Category: Trans

Book cover: Histories of the Transgender Child

Trans kids are found in history, too

Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson. Adults should acknowledge that ‘trans childhood is a happy and desired form .’ It’s not a new phenomenon. It’s ‘richly, beautifully historical.’

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18th-century illustration: pirate Mary Reed stabs an enemy with a sword

Did lady pirates button their shirts?

Yes. Art you may have seen to the contrary wasn’t realistic. Just because you’ve seen a naked image of a trans person doesn’t mean trans people walk around naked. Pirates too were motivated to button their shirts.

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Two indistinct bodies, one more feminine and one more masculine, floating underwater, holding hands

Is it about time, bodies, or both?

‘Trans Talmud’ by Max K. Strassfeld. Is this a question about time —what we think we know about the past and future? Or is it about bodies —how we sexually classify them? Or both?

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Book cover: The Men with the Pink Triangle by Heinz Heger, showing a pink triangle behind barbed wire

When the Nazis criminalized gay men

A story of persecution in ‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’ by Heinz Heger. The Nazis viewed gay people as weakening the gender binary. Gay men could be punished for “lewdness,” including simply hugging each other: prison or death.

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elderly white man facepalming in exhaustion

Pamela Paul’s latest transphobia

‘Let’s Say Gay’ isn’t about the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law. A transphobe has done a public transphobia. Pamela Paul doesn’t want lesbian, gay, and bisexual people to work together with transgender people.

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two pencils and an eraser in the trans-flag colors (pink, blue, white)

One kind of transphobia: Imagining cis-phobia

A cis person discusses sex/gender, yet it’s not OK when a trans person does it? Today’s NYT op-ed shows us, yet again, what transphobic discourse sounds like. Within hours, the rhetoric was tweeted by everyone and their ham sandwich.

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