First Draft Theater

Halloween is so beloved by many of us queer and trans people that it’s sometimes jokingly called the gay high holy day or gay Christmas. But why is that?

To explain, we need to go back to a toll gate in Wales in 1839.

Stay with me here.

In the late 1830s, western Wales was experiencing a period of poor harvests, which severely decreased the income of farmers. Yet prices of rent, tithes, and taxes, including at toll gates, continued to increase.

It was a tense time when the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. Sound familiar?

The toll taxes in particular were meant to provide funding for the improvement of the roads, but they were often run with seedy practices and jacked up fees.

So on May 13th, 1839, a group of men launched a rebellion against the mounting economic inequality, picking toll gates as both their figurative and literal target. Late that night, they ambushed a toll gate keeper — appearing out of the darkness on horseback, making a ruckus with horns, drums, shouts, and gunfire.

The leader and several others were wearing women’s dresses, some even wigs. They set the toll house ablaze and galloped off into the night, disappearing again within minutes. But when hundreds of them returned a month later to fully burn the toll gate to the ground, they were overheard by the guards referring to their leader as Rebecca.

As their riots continued on and off for the next several years, with many of the men wearing women’s frocks and nightgowns as they destroyed toll gates, they would come to be known as the Daughters of Rebecca.

Now, I’m not saying these rioters who wore women’s clothes and nicknamed their leader Rebecca were trans. Or at least, we don’t know how all of them identified. Why is everyone assumed cis until proven otherwise?

Not that anyone in the early 19th century would’ve used the word “trans,” which didn’t really come about in the way we use it now until the twentieth century… but the point is: whether or not anyone involved in the rebellion was maybe feeling some fun gender affirmation from dressing in women’s clothes, that’s not why the Daughters of Rebecca as a group did it. It wasn’t a statement on gender. One possible explanation is simply that it helped disguise them from authorities, with dresses being a readily available “costume” from the women in their lives.

This also wasn’t the only instance of a cross-dressed rebellion. Around the British Isles alone, there were numerous instances going back to at least the 1400s of men dressing as women, and sometimes women dressing as men, as part of a protest—including uprisings in the 1620s against public land being sold privately and a Luddite revolt for labor rights in 1812.

But why did cross-dressing become the fashion of protests back then, like V for Vendetta masks or pussy hats in the 2010s?

Well, apart from convenient disguises, these rebellions were building on a long history of cross-dressing and other forms of social inversion performed on holidays.

Beginning at least with Saturnalia in Rome and continuing through early modern Christmas traditions and other festival days, people would celebrate by turning the world upside down. Boys might get to play as bishops. A common man might be king for the day. Someone might be appointed the Lord of Misrule to preside over the chaos and revelry of the holiday. And yes, people might dress up and play-act as another gender.

It was an important part of ritual and celebratory fun for many populations. But it was a bit too fun for the Christian church.

Now there’s a lot of debate around the extent to which Christian colonizers mapped their religious holidays on top of existing pagan or indigenous traditions in an effort to convert people. So I’m not exactly getting into all of that.

But we do know that, for many centuries in many places, festival practices like “masking” and “mumming” often included dressing as another gender, and that it was one of many aspects of the revelry and loosening of social norms that the church sometimes tried to prohibit.

Occasionally, these festival days would include a bit of political commentary or even bubble up into some kind of direct action. Since there was a feeling of being a bit cheeky or rebellious on these days and sometimes using the cover of the festival to air your true grievances, it’s not too surprising that some people would then incorporate the festival practices into their protests on non-festival days — like the Daughters of Rebecca dressing up to destroy toll-gates and fight for economic justice.

And it should be noted that some local leaders were relatively okay with certain festivals happening as a kind of “safety valve” on society. You give people this one day to let off some steam and do whatever they want, and then maybe they’ll be more obedient on every other day of the year.

Not everyone was convinced by the safety valve theory, however.

A lot of these festival celebrations were coming to be centered around the midwinter holidays and the Puritans, for example, straight-up banned Christmas for twenty-two years in New England due to, quoting Cotton Mather,

“[spending] Christ’s Nativity in Reveling… Masking… mad Mirth… long Eating… hard Drinking… lewd Gaming… [and] rude Reveling.”

I mean, sign me up.

Of course Christmas did not stay outlawed in New England or elsewhere in America, but as Christmas steadily made its way back into the mainstream it had lost a lot of its street revelry and inversion traditions becoming, by the mid-nineteenth century, more of a quiet holiday you spent at home with your family.

And some of that “mad Mirth” and masking shifted a little earlier in the calendar year, combining with other traditions of guising and souling—ultimately developing into an anarchic cacophony of traditions that has resisted definition and evaded legal bounds for centuries. A slippery, devilish beast that became the one holiday that those in power could never fully manage to capture. One day in which old traditions were kept alive in the new. One day in which, by a loophole, queer and trans people have been kept safe: Halloween.

A Brief History of (some parts of) Halloween

Halloween truly is a day of juxtapositions, Frankensteined from a whole mess of different cultural traditions.

Many cultures around the world and throughout time have had ritual observances at this time of year focused either on the harvest, or on the relationship between light and dark as we head into winter, often as an opportunity to remember ancestors and acknowledge our own mortality.

Which all makes sense in agricultural societies when autumn is the time of harvest, providing a bounty of fresh food to enjoy before it all goes to be preserved for the coming year. There’s, hopefully, a lot to celebrate in what you’ve managed to grow and in the start of some well-earned leisure time following many months of hard work in the growing season. It’s a time to take stock of your resources as you head into a harsh, dark winter season during which a good harvest could literally be the difference between life and death.

And so mortality might have been on the minds of people this time of year, as they prepared for the most challenging of the seasons. But also as they looked at the world around them––the days growing shorter, the nights growing colder, and the land growing nothing at all. Leaves decaying and falling from brittle tree branches.

It easily evokes a kind of death. But it could just as easily be a transformation. The changing leaves a new costume the Earth is trying on. And the dark winter a time of rest before a rebirth.

Halloween, as it’s celebrated today in America and increasingly around the world, pulls from many traditions, but perhaps most of all from Celtic ones——thanks to the many Irish and Scottish people who immigrated here prior to the twentieth century.

One of those traditions was “souling” in which people—usually children and/or people from lower classes—would go door-to-door ahead of All Souls Day singing or offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food or money. It’s similar to wassailing at Christmastime when peasants would go to the homes of the feudal lords and receive food in exchange for a song — that’s where the whole “bring us a figgy pudding” line in “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” comes from.

Anyways, souling, and wassailing, go hand in hand with the mumming I mentioned earlier, which sometimes involved, not just getting dressed up, but singing outside your neighbors door before joining the party inside.

Souling, in some parts of Scotland and Ireland, evolved into “guising,” which then included dressing in costume, or a disguise, and instead of praying for the dead, kids would now perform some kind of talent, or trick, in exchange for some kind of treat.

Some have argued that this harkens back to even older traditions, in which people would wear some sort of disguise to hide themselves from the spirits who were free to roam the land of the living during Hallowtide.

It might all sound rather quaint, going door-to-door to sing a song and being given a bit of cake in return. But it did occasionally get out of hand. Particularly throughout the 19th and early twentieth centuries, this custom often became an excuse for groups of mostly young men to level destruction if they weren’t given “treats.” And sometimes the exchange was abandoned all together, with simply the night of Halloween itself being the reason for mayhem, and violence.

To try to curb this destructive behavior, Americans attempted to sanitize the holiday. Trick or treating was emphasized as being for younger children—no exchange needed, really please no tricks, just dress up and be given candy. And families were encouraged to host parties for children and teenagers to keep them off the streets and out of trouble. This worked to a certain extent. Violence on Halloween decreased significantly by the 1950s, though it didn’t go away completely, and still hasn’t.

Halloween Becomes Gay Christmas

But nonviolent festival-style celebrations were still happening among adults, especially in cities.

Halloween continued to be a day that evoked mischief, ambiguity, and turning social norms on their heads. And if you were a person whose very identity was alleged to be against the laws of god and man, wouldn’t you find a night like that at least a little enticing?

A night when you could play out your wildest dreams, or simply blend in for once. A night when the oppressive social order was disrupted, when the impossible felt possible, and when people danced in the face of death.

Halloween is “a cultural collision… between glitter and grave dust.”

— David J. Skal

As gay communities started gathering in public spheres in the first half of the twentieth century, largely at bars and drag balls, Halloween became a tent pole event.

Notably, in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s there used to be an annual event called Bitch’s Christmas, in which hundreds of drag queens led a kind of cross between a bar crawl and an unofficial parade that used to attract thousands of spectators, gay and straight. And because the city was at least socially segregated at the time, some of the Black drag queens soon started their own parade on South Street.

In a way, it’s not too surprising that Philadelphia would’ve been on the forefront of queer parades considering it’s home to the annual Mummer’s Parade each New Year’s Day. Founded officially in 1901 and still running to this day, it pulls, in part, from the same mumming, or dressing up in elaborate sometimes cross-gendered costumes, I mentioned earlier.

The Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade is not without controversy, especially in the kinds of costumes participants try to get away with, but the fact that it was a long established local tradition already in the 1940s probably helped make Bitches Christmas seem like less of an oddity or scandal.

And it’s notable that a public gathering of queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people was happening in the 40s and 50s because that pre-Stonewall era was particularly tough.

From 1848 until the early 1900s, dozens of US cities passed laws prohibiting cross-dressing. Usually these were a part of broader laws against various forms of public indecency, but they were used to arrest people for not conforming to their birth assigned gender presentation. These arrests ramped up in the 1950s and 60s, as gay communities increasingly gathered in public spaces.

Anecdotal accounts tell of people being arrested if they weren’t wearing at least three articles of clothing of their birth assigned sex. This was often used as a way for cops to harass and arrest queer and trans people even when they didn’t otherwise catch them engaging in or soliciting sex—which was still illegal among same sex partners in every US state until 1962 and in some of them until 2003.

But you know what day it’s nearly impossible to police people on the basis of gendered clothing?

Halloween.

It became a night when trans and gender nonconforming folks could breathe a little easier. Either they could dress in ordinary attire as they truly wanted to without as much fear of repercussions, or they could take the opportunity to explore their appearance in new and ever more magnificent ways.

But like Cinderella at the ball, as soon as the clock struck midnight, the spell was lifted and the cops would be on the prowl again.

Magic and fear, the opposing forces of Halloween.

Just like early modern rebels combined festival practices with political riots, queer and trans folks in the twentieth century knew how to use humor and art to effect political change, even on deadly serious topics.

Apart from simply showing up as your whole self being a political act, at the Halloween parades and gatherings that proliferated throughout North America in the 60s onward, you’d see costumes used as political satire, signs snarkily raising awareness on current issues, and sometimes direct action.

Like the Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell, or W.I.T.C.H., a decentralized feminist group that marched down Wall Street on Halloween 1968, dressed as witches, to emphasize it as the site of corporate greed and women’s persecution.

There was also an off-shoot of Queer Nation called the Grand Homosexual Outrage at Sickening Televangelists, or G.H.O.S.T., who led the counter-protest against thousands of “prayer warriors” who tried to invade the San Francisco Halloween parade in 1990.

The parade on Castro Street had been the site of anti-gay violence for decades. In 1979, Community United Against Violence was formed as a mutual aid effort year-round, but particularly assisted in keeping the Halloween parade going by training volunteers to spot weapons, de-escalate conflict, and provide first aid.

Also founded in San Francisco were the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag group who dress as nuns, and who took over organizing the parade in the 90s after the mounting violence and challenges with crowd control threatened to cancel it. The Sisters also fundraised to keep the parade running and for causes like earthquake relief and AIDS-related charities.

WITCH, GHOST, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence adopted a persona, got dressed up, and then went out to fight for their rights… just like the Daughters of Rebecca two hundred and fifty years before them.

And no, the Daughters of Rebecca may not have been queer. I don’t even know that any members of WITCH were queer—it was just a feminist group, not a specifically queer one. But to me, the ways they and the Daughters of Rebecca and other cross-dressed rioters over the centuries transgressed social norms make them a part of queer history.

Queer has so many definitions, but I like this one from Patricia Kaishian in her book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature,

“…‘queer’ is a call to action, charging us to reject the many binaries that shape our current reality to the detriment of everyone. And while ‘queer’ is used primarily to describe categories of sex and gender that are not considered ‘normal’ in today’s culture, the term can also be used more broadly for anything that complicates our ideas of what is ‘normal’ versus what is ‘deviant’… ‘queer’… summons a spirit of camaraderie and a history of defiance.”

Gay Halloween Today, An Invitation

While Halloween continues to be important in the queer and trans community as a day in which some people might feel more safe to explore their gender expression — or simply as an excuse to blow off steam, be a little goofy, gather together, and engage in the time-honored gay tradition of themed parties… Halloween in gay communities since the turn of the century has become less political than it was throughout the 1900s. Largely because being gay in public became less political.

But that’s changing.

Times are getting dark again. Our rights as trans people are being systematically stripped away and the hard-won rights for cisgender gay people are under threat as well.

I felt a lately-alien sense of hope earlier this month when I saw the huge turnouts at No Kings protests even in the small towns near me. And I had to laugh a little at the timing, as I watched one harvest festival on a town commons end promptly at 1 PM so the protest could set up.

Halloween and protest; irreverence and justice going hand-in-hand once again.

Just like Halloween has never successfully been pinned down or stamped out, queer and trans people have persisted. We are resilient. We are defiant. We join together in the face of impending darkness and we find the light. We find the joy and we laugh at the ghouls and the malevolent spirits—knowing that darkness of winter is nothing more than the promise that spring will come again.

So as the air cools and the days get shorter, we summon the strength of our ancestors. We look to them as guiding lights, lanterns in the autumn twilight. We don their masks of courage, and we keep their traditions of resistance alive—believing, as they did, even if just for one night, that a better world is possible.

And so I say to you, with the utmost sincerity…

Happy Halloween.

End Notes

• That “glitter and grave dust” quote is my all-time favorite line about Halloween and comes from David J. Skal’s Halloween: The History of America’s Darkest Holiday. His was the first history of Halloween I read and it remains my favorite. Skal was the pre-eminent scholar of horror films and incredibly well-loved in the horror and Halloween communities. On New Year’s Day of 2024, he and his husband Bob were killed by a reckless driver in California. In keeping with the holiday’s theme of honoring the ones we’ve lost, I wanted to share this obituary and encourage you, even more strongly, to check out some of his books.

• And you can view the full works cited for this piece on my Patreon. The works cited is a free post, but if you’d like to support my work, you can subscribe to my Patreon to access a bonus video with some more Halloween facts that I couldn’t squeeze into the main video.

Jack of All Trades

master of none

• If you want to hear me talk about Halloween even more, I made a guest appearance on Not Sorry’s final season of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text discussing Halloween themes in the books. If you’re listening to this podcast in realtime, that episode might not be live just yet so just keep an eye out on the Sacred Text podcast feed. And as per usual when I mention my work with Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, I’ll also drop a link in the show notes to my blogpost about why I still participate in that podcast and everything I’ve ever said against both the franchise and its author, the Queen of TERFs.

• On a lighter note, I recently started streaming weekly on Twitch. Every Monday at 6 PM Eastern time, I stream for a couple of hours while doing some cross-stitching. I encourage other people to bring projects to work on as well and we have a nice cozy time crafting together as we ease into the week. So if that sounds like your kinda thing, come join in on Mondays at 6 at twitch.tv/jackisnotabird.

• And if you are a crafty kinda person, you may be interested in this round-up of some of the cross-stitch projects I’ve completed over the last couple of years or this short video series in which I’m using cross-stitch to track the books I read each year on a mini bookshelf.

• I also started another short video series focusing on what I’ve learned from the wonder of everyday life. Here’s one from the summer.

Until next time,

Jack 🎃

Today is one of those days I dreamed about for years. And it is a completely ordinary day in my new life.

I'm writing this from my backyard with the sun warming my skin and the sounds of robins chirping in the trees around me. The air has a new sweetness from the natural world in bloom––and from the promise of future blooms from the marigolds, nasturtiums, and a dozen other plants I sowed at the start of the month.

I'm finishing up this newsletter draft and starting to think how I'll spend the rest of the day. I might go for a walk around a nearby pond before sunset. Probably I’ll watch a few Jeopardy reruns after dinner while cross-stitching, like the wannabe retiree I apparently am.

On this particular day, I have no plans with friends, no events to attend, no meetings scheduled. There have been many days like this one since I moved from New York City to this small town in Western Massachusetts last fall.

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While I dreamt of this solitude for many years, I also sometimes worried about it. Long after the shine had worn off of NYC, there remained an anchor tethered around my foot, keeping me in the city even as I tried to float away. And that anchor was the fear of missing out.

Fear of missing out on opportunities and cool events. Fear of missing my friends, the first ones I’d made as an adult and now so long in my life they were more like family. Fear, perhaps, of missing out on who I was in the city and who I would become if I stayed.

But since I moved, I have very rarely felt a hint of FOMO. Instead, I have been basking in the joy of missing out.

“FOMO’s chill distant cousin”

JOMO first appeared on Urban Dictionary in a 2013 entry defined as, “…an antonym to FOMO, that means that you prefer being unavailable and deliberately risking to miss a party that could be the greatest of all time, because (to be honest) you really don't care and [would] rather stay home and watch that new Sandra Bullock movie.”

The next year, JOMO was the title theme of a book by digital media professional Christina Crook. The term stayed relatively underground until a bump in popularity around 2018 and another one in 2024. These days, it’s an anti-distraction app, a pretty good song, several other books, and a trademarked movement with online courses and an in-person training program for educators (also by Crook).

The Cleveland Clinic tells us to “think of JOMO as FOMO’s chill distant cousin.” JOMO, according to them, is about focusing on what makes you happy, without worrying about the actions or judgment of others.

JOMO and FOMO are just new words for age-old phenomena. As Richard Sima writes in The Washington Post, “Humans have dealt with [FOMO] since we realized that there were opportunities being missed, fun not being had and Joneses needing to be kept up with.” But, he adds, “the rise of social media meant that FOMO arose in public consciousness and vocabulary.” In addition to spreading the term around, social media itself has cranked up our feelings of FOMO as we scroll through perfectly poised highlight reels from our friends and influencers.

Sima points to a 2020 paper in the journal Psychological Reports that showed correlations between higher levels of FOMO and lower levels of life satisfaction and self-esteem, and higher levels of loneliness. The paper also noted that previous studies have shown how FOMO is primarily found in those fearing social exclusion and feeling a lack belonging. But, the authors note, excessive use of social media, which many turn to when they’re experiencing FOMO, can distract those same people from having social experiences out in the analog world, “leading to a vicious circle.”

I didn’t really want to live there, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave

I have often felt pulled by the centrifugal force of that vicious circle as I scroll through social media feeds or reflexively open Instagram when I have absolutely nothing I want to see there. And I felt that same pull when I lived in New York City. I didn’t really want to live there, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave.

Much like the social internet, New York City presents you with an infinite buffet of life experiences you could be having. On any given night, there are countless events you could attend even just within your own niche and budget, let alone the larger array glinting beyond those. Add to that the professional networking events you could be taking advantage of; the revolving door of friends and relatives visiting from out of town (who never quite seem to understand that their once-in-a-lifetime trip to NYC is just another full work day for you); and the long list of friends you’ve been meaning to grab a coffee with for months, or years, because yes, inter-borough friendships might as well be long distance and everyone else is just as busy as you are––and it’s no wonder that to live in NYC is to live with a constant feeling of FOMO.

Moving to a small town has felt like logging off

Moving to a small town has felt like logging off. I could scour newsletters with event listings and maybe come up with one thing of interest to do every night of the week in the larger Pioneer Valley region, but I am freed from the fear of missing out on dozens of tempting opportunities on any given night. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of cool places to explore and things to do here — or that I haven’t made friends or joined new communities. I’ve done all of the above. The difference is the scale.

For example, last month I went to a punk show my friend was playing in (my mailman was also playing in the show, which felt like a very small town kind of coincidence). The assembled audience and the bands themselves were visually, vocally, and beautifully queer. If I didn’t look out the front windows at the surrounding mountains, I could’ve been at a punk show in Brooklyn. This shouldn’t be a shock. This region is super queer (according to the 2024 US census, two out of the three counties in the Pioneer Valley were ranked #1 and #4 for most female-female households in the U.S.). But for a former Texan who used to hear “small town” and picture a one stoplight town with nothing more than a Southern Baptist church and a Dairy Queen (both of which would be plastered in Trump signs these days), it remains endlessly refreshing to see these small towns populated by such large portions of queer and trans folks.

Since moving, I’ve also been to trans community fairs, queer art markets, LGBT lectures and film screenings, queer hikes, and countless bars where the entire staff was gay. I’ve watched my new (predominantly queer and trans) friends help organize fundraisers for trans families fleeing red states, queer proms, kids’ art classes, protests against almost everything the current administration has been attempting, and individual Pride parades for just about every town in the valley. I am in no way missing out on queer arts and culture.

And yet, the smaller scale of it feels so much more doable. I am relatively able to keep a finger on the pulse of most of the events happening around here and rarely feel like I have to choose one over the other. Maybe they aren’t always exactly within my niche interests, but with fewer options, I avoid the paralyzing paradox of choice and push myself into a wider world of experiences. I even run into some of the same people at each event, which gives me a chance to grow and deepen real relationships––whereas, in NYC, I often felt like I could meet someone once and never see them again.

The scale of the social internet is one of its downfalls

I acknowledge that this smaller scale may not be to everyone’s tastes, but it does make me think about my longstanding belief that the scale of the social internet is one of its downfalls. There’s the aforementioned paradox of choice — you spend an hour trying to decide what to watch instead of watching something, you spend an hour looking at different activities you could go to instead of going to do one — but there’s also issues like harassment and conspiracy theories, both of which existed pre-internet, but which spread like wildfire in our era of social media. If the internet turned off one day, I think we’d all be fine missing out on super-charged harassment and conspiracy theories, but saying goodbye to our infinite buffet of choices would be a lot harder.

Leaving the buffet of New York City was hard as well, but it was something I eventually realized I had to do. Among other factors, I am very much a person who does not like to be perceived unless I’m opting into it. Posting content online? That’s okay because I not only opted in, I usually produced it and was in full control of every aspect of it. Going out in public? Also good because I more or less choose to do that and can prepare myself for needing to be “on” when I do. But living in a city as dense as New York means existing in public far more than in other places. Your neighbors can hear your every movement. Your commute is shoulder-to-shoulder with countless strangers. Even the fact that crying in public is considered a rite of passage tells you how little privacy there is in the city.

Beyond that, I am a person whose stress levels spike from external stimuli. By noises, by unexpected occurrences, and most of all by people. Which becomes exhausting when you live in a building that shares walls with multiple other households and where people pass by your window in a near constant stream––talking on their phones, shouting at one another, blasting music. The analog equivalent of pop-up and autoplay ads on a news article you’re trying to read.

I also people please out of fear of conflict. I try to predict other people's emotions and anticipate situations that may arise. I’m conscientious in the absolute worst way. In New York, I would refuse to do things like play my TV too loudly or shower too late at night because I was scared that someone would confront me over their annoyance at my noise levels in the same way I wished I had the courage to do about theirs. As the years went on, I denied myself more and more basic comforts out of the fear of being overheard, judged, or berated by neighbors or passersby.

"They have therapists in Massachusetts"

I recognize that this not a healthy way to interact with the world, but I also recognize that it's a core part of who I am and who I have always been. Changing my environment to substantially minimize distracting external factors was a major way for me to manage that part of who I am. Another method would be therapy, sure. Though, as my friend Mike said to me when I previously shared this theory with him, saying "instead of therapy, I'm moving to Massachusetts," Mike responded, "they have therapists in Massachusetts." Smart guy, Mike.

I guess my point is that I know I have things to work on, but I also think it will be easier to work on them from an environment that is better suited to the reality of my current mental health state. If you break your leg, it's not going to help you heal if you insist on climbing the stairs at work everyday instead of using the elevator. When there is an option that exists to help you heal, you should take it. And then maybe one day, you’ll be better equipped to take the stairs again. Or maybe not. Or maybe you’ll know you can and you’ll choose not to. And all of those are okay.

And I gotta say, eight months in, the bones are healing.

I’m riding high on the JOMO lifestyle out here in small town Western Mass (and with a coincidentally-timed decrease in my social media consumption).

Whatever the flavor of it may be for you, if you’re interested in trying out a little of this JOMO lifestyle, here’s some advice:

#1 Accept that you can’t do everything

Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler wrote in his bestselling How to Read a Book, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

I have this quote pasted at the top of my Notion library database (which is basically my own personal version of GoodReads that I’ve built over the years in an attempt to divest from Daddy Bezos). Because so much of book-tracking is just a tally of how many books you’ve read, I keep that quote at the top to remind myself that those numbers are not really what it’s about. It’s about the meaning we get from reading. And sometimes, to let that meaning sink in, you have to slow down. You might end up reading fewer books. Your TBR list and growing stack of shiny new titles might go untouched.

It is a fool’s errand to try to know or do everything. You may spend so much time collecting tidbits of information or collecting life experiences, that you never have the time to really soak up and reflect on what you’ve learned or done. Better in my opinion to take the time to truly enjoy or find meaning in fewer things. Go deep, not broad.

A significant road block to this, however, is the guilt you may feel at saying no––whether that is guilt at not attending a friend’s event or the guilt of not reading a book you’ve been telling yourself you’re going to read for a decade. Part of accepting that you can’t do everything is releasing yourself from that guilt.

Several years ago, I was asking a mentor to help me decide which projects to prioritize. As I circled around the possibility of cutting one from my slate, he made me promise, that if I chose not to move forward with it, I wouldn’t guilt trip myself over it. If I said no, I had to just let it go.

As the production team of Frozen 2 knows very well, letting it go can be extremely difficult. One thing I’ve found that helps is to assess how every part of a project or activity makes you feel. The goal here is to evaluate if this activity is worth setting aside other ones for.

For example, before I started transitioning, I began a very ambitious creative project that would mark my one year on testosterone. For various reasons, it didn’t happen so I set my sights on my five year anniversary, and then six and then seven, and now I have just passed ten years on testosterone having decided that I will probably never return to that project to complete it. Sometimes I feel deep sadness and regret over not having done it. But at the same time, the type of effort it would require to complete it is not how I would presently care to spend my time. I want the product, but not the experience of getting there.

Because I am a person who is interested in SO many things and has SO many ideas and goals, I have had to really push myself to pare down by asking which ones bring me joy at every part of the process, not just the outcome.

Now, I will note here that I am sometimes what people call a Type 2 Fun kind of person. I like pushing myself through challenging situations to a rewarding outcome, sometimes even forgetting how tough the work was while I was in it. Case in point: last week I pushed through perhaps the hardest, longest workout of my life and afterwards, I wasn’t thinking about how I could barely breathe for a good twenty minutes towards the end, but rather about cool it was that I actually did it.

If you are also a Type 2 Fun kinda person, then this advice to prioritize activities that bring you joy at every phase of the process might not work for you. In that case, consider this: what are you able to say yes to by virtue of saying no to something else?

#2 Say “no” to say “yes”

I forgot when I first heard the phrase “say ‘no’ to say ‘yes’,” but it was very instrumental in me learning how to turn down requests as a freelancer (back in the halcyon days when companies still hired trans people to speak in offices and classrooms). I’d still feel terrible saying no to certain requests, but once I’d calculated how much time I would need to devote to something and tried to slot it into my calendar alongside existing commitments or perhaps more lucrative opportunities, I was at least able to make the practical argument against it. If I said no to one request, I was able to say yes to a different one that fit my goals better––or to simply focus more deeply on my existing work.

Leaving NYC required a similar tallying of priorities. For a long time, it wasn’t worth leaving behind the opportunities NYC afforded for the peace I wanted. But at a certain point, for various reasons, the scales shifted and I decided it was time to say no to all of NYC’s perks so I could say yes to spending my afternoons in the quiet of my own backyard.

That’s just my personal example, however. You don’t need to upend your life or swear off social media entirely in order to achieve JOMO.

In fact, Chris Barry, a Washington State University psychology professor interviewed by the Washington Post, emphasized that social connection is healthy and that social media, despite its flaws, can still be a positive means for connection –– if we take time to disconnect and recharge offline. And bonus points if that disconnection was by our own choosing, not enforced by a phone ban at school or work, as studies have shown the psychological benefits of unplugging were far higher for those who made the decision themselves.

Whether it’s social media, your social life, your career, or something else that you feel burned out on while still feeling the pull of FOMO, it can help to be intentional. Consider how, when, how much, and why you’re doing something. Think about what meaning it brings to you, how you feel during and after, and how it aligns with your goals or values.

I feel a lot of guilt about not publishing more content online

In a piece for Trans Day of Visibility earlier this year, writer and educator Flint Del Sol wrote about a particular kind of JOMO and proposed this rubric:

Where does “what is expected of me” meet “what is best for me?” and “what do I actually want and need?”

It was Flint’s newsletter article that got me really thinking about JOMO again. Because not only have I moved away from the hyperactivity of NYC, but I’ve also taken a huge step back from social media — consuming it and especially creating it. The more I cut back on consuming social media, the more joy I feel. But the less I post and maintain the presence I spent years cultivating, the more I feel a certain kind of FOMO.

Specifically, I feel a lot of guilt about not publishing more content online, just as the attacks on trans people have gotten to a fever pitch. I spent so many years spreading awareness about the trans experience and advocating for my community. Now, when voices of solidarity are needed the most, I’ve gone silent.

Flint is someone who is very much plugged into the scene right now and his JOMO article explored a micro version of what I’ve been feeling over the past several years. As the Trans Day of Visibility approached this past spring, Flint found himself exhausted by the prospect of doing something productive and public for the holiday, preferring instead to stay home and rest, to make art, to enjoy nature, and to just be.

Flint wrote, “Because all parts of me are trans, not just my physical body, and not just my suffering. There is not just one single way to celebrate and honor what it means to be ‘visible.’”

After many years of working as a Professional Transgender™, being unable to tell anyone what I did for a living without outing myself, I was tired. Hosting the Cool Stuff Ride Home––a daily podcast that was never about trans issues unless I occasionally chose to bring them up––was a wonderful interlude. But my work as an individual, my ~brand~ was still tied up in trans issues, and in many ways it still is. And honestly, it probably always will be because trans stories are the ones that excite me the most to tell and, as a hopeless memoirist, anything I make will be colored by my trans identity.

BUT I’ve needed rest. I’ve needed some time to miss out on the trends, to say no to the discourse, to stay in and have a nice snack. As the anti-trans legislation mounts, I have needed to be able to hear the news and process it privately instead of thinking about what kind of content I’ll produce about it.

My hope has been that I can make content that isn’t always about being trans, or about the fight we’re all in now. That maybe I can be visible just by virtue of being a trans person who is out there living his life and working towards his goals, instead of having to be visible by only talking about trans issues.

And after all, there are people like Flint taking up the mantle. I won’t rely on him to always be The Trans Voice, dooming him to a life forever churning out content. But the good news is, I don’t have to. He is one of many in a sea of fresh (and longstanding) trans voices who are sounding the alarms, explaining the facts, and keeping people’s spirits up.

As for me? I’ll join in the calls for alarm when I can, but for now my intention is to cope with our terrifying reality by using my social media for simple pleasures and learning rather than as a scare machine. Not to mention by basking in the joy of my quieter life outside of the city.

I don’t have the privilege to miss out on the news entirely––not when everyday brings shifting information about my access to health care or ability to renew my passport––so instead I’m missing out on what I can and finding joy in that. My focus these days is on my personal goals, my new community here in Western Mass, on gardening, crafting, and working on my next book. Those are the kinds of things I’m excited to share online these days, and I’m going to try very hard not to feel guilty about that.

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End Notes

• Some of my recent thoughts on social media were both deepened and validated by Chris Hayes’ latest book, The Sirens’ Call.

• I found some practical advice for missing out in Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport.

• If you’re looking to intentionally logoff, I recommend trying out a tech sabbath. Coined as “tech shabbats” by Tiffany Shlain, my favorite writing on them comes from my friend Casper’s book, The Power of Ritual. I started doing them once a month in 2019 (though have admittedly fallen out of the habit in recent years) and can really feel the difference they make in terms of feeling calm, clear-headed, and breaking my compulsion to grab my phone.

• Since I don’t really use GoodReads anymore and my personal library database on Notion will remain private, anyone who is interested in keeping up with what I’m reading can do so on my Bookshop.org storefront.1

• Next month, one of the apps I have used the longest and loved the most will shut down. In a surprise to many of us, Mozilla recently announced they’re shutting down Pocket, the bookmarking service originally launched as a browser extension in 2007. Being as distraught about this as I have been, I was pleased to see Anne Helen Petersen write an obituary to the app, or more specifically, an obituary to the way we used to use the internet. Because even though I’m sad about the end of a service that houses thousands of articles I swore I would one day read and about having to change my workflow, I, like Petersen, am more sad about the loss of “the halcyon days” of RSS feeds, when we actually read articles, not just scrolled, and when companies actually wanted us to do that—to spend time on their site, reading their content, and not just clicking on their ads. Pocket was great in the 2010s when text was still king on the web and when, relative to now, it felt “gloriously finite”, but Pocket became even more useful when infinite scrolling took over and you truly needed to bookmark items of interest or risk never remembering them again. You could revisit them later in one convenient app, perhaps on a subway commute when you didn’t have enough service to scroll anyways. As Petersen put it, “Pocket allowed you to keep reading the internet even when so many other forces were conspiring against it… Being there felt like slowing down internet time.” Mozilla says they’re pulling the plug on Pocket because “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved.” That is certainly true, and it’s a damn shame. Even those of us fighting against it have felt our attention spans contract, our habits splinter. Quoting Petersen, “Whatever site or blog you loved… was never an all-you-can-eat-buffet that left you nauseous; it was an excellent, satisfying meal. The architects of this current iteration of the internet identified our hunger, understood they could teach us to consume more. Instead of reading the internet, we see it — but understand what we see less fully... it’s hard not to see [Pocket] as one of the last remnants of a different understanding of what the internet is primarily for. When I miss the internet of the 2010s… I miss the internet that wanted to be read, not scrolled, and created tools accordingly.” All that said, Instapaper has made it super easy for Pocket users to migrate over there and it turns out they have a handy Carplay feature that reads your saves aloud, which has stepped in just in time for this new car commuter who misses the reading time he got on the subway.

Jack of All TradesMaster of none

• I’m super stoked to share that a poem I wrote about my favorite thing in the universe (pumpkins) was published in the SciShow Tangents Poetry Collection! SciShow Tangents was a gameshow-style science podcast that sadly ended this past spring. For each episode, one of the hosts or guests wrote a poem related to that episode’s theme and, when the show ended, they published a collection of all of the poems. The eBook features over 200 poems written by folks like Hank Green, Ceri Riley, Sam Schultz, Stefan Chin, Alexis Nikole Nelson, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Vanessa Zoltan, Tom Scott, Dylan Marron, Lulu Miller, Sydnee McElroy, Taha Khan, Tyler Thrasher, Deboki Chakravarti, Maddie Sofia, and many more—plus illustrations by Josh Quick. You can buy the eBook here.

• I don’t log on too often, but I am technically on Bluesky (@jackisnotabird.cool) for anyone else who also is and may want to follow me in case that changes.

• I made a li’l video about things I learned my first winter in New England. It’s a further expression of my thoughts on slowing down my daily life, reconnecting more with learning, and finding joy in the simple and mundane. I hope to make more videos like it in the future.

• Want to close out Pride with some truly stoopid merch? Sometimes I forget that I literally designed and sell writing pens that say “you can’t erase me” and three-ring binders that are simply labeled “binder.” iykyk

• Remember how I said companies used to hire trans people to speak at their events? It sounds fake, but it’s true! Do you have a workplace, school, or event that you think could use a speaker on the topics of LGBTQ+ issues and history, creative writing, or digital media? Need an emcee or host for an event? Galas, pub quizzes, weddings. I’ve hosted them all! If you think I could be the right fit for your event, get in touch!

And, now that I have hit Substack’s warning that this post is too long for an email, I will finally end this newsletter.

Take care,

Jack

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1

Links on the Bookshop.org storefront, and on any book links in this newsletter are affiliate links that will earn me a li’l kickback if you use the links to purchase a book.

I’m dusting off this newsletter to share some post-election thoughts because, like every writer with a newsletter, this is my way of processing—whether anyone actually cares to read it or not.

And there is a lot to process. How we got here, why we got here, how dangerous life will become or continue to be for so many people in our country.

Personally, I am now facing the possibility of losing access to the medical treatment I’ve been on for almost ten years; being sued or arrested for using the restroom; generally being imprisoned on the basis of my identity (and potentially more specifically for the content I have publicly produced over the years); losing access to reproductive rights and healthcare; losing the rights to marriage or having kids; no longer being protected from discrimination in employment and housing; and generally existing in a heightened environment of anti-trans hate.

I should say that, particularly as to that last point, I’m sitting near the peak of privilege mountain as a white, able-bodied typically cis-read trans guy. But the fact that even someone with as much privilege as me could face so many rights and protections being stripped away should tell you how absolutely fucking dire the situation is for those more vulnerable than me. Unfortunately for a lot of those folks, this is nothing new. They have been fighting this fight the whole time. And somehow they find a way to keep going. Which is exactly what I am trying to find a way to do, in part by looking to them for coping strategies.

—

My brain has been a firestorm of worried philosophizing and strategizing since Tuesday night, all mostly fruitless. As my Co-star horoscope said today, “your body is attempting to metabolize this new reality.” I’m not really a horoscope person, but I’m amused by the fortune cookie-like daily notifications, and this one felt right on the money. I’m still metabolizing. I don’t have answers yet.

That said, there has been one strong memory clunking around my skull the past few days and it comes from someone who has been around this block before and literally written the book on it: historian Susan Stryker.

Two summers ago in San Francisco, she spoke at a tribute to the life of groundbreaking photographer Loren Rex Cameron.

Some of Cameron’s most well-known and powerful work was portraits of trans men, including of himself. Many of the portraits were nudes and, whether in exhibitions or in his 1996 book Body Alchemy, for many trans men, it was the first time they ever saw bodies like their own.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact Cameron had on the lives of a generation of trans men and transmasculine people. He began sharing his photographic work at a time when “representation” of trans men, specifically, meant a shock-and-awe story on daytime television once every couple of years.

That lack of mainstream representation, and lack of institutional support, formed the bulk of a panel discussion that took place at the end of the tribute service. In particular, Stryker and the other panelists reflected on what their experiences in the 80s and 90s might teach us now.

Stryker said this,

“…the thing that I hear from younger trans people is that there is a lot of fear, there’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of anxiety, all understandable. But I also see a generation of people who at some level expect the law to be on their side, right? And that they’re asking for protection. And the thing that I feel like I wanna say as like an old fart is that it’s like, I remember back in my day we didn’t have any legal protection for anything. And we survived, you know? And here we are. It’s like, it’s great when the law’s on your side, and if it’s not, it’s not. And you are absolutely entitled to live your life and take your next breath and take up space in public. And nobody, nobody can take away from you who you are. You don’t have to be recognized by somebody to be who you are. You are who you are to yourself and in your community. And if the state is not on your side, it’s like, fuck the state… I feel like from back in the day… all the AIDS activism and anti-war activism, it’s just like… you make a space to have your life. And that is the thing that we who are older need to really communicate to the youngins. It’s just like, fight, you know? Just like insist on being and let the chips fall where they may.

This perspective stuck with me at the time because I had recently returned from the biannual Moving Trans History Forward conference, which had concluded with a panel made up of trans high schoolers. That there could even be a whole panel of high school-aged trans kids from the same general area, that they were there as part of an organization that had specific trans programming, was evidence enough of some kind of progress that has been made over the last decade or so. There are enough resources out there now for trans kids to find the language to describe their feelings at a much younger age. There are enough welcoming adults now for more kids to feel like they can come out in at least some spheres of their lives.

Yet at the same time, these kids—somberly, righteously—talked about not having access to gender neutral bathrooms at their schools and about being barred from single-gender extracurriculars that aligned with their affirmed gender. And I remember thinking that they were stuck in a really tough position: parts of society had progressed enough for them to figure out who they are and begin living openly at a young age, but the more institutional parts of society had not progressed enough for them to experience the equal opportunities or protections of their cis peers. They were also living under the microscope of the increased anti-trans sentiment that has grown in lockstep with increased awareness of trans people.

I left that panel feeling a lot of frustrated sympathy for trans youth and, while I continue to feel that, Stryker’s comments steered me toward another angle: yes, there are going to be many ways that institutions will prevent you from achieving your goals or even the safety we all deserve. At the same time, we can’t wait for those institutions to give us some official stamp of approval before we start living our lives.

We have to be able to find joy, community, affirmation, and meaning in our lives outside of institutions that are, at best, unreliable, and at worst, actively seeking to harm us.

It is not an easy thing to do. It is not always a happy thing to accept. But it has helped me to reframe the election results in this way. I don’t know how bad it’s going to get. I don’t know how much of life as I currently know it will be taken away from me. But I do know that I have to at least try to find my own sense of power and beams of light through the darkness.

Maybe that’s leaning into mutual aid, holding my loved ones closer, appreciating the wonder of blades of grass and the distant cosmos. Maybe it’s continuing to tell stories, even when doing so feels scary, because I know that, when it’s most scary, is probably when it’s most important.

Like Loren Rex Cameron did. At a time when trans people had almost zero legal protections, he dared to document what our bodies and our lives looked like. In doing so, he left a legacy that continues to grow and found a community—a community made up of many people who are still fighting together today.

So that’s the hope I’m holding onto today. Not the hope that the incoming administration will be too incompetent to take away my rights, but rather the hope that, no matter what happens, we will all continue to show up for one another and find ways to laugh, to love, to make art, and to simply be there for one another. 1

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Some Recommendations

• The speaking bureau I’m a part of has relaunched their longtime reFRESH newsletter on Substack (subscribe here: ) and also launched a podcast called The Green Room. Both showcase the work of a diverse roster of thought leaders and also provide insight into the craft of public speaking, writing, and more. I spent most of the previous Trump administration as the lead writer on an earlier iteration of the reFRESH newsletter. It helped me remain clear-eyed and aware through the chaos. It kept me connected to voices I needed to be listening to that might not have otherwise cut through my algorithms. I can’t recommend FRESH and its orbit of speakers enough.

• My friend Ahsante Bean just launched a new video essay series on democracy. It’s meticulously researched, accessibly presented, and honestly a refresher course that I think we could all use right now.

• After requesting On Tyranny from my local library and dusting off my copy of 1984, the first thing I read on Wednesday morning was the final chapter in one of my favorite books, Shakespeare in a Divided America. Written in the wake of the first Trump election by Columbia University professor James Shapiro, the book traces the influence of Shakespeare on American culture and politics from pre-Civil War to MAGA-pilled outrage campaigns. You can read an excerpt of the latter here, but I highly recommend checking out the book at least for the final chapter even if you’re not a Shakespeare buff. It’s unfortunately still incredibly relevant. And this point is still ringing in my ears:

  • “In the early years of the seventeenth century, playgoers from all walks of life crammed the Globe Theatre, turning to the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists to understand their fast-changing and unsettling world. A few decades later that great experiment came to an end. The divisions had grown too great. Few of those attending a performance of Julius Caesar back then could have predicted that the fault lines in their political culture would lead to civil war and the public beheading of their ruler. In 1642 Parliament declared that “public stage-plays shall cease,” and the Globe, along with London’s other theaters, was closed, then torn down.”

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What I’ve Been Up To

• I moved! After fourteen years in NYC, I decided to start fresh in Western Massachusetts.2 I picked this area because there are three things it is best known for and they are three of my favorite things: farms, colleges, and queer people. Honestly, what more could you possibly need? On my first trip to the local library, I was asked if I wanted to adopt a baby chick that was hatching in the children’s section. After a lecture on women in science at UMass, a professor/horse farm owner told me I have to talk to her wife for advice on growing pumpkins (a dream of mine). Suffice to say, life has been pretty good here so far.

• If you want to hear all about why I moved and how taking that plunge reminded me a lot of coming out and transitioning a decade ago, I made this video. It’s a self-indulgent vlog about moving. But it's also about transitioning, and the big changes we all dare to make in our lives. I also spent a literal year working on it so please watch it and share it with anyone you think will like it.

• I’ve been trying to post more short-form content this year to appease the algorithms. This goal has gone slightly better than my goal to write more issues of this newsletter. Here’s a round-up of some faves I’ve posted this year:

  • My 2023 Twilight phase (Instagram version)

  • The unexpected hobby I took up after the podcast ended (Instagram version)

  • This top-recommended Halloween destination is also one of my favorites to visit for Christmas (Instagram version)

  • A fun way to track the books you read in a year (Instagram version)

  • A 2-for-1 Ghostbusters travel recommendation (Instagram version)

Refer a friend

1

Everything I said here is all well and good in concept, but these are dark times. If you’re feeling defeated or need someone to talk to, you can call or text 988 in the US for the National Suicide and Crisis Hotline. Trans and queer-focused hotlines and chats are listed here: pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines

2

I teased this move publicly a few times, including the last issue of this newsletter! Which was, gulp, almost a year ago.

In early spring of 2019, a good friend and I were on the bus back to New York City from Philadelphia, where we’d been leading programming at Fandom Forward’s Granger Leadership Academy conference. It was a couple hours into the bus ride and we were starting to get a little slap-happy. I was down to the wire on a deadline for coming up with the title for my debut book and we’d spent most of the journey thus far brainstorming ever sillier ideas.

Having long cast aside her serious suggestion of Sorted (which ultimately became the book’s title once I emerged from my post-travel haze the next morning and recognized its brilliance), we were now riffing on puns using my last name, Bird. In a stroke of lexical genius, my friend rattled off a trio of title ideas that were hilariously absurd, and patently unusable. This first book, a memoir about me coming into my own as a trans man, could be called Hatching Him. In a few years, I could publish Hard Boiled: My Life As An Influencer. And, if I ever achieve my longtime dream of leaving the city, Over Easy: How I Left Big City Life and Started a Farm would be waiting in the wings for me.

Four years since the first book came out and so far there has been no Hard Boiled. Though I am feeling a bit hard boiled these days in general, despite continuing to move further away from anything remotely resembling an influencer.1

Every now and then I’m tempted to write some kind of second edition of Sorted. One that would strip out all the Harry Potter references and include a new introduction that addresses the transphobic elephant in the room (it would also probably remove a lot of personal stories, journal entries, and poorly-worded takes that I really regret including).

It’s just tough having that book out in the world without any sort of disclaimer about what has happened since it was published. (Part of that anxiety led me to writing this blog post, which compiles everything I’ve said publicly about the situation.) I often worry people won’t want to read the book because of the Harry Potter associations. In fact, I’ve seen online reviews that say exactly that.

But I am not publishing a second edition of Sorted. Or a sequel.

For the longest time, I was insistent I wouldn’t ever write another memoir-style book. Or at least not for a few decades. More recently, I’ve had a few creative nonfiction book ideas that lean more towards memoir. And who knows, maybe I’ll find a chance to use that oh-so-serious Over Easy title for one of them.

But no, there is no Sorted 2 in the works.

So why the clickbait? Well, earlier this year I was invited to join USC professors Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay on their podcast How Do You Like It So Far? And upon listening to the recently released episode, I feel like it could serve as the follow-up I’ve been craving for Sorted.

Henry Jenkins is well-known in fan circles for having written critically and positively about fandom since the early 90s. I’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with Henry and many of his colleagues in various capacities over the years. Colin Maclay is a Research Professor and Executive Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, where he co-leads the Civic Media Fellowship (of which I’m a senior fellow).

How Do You Like It So Far? chats with artists, activists, technologists, fans, policy makers, and more about the relationship between popular culture and politics. The title of the podcast is a nod to the fact that its creators are still iterating on what the podcast is and may become (something I can highly relate to for First Draft Theater).

Having had so many thought-provoking conversations with both Henry and Colin off-mic, I was thrilled to join them on their podcast. If you’re someone who thinks critically about media, I think you’ll enjoy this and any episode of the show. If you’re someone who has been wondering what I’ve been up to since Sorted came out, or since I stopped posting as many YouTube videos, or since I stopped hosting Cool Stuff Ride Home — I think this episode serves as a great update and explanation.

The large middle chunk of the episode is devoted to a discussion about the author of Harry Potter, her unwavering anti-trans assertions, and in particular the podcast series The Witch Trials of JK Rowling which, unbeknownst to me until it was published, used sound bytes of me ripped from other podcasts.

Henry and Colin gave me space to talk more about how I’m feeling about the situation these days and also articulated their own opinions in what I think is a very useful way. In a way, this conversation could serve as a counter to my largely uncritical positioning of Harry Potter in Sorted.

More broadly, in the episode we talk about how I started my career as a Harry Potter fan and then as a trans advocate, but how I’ve been moving away from both of those things — and how much of that is personal choice and how much is related to the Harry Potter franchise’s CTO (Chief TERF Officer).

At the beginning of the episode, Colin and Henry ask me to share my “origin story.” I took that to mean my origins as a fan and media-maker so you get a slightly different slice of biography than is included in Sorted there.

And in the back half of the episode, I get a chance to talk about everything I’ve been doing since Sorted came out. I talk about the many different projects I’ve been undertaking; why I’ve been posting less on social media generally and YouTube specifically; why I was desperate to have a job that wasn’t tied to my trans identity but how I still can’t stop making art on trans topics; and I talk about how I approach creating art for so many different types of media. I also touch on the struggles I’ve had to create things up to the standard I believe in while also making it sustainable. And I tell a story about almost throwing up during a performance of The Infinite Wrench.

Overall, this podcast episode hit on a lot of topics and offered space for deeper reflections that I wish people reading Sorted today could hear from me now. Or people who have tried to keep up with me but have been throttled by a combination of algorithms, an increasingly fragmented social media landscape, and my decreased presence online.

I do think it’s worth listening to the whole podcast––both hosts are media experts and Henry is a legend in the world of fan studies so their takes on the HP/trans stuff is very worthwhile––, but if you’re only interested in one bit here are some timestamps:

• 0:00 - Origin story

• 10:45 - TERF Talk

• 38:00 - HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series

• 46:20 - What I’ve been up to in recent years, and what I think about making art for different mediums as well as on topics beyond HP / trans stuff

Plus, stick around to the very end for a funny story from Henry about the very first panel I ever spoke on in 2012 (fun fact not included in that story: one of my fellow panelists was Dorian Electra!)

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Rogue Recommendations

• If you liked hearing two scholars talk about media on How do you like it so far?, then I highly recommend another podcast, Material Girls. It’s the newest show from the team behind the popular Witch, Please. Each week, Hannah and Marcelle use critical theory to discuss pop culture. Topics range from Taylor Swift to Star Wars (I particularly liked the episode on Barbie and petro-capitalism). I recently recorded an episode with them, which will be released early in the new year. Wanna bet what topic I discussed with them? Leave a comment on Substack!

• This year, Rachel Maddow went from hosting her MSNBC show every weekday to just once a week. She explained to Seth Meyers that the break from that schedule has actually meant she’s working more and is even more stressed out. Readers, I felt seen. This is very much how I’ve felt since the end of Cool Stuff Ride Home. I feel completely unmoored and like I still don’t have enough time to do everything I’m trying to do. This is less a recommendation for you and more something I just had to share.

• Are you tired of hearing the same old Christmas songs over and over again? I’ve got you covered!

  • Cher released a new Christmas album that is great for parties

  • I somehow missed that Earth, Wind, and Fire put out a banger of a Christmas album in 2014, which includes the song “December” (set to you know what song)

  • My friend, indie folk-ish musician Chris Daily makes a new Christmas album nearly every year. My favorite track this year is “When Otis Redding Sang (Merry Christmas Baby).”

  • Another musician friend, Paul DeGeorge, has been putting out meticulously-curated mixes of obscure Christmas music since 2008. Over 300 tracks to spice up your rotation available here.

• As we celebrate the holidays, it’s imperative that we not forget those around us who are suffering — especially the civilians in Palestine and Israel. This document put together by my fellow Neo-Futurist Annie Levin (which we’ve been sharing at every performance of The Infinite Wrench), includes resources on taking action to demand a ceasefire, donating to aid organizations, learning more about the conflict, and keeping up with breaking news.

What I’ve Been Up To

• I spent most of the fall performing in The Infinite Wrench. Your last chance to catch me this year will be December 15th and 16th. Tickets and info here!

• Next year is the New York Neo-Futurists’ 20th anniversary and, as a nonprofit, what better way to celebrate than by raising money to keep us going? Learn more about the Neo-Futurists and the fundraiser at this handy-dandy donation page.

• Just dropped today: the latest episode I guest hosted of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Vanessa Zoltan and I discuss chapter eighteen of The Order of the Phoenix through the theme of possibility and do the Jewish reading practice of PaRDeS.

• My most recent YouTube video (which was a while ago, but still more recent then the last newsletter I sent out…) was inspired by a line from the Barbie press tour about how gender roles rob people of half their humanity. This was my take on it as a trans man—while doing a bunch of household chores.

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Ok, I did go to a creator event at YouTube last week where I got to play pretend as a YouTuber™ again.

Notes on Notes

If you’re actually reading this via Substack, this won’t be news to you. For everyone else, you may not have heard that Substack recently launched a sort of status update/microblogging feature called Notes.

Its launch caused a bit of a stir because it seems like Twitter may have taken it as yet another sign that Substack is trying to position itself as a serious competitor. If you want more background on the beef between Twitter and Substack, you can listen to the segment I wrote about that for the Techmeme Ride Home podcast on Monday.

When I recorded that, I personally still did not have access to Notes; however, by the next morning Substack had made the product available to all users. After trying it out, I decided to write a quick update for Techmeme Ride Home listeners, but ultimately cut the segment for time.

So now you get the segment here! Why not?

To be perfectly honest, now that I have access to Notes… there’s not much to report. Despite Elon Musk’s fears, I have trouble seeing how this could truly be a Twitter competitor. Maybe for the (admittedly hefty) journalist side of Twitter, but Substack is so writing focused that I don’t think Substack Notes could replace Twitter for many other types of people and companies––and so many of the journalists have already gone to Mastodon anyways. 

On Notes, you can post short-form text updates with Rich Text, photos, GIFs, mentions, “restacks,” quotes, and embedded links. Their official line on the character limit is “we dare you to try to figure out the character limit.” I hit it at 4,146 characters, which is quite long for a “microblogging” feature. 

There is an edit button, but it doesn’t appear to show that a Note has been edited (a feature I personally think is a must with edit buttons, as John Green learned all too well on Tumblr in 2014). No video or audio capabilities yet––though they “may” be coming. There’s a Home feed and a Subscribed feed. The Home feed is made up of writers you're subscribed to and writers that they recommend. 

There’s a lot that’s still being rolled out and considered based on early feedback, but the bare bones of blocking, following, and notifications are there.

Again, I just don’t see this being a full-on Twitter replacement, or even a great reach strategy for Substack writers. Personally, I use Twitter and other platforms to try to get more eyes on my Substack from people who are not already on Substack. Substack does offer more discovery and community features than other newsletter platforms, even before Notes and Chat were added recently (that’s why I picked it, even given my concerns about the leadership’s ethics), but ditching Twitter entirely for Notes if a Substack newsletter is your main product will not grow your reach beyond Substack.

Vancouver-based artist Nishant Jain told the Washington Post, “I think [Twitter and Notes] serve different purposes… Twitter has a reach that’s global. Almost every big store and government department has a Twitter account. I don’t think everything will become a Substack account, but there’s a lot of communication you want to have with people who like to follow your work, and I’ve increasingly found that Twitter is not good for that kind of thing. The Substack ecosystem is richer, and it’s more honest engagement from me to my readers and my readers to me.”

So, good for writers who want a smaller community with less noise. Not good for blunt-force reach. Maybe it’ll grow into something more. I don’t think Musk needs to be worried.

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A few (unintentionally queer) recs

• On Trans Day of Visibility, I was lucky enough to attend a screening and Q&A with the filmmakers for Framing Agnes, a genre-breaking documentary about trans people who were a part of a UCLA gender clinic study in the 1960s. The filmmakers discovered the pseudonymous transcripts from the study and cast trans actors to bring the stories to life in a unique and spell-binding blend of art, academia, and activism. It picked up a ton of awards on the festival circuit, ending with Best Documentary at the GLAAD Media Awards last month, and is currently available to screen on-demand. I’m such a huge fan of all the people involved with this film and it was awesome to see them collaborate on this beautiful and super meta project.

• In a pretty baller move given the context, Daniel Radcliffe teamed up with The Trevor Project to host the first episode of their new roundtable series, Sharing Space. The series provides a platform for LGBTQ+ youth to voice their perspectives and experiences. In the episode with Daniel Radcliffe, he sits down to talk with six trans and nonbinary teens.

• A couple weeks ago, The Northern Boys dropped their latest music video, “Give It To Me.” This extremely NSFW track takes the one viral line about a transgender man in their previous song and dials it up to a full-on Pride anthem with a trans inclusive chorus and lead singer Norman rocking a sparkly dress and heels. Stand out lines include “Raising a glass to the gays and the bi’s and the trans and the girls and the big bald men” and “You better not assume my pronouns / You ain’t got a clue what I feel inside.” Norman ends the song with a message straight to camera, “This is a video of me expressing myself and if you don’t like it, you can f*** off.”

• And if you’ve missed the buzz around these old British drill rappers, I did a segment on them on the Cool Stuff Ride Home last September. (start around 15:30)

What I’ve been up to

• As I mentioned above, I’ve been guest-hosting the daily news show the Techmeme Ride Home while regular host Brian McCullough is on a well-deserved family vacation. Three episodes are live so far with two more to come Thursday and Friday. So far I’ve tackled topics like the threat of generative AI to video game illustrators in China; Apple’s latest strategy to prevent their retail stores from unionizing; the latest from the Winklevoss twins; and so, so much about Twitter. The only downside to this gig is having to pay attention to what Elon Musk spouts off everyday.

• I just got back from an amazing trip out to the Pacific Northwest (which is why there wasn’t a newsletter last week). A big part of that trip was attending the book launch for Oakley Rae Phoenix’s book The Gender Friend. In the book, Oak goes on a few imaginary coffee dates with the reader to have an open, casual conversation about gender. I replicated this format in the foreword I wrote for the book, imagining Oak and myself grabbing coffee together. So when we manifested that rhetorical device and actually got coffee in-person last week, you know we had to take a photo of it:

• Another thing I did on that trip was visit the largest transgender archives in the world, housed at the University of Victoria. I got to physically put my hands on newsletters and pamphlets I’ve long read about, while brushing shoulders with some of the trans elders who were around when those life-saving works were being circulated around the world. I’ve been working on a couple of trans history videos that I’m excited to share soon.

• At the end of this month, I’ll be rejoining The Infinite Wrench. Come out Fridays and Saturdays April 28 - May 20 to see me and the other New York Neo-Futurists perform thirty original plays in just sixty minutes!

• Also, it hasn’t been officially announced yet, but we usually do a big Pride show in June so keep your eyes peeled for more on that… 👀

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Depressed Goblin Nightmare is the new Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Manic Pixie Dream Girl is out. Depressed Goblin Nightmare is in. At least according to Kate Erbland at IndieWire.

Writing in a review of Zach Braff’s latest movie A Good Person, Erbland says that Braff tried to kill the trope he played a hand in creating, but fails. Instead, he creates another one dimensional portrayal of womanhood. Only this one isn’t quirky and captivating, she’s completely depressed and at rockbottom.

I have not seen A Good Person so I can’t say one way or the other whether Erbland’s assessment of Florence Pugh’s character is worthy of this critique––or how good or not the movie overall is. But I am very interested in this graduation of the manic pixie dream girl into a depressed goblin nightmare. It feels both like the expected over-correction of a filmmaker who spent the last twenty years being critiqued for the trope he birthed in Garden State, AND a metaphor for the general vibe-shift from the early aughts to now. Or even just good nicknames for millennials vs. gen z.

To back up though… “Manic pixie dream girl” was coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in a 2007 review of the movie Elizabethtown. He specifically called out Braff’s Garden State as an earlier example. By Rabin’s definition:

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition.

Despite the critique, the trope continued to pop up in movies and TV shows for several years––alongside adjacent trends of finger mustaches and galaxy print everything. This made sense because the late aughts and early 2010s were the beginning of “nerd culture is cool,” and a defining trait of the manic pixie dream girl is that she’s inexplicably attracted to the nerdy, misunderstood protagonist.

Even the men who tried to satirize the trope continue to have their works misinterpreted (or disagreed with) today––namely, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in 500 Days of Summer and John Green’s Looking For Alaska.

And once again, a man has tried to flip the trope on its head and, from Kate Erbland’s perspective, failed. According to Erbland, Pugh’s character in A Good Person doesn’t help the male love interest fix his problems. Instead, “Braff swerves wildly, giving her nothing but problems. Cut her down! More cliches! Pile on the pain! It’s almost enough to make us miss the quirks, but there is no happy medium: It’s mania, or depression, and the narrow idea of what a female character can be.”

As Erbland says,

She’s not manic, she’s depressed. She’s not a pixie, she’s practically a goblin. She’s not a dream, she’s a nightmare.

There is a lot to be said about a male storyteller’s inability to craft a multi-dimensional woman character free of clichés in one direction or the other—and I hope lots of people will chime in on that.

But again, I want to set aside the actual film and gender analysis here and just discuss how dope this term Erbland quasi-invented is. Depressed goblin nightmare.

You may recall (especially if you were a regular listener to the Cool Stuff Ride Home), that the Oxford English Dictionary declared “goblin mode” the Word of the Year for 2022.

They define goblin mode as:

a slang term, often used in the expressions ‘in goblin mode’ or ‘to go goblin mode’ – [it’s] ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations’… The term… rose in popularity over the months following as Covid lockdown restrictions eased in many countries and people ventured out of their homes more regularly. Seemingly, it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life’, or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media.

“Goblin mode” was picked as the word of the year not because it was used more than any other word, but because the OED thought it best described the mood of 2022.

As we all reject previously sought-after norms, acknowledge our mental illnesses, and reckon with a daily onslaught of global existential disasters, I can’t think of a better term to describe each of us than “depressed goblin nightmare.”

Perhaps Zach Braff’s version is an unwelcome trope of women (not to mention, by Erbland’s account of the film, of depressed people, poor people, and people with substance use disorder), but I propose we claim “depressed goblin nightmare” for ourselves—-in the same way I always wanted to claim “manic pixie dream girl,” not for what it really stood for, but just because it sounded cool.

In fact, I spent last fall performing a short play in The Infinite Wrench called “Manic Pixie Dream Wannabe” all about my teenage desires to be a manic pixie dream girl and how, in hindsight, I might’ve been viewing myself through some kind of proto-male gaze.

(The thing on my head is a turkey. It was Thanksgiving weekend. It has nothing to do with this particular play. Things get weird at The Infinite Wrench.)

More recently, I discovered the Canadian musician Lady Charles and their new album Manic Pixie Dream Boy.

In a Tumblr announcement post, Lady Charles described the album as being for fans of David Bowie, MGMT, of Montreal, and Kate Bush. Bowie and of Montreal in particular being two of my all-time faves and my endearing obsession with the “manic pixie dream girl” discourse meant this album would probably be right up my alley. And I’m pleased to report that it’s fantastic. Thank you, Tumblr Blaze, you’ve finally hit me with a perfect recommendation.

The song “Godx” is a real banger and the final song on the album “Montreal/Outro” directly name-drops of Montreal, in one of many riffs that sounds particularly reminiscent of the older band.

Lady Charles has a very different interpretation of what I would maybe describe as a manic pixie dream boy––their’s is more glam rock androgyny, mine I think would be more Puckish––but that’s kind of the beauty of all these loaded words thrown together into an even more loaded term… we can make of it what we want.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl discourse has been done to death. Zach Braff tried to reincarnate it as something better, but tripped and created the Depressed Goblin Nightmare instead. And really, didn’t we all kind of do the same?

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With a corn cob crust & a butter jar…

Little Caesars made a big stink on the internet last week with a series of videos claiming to introduce corncob crust pizza that comes with a two liter bottle of liquified butter. They made the hoax particularly believable by actually making the pizza and sending it to a few influencers to actually try.

@littlecaesarspizzaYou asked for it, and we listened! Introducing The Crust the World Craves!Tiktok failed to load.

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This is one of those times I wish I’d still be releasing daily content just so I could say “I told you so” right now. Because as soon as I watched those videos last week, I knew this was nothing more than an elaborate campaign to drum up attention for the return of Little Caesars’ pretzel crust. Fast forward to yesterday , and Little Caesars has officially confirmed my hypothesis.

I’m a sucker for anything with pretzel bread so I will 100% be trying this… as soon as I figure out where my nearest Little Caesar’s is.

Some other things

• This week is the Trans Week of Visibility & Action. With nearly 500 anti-trans bills introduced in legislatures around the US just this year, trans people are in dire need of support. Visit the Trans Week project to learn more about how we got to this point and how you can take action.

• The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a digital library. This is a resource I use almost everyday while conducting research so I am personally gutted. It’s a complex issue that I did my best to parse out last September on the Cool Stuff Ride Home. Give it a listen if you want to understand more about how e-book lending works at traditional libraries and what the ramifications of this case could be.

What I’m Up To

• On April 5th, I’ll be facilitating a conversation with Oakley Phoenix at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon to celebrate the launch of their book, The Gender Friend.1 Their book is an awesome 102 level guide to gender identity––I should know, I wrote the foreword! I’m super stoked to be a part of Oakley’s first book and, if you’re around Salem then, I hope you’ll join the celebration.

• ICYMI, I’ll be performing Friday and Saturday nights in The Infinite Wrench with the New York Neo-Futurists in NYC from April 28 to May 20. You can learn more and get tickets here!

• This week, I’m headed to the University of Victoria’s Moving Trans History Forward conference. You might still be able to register to attend digitally. Either way, I recommend checking them out. The University of Victoria houses the largest trans archive in the world.

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1

If you use this Bookshop.org link, I’ll get a little kickback.

About Those New Moon Suits…

Last week, NASA and contractor Axiom Space revealed prototypes of the new spacesuits that the Artemis III astronauts will wear on the lunar surface a few years from now. These are the first new space suits designed for NASA in 40 years.

The sleek suit, in dark colors with splashes of orange, got a lot of people talking about a fresh look for the new generation of lunar explorers. And it is! The shape, technology, and functionality of these suits represent major innovations over the bulky spacesuits of the Apollo era or even the current EVA (extravehicular activity) suits. As the New York Times’ chief fashion critic put it, the suits are “less Michelin Man… and more Hulk-meets-anthropomorphic-anteater-meets-‘Star Trek.’”

But the suits presented on NASA and Axiom’s livestream are not the suits that Artemis astronauts will be wearing on the moon in 2025. Namely, the suits will not be black, blue, and orange. They’ll be the typical solid white of the spacesuits of yore. And that’s for a very important reason: to keep astronauts safe and cool by reflecting the harsh light of the sun on the lunar surface.

So why were the prototypes such a drastically different color? Didn’t that just make things more confusing?

Well, yes.

But it was also to protect both Axiom’s proprietary design and the suits themselves from possible damage during ground training.

The dark colored suit we saw was a cover on top of the actual white suit. And here’s my favorite part: the cover layer was designed in part by Esther Marquis, the costumer designer on the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind.

For All Mankind is one of my favorite shows of the last few years. It’s an alternate history series that imagines what would have happened if the Soviet Union beat the US to the moon in 1969 and, therefore, the Space Race effectively never ended. Three seasons in and the ripple effects have completely changed the world––a breakthrough in nuclear fusion that effectively nipped climate change in the bud, NASA diversifying astronaut crews as early as the 70s, the World Wide Web never launching, John Lennon surviving the assassination attempt, and King Charles marrying Camilla Bowles from the start.

Co-created by Ronald D. Moore, it’s often more prestige drama than true sci-fi, but the attention to detail is nonetheless meticulous.1 When the show’s astronauts travel to Mars, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that some of their EVA suits looked familiar.

Show runner Ben Nedivi explained last year that the costume designs were based on one of the actual prototypes NASA has created for Mars exploration.

The real-life new lunar spacesuits are also a little similar to the Mars prototype ones. Generally, there is an acknowledged need for greater articulation and mobility as well as hand grip and dexterity. Crucially, the new suits are designed so they can be tailored to a wide range of body types and genders2––90% of American adults would be able to wear one of these suits.

The technology in the helmet (outfitted with lights and an HD camera), the life support system in the “backpack,” and more got a big upgrade as well. The complexity and cost of that tech led Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo author Nicholas de Monchaux to describe it as “…less a piece of clothing than a very small building or very small spacecraft.”

And that such an advanced piece of technology with huge teams of scientists and a $228.5 million price tag behind it debuted to the public cloaked in a design done by a Hollywood costume designer absolutely blows my mind. Marquis even got a shoutout on the livestream from Russell Wilson at Axiom Space when he introduced the suit.

It’s not like the melding of Hollywood and real-life technology is anything new. SpaceX’s suits were designed in part by Jose Fernandez, a costume and creature designer who worked on movies such as Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, and Hellboy. And we’re constantly seeing the realization of made up sci-fi inventions––like the first era of flip phones, which were modeled after Star Trek communicators.

If you want to really dive into the interplay of sci-fi and space exploration specifically, I recommend the book Astounding3 by Alec Nevala-Lee and the Washington Post podcast series Moonrise, hosted by Lillian Cunningham.

But no matter how much art and pop culture have always played a role in space, I’ll never stop getting a thrill of delight when I notice it. Space is the physical manifestation of wonder and the unknown. Most of us will never travel beyond our cozy atmosphere, but we can feel a similar sense of awe in art—whether about space or not. I know that wonder can be found in all sciences, but to me, there’s something extra poetic about space, and the wider universe, and that great beyond about which we still know so little.

For those of us whose childhoods were bookended by the tragic Space Shuttle disasters of Challenger and Columbia, the space program has been little more than a background hum for most of our lives. The Mars rovers and JWST have been cool, but they haven’t united the nation in the ways that the first orbits of Earth and first moon landing did.

Artemis III will mark the first time humans have set foot on the moon in over fifty years. It will also be the first time a woman will walk on the moon, and potentially the first time a person of color does as well (several of the current candidates are women, and men, of color and NASA has made such representation a priority for the Artemis program). And it will be the first human expedition to the moon’s south pole.

A return is not exactly as exciting as a first, but the objective of the Artemis program is to establish a lunar base to serve as a stepping stone towards sending humans to Mars. And that is a mission that I think will get everyone talking again––perhaps not united, but paying attention for sure. Kids might once again know the names of the astronauts they’re watching get launched into space. And when those first astronauts in half a century step foot on the moon––if NASA’s contractors keep collaborating with Hollywood costume designers––they’ll be doing it in style.

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PS – For a lighter integration of science and pop culture, here’s Paul Rudd chatting with NASA about quantum physics as part of the promotional tour for the latest Ant-Man and the Wasp movie.

🌼 SUPER BLOOM 🌼

This past weekend, I visited family in southern California and got to see the tail-end of this year’s poppy bloom in Walker Canyon. Technically, this bloom was an encore of the wild poppies’ main performance earlier this season, caused by a recent deluge of rain in the region.

As stunning as the showing was to my eyes as we drove up and down I-15, it was apparently nothing compared to 2019’s “Super Bloom.” The poppies bloomed in such huge amounts four years ago––and were so tempting for photoshoots––that Lake Elsinore city officials had to shut down several roads and hiking trails, and implemented a required shuttle bus to prevent people from parking along the side of the freeway.

Some measures were reinstated at the peak earlier this year, but while thousands of visitors from around the globe still flocked to the Wizard of Oz-esque hills, the flowers apparently did not qualify as a “super bloom” this year. The weaker bloom may have been due to the acute severity of rainfall this year, which can wash seeds away and prevent the stronger growth that results from softer, more spread out rainfall.

What’s Up In The World

• Remember when the CIA had a literal policy of not hiring gay people? Well these days the agency regular attends SXSW as part of their strategy to recruit LGBTQ+ employees. Or at least that was the objective when they first started going in 2017. Nowadays, in what could be a perfect metaphor how the Silicon Valley invasion stripped Austin of its weirdness, the CIA is more interested in recruiting STEM workers than solely LGBTQ+ ones.

• Last week, IFC Films dropped the trailer for their upcoming movie Blackberry. The true story of the revolutionary device, the trailer makes it feel like a cross between The Social Network and The Wolf of Wall Street, but with perhaps more focus on the truly geeky inventors. Between the tech history and the 90s nostalgia, this movie is like catnip for me, but I got even more excited when I spotted SungWon Cho AKA ProZD in the trailer. He’s a hilarious voice actor and YouTuber who, even if you don’t know by name, you have probably seen a video by at some point.

• Apparently, people around the US have been complaining that the rotisserie chickens from Costco have started tasting like soap. Bon Appetit’s Li Goldstein didn’t quite come to a concrete explanation as to why, but she dug deep and I enjoyed reading the journey.

• I just finished reading Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. It’s a post-apocalyptic horror novel in which a virus called t.rex has caused all people with a certain amount of testosterone in their bodies to become monstrous zombie-ish creatures. The main characters are two trans women and a trans man who have to navigate the militant troops of TERFs that have been taking over the eastern US. If you like reading about extreme imaginings of real current tensions, I recommend it. Then again, I’m the guy who read Station Eleven in April 2020. Felker-Martin does an awesome job describing trans people with their many nuances. It’s both fun and refreshing to read references to things like the effects of estradiol, going off T to get top surgery, and the villainy of Janice Raymond without explaining any of it. It’s the rare book that actually feels like it’s for trans people. That said, this book is not for the faint of heart. It is a horror novel and it is super graphic and visceral. Do not read it over breakfast, like I did.

What’s Up In My Life

• On April 5th, I’ll be facilitating a conversation with Oakley Phoenix at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon to celebrate the launch of his book The Gender Friend. Their book is an awesome 102 level guide to gender identity––I should know, I wrote the foreword! I’m super stoked to be a part of Oakley’s first book and, if you’re around Salem then, I hope you’ll join the celebration.

• ICYMI, I’ll be performing Friday and Saturday nights in The Infinite Wrench with the New York Neo-Futurists in NYC from April 28 to May 20. You can learn more and get tickets here!

• Next week, I’m headed to the University of Victoria’s Moving Trans History Forward conference. It’s one that I’ve wanted to attend for years so I’m stoked to check it out. I’ll also be traveling around the Pacific Northwest for several days before and after. I’ll try to queue up a newsletter for while I’m gone and can’t wait to update you on everything I learn and see when I get back.

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1

I highly recommend the official companion podcast in which lead actress Krys Marshall talks to scientists, NASA officials, and the filmmakers for background context and behind-the-scenes details about each episode. And make sure you don’t miss the bonus videos attached to certain episodes within Apple TV+, which dig deeper into the real and imagined historical events the show plays with.

2

The New York Times described the suits as “essentially gender nonbinary,” which was news to me. I knew that the older suits had been designed for men, but I didn’t know they literally were men. Now the suits themselves are nonbinary! Unless of course The New York Times just thinks the word nonbinary is a synonym for “gender neutral” and can be applied to objects as well as people. And I can’t believe that an institution like The New York Times that always does its due diligence on trans issues would phrase something so awkwardly!

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If you use the links in this newsletter to purchase any of the books I mentioned, I'll get a little kickback.

So why ‘First Draft Theater’?

First Draft Theater isn’t as snappy or as clever a title for my newsletter as I hoped to come up with. It in no way aligns with my “jackisnotabird” social media brand. And yet, when I shared the idea with friends, they all immediately said it was the perfect fit for someone whose work revolves around constantly churning out original works that I perform online and on stage.

I hadn’t even realized the writing and performing connection until they pointed it out to me. First Draft Theater was just a trio of words that popped in my head one day when I was thinking about my slapdash writing process on the Cool Stuff Ride Home podcast. While I almost always at least skimmed over what I had written before recording each day, it was a rare not-rushed day when I got to really go back and edit the text of any segments into what could by its barest definition be called a second draft before recording.

That’s the nature of so much of my work, however. Over the years, I’ve spent more and more time researching and editing the scripts of YouTube videos before posting them, but the final product is often still more off-the-cuff and of-the-moment than other forms of media. Nowadays I’m also part of a theater company that writes and performs thirty short plays in just one hour, plays which largely change from week to week. That means we’re constantly writing new plays and often performing them just three days after first coming up with the idea.

Slow-cooked edits aren’t something I even got the luxury of when I wrote my book. I signed the contract for my book deal at the start of January 2019, was given about fourteen weeks to hand in the manuscript, and the book was on shelves by mid-September. For someone accustomed to social media and online video, that actually felt like an enormous amount of time to get to sit with one solitary project (though I equally wished for many more months to research, revise, and solicit feedback from peers and experts).

So “First Draft Theater” is what I privately called the Cool Stuff Ride Home in my notes as a way of reminding myself that what I was writing didn’t have to be perfect. It was a daily podcast touching on multiple different topics everyday. Especially without a team of researchers behind it, there was no way for it to be perfect. And that was okay. I still tried my best. And in relinquishing myself from the mandate of perfection I allowed myself to explore so many topics I wouldn’t have previously felt confident enough diving into. Did I do them all justice? Almost certainly not. But it was a start.

Inherent in “first draft” is that there may be subsequent drafts in the future. This is very much intentional. Through my tenure at the Cool Stuff Ride Home, I stumbled on quite a few interesting stories or insights that inspired me to start working on larger projects. Some of them turned into plays that were performed in The Infinite Wrench. Some have turned into ideas for novels that I’ve been continuing to research and outline. Some may one day become YouTube videos or standalone podcast series.

I’d like to think of some of what I’ll cover here on First Draft Theater as much the same. As I continue to explore the wide world and share my thoughts here, you’ll occasionally see a deeper interest take hold. Some of what you read here will eventually morph into bigger, more independent creations––and you’ll be able to say that you saw it in its roughest most primordial form. And maybe even that you helped it become what it eventually did, because you were here, giving me a place to experiment, and providing feedback and pointers where you could.

Not that you’re obliged to, of course! Maybe you’re just here to get updates on what I’ve been up to since I’ve grown so quiet on Twitter and Instagram and YouTube these days. Maybe you’ll become more interested in the rogue links I share and not the longer blocks of text I clutter this newsletter up with. Maybe you’ll just pop in when I cover a topic that particularly interests you and ignore the rest.

And maybe one day I’ll remove some of those features or add other ones. Like each individual post will be, this newsletter itself is a kind of living first draft. I’m throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. I’m learning as I go, as I have done for most of my professional life. Learning as I go with the public watching. My failures on display. That’s the theater part of it all.

Though, I suppose I should admit that “first draft” is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. My real first drafts are all written out of order and filled with mid-sentence brackets reminding myself to come up with a better adjective or fact-check some claim. Anything I put out there publicly, I have probably outlined, done a little research on, and at least read it back for typos (not that I usually catch them all). So maybe they aren’t really “first drafts.” But I think in the larger context of media, they are. I don’t have an outside editor. No peer review committee. I’m not going to spend months rewriting this post. I’ll hit publish and move on to the next thing.

And okay, yes, I could write a whole other post about the ills of social media being entirely made up of first drafts, of people’s unedited immediate thoughts… I do wish we all spent a lot more time reflecting as opposed to being stuck in the centrifugal force of a broken down carousel ride that never pauses, only speeds up, while we sit glued to the twin horses of broadcasting and consuming.

So perhaps that’s why I needed you to know that this newsletter, the old podcast, my YouTube videos, none of it is really a first draft. Not entirely. Could it use an edit? Absolutely! Will I cringe when I reread it in the future? You bet. Might it grow into something larger and better? Sometimes. But did I just spit out the first things that came to me and hit publish without a second thought? No. Maybe that’s another aspect of the theater part of the name. A little behind-the-curtain magic to help even the most hasty and most honest pieces pack a punch.

So come along to the First Draft Theater. I know just enough more than you to act as your guide, but really it’s anyone’s guess what’s to come.

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Rogue Recommendations

• Book rec: I just read Please Report Your Bug Here,* the debut novel from Josh Riedel who was the very first employee at Instagram. It’s both a meditation on our relationship with social media and an adventure through the multiverse. If you liked Hank Green’s sci-fi duology, you’ll probably like this.

• Got milk? This is a story I’ve been casually following for years and which I honestly expected to go the other way. The FDA has officially issued guidance saying that plant-based beverages are allowed to call themselves milk, saying drinks like oat and almond milk “don’t pretend to be from dairy animals – and that U.S. consumers aren’t confused by the difference” (AP)

• Ch-Ch-Changes. Here’s David Bowie impersonating Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and more during a 1985 studio session––posted shortly after Bowie’s death in 2016 by the engineer who was in the studio that day recording the session.

• The Boomer Senate. Will Donnell’s interactive visualization of which generations have been represented in the US senate from 1949 to today. Lots of fun data to explore here. The biggest takeaway? The average age of a senator has increased by about a decade and Boomers currently make up a larger portion of the Senate than any generation has since 1949. Would love to see this for the House so we could see a tiny square for Gen Z!

What I’m Up To

• Last month, I guest hosted an episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text with Matt Potts on the theme of vulnerability in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

• I’m also helping run a retreat-style summer camp with the podcast/pilgrimage company behind Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. If you want to hang out with a bunch of thoughtful, podcast-y people in the Catskills this June, you can learn more and register here!

• Wondering how I can possibly do anything related to Harry Potter in light of the franchise’s CTO (Chief TERF Officer)’s inability to shut up about how us trans people are ruining the world? I’m gonna be honest, occasionally appearing on Sacred Text to critically analyze the books is about as much as I can stomach anymore. But here’s a page linking to (almost) everything I’ve ever said publicly about the situation, including a New York Times op-ed** and a BBC Radio 4 interview.

• In New York City? I’ll be performing with the New York Neo-Futurists in The Infinite Wrench Friday and Saturday nights from April 28 - May 20 (check our Instagram for week-by-week casting updates). We perform 30 short plays in 60 minutes––all original works written by us and changing from week to week. Tickets here!

*I’m a Bookshop.org affiliate so, if you use that link to buy the book, I’ll earn a little kickback. Also, Bookshop.org rocks. I’m working on migrating my recommended booklists from (Amazon owned) Goodreads to Bookshop. Watch this space!**The New York Times was kind enough to publish my op-ed back in 2019, but their reporting on trans people since then has grown ever more irresponsible, rife with poor research and unfounded fear-mongering. You can learn more by reading this article or listening to this podcast episode. If you’d like to, you can sign your name to this petition from GLAAD or this one signed by hundreds of former New York Times contributors (you can also sign as a reader) to demand they clean up their act.

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Hello and welcome to my newsletter––emphasis on new.

I wanted to get this set up before the Cool Stuff Ride Home ended so that any listeners who were curious to keep up with my other work would have a way to do that.

But I’m going to be real with you:

After 740 episodes produced in less than three years, I’m a little tired.

I have a lot of ideas for thi…

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