This article was written for Jill Magazine and reproduced here with permission. To subscribe to Jill, go here: https://jillmag.weebly.com/ Marilyn Frye’s metaphor of the birdcage in The Politics of Reality (1983) remains one of the most powerful descriptions of how oppression works. A bird can fly around a single wire. It cannot fly through many wires arranged together. We may give the cage different names. We may disagree about what holds its wires in place or how they shoul

History is crowded with masculine women

My book club for transmen and butch women recently read and discussed J. Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998). We started with the question: how would you define masculinity if not tied to men? Each of us, as the book explores, intuitively gravitates toward the concept. We are, after all, both female and masculine, and understand that if women can be masculine and men can be feminine, those characteristics are clearly not essentially connected with sex. But when tasked with

My study on the sexual assaults of transmen has now been completed. Below is a summary of the study design and it's key insights: Background and Research Questions Sexual assault against transmen is widely reported, with about half saying they have experienced it at some point in their lives. Most research stops at reporting these numbers. Much less is known about when these assaults take place, who commits them, or how survivors themselves make sense of what happened. As a r