It’s just a dream. It’s not real.
Last week I was plagued by nightmares that woke me up every hour of the night and left me disoriented and foggy for the rest of the day, less from the lack of sleep and more from the lingering sense that I was somehow still stuck between sleep and waking, in a liminal space where I couldn’t trust my own mind.
Continue readingIt took me a while to realize that my former social anxiety has morphed into a new form: what I call health anxiety.
Continue readingMy partner has been sick for the last few days. Yesterday, he went to pick up a covid test from CVS. They told him that without insurance, the test would cost $200.
Luckily, it wasn’t the end of the world: he was able to use a spare test that his friend happened to have, and based on his symptoms, it was pretty unlikely that he’d had covid in the first place. But what if he’d been coughing? Or had a fever? Or experienced shortness of breath? A covid test is only the first of a series of concerns, not least of which is the extreme price of hospital stays, especially if you don’t have insurance. This unaffordability of basic resources like covid tests came as a shock to me, as it differs drastically from Biden’s rhetoric about working-class people and covid — that being: “We need to make them care about this! We need to teach them how to be responsible and healthy!” The ignorant focus on promoting personal responsibility, instead of alleviating structural concerns like unaffordability, is disturbing but not surprising. And the covid test is only a very, very small part of the difficulties working-class people face in accessing affordable body knowledge.
The concept of “biological sex” is bullshit. When talking about trans people and the sex they were assigned at birth, the terms “biologically female” and “biologically male” are often thrown around without any critical interrogation into their meaning. They’re a fallback for a lot of people who are aware that saying “born female/male” is reductionist, but who haven’t yet done the work to find more accurate terminology. (The terminology I use and recommend is “assigned male/female at birth”). For a variety of reasons, “biological sex” is a faulty concept, rife with scientific inaccuracies, that subtly undermines and invalidates trans identity. Like a pointillist painting, the closer you examine the concept, the more you realize it’s just a cluster of meaningless points of observation, designed to trick you into seeing a complete picture that was never really there in the first place.
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Unruly Bodies 