Blog

Can you do your political work if Trump is elected?
Think of his indictments, Christian Nationalism, and the climate crisis. Think of how we’ll organize. Trump faces criminal indictments. If you’re an organizer or an activist, this general situation and this specific timeline may affect your work.

A Texas bounty on trans people
Big prizes! Win $10,000 and up for reporting a trans person! Two updates from Texas and Pennsylvania, plus a roundup of five essays on anti-trans bathroom bills. Stop trying to take our money. Stop looking.

I want to see every erased word celebrating our city’s sexual health hotline
I’ll repaint the mural myself if I have to. As a gay and trans adult, I have to show responsibility toward other queer people in this city. If we don’t stand up for each other, who will?

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.’