First two books:
Mahmoud Darwish is one of the great poets of the Palestinian people. Journal of an Ordinary Grief is an exquisite set of essays — written in the Sixties and early Seventies — considering what it means to be a people robbed of nationhood.
Jonah Mixon-Webster’s poetry collection Stereo(TYPE) is difficult to describe. By turns an exploration of what it means to be Black in a White world, what blackness means, what language means in these contexts, and how language is a limited meaning for creating these definitions, it is a book deserving of intentional reading and reflection.
Articles of note:
1. “Transgender regret? Research challenges narratives about gender-affirming surgeries,” by Harry Barbee, Bashar Hassan, and Fan Liang. The Conversation.
You’ll often hear lawmakers, activists and pundits argue that many transgender people regret their decision to have gender-affirming surgeries – a belief that’s been fueling a wave of legislation that restricts access to gender-affirming health care.
Gender-affirming care can include surgical procedures such as facial reconstruction, chest or “top” surgery, and genital or “bottom” surgery.
But in an article we recently published in JAMA Surgery, we challenge the notion that transgender people often regret gender-affirming surgeries.
Evidence suggests that less than 1% of transgender people who undergo gender-affirming surgery report regret. That proportion is even more striking when compared to the fact that 14.4% of the broader population reports regret after similar surgeries.
These studies — imperfect as they are — do not get the attention they deserve, especially in a political climate in which fear and hatred of the trans community drives narratives. Politicians on the right have been using trans people as political , driving legislation (sports bans, bathroom bills, prohibitions on medical and mental health services) and fueling an electoral strategy we’ve seen before. Remember: In 2004, Republicans used opposition to same-sex marriage to drive conservative turnout in Republican-leaning swing states and ensure re-election for George W. Bush. Its impact remains in dispute, but the effort was part of a deep-rooted narrative that cast gays and lesbians in the role of threats to tradition and the American way.
This is what we are witnessing now with the attacks on the trans community. The debate is being portrayed as being about the science, but the science doesn’t matter to anti-trans conservatives, who see trans individuals as less than human.
2. “Israel’s War Within: On the ruinous history of Religious Zionism,” by Bernard Avishai. Harper’s. ()
A good piece that explains Israel’s long descent from labor Zionism, which had a democratic component even as it posited a problematic vision of an ethno-state, to religious nationalism in the form of what Avishai calls “religious Zionism.
3. “Lose the Debate: Getting tactical. A taxonomy of bad faith, Part 1 - on the fascist refusal to occupy a shared reality.” — by A.R. Moxon.
A good argument as to why you can’t argue with an extremist.
Side note: Moxon is moving his newsletter to another platform, because of Substack’s unwillingness to keep publishing newsletters from Nazis and their sympathizers. (I have no plans, as of now, but there is an ethical questions I do need to answer for myself.)
4. A couple of other links:
Free speech and academic freedom are under attack, mostly from the right. In this climate — Judith Butler describes it as a crisis “as acute as any since the McCarthy years — those of us on campus, in particular, have a responsibility to push back.
We’ve witnessed the resignations of presidents at Harvard and U. Penn., the suspension of the Student for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers and elsewhere, and the purposeful misconstrual of language to create a public narrative that criticism of Israel into antisemitic or even genocidal in intent. Politics plays a role,but so does the elevation of hurt feelings to the level of physical harm, which enables harassment policies to be used as a blunt instrument to silence debate.
The left is guilty of this, but not on a scale approaching what we’ve witnessed from the right, which has attempted to legislate silence and impose their narrow, anti-humanistic attitudes on all.
This is leading to self-censorship in classrooms — among fearful students and vulnerable, non-tenured faculty who fear that wading into issues like Israel’s war on Gaza and its collective assault on Palestinian civilians, or trans rights, gay rights, anti-black racism, immigration will lead to reprisals or dismissal.
Read Judith Butler’s “There Can Be No Critique.”
Plus, Israel is cracking down on protest by Israelis — raising serious questions about its commitment to democracy.