Last year, I wrote a guest post for the excellent blog Womanist Musings called “Leave the Kids Out of It,” about a brouhaha over gendered Halloween costumes. Now we’ve got another situation where kids are being dragged into adult morality wars. The Girl Scout Cookie boycott, organized to protest the admission of a trans girl to a Colorado troop, was allegedly conceived by a fourteen-year-old girl, but my guess is that she’s getting her faulty information from somewhere above (and… Read more.

When my nephew was about four or five, his best friend was a little girl of the same age. My sister and the girl’s mother were friends, so the two kids grew up together. My nephew was and is a sensitive child in many ways. He has always shared his toys, stopped to help other kids on the playground who were in trouble, and worried about people around him who seemed upset. But one day, when his friend was in… Read more.

It is beyond sad that some people, trans and non-trans alike, think that Chaz Bono’s upcoming appearance on the stupid reality show “Dancing with the Stars” amounts to anything more than a hill of beans.  As trans people suffer tremendously from systemic and institutionalized discrimination and oppression (alongside many non-trans people) the trans “issue du jour” (after Lady Gaga’s appearance in male drag on the VMAs…yawn) is the fact that D-list “celebrity” Chaz Bono has been offered a slot on… Read more.

I have awoken multiple times from a nightmare hearing this phrase screamed at me over and over again.  Whether awake or asleep, it echoes over and over and over again through my brain.  It is like machine-gun fire, ricocheting through my body with unbelievable velocity.  It is a question that will probably follow me throughout my entire life.  Yesterday, I was walking out of the mall to go and catch the bus.  A group of people apparently had quite a… Read more.