Blog

3 out of 525,600 minutes: U.S. military budget for gender transition
We can collectively afford gender-affirming healthcare. We know what a world with less military spending would look like. Trans people aren’t what plagues our shared existence. We aren’t what needs to be cut out.

English only, two sexes: A mashup of two executive orders
Interlace the lines to read things like: A designated language attacks women in society by depriving them of dignity. When I read Trump’s instruction ‘to designate one — and only one — official language,’ I remembered his prior instruction ‘to recognize two sexes.’

Pausing in the darkness
Trump’s latest anti-trans executive order calls us ‘anti-Christian’. Trump has labeled as ‘anti-Christian’: trans inclusion, trans visibility, supporting queer kids, and even holding Christians accountable to the law.

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.’