Everett Maroon's Blog, page 4

Child detained at Lego store

evmaroon:

When do we decide that humans have autonomy? When is a person capable of making her own choices? Why do we imprison ten-year-olds for crime but not let a nine-year-old walk through a store by himself? Our culture’s understanding of age and agency is twisted.

Originally posted on coldbike:

“Stay here and wait for your dad. Customers must be 12 or over.”

**********

Update:

I spoke to the district manager just now, and the summary is that they will put up a sign saying no unaccompanied children under 12. The safety scenario he suggested was that if the mall was evacuated and my child couldn’t contact me it would be dangerous. I explained the difference between inconvenient and dangerous. Also the store manager denies saying anything outside of “for child safety reasons, this is our policy” – I can’t say that I blame him, to admit to having said that to me would show integrity, but be career limiting for him.

End of Update.

The following is a letter to Lego regarding an incident which happened at the Chinook Centre Lego store on Sunday.  My son, who rides his bike to school alone, goes regularly to stores to…

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Author Interview: Audrey Coulthurst

I had an opportunity to speak recently with writer friend and colleague from the Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer’s Workshop, Audrey Coulthurst, about her new two-book deal with HarperCollins. I also wanted to find a way to communicate with the public about how much Audrey likes horses, so hopefully by the end, her potential readers are clear on that.

Not exactly a muse, but close.

Congratulations on your publication news with HarperCollins! What was your path to publication?

Thank you! My path to publication was fairly straightforward. After the first draft of A Hidden Affinity was complete I spent a long time finding critique partners and revising. As part of that I participated in the Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writers Retreat. Studying with Malinda Lo and having a group of very talented writers discuss my work was a true gift.

Once I felt the manuscript was as strong as it could be, I entered a couple of online contests and got some agent requests through those. Then I began to query in earnest, and then a few months later my fabulous agent pulled my query out of the slush and offered representation. We made some more revisions and then she sold the book.

I should probably note that while this whole process can be summed up in a few paragraphs, it took a very long time. The first draft of A Hidden Affinity was written in 2010.

A Hidden Affinity is your first book—what’s it about and how were you inspired to write it?

A Hidden Affinity is the story of Princess Denna, who has been preparing for most of her life to marry the prince of a neighboring kingdom and one day become queen. But as her forbidden magical gift for fire becomes harder to hide and she starts to fall in love with her fiancé’s rogueish sister, Mare, she has to choose between her duty, her power, and her heart.

My inspiration came from writing the book I always wanted to read. I was a big fantasy reader as a teenager, but never came across a book with a female protagonist who fell in love with another girl. So I wrote it, and threw in some of my other favorite things—horses, magic, music, and the occasional assassination.

Do you see this novel as a coming out story or something else?

Books about coming out are hugely important, but I wanted to tell a different kind of story. Part of the beauty of writing secondary world fantasy is that writers are not obligated to create worlds that have the same social structures or prejudices that are present in ours. In a society that isn’t fundamentally homophobic, coming out is less problematic. Still, both of the main characters do have to come to terms with difficult things about themselves. In Denna’s case, it’s the powerful magical gift she’s been trying to repress, whereas Mare has to learn that loving people is not a weakness.

Please discuss this unending love of yours for horses, and throw in a great horse memory somewhere for effect.

Horses have been a part of my life for a long time, and my first horse was purchased thanks to a change jar. I started begging my parents for a pony at about five years old. They took a mason jar, glued a picture of a horse on it, and told me if I still wanted a horse when I turned 11, we would use the money for that. Eventually the change jar turned into a savings account slowly filled by periodic deposits from the jar. At 11 I was still as horse-crazy as ever, so we bought my first horse, Callie, who was a borderline psychotic Morgan who tried to kill me (and the barn dog) on a regular basis. He taught me a lot about how not to fall off and also when it was better to bail out than try to stay on. He loved blackberries and would come up from the pasture in summer with a purple nose, and was also known to resort to devious means to obtain peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

What are the last three YA books you’ve read?

FORGIVE ME IF I’VE TOLD YOU THIS BEFORE by Karelia Stetz-Waters
HONEY GIRL by Lisa Freeman
SIMON VS. THE HOMO SAPIENS AGENDA by Becky Albertalli

I seek out and read a lot of YA with queer characters, and I’ve been on a contemporary/historical kick lately.

So talk about the main characters—two princesses in love is decidedly un-Disneyesque—what are you aiming for in telling their story?

The real question is what’s stopping Disney! Falling in love with the wrong person is a pretty universal experience, no matter the gender of the people involved.

Ahem. I’d watch it. —Everett

 

This is the first in a two-part series, right? Any hints as to the second installment, or are we going to have to wait?

The second book is a secret for now! All I can tell you is that there will be even more magic.

Better magic than horse poop.

Audrey Coulthurst writes YA books that tend to involve magic, horses, and kissing the wrong people. Her debut novel, A HIDDEN AFFINITY, will be published by Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins. When she’s not dreaming up new stories, she can usually be found painting, singing, or on the back of a horse.

Audrey has a Master’s in Writing from Portland State University, is a member of SCBWI, and studied with Malinda Lo as a 2013 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow. She lives in Santa Monica, California. Follow her on Twitter at @audwrites or visit her on the web at audreycoulthurst.com.

A Little Zombie Excerpt

Here’s a little something from a story I’m working on right now…

 

Ezra walks like a drunk sailor, or how I think a drunk sailor would walk, because like I have never seen one but I’ve heard that sailors drink a lot and drinking makes people stagger around the way my little brother does, but whatever, Ezra stumbles around the house all the time. Mostly he clings on to furniture if it’s near enough to cling to, but some of the stuff that Mom Two buys on her antiques shopping sprees is really tippy, so then I have to rush up to Ez and make sure that he doesn’t bonk his head or break some fancy Shaker end table in the process. It gets tiring, but the extra allowance is worth it. Plus he’s cute, and so when we’re out somewhere like the arcade on Folsom or the hipster park where everyone beautiful plays lawn Frisbee or whatever the hell it is, people come up to us all agog and shit because Ezra is teetering around, saying “arararar gagagaga Amuhwee” which is some apparently adorable pronunciation of my name, Emily.

Yes, our parents gave their two children E names. It is so awesome being us, let me tell you. Actually my original name was not Emily, I had to convince my parents that despite what the doctor yelled out as I was born, I was really a girl. It wasn’t easy to get them to believe me, but they’re more or less okay with it now, and I have learned all kinds of ways to be a more patient person. Maybe. The universe gave me my parents so I would learn how to get what I need, and then it gave me Ezra so I would continue to work out my core muscles. Thanks, universe, for looking out for me.

The phone rings, and it’s my friend Iggy who is also trans and who also left out extremely crappy high school because of it. Iggy has been funny as hell lately because he finally started hormones after years on the blockers and now he texts me every time a new chin hair appears. Seriously. I have like 126 texts from him, all about freaking chin hair. Guys are so weird.

“What’s up, Ig?”

“I was going to hang at Gus’s house, you wanna come?”

Gus is one of those kind of asshole, kind of cool dude you can’t ever pin down. But his parents have a pool and it is close to 100 degrees outside.

“Well, but I have Ez this afternoon. Mom One is in a delivery.”

“And where’s the other one?”

“At some fancy furniture store in Oregon, I can’t remember where.”

Iggy sighs into the phone, which I hate because it sounds gross and wet.

“I mean, can you keep him from drowning?”

“Do I have the word stupid tattooed on my forehead?”

“I don’t know, because we’re not on video, dude.”

“You are so tiring.”

“You are so predictable,” he says, and now I’m grinning. “See you in twenty.”

I hang up and pick up Ezra on my way to my room. Swimsuit, board shorts, SPF 50 sun shirt, sunscreen for me and the baby, and then I rush down to the nursery to get Ez’s swim diaper and bright green floppy hat, because nothing says baby like old lady hats and nothing says fun like trying to keep a hat on a baby’s head for more than twelve seconds.

“Gah,” says Ezra at the sight of his green and blue shark swimsuit. Ez only has four or five words, but he uses them for 800 different things. Context is key.

He giggles as I slather sunblock on him and coos at me as I strap him into his little seat that sits behind the rear tire of my bike. If I didn’t have his little carrier we would never go anywhere, and since he’s got his favorite blanket in there and a bunch of old raisins, he loves going on all of our adventures.

It’s not long before I see some strange people staggering down the sidewalk—well, actually they’re half on the sidewalk and half in the street. I pedal past them, wondering who gets that drunk at three in the afternoon.

Gus’s house is kind of ridiculous, with these huge iron gates that block the roadway, flanked by lions, and you can only get through once someone inside buzzes you in. I could totally climb the gate or the fence, but I did slip once doing it and pierced my right ass cheek, and besides, I have Ez with me today and a ton of pool-related shit.

“Let me in, jackass,” I say into the monitor.

“Screw you, buttwipe,” he replies, and the gates open. Then it’s a longish ride down the crushed rock driveway up to his enormous house. Some people have all the money, I guess.

By the time I reach the front door Gus is standing on the top step, a towel thrown over one shoulder like it just happened to land there. He is so clueless, but I give him a wave as I throw my leg over the bike and kick the stand. Ezra babbles at me and off in the distance I see Iggy scraping his way through the gates before they finish closing. I’m used to hearing a final click as they clamp down in the center of the driveway, but it’s not until later in the lay that realize they didn’t shut this time.

Iggy barrels up to us.

“You daredevil you,” I say.

“I live for the thrill,” he says.

Gus shakes his blond head, his hair is shaved so close to his scalp that I can see each individual hair at its sprout point. The haircut is new.

“What’s with the Hitler Youth look, bro,” I ask, and Iggy cracks up, holding his sides and laughing.

“She’s right.”

“I don’t even know why I invite you two clowns over,” says Gus. He actually looks a little defeated, and I feel badly for him. He didn’t ask to be rich and beautiful.

“Street cred,” I say, and I pick up Ezra under his armpits, heading into the house, making a beeline for the pool, which is a magnificent creation. It is lined in pretty blue and green glass beads, making a mosaic of waves and small fishes, and every time I come over I find a new part of the picture I’ve never noticed before. I’ve learned to hold my breath for two and a half minutes, mostly because I want to see all of the elaborate parts of the pool bottom. There’s a slide on the side and a diving board at the far end where I lost my bikini top last summer after one jump into the water. Gus’s parents clearly spend a lot of time out here because the pool chairs are made of thick canvas and easy to nap in; the large umbrellas keep the sun off in a wide circle and there’s a wet bar out here with its own soda machine and we can splurt out a pop anytime we want one. Being rich is gross and amazing all at the same time.

It’s not long before Gus and Iggy find Ez and me in the shallow end, with Ezra kicking and splashing and laughing. The pool is his favorite place.

Iggy calls out a cannonball and a giant wave of water mushrooms over us, splattering the pool deck. Gus shakes his head.

“Be right back, I gotta take a piss.”

“What a gentleman,” I say.

Iggy does his best to float quietly on the surface of the water, but as he comes near us he takes aim at me with by splashing at my face. It’s Ez who starts another round of kicking and then Iggy is on the defensive, out of float mode and covering his face with his arms.

“Stop, kid, stop it!”

“Don’t talk to him like that,” I say, and at the same time Ezra squeals from all of the fun he’s having. I love this little dude.

It’s the scream from inside the house that makes us all jump and starts Ez crying. I’m glad I didn’t drop the baby in the water.

“What the hell,” says Iggy, and he launches himself onto the deck from the side of the pool. But he doesn’t make it into the house before he backs up toward us again. And then he can only talk in a weird low voice that not even his man-hormones have given him before now.

“Em, get out of the pool,” he says.

“What? Why? Where’s Gus?” I don’t even know why the hell I’m asking these questions, but they seem to be all I can manage.

“I’m telling you, get OUT of the POOL,” he growls, and I listen because some part of my lizard brain understands that he’s genuinely afraid to speak any louder. I shush Ezra as I climb back out of the shallow end, and for now he’s calmed down and starts pulling at my hair. And once I’m in the shadow of a big bright umbrella I can see into the house.

Four people are eating Gus.

Fetal heart beat bills and the babyfication of the embryo

evmaroon:

As always, quality medical opinions from a doctor who knows her stuff.

Originally posted on Dr. Jen Gunter:

The Ohio House just passed a “fetal heart beat” bill, which is the first step on the road to legislation that would ban abortion after embryonic cardiac activity.

Embryonic cardiac activity is typically seen by 6 weeks gestation (42 days into the pregnancy or about 2 weeks after a missed period), which is before many  women know they are pregnant and certainly before many have really had time to consider what being pregnant means for them. Thus this kind of legislation really has one goal – to eliminate abortion.

This type of bill has been tried elsewhere and while it hasn’t become law anywhere, typically because some politician decides it won’t hold up to in the Supreme Court against Roe. With that in mind, why keep churning these things through State Legislatures wasting tax payer dollars?

Possibly the “pro-life” forces that support this legislature think that if they keep…

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Living with Chronic Fraud Complex

I’ll be honest; I’m quite an average person. Oh I know there’s the whole transsexual thing, and the being from New Jersey thing, but regardless, I’m not especially bright nor talented, I have not accomplished a single push-up since 2004, and I waste a ton of time on the Internet. (I did quit that bad Farmville habit, but that’s another story.) I am middle-class, middle aged, pretty much white, male, college educated, opinionated, obstinate, fat, and okay with a sense of comic timing. I manage to remain partnered, I’ve got two terrific children, a mid-range house, a paid-off car, and dreams of a hot tub installation in my future. There is nothing exceptional in any of that, save the partner and children who are measurably and demonstrably superior in many ways. I on the other hand, am pretty good at cobbling dinner, wiping away poop, and figuring out how to soothe my children. But on any given night I may burn the potatoes and overcook the chicken, get shit on my hands and the wall, and wind up bouncing a screaming baby for twenty minutes in an attempt to suss out the problem. In other words, having some success does not in any way preclude future failure. I try on a frequent, regular basis not to attach my ego to my successes or my failures and to keep outcomes away from my sense of self, should I fall victim to an overinflated vision of myself or reach a state of disquiet desperation at my gross ineptitude.

If one only knew me from my public persona—which I have half-assed crafted at the behest of my publisher and a myriad of publishing industry experts, in an attempt to fashion the proverbial “national platform” necessary for author stardom someday—one would think my life is an exercise in perfection. There are the adorable cherubic children, the very cute home, the published books and essays, the leadership title in my online input field for occupation. All of that is absolutely true, and I am proud of my family and friends and where I find myself at this point in my life. It is, however, a curated list of high points. Not posted (in part because I disdain the whiny FB post on principle) are all of the mistakes I replay in my mind throughout the day, whether they be a driver unhappy with me or an argument I had twenty years ago. Also not presented in most public forums are the mantras from my inner critic, my sadness that I’m not on an upwardly mobile career track, my frustration with my creaky knees, and my nagging sense that I deserve all of the rejection slips I get after applying for a grant or to a literary journal. I often realize, with stunning newness, that nearly every other writer I know is more talented than me and writing something more interesting than I am.

There is no point in entertaining these destructive notions more than I do already, so I corral them off of the Internet for the most part. This means a couple of things, namely:

I feel like a fraud to some degree, every day
I have lots of coping skills for life while feeling like some degree of a fraud

I know I am not alone. Many people walk around nursing a stubborn measure of poser concern. Here is what I’ve done to muddle through my insecurities.

Step outside of yourself—The first thing I do is reality check myself. If I’d heard this story, seen this situation, or learned about these feelings regarding another person, would my response to them be the same? I tend to have way more compassion for someone else’s experiences than my own, presumably because I don’t have an investment in labeling them a failure/screwup/incompetent person.

Leave a reminder of your success—Adverse events happen all of the time, often with an inconvenient regularity that makes the anxious among us wondering if there’s not some common factor at play—namely ourselves. This tendency is a kind of confirmation bias, in that we will dwell on the negative moments and discount the positive ones. When I get a letter from a reader calling me a brilliant writer, I could presume that they have truly horrible taste in literature. The same letter posted about another writer conversely could have me mildly jealous if I let myself go there, so instead I print out the missives and keep them in a folder and when I’m feeling particularly untalented, I read them again to remind myself that sometimes my work is very resonant for people. I’m so proud of those moments, in the end analysis.

Get better sleep—At least for me, when I’m not sleeping well my mood suffers, and when my mood is rough, my inner critic takes full advantage. True it’s a challenge with two kids under age 4, but I try to take some rest and nap time on the weekends, and I do other things to recharge. Then my fraud complex gets quieter.

Do the things you’re good at—I write a new story, pull out a project I can get back to (one can edit forever, of course), or open a notebook to sketch out ideas. I can also work in the garden, bake something, take my kids for a walk, whatever will shake up my brain. I’ve even been known to make to-do lists with one or two items already completed so I can cross them out right away. Yes, I’m an ENTJ. Hard, hard J. But I enjoy admitting my accomplishments.

Consider doing less in a day—This sounds counter-intuitive, but part of the fraud complex may come down to having too much on the agenda to be successful at it all. So pare down the projects, focus in and give yourself the opportunity to succeed. Posers, after all, are about looking accomplished rather than actually finishing things and getting results. You are not a poser because you are completing your work, no matter how many items are in your master list.

Come to understand who the real frauds are—If you’re even beating yourself up that you’re a fakester, you’re not a fakester. Being a poser, after all, means that you are harboring some kind of untruthfulness regarding the substance of your activities and your affect on the people around you. People who self-reflect are attempting honesty. So you’re already not in the fraud realm at that point.

Breathe. Smile. Prioritize. Do. And tell your inner critic it can shut the hell up now, you’ve listened to it long enough.

 

We’re Talking About All of the Wrong Things

When I was a teenager, I was impressed that my father read the newspaper every morning, listened to NPR in his car, and watched the evening news every night. He told me that keeping up on current events wasn’t just an interest but his civic duty. He didn’t use those words, but look, it was a long time ago and I’m left with just the takeaway if not the precise quote. Now my dad was born in 1928, a child through the Great Depression, and one year shy of getting to enlist and fight in World War II (he lied about his age and went to work as a postal carrier instead, and they were willing to take him because they needed people). Duty and attachment to our neighbors has certainly shifted from then until today, and barely anyone reads a newspaper anymore. Our media outlets have grown, merged, super-merged, and drifted from the journalistic standards once popularized by people like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. For example, Fox News broadcasts verifiably true stories only twenty-two percent of the time. Rachel Maddow is better, but not much, at thirty-eight percent.

But in addition to the truthiness of mainstream news outlets, we have a problem with how subjects and topics are framed. Take the recent letter by forty-seven Republican Senators to Iran’s leadership, suggesting that their ongoing negotiations with the United States (and several other countries) won’t be worth the paper it’s eventually signed on. The debate frame is set up around whether these Senators are traitors or patriots, whether they should be recalled or heralded. Clearly they’re not traitors, as they didn’t call for the overthrow of the United States, didn’t send classified information to a foreign government for same effect, and didn’t attack the United States. (They didn’t even violate the Logan Act, but that’s another issue.)

What should we be talking about instead? Well, for one, we could be discussing what it means for the majority party in the Senate to publicly disagree with the White House on foreign policy twice within two weeks (first, Netanyahu’s speech, and then the letter to Iran), and what it means about the GOP’s understanding of the authority of the Presidential office. Once we frame the issue in those terms, whole new ideas can be discussed—for example, is there a troubling trend within the GOP evidenced by this letter, this invitation of a foreign Prime Minister to the floor of Congress, the refusal in Alabama by a Republican State Supreme Court Justice to adhere to a Federal court ruling on same-sex marriage, the statement from GOP leader Mitch McConnell to Republican governors that they “refuse” to adhere to the EPA’s new rules coming out this summer, and the right-wing alliance with rancher Clive Bundy who refused to pay for his use of Federal lands? Is there a conscious or subconscious movement in the right wing to not only push against “big government” but against government itself? If so, what do we think about it and what should we do in response?

These dichotomous framings—traitors/patriots, states rights/federal rights—weaken our understanding of our world, our political leaders, and our own agency within the systems that create our society. I can think of a few other current conversations that suffer from reductive logic at the moment, including:

Religious “rights” vs. LGBT rights—First of all, there is a difference between being asked to bake a wedding cake and being asked to treat an infant. We don’t necessarily think of physicians as having a right of refusal unless their own safety is at stake, especially as they have taken an oath to “first, do no harm,” which they could conceivably violate by refusing to treat a patient, given the right conditions. We don’t expect that bakers take any oaths and so it’s not as surprising to some of us if they would decline to bake a particular cake for a particular person. But pitting these situations as a clash of two equal communities with mutually exclusive value systems renders invisible that one has been consistently marginalized culturally and legally and the other has not, no matter an individual’s “feelings” of personal persecution. Further, persons are guaranteed equal protection and guaranteed inalienable basic rights, rights which are not impinged upon by doing one’s job in their chosen profession in the same way they are impinged upon if they are left to suffer and/or die because nobody agreeing with the presumed values of the person in trouble was near enough to help them. What would be a better framing? Well, questioning why some faith communities have become activist-oriented and why that orientation calls them to limit their expertise and skill sets only for like-minded people would be a better starting point.

Gun control vs. the Second Amendment—Another huge red herring issue that feels more critical with every new spree killing and accidental death by gun misfire, people from both camps seem not to be listening to each other anymore. Even Republicans who call for direct voter propositions and initiatives on other issues were happy to see a Federal judge invalidate DC’s recent concealed carry law, and earlier, were happy when DC’s ban against handguns was also stricken from the law. The usual framing is that gun control always gets in the way of good citizens who like guns, that law-abiding people should be allowed to buy even the most lethal, weapons-grade firearms and ammunition available on the market, and that any restriction on either will be a slippery slope toward the government attacking its own gunless population. A different way to frame this hot-button issue? The vast majority of Americans—including 92 percent of gun owners—support background checks on all gun sales. Background checks are a kind of gun control, but if you ask Americans if they support “gun control,” the percentage of support falls below majority status. To talk about gun culture and gun-related deaths, we need to step away from these tired phrases that are easily misunderstood, and communicate more granularly about what guns have meant in our country and who is controlling the conversation (hint: it’s not the 92 percent of us).

Trans people vs. public restrooms—“Bathroom bills” are popping up all over the country at the state level, which tells me this is someone’s concerted effort to score morality political points in the post-marriage equality environment. The framing is, as usual, that there is a safety threat to women if trans women are allowed in women’s restrooms (see above, Deaths Due to Guns), even though the data show us that the physical threat is actually toward trans women, not from them. Some of the bills under debate or in some state of passage would imprison trans people (Florida, Texas) who use the restroom that comports with their gender identity, or fine them, or expel them from school, and even fine schools who support their trans-identified students. So what is a better framing? Well, let’s start with remembering that there’s no evidence for the claims these legislators are making, and that it is a violation of civil rights to prevent people from urinating except in places where it is more likely to be unsafe for them. (Also, there’s a really big enforcement problem with these bills, but that’s another matter.) It would also be a good issue to raise the idea of what transition looks like for trans men and trans women, that some people are gender nonconforming even if their gender identity matches up with their assigned gender, and you know, it’s mean.

It’s not just the news, it’s the integrity of the news outlet, the individual newscasters, the editors behind the scenes who choose how to discuss a given story, and the fact checkers. But on the other side of the relationship is us, all of us. And we can stop listening to the anti-intellectual content that is pouring out of these outlets onto our devices. We can opt for more nuanced conversations and say that we’ve had enough of what mainstream media is serving to us. Because too much is at stake, frankly.

There’s a Suicide Prevention Infrastructure Out There But We Keep Focusing on Tumblr Memorials

The memorials pile up on Tumblr in a long stream of emoji hearts and comments that range from sad to despondent to rage. Online, friends and community members draw cartoons that at first glance could be slash art from a movie or cult television show. When 17-year-old Leelah Alcorn killed herself in December 2014, she left behind a long record of harassment, loneliness, and suicidal ideation, culminating in a suicide note that received a hailstorm of media attention. Since then, two more trans-identified teens who have also taken their own lives have also gotten online and media attention: 15-year-old Zander Mahaffey, and just last week, 16-year-old Ash Haffner. In mid-February, 13-year-old Damien Strum posted a suicide note on Tumblr but a reader alerted police who showed up at his house. He is now in an inpatient psychiatric facility. Again, a cursory look at these cases belies a much larger problem—trans youth suicide is not a new development, drivers for suicide among trans youth are not well understood, and even acknowledging when a trans-identified youth is at risk for suicide is stubbornly difficult to achieve.

What is becoming clear through research and outreach is that trans youth are under great levels of stress, often without  familial support for their gender identity, and with few trans-savvy resources to access in crisis. Kate Bornstein, a transgender activist and author of Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, described the situation in terms of pressure from mainstream culture to reject their trans identity, and then pressure to conform to being either male or female from the trans community, leaving them with no place to take risks and explore their gender. “The pressure to be one or the other is too much,” said Bornstein. “And the likelihood that these teens have explored their gender identity one hundred percent is low.” Her advice to struggling trans youth: “You don’t have to follow the binary. If you feel you’re something else, go for it.”

Dr. Jody Herman, senior research fellow at the Williams Institute, an LGBT-focused think tank at the UCLA law school, described the trans youth suicide this way: “Even though [scientists] have been studying this question since 1965, we’re really just at the beginning stages of research.” Data are hard to come by, between the mis-labeling of deaths to a cause other than suicide, the erasure of a minor’s trans identity by unsupportive parents, and differences across the country in tracking suicide attempts. So far there are no data to show causal links to trans youth suicide, and according to Herman, no clear evidence as yet of which interventions are most effective in reducing suicide attempts for young adults. Meanwhile there are concerns among researchers about the “contagion effect” of widely publicized suicide deaths. “How we talk about these deaths matters,” says Herman.

If the solutions are unknown, the stressors seem more transparent. In a 2011 national survey of more than 7,500 transgender Americans,* 78 percent of respondents reported suffering harassment in primary and secondary school. Thirty-five percent reported they experienced physical assaults in school, and 15 percent said they left K-12 school or a higher education institution due to the harassment. These experiences correlated strongly with weak outcomes in mental health, employment, and a higher level of suicide attempts. Also apparent from this and other research are that the stressors are cumulative; if a teen is facing harassment, a lack of support from his or her parents, and drops out of school or runs away from home, their risk escalates for suicidal ideation, self-harm, and suicide attempts.

People in direct services to trans youth see these issues on a daily basis. Alysia Angel, the Youth Program Coordinator at the Q-Spot, an LGBT community center in Sacramento, California, says she works with 100-150 young people a week. “They face multiple pressures like homelessness and mental health issues. One young trans woman of color has been coming in for two years, telling me about her suicidal thoughts.” Angel says the young woman tells her “something in me stops me.” Angel’s approach is to remain in the present with her and be ready with a referral when needed. Ruby Corado, founder of Casa Ruby in Washington, DC, echoes Angel’s sentiment: “I try to stay positive and be a role model so they can see someone who has overcome obstacles.” But Corado notes that many organizations focused on trans youth support are underfunded and struggle to reach the individuals who are potentially most at risk of suicide, the ones who don’t take the initiative to find an organization like hers for help. Aryah Lester, a crisis hotline counselor in Miami Beach, Florida, echoes these concerns. “Acceptance, realization of self, and conservative ideals are the main concerns I’ve heard on calls. We encourage them to find strength within, and empower [them] to face their new life with assistance in their area or trustworthy friends and family.”

If a young adult doesn’t have a supportive family, that’s where Casa Ruby comes in, at least for trans youth in the DC area. “We become their family, their chosen family.” Herman’s research suggests that supportive families may have a buffer effect against suicide attempts. But reactions from family like the so-called conversion therapy may have the opposite effect of making teens feel invalidated and hopeless. Young trans people flock to the web for more information and connection, and also find a glorification of their dead peers, along with the message that suicide is their only option in an uncaring world. Front-line staff like Angel, Corado, and Lester and research leaders like Herman know that there is a patchwork infrastructure in place to help trans youth but it hasn’t gotten the same media attention as the deaths themselves. Corado would like to see that change. “Many [people] are coming in and finding help. But we need more resources to find them online.”

For more support: Trans Lifeline and The Trevor Project
* Grant, Jaime M., Lisa A. Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody L. Herman, and Mara Keisling. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Washington: National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2011.

The Metaphor Translations: Terrorists

This is an occasional series on metaphors in narrative. Earlier editions focused on doomsday scenarios, androids, and monsters.

They are everywhere, plotting, planning, building in the moldy recesses of basements and garages where apparently they are never discovered until there are mere minutes left on the digital timers, receding separation between life as we know it and cataclysm. If there’s one big difference between narratives about terrorists and narratives about the previous topics in this series, it’s that terrorists really exist in the world (vampires, seriously, vampires do not exist, folks). And while I suppose it’s technically feasible that a volcano could rise up from an unstable fault line, it’s not likely to happen in the middle of Los Angeles, so although some doomsday scenarios (The Day After Tomorrow, asteroid stories, for example) are a remote, remote possibility, they’re not realistic in the same way terrorist and terrorism stories are.

Judging from the scripts, some of these narratives have wrestled with the news reports of terrorist activity and the attacks that occur across the world. The attacks on September 11, 2001, basically ended The West Wing’s idealized portrayal of White House politicking and policy making. These days Homeland articulates a reasonable take on the way in which government analysts sort through data on terrorist cells and actors, even as it occurs within a larger paranoid fantasy (i.e., anyone could be a terrorist, even your Congressman!). NCIS, and Covert Affairs cover plotlines that stretch much further from this approach, including stories with terrorists as more like love-torn stalkers with a political interest.

Whether the narrative at hand is an attempt at realism or further afield, it still presents a threat to our culture, which makes it similar to narratives that feature attacking monsters, zombies, aliens, and the like, but there is a notable difference to the fantastical tale. Typically terrorism narratives include a lot about our response as nation-states, as governments with caring and dedicated employees who are working against all odds to stop the threat (think 24, A Most Wanted Man, Spooks), and in this way they reinforce the idea that the tactics our actual governments use are good, be they waterboarding, phone surveillance, or the near-omnipresent security cameras in our cities. The sheer number of plot lines across terrorist-themed shows and movies that include phone tapping, police stakeouts, computer programming to listen for terrorist plots, face recognition software, partnerships between the CIA, MI-6, and Interpol, and so on become a kind of system of justification for presuming our government is on duty for its citizens. Sure there may be a bad apple here or there (and always the double-crossing agent to watch out for), but the narrative of the fight against terrorism nearly always ends with the agents from the government thwarting evil.

In my mind, this puts the terrorism narrative closer to police procedurals (the police are good, they’re here for us, they work hard and they’re often under attack from Bad People) than narratives about aliens. And as metaphors go, terrorism narratives stand as reminders that giving up our civil liberties is a necessary move in order to keep those timers from ever getting to 00:00. Think these narratives don’t have an effect on our attitudes? Public opinion analysts from a variety of organizations agree that Americans are more in support of torture than has ever been expressed before.

One other note: When I started writing this post I presumed that most of these narratives would be about brown or Islamic terrorists, but as it turns out, many of them are white, at least in American and British terrorism narratives. News media’s reporting, at least at second glance, seems to be much more skewered toward stories about Islamic fundamentalists than fictionalized portrayals of terrorism, which may have something to do with the “gotcha” or dramatic factor at play (IT COULD BE YOUR CONGRESSMAN!). I will do a more in-depth look into this and follow this up with another post.

Humor as Discomfort

A couple of years ago of the Academy Awards for his blatant and frequent sexist and racist comments. I wondered openly why anyone expected he’d do anything different, given his history as the “offend everyone” writer behind Family Guy and other television shows. Late last year I was somewhat surprised and ultimately disappointed when Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson came to Walla Walla to deliver an uninteresting and Islamaphobic lecture, and I remembered that Seth MacFarlane was the executive producer of the Cosmos: A Space Odyssey series on Fox that featured Tyson. For in the Hollywood universe, there are a few individuals who drive cultural production under the guise of many studios, production companies, agenting firms, and talent. It’s the old boys’ club of popular culture at work.

Last weekend we saw something a little different. I wouldn’t climb up on the soapbox with Maggie Gyllenhaal and proclaim it “revolutionary” (and evolutionary) as she did, but it was a crack in the edifice that Hollywood normally supports. At the Golden Globes, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Margaret Cho, Lily Tomlin, and even Jane Fonda (in a brief turnabout from her foray into conservative political stances) poked fun at this boys’ club and made those boys decidedly uncomfortable. Here is the Fry-Poehler opening monologue:

Tina’s very first line, calling everyone in the audience a bunch of “minimally talented brats” signaled a critique of Hollywood culture and production. The line about Joaquin Phoenix calling award shows a bunch of bullsh*t and then the well timed, “Oh, hi, Joaquin!” was a direct calling out of his hypocrisy (and pointed at a performer who once pretended to not care about Hollywood anymore, all for the publicity). From here they made a segue way into the North Korea threats around The Interview which would form the frame of a running joke in the form of Margaret Cho as a North Korean dictator and culture aficionado. From the mention of North Korea there were more jabs at the film and fellow actors that looked at first like the usual stuff of celebrity roasts:

Steve Carrell’s Foxcatcher look took two hours to put on, including his hairstyling and makeup; just for comparison, it took me three hours today to prepare for my role as human woman. —Tina Fey

but then were revealed as a ceaseless attack on Hollywood standards of beauty. In celebrating Patricia Arquette’s nomination for Boyhood, Poehler remarked that it showed that Hollywood now had roles for women over 40 “as long as they got the role before they were 40.” And still another, when talking about Jennifer Aniston’s nomination for her role in the film Cake: “We should explain to the people in the room here, cake is a fluffy dessert people eat at their birthdays, … which is a that people celebrate when they admit that they have aged.” Zing. Up to this point the audience mainly laughed along, sans the specific folks who were the focus of a given joke (and even they made attempts to go with the flow). When they teased George Clooney who was about to win a humanitarian award when Amal’s experience is so exceptional, they even referred to George as her “husband,” reversing a frequent sexist way of undercutting women’s experience and value.

Then the tone of the opening monologue shifted (in my opinion, of course), and Fey and Poehler did something different with their jokes: they began pushing the audience in the room and presumably at home toward discomfort.

Fey and Poehler made a shift into zoinks, objectifying men and men’s bodies (“Chris Pine. I’m sorry was that too loud?”) and the laughs became a little guarded. By the time the emcees taunted Bill Cosby, the gasps from the audience were the more visible reaction than their enjoyment. [9:04 in the video above]

Later in the program Margaret Cho emerges from the audience, goosestepping onto the stage to announce her interest in movie criticism and awards programs, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda get all disingenuous by applauding men for finally getting some good roles in Hollywood, and nobody is staging elaborate dance numbers about women’s breasts.

Many of these jokes were played not for laughs but to create the kind of discomfort that women are subjected to all of the time. Reversing the anxiety about being targeted onto men and people who insist sexism and racism are a thing of the past was the feminist agenda of Fey and Poehler, at least for this one night. In a week in which people argued about the role and limits of humor, in light of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, France, the 2015 Golden Globes stood as testimony that humor, when directed at institutions of power, is extremely powerful itself. (In fact the worst joke of the night was a remark made to Jennifer Lopez calling her breasts “golden globes,” and it was met with active derision. Tina and Amy do not approve!)

Empathy as a Radical Act

I didn’t post much to this blog in 2014, though I’m not much surprised given that it opened with a new baby, in addiction to our rambunctious toddler. I’ve mulled over a lot during the interim of the last ten months, including:

Our national inability to ameliorate gun violence through legislation, education, infrastructure, and community
Why we’re not having a nationwide conversation about police procedure and the role of police in the twenty-first century
How small civil rights strides for trans people could exacerbate an emerging hierarchy of care and support for trans people
How to support our queer and trans youth better

None of these issues have gone away, so I will spend quality time thinking and writing about them in 2015. I think my days of burger reviews and snarks against reality television (which is in a death spiral anyway) are over, at least for now. This year I’ve got to tie up my next memoir project and get moving again on two fiction projects. Blogging may continue to be on the sparse side, but I’ll make more than 44 posts this year, I’m sure. In the meantime:

It strikes me that in the context of deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of their respective local police forces, in the state-level pushes against welfare recipients, within the curtailing of reproductive rights that further restrict abortion, and that cut off insurance coverage for contraception, and in the effort to talk about the state of the US economy, we have already dug into our respective positions and are quite unwilling to listen to the perspectives of others. If there is a silent majority center in the US, it is extremely good at staying silent. In the meantime, we hear a lot of noise of folks at the ends of the political spectrum, and while we may believe in our own talking points in earnest, the other side thinks we are paying attention to the wrong message, that our evidence is full of errors, and that we’re too stupid to see the situation realistically.

I’m not asking everyone to go watch FoxNews and msnbc or crossover their favorite media sources to the presumed opposition. Rather, I’m wondering if we can find a way to disengage from the polarization of these hot button political issues, especially as the tug of war approach results in very little movement toward a new or caring society.

For example, in thinking about the very recent suicide of Leela Alcorn who posted her suicide note on her Tumblr account (which has since been taken down by her parents), it is easy to fall into a visceral hate for her family who according to Leelah dismissed her gender identity and were hostilely unsupportive of her to the point of forcing her into a trans conversion therapy program. Let me be clear: I agree with the American Psychological Association’s longtime stance (they passed a resolution against it in 1997) against the practice and stand by the mountain of evidence that shows such attempts at behavior and identity modification are ill-advised, harmful, and wholly ineffective at achieving their stated goals. Clearly, Leelah’s parents weren’t on board with her requests for transition support, socially or medically. But demonizing the parents belies a whole series of issues and ideas that bear some reflection, including:

How can an individual (a parent in this case) live with the cognitive dissonance between loving their child “unconditionally” as was stated by Leelah’s mother, and refusing with all of their ability, to fulfill that child’s repeated requests for support?
Why has Christianity become so popular as a rationale for explaining the world when it has such a long history of harming the people it is mandated to serve?
Why has the idea of “religious freedom” moved toward shutting down dissent and a diversity of opinions and people  in a country supposed founded on the twin freedoms religion and speech?
How can we work to liberalize Christian teachings to move communities of faith away from such bereft practices of isolation, shaming, and conversion and toward acceptance of young people, no matter their sexual orientation and gender identity?
Why do so many trans-identified people consider suicide early in their transition and what can we do at a personal, community, and infrastructure level to support them and minimize suicide?

Shouting at people, writing in all caps online, trolling religious right web sites—these may be laudable tactics for some, but I don’t see them changing minds. If we’re invested in progressive or radical change, it behooves us to think about what outcomes we want to see, and remember that for the majority of people, they are doing what they think is their best. We may not agree with them, but that’s how they go to sleep at the end of every day. If we are to truly communicate with people who are different from us, we will need to see the world at least a little from their perspective.