Category: Trans

Classic transphobia — since 1981
Classic anti-trans arguments in ‘The Spiral Path’ by David Fernbach. Trans people have genders, but we don’t uphold, benefit from, or depend on the gender system any more than cis people do. That’s transphobic disinformation.

Ironic fiction doesn’t tell you who trans people really are
It’s rough entering Grace and Rubie’s restaurant. Good thing it’s fiction. Janice Raymond brought up this fictional story in her 1979 book to describe what trans women are really like. That’s not analysis. It’s disinformation.

Transphobia since the 1970s
Janice Raymond’s ‘The Transsexual Empire’. It’s a transphobia classic. We can look at its irrationality and spot its repetition in today’s transphobia. Today’s transphobia isn’t new.

On ‘A + E’ by Ryszard Merey
Book #6 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Drama club, drawing, dance parties — Ash and Eu are pulled together and apart and together as in an oceanic tide. As queer as you wanted high school to be.

On ‘This Kid Can Fly’ by Aaron Rose Philip
Book #5 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. When she was 14, Aaron Rose Philip published the memoir This Kid Can Fly about herself, her family, and growing up with cerebral palsy. Today she’s a model.

On ‘Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco’ by K. Iver
Book #4 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Trans. Born that way? Maybe. A genre unto ourselves. Listen to the Bronco crunching the gravel driveway outside the brick house in the past. Impossible.

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.