#historian

So today I'll be talking about the history and creation of the trans flag! This will probably be a shorter post but still equally as important of course

The transgender flag was originally created by Monica Helms, a trans woman from America, in 1999. She got the idea from Micheal Page who had created the bisexual flag a year earlier. Helms describes the meaning of each stripe in the flag as:

"The stripes at the top and bottom are light blue, the traditional color for baby boys. The stripes next to them are pink, the traditional color for baby girls. The stripe in the middle is white, for those who are intersex, transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender."

- Monica Helms

The original flag (pictured below) was later donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2014 by Helms.

Later on, in 2019, Helms published a book in which she expresses shock that her flag design has been adopted so wholeheartedly by the trans community. I'd like to end off this post with that quote.

The speed with which the flag’s usage spread never fails to surprise me, and every time I see it, or a photo of it, flying above a historic town hall or building I am filled with pride.

Betty Reid Soskin, the National Park Service’s oldest ranger, has died. She was 104.

Since making a Tumblr under my own full name, I have been made aware of a rather concerning, if impressively stale, situation on this platform involving a deeply unstable Tumblr user, apparently an Iranian civilian living in London, who has spent several years maintaining that I somehow orchestrated an elaborate conspiracy against her during a long-ago online feud.

(Worthy of Jason Bourne, perhaps, but... not true.)

Whether this individual objects to my morals, my professional life, my volunteer work, my disability civil-rights enforcement work, my poetry, my historical fiction, my blog for The Times of Israel, my satirical essays critiquing Trump and American suburban interior design, my promotion of Palestinian statehood, my "sit-down" comedy, my personality, my family, or simply my continued existence, I cannot say.

Her campaign most notably includes a post using my full legal name, linking me to various and sundry usernames and hobbies, and making a series of paranoid and entirely false claims about my supposed behavior, some of which are very serious.

For the record, any claim that I have deliberately endangered another person, attempted to have anyone harmed, or engaged in the conduct she describes is entirely untrue.

My own statements and writing on the topic of explicit parasociality have made my position quite plain.

Naturally, despite the post being several years old, this matter has been reported to Tumblr’s Legal and Trust & Safety teams for defamation, threats, targeted harassment, and violations of Tumblr’s own platform policies.

One does not simply publish someone’s full legal name alongside demonstrably false and inflammatory allegations of serious wrongdoing and assume there will be no consequences.

I have no interest in engaging with this individual or participating in her fixation. I do, however, sincerely hope she finds the stability and support she appears to need.

but why when it's a gay person, all of a sudden it's unrealistic that two people could have been intimate because it would have been dangerous or like, some other bullshit excuse (Ronald "too cold in valley forge" "no time for it" Chernow, i'm looking at you).

because why is physical intimacy only extraneous, a time-waster, an unnecessary and implausible dalliance only when it's gay?

thinking about this a lot lately as I'm establishing myself more as a queer historian, and realizing through my undergrad that queer history remains under-studied because it is not taken seriously, and implications of queerness throughout history have been brushed off by historians (and whatever chernow is) who seem to have authority on a topic/person but do not make an honest effort to understand queer experiences in history, often because they simply do not SEE it.