To Whom It May Concern,

In the mountains of central New Mexico, right on the edge of spring, I walked between towering pine trees that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. I didn’t plan on being gone long– I’d left my husband back at our campsite as he napped in his hammock beneath a sliver of dying sunlight – but the deeper into the woods I went, the more conscious I became of just how alone I was. It was still too early in the season for tourists, and I hadn’t seen another hiker or dog walker since I left the main artery of the trail, choosing instead to follow a vein that zigged and zagged deep into the canopy. Even the birds were quiet as I crunched dried pine beneath my boots, losing myself in the rhythm of my steps. I stopped and turned in place– every viewpoint looked exactly the same. Nothing distinguished one heading from another. The noise from the road had vanished, the air was completely still, and the silence pushed against me like a current from all directions. It was like being suspended in clear gelatin, like pressing a seashell to your ear only to hear the sound of your own heart. I stopped, sat in the dirt in the center of the path, and closed my eyes.

Ten years ago, I’d experienced something similar when I chose to scuba dive off the coast of Catalina Island. I was cleared to dive down to 60 feet, but a strong tide and a mixup in pre-dive planning found me and my dive buddy at 80 feet below the surface, the compasses tethered to our BCDs reading conflicting directions. If I looked toward what I thought might be shore, I saw only a limitless expanse of empty blue. If I looked toward what I thought was the sea floor, or the surface, or the open ocean, the view was identical. Only the bubbles escaping from my regulator oriented me in space to tell me which way was up.

Back in the forest, I began to talk to myself.

I pressed my palms to the warm earth of the forest floor, and I said everything that was on my mind. I don’t know how long I was there, but I could feel the static in my legs getting louder as I let everything out. I talked about my parents, my work, my friends, my fears, my needs. After a while, I realized that this was the most I’d talked in a long time without thinking about an audience. I was existing and feeling and talking entirely by myself. No one was listening. I was alone. The relief was overwhelming. When I felt like I had nothing left to say, I stood up.

“Fuck,” I said aloud to no one. “I have got to get off my phone.”

I have been writing some version of this letter in my head every day since then.

This is because, when I first started understanding myself as trans, the internet was a lifeline. The loneliness of my position – teaching in a public high school in one of the most conservative counties on the west coast – was overwhelming and profound. I started making videos about my life as a way to find even one single other person who understood what I was experiencing. I wanted to find people like me, and to build a life where I could see a future for myself. Numbers grew faster than I could understand. 2,000 followers became 10,000, became 50,000, became 400,000. For a while, I looked up stadiums with seating comparable to the number of people who knew my name. Then it was cities. More people were watching me than there were in Oceanside, then Huntington Beach, then Anaheim. At some point I stopped checking.

There are moments where I believe a connection to the digital world saved my life.

When I had to leave my life as a teacher, when Fox News stuck my face on the front page to score easy points in a culture war no one in my community signed up for, it was strangers thousands of miles away who kept me tethered to the earth when all I wanted to do was dissolve into my bed for the rest of my life.

When my husband and I had to flee our home and thought for sure we had nowhere to go, hundreds of people we’d never met sent us what they could, or offered to open up their homes for us, to keep us from running out of options.

But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a cost.

Most days, I feel like I’m not doing – and can never do – enough. The problems feel too big, the community too split, the struggle never-ending. My body’s systems feel hijacked by demands to say more, post more, engage more. There are punishments built into algorithms meant to smother those of us who take moments up for air. If you don’t stay engaged, don’t keep those apps open, don’t continue to create, you find yourself vanished from feeds and steadfastly on the outside of the conversation. Those of us who “make” for these platforms aren’t immune to the same pernicious tricks that keep all of us addicted to screens that, for the most part, take from our lives much more than they will ever give. It’s an icky feeling.

And it bleeds into the outside as well.

Parasocial relationships – ones where one party knows a lot more about the other than in reverse – are an especially strange minefield. I’ve never had a solid handle on how to navigate them, and the idea of living a life where they only become more common for me makes me a bit nauseous. How do you build emotional intimacy and trust with someone who is always laps ahead of you? Who has built a version of you in their mind before you ever meet them?

My husband Xilo and I have spent the last year traveling around the country, learning about the many ways to exist as a trans person in the United States, while at the same time searching for a place to finally settle. In November, we parked in New Mexico and decided not to keep moving. For those who live here, it’s not a surprising conclusion. There’s something indescribable about this place, and we knew that if we could make it work permanently, we wanted to try. But almost immediately, there were hiccups. For the sake of my husband’s privacy, I’ll stay vague, but our “lower case ‘f’ fame” became a problem for him when he started working as a therapist for a practice where not everyone was especially forthcoming with him about their parasocial relationship with us. He left after only a few months.

And while he’s working now within a practice much more aligned with his values, the idea of returning to the digital world scares the shit out of me. What if the work that has been a lifeline for me for half a decade derails something he’s spent his entire life building?

It’s been just over a month since I stood up from my place on the forest floor and told myself I was done, that my time on the internet had reached its limit, that I was logging off for good. This is also about how long I’ve been dodging emails from my publisher, who has a very realistic concern: if I’m not on the internet, how the fuck is anyone supposed to know I’ve written a book?

Because I did write a book. Actually, I wrote two books. Books that I think are pretty important (and also good). And I want people to read them. It’s a classic “have your cake and blah blah blah” moment. It’s one that I’ve spent more than a month mulling over as I’ve written a hundred different versions of this letter in my head.

And this morning, it’s a question I brought to my friends at work.

Because I have a job now. A beautiful, profound, incredibly unserious job. I work at a book store. Every morning, I wake up, drive ten minutes across the Rio Grande, and I spend my entire day talking to people about books. I unbox books, I shelve books, I help people find books, and I chat with some of the coolest people in the city about the next Romantasy Book Club or the T. Kingfisher author talk or the merits of audiobooks versus paperbacks. And (most of) the people who come in have absolutely no idea who I am. It’s awesome.

But I know it’s only half of myself.

I’m still so young, and I have more I want to say. I’ve been a writer since I could grip a pencil, and I’m already mapping and outlining the books I’m ready to write next. I’m still getting into spirited arguments at book clubs and running my mouth in mixed company. I still care about my community and want to give everything I can to help them. I still have a platform, and it feels misaligned with my values to watch it collect dust. It’s been years since my presence on social media paid any of our bills, but I want to find a way to find my way back to a community I care about.

How do I square that?

So today, after we finished stacking chairs following a Buddhist meditation seminar that had just wrapped up in our children’s section, I asked my friends what they thought – Should I stay or should I go?

“Can’t you just… find a little more balance with it?” they asked me. “You don’t have to be all-or-nothing with it, do you?”

Classic. Black or white thinking had struck again. It was worth a try. Four weeks ago, the thought of writing or producing another single thing for a digital audience was enough to send me back to bed. But here we are, more than 1600 words into something I’ve been trying to write for weeks, and my stomach hasn’t done a backflip once.

So what do I think this might look like for me? What does “balance” mean after so many years sharing my life with this many people?

This is where I think I’ve landed:

1. I can always disappear again. Vanishing is a human right.

2. I will not chase an algorithm that doesn’t care if I live or die.

3. I will not adhere to a posting schedule or keep engagement goals.

4. The parts of my life belong to me, and I don’t owe them to anyone.

5. I listen first to the people who share their lives with me in the physical world.

6. When I feel like scrolling, I can pick up a book.

7. Or take a walk

8. Seriously. You live in New Mexico now. Just go outside.

9. Knowing more doesn’t always make me any safer.

10. I will value nuance and authenticity over brevity and clicks.

So, ultimately, I’m not sure when you’ll hear from me again. I’m feeling it out and letting myself live somewhere between “all” and “nothing,” and it might take me a while to feel it all the way out. Even now, I can hear some of the words faltering as I attempt to type them, the images just barely coming together. There are points I wanted to make, thoughts I wanted to follow further, but I’m trying to find compassion for the space in the middle– the space that understands how messy letters like this will always be. I’m working without an outline and without optimizing my message for an audience. In some ways, it feels much more vulnerable than it did before.

So thank you for sticking around, for staying here with me as I wander through the pine trees and try to figure out which way is up. And if not– if you stopped somewhere near the beginning and found your attention pulled in another direction– I’m perfectly happy talking to myself in the woods alone. I’ve always been in pretty good company.

Love,

Flint

warning: the following piece will describe the events of the video leading to the murder of Renee Nicole Good. If you’d like to skip the re-telling, begin at the fourth line break: “The video isn’t complicated…”

When I first witnessed the murder of Renee Nicole Good, I had no idea what it was I was about to see. I’d just started on the treadmill at my gym, with my phone propped over the little blinking timer display, and was hoping to pass ten or fifteen minutes scrolling through Instagram videos of watercolor tutorials.

I had no context, hadn’t read any captions or reactions, and hadn’t yet seen the four text messages from friends warning me that every corner of social media was about to be dominated by the graphic final moments of a young mother’s life.

Before I knew what was happening, the video popped to the very top of my feed.

I watched as a woman’s hand stuck out from the driver’s side of her SUV, waving through traffic on her left side. I watched as two masked men in tactical vests jumped out of their approaching truck and walked to her door. I watched as one of them pulled on the handle while he reached in her open window, attempting to get to her. I watched her reverse in fear as another masked man crossed in front of her, grabbing his weapon from his hip. I watched that man fire once through her windshield as she was already turned to her right in an attempt to flee. I watched him fire again through her driver’s side window. I watched her car roll to a stop as her widow screamed. I watched a murderer walk away.

The video isn’t complicated. I did not watch it a second time. I knew what I had seen.

And as we all learned details in the following hours, I also thought I knew what would happen next:

The passing on of responsibility, the blaming of “inadequate training,” the “paid leave” while an agency investigated itself.

But that’s not what happened.

What happened instead was a wave of voices arguing that we hadn’t seen what we all definitely had.

The most powerful people in our country were telling us that we hadn’t seen a murder, no. We’d seen a brave man execute his top tier training perfectly. He acted appropriately, bravely even, and had barely escaped with his life.

This time, I did watch the video again.

No, that’s not what happened.

I know what I saw. What we all saw.

More surprising than the spin was just how many people seemed to agree. A chorus of witnesses to a horrifying murder who swore with straight faces that they had seen something completely different.

This wasn’t a difference of opinion, a matter of differing values or perspectives. This was objective reality.

What was happening?

I’m not a neuroscientist or a psychologist, so I can’t reach deftly into the depths of the human psyche for a clear answer here, but I was a teacher. I spent twelve years as an educator of critical thinking and media literacy, and the more I thought about it, the more I understood.

So while I can’t say for sure, here’s what I think might be happening:

5. They do not trust themselves

When artists are first starting out, one of their most important early lessons is not to represent what they think they see or what other people have told them they see, but to look with their own new eyes at the world around them. This is why novice painters stick a round yellow sun in the left corner of a blue sky that ends in a hard line against the green earth– they are painting what they think they know instead of asking themselves what do I actually see? There’s a similar idea around truth in journalism, when writers are told: if one source tells you it’s raining and another says that it’s sunny, your job isn’t to quote them both, it’s to look out the f*cking window.

Both of these ideas are rooted squarely in self trust. There are a lot of people who are incapable of trusting themselves, who will hold off on a perspective until they hear what other people think. This is different from learning and growing through the viewpoints of others, which still retains a strong core sense of self. It’s rooted instead in shame, in a lack of self worth, and a detached values system. Self trust isn’t something that exists only within one political party or another, but existing without it makes it a lot easier to slowly drift from a defined moral center. When we outsource the trust we should have in our own experiences, when we believe that we are too cloudy or unworthy or fallible to know what we’re seeing and feeling, it’s much easier to harness our doubt for nefarious purposes.

4. They have unquestioning trust in authority

So if we can’t trust ourselves, who do we trust? For a lot of people who carry the weight of crippling self doubt, the answer is almost always an authority figure. For those of us who have been trapped in the net of an abusive relationship, especially in our youth, the narrative is a familiar one: I must be missing something. They must be right. They’re smarter than me, have more experience than me. I trust them to know what’s going on.

The disconnect between felt reality and the presented narrative has got to be a disorienting one. But the presiding authority figure in the American conservative world (that is, Donald Trump and co.) has been microdosing his followers with greater and greater untruths over the last decade, each just a little larger than the last. What started as pea-sized pills of bullshit (a crowd size at an inauguration, the trajectory of a southern hurricane) have been slowly graduated past stolen elections and Capital insurrections. Anyone who’s left at this point has been carefully trained to swallow anything presented to them. The last act always would be, as Orwell put it, to “reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.”

3. They are falling victim to the “anchor bias”

Our brains don’t like being wrong – it’s kind of how we’re wired. Our noggins prefer the comfort of a sure thing, of the rigid blanket of an unchanging neural world. Unfortunately, we are wrong all the time, which is why it’s so important to practice cognitive flexibility. But it doesn’t come naturally, and if our egos resist too hard, we fall into the trap of what’s called the “anchor bias.” The anchor bias is our tendency to latch to the first bit of information we hear and then never ever ever let it go. So if we, say, hear from an authority figure that a brave man of the law defied certain death and rightfully deflected the attack of an unruly agitator (and we don’t often practice cognitive flexibility), we might just decide that no matter what we see or hear, we will believe that forever.

The anchor bias has a best friend, and his name is shame. There is a prevailing belief, especially in more traditionally masculine spaces, that changing your mind is shameful and weak– that it’s the result of brittle moral character. That is nonsense. What’s weak is a lack of curiosity. What’s weak is being unable to hold authority accountable. What’s weak is doubling down on cruelty and rejoicing in pain. That is real weakness.

2. They’ve been training to dehumanize us for years now

If there’s one through-line in all of the buzzing discourse from the right about Good’s murder, it’s that none of them seem to agree about why it was justified. It was justified, of course, they say. But why? In the hour or two after it happened, the prevailing argument was that the man who murdered her did so to save his own life. He’s “recovering in the hospital,” Trump said, and it was “hard to believe he is alive.” But that wasn’t true. He never went to the hospital, and the vehicle never struck him. Soon, the narrative shifted. She should have complied, they said, with the conflicting instructions given by the men who approached her. Pundits on conservative networks pointed to the “pronouns in her Instagram bio,” and lingered on her queer partnership.

It’s clear that the details of the incident don’t actually matter. This week, videos have been emerging of ICE agents taunting protestors with threats that they might be next. Citizens are being arrested through car windows, at the front doors of their homes as agents march from house to house, and for recording in costumes on the street. This is coming at the tail end of a years’ long campaign to strip us of our humanity. The question isn’t if we deserve it, but when they will get the chance to follow through on what they already know we deserve.

1. If they pull a single thread, the whole sweater falls apart

Really, the root of all of this seems to be fear.

Because what if Renee Nicole Good is exactly who she appears to be? What if she really was a scared young mother who presented no real threat to the three masked, armed men around her? What if the woman who was on that street with her dog, her wife, and a glove box filled with stuffed toys was trying to peacefully observe, and the man who called her a “f*cking bitch” after he shot her was the dangerous one? What if he should have never been given a gun at all? What if the authorities who are protecting him now are lying about what he did? If they’re lying about this, what else could they be lying about? Is the ICE occupation of Minneapolis even necessary? Is the danger they’re supposed to be protecting us from even real?

And that’s a lot to be afraid of.

As I read my list back to my husband who stood in front of our small kitchenette, he nodded along in silence. There isn’t a single thing I’ve published in the last three years that didn’t first go through Xilo. He acts as sounding board, cheerleader, and challenger (the trifecta of feedback), and I take what he has to say with deadly seriousness.

“I’m interested to see how you end it,” he said.

“Well that’s it, that’s the end,” I said, physically exhausted and emotionally depleted.

“No,” he told me. “What do we do now? You can’t just leave it there. Where’s the hope?”

And honestly, I’ve never struggled more to find it.

Because I might think I know where this disconnect in reality is coming from – the divide that surges like an impassable river between them and us, but that doesn’t mean I know how to bridge it. In fact, I’ve never felt smaller, and less capable of building bridges.

I thought about Renee, who seemed to keep her heart and her smile until the very end. Who, more than five years ago, wrote a poem that reached through time that made me feel connected to myself again. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to keep writing, and making, and forging a legacy for myself that is rooted squarely in that kind of love.

Also, I made a tattoo appointment.

In just a few weeks, I’ll wear Renee’s words on my arm, to try and remember why any of this is worth fighting for, and why I will always be capable of love despite it all.

“maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.”

I’m sure Renee Nicole Good wrote lots of poems.

In the bio of her private Instagram account, she called herself a “poet and writer,” as well as a “shitty guitar strummer,” so it feels safe to say that, before a masked man shot her down in the street earlier this week, art was a central part of her life.

The thing about art is that we often don’t get to decide when it reaches anyone, or under what circumstances.

It’s hard to imagine shittier circumstances than these.

There is, however, a small miracle cracking through the charred surface of this grief, which is that in 2020, when most of us were playing Animal Crossing and trying to find a grocery store that wasn’t out of flour and toilet paper, Good was winning an American Poets Prize.

Her poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” is only 34 lines long, some of them as brief as a single word, and it packs a fucking devastating punch in the wake of the reason why we’re all finding it now.

In my first read through, some of the early images slipped past me and I had to go back and read them again. I googled “solipsist” and then “tercets,” and wondered if what she had to say was going to land with me. But then I read it again. And again. And suddenly, like the poems written by the masters I studied in college, it opened for me. It slipped into place. The poem did for me what poems are supposed to do.

She talks about studying a high gloss biology textbook “under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM” at an IHOP, burning key words into her memory, repeating and scribbling “until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore.” She describes the feeling of being silently torn between the faith that used to feel so close and comforting (and maybe still can be?) with the hard scientific reality of her world.

“maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine,” she says, “is the piddly brook of my soul.”

She wants to believe in something. She wants to find connection to faith, and to a purpose larger than her understanding. But maybe the disconnect is too strong? “now i can’t believe—,” she continues in the next line, “that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths ‘make room for wonder’—”

And her words were powerful enough for someone behind some desk in 2020 to immortalize them.

But now?

Knowing how her life would end?

With her wife screaming in the road, unable to reach her body as a mass of armed men prevent a doctor from treating her?

With protests thousands strong, braving the January cold and snow and wind and the threat of deadly force from an unchecked thug militia just to honor her memory?

That woman– the one who wondered six years ago if there was a God?

What would she think now?

The grief of that is almost too much to hold.

I’m an English major with a Masters in Education and I taught high school English for twelve years before I wrote a book. I still don’t think I’m an especially excellent judge of what makes “good” poetry or “good” art. I don’t know what an expert would think, or if Good’s poem will be read by classes like mine five, ten, or fifty years in the future.

What I do know is that I feel something when I read it. I remember something. Renee Nicole Good wrote a poem that means something to me, and I will carry it around for the rest of my life.

And really, I don’t think that the best art is art without flaws.

It’s why I’ve always preferred community art shows, why you’ll see me running to the “local authors” section of any book store, and why a local production of a show called “Steel DRAGnolias” (a drag parody of Steel Magnolias I once caught at a dinky little theater in a strip mall next to a Domino’s) still ranks as one of the best pieces of live theatre I’ve ever seen. I think the best art is the kind where we’re making it because we HAVE to. Because we have a feeling burning under our skin and we need to let it out. We’re making art for each other constantly, and it’s absolutely everywhere.

Which is why the anger so many of us are feeling is so acute.

As we watch our government lie about what happened to her, as talking heads on Fox News dissect her marriage and her sexuality and her parenting and the sixteen public words on her Instagram, there’s a flash of a shiver down our bodies:

What will they say about me as I’m bleeding to death in the street?

It won’t be about our poems.

Those same talking heads have also been calling her a “self-proclaimed” poet, as if there’s a different kind.

That’s the only kind of poet there is.

But the truth is that they carry such deep disgust for art and the humanities not because these essential parts of human existence have no value, but because they really don’t want us to feel for each other. They don’t want us trying to understand experiences beyond our own fences (and especially our borders). They don’t want us to realize that we’re all going through the exact same shit.

What I’ve always liked about discussing art is that you’re supposed to talk about it in the present tense. This is a rule you learn in just about any English or Art History class.

Van Gogh “uses” bright yellows in his sunflowers– not “used.” Audre Lorde “challenges” her feminist contemporaries– not “challenged.”

And because Renee Nicole Good was a poet, she gets to live in the present tense forever.

She questions.

She wonders.

She delights.

All without an expiration date.

I guarantee that not Fox pundit, no ICE agent, no Secretary of War, no 47th President, will earn the same.

That, now always and forever, belongs to Good.

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

ribosome

endoplasmic—

lactic acid

stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

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“It’s not that I don’t think he loves me,” I told my therapist one early morning in July. My phone was propped up on the steering wheel of my truck, windows cracked to let in just enough salty beach air to keep them from fogging over. I watched as surfers began to pepper the clearing shoreline, and I struggled to find the words to explain.

“I know he does. That’s not what it is. It’s more like his heart is one of those houses on Hoarders. You know the hardwood floors are there, but you can’t get to them. There are too many years of newspapers and pizza boxes and laundry in the way. And I can’t go in and clean it for him… he has to want to do it. And I don’t think he’s there yet.”

On the surface, I don’t seem like a likely candidate for what Oprah Winfrey recently described on her podcast as the “epidemic” of family estrangement.

My family is small – really small. I’ve been 0 for 4 with living grandparents my entire adult life, and I lost my mother to substance abuse when I was still in high school. For a long time (before he remarried), it was just me and my dad. I was the only child of a single parent as I figured out that I was gay, and again much later when I discovered that I was trans. For a lot of parent/child relationships, either one of those moments could be the expiration date on love and understanding, but not for us. My dad didn’t always “get it,” but he tried. He and I have voted the same for as long as I can remember, we have the same taste in music, and we like chatting about art, history, and politics. He’s never forgotten a birthday or gone out of his way to hurt me or undermine the choices I’ve made for my life.

But still – here we are. I haven’t returned one of his texts in six months.

How did we get here?

Mel Robbins, lawyer, motivational speaker, and bestselling author of The Let Them Theory, recently attempted to tackle the simmering causes behind family estrangement in a New York Times article she titled “Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family.” In it, Robbins characterizes the rise in “no contact” between parents and their adult children as an “unwillingness to move past the things that bother us.”

“Imagine if you had a year left to live,” she writes, “would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father’s politics? Or avoiding your sister for something she said last Christmas?”

The problem with framing family estrangement in this way (that is, as one party refusing to forgive another for a petty misunderstanding or surface-level feud), is that family relationships are almost always way more complicated than that, and those wounds go deep. What’s missing from her picture is the unspoken context buttressing these hypothetical breaking points. The father’s politics, are they in direct conflict with his child’s core identity and values? Do they support dehumanization and cruelty against people they love? What the sister said last Christmas, was it just the latest slight after decades of dismissal and disrespect? Did that sister make an attempt to apologize and repair?

It’s hard to know, because all of her examples live in the hypothetical, divorced from the personal. The people she’s talking about aren’t real. She and her article’s co-author make their points by using sweeping generalizations about those of us who have made the devastating decision to distance ourselves from our biological families. The argument that we just need to “lighten up,” as she says, is not just reductionist, dismissive, and incomplete – it’s actively harmful. And frankly, it pisses me off.

As much as figures like Robbins hope that the answer is as simple as “forgive, forget, and move on,” that’s rarely (if ever) helpful. It ignores the truth that so many of us who are estranged from our parents understand: we have spent our entire lives trying to look past the hurt to salvage relationships that are still breaking us down.

I’m going to do my best to avoid the absolutes and assumptions that plague Robbins’s article. Ultimately, I’m not an expert, and I can only speak from my own experience, but a lot of us are just now beginning to unwind the self-abandonment and people-pleasing habits that have kept us from understanding ourselves and feeling whole in our relationships, and that work never really ends.

An early statistic cited by Robbins asserts that one in four adults is estranged from a close family member. On the surface, this seems to support the claim that family estrangement is an “epidemic,” but is it? I’m reminded of graphs charting the divorce rate within the US, where we see a massive rise in separations following World War II and then again in the 1980s. These spikes correspond with societal shifts in the way we see marriage and the autonomy of women, along with the introduction of “no fault” divorce laws starting around 1970.

It wasn’t that suddenly hundreds of thousands of happy marriages were falling prey to a “divorce trend,” it was that a lot of women finally had options. It was no longer unspeakable and shameful to be divorced.

This is happening now with parenting.

Younger generations are going to therapy, are learning concepts like “reparenting,” and are watching as our peers are making much different choices with their own children than our parents made with us. Many of us are coming to terms with what it will take to heal the relational wounds that stem from emotionally immature, shame-based, (and sometimes even abusive) parenting. And as we start to name the marks that we trace back to our childhoods, we know that “live in the present” is a much different ask than “forget about the past.”

Personally? My family operated in a way that encouraged privacy bordering on secrecy. I grew up hearing “there’s no reason to go around telling people about this,” and “this stays within the family.” As capital T Traumas stacked up in my late childhood and early teens, I had nowhere to take them. I talked to no one, processed nothing, and squirreled away stacks of dormant feelings deep inside a young developing psyche.

My parents had a deep distrust of therapists, and we were much more likely to avoid than to feel. As life in my house got more complicated and my father’s support system whittled itself down to practically nothing, I can only imagine how hard it was to wake up every day, let alone raise a teenager and make increasingly complex parenting decisions.

But now, as an adult, there’s a lot between us that needs to be addressed. I’ve tried having challenging conversations with him over the years about the leftover scars of my childhood, but they have been unsuccessful. For a long time I thought I could just move on, as Robbins suggests, but I can’t. The relationship I want with him will require an excavation of the past, even though it will be uncomfortable.

This is where critics of family estrangement often miss the mark.

For many of us who are keeping our distance? We don’t want perfection. We don’t think our parents can reach back in time to make different choices for us.

What do a lot of us actually want?

1. Acknowledgement

2. Accountability

3. An Attempt at Repair

These are the most basic elements of an authentic apology, and for some of us, we know we might as well be asking our parents to lasso the moon.

This is because in order to acknowledge the part they played in any past harm (the first step before we can get close to the other two), they have to contend with shame. For the most part, our parents aren’t emotionally equipped to grapple with shame– it’s too hot to touch, too large to take a bite of. Shame is uncomfortable, and a lot of the time, their capacity for discomfort is too low to begin the work.

And frankly, we aren’t prepared to help our parents deal with that shame either. That’s a job for a professional, someone who can help them (maybe even on a weekly basis – whose to say?) dive into their relationship with their own parents. And parent work is hard! When we try to unwind our relationship with our families, we have to confront the parts of ourselves that come from them, the parts that we would rather pretend aren’t there. It’s why “you’re starting to act like your mother/father” is such a devastating blow when we hear it at the wrong time. We don’t want to know that we might have our mother’s temper, or our father’s flightiness. We want our actions to be our own, divorced from the biological or learned influence of the people who raised us.

The first acts of acknowledgement and accountability are internal, when we face the parts of us that are blocking us from self-compassion. Those are the building blocks of healing.

But ultimately, we can’t force our parents to heal.

And that’s really the difference between a boundary and a demand.

A demand is pretty straight forward: “You must do something/change something/say something/etc.” It assumes that we have any degree of control over the people around us, and we don’t. We can’t compel people to make choices, even if it feels like an undeniable need on our end:

“You need to listen to me”

“You have to be nice”
“You must start going to therapy”

A boundary has nothing to do with other people’s choices, and everything to do with our own. It’s about how we’re willing to be treated, and what we will do when our choices conflict with one another. They can sometimes feel like ultimatums, but it’s important to point out that a lot of boundaries are implied or entirely unsaid. They can be clear cut, like:

“If you keep talking to me at that volume, I will leave the room.”

“If I feel disrespected in your home, we will stop coming over for dinner.”
“If you aren’t willing to work through this in therapy, I don’t think we can have a relationship.”

Or, they can just be shifts in behavior. A parent who yells over the phone may notice that the phone calls stop coming. A sister who refuses to use their trans brother’s name isn’t invited to functions at his house.

This is where a lot of estrangements can start: with one person finally expressing a boundary.

And as much as voices like Robbins and Winfrey seem to think we’re making these estrangement decisions lightly, this is hardly a historically fertile time for many of us to be shedding family ties.

“Research has shown that people over the age of 65 report, on average, being happier than younger adults,” Robbins writes. And I believe her. Baby Boomers, for the most part, hit a generational lottery that has given them opportunities to buy homes, save for retirement, and establish some kind of enduring financial legacy for their children. Millennials, and the Gen Zers hot on our heels, haven’t been quite as lucky. For a lot of younger adults, this is exactly why some of this healing work seems to be taking so long– when we rely on our parents, we aren’t able to fully separate from them. We can’t heal wounds that keep reopening.

Robbins also says this: “You may think it’s better for your mental health to slowly distance yourself from someone you have difficulties with, but, in the long run, it will likely have a devastating impact on your happiness and well-being.”

Of all of her claims, this is the one I struggle the most to square. How could she possibly know that? That our happiness and well-being is all but doomed if we don’t repair our estrangement? This feels like dangerous advice, primarily because it seems to ask us to ignore our internal voice and distrust our intuition. Learning how to trust ourselves is one of the more challenging parts of healing, especially after we’ve spent a lifetime molding ourselves to a version of us we don’t recognize in service of our own survival. Many of us have been told for the majority of our lives to ignore or bypass our feelings for the benefit of someone else’s comfort, and we’re not doing it anymore.

My husband, much like myself, has made the decision to distance himself from his parents, but for much different reasons. While I can picture a future where my father and I have a relationship again, that’s out of the question for my husband. I won’t get into the specifics of their relationship, but I want to make it absolutely clear that they have found themselves in the realm of unforgivable. It’s been about a year since he last spoke to either of them, and I’ve watched as his mental health has shifted from tenuous to thriving.

But this doesn’t mean that he never experiences doubt.

The “self-doubt cycle” is a feature of no-contact relationships, not a bug. There are still days where I watch him struggle with the fear that he’s made the wrong decision, or that his memory is unreliable and erratic. This isn’t because there’s a real chance he’s wrong, but because decades of controlling programming rely on him feeling that way.

And correcting our internal metrics is fucking hard. We hear messages like Robbins’ constantly:

Hurry past the hard part.

Be the bigger person.

You wouldn’t want to regret anything.

What’s telling to me is that those messages are almost always pointed at the estrangers, not the estranged.

But we know how we feel. As hard as it is, we can tell when our nervous systems begin to settle, when our sense of reality starts to stabilize. We know that interactions with the people we love should build us up, not leave us needing days to recover.

And I’m getting there too.

I still notice when the voice in my head speaks with my father’s tone and not my own. I’m someone who has built a career around vulnerability, and I still seize up when I write about my family. There might always be a little kid in me who hears “there’s no reason to go around telling people about this” no matter how carefully I choose my words. But, at least this time, I think I’m ready to put myself first. We’ll see, as Robbins suggests, if I find myself living to regret it.

I still count Christmas Day 2006 as one of the single best mornings of my young life. Recently abandoned by my biological mother (and having gone several Christmases in a row without her), my new stepmother was making an extra effort to help me feel included in her own family, though she was struggling to figure out how.

I didn’t have much in common with my three stepsisters (all around my age and older), and no one in either my close or extended family really knew what to do with me. For the last few years, I’d unwrapped eye shadow palettes and nail polish sets alongside them, forced a grin, and stuffed my gifts into a drawer for the year, where they remained untouched. My father was not a “gifts person” to begin with, and I’d been feeling more and more distant from him as he settled into our new family. After years of living as an only child with a single parent, I was lost in my role as a “fourth daughter,” especially in a home where everyone seemed much much more adept at femininity than I was.

But there was something different about that morning, and it would change me forever.

As I reached into my red velvet stocking (my name hastily scribbled in glitter glue so it would match the others), I pulled out a copy of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

As a self-described “theater kid,” I was thrilled. Wicked: The Musical debuted on Broadway at the Gershwin theater in 2003, right as I started high school, and had since dominated the hearts and minds of every socially-stunted weirdo with whom I shared a lunch table.

And it got better.

As I thumbed through the pages of the paperback, tinted green the way a leather-bound classic might be foiled with gold, a pair of tickets fell at my feet. When I picked them up, the promise was clear: in just a few short months, I would be watching Wicked on stage at the Pantages in Los Angeles.

The rest of Christmas Day was a blur. I planted myself firmly in the elbow crook of our overstuffed sectional and lost myself in Maguire’s world of Oz, determined to devour the novel in its entirety before I returned to school.

In the winter of 2006, Wicked was everywhere. Though Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth sang in their starring roles for just about a year, the musical continued to rocket onward without them, reaching well over 1,000 performances on Broadway and jumping the Atlantic to open in London just three months before Christmas. And for a high schooler at the time, musicals as a whole had recently earned a more resonant place in the cultural zeitgeist with the premiere of Disney Channel’s High School Musical.

And maybe that’s what my stepmother had in mind when she stuffed a copy of the novel in my stocking that year: an updated, bouncy, teen-friendly romp into the technicolor world she last visited with Judy Garland. Maybe Zac Efron would be there too.

But that’s not what happened.

Like many adaptations, Maguire’s Oz was a little spicier than the one I would later watch from the balcony of the Pantages. His pages had many of the same basic plot beats and character details made famous by the Broadway bombshell, but they were anchored by something my parents couldn’t have possibly anticipated:

Wicked was not written for a teen audience. Not by a long shot.

Within his book, Maguire doesn’t just explore the breezy surface of themes like belonging, prejudice, and justice– he dives head first into the Mariana Trench. Characters like Elphaba, Galinda, Fiyero, and Boq don’t sing about how much they want to visit the wizard, or the importance of friendship, but they do at one point visit a sex club. Many fans of the novel remember– in vivid detail– what it was like to read about Elphaba’s first amorous encounter with the (very much married) Winkie prince Fiyero, who in the novel is dark-skinned and covered in azure ceremonial tattoos:

“...she would not be touched below the waist by hands. They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field…”

But what caught me off guard the most, and likely shaped the person I was about to become as an adult, was how much of the novel was overtly political. Elphaba isn’t just the daughter of a cold-hearted governor, as she is in the stage production and later in the film, but of a minister. A minister who spends her childhood carting her and her siblings through a country filled with poverty and inequity and populated by a people who are intentionally subjugated by exploitative, capitalistic purposes beyond their control. While in school, she isn’t just momentarily moved by the plight of one of her Animal professors, she dedicates months of her life to helping with his research (research which eventually leads to his murder). While living covertly within the walls of the Emerald City as an adult, she is part of a violent underground revolutionary network and attempts to carry out a targeted assassination.

So, like I said, there are very few songs.

There was another reason why Elphaba’s journey seared itself to my heart, and it’s one that wouldn’t make sense to me until years later, when I would dive into the book as an adult. And it would happen before I finished the first page of the prologue.

As the story opens, we watch as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, spies on a troupe of travelers making their way across the yellow brick road. The strangers: a Lion, a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman, and a young girl, are resting for a moment and discussing their theories about the witch’s evil origins.

The Lion begins:

“Psychologically warped; possessed by demons. Insane.”

The Tin Woodman piles on:

“She was castrated at birth. She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.”

The Scarecrow adds:

“She’s a woman who prefers the company of other women.”

Two more suggestions:

“She’s the spurned lover of a married man.”

“She is a married man.”

Holy shit. Was Elphaba Thropp being transvestigated on the very first page?

It made sense. American conservatives have hardly recently invented the concept of accusing enemies of bending societal gender norms. And in 1993, when Maguire’s book was first published, we were very much still in the throes of nationwide homophobic moral panic. Use of the word “hermaphrodite” aside, there was no reason to be shocked.

But then, a rewind to the moment of her birth.

In the musical, baby Elphaba has just about twenty seconds of screen time – long enough to show the audience that her green skin is an unwelcome surprise for her parents, who are immediately repulsed.

That’s not quite what happens in the book.

In a chapter titled The Birth of a Witch, Elphie’s father is absent entirely, and her mother is drugged into unconsciousness. Only midwives are present as Elphie is born, who have the following exchange in the seconds after the little green baby enters the world:

There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own counsel. “Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.” The baby shirked its obligations.

“Another willful boy,” said the fishwife, sighing, “Shall we kill it?”

“Don’t be so nasty to it,” said the crone, “it’s a girl.”

“Hah,” said the bleary-eyed maiden, “look again, there’s the weather vane.”

For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine.

Let’s return for a moment to the term that caused me a moment of pause in the prologue: hermaphrodite.

Though it’s not a word you hear much in polite conversation anymore, it was first coined by the Greek physician and philosopher Hippocreates sometime between 460 and 370 BC. You might recognize him for a handful of equally important reasons, not the least of which is the Hippocratic Oath: the foundational ethical code used by physicians today.

Hippocreates nabbed the term “hermaphrodite” from Greek mythology, where Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, serves as a representation of the merging of masculine and feminine energies. Hermaphroditus was also the great grandchild of Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the heavens.

It wasn’t until the dawn of the 20th century when we would start to see some updated terminology. “Intersex” became the medical standard for a child born with some degree of anatomical ambiguity from about 1917 onward, with a major update to how these cases were handled right around 1950. It was then, with a cultural backdrop surging with musicals such as The King and I, Guys and Dolls, and Oklahoma!, when doctors at Johns Hopkins University became the first to try and eliminate intersexuality in early childhood through involuntary surgery.

Because the dominant theory of the time was that a child born intersex was sure to grow up to become a homosexual (and in the 1950s, this was thought to be as damning to a child’s life as being born with a second head), physicians developed a subjective scale later satirized by intersex activist Kiira Triea into a tool she dubbed the “Phall-O-Meter.” The scale designated an “acceptable” length range for a newborn’s reproductive anatomy, with the low end identifying female babies and the high as male. The space in the middle? These would be “treated” with involuntary surgery, almost always defaulting to an approach that left parents with an unambiguous baby girl. Because it was an easier surgery than constructing a longer phallus (and physicians were almost always hoping to stack the deck in favor of eventual heterosexuality), most babies born intersex after 1960 would leave the hospital with hand-selected “she/her” pronouns.

Is this what would have happened to an ambiguous baby Elphaba? It’s impossible to know, as she took matters into her own mouth only moments after her birth.

The child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, wrote Maguire. The child bit the finger off at the second knuckle.

The question, of course, is whether Maguire knew he was dipping his toes into LGBTQ+ discourse around intersex identity.

It isn’t entirely out of the question.

Wicked was first published in 1996, just three years after the founding of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), and right as academics and biologists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling were writing articles about gender identity and intersexuality in publications such as the New York Times.

If Elphaba’s identity as intersex was purposeful on Maguire’s end – why?

Here could be a clue: in another early chapter, Maladies and Remedies, Elphie’s childhood nanny ruminates on her young charge’s gender in relationship to the expectations of her parents:

Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory?

Nanny knew her worldview was foggy and chaotic, pestered by demons, faith, and folk science. It didn’t escape her attention, however, that both Melena and Frex had believed uncompromisingly that they would have a boy. Frex was the seventh son of a seventh son, and to add to that powerful equation he was descended from six ministers in a row. Whatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line?

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

Way before I understood myself as transgender, when I was just a sixteen-year-old who felt out of place and lonely in my own life, this moment felt profoundly empowering to me. As a character on page, stage, and screen, Elphaba has always stood as a figure of self-determination. Wicked as a whole asks readers and viewers to contend with a part of ourselves that questions the resolve of our integrity. Are we willing to stand alone against injustice? Against a world that tells us they know us better than we know ourselves? Is our inner knowing stronger than the shame our parents taught us to carry, but never trained us to bear?

As it turns out, even a character as strong and willful as Elphaba isn’t exempt from shame. The next time we encounter evidence of Elphie’s anatomy, she’s an adult living in the Emerald City with her lover, the prince Fiyero. After a late evening tryst, Fiyero steals away for a quick potty break before returning to bed, where he takes a moment to admire her:

Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had bought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf– roses on a black background– and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking.

…he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fragility of her knee, the bony ankle… There was an odd shadow near the groin– for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin– or was it a scar?

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket.

Elphaba goes out of her way more than once to conceal her body, even from herself, and it’s not just a matter of her hue.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, just about 1.7% of the global population is intersex, or somewhere between 1 and 2 people out of every 100. And as limited as our understanding was even in the 1990s, we’ve continued to learn just how wide the intersex umbrella really is, and what it does to a child to have medical decisions made against their will and then kept secret.

One of our most profound discoveries has been the long term effects of medicalized shame. Elphaba’s transition from a child confident in her identity to an adult who still carries the weight of learned and inherited shame is one that is very familiar to me. I know what it feels like, just as Elphie does, for a stranger to clock that shame before we’ve had a chance to fully understand it.

Because the Tin Woodsman was right – we have the textual evidence to confirm that her green skin wasn’t her only bodily difference at birth. The same year I first read this book, the year I started at a new school in a new house with a new family, my classmates would have my number too. I would open my backpack one day to find one of my school binders carved up– an accusation permanently etched in four letters that I’d never heard spoken aloud before:

DYKE.

I didn’t have green skin, but my peers still saw me coming from a mile away. It was clear to them that I was different, and that was enough.

The question of whether or not the author did any of this on purpose is one we may never be able to answer, but there’s a reason that Elphaba’s story hits home for queer people, with or without the textual evidence to back it up. Her story is one of authenticity in the face of misunderstanding– inner truth when it’s hardest, and an attempt to interrupt cycles of shame before they have a chance to start again.

That might not have been what my parents had in mind when they slipped a pair of theater tickets into a paperback on Christmas Eve, but it’s a gift I’m happy to continue to keep.

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We were thirty miles west of Albuquerque when the semi-truck we’d been tailing since the state border started to lose speed, hissing to a slow stop behind a queue of cars that had just spent the better part of the afternoon passing us. Thanks primarily to a shared 300 mgs of gabapentin and the warm embrace of the Southwestern sun, the cats – Tug Boat and Submarine – didn’t even flinch when I hit the brakes, the 3 ton Airstream towing behind us shimmying only slightly as we settled to rest. My husband and I craned our necks as best we could, foreheads pressed against our windows, but it didn’t matter: the desert stretched out endless, unobstructed, and flat in every direction but the one we were headed, and there was just no way to see what was blocking our way forward.

When passable, Interstate 40 is the third largest motorist artery in the country, with 2,556 miles of road stretching across eight states: from California to North Carolina. After Albuquerque, it would snake through Amarillo, Little Rock, Memphis, and even Nashville. In the heart of Oklahoma City, the mighty I-40 balloons to more than ten lanes across. But here? The Road-Formerly-Known-As Route 66 hadn’t widened to more than two lanes since Barstow, meaning that any accident, any hiccup, any unusually large tumble weed, turned one of the busiest highways in the country into a parking lot.

A red F150 three cars ahead of us was the first to see the writing on the wall, and wasted no time swooping into the median that divided us from the I-40 West, kicking up a cloud of copper dust as he bounced across the dirt to the other side. It wasn’t long before a flurry of other vehicles joined him– a Subraru, a Prius, a Volkswagen– all approaching the severe dip of the highway’s DMZ with just a smidge more care than we’d seen from the truck. Unburdened by the need for patience, they left the rest of us in their rearview mirrors and sped back the way we’d come.

My husband and I didn’t need to talk about it. The slope bridging the divide between westbound and eastbound was too severe for us. If we attempted to follow in the parade of U-turns, it’s likely that we would buckle in the divot, stranding us in a much worse position than we were now. I shifted from D to P, resigned.

Two emergency vehicles passed us on the shoulder, sirens screaming and then fading as quickly as they appeared. Red and blue lights flickered in the distance, blending with the shimmering heat of the desert horizon. A few truckers emerged from their cabs to perch on elevated doorframes while motorists in much stumpier vehicles scampered out as far to either side of the road as they dared, arms crossed and brows furrowed as they shouted limited updates back to the air conditioned passengers they left behind.

I stretched out fingers that, until this moment, had spent the last four hours clenched tightly around a steering wheel. Across eight of them are a collection of tattooed letters, much in the same way that some tough guy bikers or old school sailors have LOVE and HATE or HOLD FAST across their gnarled, hairy fists. I got mine during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, when I was a public school teacher attempting to hold the attention of two hundred high school students a day through hour-long Zoom lectures about the literary influence of John Steinbeck. Fried, isolated, and drained from endless weeks of trying to connect with teenagers whose screens showed not much more than rows of identical ceiling fans and headboards, I’d walked into a tattoo shop on impulse and left with P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E stamped permanently onto my swollen (and largely hairless) knuckles.

Now, though the tattoo is never more than an arm’s length from my sightline, I only notice it when it feels like it’s mocking me– when trust and peace and calm are at their most distant and inaccessible.

–When I know I’m trapped.

And it wasn’t the standstill desert traffic that was making me feel that way now. No, It was a pair of headlines I’d read hours before, as we were packing up camp and the sun was beginning to crown over the Arizona mountains.

SCOTUS RULES AGAINST TRANS PEOPLE’S PASSPORT MARKERS

That was the first.

And then:

TRANS MAN HARASSED BY SECURITY AND KICKED OUT OF WOMEN’S BATHROOM IN ILLINOIS

I held both of them together in my head as I washed our dishes and made the bed. They stayed there still as I folded down our one shared table, as I rolled in our awning, as I hand-cranked the stabilizing legs of our trailer, tucking them back snug into her aluminum belly.

I tried to push them together in my mind as we loaded the last of our things into the cab of the truck and pulled onto the highway, but it was like marrying the northern end of two magnets. When they got close, they would push against each other at the last minute, protected from meeting by an invisible, irreconcilable force field.

And that’s because as inhumane and horrifying and sickening as these two headlines are on their own, they’re much, much worse together.

The first– a declaration of the Supreme Court’s intention to uphold the ban on passport marker gender changes (first ordered by the Trump administration back in January)– is disappointing but not surprising. The argument, signed, sealed, and delivered by six of the nine justices who have sworn to uphold the values and interests of a liberated nation, is that gender is immutable and unquestionably clear. In an unsigned order, the court declared that “displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth,” and that “in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”

I thought about my own passport, tucked in a lock box beside my husband’s, both of which had been updated in a panicked frenzy on the eve of our honeymoon last year. Much like the red F150, we’d seen signs of inescapable doom and delay in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and we both sent our passports in to be updated before a single ballot was counted. Our twin Ms where there had once been Fs now felt like carrying contraband, smuggled goods beneath the floorboards. The last chopper out of ‘Nam.

The court may believe that gender is a “historical fact,” but that wouldn’t save either of us if we ever tried to use our pre-transition documentation when we needed it. Traffic stops, airports, border crossings, hotels, bars– all made not just more complicated, but downright dangerous, if either of us presented papers that declared we were actually women.

And that’s why this particular case made its way to the Supreme Court in the first place. Ashton Orr, a trans guy who was accused by airport security of holding a fake passport thanks to the little F beside his name, tried to take his case all the way to the top on behalf of us all. He is (rightfully) highlighting an issue that is going to continue to endanger thousands of trans people across the country if it isn’t addressed. They may say that Gender is Forever, but that won’t stop a terminally confused TSA agent from wondering aloud why this Government-Declared Girl Boss has a beard down to his chest and a voice like Barry White. It’s a confusion that seems counter to the purpose of a passport all together, which is to affirm that the person standing in front of you is who they say they are. If I, a trans man whose receding hairline is racing in reverse with his ass hair, tried to pass as a woman in an airport or a national border, the fallout would likely be immediate and deeply uncomfortable.

No can do, the Court says for now. You’re a girl, and there’s nothing on earth that can challenge or change that.

Enter headline number two.

At first it would seem like Lucien Bates, a trans man visiting a Round1 arcade in Illinois with his fiance, was doing exactly what six Supreme Court justices wanted of him. That is, he was using the restroom most closely aligned with his gender assigned at birth. Or, as they would say, the restroom that jives with the “historical fact” of his sex.

After using the women’s restroom (which, again, is the one we’ve been hearing for years now that conservatives want trans men to use), a security guard cornered Lucien and his fiance and demanded to see both of their IDs. He was told that what he was doing was “wrong,” and that it was dangerous for him to use that restroom as there were “children visit(ing) the facility.”

By the time he left the arcade, no fewer than seven security guards had lent a hand in his harassment, threatening him with arrest for the crime of… well, of what no one is exactly sure.

If this incident seems in direct conflict with the reasoning of the Supreme Court, that’s because it is.

And this is the point.

This is the stuck, bottled, cornered, trapped feeling that is made entirely by design.

Headlines meant to make trans people believe that there’s no correct way for them to exist are engineered to feel that way. The mistake, often, is attempting to pick apart the logic of each of these blows individually, because they aren’t logical (and especially aren’t logical together).

They are meant to make you feel like you’re swimming in circles– to fracture you from yourself.

None of this has ever been about prescribing the correct way to be trans, that if only we followed it to the letter, we would be warmly welcomed into polite society and gifted the scrumptious treat of tolerance.

No, those who wish us harm aren’t building an exit out of the labyrinth, they’re tunneling tighter and tighter turns until we run out of air. They want the reality of our lives to be a trap of contradictions and discomfort as our dignity is rubbed slowly away.

And there are few things worse than feeling trapped.

As my husband and I sat in the cab of our truck, the message on my knuckles mocking me as the sun fell lower and lower in the New Mexican sky, I remembered the last time I felt that way.

I was scuba diving in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Catalina Island, searching for a ship wreck in deep open water. By the time I realized that the sands had shifted and I was unlikely to find what I was looking for, I was way off course and something had lodged in my compass, making it impossible for me to find my bearings. I looked up, down, left, and right. In every direction was the same endless, expansive ocean, with no sign of shore. I was free, but I was trapped.

Technically, trans people are as free as anyone else. We all share the same 4.2 million miles of road across the country, and no one is telling us where we can’t go.

But that’s not how it feels.

There are thousands of us without passports, unable to acquire one that won’t endanger our lives. We think long and hard about what it will mean to use a bathroom in public. Will we be harassed? Fined? Arrested? Where can we find a doctor who will treat us? A therapist who will hear us? A teacher who will call us by our name?

We’re free, but we’re trapped.

“I have to pee.”

I looked over at my husband, our kitten Tug Boat tucked into a tight cinnamon bun curl in his lap, purring and snoozing through my existential crisis.

“What?”

“I have to pee. Like, right now.”

We hadn’t moved an inch in almost an hour. Most of the passenger cars ahead of us had long since abandoned the wait, flipping U-turns one after the other until only us and the long haul truckers remained. There was no tree coverage on either shoulder, and the nearest gas station was nine miles behind us. Up, down, left, right.

“Can you hand me the house key?”

“What?”

“The house key.”

He said it slower the second time, giving me a moment to catch up.

The house key. The house we were towing behind us. The house we bought specifically to outrun feeling trapped in our own country. The house that definitely had a bathroom in it. A bathroom with a sign stuck on the front of it reading “TRANS ONLY RESTROOM.”

That house key.

By the time he jumped back in the passenger seat with an empty bladder, our kitten happy to settle once again in the safety of his lap, the traffic began to clear. We were closer to the front of the line than we realized, and we craned our necks as we passed what looked like a minor cargo fire that had since been put out and shoved to the shoulder.

Everything ends eventually, I thought. It can’t last forever.

I wonder sometimes if I have to think that, or if trusting in the cycles of the universe will one day let me down. There have been moments over the last year where my husband and I have had serious conversations about leaving the country entirely. Would life for us be that different somewhere like Mexico? Or Canada? Maybe, but we wouldn’t be able to outrun everything.

Sometimes it’s harder to accept that turning around isn’t an option, that there isn’t a better, painless choice waiting for us. Trusting cycles isn’t about surrendering to the whims of the world, but about accepting the hard feelings of our present circumstances. It’s often shitty and difficult, but it’s not impossible. The question for now is: how do we cope? How do we sit in the contradictions and indignities of this present moment? How do we hold our breath through a tunnel when we can’t see the end? How do we last long enough to find it again?

This won’t end with a neatly packaged answer. I’m not going to tell you that the secret is positive thinking, or voting, or phone banking, or school board meetings, or yoga, or waking up at sunrise to watch hot air balloons drift over the Rio Grande (though that last one is the fucking best, I will say). The answer is messy, and it’s not going to be the same for all of us.

What’s universally true is this: we have to make it.

We have to.

Resisting means knowing that what they are telling us isn’t true.

We know how to be us, no one else.

They will continue to block our way forward, to crowd the field with contradictions meant to disempower us and make us feel small, but there is always something we can do. We can fight, and we can wait, and we can outlast them all.

And we will. We always will.

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Join us from Las Vegas, Nevada as we talk about trans endurance and community in the middle of what feels like a vast and endless desert.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Archie Grimley, MD, AAHIVS, a non-binary doctor who has built a practice and personal oasis in the southern tip of Nevada. In our interview, we’ll discuss medical courage and the epidemic of pre-compliance, trans broken arm syndrome, and why we should probably hold off on bickering about “he/him” lesbians until after the apocalypse.

If you want to connect with Dr. Archie, you can find them on Instagram at queerdoctor_.

In this episode, we talk to Kam, a non-binary parent in a split-religion household who left the Church of Later Day Saints after attempting to reconcile their lifelong faith with their newly-discovered truth. In our interview, we’ll discuss parenting while trans, transitioning with limited (or no) support from a spouse, and coming home to yourself after years of self-abandonment.

We’ll also explore crying (we do, and you absolutely will too), unmasking gender and autism at the same time, and the transformative power of Depeche Mode.

Content warnings for this episode: suicide attempt, self-harm, ex-LDS

If you’d like to connect with Kam, you can find them on Instagram at-enby.nd.k

In this episode, we discuss family estrangement, why being in a perpetual state of “crisis mode” can be addicting, and what to do when your home rejects you and you have to redefine it entirely.

We’ll also explore why there are so many transmascs in Humboldt, a really devastating metaphor about scuba diving, putting bows on porta potties, and taking intermediate bowling classes with Topanga from Boy Meets World.

In under an hour, we’ll attempt to answer: what does home really mean when you feel like you aren’t supposed to be anywhere?

I am, from the deepest recesses of my heart, so truly sorry.

Not for who I am or who your child is, but for the feelings of loneliness, confusion, and resentment that have made a home in your life. Because honestly, I can’t imagine a job harder than being a parent. Teaching is challenging, but when that last bell rings, I say goodbye to my students and go home to a different life. At the end of the year, I pass them along to a new set of teachers and cross my fingers hoping that they will carry something from my class along with them. But really, there’s no way to know for sure. My investment, I hope, is a meaningful one, but it is still brief.

But you – you once held your child in your arms before they could speak and imagined a life for them. You manifested a world that was kind and secure and loving, and you played out how they would live in that world. You picked a name, you painted a room, you chose baby clothes, and you watched them night after night just to be sure they were breathing. You taught them to roll over and crawl and stand and walk. When they started school, you read to them every night and helped them trace the letters of their name. You watched them grow out of their shoes too quickly, you introduced them to the music you like, you picked them up early from sleepovers when they got homesick. There was a time when you knew your child better than any other single person in the world, including them.

I can’t even begin to imagine how disorienting it must be, no matter how much we all know it’s coming, to watch that child grow into a person. Puberty comes lightning fast, and with it, an avalanche of brain development. Neural pathways are forged, along with a host of new connections between neurons, and suddenly, that brain is in the body of a whole teenager, not a child. I know it happens to all of them, because I’ve been teaching high school for my entire adult life. Suddenly, the kid who once was struggling with a rolling backpack twice his size is six feet tall and raising his hand in the middle of class to ask “if time really exists.” Students who have obediently followed their parents to Sunday church service every week since they could walk are now dodging their moms’ texts and chatting together at lunch about the paradox of omnipotence. And a star athlete who is less than a year away from a full ride scholarship to his father’s dream school is pacing in the hallway, rehearsing how to tell him that he doesn’t want to play football anymore.

As terrifying as it is, that change in them isn’t against nature – it is nature. It is not only normal, but developmentally necessary, for children to forge their own identities.

And maybe you knew that. It’s possible that you saw this moment coming, but you thought it would be different. You hoped that your child’s departure from your worldview would manifest as something more manageable. Something, anything, but this. You thought you raised them differently. In fact, you swear you did. You can’t believe for a single moment that this kind of change came out of nowhere, or that the child you held in your arms was actually someone else all along. This has to be something forced on them, something they didn’t choose. They were tricked. They were influenced. This isn’t them.

And I know believing that is easier. Because the alternative is that you missed something. If what we say is true – that we were born this way – then a piece of your child has been invisible to you for their whole life. It was there in your arms, it was there when you watched them sleep, it was there when you read to them– it was there right from the start, and you didn’t see it.

And sitting in that is painful.

Here, there is a grief that can’t be ignored.

But instead of facing it, it is simpler to push that grief down and replace it with rage. There’s nowhere to direct grief, there is nothing to do but hold it. But rage – rage is a weapon. It’s a weapon begging to be used. That’s when you found me.

And so, as I said before, I am sorry. I am sorry that I can’t absorb your grief. I am sorry also that taking on your rage won’t help you either. The truth is that no parent has ever strengthened their relationship with their child by hurting someone else. There is no one to yell at, no complaint to file, no school board meeting to attend, no bill to pass, no president to elect, that will change who your child is and always was. Seeing me might have helped them envision a path away from shame, but there’s nothing I could have done, just as there’s nothing you could have done, to change the essential truth of their identity.

You might be able to convince your child to hide again, to retreat into themselves, to push down the knowing that burns under their skin, but you can’t reshape their heart. You can’t mold the person you want out of the person who is.

And, truly, wouldn’t loving them be easier?

Because it’s not too late. You could start right now. There is still time to turn this ship around and rebuild trust with the person you once promised to love unconditionally. You might think it’s your love that’s guiding you in this moment, but that’s not what this is. Fear, rejection, anger, resentment, disgust – these are feelings that don’t have a home within love.

I won’t anticipate that you will ever see me differently, but I will hold on to the hope that one day, not too long from now, you come back to the child who needs you.

This has been an excerpt from my new book, Teach Like an Ally, available now (also in audiobook). If you enjoy (or get anything at all) from my writing, you will enjoy this book. Consider supporting a trans writer and former educator by purchasing a copy or twelve for yourself and anyone else in your life who knows and loves trans people like me.

In this episode, we talk about the D.A.R.E. generation, the ins and outs of tripping, this one time where Flint was a net, and hot girls with tummy troubles.

We’ll also explore neuroplasticity and psilocybin, the day we figured out the meaning of life, why Xilo is still limping two days after our last trip, and the reasons we’ll be tending to our internal fires for the rest of our lives.

*The book mentioned in this episode is Be Here Now by Ram Dass

*Psychedelic Coaching and Peer Support Line

*MAPS Psychedelic Integration Station

*How to Dose Magic Mushrooms

*Correction: Flint mentions that he took a full dose of 4mg, but he actually meant 4g

In this episode, we talk about why traditional 9-5s can be so soul-crushing for trans and neurodivergent people, why we think our parents never taught us how to talk about money, and how to build a “regulation charcuterie.”

We’ll also explore the differences between “the silent treatment” and “going nonverbal,” why you can’t just skip “the debrief,” and what to do when your partner (or anyone else) crawls back into bed at 11am with a case of the sads.

The PIVOT method we mention at minute 25 can be found HERE

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In the wee hours of this last Friday night, when many of us were snoozing through the first free moments of the long weekend, something magical started to happen online. A horde of digital sleuths began to realize something all at once: wait… has anyone seen 47 in a hot second? In fact, they hadn’t. And now the president’s weekend was mysteriously free: his calendar absent of public appearances. And though his online golf tracker was showing weekends on the links without many interruptions, photos and video were scarce, if they existed at all. There were no late night calls to Fox News, cancelled flights, a newfound interest in staying firmly on the ground in DC, and a host of striking physical changes that even the most MAGA-pilled die-hard would have a hard time ignoring. Why has the kaleidoscopic ink blot bruise on his hand been growing week after week? Why is he struggling to walk in a straight line? Why is his voice growing softer, and his former appetite for public, energetic rallies waning? And now? Radio silence from one of the men least capable of staying quiet in recorded human history.

If this were someone I loved, it would be “call the cops for a drive-by wellness check” time.

Is it possible that his disappearance means something sinister?

Is there a chance he’s… not fine?

By Saturday morning, a photo appeared of Trump at a golf course in Virginia, taking much of the wind out of the swirling speculation. But as the day wore on, the theories ballooned again. Was this photo from this weekend, or 2019? Some were saying 2023. If that were true, his granddaughter would appear to be younger, wouldn’t she? Does it look like him? Where is the bruise? Is this a double? Doctored? AI? Why was Trump, a man who never carries anything, conspicuously lugging his own suit jacket on a hangar, like a soap actress trying to conceal a pregnancy behind a basket of laundry?

Personally, I have been locked the fuck in since I woke up to the digital conspiracy convention on Saturday morning. I feel the same part of me ignited by this that was once set alight by a particularly gripping fan fiction. The intrigue, the mystery, the community, the schadenfreude— I’ll take twenty more chapters, thank you.

I made my own video about the higgledy-piggledy right away, when we were starting to learn that he might maybe be okay perhaps, where I asked my followers (and now 400,000 other strangers across two platforms) what song we should get ready to launch to the top of the US charts, in the same way that the UK made “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” an iTunes bestseller after the 2013 passing of Margaret Thatcher. The playlist I made with suggestions is now almost three hours long, and I average another 15 recs every two to three minutes.

It’s safe to say that people from sea to shining sea are having a far different reaction to the potential demise of this particular leader of the free world than they did when Lyndon B. Johnson was taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One in the hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

My father, who was barely forming long term memories in 1963, has told me many times about the black cloud of hopelessness that seemed to shroud the nation after that fateful day in Dallas more than sixty years ago. It stands in stark contrast to the energy permeating the atmosphere now, where bursts of joy are sprouting like dandelions in concrete.

I want to say, for the record, that I don’t think he’s kicked the bucket… yet.

I have no idea why the white house isn’t nipping this in the bud right away, but I seriously doubt the cohesive conspiratorial capabilities of this administration. I am enjoying, however, picturing the halls of the west wing right now if there IS some major tragedy that is simmering behind the outward appearance of stonewalled silence. I like to think that the theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm is underscoring the whole affair.

It’s also easy to see why this bizarre situation is a breeding ground for conspiracy. Why won’t the general public accept the health and vitality of our president as undisputed fact? Well, because these people historically fucking suck at telling us the truth. This is the same administration that expanded the blast radius of a hurricane with a sharpie, tells us that every lackluster ill-attended rally and inagural address was actually ten thousand people stronger than our eyes can see, and has a habit of publishing embarrassingly bullshit medical reports about our president’s physical health. We are turning to conspiracy because conspiracy is all we have. We’re less and less trusting of legacy media as we watch them bow to every gentle breeze from Pennsylvania Avenue, and official press releases and web pages from the motherfucking WHITE HOUSE now read like live journals written by 15-year-old edge lords. We don’t trust them because they are untrustworthy.

There was a period of time, way back when I was a young public high school teacher, when I used to pass the time during my free period walking in large loops around the school grounds, shooting the shit with my favorite gabbing buddy: a government and economics teacher. We talked politics quite a bit, and we were starting to get nervous about the upcoming election. Was it possible that this Trump guy could actually win? We compared notes and talked through every terrible thing we knew about him: the failed businesses and unpaid debts, the sexual assault allegations, the history of real estate discrimination, and the malicious public menacing of the Central Park Five. My friend paused for a moment at the top of a long flight of stairs, and he turned to me with a haunted look that I’ve never forgotten, though we’ve long since lost touch.

”I think…” he said, his hand on the railing, “I think I might hate him more than I’ve ever hated another living person.”

And that was before he was elected… twice.

The comment section on my “Big Beautiful Playlist” video is now nearing four digits, and I think it’s time to address some of the most common nay-saying concerns, because BOY do I have feelings. So here we go:

1. ”If it does happen, it would just be worse under JD Vance”

Maybe, but probably not. One of the most inexplicable parts of the Trump phenomenon is how he’s able to wriggle out of impossibly binding situations— there’s some kind of extra lubricated slime he must excrete that keeps him out of accountability, or else never leaves a box around him locked for long. His policies aren’t popular, and his scorched earth strategies leave smoking wreckage in his wake 24/7, but his cult of personality manages to keep his head above water. Trump sycophants haven’t given us a reason to believe that their love is unconditional in any other direction, however, and JD Vance has the charisma of a festival port-a-potty. I don’t think the whole house of cards comes tumbling down the day we get THE announcement, but I also don’t believe that we’re going to start seeing AI portraits of a shirtless and ripped JD Vance flying off the back of every RAM 2500 the morning after. Better? Could be. Worse? No.

2. ”I’m not disappointed he’s alright because I’m not some neoliberal who thinks everything would just magically be fixed if he kicks it”

Let people enjoy things, Dave.

Really though, if the standard is we’re only allowed to celebrate once every objectively evil person has snuffed it all at once, we’re going to be keeping the party hats and champagne in the basement for the rest of our lives. If you don’t have feelings about the T Swift engagement, this is really the first bit of ear-perking news we’ve had in a while. There’s this fear that a lot of activists get where they believe the rest of us are going to check out from “the work” the moment something goes right for us, but it’s baseless and exhausting. If this isn’t exciting for you, feel free to scroll over to horse shoeing or sheep sheering or water color tutorials without us, but refrain from projecting your premature shame onto a population that deserves a moment of titillation. We’re tired, boss. Let us have something. ACAB also means the cop in your brain.

3. ”You shouldn’t wish death on anyone, no matter how bad they are”

Respectfully, fuck all the way off with this one.

I spent my entire career in education serving the children of immigrants, the children of families living below the poverty line, the children of the unhoused, and the children of the working class. I’ve had queer kids and disabled kids, and DREAMers. I’ve taught students when they were seven months pregnant, students who have had abortions, and students who have been abused. There is uncountable evil in the world, and no one is ever going to tell me how to feel about it when a source of that evil finally shrugs off their wrinkled cape of mortality and takes a one-way elevator to the molten core of the earth.

It’s likely it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m keeping the champagne chilled just in case.

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This is the part where I tell you that becoming a subscriber (especially a paid subscriber) is the number one way you can support my work. I also wrote a book! You should buy it and read it!

One memorable June evening in 2023, a couple of friends and I took mushrooms at Disneyland.

It was the very first “Disney After Dark” LGBTQ+ Pride Night, and Main Street USA was bathed in undulating rainbow projections and soft pink light. Someone had handed the aux to a twink CM who’d been training his entire life for this moment, so the playlist was jumping from Lady Gaga to Ricky Martin to Sam Smith and back again. At some point I wandered away from my group, completely enraptured by what the whole thing meant to me, and was moving like a tripping trans salmon through a crowd that was inexplicably thickening as I went.

And then I saw him.

In many moments after this encounter, people would ask me what he smelled like.

The truth is, Gavin Newsom smells f***ing fantastic.

I know this because we locked eyes as he appeared to me, flanked by cameras and a mooning entourage, on the sidewalk in front of the Penny Arcade. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first, like a nun squinting at all angles at a slice of toast that may or may not be singed in the image of the Virgin. With some celebrities, they look so different in person that it’s almost impossible to place them– the sheen of importance is scrubbed away by the harsh light of reality. With Newsom, the opposite is true. He looked so much like the most polished version of himself that it was almost like the screen was following him.

He saw me– a 6 foot tall trans guy in a bright floral button up and a bloodstream full of psilocybin – and seized his moment.

He opened his arms for a hug, and I dove in without hesitation. There’s a video of this moment, courtesy of a friend who tracked me down just in time, and you can see in my face that I am feeling 30 stories tall. There’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (where our Narrator, Nick, is definitely starting to fall in love with Gatsby) that sums up the feeling pretty well:

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself…”

Yeah, it was like that.

And as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

I’ve thought about this moment every time Newsom has made the news since. Seeing his name in a headline will never prepare you for why it’s there: he’s a master of the political juke. Is he ducking left or right? Is he clearing homeless encampments? Ending California’s death penalty? Accepting dodgy donations? Passing sweeping environmental protections? Who’s to say? He keeps California on her toes.

And in the fight against the rising tide of fascism, Newsom always seems ready to lace up his gloves and duck into the ring while other Democratic leaders are penning shaky letters asking the worst people in our country to maybe think about somehow stopping if it’s not too much trouble perhaps.

In the early morning hours after Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election, Newsom called a special session of California lawmakers in an effort to safeguard policies he felt would fall under attack after the inauguration (and spoiler alert: Trump is absolutely doing that). And in his latest move, he’s calling on California voters to approve a redistricting plan as a direct answer to the shady dealings of jerrymandering Texas Republicans.

Do I agree with all of his choices?

Absolutely not. Newsom has a murky (at best) record with the unhoused in California, and though he has gone to bat for queer and trans people in the past, he does not have both feet firmly planted on the right side of history.

Newsom’s past with the LGBTQ+ community is a hard circle to square. I remember the not-so-distant year of 2008, when a majority of Californians still believed that my marriage wasn’t worth legal recognition. Newsom, though it might have cost him the support of the majority, used his place as the mayor of San Francisco to signal that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the ban– he would do what he had to do to protect the rights of his gay constituents. In 2022, he declared California the very first sanctuary state for trans youth. In 2024, he stood up against bullsh*t “parent’s rights” advocates to shoot down their latest weapon: initiatives that would compel teachers to “out” their trans students to their families against their wishes.

And still, none of that lets him off the hook from his latest screw up: inviting conservative weasel Charlie Kirk onto his podcast to mutually scuff their patent leather loafers on the rights and dignity of trans women athletes.

In many left-leaning media spaces, there have been never-ending cycles of conversation about what Democrats “need” in order to shift the political landscape in their favor. They love to say how absolutely critical it is that we find “our” version of a Joe Rogan. What they forget is that the monkey’s paw always collects its toll. If you want a Joe Rogan, part of the deal is wondering “wait, what the f*** did he just say?”

But maybe that’s a part of the deal.

Transgender Americans are getting pretty familiar with scapegoating lately, as it’s growing from all sides with increasing regularity. Even before gay Democratic fireball and former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg tossed in his two cents about trans women, it was clear that many Democrats were in their emotions about what support for the trans community might cost them. It’s hard not to feel like we’re the latest demographic whose benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks for the officials we elected to help us. If our government is a sinking ship, are we the ballast tossed overboard first? Are we the battle worth surrendering in an effort to win the war?

F*** I hope not.

This still leaves us with what to do with Gavin Newsom, who is having a very good month right now.

All credit for this goes to his social media team, headed by Camille Harper Zapata, for the strategy that seems to be catapulting his goodwill into the sun. Newsom is a slick speaker, but his real good call here was trusting a grad student with a grudge and a wicked handle on what a lot of (especially young) people have been craving from their leadership. We’ve been trying “we go high” for more than a decade now, and it keeps sliding us deeper and deeper into the muck.

Honestly, as a trans person with a long memory, I’ve been waffling back and forth about how I feel. On the one hand, there’s a nausea that worms its way into my psyche when I think about the “If Kamala were president, we’d all be at brunch” kind of activism. It undermines a lot of what many of us would still be experiencing under “moderate” Democratic leadership, and it makes me think that a lot of people believe their social responsibility ends with voting. On the other hand, morale has been circling the toilet bowl for a while, and I get a jolt of excitement when a new Newsom TikTok drops.

I want to feel something again, you know?

And Newsom has always been a man who is meticulously styled and whose image is highly curated: he knows what he’s doing and how people see him. None of this is a mistake, and he’s doing something real. This isn’t just digital posturing: it’s psychological warfare.

My husband and I might live full time on the road now, but I’m a Californian through and through – I feel about Newsom the way I’m sure the X-Men feel when they have to team with Magneto or when the Powerpuffuff Girls realize they need the help of Mojo Jojo: sometimes we have to link up with our least favorite people when the stakes are higher than all of us.

So how should trans people feel right now? Where should they land on Newsom as he jukes for us and against us in his own effort to cement his legacy and drag Trump down into the mud with him?

I think we all have to decide how wide we’re willing to go as we cast our most effective fighters for the road ahead. Mario might be willing to share a go kart track or mini game party with Bowser, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to go in for a hug when the opportunity presents itself. I think I’ll take his lead if it comes up again.

This is the part where I jingle my hat and tell you that the best way for you to support my work is to become a paid subscriber on Substack. Did you know that the vast majority of your subscription goes directly to us? And though I am opposed in principle to paywalled content, paid subscribers get exclusive access to our chat!

If you’ve ever felt moved or connected or challenged by anything we’ve made, consider becoming a subscriber.

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In this episode we talk about rituals and cultural touchstones for grief, how our brains work super hard to keep us safe even when it fucks us over, and what it’s like to get paid to infodump onto teenagers. We’ll also explore emotional constipation, the myth of “applying yourself,” and why tarot readings are one of the secrets to feeling things.

*The books mentioned and quoted in this episode are The Tao of Fully Feeling by Pete Walker, The Wild Unknown Archetype Guidebook by Kim Krans, Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown, and Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman.

On Thursday, August 21st 2025, God cut the ribbon for a brand new all-gender restroom: the grave of Dr. James Dobson. If there’s any justice in the moral balance of the universe, Dr. Dobson (noted homophobe, racist, and founder of the deeply demented Focus on the Family media empire) is doing the breast stroke in a boiling lake in hell right now, where he will spend eternity choking on every square inch of pain he inflicted on the world we’re all glad he’s permanently vacated.

I have a lot to say about James Dobson, but I’m hoping you have the patience for a detour first. We can leave him where he is for now; there’s no exit ladder up from the underworld. He’s not going anywhere.

Because it’s people like James Dobson who have all but guaranteed that queer and trans people like me will always need therapy. It’s no secret that the LGBTQ+ community has higher rates of depression and anxiety, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we also seek therapy at something close to twice the rate of our cisgender and heterosexual peers. That number will likely keep climbing as we watch this new generation work tirelessly to destigmatize therapy and mental health, and despite the conservative push to roll back protections for queer people, Gen Z is shaping up to be the gayest and transest generation to date.

So it feels alarming that with the rising tide of demand, there seems to be an inexplicable lack of transgender therapists.

This came into focus for me on the eve of the 2024 presidential election as I was scrolling Instagram and trying very hard to convince my nervous system that I was not being actively hunted for sport. A flyer floated into view on my feed advertising a workshop:

”Managing Stress as a Trans Person in 2024”

I couldn’t click “add to cart” fast enough, but then something possessed me to double check the account where the ad originated. It was as I feared — the group would be led not by a trans person like me, but by a surely well-meaning cisgender woman with an “LCSW” at the end of her name.

And what’s the problem with that? Can’t she empathize? Can’t she do a good job leading trans people through stress management? Can’t we just help each other without worrying if we have everything in common?

Of course we can, but it is also odd that we so often see identity-focused spaces meant to help us driven by people who will never know the deepest roots and nauseating minute realities of our existence. It’s the same reason you’ll never see me advertising healing spaces for black women or disabled Jewish veterans. It is, frankly, not my lane. Empathy has limits. You can know some of it, but not all of it. And it matters.

This is the same reason why there are (or used to be) so many initiatives set up to diversity classrooms so the teaching population more directly reflects the realities of the students we serve— we trust, relate, and learn better when we see ourselves in the people who are there to help us. Additionally, trans people have historically struggled as “walking encyclopedias” for our cisgender therapists, acting as guides for them as they navigate unfamiliar language and community-specific concepts. Many of us have had infuriatingly similar circumstances where we wonder: “Why am I paying someone who keeps asking me questions that could be answered in Trans 101?”

Which brings us back to this— why was this workshop being hosted by someone who couldn’t possibly understand the whole of our lives? Why aren’t there more competent, seasoned diverse trans therapists ready to fill the void and bridge the gap where they are most needed?

Because to bill insurance, as the advertisement for this group made clear was an option, the facilitator had to be the owner of four very important letters at the end of her name: “LCSW.”

There are other letters too —if you aren’t an LCSW (licensed clinical social worker), you could be a LPC (licensed professional counselor), LMFT (licensed marriage and family therapist), or the coveted PhD — but they all have the same big bold problem: there are vanishingly few trans people who have them.

Unfortunately, the data we want here doesn’t really exist. There isn’t currently a group tallying the number of practicing trans therapists in the US, and with the Trump administration’s open disdain for data and the LGBTQ+ community, we are unlikely to see that shift anytime soon. But the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey (the largest of its kind, surveying more than 92,000 trans people across the country), found that only about 7% of us have an education past a bachelor’s degree, and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) reports that “less than 1% of U.S. medical students and physicians self-identify as transgender.” It stands to reason that the “official” number of licensed transgender therapists in this country is likely very small.

II

The road to becoming a therapist in the U.S. is both winding and steep, and the barriers seem to be constructed almost comically high. Because there are a couple of avenues to becoming a practicing therapist, I’ll be focusing on the one I know the best: the LCSW. Advanced degree programs for social workers usually require one (if not two) unpaid internships, plus two licensing exams (running about $300 each). After graduation, you’ll need a total of 3,000 hours of supervised practice under an LCSW, which will take, at minimum, two more years. Supervision can cost between $60-100 a week if you don’t take a criminally underpaid and unsupported position where you can get it for free. And then, when you do finally cross that finish line, you have to renew that license every two years, which will run you another $200-300.

Licenses are issued on a state-by-state basis, meaning that in order to practice (even virtually) in more than one state, a professional will have to double up with many of these requirements, paying multiple licensing boards for the privilege of accepting clients outside their own state lines.

In the research I did for this piece, I stumbled into a Reddit thread filled with LCSW candidates who were comparing the money they’ve invested in their own pursuits to become licensed therapists. The average? Anywhere from $4,000-$10,000, and that’s after the cost of graduate school.

As a former teacher, all of this reminds me so much of the barriers we see in education, where we are asked to submit to a year of “student teaching” as we work through our credentialing program, which is essentially a period of time where we pay for the privilege of working in a classroom for free (usually without the option or ability to work an additional job to support ourselves). It’s like a test to see who can hold their breath and make it out in time, but not all of us get to take in enough air to begin with, and the reward is a profession that is both undervalued and underpaid.

But why would any of this affect transgender LCSW candidates specifically?

It’s time to return again to that Trans Survey:

Of the more than 92,000 respondents, more than a third reported that they were currently experiencing poverty, and our overall unemployment rate is 18% (the national average? 4.2%). More than 11% of us have been fired, laid off, or forced to resign due to our gender identity. And while many people turn to family support as they work their way through higher education, between 12-29% of trans people characterize their relationship to their immediate families as “unsupportive.”

As much as we want to believe that we’re all racing from the same starting block, we aren’t. And even without systemic barriers, people finishing this process are going through an American Gladiator obstacle course of bureaucracy and financial hardship.

III

It’s important to point out that none of this is part of some ancient traditional practice that can’t possibly be changed. The licensing process for therapists (as we know it today) started to take off in the 1970s, and it found its footing specifically so mental health professionals could bill medical insurance and establish a “universal code of ethics.” Ultimately, the working therapists of the time wanted a system that would grant them the same prestige and respect as their peers in the more body-focused medical field.

But the system they landed on is not, by any means, a foolproof one.

Licensing can be helpful, but can also trick people into thinking anyone with letters after their name are infallible and beyond truly necessary criticism.

I told you that we would come back to Dr. James Dobson, and look, he’s exactly where we left him.

If you were wondering where the “Dr” came from at the start of his name, you should know that before he became a public skid mark, he earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Southern California before he became an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics in Los Angeles, where he counseled children and drew the asinine conclusion that all of their troubles stemmed from a “rejection of authority,” and that a return to more physical violence at home would cure them right up. For seventeen years, he worked in the division of Child Development and Medical Genetics at a counseling center, where he published works about the dangers of feminism and the family benefits of corporal punishment.

The little “PhD” at the end of his name helped him as he established the conservative hate machine “Focus on the Family,” opened a gay conversion practice in the 90s, and published 36 books before his death.

We want, so desperately, to feel as if there is a shortcut to knowing if someone is worthy of our trust and respect, and academia can lead us to believe that the answers come from how long someone has committed their lives to research and learning. Sometimes, it’s true— but not always.

Dr. Oz, a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon, spent years on television telling us that the arsenic in apple juice was a danger to our children.

Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon and oncology professor (and later U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development), thought that the Egyptian pyramids were used for grain storage. And after attending President Trump’s election night party during the height of the pandemic in 2020, he attempted to cure himself with homeopathic oleander.

There really aren’t any shortcuts to assuming competence.

IV

In the code of ethics for practicing therapists, professionals promise to uphold the “dignity and worth of the person” and “service, social justice, and integrity,” which is a worthy, if not a little vague, pledge. And despite it, the Trevor Project has found that there are more than 600 licensed practitioners offering anti-LGBTQ “conversion therapy” in the US across 48 states right now, with 70 more in active training for licensure. Therapists have their own internal moral compass, and there’s never going to be a guarantee that they all point due north.

There are procedures for reporting therapists who may be acting outside of ethical practices, but many people might not know where to begin, or what qualifies as unprofessional conduct. For many of us, speaking out against an authority figure of any kind is exceptionally challenging. Outside of the obvious, the uninitiated might not even know that they’re on the receiving end of unethical behavior.

This was the situation my transgender husband found himself in as he finished his own master’s degree in social work.

Throughout his program, Xilo (pronounced Shy-low) completed two unpaid internships (I double-checked with him to make sure they were unpaid, and he laughed at me). While the first was an overall positive experience, the second was not. Similar to the “Better Help” style of 21st century digital therapy, the company that offered him his non-optional internship was a for-profit app. Instead of hiring a team of experienced therapists to lead online chats with paying clients, they brought in (exclusively) a league of unpaid interns. The (approximately) 30 interns were responsible for 100% of the text-based client chats, and were offered essentially zero support from their one supervisor.

During his time working for this company, Xilo witnessed as his peers were verbally and sexually abused by clients, and gaslit and abandoned by the licensed therapists who were tasked with supervising them. Data was skewed for the app’s investors, and 100% of the ill-gotten profits were pocketed by the people who allowed it to happen.

I watched as a trans man who wanted nothing more than to become a therapist began to seriously doubt the long term efficacy of his chosen profession. This couldn’t be it, could it?

Like me, Xilo had also left a helping profession that used and abused its most dedicated professionals: education. It’s no secret that teacher burnout is a major drain on the profession, with more than half of educators reporting that they plan on leaving the classroom earlier than expected.

We’re seeing similar data with therapists, who are only seeing demands for their services rise as supports stagnate. Just about half say they can’t keep up with the needs of their many clients, and just as many say that they are nearing the point of irreversible burnout.

In 2021, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) updated their code of ethics to include an emphasis on provider self care, but there haven’t been a ton of provisions in the profession itself to allow for it. There are still a lot of therapists who are looking for help, with not much help to be had.

V

Arguably, the most profound case for licensing as a practice (outside of public accountability) is the commitment to professional development. Anyone can stagnate in their worldview, and there’s a huge benefit to requiring that the professionals in charge of your mental well being keep learning.

It’s a great idea that doesn’t always shake out in practice. Like in education (and many more professions, I presume), older models and ideas about mental health and wellbeing are still an active part of the PD circuit, and in some cases it actually may serve to keep less helpful modalities around longer.

I can’t help but think again of my husband, who jumped at the chance to audit a training specific to his special interest in the therapy space: autism. But he would be disappointed again: the training wasn’t led by autistic practitioners, but by LCSW’s who acted as if there was no way an autistic person could possibly be in the room with them. The talks were shockingly outdated, lacked trauma-informed practices, and left him feeling like he was being peered at through a clinical fishbowl. He left early and asked for a refund.

Xilo’s own complaints about the system he was about to enter stacked: he didn’t like that billing insurance meant that he would have to diagnose all of his clients (insurance claims require a diagnosis code from either the ICD10 or the DSM5, both texts with a long history of anti-LGBTQ diagnoses). As much as he understood the benefits of community accountability, he saw the failures of LCSW licensing and his own financial limitations. As a biracial trans man, he knew this was what he wanted to do— but how?

Xilo was feeling what so many would-be transgender therapists had felt before him. There aren’t more of us because we’re less likely to have the luxury of stability, and because of the long, expensive processes built first to keep us from the gate and then to keep us in poverty once we’re through. Which sucks, because we’re the ones who would benefit the most from a therapist who really understands us.

As Audre Lorde said: “Without community there is no liberation.”

VI

To be clear, this is not an anti-therapy article.

In this house, we budget for therapy the way that some households budget for groceries.

We live in just 200 tightly packed square feet, and own exactly one bookshelf. On it, more than half of our books are specific to therapeutic work. We have titles like Judith L. Herman, MD’s Trauma and Recovery, Pete Walker’s The Tao of Fully Feeling, and Richard Schwartz, PhD’s No Bad Parts.

We are both in therapy, with therapists who both have “LCSW” after their names. We counted through our closest immediate friends and found that more than half of them are licensed therapists. We love therapy. And we also know that there are some limitations in the systems that were set up in the time of Disco Fever that we can’t ignore.

Because we can’t test or license for the parts of a therapist that make them truly effective:

Are they doing their own inner work?

Are they committed to the kind of growth that requires them to move past their egos and embrace their limitations?

Just because someone is a therapist, just because someone’s website says they’re LGBTQ+ friendly– doesn’t mean they’re doing the work for that to be true.

And it’s the kind of work that never ends. We’ve been doing it for as long as we’ve had human consciousness, and there is no graduating from it. We are, all of us, going to have to tend our own fires forever.

And that’s what gets right down to it: the role of a therapist, of a coach, of a facilitator and sounding board – this isn’t something new or even something uniquely Western.

If everyone should be in therapy, who was doing social work before 1970? Who’s doing this now, in the past, and everywhere else? Historically, it’s been our elders, people with lived experience, and other kinds of spiritual teachers.

Trans people don’t need saviors, we need each other. We need community, and we need options. Sometimes that’s going to be with licensed therapists, but not always. Institutions are always going to be the last to change. They are not innovators, and will never be out in front of the rising tide of a shifting landscape. Institutions also do not benefit from flexibility, even when people do.

So while we might not be able to fix everything all at once and break down the barriers keeping so many trans people from a profession we desperately need, we can be open minded and adaptable as we figure out what we need next. And really, it’s the least we can do.

This is the part where I jingle my hat and tell you that the best way for you to support my work is to become a paid subscriber on Substack. Did you know that the vast majority of your subscription goes directly to us? And though I am opposed in principle to paywalled content, paid subscribers get exclusive access to our chat!

If you’ve ever felt moved or connected or challenged by anything we’ve made, consider becoming a subscriber.

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Also — we didn’t get into this in the article, but after finishing his MSW, Xilo made the decision to work as a coach rather than become a licensed therapist. If you’re curious about his work, check out his website here.

Why has Xilo “always felt really connected to corn”? Listen and find out with us!

This is a conversation space exclusively for paid subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. We’ll post questions that provide opportunity for connection, and you can jump into the discussion however it suits you.

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Join us from Boise, Idaho as we discuss what it takes to feel safe as a trans person in the United States during a profoundly unsafe time. How do we escape scarcity enough to show up for each other, and what do we do when learning one new thing about ourselves topples the identity Jenga tower all together?

In this episode, we talk gay doctors, slime allergies, the social media projection machine, and why Xilo is a truly terrible Catholic. We also tackle questions like “can you really ‘choose your hard’?”, “Is therapy the new crypto?”, and “is Portland, Oregon really the trans promised land?”

There’s only one way to find out for sure.

If you’d like to join in the conversation about our “Top 10” stops so far, you can find the Instagram post mentioned in-episode here

**Update: The phrase "choose your hard” we heard from our interview with Kam who is an amazing trans writer and parent that lives an hour outsides of Salt Lake City!

The keys to my classroom pressed deep into my palm as I hovered an inch from the door handle. There’s no way I heard that correctly. It’s not even seven in the morning, and the parking lot outside is still bathed in the deep blue of pre-dawn. Students are gathered in scattered huddles in the hallway, the knees of their pajama pants tucked under oversized sweaters as they doze against lockers. My eyes are barely open, and a paper cup full of hot mint tea is pressed dangerously close to the laptop I’m balancing on my hip. It’s twenty minutes to the start of my first class, and there is definitely not a cop on the other side of this door.

“What?”

“Yeah, he just went in. Sam let him in.”

Sam, my favorite custodian, the custodian for whom we pooled two hundred bucks for a Wing Stop gift card last Christmas, let a cop into my room? Why?

I swallowed the bile rising like mercury in my throat and let myself in, careful to check that it locked behind me. And there he was, leaning against a desk and surveying the room – a collection of student research projects stapled to the wall, a banner for the Academic Decathlon team, a decade’s worth of graduation announcements lining the back whiteboard, and a quote written out in large black letters above my desk: You Don’t Have to Burn Books to Destroy a Culture, Just Get People to Stop Reading Them. He hopped up to his feet when he saw me, and wasted no time:

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but an email came into the school this morning. There’s been a threat against you. We’re going to search your room.”

-------

In April of this year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received new marching orders from the Trump administration that effectively gutted legal recourse for transgender employees across the country: any new worker complaints that cited “gender-identity discrimination” would now be coded as “Class C.” What does that mean? If you’ve never braved a dive headfirst into American employment law, here’s a quick guide:

The EEOC exists primarily as the enforcement arm against employment discrimination in this country, but they receive many more claims than they could ever hope to review and process. In the mid-nineties, they started a new system (called the Priority Charge Handling Procedure) to create a sort of shorthand for how they want to proceed with any new case:

“A” charges are almost definitely going to be handled by the EEOC directly, not referred to mediation, and they have a high likelihood of being successful in court for the claimant.

“B” charges are probably not going to court, and the EEOC likely doesn’t have the resources to put a ton of effort into pursuing litigation. They will likely be referred to mediation.

“C” charges are the EEOC graveyard. This is where “silly or frivolous” cases end up, and it’s astronomically unlikely that the agency will do anything other than notify the organization that’s been charged. This is where claims of discrimination go to die.

So this means that in April, Trump’s EEOC made a pretty bold and damning assertion: transgender people aren’t discriminated against in any American workplaces. Doesn’t happen. No need to look any further. It’s all good here.

As a transgender person who had just spent the last year and a half filing and working with the EEOC on a discrimination case of my own, this wasn’t amazing news. I wasn’t sure what the outcome of my own case would have been, but it felt a little like being whacked in the shins with a cricket bat, especially since I had to be convinced over and over again by everyone close to me that my case was worth pursuing in the first place.

If you’ve ever been on the business end of workplace discrimination (or any kind of abuse in which one party holds pretty much all of the power), you know that an essential element is doubt. Did that actually happen to me? Was it a big deal if it did? If I say something, will it all just get worse? Do I even want to bring everything back up again?

This is because the ghost of the pain still lives inside of me, and clawing into the dirt of some of the worst experiences of my life feels like exhuming the body of a hurt I’d just as soon like to forget. I’m a lifelong writer who has sat in front of a keyboard over and over again, unable to put words to a pain that still sears like a branding iron against the softest parts of my heart. It’s been too hot to touch for a long time.

But now, I’m angry enough to get over it.

If I’m never going to get my day in court, if I’m never going to see the people who ignored me forced to confront their own cowardice, I’ll just do it here. The timelines, the screenshots – I have it all, and I’m ready to air it out. I still remember the heat rising in my throat, flushing my chest and my neck and my face until my ears burned, as I sat on the phone with legal counsel for the first time:

“I don’t care about getting paid,” I said. “I just want the next trans teacher who stumbles into that school to have a different experience. I want these people to be afraid to fuck up this badly a second time.”

-------

Don’t tell them, I’d been told. We’re going to move you to another room. Just keep teaching like nothing is wrong.

But something was wrong. There were dogs in my classroom now– dogs sniffing under the coffee maker and behind my desk and inside bookshelves– dogs looking for a bomb.

I wouldn’t see the email until much later, the email that outlined exactly why some faceless nameless whoever wanted me and all of my students dead. It would be weeks before I asked to see it, and weeks more before I read a word. My email wasn’t listed on the school website, so it had been sent to a handful of my colleagues instead. They knew before I did exactly what this person thought of me, and how he wanted to handle it. Warning, the following is quoted directly from the threatening email, and the language within is extremely triggering:

“School* has failed to provide a safe learning environment for its children, it now(sic) only ALLOWs but ENCOURAGES sexually deviant and degenerate behavior from its staff. We won’t stand idly by as leftists continue to sexualize our children and push this perverted sh*t into classrooms… I’m sick of hearing about p*rnography being displayed to children or people enacting sexual acts onto children… You are child abusers, you are scaring(sic) the next generation… Anyone who refuses to do anything abotu(sic) this is a f*cking coward. We won’t tolerate this, we won’t stand idly which is why we placed multiple pipe bombs in Deadname* “Flint’s” classroom, as well as in other locations in the high school and [his] house 1234 Street*. You will evacuate or you will all die. We will personally ensure that this subhuman degenerate c*cksucking piece of sh*t is killed… Superintendent’s* home at 4321 Street* and the School District* have also been rigged with explosives and will detonate shortly after receiving this email. The school district is equally as bad for ENCOURAGING this degeneracy. F*ck you all, we’ll see you burn in hell.”

I didn’t know what the email said as I walked between desks, my hands linked behind my back. I tried to focus on my students, who were scribbling away on a journal prompt I’d written up on the whiteboard moments before. I thought about trying for a short discussion, but every time I went to open my mouth, my tongue was dry and my lips were glued shut.

This is the worst day of my life, I thought.

Which is wild, because I thought the exact same thing three months earlier, and I would be wrong twice.

Because why did this person, the one who had allegedly spent a night hiding pipe bombs between copies of The Great Gatsby, know my name? Or the name I had before? Or my school?

That would be Fox News’s fault. More specifically, a writer working for them named Hannah Grossman. In her time updating the right wing world about my egregious existence in public education, Hannah wrote about me at least three times. Always careful to skirt right along the edge of libel, she made sure her readers believed that I was a dangerous child predator, and that my classroom library contained actual hardcore pornography. For her and her readers, that meant specifically the YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath and the YA guide This Book is Gay. It didn’t matter that the sexuality in these books was comparable, and even tamer, than in titles we actually taught in eleventh and twelfth grade English (books like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). She knew (presumably– I’ll take the hint from Fox and put an asterisk around her intentions, as they are truly unknowable) that the iron was hot against queer books in the fall of 2022. Why not strike as many times as possible? After all, clicks were clicks.

Her first article, revised at least once after its initial publication to tone down some of the more libel-y language, was published in September:

“California high school teacher boasts 'queer library' with material on orgies and BDSM/kink”

Pleased with its success, she published a second time:

“California teacher who outraged parents with BDSM materials claims it helped kids' identity development”

The pub date for article number two? Just two days before the bomb threat.

So how could the worst still be ahead of me?

-------

So far, it seems like the worst of all of this belongs squarely to bad actors hundreds of miles from my campus, so why did I go to the EEOC with a claim against my school district?

Well, I sort of expect this behavior from Hannah Grossman and the faceless bomb moron. This is what they do, this is their job: be angry, ruin lives, clock out. I had different expectations of the people I worked for. I was twenty one when I stepped onto campus and handed the keys to my first classroom. I wasn’t a new hire causing problems and drama right out of the gate: I’d faithfully served my school with dedication and loyalty for more than a decade, coming in early and staying late, coaching teams and supervising dances, chaperoning field trips and volunteering for extra assignments that didn’t pay. In my time on my campus, I’d never had a negative mark in an evaluation or one single disciplinary meeting. Even in the fallout from Fox News, in meetings where I cried and begged for different decisions, it was always clear that I hadn’t violated any policies. I wasn’t being punished, they always said– everything they were doing was for my safety.

But it’s clear that very little – if anything – was actually for my safety. Because I didn’t feel safe, and never would again. What happened instead was a slow picking away at the skeletal remains of my life at my school. Every new decision that followed was like watching some harbinger corvid nibble a little deeper into my liver. I wasn’t being saved, I was being abandoned. It would happen slowly, and I wouldn’t recover.

In the days after the first Fox article, I waited. I waited to see what my school district would do. Would they send a statement out to parents? Would they explain that it wasn’t true? That I wasn’t a threat to students? That my library didn’t violate any policies? After years of me showing up for them, were they going to show up for me?

No, they weren’t.

Every meeting felt disciplinary, even as I was being assured it wasn’t. My library was searched and gutted, and new rules were set up just for me. As phone calls came in across the country, accusing me of increasingly outrageous things, I was told to answer for them. We got a tip that you’ve been showing students pornographic magazines after school. Is this true? Nothing was credible, nothing was true, but they wouldn’t say anything about it. There were no statements of support, no standing behind a teacher whose library they’d once awarded. Some parents organized a protest at Back to School Night. Fearing violence and a lack of support, I skipped it.

After the bomb threat in December, the silence continued. The superintendent, who had also been named in the email, never called me. The next time she saw me, she pretended nothing had happened at all. The threats and articles continued. The incidents stacked. I could feel my body weakening. I stopped eating. I wouldn’t go out anywhere near the school, sick and afraid that someone would recognize and hurt me. The district hadn’t rejected any of the claims made in the news, hadn’t clarified, and left me standing on my own in a sea of hate. I started putting in the absolute minimum effort at work, and the joy I once had for teaching was gone. It felt like it had been sucked out of me. I kept my classroom door locked, and jumped whenever I heard a knock.

All during this time, I was making videos about my life as a teacher for TikTok and Instagram. I knew better than to disparage my school or my community, so I kept it vague. Viewers who knew that I’d been “featured” on Fox asked me how my school district was handling it.

“Are they being supportive?” They would ask. “Tell me they’ve got your back.”

For a long time, I thought I could still savage it. Before I knew anything about myself, I knew that I was a teacher. Who was I if I wasn’t? I’d been told not to film on campus, a rule that other teachers were not being asked to follow, and I didn’t want to hurt a relationship that was already hemorrhaging.

Sure, I said. Everything is going to be fine.

-------

Is any of what happened discrimination based on my gender identity? What responsibility does a school district have to protect its teachers? Is any of what happens outside of a school relevant to the rules enforced on the inside of one? Is neglect, abandonment, and betrayal enforceable? Of the dozens of homophobic and transphobic incidents that occurred while I was a teacher, which (if any) are my district responsible for?

I’m going to give you exactly what I gave to the EEOC to help you decide. Below is the exact timeline I once drew up as I was fighting against doubt in my decision to file a claim.

What do you think?

EEOC Timeline:

I come out as queer in early 2019

August 2019:
After school “club rush” event, the Queer Student Alliance president’s car is vandalized, her LGBTQ+ flag sticker is scraped from her bumper in the student parking lot and stuck under her windshield wipers. This will continue to become a pattern over the next several years, as harassment against LGBTQ+ students escalates during these “club rush” events.

September 2019:
A teacher from another department confronts me in the front office and tells me that my “political choices” will “send me and my students to hell.”

March 2021:
Student group We’re All Welcome* puts on its yearly “LGBTQ Talk”, inviting the whole of the student body (~2,500 students) to the theater for a lunchtime presentation. The event is supervised so poorly (hundreds of students jeering and laughing, very minimal adult supervision), I have a panic attack before my next class.

I come out as transgender in the summer of 2021, and begin using “they/them” pronouns. I change my name legally before the start of the school year.

August 2021:
A student enrolled in my class openly mocks the LGBTQ+ community on a day in which I am absent and have a substitute teacher. The substitute and a campus supervisor witness the homophobic tirade but do not respond. In subsequent meetings with administration, they express to me that the student will face consequences, but it is eight months before he serves it: a single detention. He keeps his position on the football team and within student government. He is the child of a teacher and athletic coach.

I receive a double mastectomy in July of 2022.

August 2022:
A group of 3-5 parents from my school begin to bring claims against me to the school district, arguing that I should not be allowed to have a social media presence. The leader of the claims begins her campaign for the school board.

September 2022
Fox News publishes an article claiming that I am indoctrinating students and distributing pornography because I have an LGBTQ+ library. Harassment escalates from there, including a group of parents protesting outside of our school on Back to School Night. Threats begin to come into my district email, along with direct phone call threats to the school. The emails and calls threaten violence, burning down the school as a whole, and direct claims against my life. All incidents related to my home are reported to City* PD. Administration handles all communication to law enforcement from the school. I am asked frequently by my administration to tell them if I have shown students pornographic material, which I have not. District officials begin to remove selected books from my library, though there is no policy to support their removal.

Between September and December 2022:
Several meetings are held between my administration, myself, and HR. Fifteen LGBTQ+ books are removed from my classroom library by district representatives, though I am assured that I have not violated any district guidelines or policies. I am told I can no longer film videos for social media on campus, though I have never filmed during school hours, with any campus-identifying features, or visible students. No other teachers are asked to follow this policy, no other classroom libraries are searched, and no other books are removed from any other place on campus. The only specific accommodation for my safety I am offered is an escort to and from my car.

September 2022:
A white envelope mailed from an unfamiliar address in Kentucky and addressed to my deadname is put by front office staff in my teacher inbox. The letter says “JESUS DIED FOR YOU” in large print letters on a single white paper. Letter is reported to and surrendered to administration.

December 6, 2022:
A bomb threat is emailed to my campus and copied to several of my colleagues, targeting me, my classroom, and the home of our district superintendent. I am not made aware of the bomb threat until I am already at school and find a County* sheriff in my room. I am asked to move my class to another teacher’s room while bomb dogs investigate my classroom. I am told not to alert my students that anything is wrong. When my room is announced as clear, I am told to return and continue to teach the rest of the day.

The bomb threat is made public in the following week, and during a public school board meeting, several parents again assert that LGBTQ+ literature is pornography. The district makes no statement in my support, and again I am told privately that I have not violated any district policy. My district email address is changed for the first time, and is no longer listed publicly.

December 16, 2022:
The superintendent contacts me for the first time “to say hello,” nearly two weeks after the bomb threat. She does not mention the continued harassment or the bomb threat.

May 26, 2023:
Two students who attend my school comment on my public Instagram account with disparaging comments about my trans identity, in violation of our district policy against cyberbullying. I report them to my administration, who responds that they will not be contacting or speaking with either student. They are not spoken with, and there are no consequences. Administration tells me they “don’t know what I want them to do about it.”

At this time, I have grown fearful of my community and no longer attend any optional school events, including games, dances, or performances. I no longer purchase classroom supplies or necessities within five miles of my school. I stop coaching the school’s Academic Decathlon team.

October 12, 2023:
Parent harassment continues online. Posts about my teaching at my school appear on Facebook groups for parents in my district, misgendering me, deadnaming me, asserting that I am a danger to their children, and that I should not be allowed to teach. An Instagram account for parents in my district posts photos of me with my deadname and my school. No admin action is taken, and the district continues its silence.

November 8, 2023:
I begin to receive droves of subscription emails to my school email address that I have not signed up for, the nature of which is primarily religious (such as “Christian Woman Daily”) and using my deadname. In one day I receive 44 of these emails. My district email is not available publicly and would only be accessible within the school district. Our IT is not able to stop the emails, and my email address is surrendered to my administration until they are able to issue me a third alternative district email address. This takes five days, and I continue to receive the emails until November 13, 2023.

November 13, 2023:
I return to school after five days sick at home to a four-page letter left to me from my substitute teacher. In the letter, he details his opinions about homosexuality and the Christian bible, and ends by inviting me to attend his church. He leaves the note inside a personal book he found in the drawer of my desk. I report the letter to administration and surrender it to them.

November 14, 2023:
A meeting is held between me, administration, and a union representative about the sub note and my intention to leave teaching at my school and be put on stress-related medical leave, to be initiated by a note from my doctor. During the meeting, I am assured that the sub will not return to campus and won’t be able to contact me.

November 29, 2023:
The substitute returns to campus. He knocks on my door at lunch and I open, not knowing who he is. He introduces himself and says he wanted to meet me. I find a reason to push him out, and contact administration immediately. They tell me that they hadn’t filed the paperwork yet, which is why the sub was able to access me on campus. That day, the paperwork is filed and the sub is told he can not return.

December 2023:
I teach my last day in my classroom, after just more than ten years serving at my school.

Italics and * indicate that a name has been changed or redacted

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Ironically, in April, the same week that Trump’s EEOC announced that they would now scoot all transgender discrimination claims to “Class C,” I got an email that my former school district had responded to my filing. I still haven’t read it, but I asked my husband to skim it for me– I wanted him to distill the worst of it into something with as little bitterness as possible.

They were claiming, my husband told me, that I couldn’t have had that bad of a time working there.

I never complained about them online, they said.

So how bad could it have been?

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I still don’t know what the result of my case would have been, or if it will ever move forward again. It’s possible that writing this now tanks my chances of ever seeing justice. I’m not a lawyer, and that’s very intentional. Laws change, and they’re changing a lot right now. We’re living in a time in which precompliance is the norm, and organizations of all kinds are showing just how contagious cowardice can really be. It’s only been six months since Trump signed a piece of paper alleging that trans people don’t exist at all. We’re being denied passports, healthcare, basic dignity and human rights, and even establishment democrats are deciding that we aren’t worth fighting for.

So this might be a terrible idea, but I’m not going to keep my school’s secrets anymore. If these places don’t have the government to answer to, it’s the least I can do to speak my own truth as loud as I can. It’s what I owe to myself, if nothing else. That will have to be good enough for now.

My first book, Teach Like an Ally: An Educator's Guide to Nurturing LGBTQ+ Students, just hit shelves. If you’d like to support me and my work, consider becoming a subscriber, donating to our Great Trans American Road Trip, or following my work on TikTok and Instagram.