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.

He says your academic evidence is ‘laundered’
If you believe oppression is real, Peter Boghossian doesn’t think your academic work is real. Conservatives ask for their feelings to be validated and for “Western Civilization” to be saved through intellectual debate. Can we meta-debate that?

Being transgender is homophobic? That’s trope, not truth
Breakdown of ‘A Heretic’s Manifesto’ (2023) by Brendan O’Neill. They publish screeds without speaking to a single one of us, which goes beyond paternalism and shows an intent to control us in ways that are harmful to us.

15 common features of anti-trans troll comments
They really pack ’em in. They didn’t read my article and don’t care about my perspective. They act as though I’m the one who didn’t do the required reading.

30 terrible ways to express ‘skepticism’ of transgender people
I will tell you how I generated this list. It’s not random. For people who have been bothered by these arguments, who want to see them unpacked, and who will gladly avoid repeating or amplifying them in the future.

Skeptical of trans people above all
They could have been skeptical of science denialism and supernaturalism instead. Some theories, beliefs, and agendas are false, and their falseness merits skepticism. But trans people are real. We shouldn’t be the object of skepticism.

What to expect from the ‘Adult Human Female’ documentary
Yes, of course it’s anti-trans! Adult Human Female did not interview a trans person. What’s in the hour-and-a half documentary, in chronological order. I have opinions. I make remarks.