be.

I WONDER WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO BE A TABLE OR A CHAIR OR A BATHTUB OR ANOTHER PERSON. I WONDER WHAT OLE GOLLY WOULD SAY TO THAT. OLE GOLLY LOOKED LIKE A BIRD WITH TEETH, BUT I THINK I REALLY LOOK A LITTLE LIKE AN ONION. I WISH SHE WOULD COME BACK.

Disaster strikes when she becomes caught in the dumbwaiter of Mrs. Plumber, right before practicing her “onion dance” with Janie and Sport, and she has a true crisis of identity:

SPIES—SHOULD NOT GET CAUGHT. THAT IS THE ONE ESSENTIAL THING ABOUT SPIES. I AM A ROTTEN SPY.

In her foul mood she immediately dumps on her best friends. As Janie and Harriet have previously been united on all fronts, particularly against the dreaded “dance classes”, a sign of impending expectations.

This begins the foreshadowing of Janie’s ultimate betrayal: the public reading of Harriet’s notebooks. Which leads to a new kind of feminine power Janie has never experienced through her science, the power of domination over someone she once trusted:

“Harriet, go over there on that bench until we decide what we’re going to do to you.”

The campaign against Harriet that week is the kind of bullying only children can devise. They pass notes about her developing body (Harriet M. Welsch smells. Don’t you think so?) and disgust at her well-known habits, they use the “class priss” to pull faces when the teacher isn’t looking, and when she is too busy taking notes on her way to lunch, they even steal her ritualized tomato sandwich.

This is the ultimate betrayal that has her write, in the same block letters she feels she has grown out of:

EVERYBODY HATES ME.

It is only after “playing sick” for three days that Harriet is taken to the “kindly old family doctor,” who just so happens to be Carrie Andrews’s father, a connection she’s never made. When he brings up the subject of The Notebook, her mother attempts to explain how her actions have affected others, but still she disparages her mother’s emotional labor:

THAT WAS ALL VERY NICE BUT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY NOTEBOOK. ONLY OLE GOLLY UNDERSTANDS ABOUT MY NOTEBOOK. I WILL ALWAYS HAVE A NOTEBOOK. I THINK I WILL WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING, EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY THING THAT HAPPENS TO ME.

This is immediately followed as she wakes with:

WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING I WISH I WERE DEAD.

And:

THEY PUT ME UP HERE IN THIS ROOM BECAUSE THEY THINK I’M A WITCH.

Which she realizes even as she closes her notebook, isn’t actually true. But as a channel for her emotions, these notes don’t have to be truth as Harriet sees them. They are simply her “private” thoughts, to Harriet.

When Rachel Hennessey, second in command to Marion Hawthorne, attempts to tease Harriet about still writing, Harriet makes herself physically threatening:

Harriet felt it necessary to become menacing. She slid slowly off the bench and in two steps was almost nose to nose with Rachel. “Listen here, Rachel Hennessey, just what do you mean by that?”

Rachel immediately backs down, which vindicates Harriet’s feelings toward her as a doormat and therefore inferior. Harriet uses might to make right, which is not a typical feminine quality, and is part of why she sticks out among her developing female peers. The same day, however, we see Sport’s new masculine identity: a carried toolbox.

Although Sport had been reduced to tears and could not even bear to read his own notebook descriptions out loud, now he assists Carrie Andrews (gifted in drawing) in leading the construction of the Spy Catchers Club in Rachel Hennessey’s backyard. Chosen for her mother’s well-known homemade cake.

These are three children who had previously been powerless, but through their united cruelty, have become valuable among their peers. They even fly the infamous Purple Socks as their chosen flag.

It is peculiar, dare I even say queer, that Harriet attempts to overcome this peer hostility through the type of stoicism normally reserved for male coming of age stories. She even quotes Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” no doubt once heard from Ole Golly. This poem is, of course, about what it takes to be a man, not a woman.

After this critical moment, her own bodily autonomy becomes violated through the pouring of blue ink all over her body, and the traumatic “help” of her classmates, all rubbing and touching all over her body in derisive torture, while her teacher remains oblivious.

Once Sport and Pinky begin rubbing her legs, she catapults herself out the school and out into the street and doesn’t stop until she gets home, despite leaving a trail of blue behind her the entire way:

I’m the blue monster of East End Avenue, she thought as she careened across Eighty-sixth Street and up the block to her house.

Surprisingly Harriet writes no other notes about this incident, even though the only thing she carries from school is her notebook. It could be that something so monstrous was not even able to express itself through her thoughts. I will add that for me, as a child and an adult, this particular bullying scene was the most horrific. And I believe blue, rather than black ink, is a deliberate masculine choice by her peers (and her author).

The next day she learns the name of the Spy Catchers Club, but she remains ever stoic and defiant:

I HAVE NEVER HAD TO GO THROUGH SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I WILL HAVE TO BE VERY BRAVE. I WILL NEVER GIVE UP THIS NOTEBOOK BUT IT IS CLEAR THAT THEY ARE GOING TO BE AS MEAN AS THEY CAN UNTIL I DO. THEY JUST DON’T KNOW HARRIET M. WELSCH.

As she becomes more isolated her writing becomes truly detrimental, as she completely disregards her own school work and family life and even self-care. I feel Mrs. Welsch deserves a lot of credit for her own bravery as a parent, because she takes on the thankless task of removing Harriet from her notebook at this time:

“I’m not playing. Who says I’m playing? I’m WORKING!”

Again, she distances herself from traditional womanhood by calling what she does Work. But her mother attempts to put her writing into its appropriate perspective:

“Look, dear, at the moment you’re in school, so your work is school. Just like your father works at the office, you work at school. School work is your work.”

“What do you do?”

“A lot of unseen, unappreciated things.”

Damn. That’s a helluva feminist punch hidden behind Harriet’s nastiness and indignation. And her mother still keeps a cool head.

The truth is, whether Harriet (or her father) actually see or appreciate it, Mrs. Welsch does do a lot for her family. She oversees their hired help, maintains the upper-class social network her family takes for granted, and it’s hinted she’s sacrificed quite a bit of her own cleverness to keep up appearances.

Even though she also loves math, which is traditionally seen as masculine, because Harriet has no talent for it she only sees this as another frivolous quality of her mother:

“What are you studying?”

“Math.”

Harriet made a terrible face. Mrs. Welsch came into the room and leaned over Harriet’s chair. “What fun, darling. That was always my favorite subject in school.”

Well, there you are, thought Harriet. Ole Golly wouldn’t have said that.

I feel I never gave Mrs. Welsch enough credit as a child. Yes, it is quite easy to paint her as a neglectful socialite who foists her child onto her hired nurse. (Although so does her father, and he revives no flak despite often disappearing from his family into his study with a drink.)

However this is what was expected of The Welsches in order to maintain their family’s social clout. And while the matriarchy of Manhattan may seem like a bunch of finks to Harriet and her father, it is her conflict with that feminized power which completely flattens her, because she does not understand or respect it.

And only when she has no emotional outlet do we see a much nastier and violent side of Harriet. Again, violence is a form of emotional outburst generally reserved for boys, especially by the age of 11. But Harriet trips and pinches and terrorizes without her notebook. She causes wails and tears and yelps:

SOMETHING IS DEFINITELY HAPPENING TO ME. I AM CHANGING. I DON’T FEEL LIKE ME AT ALL. I DON’T EVER LAUGH OR THINK ANYTHING FUNNY. I JUST FEEL MEAN ALL OVER. I WOULD LIKE TO HURT EACH ONE OF THEM IN A SPECIAL WAY THAT WOULD HURT ONLY THEM.

We can infer much about her classmates’ lives during this time, although some is alluded to earlier. Rachel Hennessey has no father. Beth Ellen is often starved for food and reacts strongly to being hit. Pinky Whitehead’s known problem is his mother. Sport reads cookbooks because nobody else will care for him or his father. And Janie’s planned revenge, breaking a finger, is the most violent of all.

But some revenges may appear humorous to young readers. Marion Hawthorne, the ultimate priss, is afraid of frogs and snakes. Harriet cuts a huge chunk of Laura Peters’s hair without her noticing. These are not dissimilar from what is often waved off as “boyish pranks,” but in a 11-year-old girl, they are strongly pathologized.

Mrs. Welsch (the unsung hero who has no first name, even though we know Harriet is named after her father Harry) must then leave her hairdresser’s to control the massive damage of her own distraught child’s behavior.

It is Mrs. Welsch who ultimately convinces her angry husband that Harriet needs to see a psychologist. And it is Mrs. Welsch who eventually smooths things over with Harriet’s school and presumably the mothers of Harriet’s peers.

Harriet never expresses gratitude for this unseen labor, but she does sleep blissfully when her mother tucks her in that night. Yet the next day she only washes when her father says so, and only agrees to see a different doctor because of his begrudging approval:

“He’s not a fink like most doctors.”

Of course the actual task of bringing Harriet to see the psychologist falls on her mother, presumably because her husband has work. And Harriet still views the task of seeing Dr. Wagner as being “fussed at,” the same phrases she disparages her mother with at times:

This was the dumbest thing Harriet had ever heard of. To come all this way to play a game. She bet her mother didn’t know this.

She questions her mother’s wisdom in taking her to see Dr. Wagner, until she is given a notebook, and again her mother has the thankless task of taking it away when their session is done.

While Harriet sees this as a betrayal, it does cause her to eventually attempt to make up with Janie and Sport. Her relationship with Janie remains tense, despite their bond of resisting dance class and having professional ambitions. For the first time without her notebook, Harriet finally understands her feelings:

She began to reconsider the idea of going to Sport’s house. A tear ran down the side of her nose. Janie was one thing, but Sport had always been her best friend. Suppose he acted like Janie?

It is here Sport is seen in the middle of a celebration for his father’s writing, something Harriet has been dreaming of for herself and which Sport has seen as a waste of his father’s time. Sport can’t help but briefly share his joy with Harriet, even though his anger soon returns when his father and Harriet begin to bond as writers:

“Hey, listen, Sport, get a clean shirt on. I’m taking you out to dinner.” Sport ran into his room. “How ’bout you, Harriet? Want to go to dinner with us?” Before Harriet could say anything, Sport opened the door to his room and shouted “NO” as loud as he could. Then he slammed the door again.

After this Harriet again has no tools to handle such emotions, expressed in a nightmare which begins as a pleasant dream about being rocked by her nurse:

Harriet’s mother came into the room. Harriet was still in her dream, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Ole Golly, Ole Golly, Ole Golly.” She kept on crying softly even after her mother was holding her.

Harriet rejects her mother still. And at this point my adult heart genuinely aches for her because there is nothing left she can do but humbly call on Ole Golly for her help in raising her child, after she also consults the psychologist she convinced her husband to hire. And she still returns Harriet’s notebook to her, against her own better judgement.

Harriet becomes joyously distracted catching up on her Spy Route, and before long she yearns to return to school. Here we see the true unsung heroism of Harriet’s mother and teachers, but only if we look for it between Harriet’s own disparaging views of her foes’ attempts to emulate their own bridge-playing mothers:

They walk like old ladies, thought Harriet.

“Rachel, don’t you think it would be nice if we could play bridge in the afternoons?”

Marion had a kind of cawing voice, like a crow.

Harriet has her peer-endorsed victory, the right to be published in the school paper. She has usurped Marion Hawthorne from her place of supreme power, and can now feel vindicated. But not before Ole Golly’s letter arrives (thanks to Mrs. Welsch) offering her two final pieces of advice:

1) You have to apologize.

2) You have to lie.

Of course, Harriet is immediately successful as the paper’s editor, given that she’s had years of practice. And while her published musings become kinder (sometimes), she still gloats to herself in her notebook about what she see as her Work:

I AM GOING TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT THESE PEOPLE. THEY ARE JUST RATS. HALF OF THEM DON’T EVEN HAVE A PROFESSION.

But while Harriet basks in the glory of printing stories from her Spy Route, eventually her writing takes on a different tone as Harriet begins to actually listen to what her mother and father talk about at dinner. For once, both parents are shown to be active agents in shaping their child’s life:

“I really don’t understand Mabel Gibbs. She starts out with this big thing about the kids going to dancing school—you’d think from the way she talked that they would be absolute apes in the drawing room if we didn’t send them—and I told her at the time, of course, that I thought Harriet was too young.”

Soon followed by her father:

“That better be from the Times. If they don’t print that retraction tomorrow I’m going to be mad as a hornet.”

This becomes Harriet’s inspiration to print her own “lie” in the form of a contraction, combining her advice from Ole Golly into knowledge learned from her father’s work. And finally, the gossip of her mother’s social goings as they relate to her peers also make it into the paper:

JANIE GIBBS HAS WON HER BATTLE. THIS SHOULD BE A LESSON TO ALL OF YOU IN COURAGE AND DETERMINATION. IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, THEN ASK HER.

Harriet, for once, does not hold her father above all others:

MR. HARRY WELSCH ALMOST LOST HIS JOB LAST WEEK FOR BEING LATE. HE IS ALWAYS SLOW IN THE MORNING.

The story ends with the dissolution of the Spy Catchers Club, in Sport’s own victory over his few male peers:

“This has gone far enough,” said Sport and looked at Pinky and The Boy with the Green Socks. “I can’t imagine what you MEN think you’re doing here.”

And Janie backs him up as well, contending that while men do play Bridge, they only do so in the evening when they are forced by their wives, playing directly into compulsory heterosexuality and masculinity:

Marion and Rachel finally sat alone. They looked at each other and then looked away.

“I guess,” said Rachel with some embarrassment, “that I’ll go see if the cake is ready.”

She was getting up rather forlornly when suddenly Laura and Carrie came back.

“We decided that there wasn’t anything else to do anyway, so we might as well play bridge,” said Laura.

“Besides,” said Carrie, “I’m rather fond of it.”

By now, Harriet and her best friends have navigated their adolescent emotional growths relatively unscathed. Janie has avoided dance class in favor of her science experiments for another year. Sport has become the king of his small masculine court before he must leave Gregory School for a different co-ed education. And Harriet is recognized for her relentless dedication. The three friends silently meet at the park, and walk along the river after Harriet offers a final thought:

NOW THAT THINGS ARE BACK TO NORMAL I CAN GET SOME REAL WORK DONE.

She still focuses on her Work as what sets her apart. And likely this will not change. Harriet feels superior to the likes of Marion and Rachel and their socialite heterosexual mothers, but she has also learned to make allies rather than enemies of her own gendered deviants, Janie and Sport.

It is with this greater wisdom and humility that she walks forward into the inevitable process of puberty and higher feminine expectations. But we can always hope she does so as the Spy she has always known herself to be.

CN: Sibling Abuse, Homophobic Slurs

I ride my new green bike around the neighborhood and try to think of it as my own. I can hear boys shouting and laughing as I turn the corner of Sunnydale, and I creep closer to investigate.

There’s five boys total, and they’re all older than me except for maybe the smallest one. Three of them are shirtless and the others wear t-shirts tight with sweat. Backs glisten as they wrestle each other to the ground over a football, rubbing grass and dirt into their knees and chests. The smallest boy has long black bangs he constantly pushes from his face as it drips with sweat. I like watching him the most.

(more…)

Let’s face it — it isn’t a real con unless people are chatting in the hallways after all the panels are done about their strong feelz about Steven Universe. Jason, Benny and Talon were more than happy to accommodate that need.

Organizers and hosts of the first OrbitCon hold a punchy post-mortem.

5 p.m. – whenever CDT, Sunday April 15

I mean, you can submit questions in the comments, but good luck getting much coherent out of us.

Speakers

Let’s just see who shows up, shall we?

The Super Serious Social Justice Podcast discusses current issues, ethics, social justice, and equality with a side helping of humor. Olivia, Courtney, and Brianne are delighted to record an episode on air with OrbitCon. Come Hang Out with us!

4 p.m. – 5 p.m. CDT, Sunday April 15

To submit a question for the Q&A of this panel, please leave a comment below. Questions that are actually questions will receive priority.

Speakers

Brianne Bilyeu is a scientist and project planner who sometimes forgets that she is more than her job description. She’s a force to be reckoned with who loves to do things and get stuff done…except on the days when she’s feeling vulnerable, like an imposter or otherwise unmotivated and uninspired. Brianne loves new experiences, and her dream would be to travel the world learning new languages, sharing meals with strangers, scuba diving, and writing all about her adventures. She’s a fan of the Oxford comma, and seriously doesn’t care what you think about the fact that she once – not too long ago – watched so many episodes of Supernatural that the day started with a Christmas special and ended with a Halloween special.

Olivia James is an autistic, asexual goofball who loves octopuses, cats, and rock climbing. Born and raised in the great Midwest, she went to school at a small liberal arts college and in the process discovered that too much philosophy makes her depressed. She kicked the ass of an eating disorder, adopted some kittens, and found her true calling as a marketer in a local nonprofit (while writing, podcasting, and planning a wedding on the side). When not working too much, Olivia can be found on bullet journal websites, listening to far too many podcasts, or playing a great deal of Dungeons and Dragons. If you want MOAR OLIVIA check out autofspoons.com.

Courtney Kupfer hails from the suburbs of Milwaukee, where she grew up with a whole shit-ton of privilege, but thinks Minnesota is really where all the cool kids hang. In 2006, she graduated from a small liberal arts college in northeast Iowa with an extremely useful major in Theatre/Dance and a minor in Women’s Studies. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in counseling so she can help people deal with life’s utter bullshit. Courtney is particularly passionate about LGBTQ issues and women’s reproductive rights.

Science has profoundly altered the society we live in and allowed us to explore the world in many wonderful ways. Unfortunately, those outside of science can sometimes come to see it as an infallible panacea for any problem we may have, or the only epistemological tool we have at our disposal. In this panel, a small group of scientists will discuss scientism, misconceptions people have with science, and ways that scientific epistemology could be improved

3 p.m. – 4 p.m. CDT, Sunday April 15

To submit a question for the Q&A of this panel, please leave a comment below. Questions that are actually questions will receive priority.

Speakers

Jeremiah Traeger expects to earn his PhD in Chemical Engineering from CU Boulder in 2019. Jeremiah’s research includes investigating single-molecule dynamics of DNA. He’s also co-host of the SJW Circle Jerk podcast and contributes to the A Tippling Philosopher blog.

Ari Stillman is a current psychology graduate student, and they appear on The Gaytheist Manifesto and The Cis Are Getting Out Of Hand podcast

Katie Marshall is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, studying the effects of repeated stress exposure.

Alix Jules is an activist in the Dallas – Ft. Worth area with a long history in issues and topics regarding the role of diversity in the atheist community as well as atheism in diverse communities. Alix has been featured in Ebony magazine, “One Man’s Journey into Atheism,” Godless – the documentary, and he has garnered national attention as one of the modern faces in Black humanism.

We see the Emma Gonzalezes out there, but what can those of us with a different skill set do to support the movements we love?

2 p.m. – 3 p.m. CDT, Sunday April 15

To submit a question for the Q&A of this panel, please leave a comment below. Questions that are actually questions will receive priority.

Speakers

Nicole Harris does feminist and social justicey things, most recently in the sanctuary movement. She thinks hiking and backpacking are rad too.

Michael Cluff is the president of South Jersey Humanists, and worked for Atheist Alliance of America, where he contributed to the magazine and co-hosted the Secular Nation podcast.

Autumn Reinhardt Simpson is an author and feminist theologian who has been writing, appearing on television and speaking internationally about abortion rights and feminism since 2010 when she founded Richmond Clinic Defense to help escort patients past protesters at an abortion clinic in Richmond, Virginia. She has spoken to hundreds of people over the years and has written for numerous outlets both academic and popular. Autumn runs a one-woman ministry which provides women with transportation, housing, and accompaniment as they seek abortion care. She is the author of The Humanist Celebrant Handbook (Humanist Press, 2018) and is currently at work on her second book about nontheistic Christianity.

Heather Hegi is the longtime chair of Minnesota Atheists. She’s passionate about atheist rights and wants to make our voices heard.

I’ve heard this idea that therapy is for everyone. That no matter how neurotypical (NT) you think you are, no matter how well things seem to be going in your life, that everyone can benefit from therapy.

(I know that this isn’t true – absolutes are for chumps.)

I’ve often wondered what therapy would be like. I didn’t have any “goals” for therapy, so would it do anything for me? Everyone has some background level of stress, but I seemed to have things mostly under control. I’ve never really wanted to set up appointments, travel, sit down in front of a therapist, try to discover if I’ll like them (and if I don’t, to have to start over again), and I didn’t want to pay big bucks to try out what seemed to be unessential extravagance. After all, a solid community of family and friends who are good listeners, therapy happy hour and therapy pedicures had gotten me this far in life.

But not too long ago I sought out therapy. I had come to realize that my neurotypical, mostly optimistic self had been dealing with a huge, specific stressor, and therapy started to feel less like an extravagance and more of a potential tool for dealing with it. I felt a little sheepish because the stressor was that I had started to deeply dislike my job. It seemed silly to me – lots of people don’t like their jobs. Surely I could find a way to cope? But it was really affecting me. I’ve always needed to enjoy my work. If I have to survive by spending the best hours of my life each week working, I need that work to be something that engages me. And it wasn’t.

Without going into specifics for why I had fallen out of love with my job, I’ll say what it was that caused me to reach out for therapy: I was coming home feeling desolate more nights than not. I lost track of how many times I cried in work bathroom stalls. It became difficult to fall asleep. I started stress cooking – not eating, just cooking. I would come home late on a work night and prepare highly complicated meals that took 1-2 hours to prepare. I find comfort in cooking, so I guess my stressed out self found refuge there.

I loved my employer but had lost my joy and confidence in my ability to perform well in my role. I didn’t want to quit, but I was making myself ill because I couldn’t seem to influence any lasting change in my situation. I spoke openly with HR and my director about my disengagement (I truly love my employer for being able to feel safe to do that) and we planned and brainstormed ideas for how to go forward. But things move slowly in large corporations and I was still dealing with anxiety, sleeplessness, and vacillating between numbness and Very Big Emotions.

I decided to try a therapy app to hash out some of the brain jerkiness. It seemed like an easy, less expensive, low commitment way to dip my toe into talk therapy. The idea of not having to travel to a brick and mortar location was very attractive. As was the idea of being able to type out my thoughts. It probably doesn’t come as a shock that a personal blogger like myself processes through writing. I also liked the idea that when I had Very Big Emotions while doing some of this processing, I wouldn’t have an audience. I wouldn’t have to be anxious that I was being performative, or that my nonverbal body language or facial expressions were being analyzed. To an extent, I could choose what I wanted to reveal. That made me feel safer than the intimacy of in-person therapy sessions.

I chose a therapist based on her write up – she appeared to value patience, self-kindness, resilience, and not having to carry our burdens alone. These seemed like very attractive things in the state of mind that I was in. She didn’t have any woo dog whistles or anything that might indicate that she was going to tie physical health to mental health (I rejected a few candidates who focused heavily of the body-mind connections. I’m fat and I don’t think yoga is going to solve all of my problems, so maybe let’s start somewhere else). Oh, and most importantly, she has experience dealing with workplace stress and has spent time in the corporate world. Ya know…the little things.

I got super lucky and like her fairly well. I started writing to her once every day or two, and she has always responded within 12-24 hours. I dumped a bolus of information about my situation on her, and one-by-one we started picking through the individual stressors. As we began to resolve those we found some patterns of behaviors and reactions that have popped up in other places in my life, and sometimes we spend some time examining those. I’m into my second month of chatting with her and it’s overall been a very helpful experience.

One immediate benefit of this therapy was that I was able to stop vomiting my emotions all over my close friends and family. That took a lot of guilt off my shoulders and now I can hang out and talk about things other than me and my troubles. My husband doesn’t have to shoulder the weight of a despondent, self-absorbed partner five days a week. He’s also not eating quite as well, but he thinks that’s a fair trade-off.

Having a therapist who I feel hears me and recognizes and validates my stress and emotions has been profoundly healing. It’s probably an appeal to authority, but when my friends say “you’re being very hard on yourself” it doesn’t have quite the same as effect on me as an unbiased professional saying “you’re being very hard on yourself.”

I’m also more focused on recognizing and sorting through my emotions in the moment. One of the benefits of the therapy app is that I can sit down in the moment and let all of the Very Big Emotions out in writing. I don’t have to save all of my thoughts up between physical sessions. Even if it’s mid-work day, I have a job where I can take a few minutes to write, feel better and then get back to work. I know that what I’ve written will be heard and responded to. I don’t feel alone with the stress.

On the whole, talk therapy via a therapy app has been really good for me – a fairly neurotypical person who decided to stop taking her mental health for granted and dedicate some time to examining and improving it.

I’d be interested to hear from people who have tried both remote therapy and face-to-face therapy. What were the pros and cons for you? Do you prefer one over the other?

So yeah…the bunnies are a tad bigger now.

First I was busy doing other things, then Mom moved to Minneapolis, then the elections, and a new position at work, now Nazis.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve been getting my writing and sharing itch scratched by doing updates and conversations on Facebook. I’ve done a small amount of short story writing, but not as much as I’d like.

As an aside – I think it’s fun that I’m writing on my SJW blog again at the exact same time as the red pill scene from the Matrix is playing in the background. As another aside…jeepers Reaves is a bland actor. I made the mistake of watching that Netflix movie about the girl going through a stay-away program for people living with eating disorders, and he was pretty much Neo in that, too. He’s always Neo, even before Neo was a character.

Let’s see…what else…I decided to be kind to myself and not worry too much about what I’m writing so this is going to be disjointed. Just is. I forgot all of the blogging tricks. I wonder if I can remember how to post a photo…

Ehhh…seems to do the trick. Oh yeah, I got two cats. This is Ori and Dori. They’re sweet but shy reformed ferals – brother and sister. Dori, the little tortoise-shell, still won’t let me pet her (it’s been three months), although she’ll sometime stay put if I slowly approach her with a treat extended. I’m worried about what will happen if she gets sick and I have to take her to the vet :/ Ori has turned into my little cuddlemeister for brief periods.  You can see that he’s all about the cuddles.

I’ve stepped down from the atheist radio show that I was doing. It got to be more work than fun, and when that happens to a volunteer position, that’s the beginning of the end. The show, Atheists Talk, is still going strong, which makes me happy. After a brief hiatus from that, I joined up with two friends to start a podcast called Super Serious Social Justice. We dawdled with setting it up for about a year, and finally got our first episode out at the end of this past May. We’re releasing episodes every other Wednesday, and on iTunes – which is a trip for all of us because we’ve never started a podcast before! We’re still pretty rough – if you’re an audiophile you might want to just skip over the first couple of episodes – but we’re having a blast. We find ourselves very funny.

Toodles!

On this day in 1980, an earthquake beneath Mount St. Helens got everyone’s attention. Within two months, much of her summit would be lying on the North Fork Toutle River valley floor, the lush forests stripped away, and our views of her changed forever.

My dear friend Suzanne took the above photograph during one of our visits. Perspective makes the grass look almost as tall as me -but it’s waist-high at best, possibly shorter. I was completely entranced by the mountain, so I didn’t notice the exact height. But I’d probably remember slogging through something trying to poke me in the eyeballs. And, of course, the volcano towers over us all, even though it’s off in the distance up and across the broad valley.

It’s not just perspective that makes Mount St. Helens look so huge. It is so huge! To give you an idea of how huge, even with nearly two thousand feet of its summit missing, check this out: (more…)

This chapter has a lot of child abuse. So I’m going to put this right up front:

Content Note for severe physical abuse of a child.

In the Jessop household, showing any degree of spine to Barbara results in punishment. She thrives on it. So when all her sister wives do their best to keep things calm and peaceful after Merril’s heart attack, it’s only a few weeks before she escalates to get a rise out of them. She incites the children of the household to act up in hopes of provoking the wives to attack them, just so she’ll have a reason to discipline them. Carolyn’s turn comes when she calls some of the girls out for gossiping about a girl at their school who is being bullied. She snaps at them, calling them hypocrites for pretending to be shocked, considering the way they treat the wives.

She expects Barbara to come at her for it. But instead, Barbara attacks her son, Patrick. (more…)

April is Autism Awareness Month. The first thing you need to be aware of is that organizations like Autism Speaks aren’t helping autistic people. They’re harming them. We’ll get to that in a minute. First, I’d like to make you aware of some things.

1. I don’t have a formal diagnosis, but it’s 99.998% certain your humble blogger is autistic. I’ve done a bunch of assessments for autism overall and how women (girls) present as autistic, and everything comes back as “Whelp, you’re autistic as fuck. Congratulations!”
2. Note I say I am autistic. Not “I have autism.” Nor “I am a person with autism.” That’s because it’s not a disease or a disability (except insofar as the world isn’t built to accommodate autistic people). It’s the way my brain processes the world. Those personality quirks that make me the unique me that I am? The vast majority come from me being autistic AF.
3. I don’t want to be cured. I like my autistic self just fine, thank you. So when you say you want to find a cure for autism, it sounds an awful lot like you’re saying you want to erase me and my autistic friends.

That last one’s pretty shocking, right? I mean, we all hear about how horrible and disabling autism is. Pitiable parents appear on television, blogs, and in glossy magazine articles talking about how their bright and beautiful babies suddenly became aloof aliens. No eye contact, no hugs, no words, no love! Meltdowns! Delays! My kid is a lemon and I want my money back! Oh, and it was probably because of vaccines. My abnormal psych book had a whole section devoted to how you could only maybe rescue an autistic kid from a life of certain complete dysfunction and probable institutionalization by devoting yourself full-time to rescuing them. Otherwise, they’d spend all their lives unable to even wipe themselves after taking a shit.

Who wouldn’t want a cure for that terrible disease?

(PS: I assumed I wasn’t autistic for over 40 years because my life wasn’t the empathy-devoid wasteland these folks assured me it should be.)

Only it’s not as bad as all that.

Autistic brains just process things differently from non-autistic brains. A good number of our “disabilities” aren’t so disabling once people make allowances for that fact. Like, if you don’t insist on us making eye contact all the time, we can connect and converse just fine. If you let us do our stims, we won’t melt down so much. If you listen to us, we can tell you just what we need to thrive.

You can even listen to those of us who can’t speak. Technology allows that to happen. Just because a person can’t speak doesn’t mean they don’t have plenty to say.

So, at the end of this post, you’ll find a list of blogs and organizations that will tell you more about autism, what autistic people need, and how you can be a good ally. Now we’ll talk about one way to definitely not be a good ally: (more…)

Content note for antisemitism, Trump, eliminationist rhetoric.

Once Hitler realized he’d need to dial back the antisemitic rhetoric in order win power, he began glorifying the Volk and calling Germans to unify instead. But of course Jews were not part of that Volk. He’d perfected the art of the dog whistle. Even a Jewish woman who went to one of his rallies heard “nothing even against the Jews.”

But, like Trump, Hitler managed to speak for hours without saying much of anything at all. She could have been describing a Trump rally: “[He] put up sham accusations, only to refute them, used slogans by the hour, and said nothing else than praise of himself…” Yet his admirers ate it all up. It’s so similar to Trump and his fans it’s terrifying.

Many people tried to wave away Hitler’s antisemitism, just like many people today try to pretend Trump and the Republicans aren’t bigoted scumlords. But a quick glance at either party’s platform quickly reveals the truth. The proof is in the planks. When your planks consist of racist, bigoted bullshit, your protestations that you’re not a bigoted racist can only be believed by those who need to pretend they’re not with you because of your most vile beliefs.

One particular Nazi Party Program Plank is horribly similar to things Trump is doing to our own Muslim immigrants: “‘non-Germans’ who had immigrated after 1914 would be expelled from Germany.”

And, like Hitler, Trump is leaving open racism to his surrogates while he proclaims himself to be the least racist person on the planet. Folks: When someone supports racist party planks and appoints virulent racists to high positions, that person is a fucking racist. The mask will come off the second he’s deceived enough of you so that he no longer needs it. Believe his actions, not his words.

The smaller commonalities between Trump and Hitler are also jarring. Both used the third person to refer to themselves, for instance. Both unsuccessfully ran for election before winning power. Both have a taste for grandiosity.

And both tenuously rose to power on a wave of hate. We’ll be analyzing that next.

Intro • Prologue • 1.1 • 1.2 • 1.3 • 2.1 • 2.2 • 2.3

Of course, I always do. I’m lucky to be the granddaughter of two women who raised me with unconditional and fierce love, and who modeled two very different ways to show that love. One was calm and endlessly patient. The other was… not. So I learned that we can endure without losing the loving and generous core of who we are. And that we damn the consequences and stand up for what’s right.

I am profoundly privileged to come from these two families. I miss those women every day. Given that it’s been years since they died, I’m pretty sure that’ll always be the case. That’s okay.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt their absence quite as much as I do these days.

You see: I don’t know how to handle the direction of the world right now. The swing to the hard-right. Normalisation of fascism. Incredible power in the hands of despicable people. Right now, Ireland feels like a strangely normal backwater in a world that’s falling in a direction that I don’t know I can bear. I’m lucky to live in a place that is currently relatively insulated from the worst of it. I feel helpless to do a single thing about it. I’m scared from my friends and for my world. I don’t know how to respond.

I used to love my Nan’s stories of her young adulthood. We’d sit drinking endless cups of tea (drowning in milk and sugar, of course) and she’d tell me all about her time in London. She left Ireland for a few years, you see, to work there as a nurse. She’d live with her friends and they’d work hard and have so much fun in between it all.

I loved her stories. She died a half-decade ago and I wish that I’d done something- anything!- to remember the details.

Because, of course, when she was working as a nurse and living with her friends and being a young woman in the big city, that city was under attack by the Nazis.

There are things I know that she never told me. She never talked about being afraid. Or about what horrors she must have seen, working in a hospital in a city under bombardment. She never told me how it was she saw those things, got up the next day and kept on doing what she needed to do. Or how it must have felt to never know if they would win or lose. What it was like to learn about a genocide just a few hundred miles away.

I want to ask her how it felt in the years before that war. I want to know what it was like to see hateful ideologies become normal- did people know what it would lead to? Were they afraid? What did it take for people to understand what was going on? When did they feel normality sliding away and what did it feel like for the world around them to tip over into chaos and killing? How did they continue? How did they sleep, and what did they do when they couldn’t?

What do I do?

I hope I don’t have to learn these things the way that she did. I’m afraid. I wish my grandmothers were still alive.

There’s been a dialogue between atheist writers over the past week, started by Martin Hughes of the blog barrierbreaker. In a post published last Tuesday, Hughes talks about his evolving feelings on religion, declaring himself not an antitheist any more. ‘Recently I’ve been a lot less harsh on religion and much more focused on social justice issues,’ he reports, going on to describe his mother’s ill health and religious faith.

Several responses and critiques were published in the next few days. One, from Stephanie Zvan, notes that social justice includes helping people leave religion; another, from Kaveh Mousavi of On the Margin of Error, replies directly. In a follow-up post, Hughes talks about dealing with stress by praying to a nonexistent god. Stephanie and Kaveh both replied again, writing that comfort found in faith still doesn’t get religion off the hook.

Since publication last Thursday, my contribution has been doing well. It isn’t a direct response to either of Hughes’ posts, or any author’s in particular, but talks about patterns I see when this subject comes up.

When I read posts in the non-antitheism genre, it often strikes me that most of the wordcount is about other issues. I see other writers assert that the death of religion won’t solve all the world’s problems, and that in a world without it, people who currently hurt others in the name of God would just find other excuses. I hear them say deconverting believers isn’t their priority, and that they no longer feel an urge to pick fights with them. I listen to people say they care more about social justice than bashing religion, and that there are some awful atheists, and that they have more in common with plenty of progressive believers, and that they’d rather work with them. I see them point out that being an atheist doesn’t make them more intelligent than believers are, and that religious people don’t deserve to be hated. None of these statements are to do with whether religion is a good thing.

Near the end, in a passage that’s getting a lot of appreciation, I talk about defences of religion I do hear: that private beliefs people draw comfort from are harmless, that the problem is fundamentalism and not religion at large, that not all believers are the ones we see on the news, that harm caused by religion would still happen without it. Each gets dissected individually, but I close by discussing all these ideas collectively.

When I hear people saying why they’re not antitheists — when I read tweets and Facebook statuses and blog posts and op-eds — these are the statements I’m used to hearing. None of them are useful statements. All of them are either irrelevant or wrong. I don’t think anyone who says these things is being insincere, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they became things atheists said because they’re things believers like to hear, or feel like they might be. They’re delicate, diplomatic, sayable and politically correct. They’re not things I’m interested in saying.

I want to talk more about why I wrote that post, where I’d like the discussion to go next, and some of what I have to add to it.

***

Writing at his blog Across Rivers Wide, Galen Broaddus calls himself agnostic about antitheism. ‘Do I think the world would be better or worse if everyone were an atheist? … Alex says that his answer is quick, and that’s fine. The honest answer for me, though, is simply I don’t know.’

I do understand that other people … think that we have enough information to at least tentatively conclude that the world would be better off without religion. I know at least a good number of the arguments [and] I get that the kinds of counterarguments Alex mentions (like the fact that getting rid of religion wouldn’t be a panacea because, well, duh) don’t give him pause. I just disagree on those evaluations. YMMV.

Here’s the thing—I’m basically fine with that. Being an antitheist isn’t something I care much about. I don’t feel a need to change believers’ minds, and I don’t need friends or colleagues to feel the way I do: given a shot at a world without God, I’d take it, but I get why not everyone would. That’s not an argument I need to have, and it wasn’t the point of Thursday’s post. What I do want to pursue is a metadiscussion.

I don’t object to either of Hughes’ posts, and I share the complex feelings he talks about—they’re just not reasons to adopt his stance. I’m reluctant to single him or anyone else out because I find this typical. When people make a show of not being antitheists, the reasons they provide aren’t usually ones like Galen’s: they’re the bad arguments or beside-the-point platitudes I fisked, and I think our community should have a conversation about where they’re coming from.

When I say I want this whole debate to cut to the chase—that the only question that matters is if a world without religion would be better—it’s not because I’m desperate to tell people it would, but because I want to point out what’s going on. When people are so keen to separate themselves from antitheists that they give transparently bad grounds for doing so, it’s hard for me not to feel that it’s performative. When their posts acknowledge handwavily that they’d prefer a less religious world—as if this is somehow a tangent and not the whole point—I get the sense that there’s something more complex going on. These dynamics point to assumptions about how religion gets discussed, and since those affect all nonbelievers, there are good reasons to examine them whichever side you come down on.

***

Toward the start of Thursday’s post, I talk about being approached by believers—often Christians, but not only—who tell me why they think God is on queer people’s side and want me to say I’m impressed.

I find that conversation hard, mainly because it never feels like it’s meant to be a conversation. I get the sense I’m expected to nod and sympathise, that my role in the discussion is to validate their feelings, not say what I actually think. It’s as if only part of me gets invited to speak: I’m allowed to oppose religious homophobia as a queer person, but not to critique religion in other forms as a queer atheist. I’m not being asked to participate in a dialogue — just to tell [religious people] what they want to hear.

Some of the places I’ve had this problem have been LGBT events about religious faith. These happen often in the queer community, especially at conferences and during outreach weeks, and have become somewhat notorious: I know I’m not the only with this experience both because I’m told so and because when I speak at them, it goes down well. The rest of the time, this is what happens: a handful of speakers, each from a different religion, spend ten minutes telling their life stories and saying why being a queer ‘person of faith’ is perfectly easy; a Q&A session follows where difficult questions are parried or ignored and nonbelievers feel unable to say what they think. There’s a lot of nodding and agreeing, but no one leaves with any sense tensions have been dispelled, because they haven’t been addressed. (If you’re planning one of these—seriously, invite me.)

Too often these events are emotional workhouses: places the audience, and nonbelievers in particular, are asked to make believers feel comfortable, even at the expect of what they want to say. (While some are atheists looking for fights, many have needs that end up being ignored, and queer people whose experiences of religion have been traumatic often feel invisible.) The same thing happens in interfaith work. In the forum I was part of for years, a constant struggle was the way conversations became about mutual affirmation, making it harder to bring up uncomfortable topics. Meetings where believers get told what they want to hear are fine—major religions hold them once a week—but if the point of dialogue is to air tensions and difficult truths, you need to hold it somewhere else.

‘When people say in [blog] posts that they aren’t antitheists,’ I wrote last week, ‘I get the sense what they mean is that they aren’t jerks.’ Here’s my hypothesis: I think that as atheists grow to want good relations with believers, our instincts about what that means can be the same ones that show up in queer and interfaith circles. When I read posts about why people aren’t antitheists, I’m often reminded of those events, and of experiences with religious relatives, when not being a jerk meant always making believers feel comfortable — even with platitudes that weren’t quite true; even when your nuance wasn’t really all that nuanced; even if you had to be indirect. Like I said at the end of the last post — there are better ways to build bridges than dishonest arguments. Atheists need to start talking about how we find them.

Here’s a problem I have. In various contexts—online, with family, during public events—I keep hearing from believers who take great pains to convince me they don’t hate gay people. Jesus never said anything about it, they tell me, and scripture has been misinterpreted, and the real sinners are homophobes, so for heaven’s sake let that be the end of it. I find that conversation hard, mainly because it never feels like it’s meant to be a conversation. I get the sense I’m expected to nod and sympathise, that my role in the discussion is to validate their feelings, not say what I actually think. It’s as if only part of me gets invited to speak: I’m allowed to oppose religious homophobia as a queer person, but not to critique religion in other forms as a queer atheist. I’m not being asked to participate in a dialogue—just to tell Christians what they want to hear.

There are a lot of atheists who don’t like me. To them I represent ‘politically correct atheism’, a movement that includes minorities and cares about more than just feeling smug. But political correctness was never meant to be a byword for progressive goals. Being politically correct is about saying the permissible thing—the delicate, diplomatic, convenient, feasible, strategic, sayable thing—when provocation isn’t an option. Before it was an alt-right dogwhistle, it meant being insincere to avoid starting fights: meant politicians saying ‘There are differences between us’ instead of ‘We are enemies’ and ‘economical with the truth’ instead of ‘lying’; meant telling people what they wanted but not what they needed to hear. When Christians explain their pro-gay theology to me, I sense that what they want isn’t an answer but a string of platitudes. (Not all Christians are the Westboro Baptist Church. There are good and bad people of all religions and none. Yes, I hate Richard Dawkins too.) If anything feels PC, that does.

***

Every now and again, someone in my vicinity—often at Patheos, but not just there—publishes a long piece about why they’re not an antitheist. Most recently that’s been Martin Hughes in a post at barrierbreaker; in the past it’s been Neil Carter of Godless in Dixie, and further back it’s been a range of other folk. Those posts spur complicated thoughts in me, and I’ve often felt the urge to response but not had world enough or time, so I want to share some of my misgivings here. (Stephanie Zvan has already done the same at Almost Diamonds.) Carter and Hughes are both bloggers I like, and this post isn’t about them specifically—please don’t read it as a straight reply to either of theirs. What I want to discuss are the patterns I see in these conversations, how they make me feel, and why this branch of the secular community is one I can’t join. I wish my atheism were PC: it’s not.

I don’t market myself as an antitheist, but I feel strongly that I’m not not one. Explaining why is difficult without a certain amount of meta. When I read posts in the non-antitheism genre, it often strikes me that most of the wordcount is about other issues. I see other writers assert that the death of religion won’t solve all the world’s problems, and that in a world without it, people who currently hurt others in the name of God would just find other excuses. I hear them say deconverting believers isn’t their priority, and that they no longer feel an urge to pick fights with them. I listen to people say they care more about social justice than bashing religion, and that there are some awful atheists, and that they have more in common with plenty of progressive believers, and that they’d rather work with them. I see them point out that being an atheist doesn’t make them more intelligent than believers are, and that religious people don’t deserve to be hated.

None of these statements are to do with whether religion is a good thing. I do see people talking about that—in particular, by saying their problem is with fundamentalism, not with religion itself, and by asking what the harm is if people who aren’t out to take over the world believe whatever comforts them—but those discussions are peripheral. In the process of declaring they aren’t antitheists, some authors make concessions that sound nothing but. (Mass belief in a moralising god ‘does more harm than good’, argues Hughes. ‘Would I like to see the human race leave all religion behind…? Absolutely, yes’ adds Carter.) When people say in these posts that they aren’t antitheists, I get the sense what they mean is that they aren’t jerks.

I have a lot of sympathy with that. Like most people whose discarded beliefs shaped their whole lives, I spent years in atheist puberty, a ball of anger, resentment, self-satisfaction and self-righteousness. It took a long time to direct that anger properly—first by acknowledging my childhood in the church was abusive, then by locating it in a broader history of abuse—and I understand not wanting to be that kind of atheist. I don’t view religion in general with the contempt I used to, and I have plenty of reasons to remain on good terms with believers. I come from a religious family, some of whom I’m closer to than ever, and still connect with the aesthetics of my former faith; I speak on panels where it’s my job to get on with religious people, and I spent several years as part of an interfaith group; there’s also a small, dedicated group of churchgoers who like my work. A part of me still wants to be, be like or be liked by religious believers, and I could do well as a faitheist, rehearsing the platitudes from paragraph four—just as I could tell Christians what they want to hear on queer issues.

I’m more interested in saying what I think.

Yes, there are awful atheists; yes, plenty of believers are lovely: I’m intimately acquainted with both those facts, and I don’t spend my life fighting with them over beliefs. Being religious isn’t wicked on its own, and secular people aren’t necessarily better. Ditching faith wouldn’t solve all our problems—I doubt that ditching any one thing would, and there would be better candidates if I had to choose. But I don’t think any of this conflicts with the idea that overall, religious movements do more harm than good. If antitheism is the word we’re using for that, the only question that matters is this: if everyone on earth woke up an atheist, would the world be a better or worse place? For me the answer is better, and it doesn’t take me long to reach it. I don’t know how to say that in a palatable way—I don’t say it to be cruel or unkind—but there it is. It’s what seems true to me.

And I want to talk about things we say because they feel palatable.

I’m not okay with people believing whatever comforts them—not whose beliefs have consequences for other people, at any rate. (I don’t mean anyone on their deathbed.) I grew up with a single mum who’d careened through abusive marriages, who was homeless and penniless as soon as she got away from my dad. My mum became someone who sensed demons in her front room because when she had a breakdown, her only source of comfort was the church—and because every church has one or two people someone like that shouldn’t befriend. Even after her charismatic phase, she was emotionally unstable, and I spent most of my life hostage to her moods. The same was true of her theology: in twenty-three years, I never saw any system to what Mum believed—only that she believed things that felt good, whatever impact they had on my life. Give me a hardened literalist over a Christian like that any day. A fundamentalist’s ideas are always logical on some level, and anything with an inner logic can be controlled; believers whose faith changes shape depending how they feel are the most dangerous, and often the ones looking for comfort.

I’m also not just opposed to fundamentalism. For one thing, that word meant something before it was made synonymous with extremism. (There are Muslims whose beliefs mirror one version of protestantism. That’s not what IS are.) For another, any religion with enough followers is going to have extremists: those people are a feature, not a bug. And extremist styles of religion aren’t the only ones that hurt people. I was suicidal ten years ago, when my faith was an inoffensive, mainstream, traditional one—not because I thought queers went to hell, but because I thought letting people spit on me what was Jesus would do, and because I thought prayer was a good treatment for mental illness. Most damage done by religious beliefs doesn’t involve clinic shootings or suicide bombings: it happens in small, unremarked-on ways, in people’s health and finances and schools and sex lives and relationships, but if you could collect all the tears cried over it, you could put out every burning building on earth. Only critiquing fundamentalists might make for smoother relations with believers. It’s still a cop out, and an insult to people who went through what I did.

Having grown up inside the church, in a town with a dozen denominations and a family of many, I am in fact aware Christians differ, and that not all of them are Westboro. (Like most LGBT people who leave, I knew perfectly well that there were ‘affirming’ churches.) Here’s what believers don’t want to hear: the Westboro Baptist Church is one of the least pleasant Christian sects, but not one of the more dangerous ones. I’m willing to bet fewer queer youth killed themselves because of Fred Phelps than still do in strait-laced and respectable churches—churches like Leelah Alcorn’s, like Lizzie Lowe’s and like mine. We don’t die when cartoonish people hate on us: we die when churches say they welcome and love us, get us to entrust our wellbeing to them, then tell us to choose Jesus over sin, or that God loves trans people too much to let them be trans. Wie die in churches where queer topics are taboo—not out of vitriol, but out of uptight middle class anxiety. I’d love to critique evangelicals who kill us without being an antitheist, but if I believed in their god, I’d think the same as them.

And I’d love to agree that without religion, people who do harm in its name would act the same with other rationales. It’s just that it’s bullshit. Not everything believers do could be done in any other context—in a world without God, what does a child exorcism look like? We can’t travel to that world to run tests, so nobody who makes this claim has a receipt for it, but even then, this isn’t just counterfactual: it runs against the information we do have. We know that even when other factors are controlled for, religious change across generations prompts social change; we know new religious movements cause historical changes on their own; we know that in electorates worldwide, religion is a strong predictor of how people vote; we know religious conversions change people’s lives, and that when people leave religion, their lifestyles change dramatically. For people who claim it does the world good, religion’s whole value is predicated on its power to change behaviour. Why wouldn’t it be to blame for harmful changes?

When I hear people saying why they’re not antitheists—when I read tweets and Facebook statuses and blog posts and op-eds—these are the statements I’m used to hearing. None of them are useful statements. All of them are either irrelevant or wrong. I don’t think anyone who says these things is being insincere, but it wouldn’t surprise if they became things atheists said because they’re things believers like to hear, or feel like they might be. They’re delicate, diplomatic, sayable and politically correct. They’re not things I’m interested in saying. I understand—and, nowadays, share—desire for dialogue, but when believers decide they like me it’s because I don’t bullshit them. There are better ways to build bridges than dishonest arguments.

If this protocol really did inexorably guide every child into a more permanent medical transition, this period of extended consideration would not be standard clinical practice. This time specifically serves to identify those youth who will stop experiencing dysphoria and will not want to transition. While Julie Bindel and others may speculate at length about how they “might” have pursued a medical transition, there is every indication that even if they had ever received puberty blockers, they would have had ample opportunity to recognize that transitioning wasn’t what they wanted.

The other is a confrontation of one of the most galling behaviors of America’s next top misogynist, and the attitudes among men that he dangerously normalizes:

Men will often persist in these opinions for the rest of their life simply because they don’t know better and never learned otherwise. Donald Trump is what happens when that 14-year-old reaches age 70 without our society teaching him to do better. We end up with a man who chiefly seems to acquire sex via rape, a man who resembles a large hog that’s been stuffed in an ill-fitting suit and had its head shoved in a lint trap, a man who isn’t going to let any of that stop him from judging his accusers as too unattractive to be the target of his sexual predation.

Read more at Gender Analysis!

If you only follow my writing here, you may have noticed I’ve been quiet recently. In fact, I’ve busy at work for the last month. Over on Medium, I spent November writing a—vaguely—daily journal as an exercise to get back into the habit of publishing things. In a month when most people I know feared for their sanity, it helped my mental health enormously, and I’m planning to keep writing there in a similar format. That will involve some changes to how I manage being a writer, including the way I post on this blog, and you’ll know what those are as soon as I’ve figured them out. In the mean time, I’m sharing the entire journal here. Read as a single text, I think it comes out pretty well, and I’m glad I did it.

I. Performance Anxiety

If you know me, you probably also know I’ve struggled to write this year. Tempting as it is to blame 2016 and move on, there have been a lot of factors. I’ve found it hard to publish anything partly because since last summer I’ve had no address of my own; partly because my mental health, like most of my friends’, has been running low; partly because I’ve spent much of this year working through a history of parental abuse, and partly just because other things have sucked up my time. Lately it’s become a cycle: not having put it to use for a while, I seem to have lost my voice.

To an extent, the joke’s on me. I’m a self-saboteur. As anyone who’s hired me knows, I’m a relentless editor, and in my own writing it turns out that’s a stumbling block. In 2015 and early this year — follow the links above — I did some of my best writing, but since then I’ve feared publishing anything less good. Every idea has been a tough second album, and I’ve found myself unable to write beyond first paragraphs, scrolling back up to scourge imperfections. In What It Is, her graphic memoir about making art, U.S. cartoonist Lynda Barry writes:

Is this good? Does this suck? I’m not sure when those two questions became the only two questions I had about my work, or when making pictures and stories turned into something I called work — I just know I’d stopped enjoying it and instead began to dread it.

There, sans the grace of God, go I.

I’m trying to silence those two questions, at least for long enough to get things done. I’ve hit on a couple of strategies, the first of which involves going low-tech. I have a bad habit of trusting gadgetry to make me work, when retina displays and edit screens only make a blank page more terrifying. The allure of backspacing out bad lines has grown so strong that I’ve fought to write more than a hundred words per sitting, so, in an extreme step, I’ve gone back to writing pen-and-paper.

I have a journal now, hardback with finely ruled pages and a ribbon. It’s where I wrote the first version of this, now layered with scribbles and crossings-out. The permanence of a biro guarantees messiness, and feels more forgiving as a result. Certain artists, I’m told, work with charcoal because they’re forced to live with their mistakes. Ink is the same: on an immaculate white screen, I’d never have made it this far.

Then there’s the other thing: my writing muscles need a stretch. As with many vicious cycles, the only way forward is to accept a short-term cost. I’ve failed to put my best ideas to paper recently because I’ve been unable to write much to begin with, and I’m making peace with being in no fit state to produce miracles. For now I’m going to write what I can, regularly and for the sake of it. Most of the things I want to do can wait — at the moment, I want to learn to enjoy the writing process again.

For the next month, I’m going to try and post daily. I’m not focusing on doing my best-ever writing, and I’m not going to fuss about every post being the best it can be. I’ve worried in the past about things being long, neat and relevant enough, but this month I’m not going to try and Have Something To Say or cater to the news cycle; I’m certainly not going to pay attention to how many people read. I’m going to write whatever’s on my mind, and refuse to stress over it. I won’t be striving for journalism — I’ll just be journalling.

Having neglected it, I’m taking an intentional break from my main blog to do this. Posting daily and in this way isn’t something I expect to maintain post-November, so I want it to stand apart as something self-contained — on top of which, like a writer moving from desk to dining chair, I need a fresh workspace. I might not be publicising posts as much as normal, so if you want to keep up with things here, click to follow my posts on Medium next to my author blurb.

That’s all for now — with any luck, I’ll be back soon.

II. Feeling Good

I biroed fifteen hundred words today. The Mail turns out to have printed a piece about bisexual folk that’s done the rounds — my thoughts here — and employs tropes I want to talk about. I would have liked to get that done tonight, but even by journal-a-day standards I think it needs tidying up. That’ll be published tomorrow, so for now I’m just posting a progress report. (My current sleeping hours are late-running: if I’d been awake earlier I might have finished it, but the upside is that I’ll probably be back at work on it into the small hours.)

I’m having mixed emotions about getting so much done. Coming off months of inertia, just hitting publish on yesterday’s post was cathartic. That release put me in better spirits today than I’ve been in for far too long, which probably contributed to filling eight pages in the notebook. I’d like that to become a virtuous cycle, but I fear burnout. I’m also conscious of the fact that making myself not-obsess is hard. Tomorrow’s post is not the kind I expected I’d be writing this month — it’s longer for one thing, more tied to external events for another, and I’m putting it off till tomorrow because it needs more varnish than I thought posts in this journal would. If I were to try and post something like it every day, I think I’d fail quickly, but part of why I’m doing this is to make myself compromise. I expected there’d come a point when I had to choose production or perfection, and perhaps it just came sooner than planned.

Just typing this has been therapeutic — I’m learning to let go of detailed plans and fixed-length paragraphs. (Eight lines is my go-to: it’s about the same as a hundred words on Medium, which helps when writing to a word limit — but of course, I fixate.) I didn’t leave myself enough time to write this in the notebook, so I’ve typed it from scratch, something I haven’t been able to do with anything this length for far too long.

All told, I’m going with glass-half-full. The satisfaction of churning things out feels dangerous, something that could invite complacency, but for now I’m finding the joy of writing outweighs the fear of failure. There are worse ropes to walk, and worse anxieties.

III. Settling In

I’m still at work on the biphobia piece. On the one hand, I could feel bad about not having finished it. What’s nice is that I don’t. Yesterday I worried about it not being the kind of post I planned to write this month, but I’m realising spending longer than a day on it is helping me write these updates, which was the goal. At the same time, it’s just the sort of piece I couldn’t get past paragraph one on before. Thanks to doing this, I have fifteen hundred words of first draft and five hundred tidied-up. (It’s grown a bit since yesterday, becoming less of a response to the Mail and more of its own thing. There should be subsections — seductive things — in the final version and it’s got a first paragraph that doesn’t yet entirely earn its place, but which I like. There’s a darling I may or may not kill.)

The moral, I’ve decided, is to keep at what I’m doing. There’s a sense now of having found the right rhythm to settle in for the long haul, and I’m much less anxious than yesterday about continuing. (As of this post, we’re already a tenth of the way through the month.) There’s something extraordinarily freeing in writing about nothing: this post and yesterday’s feel like letters to myself, with any other reader’s presence quite beside the point. ‘I’m not having the public in to shows again,’ Stewart Lee says at the end of one set. I worry this will cease to be a joke.

While writing the long post, I’ve been thinking about bisexual history — where the explosion of bisexuality in young people stems from, how the b-word has been defined at different moments in the recent past, and how many early activists for gay rights might now identify as bi. That train of thought led me to dig up Carl Wittman’s ‘Gay Manifesto’, written the year of the Stonewall riots and published in 1970. Not all of it has stood up well to five decades of queer dialectic — ‘we are only at the beginning’, a disclaimer admits early on — but on the whole, it’s as vital as anything being printed now. (‘It’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten,’ remarks Wittman, writing in a socialist rag. Part way through a 2013 TED talk, Mads Ananda Lodahl echoes the line.) Toward the start of Wittman’s text, one finds the following.

Homosexuality is the capacity to love someone of the same sex. Bisexuality is good; it is the capacity to love people of either sex. The reason so few of us are bisexual is because society made such a big stink about homosexuality that we got forced into seeing ourselves as either straight or non-straight. Also, many gays got turned off to the ways men are supposed to act with women and vice-versa, which is pretty fucked-up. Gays will begin to turn on to women when 1) it’s something that we do because we want to, and not because we should, and 2) when women’s liberation changes the nature of heterosexual relationships.

We continue to call ourselves homosexual, not bisexual, even if we do make it with the opposite sex also … We’ll be gay until everyone has forgotten that it’s an issue. Then we’ll begin to be complete.

IV. Self Sabotage

It’s twenty-five past ten and I’m getting to work. My rule with this notebook is to post something by midnight. Yesterday I started at ten, Wednesday at nine thirty.

There’s a pattern I tend to fall into. (Other people do it as well, but I’m a chronic case.) If you’d flipped through my school exercise books, most of all maths, you’d have seen a steady decline in neatness from the first week of each term, until the last entry was a crumpled pencilstubbed mess. I’m like that with everything that involves effort, and particularly with timekeeping. A lot of academics say they’re procrastinators, but my habit at university to put things off later every week. The first essay for any given tutor was sent a day, perhaps two, before we met, the second the evening before and the third late at night. By Hilary of fourth year I was sitting down to type with an hour to go.

It turns out this is known as executive dysfunction. I stumbled through Oxford with severe undiagnosed mental illness: the upper second I left with could easily have been a first if I’d known what was wrong. I don’t particularly remember my three years there; what anecdotes I have are lampposts in low-hanging fog. Oxford is notoriously brutal on mental health — in second year, I got used to being woken at 4am by my own hands shaking — and several friends were formally punished for succumbing to stress and self-harming. In my first year, after a bout of depression culminated with me dropping a grade, a disciplinary meeting placed me on probation. (‘Other options’ were hinted at in ominous passing.) To my embarrassment, I still nurse a quiet grudge against that tutor. Then again, I suppose I hid things well. During the year I lived in a block of college-owned flats, the site manager said I’d impressed him: ‘I’ve never had you on suicide watch.’ There was, as I recall, an Excel sheet.

In the years since, I’ve learnt how to deal with being depressed. The new thing is anxiety. Since starting out with this journal, I’m noticing how often I’m anxious — particularly about work, or what passes for it. On Tuesday I was anxious about whether I’d write a first post; on Wednesday, about burning out. Yesterday’s post, about getting into the groove of things, wasn’t anxious, but now I’m worrying about letting the schedule slip. Noticing progressive lateness never helped remedy it in the past. I’d like to believe I’m invested enough by now to stick the month out — I certainly mean to — but I’ve given up second-guessing my own brain. At least I’m noticing the fear now. There’s a cliché about realising you have a problem, and on that front, I already feel somewhat better.

Ten to midnight. Phew.

V. After Class

I’m watching Class, the Doctor Who spin off by Patrick Ness. Like the creatures that roam his books, it’s a strange beast. Originally asked to write for Who, Ness has a gift for making the familiar sinister, and the series’ best asset is its mood. ‘Do you know the feeling of dread?’ one main character asks, referring both the night terrors stalking his sixth form and to adolescence itself. (‘Teen angst’, another asserts, ‘is a pejorative phrase.’)

There’s a lot wrong with Class: from the get go, it’s apparent that Ness, a novelist, hasn’t written television before. The pilot episode attempts to spin ten plates at once, something more feasible in print, while the best yet, a tale of grief and folk music set entirely at night, thrives on being pared down. Not all the main characters work: stretching the drama thin, there are six when there should be four or five. (We simply don’t spend enough time with Charlie, the awkward alien prince, for Greg Austin to portray shades of grey, so the character’s mood swings from caring to barbed feel forced.) For every zinger — these come thick and fast from Katherine Kelly’s anarchist — there’s a joke that doesn’t quite land. And yet.

I like Class mostly because I want to; critics seem to feel the same. Half way through series one, it has yet to make good on its premise, but the glimpses of what it wants to be deserve a second run. Ness is helped out by the wave of good will toward his show: between fans of his books and Whovians starved of a spin-off for five years — indeed, this year, of their main attraction — viewers want to see Class succeed. For now, I do as well.

If anything tempers my willingness to wait and see, it’s the choice to give an entire spin off to a writer with no TV credits. Unlike the cast of Class, almost all Doctor Who’s writers look much like Patrick Ness, who was approached after success in an industry that favours people like him: it’s hard to see the same trust being placed in an equally green woman or writer of colour. None of that diminishes his talent, or the quality of his show, but I wonder about the unmade spin-offs as good as Class or better.

I like it, though.

VI. Getting Out

When you come out, there are meant to be tears and piano chords. You’re meant to do it as a teenager: sit down with mum and dad and break the news, promise it wasn’t a choice, cry a bit. Then they’re meant to tell you they accept you — that it’s just who you are, and they’ve known for a while, and God didn’t make you this way to punish you. If they don’t disown you, they’re being wonderful, and you give them however long they need to deal with it. It’s best not to deviate from the script: you’re expected to be vulnerable. You’re not allowed to be complex.

Before ending contact, I never managed to come out — partly because it was never a secret I was queer, mostly because my mum was an emotionally abusive narcissist. When she did grill me over it, at ten and eleven and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty-one and twenty-two, I wasn’t cooperative; using the word queer was only part of that. I have a sexuality no one has ever been able to guess because most don’t know it exists; I do experience it as a choice and not a natural state; I find the line between heteronormative parenting and psychological abuse blurry, and I think coming out normalises erasure and commonly prioritises straight parents’ comfort over their queer kids’ safety. Also, I’m an atheist. Whoops.

I didn’t come out — I got out. The end of that relationship proved to be a respite from a parent who weaponised every vulnerability. When my mum told me gay people went to heaven, it felt like one more invalidation of my choice to exit her faith. When she told me she was okay with who I was — I hadn’t asked, though it was a step up from ‘what you are’ — it felt like an attempt to get close enough to hurt me. For a long time I felt guilty for keeping the queer side of me at arm’s length from my mum, ashamed of having felt vulnerable, even of having been ashamed. Recently, the most freeing realisation has been that being a demanding and impossible-to-talk-to queer — being queer at all under that roof — allowed me to carve out a space too alien for my abuser to enter.

I didn’t keep that from my mum because it made me vulnerable. It kept her out because it made me powerful.

VII. Copy Writing

I have a prurient habit: when in the mood to write, I retype things I admire. Scroll through my folder of unpublished drafts and you’ll find whole facsimiles of other people’s work, most recently a stretch from Zadie Smith’s new book about dancers and writing style. Further down are Jess Row’s New Republic essay about white novelists; the gay liberation pamphlet I quoted last Thursday; a five-part work of slash fiction by a fan of The Flash, and both the first and final drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’. (Writers are told to read widely. I like to think I do.)

I don’t know when I first did it or why — only that re-ingesting things this way helps me relax. It’s also made me pay more attention. The Internet’s endless distractions encourage skimming, but retyping an existing text requires you to read it closely; like wax on a headstone, it shows every contour. When I do it, I notice which lines jar in my own voice; punctuation marks I’d leave out; how no two writers sound the same and why each sounds the way they do. I think that’s made my own writing stronger. Then, of course, there’s geometry.

I pause here to note I’ve succumbed once again to eight-line paragraphs. (I’d broken free of them this month, but they’re seductive beasts.) Part of the pleasure of duplicating posts from other platforms is playing with the shape of them: seeing how Medium enjambs things differently, how paragraphs get remoulded. I’m frankly obsessed with all that, to a degree I doubt could be called neurotypical, and part of the allure of posting here is knowing where each line will end on being published. WordPress’s awkward edit screen can’t hold a candle to that thrill.

VIII. The Hellmouth

I’ve been nervous since late last night. Folding my laptop shut for bed, its calendar icon jumped out at me — reading, in tiny script, Nov 8.

I’m not from the US, but I have enough contacts there to have picked up the mood. Friends on Facebook have been posting all day, few of them really saying anything. Chatter like this must fill bunkers before bombs fall: having by now done all they can, people have nothing left to do but wait, and anything hurts less than the quiet. For the first time I can recall, the Internet sounds like a bunch of people on their phones. If everyone tweeting furiously were put in one hangar, you could hear a pin drop.

In the sequel to the first Ghostbusters, there’s a river of phlegm beneath under New York; venture too close and it’ll make you a danger to yourself and others. Throughout the film, the slime seeps up through pipes and pavement cracks, steering prams into roads and starting fights; eventually it coats entire buildings, a great reservoir of hate rising from under Manhattan. In the video for the movie’s theme, a certain billionaire strides out of his own tower. ‘Trump’, remarked Obama last month, ‘didn’t build the building himself. He just slapped his name on it and took credit for it. And that’s what’s happened in [his] party. All that bile — all the exaggeration, all the stuff that was not grounded in fact — just bubbled up.’

The Trump campaign is not best understood as politics. As successive debates made clear, politics isn’t what Trump is about. For his most hardened core of supporters — those who retweet their leader’s rants and were positively enthused by boasts about pussy-grabbing — Make America Great Again is about something deeper than goings-on at Washington, namely the urge to exhume every necrotic idea presumed to have been laid to rest last century. Trump is only the electoral face of a movement with many more, most of them equally bleach blonde; a byword for the promise that soon, very soon, no one will mind your confederate flag. You’ll be free to cheer the shootings of unarmed black kids and firebomb mosques, to drive women from public space in person or online, to call a cunt a cunt and a bitch a bitch and to resist the encroachment of faces unlike yours on TV and video games. In great-again America, no one will be prevented from speaking their mind — only from frowning when you do.

That movement won’t retreat after tonight. Even if Hillary Clinton routs Trump, you can’t kill an idea — or, if you can, someone can bring it back. When Trump’s supporters mounted a campaign against the Ghostbustersremake, it happened in the comment section of YouTube — till recently, a place where the net’s basest urges went to die. This year the pit under America sent something back, poison bubbling to the surface once more. In a few hours, we’ll know whether the slime has risen to the top.

IX. Twenty Sixteen

I’m sure you all have seen those electoral maps that have been floating around. You know the ones. The “If only men voted” and “If only women voted” maps that show landslides. These ones:

The thing about these maps? I’m not surprised. They reflect everything I’ve been taught about white cishet culture. Nor am I surprised about the #repealthe19th hashtag or whatever nonsense that’s evolved into. I mean really, should any of us be surprised by this?

I sometimes joke and say I knew I was a lesbian before I knew I was a woman, and this is something I’ve heard from a lot of trans people I’ve spoken to. And a large part of it is the same reasons I’m not surprised by those maps. I’ve never once identified with either half of a cishet couple in pop culture. They’re portrayed as inherently adversarial, as working against each other at least as often as with, as enemies who have managed to forge a peace treaty out of necessity rather than two people who actually want to be around each other. Hell, the only straight couple I’ve ever come close to identifying with is Gomez and Morticia Addams, and their whole schtick is being as weird and abnormal as possible. That’s what we write as horrifying and unnatural: a loving straight couple.

Contrast this with a lot of what you get from queer relationships in pop culture, which is usually subtext and fanfiction… And you get people who actually want to be around one another. People who have to work against those same cultural norms that force the cishet people together seemingly against their will half the time. That’s just always seemed more right to me, why would I ever date someone who worked against me any percent of the time?

And so I really have to ask this question of cishet white America: are you really surprised? You’ve built this culture, been taught this since you were young and started teaching it yourself. Men, are you surprised at how horrified the women around you are? Are you okay with that? With voting for someone who considers half the population disposable sex objects? I mean, the fact that they’re human beings makes it terrible enough but let’s go with that fox news caster logic that finally got some of them to admit this is horrific, the majority of you either plan to or are already going to spend the rest of your life with a woman, so why treat them like your enemies and not your partners? I don’t understand.

(If you’re going to #notallmen me you can fuck right off)

I haven’t written in a long time. Far too long. I always meant to start again but something inevitably would get in the way, usually my health. I’ve been hospitalized repeatedly, sometimes as frequently as three times in a month. I’ve dealt with pain and anxiety and depression. I’ve spent all my energy on trying to get better, but all that I’ve really accomplished is to hold off on getting too much worse.

I met Niki last year and very quickly felt close to her. As a couple of disabled women in activism we had a sort of connection that I very much appreciated. Going to Skepticon with her especially was a wonderful experience. We looked out for each other. Had a sort of sense of the little things that made big differences, the stuff that you just never can understand without having a chronic illness.

There’s one moment in particular that I keep replaying in my head. It was late on the drive back from Skepticon, after a huge weekend and probably ten hours at least in the car. We were at a rest stop for fuel and the bathroom. On the way out, she washed her hands, left her cane standing and took two steps to the hand dryer. I could see how excruciating for her it was, and recognized that look of regret when she knew it was two steps back to get her cane. I just whispered and asked her if she’d like me to move it next to her, and the nod and expression she gave spoke of such genuine relief.

Niki wrote. She wrote because it was important to her, because it made a difference to both her and the world around her, and she was amazing. And now I’m going to write, because it’s the most positive thing I can take away from this. I’m going to stop getting tripped up by hospital visits and several thousand page blog posts detailing my health care not being absolutely perfect. Writing is hard, but so is living with disability. She did both, and so will I.

Racism is shitty. It’s painful. Whether reinforcing stereotypes, tropes, or systems of inequality, it permeates American culture.  It affects us all. However, America has a problem with denial which causes a schism in dynamics. The Black reality of American racism is never far from discussion and it does not comport to the current Post-Racial Narrative. Our history and realities simply don’t reflect the view that many of our White colorblind counterparts wish we shared. And though argued in practice, form, and intensity, racism is still part of the American standard. This I assert as Person of Color, and a Black man in America.

Fortunately, social media has exposed many of you to the unfair hand of policing and you’ve endeavored to understand the terms bias, prejudice, and systematic racism. And within the context of our current political discourse, the cause and impact of Mass-Incarceration and “For Profit” Prisons systems, have affixed themselves to national dialog.

Yet, you’re finding it difficult to break through to your friends or family who can’t see what you now find as blatantly obvious. Or, you want to be a better ally, but struggle in place, tone, and visibility, where you are not the center of attention or focus. How do you make a difference when so much seems stacked against you? Small voice, big world. Although I don’t purport to know it all, these are a few small actionable steps I share with my diverse, interracial family and friends who are just becoming aware of these realities. It will not dismantle the system of inequality that drives this country apart while upholding a racial hierarchy, although that’s the harder conversation we must eventually endure. These are very small things that have impact as we navigate to that place in our history that will drive change.

1. Grow Thicker Skin

It doesn’t have to be brown like mine, but since childhood, many of us have become desensitized to American racism and coded racial attacks. I hear the whistles and take the barbs. I’ve been called a nigger by racists, profiled by police, stopped for driving the wrong car in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong part of town with the wrong colored woman. Lazy, dumb, criminal, thugs, and “not a cultural fit” are all terms I’ve learned to deflect or swallow. Many of you will never know that feeling and struggle with the effacement of pride to develop these callouses. Realize that verbal attacks have evolved. The term nigger-lover is no longer vogue. Even racists, don’t like being called racists anymore. Get comfortable with hearing that anti-cop or anti-racist is now anti-white (the new race traitor). Gone is sympathizer, replaced for the pejorative insult for all “SJW”.  You will be cajoled to do nothing, with appeals to suppress your White guilt, a term rooted in regression, not progress.  It is a term once used to protect post-war abolitionists from predation, now evolved to protect a majority controlled status quo. We resist change. That’s human. We do so by developing self-defense mechanisms to maintain this homeostatic environment. Expect resistance.

2. Empathize, check in, but don’t Always seek validation

Yes, you feel the pain. I accept that and don’t expect you to be cold and disconnected from our realities. White family members struggle with this in particular, when dealing with new Black relatives. How do you relate? We appreciate genuine concern, but understand that many of us get behind the wheel of a car and don’t know if that next “routine stop” is our last. The constant news of a terrorizing force is burdensome, yet its often the messenger that gets the blame. With that said, just as we’ve maintained or developed self-regulating systems to keep our own mental health in check, you have to develop yours. Check in at the counter, but don’t make a deposit. I’m carrying enough.

3. Try not to unfriend your racist friends and family

I can’t reach them. To maintain our selves from the effects of ignorant of bigoted babble, we often dismiss our opponents or minimize their voices. It’s frustrating. But how are you going to change their minds, even if just a little, if you’ve cut ties. And no, you don’t have to win them over, but I’ve seen change. A year ago people discussing police brutality as an aberration, are close to acknowledging that their “might” be a problem. That’s a step in a journey. Watch them take it. If they’re truly toxic, bump ’em. Don’t let them bring you down.

4. Don’t let it Stand

Casual racism keeps the ghost of Jim Crow alive. The jokes, comments, and attacks that hide cowardly behind the Second Amendment, should not stand unchallenged. It is your right to address them, just as it was their right to make the statement. Your accuser will call you PC, but I implore that understand that society self-regulates bad ideas. Your voice matters. It is the defense mechanism, work around it. And be careful with your language if you care. Yes, privilege checking works, but as a reminder and way to raise consciousness. “Checking” has become so reactionary, that it is often perceived just as dismissively as the offending comment.

5. Stop Sharing Fight Videos Depicting Black Violence

That is not our norm. Yes, it happens, just like it happens in any culture, but the current narrative we’re fighting is against the justification of killing a violent race. When you share those images with people that don’t have any other exposure to Black people, that’s what they’ll remember.

Shut that down.

6. Limit Graphic Videos Unnecessarily Depicting Black Death

Facebook is becoming the largest purveyor of Black Snuff films. I haven’t found a credible study yet showing the effect of these videos on Black self-imagery or the long term desensitizing effect on attitudes, but already I hear the casual dismissal of life. Don’t let that happen. When sharing be conscious of those you impact.

7. Buy Local (and buy Black)

This is a hard one for most Americans, including most Black people to do. Black owned businesses are not prevalent and their names can be deceptive. BET is no longer Black owned, so watching the HIP HOP or Lifetime Achievement Awards does NOT COUNT. The idea of buying from a specific race may seem inherently racist. However, when the argument of modern day racism comes up, we’re told it’s a “Class” thing or an “economic” thing and that racism itself does not exist. Well, if that’s true, then you’re just making an informed decision on where you invest to improve the living conditions of a specific hyper regional locale. Instead of only buying fair trade items from and overseas market, find ways of putting money back into those local communities. That helps revitalize depressed standards, increases opportunities which in turn decreases crime, which increases investment, which reciprocally provides those communities with power in the pursuit of self-determination. This has the biggest impact in generating financial leverage required for a political voice.  America will not remove money from politics. We need financially viable Empowerment. Republicans should love this strategy – its not a handout. Now, if you have a desire to give money instead of buying, there are charities that focus on Black education, first time family support and youth counseling, mentoring of Black youth, and great community outreach. You might have to partner with a church (due to limited access), but ensure transparency. Know where your dollar’s going.

Note:  Giving local can sometimes go further than monolithic national organizations that are subject to attack, deal with higher overhead, or have broad scope. Understand its a long game and success often grows slowly, plant your dollar locally. BLM is not the only group out there, and there are long standing locally managed community endeavors that need support.

8. Vote Local

Remember that if you want to change the policing policies and systems, you have to vote local. Becoming a low level police officer, doesn’t really do it. And by the time you’ve ascended, you’ve changed. Your Sheriffs, District Attorneys, etc., are locally elected. They answer to Mayors and Governors, the legislative branches. The demand for accountability of police BY police does not work. Holding police accountable, starts with first holding their bosses accountable. If you want to change the laws and exert the pressure required to change their inaction, it happens with the legislature.

Riding While Black:

9. Phone at the Ready

If you see something, don’t just say something, VIDEO and upload immediately. ,This might save a life. It’s becoming increasing likely that police may immediately come after your phone. We’ve let legislation slip regulating citizen help. Don’t let that happen. I love to see allies on the lines during protest, however I can’t ask you to take the bullet. You can be loud and visible. Making your presence known is ok in some instances. Be cautioned that some officers or statutes may hit you with an interference charge. Know your law.

10. Carpool

Offer your friend a ride. After the Terrence Cruthcer shooting my wife came to me in tears stating:

“As a woman living in America, I know fear. However, my biggest fear now is watching you, a Black man, walk out that door and never returning because a police officer decided it was your time. An expired registration she be a ticket, not a death sentence.

If your Black friend is shielded from police, this may assist in deescalating any particular situations or at least fuck with police aim. Also, make sure they chip in for gas. They wouldn’t get away with that with any of their Black friends.

Now, of course this is a very short list which only scratches the surface. There are hundreds of things you can do to help address racism. Whites make up nearly 70% of the population Blacks only 13%. In terms of visibility, you’ve got more access to change minds. Which brings me to stats, know your stats, but don’t get distracted by misleading ones that imply causation, when there is none. America hates math with a secondary disdain for science, but let a Black person get wrongfully shot by a police officer and everyone’s a data scientist correlating race and criminality, with no deference to context. Its a separate issue.

In addition, keep reading. Understand that school integration, happened within the lifetime of most of our parents. That’s Jim Crow’s age. Acting like it happened hundreds of years ago, is dishonest. Keep working, chipping, and when you’re ready to level up on the revolution, check back for more.

Alix

Here’s a thing that I’ve experienced a lot: I don’t want to intrude on someone else’s grief.

It’s funny because as Alyssa says, grief is one of the emotions that we all share. We all know that we’ll feel it. It is different every time but some day, every one of us will have the breath ripped out of us by the blow of someone’s loss. I don’t think that grief is owned by the handful of people someone loved the most. I think that we impact on one anothers’ lives in many ways. We feel each others presence, sometimes without even noticing it. And when we are gone, loss isn’t a zero-sum game.

I wasn’t as close to Niki as many of you were. I got to know her when I joined the Orbit before our launch. I always appreciated her voice, whether that be through her blog, her Facebook, or her contributions to our various backchannel chats. She was always the voice against caution- the person who’d speak up for doing what was right regardless of the consequence. Many of us, myself included, are more inclined to be swayed by our fears. For me, Niki was a counterpoint to that caution.

And now she’s gone, and I’m gonna have to figure out for myself how to be brave when I want to hide.

But that is where my sadness lies: it’s a regret that we never knew one another better or met in person. It’s an absence. I would never, ever compare this to what so many of you are going through.

It’s also an unfairness. How on earth are thirty-five years enough for a person to exist? To be? I’m just a couple of years younger than she was, and I feel like I’m just getting started. We’re supposed to have decades, aren’t we? We’re supposed to have twice thirty-five and more. Long, beautiful decades to live, share, create, love, play, and to fight for what matters to us. We’re supposed to have time to say goodbye at the end of it all.

And I guess, in a way, I feel profoundly grateful for that. How rare and precious is it to live in a time when we can expect most of the people around us to live to be old? To die with skin so wrinked and saggy that it’s almost impossible to recognise the young person we once were. How fucking beautiful is that?! Cause I look around at the people I love and I know that I’ve lived my life expecting- not just hoping, but expecting- that one day we’ll be old together.

And it’s hard to feel grateful for that without remembering that it’s not something we all get to expect. How the circumstances of our lives and our selves make the world a far more precarious place for some of us than for others. That that’s not just theory and it’s not abstract: it’s a reality that people like me can ignore if we choose to.

I don’t have a good way to wrap this up. I guess that’s appropriate.

But hello again, everyone. I guess it looks like I’m back.

Two years ago, I addressed cultural appropriation In Halloween costumes.

And one year ago, I addressed the bullshit Caitlyn Jenner costume for men.

“Gee, Niki”, you may wonder, “What are you gonna do for this year?”

(more…)

I’ll be livestreaming starting at 10am sharp, making an attempt at beating TMNT 1 for the NES with a ten hour timelimit. No glitches, no level select code, but I’ll be (sparingly) using save states on my way through to save my ass in case of issues (e.g. emulator crashes or other system issues, etc).

As this will be my first run at the game in 15 years, I’ll make use of maps so I don’t flounder too badly.

The things I do in service of science! All of this is a backer “reward” for our DIY Science Zone fundraising this year, for Geek Girl Con, where I’ll be running demonstrations on the game Zombie Dice and how know when to hold ’em (brains), know when to shamble away and know when to chomp.

Here’s the donation form. We bring science demos to kids on an all-volunteer basis, and the cost helps pay for this zone — without this annual fundraising, we couldn’t continue this excellent annual tradition of getting the kids who visit Geek Girl Con excited about STEM fields!

Embedded video stream may autoplay so I’m putting it below the fold!
(more…)

(more…)

So today I found myself in one of those Facebook conversations I despise: with the ignorant who want to remain as such.

(more…)

…or maybe I should say “Some lady”, but since Hillary’s age keeps getting brought up (did McCain get this much shit over his age when he ran?), I’ll roll with this.

(more…)

…Matt Forney! Chicago’s favorite woman-hating racist jackass!

(more…)

By D Frederick Sparks

In July, Hillary Clinton was criticized for not wearing an American flag pin while delivering her acceptance speech as the first woman nominee of a major political party, even though I recall a huge American Flag being projected on the large screen behind her.   Just a few weeks ago, Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas faced the wrath of social media patriots for not putting her hand over her heart during the playing of the national anthem.  Now, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has ignited a firestorm for his deliberate refusal to stand for the raising of the flag and the national anthem, which he explains was a protest against police brutality and other forms of persistent discrimination against African-Americans.

People who criticize what they see as disrespect to the symbols of patriotism endow these symbols with far-ranging meaning,  from the over-arching ideals of American freedom and democracy, to a love of one’s fellow citizens, to an appreciation for those who have served/do serve in the U.S. armed forces.

And that is exactly how symbols function.  They crystallize and communicate large concepts in a succinct and hopefully commonly understood manner.  And when those concepts have particular emotional reverence for people, then a sentimental attachment to those symbols naturally follows.

I can personally relate to this. As many other married couples do, my husband and I exchanged rings on our wedding day that we wear daily.  It is such a constant that most the time I don’t even notice it’s there, but one day a few months ago I realized it was gone.  I panicked and was immediately distressed, as I thought about the happiness of our wedding day and the degree to which the ring represented that.  I was relieved to find that it had slipped off and was nestled in the bed sheets.

But let’s say our wedding day was an unmitigated disaster, and our marriage was characterized by physical and emotional abuse , mistrust, and a lack of intimacy.  How much sense would it make at that point to feel the same emotional resonance around the ring? And it would certainly be absurd for me to place MORE importance on the ring than on the nuts and bolts of the relationship that it supposedly symbolizes.

And that’s exactly how I view those critics who are apoplectic about these instances of “disrespect’ for the flag and the anthem.  For those who say the flag represents our freedom, I say how do you feel about the fact that the state of North Carolina was caught red-handed attempting to make it more difficult for African-American voters to exercise their franchise? Have you expressed your outrage at the continued erosion of the 4th amendment protections against illegal search and seizure?  I am more concerned with the state of our actual freedoms than with the ceremonial deference presumptively owed the putative symbols of those freedoms.

The “disrespect for our troops” line of attack is equally facile.   Here’s how I think we should show respect for our troops:  1) Don’t risk their lives and limbs for bullshit reasons   2) Make sure they have everything they need when they return from combat.  Many veterans and active military members  are also speaking out on being used as pawns in the debate about the Kaepernick protest, with some parsing the difference between disagreeing with his stance and protecting his right to free speech, with others, particularly African-American soldiers, echoing their agreement with the issues he has attempted to highlight.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of symbols to represent cherished ideals.  But the symbols should not be fetishized to the point that the symbol receives more attention than the underlying realities associated with the symbol.

As part of the DIY Science Zone fundraising for Geek Girl Con, we set a number of fundraising goals wherein our amateur and professional scientists offer self-torture as incentive. This year I’ll be reprising my demos on randomness and probability, only this time I’ll be doing it in context of Zombie Dice, as a tie-in with the Gaming Zone. This is going to be a ton of fun! And brains. Lots of brains.

As part of our $1500 fundraising goal, I agreed to live-tweet Battlefield Earth. Whaaaaaat a stinker. A meandering mess of displays of every baser human instinct, written by that same guy who founded that one religion. You know the one.

A few Mock The Movie stalwarts voluntarily threw themselves on my pyre in solidarity. I am Hashtag-Blessed to find myself among such friends and/or fellow masochists.

Once the fundraiser hits $3000, this year I’ll be doing a twitch stream long-play of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES. I haven’t played it in at least fifteen years. I promise I’ll be rusty as hell and will likely die a lot. Hooray! If you want to help get us there, here’s the donation form. We bring science demos to kids on an all-volunteer basis, and the cost helps pay for this zone — without this annual fundraising, we couldn’t continue this excellent annual tradition of getting the kids who visit Geek Girl Con excited about STEM fields!

(more…)

Abortion may be illegal and unconstitutional ’round these parts, but it’s also an everyday thing that around one in three women (and other people with uteri) will do in their lives. I want to see it portrayed like that in movies. A part of life, nothing more or less. Abortion movies, movies with abortion as a plot point- never the same, because our lives aren’t ever the same. But always ordinary.

I had some suggestions:

UNDERCOVER ABORTIONISTS

Think 007, only better. Reproductive rights-ier.

Operating outside the law in a land where tyrannical governments ban the most basic healthcare (so we have tons of choices for where to film it), this band of suave, skilled medical professionals do what nobody else dares. Pursued by government officials on one side and anti-choice activists on the other, they risk imprisonment from one and being gunned down at any moment from the other. But they let nothing get in between them and doing what they know is right. Anonymous and unrecognised, they won’t stop until nobody is forced to keep a pregnancy against their will.

Will they manage to stay one step ahead of their pursuers? Will everyone make it out alive?

Come for the repro rights. Stay for the EXPLOSIONS and CAR CHASES and CLEVER DISGUISES and CODEWORDS.

and:

THE ROM COM

The Main Character meets the love of their life while they’re sitting awkwardly in the waiting room. They hit it off and bond over their Favourite Classic TV Show on Love Interest’s tiny phone. The exchange phone numbers and hit it off so well they start spending oodles of time together, sparks flying all over the place (maybe one of them is a mechanic). Everything is going marvellously until Protagonist’s Terrible Ex shows up, or Love Interest drastically misinterprets something Protagonist said. Will they get past the Obstacle and realise that the other is the One For Them? Of course they will!

And of course:

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, NO WAY AM I HAVING A BABY

A few days after Protagonist finds out that she’s pregnant, the Apocalypse strikes. Waking up into a world infested with the undead/destroyed by asteroids/taken over by aliens, she knows that she’ll have to do everything she can to survive. And she’ll have to get out of town. On her way, she stops by a shopping mall and grabs all the canned/dried food she can, a bunch of tools and supplies- and a small packet of pills. No way is she bringing a baby into this world- and besides, who can fight off the undead hordes with morning sickness?! Her trolley full, she is on her way out when the building starts to collapse/she’s spotted by the a troop of robot soldiers. Will she make it out alive? Who will she meet along the way? Will she find somewhere she can hole up for a few days while the pills do their magic? And how will the human race survive?

And of course, even more over on the original post. What abortion movies do you want someone to make?

I wrote this two years ago, on the third anniversary of my Nan’s death.  I want to share it with you all, because much as I would like to say I feel healed, I can’t. It’s been five years. I don’t think I can ever forgive that church for forcing so many things to be unsaid.

You see, when I think of my gran, I imagine sharing all the things I do with her and I know how proud she would be. I can imagine exactly how everyone in her town would know hopelessly-exaggerated versions of every achievement I’d made, and I can feel that secretly-delighted mortification of hearing them back after a few rounds through the grapevine. I know that she’d have been up at the Galas talking David Norris’s ears off whether he liked it or not, and that every newspaper article about derby or demonstrations where you could kind-of see the side of my face would be saved and shared with half the town. I know that, and despite the everpresent ache of missing, that knowledge buoys me up and leaves me feeling so loved. Even though she’s gone for so many years.

I think about my nan, though? I miss her so much. I think about how much I love her. How close I always felt to her. How I idolised her when I was a kid, and how I grew up and.. well, that never really changed. I never thought of her with anything other than love. But right in the middle of that love? Is the knowledge that even if she was still alive, I’d have to keep so much from her. I can’t imagine how she’d feel about the things that I do. I’d still keep so many of them from her.

Because I was afraid. I was afraid that words would leave my mouth meaning “here is how my heart is wired and where I find joy” and reach her ears as “I am broken and my heart is bent towards evil”.

There’s more. Here’s the rest.

This weekend was spent preparing to bring two new bunnies home! My friend’s French Angora gave birth to 10 healthy babies two months ago, and now – eight weeks old – they’re ready to be weaned and brought home!

The Hubby sits with two-week old Officer Hops and Becky with the Good Hair

A couple of weeks ago we began looking for hutches. We found a large hutch for sale on craigslist for $25. It had previously been used as a chicken coop and needed some work – stabilizing the legs, replacing the wood floorboards with 16g wire mesh, cleaning the heck out of it. (more…)

I promised you reposts while I’m on holiday, so reposts are what you will receive! This post- Boundaries, Thresholds and Love: why it’s time to take back ‘Bi’–  is extremely close to my heart. I’ve poured a lot of time and love into the bi+ community here where I live. I care deeply about how we create and constitute that community. This post is written especially for people within our nonmonosexual community, but it’s relevant for everyone.

I love ‘pan’ and ‘queer’. They’re fantastic words, and one of them is one of my absolute favourite words to describe myself. To put it in far more words: I am not arguing against the fact that there are a diversity of labels that people in the bi+ umbrella choose to use. We all have differing experiences, orientations, and ways of understanding these, and that is a damn good thing. But their use to the exclusion of bi comes from biphobia.

Let me phrase that again, with entirely different emphasis: Their use, to the exclusion of bi, comes from biphobia.

There are certain biphobic threads that I have noticed within pansexual/queer communities and discourse. Things you hear all the time. Things like:

“I’m not bi- I don’t see gender”

“I’m attracted to the person, not the body”

“Bisexuals are attracted to men and women, but I’m capable of loving all kinds of people”

It’s kind of painful to read/hear, to be honest. But, y’know something? I know what it feels like to say things like that. I used to say those things. All of them. They are, of course, all bullshit.

We all see gender- we’re bathed in gender, whether we like it or not, in every interaction we have with another person from the moment we’re born. It’s one thing to say that we don’t want to live in a world divided along coerced gendered lines. It’s another thing to blithely go about your life pretending that you already do. To do that only ignores the myriad of gendered ways in which all of us act towards ourselves and others. Saying that you don’t see gender just ’cause you can be attracted to people regardless of it isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card from doing the painful work of dismantling your own internalised misogynies and heteronormativities.

As for the second? People who are attracted to multiple genders are no more or less likely than monosexuals to have physical traits they find attractive. And the idea that physical attraction is somehow less valid than, or exclusive of, attraction to someone as a person is the height of sex-shaming. There is nothing shallow or meaningless about being physically attracted to people. And being physically attracted to someone doesn’t mean for a second that you can’t fancy the hell out of their brains as well.

As for the third one? We’ll get to that, but suffice it to say that bi+ communities haven’t been using the definition of bisexuality as meaning attraction to men and woman for a long time.

I said earlier that I’m not here to rag on people who use pan or queer. That’s not what this has been for- hell, I use one of them myself, and used the other for a long time as well. I’m talking about this because all of these statements come from a painful-as-hell place of internalised biphobia, and none of them will, in the long run, do a damn thing to make anyone’s situation better.

I love ‘pan’ and ‘queer’. They’re fantastic words, and one of them is one of my absolute favourite words to describe myself. To put it in far more words: I am not arguing against the fact that there are a diversity of labels that people in the bi+ umbrella choose to use. We all have differing experiences, orientations, and ways of understanding these, and that is a damn good thing. But their use to the exclusion of bi comes from biphobia.

Let me phrase that again, with entirely different emphasis: Their use, to the exclusion of bi, comes from biphobia.

There are certain biphobic threads that I have noticed within pansexual/queer communities and discourse. Things you hear all the time. Things like:

“I’m not bi- I don’t see gender”

“I’m attracted to the person, not the body”

“Bisexuals are attracted to men and women, but I’m capable of loving all kinds of people”

It’s kind of painful to read/hear, to be honest. But, y’know something? I know what it feels like to say things like that. I used to say those things. All of them. They are, of course, all bullshit.

We all see gender- we’re bathed in gender, whether we like it or not, in every interaction we have with another person from the moment we’re born. It’s one thing to say that we don’t want to live in a world divided along coerced gendered lines. It’s another thing to blithely go about your life pretending that you already do. To do that only ignores the myriad of gendered ways in which all of us act towards ourselves and others. Saying that you don’t see gender just ’cause you can be attracted to people regardless of it isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card from doing the painful work of dismantling your own internalised misogynies and heteronormativities.

As for the second? People who are attracted to multiple genders are no more or less likely than monosexuals to have physical traits they find attractive. And the idea that physical attraction is somehow less valid than, or exclusive of, attraction to someone as a person is the height of sex-shaming. There is nothing shallow or meaningless about being physically attracted to people. And being physically attracted to someone doesn’t mean for a second that you can’t fancy the hell out of their brains as well.

As for the third one? We’ll get to that, but suffice it to say that bi+ communities haven’t been using the definition of bisexuality as meaning attraction to men and woman for a long time.

I said earlier that I’m not here to rag on people who use pan or queer. That’s not what this has been for- hell, I use one of them myself, and used the other for a long time as well. I’m talking about this because all of these statements come from a painful-as-hell place of internalised biphobia, and none of them will, in the long run, do a damn thing to make anyone’s situation better.

Read the rest – I promise, it’s worth your while- and let me know what you think, right?

Photo by sermoa

Okay, so let’s start trying to get this archive back up to date. I have no idea how long it’ll be before I get all the transcripts up, but, here you are: Tough And Deadly, a Billy Blanks and Roddy Piper joint, brackets TM close brackets.

As this is their second outing together, they have apparently developed something of a rapport with one another that none of the mockers could help but appreciate. I recall this as being a fun movie and something of a palate cleanser after Ray Burks subjected me to Glitter.

Mock date August 6th, 2015.

(more…)

Fiery exchange on CNN. Frustrating to watch, yet socially relevant to the discussion on race in America. It embodies nearly every recent conversation on race and policing that I’ve seen since the emergence of the #BLM vs #anythingBUTBLM movements. It centers on the issue of Black Crime. There is usually an appeal to inherent Black criminality, hero worship, debasement of anyone that decries police brutality or authority, coupled with facts oft bereft of context to justify belief. This discussion plays out repeatedly in social media circles from the well-educated to the Google-informed.

Readers should note, that members on the CNN panel almost scream past each other with an inability to find the common ground, assuming they were looking for it. However, they were locked in America’s racial dance of blame, which exposed the real culprits behind some of the myopic statements in the video; pride, lack of context or evasion, and questionable motives.

I won’t do a full analysis of the video (link below), since it’s worth seeing yourself. However, as a Black man in America, I’d like to respond to the attack of inherent or biological Black criminality, which the video fails to address:

Yes, Blacks kill Blacks, just as Whites kill Whites, although at a higher rate, and intra-racial crime is a problem for everyone, though its trending downward. Unfortunately, sometimes race plays a factor in sentencing, use of force, freedom,  etc.., a la the swimming rapist guy. It’s unreasonable to believe a Black person, regardless of the color of the victim, would experience the same treatment when we have strong evidence to the contrary, hence the outcry of unequal justice. What is also true, is that Black and Brown neighborhoods have higher crime rates, except when controlled for income (the missing piece in the sketchy narrative the panelist paints). For example, though both are heavily populated by Blacks, Windsor Hills, CA’s crime stats don’t mirror Compton’s. If biology were the primary factor, we should expect to see similar stats, yet we do not. Humans are resilient and given opportunity and displacement, behaviors change. That’s why despite his colorful criminal past, Jay-Z is no longer slinging on a corner. Perhaps, crime might be a byproduct of socioeconomic status and lack of opportunity, rather than a function of race. Consider that when our species suffers from a lack of resources, not unlike other organisms, we become defensive and territorial, taking more aggressive postures. Humans, like other animals, do this as a challenge response that elicits an expected observable response, especially in young males. 

Race is not the causative factor, it is a confounding one.

Now, there is a conversation to be had about reducing crime to the point where police are no longer needed in Black communities. Sure. I’d welcome that, but first we might have to create organizations that focus on the Advancement of Colored People, reaching into Black communities getting them employed, educated, empowered, addressing some of the aforementioned socioeconomic ills, and the lingering racism, etc.. Except, that’s usually met with accusations of REVERSE racism or outright destruction, such as Rosewood or Black Wall Street. A conundrum.

Which brings us back to the issue of motivation. Without acknowledging or defining proper context, the argument can’t be fully examined for honest responses or solutions. However, what I’ve found is that many of the people we argue with, especially online, aren’t always interested in change. They’re just interested in being right.

Maybe those are additional facts might help you with your discussions. Regardless, remember there is always more to the story than just the numbers .

Context matters. Great Book Recommendation: “How to Lie with Statistics.”

I’ve just published an update and sequel to last year’s Gender Analysis episode “Trans Passing Tips for Cis People”, which explored how perception of gendered features can vary between individuals due to the influence of a number of documented factors. This episode examines further evidence for various biases in gender perception and attribution, and considers what this means for trans people in the context of widespread cis assumptions about “passing” and the intensifying debate on restrooms:

In everyday life, interactions between the expression and interpretation of gender are so diverse that whether someone “looks like a woman” isn’t always entirely predictable. This naïve model of gender perception treats gender as a property emitted from an individual, with all others as passive receivers who simply accept this expression at face value. Yet this is precisely backwards – expressions of gender are not objective and singular; they are subjective, interpretative, and multiple.

The same trans person, on the same day, with exactly the same appearance, can still have their gender read entirely differently depending on who’s looking at them. Why does this happen? At least in part, it’s because many of the variables involved here aren’t located within the one person being observed, but rather the multiple people observing them.

Keep reading at Gender Analysis >>

Tuesday after work marked my beginning of CONvergence 2016. Tuesday night I learned more about Cinema Rex couches than I ever thought I would know. Carpet powder, vacuuming, quality inspection, layout, the history of couch acquisition. Daymn, Cinema Rex has their shit together.

On Wednesday I had an opportunity to volunteer for three other groups that I’ve never worked with: Logistics (hauling heavy stuff), Connie’s Quantum Sandbox (helping organize the kids activity room. ALL the arts and crafts), and Programming (panel room layouts, floor taping). It was a solid day that started at 9:15am and ended around 5:30pm. Afterwards, dinner in the hotel bar with, and then back home to pack up clothes, costumes, board games and bourbon.

I’m participating in eight panels this year (lolsob).

Thursday
*Balloon Hovercraft Activity
*Scotch and Cigars

Friday
*Oddities of Animal Transport
*Our Favorite Board Games

Saturday
*Road Tripping the Light Fantastic
*Face Value: The Truth is Trickier Than You Thought
*Space Plague and Goblin Pox

Sunday
*Sense8

The full schedule with panel descriptions can be found here.

It’s worth noting that my Friday, Saturday and Sunday panels are all 9:30am panels, which is the “early” panel. I also managed to draw a 11:30pm Saturday night panel, which is the latest panel one can have. That there’s some timing magic. I like my Thursday lineup. I think I should invite the kids from the Balloon Hovercraft Activity to the Scotch and Cigars panel. I joke, but that’s one of the things that I love about CONvergence – there’s something for everyone and for kids of all ages.

I’ll also be hanging around in the Skepchick Party Room and volunteering around con all weekend. If you’re going to be there, I hope you have a wonderful time! I look forward to seeing all of you nerds.

Eeeeee! New laptop acquired!

It’s pretty, too.

I went with an ASUS Q553 PC Notebook this time around. I’m managing my way around Windows 10 (a moment of silence for Photo Gallery and I’ve yet to figure out how to resize photos within W10. Hello Paint, my old friend). I’ve managed to sign into the most popular of all of my websites. I’ve adequately convinced both Origin and Steam that I actually own the games that I’d purchased on my other computer AND I’ve been able to open them and confirm that all of my saves carried over.

And here’s my latest submission to Powderhorn365. It’s not up on the website yet, so you get the sneak peak of the newest photo in this year’s record!

Rainy Day Walk in the Park

These two shared an umbrella for a drizzly stroll through Powderhorn Park on Saturday.

Except for in the minds of math denialists, the democratic primary battle is over. Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, and supporters of Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders himself, will decide whether they support her in the upcoming general election contest against Donald Trump.

This primary battle has been fascinating for a number of reasons. What stands out for me is the degree to which demographic patterns of voter support have been consistent. Demographic based projections such as those employed by Benchmark Politics have proven more accurate than any polls or polls based analysis concerning the results of primaries and caucuses. With few exceptions, Clinton has won states with higher levels of nonwhite voters, particularly African Americans, and Sanders has won states that are overwhelmingly white.

The 2008 democratic primaries also followed some demographic patterns. President Obama certainly benefited from high black population states; in fact, his Super Tuesday victories in the South sealed the nomination for him. But Obama also won states like Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Idaho, and lost New York, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio. So with no black candidate in the race, surprisingly the 2016 contest is more racially polarized in terms whom voters support than the 2008 contest was. But in any event it is justifiable to say that Sanders support is largely white male and Clinton has been buoyed by people of color. It doesn’t “erase” any of the women or people of color who support Sanders to state that numerical and statistical fact. It is a valid generalization supported by empirical evidence.

And this occurs underneath a Sanders campaign that has elevated the social discourse about income equality. People who would have rarely used the words oligarch or establishment a year ago now use them quite frequently in social media postings. And whether or not you support Bernie Sanders has become a litmus test for whether or not you get the real story behind economic inequality or whether you are just another establishment supporting stooge.

This ends up resulting in the amusing proposition that white men are the backbone of the political revolution against income inequality and are carrying this out by supporting the candidacy of a white man, and all these people of color who haven’t Felt the Bern just don’t get it. Amusing, because I think most white left progressives have a huge blind spot when it comes to the reality of race and inequality.

America isn’t Russia or any European country; American income inequality is specifically rooted in American racism. It isn’t something that will resolve itself once you address income inequality. It is part and parcel and has to be addressed before there is any hope of a “political revolution” against inequality.

In a 2014 interview Bernie Sanders stated that working class whites were the largest voting bloc, and therefore if they could be brought into the liberal fold, you would have your political revolution. The problem with this is it skips over the reason they are not in the fold in the first place…their own racism. Working class whites abandoned the democratic party because of the Civil Rights Act and the infamous “southern strategy”. Working class whites opposed attempts at “socialized medicine” that would have integrated southern hospitals.

And exactly what “fold” are you bringing them into? Right now, particularly within the context of democratic party politics, that fold is anchored by African American women voters, and anyone planning on launching his political revolution from the base of the democratic party really should have known that. You cannot bring working class whites into a fold of black women and other minorities without confronting the racism of working class whites. The racial resentment of many working class whites is strong enough that they’d rather see no one with things like free college than to see black people benefit from such a thing.  

Sanders and other white progressives have long been challenged on this by people of color, but as Sikivu Hutchinson noted, Sanders and his ilk have longed disdained any inter-sectional analysis on race and income inequality.   Sanders isn’t immune to these kind of racial blind spots because he participated in protests against housing discrimination in the 1960s.   The more I talk to people of color and women who have long been involved in liberal politics, the more they confirm that white male left progressives can exhibit as much racial arrogance and misogyny as their conservative counterparts.

This blind spot, not being able to see these things because they don’t have to, is why I find it highly unlikely that white male left progressives are going to be the ones who identify and anoint the messianic figure in American politics who will lead the revolution against inequality. And if I had to wager, I wouldn’t put my money on said messianic figure being a privileged white male from the Northeast. I’d put my money on a black woman from the south or a Latina from the Southwest, someone who on an ontological and inter-sectional level understands the various power paradigms that contribute to unfairness in this country and can competently speak to and address all of them, and not just get fixated on one.

She is America’s grand chef,  adding diverse ingredients to her melting pot, dishing out a bowl of “welcome” to those who would brave her shores.  However, as a Person of Color in America, experiencing a clouded confluence of historical and racial factors, and divergent realities, this beautifully aged  sculpture shifts form, from the cooper embodiment of freedom to a garish specter of political expedience. A tool opposing the freedom she once represented.

Her sight produces a tumultuous and unsettling feeling in me.

Every politician gets a piece, pimping her out to sell their message. ‘Merica. They’ve turned her out for political gain. When does her servitude end? How far is her release?

On my last trip to NYC, I got a chance to visit her and pen the following:

Liberty’s Burden

Cemented on an island of slaves,
Where she learned to behave,
Trading silence for a Green Card,
Walled Streets keep her etched message at bay.
Cries of freedom from asphalt fields,
Where my brokered ancestors were lost in trade,
Behind the concrete mountainside,
Where Garner died,
He choked on freedom, her Blue defenders say.

When my shrouded azure eyes,
Expressed themselves in my daughters’ DNA,
Revealed a shared story of violation, that we hide,
an unspoken secret of the modern slave.
The promises I make to her in trade,
for coinage and salvation
Stained Greenbacks from a lying nation,
Celestial acres and a mule,
Trumpet a metaphorical revelation,
that the Verdigris master who we idealize,
is herself, a slave.

Unspoken endorsement of sacred text sustaining our oppression,
Imposing the artificial borders that restrict our connection,
Unable to scream about our lives’ intersection,
She enforces her master’s series of “distinguished” restrictions.
From constitutional fallacies to dogmatic lies,
Eliciting fear of the commonality we call humanity.
While othering the nonconforming profiles of anyone not White,
Cis-Gendered, and Christian,
Success that is mostly chattel driven,
As the Overseer binding free speech to inaction, restriction.

“Give me your tired”, they’ve been here I say,
But address the innocence you’ve allowed slain in His name.
Torching morality, telling me I am complicit,
because I do not listen,
Lying by omission,
That we are a Nation that always refuses,
from civil war to civil rights,
we have died undoing your Master’s Restrictions.

Can we set free the one slave that America’s Beast would save to maintain the unraveling shroud of progress, she once represented to “some”?
Evidence her crown’s debasement into talking points for politicians,
Now a galvanized symbol of our accepted restriction,
Then strip away rays from her pluralistic benediction,
Until the day, we all bear the torch of her lost mission.

Marie, one day you shall be free.

Note: Marie Bartholdi is the person the Statue was modeled.

Sometimes it feels like I just don’t belong. I can talk to colleagues that are Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, etc., and except for that whole atheist thing, they understand me. Controversy free. We are separated by language, but on issues of equality, they usually find a way to understand. They may not agree, but on occasion they get it, even the church folk. However, that whole atheist thing can be a problem. Its a big hurdle for many of them to overcome, so I’m usually dismissed, then dammed on issues of morality, even though we seek similar strides in freedoms. That one controversial thing, oblongs me into the clichéd peg that just won’t fit.

Then when I find myself in a sea of atheists, I experience a similar phenomenon. I can talk using a shared language of exonerated godlessness, and except for that whole black thing, they understand me. Controversy free. Yet, in the same vein, part of who I am is denied, leaving me less than whole, and somehow, that one controversial thing, makes me again, not fit.

Circumnavigating those repellant poles makes it hard to find the right crew to flock with, especially when I really still am a duck. My identity overlaps, intersects, and is unique, but what I share with both I can not bridge. Hence, it is my hold on both, that takes flight.

What I learned during my initial hazing into atheism is that being Black really wasn’t an issue. Not entirely. It helps. And as long as you’re willing to graduate from Invisible to Token, it shows others that the community is inclusive, somehow diverse, and better than the gaggle that we so desperately fail to not reflect.

But when I consciously ‘state’ that I am Black, then the problem appears, ruffling every stunted, malformed YouTube jockey’s quill. I’m indicted, labeled as complicit in America’s racism, even though in honesty, I am a mere second and a-half party observer.  My legacy isn’t rooted in America’s Slave trade, its rooted in the French. I am an immigrant, who’s port of entry was by way of America’s financial slave hub, New York City, not the urban plantation.  I am Sowell’s mythic model minority realized.

My family escaped the preexisting narrative of the American Negro, having missed decades of Black devaluation, medical experimentation, forced segregation, and concrete housing reservations, where hunger continues to be used as a political tool to feed voting booths. I have not land, nor direct ancestral loss in this nation, nor am I a recurring generational victim as some suggest. Of those that would be thankful for the sacrifice of the fallen I am one. But again, I’m different, because I would not silence myself from the observable injustices. And my pride is not at stake, neither is my hypersensitive nationalism.  In retrospect, perhaps it is the fear from those injustices befalling me, that propelled my own successes. It is that unspoken choking hand that provides the muted responses of the voices of the millions like me, who say nothing against evil. Or worse, it lends itself to the megaphone of those that tout their own rugged independent successes as proof that no other disadvantages exist. Evidence be damned. Their dissonance fed by the same watering hole that gluts the other’s faith.

“If you’re a white, evangelical, Republican, you are less likely to think race is a problem, but more likely to think you are a victim of reverse racism. You are also less convinced that people of color are socially disadvantaged… This dilemma demonstrates that those supposedly most equipped for reconciliation do not see the need for it. – Barna

I sully my hands delivering a truth that I do not own, as a social justice sojourner, gifting in good faith responses that should’ve bridged understanding. And for  my remuneration, I’m called a sell out, again.  Damn, they sure as hell can make it clear that my kind really isn’t wanted here, yet in the same sputtering breath, stand as dumfounded cocks wondering why they can’t seem to attract a stray feather. You can’t say you want diversity, then do everything in your power to prevent it.

I recently did an interview with Seth Andrews, The Thinking Atheist (link below). We covered everything from race, religion, and other things in the year of the Trump. Nothing too controversial, except for the community that amusingly hijacks Seth’s moniker as their own. It took less than 24 hours for the comment section and my inbox to show me why so many Atheists of Color don’t feel welcomed in “this” community. I’ve spent 5 years of my life traveling the country giving talks addressing the recurring question “How can we make the Atheist community more diverse?”

And I think I’m ready to append that talk with a bit of  show and tell. You may not agree with my observations, everyone brings biases when examining social problems. But read the comments section (with caution) and understand that for many Atheist of Color, when branching out for the first time, these online resources are their first exposures.

You can call this duckling controversial all you want, but its the ugly in the comments section that should concern you.

The First in Family Humanist Scholarship: Four $1,000 scholarships are awarded to high school youth to assist with their tuition, room and board, books, and other academic resources. This award is available to anyone who attends the Los Angeles Unified School District and are accepted into two or four-year colleges regardless of if they are religions or not. Preference is given to students of color (Black/African American, Latino(a), Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American) who are (or have been) in foster care, homeless, undocumented and/or LGBTQ (system involved youth applicants are also welcome).

The Freedom From Religion Foundation Catherine Fahringer Memorial Scholarship: Four $2,500 scholarships are awarded to high school youth to assist with their tuition, room and board, books, and other academic resources. This award is available to high school youth who live in the U.S. who identify as atheist, agnostic, humanist and/or secular, and are accepted into two or four-year colleges. Preference is given to students of color (Black/African American, Latino(a), Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American).

These awards are made possible through the support of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and various members of the atheist/secular community.  Please pass on the information to eligible students!

Online and pdf versions of the application are available here.