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Help me, I live in a rogue state (revisited)

The following is an essay I wrote 14 years ago during George W. Bush’s tenure as POTUS as he was prepping the country to go to war in Iraq to find non-existent WMD’s. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the pendulum swings in American politics and, in particular, what might happen after Donald Trump is no longer acting President. GW took office following Bill Clinton, whose progressive views helped revamp the economy after a double-header of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. created a devastating recession. They followed an incredibly liberal Jimmy Carter who is generally regarded in history as a poor President and lost his re-election campaign. GW was accused of “stealing” the election (remember “dangling chads”?) in 2000, and also lost the popular vote. It’s important to revisit where we’ve been in order to potentially see where we’re going. As America hunkers down in another wave of isolationism, the bright light at the end of the tunnel is the idea that this too shall pass, and maybe what comes after can be something truly amazing.

As you read the words below, replace “George W. Bush” with “Donald Trump” and you’ll be surprised (or maybe not so much) at how many parallels there are.

HELP ME, I LIVE IN A ROGUE STATE!

This is for all the patriots who disagree with our President. This is for all the people around the world who disagree with our President. This is an apology.

I don’t believe in George W. Bush. I didn’t vote for him. I don’t think that makes my opinion invalid.

I oppose what he’s doing in Iraq and to the world not only because it’s unjust and unjustified, but also because I didn’t vote for him, and neither did half of the American population who voted. Have we forgotten that? The only reason he’s in office is because of the rules of the electoral college, he lost the popular vote. And in an age in which only 30% of americans vote, period (and that’s a generous estimate), whose President is George W. Bush, other than George W. Bush’s? He’s certainly not the American President. In a democracy, the person chosen to lead the country is selected by a majority. That does not mean a majority of those who turn their ballots in, that means a majority of the country. Our country has become so alienated and disenchanted by the American government, that we don’t feel like what we say, think, or do matters to our local representatives, senators, President. And it probably doesn’t. Why should we be surprised that America is going to war despite the fact that most of the world opposes us, the United Nations oppose us, and a huge number of Americans oppose the war, too? Did we expect anything better from a man who didn’t even win the American people’s vote?

Several months ago, there was talk about Iraq being a “rogue state”. What does that mean? That Saddam Hussein is a tyrant, winning his people over through fear, propaganda, and force? How is that different from our President? Who are we to say who is a rogue, who is an outlaw, and who isn’t? Aren’t we the outlaws of the world? With so many Americans lining the streets protesting against this war, how can our President say “i respectfully disagree”? Isn’t it his job to do that which reflects the voice of his people?

I live in a rogue state. I live in a country where my leader was not democratically elected, whose decisions do not represent the opinions of his people, who uses the media and advertising to terrorize and terrify his own people into believing that there is no other choice but to follow him. George Bush may not have planned the events of September 11th, but he’s certainly capitalizing off of them. I live in a country where if I’m not with President Bush, I’m with the terrorists. I guess that means I’m with the terrorists.

I live in a rogue state.

…

Just because we disagree with the President does not mean we are treasonous. Democracy means people have opposing views. We are patriots because we care about our country and care what happens to it, and we care about the world, and the effects of what our country is doing to it. We are patriots because we disagree. that is our right, our privilege as Americans.

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A case for women Doctors

We need to talk about Doctor Who.

I know Doctor Who is everyone’s favorite sci-fi television show. I understand that it is the longest running television show and that it’s able to bridge generational gaps because of it. It is as iconic as Star Trek and more storied than Star Wars. I get that. And the modern remake has fueled a fire in the current generation and spawned toys and games to keep the obsession hot.

But Doctor Who suffers — and always has — from a fatal flaw. Rampant sexism.

The new series of Doctor Who kicked off this weekend with what looks to be a new companion — one who’s dark-skinned and lesbian. And while I’d love to use those things to applaud the show’s attempts to add diversity to television, I can’t.

Despite the ambiguity inherent in the titular character, there has never been a female Doctor. And, though at times there have been multiple travelers with the Doctor, there is always one “Companion” and she is always female.

Since the Peter Capaldi doctor, most of the romantic overtones between Doctor and Companion in the new series have been sidelined, but that doesn’t change the inherently straight, cisgendered nature of the relationship between Companion and Doctor. Adding a lesbian to the mix doesn’t change the fact that the show is still sexist.

Companion is a weird archetype, but it loosely translates to “sidekick” — even when the Companion’s story overtakes that of the Doctor himself — as it did with Clara. A sidekick can never be as important as the hero, and anyway the show isn’t called Clara Oswald — it’s called Doctor Who. No matter what the new showrunners do with the show, no matter what new characters and stories they tell, as long as the Doctor represents only half of the population.

The Doctor is a Time Lord and Time Lords can regenerate. When they do, they take on a new form and a new personality — which is a convenient retcon to explain when leading actors are unavailable to continue the role, and likely at least partially the reason for the show’s longevity. Despite the fact that Time Lords can regenerate to a different gender, that has never happened to the Doctor (though it did happen to the Time Lord known as the Master, sometime arch enemy of the Doctor, who’s currently calling herself Missy).

It’s been posited several times that Time Lords can regenerate only 12 times; Peter Capaldi marks the twelfth doctor. Unless the new showrunners add in some more convenient retcon (something that we can’t exactly put past them in a show like Doctor Who), that would mean that the Doctor is, was, and always will have been, male, an obvious gender imbalance that should put even hardcore fans up in arms. And if they do add convenient retcon to support Doctors beyond the twelfth? Anything other than a long string of female doctors (twelve to be precise) would still be perpetuating this inherent, latent sexism.

Let’s talk about Companions for a moment.

Why has there never been a male companion? In the early days the companion was very much like whatever uterus-bearing, nameless side character in the original Star Trek that Kirk ends up making eyes at — fodder for brief romantic interest and/or involvement and a reflective surface on which to display the Doctor’s genius and ingenuity. In the current incarnation, even during the brief period where Amy Pond‘s husband tags along on the adventure with the eleventh Doctor, the Companion has continued to be, invariably, female. And despite the fact that in the new series, we see the Doctor with a wisecracking bald guy helping him out — wisecracking bald guy is not the Companion. You know this intrinsically the first scene that the character Bill appears — ah, yes, new companion, you think as you see her walk onscreen for the first time. And then you start to wonder (or, I do, anyway) why the Doctor is only ever interested in traveling with women.

I have no problem if the Doctor is just heterosexual, but the current incarnation of the show goes to great lengths to explain how the Doctor/Companion relationship is not romantic, that the Doctor doesn’t want a romantic relationship with his Companion and that he already has a (albeit unusual, time-traveling) relationship with River Song. And that only works if we explore other relationship types as well, which we can’t if the Doctor is only male.

Doctor Who has many great things going for it. It’s also terribly formulaic. To be sure, that gives it some of its charm, but the male/female, Doctor/Companion dynamic — that has been a staple of the show since its inception — is one thing that needs to go. We need more diverse stories in television and in science fiction, in particular. We need stories told from the perspective of more than just straight white men. Give me the show about a time-and-space-traveling heroine and I will be there. Television in a lens through which we perceive the world around us and, as such, needs to reflect the diversity of the world around us, not the homogeneity of writers and producers making the shows.

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Sex !== Gender

Feeling confessional and my Twitter rant this morning and the bathroom bill thing has gotten me riled up so I’m going to tell a story.

I wrote a paper while in college (16 years ago) for an independent study I did on gender. (You can still read it, if you like.) My independent study was a result of a personal exploration about gender and it was primarily through the lens of transpeople, because that’s where the real exploration and discovery of gender and what that means is happening. Cisgendered people (individuals who identify with the gender they were given at birth) don’t think about these things because, for the most part, it doesn’t apply to them, and to those people, gender is an easy binary thing.

Gender is not an easy binary thing.

But here’s the thing that I really wanted to highlight and the thing that I feel needs to be reiterated, particularly to the cisgendered people who obviously are responsible for the so-called “bathroom bills” that will put a legal impediment between transpeople entering the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, is that gender is completely unrelated to sex and sexuality.

The nightmare scenario that organizations like the one described in the Mashable article in my rant portray is this: Transperson is secretly hiding in the bathroom of a gender that is other than the one on their birth certificate for the purpose of taking advantage of the cisgendered individuals visiting said bathroom. This scenario assumes two things, both of which are incorrect:

  1. That being transgendered is a choice, something that can be turned on and off. It isn’t.
  2. That being transgendered is equivalent to some form of “sexual deviancy”.

It’s the second thing that, I believe, is most harmful, but both are pretty terrible. So, let’s talk about that.

The idea that transgender is in any way related to sexual deviancy is predicated on the idea that gender is tied to sex and sexuality. Like sexuality, gender is a spectrum, not a binary, but that’s where the relationship ends. I think it’s safe to say that we have gotten to the point where most people are pretty aware of and to one degree or another can at least acknowledge the fact that who you have sex with is unrelated to your specific anatomy. But we still correlate the two, particularly when discussing the “sex” of a baby or person. It would be comical (and probably inappropriate) to respond to a official form you were filling out when asked “Sex:” to fill in “yes please” or to check the box of the gender with whom you have sex. It’s assumed that “sex” in this context means “gender”. And that’s where the relationship between the two can be confusing and why, in most cases I’m aware of, the question has been reworded from “Sex” to “Gender” which is more accurate.

Let me be clear: a man dressed as a woman to gain access to a women’s restroom for the purpose of attacking women is absolutely something that everyone should be concerned with. But anyone being attacked in any bathroom (or anywhere) for any reason is something that everyone should be concerned with. Women being attacked, sexually or otherwise, by men is something that everyone should be concerned with. Attacks on people of color is something that everyone should be concerned about. Attacks on queer people is something everyone should be concerned about. Attacks on transpeople is something everyone should be concerned about. The thing that’s different here is the idea that someone “snuck in” to some place they were not welcome and in all other contexts are not allowed. And the reason it’s such a hot topic is because bathrooms, in particular, are places where we make ourselves more vulnerable. But the case that Just Want Privacy is using to prove their point, doesn’t actually prove anything — it wasn’t a person who was transgendered attacking a cisgendered woman, it was a cisgendered man in a women’s bathroom attacking a cisgendered woman. Your argument is invalid.

Let’s back up a bit and look at the root of the problem which is the idea that gender is binary. Because that’s the crux of the bathroom issue. There are two bathrooms, one with an image depicting what’s assumed to be a man, but really just looks like a non-specific human, and one with an image depicting what’s assumed to be a woman — identified with the triangular shape that is intended to represent a skirt or a dress. Here’s a fun fact: men wear dresses and skirts. Women wear pants and leggings. And then there’s a whole host of people in between that are not accurately depicted by these two minimalist representations of humanity that we somehow have to shove ourselves into every time we enter a public restroom.

I went to a pretty liberal program at a university in Southern California — one that was afforded a fair bit of leniency in self-governance and independence from the rest of the university. And before I walked on campus, I was told that the bathrooms were non-gender-specific. And sure, at first, I thought that was kind of sexy. You know what’s not sexy? Going to the bathroom. And that’s what a gender neutral bathroom was. Just a bunch of people using the bathroom. Yes, there were showers in there. Yes, people of both genders used them. Never, in the three years I spent there, was there ever a problem with non-gendered bathrooms. It was just a thing that existed and everyone was fine with it (possibly after a little initial time getting used to it). So, I’m acutely aware that the real solution to this problem is not to check what’s under the skirt, but to remove the binary and normalize the idea that gender isn’t one.

My independent study on gender was the result of going through a period of gender dysphoria which largely came down to not accepting or identifying with the typical expectations our society has for what it means to be “male”. “Men” are supposed to be strong, fearless, courageous. They are the protector and the breadwinner. They are dominant and assertive. They can also be violent and angry. They can be abusers and assailants. They are predominantly responsible for the depressing statistics around the number of women who have been sexually assaulted some time in their lifetime. “If there’s a choice, and I have one, I don’t want to be associated with that” went the thinking.

The same year, I went to a conference at Occidental College with the on-campus GLBSU (Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Straight Union). One of the things that remains with me from that experience is a workshop/session/discussion about bisexuality, in which everyone in the room was asked to stand in a line, and place themselves on that line with where they put themselves in terms of attraction to members of the opposite gender — the idea being that sexuality is not binary, there is a spectrum and all of it is okay. We were then asked where we would have put ourselves a couple years ago. And where we think we might put ourselves in a couple years. Where you place yourself in that spectrum changes over time.

From my independent study, the thing that was reinforced over and over (besides that gender is not the same as sexuality) is that gender is also a spectrum. I’ve come to the point where I no longer believe in binaries unless I’m dealing with software. People don’t work in binaries. Nature doesn’t work in binaries. We talk about being “on the spectrum” when we’re talking about Autism — the idea that there’s no single, all-encompassing definition of Autism, it’s a range of different things in different intensities, and each individual experience is unique.

The idea that groups like Just Want Privacy want you to believe — that a transgendered woman is really just a sexually deviant man in a dress — is preposterous. And it’s extremely harmful. It’s harmful to those who identify as transgendered on an emotional level, but it’s also harmful in a very real, physical level, by playing on people’s fears, by positing the idea that they are “wrong” and can and should be “fixed” it fosters fear and hatred toward transgendered individuals. Bills like this create a culture a fear which cultivates violence towards those deemed socially unacceptable.

Transgendered women are women. Transgendered men are men. As long as gendered bathrooms still exist, you wouldn’t ask a woman to enter a men’s bathroom and you wouldn’t ask a man to enter a women’s bathroom. So please, stop doing it.

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RPM 2017 recap

Another RPM is in the books and I thought I’d share some feelings about it.

This year I feel like I got in on a technicality. The album that I started at the beginning of the month isn’t done, and 2 of the songs on the CD I mailed to New Hampshire were from the kids’ scouts meetings last month in which I led the group in a discussion and lab about electronic music. So, it counts in that they were recorded in the month of February, but not, because they aren’t exactly mine. The 3 songs I recorded amounted to roughly 25 minutes of material, so, I was close regardless.

On the other hand, I participated in blind chaos again this year, so there’s one album, and I did produce > 35 minutes of music, so I’m still calling it a win.

Moreover, and more importantly, I’m feeling good about the project. It’s not done, and that’s okay. e and I have committed to trying to take time each night to work on art, and, honestly, that’s more important than a completed album.

In years past, I would scramble to get my RPM album done, then talk about and think about doing more stuff during the year otherwise, but it would usually never happen. This time, I feel like it’s a thing I can actually continue and, partially, that’s because we’re doing it together, even if we’re in separate rooms at the time. And I’m really enjoying seeing the finished paintings that go along with the music I’ve created and how they work together despite being created separately.

The recordings I’ve made are very rough, they are probably too long and need some work. But I’m getting used to a new laptop that doesn’t have all my stuff on it, a new version of the software, and being exceedingly out of practice since it’s been several years since I last touched an instrument. At some point, I will need to revisit the songs I’ve recorded and clean them up, but for now, I just need to get back into the habit of making music and getting comfortable again with the tools.

All in all, I’m happy with the result more because it marks the beginning  of a new project rather than the end.

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Announcing Games Collector, a tabletop game management plugin for WordPress

I’ve been quietly building something under the radar for a couple weeks. It’s been really just a passion project that came out of a conversation after the holidays.

Basically, we own a lot of games. Blame Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop for some of it, but, really, we’re frequently finding excuses to get new games. In fact, getting a new game for the family has become an annual tradition. We have so many games that it’s sometimes hard for other people to keep track of what we have and what we don’t have. And that’s where the nugget of an idea for a plugin for WordPress came in.

It started off as just a way to list the games that we own. But as I was thinking of ways to display the games, I started thinking about the user experience a bit more. Lists aren’t fun, but you know what is fun? Stuff that moves around. So, I decided to integrate Isotope.js to sort the games by different filters. Isotope animates the transition, so you’ll see games disappear and reappear and there’s lots of different things you can sort by.

As I was working with these filters I thought “wouldn’t it be cool if you could use the game list as a way to get ideas about what games to play?” What game to play depends on the audience, right? So, I added a “difficulty” dropdown that you can use to determine how hard the game is to learn. The range goes from Easy to Hard Core. What game you suggest also depends on how many people are playing, so there’s also a dropdown for number of players. So if you have a group of 4 hard core gamers, you can get a list of games that would be good for that group, and for that many players. Whereas, if you have a group of 7 or 8 casual gamers, you can get a list of games that are more laid back and are good for larger groups.

How does it work? Well you can take a look right here on my blog: Games. It uses a shortcode which you are probably familiar with if you’ve used WordPress for a while. There’s some notes on setting it up on the GitHub page. Here’s a screenshot of the back-end.

If you love games as much as me and you use WordPress, download the plugin and let me know what you think. I’m not planning on releasing it on WordPress.org any time soon because I don’t want to deal with the support forums and because it’s written for PHP 5.6 or higher (which is greater than the minimum requirement for WordPress), but if you have questions or feature requests, you can reach out on GitHub.

This is just the first iteration. I’ve got some ideas about how to extend the plugin moving forward, including integrating the WordPress REST API so the game data could be used outside of WordPress, in an app, for example. The mobile experience isn’t great, and I’d love to eventually build a way to manage and view your game list in a dedicated app on your phone.

Anyway, this is a cool little thing that I’ve been working on and excited to share. Again, download it and let me know what you think!