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Academic        
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Religion-Phobia (2005)
I've off-and-on dealt with this issue in my life. I thought that if I spoke honestly about it, I might be able to reach moderate Christians who have had their religion hijacked by extremists (or at least the representation of their religion). It took a lot of courage to say, "I did hate Christians, and irrationally, but it was because of how Christianity was represented to me." It didn't get published.
Think of The Children (2004)
Every now and then I get swept into the fervor around same-sex marriage. Here is an op-ed piece I wrote partially as a response to someone who wrote about how queer parents create terrible environments for their children (and citing statistics that have nothing to do with queer parents), and partially as a declaration that queerspawn exist as something more than a rhetorical tool to use when arguing about same-sex marriage. The local newspaper published it under "Children of Gay Marriage do Just Fine, Thanks." While a fun title, there were two things I didn't like about it. First, I hate the phrase gay marriage--it's same-sex marriage. Second, while being fun and cute, I doubt they'd be that cutesy with someone they thought of as an adult instead of a child. The Register Guard is currently updating their webpage and their archive is inaccessible and/or has been purged.
Then We'll Come for You (2004)
I wrote this after I had just got involved with a second attempt to pass a gender identity non-discrimination policy in my city. I was just discovering how easy it is for people to sell their allies out. We lost our previous chance to add gender identity to the non-discrimination policy because it was severed from a bill for a domestic partner registry so that that the domestic partner registry could pass. After being betrayed by the LGB community I learned that another nearby city had added gender identity protections only by adding an exclusion saying it was okay to fire people with "inconsistent" gender presentations! I put my anger into this paper and ended up turning it in for a class I was taking.
Emerald Ignores Institutional Racism (2004)
I wrote this guest commentary for my school newspaper after they had printed a series of articles over the year condemning activists for being "divisive" and "playing the race card" instead of just trying to get along (which somehow creates diversity). You can see my editorial as they published it on their website. You can also check out the earlier articles that I draw upon to make my criticism:
"Protesters undermined the diversity they sought" February 17th, 2004
"4J Chavez campaign must look beyond race" March 10th, 2004
"Chavez editorial misconstrues important point" March 11th, 2004
A Matter of Context (2003)
This was an essay I wrote while I was at the 2003 Creating Change conference. I was just beginning to form some of the ideas that became the central theme of my thesis. I wrote this as a way of working out how the dictionary definition of a word and its various usages can be so different. I also addressed the issue of representation and how the terminology that makes it into mainstream usage tends to reflect the experience of more privileged perspectives. I never did anything with this piece after writing it but the ideas started here became central to my thesis.
Fear or Responsibility (2002)
After I had just finished teaching peer sex ed in high school for my third year I got the opportunity to go on the European Study Tour, which took my on a two week whirlwind tour of the Netherlands, Germany, and France, where I got to interview students, sex ed teachers, public health officials, and random people on the street. I came back and wrote this piece as a way to try to connect with the abstinence-only (or even just abstinence-focused) educators and get them to think about issues of respect in the sex-ed classroom. This was published by the Multnomah County Health Department in their publication, The Rational Enquirer. Check out the whole magazine; I'm in the May 2002 issue.