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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person sticks out tongue (close-up)

Biologicals first!

OK, said the pack of hungry tigers. A slogan like ‘Biological first!’ might not work out so well for them. If we’re tied up by hungry cartoon tigers, our best bet is to untie each other.

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three red heart-shaped candies on a chalk-drawn tic-tac-toe grid

3 strategies to fight transphobia

From ‘El terfismo en América Latina,’ an article in Volcánicas. Expose TERF connections to the Religious Right, multinational companies, neoliberal regimes & white supremacy. Give trans people platforms. Keep at it.

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two hands almost touching against a sky backdrop with glowing sun between their fingers

Human rights don’t ‘trickle down’

Why must some discussions be silenced in favor of others? The commission’s name itself is peak Orwellianism. I must admit, sadly, that many rights are alienable. The Commission on Unalienable Rights has come to take them away.

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hands tying white sneaker with colorful stripes

Telling LGBTQ people what to do

One part of what the #IStandWithJKRowling hashtag means. LGBTQ-phobia is identifiable when someone who’s wholly uninformed about and unsympathetic to our perspectives demands that we behave a certain way.

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