Recently, I was dismayed to read this article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, examining how companies benefit when their employees list pronoun in their bios. The paper really encapsulates the disjoint between trans folks’ medical and economic needs, and cis folk’s vested interest in turning trans allyship into a personal and corporate branding effort.

Study authors Johnson, Pietri, Buck, and Daas found that when employees at an organization listed their pronouns in their bios, cisgender participants felt more positively toward the organization, and were more likely to believe it was a safe place for LGBTQ folks. …

As someone who believes in abolishing both prisons and the gender binary, one of the biggest misconceptions I encounter is the belief that certain groups are fundamentally “less safe" than others to be around. A lot of people mistakenly believe that the world is filled with dangerous predatory types, whom we can best understand using identity labels such “male” or “superpredator” or “narcissist.” If certain groups people are innately risky to be around, then we require police and enforced systems of gender segregation to ‘protect’ the vulnerable from them.

The argument that some groups are just plain dangerous takes a…

Trigger warning: This piece describes sex, gender dysphoria, and sexual assault.

When I met him, I was telling people I was asexual. It was a true enough label at the time; I was young and consumed with gender dysphoric feelings that made it hard to imagine actively desiring someone and remaining present with them during sex.

I had fallen in love with men before, and had found myself longing to merge with them, to become one with them utterly. I’d even had a few fun sexual fumblings as a teen, in the back of busses and behind old buildings in…

Two days ago, I opened up Twitter to find out that this shoddy piece of science reporting from Inside Edition was trending:

As soon as I read this headline, the persuasion researcher and science writer in me went completely apoplectic. Inside Edition is not exactly famous for their high quality journalism, but their already dismal reputation doesn’t take away from the fact this article was promoted by outlets like CNN and ABC News as well, and promoted across the entire platform of Twitter, where individual tweets about the research had netted thousands of reactions. …

This comedic news essay was originally read live at The Paper Machete, Chicago’s live magazine.

On August 19th, sexual content distribution app OnlyFans announced it would be instituting a ban on sexual content beginning in October. The announcement was vague, just as the sexual content bans announced by Tumblr and Instagram in prior years were: according to OnlyFans, artistic nudes and photography would still be permitted, but explicit depictions of sex acts would be banned.

In practice, such bans typically bring their hammer down on the people whose bodies are more likely to be viewed as inherently sexual: hence Tumblr’s…

Productivity will go down this year, as more workers get forced back into the office and back into commutes that suck up a significant portion of their day’s attentional capacity and time. It will go down because it will have to, as workers begin having to worry about childcare and eldercare again, flitting all across the city dropping off bodies and picking up lunch. Time spent exercising, daydreaming, and doing the dishes in between work tasks will be replaced with time stuck in aimless meetings. Breaks in the sun will be supplanted by dull moments eating yogurt trapped under fluorescent…

I’m sitting on a crate in a big warehouse filled with bodies, and I can’t seem to process anyone’s face.

My mask is pulled up high on my nose, with my glasses perched over the seam of the fabric, blocking the cloud of my breath. It’s the middle of the day, the very start of the film festival, and the warehouse is flooded with light from second-story windows. People are moving about slowly, grabbing complementary beers, and moseying up to one another to exchange waves and astonished, gosh-I-haven’t-seen-you-in-forever hugs. …

Trigger warning: This piece mentions emotional abuse, reproductive coercion, suicide, and sexual assault.

A year before he died, my rapist emailed me saying he was suicidal. A girl had just dumped him and he was spiraling. He’d relapsed on heroin. He was miserably alone and the only person he could think to contact was me.

While my rapist and his girlfriend were together, he’d largely left me alone. That had finally given me the brain space to reckon with what he’d done. Before that, I’d just considered him a friend who had ruined a perfectly good fuckbuddy arrangement by getting…