My opinions and positions on queer life and LGBTQ+ issues, argued in good faith. This is my corner of the Internet — I am thinking out loud, not hosting a debate.
If you’ve spent any time around LGBTQ history, you’ve almost certainly heard the word Stonewall. Every June it appears in articles, documentaries, Pride events, and conversations about civil rights. But what actually happened at Stonewall? Was it really the beginning of the gay rights movement? Why is one small bar in New York City remembered […]
One of the more unexpected symbols to emerge from the transgender community is IKEA’s BLÅHAJ shark. What started as a simple plush toy has become a symbol of comfort, acceptance, and belonging for countless trans people around the world. This unofficial English translation of the BLÅHAJ Empathy Manual expands on that idea with a series […]
To the executive who did it in a spreadsheet, There was no podium and no speech. Just a line item where the trans healthcare benefit used to be, relabeled something tidy like “plan optimization,” approved in a meeting that took four minutes. The people it covered found out the way people always find out about […]
Mr. President, I did not ask for my life to become a policy. You decided it would be. You have used the power of the office I am a citizen under to sign orders that declare, by decree, that there are only two sexes; to push people like me out of the military we volunteered […]
Governor DeSantis, You built a national profile on a simple trick: find a small group that unsettles people, and govern against it. You backed the laws restricting care for trans kids and narrowed what a teacher is permitted to say about people like me, and you called it freedom. It is a strange freedom that […]
Governor Abbott, You directed the state of Texas to treat loving parents as suspects of child abuse for getting their trans kids the care their own doctors recommended. Investigators were sent toward family homes. The courts pushed back and the policy wobbled, but the message arrived exactly as designed: that in your Texas, a trans […]
Representative Greene, You have said a great many things about people like me, loudly and on camera, and they share one feature: each requires an audience. The rhetoric is not built to solve anything. It is built for the clip, the fundraising email, and the next cycle of outrage you can convert into attention. I […]
Representative Mace, You made a public campaign out of policing which restroom a colleague was allowed to use, as though the most urgent matter before the country was where one person washes their hands. You called it protecting women. So I will ask you plainly, as one woman to another: who did you imagine you […]
Ms. Rowling, You say you are defending women’s sex-based rights, that you are not anti-trans, and that you reject the label. I am going to take you at your word and engage the argument rather than the caricature, because you are owed that and because the question deserves better than a slogan from either side. […]
Mr. Walsh, You have made a career, and a documentary, out of a question you present as profound and a great deal of confrontation aimed at anyone who answers it differently than you do. The confrontation is the brand. The cruelty is not an accident of the format; it is the format. I notice you […]