My opinions and positions on queer life and LGBTQ+ issues, argued in good faith. This is my corner of the Internet — I am thinking out loud, not hosting a debate.
If you’ve spent any time around LGBTQ history, you’ve almost certainly heard the word Stonewall. Every June it appears in articles, documentaries, Pride events, and conversations about civil rights. But what actually happened at Stonewall? Was it really the beginning of the gay rights movement? Why is one small bar in New York City remembered […]
One of the more unexpected symbols to emerge from the transgender community is IKEA’s BLÅHAJ shark. What started as a simple plush toy has become a symbol of comfort, acceptance, and belonging for countless trans people around the world. This unofficial English translation of the BLÅHAJ Empathy Manual expands on that idea with a series […]
To the executive who did it in a spreadsheet, There was no podium and no speech. Just a line item where the trans healthcare benefit used to be, relabeled something tidy like “plan optimization,” approved in a meeting that took four minutes. The people it covered found out the way people always find out about […]
Ms. Raichik, From behind an account, you aim a very large audience at hospitals, teachers, libraries, and clinics you disapprove of, and then describe whatever follows as none of your doing. I have run systems at scale, so I recognize what you have built: a targeting layer. You supply the coordinates and let the crowd […]
Representative, You have never met me, and you have written several bills about my body. I have read them. They are heavy with words like “protect” and “common sense” and empty of any sign that you have spoken with a single person they would actually affect. Legislating a life you have never encountered is not […]
Anchor, You found a reliable formula: seat someone who thinks I deserve rights beside someone who is not sure, point a camera at the friction, and sell the heat as balance. Six minutes, two talking heads, one settled question dressed up as an open one. The format flatters you as neutral. It is not. There […]
Concerned Citizen, You are “just asking questions.” I have noticed the questions only ever point one direction, and never wait around for an answer. They are not really questions. They are accusations wearing the punctuation of curiosity, and we both know it. Real curiosity reads. It sits with the medical consensus, listens to the people […]
Mr. President, I did not ask for my life to become a policy. You decided it would be. You have used the power of the office I am a citizen under to sign orders that declare, by decree, that there are only two sexes; to push people like me out of the military we volunteered […]
Governor DeSantis, You built a national profile on a simple trick: find a small group that unsettles people, and govern against it. You backed the laws restricting care for trans kids and narrowed what a teacher is permitted to say about people like me, and you called it freedom. It is a strange freedom that […]
Governor Abbott, You directed the state of Texas to treat loving parents as suspects of child abuse for getting their trans kids the care their own doctors recommended. Investigators were sent toward family homes. The courts pushed back and the policy wobbled, but the message arrived exactly as designed: that in your Texas, a trans […]