***
Spoilers for Mass Effect: Andromeda

Note: For ease of reference I refer to the player character as Sara Ryder, but if you played as Scott because you’re into that sort of thing, feel free to substitute as you read.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is unjustly maligned. It’s surprisingly fun and lovable for a game that earned the searing hatred of fans and critics alike, proving with depressing conclusiveness that there’s no space for flawed gems in the world of gaming.

But flawed it certainly was, and perhaps the ugliest carbon crystal in this gem is your character’s dear old dad Alec Ryder, who dies in the prologue and lives on as a malingering digital spectre. In a bit of accidental horror, you feel yourself steadily being driven mad by the fact that you’re the only person who thinks that a man built up by the narrative to be a hero is, in fact, evil.

***

In her review of Frozen 2 YouTuber Jenny Nicholson described the film as having “good bones but no skeleton.” In the same vein one can say Mass Effect: Andromeda has good bones but no spine.

The game suffers from a few problems, especially in its first act. Here, poor pacing, anaemic voice acting from core characters, and (at least at launch) janky animations conspired to give players a first impression the game never recovered from. By the time you build your first colony on Eos, however, everything starts to come together: your crew, the more interesting parts of the main story, and your sense of the game’s rhythms.

But Alec Ryder is the game’s shattered spine, whose failings run through the game from top to bottom. It all deals a near-crippling blow to the characterisation that is otherwise ME:A’s strength. This happens because the story of Ryder’s family is clearly set up to be her story’s emotional core, and it is mechanically structured to be the narrative throughline linking the entire game together in the background.

In brief: your AI, SAM, is literally in your head thanks to an implant. It’s a special tool used by every Pathfinder, and when your father bites it in the game’s prologue, he quickly transfers his SAM to your implant, making you his successor as human Pathfinder. But! Drama! You learn that you have access to some of your father’s memories and that they are locked. As you ‘grow’ as a Pathfinder (i.e. explore the Heleus Cluster and level up) these memories return and reveal dark secrets about your father, your family, and the entire Andromeda Initiative.

Or at least, that’s what the game gives the impression of. It largely fails to deliver on this because, despite literally getting to be inside Alec Ryder’s head, you learn nothing meaningful about his character, his inner life. This wastes a narrative opportunity provided by the SAM implant: the chance for Ryder to deepen her relationship with her father even though he’s already dead, and for us to go along for an emotionally impactful ride.

Why does this happen? In large measure because his story is bled dry of meaningful conflict. Alec Ryder makes numerous questionable choices (to put it politely) and yet is still treated as a straightforward hero by the game and, inexplicably, by his two children who, we’re told, had a vexed relationship with him. You can only judge Alec Ryder by his actions, which portray him as a manipulative monster that the galaxy is better off without—except, bizarrely, no one responds to him as such.

So what were Alec’s sins?

Dub-Con Cryo

The grand culmination of the Ryder Family Secrets questline is the revelation that Ryder’s mum, Ellen Ryder, is alive. She’s in Andromeda and cryogenically frozen. Alec Ryder snuck her onto the human ark under a false identity, freezing her when she was on the edge of death from her terminal illness.

This is pitched to the player as a beautiful tear-jerker moment. If this were a movie, the music would swell as Sara Ryder ran through the rows of cryo pods to find the one where her mother’s face would stare back at her.

The problem is that a moment’s thought reveals the scenario as nightmarish.

You see, from Sara’s reflections and the flashbacks she gets from her father’s memories, you’re given the clear impression that Ellen Ryder was a strong-willed woman who had—in addition to a life filled with many professional accomplishments—made peace with her untimely demise. It was a tremendous act of will for her to accept that she was going to die from her illness and that comes through quite clearly in the story. It’s a triumph of personal strength by any measure.

And yet without asking, Alec both took that away from her and brought her to another freaking galaxy. The game makes clear that Alec froze Ellen without her knowing, in the hopes that a cure for her disease would be developed while she was cryogenically frozen.

Nothing in the game suggests that Ellen got to make either of these monumental decisions for herself. Beyond that, bringing her is irresponsible. The Initiative is essentially restarting civilisation in a distant galaxy; it’s a hard life, as the game makes clear. Is it one that Ellen would want to live? We don’t know. In theory, the revelation that she was dragooned into cryo is supposed to be a happy one because she’ll get to see her children again. But what if a cure for her disease isn’t found during Sara and Scott’s lifetimes? What if they’re dead by the time she can be safely released? Is her pod using resources that are better directed elsewhere? Can curing this rare disease be a priority for the limited research capacity of the Initiative?

Just thinking about being in Ellen’s shoes makes me feel ill. Yet her predicament isn’t even the core of the problem here. The core of the problem is that no one else in the game’s world seems to recognise the shittiness of Ellen’s situation. Scott has a quick line about wanting to punch his father, but it’s quickly glossed over by treacly gratitude. You’re given no dialogue options that veer from this script.

If Ellen were my mother, I’d have feelings. First, because my father lied to me about my mother dying. Second, I’d be angry that he so egregiously violated her final wishes. Third, yes, some great part of me would be relieved and grateful that I might be able to see her again. Fourth, I’d wonder if I’d live long enough to see it happen. Fifth, I’d be furious at dad once more because he gated this essential knowledge about my own mother behind a near-impenetrable AI puzzle-box that can only be unlocked by parkouring across alien worlds while being shot at constantly. Sixth, I’d feel guilty that some part of me felt grateful she was in Andromeda.

All that anguish and grief is the stuff good drama is made of. And not one whit of it plays out on screen in ME:A, despite Alec Ryder effectively being the villain from Saw.

Yet, somehow, it gets worse.

“See the Process Through”

Throughout the first half of the game, you must struggle against widespread scorn—including from members of your own team—because Alec Ryder made you his successor as Pathfinder. You’re portrayed as kind of a dork, still trying to figure out her place in the galaxy, and nowhere near being the hotshot spec-ops Indiana Jones your father was. So, it’s an essential part of your story that you do, in fact, prove yourself worthy of being Pathfinder, even as you wonder why you’ve been chosen for this daunting task. Surely it wasn’t just sheer nepotism?

Well, it turns out that at the end of the Family Secrets quest chain, your father also tells you that Ellen’s cryogenic freezing is the whole reason chose you to be the next Pathfinder. Because you would “see the process through.” The “process” being getting Ellen out of cryo when the time was right. So, dear old dad made you the Pathfinder not because he believed in you, but because he needed to keep this shitty secret in the family, endangering you and the entire mission. Good thing you vastly exceed your father’s expectations!

It’s quite grievous. It was also unnecessary. The scene where Alec Ryder dies is one where his death was clearly accidental, sudden, and unexpected; he sacrifices himself to save you because your helmet shattered open on a planet with a toxic atmosphere, essentially. This is, perhaps, the one truly noble thing he ever does. But it’s also not exactly premeditated, nor was the fact that your sibling’s pod malfunctioned, thus side-lining him from the mission.

Alec had no way of effectively planning this, so saying that there was some grand scheme involved in making you the next Pathfinder was both needless and makes him look like an even bigger asshole.

Family

His one clear motivation in all of this was that he built the SAM AI in a galaxy that scorned artificial intelligence because he wanted to use it to save Ellen’s life. This is cliché at best and it’s given no further depth in any part of the story, despite his AI literally being a tool that could provide that depth in a seamless, narratively coherent and thematic way. After all, how many of us wish we knew why our parents are the way they are? Imagine if an implant gave you access to your parents’ thoughts; it’d be horrifying, but at least you would have real insight that offered the hope of closure. ME:A does nothing with this conceit, leaving us instead with the actions of a man who seemed to think the universe revolved around him.

It’s not hard to imagine what could’ve been.

Throughout the story of ME:A, Sara and the crew of the Tempest learn to work together and trust each other despite some well-developed conflicts and tensions that emerge along the way. In keeping with the theme of the entire Mass Effect series the crew becomes akin to a family. But for the first time in Mass Effect your character’s blood relations play a huge role in the story. They remain an active presence in your life. The player character is, thus, torn between these two worlds: her family-by-blood and her family-by-bond. That tension could have been made more central and explicit; Alec Ryder’s “family first” attitude could’ve been drawn into relief as the selfish cynicism that it really was.

It would have been tremendously satisfying for Sara to grieve the loss of her father and the loss of any hope that he would ever become a better person, to feel lost without the anchor of the Ryder patriarch before realising she never needed that in order to find true family. Despite all the talks you can have with Lexi about the Family Secrets quest chain in her role as ship psychologist there’s not much meat there. But there could’ve been: mourning and making peace with what a terrible person your father was, and what he did to you, what he’s still doing to you via his ghost that lives on in your head.

Anger turns to resolve as you accept what’s happened to your mother and vow to take care of her as best you can when she awakes. And then you turn to your crew—a real family, at last, made up of people who love you unconditionally, who will always have your back.

They emerge as a crew that serves as a reminder that family doesn’t have to be the hell created by your father, that you can carry on with your brother and your mum, but with the addition of new love and lifelong friendships, having won the admiration of thousands for being a leader and ten times the Pathfinder your father ever was.

That contrast was waiting to be drawn, yet somehow squandered. Of all the missed opportunities in ME:A this is surely the greatest.

This article was made possible by the generous support of my Patreon patrons. Why not join them? 

Special thanks goes to: Ellen Anders, Quirk G., Rose H., Jamie Klouse, Miguel C., Anastasia S., Noah Caldwell, Jules, and Chris Morris, for their continued, generous support.

Or: How to Start Having a Better Debate About Speech

Federal police roaming downtown Portland in unmarked vehicles to snatch protesters off the street are the most convincing argument that the “cancel culture” discourse is dangerously overblown. The now infamous open letter in Harper’s has aged so poorly that it’s merely bone dust now.

Yet there remains value in trying to understand the debate on speech, largely because we are in an epistemic break driven by new voices having their say. There is a more complex discussion to be had on the left about marginalisation, silencing, bullying, and so forth; about catharsis masquerading as activism, say, or about traumatised people hurting each other because their communities can’t or won’t support them. And yet, obviously, this is not what the Harper’s letter was about. Indeed, the letter and the high profile resignations of people like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan seem suspect in their timing considering the fact that political science professor and pundit Yascha Mounk is starting a brand new platform called “Persuasion” whose About page reads like a first draft of The Letter, and whose initial contributor list is almost entirely made up of signatories.

We’re condemned to this discourse. But we cannot have a speech debate worth having until we accept a fundamental fact:

There are no free speech absolutists.

There are two broad issues that have to be reckoned with in any honest discussion about speech. First, most speech debates are not about the value of free speech itself, but about other values guiding our beliefs about the ideal conduct of speech; the second is the fact that if call-out culture or cancel culture is real, most of its actual victims are people we almost never hear about and whose concerns would never trouble most “free speech defenders.”

The lack of honesty about these issues bedevils the speech debate in the mainstream press, which continues to be prosecuted as a fight between those who are either for or against free speech. But every signatory on The Letter believes in curbing free speech; most are simply not candid about that.

The Values Question

In defending the open letter, some claim that the hypocrisy of some signatories (e.g. Bari Weiss agitating to get professors fired for their views) matters less than the nobility of the letter’s ideas. But the actions of the signatories offer the only real-world context for those ideas—one of whom cheered on a SLAPP lawsuit threat I received from a right-wing YouTuber. Indeed, she explicitly hoped for my impoverishment. Clearly she thought my speech was out of bounds, that I said things that Ought Not Be Said, and that I even deserved punishment for this.

That sort of thing is context. Indeed, it is some of the only context the Harper’s letter provides. It demonstrates the emptiness of its content and how thoroughly it sidesteps the very heart of the argument it claims to intervene in. How do we decide on which values guide speech?

Every signatory, and everyone who enthused about the letter, believes that some things simply shouldn’t be said—either from the privileged site of a platform, or at all. Such limits exist at every level of even the freest society, from a whole nation, to a subculture, to a given space, to a given affinity group. Debates about speech are about where and how to draw the boundaries and not truly about whether such boundaries should even exist. The boundaries in question are informal; they are neither drawn nor policed by titled state actors, but by the subtler forms of enjoinment that define any society. And, as with any informal system, it is wide open to abuse.

Yet this issue is not addressed in grandiose declarations like the open letter. They can’t be because they force the would-be free speech absolutist to accept the fact that they are not so absolute after all. It is easier and more satisfying to believe your opponents are “illiberal” vandals on the “reactionary left” who want to destroy the beautiful marble colonnades of “the free exchange of ideas” and “a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”

By design, these are abstract “principles” with positive-sounding words that few could disagree with. Yet in reality, these would-be absolutists are no different from me.

What we actually disagree about is where lines should be drawn, not whether they should be drawn at all. In a rousing debate with Mounk, The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu made this abundantly clear as he criticised the signatories for being mysteriously silent about Fox News firing Tucker Carlson’s racist writer, Blake Neff, for a slew of bigoted posts he made on a private forum:

“Now, the response to people who bring this up has generally been, well look you shouldn’t lump this in with other cases, because Blake Neff is a racist. And this is where it gets sticky. Once you say it’s OK for somebody to lose their job because they’re a racist, the question then becomes, OK what is racism? What is sexism; what is transphobia? It becomes not a question of speech and liberalism in the abstract, with one side supporting liberalism and free discourse and the other side not supporting liberalism and free discourse. It’s a question of where the lines are. And people are functionally going to disagree about that.”

Mounk’s response was to essentially dodge that point. Who could be surprised, however? It forces the pseudo-absolutist onto messier terrain, denying them the “I know it when I see it” consensus they share with their fellow travellers. To actually specify what limits should be imposed where would lead to a breakdown among their number, dissolving into a bitter debate that denial has rendered them ill-equipped to have.

***

There’s a recursive quality to the arguments about cancel culture that never gets addressed. Who is the biggest canceller? The canceller or the one who cancels them for cancelling? It’s not just that the term “cancel culture” is meaningless in much the same way that “political correctness” is; it’s that it’s meaningless for the same reason. It describes behaviours everyone participates in to one degree or another, setting informal boundaries for what can and ought not be said.

The Unheard

The Harper’s open letter was defended by many people who claimed that criticism of the signatories’ privilege—and the fact that several are fabulously wealthy, famous, and do not want for platforms—missed the point. The letter was written on behalf of the voiceless, you see. The main textual evidence for this was the following line: “The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”

The more notable thing about that sentence, however, is that it disappears, well, the people being disappeared in Portland right now. It suggests a false equivalence between the machinery of an oppressive state and its monopoly on mortal violence with Twitter toxicity.

This is further belied by the letter’s own examples of cancel culture gone amok: “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces,” (i.e. Bennet) or “the heads of organizations” who are “ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.” Not exactly “those who lack power,” is it?

What of those who do genuinely lack power, though? Do they run afoul of “progressive orthodoxy”? That is an inapt framing because it locates the problem almost entirely in left-wing political identification, but the short answer is: yes. The problem for many of the signatories isthat these are the same people they want to exclude from discourse and decisionmaking, so it would be inconvenient to mention them.

Trans women of colour, for instance, especially those of us with working class backgrounds who were not raised by parents who hosted dinner parties have sometimes chafed against the in-group/out-group dynamics of some activist groups, especially those dominated by well-educated middle class white people; crucially, however, this often happens because of latent transmisogyny or misogynoir or classism.

Meanwhile, I’ve also seen cis Black women targeted by white women who weaponise “safe space” discourse against them, transmuting their fear of Blackness into rhetoric more palatable to social justice oriented spaces. “I feel threatened,” so easily recognised as racist when, say, a white police officer or Amy Cooper uttered it, is alchemised into victimhood intelligible to progressive rhetoric: “this is supposed to be a safe space.”

This is why I have, for years, cautioned against treating activist insights—for instance, the fact that “tone policing” is a thing—as inflexible rules. Particularly in the hands of young white activists who are coming into their own, it can be too easy to slot these “rules” into a system of informal power that they just so happen to already dominate. But again, such insights would not really interest most of the letter’s signatories unless they can be twisted to reinforce their own power. For instance, Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (who signed the open letter) took a shine to my 2014 essay on this topic and interviewed me for a piece in the Nation about call-out culture. What I didn’t realise was that she had cast writer and activist Mikki Kendall as the piece’s villain, for allegedly being rude to too many white women on Twitter.

Looking back on those pieces of mine from 2014, I realise that I was still rather naïve, myself. At the time I wrote things like “There are some people whose records are such that they could indeed be justly called ‘an unrepentant racist’ or ‘pathological transphobe,’ but there are many more whose mistakes deserve far, far less fire in response. Some may not have made prejudicial mistakes at all.”—such notions are not far afield of the Harper’s letter, especially in isolation. There is much I would write differently today, and I still tried to have it both ways about the Nation article, still trying to claim there was room for us somewhere in an enterprise that was specifically about erasing us. I regret that deeply.

Thus, I can empathise with people of colour who saw something like justice in the open letter’s Rorschach inkblot, like The Nation’s Jeet Heer who signed on behalf of silenced Palestinian activists, or Reed College professor Lucía Martínez Valdivia who was horrified to find the space she shared with transphobes (she has since had her name removed from the letter). But when vague statements of principle are put into the public sphere, the interpretation that favours those with the most power will win out.

Back in 2014, though, I at least made a point of highlighting the fact that when marginalised people talked about callout culture we were referring to how the experiences of Black and brown trans women were colonised into mute rules by white queer activists, or how multiply marginalised people in activist communities fear making a mistake, or how “calling in” might be a more productive way of hashing out pain and disagreement.

Notably, in all of that discourse (some of which is now a decade old), there was discussion of “disposability,” a term that almost never appears in mainstream free speech jeremiads against what is now called “cancel culture.” We fear our energy, power, vulnerability, and pain being bled from us to fuel the personal or political power of more privileged activists or scholars or journalists who would then simply get rid of us when we had nothing left to give. We also feared the horizontal hostility that comes from hurt people hurting people, which meant we often feared each other. Indeed, I was nearly driven away from speaking publicly about trans politics by another translatina back when I was a baby tran, for instance.

Over the years I’ve seen how brutal we as trans women can be to each other because so few of us achieve anything like mainstream visibility, each bearing the unenviable weight of a diverse community’s expectations. Either we somehow manage to be all things to all trans people or we implode. Invariably, we fail, or just distance ourselves from the community.

Yet whenever these stories are picked up by mainstream sources they are invariably positioned as cautionary tales about how “the left,” writ large, eats its own, as the cancel culture reaching its logical conclusion, rather than what it’s always been: marginalised people being held hostage in their own spaces to white supremacy and other forms of structural prejudice.

If you can find any of that complexity in the Harper’s letter, anywhere other than a gloss that massively over-interprets a single line, do let me know.

***

There are, of course, many texts in the open letter’s genre; several are already going up on Persuasion. But the letter remains a useful touchstone because it so perfectly distils everything wrong with that way of thinking. The free speech defender genre is, here, distilled down to its essence as a bundle of clichés in search of a principle. I am far from alone in criticising its lack of specificity. But I had hoped to add these two larger points: recognising that speech debates are about values rather than whether speech should be curbed, and recognising that the bitter debate about callout culture/cancel culture on the left has a much more complicated discourse among the very people the Harper’s letter claims to protect.

We’re not stupid. We know that when the “free speech defenders” criticise the hypocrisy of white social justice activists they are doing so to silence them, not elevate our voices, our expertise, our theory. That is both the truth about both our victimisation by callouts and why some of us are “toxic” as a matter of survival (I strongly recommend Sydette Harry’s thoughts on Crash Override here).

What I despair about is how little we have been able to advance this conversation, especially in public. It’s not a coincidence that whatever language we use to describe anti-social behaviour in activist circles is very quickly seized on by those with real power as a shield, but I wish I knew how to circumvent this.

Can we do better? Perhaps, but not by pretending that it is actually possible to be a free speech absolutist; aside from a few people who are perfectly consistent in opposing any state intervention upon speech, there are no true absolutists. What is at stake is what has always been at stake: our values. The debate about intra-left speech is often parallel to the wider debate about speech in our society as a whole, but these things are conflated to the detriment of the whole conversation.

“The School of Athens,” meanwhile, does not depict a real place, nor even an ideal that is frequently achieved by its loudest proponents. It does not depict the progress of democracy, nor how societies decide which debates have had their day. Dealing with speech and association as a society has never been particularly easy or fun, but we are doing it right now through speech. Perhaps it is worth listening to what the unheard have to say.

***

Influences on this piece include Julia Serano’s “Excluded,” which is a thoughtful discussion of exclusionary dynamics in queer communities, and this excellent recent thread by writer Kai Cheng Thom.

This post was made possible by my wonderful Patreon supporters. Want to see more from me? Join them and support Cross With You today!

Hey there Nuclear Unicorners,

As you’re probably all well aware, the vast bulk of my work has since moved to a variety of other websites and publications. But given that freelancing doesn’t always pay the bills, and the fact that I would like to put some of my essay work back here, I thought it was time for me to start my own Patreon (only, of course, after the bludgeoning love of many friends and colleagues who encouraged me to do so).

If you notice, the stretch goals involve funding more writing here and over the long term I would, like many of my colleagues in gaming criticism, like to have a healthy personal blogging presence as well as a presence in the wider gaming press. If you like what you’ve seen here and elsewhere, please feel free to donate, and thank you so much in advance. Click below to donate!

For regular readers of this blog it has doubtlessly not escaped your notice that I’ve been a rather infrequent presence here this past year. Much of my writing lives elsewhere these days; I’ve been a frequent contributor to RH Reality Check, I have a regular column at Feministing, and I have contributed features to Bitch Magazine. 2014 has been one hell of year and, especially in light of the hells and furies wrought by its final quarter, it’s quite fashionable now to, Festivus-style, air one’s grievances in any attempt to look back on the year.

Having stood in the midst of GamerGate I certainly have plenty of cause to want to turn the book on this year and be done with it. But the year does not belong to them, and if I were to look back on 2014 I would say that on the whole, what will endure for me is the fact that this year has been tremendously good for my growth as a writer and scholar, and that it was the first year that I have truly been able to live the professional life I want to.

While it is popular these days to, for one reason or another, lament the state of the video gaming world, I remain very optimistic. Although a number of challenges remain, the recent backlash has a lot more to do with the fact that the changes made in the world of gaming are here to stay, as are the people who are the faces of that change.

The wider world of politics is something I’m a good deal more concerned about for reasons that should be obvious to anyone following the news. I’ve written extensively this year about different manifestations of racism and police brutality.

Without further ado, however, here are some of my favourite pieces of my own writing from this past year:

Video/Gaming

Perhaps the most cited piece of writing I’ve done this year about games has been “We Will Force Gaming to be Free,” a lengthy and unexpectedly popular essay I wrote for First Person Scholar about how GamerGate quickly came to resemble classic examples of out-of-control revolutionary movements and had fully given itself to violent, “ends justify the means” thinking.

I’ve written a lot for Bitch Magazine this year, but the most fun I had writing for them was this feature on erotic roleplaying subcultures in the world of gaming, both video and pen-and-paper. The artwork they commissioned is also my favourite.

Another widely read piece was this (now tragically prescient) editorial I wrote for Polygon about how a “terror dream,” spawned by past censorship battles, wracks the gaming community, making it vulnerable to perceiving any criticism as an attempt to “take our games away.” Also in Polygon, I wrote about the tragedy of how violence is the “idiom of progress” in too many games and that developing gaming as a medium requires coming up with new ways to win (and with thinking beyond the idea of “winning” in the first place).

I wrote extensively about GamerGate as many know. I was one of the first to cover it for a non-gaming news outlet, writing an editorial essay for RH Reality Check about what it revealed about the silencing of critical women (many commenters rushed to buttress my point). My writing on the matter mostly lived on Feministing: I took on the (thankfully rescinded) decision by Intel to pull advertising from Gamasutra, how GamerGate polices the meaning of “gamer” in a deeply exclusionary way, and interviewed Revolution 60 game developer Brianna Wu.

But thankfully I got to write a bit about games themselves as well. Here, for Polygon, I compare Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri to Civilisation: Beyond Earth and find the latter wanting due to its inability to tie its mechanics into a wider narrative. Meanwhile, in one of my very few blog posts here this year, I wrote an essay about Hate Plus’ stealth villain, Oh Eun-a, and what she reveals about the impossibilities of womanhood amidst the stalled gender revolution of the modern world. I also wrote for Feministing about how fantasy RPG religions make for interesting moral exploratory tools and how newer games like Pathfinder are taking this to the next level.

Also, the delightful Jonathan Mann of Song-a-Day fame actually wrote a song inspired by my Polygon “terror dream” essay that distilled its message into a catchy diddy:

Everything Else Political

Since so much of my writing is about day-to-day gender politics, I’ll be a little bit more parsimonious with which essays I put here. I’ll be celebrating my first anniversary as a Feministing columnist very soon, so you can simply see my year in letters at my page on the site, as well as everything I wrote at RH Reality Check this year.

Online Toxicity

If you heard of me prior to GamerGate it was as the author of Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity and Abuse in Online Activism, the unfortunately named essay that helped frame a larger discussion among feminists about whether we were being too extreme, aggressive, and, yes, toxic in our interactions with one another. I added a postscript to address common criticisms of the argument I advanced.

In the wake of this, Nation writer Michelle Goldberg wrote a feature in that magazine about toxicity in online activism that featured quotes from me and my essay. Regrettably, however, she used the feature to frame the discussion almost entirely in terms that scapegoated black women for said toxicity and racialised the issue in a way that dramatically oversimplified (and dare I say, toxified) the points I and others were making. My response to that, and to the ensuing activist furore (which did little to help matters), can be found here in another unfortunately titled piece (I like to think I’ve gotten better with those!)

On Violence, Racism, and Masculinity

This has been a terrifying year in a number of ways. I wrote here about the oft overlooked misogyny of the far right, including neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Here, at RH Reality Check, I responded to the horrifying misogynist mass shooting committed by Eliot Rodger. I also wrote extensively about how police violence against black communities is a reproductive justice issue, and how the violence of our society grows out of an alarming veneration of violence as the solution to all our problems, which I argued leads to the “militarised mind.” I wrote several articles about the tragic case of Jane Doe, an incarcerated trans girl who was failed by child protective services, in Connecticut, but one of the better essays I wrote on the subject can be found here.

Transfeminism

The Jane Doe essays could easily fit here as well. But I will just highlight the writing I did about the Grantland feature early this year that exploited the death of Dr. V, a trans woman who committed suicide as a result of the author proposing to out her in the piece. I also replied to the apology by Grantland’s EIC Bill Simmons.

On a happier note, I wrote a feature for this season’s Bitch Magazine that took a broad survey of the recent efflorescence of trans women’s literature in recent years. This has been an unparalleled time of growth for independent writing by, for, and about trans women that transcends traditional narratives.

Hope

It’s been an indisputably hard year, so much so that there are Fuck 2014 shirts that one can buy to express their middle-fingered displeasure with it. There’s good reason to be outraged at this year’s events– another futuristic sounding year chock full of terrifyingly retrograde happenings. But there is always reason to be optimistic about what lies beyond tomorrow’s veil, and I think that one of the best things I wrote this year was a gentle reminder to others, especially my fellow feminists, that all is not lost. Cynicism remains our worst enemy, and we cannot let the perfect haunt the good we do at every step.

And I think that’s a good way to wind up this increasingly prodigious overview. In conclusion, I wrote far too much. Happy 2015 to all!