Category: Trans

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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wooden letter blocks for a small child, etched and carved with letters. the two letters at the center are S and X.

English only, two sexes: A mashup of two executive orders

Interlace the lines to read things like: A designated language attacks women in society by depriving them of dignity. When I read Trump’s instruction ‘to designate one — and only one — official language,’ I remembered his prior instruction ‘to recognize two sexes.’

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from a dark room, a view out a window at a snowy landscape. The glass distorts the view. Bare trees and another house are visible in the distance.

Pausing in the darkness

Trump’s latest anti-trans executive order calls us ‘anti-Christian’. Trump has labeled as ‘anti-Christian’: trans inclusion, trans visibility, supporting queer kids, and even holding Christians accountable to the law.

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closeup of person holding a basketball

Now, there’s a no-sports order

Let’s kick it open, bounce it against the wall, and dunk on it. The anti-trans movement has never been about sports. it enacts arbitrary exclusion to make trans people less safe. It’s a political assault.

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