Cecilia Gentili (!)

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. Also, it’s ok if you’re not! Everything is so fucking sad!

Anyway, I have a production update for you. As usual, Ozzy and I had prepared a full podcast episode to share tomorrow — this episode included both a full guest interview and an extended This Week in Gender segment honoring Cecilia Gentili. Late last night, we learned that we would need to hold the interview for a bit to rework a few things. So, that interview will hopefully be released another week, but in the meantime, we’ll be releasing our Cecilia tribute on Monday as a short standalone episode.

Photo: Cecilia standing on stage with her hands in the air and her mouth open, wearing a short blue dress, performing her one-woman show Red Ink. Photo by Oscar Diaz.

Most of my grief feelings about Cecilia are in tomorrow’s episode, and the rest are in my past and future therapy sessions (lol), so I’ll refrain from rehashing those here. But I just want to reiterate that if you are struggling — whether due to the loss of Cecilia, or Stevie or Fleetwood, or Hind Rajab, or any of 30,000+ other Palestinian martyrs; or the ongoing attacks on trans people’s rights to exist; or any other reason I’ll refrain from imagining or listing here — you are absolutely not alone, and I hope you’re able to receive the care and support you need right now.

(By the way, we did release an episode with Shuli Branson last Monday. I’ll talk about that more in next week’s newsletter — doesn’t really seem like the time right now! — but in the meantime, consider checking out Shuli’s show, The Breakup Theory.)

OK, here’s Links & Stuff:

Cecilia (these will also be in tomorrow’s show notes):

• Cecilia’s legacy fund!!! 
• Faltas (published by our friends LittlePuss Press)
• Full videos of Cecilia’s 2/7 memorial service
• Speaking with M. E. O’Brien for the NYC Trans Oral History Project (with transcript)
• “Cecilia Gentili’s Revolutionary Ask” on Latino USA
• “History of the Stroll & Stories from a Trans Elder” on Afterlives (w/ Raquel Willis)
• Interview with Harron for Interview Mag (2023)
• Profile by Harron in Vulture (2022)
• Interview with Grace Byron for Xtra (2022)
• Interview in Paper about COIN, a free healthcare program for sex workers (2021)
• More links and videos

Photo: A really hasty, low-res composite of two images of Cecilia speaking into a microphone on an outdoor stage. She is wearing a black bra and jean shorts. The captions say "Yes. Yes be a fucking faggot if that's what you want. I want all the faggotry. I want all the tranny behavior." Original images by Fran Tirado.

Everything else:

• Jules Gill-Peterson on detransition myths and the history of anti-trans medical gatekeeping
• Hamilton Nolan on how “the real immigration problem is capital, not labor”
• Profiles of 7 (out of roughly 100) Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel (gift link)
• Frankie de la Cretaz wrote about pro-Palestine solidarity in the Ultimate (Frisbee) community, and this paragraph particularly struck me:

“Ultimate is governed by what’s called “Spirit of the Game”—meaning there are no officials. Players must self-officiate their own games, which is something that can sometimes be challenging for the Palestinian kids as they are learning to play. “Palestinians are not used to justice,” Bannoura explains. “Usually the ref they have is Israel, and the ref is against them. But also more significantly, they have never had the chance to express themselves and advocate for themselves. Ultimate has been such a powerful tool for me to work with these kids. It encourages them to develop the communication skills, the leadership skills, the conflict resolution skills, to stand up for themselves, learn how to speak loudly, to speak clearly, and to challenge the system and to pursue justice together.”

• 100s of graffitists collab on an abandoned skyscraper in LA (gift link)
• RIP Bob Red Mill (amazing that he got a People write-up tho)
• Mckenzee sent me this bootleg 1996 Modest Mouse set, so if you have the same nostalgia brainworms as us, you might find this soothing
• Everything is SO bad but my girlfriend did introduce me to this TikTok account of baby wombats and baby koalas being friends, so maybe we only watch this for a while until things chill out.

Take care of yourself, please. Check in on each other. In the meantime, that’s it for this week. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb.

Photo: A close-up of Ruby laying on her back with her fluffy white and orange belly exposed.

Xo,

Yr resident gender detective