On my most popular tumblr-posts on transgender lives and topics

I have been posting transgender news and articles over at my tumblr blog since early 2014, and have learned a lot about that section of the transgender community in the process. 

Tumblr is dominated by younger people, and I can see that they – for instance – love positive stories about being trans and references to reputable science sources that affirm transgender identities.

You can read more about this in my article "What my most popular posts on tumblr can tell us about what transgender youth are looking for" which I have posted over at Medium.

(I am testing out Medium as an alternative way of making my content more well known.)

The Rise of the Left-handed Cult

The 20th century saw a dramatic rise in the number of left-handed people. Was it all part of a leftist conspiracy? Read on to find out!

Right now ant-transgender activists, left and right, are trying to tell the world that the current rise in the number of transgender people is caused by a transgender conspiracy.

RightLeftRightWrong tells a similar story about left-handed people:

The history of the sinister left-handed

In pre-modern times left-handed people were thought to consort with the Devil. Left-handedness in women might be considered proof of them being witches.

In the 19th century science and medicine were used to fight the threat of those left handed:

The infamous (but influential) 19th Century physician Cesare Lambroso, who identified various facial and racial characteristics with criminal traits, turned his attention to handedness at the end of the century and the start of the next and, perhaps not surprisingly, he identified left-handedness as a mark of pathological behaviour, savagery and criminality.

At the middle of the 20th century American psychoanalyst Abram Blau suggested that left-handedness was caused by perversity and the result of emotional negativism.

Yes, Ernest Hemingway was Transgender

PBS has made a new documentary
on Ernest Hemingway which presents their
gender variance. (photo by Yousuf Karsh)

Ernest Hemingway is know as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.  Hemingway is also known as one of the most macho male authors of the time. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence that the great author was some shade of transgender. 

Before we start: I am using the term "transgender" in its most common meaning here, i.e. as an umbrella term for all kinds of gender variance. 

We cannot know how Hemingway would have identified today, in a time that  is a bit more forgiving towards queer and trans people than the world Hemingway lived in. 

However, I will argue that given all the time they spent on trying to come to the bottom of their own gender variance, this was much more than a "fetish" (even if Hemingway, like most people, had their kinks). What we are facing here is a more fundamental nonbinary or transgender  identity.

Given that I do not know how Hemingway would have presented today, I stick to gender neutral pronouns.

My main sources on Hemingway's transgender nature are Mary V.. Dearborn's book, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, and Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes'  Hemingway's Genders. (References below).

Fetish or identity?

Keep in mind that few of the authors who have looked into this side of Hemingway are transgender themselves, which often leads – as I see it – to some misinterpretations of Hemingway's  gender.

For some the very presence of erotic crossdreaming or sexual role play, immediately leads to the term "sexual fetish". This is a term that is actively used to invalidate trans people. 

Mind you, I am not saying that fetishes do not exist. Most, if not all, people have them.  But it should be pretty obvious that a transgender identity is likely to express itself through sexual dreams and desires as well. Instead of using fetishes and sexual fantasies to dismiss transgender identities, we should use interpret them in a transgender and queer context.