More important to me than my identity, I am also the Vice President of the NewsGuild of New York, and targeting me with a blatantly retaliatory termination like this feels like an egregious shot against our union and against media workers as a whole.

I love my job, I love my coworkers, and I love my union. I'm devastated the company made this move. There are so few trans women in media at all — particularly ones who aren't confined to "Queer Media" — and I was incredibly proud of what my position at Bon Appétit meant within the industry.

I was acting as a union member and concerned employee when I questioned Stan Duncan, well within my legal rights.

I don't love pointing to my identity, but the company saying that I was behaving "aggressively" when I was calmly asking questions feels like a clear transphobic dog whistle.

I found a book I wanted, on Amazon.

I walked to my local book store. Showed the clerk/ owner the book. He ordered it for me (and one for his store).

My friend (the author of the book) wins.
The bookstore gets a sale and wins.
I win.

(Amazon was useful so kinda win)

Meanwhile... stop in at your local bookshop. Whether they sell new books and are helping you to discover newly published work, or whether they keep the old, the strange, and the out of print, your booksellers want you to see and smell and touch the books we have chosen to share with you.

11/

We, the collectors and booksellers, salute librarians. We value access to the books we love. And some of us - many of us - prepare for the time when our collections are recognized as valuable to the public.

10/

Yes, money changes hands in a bookshop; that's a mere fact of economics.

Time must be spent, and resources, in the pursuit of books, and in a capitalist country, that necessitates money.

Especially when political leadership discourages funding for public institutions 🤷

9/

Librarians are guardians of so much of cultural value; no bookseller would tell you otherwise.

But booksellers and private collectors are also keepers of the soul and wit of humanity.

8/

The reason we have some of those books is because someone, whether a collector in the public trust (a librarian) or a bookseller or private collector, kept them until the time when popular culture recognized their historical value, their literary merit, their astonishing and unique character.

7/

Think of all the times when the popular culture of the moment placed less interest in, say, novels written by formerly enslaved people, or the Beat poets, or Jewish literature, or news flyers sold in London streets.

6/

Even if libraries had infinite funding, even if librarians had more time and more energy and perfect insight into what future readers and scholars will need, some books of great value would still be lost.

5/

Booksellers place books, sometimes with public or academic libraries, sometimes with private collectors who then bequeath their books to libraries.

Only later, sometimes because of the work of the bookseller/collector, do enough people see the value of those books for a library to acquire them.

4/

Booksellers have, century after century, identified important texts: books printed by William Caslon, books written in Yiddish, secret thrillers by Louisa May Alcott, the Dove Bible....

Sometimes booksellers and collectors are the only ones who want certain books at a certain time in history.

3/

Booksellers, like librarians, curate cultural wealth.

Librarians have so much to do, and so little budget with which to collect, that not all books of cultural importance end up in a library's special collections.

That's where we come in.

2/

But for sure, antitrans politicians have both amplified and in many cases created the every detransiton narrative they use to argue for the elimination of trans care when it in fact is an argument for expansion of it.

I mean I agree, but also data in the 2022 US Trans Survey says 9% detransition, but when you remove people who do it for safety…

detransition rate is 0.36%

it’s almost a nonexistent issue

To be fair, studies show detransition numbers increase with increased trans identification (those who do so for safety reasons given our antitrans political context not withstanding). This isnt a bad thing but underscores we need to provide gender exploratory care, not prescribed treatment paths.

These thoughts are getting attention so I should probably establish my credentials here: I have none except my own experience with transitioning and my long exploration of different ways people think about and approach this topic, which finally led me to the conclusion that the basic outline in the

But coming to the realization that what one understood as a change in self-perception of gender identity - a thing that can absolutely happen - was sometime else instead is also not "detransition", but rather the realization that no transition took place at all. There was nothing to be undone.