I support inclusive books in Montgomery County Public Schools

I live in Montgomery County (MoCo), which is a very liberal part of central Maryland, which runs pretty liberal all around. But even here, we’re facing some of the same issues occurring in redder parts of the country, as people try to keep books they find “objectionable” or “sexual” out of the hands of kids.

Because MoCo is so liberal, nobody has come in screaming about banning books, because that tactic would be immediately ignored by the community. No, the tactics here have been fiendishly smart and have a chance of being effective. What opponents of LGBTQ+ materials or accurate sex ed materials have done is argue that they should be able to “opt out” of these books with their kids. “No no, we don’t want to keep your kids from seeing them, we just want to protect our little darlings. You can’t blame us for that, can you?”

(Well yeah, I can, but that’s a different essay.)

The messaging and what they’re actually trying to do are extremely deceptive and some of this is not well-known, so let’s do a little Q&A. (All questions are based on actual questions I’ve been asked on Twitter or at rallies.)

Jeffrey Neal Weiss (1970-2021)

It must be said to begin with, that Jeff Weiss was an unrepentant troll. He was a loving father, pain-in-the-ass husband, a curmudgeon of the highest order, and the kind of guy whose response to a midnight call to help hide a body would have been “Do I need to bring a shovel?”

He was my friend of 32 years.

We met as undergrads at the University of Maryland, College Park. As all good Jewish kids do, we met at the Hillel Student Center. We even dated for about…three months? Something like that. After we broke up, we spent nearly as much time together as we had before, because we both hung out at Hillel and worked for the Jewish paper on campus. He was known for wearing a fedora and suit as often as he could get away with it.

Jeff wasn’t just there when I met my husband of 25 years, he was with us on our first date. (Long story. Don’t ask.) Jeff’s wife Rachel lived across the hall from me in the dorm and I’m pretty sure I introduced them to begin with.

Jeff was never someone who cared about the whole world, much of which he was perfectly willing to watch fall into a live volcano (or push, as the case may be). But the people, places, and things he cared about, he cared about a lot, even if he hid it under a solid veneer of indifference.

He loved to wind me up about something I cared about (say, recycling or racism) just to piss me off and watch me rant. But when I needed a ride home from surgery, he sat in a boring waiting room for hours and got me home in one piece.

Jeff was constitutionally incapable of remembering to charge his cell phone or keep it on his person, and there was nothing he loved more than getting in his car and randomly driving to, say, Calvert Cliffs to look for shark’s teeth. I can’t begin to count the number of times a phone call with Rachel started with “I don’t know where Jeff is.” And we would curse his name and gnash our teeth and he would show up eventually…usually with a trunk full of food from somewhere.

He loved Hawaiian shirts…hell, he loved everything about Hawaii and every year for Rachel’s birthday, he would buy a fresh lei and have it shipped all the way across the country for her.

He loved Rachel (even if he was a goddamned pain in the ass) and he absolutely positively adored his daughter Ariella. He was proud of her snark and her brains and her ability to insult you in at least ten different languages. (He had an app on his phone. Seriously.) He was so proud of her at her bat mitzvah he almost forgot his air of indifference. It was adorable.

His cubicle at work was plastered with pictures of Ariella. There was also a cannonball and a rotary phone, if I remember correctly, which should give you a fairly accurate view of his personality.

There was a time when we didn’t think Jeff would survive until Ariella’s bat mitzvah, so we should be counting our blessings that he made it two years past that time. But it’s hard to count blessings when the world is just a bit less eccentric and more boring today.

The process of setting up his funeral has been a trainwreck of ridiculousness, including a lot of non-working phones and miscommunication, which Jeff would have greatly appreciated. He would be leaning back in a chair and laughing his ass off at us right now. Not helping in any way, mind you, but definitely laughing.

Jeff, we’re gonna miss your snark and your need to make pots of chicken soup that could feed an army. Also, the rum balls, Those were really good.

We promise to find more good insults to teach your daughter and tell her all the worst stories about you. We promise to take care of your wife as best we can. And we promise to never forget the time you “edited” my archaeology notes to describe the rat civilization that lived at Maynard-Burgess House.

May your memory be a blessing to all who knew you, ya bastard.

Tips and tricks for writing about pregnancy and childbirth

I read a lot. I mean a LOT. And I’m not someone who says writers can only write about the things they’ve personally experienced, but I also see a lot of stories about pregnancy and childbirth (and parenting, but that’s another post) that were clearly written by people with no experience in the topic. And it shows.

Every pregnancy is different. Every pregnant person is different. So there’s no single way to depict pregnancy in your writing, but with this infodump, I hope that I can provide some insight into things that might happen in a fictional pregnancy so your writing can be more realistic, maybe give you some story ideas, and at the same time dispel some myths about the experience. This isn’t intended to be comprehensive, either. If you really need to know it all, check out a book on the topic. (“What to Expect When You’re Expecting” may be a cliché, but it helped me a ton.)

Now, I didn’t have a great pregnancy experience either time, so this is heavily weighted toward the bad and the ugly. Keep in mind that there are actually folks who loved being pregnant and felt great most of the time. I just only know…um, one of them. Maybe two.

NB: I’m gonna get graphic here. If you’re easily squicked by medical or surgical details, please turn back. If you’re planning to get pregnant…um, maybe you should go somewhere else as well.

Today, I saw this tweet from an anti-vax mom:

Fuck your 12 years of med school, I birthed this child and haven’t left their side since, I’m their primary source of nutrition, I watch them breathe at night and can tell by a cry what they need so yes I do know my baby better than you doc. Gtfoh.

@lovelyy_jules

And…wow, that really irritates me. I’ve already ranted about this on Twitter, but you get it too. Because the thing is…yes, I’m the worldwide expert on Barak and Yael. I’m 100% the expert on their moods and habits and physical states. But I’m NOT a doctor and I’m NOT an expert in medicine.

If I show up at the pediatrician’s office and say “this looks like strep to me,” they reach for the strep test because they know that I’ve seen Barak with strep several times. But in return when they say “Yeah, I can see why you might think strep, but in fact…” then I have to respect their expertise.

Not that I think doctors are infallible ::snort:: Believe me, I know as well as anyone that they’re human and fallible. (Ask me about the case of chicken pox that Barak thankfully *didn’t* have :D)

But if I have chosen to trust this doctor with my kids’ health, I need to trust that their years of medical school and practice have taught them things I don’t know. The relationship with a doctor should be a give and take where the doctor should take my areas of expertise into consideration and I take theirs.

Now if I had a doctor who refused to listen to my concerns or automatically dismissed my ideas, I’d be looking for someone else. (There was this one OB/GYN…yeah.) The reason I’ve had the same GP for about 18 years and the kids have had the same pediatrician for 12 years is that I’ve found doctors that I believe will listen to me but also will point out when I’m totally off-base. Which is what I want in a medical professional!

In conclusion, vaccinate your goddamned kids so we can go back to not having measles in the United States.

The First Amendment and conversion therapy

According to an article on LGBTQ Nation, a federal judge in Tampa has ruled against the city’s ban on conversion therapy, using a First Amendment argument that conversion therapy is protected speech.

My first and unfiltered response to this news is a resounding “Ewwwwwww GROSS.” (I didn’t say it was a mature response, just that it was my first one.)

My second response was to squirm at the idea of calling a particular form of therapy or medical practice protected speech under the First Amendment.

My third response was to go “oh crap, but we do need to protect doctor’s rights to talk to their patients about the dangers of guns and the positive effects of abortion, for example.”

At which point I threw my hands in the air and was grateful I’m not a lawyer.

Populations aren’t individuals and other science problems

The other day, my husband laughingly pointed out a piece on CNN titled “Married people walk faster and have stronger grip, new study says” and I couldn’t help giggling with him. Before I’d read the article, I knew I was going to get a good laugh out of this.

Because even if this was based on a study with a robust design and a broad study population and good statistics…it’s still completely 100% absolutely useless to you (unless you’re a doctor or scientist).

Toku as the antidote to toxic masculinity

Between the razor company Gillette daring to suggest that maybe men shouldn’t be assholes and the American Psychological Association suggesting that maybe men acting like assholes isn’t good for anyone, least of the all the men themselves, it’s been a bad week for toxic masculinity. And I couldn’t be happier 🙂

But Mara, I hear you cry! You spend a lot of time watching Japanese and American spandex-clad superheroes beating up monsters! Isn’t that toxic masculinity at its worst?

Okay, I can see why you might assume that tokusatsu (live-action shows where heroes armor up to fight monsters, aliens, and robots) would be a bastion of toxic masculinity. I mean, heroes vs. villains definitely sounds like hypermasculine obnoxious behavior is going to be dominant.

I’m happy to say the answer is most often “Nope!”

A happy medium in drug prescribing?

With all the competing interests in drug manufacturing and dispensing, we’ve reached a point I can only consider peak absurdity, in which I don’t think anyone is being served particularly well.

Take, for example, the saga that was my attempts a few years ago to take a legally prescribed medication for severe cystic acne: isotretinoin (formerly known by the brand name Accutane, but now in generic form). 

Choices and morals and feminism

There’s a through line I encounter in discussions about choices that women make: The framing of every decision we make as being some big moral and ethical stand that we want to push on other women.

Thoughts about the butchering art

I’ve been reading two excellent medical history volumes lately.

The one I’m mostly not here to talk about was the unexpectedly charming Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis by Kathryn Lougheed. I highly recommend this book, the first by a new science writer I plan to keep an eye on. She has quite a way with words!

The book I want to talk about, though, is The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris. This book is about Joseph Lister of antiseptic fame and it’s also excellent. But one particular section caught my attention and it isn’t even about Lister himself.

Lister, of course, didn’t “invent” antiseptics or germ theory, he created a method for using antiseptics in medical practice that was revolutionary and he absolutely deserves his fame. Most of the book is dedicated to the path that brought him to the right place and the right time to save lives, but the author also describes some of the antecedents that gave Lister a boost.

One was Ignaz Semmelweis, who in the early 19th century solved the problem of childbirth fever. You might have heard the story even if his name is unfamiliar. You see, the hospital he worked in had two wards of pregnant women, one group who were attended by midwives and one who were attended by medical students. And the latter group died of childbirth fever at a much higher rate.

Semmelweis wondered if the difference might be that the medical students came straight from conducting an autopsy to assisting in childbirth. Germ theory was essentially nonexistent at this point, so he wasn’t sure exactly what the problem was, but there seemed to be a correlation. So he insisted the medical students had to wash their hands in chlorinated water and lo…the rate of infection dropped almost instantly from 18% to 1-2%.

Obviously once all the doctors heard about this, they started washing their hands and infection rates dropped everywhere and it was awesome, right?

Yeah, no. Of course not. The doctors and students got mad that Semmelweis was blaming them and refused to change anything. I knew that part of the story. What I didn’t know was the end of the story.

His behavior became so erratic and embarrassing to his colleagues that he was eventually confined to a mental institute, where he spent his final days raging about childbed fever and the doctors who refused to wash their hands.

And this quote…this is what broke me. I know why the doctors refused to listen to him, I know all about why people refuse to believe they make mistakes and double down on their ignorance. But can you imagine how Semmelweis felt?

I don’t know if he was really mentally ill or if he just pissed them off so much they locked him up. But could you really blame him?

This guy solved a problem that had plagued the profession (pun intended) since the beginning. He figured out how to save lives! And it was easy! And cheap! And safe! And could be implemented immediately!

And everybody told him to go to hell and kept showing up to infect their patients. He had to stand by and watch his colleagues kill their patients via neglect.

I don’t care if he was the most mentally stable person in the world to begin with, I feel like that might be enough to make anyone mentally ill.

I feel for Dr. Semmelweis. I wish he could have known that eventually doctors would wash their damn hands.