Blog

Unbox to see which bills House Republicans will propose in 2025
In their rules package, they express an agenda. These bills will attempt to regulate trans people, immigrants, and more.

What Rude Magic Is This (A Poem)
With the background of how I wrote it. I didn’t know what to do with three poems I lost and half-forgot. Now I hear Jacob’s epiphany as a kind of rude magic. The poems come back to me.

No one knows ‘exact role’ of hormones in sex development, doctor once said
‘Dr. Cutter issues warning in administering hormones’ to minors. Don’t worry. It was a long time ago. Dr. Irving Cutter was the dean of the Northwestern University medical school. He advised parents to feed their kids better before seeking hormone treatment.

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.’