My good old dog is at my feet in a gray dog bed; he’s injured his back chasing a squirrel. We both forget that he’s fourteen. I give him cannabis dog treats to help the pain, and carry him down the back steps so he can go to the bathroom. Now he’s looking at me with his big, button eyes, glazed over. I barely know how to help.

My students recently did a presentation on Childish Gambino’s “This is America” this week. One of my brightest stopped, mid-sentence, looking at the still of Donald Glover holding an assault weapon.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that we just had another mass shooting,” she said quietly. She is talking about Pittsburg, which, at the time of this class, had only happened a few days prior. We were still recovering from Kavanaugh (they’d been learning about moral reasoning, and we’d used the Supreme Court Justice position as an opportunity to explore ethics).

I opened a bright pink box of donuts. “Please eat,” I said to them, my palms open. They each took a donut gingerly, and I felt my heart riotous in my chest.

Let me backup a minute.

When I took this teaching job, I was shown a tiny black box, hidden in each classroom. “If there’s a shooter,” the Office Manager of my department said to me, somewhat cheerily, “just push this button and say ‘everything is just fine.’ That way, they don’t think you’re reporting them, and shoot you.”

I think about the fact that the dashboard of my car still shows mileage in kilometers because I don’t know how to reset it. How I threaten to throw my perfectly good printer out the window on a weekly basis because I don’t know how to unjam paper. My own inability to follow simple directions is something I’m largely OK with, except in my profession, where I’m expected to know how to fend off an armed person determined to kill me.

In a few weeks, I’m traveling to Tucson to teach a Gender Empowerment and Allyship workshop for community members, K12 educators, and parents. I’ve rightfully gotten a lot of pushback about this because even though I’m grayscale genderqueer and a femme who does trauma awareness and transcompetency in education, I’m still pretty comfortable with pronouns that define me as cis.

I get it. The pushback, I mean. And…

I believe that we’re living in a time where we’re redefining what cohesion and solidarity look like. A time when allyship and the work of allies needs to step up and utilize the privileges and resources that we have in order to center and hold up the most vulnerable and marginalized in our communities.

My own inability to follow simple directions is something I’m largely OK with, except in my profession, where I’m expected to know how to fend off an armed person determined to kill me.
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I know that we (my community, educators, activists) have had many discussions about how to center trans and genderqueer narratives without placing the burden of education on said folks, and I feel grateful that this workshop is an opportunity to begin that work. I recognize that this is an evolving process, one that must remain living and porous in order to consistently identify and meet the needs of those who have been pushed even further into the margins by the very real dangers of our political landscape.

I feel honored and excited to be invited to participate in this larger conversation and skillshare. Excited and honored to be just one small piece of this event, which is made up, aside from myself, of locals. I feel excited to be using the education and privilege that I have to help dismantle the problematic systems that keep our most vulnerable community members disempowered. Excited to see how allyship and solidarity can manifest when we have these intergenerational, interdisciplinary, inter-pedagogical conversations.

I’m having these conversations the day the news about the shooting comes through. I’m on the phone with a trans high school principal in Arizona, talking about listening to the most vulnerable members of our community, when Kavanaugh is sworn into the Supreme Court.

See? Every time we start to make a path to healing, another massive disruption happens in our country that derails us. It’s hard to know how to build houses in ceaseless earthquakes.

I like to say, and say it often, that teaching and writing and reading and staying engaged are the answer, and I believe that — I do. And yet it’s difficult to figure out what to teach, what to write, what to read, what to engage with. Sometimes, I feel like I’m merely teaching my students skills for harm reduction: how to not be manipulated by the media. How to be kind to other people. How to take no shit, but do no harm. To be thoughtful.

Then I remember bell hooks and about how syllabi and pedagogy are inherently colonialist, so I also think a good deal about how to make the classroom less of a white, feminized space. And also how to throw my body into the fire if I need to.

It’s hard to know how to build houses in ceaseless earthquakes.
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Is that allyship? Is that taking autonomy? Am I in the right to do this? Knowing about being or not being in the “right” requires understanding one’s own position, which means understanding one’s self. Which, for me, as a person with CPTSD and chronic pain and a smorgasboard of intersecting marginalized identities, means carving time out for therapies.

Is allyship privileged?

“Yes and no” is the answer and has been the answer to all of life’s most complicated questions. Every day I teach my students that many truths can exist alongside one another, that there isn’t really a “right” answer to anything—only an evolving attempt at an answer. Allyship itself, as a concept, isn’t privileged; allyship comes from a place of deep love, compassion, and empathy, which are all traits even people being actively attacked can feel and foster.

But the way self care, as an industry, has been created as a “mindfulness culture” (inside capitalism, inside the United States, specifically)—that is particularly privileged. To have access to therapy, to the education necessary to not only be hired to stand in front of rooms of people for pay, but to also even know that allyship is urgently necessary. After all, it’s a term we use largely in circles that are, if not entirely academic, often radical, activist, or informed by collective consciousness—and in order to have access to that information, that terminology, you still need to have certain resources.

Is allyship privileged? ‘Yes and no’ is the answer and has been the answer to all of life’s most complicated questions.
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This has been my year of teaching out of a suitcase. Of traveling across the country and showing up in classrooms and bookstores and living rooms, poetry centers and bars and cafeterias. Of re-thinking the framework of how education *really* works, and where it gets to live. Of putting down the pedagogical framework for de-constructing the very slight differences between “novice” and “expert”.

Not only because of what is happening in the world, the political landscape. But because it’s become alarmingly clear that our institutions—which produce the results they are intended to—are failing the majority of our most vulnerable friends and community members. They’re failing us, too.

Keep evolving your attempt at an answer.

For a five year old, the lectures were long and interminable.

“I would be sitting on the couch while he was lecturing away and I’d be staring at the ceiling,” Michael Bronner, the grandson of the eponymous founder of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap remembers, “He would stop and I could tell he was waiting for something from me so I’d be like, ‘All one grandpa!’ and he’d say, ‘Very good,’ and continue.”

Michael, who is now the President of Dr. Bronner’s, is not the man you envision steering a company that recently funded a semi-nude bathing camp at Burning Man. While his long-haired brother David, the company’s Cosmic Engagement Officer, seizes headlines for his robust arrest-ending activism, clean-cut Michael exudes a Midwestern charm and sensibility that is considerably more palatable. He’s funny. Relatable. A shameless family man. He appreciates the countercultural environment he steers while maintaining his misfit status. He proudly showed me the sign that greets visitors in the company’s front office: “The question is not whether our ideas are crazy, but whether they are crazy enough.”

For all the “crazy” the company is known for, that’s not the word Michael would use to describe his grandfather, or the burbling, colorful soap label featuring lengthy declarations on everything from God to morality to how to use the soap itself. As a teenager, Michael had been the chief recorder of his ailing grandfather’s lectures. “I can’t say I always got it. But I could appreciate it. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is really deep.'”

Michael and his family know the life behind the label. For them it isn’t some punchline or the unmanaged frothing of a crackpot visionary, it’s a deeply earnest plea from a tireless prophet. Amidst the liberally hyphenated screed printed on every bottle are haunting explanations: “father-mother-wife murdered,” “Hitler and Stalins to power,” and perhaps most profoundly he calls “the intensity of man’s emotions” the greatest “driving force.”

In this light, the bottle’s breathless monologue reads more like a doomful love letter from the past. A warning to humanity rising up from the sorrows of loss at the hands of a despot. Woven between incoherent maxims are the raw wounds of a man incapable of communicating just how horrific his pain was. He discloses his grief in a desperate, almost childlike way—on a soap label. A soap label that has become the iconic face of a $120 million soap company. A soap label the Bronner family will never change.

He discloses his grief in a desperate, almost childlike way—on a soap label.
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Missionary Cleanser

Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap with its all natural ingredients and peculiar labels has made an unlikely journey in the last 70 years from the hidden recesses of hippie-laden earth shops onto the shelves of Trader Joe’s, Target, and the mainstream home. Today it is the largest personal care company certified under USDA’s National Organic Program and has grown over 1,000 percent in the past 12 years, meaning more people than ever before are reading his soap bottle labels and asking, “What the hell is this?”

The success was only ancillary to Emanuel Bronner’s goal. His ambition was to place his creed-bearing soap into the hands of as many people as possible but only as a vehicle, “Jew or gentile everyone needs soap, but the soap is just the messenger,” he would tell anyone who listened. That he’s become an iconic, pop-culture question mark is an unfortunate distraction from the mission.

This sudsy tabernacle communicated his zealous peacekeeping plan following WWII, a 3,000-word philosophy he called the Moral ABCs. “I learned beginning in 1944,” he says in archival footage, “that what causes all the trouble on this earth the past 2,000 years is the lack of rabbis, and the failure of rabbis to teach every 12 year old boy on God’s spaceship earth the moral ABC’s without which none survive free.”

Politics and Soap

Bronner’s Moral ABCs first developed in the Heilbronner home in the Jewish quarter of Laupheim, Germany where for 70 years Emanuel and his family tirelessly fine-tuned the first-ever liquid castile soap, and held the prevailing belief that “You don’t mix politics and soap.”

This stalwart rejection of incorporating Bronner’s then Zionist ideology into the family business by his strict orthodox father and uncles inspired him to emigrate to America in 1929, where he would be free to create a company of his own ideation, and mix politics and soap as he wanted.

This sudsy tabernacle communicated his zealous peacekeeping plan following WWII, a 3,000-word philosophy he called the Moral ABCs.
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In America, he dropped the “Heil” from his last name and became a successful consultant for American cosmetic companies. He fell in love, got married and had three children. But his life came screeching to a halt with a postcard in his father’s largely censored scrawl:  “You were right.”

For years he had been trying to convince his parents to follow him to the United States amidst Hitler’s rise to power. He managed to securely help his sisters out of Germany but was unable to convince his parents, who held the prevailing belief of the time that “Hitler would be a thing of the past.”

Within the next year, the Heilbronner soap company was nationalized by the Nazis, and the family was deported and killed in Auschwitz and Theriesenstadt. Not long after, Bronner’s wife passed away.

A New Kind of Talmud

After the death of his parents and wife, a switch flipped. His very aliveness was a burden, a reminder of the fact that his parents died while he was living the American dream. He carried the weight of their deaths like a talisman with a gnawing question, “What are you going to do about it?”

The guilt and sorrow frothed into a frenetic madness. Rather than slip into mourning, he was seized by a singular charge: teach the world the Moral ABCs. All the sources of unwelcome philosophy from his youth were channeled into this hodgepodge Talmud. Mohammed, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, Buddha, and even Thomas Paine were some of its more notable players. And while the particulars may have been unintelligible, the guiding principle was a call to rise above religious and ethnic differences and unite on “spaceship earth.”

While burying his wife in 1944 he made a promise to God that the minute he had $10,000 to take care of his children, he would become a “servant of God.” 

His very aliveness was a burden, a reminder of the fact that his parents died while he was living the American dream.
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If he felt guilty about abandoning his kids, he never revealed it. “As the child of a visionary, our father’s own needs often took a distant second place to those of ‘spaceship earth,” Michael explained. Everything was dismissed with Emanuel Bronner’s oft-quoted adage, “What’s more important, [whatever issue they were discussing] or saving spaceship earth?”

“My grandfather always lived with this light and shadow side,” Michael remembered. “He’s this paragon figure for peace and uniting the world but was so poor at doing that for his own family.”

Emanuel started traveling the country holding impromptu lectures in public spaces. Unknowing passersby would stop to gawk at the self-proclaimed doctor with the thick German accent, who sometimes claimed to be Einstein’s nephew to gain credibility. Most of those who showed up did so to get their free soaps and left without hearing his lecture.

Then he was institutionalized. He was speaking without a permit at the University of Chicago when he was arrested for erratic behavior. At this point his sister had him committed at Elgin State Insane Asylum where for over nine months he received electric shock therapy, (which he would later blame for his blindness) insulin treatments, and underwent forced labor. After two unsuccessful escape attempts, he succeeded and moved to Los Angeles, California.

It was here that he began printing his lectures (and his personal phone number) on the soap bottles. He founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps as a nonprofit, using profits to further support his mission, which usually meant printing and distributing copies of the Moral ABCs. However, in a postwar era defined by the Dupont slogan “better living through chemistry,” his all-natural formula dating back to 1928 wasn’t exactly a product vendors were convinced by.

“He had no advertising, no sales people, no eyesight, a label that defied every single established conventional label designed, and then, by word of mouth, it became the number-one-selling soap in the natural marketplace,” Michael explained. “A company would order three bottles and he would send them a whole case. ‘Put it on the shelves,’ he’d say upon protest, ‘They will sell.’ And they did.”

In the 1960s the company boomed. The natural ingredients resonated with hippies who found it useful for outdoor bathing, and appreciated its unifying message. Letters from thankful customers poured in. One man wrote, “Until I read your label I was an atheist.” Another 72-year-old man was planning his suicide in his bathroom when he, “started reading your label and it instantly brought purpose to my life, for this, I cannot thank you enough.”

He had no advertising, no sales people, no eyesight, a label that defied every single established conventional label designed, and then, by word of mouth, it became the number-one-selling soap in the natural marketplace
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However, a large number of people, Dr. Bronner’s sons included, weren’t entirely sure what it was he was trying to say. As a young college kid, his son Ralph would complain about having to type up edits to his dad’s Moral ABCs, saying, “Nobody’s going to read this crap.” When Emanuel would start going on his lengthy tirades, his son Jim would shut it down with a, “I don’t want to hear about that crap.”

“I think my Dad thought that the Moral ABC was some lofty, unstructured ideal that my grandfather dedicated his life to rather than the support the flesh-and-blood right in front of him, for example, my dad and his siblings.” Michael reflects. “That is why, when my dad wanted to talk to my grandfather about something ‘substantive’ and concrete, he had no time to listen to any pontifications on the Moral ABC.”

The brief popularity of the 1960s waned in the following decades; for the next twenty years, annual sales hung around $1 million. Emanuel’s fanatic focus on his message left him unconcerned and bankrupt in the 1980s when the IRS began looking suspiciously at its non-profit status for a religion that had never caught on.

Emanuel was losing his company, but there was little he could do about it: his Parkinson’s was worsening, he was nearly blind, and stricken by a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed him. Someone needed to step in.

A Family Company

Jim Bronner had emerged from his scarring foster-care experience with herculean resilience. After 14 years in foster care, he entered the United States Navy as a recruit and left with the highest rank an enlisted man could achieve. He started working in his father’s soapmaking company as a bottle washer, rose through the ranks to become a chemist, and eventually became the VP of the company. He married and had three kids. “He always channeled the negative into the positive.” Michael remembers, “Because he was raised by a battery of foster parents, he made sure he was going to be the best, most attentive dad, and forge for us the wonderful home he never had.”

Jim’s relationship with his father Emanuel was never quite a “hunky dory picture tied up with a bow,” to use Michael’s words. “My dad had really gone through tough times. He had hidden from his past, or just really grit his teeth and clenched his jaw and persevered through it. But at one point it kind of came crashing down and there was a period where he was like, ‘Why have you done this to me?’ There were times he and my grandfather weren’t really talking.”

But when his father’s business was going under, Jim suspended any animosity and turned the company around. When Emanuel Bronner passed away in 1997 Jim even assumed presidency of the company he had always “played second to.”

Jim introduced a zero-deductible health care plan for all employees and 15% profit-sharing. He donated a $1.4 million land parcel to build a camp for the Boys and Girls of America in the company’s name. He developed wildly popular products, including Sal Suds, an all-purpose ecological fire-fighting foam in widespread use around the world, and a snow-simulating foam for the movie industry.

He distilled the very Moral ABCs that were a source of frustration from his past into actionable areas of influence the company now calls their Cosmic Principles. “The cosmic principles are the label distilled into actionable areas of influence: ourselves, our customers, our employees, our suppliers, our earth, our community, minus all the religiosity and eccentricity,” Michael explained. “My dad actualized what my grandfather visualized.”

But he didn’t swipe the label of its Moral ABCs. On the deepest level, he too knew what it meant to lose one’s parents tragically. “It was a monument to his father and his father’s life’s work, and he wanted to respect both his dad and his dad’s commitment,” Michael said. “He very much identified with the underlying real-world tenets of the philosophy.” The warring world had left a generational tremor of pain on Jim’s life as well. The trauma of lost parents begot lost parents as his father’s grief orphaned him. Jim couldn’t bring himself to scrub it from the bottle. It was a message the world needed to hear.

So, there in our routine naked scrubbing moments dwells the Bronner opus. A mournful sonnet, a piercing cry of pain and love sitting on our bathtubs like an omen begging us to change:

Til All-One, All-One we are! For this is my goal! No matter how hopeless, no matter how far! To fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause! For I know that if I follow this glorious quest, my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest! And I know that the world will be better for this, that one man, tortured, blinded, covered with scars, still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach that unreachable star ‘til united all-one we are!

Peggie Ames is, quite possibly, the most important transgender activist you have never heard of. Ames, who died in 2000, dealt with issues that remain relevant within contemporary feminist and LGBTQ social movements. She played a significant role in the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier (MSNF), Buffalo, New York’s first gay liberation organization, though her membership was viewed with suspicion by some members of the gay community. Ames identified as a lesbian and experienced rejection by portions of Buffalo’s lesbian feminist community who saw her womanhood as suspect. Most importantly, she created a blueprint for trans activism in rural communities and mid-sized cities.

Ames was assigned male at birth when she was born in 1921, in Buffalo, New York, and her journey to self-identification was similar to other trans women of her era. From childhood she sensed she was “different.” She dressed in her mother’s and sister’s clothes and borrowed their cosmetics when alone. She enrolled in college and joined a fraternity in an attempt to fit in with her male peers. She married and had a child before being drafted into the Air Force during World War II. Honorably discharged a year later, she completed dual degrees in Business and Psychology at the University of Buffalo, opened an insurance business, and had three more children. All this time, she dressed as Peggie in secret, fearing discovery by her family and friends.

In the Cold War era, gays and lesbians were persecuted within the federal government and American society, and trans issues were virtually unknown outside of medical circles where they were highly pathologized. Ames found a role model in Christine Jorgensen, the first trans celebrity who brought the concept of “sex change” to the forefront of American consciousness. Ames followed her story in the media and observed that, although the well-dressed and witty Jorgensen was celebrated by some, many saw her as little more than a freak. Therefore, she hid her true self in what historian David Serlin refers to as “the Cold War closet.” She did not even learn the word “transsexual” until 1973.

That year, on a day when she was home alone, she fell asleep on the living room sofa, and her wife returned to find Peggie, not the husband she thought she knew. Now that Peggie was “outed,” Ames decided to live full time as who she was. The couple initially discussed living together platonically as two women, but Ames’ wife, a deeply religious woman, could not reconcile the fact that Peggie identified as a lesbian. Her children took the news even harder, effectively cutting her out of their lives and denying her access to her eight grandchildren. Ames’ second-eldest son, Daryll, committed suicide after community members harassed him about Ames’ transition, and he left behind a note citing her as the reason he took his own life. It would be years before Ames’ eldest son and her daughter, Marsha, would make tentative contact.

Ames and her wife divorced in 1973, and she struggled financially for the remainder of her life. To support herself she opened a furniture refinishing and antique restoration business that she operated out of her barn, and taught adult education courses on woodworking. The rural community of Clarence Center treated her much as her family did. In a letter, written to a lover in 1974, she described the harassment she faced:

Boys ran by the house last night screaming, ‘Peggie, you fucking faggot.’ The police won’t come. Last year the state trooper laughed in my face. Everyone tells me the only solution is to sell. They just want to get rid of this pest, this insidious blemish on their lives and community, this freak, this fucking faggot, this queer who is infecting their lives like poison like cancer. It is becoming too much.

Yet, Ames pressed forward with her transition. After consulting with doctors at the Harry Benjamin Foundation in New York City, she underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1974, which at the time cost around $8,000. She saw the same doctors as tennis player Renée Richards, one of the first out trans athletes.

Ames understood the importance of advocacy to fight gender and sexual discrimination. In 1970 she joined the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier. MSNF incorporated as a non-profit organization in May of 1970 largely to address the targeting and closure of gay bars by the Buffalo Vice Squad. MSNF took the name of an earlier homophile organization, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, though in belief and practice they were more similar to the gay liberationist organizations, such as New York City’s Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), that emerged in the post-Stonewall period.

Ames was elected secretary of MSNF — a somewhat unusual position for a trans person to hold within a gay liberation organization at this time — in 1973 and 1974 and was praised for the efficiency and skill with which she performed her duties. Buffalo was, in the words of longtime gay rights activist Madeline Davis, “a Rust Belt city on the edge of the Midwest.” MSNF’s membership was comprised of both college-educated professionals and blue-collar workers. The group, as such, was less concerned with the politics of respectability present in other post-Stonewall gay rights organizations in large cities and could therefore make room for a white college-educated trans woman such as Ames to occupy a position of leadership. Gay liberation organizations in large cities, such as the GAA, whose membership was comprised primarily of white college-educated men, often espoused a militant politics of liberation but did not allow gender non-conforming people to represent the organization in the press, and were reluctant to fund their causes.

Ames also participated in MSNF’s peer counselor training program, organized panels on transsexualism for Buffalo’s annual Gay Pride Week, and joined MSNF’s Speakers Bureau. In a 1978 profile of Ames written for the Courier-Express, a Buffalo morning newspaper, she estimated that she had lectured to around 12,000 people on the topic of transsexualism, primarily medical, nursing, and Psychology students at the University of Buffalo and other area campuses. According to Carole Hayes, a feminist psychologist who, from 1977 to 1979, taught an adult education course at the State University of New York at Fredonia called “Changing Lifestyles,” Ames was a brilliant speaker and often began her lectures by throwing a bag of rocks on the table to get the audience’s attention. “I need you to listen and understand what I’m going to tell you,” she would say, “because I have rocks thrown at me just for being who I am.” Students often wrote in their course evaluations that Ames’ presentation was the most informative and impactful part of their semester. Contemporary trans people still navigate medical gatekeepers to access transition-related care, but educational efforts by activists such as Ames brought about vast changes in the attitudes of medical professionals towards the transgender community.

Ames’ advocacy also had national reach. She was an established contact person for the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) and later, when the EEF folded in 1977, the Janus Information Facility, based out of the University of Texas. Established in 1964 by the independently wealthy trans man Reed Erickson, the EEF became the leading organization to fund research into transsexualism and to provide information and support to trans people in need of guidance. Trans people, particularly those from the Western New York area, who called the EEF for support were often referred to Ames for peer counseling or transition-related guidance. She maintained an extensive “pen pal” network with other trans women and (cisgender) lesbians whom she met via her EEF contacts, as well as through a lesbian correspondence service called The League.

Educational efforts by activists such as Ames brought about vast changes in the attitudes of medical professionals towards the transgender community.
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By the late 1970s, Ames estimated she knew around 100 other transsexuals in the Western New York area, but she was one of few willing to be out in public. Though she faced great harassment for doing so, her physical presence helped to dispel common prejudices towards trans women. In her personal writings, she noted that while she admired Jorgensen and Richards, she had to forge her own path because, living in a rural community, her life was different from theirs in significant ways. Whereas Richards became a reluctant spokesperson after being outed by the press, Ames realized that staying quiet or closeted would do little to advance acceptance in her community.

Despite Ames’ activism, she was rejected by many members of Buffalo’s gay and lesbian community. Buffalo lesbian feminists, particularly the younger, more radical, lesbians associated with the University of Buffalo’s College of Women’s Studies, saw her as a threat to the local progress of women’s liberation. Ames was expelled from two Buffalo lesbian organizations. Gay Rights for Older Women (GROW) wrote her a letter stating they feared her presence would create an unsafe space that would compromise the organization as a whole. The women of GROW had trouble relating to Ames’ transsexual history and regarded her enthusiasm and outspokenness as evidence of her “maleness.” “Peggie just wanted to talk and talk about herself,” said Madeline Davis, “and many of the women saw that as an example of her ‘male energy.’”

Ames’ treatment reflected broader attitudes held by many lesbian feminists at the time. In 1973, Beth Elliott, a trans lesbian feminist folksinger, was forced to leave the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference (WCLFC), which she helped to organize. A radical feminist organization called The Gutter Dykes distributed leaflets proclaiming Elliott was really a man. Robin Morgan, the conference’s keynote speaker, amended her talk to address the ensuing controversy over Elliott’s participation, arguing that trans women reinforce patriarchal gender roles by taking on stereotypical signifiers of womanhood. Morgan further called Elliott “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer — with the mentality of a rapist.” The anti-trans contingent of the WCLFC then insisted that a vote be taken as to whether Elliott could stay. When a majority of attendees voted to allow her to remain at the conference, the faction created such a fuss that Elliott gave a shortened musical performance and then left voluntarily.

Ames was also rejected by Buffalo lesbians due to her preference for a “high femme” 1950s style of dress at a time when feminists were challenging gender roles by eschewing traditionally feminine garb. Ames’ skirts, hot pants, makeup, and open-toed heels were construed as evidence that she did not fit into the feminist movement. But Ames, who transitioned at age fifty-three, was simply, finally, living as herself and exploring the woman she was not allowed to be during the first four decades of her life. Her age made her ever conscious of her desire to experience life to the fullest. Though some members of GROW perceived her femininity as antiquated and oppressive, her feminism may have been ahead of its time due to her stubborn insistence of trans women’s inclusion.

She noted that while she admired Jorgensen and Richards, she had to forge her own path because, living in a rural community, her life was different from theirs in significant ways.
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Gay men, too, regarded her as a curiosity, and many did not understand the relevance of trans issues to gay rights. Ron Brunette, a former member of MSNF, speculated that Ames was tolerated, in part, due to her friendship with Jim Haynes, a prominent and well-respected gay rights activist and founding member of MSNF, and his partner, Don Licht. “The atmosphere around her was mixed as people did not want to offend Jim Haynes,” Brunette said. “[Haynes’] friendship with Peggie created a shield that helped her. Was she accepted by most… No. Most accepted her because of Jim.” Ames also speculated that many gay men simply saw her as a drag queen, and while this false association produced a degree of tolerance, it ultimately erased her identity.

Ames was, however, able to form a relationship with Luella “Lu” Kye, a lesbian from Fredonia, New York, who she met at an MSNF meeting around 1974. The two began a romance that lasted for several years and they remained in touch until the late 1970s. “Everyone knew Lu was gay, but she didn’t care what anyone thought,” said Carole Hayes, a friend of Kye’s who invited Ames to lecture in her course upon Kye’s recommendation. Hayes further indicated that as a butch woman living in a rural community, Kye may have been more sympathetic to the ostracism Ames faced. Her acceptance of Ames also illustrates that some working-class lesbians living in areas without a “gay scene,” and who were not conversant in mainstream feminist thought, accepted trans women within their circles. Ames, in fact, listed Kye as a resource for local transexuals on a guide she prepared for MSNF’s Health Committee in 1976.

Despite the mistreatment Ames faced by both straight society and Buffalo’s gay and lesbian community, she was privileged in ways not shared by many of her contemporaries. She was white, college educated, and middle class for the first half of her life. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, economically disadvantaged gender non-conforming people, were routinely targeted by law enforcement and marginalized within organizations like the Gay Liberation Front and the GAA. The multiple forms of “otherness” they embodied made them disrespectable in the eyes of the state and of white gay activists in a way Ames was not.

Ames’ work still resonates today. When MSNF disbanded in 1984, other organizations, such as Evergreen Health Services (formerly AIDS Community Services) and Gay and Lesbian Youth Services of Western New York (GLYS), more explicitly addresses trans concerns, and continue to do so to this day. Though Ames mostly withdrew from public advocacy after the early 1980s, she continued to educate and provide support via her correspondence, which allowed her to remain engaged while minimizing discrimination. The “pen pal” networks Ames, and other trans activists, created in the 1970s and ‘80s laid the foundation for the national and international communities trans people formed with the popularization of the internet in the 1990s, which contributed to a new wave of transgender activism. Ames’ belief that trans women should be included within feminist organizations and activism also anticipated the development of a unique trans-feminist perspective articulated by writers and activists such as Emi Koyama and Julia Serano in the late ‘90s and early aughts.

The ‘90s also saw the creation of the first transgender organizations in Western New York such as the Buffalo Belles and the Spectrum Transgender Group. In 2001, Camille S. Hopkins, the first out trans employee to work for the City of Buffalo, joined the organizing committee of Buffalo’s inaugural Dyke March, and was invited to speak at the end of the march. When Hopkins learned Ames’ story while being interviewed for an independent documentary film about the creation of the Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, it provided her with a source of pride, inspiration, and strength. “I just wish I could have given her a hug,” Hopkins said, reflecting on the fact that, unlike herself, Ames was rejected by Buffalo’s lesbian community and had few role models to look to.

Ames’ life and work, most importantly, illustrate that effective activism in mid-size cities and rural towns, where people are more closely knit, involves creating change through building human relationships—such as those formed by her lecturing, correspondence, and work as a counselor—over large-scale direction action protests and civil disobedience. It’s a principle that remains true today.

Ames never did leave her historic nineteenth-century house, built in 1835, despite the pervasive mistreatment she faced. In refusing to be cast out, she turned the rocks, the tools of oppression, thrown at her into tools of education and change. “Three words that come to mind when I think of Peggie Ames are ‘Brave,’ ‘Strong,’ and ‘Stubborn,’” said veteran Buffalo gay rights activist Carol Speser. Ames dealt with many hardships, but was never solely a victim, paving the way for the work of future generations of trans and gender-nonconforming people. Though most, until now, have not heard her name, Ames was a mapmaker, not just a traveler on an already established path, and she is certainly one of the unacknowledged mothers of today’s Transgender Rights Movement.

Sixty-year-old Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin—popularly referred to as “the woman that speaks with Boko Haram”—is the mother of 8, winner of the 2016 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice’s (IPJ) Women Peacemakers, and is one of the most powerful conflict mediators in Nigeria today.

Boko Haram (which loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden”), was formed in 2009 by a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists who violently oppose Western forms of government, education, and society. Since they began an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria, more than two million people have been displaced, at least 20,000 killed, and thousands of women and girls are believed to have been subjected to horrific sexual abuses.

The militant terrorists’ sprawling power and destruction continue today; on Sunday August 19th around 2 a.m., Boko Haram stormed Malari village in the Borno state with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, claiming the lives of more than 60 people in their continued attempt to establish a so-called Islamic state governed through fundamentalist Sharia law.

Hamsatu’s activism—which started about the same time as the insurgency—focuses on gaining justice for raped women and girls, re-integrating the ex-wives of Boko Haram, and rehabilitating former child soldiers.

In this interview, Hamsatu discusses her potent human rights work, her persistent fears, and the ever-evolving fate of the Northern Nigerian women who have suffered under the terror of Boko Haram.

Orji Sunday: What factors influenced the rise of Boko Haram and your activism against Boko Haram?

At some point Boko Haram lived among us in various communities throughout Maiduguri, Nigeria. Whenever they attacked on the military, they would return to the community and we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death. And when the military came for counter insurgency operations, they would arrest every youth in the entire community, including the innocent. When the violence escalated, the military started burning our houses too.

At any rate, the military was a threat and Boko Haram was another threat on the other hand. It was in this crossroad that I decided to speak against the silence. I encouraged the communities to stop hiding the insurgents. This made me popular with the people and the insurgents, too, and those encounters made me gradually embrace full time activism. The Boko Haram were all living with us, they were the children of the people we knew, but you couldn’t talk about it, and nobody could go and report it.

The Boko Haram lived among us and whenever they attacked the military, we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death.
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Can you talk about your activism with the sexually abused women and girls in northeastern Nigeria?

When Boko Haram seized some communities and small settlements in Banki, a Nigerian town bordering Cameroon, many residents fled to Cameroon. The Cameroon soldiers captured them, collected all they had, and allegedly stripped the women naked, asking them to spread their legs wide and open so they could molest the women as they so desired.

Later the Cameroonian army handed over the refugees to the Nigerian army. At Bama, a city in Borno state Nigeria, the Nigerian military separated women and children and husbands—the women and children were moved to an IDP facility in Bama, Borno state, Nigeria.

It is during their stay in the Bama IDP camp that they suffered huge sexual abuses; they alleged that military officers demanded sex before offering them food and relief materials.

We organized these women and girls into a group called Knifar Movement to collectively seek the release for their husbands after years by the military, in addition to getting justice against the alleged rapists. The violated women are over 1,600, and some of them had babies out of those sexual violations.

But nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.

Can you talk more about confronting Boko Haram insurgents?

Whenever there is such incident, I go to the women in those communities, get the details and report to the government sponsored security agents. In all honesty, it was very risky. And sometimes, the insurgents would come to me brandishing their guns, but I still kept talking to them.

Gradually even Boko Haram came to understand that I was neutral and harmless and they started opening up to me. They apologized for the threat and started telling me their own version of the story. They would tell me, “Mama, your government does not value life.”

There are more than 1,600 violated women— some of them had babies out of these sexual violations—but nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.
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Why does Boko Haram respect and trust you to lead negotiations with the government?

It is very easy. They know who is honest and not. They tell me:

“Mama, we are not willing to listen to any man, much as we are ready to listen to you. When our leader was killed in 2009, and we went underground and those who were shot during a harmless burial ceremony were allowed to die because the military refused to allow us donate blood to some of them who were just injured. The government did not care about justice then, but you did. So why should we listen to them when nobody listened to us?”

In this war against insurgency, I don’t take sides. If some military personnel suffer violation and injustice and he is willing to speak up, I would join him to fight for justice. I know that the ordinary Nigerian soldier too is a victim.

Can you speak about your other project targeted at ex-wives of Boko Haram?

I want to engage the former wives of Boko Haram next so that they wouldn’t go back. I have started in a small scale, but I want to assist them in every possible way to get back to their life and society. Because of my little resources, I need to create a small social network amongst a small number of them and we can take it further from there. And some of them are pregnant from Boko Haram. The plan is to send the younger ones to school and train the older ones on the trade of their interest, in addition to providing start-up stipends for them. Then I would engage the communities on the danger of sidelining these people. But I don’t have the resources to do this all alone or to do more than this.

What are the mistakes in the current handling of the Boko Haram issue?

We have a lot to do to get this war over. And a whole lot more to do after a truce has been reached. Almost every person and institution tackling this war is focused on humanitarian issues. We have not turned our attention to the root causes. How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?

My prayers and pleasure every day is to touch the lives of my people. And to change the little I can change. Making a difference in their lives.

What are your fears and worries especially looking at the nature of your work—you are almost confronting death daily?

I am not afraid of speaking or dying. Many people warn me not to speak because my work is dangerous. Sometimes I worry that my immediate family could be targeted. But, I worry more about the women and the children because they have lost everything. They don’t have a future. They are living a completely hopeless life.

How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?
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How do U.S. policies, leaders, and legislation dovetail with the situation in Nigeria?

The United States and the United Nations could do much more and I already said that when I addressed the United Nations Security Council a few months back. But a lot depends on Nigeria—a principal partner in resolving the conflict. While I blame the U.S. partly, I truly understand their position. If the Nigerian government had created the platform to deserve support, perhaps the U.S. could come in. This is a country that is not interested in her own progress. I have done politics in Nigeria and I know it does not work.

Nigeria is a country that is not interested in her own progress.
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What does the future hold for these women?

The women don’t have future unless we decide to give them one through collective actions as humanity. They have lost everything—their husbands, their children, their relatives and all the people that meant something to their lives. It’s sad, but in truth, the future is particularly bleak because even the government does not care.

Who is your hero?

My father is my hero. He taught me to read. He gave me everything to succeed. And he believed in me. My mother did not want me to go to school, but my father held firm and encouraged me. 

If you’d like to help support Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin’s work please consider donating to ICAN (International Civil Society Action Network) which supports women’s rights, peace, and security.

Nyamdorj Anaraa has come out to his friends and family three times: first as a lesbian, second as a transgender man, and finally as a transgender man who is attracted to other men.

From a young age, Anaraa knew that he was different from his peers. For many years, he identified as a lesbian. He married a woman and the two became pillars of Mongolia’s burgeoning LGBTQ community. However, even within this community—which did not yet include people with alternative gender expression—Anaraa felt out of place.  

Anaraa hated his female-assigned body. At first, in speaking to other women, he thought the body shame that he was experiencing was endemic to being a woman in a patriarchal society. When he tried to express his feelings to the group, he was met with sympathy and told that all women hate their bodies for falling short of established beauty standards. While he at first thought that his feelings stemmed from the same toxic source, he eventually realized that what he was feeling was instead gender dysphoria, the distress experienced from the misalignment of one’s gender identity and the sex one is assigned at birth.

In 2004, Anaraa embraced what he had not been able to express until then: he began telling people that he was trans. In 2011, he began his physical transition by pursuing surgery and hormone therapy. As Anaraa transitioned, he began to see the beauty in his body for the first time. “The more I became me, the more I came into my body,” he said in our April interview. “I began to see the beauty of myself and other men.” This profound psychological and physical change also precipitated his attraction to other men, and now he identifies as a queer trans man.

In the same way that Anaraa has undergone tremendous transition, so too has Mongolia. Only 28 years ago, the vast, yet sparsely-populated country became an unlikely democracy situated between two global superpowers. Mongolia has endured many economic and political trials, but because of its own commitment to democratic values and the urging of activists like Anaraa, it has become a leader in human rights protections for developing nations.

For Anaraa, the lack of resources available to him during his struggle for self-realization made his life more difficult. “Had I the language, had I the environment, had I even an inkling of [transgender] people […], had I been in a community where there was knowledge of other gender expressions, I wouldn’t have complicated my life so much by having to come out three times,” he laments. Indeed, Anaraa, now 41, came of age during a turbulent time for the country of Mongolia. During his childhood, Mongolia was a puppet regime of the Soviet empire. The country suffered under the poverty of late-stage communism and information did not easily find its way in or out of the country. In 1990, Mongolia’s youth staged a revolution, throwing off the Soviet yoke. As was true for many former socialist countries, the 1990s were a desperate time as the country struggled with its economic transition to democracy and capitalism. The Mongolia of Anaraa’s youth was not a place with access to resources for people struggling with queer identities.

Though not an ideal environment for navigating queer identities, Mongolia’s political transition provided Anaraa with the inspiration he later used to fight for LGBTQ rights in his country.

The Mongolia of Anaraa’s youth was not a place with access to resources for people struggling with queer identities.
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Anaraa’s was inspired by his mother’s activism. Tsendmaa Khorchinjav worked her whole life as an engineer in agrarian Mongolia’s iconic wool and cashmere industry. When Mongolia’s economic and political transition began, domestic manufacturers were unable to compete, and eager Chinese traders bought companies and raw agricultural materials wholesale. Tsendmaa’s colleagues chose her to lead the Federation of Wool and Cashmere Producers, an industry association, and she took to her charge of saving the quickly collapsing domestic industry. As Anaraa describes, his mother—who had lived her whole life under a communist system—threw herself into researching marketing, commodity pricing. She presented her findings to parliament and organized politically to pass a law that prohibited raw cashmere exports. This protectionist measure ensured that cashmere would be processed in Mongolia before being sold to other countries, protecting the industry and saving the jobs of countless Mongolian workers. Because of his mother’s work, Anaraa learned firsthand that change can be won by ordinary people organizing for legislative change.

Anaraa has dedicated his life to helping others find the self-knowledge and acceptance that was once elusive to him. In 2007, he and a group of passionate activists founded Mongolia’s LGBT Center, the first resource of its kind in the country. The group focuses on not only creating social awareness and acceptance of its community, but pursues an ambitious legislative agenda. While there is certainly discrimination against Mongolia’s queer community, the work of the LGBT Center has pushed the Mongolian government to adopt a legislative framework far more progressive than that of its neighbors. While other post-Soviet republics have seen an increase in intolerance towards queer communities, Mongolia has recently introduced new protections into law.

The LGBT Center’s political organization is savvy. In addition to finding allies in country, they have leveraged Mongolia’s international allies and the treaties that the country is party to in order to promote their legislative agenda. As a member of the United Nations (UN) and signatory to its treaties, Mongolia is periodically reviewed for its protection of universal human rights. In 2010, the freshly incorporated LGBT Center inserted itself as a civil society organization involved in evaluating Mongolia’s human rights progress and reporting back to the UN. This process yielded the recommendations  that hate crimes should be outlawed, investigated, and that the perpetrators of such crimes should be punished; that the country should pass a comprehensive stand-alone law on discrimination that includes sexual orientation and gender identity; and that it improve public education on human rights and non-discrimination.

By going through the UN processes, the LGBT Center had established a mandate, which it could then use to hold the country of Mongolia accountable. The Center used this platform to maintain a dialogue with government and the National Human Rights Commission in order to push for reform.

Becoming Trans: Transgender Identity in the Middle Ages
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Victory was not straightforward, however. When Mongolia overhauled its criminal code (which had been written in the communist era), the LGBT Center had hoped to include a classic anti-hate crime definition so as to expressly protect minorities. Instead, the new criminal code, passed in 2015 and in force since 2017, outlawed discrimination of any kind. While this was a victory, the broad wording of the new law does not explicitly protect the LGBTQ community in the way its members had hoped it would.

Anaraa and his colleagues realized that in order to receive this protection, they needed to make sure that hate crimes became recognized as discrimination. Mongolians needed to learn that engaging in hate speech or otherwise harming others because of their gender identity or sexual orientation did not constitute freedom of speech, but was now a form of discrimination under Mongolia’s new criminal code. They launched several initiatives to make sure that discrimination is widely recognized: they helped pass a law preventing medical discrimination against LGBTQ people and have provided education and treatment guidelines for medical professionals; they pushed for a ministerial resolution against police discrimination; and are currently fighting against employment discrimination and are actively engaged in debating a labor law in parliament.

In November 2017, a transgender woman was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. While in police custody, an officer pinned her to the floor and forcibly stripped her. The police division responsible did not find the officer guilty of any wrongdoing, and to date the LGBT Center is not aware if any disciplinary action that has been taken against this officer. The Center helped the victim file a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission. In helping bring her case to authorities for prosecution under the criminal code, the LGBT Center realized that beyond pursuing justice in her individual case, the police force as a whole would benefit from a better understanding of discrimination.

Aside from legal action, the Center focuses on education. As Anaraa explains, providing information and taking away fear of the unknown is crucial to changing people’s attitudes and gaining acceptance. “Once you’re able to claim your identity and fully live as yourself and be honest about your feelings […] people do accept you,” he said. “They might be shocked at first, but then you take the time to educate them and actually acceptance is very easy to come by.”

With support from the Asia Foundation and the U.S. and French embassies, the LGBT Center has developed a curriculum on discrimination and is training the Mongolian police force. The training—called “A Hate Free and Tolerant Mongolia”—uses lectures, case studies, and exercises to help police officers recognize discrimination and hate crimes. At the outset of training, some officers did not see the harm in discrimination and were inclined to express their personal opinions about minority groups in response to training prompts. Many officers expressed the belief that hate crimes do not exist in their country. Trainers described a divide between older and younger officers, gleaning optimism from the younger officers’ more tolerant attitudes and willingness to learn. Moreover, the training has been successful in that it has offered guidance to officers as to how to implement the new criminal code in their daily work.

As Anaraa explains, providing information and taking away fear of the unknown is crucial to changing people’s attitudes and gaining acceptance.
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Beyond creating a safer and more equitable country, training police officers in this way generates data to understand the depth of the problem and identify areas for improvement. Officers admitted that before the introduction of the new criminal code and training on its implications for their work, they were inclined to classify crimes that they could now identify as hate crimes as something else. For example, what they may have previously classified as a straightforward assault case, officers now know to classify as a hate crime if it was motivated by discrimination and bias towards a minority group.

The LGBT Center has now conducted six trainings of over 300 police officers, as well as some prosecutors and judges. They have been able to include officers from rural areas spanning Mongolia’s vast landscape and are currently completing training for all nine divisions of Ulaanbaatar’s police force. Anaraa believes that while this has been a strong start, for this training to truly have an impact over time it needs to be included in compulsory police academy curriculum to ensure that every officer understands what hate crimes are and their responsibility in preventing and prosecuting them.

Mongolia began its fight for LGBTQ equality by modeling the laws after other nations, but in doing so became a leader that other countries may now follow. Anaraa recently became the third transgender person in the country to legally change his gender marker on his government documentation, something that only one third of governments worldwide currently allow. He has spent the last eighteen years fighting tirelessly to improve the lives of LGBTQ people in Mongolia, and due in no small part to his effort, there is now a thriving community of leaders and activists.

After three years as the Executive Director, Anaraa recently resigned his leadership position. He will continue on in an advisory capacity while Munkhtuya Dashtsend, the Center’s former Legal Program Manager, leads the Center. He is content to live his life knowing that the group he helped found will continue to advocate for a more equal Mongolia. Looking ahead to the future, Anaraa believes the best times are yet to come. “Things will only get better […] the work of the LGBT Center will never be complete,” he said.“We have another fifty years of work ahead of us, but I do believe that in another ten years, we will have a very, very beautiful society.”

Social Media Has Its Pitfalls But You Can Use It For Positive Change — Here’s How

Together, we can build the future we need.

Unsplash/Jonathan Denney

By Alaina Leary

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

I t’s easy to think that social media is a force for negativity — that it’s bad for our mental health to be constantly exposed to a stream of news and avenues for comparing ourselves to others. But social media can also be a platform for creating and sustaining positive social change, and it’s something that we can all be a part of.

Hashtag movements like #MeToo, which was started by activist Tarana Burke and later amplified online, have lasting consequences. RAINN (The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) reported a 21 percent increase in calls to anti-sexual assault helplines after Harvey Weinstein allegations and #MeToo exploded, showing that online conversations can persuade people to seek help offline.

The 2014 hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks launched a nonprofit of the same name that now offers internship grants, mentorships, awards for authors and booksellers, and an app called OurStory that helps connect people with vetted diverse books. And Marley Dias’s #1000BlackGirlBooks has helped continue that conversation while proving that young people can become activists and create change.

These are only a few examples of how movements like #BlackLivesMatter use social media alongside grassroots organizing as a catalyst for activism. It’s worth noting that many current policy changes — like the recent repealing of net neutrality — are particularly tough on marginalized people who rely heavily on the Internet for agency, education, and activism.

One of my earliest experiences with activism was when I started using an LGBTQIA+ youth forum in middle school to spread information about safe and consensual sex with our international online community, and later became a moderator for the group.

If you’re interested in using social media as an agent for positive change but you’re not sure where to start, here are some tips that may help:

1. Take advantage of interactive activism opportunities in online communities.

Research shows that people are more likely to participate in causes with social or interactive aspects that have a personal feel. This was what helped the ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge go viral.

If your friends and family see you posting about a cause — whether it’s a call for donations or a simple action they can take — they’ll be more likely to participate because you’re a part of their personal social network. It also helps if it’s interactive in some way like the Ice Bucket Challenge was.

Last year, a friend of mine organized a call-to-action for people to write to representatives about the Affordable Care Act. She used social media to get the word out and designated a specific date for people to do it. She then invited local folks to her home to write out postcards for mailing and encouraged people to join in virtually via social media if they weren’t able to attend.

If your friends and family see you posting about a cause, they’ll be more likely to participate because you’re a part of their personal social network.

Many people might be informed about causes like affordable health care or net neutrality, but they don’t know what they can do. Since social media is social and somewhat intimate by nature (depending on how many people you connect with), it’s a great platform to spread awareness and get other people excited about a cause.

2. Make sure your activism is accessible and inclusive

The best thing about social media activism is how accessible it can be. Actions like organizing, going door-to-door for a campaign, or showing up for an in-person protest can be expensive and dangerous — especially for people of color and other marginalized people. They can also be downright inaccessible for people with disabilities.

A successful campaign for change is accessible to everyone, like the creation of the Disability March website as an online counterpart for the Women’s March. It’s also tied to offline change; not everyone can physically attend a march, but everyone can voice their concerns about the political administration with the chance to be heard. There is more than one way to get involved, so it’s inclusive of a wide range of people. The Disability March website offers examples of how people can organize online as part of their activism.

How Do You Keep Social Media From Destroying Your Mental Health?

The Women’s March was a great example of how social media helped organize an event, and disability activist Mia Ives-Rublee spearheaded the effort to make the event more accessible and inclusive to the disability community. Online efforts like Women’s March on Washington — Disability Caucus and #CripTheVote aim to sustain this momentum through finding accessible ways to get disabled people politically engaged.

No matter what your cause, there are ways to tie simple actions to real change — like encouraging people to take next steps to protect and restore net neutrality, or sharing information about how people can get registered to vote in an upcoming local election.

3. Remember that small steps are critical to getting the work done

Particularly with our constant access to information, it can be easy to lose sight of how small pieces of the puzzle are crucial to effecting larger, long-lasting change.

But small steps — like voting in local and state elections, calling your representatives, or creating a community group for political education — have a major impact. According to Harvard Business Review, easy-to-replicate, low-risk tactics are the most likely to succeed.

Small steps have a major impact.

It’s powerful if you share with your community that you’re going to get registered and make voting in the next local election a group effort, and you all get together to achieve that goal. It might seem like a small action, but state and local elections matter — they often help decide things that will have an impact on your life and the lives of those in your community. And because local elections typically have lower voter turnouts, every vote counts.

Don’t discount local protests or smaller national protests because you’re not seeing the turnout that the Women’s March had. Get invested in grassroots organizing online: What issues are communities talking about? Is there a call-to-action that you can participate in? Especially if these are communities that are typically ignored in politics and the media, it’s time to listen and get involved.

4. Share the work that other activists are doing

If you’re feeling a little lost or defeated — or you just need some time for self-care — that’s okay, too. Remember that you can’t do everything, be a part of every cause, and commit to every possible social or political action.

Amplify the work that you see other activists doing, even if you can’t take part personally. Maybe there’s someone you know who’d love to donate to a fundraiser, or maybe you can connect with someone who needs help calling their Republican Congress member.

Whether it’s showing up for a local community workshop, volunteering for a nonprofit, or retweeting activism-related information to your online network, there are so many ways to use your social platform for good.

I’m An Activist — Am I Allowed To Unplug From The Internet?

Sometimes I’ll see fantastic work that I know I can’t physically be a part of, like the Climate March in Washington, D.C., and I share the work of activists who were involved in organizing or attending. I know that I’m an individual person and as much as I contribute to causes that I care about, I can’t feasibly do everything, but what I can’t do, I can amplify.

There’s something positive and empowering about sharing our collective wins with the community, too. When you see an effort that’s affecting positive change — especially if it’s a cause that’s not often reported in mainstream media — share it with your social networks and friends. Tell them about some of the best activism victories you’ve witnessed or been a part of in 2017 — you never know, it may just encourage someone to get involved.

Social media activism is great for so many reasons: It is more widely accessible, it gets conversations started, it sustains momentum, and it helps empower people who may have never thought of themselves as activists.

As a multiply marginalized person, I always wondered what I could actually do to create real change — to work on issues like disability rights, marginalized voices in the media and publishing, accessible health care, sexual assault and consent education, or LGBTQIA+ rights.

Through online communities, I’ve gained access to invaluable resources, like learning how to distribute safe sex and consent education on campus with Great American Condom Campaign, help get college students registered to vote with Rock the Vote or report on accessibility in public transit.

Some of my activism work is fully online while other aspects have an offline component. But, regardless, there’s one thread of connection: Every time I speak up and share about these issues on social media, people reach out to me. They let me know that they feel empowered to share their own story, or that they’ve connected with a nonprofit I recommended to donate or do volunteer work.

Together, we can sustain all this momentum and build the future we need.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/making-our-movements-stronger-by-resisting-antisemitism-af01bef625e0/ Sun, 14 Jan 2018 18:21:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2429 Read more]]> Antisemitism, like other systemic “isms,” goes beyond just prejudice: It carries material power and it helps other systems of oppression function smoothly.

By Jonah S. Boyarin & Dania Rajendra

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

Authors’ Note: The title of this piece — and much of its content — is inspired by April Rosenblum’s zine, “The past didn’t go anywhere: making resistance to antisemitism part of all of our movements.” The title is used with her explicit permission.

Do you want to fight white supremacy? We do. Do you want to fight systemic wealth and income inequality! Us, too.

Well, resisting antisemitism is one more way to make our feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement organizing stronger.

Antisemitism is real, it’s here, and it is a crucial and often invisible part of the interlocking network of oppressions with which we’re more familiar.

Resisting antisemitism strengthens our commitment to collective liberation — that we will all get free, together, including Jewish people.

Who are we? We’re Dania and Jonah, two members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. One of us is a brown cis-woman and one of us is a white cis-man — and oh boy, people have been asking us a lot more about antisemitism lately now that it’s been in the news so often.

Some background on Antisemitism

Antisemitism is broadly understood as violent hatred of Jews, or hatred that bears the threat of such violence.

It coexists with Christian hegemony, which normalizes and rewards Christian ideas, people, and power structures, and devalues and attacks non-Christian ones.

Sometimes, antisemitism shows up as ugly microaggressions like when we’ve been called a “dirty Jew,” or asking for a bottle of wine to buy for our seder (a Jewish ritual meal) and getting handed a bottle named “The Velvet Devil.”

Or they can sound nice but actually be quite dangerous, like when we’ve been told, “All the Jews I know are rich,” (pro-tip: lots of Jews are poor) or when people shout “Jesus loves you!” at us.

But antisemitism, like other systemic “isms,” goes beyond just prejudice: it carries material power and it helps other systems of oppression function smoothly.

Antisemitism, like other systemic ‘isms,’ goes beyond just prejudice.
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Antisemitism is nothing new. Christian killing and expulsions of Jews for being variously racially or religiously foreign, greedy, “unsaved,” or subversive, was a feature of European life from medieval times through the Stalinist purges of the 1950s.

During the Holocaust, a third of our people were murdered by the Nazi regime, aided and abetted by their neighbors. It wasn’t just Hitler’s personal prejudice: Jews made a handy scapegoat for Germany’s interwar economic problems and the cultural and global shifts associated with the end of World War I.

Antisemitism is a dangerous fantasy of secretive, disproportionate Jewish power, a conspiratorial claim that a cabal of (Jewish) people control our economy and society.

Antisemitism distracts us from addressing oppressive systems like racialized, sexist capitalism that are the real root cause of great suffering for working and poor people of color.

It relies on a perception of Jews as being essentially foreign, religiously/racially other, “unsaved,” and having different economic, political, and cultural interests than the white, Christian, nationalist “us.”

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Anti-Semitic Twitter Trolls

Antisemitism redirects the blame for the injustices caused by systems of oppression onto individuals or a small group, onto people in highly visible middleman or “new money” roles, such as Jewish landlords, Jewish attorneys, Jewish film producers, Jewish shop owners, Jewish tax collectors, and Jewish teachers.

This dynamic of scapegoating is a pattern common in the oppression of middleman or “model minorities” (i.e., Koreans in the 1992 L.A. Uprising; or white backlash against South and East Asian enrollment in universities).

It coexists alongside vicious anti-Black, anti-poor racism that is different from the experience of those in the middle (though, to be clear, people can have multiple, intersecting identities and experiences, such as being Black and Jewish).

The effect of this redirection on collective liberation movements is to distract us from fighting systems of oppression by redirecting our blame on individuals or small groups.

Right-wing, antisemitic conspiratorial thinking has also portrayed Jews as the secret, subversive (“Communist”) power behind the Black-led Civil Rights movement, women-led feminist movements.

Today, the right absurdly insinuates that the Black Lives Matter movement consists of paid protesters stirred up by Jewish billionaire George Soros. Such false claims undermine the political power and accomplishments of people of color.

So, why do a lot of people falsely believe that Jews are clannish, rich, essentially foreign, and own the banks, Hollywood, and the media? Lots of reasons!

Some reasons include anti-communism, the G.I. Bill, antisemitic job markets, Henry Ford, racialized housing markets — you can read about this for days, but one excellent place to start is the paper that Jews for Racial and Economic Justice released this November, “Understanding Antisemitism.”

In short, antisemitism is bad for non-Jews working to get free as well as for Jews. We, Dania and Jonah, are trying to get free and we hope you are, too.

Here are 6 ways to make our collective liberation movements stronger by resisting antisemitism:

1. See, name, and organize against antisemitism on the right.

Leftist Jews looked on with fear as tiki torch-wielding white supremacists converged in Charlottesville to defend the memory of the Confederacy/white supremacy, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and brandishing assault rifles outside the local synagogue.

Terrified Jews were alienated from our leftist movements when some of our leftist friends failed to notice, comment, or check in on us after the biggest public display of murderous antisemitism in our lifetimes.

Those of us on the Jewish left are working hard to get more Jews to effectively show up for racial justice.

The dynamic of scapegoating is a pattern common in the oppression of ‘model minorities.’
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Our non-Jewish allies can help us build Jewish trust in anti-racist movements by seeing, naming, and resisting antisemitism when it happens and by organizing to militantly resist violent white supremacist incursions on our communities. In order to do that effectively, we must…

2. Study the far right’s analyses, strategies, and organizing tactics and notice how they infiltrate the center.

Eric Ward (a Black, non-Jewish writer) offers some helpful framing in his widely-shared piece, “Skin in the Game” from Political Research Associates (PRA): “Antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought, [it is] the fuel that White nationalist ideology uses to power its anti-Black racism, its contempt for other people of color, and its xenophobia — as well as the misogyny and other forms of hatred it holds dear.”

PRA offers a bunch of other helpful resources for people new to looking at the right from the left. (Full disclosure, Dania is on the board of PRA.)

3. Name and interrupt antisemitism on the left.

Know your 1%! The 1% is not Jewish — only 1.7% of them are Jewish. By far and away, the 1% is white, cis-male and Christian. But that’s not the problem — the system (capitalism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.) is.

So, the next time you see an article listing “NYC’s Worst 100 Landlords,” which focuses the blame for very real and horrible landlord abuses on individual landlords, many of them visibly Jewish, you might choose to respond, “Let’s organize to address the real problem, which is that the systemic structure of the landlord-tenant relationship is inherently abusive because it violates housing as a human right — housing shouldn’t be bought and sold, it should be a right.”

Trumpian Conspiracy Theories And Anti-Semitism Are Intimately Connected

Or you might object the next time someone spouts a conspiracy theory blaming “the Jews” for 9/11. Or maybe, when you write a post about Jay-Z’s latest album, you will point out the dangerous nature of his “compliments” about how Jews are good with money.

Name antisemitism when you see it — doing so protects Jews from violence and refocuses the left on resisting systems.

4. Don’t highlight someone’s Jewishness if you wouldn’t highlight their ethnicity or religion otherwise.

You know that maddening hypocrisy that happens every time a white Christian cis dude kills a bunch of people but he’s somehow not a “terrorist”? Yeah.

When people subtly highlight the Jewishness of someone who is abusing their power, that’s almost always about scapegoating.

5. Distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism; distinguish between Jews, Zionists, and Israel.

Israel and its head of state, Benjamin Netanyahu, often claim to speak and act on behalf of all Jews, but that is simply not true.

Many Jews are not Zionist, not nationalist, not militarist, and/or stand in solidarity with Palestine. Want to criticize Israel while also resisting antisemitism? No problem (also, us, too!): Address imperialism and colonialism everywhere.

As Indigenous leader Winona Duke has said, “We [the U.S.] can’t talk about Israel because we can’t talk about Wounded Knee.. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel.”

Many Jews are not Zionist, not nationalist, not militarist, and/or stand in solidarity with Palestine.
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And the Israel lobby (which does not represent all Jews!) is simply not the most powerful player in U.S. foreign policy — it’s systemic U.S. imperialism, which supports Israel in order to promote U.S. military and economic interests in the Middle East, not because it’s trying to do Jews any favors.

(And because Christian Zionists want to use Jews and Israel as part of their end-times theology — um, no thanks!)

6. Look out for the vulnerable, and recognize Jews’ vulnerability in this moment.

In the last month, I (Jonah), have had three people in public spaces approach me because they see me wearing a yarmulke (religious skullcap), ask me about being Jewish and then ask me about how Jews control the banks, own the real estate, and are good with money — I kid you not.

What I don’t think my non-Jewish friends realize is how scary this is — not just in the moment but more as contributing to an ongoing, existential dread that we might yet again be violently scapegoated because we’re seen as being all-powerful.

This dread carries real weight given that the Nazis murdered my great-great-grandfather and entire branches of my family.

In short, don’t assume. We’re in this work for everyone’s freedom, guided by and inspired by — and proud of — our Jewishness.

When you see a Jewish person — a woman with a star of David necklace or a man with a skullcap — you might be looking at us: two people on our way to do our justice work.

When we get on a subway car, we’re looking around to make sure everyone’s okay — we hope you’re looking out for us, too. After all, that’s the only way we are gonna make it through this administration, and the only way we’re all gonna get free.

*For deeper study, please consult JFREJ’s recent paper, “Understanding Antisemitism.”

Connectedness leaves us feeling exhausted and, for activists, can lead to quicker burnout.

By Alaina Leary

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

A s activists, we often feel like we need to be “on” at all times.

We have to be informed about any injustice that’s going on so we can help fight it. We need to be a part of the action. We feel called to be doing something that will have positive effects.

Because we live in an Internet age, that can come with a feeling of responsibility: that we should never back away from social media. That we need to always be online. FOMO — or “fear of missing out” — is ever-present.

But research suggests that, as humans, we aren’t prepared for what often amounts to an onslaught of 24/7 global news aided by the Internet age. This connectedness leaves us feeling exhausted and, for activists, can lead to quicker burnout.

When I first heard the news about Kevin Spacey coming out after being accused of sexual violence last week as I was doing my daily email and social media check for work, I panicked.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity

A lot of my activism is centered on LGBTQIA+ rights and rape culture, and this conversation is right at the intersection of the two. There was plenty of activism work I could do, but I also knew that I had a lot of work to do because it’s Monday and I’ve got several ongoing projects at hand.

There’s already plenty on my plate, and I really only had time to read about the situation and amplify a few voices online.

We need to remember that we’re absolutely allowed to unplug from the Internet and take a step (or five) back from social media — and not just during times when we’re already feeling fatigue and burnout creep in, but on a regular basis to maintain our mental and physical health.

Getting away from social media is actually an important and necessary part of self-care. Here are some reasons why, as activists, we do need to unplug from the Internet and tips on how we can (realistically) do that:

1. We can’t do the work if we’re exhausted or overwhelmed

Between Facebook’s push for users to get more of their news on the platform and people’s tendency to share things that make them outraged, consuming the news is a big part of the online experience in today’s society.

Many people I’m connected with on social media are also invested in similar causes — disability rights, anti-racism, universal health care, environmental protection.

It’s fairly common for me to be using social media as a leisure tool and come across upsetting news, petitions, protests, and long articles or videos on important topics like sub-minimum wages for disabled workers or the effects of climate change on the bee population.

It’s easy to feel burnt out after just a few minutes online. So much on social media has a call-to-action attached, and it’s not possible for us to do anything effectively if we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves to do everything.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

To avoid this, we need to prioritize self-care. It’s easy to feel guilty for spending even an hour — never mind an entire weekend, week, or longer — away from social media and from activism work, because there will always be more we can do.

But we need to remember that taking time to recharge regularly helps us come back to activism with fresh enthusiasm, ideas, and the mental capacity to handle challenges.

I try to take social media breaks for several hours daily, although I do usually check in at least once a day on the current news cycle to keep informed.

There are times I dedicate to self-care and recharging, often an entire weekend or longer, where I commit to not checking social media or reading the news (or my email!).

I usually find that I come back to the cause feeling even more ready to do the work that needs to be done, whether it’s organizing, educating, or attending an in-person protest or rally.

2. We can’t fight every single battle all the time

My family and friend circles are full of activists who tackle a variety of issues, from local politics and environmental activism to anti-racism and domestic violence. Because I’m so involved in the activist community, I know people who are involved in what seems like almost every issue.

I’m often surrounded by other activists and reading about what they’re working on, and I think about the things I’ll never have time to be a part of. I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what I can’t accomplish as a single individual.

We need to remember to be realistic in what we can accomplish, and this is a huge part of learning to unplug.

I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what I can’t accomplish.

I’m not advocating for being completely naïve and uninterested in causes that don’t personally affect us. What I am suggesting is that we try to stick to a few different niches and remember that there are folks doing the work that we can’t.

They may even be better prepared through lived experience and education than we are. Instead of feeling fatigued that we aren’t able to fight for every cause we believe in, we can amplify the work that people are doing and focus on our own strengths.

Most of my activism work revolves around disability and LGBTQIA+ rights, which are both communities that I’m a part of. I also do a lot of work on diversity in publishing and media, so I’m constantly paying attention to conversations about the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement and the fight to diversify publishing staff.

How To Help The Cause When You Need Help Yourself

There are, however, many causes that I believe in but know I don’t have the time, energy, or resources to fight for, so I spend my time amplifying people and organizations that are leading the way.

In my day job as a writer, editor, and social media manager, I am often in a position to shed light on issues and potential solutions, distributing information about activist causes to key influencers who I know will help get the word out.

Even if you don’t have access to these outlets, you can amplify other activists and causes on your own social media channels and by word-of-mouth locally.

3. Activists are frequent targets for online harassment

Particularly if you are marginalized or multiply marginalized and in any type of visible position, being an activist also comes with targeting online. If you’re speaking up for a cause, chances are high that there will be trolls and other folks online who disagree.

“Disagreement” may mean a comment here or there, but it can also escalate into things like being harassed, doxxed, and threatened.

If this happens, make sure to practice immediate self-care in the moment, but also use it as a reason to regularly recharge and step back from the Internet and social media. Build these breaks into your routine.

Depending on how often you engage online, you might take a 15-minute break for every hour spent online or take 2 full days per week to go off the grid. Check in with your own mental and physical health, and your energy levels, to see if these breaks are working for you.

Being an activist also comes with targeting online.

I started taking planned social media breaks about two years ago. I was already working at least part-time in a social media capacity for organizations, as well as using the web as a resource for my freelance and volunteer work, which is frequently activism-based.

At the time, I was exhausted and had no idea how to navigate this. After my “official” work hours ended, was I expected to be online at all times in case I came across a political story I could pitch it to an editor?

Should I be there retweeting hashtags as soon as they started, before they were even viral? If I didn’t know about the latest news in disability rights and health care, how could I put together an action plan?

Planning daily and weekly breaks into my work week became absolutely critical to remaining healthy and engaged.

You might also want to consider checking in with your community to see if there’s a way other people can support you so that you’re able to take breaks when you need to.

If you’re managing social media for a nonprofit or organization — or as a public figure yourself — you might see if there are other moderators who can step in at least a few times a week so you’re not the only one doing the work.

A Brief History Of Behind-The-Scenes Activism With A Big Impact

Asking for help can be difficult, but support from your community can be really beneficial when you’re trying to recharge, particularly if you’ve been subject to harassment.

When activism is a big part of your work (and possibly even your identity), it can be hard to separate yourself. You might feel like you need to be engaged at all times.

For example, I often feel the pressure if I see a call for pitches from an online magazine looking to publish a themed issue on consent and I don’t send in options related to the causes I care about, such as campus sexual violence, inclusive sex and consent education, or rape culture.

I need to remember that I won’t do effective, good work if I’m constantly exhausted because I’m pushing myself to be involved 24/7 in so many things. Like anyone else, I need time off and breaks from the constant flow of work, whether it’s paid or volunteer.

When activism is a big part of your work (and possibly even your identity), it can be hard to separate yourself.

I need to prioritize self-care. I need to know when to step back (which can be tough, especially if you are being harassed or threatened) and when to ask for help.

I recommend resources like The Self Care Project, Rest for Resistance, Everyday Feminism, Wear Your Voice Magazine, The Establishment, and these self-care options for days when the world feels terrible.

These are lessons we all need to take seriously, especially as the Internet and social media become more advanced.

We may have constant access to a vast amount of information, but we can’t do anything about it if we aren’t strategic — especially in how we build self-care into our priority lists for daily life.

Alaina Leary is an Everyday Feminism Reporting Fellow. She is a Bostonian currently studying for her MA in publishing at Emerson College. She’s a disabled, queer activist and is on the social media team at We Need Diverse Books. She can often be found re-reading her favorite books and covering everything in glitter. You can find her at her website or on Instagram and Twitter @alainaskeys. Read her articles here.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/millennials-are-embracing-anger-thats-a-good-thing-edf7b5e15a42-2/ Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:28:37 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2207 Read more]]> Millennials are turning anger into inspiration and using it as fuel to take action.

I was out recently with a group of friends when, over wine and spaghetti, the conversation turned to feminism. Everyone at the table — a mix of millennials and Gen Xers — said she thought of herself as a feminist, but several were skeptical of the way the movement was represented online. “Everyone just seems so angry on social media,” one said, shaking her head.

I understood her point, but I also empathized with the outrage — wasn’t she tired of being catcalled and having her ideas repeated by male coworkers in meetings? Couldn’t she imagine wanting to yell a little about hearing everyone from talk show hosts to the president joke about sexual assault? Letting it slide and “leaning in” didn’t seem to be working, so why not try being honest about how these things made us feel? Ignoring and hiding our anger wasn’t getting our point across, so why not let some of it out?

“Well,” she said carefully, looking more at the table than at me. “You are a great example of what I mean. Your posts make you seem so angry.”

Ignoring and hiding our anger wasn’t getting our point across, so why not let some of it out?
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I admit, I use the occasional caps lock to get a point across, and I don’t have a ton of patience on my personal wall for people who play devil’s advocate. So this wasn’t the first time someone had called attention to my acknowledgment of my own negative emotions as a flaw, a potential turn-off to more “level-headed” people. I’m sure it’s true to an extent, but for every person who has unfriended me or chewed me out in a private message, two or three have told me they’ve learned something or felt “seen” by my posts. Depending on how you curate your news feeds and media diet, it’s likely you’ve recently had an experience like mine — or my friend’s.

Maybe you’ve found yourself typing in all caps about fascism, or being criticized for a taking a passionate tone about public education or Black lives, or been un-friended for posting “angry” anti-Trump memes.

Artist Kayla E. Says She Is An Angry Woman
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More and more of us are protesting, boycotting, calling out, and sharing memes that reflect our anger about politics and social issues. In response, the more conflict-averse among us ask for pictures of kittens and puppies instead, and copy and paste pleas to “break up the negativity” in their feeds. We make calls to our senators, and right-wing outlets describe it using words like “harassment” rather than “civic engagement.” We take to the streets with cardboard signs, and commentators and in-laws call it a “riot.” Scroll through your news feed or cable channels and you’ll easily find fights over what social media is for, what government is for, even over what streets and sidewalks are for (i.e. protesting or driving even if it means mowing down protesters).

Almost everyone is angry about something right now, and if you’re a member of the millennial generation, it’s likely become part of your identity — whether you identify with it personally or not.

How did we get here? To answer that question, many have taken the simplest route: pointing fingers at the supposed weakness of the youngest politically and economically active generation. Millennials — people roughly between the ages of 20 and 36 — are often held up as the angriest generation (also the laziest, most entitled, and most sensitive). “Generation Me,” we’ve been called, especially since the advent of social media and the selfie. Writers like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff (authors of “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic) and cultural pundits like Piers Morgan pontificate about how millennials are weak-willed, entitled, and addicted to outrage.

It’s true that more and more of us are protesting, boycotting, and sharing our rage on social media about things that seem wrong or inauthentic to us, from companies or politicians that don’t support our values to caught-on-tape incidences of discrimination and abuse. Fifty-six percent of young adults consider themselves activists in some way, and about half consider it an important part of who they are, according to advertising firm TBWA Worldwide. And of course, though it’s hard to pin down just how many, some of us are trolls, badgering strangers and friends alike with comments and other behavior that ranges from annoying to dangerous.

The truth is that anger exists among people of all generations — just take a look at some of the coverage of campaign rallies on both sides of the political divides around the world in 2016, or the Thanksgiving tables of many American families. Millennials certainly aren’t the only ones who get upset about bad sports calls, and we aren’t alone in experiencing road rage, though fewer of us are driving. If there’s something different about millennials’ relationship to anger, it might be simply that we have an easier time recognizing and expressing it.

The truth is that anger exists among people of all generations.
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“I feel like we just have more mediums to respond to cultural events, and we are used to posting, commenting, and generating ‘thinkpieces’ on the fly,” says Ebony Murphy-Root, a self-described “old millennial” at 34.

That response has become so associated with millennials that Kat Tanaka Okopnik, a member of Generation X, says she’s often “accused of being a millennial” when she refuses to mask her anger when posting on social media.

All people — not just millennials — want to belong to part of a group and to empathize with our group mates, explains Dean Burnett, author of The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To. This tendency makes us more likely to form an “aroused mob” when anger is part of the mix, and “social networks exacerbate this, making it easier to communicate with large, like-minded groups and focus on others with their anger.”

Let Me Just Have My Anger This Week
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“Anger is a very social emotion,” Burnett says . “Someone who is angry prompts corresponding reactions in the brains of those around them, either making them more calm in order to neutralize the angry person, or making them angry in turn.”

This hints at the “outrage machine” so many have derided. But we have a tendency to look back at our history and see it as much more calm and civil than it ever was.

Anger isn’t a uniquely millennial trait; if anything, it’s our comfort with — and methods of — expressing and wielding our anger that are unique.

Life has, of course, never been fair, but people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s have inherited and experienced a unique set of challenges in a world that wasn’t fully prepared to address them.

As children we experienced 9/11, the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and the Iraq War, either through personal connections or constant media coverage, while our brains were still developing. We had no name or road map for the fear and rage that followed, and neither did our parents or grandparents, whose wars and crises were unique in their own ways.

We graduated high school at a time when college costs had reached their then-highest level (and that cost has continued to rise). Most of those who went to college took on massive debt to do so, and then graduated into the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression. Income inequality reached its highest point since the Depression in 2013, fueling over the ensuing years strikes, protests, reform movements, and a whole lot of resentment. Meanwhile, hate crimes and hate group membership have also been on the rise, and police shootings of unarmed people of color — and the difficulty of achieving justice in the aftermath — have gained increasing attention. Opioid abuse — whether in the form of heroin or prescription drugs– is on the rise, especially among young adults.

And for the first time, some studies suggest that today’s young adults may be the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. As far back as 2013 researchers were declaring millennials the “most stressed” demographic in the country.

For the first time, some studies suggest that today’s young adults may be the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
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Now, anger in America has reached a fever pitch. There is a sense that we are on the verge of either creating a collection of powerful movements fueled by anger and outrage, or becoming more divided and dangerous than ever as a culture. It seems clear that which way we go will depend on our ability to recognize our anger for what it is and find ways to employ it productively without letting it destroy us. Millennials, thanks to our adaptability and technological savvy, may be uniquely suited to addressing this challenge. Behind the thinkpiece links and all-caps rants, we are turning anger into inspiration and using it as fuel to take action.

“When you look at the protests that millennials have done and compare them to the protests of the 1960s, it’s hard not to look at millennials and think, wow, these people are channeling their anger in useful ways,” says Amy Lynch, a writer and speaker on generational conflict and communication and author of the Generational Edge blog.

We are turning anger into inspiration and using it as fuel to take action.
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She points out that during the 1960s and 1970s, the vast majority of people were on the outside of the activism — they either didn’t pay much attention, or didn’t get involved. In our world of constant updates and instantaneous reactions, most millennials are unlikely to have that same luxury, even when things don’t directly affect us. And thanks to a relentless news cycle and unprecedented access to information of all kinds, the things that do affect us have been laid bare.

“Millennials and boomers share idealism as a generational trait, but it looks different,” says Lynch. “Boomers yell and scream about things — just look at Washington right now. Millennials say, ‘This is a mess. How do we fix this?’ and they roll up their sleeves and go to work.”

When Mechi Estevez-Cruz, 27, first told members of her community in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, that she planned to start a tourism company that directly addressed the ethics of experiencing another culture, some told her she was wasting her time.

“Mechi, you can’t talk to people like that, no one will listen,” she recalls them saying. But, angered by seeing so many foreigners disrespect the people and culture of her home, she was determined to do something about it.

“I knew I couldn’t just teach Dominican culture classes — unfortunately there isn’t much demand because people think we have no culture or cultural consciousness,” she said. “I was upset to see how foreign people acted as if we owed them for their presence and as a result needed to lower prices, et cetera.”

So Estevez-Cruz founded Una Vaina Bien Spanish, a school that specializes in teaching people about Dominican culture, food, language, the perils of tourism and how to travel through a community like Cabarete in a more ethical and empathetic way.

Overcoming Anger Through Street Art: A Sexual Assault Survivor’s Story
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“I seek to educate people that we have a rich history and culture, and that we deserve to be respected on our land,” she said. And locals and tourists alike have been receptive to her no-sugar-coating approach. “So far, I’ve had no complaints.”

Like Mechi Estevez-Cruz, many millennials have launched startups aimed at channeling their frustration — generally considered a negative feeling — into something positive and mission-driven. There was very little acknowledgment in the travel industry that not all travelers are white, so award-winning entrepreneur Zim Ugochukwu created Travel Noire. Kiah Williams, 28, is redistributing unused medicine and Jen Anderson, 27, and Jane Mitchell, 28, are providing housing for young people released from prison. And action does not replace expression — in almost every case the mission is clear, and it doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that some kind of frustration was a major motivator.

While there’s some evidence that anger can lead to stress and harm relationships, when managed properly, embracing anger can actually increase optimism, creativity, and performance, according to Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, authors of The Upside of Your Darkside. In fact, experts say the positivity-policed culture many millennials grew up in has likely done us more harm than good. Instead, psychologists like Susan David of Harvard Medical School suggest striving for authenticity, which is right up millennials’ alley.

When managed properly, embracing anger can actually increase optimism, creativity, and performance.
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But in trying to break down barriers, millennial entrepreneurs and activists threaten longstanding norms that some members of even our own generation aren’t quite ready to give up. Expressing so-called negative emotions publicly can be dangerous for many people, especially women and people of color, who are disproportionately targeted by “trolls” and other abusers and harassers, both online and off.

“It is a more delicate dance for African American women,” says Dr. Jeanette Walley-Jean, an associate professor of psychology and director of integrative studies at Clayton State University who has written about the “angry black woman” trope. “Anger is a place of power in our society, so when it is demonstrated by white men, it is generally perceived favorably, or at a minimum, acceptable. When anybody else demonstrates anger, depending on who they’re demonstrating it to, it can have a negative connotation. Black people’s anger about police brutality, for example, gets coded as aggression versus white women or other groups of power that can be perceived more favorably.”

Walley-Jean points to the example of Black Lives Matter, a movement that has clearly succeeded in getting people talking about police brutality and empathizing with victims, and helped usher in change in local criminal justice systems around the country. However, BLM’s marches have often been depicted in the news and on social media as disruptive even when all participants are peaceful, while the Women’s March on Washington, where participation was largely dominated by white women, received direct comparisons and praise for the lack of scuffles with police.

Expressing so-called negative emotions publicly can be dangerous for many people, especially women and people of color.
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“Anger is a positive emotion — it motivates us to do something,” says Walley-Jean. “There are some really significant things going on in our world that warrant that response, and I appreciate that millennials are attuned to that, and connected enough to be angry. People are finding ways to use their anger to affect change wherever they are, whatever that looks like for them.”

Societal limits on whether, how, and when we can feel and express anger do nothing to make anger or its underlying causes disappear. The dismissive and sometimes demonizing way terms like “angry” and “outraged” continue to be used, especially when describing women and people of color, suggest that our culture, while arguably great at recognizing anger, still has a way to go toward understanding it. But it’s arguably millennials who are leading the way in that direction.

“I’ve been doing this thing lately where I write odes to things I’m supposed to feel ashamed of,” says poet Olivia Gatwood in an introduction to her spoken word poem, “Ode To My Bitch Face.” “Laughter is a foreign language to your dry ice tongue,” she chants. “Resting bitch face they call you, but there is nothing restful about you, no.”

The poem is an ode but also a lament, a complaint turned tool to fight the patriarchy, and a not-subtle embrace of the Resting Bitch Face moniker often used to describe the expression on a woman’s face when she’s going about her business without smiling. This effort to enthusiastically reclaim something intended as a put-down is part of a bigger movement among millennials — especially millennial women — to unapologetically embrace emotions we’ve been taught view with shame, and at times highlight them to help make our lived experiences more vivid to those who misunderstand or deny them.

In addition to poetry, protest, and the increasingly personal nature of social media, this trend can also be seen in the explosion of personal essays, which many millennials have effectively been writing for years, beginning with LiveJournal diaries or personal blogs. The growth of the personal essay has garnered some well-deserved criticism of online publications for exposing some writers to the wolf pack that is the comment section, but it has also helped to normalize vulnerability, encouraging us to express our negative emotions and experiences as well as the positive. It’s how I have been able to imagine — at least in some small way — what it’s like to grow up extremely poor, to have an abortion, to be a Black person in an all-White neighborhood.

Essays and social media posts are the only exposure that some people have to the lived experiences of people whose lives are vastly different. And when what we read makes us angry — “How could that have happened?” “Why is this allowed?” “How could someone be so cruel?” — it can make us take action.

Healthy anger, experts say, allows us to respond rather than react, and that’s something millennials are embracing.

We are at a precarious place as we attempt to use the same emotion that got us here to propel ourselves to someplace better, but there’s a strong argument to be made that we should push forward, for our own future and that of the next generation.

In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra attempts to explain the many different events that have led to such hostility, aggression, and tendency toward destruction in both the U.S. and the U.K. that led to the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote. Mishra argues that instead of retreating from this intense emotionalism, we need to face it head on.

“With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul,” he writes. “The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideas of freedom, equality, and prosperity.”

Amid the memes and rants, millennials are working through our anger together in public, sounding a call to action for this very same sentiment. Rather than suppressing our emotions in order to attack social and political issues impartially, we’re embracing those feelings and their power to bring people together.

Mixed in with “Love Trumps Hate” and “Not My President,” there’s another phrase you’ll see on many protest signs: “Try empathy.” For us, it’s not a replacement for anger; they’re both vital components for our survival.

Knitting, embroidery, and other crafts can be powerful tools in the fight against fascism and the patriarchy.

By Jessica Bateman

Even those who’ve never attended an anti-Trump protest are likely aware of the pussy-hat phenomenon. The pink-knitted caps have quickly become the almost-official symbol of resistance against The Orange One, even making the cover of Time and The New Yorker magazines.

While some have justly questioned the hats’ inclusivity, others have seen them as a novel and playful form of protest providing a welcome break from traditional forms of activism.

But these hats aren’t as unique as you may believe. In fact, women have been using knitting and other crafts, such as sewing and embroidery, in their activism for well over 100 years. In addition to advancing progressive causes, using craft as a political tool helps to rebuke patriarchal notions of femininity. Society likes to view craft-making as the dominion of docile, domestic ladyhood — but this has never precisely been the case.

Why I Felt Excluded, Then Welcomed, At The Women’s March

Ann Rippin, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK, who specializes in the role of cloth in society, explains that although craft was historically used to oppress women, it also gave them a creative outlet. “Traditionally, women were taught embroidery as a way of learning ‘feminine’ characteristics,” she says.

“It taught them to follow a pattern, to be neat and docile, to be inside the home rather than out in the world. You learned embroidery to advertise your marriageability.” But, she adds, “there was no way of controlling what women were actually thinking about while they were stitching.”

In the early 20th century, the suffrage movement saw women turn their needlework skills into a tool for liberation. In the UK, the artist’s suffrage league produced around 150 embroidered banners for marching with, as well as posters and postcards.

There was no way of controlling what women were actually thinking about while they were stitching.
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Of course, this was partly due to the limited technology of the time, making textiles and needlework the easiest modes of communication. But even as technology advanced, women continued to turn craft into an effective protest tool.

Betsy Greer, an artist, activist, and writer from North Carolina, is credited with coining the word “craftivism.” She tells me she was inspired to embrace the movement after she attended a parade in Greenwich Village around 2000, and saw some people with political puppets they had made.

“They were really creative and engaging, and I could see that people were reacting positively to them,” she says. “It was a real shift for me in terms of understanding what activism was. My grandma made hats for babies at the local hospital, and I started seeing that as activism — you’re engaging in an issue and addressing inequality.”

After furthering her education on activist craft by studying the women who knitted clothing for the Allied forces in the second world war, Betsy decided to enter the fray herself. She has created a number of anti-war cross-stitch designs, and is currently working on “You Are So Very Beautiful,” a series of stitched affirmations to raise women and girls’ self-esteem.

She’s also written two books, Knitting for Good! and Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism. “I get a lot of emails from people telling me that it’s changed the way they look at their craft,” she explains.

“Craft has been devalued throughout history — it’s been dismissed as a hobby or something only a certain type of person does. However, I think it’s very powerful to be creating something out of nothing with your bare hands.”

The concept has also been adopted for large-scale political campaigns. Sarah Corbett, founder of The Craftivist Collective in the UK, encourages people to create and send stitched messages to politicians addressing everything from climate change to world hunger. “In my experience, politicians really pay attention to the stitched messages they receive, because they can see that so much time and energy has gone into creating them,” she says. “They’re not used to getting handmade gifts, so they’re often more memorable than a petition or email.”

Corbett describes herself as being a “burnt-out” activist before she discovered the concept of craftivism. “It’s small, intriguing, and humble,” she says. “I also found that, when I was stitching, it would really calm me down and help me think deeply about injustice issues — what mark am I making on the world? What change do I want to see? How am I contributing to it effectively?”

Others who’ve combined craft with activism echo Corbett’s appreciation for the medium’s mindfulness. Taylor, 31, is a central member of The Yarn Mission, an organization formed after the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson that knits for black liberation. “During the Ferguson protests, [Mission founder] CheyOnna was always knitting, and she’d stay so calm in stressful situations, such as when our space got teargassed,” explains Taylor. “I began to wonder whether it was the knitting that helped her.”

Taylor took up knitting herself in early 2015. “It became a big self-care thing for me. I’ve suffered badly from PTSD following the Ferguson protests, and I found it so calming,” she says. “I had insomnia and it helped me through the night.”

The Yarn Mission now has chapters in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and New York, and runs knitting groups as a means of creating spaces that center black women and bring communities together. “Even just organizing spaces as a black woman is so difficult because you’re dealing with both patriarchy and racism,” she says.

“But being together is healing, because dealing with racism on a daily basis is so isolating. You try to tell people what you’ve experienced, and they will dismiss it as not being real racism. It’s exhausting. So just being able to share those stories is very comforting.”

Elsewhere, graffiti knitters — or yarn bombers — use knitting to make statements about women’s place in public spaces. Yarn-wrapped trees and lampposts subvert our ideas of traditionally-masculine street art, and show how women’s craft — and therefore women — can take up space in public, rather than be shut away in the home.

In Indonesia, Knitting Gets Political

In the art world, a whole wave of women artists have incorporated crafts into their work over the years as a means of exploring issues around gender and sexuality. Hannah Hill, aka Hanecdote, has amassed a huge online following with her explicitly political and feminist stitching. “I found embroidery at 17, and really enjoyed this different form of mark-making,” she says. “Over time, and the more I learned about feminism and the sexist exclusion of textiles from the Western art world, the more it made sense for me to make socio-political statements with stitches.”

“Being half Asian, there is also a rich history of textiles in my ancestry,” she adds. “I think it’s such a powerful and historically important medium.”

Around the world, craft is also used a tool to preserve cultures and stand up against oppressive force. Hebron, in the Palestinian West Bank, was last year named the World Craft City, an honor bestowed by the World Crafts Council. Here, traditional embroidery, ceramics, and glass-blowing have become powerful symbols of preserving Palestinian identity and culture under the Israeli occupation. The Women in Hebron embroidery co-op provides women with skills and income, as well as showing steadfastness in the face of the town’s occupation.

For many women, the preservation of these skills that have been so interlinked with the female experience for hundreds of years is all part of craft’s power. “I’m using the same basic knit and purl stitches that women have always used,” says Taylor. “It’s comforting to know that I’m doing the same thing as the women who came before me, and if they could get through everything they did, then so can I.”

As for the pussy hats, they’re just the start of the battle against the current U.S. government. Already, anti-Trump embroidery is popping up on Etsy, including “Not My President” and “Real Women Fight Back” cross-stitches, and “Fuck Trump” and “Nasty Woman” embroidery. Stitched banners have also been on display at anti-Trump protests.

Activists will need abundant self-care, plus a dollop of fun and playfulness, to keep up momentum in the coming years. In other words: Grab your knitting needles.