Leveragism: Power, Empathy, and the Common Good

A secular framework for understanding influence

Recently, I came across a question on Facebook:

“Atheists, how are you coping with knowing that the Western mind is so thoroughly Christian that even most secular values are ‘expressed’ versions of Christian ethics?”

My immediate response was simple: I’m teaching people the concept of leveragism.

And then I had to laugh a little. No I'm not.

To almost everyone else, "leveragism" probably sounds like nonsense. It's not that I haven't talked about it at all. But up until this point, it's only been alluded to in some of the writing I have done over the years. Never fully called out as a concept. And there's reasons for that.

What is leveragism? Fair question. It’s a concept that has meant a great deal to me for a long time, but I’ve never really given it much public life. I mentioned being a "leveragist" in my memoir, but otherwise it has mostly existed in my own head, reappearing over the years whenever I found myself thinking about power, belief, fairness, and the strange advantages some people seem to inherit just by speaking with enough certainty.

This post is my attempt to explain it.

The origins of leveragism

The earliest form of this idea showed up around fifteen years ago, when I was first leaving the cult I had grown up in. Back then, I was thinking about atheism in a much more confrontational and structural way. I even created a Facebook page for something I called the Leveragist Church of Atheism.

What I was reaching for, even then, was the feeling that atheism lacked a real leverage backbone in public life. Religious belief seemed to come with built-in advantages. It came with cultural deference, legal protection, moral authority, and a kind of rhetorical shortcut. The believer could say, “God says so,” and often skip past any burden of deeper reflection. Meanwhile, the nonbeliever was expected to explain, justify, soften, and defend.

At the time, I thought maybe atheism needed its own type of church to answer that imbalance.

But I never moved forward with it. Partly because I worried about how it would be received, and partly because I was concerned I was in danger of reproducing the same kind of dogmatism I was trying to escape. That mattered to me. So I left the page up, let the idea sit, and kept living.

A few years later, The Satanic Temple arrived on the scene, acting with the same sort of leverage that I had envisioned necessary.

But I felt the concept didn't really end there, and I never really stopped thinking about it.

Over the years, the ideas kept resurfacing whenever I ran into systems or people who seemed to wield certainty itself as power. It became useful to me as a way of thinking about atheism, but also as a way of thinking about authority more broadly. Eventually, years later, it made its way into my memoir. That was not the beginning of the idea. It was just one of the first times I put it into words publicly.

In the book, I wrote:

“Much more I am a leveragist. If it’s acceptable for a group to use their body, their wealth, their deity, or any other sort of unquestionable God to silence you, it is fully acceptable to leverage everything you possess to topple those deified convictions. There is no untouchable, catch-all state of being that has all the answers in the real world.”

That line came late. The thinking behind it came much earlier.

What is leveragism?

Leveragism is my way of describing how people and institutions use leverage to gain advantage, protect authority, justify power, and disconnect others from the common good.

At its simplest, it begins with this idea: human beings are connected to the common good through things like empathy, pain, need, conscience, and mutual recognition. Those are the things that tether us to each other. They are the basis of moral life.

But people also look for ways around that tether.

They look for leverage.

Sometimes that leverage is God. Sometimes it is nihilism. Sometimes it is ideology, biology, tradition, hierarchy, wealth, or institutional prestige. The common thread is the same: a person or institution appeals to something that presents itself as unquestionable, and uses it to shut down inquiry, excuse harm, or exempt itself from ordinary moral accountability.

That is where leveragism begins.

A working definition might be this:

Leveragism is a moral framework for understanding how influence is used to connect or disconnect individuals from the common good, especially through claims of certainty, authority, and exemption.

Authority as leverage

One of the strongest patterns I kept noticing over the years was that very different worldviews can function in very similar ways.

A religious absolutist may say, “God says so.”

A nihilist may say, “Nothing matters.”

An ideologue may say, “The doctrine is settled.”

A biological absolutist may say, “Nature determines everything.”

These are not the same beliefs. But they can all operate as leverage when they are used to cut off empathy, flatten complexity, and excuse domination.

That is what interests me. Not just what people believe, but what those beliefs do when they are used as force multipliers in human relationships and social systems.

This is also why I still think the concept is especially useful from an atheist perspective. Atheism, at least in my experience, often has to learn to live without borrowed absolutes. It has to reason more openly, and more vulnerably. That does not make atheists automatically better, obviously. Nihilism can become its own absolutism too. But it does mean atheism can offer a clearer view of how much power society still grants to religious certainty just for being religious.

Religious freedom, or religious leverage?

One of the places this became clearest to me was in the idea of religious liberty in the United States.

At its best, freedom of religion is supposed to protect people in the practice of their beliefs. That makes sense. The point was not to create untouchable institutions. The point was to protect conscience.

But in practice, religion often receives a kind of institutional leverage that goes far beyond freedom of belief. Religion gets treated as though it carries a special exemption from ordinary civic accountability. And that can become dangerous.

When someone argues that their Christianity is being oppressed because they are not allowed to subject a trans child to conversion therapy, or because they are expected to respect a trans coworker’s pronouns, that is not a neutral exercise of private belief. That is institutional and rhetorical leverage being used to claim too much power.

You can hold your beliefs. But your institution does not become morally special just because religion is attached to it. Your certainty does not become sacred merely because it is old, familiar, or popular.

That imbalance is one of the reasons I kept returning to leveragism.

Leveragism and the common good

The concept has become broader for me over time. It is not only about religion now, even if religion was one of its starting points and remains one of its clearest applications.

Leveragism is about recognizing when leverage serves the common good and when it breaks it.

Empathy is one of the main connectors between the individual and the common good. When leverage helps restore empathy, restore balance, expose domination, or challenge false authority, it can be ethical. When leverage is used to sever empathy, excuse cruelty, or shield power from scrutiny, it becomes destructive.

That is why I do not see leveragism as a doctrine of pure aggression. It is not a permission slip for cruelty. It is closer to a philosophy of counterweight.

If a system claims unquestionable authority, then it is fair to question it.

If a structure uses certainty to dominate others, then it is fair to resist it.

If a belief exempts itself from accountability while demanding obedience from everyone else, then it is fair to apply pressure against it.

Leveragism and the leveragist

I think there is a useful distinction here.

Leveragism is the framework.

A leveragist is the person acting within that framework.

A leveragist, as I think of the term, is not a prophet, not a believer, and not simply a victim. A leveragist is a counterweight: someone willing to use conceptual, rhetorical, emotional, or structural leverage to challenge systems that present themselves as morally untouchable.

That does not mean anything goes. It means that false innocence should not be granted to power simply because power speaks in the language of God, nature, tradition, or inevitability.

Is secular morality just Christian ethics in disguise?

My answer is no.

Not because Christianity had no influence on Western ethics. Obviously it did. But empathy, fairness, reciprocity, and the common good do not belong to Christianity. They are older, wider, and more human than that.

What religion often does is claim authorship over moral intuitions that arise much more broadly out of human social life.

Leveragism starts from the opposite direction. It does not ask which divine system morality comes from. It asks how moral connection is maintained or broken in actual lived human systems.

That is a secular question. And I think it is a powerful one.

Why I’m writing about this now

Part of the answer is simple: because I think the time is right.

We are living in a moment when claims of certainty are everywhere. Religious certainty. Ideological certainty. Biological certainty. Cynical certainty. Institutional certainty. And all of them are competing for power.

I do not think we are well served by pretending those claims are all equally harmless, or by treating every assertion of conscience as morally self-justifying.

I also know that if I say, “I’m teaching them the concept of leveragism,” then at some point I need to actually put the concept somewhere people can read it.

So this is the beginning.

I’m planning to write more about this, and eventually to expand it into a larger book project: The Moral Framework of Leveragism: Power, Empathy, and the Common Good. That book will be broader and more universal. This post is more grounded in the atheist side of the idea, because that is where it began for me and where some of its clearest uses still are.

But I think the framework reaches further than atheism. It applies anywhere people use certainty as leverage, and anywhere others need a language for pushing back.

A beginning, not an ending

Leveragism is not a doctrine, a movement, or a demand for allegiance. It is a lens—a way of understanding how power operates in the world and how individuals can respond to it with clarity, empathy, and accountability.

It began as a personal reckoning: an attempt to make sense of authority after leaving a cult, to understand why certainty so often masquerades as truth, and to find language for challenging systems that claim moral immunity. Over time, it evolved into something broader—a framework for recognizing when leverage serves justice and when it distorts it.

At its heart, leveragism asks only this:

Who benefits from unquestionable authority—and who is silenced by it?

Wherever certainty is used to dominate rather than illuminate, leveragism invites scrutiny. Wherever empathy is severed in the name of power, it calls for balance. And wherever institutions claim exemption from accountability, it reminds us that no authority is beyond question.

If you have ever felt the weight of an unquestionable system, or questioned why some voices carry more power than others, then you have already begun to understand leveragism.

This is not the end of the conversation. It is its beginning.

Working definitions

Leveragism: a moral framework for understanding how influence is used to connect or disconnect individuals from the common good, especially through claims of certainty, authority, and exemption.

Leveragist: a secular counterweight who uses available forms of leverage to challenge systems that present themselves as beyond scrutiny.

I Don't Think Most People Actually Want a Full Season of Harry Potter

I don’t think most people—even hardcore fans—actually want a full season of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, even if they think they do.

Part of what made the original films work so well is that they were complete, contained experiences. The first movie, especially, delivered whimsical worldbuilding, light storytelling, and emotional payoff in a tight two-to-three-hour format. It became something you could return to—something people built traditions around. Watching it at Christmas, doing full marathons in December… it worked because it was compact and repeatable.

And a huge part of that wasn’t just the visuals or the cast—it was the music.

John Williams didn’t just score those films—he defined their emotional identity. The sense of wonder, whimsy, and mystery is carried as much by the music as it is by anything on screen. You can hear a few notes and immediately feel that world. That kind of melodic, atmosphere-setting composition—something that becomes instantly recognizable and emotionally grounding—is what makes the experience stick.

Without that, I honestly think the first film risks feeling much flatter. Because at its core, a lot of it is exploration and worldbuilding. “Look at this magical place, look at this system, look at this wonder.” The story itself is relatively light. The music is what elevates that into something immersive and memorable.

And that’s why the shift to Hans Zimmer matters more than people are acknowledging.

Zimmer is incredibly effective at what he does—but what he does is very different. His style leans heavily on texture, repetition, and tonal buildup. It creates mood, tension, scale—but it doesn’t usually create those distinct, whimsical melodies that define a world in the same way. A lot of his scores, across films like The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar, share a similar sonic language.

That approach can be powerful—but it’s not the same as what Harry Potter originally relied on.

If the show is largely built on extended worldbuilding and exploration—and it probably will be—then it needs that kind of musical identity to carry it. Without it, I don’t see the same sense of whimsy landing. I don’t see the same emotional hook forming. And without that, the experience risks feeling thin over a longer runtime.

And that ties into something deeper when you compare it to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Both stories center around wizarding schools—but they approach power and growth in completely different ways.

In Earthsea, magic is inherently consequential. If you use it selfishly or carelessly, the consequences are immediate and unavoidable. Ged learns not just from mentors, but from his own failures—especially from confronting his own darkness. Power demands alignment with the world, with balance, and with something larger than yourself.

In Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling presents magic as something more playful and exploratory. There are authority figures who guide and punish, but consequences are often external. Learning is structured. Characters are told what’s right, and growth happens within that system rather than emerging organically from the nature of power itself.

Le Guin’s world teaches that power demands responsibility. Rowling’s world teaches that responsibility is enforced by authority.

And I don’t think that difference—or that kind of story—scales well into long-form television. Harry Potter’s strength has always been experience: tone, spectacle, atmosphere, discovery. The films worked because everything—music, sets, performances, pacing—came together to create a complete, almost ritualistic experience.

Once you stretch it out, you start to see that the stakes are relatively small and the arcs are fairly simple, especially early on. Without that tightly constructed, sensory-driven experience, it risks feeling like a very expensive prologue.

Honestly, I think people have already gotten everything they really want from this world. The films covered it. Even Hogwarts Legacy showed that while there’s still massive interest, that interest doesn’t necessarily translate into lasting cultural engagement. It spikes—and then it fades.

If anything, it would make more sense to explore new territory—stories before or after the original timeline—rather than retelling something that already feels complete.

But for me, this isn’t just theoretical.

I’m trans, and I’m not interested in supporting this franchise at all. And that’s not something abstract in my household. My kids used to love Harry Potter. It was part of our traditions. But when they grew old enough to understand who J.K. Rowling has chosen to be in the public sphere—when they saw her using her platform to target people like their mom, and people they care about—that changed things for them. It wasn’t something I had to explain or push. They felt it on their own.

So when I say I won’t be watching, it’s not just about disagreement. It’s about something that already broke.

And honestly, that contrast with Le Guin’s work makes it even harder to ignore. Earthsea is built on the idea that power carries real, unavoidable consequences—that it requires humility, balance, and care. Watching someone use their real-world influence in ways that cause harm feels like the opposite of that philosophy.

So no, I won’t be watching. And even setting that aside, I don’t think this kind of adaptation is likely to hold people the way the original films did.

Final Fantasy VII Is Possibly the Epic of Our Age

If you're even slightly aware of video games, you’ve probably at least brushed up against Final Fantasy VII again recently. Whether through Remake, Rebirth, or just the constant cultural presence it’s had for decades, it keeps resurfacing. And for my generation, a lot of people, it's nostalgia—we are revisiting something important from the past. 

For me, it’s honestly the only reason I wanted a PS5—well, beyond the kids. I’m enjoying it, moseying my way through the world and its story. Comparing it to the original as I go.

After some time playing, I don’t think nostalgia is all of what’s happening. I think Final Fantasy VII has quietly become something much bigger than that. I would even go as far as to call it the epic of our age. And that's what I want to take a moment to talk about.

When we talk about epics, we usually think of stories like The Iliad, The Odyssey, or Beowulf. The Divine Comedy. The most modern example thus far might be The Lord of the Rings. 

None of these are just popular stories. They define how people understand the world. They carry moral frameworks, archetypes, and warnings that outlive the generation that first encountered them.

Final Fantasy VII does the same thing—but it does it in a modern language.

Not through gods on mountaintops, but through corporations. Not through destiny handed down from above, but through systems built by humans. And not through mythic heroes, but through people whose identities are fractured, reconstructed, and uncertain.

At the heart of Final Fantasy VII are characters who have lost something fundamental. Cloud’s identity is fragmented—constructed out of memory, trauma, and expectation. Barret fights for a community that’s already been destroyed. Yuffie is trying to reclaim a culture that has already fallen. Red XIII has to relearn who his father was—and what that means for who he is.

These aren’t just heroes. They are people trying to understand who they are after the systems around them have broken. That’s a very modern problem.

But what elevates Final Fantasy VII beyond a story about broken people is how it treats power. It presents gods and devils—but not in the traditional sense.

The “gods” in Final Fantasy VII are not distant beings. They are everyday people who embody healing, connection, and care. Aerith isn’t powerful because she dominates the world. She doesn't. She isn't powerful simply because she's last of an Ancient species, even though she is. She’s powerful because she nurtures the world and it's people in small, everyday ways in spite of her background, because she remains aligned with something larger than manufactured systems and corporations.

The “devils” are also human. Shinra isn’t evil in a mythic sense—it’s worse. It’s efficient. It’s normalized. It’s a system that believes everything can be extracted, optimized, and controlled. It doesn’t see the planet as something sacred. It sees it as a resource. Even Sephiroth, who appears godlike, is the product of human experimentation. His transcendence isn’t divine—it’s engineered.

That’s the shift.

In older epics, gods shape humanity. In Final Fantasy VII, humanity creates gods—and devils—and then loses control of both. This is where we find the tragedy in Final Fantasy VII. It's where the meaning truly lives.

It’s not just that people die. It’s that the conditions that make those deaths inevitable were created by human ambition. The tragedy itself is derived from human action, but it's not purely human. It’s the tragedy of the gods—of things that should have been sacred, reduced to experiments, exploited, and destroyed.

And beneath that, the deeper tragedy is ours:

We built the systems that made it happen. That’s why the story still resonates. Because Shinra doesn’t feel abstract anymore. It feels familiar.

It represents a version of the world where success is measured by efficiency and growth, even when those things come at the cost of life itself. It’s not just a villain—it’s a warning about what happens when systems lose their connection to meaning.

And the answer the story gives isn’t to destroy systems entirely. It’s to refuse to become them.

If there is one core truth at the center of Final Fantasy VII, it’s this:

Don’t become the devil.

And while that sounds simple and easy, the story of Final Fantasy VII points out that it's really not always so clear. It takes an awareness of how to keep your humanity intact amidst modern developments. 

Don’t let ambition detach from consequence. Don’t let systems define what has value. Don’t let the pursuit of power sever your connection to people, to community, or to the world itself. Because once that connection is gone, everything else follows.

What makes Final Fantasy VII a true epic, though, isn’t just its themes. It’s its legacy.

Epics don’t just exist—they spread. They become part of how people think. They get retold, reinterpreted, and passed on. Final Fantasy VII has done exactly that.

It shaped a generation that grew up with it. It continues to shape new ones through its remakes and reinterpretations. Its characters, its imagery, its ideas—they persist. That’s a mimetic legacy. And it’s still growing.

Finally, it’s the medium that this narrative comes packaged in that pulls it into epic territory. Every epic is tied to the dominant medium of its time. Ancient epics were oral traditions. Then came scrolls. Then books. The printing press and wide distribution followed—until new technology gave rise to film. It’s these last few developments that have allowed The Lord of the Rings to remain present, even in an ever-accelerating age of modernization.

Final Fantasy VII exists in something even newer—interactive media. And that changes everything. Because this isn’t just a story you watch or read. It’s a story you participate in. You move through it. You make choices within it. You inhabit its world. That makes its ideas more personal, more immediate, and more enduring.

That’s why I believe this story matters a lot.

Not because it’s nostalgic. Not because it’s popular. But because it is quietly doing what epics have always done:

It’s teaching us how to see the world. And more importantly, it’s warning us about what we might become if we’re not careful.

The Rat, the Unicorn, and the Mortals

I’ve been working on a new novel, and like many fantasy stories, it carries with it old legends—stories whispered long before the events of the main tale begin. This is one of them. It tells of a wish, a unicorn, and the moment the worlds were first divided.

---

Long before the worlds were parted, when forests were older than the names of kings and rivers had not yet chosen their courses, there lived a woman who kept a small gray rat.

The rat’s name was Rick.

He was not remarkable among rats. He knew the scent of grain and the comfort of warm hands. He knew the quiet rustle of cloth and the shadowed spaces beneath cupboards where the world felt safe and still.

He knew the woman’s voice, and the kindness of being fed. But he did not know why any of these things mattered.

For a rat does not ask such questions.

As a rat, he knew no more of meaning than a chair or a table knows meaning. He lived by warmth and hunger and the smallest contentment of being alive, and that was enough.

The woman loved him gently, the way one loves a small creature that curls beside the hearth in the evenings. Yet sometimes she looked beyond her window and wondered if there might be something greater waiting for her in the world.

One night, beneath a pale and watchful moon, she wandered into a forest where the trees grew tall and quiet.

There she met a unicorn.

The unicorn regarded her with bright, untroubled eyes, for unicorns did not then hide themselves from the world, nor did they understand the fragile sorrows of mortal hearts.

“What do you wish?” asked the unicorn. For unicorns were generous with miracles, though they were not always careful with them.

The woman hesitated only a moment.

“I wish my rat could become a beautiful man,” she said softly, “so that I might love him as he loves me.”

The unicorn tilted her head. For unicorns understood beauty very well. And to a unicorn, beauty and eternity were the same thing.

So the unicorn granted the wish. Rick the rat became a handsome man.

He stood beneath the pale trees, tall and radiant in the moonlight, and the woman cried out with joy. She gave him a name worthy of the miracle she believed she had been given.

She called him Shadrick.

At first the world seemed a wonder to him.

He could speak. He could think. He could look upon the woman and understand the strange ache that lived in his chest when she smiled.

But with that understanding came something else.

Time.

He watched the woman grow older. The brightness of her laughter softened, the steadiness of her hands began to tremble like candlelight in a restless wind.

Shadrick, however, never changed.

The unicorn had made him beautiful. And beauty—so the unicorn believed—could never fade.

When the woman died, Shadrick stood beside her grave while the rain fell quietly through the grass. He wept the sorrowful tears that only meaning can bring. After his cries of longing had gone unanswered by the tomb and the larger world, he said nothing for a great while.

Then at last he spoke.

“What was the meaning of it?”

He remembered the life he had lived before. The life where nothing had meaning at all. The rat had known hunger and comfort and fear, but never the terrible knowledge that all things must end.

It was meaning that had given him that knowledge.

Meaning had given him love.

Meaning had given him grief.

And so the immortal Shadrick came to believe something no mortal man nor immortal unicorn would ever understand: that meaning itself was the cruelest magic in the world.

In the centuries that followed, he searched for a way to quiet that cruelty and unmake meaning.

From his sorrow he shaped a strange and subtle hunger—something that fed not upon flesh, but upon the desires born from the knowledge of mortality. It grew wherever a finite life claimed purpose, gathered love, or found longing.

The unicorns began to notice the thinning of mortal hearts. They did not understand grief the way mortals do, nor did they trouble themselves much with the quiet tragedies of human hearts. Unicorns loved beauty and innocence, and they tended their forests and the creatures within them as one keeps a garden.

They cared for their woods. They cared for the living things that wandered through them. And they wished men, women and all mortals to remain as beautiful and clean as their capacity allowed—indeed, as they ought to yearn to be.

But the dulling of their hearts was not beautiful.

Where Shadrick's devouring beast passed, the world seemed thinner. The songs of birds lost their brightness. The green of leaves grew dull. Creatures wandered without purpose, as though something quiet and important had been taken from them.

And the unicorns would not have their world made hollow, so they did what no creature had ever done before. They separated the realm of mortals from their own.

The lands of wonder and the lands of humankind were drawn apart like two pages of a book, slowly and carefully, so that neither would tear.

But the unicorns did not simply push the emptiness away.

Instead they gathered it.

They removed the hungry thing Shadrick had made from the roots of the world and the quiet corners of mortal longing, and with their ancient magic they extracted and shaped it. The emptiness that had once threatened to swallow meaning became the very thing that held the realms apart. They wove it into a boundary between worlds.

This boundary was called the Null.

On one side lay the lands of humankind, where time moved quickly and hearts were fragile. On the other side lay Luminwood. The deep forest where unicorns walked beneath leaves that never lost their brightness.

Yet even such a boundary could not stand alone.

A single set of beautiful, cloven hooves must continue to walk the mortal side, where wishes were still spoken and careless miracles might yet be born.

And so one unicorn stepped forward.

She left the forests of Luminwood and entered the world of humans, taking a shape that could walk quietly among them. She did not go because she understood sorrow better than the others.

Unicorns never forget.

They remember every flower that has ever bloomed in their woods, every stream that has ever run beneath their trees. And she remembered one small thing that had once grown in the world.

A wish.

A small gray rat.

And the man he had become.

And the ravenous spirit he unleashed.

So she crossed the barrier to tend the forest of that unforgotten thing, and to see that it never again grew wild enough to hollow the world.

Centuries passed.

Kingdoms rose and fell. Forests were cut and planted again. The old stories became little more than quiet legends whispered at the edges of memory.

But boundaries weaken. Old magic stirs.

And somewhere, in the silent places between worlds, something still listens for the moment when the barrier trembles.

---

A Modern Footnote

Centuries later, when the barrier finally trembled again, no one in the human world noticed at first.

The news spoke only of an explosion in a research building and the strange garden that had appeared overnight where concrete and glass had once stood.

Most people watched the footage and forgot it before the evening ended.

But somewhere in an office break room, a woman stood very still as the broadcast played. She still had a child waiting for her at home when the workday ended.

For a moment—just a moment—the camera caught the trunk of a tree in the center of that impossible garden.

The bark was silver, and she longed for home.

Double Bind Binging Businesswomen

The double bind psychology generated in the workplace. Let’s talk about it.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, that’s OK. Neither was I.

Not until my typical mosey to the car after work, trying to make sense of the scatterplot of thoughts that undulates through my mind when I’m dealing with intense feelings or complicated issues. I grabbed a few words describing the disconnect I felt, plugged them into Google, and Gemini served a term I hadn’t heard before:

Illustration adapted from a concept by Dr. Doyenne.

“Double bind.”

A double bind happens when the range of acceptable behavior becomes extremely narrow — when you’re essentially damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Speak confidently, and you risk being perceived as aggressive.
Soften your language, and you risk being perceived as unsure.

Too direct → “difficult.”
Too collaborative → “not decisive.”

As a woman and as a mother, many of us learn to navigate this dynamic early, even if we don’t know the term.

One reason I notice it so clearly is that I’m also transgender. That has given me the unusual experience of moving through professional spaces while being perceived very differently at different points in my life.

At 18 years old — perceived as male — I worked as an electrician. I had about two years of informal on-the-job training and was still in the middle of a vocational program I was completing on my own.

Despite being early in my career, I was moved into a foreman role and regularly treated as an authority.

Eighteen. Year. Old. Boy.

Fast forward to today.

Thirteen years after transitioning. A 39-year-old woman.

I finished that vocational program years ago — six years before transitioning, at age 20. Since then I’ve earned an associate’s degree in accounting, pursued bachelor’s-level education in math and data analytics, completed Python automation coursework through Google and Coursera, and spent over a decade in auditing, accounting, and credit analysis.

Across that time I’ve studied systems — electrical systems, computer and data systems, financial systems, and the mathematical models behind them.

But recognizing expertise requires something simple organizations often fail to practice:

Listening beyond the level of stereotyping.

When we rely too heavily on assumptions about who “sounds authoritative,” we risk filtering out insight before we’ve even heard it.

Over time this has made me pay close attention to how organizations recognize expertise — and how easily ideas detach from the people who first surface them.

There’s another dimension to this that’s personal.

For the first 26 years of my life I avoided femininity. I was raised male in a very fundamentalist environment and learned early that femininity was something to suppress — at the risk of cruelty.

Ironically, that early conditioning benefited my career beyond reason.

Eighteen. Year. Old. Electrical. Foreman.

In many professional environments you must be competitive, assertive — even aggressive — to move forward. Assertiveness and femininity don’t have to collide, but in many people’s minds they still do.

After spending much of my life suppressing femininity, I’m not willing to abandon it now to fit a narrower idea of what authority should look like.

And the real question is:

Why should anyone have to?

Strong organizations evaluate ideas on their substance — not how closely the speaker fits a stereotype of authority.

Because sometimes the biggest constraint in a system isn’t capability.

It’s misperception.

Rebuilding the American Dream: Why We Need a Maximum Wage Ratio

How historical pay ratios shaped our culture of ambition, and how a 100:1 cap can restore it.

In America, we’ve spent decades arguing over the minimum wage. But the real imbalance isn’t at the bottom. It’s at the top.

Other nations have already tested this idea. In Switzerland, citizens voted on the 1:12 Initiative in 2013, which would have capped any CEO’s salary at twelve times that of their lowest-paid employee. It failed, but it reframed Europe’s debate on compensation. In Japan, corporate culture keeps executive pay naturally restrained—often around 30 - 50× an average worker’s pay—more by norm than by law. And in the United States, Portland, Oregon became the first city to tax pay inequality. Beginning in 2017, companies reporting CEO-to-median-worker pay ratios above 100:1 pay a 10% tax surcharge; above 250:1 pay 25%.

But 250:1 is still astronomical. It roughly matched national ratios from the mid-2010s; already deep into the inequality spiral. So while Portland made history, it didn’t make harmony. The gap here still feels like despair. Workers don’t sense civic pride; they feel underpaid and unseen. The moral gesture is there, but the ratio is too wide to heal the disconnect.

That’s why America needs to go further. Not a minimum wage debate. A maximum wage ratio: a simple rule tying the top to the bottom, so that success lifts everyone instead of leaving them behind. Not punishment, but proportion. Not equality of outcomes, but equality of belonging.

The right number isn’t 250:1, or even 150:1. It’s 100:1, which is the balance America had during its most ambitious, hopeful era, when work still meant possibility, and success still felt shared.

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A Short History of Pay Ratios and Pop Culture

The story of wealth in America is really a story of vibe. How people felt about success, work, and reward.

Era	Avg. CEO-to-Worker Ratio	Cultural Mood	Pop-Culture Snapshot
1970s	~30:1	Blue-collar pride and suburban stability	9 to 5, Rocky → Hard work = dignity
1980s	~50:1	Wall Street excess, deregulation, MTV materialism	“Greed is good” → Wealth = glamour
1990s	~100:1	Tech optimism, expanding opportunity	Hip-hop’s golden age, Office Space, Jerry Maguire → Hustle = hope
2000s	200:1+	Housing bubble, debt addiction	“Keeping up with the Joneses” → Hustle = stress
2010s	300:1+	Gig economy, burnout, inequality boom	“Grind culture,” irony → Work = survival

The ’90s: The Balance Between Dream and Delusion

The late ’90s were the last time the American Dream still felt plausible. The economy was expanding, tech was unlocking new paths to wealth, and culture celebrated work not as punishment but as self-expression.

Hip-hop and pop culture glorified success, but also the struggle to get there. Think “Mo Money Mo Problems,” “Can’t Knock the Hustle.” Even films like Office Space and Jerry Maguire wrestled with meaning, not just money. It was a strange equilibrium: ambition with empathy. You could believe in hard work and fairness at the same time.

The 2000s: When Hustle Turned Hollow

By the early 2000s, that equilibrium broke. Tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate excess pushed ratios past 200:1. The grind became an obligation instead of a dream. “Work hard, play hard” turned into “Work nonstop, maybe survive.”

The 2008 crash sealed it. The wealthy bounced back fast; everyone else was told to tighten their belts. That’s when hustle culture stopped feeling inspirational and started feeling like gaslighting.

Why 100:1 Is the Sweet Spot

• Rewards innovation and leadership.
• Demands shared prosperity.
• Keeps success aspirational without becoming absurd.

If your lowest-paid worker earns $40,000, your highest earner can make up to $4 million. Plenty of room for ambition, comfort, and creativity.

But once pay passes 200 - 300:1, something spiritual collapses. People stop believing they live in the same system as their bosses. When that faith goes, so do motivation, trust, and pride.

Making It Real

1. Corporate tax scaling. Lower rates for companies under 100:1; surcharges above it (tightening Portland’s model for real impact).
2. Public disclosure. Every company publishes its pay ratio. Let consumers and investors decide what feels fair.
3. Federal contracts. Only companies under 100:1 qualify for public funding or procurement.
4. Bonus reform. Shift stock-based compensation toward long-term value shared with workers (profit-sharing, employee ownership, and retention dividends).

If you want a raise at the top, raise the floor first.

The New American Dream

We can keep the hustle: The drive, the creativity, the love of success; but we have to re-anchor it in fairness.

A maximum wage ratio isn’t anti-wealth. It’s pro-trust, pro-dignity, and pro-sustainability. It says: you can climb as high as you want, but the ladder has to stay attached to the ground.

The 1990s gave us the last version of the Dream that still felt real. Maybe it’s time we take that ratio—and that optimism—and build forward from there.

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Note: Historical pay-ratio series from sources like EPI, AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch, and SEC pay-ratio disclosures. Portland’s surcharge effective 2017. Japanese ranges reflect widely reported corporate norms rather than statutory caps.

The Dialogue

In my last post, I wrote about Animorphs #31: The Conspiracy. Not just the family tension, but Jake’s opening description of the war with the Yeerks: a secret war that most people don’t see. I talked about how that framing becomes a roadmap, not only for the rest of Animorphs, but for how we recognize and resist cults; and, more broadly, modern fascism hiding in plain sight. 

And of course I also had mentioned how the series became a major literary fulcrum in my memoir. It is a major part of my childhood that affected my thinking regarding the fundamentalist cult I was raised in.

I hadn’t planned to keep writing about the series.
But as I've continued my reread, #33 The Illusion stopped me cold.

Most readers remember this book for its torture sequence. Team scout and loner, Tobias, is captured, restrained, enduring unbearable psychic pain as a terrible Yeerk leader and her machine twist his brain’s pain and pleasure centers. It’s one of the most excruciating scenes in the entire series. But what struck me most wasn’t the physical torment. It was what surfaced during it.

In the middle of the torture, Tobias’s mind slips—or maybe the machine drags him deeper—and suddenly he’s in a memory. A dim living room. The shades drawn. His uncle in front of the TV, a beer in his hand. Tobias speaks, tentative, trying to share something that matters.

He says his drawing has been chosen for an award. It’s an honor. He’s excited. He just wants someone to see him. His uncle doesn’t look up. Doesn’t pause the TV. He asks if there’s prize money, and when Tobias says no, the man mutters that he had a job at that age. The words land flat.

Tobias feels the beginnings of tears and chokes them down, before retreats to his room and gazing forlornly out the window.

Outside, a mother and daughter are getting out of their car, the daughter clumsily juggling a school project in hand: a finger painting that’s getting slightly crumpled in how she is managing it. The mother stops, rescues it, and holds it up "like it was the Mona Lisa" as she carries it into the house.

Tobias watches. Realizes he’s alone. The tears start to pour, but when he moves to wipe them away, he sees his hand is covered in feathers. It’s a wing. And that snaps him back to the present. Back to the pain, the restraint, the violation.

It’s such a quiet, devastating moment. The boundary between memory and reality dissolving in the very act of survival. And that’s the line that undid me. Because I think every former child of neglect, knows that window. And as a trans parent, I'm on alert for it.

The duality of the glass

I read that scene and felt two people inside me: the child looking out, and the parent looking in.
The part of me that still aches to be seen, and the part of me trying to teach my daughter that she already is.

The other night, she told me there’s no representation anywhere for kids with trans parents. Not in books. Not in movies. Not even online. She said it gently, but the loneliness behind it was heavy.

I said something small... something like, “Yeah, I know. There really isn’t much.”

Later, I realized I could’ve said more. I could’ve turned it into a moment—a Mona Lisa moment—where I stopped everything I was carrying and held her words carefully in my hands.

But then I remembered that she felt safe enough to tell me. And our conversation had closed with her remarking that her friend was making an animation, and she’d asked her to include a trans mom. And I told her how proud I was of her noticing things like that, and being so bold in trying to change narratives to show real lives that get overlooked.

So hopefully she did feel seen, after all. My daughter is an artist and animator herself, and we ended the night by sitting together and watching an anime we enjoy.

The hawk mind

When Tobias retreats into his hawk mind, it’s supposed to protect him. To dull the pain, to detach. But even inside that refuge, the human part of him bleeds through: the boy in the dark room, speaking into silence.

Reading that, I wondered what my own hawk mind has looked like over the years.

When you’re raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, you learn how to hover above your own feelings. You learn to perform bravery, to be “proud” of being different, even when it isolates you. You learn that openness is duty, not authenticity.

I carried that habit into adulthood... into parenthood, even. Generally, when I think about my daughter out in the world—talking about her family, trying to fit that story into other people’s narrow templates—I am looking for ways to make it easier for her. Little adjustments to language that might save her from having to explain too much. Even expressing little exceptions...  Just to let her know her needs are what come first.

But sometimes, the hawk instinct comes out louder than I mean it to. I tell my kids they should be proud of who they are, proud of their family, proud of having a trans parent. And I mean that. They should be. But I’ve realized that sometimes I’ve said it like a commandment—like it’s their job to feel that way. Like pride is a duty.

That’s not what I mean or want for them. I don’t want them to inherit pride as another duty. A mask like mine was, to wear in spite of people, or in front of me. I want it instead to be a well they can draw on when people don’t understand. I want them to arrive at it naturally, formed on its own from love, and in their own words. 

And I do feel we've accomplished that, even if situations are not always easy.

Because for most people, family still comes in tidy shapes: mom, dad, brother, sister. Ours doesn’t. She has two moms, and we’re separate, and she moves between our homes. It’s not something she should have to justify. So I tell her that however she needs to talk about it—whatever phrasing helps her move through those moments with dignity and calm—is okay with me.

It’s not that she needs to redefine who I am... she already knows. I'm the custodial parent. We are close and the relationship with the other is somewhat rocky. But it’s that my daughter deserves to feel at ease while navigating a world that still isn’t sure what to do with families like ours.

So maybe my hawk mind isn’t what protects me anymore. Maybe it’s what keeps me from swooping down to meet her where she is.

Default pride

That’s where I’m learning to draw the line. Between pride that’s assigned and pride that’s embodied.

When I was a Witness, pride was mandatory. Visibility was obedience. Now, as a trans woman and a mother, pride feels different. It’s not something I expect from my daughter; it’s something I want her to have room to define for herself.

If it’s easier for her to talk about us like we’re a single mom—one word, one presence, one safe explanation—she can. If it feels better to say “my moms,” or to call us separately “Mommy” and “Mama,” that’s hers to decide. She doesn’t owe anyone the logistics of her family.

All I want is for her to move through the world without shrinking. To know she can adjust her language without betraying who we are. That it’s okay to choose comfort over confrontation, and that doing so doesn’t make her less brave.

That’s what I mean by default pride: not a performance, not a duty, but the quiet knowing that your family is whole, even when you have to describe it in shorthand.

Because the words don’t make us real. The love does.

Through the window

Sometimes I think about Tobias at that window, and how many of us grow up staring through our own versions of that glass. Some of us never stop. We spend our lives trying to become the parent in the scene. The one who knows when to stop, take the weight, and carry the painting gently inside.

Maybe that’s the real miracle of stories like Animorphs: they hand us our old selves in ways we can finally understand. They remind us that the hawk and the child are still in dialogue, still teaching each other how to be whole.

And sometimes, the only thing between them is a window: one we’ve spent our whole lives learning to open.