Canadian Conservatives Scare Me More Than American Conservatives

It is election season in Ontario, and for the first time, I’ll be voting. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, my citizenship is complete and my voter registration is in place. I can call myself “Canadian” with that much more conviction now, and the attention I pay to this country’s politics now weighs on a vote where it previously weighed on just my thoughts. In this unusually portentous time, I have been confronted not only with the mainstream parties, but with the tiny splinter parties trying to gain a foothold in real politics, as they litter public spaces with their signs and pamphlets. And they have reminded me that Canadian conservatives are pit-in-the-stomach terrifying compared to their American counterparts.

Continue reading “Canadian Conservatives Scare Me More Than American Conservatives”

Canadian Conservatives Scare Me More Than American Conservatives
{advertisement}

Save Me From Ordinary

It was ordinary people who told me my soul would burn when I told them I am an atheist.

It was ordinary people who kept me from recognizing my gender until my 20s.

It was ordinary people who promoted a level of homework that devoured my free time for most of high school.

It was ordinary people who saw everything about me that was not useful to them and demanded that it change.

It was ordinary people who kept me feeling excluded, misunderstood, and feared until I was an adult, and sometimes still.

It was ordinary people who lied to me for fun and jeered at me for believing them.

It was ordinary people who made the world too bright, too loud, too messy, too much, and told me I was wrong for noticing.

It was ordinary people who made it so that, when I am frustrated or scared enough, I stop feeling my hands.

Continue reading “Save Me From Ordinary”

Save Me From Ordinary

The Last Word on “Genital Preference”

It’s one of the last retreats and first rejoinders of people whose support of the transgender community isn’t rock-solid. It’s the base of operations of people who don’t oppose our existence but nevertheless find us grotesque and confusing. It’s tiresome, it’s exhausting, and it makes more of us more likely to date each other than our shared experiences and social spaces already did. We have to warn each other that our relationships might end if we transition, partly because of this specter.

The argument from “genital preference” simply will not go away, and that’s because its framing is tangled and often dishonest.

As a trans lesbian who herself finds one genital configuration more aesthetically and sexually desirable than the other, I come at this topic from a distinct perspective. And the most important thing I have to offer here is this point:

It is not the preference that is a problem, it’s how that leads a person to treat their prospective partners.

Continue reading “The Last Word on “Genital Preference””

The Last Word on “Genital Preference”

Love Lives Here: A Review

“Thank you,” I told them. “Thank you for being so much better than an occasional phone call asking if I’ve given up yet.”

Zoë Michelle Knox and Amanda Jetté Knox were already famous in Canada for the improbable beauty of their journey when I met them. They were the family that had gone from the picture of white suburban normalcy to a beacon of queer hope, as father and son rediscovered themselves as wife and daughter, made public by Amanda’s blog and Internet presence, and they had been all over Canada’s magazines and web sites. The fact that they were local meant that my friends and extended circles were particularly aware of these lovely people, and made sure I heard when their speaking tour brought  them to an auditorium within not-too-forbidding walking distance of my home. They spoke about Amanda’s then-nascent book, Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family, about trans issues in general, about how society fails us and how people can make sure the transgender family members among them feel loved, supported, and cared for despite widespread social disapproval and even violence.

Continue reading “Love Lives Here: A Review”

Love Lives Here: A Review

My Time Among the Tankies

The online left is a very, very strange place. It’s full of people who are all urgently certain of how right they are and how wrong everyone else is. It’s loud and hostile, with minor ideological differences turning into over-dramatic schisms in bizarrely little time. Vast slices of it are chronically, toxically vigilant, waiting with unwholesome eagerness to be the one who gets to turn on or cast out someone else for a misstep. Dial all of that up to 11, and you get the tankies.

For those who don’t know, “tankies” are devotees of the strand of leftist thinking usually called Marxism-Leninism, the philosophy of Josef Stalin rather than the eponymous Marx and Lenin. An extension of this idea, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, incorporates thoughts from Mao Zedong. They get the name “tankie” from their penchant for defending the less defensible actions of the Soviet Union and similar governments throughout history, in particular the mechanized (hence “tankie”) invasion of Hungary during its anti-communist revolt in 1956. In the modern era, long arguments about specific events from 70 years ago are far less salient than their modern corollaries. Tankies are, these days, characterized by their full-throated defenses of modern China and North Korea, which become more and more uncomfortable the clearer it becomes that some rather nefarious things are happening in those countries.

Here’s where I come in.

Continue reading “My Time Among the Tankies”

My Time Among the Tankies

Emma González for Our Glory

Emma González gives me hope.

I cannot often say that about my people. I am by turns disappointed in each half of my heritage, but it is my Cuban half that inspires the most sadness. And when I watch Emma González, I feel that unfamiliar rise in my heart, and know that my people will be better than we have been.

Continue reading “Emma González for Our Glory”

Emma González for Our Glory

How to Cook and Eat your Favorite Republicans

It’s that time of year again, when humankind holds back the darkest night of the year with expansive meals and festive lights well across the northern hemisphere. And what better festive meal on the darkest night than the pitch darkness made manifest that is the average Republican?

I know, I know—Republicans are notoriously tricky to cook, since most of them are toxic enough that no plants ever grow again on the ground where they have trod barefoot and gutting them for consumption typically requires a full hazmat contingent. But there are some tips and trick that an enterprising culinary wizard can employ to make their Republican meals safe, easy, and even fun. Let’s begin.

Continue reading “How to Cook and Eat your Favorite Republicans”

How to Cook and Eat your Favorite Republicans

Future Dive

We always picked the Crawlspace. Nobody really liked the Crawlspace. Some of the roof is strapped to the half-dead chestnut tree whose roots are damaging the sidewalk outside, and the constant drip in that part of the bar was used to water a bamboo that no one dared call lucky. At least one bar stool was half of a barber’s chair that the owners never bothered to unbolt from the floor after buying Crabbie’s Cuts, and it still smelled like old hair. We were pretty sure that the combination of fluids that, over the years, made the light brown stain at the far corner swell to take up half of the floor would make a health inspector blanch, but the last health inspector who looked at the Crawlspace did an about-face at the door while reciting “NOPE” under his breath, so, that hasn’t been a problem.
Continue reading “Future Dive”

Future Dive

Answers for Trans Day of Visibility Questions

I arranged a question-and-answer session on my Facebook profile on this year’s Trans Day of Visibility. My friends and other visitors brought up some amusing, interesting, and valuable questions. For posterity’s sake, that’s all here now.

  1. Isn’t having the superpower of invisibility the other 364 days of the year awesome?

It’s kind of disappointing, really. It makes it so much harder to get appreciation for all of these selfies.

Continue reading “Answers for Trans Day of Visibility Questions”

Answers for Trans Day of Visibility Questions