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.

Right wing lies about trans suicide
Steven Crowder makes up numbers and unfortunately is on Twitter. A former coworker actively fantasizes that my 21st-century transgender life is more miserable than if I were in a concentration camp.

2 times a trans man’s opinion was dismissed just because he’s trans
One happened to me. One happened to a more prominent trans person. Sure, these are “just” anonymous online comments. But they aim to delegitimize. Try to imagine the ripple effects into the rest of a trans man’s life.

I’m a gender autonomist
The term ‘gender activist’ is used to point at trans people living with dignity and solidarity, capable of saying ‘no thank you’ and daring to shrug at and disagree with someone who doesn’t like them just because they’re trans. ‘Activist’ is used as an insult for someone who believes in autonomy.

Cricket’s Still Alive (a poem)
Out of the gravel pit, up into the light. A poem after Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. About Kristi Noem and the young dog she brags of shooting. Beautiful trans child, goddamn untrainable dog.

What’s in the 2023 Florida bill about gender transition
The bill is called ‘Treatments for Sex Reassignment’ (SB 254). Stigma and silencing is the real purpose of Don’t Say Gay. Restricting gender transition is another way of making it difficult for certain people to thrive.

‘Don’t Say Gay’ could go national
USAmericans should vote on November 8, 2022. We could end up with a Republican-controlled Congress and a President DeSantis. If we do, the USA could have a national “Don’t Say Gay” law.