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?
Telling LGBTQ people what to do
One part of what the #IStandWithJKRowling hashtag means. LGBTQ-phobia is identifiable when someone who’s wholly uninformed about and unsympathetic to our perspectives demands that we behave a certain way.
Binary gender isn’t ‘natural,’ but we’re conditioned to believe it is
Toward a new epistemology that recognizes sex and gender diversity, in ‘Yo soy el monstruo que os habla’ by Paul B. Preciado. The epistemology of sex and racial difference is patriarchal and colonial. We can exist on borders or reject categories.
On ‘Transexualidades’ by Miquel Missé
Book #2 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Missé is interested in “transexualidad,” which operates along “various paradigms” and a “history full of conquests, paradoxes, myths and frustrations.”
On ‘Cistem Failure’ by Marquis Bey
Book #1 in my 2023 Trans Rights Readathon week. Marquis Bey says that cisgender is a “categorical ruse disingenuously hailing those who nevertheless do not and cannot sit comfortably within it.”
A philosopher discusses gender
Transgressive by Rachel Anne Williams. Fabulous trans philosophy book. Trans people can be men, women, or something else, and no one should be subject to cis normativity.
Trans exiteration
I hear an -iteration with an ex- on it. I’m bad at moving forward. I’m a hanger-on to the past.