Living a Life I Don't Know How to Live

Millie Angulalik broke down in sobs after seeing herself in the mirror.

Her niece had practised her new skill flawlessly, creating an exact replica of a traditional Inuit facial tattoo on her aunt's face.

"I feel so complete," said Angulalik. "Like really complete. I feel like flying like a bird."

The lines on her forehead represent her parents, who have died. The lines on her chin represent her niece, parents and two sisters.

"My mom and dad ... they're right there, they're the centre of me. They'll be with me forever to guide me through the Inuk way of life. This is so powerful and I'm really blessed my niece did it.

"I've always been Inuk but this is real Inuk, you know? I love it, I'm so proud of myself for doing that. I know I'm going to be strong now to walk forward in life."

I can’t imagine an editor that takes more pains in her diligence than does Hill in the new volume, published by the South Dakota Historical Society. Her notes detail everything from the differences between kinds of plums and varieties of jackrabbits to detailed minutiae about every person whom Wilder mentions in Pioneer Girl. The book is nearly 500 pages long; many of these are devoted to Hill’s research.

Despite my wistful memories of the Little House books and TV show, Pioneer Girl is not all grassy meadows and hymn sings. As has been noted in many reviews, the book paints an uglier picture of life “on the prairie” than do the children’s stories. The blizzards are colder, the people are generally less respectable, and the food is much, much scarcer.

Not long into reading Pioneer Girl, that sentimental fog that’s risen in me whenever I’ve thought about Laura Ingalls completely burned off. As Hill said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the real Laura Ingalls saw a “much grittier world” than did the fictional one.

The problem emerges when ARCs show up with a price tag attached. When one person puts a price tag on a book that’s clearly an unfinished copy, that clearly has a note on it saying the item is not meant for sale, they’re practicing something that is unethical.

But the blame isn’t just on the person who sells the ARC. It’s also on the person who buys it, especially if it’s someone who knows better than that. It sort of sounds like a no duh moment, but the fact is, it happens, and it’s not as hidden as people think it is. Buying and selling of ARCs is much more common than we like to believe it is.

When someone purchases an ARC, rather than a finished copy of the book, they rob the book of a sale. The author and the publisher and the agent and the editor and everyone else involved in the production of a book sees nothing. The money spent on the ARC goes to the person unethically selling it, rather than to those who worked hard to put together the best finished version of that story.

The suggestion that you manicure your disability (like you’re plucking your eyebrows or fixing your hair), the hungry curiosity, the gut reaction to stay “in hiding” while everyone else “walks nude through the house”—I’ve felt all of that, deeply. Sometimes I do it to myself. That’s the ableism I know: benevolent, well-meaning, even familial. The kind that everyone understands is wrong almost never happens to me. No one yells at me on the street, I’m not being denied social services or lifesaving care, and walking means that I can access most spaces (if not always on the first try). Instead, I get pity dressed as compassion. I get “I forget you’re disabled!”, glares for not giving up my seat on the train, and congratulations on being “so close to normal” (yes, that’s an actual thing somebody said). Able-bodied strangers ask “what happened?” not as an accusation, but in a way that invites sympathy. As if I’m going to say “yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it?”. They expect common ground. I look and behave and sound and succeed so much like them that I get an honorary spot on the team. That’s what ableism looks like filtered through privilege: an invitation to distance. Vitamin E for erasing parts of the body that bother other people.

And the fact is that, though necessary and laudable, the recent strides made by the literary community hardly touch its historical reality: The sheer volume of published work by mainstream writers versus historically marginalized writers speaks for itself. The Offing’s reason for being is, at least in part, to move beyond liberality, beyond tolerance, even beyond ‘welcome,’ to seek out and amplify the voices of these writers and artists, to put them at the center, to put them in charge. We are working, alongside many others, toward a more profound transformation of, and a true diversity in, the literary world — and the world beyond.

It would be saccharine coming from anyone else, but Diesel's Facebook page stands in stark contrast to the gritty, unbreakable masculinity that has made him famous. VinBook certainly complicates his public image, adding a layer of earnestness that is both unexpected and welcome.

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VinBook allows us a rare glimpse at a man who is so secure in his sense of self that he is able to be painfully sincere. Diesel is not self-conscious in the slightest; he posts about his love for Sarah McLachlan's music and his Dungeons and Dragons birthday cake (he wrote the foreword to the game's 30th anniversary retrospective book), decidedly unmasculine attributes.

In 1955 amateur fossil hunter Francis Tully discovered an exceedingly odd specimen in Mazon Creek, a collecting hotspot near Chicago. Imprinted on Tully's rock were the remains of a tubular creature with stalk eyeballs and a long mouth apparatus terminating in a feature that resembled an alligator clip. Dubbed the Tully monster, the 300-million-year-old specimen later became Illinois's official state fossil. Despite its popularity, though, researchers have made neither heads nor tails of it—until now.

I LOVE box subscriptions. Love love love. And this is a box for kids that teaches them how to code—every box comes with dozens of apps, and everyone gets everything. No girls box or boys box. The Rocket Girl project goes out to everyone. The coolest thing, said Anastasia, the Director of Operations, is then watching the kids break the apps and rebuild them into exactly what they want. Kids build with real code, not visual building blocks. The box is $30 per month.

Still, I’m not immune to the messaging on television or on the street, where my body taking up space was always seen as a threat and something to be ashamed of.

So I learned, over time, how to perform the dance of the “Good Fatty” – the fat person who can never be socially acceptable, but at least publicly flogs herself for the sin of excess pounds.

The Good Fatty comes in many guises, though the one I encounter the most often is the performative, apologetic, trying-not-to-be-fat Good Fatty.

The Good Fatty is the one who acknowledges and accepts their Othering, both by the people in their personal lives, and the professionals they interact with. The Good Fatty is influenced by the medical profession, the corporate world, the advertising that seeps into our lives.

The Good Fatty is the fatty that people will tolerate – so it quickly becomes a survival strategy for many fat folks, including myself. But it’s also a strategy we can learn to leave behind – for other forms of self-preservation.

So here are some of the lessons I learned – and how I’m beginning to unlearn them.

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. I like to think I appear reasonably prosperous. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer—five books, hundreds of articles published, a number of awards and fellowships, and a small (very small) but respectable reputation. You wouldn’t even know it to look at my tax return. I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle- or even, at times, upper-middle-class income, which is about all a writer can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do. And you certainly wouldn’t know it to talk to me, because the last thing I would ever do—until now—is admit to financial insecurity or, as I think of it, “financial impotence,” because it has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly. In truth, it may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence. “You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who teaches at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and ministers to individuals with financial issues. “Much more likely.” America is a country, as Donald Trump has reminded us, of winners and losers, alphas and weaklings. To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation—even a form of social suicide. Silence is the only protection.

People going into the forests to harvest the blossoms and leaves could spread the disease through sticky spores of the fungus that can travel on vehicles, tools and shoes.

Scientists don't want to tell festival organizers and participants what to do about an important cultural practice. The flowers are said to be Laka's physical representation and an important symbol of hula.

"We're all mainland haoles," said J.B. Friday, University of Hawaii forester, using a word meaning white person to refer to the three scientists leading the effort to battle the disease. "We're not going to tell Hawaiians what to do."

In his interview at The Pen and Muse, Bergstrom also discussed the appearance of his protagonist and the appearance of women in media. “As the father of two daughters, I became pretty appalled at the image of women they received from the culture,” Bergstrom told The Pen and Muse. “It was all princess-this, Barbie-that. It was almost a satire of femininity. … What century were we living in if the feminine ideal little girls learned about was still a woman in a pink dress and a nineteen inch waist?”

As if there is something inherently wrong with pink dresses.

As if there is something wrong with Barbie, who has had careers in every field and inspires young girls around the world.

As if Bergstrom’s protagonist did not transform from a “slightly chubby” girl to a “lean warrior,” reinforcing that a feminine ideal – even for a warrior – was a skinny, toned girl, with maybe a slightly wider waistline than Barbie’s nineteen-inches.

The Cruelty features a chubby girl who becomes a “lean warrior,” who has no problem with men catcalling her, and who dismisses the category of fiction meant for teens; whose author is blissfully oblivious to YA as a whole, who dismisses it as lacking moral complications and who sneers at genre fiction, and who sees no problem in slimming down his leading lady while making derisive comments about Barbie.

This is what Feiwel and Friends paid six figures for; this is what Paramount wants to make a movie out of.

This is “the next big thing” in YA.

If you don’t see a problem with that, you won’t like the rest of this article.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better demonstration of the perceived oppression of white people being called out on their privilege then what happened to Buzzfeed Canada writer Scaachi Koul over the weekend. [Note: Not this weekend.]

In a series of tweets that have since been deleted but are screencapped over on Huffington Post, Koul wrote, “Would you like to write long-form for Buzzfeed Canada? WELL YOU CAN. We want pitched for your Canada-centric essays & reporting. Buzzfeed Canada would particularly like to hear from you if you are not white and not male.” A pretty innocuous statement, right? Apparently, twitter thought otherwise.

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Incredibly, the backlash to Koul’s call for diverse writers didn’t end there; she also tweeted that she was “starting to get tweets from white men saying that my (white, male) boss should rape and/or murder me as professional discipline,” and has since deleted her Twitter account. (It’s worth wondering if Silverman would have received comparable harassment if he’d tweeted the exact same thing as Koul—somehow, I think not.)

As I’ve said before, the idea that our right to live in fat bodies and be treated with basic human respect is debatable is a pretty clear indication of the problem. The truth is that fat people have the right to exist in fat bodies without shaming, stigma, bullying or oppression regardless of why we are fat, what it means to be fat, or if we could become thin. There are no other valid opinions about that, it should never be up for debate.

For the record, I’m not suggesting that I can force people to treat fat people with basic human respect. What I am saying is that it’s important to know that we deserve to be treated with basic human respect. We deserve to live in fat bodies without shame, stigma, or bullying, and we are entitled to live without the crushing weight of fat phobia and oppression. What each of us does with that information is up to us – but it’s critical for us to know that these things aren’t our fault, though they become our problem, and they shouldn’t be happening to us.

So I bought her the book. Her mother reports that she’s been reading it when she’s supposed to be getting ready for school. Cool aunt win!

But – what now? If she comes back and asks what happened to Babs next, do I say: “She kept on fighting crime and flirting with Robin and absolutely never got shot in the spine by the Joker in a story that wasn’t even about her”?

It is not enough to have reviewers who understand how to discuss film. We need reviewers who can speak deeply and with nuance because of their lived experiences. The trusted voices in film criticism should be diverse ambassadors who have access to the larger conversation. If we can’t recognize ourselves within the existing public discourse, we are implicitly being asked to devalue our experiences and accept a narrative that is not our own. Excluding diverse voices from the conversation de-emphasizes the value of our different experiences. It is critical that the people who write about film and television and the arts—and indeed the world—mirror the people in our society.

Short of building a fort around our dsks using empty shipping boxes and half-functioning umbrellas, headphones are the only "Do Not Disturb" signs we have left.

When people meet me, I often get confused for a white boy. Which, hey, on the accidental privilege scale, it could be worse. But in fact, I’m a Queer, Colombian woman. Das right ladies! I shop in the little boys’ section of H&M, watched the original Ugly Betty series in Spanish, and eat fríjoles. So, when potential girlfriends find out, they don’t usually care about any of this. They aren’t interested in my career as a professional soccer player, that coming out to Colombian parents was difficult, yet not impossible, or that my Spanish accent sounds like I’m Spaniard. At least not at first. Instead, I get asked a standard set of questions to test my level of “Spanishness”:

“Are both of your parents Colombian?
 “Yes.” 


“Well, do you even speak Spanish?”
 “Yes.”


“But you look Jewish?”
 “…Yes?”

In navigating a fatphobic, sizist culture, it’s very difficult to find a partner that is worth committing to when the world codifies your body as unworthy of love. In finding a potential partner, my experiences have allowed me to create questions to guide me in knowing who to invest in as a queer Black fat femme.

To be honest, dating while fat, Black, queer, a hood feminist, and a radical activist means either compromising parts of myself, or suffering through easing partners into gradually respecting all of my humanity. Living in a culture that defines my body as unhealthy, a problem, ugly, unhygienic, and unworthy of love makes it that much harder to find a potential partner to value all of me.

Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built.

While the rest of the Harry Potter books and movies show a casual disregard for inclusiveness and rely on token minority characters (when they appear at all), the History of Magic in North America is the literary equivalent of performing in black face, although I suppose in this case it’s red face. I discussed on twitter why Rowling’s history of Magic in North America was lazy, but it’s worse than that. While it’s easy for readers to hand wave away the terrible representation in the earlier works, and by extension the movies (which have the whitest London ever depicted since My Fair Lady), it isn’t easy to dismiss this newest work. Rowling cobbled together random bits of found folklore and woo-woo like a New Age practitioner trying for a fresh identity after their third divorce. This isn’t worldbuilding, this isn’t a fresh and new spin on well-known tropes for a deeper message. This is a literal laundry list of stereotypes about Native Americans that required no thought or deeper examination. It’s hurtful to Native Americans and harmful, spreading problematic tropes, but it’s also insulting to the fans who have spent their money and time on the franchise.

And it being JK Rowling, you can imagine the kind of violent backlash these Indigenous women are receiving from fans who couldn’t care less about Natives or our issues (or our women, obviously).

For me the representation issue boils down to this: The mass media narrative around Natives is intensely problematic; if we’re mentioned at all, it’s within a stereotypical or fantastical sense, and very rarely goes beyond 1 or 2-D. Many consumers of this media have no idea we still exist as contemporary, multi-dimensional individuals, which makes these fantastical/fictional perpetrations very much a part of the problem in that NO ONE knows or cares to know any of the very real issues our communities face. Who cares about the epidemic levels of Native youth suicide when OMG JK ROWLING IS WRITING ABOUT MAGICAL INDIAN SKINWALKERS!!!

We’re marginalized in real life and we’re marginalized in media. To have a powerhouse like Rowling (though any non-Native author really) profit off our continued erasure and harmful representations is something I am totally not here for. The argument that it’s “fiction” is worthless to me. If we (as consumers) had diverse representation of Native people the same way white people do, Rowling’s latest wouldn’t be so problematic, because consumers would have other representations to base opinions off of. As it is, so much of the Native narrative is romanticized and fantastical and now one of the world’s most successful authors has thrown her mighty magical empire against our fragile reemergence from near-total cultural genocide.

It is what Apess wrote there, in that paragraph, that matters to me in my work as a Native scholar who, 187 years later, is doing the same thing that Apess did in 1829. Through story, he learned mistaken ideas about his own people such that he was afraid of them.

Obviously, misrepresenting who we are was wrong in 1829, and it is wrong now.

What J.K. Rowling did yesterday (March 8, 2016) in the first story of her "History of Magic in North America" is the most recent example of white people misrepresenting Native people. Her misrepresentations are harmful. And yet, countless people are cheering what Rowling did, and dismissing our objections. That, too, is not ok.

You know, the thing I always try to remember when I’m borrowing from mythology is to be a shit-ton more careful with still-living traditions than I am with those long gone or transformed away from their roots. I feel relatively safe treading on the threads of Egyptian myth because there isn’t a centuries-long-and-ongoing history of using, say, the worship of Bast as an excuse to steal people’s ancestral land and children in the name of Christianity. But you know what? I’m still careful, even with “dead” faiths, because I don’t know how playing with these things might hurt real people. Nations have been built upon and torn down by the concepts I’m playing with. The least I can do is research the hell out of a thing before I put a toe in that ancient water.

It’s even more crucial for religions that are alive, and whose adherents still suffer for misconceptions and misappropriations. But these are easier to research, and it’s often much easier to figure out when you’re about to put a foot right into a morass of discrimination and objectification. All the evidence is there, sometimes still wet with blood. You just need to read. You just need to ask people. You just need to think.

And whether I believe in a thing or not, I always try to recognize that these concepts, these names, these words, have power. Power is always to be respected, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, present or past.

So I get worried thinking about the message it sends to have “indigenous magic” suddenly be associated with the Harry Potter brand and world. Because the other piece I deal with on this blog is the constant commodification of our spiritual practices too. There is an entire industry of plastic shamans selling ceremonies, or places like Urban Outfitters selling “smudge kits” and fake eagle feathers. As someone who owns a genuine time-turner, I know that marketing around Harry Potter is a billion dollar enterprise, and so I get nervous thinking about the marketing piece. American fans are going to be super stoked at the existence of a wizarding school on this side of the pond, and I’m sure will want to snatch up anything related to it–which I really hope doesn’t include Native-inspired anything.

Native spirituality and religions are not fantasy on the same level as wizards. These beliefs are alive, practiced, and protected. The fact that the trailer even mentions the Navajo concept of skinwalkers sends red flags all over the place, and that it’s mentioned next to the Salem witch trials? Disaster. Even the visual imagery of the only humans shown in the trailer being a Native man and burning girls places the two too close for comfort.

We fight so hard every single day as Native peoples to be seen as contemporary, real, full, and complete human beings and to push away from the stereotypes that restrict us in stock categories of mystical-connected-to-nature-shamans or violent-savage-warriors. Colonization erases our humanity, tells us that we are less than, that our beliefs and religions are “uncivilized”, that our existence is incongruent with modernity. This is not ancient history, this is not “the past.” The ongoing oppression of Native peoples is reinscribed everyday through texts and images like this trailer. How in the world could a young person watch this and not make a logical leap that Native peoples belong in the same fictional world as Harry Potter?

So, this is where I’m going to perform what Audra Simpson calls an “ethnographic refusal,” “a calculus ethnography of what you need to know and what I refuse to write in.” In her work with her own community, she asks herself the questions: “what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?”

I had a long phone call with one of my friends/mentors today, who is Navajo, asking her about the concepts Rowling is drawing upon here, and discussing how to best talk about this in a culturally appropriate way that can help you (the reader, and maybe Rowling) understand the depths to the harm this causes, while not crossing boundaries and taboos of culture. What did I decide? That you don’t need to know. It’s not for you to know. I am performing a refusal.

What you do need to know is that the belief of these things (beings?) has a deep and powerful place in Navajo understandings of the world. It is connected to many other concepts and many other ceremonial understandings and lifeways. It is not just a scary story, or something to tell kids to get them to behave, it’s much deeper than that. My own community also has shape-shifters, but I’m not delving into that either.

What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we as Native people are now opened up to a barrage of questions about these beliefs and traditions (take a look at my twitter mentions if you don’t believe me)–but these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I’m sorry if that seems “unfair,” but that’s how our cultures survive.

The other piece here is that Rowling is completely re-writing these traditions. Traditions that come from a particular context, place, understanding, and truth. These things are not “misunderstood wizards”. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

At the open call, I was granted an audition in front of the show’s producers. Looking around the room, I felt different from the other kids who had made it this far. They were mostly white and suburban-looking, so I decided to use my half-Ecuadorian mixed-girl urbanness to my advantage by turning up my the Cosby-kid charm to the extreme. I remember the wide-eyed panel taking in my confidence as I told personal stories about my Philadelphia Eagles fandom, my thrift store shopping, and my nascent ambition to become a professional DJ. I had never done this before—play into what I thought people expected a nonwhite “smart girl” to act like—and I felt strange afterward, vain and false.

At the local geography bees I participated in as a kid, my opponents were mostly black. But when I advanced to the official state finals, as I did twice in middle school, I was surrounded by white kids and their parents, who looked at me as either undeserving or “exceptional” (not like other brown kids!). I lost those tournaments almost immediately, which made me feel like while I may have been considered smart in the fishbowl of my school, I couldn’t compete in the vast “real world.”

ON GOING VIRAL

SOLANGE: I feel like my introduction to you was probably like that of a lot of people — or at least people who might not have seen The Hunger Games — via your video on cultural appropriation, “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” which was so brilliant! I know that you made it for a class assignment, but in terms of sharing it with the world was there ever a moment of fear before hitting the “publish” button?

AMANDLA: I really didn’t think it was going to be so controversial. And then to have the label of “revolutionary” pinned on you afterward felt really daunting. I kind of had a moment with myself, like, “OK. Is this what you want to do? Do you actually want to talk about issues? Is it worth it?” There are still moments now where I’m like, “Whoa, this is a lot of pressure.” But it’s worth it because when people come to me and say, “I’m more comfortable in my identity because of you,” or “I feel like you’ve given me a voice,” that’s the most powerful thing ever.

Strap in, folks, because we've got quite a battle brewing. You may recall that Mike Huckabee recently found himself the subject of a copyright dispute with Frank Sullivan, a member of Survivor, over the use of the band's hit song Eye of the Tiger at a rally for the release of Kim Davis. Davis was the county clerk who asserted that her right to express her religion -- in the form of denying same sex couples the right to marry -- overrode the secular law of the land, which is about as bad a misunderstanding of how our secular government works as can be imagined. Sullivan's filing indicated that the rally was conducted by the Huckabee campaign and that the use of the song had been without permission, therefore it was an infringing use. Left out of the filing was any indication of whether the Huckabee campaign had acquired the normal performance licenses.

Based on Huckabee's response, it seems like no license was ever obtained, as Huckabee is instead claiming the use was fair use, and that the use was exempt from copyright law to begin with because the Kim Davis rally was a religious assembly.

As a society, it’s absolutely imperative that we work towards destigmatizing menstruation. The period-positive movement aims to do that through discussion and education. It aims to encourage open discussion about periods and raise awareness around menstrual health issues and menstrual hygiene.

The movement includes the development of eco-friendly, reusable menstrual products as alternatives for disposable pads and tampons. It usually aims to get people to see menstruation as normal, and even beautiful.

The period-positive movement is incredibly important.

But unfortunately, a lot of the period-positive movement is – often unintentionally – exclusionary.

In order for the movement to be more impactful and less oppressive, we need to think deeply about the various ways in which we can make period-positivity more inclusive.

I like board games, and I play them frequently. When the original Landlord's Game was developed, it was certainly fresh and innovative. However, 110+ years of advancement in the field of game design has produced games that are far superior, packing more strategy, nuance, and fun into a fraction of the play time. Monopoly is, by comparison, a long, boring, unpleasant slog. On the now-rare occasions that people insist I join a game of Monopoly, I play in a way that ensures not only that I'll win, but that they'll be more open to my suggestions for other games in the future.

While I don’t give in and collect as much these days, I’ve built quite the collection. Much of it is from Heroclix, but since I don’t buy them for gameplay, they just sit around collecting dust. So these days, I’ve been donating them to make room for new items to love and repurposing the ones I can’t part with into jewelry.

To me, repurposing unloved treasures into jewelry is a super simple and inexpensive project that allows you to showcase your collection in a new way—not to mention it is so easy that you’ll knock it out in a few minutes!

Starbucks in OKC built to ADA standards but mgmt makes #accessfail with furniture placement & storage choices. The "extra room" on handle side of a door? Wheelchair users need that space to reach the handle. You create #accessfail you put news racks, signboards or flower pots there!

More #accessfail when you store chairs & boxes in the wide hall to toilet or cabinets inside. As those of us who use wheelchairs daily learn, our travel path is still invisible to non-W/C users & still blocked #accessfail. You may think at least W/C user needs are recognized but not reliably.

When I point this out owner usually offers workaround "if I just ask for help." But that's why ADA design is so specific & roomy): to permit W/C users to move through the world unmarked, as smoothly as "typicals."

Solanin, at least for me in that moment, wasn’t about any of that. It was a single chapter, chapter five, that hit me the hardest. My grandmother passed away from stomach cancer and had been suffering from dementia; her husband passed long before I was born. In the chapter, there’s an old man who’s “got Alzheimer’s or something” and he mails a letter to his wife, who died in the air raids, every day for the past 40-odd years. There’s a certain poetry in that dedication to love and it made me wonder if my grandmother ever felt the same way. I never asked her, and I regret that.

That New Day can still be over with performances so overtly challenging yet simultaneously so covertly queering the the dominant paradigm in wrestling is a testament not so much to the higher ups willing to push them but to an increasingly diverse legion of fans (the same fans that brought about the #GiveDivasaChance and #DivasRevolution campaigns, no matter what Paige or Stephanie McMahon tell us) willing to cheer them. And not only are they subverting the traditionally masculine archetype of a wrestler, they’re toppling the savage, out of control machismo of the archetype of black men and black wrestlers.

4. ‘You’re Trans? Wow! I Just Want You to Know That You’re a Gorgeous/Handsome Wo/man’

This is a tricky one, the Validation Response.

I know in my little heart that lots (lots) of cis people who utter this one have nothing more than good intentions in mind. They want to show their support for the trans person before them, and so they compliment us in the best (or, perhaps only?) way they know how: by telling us our physical looks achieve some of the highest marks possible in the gender we identify with.

But brace yourself, I’m about to get nasty.

A major reason the Validation Response is a problem is—well—because it assumes your opinion validates our identity. To be blunt, you’re still only seeing us through the cis lens.

Thankfully, there was a little spark inside of me that continued to whisper in my ear even though I’d worked at smothering it for years. Be quiet, wild thing. You’ll only get us in to trouble! At some point though, I realized that there is no trouble worse than self-deception; cutting yourself off at the knees by denying your passions, your potential, your thirst for living the life that you want. One of the unfortunate side effects of your self-deception and fear is that you leave a field of collateral damage in your wake.

After a long and torturous build up, I finally cracked under the pressure. I gave up the game, secret by secret and walked out of the prison I’d built for myself. I had to stop being afraid.

As they organize, the workers likewise construct a new social identity by picking a name for their occupation that isn’t tied to trash and waste, according to Dias.

“The politics of naming matters,” Dias says. “It’s very important to help a given group get together and work toward their demands. How can you get people organized if they don’t see value in what they do?”

In Uruguay, they call themselves “classifacadores,” classifiers of materials, as opposed to hurgadores (“pokers”). In Argentina, they’re “cartoneros,” or cardboard collectors. In Colombia, scrap metal specialists are “chatarreros,” while those who seek out glass bottles are “frasqueros.” In Mexico, “buscabotes” collect aluminum cans.

Dulcey points to the lapel of his uniform, which is embroidered with the phrase “Gente Emprendedora” (Entrepreneur). “We want to touch the sky,” he says. “We are entrepreneurs.”

Hosted by the Blank Noise Project, an all-volunteer collective that campaigns against street harassment, this seemingly subtle protest event is called "Meet to Sleep," and it asks citizens to come together to reclaim public spaces and make cities safer. Started in 2003 by Jasmeen Patheja as part of her graduation project, Blank Noise mobilizes citizen "action heroes" through its projects, events, and campaigns, and it has played a major role in the snowballing discussion surrounding street harassment in India. The organization has been hosting Meet to Sleep events in cities across India since November 2014.