Blog
When we don’t have Twitter, we’ll enjoy books again
Reading ‘Melancholic Parables’ as a parable of Twitter. Flash fiction by Dale Stromberg. One way to read it: who we are when we’re tweeting, who we think we are when we’re tweeting, and why we keep tweeting.
Gilbert Highet on censorship, 1954
A collage of his words. Cave man painting a running stag? Standards of good and evil? Transmuted into living flames? I’m in. Then I realize it’s an argument for censorship.
When you claim that experts don’t know their stuff
Jordan Peterson says climate scientists don’t define their terms. When a troll accuses someone else of bad-faith rhetoric, they’re usually only describing how they themselves operate. It’s spin. And it’s pure projection.
What transphobia sounded like in 2010
‘How Evil Works’ (2010) by the editor of WorldNetDaily. In discussing racism, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, the author of course purports not to perpetuate them, but he very much does.
Classic transphobia — since 1981
Classic anti-trans arguments in ‘The Spiral Path’ by David Fernbach. Trans people have genders, but we don’t uphold, benefit from, or depend on the gender system any more than cis people do. That’s transphobic disinformation.
Ironic fiction doesn’t tell you who trans people really are
It’s rough entering Grace and Rubie’s restaurant. Good thing it’s fiction. Janice Raymond brought up this fictional story in her 1979 book to describe what trans women are really like. That’s not analysis. It’s disinformation.
Transphobia since the 1970s
Janice Raymond’s ‘The Transsexual Empire’. It’s a transphobia classic. We can look at its irrationality and spot its repetition in today’s transphobia. Today’s transphobia isn’t new.
On ‘A + E’ by Ryszard Merey
Book #6 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Drama club, drawing, dance parties — Ash and Eu are pulled together and apart and together as in an oceanic tide. As queer as you wanted high school to be.
On ‘This Kid Can Fly’ by Aaron Rose Philip
Book #5 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. When she was 14, Aaron Rose Philip published the memoir This Kid Can Fly about herself, her family, and growing up with cerebral palsy. Today she’s a model.