Search

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan My wife was the one who told me that the birth certificate for Baby Girl Boylan had finally arrived in the mail in late summer. It [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan We were at the sinks in the ladies room, the stranger and I, washing our hands, when a trans woman came out of a stall, looked [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan When the Carter presidency began I was an 18-year-old Rockefeller Republican. By the time it ended, I was so liberal my own grandmother called me a [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan In late March, President Vladimir Putin of Russia compared his country's reputational plight to that of J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. In a [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan This winter, for the third time in my life, I began learning how to do something I was sure I'd mastered 60 years ago: how to [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Issued June 15, 1976 When my mother saw the photo on my first passport, issued exactly one week before my 18th birthday, she said, 'You look [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan I'd like Transgender Equality for $100, please. The answer is: This kind of behavior infuriates people opposed to progress for trans and nonbinary individuals. What is [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan 'I feel like I got to do everything I wanted to do,' a friend said to me recently, after receiving a cancer diagnosis. 'I don't really [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Some time ago I tried to write a sympathetic column about women named Karen, people who - through no fault of their own - now find [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan A long, long time ago - I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. 'American Pie,' Don McLean's generation-defining ballad, was released [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Caitlyn Jenner's run for California governor concluded last month, having earned her a whopping 1 percent of the final votes cast. Her campaign may have gone [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Our order was ready. I headed to the counter and retrieved the fried seafood platter for two, a pornographic avalanche of crispy calamari, shrimp, scallops. There [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan In June, the city of Largo, Fla., celebrated Pride Month. A rainbow flag flew over City Hall; at a meeting of the city commission, a speaker [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan There is a regrettable incident involving a dog, a pigeon and a free kick. A soccer player loses his mojo. His coaches try to name the [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan 'Come here, Norman!' says Katharine Hepburn's character, Ethel Thayer, as she arrives at a Maine cabin in the opening scene of 'On Golden Pond.' From the [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan I was lying in my bed listening to the cicadas sing. The 'Loreleis of the insect world,' as The New York Times called them that month, [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Sometimes what we are most devoted to are our biggest mistakes. My wife hates my car, a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. She hates the way it handles, [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Treating trans children isn't an 'experiment.' The experiment is making it impossible for these young people to become themselves. The child stared at me with a [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan My father died on Easter Sunday. His spirit is all around. My father died, of melanoma, 35 years ago on the 30th of March. It was [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan When you give blood, it's more than blood you're giving. I squinched my eyes shut so that I wouldn't have to watch. 'Are you OK?' asked [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Recovering from the trauma of the Trump era will depend on how its story is told. Few moments of my life have taught me so much [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Legislators are targeting young queer people trying to live their lives safely, and in peace. There he was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan How piano lessons - and a middle school friendship - changed my life. 'I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan An encounter at a clock-repair shop offered a lesson about life in 2020. A long time ago - 100 years, give or take - a farmer [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan As a closeted queer teenager in 1970, I found something in Elton John's voice that gave me hope. It still does. Linda Ronstadt remembers that night: [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan The upheavals of our current era did not begin with Donald Trump, nor will they will end now that he has been defeated. I came down [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan A generation of Americans prepares to flee. The first time I heard someone say it, I thought it was a joke. 'I'm leaving this country,' my [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan The fight for equality isn't over, and can most definitely still be lost. It was the worst of times; it was the worst of times. I'm [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan The one-termers' club doesn't have to be so bad, Mr. President. The president was showing his successor around the White House when suddenly he burst into [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Where the Bruce is loud, and the Rolling Rocks are cold. Let's go down the shore. Grab the Coppertone and the beach towels, I'll fill the [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan They're refreshing and ridiculously easy to make, and come with just enough bitterness to help you get through this miserable year. They're called the dog days, [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan There are ways to accommodate people like me. But if our collective pandemic experience has taught us anything, it's that small sacrifices to help others are [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan A little bit of good news, in a dire month for L.G.B.T.Q. people. 'I used to think people like you should be, you know, exterminated,' the [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Flags are not just symbols of a country or a state. Their meaning lies in the consciousness of the person looking at them. For the past [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Looking back on two decades in which things got better and much worse. Twenty years ago this month I stood on the banks of Great Pond, [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Why do we love getting engaged around the holidays? I awoke with a stabbing pain in my heart. For a moment I did not know where [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan The city I once knew has changed dramatically in 40 years. But so have I. The great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once said, 'In England, when [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan The cruel vicissitudes of humanity's relationship with animals. It was when I found myself perched on our rooftop at dawn in my pajamas, coating the asphalt [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan It was the first time he'd ever been to England, a place he'd been dreaming of his entire life. Now Robert Hunter, the poet and Grateful [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan And why it's not enough. Sometimes readers give me things. A Jack Kerouac bobblehead. Gourmet chocolate cupcakes. A stuffed Brutus Buckeye, the mascot of Ohio State. [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Riding grew harder as I grew older. Then I got an electric bicycle. BELGRADE, Me. - You might have heard by now that 1969 was the [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Two years after the comedian's infamous Trump photo, she's back - battered but unbowed by right-wing cancel culture. 'You have to leave the country,' Sharon Stone [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan 'Can I buy you a drink?' I looked up from my book and there he stood: a gentleman a few years younger than me. He had [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan There, there. Have a Negroni. This most delicious of bitter cocktails, the perfect elixir for a summer afternoon, turns 100 years old this year. You can [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan 'There are only two grades to get,' goes the ancient snark, 'A or F. Anything else, it's as if you aren't really trying.' As I wind [...]

Byline: Jennifer Finney Boylan Jon Snow was looking for the queen. There had been a lot of bloodshed. I asked him about the day he'd discovered all the corpses. 'That [...]

Byline: JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN Correction Appended It took Donald Trump to make me associate Franklin Roosevelt with Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It was Roosevelt, of course, who, in his first [...]

Byline: JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN I was surprised to learn on Sunday morning that I do not exist. This will come as sad news to my children, to whom I've been [...]

Byline: JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN There she was -- not just alive again, but young. It was Carrie Fisher, at the end of the Star Wars film 'Rogue One,' as Princess [...]

Byline: JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN The mother sat in my office. Her daughter, my advisee, was failing three of her four classes. Perhaps, the mom suggested, a private tutor might be [...]