Despite walking home with both arms full of groceries, I stopped to admire this massive street art mural on the side of PS 958: An Inclusive Elementary School in Sunset Park. The mural is titled “Indigenous Flow” by Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez. This street art makes an impact that matters.
On my way back from CVS this past week in the evening, the art piece above exhibited in the window of 440 Gallery (located at 440 6th Ave, Brooklyn) caught my attention. I immediately thought of “a tempest in a teapot,” but this was a tempest erupting out of a tiny cardboard box. I learned that it a work by Fred Bendheim titled, “Out of the Box.” There’s always interesting things like this on display at 440 Gallery.
Walking down 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn yesterday, I saw that someone had added something to a larger graffiti: a small transgender flag and the words: “We Will Always Be Here.”
As I’ve posted before, trans rights are human rights.
If you actually believe in freedom and individual rights, you believe in rights for everyone.
Put another way and borrowing a metaphor from JFK, guaranteeing personal freedoms and rights for the least advantaged is like a rising tide that lifts all boats.
Rights are not a zero-sum game. Ensuring rights and freedoms for more people supports everyone’s rights and freedoms. When you advocate for taking away rights and freedoms from one group, that’s fascistic. Ultimately, taking away others’ rights erode and likely lead to erasure of your own.
The hysteria over trans persons manufactured by the right is not so much about an infinitesimal minority’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s an attempt to erase a group of people from public space and social participation. It’s one beachhead in a multi-headed attack on foundational American ideals.
These attacks are also anti-scientific regarding the reality of both sex and gender. Ignoring transgendered persons about their lived experience and the deep and vast knowledge from biological, psychological, sociological, historical, and legal experts focusing on transgender issues is obviously guided by bigotry and willful ignorance.
For those folks who want to be allies and want to learn more, I highly recommend Dr. Susan Stryker’s Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Revised Edition, 2017). Her website is also an invaluable resource, including links to her other work, such as the foundational (and free) essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (GLQ, 1994).
When I moved a pile of oak boards (that had been there at least a decade) off my parents’ porch a few weeks ago, this toad hopped out from underneath them. While I was finishing up, he moved over to this 1″ x 4″ board in front of the patio door. I took this photo, because it looked like he was waiting to be served at his local.
When my dad and I stopped at Tait’s Feed and Seed a few weeks ago, I walked around and took some photos of the Old City Hall and some street art murals in and around downtown Brunswick, Georgia.
