Starbroken

Category: Uncategorized

  • America, My Heart

    America, My Heart

    At every Boston subway station hangs a U.S. flag,
    with fifty stars and thirteen stripes, its colors red, white, blue,
    and every time I see that proudly-mounted canvas rag,
    I think of how I miss the pride I used to have in you.

    America, my heart, am I a fool, believing when you said
    “All men created equal”, heedless of the grip
    With which your other hand was curled around your cursed slaver’s whip?
    Those words, are they just passing thoughts from men long dead?

    You didn’t mean them then, two hundred fifty years ago;
    “These truths we hold self-evident,” you lied with ink and quill.
    But truth remains the truth, no matter if you think it’s so,
    And to this day those words live on – we dream of freedom still.

    America, my heart, am I a fool to let your promise stand?
    To keep the Declaration, throw away the whip,
    To one by one replace the boards and beams of Theseus’s ship,
    And hope for freedom’s dawn across this stolen land?

    Or are the fools the ones who see the whip with greedy eyes,
    Who think that some are born to serve and others born to lead?
    Is folly made from guns and walls and libraries of lies,
    Because the truth is not a thing we let our children read?

    America, my heart, I know that I’m a fool to love you still,
    But I don’t know what happens after you are gone,
    So here I am, a foolish girl with both hands barely clinging on,
    A stubborn part of “We, the People,” come what will.

  • Digital Oases of Freedom

    (Or, Home Servers: What, Why, and How)

    There’s a project I’ve been doing in my spare time over the past couple of weeks, and it’s really helped me maintain my sanity in our increasingly insane world. It’s my home server. It lets me and my friends and family live a little more freely, giving us all a bit more control over our online lives. In today’s blog post, I’d like to explain what a home server is and why you (even if you’re not particularly technical) should have one, along with busting a few myths along the way.

    What’s a server, anyway?

    This is a server. It’s about three and a half inches tall, eighteen inches wide, and 28-ish inches deep. It has more computing power than three or four suburban homes combined, sounds like a jet engine, and has a five-digit US dollar price tag. Most of the Internet is running on machines like this, mounted in special cabinets called “racks” that let you stack upwards of a dozen such machines in one cabinet, then installed in massive datacenters by the thousands.

    But here’s the secret: underneath all the pricey hardware, this server is just a computer. A very powerful one, sure, but just a computer nonetheless. There’s nothing fundamentally different about it compared to the computer you’re using to read this right now – even if that computer is a phone.

    Any computer can be a server, in fact. All “being a server” means is that a computer is listening for requests from other computers and serving up data when it gets those requests. The reason most of the Internet runs on big, fancy, expensive machines like the one above isn’t because it has to. It’s because the Internet isn’t what it used to be. There are fewer and fewer small, personal things on the Internet… and more giant corporate platforms. And when you’re a giant corporation with millions of users, well. You need the hardware to serve millions of users.

    This, too, is a server. It sits on my bookshelf, taking up less space than my copy of The Brothers Karamazov. It makes no sound at all, and costs maybe a dollar or two a month in electricity. I bought it for less than a hundred dollars, and this page you’re reading is running on it. Other things that run on it include cloud storage for my friends and family, an online office suite (like Google Docs) to make that storage useful, and a private streaming service (think Netflix or Spotify) for my collection of music, TV, and movies.

    What’s the point of it?

    Good question. I don’t like the way most technology these days is headed – and by “these days” I mean since about 2010. For a long time, we had a consensus as a society about how things in general would work. If you wanted something, you’d buy it, and then it would be yours in perpetuity. You’d be able to do with it whatever you pleased, providing you weren’t using it to break a law or hurt someone.

    Then Silicon Valley changed all that. Slowly, and then all at once, a new way of thinking came about. A way of thinking that trades “purchase” for “subscribe”, that lets Amazon delete books you bought from the Kindle you bought, without your consent or foreknowledge. A way of thinking where you lose all control of your technological life, and the tech companies don’t even give you a discount for it.

    Windows comes with ads now. Your files in whatever cloud service you have, they’re not yours anymore. They can disappear whenever the company running it wants them to, and you’re left in the lurch. The media collection you bought and paid for? Sorry, friendo, you didn’t buy a copy, you bought a license. And if for whatever reason the licensor can’t or doesn’t want to let you access the media, well. You’re in the lurch.

    I’m a huge fan of Stargate SG-1. Back in 2019, I was going to shell out the money for DVD copies of the whole series, but luckily for me, MGM decided to set up a streaming platform called Stargate Command, giving me access to the whole Stargate franchise for a paltry $50 a year. What a bargain, compared to the $80 or $100 it would have taken for me to get all ten seasons of SG-1 on DVD! At least, it would be a bargain as long as I didn’t keep paying that $50 for three or four years. Well, as things turned out, the streaming service didn’t last long enough for that math to matter. After about a year, it was just gone, as were my $50. There I was, $50 poorer and still Stargate-less.

    The same thing happens all over the place. Microsoft Office isn’t a thing you can just buy once and keep forever anymore, despite Office 2007 or earlier still being sufficient for 90% or more of people who need an office suite. Spotify (and Apple Music) have long displaced just buying a CD for the vast majority of people, despite it costing subscribers more and paying artists less.

    But I’m not railing against the mere existence of such services! Don’t get me wrong; I love the fact that I can send people files from across the globe by simply uploading them to the cloud and sharing a link. Having my entire music library at my fingertips from anywhere, anytime, as long as I have an Internet connection? Literally life-changing. What I hate is the fact that these things are used to screw everyone involved over except shareholders.

    Luckily, there exists an alternative for people like me, and I hope, like you: a home server.

    With my home server, I can stream my music library just as if I were paying for Spotify. I can watch my movie and TV collection as if Stargate Command had never died. I can still send people files from across the globe with a link, and I can still edit documents online with other people, as if I were paying for Google Docs. It’s just that all of those things aren’t happening on someone else’s big, fancy server in a datacenter somewhere in Indiana. They’re happening on my bookshelf, and costing me practically nothing.

    That sounds complicated.

    I won’t lie and say it’s child’s play. But it’s less of a hassle than you might think. Getting a machine to serve as your server – pun not intended – is as simple as finding an old computer you or a friend isn’t using anymore. If nothing comes to mind, you can find tiny office PCs from manufacturers like HP or Lenovo very cheaply on eBay, often less than $60.

    That’s probably not the complication most people are thinking of, though. For most people, the idea of setting up a server that does all the things I just mentioned sounds exhausting. And even a few years ago, it would have been. But there’s a beautiful project called Yunohost, explicitly built to make running a home server a breeze. If you know your way around your own computer, you can run a home server with Yunohost.

    The tutorial on their website walks you through how to run it, and the Yunohost project will even help you get a web address of your own set up, so other people can use your server with a convenient link. You don’t need to know your way around a command line, you don’t need to be an IT whiz. All you need to do is keep an open mind and be willing to try something new.

    I had already set up a home server the complicated way, but I redid it when I found out about Yunohost. Setting up my server – which, just to remind you, is a cloud storage service like Google Docs, a music streaming service like Spotify, a TV/movie streaming service like Netflix, and a website host for this blog – took me about two hours, and most of that was just making sure things like my old blog posts got carried over properly.

    In conclusion…

    You can claw back a little bit of control from the big tech companies that are running your online life. It’ll save you money, it’ll keep your data private, and most importantly, you can share the benefits with other people. Building a little corner of the Internet that you can truly call your own can really change your life, even if just a little bit.

    It also helps give the right-wing billionaires who *own* those big tech companies just that smidgen less power over you, something which can help put your mind at ease as America tips further and further into hell.

    It’s cheaper than you think, it’s easier than you think, and it’s more rewarding than you think. And if you don’t have the technical know-how to keep a home server running for yourself, chances are, you have a friend or family member who does. In the dry, sandy landscape of the corporate Internet, you owe it to yourself to build – or share – an oasis.

  • 84 bpm

    84 bpm

    I am a metronome.

    At the tempo of my racing heart (faster than I’d like, but not fast enough to kill me), I oscillate madly between my extremes of fear and faith. It happens when I make my morning meal, it happens when I take my evening shower, and it happens every moment in between.

    Fear and faith. Fear and faith. Fear… and faith.

    It’s been seven months since I’ve written anything here, in this silly little archive of my words. That’s not for lack of trying. I’ve had post after post half-written, then discarded with some mix of a sigh and a manic laugh. None of them were enough. Nothing I could possibly write could ever be enough.

    I could talk about death, maybe. How our politics have so inured us to death, conditioned us to view some deaths as acceptable or even inevitable, that Israel can starve the entire Gaza strip to death on live TV and most of our politicians will keep signing the checks for more and more bombs, guns, and missiles. How in our own country, vaccines and pasteurization – things that, along with better maternal care, increased the average human lifespan by a full fifty percent in the twentieth century – are being demonized, while our kids are dying in more school shootings and fatal car crashes every year.

    I could add anecdotes about my own suicidality. After all, this year has been an eventful one for Team Samantha’s Intrusive Thoughts. When that metronome arm in my soul is swinging toward the “fear” side, my brain fills up with such wonderful refrains. It would be so easy, so quick, it whispers. There’s no more fear, no more anger, just nothing. Just nothing forever. I could talk about how I’m certainly not alone in that, how it just so happens that the subway system here in Boston changed their automatic announcements at stations this year. Now, every time a train is approaching, the automated voice gently tells people to step back from the edge. Increased safety culture at the ol’ Transportation Authority? Maybe. But also, almost certainly, more people like me who get those annoying whispers when they’re waiting for their train home.

    Perhaps I could talk instead about resurrection. It’s an idea central to my faith, after all. I could pontificate about how I think it’s a tragedy that the symbol of Christianity around the world is a cross, instead of an empty tomb. Do I know what a symbol of an empty tomb would look like? Fuck no. But it’d have much better meaning than a cross. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t special for being crucified; the Roman empire crucified thousands and thousands of people. He was special because he got back up again, and the promise of my Christian faith is that through his resurrection, we all are resurrected.

    I could trace a fragile thread of hope through the better moments of the past half year, to talk about how no matter how much hate and death and suffering there is in the world right now, it is possible to rebuild. Mandatory to, even. I could talk about what it means to me to do the work of resurrection as my society steadily feeds itself into the ever-widening gyre of fascism.

    But talking about death at the moment just makes me want to do it, and talking about resurrection and hope feels fake. “Don’t worry, guys,” my inner clickbait YouTube host says, “there’s still goodness in the world. I’m taking a hundred random sick people and covering their medical bills, and this is a video for people’s entertainment instead of a thing that the government just does for everyone because we live in a death cult! Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”

    You know, even on my bad days, I think today’s fascist America is a fragile house of cards just waiting for the right stiff breeze to knock it over. I know that eventually, whether through right-wingers killing themselves and their children with raw foods and a pathological hatred of modern medicine or through the sheer weight of injustice, a new day will dawn and people will be free. I think the genocide in Gaza will be stopped, and its perpetrators brought to justice. I’m an optimist like that, I guess.

    It’s just that on those bad days, it’s hard to imagine myself and the people I care for most actually living to see it.

    Things are getting worse before they get better. That’s just a fact. How much worse? Hard to say. How much better? Also hard to say. And as the mechanisms of our society turn, I tick back and forth.

    Fear and faith.

    There’s an old Scottish hymn that’s been on my mind this year, written by George Matheson after he lost his eyesight and his fiancee left him. It’s titled “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”, and its third and most poignant verse says:

    “Oh Joy that seeks me through the pain,
    I cannot close my heart to thee;
    I trace the rainbow through the rain
    And feel the promise is not vain
    That morn shall tearless be.”

    I’d like to think, as my soul ticks back and forth between my fear and my faith, that the song I’m setting the tempo for sounds something like that. In the meantime, I’m going to go hug my wife and try to get a decent night’s sleep.

    No recipe for you today, other than a hearty endorsement of taking frozen imitation crab sticks, defrosting them, slicing them into 1-inch-long bits, tossing them in some soy sauce, and serving them over rice. Shake some shichimi togarashi on top, if you like spice and flavor. A perfect meal with not much effort, whether you’re fearing or hoping and believing.

  • There Are Four Lights

    There Are Four Lights

    (And a recipe for mushroom turnovers)

    (Click here to skip to the recipe for my great-grandma’s mushroom turnovers.)

    So I’ve been thinking about Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders recently. Specifically, that first one, the one where he purports to define sex in terms that sort every human being into one, and only one, of two distinct and immutable sexes. It’s a template that’s played out more or less the same way in state houses across the country; the language differs from instance to instance, but the concept is the same. “There are only two sexes,” these policies, bills, and orders scream out at us, “and you can’t change yours.”

    They’re wrong, of course. We know full well – because we’ve had a long time and dedicated scientists – that sex is neither binary nor immutable. The people writing these screeds know it, too. If sex were immutable, they wouldn’t have to try so hard to stop people from changing their sex; if it were a natural binary, they wouldn’t have to add carve-outs in all their bills banning sex-altering surgical procedures for children to say “it’s totally okay if the surgery is to take an intersex infant” – though they wouldn’t use that term – “and make their sex binary.” These people aren’t making definitions; they’re making demands.

    To be clear, if you’re not incarcerated, the government can’t physically stop you from changing your sex. It’s an incredibly simple and easy thing to do, physically speaking – something which terrifies right-wing operatives. All you have to do is rub a bit of the right gel on your skin on a regular basis, and you’ll find your sex changing. Some of these gels are unlawful to obtain or possess. Some aren’t. None of them are hard to obtain or possess, if you go looking. Even if the government were to successfully make it illegal to change your sex – an unlikely proposition short of complete Constitutional collapse – they couldn’t physically stop you. But they’re not trying to physically stop you.

    All the terrifying things Musk and his lackeys are doing to the government, all the policies Musk’s number one ventriloquist dummy Trump are trying to enforce, they all boil down to the same principle. These fascist goons want you to ignore reality, ignore truth, ignore learning and research, and pretend the world is what they say it is. From their stances on trans rights to their foreign policy to the way they’re constantly lying about what it is that the college fucking freshmen of DOGE are doing to the payments system of the US fucking Treasury, they want you to ignore the real world and act like you live in the world they want.

    In their world, you’re powerless to do aught but obey. There are two sexes, and one of them is better than the other. No, you’re not allowed to pick which one to be, are you some kind of communist? In their world, the only thing that matters is the power to do violence. From God down to the President down to the cops down to the man of your household down to his submissive, feminine, stay-at-home wife, to their beautiful, white, abused children, the only things that matter are power, submission, and punishment.

    I know because I grew up in that world. Anywhere from a tenth to a full fifth of the American population grows up in that world: the world of evangelical Christianity. I won’t get into the history of evangelicalism here, nor will I get into the specifics of the things evangelicals believe. Because the thing that matters most is their tactics.

    It starts with controlling information. The false reality of the right is jerry-rigged and inconsistent, so if people get even a whiff of the real world, they start to see how the false one’s coming apart at the seams. In evangelical households, this takes many forms. A ban from TV or movies, for example – explicit Christian propaganda excluded, of course. Strict parental controls on any Internet access, not to filter out pornography, but to filter out *science.* An insistence that their children shouldn’t visit the library unsupervised, and that the parents should read every book the child wants to check out, cover to cover, to ensure it doesn’t contain any unauthorized thoughts or ideas.

    Music? Art? Absolutely not. These things bare the depths of a person’s soul; these sorts of evangelicals will avoid any music or art that isn’t explicitly Christian in nature.

    Public schools teach things like evolution, and more insidiously, the idea that government should be secular. And worse, public schools are open to immigrants and queers and black people. No, best to send the kids to a private, Christian school with strict anti-queer policies and tuition fees high enough that most immigrants and people of color are excluded. The attitudes of the staff will be enough to exclude the rest.

    If these sorts of evangelical parents are doing their job right, from birth until college and even afterward, their child will never leave the bubble of false reality that’s been painstakingly held up around them. And these are the tactics that the Musk/Trump administration wants to implement in our society at large, by making their demands in the form of policy statements.

    “There are only two sexes, and you can’t change yours!” “Diversity is racism!” “The government has been persecuting Christians, and we’re going to put a stop to that!” “Canada would be better off as the 51st state!” “We’ll own Gaza!” “The Panama Canal belongs to us!”

    It is the hope of the Musk/Trump administration that if they lie often enough, loudly enough, forcefully enough, if they threaten enough journalists who call them out on their lies, they can build a world where their lies are true. Well, not true true, but close enough for government work.

    In a particularly poignant episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, Captain Picard of the Enterprise is captured by the fascist Cardassian regime. His jailers torture him brutally for information, but he doesn’t talk. Eventually, the Cardassian in charge of Picard’s interrogation hits upon a new technique. He shows Picard four bright lights, then tells him there are five. When Picard insists there are only four, the Cardassian tortures him again. This goes on for some time, with the Cardassian offering Picard comfort and safety if he would only agree that there are, in fact, five lights.

    It almost works. Just before Picard breaks and tells his torturer that there are five lights, another Cardassian arrives and sets him free. His crew have come to rescue him. On his way out, weary and broken down, he shouts at his jailer: “There are four lights!”

    When he’s recovering on his own ship, he later admits that by the end, he was starting to be able to see that fifth light.

    The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – signed by almost every country on Earth, America included – states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” If you haven’t ever read the UDHR – and if you’re an American, there’s a decent chance you haven’t – you can find it here, at the United Nations’ website. It’s one of the more inspiring documents I’ve ever read.

    It starts from the premise that all human beings are inherently free and equal, in a way that the United States likes to pretend it did. And it starts from that premise because it’s the truth. To be human is to be free, and to be free is to be equal. If you put human beings under oppression, inequality, or tyranny, it is our nature to rebel and resist. Maybe successfully, maybe not. But rebellion and resistance will happen.

    The Musk/Trump administration wants a world in which people are born to obey or to be obeyed, and they’re willing to pretend very loudly that we all live in that world. Their hope is that if they’re loud enough, they can drown out the most fundamental truth of human society: You’re a human being, damn it. And you were born free, and you were born equal to every other human being on Earth. Your body belongs to you, and you can do with it what you please, providing it harms no one else. You can build friendships with other people, people that are like you and people that aren’t, if you want to. You can create community together with people from all walks of life, from all corners of the Earth, with different languages and ideas and philosophy and music and art and food – and the diversity of perspectives and ideas will make this community better and stronger and more free.

    Your government can form meaningful relationships with other governments, your community can form alliances and friendships with other communities, crossing lines both geographic and linguistic – and this will make your country better, stronger, and more free.

    You can hold a deep, meaningful, powerful faith and hang onto your freedom and rights as a human being at the same time, because these things aren’t opposites. You can let people live in the places they’re from, and you can let them live in the places they want to go. You can help them defend themselves against terror and tyranny, dehumanization and erasure, and everyone involved will be the better for it.

    You can reach out to others with open hands of friendship, not closed hands wrapped around the grip of a gun, and you’ll be better for it.

    Compassion, love, peace, justice, friendship, and yes, freedom – these things aren’t weaknesses. They’re strengths.

    There are four lights.

    The Musk/Trump administration will get louder, more forceful, and more violent about their bullshit. Most media platforms, being owned by billionaire oligarchs, will cave and start pretending that the false reality painted by the right-wing is the real world, and that the siren song of liberty doesn’t beat in every human heart. The government will attempt to paint those of us who believe in freedom, equality, and dignity as crazies. Extremists, perhaps, or radicals.

    It’s not extremist, not radical, not even unusual to see four lights when the regime insists there are five.

    We’re at a turning point in America. As unelected shadow president Elon Musk would put it, a fork in the road. On one path that lies ahead of us, we don’t fight back against right-wing narratives. We try to carve out little niches for ourselves in the society of power and violence they’re trying to build; we fight for our rights, but on the fascists’ terms and on their turf. And we lose.

    On the other path ahead, we start from the bottom up. We start by proclaiming from the rooftops to the streets, by shouting from the mountains to the valleys: We’re human beings, damn it, and we are free. We build our politics and our communities around freedom and equality, we let people choose for themselves what to believe and where to go and what to think and say and do and be. And when would-be tyrants try to keep us from our freedom, we hang onto every last inch of it, with every means at our disposal. We fight tooth and nail, we salt the fields behind us. Because to be human is to be free, and I’ll die before I let anyone take that away from me.

    And I hope to God you’re with me.

    Great-Grandma Lehmann’s Mushroom Turnovers

    Ingredients (makes 25 turnovers)

    • 1/2 cup margarine
    • 8 ounces plain cream cheese
    • 1 1/2 cups flour
    • 1/4 cup water
    • 1/2 pound white button mushrooms, minced
    • 1 large onion, minced
    • 2 tsp chicken stock
    • 3 tbsp butter
    • 1/2 tsp thyme
    • 1 tsp salt
    • 1/4 cup sour cream
    • 2 tablespoons additional flour
    • 2 eggs

    Directions

    1. Mix the margarine, cream cheese, and water together, then add the quarter cup of flour. Mix by hand and form the mixture into a ball. Refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.
    2. Over medium heat, sautee the mushrooms and the onions in the butter. Add the thyme, salt, sour cream, chicken stock, and the 2 tablespoons of additional flour. Mix well.
    3. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
    4. Crack the eggs into a small mixing bowl and whisk them until they’re a nice smooth, consistent liquid.
    5. Take the ball of dough you made in step 1 and roll it out flat. Cut it into circles about two and a half inches in diameter. Place a teaspoon of the filling you made in step 2 into the middle of each of the circles of dough, then fold the dough circle over the filling to make a half-moon shape. Press the edges together with a fork to seal them.
    6. Arrange the turnovers you made in step 5 on a standard baking sheet; use a sheet of parchment paper to keep them from sticking to the baking sheet. Poke holes in the turnovers to let steam escape, and with a basting brush, give them a light coating of the beaten eggs from step 4.
    7. Bake the turnovers for 12 to 15 minutes, until they’re a nice golden brown.
    8. Enjoy!

    (Click here to jump back to the blog post.)

  • I’m Not Just Like You; You’re Just Like Me

    (and a tofu banh mi you can be proud of)

    (Because I’m not an asshole, you can click here to go straight to the recipe.)

    It’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times.

    For trans people, I mean. We’re in this crucial cultural moment where trans people’s existence is well and truly out of the bag, where in some places, transitioning is easier and arguably safer than it’s ever been before. And in other places, we’re being repressed.

    At the same time as trans people are finding their way onto the silver screen and into the halls of Congress, laws are being proposed and passed all over the country at a state level (and soon at a national level, with a Republican-led Congress) that aim to erase our existence from public life, force us back into our closets, or worse: “eradicate transgenderism” entirely.

    It won’t work, of course; this particular bit of toothpaste can’t go back into its tube. But that won’t stop transphobes from trying, and it certainly won’t stop them from wreaking incredible collateral damage along the way. The Democratic Party may choose to throw us trans people under their campaign buses, or it may not. It’s too early to tell (even if some results are encouraging).

    Many trans people are trying to defend themselves against this outpouring of hate by doing the same thing they did before. “We’re just like you,” they’ll say. “We’re normal, we can fit in, we promise we’re not weird or gross. We’re not like those trans people. We’re the good ones.” The few cisgender people that do defend us in the media tend to use the same narrative – trans people just want to live our normal American lives.

    They’re wrong.

    Trans people are to normalcy what vampires or Jehovah’s Witnesses are to your home: we can’t enter without permission, and you can revoke your invitation at any time.

    There’s a trick to being invited into normalcy, and it’s one some trans people have down to an art. Just don’t look or act transgender. If a trans person transitions early enough, happens to be good-looking, or has enough money to afford surgical intervention, they can look like a cisgender person. If they train themselves well enough, they can act like a cis person. Mostly.

    Of course, doing that takes a toll on a person. Hiding yourself like that is a source of constant tension, constant stress. Always worrying that your secret will be found out – and boy howdy, are people looking these days. But it can work. A trans person can be invited into normalcy if nobody knows they’re trans.

    For the rest of us, fitting into cisgender society is a precarious proposition. Maybe we’re too tall, or too short. Too fat, too skinny, too curvy, too angular. Maybe our voices are too deep, or too high. Maybe we don’t like the ways we’d have to dress, act, and speak in order to fit in. Or maybe we’re just sick and tired of being tentatively invited into normalcy for the hundredth time only to be thrown back out again.

    The truth is, most of us aren’t just like you. If we were, transphobes wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to stop you from knowing about us. They wouldn’t be banning our stories from library shelves, overriding the consensus of every reputable medical organization to ban trans healthcare, stripping us of our ability to have paperwork with our real name and gender. The Republicans and evangelicals, the right-wingers and TERFs, they’re genuinely convinced that trans people pose a danger.

    And they’re sort of right. We do represent a dangerous truth. Because while we might not be just like you, you’re a hell of a lot more like us than you think.

    The feeling of incongruity and wrongness that – in trans people – is called “gender dysphoria”? You’ve felt it too, I’d wager. Every time a man is bullied for his interests not being “manly enough”, every time a woman looks in the mirror, her standards set by Photoshop and Hollywood, and finds herself ugly, they feel it.

    The same surgery that right-wing politicians are tripping over themselves to ban for young trans men – mastectomy, the surgical removal of unwanted breasts – is something that’s not all that infrequent in young cis men. In fact, the vast majority of double mastectomy patients under 18 are cis boys.

    Gynecomastia – breast development in males – is hardly the norm, but it’s not uncommon, and many men who develop breasts do end up having medical intervention. It’s only a problem when it’s trans men that want that intervention, though.

    Hormone replacement therapy is incredibly common among cisgender people. Many men report a variety of symptoms, both psychological and physical, when they have low testosterone levels. Postmenopausal women have their own list of symptoms stemming from a lack of estrogen – and you’d be stunned to hear how many of those match my own symptoms precisely, when I’m low on estrogen.

    One of the things that occasionally rends my soul with grief is that I’ll never be able to bear children. My body can’t do it. And some of the people who’ve shared that feeling with me most, who I’ve bonded with over that pain? I’m the only trans person they’ve ever known. A lot of cisgender women who can’t have children for medical reasons feel those feelings.

    Hormones, surgery, not being able to fulfill one of the roles in the American nuclear family as my parents no doubt intended: these things aren’t just trans experiences. They’re not normal experiences, but you don’t have to be trans to have them. Trans people’s problems are your problems too, because you’re just like us.

    I’ve stopped asking to be let across the threshold of normalcy; it’s not a place I’ll ever be able to stay. But I do knock on the door occasionally. Not to be let in, but to invite people out into the weird world I inhabit. There are wonders out here beyond belief, and there’s family, love, and acceptance too. You’d be surprised how much you belong out here in the transgender wildlands, whether you’ve ever questioned your gender or not.

    I’m not just like you. You’re just like me.

    Tofu Banh Mi

    Ingredients:

    • One pound of extra-firm tofu
    • White vinegar (at least 3 cups)
    • Kosher salt
    • Granulated sugar
    • 1 medium-sized cucumber
    • 1 medium-sized carrot
    • Either one daikon (a large Japanese radish) or 4 regular red radishes
    • 3 tablespoons sesame oil
    • 1/2 tablespoon ground ginger
    • 1/2 tablespoon ground garlic
    • 1 cup soy sauce
    • 1/2 teaspoon sesame seeds
    • The juice of 1 lime
    • A baguette, as fresh as you can get it
    • Mayonnaise
    • Sriracha sauce
    • 1 bunch cilantro

    Preparation:

    The night before you intend to serve the banh mi, set out a large Ziploc bag and a small mixing bowl. Drain the tofu thoroughly and slice it into approximately 6 slices, about half an inch thick by three and a half wide by two tall. In the Ziploc bag, pour the soy sauce, sesame oil, lime juice, sesame seeds, ground ginger, and ground garlic. Seal the bag and shake it thoroughly until the ingredients emulsify, then place the tofu slices into the bag. Ensure the tofu slices are completely submerged in the mixture, then carefully drain the air out and seal the bag again.

    Take your cucumber, slice off the ends, and slice the cucumber in half lengthwise. Remove the seeds from the center (the best way of doing this is to scoop them gently using your 1/2 teaspoon measuring spoon, but do this over your garbage can, as it’s quite messy!), then slice the remaining cucumber flesh lengthwise into strips between 1/8 and 1/4 inch wide. Chop these strips into one inch long “matchsticks”, then cut the carrot and radish (daikon or otherwise) into “matchstick”-like strips of similar size.

    Place these matchsticks into the small mixing bowl, then pour white vinegar into the bowl until the chopped veggies are completely submerged. Add a pinch each of kosher salt and granulated sugar, then stir gently and cover with cling-wrap or a lid.

    Refrigerate both the bag of marinating tofu and the bowl of pickling vegetables overnight.

    When the time comes to prepare your banh mi, slice the baguette in half lengthwise, then cut it into sections about the size of the tofu slices. Arrange the baguette slices on a baking tray.

    Take your tofu slices out of their marinade. Pan-fry them over medium heat, using a neutral oil like canola, until they have a crispy texture on one side, then flip and cook for another minute.

    Place the baking tray full of baguette slices into your oven, then use the broiler to toast them for about 3 minutes.

    When the baguette slices have been toasted, bring the pickled veggies out of the fridge.

    Cover the baguette sections with mayonnaise on both halves, and add sriracha on the half that will become the top half. Place a liberal amount of the pickled veggies onto the bottom baguette half for each sandwich, then add a slice of marinated tofu. Use one or two sprigs of cilantro to garnish, then close the sandwish.

    Serve fresh.

    (Click here to jump back up to the blog post.)

  • I’m Not Satisfied With This World

    I’m Not Satisfied With This World

    (and a recipe for breakfast burritos)

    Hi there!

    Because this is the first ever post on this blog, I feel obligated to explain what the hell I’m doing, what you can expect if you read these writings, etc., before I actually get into the post proper. So here’s the deal: I love to write. About politics, philosophy, tech, theology – I’m an eclectic kind of gal. The posts here are going to be all over the place. However, they’re all going to have at least one thing in common, because I also love to cook. At the bottom of every post, there’ll be a recipe I love making. And because I’m not an asshole, around the top of every post, there’ll be a link that lets you skip the blog post part and just get to the recipe.

    If you want to skip to the recipe for my Arapahoe County breakfast burritos, click here.

    Ever since I can remember, science fiction has had a special place in my life. When I got my first TV and VCR – an old RCA set from a literal dumpster – I watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan often enough that I wore out three VHS tapes of the movie. (I only went through 2 tapes of The Voyage Home, if you’re wondering.) My bookshelves have always been packed with a range of sci-fi novels, from Banks to Leckie, LeGuin to Jemisin.

    A good bit of sci-fi does something special: using an imagined future, it paints our present in new colors, exposing the cracks in our society. Not every sci-fi book, movie, or TV series has to do that, of course. For every Octavia Butler, there are a dozen Kevin Andersons. But it’s the Butlers of the world, the LeGuins, Bankses, and Leckies, that stick with you. Because the best works of science fiction don’t let you walk away unchanged.

    The anime series Mobile Suit Gundam 00 is one of those works of sci-fi that didn’t let me walk away unchanged. In the first season of Gundam 00, a group of high-tech rebels decide that war and armed conflict aren’t allowed on Earth anymore. Using their superior technology and firepower, they “intervene” in any armed conflict that starts, killing anyone on any side that doesn’t retreat and stop fighting. “Peace through overwhelming force” is an inherent contradiction, and one the series doesn’t simply ignore as the plot barrels forward.

    In the climactic battle that concludes the first season of the show, Gundam 00‘s protagonists get what they want… sort of. The three major power blocs of Earth join forces, ending the three-way cold war that had been the status quo for years, to focus on eliminating the protagonists’ organization, Celestial Being. The Celestial Being forces lose the battle – badly. One of the four main protagonists is killed, and as he bleeds out in orbit over Earth, his last words are aimed at the planet below.

    “All you people down there, are you really satisfied with a world like this?” he asks, knowing nobody can hear him. “As for me, I hate it.”

    It’s just a couple minutes of television, but it’s stuck with me for years. Every time I see someone give up on their dream in advance, every time I hear the phrase “It is what it is,” those words come back to me. So much time and effort is spent convincing people that a better world isn’t possible – or worse, that a better world is impractical.

    In the wake of the 2024 presidential elections here in America, we’re already seeing it. Despite Kamala Harris running with Bush-era conservative talking points, despite her campaign trumpeting endorsements from Dick “literal cartoon villain” Cheney, the pundit class is already saying Harris’ campaign was too “woke”. The call is ringing out from the offices of the New York Times and from the blogs of milquetoast centrists everywhere:

    Throw queer people under the bus. Be harder on migrants. Stop banging the abortion drum so hard. Don’t call your opponents fascists. Lean right. Appeal to Republicans.

    Or, in so many words, This is the way the world is. Learn to live with it.

    Despite all the evidence showing the exact opposite, there are powerful voices trumpeting the idea that we just don’t live in a world where people want their neighbors to have human rights. That the American public, and the public of a lot of other countries, just wants cruelty, and who are we to stop them from getting it?

    The world that the “centrists” among the Democratic party and the media establishment believe in is simple: Democracy is a failed experiment, human rights are a technicality, and catastrophic climate change is inevitable. The best they can think to give us is a softer blow, a kinder suffering. A spoonful of sugar to make the hemlock go down smoothly.

    I don’t think that’s the world we live in. Truly, I don’t. But even if the sneering “anti-woke” pundits blaming Democrats’ election losses on pronouns were right, the conclusion wouldn’t be that we should just give up on trans people. Even if Democrats lost because they were too woke on the border, the conclusion wouldn’t be that we should support mass deportations.

    Even if trans rights, abortion, climate resiliency, degrowth, freedom of and from religion, and multiculturalism were losing battles – and I don’t think they are – they’d still be worth fighting for.

    I don’t know what the future looks like for America, or for trans people like myself, or for immigrants or refugees. There are a lot of battles ahead for all of us, in the courts and in the streets and in the state houses and city halls and police precincts. There’s a distinct possibility that we try our best to make a better world and fail.

    But all you people out there, are you really satisfied with a world like this?

    Personally, I hate it.

    Arapahoe County Breakfast Burritos

    Ingredients:

    • Chorizo, 8 oz
      • Important: use hard sausage chorizo, not the stuff that has a paste-like texture.
    • Shredded potatoes
      • If fresh, two medium-sized Russetts
      • If frozen, 2 cups
    • Green chiles, 1 can
    • 8-inch flour tortillas, 8
    • Large eggs, 5
    • Queso fresco, 8 oz
      • You can absolutely substitute a “Mexican 4-cheese blend” or similar.
    • Powdered onion, 1/2 tsp
    • Powdered garlic, 1/2 tsp
    • Lawry’s Seasoned Salt, 3/4 tsp
    • Black pepper, 1/4 tsp
    • Smoked paprika, 1/2 tsp
    • Curry powder, 1/4 tsp
    • Canola or peanut oil

    Directions:

    Heat up a frying pan to medium heat and add the shredded potatoes in an even layer. Add canola oil until the top of the layer of shredded potatoes barely peeks out, then season the potatoes with Lawry’s salt, black pepper, powdered onion, powdered garlic, and curry powder. Stir to ensure even spice distribution.

    Let the potatoes crisp up, about 8 minutes, then flip them and cook another 8. While the potatoes are frying, in a small bowl, crack the eggs and scramble them with a whisk until they have an even yellow coloring. Slice each link of chorizo in half, then peel the meat out of the casing. Take a knife and dice the chorizo into pieces about a quarter of an inch on each side.

    When the potatoes are cooked to a crispy dark brown color, drain the oil from the pan and pour the oil-less potatoes into a large mixing bowl.

    Keep the pan on medium and add the diced chorizo. Let it cook down for about 3 minutes, then pour in the scrambled eggs. Stir the eggs gently until they’ve cooked solid, then remove the pan from heat and pour the chorizo and egg mixture into the mixing bowl with the potatoes.

    Add the green chiles from the can, mix the contents of the bowl thoroughly, and set out your tortillas.

    In the center of each tortilla, spoon out about 1/3 cup of the burrito mixture, then sprinkle your cheese on top. Fold the sides of the tortilla in and roll, until your burrito is completely wrapped.

    This recipe typically makes between 5 and 8 burritos, each of which is a complete serving.

    Click here to jump back to the blog post.