help me get to the allied media conference

I wasn't going to do this, but then I went to try and buy a plane ticket and went a little green.
(Laugh if you must, but I've never bought a plane ticket by myself before, and only flown alone for one round trip, ever. I've never even gotten myself a cab.)

I'm going to the Allied Media Conference in June. And I may empty out my savings getting there. Any donations to my travel fund would be appreciated overwhelmingly. I know most of y'all don't have any more than I do; every little tiny bit will help. And I can promise you that every cent of it will go to travel expenses, and I don't mean knickknacks at the conference or fancy dinners or cocktails on the plane or nothin'. One hundred percent.

I'm terrible at this PayPal stuff--I've never even used eBay, believe it or not--but I had a friend set me up a button for this occasion. My name is not on it, but I promise you the money will go straight to me. I can send a personal confirmation e-mail to anyone who chooses to help me out.

If I get even one way covered for the trip, I will do a posting marathon this summer, where I post as often as a normal, non-slacker blogger, like, every day.

Here it is, the amazing thanks-to-my-friends-who-know-how-to-work-computers Donate to Little Light Attending the AMC This Year Button:




Thanks so much to anyone who considers helping me out.

I, colonist

I think, now that some dust is settling, one thing is clear: we all have a lot of slack to pick up. And I'm the slowest blogger alive, so I need to step up and get a little braver, a little more incisive, a little readier to ask hard questions, in order to help close the gap.

So here goes:

I am part of the problem of gentrification.
I live in an amazing neighborhood that I love. I moved here a few months ago to move in with my fiancée, and this was a place we could afford--we're neither of us rolling in excess money, as young dykes of color, me in blue-collar work, her in childcare--and it's beautiful, and the house was empty. But this is a historically black neighborhood, and there are no two ways about that. It is slowly being artsified, rents are going up, storefronts are fancier: it's now an "Arts District." Old barbershops and auto-repair places and corner mom-and-pop bodegas are getting pushed out by fashion boutiques, art galleries, and expensive restaurants every day. Houses are renovated as soon as they're vacated, and soon get filled with white folks and yuppies. Students and artists are moving in, and working-class black families are moving out, further toward the city's margins, further out from this influx of money and prestige. This neighborhood is known, too, for being home to a huge percentage of the city's queer women, but that demographic is shifting as well, toward more queer men, more young upper-class women moving in and replacing the blue-collar lesbians who used to rule the roost. More young couples like me and my best girl and our upstairs neighbors, fewer established families with kids who go to the public elementary school down the block.

I love it here, partially because of what it was and still mostly is--a decent family neighborhood with backyard gardens, cracked sidewalks, brick elementary schools and hole-in-the-wall taquerias, where I can walk down to the butcher's and they know me, where my partner and I can afford a home with a living room and flower beds. But I have to recognize that that's why a lot of other people moved here, too--and that by moving here, they--and I--are changing the place, house by house, block by block, into something else.

I had the privilege not to think about all that when I moved in. I just saw an affordable home near things I like, with a park close by and a grocery co-op and a backyard I get to play in--it's a little tiny house split in two, one couple upstairs, one couple downstairs. I saw a decent kitchen, and room for a couch for the first time in four years, and stability and security for me and my partner. I didn't have to think about what I represent to my holdout neighbors, what I represent to the black church across the street, what I'm a part of. I had the luxury of not thinking about myself in the context of greater currents of change--I just saw something that would be good for me.

And that matters. I get to have good things, of course. I'm under no obligation to flagellate for having taken the best chance I saw for a decent place to live that I love, and it could be argued that, being brown and queer and trans and likely to be restricted by my own oppressions in where I can live, I'm not so much part of the problem as part of the leading edge of the problem, and it's just that people like me are a foot in the door for others who come after. In the end, I'm not going to move out, after all, and even if I did, that wouldn't fix it or reverse what's happening to this neighborhood. And whatever protestations one might make toward my own marginalization, the fact remains: I'm brown, but I'm not the kind of brown this neighborhood has historically been home to. I do blue-collar work now, but I probably won't for life, and I have the privilege to expect that. I'm not supporting kids. I have an expensive education and I'm probably not settling here for good, which makes me part of that transient just-passing-through class of young people who are less likely to get to know their neighbors, to invest in the neighborhood's long-term future, to raise their kids here, to build lasting community.

My privilege here matters, and ignoring it is foolish and wrong. Whatever my intentions, and however powerless I may be to stop it, I am part of a wave of change that negatively affects working-class people of color.

So what can I do about it, now that I'm here? How can I divert the changing of the tide at least enough to offset my being here?
Well, for starters, it's not enough any more to "think globally, act locally." It's well and good to go there, and it's a start, but it matters that I support not just local business, but neighborhood business. That means buying my groceries at the mercado down the block and the co-op down the street, run by people who live and work here, with goods from close by, whenever possible, even if it means less variety or luxury, even if it means prioritizing supporting a working-class neighbor over getting organic produce that honors my other principles. It means getting to know my neighbors, and making an effort to build lasting community even if I'm not here to enjoy it ten years from now, helping reinforce this as a place where people know each other and help each other, not a place where some girl like me can just pass through without thinking of her impact on everyone else. It means lending a hand. It means indulging the old lady next door in conversation even when I'm on my way somewhere else, and recognizing that whatever she thinks of me, she is worth listening to. It means connecting to the outreach group for young women of color a few streets over, and asking them what I can do to help. It means sharing from my garden when it's harvest time.
It means making sure that I am not just using this place's resources and what so many people have worked so hard to carve out and build. It means giving back, and it means solidarity even when inconvenient, and it means being a part of a community, even when it's uncomfortable or it's extra work.

This neighborhood deserves at least that much, and much more. I'm not doing all of it, yet: there's my privilege again. The fact that I'm even discussing this reveals choices I have that not all my neighbors do. I could live elsewhere, probably. A lot of them can't, and most of their children won't be able to live here.

I wish there were a way to just stop it, but I imagine it's not for me to think up. It's for me to look up the people right here who're already working on the problem, and to come in humbly without expecting to ride to the rescue and ask, "What can I do to help your work?"

Here I am.

dark days

You are a woman the world requires, and I am so grateful for you and your work.
Hasta la victoria siempre, hermana. You're a hero to so, so many of us.

See you around the bend.

getting hands dirty

Cultivation, foremost, is an act of faith.
There are the practicalities, of course. You can read your almanac or the book of your experience, do your best to predict when the last frost is, and the first of the blackberries. You can start your seeds indoors, test the soil, add fertilizers. Cultivation is about planning and knowledge and transmission, as well.
There are the brutalities, too. Garden, farm, or window box, the act of intentionally growing things comes with a lot of casual killing, from the bugs that eat your crop to the weeds that choke it--and what is a weed but a plant somewhere you don't want it, competing for resources with the ones you're protecting? Cultivation is also about judgment and guardianship, and the sometimes savage effort to maintain an order you've arranged, because the flip side of nurturing is showing your teeth to whatever wants to destroy what you've nurtured, often enough.
Then, too, it's about death and decay. Working in the soil means tilling under what has died from seasons before and recognizing the fundamental work done by mortality to make fresh growth possible. Cultivation is about honoring what's gone before and letting it be dead, too, so it can feed and found a new work.
Cultivation is a lot of things, but before all of them, it is about faith.

We had a freak snowstorm last week, which in March is very strange, around here. We're low-lying and rain-heavy, but rarely below freezing even in midwinter, and by this time of year it's often all sun and flower-buds. And we had snow, and hail, out of nowhere, for a couple of days on and off. The vegetables and herbs I started in pots out on the porch were brought in: less sunlight, more safety. And I know that for them to grow properly, they need to go outdoors soon, where I can't look after them all the time, where I can't come check up on them first thing in the morning with a little warm water and coo at how quickly my peas and mustard have grown. They'll have to go outside, and some of them--my strawberries have doubled in size--will probably need to go in the ground, or into pots too big for the living room.

There is no guarantee that there won't be another surprise frost. No guarantee of no more hail until October. You can plan, and predict, and draw lines and prognostications, you can figure out what's likely, and where the sun and shade are. But you can't be certain that there won't be a pepper-wrecking snow-flurry in April. And while you can viciously tear away the English ivy and the Himalayan blackberry until they can't strangle your apple tree and your onions, you can't defy the sky that way. You can't really keep the neighbor's cat from using your plot as a litterbox while you're not watching. You can't have an ironclad promise that some mole or raccoon won't come along in the night and take your roots and fruit. My own formidable mother never could keep the deer from nipping the blooms from her roses. Sometimes your carrots just end up compost for next year, and your wildflowers crow food before they're sprouted.

Planting seeds, and investing in them water and food and warmth and love, is a dedication to the prospect of an uncertain future. It's about accepting the premise that more seasons are to come, and that it's worth the risk to expect to be present for them. As the saying goes, "if, when the Last Day comes, you're on the way into your fields to plant an olive tree...plant your olive tree." It's a promise, however often broken, to focus care and effort on a world yet to come and to try not to break if something goes wrong. Maybe your roses are torn up by a hailstorm. You can try again next year.

Cultivation is an act of defiance. It says that no matter what the world may throw at you, no matter how unpredictable the vicissitudes of fate and weather and probable misfortune, you have chosen the courage of trying anyway. A sprouting plant, like any infant enterprise, is fragile and vulnerable. The cultivator accepts this, and moves forward knowing the way the ground lies. Tilling from a fallow field, working under the debris of past enterprises and planting new seeds, ultimately means making rude gestures at pessimism. It is a rebellion against every uncontrollable force that would take away what we love, and by definition cannot be futile. The heartbreak of a ruined crop, a matter of life or death for many people, still leaves the hope of a workable field for someone yet to come, some other season, even once we're gone. It will be ready for someone else to nurture until it provides them with beauty and sustenance and spring-green hope.

Those of us working to shield, water, and love these shoots and sprouts are often knocked down by the despair and fear of what the unpredictable skies might do to them. And many of us are too fearful to continue on and scatter more seeds, let alone set to plowing. But the skies won't get any more predictable by our fearing them, and neither will the neighbor's cat or the hungry deer, let alone some stranger's random malice. We can only do our best to prepare our plots, fertilize the soil, and know what grows best where; we can find ways to sustain ourselves with the compost of last year's failures and successes; we can stand up against what forces we can see coming and arm ourselves against. And then we just put in the daily work of weeding and watering and maintaining, and hope that hail doesn't come.

Hope is not a foolish standing back and pretending that all will be well if we believe it will. It requires vigilance, discernment, focus, and effort. It requires that we fight back the ivy, prepare the earth, and get our hands in the dirt if we want anything to come. It demands that we know our needs and desires and are prepared to shape what we have to make those goals possible, and that just as much we give a new life room to grow for itself. It also requires that we understand the world sometimes simply doesn't care about our tender pepper plants and darling blossoming peas, and we will lose them. Hope is not about gambling, you see, because hope is not blind, and it is not all about luck. It is about cultivation. It is about labor, and love, and faith: not the nonsensical faith of passivity, but the faith that encourages us to do the work before and trust that, even if the hailstorm comes, the work itself matters.

We can only put those beloved seeds out into the world and do our best to see that they have a chance. After that, it's all up to the hard work of hope.

good housekeeping

So, it's come to my attention that there are at least three college professors teaching my work in classrooms. Now, this is extraordinarily flattering, but it also means that I have to say a few things here, for my own sake:

First, all of my work is under a Creative Commons license. So far everyone has been gracious enough to link back to here, that I know of. My writing is free to distribute so long as it is attributed to me and to this site, nd so long as it's not published elsewhere without my consent.

Second, I would appreciate an e-mail or a comment from anyone planning to assign one of my pieces or sending students my way, just so I can keep track of who's where. There's nothing legal here, of course; I'd just take it as a courtesy.

Third, I like having this exposure, and I think it's an honor to be included in the educational process. If you were to contact me and want to attribute what I've written for the ease of students and for academic rigor's sake, it's very likely that I'd be inclined to help you with that process by giving you my actual name.

Fourth, this makes it pretty clear that I should be seeking a publisher. Is there anyone in the audience who would be able or willing to help me with that? I imagine my being published would be an improvement both for me, the writer, and you, the teacher forced to deal with the awkwardness of citing internet sources. Trust me, I've been there.

Fifth, uh, hi, everyone. Welcome. Hope you find something here that does you some good. Drop me a line, if you like, and let me know what you think, yeah?

ain't misbehavin'

My friend Graham, a feminist activist who I've been proud to work alongside out in the kind of activism where you have feet on the ground and an all-around sharp lady, has started a blog on sex work, feminism, public health and sexual politics. She's got a keen eye, knows her way around a sentence, and has a perspective that neither sugarcoats nor demonizes the sex industry or the people working in it.
Watch this space, folks. I think she's going to have some really interesting things to say.
Check it out: Red Spine.

if we do not hang together

A long time ago in a town called Cordoba there was a young music teacher named Abbas. Abbas was earnest, ambitious, well-known around town. Abbas was consumed with an obsession that nearly ended his life.

Abbas was utterly obsessed with the notion that, like the birds, he could fly.
Now, there are a lot of crags around Cordoba, and a lot of birds, so there was plenty for young Abbas to pay attention to. He had a keen eye and an inventor's zeal. He was certain that he would be the first human being to soar among the clouds, the very first to ascend to the heavens. He would leave behind this great crusher gravity, remove his feet from the earth, and dance up with the gulls and eagles. He would be gone from down here, from his prosaic music-teaching existence, and ascend past the height of poetry to somewhere newer, better, that none of his fellows could go. Like a falling angel's opposite number, he would blaze up toward Heaven.

Abbas watched the birds. He made sketches. He began to spend every waking moment nursing his idea, sleeping with it held close when he could sleep. Wood and cloth took shape by his workbench, changing every day with some new addition, some adjustment of the curves. He would collect feathers, and attach them to it wherever he could. And finally Abbas had a pair of wings, a great sail he could strap to himself and fly away with. So he made the announcement: everyone from far and wide should show up to the cliffs outside of town tomorrow afternoon, because for the first time in human history, a man would fly like a bird.

Now, in that day and age, there wasn't much to do around Cordoba that didn't involve hard work and sheep. And when the choice is your day's labor, or a spectating at a grandiose tragedy, most human beings don't have a difficult time choosing.

The hour came, and there was Abbas; some say on the roof of a tower, some say with his feet firmly planted on the cliff-top. His miraculous wings were strapped to his back. And, depending on who you listen to, he was naked, and had glued feathers all over his body. Abbas made his announcement. And then he made his leap.

Abbas and his wings soared, but they didn't get to Heaven. The man transfigured sailed in a straight line for the length of three football fields, by all accounts, over grass and trees and houses and an astonished crowd. And it was only then that Abbas realized, in a flash of insight, that he had forgotten one feature in his design, had passed over one function of a flying machine that ought be considered earlier than late into its maiden flight.
He hadn't thought to design it to land.

The music teacher came to Earth again with a sickening crunch, alive but broken in the wreckage of his miraculous wings. And in his long convalescence, Abbas had plenty of time to modify his design, to become obsessed with newer, better wings, wings that had a tail like a bird's attached, a mechanism for steering and slowing down so a flying man could safely return home to the ground. The trouble was, Abbas couldn't get a running start any more. He could barely walk. And there were, shockingly, no volunteers to test the new pinions, and they mouldered, unused.

Abbas ibn Firnas didn't get to Heaven. He did not make it, alone, to the dome of the blue sky, there to leave behind a normal life forever. But he did have another hobby, and a new obsession. Abbas couldn't get up to Heaven, but he could bring a piece of it down.

So he ground lenses. He built telescopes. And, immersed in study, surrounded by skeptics, Abbas began a new masterwork: an intricate planetarium, one that would bring the stars and the planets close enough for anyone to touch, not just one flying man with a broken dream. It had to be perfect. It had to mimic the wheeling of the constellations, the positions of the Sun and Moon, even the weather. He worked on it, day and night, with his back and legs aching from old disappointments.

Abbas wasn't a young man forever, but by the time he was an old man, there it was: a piece of the sky brought down for everyone to see, a bit of Heaven you could get close to with your feet still on the ground. And by all accounts, he died happy.

That planetarium is gone, but it can still instruct us. Too many of us think if we can leave our fellows behind, if we can just make our devices perfect, we can escape from our human contexts. We can get out of where and what we are, and get to our own Heaven, so long as we're willing to leave everyone else behind. We can make our one pair of wings and ascend. As it turns out, some of us even manage to fly a ways, to soar over houses and mud and gravity, over oppression and degradation, over our own histories. We manage for a little while to separate ourselves out and get close to what we want.
And then it all comes crashing down, and there's nobody there to catch us, there's nobody there willing to carry on our schemes for us, there's nobody who understands what we were trying to do. And it's our fault. We didn't include them from the first. We didn't explain it. We didn't want their help, or their contagion, or the embarrassment of association with them. We wanted to get ours, and get away, and buy that ticket to the skies.

There is another way. It means not getting everything we want, sometimes. It means tinkering with the dream, a little. It means giving up flying away from all the dirt and rock we stand on, and seeing what can be done down here. It means letting go the notion that, alone, we can leave behind others and escape context and history. It means working for each other, not just ourselves.

We can bring some of that Heaven to each other, instead of running for it alone. We can build it, right here where we stand, if only we can set aside the self-centered obsessions for a moment and take stock of what we have. We can sacrifice that lone flight into the wild blue in exchange for making a better world that all of us can share, one with joys for the folk who don't have the privilege of spending days and months building personal flying machines. We can look past the privilege of miraculous wings and devote ourselves to a greater, deeper, more long-lived miracle: creating edifices on the ground that elevate all people. Not everyone has the money and time and material to buy their own wings and workshops. Not everyone can climb a cliff to begin with, let alone wearing nothing but feathers and pride. Why do we keep thinking that it will work to abandon those around us and, by so doing, buy our way to the gates of Paradise? Why do so many of us forget how much we can all see if we just join hands, take up our tools, and dream together?

There are many of us with a half-finished pair of wings in the yard, a new design set aside for far too long, the wreckage of one that didn't work out, the broken bits of past disappointments and hurts. The one thing that can heal those wounds is community. It is solidarity. It is letting others in and joining with them to contribute to something larger than our own comfort and ambition. It is choosing to use what privilege we do have to give more people access to what, before, was far out of reach. Let others invent the hang glider and the airplane and the Tower of Babel. Let us instead turn our brilliance toward something that can be shared, and that, because of its collective strength and firm human foundation, is much harder to knock down.

a note

Hey, so I'm suddenly getting a whole lot of traffic from a Willamette University message board that appears to be linked to a class. It's all headed toward "The Seam of Skin and Scales."

Welcome, Willamette students. ...any of you care to let me in on what's going on over there?

comfort

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed--with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun." --Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 (NRSV)

I woke up to bad news today. It didn't stop coming.

It was a bad story, and badly told. But the point is straightforward: another sister murdered today. Another name for the Day of Remembrance. Another young trans woman of color, stabbed to death. Another voice we're never going to hear again. Another world, another way, another life, stomped on and punctured and torn open ragged and wet and, in the end, missing.

And another set of jeering, contemptuous onlookers. Another bunch of cops whose first sympathy is with that poor, traumatized ex-convict who stabbed her to death and got her blood all over him, poor shaken guy, duped, tricked, threatened, violated even, though God no, it's no reason to murder someone, it's just, well, you can understand why he would. Another crew of reporters willing to sensationalize and abuse the story of another murder victim, to spin it and twist it until she brought it all on herself, until all the facts of her life and hopes and dreams and loves, her favorite foods, her warm breath, her days and nights and days again--until all of those are reduced down to nothing but a list of exploitable physical flaws, a flock of whispers and insults, a splashy, lurid headline. Until it's all just her shoes and her measurements and a name and idea she worked so hard to leave behind, as though the past years of her own making, besides the snide references to her breasts, can be undone--chipped from the record of history like the name of a hated pharaoh or a long-since-disappeared political rival, scrubbed clean from anyone's having to deal with the complexities of her situation.
Until the public can be satisfied that it's finished the murderer's job. He ripped her breath and blood out of her, after all, but her body remained, in an abandoned pile of meat and bone and contemptible breast implants. Her name remained. Her memory remained, even in neighbors who assumed she could only have so many callers because she must be a whore like all her kind, even in family far away, even in the simple things left behind in her Bronx apartment.

We couldn't have that. We couldn't allow that residue to stay on our daily concrete.
There's nothing new under the sun, okay? But we erase what we cannot stand to remember was here, as best we can. We turn the hose on those sticky bloodstains and try desperately to fence the stolen goods, patch up the places where it's obvious something is missing, make sense of the fact that a twenty-five-year-old woman was here just the other Saturday, laughing, a cheerful fixture of the neighborhood if anything's to be believed in those reports, and now she's not, she's a statistic, she's a corpse, and we can't even afford her the dignity of having been complicated. Because it's not enough that a man more than a decade her senior, with a criminal record, seems to think it was appropriate for him to commit brutal murder, or that for many onlookers, he's the hero of the story. We need to make it make sense. We need to make her make sense. We need a reason that a person might do such a thing to another person, and the truth is just so hard to look at--the truth, and our whole society's complicity in that truth--that we have to turn it inside-out and make it her fault, not his, not ours, just in order to preserve the fragile avoidance of the fact that this world can be terrifying, that it's the people who respond to not seeing what they want to see with knives who often have those knives ready, that those on the bottom fighting for a chance to just scrape out a safe, warm place in this world more often than not do not get that place. The breaking is there, the breach in what ought to be, and we cannot look at it, so we have to sweep at the edges of it, put its weight on those who aren't ourselves, and make them carry the burden of their own oppression so we don't have to know that they are like us, and that we are like them, in how quickly our own breath can be torn out.

We all might die alone. But some of us have to be ground and ground and ground down into the ground so the rest of us can feel a little better about our own chances at avoiding it. We have to make them more alone, even in death. We have to take away their names and their dignity. We have to take away even the chance that they might be mourned as real human beings who are gone and never coming back, who are missed by loved ones somewhere, who meant something. A murder is incomplete, and we cannot stand ending on an unresolved chord. We all have to join together and finish it, so the eyes of the murdered cannot accuse us in our sleep.

We do this to each other.

We did this to Sanesha Stewart, who is dead.

We did this to so many. We could do it to me, tomorrow. How many of you would know, in another obituary about a deceitful boy with breasts who had it coming, that these words were mine, and that I was gone? But the dead are not, indeed, more fortunate than the living, though perhaps they are more comfortable. Oppression still weighs on those of us with breath, but we have a chance to look it in the eye. We have the chance to put our hands against it and push. And maybe this is not enough. Maybe it doesn't make up for our hard days, and our hungry children, and our bruises from the business end of injustice after injustice. Maybe this is all vanity, and chasing after the wind.

The living don't have the luxury to care, because we're here, and most of us plan on going on living. And it wasn't enough for Sanesha Stewart, but it might be enough for me. Or you. Or someone you never knew had it coming until they ended so senselessly that some stranger decided to tell you they deserved it, just to finish that job. In the end, it's still better to light a candle than curse the darkness, even in the face of a darkness that viciously extinguishes candle after candle, light after light, because it has to be done. And we can do it together, we can stop this erasure, we can stop this sacrilege, we can stop losing more and more family, until maybe we can put down the nausea and see the dead waiting for us to pull it together and give them reason to rest.

It has been a long day, full of worry and sorrow and grief and fear. But I'm not alone, and I still have my name, and I still have breath to lend to this, and we can do this so long as we remember that we're not alone, any of us.

I will hold my partner a little more tightly, tonight.
Keep safe, everyone.

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken." --Ecc. 4:9-12

in making-up-for-the-weather news

Despite many efforts to block it, Oregon finally has domestic partnerships that are, in all but name, equivalent to marriage.

Here's the ruling.

We're got miles yet to go, but today, for just a moment, I'm going to sit and be proud to be an Oregonian. I was there cheering for the very first same-sex marriages in Oregon, and I was there for the heartbreak of having marriage equality shortly after taken away. The other night I saw a woman twice my age weep openly that this was even on the table and could be rallied for. And we did it.
We did it.


A contrite and deferent hat-tip to the ever-wise Sam at Xyre.

hanging around in the lost and found

If you're a student of ancient history, you've probably stumbled across silphium, or something like it.
Silphium is all over the literature of the ancient Mediterranean. It was used extensively by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and probably the Phoenicians and the Berbers and other North Africans--that is, anyone near enough to the areas it could be found to grab a handful. And "extensively" is not an exaggeration: the Hellenes record using silphium as a sovereign remedy for everything from headaches to fevers, as a birth control and an abortifacient, even as a popular cooking spice. An entire city's economy ran on it, and ran well. It was pictured on currency, pastoral pieces were written about people harvesting it, ancient doctors raved about its myriad uses. It was considered priceless.

There trouble is, we don't know what silphium was.

We know silphium was a plant that grew wild around the Mediterranean, especially along the African coast, and that it was hard to cultivate its most potent varieties in any kind of quantity, so it was encouraged to grow wild all over the place. We have rough pictures of it, stamped on coins and painted on pottery. We have descriptions of the way it was processed down into medicine, down to the ungodly reek that potsfull of its resin produced. We even now have documents pointing out other plants that some of its proponents believed were similar or related to it; asafoetida, which we still have, was considered a poor substitute by Roman physicians, for instance. But none of those ancient readers felt the need to identify which plant silphium was in any detail.

The trouble for those of us now reading is that there was never any need to explain what silphium was, or describe it in detail, because it was so ubiquitous that it must have seemed silly to do so. Nobody in a modern conversation or a modern novel hands a bottle of aspirin to a friend, pausing to note, 'This is an aspirin pill, a small bit of compressed powder of synthesized willow salic, a chemical derived from the bark of the willow tree. We use it as an anti-inflammatory and painkiller despite its deleterious effects on the liver and stomach.' And indeed, few of us reaching for that bottle of pills know where aspirin comes from. It's everywhere. There's no need to know; you can trust that the people who made it knew what they were doing and where they got it, and that when you put it on your grocery list, whoever reads it will know what you mean. Casually describing the rest of it comes off as redundant, pretentious, and unnatural.
We know where silphium fits in the ancient Mediterranean. We have a rough idea of what it might have looked like, a few snatches about the smell, some idea of other plants related to it. We can guess, with reasonable accuracy, that it was probably an extinct relative of fennel and parsley, of all things. But nobody felt the need to leave us an elaborate map pointing at where to find this sovereign remedy, this popular cure-all. They assumed it would always be around, and that our parents would be able to tell us, and their parents tell them. And somewhere around a thousand and a half years ago, that got shaken up, and it was gone forever, due to overcultivation, or desertification of the southern Mediterranean, or simple neglect. Maybe there's still a few clumps of it in Tunisia that someone drives by every day without knowing.

History is full of these things, no matter where you go, things we can circle around, draw rough outlines of, even make very good educated guesses about. But we don't have them any more, and we're different people now, and nobody thought to leave us careful instructions because they just assumed that what they had would always be there. There's an entire genre of Song Dynasty Chinese poetry that's really song lyrics, but we don't have the tunes any more in part because they were so popular they didn't need to be written down. There are buried cities that periodically turn up all over Arabia that we don't even know the names of, any more--huge capitals of trade and art just vanished, when once everyone knew where to go to find them.

When I first began my transition, I searched desperately for context. I grew up in a small town surrounded by miles and miles of sagebrush and juniper and lava rock, where storms would come rolling down from the north and have nothing to stop them for the length of another three states. Nobody gave me patterns for what I was going through. Nobody gave me a starting place. I was off the map. So being who I am, I ran for the library, and I pulled out every book I could. And in between all of the autobiographies and sociology and theory, I was shocked to discover that there were all these rough pictures, throughout history, of people going through something that looked similar.

It wasn't the same, I later found out. They had other cultural contexts, in different times and places, with different tools and ideas to manage what looked very much like gendered lives outside of a biology-bound binary. I looked, though, at those stone tablets, at those translated manuscripts, at those colonialist records of destruction, and I found not only people familiar to me, but societies that had places for them.
Often enough, it wasn't explicit. There were words that were considered hard to translate, or that had no English equivalent at all. There were pictures of people who didn't seem like the other men or women in their societies. There were references, here and there, to crossing boundaries of physical sex. There were records of social and work roles. Some were more complete and detailed, though often colored with the confusion and disgust of colonizers and cultural imperialists. Some were the vaguest of conjectures. Some were just indications of where certain kind of people fit, how they dressed, what they ate, what they did, who they loved, without specifying who they were; why do so? Everyone knew who was being talked about. It was elementary.
Like many before me, I ran up against too many missing pieces to get those shattered pieces of human life back. Even extant examples of living, breathing people in parts of the world far from me were irrevocably altered by colonization, globalization, and the inevitable turning of time, and I found little desire to exacerbate that process with my own intellectual invasions. I had substitutes to find, and bits of culture or idea that, by crude replication or convergent evolution, performed similar work in my own cultural context, in my own life. There were relatives in that family tree I could cobble together. But those histories, no matter how important and how much they informed my own approaches, were histories. What they recorded was gone for good, and even if I could take it back I in most cases had no right to. Ci songs had gone tuneless. Silphium was extinct, or missing, but certainly out of reach forever, and something else would have to take its place if its kernel could not be found hiding somewhere. Whatever was left of it was changed enough to be unrecognizable, buried under centuries of sand and silence.

Somewhere in there desertification set in, or maybe over-farming, or maybe unsustainable harvests, or maybe simple neglect. Maybe it was just wholesale murder. One way or another, the gears and tides of history moved on, and something our ancestors or their neighbors had--had so much of they took it for granted, that they never felt the need to explain it for posterity because it was elementary, because it was easy, because it would always be around, because it was so normal as to be an absurd object of study--went away and didn't come back.
There were cures that disappeared, people there stopped being room for, solidarities that were so commonplace as to be unremarkable until they dissolved into dust or were stomped into oblivion.
Some of them we need now, and we find that empty space, between the potsherds and the pastoral poetry, where once was something that could have done us some good. And we're left with the task of finding it again, or finding replacements. Human stories and human objects and human lives were lost. How do we rebuild? How do we cobble together new cultural spaces, new cure-alls, new places to fit something that we ourselves will someday take for granted so thoroughly that our descendants will scratch their heads and wonder what we're talking about?
And when we rebuild--how do we preserve it? How do we take these tools and keep them safe so our descendants will know what they were, and be able to make use of them? How can I describe my life, and written where, so that it will be helpful to those who come after? How can we make our hearts' work stick, our solidarities solid? How can we make sure our replacements don't need replacing?

There were times and there are places not my own, where someone like me might find a place that looks like home. I, and others like me, am tasked with finding something that works for me and for those on whose behalf I've chosen to work in the here and now. We have to cultivate, and harvest, cures for our own society's stumblings and sicknesses. And if we succeed so thoroughly that what we distill is accessible to everyone, what then? How do we weather history? How do we keep the places we build, the growth we achieve, the linked arms and shared voices we hold together from losing their meaning the more they grow?

Maybe we need to start by looking at what's already been lost. Maybe we need to understand what's missing and that much of what we ourselves become will someday go missing, too, and that it's up to us to make sure the important parts are still there for those who will come after us. Maybe it's just a matter of not assuming that these things we hold dear will be there when we're gone, and doing a little more work to make sure that even if our own fields are someday empty of them, that they grow wild somewhere else.

phone booths, v: broken voices on broken phones

(Previous installments of the Phone Booths series here, here, and here. "Phone Booths" part 4 is currently in a vault; I can, indeed, count.)


A while back I lost my voice.
I've been thinking about that, lately. In the long tail-end of my illness, I've found myself laryngitic, stopped up, hoarse. I find myself repeating old nightmares where something important is happening, and I open my mouth, and nothing comes out but a whisper, and it's never, ever loud enough. I find myself revisiting silent childhood hours in the backs of closets and homemade bird-blinds, back when, though nobody now believes it, I was quiet.

But those are moments and inflictions and afflictions and airy nothings, in their way, though they go deep. A while back, not a long while, I found myself losing my voice.

One of the hardest things about the kind of transition I am currently going through is that while the chemicals and processes, laws and re-namings with which I currently reshape and reclaim my body can rearrange a great deal, there are some effects of my history that cannot be edited. One of those is the effect of testosterone on the larynx. It adds flesh that does not atrophy or melt away with simply hormonal treatment or complex practice. That organ is lengthened and thickened and inclined to stay that way.

Sometime around seventh grade, always too quiet except when provoked to long, breathless encomia about my latest scientific obsession or favorite novel, painfully awkward, I became fascinated with music. I had always hidden from music, because I grew up in a profoundly musical family. My father and brothers each to some degree have perfect pitch. They are all talented in the extreme; my father, rusty from years of focus elsewhere, is now only an accomplished pianist and harpsichordist, but my brothers can each play upwards of seven instruments with proficiency and panache, and sing in a way that always leaves you wanting more. Music appreciation came to me from my first steps on, a necessary discipline and source of pleasure, but--surrounded by people who could appreciate a level of nuance and mastery I felt locked out of, like a colorblind child in a family of painters, I found myself embittered, and hid. My fingers were too clumsy to dance on the keyboard. My ear was too impatient to learn the rhythms and the keys. I preferred, instead, to play hooky from piano lessons and cajole the teacher to take me out back, to her stable, where she taught me the care of horses, the cleaning of an iron shoe, the facts of heredity, the pungent realities of mucking out a stable stall, the hard work of training and moving with a creature without a common language.
And one day, weedy, thirteen, freshly bruised from some intimidation, walking down the cement-brick hall, I heard it: harmony.

I began to give up my lunch periods to huddle unseen in the vestibule of the choral hall, ducked out of sight of the window in the door, utterly rapt. They rehearsed--a junior high school chorus, of all things!--and I was fascinated on a level that became religious. There was a piece of heaven there I had somehow missed in my entire childhood drenched in Bach and the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Beethoven. One day, inevitably, I was discovered, curled up outside the door; the rumor was that I was there to stare clandestinely at a pretty girl in the back row. Blushing, I allowed it: how much less embarrassing was the truth? The teacher simply smiled, confused, and invited me to sit inside the room while they practiced. Eventually I was moved into the back row myself, though it was some months before they discovered I was skipping meals to do so, attending an extra class a day just to be near the music, and shuffled nervously to make my devotion legal. I was enrolled in the choir, untrained, strained, croaking, enthusiastic and always struck with headaches at the high notes.

That was when the teacher began to realize she had an unusual child on her hands. Eventually my secret was torn out of me: I couldn't sing the baritone part. It was far too high. I was the first basso profundo she had ever taught. Though I never mastered the technical theory, I could feel chords, right or wrong, in my chest and in my bones. I was used as a secret weapon in competitions, dragged out suddenly to rumble out a low C and grind out gospel and blues with a voice children my age should not have had. Suddenly my voice was the thing--I could not sing like my brothers because I could not sing like anyone we knew my age. I was, however, called on for impressions of Louis Armstrong and James Earl Jones. I was, eventually, cast as a string of stage villains as long as my arm, stentorian, sinuously resonant, and with a few more years of training and practice, able to shake people's chairs, bounce my rumblings from the back of large auditoriums, drown out an entire choir without a microphone. My voice was huge. The casting shifted from petty Shakespearean noblemen to Death, and then the Wrath of God. And I took greater joy in it than I could say. My voice was my own, and it shook my whole body like the sound-box of my brother's guitar, like the string-full bulk of my father's piano. It poured emotion out of me whenever I needed the outlet. It did whatever I asked of it, except for those high notes. It was witchcraft. It was pride.

By high school, it was something else, too. A friend shoved me in front of an anti-war demonstration shortly before my fifteenth birthday, and someone handed me a microphone, which I did not need. And I froze for a moment, and then words came out, words upon words, with a pattern, with a picture. I didn't know how it happened, but they were clapping, they were hugging me, and someone cried.
I didn't just have a voice. I had words to use it for, my own words, not a script's, nor a score's. I could get up in front of people and say things that mattered. It wasn't just pride: it was an instrument of change, a connection to other people, maybe even a calling. I was a preacher, and suddenly the voice was not just my own. It was something I could give to ideas that I felt mattered. I could speak, not just for myself, not just for an audience, not just for the sake of glorious noise, but for standing with others.

And then it was a millstone around my neck, because I trained it lower and lower, for more and more resonance with whatever I asked of it. When it was pointed out that my speaking voice and my voice on stage, in song, were hugely disparate, I caught the hole in my persona, and dropped the speaking voice an octave or so. And when I sang the blues, I meant it. When I sang "I lay down this world" with my best vibrant Gospel exhaustion, I meant it. Because I was trapped in a person I wasn't.

And when I came out, that voice was a problem. I'm not particularly tall, or broad. As my family goes, I came out small, and curvy, really, with long hands and big brown eyes. Even before I started my physical transition, I didn't have a great deal of trouble being read as a woman--at least until I opened my mouth. I heard it over and over: "I'd never have known, until you started talking." "I'd never have known, until you opened your mouth."

The other side of that was obvious: "You can have the life you want, the transition you need, if you just don't open it. Shut up, and you can have the world."

I was soaked in the messages every other young woman gets, of course, by that point. Keep quiet. Nod and smile. Defer and demur. Make your sentences into questions. Keep it soft. Keep it sweet. And while I was proud and relieved to let go of the part of male privilege that encouraged me to interrupt, to talk over, to drown out, I began to drown myself in this. If you want your life, if you want to get by, if you want to be safe, keep quiet. Don't rock that boat. Don't demand your place at the table. Accept that you are unacceptable. Understand that you cannot be understood. Don't push it. Don't push it. Don't push it.

Just. Shut. Your. Mouth.

And I choked back so, so many words.

How many vibrations of my vocal cords did I waste? How much did I throw on the scrap-heap of my head, to rust unsaid for fear that it might mark me less-than-real? How many knives did I force into my voice, like Abraham and Isaac unhalted, desperate to sacrifice it for my undeserved place in the world?

I cannot say. I cannot say. But my breath was held back, eventually, even my gestures growing smaller, as I tried to make myself breathy and unthreatening and demure. And I could not say, though, like another voiceless girl I'd met as a child, my feet ached and burned with each silent step in a world not willing to make room for an immigrant who smelled like the sea.

Something burst within me, over and over. Because I had felt it, singing in me, once, as I sang, as I shook crowds: that my calling in life would require my voice. That my voice would not only carry me, but could be a comfort to others, would not be a career but a lever for a better world, somehow. It seemed big enough, then. Its vibration seemed strong enough. And here I was, faced with what looked like the worst of choices: do you take your calling, your great chance to give something to the people around you, your meaning, while giving away your chance to feel whole and worthy of love? Or do you complete yourself as a human being, make your skin and bones and face tolerable, at the cost of giving up what you feel gives that humanity of yours meaning? Do you seek duty, or love? Words, or the touch of another person? What you feel you must do, or what you feel you cannot do without?

How could I preach, with my own voice always tripping me up, humiliating me, getting in my way? How could I speak warmly to loved ones? How could I sing?

I don't think I really slept, for a while, tossing back and forth, tearing myself up over it, all those harmonies that had intoxicated me becoming discordant, the tones and tunes matching up wrong until the vibrations were ready to shatter my bones and write angry burnt symphonies on my skin. I felt monstrous. How could I want something so badly for myself that took away my ability to use what I saw as my gift? How could I want something that took away what I thought was my best chance to serve?

Of course, I was holding the score upside-down. I was missing part of the script. I had shown up for a demonstration, a pulpit, on the wrong day. I was speaking words of comfort to someone who didn't want them.

I learned many things about listening, while I choked, of course. I learned many things about myself. I learned much more than I thought I ever would about all the things I could do that were not about my voice, but about hands and feet and everything under a rib-cage. But I also learned that I had been a fool.

I never lost words.

And my voice just needed to learn new songs.

The options are limited, as options always are. I could allow a hot scalpel into my throat, for a great deal of money, to edit and excise the cartilage that made my voice what it was, at the risk of losing all ability to speak aloud forever. I could send a different pile of money to people who would promise to make me sound like something else. I could keep silent. Or I could do the painstaking, day to day work of training myself in new ways, so that I could speak in a voice that would not make my life untenable, but that still left room for laughter, for conviction, for range. I could find a new way to raise my voice, out of the depths but without losing the resonance.

I've stumbled, on that road, and it is still a source of difficulty. And I have still not found a way to sing, and it breaks my heart, some days. But I'm looking. I'm looking. And I will, someday. I will someday take it back, all but the bit I cut away some ways back on the road, to let the road know I'm serious.

I will sing again, someday, and it will be my voice, but it will not be the voice it was before.



This is done with saying, for now, but I should say this, anyhow, outside the bounds of what I just made. This place you're reading: this was born, if anything, of fear. This was made by a person frightened she had betrayed words, betrayed her voice, and could not speak. This was made as a proof that I still could. And I give you all the thanks I have for listening.
Goodnight.

meet and greet

So, despite my continuing battle with the Consumption,* I made it to the Feministe meetup the other night. ...an hour late, but I made it.
Y'all, we have to do this kind of thing, this face-to-face thing, more often. It was wonderful to meet everyone. I got to make new local friends (hi!) and there were a bunch of people I wish I'd gotten to talk to more. The conversation careened around from the political to the laughing at funny stories to the "who's your favorite troll?", and it was just--coughing aside--a grand time with good folks.
As it turns out, the lovely Jill is actually even nicer and more fun in person. And sort of astonishingly well-dressed, which seems to run in the family.
I think the best part? When the gang of sketchy guys, prodded on by a creepy bartender, showed up at the table to hit on us. They had no game, my friends, and it was hilarious. La Filipovic kindly sent them on their way with Feministe business cards, wishing them well in their endeavor to learn something, and they were utterly lost.
All in all? The sort of thing we-all ought to do more often. I know I've got Portlanders reading here. We could troublemake on a regular basis. It could be gold.
And then I'm headed to New York, one of these days, to harass all of you over there. Brace yourselves. I plan on having my health back by then.

*For serious. I spent the whole night coughing into a handkerchief like Doc Holliday and drinking hot things with cloves in 'em. There were jokes about me passing daintily away any minute.

everywhere the ceremony of innocence

I was raised to see the future as a threat.

Hard times coming, see. Interesting times. Dark times, war times, change times. I was brought up seeing a world where good and evil would have a big dust-up and things would get decided for once and all, and I was brought up to believe I would matter in the outcome of all of that--that I was special, that I would shelter people, that I would lead them.

I raised myself believing that if I didn't train myself in every field of human endeavor, to the utmost of my effort--from military strategy and martial arts to physics and medicine, occultism and cookery to physical fitness and the memorization of literature, pottery and metallurgy to poetry and mysticism--that someday, that threat would be realized, those big important days would come, and someone would need me, and I would fail them, because I hadn't put in the work. I let myself believe that if I couldn't be a hero, the kind they make statues of, then nothing I did would be worth anything.

Looking back on that, it is both neurotic and arrogant, but most of all, it's a desperately lonely way to look at the world. Training. Everything, even beauty, in the service of pursuing mastery, not for its own sake. Connections to other people only as useful, as practice, as a thing to learn.

It was a world missing wonder. It was a world where I had to be less than a person in some ways so that I could be more than human every way I could, with the hanging threat, always, that if I slacked off for a moment, I would be buying the death and oppression of loved ones. Of course, it was easy to abuse myself and my worldview this way; I couldn't imagine being a real, whole person, getting a real, long life, so going out with a bang as a symbol seemed like an appropriate alternative.

I say all this because, in a lot of ways, it's very easy for some of us to slip into these patterns. They start with this ideal, that we should look forward to the Big Fight That Decides Things. That the decisive battle between good and evil, the Revolution, the great paradigm shift, is something to look forward to.

I don't know about you, but once I did some growing up and some being in the world, I saw the big problem there. When you go to war, people get hurt. And even if you're on the side of the angels, you're on the side that says people have to stop being a mess if they want to come out okay. If you're on the other side, you're saying they can't stop it at all. And either way, you're saying that everything anyone does that isn't part of this cast-of-thousands epic doesn't come to much at all.

When you look forward to a decisive battle, you look forward to destruction and chaos being visited on real people. When you seek heroism too vigorously, in the end, you're seeking a world where heroes are necessary: a world with enough disaster in it, and enough people sitting back, that someone "better" has to step in. Heroism is only heroism if it wants to make itself obsolete, but too often it's about separation from others. Revolutions go 'round and 'round, but heads always roll.

When it comes to the big fight between the white hats and the black hats, I've become a third-party voter. You put on a hat, you're not just declaring your moral authority above others. You're volunteering for a world where regular folks get to die in the name of ideals and prophecies and grand overarching plans. You're volunteering for a world where people need to be different in order to make it, where the ticket to Utopia is bought by changing human nature.

Us people, we're a mess. I used to think we had to stop that to be worth preserving. We had to shift our natures, slough off the ape, embrace the angel, burn away impurities in a vast moral crucible. It sounds nice if you don't think about it too hard: for people to survive, to be worthy of survival, they have to stop screwing up.

The solution isn't in making people not a mess. That's no good, because in the end, you'd be rescuing and redeeming something that wouldn't recognizably be people. You'd be insisting that people be what you want them to be if they want a life preserver. That's what an apocalypse is. That's what a revolution is. You can't ignore who--and what, in all of us--gets to go against the wall and smoke that last cigarette.

You have to be able to do for people as they are--as messes. You have to be able to love them as messes. Can you really love people, really love them, without loving all of them? Without loving them as flawed, mistake-making, stumbling messes? It's not about good not being able to exist without evil. It's not about people being incapable of change, of striving, of improvement. It's about saying that they don't have to be improved already to be worthy. It's about saying that the revolution doesn't have to come before we can love and stand with the people next to us. They don't have to be heroes. They don't have to be angels. They just get to be people.

It's vile to limit people's growth, to poison their gardens and roads and say they can't rise above the places they now stand. But too many of us get burned up in the search for a world without sin, in the name of this cause or that. Too many of us get kicked off the cart because they haven't evolved the way to revolution expects them to.

I think it's dishonest to just love the best of people. And in the end, licking our lips in anticipation of a world without sin, cheering for the downfall of corrupt empires--it glosses over the fact that even a battle against the most noisome of foes has casualties. It leaves a field littered with the wounded and dead. It damns people for nothing more than having their backs turned at the wrong moment.

We can reach for our best selves without expecting that only our best selves deserve compassion and justice. We can look forward to better times without leaning forward in our seats looking for a big shift that makes the unworthy ones fall down. We can fight oppression without needing to make human beings into something other than themselves to do it.

Change always comes with a price. I used to think it could be clean, that you could have simple triumph, vanquish and walk away, happily ever after. But when things fall apart, even foul things, people suffer. Growing up made me finally realize that. It made me realize that the only side I could take was Us.

The future doesn't have to be a threat. It does have to be a place where people can live--not just people shaped and purified for ideologies, but people, in all of their mistake-making, messy beauty. Otherwise there won't be many of us there to appreciate this brave new world--and that's no world I want any part of.

there is no spoon

I have been very, very ill.
I mean, I'm only just getting back the ability to sit up, eat, talk, or type, ill. I had my first solid food in more than a week today. And it got me thinking.
See, there I was, incapacitated, unable to sit up or wash myself or feed myself, body weakened by four days of 103-degree fevers and convulsive chills and dehydration, in so much pain that I couldn't drink clear water. Everything hurt--joints, tongue, you name it--even down to my eyeballs, which were in so much pain I had to blindfold myself. I had to be taken care of. At the doctor's, I needed a wheelchair, and nobody talked to me like a person.
And I was angry.
I was hurting, I was feeling sorry for myself, I was miserable with the ravages of whatever illness this was, but you know what? I was angry.

Isn't that interesting? Angry. I felt a sense of profoundly wounded pride, I was upset at the total stripping-away of my dignity, I didn't feel like a person. I was sitting there naked and reeking and unable to drink water by myself, and it made me mad.

What, because I didn't deserve it? Because it wasn't fair? Because I'm entitled to an able body and what comes with it? Because my inability to take care of myself or even sit up filled me with a thousand childhood messages about self-sufficiency and strength and weakness and illness-as-moral-failing, and the result was self-loathing?

Yeah. That.

I wasn't just feeling pain, though that was significant and independently upsetting. I was feeling a temporary loss of privilege, and my reaction was not pretty. Phrases like "reduced to this" came to mind. Phrases like "this is what the proud daughter of a warrior clan comes to." Words like "pathetic" and "weak" and "vulnerable." I was frightened, I was suffering, but more importantly, I didn't feel it was fair.

I find that fascinating. I expect to be treated like a person who knows what a fever is. I expect to be able to drive myself to the store for medicine or food. I expect to be able to get up and walk to the bathroom. I expect that my acceptance of help from others in any given hour is optional, and a matter of character. I expect to be able to feed myself. And all of that went away. All of those expectations. I was weak, and vulnerable, and dependent. I needed--still need, I'm not all recovered yet--assistance to perform basic life functions. And that gets to me, hard.

Where do I get those expectations? And where do I get off feeling like less of a person for not meeting them or having them met by the world? Where do I get off feeling that way when I find the idea of looking at other people with similar limitations that way, well, abhorrent? And do I, in the end, still apply that internalized cultural ableism to my lens on the world?

My answer to that last, in the honesty of my vulnerability, is yes. And it bothers the hell out of me. I know I'm not alone in this, and I know my able-bodied privilege is one of the last I became aware of. I credit others in the blogging community with making me less of a damn fool about it. And I know it's there. I may be only temporarily able-bodied on a good day, but it's a whole lot of able, speaking as a former competitive athlete who's been, nearly without exception, healthy as a horse her whole life. I take it for granted, and when it's taken away from me, I take it personally. I take it like a personal offense. I take it as unfair.

Well, isn't that nice for me.

I'm privileged. For the most part, for now, I have an astonishingly able body, and with it the privilege and luxury of nitpicking my health and choosing when to be dependent on others or not. And that's been waved around in my face this week, and I've been forced to confront some of that privilege.

I'm talked before about how important solidarity is between the trans and disabled communities. Now, more than ever, I'm convinced of it. Ability privilege is the one privilege that we all, at some point, lose. So we'd all better suck it up and realize that this problem needs all of our effort no matter what our bodies do for us right now, because none of us is entitled to our health, and there's nothing fair about it for anyone. This is not a cause anyone can afford to ignore, and there's already amazing people working hard at it--there have been for many years--and it would behoove the rest of us to listen to them, and listen well.

And then it would be good, right after some of that listening, to lean forward and say, "Okay. What can I do for you?"