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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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sail, viewed from the deck of a ship, gazing up the mast

Pirate secrets you can’t have at sea

They worried their mates might steal a watch, not that their mates might be trans. Many people today act as if trans people were secret pirates. But even pirate captains didn’t care if other pirates were secretly trans men.

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detail of the book cover for BAD GAYS, focus on the word BAD

There were gay Nazis

‘Bad Gays’ by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Weimar-era Germany had LGBTQ society and culture and an early movement for LGBTQ legal rights. Of course, that was lost. And some of the Nazis were gay.

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Blonde woman has a surprised face. She is looking over her big sunglasses and she is holding both hands (with painted fingernails) in front of her face.

More shameful nonsense from ‘Gay Shame’

Regarding trans people, Gareth Roberts asks: ‘Who exactly invited the vampire in’? A continuation of my criticism of the ‘sex-realist’ aka ‘gender-critical’ aka transphobic book ‘Gay Shame’ by Gareth Roberts, published in April 2024.

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Silhouette of a man awkwardly standing on his head against a rainbow vortex background.

121 things I want cis men to stop doing

Conveniently, all of them are sentences in the same article by the same cis man. Cis men’s name is Andrew Sullivan and I want them to stop doing what he did in his April 9, 2021 article on Substack. This is not Star Wars.

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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?

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