Category: Other essays

The person who allegedly killed five people at a gay bar the night before Trans Day of Remembrance has announced through their lawyers that they identify as nonbinary and use they/them pronouns. It would be easy to conclude that the alleged murderer is cynically trying to avoid Hate Crime laws by falsely claiming to be…

Prompt on Twitter: “When did you first notice feeling confused by social expectations?” Reply: I don’t remember “first”, but… story time! When I was in fifth grade or so, the bully wanted to beat me up. I told him he could, but only if it was after school where nobody could watch. I told him…

There’s an urban legend going around that says that furry youth are demanding–and getting–litter boxes in high school bathrooms. I have yet to see any credible evidence that a single such box has been seriously demanded, let alone installed. But that doesn’t stop people from railing against these fictions. This morning I saw a photo…

Let us assume for the moment that transgender and intersex people don’t exist. Let us assume that every single human has either XX or XY chromosomes and genitals to match. This is not true, but let us assume it is. Even under this assumption, recognize that our brains are culturally programmed to identify within seconds…

Yesterday I saw a FB ad for a credit card offering cards with your chosen name, and several comments were sneering about “Why don’t you just get a name change? Anyone can.” So. Having just finished the court process of changing my name, here’s what it involved: 1. I mailed in my application on May…

I’m not going to talk about the slap. I’m not going to talk very much about the joke, because there are at least three levels to it. I’m going to talk about one of those three levels. I want to make it clear that this is a small part of The Incident. The Incident and…

This next sentence may seem odd coming from me, but keep reading. It’s not transphobic to say that trans women athletes have a physical advantage over cis women. The medical truth of that statement has been debated, and I believe that, on the whole, it’s not true. There are certainly cases of trans women who…

(A Twitter thread) Effective censorship requires systemic power. This is related to the conversation about *ism and the non-existent “reverse *ism”: I can have prejudices that are negative about cisgender people, for instance, but I don’t have the power of the system behind me. When we transgender folk “cancel” JKR and DC, our power is…

On Facebook:The term “Cancel Culture” is a part of a larger system of domination and, frankly, is used itself to cancel conversation to avoid uncomfortable conversations and accountability. “It was just a joke” is part of that, too. The image below is framed in terms of men, but it’s part of the greater system of…

I used to call myself a libertarian. I used to say that meant that people could do what they wanted as long as it didn’t hurt other people. I used to be the final arbiter of whether my actions hurt people. It’s easy to declare that one’s own actions don’t hurt other people: “My actions…