Tag: Trans

The Rose Project: Portraits of the Trans Community

The Rose Project is a deeply personal portrait project dedicated to the beautiful trans community. It began after a friend and collaborator of mine, Cash Askew, passed away last year. She and I created a lot of wonderful images together, and I felt compelled to continue the project. It’s ca...

Acting the Trans Away

When I was a kid and I had to hide my transgender identity, I became a great actor. Maybe even the greatest actor. I remember joking to myself that I would one day win an Oscar, with the sentimental hope that one day, people would understand. With an unsupportive family, no chance of receiving ...

“Why Are There Suddenly So Many Trans People?”

Chris Tyson appears in most of the videos in Mr. Beast’s channel. Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson) is the world’s biggest YouTube star. He and his friends stream their video game play and commentary, perform funny pranks and stunts, and give away thousands of dollars to strangers, someti...

Michigan Trans Man Shot in His Wheelchair, Called Trnny, Fggot

Ican’t tell you how shocked I felt reading the above words early yesterday morning in the LGBTQ newspaper Pink News. I’m a Michigander who lived in the Detroit area for many years. I know Pontiac well. Or I thought I did. If somebody had asked me before yesterday...

2 Trans gals Elon Musk’s kid Vivian Jenna Wilson and US Senator-elect Danica Roem. — We love you!

Meet Danica Roem, Virginia’s first transgender elected official! Danica Roem is a trailblazing American politician and journalist known for being Virginia’s first openly transgender elected official. She’s smart, beautiful and determined! She made history by winning a seat...

Curating a trans narrative

We talk about trans identities like they are this homogenous thing, as if all trans people are the same. Its as if we believe that trans identities are monolithic men in frocks, a predatory subset of the male sex. Yet, as with all things no two trans people are the same, and no two trans narratives ...

Anti-trans bots

In the bad old days of anti-trans media discourse one had to get an article past editors, publishers, and a sceptical audience in order to find acceptance. Printing was a relatively slow process, with books being published in the thousands and newspapers being chip wrappers the next day. Even in the...

Trans rights and evidence

On any fine day you will find gender critical feminists baldly stating that trans women are men and that therefore they are a threat to cis women and girls. They throw out tabloid headlines, slam transphobic memes in the threads, and invariably throw up a bunch of dodgy stats that would make a neoli...

Why are AMAB trans people denied the closet?

How do you think your acquaintance might react to that? They’d probably find your comment to be crass and dismissive, wouldn’t they? And it wouldn’t be because they doubt heterosexual privilege exists, but rather because this singularly focused framing erases the complex reality of...

Building inclusive products for trans people

In the 60s and the 90s, the media trained us to make fun of trans people (e.g. film “Mrs. Doubtfire”, 1993: Robin Williams is dressed as a woman to be hired as a babysitter for his children), to be afraid of them (e.g. film “Psycho”, 1960: the serial killer is ...

My Trans Journal: Some People Just Won’t Listen.

I wrote a story yesterday based on somebody else’s very ignorant uneducated story on their not being able to understand anything about how there can be a gender identity and a sex incongruence. I thought this might be a good learning opportunity. A time for trans people to educate someone. But...

My Trans Firsts Happened Secretly

My sister’s screams rattled the room. Mom had frozen her ear lobes with ice, but what freaked out the child was the crackling of cartilage as the sterilized needle pierced her ears. My sister was two. I was six. My tears were not due to her pain. I was so jealous I wanted to explode. Mama k...

Lack of evidence for trans history

It is always telling that when someone is desperate to deny a minority group their place in history they fall back on either their own personal lack of seeing that minority or some authority figure who has tangential knowledge of that minority. What those who deny trans history in particular forget ...

My trans daughter looks a lot like Barbie…except for that one part

I remember it like yesterday- Gideon sitting on his knees, grinning from ear to ear, and meticulously (well, as meticulously as his 4-year-old hands would allow) sifting through the boxes that his big cousin Harper had shunned to the side of her bedroom. Harper’s “Barbie bins” were...

Trans Girl’s Best Xmas Ever

I remember when I was a child on Xmas eve. I would rush to bed early so I could get up and open all my shiny presents. It was magic as I ripped the wrapping paper off to reveal my new treasure. I would play with them for a few days then throw them in a closet. It was more about receiving than the gi...

Nikki Haley, the U.S. Military Is Not at Risk from ‘Woke’ or Trans Inclusion

Is it deja vu all over again? Last spring, U.S. Representatives Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Boebert (none of whom ever served in the military) made some pretty startling claims. To paraphrase, they claim the U.S. military is woke, socialist, and into critical race theory....

All I Want Is My Family to Love Me, but They Kicked Me Out for Being Trans

It’s been two years. I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for two years. I’ve dreamed of being back in my family home on the other side of the country each night. They are just dreams. They aren’t real. I know they’re not real because my home is warm. My father em...

How Many Anti-Trans Laws Were Proposed Last Week?

Only three days into 2024,” Erin Reed informed us yesterday, U.S. lawmakers had submitted 125 anti-transgender bills. I don’t want to steal her analysis here (she’s doing the hard work), but we all need to be amplifying the news and the message. So, in this post, I&rsq...

Trans Florida Update January 2024

Florida Congress is back in session, and attacks on trans people are once again at the forefront. On January 4, Florida’s SB 254 officially went into effect, essentially creating a full restriction of transgender medical care. Since the summer, trans activists, citizens, and their al...

GOP Wants to Eliminate Trans People

When I started this blog I wanted to make it a mixture of my poetry and short stories, some biographic essays, some travel pieces, particularly on Korea and Asia, and some political rants. But, over time, I did less and less political rants. As you may have figured out by now, I am in the camp th...

Did Ohio Find a Loophole To Ban ALL Trans Care?

I mean, think about it, they’ll just tell everyone ‘you can’t possibly think a bioethicist is too much to ask for, right? You don’t want moral authority on this?’ I can’t help thinking that after Glenn Youngkin’s ‘Parents’ Rights’ campai...

Curating a trans narrative

Why Are Politicians Bullying Trans Kids?

Since the Civil War (and several millennia before that), political parties have been divided primarily by opinions on the issue of race (and immigration, which is also about race). Many other issues intertwined with that, but race was what fired up the followers on both sides. ...

Finding Love as a Trans Woman

Throughout my life, I have gone through three significant evolutions of fear. My first fear was, as a child, being caught wearing my mother’s clothes. I was. I was unpunished. The second was coming out to my then-wife. I did. I was punished. My current fear is dating. I didn’t date. I...

Joy. A Trans Kid Teaches It.

His laugh is unmistakable. I could hear it in a crowded theater, down the block, anywhere, and I would instantly know it and see his face in my mind. Big, deep dimples, eyes crinkled almost shut, wide smile, absolute impish delight beaming from him. That’s my boy. My middle son, who has ...

Thirteen, Trans and Homeless

I come from a small village in Mersin province, Turkey. There was a time when I would sit on the rocks with my camera that had no name and try to capture the rarest moment of all: a still wave. Everyone in the village called me Prenses. That means princess in Turkish. The whole village....

Am I a Trans Girl?

Let temptation be your path and empathy your navigator. - Alleria Brightfall Of all my emotional battles, from quietly dealing with schizophrenia to being drowned in my empathy, none has been as brutal as my conflict over how I identify myself. I was raised in a chaotic environment. I spe...

What I Want You to Say or Do When I Tell You My Kid is Trans

Maybe you think transitioning to another gender is sinful, stupid, or scary. I don’t want to hear your opinion. When you explained how your entire family’s life was now revolving around your ten-year-old’s travel football team despite his minor concussion last week, I kept my mouth...

Stop Asking “Would you Date a Trans Person?”

Would you date a trans person? This is a question that many cis people have probably asked themselves or have been asked. As trans people become more visible in society, I’m sure a cis man has looked at a trans woman like Kim Petras and asked himself “Would I have sex with her?” It...

The Trans Woman and Her Loving Father

When my father died, a metaphorical train hit me. My world, the world stood still. It ceased to be. People were frozen in time. He had been sick with cancer. It ravaged his body like a plague of locusts. It ate him from the inside out. The sun was shining that day, and the view from the window wa...

Attacking trans bodies

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, exclusionary feminists decided to dog pile on Kim Petras and no-one in the real world cared. Crickets. Not a news headline, not a celebrity tweet, not even a nod from the original poster. All that needed to be said was Kim was a woman, and it was cat n...

My Trans Daughter Looks a Lot Like Barbie… Except for That One Part

I remember it like yesterday — Gideon sitting on his knees, grinning from ear to ear, and meticulously (well, as meticulously as his four-year-old hands would allow) sifting through the boxes that his big cousin Harper had shunned to the side of her bedroom. Harper’s “Barbie bin...

I Was Saved by a Cat When I Was A Trans Homeless Kid

I could see myself. I could see myself shivering in a blanket under a railway bridge. I could see myself crying. I could feel it, too. Nothing was more painful than the absence of love I felt at that moment. It felt so vast it was unimaginable. I was so numb that if I died there and then, I don&rsqu...

My Trans Firsts Happened Secretly

She wanted a beautiful daughter to take to church in lavish dresses and curled and bowed tresses. She’d sometimes dress me up as an infant and toddler girl, then cooed about my beauty. Then she hurriedly took everything off, worried my dad would discover our secret. He did once and was so angr...

Common trans debates: only the facts

Last year, I examined dozens of papers on the topic of detransition, finding mean and pooled rates of 3-4%. Surgical regret rates are lower (but not <<1% as some have argued). A misleading narrative has been woven using studies that (a) relied on a definition of gender identity ...

Trans Girl’s Best Xmas Ever

My Trans Journal: Sitting in peace, dissecting the fear.

Well, for one thing we thought that by eating a mostly vegan diet of beans and lentils that pounds would be melting off of us, but no. Second, there aren’t too many people around us that we feel comfortable enough to get to know better. There are a few people here and there, but for the most p...

Lack of evidence for trans history

Why Are Politicians Bullying Trans Kids?

Trans Advocacy in New York State 2023

Years ago, the Audre Lorde Project was one of the only organizations in New York City that focused on social and economic justice for BIPOC LGBTQ+ folks and had, and still has, a separate TransJustice committee. The organization had organized people together to highlight the harm caused...

Thirteen, Trans and Homeless

An Open Letter to the ICC from a Trans Cricketer

Hi! My name is Billie, and I am a transgender cricketer living in Boston, Massachusetts. Make no mistake, I am a remarkably average player, but I was still hurt by the ICC’s decision to ban transgender women from playing international cricket in women’s teams. I want you to understand wh...

What I Want You to Say or Do When I Tell You My Kid is Trans

I ran into an old friend this weekend. Hadn’t seen her in years. We did the obligatory “So, what are all your kids up to these days” kind of catch-up. “And what about your son?” she asked as I finished bullet-pointing children one and two’s accomplishments. ...

Trans Florida Update January 2024

Stop Asking “Would you Date a Trans Person?”

Whether or not you are ultimately supportive of trans people when discussing this question and no matter your answer, it is not a conversation that cis people should be having – especially not publicly. Recently, I watched a video where YouTuber Samantha Lux reacted to a video from the YouTube...

‘Water I Won’t Touch’: A Trans Ecopoetic

Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s third poetry collection, Water I Won’t Touch, introduces us to a trans ecopoetics in which the body is as porous and communal as the earth. Candrilli dissolves the boundaries between the human and non-human, between genders, when they meditate on what happe...

Honest Talk About Cis Gay Men Who Aren’t Attracted to Trans Men

In an LGBTQ+ Facebook group, a cis gay man declared, “I respect trans people’s identities. But if a trans man comes for a hookup, and he pulls down his pants, I won’t be interested.” A trans female friend, Lyra, was the admin of the group. She was mad and deleted his post....

Five Memoirs by Trans Authors

What could be more important than access to queer fiction? A wide variety of LGTBQ+ nonfiction for parents and children to choose from. When LGBTQ+ literature is banned, we lose the opportunity for kids to see others like themselves in media, and they and their parents miss out on seeing all the ...

I did not always know I was a boy: On not fitting neatly into normative narratives of trans identity.

So often, we think of, hear of, read about trans people who “just knew” about their gender since they were three years old, or five, or eight. They coveted their sister’s toys, or they screamed any time their parents tried to put them in frilly dresses. But for myself, I didn&rs...

How (De)Transphobia Harms Both Trans and Detrans People

For transgender people, healthcare providers and researchers, detransition is often a taboo topic. For those opposed to gender-affirming care, detransition is a scandal to be weaponized. And for those who detransition, it’s a lived experience — one that can lead to rejection, isolation a...

Did Ohio Find a Loophole To Ban ALL Trans Care?

What if it doesn’t stop there and just goes from Red state to Red state? I mean, think about it, they’ll just tell everyone ‘you can’t possibly think a bioethicist is too much to ask for, right? You don’t want moral authority on this?’ I can’t help thi...

Why are AMAB trans people denied the closet?

Reclaiming the past: was Kurt Cobain trans?

However, queer people see themselves in these examples through history, and there is nothing to say these people would not see themselves in us too. Our current culture centres labelling and coming out as core experiences, and thus the metric by which it is appropriate to call someone gay or tran...

Realities of Trans hormones

Hormones became this golden harp worth aspiring towards when I was around 19 years old. I had started leaning more into my femininity. I was wearing female clothing on weekend nights when I would go out. I was sneaking my eye shadow on the bus before my shift at the supermarket.I was introducing mys...

The Surprising Way My Church Reacted When My Teen Came Out as Trans

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is love out there within the church. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about the horrific “hate the sin, love the sinner” nonsense. No, some Bible believers have genuine love for our LGBTQ+ siblings in Christ, not in spite ...

Trans economics: The cost of transition

When exclusionary feminists demand that we consider the kids and stop child mutilation, they forget that most trans adults have the similar narrative: they knew their gender identity from an early age and if they could have transitioned young they would have. That most trans folk do not is due to a ...

I’m Trans Myself, But I Haven’t Always Supported My Trans Kids

I’m trans, and so are my adult kids. Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? I hesitate to talk about my family. Someone might decide I made them trans, by pressure or example. Bigots in redder states might use us to fuel their crusade to remove trans kids from their homes. I wonder if admitting...

Where is home for the biracial trans bois?

It’s taken my entire life to find the nerve and vocabulary to articulate what being gay, trans, and biracial have meant for me. I felt like I’ve always lived in those hard-to-relate-to in-between places. I have always struggled with black and white, circular thinking which made holding n...

Defining rights and trans personhood

I have never been attacked in person because I am a trans person, the worst I have suffered is occasional mis-gendering and the odd slur back in the early days. I have the privilege to sit back and enjoy being a woman in society at large, relatively free from the slings and arrows of transphobia. Ye...

Anti-trans bots

I Was Outed as Trans in Church, Then the Pastor Performed an Exorcism

I’m always fascinated when folks declare they have no regrets; I regret almost everything. I was born into an Evangelical Christian home in 1962. I knew from my first cognizant moment that I was a girl, but I had to argue that fact as soon as I could talk. A pesky protrusion noted on my birth ...

I Came Out As Trans at Age 3

When I was a toddler Mama and I had an argument. She said I couldn’t be a girl because I had a penis. I shouted back, “Of course, little girls can have penises! I have one!” I made her cry. She went to a therapist who told her it was a phase and to let it play itself out, but&...

Becoming a professional trans person

A couple of years ago the Daily Telegraph ran a transition diary by Diana Thomas, and regardless of your position on both the paper and her, one thing she talked about in the last few entries was that she did not want to be labelled a professional trans person. That is, she did not want to be only k...

Being Non-Op Transgender.

The point is that people that don’t understand how varied trans humans can be, lump us all into the same categories and generalize across the board that we’re all the same and do the same. I don’t care to use what they’re calling, “women only spac...

Stop Asking “Would you Date a Trans Person?”

Who Gives Medical Treatment to a Nine-Year-Old Trans Child?

The child is allowed to choose their own name, pronouns, hairstyle, and clothes. They periodically check in with a psychologist to find out whether this still feels like coming home, or whether it’s last week’s craze. That’s it. That’s all they do at such a young age.&nbsp...

Where is home for the biracial trans bois?

My Trans Journal: There’s No Hiding Who I Am Anymore

So there I was when our MAGA guest first arrived. I was wearing a purple Tomboy X women’s half-sleeve T-shirt, silky above the knee women’s black shorts, I had on purple socks to match the shirt, my legs and my body shaved smooth, I smelled a bit like flowers, my ear piercings in both ea...

Trans Crisis Management

Over the years as I went through the process of living my life as a transgender woman, I encountered many instances of crisis management. Some of the encounters were funny, some were anything but funny. Several come to mind as I write this post. Probably the most humorous account came at the ill ...