I don’t know a lot about Taylor Swift.

I’m not sure if she’s a good person, if I would entrust my children to her care, or even if she sparks joy. But I know enough about her to know that we can’t eat her.

Here’s why.

Workers of the world unite!

There’s a growing awareness that there is something deeply disturbing about Capitalism and what it’s doing to our planet and our lives. So many of us have a deep nagging sensation that something is tremendously unfair here. Our lives seem to be ordered by forces that appear bright and happy on the outside, but are sincerely nightmarish and disturbing once we peek behind the curtain.

Not all of us are going to go on to learn German so we can read Das Kapital in Marx’s mother tongue. But I’d love to see a growing knowledge base about the core mechanics of how Capitalism is grinding our souls to dust. A lot of us are a little vague about what we’re resisting.

For example, I was recently scanning a Reddit board whose members were debating whether we needed to eat Taylor Swift. Some commenters pointed out that Taylor wasn’t the only musician to be concerned about. One offered up Rihanna “for being a billionaire in general and especially for predatory subscription marketing.” Another offered up Harry Styles “for his ridiculously overpriced nail polish line.”

Regulating predatory or manipulative sales tactics is helpful, but it doesn’t address the core issue. And if the critique is that Harry Styles sells “ridiculously overpriced nail polish” and people purchase it, it seems like we’re completely missing the mark.

Because selling luxury goods or making a huge profit doesn’t qualify a thing as Capitalist.

As long as we believe our battle is about pushing successful businessmen to be more charitable towards those of us who are less responsible or industrious, we’re off track. The narrative of the less capable envying the success of the gifted and hardworking is what Capitalists are using to discredit the Left.

But that’s not what we’re actually horrified about.

What is capital anyway?

Capitalism isn’t primarily a problem with how things are sold (Rihanna’s allegedly predatory subscription marketing) and it’s not a problem of how much profit is made selling things (Harry Styles’ allegedly “ridiculously overpriced” nail polish line).

Capitalism is a soul-consuming nightmare because of how things are made.

In Capitalism, “capital” refers to the wealth and resources used to make goods and services, like money, factories, machinery, and worker’s skills, knowledge, and labor. But the name is misleading because money, tools, and labor are part of all economic systems.

What sets Capitalism apart is private ownership. If a factory is owned by its workers and they have wonderful ideas, inventions, and profits, it’s not Capitalist. It becomes Capitalist when someone who contributes no value or labor to the factory gets those profits: Owners and investors.

Capitalism, at its heart, is the systematic skimming of value from the labor, skills, and creativity of other humans while offering nothing in return.

Capitalism, at its heart, is the systematic skimming of value from the labor, skills, and creativity of other humans while offering nothing in return. Which — in the end — is the systematic skimming of time, hopes, dreams, health, and life itself from other humans.

While offering nothing in return.

For example, when you go to work and produce 100 widgets a day, but are only paid enough to afford one widget for that day’s work, your labor and life are being extracted from you for the benefit of someone else. 99% of your energy just benefited someone who contributed nothing to the process. You are being exploited.

Taylor’s version

You don’t have to like Taylor Swift, but she is a laborer. She wrote and recorded her first six albums through the record label Big Machine Label Group, who signed her as a 14-year-old child. Taylor provided the labor to write and record those six albums. Big Machine Label Group, as the owners of the rights to those albums, kept 85–90% of the profit from the records, contributing nothing to the artistry or work involved creating or recording them.

When Swift become more wealthy, more powerful, and more mature, she fought back against the exploitation of her labor by re-recording those albums and offering her version of them for sale in the open marketplace.

Even today, Taylor Swift still only gets 50% of the profits from her music. The rest is vacuumed up by shareholders sitting on their yachts. Universal Music Group, the current parent company of Taylor Swift’s record label, profited $1.69 billion in 2022. That’s money that didn’t pay artists, didn’t pay for marketing, didn’t pay for record production, didn’t pay for publicists, didn’t pay for lawyers. $1.69 billion extracted from workers (musicians) with no value provided in return.

I don’t have a need to protect Taylor Swift from critique. She absolutely has tremendous unearned privilege under the Imperial Nightmare Code that we’re all living under. Intergenerational wealth and whiteness and conventionally attractive privilege. A just and fair tax system would never allow any one human to accumulate this much wealth.

Even today, Taylor Swift still only gets 50% of the profits from her music. The rest is vacuumed up by shareholders sitting on their yachts.

But even today, Taylor Swift still only gets 50% of the profits from her music. The rest is vacuumed up by shareholders sitting on their yachts.

And it doesn’t really sound like she’s trying to squeeze a profit out of the labor of her backup dancers and truck drivers. Swift’s wealth is primarily the result of people voluntarily paying her for the delight, joy, and catharsis (or perhaps escapism and numbness) they find in the music she writes and performs.

I’m not saying that she’s a role model for the revolution. You can ask for more from Swift, but you can’t eat her. Because she’s a worker. And if we’re going to survive this Fascist-Capitalist-Environmental apocalypse looming in front of us, we need to figure out how to strategically target where trillions of dollars and trillions of hours of our lives are being siphoned off.

And it isn’t by Taylor Swift.

Eat the Rich

French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

Karl Marx elaborated that this might look something like the workers (proletariat) taking the factories, offices, patents, and copyrights of corporations (seizing the means of production).

Capitalism is such a runaway mindfuck at this point that 8 rich guys control more money than the poorer half of the planet, almost 4 billion people.

But Karl Marx wasn’t looking at the same death grip on the means of production that we are today. Capitalism is such a runaway mindfuck at this point that 8 rich guys control more money than the poorer half of the planet, almost 4 billion people.

Capitalism is a rapidly evolving social virus that transmits wealth from the poor to the rich, then uses that wealth to shore up, improve, and reinforce the process. Capitalists buy politicians, write their own tax codes, and own the newspapers and TV stations that report on the world around us.

They are more than happy to burn the ecosystem to the ground, drive workers into early graves, and provoke global wars if it means they can wield more power. Their dragon-treasure-hordes of human health, hopes, and dreams generate their own weather and outlive the individual billionaires who tend to them. Amazon will outlive Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg’s children will inherit his billions of dollars, and entire nations will scrape by with fewer resources than these individual men we keep crowning as golden gods.

It is dramatically worse than it has been at any point in human history. Medieval emperors conquering kingdoms couldn’t hold a candle to this scale of wealth seizure and hording.

I don’t know how workers can reclaim the wealth that we’ve created from these dragons hoarding it while our world burns. 150 years of attempting to seize the means of production haven’t gone very well. And smug proclamations that we should directly revolutionize the revolving revolution in a direct action while reading theory don’t feel particularly clarifying to me.

But I do believe that correctly defining a problem is at least half of solving it. I can think of three things I’d like enthusiastic Leftists to understand as they survey the world around them.

1. We have to understand the difference between millionaires and billionaires.

Millionaires aren’t a problem. If all of the wealth in America would divided equally, every family of 3 would be worth a little under 1.5 million dollars. Feel free to do the math.

The problem is billionaires. Capitalists who can siphon off unimaginable amounts of money from the general public. A million minutes ago was the height of the COVID pandemic. A billion minutes ago was the height of the Roman empire. Feel free to do the math.

2. We have to understand that generosity, charity, and the non-profit industrial complex are not going to solve this.

Begging billionaire Capitalists to be more benevolent is like petitioning dictators to be more merciful. The problem isn’t that the dictator isn’t nice enough, the problem is that there shouldn’t be a dictator in the first place.

There are no offerings that will ever appease these gods of greed.

We have to remember that philanthropy and the nonprofit industrial complex primarily serve to launder Capitalist’s public image and shift the blame for a crumbling quality of life from the failure of a vampiric economic system to the failure of common people to be generous enough.

3. And we have to understand the difference between workers and owners.

The average NFL player makes a bit under $1 million a year. The owner of the Dallas Cowboys is bringing in $300 million a year. NFL players are regularly suffering significant damage to their brains and risking their lives in their labor. Owners are risking an unprofitable investment that the bank could seize from them.

You don’t get to eat the millionaire athlete. You get to eat the team owner.

John Boyega was paid between $100,000 and $300,000 for his work on The Force Awakens. Disney shareholders made over half a billion dollars off his work.

You don’t get to eat the millionaire actors. You get to eat the studio shareholders.

Rich men sunning on their yachts have made hundreds of millions of dollars off of Taylor Swift, starting when she was 14-years-old.

You don’t get to eat Taylor Swift. You get to eat those parasites.

What our country is participating in in Gaza is a nightmare of Biblical proportions. And neither guilt nor desperation nor ignoring the carnage is going to spare a single person from this unfolding horror that will haunt us for generations to come.

Navigating our days as privileged citizens of an empire drowning in circuses, bread, and capitalist life-extraction is a bewildering exercise in compartmentalization, dissociation, and grief. Oil executives shame us for our carbon footprints while banking billionaires offer us tips on skipping lattes in order to make rent. Our neighbors are go-funding-me their children’s chemo bills and our tiny-pocket-screens churn out adorable cat videos and TikTok tutorials on surviving our panic attacks faster than we can hope to watch them.

Jaded cynicism, hyper-distractions, alternative facts, or trauma-fatigue numbness feel like the only ways our nervous systems can withstand the barrage of unending dominos that keep our attention fractured. Even those of us that can agree on the facts of what lays before us are still so often at one another’s throats, so often eating our young, so often lashing out at our nearest neighbor.

It’s easy to drown in the shrill cacophony of voices shaming us on all sides for our shortcomings as humans. Whether we’re not thin enough, attractive enough, and productive enough, or we’re not progressive enough, informed enough, and self-aware enough. Belonging and safety feel precarious and are so often predicated on contempt for those outside the circle.

I don’t want to die this way.

As a parent, a neighbor, a friend, a citizen, and a human, I keep fumbling around in my mind for ways forward that will nurture the sort of growth, healing, and movement we so desperately need without defaulting to shame, contempt, and disgust as the engine of change

And what we’re currently doing to the humans in Gaza is exacerbating my sense of urgency.

As a history student, a debilitatingly empathic person, and a citizen of humanity’s most powerful empire, I have watched in horror for months as the most deadly military action of the twenty-first century has unfolded on a small screen in my hands. The grandchildren of the holocaust survivors implementing their own final solution that weds the ghetto with the concentration camp, 2-million souls walled in on every side. Satellite-guided precision smart-bombs for hospitals, dumb bombs for residential neighborhoods and two thousand pound bunker-buster bombs for tent camps crowded with refugee children. More tons of explosives than Nagasake and Hiroshima combined. And we are on the razor’s edge of starvation that will dwarf the deaths from these American bombs.

Life is again stripping me of anything resembling a comfortable world-view. My mental models are breaking. Four decades of incremental course correcting my understanding of the United States of America to better line up with new information hasn’t been enough to stretch my old understanding of my nation into one that can accommodate what I’m watching today. I am colliding with a dawning knowledge that Caitlin Johnstone has languaged as “discovering that the western empire is the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, and that we’ve been lied to about this our entire lives.”

So I get it. I have nothing but empathy for the sea of people I care about who can only spare a sad shrug for Palestine. None of us want this. No one has consulted with us. There is so infinitesimally little that we can possibly do about it. I get why many of us are actively avoiding knowing what is happening in Gaza. We don’t want to partake of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because once we do, we suspect we’ll find out that we’re complicit. That we’re to blame. That the violence of our empire is a personal failure on our part in some way.

We don’t want to partake of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because once we do, we suspect we’ll find out that we’re complicit.

And we’re also afraid that to get to know the faces and voices of our Palestinian neighbors would make their pending disembodiment unbearable. We don’t know how to navigate a world who’s trauma dwarfs our tiny little cups of empathy and hope by such an exponential factor.

Our America has taught us over, and over, and over again that our hopes, our values, our fears, our nightmares are irrelevant to the billionaire-class oligarchy steering this ship. The horrors keep ratcheting up. As Johnstone points out, our “vast globe-spanning empire is built on the foundation of how difficult it is to look directly at something that is extremely unpleasant to look at.”

As I’ve gazed at my own despair, I’ve found that I need a deeper reason than hope or outrage if I’m going to stay present with our collective lives.

If I am going to look at them directly.

“A truth-based relationship with life”

The Democratic president that I voted for has welcomed the massacre of Gaza with an enthusiasm and glee that has crushed decades of beliefs I’ve had about incremental change, democracy, and voting. His eagerness to fund, fuel, and arm the most efficient killing America has participated in in my life has left me uprooted. I feel a deep, numb nausea about a November ballot with Trump and Biden on it. A numb nausea about my children’s futures in this empire.

I feel frozen in the headlights. These are not problems I want to acknowledge, let alone sort out.

My only way forward has been to set down my craving for solutions, answers, and control. The words of Tom Atlee, a quirky-but-wise, new-age-but-humble sort of white guy have been centering to me lately. “Let go of outcome. Since we’re not in charge (and never really were), admit that what happens is much bigger than any of us.”

I think my problem is that if I skip to the end of the story, I find that it’s not an ending I can bear, and I want to stop reading where I am. So if I’m going to keep going, I have to find a way to stop and ground myself in something other than my desire, my hopes, my outcome. Five things I can touch. Four things I can see. Three things I can hear.

Again more insight from Caitlin Johnstone:

Uncomfortable truths and uncomfortable feelings need to be met in the same way: head-on, with an open mind and an open heart. Moving into a truth-based relationship with life means wanting to see everything: uncomfortable truths about the world, uncomfortable truths about ourselves, and uncomfortable feelings we haven’t been allowing full expression to. It can be painful at times, even downright terrifying, but it’s also the only path to health for both our species as a collective and ourselves as individuals.

Both Dante and Frost agree that the only way out is through. I’m coming to believe that this colonial misogynistic capitalist dumpster fire is going to consume me if I keep trying to evade it or ignore it. Sitting and staying present increasingly feels like my only hope.

Again, Johnstone:

That takes effort. It takes emotional labor. It takes a willingness to experience a high degree of psychological discomfort as you wade into the muck of reality to face the inconvenient facts you’ve been avoiding looking at your entire adult life. It takes a willingness to experience this unpleasantness not just intellectually, but emotionally and viscerally as well. You’ve got to look at it with your eyes and your mind and your heart and your guts. And you have to somehow find the time and psychological spaciousness to do all this in a society that is designed to keep ordinary people busy, tired, dysfunctional, and stressed out.

The amount of unlearning is tremendous. It’s an attempt to rewind decades of track laid down through our language and our fantasies and our knowledge.

I don’t believe in cabals or secret societies or in any kind of exceptional intelligence in the billionaire class. But I do believe in a Darwinism of narratives, in which the stories that reproduce the most and die the hardest — stories of empire, and divine ordination, and justified violence — are likely to be incredibly durable, resilient critters.

Johnstone points out that the mythology of empire runs deep:

You have been propagandized and indoctrinated your entire life into accepting [empire] as normal. In school we’re taught that we live in a democracy and that our government is basically good while other governments are bad and their countries are places you would not want to live in, and then in adulthood this false indoctrination is reinforced… Before we have time to learn how to think critically, we are spoon-fed a worldview designed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful, and we will experience cognitive dissonance if at any time we are presented with information that contradicts it…

[It’s designed] to build and reinforce a worldview within us which is fiercely loyal to establishment power structures… You are fed a power-serving worldview… which you will zealously defend as the gospel truth.

But she goes on to add:

It’s a highly effective trap, but it’s not inescapable. Anyone who’s ever escaped from an abusive relationship, a dysfunctional family or a cult knows that it is possible to find your way out of a psychological cage that has been built for you by a skillful manipulator, even if there were times in the past when you hadn’t even known the cage bars were there.

…

Many of the indoctrinated are too far gone to be reached, or are too personally invested in the status quo they defend, but many others are right on the cusp of leaving the cult of the empire, ready to take the leap if they are just given a good enough reason to.

And in an entirely different piece, Johnstone adds the following encouragement:

The painful emotions which come up when we discover an uncomfortable truth aren’t problems which need to be dealt with, they’re feelings which need to be felt. Let the grief, anguish, rage, shame, fear, or whatever it might be say everything it needs to say to you, in the same way you’d let a beloved child tell you about their feelings and concerns. You wouldn’t push the child away or treat them like a problem, you’d hear them out and give them a cuddle and let them know you care about them and that you’ll keep them safe. Once you’ve consciously felt a feeling all the way through and heard out everything it needs to say to you, its energy will dissipate.

For me, wading through the grief and loss the way I wish the world was, or the way I was taught the world was, was predicated on letting go of the ending. Letting go of the illusion of my ability to solve, or even help, the injustices and traumas that loom so large.

Quirky white guy Tom Atlee notes:

“Some say God (or the devil) is in the details. I say God (and the devil) are in the possibilities. Every moment is filled with them. Although we don’t get to control how they turn out, they are very responsive to our actions, our beliefs, our caring. That is the edge of co-creativity where Life resides most vividly.

I’m still not sure exactly what that means, not in a way I could explain to my eleven-year-old. But I think it has something to do with the reality that I can’t protest, or vote, or boycott, or donate my way into the world I want to see. None of those things come remotely near to guaranteeing me the results I want.

I think it has something to do with the reality that I can’t protest, or vote, or boycott, or donate my way into the world I want to see.

But I can stay present. My actions, my beliefs, my caring are ways I move through this world. I can fall in love with Lama and Bisan. I can speak aloud the truth that my president and my nation and our coalition have failed the world in the most basic, most fundamental, most human task imaginable. I can grieve. I can stay open to the reality that none of us knows what will happen next. None of us knows when we may have a moment to make a choice, or care for someone, or support a message that will go on to have a profound impact on the story.

And when I do protest, or vote, or boycott, or donate, it will be in the spirit of staying tuned in, not under the illusion of solving, or even, necessarily, helping.

I’m worried about this juncture. I’m worried about how we navigate this live-streamed genocide.

I think I’m afraid that if we can ignore the horror in Gaza, then we will be able to ignore atrocities of any magnitude for the rest of our lives. I’m afraid that if we can accept the West’s annihilation of the people of Gaza, we’ll be able to accept literally anything the American-led empire will do for the rest of our days.

No, I don’t know how to stop it. And I don’t want to get burnt out, functioning out of shame or rigidity. But I do want to let the grief be felt and named. And I do want to keep being curious.

This article is at least half direct quotations from Caitlin Johnstone’s piece, The Empire Depends On Our Unwillingness To Look At Its Crimes. Johnstone’s X page offers “All works free to republish, bootleg, use or c/p. All works co-authored by Tim Foley.”

A Question of Power

There were certain voices in the Democratic party that called for moderation and reconciliation after the humbling disaster of Trump’s election. Wizened white neo-liberal Democrats urged the further left to drop the identity politics, drop the Socialist nonsense, and to stop coming out as trans and nonbinary. They pondered that perhaps us city folks didn’t understand the feelings and needs of our country kin? A day back on the family farm shooting gophers and sharing corn on the cob would almost certainly sort things out.

Then Democrats and Republicans could return to a more civilized debate about whether a 2% or 3% tax on intergenerational blood money was most appropriate, or whether, say, 45% or 55% of our economy should be devoted to fighter jets and lethal drones.

I wanted to kick these people in the genitals.

Most of the lukewarm whining of these moderates amounted to victim blaming. If we didn’t have such ridiculous hopes and dreams Trump would stop punishing us and withholding his love. But one article (I‘ve forgotten where) introduced an image that I couldn’t shake from my mind.

The author argued that a presidential candidate’s job is not to lecture America on their sins, not to preach repentance, not to confront evil forces. A presidential candidate (really, any political candidate) needs to get elected. Then they need to wield political power in an authentically good way. Reigning in the wealthy white male ruling class, Advocating policy that honors trans folks, the undocumented, the sex workers. Prioritizing children over billionaires, our water and air over the Wall Street wealthy’s return on their daddy’s investment.

The question was, do we want Politician X who says all the right things and doesn’t get the vote, or Politician Y who only says moderate things, gets the vote, then actually changes policy for a better world.

Which do we prefer?

The role of politicians, this author believed, was not to transform public consciousness, but to transform public policy.

It reminded me of Stokely Carmichael’s admonition that racism wasn’t about opinions, it was about power.

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. ”

― Stokely Carmichael

Of course there’s the small problem of politician Y actually being politician Z, Joe Bidens who don’t have much to say or much to deliver, but just smile and reassure.

But regardless of that problem, that seed of an idea was stuck in my mind.

The Joy of Being Right

I’ve learned a lot about pop neuroscience in the last decade. I’ve been especially fascinated by self-deception and our ability to believe two contradictory things at once. How can my neighbors believe that CAT scans for example, invented in 1971, are reliable medicine, trusted and true. While vaccines, medical technology older than our nation, are new-fangled and untested technology?

Another one of the things that has stood out the most clearly to me is the reality that we all reliably reject facts that don’t match our beliefs rather than adjust our beliefs to line up with new information. More than that, we double-down on our beliefs when confronted with challenging facts. Contradictory evidence doesn’t lead to conversion, it leads to radicalization of the original stance.

Contradictory evidence doesn’t lead to conversion, it leads to radicalization of the original stance.

Another idea that gave me deep pause is the reality that we feel immense pleasure when hear our beliefs echoed back to us. A Black Lives Matter bumper sticker gives me a rush of fondness for my black neighbors, a sense of belonging and unity in our resistance to white supremacy and police violence, hope for a future where my children don’t have to deal with the horror of state violence against citizens. A pink, blue, and white heart sticker makes me feel like my family is loved and safe, like my children might be valued for who they are above their conformity to a gender assigned to them at birth.

It brings our nervous systems titillating joy to hear that we are, in fact, right.

Whether or not we are, in fact, right.

I’m not a relativist. I believe that there are ideas and beliefs that are visiting horrors on my neighbors and crushing the dignity and humanity of my children. Beliefs that are literally consuming our living ecosystem alive with their greed and arrogance. People’s beliefs are capable of producing holocausts or vaccines, slavery or symphonies, hate crimes or blood donors.

But I no longer believe I can test the outcome of these ideas based on how I feel about them.

Because the sense of deep loyalty and resistance to injustice that Christian rap rock group P.O.D. stirred up in me at 18 with their song Abortion is Murder is the literal, exact same chemical in my brain that a Planned Parenthood bumper sticker stirs up in me today. And the white hot righteousness I felt vandalizing public spaces with Fuck Trump stickers is identical to what my rural neighbors feel flying their Fuck Biden flag.

Winning the Culture War, Losing the Legal One

By all accounts, the Left has made startling progress on the cultural front in my lifetime. I saw no evidence that same sex relationships would be more than a fringe, niche part of the national conversation, akin to say vegans or stamp collectors, when I graduated from High School in the late 90’s.

The white media’s scoffing at affirmative action or their show trial of Gangsta Rap in that same decade offered no hint a future where our largest corporations would have ad campaigns about how they were specifically going to support Black Lives within their organizations and within their neighborhoods.

The rapidity with which queer young characters have blossomed in novels, graphica, TV shows, and streaming music seemed beyond my wildest imagination when my first child transitioned eight years ago. It seemed she was going to grow up in a silent identity mirrored almost nowhere in our collective dreams and fairy tales.

As a child, notions of Socialism were confined to imaginary games where we shot at Communist Russians to defend American Freedom™. Some dusty people a lifetime ago had been interested in Socialism before McCarthy had burned them all at the stake. But surprisingly today, even my Baby Boomer father has a begrudging respect for Bernie Sanders and his politics of kindness.

Amazon does not sell Confederate Battle Flags. NASCAR won’t fly them. Both roll around naked in rainbows every June. Giddily gay rappers are applauded on Twitter by country music legends.

If America were a democracy, where the will of the majority was reflected in law, the future Liberals want would have arrived by now.

But we aren’t.

Minority Rule

America is an Oligarchy in which the 1% Billionaires rule through a propaganda machine directed at the 30% most angry and least educated of us. This is neither hyperbole nor is it conjecture.

America was founded by conspiracy theorists simultaneously preaching hatred of Big Government while concentrating power in the hands of a few white, wealthy men. This reality has been deeply entwined into our DNA.

Fast forward to today, where Patriots™ are willing to have gunfights with the FBI over their entitlement to free grazing land for their cattle, willing to beat Capital police to death with fire extinguishers, all while proudly driving oversized pickup trucks with Back the Blue stickers on the back. A country where white ranchers’ cattle are entitled to Federal subsidies while black humans in cities are leeches for needing baby formula. A country where Roe V Wade was Federal overreach, but a standing army larger than the rest of the world’s military combined is just about right.

A nation sincerely framed around liberty and justice for all might not need to require its schoolchildren to chant about that in monotone five days a week.

The way the 1% leverage the 30% is well documented. America’s House of Representatives overrepresents rural America in mind-numbing ways. The electoral college keeps poisoning elections. The filibuster stifles popular legislation. Gerrymandering works. Unlimited dark money bulldozes elections. Disenfranchisement is easy. And voter suppression pays dividends.

By Any Means Necessary

I liked putting up Fuck Trump stickers on the back of stop signs. It was soothing. I like standing in the streets surrounded by thousands of protestors confronting corrupt police and fascist politicians, roaring and pumping our fists in the air. I love the thrill of watching anarchists bringing my city to a grinding halt. It is enlivening.

I’m good at angry diatribes. The depth of satisfaction I get in telling anti-vaxxers that they are full of shit, or anti-immigrant folks that they are failures of human beings is intoxicating. The number of political memes I have successfully launched into the interwebs is a source of private satisfaction for me.

But I increasingly believe that not only is this activism not accomplishing anything, it’s hurting our cause.

But not because it’s too ambitious, too honest, or too hopeful. Quite the opposite. It’s because it’s too selfish, it’s too myopic, it’s too centering of my pleasure and my identity.

It’s too tangled up in me being right.

How committed am I to providing housing for all my neighbors? To providing shelter to refugees? To seeing women equally represented at all levels of government? To seeing a tax code that supports the least powerful Americans rather than the most? To seeing police departments replaced by neighborhood food banks, mental health care, or affordable child care?

Am I willing to pursue political work that is humbling, muddled, that involves delayed gratification? Am I willing to do the work of accounting, or washing dishes, or supervising children while others network? Am I willing to be involved in political outreach to people I don’t agree with or even like?

For example, I am grateful to the work Antifa puts into keeping the white supremacists in check. And the invitation to get a black balaclava, some combat boots, and a large pistol is exciting. Who doesn’t want to kill Nazis while defending innocent children?

But what if the way forward involved getting white supremacist's children access to better public schools? Sitting in PTA meetings. Or what if it involved reducing the interest rates predatory lenders are allowed to charge? What if it involved letting rural white communities have better access to the fresh produce being produced right there.

I’m not suggesting that any of those methods are even slightly strategic. But I wonder about how excited I would be about them if it turned out they were the best way to reduce extremism?

The Red Herring of Trump‘s Basket of Deplorables

In the end, our collective disgust with the backward, hateful Republican voter shredding the fabric of public life does nothing to stifle the continued concentration of power and wealth at the top of the increasingly steep, hierarchical pyramid.

Yes, it is disappointing when our neighbors buy into manipulative and hateful rhetoric, siding against their own self-interest and the needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. And there can be times and places for evangelism that helps people escape these manufactured talk radio realities, as well as repentance, and amends. I can speak to that process as a former supporter of the right wing agenda.

But if our attention lies primarily at the level of the Trump voter, or the distorted caricatures of politicians who keep cropping up in rural America, or even the power brokers of Republican Party leadership, I suspect that we’re missing the hand that’s pulling the strings.

The Billionaire class, in some ways strategically and explicitly, but often in ways that are systemic and subconscious, continues to shore up legal structures that grow their wealth and power at the cost of the rest of humanity. Finding ways to sever their influence over a governing system that claims to be by and for the people feels essential to stabilizing this rapidly sinking ship.

Utilitarian Grit

If we are committed to the struggle for a humane, just, safe, livable nation (world), we have to find a level of sobriety and tenacity that matches the task.

The top 1% of Americans control more wealth than the entire middle class. Furthermore, their wealth is almost entirely discretionary, where the rest of us have basic needs that consume almost all of what we have. If it’s a question of ad budgets or political donations, there is no way we can win on that front.

The billionaire class is small group of incredibly similar people (older white men) with similar interests. The remaining 99% of our country is an incredibly diverse swath of humanity with deeply varied hopes, dreams, and needs. The humility and patience to form broad partnerships with groups we disagree with on important issues will be essential to confronting the increasingly fascist tactics of the elites. We have to develop an understanding that interacting with other humans doesn’t equate to a wholesale endorsement of their world view.

We need to be committed to evidence-based, not feelings-based, policy. We need a deep belief that the outcome is more important than the route to get there. If we’re devastated by police violence against Black people in our communities, we need to be committed to policy changes that actually reduce that violence, not policy changes that make us feel better. Satisfying my outrage at police shootings isn’t as important as reducing police shootings.

The adolescent fantasy that we’re one election cycle and one unicorn politician away from the promised land isn’t helping us gain ground in this reality.

We have to be committed to a lifetime of work. The adolescent fantasy that we’re one election cycle and one unicorn politician away from the promised land isn’t helping us gain ground in this reality. Politics is notoriously slow, frustrating, boring work. Good people put decades into inconspicuous local political careers to only have one moment where their vote, their voice, truly impacted a meaningful outcome. Court cases build on precedent from previous court cases. Impacting the constitution takes once-in-a-lifetime moments of pinpoint precise coordination of hundreds of millions of voices. Supreme court judges will live our their natural lives holding that power.

We need a strategic rethinking of the tools in our toolbelt. Because voting like we’ve been voting, unionizing like we’ve been unionizing, and direct actioning like we’ve been direct actioning haven’t fixed the problem. We are in deep need of an honest, hopeful, creative inventory of what works in what ways.

What do mass protests accomplish? What do hunger strikes accomplish? What does chaining ourselves to things accomplish? What does calling our senator accomplish? What does signing a petition accomplish? What does an angry bumper sticker accomplish? What does running for the schoolboard accomplish? What does donating to a nonprofit accomplish? Donating to a politician? A political party? A direct action network? A neighbor? What about boycotts? Letters to the editor? Voting? Extralegal steps to being ungovernable? Good trouble?

And we’re in need of fresh vision and curiosity. Where do we need more education? More history? More encouragement? More support? How can we retool for more sustainable, more joyful, more resilient resistance to to the trauma of soul-crushing power structures? How does mental health, neighborhood food banks, tiny libraries, or neighborhood barbeques fit into the picture?

What is the role of love in this movement? Compassion? How do we hold our outrage and our grief? How do we empower our traumatized while still inviting our more entitled community members to become more gentle and compassionate? How do we invite our children in, honor our elders for the decades they fought for human dignity while we were oblivious. What do we do with our white hot rage? How do we live with the horrifying injustices in our collective story up until now? How do we dance and what do we sing about? What can we forgive ourselves for?

How do we choose our battles? How do we operate out of hope and not fear?

How do we choose impact over identity?

Change over outrage.

The brainstorm

I’m worn from hearing hopeful voices shouted down. I’m tired of the timid getting spoken over in leftist spaces. I’m worn bone thing with snarky, condescending down-punching.

We need hope more than we need to be right. We need love more than we need correction.

I may not feel optimistic about postcard writing campaigns but I want to bring you homemade cookies when you’re working on one. I may not be up for chaining myself to city hall, but I’ll sure chip in $20 for some handcuffs. I don’t want to arm myself to face the Proud Boys, but I’m up for bringing cold water.

And we can still have boundaries. Strategies that are too violent, partnerships that cost us too much. But I want my boundaries to be about care and integrity. I don’t want to dehumanize people who dehumanize people. And I don’t want to be operating in the chemical ecstasy of being right.

Because I don’t personally know how to move America toward a hopeful, peaceful, safe, compassionate space. None of my strategies have worked so far. But I do deeply believe we need more ideas, not less. More dreaming, not less. More being-up-for-anything. Less rigidity. Less brittleness. We can’t afford the burnout of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

We need to fall in love with real world lived outcomes as more central than orthodox belief. While also falling in love with a journey full of compassion and mutual support, knowing that we can’t ever fully control the destination.

What sounds promising to you?

“Nobody is a villain in their own story.
We’re all the heroes of our own stories.”

― George R.R. Martin

The Joy of Being Right

One of the most seductive qualities of my decades spent in Evangelical Christianity was the unrelenting mantra that I was so right and that those who disagreed with me were so very, very wrong. It was exhilarating to have an entire community organized around sympathizing with my sense of woundedness when someone disagreed with me and rushing to my side with contempt and disgust for those who would dare defy my worldview.

This worldview of unending rightness is a fragile one though, and it needs shielding from sharp edges or introspection. One of the most powerful tools in shielding it from self-awareness is the narrative of victimhood.

I, like Evangelical Christians across the nation, had a sincere and deep belief that I was an oppressed minority. True believers were rare in my imagination, and the world was hunting them down aggressively.

But the game of make-believe, it turns out, is intended for young children. Staying in that headspace as an adult begins to take a serious toll. The mental gymnastics necessary to reconcile my real-world experiences with my rigid beliefs would soon consume most of my mental, relational, and emotional energy. The amount of time in prayer meetings, worship services, revivals, and Bible study necessary to numb my inner awareness that the world was not as we claimed it was would steadily increase until it became unsustainable for me.

Humans, as Marginalian curator Maria Popova would put it, “are touchingly prone to… mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence.” Believing harder seemed like an effective strategy for cutting off nagging doubts. But in the end it wasn’t an effective one for me.

Standing up to giants

Evangelical Christianity is famously distrusting of science, and for good reason. We were taught that we should dismiss science (at least when we disagreed with scientific conclusions) because it was a tool for people to force their misguided personal beliefs upon others by framing them as “objectively” true using overly complex arguments and by leveraging authority on the matter that was established in a circular sort of way. (It would be decades before I would notice that this accusation was actually a confession of the way our community operated)

And while people can make appeals to science that use this exact strategy, it was, as was our assessment of everyone who didn’t share our worldview, a gross mischaracterization of the actual worldview. As fantasy author Terry Pratchett would so tenderly put it, “Science… is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”

“Science… is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”

-Terry Pratchett

Most humans, it turns out, have a rather decent and fair sense of justice at our core. So in order to get us to enact fundamentally unjust violence on others, you must first convince us that we are the victim and those we are drone-striking, sending to prison camps, or lynching, are the perpetrators. Fascists don’t work to convince their nations that they are strong and powerful. They convince their nations that they rightfully deserve to be strong and powerful, and are unjustly being kept from that rightful destiny because of the malicious injustice of specific vulnerble parties. The Jews. The undocumented immigrants. The communists. The drag queens. Trans children.

The powerful must believe they are the powerless. Goliath must believe that he is David.

And if anyone attempts to introduce a Pratchettian reality check onto these victim arguments, another defense mechanism arises to shield our eyes from looking at the test results: A deadening, numbing relativism.

For example, when I suggested to my MAGA brother that white supremacy might be reasonably suspected to actually exist in America based on the observation that white families hold about seventeen times the wealth of Black families, or my white children are about one-fifth as likely to end up imprisoned as my neighbor’s black children, my reasoning was easily shut down by him.

Statistics can just be made up and manipulated.

And so they can. Which is why you might want to explore their veracity. Why you might want to spend some time learning about how statistics are generated, how they are double checked, what scientific consensus actually means, or what peer-review means. These are necessary skills for anyone sincerely interested in truth with or without a capital “T.”

But such research is a waste of time and resources for anyone submerged in a faithful community’s make-believe. Because they already know what the result of any careful investigation will reveal.

They are right.

It’s hard to be curious when everything you believe is true.

English preacher Charles Spurgeon proposed that the Christian faith is like a lion that doesn’t need defending, but rather needs to be let out of its cage. English apologist G. K. Chesterton proposed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Sentiments like this abounded in my circles of faith. Naturally. They are so self-soothing. So heartwarming. We are on the right side of history! We are the ones who know. Our truth bats .1000 and has never been defeated. We are the ones who are right.

That the Christian faithful are never allowed to actually interact with secular truth claims without a pastoral filter on them is irrelevant. That the Christian ideal may have occasionally been tried and found wanting is important to filter out. Christian children must not be confused by these adult issues. And adult parishioners can’t be entrusted with evaluating such damning lies.

That the Evangelical worldview isn’t actually allowed to play at recess with others is something best left unnoticed. Faithful men of God assure you that their very accurate representation of evolution, homosexuality, and feminism were beaten fair and square once in a debate they watched. Further investigation is unwarranted.

Repeating that experiment is entirely unnecessary.

Honest repentance

It wasn’t until I entered the (ironically: admittedly problematic) halls of Social Justice that I would ever meet someone who actually encouraged reality-checking my assumptions. They were the first community to invite me into asking Pratchett’s awkward questions.

Like all communities and world views, the idea of truth could, and would, be wielded by social justice practitioners against others (and one another) to create a sense of superiority and self-importance. But, at least in the community of queer poets I stumbled into in Seattle, it had some sort of safety mechanism built in.

The godless liberals I met didn’t have a mantra that “we” were the victims, and those who disagreed with us were the perpetrators. It turns out that the notion of playing the victim card (like the notion of using science as a sleight of hand trick) was rather a confession of my Evangelical community that we projected onto others. These social justice warriors I would meet in my thirties did indeed place a heavy emphasis on systematic harm and the injustice of who wielded power over whom. Their world too had Davids and Goliaths. But these Davids and Goliaths weren’t only groups of people or individual people. They were also inside each of us.

Like Solzhenitsyn observed in The Gulag Archipelago, these people sincerely believed that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

The woman who first explained the invisible backpack of privilege to me was a fat, queer, woman of color. Who had every opportunity to organize me into the straight, white, cisgender, male demographic I inhabited while organizing herself as a victim of every unearned privilege I was hoarding.

But that’s not how the lesson goes.

She instead spent 45 minutes highlighting the immense privileges she held that she wanted to be more mindful of. Because the exercise is fundamentally an exercise in asking the oh so tender, awkward question: where do I benefit from injustices other suffer? Where am I part of systematic harm in ways that I am unaware of?

After two decades in a community that championed “repentance” at every turn, I sat with this fat, queer, woman of color who was practicing repentance in front of me in real time. I had never been in a community that located Jung’s shadow creature within each of us rather than exclusively residing in the communities that didn’t hold to our world view.

It was the first time I was in a community that located Jung’s shadow creature within each of us rather than exclusively residing in the communities that didn’t hold to our world view.

Despite two decades in an Evangelical community organized around the idea of the fundamentally sinful nature of each human, it was the first time I was sincerely invited into self-awareness about the harm I was causing others. And the brilliant scaffolding of intersectionality laid out by fierce black women a generation before me gave me a framework in which I could make room for the ways I was both beloved, deserving of grace and love, while I was also accountable for my participation in denying the image of God in my neighbor and enemy.

The monsters under the evangelical bed

J.K. Rowling has developed a reputation as the most prominent celebrity opposed to runaway, unchecked rights for transgender people. She feels that speaking her truth is coming at a great cost. In fact, she just released a book she wrote about a transphobic cartoonist who is doxxed, stalked, and killed for her transphobia. And I personally don’t think Rowling is cynically employing the tools of propaganda to mislead others. I think that she really believes that the criticism she has experienced for being transphobic is that unfair and dangerous. I think to her that it feels like she is facing the possibility of death.

While certainly not an Evangelical, I believe she’s employing the same victim mentality to lubricate her thinking as the church I come from: I think she sincerely believes that the billionaire being criticized for amplifying dangerous and deadly ideas is the central victim in the grand narrative unfurling all around us.

It’s easy for me to be convinced of that because I personally believed that I was in a small minority group in danger of being eradicated. While growing up in the most powerful empire the world has ever witnessed, which has exclusively had heads of state who publicly practice my Christian religion, for its entire history. I sincerely believed that secular, atheist, anti-Christian leaders held the lion’s share of the power in American politics.

I personally believed that I was in a small minority group in danger of being eradicated. While growing up in the most powerful empire the world has ever witnessed, which has exclusively had heads of state who publicly practice my Christian religion, for its entire history.

The mental gymnastics are breathtaking in retrospect.

The fact that no one has ever been killed in an anti-TERF hate crime is entirely lost on Rowling. The overwhelming evidence that a transgender identity is the most damning identity variable to someone’s lifespan isn’t present in her imagined world. The actual murder of actual transgender children doesn’t need to be taken into account.

This is the kind of math formula that transmutes Barack Obama’s personal testimony of entrusting his life to Christ into him simultaneously being both a secular humanist and devout Muslim, while Trump’s repeated and ongoing denial that he has any need for Christ’s forgiveness is transmuted into his identity as the leader Evangelicals are most likely to be picturing while orgasming.

My actual family with its real flesh and blood children

None of my children are gender conforming, and I don’t know why. At the time the youngest was born I was on the board of a church that belonged to the Baptist General Conference, a denomination famous for blaming natural disasters on gay sympathizers. So while I grew along with my kids, I certainly didn’t engineer their gender expansiveness or creativity. And given pronoun changes in preschool, for example, it’s highly unlikely that YouTube or Tumblr contributed much to their gender journey.

Out of four kiddos, I only have one who has consistently asserted that he identifies with the gender we assigned him at birth. And he’s a boy who likes to wear dresses sometimes. In middle school. So our family isn’t going to pass any of these Republican legislatures litmus tests.

I have one child who’s name and pronouns were legally changed before a compassionate judge in the days leading up to Trump’s presidency, when the early shadows of the transphobic panic engulfing our nation today were just beginning to appear. We didn’t know what fear was back then.

These days our neighboring state has brought up legislation that would imprison me for allowing my children to choose their own pronouns. Florida is proposing legislation that would require the state to take my children away from me and place them in state care. Texas has already passed that legislation.

So far eight states have made the medical care my daughter receives illegal, despite the fact that every single reputable pediatric medical and psychological association in the nation recommends and affirms the precise actions I’ve taken.

Today in Alabama supporting my transgender daughter’s wishes is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Pretend persecution

My partner grew up in Missouri under the cloud of fear that the state would come to take them and their siblings away from their parents. They were warned about this possibility, and taught how to navigate government authorities to avoid it.

The reason they would be taken away was that they were Christian homeschoolers. Surely a fringe worldview in 1980’s rural Missouri.

I know so many Evangelical friends from my childhood who are still living in this make-believe world. I know the fear they feel is real, because I felt it too. But their fear is being manufactured as a way to keep them compliant to Evangelical power brokers. I know now that none of it would pass Pratchett’s reality-check.

But their fear is being manufactured as a way to keep them compliant to Evangelical power brokers. I know now that none of it would pass Pratchett’s reality-check.

There are no laws on the books anywhere in the nation that make Christian homeschooling illegal. No legislature has ever proposed outlawing homeschooling anywhere in this nation on the basis of it having a religious lens.

Christian homeschoolers are in no danger of being taken away from their parents on the basis of their schooling. Christians are in no danger of being rounded up by FEMA on the basis of their faith. No city, county, or state in the nation is in any danger of being required to live under Sharia law.

None of these things pass even the gentlest reality-check.

The majority of the states in our country, in reality, are currently proposing, or have already passed bills that would imprison me and, or, take my children away from me on the basis of their gender. And the gut punch of that reality, and the make believe I participated in as an Evangelical, are light years apart from one another.

The essential ingredient of victimhood

One of the central patterns of intellectual dishonesty necessary for this reality to come into being is the make-believe victim mentality that allows the powerful to punish the weak without triggering their own personal ethical gag reflex.

It is essential that schools, Hollywood, and state legislatures allowing trans children to exist, unpunished, is understood as an existential attack on Christian families. How can they go on worshiping Christ under these circumstances? While dismantling families and imprisoning (inaccurately assumed to be) secular parents is a win for freedom. Forcing trans girls to grow beards and trans boys to grow breasts must be understood as a kindness that they will later thank us for, not a cruel punishment that will turn their adolescence into a vivid hell.

The mere existence of those who don’t share your world view is understood as a more significant danger to you than forcing conformity to your worldview onto them would be from their perspective. The alchemy of transforming Jesus’ golden rule into inert lead.

As long as your camp is understood as both vulnerable and in the right while those you disagree with are framed as powerful and in the wrong, this sort of shadow projection and scapegoating will continue to prey on the lives of the least powerful among us. As long as the line between good and evil divides your community from the communities that surround you, trans children will continue to attempt suicide at seven and a half times the rate of their peers.

But that’s okay. I know It won’t bother you. Because you don’t even know any children that have been allowed to transition. They only exist in your imagination. And in your imagination, those children are now better off, separated from their parents and in state custody, or forbidden to make medical choices about their body that reflect their desires and not yours (a complete stranger). You’ll simply imagine that they aren’t committing suicide, and find someone with made up statistics that “prove” they’re not. Surely you’ll be able to find the testimony of at least one teen saved from the hell of bodily disfigurement by the gospel of Jesus, right? Your ex-gay ministries transformed millions of gay men and women into straight, chaste, content Christians, didn’t they?

Didn’t they?

So you’ll simply imagine that you’re making the world a better place. You’ll picture it very clearly in your mind. Because in the absence of any reality-checks, the world gets to be exactly as you pretend it to be.

So go back up to the beginning of this article. Go through and cross out everything you know is false. Redact it entirely with a thick black marker. Remember that trans children kill themselves because being transgender is so fundamentally toxic, not because of the bullying of adult men in suits outlawing their lives. Remember that the parents of transgender children are deeply misguided, pushing a toxic liberal agenda of gender confusion and early sexualization down their children’s throats and that their children need to be spared from this by the loving arms of the well-funded state foster care system. Remember that you know what’s best for your neighbor’s children, not them. Remember that the statisticians and pediatricians and psychologists who study these matters are secular humanists, dedicated to pushing a vulgar agenda into American’s homes, sowing confusion among your own children. They don’t actually know anything about real joy or hope or freedom or the shape of the human soul.

Only you know about those things.

Remember that you are the light. That you can discern the truth. Remember that those who disagree with you have been sent to cause confusion by hell itself.

Take a deep breath. Keep your eyes shut tight.

God himself agrees with you.

You are right.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win”

Trump’s outrage at the election is driven by a remarkable insight he has into the votes that have been cast.

Trump knows, for one, that if we count the legal votes, he wins. He also knows that millions of illegal votes have been cast. Furthermore, he knows that if we count those illegal votes, Biden will win.

And his supporters are understandably outraged by the injustice of it all.

I, for one, personally, don’t want to have a conversation about whether or not he’s right. I am not, in any way, challenging his facts.

I can’t.

Because I, personally, don’t know who will win if we count the legal votes. I don’t know how many illegal votes were cast. Furthermore, I don’t know who those illegal votes are actually cast for.

I, personally, don’t know who will win if we count the legal votes. For me, an unopened vote in an envelope is a complete mystery.

I, like most Americans, will have to wait until the votes have been counted to know who the votes are for. For me, an unopened vote in an envelope is a complete mystery. I have no idea who the vote inside is for.

I am curious though about precisely how Trump knows what’s inside the envelopes before they’re opened? And how can he tell illegal votes from legal ones? And how does he know who the illegal votes are for?

I am curious though about precisely how Trump knows what’s inside the envelopes before they’re opened?

C.S. Lewis, the author of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia, and a faithful Christian, proposed at litmus test for certain kinds of miraculous knowledge. It has been dubbed a trilemma, a portmanteau of tri (three) and dilemma.

Jesus of Nazareth, a Palestinian Jewish Rabbi, proposed that he was the “Son of God.” On one hand, as fantasy writer (with an entirely unhealthy interest in adults and children having sex in his novels) Piers Anthony has countered, this could mean that Jesus was a child of God, in the sense that we’re all children of God. But, people smarter than both Piers Anthony and I have realized that “Son of God,” in this case, means God embodied in human form on earth.

And claiming to be God on earth is a remarkable claim. Some people believed Jesus about this bit, and other’s did not. To this day disagreement about his claim remains. But C.S. Lewis summed up the difficulty nicely in his book Mere Christianity:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said [about being God] would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

And I find myself bringing this lens to the question of Trump’s insight into vote counts.

Trump knows what the total vote count is before the rest of us. And this seems to me to be a remarkable feat. Literally million of ballots across thousands of miles of country. The rest of us have to wait patiently while thousands and thousands of humans carefully count the votes to find out the totals. But for Trump, there seems to be a special connection between the vote count and his mind.

For Trump, there seems to be a special connection between the vote count and his mind.

I’d like to apply Lewis’ logic to Trump’s remarkable claim.

Perhaps Trump is a Liar

Perhaps Trump is just pretending to know what the vote count is to trick us. This is entirely possible. Sometimes politicians lie in order to get what they want. Maybe Trump simply made up the vote count.

Perhaps Trump is a Lunatic

This is also a real possibility. Humans have been known to get deeply disconnected from reality by a variety of mental illnesses. Perhaps Trump is hearing voices in his head that are telling him the vote count. And perhaps Trump believes those voices, even though they’re just the product of mental illness. This does happen to people.

Perhaps Trump is a sort of Lord

The third option is that President Trump does indeed have a fantastical, mystical, magical, or miraculous insight into what unopened ballots say inside, how many of them there are, and whether they were cast in a legal or illegal way.

I do worry about Trumps insight into the illegal ballots though. It might be seen as evidence of a crime if someone both knew how many illegal ballots there were and what the contents of them were. Because it may be hard to sell the Liberals on the good news that Trump has miraculous powers of insight into vote counts. And, apart from that, the only way one could know about those illegal ballots would be if one had cast them personally.

The only way one could know about those illegal ballots would be if one had cast them personally.

How about you, friend? What do you make of Trump’s insight into vote counts? Do you suspect him of being a liar, trying to trick Americans? Do you suspect him of being mentally ill, disconnected from our reality? Or do you find him a kind of Lord, with miraculous insight into our vote counts, perhaps knowledge flowing directly into his brain from God?

My Facebook circle is about at 40% of what it used to be. I think the heyday for me was around 2013 when SCOTUS overturned DOMA. Seas of HRC red faces feeling very joyful and self satisfied by their clictivism.

There was a time when I knew of two very specific people who weren’t on Facebook. I wanted them to be. I wanted to catch up on their lives. But that was it, just Angie Spears and Bridgette Whearty.

It’s possible that I’m a bad friend. Or that my radical leftist views have driven away more moderate or reasonable members of my social circles. But one way or another my community has evaporated.

I have 197 “friends” left today. I’ve wavered on my IRL policy with friending people over the years, so maybe 2/3 of those are folks I have a personal connection with. I still have over 1,000 “followers,” mostly due to my witty, far left writing on Medium, before it went paywall and jumped the shark. But it’s a quiet, empty room compared to what it once was.

I loved the digital utopia Facebook promised. I was going to have a digital connection to everyone I loved and cared about. Access to photos of their vacations, children growing up, latest craft projects and homemade dinners. I wouldn’t need phone numbers, email addresses, any sort of key or data address. Just one dashboard for everyone. Just click on their face to reach out to them by text, audio, or video.

I’ve never particularly suffered the social media malaise where I just feel dispirited and left behind when I see my friend’s manicured lives. Perhaps because I’m winning at life and I’m the one causing such malaise, or perhaps because I’m so full of Christ-like compersion and fondness for everyone. I just felt secure knowing I had some sort of access to all of these people who mattered to me.

I get that capitalism and Russian Trump bots and Mark Zuckerberg patenting all of our mother’s maiden blood types ruined it all. I get why everyone left.

I even had my own DTR with Facebook soon after Trump was elected. I needed to disengage from the 24 hour news cycle that was consuming my energy. I shifted to Pinterest and Instagram for more personal, less Trump-centric content. But I still kept my Facebook account. I was still on a few times a month.

But lately I miss this thin, ephemeral, brief glimpse of one another we once had.

I fantasize about a Wiki-Face-Pedia-Book where free, open source technology gently holds all of our photos of pets in halloween costumes and videos of our kids playing roller derby can live in safety and peace. Where you can check and uncheck the “politics” filter, the “food photos” filter, the “cute pets” filter. Where endless scrolling numbness and ads for camouflaged ammo aren’t the theme. Where our dopamine addiction and social media jealousy are somehow mitigated.

Where we can all sit on our digital front porches and wave hello to one another as we go on our evening walks.

Ok. White guys. Straight guys. Christian guys. We need to talk. Here’s a thought experiment.

Antifa and BLM join forces and overthrow Trump and hack into all the nukes and and burn the constitution and declare that we’re starting a new country.

55 delegates are sent to the Second Constitutional Convention. Only the best and brightest Americans are selected. The best of our best.

It turns out that none of the 55 delegates are guys. 31 Black women, 17 Latina women, 4 Asian women, 2 American Indian women. And one person who says they’re biracial and nonbinary, neither a man nor woman, whatever that means. And they’re all queer as hell. Asexual or bisexual or lesbian or polysexual. A bunch are vegans. 35 of them are Muslim. 7 Jews. 2 Wiccans. The rest are atheists.

ONE: Do you believe it?

OK, first of all, do you believe it?

Do you believe that all of these delegates were sent to this Continental Congress because they happened to be the best and smartest American? Do you believe that it’s a coincidence that not a single one is a guy? Do you believe that it’s a coincidence that not a single one of them is white?

Do you believe that this group was assembled without consideration of gender or race or religion?

TWO: Do you trust them?

Second, do you trust them?

They have a big sign over the room where they’re working, “All women are created equal.” And they’ve explained to reporters over and over that of course men are included in that statement.

They have a Muslim Prayer Breakfast, Good Vibes Witchcraft Weekend, and Atheist day of enlightenment. But they clarify to reporters that they believe in religious freedom. Of course they’re going to look out for Christian’s rights.

They’re not sure if they’re going to make straight marriage legal under the new constitution. But if they don’t, they want to make sure you know that straight domestic partnerships will be taken just as seriously as gay marriage.

Straight domestic partnerships will be taken just as seriously as gay marriage.

Do you trust them to do right by you?

They’re going to set up tribunals to try war criminals and deal with Trump loyalists. But they promise, they’re going to be fair and impartial. If you’re a Trump supporter with nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. They tell it to reporters over and over.

Does this Constitutional Convention have your family’s best interests at heart? Can you trust them?

Will they set up a Constitution that is fair and equal for all Americans?

Bad news

The 3/5 compromise

Well, bad news. The Constitution is finalized. The states have ratified it. All women of color have the right to vote. Men of color will be represented by their sisters’ and mothers’ votes. White folks are a bit more complicated. We’ll be counted as 3/5 a person for purposes of determining each state’s representation in congress. So, we’ll still be somewhat represented by our woman of color neighbor’s votes.

Voluntary Reparations Workforces

More bad news. White folks living in states that fought with the Confederacy are going to be required to join “Voluntary Reparations Workforces.” They will be used to bolster the flagging economy by donating their labor to corporations and wealthy people of color. Children will be participating as well. Purge rules apply for these Voluntary Reparations Workforce laborers. If they don’t comply, whippings and executions. If they complain about sexual harassment and rape: whippings and executions. If children are needed to work in a different state than their parents, so be it.

White reservations

But that’s not all. White folks living elsewhere are getting rounded up onto reservations. The new government has carefully chosen the best parts of each state for white people to move to. Unfortunately you’ll need to leave your home today. With whatever you and your kids can carry, because it’s no longer legal for white people to drive or ride on public transit. But don’t worry, these reservations are great places, set up by the government with white people’s needs in mind.

But don’t worry, these reservations are great places, set up by the government with white people’s needs in mind.

And white people still illegally occupying their former property may be shot on sight by the roving militias of BLM and Antifa peacekeepers.

Just keeping the peace. Law and order.

But good news too! One of the members of the new congress is a white woman. So we know, for sure, that white people are allowed to be part of the ruling government. So no more whining about us being left out.

Why is this so hard?

Why is it so hard to admit that America is a nation founded by straight, white, Christian men for straight, white, Christian men?

Why is it so hard to name that our nation was founded on slavery and genocide, on stolen land and with stolen labor?

Why is it so hard to admit that America is a nation founded by straight, white, Christian men for straight, white, Christian men?

Why is it so hard to empathize with women, gays, Muslims, and people of color about how precarious it feels to not be represented in positions of power, to not be at the table when important decisions are getting made?

Why is it so hard to name the unspoken rules that keep most of the wealth and power in the hands of white men to this very day?

Our nation was founded by white men on the backs of black slaves working on stolen land. Pretending that’s not true dooms us to forever be stuck in the generational trauma of how deeply we have failed our proclaimed values of Liberty and Justice for All.

Things have gotten better. But there is still a long way to go.

409 out of 535 members of congress are men. 412 out of 535 are white. 10 out of 535 are openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

Every president we’ve ever had was a Christian man. All but one was white.

Nothing about this passes the Golden Rule. If we wouldn’t want this for ourselves, we can‘t ignore how painful this is for our neighbors.

I did my graduate work at an Evangelical Christian school. A breathtaking, remarkable place by so many measures, deeply unlike whatever comes to mind when you hear of Evangelical Christian education. But a flawed and human organization as well, that would break my heart in a variety of ways.

Years after graduating I kept hearing from my LGBTQIA+ former-classmates that they felt like second-class citizens. And I ended up, somewhat foolishly, leading a push to get the school to add sexuality and gender identity to its bullying policy and non-discrimination policy regarding both students and faculty. My argument was that we simply wanted to say out loud that queer folks were allowed to be at the school. We weren’t asking for the school to adopt an inclusive teaching stance, or proclaim a doctrinal position on God, perhaps, being fond of queer folks. Just that they could be present.

It drummed up a lot of energy. I was surprised by the courage of some folks to align themselves publicly with their queer neighbors. And I was disappointed by some folks I thought of as friends and their scowling shaming of me.

My then-pastor (and fellow alum) relayed a backchannel message to me. The first point was that I had set back the inclusion of queer people in the school “by a decade.” There were “people” working behind the scenes to “make things happen,” but by publicly pushing for some measure of inclusion now, I had harmed the cause deeply. A common, and very effective, rebuke for people who demand justice.

The second part of it was equally familiar: It’s more complicated than you understand.

This version of It’s complicated is used strategically to gaslight people and movements. Don’t trust your own experience, we actually have a more accurate experience that’s beyond your grasp, so you’ll have to trust our understanding over your own.

You want the police budget cut in half? Politicians want to let us know that it’s just more complicated than our little brains could process, so we’ll have to trust them that not cutting the budget is actually in our best interest. Want to have the creepy, lecherous manager at work fired for his inability to keep his hands of your female coworkers? You’ll be surprised to find out that, well, it’s complicated.

This version of It’s complicated is used strategically to gaslight people and movements. Don’t trust your own experience, we actually have a more accurate experience that’s beyond your grasp, so you’ll have to trust our understanding over your own.

This is a weapon to establish mental superiority of those in power over those without power.

But there’s also another kind of it’s complicated. One that’s painful, but one that I’m grateful for.

I have friends across a wide variety of the political spectrum on Facebook. When RBG passed away on Friday, there was a variety of responses. Including posts saying that she can burn in hell.

But not from the right.

The political spectrum on my Facebook page is, well, complicated.

A wise Latina woman in my life posted with bitterness the she didn’t want to hear RBG’s name on Trump’s lips. Her post, if possible, was quivering with rage. I would have counted myself among those who had no interest in finding out what Trump had to say about her passing. His messages are so often dark and terrifying and baffling and toxic. They leave me hopeless about the state of our nation, and I only have so much bandwidth to process so much horror.

A wise Latina woman in my life posted with bitterness the she didn’t want to hear RGB’s name on Trump’s lips. Her post, if possible, was quivering with rage.

But someone on TikTok duetted with a video of his response to reporters when he found out. So his face and words were suddenly on my phone. The TikToker had duetted the video because she was so surprised by what he said. I felt her shock as well.

If we can pause the three million other variables, that do need to be taken into account, for just a moment Trump’s response is deeply surprising.

“She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman, whether you agree or not. She was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I’m actually sad to hear that.”

The video is even more intense that just reading the printed words.

And it’s all so unexpected at so many levels. It is, with all sincerity, the least narcissistic and least sociopathic clip I’ve ever seen of him speaking. He comes across as human, as genuinely sympathetic, as spontaneously praising someone with kindness and fondness.

We need a mental shorthand for the world around us. Our little brains didn’t evolve to keep track of too many variables at once. We can’t concentrate on the capital of Syria and chord structure of My Shot, and that snide comment our mother made as we were heading out the door to our first middle school dance all at once.

When I teach drawing to college students or my children, much of the work is getting them to unravel the mental shorthand they have about how things look and begin to explore a more longhand way of making note of the world around them. Cats are not circles with triangles and straight lines coming out of their heads.

One of the surprising things my Evangelical Divinity Program centered on is Alfred Korzybski’s postmodern observation that a map is not a territory. A word is not the thing it represents. Or as Magritte pointed out to us in The Treachery of Images, this is not a pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe.

My thoughts about the Bible are not the Bible

My observations on Trump are not Trump.

The real thing will always be more complicated than my brief notes that I have taken about it.

Those on my Facebook wishing RBG a good time in hell were on the far left, not the far right. To be fair, they were more friends of friends. They wanted us to remember that she cheerfully deported undocumented folks and joyfully built pipelines through sacred indigenous lands. That she was part of the prison industrial complex.

They are, of course, right. RBG wasn’t a saint.

But in that moment, they were displaying significantly less humanity and generosity than Trump, which is saying something.

I have tried to hold onto some semblance of nuance about Trump throughout his presidency. My divinity program is likely responsible for my ability to do so.

But I do so for my sake, and for our sake, not for his sake.

He is unbelievably self-absorbed. He is remarkably uninformed and uneducated for a political figure of any stature. He consistently is racist and transphobic. He is violent, likely a child rapist, admittedly a sexual predator. He is, certainly, a monster.

But, as American Horror Story: Asylum’s Sister Jude Martin reminds us, “all monsters are human.”

His crimes don’t erase his humanity.

But I can only hold onto this because I also remember that his humanity doesn’t erase his crimes.

His crimes don’t erase his humanity. But I can only hold onto this because I also remember that his humanity doesn’t erase his crimes.

I want to honor my wise elder’s disgust at RBG’s name on Trump’s lips. But I want to see Trump’s armor crack, if only for a moment. I want to honor RBG’s powerful legacy of doing harm to the patriarchy at so many levels. But I don’t want to imagine her a saint, caring well for the undocumented, indigenous, or falsely accused. I want to remember those disappointments.

I want to remember that this is all complicated. Not the relativistic, nihlistic too complicated to be thought through. Not the condescending complicated of those in power trying to cast doubt on the experiences of the oppressed.

I want to remember that it is more complicated than I currently understand. I want to hold onto certain kind of curiosity and humility than hold open space for new revelations, new understandings, new vantage points.

I want to hold onto certain kind of curiosity and humility than hold open space for new revelations, new understandings, new vantage points.

I want to set down the bombastic black and white rage that smugly sees itself as above the sheeple, regardless of where it comes from on the political spectrum. Not because all parts of the spectrum are equally valuable, and have an equal mix of saints and sinners. But because all parts of the spectrum have ways of knowing that are bitter and rigid and toxic.

I’m thankful for the life Ruth Bader Ginsburg led. She has brought hope and courage into my life personally. I deeply grieve the monstrous presidency of Donald Trump and the hatred and ignorance he has nurtured and fanned in my neighbors.

But I want to stay open to the three dimensional humanity of both of them. With room for relief and disappointment.

Look, I can probably out-radical-cred 98% of my peer group, maybe 99% of America. Medicaid for all? So 2012. I’m ready for single payer healthcare, universal basic income, and housing as a guaranteed right. You want gun control? I’m ready to abolish the second amendment. Overturn Citizen’s United. Publicly fund all forms of education, preschool through doctorates. Let’s ban fossil fuels effective immediately. Free childcare and stipends for parents raising young children. Reparations. Global citizenship. Amnesty for all undocumented Americans. Migration as a human right.

Anarchy? Let’s study that shit. Communism? Let’s fish out the beautiful ideas from the failed execution. Eco-feminist indigenous witches? I’m in, how can I stand in solidarity and offload some of my false white capitalist privilege?

Is Joe Biden my man? Hell no. Does his biracial Black, Indian American female running candidate do it for me? Nope. Could I offer my unreserved support for Bernie Sanders? Nope.

Do I think Seattle’s Democratic lesbian mayor is a corporate tool? You bet I do.

AOC? 🤷‍♂️

The fact is that there is no candidate that I can’t critique.

But that’s not the point of elections.

Your third party strategy

Does the two party system have a stranglehold on American politics? Yes, absolutely. Would we be better off with a third party, or twelve? Yes. Am I willing to invest in the future of a third party? You bet I am.

Have I ever voted third-party? You bet your organic fair-trade undergarments I have. I’ve voted for third party candidates in local Seattle politics who have built up the necessary coalitions to be viable candidates. And they’ve won.

But isn’t this a chicken and egg problem? Don't you need to vote for nonviable candidates in order to create viable candidates? Nope.

But isn’t this a chicken and egg problem? Don’t you need to vote for nonviable candidates in order to create viable candidates? Nope.

Please hear this clearly: Donate and campaign for and protest in the name of your third party radical platform and candidate. Bumper stickers and tattoos and sweat and blood and tears. Give your all for what you believe in.

But if you don’t have the momentum built up to have a viable candidate by the time of an election, then take the time to lick your wounds, plot how to do things even more awesomely over the course of the next election cycle, and vote for best viable candidate.

If you can’t tell the difference between a Trump presidency and a Biden presidency, I have some news for you: you are living with an immense amount of privilege. Because the nuances between the two flawed, straight, white, groping, capitalist, septuagenarians are huge for the most vulnerable in the margins.

If you can’t tell the difference between a Trump presidency and a Biden presidency, I have some news for you: you are living with an immense amount of privilege.

Your smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous, hipper-than-thou, more radical-than-thou, more pure-than-thou self may feel awfully pleased with itself for not dirtying your hands with Joe Biden’s corporate owned ass. But the degrees that his presidency will move the dial to the left of a Trump presidency will mean life and death, prison or freedom, dignity or despair, for millions of people wit the least amount of power in our communities.

The radical power of not voting

Picture this. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Trump, Mitch McConnell, Biden, W, and Zuckerberg are sitting in a dark room, smoking cigars, laughing at collapse of Democracy and civil liberties.

But suddenly! An aid rushes into the room with an emergency memo!

“Good white sirs! Urgent news! It looks like the radical leftists have convinced millions and millions of Americans to… not vote!”

“Good white sirs! Urgent news! It looks like the radical leftists have convinced millions and millions of Americans to… not vote!”

Can you see the way your subversive revolution has struck terror in the heart of these monsters? Do you see the clever way this takes all of the systems of power and turns them on their heads?

No?

Me neither.

These power structures have nothing to fear from your lack of participation.

Your disinterest in voting, while it may preserve the lily white virginal innocence or your hands that have never cast a vote for someone who’s name doesn’t start with “Comrade,” is taking a massive shit on the legacies of people like John Lewis, Herbert Lee, and others who fought, and even died, to expand the right to vote. People who were at least as literate as you on the Marxist texts you use to decorate your local, organic wheat-fueled home brewing room.

And it foolishly ignores the incredible amount of time, effort, and money the right invests decade after decade in creating barriers for ordinary people to vote.

Back to third-party candidates

If you’re going to vote third party, make sure you at least use your vote for the most impeccable, most revolutionary, most woke candidate.

Her name is Cat Ludowski. She’s even less problematic than the candidate you had in mind. She’s even more marginalized, more lit, and more revolutionary on every single god damned issue than the sell out you have in mind voting for.

And I know that for a fact. Because I just made her up.

And if you vote for her, you can sleep peacefully at night knowing that you are on the side of all that is good and right in the world. And if you put her bumper sticker on your BPA-free thrifted water bottle, you better believe ain’t no one going to call you out for her problematic stance on shit at your next socially distanced farmer’s market, community house meeting, or non-profit management Zoom call.

Because she’s fucking made up. She’s make believe. She’s pretend. Just like everyone in America waking up tomorrow and spontaneously casting their votes for your revolutionary third-party candidate.

Because she’s fucking made up. She’s make believe. She’s pretend.

Just like everyone in America waking up tomorrow and spontaneously casting their votes for your revolutionary third-party candidate that they’ve never even heard of.

Even better yet, just imagine voting for Cat. Visualize it. Pretend like she wins. Pretend like the entire fucking system comes crashing to its knees. We literally eat Bezos, drinking his blood in a new age communion, eating his flesh in a post-pagan marxist ceremony marking the end of capitalism and fossil fuels.

But while you’re jacking off to fantasies of your imaginary candidate’s imaginary win, the real work of organizing and creating policy and getting educated and forming coalitions is falling to other people. Usually women. Usually people of color.

But while you’re jacking off to fantasies of your imaginary candidate’s imaginary win, the real work of organizing and creating policy and getting educated and forming coalitions is falling to other people. Usually women. Usually people of color.

Real change doesn’t take place in pretentious, elitist daydream, or in passive compliance with horrific realities of the eco-carnivorous hetero-patriarchal-capitalist white-nationalist consumption of human peace and dignity. You have to get messy. You have to vote for assholes like Joe Biden while you continue to show up for black lives, while you continue to train and educate and love young radical leaders. While you continue to make reparations, continue to educate yourself about lives even queerer than yours.

This isn’t about selling out. This is about growing out of a fantasy-driven, ego-centered, selfish understanding of how the world works.

You’re going to have to get your hands dirty.

My daughter is ten now. Old enough to have read your books and watched the movies. But not quite old enough to make sense out of why you’re working so hard to demonize the work and progress of her transgender community.

It’s hard to know how much of the world to expose her to. When I’m sheltering her too much. I want her to know that there are people in the world who dislike transgender people, especially transgender women. I want her to be prepared, informed. But I don’t want her to have to feel all the fear and anger that I do as an adult, on her behalf, as her parent.

So from time to time, I write letters to the editor, join a protest, or donate money to transgender organizations. I do it because I care about her, wanting a better world for her to emerge into. At some point she’ll be leading the fight and I’ll be watching her back.

But maybe for one last time I feel like I need to speak out in ways that she can’t quite yet.

The media’s influence

You’ve written about your concerns about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, about the problem of Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube turning young people transgender. I would like to assure you that when my daughter transitioned, in preschool, she had almost no exposure to Tumblr, Reddit, or YouTube. Her minimal YouTube exposure was confined to celebrities reading children’s books and impossibly cheerful children’s musicians.

Among the hundreds of other parents of transgender children I’ve met through support groups and international conferences, I’d say, partially due to our children being elementary school aged, no widespread pattern of Reddit or Tumblr usage has emerged.

Of course, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, despite it’s ominous capital letters, isn’t an actual diagnosis or condition. It’s an article’s poetic description of a group of parent’s perceptions of their teens coming out of the closet as trans. Which, I can imagine, could feel quite sudden, for those parents.

That’s not natural

I suspect what you’re reaching for with the social-media-turns-kids-trans theory is some sort of explanation for the tremendous growth in visibility and rights for transgender people in the last decade. You’ve referred to it as an “explosion.”

And, like these parents, awareness of trans peoples’ existence may feel very sudden to you. And, like we did for that last several decades with homosexuality, you may be searching for an explanation for it. Is it vaccines turning the kids trans? Cell phone towers? Overbearing mothers?

It seems that merely hearing of the existence of trans people can turn some people trans. Almost like they were already trans, but didn’t know that transitioning was a possibility until… until they learned that it was.

Erasing women

Another concern that you’ve brought up is that acknowledging the existence of transgender people will erode cisgender women’s existence. And while internalized misogyny is a horrific reality that women the world over face, I think that you might find, talking to transgender people, that they don’t primarily transition because of a hatred of the gender they were assigned at birth. Their stories are actually much more three-dimensional, joyful, and rich than that.

If we trust and listen to trans folks, I think you might find that they’re on the bleeding edge of honoring gender, allowing all women to connect with womanhood, allowing all women to be who they authentically are without a prescriptive code about what you have to do to measure up.

And while, even if your numbers are accurate (they rarely are when it comes to trans issues), and more people assigned female at birth are discovering they’re male than people assigned male discovering that they’re female, I don’t think this is going to make a substantial dent on the world’s gender balance. While some people that you assumed were women may turn out not to be, you also have amazing people like my daughter joining alongside you.

And even teens with the highest concentration of Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube consumption are rarely transgender. Most of the cisgender women you know will stay cisgender women for the rest of their lives.

Dodging gayness

You’ve also brought up concerns about people pressuring their children to transition genders in order to avoid being gay. To which I can only reply: What?

Have you met trans people? Have you met gay people? In precisely which universe are people less bullied for being trans than gay? Are conservative parents more comfortable having transgender children than gay children?

And also, in case no one has brought this up, trans people can also be gay. I don’t have any numbers, but I’d be willing to bet several months of rent that there are less straight transgender folks, per capita, than straight cisgender folks.

Vulnerability of Bathrooms

“I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”

-JKR

I’ve had to talk and write on this topic more than any other transgender concern. I understand the anxiety that rises up initially when the idea of transgender people sharing a bathroom with you comes up. I don’t want to disproportionately go into all of the poor logic involved in trying to confine people to the bathroom that you choose for them, but I’ll try and hit the highlights.

To begin with, transgender women assaulting other women in the bathroom is a nonexistent problem. So is the problem of men disguising themselves as transgender women to assault women. They are of similar pressing concern to the world as quicksand or villains tying victims to railroad tracks while twirling their mustaches.

But, even if this were a problem, you’ve got it backwards. You’re imagining men “dressing up like women” to access women’s spaces. But if you require people to use restrooms that match their genitals at birth, you’re asking transgender men with beards, deep voices, and burly muscles to use the women’s restroom.

And, simply put, it’s a lot easier for a cisgender man to pass as a transgender man than pass as a transgender woman.

Unless, of course, what you’re proposing is that cisgender women use the women’s room, cisgender men use the men’s room, and transgender folks can just stay out of public life altogether.

Not to mention intersex folks. Who, as a refresher, in the likely event your sex ed curriculum completely ignored them, aren’t neatly packaged into the boy/penis box or girl/vulva box.

Plus, assaulting anyone in a restroom is already a crime. Harassing or ogling someone in a restroom or locker room is already a scenario that we have rules in place for.

Lastly, you have no idea what anyone’s genitals at birth, birth certificate, hormone levels, or genes are. And hopefully their current genitals aren’t getting inspected as criteria for entering restrooms now or in the near future. Your line of thinking, like so many, rests on the ridiculous idea that you can tell if someone is transgender by looking at them.

Which brings us to gate keeping.

Gate keeping

“The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.”

-JKR

Yes, historically we have required trans women to prove that they are “woman enough” by… wearing dresses. Growing their hair long. Painting their nails. Wearing high heals.

You can see where this list is going. These aren’t definitions of womanhood that have served women very well.

Secondly, the price for hormones and surgery is astronomical. Which tends to be primarily available to wealthy white folks, leaving many trans people who desperately want them unable to access them.

And thirdly, hormones and surgery carry medical risk with them. So maybe something we better leave to… I don’t know… a woman and her doctor?

So while hormones and surgery do much to alleviate the transphobia that rises up in most of us when engaging someone who’s gender and body don’t match up precisely as we’d like them to, they may or may not be desirable or available to all transgender folks.

What if they regret it?

Parents of transgender kids get a lot of hand-wringing and anxiety from those around them about how their children are really just too young to know their true gender. Oddly, no one is concerned whether or not my three cisgender kids are old enough to know their gender.

And then there’s the whispered question: what if? What if your kid is wrong about their gender, and it turns out they’re another gender? What if they had several years of hormones and a bit of surgery here or there, and then they realize it was all a terrible idea?

But that’s the exact risk I’m taking with all four of my kids, trans or cis. Unless we’re going to start universally putting kids on hormone blockers until they’re thirty, we’re going to run the risk that people undergo puberty that leaves their bodies looking different than would prefer later in life.

So we do the best we can. We trust our children’s self-knowledge and support their sense of direction. And if we reverse course, we reverse course.

Detransitioning is rare, but it’s real. And it can be accompanied by intense disappointment and regret. But, statistically, using the most sincere and impartial numbers, my kiddo is a thousand times more likely to regret not using hormone blockers and cross hormones.

Criticism is hard to take

Criticism is hard to take. No one enjoys being called homophobic or racist. But calling out hateful speech, ideas, and attitudes is an important part of caring for the world around us. And please hear that the transgender community believes that your speech endangers trans lives.

I grew up an Evangelical Christian. I was homophobic. That didn’t make it enjoyable when I was called homophobic. I grew up in the same patriarchal culture that we’re all navigating. As a man, having misogynistic ideas, words, and actions called out doesn’t feel good. But it’s an important opportunity for me to identify the ways I’m participating in the patriarchy and burn those ways of moving through the world to the ground.

As Wesley Wade points out in his deeply enlightening article dealing with the pseudoscience and misinformation that you keep spreading, TERF isn’t a pejorative coined by transgender folks or their allies. It’s a term that trans-excluding folks coined.

I don’t know that I have much use for the “R.” But it is noteworthy to me when a feminist excludes trans folks, radical or not. Similarly to feminists who are white supremacists, or anti-racist thinkers who are misogynistic. It feels like someone deserves a heads up.

But the real weight of the term isn’t really about feminism at this point. It’s not exactly getting constrained to use only for discussing radical feminist. TERF has come to represent transphobia. And getting called transphobic isn’t pleasant.

So you go out of your way to deflect it. Your insistence that you have trans friends. Or the patronizing language you use assuring transgender folks that you have their safety and best interest at heart while advocating for public policy that they have told you is dangerous for them.

But be it TERF or another term, the response is clear: your words and ideas are transphobic.

Ms. Rowling, a lot of people you care about have felt the need to publicly speak out to clarify, in the very least, that they don’t share your views on trans people. Or, more helpfully, that they trust transgender people to self-determine their own lives, without the interference and gate keeping of doctors, politicians, or celebrity authors.

If you look at it through the lens of generations, you’ll probably notice those most hurt, most angry, quickest to contradict you, are folks younger than you. And you’ll probably notice that those most likely to stoke your fears of transgender women in the restroom, without a lick of surgery or the courtesy of hormones, those folks are your age and older. There will be exceptions, of course, but generally.

I think that if you thought that through, by itself, it would give you pause. When was the last time the young folks had gender and sexuality wrong, and the older folks were fighting for compassion, humanity, kindness?

Or you could look at your allies. Who most wants to keep transgender women out of bathrooms? Most wants to make it difficult to change legal documents to match your correct gender? Trump supporters. TV preachers. Fearful, small minded folks.

You’re digging your hole deeper the further you go. And this will be a lasting legacy for you. His compositions were amazing, but it turns out he was antisemitic. Her science was brilliant, but we need to acknowledge that she was deeply homophobic.

She wrote the most magical novels in a century. But she was incredibly transphobic.

Seriously, I can’t recommend Wesley Wade’s article The Miseducation and Misinformation of J.K. Rowling enough. It’s amazing.