Blog
A hinge that opens the heavens
A small reflection on my daily reading. You’re at an apparent end due to a failure of wit. You can’t imagine what comes next. But you’ll recover wit, you’ll find horizon, and universe won’t end.
6 things mystified me in the trans film ‘I Saw the TV Glow’
This 2024 movie is tough to crack, but finally I think I get it. In art, opaque describes a substance you expect to see through but can’t: paint, glass, a thin layer. Metaphorically, it’s something you can’t understand.
Why are you trans?
Will they be mad that they were given a reason? If so, why did they ask? Trans people didn’t invent gender stereotypes. Collectively, we don’t reinforce them any more than anyone else. We navigate societies that stereotype us.
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.