Nex should be alive.

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Parents of nonbinary and trans kids are not okay right now.

*Content warning for discussion of trauma, violence, transphobia, and death.

How ironic that I am writing this after a piece on how great my kid’s middle school experience has been.

Two nights ago, I was scrolling Instagram and found out that a sixteen-year-old nonbinary kid in Oklahoma was beaten to death. The inadvisability of late-night doomscrolling aside, this news sent me into a panic spiral I’m still trying to escape. I am not okay.

Nex looks a lot like my kid and other nonbinary kids we know. They look healthy, comfortable in their skin, young, and innocent. Nex was also indigenous. They were bullied for a year at the school before they were beaten to death by three older girls. Oklahoma had banned nonbinary and trans kids from using school bathrooms. Teachers had been fired for being supportive of queer kids. The school nurse apparently refused to call an ambulance for Nex, who had a severe head injury. They existed in a hostile environment that killed them both actively and through neglect. This same environment made murderers of three underage girls, just as the environment in the UK made murderers of two teenagers who were just convicted of murdering Brianna Grey, a trans teenager.

There are lots of great explainers on the internet about the legislative landscape in Oklahoma and all the fucked up shit leading up to this, so I’ll let you find them. @underthedesknews on Instagram is a great source. Oklahoma has been unrelentingly vicious towards the queer community, particularly gender-nonconforming kids.

As the parent of a nonbinary kid, this is absolutely fucking terrifying. It’s hard to describe how little capacity I have to manage my emotions around this. There’s rage, yes. But mostly just terror. My kid is a light. They are an amazing human who makes the world a better place by existing. They are a great artist, a supportive friend, the best small dog whisperer, and funny as hell. They deserve to grow up. The world needs them. The world needed Nex and Briana, too. These kids weren’t killed because something was wrong with them. They were killed because something is wrong with us. This wave of transphobia, transphobic laws, and transphobic rhetoric is harming all women and queer people.

Navigating my feelings around all of this has been close to impossible. I know, rationally, that I can’t engage in activism while I’m in a panic spiral, and I can’t be present and stable for my kid if I’m doomscrolling and reposting. But as I recently found out I have ADHD, my lack of impulse control is a thing that I’m not doing great with at the moment.

Austin is a very thin, permeable, progressive bubble. We vote blue, our city council and mayor are Democrats, and we’re known for being a liberal haven in a red state. In reality, all the major municipalities are liberal, but Greg Abbot and his cronies don’t want you to know that. For example, Greg Abbot released “guidance” a couple of years ago, empowering CPS in Texas to investigate the parents of trans kids as abusers. Because it’s not backed by legislation (he couldn’t get it through the legislative session), it’s non-binding, but it means that CPS is harassing parents of trans kids in conservative municipalities. Austin does not follow this guidance, but that only holds as far as we continue to elect progressive officials and Abbot doesn’t attempt overreach. However, Abbot recently took over the Houston school district, installed his own unelected officials, and unseated those elected. This is one of many instances where the ultra-conservative state leadership overturned local laws. Several years ago, Denton outlawed fracking within city limits, and then the legislature passed a law that overturned it.

Austin’s new-old mayor invited state troopers to supplement the Austin Police Department. They engaged in blatant racial profiling. When he un-invited them, Abbot refused to allow them to leave. I don’t feel safe in Austin; I just feel safer here than in the rest of Texas.

This year, we decided to stay in Texas until my kid finishes high school, if they got into the arts magnet they applied for. As a developmental scholar, I know that my kid’s strong community of friends and supportive adults is vital to their health and emotional growth during their teen years. Talk of moving was stressing them out. Trying to balance my fear that my kid could be targeted or that we could be targeted as parents with my kid’s immediate needs seemed impossible. But I knew that even if we moved to a less hostile state, there was no guarantee that they would have the community there and the lack of bullying that they have here. So I just have to hope that they get into the school they want (or we can afford to move into the district) and that this fragile membrane holds through the next legislative session. I’m choosing to hold the fear and tension of the situation so my kid can feel safe and stable. That was hard enough before this week.

Seeing my worst nightmare come to life broke my brain. My nervous system is overactive at the best of times, but I think any parent of gender-nonconforming kids is going through this right now. So, I will put a few things out there that I’m trying to do for myself.

You know how when you’re on a plane you’re supposed to put your oxygen mask on first if the cabin loses pressure? That’s so you don’t pass out before you put your kid’s mask on. That’s where I am and where I bet other parents are right now. We’re trying to figure out how to fly the plane instead of putting on the mask and breathing until our brains start functioning again.

There’s a model called Ring Theory that describes healthy trauma processing:

The main point of the model is this: the closer you are to the traumatic event, the less you should be taking on of other’s trauma. Parents like me are experiencing secondary trauma, which is trauma triggered by someone else’s event. Secondary trauma can be very severe. My job is to care for myself and try to be emotionally stable for my kid. I need to lean out of my circle to get comfort – and the friends I lean on need NOT to be other parents of gender-nonconforming kids because we will just re-trigger each other. So, for example, I talked to my therapist yesterday. That helped, but I may book an extra session because, as previously stated, I am not okay.

However, now I’m struggling because the other communities I turn to are most likely to be impacted by this event. I’m in a Facebook group for parents of nonbinary kids. They’re in the same place. It’s good to know I’m not alone, but we can’t effectively release that energy into the space because there’s too much to go around. The energy has to go out, not in. So where is out for me?

The problem is that we are taught to see our problems as personal, not communal. So I could get a massage, get acupuncture, work out, take my meds – and do a bunch of things that will help regulate my nervous system and get my brain back on track. And I will do at least some of those things. But Nex’s death is not a me problem. It’s an us problem. And capitalism and the nuclear family, and a million other ways that we are split up into little nonfunctional groups, make it really hard to find a resting place for the community. I’m also currently unemployed, so I don’t have as much daily social interaction as I’m used to.

So, I guess this has become an ask. If you are a person in community with a family with gender-nonconforming kids, reach out. Check in. Let them vent or cry or shake and hold space for big emotions. And then go to your people to deal with any discomfort or trauma that may have caused you. Check on your people if you are a counselor, a rabbi/priest/minister/imam in a queer-accepting community. If you are a teacher, check in with your gender-nonconforming students. Any community you are in will likely have people impacted by this horror show who feel helpless and alone. Show us we are not.

I did so much of this during COVID, mainly for students and graduate students. I was the safe harbor, the safe adult. I helped students find resources and support. It turns out I’m great at that, but my own resources are sparser than they should be, maybe because I’m used to being the ally, not the (potential) target.

Nex’s death was caused by communities of hate. We, the parents of gender non-conforming kids, need communities of love to help us recover and fight back. Our kids need strong, safe, gentle communities to grow up in. We cannot do this alone.

Donate here to the ACLU’s efforts to fight anti-trans legislation in the US:

Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2024

Stop gatekeeping gender.

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Excluding Trans women is not feminist. It’s the opposite.

This happened:

ladygaga

A post shared by @ladygaga

Lady Gaga posted this picture on International Women’s Day and a bunch of people freaked the hell out. So she wrote about it (click the link) because she’s Gaga, and she’s an ally.

Like the impulsive mess social media researcher I am, I read deep into the comments, and past the first strata of supportive comments, it was all TERF bullshit, deadnaming, gaslighting, and gatekeeping.

Most feminists believe gender is constructed. That means that what we associate with femininity is stuff that we have made up or has been engineered for us by society and people with more power. If you are an intersectional feminist, you recognize that all marginalized identities affect one another, and your experience as a woman (particularly if you are white) is NOT emblematic of or central to all women’s experiences. Intersectionality means consciously and repeatedly de-centering white women and re-centering Black, trans, disabled, non-western, non-white, and other femmes, nonbinary people, and women.

Feminism is also about upending hierarchies and recognizing that systems of oppression like patriarchy and colonialism are engineered to put a specific group on top (usually white dudes) while creating an illusion of scarcity and competition for everyone else. That illusion keeps the oppressed groups competing with and oppressing each other instead of doing away with the shitty system.

So when I see women gatekeeping their identified gender from other women based on their sex at birth, or ability to lactate or gestate, my first thought is, WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK.

TRANS WOMEN ARE NOT TRYING TO TAKE ANYTHING AWAY FROM US. They are not a threat. They are more likely to be murdered based on their identities than we are, and that’s saying something. Trans women are women if they say they are because that’s how gender works. It’s an identity, not your biological makeup.

But seeing womanhood as somehow tied to your reproductive ability or period or some shit and using that as an excuse to exclude trans women? Really? In this economy?

I’ve had an IUD for about 15 years. So, for about half of my soon-to-be-over reproductive cycle, I’ve had very little period and been unable to get pregnant. Does that mean I’m not a woman? I know some tradwives who would say yes. My fucking hot flashes say otherwise. But you know what actually makes me a woman? Me calling myself one. That’s it. I’m a femme person who identifies as a woman. My biological sex is female, as far as I know, but I haven’t tested all the things that could be intersex.

Gender is not sex, and gender is not sexual orientation. It is a bunch of internal, subjective things and externally constructed, subjective things. Femininity and masculinity are flavors that you may identify with or be attracted to—or not. And femininity and masculinity are constantly changing across time and culture. They are fluid, not static. So the doctor who identified my genitals at birth did not determine 1) how and if I identify with a gender, 2) whether or not I can or will reproduce, and 3) who I’m attracted to.

And just to beat this dead horse one more time, HUMANS ARE A LOW DIMORPHISM SPECIES, AND INDIVIDUALS ARE OFTEN MORE GENETICALLY DIFFERENT THAN SEXES.

I identify as a woman because that’s how I feel. I’m on the brink of menopause, so you know what? That might change!

My point is gatekeeping gender away from trans people (or lesbians as in the second-wave movement) is just doing patriarchy for patriarchy. It’s doing colonialism for colonialism. Divide and conquer is the entire MO of systems of oppression, and when you freak out because Gaga likes Dylan and includes her in womanhood, you’re just Andrew Tate-ing the work of all the women who fought for us to have the rights we are now losing. Devaluing the femininity of women you don’t like is not it. Scrabbling for a piece of the lower-status pie is not it. Recognizing that our androcentric (male-centered) society devalues anything it associates with femininity and DISRUPTING THAT is feminism. Dylan’s femininity is not inferior or superior to mine; we are all uniquely us. Why would I want to participate in a system that ranks us? And more importantly, why do you?

Thoughts on Middle School

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It doesn’t always suck.

People regard middle school with horror and trepidation, much as parents view the oncoming train of the teen years. My experiences have been kind of the opposite, so I’m sharing them with you as an alternative perspective (with some developmental science thrown in for funsies).

I had a totally different middle school experience than many of my peers, and so has my 14-year-old enby. I was bullied badly in 5th grade, so by the time I got to middle school, I had no fucks left to give about what other kids thought. I was in awesome gifted and talented classes that I loved; I had semi-stable friend groups, and I volunteered with the Mondale-Ferarro campaign. I did music, theater, and art. It was way better than high school, which I left early for college because, between the Heathers culture and the rape culture, it was freaking awful.

My kid is queer, out, has a great group of supportive, mostly queer friends, has some amazing teachers, and is in advanced theater, which is like a pile of sweet hyperactive puppies. These kids support each other so much. I did all their makeup in one crazed Halloween afternoon, and it was a blast. I didn’t send my kid into middle school with the expectation that it would suck because my experience was so non-normative. But they also have a different landscape. They’re a quarantine kid – half of 4th and all of 5th were online. It gave them a chance to develop as an individual without so much gender and behavior policing. They learned to use their phone and computer to connect actively with other kids rather than just passively watch stuff. They started with a stronger sense of self in middle school than I did. They also do better with the multi-class format than the one-teacher format, by far (as did I). It’s easier to ignore one asshole teacher for three hours a week than every day.

It has not been without challenges. The US, my state in particular, does not give a flying fuck about neurodivergent kids, so it often comes down to either individual teachers or me waving my Ph.D. in the face of the district and threatening legal action. Some teachers are incompetent or sadistic, and nobody does anything about it. There’s no real support for ADHD and Dyslexic kids beyond accommodations, and the teachers ignore them half the time. My kid has struggled with anxiety and depression over friends being in bad home situations, the world being generally on fire, loss, and grief, and struggling with executive function as we were slow to get the ADHD diagnosis* (mom guilt ACTIVATE!). *Side note: are you a parent who found out you were neurodivergent when your kid was tested? I am now a member of your club. Please tell me where the cookies are.

I see a lot of the problems with middle school as systemic as much as social. Yes, my kid can be an asshole regularly due to hormones, neural remodeling, sensory overload, or just general teen-ness. But I think the challenge for us as parents is to step back and let them lead as much as is safe and sane. Teens are not overgrown kids, and they are not immature adults. They are in a distinct developmental stage, the hallmarks of which include a major remodel of the brain (which is mostly responsible for weird behavior, not hormones), a growing awareness of impending adulthood, and a very developmentally healthy and necessary (and painful for parents) switch of focus from parents to peers. They are risk-prone for important developmental reasons, which is a bitch to grapple with. The rules and limitations of childhood WILL NOT WORK (and neither will adult expectations) and need to be assessed and adjusted regularly. This includes screen time and socials, bedtimes, food rules (if you do those – I don’t), homework, language, and a reassessment of what is considered general teen-ness and what is genuine assholeness that needs to be addressed.

All this to say, your kid’s middle school experience is not set in stone. Magnet schools can be great (if you’re in the US) and may provide kids with a peer group less likely to descend like a pack of rabid hyenas. Talk to other parents and educators in your district and get the vibe. Teenagers are freaking awesome–unfortunately, it’s on us to get past the considerable butthurt that comes with not being as needed, respected, or loved-on as we were by our younger kids. Our feelings are real, but they are not the teen’s fault. We must build or rebuild our social supports as our kids become more independent. Call your old therapist. Try a new thing. Commiserate with other teen parents. Think about how much you don’t miss the toddler years. And love the people your teens are growing into as much as you loved that tiny larvae of endless potential.

Things that make me go asldkjdlfkgjdlkfjasdlkj: When health experts ignore structural inequality and blame fat people instead

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Kill me now.

My brain rn.

I listened to this story this morning on NPR and promptly lost my goddamn mind. If you don’t want to listen (I can’t find a transcript) the gist is:

  1. Covid lowered life expectancy in the US by a lot.
  2. It’s gone back up.
  3. But life expectancy in the US is still low compared to other wealthy nations.
  4. The title of the article is about suicide rates.
  5. The guest expert (a correspondent, not a scientist) does not go into the causes of or solutions to increasing suicides; he just notes that it exists.
  6. He instead glosses over addiction and gun violence and then pivots to chronic illness because, wait for it……
  7. Obesity. Yes, the problem is because we’re fat.

THIS IS NOT THE PROBLEM

FUCK MY LIFE

People cannot fucking get away from blaming fat people for anything shitty that happens to them. This ignores all the chronic illness that affects non-fat people. And all the fat people who don’t have chronic illness. And people with disabilities who can’t get decent medical care, housing, education, or jobs because states like Texas routinely ignore their civil rights.

Do you know what is different in the US from other wealthy countries? Economic inequality. Lack of access to health care. Chronic stress, because any of us could end up homeless from getting cancer. Vast disparities in housing, education, and access to food. Gun violence.

But no, this fucking Chad is like, “You know what is different in the US? All the fat people.” Not unsubsidized healthcare. Not food deserts. Not housing shortages and homelessness. Not a criminally high maternal mortality rate that overwhelmingly affects black women. Not medical racism and misogyny and fatphobia (which is, in fact, one of the most significant health risks for fat people) Not hate crimes. Not our ongoing history of marginalizing and criminalizing non-white people, disabled people, women, and LGBTQ people. NOT GUN VIOLENCE. The US has the second highest rate of gun deaths per capita IN THE WORLD. Not in the developed world, not in the Western world (whatever the hell those really mean), in the whole world.

But it’s the fat people! The fat people are making the US sick. Not a gutted EPA. Not climate change, mass shootings, pandemics, natural disasters, broken infrastructure, and yes, again, an inaccessible, discriminatory, elitist, insanely expensive health system. Nope. It’s just fat people not trying hard enough not to be fat.

Let me also point out that the expert in this report is a correspondent, not a scientist. He’s not looking at what makes us different from other countries. He’s not looking at the underlying causes of chronic illness; he’s just blaming fat people. He’s also speaking as if he’s one of the authors of the studies he’s citing (“we found”), which he is not. It’s weird.

The interviewer pushes back on Chad’s generalizations, but Chad continues acting like he’s the expert and dissembles. He literally says that kids eating processed food causes them to die younger. You know what kills the most kids, Chad? Guns. It’s the fucking guns. More than even cars, the second highest cause of child mortality.

We have limited agency over our bodies. The more marginalized (and poorer) we are, the less control we have over stress, movement, food, and how others treat us. Our genetics determine a good bit of how our bodies age and respond to stressors, and our environment contributes a whole lot more.

Why is health a moral issue in this country? Why does not looking a certain way subject us to derision and blame? Could this hyper-individualistic self-empowering nonsense be masking a plethora of social and environmental ills that we refuse to deal with, which affect us far more than our individual behaviors and appearance?

Yes, Chad. Yes, they do. Stop shilling for late-stage capitalism, pretending that gun violence and suicide are just inevitable things we can’t control. Other countries have mental illness without multiple mass shootings a week. Other countries have accessible, free healthcare for everyone. And other countries have fat people too. The disparities in longevity in the US are likely caused by the vast, noticeable differences in how our society and government operate, not how many chips you eat.

As a scientist, this makes me crazy. This is not how you science. If you are looking at large, nationwide samples you can’t then extrapolate that individual behaviors (which would be tracked through much smaller studies and samples) are the leading cause of disparities. The Black Death killed 1/3 of the population of Europe because it was a deadly pandemic that overwhelmed our species, not because people didn’t eat enough kale.

It’s like he surveyed a small sample of people in Europe before the Black Death and found they didn’t eat kale, and then they all died of the Black Death, and he claimed the Black Death was caused by low kale consumption.

alskfjasdkjfaslkfd

The US has deep, systemic inequalities that significantly affect most of its population. Maybe take a look at those things and how other countries have successfully navigated them before resorting to the same fatphobic tropes masquerading as boostrappy individualism. Because that is not serving us well.

Why I left my job, Part 1: Trauma

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I have several long, unpublished posts on why I left my full-time university teaching gig. I doubt publishing them would do me much good, but reflecting on what happened might be helpful to me and those of you in similar situations.

Teaching is Traumatic
College teachers are not trained in any way to deal with student trauma. We are also not encouraged to treat our own trauma. Getting a PhD is usually quite traumatic, and there is very little discussion in the industry. Academia is like a big extended family that keeps passing generational abuse down and rationalizing it as “grit.” This became crystal clear to me during the pandemic but was an overwhelming reality long before.

In 2017, I went from teaching small classes of adult learners part-time at a private university to teaching much larger classes of traditional undergraduates in a high-pressure, high-status college at an R1 university in Texas. (R1 means it’s a top-rated research institution with all its baggage around research>teaching, and steep hierarchies of pay and status). My students were primarily women on pre-med tracks who were disenchanted with the biology department and wanted to focus on structural issues, kids, or a more holistic approach to medicine in their careers. They were, by and large, freaking amazing. They were intelligent, motivated, hard-working, focused, and kind. They were also young, and many were dealing with the effects of childhood trauma, social inequity, racial and gender-based violence, and family and cultural pressures.

By the end of my first semester, I’d had students disclose childhood abuse, cry in my office, cheat alarmingly, and seek help with finding psychological care. This cohort was also experiencing retraumatization from previous events on campus. The year before I started at the university, there had been a stabbing on campus. There were no established safety protocols, and the university did nothing to keep students or employees from the scene. Students found out about it on Twitter, and teachers sent them out of their classrooms to an ongoing violent crime scene. I soon learned that the event stayed with that generation of students throughout college.

In the first year or so, my city had a serial bomber kill several people (one bomb was in my neighborhood, so fun!), and a professor at my university was arrested for multiple counts of domestic violence (but not fired). And some cars were set on fire on campus. The university dealt with these situations very poorly. Whenever something traumatic happened, I would make space in the classroom to talk about it and direct them to mental health resources, and the conversation would always turn into a “where were you when” about the stabbing incident. This cohort did not trust the university to keep them safe and expected it to lie to them, which it did repeatedly.

Without fully realizing it, I fell into a triage role. I learned as much as I could about disability services and the Americans with Disabilities Act, initially for students with mental illness but eventually to help all students with disabilities access their rights under the ADA. I had the on-campus mental health center do presentations (until they started ignoring my emails). I would take classes on field trips to the museum for reflective, non-verbal work. I made additional office hours for informal conversation so students would feel comfortable chatting without a class-related agenda.

I worked hard with my therapist to determine the line between providing a sympathetic ear and taking on too much of the burden of secondary trauma. I developed (with the help of many students) a massive spreadsheet of mental health resources for different demographics at reasonable price points. I walked students through the process of getting disability accommodations and honored them even if they hadn’t completed it.

I encouraged discussions of trauma and mental health when students had something collective to process but followed Trauma-Informed Pedagogy guidelines. This meant students could opt out of triggering discussions, ask for alternative assignments, and were never asked to disclose anything they didn’t want to. I built discussions and activities on mental health into all my classes but was most gratified when students would advocate for mental health care to other students (much more effective than when it’s just the middle-aged white lady at the podium doing it).

Nonetheless, there was a huge gap between my students’ basic well-being and the university’s resources and culture. About 60% of my students were people of color, and they were often gaslit or disbelieved by professors when they talked about discrimination. One Black student had her hair felt by a white professor. Another was accused of bilking the system by a student loan officer for taking out modest student loans. A student with documented severe migraines and another who had just been in a high-impact car accident were denied alternative test times in a blatant violation of the ADA.

Many professors viewed students as entitled and lazy at best and were often judgemental, adversarial, and sometimes cruel. Many routinely denied students documented accommodations in violation of the ADA. I rarely encountered any of these qualities in my students. If they were struggling in my class, it was because something was going on that I didn’t know about. The more I encouraged them to talk to me, my TAs, or each other if they needed help, the less they fibbed and avoided responsibility. I can count on one hand the number of disingenuous, difficult students I had out of the several thousand I taught over six years at the university.

Covid
When the pandemic hit, I fell into full-time triage mode. I built an online student community where we shared resources and memes. I changed my policies to be more flexible on attendance and deadlines so students who needed to be asynchronous could do so. I prerecorded lectures to make them more accessible. I didn’t decrease the rigor of my courses; I just made them more accommodating to students fighting major mental health issues, family deaths, increased financial responsibility, being unhoused, racial violence, and more. And I saw all those things happen to my students and many more. Hate crimes. Assaults. Suicide. I did my best to gather them up and create a community in my classes where they felt comfortable with each other, coming to me and my TAs with their issues, and where my teaching team felt competent in helping them find the needed resources. I did a ton of additional training on disability, systemic racism, inclusivity, and trauma-informed practices so I was better prepared to help with situations I had never personally encountered (being a privileged middle-aged white lady) and tried to learn from every mistake and misstep.

I dove headfirst into trying to fill the knowledge, care, support, and safety gaps that many of my students faced. I also had a kid learning at home for a year (5th grade), an anxiety disorder, and several losses of people I loved. We were mostly all underwater during that time, but I threw myself into care work and ignored my own needs.

We also experienced “Snowvid” in February of 2021, when Austin froze for a week, and most residents lost power, water, gas, or all three. My family lost water for almost a week, while my quarantine family lost power. It was insanely stressful, but most of my TAs and students lived in apartments that got hit much, much harder. Austin was treacherously frozen, so it was almost impossible to drive anywhere (we have no infrastructure for frozen roads). Nonetheless, students braved frozen roads and holed up in friends’ apartments with water or heat, sometimes for weeks before their apartments were safe to return to. It was awful. The compounded trauma just kept coming.

The Beginning of the End
During Covid, I taught exclusively online for two years. I had to get an ADA waiver for the second year (2021-2022) because my asthma made me high-risk. My university had hired a new president whose answer to Covid was to force students and professors back into crowded classrooms with no mask or vaccine requirements, throw super spreader parties with free food and music to boost his PR, and ignore not only the epidemiologists working frantically on a vaccine at his own freaking university but also national and world safety guidelines.

It was at that point I decided that I didn’t want to work for an organization that truly didn’t care if I lived or died. I was beyond burnt out and edging towards severe depression.

In November, my kid got the Delta variant and gave it to me and my husband. My husband was hospitalized with blood clots in both lungs and almost died. I just kept teaching while running back and forth to the hospital, reassuring my kid, and generally over-functioning while also having side effects from the high-dose medications I had to take to treat my asthma while I had Covid. I was an emotional wreck for several months after.

During those years, I published a chapter in a book on Trauma Informed Pedagogy during Covid, won an award for pandemic teaching, served on multiple committees, did volunteer work, and generally stretched myself beyond endurance to serve a population of students who had inadequate resources for dealing with the traumas of untenable cost of living and housing, climate change, social unrest, rising systemic racism, rising hate speech and violence, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and misogyny. During the second year, I was also job hunting, interviewing, networking, and trying to change careers. It was insane. I was insane. I feel insane writing about this now. I was driven by the motherhood/feminine/service/education trope of “never enough,” and I never slowed down enough to notice I was drowning.

I will leave the systemic issues I experienced with universities and faculty for another post, but suffice it to say I was not compensated for the amount of intellectual, physical, and emotional labor I was pouring into my job, and it was utterly unsustainable. That’s why, after six years of teaching some of the coolest students on the planet and some of my favorite classes ever, I quit my job before finding another one. Stay tuned for part 2.

Why be a gender-affirming parent?

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So your trans kids live to be adults.

For families who have not encountered trans or nonbinary people before, it can be a huge shock when their kid says they are trans. While lots of accurate, evidence-based information is available on gender identity, we often retain the most exaggerated or inaccurate information because it’s screamed from our televisions or social media (or pulpits).

While we see more trans and nonbinary people on TV and in movies, and our current president openly celebrates the LGBTQIA community, those of us raised in an entirely binary world may filter out things we don’t understand or make us uncomfortable. This may not seem like a life-threatening emergency, but it is.

My kid has a bunch of awesome, queer-identifying friends at their middle school. Some of them have super supportive parents. One kid does not. They’ve tried repeatedly to come out to their mother and been told they are too young to know their identity, that their friends are influencing them, that they can’t be trans because they liked girly things when they were little, and that they’re not allowed to be trans until they are 20. They are consistently deadnamed and misgendered at home and by their extended family.

I can’t understate how dangerous this is. Queer kids are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their cishet peers. This number increases when they live with people who deny their identity and drops when they have gender-affirming families. This comes from nationwide data; we don’t have data yet on how living in a state hostile to gender-affirming care and trans rights affects suicide rates, but early data shows that it significantly negatively affects their mental health.

I live in Texas, which just outlawed gender-affirming care. Many of the doctors who provided gender-affirming care have left the state or quit their jobs for fear of arrest, fines, or losing their medical licenses. Child Protective Services in Texas has been empowered by the governor to investigate gender affirming parenting as abuse. Gender-affirming families with trans kids are fleeing Texas because they fear harassment by the government, having their children removed from their homes and put in the broken foster system, and because their children can no longer receive gender affirming medical care.

Just to reiterate, gender-affirming care is lifesaving. Whether it’s being accepted at home and school, working with affirming therapists and doctors, or hopefully all of these things, gender non-conforming kids are much less likely to consider or attempt suicide if they receive these types of care. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. Gender dysphoria can be excruciating, and kids who don’t receive support and care may resort to self-harm. This is not dogma; it’s science. Gender non-conforming people have always existed, in every time and place on the planet. They are not new. It is not a trend. Support and love and BELIEVE your gender non-conforming kids. It might save their lives.

Things that make me go “ARGH!”: A series

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Part 1: Dopamine Addiction Panic

In the realm of things with which I cannot, the current “dopamine addiction” nonsense is right the fuck up there. The AMA posted this article on LinkedIn:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/12/1180867083/tips-to-outsmart-dopamine-unhook-kids-from-screens-sweets

I really cannot.

First, things feel good because they have some short or long-term benefits. Something feeling good does not automatically equal addiction. To qualify as an addiction, behavioral addiction must substantively harm the quality of life, relationships, and finances. Your kid’s enjoyment of your iPhone is not a heroine addiction in waiting. Can the internet be awful? Yes. Is it a drug? No. No, it is not.

Of course, kids need boundaries. They need sleep and food, and running around is good for them. Depending on age, they have little to moderate impulse control. We scaffold this for them so they can learn to do it themselves. But this biohacking bullshit has got to stop. Every kid is different. The boundaries and motivations you provide for them must match their personality and needs, not your paranoia. Biohacking is a scam.

I’m semi-co-parenting with my quarantine family. They have two kids and I have one. Each kid is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. What makes them upset, what makes them happy, what they need when they are sad, what they like to do — it’s all different. Kids are different people with different needs. And your toddler will find something else to throw a tantrum about if you take away your iPhone and cookies – I guarantee it. They have tantrums to blow off extra energy and regulate their nervous systems. If you have a huge stake in what it is they are freaking out about, rather than what they need when they are freaking out, that is a you problem.

Second, you cannot raise a kid who is at peace with their body, has good impulse control, and cares about others if you constantly obsess over hacking their biochemistry to make them better. This all smacks of the same colonialist, white-supremacy bullshit that pathologizes sex, gender, eating, and existing in any body that isn’t white, male, young, and muscular. The construction of race was built around false ideas about white people having more self-control (rather than just some super culturally ingrained OCD) than other races because we could abstain from sex and starve ourselves into thinness (our ability to do so or not has nothing to do with race all of this was made up to justify slavery and indentured servitude).

Pathologizing eating and grafting moral qualities onto food can lead to weight cycling, which has long-term adverse effects on health, and eating disorders, which can kill you. Dieting is socially sanctioned starvation. Starvation is bad for you. Don’t fuck with your kids’ appetites, don’t judge their food choices, and don’t talk shit about your body or others’ bodies in front of them. And for fucks sake, don’t try to dopamine-detox them out of liking sweet things. Some people like sweet things. Some don’t. It’s not moral. Body size is not moral. Health is not moral. Most of this shit is genetic, but we pretend we have way more agency than we do and screw with our bodies and make them sicker, not healthier.

If you want more on this, I highly recommend the book Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith. You can’t raise kids free of diet culture’s madness without unpacking your own attachment to it. I also recommend following TheNutritionTea on Instagram. She’s a registered dietician who takes a weight-neutral approach to food and unpacks many colonialist assumptions about health.

Third. We naturally produce dopamine for all kinds of reasons. We can’t control that, nor should we try. I pare it back if I notice that too much TikTok is getting me down. I don’t freak out that I have a dopamine addiction and try to ban it. If I eat too much of something, I get a stomach ache, and then I don’t do that again for a while because I don’t like feeling sick. If only we’d listen, our bodies tell us when something is out of whack. This illusion of ourselves as some master being puppeteering our bodies from the outside is alienating af. We need connection and community with others, not a perfectly obedient body (that will still age, sicken, and die). Every time these stupid trends invade the hive mind, it alienates us from ourselves, leaving no room to connect with others.

Do you know what the most significant determinant of longevity is? Social connection. Not diet, not weight, not exercise, not income. As shown across multiple studies, our ability to connect with others is most likely to help us live longer. So maybe give the whole dopamine addiction thing a rest because it keeps us away from what we really need — each other.

It was never about protection. It is always about control.

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How homophobic, transphobic, racist, and sexist misinformation persists.

people holding brown wooden signage during daytime
Photo by Alex Motoc on Unsplash

(Published 10/2022)

The world is on fire. In some places, quite literally. When things get scary, a big chunk of the human race decides that something else is the problem, and usually, that something else is a group of people they think they can oppress. But this is sublimation; usually, the oppression comes couched in words like “protection” and “safety.” The killings of women and protesters in Iran are in response to the death of a woman whose supposed “safety” was hindered by her incorrect hijab. The French government and now more European nations are somehow “protecting” women by not allowing them to cover up or wear the hijab as they wish. Are they protecting Muslim women from themselves or non-Muslim women from the threat of not seeing their bodies as commodities for commercial exploitation? Hmm. Or maybe it’s just flat-out racism and resistance to multiculturalism. In any case, nobody is being protected. They’re just being oppressed.

In the US, far-right candidates, pundits, judges, and elected officials are banning books on being black, gay, or anything other than their idealized. Leave it to Beaver’s fictional version of America to “protect” kids. Black kids might think they are oppressed if they know what microaggressions are! White kids might feel guilty if they understand the lived experiences of their black, gay, trans, or disabled peers! Trans and gay kids might expect basic human dignity and rights! Oh, noes! They might be able to discuss OBJECTIVE REALITY with one another and want to change things for the better!

Control, Mary. This is about control. Controlling the information our kids learn in school and controlling what is discussable and what isn’t—controlling our species’ means of production: people who make babies.

Every draconian law Texas has ever passed limiting access to abortion and family planning has been in the name of “protecting” women from harm. HB2, which I protested with thousands of other women in Texas, claimed that abortions are high risk (they are not) and that abortion clinics are unsafe (they are not). Women trying to obtain abortions already had to deal with hateful protestors, an invasive internal ultrasound, and read pamphlets full of misinformation about non-existent side effects. It was already fucked up. Now it’s just gone. Women in Texas cannot get abortions if they are raped, molested, high-risk, or have an unviable fetus. Women must travel out of state for a D&C if they miscarry or risk sepsis. It’s mind-boggling. Sarah Weddington, the attorney who successfully argued Roe v. Wade and served in the Texas Legislature, was a Texas woman. So were Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan. These women did not need the false protection of men; they fought for the rights and dignity of all people, helping society to see how it was failing and harming the most vulnerable. What happened?

Texas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US, the highest in the developed world. Black women in Texas have a much higher maternal mortality rate than white women. Beyond the fact that this is incomprehensibly criminal, I think it’s safe to say that Texas legislators give zero fucks about women’s safety, whether pregnant or not.

Forcing children to give birth to their sexual abuser’s child is not about protecting anyone. It’s about ensuring the impregnator has more power than the pregnant person. Denying a person with a non-viable fetus or will soon be non-viable an abortion is life-threatening. It protects no one. It’s just about control. Denying Black women fundamental medical rights, pain control, necessary tests and procedures, or lifesaving interventions during birth is abhorrent. It’s about social control and sublimated fear based on 400 years of oppression.

Why do some humans seek to control other humans? Well, there are a few different answers to that. Some of it is economic. Creating a whole branch of fictional science about the genetic differences between dark-skinned and light-skinned people (essentially the creation of race as a concept) made America very, very rich. Slavery was the engine that drove our rapid expansion and eventual domination of the world economy. Its legacy persists in the high incarceration rates for Black people for minor offenses resulting in virtually unpaid labor. So more money for free labor.

Forcing people to gestate removes them from the workforce, impoverishes many, and risks the physical and mental health of the pregnant person and their family. But when you’re fighting for survival, it’s harder to fight for change.

But ultimately, this is all one giant self-own. Higher poverty rates mean less spending, which hurts the economy. Yanking women out of the workforce means a lower GDP. You can surf the wave of oppression and disenfranchisement for a little while if you are super privileged, but ultimately it erodes the fabric of the society in which you live, which will affect you too. Oppressive regimes always reach a tipping point where the population feels like they have nothing left to lose and fight back.

So no. Abortion bans are not about saving babies or protecting women. Book bans do not protect children. Mandating or outlawing the hijab protects nobody. Denying trans youth and adults access to medical care causes harm, not prevents it.

Under all this crazy lies one basic thing. Fear.

Specifically, existential fear – of death, illness, loss, and on a grander scale- of our survival as a species as we continue to fuck with the planet. This drives these increasingly pathetic yet deadly attempts at social control and power grabs from the local to the international level.

My dissertation research used defense mechanisms as an analytical lens to examine aggressive online behavior. So I have a lot of thoughts about how this plays out.

Sublimation is when we transform a fear (often repressed or unconscious) into something tangible we can project onto a group of people. It takes what we can’t deal with (childhood trauma, loss, etc.) and turns it into something tangible at which we can direct that energy. Hitler used this to great effect by making Jews the cause of all of Germany’s post-WWI loss’ ills. Jews had nothing to do with it, but they were a convenient and historically oppressed group, and blaming them gave form to the trauma that resulted from losing a world war and plunging the country into a deep financial depression.

We see this everywhere now. Everyone is the bogeyman. Trans kids. Feminists. Jews. Black people. Gay people. Parents of murdered children. Somehow groups of people with less power and less agency become the ones who have secret cabals that are controlling our minds with fluoridated water and space lasers. The WHO released a report that we need to drastically reduce our impact on the environment to avoid catastrophic global warming, but let’s just scream at each other about Kanye West instead. That should work out fine.

The purpose of defense mechanisms is to offload the stress associated with the repressed fear or trauma so we can function. In the short term and on an individual basis, it works. It may cause harm to those around you, but it discharges the energy associated with the fear or trauma for a little while and stabilizes your psyche. On a social level, it’s a fucking disaster.

We need to take a few deep breaths and look at the big picture. For our species to survive, we must stop victimizing each other and start using our collective frontal lobes to make major systemic changes to how we live in the world. We need to reverse population growth. We must remake our economic system as circular and self-sustaining instead of growth-dependent. We need to make sure all children have access to nutrition and education, and all people have access to family planning. We need to agree on and enforce human rights worldwide. Full stop.

This isn’t ideological; it’s survival. We are our own worst enemy and currently the planet’s worst enemy. We need all of us, not just a few unhinged billionaires, to work together to create a viable future for our species. We can do so much that is amazing. Can we stop reverting to our worst selves and put that energy toward peace, acceptance, and sustainable survival instead? Because that would be great.

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Aggression and Adaptation: A new working theory

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So I wrote my dissertation on the psychodynamics of online aggression. It was published in early 2017, just in time for the Trump Twitter phenomenon to start taking over the conversation about the power of social media to influence people. I was focused mainly on adaptive development.

My modest research showed a few interesting things:

Thing 1: If you agree with the premise that we are wired for adaptation (See the Freuds for defense mechanisms and George Vaillant for modern research on adaptation), then aggressive online discourse (arguing in the comments) may have a more significant developmental role, on both an individual and social level, than we have attributed to it.

Thing 2: At least in my sample at the time, which consisted of three discussions of a fatphobic YouTube video within the body-positive community (on three platforms), there were a lot of moderate distortions like projection and displacement, a smaller but significant amount of mature or adaptive behavior, and a statistically insignificant amount of psychotic behavior. In plain terms, many people wanted to argue about whether it was okay to be mean to fat people, but my sample of 150 comments across three platforms only included one violent comment. Given the attention paid to trolling and violent online behavior at the time, I concluded that we needed to pay more attention to adaptive behavior, as it was more significant and pervasive than truly maladaptive behavior.

Thing 3: This was the most experimental of my findings, but one pervasive theme that emerged from my analysis was the projected fear of death. People seemed motivated to predict fat people’s early demise to lessen their anxiety about existential realities like their own eventual demise.

Thing 4: (and this is where I just had an aha moment) There was a basic epistemological contradiction between a psychodynamic interpretation of online aggression and a sociological one. From a psychological perspective, people distort reality to partially, rather than fully, deal with it. Their psychological strength and experiences dictate how much they do this. Over time, they tend to distort less and deal with reality more as they grow in ego strength and experience.

On an individual level, displacement (projecting a quality onto a group of people) is more adaptive than projection (projecting a quality onto a single person) because it is more diffuse and less individualized. It’s less distorted. But from a sociological perspective, it seems like just the opposite. Prejudice is a pernicious bastard, and done en masse, it erodes society.

At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile these opposing viewpoints. How can what is good for individual development be shit for social progress, and vice versa? I’m more adept with developmental psychology than social psychology, so I just kind of sat with it and went, “huh.”

But the seven years since I finished my dissertation have been absolutely bonkers in terms of how the internet has grown, the growth of online communication, the spread of misinformation, and the sheer power of online discourse to affect the world. The weaponization of misinformation in this era has been breathtaking in the worst possible way. And in a truly frightening, chaotic era with both very real and imagined threats to our existence, many people have retreated behind the virtual walls of citadels of misinformation. A phenomenon that, from a psychodynamic perspective, looks like mass psychosis.

We are trying to grapple with pandemics, catastrophic climate change, and violent social unrest. Meanwhile, vast swaths of people are instead blaming vaccines instead of using them to protect themselves and others, targeting trans kids and their parents with harmful and fully debunked claims, and passing legislation to make teachers cease teaching anything that upsets middle-aged white men—and that’s just in the US.

So yeah, things have changed a bit since I wrote my hopeful, chirpy little dissertation. However, I’ve seen some synergy between how societies and individuals develop. There’s a saying in organizational studies, “Culture eats change for breakfast.” In organizational terms, that means that just because you hired a shiny, fancy CEO who made another company a lot of money, he or she may not be able to make shit happen at your company because the culture dictates what is and is not discussable and, therefore, executable. This is a thing I learned from my org development master’s, which I completed in 2007. When I was working on my Ph.D. I became rightly suspicious of a lot of the literature I’d studied in my previous program because it was super self-justifying of capitalism and mostly ignored any hint of structural inequality. We did not study Marx and grapple with the fact that capitalism is designed to extract maximum labor at minimal cost and pass the profits up to shareholders and executives. No, we sure did not do that thing. So while I still teach some organizational theory, I’m pretty sparing as I think a lot of it is willfully blind to how exploitative most industries are.

But back to “Culture eats change for breakfast.” What if it wasn’t just organizational cultures that did this? What if national cultures and ethnic cultured and religious cultures, and pop cultures did this too? What if social systems had enormous power to push or hinder individual development? I mean, it seems obvious now that I’m typing it, but what if we get stuck in a displacement loop, and we can’t break out of it because nobody around us can, and alternate viewpoints become undiscussable, just like they do in organizations?

So it’s the 1930s in Germany, and people are suffering after a grueling war, and there are these centuries-old, normalized (inaccurate) prejudices against Jews that turn into crazy conspiracy theories that make people feel like if they just follow the screaming mustachioed guy, all their suffering might go away because it’s easier to blame it on the Jews than deal with poverty and the horror of modern warfare?

Or it’s 2020, and the thing scientists said was going to happen any minute happened, and we have a worldwide pandemic that’s killing thousands of people a day. Still, it’s easier to blame the Chinese and Scary Jews and ignore established science than to wear a mask and wait for a vaccine and deal with how little power we have over the forces of nature that we have been fucking with at our peril. So our emotional immaturity leads to echo chambers of misinformation that feeds our immaturity and keeps us from working together to change for the better.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t successful at securing the right to vote for millions of Black Americans because he was a good orator. He forced white Americans to watch black children being savaged by police dogs and peacefully protesting Black men and women being beaten to death until white America had to face their prejudice and its impact on Black citizens and feel ashamed enough to support change. He and other activists disrupted the culture of white displacement (prejudice), at least partially, allowing for new laws and an end to some of the worst aspects of the Jim Crow era. Of course, prejudices still simmer under the surface and bubble up when people need someone to blame, but culture can be changed. It can push us back into our hindbrains or toward something closer to equity.

The internet is many things, and the one thing I have always believed is, like religion and governments and art, it is us. It is humanity doing human things. But I think I underestimated how networked mass communication changed things. I think the internet was disruptive, like the printing press or the wheel was disruptive, and we are still pretty fucking disrupted. I have no idea how this all falls out and how long it takes. I don’t know if we do ourselves in and the planet dramatically cuts our numbers down to a manageable level or if we figure out how to work together on a more inclusive, global scale. I know that the internet aids compassion and solidarity in many ways, just as it aids division. But I think it’s time to take a systems perspective on human development and recognize that while we are working on our individual development, other systems are working on us.

Our belief systems come from our cultural influences, which can determine whether we see another person as a sibling or an alien. I hope, for all our sakes, that we can break down some of the current mass displacement and projection and start to connect. But it will take courage. The courage to be uncomfortable, to feel guilt and shame, and to recognize that we are flawed. It will take the courage to make amends and then make more mistakes and make amends for those too. It will take the courage to stand up for those who are marginalized to those who have power. We can’t afford to hide behind easy-to-digest prejudices and misinformation anymore. We don’t have time.