"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...


Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!




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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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My third book, Within the Box, is about a gender-variant person in a rehab facility. And rehabilitation is approached as a type of psychiatric practice, with the facility being run by psychiatrically trained personnel. So the book is also about the clash between a gender-variant person who doesn't think they have something wrong with them, and an impersonal psychiatric practice that considers all of its clients to be pathologically impaired.

A lot of LGBTQIA+ people get seen by psychiatric services. If you don't already have a politically critical perspective on the profession, it is time for you to develop one. Even if you have found some good in their services.


To start with, the psychiatric establishment is fundamentally conservative: that which is typical and normative is defined as that which is healthy. Different is intrinsically regarded as pathological. Clinical names are affixed to each of the ways in which people seem to follow a different pattern than the mainstream pattern.

This works against you on two different levels, simultaneously: first of all, every one of your decisions, preferences, tastes, priorities, and so forth are subject to being evaluated for being different from those of your peers, and considered to be possible symptoms of some unfortunate condition that they watch people for.

Then, on a broader level, they often regard a specific difference, such as what they call "gender identity dysphoria", as a pathology. Until 1973, "homosexuality" was tagged as a mental disorder. It is true that they removed it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and thus no longer define it as a psychiatric ailment, but many individual psychiatrists continued to believe it to be so (since that was how they were trained). With gender, being trans used to be conceptualized officially as a disorder; then they shifted to only defining it as a pathology if it was making you miserable. But again, attitudes often linger behind official definitions.

People in the LGBTQIA+ community often turn to psychiatrists because they are seeking help with coping with the friction between themselves and an unaccepting society. This is sometimes very specific and official help, such as the requirement that in order to obtain medical transition, a person needs to be assessed and under the ongoing care of a psychiatrist.

Their role as gatekeepers and enforcers of the most stereotypical gender norms for people desiring to transition has been commmented on often. But the psychiatric profession serves a larger and sneakier role as excuse-maker for patterns of life that don't need any excuse because there's nothing wrong with the person in question.

If you aren't particularly happy and satisfied with your lot in society, that does not mean something is wrong with you.

If you are different from the normative, that does not mean there has to be some underlying brain difference or chromosomal variation that made that happen, which "makes it okay" since it isn't your fault. Because if there's nothing wrong with it, it doesn't require an excuse.

What do you have on your desk that you can safely toss without doing any damage? Maybe a box of paper clips, or that handful of dice you use for that game? Select a spot on your floor, and then toss your items at that spot as a target. You see how they spray all around and some of the individual items are pretty far from the target? But you didn't throw them differently than the others. Their different landing position doesn't have a "cause" or a "reason" different from what happened to the other items. When our differences are tagged for investigation into "what caused it?", the implication is that our difference is a wrongness in need of explanation that the normative ones don't need.

Think about it.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I've been blogging since 2014, but starting last spring, I began doing something a bit different: I started echoing these blog posts on a high-traffic fast-moving general-purpose message board.

To put things into perspective, here on LiveJournal a given post will sometimes get a comment, maybe even two; on its DreamWidth clone, a couple of comments were entered during the year; on Facebook, where I post links to the blog on several gender-related groups, I'd get a couple "likes" and an occasional comment as well; meanwhile, on the Straight Dope Message Board, copies of these same blog posts generated 415 replies during one week, 279 on another, with people interacting with each other as well as with me and my own replies to their comments and so forth — a full-blown conversation.

Well... I have always thought that if I had people's attention for long enough, I'd make sense to them, they'd get it. That even if some people took an adversarial stance or became dismissive of me and what I was saying, I would be making sense to enough people that I'd have supporters, and that the overall weight of public opinion would have my back.

And, well... it didn't work out that way.


The first post in the series that I reposted to the Straight Dope was Regarding Matters Psychiatric, which delved into what happened in the spring of 1980 in the weeks and months after I first came out: some people on campus found me disturbing and unsettling, they couldn't make sense of the things I was saying with such fervor and intensity, and they began to wonder about my state of mind — perhaps in part because I was obsessing so much about sex and sex-related matters, which are considered personal and somewhat weird to talk to people about, perhaps in part because I was behaving as if I was onto something of earth-shattering, game-changing importance, but probably mostly because people who are this excited and passionate about some set of ideas have usually acquired those ideas from some religion or cult or other font of ideology, but I had apparently made mine up on my own.

So I suppose it is fitting in a way that I have just finished a year trying to make sense to the folks at the Straight Dope, being intensely focused on the things I wanted to explain to them and discuss with them, mixing my own home-brewed gender theory with anecdotes from my personal life and, as the months ticked by, leaving them more and more with the impression that here amongst them was someone who was very self-immersed, very obsessed with a bunch of ideas that didn't make much sense to them, someone who was impervious to their attempts to get me to realize that this stuff either doesn't matter or isn't anywhere near as important as I act like it is... in short, someone disturbing and unsettling who kept posting things they couldn't make much sense of, someone who struck them as not being in a very stable and balanced state of mind.


Well... I've always been out, on the message board, as a psychiatric patients' rights advocate and activist against psychiatric oppression. There have been times when there have been debates about forced treatment and patients' rights and a few people have said I was too coherent to be a real psychotic:

When I first read your posts on this subject it took me a while to realize that I fell into a "True Scotsman" fallacy about you: No true schizophrenic could be so functional, rational and lucid, therefore you could not be a true schizophrenic.

So, on the bright side of things, I guess the people of the Straight Dope now have a more direct and personal experience of how it might be possible that someone like me, who is not a danger to anyone and who merely has some strongly held odd ideas, might be experienced as someone whose mental status comes into question, even to the point that school authorities request that he be put on a locked ward for evaluation. Yeah, deja vu all around: this is pretty much how it went down in 1980. (Except that having a lot of cyberspace between me and the denizens of the Dope seem to have ameliorated any sense of compelling in loco parentis type responsibility).


On the less bright side, it's very frustrating and rather demoralizing. I tend to think I write well. That I express myself in words quite skillfully and can make some very complex concepts materialize in verbal form. Maybe instead I write with great opacity, making sense mostly only to myself.

And of course I'm trying to get a book published. Let's not forget that. The book isn't written as a work of gender theory (fortunately), and I like to think it is written in language that is a hell of a lot less off-putting. Still, the bottom line is that I wrote it with the confidence that if I had people's attention for that amount of time I would make sense to them, I could show them how it was and they would get it, and yet that's also what I expected of my blog posts... so you can see how this is kind of worrisome, yes?


The replies I got over the course of the year gradually escalated in hostility, contemptuous dismissal, and in their frustration with me. The Readers' Digest Condensed Version of their reaction to me was that, while they understand transgender people, I wasn't trans, since I was not at odds with the body in which I was born, and therefore I should get the fuck over it, I wasn't much different from many other male people who also weren't John Wayne or the Marlboro cowboy. And that, furthermore, I was the one going around stating that men in general have chacteristics A, B, and C, which others observed and I myself observed were characteristics that I lacked, while women in general had characteristics D, E, and F, which both I and other people observed that I did have — and by making such statements and observations, I was the sexist one mired in traditional gender assumptions and beliefs.

I think many of them found it frustrating that after they had pointed this out, I kept on doing it. I was being stubborn, dense, and it was annoying to them: they'd pointed out the error of my ways, and although they outnumbered me I wasn't taking their word for it! We've all told him, over and over, how many times do we have to tell him? Yeesh, he's thick as a brick!


Is there any less humiliating spin or interpretation I can put on their reception to my ideas and my attempt to express them? Well... yeah, actually, although in my position I need to be cautious about embracing the explanations that make me feel good, if you see what I mean... anyone in my situation should seriously consider that maybe they're not saying important meaningful things that make sense after all. But having said that...

• Things that I say seem crazy to people sometimes because they don't already understand it. To state the almost ridiculously obvious, it is easier to understand something you've already listened to and understood in a slightly different form before than to understand something that's more completely new.

• Add to that the fact that I'm one individual person, and we don't actually tend to take individual people's thinking seriously. It's as if folks secretly believe that all ideas actually come from outside of people's heads. Last week's blog post, in fact, was in part about the audacity of saying "we" to refer to a not-yet-established social identity. I've also spoken on occasion about socially liberal modern culturally aware people who behave as if they had been issued a little paper score card listing all the marginalized outgroups they need to care about.

• Meanwhile, gender and sexuality are areas of powerful emotional content for all of us; we all tend to have a degree of emotional investment in the models of such things that we hold in our own minds. And, as Elizabeth Janeway once said,

[T]oday's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to. We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles and mysterious behavior. Why?

Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility, and by doing so they change the way we look at them.

Well... (I apparently like to write "well..." a lot)... anyway, yes, I have found all this disconcerting and worrisome, and yet my ideas still make sense to me, including the idea that this stuff is important and is worth expending the time and energy trying to put it out there. So despite doubts and insecurities about it, I am, on balance, inclined to continue doing what I've been doing.


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Hi! Yes, I am nearly 10 days past my presentation date, and I didn't review the experience or anything. There's a reason for that: a battallion of bronchitis buggies set up their field offices in my lungs and colonized my nose and sinus passages and left their dirty bootprints all over my carpet and stuff. I've been very busy doing things like breathing and being alive. Now I'm starting to do some other things, but reviewing my presentation at Life in Nassau / Nassau County LGBT Center isn't where I'm going to begin today. Soon, I promise.


But today I thought I'd cycle over to the Tone Police Station. We hear so much about tone policing, most of it negative and most of that, I'm afraid to say, well-deserved, but I was curious to see if there was another side, any other side, really, to the story.


Luw Movin, Community Relations Officer, was quite willing to talk to me. Luw, who prefers xe / xes / xe's pronouns, is a soft-voiced intersex individual of Aleutian and Pacific Islander background who identifies as trigender woman-man-altbeing and xe's distinctive handcarved arm-braces and some posters on xes wall proclaiming "SCHIZOPHRENIA IS A DIFFERENCE. NORMATIVITY IS A DISEASE" and "STOP INVOLUNTARY PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT" provide testimony to Movin's status as one of the differently abled and differently minded amongst us. "Yeah, really", xe says, "I'm not a joke. What's a joke is that some of the folks in Tone Police thought that by putting an individual who belongs to the smallest number of obvious privileged identities in this chair, they could make their problems go away. You better believe there is tokenism, but I'm good at what I do and this position appeals to me for my own reasons. Sit down, if you're a person who sits by preference".

"Anyway, sure, that's part of the Department's image problem, that tone policing is a behavior of the comfortably privileged people, and directed towards marginalized people. But that's not where the Tone Police dug themselves into this hole, it's not the core of our PR problem, our public relations situation. No, the problem with the Tone Police is that we've reacted to people's anger, their expressions of trauma, by focusing on HOW UPSETTING THEY WERE BEING when they spoke of what they'd been through."

I nodded. Movin was saying just what the critics of tone policing so often said.

"You think about that for a moment", Movin continued. "Here's somebody finally putting into words how badly they were abused, the lack of any acknowledgment that treating someone that way even constituted abuse, and here come the Tone Police telling them 'Whoa, the way you say that, you could be making some folks in here feel like you're blaming them personally, be careful how you express yourself'... "

Luw Movin brushed xe's braid back from xe's face and laced xes fingers together on the desk in front of xes. "Tone Police going to be seen in one of two ways if they keep doing that. First off, people are going to feel like the content of what they have to say has been belittled, after saying something of that impact, something as personal and vivid as what they just shared, because the reaction ignores what they said and focuses on the WAY THEY SAID IT. Now, as bad as that is, that's the more charitable interpretation, because the other likely interpretation is that the Tone Police doesn't LIKE what they said, that they've got some kind of stake in the silence, that they don't WANT this kind of truth coming out, because it makes them uncomfortable, so they turn to tone policing as a way of silencing them."


"Well, wait a minute then", I reply, "because it sounds like you're agreeing with the charges people are making about tone policing. But you ARE the Tone Police, so since you're here you must have some notion that tone policing isn't always a bad thing...?"

"Are you asking if I think there's any legitimate purpose to the Tone Police? Well, yes, or at least I think there can be. At least if there's less... tone deafness from the Tone Police themselves. But let me give you some examples."

Movin glanced around the room, xes eyes finding their way over to the bookshelf on the far wall, and xe nodded. "All right. Example. Psych Rights. The National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy, 1985, the big conference. Internal politics within the movement was in more uproar than usual because the mental health system was all of a sudden trying to fund user-run self-help, and that was us. But to most everyone who'd been a part of the movement all the years up through then, the mental health system had been The Enemy. It was an Enemy of many parts, many arms and legs... you had the APA, that's your organized psychiatrists themselves, hard-core enemy; you had various state Departments of Mental Hygiene... always sounded like they thought of us as an infection, bloody Department of Mental Sanitation, but they were mostly enemy... anyway, the nationals, the Nat Institute of Mental Health, often progressive in some ways but they work with the others... the astroturf organizations, Alliance for the Mentally Ill, phony grass-roots, really the parents and families who love medical-model psychiatry because it isn't Freudian, yeah my kid is batshit insane but not because we toilet trained her wrong, she has a mental illness, and we need to be able to drug her up for her own good and ours too, so them, AMI, theoretically potential allies but Enemy, pure Enemy, in every fight along the way. Then associations and endowments and stuff, the Mental Health Association, that kind of thing. They don't have to manage institutions or justify what they've done in them so sometimes pretty progressive, but not always on the same channel as the movement. And so on. Well now all of a sudden some factions in that constellation of Enemy is saying they want to fund us. Give us money to organize, run our own alternative stuff, do public education. And overnight, half the people in the movement are all 'Oh goody goody let's write grant proposals' and the other half is 'Anyone who accepts their blood money is tainted and we should blackball them from all future movement events'." Movin shook xe's head with a wry smile. "We needed to be talking to each other, respecting each other, listening to each other. But there were a lot of people who figured certain... let's call them 'issues', I guess... certain 'issues' had ALREADY been discussed, and wise people had been present to discuss them, and a consensus was reached, and therefore we ALREADY know the answer to that one and if you're not on board with that answer you have said wrong things, you've destroyed your credibility in this context."

Movin pointed to the sign about involuntary psychiatric treatment. "That— in my opinion— is where the line in the sand should have been drawn. If the Mental Health Association of Lower Septic Tankland wants to pay us to do user-run self-help and we don't have to put anyone into an involuntary treatment situation, not by mandated referral, not by required reports to the police, zero, nada, then I don't see what's wrong with accepting that money. It costs money to run a program. If we don't run it, someone who isn't us, who doesn't share our values, is going to get that money and run something."

Xe turned around to face me head-on. "So. Tone Police. This is me, being the Tone Police, and you imagine that you, and a handful of others sitting next to you, have been saying anyone in the movement who takes money from mental health orgs has joined the oppression and is out of the movement." Xe glared at me as if I were the described faction. "YOU do not get to speak to ME, your ally and comrade, as if the wise and important people already decided this and OUR role is to either agree with them or shut up. That would be elitist, and so you sound elitist. YOU do not get magic authority by waving your arms towards established tradition in our movement, magic authority that lets YOU decide whether I have transgressed without hearing my side of things. Want to know why? Want to know why? BECAUSE WE ARE NOT ABOUT TRADITION, you noisy blustery rudeness! We are about CHANGE. All the wrongnesses that change organizations are up against, they are rigid and full of bad thoughts and ideas BECAUSE they have clotted themselves up with tradition and closed themselves off to anything new."

Xe stopped, closed xe's eyes for a moment and chuckled. "That felt good. Except of course that would not work, not saying it that way, not to them. Because Tone Police. It's the right message but the people involved, the old movement regulars, would not have reacted well to being scolded BACK even if, yes, they'd started it. But saying it, saying it the right way, that's a legitimate role for the Tone Police. To tell people, in any activist movement, that it isn't nice to tell others in the same movement that they're on the wrong side of some issue that all the people who matter have long since decided."

I scribbed some more notes for my article, but Luw Movin wasn't finished.

"There's a flip side, even there. There usually is in these matters. Simplicity and activist politics don't mix. Anyway, let's say we all agree that yes, it's bad form to tell other people in your movement, your sisters in arms and whatnot, that the word or phrase or partial opinion they just voiced is Oppressive and that they should Not Say That Again. Not like that, not in that kind of belittling tone, they're entitled to be heard out if they think otherwise than you do on it, whatever it is. But the flip side is that yes, it DOES become tiresome to have to say and resay and reiterate and explain and re-explain the same thing". Movin pointed again to the sign about forced treatment. "The funding did happen. Lots of organizations that applied for it were not our movement and were not opposed on principle to forced treatment. A few years later, people who had come up through user-run self-help orgs that were not movement-run began coming to meetings we'd called and advertised. And they'd say HORRIBLE things in discussion groups! 'Hey that person who just spoke sounded awfully confused and decompensated to me, don't you think we should call 911, maybe they're off their meds and need to be locked up' So immediately of course it wasn't a safe place and what they'd said was wrong in so many ways... " Movin shrugged. "After the first time we implemented an identity policy. That who we were, if you were in here, if you were in these groups, was not just user-run self-help but user-run self-help that accepted, as a principle, that we did not use or condone forced treatment. That lets us stop situations like that without violating the Tone Police principles. I don't want to become that gal or guy who says 'You Just Said a Bad Thing. That Was Wrong and Oppressive and Triggering and You Must Self-abase Now". The Tone Police are still right to jump on that kind of behavior."

"Well", I asked, "so are you going to take every one of the ideas that most of the activists in your cause have come to accept as true and incorporate those into your Declaration of Identity? Does that fix the problem, or are you just sort of relocating it from being an internal friction thing to an us versus them thing?"

"If we took everything that the loudest and most contiguous, let's say, block of activists agreed on and made every one of them part of our Definition, we'd have very little rancorous argument. Of course we'd have maybe 11 members, having either defined everyone else as not-us or driven anyone else away with the sheer volume of what they're supposed to read and say 'Yeah I agree with that' before they can even come in and participate. Look, there are GOING to be hurt feelings and misunderstandings and miscommunications. Someone is GOING to say something that reminds someone else of the way the Oppressor used that language and they're going to find it triggering, and they will hopefully say so and explain what hearing that evokes in them. But you know what? You know what? It doesn't mean the person who said it did something wrong. People complain about the Tone Police as if tone were unimportant, but it's the tone that the Oppressor gave the phrase that made it triggering. How you say something, the hostility or contempt or belitting condescension or whatever, that is what gives terms and phrases, and even opinions and positions and ideas sometimes, their bite. Think of the worst epithet you can think of, a word so bad that people in nearly any progressive movement would be horrified to be seated next to anyone who spoke it. Got one in mind? Got any idea of the origin of the word itself, like what language it comes from, what it meant in that language... OK you're nodding. Tone. And given enough time of the Oppressor using a word with a tone, you've got a meaning, the tone has become the meaning. But if you have an activist movement, well, not just the voice of the Oppressor gets to put tone to a word or a phrase. You hear of any activist movements that have reclaimed what was hurled at them as a derogatory term, and they use it with pride? Oppressor is not the only voice that gets to have tone. So part of Tone Police's role is to say, sometimes, 'Back down. I understand what you heard is something you associate with negative. But the person who just said that is in here, one of us. Give the speaker the benefit of the doubt. You heard it elsewhere with a tone that the current speaker didn't necessarily intend. You should hear it here with the ear you give to someone who shares this cause with you, and don't be so fast in saying 'Bad Word' or 'Phrase Used By the Oppressor', at least not until you've given it an opportunity to be something new and different".

"Well... you've given me a lot to write about, and I think my readers will find this interesting to think about. I want to thank you for your time".

"Well, I should be thanking you for yours. You may be helping the image of the Tone Police with your article... it's not like it could get a lot worse than it is at the moment. Your readers spend their political attention in one or more activist concerns and movements, I imagine. I bet it isn't the psychiatric rights movement, though, is it?"

"Not for most of my readers, I'd say, no".

"Good. Some things are easier to hear and understand when the examples given aren't right up close to where they've been spending their time. Send me a link to it when it comes out, OK?"

I said I would.

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