Category: Trans

detail of the book cover for BAD GAYS, focus on the word BAD

There were gay Nazis

‘Bad Gays’ by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Weimar-era Germany had LGBTQ society and culture and an early movement for LGBTQ legal rights. Of course, that was lost. And some of the Nazis were gay.

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Blonde woman has a surprised face. She is looking over her big sunglasses and she is holding both hands (with painted fingernails) in front of her face.

More shameful nonsense from ‘Gay Shame’

Regarding trans people, Gareth Roberts asks: ‘Who exactly invited the vampire in’? A continuation of my criticism of the ‘sex-realist’ aka ‘gender-critical’ aka transphobic book ‘Gay Shame’ by Gareth Roberts, published in April 2024.

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Silhouette of a man awkwardly standing on his head against a rainbow vortex background.

121 things I want cis men to stop doing

Conveniently, all of them are sentences in the same article by the same cis man. Cis men’s name is Andrew Sullivan and I want them to stop doing what he did in his April 9, 2021 article on Substack. This is not Star Wars.

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Pencil erasers, not used

Yet another pro-discrimination argument

Always follow the typos. They reveal what editors aren’t researching. Why does a national newspaper pay a columnist for a 2,800-word anti-transgender opinion essay? More mysteriously: If there’s a typo, what does it imply?

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holding a paperback of Mars and Her Children by Marge Piercy

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.

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Detail of book cover: Summer Fun

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.

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parent snuggling with baby

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.’

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A person stands at a train window, holding their face in their hands

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.

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