THE NEIGHBORS now out in trade paperback. Also wrote: MAW (2022), DEAD BLONDES & BAD MOTHERS (a Kirkus Best Book of 2019) & TRAINWRECK (2016). He/they.
I just found out that my short story, "Contagious," is going to be in Issue
#1
of HELLO DARKNESS. Also, we managed to get the full team from "The Neighbors" back on it! Pick it up July 24th to see our glorious reunion.
We’re ghoulishly delighted to introduce HELLO DARKNESS, a brand new ongoing anthology series showcasing what BOOM! Studios is known for—the best in Horror, Fantasy, and Mystery, from a murderer’s row of world class creators including:
@RL_Stine
,
@f_francavilla
, Garth Ennis,
WELL WELL WELL, guess who got surgery to align his body with his perception of himself???? Gonna need you to run this one by the state of Missouri, Matty
Janelle Monae, tracing the relatable post-coming-out trajectory from "24-song concept albums about futuristic androids whose experience mirrors the plight of multiple oppressed groups" to "I like butts"
Steve Albini was one of the few models of a white guy owning up to his edgelord shit, deciding it was bad, and then just... NOT DOING IT any more. It was awe-inspiring, and a model for all of us, and you should read this today in his honor:
This month, former anti-trans activist Elisa Rae Shupe sent me an archive of every email she'd sent between 2017 and 2023. I came away with a picture of how organized transphobia operates behind the scenes, and how "detransitioners" like her get made:
TRANS PERSON: I am human. I can feel and think things.
CIS JOURNALISTS: Risky claim, needs substantiation.
A TAMAGOTCHI PROGRAMMED TO TYPE RANDOM ENGLISH WORDS: I can feel and think things.
CIS JOURNALISTS:
Last week, Mother Jones and
@_nyancrimew
publicized emails in which a secret work group of TERFs and Christian right operatives worked to ban youth transition. I've seen that archive, including many, emails that aren't yet public, and the story is terrifying and very instructive.
Elisa Rae Shupe was crafted into a weapon when her narrative was taken out of her control by TERFs and Christian conservatives.
@byJudeDoyle
tells her story and provides a behind-the-scenes look at one anti-trans group’s strategy to destroy trans rights.
I refuse to dignify AFAB urinal discourse but: I used to feel weird peeing in the stalls, thinking all the dudes would notice and kick me out, but actually, NO dudes notice each other in public restrooms because they are all making horrible sounds like they're dying
This is the part that stands out. Yoffe wasn't publishing a story about a union-busting CEO or a celebrity sex predator. She wasn't even publishing a story about a public figure. She had a story about a private citizen, a minor, and she treated them as hostile to their own story.
Upon interviewing Emily Yoffe myself I was told that I had no say in whether or not the article was published. I asked if my consent was required to publish the article and the reporter told me, “that’s not how these things work.”
Here's me, at
@XTraMagazine
, with a deep dive on how the New York Times took a hard-right pivot on trans issues, and who's responsible for the change:
KID: Do boys wear makeup?
ME: Sometimes. Depends on the boy.
KID: Like you were a boy, and you wore makeup.
ME (grim, stoic): Uh-huh. Sure.
KID: Because you were Goth.
ME (enormous sigh of relief): Yeah, because of that.
I wrote about some of the hypocrisy surrounding Sinead O'Connor's death, and how the best way to honor her is to think about how you treat women with mental illnesses while they're alive:
You ever think about how, if River Phoenix hadn't died at the age of 23, there's a very solid chance that Leonardo DiCaprio would just be some dude out there dating adult women
My kid's school had her build a "leprechaun trap," which she left with us overnight, and I would like to thank the public education system for the fact that I woke up at 5 AM with a pissed-off kindergartener standing over me, asking "did you even TRY to catch a leprechaun???"
I know hating on Gadsby is cool and all, but Picasso once bent a teenage girl over a bridge and put a cigarette out on her face. Sometimes, as annoying as you might find feminist art critique, it's on the money
Something I've been thinking about, w/r/t the pseudo-feminist grief about "tomboys" being transed, is that the tomboy is an inherently unthreatening figure. She's a child. She's a "she." She can be read as a girl who admires men enough to imitate them. She might grow out of it.
I had a dream that I released a book called "Trans People Talk About Their Day" and it was just 300 one-page descriptions of people's morning routines and the entire goal was to make transphobes read it for something scandalous and only find extremely specific oatmeal preferences
ICYMI: I wrote about the Joyce Carol Oates trans Twitter redemption arc, possibly history's only instance of someone becoming LESS transphobic on Twitter:
Even if the goal is "just" forced detransition, and not camps, forced detransition represents an extreme bodily violation, on par with other major violations like sexual assault and forced birth. We classify mass rape as genocide. Mass detransition fits the bill.
You don't need to "reach out" and coddle the dudes who are already watching how-to-rape lifestyle guides online. It's too late. You need to raise every kid, from the beginning of their life, to know that consent matters and that everyone, no matter their gender, has human worth.
I know this will shatter your mental world, but the story about how five-year-olds were given HRT injections because they said "I'm a rock" may have been made up
From
@TheAthletic
: Baby Gronk is a 10-year-old whose father is pitching him as the next big thing in college football. “He’s a real athlete. He’s not a normal kid,” his father told us. “He has been trained and programmed since he was 6 years old.”
Taylor Lorenz decided she was going to "help" trans people by giving an hour of unedited screen time to someone who encourages people to kill us. Then, when trans people took issue with it, she called them stupid. Let's discuss:
The argument that "teen girls" are so emotionally fragile that they will transition if they even hear about trans people is, almost literally, the same as the Victorian argument that women would have nervous breakdowns or become sexless she-beasts if they read the newspaper
There's a TikTok going around of a woman crying & talking about touch starvation, which is apparently hilarious. I don't know, I remember being 25 and thinking 40-year-olds were idiots when they talked about the Internet desensitizing people, but... Christ. They weren't wrong.
(SPOILERS?) I think the main joke of "Barbie" is that Ken is the feminist movement. He gets sick of being a second-class citizen, and decides to overthrow the matriarchy, but in the end his movement falls to infighting and the women in power only make a few superficial changes.
So: On preventing incels. When my daughter was about two or three, a boy at her daycare used to follow her around and touch her -- petting & pulling her hair, stuff like that. She complained to us, and we spoke to the teacher, but the teacher just said "I guess he likes her."
The kids were young enough that there were no hard feelings. They were going to each others' birthday parties soon enough. That kid learned that touching people without consent makes them scream at you. My daughter learned she doesn't have to be nice when people do that to her.
I have not seen "Everything Everywhere All At Once" yet and it's already gone from "the best movie of the decade" to "too many people I dislike watched it and thus it is terrible." Don't do this. Don't "Hamilton" this one for me.
Anyway, her name is Francoise Gilot, she's a writer, she's an artist, she's alive and 101 years old today, maybe your conception of art history and/or human suffering could broaden to include her a little
(Tweeting it WITH the link because I realized you couldn't click it in the last one I sent. I don't actually love the sound of my own voice that much, sorry.)
My hot True Crime take is that telling women it's "punitive" to want their attackers or abusers in jail won't really sway them toward abolitionism. Pointing out that at least 77% of women in prison for "murder" are there because they killed their abusers in self-defense might.
"Man" is also a costume! They're all costumes! In order to be seen as your gender, you have to cite popular ideas of what "your gender" looks like, not because they're Objective Truth, but so people can understand what you're going for! Judith Butler wrote an entire book!
This week, at Medium: A case study from the Elisa Shupe leaks shows how TERFs whip up harassment campaigns to discredit their critics. It starts with a trans woman naming Lisa Marchiano in a blog post and ends with FOX News and leaked nudes:
This week: There are records of dozens of trans men living in medieval monasteries. I am obsessed with all of them. Here's me, on the secret history of transmasculine sainthood:
RON DESANTIS: I will personally murder every gay person in the state of Florida
THE PUBLIC: Relatable
RON DESANTIS: In addition, I eat pudding with my fingers
THE PUBLIC: That is a bridge too far
The pudding incident, which former DeSantis staffers describe as a common instance of him not reading the room (in this case, a very intimate flight cabin):
This is Twitter, and I'm not going to get every nuance into one tweet, but, roughly: In the logic of patriarchy, the transfeminine person is a traitor and the transmasculine person is a thief. One betrays & refuses masculinity. One presumes above their station. Both are punished.
So, members of a marginalized community sharing information about reporters with an agenda is "doxing," but going out to find any random crackpot willing to tell you that "we don't know puberty blockers DON'T cause lifelong impotence and brain explosion" is newsworthy. Gotcha.
@Esqueer_
Update: The Times decided not to have a freelancer write this article, so they killed it two days ago. But thanks for doxing me, Alejandra, you're such a champ.
OK: The "therapy speak" problem is that manipulative people will always try to game the conversation and create a new set of rules that make them the winner. The problem is not therapy. It's manipulation. If you were both evangelical Christians, they'd quote the Bible.
One of the strange things about today's political cleavage around gender rights (and here, intersecting with racism) is how many of the proponents of traditional masculinity do not even follow their ideals. Let's look at how James dresses 🧵
We spent an evening or two teaching her how to scream in her loudest voice. If the boy ever touched her against her will again, she was supposed to turn around and yell "DON'T TOUCH ME" in the loudest, scariest voice she could manage. Which she did. And it worked.
People have probably said this already but the bans on being trans or being "in drag" in front of minors are explicitly transmisogynistic. Me wearing a hoodie and jeans in front of my kid is going to strike people as a lot less "gender non-conforming" than a mom in a dress.
So the romanticizing of "tomboys" is ultimately not very feminist at all, because it's a commandment to know your place. "You'll never be a real man, but it's sort of cute when you dress like one." Although even then, it's only cute for children.
It's okay for little girls to "imitate" masculinity -- they "want to be" the gender that's in charge, and who wouldn't? -- but if someone starts saying they actually ARE a man, actually puts themself in competition with cis men, that's threatening and is put down with force.
Part of the problem is that no-one is willing to define "men's issues," and if you dig down on any one manfluencer's definition, it always comes down to "women having stuff"
Yes leftists, please keep telling me that the left is bad on men's issues while citing absolutely no one specifically or any specific thing said person that you've failed to cite has said. Please just keep expecting me to take your vibes as evidence. It fuels me.
@nytimes
Among those who signed that letter were several
@nytimes
employees. The NewsGuild of NY says that members have been called into "investigatory meetings" and an informed source tells me that disciplinary proceedings are under way.
I did more reporting for this piece than I have for almost any other, and what I found is that sometimes, this happens because of a complicated debate about objectivity, and sometimes, what happens is that someone with a history of transphobic coverage gets a promotion:
This is a long piece, because there's a lot -- A LOT -- of stuff you've always suspected, but never been able to prove, in that email archive. The ROGD stuff, in particular, leads me to suspect that Jesse S. abandoned social media for more than one reason.
This week, at Medium: Lonely men are real. The "male loneliness epidemic" is not. Here, an attempt to look at some actual numbers and connect the discourse back to reality:
As a self-identified Lottie, I support the thesis that no '90s friend group is complete without the weird Wiccan Tori Amos kid who takes the slumber party game to an uncomfortably demonic place
Honestly, the one piece of advice I have for any parent -- and this will make you a better person, if you let it -- is that sometimes you need to stop, take a breath, and think, silently, the sentence "this is not your fault, you did not choose to be five years old."
I get where they're going with this, but I am also quietly blinded with rage that they needed to make the viewpoint character a Concerned Father To A Daughter and not, like... the actual little girl
WATCH: “My daughter was raped. She’s 12. You won’t do anything?”
“I’m a Republican… I won the election… It’s MY decision.”
Brutal new ad from
@progressaf3
. (Every Tennessee Republican legislator voted not to let raped kids have abortion care)
It is at this point that I bum you out by reminding you that the urge to "compromise" on a clearly winning issue with majority support was also the Democrats' approach to abortion, pioneered by one Joe Biden
man it's super cool that republicans hyper focus on being creepy fascistic weirdos about trans people is actually costing them elections and the white house response is now "hmmm. let's meet in the middle with them"
Any queer person is "gender non-conforming" because heterosexual expectations are packed into gender. The most burly, bearded, trucker-hat-wearing dude on earth is a gender-non-conforming man if he fucks other men, because men aren't "supposed" to do that.
The belief that """girls""" are all being corrupted by their empathy for scary adult trans women reminds me of the TERFy "girls say they're bisexual to be polite" talking point -- the idea that anyone assigned female is just incapable of desire or agency in their own right
🧵next time someone raises fears of "the rising number of 'young girls' transitioning," send them this essay – it provides the real statistics and critiques their sexist & ableist framings. no-paywall, pls share widely & give it "claps"!
#trans
#LGBTQ
There is nothing inherently sexual about learning about queer and trans people, and “suppressing information about our bodies doesn’t make them stop existing,” writes
@byJudeDoyle
.
*sigh* Once again, the world has refused to honor my clearly stated Boundary that I am the only person whose feelings matter and therefore I get to tell everyone else what to do
Before my kid goes to sleep, we do this thing called The Words, where I tell her good things about herself, and so now I sometimes wake up with my kid petting my hair and going "you are loved and safe... you deserve to be tooken care of... you smell bad and you need a shower..."
I'm no ace reporter, but I've covered sensitive subjects -- sexual assault, Internet harassment, trans kids -- and you always come to the table with an understanding that publicity could make the situation worse. You actively work with your source to make sure they feel safe.
I get the argument for degendering "Best Actor" and "Best Actress" but I also think that, if this happens, it will pan out the same way as "Best Director," where the single most objectively award-deserving person in the profession somehow just happens to be a man 99% of the time
Jude Doyle's Weirdly Controversial Take Corner: "Man-hating" is just an accusation dudes invented to make sure women have to present themselves as "not man haters" and thereby avoid expressing any inconvenient anger, criticism or distrust toward men
Tina Turner mattered to so many people as a sign that you could take your life and (literal) voice back from your abuser. She does not deserve to have that abuse euphemized as "tempestuous partnership" in her fucking obituary. Come on.
Soulful diva Tina Turner, who succeeded a lengthy run of ’60s and ’70s R&B hits in tempestuous partnership with husband Ike Turner with major pop stardom in the ’80s, has died. She was 83.
It's just, you know, that's a human being crying and saying that they feel lonely and want love. They put it on the Internet, because presumably that's where they can reach some sympathetic people. But I honestly don't see how that defining human vulnerability can be a joke.
If you can't do that -- if you treat the (not implicitly newsworthy!) details of a minor seeking medical treatment as YOUR story to "expose," not theirs to tell if they can do so safely -- you are going to get someone hurt, and you are failing the basic ethics of the profession.
when women demanded the vote, when minorities demand to be treated equitably, it will seem like "social contagion" to those who imagine themselves doling out permission for others to live as freely & without risk as they do.
And it's twice today I've seen someone take a TikTok of a woman having a scared or sad moment and turn it into a joke! Maybe developing a device where we can all get a raw live feed of each other's pain and riff on it was not great for humanity, I don't know.
My child has been referring to the protagonist of "Alice in Wonderland" as "Alison" for some time and I only just realized that she thinks her full name is "Alison Wonderland"
This is the moment where all 100 monkeys at their 100 typewriters slow down, stop, and then, out of the silence, emerges the lone clack-clack-clack of that one monkey typing out the opening of HAMLET
I like that Beyonce's post-kid tour involved an entire documentary about the excruciating process of training herself to dance again and Rihanna's post-kid MO is "I'm Rihanna, I can hire dancers."
"If you marry him, he'll stop being an asshole," one of the great pieces of relationship advice, along with "he hits you because he loves you" and "having a baby will probably fix it"
It always delights me to see how people imagine "the past" so that it exactly accords with their contemporary aesthetics and beliefs and this is a great little compilation
your guide to quickly determining what decade a medieval movie was released:
are the women snatched to the high heavens? 1950s
is everything really shiny & sparkly? 80s
does everyone look kinda dirty? 90s
are the men wearing hoodies/leather jackets? it's the 2010s
Today, at
@XtraMagazine
: Trans people are constantly bombarded with news about horrific anti-trans bills. How much panic is too much panic, in this context, and how can media outlets keep the public informed without traumatizing them?
I'm a writer. I can pay my way with writing now. There have been times when I couldn't get work and my partner has supported me. There are also times when I've taken a job as a receptionist so I could pay my half of the rent. "Art" is a vocation, but your partner is a person.
My child just outlined her six known genders: "We're all good how we are. Boys, girls, moms who are boys, moms who are girls, dads who are boys, dads who are girls. Everyone."
TERFs have done so much to take over our imagination of "radical feminism" -- and, in turn, to make all criticism of men, or concerns about "women's safety," sound TERFy -- that we forget even fucking Dworkin knew this turn was fascist, not feminist.
I've shared vulnerable stuff and seen the Internet react weirdly to it, obviously. Once, I wrote about my Dad throwing a chair at my brother's head, and someone screencapped it to make fun of me for saying Eminem was homophobic (???). I get that people lose perspective on here.
@CatchyMelodyNA
The issue is that she turned over her full email inboxes, to prevent suspicion of tampering. There's stuff in there that shouldn't be public, for her safety. The choice to release only the emails to lawmakers was a good one, I think, but maybe future curated leaks will happen.
There's a viral tweet speculating that Andrew Tate is gay, and look: He's clearly sexually wounded & traumatized beyond human comprehension, but trying to name that wound keeps the focus on him and what he needs, rather than what his victims need or how to stop him hurting people
I literally would not ever talk or think about the wizard game if I hadn't seen 346 cis people on my timeline talk about how they can still be good allies even if they play the wizard game. Read another book. Buy some genre media by a trans person. Please.
World burning, books getting banned, libraries closing, teachers getting fired for teaching, and we're still fucking debating "trigger warnings" like it's 2013
Some productive therapy terminology: A "boundary" is not something you command someone else to do. It's a rule you set for yourself about how you'll respond. "Please don't tell me that what I did was hurtful or ask for respect; that's a Boundary" is not, in fact, a boundary.
The trick is, if someone outlines how they want you to Respect Their Boundaries and you say “all right, I would appreciate it if you reciprocated and made these same concessions for me” but suddenly it becomes “emotional labour” they can’t perform, don’t hang out with that person