What am I going to say now instead of “safe, legal abortion?”

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much! Just under the clock, exactly 150 donors, and about twice that many other helpers, got us across the finish line and past our minimum goal of $10,000 for our Halloween annual fundraiser.

This Sunday, our team and our supporters will be hitting the virtual pavement to enjoy some Halloween fun and ask folks if they'd skip the tricks and make the treat a donation to Scarleteen.

As a writer and a reader, books have always been my constant companions: when I feel alone and isolated, they're one of the first places I turn. We've got you here in our direct services at Scarleteen (and if you want to talk to a nonbinary person specifically, you can always ask for, or email, me or one of our other nonbinary team members, like Ruby or Jacob), but if you also like the company of books, here are a few books I like from nonbinary writers, about nonbinary identities and thought, relevant self-care or help sorting things out for yourself, and a couple of my favorite nonbinary or trans balms for the soul.

Are you an independent sex educator? We know all about that hustle! We'd like to try and make it a little easier by helping you promote yourself on social media every week.  Find out more about #IndieSexEd Sundays!

It feels a fitting start to open this by telling you that in the most 2020 way possible, we -- including me, the founder of this place, who first launched it frozen in my basement apartment with the entirely unuseful radiator in the ceiling  -- forgot our 22nd anniversary earlier this month.

This is a deeply lousy year for Halloween shenanigans. You can't shake candy out of a Zoom meeting, go to a haunted house unless your house is itself haunted, and it's really hard to drum up enthusiasm for a virtual party of any kind right now when we're all sick of the spaces we've been stuck in for months on end, when so many are ill, hurting or both, and, for those of us stateside, when election anxiety has our stomachs and hearts in a vice-grip.

This is also a lousy year for organizations and projects who need donations to keep the lights on and do all the things that they do, Scarleteen very much included. Based on how things have been the last eight months and how we suspect they'll still be for a while, unless something changes, we'll have about $10,000 less to work with this year than we did last year. We’re asking for your help.

I've been saving this very wonderful birthday-card-of-sorts from the also-very-wonderful Liz for almost a year now, looking for just the right time to post it.  Seeing as we're two days away from the end of this 20th year and our next (our 21st!) birthday, it certainly feels like a good time.

I know you'll be flooded this week with people asking for money from you. If your inbox has been anything like mine, you've already suffered through a solid week of targeted marketing landmines and nonstop sparkly coercions to spend money buying everything and anything on earth, no less.

At long last, Merriam-Webster has added they and them, as singular nonbinary pronouns, specifically, to the dictionary.

Those of us who are nonbinary, who use these pronouns, or both, didn't need a dictionary to validate our identities, or the pronouns we use.  Anyone and everyone's identities and pronouns are valid, whether the dictionary or other cultural institutions acknowledge them or not.