Blog

Read this chapter in the January 6 Committee’s report
Everyone should read the final report of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack. The committee interviewed a thousand witnesses and crunched a million documents to reach its conclusions, so this is valuable information.

What we fear from the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’
In Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, alien seed pods fall to earth and sprout plants that quickly mature. While a human is asleep, the plant produces an emotionless clone of the human body and then destroys the original body.

Transforming into ourselves: Identity and climate
Discovering who we’ve always been and who we must become, collectively. We don’t have to live according to a prescribed model of sexuality or gender. We don’t have to burn fossil fuels either. Everything could be different.

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.