Category: Trans

Jewish and trans: Conspiracy theories won’t leave us alone
On ‘Jewish Space Lasers’ by Mike Rothschild, with my own reflections on transphobia. No one can prove anything to anyone who isn’t open to real evidence and logic, as conspiracy theorists are not. Still, pay attention to their antisemitism.

How do you know the legislation is anti-LGBTQ without reading it?
2023 was gruesomely challenging. 2024 is something else. You could try to read 20 anti-LGBTQ bills per business day. Or you could just recognize that this massive legislative campaign is anti-LGBTQ and harmful.

How many anti-trans laws were proposed last week?
They‘ve been counted, but let’s also reflect on what they mean. We all need to be amplifying the news and the message. Support the trans people and cis allies who are doing the work.

Yet 10 *more* ways trans people are told we shouldn’t exist
Now my list is up to 30. More than one transphobe engages with these ideas. If you read them, you’ll feel the force of the repetition. The message: Trans people shouldn’t exist.

10 *more* ways trans people are told we shouldn’t exist
Truly, there are a lot of ways. Here are items 11–20. Trans people have a relevant perspective here. When we hear anti-transgender statements, we know that the true meaning is ‘trans people shouldn’t exist’.

10 ways trans people are told we shouldn’t exist
Here’s why transphobia sounds like an eradication campaign. If someone were denying your gender, would you understand them as literally telling you to stop having your gender? Comply, and everything will be OK?

Classic transphobia — since 1981
Classic anti-trans arguments in ‘The Spiral Path’ by David Fernbach. Trans people have genders, but we don’t uphold, benefit from, or depend on the gender system any more than cis people do. That’s transphobic disinformation.

Ironic fiction doesn’t tell you who trans people really are
It’s rough entering Grace and Rubie’s restaurant. Good thing it’s fiction. Janice Raymond brought up this fictional story in her 1979 book to describe what trans women are really like. That’s not analysis. It’s disinformation.

Transphobia since the 1970s
Janice Raymond’s ‘The Transsexual Empire’. It’s a transphobia classic. We can look at its irrationality and spot its repetition in today’s transphobia. Today’s transphobia isn’t new.

On ‘A + E’ by Ryszard Merey
Book #6 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Drama club, drawing, dance parties — Ash and Eu are pulled together and apart and together as in an oceanic tide. As queer as you wanted high school to be.

On ‘This Kid Can Fly’ by Aaron Rose Philip
Book #5 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. When she was 14, Aaron Rose Philip published the memoir This Kid Can Fly about herself, her family, and growing up with cerebral palsy. Today she’s a model.

On ‘Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco’ by K. Iver
Book #4 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Trans. Born that way? Maybe. A genre unto ourselves. Listen to the Bronco crunching the gravel driveway outside the brick house in the past. Impossible.