Blog
3 out of 525,600 minutes: U.S. military budget for gender transition
We can collectively afford gender-affirming healthcare. We know what a world with less military spending would look like. Trans people aren’t what plagues our shared existence. We aren’t what needs to be cut out.
English only, two sexes: A mashup of two executive orders
Interlace the lines to read things like: A designated language attacks women in society by depriving them of dignity. When I read Trump’s instruction ‘to designate one — and only one — official language,’ I remembered his prior instruction ‘to recognize two sexes.’
Pausing in the darkness
Trump’s latest anti-trans executive order calls us ‘anti-Christian’. Trump has labeled as ‘anti-Christian’: trans inclusion, trans visibility, supporting queer kids, and even holding Christians accountable to the law.
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.