Vote, Vote, Vote!

October 26, 2025October 26, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I was not planning on writing about politics today, but as I worked on a post about the Audra Winter mess (forthcoming), I couldn’t stop thinking about the gubernatorial election that is going on in my state as we speak. If you’re in New Jersey, make sure you go out and vote, preferably Democrat/Mikie Sherrill.

Sherrill was not the person I was backing in the democratic primary over the summer. She is, at best, a mid, moderate democrat. I flipflopped back and forth between Steve Fulop and Ras Baraka up until the day I filled out my ballot, and if nothing else, this primary taught me why we need ranked choice voting in New Jersey. I think, if we had it, we would have a more progressive candidate running for governor.

At the same time, it is not the time to not vote or to vote for everyone but Sherrill. Unfortunately, some elections are meh versus an absolute horror. The republican candidate has run (and lost) repeatedly, but with each campaign, he has aligned more closely with the current president’s agenda. He is anti-queer people, anti-trans people, anti-people of color (his ads are like 99% white people), anti-choice, and his ads try to paint Sherrill as an air-headed woman, which means he is misogynistic as well, big surprise.

As someone with a working uterus (unfortunately) and a partner on HRT, I am terrified that he will be elected. Sherrill has been ahead in the polls consistently but not by that much. This is certainly not a runaway, and as someone said, “Women will vote for misogynists, but misogynists will never vote for women.” New Jersey is a decently liberal state with protections for marginalized people, BUT a lot of them are only edicts from the governor, not anything codified in state law, which would make them harder to get rid of. A republican as governor could rip those protections away within days of getting into office, and I am so worried for trans people, women, anyone that ICE could target.

I think a lot of people assume New Jersey is a thoroughly blue state, but it isn’t. We have a lot of republicans, and my own town is grossly red despite how diverse it is. Because people assume New Jersey will lean democrat no matter what, the fear is that younger people won’t go out and vote. I actually gave my students off for Election Day, so they can go vote, even though we have early voting and mail-in ballots in our state. I want there to be zero excuse for them to do their civic duty. The other reason I give them off on election day is because in past years, the anxiety level has been so high that teaching them feels pointless. Between me and them, we are ten seconds from exploding, and giving them the space to vote and decompress is more important than one lesson on writing essays.

The takeaway from this is to vote with the rights of the most marginalized person you know in mind. Who will care for the sick best? Who will protect reproductive rights if someone needs an abortion? Who will protect the undocumented people in your communities the best? Who will pushback against those who want to take your rights away? And even if they aren’t the most liberal person, who won’t stand in the way if the legislature wants to be more liberal than they are? It is worth preserving what we have and striving for better than spitefully letting things go to shit because your ideal candidate isn’t running. It sucks, but when the choices are meh and horrible, meh is the ethical choice, especially if the meh candidate probably won’t stand in the way of other people’s right to have a good life.

If you’re eligible to vote in NJ, please go vote for the democratic candidates in your area, do research on your school board candidates, and encourage others to vote as well. And if you’re in NYC, vote Mamdani (because I wish he was my governor instead of your mayor).

Personal Life

On False Crabs and Real People

August 10, 2025August 10, 2025 Kara Jorgensen2 Comments

Right now, in the US and UK especially there is a ton of transphobia, and every time I hear cis people being weird about trans people, I think of king crabs. Yes, crabs. Now, bear with me because this will make sense.

So you know king crabs, right? Giant crab, long legs, lives in very cold water up north for the most part, you find them in seafood boil bags, very expensive and tasty, a star of Deadliest Catch. Well, did you know that king crabs aren’t technically crabs?

Now, the thing with crabs is that they are an optimal life form: the perfect shape, the right amount of agile and little guy, can fit into many ecological niches while being able to survive well. Over eons, you had crabs evolve, but you also had convergent evolution where other things also evolved into crabs. If you look at crabs closer, you will notice that there are different infraorders in regards to their classification. You have true crabs, which are infraorder brachyura and are the original crab lineage. Then, you have false crabs, which belong in the infraorder anomura and have evolved to look and be like crabs.

Can the general public tell a true crab from a false crab? No. If it has the right amount of legs, looks crab shaped, and acts like a crab, it is for all intents and purposes, a crab.

People don’t go to a seafood restaurant and get upset because king crab is listed in the selections of crabs or in the crab tank with the other crabs when it’s a false crab because it is identified as a crab. If you went into a seafood market and started checking to see if the crabs were true crabs or false crabs by flipping them over and checking their abdomens for any remnants of the tail false crabs have, people would think there was something wrong with you and kick you out. That’s basically how transphobes and terfs behave. They just heard about false crabs, so now, they need to disturb everyone by checking all the crabs in the tank under the guise of safety when all the crabs were fine mingling together. The panic over true and false is made up.

The only people who really care about the difference between true crabs and false crabs are scientists who are looking at very specific parameters in their studies, and this is how it should be with cis and trans people. Medical professionals or scientists who study differences in hormones or anatomy, probably need to know, but for the vast majority of people, there is no difference and it isn’t their business. And once hormones/hormone replacement therapy gets involved and levels are stable for a while, there is very little difference between binary trans people and cis people.

And even without hormones, if a person decides to change their clothes and name to socially transition, then respect them; it isn’t hard. If you would not pop the shell off a hermit crab and declare to everyone that isn’t a true crab and shouldn’t be called a hermit crab or allowed a shell, then don’t call out people for being trans in a negative way. Yes, hermit crabs, one of the most famous crabs, is a false crab. It has a tail inside its shell.

Horseshoe crabs do not pass very well as crabs. They are shaped like a toilet seat and have a long tail and look nothing like a crab apart from their legs, and yet we still call them crabs without any fuss. It truly isn’t hard to respect what something or someone is called.

The thing with crabs is that creatures evolve into them because it is beneficial to their survival and being trans is the same way. People transition because it is the thing that will keep them alive. It is beneficial to their soul and mental and physical health. Just because they didn’t start out that way doesn’t mean it isn’t better for them to change and become something new.

If someone says they are a woman or a man or nonbinary or anything in between, respect it and acknowledge it because if you can manage to call anything remotely crab-shaped a crab, then congrats, you can respect a trans person’s gender and identity no matter how well they perform their gender.

Personal Life

Gender on my Terms

December 8, 2024December 6, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I’m nonbinary. Gender makes little sense to me as a social construct because, to me, people are people, but the moment I’m perceived as a woman (along with all the assumptions that come with that), I understand how heavily others rely on gender and how much I don’t like it. I would feel like I was in drag against my will when I was forced to dress femininely growing up. Dysphoria hits me hard the moment I have to wear a dress or skirt or put my hair a certain way.

The problem is that my gender is like Goldilocks. Feminine things set off my dysphoria hard, but if I go too far into masculinity, my brain rebels as well. I don’t want facial or body hair beyond what I already have or a deeper masculine voice. I tend to just say I’m agender because I would like to put gender as a social construct in the trash like moldy leftovers. Still, I find myself on the masc side but lightly. Can fop be a gender? I want to wear saturated colors, wear my hair long but pulled back, and occasionally indulge in frothy lace. Wearing a frock coat and breeches like Anne Hathaway in Twelfth Night is gender goals, even now.

As someone who struggles with changes, I have sort of eased into being a little more masc. This has mostly been because gender is complicated, and as I mentioned earlier, I get dysphoria in either direction. I also don’t want to take hormones or have surgery at this point. Instead, I’ve been stepping back and started thinking, what do you already have or do that’s a little masc that you want to make more obvious?

I have always thought my very square, straight shoulders look masculine, so I decided that I would work out my arms and shoulders to make them a little more sturdy. I do not want to be swole as the kids say, but I would like to be stronger and have more defined arms. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working out my arms, back, and shoulders nearly every day, and I’ve been enjoying it. In the past, I’ve struggled to exercise due to my asthma reacting very poorly to cardio despite being on stronger meds, but weight lifting doesn’t bother my asthma or inflammatory issues at all. I’m already seeing a little progress, which has been gratifying. The workouts should also help to strengthen my muscles and help control the hypermobility in my shoulders. In the past, I’ve shied away from other exercise because it’s mostly about weight loss or looking more feminine, which I’m not interested in.

For a while, I had been toying with buying a compression bra or binder to squash down my chest a bit. I put it off because a “real” binder might compress my ribs too much, and sometimes, due to hypermobility, they slide out of place, which is very painful. I ended up buying a compression bra from a trans-affirming company, and it has been really nice. I’ve never really liked my chest because it’s oversized, and when people register its presence, they see it as feminine, which I don’t really want. Squashing them down but not completely removing them has been enough to make me happy. It also makes working out my arms, back, and shoulders much easier. While these changes might seem small, they have made me very happy.

When I think of what my gender means to me or what it feels like, it’s masculine softness. I tend to think of characters like Stede Bonnet from Our Flag Means Death or Lestat from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles or even Zorro’s brother from Zorro the Gay Blade. I often joke that my gender is “weird little guy” like Gomez Addams or basically any character Nathan Lane has ever played, which amounts to queer and slightly silly. My gender is tender and loving with an edge of morbidity and strangeness (and probably a few startled yelp-screams as they are the cry of the weird little guy).

My partner is also embarking on a gender journey that will probably look different from mine, and I’m very grateful to be along for the ride to support them along the way. As we get closer to the new administration taking over, I want everyone to remember that bodily autonomy extended to gender expression. We should all be allowed to be the people we want to be or feel we are without government interference, and that includes children. I had dysphoria as a tween, even if I didn’t have the words for it, and if I had been able, I would have loved to have gotten hormone blockers to avoid the dysphoria that came with early puberty. I guess I’ll just end this by saying trans rights are human rights, and children deserve the same right to live as themselves as I and my partner do. Please bug your reps and senators to not throw trans people under the bus.

Personal Life · Writing

When a Happy Ending is an Act of Defiance

May 8, 2022 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’ve been struggling to think of what to say this past week. Or really the past month or so, because most of my thoughts amount to “I have lots of feelings, none of them good.”

Living in the US, I have been constantly surrounded by headlines about overturning reproductive healthcare/abortion, attacks on queer relationships, and transphobic laws that seem to want to stamp out our existence. It’s so much all at once that it’s mind-numbing. I’m a nonbinary person with a uterus, and while my reproductive health is somewhat secure due to steps my partner and I have previously taken, this is all a lot. I think for anyone who gives a shit about other people, this past month has been a lot.

I’m tired, my brain feels pulled in a hundred directions, and I feel the negativity creeping through my veins because a very loud minority has decided I shouldn’t exist and many of my friends shouldn’t exist. Or if they do, it’s only on their terms.

And it has made it very hard to write lately. The weight of hatred and uncertainty looms over me constantly, but it reminds me why I started writing in the first place.

Back in 2014, we were still fighting to have same-sex marriage recognized. States were facing lawsuits after banning it even after it was legalized country-wide. Anti-queer sentiment was overt, loud, and just as painful as it is now. I remember staring at my books with their cast of queer characters and wondering if there was still a place in the world for me. Publishers were still pushing queer characters to the sidelines or cutting queer plotlines all together unless they were not on the page. I’ve written before about why I self-published, so I won’t stay on it too long, but the sidelining of queer characters/relationships was why I decided to self-publish. No publisher or company or anyone but me could make my characters straight.

Writing queer characters who eventually got their happily ever after was an act of defiance. In romance, marriage is the usual happily ever after because that’s what cis het M/F couples do. It’s recognizable, it’s legally binding, it’s overt. I wanted that for my characters even if that wasn’t legally possible in the 1890s. The next best thing was a faux wedding (as seen in Dead Magic‘s binding ceremony), but having queer characters find each other, love each other, live closely, and be recognized as a couple by their friends and family was still defiance.

When you write anything involving historical elements and queer characters, reviewers will toss back in your face that “being gay was illegal” back then. Well, so was prostitution, adultery, theft, and murder, yet all those happened as well and no one complains when they read about those things in historical romance. The double standard is eye-roll inducing, but each of those obnoxious reviews spurred me to write more queer characters and eventually more trans characters.

In the back of Kinship and Kindness, I even included a short further reading section about trans people in the 1800s. So many lived normal lives where they worked regular jobs, socialized, and even married. Often, the weren’t even outed as trans until after death, but people don’t want to take into account that people could blend in or that their communities protected them or at least looked the other way if they knew. We all know of famous supposedly straight historical figures who had a “roommate they were really close to” or “a dear friend” they often holidayed with in the South of France that people still refuse to believe were some flavor of queer.

When we write queer characters during times that feel fraught, it is an act of defiance. Writing their lives is a declaration of our existence, our struggles, our love for each other. The stories don’t have to be happy. Their lives don’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) perfect. But writing queer characters into existence as complex, real people is hammering home that we cannot be stamped out. We will not disappear.

I’ve been trying to remind myself of this as I work on my writing. My projects matter even when the world feels like it’s pressing in. There’s always the hope that someone will see themselves in my characters and feel better for a time or lose themselves in whatever drama is playing out. The Reanimator’s Heart has a society of paranormals where people are more likely to be queer than not, and there’s also a lavender marriage where each participant has a partner of their own (one of which is a sapphic trans woman and the other is an autistic gay man). Even if it’s the mid 1890s, everyone manages to live a fulfilling life and eventually find happiness, and that matters.

If you’re writing queer books right now, no matter how bleak it feels, it still matters. Someone out there is clinging to your work in this storm.