Blog
The ‘undecidability’ of life
Freedom and despair in Will Eaves’ ‘Murmur’, about Alan Turing. The novelist directs our moral scrutiny not at the innocent man but at the state that victimizes him. The state destroys him, politically and existentially.
Trans and nonbinary kids talk about identity with Daniel Radcliffe
Sharing Space is a video series with the Trevor Project. Each of us has allyship and activism that we can do because of who we are. There’s something each of us can do especially well to make a real difference.
Butler on ‘imagining alternate futures’
Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian. So-called gender-criticalism is ‘a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism,’ Butler says. This interview is one I keep coming back to.
When the Nazis criminalized gay men
A story of persecution in ‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’ by Heinz Heger. The Nazis viewed gay people as weakening the gender binary. Gay men could be punished for “lewdness,” including simply hugging each other: prison or death.
100 years from now, transphobia will always have been wrong
A parallel between Wagner’s antisemitism and Rowling’s transphobia. 100 years from now, there could be a mass murder. But that’s not why Rowling’s transphobia is wrong. It doesn’t become wrong in the future. It’s wrong now.
This 1949 examination of fascist rhetoric shows us how we got here
More on the connection between transphobia and antisemitism. Max Horkheimer examined the social and psychological reasons why people become fascist agitators. This book analyzes antisemitic rhetoric in the US.
Transphobia, overt or underhanded
Either way, this behavior is proof of transphobia. Transphobes aren’t interested in trans people’s viewpoints. Instead, they turn trans people into a bad-faith debate. They see it as a publicity opportunity.
Posie Parker won’t tell us about the billionaires
On air, she alludes to a conspiracy theory — and then won’t explain it. In this March 2023 interview on Radio New Zealand, the anti-transgender activist Posie Parker says that billionaires promote the cause of being trans.
The worst transphobic words I’ve seen (this week)
…were also antisemitic. Modern antisemitism and transphobia are fundamentally linked, and the crush of anti-transgender legislation is an attempt to exterminate trans people.