Emily Gorcenski was not thinking of the Otherwise (formerly the Tiptree) Award when she wrote:

“People are really trying to bake sale the USPS back to life instead of like, I dunno, storming the house of every US Senator” (Twitter)

But there were a lot of us who held bake sales, made cookies for those bake sales, or bought cookies at those bake sales to promote science fiction and fantasy that didn’t center masculinity. And we made it a point of pride that we did it that way.

I wonder where we’d be, as a genre, and as a culture if we had been storming the Hugo ballot to get more not-men and BIPOC nominated 30 years ago instead of an “award of our own.”

We have a culture that treats organizing anything bigger than a bake sale as dangerous, and that holds us back from getting more done.