Category: Essays

Children are magic.

I never realized it, though, until my future self knocked on my front door.

“I’ll trade you,” she says when I answer, “for a week.” She peers over my shoulder at the screaming baby whose heels seem bent on turning his tantrum into dents in the floor. A fond smile softens her face.

She looks maybe twenty years older than I am, hair starting to thread with grey.

“Someone invented time travel?” I ask, surprised. So far, we haven’t even managed viable nuclear fusion.

She tips her hand back and forth in a “so-so” gesture. “Turns out it was there all along. The trouble was people kept trying to find a way to do something dramatic. Go back and assassinate Hitler, that kind of thing.” She shakes her head. “That’s why it never worked.”

Questions pile up behind my tongue, but I hesitate. I’ve read too many stories not to know how dangerous this could be.

“What can you tell me?” I ask at last.

“You, nothing.” She peers past my shoulder again, wiggling her fingers at the child whose screams have turned to sniffling wails. “Him on the other hand…”

“Come in.” I step aside and wave her in. I ought to feel a twinge of anxiety as she reaches him, but I don’t. On some level, I know who she is.

Kiddo does, too. She drops crosslegged onto the floor, and he flings himself into her lap, sobs muffled against her shoulder. Her arms curl around him, and her eyes close. A soft smile spreads across her face.

I settle tentatively on the floor next to them. I could never manage that. Not with the last half hour of screaming still reverberating in my ear. I study her peaceful expression more closely. She looks careworn. A little sad, even, under the smile. One hand moves on the child’s back in a gentle caress.

I swallow around a lump in my throat. Twenty years. That sadness could be no more than an empty nest. It doesn’t have mean… anything.

“You mentioned a trade?” I venture. “Would I… take your place?”

She shifts him away from her shoulder, her eyes opening. I search her face, looking for some sign of what I might find if I did. Do I want to know what’s coming?

“At a week long silent writer’s retreat. It’s in the forest in the middle of nowhere. No electronics, no communication with the outside world. Back to writing by hand, if you can believe it.” She takes a moment to look me in the eye. “That was what they discovered about time travel. You can trade places with yourself, but only as long as the experience feels utterly mundane.”

The baby’s sobs have stopped. She holds him up on front of her, his chubby feet braced against her legs.

Mundane… and precious. Three weeks alone with the baby while my husband is incommunicado at his archeology dig, and I can only see the preciousness through her eyes. My husband will be back in a week. I’ve been telling myself I’ll make it.

“What do you think?” she asks. “Trade?”

I went. It was marvelous.

When I first learned about sexism, racism, etc. I learned that they were structured essentially as layer cakes. There were two groups (more or less): a privileged group on top and an oppressed/marginalized/disadvantaged group on the bottom. As my understanding of interlocking axes of identity and the complexity of intersectionality deepened, the layer cakes might have gotten mashed together, crisscrossed, and warped a bit, but they were still recognizably there.

Such a view, however, misses the point of oppressive systems. Functionally, they are pyramid schemes. Their entire purpose is to extract labor and wealth from as many people as possible while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of as few people as can be gotten away with. This is why they are so flexible and hard to dismantle. Group categories and stereotypes that purport to be natural and unchanging are actually constantly adapting, becoming whatever the system needs to keep the wealth flowing upward while preventing so many people from getting fed up that they overthrow the whole thing.

Continue reading “The Pyramid of Oppression” →

“Ms. M you hella fake!” Madai, one of my students, keeps informing me. I frown in confusion and ask what she means. “You know,” she tells me, “you gotta be real with us.” 

I don’t know. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I forget about it, actually, until I hear the same word from one of my colleagues. “We’re being fake,” he says. “We need to be real.” Be real? I still have no idea what that means.

It’s not until I’m driving Sammy, another student, up to Berkeley to meet Geoffrey Canada that someone explains it to me in a way I understand. We’re talking about the different ways we talk to people as we pass a beat up old car. It’s rusting out and has broken headlights, and were it not for duct tape, it would dissolve into pieces on the road.

Continue reading “Being Nice and Being Real” →

Sometimes someone else’s essay is so awesome that there’s nothing left for me to do but link to it. I love those essays. Especially when I’m on a deadline. Below is the iconic cartoon about the mental load of household work. It’s always worth a revisit.

How many of us can imagine ourselves responding the way the owner of a family restaurant in Minneapolis did when his restaurant burned to the ground during the riots triggered by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police? “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served. Put those officers in jail.” His daughter, telling the story in the Washington Post, adds, “If this is what it takes to get justice, then it will have been worth it.”

Continue reading “Who Pays for Justice?” →

As a sci-fi author, I wrote a world of characters who disagree with each other about what gender is, but all think that our gender binary is illogical. This drives some real world cisgender people wild. “But isn’t dividing into men vs. women natural?” they argue. “Humans only have two reproductive roles. Defining gender based on who has a penis versus who has a vagina just makes sense!” (Pointing out the existence of intersex people makes a remarkably small dent in this logic. Instead, intersex people get shuffled off as a minor exception to an otherwise logical system grounded in the fundamental facts of reproductive biology.) Many trans activists and theorists have countered this argument far more eloquently than I. However, I would like to take a moment to respond to this argument purely from within the experience of a cisgender straight person. Even the cis people most wedded to conventional divisions of gender fail to take those professed beliefs seriously. From the standpoint of its own professed logic, the gender binary is incoherent.

Continue reading “The Biology (or Lack Thereof) of Gender” →

ACT 1

The curtain opens on a darkened office. One lamp casts light onto the face of the White Author, who is sitting at a desk hunched over a laptop looking at Twitter. Whispers start. At first, the words are too faint to make out, but gradually occasional whispers become audible, making it clear that the White Author is reading comments about their recently published book. The word “racist” is heard with greater and greater frequency. The White Author straightens and starts typing frantically.

WHITE AUTHOR: What! How dare you say my book is racist! I’m not racist! You’re racist!

The White Author raises their hand, about to strike the “Enter” key angrily. Behind them, Ghost 1, a semi-transparent white man wearing a top hat and coat, materializes.

GHOST 1: Wait!

WHITE AUTHOR: (turning and lowering hand) Who are you?

GHOST 1: The Ghost of Racism Past.

Continue reading “A Christmas Carol: For White Authors Who Don’t Want to be Scrooge” →