About the author

Since I’m trying to tell you all this science stuff, I figure it behooves me to give you some idea of who I am, if only to lay my biases bare. I try to be as unbiased as I can be in my presentation of facts, but everyone has biases, even if it’s only in *what* information they chose to present. Also, knowing my underlying credentials and so forth gives you some idea of how much you should trust any unsupported statements I make.

I am a middle-aged woman from Arizona. I have visited elsewhere (including eastern Australia, ask me about leeches and/or Christmas-tree worms), but I have never lived anywhere else. I went to the University of Arizona (lo these many years ago), and got a BS in general biology. More recently, I attempted (mostly unsuccessfully, though I did take some classes) to get into grad school at Arizona State University. A majority (or, at least, a plurality) of my working life has involved some kind of low-level lab work, mostly chemistry-related.

I am on the autism spectrum, and have ADHD. When Asperger’s was still a recognized diagnosis, it was the most applicable to me, most likely. This means, among other things, that I will sometimes jump down rabbit-holes tangentially related to what I’m talking about, just because I think about things a lot and my mind wandered off that way.

At least by American standards, I am a liberal with slight libertarian tendencies.

I believe trans women are women and trans men are men, and a distinction should be made only when it’s actually relevant (eg trans men need “female” health services like pap smears, trans women don’t).

I think it should be illegal to fire or evict someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity (barring *extreme* edge cases like, say, a non-offending pedophile working with kids–arguably, being a pedophile is a sexual orientation, and in and of itself harmless, though actually molesting kids or whatever is obviously evil and a crime–see what I said above about rabbit holes?).

I support reproductive freedom, in basically all of its forms. I think anyone who is pregnant and wishes not to be should be able to terminate a pregnancy, at least in the first trimester, with basically no questions asked. I think we should have comprehensive sex ed in schools. I think birth control should be readily available, supported by health insurance (where relevant) and/or as nearly free as possible (at least the “basic” versions, I’m perfectly OK with certain options being luxury items, eg flavored condoms), and easily accessible to everyone, even kids (“Just Say No” has… pretty much never kept teens from having sex in the history of ever)

I support some kind of UBI, if we can work out the kinks and perverse incentives (I think part of the way to do that is to make the UBI just *barely* enough to live on–the idea being to make it a floor you can’t fall below, not a comfortable living in and of itself).

And so on. I try to make my political beliefs–and all my other beliefs, honestly–as fact-based as possible. Show me *evidence* that I’m wrong, and I might change my mind.

In terms of religion, I consider myself a nonspecific theist. I believe there is a Higher Power, and that He is, for a reasonable definition of the word, good. But I also believe that She is, for a reasonable definition of the word, infinite, and human beings are absolute crap at actually understanding infinite things. (pronoun switch deliberate, I don’t think God has junk…I should probably just use They, instead, that’s what my 70-year-old mother suggested, but I find the singular they linguistically awkward) For what it’s worth, I was raised Presbyterian.

I believe, as a matter of faith, that God created the universe, but I do not in *any* way insist on it as a scientific point. I 100% believe that we could have ended up in essentially the exact same universe with no Creator, I just think that He nudged things along the way She wanted them. And I think anyone who treats their creation myth absolutely literally–whether we’re talking Genesis, the Popol Vuh, the Poetic Edda, or whatever else–is, at least in this day and age, being profoundly silly at best.