Charlotte's Web Thoughts Charlotte Clymer

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Yesterday, Republican Congressman Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma stood on the floor of the U.S. House in support of his amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which you probably know best as the legislation that funds our Defense Department.
Mr. Brecheen’s amendment, which passed the GOP-majority House in a voice vote, would ban any funding in the final version from being used on drag events, in what is clearly a painfully obvious attempt at pandering to anti-LGBTQ hatred.
That, alone, I find hilarious given the very long history of drag performance in the U.S. military, notably among the young men of the Greatest Generation — for that, check out this fantastic write-up from none other than the National War War II Museum (!!!).
Anyway, Mr. Brecheen, in his floor speech, stated this:
"Young men who make up the bulk of our fighting forces are inspired by G.I. Joe. They're not inspired by a Barbie girl in a Barbie world."
The anti-drag nonsense is easy enough for me to laugh off given how patently absurd it is, but this is not. It’s profoundly disrespectful to women service members and veterans, and I find it more than a little hypocritical coming from this particular guy.
Mr. Brecheen was 22 years old on 9/11 and a healthy, able-bodied young man.
He could have enlisted that day or in the many years afterward, but he did not. He declined to serve his country in uniform during a time of war.
But more than 300,000 women have enlisted since 9/11.
More than 9,000 women have been honored for their actions in direct combat.
166 women service members have been killed in combat since 9/11 and more than 1,000 have been wounded.
Women like Lt. Emily Perez (1983 - 2006), the first female graduate of West Point to die in Iraq when she was killed in a makeshift bomb that exploded near her Humvee during a combat mission.
Women like Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who lost most of both her legs when the Black Hawk she was co-piloting was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade from Iraqi insurgents.
Women like Cpl. Jessica Ellis (1983-2008), a combat medic who volunteered a second time for a dangerous mission clearing a route and was killed in a roadside bomb. She was 24.
What was Josh Brecheen doing during that whole time?
He worked as a political staffer and owned a motivational speaking business called Brecheen Keynotes and Seminars, and then, he ran for office.
I kid you not.
And now Mr. Brecheen stands there, insulting the memory of women who have died in combat while he was a coward who stayed home and, ironically, sold motivation.
Perhaps it’s an appropriate moment for the Congressman to reflect on why he so oddly claims to identify as a patriot when he lacked the courage to serve where the women of this country have so faithfully stood in the breach.
Sit down, Sir.
And by the way, I’d trust Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig with my life long before I’d ever consider the resignation of settling for your third-rate informercial ass.
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[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And if this is too big of a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]
I spent this weekend in El Paso at the 2024 Texas Democratic Convention, and it was a breath of fresh air just to be around Texas Democrats. The excitement, the passion, the values, the pride, and the unyielding commitment were on full display. It felt so good to be home.
When I was invited to speak at this year’s convention, there was no doubt in my mind what I wanted to say. I wanted to offer a love letter to what it means to be a Texan, and specifically, the Texas Democrats who have guided my path in life and continue to do so.
The original speech I wrote was a bit long, and after a kind and very reasonable request from convention staff, I trimmed a few minutes off it, but I want to include here the text that I had to cut, so the remarks that are italicized indicate they were in the original speech but not what folks saw at the convention.
I implore folks to support Texas Democrats this year. I’ve rarely seen such energy as I saw this weekend. Folks are putting in the work, and it shows. I am optimistic about November.
Please consider donating to Texas Democrats right here, Annie’s List (supporting women candidates) right here, and Find Out PAC, a project started by the legendary Gina Ortiz Jones to beat extremist Republicans on the Texas Supreme Court, right here.
I’m including the video of the speech below for those who’d like to watch it, and below that will be the full text of my remarks:

FULL REMARKS (italicized text in original speech but not during delivery):
My name is Charlotte Clymer, my pronouns are she/her, and I am proud to be from the Great State of Texas.
I currently live in our nation’s capital, and often, when I meet someone for the first time and they ask where I’m from and I tell them, they’ll have a look of sympathy on their face and say something like: “Oh, I’m sorry. That sounds terrible.” And they mean it.
And when that happens, I respond that I’m actually very proud to be from Texas. I love Texas.
And the sympathetic look on their face will vanish and, in its place, will be confusion and incredulity.
They’ll say to me: “But Charlotte, you’re a Democrat. You’re pro-choice. You support abortion access. You’re a trans woman. How can you be proud to be from Texas?”
And I realize, in that moment, they truly don’t get it. So, I gotta tell them.
I tell them that I am from the home of Barbara Jordan, and that during the Watergate scandal, when Americans felt so alarmed and uncertain about our country’s leadership, the conscience of our nation was a Black queer woman from Texas.
I tell them that I’m from the home of Gov. Ann Richards and that long before these extremist male politicians were so threatened by women controlling their own destiny, Gov. Richards was making it look easy, backwards and in high heels.
I tell them that I am from the home of Wendy Davis and Molly Cook and Julian Castro and Joaquin Castro and Gina Ortiz Jones and Molly Ivins. I’m from the home of Celia Israel and Beto O’Rourke and Gene Wu and Monique Alcala and Becca DeFelice.
I tell that them that if they listen to Willie Nelson and Beyoncé and Selena, they are listening to Texas music.
I tell them that when they watch Simone Biles dominate the Paris Olympics this summer, they are watching a Texas woman do that.
I tell them that I’m from the home of Sheila Jackson Lee and Sylvia Garcia and Lizzie Fletcher and Greg Casar. I’m from the home of Veronica Escobar and Al Green and Marc Veasey and Vicente Gonzalez and Lloyd Doggett.
I tell them that I am from the home of Jasmine Crockett.
I tell them that I am from the home of Sarah Weddington and Cecile Richards and Ilyse Hogue and Kate Cox and millions of T

[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And if this is too big of a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]
It’s Pride Month, and I’m trying to remember that.
Yesterday afternoon, I was walking through downtown D.C. on a few errands when the sky burst open, and I took shelter under a nearby awning with a number of folks, waiting for the rain to pass along.
I don’t know how true this is scientifically, but my gut feeling has always been that rain tends to calm us down. I have no actual evidence to back that up that claim, but I think there are fewer disputes, less interpersonal drama, and whatnot.
And so, it came as quite a shock when a man joined us under the awning, noticed my presence, and then began harassing me with vile, transphobic remarks — at first, with a slightly raised voice and then full-on yelling. Screaming. Spit coming out of his mouth as he berated me from less than 10 feet away.
I’m not gonna mention here what all he yelled, but it was pretty bad. It was disgusting and hurtful and cruel. It went on for several minutes.
I decided to completely ignore him. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a response. The people around us said nothing as the tirade went on and on. Maybe they didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, either. I suppose that’s a kind and diplomatic read on bystanders, right?
I thought about taking out my phone and recording him, but would that escalate things? Would I be risking assault? I decided not to film, and to be honest, I regret that.
It became too much, and so, I walked away, in the rain, hoping he’d stop. But he didn’t. He followed me for several moments, still shouting, both of us walking past more people, who, I guess, were also choosing to stay out of it.
Maybe he got bored. Maybe he got tired of hearing his own voice. The shouting eventually stopped, and I just kept walking, as calmly as I could. I went home, and for the rest of the day, even as I tried my best to contextualize things, I was shaken and I was embarrassed to feel shaken.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. Like most women, I’ve been street-harassed on a fairly regular basis, although it’s typically no more than a few seconds. Sometimes, it’s worse than that. Like a few months back, as I was walking to my office, when a guy pulled up in his car and said some not-so-nice things and followed me for two blocks. That was scary.
I can only speak for myself, but I do think a broad challenge for trans people is that if we talked about every time we encounter public hostility and discrimination, it’s all we’d ever talk about. So, we have to pick our battles.
Even as I write this, I worry that it’ll somehow be read as self-absorbed. Maybe that’s irrational, but in my experience, a lot of non-trans folks tend to get uncomfortable when a trans person talks about the harassment they encounter.
And yet, with a platform like mine, don’t I have an obligation to raise awareness about this? If I’m not, is that a failure of leadership on my part?
Ultimately, it feels like constantly being between a rock and a hard place. I want to be an interesting writer who happens to be a trans woman, not a trans woman who happens to be an interesting writer. And that’s really tough.
So, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to focus on the good for a moment. You see, when I have days like yesterday, I try to remember all the kindness and generosity I’ve experienced from non-trans people who go out of their way to make trans folks feel welcome.
Like a few years ago, when a TSA agent saw I got erroneously flagged by the full body scanner at airport security—a very common occurrence for trans people, believe it or not—and she rushed over to tell her colleague that she would handle the search.
E

[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And if this is too big of a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]
Many years ago, I belonged to a more conservative church; it could accurately be described as evangelical, and I could be accurately described as the token progressive among the parishioners there. How I came to join that church is a story for another day.
When we weren’t talking politics, life was great, but when we were, it could be exasperating.
On the morning of the 2008 presidential election—you’ll remember Pres. Obama’s historic victory that evening—our church sent out a rare email to the entire congregation which basically encouraged them, without explicitly saying so, to vote for Sen. John McCain.
The email explained that abortion should be the most important issue for voters and that our church is against abortion and congregants should support the anti-choice candidate, which, of course, was Mr. McCain.
For a number of reasons, I was not pleased with the email. It felt wildly inappropriate for any church, particularly one benefitting from a tax-exempt status, to write such a blatantly partisan email.
So… I took my time writing a response and then hit “reply all” to the hundreds of folks on the list.
I explained that I know politics can be stressful and abortion is a particularly fraught issue but we live in a country founded on freedom from religion and that neither I nor anyone else—and certainly not the government—has any business telling women what to do with their bodies.
Well, the responses came quickly from fellow parishioners who were not exactly pleased with my position and let me know they were displeased in no uncertain terms.
Call it my youthful arrogance at 23, but I wasn’t backing down on this, and I politely responded to all the spirited critiques. About an hour into the email chain, one of the pastors stepped-in and asked everyone to halt the conversation. This had clearly not gone as planned, and it was time for the church to save face.
But something pretty great happened after that: over the following week, I got emails and texts from many friends in the church who had been uncomfortable with the initial email telling us how to vote and wanted to say something but had felt alone.
We all started talking to each other more. It turns out I wasn’t as much a token progressive as I’d thought. In fact, there were numerous folks in the church who supported abortion access.
I am pro-autonomy. I am pro-independence. I am pro-choice. My religious views have no place in the affairs of other people. What someone does with their body is none of my damn business — that goes for any reason but especially when their life is in grave danger. That’s my primary problem with anti-choice extremists.
But my secondary disconnect with the so-called "pro-life" message, aside from the obvious autonomy issue, is that very rarely have I seen so-called “pro-life” folks argue as passionately for universal healthcare or refugee assistance or reforming our nation’s gun laws or abolishing the death penalty or eradicating poverty or funding mental health or eliminating homelessness, etc.
And by passionately, I mean posting on social media with similar outrage, protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court, burning up the pulpit in church, marching in the streets — basically, everything so-called “pro-life” people do on this one particular issue that’s strangely absent on every other issue.
I feel that, for so-called “pro-life” people, what truly separates abortion from all other matters of life and death is an implicit, religious need to shame and control women's sexuality.
There is an undeniable theme of alleging “irresponsibility” and “selfishness” and "promiscuity" on the part of women that is

[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And if this is too big of a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]
Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are deeply unethical. Their conflicts-of-interest are brazen and shameless, they are openly corrupt, and their general and open hostility toward those they believe are their political opponents is especially jarring given how they’re not supposed to engage in such behavior as sitting justices.
Mr. Alito and Mr. Thomas do not belong on any federal bench, of course, let alone in seats on the Supreme Court. I feel every reasonable adult considering the evidence in good faith agrees.
That’s all well and good to acknowledge, and also: the harsh and sad truth that many folks need to hear is that Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas aren’t going anywhere, unless by their own volition or the unyielding authority of mortality’s sweet embrace.
More to the point: Mr. Alito and Mr. Thomas will not be removed from the Supreme Court. That is never going to happen. Ever. So long as they wish to be in those seats and their bodies don’t fail them, both will remain sitting Associate Justices of the Supreme Court.
I feel the need to point this out because I see a lot of well-meaning folks getting angry with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin and President Biden and whomever the hell else, as though of any these people have a magic wand that can spirit Mr. Alito and Mr. Thomas out of power.
So, let’s review: by authority of the Constitution, federal judges can only be removed from the bench—that includes Supreme Court justices—by a two-thirds conviction of the U.S. Senate following impeachment by the U.S. House.
So, for example, if Mr. Alito were to be impeached by the House, as damning as that may be, and even if a whopping 66 senators vote to convict after trial proceedings, he still would not be removed because it takes 67 senators (two-thirds of the body) to reach a conviction.
This is not without precedent regarding accountability of federal judges, 15 of whom have been impeached in our country’s history, eight of them convicted in the Senate, on charges ranging from abuse of power to soliciting bribes to intoxication while presiding.
That exclusive club includes Justice Samuel Chase, the only member of the Supreme Court to be impeached, in a highly partisan war between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans (the two major parties at the time). He was acquitted on all charges by the Senate.
But folks, need I point out the obvious? We don’t live in a rational time. We don’t live in a good faith political environment. Mr. Alito would have to commit crimes so visceral—and the evidence brought against him would have to be so overwhelming—that numerous Republican senators would have no choice but to vote for a conviction.
This is the same bunch that let Trump get away with blatant corruption in two separate impeachment trials. Please, raise your hand if you think the Senate would convict Mr. Alito short of him murdering someone and bragging about it on national television.
I know it’s frustrating. I know it can feel demoralizing. But I worry far more about the exacerbation of folks’ exhaustion if they’re led to believe Mr. Alito might be removed from the bench, only to realize, down the road, he will never be. It’s not gonna happen. Ever.
And before y’all mention it, yes, I read Congressman Raskin’s elegantly penned op-ed in The Washington Post yesterday, in which he argues that Mr. Alito and Mr. Thomas can be forced to recuse themselves from the Jan. 6th case.
(Quick note for those not-in-the-know: “recusal” means a federal judge acknowledges a conflict-of-interest they may hold in a pending case and removes themselves from the process in the

[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And yes, I am available for Pride Month speaking engagements. And if all this is too big a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]
Every American of a certain age and older knows this story well: in Peanuts, the all-time great comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, there’s a long-running gag in which Lucy van Pelt holds a football in place and invites friend and neighbor Charlie Brown to kick it.
And every single time, for five decades, Charlie Brown would earnestly run at the pigskin, sizing it up for a good, clean kick, and at the last possible moment, right before he makes contact—YOINK—Lucy would rip it away and Charlie Brown would swing his leg through a ghost and fall flat on his ass. There were somersaults. Shoes were lost. The sky would spin.
SPLAT.
As Charlie Brown lay there on the grass, forced yet again into a reexamination of his unyielding faith in the goodness of others, Lucy would stand over him, holding said ball, and offer a biting and witty observation.
It was hilarious. It was glorious. It was frustrating in the best way possible.
It became an annual tradition for the strip, appropriately marking a cultural beginning to autumn (or fall, if you will). Would this finally be the year that Lucy offers a respite of mercy and Charlie Brown kicks the damn ball?
It never came to pass. Charlie Brown never did make contact. Schulz, one of the few public figures in the past 50 years whose easy wholesomeness gave Mister Rogers a run for his money, was consistently cruel on this particular matter.
Say what you will about the eternal naïveté of Charlie Brown, but you can’t fault his intention. His sole motivation was kicking the ball, and his sole fault was earnestly trusting Lucy.
Last week, former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley announced during an interview that she would be supporting Donald Trump in the election, despite her many statements to the press condemning Trump’s leadership and character.
Like last June, when she said that Trump had been “incredibly reckless with national security” after the Justice Department announced its initial 37 charges against him in the ongoing classified documents case.
Yes, you read that right: Haley is now endorsing a man she deemed “incredibly reckless” with national security. As of this writing, no political reporters have asked her about this incongruence.
YOINK. SPLAT.
Then there was the interview on CNBC the following month in which she said this about Trump: “We can’t have, as Republicans, him as the nominee. He can’t win a general election. That’s the problem. We’ve got to go and have someone who can actually win.”
She has not been asked about this by political reporters since her endorsement of Trump.
YOINK. SPLAT.
Or how about when Haley appeared on “Face the Nation” back in September and asserted to host Margaret Brennan that Americans would not “vote for a convicted criminal” when asked if she’d vote for Trump if he were the nominee and convicted in any of his four pending indictments.
As Trump’s hush money trial enters final arguments today—and it looks more than likely he’ll be convicted—as of this writing, no political reporters have asked her about this statement, one which was offered on one of the most well-known news programs in the country.
YOINK. SPLAT.
What about in January, when Haley was asked about Trump’s various legal battles with E. Jean Carroll, whom he raped and defamed and was found liable for said defamation by two separate predominantly-male juries? Haley claimed she hadn’t looked at the details of the then-pending trial, but that if Trump were found guilty, “he should pay the price.”
She has not been asked about this statement by any political reporters