Me and my father vs the packers and bears.

The Packers just defeated the Bears and made the playoffs. The birthday letter to my father last year was about football and chasms, and 16 weeks, and trying to stand on the same piece of a plane for a few moments. And the Packers made the playoffs and the rift between us is larger than it's been in a very long time.

I feel like a failure.

I can't call him and talk to him because something would be my fault and we couldn't go back from there. So, a lot of things are my fault. Things I can't really talk about. Things that come with stamps of failure on them. Lies he doesn't even know about. I don't know when this got so hard. I struggled with the letter this past year, it took me a few days to figure out what I wanted to start saying, and a few more to figure out how to say it, and even then, I restarted the letter about a dozen times before just rolling with it. And then it was football season, and election season, and angry phone calls and passive-aggressive emails and the chasm growing wider and wider. and and and. I wish I could say 'and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' but all I have are the ands and no idea what anything about tomorrow will be.

Except a wider and deeper distance between me and my father.

vote to abort or to give birth

trigger warning: abortion, despicable humanity

No really, you didn't read that title wrong; it's what one couple is doing on a site you can find if you so choose to google it: they're asking you to vote on whether or not they should abort her pregnancy or carry it to term.

And there's where it all falls down for me.

The poll question reads: Should we give birth or have an abortion?

Answers: Give birth; Have an abortion.

There is no answer for: 'being pro-choice means that I respect your right to your autonomy and this decision should rest entirely with you'.

Because that is what being pro-choice means. Pro-choice does not mean voting for her to have an abortion simply because you believe that is her choice to make. The couple said they were considering abortion because she had been through three painful miscarriages already and collectively, they weren't sure if they were emotionally ready to have a child. Damn, y'all, that's some fucking personal shite they've got going on. But putting it up to a vote on the internet? I am not at all surprised that 80% of the vote is swinging towards 'give birth' and that several of those voters have emailed expressing interest in adopting the child if the vote and/or their decision is 'have an abortion'. Why? Because I would think there are several pro-choice people out there similarly not voting because we understand this is a personal choice. It's the pro-life crowd that views every birth as a victory - but it's not as if the pro-choice crowd views an abortion as a victory. We view the choice itself as a victory. And that is the MOST IMPORTANT thing to consider when discussing pro-life and pro-choice and who has a baby and who has an abortion and who gets to decide.

The couple go on to say 'The whole point here is to let people have a real way to voice your opinion on the topic of abortion and have it actually make a difference in the real world' which isn't exactly true. As long as the option of a choice is there, then my opinion already has an impact on the real world. When you create an environment in which that choice is no longer there and there is a woman in that environment who wishes to make the choice to have an abortion - then, and ONLY then will my vote to impact 'give birth' or 'have an abortion' make a difference in the real world. And even then, my opinion/vote will be for 'let her make that CHOICE for herself'.

'By voting on whether to continue or abort an actual pregnancy, you are doing so much more then simply telling an elected representative your feelings. You are actually changing something in the real world.' Again, THEY'RE MISSING THE POINT. No-one is telling this woman she cannot have an abortion. Therefore, there's nothing for me to vote on. I can't vote on her choice - I can only encourage my elected representatives to CONTINUE TO ALLOW WOMEN TO MAKE THAT CHOICE FOR THEMSELVES.

There's nothing for me to vote on here. There's no change I can make on the real world. The change has already been made, in 1973, with a court case called Roe v Wade, which legalised abortion in the United States. Someone else VOTED for HER, and all WOMEN, a long time ago, before I was born. And there are a lot of places here in these United States where that vote doesn't hold as much weight as it does where this couple seems to live. So if I'm going to make any vote in the matter whatsoever, it's going to be for legislatures who will uphold Roe and the CHOICE that Roe represents.

That couple gets to make their own choice on her pregnancy. That's not a choice I - nor the collective voices of the internet - should be making for her.

blue glitter

I had a teacher apologise to me once, for the way my classmates were treating me, and how she couldn't stop it. I was 14 at the time of the incidents, and 15 when she apologised, the summer after I had her class. I haven't thought about that in over ten years. Until Spirit Day and a discussion over whether telling someone they're wrong is bullying or free speech.

There's a difference between opinion/respectfully disagreeing with an opinion, and a fact/shame and judgement of that fact.

Telling someone that they are wrong for being gay implies in there that someone has made the choice to be gay - it's as asinine as telling someone that they're wrong for being born with a particular skin colour. Because if one could pick skin colour, or sexuality, why would anyone chose to be a part of the marginalised, dehumanised group? I want to bring up the Prop8 case and the Findings of Fact, because two of them strike me as the end to the argument. And I'm going to use them, instead of my story at 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 and today, because my story is one thread, too easy to dismiss as an 'opinion' on what shouldn't be a narrative in the first place. They are findings of fact 46, and 44 [partial], respectfully.

Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation. and, only a fragment, but no less important, sexual orientation is fundamental to a person’s identity.

Sexual orientation is neither an opinion nor a choice. And telling someone they're wrong for having a non-het/cis sexual/gender identity is denying someone pieces of their intrinsic human worth. No-one is worth less because of the way they were born. All men are created equal. It says so right there in the Declaration of Independence. And not only that, but it says that being created equal is self-evident. Deliberately infringing upon that, even if one does it under the guise of an opinion, is bullying. Period. [Should be] end of conversation.

If a person is disabled, poor, male/female, an immigrant, or LGBTQQIA, (to name a few), and you tell them they are wrong - that they exist wrongly as a human being - because of it you are bullying them.

And you should be ashamed of yourself.

I don't think I've ever told this story. Perhaps just pieces.

I knew something was wrong with my body when I was twelve and starting bleeding. I told my mother once shortly after that I didn't want to be a girl, if that's what being a girl was. I never got used the idea, even today, many many many moons later. When I was 15 I dated Robert. He was a sweet enough guy, we worked together, but every time he'd try to kiss me, I'd flip out. I liked him, I liked him a lot, I just didn't want to kiss him. When I was a junior in high school, Nate announced to everyone in homeroom that anyone who wore yellow sweatshirts was gay - and not in the 'that's so gay' sense. At 17, I fell in love with my best friend, Kate. I told the librarian of my school that I wanted to cut myself to death because I couldn't take everything going on at school and everything in my head anymore.

This whole time, I maintained, even to myself, that I was straight and cis, even though I had no idea the concept of what cis/trans was.

After I successfully fought for my school to be allowed to partake in the Day of Silence protest, we were told that the fliers we wanted to distribute needed to make no mention to transgender or transsexual, because God had created us in his image, and we might have girls liking girls, and that was fine, but girls who wanted to change their parts and be boys were abominating their God-given bodies. Even as an atheist, I readily agreed.

I was teased mercilessly in high school, and some of it was attacks on my sexuality, which are cheap, and easy to make, and shouldn't have hurt as much as they did. I mean, I wasn't gay, so why would it hurt so much, right? I denied the concept to everyone else, and ran away from it myself, but I still threw out my favourite yellow sweatshirt and tried, desperately, to find a guy at my school to go out with. Falling in love with Kate, well, that didn't really help matters much. There was an explosion in my head of everything I wanted, everything I denied I was, and everything I didn't have.

I never felt emotionally safe enough to confront anything that had been rattling in my head in since the age of 12. My mother told me they made pills that would help make the bleeding stop, but that it would all be worth it when I had children of my own. The thought was anathema to me. Why the hell would I want anything growing inside of me, and then ... pop it out? It didn't make any sense, and it didn't make being a girl any easier - it wasn't exactly comforting words. Shiraz had been shoved out of the school for being gay - he was outed at a birthday party in front of more than a few of our classmates. The subsequent lack of support from his friends and school system left him to leave. I didn't want to be like Shiraz, I still hadn't even defined my own sexuality and gender, but I wanted my classmates to know what they had done was wrong on a basic, human level. For that I was told I must be gay, because no man would ever take me, but maybe a really ugly woman would. These kids weren't exactly full of originality. But standing up for someone clearly meant I was in the same boat as they were, so why didn't I just go find some bitch to go rub against?

The words weren't true - I wasn't gay, I did like boys, I wanted to have sex - all driving points I went home and told myself after I fought with my mother and went to sob upstairs. I couldn't figure out why it hurt so much. Until Kate. And then, rather than having everything suddenly make sense, it suddenly all made so much less sense. Because now I really did like Kate. And really wanted things to happen with Kate - but there was still a part of me that thought being gay was perfectly fine as long as it happened to other people. That was the lesson my parents taught me.

So I ran. From myself, from my sexuality, from any exploration of gender. I ran and ran and ran and didn't stop until I happened upon a particular part of the internet and a community that accepted everyone. At first, I stood on the edges, calling myself a straight-ally, until I figured out that it was okay to say 'hey, I don't know'. So I called myself asexual, and decided I wasn't going to do anything, with anyone, ever again. Having to testify against an ex-boyfriend and a separate rape helped fuel that idea. But with a lot of time and a lot of struggle, I learned to look at the pieces of myself and figure out which whole they made up.

Now? Now I'm genderqueer and don't care and if you don't like it, you can leave.

echoes into the silence

trigger warning: rape

75% of all the rape cases worldwide that MSF deals with come from Eastern Congo. An entire generation has been irrevocably damaged. And there is silence. There is a cold haunting silence that the screams of an entire population cannot penetrate.

Sometimes being a political organiser gets to me. Sometimes I have to remind myself why I do this. Because sometimes it all seems so petty, talking to a voter about taxes and who we should raise them on. Sometimes I wish I could go to Africa and see what I see and then type until my fingers bled, trying to get someone to see with me. Because when the response I get here to the above statistic is 'doesn't surprise me' with a casual shrug of the shoulders, that's a problem. And it's not that the stat is surprising - it's the attitude behind it. Then again, if rape in the US is an accepted culture all its own, then perhaps the response shouldn't have been surprising. Perhaps the real surprise should be 'why is rape culture still an acceptable culture in the US'? No wonder it's so easy to wrapped up about Sudan and people dying, but rape is rape, and hey, if a woman in the US 'asks for it' by the clothing she wears, or the places she visits, or the men she looks at, then why should we talk about why women and girls in the Congo are being raped by the thousands? Because that's the real problem. We don't TALK about it.

It's a forbidden, taboo topic that we can't talk about, ever, except to quote stats about it. 1 in 3 college women, 1 in 4 women across the US in their lifetimes. We can't talk about it, so no-one ever corrects the myths about who does the raping and how they rape. We can’t handle rape as a culture so we put the blame where it’s easiest – on the woman who actually dared to speak out. We have to make it easier. We have to trust women more. But talking? And getting some things straight? That’s just as important.

There were two surveys* done of populations of men, asking them if they’d raped. In the first one, 6% of men admitted raping. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is that of that 6%, of the men who had raped more than once, the average number of rapes was nearly 6. SIX. That’s a ridiculously high recidivism rate. In this survey it breaks down to 4% of the men committing 28% of the rapes. In the second survey, 13% of men admitted raping. The average number of rapes was just over 6. AGAIN. SIX. In this survey, it breaks down to 8.4% of the men committing 95% of the rapes.

That is scary, but not in and of itself the most shocking part. No, that comes with "The stereotypical rape incident characterized by a man violently attacking a stranger was not reported by any of the respondents". But SOMEHOW, and this is where I get mad, SOMEHOW rape is only to be ‘believed’ if a woman is dragged from her car, screaming by some unknown man in a mask. Don't get me wrong: I AM SURE THIS DOES HAPPEN. But the fact that a woman who is date-raped faces her peers siding with 'the good guy who was just confused' infuriates me. I've been there and I can't get over how quickly friends of mine bought into the rape-myth. That because Timothy seemed like a good guy and we knew each other and people had seen us that night. So clearly he couldn’t have raped me. I wish I were making that up. I have written about rape. And again. And again. And too many other places to mention. And I still cannot even come close to comprehending our rape culture.

I really didn't mean to make this post about US and rape culture. I wanted to have it be about Africa and the women who live in its heart who live in darkness night after night after night. Who have nothing and no relief. But I cannot write about them without writing about us as well. We abandon our own women day after day after day and make it damn near impossible for her to be taken seriously about being raped. We strip away any of her innocence because it’s the only way we've figured out how to live with the realisation that we KNOW these men, so we need to justify knowing them. That is what we do to our women.

And what do we do to the women of Africa who are not 1 in 3 but every single one of them over and over and over again? What do we do to the generations that will be shattered by this, tortured by this hollowing of thousands upon thousands of souls? What do we do? We define ourselves by our silence. We don't talk about our own culture and our own women and we don't talk about the women buried by a face of war and rape and war crimes. We fill the silence with jokes and assumptions and myths and accusations. And we ignore the underlying helplessness. We ignore any cry thrown into the silence because we might recognise the sound of her voice.

I wish I could put the helplessness I feel into proper words. I wish I could mention the outrage in some other way. I wish talking to the silence got me back something other than an echo.

of chasms and football. Or, a letter about my father, on his birthday

I keep restarting this letter. I don't know why it's so hard this year. Maybe because my dad and I have been really distant this year. A lot of things have happened to push that boundary further away than it usually is. We can usually find something to connect on, even if we only talk for five minutes. But lately there's been a huge chasm that we haven't been able to breach.

I get that he's a pretty conservative catholic. I get that he and I don't see eye-to-eye on social issues. I get that he and I cannot have conversations about things that are wholly important to me. I get that I hate baseball, and only follow football to root against the vikings. My dad's not too into basketball, unless TCU is playing. My dad's not really into a lot of sports unless TCU is playing.

He's a very quiet, reserved guy. I see him get passionate about sports, and that's about it. And the stars, but that takes some prodding. But sports? My dad lives for Football Sundays. When I was growing up, we went to Mass every Sunday. At eleven. And Mass ran for an hour. And sometimes kickoff was at noon sharp. And let me tell you, we could videotape it, but apparently there is no greater thrill than watching a kick-off live. I have fond memories of getting out of the pew to go to communion, and my dad hissing in my ear 'grab your coat, we're going straight to the car' and then the RACE home at 11:55 to get in the house by noon sharp. Lucky for him we lived so close to church.

Watching him watch the game was an event in and of itself. The loud loud yelling at bad calls, the occasional throwing of things. My dad got intense during his game, and damn it all, if the Packers lost, he'd be in a foul mood the rest of the day. When I went off to college, I followed Packer games specifically to see the final score. And if the Packers lost, I'd wait to call him. [As for baseball, my dad is DIE HARD Brewers fan. They go into a game expecting to lose, so the real surprise is when they pull off a win. Okay. Perhaps I'm not being fair. But it's no biggie to call him after they lose.] I never considered it strange to make that the basis of our communication. I still don't. I've mentioned before how we communicate on different planes. This is just one of those planes, one of the ones that I'm okay with. It's a place where we can meet, and stand together. It's a small plane, tiny, nearly insignificant.

And for me, even though we are distant right now, I'm pleased that there's a Packer's game tonight. 16 weeks and maybe my dad and I can figure out a way to close some of this chasm, one tiny plane at a time.

on census classification

I officially registered as transgendered on the census. The census guy I talked to was AMAZING.

I mean, technically, it's a refusal to answer the question, with an official note at the bottom, but still. It feels surreal knowing that in 70 years, there will be some record, of this time and place, and of who I was at that time and place. I didn't realise refusing to answer the question was an option until the census people informed us that they were redoing the count for the entire house and we basically had to fill it out all over again. And I did it by phone, and I asked him, at the end, to include a note that I wanted to Queer The Census, and he added the note, and then asked me if I wanted to be M or F, and I said I want to be neither, and he said he'd change it to me refusing to answer the question and add the note as to why.

It's a simple story, but I feel like retelling it as many ways as I need to - as I want to - as there can be told.

I feel like of course this is nothing and of course this is everything, all at the same time.

I wish I had a more poetic way to say any of this, but I don't.