Category: Trans

person comes to a fork in the road. street sign has a red arrow pointing one way into darkness and a green arrow pointing the other way into blue sky.

‘Gender-critical’ ideology is just dualism

The ‘GC’ worldview is a split between good and evil, physical and mental. It incredibly claims to vaporize all gender roles despite working to uphold gender. It focuses on what people can or can’t be, do, or have due to their sex.

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Jen the Gelfling plays the flute while Kira the Gelfling rows their river boat

The Gelflings are trans

And trans people are Gelflings. ‘Now, we leave you the Crystal of Truth,’ the Beings tell the Gelflings who are no longer Gelflings — because they are finally being left alone.

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An impressionistic photo collage of a person who appears to be stuck inside a large soap bubble.

Empathy for cis people

Trans people have it because we don’t live in a trans bubble. My jaw hit the floor. I picked it up and put it back in. It fell out again. It rolled under the sofa and I have spent the last two weeks looking for it.

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Book cover: Histories of the Transgender Child

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.’

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18th-century illustration: pirate Mary Reed stabs an enemy with a sword

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.

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Two indistinct bodies, one more feminine and one more masculine, floating underwater, holding hands

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?

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Book cover: The Men with the Pink Triangle by Heinz Heger, showing a pink triangle behind barbed wire

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.

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