Blog

The feeling of knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’. ‘Epistemopathy’ means the feeling of knowing. We have pleasant and unpleasant feelings associated with knowing. That’s part of why knowledge matters to us.

Turtles all the way down
Finding truth in emptiness. When we acknowledge there is no final turtle, we open ourselves to discover and live more. The turtle on which we are standing is never the last one.

We can’t prepare for this moment
‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. What to make of this political and ecological moment, this chaos that arrives with no instructions? We can “see, collectively, in the dark.”

‘Gyre’: A novel about how we’re called into being
‘The deduction came in a rush: I had been alive before’. ‘I could just as easily have held my tongue, or saved my comment for another time. This realization came, as always, too late,’ Abby says in ‘Gyre’.

In 10 days, four anti-trans exec orders & a bathroom ban for fed employees
Keep looking up. Trump 2025 has been in office for a bit over a week. These will affect trans people intersectionally or in unexpected ways. There’s a lot of material, so I’ve listed the executive orders with clickable images.

Tonight’s ban on adult gender transition (yes, 18-year-olds are adults)
By executive order, the federal government will not support transition. ‘Maiming’ is unspecific. ‘Sterilizing’ is generally untrue. ‘A growing number’ is fact-free; if the president had numbers, he’d provide them.

You’ve been trying. I see it.
What’s happening now isn’t because of who you are, dear readers. Let’s continue to try. So you consumed too much ice cream, got wicked creative, were fascinated by death, made decisions with your gut, wrote inappropriate film dialogue. And?

Am I the right kind of gay and trans for you?
Why our identities matter so much to us, why we bring them up, and why we use our favorite labels. My identity isn’t a bargaining chip. It’s an intangible. Try to touch it. It’ll vanish. The label denotes the space through which breath and fire passes.

Republicans to change Title IX to deny trans kids’ genders
It hurts everyone. If they abolish the Dept. of Education, no one will have sex discrimination protections. If the Education Dept. disappears, no student can make any discrimination claim. Girls won’t have sex discrimination protections. Who will hear them?