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.
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 […]
Representative Greene, You have said a great many things about people like me, loudly and on camera, and they share one feature: each requires an audience. The rhetoric is not built to solve anything. It is built for the clip, the fundraising email, and the next cycle of outrage you can convert into attention. I […]
Representative Mace, You made a public campaign out of policing which restroom a colleague was allowed to use, as though the most urgent matter before the country was where one person washes their hands. You called it protecting women. So I will ask you plainly, as one woman to another: who did you imagine you […]
Ms. Rowling, You say you are defending women’s sex-based rights, that you are not anti-trans, and that you reject the label. I am going to take you at your word and engage the argument rather than the caricature, because you are owed that and because the question deserves better than a slogan from either side. […]
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 […]