One memory sticks out to me about the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and probably not the one that sticks out to most people. It’s not the gory video that made its rounds. It’s not the immediate rush to blame a trans person as quickly as possible. Those memories are definitely there. No, the memory that sticks out to me is the reports of people immediately looting the blood stained merch. Opportunists jumping into a fresh crime scene and pillaging what they can as a man dies.

I live in America. There’s a new mass shooting every day. In fact, on the same day Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a mass shooting at a school. But the looting of the merch… that was a bizarre moment for me. It felt a bit like watching someone commit grave robbery. And Charlie Kirk’s grave has continued to be pillaged. And the most messed up part about it is, its not being pillaged by his enemies. It’s being pillaged by his friends. His family. Those closest to him.

Now it’s no secret I was no fan of Charlie Kirk. I think he was genuinely one of the worst people of the modern age, but I’ve said for a while I think it’s important to find empathy for your oppressor. To imagine a world where your enemy could be happy while not doing harm. I don’t say this because these people necessarily deserve empathy, but because I believe all people are interconnected. That your oppressor needs to be set free of their desire to oppress as well. When you begin to see that your oppressor is both a beneficiary and a victim of the very systems they continue to uphold, it becomes easier to see what led them down this path in the first place. And once you see what that path is, you can try to prevent other people from going down it.

A lot of people talk about Charlie Kirk the figure, and all the salaciousness around his death and his wife and the many figures who have profited off his corpse, but they don’t talk as much about the actual media empire Charlie Kirk built. They don’t actually talk about the function of Turning Point USA. And I think in order to do that, we have to, momentarily, put ourselves into the shoes of Charlie Kirk. Not to excuse him. There is no excuse. But to achieve greater understanding of what Turning Point is, and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

Charlie Kirk was plucked from his college campus at eighteen years old by billionaire Bill Montgomery to start Turning Point. I want you to think about yourself at eighteen years old. Eighteen. You’re fresh out of the house, likely full of bad ideas, and ready to pounce on any opportunity offered up to you. Now imagine a billionaire comes up to you and says “I will give you a million dollars. I’ll make you a star. You’ll be a household name and your ideas will be spread all over the country. All you have to do is never, ever change your mind.”

At eighteen, would you have taken the money? I may have. I thought I was right about everything at eighteen. And I think if you’re honest, you would have too. Now, a lot of people writing this probably didn’t have ideas nearly as bad as Charlie Kirk did, but the vast majority of us can say that our views have changed since we were teenagers. They became fuller, more comprehensive. We had the opportunity to learn and grow and become better people. Charlie was paid to make sure that never happened. He was incentivised to never feel empathy, never learn new things, never seek out new information. He was given money and cars and a pretty wife and, if my hunch was correct, a possibility of becoming president. All he had to do was never, ever be better. Its a devil’s bargain that cost him his life. A bargain that made it so that his legacy is not one of an actual human, but of an expenditure gone wrong. What we are witnessing from those who surrounded him is not grief. It’s a bunch of people who put a lot of money into this man trying to get a return on their investment.

The purpose of Turning Point is not just to be a “conservative voice on college campuses” or whatever they claim to be. The purpose of Turning Point is to be a Charlie Kirk factory. To pump out a million identical, expendable talking heads to start podcasts and run for office and clog up the courts with their grievances every time a transgender teacher gives them a bad grade. A million kids whose bodies can be looted if they end up shot and who can be easily replaced if they fail to materialize results or if they realize that what they are doing is cruel. They figure that somewhere in that mix is not just the next Charlie Kirk, but the next Donald Trump.

It doesn’t matter that Erika Kirk is an unlikable lunatic. She can be as bizarre as she wants. It’s not going to change anything. Because all she actually has to be is a grievance beacon. She has to get enough attention that when some Evangelical Protestant nineteen year old from Oklahoma loses a swimming competition to a trans woman, she knows that her local Turning Point chapter is where she needs to go to turn her butthurt into cold hard cash. She doesn’t have to be competent. She just has to get attention. And she is fantastic at getting attention.

The question isn’t “Can Erika Kirk run Turning Point?” The question is “How the hell was Turning Point ever allowed to exist?” How do we stop an organization whose sole purpose is to make sure our young people stay stuck in a state of arrested development by selling their souls? An organization that will gladly toss them away the second they no longer hold the media’s attention and who will have very few, if any, career opportunities once the miasma of the Trump administration has worn off. One day, it will be embarrassing to have been a part of all this.

I wish I had the answers. I wish I knew what to do. It’s very clear that the regressive party in our country is playing the long game while the Democrats continue to be short sighted. All I can suggest is to start building up your own communities. Start creating a long game of our own. Start actually investing in our young people so they don’t feel like their only chance at life is to become a grifter. Start ensuring that no regressive runs unopposed. Because right now, they are building an army of Charlie Kirks whose bodies they will loot for profit. And if we aren’t careful, one of them will end up in the White House.

My wife and I were laying in bed on Valentine’s Day morning. And as I stroked her hair and lips one word kept echoing in my head. A word I loathed and hated my whole life until recently. Dyke. Just a couple dykes lying in bed together. It is not a very old word, and yet it feels ancient. It’s an emotion echoed down for generations that conjures up images of flannel clad lumberjack women with facial hair and thick, unkempt eyebrows.

It’s a strong word. Not like other slurs with their rolling g’s and a’s and o’s. It’s a word one feels in the back of their throat.

I am a trans man, or at least that’s what I tell people. It’s shorthand, a small and simple descriptor for small and simple people so that they can choke down who I am more easily. I am he/him but… a man? Sometimes I’m a man, but not in bed with my wife. In bed with my wife, I am a dyke. There is no part of me that is a woman. Even if I’m wearing women’s clothing I am a man wearing women’s clothing. I am a butch in a bra. A dyke in a dress.

And there will be those queers who clutch their pearls. They will say “don’t talk about yourself that way” as if I see this as an insult. As if there haven’t been generations of us binding up our tits so they fit into tuxedo jackets. Kissing women in smoky back rooms of wine stained bars. Living with our “roommates” and a few cats. As if no one before me has ever been asked “are you a man or a woman” and been unable to answer. So we would just say “I’m a dyke”. A dyke, a butch, a stud. With broad shoulders and a stern face like a bull. Unpretty. Treading where society tells us we dare not tread.

TERFs would see me as some “lost lesbian sister”, as if I’ve gone anywhere by cutting off these nuisance tits. Sometimes I imagine myself as a big tough man with a beard. But not today. Today, as the T gets removed from queer history across the country, I am a dyke. A transvestite. I am all those words we used to be called before they fell out of fashion. And I stand before the world filled with the love of God and the wisdom of all the prophets, just as any human being is.

Lesbian, transgender, these words feel too soft to describe myself. They feel too soft for the brutality it took to create me. I am the teasing in every locker room, the concern in every old hag’s face upon seeing my bald head. I am waking up in a hospital room before pain meds with two new bold scars on my chest. I deserve a word that describes the fact that I will not chip away at myself to be digestible. I need a word that people have to choke out. Those words may be fine for others, and if others feel those words in their soul they should use them. I certainly won’t be offended by new language that helps describe a wide range of queer experiences.

But me, this lumbering ogre with a curved spine who towers over both men and women. For me, it’s transvestite, transsexual, dyke. Words that don’t need your acceptance. That don’t require your validation. Words that don’t long for assimilation, but instead quest for freedom. I am the burning of the Institut of sexualwinsenchaft. Black triangles. Legs wrapped around women’s thighs.

I am a snake handling preacher carrying words filled with venom. A big, broad shouldered bull dyke.

The other day I did something I’ve never done before. Most mornings I try to pray my rosary. I generally fail to do this, because despite being a minister, I am actually very bad at being a religious person, but that particular morning I hadn’t failed in my mission. The way I pray the rosary is not traditional. Instead, The first go round I praise God for all the things I’m grateful for, and the second go round is either things I want God to give me the strength to change or to accept.

But as I was praying my rosary I was finding it very difficult to do that first rotation. After all, the world feels like its on fire. What is there to be grateful for. I’m certainly not grateful for the gas prices. I’m not thankful for my government. I’m not thankful to be underpaid, I’m not thankful for misinformation, I’m not grateful for this war we’ve found ourselves in. Most mornings I wake up terribly angry and bitter, actually. I don’t think I’m particularly alone in this.

So I’m counting each bead, trying to assign gratitude to each one, and at this point I’m running out of things to be happy about. And, with all the frustrated angst of a teenager mad at their dad, I say “Thank you God, for my toilet”. God blessed me with laughter for that one. They tends to do that when I’m at my brattiest. But the more I thought about it, I’m actually kind of surprised I’ve never thanked God for my toilet sooner.

According to UNICEF, as of 2019, over 60% of the world’s population either doesn’t have a toilet, or doesn’t have one that effectively and safely manages human waste. Lack of sanitation services is, quite literally, a humanitarian crisis, and its something we don’t even think about most of the time. We kind of take our toilets for granted. Its easy to forget how lucky we are to have toilets and soap while we have them, but boy howdy would we notice if we didn’t.

We are quick to complain about homeless people relieving themselves in the streets, and yet we allow businesses to gatekeep bathrooms and refuse to create new facilities. We don’t think about how bombs effect the simple human dignity of being able to use the restroom in peace. How ICE detention centers usually only have one hole or bucket in the middle of the room that is very public and everyone has to use it.

I think there are several reasons we don’t often think about these things. I think the first is that we kind of just get caught up in our own stuff. We get caught up in our own lives, our own worries, our own struggles. We don’t really feel like we have the time or energy to take on yet another thing wrong with the world. It feels so insignificant when bombs are falling. And yet, sanitation is linked to nearly every humanitarian crisis on earth.

What kind of world would we build if our goal was just to make sure everyone had a clean, functional toilet? There would be less disease because things would be more sanitary. Less famine because waste wouldn’t contaminate groundwater. Less war, because you can’t make sure everyone has a toilet if you are constantly destroying them.

I think the second reason we try not to think about things like this is because it makes us feel bad. I think sometimes, in the midst of crisis, we don’t want to think about our luxury. There’s a guilt that comes with it. A pain that comes with privilege. A discomfort with truly looking at our own status in the world and feeling powerless. We don’t like to think of ourselves and our country as being filled with luxurious oppressors. We don’t like to think about the little hands that dig up our diamonds or the slaves that pick cocoa for our chocolate or the undocumented people who make sure our food makes it safely to the grocery store. We especially don’t like to think about it because our lives are hard. Our lives are hard, and we can very clearly see that the world is being run by a bunch of idiots who have more money than they could ever spend and who think they are Gods because of it. We think “why should we bear this emotional burden when those guys exist?”

And those are the very people, the type of people who see thousands of dollars as pocket change, who most often tell us we should be grateful as they get us into pointless wars and rob us blind. I think from top to bottom gratitude as a concept has been used against us. Its been a way for people who either make the world worse or do nothing to make it better to pretend they are still superior. As if We should be grateful to them for even allowing us to have as much as we do. As if it is not our labor that brought them into the lap of luxury.

So we have become resentful of gratitude. Resentful of thankfulness. We see it as an excuse for people to lord over us. But gratitude is so very important. Because gratitude, if not coercive, builds empathy. By seeing what we have and taking account of it, it is easier to see what our neighbors lack.

Before I thanked God for my toilet, I hadn’t really thought about how many people didn’t have one in a while. How people even in my own community don’t have one. And because of that, I haven’t thought to help. I’ve been caught up. I’m tired. I feel like I’m constantly putting out fires. But it is my gratitude that keeps me going. We aren’t meant to only see the bad all the time because we have to believe that things will get better.

In West Virginia right now there are people who don’t have clean water to drink or cook with or bathe in. We can help them by donating water. We can go to our city council and propose a plan for more accessible public toilets. We can provide our shelters with sanitation supplies. We may not be able to give everyone a toilet, especially people on the other side of the world, but we can do our best to make sure our government doesn’t keep destroying their toilets with bombs. And when we have a little extra, we can donate to programs that help with sanitation supplies.

When I was homeless in New York, after Hurricane Sandy, we moved the occupation, which was, at that point, essentially a homeless encampment, to Trump Tower. And there was one morning, I woke up having to use the bathroom desperately. I knew that I wasn’t going to make it the six blocks to the only accessible public bathroom, so I did what I had to do in the streets. And I could see Trump Tower from the place I was relieving myself. I could see the building that hosted Donald Trump’s gold encrusted toilet as I was debasing myself in the streets, and I just remember thinking “That man has entirely too much money”. I look back now and have not only gratitude for my toilet, but there is no greater view of the depravity of luxury than when one is squatted on the street. I am grateful for the perspective.

And the men with the gold plated toilets will say “If you want everyone to have a toilet so bad, why don’t you invite strangers to use your toilet then?” And that is an option. I think there is something to be said about the lack of American hospitality and the paranoia it has built within us. After all, it was not uncommon for ancient people to allow total strangers who were passing through to sleep in their beds with them, and while I doubt many people will be willing to go back to that level of privacy invasion, I do think it is something we should at least be mindful of. This level of individualism is fairly new. It used to be that you were considered rude if not downright evil if you saw someone sleeping outside and didn’t invite them in for a warm bed and a meal.

But while letting the whole town use your toilet is an option, there are certainly other options that work for everyone. Infrastructure options that can be paid for by our tax dollars. We can’t allow people who have an interest in exploiting our gratitude to take it from us. It is a gift.

It is through our gratitude that we find solidarity. It is not “I have a toilet and I should feel guilty”, nor is it “I have a toilet and that makes me better than others”. It is “I have a toilet, and everyone should. Why does my neighbor not have a toilet?”

So today, thank whatever deity you pray to for your toilet, for all those little things you take for granted. Because gratitude helps you see both when the pot your neighbor cooks in is empty, and when the pot your neighbor pisses in doesn’t exist.

On December 13th, 2025, two man opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney Australia. This act killed over a dozen people, and probably would have killed more if not for the bravery of one man. Ahmed Al Ahmed saw the attack from his fruit shop, and rushed outside to help, attacking one of the gunmen and taking his weapon. Al Ahmed was shot during this altercation, but he survived and his bravery saved the lives of dozens of people that day.

And I wanted to focus on the bravery of Ahmed Al Ahmed because when this event happened, while many outlets were quick to give his heroism focus, many people were very quick to ignore him altogether. Because Al Ahmed was a Muslim, but so were the two men who opened fire on a group of Jewish people just trying to celebrate Hanukkah.

When 9/11 happened, my grandmother pulled me out of school. She sat me down at a table at McDonalds and looked me directly in the eyes. “Something terrible has happened,” she said. “Some Muslim man did something awful and atrocious and a lot of people are dead. You are about to see a lot of people show a great deal of hatred and cruelty towards Muslim people because of this. But you listen to me right now. No matter how sad or angry you are, you can not let that hate fester in you. It will lead you down a path of no return. These men were extremists. Don’t let their hate become yours.”

To this day, I consider this one of the greatest pieces of advice I have ever been given. One I could not fully appreciate until I was much, much older and one I hold close to my chest now in a time where religious extremism is gaining power at an alarming rate both at home and abroad.

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me as I get older, that at the end of the day, there are only two religions. Sure, we may have different texts, different rituals and different names for the divine. Some people see the divine as one God, sometimes many. But inside all these different lenses through which we see divinity, there are two religions. The religion of the oppressor and the religion of the oppressed. The line cut between these two religions knows no religious symbols. It knows no borders. It knows no language.

The religion of the oppressor lives within Christian and Israeli nationalists. It lives within Right Wing Fundamentalist Islam. It lives within the Hindutva in India and within white supremacist Norse pagan groups. It exists among Buddhists, and atheists, if you think you are going to be able to slide past this one unscathed, I hate to be the one to inform you, but they exist among you as well. These are people who exist in every religion on earth, and their true God, at the end of the day, is power. They thrive on control, exclusion, fear, violence and greed. They desire to eat away at anything that is not like them, and their hunger is insatiable.

In contrast to them stands the religion of the oppressed, and they are just… everyone else. Normal, average people on various levels of religiosity, from the extremely devout to those who never really think about religion at all. These are good, gentle, helpful people just trying to get through their day and leave the world a little bit better than they found it. People who believe in peace and joy and compassion for other people. Most of the time they are good, and some of the time, they are extraordinary. Their vision of divinity is love. Its nature and humanity and beauty. A quiet divinity that holds the door open for a stranger or gives a homeless man a dollar in a way no one else can see. It is made up of people who know what its like for the world to dump on you, and who make an active choice to try to ensure that doesn’t happen to anyone else.

And I think these two forms of religion are always at war for our souls. For our humanity. And in times of change or poor material reality, I think that battle begins to get louder and more intense. People get angry and scared and disgusted. And in that environment, the God of the oppressor sits down at a full table and begins to feast. He points at certain people within the religion of the oppressed and says “come, sit at my table. I promise you can eat your fill as long as you make sure my feast is not interrupted by the undesirables.” And so they turn. They buy guns. They spread lies. They worship at the feet of a golden God as he throws them scraps of red meat. Just enough to keep them from attacking them, but never enough to feel full.

But there are those in the religion of the oppressed who will never be asked to the table, nor do they want to be. Those who have turned away invitations and those who once sat at the table and began to see it for what it was.

There is a story many of us have known from childhood called Stone Soup. It involves a boy coming into town with nothing but a cooking pot filled with water, and a stone. When asked what he is making, he replies that the pot is magic, and that he’s making stone soup, he just needs a bit of meat. The butcher in town says “I don’t have much, but I can give you some meat”. Then the boy says “This stone Soup is fantastic, but potatoes would make it truly wonderful”. A woman in town says “Well I have some potatoes”, and proceeds to cut them up and put them in the pot. This goes on and on, with people donating onions and carrots and celery and peas until the pot is full of delicious stew.

Another parable I was taught growing up was about a man who gets the opportunity to go to both heaven and hell. In each place, there was a bowl of rice and everyone had extremely long chopsticks. These chopsticks were so large they could not possibly get the rice from the bowl into their own mouths. But those in heaven were fat and happy, and those in hell were starving. Because those in heaven had decided, collectively, to use the chopsticks to feed each other, where those in hell thought only of feeding themselves.

The religion of the oppressed does not need what’s on the Golden God’s table. They don’t require his scraps because they are not hungry. They have a table set already. They made Stone Soup. They fed each other. Because those who follow the religion of the oppressed are willing and able to see the divinity within each and every person. To see each human being as holy.

Extremism is the result of a spirit unfed. A starving soul pushed to its brink. Perhaps due to material circumstances, perhaps due to trauma, perhaps due to insecurity or greed or lust or envy. Perhaps some people are just born with a hole in their souls. Either way, they are hungry. And the Golden God makes sure they stay hungry. Hungry people are easier to manipulate. They are more prone to violence and corruption. And once someone is used to taking scraps from the table, its hard to get them to see there is any other way of living. They’ll die to protect that decadent feast they can never quite reach. Because its the only food they’ve ever known.

To protect that feast, they will vote in fascists. They will pull babies from their mothers arms. They will slaughter millions. And the whole time, they will see it as protecting their food source. And if you try to get them to stop, oftentimes, they will see it as an attack on their very way of life.

I wish I knew how to fix the problem of religious extremism. I wish I had all the right answers, especially at a time when many people all over the world are celebrating their winter holidays. I wish I could give you the words that could create people on earth and good will towards men. But the only words I have are the ones my grandmother gave me over two decades ago. Don’t let their hate become yours. Even as we resist. Even as we fight. Even as we do our best to survive each and every day, don’t let their hate become yours.

Instead, feed one another. Feed one another both physically and spiritually because the religion of the oppressor requires hunger to survive. Without hunger, people become far harder to bribe with scraps.

I think people have a tendency to see entire groups of human beings as their most extreme members. As if the most violent, horrific or annoying in any group are indicative of the whole. When the reality is, they are just louder. Crueler. More easily noticed. Meanwhile the good deeds of the majority go unnoticed or unrecognized.

So in a world full of extremists shouting hatred from the rooftops, be like Ahmed Al Ahmed. A man who spent his entire life feeding people good fruit. And when the time came to defend those being attacked, a man who made the choice to be brave.

And if at the end of this, you are asking yourself which God you follow, look to the poor. Look to the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed. Look to who is caring for the widow, the orphan and the immigrant. And ask yourself if you’re following their lead. Because that’s where the Spirit of love resides. Every single time.

One of the topics I’m asked about the most as a minister, in private, of course, is intimacy. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I don’t know if it’s because relationships are a major part of people’s lives or because many of us grew up in religions that encouraged people to feel shame around this topic, and people are just curious about what a more progressive minister might have to say on the matter.

I figured this is as good a time as ever to discuss this topic. I’m not a minister who has ever been afraid to veer into the realm of the taboo if I think it’s important to do so.

A lot of us spent our early lives in religious traditions where we were told sex and spirituality were separate and nary the two shall meet. And yet, it seemed to be something our religious leaders were obsessed with. Purity. Virginity. Marriage. Adultery. And, of course, homosexuality. For many religious leaders, sex, namely control over sex, is a primary point of focus. It’s never discussed in detail or with safety in mind, but there is many a religious leader who has quite a few opinions on when you should do it, how you should do it, and who you should do it with.

So many of us have been told we don’t fit. That we don’t do it right. That we are too naked, too modest, too gay. Women are criticized for the same sexual behaviors men engage in frequently. Passion is discouraged and shamed, but it is certainly marketed. Those who are asexual or choose chastity are treated like something anomalous, as if they don’t stand in the footsteps of saints and martyrs. There seems to be no right way to engage with one’s sexuality, but there are plenty of people who are happy to tell you that you are doing it wrong.

Purity also gets racialized, with black and Latino people being seen as more inherently sexual than white people, and thus, more sinful and less deserving of love. Even something as simple as dancing can be deemed inappropriate through the lens of purity culture.

Yet despite all this talk of purity, it seems that religious institutions, namely the church, are often wrapped up in sexual scandal. Adultury, spousal abuse and child abuse happen quite often within religious institutions, and like many areas of society, they often go unaccountable. We live in a world where people see a white man bragging about statutory rape as somehow more pious than a Latino man simply dancing with adult women. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Purity culture seems less defined by how chaste one is, and more defined on how well you uphold some invisible hierarchy that benefits very few people at all. It is the expectation that people are right instead of that they are good or kind or noble or even in love. It turns our bodies and desires into commodities.

I think at this point we have realized that the way many major religious institutions go about discussions of intimacy is wrong, but I don’t really know if we have a blueprint for how to do it right. These discussions are often uncomfortable. So I want you to know, I’m not here to judge you. As a minister, I don’t see that as my job. So that, at least, is one anxiety about this you can let go of.

Because I work online as well, I often hear from people my age and younger about their experiences with sexuality, and it makes me sad how many people approach this subject with a sense of anxiety. There are so many people who are afraid they will hurt their partner or do a bad job or accidentally breach consent or have their consent breached, and in the digital age, we now have the added anxiety of someone sharing intimate details of our bodies on the internet.

So if no one has told you this before, let me be the first. Sex is confusing. And its okay to feel confused about it. Its okay to feel confused or conflicted or overwhelmed by the topic. Because sex is powerful. In her book “Shameless”, Pastor talks about the power of sex, and how the church may be one of the few institutions that understands the power of sex, even if they often abuse that knowledge.

The general premise of “Shameless” is to start a conversation about sex and sexuality within religious communities. It is a very good read and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to explore this topic in more detail. But a phrase Bolz-Weber often uses in this book is “Surface Area”. Specifically, the concept of “shared surface area”. Skin to skin contact and the vulnerability and bonding that comes with it.

When I had my first child, something that came highly recommended by my doctor was skin to skin contact. And this was a practice that both parents were encouraged to do, because the medical community has recognized the importance of skin to skin contact between humans. There is something innate to it. Bestowed upon us by divinity or evolution.

We have a desire for surface area both inside and outside of sexuality. It can manifest in hugs with friends or cuddles with a pet or dancing with a stranger or holding our children. But no matter how we end up engaging with it, we have a need for touch. Because we have a need to be vulnerable. And there are few acts more vulnerable than having sex.

We are naked. Often someone has their full body weight on top of us. They have access to every vein, every artery, every vital organ, and we are in a situation that we can not escape easily without embarrassment. We want to touch who we trust. And when that trust, that vulnerability, that surface area is disrupted, it can devastate us. There is power in that act.

I discovered that I was queer at a very young age, and because of the church’s views on sex and sexuality, my realization of this identity also came with a loss of faith. And because I had been brought up in this rigidity and purity culture, my first instinct was to rebel against it. To go as far in the other direction as possible. Hedonism. If the church hated me, and hated pleasure, then that is the life I wanted to live. A life mindlessly chasing my own desires and my own wishes and my own pleasure. Damned be the consequences on my mind, my soul or my liver. But just like purity culture, hedonism left me anxious, unhealthy and unfulfilled. It becomes boring to live that way. And messy.

So how do we find a balance? How do we respect the power of sex while also respecting the fact that the divine gave us the full spectrum of human pleasure? I’m a man who thinks the divine wants us to be happy, and I don’t think the divine would make sex feel good if it was something we are supposed to engage with in shame.

There are so many expectations around what sex should or shouldn’t be. What our partner should or shouldn’t look like. Who and what we should desire. And so many people end up weird and repressed. There’s a reason there’s a strange psychosexual undertone to the rising fascism we see in this country right now. Why there’s so many discussions around gay people and trans people and western womanhood and masturbation. So many people;s expectations for their lives are in direct conflict with what they actually desire and what would actually make them happy.

It is hard to even discuss liberation without discussing sex. After all, the manner in which we have sex or express sexuality is often at the heart of queer, gender and racial politics. Sex shapes us. It shapes our lives, or gender, our expectations, how we see ourselves and how we treat our bodies. And the conceptions and misconceptions about sex can affect how we treat, value and relate to one another. There is no escaping sex as a concept. So how do we navigate this confusing, polarizing, powerful topic?

While discussing the power dynamics of sex, Bolz-Weber points out that because there is such a narrow window of sex that is seen as acceptable, many people fall to the margins. And when that happens, gaps begin to form in our knowledge and understanding of intimacy. What do you do if you fall outside this cisgender, heteronormative, monogamous, same race, no sex before marriage structure that is expected of us? What if we are gay? Trans? Someone who wants multiple partners or no partner at all? What if our sexual experience is shaped by trauma? We get no guidebook. Because the world wants to pretend those things, those people, don’t exist.

And even those who do fall into that narrow definition of what a relationship should be often go unfulfilled. So many people are ashamed to tell their partner they’d like to try toys or that they don’t want children or even that what they are doing in bed hurts them. Sex is not supposed to hurt, at least not in any way that both partners have not agreed to.

Then, because there are all these gaps in knowledge and things people feel too ashamed to bring up, the power of sex ends up being used in harmful ways. And navigating sexual harm is, in and of itself, a minefield. Because people tend to think of sex in two ways. Either its good, pure, marital sex for the purpose of procreation, or its deviant sex. Criminal, shameful sex. And that is, frankly, a bizarre way of looking at this. Not just because perfectly normal sex often gets villainized, but because actual harm then goes ignored. When something as simple as using a toy gets lumped into the same “deviant” category as sexual assault, we are no longer able to discuss sexual assault in a meaningful way.

In recent years, a lot of these conversations get framed around issues of consent. Which is a very good thing, and a much needed conversation. But Bolz-Weber points out that just talking about consent and the destigmatization of pleasure isn’t enough. That it leaves a grey area. It frames pleasure as good and anything outside of pleasure as a breach of consent, which can leave people, especially sexually inexperienced people, very confused. After all, how then do we talk about having good sex with an abusive partner? Or bad sex with a partner you desperately love? Or confusing situations where you try something new and you realize halfway through that you hate it, but you’re too ashamed to tell your partner, and afterwards, you both feel bad.

Bolz-Weber claims that the missing piece of this conversation is consideration. That talking about pleasure and consent alone can lead to anxiety just as paralyzing and unhealthy as purity culture. That we shouldn’t just teach people to respect their partner’s consent, but that we must also teach them to be considerate of their partner’s body, mind and pleasure. If not, people will continue to stay in unhealthy relationships because the sex is good, and they will also assume everything is fine as long as they got a verbal “yes” beforehand.

Consent helps to ensure that the situation isn’t violating, but consideration is what makes the act fun, meaningful and pleasurable. It ensures that the surface area you are sharing is not regrettable and that the power you are engaging in is something all parties can enjoy and feel good about afterwards.

And that is not to say things will always be perfect. Sex is a messy act that is often nowhere near the expectations people get from movies or magazines or internet videos. Sometimes people fart. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes your arm falls asleep or your leg gets a cramp or your body doesn’t do what you want it to do. Sometimes there are bodily fluids that are… unexpected. But through consideration and communication, you can move through those awkward moments and enjoy the surface area for what it is, even if its not perfect and magical every time. You can appreciate that you are having this experience with someone you love, or someone you like, or even someone you’ve mutually decided you’re only spending one night with. There’s no guide to perfect sex. No podcaster or preacher who is going to prevent you from being hurt or rejected or embarrassed. A lot of it is trial and error. But with consideration, you can ensure that trial and error goes as smoothly as possible.

Because intimacy, for those who desire it, is incredible. That moment where you’re with someone you really care for, either for a lifetime or for a night, and you become one body. That moment where nobody else in the world exists. There’s nothing quite like it.

People often obsess over how to have sex that is good or godly or unproblematic. Sex that is simultaneously exciting and without any risk. And that doesn’t exist. All you can do is be considerate. Consider your partner. Consider your own feelings. Consider if this is someone you trust with that much surface area. Communicate often and try not to get in your head if something isn’t working. Drink lots of water and pee afterwards. That’s kind of the best you can do. But you don’t need to be scared. You don’t need to be repressed. And you don’t have to be ashamed of feeling good.

When I was a kid, I had a friend named Kenny.  Kenny was a gangly Melungeon boy with a rat tail that hung down between his shoulder blades.  Ten year old me was convinced I was going to marry this boy since the expectation for girls in my area was to get married as soon as possible and that fantasy was well placed in my head even at that age.  It didn’t matter that who I actually wanted to spend my time with was the blonde girl two blocks up the road.  I had constructed a future with Kenny.  It was destiny.  So we spent those summer afternoons hunting crawdads in the crick, digging for old steaks in the IGA dumpster to feed his Pit Bull, and eating Slim Jims while watching pro wrestling.  

One day, my mother found out about these pastimes.  She was furious.  My mother got furious about a lot of things.  “You are not to hang out with that boy”, she said.  “I’m not going to have you grow up to be white trash.”  My mom thought a lot of things were “white trash”.  She was a registered nurse who had put herself through college while raising me after my dad R-U-N-N-O-F-T to be with his mistress in Seattle and carried an air of arrogance with her over it.  

My stepfather (who I will be referring to as my actual father throughout this because he was) was equally horrified by the thought of being “white trash”.  He saw his family of blue collar factory workers as “white trash”.  Hillbillies.  Rednecks.  My alcoholic Papaw who turned to violence every time he was annoyed.  My mamaw who covered herself in sequins and blew all her money on slot machines.  My uncle, who spent his days drinking beer while listening to KISS in the garage.  It didn’t matter to him that all those people actually made more money than him, especially since he was still paying off his student loans.  

Being “white trash” seemed less about the actual income, and more about a certain vibe.  An aesthetic.  And when you don’t actually have that much money (and my parents didn’t at that time, though they both got pretty substantial promotions when I was in high school) the only way to obtain that kind of aesthetic is through debt.  Incredible amounts of credit card debt.  My parents were so good at maintaining this facade that a lot of my friends saw me as “the rich kid”.  I saw myself that way.  

I grew up feeling that being a hillbilly was a shameful thing to be.  That it is something you should avoid being at all costs.  That, even though my mother used food stamps before she was remarried, using food stamps was a shameful thing to do.  It was for leeches on the system. My family saw my mother’s food stamps as belonging to someone who actually needed them.  Everyone else’s food stamps were just a crutch.  

My parent’s culture was Target.  It was Limited Too.  It was Olive Garden.  It was all those expenses racked up on credit cards that then got paid off by my maternal grandparents.  It was family portraits hung up on the walls to remind my mother that we were better than everyone around us.  My parents' only contentment were the baubles provided by capitalism and their ability to lord it over others even though they couldn’t actually afford them.

It was only in those moments that we actually gave in to “the culture” that there was any real joy.  Fishing with my Papaw and feeding his chickens.  Eating my grandpa’s freshly killed deer meat.  Going to the county fair.  Shucking corn.  Making biscuits with my aunt at 6am so they’d be ready by the time everyone else got up.  

I loved my Aunt’s house growing up.  I loved how it always smelled like cigarettes and bacon.  I loved the raspy voice of this old indigenous woman.  I loved the way she and my grandmother, our matriarch, laughed like they were still schoolgirls when they were together.  My aunt and my grandmother, that's where the warmth was.  Where the love was.  It was not in the department stores or the shopping malls.  It was in all those little moments where I was with my grandmother.  All those little moments where my family let their guard down and just admitted that the fried chicken at the local diner was just plain better than it was at the chain restaurants.  

And as quickly as I learned that being a redneck was something shameful, I also became acutely aware of our cultural issues.  The rampant poverty.  The drug and alcohol addiction and the subsequent domestic abuse.  The racism.  The homophobia.  Especially after 9/11, the dominant culture of my area seemed to crystallize around hating Muslims.  Black and brown people who lived in town were ok.  So were, to some extent, the gay people.  But there were these other, mythical black and brown and gay people who were violent perverts who did nothing but sell drugs and shoot each other and work as prostitutes.  Never mind we had plenty of people in our own town shooting each other and selling drugs and doing sex work.  Those folks were the white trash, unless they were your family, at which point, they had ‘fallen on hard times and would snap out of it any day now”.

In my 20’s I married a hillbilly man, much to my parents’ dismay, before realizing something queer was happening that wasn’t going to allow that relationship to work.  (I was trans, but at that point, I had just become convinced I was a lesbian).

I ran away.  I ran as far away from being a hillbilly as I possibly could.  I ran to New York.  I ran to California.  But I realized I never really fit in anywhere.  At least not with other white people.  Other white people found me brash.  Crude.  A bit too honest for their sensibilities.  They’d hear the slight twinge of my accent I hadn’t managed to cover and side eye me.  I wasn’t to be taken seriously as a writer or a creative.  I was white trash.  

But in black neighborhoods, latino neighborhoods, that's where I actually felt welcome.  They had a lot of the same problems my town did.  Poverty, drug addiction, homophobia.  But there was warmth there.  Good food.  Love.  Community.  All those things I desperately craved growing up that my parents seemed to despise. People who set off fireworks.  Who had cooked good food.  Who listened to music and danced.  These people were no different than us.  There was no mythical black or brown person that was just violent for no reason.  That didn’t exist.  The “bad neighborhoods” were just the same as the trailer park.  

It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20’s that I started to really love who I was and where I came from.  The cities were nice, and full of lovely people, but I craved nature.  I craved homemade biscuits.  I craved bluegrass and putting my toes in the crick and the sound of the cicadas.  So when I got pregnant, I came home.  And for the first time, I tried to love Appalachia.  To really love it.  To cast off all that shame. And what I found was a beautiful, vibrant, multiracial culture.  A culture with a thriving queer community and quite a few interracial families.  A culture with a history that wasn’t just lost, but intentionally hidden.  Radical, socialist and anarchist labor movements.  A matriarchal family structure that I had grown up in but hadn’t even noticed.  Birth, death and wedding rituals that had been passed down to me via cultural osmosis.  I was an Appalachian.  A hillbilly.  A redneck.  And I took pride in that.

That was just a couple years before Donald Trump became president and MAGA swept through like a plague.  A cultural rot that fed on all the fear and shame.  That took the worst parts of our culture, the racism, the homophobia, the isolationism, and amplified it.  It preyed on the distrust of the government that had been in our blood since Blair Mountain and that had solidified through NAFTA and the opioid epidemic and the years of poverty, and it created a simulacrum culture.  A culture that promised Appalachians a seat at the table and turned them even further away from other working class people.  It had been infiltrating for years.  Through the churches that preached prosperity gospel.  Through the radio shows that masked bigotry as truth.  Through the schools that were more than happy to bury any mention of The Mine Wars or socialism or anarchism.  Through the shady employers with training videos that discouraged unions, instead encouraging “a workplace environment of familial love based on mutual trust between employer and employee”.  

All that beauty, that culture, that warmth ran down the mountains and into the streams like coal dust.  This place became cold.  Empty.  MAGA promised cheap eggs.  Cheap gas.  An end to all those “illegals bringing drugs to your town” and those “queers who want to steal and indoctrinate your children so they go to Hell” and all those “welfare queens who take all the government’s money so the roads don’t get fixed”.  MAGA is not a keeper of Appalachian culture.  Its a cultural Siren that stands with blonde hair and big tits draped in an American flag, whose only goal is to hold our heads under our polluted water until we stop breathing.

And we were forged into a gun.  Just as we have been time and time again.  A broken, backfiring gun that shoots out in all directions.  A bulwark against solidarity.  The mine bosses used the same tactic, then the government covered up any evidence of progress made through diversity so they could keep using it.  But they couldn’t get rid of it completely.  Because we tell stories.  We’ve always told stories.

Stories of the devil showing up to town in a suit to make deals of prosperity at the cost of your soul.  Stories of mine workers who still dwell in their final resting spots all those years later.  Ghost tales of women who haunt the men who abused them in life.  Monsters who roam in the woods that just happened to hold someone’s pot farm or moonshine still.  Mysterious men in black who come to town asking a few too many questions.  Stories, stories, endless, vibrant, beautiful stories.  The one thing that no one can take from us as long as we make an effort to preserve them.  The “creepiness” of Appalachia isn’t some cultural quirk.  It is a method of survival.  

Yesterday I attended an event called “Redneck Reclamation” put on by transgender artist Sassa Wilkes and community matriarch Gina Milum at a local community space called The West Edge Factory.  The West Edge Factory was once the Corbin, Ltd. garment factory, that, after its abandonment in 2002, was repurposed a decade later by Coalfield Development into a community space that hosts local artists, vocational training, and agriculturists.  If there is any place that truly embodies the spirit of Appalachia, its West Edge.  After all, we’ve always created beauty, culture, and resilience in abandoned places.  And it's always been created by outcasts, immigrants, colonized people, queer people, and women.  The same folks that have always held the torch still hold it today.  

I wasn’t expecting the emotional reaction I had when I walked into the Redneck Reclamation.  All the people from all walks of life in their red bandanas, so many of which had been told by MAGA that they didn’t belong here.  That we were somehow “ruining things”.  That we were “destroying the culture”.  No, we are the culture.  The builders.  The creators.  The keepers of tradition and the collectors of stories.  It is us.  The “conservatives” are conserving nothing.  They’d be more than happy to bury it all, burn it all, and sell the ashes to the highest bidder.  Appalachia was built for us.  By us.  All those women, those artists, those historians and workers and immigrants.  And we told stories.  So many stories.  We played music.  We danced.  We laughed. We ate Pepperoni Rolls and drank sweet tea.

 I cried.  One of those big, ugly cries that made me have to excuse myself.  This is what we could be.  

At the end, Sassa invited us to create a painting of the late, great Sid Hatfield, one of many labor rights heroes that, when combined, would create a mural.  Each of us would take a square, part of the paintings that Sassa himself had already created, and we would recreate that square with our own hands.  Then the squares would be placed together to recreate the painting anew, a piece built by all of us, for all of us.  A mural built not by one painter, but by the community.  Each square imperfect, unique, and important, sewn together like a quilt, sustained not by our political power or isolationism, but by our diversity, our community, and our stories.

That is what Appalachia is.  What it is meant to be.  A place defined not by its bigotry, its poverty or its addiction, but instead defined by its diversity, creativity and resilience.  A place that understands there is strength in numbers and that the best way to keep yourself safe is to ensure that your neighbor is safe.  An Appalachia that does not let its mountains become walls, but instead treats them as a warm bosom where everyone is invited.  An outstretched hand that longs to hold the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  A place where the red bandana yet again becomes a symbol of strength, ingenuity and perseverance.  

Yes, I’m a redneck.  I’ve always been a redneck.  I’ll always be a redneck.  Inshallah and the creek don’t rise.

I’ve struggled with guilt for as long as I can remember. This deep ache in my soul of always feeling “bad”. The bad kid. The difficult kid. The unruly kid. For most people, those feelings would dissipate over time, but not for me. Even now, as a grown adult, it’s a struggle. Being trans is a world that is constantly telling you there is something fundamentally wrong with you doesn’t help. A world that is constantly accusing you of crimes you never committed, constantly telling you that children are unsafe around you, constantly perceiving you as a perverted threat. You internalize that. You take it in. As much as you try not to. You can tell yourself all day that the people who say these things are small. That they are petty and unhappy and need someone to blame for that unhappiness. But emotionally, it’s all still there.

My nickname in high school was “Shrek”. I never actually approved of this nickname, of course, but thats what I was. This big, tall, lumbering, threatening thing. Barely a person. Certainly not deserving of care and kindness. I’m still treated that way, so I go out of my way to be as non threatening as possible. It doesn’t matter. I’ve had to accept that, because of my size, my muscles, my fat, my low brow and deep set eyes, there will always be people who see me as a threat. I’m always going to frighten someone. And I feel guilty for that. I feel guilty for existing in a way that makes people afraid.

Working on the internet does not help. There’s always someone on the internet to tell you how terrible you are, and under the guise of anonymity, you have no idea what their intentions are. Did you actually do something bad or wrong? Is this person just having a nervous breakdown? Is this person simply a piece of shit? If you’re like me, you just assume the first one. That somehow, you’re always managing to fuck it up. Because you’re bad. You’re wrong. You’re one of God’s mistakes. Barely human.

I’ve gone to therapy. I’m still in therapy. I’ve been in therapy since I needed a therapist to sign off on my gender affirming care and she has been fantastic. I’m far happier than I used to be. After transition I was able to quit drinking, find a good relationship, and return to faith. And yet, the guilt remained. Things I did as a literal child still haunted me, no matter how many times my therapist assured me it wasn’t actually a big deal. “Cognitive distortions” she called them. Beliefs about one’s self or the world that persist even when given evidence to the contrary.

I say all this not to gain sympathy, but because I finally found something that helped. And I’m hoping that, for someone reading this, it might help too.

When I reverted to Islam, I began reading as much as I could, and, on one particularly anxious day, I began to research what Islam has to say about these feelings of guilt. Because I’d tried everything else. I’d tried therapy. Medication. Meditation. Prayer. And those things had helped. The guilt certainly wasn’t as bad as it was before, but it was still a persistent presence in my life.

According to the Islamic sources I found, guilt can be good. Guilt lets you know that you are doing something hurtful to yourself or others. There are times it is good to listen to feelings of guilt, because if you never have them or never listen to them when they arise, you’re probably a self centered jerk with no empathy. Everyone makes mistakes, and its normal, fine and healthy to feel guilt when that happens. When you lose your temper, when you eat that extra piece of pizza when you’re already full, when you say something stupid that you didn’t mean to come out the way it did and you hurt someone’s feelings. In those instances your guilt is there to say “Hey, you should probably apologize and try again next time”.

But if the guilt is excessive or debilitating, that is Satan whispering to you. It is Satan trying to come between you and God. He is trying to tell you that you should be too embarrassed to stand in front of God, that you are undeserving of grace or mercy, that you do not deserve God’s love or people’s love because you are irredeemably broken. It is not real guilt. It is the devil trying to cut you off from God’s fountain of love and make you thirst for things that harm you.

And for the first time, something helped. It helped to think of what was happening not as a malfunction of my own brain, but as a spiritual outside force attempting to keep me from God’s overflowing love and mercy. Because if my brain was just malfunctioning, that was just further proof of something being wrong with me. But the devil, well, he’s a liar. He is evil and always lies, so obviously, he would have the incentive to lie and tell me I am a monster.

I’ve never been one to think of my mental illness as some sort of spiritual affliction. I think that type of rhetoric can so often be misused by some of the worst people society has to offer. That it can be used to keep people from seeking medical treatment. It can be used to convince someone who is just different that they are actually demonic. It can be used as a tool of control, exploitation and cruelty.

For other people, seeing mental illness as a spiritual affliction can lead them to deny responsibility for wrongdoing. All wrongdoing is the result of the devil. All sins are forgiven by God. They become spiritually stagnant, relying on this mythos to never grow or change. After all, when you are saved by faith alone, what incentive do you have to be better? All you have to do is believe and you can do no wrong.

But I don’t necessarily think its good to constantly pathologize mental illness either. To treat it as nothing more than chemical reactions and misfiring neurons that can be fixed if you just take the med and talk to the nice lady at the doctor’s office. I think there is something spiritual about the mysterious ways our minds work. I think a lot of spirituality lies in mystery.

It’s why we see someone like Stephen Miller as having a rot in his soul, even though, clinically, he is probably just a sociopath. Something that should, logically, be able to be treated medically. But I think deep down we also realize that there is a difference between the medical diagnosis and the soul rot. The iblis. The demonic influence. Whatever you want to call the voice that gets in between you and God, beauty, nature, the universe and love. It is that which truly, honestly separates you. A diagnosis or lack thereof is not truly what keeps Stephen Miller from experiencing the love of God and humanity. I’ve met sociopaths who were treated early in life, and those people, though they still struggle, are able to live fairly normal lives. They are able to have happy relationships, make friends, and have careers. But those people had three things that Stephen Miller did not.

Stephen Miller did not have a family willing to get him help, even though his problems were noticeable from an extremely young age. He did not have systems in place to hold him accountable for his behavior. And he did not have a willingness to grow or change. He had the money. He had the ability. He had the privilege. And yet, here we are, dealing with Stephen Miller. I think that is where the spiritual element comes in.

We can explain the material conditions. We can explain the medical science. We can talk about nature and nurture all day, but what we can not explain is what makes a parent look at their child with obvious behavioral issues and refuse to get them help. We can not explain what makes people so greedy that they put systems in place that deny people assistance. We can not explain what makes someone refuse to better themselves even when they have the ability, especially when they know they are suffering or harming themselves and others. We can not explain exactly why Stephen Miller feels compelled to be separate. Why he wants to be separate.

Diagnosis does not mean damnation. It does not mean you are destined to suffer. It does not mean that you can not grow or change or get better through a combination of medicine, therapy, community and some form of spirituality, even if your spirituality is not a belief in God, but instead a love for fishing or Nascar. If that’s what makes you feel love, feel connection, feel joy, then that spirituality is good enough for me.

It is important to change the material conditions that keep people from seeking help. We must change the societal expectations that create a stigma around improving one’s mental health. But we must also treat the soul rot. The spiritual rot. The element to the equation that we can not quite explain.

We want to know how evil works. How suffering works. We want to pathologize it. Autopsy it. Dissect its brain and find where things went wrong. But maybe we can’t always predict that. Maybe there is just some force out there that tempts us. That encourages our worst impulses. Maybe there’s a little voice in all of us that tells us that we are good when we are monstrous, and that we are monstrous every time we make a mistake. Maybe there really is something out there that we can’t understand that will do anything, sacrifice anything to disconnect us from God, from love, from each other.

And maybe these stories, these rituals, these metaphors, they serve a purpose. To remind us that even when we fall off the path, that even when the whisperings of the devil are loud, we can return. We can find our compass. We can come home.

When I was with Occupy Wall Street in 2012, one argument was front and center. It is an argument that still persists on the left today, and to this day, it’s still enough for nearly any group of leftists to come to blows.

The argument goes like this. Someone, usually a white man who carries around a copy of The Communist Manifesto like a Mormon with a Bible says something along the lines of “We just need to leave behind this identity politics stuff and focus on class consciousness".

At which point, a box dye college student with neopronouns and a trust fund would shout “Of course you think that! Your identity has never been under attack!”

These two would go back and forth, with many other activists chiming in, at which point I would generally just take my leave and go smoke pot with all my transsexual sex worker friends while we discussed which one of us was going to be the one to dig through the Duane Reade garbage bags for sandwiches tonight. I have been listening to the same argument for over a decade now.  It’s a stupid argument.

And it’s an argument that, in my opinion, my generation of queer people had no hope of solving. Previous generations might have. Future generations still have the opportunity to. But not the millenials. Because my generation is defined by a burdensome plague. A generational flaw we can not shake. Which is that we hopelessly, desperately want our dads to love us.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a real dad, (though sometimes it is) but more a dad in the abstract. A metaphorical dad. We want someone older to pat us on the shoulder and say “you did good, champ. You improved the world with your existence, and I accept you for exactly who you are”.  But that shoulder pat never came.

After years of being treated like immature children, we just started believing it. 

We sat there with our action figures and hufflepuff blankies and we zoned out. We waited for the world to change. We had convinced ourselves wholeheartedly that if we tried, we would probably fuck it up. 

Sure, we had a few protest movements. We brought “awareness” to a lot of things. But here’s the thing, we are all kind of aware now. Nothing changed. Nothing moved. If anything, it’s gone backwards. And I think it’s important to ask ourselves why.

I think it comes back to that stupid argument from all those years ago. We can never solve it, because the way we look at activism is fundamentally flawed. Our entire political existence has boiled down to trying to get dad to love us. To try to be “valid” to the dominant culture. At the end of the day, it’s assimilationism. A political worldview based on head pats that masquerades as liberation.

The head pats aren’t coming, Millenials. Grandpa isn’t going to use your pronouns. They are never going to like you. They aren’t going to respect you. And at the end of the day, you can not force anyone to be nice to you. You certainly can’t do that by screaming at them. You can, however, make sure you have your rights. 

We seem to have adopted this misguided idea that if we could just get people to validate us, that human rights would follow, but this is backwards. Human rights have to come first, and, slowly, acceptance is inevitable. 

I think a massive problem is that the Millenial queer movement, despite being built on the backs of trans women of color and lesbians in the 70s, 80s and 90s, has been largely spearheaded by white gay men and lesbians. It’s been “Modern Family” queerness. Ryan Murphy queerness. Ellen Degeneres queerness. A queerness fundamentally built around being loved by the masses. On making sure Pride Merch gets sold at Target, instead of relying on the very real cultural creativity we’ve always had. 

Black people, brown people, poor people and queer people are the culture of America. We built the culture of America. The food. The fashion. The music. There is not a single cultural staple that can’t be traced back to those four groups. At least not anything meaningful or worthwhile. So why on earth are we on our knees begging to be let into the beige suburbs when we already created a world full of color? Why do we want dad to love us, when the people who love us have been around us the whole time? 

What we need is not validation, but liberation. The opportunity to not be crushed under the boot of capitalism, and the many ism’s that have only come about as a consequence of white male greed. Greed is the cause of racism, of misogyny, of homophobia. All of those came about due to the arrogance of white men attempting to justify exploiting everyone else. To have free or cheap labor on an industrial, sexual, and domestic level. (If you would like a fantastic book on this, check out “The anti greed gospel” by black liberationist and theologian Malcom Foley)

To seek validation is to seek assimilation into this system. To become a part of a table that we will only be allowed to sit at if we become monstrous. Gay validation’s ultimate end point is not to set us free, it’s to become Peter Thiel. 

We don’t have an “identity politics” problem, we have an assimilation problem. We have a form of identity politics not based around autonomy or cultural liberation, but around ensuring we gain acceptance and access to levers of power in a broken system. Having power is not necessarily a bad thing, but it should not be the end goal, and having someone who is “like you” in a position of power is not a guarantee that your rights will be expanded or protected.

Girlboss feminism is a fantastic example of this. Girlboss feminism is not about the actual liberation of women. It’s about ensuring that women have the right to sit atop the corporate ladder and oppress others the same way their male counterparts do.

I don’t give one entire shit if the worst people on earth like me or are nice to me. What I want is the ability to exist in the world safely, and for my community to have the ability to self actualize whether people like us or not. My ability to piss in a public bathroom should not be reliant on whether or not Susan from Barboursville, WV thinks I’m icky. Susan is going to think I’m icky no matter how many times I yell at her because Susan sucks. And no matter her opinion on me, I still have to piss. 

When identity based liberation movements actually have that in mind, the question of having identity vs class based movements simply no longer exists. Because there is a collective understanding that all liberation movements are intrinsically linked. That if you don’t have black liberation, immigrant liberation, Palestinian liberation, women’s liberation, queer liberation, you have no class liberation. You have no liberation at all. This must be a collective push towards freedom, not assimilation. Assimilation ensures that someone is always on the bottom of the hierarchy. That someone always gets left behind. 

In this quest for acceptance, Millennials have contributed to making the world worse. We shrouded ourselves in techno-optimism. We held out for fully automated luxury space communism. And we allowed the world of tech giants to be built upon the foundation that we laid. 

Not only that, but the same immaturity and desire for acceptance was what created the entire alt right movement. It is a bunch of dudes seeking a strong father figure to solve their problems and tell them what to do. It is people trying to return to a time where they could simply watch Spider-Man without thinking critically. All political movements born from our generation have been about acceptance. The right wing does not care about being liberated. They want to be loved, and the only love they see as valid is paternalistic control. 

But we do have the opportunity to fix this. We do have the opportunity to give the younger generations something that we were never given. Guidance. Real, true guidance. Not just criticism. Not just critique. But genuine wisdom. The kind that only comes with age and making mistakes. But in order to do that, we have to stop looking for dad’s acceptance. We have to take responsibility. We have to grow the fuck up.

After much deliberation, I have decided it’s finally time to leave TikTok. I woke up this morning and my first thought was “It’s time”. It’s just time. It’s been time and I just keep dragging it out the suffering like a pet I can’t bear to put to sleep. I keep making excuses. 

“I need the money”.

“My followers will be sad”.

“I’ve spent nearly seven years of my life on this project. I can’t just give up now”.

“I rely on it to get donations for my church”.

“I’ll miss my friends and I don’t know where else to find a lot of them”.

But it’s gotten to the point where none of those things can justify me staying anymore. There’s a weird kind of grief to that. A sadness for leaving behind something that no longer serves me. 

To my patrons, I understand if you want to leave, though I will still be making content on Substack, Youtube and Bluesky. I hope you will decide to follow me there. All Substack articles will be available on Patreon first from here on out. 

But I think you guys all deserve to know why exactly I’m leaving. Not just because a lot of you have been watching me for years, but because I really do think, perhaps, the platform is just bad for people.

1. It’s owned by the devil

Now, I understand, pretty much every internet platform is owned by the Devil these days, but Larry Ellison is uniquely evil. He’s just slightly less weird and more private than Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But he’s still just as ruthless, just as greedy, just as corrupt. He still has his dirty little fingers in all our politics. This man is the richest man on earth. I’m not going to make him any more money.

2. It’s addictive 

Again, this is not unique to TikTok. But there’s something about that algorithm that just hooks you. You get stuck. It’s easy to just lose hours of your life. I don’t want to contribute to people losing hours of their life to Larry Ellison. These algorithms were made this way by design. 

3. If you don’t make ads, you’re screwed

I decided a long time that I didn’t want to do ads because I do a lot of religious content and it felt icky to advertise to people who were looking to me for guidance. Unfortunately, if you don’t make ads, the algorithm will bury you

4. I have no privacy

I’m trans. I find the thought of people seeing videos of me from three years ago because the algorithm hooked onto them randomly very annoying. I also have a lot of videos where I am in active addiction, and I would have to go through and take down all those videos one by one. 

I’m also a man who enjoys my privacy, and I just can’t justify being on a platform that makes me feel like I don’t have any. I used to feel seen. Now I just feel watched. 

5. The money has dried up

My Patreon has been slowly dying, and I completely understand why. The economy is doing a downturn, and when people have to start cutting expenses, paying content creators is one of the first things to go. It just simply isn’t financially viable anymore. I’m better off just picking up another day at the car wash. My Substack subscriptions are actually picking up too, and I have a fairly cheap rate. I also will still have money from YouTube. 

6. It’s mean

After I made the video about reverting to Islam, I took a week away from the app to figure things out. When I came home one of the first things I saw was a mutual, a licensed therapist, picking on a trans person. 

There is a unique cruelty to TikTok in particular. Cruelty exists on every app, but TikTok’s cruelty is one that I find particularly disturbing. I can handle overt cruelty. I can handle being called slurs or told I’m “not a real man” or whatever. But TikTok’s cruelty is different.

 It’s a cruelty that hides behind self righteousness. A paternalistic cruelty that can’t help but tell you how disappointed it is in you. It’s a puritanical cruelty that is disgusted by all forms of intimacy, community building, uniqueness and tangible solutions. It’s a shit talking platform. A place to talk shit. It’s an endless lolcow factory, waiting for its next victim. 

It’s always been like this. Way back before the womblands controversy. Hundreds of creators made their entire platforms off creating lolcow content. Everyone was stuck inside. They wanted someone to gawk at. Someone to pick on. Someone to hate. It justifies this cruelty through social justice language and therapyspeak. But it is just cruelty. 

It tears away at people’s ability to be human. To be themselves. To be unique. Because if you do something even a little cringe, and the algorithm picks it up, you’re done for.

7. It’s constantly rolling out new features that everyone hates

I guess we are all being thrown into the AI machine now. Fuck me.

8. It’s rotting your brain

I have yet to see a platform that encourages not paying attention as much as TikTok does. People watch for 10-20 seconds and then pass judgement or decide to deliberately misunderstand what you say. In a world where literacy rates are in hell, I just can’t justify being there anymore. 

9. It’s killing your soul

You aren’t meant to see videos of people being bombed right next to cat videos. Your brain does not know how to respond to that. It makes you afraid, anxious, paranoid, addicted to anger. It convinces you that the world is shitty and terrible and people can’t be trusted or loved. 

10. It kills your activism

It keeps you from building real community and doing real organizing in exchange for the constant dopamine rush of posting online. You have to do more than post online, and no matter who you are, you can do more than that. None of this is real. It’s kayfabe. It’s a bunch of podcasters trying to get their bag. They are entertainers. We all are. You should read real books. Go out and make real connections. Breathe the air. Listen to the birds. Remember what you’re fighting for. The internet will convince you that anyone with even a slightly different idea is your enemy. That they are the reason everything is bad. That’s not how the world works. The world is full of beautiful people who are doing their best to do the right thing. Places like TikTok are also misinformation cesspools. You’re just going to end up confused and uninformed, sucked in by interpersonal drama masquerading as activism. 

Tonight I will be deactivating the account entirely. Pulling the plug on something I spent over half a decade building. A platform that paid for my top surgery. Where I met so many wonderful people. But all good things must come to an end. It’s time. It’s been time. And I’m devastated, but also relieved. I’ll miss a lot of things about the platform, but right now, I’m really involved and invested in my real life community activism. We had our first 6H meeting yesterday and it was invigorating. I’m surrounded by the best community I could possibly ask for, and now that I’ve found it, everything online just seems hollow. Empty. Useless. 

I’ll miss you guys. I’ll miss talking into the void and hoping you hear. And I will still be doing that on YouTube somewhat. But it’s time to let go.

I hate having to comment on other trans people. I do, and generally I avoid it at all costs, because this isn’t the time or place, but I think its time to have a serious talk about Contrapoints.

Actually, fuck it, I’m just going to direct this to Contrapoints. Because backbiting is a sin and I’m not a coward. Girl, someone needs to have a serious talk with you. Internet, do your thing and get this to my girl. I don’t have her email.

Now, I love you, Contrapoints. I love you in that “family member who just joined a cult” kind of way. You’re my sister because we are both trans, but also, girl, what are you doing?

Here’s what I think is happening, really and truly. I don’t think you believe this shit. I think you may have deluded yourself into thinking this is the correct political position, but you’re too smart to actually belive this. No, what you are is scared. You’re scared and you’re pissed off. I know, because I too am a content creator and a transsexual. And I’m telling you this from experience. You don’t, and have never, had the personality to do this job.

I’m not saying this as shade, I’m saying this because I also do not have the personality for this job. I do not have the personality for a million followers. I keep my following small. I show up. I get my bag. I NEVER read the Youtube comments. Because if I did, I’d lose my whole mind.

You are an artist. That’s all you ever wanted to be. But then someone slapped the label of “the youtuber who is deradicalizing the alt right” on your ass and you just got stuck. That’s what happens. Most of us are holding out for a career that isn’t this. But you get labeled a political commentator and, unless you get very lucky like Abigail Thorn, you get pigeonholed and you can’t escape.

You’ve been doing this a long time, girl. You’ve managed to stay in this longer than most, but something changed after “Opulence”. And I get it, that shit was fucked. You spent Lord knows how many hours gluing rhinestones on your face, creating something that, quite honestly, was a gorgeous piece of queer cinema, and if we were smart as a community, it would have been archived and held up as a classic in your medium.

But you used Buck Angel’s voice. A 10 second clip that overshadowed the entirety of your film. And its bullshit. Because directors cast people who have done far worse constantly in far greater roles, and no one says shit. And I’ll grant that it was bullshit. It was an opportunity for the dumbest, screechiest segments of our community to have a shit fit over a simple mistake. Months of hard work on what was essentially your magnum opus, destroyed by 10 seconds of footage from an old porn star with some bad takes. Girl, I would’ve gotten high too. I would’ve gotten so fucking high. I would have been drunk. I would have been a mess. I would have pissed myself on the floor of the Stonewall nightclub.

And thats what you did. Maybe not the pissing, we don’t know each other like that, but definitely the getting fucked up. And we all knew you were fucked up, because we could tell you were fucked up in the videos. That JK Rowling one especially… that was not sobriety. And you admitted it. And you at least stopped doing opioids from what you have told us, and I’m going to trust you on that. I’m not sure how sober you are now, but I’m hoping the answer is “very”.

I was an alcoholic. I know how that shit goes. I also know what it’s like being an addict under a microscope. I know what it’s like to try to get clean in the public eye. That’s why I want to come to you with empathy as both an internet stranger and your coworker before I say what I have to say next.

Your take on Gaza was shit. And it would have been shit no matter what, but you and I both know that post wasn’t actually about Gaza. That post was about you being pissed off. You’ve been pissed off since “Opulence” and the outcome of the last election just pissed you off more. That post had nothing to do with the fact that our tax dollars are being used to fund a genocide, and everything to do with the fact that, from your point of view, the same people who crumbled your artistic dreams into dust also made Donald Trump win the last election.

To you, the left is a bunch of sniveling, whining little babies who can’t make good choices because they are too emotional. They are people who will leverage an entire election, putting themselves and you in danger, over a single issue. You are the adult in the room. They’ve already proven they can’t be trusted. They’ve already proven that they will clip and gaslight and tear you to pieces over every perceived imperfection. And on that last part, you are right about that. The rest of it you aren’t, but the last part you are.

The internet will never be nice to you. They will never love you. They will never respect you. They will bitch and whine and cry and shit on you if you so much as have a zit on your nose. Because you’re trans. They do that to all of us. The right shits on us for being “perverts”. Our own brothers, sisters and siblings shit on us because they want us to be the perfect representation of trans people in the media. And it snowballs. It snowballs into a gruesome, monstrous thing that leaves you drunk and paranoid at 2am.

The thing is, I think this is now your filter. Every political opinion must first travel through this sieve of your own personal hatred of the online left. I think you’ve gotten to the point where you’re an anime profile picture hater first, and a political commentator second.

It’s a similar thing that happened to JK Rowling. JK Rowling hates trans people so much that now all her opinions must first be filtered through her trans hatred. Natalie, you’ve somehow radicalized yourself into being an enlightened centrist. I didn’t even think that was possible.

But I’m here to bring you good news. The online left is not how the vast majority of actual leftists operate. Most leftists do vote. Most leftists do mutual aid. Most leftists do engage with their communities and unions and the groups they support. Most leftists are politically engaged. They are also just very annoying online.

And the most annoying are the ones who feel inferior and insecure about the fact they aren’t actually engaged. That they aren’t actually doing what the vast majority of leftists are doing. Those are the ones who have a million excuses as to why they can’t manage to be nice or bake their neighbor a pie. They have to keep up an air of superiority because they know they aren’t actually doing anything useful.

These types of people are actually a real struggle to cope with when they do start doing real life activism. They are gossipy. They are reactive. They break up coalitions. They start the messiest polycules and then break up and entire movements fall apart. They must always be the center of attention. These people do exist, and they are really hard to deal with. But they aren’t as numerous as you seem to think they are.

I think deep down you know that what is happening in Gaza is wrong. I think you know that the US funding this is wrong. But you are also scared. It’s ok to be scared. I’m scared too. And that fear is by design. That fear is meant to make you consent to the bombing of children as if all of our struggles are not intertwined. Those same war machines killing those children will be passed down to the police in your neighborhood. Those same tactics used by the IDF are now being used by ICE. What happens abroad eventually comes home. You are smart enough to know this.

And if I’m honest, I too used to have a bad take on this issue. I too felt pressured by an audience who demanded I have a fully formed take on it within 24 hours. It took me around 6 months to sort through the lifetime of propaganda. It probably would have taken 3 had I not had the online left screaming in my ear the whole time.

I was able to finally figure it out because I had a really wonderful group of real life friends who were patient with me and forgiving of me and understanding of the fact that I genuinely wanted to do right by people. That the starting point I had on October 7th was one of not even understanding that Palestine wasn’t its own country.

That’s the grace I want to extend to you. Perhaps it’s naive. But in the end we are in this together. I’ve found that in my life I’ve lost more from refusing to be patient than I have gained from judging prematurely or getting reactive.

But I’ll be honest, girl, and this is the part that is really going to sting. You gotta pack it in. You gotta get offline. You gotta get off twitter. You gotta stop making videos for like, a good 3-5 years. Or better yet, change mediums. Make actual short films. Real, collaborative projects where you aren’t just alone in your house with a camera. It will drive you mad. I know this from experience.

I don’t know a single person who does this full time who doesn’t have some sort of vice to cope. Drinking, drugs, pornography, some sort of eating disorder from looking at your own body all day every day. I would not be able to get up and face the comments section if I didn’t have God and a vape and good friends. Because somehow, an invisible force in the universe feels far more real than whatever hellish unreality the worldwide web has in store for me. The internet has damaged me far more than the church ever did. And I’m a transgendered from rural Appalachia, so that’s saying something.

You have to break away from the screens. Go out into the forest. Move to a trailer in New Mexico and paint girldicks with another lesbian. I don’t care what you do, but do something other than this. Its killing you, and whether you like it or not, every time you bow to this hatred, you release something into the world that can’t be taken back. That opinion is gone now, like a bag full of feathers in the wind. You can’t collect it back. You no longer have control of what people do with it.

And should you decide to come back, you’ll be able to come back with an appreciation for the fans you do have. Because you do have good fans. I have good fans. The vast majority of the fans we have are good, kind people. Believing otherwise is a cognitive distortion because the shitheads are always really loud and really mean. And even those loud and mean people are usually like that because they, like you and I, feel like their lives are out of control. Creators are just their punching bags because they don’t feel like they can change their government. They are bullies because they are sad, scared, and insecure.

I hope you take the advice, girl. From one broken, sensitive tran to another.

Sincerely,

Rev. Oliver Snow

My wife and I have joked that we would not be married if we’d tried to get together on a dating app. That we would have taken one look at each other’s profiles and swiped left. She would have found me to be an irresponsible anarchist hippie with a loud mouth and a shit job, and I would have found her to be an impenetrable stick in the mud who posts far too many cringey communist memes. Not to mention we probably never even would have seen each other, considering I only really searched for people five years older and three years younger than me, and my wife is twelve years my senior. Had we not met in person, we never would have fallen in love.

I was listening to Omid Safi’s podcast, “Sufi Heart” the other day, and he said something I found quite beautiful.

“Wisdom is best understood face to face”.

I have quite a few friends that, had I simply experienced them online, I may have hated them. I would have found them annoying, stupid, or bad for “the cause”. Too liberal. Too conspiratorial. Too prone to bad judgement or disinformation. But I know these people in person, and all of them are good. All of them are kind, wonderful, generous people who just have bad internet takes.

I think we like to think of what we post on the internet as a reflection of who we are, but I don’t think thats really the case. Your online self can’t work at a soup kitchen. It can’t show up to a protest. It can’t sit with the elderly or look after children. Who you are online is the best and worst of you. The part of you that gets a bit too bold behind a screen. It is a you that is airbrushed, well lit, posed and propped. Its you in 160 characters or less.

On the internet, you are expected to have a quick response. To be the first to comment on something. To have fully fleshed out ideas on complicated topics within 24 hours, lest someone comment “your silence is violence”. You are expected to do everything, know everything, be everything. And if you’re not, you’re bad and irredeemable.

So people end up posting half baked takes in order to gain clout, to shut people up, or because they are afraid of missing out. I can say that my worst internet takes have been due to not knowing when to shut the hell up, slow down, and listen.

Perhaps we’ve lost something in the speed of it all. In the desire to know everything right this second. Perhaps, in our fear and anxiety and desire for certainty in an uncertain world, we have given away our ability to find beauty in slowness. In quietness. And we have been incentivised to do so.

Our algorithms punish us for not engaging. Our bosses punish us for not giving them all their time. We are told to hustle, to grind, to always be moving and never shut up. To have opinions, but never actually listen. We have chopped our world into 20 second clips through which we pass judgment on others.

Last Ramadan, I gave up the news. Don’t get me wrong, I still had some interaction with news media, its basically inescapable. But I didn’t scroll as much. I didn’t listen to as many commentators. And what I found is that I was not actually less informed. Because I was able to truly look at and care about the news I did receive. I was not treating my brain like a computer through which the entirety of world events should be filtered. I began reading more books. Spending more time with friends and in nature.

I think the internet, with its anonymity and empty glass screens, makes us feel a bit safe. After all, outside, people could do us real bodily harm. But I think we forget they can give us real bodily love too. And they do that far more often. Strangers hold open doors for one another. Children play in the park together. People return each other’s wallets. It is not all hate crimes and child abductions. And people on the internet are far, far meaner than they are in real life.

Nothing you see in this little box is real. Not really. The vast majority of it is staged. Its Kayfabe. It can’t teach you anything. It can give you pictures, but it can’t help you process them.

Maybe its time to slow down a bit. To collect ourselves. To remember why we fight for justice in the first place. Not just for ourselves, but because we want a better world for others. What is the point of anger and concern if there is no hope on the other side? No light at the end of the tunnel?

So today, go outside. Listen to the birdsong. Smell the air. Remember you are human. Because this little box may give you comfort, it may give you information. But its rarely going to give you wisdom. Wisdom is best understood face to face.

You aren’t going to get Socialism if you can’t be social, and people are a lot easier to love in person.

Last week, my congregation and I went outside to work in the garden.  It was one of those days that felt a little bit perfect.  A bit of sunshine in the midst of the chaos.  We used different tools, but the goal was the same, to clear out the weeds that had grown over the bed.  To leave that which needed to remain, and to rid ourselves of the rest.  We went outside and with shovels and rakes and tillers and garden hoes, we cleared out the weeds in far less time than any of us expected.  It was good.  It was satisfying.  The only thing that would have made it better was a nice big pitcher of fresh lemonade, a note I put in the back of my mind for our next environmental stewardship day. 

When I was a young activist, a phrase often circled around the activist circles. It may still circle around, I’m not sure if the younger generation is familiar with it or not.  The phrase is “I do not dream of labor”.  It is usually said in response to someone asking what your dream job is. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the sentiment.  Every job feels like endless, meaningless, pointless toil for the most part.  Few of us have jobs we find rewarding and even if we do we tend to feel overworked and underpaid.  We dedicate our lives to toil, only for a rich man in a tower somewhere to make a fortune off our hard work.  But despite knowing all this,  I hate that phrase.  Always have.  

Because in a city not too far from where I grew up there was a giant mural of four coal miners.  Above that mural was another phrase, this one created by greek playwright Sophocles,  “Without labor, nothing prospers”.

When we think of labor, we tend to think of it in terms of the work we do that pays us money.  We think of it in terms of our relationship to income, to profit, to capital.  But is that what labor is?  Is it really?  Was what we did in the garden not labor?  It certainly felt like labor.  And yet no money exchanged hands.  No checks were cut.  No wages dispersed.  We did that not for money, but for the good of one another.

Perhaps it is time to redefine our relationship with labor.  Perhaps it is time to stop defining it as that which we do for our boss to make money, and start defining it as that which we do to ensure we prosper.  This reframing changes everything.  Because then one must ask themselves why so many jobs are done, and why so many go undone.  Does the world really need more senior assistant advertising and synergy managers for a tech company that is destroying the planet, when we can’t find enough people to care for the elderly?  And why is the former paid more than the latter?  Why is it that there are still potholes in the roads, but there are also, somehow, very few job listings for road construction workers?  Why is it that being a CEO can rake in billions, but being a mother, literally using your body to bring the next generation into the world, is somehow not considered real work worthy of a living wage?

I think our relationship with labor has been built this way by design.  To convince us we are lazy if we do not want to toil away doing something useless in order to make a rich man richer for the rest of our lives.  

But I do dream of labor.  My God, do I dream of it.  Every single day.  I dream of making lemonade for my friends.  I dream of making little movies for people to watch.  My church.  That place.  That is my dream.  

No one had to go outside and help in that garden.  Not a single one of us had a financial incentive to do so.  We did not go out and dig up weeds in the sun because we were seeking profit.  We did it because we loved one another.  Because we wanted to watch something grow.  Because we wanted to dig our hands in the dirt and feel close to the life and divinity of the earth.  We did it because we wanted to create something that prospered.  

My wife and I often pray together.  And in Islam, we are supposed to pray five times a day.  I’m not sure we have ever actually managed to do that.  I know I haven’t.  And part of the reason why is that the society we live in doesn’t allow time for that.  Prayers often fall when I’m on my way to work or when its time for her to pick the children up from school.  And also, I work in an airport and I do not think the residents of Huntington, West Virginia are prepared to hear the Muslim call to prayer in that location.  I’m fairly sure if a lot of these people heard my phone go “Allahu Akbar” as they are waiting for their flight I would be shot.  

But despite not feeling safe enough or like I have the time to do it, I do appreciate how disruptive the call to prayer is.  I appreciate that five times a day, you are expected to stop working and commune with the divine.  Most religions have some sort of resting practices, whether it be daily prayer, meditation, or a sabbath.  For years, religions have created complex rituals around work and rest.  They have studied the moon, the stars, human behavior and the way plants grow in order to find what we now halfheartedly refer to as a work/life balance. We have fought wars for it.  We’ve died for it.  Appalachians know that better than almost anyone.  At least we should.

And yet, our greed always finds new and exciting ways to wipe out all that study.  All that progress.  All those things that all those humans did over all those years to make our lives better.  The greed of men was what forced people into slavery, into indentured servitude.  It is what made sure our brothers died for oil and its what made our grandfathers cough up black dust.  

I love the call to prayer because it disrupts those systems of greed and corruption that tell us our bodies are only worthy if they are profitable.  It is a reminder that we are human.  That we do not exist just to make someone else money before we die.  The call to prayer is an 8 minute strike five times a day.  One I wish I was brave enough to engage in anywhere other than my home.

Both earth day and May day are coming up.  One holiday meant to remind us of our relationship to the earth. The other to remind us of our relationship to labor.  Bur both holidays remind us that we do have obligations.  Obligations to the earth which nourishes us, and obligations to the community which sustains us.  We are not islands.  We do not do this alone.  

Just like in the garden, each of us may have a different tool, a different ability, a different energy level.  But everyone has something to give.  Everyone, no matter who you are, is capable of labor.  Because every one of us is important in our own way.  Without all of us, nothing prospers.

It was 3am when I realized it. I had been scrolling through TikTok, mindlessly refreshing my own page while watching television, watching the view count go up and up. Sometimes only by one or two, but always at least a little bit every second. That’s when it struck me.

I am literally always being watched.

Every day, every hour, every second, someone is seeing my face. Formulating opinions. Passing judgement. My stomach began to turn. In that moment I just thought “I need to quit”.

I’m not very good at being a content creator. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’m pretty decent at the act of content creation. People seem to like what I do, and for the most part, I like doing it. But there’s all this other stuff. The stuff that happens behind the scenes that no one sees.

The stalkers. The lurid fan art. The people coming up to you in public and hugging you without consent. The never, ever being alone.

The never being alone part is what gets me the most. It’s to the point now where I have a perpetual comments section that rolls through my head. A crowd of invisible, nonexistent people who comment on every action I make in life. Every act, no matter how small, is punctuated by how I believe this invisible comments section will react. And they are almost always cruel.

Every time I buy chocolate for my wife, the comments section says “Don’t you know how chocolate is made, you stupid fuck! Guess you just want children in South America to fucking DIE!”

Any time an older congregant slips up on a pronoun, the comments section says “So you just ALLOW transphobia in your church? Wow. Guess you don’t actually care about trans people after all you fucking traitor. Typical white religious man. You’re such a disappointment. Everyone should’ve known better”.

Every time I tell my child to do the dishes for the sixteenth time, the comments section says “Wow, you can’t respect your neurodivergent child engaging with their special interest? You have to STOP them to do a CHORE. Disgusting parenting.”

Even when I make love to my own wife, I feel watched. “I can’t believe you two are into THAT. Look how fucking stupid you look. You should be ashamed of yourself. Look at how fat you are. She deserves better.” It’s gotten so bad I’ve had to just stop sometimes and take an anxiety med. I’m pretty sure that the internet has given me more sexual anxiety than the church ever did. Far more shame.

I don’t think everyone has digital anxiety to this extent. I think the level of absolute lunacy my job is driving me to is actually probably pretty rare, but I think we all feel it a little bit. That feeling of being watched.

At any moment, you could trip on the sidewalk, and someone could have their phone out to film, and if they upload it and it goes viral, now you are “sidewalk tripping guy” forever.

You could have a fallout with a friend and they could upload the lurid details to the internet. All your texts. Your private conversations. All those dumb things you said in the heat of the moment.

Any sexual encounter becomes a landmine. That man could be secretly recording you so he can share it with all his friends. He could drug and rape you and then post it to the internet. Share it around in group chats. Teach other men to do the same. After a while, most people would probably just assume it was staged or AI. Not the worst moment of your life. A copy of a copy of a copy of all your trauma. A little piece of you, distributed and sold in a lurid compilation.

Is it any wonder no one wants to leave the house? Is it any wonder the kids don’t go outside to play anymore? The tech bros keep complaining about the birth rates falling, but it is their own addictive technology contributing to it. Men keep complaining they can’t find a girlfriend, but how is any woman supposed to trust a generation of men who have learned that sex is supposed to look like what they see online?

AI generation has not helped with any of this. Now you don’t even have to be the tripping guy, the argumentative friend, the woman being raped. Now people can just AI generate your face onto that person’s body. They can make you the victim of a crime. They can make you the perpetrator of a crime.

We see each other’s pain through the safe distance of a screen and we aren’t sure how to process it. It is simultaneously hyper-real and not real at all. That child is dying in Gaza. That same child is also dying in your living room. They are right in front of your face. They are on the other side of the world. How on earth are we supposed to process that?

We use our phones to bet on wars. On politicians. On who lives and who dies.

Political discourse is no longer about who has the best ideas, it’s about who can present those ideas in ways that generate the most engagement. And what gets engagement is often furthest from the truth. This is the reason our country is a dumpster fire right now. You didn’t vote for him. But you commented on him. You retweeted him. You helped raise him to power because you couldn’t look away. We all did that. We are all complicit. On the internet, all attention is good attention.

Why are we shocked that our government is a series of lolcows? Why are we shocked that most leftists we see online are the most shocking looking and annoying? Why are we shocked that Joe Rogan, a man who made his career getting punched in the head until he got brain damage, is the most popular podcaster in America? Everyone has been siphoned off into algorithmically generated categories meant to be marketed to. And the people who fit those categories best will always rise to the top. People will always react to things that confirm their biases.

You are who the marketing executives say you are. And you are that forever. No space for grace or growth or learning new things. Why bother? You are that tweet you made at 16. You are your search history. You are your best and worst moments and nothing in between. Is nihilism really that surprising of a reaction when your entire life is documented? When who you are at 12 is who you are at 16 and who you are at 16 is who you are when you are 24 and who you are at 24 is who you are at 68? This generation will go into the ground and they will still exist. All their joys. All their mistakes. We will judge their corpses.

Literacy rates keep declining. Skills keep falling away. Why learn anything when a robot can learn for you? We go to these phones for comfort. For pleasure. For information. For intimacy. All those things we are supposed to be getting from other people who can physically hold us.

Even our own relationship to God and spirituality has been digitized. Prayer apps that cost $19.99 a month. AI Jesus peers at evangelicals through their phones telling them whatever tech companies want them to hear. Our relationship to the divine has been individualized to the point any community or collective consciousness has been made obsolete. We are all televangelists now.

I have often wondered how many little, precious moments of my life I’ve sold to these tech companies. How many intimate moments of my existence have been made into content, willingly or unwillingly. When you do that, how much of you remains? Are we people, or just content? We are utterly connected. We are completely alone.

But we are beginning to see a backlash. A desire to regain what was lost. An attempt to move away from the techno-optimism of years past. Maybe fully automated luxury space communism isn’t actually what the goal should be. And we certainly shouldn’t aspire to whatever cyber-dystopian hellscape these tech oligarchs seem to be striving for. Perhaps we need to start really looking into how to balance this all out. How to live with both technology and nature. How to keep the good things our innovation has given us, while giving up the destructive parts.

And that may mean you have to give up things you love. It may mean giving up things that give you comfort. It may mean that the computers need to be at home instead of in our pockets. That the AI therapist you went to for advice gets shut down. That we may need to start making physical media again. That you may actually have to go outside and make friends. Until we start doing these things, I question our ability to be truly happy.

I’ve moved a lot of my content onto Substack recently. I might make this my only platform. Partially because it’s easier to moderate comments here. Partially because I have realized I’m far more comfortable in the writers room and behind the camera, than I am being in front of it. But partially also because I want you to read. I want you to engage with my work in a way that you can’t do when you are also playing candy crush in the background.

I want you to read. I want you to go outside. I want you to make real, true friends and real, true relationships. I want you to be in public. I want you to be in private. Truly in private. With no cameras

watching you. With no endless comments section in your head. With no fear that your ex boyfriend or your government is spying on you. I want that for me too.

It’s time to let go of our virtual God. It’s time to escape our digital panopticon. To begin to give up this technology that is destroying our minds, our souls, our relationships and our environment. It’s time to be free.

About a month ago, I hit my tipping point.

I had woken up to two stories that shook me to my core. The first was the story of Pete Hegseth drunkenly waxing poetic about starting a Holy War. The second was the story of ICE agents stealing the crayons of children in detention centers and ripping up their drawings.

I broke.

My faith broke.

Not my faith in God. That is as unwavering as ever. But my faith in the church, and in Christianity as a whole, to rise to the occasion. I am beginning to see the change. The power of so many preachers and priests and even the Pope himself who are standing up to this regime and all it stands for.

But I can’t help but to think “What the hell took you all so long?”

When black ministers and queer ministers and lady ministers and Palestinian Christians were screaming all this from the rooftops, how did you not see this? What blinded you so thoroughly that you allowed it to get to this point? What made you cast us aside? What prevented you from making a choice?

The church felt it right to judge, condemn and torment so many people who did nothing wrong, all while covering up sex scandals and allowing fascism to fester in its ranks. It does not just have an extremism problem, it has a passivity problem. Christianity has never really reckoned with itself. With its relationship to empire. With its history of violence. And thus, it has never reckoned with its history of looking away from violence either. Of standing idly by, twiddling one’s thumbs as the world burns, and calling it “turning the other cheek”.

At the Charlie Kirk memorial, an evangelical minister had a cross on wheels that he carried around. This feels like the perfect metaphor for what the white American church has become. It is unwilling to carry the cross. To shoulder any burden. Its worst adherents are violent psychopaths. Its best seem to just now be getting the picture.

For years, I’ve watched my fellow marginalized ministers struggle uphill. I admire their dedication to this Sisyphean task. To those of you who have decided to carry a cross without wheels, I salute you. You are doing something important. I am sad I can no longer be a part of it.

It is not that Christianity feels wrong to me, in fact, I plan on keeping many of the cultural traditions associated with it, but it does feel… incomplete to me. Even in its most liberationist forms, the gospels are unwaveringly pacifistic. Ironic, considering Christianity as a whole has been the Abrahamic faith that has most closely allied itself with empire over the years. But I fear that Christianity is far too willing to “find the peaceful option” by excusing injustice. The turning the other cheek has become turning a blind eye.

Its easy to forget with the Christian Nationalism of it all, but the teachings of Christ do not condone violence ever. In any form. Instead, they encourage Non-Violence, self sacrifice, and, ultimately, martyrdom. The most one can say Jesus approves of is property damage.

I do not actually think these things are bad. I think there is a time and place for pacifism and nonviolent action. I think these movements do a lot to encourage the general population to feel empathy towards a cause. After all, if an oppressor is willing to brutalize someone who is doing absolutely nothing at all, it underscores their cruelty, and when people see that, minds do change. Nonviolent action, when done with bravery and intent, is certainly not nothing. It is valuable. It is beautiful. But I don’t think it can stand alone.

The parable that brought me to Christianity was the parable of the persistent widow. In this parable, a widow goes to a judge who is described as “Neither Fearing God nor caring what people think”. The widow demands justice for her husband, but is denied. So she persists. She comes back over and over again. Eventually, the judge becomes afraid that she might kill him and relents.

But what happens when those who do not fear God or care what people think don’t relent. When they aren’t frightened by you just showing up over and over again? When they have created a system designed to wear you down to the point where nonviolent persistence becomes impossible? What happens when you are up against the most powerful propaganda apparatus ever created?

Christianity is incapable of answering these questions. But Islam does. And because of that, the very parable that brought me to Christianity brought me to Islam as well.

I think we have created a false dichotomy where we have to choose between violence or Non-Violence, instead of understanding that liberation requires both. Islam understands this in a way Christianity does not seem to. And because of Christianity’s close relationship with western empire, I question whether it is ever capable of anything other than passivity. Is Christianity, with its endless forgiveness and inability to fight back, ever going to be able to shake the fact that it has become, at best, a collection of liberals resting on their laurels, and at worst, a safe haven for some of the most demonic people humanity has to offer?

This is not to say Islam has never been prone to corruption, it certainly has, (Looking at you, Saudi Arabia) but it also provides a way out of oppression. It gives oppressed people an actual, tangible escape route. It says “You don’t just have to let them kill you, you know?”

Christianity demands that oppressed people take up the cross. It tells us that the greatest thing we can give is the sacrifice of our bodies. And for those who choose to take this path, to believe in pacifism wholeheartedly with their minds, bodies and souls, may God bless them. But these rich men do not fear God, and they don’t care what people think.

At this point, with a congregation of queer people, I feel like encouraging this kind of self sacrificial Non-Violence is little more than leading lambs to the slaughter. You can sacrifice all you want, but you cannot appeal to the humanity of people who have already sold everything human about them. I don’t believe God’s light ever fully leaves anyone, but a lot of the people in power are running on embers. And I doubt that the bloody body of another dead trans person is going to change that. In fact, its probably just going to excite them.

Islam is disruptive, and not just politically. Spiritually as well. In a country where we are encouraged to work every second, five prayers a day, five moments where you literally cannot work, are radical. For nearly an hour a day, I am made fully aware that I do not belong to capital. I belong to God.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve kept a great deal of the cultural signifiers of Appalachian Christianity. Not much has actually changed with me theologically. I already had some… issues with the trinity. Paul has been on my shit list for a while now. I still plan on utilizing both the Tanakh and the gospels.

I’m still a preacher, something that, honestly, made me very hesitant to make this choice, as I was unaware that in Islam, anyone can lead service. There’s nothing technically barring me from leading services, as long as I continue to see myself as a servant and not an authority, a mentality I’ve steadfastly tried to maintain since my first day in the pulpit. I still have a great deal of the hymns. The rituals. The little things I grew up with. Islam is practiced culturally in many ways around the world and I’m excited by the challenge of figuring out how to practice it as someone who is culturally Appalachian. Because at the end of the day, Islam negates very little of Christian theology, it simply expands on it.

And putting down the burden of feeling like I had to be peaceful and gentle all the time has been a great relief. The yoke was too heavy. The burden was not light. I know God is big enough to hold my rage, but Christianity is not. Islam has given me peace. True peace. The kind that comes with the acknowledgment of justice

People have asked if I’m worried about the homophobia and transphobia present in Islam, but I think that’s a pretty silly notion. I wasn’t scared of it in the church. And the violent church people live in my town. Why would I be afraid of it in Islam?

Pete Hegseth has said that Islam is incompatible with Christianity. This is not the case. Islam is not incompatible with Christianity. Islam and Christianity are both incompatible with capitalism. Muslims and Christians can get along just fine. Hell, Muslims, Christians and Jews can get along just fine if they just decide to. They do it every day. I am of the mentality that God gave us different lenses through which to see the divine. We are too small to see it all in its entirely, but with the help of each other, we get a fuller picture.

I do not think Christianity is bad or wrong or meaningless. As I said, I am very happy with the progress the church has made, however slowly. I am grateful to those who commit their lives to nonviolence. I’m happy with this new pope. But I just can’t anymore. I can’t sit here and pretend that I believe that Jesus was the last messenger, and while I’m happy to tell my fellow marginalized people to be brave through their struggle, I can no longer bear to tell them to pick up their cross. Especially when the white American church is carrying theirs around on wheels.

About fifteen minutes from where I grew up there is a place called Robinson’s cave. In the peak of the gilded age, local coal miners gathered in that cave. In secret, they plotted what they could do about their working conditions.

The work of mining was hard. It was dirty. Death was plentiful and pay, if there was any real pay at all (many miners were paid in company scrip) was piddly. They had unionized, they had gone on strike, and now the company had replaced them with scabs. The miners were running out of options.

On October 11, 1884, things finally boiled over. The miners filled carts full of wood, lit them on fire, and pushed them into the mines. The coal company tried desperately to plug the fissures, but to no avail.

The mine ignited, burning so hot that local residents could cook eggs on the roads and pull water warm enough to brew coffee from their wells.

It is 2026. The New Straitsville mine is still on fire.

The other day I was talking to a friend. His company severely underpays its employees and with rising prices, the workers are beginning to sweat. They often don’t have the tools necessary to complete their jobs and have to buy materials out of their own pockets just to do the work that needs done.

“The other day the boss came in 15 minutes after closing time to cut our measly checks so I was already late getting home” my friend said. “And when he walked in, he was just farting. With every step he was farting. Now normally I would give people a pass on farting. Everyone farts. But most people when they fart, they would be embarrassed. They would probably even apologize. Especially because it stunk. But not this guy. No. He was just ripping them. Forcing everyone around him to smell them. It almost felt like he had held in all his farts just so he could do it there. I know it sounds crazy man, but those were not normal farts. Those were the farts of a rich man who has complete contempt for his employees. Who doesn’t see them as human. Those were the farts of a guy who doesn’t care about anyone but himself. At that moment I thought ‘I could just burn this whole place to the ground’”.

My friend did not do that, of course, but someone else did. A warehouse worker in Ontario, CA named Chamel Abdulkarim allegedly filmed himself setting fire to packages of toilet paper at the Kimberley-Clark warehouse he worked at. In the video he was heard saying  “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”

My wife calls the period we live in “The second gilded age”. I’ve heard quite a few historians agree with this assessment. This is a time of growing income inequality. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. Gas and grocery prices are beginning to soar higher than most people’s rent and mortgages, as if the rent and mortgages weren’t already high enough on their own. Unless we are wealthy, we are feeling the squeeze.

Even for those more well off luxuries like family vacations are now becoming unobtainable. Tourism is beginning to dwindle due to this income inequality as well as many foreign tourists opting out of visiting America out of fear of ICE.

We are fighting a war none of us wanted or asked for. Minorities are under constant threat. Most of us rely on cars for our commutes, but repairing them is enough to wipe out any savings we have, if we have any savings at all. And while all this is happening, our bosses are forcing us to smell their farts as they cut our measly checks 15 minutes after we were supposed to leave.

The memeification of Abdulkarim was a bit slower than it was with Luigi Mangione, but it is beginning to bubble to the surface. Especially because unlike Mangione’s alleged crime, Abdulkarim literally hurt no one. Not a single human life was ended by him lighting that toilet paper on fire.

One could argue harm was done. The warehouse workers are now out of work. And fire is dangerous no matter what, especially in the tinder box of California, but as someone who grew up hearing about the New Straitsville Mine, I think those excuses are as piddly as our wages.

Something I’ve found myself saying quite often lately is “This wasn’t good, but it was inevitable”. Death is not good. Setting things ablaze is not good. Shooting a CEO or a racist podcaster in the street is not good. But this is what is going to happen when the material conditions created refuse to change through nonviolent or nondestructive means. Even Jesus finally flipped tables.

If there was any Bible verse I would get tattooed on my body, it would be Jeremiah 6:14.

“They have treated my people’s brokenness superficially, crying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”

There cannot and will not be peace until there is justice. It is quite obvious that there is a class of people in our society that is fully willing to torture all of humanity until they own every last penny of wealth the world has to offer. These men steal your wages. They molest children. They bomb little girls. And while they do it, they fart in your face. Under these circumstances, people are going to start setting things ablaze.

So how about instead of demanding that these things don’t happen, we look at why they are happening in the first place. This isn’t just mental illness. This isn’t some intrinsic evil people have in their soul. It is a very real, very reasonable reaction to a system that robs people blind. It is the result of thieves who steal our bodies, our souls, our time and our money never being held accountable.

Protest isn’t working. We are still underpaid. The groceries are still too high. The healthcare is still unaffordable. We are still fighting and paying for endless wars. We pay taxes and the roads still have potholes that destroy the cars we can’t afford to fix. At this point, protests have nothing to do with swaying the opinions of government officials. It is obvious that our government officials neither fear God nor do they care what people think.

No, the point of protest now is to meet people. To network with them. To figure out next steps in our own communities. Some people will use this to build mutual aid networks. Some people will use this to unionize their workplace. But some people are going to use this to find people who will help them set the mine, the warehouse, the fast food restaurant ablaze.

The New Straitsville mine fire does not just remain burning underground. It burns in the hearts and minds of every worker on earth. The rich have decided to fart in our faces. You can’t act shocked when people decide to light a match near their asses.

I finally learned the full story of what happened to Kristi Noem’s dog. Don’t get me wrong. I knew Kristi Noem killed her dog. Everyone knows Kristi Noem killed her dog. But it wasn’t until recently that I actually learned the context of this dog killing.

This dog apparently had been purchased as a hunting dog. It had attacked some neighbor’s chickens. She killed it.

Now, I grew up in a rural area. This is not actually an uncommon happening. If your dog kills another farmer’s livestock, there is a general expectation that the dog will, in some way, be done away with so it cannot happen again. You will probably also be expected to compensate the farmer for the loss of livestock.

It’s fairly common knowledge that if the dog gets into the chicken coop once, it will do it again, as such a thing becomes quite exciting for the dog. At that point you have two options. You take the dog to the (often underfunded and understaffed) pound and pray it gets adopted as a family pet before it is euthanized, or you can take it somewhere nice and do the solemn deed in nature. Put in this context, it is not only understandable, but quite often an act of mercy.

However, it is Noem’s description of events that takes this action from an unpleasant necessity of rural life to a psychopathic act. Noem describes hating this dog. She describes her fury. Her satisfaction at finally getting to blot it out of existence. And she uses this story to underscore her “qualifications” for office.

If you grow up in a rural area, you know that death is kind of part of the process. That the burger does not just magically appear on your plate. That chicken does not simply lay down on a bun ready to be eaten. You have to kill it.

When farmers generally talk about disassembling an animal, they talk about it in the same way they talk about fixing a tractor. You kill it. You gut it. You skin it. Flesh is torn from bone. It’s cut up. It’s made into a steak. More often than not though, it’s not even talked about unless you are teaching someone else how to do it.

When I was traveling around the country, I ended up with a nonbinary person named Kai as a traveling companion for a while. Kai was a friend of another person I was traveling with, and so, begrudgingly, they were brought along for the ride.

Now, I had grown up firmly on the upper edges of the working class. My mother was a registered nurse. My father was an occupational therapist in a nursing home. They did well for themselves in a time and place where those careers could generally produce a decent life. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that my family did not have more than those around me.

But Kai was wealthy. I mean, private school, backpacking in Europe, McMansion in California wealthy. At some point we got on the topic of how we grew up, and Kai treated me as if I had been raised barefoot in a dirt shack.

They were blindsided by the fact that military recruiters were allowed to come to my school. They were horrified when I told them that my grandfather often had a gutted deer hanging in the garage, and that we ate the meat. They were sickened when I told them that the wind around my childhood home often smelled like the cow dung used as fertilizer on the fields.

To them, the way I grew up was barbaric, backwards, the last gasping remnants of a bygone era. A brutal culture contrasted against the “civilized” routine of simply picking up chicken at the grocery store and pretending you aren’t eating something dead.

Honestly, I should thank Kai. Because that was the moment I stopped being ashamed of growing up Appalachian, and started embracing it out of spite. Ironically, it really was the absolute disdain for this blue haired, college educated, completely clueless, coastal nonbinary person that made me love where I am from.  I understand the disgust for this particular genre of human being on a visceral level.

A familiar thought underscores the mentality of rural Americans. “We do the dirty work so you don’t have to”.

It is our hands that slaughter your food. It is our children that fight your wars. It is our lungs that cough up black dust so you can power your laptop at Starbucks while writing an essay for your gender studies class. This is a point of both pride and contempt. We are proud of this contribution. Also, fuck you.

Fuck your soft hands. Your soft hearts. Your soft faces that have never seen blood or death or sweat. Fuck your eyes that have never seen a body that has been mangled under a tractor or stiffened after an overdose. Fuck you. Fuck you. You beast of burden. You fortunate son.

In many ways I’m a product of my upbringing and culture. I’m Christian. I’m stocky. I value hard work and ingenuity. My sense of humor is dark and my writing is visceral. I love a good meal of meat and potatoes and at any given moment, bluegrass can be loudly heard playing from the windows of my car.

But most of all, I’m fully and unabashedly aware that nature is not just flowers and trees and pretty bubbling brooks. Nature is harsh. It is wild. It will fucking kill you. My religious views reflect this. God is heavily tied to nature, and any group of people who has to fight back against a harsh and unforgiving environment that also sustains them, understands fully how God can be both vengeful and merciful simultaneously.

But in many ways, I differ from many of my peers. I’m well read. I’m well traveled. Two things that gave me an enormous amount of perspective that the isolated people I grew up with simply do not have. I have been to enough places categorized as “rough neighborhoods” to know that I get along with the people living in them far better than I get along with people who grew up in wealthy, white suburbs. I wish my fellow rural people understood this.

We are all just doing what we have to do to get by. Sometimes it is messy. Sometimes it is violent. Sometimes it is brutal. But there, just as here, we are held together by community. Black people in cities and white rural people have the shared experience of our government abandoning us.

It is through our isolation, however, that we are controlled. An isolation that is, at the end of the day, not entirely our fault. The terrain simply separates us from other people. Some people I know only gained internet access in the last decade. Some in the last few years. Even the culture and rituals can vary wildly from town to town. The mountains are a wall that keeps outsiders out and traps us in.

To many Appalachians, the white people who live outside their area are rich, liberal elites. They are clueless college kids. They are extravagant queer people decked out in Dior and Versace. The people of color are violent thugs who are violent and thuggish for no reason whatsoever. They are capable of seeing themselves as a strong and enduring people who are struggling against a hostile environment. But their racism prevents them from seeing people of color the same way.

Appalachians exist in a strange place in the racial hierarchy that I like to refer to as “off white”, or, in jest, “Biscuit white”. I frame this as part of a racial hierarchy and not a class hierarchy because it is cultural differences (such as our dialect) as well as class differences (such as our lack of dentistry) that cause this disparity.

While being Irish never even came close to the level of oppression black people endured under chattel slavery, the association with the Irish never really washed off of Appalachian people either. This makes this a contentious subject to discuss. I’ve had success explaining white privilege to rural white people in this manner.

It ain’t perfect, and probably someone with more education than I have on this subject could explain it better, but it does get the job done.

“You are not white like them. You will NEVER be white like them. Your skin may be white, but they still do not want you there. And nothing you do will change that. No matter how hard you work. No matter how much you bend the knee to them. Being white like they are white is not worth the cost. You are biscuit white. Not billionaire white.”

We are white enough to have some benefits of white privilege, but not white enough to ever fully be admitted to the club unless we cast off our culture entirely and become awkward, hollow psychopaths (See JD Vance). Quite a bit of soul selling is involved here.

This makes it very easy for those in power to frame “whiteness” (in the academic sense), as an achievable goal that can be reached, a bone dangled in front of our faces. All we need to do to get it is climb onto the backs of other marginalized people. The system would give us what we need, it claims, but all those queers and black people and brown people are sucking up all the resources. They are bleeding the teat dry.

So our place in this system is to serve as the brutal and unyielding boot on the necks of everyone else. We are the “defenders” of the most violent pieces of America. Racism, imperialism, colonialism, violence against women and queer people.

We have been taught that we must bend so that we do not break. We have not stopped to consider what shape we have been bent into.

Appalachia has been fashioned into a broken gun. And in our rage, we have been taught to fire. Over and over and over again. No matter how much debris and shrapnel ends up under our skin, no matter how many times the barrel bulges and explodes in all directions, no matter how many times we put it back together, as long as we hit a black person or a brown person or a queer person in the process, it is worth it.

Over time, this gun has become warped and barely functional. Held together with duct tape and crusted in rust. Our bodies are bruised and bleeding. But we just keep firing. Because we were told if we keep going, our reward is right around the corner.

We don’t even know what we are fighting for anymore. We are just bleeding and dying and angry. A wounded animal bearing its teeth.

Our children move away, our populations age, our families and communities fall apart. Our churches fill with rot and our once vibrant culture is torn to bits, reclaimed by the mountains themselves.

Those stories about Jesus Christ’s radical love are now nothing more than political props. Those ghost stories that used to protect moonshine stills and warn our children of rich men in fancy suits making hollow promises now serve as a cultural export for the TikToks of wealthy tourists.

The coal is running dry, yet we hold onto it, coughing and choking, too terrified to let go even if it kills us.

“Just be a bit more patient”, we say. “The reward is right around the corner”. Our religion takes advantage of this. Because if the suffering doesn’t end soon, at least we will be rewarded in heaven. The rapture will happen any day now, just hold tight. You’re part of the Lord’s army. Don’t think about it. Just keep firing.

We are always just waiting, waiting, waiting, and frustrated by the waiting, we kill, and we kill, and we kill.

The goal of people like Kristi Noem and JD Vance is to exploit this rage and exhaustion. In fact, the entire Republican Party has become incredibly adept at signaling to their base.

I have written before about how Erika Kirk often signals familiar Appalachian grief rituals. People catch onto that, even if her execution of said rituals is unnervingly warped.

But she is not alone in this. From Hegseth waxing poetic about the rapture to JD Vance using the opioid epidemic as an excuse to detain refugees, the regressive party in this country sneaks in all these tiny dog whistles that sound insane to anyone but us. They speak to our pain. They say “We see you. We understand you. At least we try”.

Kristi Noem’s dog story is a relatable rural tale of duty wrapped in her own warped sense of self. It is psychopathy wrapped in our deeply held beliefs. She is saying “I have what it takes to do the dirty jobs”, but what she actually wants to do is gleefully watch as brown people are slaughtered the way she slaughtered her dog. To Noem, every brown person is a dog that got into the chicken coop.

The job of these people is to make wanton cruelty normal. To frame empathy as being in direct opposition to survival. To get people to equate the pride of messy, difficult work with the acceptance of savagery.

They want the mass torture, incarceration and slaughter of innocents to be spoken about in the same way we talk about gutting a deer.

The result of this is the complete collapse of Appalachian culture. It is the contorted corpse of a coal miner reanimated and forced to dance. But anyone desperate to see that miner alive will still say “That is my brother”. Even as the eyes glaze over. Even as the fingers turn green and fall from the hands.

For those of us who hold a more liberal or leftist worldview, we see this corpse for what it is. We watch our fellow Appalachians as they place a red hat on this rotting body and kiss it and caress it. We are disgusted. We are horrified. And yet our hearts are full of pity and grief and loss. Because we know that they are only doing this because they can’t let the dead die. They would rather carry this rot than bury their brother. Even as the flies around them buzz and bite and spread disease.

It is time to put down the gun. It is time to bury the body. It is time to let all those old things that never or no longer serve us sink into the dirt. The racism, the homophobia, the desire to join a club we will never be a part of.

You aren’t “preserving” anything. It is dead. You have to let go if we are going to build something new with the stories and memories we still have left. It will be hard, but we are used to hard.

It’s time for a new Appalachia. An Appalachia quilted together by old timers and immigrants, queer people and straight people. It is time to breathe new life into this place. Not through data centers. Not through carpetbaggers or through the empty promises of rich men. But through our hard work. Our ingenuity. Our faith. Our ability to survive and most of all, our willingness to build community. Those are the things we have always done best.

It is only when we let this rot return to the earth that the flowers will grow again.

“The older folks are uncomfortable”. These were the words spoken to me by my mentor, the treasurer at the first church I ever preached at. I was a new minister who was still nervous in the pulpit, and I wanted to be good at my job and make everyone happy. Not just for my congregation’s well-being or for my personal satisfaction, but because I was the only transgender minister in my area and I was carrying the weight of my entire community on my shoulders. The church was a place that had been so unwelcoming to us for so long, and I had the opportunity to change that. I had something to prove.

“Can you explain why?” I asked.

“Your sermons are… well…”, the treasurer shuffled uncomfortably. “Well, they’re a little to radical. A little too gay”.

This was shocking to me, since at the time, the last sermon I had given was not even about queerness. It was about homelessness, an issue I had begun to realize that my somewhat wealthy, older, white congregation had difficulty coping with. Was the suggestion that homeless people should be welcome in the church “too radical”?

At that point, I had a choice. I could bend the knee, and begin writing the same humdrum sermons as every other minister. I could sit quietly in the pulpit, do as I was told, and cater to the comfort of the old people with the money as was expected of me. This would have been the easy option.

The other option was to continue on as I had been. To keep writing as I had been, and risk my pulpit. The choice, to me, was clear.

“Straight and cis people have dozens of churches in this town they can go to”, I said. “Queer people are not even allowed in those churches, and as long as that is the case, I write for queer people. Straight people can deal with a speck of the discomfort we feel in churches all across America.”

I want to make it very clear, straight people are absolutely welcome in the church I preach at. They can come, they can listen, they can participate. And they do. There are hundreds, if not thousands of straight people who have found my work in both the pulpit and online to be of benefit to them in some way. But what I don’t think a lot of people realize is that every minister is speaking to a specific audience.

We like to believe that ministers are speaking a universal message. A message that is for everyone. But if you’ve ever been a marginalized person in a wealthy, white church, you know that isn’t the case. Even when you find a very good minister, one that has a beautiful and profound message to share, you constantly have the feeling that this is not actually a space designed with you in mind. That the church is simply doing you a favor by allowing you to be there. That they are patting themselves on the back for their “diversity” while centering those that they either relate to the most, or those who put the biggest checks in the offering plate.

I do not shun straight people, but when I am writing, I do not blunt the edges for them. I do not sand down what I have to say because their feelings might get hurt or because they may start to see parts of themselves that make them feel uncomfortable. This complaint has been one I’ve experienced in every church I’ve preached at long term, including the one I preach at now. Though they have, for the most part, gotten used to me by this point. Once they accepted the fact that the last minister was no longer going to be preaching, and that things were going to change with me directing the services, eventually they began to appreciate the challenge.

I’ve been thinking about this moment a lot since this last Trans Day of Visibility. Because this year, a lot of questions and discourse arose that brought it to mind. Namely around issues of safety and perception within the transgender community.

The first situation was the discourse around the leaked photos and messages of Bryon Noem, husband of former DHS head, Kristi Noem, in which he is engaging in cross dress fetish play with sex workers. Many trans people met this discourse with laughter and memes, but some did not. Some made it their prerogative to ensure, with absolute certainty, that as many straight and cis people as possible knew that he was not, in any way, shape or form, transgender. In their minds, this was the top priority. To them, Bryon Noem was engaging in a fetish that actively demonizes the trans community. He was a powerful man who wanted to be humiliated, and in his mind, the most humiliating thing imaginable was to be dressed like a woman.

The second thing that happened had to do with my local Pride board.

(Side Note-If you are reading this and you are a member of my local Pride board, I want you to know that this is, in no way, me trying to backbite you. You guys do excellent and valuable work. The only reason I didn’t bring this up to you in person is because, honestly, your board has gone through so many changes lately that I’m not entirely sure who I should talk to. If you would like to discuss this matter in private, hit me up, we’ll have some tacos and tacobout it.)

This year, as per tradition, my local Pride board put on an event for Trans Day of Visibility. However, when they went to advertise this event, they began receiving threats. Their response to this was to change venues, and to make it so you had to sign up for the event in order to get the location of the venue. Ironically, and perhaps without even realizing it, they had made Trans Day of Visibility invisible. And in the process, told every idiot with an inflated ego and hate in their heart that they could intimidate us into hiding.

These two events feel interlinked to me. It feels we’ve reached a fork in the road where we need to decide how we will proceed as a community. Where we have to make a difficult choice about which direction the culture is going to go in.

Do we prioritize the feelings, demands and opinions of straight and cis people in order to keep ourselves safe? Or do we take the risk, live radically, and simply not take them into consideration when we make decisions? Is the safety worth the cost? And even if it is, does hiding or catering to the feelings of straight people actually make us more safe? I don’t think it does.

It is most likely that Bryon Noem is just a straight male fetishist who gets his rocks off by putting on big tits. But we do have to contend with the fact that he might not be. What if, in six months, when he and his wife finalize their inevitable divorce, he ends up going to therapy, turning over a new leaf, and realizes that what he thought was a fetish was really him just trying to explore his identity in the only way he knew how under the prying eye of his tyrant wife? This is also not an uncommon thing, as much as we like to pretend it is.

Pretending that trans people never figure out their gender identity within the relatively safe confines of kink culture keeps us from having to explain the nuances of all this to straight cis people who can’t tell the difference between a trans person, a drag queen, and a fetishist. This is a part of our culture that they are unable, or more often, unwilling to understand.

So we become prisoners of their perception. Terrified that if they find out that kink is a perfectly normal way people sometimes explore their gender identity that they will lash out. That they will call us perverts and pass legislation against us and kill us in the streets. But I reject the notion that it is our responsibility to “act right” or to debunk stereotypes that, and let me be very clear about this, they created.

I am reminded of a quote by Jean Paul Sartre in his essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” in which he asserts that these stereotypes are not rooted in reality, but rather the fears and insecurities of the bigot themselves. “If the Jew did not exist, the anti semite would invent him”. This logic does not just apply to Jewish people, but to every marginalized identity. The structures in place need a scapegoat.

Trans people are not predators. We are not a danger to children. We are not invading women’s bathrooms for sexual kicks. But that is the narrative that transphobic people need in order to justify their disgust, their hatred, their insecurity and their brutality. Straight and cis people need to think that there is someone more perverted, more violent, more dangerous to children than they are so they can justify the perversion, violence and child abuse that happens among themselves.

They must believe that they are good people, that they are protectors of western civilization, and because the behavior among their own ranks is so abhorrent, (See: The Epstein Files) they have to believe we are doing something worse. To think otherwise would disrupt their entire sense of self.

The other day I was at a sushi bar that was hosting a drag show. This drag show was an all ages event, however, there weren’t many children there, and most of those who were there were older teens. Probably because, while it was an all ages event, the vibes were closer to that of an 80’s dinner club. Nothing scandalous was happening, but most small children would be absolutely bored out of their minds. There was, however, one baby. A little tiny one, at the age where they can do very little but sit up on their own, smile, and clap their hands.

The hostess of the show came out into the middle of the room, dressed in a long golden gown that covered more skin than most modern pop stars, and asked if this was anyone’s first drag show. A few people cheered, but most people in the room were older queer people and seasoned drag show participants who had shown up because they loved drag, but also loved being home in their pajamas by 9pm.

Then the hostess saw the baby. “Is this the baby’s first drag show?” she asked. The mother nodded.

“Everybody give it up for the baby!” she shouted. The whole room erupted with applause as the mother held the baby above her head like Simba from The Lion King. The baby beamed. It didn’t know much about what was happening, but it knew it was loved. That all that cheering and applause was for them.

That is what straight and cis people are actually afraid of. That is what they perceive as the real threat towards their children. That they will be so loved, so cherished, so celebrated and so welcomed by queer people, that they will no longer be able to be controlled. Whether it be through religion, family dynamics, or social constructs.

They are terrified that their children may grow up to be people who embarrass them in front of their friends. The women are terrified that their husbands might turn out to be gay and leave them. The men are terrified that they may actually enjoy themselves when they pick flowers or use bubble wands or put on a dress. They are terrified of what other people might think. And that fear makes them mad. Because they want us to feel as ashamed and frightened as they are.

That is why I reject the notion that we need to cater to their feelings. That we need to bend over backwards to prove that any man who puts on tits for fun or pleasure is “not like us”. That we need to hide away in the shadows so some insecure man doesn’t blow us away with a high powered rifle.

Now that isn’t to say that we should be unkind to straight people. That we should never try to meet them where they are at. That we should never sit down with them in our own communities and have these important conversations when they arise. Quite the opposite really.

A few days ago I found myself on a long car ride with a blue collar straight friend of mine. He’s a good man. The kind of man who would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it. But he also has been subjected to quite a bit of inaccurate propaganda about trans people. So on this long car ride, we talked about it. He tried to do the “You’re one of the good ones” thing, and I shut it down. I explained the nuances of our community and the things he may have been perceiving incorrectly because he didn’t have all the information. We both left the conversation feeling good about it. Our friendship was deepened by this understanding. It is entirely possible to meet people where they are at while also not compromising your values as long as both parties care about one another.

Marsha P. Johnson used to say “Pay them no mind” and I think that advice still rings true to this day. You can’t pay them any mind. You can’t live your life afraid of their reactions. You can’t hide away or cut pieces out of yourself or your culture because they might laugh at you or become inexplicably violent. Be aware of your surroundings, have discernment about where you can wear your pride pin, but don’t let them factor into your decisions.

Instead, live a joyful, wonderful queer life. Its worth the risk. And if the straights are respectful and want to join in on the fun, let them. We are fun.

What conservatives are afraid of is that we are going to show the world what love looks like. That we are going to let their kids know that the “love” their churches profess is often trash. That we are going to let their kids know that they can say “no” when strange men want to touch their bodies, and they will finally have to face the embarrassment of addressing that weird uncle at Thanksgiving. That we are going to teach women that it is reasonable to expect the man they are dating to wash his bootyhole. That our love is going to turn this entire exploitative system inside out and that their power, their privilege, way of thinking will be obsolete. That is what frightens them about us more than anything else.

Don’t bend the knee. Scare the hell out of them. Pay them no mind.

On trans day of visibility, in the year of our lord 2026, the story broke that former head of DHS, Kristi Noem’s husband was a cross dresser. The pictures, leaked by one of the immigrant sex workers that he paid over $25,000, show Noem with what appears to be either a very large breastplate or two balloons he placed in his shirt. These giant honkin bazongas have now made front page news.

From all information that has been acquired, this was a fetish for him. In the kink community, there are several names for this particular desire. Sissification, bimbofication, sexual cross dressing, a humiliation kink, but whatever you call it, the long and short is that this is a man who gets sexually aroused by wearing women’s clothing.

Cross dressing fetishists have long been a contentious issue in the trans community. Namely because the average straight person in America is incapable of telling the difference between a cross dresser, a sissy, a drag queen and a trans person. To the average American, all people who wear clothing that is different than what is expected for their birth sex is painted with a broad brush. And the stereotypes associated with that generalization tend to lean more in the direction of the sissies and cross dressers.

So, for the uninitiated, a cross dresser is anyone who wears the clothes typically associated with the opposite sex for whatever reason. Cis people can be cross dressers. Trans people can be cross dressers. Mulan and Joan of Arc and David Bowie were all cross dressers. It’s a broad, overarching term, though one that trans people usually don’t tend to appreciate in polite conversation.

A drag queen is an entertainer in the medium of drag. Drag is a type of traditionally queer performance art involving costumes, makeup, prosthetics, music, dancing and comedy. To say someone is a drag queen is similar to saying they are a painter or a comedian. You are describing the medium they work through. While most drag artists are queer, some are not, and they can be both transgender and cisgender.

Transgender people are people whose birth sex is incongruous with the way they perceive their own identity. It is an umbrella term that can include a wide variety of gender identities. Not all transgender individuals choose to have surgery or experience gender dysphoria.

Transsexuals are people who seek medical transition to achieve their desired gender goals. This can include plastic surgery and hormones. Usually these individuals have a desire to “pass” as a sex different than what they were assigned at birth. Some people use these terms interchangeably, especially binary and older trans people, though the medical intervention is really the distinction.

Transvestite is an outdated term that most transgender and transsexual people choose not to use. Though some older trans people still do and there has been some attempt at reclamation of the word.

Sissification and Bimbofication are fetishes in which a cisgender man achieves sexual gratification by dressing in women’s clothing and/or using padding and prosthetics to create a hyper feminine appearance.

These terms overall encompass a large variety of gender nonconforming individuals. And to those unfamiliar (or unwilling to learn) it is quite easy to place all these people in the same box, despite the fact their motivations and senses of self are entirely different.

And because of longstanding stereotypes and the scandalous nature of fetish in our repressed and puritanical society, the generalization people tend to make is that all of these groups are people who become aroused by cross dressing. That anyone who engages in wearing clothing that is “not for them” is a dangerous pervert who wants to give children bottom surgery during recess.

The defunding and destruction of scientific research around trans people and our bodies has not helped this matter, and the little research that has been done often leads to biased results.

For example, if you simply ask a bunch of trans women if they become sexually aroused when they wear a lacy bra and panties, many will say “yes”. The thing is, so will cis women. It turns out that a lot of women feel sexy when they wear sexy lingerie. Who would have thunk?

Trans women see themselves as women all the time, so it makes sense that the bedroom is yet another place they want to wear womenswear. But this is not how trans identity and sexuality are framed. Any sexual desire a trans woman experiences while wearing the clothing she enjoys is framed not as a natural extension of her gender identity, but instead as a fetish that has leaked out into “polite society”.

Which leaves us with the question “What the hell are we supposed to do about this?” And in Trump’s America, this question feels more pressing than ever.

Many people in the trans community see themselves best course of action to be drawing hard lines between the queer community and the kink community. To frame queer people as perfectly capable of assimilating into cisgender, heterosexual society. To them, trans women are just normal, average, everyday women who would be more than happy to go to a Baptist church and vote republican and only have sex in the missionary position if only society would accept them. To them, the problem is the oversexualized queer culture that has allowed this misconception to fester. You can find these people having “No kink at Pride” discourse in the twitter comments section.

However, things aren’t that simple. Sure, there are plenty of boring trans women, but the queer community and the kink community are interlinked by deep cultural ties.

Most communities have some parts of their culture that are not appropriate for children. The issue is that the sexual parts of our culture often overshadow others. Including our contributions to science, public health, philosophy, religion and the arts. A great deal of which is not only family friendly, but has also greatly improved the lives of children and families.

Queer songwriter Howard Ashman, for example, was the great mind behind the Disney Renaissance. He was so critical to the success of the Disney musical that Michael Eisner essentially had the entire animation department pack up and move to New York so Ashman could work on Beauty and the Beast as he was dying from AIDS. Ashman’s queer influence is all over his work. From the broadway inspired musical numbers to the fact that The Little Mermaid’s quintessential villain was based off the drag queen, Divine.

The work done by queer people during the AIDS epidemic also helped to create and improve the structures necessary to track and manage infectious disease. Something that has and continues to save countless lives.

Drag artistry is particularly contentious as a political talking point. But drag is just a medium of expression. Some forms are for all ages. Others are just for adults. To say that drag is not family friendly is like saying that children shouldn’t see ballerinas because exotic dancers exist.

Queer people are parents. Queer people are teachers. Queer people are childcare providers. Because while sexuality is part of our culture, it is not all of it. That’s like saying Appalachian culture is just guns. It’s hard to talk about Appalachian culture in its entirety without mentioning them, but pretending they are the only things about Appalachia worth mentioning is absurd. Both Appalachian and Queer cultures are rich and vibrant. Full of good and bad. Both cultures have things about them that are family friendly, and things that are only meant for adults.

I understand the knee jerk reaction in circumstances like Noem’s to immediately distance ourselves from his behavior. But at the end of the day, Noem didn’t really do anything wrong other than refuse to pay his sex workers on time, cheat on his wife, and engage in behavior that could be easily blackmailed due to his conservative wife’s high ranking government position. The shame and embarrassment comes not from the act of cross dressing itself, but the act in relation to the values his wife claims to stand for. And we can’t forget that she too was engaged in sexual infidelity. With her subordinate no less.

Mrs. Noem’s behavior, at the end of the day, is far more egregious. She gets a pass because she’s straight. Her indiscretion is played off as the mistake of a single individual, instead of becoming indicative of an entire community of people. Knowing this is what makes queer people nervous.

Because at the end of the day, to a good chunk of Americans, fetishistic cross dressing is exactly the same as being trans. It isn’t, but then that begs the question. What are the chances that Bryon Noem IS trans?

In my opinion, the chances of that are fairly slim, however, not completely nonexistent. Most trans people do not have a safe place to experiment with gender, so they start with Halloween costumes or Rocky Horror performances or, yes, the kink scene. Things are not always cut and dry.

We now have a case of Schrödinger’s titties. An uncomfortable situation where an individual’s cross dressing could either be a straight man’s fetish or an experimentation with gender identity. And that makes it very difficult to create a cohesive political narrative. It would be far easier for us to say “oh, he’s a kinkster, that’s not the same” or “he’s in the closet” and try to encourage grace while he works through that. We are stuck in the awkward situation of not having enough information to do either.

In these places of unease, it’s very easy to shut down. To demand people stop making jokes. Either because it makes Noem seem “too trans” in a way that could backfire, or because it demonizes the kink community. But I feel like we are all mature enough to recognize that the humor in this situation comes not from the act itself, but because Kristi Noem finds it humiliating to be in the proximity of kink and queerness. Coming unglued just makes us seem like reactionary killjoys who can’t laugh at an obviously funny situation and who are so insecure that we can’t even see a man with mismatched balloon tits without becoming irate.

I think the way to handle this situation is to make it very clear that the humorous act in question is not cross dressing in and of itself, but shame.

In the same 48 hour period, obvious closet case Lindsay Graham was photographed with a bubble wand at Disney world. Graham was so humiliated by this that he felt the need to post video of him shooting guns. The humor of this situation is not the bubble wand. Laughing at it does not demonize men who hold bubble wands. I know many a dad who is more than happy to play pretty princess games with their daughters, and many men who find embracing their feminine side to be rewarding. The humor comes from the fact that Lindsay Graham is embarrassed by something as innocuous as holding a princess wand.

If anyone else wanted to put on tig ol’ bitties and dance around, whether for pleasure or for the entertainment of others, I’d simply say “God bless”. In fact, at time of writing this, I have plans to spend a lovely evening with my wife at a drag show hosted by a local hibachi restaurant in order to do just that. If comedy is part of this routine I’ll laugh, but if not, I will simply bask in the artistic expression of people confident enough to be themselves.

I’m not ashamed of kinksters, and I refuse to give this conservative narrative an inch by being reactive. I’m confident enough in myself and my own identity to understand the nuance here. If other people don’t, that’s a them problem.

I know it’s a dangerous time. It sucks that this misinformed narrative continues to persist. But until people become educated enough to understand that a trans person, a drag queen and a fetishist are three different things, people are going to continue to act foolish about this. And right now people aren’t just uninformed, they are deliberately misinformed. They are choosing not to have correct information. We can’t just talk them out of this by getting mad. For a lot of them, our anger is the desired reaction. What good does it do us to make ourselves miserable to try to appeal to people who want to see the worst in us anyway?

These people think we shit in litter boxes and inject ourselves with aborted fetuses. Reality isn’t their strong suit and no amount of finger wagging is going to make them suddenly return to the universe the rest of us live in.

We don’t need their validation to achieve our liberation. In fact, if we sit here waiting for all of cis society to like us and not make fun of us, we may never achieve our liberation at all. And we will crush ourselves in the process.

Don’t get caught up in the same trappings of shame that have made Bryan Noem’s bazongas a national security risk. Because it wasn’t the cross dressing that got him in trouble. It was hiding it. Refuse to hide. Refuse to be scared. Refuse to feel insecure or ashamed. Let that little freak flag fly in whatever direction it ends up waving. Isn’t that what trans day of visibility is all about?

So laugh. Laugh at the shame. Enjoy watching Kristi Noem’s public humiliation. Because to her, the worst thing she can be is someone in close proximity to us. Allow her humiliation to be the contrast between our moral compass and hers. Let them be the unreasonable ones. Just live. Live in all the ways they don’t want us to.

And then, after we’ve gotten out our giggles, let’s help build a world where, whether Bryon Noem is a closet case or a fetishist, he has the opportunity to explore that on his own time and in his own way. A world where guys like him feel safe enough to allow others to teach him about wigs and makeup and that nipples are generally supposed to point in the same direction.

The new Druski skit about Erika Kirk has brought a picture back into the spotlight.  A picture of Erika Kirk’s hand, resting atop her husband’s hand as he lies in his casket.  I had apparently missed the hullaballoo about this picture the first time it made its rounds, but this time it reached me. I expected the comments about Erika Kirk and her bizarre behavior, but I wasn’t expecting the comments about how “weird” it was to post a picture of you holding and kissing your dead husband’s hand on the internet.  

Of all the bizarre things Erika Kirk has done recently, this one actually didn’t feel that weird.  In fact, in the moment I felt a little defensive, as I’ve seen many people I grew up with post similar pictures. Usually the picture depicted them holding their loved one’s hand in a hospital bed, either right before death or right after.  

Death photography has been around a long time, and this seemed to just be a modern version of that. When I reached out to other rural people, many expressed that their families also had a ritual of death photography. This was not an uncommon death ritual, and in the moment, seeing people’s comments about how “weird” was, I felt a bit slighted.  After all, what did these city folks know about us? About our grief? Who were they to judge?

Then it hit me, a wave of unease.  Because right then I was able to pinpoint exactly why Erika Kirk’s “grief” has been so bizarre to onlookers.  Erika Kirk is not rural. Erika Kirk grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona. The background of her life was a series of upscale resorts and golf courses. This was not the grief of someone who could not afford an obituary in the newspaper. She was pretending. 

A common retort I hear online is that Erika Kirk is expressing grief in a way no one else has. But I think this is wrong. I would argue she is expressing grief in a way millions of women in her socioeconomic background have. By pushing down the complicated feelings of her obviously arranged marriage, dropping her kids off with the nanny, and grabbing power in any way she can.

Normally a wealthy woman in her situation would “take some time away from the spotlight” in order to arrange such affairs, but with all the rats scurrying out of the woodwork to take her husband’s place, she knew she had to act fast. That she needed to be the new face of Turning Point, lest she be at risk of losing her power. 

What makes Erika Kirk’s behavior bizarre is that she is not only accidentally exposing the way wealthy families work behind closed doors, she is doing so while being stuck in a position where she has to appeal to white, working class evangelical voters in order to maintain her husband’s legacy. Turning Point is, by its very nature, a propaganda network. If Erika wanted to maintain her power, she was going to have to keep churning out the propaganda. And Charlie Kirk’s death was the perfect opportunity for the American right to have their Reichstag Fire moment. Unfortunately for her, she isn’t a very good actress. 

Charlie Kirk’s memorial, and Erika’s subsequent behavior, is what happens when a bunch of very out of touch rich people attempt to recreate a rural funeral with a massive budget. The individual pieces of the Charlie Kirk memorial, and the grieving rituals Erika engaged in afterwards are not actually that out of place amongst the middle and working classes of rural America. It is not uncommon for there to be fireworks, alcohol, constant mentions of heaven, Jesus and God. The aesthetic was somewhere between megachurch, pentecostal worship service, and bonfire funeral. But combined altogether in that way, it doesn’t quite fit. It becomes uncanny, a Frankenstein’s monster of stolen grief rituals meant to appeal to the Republican base. 

Erika Kirk is not familiar with these grief rituals. She did not grow up with them. She is unable to recreate them in a believable way. Because of that, the cracks begin to form in the facade. It comes across as fake, shallow, performative.

Erika Kirk has not been taught grief ritual. She has not been taught to question the world of power and privilege she was raised in. She was taught to seize the moment when opportunity is presented to her. She is doing what she was raised to do.

But Trump’s evangelical base knows these rituals intimately. They go to megachurches. They shoot off fireworks. They dance through their grief around bonfires and tell stories. These are the things they grew up with. And they are desperate to see themselves in her. Like children watching pro wrestling, they want so badly for it to be real that they suspend their disbelief. 

When I was around 9 years old, the stepfather of one of my classmates died. My grandmother pressed a $10 into my little hand and told me to walk to the corner store and pick up a dozen donuts to give to the family. My grandmother told me that “it helps ease the burden”. To this day, whenever someone dies, my first instinct is to bring them food. These rituals aren’t necessarily taught. They are absorbed through experience. They start to happen like breathing. It is not something that too much thought gets put into. It’s just “what you do” in these situations.

Erika Kirk did not absorb rural Protestant death rituals. She is a wealthy cradle Catholic from the southwest, who only became a Protestant when it was politically beneficial for her to do so. And you can tell. These are not her traditions. She doesn’t have any. For girls like her, funerals have likely been cold and stuffy. A formality before returning to work. The bodies are processed to look as if they are sleeping. Death is not a loss of a human, but a power vacuum to step into. She does not understand the intimate nuances of the grief rituals she is expected to perform. 

Erika Kirk’s upbringing has denied her the opportunity to feel, to grieve, to love, to work through the fact that the man whose children she bore from her body is no longer here. She is hollow. A pretty, blonde vessel through which propaganda is regurgitated. It would be tragic if she and her husband were not such wretched people. Perhaps it’s still tragic in spite of that.

In this way, Erika Kirk is doing precisely what she says she is doing. Upholding her husband’s legacy. A legacy of greed, brutality and exploitation. A legacy where rich men exploit the traditions of white rural people to get them to turn against their neighbors. A legacy where grief gets in the way of profit, and where empathy is a sign of weakness. 

So I realized today that a great deal of American politics are based around shame.

Now, I’m going to focus on the way shame is deployed by liberals and the left. Not because the way the right deploys shame isn’t far worse (it is), but because

1. Talking to regressives is about as useful as slamming your head against a brick wall to get it to move. They have proven time and time again they can’t be reasoned with and you’re wasting your time trying to do so. They’ve got to reach the moment this thing they’ve done actively starts destroying their lives.

2. The way the right deploys shame is simply different, and its targets are different, so a lot of what I want to talk about here simply doesn’t apply.

I’m also not really here to talk about how liberals and the left shames the right. I think shame against the right is, at worst, useless. A waste of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere. And at best, I think it can be helpful. Shame can be a useful tool, especially when addressing ideologies that cannot exist in a civilized society. Fascism is not a civilized ideology. It is a barbaric one by its nature.

No, I’m here to talk very specifically about the way shame is deployed by liberals and the left against each other. It’s been a frustration for a while, and at this point, I just need to get it off my chest.

I was reminded today by a friend that Dorothy Day of the Catholic Workers movement abstained from voting after working to achieve voting rights for women. On the surface, this feels like a contradiction. Why did Day fight for the right to vote while abstaining from the process herself?

Day was skeptical of electoral politics, but expressed a deep belief in bottom up politics and the power of people and community to make real world change. This is a cause she dedicated her life to. She lived a radical lifestyle rooted in selflessness and justice, and the effect she had on workers rights still ripples out to this day.

Do I agree with Day’s stance on voting? I do not. But there have been few people whose work I admire that I agree with on everything. And in a world where electoral politics have become so prone to corruption, I would be lying if I said I don’t at least see her perspective on the matter. I certainly don’t believe that her activism is somehow negated by this principled stance. That she cared less about the world than people who did engage electorally. I think anyone who tries to claim that Day was selfish or didn’t care about others is ridiculous. Caring about others was this woman’s life’s work. It is her legacy.

For so long, the stance of the liberal and the electoral left has been to shame those who do not engage in electoral politics. I understand this perspective as well. After all, it feels very frustrating to see the chronically online twitter left constantly telling people not to vote while simply sitting at their keyboards doing nothing. I’m not going to pretend these people don’t exist. They do. And they are infuriating. It feels like people who do not engage in electoral politics are simply lazy. Incapable of doing what seems like the bare minimum.

However, there are many principled people who do not engage in electoral politics. People who, like Day, have dedicated their entire lives to creating change, but abstain from this part of the process due to this principled stance.

Expecting people to fall in line to vote, or stranger yet, to vote for who you want with no exceptions, is fundamentally undemocratic. Having the right to vote means having the right to vote out of principle. And we must accept that the American Democratic Party has often failed to live up to many people’s principles. Especially regarding human rights and international policy. This is something that must be reckoned with. You cannot just shame those who point this out into obscurity. The underlying problem still exists and will continue to effect both elections and human rights as a whole until it is addressed and dealt with. It does humanity no good to shame those who point out a genocide instead of addressing that your favorite politician’s stance on genocide falls short of many people’s principles.

Certainly you, as the voters, have realized by now that the Democratic Party’s constant capitulation to capital and right wing interests has gotten us nowhere. Certainly you have realized by now that Gavin Newsom’s policies are nearly identical to Mitt Romney’s. Why do you settle for this? And why are you so adamant that other people do? How many marginalized groups will be sacrificed before you address this issue?

That being said, the holier than thou encouragement of the left to not engage electorally is equally harmful. If this is a principled stance you choose to take, that’s fine. But pretending voting is useless or unimportant in a world where the Trump administration is doing everything in their power to take people’s votes away is absurd. They are obviously afraid of it.

But if you insist upon taking this stance, you then must ask yourself what you are doing instead. You must ask yourself if you are living up to your own standards, expectations and values, or if you just want to scream. Are you, in your own life, organizing? Are you shaping policy? Are you building robust mutual aid networks? Are you showing up to more liberal minded protests, cookies and pamphlets in tow, to try to get people to see that moving further left is in their best interest? Or do you just want to screech on the internet about how the No King’s protests are useless and everyone needs to go read Marx?

Some of you are doing this. I am deeply proud of the way my fellow Appalachian leftists have been organizing. I think that between our long labor history and the fact we are outnumbered in these red states and know we can’t afford fractures, we have, for the most part, found a rhythm. We know when to work with the liberals, when to ignore them, and when we need to bop our young, piss and vinegar activists in the head and make them go do grunt work.

However, I have spent years listening to the chronically online left cry out for revolution, yet when tyranny is on our doorstep, the left not only does not materialize the revolution, they also insist on being so haughty and annoying that no one wants to join it.

One does not unionize the Panera Bread by simply playing the USSR anthem loudly while cleaning the dishes. (Yes, this is something I once witnessed a real life leftist attempt to do.)

The revolution must not just be a righteous cause, it must also be irresistible. Beautiful. You must prove that the future will have dancing and roses or people will not take the risk. You must also prove you are capable of competent post revolution governance. That you have some sort of plan that won’t leave an open power vacuum that some cruel dictator or religious zealot will happily fill.

So what we are left with is a bunch of liberals, convinced wholeheartedly that they are the only adults in the room, refusing to address systemic issues within their party in order to preserve both it and the status quo. To them, voting and rallies will be enough. If they simply show up to those rallies and to the ballot box, everything will be okay. They can go back to brunch. Meanwhile, the left insists that the rallies (centers of post pandemic community) and voting (a piece of the puzzle that the right actively uses to gain and maintain power) are fundamentally useless as opposed to their strategy. Reading Marx and firebombing a Walmart. The latter of which they are not doing anyway.

This is not to say every leftist does nothing. Some of the greatest centers of mutual aid, community care, safety and unionization have come from leftist movements. In this country, black and Appalachian leftist movements specifically. Both militant and nonviolent. But we must accept that the modern left has largely fallen short of our forefathers. That we lack their discipline and dedication. That we have exchanged our hard work and values for circle jerk book clubs and podcasting. And it has not gone unnoticed.

If you insist on being anti electoral, you must get off the computer. You must put your hands in the dirt. You must live up to the standards you impose upon other people. If you want a people based movement, you must learn to appeal to the people.

Likewise, if you are more liberal, you must learn that it cannot stop at rallies. It cannot end at the ballot box. The system will not save us. It is broken. You must be willing to take a risk, or at the very least, you have to stay out of the way so other people can.

The right gained power through the seven mountains mandate. They looked at pillars of society (Family, religion, entertainment, government, education, media, business) and attacked each accordingly. They used methods both inside and outside the system to do this. Methods that were both legal and illegal. They moved like a wave, infiltrating every facet of public life for decades.

We are David to their Goliath at this moment. We are fractured, undisciplined and cowardly. We lack the kind of billionaire funding they have. But we do have things they do not have. We have diversity on our side. We have numbers on our side. We have the fact that both business and world leaders hate these people on our side. And most of all, we have reality on our side. Truth on our side. Science on our side. This is not impossible.

So liberals, start understanding that leftists are part of your base. That they are an asset to getting us out of this mess. That shaming them into voting does not make them vote, but alienating them ensures that we stay fractured forever. These are not children. Many of them are principled adults who have dedicated their lives to helping those most in need in ways the system you cling to has failed at.

And leftists, you must ensure you are living up to your high ambitions, that you are taking the risks you expect others to take. That you inspire people to join your cause. That you are actually doing something other than just hanging out in the twitter comments section. Historically, we have moved mountains. And it was not just because we got the politics right. It was because we were disciplined. We were organized. We were inspirational. We took risks that other people weren’t willing to take.

We must accept that brunch is, indeed, good. That at the end of the day, we would like to be at brunch too. But none of us get pancakes until the work is done. And if we don’t figure this out, we will be stuck in an endless loop of shaming one another and getting nothing done.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has their place in this. We have to learn to create the same wave the right created. And it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to have to take years, decades, of heaving against all odds to push these fascists back to hell where they belong.

You don’t have to like each other, but you will have to serve soup next to each other. So learn to work together where you can. And in those moments where someone is pushing in ways different than the way you push, learn to stay the hell out of each other’s way.