Category: Trans

I want to see every word that celebrates our city’s sexual health hotline
I’ll repaint the mural myself if I have to. As a gay and trans adult, I have to show responsibility toward other queer people in this city. If we don’t stand up for each other, who will?

I can’t write the anti-gay argument for him
No one wants to be called a ‘bigot’ or a ‘fascist’. But it’s not my job to give him alternate explanations for his reasons or feelings. If I say something is bigoted, I may not be judging someone’s character, at least not primarily; instead I may be asserting why I’m not jumping on board.

A Texas bounty on trans people
Big prizes! Win $10,000 and up for reporting a trans person! Two updates from Texas and Pennsylvania, plus a roundup of five essays on anti-trans bathroom bills. Stop trying to take our money. Stop looking.

I want to see every erased word celebrating our city’s sexual health hotline
I’ll repaint the mural myself if I have to. As a gay and trans adult, I have to show responsibility toward other queer people in this city. If we don’t stand up for each other, who will?

The $120 million anti-trans joke
We used to call it ‘the one joke,’ but now they’ve gone and spent money on it. Two-thirds of voters want politicians to stop attacking trans people and just talk about the economy. Republicans are most likely to say they want this.

Trans people need to ‘exist on our own terms’
Jessie Gender talks to us about acknowledging our stories, setting the terms, and framing our success. In this YouTube video, Jessie Gender acknowledges that ‘we constantly fight under the terms set by systems that were never built to enable us.’

New dogs, now, in my own poems
Rereading ‘Mars and Her Children’ by Marge Piercy. Marge Piercy’s poems in ‘Mars and Her Children’, I decided early on, are what I want to sound like when I wrote a poem. I’ve found my voice.

Darned if I can tell you how magic works
But this award-winning novel can: Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton. How do we create our realities? How are you magic? If you haven’t yet read trans literature, I am giving you sage advice: Trans people’s books are magic.

Making an effort toward equal parenting
Written by a gay man, ‘The Equal Parent’ is about gender-inclusive parenting attitudes. Both men are active parents. The nursery has both of their phone numbers, and ‘if they cannot get hold of the dad they called first, they try the other one.’

My two favorite tweets from year-end 2021
The grace of shared joy and success. Seeing your own place change in the rankings often implies there is a rising star in your network. Their success doesn’t step on yours. Share their joy.

A gay self-discovery: Body, desire, but no ‘essence of me’
‘The Flower From a Poisoned Seed’ by Jonathan C. David. The more we want something, the harder we pursue it, and it feels like the reason we’re here. But if we ever reached it, what would be the point of life?

The ‘undecidability’ of life
Freedom and despair in Will Eaves’ ‘Murmur’, about Alan Turing. The novelist directs our moral scrutiny not at the innocent man but at the state that victimizes him. The state destroys him, politically and existentially.