Category: Serious stuff

Blog, gender, Important Stuff, LGBT, LGBTQIA, queer stuff, Serious stuff, Trans stuff

Transgender Diaries: Entry 1

Transgender blocks, photo by Sharon McCutcheon
Sharon McCutcheon

So, I’d like to start off by saying that it is 100% possible to be trans without spending your childhood despising all that comes with your assigned gender, and not everyone who identifies as transgender has the same “I always knew I was *insert gender here*” narrative. There’s no such thing as being “trans enough,” and you can identify as trans without ticking a single box on the What People Usually Expect Of Trans People list.

Continue reading “Transgender Diaries: Entry 1”
T.J. Baer3 Comments
Blog, Serious stuff, Vegan and Vegetarian

Vegan Learning Curve

There are lots of things I’m learning as a relatively new vegan. One of them, sadly, is that you can’t show people what they don’t want to see.

In my innocent youth, I always thought of the dairy and egg industries as being pretty benign, just a bunch of happy cows and chickens roaming around on the picturesque farms shown on the milk cartons. When I found out the truth – which I won’t go into here, but feel free to Google “egg industry” or “dairy industry” if you never want to sleep again – I was pretty horrified. “Appalled” would be a good word to describe it, in fact. And I thought, “Do people know about this? People can’t possibly know about this or they’d be as horrified and appalled as I am!”

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Amurica, Important Stuff, Serious stuff, Writing

On the American Dream

ColbertAmerica

So, in America, we have something we like to call “the American dream.” It’s the idea that if you work hard enough, you can drag yourself out of even the lowest gutter and become rich, successful, and happy, all while a chorus line of anthropomorphic apple pies wave little American flags and sing the national anthem while fireworks explode behind them (or something like that).

And hey, that’s a beautiful dream to have, but it’s also probably one of the most damaging aspects of our society. Continue reading “On the American Dream”

T.J. Baer1 Comment
Blog, Serious stuff

About a girl

girls-friends-flowers
Image from freespiritgirl.com

So, there’s a girl I’ve known for essentially my entire life. We were born within months of each other, our mothers were best friends, and even though her family lived in Florida and mine in the yawn-inducing valleys of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, we kept in touch throughout our childhoods and met up every summer for some of the hands-down best times of my life. (Seriously, there were curtain-rod lightsabers involved, and if you don’t think that’s awesome, there’s something wrong with you.) Continue reading “About a girl”

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