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I have questions, but Chait says I’m not allowed to ask any
Per Jonathan Chait’s NY Intelligencer column, trans people who ask questions are risking the 2024 election. When will we be allowed to speak? Can we speak up after the election? No, as then we’ll be told to start worrying about the next election.
The ‘man’–‘woman’ porridge has gotta stay in the Goldilocks Zone
Transphobes don’t want to be any more, nor any less, specific. They don’t want more specificity about ‘man’ & ‘woman.’ ‘Cis’ is a slur, they say. They don’t want less specificity either. ‘Person’ is erasure, they say.
Sorry, I’m out-of-body right now
I’ll answer your hate mail in another lifetime. Asking fake questions about etymologies and intra-community debates they don’t care about. They’ll follow up with fake theories about floating out-of-body.
The feeling of knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’. ‘Epistemopathy’ means the feeling of knowing. We have pleasant and unpleasant feelings associated with knowing. That’s part of why knowledge matters to us.
Turtles all the way down
Finding truth in emptiness. When we acknowledge there is no final turtle, we open ourselves to discover and live more. The turtle on which we are standing is never the last one.
We can’t prepare for this moment
‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. What to make of this political and ecological moment, this chaos that arrives with no instructions? We can “see, collectively, in the dark.”
‘Do I want it? Life, that is.’
‘On Not Knowing‘ by Emily Ogden. What is there to hope for? Should we hope? We can work in the field, making bales of hay, but the work of the soul “never will be cut and dried.”
‘Agnotology’: The study of ignorance
Our ways of knowing can be corrupted. “We’re going to have to rethink our metaphors,” Proctor said, on persuading people away from science-denial. “We’ve got to think much more creatively.”
We knew it before we were quizzed
That truth remains valuable. We existed. We went to school and forgot ourselves for a while. Then we remembered who we are. We had this knowledge with us the whole time.