Blog
Do we find truth in stories? In nostalgia? (A contemplation)
‘Beneath the exhausted rubble of our hearts, this miraculous potion awakened something strangely precious’ — Heinrich Böll. Snow falls lightly on the street vendors. He smells cheap tobacco, hears the squeak of chalk on a blackboard, sees a woman scrubbing a front step.
Stoking ‘trans panic’?! We have to create other political narratives
Andrea Pitzer’s video on ‘Ending Trans Panic’. Political risk doesn’t always fall on the side of standing up for people’s rights. Sometimes, supporting people’s rights helps you win elections.
I’m ‘disdainful’ of the latest U.S. court ruling against trans kids
No one asked me, but 🏳️⚧️ I’ll speak up while I still can. Connecting two court cases: US v. Skrmetti and Anderson v. Crouch. We exist, we should have basic rights, we can explain why. They want to stop us.
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.’