Blog

‘This is the team’: Collective change on climate
‘Under The Sky We Make’ by Kimberly Nicholas. The ecological tipping points are upon us, and all is lost, unless we have a mindset change. “Look around you,” she writes. “This is the team. We are it.”

Animals want to live. Will they save us?
We are part of the world, but we don’t take it seriously. The Prophecy: They’ll renew time and heal the planet. The forest creatures find a way to show them the light. The oppressors can’t do it for themselves.

Everything around us? It’s ‘the surround.’
The word ‘environment’ puts the world in a cognitive box. ‘The environment,’ the entirety of Planet Earth, the world and its nature — so large, yet we manage to trap it in the box of our own minds.

A surgeon for WWI and WWII vets also helped a trans man
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris. Harold Gillies “never shied away from a surgical challenge ,” Fitzharris writes. Gillies agreed to perform phalloplasty for a trans man in the late 1940s.

Trans kids are found in history, too
Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson. Adults should acknowledge that ‘trans childhood is a happy and desired form .’ It’s not a new phenomenon. It’s ‘richly, beautifully historical.’

Did lady pirates button their shirts?
Yes. Art you may have seen to the contrary wasn’t realistic. Just because you’ve seen a naked image of a trans person doesn’t mean trans people walk around naked. Pirates too were motivated to button their shirts.

Liberation projects, art appreciation, and perceptions of the past
From my June 2024 reading list. The bird has flown, but the stone has not yet been thrown. Perhaps in the future it will come to mean something.

Is it about time, bodies, or both?
‘Trans Talmud’ by Max K. Strassfeld. Is this a question about time —what we think we know about the past and future? Or is it about bodies —how we sexually classify them? Or both?

‘Overawed by the marvel’ of trans
A new miniprayerbook. When we sanctify something, it changes. I think Heschel would understand and would like to continue to live and change and cast and reflect light.