Blog

A story worth telling: The world we will build
‘Let This Radicalize You’ asks us to tell stories about how we’ll support each other. Tell a story about how people support each other. People who are listening want to feel they can find a personal role to play. It’s worth doing.

5 ways philosophy fails (sometimes)
Too much time looking down, forgetting to come up for air. I do philosophy. I must accept there’s no one true answer. I must care, help others care, be practical, keep going. I’ll fail often. I hope for small wins.

We wait for the writer to finish the story
Patiently waiting for that person to return. We find ourselves talking too much. Sick of the sound of our own voice. Self-consciousness restricts creativity. Better to write nothing at all?

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.