On this #TransDayOfVisibility I have some happy news:

Over the past week, 2,659 content creators from 43 countries participated in the #TransRightsReadathon. We read & made content about trans books, fundraising for >250 different trans-supporting funds & individuals.🧵 Together, we read >7,800 trans books and raised >$234,000 for trans rights!

At least 2 trans authors who had book releases around the readathon saw their books hit bestseller lists. And many, many trans authors reported their best week of sales since their book releases. 2/

I encourage leftists to pay attention to the #TransRightsReadathon campaign, even if you’re not a book person. Decentralized organizing, which empowers people to do something that matches their skills & interests in service of a public good, is catching like wildfire 1/ People everywhere are actually pretty desperate to DO something, anything, that makes the world a better place. When we create a way that they can, whilst tapping into what they’re already good at & interested in? That’s clearly powerful. 2/

🔥important🔥 since authors who’ve written books w/trans MCs, but who’ve not disclosed their gender, are being included on lists of trans authors in the #TransRightsReadathon, and this could lead to forced outing, I suggest opening the guidelines to “trans books” generally 1/ So previously my messaging was “let’s read books by trans authors,” but many lists are including books by authors who don’t self-identify as trans, but write trans characters. So if you’re doing that, just say you’re reading “trans books” or “books with trans rep.” 2/

Just throwing out that I would love to see more authors participating in the #TransRightsReadathon! Idk if you’re waiting on an invite? Here it is!!! Trans or cis? slow reader? Can’t afford to donate much? It doesn’t matter! All are welcome to join however they’re able! Because I’m seeing some authors interacting with the hashtag but not throwing their hat in the ring. Maybe you think you’re not allowed bc you’re an author? You’re totally allowed & welcomed!!!

Last week I made a video thread called “Why do they hate us?”, a brief history of anti-Semitism that went viral on ⏰, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer # of people who commented they had no idea that anti-Semitism goes back millennia or had never heard about Blood Libel🧵 I almost didn’t post the videos because the info seems so obvious to me, but of course that’s because I’m Jewish, and many of us are taught our history through our family. Meanwhile Christians have no clue their history has always been inextricably intertwined w/our genocide. 2/

My kid is 5. We're a still-masking family. At the beginning of the year, she was one of about 5 kids in her school still masking, so she told me she was going to stop. I said okay. Then she got sick for a month straight. On her own, she decided to start masking again. 1/ Since she started wearing masks again (kn95s), about three weeks ago, she hasn't been sick. So she told me she's going to keep wearing a mask, because she doesn't like being sick. How can a 5yo figure this out but grown-ups really struggle?? Being sick SUCKS?? Like even colds?!?

Let’s talk about how the vast majority of white characters written by white authors are super dishonest when it comes to whiteness. A 🧵. We live in a white supremacist society. Regardless of what they tell you, white people are absolutely aware of their whiteness and their lifetime’s worth of racial biases and understanding of racial power dynamics any time they’re encountering non-white people. HOWEVER… 2/

My disaster-queer, revolutionary punk kids are going to be published!!! This book was born from so much love and grief over all my years of activism in Texas.
THE FREE PEOPLE'S VILLAGE insists there is no climate justice without abolition!
Coming Fall 2023 from @LevineQuerido! I am beyond thrilled to work with @capaciousmood as the acquiring editor on this book. Irene is a nonbinary Afrolatine Houstonian, with organizing experience in Houston. Irene knows these neighborhoods and communities, and what Gulf Coast activism is all about.

Cultural gatekeers blew it in the first two years of the pandemic by largely refusing to fictionalize our experiences. Whether folks were “in the mood” or not, we had an opportunity to use fiction to help win the culture war around masking and ethical pandemic behavior. 🧵 We could have rapidly pushed out TV shows, movies, books, reflecting our pandemic experiences, creating a cultural ethos around taking care of each other, exploring shifting boundaries around morality and safety, and showing the danger of betraying those measures. 2/

Spouse & I have been married 9 years today, and he's still my BFF, so here's some unsolicited marital advice for whoever wants it: 🧵 -Recognize the lil things you do for the fam & thank each other VERBALLY every time, even if it's repetitive. "Thanks for cooking/doing laundry/etc. Say thanks to each other EVERY DAY. (And you gotta do something helpful every day too, unless it's a real bad day)

Voted for Biden for harm reduction, but I live in Texas and am still feeling extremely fucking harmed. The GOP has increased their attacks on voting rights, trans people, and truth. Biden wants to increase police budgets and give up on dealing w/ COVID. No plan for climate change or stopping the far right besides scooting out of the way of the Overton window before it hits them.

Bad news for the “back to normal” people: COVID aside, “normal” is rapidly destroying the habitability of Earth, and the extent of systemic change that needs to happen to save you from facing catastrophic climate change in your lifetime is WAY more intense than wearing a mask. Everything about our lifestyles needs to change, from how we grow food, move people around, organize cities, power society, what we consume, and how we elect leaders, or your “normal” in 20-30 years is going to involve more catastrophe & mass death that you can probably imagine.

Valero plant reports “flaring.” I’ve never seen that much smoke from flaring.
#houston #houstonfire #houstonsmoke @KHOU @abc13houston @LinaHidalgoTX An industrial accident near my house, a screw in my tire, and a sick kid, this is one hell of a Monday

Name an anti-capitalist picture book @haymarketbooks when are you starting up a picture book division?

I first learned of Thich Nhat Hanh in 2016, during a weeks-long insomnia brought on by the election. My go-to anxiety-coping-mechanism, drinking, was not available because I was pregnant. I was watching ASMR to try to fall asleep, when I came across one of his guided meditations/ That video had a profound, calming effect on me. At that point, I don't think I had ever, in my adult life, fully inhabited the present moment. Not sober. I could get there stoned, but not on my own. In fact, I'd never really understood what people meant by "being present" /

For those arguing that this isn’t a thing, consider that even though Don’t Look Up was supposedly a blistering satire about COVID and/or climate change, it mentioned neither COVID nor climate change.

https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1484559461675155466

Naming a few best-selling authors as exceptions is not the dunk you think it is. I know there are exceptions and clifi gets published sometimes—my whole career is an exception. And I’ve also run into many publishing professionals who will point blank tell you “don’t write this.”

Traditional publishing says don’t put COVID in your stories. No climate change either.

But that means our “contemporary” stories are set in a fantasy alternate reality that gets farther and farther away from the real world every day. This is the idea thats haunting me most after talking “Art at the End of the World” with @MaryHeglar @amywestervelt and @lyta_gold last night. Podcast will be up next week!

One of the most ethically and politically loaded aspects of writing speculative fiction is just describing how a character perceives another human being they’ve never met. So much world building is packed into every choice you make there. Do people assume others’ genders on sight? Binary genders? Do they ascribe pronouns to this person immediately? When rendering physical descriptions will your character assume and name race or ethnicity or avoid stating them outright? What do your choices reveal about this world?

It scares me when I see liberals assume that the CRT fight is bound to backfire. McCarthyism successfully suppressed-the-hell out of glaring, powerful truths, leading to a 70-yr of attrition of worker's rights & labor power, turning basic socialist concepts into boogeymen. "How can you ban teaching truth? How can you ban conversations about the fundamental power dynamics that make sense of our history and present?" Uhhhhh....yeah, remember how our media tells us that providing medical care or family leave are "radical leftist positions"? Like that.

Hey #IamNonbinary and I write this book about gender & climate change & ghosts, and if you're scrolling the hashtag looking for something good to read--why not this? Also it's a short lil novella, everyone reads it in one sitting. You'll love it. Yay for nonbinary people. Gah and I forgot the alt text, sorry. It's a graphic of the cover of my book DEPART, DEPART! and also my headshot and the publisher, Stelliform Press's logo, and then some quotes about how great the book is that I'll link to: stelliform.press/index.php/prai…

A major media outlet only just paid me for an article I wrote over 2 months ago, and only after exchanging over 30 emails with their editors and accounts payable department. I spent 2x as long trying to get paid as I did writing the article. Not the first time this has happened. My first job in journalism was writing a series of music and culture articles for the Houston Chronicle’s youth culture blog—called 29-95–which folded, and I never got paid for those. I only followed up about 5 times before giving up because I was 22 and didn’t know better.