Category: Trans
Binary gender isn’t ‘natural,’ but we’re conditioned to believe it is
Toward a new epistemology that recognizes sex and gender diversity, in ‘Yo soy el monstruo que os habla’ by Paul B. Preciado. The epistemology of sex and racial difference is patriarchal and colonial. We can exist on borders or reject categories.
On ‘Transexualidades’ by Miquel Missé
Book #2 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Missé is interested in “transexualidad,” which operates along “various paradigms” and a “history full of conquests, paradoxes, myths and frustrations.”
On ‘Cistem Failure’ by Marquis Bey
Book #1 in my 2023 Trans Rights Readathon week. Marquis Bey says that cisgender is a “categorical ruse disingenuously hailing those who nevertheless do not and cannot sit comfortably within it.”
A philosopher discusses gender
Transgressive by Rachel Anne Williams. Fabulous trans philosophy book. Trans people can be men, women, or something else, and no one should be subject to cis normativity.
Trans exiteration
I hear an -iteration with an ex- on it. I’m bad at moving forward. I’m a hanger-on to the past.
Trans volta
I didn’t choose the word ‘trans’ to describe my unique life path, nor would I have chosen it, but these days, this word happens to be the umbrella that works in the rain. A word you can use alongside ‘trans’ is ‘volta’.
Trans kids are found in history, too
Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson. Adults should acknowledge that ‘trans childhood is a happy and desired form .’ It’s not a new phenomenon. It’s ‘richly, beautifully historical.’
Did lady pirates button their shirts?
Yes. Art you may have seen to the contrary wasn’t realistic. Just because you’ve seen a naked image of a trans person doesn’t mean trans people walk around naked. Pirates too were motivated to button their shirts.
Liberation projects, art appreciation, and perceptions of the past
From my June 2024 reading list. The bird has flown, but the stone has not yet been thrown. Perhaps in the future it will come to mean something.
Is it about time, bodies, or both?
‘Trans Talmud’ by Max K. Strassfeld. Is this a question about time —what we think we know about the past and future? Or is it about bodies —how we sexually classify them? Or both?
‘Overawed by the marvel’ of trans
A new miniprayerbook. When we sanctify something, it changes. I think Heschel would understand and would like to continue to live and change and cast and reflect light.
When the Nazis criminalized gay men
A story of persecution in ‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’ by Heinz Heger. The Nazis viewed gay people as weakening the gender binary. Gay men could be punished for “lewdness,” including simply hugging each other: prison or death.