Recommended reading

Spotted these recommendations:

What books, podcasts, or other media would you recommend to anyone interested in philosophy?
I recommend the “Crisis and Critique” podcast, hosted by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, available on YouTube and Spotify. Likewise, I love the many lectures uploaded onto the “European Graduate School Video Lectures” YouTube channel. In my recommendations, I also include Marc Nichanian’s work for anyone interested in the philosophy of history, genocide, and memory. I also like Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work as well as Cathy Caruth’s and Rebecca Comay’s books. Finally, in what is a time of emergency on every level, I suggest that students (and teachers) read Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Life of Students.”

“Why Philosophy?” Veronika Z. Nayir is interviewed by Céline Leboeuf. This interview of Veronika Z. Nayir was first published at Why Philosophy? Appearing on the Daily Nous on April 9, 2024.

And:

What's on your to-read and/or to-watch stack?
My to-read list is long. It includes Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Witches by Brenda Lozano, Eternal Audience of One by Rémy Ngamije, The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kōhei Saitō, Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, The Story Game by Shze-Hui Tjoa, and Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. I still haven't read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, so I want to read it this summer and feel hopeful about societal change. On my to-watch list is Dario Argento's filmography.

Wendy C. Ortiz interviewing Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Mommy's El Camino, March 21, 2024

Baloji's film 'Omen' ('Augure')

Baloji's first feature film, “Omen” (“Augure”), debuted at Cannes and will be in UK cinemas on April 26. (Use UniFrance to find more places to view it.)

It is, as he explains, "prohibited, censored in certain African countries, because they consider that we’re promoting LGBT culture and polyamorous sexualities. So the movie’s censored in Cameroon, in Uganda, Ghana – which is quite surprising."

CNN says:

"It begins with Koffi, the ostracized son of a Congolese family, who returns to the DRC from Belgium with his pregnant White fiancé. He wants to honor tradition and pay a dowry, but he’s met with hostility; his father won’t meet him, his mother is scornful, and his sisters turn sour when there’s an accident and he’s accused of sorcery.

Interweaving the stories of four people touched by sorcery, Baloji conjures an absurd fable that marries Central African animism and Catholicism with Disney and European folklore. It’s avant-garde filmmaking that prizes image above all, though it’s fizzing with ideas."

Baloji says:

"Koffi is not a victim. He’s on the side of the privileged, because he has something that no one else has in the DRC: a passport. He can leave whenever he wants. Koffi is a McGuffin, he’s an entry point. So you think we’re going to talk about something that is very present in literature for the last 200 years? Going back home and feeling disconnected? Then after 20 minutes we change the point of view. The main character is his mum, because she’s the one that goes through a big change in the narrative."

The film did not receive funding from France. Baloji tells CNN:

"...the moment you have a French, White character, the commissioner wants to know the point of view of that character. They want to follow the narrative from that character. They don’t accept that this character can be just a supporting act.

Because they blocked us for so many years, we decided to change the name of (the White character) Alice to Salma. From (that moment), nobody cared. It was not a problem that she was secondary anymore. No readers identified themselves with her, so they cannot read and be like, “Where’s my point of view?” “Where’s my narrative twin?” That’s the only thing that unlocked the funding. It’s dispiriting."

— From ‘sorcerer’ and illegal immigrant to Cannes and the Oscars: this filmmaker’s remarkable path to success, Thomas Page, CNN, April 17, 2024

"Where's my point of view?"

'Testament: The Story of Moses' (Netflix)

Testament: The Story of Moses is a series about the life of Moses, coming to Netflix on March 27.

1931: U.S. railroad deaths

Pauli Murray writes in Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (Chapter 7, Survival):

"I did not know in that psring of 1931 that I was about to join an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 homeless boys — and a smattering of girls — between the ages of twelve and twenty, products of the Depression, who rode freights or hitchhiked from town to town in search of work. Thousands lived in 'jungles' near railroad tracks, constituting the 'tragic army' which aroused the alarm of the Children's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, and created a national problem which eventually led to the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps. These young people were part of a larger army of nearly three million homeless unemployed men who also rode the rails and lived in jungles. One railroad official reported that some ten thousand transients per month were traveling through the Southern Pacific freight yards in 1931. In the same year, 831 were killed on the arterial highways and dozens met their deaths under freight trains.

* * *

Hoboes faced the ever-present risk of being shot by armed railroad guards in the big railroad divisions where the freight trains were assembled. When the long trains pulled out of the yards, we had to choose between two dangers. If we ignored the guards who shouted warnings to stay off the train as they ran along the walkways on top of the cars, we became targets for their bullets. If we waited for them to get off, the train had picked up such speed that we risked being thrown under the wheels trying to swing onto a fast-moving boxcar. Another hazard was the fierce cold of windy nights, which forced us to try to keep warm by riding too close to the engine, in the path of hot cinders that blew back upon us. One night the only shelter from the wind I could find was on a flatcar loaded with bridge timber. I crawled into a crevice covered by lon wooden beams and went to sleep. Next morning I discovered that the heavy beams shifted every time the train lurched and this shifting had provided my crevice; a strong enough lurch would have dislodged some of the heaviest beams and crushed me to death.

Crossing the country, I learned to ride cattle trains, fruit-butter-and-egg trains, 'hot shots' (fast express freights), and 'manifestos' (nonstop express freight trains). When refrigerator cars carried citrus fruit, the narrow ice chests, or 'reefers,' at each end of the car were left empty. The hobo's haven was an open reefer which could be entered through the small trapdoor at the top of the empty ice chamber. The upraised door was held by a jack, and if one was small enough to wriggle through the opening one could slither down inside the steel-plated cell floored with wooden slats and ride in comfort out of sight of railroad 'bulls.'"

Virginia, 1629: An incident in intersex & trans history

In 1623 — as Kit Heyam writes in Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender — Warraskoyack, Virginia, "an English colonial settlement, on Powhatan land," had a population of "twenty-nine white and four Black people." This included a person named Thomas Hall, who worked as a servant to two men. Hall's story was that they had grown up as a girl in England, then dressed as a young man to fight on the Île de Ré in the 1620s, then resumed employment as a woman in needlework for a few years before sailing for America in 1627.

The small community in Warraskoyack had differing opinions of Hall's gender, which seems not to have been a problem for about a year, but in early 1629 became the subject of debate and investigation when Hall was said to be having sex with a person known as "great Bess," who was a maid to a plantation manager. Hall also wore women's clothing and claimed to like sex with men too.

Heyam writes that, in 1629, "around one third of the Warraskoyack population had directly involved themselves in the task of establishing whether the person they knew as Thomas was 'man or woman'." Hall, when asked directly, asserted that they were both. One of Hall's employers likewise answered that he believed Hall to be both. The community then "sought to prove the 'truth' of Thomas(ine)'s gender by inspecting their genitals repeatedly and violently." No one agreed whether Hall's genitals were male or female, and "the case was passed to the Jamestown court," which decided that Hall should be treated as both "a man and a woman."

Heyam points out that "intersex bodies have always been made to stand for more than they are: for God's judgement, for hte supernatural or monstrous, for threats to the patriarchal order. People whose intersex traits are obvious have rarely been able to fly under the radar. While trans history is often hidden behind ambiguous motivations for gender-nonconforming behaviour, intersex history is often violently laid bare before an invasive medical, religious or literary gaze." Unfortunately, some "trans people have appropriated intersex traits and identities to validate our genders or access medical treatment." Nonetheless there are some similarities between trans and intersex experience, including that "medical and legal professionals" try to interfere and to change trans and intersex people's bodies against their wishes. "The same doctors who were keen to change intersex bodies, which they saw as in need of 'correction', were reluctant to help trans people, whose problems they understood as psychological, not physical." Some people therefore asserted that they were intersex because it was a way for them to seek hormones and surgeries.

The life of Thomas Hall can be seen as part of intersex history, trans history, or both.

Please do check out the book Before We Were Trans because it is full of insightful ideas like this.

Measurements and categories

On the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905). Philosophy of nature can discuss

"the need for a hybrid vision of environments that does not separate what is 'natural' from what is 'human,' and that abandons environmental determinism by focusing on the complex interactions in which spatial frameworks are not simply a context, but fully-fledged actors in the history—one that is essentially an environmental history and cannot be separated, as Reclus would have said, from geography. With regard to ethics, the fact that human beings are part of nature also limits their pretentions to domination over it."
Federico Ferretti (translated by Arby Gharibian) « Élisée Reclus: A Philosophy of Nature », Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe [online], ISSN 2677-6588, published on 22/Jun/2020, consulted on 09/Aug/2023.

"When we ask what makes something a sandwich we should also ask why we need to know, and who we are. The "we" is a culturally specific we. The type of handheld that is a sandwich has a lineage and it is a cultural one. That cultural lineage informs the conditions under which it can be used, so in that way informs its function. Then the question is why we are asking the question. Why do we want to know? What hinges on the answer? That is going to guide us in making our question more precise. What is our purpose?"
— Ásta, Professor of Philosophy, Duke University, quoted in Notable Sandwiches #89: Hot Dog, Talia Lavin, The Sword and the Sandwich, March 15, 2024

"Beginning in the late 18th century, 'Is X a Y' was asked about entire categories of human beings who had previously been excluded from the category of rational political actors (Jews, women, people of color, etc.), and the world we now live in was shaped by the destabilisation that question produced in the minds of the people who asked it; in many ways we are still suffering from the after effects."
Alana Vincent, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Umeå University, Sweden, also quoted by Talia Lavin in the same post

"Polymer chemists use the Kawabata Evaluation System, a set of extremely precise instruments developed at Kyoto University that measure the subtlest properties of textiles—the ones associated with what the Wilson College of Textiles at NC State calls 'comfort perception.' By manipulating fabrics and exerting exceedingly low force on them, Kawabata instruments gather data sets including stretch, rigidity, compression, and surface friction on human skin. Of these, compression (thickness and loftiness) and friction (roughness) are believed to be what comprise the aesthetic of soft.
But even Kawabata can't understand what produces the anti-aesthetic of heebie-jeebies. ...heebie-jeebies seem related to fabric's “shear”—the capacity of a material to impose stress when it runs along skin, thus scraping or chafing it, rather than when it comes at skin, which leads to pokes or punctures."
The Mystery of Heebie-Jeebies: The human senses never cease detecting things the brain finds a way to dread, Virginia Heffernan, Mar 16, 2024

History: Denim jeans for workers, not 'men' or 'women'

Jeans by Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

Denim jeans are for workers:

"Women had begun wearing pants — specifically, denim jeans — because they were granted practical permission in industrial factory work during World War II. Women had not earned 'the right to wear pants' as a symbolic legal right, or as a matter of formal equality. The police had simply chosen, for obvious reasons, not to arrest them for wearing pants to and from work. Their pants were tied to their work, to the class status of being a worker in the formal labor market and the public sphere."

— "The Left Hand of the Law": Anti-Drag Law's Policing Ought to Inform Political Responses, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 27, 2023

Later, jeans are not explicitly men's clothing, but not necessarily women's clothing either:

“Those who do not want to change their anatomy but do want to change their gender behavior fare less well in establishing their social identity. The women Holly Devor called ‘gender blenders’ wore their hair short, dressed in unisex pants, shirts, and comfortable shoes, and did not wear jewelry or makeup. They described their everyday dress as women’s clothing: One said, ‘I wore jeans all the time, but I didn’t wear men’s clothes’ (Devor 1989, 100). Their gender identity as women, but because they refused to ‘do femininity,’ they were constantly taken for men (1987, 1989, 107-42). Devor said of them: ‘The most common area of complaint was with public washrooms. They repeatedly spoke of the humiliation of being challenged or ejected from women’s washrooms. Similarly, they found public change rooms to be dangerous territory and the buying of undergarments to be a difficult feat to accomplish’ (1987, 29). In an ultimate ironic twist, some f these women said ‘they would feel like transvestites if they were to wear dresses, and two women said that they had been called transvestites when they had done so’ (1987, 31). They resolved the ambiguity of their gender status by identifying as women in private and passing as men in public to avoid harassment on the street, to get men’s jobs, and, if they were lesbians, to make it easier to display affection publicly with their lovers (Devor 1989, 107–42). Sometimes they even used men’s bathrooms. When they had gender-neutral names, like Leslie, they could avoid the bureaucratic hassles that arose when they had to present their passports or other proof of identity, but because most had names associated with women, their appearance and their cards of identity were not conventionally congruent, and their gender status was in constant jeopardy. When they could, they found it easier to pass as men than to try to change the stereotyped notions of what women should look like.”
Judith Lorber. Paradoxes of Gender. Yale University, 1994. Chapter: “‘Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender” (PDF). p. 21.

On Jewish values: 'Alfred Kazin's Journals'

Today's email from the New York Review of Books shares an old article, "The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin," by Edward Mendelson (Aug 18, 2011). The email teases it:

“‘Values are our only home in the universe,’ Kazin wrote in 1962 at the height of his public success, and the more intensely he thought about values, the more intensely he thought about himself as a Jew. ‘For what is it I draw my basic values from if not from the Jews!’ His journals explore a radical, idiosyncratic Judaism informed by the same nonconformist moral passion that drove William Blake’s radical, idiosyncratic Christianity.”

The Book

Alfred Kazin's Journals: Edited by Richard M. Cook. Yale University Press, 2011.

Publisher's description:

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.

To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.

Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

Spotted Kazin here too:

"White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes."

— Memory Failure Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Another reflection on Jewish values

Isaac Deutscher identified with the oppressed. Supporting people who are oppressed is what he saw as the important meaning of being Jewish.

"Polish Jewish intellectual Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) insisted," as Rebecca Ruth Gould explains, "that his identity obliged him to adhere to a certain kind of partiality. In Deutscher’s own words: “I am … a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.” Deutscher’s partiality was against racism, and ultimately against Zionism."

As I see it, "solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated" doesn't mean agreeing with anything and everything that person says about any topic whatsoever; it means having solidarity vis-a-vis their oppression and their right to exist and to get free from their oppression. The meaning of solidarity that is "unconditional" is, I think, that we don't impose additional conditions on our solidarity. They do not have to sing and dance for us to earn our solidarity for getting free. They do not have to bribe us. They do not have to work for us. The fact that they are oppressed is in itself a reason — the only reason — for us to have solidarity with them in their fight against oppression.

This is aligned with "what [Indian philosopher Akeel] Bilgrami calls ‘wilful imbalance’," meaning that you intentionally take sides. Your view is not from nowhere. You have a standpoint, and you choose the side you want to take.

Gould concludes her essay: "Justifications of free speech that rely on the liberal emphasis on balance obscure what it really means to silence another person’s voice. To silence is to deny, through the language of moderation and balance, their very right to exist. To respect free speech is to respect life itself."

As I understand it: If there's a debate over maybe these people should be allowed to exist and be free, or maybe they shouldn't? that debate doesn't embody freedom for the people who's lives are at stake, because one of the options being considered is that they shouldn't be free (or that they shouldn't exist at all, which is tightly linked to the idea that they shouldn't be free — those are overlapping concepts). This raises the question of, when we say "free speech," for whom is the speech free? For the person who's running their mouth, perhaps freedom means their right to speak any words it occurs to them to say or that pass through their lips with varying degrees of intentionality. But whether the speech promotes freedom is another question entirely, and it matters for the person who's being talked about. Free speech that undermines the conditions of freedom is a kind of paradox. Should the person being talked about cease to be free, or even cease to exist, in what sense will the speaker continue to have "freedom of speech" to talk about them?

"Against Balance: Why Free Speech Cannot and Should not be Neutral," Rebecca Ruth Gould, Dialogue & Discourse (Medium), Feb 25, 2024

Citing The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essaysby Isaac Deutscher (Verso, 2017).

On the portal: Midlife transition

A reference to "the portal" drew my attention. Yes, the midlife transition is like a portal. I read:

"Are You In the Portal?" It's a crisis, but it's an awakening. Anne Helen Petersen. Culture Study (Substack). Oct 22, 2023.

Petersen's mother said to her one day:

"'What are you now, 42?...I think that’s exactly when I started writing textbooks. I just had this huge creative surge.'

What an amazing way to reframe the energy I’ve been channeling this last year: energy to write another book, energy to figure out a Culture Study-related podcast, energy to dahlia farm. What if it wasn’t ambition pushing me forward….but a swell of creativity? And what if that swell of creativity was possible because I’ve become a whole lot less concerned with bullshit?"

Petersen read how Anja Tyson referred to "the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in." Then, Petersen says: "I became obsessed with this idea of a portal, and when I brought it up — on IG, but also in casual conversation — it seemed to resonate. Something was happening. Maiden-becomes-crone, sure. Destabilizing, yes. But it was also an experience of transformation, of refinement."

She spoke to Satya Byock, "a Jungian psychotherapist who specializes in younger patients going through transitions" and author of the book Quarterlife, who sees that, "within a Jungian framework, there’s a midlife passage," and "the experience is more intense if you’ve been heads-down — absorbed by parenting, by your career, by an illness, by something — for some time."

She also spoke to Claire Zulkey, author of the Evil Witches newsletter. "'Part of me thinks that I’ve gone through the portal,' she told me, 'but the part of me that’s paranoid and wise thinks: oh bitch you haven’t even begun to portal.'" If you're privileged to do so, you can redesign your life so you have more time for parenting, yet still, "it’s half boredom, half gratitude."

(I have felt that way about redesigning my life for an office career.)

Career coach Keren Eldad had her own experience at 36. It's just that something "sets you off the edge," as Eldad puts it. "It can be stagnation around your career, it can be kids going to elementary school or even college. It can be around physical changes..." Once you're set off, you're in an ongoing process of letting go of the past. What you feel about yourself and your life might be separate from what you feel about the new work you're doing. Eldad says: "Like, I am personally done, but this is not done. And that, you feel invigorated by. If you’re grieving what you’ve left behind, let yourself feel it. What you’re doing is gathering your strength, and there will be a point when the grieving ends."

Petersen concludes:

"There’s nothing magical about the portal. It can be painful and discombobulating and, as Claire Zulkey points out, sweaty. There’s certainly no guaranteed joy on the other end. I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to experience it or to understand its shape in your life. I don’t even think it’s gendered...It’s just a period of transition. You can lean into it, you can ignore it, you can understand it as a crisis or a transformation."

You should read her essay "Are You In the Portal?" for more of this.

Questions to guide a planned transition

Osi I. wrote:

"Here are a few points I reflected upon as I prepared to take my leaps. They might be helpful as you consider yours:

1. How important is it to take such a step? Will it change my life for the better?
2. What are the barriers, if any, to taking the leap? How can they be addressed, mitigated, overcome?
3. Can I just step out on faith to do what I know my spirit is calling me to do?
4. Will taking this leap add value/joy/peace/fulfillment to my life?
5. Will this leap help me and mine grow in unimaginable ways?
6. Will this leap save my life?
7. If I don’t take this leap, what will it cost me?"

— "I Left My 6 figure Job to Save My Life," Feb 25, 2024

I wrote of my midlife transition

Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption.

Three waves of opposition to transgender bodies

G. Samantha Rosenthal is a scholar of transgender history.

Here's a recent article:

Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People: Three major waves of opposition to transgender health care in the past century have cited faulty science to justify hostility. G. Samantha Rosenthal & The Conversation US. Scientific American. February 12, 2024.

Rosenthal argues that there have been "three waves of opposition to transgender health care". I organized this blog post based on them.

Wave 1: Nazi Germany

Rosenthal writes: "In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe."

One important beginning in modern trans history: "In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice" just as "the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness." Following an "Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms," some scientists "developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences." Everyone was classifying queer/trans people, but some wanted to do so for political liberation and others for genocide.

Gender-affirming care has existed in the United States since the 1940s. Rosenthal says: "Puberty blockers, hormone therapies and anatomical surgeries are neither experimental nor untested and have been safely administered to cisgender, transgender and intersex adults and children for decades," and opposition to this "has historically been rooted in pseudoscience."

Learn more

This history is known. Historians can ask questions:

“So who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Were they the ambisexual performance freaks whose audacious and aggressive sexuality and playful confusion of gender norms triggered an entire society into fascism, as though the Nazis were an allergic reaction? Or were they people like Ernst Röhm, whose worship of masculine vitality… and who followed that impulse towards lifting fascists to power? Were they people like Friedrich Radszuweit, cautious and apolitical men who decided to stand back and stand by while fascism gained steam? Were they people like Hirschfeld, complicated and ambivalent men with deep reservoirs of idealism, knowledge, and compassion who were limited by their blind spots, shaped by and shaping racist and eugenic discourses, and often willing to accept rights for some at the expense of others?”

— Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. London: Verso, 2022.

In late 2022, for the first time, "a court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted in Nazi Germany." — New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People, Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation, September 21, 2023.

This result followed 20 years of activism. In January 2023, the German parliament "dedicated the [annual Holocaust] remembrance to those killed by Nazis because of their gender identity and sexual orientation. The body also acknowledged decades of post-World War II persecution against LGBTQ+ people in Germany." — The Advocate

For more information about the colonial-era and industrial-era construction of "homosexuality," please read "There Were Gay Nazis". It's a 7-minute read on Medium.

Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres
Blu Buchanan
GLQ (2022) 28 (4): 489–513.
October 1, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9991299
The author said on Twitter: "This was YEARS in the making, and I hope it’s a valuable launching point for future scholar-organizers."
It's rentable from Duke University Press for $15 for 48 hours.

On evolving biological knowledge ("A Doctor’s Case Against Assigning Sex at Birth," Assigned Media, April 8, 2024), Emry Cohen, MD writes:

"It was not until 1923 that Theophilus Painter discovered the X and Y sex chromosomes, which was later confirmed by Tijo and Levan in 1956 where they were able to definitively describe human chromosomes. For those keeping track at home, this means that our knowledge of chromosomes and any of the resultant deeper understanding of sex occurred three years after Christine Jorgensen trail-blazed her way to international fame by transitioning to become a woman in the early 1950s."

Wave 2: 1970s

Rosenthal writes: "In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, transgender medicine bounced back in the U.S. Scientists and clinicians at several universities began experimenting with new hormonal and surgical interventions. In 1966, Johns Hopkins became the first university hospital in the world to offer trans health care.

By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights."

Rosenthal continues: A 1979 study by Meyer and Reter was "homophobic and classist in design" insofar as it defined the success of gender transitions by whether the people had "straight marriages and...gender-appropriate jobs." So: "The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry."

Wave 3: Post-Covid

Chase Strangio: "Though contemporary political assaults on trans lives began in 2016, it was only in 2019 that the right found a fruitful opening for attack: Since 2020, 24 states have passed bills barring trans kids from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities." ("Trans Visibility Is Nice. Safety Is Even Better," New York Times, Feb. 15, 2024)

Hil Malatino (Trans Care, 2020) refers to "the present moment, when trans lives are recurrently and brutally utilized as a political wedge issue in order to consolidate horrifyingly ascendant forms of ethnonationalism and the ongoing violence of neoliberal austerity. This produces forms of hypervisibility that wear us out, that cultivate hyperalertness and anxiety that, for so many of us, make getting out of bed and getting through the day difficult."

Malatino goes on to mention the 2018 New York Times headline "‘Transgender’ Could be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration"; it was predictable, yet still felt shocking. Malatino explains:

"The strategy being deployed by the Department of Human Services under Trump — interpreting gender as reducible to biological sex, where biological sex is wrongly understood to be radically dimorphic and grounded, fundamentally and irrevocably, in the aesthetic appearance of the genitals at birth — is old hat. I lived and taught in the southern United States for years; I've listened to conservative politicians repeat this idiocy over and over again in order to attempt to push through transphobic legislation."

Rosenthal writes: "And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave."

See my article: 2024 anti-transgender initiatives in the US

On systems thinking

Systems thinking is non-hierarchical and undermines supremacist thinking.

On 'systems thinking'

A few days ago on Bluesky, Dr. Elizabeth Sawin says it's "revolutionary/radical thinking" (Bluesky)

there aren't lines in the world, just in our minds"
good: "curiosity about borders and boundaries"
dangerous: "treating made-up boundaries as real" (Bluesky)

"events unfold in multistep (sometimes circular, sometimes branching) chains of causation" (Bluesky)

She recommends this book: Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows

Right vs. wrong

People like to perceive a Team A vs. Team B conflict and propose which side they'd be on or (as a spectator) hope will win. However, such an imagined "conflict" may not the best way of understanding what's going on. Maybe there's a place for A and B to both exist in the world and to exist in some kind of creative tension or mutual support. Jumping to right vs. wrong eliminates possibilities.

Tessa Koumoundouros shares an example of a failure of systems thinking: Instead of acknowledging "complex ecosystem interactions," we reduce it to a problem of "horses vs wildlife that can be fenced (it can't) to argue for an emotionaly charged 'ethical decision', at expense of the entire system" (Bluesky) The context is this article: "Rethinking the mantra of biodiversity: Why the past should not determine the future." Pablo Castelló and Francisco Santiago-Ávila. ABC Australia. Feb 8, 2024.

Ecological crisis

The tendency toward atomistic thinking, where you can focus on a discrete person or thing as well as on some direct cause-and-effect chain centering on that same originally perceived person or thing (whose identity is not transformed by the process), and individualistic thinking (selfishness), is a reason why people don't productively discuss or sustainably enact our relationships to natural systems.

Gender

"Gender" means "category." To understand someone's gender, we can look at them not only as individuals, and not only as how they individually fit (or don't fit) into the category, but at their relationships with others and how everyone's characteristics and category membership are always in flux. That would be systems thinking.

Another suggestion

See also: Systems 1: An Introduction to Systems Thinking by Draper Kauffman and Morgan Kauffman

Writing complex topics that feel accessible

On the "single stark element" that's with you all along in your narrative, something that "underpins the whole thing," Charlie Jane Anders says today:

"I have a feeling my stuff errs on the side of 'deceptively complicated.' I write things that have a million things whizzing around, but they boil down to one or two simple ideas. Or at least, I hope that there’s one or two main ideas when you look past all the fancy whizzbangery on the surface, or else you are left with just a mickle of a muddle. Right?

* * *

But if something is deceptively complex, how do you keep it from becoming just straight-up overcomplicated and messy? I wish there was a magic bullet – but I think part of it is that if you want to be able to strip away all the layers of complexity and find something stark underneath it all – a single stark element – then that needs to be there the whole time. You have to have one idea that you keep coming back that underpins the whole thing."
— Charlie Jane Anders, "The Difference Between Deceptively Simple and Deceptively Complex," Buttondown, January 10, 2024

Her book on writing:

But what makes it serious?

Be your theme simple, complex, or somewhere in the middle like "deceptively complex," what makes it serious?

Sometimes you have to write it to find out and let the reader decide.

An affirmation: My essay theme "may seem silly" and "probably is silly, which is a shame, considering that I’ve got this whole essay about it now." ("This is What Makes Us Girls: On the Lana-Del-Rey-to-Red-Scare Pipeline." Jude Doyle (on Ghost). 11 Jan 2024.)

Ask lots of questions

Ask questions, e.g.,:

• "What words would you use to describe the most important values held by people in your culture?"
• "Who taught you those values? Why are they important to you?"

And so on.

Those two questions, and a few more, are from "50 Possible Questions to Open Israeli-Palestinian Dialogues," Kenneth Cloke, Mediate.com, January 26, 2024

Ask one big question

"The personal essay can be about almost anything," Aimee Liu writes, but is "rooted in a central question." The writer writes themself into the frame as the person who is raising the question, a recognition that is central to what makes it a personal essay. It doesn't matter so much if the question is answered. The personal essay "doesn’t necessarily seek to make sense out of life experiences; rather, these essays tend to let go of that sense-making impulse to do something else, like nose around a bit in the wondering, uncertain space that lies between experience and the need to explain or organize it in a logical manner."

This is from "Picture Your Structure" in her Legacy & Lore (Substack, February 16, 2024):

"Like a memorist, an essayist always writes two essays simultaneously, overlapped as transparencies, one exploring what Vivian Gornick calls the situation, the other what she terms the story. Poet Richard Hugo talks about a piece’s 'triggering subject' and its generated, or real, subject. Phillip Lopate describes the 'double perspective' that an essayist needs, the ability to both dramatize and to reflect. I’ve always talked to my writing students about the narrow subject and the larger subject."

Know the answer to 'did they or didn't they'?

"Fitzgerald had to know whether Gatsby died in that pool in the end. If he wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure which story he was telling..." — George Saunders, "De Maupassant, Part Three," Story Club, April 4, 2024

There's no one model to explain all of human psychology

Paul Tournier explained in The Violence Within that there are “schools of scientific psychology” that “set up a doctrinaire model into which they attempt to fit the whole of human behaviour in terms of a few relatively simple mechanisms — projection and introjection, identification and differentiation, unconscious repression and liberation of complexes, drives and resistances…” While these may contain insights that are “true and valuable,” Tournier says that when we give too much weight to them (exactly “in the very fact of their being elevated into systems”) we risk “the infinite diversity of life and of the mind,” and we may forget that “the essential problems are not about mechanisms, but about values, not about functions but about the person, problems which cannot ever be reduced to an inventory of functions. Literary psychology cannot be learnt—it is too rich, too varied, too subtle, because it never allows itself to be reduced to any sort of model. It may be looked at as one might contemplate a big bunch of wild flowers…the bouquet as a whole does not deliver up the secret of its harmonious unity.”
Paul Tournier. The Violence Within. Translated by Edwin Hudson, 1978. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, (originally Violence et Puissance, 1977) pp. 64–65.

People have feelings about what they do

"I can’t think of a way for a character — fictional or otherwise — to pull off a convincing redemption story without experiencing and expressing true remorse ... feeling remorse is a valuable and cathartic experience that empowers change. Whether personal responsibility is an illusion or not, feeling responsible and taking action to change our behavior, is a powerful thing."
— Steven Toews, How to Write a Convincing Redemption Story, The Writing Cooperative, Feb 8, 2024

People can reflect on their arguments

To reduce fights, reflect on:

1. "Why the conflict happened"
2. "How the conflict should have been handled"
3. "How conflicts should generally be dealt with"
4. "How people should generally respond to conflicts in their relationship"
5. "Why this kind of response makes sense"
6. "What would be most helpful for dealing with future conflicts"

"6 simple questions that reduce relationship fights — from a psychologist." Mark Travers. Forbes. April 18, 2024.

Pick a compelling title

Michael Gallant gives some tips in How to Write a Book Title That Gets Attention, BookBaby, January 11, 2024:

• "Be clear and concise."
• "Use strong, evocative language."
• "Be original and unique."
• "Make sure your title is relevant to your book’s content."

Brian Evenson: 'Denarration....you're told something and then it's removed'

The Horror Is What We Don’t Yet Know (and Maybe Never Will): Brian Evenson Interviewed by Rob Goyanes, BOMB Magazine, Jun 25, 2019

One of his books is "Last Days, about an amputee cult who captures an unwitting messiah."

From the interview:

RG
You use repetition, in terms of wording and syntax, to create an unsettling effect. What other devices do you consciously employ to produce this?

BE
Most of my work in revision is about sound and rhythm, trying to figure out what is going to really serve the story. I'm working with those things to try to manipulate the reader. A lot of my work uses a process of “denarration”, by which I mean it presents something, narrates it as if it’s real, then it takes it away. A lot of things are qualified or taken away or compromised, or you're told something and then it's removed. That is a big part of the unsettling effect, of destabilizing the story’s world.

Evenson continues:

"So much fiction has this idea: there's a character, they confront something, they change, and then they're different people. If you're around humans for long enough, you realize that that's the exception rather than the rule. It so rarely happens that people actually change in a meaningful way. I've always been a little skeptical of character development, but then what do you do with fiction? My sense is that maybe it’s about conveying mental states and changing the reader. That, to me, is more important than conveying some kind of change in a character in a world that doesn't look like our world."

This reminds me of what William Maxwell enjoyed in novels (1955)

William Maxwell, in a 1955 speech at Smith College, said: "These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it." (see: The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine. Reprinted in LitHub, January 24, 2024.)

The reader stays to find out whether "there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had." The characters don't know something because "they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you." You're introduced to a character, and "you have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands..." Or: "A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in." Or the narrator "has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront." Or the writer gives special voice, attitude: "A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s." And "the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up." Trust: "If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. ...you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)" As in "the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. ... As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end." Timing: "a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos."

More reading (if you've got a Medium membership)

Medium members: Check out "The Worst Philosophy Paper I Ever Wrote."