Also.Also.Also: Noted Lesbian Author Kristen Arnett Was a Clue on Jeopardy, the Category Was “Get Stuffed”

It’s Tuesday already. How?? And simultaneously, how is it only Tuesday??


Queer as in F*ck You

Ok so this is a slight editor’s privilege, but tonight’s headline goes out to Kristen Arnett WHO WAS A CLUE ON JEOPARDY TODAY (click to hear the clue in real time) and our entire workplace cannot stop screaming about it!!!!

And then an indie bookstore got involved, and it was so cute? But obviously the winner here is the Kristen Arnett’s fiancée, my daily coconspirator, woman of my heart, queen of the Autostraddle daily calendar, our Managing Editor Kayla Kumari:

THATS GAY indeed. Ok let’s see what else!

It’s been days, and I have not stopped being angry. Utah Just Became the First State of 2023 to Ban Gender-Affirming Care (and to read more: Utah’s New Anti-trans Law Is “Brutally Unfair” and Will Face a Legal Challenge, Advocate Says)

Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union Share Sweet Photos with Zaya Wade Ahead of Winter Formal. At least there’s some good in the world, somewhere.

nbd JUST AUTOSTRADDLE BEING INTERVIEWED BY CNN!!!!! Congrats to Nic and Valerie 🎉 How ‘the Last of Us’ Did Bill and Frank Justice — And Impressed Many LGBTQ Fans


Saw This, Thought of You

I’m sorry… what. Wait, So Now Even My Hair Is Aging?

How Our Definition of Healthy Fails Black Women. I think about this a lot.

I was actually just talking about this over the weekend! Black Teen Girls On TV Are A Mess… Finally


Political Snacks

“In life, Nichols had been diminished to an abstraction, a target for the inchoate rage of men who were, at least nominally, part of his own community. In death, he was reduced again—this time to a cudgel with which to goad liberals for their one-note fixation with racism. Observers on the right seized on the racial uniformity of the incident as if the fact that Black cops are also capable of behaving so violently toward a Black man might retroactively exonerate similarly violent white cops of the charge of racism. “liberals blame racism for memphis man’s brutal beating despite officers being black,” a headline on the Fox News Web site claimed. The left, exasperated conservatives appeared to be saying, is so bereft of novel ideas that it blames white people even for situations in which no white people are present.

Yet seemingly few Black people have harbored the delusion that white people are the sole vectors of white supremacy.”

The Killing of Tyre Nichols and the Issue of Race by Jelani Cobb for the New Yorker, one of the few people I want to hear from during times like this.

OK. And now! To be honest, I debated including this. I don’t want to fear monger for the sake of doing it, and I don’t believe Trump will ever be President again so giving him any kind of platform for his hate (even here, in a publication that’s obviously standing against everything he says, that goes without saying) is dangerous.

I also know that coordinated attacks on trans kids and trans adults — because it is not going to stop at trans kids, not that it matters — has been gaining groundswell years, we all know this, and that’s shaping up to becoming the defining lines of a right wing culture war going into the 2024 election. So, by that measure, ignoring Trump once before because “he simply could not win” was something promised myself never to do again. Here we are, getting prepared: Trump Vows to ‘Stop’ Gender-Affirming Care for Minors if Re-Elected President

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Carmen Phillips

Carmen Phillips is Autostraddle's former editor in chief. She began at Autostraddle in 2017 as a freelance team writer and worked her way up through the company, eventually becoming the EIC from 2021-2024. A Black Puerto Rican feminist writer with a PhD in American Studies from New York University, Carmen specializes in writing about Blackness, race, queerness, politics, culture, and the many ways we find community and connection with each other.  During her time at Autostraddle, Carmen focused on pop culture, TV and film reviews, criticism, interviews, and news analysis. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. And there were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. To reach out, you can find Carmen on Twitter, Instagram, or her website.

Carmen has written 716 articles for us.

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