Category: Trans

Trans and nonbinary kids talk about identity with Daniel Radcliffe
Sharing Space is a video series with the Trevor Project. Each of us has allyship and activism that we can do because of who we are. There’s something each of us can do especially well to make a real difference.

Butler on ‘imagining alternate futures’
Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian. So-called gender-criticalism is ‘a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism,’ Butler says. This interview is one I keep coming back to.

‘The story of my untangling’ through gender transition
‘Pageboy’ by Elliot Page. Page realized he was trans when he was about 30. He says it ‘seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than…to support trans people.’

The definition of possibility was inadequate
Conundrum, a memoir by Jan Morris. Being a woman ‘is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction’ that ‘has never seemed ignoble or even unnatural to me,’ Jan Morris wrote.

Little-known transgender memoir: ‘Reborn’ (1955)
Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition From Male to Female by Tamara Reese. After her 1954 transition, Tamara says she’s ‘serving society in a useful and worthwhile manner’ and is ‘one of the happiest persons alive today.’

A surgeon for WWI and WWII vets also helped a trans man
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris. Harold Gillies “never shied away from a surgical challenge ,” Fitzharris writes. Gillies agreed to perform phalloplasty for a trans man in the late 1940s.

100 years from now, transphobia will always have been wrong
A parallel between Wagner’s antisemitism and Rowling’s transphobia. 100 years from now, there could be a mass murder. But that’s not why Rowling’s transphobia is wrong. It doesn’t become wrong in the future. It’s wrong now.

This 1949 examination of fascist rhetoric shows us how we got here
More on the connection between transphobia and antisemitism. Max Horkheimer examined the social and psychological reasons why people become fascist agitators. This book analyzes antisemitic rhetoric in the US.

Transphobia, overt or underhanded
Either way, this behavior is proof of transphobia. Transphobes aren’t interested in trans people’s viewpoints. Instead, they turn trans people into a bad-faith debate. They see it as a publicity opportunity.

Posie Parker won’t tell us about the billionaires
On air, she alludes to a conspiracy theory — and then won’t explain it. In this March 2023 interview on Radio New Zealand, the anti-transgender activist Posie Parker says that billionaires promote the cause of being trans.

The worst transphobic words I’ve seen (this week)
…were also antisemitic. Modern antisemitism and transphobia are fundamentally linked, and the crush of anti-transgender legislation is an attempt to exterminate trans people.

The biggest conspiracy theories are all-consuming
This week’s antisemitism and transphobia—Trump, West, Rowling—is all connected. Donald Trump, Kanye West, J. K. Rowling are billionaires who validate their followers’ hateful conspiracy theories. Antisemitism and transphobia are linked.