Call me Red

This is a draft of something I've been writing for a couple months. It is mainly focused on the culture of the USA. Feel free to repost or otherwise share, with or without credit.

Do not tell people what to do—help them do it! 

Give the gift of relief from being forced to engage in society’s unsustainable ways of life. 

“People need to eat more plant-based foods.” ->Talk about your favorite recipes, give others recipes, cook for them, and grow vegetables and plants in your garden and give them away as gifts. 

“People need to repair their clothes.” -> Offer to repair others’ clothes, and teach people how to repair their clothes. 

“People need to buy less clothes.” -> Give them old clothes that you don’t want, help them repair their clothes

“People need to buy less plastic stuff.” -> Learn to make things that can serve the same purpose, such as baskets, and give them as gifts. Let people borrow things you own so they don’t have to buy their own. 

“People need to stop using leafblowers and other gas-guzzling machinery.” -> Offer to rake the leaves. You can use them as compost in your own garden. 

“People need to be more educated about nature.”-> Learn about nature yourself. Tell people about nature. Be open about your love of creatures such as snakes, spiders, and frogs. Do not show awareness that this could be strange. You are not obligated to quiet down your enthusiasm for creepy crawlies to demonstrate awareness that it is weird. Point out at every opportunity how these animals are beneficial. 

“People need to use cars less.” -> Offer rides to others whenever you must go somewhere. Whenever you are about to go to the store, ask your neighbor or your friend who lives along the way, “Is there anything you need from the store?” 

You cannot control others’ behaviors, but you can free them from being controlled. 

If you think to yourself, “But this would be so difficult to do!” ask yourself WHY? Why does your society coerce you into less sustainable ways of living, forcing you to consume excessively? After thinking about this, consider that it is less simple and easy than you thought to make more sustainable choices, so why would you judge others for not doing it? 

Do not act alone—act with others! 

Environmentally friendly behaviors that can be done alone, without collaborating with or consulting another person, are the least powerful of all. Whenever an “environmentally friendly” behavior is suggested, figure out “How can I give this as a gift?” or “How can I make this possible on the level of a whole community?” 

“Personal choices” do not work because every single person has to make them individually. If you are focused on making your own personal choice, you are not focused on others. If you are not focused on others, you are not helping them. If nobody is helping each other, most people won’t be able to make the “personal choice.”

You inherently share an ecosystem with your neighbors  

            Start with your neighbors, the people physically close to you. You live on the same patch of land, containing roots from the same plants and trees. You can speak to them face to face without traveling, which means you can easily bring them physical things without using resources to travel. 

            Always talk to your neighbors and be friendly with them. Offer them favors unprompted and tell them about how your garden is doing. Do not be afraid to be annoying—a slightly annoying neighbor who is helpful, kind, and can be relied upon for a variety of favors or in times of need is a necessary and inevitable part of a good community. If you make the effort to be present in somebody’s life, they will have to put up with you on some occasions, but that is just life. We cannot rely on each other if we do not put up with each other. 

Simply spending time with someone influences them for good 

Every hour you spend outside with your neighbor is an hour your neighbor doesn’t spend watching Fox News. Every hour you spend talking with someone and interacting with them in the real world, eating real food and enjoying your real surroundings, is an hour you don’t spend only hearing a curated picture of what reality is like from social media. 

            Isolation makes it easy for people to become indoctrinated into extremist beliefs. When someone spends more time alone, watching TV, Youtube, or scrolling social media, than they do with others, their concept of what other people are like and what the world is like comes more from social media than real life. TV and online media are meant to influence you in a specific way. Simply restricting the access these influences have to yourself and others is helpful. 

A garden is the source of many gifts 

If you grow a garden, you can give your neighbors and friends the gift of food, plants, and crafted objects. This is one of the foundational ways to form community. When you give food, you provide support to others. When you give plants, you are encouraging and teaching about gardening. It is even better when you give recipes cooked from things you grew, or items crafted from things you grew. You can also give the gift of knowledge of how to grow these plants, cook these recipes, or craft these objects. 

More on gift-giving

            Some people are uncomfortable with receiving items or services as gifts. They want to feel like they are giving something back, instead of having obligation to return the favor hanging over them. 

            It can help to ask a simple favor that can be easily fulfilled. People generally like the feeling of helping someone else. 

When you give someone a gift, it can help to say something like “Oh, I have too many of this thing to take care of/store/eat myself! Do you think you could take some?” This makes your neighbor feel like they are helping you. 

When allowing others to borrow items, you might not get them back. Don’t worry about that. It just means the item found a place where it was needed the most. You can ask about the item if you think it might have been forgotten, and this can create an opportunity for a second meeting. But don’t press. 

If the person you give to insists upon some form of payment, this is a good opportunity to negotiate a trade. 

Ask to be given compostable or recyclable things 

Ask your neighbor to save compostable scraps, biodegradable cardboard and paper products, and any other items that might be put to use. Use them in your own compost pile. Or, start a compost pile at the edge of the yard where you both can add to it. Remember that “wet” compost like vegetable and fruit bits needs to be mixed with twice as much of “dry” and “woody” compost like cardboard, leaves, small twigs, paper and wood bits. 

Use the front yard for gardening

Overcome the cultural norm that the front yard is only decorative. Use the front yard for gardening so you can be seen by others enjoying your garden, and others can witness the demonstration of the possibilities of land. In the front yard, anything you do intentionally with your land can be witnessed. It also makes you a visible presence in your community. 

Grow staple foods 

Don’t just grow vegetables that cannot be the core component of a meal themselves. Grow potatoes, dry beans, black eyed peas and other nourishing, calorie-dense foods. Grow the ingredients of meals. You could even build a garden around a recipe.

Invite neighbors and friends over to eat food made from things you grew 

Be sure to send them home with leftovers.  

Grow plants for baskets 

Containers are one of the fundamental human needs. If we had more containers, we wouldn’t need plastic so much. You can learn to make baskets, and to grow plants that provide the raw materials for baskets. 

If someone rakes their leaves, ask to have the leaves  

If you see someone putting leaves in bags, don’t be afraid to ask if you can have the leaves. More likely than not they will be happy to agree. 

Collaborate with neighbors to plant things in the no-man’s-land of the property line 

In the border land between your neighbor’s yard and your yard, it is almost always just mowed grass because no one can plant anything without it affecting their neighbor. But these border lands add up to a lot of space. It would be much better if you talked to your neighbor about what would be nice to plant there, and together created a plan for that space. 

Give others the freedom to wander 

Make it clear that you will not get mad if the neighbor’s kids play in your yard or run across it. Invite the neighbors onto your land as much as possible. Tell them they are allowed to spend time in a favored spot whenever they would like.  

The power of the hand-made sign 

If there is a yard sale, you always know about it because of the hand-drawn signs placed around. Therefore, a cookout or unwanted item exchange can be announced the same way. In rural areas I have seen hand-made signs that say: FIREWOOD or WE BUY GOATS or EGGS. This is one of the few technologies of community that remain in the USA. If someone who looks to buy and sell can put up a hand-made sign, why shouldn’t you?  

Religious people or people with strong political opinions like to put signs everywhere. If they have the confidence and courage to do so, why shouldn’t you? 

So if there is a message you would like everyone to see, use the simple power of the hand-made sign. Proclaim “BEE FRIENDLY ZONE!” above your pollinator garden with all the confidence of a religious fundamentalist billboard. Announce to the world, “VEGETABLES FREE TO ALL—JUST ASK!” “WE TAKE LEAVES—NO PESTICIDES.” Instead of YARD SALE, or perhaps in conjunction with YARD SALE, you can write, PLANT EXCHANGE or SEED SWAP or CLOTHING SWAP. Who can stop you? 

Someone has to do it for society to change  

It's not particularly glamorous work but I think a lot about my various community clean up programs over the years. It started as a prison abolition and community-sanitation project. See, where I grew up, "cleaning up trash outside" was a conviction sentence. In CA, a huge deal of essential services are performed by un-/under-paid detained people with no rights or safety protections. This meant that you would drive down the highway on the school field trip bus and see literal chain gangs being overseen by prison staff. It was upsetting to say the least.

Several people in the community decided to branch out in their more specific advocacy for prison abolition and seek to disrupt the ability of the state to force detainees to provide these services. There were a lot of ways they did this, depending on the service, but for this, they went the route of "at least we can make this a "prison job" with nothing to actually do". The hope was it would discourage continued reliance on these people in more dangerous clean up locations like highway on ramps so at least they could be less likely to be injured. I was young, as were the organizers, and i'm really not sure how meaningful we actually were in that, but nonetheless the clean ups were a HUGE success.

Something we noticed is that when the environment is more welcoming and comfortable, people are more likely to spend time in it TOGETHER in community with each other. This ALONE would have been worth it to us because it helped us recruit and empower new volunteers for future clean ups, it helped us direct people to aid resources and orgs we worked with, and it eased interpersonal tensions in the community for everyone to be in regular contact with each other. So ever since, my goals for community work have been as follows:

1) physically bring people together in shared space for An Activity

For me, this is usually a community clean up project, a meal, managing a community garden, or kids' programming. I find that when people are sharing space with purpose it can make it easier for everyone to give each other that unconditional regard that's essential to sharing space with love and respect

2) always be the first one to get your hands in the work

If you organized it, then you better be the first one getting your hands dirty before a single one of your guests. Facilitation is all about smoothing over barriers that may prevent others from acting on their own power. You are not there to teach, to do on behalf of, or to lead. You are simply there to perform the work, and in order to facilitate that performance, you have arranged and ensured the presence of others willing to do the same. If you boss people around, they will get annoyed and stop coming. If people feel overly confused and uncertain, the work won't get done and folks will stop coming. So do the work. Talk to others about why you're doing what you're doing as its happening so they can learn if they want, and be willing to answer questions or offer suggestions without pressing the issue.

3) always make sure people feel that you are excited to have them there, even if they only come for the photo ops, if they only come once a year, or if they only come to hang with their friends, the work is the point but the work goes beyond the tasks being performed. Never alienate a potential ally for their current level of readiness to act because this readiness is inherently changeable based on timing and circumstance.

Some of my gardest working volunteers over the years have been people who basically just showed up, ate the food, and listened to us talk for YEARS before actually doing anything.

But they LISTENED. If I had made them feel unwelcome because they weren't participating in the ways I wanted at the pace I wanted, they would never have spent the time with us to hear what we had to say. Facilitation means that the door never closes, no matter how long someone drags their feet about getting started, because you have to assume that they wouldn't still be gearing up if they weren't eventually going to get around to it.

So what am I doing right now?

The land we live on uses trees as plot markers. We've been starting up conversations with our neighbors to the tune of "hey, could we add some fruit trees to the line? You would of course be welcome to the fryit same as us!"

I'm using my garden as a pilot test bed for neighborhood hurricane resilience landscaping. We live in wetlands and flood horribly during hurricanes, which historically has devastated the neighborhood. We've been introducing storm gardens and restoring the creek with the goal of reducing the severity of storm and flood damage. Ideally as more neighbors agree to work with us, we'll be able to reduce the risk of the neighborhood pretty substantially!

Food fridges are a huge benefit to communities, especially those whose food pantries choose to or are required to means test their applicants. Food fridges are hugely effective at reducing childhood food insecurity, and at reducing the medical risks of food instability in a region. The nearest food fridge program to us is a 4hr round trip drive though. Longterm, we hope to have a community garden and multiple locations willing to host a "fridge" with food from that garden, but for now we're on the scale of a neighborhood.

I'm starting a mending and tailoring business! I've got some lovely little business cards with a website and QR code, and they're gonna go up all over town in the new year. People can call and ask for help repairing favorite or essential clothing items, and can make full new purchases from recycled fabric garments, etc. I used to do a stitch and bitch in person and for a hot minute I tried to do one virtually, but I think I might do something similar again here! Give people a Q&A space to come learn about sewing or mending or other aspects of the work while I deal with my orders.

The neighborhood trashcan is a classic. I've had one plenty of times and its always worth it. People are usually happy to throw trash where it goes! Assuming it HAS anywhere to go. So I buy those enclosed park bins from restaurant supply places online and park them on the sidewalk with a little sign that says to use it. Practically overnight the area gets prettier and cleaner.

I've stopped using pesticides, and while I can't control what my neighbors do, I can talk to them about what I'm doing and why. As my garden establishes and really comes together, I expect to get people asking after it. That's always an opening for me to share HOW my results are so good - functional planting blueprints based on forest layering, reducing the introduction of harmful materials and chemicals, increasing local bio-diversity through intentional planting and cultivation of volunteer seedlings, supporting the plants via inter-species and intra-genus environmental function planning, etc. I have a lovely, healthy looking "lawn" in the dead of winter while theirs are drowning in fozen mud sludge because I worked WITH my environment instead of against it, and if they like my results, well I would be delighted to show them how I did it. Historically, this has been pretty effective for me in getting people on board.

My local craigslist free section is a glorious place. I can find people giving away decades old stores of craft supplies, recycled wooden shipping pallets and fire wood, chickens for the flock or for butchering, furniture or clothes, practically anything you like as long as you can come haul it. Right now, I just make a day of things, rent a little uhaul truck, and snag what I want, but eventually I want to have my own little pull behind hauling trailer so I don't even have to do that.

Did you know that you can buy clothes from the thrift store, alter and repair them, and then give them BACK to the thrift store? Now, granted, your work DOES need to actually be able to sell back to gen.pop., so depending on skill and what you're doing, this may not be a good plan lol. But I like being able to give a lot of plus size clothes to the thrift shop since I know they cycle faster, and it's pretty easy to take damaged or slightly marred straight size clothes and upsize them. Once when I was in high school I briefly had a deal with the local thrift shop that any donation clothes they received that could not be put on the shelves, I could have as long as I turned at least some of them into new garments they COULD sell. Got me a steady supply of recycled fabric I didn't have to pay for, got them an atypical garment supply source they could use to round out their stock. Another option for this is finding someone who sells fabric scrap by weight. There's a few shops I use that will send you 10lbs of fabric scrap for the cost of shipping, and that's a great way of getting inexpensive fabric stores for whatever I like.

My answer to those people is Get Kate Bornstein'd:

Tranny. Many people don’t know the history of the word, they assume it was an assigned hate term or slur along the lines of the “n” word. That’s not how it happened. Tranny was invented by us in Sydney, Australia in the 1970s where drag was a big deal, and still the best drag shows ever are in Sydney, Australia – they’re amazing. So a lot of trans-identified women who were assigned male at birth did drag, that’s how you made your living. And so they were transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, and they were all doing drag to make money. They all bickered amongst each other who is better than who, “Well the drag queens are better,” “No, the transsexuals are better.” “You are all freaks, we’re better.” And on and on and on. But they worked together and they were family together, so they came up with a word that would say family and that was tranny. In Australia they do the diminutive, that’s how they come up with words. So tranny. I learned the word in the mid-1980s, late 1980s from my drag mom in San Francisco, Doris Fish, who was the city’s preeminent drag queen and she’d come from Sydney. And she schooled me in this word tranny, she said, “This way it means we’re family, darling.” “Thank you mama.” [...] So we used it and we were trannies together. And F to M was just beginning to start, the trans men were just beginning to become visible, Lou Sullivan was a neighbor of mine around the corner, and he was the first big out trans man, wrote his book. So trans men and cross dressers . . . cross dressers were also family. Transsexuals, we were all trannies and that felt good. That got into the sex industry and became a genre – there was tranny porn, there were tranny sex workers – chicks with dicks, she-males. [...] And, my only guess is that people who . . . because the only way they would have found out about the word is if they were watching tranny porn or having been with a tranny sex worker and then hated themselves so much that they turned it into a curse word. So it’s not really technically correct to say we’re reclaiming a word – it was always ours. So, many people mistake the word for the hatred behind the word and, in my generation, and I’m sure in future generations of trans people, tranny is going to be a radicalized, sexualized identity of trans in the same way that faggot is a prideful identity in the gay male community – not all gay men are faggots, but those who are are proudly fags and those who are dykes are proudly dykes within the lesbian community, trannies are proudly tranny within the transgender community. Does that mean we can’t call ourselves that because some trans woman does not want to be called a tranny? No. I’m going to keep calling myself a tranny. To the trans woman who gets called tranny, I’m sorry – as soon as . . . you’ve got to look at why you’re getting called tranny and if you don’t pass, you’re going to be read as a transgender person and then you fall back on the cultural view of trans folk which is freak, disgusting, not worth living, we can hurt you. It has nothing to do with the word, it has everything to do with the cultural attitude. So the word has stirred up a shit storm, but it’s not the word.

^ From this interview

Four weeks ago, Bear posted a call for submissions on his blog. In the interests of keeping the call as open as possible, we agreed to include as many trans-identities as we knew, so we used the word "tranny." And that's where the activist shit hit the postmodern fan base. People have been pissed. Here's their argument: FTMs are co-opting a word that belongs to MTFs. The word "tranny" belongs to MTFs, reason those who were hurt by our use of the word, because it was a denigrating term reclaimed by MTFs—ergo, only MTFs could be known as trannies. I spoke with Bear, and we agree that’s wrong on several counts:

Tranny began as a uniting term amongst ourselves. Of course it’s going to be picked up and used as a denigrating term by mean people in the world. But even if we manage to get them to stop saying tranny like a thrown rock, mean people will come up with another word to wound us with. So, let’s get back to using tranny as a uniting term amongst ourselves. That would make Doris Fish very happy.

It's our first own language word for ourselves that has no medical-legacy. 

Even if (like gay) hate-filled people try to make tranny into a bad word, our most positive response is to own the word (a word invented by the queerest of the queer of their day). We have the opportunity to re-create tranny as a positive in the world.

Saying that FTMs can’t call themselves trannies eerily echoes the 1980s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word woman to identify myself, and the 1990s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word dyke. 

At one phase in the evolution of transpeople-as-tribe, it was the male-to-females who were visible and representative of trans to the rest of the world. They were the trannies. Today? Ironically true to the binary we’re in the process of shattering, the pendulum has swung so that it's now female-to-males who are the archetypal trannies of the day. The generation coming up beyond the next generation, i.e. my tribal grandchildren are the young boys who transition to young girls at the age of five or six. They’re the next trannies. None of us can own the word. We can only be grateful that our tribe is so much larger than we had thought it would be. How to come together—now that’s the job of the next generation of gender outlaws.

^ From Who You Calling A Tranny?

We've been having this debate forever and its been stupid forever.

Celebration of natural hair.

No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to

It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!

‘I worked 20-hour days to make Naomi Osaka’s Wimbledon dress’

The Japanese designer Hana Yagi created the striking all-white bridal-inspired kimono that drew cheers from the crowd at the All England Club

The Japanese kimono and the traditional western wedding dress are difficult enough to walk in, let alone play tennis. But Naomi Osaka did so anyway, emerging on to Wimbledon’s Court 3 in a gown that was a hybrid of both garments to play a round of practice shots.

The dress, which drew cheers and wolf whistles from the crowd, was the Japanese player’s latest fashion display, following the gold sequinned outfit that she wore at the French Open and her extravagant turquoise and green dress at the Australian Open in January. Her Wimbledon effort was the work of Hana Yagi, a 26-year old Japanese designer, who created it alone in ten days in her studio in Tokyo.

2026 French open, designed by Kevin Germanier in collaboration with Nike:

Yagi was asked to create an outfit for the “walk on”, when players enter the court before the beginning of a match, a well-established opportunity for fashion statements. At the French Open, Osaka compared her sparkling dress to the illuminations of the Eiffel Tower. Her extraordinary Australian Open outfit was inspired by jellyfish.

Australian Open 2026, designed by Robert Wun for Nike:

But Wimbledon imposes strict rules — above all that all clothes must be completely white (Roger Federer once got a telling-off for wearing shoes with orange soles). “First, it had to be all white,” says Yagi. “Visually, [Harper] gave me the image of a kimono or junihitoe [a traditional 12-layered kimono of the Japanese imperial court]. As a part of the concept, they wanted to reinterpret the tradition in the context of sport.”

The vintage wedding dresses she had in her own stock were cream and ivory — shades unacceptable at Wimbledon. She went to shops in Tokyo and bought the pure white western style wedding dress that forms the lower part of the Osaka gown, and a shiromuku, the traditional nuptial kimono in which brides are wrapped for delivery to their new husbands.

It is this, embroidered with brocade images of cranes and cherry blossoms, that forms the upper part of the dress, but drastically restructured to allow freedom of movement. “I didn’t want her to walk with small steps — in this she won’t have any difficulty walking,” Yagi says. “And it’s not like a tight corset, but a dress that Naomi herself can adjust.” Osaka wore her playing dress, created by her sponsor Nike, below Yagi’s creation, so it had to be lighter than a conventional kimono. The other condition was that the player had to be able to put on and remove the dress quickly.

“It was my first experience of that, because all my past works were art pieces, and not really aiming to be functional,” she says. “But this has to come on and off in three minutes. I kept it putting it on myself over and over again to confirm that it worked.” The secret ingredient? Extensive strips of Velcro.

Some more of Naomi Osaka's show-stoppers:

US Open 2024. Designed by Yoon Ahn for Nike:

US Open 2025. Designed by Osaka herself:

The big question is, what do we call it? Turns out making decisions is hard and we need an adult.

Help us out by voting for the name that most accurately describes this new pink yarn, or leave a new suggestion in the comments!

Heck yes it stands up! I didn’t know if it would; I didn’t think the stockinette was dense enough to make up for the airy lace. (You work the heavy yarn and the light yarn on the same needles. Needle. It’s a circular needle.)

Scaffolding Cowl.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

A Real Yakuza cares for their Pokémon

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BIRTHDAY GIRL'S BETRAYAL, also readable on my website.