Blog
Geena Rocero’s TED talk reveal
‘Our spirits will always expand to fill whatever space we are given,’ she says. She found her own face in the mirror, her own presence, emerging from nothingness.
Shaneel Lal’s fight against conversion therapy
In 2022, powered by young activist Shaneel Lal, Aotearoa New Zealand banned conversion therapy. ‘Stop congratulating me for being brave,’ Lal says. Instead, ‘annihilate the systems that force me to be brave.’
A queer horror fan, as a boy, craved ‘just one moment like that’
Richard Scott Larson’s memoir ‘The Long Hallway’. At 12, Larson has a recurring dream about a long hallway, ‘as if part of me was always making the interminable walk toward whatever fate awaited me.’
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.