Blog

Geena Rocero’s TED talk reveal
‘Our spirits will always expand to fill whatever space we are given,’ she says. She found her own face in the mirror, her own presence, emerging from nothingness.

Shaneel Lal’s fight against conversion therapy
In 2022, powered by young activist Shaneel Lal, Aotearoa New Zealand banned conversion therapy. ‘Stop congratulating me for being brave,’ Lal says. Instead, ‘annihilate the systems that force me to be brave.’

A queer horror fan, as a boy, craved ‘just one moment like that’
Richard Scott Larson’s memoir ‘The Long Hallway’. At 12, Larson has a recurring dream about a long hallway, ‘as if part of me was always making the interminable walk toward whatever fate awaited me.’

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.’