We grow up hearing that gender is “just how things are.” Many people still assume masculinity and femininity follow naturally from biology. That assumption holds only when gender is observed at the surface level. When we look closer—across history, across cultures, across experiences—the neat divide begins to blur. What appears to be an innate truth reveals itself as a social script written and re‑written to fit particular times and power structures. Contemporary research distinguishes sex (biological traits) from gender (social and structural expectations) and emphasizes that their influence on human behaviour and health must be investigated empirically rather than assumed[1]. Recognizing gender as constructed does not trivialize it; it makes its construction visible and therefore contestable.
There is a point where “mismanagement” stops being a useful word.
At a certain point, you are no longer looking at a country that simply got a few things wrong. You are looking at a system that has become so attached to its own cruelty, so committed to its own bad logic, that it keeps choosing the version that hurts people most and then acting like this is just the weather. It is not weather. It is architecture. Extraction is not a glitch in the American experiment; it is the original blueprint. I need people to stop pretending otherwise. Because even if you strip all the morality out of it—even if you look at this in the coldest capitalist terms possible—the whole thing still does not make sense. That is the part that should embarrass everybody in charge. Not just that it is cruel, but that it is stupid. It is structurally stupid. It is the kind of stupid that should have been ruled out by basic survival instinct ten years ago, and yet here we are, still being told to clap for it. A society cannot treat human beings like expendable fuel and then act baffled when the engine starts failing. You cannot demand endless output from people you deliberately starve of healthcare, education, rest, and security, and then blame those people for not producing miracles on command. That is not governance. That is an abusive relationship with a national anthem. 
I don’t understand, and I don’t think I’m meant to. There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with trying to make sense of a world designed to keep its gears turning at the expense of your own sanity. We are conditioned to accept the grinding noise of systemic failure as background hum, taught to look past the chains on our own perception so we can keep playing our parts in the simulation. I’ve reached a point where I can no longer ignore the friction between the humanity I know exists and the cold, mechanical reality we are forced to inhabit.
In the house where I grew up, “diversity” wasn’t a celebrated buzzword or some noble ideal to be embraced; it was treated like a dirty word, something suspect, something inconvenient, something that threatened the illusion of order my family so desperately wanted to preserve. It was a threat to a very specific, very rigid status quo, one that demanded a performance I could not, and would not, give. On a daily basis, I was interrogated about why I couldn’t just be “normal,” a question that carries its own kind of quiet violence because it is never really a question at all. It is an accusation dressed up as concern. It is a demand that you shrink yourself until you become manageable. I was shamed and derided every single time I reached for any semblance of authenticity, every time I let some honest part of myself surface in a room that had no interest in honesty unless it was convenient. It’s a strange thing to realize that your own family views your intrinsic self—the way your brain actually processes the world, the way you move through it, the way you survive it—as a personal affront to their comfort. In that environment, my neurodivergence was never understood as a different way of being. It was treated like a defect of character, a moral failure, a deliberate refusal to comply with a system that was never built to accommodate me in the first place.
There are a million things we tell ourselves when our emotions start to surface, especially when the timing is inconvenient. It’s easy to swallow it down like a too-big pill and to keep swallowing the phantom lump in our throats, because we busy ourselves with obligations. We prioritize our lives in such a way that puts our needs on the back burner, low heat and apply just enough attention that we don’t have to worry about it burning the kitchen down (metaphorically and literally, in some cases). It becomes second nature to remember we even have needs, never mind how to meet them; we’re doing everything we can just to survive another day in a world that wasn’t built for us.
There is a buzz developing around the systemic sexism that echoes the patriarchal delusion of male superiority. It is ironic how the same people posted at the top of the social hierarchy are the ones lost in the rose-coloured fog of dissonance. They see the inequity…backwards, of course, clinging to unearned authority over what’s “right.” Tensions build from every angle, and blame is cast on misandry as the antagonist. This mordant perspective, by hard-heartedly dismissing the lived experience of everyone else, fuels the very manifestation of antipathy towards cis men that it claims to oppose. It minimizes the fundamentally trauma-informed byproduct growing from the epicenter of the impossible demands of patriarchal social construction. Still, lack of accountability and the denial of science lead society down a darkening path of destruction—and the centuries-old self-deception peals, loud and oppressive. Society’s inescapable patriarchal structures inflict profound damage and enable severe, intersectional oppression against women and gender-nonconforming individuals—realities often dismissed by a misguided focus on misandry, underscoring an urgent need for accountability and genuine societal transformation.
People talk about the patriarchy like it signals male superiority, when in reality none of them can achieve, let alone define how it actually impacts their daily lives. They don’t name it, of course, but it bleeds into every conversation, every law, every social shift.
Every day, a new parallel surfaces, begging for recognition, acknowledgement, and an end to the cycle. Democratic erosion, National Socialist propaganda that blatantly targets minority groups (e.g., autism, LGBTQIA+ individuals, non-White people, non-Christians, and women), and religious extremism are all too familiar in American politics today. The rise of White Christian Nationalism and other extremist ideologies echo the not-so-distant past, reminding us that our education system has always been manipulated to placate those most averse to a liberal agenda. Instead, we see a whitewashed curriculum overhaul that minimizes the struggles and oppression marginalized communities have faced throughout history. This gross perversion of history—which emphasizes American exceptionalism and exemplifies democratic erosion—further limits access to diverse perspectives and critical thinking, resurrecting a totalitarian rule that drips with patriarchal illusion. Right alongside this stark decline in social progress, democratic norms dwindle through voter suppression and election manipulation, the rampant spread of misinformation by those in power, and a multitude of discriminatory executive orders.
Extremism is on the rise. The too-frequent argument is that “it’s both sides,” which may be true—only if we ignore the fact that not only were right-wing extremists responsible for nineteen of twenty-two extremist-related murders in 2020, but investigations of domestic terrorism more than doubled over the next two years.
Assumptions are made, by everyone, from time to time. Some are correct—if someone works at the local grocer, it’s pretty safe to assume they live nearby. But assuming to know someone simply because you know their name or, worse, because you know the people who sired them says a fair bit more about you than it does about them. Sure, in a perfect world everyone would share a strong, healthy relationship with their ‘family’—unfortunately, that is not often the case, and people see what they want to see. Many people who believe they have healthy relationships with their relatives fail to recognize deeply rooted co-dependent dynamics and generational trauma cycles. In many cases, they have to do mental gymnastics to justify the less than healthful interactions or core beliefs passed down from one generation to the next. This is evident in the way those same people always have some condescending remark or an attempt at insult in rebuttal, for being confronted or proven wildly misinformed.
That’s not to say that what they want to see is what they want to exemplify, but it is to say that most people seem to find it easier to subconsciously choose false narratives that support their own perception of reality. 
Maybe I’m self-absorbed. Maybe I’m overly sensitive, bordering on neurotic, and completely off base. Perhaps, I’m jaded by being handed shit packaged as chocolate and being told to swallow it without reproach.
I read—a lot—though, admittedly, not as much as I’d like to. That’s only a half truth, I suppose, as in the whole truth I never stop reading. Articles, textbooks, studies, prose, comment sections, subtitles…but I don’t read as many books as I’d like. Suffice it to say, if I could, I’d probably waste my days away lost in book after book written a hundred years ago and undoubtedly find all of the dots that still connect in society today. I’m often told that I think too much into things, but the truth of it is that I never have to put much thought into making such connections. They glare at me in the face and scream for recognition. How, then, am I supposed to say nothing of it? And for what? To save face, to play politics? Silly me for expecting words to mean as they are defined, and for actions to align with proclamations. For a while, I considered that maybe it was the genres I favour or that I’d gotten myself into a centuries old echo chamber, but that seems more illogical still. My bookcase and shelves are tightly packed with everything from personal development and social commentary to contemporary literature and historical fiction to horror and crime…nevermind the occasional romance, the textbooks, and the dozens of meta-analyses I have on my external hard drive. It wasn’t all too long ago that my personal library alone could have gotten me committed to an asylum, when female independence was seen as madness. Nonbinary identity not withheld, the world sees me as female—and there are considerably worse things to be. The point still stands, I wasn’t born in a body that permits the power knowledge holds. My attempts to understand and engage with the world around me, here, are frequently met with dismissal and hostility, an air of superiority and contempt.
If the Appalachia region has anything, it’s urban legends and stories of cryptids and creatures that lurk in the trees. These stories are made evermore eerie by the ruins and abandoned structures reclaimed by nature sprinkle throughout the hills. Somewhere between the skin walkers and mimics, there are stories of ghost towns with ominous histories. One such town, is Livermore, Pennsylvania.
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Sheena MonsterThey/Them/Theirs 
Naming the things that society works hardest to ignore, to reclaim the humanity stripped by systemic deception.
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