Everett Maroon's Blog, page 5

The Freaking Binky Fairy

Someone suggested I tell Emile about the Binky Fairy as a way to get rid of the pacifiers he uses. So I started to weave this mythology to my 3-year-old, and of course he’s been asking questions. I usually plot out my stories and check that there are no gaps in logic etc., beforehand, not on the fly. Where does he take the binkies? (To BinkyLand) Why does he take them? (Because he thinks you don’t need it anymore.) What does he do with them? (He gives them to other children who are smaller and still need binkies.)

In reality, there’s a huge tear in Emile’s last binky standing, so Susanne and I are concerned about it choking him. (We are great parents, really.) I can’t give it to him, and Emile, with a full child’s complement of teeth now, burns through them in a couple of weeks. So I’d like this to be the last one! He doesn’t ask about them as much, and says he’s ready to not have them around anymore (except of course, when he’s TOTALLY NOT READY, DADDY).

Today I was putting him down for a nap when he asked for it. The ruined pacifier is on the kitchen island, about to head into the garbage bin. I said, “I don’t know where it is, maybe the Binky Fairy came already.”

“When did he come?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want to know. Is my binky gone? It helps me sleep, Daddy.”

*cue Bad Daddy music*

“I think it’s gone. I’ll talk to the Binky Fairy.”

At this news, Emile sits bolt upright in his toddler bed.

“You’ll talk to him? He’s here?”

“No…I mean, I’ll call him. On the telephone.”

“What’s his name?”

“Binky Fairy.” My lord with the questions!

“What’s his real name, Dad?”

I panicked. I wasn’t ready for another lie/layer to the story. I blanked. I said the first name that came to mind that wasn’t Emile or Lucas.

“Schmendrick.”

OMG, EVERETT, SCHMENDRICK? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF WRITER ARE YOU? SCHMENDRICK?

“I knew it,” said Emile, putting his head back on his pillow.

And that, people, is how I proclaimed that the Binky Fairy is really the hapless magician from The Last Unicorn.

The Dos and Don’ts of Protesting

I’m not an expert on anything. I used to be a quasi-expert on usability analysis, and then I left the field and in the meantime, it emerged as its own real subject area with doctorate programs and certifications and I’m far enough back now that I’m not even in the dust. I write books, because I’m somewhat good with words, but I don’t consider myself an expert in writing, per se. I tend to take a commonsense approach to most topics, I try to get involved beyond the standard dabble when the issue resonates with me, and I’m no longer surprised that a Catholic girl raised to be a conservative republican has somehow become instead a progressive man who doesn’t attend any church. What I am pretty good at doing—though again, not an expert—is spotting contradictions in culture and rhetoric, and I think I owe my skill to some badass teachers from my youth, and my own tendency to complain.

So that said, I am not an expert on protesting. I don’t know the intellectual lexicon of the protest theorist, or whatever they call themselves (all due deference to protest theorists). I’ve been involved in organizing protests for twenty-two years, was taught specific protest tactics and de-escalation techniques by some of the women who invented them, and have personally taught three dozen people how to eat fire. I’ve gone to some of the biggest protests ever seen in Washington, DC, and been one of three people holding signs on a street corner when nobody else cared enough to show up. So along the way I’ve heard some things that are a kind of best practices regarding protests, namely:

Have a plan before you head out to start protesting—It seems simple enough, but protests are more complicated than we see them on the news. Most of the planning sessions I’ve been in were attempts to answer a series of questions:

What is our message? Who are we targeting with our message?
What do we want to see happen as a result of our protest? The end of desegregated bussing, the involvement of the media to a previously silenced issue, networking with likeminded people?
Who do we need to get involved in our protest? This goes to ensuring it’s not allies running the show, that it includes people who may have already been working on the issue, etc.
Are we willing to be arrested en masse? This will affect what kinds of things protestors can include in the protest (Hint: shutting down a part of the local infrastructure will get at least some people arrested).
What is the history of the local law enforcement, and how are they likely to respond to our protest? As we’ve seen, protests have had different kinds of responses from police and military organizations in Egypt, Hong Kong, NYC, and Ferguson, Missouri, to name a few.
Who will volunteer to be our core group of organizers? It’s neither helpful to have one person coordinating a protest nor thirty, so a reliable group of four to ten folks can handle the heavy lifting while they communicate with the rest of the network who will make up the bulk of the protest participants.


Have a communication strategy for use before, during, and after the protest—Depending on the nature and controversy surrounding the issues taken up at the protest, there may be a lot of pushback during the protest itself. Marshals or coordinators should have a ready means of talking with each other especially if they will be dispersed in a large crowd. Things can happen quickly and everyone needs to know what’s going on.
Bring lots of cameras—No matter what you’re protesting, chances are you won’t have good media coverage or the kind of media coverage that adequately illuminates what you’re doing. (Anyone remember the Occupy Wall Street protests and the images we saw on CNN?) Document your work, and especially document the on-the-ground response to your work.
Know how to de-escalate—Many of the protests I’ve seen that had counter-demonstrators (usually ne0-Nazis, let’s be clear) had moments when yelling started to get out of hand. I am grateful to have worked with Marty Langelan who tested and pioneered a series of tactics to de-escalate hostility before it could erupt into violence. Before any DC Lesbian Avengers protest, we always got the participants together and ran down the ways to unlatch from an overly angry individual in our midst.
Identify the dramatic personalities in your network—I’ve seen a lot of damage to progressive groups because that one person gets the mic in front of them and makes everything about themselves, or they wind up making a small problem big and then the protest stops or gets diverted to deal with their dust-up. Minimize these distractions by keeping people involved, active listening to your group members, and clear communication. I was asked once to talk to a member of the DC Trans Coalition who kept taking us off topic in meetings with inappropriate statements, and while I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, it did let her know where we all stood and what changes the group wanted to see from her. (Plus if Sadie Crabtree asks you to do something, you should do it.)
Stay on message—This means you all need agreement regarding what the message is. And while protesting isn’t about making people feel good, if you’re actively looking to antagonize people on the street, you will likely get a lot of upset people in your face, and they may not be listening to your message at that point. This is in part why you should consider protesting organizations and not general passersby, although of course shutting down the West Side Highway is a good way to get the attention of the City of New York, even if it does antagonize drivers (I mean, commuters, who are we kidding).
Know your protest history—Read up on the civil rights actions of the 1950s and 1960s, because hello, they were rather successful. Also read up on the Stonewall riot, the actions of ACT UP and the Lesbian Avengers, and other nonviolent groups who have changed institutions and public policy. Please please don’t ask some member of an oppressed group to tell you their history. Seek it out yourself.
Have an exit strategy—Protests end; they have to at some point. People need to eat, sleep, etc. Have a clear denouement to your protest so that you can claim the ending for yourselves and not have some competitor or media personality declare your protest over for yourself. Some protests go on for a long time, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But in that protest, people were avoiding doing a thing every day—taking the bus—and so it was a cyclical protest that could occur over a longer period. If you are standing on the sidewalk you will not be able to carry it on for a year.

Final points: Don’t make the protest about yourself. Don’t make the protest clever. Cleverness detracts from clarity. Don’t make the protest about the wrong group of people or a too-broad group of people (e.g., even white people are diverse in terms of their access to social and economic power). Don’t make your protest about a hodgepodge of issues because you will have too many messages to carry and communicate. Make your protest as safe for your participants and the general public as possible. And ignore the trolls.

And be well, friends.

Bad Dates

I meant to construct a web site to announce this, and I meant to announce it with more pomp and circumstance, or fanfare, or something, but whatever, I’m busy and you all know how to respond to a call for submissions. So, without further adieu: I’m honored to announce that I’ll be editing a nonfiction anthology entitled Bad Dates: Hilarious Tales of Queer and Trans Romance Gone Wrong. We’re talking mortifying but funny, like flipping off a person on the subway who cut in front of you and then realizing they’re your blind date for that night. Or learning the date you thought was a fellow vegan has brought you to a pit barbecue fest, or the old school queer standard, winding up on a date with your ex’s other ex and trying not to let the conversation get swamped into shared tales of those relationships. Submissions should be:

In .doc, .docx, or .rtf format, using standard manuscript format
Maximum of 5,000 words, but shoot for 3,000-4,500 (and yes, 5,100 words is over the maximum)
Free of sexism, trans misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism, ableism, just generally not douchey or reliant on offensive stereotypes of people on the margins
Showing your name and contact information (which is in the standard manuscript format, but whatever, it bears repeating)
Focused on queer and/or trans people as the main characters in the story
True stories that happened in actual life, or like, we can’t call the book nonfiction
Funny or have a humorous aspect to the story, or else the subtitle won’t be very accurate

Submitters should also include in their submission a maximum three-sentence bio with any relevant publishing credits. Submissions are due by February 14, 2015, because… oh come on, I don’t need to explain why that’s the deadline, right? Please send in your best work! I’m so excited to read your stories. Submit your stories to:

BadQTDateBook@gmail.com

Life Hazards, Or, How I Learned to Argue with Doctors

Yesterday at 1:22pm, after coming into the office from lunch I had to deal with someone at my syringe exchange and in the process I received a needle stick injury. I am not going to write about the details of how that happened, certainly not online, but enough people have heard about my injury that there’s little sense in not talking about it at all. I’ve known ever since working for this nonprofit that working in the exchange carried some risks, and I’m proud that after fifteen years in operation, this is the first accident in the program.

However, if I thought there was a readily accessible and understandable protocol for dealing with needle stick injuries that I could work through in the hours after the injury, when it is most critical to get care, I was sorely mistaken. For a town known to have a great number of medical personnel and a nursing program, I had to work through six different care organizations and several staff who were close to incompetent, who had poor patient listening skills, and little cultural competence. Here is what happened after I washed my wound out in my office rest room.

I called the health department, saying I had a needle stick event and needed to talk to the infectious disease nurse, who knows me professionally because of my position at the nonprofit. She told me that I needed to contact Occupational Health at the hospital beause those are the folks who deal with needle sticks that have occurred in the workplace. I pulled up their web page and called the number at 1:30pm, eight minutes after the event, and got a recording saying their normal working hours were 8:30am until noon and 1:00pm until 5:00pm, but I could leave a message and they would call me the next day. I hung up and called again. Same thing. I texted Susanne, knowing she would be in class until 2:20pm.

I drove to the emergency department, got a bracelet, and was ushered back to a bed by 1:50pm. I texted the president of my board who offered to join me. I accepted. The nurse on my case told me her computer said to send me to urgent care because they are associated with the occupational health department. She cut the bracelet off my wrist and I drove half a block to urgent care. My board president met me there. At 2:30pm they brought me back and a nurse took my vitals. She was concerned that my blood pressure was 148 over 90, but I said given the circumstances it wasn’t going to get much better. I tried to relax; but my BP readings were just borderline high, which is atypical for me.

The doctor came in and asked what happened. I told him I run a syringe exchange and that I received a needle stick injury through my rubber glove. He asked me the name of the “source patient,” science-speak for the owner/user of the syringe. I said I didn’t know his name as this is a confidential program. This began a strange discussion in which I outlined:

This primary exchanger trades in needles for himself and several other people, none of whose names I know
Sixty percent of injection drug users have hepatitis C, nationally
These were not needles from diabetics or people with a health condition, but people at high risk for HCV and HIV, as well as other blood borne pathogens

He nodded, and left me and my board president to wait again. We talked about maybe calling people we knew who were doctors. Maybe I should call the doctor who sees my HIV-positive clients. We waited.

The urgent care doctor (where is occupational health, again, I wondered) came back in and said that because I didn’t know for sure if the needle had blood in it or the source patient had HIV, that this was not a high-risk event and I should just come back to get tested for some variety of diseases I could now be exposed to. I think my jaw dropped.

“I can’t think of a higher risk scenario in all of Walla Walla,” I said, “unless I got a needle in my thumb from one of my clients who has a high viral load. I need PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis).”

“I just don’t think you need that,” he said. He referred me to CDC protocol for needle stick injuries which indicate PEP if the source patient is known to have HIV. The protocol says nothing about syringe exchange programs (SEPs), but it did give some latitude for a “case by case” basis to administer PEP.

It was now 3:30pm. Two hours, eight minutes after exposure. I’d gone to two health organizations and couldn’t get this physician to understand what a syringe exchange program looked like, apparently. I manually kept myself from shaking. I texted the head of the North American Syringe Exchange Network and asked her if she knew of any CDC circular that mentioned dealing with needle stick injuries at SEPs. In five minutes she and her colleague had texted back two PDFs for me to show the doctor, who had left the room again, this time to call the CDC hotline. The doctor was trying to describe my situation to another physician who was either looking at a check list or making an educated guess, and in this way, he was an unwanted middleman in my process of getting critical drugs.

He came back in the room for the third time, and sighed as he sat on the chair. I was annoyed that he was annoyed. He told me, as if making a penultimate stab with his newfound knowledge of syringes and needles that hepatitis C dies after about nine hours outside the body. I snapped at him.

“You’re acting like these were just some syringes left in a sharps container at the hospital over the weekend. I don’t know when they were last used. It could have been five minutes, three hours, 90 minutes. They’re injection drug users who use often, multiple times a day. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if many of the needles in that container had been used within the last hour from when he came to my office.”

“There are a lot of side effects to these drugs. They’re not easy to take.”

“I know that! I manage more HIV-positive clients than anybody else in the county. I hear from them all the time about how difficult these drugs are to live with. Bad, vivid dreams, or insomnia. Or somnolence. Nausea, diarrhea, headaches, limb pain, rashes. I will live with it for one month. It’s a no brainer compared to the rest of my live with HIV. Will you give me the drugs or not?”

He told me he’d give me two prescriptions, the usual remedy as outlined by the CDC. I asked what happens next. He told me I’d need to get tested for HIV in a few months. I corrected him and said, “six weeks, three months, then six months.” He nodded. Motherf*cker, I thought, my civility dissipated. He tried to explain the difference to me between antibodies and antigens. I explained again:

“I also perform more HIV screens than anybody else in Walla Walla and Columbia Counties, so I know the freaking difference between antibodies and antigens, doctor. Come on.”

I thanked my board president he left because now it was time to go home and meet his family for supper.

The nurse came in to take my blood and get a baseline on a host of health indicators and pathogens before they administered my first hepatitis B vaccine dose. I sighed. Look, I said, I’m transgender so some of these indicators may come back out of normal range. Red blood cell count, for one, is often off from both the male and female range.

She nodded, trying to be professional.

“Do you use male or female pronouns,” she asked.

“What the fuck do you think I use,” I said, pointing to my goatee.

“Well, I had to ask,” she said, apologetically.

“No, you didn’t. Just use male. It’s right there on my patient file.

She drew two vials of blood and then told me to make an appointment to get my liver checked in two weeks, because the HCV and the HIV prevention drugs could tax it and they wanted to monitor it. I walked to the counter and waited for the staff member to get off the phone so I could make my appointment. As I was standing there with my order in my hands, itching to get to the pharmacy, another employee sat down at her desk. Almost immediately a woman behind me walked past and asked her to help her make an appointment.

“Oh, I think you were behind me,” I said. Frontal lobe somewhere inside me said, no, Everett, stop. Actually it was more of a whisper. Not that frontal lobes have vocal chords. Whatever.

“My sister is in labor,” she declared, a big smile on her face.

“Oh. Oh your sister is in labor,” I said.

She continued to smile as the employee looked at the urgent care calendar. Because we all love making appointments with urgent care.

“It’s not you in labor, it’s your sister.”

“I could show you the texts,” she said to the employee, who clearly didn’t give a crap what was on this woman’s phone.

“Because you don’t know, maybe I’m in a hurry, too. Maybe I’m in a minute-by-minute race over something critical not to my sister, but to me. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that because I’m not announcing it and cutting in line over it.”

“Could you do November 12,” asked the employee.

The woman looked at her phone.

“I mean, she can’t be like almost about to deliver because you wouldn’t take time out of that to make an appointment, right? But by all means, cut in front of me.”

She walked away, her appointment date in hand, looking very confused. The employee apologized to me, and the staff member I’d been waiting for finished her phone call. She gave me dagger eyes, but I no longer cared.

“I see you have an appointment on November 12th for physical therapy. I could make this appointment the same day if that’s more convenient,” she said, giving me a time in the afternoon.

“My physical therapy is at 8:30am that day. How would this be convenient? I would just need to leave work twice to come over here.”

“Okay, well I can squeeze you in on November 11.”

“Let’s do that.” At 5:10pm, I finally left urgent care.

My usual pharmacy didn’t have the drugs but could get them the next morning. I thanked my favorite pharmacist in the world but said I had to start them that night. I know I had 72 hours to start the drugs to be effective in stopping HIV replication, but the sooner I got started the better it would be for me. She called another pharmacy and they said they had both in stock. I got back in the car and drove to pharmacy #2.

The pharmacist took my information and came back from the stock of pills frowning.

“We only have the Truvada,” she said.

The other pharmacy just called here fifteen minutes ago to see if you had both pills.

“Do you know who she spoke to?”

“Does it matter?”

“Uh, I guess not.”

“I need you to find a pharmacy that has both of these pills,” I said.

“Well let me just help the gentleman behind you,” she said.

“No. You may not make me wait here to help someone else. I stood in line, it’s my turn to get assistance now.”

Frontal lobe: OFFLINE. PLEASE CALL ADMINISTRATOR.

“Uh, I don’t know who would have them.”

I had picked the pharmacy that four of my clients use, but the second HIV med is in uncommon use, as it’s an integrase inhibitor that gets used when a first-line class of drugs no longer works against an individual’s HIV. So I picked the next in-town pharmacy my clients use and asked her to call there.

They had both Truvada and Isentress. I said, “Please call them now and transfer this to them. I need to start these meds as soon as possible.” She said she would.

I drove across town again, to pharmacy #3. Sure, they had those medications, but they didn’t have the order from pharmacy #2. She was just itching to serve that guy behind me, I guessed.

“Please call them,” I said.

“Okay, said the employee. What’s your phone number?”

“Why do you need my phone number?”

“So I can call you later after I’ve gotten the prescription transferred.” She looked at me like I had ten heads.

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere until you give me those medications. I’m going to wait right here. I need them now. And I mean NOW.” I put my fist on the counter.

FRONTAL LOBE: WHERE IS THAT ADMINISTRATOR?????

“I have had to deal with SIXTEEN FUCKING INCOMPETENT PEOPLE TODAY and now I can finally get my medication so that any HIV that may be in my body RIGHT NOW can be shut down before I CONTRACT HIV. Do you understand? I need you call pharmacy #2 this very instant, and I thank you in advance.”

Frontal lobe threw in the thank you as a last-ditch effort.

The pharmacist standing next to her stopped what he was doing.

“Sir, are you all right?”

It was the first time any health care worker had asked me that that day.

“No, I’m really not all right. I got exposed to I don’t even know what at work today and I just want to go home.”

“I’m going to call them right now and get your meds. There are a couple of people ahead of you, okay?”

“Okay.”

I walked into the aisle that had Nyquil in it and cried and texted Susanne a whole host of angry, sorrowful notes.

Another pharmacist asked me if I knew what the pills were for.

“Why, do you need me to explain it to you?” I walked away from her confused face and drove home.

I took the night dose in my bathroom and ate tacos at the dinner table with my kids and my in laws and Susanne, and I slept mostly soundly. I know it will be all right. But our health care system in Walla Walla needs a lot of work.

In Honor of the Closing of a Lesbian Bar

Here’s an old short story of mine about another lesbian bar from upstate New York. Those of you who recall My Bar may find the setting somewhat familiar. I hope you enjoy it.

8 Ball, by Everett Maroon

It’s about the size of a typical urban efficiency apartment, with a faded certificate of occupancy stuck on the wall by the front door, probably with some bouncer’s chewing gum, announcing it is fit to legally house 35 people. Thirty-five dyke pygmies, maybe, but not 35 wide-assed people. Smoke hangs next to the low ceiling, hovering around the light over the small and slanted pool table, a cheap but efficient way of adding a dramatic atmosphere to both the serious and poseur sharks who swim underneath it. Most of the patrons use pool-playing as a tried and true method of picking up dates, but this usually leads to them slamming the stick into the cue ball too hard, ricocheting the shot out of the hole and ending in a staccato set of swears as they express their “disappointment.”

My friends and I have just entered the place for the third time in five days because one of them has a new crush on a townie who usually hangs out here. Usually, however, being the relative term that it is, has not included any of these three nights, and has led directly to my frustration at winding up in this dump once again, cheap beer or no cheap beer.

The bouncer, a woman who seems to value herself based on her ability to be serious throughout all moments of the day and night, claps a meaty hand on Joselyn, the friend with the crush. “How’s it goin’, Jos,” she says, deep-throated and completely absent of any hint of a smile. She is the female version of the Michelin man, having obviously taken the name of her profession to heart. For over these three engaging encounters at My Bar, I have witnessed no fewer than six, count them six, bar fights, the resolution of each ending with her not man-handling the offenders (for that would never happen in a lesbian bar), but by bumping into them and pushing them out the door.

“Great,” says the newly named “Jos,” and we head inside. My Bar, doing its part to encourage patronage of a classically poor community, has no cover. Small rodents didn’t even bother to come inside in the dead of winter, so the owners justifiably decided against asking for any kind of entry fee.

We step up to the bar and check out the scene—well, the small, dimly lit room, anyway. There is a dress code here that sets apart My Bar from the more trendy places in town: white sneakers or black dress shoes, jeans, usually black, always tapered, black belts that look butch at first until one recognizes they’re slender women’s belts, tucked in polo shirts or buttondown shirts, and once in a while, a tie. And to top it off, a mullet. All mullets, all the time. That famous dyke haircut #1, the one that folks tried en masse in the ‘80s, the one that lesbians fool themselves into thinking makes them look feminine during the day, out queers at night. And the object of the crush sported nothing less than a short on top and sides, long in back look. No matter; Joselyn was completely smitten by her.

Her name was Jennifer Kelling, and if you looked beyond the hair she was attractive, strong, funny, and charming in a very non-assuming, down-to-earth way. She wore, alternatively, diamond stud or small gold loop earrings, drove a Sunbird, and had a penchant for beer bottle cozies, the ones with the little zipper on them. Jennifer was as townie as one could get. We’d come this night because Joselyn had heard through the grapevine—whatever that was—that Jennifer would be making an appearance tonight.

Not more than two minutes later, Jennifer walked in, entourage of mullet-haired friends in tow. I could never get any of them to talk to me since they all saw me as a non-mullet (and therefore, not their kind of butch), an academic type who had nothing of interest to talk to them about, as if I only could speak the language of intellectual drivel. I waved anyway, and Jennifer waved back, heading over, straight to “Jos.”

“What’s up,” Jennifer said in her low voice.

“Oh, just hanging out,” I said in the same moment as Joselyn.

“Just hanging out,” she said. Well, there was no need for me to reply, was there?

“That’s cool,” she answered. She swiveled around to face the bar more directly, and ordered a Michelob light. I waited for her to pull out her bottle cozy, but she reached in and took out her wallet instead. Zooks and Beth, our other friends who came with us here, snuggled quietly at the corner of the bar and the wall, which in this confined space, was about four feet over to the left. Friends for years, they’d finally hooked up three weeks ago after independently making their way through all of the available queer women on campus, and did the thing that many dykes do in very new relationships—they fawned constantly, sickeningly over each other. I was astonished they’d even left the sanctuary of Zooks’ bedroom. Maybe they needed to air the place out.

Between the ardent newlyweds and the lightening storm of Joselyn and Jennifer, I headed over to the pool table to get my name on the list for a game or two. Once upon a time one could just set her quarters on the table as her place in the queue, but after one too many brawls, they’d set up a small chalkboard where folks signed their names. If they happened to get erased in the wrong order, well, let’s just say it was always possible to start a fight if you wanted to. I walked over to the board and wrote down my initials. The game in play was nearing its end—two striped balls left on the table, and the solid balls were all down. They were playing one on one, so one of these women was chasing the 8-ball around the table, trying to get it to drop. Either she was drunk, trying too hard, or bad at pool. Watching her take her next shot, I decided on the first alternative. She could barely stand up.

She was about 5 feet 6 inches, thin but wiry-looking, and was only taking the world in through half-open eyes. A dirty ballcap was perched backwards on her head, thankfully covering up most of the hairdo, if not in a fairly unappealing way. She caught me looking at her and glared. When I wanted to speak nobody would notice, but when I wanted to be invisible I was the most obvious person in the room, of course.

The game ended eventually, and after standing next to the wall for an eternity (Zooks and Beth were still working on second base), my game was up. Drunk ballcap girl had somehow managed to win against several others, but likely this was because she was a modicum less intoxicated than they were. House rules decreed that the winner got to break, so I set up the balls as tightly as I could. Her first attempt to hit the cue ball ended with her missing it entirely. I smiled and motioned for her to try again. I would wipe the floor with her if she kept drinking.

After playing about ten minutes, I had one ball before the 8-ball and my opponent had 5 balls to go. She looked unhappy about this. I tried to contain myself, but my glee was obvious. I was smiling a lot. Nailing the 8-ball was the last straw.

“What did you say to me,” she asked, slurring her words.

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“I heard what you said to me,” she said, stepping closer and drinking from her bottle. I noticed, however, that there wasn’t any beer left in it—she just hadn’t noticed. Oh dear.

“I didn’t say anything,” I repeated.

“You stop calling me names,” she shouted, holding the bottle over her head.

I put my hand up defensively, stammering “I swear I didn’t say anything. Just calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she roared. Apparently this was a trigger for “please beat the shit out of me.” Where was the fucking bouncer?

I looked over and saw six or seven mullet-headed women staring at me. It was like a mullet-haired army. They would pelt me with Michelob and Bud Lite bottles until I succumbed to their ways, changing my hair and wearing tucked-in polo shirts. I vaguely thought about the value of diversity in the dyke community, but just as quickly realized this wasn’t the time to bring up that subject. I felt my heart beat.

“Let’s take this outside,” she said, shaking the thumb of her free hand like she was hitching a ride.

“There’s nothing to take outside,” I said. I looked over at the useless Zooks-Beth couple, oblivious to the world around them in a long lip-lock. Joselyn and Jennifer had apparently made the plunge themselves, searching out the structural integrity of each other’s epiglottises. Fucking fantastic.

She continued to advance, muttering something about “fucking campus lesbians,” and I said “Hey! That’s dyke to you,” knowing full well I wasn’t helping matters any. I backed out into the street, remembering that it was me who drove us here and thus me with the means of leaving this level of hell. Jennifer could drive them all back later, if they hadn’t merged into a puddle of queer sex goo by then.

A few of the women followed me onto the street and jeered at me, as I drove away. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw my face looking worried and tired, short hair included. I sighed, wondering if I possibly would be missing out on something, but hoping that the “something” was a choice between cozy beer or no cozy beer.

An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic National Committee

Honestly, I have a lot of other things to get to this week, and within that, a lot of other pieces to write. But I have been so ubiquitously harassed by national-level Democrats that hey, I’ll take some time out this afternoon to respond to their litany of email.

Dear Representative Pelosi—

Perhaps there was a time in my life when receiving an email from the former Speaker of the House would have been at least a little thrilling, but the bloom is off the rose now. I don’t really even think you care about me, what with all of your messages—which are too many, honestly, it’s getting embarrassing—addressed to me as . It feels half-hearted, Representative Pelosi. I know you are well networked in the legislative scene over on Capitol Hill. I used to see you around town from time to time when I still lived there. Okay; that’s a lie, it was Dennis Kucinich whom I saw, and mostly at the Greek restaurant on Pennsylvania SE that has sadly closed down. What I don’t understand, however, is how with all of your knowledge and connections and wealthy campaign contacts, you haven’t come across anyone who has mentioned even in passing that the Democratic National Committee’s strategy on getting donations for these midterms is abysmally bad. Here are the subject lines of just a few of the HUNDREDS of messages I’ve received these past few months:

painful loss
we. fell. short.
Friend we’re BEGGING
B O E H N E R wins
all hope is lost

The content in the actual email isn’t any better.

A new Koch Brothers front group just ambushed us with $1.8 million worth of attacks in 2 must-win races. We repeat: These are NEW last-minute attacks from the Koch brothers in 2 must-win races.

We’re still coming up short.
Tonight is the final federal fundraising deadline of this election. And let me repeat: we’re still coming up short.We wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important. This week, Boehner’s allies are spending $17 million attacking us. We’re getting completely outspent.

Oh I don’t know, I kind of think you’d still be asking, Ms. Pelosi.

Here’s the thing—I’m not really afraid of the GOP anymore. The scare tactics of a GOP-run Senate can’t be much worse than what’s already happened with Democrats in technical control of that chamber. We still all suffered through multiple financial cliffhangers over the debt ceiling and federal spending. Isn’t sequestration still going on, like right now? It’s been nearly a year since the President named an individual for Surgeon General, but nobody has pressured Senator Paul to remove his block, even in the midst of the Ebola hysteria.

On the other side of the aisle, we haven’t seen any immigration reform even though it’s been talked about for six years, and was part of what Barack Obama campaigned on in 2007. I run a syringe exchange program in southeastern Washington, which is about to exchange four syringes for every person living in the city of Walla Walla, but even though ending the ban on federal funding of syringe exchange was part of Mr. Obama’s pledge to public health advocates, it was only removed for one year, and in the Democrat-controlled conversations about the Affordable Care Act, was put back in place as an offer to the GOP. Your own House left undocumented and new immigrants out in the cold on health insurance, and it was your team that allowed the crack in the shield of contraception coverage by saying employers didn’t have to cover it when it had been part of standard coverage for decades, but by all means, let’s pretend the Hobby Lobby decision has nothing to do with that.

You want money from me, I get that. Even $5. And what would my $5 support? The increased deportation of individuals, stepped up by the Obama Administration since George W. Bush left office? The also increased frequency of drone attacks? The vigorous pursuit of whistleblowers? The unilateral attacks on Syria with no congressional approval? Would it support the closing of Gitmo, or more money into CHIP and TANF? Or would it just be a latte I didn’t drink that week, on your behalf?

I have been a card-carrying Democrat for two decades, and yes, I have given nominally before to earlier campaigns. But I think we both know that the midterm election in the sixth year of a White House term always goes against the party holding the executive branch. Between this very robust American political tradition and the fact that my Democratic Party looks less and less like the party I know, I will continue ignoring your shaming, guilt-tripping, sensationalized email messages. You may email me. FLOTUS may email me. The President himself may email me, but these are in name only, a facade as certain as the Democratic position papers are these days.

I will count on a series of vetos by the President once all of Congress is GOP-run, and I will hope with my dearest hope that a true progressive takes the reins of the party for the 2016 election. But for now?

I’m keeping my $5.

Sincerely,

Everett Maroon

 

Goodbye to Kitt

My first move toward transition was to explore online, mostly on LiveJournal, MySpace, and a now-defunct bulletin board called strap-on.org. It was split into discussion rooms that resembled the identity politics of the new millennium—a POC exclusive space, a transgender umbrella board, an area to talk about popular culture and feminism, a space for survivors of violence, a femme area, as well as specific discussion rooms for BDSM, a wide open anything goes space, and I can’t even remember what else. If a dozen years earlier I’d gotten obsessed with online gaming (known as MUDs), now I was headlong in the waters of my own subjectivity. It was fascinating, in that terrifying way. I was nothing but my persona. But wait, I was my persona? I had to ask large questions of myself that were way more vulnerable-making than the entirety that had come before. I was afraid of my own narcissism, but my foray into hyperspace was already a leap, and I couldn’t force myself backwards because I falling somewhere very deep.

Then real people emerged from the brightly lit pixels on my screen. I drove five hours to New York City to meet people I would never have to see in the material world again if I didn’t want to (read: if I was a big transgender flop). That went okay, even as it provided evidence that I was very much out of the politically correct loop for how to interact with other trans people. I struggled in my romantic relationship with a person who was himself transitioning and who was strangely territorial about the process. He declared that I wasn’t allowed to go to DCATS, the transmasculine group in DC, even if he’d gone only to a couple of meetings himself. So I stayed away. But I learned of another group that met in Glen Burnie, Maryland, of all places. It was way too suburban for my boyfriend to be caught dead there, so I drove out the dark highways to a Friendly’s restaurant, and met half a dozen trans men who liked to chat over fried clams and sundaes. And that is where I met Kitt Kling. 

I’d go to these meetings with a coworker of mine who had transitioned on the job and whose career had taken a sharp nosedive. I never really heard him explain what was going on for him as the all-staff notices went out and the testosterone did its work masculinizing him. He did talk to me about feeling more at peace with himself, but I think it was hard for him emotionally to be among 1,200 people who knew him as someone else before his decision. I was myself probably not great about his initial announcement; I challenged him to an arm wrestle on top of his desk, and won handily. He wanted to arm wrestle me every week thereafter, and yes, he got stronger and stronger until I was no match for him and I really hated that. I mean hindsight, 20/20, but at the time I wasn’t present in myself enough to realize what the challenge was really about for me. But he was kind enough to go with me to see the other men and when I was all of two weeks on hormones, I went to Glen Burnie with him.

Two cis women were at the table; both partners of trans men. One was also a physician at the Chase Brexton LGBT health clinic. She took one look at me and said I’d never make it as a trans man. I wasn’t sure why she said that and I wasn’t sure why I cared what a total stranger thought but it rattled me, until Kitt shook his head and said quietly that my own opinion was the only one worth heeding and besides, I would definitely be a great trans guy.

Let me be clear, at this point I don’t actually give a shit what kind of “trans” guy I am; I worry much more about what kind of person I am, gender aside. But to hear this from him helped me not stand up from the table and bolt to the door. Another man who had overheard the doctor’s comment told me, laughing, that at least I had some height. (I’m 5’9″. I always wanted to be taller.)

Kitt was a veteran with a host of chronic illnesses that had gone largely neglected by the Veteran’s Administration, which at the time didn’t have so much as a protocol for trans patients. He had a lot of dental misery, too, but the bright whites of his eyes set off a magnificent optimism about him, and he was full of ideas and advice for everyone around the table. He too seemed to be the type of personality who dove into an area to learn about it as much as he could. He’d done research on stand to pee devices, on hormone application sites, on which surgeons had the best outcomes, anything related to transition and trans health. He and a friend who was in training to become a nurse (the first of many trans man nurses I now know) had written a book about transitioning for trans men, but couldn’t find a publisher. They believed in the project so much that they were going to self publish it, and this was in the days before there were 800,000 self-pubbed books in the market each year. They’d written the Library of Congress for an ISBN, and two months later, were still waiting to hear back.

I met Kitt’s son a few months later at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference, in its first year of operation. I was amazed and then not that his son James was also trans. With a mind as open as Kitt’s, he’d let his child become who he needed to be.

I think I only went to the Glen Burnie group for six months or so, but they were pivotal months for me, in the time before I began finding kinder people in my life and filtered out the noise from what I needed to hear. Kitt was, in long retrospect, the very first non-therapist I met who was simply happy for me to figure myself out whatever that meant, but he paved the way for me to identify others and to recalibrate my life.

Kitt passed away last night, too young. I thank him for his service of all kinds. And I will be among many who will miss him.

How to Ruin Halloween

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about offensive Halloween costumes and how they send the wrong message to children, mocking people who look different or who come from communities on the margins. The commercialization of Halloween, like the commercialization of every American “holiday” is so focused on profit that there is little left to authentically celebrate. But Halloween has seen a surge in popularity in pop culture and it seems like every year the offensiveness quotient is ramped up another notch or two. Despite campaigns against appropriation for Halloween, there are far more instances of using other cultures as dress up or as object of mockery than resistance against such moments.

Halloween also puts pressure on parents to buy the best, most professional costumes possible lest their class status appear too low. A casual glance at children’s costumes on the Web reveals that if one looks for something beyond a plastic costume and mask, prices start in the mid-$30s and range past $100. This puts children in the position of announcing their parents’ financial resources just to participate in the evening’s festivities (unless they’re in a very cold weather region and the costumes are tucked under coats, perhaps).

Then there’s the fear. Trick-or-treating, once the duty and delight of kids when I was a child, has declined due to concerns about tampered candy and nighttime predators. Parents who do let their kids go door to door follow them around on the sidewalk, or children are corralled into events that take place at the local YMCA or city block. And while I may love kids, I cannot handle having 3,000 small costumed children banging into each other and screaming over the last Snickers mini-bar.

There may still be some glory left in what was once a harvest holiday. If neighbors can agree to have some candy and entertain kids for a few hours, one can get to know those neighbors a little better and get to know the neighborhood more. If children are encouraged to share their candy, get out and walk around and laugh with their friends and family, I see a glimmer of fun in the experience. But certainly there is a lot to wade through to get past the hype, blinking skulls, fake spider webbing, and plush DisneyTM/Sesame Street/PowerRangers/Transformers costumes to get to the fun.

And hooray, Columbus Day is next week. Don’t get me started on that one.

But What About Science?

It’s not often that a bonafide famous person steps into Walla Walla, much less a celebrity known for being an intelligent, interesting thinker and speaker, specifically Neil DeGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and host of the redux of Cosmos. Rather, living in a town as conservative as Walla Walla it was pretty unsurprising that Susanne and I would jump at the chance to see him give a ninety-minute talk, even if the tickets cost $50 each. The seal on the deal was the reality that we don’t go on dates all that often, what with two children under the age of three—so between presumed smart lecture on science, sitting in a hall with other less-than-Tea-Party people, and Date Night, it was a no brainer (see what I did there?) to spring for the tickets. And just like I thought would happen, we saw all manner of acquaintances and like-minded comrades. There were many school-age kids there, which was nice. At least at first.

I admit I felt some excitement rumble through the auditorium when the lights were lowered and an older man rambled onto the stage to give Dr. Tyson’s introduction. Except it wasn’t an introduction, so much as a self-congratulatory speech about bringing Dr. Tyson to Walla Walla. Of course we were all happy to see the good doctor—we’d bought $50 tickets to prove it, after all. He called up Dr. Maxood, a local cardiologist, to the stage, and then that good doctor told us about his “long shot” plan to get Dr. Tyson here to speak. I looked at my watch, mostly ignoring their remarks, but increasingly annoyed that we were listening to this and not either opening comments about the host of Cosmos nor the speaker himself. And then a third man took the conch, I mean, microphone, to tell us about his grand work raising $20,000 so that 356 local students could come and hear the lecture. Wait. Someone had to raise money for the students to attend? They weren’t simply let in? If the money hadn’t been pulled together, they wouldn’t have been let in?

Susanne and I opened up the programs we’d been handed in the lobby. While the event was a production of Main Street Studios, it was actually coordinated within the nonprofit arm of the Main Street Studios organization, which has only been in existence since late 2013. Now we had questions about how the math worked—what was Dr. Tyson paid to speak, and who got the proceeds from the speaking engagement? If Man #3 on the stage had raised $20,000 to send 356 students to the lecture (which comes to $56.18 per child, so the ticket cost plus the fee, which appears not to have been waived in order to send a higher number of students to the lecture), where did that $20K go? To the nonprofit arm of the organization or to Main Street Studios? And what are the ethics of using a nonprofit organization to support a for-profit venture, if that’s where the money went?

Feeling unsettled, Dr. Tyson at last took the stage. Things went downhill from here.

To open his talk, he told us that Cosmos was an amazing thing to have occurred in our recent history of the United States, because as the bullet points flashed animatedly across his Powerpoint presentation, it was (comments in parenthesis are paraphrases of his comments):

A documentary (who watches those anyway?)
About science (and who watches anything about science?) [I don't know, doctor, ask the producers of NOVA.]
In 13 parts (can anyone tell me what other documentary—other than a Ken Burns documentary—is in that many parts?) [Well, if you're going to go and except Ken Burns, that's not a fair question anymore.]
In primetime (not just any time slot!) [Does primetime matter anymore in the world of DVRs?]
On network TV [I think this is a diss of cable and Netflix.]
On FOX

Now here is where it started to get weird. Neil DeGrasse Tyson stands on the stage and starts shaking all over, and says, now I know the bleeding heart liberals in the audience will start foaming at the mouth thinking about FoxNews, but come on, FOX is TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX, the same company that brought you Little Miss Sunshine, the same company that has played The Simpsons for twenty years, and that’s definitely not an extremist right show.

My jaw may have dropped open. First, he spent no fewer than three minutes apologizing for FoxNews, probably the most un-sciency news organization in the entire country. But second, his logic was ridiculous. I might as well say, “Don’t worry about Little Miss Sunshine, it’s the same company that brings you FoxNews, so it’s okay.”

Other points in his presentation were equally if not more problematic, and included the following:

An insistence on naming rights as evidence of a culture’s investment in science and scientific thought—but even the Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey itself showed that naming rights as such an indicator are at the very least problematic, as many people have not gotten credit for their work, or their work has been made invisible by powerful interests. And yet this was a point he came back to several times in the lecture. I didn’t understand why.
Random evidence about how other countries love science more than the USA—many of Dr. Tyson’s examples were decontextualized and this made them seem opportunistic to me rather than part of an argument about our nation’s weaknesses. Which then means that he missed an opportunity to talk about where our weaknesses actually are. For example, Dr. Tyson pointed out that because elevator buttons skip the 13th floor, it means we’re all anti-science. But in reality those triskaidekaphobic moments are vestiges of nineteenth century spiritualism, not contemporary anti-science sentiment. They’re much more prevalent on the East Coast, it turns out, when the building planning was in full swing at the same time as the popularity of seances and the like. Dr. Tyson could have just as easily pointed to Ouija Boards as proof that people in 2014 hate science. It just is a terrible example.
Islamaphobia—First, Dr. Tyson showed us his personal pictures of September 11, 2001, which could only have been emotionally upsetting for him, at least on some level. I know it was upsetting to me to see them, certainly this wasn’t in my cadre of expectations for his lecture that night. While I wouldn’t say 9/11 should be verboten, I was ready for him to talk about how this moment related to science and support for science, and while he did speak a little bit about jet fuel and vaporized particles and velocity, his main point here was this: 9/11 happened, terrorism happened to us because a whole group of people have given themselves over to religion instead of curiosity, science, or a willingness to seek observable knowledge. He took a shoe off of one foot (certainly something that people in the Middle East do to show their reverence to Allah and to throw in disgust at men who frustrate them but that’s beside the point), and knocked it off the podium. “One-point-five billion Muslims have stopped doing science because they believe that the reason a shoe falls down is because it is the will of God, not because of gravity.” Seriously, that’s what he said. The Golden Age of Islam, he declared, was one thousand years ago because that is when Muslims stopped asking scientific questions. In his numbers up on the screen, Dr. Tyson showed that twenty-six percent of science related Nobel prizes have gone to Jewish scientists and 0.5 percent to Muslim scientists in the last 100 years. This ignores that the latest mathematics Nobel went to an Iranian woman scientist (actually no women were mentioned at any point in his lecture), and of course it doesn’t ask the question as to whether the Nobel prizes are complicated by anything like politics, power, nation-states, war, and anything else that clearly affects how they are awarded (Obama the Peace Prize winner notwithstanding). EDITED TO ADD: Let’s also look at the numbers for a moment. Basically, Dr. Tyson was saying that nobody in all of the Muslim world is doing science. That’s an outrageous statement. If only half of one percent of those 1,500,000,000 are doing science (which would be a really small number, right?), then seven and a half MILLION Muslims are working in science. I would not chuff at 7.5M of anything! This is a real head-scratcher for me.
Little details that usually matter to scientists, didn’t—in showing us the I-35 bridge collapse in the Twin Cities from a few years ago, Dr. Tyson called the Mississippi River “some little creek or something.” In posting up a picture of Bulgarian money with a scientist’s picture on it, Dr. Tyson said he couldn’t remember his name other than to say he was “a Bulgarian scientist.” (And how all of the European currencies have been replaced by the Euro which has NO SCIENTISTS ANYWHERE on the currency.) In telling us how anti-numerals we are, he showed us a picture of a basement floor in Germany numbered “-1,” ignoring that many, many more buildings in Germany and Europe use words like “Mezzanine” and “Ground Floor” and “Erdgeschoss.” If the rhetorical point here is that the details matter in science, then these details do, too. And a suggestion for Dr. Tyson: Use the little notes section of MS Powerpoint to put some of these details in, like Mississippi and Dr. Peter Beron.)

I agree with Dr. Tyson that there is a strange current of anti-science in the United States, but really, it is limited to certain members of Congress (See: “legitimate rape”), extremist school board members, and a few very vocal fundamentalist Christians. Most of the anti-science viewpoint is overstated by our media which loves a good fake fight. There certainly is plenty of anti-science sentiment to critique, but I don’t think it’s fair to do it using the ghosts of 9/11, ignoring Africa, silencing female scientists, and staring at old money. Three hundred and fifty-six schoolchildren were exposed to his ideas as the “progressive” side of the conversation, and I dearly wish it hadn’t come with so many problems and misrepresentations.

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How HRC Is Botching Its Apology to Trans People (Part 2)

In Part 1 I outlined the HRC President’s apology to trans activists at the annual Southern Comfort conference, suggesting that looking at the entirety of trans lives would provide a better starting point for getting behind trans civil rights than staying the HRC course of a new, albeit now-trans-inclusive, ENDA bill. Beyond the general, “what do children, adults, and elders need in the way of trans rights” question, there are critical services and support systems that more vulnerable trans people also need and often don’t get, in part because they’re trans, and in part because they may have other overlapping statuses that limit their access to those services. Specifically, I am talking about trans prisoners, transgender people with moderate to severe mental illness, drug addiction, and trans sex workers. So today I’ll outline my ideas around what these vulnerable groups need that in large part, they are not getting from our society and its infrastructure. And if HRC would like to fund the programs that are in place across the nation, well, that money could make a real difference.

Trans Prisoners—Intersecting transphobia with societal hostility toward people convicted of a crime, transgender prisoners are especially vulnerable to abuse in the criminal justice system, from the earliest stages of a police investigation, through the pre-trial process, trial, sentencing, and throughout their term in the prison system. Data are incomplete but suggest that transgender prisoners are more often placed in solitary confinement, both as punishment and due to the dearth of alternatives for housing them while they serve their terms. Further, while no studies or analyses have been conducted regarding whether transgender people accused of a crime are treated fairly in the initial stages of an investigation, the CeCe McDonald case certainly highlights that extreme injustice can and does occur, and is very difficult to remediate through the criminal justice system itself. Trans people in prison are much more often than not denied hormone therapy or other trans-related health or mental health care. Organizations like the Transgender Law Center, Lambda Legal, and transgender prisoner advocacy groups are relatively underfunded and already working on these issues and could use a significant funding boost.

Trans People with Mental Illness—Like transgender prisoners, these are trans people who face restrictions on their credibility and autonomy by virtue of living with moderate to severe mental health issues, which are exacerbated by people’s transphobia and gender expectations. They may be denied hormone therapy (whether they’d already begun it or not), have a higher rate of turning to the gray market for transition-related care, which is unregulated and often dangerous, and they may have higher rates of suicidal ideation and attempts. Telling someone who already has challenges with their mental health that they will not be supported as a trans person can certainly make their health issues worse, and it is well documented that individuals with mental health instability often fail to find effective advocates to help them meet their health needs. Advocates like the National Alliance on Mental Illness work to separate a person’s mental health from the idea that being transgender is itself a mental illness, but much more work among therapists, the health care system, and the courts needs to be done.

Trans Drug Users—With relatively few paths toward adequate health care, a culture that adds stress to trans lives, limited work prospects, and a general lack of access to mental health support, many transgender people self-medicate to handle their trauma or conditions. If this approach leads to worsening or more frequent drug use, an individual may find themselves in the criminal justice system (see above), in unstable housing, and their health outcomes worsen significantly. Not only do we need to alleviate the drivers of unhealthy drug use (I am not getting into an argument about recreational drug use), but we need to ensure that the support system around drug user health is culturally competent to work with transgender people, so that transphobia is not a barrier for them as they interact with drug counselors, doctors, trauma care personnel, first responders, and peer programs. Syringe exchange has a 25-year history of lowering HIV and hepatitis C incidence among drug users  but many programs do not have specific training on working with trans users.

Trans Sex Workers—When I talked with transgender sex workers in Washington, DC, several people told me that they started out in sex work because they had been bullied out of high school and never earned their degree. Often they were also estranged from their immediate family, so there were few avenues to earn money and be able to support themselves. Many people I knew began sex work in their mid-teens and while they knew it was dangerous, it also allowed them flexibility and was, for them, less humiliating than working for minimum wage at a business that wouldn’t respect their gender identity. Culturally we treat sex workers with great disdain and in places like DC, trans sex workers have been harassed by police, disproportionately arrested and imprisoned, and then humiliated in prison. Transgender sex workers face a higher rate of HIV and hepatitis C in part due to poor police practices around their arrests and convictions. Organizations like HIPS actively perform outreach to provide sex workers with education and condoms with very little funding, at least compared to HRC.

Transgender people live on the margins. We are often unemployed or underemployed. We face open hostility and harassment from passersby and when we defend ourselves we may face imprisonment instead of our attackers. We have more trouble than average getting housing, have higher rates of suicide and drug use, and alcoholism. All of that said, we’re community leaders, live in stable relationships, raise children, donate to causes, we vote, we have successful careers, and we are loved. When a transgender person’s experience intersects with another condition of vulnerability, we must provide support to them because that could be any of us, given the right circumstances. What keeping to an agenda of a new omnibus ENDA-type bill forgets is that too many trans people face conditions more dire than that potential law would ameliorate. Until we lift all of us up, our movement is incomplete. And if HRC truly wants to apologize to “the trans community,” it needs to define an agenda that includes all of that community.