about

My last time in a swimming pool in Florida

blue glass brick wall in swimming pool

Florida has made so many laws against me, I don’t suppose I can go there anymore. Anti-transgender laws are meant to say that our existence is a logical impossibility. These laws are false, unworkable, bad-intentioned, and wrong.

How the bathroom verification cards would work

Person with red-painted nails holds a piece of graph paper with crudely hand-drawn smiley, flat-faced, and frowney faces. The line next to the frowney face is checked off.

I think they want magnetic locks on public bathrooms. Don’t put me on a registry of ‘safe’ trans people. No one stands to gain anything from it. Everyone would be harassed in search of the Mythical Bad Trans.

Transphobia, the Interrupting Cow

sketch of crying long-haired person

Prejudice obstructs continuous and coherent thought. Transphobia upholds gender-conformist and authoritarian aspects of culture. It tries to link itself to important feelings, but it isn’t sincere.

Bathroom bills are intended to suppress trans life

ghostly hand knocking at a door

They will require little or no proof. If the intent behind the law is to take you away, they don’t care about proof. They don’t care how you’re trans. They don’t care that you’re harming no one.

WDI co-author doesn’t support dressing however you like

torso of a person with long hair wearing a white blazer

In which Sheila Jeffreys says you can’t really wear what you like & there might be nothing wrong with being a transphobe. Jeffreys doesn’t believe people have the right to be trans. She thinks the reason to avoid a self-descriptor like “transphobic” is that it’s a naughty word.

I am not taking complaints about my face

owl with bright yellow eyes

Why the term ‘womanface’ is wrong. How is having a womanface or a manface different from having a face? What must I stop doing? I am trans and I woke up with my face. This is my manface?

The freedom to be left alone

wildflowers silhouetted in sunlight in a field

We should have the choice, but we don’t always have it. In the past, when prompted to think about whether I’m ‘out’ or ‘queer,’ I’ve thought about the transgressive sense and about the meaning of visibility.

The system always leaves someone out

turntable for vinyl records

It doesn’t mean the person is strange. Any time we make a system of classification, someone won’t fit. This exclusion might say more about our need to classify people than about them.

Baldness isn’t just physical

A bearded man wears a button-down shirt with floral embroidery. He's playing a banjo and is wearing a large hat, so you can't tell if he's bald.

It’s also performative. Labels describe how we live. Even when they describe reality, they’re about perceptions and performances. How we live interprets who we are.

When labels don’t feel right

three women walk hand-in-hand down a path by a meadow

She had two moms, and she didn’t like the word ‘straight’. If we have a stake in a shared outcome, we might avoid declaring how we’re different and separate from others, especially to imply our superiority.