The Gore Vidal collection at Harvard is substantial; it includes 394 cartons of material that take up 367 linear feet. The library also holds a 1-carton archive of James Trimble III. Just a few minutes with the Trimble archive made it clear that it was not complied by Vidal, or by anyone who knew Vidal or Jimmie, but by an outsider, whom I will call Roger.
My kid and I, we’re fine. She knows who I am, and for right now, she sees me more clearly than anyone I’ve ever known, because she doesn’t know yet what it’s supposed to mean to be a man or a woman, or a mom or a dad. She just knows me.
Over email, Verdell Wright, Lola Prescott, Sarah Galo and Keisha McKenzie and I talked about the impact I Kissed Dating Goodbye had on our own lives and how each of us has worked to untangle our lives and relationships from the shame of purity culture.
I feel, so often, that I have lost too many years by not having come out as transgender earlier in my life, yet the past also feels brief and momentary, the present ever-present. Everything becomes a moment.
The world feels like it has gotten at once bigger and smaller, with all these transitions.
I assumed that not having cis men in a space would create safety, and encourage my fellow non-cis men to accept trans women and form a community around our shared non-cis-man-ness. But this definitely never happened, and instead I noticed many unfortunate results of this identity-policing stand on party entry. Very little of it made me feel safe.
Sometimes, a TV show is so jarring and takes you so far downward to the worst of humanity that you can’t help searching for levity. It’s an irresistible prospect when you’re a) a fan of femslash and b) watching The Fall, which is essentially a dual character study of a serial killer and the lead detective assigned to his case.
Last night North Carolina's legislators held a special session in order to prohibit local governments from passing anti-discrimination laws, particularly targeting an ordinance in Charlotte that would have allowed trans people to use public restrooms corresponding to their gender.
Pretty much the key thing to know about gender confirmation surgeries in general is that we as humans can do them, which is itself weird and wonderful and kind of unbelievable. Think about it: a body can be anesthetized and wounded and healed in such a way as to feel like a home it wasn't before. Each piece of the process still seems miraculous to me.
On weekdays around lunchtime, I head across the street from my office to the gym. It’s a New York Sports Club, which means most of the women in the locker room are white, skinny, tweezed and plucked all over. I feel like a lumberjack when I walk in there, all hairy, crewcutted and booted among the naked women with white towels wrapped around their heads.
