"If gender weren’t mostly for other people’s benefit, we wouldn’t put so much effort into it (I sweep my floors before friends come over, not once they’ve gone back home)." (by charles theonia)
concise yet thorough. should be stuff that is second nature to every journalist
"Reporters and editors have unconscious biases. In the case of trans people, that often manifests in worrying more about people who may mistakenly identify as trans — and regret that decision — than about the challenges that trans people face."
"Gender is how women are oppressed; sex is the excuse patriarchy uses for the oppression of women. Reality—the reality shared by women, actual women, in the world—really does matter for feminism. Metaphysical definitions of the category “woman” really, really don’t."
"My interest in 'data as medium' is partly motivated by the horror of that, the misery of the being watched, being gathered, with no real opportunity to revoke consent. And also, in truth, by the closeness of that — the touching of me against the whole world." [...] "I want queerness not as a condition under which we are labeled and are made to suffer, or even as a condition under which we are labeled and find individual joy, but as one (of many) gifts for the world."
"In the US, women are underrepresented in high-paying occupations, but data shows that gender representation across most industries has improved significantly over time. Stable Diffusion depicts a different scenario, where hardly any women have lucrative jobs or occupy positions of power. Women made up a tiny fraction of the images generated for the keyword “judge” — about 3% — when in reality 34% of US judges are women, according to the National Association of Women Judges and the Federal Judicial Center. In the Stable Diffusion results, women were not only underrepresented in high-paying occupations, they were also overrepresented in low-paying ones."
'If you understand the two tendencies that I just described — outsiders’ propensity to identify with cis parents rather than their trans children, coupled with parents’ tendency to disbelieve that their children are “really trans” (at least initially, and in some cases permanently) — then it becomes obvious how easy it is for journalists and media producers to manipulate audiences’ opinions of trans youth and gender-affirming healthcare with a few well-placed quotes from reluctant or skeptical parents.'
"This micro-syllabus offers materials to help students historicize current anti-trans legislation, contextualize it within broader legacies of repression and resistance that stretch beyond the law, and think across multiple strands of political struggle."
'None of this is predicated on “trying not to misgender someone” or even “trying not to mess up pronouns accidentally and get yelled at.” Linguistic care work, like any care work truly based in principles of a loving community, cannot run on shame-based fuel. Avoiding shame and harm are only the barest, most basic bar to clear—they do not constitute showing affection. Failing to abuse someone isn’t the same as loving them.'
"Women’s ratings bottomed out at age 47, on average" well I have that to look forward to I guess
"Again and again we see female-dominated media fandoms’ interpretations dismissed as emotional and ideologically motivated. But what is all this vast effort to butch up Kirk but clear evidence of at least equally goal and emotion-driven work on the part of male-dominated sectors of fandom and popular reception?"
"Griswold also formed the basis of Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to marry someone of the same gender) and Lawrence v. Texas (the right to have queer sex, ever, at all, without being criminalized). If there is no “right to privacy” and no sovereign right to control one’s healthcare decisions, then bans on HRT and gender-affirming surgery for adults are within the realm of realistic possibility..."
"nothing is denied the girl in that video by recognizing that the hatred of girls and women on display therein attacks trans girls and women with equal vigor. That experience is activated when you are sexed or sexualized against your will, when having health care that focuses on your genitals or have such healthcare withheld"
"Liberal capitalism would cast our transitions as products we buy as individual consumers, or as treatments we receive as individual patients, but in fact a transition under capitalism is a commodity we labour with others to produce, a process from which surplus value is extracted to accumulate capital for bosses and in which everyone else is paid but us." 🔥
"I'm glad you're asking this. Jordan Ellenberg dropped me a note saying that I'd written a novel about wealth disguised as a novel about sex. I think that must be right."
"[W]e must keep all of our tools to hand, both the paranoid and the reparative. Otherwise, we run the risk of simply saying to these safety-pilled kids, 'Don’t worry. Language can’t hurt you. Calm down.'"
"What I feel most grateful to myself for in that home video is breaking me of that binary. If seven-year-old Jules was more like me today than not, then there was no opposite of dissociation to call on. There was nothing, or no one, to reintegrate. She was already there, which I suppose is how dissociation actually works, but not always how it feels when the child appears in the depths of our flesh as real, but our culture tells us she is a figment of retrospection."
'[T]he structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”'
on data and dysphoria: "The data fetishist is no doubt riled up at this point, eager to move the goalposts again. But I have left the field, there is no game left here. Every time you melodramatically invoke your concern, or interest in studies and numbers, I see your admission that you are in want of a justification for your aggression, for your eugenics, and for your authoritarianism."
"Trans narratology teaches us that neither a singular narrative of becoming, nor the laying out of life as a causal sequence, will do justice to the complexity of trans identification. Trans lives slip and slide, forward and backward in time."
"So conservatives shifted from blocking marriage equality to blocking restroom access for transgender people in 2016. Having lost that round, they’ve shifted to “protecting” young people from gender-confirmation treatment, still grounded in the same theories of sex and gender as biologically determined."
'Slowly, slowly we reconnect the threads that connect me typing at my laptop in 2021 CE London backwards in time... to the dawn of the written word in the fertile crescent, when the gala priestesses of Inanna, who spoke only in the women’s tongue, sang in praise of her, “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana” nearly four thousand years ago.'
"graphs the usage of words (whether in description or dialogue) over time, distinguishing that usage both by the gender of the fictional characters the terms are associated with, and by the gender of the authors who used them"
"...however vulnerable the situation of transphobia makes us to the pain of wrong love, however vulnerable trans people are to abuse from cisgender partners, wrong love is not a trans problem. It is not a chaser problem. It is a problem everyone has; it is the problem that systems of meaning-making as diverse as heterosexual marriage, political lesbianism, and T4T sexuality all attempt to safeguard against."
"Transfeminine Science contains articles by different writers on the subject of transfeminine hormone therapy. Our authors and their information are listed on the Authors page. Transfeminine Science is written by transgender people, for transgender people—and for their medical providers."
"We don’t just have a graded distribution, we have combinatorial variation."
by zefyr lisowski