Category: Academics

Setting the scene, Gust told us that day had been a day of action for Palestine against genocidal violence (aka Hamas refusing to release further hostages with no sign of the Bibas kids), puberty blockers had been banned for trans kids, there was an athletics ban for trans women, etc. All of this was ‘boring’ and ‘depressing’ and so Gust turned to history of trans people to cheer herself up. Namely, mermaids (or merfolk, as she mostly failed to remember to call them).

The book arose from ‘ethnographic* and archival research among queer-, trans people, feminists and sex workers’ and was about the ‘everyday troubles with transness in social and institutional life’ in Istanbul, Turkey, since 2016.  She wanted to know how trans people dealt with such ‘state power’ in everyday negotiations.  It was her claim that there were two currencies – violence and intimacy; hence ‘violent intimacies’ were an ‘entanglement’ that trans people were caught in.  Therefore, the book offered a novel (i.e. stupid and cockeyed) concept and was obviously chosen in lieu of actual evidence of real violence, the traditional got-punched-in-the-face sort. 

Seminar on the state of things for ‘trans’ people in Russia, held at London Metropolitan University in February 2024. Legislation of 24 July 2023 Unlike

This is the second of the IOE’s ‘Trans-inclusivity Seminar Series’ that we have attended, the other being ‘I Was a Queer Child and So Were You,’ which was exactly like it sounds. This talk, given by Dr Kata Kyrola (they/them), was far less batshit than Stockton Dean’s. Professor Martin Oliver, who told us he uses ‘he/him pronouns’, introduced the gender activist, sorry, academic, and described the seminar series as ‘just lovely’ with ‘such exciting ideas’. We’ll be the judges of that, thank you.