Category: Trans

Trans and nonbinary kids talk about identity with Daniel Radcliffe
Sharing Space is a video series with the Trevor Project. Each of us has allyship and activism that we can do because of who we are. There’s something each of us can do especially well to make a real difference.

Butler on ‘imagining alternate futures’
Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian. So-called gender-criticalism is ‘a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism,’ Butler says. This interview is one I keep coming back to.

‘The story of my untangling’ through gender transition
‘Pageboy’ by Elliot Page. Page realized he was trans when he was about 30. He says it ‘seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than…to support trans people.’

The definition of possibility was inadequate
Conundrum, a memoir by Jan Morris. Being a woman ‘is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction’ that ‘has never seemed ignoble or even unnatural to me,’ Jan Morris wrote.

Little-known transgender memoir: ‘Reborn’ (1955)
Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition From Male to Female by Tamara Reese. After her 1954 transition, Tamara says she’s ‘serving society in a useful and worthwhile manner’ and is ‘one of the happiest persons alive today.’

A surgeon for WWI and WWII vets also helped a trans man
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris. Harold Gillies “never shied away from a surgical challenge ,” Fitzharris writes. Gillies agreed to perform phalloplasty for a trans man in the late 1940s.

QAnon fights imaginary cabals
Explained in Will Sommer’s ‘Trust the Plan’. To its followers, QAnon seems to explain the world. It’s also their community. Normal policy can wait until the vampires are vanquished.

What is a Bible?
You already know, and you already know what a woman is too. We don’t have to keep asking what ‘transgender’ essentially is, nor what ‘woman’ or ‘man’ essentially are. There is no essence. But we know what they are.

‘Radical gender theory’ is itself a social construct
The people who’re making it up do not have good intentions. This isn’t a serious intellectual project. There’s no scholarly substance. Chris Rufo just wants to organize the right-wing to make noise and hurt LGBTQ people.

The right wing wants to stop adults from being trans
Knowles: ‘You have to ban transgenderism entirely’. Michael Knowles wants to ban people from being transgender. His ‘love’ for the Kansas bathroom bill is because it ‘aggressive[ly]’ excludes trans people.

Anti-trans bills encourage far-right violence
That may be the intent. It sure looks like the outcome. The far-right wants the support of the center. The center has anti-transgender legislative campaigns. The far-right perpetrates anti-transgender violence.

Why is the far-right ever more intensely anti-trans?
Because they’re bored by finally winning against abortion rights. Fascists oppose trans people because they find difference threatening. Being anti-trans is fundamental to their politics, and it predicts what comes next.