Blog

I listened to ‘Free to Be … You and Me’
I turned out trans anyway. Pamela Paul is indeed aware of the existence of trans people, or she wouldn’t have written three anti-transgender articles this year. It’s on purpose.

Pamela Paul’s latest transphobia
‘Let’s Say Gay’ isn’t about the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law. A transphobe has done a public transphobia. Pamela Paul doesn’t want lesbian, gay, and bisexual people to work together with transgender people.

One kind of transphobia: Imagining cis-phobia
A cis person discusses sex/gender, yet it’s not OK when a trans person does it? Today’s NYT op-ed shows us, yet again, what transphobic discourse sounds like. Within hours, the rhetoric was tweeted by everyone and their ham sandwich.

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.