The thing that bothers me about "nonbinary parenting" is that parents are so often unaware of all the subtle social and nonverbal signals they still give off to gender their kids.

In the 80's and 90's, "gender neutral parenting" was a bit of a trend, especially among college-educated liberal parents. But it pretty much just amounted to neutral-colored bedrooms and giving the kid a few androgynous toys like Legos. Nothing much deeper than that.

Those "gender neutral" kids still picked up on gendered trends super fast -- they noticed Mom was more likely to be the one doing the dishes…

Humans 101

Yesterday, I happened upon a thought-provoking Twitter thread from web developer Marco Rogers, about the ways in which white people are conditioned to avoid difficult conversations. Marco said, “Did ya’ll know that a lot of white people don’t have the cultural concept of ‘real talk’? You know where you stop saying the diplomatic thing and tell people what’s really going on. They just don’t have it. You try to have a moment of ‘real talk’ and they freak the fuck out.”

In the conversation that followed Marco’s tweet, many people of color shared how they have attempted to initiate candid…

Content warning: This essay discusses suicide ideation and eating disorders.

This weekend, prominent leftist Youtuber Philosophy Tube (aka Abigail Thorn) came out as a transgender woman. A few hours after making heartfelt coming-out posts on Twitter and Tumblr, she released a 37-minute Youtube video about her journey, entitled Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story.

As a trans person and Philosophy Tube fan, this was a welcome and eagerly anticipated announcement. I’d noticed, as many fans had, that Abigail had hinting about being trans online for the past several months. Her appearance had been changing, and several times she had to…

Humans 101

I’ve been fighting with people about narcissism since the day Trump declared his candidacy. So many left-leaning people seem to relish mental illness as an explanation for his actions. Calling Trump a narcissist seems to satisfy a deep need many people have to understand him as an aberration, an evil defect taking advantage of a system that otherwise works and is fair: If he’s a narcissist, then he’s almost inhuman. Absolutely evil. And all we have to do is get rid of evil people like him, and then we can return to normal.

Of course, the “normal” way of doing…

Essays are truly one my favorite art form. A good essay is capacious, bursting with ideas that linger inside your brain long after you’re done reading. There are some essays that dazzle me every single time I revisit them, because they’re so effective in probing a feeling or laying the writer’s perspective bare. Each time I reread these works, they pull me into a private world and change me in some way, then send me back out into the everyday world, ready to become a better writer myself.

I always find myself returning to these essays in the winter. Part…

This Is Us

The first time I sought out therapy, I was met with a smiling gender-conforming white lady who furrowed her brows when I described the pain I was in and said softly to me that it “must be so hard.” It made me immediately want to bolt from the room. Instead, I just sat there and cried.

I was in graduate school, depressed and unmoored, and the therapist was overseeing a social anxiety group I was desperate to join. She sat me down on a couch across from her and asked a few gentle, quiet questions about what it felt like…

When the pandemic began, many people took to the internet to share all the things they hoped they’d accomplish in isolation.

“I’m going to write a memoir!” one friend of mine announced.

“I’ll finally have time to work out every day!” another declared.

“Look at all this bread I baked!” said several others.

Across the internet, some people even turned their goal-setting into a cudgel with which to beat others: “I read four books this week and practiced my Spanish every day,” they tweeted. “What’s your excuse?”

When in a state of shock, it’s pretty common to retreat into work…

This year, for the first time ever, I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving. I didn’t brave the overnight Amtrak and subject myself to the germs of hundreds of travelers; didn’t wake up in the Cleveland suburbs to watch the parade and drink vanilla-flavored coffee from my mom’s Keurig. I didn’t get to spend two hours with her and my sister, squealing over the cute pups in the National Dog Show. …