Untitled, Written for TDOR 2023

I wish that people knew
That when you choose to slough off the egg
And become the you that will be
That yes, the shape of the body changes
But what changes so much more
Is the shape of the heart

I wish that people knew
That when your heart finally wakes up
And you finally start to see
That yes, the way you dress changes
But what changes so much more
Is your place in the world

I wish that people knew
That when you make all these choices
That suddenly, you see
all of the hurt and the pain
A sea of people just like you,
or like how you were
And all you want to do is scream
This new transfeminine howl

I wish that people knew
That when the trans girls are behind closed doors
That yes, there are the makeup tips
The happy selfies, the twirly dresses
But what you also see
Is that there is always a hat being passed
Someone who lost their job,
Someone living in a car
Someone not around anymore

I wish that people knew
That when you finally start feeling
After decades of not
That one cannot shut up
There is no option to do anything
but to witness and remember
For your siblings that can’t

I wish that people knew
When they look at my trans face
and utter the word “brave”
That yes, I do know who I am
And what they all think of me
But what is really brave about me
Is that I look at tomorrow with hope
With a desire to help and a hand out
What’s brave is to do that with a smile
instead of that transfeminine howl

Copyright 2023 by Zoë Michelle Schirmer

Untitled

There’s a certain type of compliment

That you get

When you’re a woman like me

And you manage to go out in public

And cross the street gracefully in heels

Or choose the right lipstick

Or braid your hair cleanly

And that type of compliment

Comes with a certain stare

And with a fawning over-praise

From these friendly cis women

And I can never quite tell the line

Between acceptance

Genuine appreciation

Or between something more sinister,

That sense that they think that they’re talking to a child

Or worse, to someone that has stolen a bit of something

And how I so wish that they knew

That all of this, this totality of me

Is not something that I just decided to put on

That my whole life, I was always in here

That this is me, and the me that was

Well, that was the mask

And this me, well, it is nothing stolen

That the me inside was always my destiny

And that this isn’t me stealing a bit of womanhood

It’s me taking the thing back

That part of me that was always screaming

About what was stolen from her

About that what was lost and now is no more

And that eventually, that girl would come to live

To cross the street in heels

To wear the lipstick

To braid my hair nicely

And if that cis woman

With the smiling and distant face

Can’t see that I’m the victim

And not the thief

Well, then, I hope she sees me in a year

Because my shine is not dimming for anyone.

No Longer In Texas

So, I’ve been silent for a while, but it’s been with a fruitful cause: I’ve been moving. I have vacated my old home in Austin, TX and I’ve relocated to the Pacific Northwest. Two weeks in, and I have to say that things are really going pretty well, and I think it’s about time to kind of do a bit of a postmortem on my time there. I will discuss suicide, sexual assault, gender dysphoria, and similar topics in the below essay.

When I came to Austin, I was a 22 year old bisexual twink who did not really understand himself [I deliberately am using he/him pronouns to describe myself this deeply in the past — for me, pronouns live in the conscious mind, not the inner self]. In the intervening two decades, the following things have happened to me, in kind of chronological order, and presented as a bullet list to avoid having this post be a book:

  • I lived alone for the first time
  • I made community with my grad students
  • I taught my first classes
  • I went to a gay bar
  • I had receptive anal sex for the first time
  • I learned to code switch between the world of technical sciencey people and queers
  • I used craigslist for anonymous sex
  • I found a theoretical physics advisor
  • I was raped
  • I had what I know now as my second big gender crisis, panicking on my body hair as a response to the rape
  • I cheated on a partner
  • I lived alone again, while actively ideating
  • I self-harmed
  • I fell into abusive relationships. I say this directly, but I will also say that abuse was what I needed at time. My partners’ poor boundaries with me also included instructions to continue living, and while the entreaty to “go to therapy” came from a place of “I don’t want to deal with your bullshit”…
  • I went to therapy
  • I met my first trans person
  • I went on a “first date” with who was going to be my sibling of choice
  • I conducted a plan of theoretical physics research
  • I had a research funding crisis, became a migratory adjunct for a year
  • I became a phd
  • I attended my first regional burn
  • I taught myself how to program, got my first technical computer job
  • I wore my first dress in ordinary public, not going to a drag show or a queer event
  • I met my future wife
  • I had a right true absurd polyamorous relationship explosion with full drama in it, simulcast with my metamor having a worse crisis
  • I got married. We wore matching nyan cat rainbow dresses. My wife’s husband wore the all black “tac nyan” dress and officiated
  • I had a crisis from drinking. I quit drinking for the last time
  • I moved in with my partners
  • I became an aerialist, to replace the bars at first
  • I started dressing femme full time in my private life
  • I planned large scale home projects together with a family
  • I came out as an enby at work, and either got sexismed out of a job or transphobiaed out of it, pick which one
  • I ate the first estrogen pill (actually, I sublingualed it, but you get it)
  • I started more actively involving myself with trans activsm
  • I was caught in multiple giant infrastructure and power failures in central texas
  • I changed my name
  • I bought a house with a polycule
  • I left Texas forever. I loved the people I met there, and in balance, the wasted time aside, I think the two decades were well-spent. The middle finger below is intended for Greg Abbot, Ken Paxton, Dan Patrick, Dale Phelan, Stephanie Klick, and everyone else who made the state unsafe and unwelcoming for trans people, not for the lovely community I made along the way, and that I still talk to and think about daily. But the below is the moment where I left the state for the last time.

Ok, that list was longer than I expected, and I certainly still have processing left in me. It’s been interesting being caught in the whole “pandemic transitioners” and “2023 great trans migration” moments, which I feel will be chapters of queer history in 20 years or so. I am stronger, wiser, more aware, and more grown than the person who came here, and I am already starting to lay down new roots and to flower in my new home. My family of choice is stronger and closer than we have ever been here, and we did the whole thing together. That twink is now a self-aware, out and proud transexual woman, and there is no going back. Thank you for reading with me.

The Trans Rubicon

Hi, it’s been a long time, blog. I do believe this is a better home for my stuff than most venues, and as I start doing real writing more, I expect this place to be more active again. The below was written for an Austin spoken word sexuality confessional performance event. It appears I will likely be fleeing Austin before said event has a chance to put me on stage. The core intent is “wake up cis people”, and to cut through how medicalized and sterile the discussion about something that is really very visceral has become (and I believe this even more strongly after watching 90% of the House floor debate on TX SB 14), but everything below is felt in the bottom of my heart. I am publishing it today, under my true name, Zoë Michelle Schirmer, because having this in the world before I leave is important. I suspect it will be reworked into a call for action to protect trans people in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and the like at some point after I have removed myself to safety. But for now, here is the original piece, edited for clarity and without word limit constraints.

Hi everyone.  I’m saying all of this to you at an especially critical moment in the lives of trans people, and trans Texans in particular.  This legislative session, we have seen more than 100 bills in Texas alone that are designed to negatively affect the lives of people like me.  Two of the most egregious of them have been sent to the governor’s desk.  We have seen the state that contains my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri, enact a law that functionally bans medical transition for all but a very small number of people.  We are going to discuss who I am, where I came from, and come back around to what this all means for me, and really, for any trans person who has had the emotional vulnerability to speak with me on this.  It’s going to be a bit of a ride, so please be ready.  There will be a trigger warning moment, and I will give advance notice when it comes.

So, let’s begin near the end.  Let’s talk about what actually transitioning felt like.  A typical estrogen transition will start with three months of a testosterone blocker, then followed by the addition of estradiol, the form of estrogen associated with most of the effects we know about.  I opted, instead, to start with the lowest effective dose of estradiol, only.  I was pretty adamant that I wasn’t “trans”, I was “nonbinary”, and that I didn’t want big changes.  I was just going to grow some breast tissue, maybe get a little bit of fat redistribution, maybe slow the signs of male aging that I was starting to see on my face.  

What happened, instead, was exactly the metaphor that the Wachowskis intended when they wrote the red pill metaphor in the Matrix.  The veil that I had been living under was suddenly and irrevocably pulled back.  Within the first week, I was freed from the tyranny of my dick screaming at me for no reason all of the time.  I felt my emotions start to shift and change – anger was the first noticeable one, evolving from an emotion that was grounded in a sudden, furious reactive response, quick to come and quick to leave; into one that built slowly and simmering, but once activated, was lodged into the my brain as a stew of *can’t even*.  Sadness  built several new layers and depths.  Joy, too, seemed to split into graded emotions, the three would mix together in complex ways.  My sense of smell deepened.  Suddenly, different flowers smelled different, rather than just different intensities of “flower.”  My tolerance for an old catbox vanished.

And that’s before we even get into the sexual response and function changes that developed.  From the inside, it really is like one went and installed female firmware everywhere in the system. And while the physical blossoming out happened over months and years and is not done yet, the mental and emotional effects were all the way there in weeks. Want to seduce me? The typical “hey, sex exists” approach you would use with a man is going to fall flat. Want to arouse me? You’re prooooooobably going to have to be slightly better at teasing than simply reaching down my pants and expecting something that is not a dangly noodle at minute one. I have to keep mental presence and concentration to keep everything engaged and building, but hey, when we get there, the upper limits of delight are pretty much limited by my ability to not faint. And like, all of this is me bucking the trend of the transfemme bottom.  Like, I’m an actual vers non-op transfemine person, and not just a bottom.  And still, fucking me is like the above

But, more than anything, the core change during transition is that I suddenly felt, from the very beginning, a sense of grounding with myself, and a sense of harmony with my emotions and my body.  Suddenly, I was not fighting to control my emotions in order to act in a not-maladaptive way.  I was setting better boundaries at work and at home.  Within a year, I had changed my regimen from pills to injections, increased my dose to a full transition dose, and maintained my blood hormone levels at the same levels as a cis woman’s.   So, that’s the first warning – feel free to listen to the siren’s call to the sea, but beware, lest you find out that you were, in fact, a mermaid that had given up her voice all along.

So, let’s zoom back a little bit.  Like 15 years.  I’m in Austin, and I’m spending my first social time with actual trans people.  I’ve long been openly bisexual, and certainly thought that was the bottom of my queerness.  But, looking at these women, there was this intense feeling of being drawn in, but tinged together with a nearly insurmountable distance.  It was absolutely a sense of not daring to fly too close to the sun.  Looking back it’s almost inconceivable that I was unable to recognize that my insides were going “they learned how to girl and so can you!,” and that this push/pull I was feeling had nothing to do with these other people, it was ME.  

By this point, I had been playing nearly every video game I touched as a female character.  My music choices had long ago been nearly totally dominated by lesbian folk music.  In my 85:15 male/female ratio graduate program, i somehow always ended up socializing with all of the women.  And still, if you challenged me on any of this, maybe asking me if I had thought about, “hey, maybe you’re not a boy”, I would have responded with a big long speech about how gender roles are a thing that should be torn down and that we should all dress and act how we want, and gender should die.  I still believe a lot of this, but at the same time, I think what this whole journey has taught me is that, in fact, **gender is so very important, at least to many of us**.  Maybe it makes no sense to wall off the forest from the plains, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t creatures native to both places out there.

And that brings me to my next lesson: if you are looking at me, dear totally cisgender male audience member, and you are like “I can’t believe how they look up there in that corset, how confident, I could never do that,” with a combination of admiration and envy.  I hesitate to say this, and wouldn’t to your face, but it is probably time to go and find a gender therapist or an informed consent gender clinic and to ask them if Titty Skittles™ are right for you.

Ok, now we’re at the point where I”m going to give an extreme trigger warning. We’re going to talk about the worst things that ever happened to me. I’m going to count to ten. Do what you need to do to extract yourselves.  I will raise my fist when we are clear. So, let’s go back some more years, when I was in my early 20s, I was lanky and young and had great skin, and was newly out as bi, and the world definitely saw me  twink than a baby tran.  

At this point, as people in their early 20s are prone to do, and ones with undiagnosed and unconscious gender dysphoria are even more prone to do, I was not one to especially watch out for my safety.  This ended in me being roofied and abducted from a 4th street (for the unaware, this is where the gay bars in Austin, TX are) establishment. I woke up in a stranger’s bed. I saw the smile on his face as he detailed what he was going to enjoy. I remember dissociating  and staring down at the layout of the room, at his body and mine. I remember, still, the sensations of touch from that awful night and morning, pieced together in patchwork as they came back over the next year. I remember this man’s roommate sitting in the breakfast nook noshing on spaghetti casually looking over at me while I emerged half naked and broken from the next room. I remember sitting in that car going back to the city, and getting dumped off in west campus like nothing had happened.  “Here, kid.  Done with you, have a life.”  And, of course, I remember hitting “refresh”, over and over, on the web browser, waiting for the results of the HIV test to come back.  This was before truvada was widely available, after all.

In many ways, my life cleaves into a before and after of this event. The trauma of this time, plus all of the sublimated dysphoria ended in a pretty severe and escalating alcohol problem.  I made very bad relationship choices.  I lost the ability to set boundaries with partners entirely, really.  My graduate research stuffered.  It was a large pile of problems that stacked on top of each other and caused me to hurt everyone around me.  Jumping back to today, it took so much time and compassion from my current partners to even start to unravel all of the damage from this period, and learn how to self-advocate, before I could even start to dig at the truths below.

In all, take it from me that I am not speaking about this abstractly or flippantly. I’m not some gamergater making a metaphor in the next statement. This is direct, fucking, first-hand knowledge, held in my heart.  <RAISE HAND>

Today, in Texas, we have a wide range of laws about medical transition, some, like sb 1029, basically outright banning it for everyone, others, like sb14, currently on the governor’s desk, are limited to children.  We have also seen our governor and attorney general act in very hostile ways toward trans people in the past, and there is no reason to believe they could not follow Missouri or Florida officials’ lead.  

In the face of this, I’ve been working to find a metaphor strong enough to tell you what staring at forced detransition feels like as I pack up my life to go somewhere safe, and what that feels like for the people that are stuck here.  All I can come up with is saying, if you gave me a contract, and on one hand, you had “one day each year, for the rest of your life, you will have another abduction rape”, and on the other hand, I am offered to live out the rest of my life detransitioned, I would choose the first option without second thought. I don’t think I’d be alone, hearing the way that this is talked about in trans peoples’ private spaces. We can make this as abstract as we want, we can hide the terms in abstract medical language, but for those of us who live in these bodies, it is not some medical curiosity. It. is. Our. Lives. This is the depth of this to me.  To us.  Forced detransition is torture, it is death, it is genocide. And a little bit of that, just until you turn 18, is. The. fucking. Same.  If you know who you are, you know who you are.  And no amount of torture changes that.  We should be helping people know who they are, not putting barriers in front of their actualization.

Thank you for (listening/reading).  Trans rights are human rights.  None of this ends until there is a universal right to bodily autonomy including the right to abortion, the right to transition, the right to informed consent health care, and freedom from sexual assault and domestic violence.

Death Penalty

I remember the exact moment I became opposed to the death penalty.

It was June 12, 2001, the day after Timothy McVeigh’s execution. They innovated a sort of “closed-captioning execution viewing” thing because of the sheer number of victims and the difficulty of getting them all in the execution chamber. And I rememmber sitting and listening to the coverage of it on NPR, and the interviews with the OKC victims’ families, and I can still just vividly feel the bloodcurdlling rage directed at McVeigh from all of the victims.

And their rage is of course, justified. I would feel the same in their position. And McVeigh is as close to a perfect case for the death penalty as ever has and ever will exist. Fuck, he was the hearald for all the shit we’re living through today.

But here is the thing. Watching the aftermath of that execution, it was pretty clear that this was not an act of “seeking justice”, or “an impartial government coming to a fair conclusion”, though neither of those things are necessarily logically incompatible with the death penalty.

This was a simple ceremonial act of revenge or retribution. It was the town square getting together and throwing rocks at someone. The fact that McVeigh deserved it didn’t change the debasement to everyone that participated in the thing. What I saw was an invitation to wallow in rage and anger and hate far more than it was any attempt at closure, or even “an eye for an eye”. And this was the best-fucking case scenario for the death penalty.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about exonerations from the innocence project, about disparate racial outcomes from jury trials, the cruelty of botched executions, and the effects on executioners from administering executions, but the core thing is, I don’t think the state should be sponsoring hate rallies, even against the worst of us. Even when the evidence is clear and impartially delivered.

I know that this is a moral argument that is not delivered in the spirit of a Rawlsian public reason, but it is kind of the heart of how I feel. And maybe it comes from viscerally feeling unjustified blind hate directed at me, I don’t know

On the Alaska Special election

OK, I promised to revisit this, so here I am revisiting this.

Alaska’s current system is as follows:

The “primary” is an at-large race with all candidates on one ballot, irrespective of party. Voters get a single vote. All but the top four candidates are eliminated. Then, in the “general”, voters rank choice the top four candidates, and the ranked choice ballots are tabluated by reassigning the votes of the last place candidate down their rank order.

Primary results:
Palin 27.1
Beigich 19.1
Gross 12.8
Peltola 10.1
Sweeney 5.9

First round ranked choice:
Peltola 40.2
Palin 31.3
Beigich 28.5

Second round ranked choice:
Peltola 51.5
Palin 48.5

Doing the math on the totals showed the Beigich vote broke
50.3 Palin, 28.7 Peltola,, 21.0 No one

But, looking at these results, you might immediately ask “what about Al Gross?”

He did qualify for the second round, but being a Democratically aligned independent, opted instead to drop out. What would happen if he had stayed in? Let’s just scale up the top four from the first round so that the sum total is 100%

Primary with only top four:

Palin 39.2
Beigich 27.6
Gross 18.5
Peltola 14.6


These totals still look badly out of line with the first round results, with Palin doing better, and Gross + Peltola doing much worse than Peltola did in the first round. It is pretty well documented that, since the primary, the Dobbs decision and all of the Democratic congressional legislative successes happened, and Democrats, across the board, are doing better than they were two months ago. To account for this, I’m going to go and make the Gross + Peltola total match the Peltola total and the Palin + Beigich total match it’s actual result. I’m also going to flip Peltola’s and Gross’s position in the general, both for a better apples to apples comparison with the real result, and assuming that “Dobbs momentum” would have broken toward a pro-choice woman

First Round General, with gross, rescaled to match real general

Palin 35.1
Beigich 24.7
Peltola 22.5
Gross 17.7

Now, this is the key point. How the ranked choice breaks down depends a lot on how those Al Gross votes break. If they 100% all go to Peltola, then Peltola goes to first place in the second round, and we play out the same result. But what happens if they do something like break something like 70% for Peltola, 20% for Beigich, and the rest spoiled?

Second round general, after gross votes break
Palin 35.1
Peltola 34.9
Beigich 28.24

apply the same fraction vote break to Beigich from the real first round, and rescaling to 100 to account for the spoiled ballots:

Third round general, hypothetical
Palin 52.9
Peltola 47.1

There are a lot of hypotheticals in this arrangement, and this is not meant to be a demonstration of “this is definitely how the race would have turned out”, but the key point here is that the outcome ranked ordered balloting depends a lot on the order in which candidates are eliminated from the ballot, and it opens up races to strategic decisionmaking. Here, the decision by Al Gross to drop out of the election is critically important. We got to this conclusion by making not-wild assumptions.

Also, none of this is to discount the accomplishement Peltola made. Here, we handwaved the real campaigning and work that was done as “Dobbs momentum”, but that’s almost certainly only half of the story. I’m not trying to talk about her real campaign and real victory, but just trying to demonstrate how ranked-order balloting can play out, and how important strategic concerns and party coordination remain in these systems.

Thank you for reading.

On Alcubierre Warp Drives

OK, I’ve read this article that I’ve been asked about a few times now.


Background (general relativity):
There is a hard limit to speeds that objects can take in special relativity that generalizes to general relativity. This is the famous “you can’t go faster than the speed of light” claim, which, I’d argue, in the case of travel over distances small compared to the curvature of space, is really kind of closer to “moving faster than light doesn’t MEAN anything, it’s a non-concept”


General relativity, however, offers a loophole. Since spacetime is curved, and the curvature can be time-dependent, you can create various schemes where you are basically “surfing” in spacetime, and appear to have travelled faster than light to distant observers. Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre worked out one particular exact solution to Einstein’s equation, the fundamental equaiton of general relativity, that allows motion like this.


There are several naïve problems with directly applying this “Alcubierre warp bubble” solution though:

  1. The model requires a matter distribution that has a negative energy density, and this is not known to exist
  2. The amount of negative energy required in order to safely transport a human with the Alcubierre geometry is something like “negative one times the mass of Jupiter”
  3. While the particular Alcubierre geometry does not allow the warp bubble to stop, slow down, or turn, if you allowed these features, it would inevitably enable time travel, grandfather paradoxes and the like. Which, basically ruins the predictability of physics

For these reasons, most physicists have believed Alcubierre-style drives to be unbuildable, in principle. Enter the above cited article.

Background (quantum field theory):

OK, so, the other half of prerequisite to understanding this article is understanding what the Casimir effect is. The real ground basis here is that in quantum mechanics, systems tend to have what is called a “ground state energy.” Most famously, this is represented by the 1s orbital of the electron in a hydrogen atom from chemistry class — the electron can go to this energy level, but it can go no lower in a hydrogen atom. Most quantum mechanical systems with finite energy have some sort of “lowest possible” energy. When you do quantum field theory for the first time, though, you find that you have to treat every point in space like it is a “bound system” in a particular mathematical way that is beyond the scope of this article. This results in an infinite energy for spacetime called the “vacuum energy”. Current QFT frameworks basically sweep this away and say “the only meaningful energies are differences with this vacuum energy,” and then go on with their lives.

Henrik Casimir, however, came up with a clever way of poking the vacuum, so to speak. He realized that if you took two metal conducting plates, you would change the number of possible states available to the system in between the two plates in a way that depended on the distance between them. In particular, you’d end up removing states available to the system, which would mean, basically, that there would be vacuum energies not accessible between the plates — it would look like the energy density between the two plates was, in fact, less than the vacuum energy. He then showed that the plates would exert a force on each other due to this effect. This force was later measured.

The White, et. al. article

So, the above article got published a few days ago. The takeaway of the article in the popular press is “we built a tiny warp bubble.” I believe this claim to be wildly misleading at worst, and missing several Jupiter-sized caveats at best. Here is the basic argument in the paper:

  1. We have come up with a novel way of computing the Casimir negative energy density in a system of many, arbitrarily shaped plates
  2. We have developed a particular geometry of plates such that they create a “negative energy density” that matches the negative energy density required to create an Alcubierre metric
  3. Therefore, we have made a very small warp bubble

But, notice what was left out of the above argument:

  1. Any real evidence that “negative energy relative to the QFT vacuum” really means the same thing as “negative energy in General relativity”. In particular, there is no measurement of gravitational effects of Casimir cavities and a demonstration that they are, in fact, negative matter distributions. Note how different the above two approaches are. It is not obvious that they are equivalent.
  2. Any measurement of superluminal effects, or even an assertion that they are there.
  3. Any analysis of the motion of particles under the influence Alcubierre metric beyond just a naïve matching of the energy density functions

I’d argue that these points are most of the connection that one would have to make between “There is a Casimir force” and “I have a warp bubble,” and I will go back to my claim that the linked article is wildly premature in it’s claims at best.

Errata (edit):

I should note that there are reasonable arguments to believe that the Casimir cavity is not a negative energy density per GR. For one thing, the relationship between vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, which would follow from just treating vacuum energy as “gr mass-energy” has famously produced “physics’s worst prediction” (namely, that the cosmological constant is less than 1/10^100 the size that it “should” be). There is almost certainly more complexity there than just saing “A = B” and calling it a day.

Similarly, someone reading the above might think about “negative mass”, and think “antimatter”, but that is not correct. Antimatter has positive mass for the purposes of general relativity (easy way to see this, a photon can decay to an electron and a positron, but the photon gravitated with a positive mass-energy, so the products have to too, they don’t just cancel). General relativity couples to the four-momentum of matter, and the four-momentum of matter is conserved in decays in quantum field theory.

My court packing scheme

If the Barrett nomination goes through and the Democrats subsequently get the trifecta, this would be my response:

  1. Pass a bill that expands the supreme court to 11 justices, name two appointees
  2. Propose a constitutional amendment that:
    1. Sets the court at nine justices permanently
    2. Sets the tenure of a justice to 18 years, nonrenewable, with one expiring every two years, in feburary of odd years
    3. Retires existing SC justices in inverse order of tenure (so, Thomas, Breyer, Roberts, Alito, Kagan, Sotomoyor, Gorsuch
    4. States that if an appointee to any federal office is not voted on in six months, the senate will have been considered to have waived its right to advise and consent, and the appointee takes their office

If the republican state legislatures want to live with the court packing scheme, they would get to. But if they want to repeal it, this amendment gives them a path to repeal the court packing scheme and replace it with a sustainable and fair way of dealing with the problem — every president gets two appointees, the senate majority leader doesn’t get a pocket veto, and there is no more waiting for 85 year olds to die as a structural part of our system of government.

It’s not enough to retaliate against abuses. Make structural changes that make future abuses of the same type impossible.

On “the magical founders”

In response to Barrett, a pretty great op-ed in the NYT.

This is the main point I’ve ever harped on with the “Originalism” thing. The equal protection clause of the 14th amendment fundamentally changes the entire constitution. it touches every word that comes before it. To talk about the “original public meaning” of, say, the bill of rights without discussing how this was changed by the 14th amendment is to be utterly and completely full of shit, IMO.

There are many toxic stews that exist in American’s heads, good and bad, and one of them is this thought of the Founders as Lycurgus, giving us this perfect, unimprovable system validated by their deep and infinite wisdom, rather than politicians working within the political constraints of their era, that created a deeply unstable young country that outright fell apart within 80 years of its founding. In the context of the 1790s, you can certainly point to some accomplishments (and egregious failings), but in order to do that, you have to be willing to see that what was passed down from that era, with the aid of retrospect, was not perfect for their time, much less from ours.

And when you interpret the constitution, you have to not only factor in the original document, but the leanred wisdom that came from generations that came after 1790, and saw that the system was deeply flawed, and had to be changed. And that those people didn’t get it right, either.