Blog
Give trans kids privacy and affirmation
Doing so won’t hurt you. California Assembly passes two bills in 2023. One way not to be anxious about trans people is just to listen to us and respect what we say we need, because what we truly need isn’t scary.
How to reduce your anxiety over the ‘idea’ of trans kids
Look at that ‘idea’, and change your assumptions about it. Or, if you want to spend years feeling anxious that you don’t know how to respond to the existence of trans kids, start by making these bad assumptions.
When I, a trans person, spoke to a bioethicist about consequences
We did not agree, and I was wrong. But I wouldn’t have wanted the state to send me to a mandated mental health counselor nor hand up six months of counseling notes to a bioethicist.
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.’