Category: Trans

Plastic six-sided die for board game

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.

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bicycle parked on a colorfully painted staircase on the sidewalk in the rain

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.

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cute pointer puppy wearing a light blue and pink rope collar

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.

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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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