Some shit I'm angry about

1) The absurd number of feminists, and people in general, who refuse to consider trans women to be women. The fact that the Michigan Womyn's Festival STILL has  a "womyn born womyn" only entry policy. Having a vagina is not what makes you a woman. THIS IS NOT COMPLICATED.

2) White, cis feminists who refuse to acknowledge how disproportionately violence affects trans women and women of color. While I might be at higher risk for rape or domestic violence because of my gender, the likelihood that I will be on receiving end of violence goes way down because I'm white and cisgender. This is also true for pay gaps and just about every other feminist issue you can think of. Saying that is not in any way diminishing the seriousness of feminist concerns. It's just true. Feminism that isn't deliberately, consciously intersectional and self-critical at all times is BULLSHIT. Anyone who feels otherwise should do some serious self-reflection/just be a better person.

3) The fact that so many people conflate the two meanings of privilege and refuse to understand what people mean when they discuss privilege. "Privileged" can mean lucky in a single-instance sense, like when you feel privileged to be somebody's friend or privileged to be nominated for an award. Systematic, institutionalized privilege is a different thing, and it's a very real thing. I benefit from white privilege, as do all white people, regardless of their level of education, gender, income, sexuality, etc. I can walk down the street at night in a hoodie with a reasonable expectation that I won't be shot or harassed by the police. If I ever am a victim of violence or sexual assault, I have a reasonable expectation that the police will believe me and take my complaints seriously. The fact that I might be oppressed because of patriarchy doesn't make my white privilege any less of a thing. Bringing up the individual circumstances of your life that are less-than-optimal when someone is discussing systematic oppression is a form of derailing. Stop, listen, shut up. It's not that complicated.

4) The large number of people who are willing to get on their moral high horse about being vegan or vegetarian who are unwilling to a) get anywhere near as riled up about the horrible treatment of the PEOPLE in our food system, notably migrant farm workers or b) critically examine the way PETA's ads normalize violence against women and exoticize women of color. How do you care more about a cow being slaughtered than about people being held in slavery on Florida's tomato plantations? I do not mean metaphorical slavery or wage slavery, I mean literal, no-pay, threats-of-violence, held-against-their-will SLAVERY. I mean, I get the sympathy for cows and stuff. I'm not condoning factory farming, and I want to smash corporate industrial food systems and slaughterhouses. But seriously, people, PRIORITIES.

5) The border. Just seriously. Why is that even a thing? Why do we need a WALL to separate us from Mexico? And more to the point, all the people who say, "Well, they should just come here LEGALLY like MY (white) ANCESTORS DID." Like bro, seriously. It's a 20 year wait for a visa if you're a Mexican national with a close relative already living in the U.S. Twenty years. And also WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO JUDGE SOMEONE ELSE'S MOTIVATIONS FOR COMING TO THIS COUNTRY? Like, what gives you the right to go to like 90 countries with nothing more than a passport while we build a wall to keep the brown people out? Nothing. Don't say U.S. citizenship, because that is a social construction. There is nothing inherent in you as a person that makes you any more deserving. Nothing.

There are a lot more I could say, but those especially. If you're a friend who's unclear about any of these points, please ask me. I don't mind trying to help out with information; I do mind people who are wilfully ignorant.

Reflections on a career in journalism (stage one)

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll be taking over the reins of my beloved college newspaper, the Whitman Pioneer for the 2012-13 school year. I’ve just finished hiring all of my editors, managers, and general people-in-charge-of-running-stuff. So this editor-in-chief title is starting to feel real, and it’s put me in a bit of a reflective mood.

I joined the staff of the Pio freshman year with no real journalistic experience. I say real because in 5^th grade, I was the founder, editor and main writer for my class newspaper, the Outer Mongolian Press. I put out a weekly paper, though to call it that might be a stretch. The entire thing was written in Papyrus. Articles were just stacked on top of each other—no columns. I didn’t even bother to justify it. If that counts, though, then this was my first news article ever:

Rooms 108 and109 are about two-thirds done with our famous 5^th Grade Research Project. We just finished writing a rough draft from our outlines and are working on title pages and citations. Some of our fabulous topics are Women’s Suffrage, the Oklahoma Land Rush, the Trail of Tears, and Irish Immigration. These projects are due on April 4, and are going to be excellent according to Ms. Zoog and Ms. Jones. Until then, good luck on your projects.

Seventy-eight words of pure glory, and in true professional journalist style, my project topic was one of the ones listed (the Trail of Tears, incidentally). I remember distinctly when Carl, who was in room 108, started a rival newspaper for his class. He’d used Publisher to make something that looked like an actual newsletter, and he asked me to team up with him. I refused him, because I knew that while his paper looked way better, mine had far better content. And more people read mine, in spite of the Papyrus.

Middle school made me take a break from my publishing career, though I did maintain an angsty Livejournal. I actually applied to be staff on my high school’s paper, the Garfield Messenger, and was rejected. I was trying to be a photojournalist back then, so I’d applied for both that and writer. They turned me down for both, which I still attribute to the extreme cliqueness of high school (I was on the Executive Committee for our outdoor program, and we didn’t mix much with the Messenger staff).

Instead, I wrote a few columns for the Watchdog, a political opinion magazine/newsletter type thing that a few classmates started. My only serious one took on the accelerated program I was in from 2^nd through 8^th grade (it was called APP). Though the program ended in high school, the (largely white upper and middle class) students in it got automatic placement at Garfield, a magnet school which also served a neighborhood population in a largely black area. The result was an essentially segregated school, made worse by the fact that the school district had decided to cut yellow bus service for all students except those in my program. I wrote:

If the district is going to allow APP students to come from all corners of the city to attend Garfield, they need to make sure that neighborhood students who live near Garfield are not being left behind in their own school. While APP students may be scattered all over the city, we knowingly chose to go to a school far away from our houses, and we shouldn’t be given special treatment because of that. Even for routes where there is extra room, the district could have allocated it in many other ways to be fairer to non-APP students living far from Garfield. They could have sent out a notification to all Garfield students letting them know about buses and allowing students to sign up if they were interested. They could have given first priority to students on free/reduced lunch, or students living furthest from school, or students with the longest Metro routes to school. They could have asked upperclassmen with access to cars to opt-out of buses and make space for people who can’t drive. Regardless of the way they go about it, the district needs to make sure that transportation is assigned on the basis of who needs it most (students furthest from school), not on the basis of enrollment in an academic program.

There is one more solution. The district could reinstate yellow bus service for Garfield. They’re not saving any money by giving us Metro passes—according to Stephanie Bower, head of the APP parent advisory committee, it’s just as expensive as yellow buses would be. If the district doesn’t want to do this—if they’re serious about “creating a generation of public transit users”—they need to make sure the policy applies to all students equally. If my non-APP friends living three blocks away from me don’t get a bus to school, I shouldn’t either. If my friend chooses to go to Garfield even though she lives three blocks from Roosevelt, she can deal with getting on the overcrowded 48 every day after school. If the school district can’t provide a yellow bus for every student at Garfield, then the APP students need to find another way to get to school, just like everyone else.

I got a lot of reactions to that piece, and it generated a pretty heated Facebook discussion about privilege in the APP program.

Senior year of high school, I also took part in a photography class at Northwest Photo Center. I’d taken four quarters of classes with Youth in Focus, a program which provided free instruction and supplies to urban youth. After exhausting all of their offerings—beginning, intermediate and advanced black and white, plus advanced digital—they paid for me to take a real class with adults.

Our final assignment was to produce a portfolio of work organized around a theme. Around this time, the Seattle School District was closing a bunch of schools to cut costs. Almost all of them were in the south of the city and predominantly served people of color. I decided that my project would be photojournalism—covering the meetings where these decisions were being made, as well as some of the culture that would be affected. I spent a good portion of my time after school hanging out at protests and school board meetings with my trusty Nikon D80. And while I’m no expert photographer, I'm proud of some of the scenes I was able to capture.

Freshman year at Whitman, I went to the activities fair with a purpose in mind. I’ve never been the type to make friends quickly, and I knew that my non-drinking, non-partying self needed to find an activity to get overinvolved in or risk social isolation. So it was my nagging insecurities about being too nerdy that propelled me into journalism for real. The Pio staff people looked nice, and I figured since we got paid to write, I could give it a try.

I just pulled up my application for my original news reporter position, and I’m kind of proud of my 18-year old self. I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing, but when they asked me why I wanted to write for the Pio, I said:

I think news reporting is one of the most important aspects of society—it allows people to stay informed and engaged in their communities and the wider world. I love to write and share my opinions, as well as being attention to things people might not otherwise think about.

My first assignment ever was to cover a transit board hearing about potential service cuts to the bus system in Walla Walla. I biked three miles to the meeting and felt like an undercover agent. I got quotes and interviewed people, and all I could think was, "All I have to do to get these people to talk to me is say I'm a reporter!" I didn't feel like one, but I wrote my first article, and it was put on the front page. I almost quit after my first semester since the job was taking over my life and my editor utterly failed as regular communication, but a very drunk copy editor yelled at me in the kitchen of some upperclassmen's house at our end of the semester party. "Rachel, you can't quit! Your articles are so easy to edit!" So I stayed.

Since then, I've done things I never would have imagined. I've interviewed Dan Savage one-on-one (while I had vaccine-induced typhoid), attended a farmworker rights march in Pasco, ridden in the back of the mayor's car to go see election results printed off at the county elections office and had the executive editor of the Seattle Times call my story on campus rape "hard-hitting." I've spent a month as a reporter for a rural Ecuadorian newspaper and sat in on a live Skype chat with Bill McKibben and a bunch of interns at The Nation in New York City. I've used the skills I've learned as a journalist to write better papers, ask better questions on field trips and learn more about most of the issues I care about.

Next year is going to be a challenge for me. In my heart, I'm a reporter. I want to be cracking skulls, following leads and exposing corruption. But I know I have it in me to lead, to take pride when people on my team are able to write those stories and put them on the page in a way that makes it impossible for people to ignore. I have the rest of my life to speak truth to power and bring the U.S. government to its knees. For the next year, my job is to make the Pio the best damn paper it can be.

Wondering what evil looks like? I don't know, but ALEC is pretty close.

Wondering why Florida has a “License to Kill” law that contributed to the death of Trayvon Martin? Or where tough-on-immigration laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 come from? There is this thing you should know about. It’s called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and it’s the closest thing to pure evil that I’ve been able to identify in national U.S. politics.

Okay, that might be an exaggeration. But not a big one. ALEC is a place for industry and special interest groups to come together with legislators and draft model legislation. Corporations pay large sums of money to become members, and legislators who have a cause they’re working on (say, cracking down on immigration) can team up with corporate lobbyists to draft a piece of legislation. This is what happened with Arizona’s SB 1070, the bill that allowed law enforcement to stop anyone who they thought looked “illegal” and demand proof of legal residency in the United States. That bill was based on a model piece of legislation drafted by the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Committee at a time when both the National Rifle Association and the Corrections Corporation of America were members of the committee. Corrections Corp has since dropped their ALEC membership, but I’m sure they’re making out nicely with all the new immigration detainees that Arizona’s largely privatized prison system has to take care of.

I could list dozens of examples like this, but the wonderful folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have set up an ALEC Exposed Wiki, so I don’t have to. Check it out. Read up on the way ALEC works at the Nation. See what Paul Krugman thinks. This is a hugely important shadowy underground anti-democratic machine of evil. At the very least, you should know what they’re up to.

Coming out

This post has been a long time coming, but there’s something I’ve finally decided I need to say.

I’m not straight.

I’ve known this for at least a few months, and probably really the better part of a year, but I was afraid to say it. I was afraid because I wasn’t positive, and I felt like declaring that you’re not straight isn’t something you can take back. Heterosexuality is the default; as soon as you step outside the safe realm of straightness, you can’t walk back across the line so easily.

And also, I was afraid because I felt like I hadn’t earned it. Many of my LGBTQ friends went through long processes of self-discovery. Some spent years trying to hide their identities or convince themselves that they weren’t “other.” Most had to deal with dating people of the same gender in high school and were subject to scrutiny from peers and parents. Many of them had supportive families and friends, but there was still a level of self-awareness and struggle that I didn’t feel I could compare to.

I’ve always dated guys, keeping my crushes on female friends under wraps until after we’d all graduated from high school. Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with women about as often as I’ve had a boyfriend, but something about my desire seemed fundamentally different. There wasn’t anything sexual about it; it was all about admiration and devotion. My crushes on women tapered off as I got my first serious boyfriends in high school, and I laid the thought of same-sex attraction to rest.

But after two years of long-distance college relationship, I found myself single again. Faced with the prospect of dating and hooking up, I started thinking vaguely about women again. I told myself that in the right state of mind (slightly intoxicated, somewhat horny), I could see myself hooking up with someone who wasn’t a guy. But this was all theoretical, until I actually tried it a few months ago. And I liked it. A lot.

Since then, I’ve opened myself up to the idea of desiring women, of not discriminating based on gender when I’m attracted to someone. And lo and behold, that voice in the back of my head telling me to reconsider has only gotten stronger.

Still, I didn’t want to label myself. How could I say I was queer when I hadn’t actually slept with or dated anyone who wasn’t male? On the other hand, denying this part of myself seemed like lying, not to mention furthering the invisibility of the substantial non-straight contingent of people in the world. I lamented this to my friends, many of whom are LGBTQ. After agonizing over my options for a few minutes, one of my best friends, who’s also gay, interrupted me.

“Rachel, our tent is small enough as it is. You’re an awesome person, and we’d love to have the company.”

I began to speak openly about my experiences with women. Because I go to a liberal arts college in Washington State, no one really batted an eye. I thought about coming out, but it seemed contrived. I wasn’t sure how to label myself—bisexual reinforces the idea of a gender binary, and queer seemed inaccurate given my limited experience. It’s the closest thing I have, but I ultimately decided that even coming out as “not-straight” was worth doing. So here we are.

I have benefitted from and will continue to benefit from straight privilege. Most of the relationships in my life will likely be with men, because I’m more on that side of the spectrum and because it’s what I’m used to. I have the option of folding myself back into the niche that society wants to carve out for me, and to do so wouldn’t be impossibly difficult. I could forget about this whole queer thing.

But I don’t want to. I know many LGBTQ activists have staked claims on the fact that their sexuality wasn’t a choice, and that science has suggested some portion of our orientations might be coded in our genes. I’m declaring the opposite. I’m choosing to be this way, because it makes me happy. I don’t know where I’ll end up, what experiences the world has in store for me. But I know that I’ll live better for keeping that door open.