Lately, I have been engrossed by the films by documentarian Penny Lane. The subjects she chooses are always very odd, the sort that seem buck wild and grab your attention while browsing Netflix. At the same time, she approaches her films with a humour and wit that elevates the topics. In Hail Satan?, she presents The Satanic Temple as a paradoxically neoliberal institution, an organization founded to offend, choosing to follow the rules of the system they are opposing. In Listening to Kenny G, Lane starts the film by stating “Kenny G is the best selling instrumentalist of all time, he’s probably the most famous living jazz musician, and I made this film to find out why that makes certain people really angry” (Lane 2021, 0:00:42) before playing Kenny G to a series of jazz critics. Both of these films are fantastic and I highly recommend checking them out, but I want to look closely at another of her films, Nuts!, which explores both quackery and authorship.

I recommend viewing the film prior to continuing to read my opinions on it. As strange as it is to say, I will be spoiling this documentary. The film is about a doctor who became successful by implanting goat testicles into men to cure impotence. That is all before the opening credits and only gets more outlandish from there. While it is not on any streaming services that I am aware of, it is available through iTunes, Google Play store, and Vimeo On-Demand.

​I believe I first found out about The Shape of Sex shortly after I had surgery earlier this year. I was immediately interested. DeVun had previously co-edited an issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on Trans*historicities that I have referenced extensively, so I was rather excited to get my hands on The Shape of Sex. I am happy to report that it lived up to my expectations. This book, more than any I have read before, makes a strong case of transgender studies as a discipline.
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I hate Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. Reading it is like torture to me. It is part history book, part autobiography, but unfortunately it is still one of the few mainstream books on transgender history. Feinberg is not an historian, and it shows. The whole book serves a narrative around class conflict; the upper classes subjugated the lower classes in many ways, one of which was through destroying transgender experiences. While Clare Sears’ Arresting Dress takes a similar framework, Transgender Warriors lacks any kind of nuance. Worse yet, Feinberg will offhandedly mention aspects of transgender existence without exploring them further. It becomes incredibly frustrating to read because it is clear to the reader that there is more that could be done with the history than is being presented. It is a book full of loose ends.
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But there is one thing I appreciate Transgender Warriors for; its broad definition of what counts as “transgender”. The definition of “transgender” has changed a lot since Feinberg wrote Transgender Warriors; at the time, it represented anyone who was “beyond-the-binary” (Bettcher). Since then, transgender has come to mean a lot of different things, from binary transgender people to being an umbrella term for the whole community (often represented as trans*). The reasons for these changes are complicated, and even I do not fully understand them. But reading something like Transgender Warriors and calling a figure like Joan of Arc transgender for existing outside the traditional gender binary; that can be very refreshing.

​My exhibition, Transition Related Surgery: The Fight For Access, launched earlier this month. This was a culmination of 21 months of work. This exhibition served as an avenue to explore the ways in which trans history and trans stories can and should be told. Because of this, I felt it was appropriate to discuss some of the choices I made in this reflection. 

​Stonewall by Martin Duberman is one of my favourite books to read. It tells the events that led to the Stonewall Riots and those that came after in such a narratively interesting and captivating way that I find ingenious. Since I had surgery at the start of the month, I decided to reread it and critique it for my website, a simple and enjoyable task while I was still recovering. 

​When I think about how I describe my current career trajectory and the aim of this blog, the phrase I frequently come back to is “bridging the gap between trans studies and museum studies.” I think this really highlights what I am trying to achieve. Museum studies alone is not at the point yet where I feel it can quarrel with the very broad idea of transness on its own (just recently I found an article published last year that used a definition that misgenders trans people) and so it is frequently within the sphere of trans writing that I find relevant material. This was the case with Clare Sears’ Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco and one section in particular.

​On January 30, Abigail Thorn, the youtuber Philosophy Tube, released a video coming out as transgender. In her video Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story, she rather poetically discussed the philosophy behind questioning one’s gender. I would recommend watching it before finishing this article. Thorn’s video caused me to revisit a lot of thoughts I have not returned to since I was questioning my own gender, today being four years since I “came out to myself”. A lot has happened in those four years so looking back on that questioning process, especially with my Museum Studies degree, produced some very surprising realizations.

​When I started searching for materials on transgender museum studies, I found essentially nothing. Literature on queer museums focuses so much on sexuality that I have seen LGBT and sexual minorities used interchangeably. In one of the few articles that I found that actually addressed transgender issues in a meaningful way, Robert Mills described “the T in ‘LGBT’ is often a fake T” (Mills, 256), a phrase often by trans activists to discuss the lack of trans visibility in the queer community. That article was originally published in 2006 but even 15 years later, I do not believe enough has changed to make that characterization any less true. For the most part, this usually encourages me to keep doing what I am doing, reminding me just how important my voice is to this field, but it can get so exhausting.