Blog

The biggest political donation in U.S. history is funding anti-trans laws
Anti-trans strategy isn’t invented by ‘concerned parents.’ It’s paid for. Laws against gender-affirming care aren’t the result of a concerned parent movement. They’re a well-funded political strategy.

What does Twitter think ‘destroy transgenderism’ means?
When Matt Walsh said it, what did his Twitter followers hear? Children are ‘but one phase in the overall war,’ Walsh said. He means he does not accept transgender adults either. And he is waging war on everyone.

CPAC Transphobia, March 2023
When they can’t possibly be worse, they find a way. He’s still on that horse, and so is the whole Republican party. At CPAC, Trump warned that the country has plunged into a ‘filthy communist nightmare.’

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.’