It’s weirdly funny to look back at the controversy around Cypberpunk 2077 before it came out. It’s not that the controversy itself was funny or ridiculous but that, seven years, a pandemic, and a right-wing cultural backlash later, it feels very quaint and like it happened in a different universe.

The game felt billed as this very woke experience where you could be anyone you wanted to at the same time it was being marketed by people who were making “did you assume my gender” jokes with Elon Musk, who at this point did not own Twitter and had not become a full mask-off white supremacist quite yet. What I remember the most, however, was the trans stuff.

Around the time it was coming out, I had just started hormones and was transitioning socially in college. I was myself for the first time in my life, and I loved the cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner is still one of my favorite movies, and I still wish that the whole aesthetic wasn’t hack. I remember being stoked for the game, even though at the time I wasn’t familiar with the source material and didn’t have anything that could run it. I was particularly interested in the fact that you could, at least sort of, play as a trans woman for obvious reasons - I always picked girls in video game, and the idea that I would be able to play as close to my real self as possible was pretty cool, even if it felt superficial.

But a lot of the weirdly transphobic-feeling marketing that in-game ad (we’ll get there) made me decide I wouldn’t play the game. When it came out and flopped for being a buggy mess, I laughed. (I was hating from outside the club a little because again, I was broke, in college, and did not own anything capable of running this game to begin with).

Fast forward to now, and I’m an adult with a fully-developed frontal lobe. I don’t game as much as I used to, but I found myself really missing it. Combined with a need for some sort of distraction from the general state of things, something to stop me from scrolling on my phone constantly, I figured I’d try out Cyberpunk 2077. I heard from so many friends, including some trans people, that it was worth playing now. Fuck it, why not?

I got hooked. I played for 80 hours and did basically everything there is to do, and then immediately started another playthrough. Everything is so satisfying. The world feels so lived-in and detailed, and the graphics are gorgeous. I found myself reading every shard, talking to every person I could, reading all of the wiki pages. The characters and story were really compelling to me, too (Judy, my beloved). The Phantom Liberty DLC makes a solid game even better, and I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 might have made its way into my top games of all time.

But what about the trans representation? Was my mind changed at all because I liked the game so much? In short, not really. But I think cyberpunk is inherently kind of transgender, and that was enough for me in a lot of ways. But I also wanted to think about the trans representation that is in the game and sort of relitigate it. (At least the stuff I found in my playthrough. If I missed something, let me know).

Everything is sexy and I can’t get horny

First is the “Mix It Up” ad, the thing that became so infamous that even my non-online girlfriend who only plays farming games remembered it. It’s an ad for the in-game Chromanticore drink with a woman in a tight leotard. The outline of her gigantic throbbing dick is visible through her clothes, and the tagline is “Mix it Up.”

You do not need a PhD in queer studies to figure out why people weren’t into this. It’s weird! It fetishizes and exoticizes pre-op trans women, already a demographic that’s highly exploited. The stated rationale for the design that the ad’s creator, Kasia Redesiuk, gave was that it meant to show the in-universe exploitation of queer identities under the regime of megacorporations. From a 2019 Polygon interview:

“This is all to show that [much like in our modern world], hypersexualization in advertisements is just terrible,” Redesiuk continued. “It was a conscious choice on our end to show that in this world — a world where you are a cyberpunk, a person fighting against corporations. That [advertisement] is what you’re fighting against.”

I mean… I guess? If it was one in a series of in-game ads, or if there was side-quest where you could help that model escape exploitation, I’d maybe believe that. I’m sure that was the intent. But it’s one in-game advertisement, and what really surprised me upon actually playing Cyperpunk was that it’s everywhere. Like, plastered all over Night City. You can find it in almost every vendor shop, on every street. It’s so repetitive, almost like it’s mocking you. I understand that game assets are hard to create and that making a bunch of different ads for a game is a big ask. But this specific graphic being everywhere, in light of how stupid it is, just really annoyed me.

Besides, what’s the commentary? Yeah, queer and trans bodies are exploited and advertisements are hypersexualized. You can show that without exploiting stereotypes and making real-life caricatures yourself. As others have pointed out, this kind of trans woman, the kind that’s the butt of some sort of joke, is everywhere. It’s not biting satire, it just perpetuates a vicious cycle.

Redesiuk’s other comment, that she thought the in-game ad might help increase empathy for trans and queer people, rang hollow to me. It’s an advertisement for an in-game soda that uses a gigantic futa cock model and says “Mix It Up.” Be so for real. It’s a sub-GTA level joke. I don’t feel any plight for the model involved, especially since there’s nothing really to be done about it in the game. I mostly got sick of seeing it a few hours into the game.

What’s funny is I think Cyberpunk actually has some compelling narratives about sexualization and exploitation. Evelyn Parker, the sex worker who gives you the quest to steal the relic from Arasaka only to eventually be sold into sexual slavery herself and forced to create unspeakable pornos (called braindances in game). Her storyline sends you to Judy, a braindance editor who runs with a gang of sex workers called the Mox. Eventually, you help Judy and the Mox try to rid their club of gang members in a bid to help the sex workers there run it themselves. It’s an interesting story about labor, as well as what it means to have your body literally commodified. The sex workers, called dolls, have chips installed that take over their bodies, so they can be essentially asleep during sex. They do whatever is asked by the client without really any consent. Several of the dolls you help talk about being beaten or assaulted, and Evelyn’s story in particular is upsetting.

A short quest about helping trans or queer dolls deal with a specific kind of exploitation would’ve been interesting. But there’s nothing there. It fits into one of my big critiques of Cyberpunk. It’s a real “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny” type game. All the ads, including the “Mix It Up” one, are hypersexual. When you go to one bar near the beginning of the game, you’re told they have insane porn braindances you can watch, but you can’t actually watch any of them, and all the BDs you do watch are usually for narrative purposes that don’t involve sex. You’re allowed to make your character a woman with a penis, but it doesn’t show up during the game’s sexual encounters. Cyberpunk is obsessed with sex, and there’s not much that’s actually interesting about it. No matter how bad you want to, you can’t “Mix It Up” even if you wanted to. I understand that there are ratings involved and not everyone cares about this sort of thing, but it felt like a missed opportunity.

If you’re going to let me give my V a dick, I think it should have some sort of bearing in my character’s story, even if it just shows up during the sex scenes. It’s nice that I can create a diverse body, but what’s the point if I can’t really do anything with it? What’s the point of making commentary on queer sexploitation if you’re just doing it yourself?

It’s funny that the "Mix It Up” ad was considered both thoughtful and empathy-driven by the devs because, as Stacey Henley at Polygon pointed out in 2020, the ad is one of the extremely few times you see a trans person in Cyberpunk at all. Which brings us to…

The Claire of it all

The only actual explicitly trans character in Cypberpunk 2077 is Claire Russell, a side character. Claire is the bartender at Afterlife, the legendary merc bar run by Rogue. She’s also an engineer who loves street racing, and her only quest is “The Beast in Me” where you help her finish a series of races. Claire is also trans.

How do you know she’s trans? Well, she doesn’t say it right away, but when you go to her autoshop to start the quest, you see that her truck, Beast, has a gigantic trans flag decal on the back. (Side note: Nobody has come up with a new trans flag in the future?). Her journal entry also notes that she’s a trans woman, but those words aren’t ever spoken (again, unless I missed a dialogue option or something). She might as well have a Blahaj.

Look, I have a trans symbol necklace I wear everywhere, and my jacket has a trans pride flag patch. It’s not like I don’t have the trans flag on stuff. But I don’t plaster it everywhere, and maybe I just live in Texas, but I wouldn’t put it on my car. It feels like a lazy way for writers and artists to say “look! we have a trans character!” I guess it’s better than the new trans character DC Comics introduced.

Consider Kerry Eurodyne, the former member of Samurai that you can romance and do a few quests for. He’s gay, and tells you so if you try to initiate a romance with him as a female V. Is it amazing gay representation? Not really, and it doesn’t really come up outside of the romance stuff. But he’s not decked out in rainbow flag stuff. Same with Judy, the best queer character in the game.

Claire’s not a bad character by any means. As you complete races with her, you learn that she’s racing to avenge her husband, Dean, who was killed in the championship race after a collision with a corporation-backed driver. Claire will tell you that Dean supported her through her transition, and brought her flowers the day she got bottom surgery. Once you finish “The Beast In Me,” that’s about it, and she gives you Beast as a reward. I played my V as a trans woman, so it was kind of cool to get a truck with a trans flag on it even though I drive bikes in the game. But story-wise, it makes no sense. Why would a trans woman give her prized posession, customized with pride flags for her own identity, to a cis person?

And for a game that is obsessed with at the surface level with all sorts of “out there” stuff, it’s interesting that the game’s only trans character is pretty plain. Claire is a heterosexual trans woman who got bottom surgery and doesn’t have any cybernetic implants. Obviously, that kind of trans woman really does exist, and there’s nothing wrong with being trans, straight, and getting bottom surgery. Getting bottom surgery or injecting hormones is incredibly cyberpunk to me.

But couldn’t there be more? My transness is an expression of my bodily autonomy. I’m free to modify my body as I wish, and that includes transitioning and getting the surgeries I do (or don’t) want and expressing myself however I want. In that same vein, part of the the allure of the cyberpunk genre is that it’s about the ways people exercise their autonomy in a world ruled by corporations. Cyberpunk denizens enhance their bodies with cybernetic tech to fight the very companies that make them. In a sense, they are physically taking back some of your power by doing so.

Imagine the trans stories you can tell in that kind of setting, with that kind of tension. Trans women who are reliant on implanted bio-pumps that give them estrogen, and the kinds of gender expression that would spring from being able to modify your body on a whim. In a cyberpunk future transitioning and passing might be easier than ever but only to people with ludicrous amounts of money, while the rest go to back-alley rippers or learn to hack themselves to transition. Not even to mention what being trans might look like in a world where existing in “The Net” can be realer than real life. There are plenty of trans and queer people telling their stories in cyberpunk settings in super compelling ways. Imagine if they had the budget of an AAA game to do it!

With that in mind, Claire was disappointing to me even if I found her a welcome addition to a game with such little meaningful trans inclusion. Again, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with her characterization so much as it felt like she was made with a limited imagination. In a world where tech and medical science are far beyond where we are, where you can be whoever you want to be in a city where forging your own path is the way to survive, the best we could come up with was a heterosexual trans woman who is an engineer and bartender? It just feels like a little bit of a wasted opportunity.

I would love to know more about how Claire came about, if she was a reaction to the “Mix It Up” fiasco or if someone really did geniunely want to create a trans character for Cyberpunk. I’m not sure if any of the devs on the game were trans or had any input on Claire (I would hope so!) but I think myself or any number of trans creatives could’ve really cooked here.

Go your own way

What actually playing Cyberpunk years after release reminded me is that we can’t rely on the biggest publishers and corporations to create the stories we need and want. It’s nice if they can, but I shouldn’t expect CD Projekt Red or some other giant AAA game studio or publisher to create the perfect trans stories I want to see. That kind of creative process is inherently exclusionary a lot of the time, even if it’s not intended to be. When only cis people are in the room for most of the creative process, it means they’ll create and tell mostly cis forward stories. I loved romancing Judy, and felt that it was a really good sapphic relationship depicted in a video game. But that kind of thing still feels like a rarity, and when trans people are concerned, we end up less like Judy and more like Claire: filtered and filtered down in order to not bother anyone, until there’s just a vague, trans flag shaped outline left.

I played my V as an expliticly trans person, and I got a lot out of the game. Cyberpunk made me want to read more cyberpunk genre fiction and maybe even create my own. In true genre fashion, I’ve learned that I have that I have the power to tell the stories I need, that people want, even if it requires me to use software and systems created by corporations I loathe. There’s freedom in realizing that, even if I wish games like Cyberpunk could do it for me sometimes. Sometimes, you have to just take what you can get, and make what you really want yourself.

Thanks for reading!

The first time I ever felt like myself, I was dressed as a poor facsimile of Madonna for a Halloween party in 2018.

I wore fishnet stockings from Spirit Halloween, a black miniskirt from who-knows-where, a bralette from Target, pink fingerless gloves, a cross necklace and some dangly earrings. My then partner did my eyeliner and makeup. I think the vibe was the “Like a Prayer” music video, which is one of my favorites at the time, although now I’m not really sure how much I actually looked the part.

I didn’t really care that I had short hair or visible stubble or that I had no boobs to speak of for the bra I was wearing. What mattered for me is that for the first time in my life, I got to go to a party, where I didn’t know people, and present as a woman to them. This, to use terminology I sort of hate, was when my “egg” “cracked."

Halloween is one of the few times in most of the country that it’s socially acceptable to crossdress, and I’d wager that for most trans people but trans women especially, it’s the first time most of us really experimented with our presentation or really tried to appear as the opposite sex. Growing up in suburban Texas, gender roles were strictly enforced. Wearing skinny jeans made you gay, which essentially made you a woman. (So did liking Sonic the Hedgehog, which, well look how I turned out).

There were precious few times you were able to have an exception to the rule1: Football games, but only if you were wearing drag for comedic effect, being a theater kid, and Halloween.

Living at home with strict parents who didn’t support me being trans, the times I was able to express myself, then, were limited. Before I realized I was trans, I would occasionally go to the mall and let my cis girl friends put me in dresses and other women’s clothes "because hahahaha wouldn’t it be funny if I wore a dress. That would be crazy guys!” A few times in high school, I tried working up the courage to put makeup on at school and wear makeup to class. I never made it past first period, usually the point when someone would go “Hey, what’s on your face?” After I came out and was denied by my parents, I wore women’s clothes and makeup, mostly donated by my supportive cis girl friends, in secret in my literal closet in my bedroom.

For the longest time, turning 18 was the magical milestone I longed to reach, where I could move far away for college, never talk to my parents or friends ever again, transition, and become an unrecognizable bimbo. That was what I survived for, what I strived for. Imagine my white surprise when I ended up at Texas A&M, living at home my first semester of college.

I don’t really remember how the idea of being Madonna came about. It may have been my ex’s idea, or it was mine. By then, I had begun to make some good, supportive friends through college radio and I had started floating the “aha i’m nonbinary” stuff that you do before you really decide to transition. But I still presented “I’m going to be Madonna for Halloween,” with the same intonation you do a joke, like “Can you guys believe I’m going to be a girl? For Halloween?”

But when I looked in the mirror after donning my costume, I was shocked. The person I saw in the mirror wasn’t me, or at least the me that I was used to seeing. I had worn women’s clothes before, though either in the company of a few friends who understood or in my bedroom in the dead of night when I knew nobody would barge in and catch me. But this time,I had been dressed by someone who understood what was flattering and (this is important!) what was not. I had wanted to trasnition for so long but felt hopelessly lost. My grotesque male body could never look feminine, I thought. Looking in the mirror at Madonna changed that. Staring in the mirror was a stranger, but a stranger I recognized nonetheless, and not just because I’ve watched the “Like A Prayer” video a gajillion times. It was the person I’m supposed to be, if just a glimmer of her, staring back. That moment, I know now, was when I realized that transitioning was a possible future for me. I went on hormones almost a year exactly later, and the rest is history.

I don’t remember really anything from that Halloween party I went to dressed as Madonna, except for two things: I got really drunk because I was 18 and didn’t know how to be drunk, and a guy poked my padded bralette and was like “wow, I thought these were real, I didn’t realize you were a guy.”2

It’s funny to look back at the photo seven years later. Since then I’ve come out, changed names, and been on hormones for six years. I pass way better now and I even though I haven’t gotten any surgeries, I feel secure in my womanhood.

I struggled with writing this a little bit. I still carry a little bit of shame with me about the way I think about this, which to me is crossdressing, even though I never thought of myself as a crossdresser.3 I’ve consumed a lot of TERF media about perverted husbands who, in their telling, get off on “stealing” their clothes. But I shouldn’t be ashamed to say that wearing women’s clothing as part of a bad Madonna costume made me feel a little more like myself.

Expressing yourself, trans or not, is a good that should be encouraged. I’m glad that trans people have a holiday where for one day a year, it’s safer to be ourselves.

For that, Halloween is a transgender holiday. Happy halloween, guys and dolls!

By the way, if you’re trans and have a story about dressing up for Halloween similar to this, I’d love to hear it.

Thanks for reading. I’m going to try to blog semi-regularly again as a way to stay in practice when I’m not working and have a good creative outlet that isn’t related to my job. Feel free to subscribe to get this in your email when it comes out.

Friends come and go, but I will never forget about the MacZCliner(TM), only at Gallery Furniture.

That’s because Houston’s resident furniture crank and occasional election denier, Mattress Mack, advertises the MacZCliner probably a dozen times during any given Houston Astros radio broadcast.

Forget about Mack’s politics and his possibly-culturally-insensitive advertisements. I will hand Mr. McIngvale this: the guy is a grade-A, no-bones-about-it hustler. When Hurricane Beryl swept through last year, Mack found a way to work it into his radio ads. When mind-boggling floods swept away children and killed over 100 people in Central Texas this year, Mack was there to sell. The guy will do fucking anything for a sale.

I realized this because of 162 Astros games, I probably listened to 130 of them at one point or another this year on the radio. I could recite Mack ads in my sleep. Sometimes I wander around my home and just go up to my girlfriend and yell: “COME ON DOWN TO GALLERY FURNITURE GALLERY FURNITURE DELIVERS FREE FREE FREE TONIGHT.”

My dad was a big sports on the radio guy. As a kid, he’d throw Rangers games on in the car. He drove me absolutely nuts when he’d turn on Kansas City Chiefs games and spend the entire first quarter trying to sync the TV up with the Chiefs radio broadcast. He couldn’t stand the TV guys, he explained. He wanted to hear the guys back in KC.

When I started watching baseball to fill my time after moving to Houston in 2022, I quickly realized that I could not afford to shell out $70 a month to stream games on my barely-$40k a year salary. I was not buying cable. But I learned that the radio was free.

There’s really nothing like listening to baseball (or really any sport) on the radio as your primary way of consuming it. Seeing baseball in person is a treat. Watching it on TV is a luxury. But listening to a game on the radio, I’ve learned, is warm, firm, like a hug from your dad.

If you’ve read my love letter to my iPod, you know I love an uncomfortable, anachronistic-to-a-twenty-five-year-old experience. But it took me a little while to get there. I cycled through the MLB and iHeartRadio apps before getting an actual, physical radio. (My great grandmother died this summer and I was in Memphis to clean out the house. I was told I could take whatever I wanted, but all I took was the radio). And I never looked back after that.

Watching an NFL game on network television reminds you that thousands, if not millions of people tune in every week to shows called Tracker and Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. Listening to baseball on the radio transports you somewhere stranger. All the ads on the radio broadcast are for Dasani and Wendy’s hamburgers and life insurance and local foundation companies and for other radio shows called Sports Thoughts With Chuck and Creepy Gil. In a day and age where your advertisements are curated by algorithms whose inner workings are a mystery to their own creators, listening to an commercial for bottled water feels like almost like performance art. Not to mention, much to my girlfriend’s chagrin, that they same the play dozen ads over and over. You learn to crave bottled water after a while.

Mattress Mack’s incoherent ads and bottled water is worth it for the Astros radio broadcast. I know everyone hates the Astros for a million reasons, many justified and some not. But I’d argue that you’d be hard-pressed to find a finer broadcasting duo than Robert Ford on play-by-play and Steve Sparks on commentary.

Ford has made a life in radio broadcasting, calling minor league games for the Binghamton Mets, Kalamazoo Kings and Yakima Bears before working for the Kansas City Royals. Sparks is a former knuckleballer who pitched for the Brewers, Angels, Tigers, and A’s during his career (The Astros signed him to a minor league deal in 2005, but he retired after being cut). The broadcast booth duo of a veteran radio man and a retired player isn’t rare, but Ford and Sparks have better chemistry than most.

What keeps me coming back to Astros radio is that both just ooze love for the game. Ford has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game; Sparks can fill any dead inning with a fascinating tale from his pitching days. His knowledge of pitching mechanics is fascinating, and I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the kick-change pitch mechanic this season.

But besides being stat and mechanics-savvy, both love the game’s history. During a game in May, Sparks regaled listeners with the story of a Pony League baseball manager who was also a bank robber. Last summer, during a blowout loss against the Tigers, both recalled the story of Ty Cobb beating up a heckler who questioned Cobb’s racial ancestry. They probably knew those stories by heart. The Tigers beat Houston 13-5, but I listened to every out just to hear the banter. Every time surprise Astros pitcher Jason Alexander started, they’d crack Seinfeld jokes. When reliever Bryan King faced Jake Burger, they similarly got witty with it. No matter the quality of play on the field, the radio broadcast put a smile on my face.

Ford brings almost a literary quality to his play-by-play. When describing a player with two home runs, Ford said “He of the two homers.” There are better examples, but I always loved that phrasing. But make no mistake, when the ‘Stros are cooking, the two know how to pump you up. Ford’s “AT THE WALL, LOOKING UP, SEE YA LATER!” has soundtracked iconic Astros homers, whether they were regular season games in June or playoff must-wins. Even when Adolis Garcia or Aaron Judge or some other Astros foe had a big dinger, his “If it stays fair it’s gone… and it is gone” put a great bow on what surely must have been a bomb. A great baseball call stays with you for days, weeks, even months after the game. Sparks’ “SÍ SEÑOR” or Ford’s “Keep booing” at Dodger Stadium will always stay with me.

I needed this, the routine of dinner after work and baseball on the radio after dinner. For various reasons, whether it’s career stuff or the overwhelming dread of being transgender in America right now, it’s been a weird year for me. Sparky and Ford were my constants through much of it. The broadcast schedule of two night games and an afternoon game became the rhythm of my summer, as did the incredible bumper music played between innings on the radio. There are not a lot of things that feel stable for me these days, if nothing else because of my anxiety. For most of the year, Steve Sparks, Robert Ford, and Houston Astros baseball is one of the few things that feels like it will never end, until it does.

It’s expensive to watch baseball, not to mention blackouts and streaming exclusive games. The radio, then, feels like a hidden gem. Baseball on the radio is out of time. It’s like going to library or finding a coffee shop that still lets you use the bathroom without paying for anything. Listening to baseball feels like one of the few things left in our society that doesn’t want to take advantage of you while you do it. The commercials are obnoxious, but they are part of the quirk. The crackle of the radio and finding the random spots in my apartment where I don’t get reception are novelties. I can find anything I want within seconds now, thanks to my phone. To be denied something for a few seconds because of radiowaves and the things that interfere with them almost feels like a blessing.

Obviously, I’m bummed my Astros aren’t in the playoffs. But my summer of radio was worth the heartbreak. I went to a game alone earlier this year and took my radio. I listened to the broadcast while I watched and scored the game. It was an exercise in being by myself, but I wasn’t really alone. I felt more in tune with the game as I watched and listened. It felt like baseball distilled to what it was supposed to be, and everything else melted away.

To watch something without sight is to learn how to see again entirely. I can’t see every pitch, every out, every dinger, every error. I can only hear them thanks to the broadcast, and it’s up to my mind to fill in the rest. For me, the image that comes through is something warmer and sharper, something realer than real. I can see Jose Altuve up with the bases loaded and two outs.

Even when he strikes out looking, I feel richer for the way I saw it.

My girlfriend and I spent this past weekend in Fort Worth, visiting some friends from college, and while in town we paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I have to say up front here: Fort Worth, I was not familiar with your game. The Modern is absolutely delightful.

I guess I’m what you would call a museum completionist. I have to stand in front of every piece for a few minutes and really soak it up and look. I have to read every placard and really take in the whole experience. The best museums can really get me lost in a headspace, and when I’m with a group I tend to sort of disappear.

That’s how I got to wandering around the Modern, thinking about spaces, contrast, intrusions and the violence of modern life. The gift shop wasn’t too bad, either.

On display this summer is American-Venezuelan artist Alex Da Corte’s solo show The Whale, collecting his work and works that compliment and influenced his style. The Whale focuses on Da Corte’s fascination with pop culture and our societal ephemera. In the exhibition pamphlet, he described his process as “analogous to the Jungian night sea journey, looking backward and collecting the past as an act of commingling with spirits, either cultural or personal.”

I wasn’t familiar with Da Corte’s body of work before this weekend, but I was really moved by his multi-medium works included video and paintings done on glass in the style of celluloid animation. I’m sort of a sucker for pop art, especially thinking about our tenuous relationships with stuff and the way advertisements and celebrity play on emotions, things like that. Plus, there was a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, which I’ve never seen in person (see above), and some Roy Lichtenstein pieces, who I like even if he’s been done to death by copycats. I like the colors. Sue me, I guess.

But I found my experience at the Modern clouded by a saga that I still just find completely bizarre and kind of chilling.

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Last year, the Modern unveiled an exhibit called Diaries of Home. From the Modern’s website:

Diaries of Home features works by women and nonbinary artists, who explore the multilayered concepts of family, community, and home.

The artists included Nan Goldin, Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems. It seemed very cool. But just before Christmas of last year, the right-wing “newspaper” Dallas Express “reported” on “a tip” about Diaries of Home, alleging that the on-going exhibit featured “pictures of naked children and LGBTQ+ content.” (The Express was once a progressive, Black-owned newspaper in Dallas, now it’s a “pink slime” right-wing outlet owned by a local GOP megadonor)

At issue are two photographs by Sally Mann. One is a photo of a naked girl jumping on a table. Another features a young boy posed with what the Dallas Express called “an unknown liquid substance” on him with “his genitals exposed.” Other complaints in the article included a video on a TV screen “where an individual talked about her ‘queerness’” and photos showing “a topless woman exposing her breasts and a photo of two women together in bed.” It’s written very salaciously, and is a little funny when juxtaposed with some of the other images in the article, which appear to be stuff you could see in any art museum. The photos are of Mann’s children form her book “Immediate Family” which has been a subject of controversy before and features photos of her children in the nude as they grew up.

The writer then went to bother an employee about the pieces, who “pointed to a warning sign that said, ‘This exhibition features mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.’” The author immediately asserts that these pieces by Mann are child pornography, which he says randomly “is NOT protected under the First Amendment and is a criminal act.”

A brief google search will tell you that the staff writer who wrote this piece, Carlos Turcios, also works for the Tarrant County GOP.

The article also quotes two "Tarrant County residents.”

One, Kenya Alu, says that “pedophilia is not art. If this ‘artwork’ were on my phone, I would be arrested. Normalizing this is sick, and I want it to stop.” Alu seems to be a North Texas realtor who has written for right-wing outlet Texas Scorecard. Another concerned citizen, Leigh Wambsganss, said that “child rape is not art, it’s pedophilia.” Wambsganss called for museum board members and staff to be “held accountable.” It would probably not shock you to learn that Wambsganss works for Patriot Mobile, a right-wing mobile phone company based in the DFW area that appears to do very little mobile-phone company stuff but a lot of work to get Moms For Liberty-type candidates elected to North Texas school boards. The story ends with a quote from the executive director of conservative group Tarrant County Citizens Defending Freedom, thanking a “concerned citizen” for alerting TCCDF’s leadership about “deeply troubling” paintings at the Modern.

All of this is to say that whether or not anyone actually “tipped off” Turcios about the Sally Mann photos at the Modern, this story from the get-go is not exactly on the up-and-up. I wasn’t familiar with Sally Mann before this, but it seems like her work is definitely controversial, especially the nude photos. It’s not really my thing, but it’s certainly not something I looked at and thought “child exploitation.” The whole thing fits neatly into the ongoing push, in Texas and nationally, to sensationalize and scandalize about nudity and queerness in the name of “protecting kids.”

Anyway, this appeared to be the only blowback the exhibit recieved since it opened last November. Tim O’Hare, the Tarrant County Judge who is one of the most right-wing figures in the state, called for an investigation. Fort Worth police seized seized the photographs as part of an investigation into allegations that they were child pornography. The DA’s office opened a case and investigated, but eventually closed the case and filed no charges, probably because who they would even charge was up in the air. A North Texas lawmaker filed a bill that would fine museums that show “obscene” art up to $500,000 a year. It was all very ridiculous, and the show closed after finishing its run, although it’s unclear whether FWPD has actually returned the photos. What appears to be an entirely manufactured outrage has ended without accomplishing much other than making a lot of noise. Or did it accomplish something else?

All of this was on my mind as I took in The Whale. I couldn’t stop thinking about the seizure of the Mann photos as I walked around the quiet museum, my footsteps and the sounds of a distant video exhibit the only noise. What would it have been like to see police, clad in body armor with guns holstered, show up to the museum with a search warrant? To hear the wood floors creak under their boots? To watch as they pointed to the photos, ah yes, that’s the offender, the one with the penis, the one with the unidentified liquid? As one by one, they pulled the photos down and carried them to their black cars, to be taken back to the station to be processed and filed away in evidence closets like contraband? The scene played in my mind as I wandered the museum. Maybe I just didn’t take my ADHD meds that morning, but something was off. It deeply unnerved me. I could still feel the police presence months later, I could feel that there was unease in the dark concrete walls of the Modern. This was a place that was vulnerable, and I felt vulnerable. I felt myself looking around at the other people in the museum. A family with young children sat and watched a video. Would they find something perverted about it? Did they care? Did they even know what had happened?

It all got me thinking about two complimentary pieces in the Alex Da Corte exhibition; “Gun” by Andy Warhol and “A Time For Killing” by Da Corte. (I only have an image of one of these.) Both deal with violence.

“Gun” is fairly straightforward. It’s a black and white painting of a .22 caliber revolver, with a bright red afterimage offset from the original. The gun is cold and dark, lifeless on its own. The red represents the warmth of the person wielding it, the bloodlust and the life simmering just beneath the surface of an otherwise inanimate object. (It’s probably not a coincidence that the radical feminist Valerie Solanas tried to kill Warhol with a revolver in 1968.)

“A Time for Killing” is more multifaceted. Done as what Da Corte calls a “Slatwall painting",” its made by hanging found objects from the hangers found and used in retail stores. There’s not any good images of it, so I’d just encourage you to go to the Modern and see it yourself if you can. It's a purple and red background with standees from party stores used as its subjects. Elsa from Frozen lies upside down, and a Stormtrooper from Star Wars points a gun at her. There are red opera gloves, obviously meant to be blood. Da Corte, who is queer, has said the work was inspired by the Pule nightclub shooting in 2016, and it became clear to me that the piece was essentially a recreation of the shooting with found objects. It plays with the idea of violence in safe spaces. The stormtrooper points a gun at Elsa, the main character of a children’s film. The background is a dancefloor. The blood, the gun, these are foreign objects in a safe queer space.

Taken together, with the Sally Mann seizures in my mind, I began to think about the juxtaposition of men with guns in a place like the Modern. About how, like in “Gun” it felt like there was a scarlet bloodlust beneath the surface of the museum. Like in “A Time for Killing,” violence from outside had been brought into what should have been a safe space for creativity and ideas that push us.

I tried to get into the mindset of someone who would be mad enough at art, at the concept of nakedness or queerness in any context, to call the police and have it seized and put into storage and tried for the crime of existing. As a trans woman in Texas, in America, it chilled me to the bone. My existence is now considered just as perverted, just as unsuitable to children as Sally Mann’s photographs. Trump’s Project 2025 called for “transgenderism” to be classified as pornography and outlawed. Was I next? The merits of whether Mann’s photos are unsuitable for viewing, if her photos share private moments in public settings in a way that’s exploitative, can be debated by reasonable people. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s Sally Mann today, and you and me tomorrow. That threat, like in “Gun”, invaded the museum and lingered just beneath the surface, a threatening red future just beneath the museum’s facade.

You don’t have to explain the last decade of American politics to me; I understand how we got here. But standing in an art museum where cops seized challenging photos over allegations of child exploitation pushed by a right wing newspaper bankrolled by a billionaire made me realize that we are here, and it is kind of a mindfuck to be here.

I promise I really did enjoy my visit to the Modern. I did, after all, buy a cool hat.

Thanks for reading. I’m going to try to blog semi-regularly again as a way to stay in practice when I’m not working and have a good creative outlet that isn’t related to my job. Feel free to subscribe to get this in your email when it comes out.

I will never forget getting the “Trans Tipping Point” issue of TIME in the mail. I was 14 in 2014, and because i enjoyed not having friends, i was a rabid news consumer. I asked my grandmother for a subscription to TIME for my birthday that year, and the day it came in the mail was like christmas for me.

I was also a closeted trans kid. I had known for about a year that i was different, and i had come out to my parents the summer before (it did not go well and i went back into hiding, chocking up the whole thing to a depressive episode). Seeing Laverne Cox on the cover shocked me. It had been impossible to believe that someone like me could be so feminine, so beautiful, that they could grow old and have a life and have one worth featuring in a major American magazine. I remember the content of the actual article very little. That photo on the cover though, the one that told me that maybe things could get better, maybe i can transition one day, is etched in my mind. It felt like a new chapter was beginning, like a door had opened.

If the Trans Tipping Point felt like the beginning of something, well, the end feels like all of the anti-trans executive orders signed by President Donald Trump purporting to end “gender ideology” and protect kids from “chemical and surgical mutilation” during the first few weeks of his second term. That these things happened about ten years apart is not lost on me (If we want a cleaner timeline, Caitlin Jenner came out a decade ago this year, meaning that I’ve technically been trans for a little longer than Caitlin Jenner has).

In the rough decade since the point tipped, I finished public education, moved out of my parents house, came out and started hormones, changed my name and gender, finished college, moved cities and got a career. All the while, i watched trans people like me gain marginal acceptance and paltry legal protections. I went to a conservative public university in Texas and almost noone cared i was trans. It felt like the point really had tipped. but since i’ve left college, things have gotten worse, first slowly and then all at once. Half of all states ban trans kids from recieving the healthcare I rely on to survive and ban them from playing sports. several more ban teachers, who I relied on to affirm me when my parents wouldn’t, from supporting queer kids or teaching them about my existence. The President of the United States ran campaign ads saying that my existence takes away economic opporitunities from others, and when he was sworn in, he banned me from the military on the grounds that i am too dishonorable to serve. As Jude Ellison S. Doyle wrote in Xtra, “Ten years after the iconic ‘TIME’ cover, trans people are subject to even more widespread hatred and legalized bigotry. If we’ve ‘tipped’ in any direction, it’s backward.”

I knew pretty much as soon as my parents pushed me back into the closet that transitioning as a minor was not happening. It helped that I didn’t really know how it worked. I think had I known that there were doctors treating kids like me in a non-abstract way, it would have made me insane. But I just had to wait my turn, and luckily I transitioned early enough that many don’t know I’m trans at all. But now that I’m a mostly happy trans adult, I know firsthand how suffocating being a trans kid is, how dysphoria is like a thousand fire ants under your skin and sweating in the night from the heat inside your heart and tv static that plays non-stop in your mind. If i had had a pill to make it all go away, I would have done anything to take it. If I had been able to live in a world where I was told I was normal, that we actually have drugs and shit for that now, that I could be a normal kid, I don’t know what I would be driven to if it was taken away. I know now that I would and will do anything to preserve access to my own care, though.

In my very short lifetime, I think trans rights is the first time that it felt like maybe there was a future where everything ended up good before the door slammed shut. I feel like I’m no longer just mourning the childhood I didn’t get to have, I’m mourning for the trans kids who got to have the childhood I didn’t that but are now having it taken away. My heart breaks for them every day, and I feel like I failed them somehow. It feels weird to be finished transitioning as a young adult and have watched things get worse, not better. I can’t imagine being a trans kid now. I almost feel like I caught the last helicopter out of ‘Nam, or something. What would I tell my young self if I could meet her now? “Hey babe, in the future you’ll be much happier but also not. Things got better for a while, then they got worse?” Maybe that’s just how things go. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that I’m a white trans woman with health insurance. People have had it much worse than me for much longer.

Maybe it was all bullshit, anyway. Reading the Trans Tipping Point a decade later feels almost quaint. It was written before trans troops were ever allowed to serve, before their service had been banned, then reinstated, then banned again. It mentions that “many insurance plans have explicit exclusions for treatments related to gender transitions.” That would be crazy if that ever happened again, right? Right? We’ve gotten some great movies and TV shows with trans characters (and some really bad ones, too!) and a lot of backlash to it all. We even have our own Congresswoman now, and she gets misgendered just like the rest of us on the House floor. Things change. Every moment now is a possible tipping point,a place where straight lines turn into corners and curves on the timeline of history. I have to believe this moment will pass; it’s the only way I can wake up tomorrow and live to see it recede out of view. I have to believe people are still good and compassionate and caring, and that they have the capacity to learn new things and grow. Living through it now, with the door slammed shut on a future of easy-won trans rights, feels almost like we’re back at square one. This time, I won’t be naive enough to think that change can come from a glossy magazine cover.

Thanks for reading. I’m going to try to blog semi-regularly again as a way to stay in practice when I’m not working and have a good creative outlet that isn’t related to my job. Feel free to subscribe to get this in your email when it comes out.

These stories are already indicitave of the rapidly decaying social fabric of our country, where the slightest provocation in public results in injury or death thanks to our lax gun ownership laws. Now, a story out of New York has shaken me to my core and shows that something sociopathic rests underneath discussions of self-defense and public misunderstandings.

https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1653608368773435392?s=20

An unhoused man, Jordan Neely, had a very public crisis on the New York City subway, yelling that “he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail”. A bystander was apparently so threatened by Jordan’s distress that he held Jordan in a chokehold for fifteen minutes, choking him to death while bystanders watched.

Let’s be clear: an unhoused man was very upset about not having a place to live. He had a public mental breakdown and screamed on the train, almost certainly anguished about how hard his life was. A random subway passenger, annoyed and distressed, decided that Jordan should die for this unthinkable crime. He choked him for 15 minutes on the train while everyone watched. The New York Post published a photo of this, with the headline saying: “NYC subway passenger putting unhinged man in deadly chokehold”. The New York Times added some abiguity to it: “A 30-year-old man died on the subway on Monday after he was placed in a chokehold, the police said. Witnesses said the victim had been acting in a “hostile and erratic manner” toward passengers on the train when the other man, 24, moved to restrain him.”

A man killed another man for yelling on the subway. The NYPD let the killer go with no charges.

Go to the comments of any news article about this event, and you will find a head-spinning amount of people who think that Jordan deserved to die. Pedantic Twitter Blue users at the top of the replies were quick to argue about whether or not the chokehold was actually “deadly”. Social media accounts whose sole purpose is to stir up paranoia about crime in major American cities were quick to find anecdotes about others who had encountered Jordan and felt unsafe. Some argued that taking off his jacket was sign that Jordan was ready to assault someone. Many argued that all citizens have a right to self-defense from “unhinged bums”.

In just a few short years, we’ve gone from self-defense as something you have a right to when your home is burgled to something you can claim in just about any situation. Just like cops can claim almost any excuse for why they felt justified in killing an unarmed person during routine interactions, everyday citizens (armed to the teeth) are empowered to kill or maim anyone who accidentally crosses their path or irritates them. The Castle Doctrine now applies to the kingdom of the self. Any percieved attempt to breach your walls calls for retaliation.

Why is this happening? There are too many reasons to list. The manufactured media panic for the past 3 years about crime in American cities. Already lax concealed carry laws that have been loosened even further. Demonization of the homeless and poor populations that have exploded thanks to skyrocketing living costs and low wages. Destruction of public spaces where you can exist without spending money.

Demonization of the poor, and by extension The Other, plays an especially big role in all this. We’ve been inundated by madenning stories of crime in cities, mostly shared by panicked suburbanites who don’t live there. Rising inequality has caused a rift where the bottom of the income range continues to get bigger and more people fall out of our society and land on the streets. The people who have only gotten richer now have to see it and cannot handle seeing their distress, and wish it would just go away. We remove benches and close bathrooms and crush encampments and just wish they would all go somewhere else. But there’s nowhere for them to go. The unhoused and impoverished live in public because that’s where they can go. They get no privacy; no dignity.

I ride public transit for all my daily trips, because I can’t afford to buy a car at this point in my life. Because Houston is much easier to navigate with a car, only the most desparate in our city use the bus system. Riding the bus will sometimes put me next to people who are struggling more than I could ever imagine. Some may use drugs, some may not have a steady place to live or a job. Some of them yell on the bus or cry or argue with strangers. It is an uncomfortable experience. It isn’t easy to see or particularly pleasant. But never have I decided that any of them should die because it made me feel weird.

Let me ask you a hypothetical. If you had to live on the street, unable to bathe or shit or sleep in peace, could you handle it? Would you be able to stay cool if you didn’t know where your next meal would come from or where you would rest that night? If you had to live your entire life in public with all your belongings in plastic bags, would you be able to stay sane? Would you be able to keep your calm on the bus or the subway or on the street corner you call home?

I couldn’t. That experience is so far from my lived experience that I can’t really wrap my head around it. I certainly don’t think I could sit quietly while it all happened to me. Our society has failed our most vulnerable members so miserably, and we continue to demonize them, and when they respond to that cruelty we kill them with our bare hands.

If this piece is incoherent, it’s because I just cannot take it anymore. I can’t hear about crime or urban decay anymore. I can’t listen to people who claim that Downtown Houston looks like a zombie film because of all the people there who may or may not be on drugs. What happened to Jordan Neely is the logical conclusion to all of the public outcry about homelessness. It isn’t enough to have police sweep our unhoused off the streets. We can’t give them money or a place to live or safe places to shoot up. The system responds by allowing the angriest and most unhinged members of society to kill people that they don’t see as human in public, while all of us watch. We have to do better than this, or we will lose the last shred of humanity we have left.

"We're not gonna fix it," Burchett responded when asked what Congress would do about gun violence. Asked if there were other steps lawmakers could take to protect children like his daughter, Burchett replied, “Well, we homeschool her.”.

Burchett wasn’t the only one to admit defeat. President Joe Biden threw up his hands, telling reporters that he has exhausted all options to address gun violence through executive authority. “I can’t do anything except plead with Congress to act reasonably,” Biden said.

That Congress and our federal government is powerless to act in the face of catastrophic social problems is nothing new. It isn’t particularly surprsing that our elected officials have no interest or ability to do anything productive, especially if you are one of the millions of Americans that could benefit from government assistance. The last time a majority of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, 9/11 had just happened. Even so, the stark admissions from both sides that they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas struck me as especially bleak. Not really the sort of thing you want to hear those in power say.

Political gridlock has long been a symptom of our political system. From powerful lobbyist groups and gerrymandering to Constitutionally created institutions that are themselves inherently anti-democratic, our system of government is strangled from doing anything to benefit the public. But if gridlock was once just a puzzle that policy wonks tried to solve with op-eds, it is now yet another tool in the arsenal of the very powerful, who can weaponize our dysfunctional government for their own gain.

Take for example the Supreme Court’s deliberations over President Biden’s plan to eliminate up to $20,000 in federally held student loans for qualifying borrowers via executive action. In the case, Nebraska v. Biden, conservative attorneys general argue that the Biden’s Education Department doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally cancel student loans under the HEROES Act. The law says that the Secretary of Education may “waive or modify” student loans, which sounds pretty clear to me. (What do I know? I”m just a schmuck with $19,000 in federally held student loans). Even Brett Kavanaugh, famous beer lover, agrees with me:

“Waive is an extremely broad word,” Kavanaugh said to Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell. “Why not just read that as written?”

Luckily, the Supreme Court and the conservative legal movement have a solution to the pesky issue of reading the law as intended. It’s called the major questions doctrine, which you can read more about in depth, along with the detailed facts of the case, here. (Mark Joseph Stern, if you’re reading, I’m a big fan.)

The major questions doctrine allows the Supreme Court to challenge and strike down any policy they believe that Congress has not explicitly allowed. It’s incredibly vague by design. The major questions doctrine relies on cherrypicked readings of the law, requiring that Congress must very clearly allow executive agencies to decide matters of “vast economic and political significance”. Essentially, it requires that Congress must think of every possible issue that could ever happen, then plainly give an executive agency the authority to do something about it. Last summer, the court hamstrung the EPA’s ability to fight climate change in West Virginia v. EPA. Invoking the major questions doctrine, it ruled that Congress doesn’t give the EPA the power to regulate the power grid. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority has also invoked the major questions doctrine in the student loan forgiveness case, although the justices seemed unsure what to think of the case. Still, the message is clear: if you want to enact a policy that makes systemic changes, Congress has to pass a law.

So all we need is for Congress to pass laws that regulate guns, enact clean energy standards, and forgive student loans. Seems simple enough, right?

The conservative legal movement is nothing if not incredibly savvy. They read the same news as you and I, and have done the political calculus. Two senators, with the help of the filibuster, have veto power over pretty much any major legislation. It doesn’t hurt that the senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are well-lobbied by the energy and financial industries. Manchin routinely defends his state of West Virginia’s coal industry, and Sinema is nakedly owned by special interest groups. Combined with a Republican controlled house, any legislation that might make a dent in the problems of today and help out ordinary people is dead on arrival. The conservative legal movement is counting on the dysfunction. When the courts put the ball in Congress’s court, they know that nobody is going to pick it up.

The dissolution of the administrative state has been a long stated goal of the American Right. Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” The dream is a weak central government that can do nothing but fund the military and build highways, while public goods and services are sold wholesale to private enterprise. Now that the goal is realized, it isn’t enough. The courts now work to hamstring state governments from doing anything to stem the tide of gun violence. State legislatures, like in my home state of Texas, are now trying to take away autonomy from its liberal leaning cities. Gone is any semblance of government that regulates the public good. In its place is the tyranny of unelected judges and politicians who have gerrymandered their way to entrenched power.

What is the end result of the weaponization of dysfunction? It is an anomic state, one where the fate of millions of people hangs in the balance as we wait for nine wizards to decide whether or not we have to pay back our student loans. Rogue federal judges can now decide whether the poorest people live or die. All the while, our elected officials throw up their hands and wait for the next preventable tragedy to strike. I just hope that at a certain point, the dysfunction becomes too unbearable for most people, and we all do something about it. But in the haze of constant confusion, what that something is never seems clear.

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Since then, Spotify has also rolled out a new AI called DJ, which “will deliver a curated lineup of music alongside commentary around the tracks and artists we think you’ll like in a stunningly realistic voice.”

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I just want to listen to music. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve found loads of great stuff through Spotify’s algorithmic playlists and suggestion features. But these new features seem like yet another way to get eyeballs on an app on your phone, to mine just a little bit more user data that can be sold to the highest bidder.

Spotify’s recent moves, as well as the daily streaming company shakeups, have got me thinking about my own relationship to the digital ecosystem and my phone. It feels like now, more than ever, every single platform is begging for attention. Every new feature is built to pull in some new audience that executives have yet to capture. Every update is pushed out to generate a few more impressions, a couple more cents in ad revenue. Meanwhile, the overall user experience of the internet gets worse by the day.

I’ve tried more than a few times to quit social media and spend less time on my phone. I’ve deleted Twitter and other social media apps, set time limits, and used some of Apple’s proprietary software to help me stay off my phone. None of it has really worked. Every time I try to cut myself off, I can’t handle the withdrawls and come back for my fix. It’s nearly impossible to disconnect yourself from the digital ecosystem of the post-pandemic world. When we give up our virtual lives, we sever connections. To put down social media is to be cut off from the culture. We deprive our brains of dopamine in the form of likes and retweets. When all you’ve known is constant noise, silence is deafening.

You know what will never beg for my attention or use AI to try to figure out what I like, ever?

My iPod Classic.

My friend Cameron is an electrical engineer who restores old tech in his free time. He originally got interested in single purpose devices like the iPod after being frustrated at how much of his daily life required a phone.

“There’s gotta be an app for everything now. When I went to the parking garage the other day, they were like “you can’t pay at the kiosk, you have to use the app,” he said. “What if I left my phone at home? What if I have a flip phone?”

After seeing how much he enjoyed using his iPod in his daily life, I decided to take the plunge. I rummaged around at home during the holidays, and found my 3rd Generation iPod Nano.

I’ve been collecting physical music since I was a kid, so I already had a sizeable music library. Once I set up my new iPod in iTunes, it was easy to start listening to music with no internet connection or monthly fee required.

What immediately struck me about using an iPod after years of owning a smartphone was how well designed the original line of iPods were. There are four buttons and a switch to lock the screen. The user interface is controlled entirely by the clickwheel, which uses a sensitive interface to feel your thumb as you scroll through your music library. Ingeniously designed and simple to use, and you can tell why the iPod was an immediate success compared to its competitors at the time:

You can see that next to a few of its most prominent competitors, the iPod looks incredibly sleek and luxurious. While each of the other products were probably great on their own, they simply didn’t have the complete package like Apple did. The original iPod, released in 2001, had a few notable edges over its competitors in the MP3 player space. The first was a tiny hard drive developed by Toshiba, able to fit into compressed spaces while using less battery life. The second was the inclusion of Apple’s own FireWire port for transferring songs, a much faster alternative to the industry standard USB.

“At the time the industry standard was USB 1.0 which was 12 mbps and FireWire was 400, which was an insane difference. Even USB 2.0 wasn’t that fast,” Cameron told me. “Apple actually invented FireWire and originally made it open source. It gave them a leg up with that. When you look at the specs, they’re still impressive to me by today’s standards, even though it’s just a single purpose device.”

At launch, the iPod retailed for $400, or about $700 in today’s money. You got five gigabytes of storage in a device that fits comfortably in your pocket. For just $100 more, you could get ten gigabytes of storage.

“There’s something kind of innocent about watching that first launch video for the iPod, to see where we are in tech now,” Cameron said. “That launch where Steve Jobs is up there on stage and he’s like “You can put 1,000 songs on this thing.”

What’s also surprising about the iPod is how much it does not do. There’s no Wi-Fi adapter in any product in the original iPod line. To add music or update the device’s software, it must be connected to a computer with iTunes installed. Wi-Fi, along with a touchscreen, wouldn’t make it to the iPod familiy until the iPod Touch was introduced in 2007. Later iterations would add simple games that could be played with the clickwheel, but at its core the iPod is really only good at listening to music.

To hold an electronic in your hand that is so oriented towards one task, playing music, feels both novel and revolutionary in this day and age. There’s no social media, no texts, no notifications. While going on walks with my iPod, I noticed that when I got the impulse to check my phone, I would reach for my iPod and unlock it, only to find that there were no notifications on it. It’s sort of embarassing to check your phone out of habit, only to see an empty lock screen. To do the same thing on a device made before the smartphone was even concieved feels silly at best and deeply depressing at worst. Nobody involved in engineering the iPod ever thought about how to best extract attention or information from the end user. They were simply invested in making the user experience pleasant.

Using my iPod has helped me concentrate in the times where I listen to music the most. Where the action of unlocking my phone to skip a song could entice me to spend time looking at other apps, skipping a song on my iPod takes one press of a button and requires less than a milisecond of my time. I can listen to music while I write or work, and have no interruptions. I’m also not reliant on good cell service or Wi-Fi to listen to music. I’m only limited by the songs I’ve remembered to load up and my iPod’s battery life.

I’ve also found new ways of enjoying music that streaming doesn’t offer. For one, the distraction free nature of the iPod makes listening to a whole album from start to finish much easier. I don’t feel the compulsive need to skip around from track to track like I do on my phone. The personal nature of the iPod also means that all the music truly belongs to me. I don’t have to pay a monthly fee to access it, and I’m not out of luck if an artist decides to completely remove her catalogue from streaming services.

Another thing that I really love about my iPod is repairability and hackability. The 5th generation iPod is by far the most popular iPod on the resale market now due to how easy it is to take apart. I wasn’t happy with the mere 8 gigabytes of storage that my Nano offers, and wanted more. While my Nano can’t easily be modded, I was able to buy a 5th generation iPod on eBay and repair it using easily available parts online. The one I bought on eBay had an anemic battery life, broken front panel and dead hard drive. Now, it looks like this:

The battery now lasts for days. Inside, I’ve installed an SD card reader that can hold as much storage as I want, and can be upgraded as my music library grows. Finally, I added a transparent faceplate for Y2K flair. Not to toot my own horn, but it’s an item that regularly inspires “oohs” and “ahhs” when I pull it out. It feels like it really is my music player. And as long as compatible replacement parts are readily available, I can repair it or upgrade it as many times as I want. I can even put an entire new operating system on it if I want to play different file types or change the look of the user interface. I’ve also found a great online community of people who share modding tips, builds, and music with each other.

“One thing I like is longevity and repairability,” Cameron said. “I think I could keep this iPod running until I’m dead. It really represents a turn as the last hackable thing that Apple made.”

Using an iPod in 2023 presents a stark contrast between the consumer technology of the early 2000s and now. You can see the Apple that was and the Apple that is. Apple once made products that really were innovative and revolutionized the way people thought about technology in their daily lives.

The Apple of today is stagnant, their iPhone practically a perfect device. Each iteration only improves camera quality or processing speed marginally. In fact, each new iteration of Apple’s flagship product actively removes experiences. Beginning with the iPhone 7, Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone in favor of their proprietary Lightning connector. The iPhone X removed the headphone button. A future iPhone may have no buttons or ports at all. The alternative isn’t much better - leave Apple’s ecosystem for Android, and you’ll find yourself a social pariah with green text messages and low-quality video. The user is encouraged to buy the new iPhone not because it will make their lives better, but because the old one will be made obsolete within a few years. The Apple of yesterday made great products because they had to prove themselves the best in a crowded field. The Apple of today is a tech monopoly that does not innovate because it has no reason to.

“I feel like the phone does everything a little bit worse than whatever single purpose device it would seek to replace,” Cameron told me. “Its really unsustainable to get a new phone every few years when you can get a device like this that only does one thing, that’s why I’m really drawn to them.”

Apple and other tech monopolies don’t just create millions of tons of e-waste. Their philosophy creates a throwaway culture where people don’t value the things that they buy and use in their daily lives. My iPod can be upgraded, repaired, and customized to my heart’s content. It can be molded and shaped to my needs, with limitations. My iPhone is an impersonal rectangle that must be replaced anytime anything goes wrong. Sure, I can buy a fun color or change my wallpaper, but it doesn’t feel like its really mine. It is a black box that takes inputs and gives you overstimulating outputs with no explanation of how it does it. When you take it to the Apple Store, a guy called the Genius takes it in the back and says they’ll mail it back to you. They could send you back a different phone with all your data on it, and you’d probably never know.

Cameron told me that this shift has had negative implications for both user privacy and the industry.

“Because phones have become the major way that people use computers, it's pushing the whole industry into giving the end user less control over their devices,” he said. “People don’t fully grasp the technology that they interact with every day, even if they think that they do. You can understand the user interface without understanding what its doing. This is what you get with a lot of tech you buy these days. People love to complain about the smart fridges and say like ‘why does the smart fridge need to connect to the wifi?’ That’s a really good question! What kind of information does it collect about you? This is all a result of the iPhone pushing the industry in the smart gadget direction.”

Not only are our phones bad for our privacy and our relationship to technology, but there’s not an easy way to avoid participating in the ecosystem. I feel like the oldest Gen-Zers like me were the last pre-phone generation. I didn’t get my first smartphone until I was 15. Before then, I had a Sony Walkman MP3 player and later an iPod Touch, which functioned pretty much like a phone but was still limited in functionality. My favorite online activity was playing games on Lego.com and sending emails to friends. Now, with the entire line of iPod products discontinued as of 2022, there’s no soft landing into the world of smartphones and social media, no silly websites and niche corners of the internet to congregate on. Kids younger than me have phones way nicer than me, watching Family Guy Subway Surfer videos. We’re only just now starting to understand the effects of smartphone usage in young kids.

At a party a few weeks back, I asked a couple strangers about whether or not they think our generation could ever live without phones. The answer was a resounding no. Most agreed that having a phone feels like a prerequisite to participate in society. Still, when I read about teenagers who use flip phones and read poetry in the park together, I’m reminded that people naturally crave connection. We don’t have to accept the alienation of modern life as the status quo.

I’ve started incorporating other single purpose devices into my life. I bought an old Kindle for reading, and last spring I documented my road trip to New York City on my Nikon Coolpix digital camera as a way to capture memories without holding my phone up the whole time like a tourist. These single purpose devices haven’t replaced my phone and they probably never will. What they have given me is some of my attention back in a world that’s constantly vying for it.

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On Friday, Google was the latest tech giant to announce a stinging round of layoffs, cutting 12,000 employees, roughly 6% of its workforce. Employees were notified via email that they were getting cut. These come amidst a greater round of layoffs in the tech sector. Spotify announced a 6% reduction in its own workforce (if 6 is anybody’s lucky number, sincerely sorry about that). These companies join the growing list of tech and media conglomerates who are ringing in the New Year by laying off thousands of employees. With many of these jobs in the knowledge and software-as-a-service industry, it’s prudent to ask the question: is the era of big STEM over?

STEM education (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has long been seen as the most sustainable path to post-college success. In the past three decades, employment in STEM has grown over 79 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in 2015-16, 18% of all bachelors degrees awarded were in some sort of STEM field. It’s long been assumed that getting a humanities degree is a waste of time and money, whereas getting a STEM degree, specifically those that will lead to employment in engineering and computer science, has been seen as the path to middle and upper class prosperity. You can find thinkpiece after thinkpiece espousing the uselessness of humanities degrees while extolling the value of a STEM education.Underwater basket weaving has long been a favorite catchall phrase on the right to ridicule any college degree that doesn’t have an obvious pathway to making boatloads of money right out of college.Gender studies is another favorite degree program to bash, most recently when Joe Biden announced he would be forgiving up to $20,000 in student debt for most borrowers. All of this can be summed up in one phrase that I’ve heard time and time again:Learn to Code.

The explosion of big tech jobs and universities’ heavy investment in STEM programs have led to a boom of early childhood education programs focused in programming and engineering. 2010s fourth wave feminism focused a good amount of energy on growing the amount of women, particularly women of color, in STEM fields. The Obama administration called for a $4 billion investment in K-12 computer science programs in 2016, part of a broader push to emphasize job training in primary education. Nonprofit Code.org launched Hour of Code, a public campaign encouraging schools to introduce coding to young kids through various activities. The rationale was simple: in a post-industrial America that had a growing knowledge economy, more and more jobs relied on computational skills to complete everyday tasks. If we were to compete in the 21st-century with growing global powers like China, it only made sense that we needed to start early. None of these goals are misguided or wrong on their own. Addressing racial and gender equity gaps in the workforce is undeniably a good thing, and training students to be prepared for the workforce, whether or not they go to college, makes tons of sense.

There’s just one problem: what if it’s not every kid’s dream to be a code monkey?

I was in late middle school, early high school when the coding-for-kiddos boom started to take off in the mid 2010s. Schools in my district introduced more math and science heavy curriculums and participated in stuff like the aforementioned Hour of Code. The message was clear: the future is STEM. I remember friends participating in all sorts of smart extracurriculars like research symposiums sponsored by Intel and coding bootcamps designed to prepare them for four year computer science degrees. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things inherently, but for me and my peers who excelled in the humanities, it felt a little like being left behind.

When it came time to start touring colleges and make decisions for what my career would be, I picked computer science. I was good with computers and had taken a few online courses on rudimentary Python and Java. I could set up a Minecraft server, so naturally I figured I’d do well in CompSci. Never mind the fact that I was bad at math and science and that I really wanted to be a journalist. I resigned myself to the fact that I had to make money somehow, and that I’d get a minor or something to satiate my love of writing and reading. It didn’t work out; I washed out of my college’s engineering program after one semester and ended up getting a degree in sociology with a minor in communications. The number one thing that people asked me about my humanities degree was “What do you want to do with it?”. After I graduated and looked for jobs, one family member told me that there were no sociology jobs and I had wasted my time in college. Not great! While I ended up gainfully employed, the average starting salary for someone with my degree was in the $43,000 range. By comparison, the average starting salary for someone with a STEM degree starts around $57,000.

However, those starting numbers aren’t evenly distributed throughout the entire STEM field. Looking at the highest and lowest paying college majors, it’s clear that most of the money is focused in the Engineering and Technology areas. Majors like petroleum, computer and nuclear engineering can net you upwards of $70,000 right out of college, while majors like nutrition sciences, biology, and geosciences won’t net you above $40k a year in many cases. On the surface, this might make sense. Fields like pure science and mathematics are much more focused on academia, and may require graduate or postgraduate degrees before they start paying the big bucks. But for those who don’t want to go to grad school, the job prospects are about as good as mine are, which is to say they’re bad. If STEM is supposed to be the only thing worth getting into college debt for, why are three out of four of the letters getting the shaft?

My theory? STEM education is just another component of the tech bubble that’s bursting right now. In the previous decade, tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta borrowed loads of virtually interest free money from banks and venture capital funds who were more than happy to fund tech’s pet projects. The companies could afford to grow at unprecedented rates, buying up their competitors along the way for ludicrously overvalued sums. They could also afford to go on hiring sprees, offering college graduates competitive salaries complete with perks like generous remote work policies, complimentary matcha lattes and mental wellness seminars. The pandemic only made things worse; the easy money policies got even easier and both consumers and businesses relied on tech for their basic needs during lockdowns. It didn’t matter that many of these companies either operated at losses for quarters at a time or never actually turned a profit at all. It seemed like there was no ceiling. As long as the Fed never raised interest rates and everyone continued to stay home, everything would be hunky dory.

STEM education programs played a unsung role in big tech’s growth. Companies like Meta invested in K-12 computer science programs not because they wanted to develop young scientific minds, but because they wanted to develop the next generation of Meta employees. Amazon sponsored engineering and coding bootcamps and put laptops in inner-city school districts, and Google has partnered with school districts around the country to make sure their poorest students have internet access. By playing the role of educators and public service providers, the biggest companies in the world have enshrined themselves in the hearts and minds of young people as scions of opporitunity and pathways to prosperity. The goal of tech companies investment in education programs, primary and secondary, is to create workers and plant the seeds of STEM careers as lucrative pursuits early and often. The investment doesn’t always need to come from outside sources either. Ever aware of changing market needs, college administrators will institute “academic prioritization”, where funding will shift from programs deemed unncessary to those most in demand. As Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt writes in Inside Higher Ed, academic prioritization comes at a high cost:

“Such euphemisms usually mean departments that serve the public good, such as the humanities, social sciences and even some sciences like math and physics, are going to be sacrificed for a robust expansion of other job-oriented programs such as health sciences, business administration, sports management and various pre-professional and polytechnic programs that serve the market-driven, neoliberal interests and profit-driven model of education.”

This shifting can be a death sentence for humanities programs that provide invaluable knowledge and soft skills, but no immediately visible return on investment. During the pandemic, schools facing low enrollment put humanities programs on the chopping block before anything else. Henry Giroux writes that with this mindset, “the dystopian mission of public and higher education is to produce robots, technocrats, and compliant workers.”

The idea that college should give you the necessary skills to succeed in the working world isn’t new and it’s not illogical. College tuiton is incredibly expensive, and more than 40 million Americans, including yours truly, are in debt from student loans. In the minds of parents and prospective college students, a degree in the humanities simply doesn’t seem worth the cost. I can’t tell you how many of my STEM peers, upon hearing that I’d be switching to liberal arts, told me, “I wish I could afford to do that, but I have to be able to pay off my student loans”. College is now a way to climb income brackets, but it shouldn’t have to be that way. We should pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Conservatives love to claim that in commmunist economies, you don’t get a choice of what career you have. Your lot in life is decided by the whims of the government, which assigns you a job based on the needs of the collective. But isn’t that the job market we’ve built? When your career prospects are determined by the needs of the free market, doesn’t that take away your agency, too? It shouldn’t even matter that a liberal arts education can actually have a great return on investment and lead to stable, even profitable careers. We should pursue education because it is meaningful, because it provides perspectives different from our own, because it connects people.

Will the bubble burst we’re seeing now create a radical shift in the kind of education that gets funded? That remains to be seen. Probably not; Google isn’t going bankrupt anytime soon. Still, the money is drying up. The Fed did the one thing it wasn’t supposed to, raise interest rates. The belts will tighten, the fat will be trimmed. By the end of these tech layoffs, thousands will be unemployed, though hopefully they won’t have too hard a time finding a new job in their field. With all of this in mind, it’s time to look again at the STEM vs. humanities debate and remember that no matter what degree we got, we all have one thing in common: we mean nothing to the companies we put ourselves in debt to work for.

If you made it to the end of this screed, congrats! Here’s what’s good this week.

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This week, I read a fantastic piece in the New Yorker about a looming UPS workers strike. New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman followed Antoine Andrews, a UPS driver in Brooklyn, as his union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 408, prepares for a possible strike this summer if contract negotiations with UPS fall through. Gonnerman highlights yet another industry that’s critical to the basic functioning of our economy that also fails to, you know, pay the people that actually make it happen a livable wage.

While reading, I started thinking about our relationship to our stuff and how we get it. Like most people, I buy my things (food, electronics, clothes, knicknacks, doodads, bobbles, trinkets etc) both online and in-store. Since I sold my car in October of last year, I’ve had to supplement some of my shopping habits with more online purchases, such as ordering grocery delivery for stuff I can’t carry easily. I’m not alone; Americans be shopping. In 2022, revenue from e-commerce sales was over 900 billion dollars. Amazon, who has pioneered ways to have stuff delivered to you before you even know you want it,

has a whopping 56.7% share of those sales. That puts pressure on traditional package delivery companies like UPS to pick up the pace of deliveries. The piece quotes Vinnie Peronne, I.B.T Local 408’s president, about the rise of Amazon Flex drivers, Uber-style gig workers who use their own cars to deliver Amazon packages:

[Amazon Flex] has made it difficult for UPS, with its full-time drivers and regular start times, to keep up. Perrone told me that he recently saw an Amazon Flex driver delivering a package to a neighbor’s house at 5:45 a.m. “People are waking up to packages on their front doorstep,” he said. He imagined what might be going through the minds of UPS executives: “How can we compete with this nonsense?”

This got me thinking about how much I participate in this “nonsense”. During a recent bus commute, my phone battery was about to die. I realized that I should start bringing a portable charger with me on my longer commutes, so I used my last 2% to order a portable battery with same day delivery. Sure enough, when I got home, my package had arrived. Because Houston is one of the larger cities where Amazon offers same day and overnight delivery, I can now get pretty much anything I want delivered to me faster than I can think about how bad I actually want it. I’ve had things like stationery, phone chargers, a new pillow and even a bidet ordered this way (the bidet exploded in my apartment and went back to Amazon).

Contrast this with another recent purchase - a used 2005 iPod Classic 5th generation that I bought on eBay (we’ll touch on this in an upcoming post). eBay advised me that it would arrive on Friday the 13th, but it hasn’t arrived. USPS says that it’s currently sitting in a postal facility in Pensacola, Florida. I know that it’ll show up eventually, and that an MP3 player that’s nearly 20 years old is not something that I need urgently. Just the same, I can’t stop checking the tracking information obsessively. It’s an annoyance to be sure, but it’s also a sign of how much e-commerce has changed our expecations, our patience, and our shopping habits. There was a time when a one week delivery was considered the standard, and getting something you bought online the same day seemed like a far off possibility. Now, Amazon is the rule, not the exception. Amazon Prime has spoiled us with the thing we humans love: instant gratification.

In my never ending quest to play Carrie Bradshaw, I picked a few friends’ brains about why we like to online shop. My friend Deja offered up one explanation:

Online shopping, to me, feels like buying a present for yourself, even if it’s something mundane like new razors or a textbook for class. Opening your new stuff is an event to look forward to when you get home, and you get a quick hit of dopamine from unwrapping it. It’s a great feeling, but it never lasts very long, and depending on how bad your shopping addiction is, the cycle quickly repeats itself. Now that it’s open and in your hands, the thing that you saw on the computer now has to go somewhere in your home. It has to take up space and coexist not only with all of your other baubles, but with you as well. Like a stray you took in, the ANGTUO Wooden Mushroom Lamp Baby Night Light for Kids with 16 Color Changing and Dimmable Nursery Lamp Bedside Light for Breastfeeding Baby Bedroom is now part of your life.

Contrast this to buying stuff in person. It’s agonizing, and suddenly your money is very real. Spending $40 online is easy enough, but when you’re faced with a decision in the real world, you suddenly start thinking about how much $40 really is. You worked long hours at your email job to get that stuff. Will it go with the vibe of your place? Will your other things appreciate it? Will you actually even use it? I think the pause that comes from brick-and-mortar shopping is generally a good thing. I’m by no means a minimalist. I think your space should be full of things you like that reflect your personality. It should be devoid of junk.

JUNK

/jəNGk/

noun

1. 1.

   INFORMAL

   old or discarded articles that are considered useless or of little value.

   "the cellars are full of junk"

What is junk? Go on Amazon and type in pretty much anything you can think of. You’ll see pages upon pages of low quality, mass produced stuff that is a carbon copy of other stuff. These things are fine in a pinch. A battery bank, a memory foam pillow, a hand mixer. All things that will work when you need them to. But what aesthetic purpose do they serve in our lives besides functionality? What greater niche is filled by plastic junk that leaves our lives just as quickly as it entered? When I can order a bidet, have it come fast only to not work, and send it back the next day like it never was there in the first place, it feels like I did something wrong. Do that over and over, and it starts to feel like online shopping has created a throwaway culture, where we buy things with our hard earned money that we don’t really value.

Your cellphone is a good example of this. Think about the phone you’re reading this article on right now. Do you really like it, value it, and appreciate what it brings to your life? Or does it serve its purpose until you get the next upgrade? I’m willing to bet it’s partly the latter. Couple that with planned obsolesence, the ubiquity of cheap semiconductors and electronics, and the fact that a new iPhone seems to come out every year, and you get a world where 50 million tons of e-waste are produced each year.

I don’t think any of this necessarily means we should stop online shopping. We should shop purposefully, spending money on things that will enhance our lives or make us genuinely happy instead of giving us another dopamine hit. Spend money on used things, buy in person when you can, and decide if you really need that mushroom lamp delivered right to your door. Most importantly, remember the human aspect. A robot isn’t delivering your things; it’s a real flesh and blood person, often working for low wages in inhumane conditions. It’s our duty to shop smarter and more responsibly, if not for yourself, then for them.

What’s good? This video of David Bowie and Trent Rezor dueting “Hurt” in 1994 is crazy good.

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I think LOUD!FEST 2018 was the first concert that ever made me feel something. Crammed into the tiny venue space of Revolution Bar and Cafe; moshing with a hundred other sweaty strangers and my best friend, I felt awash in the hardcore punk blasting from the band right in front of me. I had so many experiences like this in downtown Bryan, Texas, right here in Aggieland. Most students assume there’s nothing to do in Bryan-College Station (outisde of Northgate), and they’re not entirely wrong. I’ve lived in College Station since I was 5, and I was certain there was nothing to do. 

Everything changed my freshman year, when I made the decision to stay in town and go to Texas A&M. My best friend Hope invited me to Loudfest 2018 - a three-day punk, hardcore, and metal music festival that happened every year in Downtown Bryan at Revolution Bar and the Grand Stafford Theater. 5 dollars got you access to over 50 amazing bands ranging from hardcore punk, shoegaze, indie rock, metal, thrash, and more. Having spent most of my teen years raging in the suburbs of south College Station, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had craved this imperfect, bloody knuckles, rough-around-the-edges alternative scene, and I thought I had to leave town or even the state to find it – yet here it was, right in my backyard. 

I discovered that there was a small but vibrant punk scene that had been thriving here since the early 2000s. There was a local zine called 979represent, that focused on the underground music scene and going ons in the BCS community. I started going to shows at Rev’s and the Grand Stafford Theater when I could, and I made sure that LOUD!FEST was always on my calendar when the end of the semester would come around. I smoked some of my first cigarettes, learned to write poetry, and found my voice as a transgender woman in small-town Texas. When I joined KANM, I was so happy to see that people there knew about the scene in Bryan - we hosted Save the Music, our fundraiser concert, at Revs in 2018 and 2019. It was the first Save the Music I ever attended (and I can’t believe how few people were there!).

LOUD!FEST 2019 continued my love of the scene, and I got to see incredible bands like ASS, From Parts Unknown and Sykotic Tendencies, play at the Grand Stafford and Rev’s. For the first time in my life, I could tell people that no, BCS is not the boring backwater that you think it is. Once upon a time, Texas A&M and BCS were host to many music legends: Johnny Cash in 1965, who played for students off-campus, Elvis in the 50s when he played for the Corps of Cadets, Nat King Cole, Garth Brooks, and more. Punk acts like The Ramones and Fugazi, as well as rock bands like R.E.M and Green Day all played on campus or on Northgate in decades past. While that’s no more, and Northgate is a country music stronghold, there are things to do in BCS if you look beyond the confines of University and Texas Avenue. 

All good things have to come to an end eventually; COVID-19 upended the local scene. Rev’s, which had already struggled with closure due to renovations, closed down in 2020, unlikely to ever reopen (knock on wood?). 979Represent closed shop at the end of 2021, with many of its founders moving on to other projects or out of state completely. LOUD!FEST has been canceled for the past two years due to COVID, although I have hope that one day, it will make a triumphant return. Nothing good can last forever, but I’ve always believed that the end of one era ushers in the coming of another. The punk scene that raged on for over 10 years is far from dead; many of the regulars of Revs live on at the 101, a bigger and cooler space founded by a former 979Represent writer. After the worst of the pandemic, KANM started hosting Save the Music again at The 101; where STM 2018 had maybe 50 total people show up, STM 2021 and 2022 had over 300 people. Not only is the scene alive and well, but it is strong.  My hope and goal as the PR director of KANM was to support the local scene here, to build off of the success of the elder punks, emos, and weirdos who came before me. To show the bands that I spent my early college years moshing to the same love their music and culture showed me. To give all the misfits in BCS a place to call home, just like the scene here gave me that same warm welcome. Next time you think there’s nothing to do in BCS, take Texas Avenue past the part of town that you recognize, past the part that makes you feel safe in corporate suburbia, and rejoice.  

Thank you to everyone who was a part of the scene; to all the Revs regulars whose names I never learned. To Hope Lascurain - even though we don’t hang out that much anymore, I’ll always love and cherish our friendship. You taught me to be my truest self and how to let loose - I’ll never forget the time we spent that summer before college. Thank you to the early KANM members who welcomed me into student radio - Cameron, Eren, Lillie, and the rest of you: I have no clue where I’d be without y’all. To my current KANM friends, to Paige, Deja, Lillie, Harmon, Julia, Nathan, and everyone else: Thank you for being the best friends I have ever had. Thank you to 101 for carrying on the legacy of the local scene, and for putting on fucking awesome shows every year. Y’all are the best.

Editor’s note: This piece is originally from my Medium blog, which after a whopping two articles, has fallen into disuse. I wanted to make sure that it doesn’t get lost, so I’m publishing it here. I get to say I published a blog this week, and I get to do a little housekeeping; two birds with one stone. The following essay was written in February of last year, when I thought only writing in lowercase was cool. It was a different me. Joking aside, I really do think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written, and hopefully it will resonate with someone new the way it did with so many last year.

i think the worst part of being transgender is how much time you lose.

when i was 13, i came out to my parents in a letter that I left on their dresser for them to read. soon after, i got on a plane and flew to phoenix, arizona to stay with my aunt for two weeks during the summer. two agonizing weeks where i went to the grand canyon and did the shit you do when you look at the grand canyon, and thought about how easy it would be if i just went tumbling down the side of the canyon and got dashed to a million pieces by the rocks and scorpions and cacti. when i got home, my parents were not happy. they did all of the things that parents who like to think they aren’t prejudiced but can’t imagine their kid being queer do; there was the let down at the beginning, the hard drop to the bottom of the canyon floor that sounded like “we don’t accept your decision”, then the crying, then the reasoning, that nobody my age would understand and that it was a huge decision to live as a woman, that i couldn’t possibly understand the reperucussions of the decision i was making, that i’d get bullied and that i needed to wait till i was 18. how could you do this to your mother, you pervert? i got grounded for the rest of summer.

two weeks wasted agonizing and hoping.

i kept myself secret for the next five years. i built a carefully crafted image of a straight, cisgender boy who just got a little confused in my early teen years. i hid my first (and only) boyfriend from them. i tried on women’s clothes in secret and lied about who i was with when i’d go to the mall to try on dresses. i confided in very few people and saved my money for the day i could start hormones. i planned to go to a college far, far away and cut off contact with my parents. but then, at a certain point, the double life and the planning became too much for me to bear. i stopped going to the mall to try on dresses in secret. i got rid of my makeup and women’s clothes. i quit going by other names, online and in person, and went back to a shortened version of my deadname: Drew. it was easy and gender neutral enough that I could get through the day without wanting to cry. i wore flannel shirts and did all the things a nice, straight, cisgender man was supposed to be. i pretended to be a different person for so long that i came out the other side of my teenage years as an actually different person altogether.

being transgender is a forever game of catch-up. for all of the narratives associated with coming out of finally finding your true self and living authentically, there are the countless years of hiding in plain sight and trying to kill the real you to stay alive. it’s being born and living life at a standstill until you’re old enough to transition and then being born again in your 20s and going through puberty for the rest of your life, trying desperately to catch the dream of normality, chasing the white rabbit forever but never being able to get past your untied shoes.

none of this is to say i didn’t love my teenage years. i did all of the shit that teenagers are supposed to do — drugs, drinking, play bad computer games, play good computer games, crash a car, get into a fist fight with your uncle at a sushi restaurant in reno, nevada, etc. i listened to bad music that i thought was good and good music i thought was bad. i had crushes that never went anywhere and went to prom and hated the whole thing. those are the things you’re supposed to do and i reveled in every minute of it. but when i got to college and started my actual transition and became accepted by the cis women i was friends with, i couldn’t help but shake the nagging feeling that i wasted all my formative years trapped in the wrong body.

i never got to do the things that teenage girls do. i never got to wear clothes from justice, or have a diary or play with dolls, or get crushes the way they did or read the weird introspective teenage girl blogs they did. sure, no female experience is universal but there’s a part of my trans woman heart that yearns for a cookie cutter cisgender childhood. the common transphobic narrative championed by terfs and conservatives alike about young cisgender girls forced to shower with men pretending to be women always ignores the lived reality of actual young women forced to shower with men because nobody really believes they’re girls. i will never get my first period, or my second, or my third. i would take the pain of cramps and bleeding if it spared me the pain of having parents that only love you when you perform for them.

i never got my great getaway, by the way. i started college 15 minutes from my parents house and was anguished about it. but i transitioned anyway. i’m finally starting to see the shape of my own womanhood, and there’s no dent in it just because i didn’t have the stereotypical childhood that nobody really has except for in movies and TV. for now, i will keep mourning the cisgender girlhood that i didn’t get to have, because i think some tiny part of me will always want to be a cisgender woman. i don’t think anyone will ever totally shake the feeling of wanting to be somebody else every now and then. i will have to come to terms with the fact that i don’t get a do over. sometimes i think it’s okay to want to be someone else, because when i’m done i come back to who i really am, and decide that i like myself a lot. i love that i am a self made woman, that i get to define my own womanhood, my own existence as it may be. i got to be a teenage girl online, on tumblr, on forums where i read webcomics, on MMOs and video games where i could be anywhere i wanted to be. and i got to do it my way, which is the only way anybody gets to do anything. and at the end of the day, that will have to be enough.

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Doesn’t it make you feel fucking insane?

Let’s rewind.

I’m 15, sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee. She’s got JACK FM on the radio. They’re playing what they want. Suddenly, after like a commercial for roof repairs, the chainsaw guitars of Harvey Danger’s 1997 “Flagpole Sitta” roar through the speakers.

I had already fully entered my nu-metal, pop-punk, post-hardcore era after my parents gave me a cherry red Sony walkman with their combined iTunes library downloaded onto it. It included stuff like early Blink-182, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, and also stuff my dad liked like Weird Al, Alan Parsons Project, Steve Miller Band, and Megadeath. I was also fifteen - hormones were pumping, I was falling in love with girls, and I was horny. To say the pump had been primed for me to absorb “Flagpole Sitta” was an understatement. The catchy lyrics about angst, alienation, and jacking off resonated with me, and frontman Sean Nelson’s raw delivery of lines like “paranoia paranoia / everybody’s coming to get me” sell the picture of someone who is being pulled in every which way by culture.

Seven years later as I sit in the office at my full time job, “Flagpole Sitta” feels more relatable than ever.

When “Flagpole Sitta” was written, it came at a weird time in ‘90s rock music. Kurt Cobain had just taken has own life, and the Seattle rock scene that produced that era’s biggest bands was quickly becoming what Nelson called a “worldwide theatrical production of rock music of the alternative culture”. As he puts it so well in a 2015 interview with the AV Club, “You’re watching the land you are standing on get commodified.” The song talks about what it’s like to feel caught in the middle of a cultural upheaval, both as a participant and an observer. It’s about feeling insane as you try to participate in something and create something, wanting to do something that will make you feel alive, all while you tell yourself that it’s impossible, and that feeling of self loathing makes you feel insane and paralyzes you.

I’ve been feeling a lot of that right now. I just left college for a new job in a new city, and I don’t really have any friends. I’m not sure how to participate in a community and find something bigger than myself — every public space feels like it’s been commodified, and it feels like there’s no point in doing anything if it’s not popular or profitable. I know that I should just do something that I enjoy (like writing this blog!) but I feel almost like there’s nothing to it. I want to publish zines, to break out of the depressing news cycle, rebel, pierce my tongue and find something real in my life. But mostly, I want to find my way out of the brain fog of information overload. I feel sometimes like what I need is to turn my brain off until we can figure out what the hell is going on with…. everything.

I wanna publish 'zines
And rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
It doesn't hurt, it feels fine
The trivial sublime
I'd like to turn off time
And kill my mind
You kill my mind
Mind

The one part that I really think about it is the last section:

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's comin' to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm runnin' underground with the moles
Diggin' holes
Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring
But if you're bored then you're boring
The agony and the irony
They're killing me, whoa

When we’re so overexposed via social media, so inundated with advertisements and news and the constant pressure to perform for others, it makes you feel like you’re being stalked everywhere by everybody. It leads to the feeling that everyone is thinking about you all the time, that you take up negative space in someone’s head. It feels sometimes like everyone is paranoid about everything, whether it’s about crime or conspiracy theories. It doesn’t help that since the pandemic, we’ve become more antisocial, spending more time alone than ever before. We increasingly viewing each other with suspicion, hostility and exhaustion. Couple that with the ironic, too-cool-to-care posture we all take in our online interactions, and we’ve created a perfect storm of cultural anomie.

Anomie is a societal state of derangement, one where moral values in a society have broken down and cause belief systems come into conflict. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, popularized the idea of anomie in his 1897 book Le Suicide. Durkheim was looking to understand why people committed suicide, and in one study, he compared suicide rates between Protestant and Catholic communities. He found that the suicide rate was higher among Protestants than Catholics. Protestants, Durkheim believed, place higher value on individualism (the Protestant work ethic itself and how it relates to capitalism was well studied by one of Durkheim’s contemporaries, Max Weber). Catholic faith, on the otherhand, instilled strong communal ties as a means of social control that gave people support systems to rely on during hard times. Durkheim called this concept “anomic suicide”, where people ended their lives because they had no support systems to rely on when they fell on difficult times.

A key part of anomie is that it happens when belief systems come into contact with expectations. In the religious example, people felt they had no choice but to commit suicide because their feelings told them they needed support, but their belief system instilled in them by the church told them to rely on their own hard work. That gap between what is expected of you and you actual circumstances is where anomie is created. It’s something that’s been studied in all sorts of real world applications such as war crimes, where soldiers are trained to do one thing but are ordered to do something in conflict with their values by a superior officer (this is something my old sociology professor, Stjepan Meštrović, discusses in his fantastic book The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor).

“Flagpole Sitta” really is describing the anomic derangement of the ‘90s that the narrator is both witness and participant in, and I think it can be applied to the present day. Consider the pandemic that’s still raging on - the messages we recieved from the federal government were in conflict with what our governors were telling us, and those guidelines were in conflict with what media, scientists, and our own communities were telling us. I think that people can be forgiven for turning to conspiracy theories that at the very least offered them some sort of explanation for what was going on, even if it was incorrect. In fact, we can take this thread to it’s logical conclusion: the entire health system of the United States is anomic. Your doctor tells you you need a procedure to remain healthy, but your health insurance company tells you that it’s not necessary? What do you, the individual, even do in that scenario? Today, our world is more deranged than ever. Mixed messages on social media. The feeling of obligation many people feel to support social justice causes without any actual recourse to fix problems in their own communities. Even now, online, we’re told by countless activists to organize in our communities, when we’re actually more alienated than ever. It’s enough to make anyone want to dig a hole and live underground away from their obligations.

Despite all the insanity of the current culture, I think “Flagpole Sitta” offers us an out as well - it advises us that the only real course of action is to do what you want and figure it out as you go along. There’s not going to be a clear answer about why anything is happening and there’s not a way to turn off your mind and drop out. Build social bonds, do what you want because it makes you feel happy, and try to live in the moment. Those things aren’t easy - they’re incredibly hard. I struggle every day to uncouple myself from the expectations of others. But when I do feel like I’m trapped on unsolid ground, I find solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who’s not sick, but not quite well, either.

Believe it or not, the people who work for him would rather take three months of paid vacation than work long nights in whatever he envisions as “extremely hardcore”. Presumably, “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 will not have anything cool like mosh pits, incredibly loud music or those guys at shows that love to spray beer all over the mosh pit. If I had to guess, it will actually suck quite a bit. Critical engineers seem to have made the same judgement call I did, and so the whole thing seems to be sinking:

It seems like it’s time to get off Mr. Bones’ wild ride. Twitter right now has the same chaotic energy that Tumblr had when Yahoo! first bought it in 2013. “Where will I go now?” the people asked. Just like now, alternatives were floated. My Tumblr 2 of choice was Peach, a microblogging site similar to Tumblr but much more bare bones. I tried to log in, but sadly I don’t remember my password because the last time I used it was probably the 10th grade. I remember it being popular for a little bit and lots of my Tumblr mutuals migrated over, but eventually I lost interest. A 2016 Bloomberg article declared that: "like a fruit at the peak of ripeness, interest in Peach softened.”

The thing is, Tumblr didn’t die. It stayed pretty much exactly the same as it had been during the Yahoo ownership, albiet quieter. Although it wasn’t my preferred social media platform, I still used it from time to time. What I found there was a strange digital serenity that didn’t exist before. Maybe it’s because all the truly insane people went to Twitter, where they discuss hot ideas like who is allowed to use Doordash. My girlfriend, who has been an avid Tumblr user during this period, put it best:

“It’s less personality driven. There’s no internet microcelebrities and I never see drama, at least in my circle of blogs that I follow. Most people seem to use it for self expression, where as Twitter, I feel like most people use it in the hopes of going viral? In that sense, Twitter to me can become very masterbatory.”

Speaking on online personas, she added that, “Tumblr doesn’t require you to be funny or share really intimate details of your life to gain followers or interact with people, it feels like Tumblr followers don’t even matter at all, since you can’t even see how many followers a blog has. Since it’s a blog…. there’s less pressure for you to have a persona. On Twitter or Instagram, it’s like ‘Okay, I need to put on this facade of how funny I am or how exciting my life is, how pretty i am, how many friends I have, because your face is on the profile it represents you and you want the best version of yourself. That’s also how everyone else uses it. On Tumblr, 'it’s like ‘Okay, no one knows who I am, I’m just a blog I can post whatever the fuck I want’ — It’s completely incapable of trying to replace social interaction in the way i feel like websites like Twitter have for some people.”

As you can read, my girlfriend is very smart. As she noted, a key thing that I think differentiates the Twitter collapse from the Tumblr exodus (aside from the fact that Tumblr wasn’t bought by a failing car manufacturer) is that Twitter, unlike Tumblr, has replaced, rather than augmented, social interactions for many. Sure, Tumblr facilitated many friendships and key moments for people, myself included. I found out I was transgender partially because of my interactions with the trans community on Tumblr — something that wasn’t readily available to me in small town Texas. I’m not alone in this — papers have been written on the way that Tumblr allowed people to explore their queerness safely in a way no other social media could come close to.

Unlike that, Twitter feels like it’s become life for some people. Whether it’s #Resistance libs weepily mourning a website or pathetic reactionaries dickriding the richest man in the world, people have begun to take Twitter entirely too seriously. The front page of the New York Times has Twitter news higher than news on the war in Ukraine. During the pandemic, Twitter usage soared. That’s fine, because where else was everyone else supposed to go? But in light of the pandemic slowly receding, it seems like the worst habits of Twitter usage have only stayed with us. Many people retreated online during one of the most traumatic global events of our collective lives, and when they found community there, they didn’t want to leave.

The problem is that “community” used to mean something different online. Online communities revolved around forums related to hyperspecific topics or niche subcultures. I used to frequent The Mystical Forest Zone, a Sonic the Hedgehog spriting and comics forum. There, I found people who were into the same games as I was and got interested in pixel art. It was my first gateway to the internet, and I loved every second of it. Forums shaped early internet culture as we know it. By comparison, modern social media throws everyone together and hopes for the best. While Twitter claims that “We believe real change starts with conversation,” it’s not actually a good place for long term discussions, and it moves with the news cycle and everyone’s general attention spans. It’s good for posting snappy, forgettable things and being the best, most ironic or self-serious version of yourself. It’s not good for sustained conversations, and it’s certainly not a substitue for real human interactions. As more and more of public life eroded due to the pandemic, people replaced lots of real community with online ones. Now, with the rugpull feeling imminent, Twitter users are wondering, much like 2013 era Tumblr users, where the fuck do I go now?

We stand before a pivotal crossroads in internet usage, where most people are genuinely unhappy with the fact that apps rule many of our lives. My terminally online friends, we have the chance of a lifetime to remake the internet in ways that stupid billionaries can only dream of. Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here: people will stay on Twitter. Despite Elon Musk’s best efforts, Twitter at its core is still a platform hundreds of millions of people use with wealthy interests invested in keeping it afloat. It’s not going to disappear overnight, and someone may step in and course-correct the ship (In that case, I wasted an evening writing this column). I will probably still use Twitter. My hope is that as Twitter crashes, people will reevaluate what kind of community they really value. We can migrate to more community-centered platforms and learn to use social media in ways that amplify and augment friendships and comradarie rather than replace it. Perhaps most optimistically of all, maybe we can all go outside. We can all move away from this idea that posting is an extension of the self, that to be human is to partially be online. At risk of sounding like a 2010s boomer, maybe we can start to live a little bit more authentically and a little less online.

As Twitter crashes and burns, where are you heading?

I should’ve known something was askew when I ended up in Humble, Texas. Humble is one of those Texas towns that was once an oil boomtown but now waits until the next recession puts it out of its misery. It’s one of those places where high schoolers go to Wal-Mart to hang out. One of the many American cities that got hollowed out by capital flight and left just enough people behind to staff the local Dollar Tree. It was genuinely sort of a bummer to visit. And I was there to buy a car.

I don’t have an amazing track record with cars. I’ve owned 4 cars since I got my driver’s license and parted with each one in equally stupid and stressful ways. My 2007 Toyota Matrix, my first car, still stings the most. I was run off the highway by someone who merged on top of me. When I swerved to avoid them, I went off the road and hit an exit sign at 50 miles per hour, totaling the car. Weirdest of all was that for the months preceding the accident, I had dreams that I would be in a car accident where I was run off the road on my way to work. The accident occured exactly like my preminotory dreams. My second car, a 2012 Honda Civic, had a transmission failure. I paid $5,500 for it with the insurance settlement from the Matrix Incident. When I traded it in 2 years later, I got $750 for it. To the Toyota Dealership, my 2012 Honda Civic was worth about as much as a nice espresso machine.

I traded up for a 2021 Toyota Corolla. Brand new off the factory lot, it had about 400 miles on it. It was the nicest car I had ever owned, and it was intended to be a graduation gift. 6 months later, on the first of this year, I rearended a 2022 Chevy Tahoe at a stoplight in Dallas because I thought he was going on a yellow light. The guy threatened to kick my ass until his wife and kid got out of the car — once his wife was in earshot and he could see I was in tears he asked me if I was okay. The front end of my Corolla was so fucked up. I had driven the front of my car directly under the bumper of the Tahoe, so my hood was scrunched up. I did absolutely no damage to the Tahoe, which the guy reminded me about 5 times was brand new. (Sorry for making this guy sound like an asshole — in all fairness I did rear end him.)

The Corolla was totally repairable, and I walked away with incredibly damaged pride and a stiff leg. While the damage to the car was bad, it wasn’t enough to total it and I figured I would learn my lesson in the form of being carless for a month while the bodyshop waited for backordered parts. I figured that this time was the time I got my shit together and became a better driver.

In February, around my birthday, I got a call from the bodyshop. My car had been left outside by a technician, and due to a heavy hailstorm that came through, my car had been deemed a total loss by my insurance company. I was absolutely stunned. What had been totally fixable a week before was now a worthless hunk of metal and glass. I wept for days at my misfortune. I couldn’t believe how much things could change in less than a year. What followed was unbelievably messy - insurance paid out enough for me to pay off the loan on the car plus a little left over. The bodyshop took the money that the insurance company gave them and ran off with it. It was incredibly stressful and involved many tearful phone calls with the insurance company. All the while, I was stranded with no way to get around in a town that was impossible to navigate without wheels. The entire experience left me stewing in resentment - at Geico, at mechanics, at God and The Devil and Robert Moses.

But mostly, I hated myself.

I hated that I had been so careless and let my attention lapse for a second. I hated myself for having been irresponsible, for not taking better care of my previous cars. It became twelve rounds with myself, each time bludgeoning myself with what-ifs and how-could-I-be-so-stupids. It’s not like I was drunk driving or intentionally being reckless. I, like everyone else, had a momentary lapse of reason. But because that lapse royally screwed me in a country where one emergency can put you on the brink, I took it to mean I was a horrible fuckup. I had nightmares for months about car accidents. I swore to myself that I’d never put myself through the anxiety of car ownership again. So when the insurance check came in the mail, what did I do?

I went out and bought a fucking car again.

Now, I can’t be too hard on myself. I live in Texas. Not having a car in Texas effectively makes you a non-person. Everything really is bigger in Texas, including our freeways. I was planning on moving to Houston, one of the most car centric cities in the nation. Even though many told me that buying a car probably wasn’t a good idea, I didn’t think about it. I wanted to get around, god dammit! So I took my insurance settlement and went back to the casino and gambled. If I just played my cards right, I could strike gold. It’s a hot car market and anything goes, baby!

That, dear reader, is how me and my roommate ended up in Humble, Texas looking at a 2006 Subaru Forester with 100,000 miles on it. Cold AC. One owner, never been smoked it. Ran great, new tires and new battery. This was a great car, one that will last another 100,000 if I take good care of it. A serious downground from my last car, but in many ways a serious upgrade to my street credibility. I mean, this thing had undeniable charm. Between the old cloth seats, the slight smell of gas and the gold metallic color that they don’t put on cars anymore, I was sold. I drove it around the block and decided it was good enough for a point A to point B vehicle. With just a little bit of my womanly charm, I could turn this oldie into a real conversation piece. Nevermind that I was spending nearly all my pandemic savings on the car, or that I neglected to get a serious inspection before buying from a woman I met on Craiglist. This was the piece of the puzzle I needed to finally get my life back on track. Once I had personal transportation again, I thought, I could pay back the debt I had racked up in the form of bumming rides everywhere I went. I’d be back in the good graces of the society I felt ostracized from. So I paid too much for a car almost as old as I am because I thought it would make me feel better about my series of unfortuante events. At the time, it felt like a nice end cap.

That was until it broke down and I had to put it in the shop for $3,000 worth of work. And then, it broke down again, putting me another $1,800 in the hole. In the span of just a month, I had put more than the value of the vehicle into repairs, registration and insurance costs. I had wiped out my savings and actually taken on debt in service of this car. The car dreams again returned. I was financially drained, all the while in the middle of making the big change of moving after college.

As with any time I’m stressed, I felt like the floor was about to fall out from under me. I started to panic thinking about how much more money I would have to put into the car. I started to learn to do my own repairs. I joined a forum for Subaru Forester owners in the hopes that someone there could help me do my own repairs and figure out what was causing the constant breakdown. Each time the car broke down, I broke down. The car went to the shop more than I drove it, and I started having to budget for if the car broke down again. If I didn’t have the luxury of working mostly remote, I would’ve probably lost my job. I started to feel like I was in an abusive relationship with my car, always crawling back to try to make things after I got hurt.

After the last time the car went to the shop, things seemed fine for a while. I began to feel like I was in control again. The car didn’t give me any problems, and I started planning what needed to be done next - brakes, detailing, maybe I’d be bold and try to do something big like change the oil myself when it came time. I started to fantasize about my second life as one of those people who knows shit about cars. I followed car mechanic subreddits and laughed at stuff that didn’t really make any sense to me to cosplay the blue collar bliss that seemed to radiate off of guys who talk about cars all the time. I felt like I had gleaned some sort of knowledge from my experience buying a shitty used car and now I knew better.

When the car wouldn’t start again, same as every other time, while I was trying to head home from a weekend at my parents, I lost it. I actually kicked the car and cursed it, like they do in movies. I didn’t recognize myself after how upset I became. I had become so angry, so self-hating over a car that I chose to buy. Like an addict, I started the cycle all over again. I put the car in the shop and waited for what my mechanic had to say. He was a nice guy after all, and maybe this time we could figure it out.

When he called me and told me he had no earthly idea what the problem with my car was, it was like my eureka moment. I decided to take it to the dealership, where insanely expensive car repairs go to become absurdly expensive car repairs. It’s there right now, and I have no clue what they’re going to find. But I had an epiphany. If the guy who I pay to fix my car has no clue, what hope do I ever have of making sense of it? I realized that I have sunk time, money and emotional energy on a car I bought in July. Reflecting on my months where I had no car at all, I realized that I had been much less stressed without it. I had no driving anxiety, and I had a little extra money in my pocket from no insurance costs. I decided that I was going to break the cycle and quit my love affair with the car for good.

A big part of my car anxiety has to do with the afformentioned marginalization that comes from a society organized around cars. Unless you live in a major coastal city, owning a car is essentially required to participate meaningfully in modern life. If I wanted to be someone, it felt like I had to own a car to get around. How else could I experience true freedom if I was dependent on a bus schedule or Uber or god forbid, walking? Even though I considered myself progressive, I carried the shame that many associate with public transportation, even though I absolutely loved taking the bus in college.

In an incredibly selfish way, taking the bus made me come to terms with my own ordinariness. I was not special, at least not in a way that entitled me to my own metal death trap. I was an other, and that made me feel genuinely very strange. I started to worry that I would be left out of things because I didn’t have a car. If I couldn’t get a ride to a social event, I might no longer be part of the group. I might be looked down on because my own bad decisions had led me to be one of those people that get Twitter memes made about them. In a world dependent on the car, it can feel like there’s a stigma attached to not driving for various reasons. Are you too lazy to get a license? Are you too poor? These and more are things that can be conjured up by telling someone you don’t drive. And I was afraid that I’d be marginalized. I also worried that having just moved to Houston, I would be cut off from a lot of great culture because I couldn’t drive there.

So this past weekend, I decided to try the bus in my neighborhood to get a sense of how reliable it really is. The first thing that struck me was how cheap it was - $3.00 for unlimited rides all day felt like a great choice if I had a lot of errands to run. I decided to take a trip to Target down the road. What I noticed after boarding the bus was immediately how many different kinds of people were there. I saw people in suits on their way to work. Homeless people, kids, teens on their way to the mall, people I had seen around my apartment but never talked to. I suddenly felt surrounded by the very thing I moved to the city for in the first place - the abundance of people from all walks of life.

I’ve taken public transit many times in various cities. The Phoenix lightrail is one of my favorites - it’s fast and reliable, and goes all the way to Tempe in about an hour. I fell in love with the subway and the walkability when I visited NYC this spring. I’m no stranger to seeing people on the bus, and I wasn’t gawking. But since moving to the city, I felt alienated between working from home and commuting. Suddenly, I felt less like I was commuting and more like I was part of a community. I felt like I was enjoying my outing and getting more out of the time I spent commuting, instead of sitting in the car staring at the back of some dipshit’s Ram 2500. As I saw some people who seemed to be sitting on the margins of society, I realized that what I took for granted was something that others lived every day. My incovenient trip on the bus was the only lifeline for many in the city. For every minute I spent feeling sorry for myself for not owning a car, it wasn’t an option for millions of people who take public transit rain or shine. These were all things I knew of course in the abstract, but never thought about concretely until I decided to make the concious choice to utilize public transportation in my daily routine.

Most of all, I realized that as much as I lamented the fact that public transportation in the US is so piss poor, I was a contributing factor to making our cities less pedestrian friendly. Everybody says that it’s impossible to get around in Houston without a car, but maybe that’s partially just a lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid making a change. Every time that someone starts taking a bus or utilizing the downtown MetroRail, it becomes one more person putting their faith in alternative modes of organizing the way that we live and work. Will ditching all of our cars overnight make public transportation better? No! These things take years, sometimes decades of hard lobbying and organizing to make happen. There’s also a massive, entrenched corporate lobby in this country dedicated to making sure that everybody remains a slave to car ownership.

I also acknowledge that cars do have a place in the modern world - plenty of countries in Europe that emphasize public transportation have cars and car ownership. Plenty of people in rural areas can’t or don’t want to move to giant cities and ditch their cars, and giant cities don’t always need the extra people. I also recognize that I’m extremely lucky that I don’t need to drive five days a week for work. Not everybody, especially people working more than one job, have that luxury. But my hope is that more and more people, like myself, start to rethink the role of cars in their lives. If even just one person who can afford to, like myself, takes the step to reduce their dependence on cars, it creates one less driver on the road.

I’m not totally over cars. I’d love to drive a newer, reliable car in the future once I’m in a good spot financially to afford one. There are pros to car ownership, just like there’s pros to walking and taking public transportation. But for the time being, I’m at peace with my decision to sell the Subaru and pocket the money while the car market is as insane as it is. I’m doing myself, and really all of you, a favor by not getting behind the wheel of a car anytime soon. So if anyone wants to buy a 2006 Subaru Forester, please email me at gwenhowerton@gmail.com. No lowballs; I know what I have.

Last December, I began the painstaking and patchwork process of getting my name and gender legally changed in earnest. I’ve been going by Gwen for about 3 years now and identified as a woman ever since I found out that was an option. I’ve been on HRT for three years and a month and watched my body morph into something bearable, if not outright beautiful. I’ve socially transitioned in every meaningful way - I use the women’s restroom, I get called ma’am everywhere I go, and the other day my boss at my new job told me he had no idea I was transgender until he hired me. For me, getting legal documentation that reflects my real name and gender felt like putting a roof on the house I’ve been building for as long as I’ve been alive. But it also feels sort of like getting dumped off the bus at the end of the line and told “good luck” right before I fall on my ass. When there’s no more roadmap for being transgender, what the fuck do I do now?

I started planning my transition almost as soon as I discovered what being trans meant, sometime in like 2013 in my Tumblr days. I did exhaustive research (I found a WikiHow called “How to Be Transgender) and consulted all the experts I knew (I asked random transgender women on Tumblr what to do). I made a pretty simple plan - I would come out to my parents and then the rest of my life would be smooth sailing.

When I cdid out to my parents at age 14, it went pretty bad. My parents were convinced I had some sort of weird fetish, or that I was confused and hadn’t thought of the larger consequences, or that I needed to go to church more. We don’t want you to do something you’ll regret, they said. When you’re 18 and don’t live in our house, you can do anything you want but as long as you do, you’re going to be a man. I counted myself lucky that I didn’t get kicked out. For the rest of that summer, I wasn’t allowed to see any of my friends and I was forbidden from using social media. I apologized to my parents and promised to be their perfect son. Clearly I hadn’t thought it through, I said. I retreated inside myself and plotted my revenge. While I pretended to be a cis guy to friends and family, I changed my pronouns and name online. I went by a few different names - Daphne, Drew, Daisy, Alex. None of them really fit me, but with the social media revolution in full swing, I could craft a completely new self at a moment’s notice. Like Neo in The Matrix, I lived a double life - one in the real world as a cisgender guy and one online as the woman I knew I was inside. In the vast infinity of a digital ocean, I could swim as far as my arms would take me.

I finally got to start HRT through the clinic on my college’s campus. I was lucky enough that the school had a dedicated trans healthcare practitioner trained to diagnose and treat gender dysphoria. I was able to discuss my transition goals - things that all felt far off and sort of unattainable at 19. We talked about what it might be like if I wanted sexual reassignment surgery (I didn’t) and what sort of things I’d expect in the next 2 - 3 years. The informed consent sheet felt like a set of instructions for how to become a woman and piss my parents off in the process. Instructions have always felt comforting to me — when I was a kid I got so excited to build Lego sets for the first time, flipping through the instructions meticulously. Sometimes I’d skip several steps ahead or look at the very last page and imagine what I would have to do to get there. Starting HRT felt freeing obviously because it alleviated my dysphoria, but it also provided a jumping off point with branching paths that all ended in concrete, achievable goals. I saw myself as yet another Lego set, a complex sum of parts that would look exactly like the box. It was up to me follow the instructions, or skip through the pages and figure out what to do myself.

What I thought I would look at the “end” of HRT was basically some sort of bimbofied Barbie Doll, but like, scene. I wanted really long blonde hair for some reason, boobs but not huge boobs. I didn’t understand what HRT would and wouldn’t do at first. A lot of people think that it changes your voice (it doesn’t - only testosterone can) or feminizes your face (to an extent - hormones can’t move bones). I thought HRT would take a sledgehammer to my male form and transform me into a beautiful woman overnight. Instead, my male exterior was gently chisled away, slowly but surely, revealing the soft, feminine form underneath. I trained my voice, learned to feel when there was a ‘buzz’ in my throat which meant I was going too low. I watched videos on changing the way I walk - shorter strides meant it was less ovious that my shoulders were broader. Tucking - the act of learning to push my penis between my legs - made it easier to swim. Between HRT and endless scrutiny of myself, I learned to cloak myself in womanhood. Eventually, it started to feel less like a costume and more like my authentic way of life. I started getting gendered correctly everywhere. A doctor asked me how regular my periods were, and I had to awkwardly explain that they were irregular because I didn’t have any. Even though I didn’t follow the instructions to the tee, I look at myself in the mirror and occasionally feel surprised at how I ended up. Am I the spitting image of a cisgender woman? Absolutely not! I still get clocked occasionally and when a weird visibly gay guy asks me what my pronouns are, I know I’ve been found out. But when I look back on the darkness of my pre-transition days and how unbearable it felt to just look in the mirror some days, it all feels like it happened to someone else. Transitioning literally saved my life.

With my body in order, it felt like time to have my legal documentation reflect who I was. I was tired of having to use my deadname at the bank, for insurance, when I applied for a job. I put it off for almost a year because it was expensive and I didn’t want to go to court. Last December, some friends generously put together money to cover my court costs to get my name and gender changed. I filed earlier this spring and it still took about 3 months to be approved. What shocked me was that Texas, unlike a lot of other states, doesn’t require you to have had any surgeries or live as your preferred gender for a certain number of years before getting your gender marker changed. For a state that’s so anti-trans, the actual legal system doesn’t seem to care. I got my driver’s license changed not long after, and I’m currently in the process of getting a new social security card and birth certificate. (This process is such a headache because you have to get each thing changed one at a time. So right now I have a Social Security Card that has my deadname, but a driver’s license that has my new name on it. We love patchwork government don’t we folks!)

Holding my new driver’s license in my hands feels like a fever dream. It feels like I’ve reached the finish line of my transition. I mean, if the United States Federal Government recognizes my name and gender identity, whose to tell me otherwise? I win, transphobes! It also feels a little bittersweet. Looking back on the journey, it was so fun, if not awkward, to see myself grow and experiment with my newfound freedom as an out and about trans person. It’s been confusing because I’ve pretty much made it, and I’m very happy. So what comes next?

Of course, there’s still things I could do. I’ve given SRS some serious thought, although I’m not sure if I’m really all that interested in getting a vagina. The surgery itself, the cost and the recovery time seem really daunting, and I’m not sure that I’m really up for it. I’ve also entertained other various gender affirming surgeries, ranging from boob jobs to facial feminization surgery. These would definitely make me feel good about myself, but I don’t know if I really want them enough to go through with them. I’m afraid of things going wrong, and I hate the hospital. These are things that still remain to be seen, things that I have to contemplate, and maybe even work towards.

But what else is left is subtle, and now that I’ve been mulling it over, it feels freeing. I’ve moved on from the real to the metaphysical. With so much discussion in the media about gender and sexuality, and with trans rights squarely in the sights of religious ghouls and conservative freaks, the nature of being trans has been on my mind. Where I was once obsessed with walking correctly, I now really think about what makes me a woman at all. When I moved last month, I had to find a new doctor that could prescribe me my usual regimine of HRT, and I’ve missed about a month’s worth of doses. Without the safety net and predictability of medication, I’ve space to figure out where my own feelings of femininity and womanhood comes from. It’s not necessarily from clothes, or from .75 ml of Estradiol once a week. It’s not really even from being treated like a woman. It’s from the understanding granted to me by others. It’s feeling in tune with my female friends in ways I never have with men. It’s the way I’ve always been seen as lesser than by other men - while men love to say I’ll never be a real woman, in the socio-sexual hierarchy of maleness, I fall right off the scale.

So I guess what I’ve been trying to say this whole time is that what comes next is nothing, and everything. Finishing my transition bucket list wasn’t the end of anything, but a jumping off point for the rest of my life. I’ve moved beyond the realm of tweaking medication doses and learning how to dress and started to think about my place not just in the woman’s world, but in the world at large. I’ve already decided that I’m a woman. My task now is harder than the physical transition, and there’s no instruction manual. Now, I have to decide what kind of woman I want to be.

Like a large swath of Americans, I grew up in a small suburban town. College Station, Texas is home to around 120,000 people, not counting the extra 70,000 students that attend Texas A&M University, which the city is built around. I moved there when I was 4 and attended K-12 school, and eventually attended A&M when I finished high school. I lived the first 20-odd years of my life in a town whose biggest claims to fame include Johnny Manziel, Disney-channel star Raini Rodriguez, and the girl who had that really viral tiktok about trying kombucha for the first time. I had a pretty good college experience, and I wouldn’t say that growing up in CSTAT was a bad experience at all. But like most suburban 20 somethings, I always wanted something more. I wanted to go where people were, where vaguely defined things were happening. I wanted to experience culture, for christsakes! I wanted to live in the big city, where everyone knows your name and you can walk to a restaurant that costs $30 per plate. I wanted to live in New York Fucking City.

Of course, you can find these things in pretty much any city anywhere. But as a suburbanite with an honestly pretty limited worldview, I was taken by the idea of living in New York almost from the moment I found out it was a real place. I grew up with gen x parents who consumed lots of New York Media. My mom and I would watch reruns of Friends and Seinfeld after I got home from school - I was absolutely enamored by Monica’s big apartment or the idea of taking the subway to Coney Island. Even recently, when I completed my first full watch of Sex and the City, arguably one of the most important pieces of New York Media ever created, I was obsessed with the idea that I could be Carrie Bradshaw, roughing it in a cozy apartment and going to hip restaurants and clubs each night. Our media is full of stories of Big City Dwellers who live in the Big Apple or a fictionalized version of it. Millions of people live in NYC and with so much culture being created and exported from the there, there’s a reason that it’s considered a caput mundi, a latin phrase which described Rome as the capital city of the world.

New York isn’t the only city that exists in our popular imagination as the Place To Be. LA, Chicago, Paris and London all have romanticized as extraordinary centers of What’s Cool and Exciting, The Place To Aspire To Live. And none of these places are anything they’re chocked up to be in the movies. As the cost of living has skyrocketed in the past quarter-century, places like LA and New York have become the most expensive places to live in the U.S. Influxes of people moving north have only thrown gasoline on the fire of the national housing crisis in our largest cities. Paris can be so disappointing to some tourists that there’s a syndrome for it. Despite their problems, these cities still have massive appeal for people who want to move their for any number of reasons.

I didn’t move to New York City after college. I was up for some jobs there and seriously thought about it, but the cost of living and being far from my friends put me off. I ended up moving to Houston for work at the beginning of August. I was so excited by the prospect of living in a city that, while not perfect, is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country. There’s lots to do here, amazing food, nightlife and tons of stuff to do off the beaten path if you know where to look. So despite all of this, why could I not help but feel like I didn’t do the right thing by moving here? Why did I feel like no matter what, New York was the place I absolutely needed to move to at some point in my future?

I think in addition to the fact that our culture is so saturated by New York-centric media, social media adds another, even more psycholigically damaging layer to the “Place You Need To Be Complex”. Social media lets you see the most curated version of everyone’s lives - whether it’s the picture perfect vacations or the millions of “day in my life as a rich Bushwick socialite” TikToks, you’re inundated with a constant stream of media telling you the best parts of life are happening wherever you’re not. To my 22 year old brain, seeing social media posts of European study abroads, vacations and perfectly coreographed videos of people going out with their friends while I spent my post-college summer alone in my apartment looking for a job made me feel like I was wasting the best years of my life. Did I not make the right friends? Did I waste my time not looking for more study abroad opporitunities that I probably couldn’t afford? Was I settling for a city that was “only” an hour and a half away from me when the best parts of life were really in the far off places I created in my imagination? Worst of all, I was beginning to entertain the idea of graduate school just to see if maybe that would help me end up in one of those cities where I believed Culture Happened. I was making myself miserable thinking that the only way that I could be happy was if I took some sort of vague media job in New York City where I couldn’t afford to rent a broom closet, let alone the huge studio of my Sex and the City inspired fantasies.

I got the chance to visit New York City this past spring. I took a roadtrip with some friends and spent three days sight seeing in the city and I really enjoyed it. I did all the things you’re supposed to do when you visit. I went to the museums, I stared up at all the buildings until my neck hurt, I got lost in the subway and I got yelled at by Elmo in Times Square because I didn’t know you’re not supposed to take pictures of the guys in costumes without paying them. My bad. I fell in love with the city and my trip cemented in my head that it was where I needed to be to make the most of my twenties. But having given it more thought, I realized that I didn’t experience anything that can’t be found most places. In fact, what I really experienced was what capitalism and modern urban planning has deemed to be culture. I spent way too money in shopping centers, I walked around corporate office districts and spent forty-five dollars a plate at food halls. I didn’t do anything off the beaten path, anything I couldn’t experience in any midsize metropolitan area in America. What I and millions of other construed for Culture was really Consumerism sold back to me as Authenticity.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and various news outlets all contribute to the NewYorkIfication, and more broadly, the Cityification of our society. If you get lots of your culture through the internet, as a good chunk of people do, chances are you follow or see lots of NYC based journalists, writers. You saw lots of articles this summer debating whether Dimes Square Was A Thing (is it? I have no clue and decided that I don’t need to care). There was that incredible New York Times op-ed about how the Gen-Z reactionary catholics like Dasha Nekrasova are part of a new trendy subculture. Local and regional newspapers owned by large media conglomerates regularly beam news from the Big Apple and other cities into our inboxes and feeds, oftentimes making it hard to find out what’s going on in our own cities. As a trans woman, it can feel like all the cool trans people all live in New York City and do ketamine, and the only way I could ever really find queer community is if I pack my bags and go north. Again, none of these things are applicable to the millions of people who don’t live and work in our nations cultural capital. But if you spend anytime online, it can feel like all culture is happening somewhere else, and you’re missing out on it. All you need to do is go out to eat every night, have expensive drinks and mill around places designed to sell you things you probably don’t need. None of this is actually fulfilling. It will never fill the space in my heart that I reserved for the imagined world of my fantasy twenties.

Since moving to Houston, I’ve been trying really hard to ingrain myself into the vibrant culture here. I’ve started to try to orient my digital feeds around where I live, following local businesses and venues I like in order to keep myself appraised of what’s going on in my city. Undoing the damage that cultural FOMO has done to me hasn’t been easy, and I think it’s excacerbated by my own feelings of insecurity that will stay with me no matter where I live. Last night, as I cooked dinner in my small apartment kitchen, I had the incredibly stupid but important realization that living in New York City wouldn’t fix me, just like retail therapy or drugs and alcohol don’t fix me when I’m feeling down either. In fact, living in NYC might alienate me more than anything else. At least in Texas when I feel lonely, my college friends and family are just a short drive away. In New York, I’d be in an incredibly small apartment cooking noodles with no support system. There’s always something happening to get involved with wherever we are, whether it’s the big city or the middle of nowhere. When the internet and politics alienate us from each other more than ever, the most important thing that we can do is try to make real, tangible communities in any way that we can.