Link Roundup! -The Toast

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I wrote the best thing on the internet yesterday, so read that first.


Novels about bein’ trans, written by trans women! Casey Plett compiled this list after writing a piece which was critical of novels about trans people written by cis people:

Each protagonist is a chosen one, a lone wolf plodding on against adversity. They do no wrong; they remain gentle and stoic in the face of difficulty. Whatever imperfections they show are forgiven, usually by dint of gender trouble. “I felt unusually brave that day, a soldier alone in the trenches,” Sydney says, describing a cold trudge to the clinic for chest-reconstruction surgery. This might make for inspiring reading, but it’s odd to spend a few hundred pages with someone who goes through hell and emerges with all the flaws of a Disney hero. The reader scarcely knows anything about the characters’ inner lives.


“Revisiting the Russian cartoons of my childhood” (you know I love Russian cartoons):

Another woman was more specific: “The difference between Tom and Jerry and Ну, погоди! can probably be best seen in the antagonist wolf. In the American cartoon, Tom chases Jerry around for a while. It is aggressive, it is fun, but it is meaningless. This is not a bad thing, but beyond a psychological examination of ‘wants and needs,’ Tom doesn’t stand for anything, he does not represent anything cultural. The wolf, on the other hand, is a reflection of the rebellious Russian youth. He is a hooligan, quite literally. He smokes, wears bell-bottom jeans (very Western), is uneducated, and clever but stupid.”


One year after the destruction of Susan Cahill’s clinic:

Though she is giving up performing abortions, Cahill said she would still like to get back to her practice, to engage with her patients again at a personal level and get to work healing again.

But even that is proving difficult; according to Cahill, two building owners, one of them a personal friend of hers, have declined to rent her a space, saying she’s too much of a liability.

“I’m totally in limbo at the moment,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to stop looking for a place, but I also realize that I’m going to be confronted with this problem, big time. If close friends think I’m a liability, that’s saying a lot.”


The cathedral in San Francisco which is dousing sleeping homeless people and their belongings with water.


FREAKNIK:

Freaknik evolved from picnic to party to long weekend of concerts and cruising through Atlanta’s dogwood-shaded streets. Buzz rippled through the campuses of historically black colleges and universities, luring students who road-tripped to Atlanta for all the reasons college students congregate anywhere: music, dancing, drinking, love, lust, and the chance to just hang out. In Atlanta—with its black political and business leaders and rich history—they found a welcoming environment. “Growing up in a place like the San Francisco Bay Area, where mainstream white middle-class culture pervades, the only understanding you had of college spring break came through a white filter,” recalls Ayanna Brown, who attended Tuskegee University in the early 1990s. An April pilgrimage to Atlanta proved “you could be black and academic and have fun—but it happened not at the beach but smack dab in the middle of the city,” says Brown, now a professor of education at Elmhurst College in Chicago. As Freaknik grew, weekend events spilled out from Piedmont Park and into clubs and concert venues around town, attracting performers and promoters. But for most attendees, the attraction was not so much going to events as getting there.


DID you watch Justified this week?


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