Thank you for addressing the naked elephant in the room. I write and illustrate about sexual anatomy. I don’t need to bore anyone with the statistics. Sex education in this country is appalling, and the areas that have the least knowledge have the highest rates of STIs, non-consensual sex, and unplanned pregnancies. I am trying to change that.

So while others can claim this issue is common sense, if it was…we wouldn’t have one-third (yes, that high) of this country not knowing what a clitoris is. Forget finding it. I understand Medium is caught in a Hobson’s choice, so I will be moving all sex education to my Substack.

I still plan to write for Medium on other subjects.

But I beg for some leniency regarding violence. I recently interviewed a man who is running the largest database of school shootings in the country. He tracks these shootings and finds patterns so he can better advise the FBI, parents, teachers, and the public on how to prevent them. I am finishing up our edited interview and article now.

He told me the only reason he granted me an interview was because it was going on Medium. He didn’t want advertising, clickbait, or censorship around this sensitive topic. He wanted independent journalism.

Sure, I can keep the reader at a safe distance and write about school shooting statistics only, but it won’t move anyone to change gun violence in our schools. The great propagandist Stalin understood this better than anyone. He said, “The death of one soldier is a tragedy. The death of 1000 is a statistic.”

This is just one example. It will be a Sisyphean task to discuss racism in America while decoupling it from violence. We risk reducing some very tragic (and solvable) problems to unmoving facts.

Not to mention, there’s an art to a strong polemic. What makes Medium great is that it is a place to have tough (but polite) conversations. I fear we will be silencing those conversations.

Anyway, no need to respond. Just voicing some concerns. I will do my best to toe the line.