I don't have the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. To be relevant and capable of explaining a lot of things that you were concerned about.

I think that a lot of the things I say and write are important and powerfully explanatory, but for the most part I don't have what you could call a following. It's an interesting ( Read more... )

I've said before that in an intimate relationship, there is often a power inequality -- not so much because someone is seeking it or deliberately weilding it, but because intimacy creates vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to not be in control. There's no way to structure vulnerability out of intimacy, so it's there; and vulnerability is the risk ( Read more... )

So many of us crave a world where it doesn't matter. "It" meaning our difference, the thing that, in this world, has set us apart. Marginalized us. Sexual orientation. Race. Gender identity. Whatever ( Read more... )

There is definitely a personal emotional stake when you write about yourself, about what happened to you, and then make it available to others. It's different from writing fiction. I mean, you can have a significant ego investment in being the author of a work of fiction, and it can leave you vulnerable to dismissive or hostile opinions of ( Read more... )

"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that ( Read more... )

You don't need anything from me in order to be different from me. You can simply be you, and leave me to either notice or not notice, care or not care ( Read more... )

This is me, a first grader, and I want to write about something very important ( Read more... )

Just a couple of decades ago, we had no term, and no concept, for what we now call "cultural appropriation". Like "genderqueer", it's a new notion we can now use to frame our understandings of social inclusion and social justice ( Read more... )

I am neither trans nor cis.

That's been a recurrent theme in my blog posts, along with the sense that my identity often gets erased whenever someone tries to divide the world up into either trans or cis.

Why?

Because I'm definitely not cis, but the mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans does not include people like me ( Read more... )

Replying to last week's blog post, my feminist colleague Emma wrote: "Perhaps you could ask a question pertinent to your point and then use the answers to develop what you want to say. For example, are you trying to talk about the idea that feminists have critiqued masculinity but then, when some men have rejected masculinity, critiqued that too?"

( Read more... )