Category: Essays

“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” →

Continue reading ““he” and children’s literature” →