Posted on by Matt Thomas

What Ever Happened to the ACLU?

Note: This essay reflects a personal memory of what the American civil libertarian tradition once represented to many people who came of age politically in the late twentieth century. Organizations evolve, and the American Civil Liberties Unionhas played an important role in many areas of constitutional law and civil rights over the past century.

The purpose of the piece is not to dismiss that legacy but to reflect on a perceived cultural shift in how civil liberties—particularly free speech—are understood within contemporary progressive politics. The older civil libertarian framework emphasized neutral principles that applied equally to all speakers, even those whose views were widely considered offensive or dangerous.

Whether that framework still holds the same cultural authority today is an open question. This essay is simply one observer’s reflection on how that shift has felt from the inside.

Epigraph:

F the CC

Steve Earle

When I was younger, the American Civil Liberties Union had a certain reputation among politically attentive Americans.

They had balls.

The ACLU was the organization that defended people nobody liked. Neo-Nazis marching in small Midwestern towns. Communists during the Cold War. Religious cranks, fringe activists, offensive speakers. The principle was simple and bracing: civil liberties matter most when they protect speech we find offensive.

I admired that. Many people did.

In the 1990s the ACLU seemed to embody a kind of austere civil libertarianism. The idea was that the Constitution protected everyone equally, and that civil liberties meant very little if they only applied to people we already agreed with.

And there were plenty of examples that made the point vividly.

The most famous was the controversy over whether a small group of neo-Nazis had the right to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie in the late 1970s.

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie

Skokie was home to many Holocaust survivors, which made the proposed march especially painful and inflammatory. But the ACLU nevertheless defended the Nazis’ right to demonstrate, arguing that the First Amendment could not be applied selectively. Free speech, if it existed at all, had to apply even to people whose ideas were repellent.

That case became a kind of civic legend among civil libertarians.

There were many others.

During the Cold War the ACLU repeatedly defended the rights of individuals accused of Communist sympathies, arguing that political belief alone could not be grounds for government punishment. In later decades the organization defended the speech rights of controversial artists, religious minorities, and political extremists across the ideological spectrum.

Every once in a while a case would appear that tested the principle in uncomfortable ways. I remember reading about things like the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and the legal questions surrounding the government’s conduct toward Randy Weaver. Weaver himself was hardly a sympathetic figure to most Americans, but the civil liberties questions raised by the incident were serious enough that organizations committed to constitutional rights had to pay attention.

That, at least in my memory, was the ACLU’s zone of operation: defending civil liberties even when the individual involved was politically or culturally radioactive.

For a long time that seemed like the organization’s defining characteristic.

Then something began to feel different.

My moment of realization came around 2017 at a conference at Case Western Reserve University. The event was filled with what felt like an entire arena of fucking international liberals—academics, activists, policy types, the whole familiar ecosystem.

At one point a speaker took the stage and launched into a full-throated denunciation of Donald Trump.

Now, criticizing a president is of course perfectly legitimate speech. But as I sat there listening, something about the moment felt off.

The energy in the room was not about civil liberties. It was about political opposition. The speech had the tone of a campaign rally rather than a lecture about constitutional rights.

And I remember thinking very clearly: this is not the ACLU I admired in the 1990s.

Something about the mission had shifted.

To be fair, institutions rarely change because they suddenly become foolish. They change because the culture around them changes first.

The older civil libertarian tradition that shaped organizations like the ACLU grew out of a very specific intellectual climate. It emphasized neutral principles, distrust of government power, and a willingness to defend speech even when that speech was deeply unpopular.

The logic was austere but powerful: the moment we begin deciding which speech deserves protection, the principle itself begins to erode.

But the dominant strain of progressive politics today often approaches these questions differently. Instead of asking whether a principle applies equally to everyone, the question increasingly becomes whether a particular form of speech contributes to harm, inequality, or social injustice.

That shift in moral emphasis naturally changes how civil liberties are understood.

Speech that once would have been defended in the name of neutral principle may now be evaluated in terms of its social consequences. And organizations that operate inside a particular political culture tend to absorb the assumptions of that culture over time.

The ACLU did not necessarily set out to abandon its older civil libertarian posture. It may simply have followed the broader ideological current of the progressive world in which it operates.

Still, for those of us who grew up admiring the older model, the change can feel disorienting.

The ACLU once stood for the uncomfortable proposition that freedom of speech requires defending people whose views we might find offensive, foolish, or even dangerous.

It is not entirely clear whether the culture that once sustained that belief still exists.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks I: Kofi Annan

Note: This piece begins a small series I’m calling “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” Political and public life are full of attempted returns. Leaders lose elections, wars, or moral arguments and then try to reclaim the stage. Most of these efforts fail. The moment has passed, the audience has moved on, and what once felt urgent has dissolved into what might be called moral fatigue. Yet every so often a different pattern appears. Occasionally someone loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for history itself to shift. When that happens, what first looked like defeat begins to resemble something closer to a delayed victory. Kofi Annan provides a particularly interesting case. His opposition to the Iraq War did not stop the invasion, and at the time it appeared that the argument had been decisively lost. Yet as the years passed and the consequences of the war became clearer, the moral judgment he articulated gained increasing weight.
In that sense, the story of Annan’s career suggests a useful distinction: some comebacks succeed not because the player reclaims the moment, but because the argument itself eventually catches up with history. Future pieces in this series will look at other figures—some who managed remarkable returns, and others whose comebacks never quite arrived.

Political life especially produces them in abundance. A leader loses a battle—an election, a war, a moral argument—and disappears into the quiet margins where yesterday’s figures slowly fade. The public moves on. The moral urgency of the moment dissolves into what might be called moral fatigue. Outrage that once seemed unstoppable becomes background noise. A new crisis appears, and the world’s attention shifts.

Once this fatigue sets in, comebacks are difficult. The audience that once cared has already drifted elsewhere. The stage has changed. Most players who attempt to return find that the moment that once belonged to them has passed.

Yet every so often a different pattern appears.

Occasionally a figure loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for the moral tide itself to turn. When that happens, what looked like defeat begins to resemble something else entirely.

Kofi Annan offers one of the most intriguing examples of this phenomenon.

In 2003 the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. The invasion was justified by a mixture of strategic arguments, intelligence claims, and moral rhetoric about tyranny and liberation. In Washington and London the momentum of the moment was overwhelming. The war was framed as both necessary and inevitable.

The United Nations, by contrast, found itself sidelined. Annan, then serving as Secretary-General, watched as the institution he led was bypassed by the coalition preparing for war. The moment belonged to the advocates of intervention—particularly the group of American policy thinkers who had spent years arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

At the time, it was not at all clear who would ultimately win the argument. What was clear was that the United Nations had lost the immediate struggle for influence. The invasion proceeded without explicit UN authorization, and the diplomatic machinery that Annan represented appeared powerless to prevent it.

The moral emergency that had animated the debate quickly hardened into geopolitical reality.

Then, in September 2004, Annan said something remarkable. In a BBC interview he stated plainly that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law.

It was an extraordinary declaration. Rarely does a sitting Secretary-General of the United Nations describe the actions of the world’s most powerful government in such blunt terms. Yet the statement did not produce the dramatic reversal one might imagine. The war continued. Washington and London dismissed the criticism. The machinery of global politics moved forward largely unchanged.

In the short term, Annan had lost the battle.

And the personal toll of that moment appears to have been considerable. In his biography there is a striking image from this period: Annan alone in his darkened living room, unable for a time to rise from the floor. The room itself reportedly kept in near darkness. It was not exactly depression, at least not in the clinical sense, but something close to exhaustion after a prolonged moral struggle that had failed to alter events.

It is a haunting scene. One of the most powerful diplomats in the world sitting on the floor of a dark room, confronting the limits of his influence.

At that moment, the story of Kofi Annan could easily have ended as the story of a failed comeback. A leader who tried to reassert the moral authority of international law and found that the world had already moved on.

But history has a way of rearranging the meaning of certain moments.

As the years passed, the Iraq War came to be widely regarded as a profound strategic and humanitarian mistake. The claims that had justified the invasion collapsed. The war itself destabilized the region and reshaped global politics in ways that few of its original advocates had anticipated.

Gradually, the moral argument that Annan had made—quietly but firmly—became the prevailing historical judgment.

After leaving the United Nations, Annan did not retreat entirely from public life. Instead he reappeared in a different role as a member of The Elders, a group of former statesmen attempting to exert moral influence outside formal political structures.

It was a curious transformation. No longer the head of the UN, Annan had less formal power than he once possessed. Yet his voice now carried a different kind of authority—the authority of someone who had remained in the arena long enough for events to vindicate his judgment.

By the end of his life, the moral verdict on the Iraq War had shifted decisively. Few serious observers still defended the intervention with the confidence that characterized the early years of the conflict. The consensus had moved, slowly but unmistakably, toward the position Annan had articulated when it mattered least.

In this sense, his career offers an unusual example in the history of comebacks.

He lost the battle.
But he may have won the argument.

That distinction matters.

Most political figures attempt comebacks by trying to reclaim the exact moment they once dominated. They want the same stage, the same audience, the same authority. When the moment has passed, the comeback fails.

Annan’s story suggests a different possibility. Sometimes the moral argument itself continues moving through history long after the political battle appears settled. If a leader remains present long enough, the tide may eventually turn.

Which leads to a simple but revealing observation about great players in any arena.

A truly great player is never entirely out of the game.

The moment may pass. The audience may drift away. But if the underlying argument proves sound, history itself has a way of reopening the field.

And when it does, the comeback is already underway.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Transference in Artistic Collaboration

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
With the beat in now…
And your chest came out
’Cause you weren’t too scared.

Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”

There is transference.
There just is.

Matthew Thomas

I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal

It’s real because it’s grounded.
It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.

That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.

In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.

But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.

What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.

The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent.
It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive.
It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.

And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:

We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.

We remain in our own psyches.
We allow resonance without fusion.
We allow voltage without blur.
We allow openness without myth-making.

This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.

In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.

History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.

That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.

The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.

But the boundary holds.

Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.

Openness with form.
Exposure with spine.
Laid open, but not laid bare.

This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.

The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.

And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.

This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.

Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…

Openness is not the danger.
Losing oneself inside openness is.

This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:

Can I remain open without giving myself away?
Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny?
Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it?
Can I collaborate without collapsing?
Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?

The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.

Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.

Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.

The adult self leads.
The trio leads.
The work leads.

And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:

What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?

That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.

Dedication

For the collaborators:
the drifters,
the drop-ins,
the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.

You keep the corners loose
and the truth a little crooked.
My kind of people.

Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.

Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Sarah Lawrence Kids: My Take

Contextual Note

This reflection is inspired by reporting on the case of Lawrence “Larry” Ray, whose actions at Sarah Lawrence College became the subject of extensive journalism and later criminal prosecution. Ray, the father of a student, embedded himself within a group of students and, over a period of years, exerted psychological and material control that culminated in multiple federal charges. In 2022, he was convicted in U.S. federal court on counts including racketeering conspiracy, extortion, forced labor, and sex trafficking, following testimony detailing patterns of manipulation, coercion, and abuse.

The essay above is not intended as investigative reporting or a comprehensive account of the case. Rather, it uses widely documented elements of the Sarah Lawrence story as a lens for examining broader dynamics of influence, consent, authority, and psychological boundary erosion. Readers interested in detailed factual accounts are encouraged to consult court records and major journalistic coverage of the case.

Epigraph
“I can’t force myself to say something
More than I can think of a thing to do
Any more than you can pull yourself out of nothing
When there is nothing forcing you to.”
— Bedhead, Extramundane

This isn’t really a story about sex, crime, or even a “cult” in the way headlines tend to frame it. It’s a story about how consent can be quietly eroded — not through force or spectacle, but through a gradual shift in tempo. An adult inserts himself into a group of bright, searching young people and begins, almost imperceptibly, to reorganize how they interpret their own experience. Nothing dramatic happens at first. There is conversation, attention, fluency in the language of care. The early moves feel supportive, even mentorship-like. And that is precisely why they work. By the time anything overtly troubling emerges, the conditions for real choice have already thinned out. The ground tilts before anyone recognizes that it’s moving.

The students drawn in aren’t naïve caricatures or damaged stereotypes. They’re thoughtful, introspective, and accustomed to treating their interior lives as material for reflection. That habit, usually a strength, becomes a vulnerability in the presence of someone adept at narrating other people’s feelings back to them. The dynamic isn’t driven primarily by charisma or intellectual brilliance. It’s driven by tempo. Boundaries aren’t crossed so much as softened. A late-night conversation becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a shared framework. A framework becomes dependency. And when harm finally appears, it doesn’t feel like a clear rupture between “yes” and “no.” It feels like a choice being made inside a structure already built.

There is often a moment when the room shifts, but it rarely looks like a turning point. Someone says they’re exhausted, and exhaustion is reframed as a signal with hidden meaning. Confusion becomes resistance. Ordinary hesitation becomes evidence of deeper moral or psychological blockage. Each reframing lands with the texture of insight rather than coercion. Over time, reactions are no longer treated as self-authorizing; they become data awaiting interpretation by the person occupying the role of guide. The students aren’t agreeing with an authority figure so much as agreeing with a version of themselves that figure has begun to narrate. When narrative voice drifts outward like that, autonomy doesn’t vanish dramatically. It diffuses.

The difficulty in describing situations like this lies in the absence of clear theatrical markers. There is no singular moment of surrender, no obvious villain/victim tableau. The participants often experience themselves not as surrendering but as collaborating. They believe they are doing the work, gaining insight, moving toward growth. Particularly for intellectually curious students, the promise of self-understanding is compelling. When directives are framed as pathways to clarity, resistance can feel like failure rather than protection. The structure tightens without ever announcing itself as such.

What emerges from observing cases like this is less outrage than a kind of double vision. On one level, the mechanics appear familiar: authority built through interpretive fluency, dependence fostered through narrative control, legitimacy derived from proximity to vulnerability. On another level, the situation remains unsettling precisely because the openings are so ordinary. The dynamic does not depend on extraordinary charisma or theatrical manipulation. It depends on recognizable human needs: attention, guidance, belonging, the desire to make sense of one’s own experience. Intelligence does not necessarily protect against these forces; in certain contexts, it can deepen engagement with them.

That recognition invites a measure of humility. The distance between observer and participant is not always as large as hindsight suggests. What protects one person in a given moment may be temperament, timing, or simple circumstance rather than superior discernment. The impulse to locate safety in personal invulnerability can obscure the broader lesson: susceptibility is situational, and the pathways into these dynamics are rarely marked by obvious warning signs. Often they look like ordinary conversations extended just a little too far.

If the Bedhead lyric offers a frame, it is through its quiet attention to inertia. The line does not describe dramatic coercion but a subtler erosion of agency — the sensation of trying to act from a place that has already been partially displaced. “You can’t pull yourself out of nothing when there is nothing forcing you to” captures the paradox at the center of this story: the absence of overt pressure can itself become constraining. Consent may appear intact even as its underlying architecture shifts. The drift is gradual, almost ambient, and therefore difficult to name in real time.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the ordinariness of the openings. The story is not about an extraordinary manipulator but about how easily authority can be constructed within familiar relational spaces, and how collaboration can feel indistinguishable from growth until perspective changes. The lesson, if there is one, is less about condemnation than awareness — a recognition of how narrative authority operates, how tempo shapes consent, and how autonomy can narrow without any single decisive moment marking its loss.

Dedication
For those who walked.
And for those who couldn’t.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy my other piece on educational institutions. You can read it here.

On My Seven Years Under Dr. Charles Fox
Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position

Note: This is the fifth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. Our fourth position is about what we consider the inequitable banning of clove cigarettes by President Obama in 2009.

I. Starting Point — Dignity, Not Debate

Trans people exist. This is not a trend or a modern invention. Gender variance appears across cultures and across history, long before the vocabulary we use today existed. Whatever complexities emerge in policy, youth development, or medicine, one thing is foundational:

Trans people are owed human dignity.
No conditions, no asterisks. Just dignity.

Everything else follows from that moral floor.

II. Adults — Full Citizenship and Recognition

For adults, the ethical picture is straightforward. Trans adults should be able to live, work, love, and move through the world without harassment or discrimination. This includes:

  • The ability to legally transition through a fair, transparent process
  • Access to transition-related healthcare under informed consent
  • Workplace and housing protections that include gender identity and expression
  • Access to military service and civil participation under the same standards as any other adult

At the adult level, the question is not whether trans people exist or deserve rights — they do. The challenge is implementation, not justification.

III. Youth — Compassion and Caution, Not Panic

Young people need something slightly different from adults. They need care, patience. Youth — Listening First, Care Without Panic

Young people do not need slogans or pressure; they need adults who are willing to listen carefully and stay present over time. Before policy, before pathways, before decisions, there is a more basic responsibility: to take a young person’s experience seriously, without rushing to explain it away or lock it in.

For some youth, feelings about gender are clear, persistent, and deeply rooted. For others, gender exploration may be tentative, fluid, or intertwined with anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, social stress, or the ordinary turbulence of adolescence. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and none of them invalidate a young person’s distress or self-understanding.

A healthy response begins with attentive listening — not as a procedural step, but as an ethical practice in its own right. Children and adolescents deserve to be heard in their own words, at their own pace, without the expectation that every question must immediately produce an answer. Parents and caregivers are allowed to say, honestly and without shame, “I don’t know yet.” Uncertainty, when paired with care, is not neglect; it is often wisdom.

Exploration itself is not harm. Questioning gender assumptions, trying out names or pronouns, or experimenting with presentation can be a way for young people to understand themselves more clearly. When such exploration reduces distress and helps a young person feel safer or more coherent, it should not be treated as dangerous or pathological.

At the same time, adults have a responsibility to protect young people from both kinds of harm: the harm of being dismissed or unheard, and the harm of being rushed into irreversible decisions before they are ready. A balanced, compassionate approach includes:

  • Making space for reversible forms of social exploration when they ease distress
  • Offering non-judgmental counseling that supports understanding rather than steering toward predetermined outcomes
  • Thoughtful screening for co-occurring factors — such as anxiety, depression, trauma, or neurodivergence — without stigma or presumption
  • Treating medical interventions for minors as decisions that require time, persistence of dysphoria, multidisciplinary evaluation, and informed consent

The goal is harm reduction in both directions: reducing the risk of long-term, untreated dysphoria while also minimizing regret from irreversible interventions made too early. Compassion and caution are not opposites; they are partners.

Most importantly, young people should never feel that they must perform certainty in order to be taken seriously. Listening does not require immediate resolution. Care does not require panic. What children need most is the assurance that the adults around them are paying attention, taking them seriously, and willing to walk with them — even when the destination is not yet clear.

IV. Language and Pronouns — Respect Without Fear

Using someone’s chosen name and pronouns is simply respect — no different from honoring a nickname or a married name. It is not complicated on a human level.

Our stance:

  • Respect is the default
  • Mistakes are human and correctable without punishment
  • Deliberate misgendering is disrespect, but ordinary errors are not crimes
  • Institutions should model inclusive language, not create environments where people feel terrified to speak

Respect should enlarge conversation, not freeze it.

V. Sports — Inclusion and Fairness, Context by Context

Sports are not a single system — they exist on a spectrum with different purposes and stakes at each level. Because of that, one rule for everything doesn’t work.

At the youth or school level, sport is primarily about identity formation, belonging, and joy. Stakes are low, development is ongoing. In these settings, inclusion should be maximized and kids should generally be able to play on the teams aligned with their gender identity.

In adult amateur or recreational sport, flexibility should continue. Local leagues and organizations can experiment with mixed teams, open categories, or self-organizing solutions based on context and community. These spaces are more about health and community than lifetime opportunity.

However, college athletics, scholarship competition, and pathways into professional sport introduce real material consequences — scholarships, visibility, and career access. In these spaces, fairness and inclusion must be balanced, and physiological advantage has to be considered. Trans participation is possible within a framework that takes development, hormone levels, and evidence seriously.

At the professional, elite, and Olympic level, physiology cannot be ignored. These competitions involve prize money, legacy, and national representation. Rules here should be science-informed and sport-specific. In some cases that may mean time-based hormone requirements; in some cases, open categories or structural alternatives might emerge. The goal is not exclusion — the goal is competitive integrity that respects all athletes.

In summary:
In everyday sport, inclusion is the natural priority.
In elite sport, fairness and physiology matter more strongly.
Different contexts call for different solutions.

VI. Women’s Spaces (Prisons, Shelters, Spas, Bathrooms) —

A Category We Are Listening To

Not every issue in the trans conversation is equally simple. Spaces involving privacy, trauma history, and safety — such as domestic-violence shelters, prisons, changing facilities, and spas — require deeper listening and care. Women’s vulnerability and trans women’s vulnerability both matter, and overlapping fears cannot be solved by declaration alone.

Rather than issue a premature stance, we hold this position:

We are listening.
We are learning.
We are not ready to speak in absolutes.

Refusing to claim certainty where uncertainty exists is not weakness — it is honesty.

VII. Our Tone Moving Forward

We choose nuance rather than slogan, discussion rather than trench warfare. We reject cruelty toward trans people and we also reject moral panic. We value evidence where policy is needed, care where identity is forming, and the courage to say “we’re not sure yet” where complexity remains.

In short:

Trans people deserve dignity.
Where rights are clear, we affirm them.
Where questions are hard, we move with care.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: On Why Clove Cigarettes Should Be Legal in the US

Note: This is the fourth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible.

Full disclosure: I love clove cigarettes. I’m not here to pretend tobacco is harmless, but I do smoke and I love cloves specifically — their sweetness, their bite, the way they announce themselves rather than slip by unnoticed. They’re not a casual habit. They’re not cheap. They’re not especially forgiving. They are, unmistakably, a specialty product for adults who already know what they’re doing. Which is precisely why their disappearance from the United States strikes me as so strange. If public policy is supposed to focus on scale, harm, and likelihood, cloves barely register. And yet they were eliminated cleanly and completely.

This isn’t a brief for Juul, bubblegum vapes, or any product designed to recruit new smokers as efficiently as possible. Those deserve scrutiny, regulation, and in some cases outright prohibition. Clove cigarettes are something else entirely. They were never poised to take over American high schools. They were never discreet, never mass-market, never engineered for easy uptake. They appealed to a narrow, adult audience — travelers, artists, longtime smokers with particular tastes. Their banning didn’t meaningfully change youth smoking behavior; it simply removed a minor, culturally specific option from the legal market. Which raises a quiet but important question: why was such a small thing targeted so decisively, while other flavored cigarettes were not?

The answer, of course, is the carve-out. In 2009, when the United States banned flavored cigarettes, it did so selectively. Clove cigarettes were prohibited outright. Menthol cigarettes were not. This distinction was never really about flavor chemistry or relative harm; it was about politics, constituencies, and consequence. Menthol had a large, organized user base and a long, fraught history tied to race, policing, and targeted marketing. Regulators understood that banning menthol would provoke backlash, raise enforcement concerns, and create secondary harms. So menthol survived. Cloves, by contrast, had no organized defenders, no obvious political cost, and no plausible narrative of collateral damage. They were small enough to remove without resistance.

We don’t object to the menthol carve-out. In fact, I understand it. Public policy often has to weigh downstream effects as much as stated intentions, and there were legitimate fears about what a menthol ban might unleash. But that logic cuts both ways. If menthol was spared because its removal would have caused disproportionate disruption, cloves deserved consideration for the opposite reason. Their user base was tiny. Their market footprint was negligible. Their elimination solved no urgent public-health problem and prevented no foreseeable epidemic. It simply demonstrated how regulation tends to work in practice: not by calibrating rules to scale and risk, but by acting most decisively where the fewest people are able—or willing—to object.

What the clove ban reveals, more than anything, is how regulation actually moves through the world. It does not flow evenly from evidence to outcome. It flows through constituencies. Products with organized users, sympathetic narratives, and visible secondary effects are handled with caution. Products without those protections are handled cleanly. Clove smokers were never numerous enough, loud enough, or legible enough to matter. There was no lobby. No advocacy group. No credible fear of backlash. As a result, cloves became an easy victory: a flavored cigarette could be banned, a public-health win could be declared, and no meaningful political cost would be incurred.

This is not corruption so much as gravity. Policymaking, especially in public health, often advances where resistance is lowest. That doesn’t make it malicious, but it does make it uneven. And unevenness matters. When regulation targets the smallest, quietest practices first—those least likely to produce harm at scale—it risks confusing symbolic action with effective policy. The clove ban didn’t fail because it was harsh; it failed because it was misaligned. It addressed a marginal behavior while leaving far larger, more consequential ones to be negotiated indefinitely.

One of the unspoken assumptions behind the flavored-cigarette ban was that flavor itself was the problem. But not all flavors function the same way. Some are engineered for mass adoption: sweet, smooth, cheap, discreet, and easy to inhale even for first-time users. Those products lower the barrier to entry and deserve aggressive scrutiny. Clove cigarettes operate at the opposite end of the spectrum. They are pungent, smoky, and unmistakable. They announce themselves immediately. They are harder on the throat, more expensive, and far less forgiving to the uninitiated. In other words, they are an acquired taste by design.


This distinction matters because public health should be attentive not just to ingredients, but to uptake dynamics. Products that spread rapidly among new users pose a different kind of risk than products that remain confined to a narrow, self-selecting adult audience. Cloves never behaved like a recruitment tool. They didn’t mask tobacco; they added complexity to it. They weren’t optimized for stealth or scale. Treating them as equivalent to mass-market flavored cigarettes collapses important differences and replaces targeted regulation with blunt prohibition. If the goal is to prevent widespread initiation, then precision matters—and cloves were never the right target.

There is also the question of adult autonomy, which is often treated gingerly in tobacco policy but can’t be avoided entirely. Smoking remains legal. That fact alone establishes a baseline assumption: adults are permitted to make choices that carry known risks. Within that framework, the question is not whether tobacco should be virtuous, but whether adults are trusted to exercise discernment among legal options. Choosing a clove cigarette is not an attempt to evade regulation or denial of harm; it is an aesthetic preference exercised within an already constrained and taxed marketplace.

This is where the phrase “following the muse” matters. It sounds indulgent until you realize how narrow the claim is. It is not a demand for limitless choice or novelty flavors designed to entice new users. It is a request for consistency. If adults are allowed to smoke, they should be allowed to choose among products that differ meaningfully in character, tradition, and appeal—especially when those products are demonstrably niche and non-expansionary. Removing cloves didn’t protect children. It simply narrowed adult choice in a way that feels arbitrary rather than principled.

It’s reasonable to ask why any of this matters. Clove cigarettes are not a public-health crisis. Their absence does not rank among the great injustices of modern regulation. But small decisions often reveal larger habits of mind. When policy treats scale, intent, and impact as interchangeable, it stops distinguishing between meaningful intervention and symbolic tidying. The clove ban solved a rhetorical problem more than a real one. It demonstrated action without demanding precision.

What’s left behind is an inconsistency that never quite resolves. A flavored cigarette with massive market share remains legal because its removal would be disruptive. A flavored cigarette with negligible market share was eliminated because its removal was easy. That asymmetry doesn’t undermine public health as a goal, but it does weaken confidence in how that goal is pursued. If regulation is to be trusted, it should align most tightly with where harm is greatest—not where resistance is lowest.

This is not a call to roll back tobacco regulation or to relitigate every compromise embedded in public-health law. It’s a narrower observation. When a system is willing to make exceptions for powerful constituencies while eliminating marginal practices without consideration, it reveals something about how decisions are actually made. Clove cigarettes weren’t banned because they were uniquely dangerous. They were banned because no one important would miss them.


Even so, positions don’t need mass movements to exist. Sometimes they begin as a splinter fraction: a small, clear objection to an unnecessary loss. If smoking is legal, and if nuance still matters, then there is room—at least in principle—for a carve-out that acknowledges scale, intent, and adult choice. Even if only two people think so, even if it’s just me and Annie, that’s enough to say it out loud.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Shisha Girls and Shisha Boys of Kyoto: Field Observations

Epigraph: Where is my nurse, my nurse with the pills? — Ryan Adams

When the world is too sharp, too fast, too opinionated, I do not go to bars.
I go underground.

Down the low-lit stairs in Gion — where tourists drift past overhead and never notice the door — there is a basement shisha den that looks closed even when it isn’t. Noon to 3:00 a.m. daily, 5:00 a.m. on weekends. A place you would miss unless you were meant to find it. Shoes off at the threshold. Warm air, low music, no urgency of any kind. Just couches — three of them — a handful of curtained recesses where people lie fully horizontal like monks or patients or dreamers, and a second floor with several cubbies up steep wooden stairs.

I take a couch, the one I always take — long enough to fully stretch out. Because I am a serious regular, the staff will bump me ahead of others in line to make sure I get my couch. I never asked for this privilege; the staff simply decided on my behalf.

Shisha here is not an accessory; it is the medium. A cappuccino-cinnamon-berry bowl — number four, Turkish — smooth draw, no burn, warmed through cassis if I want the smoke heavier on the lungs. One gin and tonic, maybe two over the course of a session and a glass of water. After thirty minutes, I’m steady. After two hours, I am gone — dissolved but aware, body slow, mind open like a lens on long exposure. Six hours is half a day and feels like two minutes.

This is how I work. I write here. I talk on the phone here. Parallel processing is possible here in a way the world never allows — one half of the brain in conversation, the other spilling sentences into the phone notes without friction. Time softens. Thoughts move without edges. I do not come here to escape the world. I come here to metabolize it.

And always — there are Shisha Girls, and occasionally Shisha Boys.

The girls are not bartenders. They are not hostesses. They are ritual nurses, the so-called nurse with the goods.

The first one I met — call her B. — recognized me early as a serious regular. Light build, hair tied back, barefoot, comfortable like someone who lives inside her own body without apology. She bends into the couch alcove, refills the charcoal, and takes two or three tester pulls through the mouthpiece she wears on a lanyard. That detail matters: they share your bowl to tend it properly. Their breath meets your breath. Their lungs judge the temperature. They diagnose by inhalation.

No plastic tips if you don’t want them — the gold mouthpiece direct to mouth, warm, personal, intimate in the way only unspoken trust is intimate.

K. is older — early thirties — and the one who opens at precisely noon. I give her three or four minutes to descend the stairs and switch on the lights. She’s the quiet boss, not by authority, but by ritual competence. She alone recommended berry + cinnamon when I asked for something special. She knows my bowl, my drink, my couch, my tempo. When she works, I settle in with the confidence of someone returning to a familiar bed in a hotel room booked under a different name.

There are Shisha Boys too. One rotates charcoal with the same practiced inhalation, hair slicked back, present but not overly personal. Another is stationed at the front like soft-security — staff-adjacent — always smoking, rarely speaking, cashing out customers with a nod. They do not socialize. They do not pitch stories. They do not extract biography. You might visit for years and never know their names, and this is deliberate.

In bars, the first currency traded is information: What’s your name? Where are you from?What do you do? Identity is the entry ticket; personality is the product.

But shisha does not trade identity. Shisha trades nervous systems.

You don’t bond through story —you bond through shared respiration.

The intimacy is somatic, not verbal. They watch breath, not face. They regulate heat, not conversation. They calibrate you the way a nurse adjusts an IV — quietly, competently, without inserting themselves. Bars escalate. Shisha deepens. Bars push energy outward. Shisha draws it inward like a tide at night. In bars, you hold yourself up. In Shisha, the room holds you.

After three or six hours, only one thing pulls me back to the surface — nicotine. Shisha gives without demanding, but you are not allowed to smoke a cigarette. A single drawback. So I rise, shoes on, payment made, nod to K. or B. or whichever quiet caretaker tended the bowl. I climb the dim stairs and push into daylight or dark, immediately searching for a legal ashtray on the street.

The re-entry cigarette is the punctuation mark. Shisha is the sentence.

Why do I go? Because here I can chill, dissolve, write, speak, breathe. Because every part of the ritual feels earned — the bowl, the gin, the charcoal refreshes taken communally through their own mouthpieces. Because I belong here in a way that requires nothing.

They are not my friends. They are not therapists. They are not bartenders.

They are my extended other family of lungs and smoke, a household without biography, without narrative — only breath.

Dedication: For B. and K., sneaky babes both of them.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Federal Age of Consent: A Reply to Alan Dershowitz

Sometimes an argument tells you more about the man making it than the subject he claims to be discussing.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
— Carl Jung


“Chronologically I know you’re young,
but when you kissed me in the club you bit my tongue.”
— Loudon Wainwright III, “Motel Blues”

Note: In On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl), I wrote about the interior rooms we protect — the places where selfhood gets built without interruption or performance. This piece is about the larger boundary: the one society owes to the developing self.

Opening
Alan Dershowitz has a way of wandering into arguments that look like legal questions but are really psychological ones. Back in 1997, he argued that statutory-rape laws were “an outdated concept,” a position he has never meaningfully walked back. It wasn’t a constitutional insight then, and it isn’t one now — it’s an ethical fog of his own making, clever on the surface, a little out of control underneath, and surprisingly indifferent to the actual developmental reality of adolescence. I’m not a lawmaker, and I’m not pretending to be one. I’m simply an adult who has spent decades in and around schools all over the world, watching young people grow into themselves — slowly, unevenly, beautifully. And from where I stand, there’s nothing arbitrary about protecting the forming self from the fantasies of adults who should know better.

Thesis
Bodily autonomy begins with the smallest choices — what you eat, what you refuse, what you allow into your system. Anyone who has ever fought for control over diet, appetite, or health knows that dignity is never abstract. It lives in the body first. Food, sleep, sex, presence, touch — these aren’t lifestyle accessories. They are the basic architecture of selfhood.

And that’s why autonomy matters.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a political hashtag.
But as the ground of being human.

People like Dershowitz talk about age-of-consent laws as if they’re philosophical puzzles, as if desire and authority rise from the same level floor. But bodily autonomy doesn’t work that way. It has requirements. Preconditions. A forming self needs time, scaffolding, protection — the freedom to grow into decisions that will define a lifetime.
Bodily autonomy is the core of human dignity.
And dignity requires a federal age of consent set at 18 — with room for close-in-age relationships, but no room for adult fantasies about adolescent equality.

Ethical Architecture


Autonomy isn’t a mood or a vibe. It’s a developmental achievement — the slow process of learning to inhabit your own body without needing permission, without coercion, without fear. Emotional regulation, impulse control, identity formation, consequence mapping — none of that arrives early.

I learned that early with food. When I was fourteen, I wanted to become a vegetarian. My mother didn’t approve, and at one point tried to enlist a doctor to shut it down. Decades later, it’s still not funny to me. It was my first glimpse of how threatened adults can feel by a young person’s bodily autonomy — even when the stakes are seemingly mild.

If this is true about diet, something reversible and lower-stakes, it is infinitely truer about sex, where the stakes shape a lifetime. This is why age-of-consent laws exist: not to police sexuality, but to protect the dignity of someone whose selfhood is still under construction.

Psychological Layer

Adults love to project adulthood backward — to imagine that adolescents are simply smaller, louder grown-ups. But when an adult looks at a teenager and sees “maturity,” they are seeing their own desire reflected back at them. It’s projection disguised as equality.
And that’s the shadow: the part of the adult that refuses responsibility.
When an adult insists “adolescents know what they want,” what they’re really saying is:
“I want them to know what I want.”
Desire is real.
But consent requires architecture.
Adolescents feel everything — intensity, longing, hunger, embarrassment — but they don’t yet have the scaffolding that turns feelings into sustainable decisions. They’re still learning how to hold their boundary, which means adults must hold it for them.
Layer on top of that the baked-in authority of adults — teachers, coaches, mentors, older partners — and it becomes obvious that any adolescent “yes” is distorted by fear, approval-seeking, and conditioning. That’s not consent. It’s compliance.
The danger is never the adolescent’s feelings.
The danger is the adult’s refusal to be an adult.

Policy Layer
I’m not talking about university students and professors. That’s not my area. I work in a high school; I work with adolescents. My authority such as it is is rooted in those spaces.

And there are practical reasons for setting the line at 18 that have nothing to do with purity politics. Eighteen is already the age of legal majority — the moment a person can sign contracts, make medical decisions, join the military, lease an apartment, and carry full responsibility for their choices. Consent belongs in the same category: it requires structural independence, not just emotion.

Before 18, almost every part of life is mediated by adult authority; after 18, the power balance shifts. A federal standard removes the patchwork of loopholes and state-by-state inconsistencies that predators rely on. And for the record, I support lowering the federal drinking age to 18. I’m not arguing for innocence. I’m arguing for dignity — and dignity requires autonomy, not surveillance, and certainly not adult desire dressed up as philosophy.

Close-in-age exceptions protect real relationships. They do not protect adults who want to pretend a teenager is their peer.

Why It Matters Now

Silence used to feel like neutrality. It doesn’t anymore. I’ve been in and out of high schools around the world — Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, China, Southeast Asia, North America — and I’ve seen enough to know that adolescents today are more exposed than ever. More pressure, more surveillance, more chaos, more online distortion.

Adults can either disappear into clever hypotheticals, or they can show up. The world is louder now than it was in 1997. More invasive. More demanding. Adolescents have less room to breathe, to fail safely, to grow without an adult’s shadow pressing against their outline.

That’s why I’m saying this aloud.
Not because I enjoy the argument.
Because silence, at this point, feels like complicity.

Closing

At some point adulthood has to mean something. Not moralism — responsibility. Adults hold the boundary. We don’t collapse it when it’s inconvenient or reinterpret it because we prefer a clever argument. Adulthood is the willingness to carry the weight of our power without pretending it isn’t there.

Which is why Dershowitz’s old argument still bothers me. It treats adolescents like abstractions in a constitutional seminar instead of actual forming selves. And you don’t need to mention Epstein or anything else to see the flaw — you only have to hear the tone. A man brilliant enough to win a debate in his sleep, is nonetheless a little off-the-hook. Dershowitz is strangely pre-occupied with farmer’s market battles, and often more enchanted by the elegance of the puzzle than the dignity of the child.

But here’s the thing:
I’m not coming for art.
I like Loudon Wainwright. I love “White Winos.” I like “Motel Blues,” even with its sideways energy. Songs are allowed to be messy. Human desire is allowed to be messy. And if the girl in the song is legal and in the club, then that’s that. Adults can make mistakes, write about them, sing about them, and turn them into something worth listening to. That’s art’s job.
But real life is different.
Real life has a boundary.
The line between adolescence and adulthood isn’t drawn to stifle desire.
It’s drawn to protect dignity — the child’s dignity, yes, but also the adult’s. A clean boundary keeps everyone honest. It keeps projection from rewriting the story. It keeps the shadow in check. It keeps the music in the music, not in the courtroom.
A federal age of consent at 18 is not about purity or panic.
It’s about clarity.
And clarity is what lets adulthood do its actual work.
Because the truth is simple:
I can enjoy Loudon’s songs, raise an eyebrow at his more questionable moments, and still believe absolutely in a boundary that protects adolescents until they’re ready to stand on the same ground as the adults around them.
Art can be blurry.
Ethics can’t.
And adulthood — the real kind — knows the difference.

Dedication
For the forming selves,
and for the adults who finally decided to act like adults.