My Credentials
Note: I won’t normally post two newsletters in one week, I’m just spoiling you <3 Also, future newsletter pieces will be much shorter than these first two!
What business do I have talking about science, abolition, trans issues, and U.S. politics in general? How did I become a street activist, local organizer, and educator? Let’s go back a bit so that new readers know what they’re getting themselves into.
My political upbringing really started in 2012, when I first took my high school’s brand-new “AP U.S. Government & Politics” class. This was the year of a new presidential election, a massive resurgence in conservative congressional power in direct backlash to my country’s first Black president, a rise in internet anti-feminism that would lay the groundwork for #GamerGate and other harassment campaigns, the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, CT (the town where my cousins lived and went to middle school), and a much-anticipated apocalypse. So yeah, pretty foundational year for my view of the world.
I had two major friend groups in high school, one that was mostly nerdy cis boys and one that was mostly nerdy LGBTQIA+-identified feminists. I was still moving throughout the world as a cishet white boy, pretending as though my gender feelings (“not a boy, but ???”) weren’t serious enough to warrant a change in pronouns and pretending to be allosexual to avoid the judgement of my male peers. I like to joke that in most alternate universes, I’m probably an incel (instead of a demisexual trans lesbian abolitionist eco-socialist). Luckily for me, I had enough young feminists (especially queer ones) in my life to keep me several steps ahead of the early-2010s internet nerdspace. In this way, and in many others, I have always been in community with women.
In 2013, I started engineering school at UConn and was exposed to more ethnic diversity than ever before (my hometown was 98% white). In 2015, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between The World And Me” while on a family trip to Washington, D.C.; this was a “come to god” moment in my anti-racist education. That same year, I watched horrified as a) numerous Black Americans were murdered by police on TV, b) an aging fascist opened his presidential campaign with the line “Mexicans are drug-dealing rapists” among other horrors, and c) a lot of white people seemed to be very happy about those two things. I was shook, but I had little direction other than to post to social media and comfort the people of marginalized identities in my own life.
In November 2016, that aforementioned fascist took the white house. In January 2017, on the day of his inauguration, I attended my very first in-person protest on the day (see below). I started talking to everyone I knew about how messed up this was, and I shifted my entire social media personality to posting about social justice issues. In October 2017, I started transitioning (amazing timing, babe, great job) and by September 2018 I was out to the world as Anna Marie LaChance (yay!!)
Even if you’re 100% sold on intersectional feminism, something changes when you go from studying the ways women are marginalized to actually living it. I was a PhD student by that time, and I got direct proof that I was taken more seriously as a man who knew nothing than I was as a woman with years of experience behind her. I can’t precisely place when I made the transition from “liberal” to “leftist”, but I was firmly anti-capitalist around this time as well.
[Image description: (Left) Me at my first-ever protest, holding a homemade sign paraphrasing Rep. John Lewis’ quote that 45 was “not a legitimate president”. (Right) Me at a 2020 protest waiving the Philly pride flag and a “Cassandra Martineau for Congress” yard sign.]
I attended a few YSA meetings and campus protests here and there, but for those first few years of my transition I mostly focused on me, spending my free time reading about Black feminism, tech ethics, building safe communities, and United States history from a leftist perspective.
In the summer of 2020, following the consecutive murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, I finally realized that now was the time to take to the streets (sheesh, took you long enough). I started going to protests and organizing locally for change. At UConn, I successfully led graduate students in my research building to rally for better working conditions during COVID-19, and I worked with graduate students of color to develop an anti-racist education program for School of Engineering faculty and staff. When I got the chance to teach my own chemical engineering classes, I made it a point to bring up anti-racist subject matters as much as I could, including lectures on Indigenous science and an entire module on environmental justice.
In the town I lived, I attended weekly political rallies for nearly two years, all the while building a county-wide activist coalition across age, race, and gender lines. Our coalition accomplished several things and continues to do so in my absence, but in my time in Connecticut I’m most proud of: a) installing a committee for police accountability, b) getting a trans elder and a non-binary person of color elected to local office, and c) getting James Flores, a wrongfully-arrested Afro-Indigenous Puerto Rican activist, freed from jail. I also contributed to efforts to reinstate our local hospital’s maternity ward, which was shut down in our majority-Black and Puerto Rican town during a global pandemic (this fight is still ongoing) as well as efforts to stop a coal-fired power plant from being built in Killingly, CT (which after 6 years of fighting was successful; the building plans are dead!)
I have seen what local organizing can do, and it is wonderous. Even in the current political moment, my time doing mutual aid and organizing has shown me that anything is possible if a group of people commit single-mindedly toward a specific goal!
I’ve been taking a sabbatical from street activism so far this year, due to personal burnout and other life reasons. However, I am moving up to Western Massachusetts next week, and I fully plan to get back in the game once I do. I also plan to bring an abolitionist teaching philosophy into my time as a Lecturer at UMass Amherst, starting this Fall.
You can subscribe to this very newsletter to see how that all goes! I’m sure there will be many stories to tell....
Currently Reading
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig (1974) is a meditation on Quality, art, engineering, and philosophy, all told through the narrative device of a road trip with the author's son. I've been reading it as part of CJ the X’s Patreon book club. It's a classic for a reason! (Goodreads)
Is “mass media” a thing anymore? Like I said above, I spent years posting into the void before getting into “real” activism (IRL, collaborative, improve-material-conditions activism). I’m glad I spent a lot of time reading and learning before hopping into the movement (lord knows many embarrassing white women don’t do the same…) but nowadays I try to remember that politicians don’t respond to social media, marches, protests, or petitions anymore; they respond to their power being threatened. Time To Say Goodbye (an Asian American-produced leftist podcast) discussed this in-depth on their latest episode; go check them out!
Watch History
Intelexual Media is one of the best content creators in the game. A Black sex worker who makes intricate video essays about U.S. history? Yes, please! She’s currently doing a series about the 1980s and it’s a much-watch. She even does more light-hearted videos, like this one on foods that came out during the 80s.
Anna Akana—who may or may not be one of the reasons I chose my name—made this great piece on what trans men can teach us about gender privilege. As a former very-emotionally-stunted man, I can also attest to the fact that men do indeed need more forms of emotional care. The important caveat to this is that we shouldn’t put 100% of that emotional labor onto women (because that’s just the patriarchy again). Rather, men have to fix men. Your time is now, kings!
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
I am obsessed with the new Empress Of EP, featuring the title track “Save Me” and “Dance For You”. OBSESSED!
The “Summer Nights” EP by Hazel English. It does what it says on the tin; as warm days turn into cool evenings, these love songs are the perfect accompaniment. (Side note: anybody wanna fall in love with me??)
Quick Actions
Here’s some applied chemical engineering: Senate bill S.4139, also known as the HEATR act, would provide a tax credit for high-efficiency electric heat pumps. This practice could save homeowners lots of money and speed up American electrification by decades! Consider contacting your representatives about the bill, and about a just transition to sustainable energy in general.
Tangents
I’ve long supported the #AbolishGolf movement—golf courses take up lots of land that could be used for housing, solar farms, rewilding, giving the land back to Indigenous peoples, or literally anything else besides serving as a hobby for the rich, not to mention the environmental impact of pesticide use and other land maintenance. Recently, a former-landfill-turned-golf-course in Columbus, OH was turned into a solar farm, which is super exciting! While there have been complications along the way, hopefully this can become a model and/or learning experience for future efforts to change how we use land!
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna