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Paisley Currah

@paisleycurrah.com

5.7K followers 970 following 350 posts

My speciality: government decisions on sex classification. CUNY. Institute for Advanced Study, 2024-25. Wrote Sex is as Sex Does. Dad, dog companion, kayaker. n+1, Boston Review, Nature, New Yorker, New York Review, Yale Review. www.paisleycurrah.com

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · May 28

My piece on the havoc wrought by Trump's "Defending Women" executive order--it goes far beyond harming trans people.
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Donald Trump’s War on Gender Is Also a War on Government

By forcing rigid definitions of sex across all federal agencies, Republicans are undermining the administrative state’s capacity to protect public health and safety.

www.newyorker.com

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Reposted by Paisley Currah

Andy Sellars @sellars.bsky.social · 8d

AAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Ahead of the case caption, a handwritten note: "Trump has pardons and tanks . . . . what do you have?" Judge Young's reply: "Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,
Alone, I have nothing but my
sense of duty.
Together, We the People of the
United States –- you and me --
have our magnificent Constitution.
Here’s how that works out in a
specific case –- "

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 12d

Texas Tech Moves to Limit Academic Discussion to 2 Genders www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

Texas Tech Moves to Limit Academic Discussion to 2 Genders

www.nytimes.com

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PSC-CUNY @psc-cuny.org · 16d

Make a plan now to join the PSC, a growing number of other unions, & community groups to protest ICE’s abuses in the courtrooms & in our communities, resist the deployment of federal troops in our city, & demand state legislation to protect immigrants.

tinyurl.com/NYersAgainst...

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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 13d

I looked into the group and the guy pushing the FBI to create a new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism”—itself a political project, meant to conflate the fact of trans people’s existence with extremism.

The Right’s Baseless Project to Link Trans People With Extremism

A campaign for the FBI to adopt a new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism” is less about law enforcement than politics.

newrepublic.com

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Lydia Polgreen @polgreen.bsky.social · 14d

This is really great reporting from Mother Jones - the "godfather" of evidence-based medicine disavows the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine for misusing his work. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown

The godfather of evidence-based medicine on rejecting anti-trans "misuse" of his work.

www.motherjones.com

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 15d

In the olden days, even judges ruling against a transgender plaintiff would often use the correct pronoun.

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 15d

I think of pronouns as part of grammar of civility. It's simply common courtesy to use the pronoun someone prefers. "These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are...the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place."

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 15d

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review

Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

www.bostonreview.net

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Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they) @katjathieme.bsky.social · 16d

What it sounds like when philosophers who are also anti-trans activists submit an amicus brief to a US court where they argue for banning trans girls and women from women's sports.

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the option of interpreting the Idaho and West Virginia
statutes as motivated by the justified aim of excluding
all males from female sports, it is quite invidious to
interpret them as instead motivated by the unjustified
aim of excluding males who identify as female in par-
ticular.
Consider a simple analogy. Imagine that we are
back in Medieval Europe. Gold is the currency of the
land. Consequently, many merchants prefer to accept
gold and only gold as payment. However, a new move-
ment is afoot, whose members are known as the alche-
mists. The alchemists purport to have found a way of
turning iron pyrite (fool’s gold) into gold. Some people
are convinced by the claims of the alchemists, though
many others are not. This difference in attitudes
starts to lead to time-wasting interactions in which an
alchemist or fellow traveler tries to purchase a good
using iron pyrite from a merchant who, unmoved by
well-publicized insistence on the part of the alche-
mists that only irrational prejudice could lie behind
lingering doubts about the possibility of converting
iron pyrite into gold, continues to insist on only ac-
cepting gold as payment. One such merchant, whose
unofficial working policy has hitherto been to accept
only gold as payment, decides to make his policy offi-
cial by putting up a sign on his store saying, “Only
gold accepted (no iron pyrite!).”

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 17d

The sickening feeling when you realize the institutions of civil society are much worse than you thought—Berkeley handing over 160 names, & what will ensue now that the FBI is targeting trans people as “violent extremists”? Excellent column by @mashagessen.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/o...

Opinion | I Look at This Country and I See a Stranger

www.nytimes.com

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 19d

I know. I already have Riki's book! But Lydia Polgreen is consistently very good and I think in it's important to acknowledge work like hers, even if it's published in the Times.

Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 19d

A powerful op-ed about MAGA's fixation on trans issues from @polgreen.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/o...

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Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein.bsky.social · 20d

The FBI is preparing to label transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder:
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-readie...

FBI Readies New War on Trans People

“We’re looking at the entire web”

www.kenklippenstein.com

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Lex McMenamin (they/them) @leximcmenamin.com · 20d

NEW @teenvogue.com: a Texas bill passed this summer mandating schools deadname trans students, leaving enforcement to districts. @kitoconnell.com speaks to trans students in TX:

“I’ve never felt more at threat here. I can’t stop thinking that everything would be so different if I detransitioned.”

Some Texas Schools Are Making Teachers Deadname Trans Students After New Bill Passed

“This can’t be interpreted as anything else but an attack directly on trans kids.”

www.teenvogue.com

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 20d

Awful and dangerous to hear the Mayor echo the transphobic bigotry coming from the Trump administration. It's completely at odds with the values of our city and another reason why his single, disgraced term in office cannot end soon enough.

A screenshot of two tweets from the Politico reporter Joe Anuta.

The 1st: ".@NYCMayor elaborates on his comments yesterday that boys and girls should not use the same bathroom. He says he will review the policy of his own education department, which allows students to use restrooms “consistent with their gender identity” and potentially change it"

2nd: "He says students whose sex at birth differs should never be allowed to use the bathroom at the same time, regardless of gender identity"

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · 26d

A personal story, from a child's vantage point, about what it's like to live under never-ending state surveillance and persecution. Also to survive that through resistance and solidarity. From Joan Wallach Scott, who I was lucky to have as a colleague last year. www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

A General Air of Anxiety - Boston Review

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

www.bostonreview.net

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 28d

getting fired from your job because some dipshit student who missed their calling in the Stasi filmed you talking about gender in a class about gender

Kim Weeden @weedenkim.bsky.social · 28d

I agree but this case is even worse: it appears that the detailed course description* explicitly mentions that it will explore how gender and sexuality are depicted in YA literature.

*As the reddit poster mentions, there's some confusion and possible misreporting of which course she's teaching.

Screenshot of reddit post from user Wang_Lung_1921.

Begin quote:

I understand that ENG 360 is Children's Literature, and that's what has been reported, but she's not in the Course Schedule for 360. Instead, look at ENG 394, which does show as her course. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But that's what my search pulled up.

You can still find her syllabus, with a detailed course description, that falls within the range of the general description given in the Catalog.

"COURSE DESCRIPTION Did you read what we now call “young adult literature” as a young adult? What exactly is a young adult? Does the term refer to an age category or a marketing tool, a personality type or a genre? What differentiates adult from young adult from teenager from child? How do we understand the genre of literature for and about this blurry, shifting group? In this course, we will explore a range of young adult or YA literature in English, including poetry, contemporary fiction, graphic memoirs, historical fiction, and fantasy, from a diverse group of authors with many varied perspectives on race, gender, sexuality, disability and other realms of human difference. Our task is to think critically about what these books can tell us about how we (and others) understand adolescence, how those definitions have changed over time, and how these books participate in larger movements of history, culture, and literature."

End quote

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The New Yorker @newyorker.com · Sep 8

Too many people seem to believe that “wokeism” has killed art, rather than enriched it. And yet trans people have been underrepresented in major institutions even before Trump’s suppression of so-called gender ideology, Grace Byron writes.

The War on Trans Art

Politics and aesthetics have an uneasy alliance. Too often, trans expression is on the losing end.

www.newyorker.com

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Reposted by Paisley Currah

Jessica Clarke @jessicaclarke.bsky.social · Aug 18

I've posted a draft article on the Supreme Court's Skrmetti decision on SSRN. I argue that this harmful decision represents the worst sort of legal formalism, but does not predetermine the results in other transgender rights cases or eviscerate sex discrimination law. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · Aug 11

Chaos as governing…comparing Brazil 2019 with the US in 2025, from the Sexual Politics Bulletin: sxpolitics.org/spw-library/...

180 days of destruction, sadism, and global disorder - Sexuality Policy Watch

In June 2019, we published a special issue on the first 180 days of the Bolsonaro administration. Six years later, we take on the challenge

sxpolitics.org

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Jamey Jesperson @jameyj.bsky.social · Jul 18

There are less trans woman History Professors in the US than I have fingers on one hand, and one of them was just FIRED 🚨

Why? Anti-trans alumni/donors threatened to pull support form the university...

substack.com/home/post/p-...

I was Hired as an Expert in Transgender History—Then Fired for it

My year at Washington & Lee University

substack.com

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · Jul 26

Institutions sacrificing trans youth and student protesters in the hopes appeasing an angry god. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Virgin Sacrifice in the Ivy League

When enlightened institutions resort to ancient rites of sacrifice

substack.com

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · Jul 5

Theda Skocpol puts the creation of Trump's secret police force, which is the centerpiece of the OBBB, in historical perspective. It has close precedents in Europe between the wars.

Critical Read About the BBB, Federalism and the Future of American Democracy

TPM Reader TS (Harvard sociologist/political scientist Theda Skocpol) and I often compared...

talkingpointsmemo.com

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · Jul 5

Good morning Brooklyn.

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · Jul 5

Watch my talk on “Sexual Democracy, Moral Panics, and Trans Politics,” virtually live, Saturday, July 5th, 7:00 p.m. @socialismconference.org (Chicago time).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8HTgoHqW7o&list=PLcqXhvSDf0z1h6gfcz5WM3IPbuBIm1C9F&index=3

Sexual Democracy, Moral Panics, and Trans Politics

YouTube video by Haymarket Books

www.youtube.com

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Paisley Currah @paisleycurrah.com · Jul 2

Trump helping Eric Adams the way he helped Pierre Poilievre. Carry on.

Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · Jul 2

Sharp new response from Zohran Mamdani, hitting back at Trump's threats:

"His statements...attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation."