David Minerva Clover

David Minerva Clover

Bio

David Minerva Clover is a queer and transgender writer, covering everything from parenting to why dinosaurs are awesome. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Mag, The Establishment, and many other places. He lives in beautiful Detroit Michigan with his spouse, one child, and an embarrassment of animals. Check out his blog at Postnuclear Era or follow him on twitter at @dm_clover.

David Minerva Clover Articles

Despite conservative fears, when many people picture what “marriage” is, marriages like mine simply aren’t a part of it. Image: Thinkstock.

I Challenge You To Love Your Spouse — As Long As He's A Heterosexual Man.

I expected it was only a matter of time until someone sent it my way. I mean... friends have even called my relationship with my wife “inspirational.” [...] [O]nce I noticed that I still hadn’t been invited, I started to notice something else: Everyone that I saw posting “love your spouse” pictures was straight....

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Photo by Dan Smedley on Unsplash

Stop Blaming Parents For Our Lack Of Self-Care

When I have to pick between doing what’s best for my kid and doing what’s best for me, most of the time, I’m going to pick my child. Read...
There are definitely classist roots in here, but I still like Konmari. Image: Thinkstock.

This Sh*t Brings Me Joy: Konmari For Poor Folks

Getting rid of all of your stuff is all well and good if you are childfree, but if you have the fortune (or misfortune) to have children, they literally will not let you.

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Pretty much nobody wants to be called a housewife. Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s degrading to spend your time doing housework. Housework is the ultimate invisible labor.

I’m Not A Stay-At-Home-Mom, I’m A Queer Housewife, Thanks

One of the most insidious things that patriarchy does is the complete and utter devaluation of anything that is considered “women’s work.” Not only does patriarchy limit what women (and all trans and nonbinary folk) can do in the world, it also takes what we do manage to do and tells us it isn’t worth anything.

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In this family, those figures traditionally made of three snowballs stacked atop each other — they’re called snowpeople.

In This Family, We Say Snowperson 

People might raise their eyebrows when they hear me say “snowperson” for the first time. But it makes perfect sense. A man is just a kind of person.

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Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

We All Liked Problematic Stuff As Kids, But We Don’t Have To Pass Them On

To knowingly include stories with deeply problematic themes strikes me as just adding fuel to the fire.

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I am surprisingly unstressed about the amount of screen time our 1 year old is getting. Image: Thinkstock.

Why I'm Not That Worried About Screen Time

Once upon a time, the only thing to consider was “Does your kid watch too much TV?” But now it seems like nearly everyone can agree that kids these days spend far too much time looking at screens of all sorts.

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Once I realized that I could embrace the parts of femme that I liked (lipstick! frilly skirts!) and reject the ones that didn’t work for me (shaving! heels!) things got a hell of a lot easier.

I'm A Queer Femme — And It Only Took Me 30 Years To Embrace It

Faced by the extreme pressure to conform to impossible beauty ideals, I followed my instincts (and my budding feminism) and rejected them wholesale. I wasn’t going to play like that; I wasn’t going to let my gender require that I wear makeup or perform a certain way.

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For now, I’m a boy, and I’m a mama, and those seemingly contradictory truths are things I can accept about myself.

When I Realized I Was Trans, I Still Wanted To Be Mama

When I finally realized I was trans, it was after almost a year and a half of therapy, a lot of trauma, and after becoming a parent.

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Listen, a vagina is not an artificial waterway for babies to be born.

Let's Talk About Genitals: The Term Birth Canal Is The Actual Worst

The way we as a society discuss genitalia is already messed up and confusing. When the word “vagina” is used to mean everything from, well, “vagina” to “vulva” to “the entire female reproductive system — yes, even including the ovaries,” it’s no freaking wonder we don’t know how to talk about this stuff.

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