Hi! It’s been a minute. I’ve been going through a rough time lately, to say the least. And as, unfortunately, I am wont to do, I’ve let my personal struggles spill over into how I interact with people on the internet, and not in a good way. I plan on addressing that in (possibly a series of?) posts in the coming weeks. But here’s a super quick and not-at-all-exhaustive update on what’s been up with me.
Ten days ago, I had a transition-related surgery (or “gender-affirming surgery,” if that’s more your lingo). It’s not my first, but it’s probably the biggest one I’ve had. And hopefully, it’s the final one I’ll need. (Things seem to be fine.) I didn’t actually plan on publicly talking about it at all, because over the course of the past several years, I’ve gotten a lot more self-conscious about publicly sharing milestones related to my transition, which began back in 2012, a simpler time when every single person on the planet didn’t seem to have an opinion on trans people, if we should exist, or how we should be allowed to participate in society. I started sharing a lot less about my personal life over the years (even selfies are pretty rare on my social media accounts these days).
But I don’t think it’s really possible to explain my (more than a week-long) absence from TPA and some personal failings I’ll open up about without talking about the surgery to some extent. So, bear with me.
If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed that I’ve been picking fights with anyone and everyone on the internet. Friends. Acquaintances. Professional colleagues. Complete strangers. I’ve always had a really short fuse, but the past few weeks have really taken it to a new and embarrassing level. I was telling people to “fuck off into the sun” over a mild disagreement with the frequency a normal person would say, “Good morning!” This is… very bad. There is shame, embarrassment, guilt, and a whole lot of personal apologies to be doled out in the near future. In most cases, I will not deserve, nor will I likely find acceptance for said apologies.
Several weeks ago, to prepare for the aforementioned surgery, I had to go off of my estrogen (I was only able to restart it on Monday of this week). And just... however obnoxious, rude, and self-absorbed I usually am, I’m just a whole, whole lot more unregulated when I’m not on my hormones. And at first, it didn’t even fully register with me that I was being extra hair-trigger-y and irrational. And even once I did, I couldn’t find the will to stop being mean to people who didn’t deserve the type of response I was giving them. It’s not an excuse. Just context.
I know my worst impulses well enough that, before the surgery, I bought a product called Brick (a little NFC tag that locks you out of certain apps — I set it to keep me out of X, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky — until you tap your phone against it again) so I wouldn’t do anything stupid while I was in the hospital for a few days immediately following the surgery. However, when I was discharged from the hospital, I thought I was more stable than I was.
This is not me saying, “I wasn’t on my hormones! Wah! It’s not my fault!” This is me saying that I really want to talk about all of this, but I need to actually physically recover from this surgery before I can do that to the extent that I want to.
And I don’t want this to be some sort of, “I won’t flip out on someone for saying something I disagree with again” post, because that’s the problem: as much as I’ve tried, I can’t seem to actually keep those promises. So I’m going to hold off on making more of them until I’m confident I can make good. I am trying, and I will keep trying until I can.
But for years now, I’ve been acutely aware that social media and direct text communication is where I’m at my absolute worst. I just don’t think I can do text-based social media anymore (a conclusion I’ve reached a number of times in the past, but haven’t followed through on my planned actions of, you know, no longer using these social media platforms, no longer DMing people irritated or angry rants. I’m going to try it again, and I’ve already locked down my Twitter and Bluesky accounts. I really hope I can resist the Sirens’ call back to the apps that functioned as the primary way I communicated with people all the way back to MySpace. It’s not going to be enough to just say, “Okay, I’m done using social media anymore,” because I’ve tried that and failed. I’m working to figure out a true plan of action, and I just don’t quite know what that’s going to look like yet. So I’ll be addressing that in the near future, as well. It took me several times to quit smoking, and weirdly, stupidly, this has been harder for me.
I know I can communicate without blowing up at people online because I do it in every article I write. The words are deliberate. The tone is deliberate. But there’s something about microblogging and direct text communication that I just haven’t been able to make work no matter how much I’ve tried over the past 15 years or so.
So, stay tuned for more on all of that. When I know what I’m going to do, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, hang tight. Today’s piece, below, is somewhat related. - PM
Strangely, I can relate
On Tuesday, the Boston Globe Magazine published a story by Annalisa Quinn about Last Ditch, a struggling lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. A defining feature of the bar was that it required patrons to wear KN95 masks. And at the end of last month, it announced that while masks would remain mandatory for the rest of the week, Saturday nights would be mask-optional, a decision born out of financial necessity in hopes of saving the bar. It was a literal last-ditch effort to save Last Ditch.
The story went super-mega-viral (not unlike the viruses its patrons were trying to avoid). And it’s not that readers were just super interested in a story about the financial struggles of lesbian bar in a small town in Massachusetts, but because it gave them something to gawk at.
People got a lot of laughs out of the story, because it was kind of a collection of what “normies” would think of as a perfect storm of “woke” excesses. Where to start?
You’ve got a bar that requires its patrons to wear masks. A lot of people laugh at the very idea of a mask mandate in September 2026, nearly seven years into the pandemic (coincidentally, one of the blow-ups I had via text with a professional colleague days earlier was about mask mandates and whether or not the COVID-19 pandemic was actually over). There’s a drag performer, one of the bar’s co-founders, who uses it/its pronouns. There’s a he/him lesbian (I know this is confusing, but really, truly, this is not a concept that anyone outside the queer community should concern themselves with, really, it’s fine). There’s the fact that even the bar’s apology for the tone of its announcement got attacked because the image it posted to Instagram didn’t have alt text. (That’s what screen readers use to describe images for visually impaired people. Alt text is good! Use alt text when it’s an option and you’re able to!) There’s the fact that one of the founders left to enroll in clown school.
And then there’s the backlash, which goes way beyond what anyone would consider reasonable. Here’s one of the comments on the original post:
“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic].”
On September 11, the bar held its monthly community meeting, with a licensed therapist on hand to serve as a mediator for what looked to be a pretty tense situation. Some of the attendees were there in person. Some attended virtually over Zoom.
The therapist told the people joining over Zoom that she loved having them there, but that “these platforms alienate us from each other. I’m talking about social media.” She asked whether everyone could try to step out of “places of righteousness,” and said she’d love to get to a place “where we all know each other’s face, where we all know each other’s name.”
That did not go over well with the online attendees.
“It’s messed up that the mediator is dismissing those attending virtually. That’s not accessibility,” someone wrote in the chat. Another said, “A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgment of harm and I’m hearing a WHITE therapist ... center[ing] the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff.” At one point, attendees claimed that as therapists are mandated reporters, that basically made the therapist the same thing as a cop who could have them hospitalized against their will. Her mere presence was “wildly unsafe.”
And man, that’s just... a lot going on. You’ve got some righteous grandstanding, some paranoia, identities being used as cudgels. And through it all, a demand for something like accountability or punishment.
26-year-old Jackie Matellian, the last of the bar’s three founders still running it, cried when it was her turn to speak. See, Last Ditch wasn’t actually her “passion project,” so much as it was her two other co-founders’. “I never really wanted to do this,” she told the room. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.” She was there, still trying to make things work because she was on the hook for the $50,000 loan that the founders took out to launch the bar in the first place. Apparently, she’s been living in her truck for six months and working four different jobs to try to make it all work. It had broken her. She was financially ruined, she was emotionally ruined, and she was just trying to do the best she could to keep from things getting even worse.
The chat was not moved by any of that. One attendee said, “[Y]ou chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”
It’s just... well, it’s a trainwreck. The whole thing is a trainwreck. And oh boy, do people like to watch trainwrecks. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, a note to Globe staff said the story brought in 1,000 subscribers in a single day. The paper’s managing editor called it “by far our best performing story of the year,” and said that it was “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records.”
That’s wild. This is the same paper, founded in 1872, that published the 2002 investigative series about sex abuse in the Catholic Church that inspired the movie Spotlight! And now, a story about a failing lesbian bar in a small town in Massachusetts was going to be the paper’s crown jewel of 2026.
National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry asked his colleagues to name their favorite lines from the story. (He went with the clown school quote, for what it’s worth.) And honestly, I cannot blame the public for gawking at this disaster.
Sadly, all of this is almost certainly going to end with the bar closing sometime in the very near future, and its owner will be something nearing destitute. Far from the laugh riot it’s been made out to be, it’s just really, really sad. The bar probably never had a chance. Masks, no masks, it’s really difficult to run a lesbian bar in the 2020s. It was doomed from the start, and the whole thing is heartbreaking. For the bar, for its patrons, for its owner, and for the local queer community.
And when you look at it, especially from afar, it’s clear that the amount of rage and vitriol directed at a bar owner who was just trying her best to keep her business afloat was not rational. It’s not fair.
Saying you hope a bar gets firebombed is crazy! I’m sure the person who wrote it felt righteous. And that’s... kind of the thing here... it’s really, really easy to sit behind a screen and say some of the most unhinged, anger-fueled things you can imagine. It’s so easy. There’s a word for it: keyboard warrior. I’m pretty sure whoever wrote that comment wouldn’t have said it to Matellian’s face.
And that’s where I’m at
That’s where I can relate to the story. That’s a big part of my problem. I’ve been the “firebomb” person! Sometimes I am (not literally in this case) the “firebomb” person! Sometime about a decade or so ago, I once infamously yelled at via direct message on Twitter a whole host of horrible things (”Die in a fire! Drink bleach!” and some stuff that I can’t even print here because of a disagreement over whether or not journalists deserved to be paid for their work). And try as I might, truly, truly, I can’t keep myself from losing my cool on the internet. Pretty much every controversy I’ve gotten myself into on the internet over the past 15 years or so happened because it’s just so easy to type things you would never, ever say to someone’s face. Or even over the phone. One of my recent blow-ups actually started with the other person suggesting we have the conversation over the phone. And you know what? Had I taken them up on that offer, I’m sure it would have been a fine conversation! We might not have agreed, but it would have been normal, and not the antisocial disaster of insult-slinging via text that it ended up being.
See, god, this is embarrassing to admit, but I’ve always hated talking on the phone. For one, I’m a lot quicker at putting words together when I can see them in writing on a screen. But mostly, it’s always been a source of anxiety for me. When I was a kid, I’d pick up the phone, say hello, and hear one of my mom’s friends say, “Hey, Sue!” (Sue is my mom.) My voice wasn’t particularly masculine. For a while before I came out as trans, I worked in a call center, and I got a lot of “I was just talking to the young lady” when a caller who’d been disconnected from me moments earlier called back and got someone else, so I started trying to purposely pitch my voice down a bit. Then I came out, and I became extremely self-conscious about my voice all over again, this time thinking that it “clocked” me as trans, because I thought it was too masculine and because of the years of affectations I’d been applying. (Think the way Elizabeth Holmes used to speak publicly.)
And lol, the truth is that my voice has always just been a bit feminine for a man, masculine for a woman, but in reality, I’m the only one hung up on it. No one else really cares, I’m sure. Additionally, I live a pretty physically isolated life.
Not long ago, I’d been beefing with someone on Twitter about an organization he worked for and trans issues. At one point, he was like, “Parker, I’m going to block you.” (And I’d have definitely deserved it.) I offered a video chat instead, and he said yes. We ended up talking for about half an hour and actually had a productive conversation. It was a good experience! I still don’t agree with him on the stuff we disagreed about, but I felt like I understood his position better, and I could feel a lot less rage. Unfortunately, that was in the middle of me still having a lot of BIG feelings in texts and DMs and group chats, the ones I wrote about at the top of this post.
I need to get tf over myself and learn to pick up the phone. Because if I don’t, if I try to keyboard-warrior my way through it by text or tweet or even email, I’m going to keep getting worse. I’m going to keep alienating what friends I have left. I’m going to keep making enemies. I’m going to keep being the worst version of myself possible. I hate that version of myself.
I’m going to get into all of this in more detail, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, if I had to guess? I just need to not be writing this from my phone while in my bed.