2nd Patreon Goal Met

So what’s exciting about this whole Patreon thing is that I feel like people are signing up to read me as a writer and not just me as trans advocate. And that feels good.

I hit my 2nd goal of 25 patrons which means I have to make a video. Come join and you’ll get to see it.

Another thing: this site is having some kind of Malware issue, but my webmistress, my wife, is in the middle of dealing with both (1) having totaled our car last week – she’s fine, and (2) moving to Ashland to start her hear with Oregon Shakespeare Festival — without said car, obviously. She’ll check into it as soon as she can, but in the meantime, you may need to bypass the blog and use direct links to my various things.

Sorry about that. Repairs on the way.

1st Patreon Goal Met

So the whole Patreon thing is exciting. I wish I’d done this year ago.

I promised that if I got a dozen followers I’d post a short piece on the Art of Aspiration & Resistance I’m working on, a manifesto of sorts, and I did and it’s up.

Here’s an excerpt:

Yet someone thought to take a time lapse of the way the light plays with the stained glass of DC’s National Cathedral. Who did that and why? Who built it and why? What happens to me when I watch, when you do? What happens in our brains, to our eyes? Do the tense lines in our faces relax, do our pets sigh nearby, do our breaths get a little deeper so we can take a minute to think or not to think, depending? What faith once did – provide beauty and aspiration and art and peace – seems to be missing from so many lives. So much faith seems to be about hate these days.

My intention, then, is to dig in, to go back to a time when I didn’t know what to do with this great desire for beauty, when I didn’t even know it was that, to dig into the other great yearnings I’ve learned how to name, for the erotic, for power, for peace, for friendship, for something I hesitate to call communion. Love, meaning, life. Once again I have no choice but to lean on Art, but Art in her most eternal form, the only real response there can ever be to despair.

Because I know how hard I’m fighting that beast and I assume others are too. How do you live with a big sensitive soul in a time when everything seems awash in ignorance and violence, with the one rolling into the other, joining forces and gaining speed? How do we build a culture that says no even as the rest is trying to kill us? And how do we stop it from killing us not just spiritually but actually?

Come join me!

Me on Patreon

It’s high time, and in the light of the loss of Ursula Le Guin, I decided to take this little leap off a cliff by starting an account on Patreon. I can’t let my wife have all the fun, can I?

I haven’t set up goals or rewards yet as I’m curious to hear what all of you would want from me. I *do* plan on doing a video and maybe some audio recordings – cause y’all like my voice – but mostly this will be new and different kinds of writing that I don’t do as much of because my blog is so on the trans/gender tip.

Expect pieces more like this and this and this, and maybe some fiction, maybe excerpts from the two novels I have written but never quite finished, and maybe some of a fairy tale I keep kicking around, and maybe anything I’m writing that doesn’t as easily cleave to the HB brand.

Thank you in advance. It means everything to me to have people in my life who want to read what I write and who want to support me while I do.

Ursula K.

Ursula K. Le Guin died yesterday at the age of 88.

I don’t even know how to begin to process this news.

For me, she was more than Bowie or Prince – but no need to compare, either.

In Left Hand she taught us all about relational, relative gender by inventing characters who become sexed  as a result of the person they were with, so the male King of a kingdom had, in a previous relationship, given birth to her own children.

She taught me everything we all already know about trees but have failed to imagine. In Direction of the Road, she writes as an oak tree :

If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

And in Earthsea she taught us about power and ethics and how to live despite everything.

She taught us what it means to only ever be a ‘bad man’ because we are women; that is, she uses the ‘bad man’ idea to explain that we are all of us people, but some of us are automatically bad at being what we are supposed to be because of gender and its caste.

She also told a senior editor at Harcourt that he’d created an anthology of new writing that was more like a locker room and so didn’t blurb it. 

Her clarity of mind – that bright, steady, lamp of intellect she yielded alternately like a laser or a search light – made so much visible that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Such a huge loss, such an inspiration, influence, mentor-from-a-distance; she taught me how to hold my head up as a woman who writes and that has been invaluable.

#metoo Read Up

Let me get out of the way that I’m one of those horrid feminists who not only works with men but who works to bring men into feminist movement. In addition to men of course being part of the problem, by act or omission, they also desperately need freeing from gender. We all do.

I’ve been wishing lately, in the midst of all of the articles and op-eds about sexual assault, that women all over the world might just publish the direct messages, chats, conversations in women’s groups, and transcripts of phone calls that have been happening for months now, the ones that start “shit this week has been triggering” and “okay the Ansari story is exactly it” and the like. But we won’t. We shouldn’t have to.

Because it’s all already out there, as Lindy West just pointed out in the NYT. So many things, so many. We have been talking amongst ourselves lately for months but we’ve also been talking about this amongst ourselves for decades (and before that, we were pointedly not discussing it but trying to keep other women away from those men, when we knew them). Women recommend these books to each other all the time and give them to each other as presents sometimes to say #metoo to teach other but also to say #yesallwomen but rarely do we give them to the men in our lives.

I suspect that most of my closest male friends have not read one book that’s explicitly feminist, and I’m what some might call a humorless feminist, so the men I’m close to are generally of the more enlightened variety. But even among them, I suspect there are very few who have read any of the books on that list or any other books by women and about women.

So guys, READ UP, would you? Almost any woman you know would be happy* to recommend one and most would even be happy to discuss it with you, but with one giant caveat:

You Can’t Be a Jerk About It.

Here’s How: (6 Easy Steps! A Listicle! Learn things about women while investing almost no time!)

  1. Read to understand, not to disagree. No looking for the holes in the arguments.
  2. Read it as if you were a woman. That is, try to imagine you were assigned one at birth and raised one or transitioned or whatever version of woman  you can imagine yourself being most easily.
  3. Try to remember that most of the is lit is written by white women and reflects all of the privilege and self-selection that implies.
  4. don’t think about your sister/wife/girlfriend/mother/daughter because your relationship with them is likely already stepped in a fuckton of male privilege you probably don’t recognize. That is, you already think of them as women, which is really the root of the whole damn problem.
  5. Tell a woman who might be willing to talk to you about it that you’re ignorant af but really want to understand how you could have grown up in a culture where you failed to notice that more than half the population is scared to say no, or hi, or to speak to men they don’t know or to men they do know except when they’re drunk or angry or men they thought they knew and trusted only to find out how wrong they were.
  6. Also, don’t discuss it. Highlight things that confuse or perplex you and ask her to explain them. Don’t talk. Listen. Quietly. Without objection.
  7. When you’re done, start over with a new book and maybe with a new woman (dependent on how likely you followed the previous 6 instructions).

This is how you learn things, guys, by learning things. Read books written by women in whatever genre you prefer: it’s all in there, in one form or another, in one book or another.

You might even find a new favorite writer. (Really. I actually like some male writers, no kidding, but only if I can relate to their lives.) (OK, that’s a joke. I like a lot of writers I have absolutely nothing in common with. That’s kind of the whole point of reading, to understand other people’s lives and so live in the world with compassion.)

Start now, please.

*Okay, I’m only kidding. Don’t ask a woman to volunteer for this bullshit. Find one who is willing to work with you and PAY HER to educate your ignorant ass.