Reading Time: 6 minutes I had a complicated relationship with my voice even before I figured out I was trans. When I was small I loved singing, but then my voice broke. That’s what we call it in the UK when testosterone makes a voice change at puberty—we say your voice “breaks.” As a trans woman, I find that term especially apt. Because my voice was still unpredictable, the choir teacher put me in the bass section where no one would hear me. Singing became something I was afraid to do.
Identity
Posted inIdentity
If you know someone is adopted—tell them
Reading Time: 6 minutes I had never met these two little girls before—flesh and blood relatives—but when I did, it was a lot of fun. They were full of energy and cuteness. It was 40 years ago. I was 15. My parents had taken me back East one summer, to the Bronx, to the neighborhood where my father grew […]
Posted inIdentity
Eight reasons this atheist Jew still celebrates Hanukkah
Reading Time: 5 minutes Being a Humanistic Jew means living in a middle ground between secular friends who ask, “If you don’t believe in God, why are you still Jewish?” and theistic Jewish friends, who sometimes ask the same question! Hanukkah, the most widely celebrated holiday on the Jewish calendar, provides a great opportunity to explain how “nontheist religion” […]
Posted inIdentity
Nigel Farage: ‘Everything that Western civilization was built on was Judeo-Christian culture’
Reading Time: 8 minutes Nigel Farage, one of the architects of Brexit, and continued xenophobe-in-chief in UK politics, has again been caught stoking the embers of cultural discontent. As recently reported at OnlySky, the 2021 UK census results have shown that Christianity is now a minority belief and that immigration has shifted demographics in certain cities. On the back […]
Posted inTechnology
Anonymity, privacy, transparency, integrity: Do we even know the future we want?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In the late 2000s, research blossomed around our use of online avatars. Did our videogame icons and social media profiles represent our actual selves, our ideal selves, or something else entirely? And did they have a reciprocal impact, a “Proteus effect” that transformed self-perception? Did we change in the real world based how our online […]
Posted inCulture
Speaking Kazakh: How Putin’s attack woke me to my own identity
Reading Time: 4 minutes Azamat Junisbai was almost 16 when the Soviet Union collapsed around him. But it took Putin’s aggression against Ukraine for him to decolonize his Kazakh mind and identity.
Posted inThe Future
The overthinking humanist: Life in a world of eight billion
Reading Time: 13 minutes At 4 a.m. on Sunday, I just needed fifteen minutes to finish a news brief. Fifteen minutes, and I’d be ready to leave for a trip to a pueblo two hours away. Fifteen minutes, and I’d switch modes completely: from English to Spanish, from digital to analog, and from the high-minded literary life to something […]