Blog
We are the book we’re talking about
And we are what’s at stake in truth-telling. If the interlocutor opposes me because of who I am, will they be impressed that I read a book? No. Even if it is a book they have heard of? No.
Humility: A needed balance
On early modern philosophers and online trolls. In Lewis Carroll’s ‘You Are Old, Father William,’ a young person asks: ‘You balanced an eel on the end of your nose - / What made you so awfully clever?’
What is human dignity?
Where does it come from? How do we know it exists? Does dignity need to be pinned to God, or can it have secular grounding? Is it about humility, pride, or both? What does interdependence have to do with it?
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.
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.
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.
Gareth Roberts says accepting trans people is ‘Gay Shame’
Yet another LGB-minus-T ‘sex realist’ book hits the shelves. Roberts won’t engage the academic work or mere existence of any trans people. He name-drops a couple, but we’re all either airheads or criminals to him.
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.
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?