Dynamic Subspace

Tag: Rights

  • “We Will Always Be Here,” A Transgender Pride Flag in Brooklyn

    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).

  • How I Shot the LEGO Pride Flag Photo

    lego bricks resembling the pride flag are connected to a mix of other hidden lego bricks in front of a white cardboard box and illuminated by a book reading light

    On Monday, I posted happy wishes for Pride Month with a photo that I made of a LEGO Pride Flag.

    To create the photo, I first dug through my boxes of LEGO to find 8 stud wide bricks that matched as close as possible to the Rainbow Flag’s approximation of ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

    My first shots had the flag resting on the table some distance in front of a white cardboard box, which served as a neutral background. For lighting, I held a USB rechargable book reading light belonging to Y just above my smartphone to avoid casting a shadow from the camera.

    I didn’t like how these turned out, because the flag was kind of boring just sitting there. So, I thought about levitating it like in Monday’s post.

    To levitate the flag, I built a counter-weighted assembling of 6-stud wide bricks with an armature that connected behind the yellow bricks in the Pride Flag. I built this armature one brick higher than the flat to give it the illusion of floating in midair.

  • Happy Pride Month!

    red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple pride flag made out of lego bricks in front of a white background

    I want to wish my LGBTQIA+ friends, coworkers, students, and people of the world a Happy Pride Month! It’s a celebration of those folks’ accomplishments and contributions, and remembrance of the hard work, struggle, and loss for liberation that unfortunately still isn’t over. I stand with LGBTQIA+ folks in the fight for liberty and equality for all.

  • Octavia Butler’s Observation on Leaders in Parable of the Talents

    Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the celebrated science fiction writer, imagined a near-future dystopia set approximately in the United States of our time now. As I tell my students, she was extrapolating from her here-and-now to write stories set the future. While she was imagining what the future might be like, she was also writing about her present due to it being her initial starting conditions. For her novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), she wrote in recognition of the effects of climate change–especially in California, concern for the push for de-regulation by the wealthy, and response to an earlier president who used the campaign phrase “Make America Great Again,” Ronald Reagan. The following passage is the epigraph to chapter eleven in Parable of the Talents. It has stayed with me. All of her points can allude to today and serve as a warning for considering our leaders in the future:

    Choose your leaders
   with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
   is to be controlled
   by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
   is to be led
   by the opportunists
   who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
   is to offer up
   your most precious treasures
   to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
   is to ask
   to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
   is to sell yourself
   and those you love
   into slavery.