Category: Trans

Can a man take a woman’s gold medal?
After years insisting it’s a cardinal sin, he did it. Transness is real; it just isn’t made of metal. The prize can’t be transferred. If you don’t have transness, that’s fine. You inhabit yourself.

The Heritage Foundation’s new policy paper on one-man, one-woman marriage
They’ve always been sour on gay marriage. Now they’ve written up a plan for a society that doesn’t include us. The Heritage Foundation longs to return to what they remember as a pre-2015 condition when no one had yet written about trans people, sex toys or polyamory.

What will the U.S. Supreme Court decide about our genders?
Yesterday’s SCOTUS hearing on trans belonging (and sports). Will they let us keep autonomy and privacy to live in our genders, or will they transfer more power to institutions and laws to verify and enforce our sex?

Arkansas lawmakers want you to sue over your childhood haircut
Behold! I espouse my gender identity with scissors and comb. Or lack thereof. Will the people who all this time had only ‘reasonable concerns’ please speak up? Surely they wish to allow girls to roughhouse and boys to play with dolls.

Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights
No, it’s not a typo. It’s 🏳️⚧️ erasure. Sylvia Rivera began fighting for gay and transgender rights. Hold the flickering candle of that sentence. We know what the Stonewall National Monument said.

Why is anti-trans talk on the rise? A new history book analyzes roots
‘Enemy Feminisms’ by Sophie Lewis. The sex binary, which is furthermore a sex hierarchy (men on top), is part of capitalism. It has been a central theme of bourgeois feminism.

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.