Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
"Lisa the Beauty Queen" is the fourth episode of the fourth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on Fox in the United States on October 15, 1992. In the episode, Homer enters Lisa into a beauty pageant to boost her confidence. Lisa is runner-up, but gains the title of Little Miss Springfield after the original winner is injured. Little Miss Springfield's duties include being a spokesperson for Laramie Cigarettes, which causes Lisa to speak out against smoking. As a result of her anti-smoking protests, her title is taken away on a technicality.
Laura Jane Grace is an American musician best known as the founder, lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the punk rock band Against Me!. In addition to Against Me!, Grace fronts the band Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers, a solo project she started in 2016. Grace is notable for being one of the first highly visible punk rock musicians to publicly come out as transgender, which she did in May 2012. She released her debut solo studio album, Stay Alive, in 2020, followed by Hole in My Head in 2024.
Ed the Happy Clown is a graphic novel by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. Its title character is a large-headed, childlike children's clown who undergoes one horrifying affliction after another. The story is a dark, humorous mix of genres and features scatological humour, sex, body horror, extreme graphic violence, and blasphemous religious imagery. Central to the plot are a man who cannot stop defecating; the head of a miniature, other-dimensional Ronald Reagan attached to the head of Ed's penis; and a female vampire who seeks revenge on her adulterous lover who had murdered her to escape his sins.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
Hadley Clare Freeman is an American British journalist. She writes for The Sunday Times, having previously written for The Guardian.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is a 2006 memoir by American author Elizabeth Gilbert. The memoir chronicles the author's trip around the world after her divorce and what she discovered during her travels. She wrote and named the book while living at The Oliver Hotel on the downtown square in Knoxville, TN. The book remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 187 weeks. The film version, which stars Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, was released in theaters on August 13, 2010.
Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely.
TERF is an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. First recorded in 2008, the term TERF was originally used to distinguish transgender-inclusive feminists from a group of radical feminists who reject the position that trans women are women, reject the inclusion of trans women in women's spaces, and oppose transgender rights legislation. Trans-inclusive feminists assert that these ideas and positions are transphobic and discriminatory towards transgender people. The use of the term TERF has since broadened to include reference to people with trans-exclusionary views who are not necessarily involved with radical feminism. In the 2020s, the term "trans-exclusionary radical feminism" is used synonymously with or overlaps with "gender-critical feminism".
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, often referred to as Miss Major, is an American author, activist, and community organizer for transgender rights. She has participated in activism and community organizing for a range of causes, and served as the first executive director for the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.
Daniel M. Lavery is an American author and editor. He is known for having co-founded the website The Toast, and written the books Texts from Jane Eyre (2014), The Merry Spinster (2018), Something That May Shock and Discredit You (2020), and Women's Hotel (2024). Lavery wrote Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice column from 2016 to 2021. From 2022 to 2023, he hosted a podcast on Slate titled Big Mood, Little Mood. In 2017, Lavery started a paid e-mail newsletter on Substack titled Shatner Chatner, renamed to The Chatner in 2021.
Deadnaming is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name. Deadnaming may be unintentional, or a deliberate attempt to deny, mock, or invalidate a person's gender identity.
Beth Elliott is an American trans lesbian folk singer, activist, and writer. In the early 1970s, Elliot was involved with the Daughters of Bilitis and the West Coast Lesbian Conference in California. She became the centre of a controversy when a minority of attendees in the 1973 Conference, including a keynote speaker, called for her removal because of her trans status.
Lily Hoshikawa is a fictional character from the Japanese anime series Zombie Land Saga. She was created by the team at production studio MAPPA and in particular series composition writer Shigeru Murakoshi and producer Nobuhiro Takenaka, who developed her character. She is voiced by Minami Tanaka in Japanese and Sarah Wiedenheft in the anime's English dub and played by Riri Takanashi in the stage play of the series.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a memoir, arranged in the form of a series of essays, by the American writer Daniel M. Lavery. It was published on February 11, 2020, by Atria Publishing Group. The book explores topics including gender and gender transition as well as popular culture and theology.
I'm Glad My Mom Died is a 2022 memoir by American writer, director and former actress Jennette McCurdy based on her one-woman show of the same name. The book is about her career as a child actress and her difficult relationship with her abusive mother who died in 2013. This is McCurdy's first book and was published on August 9, 2022, by Simon & Schuster.
Sasha Kekauoha, best known by the stage name Sasha Colby, is an American drag performer and beauty pageant competitor. In 2012, she won the Miss Continental competition. In 2023, she was crowned the winner of season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race.
Fucking Trans Women (FTW) is a zine created by Mira Bellwether. A single 80-page issue, numbered "#0", was published in October 2010 and republished in 2013 as Fucking Trans Women: A Zine About the Sex Lives of Trans Women; further issues were planned, but none had been published as of Bellwether's death in December 2022. Bellwether wrote all of the issue's articles, which explore a variety of sexual activities involving trans women, primarily ones who are pre-op or non-op with respect to bottom surgery. Fucking Trans Women was the first publication of note to focus on sex with trans women and was innovative in its focus on trans women's own perspectives and its inclusion of instructions for many of the sex acts depicted. Emphasizing sex acts possible with flaccid penises or not involving penises at all, it coined the term muffing to refer to stimulation of the inguinal canals, an act it popularized. The zine has received both popular-culture and scholarly attention, and was described in Sexuality & Culture as "a comprehensive guide to trans women's sexuality" and in Playboy as "widely considered" the "most in-depth guide to having sex with pre- and non-op trans femme bodies".
Mira Bellwether was an American author, artist, and sex educator best known for Fucking Trans Women, a single-issue zine in which she wrote and illustrated all articles. Described in Sexuality & Culture as "a comprehensive guide to trans women's sexuality", Fucking Trans Women was the first publication of note to focus on sex with trans women and was innovative in its focus on trans women's own perspectives and its inclusion of instructions for many of the sex acts depicted. Bellwether was also an advocate for transgender women and in opposition to trans-exclusionary feminism.
Grace Elisabeth Lavery is an associate professor of English critical theory and gender and women's studies at UC Berkeley, whose research focuses on the history of language and aestheticism in 19th century Victorian English society, along with topics involving the language and literature of sexuality and gender.
