Category: navel gazing

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From the Rubble: Notes on How To Do This (or Not)

There are things I could be doing, like re organizing my house or doing a spring cleaning; I could be exercising every day or teaching myself to make scones. I could try on all my clothes and get rid of things that don’t fit or are ripped or stained. I could create a podcast or make videos with my partner or create anything, but anything, useful.

I could be distracting myself with bad TV or clever memes or parody songs that replace the original lyrics with lyrics about Covid. 

I could be sewing masks but I can’t sew and I could be prepping a syllabus and online teaching resources but I’m not teaching this spring. 

I am pretty certain I will be leaving social media in a minute; the joking all seems inappropriate, and I’m sick of this culture that laughs and snarks at everything, that craves distraction above all else. We’ve done it a million times with school shootings and hurricanes and it’s all stupid. Sorry, but it is.

We need to sit with this grief, with the grief of people having to die alone who shouldn’t be dying at all. 

Maybe just I do, and a few of you out there who are more meditative, the people who are scared, the people who need to breathe in this new reality. We have let too many moments pass where we got angry and posted things and made jokes and went back to Netflix. We’ve let school aged children die and done nothing. 

This whole culture is a death cult with no appreciation for grief. 

And I’m done, I’m stepping out of it. I need instead to slow down, to find what genuinely brings me joy.

Every night when I go to bed my 5 year old miracle of a cat – she was gifted me by the universe so I could withstand the pain of my mother’s death – cuddles with me, purrs so loudly I can feel it in my organs, and cleans my face. I cry, she cleans. She teaches me what it means to be near someone, to hold their feelings. She is, luckily, a big strong cat, our house panther, who plays otherwise all day. One of my students would marry her if she were human, and for good reason. She knows how to live and how to love and how to pay attention to how people are doing. I really couldn’t be more lucky.

On the other hand I live with a partner who makes me laugh and who appreciates long hours of no talking. She is there in an entirely different way: she goes to get things. She makes art. She reads the news. She lets me sleep and she reads on the couch. We have been together 20 years and I am thankful for that, too: we are not ironing out how to be together. We have been together through so many things and we know how we are, how we argue, who gets impatient with what. She remembers to buy kielbasa because it’s a stupid pleasure that makes me happy. 

I have these things, this wife, these cats, this home, books, Sims, writing. I have gummi bears and girl scout cookies, a freezer full of bread. I have tea and milk and too many clothes. I really do wonder why I have so many clothes. 

I have these things: my secular faith in science and smart people, my love for my hometown, earnestness, food, and music. I have the ability to sit still, to be quiet, to listen to the robins at 4am singing, singing so loud then, talking to each other across the street like the Italians singing across courtyards.

And yes, I have Netflix. I am rewatching the original CSI because it’s familiar and because, to be honest, it’s an entire show about scientists trying to find the truth and bring some justice. I know all the science is terrible, promise: I really just needed some Gil Grissom in my life.  

I know so many of you are frantic and beside yourself with fear and anxiety and boredom and what I’m trying to say, with love, is that distraction and snark may not help at all and may, in fact, be making things worse. Not for all of you. Some of you, who work in the trenches with queer grief, at hospitals, in other places where life and death are constant and immutable, need whatever glamour and humor you can find. 

I’m not surprised to hear from so many friends that cooking is what’s keeping them sane, that sharing a meal with family is what works for them. In today’s update, Cuomo talked about the Italian family dinner, and joked too that it’s never been about the food. I grew up like that too: we had family meals every night that everyone was expected to join. We took no phone calls, watched no TV; sometimes music, on the radio, but low so conversation could take center stage. I’m thankful for it; those traditions grounded me in ways I didn’t acknowledge at the time, and more than once, like Cuomo, I resented them for what I was missing because I had to eat with my family, the same way we’re all resenting all the things we were supposed to do that we’re not doing anymore because of Covid. But like that family meal, this invitation to slow down and shut up and feel things could be a way to grow roots, to find out that you are far more than you know yourself to be. 

What I’m encouraging you to do is this: make a list. Read a book that’s beyond your usual. Watch documentaries. Learn things. Cook, sew, walk. 

But try to live in a way, for a minute, that respects the grief in the world right now. Thousands of souls in this country alone, and thousands in other places are already gone. All the overcrowded cities of the world will be inundated with grief. Find a space in your life, or a time in the day, to sit with that, to feel that sadness, to send whatever love you have for the world back into it. 

If you truly need to be distracted, go ahead. But I want to ask you if you’ve even asked yourself if you do, or if you’re just caught up in a culture that demands it. Really, genuinely ask yourself if your anxiety isn’t worse because of it. Ask yourself if spending time doing yoga, or cooking, or reading, or just staring out the goddamn window at the robins and squirrels isn’t what you need more. Just try something else. Self care is not about disposable feelings, after all; it’s about the big deep revelations that change the way you live, what you value, who you love, how you love them. It’s about creating an existence that is humane, whole, and compassionate. 

Calamity like this brings potent change. I am not very good at change and so I need more time to think, to ready myself, to let go of the old expectations. Things can’t go on the way they’ve been going. The idea that we all want to go back to normal – this normal that includes laughing at ridiculous, hateful, ignorant people, this normal that lets marginalized people die, this normal that provides no guarantee of healthcare, this normal that measures our value by the size of our bank accounts. 

Well fuck that normal we’ve left behind. It wasn’t good or healthy for any of us. Pick from the rubble what’s real, what holds you, what brings out your best self. Leave the rest behind.

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Not 1 in 6 (Excerpt)

I’ve got a piece up on Patreon that I wrote last week in response to the Kavanaugh interview, by which I’m thoroughly disgusted.

When will we get to the point where we believe women?

They say “1 in 6,” but I don’t believe them. The numbers are much, much higher.

I believe that because almost no woman I know who has been raped has pressed charges. Maybe they went to therapy. Maybe they wrote about it. But none of them – zero – reported it or pressed charges.

When or if they talk about it one or two things is true: (1) they didn’t know it was rape at the time – and maybe even don’t while they’re talking about it, and (2) it had been years since it happened.

That’s why we believe her.

Because women all know the women who were groomed, the girls raped as children, the so-called slut in high school who was raped (which was, of course, what made her a slut, because that’s how this shit works), the woman who went to an interview before or after regular business hours, the woman who went to a male friend after being raped by a boyfriend, who was then also raped by the friend (or vice versa), the woman who told her dad and who was punished for it, the woman who.

Later in the piece, I talk about what it’s like to be a woman who has not been raped.

So let me make it clear to the doubters, for the men who don’t believe, for the men who think all rape is caused by boys who are “too drunk” to hear the word “no,” who think most men are good men who don’t communicate well, and that men want to protect their mothers and daughters and wives, and for the women who think it’s something other women are bringing on themselves: Not so fast. Rape is such a common experience of women that I have spent most of my life feeling categorically different from other women because I never was.

Let me repeat that: Not having been raped makes me feel like I’m not the same as other women. The only other thing that makes me feel categorically different from other women is the desire to have children (whether or not they have) because I never wanted my own.

Please call your senators and tell them to vote against this rapist.

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Hanne Blank’s Reasons Not to Quit

The incredible Hanne Blank has been writing a Reason Not to Quit daily for more than a year now. It’s an amazing project, and every time I see one it makes my heart sing a little.

Here are a few I love (but they’re all pretty genius):

  • Reasons Not to Quit #560: I’m not quitting today and I hope you’ll join me.
  • Reasons Not to Quit #558: Love is a verb.
  • Reasons Not to Quit #555: So many ways to fight jackassery, so little time.
  • Reasons not to quit #200: If I can find 200 consecutive Reasons Not To Quit, you can find one too
  • Reasons not to quit #191: It is astonishing how rarely the universe collapses if we leave that one thing to be finished later.
  • Reasons not to quit #117: Confound the expectations of everyone who ever underestimated you.
  • Reasons not to quit #109: Some days, white-hot bitchery and pettiness is what it takes to keep
    you going and some days, that’s a-ok.
  • Reasons not to quit #101: Think of a nemesis of your choice. Outlast them.
  • Reasons Not to Quit #549: There is some way you can help, today. Go find it and do it.
  • Reasons Not to Quit #538: Every time I start feeling ashamed of crying I tell myself firmly that from one perspective, humans are basically highly sophisticated devices for moving water from one place to another and I’m just doing my job.

You can support her – and read these as she writes them – by joining her on Patreon.

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Giving Thanks

Here is the day of giving thanks, and I know so many of you are exhausted or disgusted or both, but I feel so profoundly appreciative despite my sadness and frustration and honestly, my outright expectation of gloom, that I needed to note the things in the world that don’t suck.

First, to my mom and grandma who cooked and cleaned and managed the shit out of Thanksgiving Day for my giant family, extended family, invited and loved guests, and anyone who dined at our table. I didn’t know then how much you gave or how much it was worth, and I’m profoundly indebted to your graciousness and service. So many Thanksgivings, so many complicated memories, and they were all inspired and built on the work you did. I can’t even comprehend your beauty or your motivation.

To my queer community, who know firsthand what brutal times we’re living in, and who go on, every goddamn day, to bring peace and light and less shame to all of the souls in this world: thank you for your leadership, your guidance, and your friendship.

My friends of color: you bring all of the things all of the time and I don’t really understand how or why, but you do, and you are life. Thank you.

To my fellow politicos, who run for office or who get out the vote or who do whatever you think is right for our democracy (whatever of it still exists), thank you for believing in a system that so often doesn’t seem up to your faith in it.

My wife, of course, because she is magical and kind of like a unicorn except when she’s a beautiful, tired, exhausted draft horse who just keeps on keeping on and brings joy to everyone who sees her and knows her.

To my fellow artists who seek truth and beauty and honesty and decadence and all the other things that are good in this world — especially those things that aren’t recognized as good at all.

To my students, present and past and future: thank you for worrying about me. When nothing else seems real, your respect for me and what I do absolutely does.

Thank you to the trans community for never, ever pretending not to be broken. You have no idea what you’ve meant to me. With every moment of clarity, of loneliness, of euphoria and sadness, you bring something incredible to the world, to my world. Thank you for trusting me.

Right now I am thankful for anyone who understands that kindness is power, that truth is difficult, that being who you are and what you are is both the most complicated and liberating thing in the world.

Do the good thing, do the kind thing, do the just thing. And every day give thanks that you can.

Love to you all.

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A Year

Last year on May 19th, my mom died at the age of 86 on what would have been my father’s 88th birthday.

Here they are being about as much as a 1950s couple from Brooklyn it is possible to be.

I miss them both so much.

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The First Year Without

I was going to wait to post this on the first anniversary of my mother’s death, but I know so many of you out there who are missing your moms today – whether it’s your first mother’s day without her or your 20th – so I wanted to share this to say: I see you. I know. I’m not really sure how I’ve survived this year but you fellow sufferers have been particularly helpful. A special big bunch of love to Ade & Hanna for having been so tender with me.

You don’t always make the best decisions in the wake of a death. Sometimes you have sex with someone you’ll never have sex with again because it seems like he right thing to do. You might drink too much. You might spend too much money on clothes or dye your hair a new color or get a tattoo. You might decide you’re working in the wrong industry all together and quit your job or move clear across the country.

You might sit in your room at 3AM and watch Deep Space 9 for 4 hours solid.

You might wonder about that guy you dumped 25 years ago and wonder, too, how it was you managed to keep sleeping with him despite your inability to agree with him about anything and realize you haven’t had sex that good since then. Nearly, in some instances, but not.

You might surprise yourself by spending an hour digging out your middle school yearbook only to remember when you’re shoulder deep in boxes sitting half in and half out of your closet that you lost that particular yearbook years ago.

You might wonder if your mom got buried with that ring she found that she was convinced he’d bought her for Christmas that year but that you were convinced he’d bought for their 60th anniversary which he didn’t make it to.

You wonder whether or not you will be younger or older than your mother when she gave up on living.

You wonder how it is she didn’t remember the entire year after her husband died, and you wonder if you’ll remember this year that’s now ending. You are pretty sure you don’t want to.

You stop dead in the street when you see a cardinal in a tree. You try to remember what that means and in what culture it means it. It’s a sign that your loved one is nearby, but is that in some symbolic sense, or is the cardinal supposed to be some reincarnated version of your loved one? Are cardinals always representatives of dead people, or are they just birds sometimes? Because I live where they live so either I’m being plagued by dead people or it’s just spring where I live.

You eat whatever you feel like eating. A muffin for dinner seems reasonable. A turkey pot pie for breakfast is also reasonable.

You work out in a regimented, unenthusiastic way but discover after four weeks that you can actually do 100 pushups, that it worked, but you don’t really care of feel any sense of accomplishment.

You feel disposable.

You wonder when someone tells you that you look beautiful whether or not they can tell you’re dead inside, too, or if being dead inside is part of what makes you beautiful.

You remember every disappointment, every betrayal; every loss from a death reminds you of 15 other losses; that guy who said he’d be there for you but who wasn’t there for you once you weren’t sleeping with him, OR the guy who was there for you but who wasn’t after he realized you wanted to sleep with him.

You save muffin wrappers for your old cat who has discovered an explicable joy in muffin wrapper licking.

You drink too much.

You wonder if you think about your mom being dead too much, enough, or not enough. You wonder if you have unresolved feelings about her even though you’ve spent most of your life realizing unresolved feelings for her.

You think about the joy on her face when she gave you your first bike.

You think about that really terrible jacket she gave you for Christmas one year, a jacket so horrendous you checked the tag on the present in hopes that you’d mistakenly opened someone else’s present because please god let no one who loves me think I would like that horrible jacket. You remember your sister watching you try to surreptitiously check the tag from across the room and how she tried to stifle her laughter while you calmly put the jacket back in the box and hoped that no one else saw any of that.

You wonder if that guidance counselor who asked your mother if you were in a cult because you were wearing African mask earrings is still asking parents stupid shit like that. Your mother bought you the earrings, of course.

You wonder if you will ever stop feeling sad.

You wonder if the friends who are there for you are there because they like you or because they feel bad for you.

You wonder if people who really like and admire you are just deluded and whether their feelings for you would be the same if they knew how you spend your time alone.

You wonder if now, with both parents dead, there is some astonishing reality about yourself you are about to uncover. You hope there is. You hope there isn’t.

You think about calling or emailing someone who really let you down to give them what-for.

You listlessly scroll down Facebook liking everything and posting dumb comments or you listlessly scroll down Facebook wondering why people spend so much time on really dumb shit.

You wake up, as if from a trance, after watching 20 minutes of goat videos. You do not feel better, but you are sure you do like goats.

You wonder if your cats can tell when the dead are visiting and simply choose not to notice them or inform you that they are present. Occasionally you are certain they can see the ghost of your loved one right behind your head because they are obviously staring at something that is just to the left of your right ear.

You assume that other people maybe don’t have as much sexual regret in their lives or that they have a lot more or that for some people sadness doesn’t mean reexamining your sexual orientation, your sexual choices, or excoriating yourself for not sleeping with that very cute woman when you could have. She wanted you. You were scared she wanted a girlfriend. You couldn’t be her girlfriend so you didn’t sleep with her but you wonder if you should have anyway and whether you really should stop considering every last ethical ramification of every possible flirtation, crush, or love affair you’ve ever had.

You wonder if there is anyone in the world who might understand how it feels to hear your mom’s voice on your voicemail still, her beautiful singsongy way of talking, the message she left you only a week or so before she died. You are still amazed at how much she radiated happiness on the phone even when she wasn’t, and how, when you were a kid, she could go from screaming about what a mess this place is to answering the phone with the joy and melody of a bluebird as if she had become a different person in that split second.

You realize you will never hear her say anything new again to you. She won’t see any of the new clothes you just ordered online. But you’re happy she did see that you finally found the perfect raincoat and that a year later you still love it.

You wonder if anyone knows that you kept your hair blue for a year because it was the last color she saw it. No one would have noticed if you’d worn black every day. You know she would appreciate you taking the time to live out this Catholic rite even if it was with blue hair instead of black clothes. You know she would especially like that because she especially liked you.

You wonder if you remember the rosary and if it really would make you feel any better as she insisted it would so many times in your life. Your grandmother did, too, and you wonder how long she’s been dead because once you’re mourning your parents every ghost of your life pays a short visit at least once. It feels like there’s a party but everyone at it is a dead person you’re only remembering.  You don’t even bother to try to find the rosary she left you.

Here is the blanket my grandma crocheted. Here are my mom’s pajamas I wore when I slept in her assisted living facility with her. Here is my father’s sweater which is still surprisingly cooler than almost every other sweater I own.

You don’t clean the catboxes as often as you should and you don’t clean the house ever except for every once in a while when you realize you have to clean something because you have no idea what is clean and what isn’t. You do the bare minimum which is even less than what the bare minimum used to be.

You take a lot of baths or you forget to bathe for days at a time and then having to try to remember when you last took a bath as if the difference between 3 or 4 days ago is somehow not negligible. If you realize it’s only been 3 you decide you can wait another day. You come to all the same conclusions a day later because memory is no longer your strong suit and you walk around on a lot of Wednesdays thinking it’s Tuesday and vice versa.

You become certain that taking a probiotic/vitamin C/valerian/fish oil/whatever really has made a difference in your health.

You say “I hate children” with a hint of rage even though you don’t actually mean it and regret it for weeks and wonder if you should explain that you really don’t to the person you said it to or if that would be protesting too much. It’s not children, anyway, it’s how sticky they are and how the world revolves around them that you hate. You decide to explain what mourning is like to that person who you told you hated children to so that they can realize you’re just full blown crazy. You add a smiley face to the email as if that will make you seem less crazy though the opposite is probably true.

You wonder again about unresolved issues.

You can’t seem to fake a smile or even work up the energy for anger, your most stalwart emotion. You feel mean and unapologetically so except the next day when you wish you could be a nicer more upbeat person.

You realize no one wants to have sex with a sad person, not even you.

You wonder why so many people like Klingons so much when they’re just so patriarchal.

Robin Williams was once told that coke makes you more like yourself and so asked, “but what if you’re an asshole?”  Mourning is the same as coke, then.

You know you’re fine especially when you aren’t at all.

I still don’t know how to do this, to live in a world where the woman with the brightest voice and the brightest smile who was fearful in a way that made her so old and yet gave you a glimpse into how she must have been when she was 7 is dead. I am still in that room with her, sitting and holding hands with her, the TV on or off, the trees and flowers blooming outside as she lay dying in the spring. She loved spring so much but the sun on her face almost hurt her skin at the end, and the cool breeze was an affront that no sweater could ameliorate.

She was already in mourning the whole time I was waiting to be.

I am pretty sure I don’t know how to do this and probably never will. I am also sure I will be doing this for the rest of my life in one way or another.

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Tomboys, Gender Non Conformity, & Trans Identity

A few more thoughts about that NYT tomboy article, the various rebuttals, and my post from yesterday.

I have to own that I wanted that mom to be right. For starters, because the world is transphobic and I am too – not because I mean to be but because it’s so easy to be so. It’s how the world is structured.

For example, some folks immediately objected to my using ‘he’ pronouns for this child, but only trans people objected to the child being referred to as ‘she’. And I think that’s precisely because most people still think biology is destiny, and thinking the child’s gender assignment at birth is more natural than the child being trans is, basically, transphobic.

Any assumption that the child being a trans boy is a worse or ‘less real’ outcome than the child being a tomboy is also transphobic.

While all of that may or may not have caused me to be cheering on this tomboy, it’s way more than that, too.

What was disappointing about that article is the way she presented trans and GNC as if they are mutually exclusive opponents of some kind. They are not.

The thing is, I want company. I’ve been gender non conforming in one way or another for most of my life; even when I was as feminine as I could manage – and I tried, I swear I tried – I was often assumed to be a lesbian. These days, when people know that me or my wife is trans, they assume I’m the trans one — though I’m honestly never clear which direction they think I’ve gone/am going in, to be honest. I’m personally thankful that the trans movement has made my own liminally trans/GNC gender a little more legible, but as a result I face another dilemma: people assume I’m trans because I’m GNC.

And that’s the nut of why I and so many others wanted that mom to be both honest and right: because gender non conformity is policed all the time, and it seems sad that the only way to convince others that your gender non conforming behavior or appearance is real is to identify as trans yourself. Gender stereotypes and gender role enforcement are bullshit for everyone whether you’re trans or not trans. A trans woman feeling forced to be stereotypically feminine is as bullshit as a non trans woman who experiences the same patriarchal pressure.

Here’s the thing: I know I’m not trans. Some crossdressers know they aren’t. For the same reasons we trust trans people to know their own gender identities, we know what ours are too. And mine just isn’t binary or nameable or whatever. Sometimes I like Ursula LeGuin’s “bad man” idea. Other times I remember I produce more testosterone than most people born with ovaries. I also choose not to identify as trans because I am married to my wife, who did transition, and who lives with a world of bullshit that I do not. That is, I don’t identify as trans because I respect the authority of the people who I know to be trans, and I am sure my experience is nothing like theirs. That is, I have cis(sexual) privilege, despite not being normatively gendered.

I really shouldn’t even have to explain that but I feel, often, that I do. I’m not trans because I’m not, just as my wife is trans because she is.

But right now my gender identity (GNC) and her gender identity (trans) are supposed to be part of the same big trans umbrella. Originally the word transgender was meant to be an inclusive term that included transsexual people (along with many others) but transgender has since supplanted transsexual and now that it’s been shortened to trans that’s even more true.

To explain: the definition of transsexual was, in the first place, meant to describe people who had pursued medical/legal/social transition. Transgender was supposed to enlarge and expand that, to include those who couldn’t medically transition or to cover those who were socially dysphoric but not body dysphoric, etc. So it’s awesome that we have an expanded sense of what trans is except that it really isn’t. The thing is, almost every visible trans person is not only transitioned, but they are usually and often binary transitioners (meaning they go from people who are assigned one gender at birth who live as the “opposite” gender after transition). As a result, transgender often effectively means transsexual, even though we don’t use the latter term much at all anymore. The umbrella has collapsed, where every other version of trans that isn’t transition has become ‘less than’.

As many genderqueer, non binary, gender fluid, gender non conforming people, crossdressers, drag queens, sissies and tomboys will tell you: when we don’t claim big umbrella trans it’s because trans is also policed, and only those who choose either binary or medical/legal/social transition are considered truly trans. As another piece explains well, it’s really as if cis/trans has become the next binary, or an emerging binary, except that I’m not entirely sure who’s supposed to be on which side.

So that’s why I don’t identify as trans. I use “gendery” because it seems more accurate. I have a lot of gender(s), and some of them are visible and available all the time and some of them come and go. I was a tomboy as a kid.

What we’re left with, really, is a problem, and perhaps the biggest unspoken wish when I was reading that tomboy article: not only do I want company, but I want to BE, and so do a whole bunch of people like me. And while it’s true that many trans people are open to the idea of others being GNC, I’m not really sure we’re considered real, not by anyone, actually, trans or cis alike.

The reality is that trans people are FAR more comfortable with gender non conforming people than cis people are. There is no trans agenda that “encourages” children to transition. But I’d argue that transphobia is itself the reason that people may want gender non conforming children to transition or for adults who are NB to “choose one or the other” (as if there are only two). Trans/cis is not a particularly useful binary for those of us who aren’t either, exactly; I’ve written before about being cissexual but not cisgender.

Here’s the first clue: maybe a goddamned binary won’t work, because they never do.

I don’t want to feel forced to identify as trans in order for my gender to be recognized, and neither should any kid. So maybe instead of diagnosing this child, we should be thinking instead about how we make space for children and for people who are traditionally gendered or binary, those who are gender non conforming, and for those who are legally/medically trans. We can call it the gender trifecta. Trinities are always cooler than binaries anyway.

The thing is, this girl exists. This tomboy. The NYT author may have been lying or in denial or just transphobic, but even if this particular child is not a tomboy and is trans, that doesn’t mean that other tomboy isn’t out there. She is.

I was her. She is me. That child may also grow up to be a man, a gender normative woman, or any number of other gender choices. What I hope she won’t be is hostile to trans people of any stripe: this is not a contest between; it’s a distinction among. That child is the reason I’m a loud and proud trans advocate; not because I don’t believe in trans people, but because I do: I live right next door.

(much thanks to Paisley Currah and Erica Foley for providing the space and pressure to work out these ideas.)

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What Comes Back

It’s been a long year of so many losses, but in a sense, this start of spring, the undoing of wintry death, reminds us too of what won’t come undone just with the passage of time, that some things, and some people, will stay dead, but that other things are still on their way, incoming bits of beauty that are awaiting just the right ray of sunshine to make their appearance known to us.

My mom loved the spring because she loved trees and plants and flowers in ways that I never really understood; she could be moved to tears at the right bud on the right flower making its way through the ground. She loved babies too, of all kinds, and I regret that she never did get to see spring in Wisconsin, the baby bunnies and baby raccoons and ducklings all in the midst of this powerful, powerful green. It’s a little overwhelming for a city kid, and my allergies are a fucking wreck, but it’s still so profound every year, the way this place comes back to life after being so frozen and so cold and so gray for months and months and months.

A former student wrote to me with doubt about writing his life with a lush mother and too many bad bedrooms of his childhood. In the context of Syria, he said, who cares about my bullshit? And you know? Sometimes all we have are the human-sized losses, the ways that we can mourn what we did have and what we never had, to remember that love for each other on the day to day is the only thing that counts.

Some days I am merely thankful that my parents are not here to see what we are doing to each other in the name of freedom and peace. MOABs bring neither, but watching out for each other on a small scale might.

Keep the faith, folks. The world is already a better place than it seems to be sometimes, and so often, good things have to hibernate or disappear in order to come back.

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Baby and Bathwater

There is a tendency, I think, for those of us whose goal is creating a world that is a little more self aware of sexism, racism, transphobia, and the rest, to dismiss writers and artists based on a single opinion, utterance, work of art, song, etc.

  • Is all of Kate Bornstein’s work necessarily discredited because she defended the use of the T word?
  • Is all of Dan Savage’s work for shit because of his denial of bisexual existence and/or his transphobia? 
  • Is there any delicacy in recognizing that there was a moment in time in which being “trans amorous” was a radical and trans-positive position? 

I think about this stuff because a lot of what I’ve written over the years could be interpreted as transphobic now, or, at the very least, problematic. Some of it was at the time, too. I am not, nor have I ever been, a ‘respect your elders’ sort of person, but I’m also pretty turned off by the complete lack of historical context some seem to exist in, as if fine-tuned arguments about the nature of transphobia haven’t been happening all along: As if we didn’t debate ‘transgender’ vs ‘transgendered’. As if no one has ever called themselves a transvestite proudly. As if…

To some degree, it’s one of the reasons I feel myself not wanting to write another book about anything trans related; for starters, I think it was useful for a cis feminist liminally trans type like myself to do the work that I did at the time, but now? I think transness is in good hands for the most part, although I’m happy to pipe in when and where it’s needed.

But mostly I feel myself stymied by the idea that anything I might put into the public sphere now would be so roundly shot down on a technicality that it’s really just not worth the effort. I prefer hanging out in this tiny corner of the internet doing my thing, being read by folks who appreciate what I do, and talking to people one on one who might need some help finding resources or the like.

I’m tired of people who have opinions but who don’t do anything or create anything or legislate anything. I feel more much occupied by the work and much less interested in the debate.

Maybe it’s an older vs. younger activist sort of thing and I’m officially middle-aged, but from here on in I feel like I’m going to be asking a lot more questions of critics far and wide: well, what have you done? Who have you helped? Have you created, or tried creating, anything of lasting value? In a sense it’s an age-old problem: This doesn’t satisfy, says the critic; So what have you got? says the artist.

And out goes the bathwater, baby and all.

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Working Women

This is my grandma. She was a janitor for a building in midtown, a proud 32 B/J union member, a single mom, and a survivor of domestic violence. The only day she called in sick to work was the day my sister Kathy graduated from NYU because she was the first in our family to do so.

My mother worked as a bank teller, as a cashier, in my sister’s bakery, all while raising 6 children and a grandchild. I don’t remember her ever sitting down when I was a child.

My eldest sister was the first professional woman I knew. She used to come home and hang her dry cleaning in the front hall, and those clothes always seemed to me like a passport out of the shitty part-time jobs the women in my family often had. She has supported nearly every single member of my family financially at one time or another.

My second sister owned her own bakery – working there was my part time job through high school and into college – and went on to get numerous degrees and just returned, at 53, to law school. She raised three kids solo, and now she specializes in disability rights.

My first jobs were babysitting, a newspaper route – I was one of only two girls who delivered papers, a baker’s assistant, a video store clerk, a writing tutor, a canvasser for environmental/consumer legislation, an admin, and now, an educator.

We have never been paid a dollar for a dollar’s work. 

To the working class women in my family, and in my world: thank you.