Blog

A surgeon for WWI and WWII vets also helped a trans man
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris. Harold Gillies “never shied away from a surgical challenge ,” Fitzharris writes. Gillies agreed to perform phalloplasty for a trans man in the late 1940s.

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.’

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.

On ‘Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco’ by K. Iver
Book #4 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Trans. Born that way? Maybe. A genre unto ourselves. Listen to the Bronco crunching the gravel driveway outside the brick house in the past. Impossible.

On ‘Hall of Waters’ by Camellia-Berry Grass
Book #3 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. The book about Excelsior Springs, Missouri is grounded in “collective experiences” and narratives about water. Grass aspires to help other trans writers.

Here is how we do the 2023 ‘Trans Rights Readathon’
Read trans books and support trans people. Read trans books, donate to trans orgs, and support trans people. If you do it the week of March 20, 2023, you get to say you participated in a readathon.

Geena Rocero’s TED talk reveal
‘Our spirits will always expand to fill whatever space we are given,’ she says. She found her own face in the mirror, her own presence, emerging from nothingness.

Shaneel Lal’s fight against conversion therapy
In 2022, powered by young activist Shaneel Lal, Aotearoa New Zealand banned conversion therapy. ‘Stop congratulating me for being brave,’ Lal says. Instead, ‘annihilate the systems that force me to be brave.’

A queer horror fan, as a boy, craved ‘just one moment like that’
Richard Scott Larson’s memoir ‘The Long Hallway’. At 12, Larson has a recurring dream about a long hallway, ‘as if part of me was always making the interminable walk toward whatever fate awaited me.’