The Neurospicy Bean

I am so angry and I am so tired. I’m tired of walking into spaces I expect to be the most accepting of my existence, only to have it denied with a casual “she” from the most prominent drag queen in the city. Tired of watching my classmates jump to correct the professor when she misgenders a classmate, only to hear myself misgendered and wait for the correction – and wait – and wait – until the discussion has moved on and I have to admit to myself, “you’re just not trans enough for them.” I am tired of being misgendered by a gaming friend and thinking “well, maybe he’s just not good at they/them pronouns,” and then hearing him a second later smoothly referencing a non-binary character, the pronouns rolling off his tongue so fluidly and so in contrast to my own stuttering attempt at correction. I am tired of being praised for wearing men’s shorts, as though this is some huge step in my transition, when it is nothing more than a facet of how I choose to present myself. I am especially...

  I recently brought my girlfriend of over three years to a Renaissance park my aunt and uncle had invited me to. She’s great with kids (they have four and I’m half convinced the reason they invite me anywhere is to babysit), is only visiting for the summer, and had said she wanted to go to the park. Plus, you know, I like introducing the people I love to one another. So I thought, what’s the harm in bringing her along? Well, when I texted my uncle a heads up that we were running late but were on our way, he told me to have fun with my ‘friend’ and maybe we’d run into one another. I told him that although yes, my girlfriend was coming along because she wanted to check it out, I had planned on spending time with them all evening, and sent an additional text when we arrived. I received no response. We did end up running into them twice. Both encounters were painfully awkward and left my girlfriend and I with the impression that they didn’t really want to spend time with us. Now, ...

  This is an essay I wrote for a class I took in Spring 2023 called Wilderness Medicine and Ethics. Some of the discussion is specific to the class, but much of it is deeply relevant to both outdoors and philosophical discourse and I thought it would be valuable to share with a wider audience. I have included sources here both to give credit as necessary and provide links to the resources I reference. My experience with athletics has been, frankly, less than stellar. Although I’ve participated in a wide variety of activities, from climbing to taekwondo, none of them lasted past my first year of high school, and getting me to attend my regular practices was like pulling teeth. It was only recently that I realized part of the problem was how alienated I felt as a disabled person – even before knowing I was disabled, I knew that I wasn’t the same as the people around me, and I knew that fact made me unwelcome. Disability access and inclusion is perhaps one of the least developed front...