Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Foster Care: And Silence Makes Three

      December 5, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Grace

      December 4, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      TO THE TEETH #4

      December 4, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Bent of Light

      December 3, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Walls

      June 5, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: In Memoriam, Amy Winehouse: Years Later, My Tears Are Still Drying on Their Own

      June 3, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      Autumn Passing

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Best of 2019: Best Fiction Books

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Vexing the Dog

      November 27, 2019

      Fiction

      A Hurt In Negative

      November 20, 2019

      Fiction

      The Sledge, Part IV

      November 13, 2019

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Obsessive, Recursive Violence and Concentration: Charlene Elsby’s Hexis

      December 5, 2019

      Review

      EVERYTHING CAN GO/ ON THE GRILL: A Combined Review of Alissa Quart

      December 2, 2019

      Review

      Review: If the House by Molly Spencer

      November 18, 2019

      Art

      The Nabis’ Eye-Pleasing Corners of Creation: Review of Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life

      November 18, 2019

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      MOUTH: EATS COLOR and the Devoration of Languages

      January 12, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Game Over Books

      December 3, 2019

      Small Press

      Jamii Publishing

      November 19, 2019

      Small Press

      Elixir Press

      November 12, 2019

      Small Press

      October and November: Small Press Releases

      November 1, 2019

      Small Press

      Blasted Tree Press

      October 29, 2019

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Featured

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 11 (Karma Police)

        November 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Shattered Memories: Biography of a Place

        September 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Downpour: Biography of a Place

        August 3, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Foster Care: And Silence Makes Three

      December 5, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Grace

      December 4, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      TO THE TEETH #4

      December 4, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Bent of Light

      December 3, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Walls

      June 5, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: In Memoriam, Amy Winehouse: Years Later, My Tears Are Still Drying on Their Own

      June 3, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      Autumn Passing

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Best of 2019: Best Fiction Books

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Vexing the Dog

      November 27, 2019

      Fiction

      A Hurt In Negative

      November 20, 2019

      Fiction

      The Sledge, Part IV

      November 13, 2019

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Obsessive, Recursive Violence and Concentration: Charlene Elsby’s Hexis

      December 5, 2019

      Review

      EVERYTHING CAN GO/ ON THE GRILL: A Combined Review of Alissa Quart

      December 2, 2019

      Review

      Review: If the House by Molly Spencer

      November 18, 2019

      Art

      The Nabis’ Eye-Pleasing Corners of Creation: Review of Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life

      November 18, 2019

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      MOUTH: EATS COLOR and the Devoration of Languages

      January 12, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Game Over Books

      December 3, 2019

      Small Press

      Jamii Publishing

      November 19, 2019

      Small Press

      Elixir Press

      November 12, 2019

      Small Press

      October and November: Small Press Releases

      November 1, 2019

      Small Press

      Blasted Tree Press

      October 29, 2019

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Featured

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 11 (Karma Police)

        November 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Shattered Memories: Biography of a Place

        September 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Downpour: Biography of a Place

        August 3, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Food

The Care and Feeding of Your Sex Change: Community Potluck

written by Julian K. Jarboe May 25, 2018

If you’re going to get through this and if you’re going to thrive, you need friends and maybe “a community”. It’s sort of a trick word. Sometimes it seems like community is just grant-writing code for demographic, population, or scene. Other times I think I’ve seen it glimmering through a room, a moment, a crisis, a joy, like a cryptid in a dark wood. Whatever it is, it’s vital.

That’s not to say you need everyone within your community to be your friend. It’s also not to say that everyone who shares some of your language and experiences is your community, either. If I could say something to myself ten years ago (or five years ago, or last year, or right now), it’s that putting much stock in a nebulous concept to alleviate your basic existential loneliness can break your heart. You can easily find the people who are mourning the mirage of community they felt they would catch when they came out, whether it was the first or twelfth iteration of doing so: they’re the ones loudly or bitterly disowning the idea; they’re the ones scapegoating some other end of the umbrella for their frustrations; they’re me off and on for, like, the last decade.

I’ll give you an embarrassingly specific example. I’ve been every letter in LGBTQ, and one thing I’ve learned from this grand tour is that telling you at this present moment that I’m an “invert transvestite” versus a “queer trans masc” versus a “gay FTM” versus a “bi boi” versus a “non-binary pansexual polyromantic demi-butch” transmits next to nothing about my day to day internal experience, much less the external material reality. Yet depending on the person describing me, 100% of those would be accurate. I prefer some of these over others, but those preferences would not offer you much certainty, either, it turns out. They’d tell you more about where, when, and how I came to understand myself; which online or offline communities, what bars, what social class and generation and ethnicity I belong to; what sexual history, what books and schooling and friendships inform the language I had that felt right at a certain formative moment.

It’s sort of like how the “best” era of pop music is somehow the one that aligns very specifically with your formative years (hmm, funny that). That doesn’t mean the feelings aren’t real (they’re as real as my unironic love for Blink-182), just that endlessly picking each other apart about terms and endlessly coining new hyper specific ones (because one time we met a mean person who identified with an older or broader one, so can’t be that, oh no) is maybe, just maybe, a deep waste of your time, sink of your energy, and probably harmful to yourself past a certain point.

I’m not sure yet what that point is for me, even. Is it the practical navigation of institutions? The social capital and sexiness? The intellectual comfort of a good theory of self? A framework for the past? A manifesto for the future? Maybe it endures the violence of ridicule. Maybe it actually is ridiculous.

I’ve seen people blow apart entire projects, scenes, opportunities to connect over, say, the fact that someone else uses their word for a different circumstance. Burn it all to the ground because someone casually takes on something that, for you, felt hard earned, in need of defending like a castle. Well congrats. Sit alone on your throne of eroding rights and protections, I guess!

The thing is, uncritical mass inclusivity can be as equally shallow as those defensive, reactionary theory wars. Let’s have a free for all, let’s have hugs and snuggles and affirmations and validation, let’s turn strangers not reading our minds into erasure, let’s make everything about comfort, let’s never interrogate that maybe even self-identification can be weird or flawed or appropriative. Or let’s not. These kinds of anything-goes, faux-uplifting attitudes can quietly alienate and fling out the most marginalized by falsely equating everyone’s problems to avoid oppression Olympics. The stakes are simply not always the same. Feeling uncool or bummed out is simply not, itself, an axis of oppression.

What both attitudes lack is, I am starting to think, a long term strategy about how to actually ensure the broadest solidarity and material survival. And maybe a sense of humor? But I’m perverse. I long for even worse representation and airing all the dirty laundry.

I wish my past self could find nicer ways to raise questions like “it seems like your identity is in contradiction with how you’re living and that gives you a lot of anxiety, so what does this word mean to you? What would have to happen to reconcile these things for you?” I wonder if the way to get that close and intimate with each other, to be able to say “hey you’re maybe wielding that language in a mighty weird or harmful way,” is to let each other in past the defenses in the first place. Maybe you’re right to be a little suspicious. Patriarchy would love for you to let down the defenses so it can bulldoze you. But we can be stronger than that. The things that came before you are now slurs, “dated”, “problematic”, the things that came after you are now baffling, “made up”, “vague”. Embrace them. Ask more questions. Realize no one is an authority or an expert on something so vast.

I think– I say to my younger self, I say to my fear, I say to every mentor and caretaker and figurehead who got me here– if you actually provide the acceptance and support without being precious about it either, people will by and large chill out enough to come to their own conclusions about what’s been a different kind of place to hide from themselves and what’s been a place of revelation. Like, thank God I got to try on so many things that almost fit, or did fit for a passing time. Language will continue to change and branch, and it can provide both new territories and room for old ones.

Maybe a healthy self-check about identity words is that if you’re arguing with people about the semantic aspects of this or that term and it’s getting you truly heated, that is, if it’s making you more miserable asserting the micro-differences than it is bringing you joy to embrace the label, you have lost your way a little. If we acknowledge that people can identify the same way and still have it mean something very personal and disparate anyway, then people going different rhetorical ways is probably less important than the shared stakes. The call is coming from inside the house. All of the terms, turns out, are umbrella terms.

I don’t mean this in a corny, fuzzy, false equivalence way, but like: make friends just like you on paper and let them drive you a little nuts with their tiny differences. See how someone very, very different came to be so. Laugh it off. Mind your own business. Lead with questions, love, and good boundaries. Know your limits. Know that, actually, no one is checking membership cards. Bring a soup to the potluck and try to relax.

Julian’s Garden Gazpacho 

  • 2 cups chopped cucumber, unpeeled
  • 1 cup chopped celery
  • 1 cup or 1 bunch chopped green onions
  • 1 4-ounce can of mild green chilies
  • 1 26-ounce can diced tomatoes in juice
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon chili powder
  • 1/4 cup drained capers
  • 1 chopped habanero pepper
  • 1 whole small head of garlic, chopped
  • 1 slice/heel of multigrain bread, torn to pieces
  • salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and immersion blend to consistency of choice (I prefer finer). Save a few bits of chopped celery and onion for garnish if desired. Should be a light green color. Add more tomatoes for a ruddier version. Tastes best after chilling in the fridge for at least half a day.

Cover illustration by Flynn Nicholls.


The Care and Feeding of Your Sex Change is a guide to eating your way through hormone replacement therapy, plastic surgery, standing in line at state offices, lying to gatekeepers, fielding invasive questions from strangers, concealing panic attacks, and managing eating disorders, all disguised as a recipe column. Cis people can read it too, but are encouraged not to take terminology cues from irreverent intra-community internet essays. Big moods and big foods, taken with a grain of salt.

The Care and Feeding of Your Sex Change: Community Potluck was last modified: May 25th, 2018 by Julian K. Jarboe
communityJulian K. JarboepotluckrecipesemanticsThe Care and Feeding of Your Sex Change
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Julian K. Jarboe
Julian K. Jarboe

Julian K. Jarboe is a writer and sound designer living in Salem, Massachusetts. They are a 2018 Fellow at the Writers' Room of Boston. Their other work can be found at their website, toomanyfeelings.com, and they Tweet @JulianKJarboe.

previous post
THE HOUSE IS ALSO BREATHING US: An Interview with Selah Saterstrom by Teresa Carmody
next post
Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like): with Sassafras Lowrey

You may also like

Dinnerview: Meredith Russo

March 20, 2019

Cooking Origin Stories: The Joy of Not Getting it Right in the Kitchen

March 6, 2018

An Annual Delicacy

December 23, 2015

Dining With A Cursed Bloodline: Wounds of the Mind, Wounds of the Body

September 24, 2018
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • Ginger Lang Mairead, a heartfelt gift from you to all who read and share your piece, and peace. Thank you for being brave and vulnerable so others in need of healing can feel you reaching out to them. Thank you...

     The TO THE TEETH #4 ·  December 5, 2019

  • L33tspeak Is that what they call it in France?

    The Culinary Appeal of the French Taco ·  December 3, 2019

  • Ben Roylance Her books have become pretty impossible to find after her death. I recommend setting up alerts on Abebooks or somewhere similar for when one is listed. This book may not be available, but all of her...

    A UFO Book Collecting Primer ·  December 2, 2019

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • Sunday Entropy List
  • Variations on a Theme
  • WOVEN
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • Birdwolf
  • Session Report series
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Notes On Motherhood
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • The Talking Cure
  • Best of 2018
  • The Weird Interview
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • Pop Talks
  • The Concept World is No Longer Operational
  • Splendid Grub
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy
  • Stars to Stories

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2019 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top