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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.

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My Time At Northern Arizona University Interlude and Part V: Return to Japan and Year II Term I

Interlude — Return to Japan, Winter 1999

I flew back to Japan in early December ’99, eleven months after Flagstaff, twenty six years ago today.

My girlfriend — soon to be my wife — met me in Kumamoto and before we went anywhere near a city office we took a bus tour of Kyushu. One of those packaged trips where the landscape is real but the schedule isn’t — temples, viewpoints, souvenir shops engineered into the route because somebody is getting a cut. I’ve never liked bus tours. Too passive. Too commercial. A landscape you watch instead of inhabit.

The first night in the hotel we were intimate for the first time in a year. It was good enough — tentative, self-conscious on my part, like we were remembering choreography rather than improvising. It would all come back pretty quickly.

After the tour we stayed with her parents in Uto City — small house, tatami floors, her childhood bedroom upstairs. We shared a single futon where she had slept alone as a girl. I remember the narrowness of it, two adults lying in a past built for one. The walls thin, the air still, her parents downstairs, in their own world.

.We went to the city office the first week of December and signed the papers — no ceremony, no white dress, no crowd, just bureaucracy, and permanence I suppose. A moment small in appearance and enormous in consequence. One pen stroke and we weren’t dating across continents anymore — we were married.

I flew back to Arizona before the semester resumed. I was a married man. Small ring. Big life. My cold room waiting.

That was the hinge — Japan in winter, Flagstaff in spring, and me between two homes that I didn’t yet know they would trade places for good.

NAU Year Two — Term One

I flew back to Spokane that winter the same way I had the year before — no plan except back to NAU and see what I could do. The red Toyota pickup was waiting for me, still running, still mine, connecting Washington and Arizona. I drove south again — long highways, cheap motels, maps instead of GPS, how I knew what I was doing I have no idea.

Flagstaff was colder that winter, or maybe I had just forgotten what dry cold felt like. I didn’t keep the old room near campus, and I didn’t want to. I spent two nights in a budget hotel, stretching my graduate-tutor income across meals and rent in my head. Still — I was back, and that is what mattered.

A classmate pointed me toward a woman named Bev who had a room for rent. She lived twelve minutes from campus. She has a big house — divorce settlement money, and a shoo downtown that sold wood furniture she built by hand. The furniture was bad, and she told had sold exactly zero pieces. That alone told me she was operating on a different financial zone than the rest of us.

I moved in. My own room, my own bathroom, access to the kitchen, $700 a month. Not luxury, not struggle — just workable. I drove to campus every day, which meant less drinking, more structure. Only once did I drive home drunk, and it scared me enough to make sure it stayed a single incident. Mostly, I left the truck downtown and taxied home, or I didn’t drink at all.

Academically, the rhythm was set — Said, Ray Huang’s 1587, Braudel, Portelli, more Bourdieu when I could manage it. The hardest class was Bob Baron’s Marx seminar. Everything else felt manageable, maybe even easy when I had momentum. My friendship with Mandiola deepened that semester — sharper, closer, more real — the two outsiders orbiting the same department.

That was also when I noticed Sonia. First as a presence — around campus, then behind the counter at the organic market I could barely afford. The book van outside sold $1 paperbacks, and I bought more of those than groceries. We exchanged looks — recognition, curiosity — but nothing more. Later I realized she was an undergrad in the Post-War German History class I lectured in. That alone helped keep the boundary clean.

By late fall the loneliness was real. I was married, but alone. She missed me. I missed her. She was thriving at work — promoted to Head Nurse at 24 — and still, distance was beginning to feel like erosion rather than opportunity. So we made a plan:

So in the Fall of 2000 my wife would come to Flagstaff and take part-time English classes. We would be in the same place again.

Around that same time the last of my Hamilton debt — $17,000 — was paid off by her or by her mother. I’m still not certain which. Either way, relief arrived quietly. I would repay it not as a transaction but by building a life — covering everything from 2002 onward.

And that was the first term of year two. Cold roads, heavy reading, a quiet spark at the edge of ethics, and the decision that distance had served its purpose.

My wife would come next term.

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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.

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On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

So, for the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties.” This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on I was drinking, I was dancing, packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station at 42nd Street into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.