Since first getting access to its closed beta back in March, I’ve spent quite a bit of time messing around with Midjourney’s artificial intelligence art tool

About a week ago, I decided to make it my goal to use AI to generate 1,000 pictures of SpongeBob SquarePants.

I’ll explain, but let’s enjoy some photos first. Here is what the AI gave me when I asked for Chris Evans in a live-action SpongeBob SquarePants movie, as well as another image, which was something along the lines of “SpongeBob SquarePants as a Mark Rothko painting.” I like them both, in part because they don’t actually look like SpongeBob SquarePants.

“Detailed vintage photograph of SpongeBob SquarePants at a pool party” and “Vintage photograph of SpongeBob SquarePants as a Chicago Bulls fan.”

A child’s crayon drawing of SpongeBob SquarePants and a SpongeBob tattoo.

Photos of SpongeBob in the pit at a metal show.

And then there were a lot of these, which were just… eerie and unsettling.

The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. If you like my work, the best way to show it is to become a paid subscriber. Additionally, for every new paid subscription I get in the next 24 hours, I’ll post one of my more than 1,000 SpongeBobs to Twitter.

I started this project because I desperately needed something to occupy my mind.

[Content warning: discussion of depression, suicidal ideation, etc.]

I don’t have to tell you that things are bad right now. No matter who you are, I’m sure there is something that is just straight-up bad happening, and whatever it is, I hope you’re weathering that storm.

But yes, things are bad. For me, it’s a matter of things being bad in the sense that I worry whether or people like me — transgender people, and LGBTQ people, generally — will be able to exist and live in peace, now and in the future. I want to feel hopeful, but every day, I’d wake up, open Twitter, and see some new horror.

An 11,000 word New York Times Magazine feature about trans kids who are supposedly receiving transition-related health care without proper screening that doesn’t show a single example of that happening. A New York Times columnist who has written a total of 15 opinion pieces since being hired in April, three of which (20%) have been anti-trans smears that baselessly blame trans people for everything from the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade to book bannings. A FiveThirtyEight blog post that twists polling data to fit an anti-trans narrative. A Republican Party that has decided that the eradication of trans people should be priority number one.

I see it all, I hear it all, and it’s taken me to a real breaking point lately.

What makes all of it so frustrating is that the arguments being made by the anti-trans side of things tend to have little to do with reality.

It’s one thing to try to win a political fight, but it’s another when you have to explain that no, trans people are not trying to ban the word “woman;” no, there’s not some epidemic of trans kids getting treatment too early and without evaluation; no, trans people (and LGBTQ people, generally) are not “grooming” children. This all makes it impossible to just get to the heart of the issue, which is that trans people just want to be accepted by society and legally protected against discrimination in housing, employment, health care, and public accommodations (just as people are protected from discrimination in those areas on the basis of other characteristics like race, sex, religion, etc.).

Instead of pieces dealing with those legitimate issues, mainstream media outlets have decided to go all-in on this sort of “Here’s a rumor we heard about trans people, so this is the news now.” type of coverage. It certainly doesn’t help that these news outlets have decided that trans people who speak out about their life, experiences, and desire to just exist as “activists.” Calling people “activists” is a way to delegitimize them as biased and incapable of telling the truth. It’s why none of these stories about trans people actually get told by trans people.

Yashar Ali recently pointed out that when it comes to actual, paid on-air talent, Fox News is the only big-name cable news outlet that actually has a single trans contributor (in Fox’s case, it’s Caitlyn Jenner, who appears on the channel mostly to argue against trans rights — so that’s not exactly something to Fox’s credit). CNN and MSNBC? None.

Just a couple of weekends ago, I saw a CNN segment about someone saying “people who can become pregnant” instead of “woman.” There to discuss it was… former Trump campaign official David Urban, and… former Trump administration official Alyssa Farah Griffin. The two of them were clueless on the topic, and any viewers who were hoping to understand why someone might say “people who can become pregnant” rather than “woman” (for instance, the recent case of the 10-year-old Ohio girl that was all over the news — to refer to her as a “woman” really skews just how horrific it is that Republican-controlled states want to make girls like her carry a pregnancy to term), were out of luck.

So anyway, all of this has just been bouncing around in my head lately, and it’s taking a toll. Lately, I’m just sad. Lately, I feel hopeless. Lately, I’ve again begun struggling to see what a future with me in it looks like. And all of that is just reinforced by the press, by Twitter, and should Republicans get their way, by the government.

There’s an April 2019 article by Anna Borges that was published at the Outline that I keep coming back to. It was called, “I am not always very attached to being alive,” and it detailed Borges’ experience living with passive suicidal ideation.

“I wish there was a nicer way to say this, but I don’t always want to be alive. Right now, I don’t actively want to kill myself — I don’t have a plan, I don’t check the majority of the boxes on lists of warning signs of suicide, I have a life I enjoy and I’m curious about the future — but the fact remains, I don’t always feel strongly about being alive and sometimes, on particularly bad days, I truly want to die,” Borges opens the piece.

I feel that. I feel all of that. None of that is new to me. That said, the “particularly bad days,” for me, have been more frequent as of late. Still, I’m fine. Don’t worry.

Before I came out as trans, my bouts of suicidal ideation were definitely more of an “active” phenomenon than the passive form they’ve taken since. I think the improvement has to do with no longer feeling at war with myself and my own body (at least nowhere near. as much as I used to be). Instead, the war has taken external forms: how society treats me, for instance. Lately, I’ve found a disturbing number of people who believe that being trans is an “ideology.” It’s not. Opponents of trans rights seem to think that if you label trans people as though their existence is a sort of political belief, their eliminationist rhetoric becomes more palatable to a wider audience.

The more of it I see, the more of it I read, the more of it I hear, the more I slip into a state of despair. I know that simply ignoring the news doesn’t make it go away (anti-trans laws and anti-trans sentiment will still hurt me and hurt others like me — also, keeping up with what’s happening in the press is quite literally my job), but if I can take breaks, I think I can stay afloat. And here I am, folks, floating.

For now, that’s meant cutting way back on Twitter. If you look at my feed, you’ll notice that I haven’t posted anything other than links to my articles (or responding to occasional questions about those articles) for the past week. Instead, in the time that I’d ordinarily spend posting and reading, I’ve just been typing prompts into Midjourney, instead. “Show me… SpongeBob Squarepants as a WWII soldier storming the beaches of Normandy.” Boom.

Why am I writing this? Because I doubt I’m alone in my despair.

I’m begging mainstream media outlets to rethink how they cover trans issues. I’m begging politicians to rethink how they use trans issues to advance their own culture war agenda items. I’m begging the world to understand that trans people are human beings.

Some people are big on “pride.” “Gay pride!” “Trans pride!” and so on. Good for them. I’m not, to be honest. I’m not “proud,” so much as I’m just… here. I spent two and a half decades of my life trying not to be trans and only came out when I found myself at a fork in the road: one path meant suicide, the other meant honesty to myself and a glimmer of hope. I chose hope. Lately, though, with the ways things have gotten worse for trans people, I wonder if other people at that same fork in the road still feel that kind of hopefulness. I hope they do.

But if you are feeling sad, if you are feeling depressed, if you are feeling hopeless, just know that I’m right there with you. I hope that things will get better, that the press will choose to be better, and that politicians will choose to see our humanity even if they can’t quite understand it.

In the meantime, keep doing whatever it is that keeps you afloat. For me, for the moment, that means more SpongeBobs.

Today’s tunes:

“Death of an Interior Decorator” by Death Cab for Cutie