Category: Trans
On ‘Hall of Waters’ by Camellia-Berry Grass
Book #3 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. The book about Excelsior Springs, Missouri is grounded in “collective experiences” and narratives about water. Grass aspires to help other trans writers.
Here is how we do the 2023 ‘Trans Rights Readathon’
Read trans books and support trans people. Read trans books, donate to trans orgs, and support trans people. If you do it the week of March 20, 2023, you get to say you participated in a readathon.
Geena Rocero’s TED talk reveal
‘Our spirits will always expand to fill whatever space we are given,’ she says. She found her own face in the mirror, her own presence, emerging from nothingness.
Shaneel Lal’s fight against conversion therapy
In 2022, powered by young activist Shaneel Lal, Aotearoa New Zealand banned conversion therapy. ‘Stop congratulating me for being brave,’ Lal says. Instead, ‘annihilate the systems that force me to be brave.’
A queer horror fan, as a boy, craved ‘just one moment like that’
Richard Scott Larson’s memoir ‘The Long Hallway’. At 12, Larson has a recurring dream about a long hallway, ‘as if part of me was always making the interminable walk toward whatever fate awaited me.’
Colombia: 40 years of LGBTQ Pride
Fundraising for a trans community organizing space in Bogotá. Besides seeking a comprehensive trans law, La Red Comunitaria Trans plans to build a trans house for organizing and support. Fundraising goal: US $100,000.
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.