Blog
A concern troll’s cognitive dissonance: Helen Joyce on trans kids
If your mind is made up, why do you pretend to be open to more data? I used to wonder why people got so anxious over the idea of trans people, and now I realize it’s because they believe contradictory things about us.
Helen Joyce: All trans people break the world
It sounds metal, but actually, she just doesn’t like us. She compares gender transition to a contagious disease, lobotomy, and opioid abuse and calls us a disaster.
YouTube deleted the Peterson/Joyce ‘meat lego’ video
On ‘meat Legos’ and what’s older than trees. “That’s what people say about me,” Joyce says innocently, smiling, batting her eyes. “That I want to cause a genocide…When did I ever write such a thing?”
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.’