Exploring Dawn

There’s a fascinating book coming out by Daniel Brook, called The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin.

Wow, so, over 100 years ago, people were already talking about race and gender as social constructs. This wasn’t something invented a few years ago by people that Republicans and related fascists hate. And gender fluidity goes back millennia, back to the beginning of recorded history and literature.

One thing that blew my mind in this review from LitHub, is that the infamous Nazi book burning pictures we have are of Nazis burning his books from his Institute for Sexual Science, a think tank and surgical center in the 1910s and 1920s. Hitler and his Nazis burned and tried to erase his research, but it has lived on. Trump, Republicans and Christian Fascists are trying to do this today, and they will fail also.

We’re here, we’re queer, and we are strong.

You can read the article on LitHub.

Finished reading: Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski 📚

A really good collection of poetry. I love poetry, and esp. trans poetry. I’ve feel a visceral connection with the artists and their words. I sometimes find words or emotions to explain or flesh out my own experiences.

When I finished reading, I thought abuot how to rate it. It’s weird that this book made me rethink how I like to rate items. I usually use a ranked system, 1-5, with 5 being the best. But, it doesn’t seem fair to rate poetry on a scale like that. It either grabs you or it doesn’t. And if it grabs you, I think it changes you, on some level.

That is why I always return to poetry, I think. There’s something about it that lets you think more deeply. There’s a thread, there’s scaffolding or superstructure, but you bring more of yourself to a poem since you need to provide the details. So, for poetry, I think I need to confined myself to “moved” or “unmoved”. This collection is a moved, without a doubt.

P.S. Ok, I’d give it a 5/5 if I had to but that’s just me wanting to make sure people know this is a great work, and if the poet ever ran across it, she would know that she made a difference to me. Thank you.

I’ve been doing both a bunch lately and I keep blurring the lines between something that could be inner-inner monologue vs inner-outer monologue. I think a blog like this needs to have more content that probes deeper than surface level, both for me developing as Dawn as well as others who (hopefully) stumble across my scribbles. For me, I get to explore and experience myself. For others, they get to see me for who I am as well as maybe see a bit of themselves.

That was the hardest part growing up, not being able to see other people like me, except maybe in a film or a book where they were portrayed as a monster, a scapegoat, or just a splash of non-cishet life that could be exploited for a laugh or a jump-scare.

I hope I’ll have more content soon that will explore these feelings. I’m figuring it out myself too as I go. I hope you enjoy the journal too.