Emily St. James

Why do we build the wall

When I was 4, I loved to play dress-up. My mom had a bunch of weird old clothes she had saved from her and my father's '60s and '70s wardrobes, and I would wrap myself in them and pretend I was somebody else. My mom

You already know how to do this

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I had a fight, a big one. It wasn't a marriage ending fight, and I knew it at the time. But it was a fight where I needed to do something to act out, to show how wronged I felt,

A Chromosome

The Y chromosome looks insignificant when lined up next to the other chromosomes. It's a little nubbin of a thing, an afterthought that has nevertheless rewritten human history. In actuality, most of its work is done in the womb, shaping the sex organs of babies assigned male at

Episodes: Fame

Episodes: Every part of the whale

Burning your male privilege, with Emily Sandalwood

There may be no time when any human being becomes aware of how much male privilege they have than right when they are about to lose it. And there may be no time when any human being becomes so reckless with that privilege than when they know that every use

Stealth: Vocabulary

Today, I saw something on Twitter that really made me mad. Posted by Erik Weinstein, who works at Thiel Capital, it was part of a string of tweets he made that were designed as a so-called "scientific" pushback against Twitter's new regulations that make it

Looking at women

"Do you always get in a car like that?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "I guess?" "I thought maybe you'd started trying to copy how women get into cars! It just seemed so feminine." And I

Episodes: It's already gone

Wanting

The idea I see shared a lot in trans discussion spaces is that wanting determines destiny in some way. Because I want badly to be a woman, I am a woman, by this line of thinking, even as I write this while cloaked in the guise of a seemingly typical

To the girl at the Hollywood/Vine Metro station in LA, out having fun today

First: I love your shoes. Perfect going out shoes. Second: I'm sorry if I stared. I didn't mean to. I know that you are probably self-conscious about that, since you don't pass. And I know that there are a lot of men who

Testosterone

A few years ago, for a medical matter, I had to get regular testosterone shots every other week. My levels were within the normal range for a man, but at the low end of that spectrum, and everybody wanted to find a way to boost them to prepare for an