Blog

Saying ‘cleareyed’ when you mean ‘exclusionary’
The latest transphobic article in ‘Tablet’. He’s giving readers permission to reject trans people. He’s specifically telling cis gay men it’s OK to reject trans men , who can never be men.

She made an anti-trans statement in a professional setting. I said no.
No, that famous person doesn’t love trans people. I corrected the record. She said Germaine Greer likes trans people. She well knew that Greer has, in fact, been hostile to trans women. Otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up.

When technofeudalism manifests as transphobia
Life is both experiential and commodified, but they don’t want us to have our gender in any dimension. Technofeudalist Elon Musk admits he’s driven by his own transphobia. Anti-trans people are trying to shut us down, and trans people are trying to survive.

The ‘undecidability’ of life
Freedom and despair in Will Eaves’ ‘Murmur’, about Alan Turing. The novelist directs our moral scrutiny not at the innocent man but at the state that victimizes him. The state destroys him, politically and existentially.

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.’