Everett Maroon's Blog, page 9

An Open Letter to America

I don’t understand us humans. No really, I don’t get it. Maybe I’m getting dumber in my middle age, but it could be that we really have stopped making sense. If Emile texted me while I was in a movie theater, I would totally text him back. And I would expect not to get shot just because I told my kid “hi” while I was away. Why can’t we have a respectful conversation about guns and gun control? Why don’t the rank and file NRA members stand up and say, enough is enough, there has to be a way to balance our Second Amendment rights and public safety? And why are we so unwilling to admit our mistakes and where our public policies have gone wrong? We agreed to make legal opiates available to the general public (in the form of Oxycontin and Percoset, etc.) knowing that some percentage of people would become addicted to them, and disabuse ourselves of a comprehensive program to help them out of addiction?

Why are we so willing to throw away people after they’ve made mistakes, imprisoning heroin and pot users, or devaluing individuals, like telling poor people we won’t give them food stamps, telling poor kids they should have to work for that free breakfast at school? Why didn’t we pass a background check law last year when 90 percent of Americans wanted it? Why are we okay when a natural gas company contaminates the drinking water for 300,000 people in West Virginia? Why are we not talking about the shooting of schoolchildren in Sandy Hook after Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, asked us to have a one-year moratorium which is now over? Why did we even have to entertain the notion of armed guards at every school in America?

I know these questions don’t have easy answers. And I know we are reluctant to duke it out in any national forum. And I’ll say that I like shooting a shotgun at a clay pigeon. I see the weary faces of my syringe exchangers every day. I live in a poor county in rural America and I see what guns mean for some people. I know we all want to have a sense of pride and dignity. I think there’s a way through for us all but our leaders don’t give a crap about us. We have to make these conversations happen ourselves. We have to push back with the only remaining tools we have—our voices, our words, our votes, our energy to agitate. If you’re an NRA member and you’d like to see sensible gun policy get an actual debate in Congress, please speak up. If you’re a Guns & Ammo reader and you are appalled that Dick Metcalf lost his job simply for asking that we have a conversation, speak up please.

If you’re a Christian and you’re sick of sermons about abortion and gay people and the culture wars, speak up. If you’re a teacher and you’re exhausted about teaching to a test that doesn’t help your students, speak up. If you worked in a union for 30 years and it benefitted you, speak up to those who say unions are evil. If the police in your neighborhood harass youth or poor people, speak up. If your job is a hostile work environment, speak up to someone who has the authority or responsibility to help. If you see a child being bullied at school for whatever reason, speak up.

The point is, we need to take responsibility for ourselves, but we need to take responsibility for each other, too. I guarantee you that in the days following this latest cinema shooting, news will come out that this retired police officer has been acting erratically for some time. We’ll learn that nobody said anything, or if someone did, that it didn’t get taken seriously or communicated to the right people. Because that’s the story every time. I can predict this guy’s behavior because nobody pulls out a gun the first time they get pissed off. Reasonable people would try shushing someone in the row ahead of them, or storm out, or talk to them, or ask themselves in their own head if maybe they just don’t know all the facts of those two people and they should give them a break. This was not a reasonable person. And he should not have had a gun.

Can we please talk, America? About ourselves? About starting to become better?

Not All Opinions Are Equal

Credit: Amnesty International

There, I said it. Of course, this itself is an opinion. But give me the honor of a clarification first, and then we can debate the premise of my argument.

While it may be ethical to treat all people equally, provide equal access to resources, equal responsibility under the law, and equal opportunity to basic human rights (which are all debatable concepts, I know), people’s behavior, ideas, and attitudes are not in an of themselves equal. For example:

I’m pro-choice. I’m pro-life.

These are not equal sentiments, even if they are held in equal strength of passion by the individuals espousing each one. Yes, they are opposed, but the definitions of each of these stances makes them unequal to each other. One opinion allows for women to make their own choices with regard to their health and their lives. The other opinion holds that because life begins at some point before one’s birth, that women do not have the prerogative to make any “choices” once they become pregnant, and sometimes it means that women should not have the prerogative even to prevent unwanted pregnancy itself. Thus the effect of these opinions is to approve or denounce specific rights for women.

To pretend that all opinions are equal, or to favor its more tactful cousin, the “At least we can continue the conversation,” is to ignore the effect of public opinion and genuinely held beliefs. In other words, insisting that everyone is entitled to their opinions means that we have no way to understand or think through the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland or the refusal of a hospital in El Salvador to grant a termination when the fetus has died, because it may usher in abortion rights in the country that currently prohibits them. We don’t hold opinions, after all, because we don’t have an investment in practicing them. We take our opinions out into the world and we push for them, we make policy, we decide how to vote using them as our frame for selection. We implement our ideas.

It goes the same for all opposed ideas that center on banning something or removing a ban. Same-sex marriage. Covering trans-related health care, or letting trans people use the restroom that comports with their gender identity. Evolution should be taught or not taught in school. Believing that people in poverty are necessarily lazy and undeserving of any support. All of these opinions close down the possibility that there can be another perspective, because all of these opinions are predicated on another assumption—that “my” opinion is the only “correct” opinion.

The problem here is that becoming so invested in one’s opinion—such that there is no room for change, either forward or via a doubling back—is that it pressures the facts of any given situation out of the room. To use the example of reproductive rights again, claiming an anti-choice stance is used as the basis for a new wave of abortion restrictions across the United States. None of these proposed bills or passed laws mentions that the availability of safe, legal abortion has no effect on the number of pregnancies conceived each year. None focus on the high rate of miscarriage, the improved outcomes for women who have access to abortion, the lower morbidity and mortality of women, and so on. Because if facts and scientific data were truly valued in the conversation, there would at least be an attempt to explain these data as part of the lawmaking. Instead simply having the opinion “I’m pro-life” is justification enough to write any kind of abortion-curtailling language the lawmaker (or the lobbyist) wants to write.

This is why I am suspicious of people who insist on “continuing the conversation” or on being “entitled to their opinion.” This is why I prefer thoughtful study of a political position or opinion. Because if we’re willing to base our beliefs on weak evidence, then we have no argument against the individual who insists the planet is flat because the street he walks on is flat. The “opinion” that vaccinations cause autism in children has been thoroughly debunked, the so-called scientist who purported the theory revoked of his license, and still it floats around the Internet as some kind of “alternative” to vaccination, which has saved millions of lives around the globe from diseases that are no longer the menaces they once were. And because enough people now choose not to “believe” in vaccines, my entire family was quarantined with whooping cough last September—and we had been vaccinated! (Which meant that we had a more mild form of the disease, even if we could still communicate it to others.) Paying attention to evidence would have, in our tiny local moment, made a big difference to us on Emile’s second birthday.

No, opinions are not equal. People are, or at least, they ought to be. Equality is the basis of my ethics, not unsupported opinions. The next time someone declares that all opinions are equal to each other, you tell them I disagree.

Make Time to Write

When I was an intrepid tween writer I came across a quote by Stephen King that went something like “Writers write. I meet people all the time who say they’re writers, and when I ask what they’re working on, they tell me they’ve never written a word. They’re not writers. Writers write.” Apologies to Mr. King for the paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. What this did to my consciousness as someone who really wanted to be a writer was set an external expectation on me. If I ever stopped writing, I could no longer call myself a writer. I had to be a shark, always swimming, always moving, or poof! I’d disappear in the mist of my own failure. So I wrote and wrote, terrible stories but interesting to me, and definitely definitive in setting up the foundation of my craft. Early on I was fascinated by ordinary people in near-extreme circumstances, and the relationships between them. I submitted to summer writing programs between my high school years, getting rejected a lot and accepted a couple of times, and then I absorbed as much as I could from the other writers around me.

I saw that folks each had their own rituals for writing, their habits, good and bad, and their tendencies, like being a night owl or a midday writer. They also took on the specific task of writing differently. Some wrote and rewrote through their first draft, others plowed through and got to the nitty gritty in later drafts. One woman spent months writing backstory and plotting reveals and twists before she ever got into the manuscript, and another friend jumped in and let the words take her wherever they happened to go. There were tradeoffs for every strategy of course, but taken in aggregate they led to a literature among us. That is what literature should do—provide an avenue for people who need to tell a story of importance to someone else. If the process of writing is varied, so is the access to writing. So it behooves us who care about the characters in our heads to open a space for the writing to happen. Here are a few of my ideas, humbly offered with no expectations for agreement.

Identify the times you have for writing—If weekdays are too cramped with obligations, look to the weekend. If you could stand to wake an hour earlier, go for it. Or say no to the standing Sunday afternoon coffee date with a friend, and make a date with yourself instead. Don’t worry if your time bands are three hours, one hour, or three-quarters, just find where they are and take stock. Also give a look to what abets them: if you’re trying to stuff in a block of writing between your gym routine and your shower, that might not work out too well for your words.

Know thyself—Most of us have figured out if we’re morning people or night people, but if you’re not sure, keep a journal for a couple of weeks and write down your activities, and then judge for yourself. Heck, if you completely forget to keep your journal until 2PM, that’s good evidence of your tendencies, too. The point is to be able to match up your time availability with your mental and creative peak, or near as the two meet.

Be forgiving—I think the Stephen King quote is a little narrow for some writers. True, nobody who has never written a short story would be accurate in calling themselves “a writer,” but on the other hand it’s not really about identity, it’s about getting something produced. As one who lost more than a decade by insisting I wasn’t “really” a writer, I wish I’d said screw it to my expectations and sat down to the keyboard no matter what it did or didn’t mean about me. If you only have one time a week to write, take it and use it. Protect that moment in your schedule with the fierceness of one thousand mother bears. Grizzly bears. Desperate grizzly bears. But when it comes around, put your doubts and your naysaying away, and WRITE THE LOVE OUT OF THAT TIME. Then when life gives you another opening, you can double your writing time, and so on. And then you can be more flexible about it. But momentum counts, so open up your access to writing when you can, and stop berating yourself in the meantime.

Write what you can—Some days Shakespeare is not going to spray out of your fingertips. Most days, actually. Okay, maybe never. The point is, if all you can write is back story, or plotting, do it. Give yourself a reason to move forward, or at least away from square one, in any direction (think: chessboard or Hunger Games arena). If you keep up with it, the writing will happen. And also consider other projects. If I get stuck on a long novel-in-progress for longer than I’m comfortable, I move on to a short story or an essay. Or a blog post about coping with writer’s block. Finish the sentence “writers write” with “whatever they can.” The block will ease at some point, or you’ll create a bunch of other things in the meantime.

Be on the lookout for that which helps you write—A comfortable chair and adequate desk support are critical, but give yourself enough light, a happy enough space, a drink nearby, and so on. Set yourself up for success. I realized early on that I have to have noise nearby that I can then tune out. If things are too quiet my mind wanders in an attempt to fill the silence. But I’m the youngest of a big brood, so that makes sense. The reverse is also true, so if there is too much clutter around you, clear it out. Have a separate space that won’t suck you back into your other obligations like I don’t know, vacuuming. (Who ever stops writing to vacuum? Anyone?) And remember that music often stimulates our creative neurons, so get yourself a radio, etc.

Losing access to our writing time is a common way for writers to quit their craft, and in many ways, it’s a small, painful death that never really fades. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to be the next bestselling author or if you’re only writing for yourself. Make time for your passion, don’t worry about the words you’re writing if it’s typing versus not writing anything. Momentum has a way of helping us become better writers. Practice really is its own reward, and you can thank yourself later when you’ve finished a project.

 

Everett’s Annual Crystal Ball Predictions

I’ve made some semi-serious predictions for the past few years, often involving Sarah Palin (but not this year, darn it!). As in previous years, I’ll stick mostly to political stuff and some popular culture territory. So let me go out on a limb once again and make a few bold statements that are probably not true but whatever. Nothiing is really true on the internet, right? Except Buzzfeed.

It’s the beginning of the end for the NFL as we know it—Between the increasing evidence that even high school football causes irreversible brain injuries, that crowds are thinning out at team stadiums because ticket prices are too high, cities pushing back against the extravagant costs of building new playing fields, and a slew of bad publicity that players and coaching staffs are mean even to each other, we could be seeing the end of the machismo of this monopoly group. Just yesterday, Jovan Belcher’s mother filed a lawsuit against the Kansas City Chiefs that they knew he was ill from repeated head injuries well before Belcher killed his girlfriend and himself last year. This is not even the beginning of a wave of suits against NFL clubs, given that the NFL just settled a class-action lawsuit in 2013 (which left many people unsatisfied) for hundreds of millions a dollars, nor is it the start of gruesome violence committed by former and current players suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. As one NFL official put it in the recounting done by Frontline last year, “If only one mother in ten decides she won’t let her son play football, that’s the end of the NFL.”

The death penalty in the US will come up for debate once again—There are two fronts in the war against the death penalty. For one, it has been abolished in eighteen states, putting pressure on the equal protection clause in the US Constitution, because the same offense in different jurisdictions could result in very different sentences. According to The New York Times’ recent opinion piece on this subject:

All 80 death sentences in 2013 came from only about 2 percent of counties in the entire country, and all 39 executions — more than half occurred in Texas and Florida — took place in about 1 percent of all counties.

The other front concerns the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the cruel and unusual punishment section. In the time since European manufacturers ceased sending the drug cocktail used in lethal injection in the US, wardens have had to come up with their own formulations, which haven’t been tested for efficacy, and more specifically, to ensure that there is no undue pain on the part of the prisoner as part of the execution process. The likelihood that either or both of these topics come up in 2014 is strong. And in a midterm election year? It’s been a long time since the death penalty as an issue was part of a congressional campaign. Even the pundits aren’t sure how it could affect the rhetoric of any races this summer and fall.

Some new media outlet is going to have the breakout hit of the year—Mad Men, let’s face it, is on the decline, AMC killed The Killing in its third season, and it hasn’t found a replacement standard-bearer yet. Netflix did very well last year with its original programs House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, so maybe its time for another smaller studio to come up with an edgy winner. Forget A&E, people, mired in copious amounts of offensive reality programming. Think Hulu. Think Downton Abbey meets Battlestar Galactica. Think really super BIG. It’s not going to come from broadcast television, much as everyone loves Scandal (settle down).

We’ve got another year of insufferable, reductive debate about Obamacare coming—If you held out any hope that people would shut up about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, start working on letting go, because it’s not happening. With an extremely short list of accomplishments other than a government shutdown in 2013, the GOP members of Congress have to hit the campaign trail with some kind of drum to beat, and a shaky web site and people complaining about losing their fake health coverage is that drum. We will see new biggest-ever levels of funding even in smaller House races because the GOP needs to hold that chamber, so expect every piece of misinformation to be plastered on our televisions starting this spring, mostly from the lovely not-so-well-regulated SuperPACs that will be designed to get your vote. It’s time to invest in a DVR and skip all the commercials.

 

2013, Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

I only wrote 75 blog posts in 2013 (well, 76 considering this one is on the last day), partly because parenthood and partly because I was working on so many other things. My second child is due to arrive on March 1, my second book sometime before that (wish I had a date, ahem), and life at work is full of advocacy, budgeting, negotiations, and paperwork. I’m pretending I’m not stuck in the middle of a new novel project, because I can’t really call it new anymore if I’ve been working on it since 2012. I joined a board of directors for a former prisoner transition program that was desperate for funding before it was awarded nearly a million dollars in a settlement with AT&T for price gouging. I continue to field calls from people looking for resources or lawyers or therapists or a shoulder to lean on, and I wish I was a better connector for them. I would love to find some new music, or find music in a new way because Spotify’s recommendations can only take a person so far.

I’m doing my best to fit into Walla Walla and its tiny machinations of power and prestige, but I still dream about relocating all of us to a more metropolitan area where I won’t want to squeeze every person of color I see on the street and where we can meet other people like us who aren’t also urgently trying to find a way to leave. I keep having the sense that I’m in the middle of something, which is better than feeling like I’m at the end, I suppose. Maybe this is what middle age is—the experience of the mud in the middle. When I was 23 and dirt poor and on the edge of eviction, I dreamed that twenty years from now I’ll have it all handled, I’ll own a house and have a well paying job, and instead my future hasn’t met those class aspirations. I do value stuff a bit differently these days, which is either by design or by cause of condition. I get so much time with Emile and I have no regrets about that.

Earlier this year someone I knew committed suicide and I continue to think about her often. If only we all knew the difference we each made in the world, every day. I think she’s haunting several people, actually, which pressures them and uplifts them at once. I try to keep a lookout for the people around me as if it’s some kind of defense (against the dark arts) and even as suicide rates in the United States increase. So once again let me say that if you need to talk to someone, consider talking to me. I’m never more than 6 inches away from the Internet. [ @everettmaroon on Twitter and ev dot maroon at gmail ] On the upside, I’ve seen the WW school superintendent’s office pay attention to the trans youth among their student body, and gotten 90 minutes from my Congresswoman’s office on the subject of social and medical services for HIV-positive veterans. I try to take each boon with gratitude.

In 2014 I hope to help launch a successful needs assessment here in Walla Walla, along with a few other people, to help get some concrete responses about life in town from other LGBT people, push for better HIV prevention funding in areas outside of King County (where Seattle is located), and win a grant to do some research on the founding of the Harvey Milk High School in NYC. Susanne and the family and I will try to get out east to show off our youngest to our friends and relatives. I have a book launch for my debut novel, and there’s a maybe blog starting up this spring from the likes of the Lambda Literary Foundation fellows from last summer that has gotten me excited. I don’t have any short story work on the horizon, and I’m not actively bidding to start a regular column anywhere, but that kind of stuff can change in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I’ll try to get to a conference or two, but I’m probably spending a good chunk of 2014 bouncing a new youngun on my knee. I really love bouncing babies, it seems.

I have found the fights of 2013 to be dispiriting and almost completely useless. Look, maybe Dan Savage is a jerk, Ani DiFranco is a narcissist, and Buck Angel has no perspective. These people may have made headlines in popular culture and become marked as some kind of LGBT leader, but they’re not. They’re just not. One person cannot speak for the multiplicities of communities that comprise LGBT any more than one president could represent Planet Earth to the rest of the universe. There’s a reason that only some people present themselves as spokespeople, and that other people quietly go along doing the work that forges real empowerment for marginalized people. Don’t look toward the loudmouths, go searching for the principled workers.

2014 will be a great year, if only because CeCe McDonald will be released from the St. Cloud Correctional Facility. Let’s remember all of the other trans prisoners across the country, please, and get involved in writing to them and supporting them in what are extremely hostile environments. Next year we’ll see more in the way of same-sex marriage debates, ignorant celebrities saying ignorant things, and ALEC-driven legislation meant to disempower women and LGBT people. I for one will do my best not to be petty but to push back, speak out, and move through these moments. If I can help with a cause, I will put in my energy, and I hope you do the same.

Thank you to everyone who helped me out in 2013, supported my work or my family, congratulated me on my successes, cooed over Emile, volunteered for a cause I love, donated to HIV or LGBT groups, listened to a youth, bought someone a meal, offered condolences, or did their best for the people around them. I know it’s sappy but I still believe, idealist that I am, that love will always see us through. I welcome 2014 with open arms, as I do all of you. Have a wonderful New Year.

Best and Worst Pop Culture Moments of 2013

Two weeks until 2013 is in the dust bin with all of the other expired calendars from years past. So much has happened, including a drawn-out government shutdown, the death of Nelson Mandela, and the Lady Gaga/Muppets Christmas special, among other low points. On the bright side we’ve also witnessed the breakout hit Orange is the New Black, Wendy Davis’s filibustering prowess, and a thrilling conclusion (or even a conclusion) to Breaking Bad. It’s been a year of oh…forget it, don’t let me descend into platitudes. Here’s my best and worst list for the year.

Best Stuff

New Kickass Women in Congress—Yes, Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren were elected at the end of 2012, but they took office this year. And already they’ve gotten involved in issues that have been twisting in the legislative wind for years now.  They sent a letter to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of Health and Human Services to end the ban on gay men donating blood. They’ve also taken on big, systemic issues, maybe most notably with Senator Baldwin co-sponsoring a bill to end to phone tapping by the NSA, and Senator Warren tackling banking regulation, the lack of which got us into the 2008 financial crisis. They’re happy to let us think that this Congress is unable to get anything done, because that’s just when they’ll squeak through urgent changes under the radar.

Transgender Representation that Doesn’t Suck—I’m not saying there’s nothing problematic about a white woman who spent a year in jail getting to write a successful memoir about her experience and helping it get turned into a flagship program for troubled Netflix, but there is also a lot about Orange is the New Black that is terrific for popular culture, none more significant than the casting of Laverne Cox as a transgender prisoner. Not only is this not a representation of a dead trans woman which we could see any week during a police procedural, but the role is played by a living, breathing trans woman, who is chock full of talent, and who gives interviews that spotlight the interesting things she has to say about the world around her. She’s as refreshing as a mountain stream. I really think there’s something particularly important about getting to see a trans woman of color anywhere in the media as a thriving, successful person.

The Rise of Wendy Davis—In the best filibuster since Senator Stackhouse refused to sit in an episode of The West Wing, Wendy Davis held off an extreme anti-abortion measure in Texas for about a month longer, and in doing so, became a literal overnight celebrity who is now on the campaign trail to be governor of the Lone Star State. Sadly, the bill was signed into law by Rick Perry and after a brief court challenge, was allowed to proceed by the US Supreme Court.

Worst Stuff

Miley Cyrus—Yes, there was the loss of innocence for teddy bears everywhere in light of Cyrus’s VMA Awards performance, otherwise known as TwerkGate. But much worse was the pop culture and social media response that included people calling her “demonic,” and death threats from affronted individuals, she received one, two, three, four, and five shaming letters from none other than Sinead O’Connor. This was not a high point in popular culture by any measure. Also troubling was the defense of masculine grossness by Robin Thicke who had one of the most sexist videos of the year in Blurred Lines, and it wasn’t exactly an empty field of contestants for that award. Although I will say this parody is almost worth the offensiveness of his version, which he actually had the gall to call a “new feminism.”

The Fake Note Deathmatch at 30,000 Feet—Elan Gale, a self-important guy you’ve never heard of before, who helped bring us The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, those stalwarts of quality television, faked a hostile note campaign during a flight to Phoenix, Arizona, this Thanksgiving. I wrote about it, myself, because I was concerned about what it meant for harassment, macho-coded violence, and what lengths people will go to for laugh, as well as how strenuously people will defend such problematic behavior. Tosh.0, anyone? Sure, turns out there is no cancer-ridden Diane. Great. It was still a rallying call for intimidating women we don’t like. And that makes it a low point for me.

The Crappiest Oscars in Memory—What do you get when you cross a self-aggrandizing celebrity, an awards show with a spotty history toward women and people of color, and live television? You get with the most sexist dance number anyone can remember. And then the cutest kid in Hollywood who turned in an amazing performance while still in the single digits of her life is called the c-word by the Onion. It was that kind of night. But don’t take it from me, here’s a list of eight other incredibly racist things that happened at the Academy Awards in 2013. At least there was this love letter to Quvenzhanzé Wallis from the Crunk Feminist Collective.

The Trayvon Martin Verdict—I watched the trial with a sense of horror because even all of the commentary around the trial was problematic, blaming Martin for his own death, dismissing the testimony of his witnesses, and pondering all too much about how hard it must have been to do what George Zimmerman, self-appointed community guard, did that night. His acquittal was followed by a faked “rescue” of a family after a car crash, an arrest of his wife on perjury charges, and his own arrest following threats he made to his girlfriend while wielding a gun, which resulted in no charges filed just a few days ago. There have also been rumblings from the medical examiner that the case against Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin, filed several months after the shooting, was never intended to be won by the prosecution. Silver lining: The “stand your ground” law in Florida, which was actually not part of this case, was championed by ALEC, and has caused several corporate partners to drop out of the exchange, fearing backlash from public opinion.

2014, you are almost upon us. We’ll have midterm elections for a third of the seats in the Senate, all of the House, and 36 states have gubernatorial races. There will be a whole host of bickering over this year’s Oscar contenders, grousing about the National Book Award, loads of fodder from FoxNews for Stephen Colbert to skewer, and fussing over how Jimmy Fallon is doing as Jay Leno’s successor. We will argue about whether racism still exists in the United States, and if The Walking Dead could really happen. We’ll stay glued to Scandal even if the show doesn’t make any freaking sense, and we’ll cry our eyes out when Sandra Oh leaves the cast of Grey’s Anatomy. I just hope there aren’t too many disasters ahead of us. Like say, a government shutdown that costs the country more than $20 billion.

Let me just play that new Beyoncé album…

What’s Wrong with Transgasm.org

Somewhere between the endless Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, health care reform, and frequent trans community infighting, it had to happen. I mean, it couldn’t go on forever that the huge disparity in supply and demand for gender identity-related surgeries didn’t motivate someone to come up with a scheme touted as the solution to all of our troubles. Yes, there have been top surgery parties for years, and the swath of crowdsourcing applications seems to continue unabated, but these are at the initiative of the person seeking a surgical procedure. On Friday last week, Buck Angel and Jody Rose launched Transgasm.org, which sounds like a porn venture, but has nothing to do with the “gasm” spectrum.

Transgasm markets itself as a positivist campaign to fund trans-related surgeries. From their site:

Transgasm.org is an organization that will fully fund surgeries in the FTM and MTF transsexual communities and help to create income for the transsexual community, its supporters, and for anyone else who identifies the way they choose to identify.

Still following?

Putting aside the conflict and issues with definitions like “transsexual” and “the way they choose to identify,” there are some clear points in the sentence. Things like “fully fund” and “organization” are specific terms, even if “anyone” and “create income” are not. And the vagueness in the FAQ for the site, which is supposed to be the page where questions are clarified, winds up being real cause for concern. Here are the issues I have with Transgasm.org:

1. It’s a pyramid scheme—As eloquently described by Emi Koyama, the paying-it-forward nature of Transgasm means that there needs to be an ever-expanding group of people paying into the scheme to keep the money flowing. Read her post to get a lot more detail on that.

2. It asks people on the margins to contribute creative projects to the site for free—There’s a lot of touting on Transgasm.org that they ask for no fee from people seeking funds for surgery. Well, of course they don’t. They’re asking for original artwork, ebooks, video, and other digital content that they can sell on the site to generate capital for these surgeries. If the works are high quality, then that is a crappy thing to do to someone who worked hard on their art and who will not be able to publish it anywhere reputable after they publish it on the Transgasm site. Artists and writers should be paid, even nominally, for their work. If the works are mediocre or poor, then who is going to buy more than a few copies of them? 

3. Its system for identifying content producers is non-transparent and full of meaningless jargon—To get your surgery funded, you need to “attend” Transgasm University. To “attend,” you need to sign up on the site, and then hope you’re selected by Buck and Jody. How this selection process works, nobody knows. How any selection process funds the entire FTM and MTF communities, I also don’t know. Why have a selection process other than first come, first served, if the point is to revolutionize funding for surgeries? But furthermore, why do individuals have to sit through a seminar? Is it to share the “new skills” in the “law of attraction” and “thought science”? Also, isn’t sitting through a seminar the fast track to a time share in Boca Raton?

4. It’s devoid of the rapid changes in health care coverage and the political push for trans-related health care coverage—As we speak, trans people are signing up for health care insurance. More and more employers are ending the trans-related exceptions in their insurance policies, and covering preventive care (like PAP smears for men with cervixes and prostate exams for women with prostates), and surgical procedures. After all, what makes a system like Transgasm even possible is a market that for decades has refused to serve the trans community. What if more people put their energies into changing that market, and say, using the leverage contained in the Affordable Care Act to do so? Oh, what’s that? That’s already happening? Great! So why are we going to give all kinds of content free to these two guys?

5. It’s had zero trans women involved—If this were really a system dedicated to both trans women and men, would the emphasis be so much on Buck and Jody’s physiques? Or their tips for bodybuilding? Or not have any input from even one single token trans woman? It’s not just a surface issue of representation, either. Trans women and trans men seek rather different medical and surgical procedures, which come at ridiculously different price points. Average cost for a bilateral mastectomy and chest reconstruction: $8,500. Average cost for a vaginoplasty: $20,000. Yes, some surgeries requested by trans men will be more expensive than those requested by trans women (e.g., phalloplasty versus larynx shaving), but my point here is surgery =/= surgery. If my ebook sells on Transgasm.org for $20, I’ll need a lot more of them to sell if I’m looking to cover a $20,000 procedure. Involvement from trans women could have, I don’t know, pointed this out to them before they slapped up their web site.

6. The math doesn’t work—Let’s go back to my $20 book. So according to Buck and Jody, if I sell a copy of my book on their site, $10 will go into my account for my personal Idaho—I mean, surgery—$5 will go to 7 other people and their surgery funds (I’m sure they’re grateful for my 71 cents), and $5 will go to administering the site “to make sure it can continue to do this important work.” If my surgery costs $8,500, I will need to sell 850 copies of my ebook, and in the process I’ll have “donated” $4,250, or $607, to each of those 7 other surgeries. It’s a huge number of sales needed for a much smaller return to anyone else in the stream. Not to mention that again, with no known editorial process, no distribution or marketing other than what happens on the site, the likelihood of selling 850 copies is miniscule. So disparities in how much a procedure costs can echo in terms of how long or how much effort needs to go into funding some of these surgeries.

I’m not here to argue with Buck or Jody of their rippling muscles, or marvel at their copious YouTube videos. I’m here to tell fellow transfolk that their energies will be better spent elsewhere. If the web site that is supposed to change funding trans surgeries “forever” can’t even explain how their business model works, and if they use finding $160 in the street as an example of how that business model functions, then it is time to close the tab on that experiment. Because what we don’t need any more of around these parts are bad ideas.

The “Passive-Aggressive” Note Thing & Just How Problematic It Is

TRIGGER WARNING for conversations and content about rape culture and sexual violence and intimidation.

In the midst of the Thanksgiving gratitude Facebook posts, reminders that the holiday is an aggrandizement of genocide against Native Americans, and pictures of turkeys, a little story about airline travelers made the viralways on social media. It detailed the hostilities between a producer of The Bachelor and a private citizen in seat 7A as their flight, delayed, sat on the tarmac.

Elan Gale, the Hollywood producer, opened with a tweet that seemed humorous at first:

It’s sarcastic and not particularly sensitive, but it goes to the frustrations and anxieties that many of us have when traveling in an airline system that hasn’t been passenger-focused in a long time. But thinking about it more carefully, there are only some people who can afford to travel by air. Some others of us either take the bus or the train, drive a shorter distance that doesn’t break our budget, or stay home. So already this is a conversation between relatively entitled people. 

Fifteen minutes later, Elan is still annoyed by her, and tweets:

So it sounds as if she was rude to the cabin staff, but what also seems clear to me is that she is having a lot of anxiety about not being present with her family on the holiday. Many of us can identify with that, but if this one person is voicing her anxiety this loudly and rudely, it makes me wonder what degree of anxiety she lives with on a daily basis. Even if most of  us get stressed trying to travel around/for the holidays, we still can silence ourselves or whisper with our traveling neighbors about our frustrations. Certainly Elan isn’t using his filter, either, he just thinks he’s the better person for tweeting about it to thousands of people instead of announcing his feelings to the other people on the plane.

He also shows a complete lack of empathy for her. And maybe a lack of headphones:

Finally the captain announces they’ll be taking off in a few minutes, and Elan tweets that the woman muttered “Bout DAMN time” from five rows back. That puts him in the second row. And that puts him in first class seating. So part of the subtext here is that a white, male, first class passenger, is pissed off because a woman in economy is complaining too much and too loudly about being delayed and missing her connection on Thanksgiving. But ha ha, let’s just laugh at how he characterizes her and her emotions.

The Huffington Post article about Elan’s tweets uses “Annoying Airplane Passenger Got What She Deserved” as a tag for the article, which lends to the overly aggressive tenor of the successive interactions between Elan and the woman. It’s not as if the “deserved” concept doesn’t get attributed to stories about women who face hostility from men all the time. We know how to read such a tag because we’ve seen it so many times before. Now that we’ve seen the set up from Elan—this woman is rude, hates workers, and deserves the mockery of thousands of us—he progresses from communicating about her to communicating to her. And it’s not nice:

The note reads: Dear lady in 7A: It has come to my attention that today is your Thanksgiving!! It must be hard not to be with your family! Please accept this glass of wine. It is a gift from me to you. Hopefully if you drink it, you won’t be able to use your mouth to talk. Love Elan!

So to make sure I understand this: a man in first class is angry at a woman five rows behind him, can’t focus on anything else, starts complaining about her online, and then sends her a hostile note with a glass of wine. Did he really think she would drink it? Reflect on his pithy sentiment and change her evil ways? Be silenced by his mansplaining self and never make another peep? He’s presumed who she is, why she’s so upset, and how he alone can fix her, never anticipating that perhaps she’ll respond in some way. This isn’t an oversight, it’s a direct consequence of not asking for a moment what her perspective may look like.

But one note and a glass of crappy red wine isn’t enough for Elan. For whatever reason (he somehow didn’t feel the motivation to tweet about it), he then works with a flight attendant to leave two little bottles of vodka on her tray table, walking by “pretending” to go to the lavatory. And then he reports he’s “shaking” because he’s so terrified that he did that. Yes, buddy, you’re shaking because you’ve repeatedly invaded someone’s space.

Elan then tweets that the woman is staring at him in anger. I’m not sure that was her emotion, but for someone who so far has been driven by anger with his tweets and notes and provisions of alcohol, just maybe she could have been looking at him in fear. Certainly the note she sends back telegraphs some of her emotions:

She’s not friendly, but why would she be? A big burly guy five rows in front of her is really angry at her and has now left her a hostile note and invaded her personal space. What her letter reads to me is frightened and defensive, and it’s drawing a boundary. In case he thinks he’s being hilarious, she wants him to know he isn’t. She calls him on his lack of empathy (which one could argue she was lacking too, in her conversation with a flight attendant). Maybe it was unwise to write back to him, but how was she to know when his harassment would end? After all, she hadn’t responded between the wine and vodka. What if her first response was to ignore him and her second to repel him with a note?

Of course the story doesn’t end here. He reads her note and tweets, “This means war.” He is not getting it at all—not his social position, his entitlement, her sense of humor, his sense of space—he understands no nuance here. He tells his Twitter audience a little bit more about her:

Diane is in her late 40s or early 50s. She is wearing mom jeans and a studded belt and she is wearing a medical mask over her idiot face

Whoa, he didn’t mention the medical mask this whole time? Maybe she has a compromised immune system, which makes me wonder why he thinks she’ll drink his wine or vodka. Or maybe she really has an anxiety disorder. To call her an “idiot” just furthers his defense of his hostility. Which he continues against his target. He walks by her again and smiles and takes a picture. And tells his audience that he’s considering balling up his next note in his mouth and spitting it at her. I’m wondering at this point, in reading the article, why the flight attendants are so willing to let one passenger harass another, if the woman isn’t very likable.

Here come another two notes from Elan, each venturing into threatening territory:

It ends with:

I hate you very much. Eat my dick.

Why doesn’t he think he’s terribly, horribly scary? I’ll also note that this is four hours after the flight was initially delayed, a long time to commit to being this angry at a complete stranger. He’s been looking for support from his Twitter followers for every action of his, and at this point is getting pushback from some of them. Never does Elan see this woman as a person, telling followers hey don’t go all “Team Diane” on me. She’s not “Team Diane.” She’s a woman named Diane who in all likelihood wants to be as far from the plane he’s on as any of us would.

She writes back to him, telling him he is very inappropriate and she will be “speaking with the authorities” when they land. I can’t say I’d write any differently were I her. This is also another attempt to get him to stop. She’d pressed her call button several times but again, nobody seems to be telling him to curtail his behavior. He sends another note:

When you speak to the authorities please make sure they arrest you for cannibalism because you ate my dick!

Again, threatening, a reminder of his power as a man, and a dismissal of her promise to tell law enforcement about him. He’s in safe territory, after all, as women are so often deemed not credible in their own defense. In fact, Elan has a third note for her at the gate once they land in Phoenix, and he waits for her to get off the plane to hand it to her. She slaps him. Authorities ask him if he wants to press charges. Because he’s the wounded man, right? And she’s crazy and wearing a surgical mask, and isn’t a nice person. By the way, Elan looks like this:

Sure, there’s nothing intimidating about him. He’s a barrel of laughs. She loves to eat dick, clearly, with her nervous persona and her anxieties and her jerkiness. We all just read about rape culture in an airplane on Thanksgiving, and we’re supposed to laugh about it.

This is not passive-aggressiveness, dear media outlets. This is sexual harassment and intimidation and threats of violence. And it’s extremely not funny.

Thoughtful Gifts for the Harried Writer in Your Life

I’ve done a gift list here and there in years past and it’s had the requisite nice pen/journal/#1 writer mug suggestions which come on, is so 2006. This year I’ve tried to come up with some items that are maybe less obvious but still helpful. Writers need to focus, after all, or they don’t write enough and then they get grumpy. So think of this list as grump-avoidance.

1. Noise-canceling head phones: You’ve got your nice cup of caffeine at your side, your trusty, beaten-up laptop, and two reference books next to you, and you plug in your white earbuds, only to realize that your physiology of your right outer ear is incompatible with Apple’s design, and holy hell those college kids three tables over sure are LOUD. Writing is not happening in this scenario. Make writing happen. These headphones from Creative are much more affordable than most at $60 (Bose is more like $300), and they’re well rated. Cut out the noise, and the fiddling with plastic.

2. Shower-proof note pad: I know I already dissed blank journals, but this is different I swear. The writer in your life already has an ordinary journal (and I have at least a dozen and I love them all). This notepad comes with water-impervious paper and a special pen and it’s like, $7. Think of the possibilities! Backstory development for a new romance while basking in a sea of lavender bubbles. Notes to loved ones that will survive the Pacific in a bottle should you get stranded on a desert island. Capturing ideas while camping in the rain. It’s a must-buy. As seen on TV.

3. Small artist’s shelves: I keep colored pens (which I use in storyboarding), paper with story ideas, mementos that inspire me, and other junk in a beat-up IKEA mobile shelving unit. It’s next to my desk, and I jimmy the drawers open all the time when I need THINGS. Things, people. We writers need them. Let us work the way we need to work, okay? The IKEA drawer is $129; there are lots of similar items around for less. Froogle is your friend, folks.

4. Non-leather laptop case: My case for my computer is gray felt with a lovely elastic band that keeps it shut, and two pockets for things like the aforementioned ear phones and waterproof note pad. It was $25 from Etsy. In fact, there are lots of cases on Etsy. Thirty thousand of them. Want one that’s shock-absorbent? Yeah, they have that. One that will survive the floods after the polar ice caps melt? They have that, too.

5. A quality book on writing: I know lots of folks recommend Stephen King’s On Writing. But there are other books of writing advice out there that are, in my opinion, even better. Here are three—Samuel Delany’s About Writing (it’s all about the preposition, I suppose), Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, and Delany’s recommendation of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise. There are more, of course, but I’ve found these particularly useful.

Now then, writers are, despite their protestations, still humans, so they should also like the occasional bottle of whiskey, flat screen televisions, and luxury automobiles. But I’m betting most writers would be tickled to receive one of the above items, too. Or maybe a hug. Everyone needs a hug.

Don’t like any of my ideas? Read the suggestions from the LA Times. Or this Pinterest board (scroll down to see the typewriter teapot).

If a Tweet Falls in the Forest, Does It Make a Sound?

There’s a woman in the coffee shop, standing around waiting for her $4.50 espresso drink, and I’m guessing she’s impatient because she’s pacing in a wide 8 figure. She needs a cello accompaniment, something moody to go with her dark gray fleece jacket cinched tight at the waist, and her Ralph Lauren glasses (worth approximately 100 pricey espresso drinks). I’m betting she’s a little guilty that she’s such a Type A personality, because every so often she flashes me a smile and then it’s gone as she checks her gold watch again. I like her but I find myself mildly worried for her. I want to invent a whole back story for her but I can’t decide where to begin. I think it’s a funny story but nothing is coming to me.

Two years ago, three and four years ago I loved writing humor, loved making people laugh, especially if adversity was the target. It’s been such a long-used coping mechanism of mine that I figured it was part of my personality. Coping skills what they are, I see retroactively that it was in response to a 25-year long string of stressful episodes, and not me. I hate giving up pieces of myself when I think they’re real, because blah, change sucks and is hard and all of that. But it’s also the only lasting path to improvement that I’ve found. 

I’m not saying, for anyone gasping at my assertion here, that I don’t have a sense of humor. I do, I swear. But laughing at the madness of everything isn’t me. It’s a tactic that makes terrific sense to me. It’s not that I’m funny, it’s that I really super enjoy funny things. But as far as laughing into the storm, it’s a semi-conscious practice I picked up early that works for me. Who I am, at the core perhaps, is the resistance to adversity. The humor part of it is just a great way to face that adversity in a way that more often than not offers strength without collateral damage to other people. I don’t pretend that humor never hurts, because who hasn’t bristled at the “lighten up, it was just a joke” excuse after something (previously) offensive? But humor isn’t armed resistance, either, or at least, it’s not designed in the same way. I’ve found that humor can help people connect to an issue or an injustice while providing little for critics to push back.

These days my personal life is busy, productive, and loving. What’s the need for humor there, except to share the latest giggling episode as our toddler learns to interact with adults, or takes up the complexities of English, or asks why this much toilet paper and not that much toilet paper, Daddy. So when I sit down to blog which I know is infrequent (see earlier reference to being busy), it’s not humor that’s calling me. It’s an attempt to be articulate, sometimes even wry, but not funny per se. I struggled with this over the past year or so, feeling out of sync with my thoughts, before it occurred to me that my tone has shifted. So what kind of writer am I? Should I lose the “humorist” sign outside my studio (Hint: I don’t have a studio.)? Have I lost my interest in the world around me?

I haven’t I promise. Practically nothing is less absurd today than it was in 2011. Including the politicians, literary theorists, and espresso drinkers. But I may not be writing about humor or writing or people or the government or civil rights in the same way anymore, and that may mean that people won’t feel as connected to these things by my words, and maybe I’ll have to struggle with such things for a while longer. Because using humor feels more like a tool these days and less like a strip of my DNA. I think that’s okay. Stuff changes. My fingers on a keyboard are the same, my brain is a supposed improvement over my dendrites I’ve linked together up until this newest moment. I’ll keep pushing on. Because that, above all other things, is who I am.

A pusher. I mean, someone who pushes forward.

Ha, that was a little joke right there.

Afterward: This was supposed to be about pissing off Salman Rushdie on Twitter the other day but I didn’t even mention it. Take that, Salman.