Blog
Transphobia since the 1970s
Janice Raymond’s ‘The Transsexual Empire’. It’s a transphobia classic. We can look at its irrationality and spot its repetition in today’s transphobia. Today’s transphobia isn’t new.
On ‘A + E’ by Ryszard Merey
Book #6 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Drama club, drawing, dance parties — Ash and Eu are pulled together and apart and together as in an oceanic tide. As queer as you wanted high school to be.
On ‘This Kid Can Fly’ by Aaron Rose Philip
Book #5 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. When she was 14, Aaron Rose Philip published the memoir This Kid Can Fly about herself, her family, and growing up with cerebral palsy. Today she’s a model.
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.