Blog

10 clues this guy doesn’t want to hear your trans-inclusive pitch
On an ‘Evening Standard’ column, in which Richard Dawkins gets mad imagining that trans people might double-score on cake. He’s managed to make trans rights about himself. He wants to eat his cake and have it.

No one should inflict hunger in Gaza. Famine is a choice.
Headlines on the crisis for those who have overlooked them. We can find ways to coexist. And not to weaponize the control of food. It’s an absolute minimum. This year’s Yom Kippur fast isn’t easy. We can do better.

You’re not my type
Trans man explains dating preferences to cis man. For gender and sexuality, self-ID is the tiebreaker. If the question is, How do I know if I’m a gay man?, the answer is never going to be, Ask Blake Smith.

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.