First, a couple of quick plugs!

I have a novel coming out in August called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. A trans witch decides to bring her grief-stricken mother back to the world the only way she can think of: by teaching her mom to do magic. It’s my homage to A.S. Byatt’s Possession as well as all my favorite books about complicated magic and even more complicated families. You can pre-order a signed/personalized copy from Green Apple — and if you’re in Canada and pre-order before July 20, you can get a signed bookplate from Cross & Crows in Vancouver. And if you pre-order anywhere, please send me your receipt and I’ll give you a hefty glimpse of the sequel to All the Birds in the Sky. (Details here.)

Also! I’m bringing back my reading series, Writers With Drinks. We’re doing a special event next Saturday, July 12, at Strut in the Castro featuring M.M. Olivas, June Martin, Natasha Muse, Alex Hanna and Lio Min. And then on Aug 14 in Seattle, we’re featuring Becky Chambers, Andrea Hairston, Darcie Little Badger, Annalee Newitz, Cecilia Tan and me. (RSVP required — please buy a ticket here.)

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I don’t want to write about selfish or cruel heroes

Lately I’ve been working on a couple of brand new novels that I hope to sell later this year or early next year. I've written some chapters, but I decided to go back and do a bit more outlining and brainstorming before I can keep moving forward.

(Side note: I hate the plotter/pantser dichotomy, the same way I hate all false binaries. Every writer is both plotter and pantser! There is no way to not be both! It’s a spectrum, dammit!!!)

Where was I? Oh yeah. One of the big stumbling blocks with both of these new novels has been making sure I really understand my characters and where they're coming from. Sometimes, I can figure out a lot of this stuff on the fly — by seeing how these people react to different scenarios, or what they end up chasing after. But in the case of these novels, I found that I needed to hash out my main characters, and figure out what motivates them.

I really like a character with a strong motivation — someone who wants something, or believes in something, that will carry them forward so they’re not just swept along by the plot. When I wrote the opening chapters of All the Birds in the Sky, I tried to make readers bond with Patricia and Laurence by giving them strong goals right off the bat. Patricia really, really wants to save that wounded bird, and protect it from her evil sister. Laurence really wants to go see a rocket launch and escape from the numbing conformity imposed on him by his parents. Hopefully, you end up rooting for them to achieve those goals, and this leads to you caring about them in general.

So I've spent a lot of time lately bashing away at the motivations for the major players in these two brand new novels. Do they want fame? Power? Revenge for some past injury? Are they seeking to reclaim a lost family legacy? Are they desperately in love? Even if a character doesn't want a MacGuffin, or some prize that they’ll crawl through barbed wire to get to, it's helpful if a character has an overall sense of what they want from life.

(It’s certainly possible to care about characters who don't care about anything, but I sometimes find it harder.) 

Pretty much across the board, I’ve found myself gravitating toward characters whose motivations are basically altruistic. That is to say, they want to do good in the world. They want to help people who are hurting or in trouble, even total strangers. They want to be kind and generous, even when the world makes this really challenging. 

Writing an altruistic character is a form of wish fulfillment and escapism for me — because lately, I feel utterly horrified at the systemic evil in the world, and I desperately wish I could do more to help everyone who is being ground up by the gears of exploitation and hatred.

I keep thinking about when I was a college student, and one of my professors told me that someone who is committed to a philosophy of total hedonism could still be generous and kind — because helping others is one of life’s great pleasures. (I think this was part of a conversation about Samuel Johnson, maybe?) At the time I felt like this was a bit of sophistry — sure, doing good is a form of enjoyment, but it’s not the same as eating really excellent pizza. But as time has gone on, I kind of see his point: I like pizza, and taking long walks, and other stuff, but being able to make a real positive difference in someone else’s life does feel extremely good.

And because there’s only so much I can do for others without burning out — I speak from experience, unfortunately — being able to help a lot does feel, weirdly, like an escapist fantasy. In some ways, it’s better wish fulfillment than having a whole dang castle.

As you can probably tell, I also think of writing benevolent characters as a way of advancing a theory of human nature. Many powerful people seem to believe that humans are intrinsically selfish, and it’s natural to take satisfaction in keeping other people down. (Especially people who are “othered” in various ways.) I think the need to reject this idea is definitely one reason for the popularity of cozy fiction, and it’s one reason why I'm increasingly leery of the traditional three-act structure. Many of us want to believe that people can be better, that kindness can win out — and lead to more kindness, in a virtuous cycle.

People can create huge messes with the best of intentions. You can set out to help someone else and end up making their life worse, not better, because you didn’t bother to ask them what kind of help they needed or wanted. I have a huge soft spot for characters who rush in to try and make a situation better, only to misunderstand and create a bigger problem. (Or who do the things that they know would make them feel better, but which end up making someone else feel worse.) In other words, there are plenty of stories to be told about a person who earnestly wants to help.

And as much as noble motives go really well with hedonism, they also go incredibly well with anger — at injustice, at unnecessary suffering — and as I’ve said before, anger is one of my favorite things in the world.

A while ago, I did a post on Bluesky and Tumblr which went mega viral in both places and keeps popping up again:

On Bluesky, I followed this up by clarifying that I do love a sympathetic villain — someone whose motivations are complicated and kind of relatable. But I also love the kind of villain that Shakespeare used to specialize in, someone who is just a hateful, cruel piece of shit. I'm still the person who wrote Bianca in The City in the Middle of the Night, as well as Marrant in the Unstoppable trilogy. (Not to mention Jeremy in “Don’t Press Charges.”) And I can’t help noticing that a heck of a lot of real-life people seem to be taking immense pleasure in committing unspeakable atrocities against the people they despise.

It may well be true that every villain is the hero of their own story — but in many cases, it’s a dark, ugly story about greed and domination.

(Years ago I wrote a novel that never saw print, featuring one character who’s a selfish monster. At one point, people try to confront him about his behavior, and he says, “Whatever, I went to Princeton. I know all about the Banana of Evil.” It turns out that he basically slept through a lecture on Hannah Arendt and nobody can convince him that there’s not a type of fruit called the Banana of Evil. This still makes me giggle.)

Anyway, as part of my recent hunger to write stories about altruists, I’m not really writing villains lately. I might throw in the occasional minor antagonist, meaning someone who happens to stand in the protagonist's way but isn't necessarily acting out of malice or even trying on purpose to thwart the protagonist's goals. (I was very keen that All the Birds in the Sky not include any villains, but Theodolphus Rose kept resisting my attempts to cut him out.)

My current vibe is that I will include reprehensible people in my books — but they won't be major characters.

Case in point: Lessons in Magic and Disaster features a couple of characters who are bigoted assholes, and neither of them gets much “screen time.” They show up long enough to inflict some damage, and then they're gone again. The book isn’t really about them, and the only reason they really matter is because my characters struggle with what to do about them. They could almost be natural disasters. If I’d wanted to develop them as characters, I would have written a very different book, and it might have been one about them learning to acknowledge the harm they’ve done and try to make amends — which would be an interesting story to tell someday, for sure. It’s just not the story I was setting out to tell this time around.

I’ve written a fair number of fascists over the years, and for the most part I’m comfortable with not humanizing them or softening my portrayal of them. At the same time, I want to acknowledge that they exist and can do real harm.

Years ago, I went to a philosophy conference where a number of people delivered papers about human nature, focusing on ethics and what it means to be a virtuous person. One paper lives forever in my mind: Loren Lomasky, a professor from UVA, delivered a paper arguing that we need to account for the existence of malevolence. Sometimes people want to hurt each other out of spite, out of anger, or just because they feel like it. As much as we want to think about benevolence is a huge part of human nature, we need to reckon with malevolence — or it will reckon with us.

The way I'm feeling right now, I want to write primarily about benevolence, and the challenges as well as the rewards of trying to do good in a messed up world. I also want to acknowledge that malevolence is real, but I don't feel the need to wallow in it. I see plenty of malevolence in the world right now, and depicting its opposite feels like an imaginative lift as well as a deeply satisfying rebuke to the worst theory of who we are at our core.

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Music I Love Right Now

I have a brand new obsession, and her name is Nik West. She’s a funk vocalist and bass player, who’s gotten the seal of approval from none other than Larry Graham. I think I might have seen one of her videos in the past, but she got my attention when she released a brilliant cover of Graham’s song “Hair” — which is a hard song to do justice to, y’all. She also released a live album earlier this year, called Little Big Beat Studio Live Session, and I cannot stop listening to it. Her bass virtuosity is utterly thrilling, and she’s also a phenomenal songwriter. That live performance is on YouTube as a video, and I encourage you to check it out now. (Literally the only thing I don’t like about this video is the shots of the audience sitting politely in their folding chairs instead of getting up and shaking their booties. What is wrong with these people???)

That’s it — that’s the whole post.

 

The mom of a trans girl pleaded with a New York Times producer not to use audio captured in a vulnerable moment. Against her will, the company is slated to use the clip for its new podcast.

  

by Evan Urquhart

This story was copublished with The Objective.

A New York Times podcast on transgender youth health care, released June 5, features the mother of a trans girl against her will after producers caught a vulnerable moment on tape. 

The teaser for the podcast, The Protocol, says that it will examine the history and politicization of gender-affirming care for youth. But Assigned Media has learned the six-episode podcast is slated to include audio from the mother of a trans girl who begged producers not to include it in the show. It comes at a time of rising anti-trans hate incidents, with trans and gender-nonconforming people most targeted by discriminatory violence in the past year. 

In light of the NYT’s own record of biased coverage of trans youth, as highlighted by activists and even many of their own contributors, the decision to play hardball with the parent of a trans young person suggests that The Protocol will double down on harming trans people rather than chart a new path. 

The audio clip captures a confrontation between Heidi, the mother of a trans girl, and Jamie Reed, a former Missouri gender clinic staffer-turned-activist whose sworn affidavit misrepresented the medical history of Heidi’s daughter, Grace.

Although Heidi refused to be interviewed for the podcast, the New York Times senior vice president of external communications, Danielle Rhoades Ha, maintains the paper is within its rights to use the audio. Via email, Rhoades Ha stated that Heidi “was aware that the Times was recording for the purposes of audio journalism” and the audio was recorded at a public courthouse, “where news media were allowed to attend and record.”

The Protocol’s trailer says the show was two years in the making. That’s when Heidi’s experience with NYT journalists began, an episode she now calls a “nightmare.”

Early experiences of being dismissed by the NYT 

Heidi had contacted NYT reporter Azeen Ghorayshi back in August 2023. Ghorayshi was reporting on Reed’s highly publicized allegations of wrongdoing against the St. Louis gender clinic where she’d once worked. By that time, many families had come forward to other news outlets to say those allegations bore no resemblance to their experiences seeking and receiving care. Some of those families also spoke with Ghorayshi.

Heidi’s evidence went further. Using emails and medical records, she proved to Ghorayshi that Reed had misrepresented Grace’s treatment in both an op-ed and a sworn affidavit to the Missouri attorney general alleging wrongdoing on the part of the clinic. Through the compiled documents, she showed that Reed’s account was a distorted version of events falsely blaming Grace’s gender-affirming care for a liver reaction caused by a different drug, and misrepresented their family’s gratitude as rage at the clinic over this putative harm. Reed later claimed she got Grace’s entire story secondhand. 

While an internal investigation of the clinic found no wrongdoing and the attorney general has brought no charges, gender-affirming care was banned for all Missouri youth soon after Reed began making her claims. Ghorayshi’s coverage of Reed has since been cited in briefs supporting bans on care submitted to the Supreme Court, including by the Family Research Council.

This misrepresentation of Grace’s medical history — and its use to fuel bans on care — has been devastating to her and her family.

“It was really hard, having her knowledge of my medical info being used to keep my friends from care they could have reached,” said Grace, in an exclusive interview with Assigned Media. 

Grace, who is now a legal adult, has stayed in touch with other young trans people impacted by these bans on care.

“I caught up with someone’s sibling and they’re starting to get to the age where they’re not affected anymore,” she said. “That’s three years that they’ve been affected by this. And that hurts to think about.”

The Protocol will include an interview with Reed, but it won’t include Grace’s hurt. Heidi’s name is never mentioned, and her anger will be present only through an audio clip, captured in public at a Missouri courthouse, where an NYT producer recorded her personally confronting Reed. 

Although Heidi was asked repeatedly by Ghorayshi to participate in the podcast, she said she had no wish to do so because Ghorayshi and the paper had already betrayed their trust.

Heidi believes Ghorayshi’s August 2023 story played down core questions about Reed’s veracity by relegating the fact that her affidavit contained at least one false allegation to the bottom third of its long account. She says the coverage story simply confirmed incidental details about the clinic’s practices — details that implied no wrongdoing — as a springboard to paint a misleading picture of whether Reed’s accusations were true. 

By then, two local Missouri news organizations had already published stories saying Reed’s allegations had been contradicted by family accounts. To date, Grace has the only patient history to have been definitively linked to a specific allegation of Reed’s.

“All sources do not have the same degree of power”

Now, Heidi and Grace say the harm is being compounded by the Times’ determination to use audio captured by producer Austin Mitchell outside the August 2023 court hearing where both Reed and Heidi were present. At the time, Heidi says, she never anticipated the vulnerable moment could be exploited and used against her will. 

Heidi first learned this was a possibility in April 2024. During a phone call with Mitchell, Heidi asked the producer how her audio could be included if she had refused to participate in the podcast. Mitchell explained that the recording had been taken in a public place.

Legally, experts say, the use of audio of Heidi confronting Jamie Reed is likely on solid ground. Americans don’t have an expectation of privacy in public places, which means reporters are within their rights to capture and exploit people’s public actions. (In addition, Missouri is a one-party consent state.)

But others say journalism has a moral responsibility to treat sources with dignity and respect. One such expert is Anita Varma, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin whose work has focused on solidarity journalism.

Varma says she’s seen a lot of variability in how newsrooms  and journalists approach questions of what is appropriate to use when the source doesn't want something to be included, “ especially if the source has already gone on the record or if it is a comment that was made in public.” 

“Some news organizations and journalists take the stance that whatever is on the record is on the record, and that applies equally to all sources, whether it's the governor of the state or someone who has no official status,” she said. “But this 'one-size-fits-all' approach ignores the reality that all sources do not have the same degree of power. The situational context matters, especially for vulnerable sources.”

Despite the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics code emphasizing journalists “do no harm,” journalism still grapples with the question of whether there’s an ethical duty to treat vulnerable sources considerately. However, in journalism, as in most professions, there is a norm that an unhappy client, customer, or source would usually be given an avenue to complain. 

In their treatment of Heidi, the NYT’ reporters diverged from this norm. During the phone call with Mitchell, once it was clear that the producer was determined to use the audio, Heidi then asked if there was someone else at the NYT to whom she could appeal. 

She asked once, and Mitchell refused to offer anyone else who she could speak to. 

In tears, she asked again: “Who can I speak to who has a human heart?” Mitchell, again, stayed quiet. 

Heidi later found the email address for an editor at the NYT’ Standards Desk. Last April, she wrote to the standards editor to describe her treatment by the NYT and ask again that her audio not be included. She said the response was unsatisfying, but it left open the possibility that the final cut of the podcast might not include the clip.

As weeks and months passed without a podcast, Heidi hoped this meant that her objections had been heard and taken seriously. A subsequent attempt by Ghorayshi to find new families of trans youth in Missouri to interview gave her more hope that the paper would find an alternative to using her audio without permission. However, late last month, she was contacted by a fact-checker who confirmed that her exchange with Reed would be included in The Protocol.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Heidi told Assigned. “There’s nothing I can say. I was very clear that I did not want to be part of the podcast, but they found a loophole and there’s nothing I can do.”

Advocates say the NYT has a consistent history of bias in its coverage of youth transgender care. 

“If the New York Times were serious about standing behind their claims of their trans coverage being unbiased, empathetic, and accurate, they would listen to the families that regret speaking to Times reporters,” a spokesperson from GLAAD told Assigned. “They would meet with leaders from the trans community to hear and address valid critiques of the coverage coming from the community, journalists, and allies alike.”

For two years, GLAAD has been calling for the newsroom to improve its coverage of trans people. 

“It’s not ‘empathetic’ to ignore the community your coverage is harming, or to try to profit off of the coverage that has been roundly critiqued as inaccurate and biased,” the GLAAD spokesperson said. 

Whether The Protocol will continue this pattern has yet to be seen. The podcast is scheduled to be released June 5.

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Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.

 

As you read this I am in New Orleans, but I pre-wrote this post reminiscing about the Center for Wooden Boats, a boat museum I visited in 2022 on a vacation to Seattle.

Here's me at the Center for Wooden Boats:

Here's some of the boats:

I was a massive boat liker in middle school, high school, and college. Starting in 7th grade, I saw Master and Commander in theaters, then promptly went out and read every single one of the Aubrey/Maturin books. I also learned how to operate a sailboat. I used to rent a Sunfish for a dollar an hour at a lake near my house and rip around on it in the summer. On our 2022 vacation to Seattle, when we saw there was a historic boat museum on Lake Union, I made attendance mandatory for us!

It's a great museum! They restore boats in the large building I'm standing next to in the picture above, and there's loads of little info stations about how the boat restoration process works. Unfortunately, I don't have good pictures of that. I was too busy quoting boat facts to my husband to take any pictures.

The museum is on Lake Union, and you can actually RENT a lot of the wooden boats and row them around on the lake yourself.

Seattle residents, let me repeat: you live in the same city as a historic boat museum that lets you sail the boats!!!!!!!

It is a living museum, and the boats are in the water, and they're meant to be sailed. Unfortunately, we didn't know about this cool detail when we visited the museum... and just as we were entering the museum, we each consumed an edible. So we were in no position to sail the historic sailboats. We've decided that we need to go back sober someday and sail the boats ourselves.

I'm posting this just to show my cool pictures of the museum, really. Here's another. Because the museum is on Lake Union, we got to watch sea planes land in front of us for hours... so here is my not-very-good picture of a sea plane cruising toward the museum.

One of the most important things we took way from the Center for Wooden Boats was our "Center for Wooden Boats" t-shirts, one red, one blue. We wear them all the time, sometimes together. In fact, I'm wearing mine right now, as I write this. They're delightful. One of my most treasured possessions. Here is a picture Brendon drew of me wearing it:

And the shirt in real life:

Anyway, it's a good museum. You should go!!