Cyanotypes by
Paul Burty Haviland, 1909-1910.
Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees showed what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest hurdle came when the press learned of her identity.
1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories considered her brave or heroic for her openness. National papers would even celebrate her wedding in 1955. At worst, her narrative was seen as banal and unnewsworthy.
The New York Daily News ran a surprisingly respectful series of articles on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees' were among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity but also other trans people like her.
Tamara wasn't the first famous trans woman of the 1950s nor was she the best known. However, she had a unique opportunity to share her own story. You can read Tamara's 1955 autobiography, “Reborn”: A Factual Life Story of a Transition from Male to Female, at http://transreads.org/reborn
thinking about that kakapo egg that got crushed but the conservation team patched it up and it survived
For those who don’t follow kakapo conservation, they are critically endangered parrots who only breed on years where the rimu tree they rely on meet a certain threshold of fruit production. One breeding season in 4 years can be typical, and about half of all eggs laid by kakapo are infertile (they still aren’t completely certain why, it could be a recent population bottleneck) so each fertile egg is worth its weight in gold.
This was one of only 5 fertile eggs laid on the Whenua Hou island population in the 2014 breeding season and it got crushed by its mother on accident. It was mended with glue and tape and incubated by the rangers until hatching.
At 150 days old kakapo chicks are officially added to the population total and given a unique name, until then they are given their mother’s name and a number for birth order laid in the clutch. This chick was known as Lisa-one before officially being given the name Ruapuke by local indigenous Ngai Tahu people.Here he is grown up:
It’s sad when a species is so rare we know them all individually but at the same time I love that you can point at this one bird and say oh that’s Ruapuke, his mom sat on him too hard
This reminds me of the time that I asked if anyone had resources on the history of Shinto and while nobody had book recs, turns out an actual Temple Maiden followed me on Tumblr and was down to chat.
Tumblr has a startling number of well informed insightful people with names that reference obscure hentai.
People are downright interesting when they're not being duct taped into one box or another.
The world is fucked when historians and linguists and mathematicians and artists of all kinds are forced to work jobs that suck the soul out of them because they didn’t get the right bit of paper from the right building or be born in the wrong place or something
seriously think about how many absolute geniuses spend their free time mastering some obscure realm of knowledge but have to mop up shit for 8 bucks an hour, or pick vegetables for a nickel
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen Jay Gould
Skull Study by Archerv1987
Art by Lander Strijbol