Issue 3.1

It’s funny that the first question from many people, when they hear a positive stance on transness, is “But what do you think about transgender people in women’s sports?” As if these interlocutors had any stake in women’s sports to begin with. As if the most pressing issue facing trans people today is athletic events. And as if keeping trans athletes out of competition is sacred, noble, the last bastion of women’s rights. In fact,

It’s ingenious, the idea for this book. Francine Prose has written twenty-two works of fiction, and 1974 is her first memoir. She takes one year in her life and one dramatic relationship she formed in that year, and she tells you everything she wants to about being twenty-six back then. You can’t tell the difference between the voice of the girl she was and the voice of the person talking to you now. It’s a

María Folguera called in early 2019 to offer me space in the book she was putting together: Tranquilas: Historias para ir solas por la noche (Keep Calm: Stories to Help You Walk Alone at Night). Two years earlier, I had published the Spanish edition of Rape New York (Feminist Press, 2011) and María wanted to enlist me in this new project aiming to counteract the culture of fear in which women exist. This wasn’t necessarily

On an overcast Saturday afternoon, I attended a press showing of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sally and Tom at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. What I anticipated: a historical play, dark and complex, about the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Parks’s oeuvre, after all, includes rich and complex plays inspired by the darkest portions of American history, including Topdog/Underdog and Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. What I did

Is heterosexuality a choice? A new edition of Joanna Russ’s 1980 novel On Strike Against God asks us to reckon with this and other questions posed by an earlier generation of feminists. Heterosexuality warps the thirty-eight-year-old protagonist Esther’s life—until she figures out how to shake it off. Esther describes her engagements with heterosexuality as a kind of pathology. Sex with her ex-husband was painful yet bland. She became “sexually dead,” suffering physical symptoms. An affair

The other day, while walking down my driveway to get in my car, I noticed what looked like an enormous tangle of grape jellyfish: my bloody tampons, littered all over the street, spilling out of our garbage cans. Someone had rifled through our bins, looking for recyclables or whatever, and instead found bags of bloody tampons, which they decided to fling into the air like biological confetti. I started to shovel the purplish stumps back

Librarians feature prominently in my two most “controversial” books for children. In Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, a white child visits the library with their mom and learns from a library book about the history of systemic racism in the United States and the legacy of white people who aligned with black leaders and liberation all along. Not My Idea encourages white children to tune into their instincts about racial justice and step

Convinced that the vast volume of murder podcasts I was listening to was making me both dumber and more paranoid, I recently made a major intellectual upgrade and tried out . . . murder audiobooks. The kind of terrible women’s psychological thrillers that usually feature secret pasts, betrayals, specious plots, spouses who are not who they seem to be, etc. So some miscellaneous Lisa Unger was the soundtrack to my dish washing and laundry folding