today i listened for two hours to an 86 year old trans person tell me about experiences with mid-century psychiatry and fuck i do not know how those of you who do oral history cope
it occurred to me in the course of this that being a historian doesn't actually allow you to do very much witnessing or sitting with the gravity of people's stories
which it turns out is not a skill that any of my professional training has cultivated because the focus is always on having smart ideas and producing a piece of writing out of the devastating thing you've heard
when what actually was going on was that this person had seen my name in the new york times and reached out because i seemed like the right person to tell this to
like i found myself trying internally to come up with essentially an argument about what had happened, and feeling like i needed to ~do something~ with this story
tonight was care as method night in trans method. my students asked me to leak their list of suggestions to make education feel less like suffering so here it is.
lol up early to attend a faculty orientation that was moved to zoom because it’s not safe to meet in person where they’re going to tell us we have no choice but to teach in person 🙃
Penn is hiring a HISTORIAN OF SEXUALITY (!!!!) as the second person in my cluster hire (TT, assistant professor level, would be based in History with strong ties to GSWS), job ad just posted:
huge thanks to
@The_OAH
and the d’emilio prize committee for recognizing my work. winning this award was a quiet dream of mine the whole time i was writing the dissertation and i could not be more pleased.
the first published bit of my dissertation has dropped! learn how contemporary trans medical gatekeeping is rooted in a few guys making things up as they went
i literally have told multiple nyt reporters who have interviewed me about the long history of constructed uncertainty as a way to deny access to transition care who then went ahead with their ~debate~ framings and lol here we are
This is from an expert report filed by Texas in defense of its policy of directing the "child welfare" agency to investigate medical treatment for gender dysphoria as child abuse. It is hard to watch this all unfold with such devastating harms.
i did almost accidentally submit it on proquest to yeshiva university instead of yale but it's done, gender-neutral title unlocked, going to print this mf and set it on fire now
i got my absolute DREAM job as asst prof of history & sociology of science at penn! i feel exactly like this about it and am working on how to feel all aforementioned feelings (joy! relief! extreme guilt! rage for my precarious colleagues!) simultaneously:
unless the standard is “oh cool you want hormones/surgery/whatever? nice! here’s some actual research on how to get the results you want, and a clinician who won’t be a shit to you and knows what they’re doing! also it will cost zero dollars!” i have no use for it
i haven't said anything due to feeling v complicated relief/ excitement/survivor's guilt, and also trying to read the devastating room of the job market, but it feels weird to not say anything and it's a big deal worth celebrating even while recognizing the system is very bad SO:
a uh timely reminder that the wpath standards of care started as a way to protect doctors from what they saw as unhinged patients and negative public opinion by instituting a system of “peer review” of trans cases
i was having real first day of department events appearance respectability anxiety but have decided no, they hired a resident trans, they are getting a resident trans. will my confidence in my aggressively casual outfit last the day? time will tell!!
how does one get over feeling guilty for “just reading” instead of doing “real work,” and why have i become so deranged that i feel guilty for reading when a large part of my job is literally reading
"Each of us will probably die by getting shot by some patient like E.V.," wrote urologist Elmer Belt to Harry Benjamin, endocrinologist and so-called father of transsexuality, in February of 1960.
Find out what happened next in:
I have two godchildren, brother and sister, that are in quarantine together. My godson (who is six) made a scavenger hunt for my goddaughter (who is nine). This was the treasure that she found at the end of the scavenger hunt:
i'm sorry committee, i cannot finish my dissertation because my options are downloading books one chapter at a time, attempting to read poorly formatted epubs with endless transcription errors, or scrolling through a pdf that moves at a rate of approximately one pixel per hour
the first day of the queer science class i’m co-teaching with
@JoannaRadin
was SO GOOD and this is probably the most hopeful i have felt about anything in months
deeply horrified that an offhand tweet about a feeling got eleven thousand likes overnight, that is not the amount of being perceived by the internet i wanted
does the 7 minutes between coming up with a question after a talk and deciding to ask it and then actually asking it count as aerobic exercise, asking for my overworked little heart
i was feeling very anxious about the fact that i'm struggling to find a place to stay in chicago for my research trip that isn't a zillion dollars but then i realized i get to visit nonbinary icon
@SUEtheTrex
and am now soothed!!!
save the date, june 14 at 6pm i'll be doing an online science on tap talk called "repurposing life sciences for queer survival" where i'll probably just have a lot of feelings about nonbinary bees
i'm having my first wildly productive writing/revising day in forever and while i'm relieved this chapter is, in fact, salvageable, i'm so sad that i can't access this level of joy and interest and capacity for my work most of the time
i know people get cranky about informal student emails but i am always so pleased when a student is comfortable enough with me to send an all lowercase email peppered with emojis and thank u's
i was honestly feeling pretty chill about all of this until a few days ago and now instead am like mmm but will i be fending off a panic attack while going over the syllabus who can say really
The new right wing angle of attack is that NO trans people should have access to hormone replacement therapy because it's "experimental." Trans people have literally taken cross-sex hormones since at least 1918. Governor DeSantis' move is illegal, dangerous and based on lies.
i need to stop writing multi-paragraph responses to my students' weekly think-pieces so i can do other kinds of work but i just want to keep talking to them about their ideas
so like how are we navigating the i-can't-focus-on-anything-because-the-trauma-of-an-entire-pandemic-has-rotted-my-brain/must-be-as-productive-as-usual combo
JOB: TT Assistant Professor, History & Sociology of Science, U. Penn
Historical or social studies (including STS) of science, technology or medicine in modern Japan
#HistTech
#HistMed
#STS
what's everyone's favorite work on the history of statistics and/or making sense of large amounts of information, especially early-to-mid 20th c? i've already got stigler, bouk, porter, igo, and blair but feel like i'm probably missing things
i got this insurance denial/appeal denial the same week that i was on a
@PennEidos
being lgbt in the academy panel and co-taught a trans-affirming pedagogy workshop for the penn ctl
at
#HSS22
i’ll be debuting my trans history to history of statistics pipeline work at “naming stakes: critical histories of classification” saturday @ 11, yelling about the nyt being garbage at trans stuff on the political advocacy roundtable at 4, and tbh hiding in my room a lot
a subtweet: let's not do the thing again where we defend the existence of trans people with "we're not saying sex isn't real!! sex is obviously real!"
if by "real" you mean a coherent biological thing, sex is not, in fact, real.
clearly yale is anticipating "emergencies" and "crises" and has decided a) that's ok and b) the best way to deal with that is to dramatically underpay grad students to write reports when undergrads die on their watch
ok can we talk about how Yale is trying to manipulate poor grad students into risking their lives to make sure undergrads (who literally shouldn't even be coming back to campus) follow COVID safety guidelines? 1/
i'm pretty sure everyone who is like "write 15 minutes a day in disconnected segments between twenty-seven other things and you shall produce an article!" is, in fact, wrong
why did i, a person who has cried in every professor's office i have ever been in, not anticipate that i would cry in my own office and be prepared with tissues
is there any good work on trans joy? i have a week on Feeling As Method that is bleak af and while i want to talk about the trans studies feeling bad turn and that is personally my general vibe, i'd like to give my students something that is less rage/depression-oriented
i had my students write love letters to the future in class today, after harlan weaver, and am enjoying my further descent into the feelings-based pedagogy of which the humanities are accused but don’t actually do
there are a lot of shitty things about these articles but what i’ve spent the most therapy time on is how my name is getting used in them to check the I Cited A Trans Expert box and then deployed in the service of transphobic bullshit
i wish i hadn't learned anything while writing my dissertation so that the chapters i wrote two years ago didn't now feel like they need to be set on fire and rewritten from scratch
if you’re going to
#4S2019
and want to hear about why 19th century worker bees are non-binary icons of the future, come to my panel on thursday at 2:45
my department (history and sociology of science at penn) is hiring a senior lecturer for a 4-year position at 2:2, open to any geographic focus, any aspect of sci/tech/med. at least one year of teaching and undergrad mentoring experience preferred.
everything's a nightmare but 6 years of research training and the yale vpn enabled me to locate the lost peanut butter cookie recipe of my childhood in a 1980 cookbook so that's nice
a guy from the gas company just solved the several-week problem that was my oven making a mysterious high pitched sound by banging on it with a flashlight, which gives me hope for my dissertation