Blog

Pencil erasers, not used

Yet another pro-discrimination argument

Always follow the typos. They reveal what editors aren’t researching. Why does a national newspaper pay a columnist for a 2,800-word anti-transgender opinion essay? More mysteriously: If there’s a typo, what does it imply?

Read more >
Closeup of a Nandu ostrich head

‘And you know what that means’

Is it a dogwhistle? I don’t know what it means. Transphobic essays are fiction. Not the harmless entertainment kind, either. These are lies about brutalizing the elderly and medically intervening on kids.

Read more >
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.

Read more >
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?

Read more >
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.

Read more >