Today join me as I stand at the intersection of socioeconomics, disability and one of my favorite things in the whole world: libraries.

I love reading. I love places with wifi where no one expects me to buy an $8 cup of coffee to sit there and use it. I love public events with authors and local leaders and art exhibits presented free to the public. I love hardcopy books and ebooks and audiobooks. Libraries give people all that and more.

You know who doesn’t love that? Publishers.

Author Ijeoma Oluo, who wrote We Need To Talk About Race, posted a tweet thread about something she learned while she was negotiating the audiobook contract for her next book. She found that a major audiobook distributor (spoiler: It’s Audible) wants to limit the number of audiobook licenses they grant to libraries. In other words, they don’t want to make it possible for libraries to have multiple copies of audiobooks to lend to patrons. What they want is the wait for library copies to be so long that patrons give up and buy the books, so the publishers can make the money off it.

This isn’t new. Ebook publishers are doing the same thing. Starting in November, Macmillan publishing will only sell libraries 1 license for ebooks for the first 8 weeks after release of a new book. That means that the wait time for that bestseller you wanted to read on ebook is gonna go from a few weeks to the back end of never.

This is such an intense type of capitalist fuckery that I can hardly describe it. Audiobooks and ebooks have big upfront costs – editing, layout, recording, producing – but once they’re in the can? Nada. There aren’t even shipping costs. Load them on distribution platforms and everything rolls in as profit. But that’s not enough for publishers. They want even more profit even if it means screwing marginalized people.

Yeah, yeah, some library patrons are people like me who just want to get their hands on a new mystery novel. If that’s who you picture at the library, then this might not seem like a big deal.

But what if you picture a kid who needs a book for a school project and can’t get it another way – because the embargo extends to school libraries, too? Or what if the person waiting on the audiobook is blind and faces financial hardships due to disability and can’t afford books? What if the reader or listener has cognitive disabilities that require adaptive tech like audio or font adjustment or whatever and suddenly their library can’t accommodate them?

Now do you see where this is going?

The libraries are willing to pay for the licenses. They’re happy to buy the product. It’s the publishing industry that is refusing to sell to them. It’s peak bullshit and we should let publishers know that we see them.

Vote with your dollars, folks. That’s all capitalism understands.

The title pretty much says everything I want to say. I could add “Transmen are men. Non-binary folks are non-binary folks” and feel pretty good about my essay here. But I’ve been on Twitter for two days reading remarks from people who keep what-abouting at me so I guess this isn’t really settled.

I mean, I knew it wasn’t settled. I just live in a bubble where all my friends are groovy about gender identity. It wasn’t until JK Rowling showed her ass about the issue that I was starkly reminded that gender identity bothers people a lot.

On a better day, I would get into the science of biological sex and the research into how much that and gender exist on a big, beautiful spectrum but I’m not feeling that intellectual. Besides, unless you’re a doctor treating trans people, you don’t need to consider biochemistry and gene analysis and hormone levels. It’s not something any of us think about when we think about cis-folks so we can dispense with thinking about it regarding trans-folks.

Instead I am going to say this: Why does anyone care about anyone else’s gender?

If you are not romantically or sexually involved with a person and are thus intimately involved with their genitals, why on earth should those genitals matter to you one bit?

And why should their chromosomes matter to you, either?

Seriously? Why do you care?

If you meet a person, find out their name, find out their pronouns, file that info away. Then you can move on to the things that are really interesting about a person. Learn their favorite band. Ask what books they read. See if they like to travel. Maybe they’re a sports fan and you can talk about that. If you’re at work, you can bitch about how slow the elevators are. The possibilities for human interaction are really limitless and GENDER IS LARGELY IRRELEVANT.

It’s not irrelevant, of course. It’s deeply personal and a matter that consumes people’s internal lives. If gender identity and physical anatomy don’t line up, it’s a situation that requires such remedies as a person and their medical team see fit. People should have access to the right kind of care and insurance should cover the care so people can live their best lives. All of that is relevant and important and it’s something anyone who loves a trans or NB or otherwise genderqueer person knows already.

But when you’re dealing with people day to day? Eh. You can just be nice to them regardless of anything pertaining to their gender.

And you can totally stop concern trolling on social media, saying things like “But what about sports, huh? Won’t trans athletes be a problem in sports?”

Transpeople are people. Treat them like people, not like problems or science experiments. They are people of inherent worth and dignity and they deserve to be regarded as such.

Every morning I take 50mg of Will To Live.

That’s not what it’s really called. It’s an anti-depressant with a long, polysyllabic clinical name but I prefer to think of it as my will to live. You see, a few years ago, I got hit with a bout of depression that had me sad, angry, and emotionally paralyzed. I was doing ok with the tasks of living but I wasn’t taking any joy in them at all. I finally reached the point where I summoned the shreds of my emotional energy to call my doctor and ask for help with my depression.

Because I have adequate insurance, I had access to a primary care practice and they gave me an appointment right away. And because I have adequate prescription drug coverage, I could fill a prescription for a name brand medication right away as well. My emotional well being didn’t come with a side of financial hardship.

It’s just luck that all of that is true.

There is not one of us who will make it through life without needing medication. Many of us will need long-term management of a chronic condition, like a mental health condition. And many of us are fucked over by insurers who don’t want to pay for it.

Back in the pre-Obamacare days I was looking for an individual health insurance policy because my job didn’t offer one. I was rejected for a plan because I took medication for ADHD. The next plan I applied for accepted me but excluded any mental health coverage, including the cost of my meds. The one thing I needed the most? They didn’t want to cover and there was no law saying they had to.

That’s different now. We have been parity for mental health coverage and prescription coverage is more comprehensive with the ACA regs in place. Cool, right? Everyone likes that, right?

Hahaha, no.

Republicans are still doing everything in their power to tear down the ACA and they just got a court ruling that will make it potentially easier to do so. The entire Republican Party has decided that they are under no obligation to ensure the mental and physical well being of Americans.

It’s depressing as fuck. And they don’t want you to get meds to treat the depression.

Having insurance can mean the difference between walking around with an untreated condition for years and getting treatment that helps bolster mental health. And when you consider how many women and minorities suffer from the negative emotional effects of living in a world that oppressed us, lack of access to mental health services is a critical intersectional feminist issue.

While we wait (again) on the date of Obamacare, we need to call state and federal lawmakers and ask them to shore up protections for our coverage for all health care but especially mental health. It’s too big a deal to ignore.

Good morning! Happy impeachment day for those of us who think the President of the United States illegally solicited foreign assistance in an election then lied about it! For anyone reading this who doesn’t think that, um, hi? How did you end up here? I mean, you’re welcome to hang out and stuff but this isn’t the kind of space you usually find appealing.

Speaking of things that Trump supporters like, let’s talk about the letter he wrote to Speaker Pelosi yesterday. You can find it here. It’s a rhetorical marvel, filled with alternating bursts of policy language and tweet-speak using strange rules of capitalization combined into something barely recognizable as a formal correspondence between leaders of a real nation.

And it fact, it wasn’t that.

I’m not an expert in propaganda but you don’t need to be one to understand that Trump released six pages of coded language meant to bolster his base the day before something very bad is about to happen to him. He wasn’t talking to House Democrats. He wasn’t even talking to Americans in general. He was talking to the people who attend his rallies.

The whole letter, particularly the parts where he listed all of the things he sees as accomplishments, is in-group speak targeted at that kind of people who have Trump 2020 flags in their yards. It was meant to strengthen their convictions about the man they voted for. It re-demonized Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats to remind the base to keep hating them. It reiterated the (entirely false) claim that asking the Ukraine for an investigation into a political rival is business as usual. The whole letter was engineered to reel back in any loyalist who might have been thinking “Gee, maybe Democrats have a point.”

It was basically a rally speech printed on White House letterhead.

But that letterhead is a powerful tool. You can tell that’s true because the entire media started talking about the letter as if it were a real and impactful thing when they should have been treating it like the kind of screed a jilted teenager writes to convince himself his ex-girlfriend was the idiot for dumping him.

Part of dismantling the patriarchy has to be calling out its bullshit tactics like this one. Just because a rich, powerful, white man says something, doesn’t make it true. The media treating this is if it has meaning is insulting to my intelligence. That letter, that call-to-fury, to the Trump base has no more inherent gravitas than the comments section on FoxNews. Treating it like it does reinforces the myth that Trump and others like him are infallible and untouchable.

The response to that letter was frankly irresponsible. Trump threw a tantrum meant to solicit cries of “Fuck yeah! MAGA!” from his supporters and the media acted like he dealt a serious blow to the impeachment process. He did not.

The impeachment vote will take place tonight and the US House of Representatives will indict the President for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He can’t unmake that series of events, no matter how hard he tries.

NOT ALL MEN!

There. I said it so you don’t have to. Yes, there are probably some men who list intersectional feminism among their competencies but I have not been dealing with those men lately and whoa nelly. There are some guys out there who are just awful.

Let me explain. I live in a big, diverse county with approximately a gazillion schools. The schools are all basically good but there are clusters of poverty, clusters of lower achievement, and clusters of different racial groups. Conversely there are clusters of wealth, clusters of high achievement, and clusters of one particular racial group that thinks it’s the best racial group. We also have some school with way too many students and some schools with empty seats.

No one has done a comprehensive analysis of the situation since the 1980s.

Today, the county wants to do such an assessment and redraw school boundaries with consideration given to diversity as well as raw population numbers. And OH MY GOD the rich white men are acting like the sky is falling on their rich white heads.

I joined two facebook groups to talk about this process and got kicked out of one in under 12 hours. No, I didn’t call anyone racist, thanks for asking. I simply reacted to reports about a meeting where parents yelled at a presenter and booed a middle school student. I made the controversial assertion that adults should never boo 8th graders, nor should they hijack someone else’s meeting.

I’m such a rebel.

The other group is better but still. There is a notable contingent of people who are absolutely certain this process will end with 70s era busing that takes their kids out of their neighborhood schools and sends them on long bus commutes across the county to the schools in less wealthy clusters.

Everyone that I have encountered in this contingent is a white man.

The group is filled with other people too, people with expertise, experiential knowledge, visionary ideas. Collectively, there is a deep well of understanding of the complexity of educating million of students of diverse backgrounds living across a region of hundreds of square miles. People are sharing articles and studies, ideas and recollections, current and former students are weighing in, teachers are explaining their position. It’s amazing.

Then in the comment section there is always some white guy screaming that none of that matters because they don’t want their kid on a bus to a less-prestigious school.

And don’t even get me started on the ways they have tried to shout down a few women of color who have posted information about what privilege in general and white privilege in particular look like in practice. They do not like hearing that their mindset could prevent non-white families from gaining equity in our school district.

So to these men, men who are otherwise probably pretty progressive, men who might happily call themselves feminist in other circumstances, to them I say this: BRO. This is not about you.

That goes for any women who are doing this as well but I haven’t tangled with them in the comments.

Educational equity is where the intersectional rubber meets the white supremacy road. This is where we fix stuff for the next generations. That is not news. Education reformers all know this. But somehow these men missed that memo and they are acting like education is just about their kids.

It is not. Education is about all the kids. Every single one.

These people are so committed to protecting their interests of their families – and only their families – that they are doing everything in their power to stop the assessment from taking place. They aren’t even willing to discuss a possibility of change if they can’t benefit from it. It’s all really quite breathtaking in its arrogance.

So now I know what my main act of intersectional feminism for 2020 has to be: standing shoulder to shoulder with others in my community at the intersection of race, gender and socioeconomics to make sure that everyone gets their chance to be heard.

Will this benefit my kids? It sure as fuck will. They might wind up on a bus across town at the end of it but the place they’ll be going will be fairer and more intersectional than they would get otherwise.

If you mention the name Tipper Gore to anyone in Generation X, you will probably be met with a sigh and dramatically rolled eyes. We all vividly remember the years of the Parent’s Music Resource Council and all the hearings and articles and fretting adults did about lyrics. We thought it was stupid over reaction then and we think it’s a stupid over reaction now.

But after we roll our eyes we might say “Those stickers on albums, though. Those let you know where the good music was. You know. Not the mainstream stuff.”

Every generation had it’s counter-culture but I like to think GenX honed counter-culture and the accompanying sneering disregard for everything to a fine art. GenX knew how to hate shit. We were like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice.

At the same time, however, we were probably watching “Beverly Hills 90210”. We were elitist but we knew sometimes popular stuff was popular for good reason.

You are wondering when I’m going to get to the feminism, aren’t you? It’s coming.

Remember last week when I was challenging myself to get real about my intersectional feminist principles and admit that I need to pay attention to the Dem 2020 candidate that has the biggest share of Black support? And how that candidate is not my personal choice, Elizabeth Warren? It’s Joe Biden?

Yeah, so my GenX-fuck-the-establishment tendency is kicking in like crazy at the idea that I should vote for Joe Bide. Even knowing I would be doing in in support of a voting bloc who needs their choices elevated more than I need my choices elevated. I want to scream “Fuck you I do what I want!” and stomp my GenX feet and vote for Warren anyway. Because she is just that good. She’s like Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho.

I don’t want Joe Biden. He’s like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Only…they’re both still Keanu Reeves.

Warren and Biden are both Democrats who will give me what I most want in the world of politics: liberal Supreme Court Justices and a good faith attempts to provide health care, education, housing, and food for all Americans. I can be all sneery and condescending about Biden but I also have to acknowledge his strengths, one of which is appealing to Black voters.

Joe Biden doesn’t come with the warning label of the music of my youth to let me know the good stuff is there. He’s about as mainstream a candidate as you can get. But if I know anything after years of being the person who defaults to hating things, I know this: just because something isn’t to my (snooty, elitist) taste doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sometimes other people know better than me and I have to listen.

In 2016, after Hillary’s electoral college defeat, one number stood out to a lot of us on the left: 90% of Black women voted for Hillary. One of the most important population segments in America looked at Donald Trump, and as a whole, said “Nope. No way.”

They were right. But we knew that already.

In the aftermath of all this, a lot of us progressives adopted a mantra of “vote like a Black woman.” On its surface, that sounds a little shallow and like we’re pandering to a purely political ideal of welcoming Black women simply for the sake of their votes. But if you go even just a touch deeper, the reasons to vote like a Black woman are solid.

When I used to work in cancer advocacy, we always said: “If there is a flaw in the healthcare system a cancer patient will find it.” In the case of American politics and policy, if there is a flaw in the system a Black woman will find it. I don’t need to tell you all the ways in which Black women – or any women of color – are marginalized by society. If you’re reading this essay, you probably already know that and, if you don’t, there are whole Ph.D. theses on the subject. Go look those up. Anyway, the corollary to a group of people being experientially aware of problems is that they probably know who and what can fix those self-same problems.

Black women are uniquely placed to guide us to the ideas that will best serve those on the not-billionaire side of the inequality equation. And if we address the concerns of one group of marginalized people, the results will help pretty much everyone else in America as well.

Maybe not Mike Bloomberg. But honestly, that old rich guy can take care of himself. I’m not losing any sleep over him.

Anyway, voting like a Black woman is a good idea and I know I should do it. I might still do it even though the latest polling on Black voter preferences in the Democratic primary is breaking my Elizabeth Warren-loving heart. Right now, depending on the poll you read, Joe Biden enjoys anywhere from 44% to 51% of Black support. That’s…a big number.

I haven’t seen a break-out along gender lines in those polls but if Black people trust Joe Biden more than Elizabeth Warren, it’s incumbent on me to trust their judgment. I need to go back to the research phase and learn what it is about No Malarkey Joe that is drawing support among people who I respect. I need to take off my own bias-colored glasses and look at what they say he brings to the table and what deficiencies they see in Warren.

If Black women believe he is the one who can do the most to serve them, I feel honor-bound to support their conclusion because I truly believe that what is good for Black women is good for America.

A teenage girl is Time magazine’s person of the year. Never mind that environmental activist Greta Thunberg probably opposes things like deforestation for the manufacture of paper, the chemicals used in glassy magazine publishing, and the fact that the mainstream media can’t seem to resist letting climate-change-deniers have air time, the fact that she is getting recognition at all is heartening.

Well, it’s heartening if you’re the kind of person who appreciates and uplifts young women and their passions. To a lot of other people, Greta getting accolades is some kind of personal affront.

Now, I have not done a comprehensive study of who likes Greta and who hates her but I can say that in my social media feeds, the only people I’ve seen complaining about Greta are cis-guys. They say stuff like the above-pasted tweet (and before you get on me about not blocking the name of the tweeter, be assured he has over 12,000 followers so he’s not worried about the public finding out that he’s a Greta detractor) and suggest that she is somehow not a good activist because…fuck if I know. I never studied Angry CisDude in college so I can’t always translate.

Grown men are really awful to teen girls in general. It’s a truism that society sneers at the things teen girls like, such as their favorite shows and music. Media portrayals of teen girls have historically been deeply unfair. Ditzy sisters obsessed with lip gloss abounded on the sitcoms of my youth. Being “like a girl” is considered an insult to this day.

But then when a teen girl has passion, smarts, and valid concerns and uses all of the above to mount a global movement for change, that’s also not ok.

What the fuck, guys? What can young women do that will make you happy?

On second thought, don’t answer that.

I’m sick of having to defend women of all ages from the sneering derision of guys who think they could do the thing better while, at the same time, not doing the thing at all. If you don’t think Greta’s way of being an activist and global citizen is admirable, get off Twitter and show me you can do it better, Until then, kindly shut the fuck up.

OMFG, minutes after I hit publish on this post, this happened and I rest my case forever.

But at least Greta is still amazing.

Do you know how hard it is to do a deep dive on a small Dutch non-profit when you don’t speak any Dutch?

Basically, what I found is that the organization exists and there are no English language analyses of it. I got cozy with Google translate and pasted in lots of text from their website so see what their deal really is. It turns out they do have some kind of sponsorship program to help people who decide to parent. They also have a whole page about reversing medication abortion. That’s more wishful thinking than medical science at this point so…yeah. They also use a lot of manipulative language about a pregnancy being a “whole life” that abortion destroys.

So, maybe give the story in the screengrab half credit. But as a fantasy scenario where unplanned pregnancy is met with a full array of viable choices it is really nice to think about, isn’t it? Like, what if an unexpected pregnancy didn’t present a binary choice of abortion or extreme hardship? What if pregnancy could just be a surprise that only disrupts life in the normal having-a-new-baby way, not the way that leads to extending the cycle of poverty for another generation?

There have been a lot of panicked news reports lately about declining birth rates and worries about what happens when a country’s birth rate falls below the replacement rate. America is getting close to that and no one seems to know what to do about it. Feminists read those hand-wringy pieces and start screaming into the void and the screams are the exact same ones we scream at people who claim they want to reduce abortion but only suggest banning medical procedures as a solution. People don’t get abortions because abortions exist; they get abortions because they need to not be pregnant. People don’t avoid having babies because babies suck; they do it because it isn’t feasible to parent*. If you want people to want pregnancy, you need to look beyond the womb and into society at large.

Not being pregnant – either through not getting pregnant in the first place or terminating a pregnancy after it starts – are choices people make less because of pregnancy itself and more because of literally everything else in their lives. And in America, we have done a lot to fuck up the “everything else in their lives” portion of the equation.

We have stagnant wages, rising housing prices, student debt, consumer debt, and insecure access to healthcare. Raising a family usually demands two full-time incomes and then childcare can cost about a third of that money. Pensions have all but vanished so any saving people can do has to be for retirement or emergency first. And now we have tariffs jacking up the cost of consumer goods as well. So that’s awesome.

The fact that anyone at all decides they can afford a baby is remarkable.

If we had in America what that screengrab describes, the choice to start a family would be a lot easier. As it is, we don’t have that. We have morality police telling you all the ways the choices you’ve made are bad and you have the economic powers-that-be limiting your choices by keeping you on the edge of destitution while they get richer and richer. The environment in America suppresses demand for babies. It increases the demand for IUDs and abortions. The demand is driven not by the supply of abortion and birth control. It’s driven by the environment people live in.

If you want people to toss their birth control or welcome an unplanned pregnancy, you need to make it possible for them to parent and live at the same time. Until we do that, we are not a pro-family nation and anyone who says we are is a liar.

*There are also people who don’t want to be parents and there are people who are infertile. I see and acknowledge those people and their choices and circumstances are real and valid.

I read Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill right after it came out and the whole thing blew me away. Never mind how unfair it is <insert grouchy foot stamp here> that at 30 years old Ronan Farrow is talented and smart and together enough to pull off such a major upset of the establishment apple cart. Once you accept that you are dealing with a one-time prodigy who has gone ahead and done the work to become a true force in his industry, you can just marvel at what he did with his reporting and with his book.

Farrow pulled back a curtain on the world of news and entertainment and showed us that the worst of our fears are very, very real. The whole industry is littered with casting couches and cover-ups. Locker room talk gives way to locker room acts. The old boys club only admits women who will fuck them – and if the women won’t fuck them willingly, they’ll rape them.

It’s all so foul as to defy description.

But one small thing got my attention and I want to talk about it a little bit. I want to start by stipulating that Ronan Farrow is one of the Good Ones. He is a guy who was handed all the advantages and privileges the world has to offer and he used those gifts to be a voice for the silenced. He could have taken his genius and wealth and good looks and become a smart version of Eric Trump but he did not. He got himself so educated that I’m not sure how his neck holds up his own brain and then became an investigative journalist with social justice agenda. This is a good person doing good work.

So why the hell did he turn to the patriarchy for mentorship?

In the book, he describes several different meetings where he talked about his career with more seasoned journalists. He chatted with Tom Brokaw. He had a sit down with Matt Lauer (before he knew what scum Matt Lauer is, mind you). He met with male executives at NBC about his plans. Men, men, and more men.

Never mind that he came out of MSNBC, a network that basically fills time all day until 9pm when Rachel Maddow starts her show. Never mind that Savannah Guthrie, who also started as an MSNBC anchor working with Chuck Todd, was probably just as available to him as Matt Lauer. He didn’t talk about going to either of those venerable women to ask how they got where they got or how to work within an oppressive system to do good work.

He talked to other guys. Some of them were the worst guys. Guys who went from mentor to investigative subject before his very eyes.

I don’t know for sure that Farrow didn’t ask women at NBC for their thoughts on how he could progress but, if he did, he didn’t write about it. He wrote about the men. It just goes to show that even a man as exceptional as Ronan Farrow has the instinctive pull toward the authority of the patriarchy.

How would his process have been different if he had spoken to Rachel Maddow at the beginning of his investigation into Weinstein? Why didn’t he take advantage of her expertise as an investigator without peer? Her research department is probably the best in the business. She knows about doing deep dives into very dark, very dirty subject matter. Why didn’t he rely on her?

He described how fearless Maddow was when the network was doing everything in the world to keep his accusations off their airwaves. She sat across the desk from him and asked him the questions that the powers that be expressly didn’t want her to ask. She brought him back as a guest after he had been blackballed from promoting his book on NBC properties. She is clearly a force unrestrained in NBC’s world and he didn’t tap that force during his investigative work, when he was being stymied by leadership.

He also never seemed to go to Anne Curry, even though her insights might have provided him with valuable material toward understanding what the hell was happening when executives were shutting him down. She certainly knows about being silenced at the behest of Matt Lauer.

He just kept asking men why they were so determined to protect other men.

The first moral of this story is – as it so often is – to seek out women and listen when they talk. The second moral of the story is for women in a position to offer mentorship and the wisdom of experience to proactively offer it. Our habit of keeping our thoughts to ourselves isn’t serving anyone. We know stuff and the only way we will pass it on is by actually passing it on.