Blog

Why is anti-trans talk on the rise? A new history book analyzes roots
‘Enemy Feminisms’ by Sophie Lewis. The sex binary, which is furthermore a sex hierarchy (men on top), is part of capitalism. It has been a central theme of bourgeois feminism.

My gay and trans identity isn’t a little magic saltshaker
But it is nonetheless a favorite TV show, so keep tuning in! You can’t have someone else’s identity because you can’t be them. Even if you could have it, sprinkling their identity on your work wouldn’t guarantee cash.

Early 1990s document formatting: Excellent margins, please
Did your school have this procedure for your homework? A digital file wasn’t the ‘real thing.’ The text became real when it was on paper.

The ‘undecidability’ of life
Freedom and despair in Will Eaves’ ‘Murmur’, about Alan Turing. The novelist directs our moral scrutiny not at the innocent man but at the state that victimizes him. The state destroys him, politically and existentially.

Trans and nonbinary kids talk about identity with Daniel Radcliffe
Sharing Space is a video series with the Trevor Project. Each of us has allyship and activism that we can do because of who we are. There’s something each of us can do especially well to make a real difference.

Butler on ‘imagining alternate futures’
Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian. So-called gender-criticalism is ‘a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism,’ Butler says. This interview is one I keep coming back to.

‘The story of my untangling’ through gender transition
‘Pageboy’ by Elliot Page. Page realized he was trans when he was about 30. He says it ‘seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than…to support trans people.’

The definition of possibility was inadequate
Conundrum, a memoir by Jan Morris. Being a woman ‘is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction’ that ‘has never seemed ignoble or even unnatural to me,’ Jan Morris wrote.

Little-known transgender memoir: ‘Reborn’ (1955)
Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition From Male to Female by Tamara Reese. After her 1954 transition, Tamara says she’s ‘serving society in a useful and worthwhile manner’ and is ‘one of the happiest persons alive today.’