Category Archives: Social Commentary

Gender, Sex, Kids, and Transphobia

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What grooming isn’t.

It’s hard to write something that hasn’t already been said about the insane spate of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-drag, and generally anti-anyone-except-straight-white-dudes laws being passed in my state and many others. My lived experience informs how I’ve experienced these things in several ways. I’m a college professor in the human sciences in a red state at a public university. I’m the mom of a disabled gender-nonconforming teen in a red state at a public school. I’m a scholar of sociology, psychology, and the psychodynamics of online behavior. I’m a privileged white lady. I will try to write about these issues from each perspective and see what emerges.

So. First, I’m a mom. No, that’s not my primary identity, but it certainly colors how I experience the madness that’s taken hold in my state. My kid uses they/them pronouns. They’ve experienced very little transphobia – a few olds who don’t get it, and some medical people who sucked. Let me say having a nonbinary presenting kid is amazing. By the time I was my kid’s age, I had been sexually harassed, come on to, and creeped on many times by older men, had my body continually commented on by women, and had been harassed by older boys. I had a feminine body, and I’m generally a femme person, which signaled HARASS THE CRAP OUT OF ME to everyone around me. Also, it was the 80s, so feminism was over (hahaha), and we were supposed to be flattered when dudes exposed themselves to us. My kid has experienced none of this. They took a good look at gender and said, “No, thank you.” I love this for them. I love how they develop as a human instead of a girl or boy. I love their gender-nonconforming friends and allies. I mostly love their school and supportive teachers. Having a gender-nonconforming kid is a joy.

This is balanced by the mind-numbing fear and rage imposed on me by a state targeting kids like mine and parents like me. I have a bit of protection since I live in a liberal city (and am privileged). Still, most of the red states are creeping into controlling large, liberal municipalities and stripping what little protection we have. Our doctors are leaving in droves. Our teachers are leaving in droves. Kids who need transition medical care must leave warm, supportive communities and move to new states to survive. And that’s only if the families can afford it. The idea that we somehow maintain freedom and protect families by targeting a small and very vulnerable population of KIDS is nauseating. So let’s get into the science.

I teach a gender and sexuality class at a major university in Texas. Most of my classes have some sociological content, as I am in a Human Development and Family Sciences department, which studies the health and well-being of children and families. The basics of gender are this. Humans are not a particularly dimorphous species. This means that there are relatively minor biological differences between males and females. However, the species have many variations (we look many different ways and have different bodies). That said, species that rely on sexual reproduction need a sex that provides genetic diversity (males) and one that builds new members of the species (females). Not all members of the species can do either of those things. Whether you can fertilize an egg or grow an embryo has exactly nothing to do with who you are, who you love, what you’re good at, or what colors you like. Gender is psychological and psychosocial. It’s a thing we may (or may not) feel and a thing that is imposed on us by our social system. Over the last centuries or millennia, depending on who you talk to, the idea of gender has been used to create harmful and made-up hierarchies. This also applies to race, another idea created to justify exploitation and mass murder.

Some people heavily identify with a gender; others do not. Those of us who do may not identify with the gender associated with our genitals because GENDER IS AN IDEA, NOT A FACT. Some cultures assign roles based on how people function as adults or teenagers rather than on reproductive capacity. Some cultures don’t really define gender at all. What we associate with gender changes constantly, even in cultures as gender-obsessed as ours. Flight attendants and cheerleaders used to be male-dominated, masculine professions. Pink used to be for boys, and blue used to be for girls. All of this stuff is mutable and heavily monetized and marketed.

What we are wired for is connection. Humans are social creatures, and all these ways we create hierarchies around ideas like gender and race interrupt connection. Research shows that our ability to connect with our loved ones and our communities is one of the most significant correlates of longevity. Connection = health and well-being. Disconnection = unhappiness and shortened life span. Tell me again how targeting people for being too different from our made-up, exclusionary norm is better. It’s not. #science

I study things like aggression, trauma, and online behavior. The obsession with policing ourselves, each other, and particularly children has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with maintaining social control. Far wiser people than me have written about this extensively. I’ll summarize what I’ve observed, studied, and found most helpful. The dying ruling class of this country is power-grabbing under the banner of religion, freedom, and democracy while representing quite the opposite. Unfortunately, those of us with proximity to that class often collaborate with them to our detriment to maintain dominance over everyone else. It’s kind of a mass psychotic Tragedy of the Commons. The Tragedy of the Commons is a parable that shows what happens when people overuse shared resources — everybody loses. But when we perceive a shortage of that resource, we have to fight our individual instinct to hoard it and understand how that will ultimately doom us and our community. However, regarding the perception of power in our culture, it’s not enough to hoard it because you don’t want to lose it. We will actually vote against things that are in our self-interest to make sure nobody else gets them, either. That’s a special kind of stupid. Not run-of-the-mill, short-sighted human stupid, but really ugly stupid. This is why our healthcare system is a mess, we have massive poverty and inequality despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and we have mass shootings on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Power and proximity to power seem to rot our brains.

One particularly insane bit of misinformation by the hang-on-to-power-at-any-cost population that has boggled my mind is using the word “groomer” to refer to LGBTQ people. A person who grooms a child manipulates them so they can sexually abuse them without being caught. Grooming is abhorrent. It has nothing to do with being gay or straight or trans or cis. The vast majority of sexual abusers are straight men. The institutions with endemic sexual abuse issues include the Catholic Church, the Baptist Church, and the Boy Scouts. The people spouting the LGBTQ grooming nonsense are equating sexual abuse — nonconsensual sexual activity between children and adults — with being gender nonconforming or gay.

THESE ARE NOT THE SAME THINGS.

Trans people, drag queens, and gay people are not pedophiles. They never have been. You can’t make your kid gay or straight, and you can’t make them cis or trans. They are just themselves. You can only make them feel terrible about being themselves or support them. LGBTQ kids have a much higher rate of suicide ideation than the general population, and that was before Texas and Florida and Tennessee and Oklahoma, etc. tried to legislate them out of existence. History will not look kindly on this era. Kids who sit at the intersection of multiple identities toiling under newly minted human rights abuses like anti-immigrant laws, book bans, and anti-DEI laws will be hit much harder still.

How did we get here? How did we reach the point where targeting children is considered sane and loving and supporting them is not? As a parent, a professor, and a scholar, I have lots of ideas, but really, I don’t know. I know that we have to fight misinformation. We have to stand up for everyone’s rights because “there is no such thing as other people’s children.” (Quote by Glennon Doyle) Your cis-presenting kid is facing similar stuff to what my nonbinary kid is — less protection against sexual assault, no access to reproductive health care, and less protection against racism, hate speech, and dumbed-down education. Kids of color are having their histories forcibly erased from school curriculums and removed from libraries.

Parenting is simultaneously the most joyful and terrifying thing I have ever experienced. All the time. I want a better future for my kid and their peers because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Give our kids a better future. Give them room to grow and develop and spread their wings. Provide a safe base when they need love and acceptance. Texas is making that harder for a whole lot of parents right now, and it’s wrong. Y’all means All. Protect trans kids, Black kids, disabled kids, and immigrant kids, and push back against the assholes who will trade our kids for one more second of useless power.

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

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, which has 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 fetus that is non-viable 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 environmental impact 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 we are 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 just stop reverting to our worst selves and put that energy toward peace, acceptance, and sustainable survival instead? Because that would be great.

A Tale of Two Governors

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Texas and Florida are the epicenters of the Delta strain Covid outbreak right now. Both governors have outlawed mask and vaccine requirements for publically funded institutions, which includes K-12 schools and public universities. I teach at one such institution.

My university does important research on Covid, yet the leadership refuses to protect students, employees, and staff from possible infection, disability, and death. We have been told that we must return to campus and teach in crowded classrooms, even if we live with unvaccinated children or immunocompromised family members. Students want online classes. Teachers want online classes. Staff wants flexible work arrangements for safety. No one cares. The university has not polled or requested any information from any of the affected stakeholders, and the president, most recently known for keeping a sports song that originated in minstrel shows and booting band members who don’t want to play it (against the recommendation of pretty much everyone) has decided that our fates are unimportant in the greater scheme of things. The greater scheme of things is, apparently, not pissing off our genocidal governor and making more money off the backs of students and underpaid workers, regardless of risk.

One of my students committed suicide last semester. While the university doesn’t publically share the number of suicides, I know anecdotally that many more students took their own lives. Many students lost family and friends to Covid, experienced deep personal trauma, and had severe mental health crises. Mental health resources in Austin have been maxed out for over a year. I spent a lot of time last year compiling mental health resources for students and sharing them widely, for what little good it did. Through all of this instructors and TAs also experienced trauma and loss while trying to adapt to student needs and university demands.

The current situation is untenable and deeply unethical. I know we are not the only university experiencing this; many of my colleagues around the country have been talking about similar situations with their work. So just for the record:

Our lives are not expendable. Our work is not expendable. Our students’ lives are not expendable. Grow a backbone and follow the science you make so much goddamn money off of and protect us from unethical laws instead of pretending that the inevitable illness, disability, and death is acceptable. It is not.

Trauma Informed Pedagogy in K-12 during a Pandemic: Some thoughts

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I have been learning about and teaching through the lens of Trauma Informed Pedagogy (TIP) for a couple years at the college level. Here are some of my basic assumptions and practices:

  1. I don’t know peoples’ stories.
  2. Many people have experienced trauma and I cannot predict or judge how my curriculum may affect them.
  3. I recognize that discrimination-based trauma is ubiquitous and I do my best to acknowledge harm and make amends when I cause, misunderstand, or overlook it.
  4. I try to center marginalized voices in my classroom.
  5. I acknowledge the influence of colonialism and patriarchy on the formation of philosophy and science and try to provide access to research by non-white voices.
  6. I provide trigger-warnings and alternate assignments for topics such as hate crime, police violence against people of color, domestic abuse, child abuse, and sexual abuse.
  7. I allow students to actively use self-care, including leaving the classroom or engaging in non-distracting breaks (drawing or looking at phones) if they are feeling triggered.
  8. I discuss and provide resources for counseling, mindfulness, and self-care on and off campus.

This is just a starter list – I expand it as I go and learn new things. In the Zoom school world, there has been conversation about video and how to manage TIP while teaching online. As a professor, it really helps when I can see my students’ video feeds. Screaming into the void is hard and exhausting. However, I don’t mandate video use because, again, I don’t know people’s stories. They might be homeless. They might be sick. They might be having a bad hair day. I’m not God, and I don’t get to choose for people how shitty they are feeling and which reasons are valid.

My daughter started the 5th grade this week and it’s mostly on Zoom. She did Camp Half Blood this summer for 4 weeks, all online, and it was EPIC. Like so good. So she’s fairly comfortable with the technology and how it works. But it’s very different to be in a Zoom classroom with stressed out teachers and stressed out kids with stressed out parents, trying to have a “normal” school day. I feel for the teachers. It is a whole damn thing to try and make this work with 10 year olds–can you imagine what it is like for first graders? I can’t even.

But here’s the thing. Some topics, like in my classes, are intellectual and easily discussed without getting overly emotional. Some are not. My kid spends most of her day with her two main teachers, and a few short sessions a day with the PE, Art, Music, Chinese, Library and Social Emotional Learning teachers. These topics are not all the same. How kids react to them is not going to be the same for a variety of reasons.

I want to see TIP practiced in elementary schools. If you are talking to kids about feelings and stress, they may get stressed out. They may have had relatives die in the last few months. Their parents may be out of work. They might be food insecure. Don’t force them on camera. Don’t make them parrot words back at you. Don’t threaten to call their parents in front of other kids.

Like just don’t.

Need to call on kids in math class? Probably fine. But remember, you don’t know their life. You don’t know if one of their parents is drunk and abusive and at home. You don’t know if they are worried about not having new clothes and looking bad to other kids. You don’t know if they have shitty bandwidth.

You. Don’t. Know.

I need elementary school teachers and counselors and administrators to recognize this nothing is normal right now. Pantomiming normal is not helpful for kids, it’s confusing. Compassion is helpful. Grace is helpful. Many teachers know this and do endless amounts of emotional labor to help kids feel safe. But please remember that kids do not have the same capacity for denial as adults. They can’t filter, and they can’t choose what makes them feel scared.

Whether you teach grad students or kindergarteners, please remember that you do not know what they have seen or experienced in the past few months. It is not your place to judge. We have to do our best to provide education under the weirdest of circumstances, and if we want our students to give us a break when we screw up, we need to afford them the same respect, no matter their age.

Historical Antecedents of the Quaranteam

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My family (my husband, daughter, and I) recently decided to invite another family to be part of our quarantine bubble, or Quaranteam. Texas is sucking mightily at flattening the curve (All Hail the Ravening EconoBeast), and most of us have pulled our kids out of the summer camps that remain, expecting to have a long, hot, boring, socially distant summer. The family we teamed up with is compatible in lots of ways: two kids that my kid went to preschool with, the older of whom is close in age, working from home/staying home parents, and a commitment to minimal exposure to COVID-19 through quarantine, the use of masks, grocery delivery, etc. We’ve hung out a lot over the last few years because it helped wear out our kids and gave us other interesting grownups to talk to and they are fantastic humans. We are politically compatible and share interests in nerd things. I’ve also hung out with both partners individually doing stuff like lunch or gaming. We all get along pretty well. It’s no small feat to find a group of seven humans who can stand each other most of the time. Sometimes our kids get into it, as kids do, but it works pretty well.

It was a huge relief to be near other people when we finally took the plunge. Whatever mental or physical deficiency (probably both) comes from not being able to be with your people was mightily assuaged just by an afternoon of hanging out and letting our kids play. We fist bumped. The kids hugged. Seeing my only child get her first hugs from other kids in forever weeks made me a little verklempt.

So I was explaining it to my therapist, and I kept coming up with this seemingly weird parallel. When I was 17, I moved to San Francisco to go to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I got two degrees and worked while flying around for auditions, so I was there for about seven years in all. I lived there from 1989-1996, during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Nobody close to me died, but people very close to people close to me did. A lot. Sex was dangerous. San Francisco is also a famously sex-positive, kink-friendly city that was an LGBTQ haven in a still homophobic country.

The upside of this is that sex was practiced frequently, enthusiastically, creatively, and very carefully negotiated in advance to ensure minimal risk. Everyone knew someone with HIV. Didn’t matter if you were gay or straight, in a city where those lines were super blurry to begin with, it was common courtesy to 1) disclose your sexual activities with prospective new partners, 2) discuss types of protection (and/or contraception if pregnancy was a possibility), and 3) disclose the last time you were tested or get tested before engaging with a new partner, even a casual one. There was a hotline you could call for free to find out the latest information on transmission and prevention. There was (is) a fantastic store for books, toys, videos, cheap high quality condoms and other protectives that was laid out like a clean well lit book store and not a creepy sex shop. Absent was the furtive, guilty, ignorant behavior often associated with sex, and sadly, still very much present in states where sex-ed is banned or limited to abstinence “education.” Yes those are snarky quotes.

So anyway, here are the weird parallels. We are trying to protect ourselves and our loved ones from a debilitating and potentially fatal disease. This is drastically changing our behavior patterns. When we didn’t understand how HIV was spread (and not spread) abstinence was the only safe option. Just as quarantine is the only safe option when we can no longer control the spread of COVID-19. We still have human needs for connection and proximity, which come into conflict with our desire to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. Hence, we deliberately, carefully, negotiate terms of engagement in a way that will hopefully carry minimum risk and maximum gratification. Same/Same. Ish.

The other parallels are much darker. Spread of HIV among heterosexual populations where discussing sex and prevention is taboo is still a problem, especially in places where effective treatment is too expensive or unavailable. Such is the case with COVID-19. But instead of people half way across the world being in danger, it’s us. Our government has utterly failed at controlling the spread of COVID-19, and the ignorance of much of our population, combined with structural inequality that puts low wage workers at much higher risk with little power to control their levels of exposure. Others refuse to believe that a virus is more powerful than they and act as if there is no danger. All of these issues exponentially increase the likelihood of infection for everyone else. In the 90s, if nothing else, we could stop having sex. But we can’t stop breathing, or eating, or working, and those activities or the activities that enable them put us and our loved ones at risk.

So I am happy to have some more people to hang out with and practice safe quarantining (as safe as we can be with an airborne pathogen), but I continue to be concerned about the misinformation and blatant idiocy that is keeping this disease active and dangerous. We are so lucky to have compatible friends and jobs where we can quarantine easily. We are also the recipients of tremendous unearned privilege. As my mental health improves, I wonder how I can compensate for this in some way. For those of you similarly safe – respect safe distance from others. Tip the crap out of delivery people. Speak loudly (and financially) in support of higher wages and safe working conditions for the people keeping our children fed. Don’t forget that the ability to quarantine safely is anything but universal. And just as the AIDS crisis of the 1990s was not the fault of the victims, but of a negligent government, your ability to avoid infection now doesn’t mean that you have done anything special to deserve it.

Everything is weird. With systems theory and some personal theology.

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The coronavirus has taken over all our lives, one way or another. I’m extremely fortunate to be able to keep working by teaching from home. My husband works from home. My daughter is also home and doing some schoolwork for the remainder of the semester. So I’m teaching 6 zoom sessions a week, plus meetings, plus doing most of the homeschooling, plus child-rearing and trying to manage her trauma and my own. It is a lot. But I am insanely lucky and privileged.

I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of feels. I’ve been through periods of trauma before. I was in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. I remember the giddy numbness that eventually faded into jumpiness and fear. But I’ve been home by order of our city since the middle of March and the giddiness and dissociation has started to wear off. What’s left behind is sadness and rage.

The sadness is for all the pain people are experiencing. For the people dying without their loved ones and their loved ones not being able to be there for the dying. I’ve been at a deathbed, and it is a traumatic but also sacred experience. I’m sad for the health care providers, caught in a tug of war between public servants and a financially and morally bankrupt industry and a toxic, dysfunctional government. So many have already died. All of this makes me deeply sad.

The rage is about the sheer idiocy that is pervading our government, and the idiocy of the people who are protesting or flouting basic safety measures that don’t go nearly far enough. I write and think about systems theories, a lot. I wrote this piece about systems theory and the environment and human limitations almost two years ago. I’ve been thinking about it.

The thing that has always gotten me isn’t the cruelty that is so obviously from a place of trauma and fear. I don’t approve of cruelty and believe it should be stopped whenever possible, but I understand how trauma can turn into psychotic projection, and how society creates an environment for it.

What gets me is the casual cruelty and dismissal that is so common and mundane. I can wrap my head around someone telling a fat person they should kill themselves because the source of their pain is so obvious. It’s abusive and not helpful or generative, but it’s a clear demonstration of projected trauma. I have a much, much harder time with this binary, cause and effect, self-centered, casual cruelty that causes people to rearrange reality so they don’t have to feel uncomfortable. Right now I see it everywhere and it’s making me miserable and angry.

Austin’s mayor got ahead of the curve (for Texas) and put in place rules for social distancing and shutting down non-essential services. We have had relatively few deaths for a population of a million. Cases are rising faster now, however, because it seems that many people can’t understand the basic trajectory of a contagious untreatable disease. You get it. You spread it to others before you get symptoms. They spread it to others before they get symptoms. People die.

I have some theories about this blindness. Particularly because the people protesting and calling health measures fascism are mostly my age or older and white.

White people are totally centered by American society. We grow up seeing people who look like us achieving the pinnacle of success in every field and sector of society. When we suffer, it’s tragic. When the other (black, latinx, disabled, gay, etc) suffers it must be because they have done something to make it happen.

This is a grossly distorted view of reality. Humans are not the primary system on this planet and our little genetic differences in appearance matter not at all to organisms like viruses and bacteria. Our constructions of societies and languages and countries and tribes matter not at all. And we are not the most intelligent system. The earth is. The earth is a system that is vastly more complex and intelligent than people on our very best day. Intelligent doesn’t mean conscious. And I am starting to doubt how important consciousness is to our survival as a species after all, since we seem to be using it to rationalize doing really, really stupid shit.

We are tiny organisms that are part of a much, much larger ecosystem. Population control via disease is a basic tool in nature’s toolbox. As many scientists have said, it was only a matter of time.

But white men (and women) have been living in an imaginary world where we are the masters of nature and our primacy in society is due to some assumed superiority of mind or spirit. And suddenly, we can’t escape the reality that we are very, very small in the scheme of things. We are helpless in the face of this virus, and we have a very small, very disruptive set of things we can do in the short term to keep from dying off in the millions.

White people can’t deal with this basic existential reality because we have been raised on exceptionalism. We breathe it, eat it, see it constantly in media ane art, and are constantly reminded that we are uniquely connected to the best of what humanity has achieved by our whiteness. So now there are protests and conspiracy theories (I particularly love the one about Bill Gates engineering the virus – because of course, it has to be a white man wreaking havoc on our species – it can’t be a non-sentient hyper-intelligent system we have no control over).

So faced with the existential terror of a death we cannot project or blame on someone other we create fantasy worlds where the virus is a hoax and people are not dying by the thousands every day and our president isn’t lying and stealing supplies from destitute hospitals full of workers who are dying while trying to save our lives. Where governors and mayors who are trying to save lives are actually Nazis trying to steal our personal liberty (whatever the hell that is) and where going to church won’t result in countless deaths over months as community spread creeps through our communities.

I don’t know how to cope with this. There is no Schadenfreude if these morons get sick, because by the time they do they will have infected hundreds of innocent people who are just trying to survive. They will orphan their kids. They will kill their parents. All because they can’t handle being small. This virus reminds us that we are tiny. I believe in God, and I believe that I am loved by God. But I don’t believe God loves me more than they love the ants I have killed by pest control or the Arctic animals losing their habitats. God doesn’t love me more than the black families who can’t get decent health care because of racism and exposure to toxic chemicals and stupid white people who refuse to pay attention to scientists. I am not loved more than the ant, or the person with darker skin than me, or the undocumented immigrant, or the endangered species. My God is the Universe, and they don’t play favorites with humanity.

I’ve been yelled at online by multiple people in the last few weeks who say I’m a terrible teacher because I question authority and that z-paks cure the virus and that black people are high-risk because they make bad decisions and our mayor is actually Hitler because face masks. And then I see the same bullshit said from the podium of the white house and from national news and retweeted over and over again. And I think, huh. If having consciousness means we can distort reality to the point that we do nature’s job for her and reduce our species’ population by millions, is consciousness really a sign of advanced evolution (or God’s favor), or is it a failsafe for Nature? Are the limitations of our ability to understand that we are not actually the center of God’s creation what will keep us from destroying it? That is terrifying and sad.

My daughter understands how community spread works and she’s 10. My students, on the cusp of adulthood, are arguing with their parents and grandparents about staying home while finishing natural science degrees from one of the best universities in the country. It’s not getting through.

I’m out of thoughts. I hope that somehow people come to terms with our smallness and start doing everything we can to slow the spread of this disease so we can make better decisions about how to live as a species on this planet in the future. But for now, I’m just sad. Here is a song that helps me connect to my sadness and to my kinship with all those suffering right now: