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.
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 […]
Tech likes to think of itself as a meritocracy, judging the commit and not the committer. In my experience it judges both, and the second judgment is just quieter. I have watched a room take an idea seriously only after a man repeated it, and I have learned to read the temperature of a stand-up […]
There is a format the media loves: two guests, one of whom thinks I should have rights and one of whom thinks that is up for discussion, talking over each other for six minutes while a host nods neutrally in the middle. It is presented as balance. It is not balance. It is staging a […]
So much of the writing about queer life is about pain — the discrimination, the legislation, the statistics that should keep anyone up at night. All of it is real and none of it should be minimized. But if the only story we tell is the suffering, we hand the people who want us gone […]
A deadname is not just an old name. It is the name of a performance you gave for years so that other people would be comfortable — a role you played so well that some of them mistook it for the whole of you. Hearing it now does not feel nostalgic. It feels like being […]
Being visibly queer in public is a choice with a price tag, and the price is not evenly distributed. For me, being out means the occasional stare, the comment, the wondering whether a given room will be fine. For others it means real danger. Anyone who tells you visibility is free has never had to […]