#506: Transitional Period

Article Club

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23d ago 19:12

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Hi there, Loyal Readers. Before launching into today’s issue, I’ve got three updates:

* A big welcome to all the new subscribers from The Electric Typewriter. Thank you for trying out Article Club! I’ve been following TEW for 10+ years. It’s a great curated resource of outstanding articles.

* This week on the podcast, Melinda and I chat about her foster puppy, Melinda’s Grief Corner, and our first impressions of this month’s article of the month, “They Burn Books to Burn Us Too,” by Saint Trey W. Hope you take a listen.

* Speaking of our article of the month, here’s more information about it. I warmly invite you to join our discussion on Sunday, August 24, at 2:00 pm PT. All you need to do is click the button below to sign up.

All right, let’s get to today’s issue. One reason I do Article Club is to read and share articles that push my empathy. This week’s lead article, “Transitional Period,” did exactly that. Written by Kai Cheng Thom, the piece is about parents who say hateful things about their trans kids. As a trans person, Kai can’t accept their hostility. As a therapist, however, she responds with compassion, understanding that their sentiments, though hurtful and wrongheaded, are an expression of grief. “Their anger and bitterness are often a disguise for a deep wellspring of fear and shame around the parental terror of having failed your child,” she writes. If you feel safe to read the article, I encourage you to. I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.

If reading about parents of trans kids is too much or doesn’t interest you, never fear. I have three other pieces ready for your attention. They are articles about:

* a woman who works four jobs and still can’t make ends meet

* a program that pays young people $50 a week, no strings attached

* a policy that forever bans anyone 25 years old and under from buying vapes

Hope you enjoy this week’s issue. As always, thank you for your readership and your support of Article Club. If you appreciate the newsletter, I’d be honored if you shared it with a friend or colleague. Have a great weekend ahead!

1️⃣ Transitional Period

Kai Cheng Thom writes with a generosity of spirit in this thought-provoking piece.

Between the ages of sixteen and thirty-one, I worked in the overlapping fields of grassroots queer community-building, social work and clinical child and family therapy. During that time, I worked with queer and trans youth and their families in a drop-in centre, a psychiatry department, a sexuality clinic, and a community-based therapy program. A core theme I encountered across all those contexts was the grief that many parents of trans youth experience. These parents could not find a way to love their kids as they were, instead mourning who they had thought their children would be. This grief was often paired with anger toward the LGBTQ2S+ community, which some parents framed as having “stolen their kids.”

Like many millennial queer activists, I had been trained by my peers to react to such sentiments by dismissing them outright as wrongheaded and problematic. Contemporary psychological theory and research findings assert that parental expressions of grief and anger over children coming out and transitioning can be significantly harmful to queer and trans youth.

Yet in the role of a practitioner, sitting across from adults caught in a sea of rage, pain, fear and sadness, it was clear that it would be neither kind, nor effective in supporting the wellness of trans youth, to tell these parents to just get over themselves. As I listened to them talk and looked into their eyes, I knew that their fears came from somewhere deep within. Those fears would not be assuaged through academic debate — they needed to be met with compassion in order to be transformed.

By Kai Cheng Thom • Maisonneuve • 13 min • Gift Link

2️⃣ Confessions of the Working Poor

Jeni Gunn works four jobs (security consulting, emergency management, private investigating, freelance writing) and still can barely pay the rent on her 500-square-foot basement apartment in British Columbia, Canada. It doesn’t help that she’s got $6.58 left in her checking account. In this unvarnished, straight-ahead account of her daily life, Ms. Gunn, who is 51 years old, illuminates the struggles that many people face to make ends meet. She acknowledges that dropping out of college, pursuing daycare as a profession, having a kid, and getting a divorce certainly did not help her chances at economic stability. But she wonders, Shouldn’t there be more pathways for the working poor to meet their material needs?

By Jeni Gunn • Macleans • 17 min • Gift Link

3️⃣ How To Improve Kids’ Lives? Give Them $50 A Week

My students used to ask me, “Why do you get paid and we don’t?” It was a fair question, and my answer never satisfied them. Too bad they were born too early, because now, several schools across the country are experimenting with giving students cash, $50 a week. The program, called The $50 Study, began at Rooted School in New Orleans five years ago. So far, the results are mixed. On the one hand, grades and attendance have not improved too much. But on the other hand, students have learned financial literacy skills, saving on average 15 percent of their income — a much higher rate than most American adults. What I find refreshing about The $50 Study is that the money comes unconditionally, no-strings-attached. “I don’t think what we’re doing is so radical. I believe this just works,” says Talia Livneh, Rooted’s senior director of programs. “They deserve deep, deep trust that students and people know what’s best for them.”

By Neal Morton • The Hechinger Report • 8 min • Gift Link

4️⃣ How To Get Kids To Stop Vaping? Ban It Forever.

Want to get young people to change their behavior? One approach (the article above) is to give them what they want and offer them choice. Another approach (this article) is to take away what they want and offer them no choice. If you happen to want to buy cigarettes or vapes in Brookline, Massachusetts, and your identification says you were born on or after Jan. 1, 2000, you’re out of luck. Sorry, no vapes for you, for the rest of your life. Sure, you can bop over to Boston, 10 minutes away, and get your fill, but still, Brookline’s bold stance has elicited praise from health professionals and other cities. But in her reporting, writer Makena Gera is not so sure. Isn’t this taking away young people’s agency? How do we teach kids how to choose if we don’t get them choices?

By Makena Gera • Boston Magazine • 10 min • Gift Link

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

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