If there is one thing white people have taught me, it’s that you cannot stand the truth in any of its forms.

White people, you have a motherfucking problem.

You lie too goddamn much. You teach your kids to lie too goddamn much. You tell your families to lie too goddamn much. All you fucking do is lie and lie and lie about lying to the point that you are killing everyone, including yourselves.

You lie at the highest levels, so much so that we expect it from our elected officials. Our presidents have told lies that resulted in the death of more than 50,000 American soldiers. You lie about civilian massacres. You lie about terrorist attacks against Black Americans. You lie about sex education and risk the health of your children. You lie about your friends’ qualifications to run national agencies, which results in unnecessary deaths. You lie about your experiences while reporting. You lie about American history. You lie about historical heroes. You lie about slavery. You lie and lie and lie on a massive scale and cover up the lies, protect the liars, rehire the liars, and elect the liars because *shrug* everybody lies.

You lie about the littlest things, like if you ate the last cookie. You lie to your spouse about their annoying habits. You lie to your kids about how to make babies. You lie to your neighbors about your debt. You lie to your boss about sleeping in. You lie to your co-workers about your weekend. You lie to your doctor about your body. You lie to everyone and say you are fine. And you lie to yourself about how wonderful and nice a human being you are.

You lie and lie and lie on a massive scale and cover up the lies, protect the liars, rehire the liars, and elect the liars because *shrug* everybody lies.
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But you aren’t nice. You wear a veneer of nice. You are a rotten tooth in the mouth of the world. Instead of taking care of yourself and preventing decay, you feed on the power of your whiteness like candy. When you start to smell, you use mouthwash and mints to hide it. When you start to visibly decay, you try to hide it with whitening gel. When you start to hurt, you take pain medication. When the pain becomes too great, you finally seek help — and that help is to numb yourself, pull out the nerve, then slap a crown on it so that no one can see your empty core. Instead they see a perfect veneer passing for a healthy tooth. But it is a tooth that feels no pain and only emulates the others.

In case you didn’t know, that ability to feel is called empathy. And as far as I can see, white America has none.

Or maybe you do. Maybe you have empathy, but it’s overshadowed by the centuries of stinky, infected rot left by your presidents, your congressmen, your police, your lawyers, your corporations, your lobbyists, your business leaders, your forefathers, and your motherland, all in the name of colonialism. Maybe you don’t know what empathy even feels like anymore.

Human rights violations are so interwoven with American history that you can no longer tell what’s right . . . if indeed you ever could.

You are a rotten tooth in the mouth of the world. Instead of taking care of yourself and preventing decay, you feed on the power of your whiteness like candy.
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I know, I know, not all white people. My husband is white. Except I wrote an entire fucking essay about how I needed to put his ass in check for his lack of empathy. Except that I spent years tuning him into what the fuck is going on with the huge swath of the population that doesn’t look like him. And I still deal with the empathy-less white people he’s brought into my life. Not often, because I love myself too much to deal with that weird combination of superficiality and toxicity that permeates white society and dictates their interactions, but still. They are in my life, kind of.

And at work? The fact that these people categorize murder by cop as politics makes me want to throw a goddamn table. “I don’t talk politics at work.” People were murdered and you liken it to the ego-stroking and ass-kissing office bullshit that I put up with for my check? Get the fuck outta here!

Seriously, get the fuck outta here.

Can you really not see the difference? Does this really not resonate with you? Does the constant replaying of the murder of Black people really not matter?

You don’t have to answer that. I already know. We aren’t human to you. We never have been.

But you won’t admit that because it means telling the truth. And if there is one thing white people have taught me, it’s that you cannot stand the truth in any of its forms.

I keep asking myself — when will they see the monster in the mirror? When will they see who they really are? What they do? How they destroy the world with their endless quest for power and the tireless subjugation of others to do it? When will they admit their fucking inability to see the humanity in difference?

Honestly, I wouldn’t care if so many white people didn’t have so much fucking power. But y’all do, and your consistent abuse of that power has destroyed countless lives and continues to do so. From your rapist sons, to your murdering daughters, you continue to destroy everything you touch.

But I have hope for you.

My hope is that one day, enough of you will stop lying to yourselves and heal. That one day you will stop lying to yourself and admit that you are an empty shell, existing on the continued pain of others as you beg, borrow, and steal from EVERYONE else to feel relevant.

One day you will stop killing everyone who doesn’t fit your image.

One day you will stop attacking anyone who questions your decayed foundation.

One day you will actually love instead of trying to destroy people who live, love, and somehow thrive despite your oppression.

From your rapist sons, to your murdering daughters, you continue to destroy everything you touch.
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In these times of tragedy, we talk about Black healing. It’s a necessary conversation about something we have a lot of practice doing. Hundreds of years worth, actually.

What we need is white accountability. Are you strong enough to do it?

I’ll wait.

As a devoted William Morris fan, it’s been a delight — in part — to see Morris & Co prints brought to high streets across the world by H&M and rendered instafamous. Morris’ beautifully stylized depictions of nature are almost ubiquitous now.

These mediaeval-inspired designs were originally produced for Victorian wallpapers and home textiles, and their imposing yet delicate grandeur established Morris as one of the 19th century’s most famous textile designers. Now the popularity of this clothing collaboration has launched his work into the international spotlight. But just what tradition is being celebrated by H&M marketing his work as iconically British? Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?

In addition to being a poet and designer, Morris was also a revolutionary and friend of Marx and Engels. He was an idealist who argued that craftwork and cooperation would make wage labour obsolete and, far from being simply the “iconic [nineteenth Century] British wallpaper and fabrics brand” which H&M proffers, Morris’s company was run on collective principles and managed by his daughter May at a time when women were rarely afforded such power.

Capitalism has done to William Morris what it always does best to political creatives: de-politicized his legacy for profit. Admittedly his household designs have long been mass-produced and on sale in museums and homeware shops. But at least the mugs, coasters and tea towels were affordable symbols of affinity with Morris. They were often marketed within the confines of the designs’ history and therefore, by and large, did not so fully erase his politics.

Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?
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H&M presents his maximalist, repeated homages to the natural world as emblems of British tradition and nostalgia, when in fact Morris used mediaeval aesthetics not to celebrate Britain, but rather as a protest in advocating pre-industrial values. The press, however, has followed H&M’s marketing wash, instead of looking to Morris’s actual political legacy.

Vogue termed it “another British heritage brand”; The Guardian, too, echoed the “heritage” language.

How does capitalism’s own tradition of depoliticization play out when consumers are clothed in imagery taken out of context but also place, having originally been created to celebrate home?

H&M is curating a selective history which conjures nostalgia for a Victorian era of Empire. They launched their Morris and Co collaboration with a campaign video boasting a grainy, faux ’70s aesthetic.

Skinny white women prance through what looks like the Scottish Highlands, a brook and a cottage to their backs. They wear silk scarves, maxi dresses, pussy bow tops: demure looks paired with classic jumpers and jeans. Then, in a move which reinforced the capitalistic juggernaut that is H&M’s marketing, the company then gathered influencers for “paid partnerships” at the Morris-decorated mansion Standen House.

This manipulation fits within fashion’s long history with the commodification of radical craft and the history of Morris prints is simply a case study of how mainstream consumerism subsumes radical aesthetics.

Two previous uses of Morris designs for clothing aimed to pay tribute to his anti-establishment politics by linking them to subcultural styles.

The first was in the ’60s when autodidact designer Mary Quant — inspired by Mod fashion and the sexual revolution — made a mini-skirt suit in Morris’ “Marigold” print. The second instance occurred in 2017 when fashion house Loewe released a capsule collection approaching Morris through punk style. 

However, both fell into the consumer culture trap where radical social movements were transformed into fashionable commodities for companies to profit from.

The aesthetics of subcultures — like punk for example, which communicates a rejection of the status quo and an alternative belonging — also resided within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement (of which Morris was a leader) in their distancing from Victorian production and values.

When aesthetics designed to be imbued with a certain meaning are donned as decontextualized fashion statements, those meanings are signaled without an actual affinity for movement, without a desire to belong or perpetuate the aesthetics’ accompanying ideals. This transformation — problematic in itself — is the process of reincorporation which leads to meanings being written over at best and bastardized or erased at worst.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights
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Looking at the H&M collection, we can see nods to this lineage of aesthetic spin-offs, although they don’t directly mention the homage.

Their ’60s-esque mini dress uses the same print as Quant’s mini-skirt suit and their “Pimpernel” trouser suit recalls George Harrison in a “Golden Lily”-patterned blazer or John Lennon in “Chrysanthemum.” 

Morris’ politics inspired some subcultural affinity in the 20th Century but the sartorial trickle-down of these styles is mere commodification.

The anti-establishment message has disappeared when a mainstream brand like H&M calls him “iconic.” yet simultaneously ignores the radical politics he stood for. Indeed, when the company talks about “tradition,” they don’t even mean this tradition of subversive reuse. Instead, they invoke an abstract, white, and classist British status quo of countryside leisure.

Returning to the bigger picture of how fashion commodifies art, the connection between Morris’ radicalism and subcultural fashions like mods and punks is fitting — but not for the reasons the fashion houses intended.

Dick Hebdige, scholar of subcultural style, coined a term for the way capitalism seizes subversive aesthetics and turns them into a “fashion,” therefore making them apolitical, mainstream and profitable: “reincorporation.”

In his book Subcultures: the Meaning of Style he argues that youth movements develop their own style which puts across their criticisms of the existing order. The mainstream culture, however, incorporates their subversions within its own pre-existing world-view. In this way, the deviant meaning is lost. This sort of commodification happened to the styles of teddy boys, mods and rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks, etc., but it also happens today when far older styles with a political message are brought into vogue.

William Morris’s natural imagery — inspired by mediaeval styles because it sought to evade capitalism — now adorns the high street as season-appropriate florals.

Paying attention to the intended meanings behind art and design is important, especially when corporate fashion aims to depoliticize and commodify those visions’ intentions. Fashion is political, and the imagery it recycles, especially so.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights; his words still appear on trade union banners today. Dismantling the homogenizing consumerism of fashion means celebrating the hidden radical histories erased by corporations, whether those be the politics of class, race, gender or sexuality.

So when you next see someone in that instafamous H&M x Morris & Co. maxi dress, they are — arguably — an inadvertent, living homage to a Victorian anti-Capitalist aesthetic and to those who sought revolutionary in the ’60s and ’70s.

There’s a thin line between buying pleasing patterns and communicating affinity of ideals, but if we celebrate and talk about these hidden histories we foster a critical eye and a celebration of the subversive role fashion should be allowed — and continue —to play.

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.

The free public library is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the mid-1800s, only the rich read. That all changed, however, when Melvil Dewey took over as State Librarian of New York in 1888. The concept of a free public library had been gaining ground sluggishly since the mid-1800s but, few libraries were truly free for all, with most requiring annual subscription fees. Dewey goosed the growth of free public libraries with funding, infrastructure, and regulation.

He invented professional organizations and opened librarian schools, bullied committees, and made rousing speeches. He was a zealous librarian celebrity, famously arrogant, and completely committed to the idea that the public could only improve themselves if they understood and embodied Christian morality. Dewey could provide this education with books, which would “elevate” them through a system of ideologically coordinated public libraries. When shown the foundation of Western literature—ran the logic—readers would understand how society functioned as well as their place within it. The result would be literate but passive components of a capitalist machine. Public libraries would be its oil.

Those same public libraries began to move away from Dewey’s vision almost immediately upon his ouster from the profession for sexual harassment, anti-Semitism, and career-spanning fiscal hijinks around 1905.

Almost as soon as Dewey opened a library school, librarians began to migrate away from his conservative ideals. Library doctrine of the 21st century emphasizes empowerment rather than passivity; the library should serve as a bastion of free thought and durable democracy. The American Library Association—Dewey’s own organization—vigorously supports seditious and controversial literature, and the Office of Intellectual Freedom thrives with its blessing. Librarians of the 21st century are more likely to be secret radicals than soldiers of conformity. They have appeared at Occupy Wall Street, stood up against White supremacists, advocated for Black lives, and gone to bat for LGBTQ book displays.

Nevertheless, the bones of public library work are Dewey’s, and if the profession no longer exists purely in his image, then it still bears a striking familial resemblance. As libraries move forward into an increasingly diverse future—one where the yawning gap between rich and poor is constantly exacerbated by technology and lack of education—it finds itself in the rare position of equalizer, leveler, and sharer of privilege. Public libraries could be powerful mitigators of a class crisis in an increasingly class-distressed nation, but first, they must grow past Dewey’s architecture and define themselves anew.

Those at the very bottom of the class pile make up the public library’s most loyal and most dependent users. For them, book purchase and charitable giving are simply out of the question, never mind a run for the office of Trustee. Their voices will not be heard in public discussion of the library; if money talks, they are nearly mute. However, they make their wishes known through their avid use of the Internet, driving libraries through classic consumer modeling. Low-income library patrons don’t just enjoy public-access computers, they rely on them.

Craigslist is now a critical housing service; many high schools distribute homework over Google services; being unable to use the Internet at will is debilitating. Even reliance on mobile technology–which is how most low-income people access the Internet—can’t make up what users lose when printers, keyboards, and full-size screens are out of the picture.

Public libraries are keenly aware of their role in bridging the digital divide, which is the little-discussed but gaping success gulf between people who can afford technology and people who can’t. But even as libraries work to fix a digital revolution that is crushing vulnerable people, cognizant of the fact that few other organizations are filling this niche, they struggle to keep the library “nice” for donors, who may jump ship if the library seems to be “deteriorating,” and elected trustees, who may cease to support library outreach to marginalized communities if they feel that a quaint, attractive book warehouse is becoming un-vote-for-able.

Vulnerable voices will not be heard in public discussion of the library; if money talks, they are nearly mute.
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Compounding this problem is the fact that many librarians in administration can’t articulate, and sometimes don’t realize, the importance of class awareness in library work. This is because most librarians are white, middle-class people who are able to afford graduate degrees. Those who can’t afford the degree may still work in libraries as technicians or clerks, but administration is generally out of reach for them. Opportunities to steer the library’s direction are rare for non-degree holders who might otherwise give the profession a more diverse perspective. Again, we have Dewey to thank.

Dewey believed, at least in word, that idealists shouldn’t worry about money when devoting their careers to the public good. His own initial willingness to take less money for library work compounded his later willingness to pay other people less money for library work, leading to his decision to hire women into the profession. After all, a woman could be paid far less than an equally qualified man, and she posed no threat to established male leadership. How ironic that Dewey’s conserve blinders led to the eventual women’s takeover of libraries, to the extent that 79% of librarians were women in 2017. How tragic that this very same takeover still resulted in an internal pay gap.

In 2016, the average degreed librarian was paid a little north of $27 per hour. The degree that made this wage attainable costs at least $5,500 from Texas A&M Online and upward of $50,000 from Syracuse University; the Master’s requirement to become a librarian functions as a gatekeeper, and many people—especially those from disenfranchised backgrounds— simply can’t afford the toll. Alternatively, if a graduate degree becomes possible for a student who otherwise couldn’t afford it, why not make the most of the opportunity and become a lawyer—who average a yearly income of $118,160—instead of idealistically gunning for a middle-class job?

Anyway, most library jobs are now part-time positions, even those requiring degrees, and breaking into a benefited full-time library job can take years. In effect, the graduate degree—which Dewey also introduced as a requirement for professional librarian status—filters talent and diversity out of the profession. The result is a cohort of well-meaning librarians who may not have vital enough connections to the marginalized sectors of their communities to make the best possible impact there.

The digital divide is the little-discussed but gaping success gulf between people who can afford technology and people who can’t.
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Though modern librarians celebrate the role of non-degreed colleagues—also known as “para-professionals” or “para-librarians”—they also find themselves in a bind when confronted with the fact that the degree is a barrier for some of their colleagues. If the Master’s requirement goes, then librarian salaries may become devalued and current degree-holders, already struggling to find full-time work, will suffer financially. Lower salaries could also undermine the profession and fail to draw talent into public libraries. However, it is undeniable that some talent is already failing to be drawn into areas where it could be best utilized. Para-professionals and librarians work on different sides of an invisible fence, often doing similar work but having vastly differing levels of impact on their institution’s direction. In many libraries, they even belong to different unions.

But to all appearances, Dewey never intended the library profession to be accessible to people of non-middle class status. He and his fellow morally—and economically—elevated white Christian librarians were showing up to help everybody else become them, a mission of cultural homogenization. They had no stake in perspectives rooted in the communities they were trying to serve. Their perspective was the only one that mattered, and it was that everybody should read Socrates and the Bible.

During Dewey’s tenure as State Librarian of New York, library grants were determined by the number of “quality” titles that a collection contained. The work of William Shakespeare was of appropriate quality. Popular rags-to-riches fantasies and romances were not. While Dewey himself hailed from a working class background, he held himself separate from and above most of the people he set out to save. His substantial charisma amplified the force of his vision—flawed as it was—and whether because of contemporary ignorance, conscious preference, or infectious enthusiasm, nobody called him out on the problems with his model.

The first generation of truly professional, organized librarians were a pack of Dewey converts, peppered with the occasional skeptic who knew better than to speak up.

If Dewey could have imagined the diversity of modern library clientele and their respective needs, would he have considered them important? Not likely. The critical literature of homeless LGBTQ minors, Muslim immigrant mothers, and college-bound men of color isn’t conducive to the creation of obedient class-dwellers who sit contented in their particular pigeonhole.

Dewey’s concept of “quality” literature would never have extended to the likes of James Baldwin or Camille Paglia. Today, librarians and the ALA stand robustly in favor of diverse literature, but they are hampered by the homogeneity that Dewey’s system still fosters. Class fractures that run along racial and ethnic lines quickly become library problems; in an increasingly bilingual America, it is still the rare librarian who can explain how to use a printer in Spanish.

This issue isn’t limited to libraries, of course. Many middle-class professions, including social work and teaching, are overwhelmingly white and well-meaning for similar reasons.

The obligatory graduate degree filters talent and diversity out of the profession.
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Like teachers, librarians tend to put in a lot of off-hours work, often reading for several book clubs and professional background without even considering reimbursement. The relative value placed on books holds strong thanks to state and regional offices that depend on book circulation statistics as metrics of a library’s performance. But book culture, too, is privileged territory. A book takes time, and time is money.  

The concept that all people should or even could set aside hours in every day to “improve themselves” through reading has simply fallen through in an age when poverty is expensive and maintaining middle class status requires workaholic tendencies. Reading is a luxury activity; the ability of libraries to develop will depend on getting books into the hands of a broader audience.

Here, at least, the library is starting to change the game. E-book lending models are a roaring success fewer than ten years after their debut. They’re remotely available, mobile-friendly, and fee-less incarnations; they fit into pockets, budgets, and schedules alike—literature is available on the bus for free. The most significant threat to this new innovation is a chaotic publishing model that has shown itself to be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of digital loaning, however. Going forward, one of the library’s most critical missions may be to stand between their patrons’ reading rights and the companies that want those rights to cost money.

Librarians have worked hard to flip the script of the judgmental, classics-heavy library. Meanwhile, in the face of constant budget squeezes and the departure of full-time jobs, libraries themselves are reorganizing. Many are trying to combine innovation with healthy caution for ideas that could prove bad. As long as the moment is right for skepticism and self-awareness of present shifts, then perhaps it’s also time for a look at the roots of the public library, especially at Dewey and the men who sought to use libraries to impose class obedience through reading. Attempts are being made. Loanable collections of tools empower apartment-dwellers. Community meeting room space and summer lunch programs have become library projects. The traditional book bastion is growing into something more.

Book culture is privileged territory. A book takes time, and time is money.
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But if libraries are truly to transform, it’s time to do some much-needed navel-gazing. Only diversity will empower them to serve a diverse nation. If the solution must include the graduate degree, then it could manifest as an extensive, aggressive program of scholarships and recruitment. Without, it may involve union-like behavior on the part of the ALA, or even partnership with existing bargaining units. This may be prudent anyway. There are plenty of reasons for libraries to employ knowledgeable professionals full-time. The fact that these reasons may not always involve books only speaks to the fact that knowledge is versatile. Unions may be crucial to ensuring that librarians of all degree statuses do not fall between the cracks of the digital age themselves.

Dewey was short-sighted: providing information for free is always radical. Despite their problematic mold, libraries have reshaped themselves into unifiers, and deeply important Amazon alternatives. There has never been a better time for a free public information alternative to corporate greed. There has never been a better time for that alternative to represent a force for anti-division and equality.

You might not know Sarah Baartman’s face, but you know her body.

Sarah Baartman — also known as Saartjie or the “Hottentot Venus” — was born in the late 18th century in the Eastern Cape (part of modern-day South Africa). She was brought to the UK with a ship surgeon who profited from exhibiting Sarah for the entertainment of the British public because of her steatopygia. This meant that she had excess fatty tissue around her hip and bottom area, spectacular enough to warrant her, well — a spectacle. She subsequently spent most of her adult life being exhibited as a caged freak-show attraction both in London and Paris, where she died and was displayed even in death up until the late ‘70s.

There are many details about the life of Sarah Baartman that are still either unknown or unconfirmed. This includes her birth name, her cause of death, and the extent of any agency she may or may not have had in the events of her adult life. A lot of us won’t even have even heard of her, yet her story bears a troubling resemblance to the experiences of generations of black women down the line. Sarah Baartman’s reality as an attraction to behold, gawk at, and prod at manifests itself today in every hyper-sexualized fetishist remark veiled as a compliment, and every depiction of my big black ass as either comedic fodder or the accessory of the moment.

You might not know Sarah Baartman’s face, but you know her body.
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Sarah’s story has always resonated with me as a young black woman with a pretty shapely behind. As a teenager especially, I was no Sarah Baartman, but I still turned heads. My developing body was the pink elephant in the room, creating tension that was exacerbated by my being both the youngest and the only girl in my family. Lewd comments from men on the street old enough to be my father went hand in hand with warnings and admonishments from relatives to not wear that skirt, or sit like that, or dance too provocatively. This seems to be a shared experience among black women growing up, and this hyper-sexualized lens from which the black female body is viewed is a major factor in how we are treated.

Sarah Baartman was one of many Khoi women who were visited by European scientists and coerced into undressing and displaying themselves to satisfy Europeans’ perverse curiosities. These scientists carried back with them the image of these women as primitive and sexually insatiable. This misconception has managed to trickle right down to the mouth-breathing creep at the bar who leers at us with suggestive confessions of “never having been with a black girl before,’’ then adopts this picture of our sexuality as primal, serving to further dehumanize and assign us the role of entertainer.

Charles Matthews, a comedian who lived in London at the time of Sarah’s station there, recorded his observations of visitors who came to view her. “One pinched her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, ‘nattral,” he wrote. Documented interactions like these further justify the fury we feel when white people tug at our hair and paint their faces black on Halloween.

The white gaze of the black body, regardless of gender, has always been and is still very much entrenched in the idea of entertainment. What were minstrel shows without the large drawn-on lips and charcoal black skin? How much funnier is it when the loud and gobby black female character we’re encouraged to poke fun at in any comedic TV show is fat and often dark-skinned? This sense of awe over the black form reduces us to being spectacles rather than human beings, something you’d see in a museum, a freak show in Sarah Baartman’s case. When black people set boundaries on our bodies, asking white people not to touch our hair or ask about our skin color, what we’re trying to get across to people is that our bodies were not made for white entertainment.

If black bodies were seen as inherently sexual, then emulating blackness has been a way white women have played with their sexuality while remaining safe in their whiteness. We keep seeing white women in the public eye monopolizing the black female body to gain them cool points (see Miley Cyrus circa 2013 and Rachel “Transracial” Dolezal who, after being outed for pretending to be black for most of her adult life, has written a book, and is now the topic of a Netflix documentary, which can only serve to give her even more publicity.) White women in the public eye who go so far as to surgically enhance their bodies to adopt typical black features like large lips and big butts tend to become the poster girls for the “body of the moment.” Everyone wants “Kim Kardashian ass” because her body is an amalgam of the erogenous features of the black woman, but without all that “black.”

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This is especially interesting considering the infamous #BreakTheInternet Paper photoshoot where, in an Inception-like multi-layered recreation, Kim Kardashian stood in as the subject of a series of images that originally cast black women in a highly fetishized light (one that photographer Jean-Paul Goude has reinforced with previous works and comments.) Long before Kim’s time, the images in question have often been likened to our very own Sarah Baartman. We can’t ignore Kim’s role as the modern Sarah, this time using her body to exploit modern society as opposed to society doing the reverse. But 10 points to whoever can guess the main difference between Kim and Sarah. Her privilege in being able to cherry pick the aspects of the black female form that enable her to commandeer her universal appeal so successfully (the butt, the lips, the racial ambiguity) puts her at an advantage that no black women are welcome to.

For those without Kim’s figure, there was the bustle, which was all the rage in 19th-century women’s fashion. These huge structures (often accompanied with padding) were worn as a way of accentuating the female figure and enhancing the posterior. This means that during Sarah Baartman’s time as a freak-show attraction, the very women gawking at the natural curves on her body would likely have been enhancing their own bodies to look like hers. The difference is that while these women were seen as fashionable for their manipulated forms, black women like Sarah were being treated like freaks. It seems like a black woman’s body is only desirable (not to be confused with fetishized) when a white woman is wearing it.

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One of the saddest things about Sarah Baartman’s existence, besides her enslavement and objectification, is the absence of her voice in her own narrative. Everything we know about her has been recounted by the scientists, captors, and audience members who benefited from her circumstances. Her duty was to be seen and not heard. That’s still the expectation for black women today — think about how quickly white audiences rejected the political turn Beyonce’s music took. The booty-shaking, female empowering Beyonce with her universal themes of overcoming heartbreak was actually black all of a sudden, and this made people uncomfortable.

It is this attempt to silence black women that concerns me most. As troubling as Sarah’s story is, there are plenty of black women out there who enjoy being exhibited, whether they are models, dancers, or any other type of performer. The freedom we’re asking for involves being able to express ourselves and control our bodies without attracting harassment and ridicule.

Sarah Baartman was only returned home to be buried in 2002 — more than 80 years after her death. If there’s one thing we can take from her story, it should be the reminder that every inch of the black female body — her skin, her butt, her voice — belongs to the black woman herself. It is not your costume nor your plaything. It is her being.

Queer identity and expression is often seen as a very au currant issue in today’s society. I often hear statements that queer identity “didn’t exist in my time” and that queerness is a “problem of the millennial generation,” specifically when dealing with trans individuals.

This is simply not true.

Questions surrounding sexual orientation and gender expression have existed since long before modern times, even before the 20th century. As David Halperin, author of How to Do the History of Homosexuality, states, “We have preserved and retained different definitions of sex and gender from our premodern past.”

It is through this variety of definitions of sex and gender passed down through the ages that premodern people also struggled to define what it meant to be a “man” and what it meant to be a “woman”; they also wrestled with the nature of their sexuality.

In fact, during the Middle Ages, there are several key figures who expressed a queer identity analogous to a modern trans identity. These figures—both fictional and historical — challenged and complicated the prevailing definitions of gender identity, much like trans individuals do in our society today.

As Heather Love writes in her book on lost queer history, Feeling Backward:

“Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage we live with in the present.”

Because queer history has been obscured and erased throughout time, non-binary identities are readily framed as “problems of a modern age,” when in fact, they are questions and identities we’ve had for centuries.

By surfacing the trans identities of the Middle Ages we can reclaim some of our lost history, as well as challenge homophobic and transphobic claims surrounding them.

In the 13th-century French romance, Le Roman de Silence, or Silence, the titular character is born a woman, but lives as a man in order to inherit their father’s land. As they grow, they are raised as a knight and constantly praised as the “best man in England.”

Pretty soon, though, Nature (personified) feels she has been cheated as she has made Silence more beautiful than “a thousand of the most beautiful girls,” yet no one recognizes them as female. A whole comical debate breaks out between Nature and Nurture about Silence’s gender, prompting Reason to step in and, ultimately, she sides with Nurture — Silence was raised a man and should continue to be a man.

As Silence concludes, “I have a mouth too hard for kisses/and arms too rough for embraces. One could easily make a fool of me in any game played under the covers.”

As the romance makes clear, gender is not a clear cut issue—even in the Middle Ages.

Trans people are often thought to be going “against” nature for expressing their identities, and Silence is presented in much the same way. Silence often feels conflicted over their biological sex and their gender identity, echoing the body dysphoria felt by many trans individuals.

Even though Silence “deviates” from Nature’s intended role, they are only able to catch Merlin—a vital piece of Silence’s prophecy is “Merlin will only be fooled by a ‘woman’s trick’”—because of their queerness.

Within the romance, Merlin is depicted as more animal than man, a mad hermit living in the woods. In order for Silence to fully become a retainer of the king, they must capture this elusive man-beast. Their biological sex technically fulfills the prophecy, but their gender expression—which determines their position as a knight—is what allows for the quest to occur and succeed.

Gender is not a clear cut issue — even in the Middle Ages.
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To read Silence’s character as a trans man vastly expands the possibilities of trans history and reveals it’s far more than a modern phenomenon. As this medieval romance reveals, gender and sexuality are presented as ever and always in flux; there is no clear resolution between Nature and Nurture’s argument on Silence’s gender, and there doesn’t need to be.

Even at the end of the romance, when Silence’s “true” gender has been revealed and they are married to the king, we still have the king bedding the most beautiful and skilled knight in all of England.

Silence is not the only trans figure in the medieval period. The historically real case of Eleanor (John) Reykener, a medieval sex worker who lived as a woman, but was born a man, again suggests gender and sex have been fluid for far longer than our current dialogue accounts for.

On a Sunday in December of 1394, Eleanor Rykener and John Britby are arrested by London authorities for presumed prostitution.

The authorities—and the court—were shocked to discover that Eleanor Rykener was actually John Rykener and that they had been “posing” as a woman. In their testimony, Rykener admits to working as an embroideress under the name of Eleanor, and having sex with at least three other men. (As well as several women, too.)

Their continued confession recounts various religious and secular men that they had slept with either for money or pleasure. As Carolyn Dinshaw arguesin her book Getting Medieval: “It is impossible to discern what Rykener’s various customers wanted,” but it is also too limited to assume their desires were strictly heterosexual in nature.

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Even the legal documents had a hard time defining Eleanor/John’s gender identity as the author continually slips between referring to them as male and female in the same brief.

Again, like Silence, Rykener’s gender identity is similar to modern trans identity in that their identity resists categories. Even the crime itself—either of sodomy (primarily a male crime) or prostitution (of which only female cases are recorded)—is left open to interpretation in the legal document.

While Rykener’s identity does not fully account for the varied trans identities we have today, their life is, according to Ruth Karras, “transgender-like.”

Like Silence’s and Rykener’s bodies and gender expressions suggest, sexuality and gender identity were complicated and nuanced in the Middle Ages. Both literary and real figures openly questioned traditional gender norms, and even then those definitions were not solidified.

Is Silence a good knight because they are born that way or because of their social upbringing?

Is Rykener’s crime prositution or sodomy?

These questions are subjective at best and suggest that medieval people did not have clear answers for them.

Fast forwarding to the present, we find ourselves still struggling with these questions. As trans people become more visible, dialogues abound in both social and legal settings on how to define trans bodies. With current travel laws and the ever-infamous bathroom laws, trans bodies are always forced to be put into categories — categories that even premodern people recognized as unstable.

‘Is It Safe Now?’ The Trauma Of Bathroom Laws
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As author Carolyn Dinshaw says, “Laws based on clear and apparent sex differences” are made inadequate when dealing with “queer desires or queer truths.”

Dinshaw’s point is correct because laws that rely on rigid definitions of gender and sex cannot fully account for queer bodies or queer desires. Queer people resist tidy categorization by their very nature. As trans identity and other queer sexualities and identities become more visible, laws based on basic definitions of heterosexuality and biological gender become increasingly inadequate.

Queer identities — specifically trans identities — are not a part of modern culture, but rather have existed and evolved through time. While a queer future is important, we should also not forget about the past.

We as queer people deserve a history just as rich and varied in order to combat homophobic and transphobic ideas. Sex and gender have evolved — and will continue to do so. It is through revisiting what was considered “normal” in the past to see that these definitions have changed.

By turning to older literature and willingly reading characters or works as queer, we can reclaim some of our lost history; this is one of the only ways we can continue to have access to queer people in the premodern world and honor the voices of the past who have paved the way for our future.

Illustrations by Katie Tandy

By Mina Moriarty

From Hindu Goddesses and Pagan rituals to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the c-word has had an ancient and powerful history that spans centuries and cultures. Why, then, is “cunt” still considered one of the most offensive words in the Western Hemisphere?

According to author and historian M. Geller, its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972 saw the word having been first sighted in London in 1230 as the street name “Gropecunte Lane,” a supposed Red Light District. Lexicographers also argue a connection to the Romance languages, with the word “vagina” rooted in the Latin cunnus, meaning “sword sheath.”

While “vagina” is used much more commonly in colloquial speech to refer to the genitals of people with vulvas than “cunt” is, its origins are defined by its service to male sexuality, making “cunt” — interestingly enough — the least historically misogynistic of the two. “Cunt” has also been used in Renaissance bawdy verse and in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but it was not until Shakespeare’s era that its meaning began to fundamentally shift, during the dawn of Christian doctrine.

The precise etymology of the word “cunt” is a matter of debate and an admittedly — sometimes egregiously — convoluted subject that, aside from a couple of features here and there (such as the Independent’s interview with Germaine Greer—whose long-noted transphobia makes such an interview dubious at best—from 2006) has attracted little investigation in contemporary mainstream media and pop culture.

For some, “cunt” epitomizes a disconcerting global attitude toward the sexualities of female and non-binary people and their accompanying position within our patriarchal system. Author Kate Millett in her book Sexual Politics summarizes the still-potent degradation and shame of “being a Cunt”:

“Somehow every indignity the female suffers ultimately comes to be symbolized in a sexuality that is held to be her responsibility, her shame […] It can be summarized in one four-letter word. And the word is not fuck, it’s cunt. Our self-contempt originates in this: in knowing we are cunt.”

1. Kunti

The Hindu Goddess Kunti, or great “Yoni of the Universe,” represented the beauty and power of the female body in Mahābhārata, a major Sanskrit epic of ancient India. (And soon to be movie.) The Mahabharata was a historical Hindu text, believed to have been written between 200 and 400 BC, containing mythological and didactic tales of heroism and the sovereign rivalry between two families. Not only did Yoni lead a powerful matriarchy that rivals the discourse of contemporary gender politics, but she encompassed life itself; she was worshiped at hundreds of shrines across the ancient Eastern world.

2. Christianity And The Demonization Of Female Sexuality

In the Middle Ages, Christian clergymen preached the idea of a woman’s genitals as a potent source of evil, referring to the “Cunnus Diaboli,” meaning “Devilish Cunt.”

Shrines across South Asia depicting any reference to the Goddess Kunti were also destroyed; they were deemed grotesque and blasphemous.

3. Culturally Diverse Origins

3a. Originating in India through the Goddess Kunti, the word has since evolved from the Old Norse “kunta,” referring to vulvas, with many variations existing in other Germanic and Scandinavian languages, including the Danish “kunte” and the modern use of “kont” in Dutch, meaning “buttocks.”

3b. In Anglo Saxon, “Cu” is one of the oldest word sounds in recorded language, a feminine meaning that has evolved into words such as “cow,” “cunt,” and “queen,” though the earliest “cunt” has been used in English is during the Middle Ages.

3c. Since the etymology of “cunt” remains contested, there is also the possibility that it stems from the Latin for rabbit hole, “cuniculus,” connected to the Latin “cunnus,” meaning “vulva.” (Another possible source is the Latin “cuneus,” meaning “triangular wedge.”)

4. Middle English Euphemism

The Oxford English Dictionary also suggests “quaint,” queynte in Middle English, as a euphemistic substitution for cunt, with one of the best-known examples being found in the late 14th century in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In Miller’s Tale, Nicholas attempts to seduce the miller’s wife, he “prively […] caught her by the queynte.”

5. A Cunt-ish Country

The 1500s saw Shakespeare, rather than directly referring to “cunt” or “cunny,” alluding to the word in suggestive disguise forms like “cut,” “constable,” and “country.” This is evident in Act Three Scene 2 of Hamlet, in which Hamlet says, “Do you think I mean country matters?” followed by, “That’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs.”

6. Scottish Rabbits

The slang word “cunny” is also found in 1719 in the first volume of Thomas D’Urfrey’s Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy, where it is associated with “coney” — a word that came to mean “rabbit.”

“Cunny” was also regularly used in Scottish bawdy verse such as that of Robert Burns in “My girl she’s airy” when he says, “Her taper white leg wth an et, and a, c, / For her a, b, e, d, and her c, u, n, t.”

7. The Cunt Liberated

In 1929, D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for promoting adultery. And although viewed as “obscene” in the early part of the 20th century, we are now — with the glorious benefit of hindsight — able to read this novel as a progressive, largely joyful account of promiscuous sex from a female point of view. Lawrence believed in the redemptive power of mutual orgasm, and so it comes as no surprise that “cunt” was used freely in this text to express sexual pleasure, “a woman’s a lovely thing when ‘er ‘s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good.”

8. Just Beat It

Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac used “cunt” liberally as a means of conflating love, desire, and sexual aggression in their characters — it served as both a means to normalize the word and shock the reader into confronting their relationship with it. The original scroll version of On The Road boasts, “I wanted to jump down from a mast and land right in her cunt.”

9. Reclamations

Eve Ensler calls women to reclaim the word in — what else — “Reclaiming CUNT” with her play the Vagina Monologues. “I call it cunt,” she writes. “I’ve reclaimed it, ‘cunt.’ I really like it.”

10. A (Possible) Chapel Of Cunt

Germaine Greer’s investigations on the BBC’s Balderdash and Piffle see her paint “CUNT” in bright red letters on a white wall and ask, “Why is this the most offensive word in the English language?” She goes on to discuss its fraught etymology and speaks to members of the public about how they view the word — and why.

Can we ever truly reappropriate “Cunt”? Can we use it with pride? Can we chip away at the palace of the phallus and instate a chapel of Cunt in its wake?

By Vidya

I can distinctly remember a moment during one of those many (many) days in my first year of medical school when we were sitting in lecture and learning about a disease.

Before my professor described the mechanism of the disease, which involved inflammation of the blood vessels, he paused and cleared his throat. “I want you to know that you may see this disease referred to as ‘Wegener’s granulomatosis’ in textbooks or amongst colleagues. However, we as a profession have decided that we are not calling it ‘Wegener’s’ anymore. Because Wegener, it turns out, was a Nazi.”

He said this solemnly, and then proceeded with the lecture, referring to the disease by its new names. First, in the 2000s, “ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis” was used; now, it is often taught as “granulomatosis with polyangiitis” (GPA).

Medicine is rife with old eponyms — diseases or body parts named after their discoverers or researchers — that are beginning to be replaced by more logical names for practical reasons. (The term “rectouterine pouch,” after all, tells us more precisely what we are talking about than “pouch of Douglas”).

But this was the first I had heard of the entire medical profession deciding to change an eponym for the sake of revoking honor from someone whose actions were now deemed immoral. And, more than that, the name change accompanied a small but repetitive teaching of why there was a new name — actively passing on the unethical history that led to greater understanding of a rare disease.

When other diseases gained new names, we were typically allowed to use the original eponym and the logical name interchangeably. But here? We were being told: Don’t use this old name. This man was a Nazi, who used tissue from Nazi prisoners to make his discoveries. And this moment of reflection on the history of this disease’s name happened almost every time I was taught about GPA.

It happened again when we learned about “Club cells,” the dome-shaped cells with short microvilli which serve to protect the lining of our lung’s small airways. We were told that they were originally named “Clara cells,” after the man who first described them in 1937. But Max Clara, we were told, was a Nazi — and so the pulmonary physician community made a dedicated effort in 2012 to have a name-change take effect in January of the next year. They rolled out the change systematically: for two years, they would put “Clara” in parenthesis after “club cell.” After that, “club cell” alone would replace all mentions of the name.

I started thinking about this movement to change names recently in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville and the national dialogue on removing monuments. The scientific name changes above signal a systematic effort to remove honor afforded to those who did immoral, horrific things to other human beings in the name of country-sanctioned medical research.

As a medical student, I am proud of the profession for pushing this change and I welcome the continued mention of the change in our medical training — with little effort, it allows us the important benefit of remembering the unethical history of the disease’s discovery without honoring it.

The Statues Must Come Down

But with each of these instances, there is also a growing feeling of disparity in this remembrance.

I rarely encounter the same explanation or historical interludes prefacing some of the tests we use in medicine today, which were developed in the context of racial exploitation in our own country’s history — such as spirometry to test lung function, or the immortalized cell line of Henrietta Lacks.

Soon after I learned how to do a speculum and pelvic exam in medical school, I happened to listen to an NPR Hidden Brain story which detailed the work of surgeon James Marion Sims. Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynecology,” developed the first speculum out of pewter in the 1840s — it was not markedly different from the very same device we use made of steel or plastic today.

There is an important benefit of remembering the unethical history of a disease’s discovery without honoring it.
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He is also famous for perfecting and pioneering a technique using silver sutures to repair vesicovaginal fistulas—an opening between the vagina and bladder that could result from complicated childbirth, which caused women suffering and social stigma from urine leakage.

In 1845, Sims purchased slave women with fistulas and housed them on his property for the purposes of medical experimentation geared towards gynecological research. In his memoirs, he names three of the at least 11 slave women he kept to experiment on — Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — brought to him by their owners. For the next four years, he did a series of experiments on them without anesthesia.

According to physician-historian Vanessa Northington Gamble in the NPR story, “there was a belief at the time that black people did not feel pain in the same way.”

In her book Medical Apartheid, writer Harriet A. Washington describes how, when the subjects of Sims’ experimental surgeries screamed in agony while he cut them with a scalpel, his medical assistants would forcibly hold them down. According to her research, women would be awake and naked while he did the procedure, often with many male assistants or interested physician colleagues watching.

One subject of his experiments, Anarcha, underwent 30 surgeries before he figured out how to properly heal her fistula. After that, Sims did the procedure in clinics — with anesthesia — to heal white women with the same condition. He started a women’s hospital after he moved to New York in the 1850s, where he gained his reputation as a surgeon treating women’s gynecological issues.

He reportedly repaired the fistula of a European empress, and became American Medical Association president in 1876 and president of the American Gynecological Society in 1880. According to Washington’s research, Sims also used black infants as subjects for experiments, using scalp incisions to pry skull bones into new positions based on the false belief that their skulls closed prematurely and caused lower intelligence; he was not blamed or persecuted when the infants died.

Washington writes that eugenics provided a contorted rationale for Sims’ and others’ experimentation on slaves:

“Many researchers argued that blacks were so different from whites — less intelligent, much less sensitive to pain, possessing numerous physical anomalies as well as markedly different patterns of disease immunity — as to constitute a separate species. Given this supposedly vast biological chasm between blacks and whites, how could scientists logically infer results of medical experiments from blacks to whites?”

Throughout August and September I started to see more articles in the press about Sims beyond the NPR story; people spurred by the events in Charlottesville started to organize to protest the statues that exist in tribute to him. There is a statue of Sims across from the New York Academy of Medicine, on Fifth Ave and East 103rd St in NYC. The New York Academy of Medicine has released a statement that it supports removal of the statue, writing that it does not belong to the Academy or its property and is in the control of the Parks and Recreation department.

In August, the activist group The Black Youth Project 100 held a protest in front of the statue, with protestors memorably wearing bloody-appearing hospital gowns. The statue currently still stands, though in the aftermath of Charlottesville, New York City declared that it will be going through a 90-day review of “symbols of hate on city property,” and as part of that, the Sims statue was discussed at a public city hearing in late November.

What Really Happened In Charlottesville

Yet another statue stands on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, South Carolina, Sims’s home state, with an inscription commending him for “treating alike empress and slave.” Columbia mayor Steve Benjamin said in an interview in August that the Sims statue is the most offensive one to him of all the statues on the grounds, and that it “should come down at some point.”

Kwoya Fagin Maples, creative writing instructor at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, helped to organize a protest in front of the statue that took the form of a poetry marathon, to show support for the hastening of its removal.

“There have been no preparations, to my knowledge, for it to actually happen. I suppose the protest was a way to support the mayor’s words in hopes that it would move us closer to giving the eleven or more women he experimented on retribution. I think the monument should contain images of the women he used for his discoveries. Personally, I think his image should not be the focus of the monument, if there at all.”

In September, Nature published an unsigned editorial originally entitled “Removing Statues of Historical Figures Risks Whitewashing History,” in which it argued that names or statues (specifically pointing out Sims) should not be removed but instead supplemented with additional plaques or “equally sized” monuments commemorating their victims:

“Sims was far from the only doctor experimenting on slaves in 1849, despite the fact that the abolitionist movement was well under way in the United States. And his achievements saved the lives of black and white women alike. But some historians argue that his experiments could have been considered unethical even for his time.”

The original article was met with strong backlash in many publications and on social media. Nature changed the title of the piece to “Science must acknowledge its past mistakes and crimes” with some content changes, and with an editor’s note apologizing for the original article being “offensive and poorly worded.”

A few weeks later, Nature editor-in-chief Philip Campbell published an apology statement in the journal:

“Removing such statues or other memorials does not erase these individuals or their acts from history. Beyond that fundamental error in the Editorial, the arguments throughout the piece — including an inappropriate framing of the example of J. Marion Sims — and its overall tone were naive and unintentionally served to reinforce the insidious notion that women, people of colour and minority groups do not have a place in science. This notion is wrong. We did not recognize how destructive the overall Editorial was and the effects that it could have.”

When I read about this saga in Nature, I remembered Wegener and Clara again. Why propose to build an “equally sized” monument to stand alongside the existing one, when one could build an entirely new monument altogether? In her NPR interview, Dr. Gamble proposed that his subjects Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey be depicted instead. “I think what the inscription would say is ‘Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy, the mothers of modern gynecology.’”

Apart from teaching medical students like me about the history behind the modern practice of gynecology, learning about the experimentation by Sims also brings up important conversations regarding the ability to consent.

In the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2006, physician L.L. Wall argued that “Sims’s modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims” and that, based on Sims’ own writings, his original patients were “willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction.”

But can any people considered property actually consent? And would a woman truly “consent” to 30 surgeries without anesthesia? The argument is fallacious, dangerous, and openly ignores the intent with which Sims purposefully bought black women for his experiments, not to mention the eagerness of slaveholders to have their slaves returned in better condition for physical labor.

Can any people considered property actually consent? Would a woman a truly ‘consent’ to 30 surgeries without anesthesia?
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While Sims had been criticized by contemporaries as early as 1858 (by African-American surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, according to Washington), Wegener kept his Nazi ties secret for decades. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and it is speculated that he participated in Nazi medical experimentation.

The American College of Chest Physicians awarded him a “master clinician” prize in 1989, a year before his death, but rescinded it after his secret Nazi past was discovered 11 years later through the work of two physicians researching his life in preparation for an intended celebratory article. Sims, for his part, experimented on living women — further exploiting their already harrowing reality of exploitation, using eugenics-based logic to give them no pain medication.

But even more important is the fact that, though Sims practiced 100 years before Wegener and Clara, American assumptions based on false theories of racial difference are still held by some physicians today.

A study last year from the University of Virginia found that a substantial portion of white medical students and residents surveyed believed that black people are biologically less sensitive to pain; in their results, 40% of first and second-year medical students and 25% of residents thought blacks have thicker skin than whites.

American assumptions based on false theories of racial difference are still held by some physicians today.
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One aspect of knowing the history of American medical experimentation is also understanding and empathizing with the views of black patients who continue to endure bias today. My medical school classmate Shelley Thomas is passionate and outspoken about working towards racial justice in health care, and was one of the classmates I interviewed for this article.

She cited acceptance of intrauterine devices (IUDs), a form of long-acting contraception, as one of many examples of history informing patient skepticism. “There are so many populations that are skeptical of IUDs. Some people think, ‘she’s not looking at the statistics, this is just lack of education,’ without knowing the history of forced sterilization,” she explained.

“When you’re talking about putting something inside of a black woman that will stop her from having kids for 5–8 years, the history is there, and without knowing that history, we can make a lot of assumptions about why people are so hesitant about a lot of these different forms of medical advancement.”

When I worked as a clinical research coordinator, my required online training included a section on research ethics that described the history of the Tuskegee trial. Wouldn’t it make sense to require us to preface our learning about, say, the speculum exam with a lesson about the man behind the device?

I often wonder why these histories don’t already exist in medical curricula; why I come across it almost solely in the lay press. I interviewed Dorothy Charles, a classmate a year ahead of me who is an organizer for the national White Coats for Black Lives movement.

“It would be a great to have syllabi on this in medical school,” she said. “We need medical students to learn these social justice issues in medicine, and be educated about the racial history and myths in medicine.”

She suggested having people who are experts in these topics teach it — not necessarily physicians, but instead social scientists or historians. Some might argue medical school is not the place for medical history, but as both Charles and Thomas pointed out to me, then why comment on the Wegener’s name change at all?

How Medical Schools Are Failing The LGBTQ Community

And, Thomas added, “when we don’t address it and don’t talk about it, now you’re having a child whose pain is being ignored because a resident that has gone through our medical education system thinks that black children don’t experience pain the same way that white children do.”

(Studies show that black children are less likely to receive appropriate pain medication as compared to white children, even for a condition such as appendicitis.)

I wonder if having increasing black representation at academic medical centers would push the process of learning about and introducing stories like that of Sims into medical curricula. In an article in the Journal of Urology in 2011, two urologists write that while lay journalists and historians have increasingly studied and critiqued Sims’s surgical discoveries and accomplishments, “relatively little mention is found in standard urology textbooks or journals.”

“Medical sources have continued to portray him unquestionably as a great figure in medical history. This division keeps the medical profession uninformed and detached from the public debate on his legacy and, thus, the larger issues of ethical treatment of surgical patients.”

The authors found that urological textbooks referred to Sims repeatedly as a surgical innovator in their sections on vesicovaginal fistulas. Though a more recent edition of a urological textbook did have a paragraph on the controversial ethics of his practices, it concluded with: “It is generally believed that Sims was trying to enhance the lives of these women and was in concert with accepted mores.”

Before inpatient rounds one morning earlier this year, Thomas gave a short presentation on GPA, which one of her patients suffered from. “GPA used to be called Wegener’s, but they changed the name — I have some thoughts about that, which we can talk about later,” she said. After the presentation, her resident asked her about it, and we had a short discussion as we walked to the first patient room about the issues with changing some names in medicine while continuing to honor others. But these conversations are difficult to initiate as a medical student who is constantly in the position of being evaluated by our superiors.

I hope that one day, across medical schools, before we are even allowed to do a pelvic exam, we are given the context of Sims and his experiments.

“Just like you do with Wegener’s, give that little one slide about the complicated history here,” Thomas told me. “I think that begins the process of honoring these women who suffered.”

History is shaped through all kinds of activism.

Daisy Bates’ writing was instrumental to the success of the Civil Rights movement (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When we reflect on the activists who changed the course of history, we often think of those who showed up and made their presence known: the Civil Rights activists who took to the streets, despite the very real threat of police brutality; the protesters amassing by the hundreds of thousands, signs in hand, like those who participated in the recent Women’s March; the canvassers tirelessly knocking on doors, getting out the vote to shape the future of American politics.

But history has not always been made by those who are so visible.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is best remembered for his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial — but many are unaware that these most famous lines were reportedly inspired by Baptist minister Prathia Hall, who used the phrase in a public prayer honoring those lost in the Mount Olive Baptist Church arson.

History has not always been made by those who are so visible.

Similarly, “Queen of Gospel” Mahalia Jackson, who performed the last musical act before King’s iconic speech, used her public platform from behind the podium to interrupt King partway through his oration and advise him to “tell them about the dream,” a phrase she had heard him use in previous speeches. At her request, he instantly improvised the next section, which began:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

These kinds of behind-the-scenes actions are often overlooked in favor of more visible activism. But it’s both inaccurate and problematic to dismiss this brand of social justice advocacy—in part because for many, highly visible activism simply isn’t possible.

In January, my Instagram feed was filled with images of friends, family, and acquaintances participating in the Women’s March all over the country, with the highest turnout in my current city of Los Angeles. I got out of bed hopeful that we can make a difference — but I say “we” even though I slept through this monumental event. That’s because I have dealt with many health conditions, including sleep apnea, which can cause severe exhaustion.

Those with visible disabilities often need to work against obstacles and have crucial needs that are frequently overlooked. At the same time, we must also acknowledge those with invisible illnesses — like anxiety, a sleep disorder, or depression — that may hinder their ability to be present for marches, protests, canvassing, and other in-person engagements.

For inspiration and wisdom, we can glean much from examining the history of social change, which has long been shaped in part by those behind the scenes.

The Power Of The Pen

As is true today, writers, editors, publishers, and everyday folk were instrumental in the success of the pre-Revolutionary War and Civil Rights Movement, even when they weren’t on the front lines of protest.

Leading up to the American Revolution, the British Stamp Act required “government-issued stamps be placed on all legal documents and newspapers, as well as playing cards and dice,” according to historian Carol Berkin in Revolutionary Mothers. In protest, a group of women in New York City made a public announcement in the newspaper, refusing to marry their fiancés if they applied for a stamped marriage license. This act of opposition was a bold feat at a time when women were discouraged from participating in print dialogue.

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

In another prime example, this year marks the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that abolished anti-miscegenation laws. Mildred and Richard Loving, black and white respectively, were not allowed to return home to their state of Virginia after marrying against Virginia law. Mildred, though highly unassuming, wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking for assistance, which she then received from the ACLU. This simple letter ignited change that has altered marriage laws country-wide and was the inspiration for same-sex marriage equality in the 21st century.

In a different historic Supreme Court case, Daisy Bates, co-publisher of the black newspaper the State Press, chronicled the fight for school integration following Brown v. Board of Education in Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to using her pen to document civil rights issues, Bates acted behind the scenes to protect and support the first nine black students integrating Little Rock Central High School — a group commonly referred to as the “Little Rock Nine.” Bates even penned a letter to President Eisenhower, asking for reinforcements to combat the violence she and other activists experienced as a result of upholding the new legislation. She ingeniously placed “spies” on campus to report both positive and negative truths about what happened inside the school, in order to combat misinformation from both sides.

Bates has inspired me in my own efforts to contribute in part by writing words — words about Gabrielle Gorman and Jesse Williams, about black NASA trailblazers, and about the biased American captivity narrative. This, too, matters.

Boycotting Goods

The Montgomery bus boycotts and the Boston Tea Party are of course the most widely recognized boycotting efforts in the U.S. But other boycotts past and present have played significant roles in the country’s progression.

After the dissolution of the Stamp Act, the colonies began boycotting other British imports, especially luxury items. Sugar, mirrors, silk, lace, and even pickles were renounced in 1769 by the Virginia House of Burgess. It took several years for the boycotts to gain momentum, but we know how the story ends: America was able to release itself from British rule following the Revolution. This type of activism was performed by everyday men and women, all of whom relied on goods and services for their daily needs. While the boycotts themselves became a public force, individuals were able to contribute in small ways with a big impact.

Boycotts past and present have played significant roles in the country’s progression.

Today, boycotts against companies that financially back Trump and his family have also proven effective. Lyft downloads surpassed Uber for the first time after a recent boycott, resulting in Uber pledging a $3 million defense fund to help drivers with immigration issues. Additionally, following a recent boycott of Nordstrom, the clothing company decided to no longer carry Ivanka Trump’s brand, citing a significant drop in sales due to the boycott as its motivation. Other retailers, such as Neiman Marcus, T.J. Maxx, and Burlington, have followed suit.

Taking Care of Loved Ones

We each have different roles in the current fight for the preservation of our country. While my aunt and uncle (a Democratic county representative and legislative district chair, respectively) participated in the Seattle airport protests against the immigration ban, my cousin, who participated in the Women’s March with my aunt, contributed to the cause that night by watching over our ailing grandmother. My sister, who was well into her third trimester and recently had her baby, sat out the march but contributed to the ACLU.

We should take advantage of enacting change within our individual spheres of influence and power.

While we must all push ourselves to do more during this horrific presidency, we should also take advantage of enacting change within our individual spheres of influence and power. Though I cannot participate in everything, I have been able to not only use my writing to speak power to truth, but also to sign petitions and send emails (though still not as much as I should).

Those with invisible illnesses, or who otherwise can’t engage in in-person actions, may fear they can’t do their part. But as essayist Michel de Montaigne so wisely put, “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”

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