When Complete BS Becomes "Common Knowledge."

Someone told me they stopped paying attention to someone who reviews movies after one too many mean-spirited jokes about trans people, and it was one of those cases where the reviewer in question definitely had the vibe of someone who'd go around doing that, but I couldn't think of any real flagrant examples. Cut to me watching a movie the other day, remembering that oh yeah, I skipped that one guy's review of it because I wanted to go in blind, and sure enough, that review has this big long crappy 5 minute aside of an out of left field "DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY GENDER!?" routine. So that's a shame.

Now this particular guy rather famously Does Not Get Out Much. Pretty sure he hasn't really have any exposure to a single trans person, or to any real die hard transphobes, and most likely what happened here is he saw I dunno, an episode of South Park or a facebook post from some bigoted aunt, or some Tiktok video, something like that, and just blithely assimilated it into his world view.

But you know, the reality is... to the best of my knowledge no trans person has ever actually said this, or anything similar to this, and we sure as hell don't live in a world where anyone would have the back of someone who did? But you know, here we are.

Now I want to be clear, this isn't some kinda thing where trans people can't take a joke or anything. Literally while I was typing this, some cis guy just tossed this out, and this is a real tired old hokey one, but I cracked a smile, because oh yeah, the whole "programmer socks" bit really is a weirdly accurate stereotype.

And there's plenty of other trans jokes I'll laugh at. Ones directly at my expense. Some real dark ones even. You wanna go off on trans women all having the same like 10 names and them all sounding like we were born in the 1800s, go for it. Other stuff about how we all dress? Coping mechanisms? Low standards? Being too into pickles and sriracha? There's plenty.

But "DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY GENDER!?" and while we're at it, "I identify as..." don't even have the vague shape of something you're ever going to encounter in reality. Like if I didn't know the context of where these came from and hadn't had them posted a thousand times or so by people with swastikas for avatars and such, these probably would get a laugh from me the first time I heard them, because they sound like weird surrealist humor. Like, "don't you hate how every time you go to the laundromat, you have to play chess with the dragon before they let you in?"

But, again, I know the context. And the context is a bunch of fascists want people like me dead, and they're both too scared to pick up a gun to do it themselves and too incompetent to know who to point it at or where to find them. So they sit around with each other and go "hey, what sort of person does everyone hate? Let's all say trans people talk like them!" And because they haven't spoken to a single human being besides each other and the rich parents they're sponging off since getting banned from the Something Awful forums in the 90s/punk bar in the 80s/whatever, they settled on "rich white person calling the cops on somebody for walking down the street" and "didn't I first get into being a hatemonger because I was stupid enough to think that time I saw someone roleplaying he really thought he was a big scary dragon?" Which has honestly worked out weirdly well for them when you stop for half a second to appreciate just how absolutely ridiculous it is to ever imagine cops coming to the aid of trans people.

Like... here's a situation that actually plays out in reality. I have a bad tooth. Dentist says I need a root canal, and she doesn't do them. Refers me to another dentist like an hour and a half away. I walk in, write my Victorian sounding name on some paperwork, fill in all my various medications, wait a bit, hop into the big dentist's chair, so far so good. This dentist busts out the pick and the mirror about to have a look, and goes "hey, so I noticed on your medications you're taking a ton of something called divigel? What is that?" I say "oh, yeah, I'm trans, so I'm on supplemental estradiol." She almost drops the mirror, stares at me like she just realized I'm Venom and if she bent down to look at my teeth I was about to swallow her whole head. She stands bolt upright, says, "your teeth are fine, get out." I'm a bit confused, but I can read a room, so I say "well that's weird, but OK..." and start to leave. I get a "have a nice day SIR!" shouted at me. And then I go out, call the cab company to say my appointment ended early, and get told too bad, it's coming when it's scheduled, and someone snickers. See, at some point in having to take cabs to all my appointments, a driver worked out that this woman he'd been picking up from this address for the past year has a similar voice to and maybe vague family resemblance to who he'd been picking up from that same address the year prior, and after getting the courage to ask me, guess who's constantly having cabs show up late, or not at all, or on time with a driver staring angrily into the rear view mirror while blaring AM radio with someone shouting about all "the gays" needing to be rounded up so they can burn in hell. And I just need to suck it up and live with it. I'm sure as hell not going to pick a fight over it. I'm just gonna stand out in the cold (fortunately with nice warm knee-high socks) waiting for this cab for an hour because I sure as hell can't stay in this lobby.

But again, the whole weird myth here posits a world where trans people are all-powerful and control the government and stuff. And the basis for that is like... sometimes people refuse to pass ridiculous laws to stop trans people from doing things we only do in bigots' imaginations at great taxpayer expense, and SOMETIMES someone is responsible enough to double check what's up before they allocate the funds. Like... hell, you know what's exactly as completely divorced from reality and honestly the same people doing to same crap? That wild BS about "schools keeping litter boxes in classrooms because all this acceptance of trans people means we also have to accept kids who think they're cats!" Like... how the hell can anyone actually be stupid enough to believe that anyone else could be stupid enough to believe that they're actually stupid enough to believe such an OBVIOUSLY made-up narrative? Like... lawmakers bring that one up and try to get bills passed on it. Everyone else in the room is socially obligated not to laugh and ask whether they also want to pass legislation against Bat Boy and UFO abductions. This is Ralph Wiggum tier absurdity.

But like... what do you do about this sort of thing, really? As the person ultimately has to deal with the dentists who think I'll bite their heads off, ask to speak to their manager, and drop trou over a sandbox the state mandates they keep in the middle of the room, I'm... not in the room when this BS gets concocted, or discussed, or shared in Minions meme some film critic sees and imitates to try and be relatable and relevant. Can someone else start grabbing all these people by the lapels and shake them and shout questions about how they can be this stupid, maybe invite them back to reality for me?

OK I guess I'm talking about this loser a little. In the screenshot that is, the person posting this seems perfectly fine. First though I kinda want to highlight the one tag originally on here and this first comment because those are pretty relevant:

Anyway, story time. One of the less fun things about me is I find myself pretty regularly asking people around me if they could please stop CONSTANTLY ambushing me with screenshots of the social media feeds of far right creeps who have a history of targeting me, specifically, for years. In particular, this applies to the one nazi/pedophila-advocate who changed his last name to something long long and greek to encourage people making fun of him to get maybe-racist while doing so (who mercifully does seem to have fallen off people's radar), the former British TV writer who prior to becoming a cartoon villain petitioning the government to defund a children's charity because transphobia ate his brain that badly spent something like a year or two clumsily trying to get into my pants and those of several other trans women, and this loser here.

Just about a decade ago, when neo-nazis were really starting to kick it into high gear against trans people and were really all in with that one twitter hashtag I don't want to mention while talking about this and would prefer nobody reblogging this go and add, I and a couple other trans gals ended up forming this little support group for people who were really in the thick of dealing with that hate mob and needed some friendly voices. Since we were all being really heavily stalked, we had a policy that nobody else be invited in without the unanimous consent of everyone in the group. That policy was ultimately pretty short lived, because eventually we threw an invite to someone who was a bit of a celebrity victim of this crap, who just sort of decided that notoriety came with special privilege and authority, and was also kind of the worst judge of character I've ever met. Said person immediately tossed invites to a number of other people they considered good people, which included a few shady characters who have since become fairly notorious, most notably, the scumbag in the screenshot above.

The real kicker of course was being told quite some time later that he was considered "good people" worth inviting to the support group of mostly-pseudonymous-trans-women dealing with murderous nazi stalkers in spite of knowing that he wrote a high school essay about how much he loved and respected Hitler. While he was at the time half-assedly doing the anti-fascist thing in an effort to ride the coattails of our celebrity member, he was also absolutely spying on the rest of us, and while he didn't ever get anything out of it (this being MOSTLY a group of very good eggs and all... not in that sense but come to think yes also in that sense), he sure as hell did his pathetic best to absolutely ruin the lives of everyone who was in there legitimately for years after.

So, yeah, I am really not a fan of seeing his face, because it reminds me of all the awful things he did to me, and various other people I'm still quite fond of, and ALSO because it reminds me of this former friend of mine who invited him in and put everyone's lives at risk... and the various other things that former friend did to wreck people's lives, like bringing some other terrible and dangerous people into our lives, and... kind of skipping town with a rather large amount of money that was meant to be shared around. Lot of ugly history.

But again, since we're on the subject, yeah guy's a really weird pathetic idiot. Before he became like... a professional licker of Elon Musk's boots or whatever the hell is going on there, he was trying to make a living in a managerial position at some would-be videogame news site, but couldn't work out how to maintain employees who came to him with demands like "I would prefer not to be stalked and sexually harassed by coworkers" and "I would like to actually be paid for writing articles for your for-profit website." He rather famously had a very public saga about sleeping in a bed filled with thousands of ants and failing to understand people's advice to solve this problem by not having food on it. In the brief period I was forced to interact with him on a daily basis, he needed to have the most basic things explained to him on a daily basis. Like I'm not kidding about not knowing what to do about an employee being sexually harassed. He was asking everyone he knew how to make her be quiet about that "talk to and/or fire the people harassing her" was a completely alien concept to him. And yes, I do believe he in fact does not know basic math and somehow blames this like all his other problems on trans people.

And I can also confirm that yes, he and a lot of other "big names" in right wing spaces actually does make living off of saying the most profoundly stupid things in public. People actively maintain accounts on the weird nazi site he posts these things on and follow him to screenshot this stuff and/or confirm it's real. The cargo culty thoughts on popularity those crowds have makes him a Big Deal to... well Elon Musk apparently, and whoever's paying him for opinions lately. He lives on that, and bends people's ears with that. So yeah, while usually the whole "don't feed the trolls" thing is BS and an excuse to blame victims for the behavior of their abusers and such, in this one specific case, no really, there is, via convoluted means, some real benefit to be had for just completely ignoring this particular piece of human garbage. Particularly for me, a seriously traumatized trans woman who otherwise keeps having her PTSD triggered by people pointing and laughing at this nazi clown instead of a plethora of available non-nazi clowns.

PEMDAS is a conspiracy according to far-right idiot and friend of Elon Musk.

Can we talk for a bit about these pathetic baby crib trucks?

I'm sorry I just have to ramble on a bit here because I am just getting so damn sick of getting stuck behind these giant cribs for adult babies consistently driving 10 mph under the speed limit and forcing me to imagine the sniveling snot-nosed wimps behind the wheel who I guess are just too scared of being on the big scary road to drive anywhere in an actual vehicle for adults.

This isn't exactly a new problem. Doing some quick research, the trend towards American dealerships talking snot-nosed little wimps into buying giant ugly pieces of garbage that look like the sort of chunky plastic lumps you'd give a toddler to play with goes all the way back to the mid-1970s when a gas shortage lead to new regulations that cars be designed to get halfway decent mileage, and manufacturers who just couldn't be bothered started exploiting a loophole where you can still be terribly inefficient if you're big enough to technically classify as a light truck instead of a car.

That kind of got us onto this path towards everything on an American road being stupidly big and ugly as people continue to fail to close the damn loophole and force people to sell actually decent and useful vehicles to Americans instead of these big dumb toys. I hate how stupidly big my car is, but at least it's a car. It gets decent mileage. It's nice and low to the ground so I can just open a door and sit down without having to climb up a latter and won't flip over if I drive over a bridge on a windy day, and I'm not super thrilled by how much interior space it would normally waste, but did pick it specifically because I'm some kind of giant and actually need exactly this much headroom to properly fit. Still it's ridiculously huge compared to a proper sexy little car like I'd want if I had infinite money and wasn't a giant.

I mean that or one of those rad little City Cars where it's just you, the wheels, and a panoramic view, and they crunch up when you park'em so they take no space and you can just stand up and stroll right out. Those are also kinda sexy. Just nothing between you and the road, and they've gotta just turn on a dime, right?

But anyway, I don't have one of these, I have one of these big ugly American cars... and even that gets positively dwarfed by these big baby cribs on wheels. Really just look at these stupid things.

These things are completely worthless as actual trucks, just to get in front of anyone getting ready to try and rationalize them. The sad little wimps who drive these jack them up on like monster truck tires, I guess because they're too scared they're going to hurt themselves by crashing these absurdly bloated pieces of crap and want to make sure most of the impact goes to those big squishy wheels and not the crib itself. That leaves the bed too high off the ground to actually toss stuff into it and lean in to strap it down... and then I guess to hide the fact that they're never actually hauling anything they build up the sides and the tailgate extra tall on top of that so the average adult standing to the side can't even see over the edge and take in that big bed full of air that needs hauling from the baby's house in the suburbs to their desk job in one of these. And the new trend seems to be making them extra wide too, I guess to try and convince people that no they've totally got like a whole swimming pool back there, or maybe an actual truck, or a trampoline or something. And sometimes I guess to make sure that other sad little babies driving giant cribs on wheels also can't see how there's nothing back there, they by these aftermarket "caps" so they can pretend their big baby toy is a bus or something instead of a truck, and that there's even more magical oats for their ponies or whatever back there. Maybe they're hauling unicorns!

This one's an extra funny example because look it's got these little indentations like other toy trucks, where you're supposed to put the little window stickers on that make it look like there's read stuff in there and it's not a hollow plastic shell. I guess this little boy was in too much of a hurry to go play outside to let his mommy stick them on, or maybe they washed off because he left it out in the rain.

And as you may notice from that last photo in particular, with the fake windows, the common thread of all these things we do to the cribs these babies are in to make them feel more secure is that all of it makes it impossible to actually see anything if you're inside of one of these things. Or behind one. Or to the side.

Like, there are real vehicles, for adults, that have similar vision issues. Emergency service vehicles, buses, actual freight-hauling trucks... and we have a lot of systems in place to compensate for the vision problems. There's extra training, there's extra mirrors and sensors, there's big warning lights and sirens, especially when they need to turn or back up, sometimes dedicated roads without any normal traffic on them so nobody has to deal with the obvious hazard they pose. But because we just really do not properly enforce the laws on safety standards, we let large babies sit in their high chairs and steer their big dumb toys into actual streets, completely obstructing everyone's view of signs, lights, and side streets, and we even let them onto highways, where there are parallel lanes of traffic splitting and merging where actual adults need to look around, speeding up, slowing down, and using signals to safely weave around each other, and now we all just need to live with the extra headache of dealing with these giant baby cribs drifting along doing 40 in a 65 because there's a scared baby behind the wheel who can't even see the other cars on the road, since all they have in their vision cone is this.

Honestly, I'm mostly just venting here. I would, seriously, love to see a serious legal crackdown that pulls these ugly pieces of garbage off the roads and out of dealerships, but for now I'd just like to see people spread this around and explain to the adult sized babies in their lives what their parents should have, that they aren't supposed to play with their toys in the road, and need to keep them in their back yards where it's safe.

another reminder to stop buying/watching/reading anything JK Rowling associated

Thinking About How We Talk

This is one of those subjects I bring up now and then where it feels like I'm lighting a match to inspect some powder kegs. So right up front let me say this is NOT going to be a post where I'm going to actively police the language you use, talk at all about George Orwell, or be some sort older out of touch person who just doesn't understand how younger generations talk. This is all about encouraging personal reflection, considering word choices, inoculating yourself against nasty rhetorical tactics, and history lessons here.

And before I do the whole cut thing I also want to get into a real obvious example of why all this is important. In the last couple of years, people have finally been catching up to this, but for the vast majority of my life, everyone was bafflingly cool with calling the extremists with such a hard-core anti-abortion stance they'd gleefully push policies where people were forced into definitely-a-stillbirth situation which additionally posed a serious risk to their lives and engaged in full on terrorism against people performing abortions or even just potentially pointing people towards the right resources, in a full on bombs and mass shootings in doctor's offices sort of way. And aside from just the disgusting hypocrisy involved in that, this language control was actually effective enough that a huge number of people with pretty reasonable thoughts like "well obviously I don't have a say in what other people do, but I think if I ended up pregnant, even if it wasn't a planned thing, I'd go ahead and have that baby" thought that that meant they were "pro-life" and shouldn't oppose people claiming to be such. That's the sort of terrible situation you get when you just kinda roll with the language shifts total monsters push for.

That's a real grim note to start this off on, so let me dial it back a little. As you may or may not know, just about 10 years ago now, my life went down kind of a weird road where I suddenly found myself spending basically all my time monitoring and combating really hardcore far right extremist groups and their various pushes to mainstream their garbage. The most prominent example of this was the whole Gamergate thing, and the less-publicized string of similar 4chan "ops" where a bunch of creeps from this weird insular pile of misanthropic nazis would do their best to disguise themselves as normal functioning human beings and subtley spread their hateful crap. This was obviously awful in so many ways, but on a certain level it was kind of hilarious because the vast majority of these people were just completely incapable of speaking like normal human beings. They'd be pretending to be concerned housewives or black civil rights activists but still pepper everything with 4chan post signifiers, talking about "cucks" and "fags" and doing the whole bit of ">be me >walk into a walmart >see some SJW talking about mysoggyknees >puke" and whatnot. You could spot them from miles away and see right through them. TERFs of course still work on this level, trying to talk to normal people and rambling about "TIMs" and "large gametes" and "adult human females" and all that.

Now eventually, by and large, they've gotten steadily better at masking this crap. There's some terms and typing styles that have generally dropped off, there's a lot of weird coded phrases they use now that couple plausibly come from the mouths of normal people, but more than anything else, they made this HUGE push years back to infest the hell out of youtube and other websites with a lot of unattended impressionable children. They'd do things like ramble about Minecraft and... whatever else it was 12 year olds were really into around 2015 or so, and subtly pepper in their weird rhetoric, terminology, and conspiracy theories, trying to indoctrinate kids too young to know better, and frankly they made pretty good inroads. I don't know that they were super effective at turning that many kids into full on nazis, but they did a great job of normalizing a bunch of jargon and they at least messed with kids values enough for them to age into the sort of witch-hunting weirdos you see all over Tumblr here just itching to bun people at the stake for being too sex positive or whatever other weird arbitrary reason.

Now, I don't like this because I can no longer look at someone talking about "Chads" and "cucking" and such and know without the slightest doubt that that's one of those hardcore fascist creeps talking, which bugs me but, ow well, damage done. But also, you know, words mean things. You really can influence someone's thought patterns by encouraging trends in their vocabularies. Cults know this, that's why they're so keen on actually policing the hell out of how members talk, getting them to only express certain concepts in certain ways and all, so they don't ever question certain baseline assumptions and whatnot. And that still applies when you freely choose to adopt certain language.

This isn't always a huge problem. Hardcore nazis talk about "Chads" all the time as part of this super messed up offshoot of pickup artistry where there are inherently superior "Chads" that whatever woman you're hoping to manipulate into banging you are always going to pick over you, the wannabe pickup artist loser, because ultimately women are awful contemptible things incapable of seeing your best qualities, and when you go down that rabbit hole far enough people push you into going on killing sprees in hope of the government being brought to their knees and forcing women to ignore their Chad preference and date people like you under penalty of imprisonment or something. Super messed up, but as that one got mainstreamed it seems to have distorted a bit into a general (and maybe even gender neutral) term for someone cool you should try to emulate.

Then you have terms like "cuck" getting mainstreamed. That's a word that just DID NOT EXIST in the popular consciousness until about a decade ago. It was a thing previously, but only in specialized porn circles. It's short of "cuckold," this odd antiquated term, where you have this specific scenario where some white guy walks in on his wife or girlfriend having sex with a particularly physically impressive black man, and just kind of blubbers impotently as she brags about how impressive the new guy is. I assume it caught on with the general public because ha ha, the nazis are identifying with this loser in this obscure porn fetish. Meanwhile for the nazis this is total propaganda for all their garbage about "the great replacement theory" and general threat posed by black men and the concept of women being property to be defended and all that crap, and like... that's just inherently what the concept is here? You can't deploy "cuck" as an insult without at least SOME buy-in to, at the very least, some of that idea of women showing any sort of sexual interest in other people is a sign of failure on behalf of some guy who on at leas some level owns them and needs to defend their property from others and that's just a really messed up world view to enforce? Particularly when you're doing so as an alternative to just calling some pathetic loser a pathetic loser, or any number of other things that get that same point across.

Worse than that though? Cringe. To cringe is to physically recoil in instinctive disgust as an involuntary reaction to something profoundly terrifying or unpleasant. Like opening the door to a closet and having a wall of maggots suddenly collapse down from behind it or something. Fascists love to use this to describe the various sorts of human beings they intensely dislike and want to exterminate. "I can't articulate just what it is about just seeing this queer person existing in public that makes me shudder in revulsion, and that's cool because I love not thinking about my reactions and just acting on them" basically. And when someone who isn't a fascist refers to someone or something as "cringe" they... also mean it in exactly that fashion. The whole concept behind turning the word into an adjective like this is to externalize personal feelings of disgust and turn them into some objective flaw in the source, rather than analyze why you feel that way. It's really just not a concept you should have ANY term for, let alone this specific one. Like it's fine to be disgusted by someone, but you should always be able to clearly articulate why you feel that way. Like, say, "ugh, look at these disgusting losers who set up a whole message board just to stalk a bunch of random queer people. Could you ever imagine having such an inability to find joy in anything that that would seem like the best way to spend your time?" That's totally fine. But if you're ever in a situation where you're disgusted by someone and can't put a finger on why? There's some chance you're being groomed into irrationally hating people over some signifier they're a member of a group hate groups want wiped out. So you know, maybe strongly consider just dropping that one from your vocabulary?

Or how about the real big obvious one, "woke?" I feel like out of all of these, this is the one people are most likely to toss around without really thinking about what it actually means. So history lesson! Back in 2014 there was this absolutely horrific incident where a cop absolutely brutally murdered a child who was walking down the street in Ferguson, Missouri. Shot him six times, in front of a good number of witnesses. When questioned on it spouted off some absolutely WILD BS about him having superpowers, being a demon, and "bulking up" when shot. These are actual quotes, I want to be clear. Not only did he face no actual repercussions for this, he wasn't even charged with a crime, and there was a rather profoundly large number of people in law enforcement lining up to back up this murderer's story that he absolutely had to completely unload his gun into an unarmed child with hands over his head in the head to keep him from using his demonic super strength to tear him limb from limb.

Being such an astonishingly clear cut example of... this thing that cops are constantly doing to black children all over the country and all, there was a good deal of press coverage and protesting over this, and for a VERY brief period, maybe a month or two? People who were on the scene being terrorized by shockingly militarized police while they tried to hold candlelight vigils for this murdered child were referring to themselves as "woke." As in "this incident woke me up to the fact that racist cops really do have complete institutional protection any time they feel like straight up murdering an innocent child like this." Right wing monsters didn't quite immediately co-opt the term. There was a bit of workshopping from the more media savvy/TV show hosting far right types, particularly this whole embarrassing effort to try and make "black lives matter" sound in some way threatening, before they eventually settled on making "woke" into this slur that definitely and specifically does refer to "anyone who objects to police being allowed to murder innocent black children without fear of consequence" but is obfuscated enough to have some plausible deniability.

Now, I'll admit there may have been a bit of linguistic drift amongst the far right with the specific definition of the term. The edges may have blurred some on who it can be applied to, since we are talking about a crowd who relies pretty heavily on growth through emotional appeal, frowns on self-reflection, flattens terminology, and really prefer vague blanket catch-alls to targeting specific minorities because it's just easier that way. The spirit behind it has never changed at all though. It's still a declaration of seething hate and a demand for a general social status quo where it's basically OK for state agents to murder the sort of people they consider to be undesirable.

How about the usage of the term amongst people who aren't complete monsters? Well, the people who were originally self-describing themselves as "woke" stopped using it pretty damn quick, I think around the second time one of them was found with a fatal bullet wound in his chest, in his car, which was set on fire. As in more than one person protesting the whole police murdering innocent people deal was murdered in this specific ritualistic way. Serious stuff went down in Ferguson and we really should talk about it more. Then though, more recently, there are a hell of a lot of people you would maybe think should know much better who are... also tossing the word "woke" around in a sneering slur-adjacent fashion? Sometimes it's in this vague mocking contempt sort of way like "ooh, I guess this movie that just came out is 'woke' right, because there's a black woman as a major character?" Maybe more often though it's in some context of throwing people under the bus? Like, "hey, I consider myself left wing, but I'm not part of that woke crowd!" Which, you know, that's just a whole category of crap people say that should raise a red flag that they're trying to talk fascists into considering them good people before we even get into how you're actually saying you're OK with cops murdering innocent children. Again, I'm not saying you HAVE to immediately completely drop this term from your personal vocabulary, but, you know, I'd really appreciate it if you put some thought into it and whether there's a good reason you shouldn't?

For that matter, it's worth a bit of examination on how the hell this is even an issue in the first place? Like, how do people who aren't just the absolute worst pieces of human garbage constantly getting into a positon where they're talking like creeps making posts on obscure insular hate sites a decade ago? I'm pretty confident guessing it more or less always starts off with some sort of attempt at mockery. Maybe a few instances of trying to talk to people on their own level. And this all almost certainly comes from some kind of weird elitist viewpoint where people end up thinking far right monsters talk the way they do because they're stupid, unlike them, sophisticated well-educated people with refined sensibilities and a snappy sense of humor and wordplay or something.

Now... I'm not going to say that hardcore nazis AREN'T breath-takingly stupid. You have to be a pathetic loser with an extreme inferiority complex to sign up, and once you do you marinate in an echo chamber of propaganda slogans and extremely discouraged from ever taking time to really think about what you're doing or questioning anything you're told and all. That's going to dull your wit quite a bit. But here's the thing. Let's picture someone who just sits in a little shack somewhere who never talks to anyone, never reads, never thinks about anything of any sort to any degree except for forging axe-heads. He's got a forge in there, he was trained in how to do this one specific thing, it's the only thing he does, and he does it all day every day. Odds are pretty good you could beat this guy handily at any sort of battle of wits, trivia contest, philosophical discussion on the nature of humanity, etc. But I think we could all agree that it would be incredibly stupid of you to assume you could forge a better axe than this guy.

Fascists are like this, but instead of forging axe heads, the one thing they do at the expense of everything else is normalizing extreme bigotry. You're not going to beat them at the game of screwing with norms and language usage. You're not going to "own" them by using the terminology they use. You're going to internalize that hateful crap to SOME degree and poison your own thinking with it. Don't ever let them define any terms or otherwise control a conversation. Don't ever assume out of hand you have a shared understanding of what words mean with them. Really try to avoid ever speaking to them at all.

And hey, if you do make it a point like I do of being actively mindful to never use the same vocabulary as fascist pieces of garbage, and get into it with people around you who do, aside from everything else it makes it damn near impossible for any sort of cryptofascists to get a foothold trying to recruit you or mess with you (by which I mean nazis trying to hide that they're nazis not nazis trying to get you into NFTs or whatever but honestly WOW is there a lot of overlap).

All of this being said of course, I again remind you, hey, don't turn into some weird purity purging creep policing people's language. This isn't exactly an adjacent concept to what I'm talking about here. There's a pretty wide gulf. But just in case, I'm emphasizing it here. I've seen people do weird witch hunts over things like someone praising a fictional character as a good representation of someone on the autism spectrum or whatever and not liking the specific language they used to do so. Or like, hell, do I need to get into a whole sidetrack about the big campaign from TERFs to try and convince people that the word queer is a slur and try to ban queer people off sites like this one here for using it? Yeah don't have any part in that sort of crap. Just try to personally not parrot crap fascists say is all I'm getting at here.

There is a long, LONG history of bigots pointing at women of color doing well in various athletic fields, screaming about how they're probably secretly men, and demanding people "check" in as humiliating and invasive a way as possible. As people started objecting to... you know, dragging women down off podiums and shoving metal rods up inside them to prove that coming from various countries in Asia and Africa does not, in fact, cause a woman to "not count," there's been an uptick in this sort of BS making up new arbitrary hormone level tests specifically crafted to force that particular woman to either retire or start taking a medication that's going to potentially cause her some really serious health problems to satisfy the arbitrary BS.

I want to make it clear too that this isn't really transphobic BS doing splash damage to cis women of color, either. This basically started immediately after the governing bodies for various sports were told they could no longer openly racially discriminate, I'm not aware of any white woman even getting tested for crap like this, and while the wording of it all suggests its an anti-trans thing, it doesn't tend to hit us, mainly because it only starts coming up when someone is winning, and despite all the scaremongering, the only trans woman I'm aware of to ever excel in one of these events is Caitlyn Jenner, who competed in the men's division, several decades before coming out and transitioning. We DO totally get discriminated against too, but it's this whole other level of random arbitrary on the spot BS getting deployed to keep us from even like, playing soccer in middle school or whatever because the very sight of us on a field will give other small children heart attacks from fear or whatever random things terrible people use to rationalize blatant discrimination.

Wait... Wait wait wait, let me understand something.

So for this cisgender woman with naturally high testosterone (and/or an intersex condition, I do not know her specific condition and it's honestly none of my business) has to be be forced to take the same testosterone suppressing medications that these same competitive regulatory committee said wasn't good enough to suppress trans women's testosterone to allow them to compete in women's sports.

If she has naturally high testosterone, similar to that that trans women experience in their lives pre-transition then wouldn't she have the same advantages that a trans woman supposedly inherently has and can not be corrected with said testosterone suppression?

Like, no one should have to undergo forced medical treatment to be able to compete or to make it "fair" for their competition. Other athletes have all kinds of natural advantages, like Michael Phelps having an abnormal wingspan and larger lungs and heart. In fact, every high level athlete has some kind of physical advantage, that's how they're such high level athletes. You think the people they beat out for their spots just, what, didn't work as hard? Didn't grab those bootstraps tight enough? Fuck no.

Racism, intersexism, and transphobia are all linked, and this case is maybe the most glaringly obvious one.

So this year it just so happens that March 31st is also the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, giving us some sort of holiday double event.

So like... praise unto the great bunny that hatches all the eggs, and may you introduce someone to The Matrix Resurrections?

Also I'm just attaching this to a re-posting of the one post of mine that's been shared around more than anything else I've ever put on this blog, you know, in case someone missed it or something.

Let’s talk about how Ranma is trans, and not as a metaphor.

Yesterday, I had a quick, joking exchange with a friend, riffing off the general premise that the protagonist of the classic manga series Ranma ½ is a trans girl.Today I woke up to a slew of hateful, low-effort comments (the C-word is always a weird one to throw at a trans woman), largely objecting to this premise, so, I’m going to sit down now and show my work.

I was actually going to do this either way, honestly. Reading Ranma ½ and indignantly shouting “in what sense is this a ‘curse!?’“ is a pretty significant touchstone for damn near every trans girl born after 1970 or so.

Keep reading

The can seems to have been successfully kicked down the road for another month, barely. Still only have $500 in change in patreon pledges so I'm going to be $600 short again for May, as it stands, but I have a roof over my head for next month. One day at a time and all that.

I really, really hate begging like this but... this is my Patreon. A week ago it was set for me to just barely mostly cover my rent for next month. A couple people just did that thing where they cancel payments right at the end of the month, and I just suddenly dropped down to $600 shy of my rent. I have no savings. I have nobody I can turn to. I genuinely have no way to survive unless people see this and throw something at me in the next uh... 2 or 3 days I think? Otherwise I literally can't keep living.

I really, really hate begging like this but... this is my Patreon. A week ago it was set for me to just barely mostly cover my rent for next month. A couple people just did that thing where they cancel payments right at the end of the month, and I just suddenly dropped down to $600 shy of my rent. I have no savings. I have nobody I can turn to. I genuinely have no way to survive unless people see this and throw something at me in the next uh... 2 or 3 days I think? Otherwise I literally can't keep living.

Another one of those posts making my mental health your problem if you read it.

I am in an odd spot right now. On the one hand, I actually made a huge breakthrough with the whole designing my own controller/console thing, and I think all that's keeping me from making a prototype is needing a set of calipers for like $20, and like another $20 to get some PCBs made (and ideally also a proper multimeter/oscilloscope, probably a soldering setup, but again, cheap). Problem is, $20 is a pretty damn insurmountable barrier right now. I'll get into that and some other things below the fold here.

I don't know if I've mentioned it recently, but I have been in an increasingly scary financial situation for several years now. I had a decent run for a few years in there, but the whole thing where the site you have to be on to be a freelance writer getting bought out wholesale by an idiot who's desperate to please a particular neo-nazi with a weird personal interest in bringing me down and the general cumulative effort of various other stalkers is keeping me from getting any other sort of work anywhere. My patreon's kinda flatlined because the people who were paying into it were doing so to get my thoughts on that site, never came to this one. I've been working really hard on the whole streaming things on Twitch thing which would theoretically help if the audience wasn't in the single digits.

And now I've been having an increasing amount of surprise issues with the social security office losing records, forgetting to replace them, and just cutting me off from benefits I really rely on... while my pharmacy just isn't stocking stuff I kinda need to live. So that's not great. I have less than $100 right now. I'm really getting sick of having to panic and beg my way through half of every month to keep my rent paid and I'm getting kinda loopy trying to ration what food I can get out. Lot of "this one can of soup and nothing else" days here.

And then uh... well, I don't want to get into the specifics of it, but my best friend dropped off the face of the earth, my cat died, and in the one corner of the internet I still felt safe, yesterday on learning that a certain subject is... upsetting to me in a life-endangering sort of way just started gleefully hammering on about it, for basically a full 24 hours, specifically addressing me. So... I guess I can just never go back there again. So I am... very alone right now,and it's seeming increasingly unlikely I'll be able to survive like this.

A human rights crisis that demands your attention.

As always, I recommend following Erin Reed's Substack for updates on transgender legislation. She's a journalist focused on tracking U.S. trans laws and politics.

Another good beginning point for getting involved is locating your state's local Equality Federation organization, who are probably tracking these bills and carpooling to state capitols to testify against them.

Most importantly, open your homes and wallets for those fleeing their homes or stockpiling medication.

ID available in alt text and below the cut.

ID begins. A cartoony comic that is primarily black and white. The first panel shows a pie graph with five sections. Each section has a drawing of a different person in it. Two of the sections are highlighted in orange, and the people in those sections are sad. The text reads: as of March 2024, 38% of American trans youth live in a place where our basic healthcare is illegal. That’s 23 of 50 U.S. states. Millions of people are being forcibly detransitioned by the government. Statistic from the LGBT Movement Advancement Project, March 7th, 2024.

Panel two. A drawing of the author, shirtless, wiping his face with a towel over a sink. He has body hair and top surgery scars. The text reads: It’s been a year since the clinic where I received care was forcibly shuttered by the far-right state government. If I had been a few years younger, I would never have been able to access the care that allowed me to blossom. The grief and fear is constant.

Panel three is split into two panels. On the left, a hand holds a smartphone on which an article is displayed. The article is titled: U.S. International Refugee Crisis: 130-260k Trans People Have Already Fled”. The right panel shows a laptop on which an article is displayed. This article is titled: Some Trans Kids Are Being Forced To Flee America For Their Safety. The comic text reads: This is a crisis.

Panel four shows a map of U.S. states. 23 of them, all of which are in the South and Midwest, are colored orange, and in these states, gender-affirming care for minors is illegal. This map is via the LGBT Movement Advancement Project. The text reads: As a holdover from preserving slavery, each state essentially operates as a country and gets to make its own laws. If Texas was a country, it would be the world’s 38th most populous. This month, Texas tried to demand the names and addresses of its trans kids.

Panel five. A drawing of Joey, the author, a man with short hair, wearing a sweater and an N95 mask. His arms are crossed and he looks upset. The text reads: After moving north, when I talk about human rights horrors in red states, I always get the same responses. Two text bubbles read: Why don’t they just move? And: Everyone in red states should just die. Additional comic text reads: As if we don’t live everywhere.

Panel six. A fat woman with short, curly hair wears a backpack and holds a suitcase while holding the hand of her child, whose hair is held back in curly poofs. The child is also wearing a backpack, out of which peeks a teddy bear. The text reads: Regardless of ability to move (although “safe” states are increasingly expensive and inaccessible), you’re literally talking about internally displaced political refugees.

Panel seven. A drawing of a fat person with a mohawk, glasses, a vest, and necklace. They use a cane and are smiling. The text reads: To be clear, none of these bans are based in reality. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey, with 92,000 respondents, found that 98% of respondents were significantly happier due to hormonal replacement therapy. Via ustranssurvey.org. Released just last week, a study from Perth, Australia found that only 1% of their pediatric gender clinic patients went on to reidentify with their birth sex. Via Cavve et al, JAMA Pediatrics, March 4th, 2024.

Panel eight. A drawing of Joey wearing glasses, an N95 mask, and a professional button-up shirt. He carries a laptop. An arrow points to him and is labeled “straight up adult”. The text reads: And it’s not just about trans teens. This manufactured outrage has planned to ban adult care from the beginning. Some states have begun proposing laws to ban care up to age 26, which would cut me off after 6.5 years on hormones. An article headline by Erin Reed is pasted at the bottom of the panel. The headline reads: Ohio, Michigan Republicans In Released Audio: Endgame Is To Ban Trans Care For Everyone.

Panel nine. Joey as a kid with jaw-length hair kneels to tie his shoe. The text reads: As a trans child, the easiest thing I could do was be authentically me. Will you not preserve this joy for others? Published March 10, 2024. End ID.

I wish I didn't know that Fallon Fox actually had a middling career in women's MMA and lost to the only fighter she went up against that had a positive win/loss record.

I wish I didn't know that orbital rim fractures are one of the most common injuries in MMA.

I wish I didn't know that Veronica Ivy's world record was specifically set in the 35-39 age bracket.

I wish I didn't know that her record was beaten three months later by a cis woman.

I wish I didn't know that those two trans girls in Connecticut bombed at regionals, and that the only reason they broke so many records at their school is because the school was severely lagging behind the rest of the state.

I wish I didn't know Lia Thomas' name.

I wish I lived in a world where when my supposed "allies" saw headlines that say "trans woman crushes a woman's skull in mma" that they didn't respond with "okay well maybe the bigots have a point this time".

Maybe, if they didn't always respond that way, I wouldn't have to know half of the things I know about other trans women athletes.

Maybe they would stop seeing women like me as a problem to be solved.

Damn that would be nice.

Not just "a trans care institution." It was THE place in the world for serious research on trans people and the medical needs thereof. There were a bunch of studies housed there and only there that we're still having to reproduce. And of course as others often point out, the fact that the founder of the institute was Jewish was one of those big conspiracy theory cornerstones. Gotta get rid of the Jews because look they're over here turning our proud German men into women as part of some dastardly plot and all. A connection the people in the video linked above by the way are still totally trying to make and strengthen. You have to get deeper into the weeds than usual, but they've got all sorts of "theories" about Jewish billionaires funding trans causes and "the people who control the banks" hiring trans people to work at them. It's a whole thing.

And just to get ahead of the next step in this conversation, yes, "literally friends with known Nazis" means actual Nazis. The same general tactic of scoffing at the idea of trans holocaust victims leads to Nazis popping out of the woodwork to shout "you call everyone you don't like a Nazi!" which has been reliable enough for them in giving people pause they'll pop up and shout it at people in response to statements like "racism is rampant amongst police" or "here's a historical account of something the SS did." It's kind of hilarious how sloppy they get, but the point of that tactic is to make you read something like the above and assume we are not in fact literally saying that Rowling rubs elbows with people who openly self-identify as Nazis, toss around swastika imagery, directly quote Hitler every chance they get, etc. etc.

Is it weird that someone who got famous for writing children's books is so cartoonishly evil? Yeah. Facts are facts though.

if you're just joining us, george takei is having to educate jk rowling on holocaust denial

Is it possible to have a conversation about Trans Lifeline that isn't extremely uncomfortable?

This is, for quite a few reasons, one of those subjects it's really hard to even bring up, but you know, sometimes these things need talking about. I'm not planning to go too dark here but you know, content warning all the same.

So... Trans Lifeline is a charity organization which, on paper, primarily runs a crisis hotline explicitly for trans people, with a volunteer staff of other trans people, and on the side, dolling out small amounts of cash to people trying to get legal name and gender changes straightened out. And that's a great thing for people to set out to do. Also just getting this out there, many years ago now I did avail myself of both those services. Didn't actually end up needing the $50 or so for the name change formalizing (I'm poor enough that the probate court just waived the fee turned out), and I don't suppose I can complain about the hotline service, because while on the one hand, I'm pretty sure I was talking to someone very much out of their depth, but you know, someone answered, talked, and hey I'm still here right?

Really, that's the sort of thing that's just inherently selfless and important enough you'd have to be some kind of utterly horrible person to ever go and criticize, right? Which... kinda makes me horrible right now. See, as mentioned, they helped me out some years ago, but there's kind of an emphasis on the years ago part of that. I've had plenty of cause over the years to pass info on them to people, both the number and the grant program, and again not to get too dark but I've had reason to personally call myself here and there, lack of any sort of support network and all, and this is partially just anecdotal, but I don't know that I've actually ever heard of anyone getting in touch with anyone there in like... the past 5 years? Maybe 6?

I have been told they just will not do the grant thing for people in Canada despite advertising themselves as serving both Canada and the U.S. Which is a shame because my understanding is it's a much more painful process there (it's absurdly easy in the U.S. generally speaking, quit psyching yourselves out, go to probate court, ask for a form, then after there's another at the post office). And for quite some time now, anyone attempting to call that I've heard of hasn't reached a live person, and hasn't even been put on hold. You get a recording. The recording says everyone is busy, and their hours are from 8 AM to 2 PM Pacific time, and then the call disconnects. Which still seems to be the case when you do call in that range... and also those hours don't match what's listed on their site. And the numbers they advertise on their front page don't seen to have risen since people first really became aware of them and they started getting flooded.

And like... I'm really not trying to stir anything up here, or say they suck or something. The work they do is super important and takes a horrible emotional toll on the people doing it. I know. I've spent dozens if not hundreds of nights talking trans people down from rather immediate self-destructive thoughts, both people I knew and people I didn't. This was my whole thing a decade ago. I also have experience being on the ground floor of a charity organization that flamed out in a hurry, and which never made any sort of statement indicating it'd completely shut down, nor took down the page (to be clear- I never saw a dime of that money, and did what I personally could to explain that). My point is, I get it, stuff is hard to keep going, and hard to admit you aren't keeping going.

I'm also not putting forward the idea that TLL has secretly shut down here, but they do seem to have... severely retracted? Again, when they first got started, they were dealing with call volumes and volunteer counts where you'd maybe spend an hour on hold before getting through to someone, but you could call at the sort of times where someone is going to feel the need to call such a hotline. Now you've got this theoretical short window like, around lunchtime/early afternoon. And they close entirely on weekends apparently. And shut down for the whole back half of December, as I just look at these recent announcements on their blog. And like... I can understand being stretched thin, I'm sympathetic, but I'm also looking at this from the perspective of the people in crisis, you know?

I would argue that a crisis hotline not existing to be called at all would be preferable to reaching a point where you're calling one, and having a prerecorded message tell you they can't help and hanging up. That is THE worst thing you can hear in that position. Crisis hotlines are already something people generally only turn to as a last result when there is absolutely nobody else they can flag down to talk to in an emotionally charged moment. You're not going in expecting any sort of magical fix to your problems, just someone, even if it's an overworked stranger, who will listen and respond.

So... why am I getting into all this? Well, besides it being the 10 year anniversary of like... all my major trauma and accordingly just being in this morbid sorta headspace, I see people recommending that people call TLL all the time. People throw the number out when discussing self-destructive thoughts broadly, when they see someone directly in a crisis situation rather than try and talk them through things personally, and it's kinda like... THE organization people look to when they feel upset about the plight of trans people and want to do some charity fundraising.

It's already just bleak as hell that when people feel bad for trans people and want to throw money around, they aren't helping people get away from abusive parents, or cover medical costs, or help people replace all their clothes, or inviting people whose social circles just shrank to nothing or next to out to see movies or get dinner or anything like that, just pay people to talk to them when all of the above gets to be too much to deal with and they give up on life. But the hard reality here is, people do that, pat themselves on the back, and then when people do just collapse enough to need to make such calls, nobody picks up.

I don't really know what the fix for this is. Like I don't wanna say people need to just stop supporting TLL, because in theory they are still helping SOME people? And like, hey, I think it's an all trans staff, so you're helping at least a handful of us get by if nothing else... but it's like hearing about a bunch of people dying of thirst and the best fix anyone has is dumping buckets of water into an extremely leaky barrel and encouraging people to try and get there before it all drains out, you know? There's really a whole slew of related problems here, and I don't really see any of them getting fixed until we just kinda collectively admit that the way things stand right now, we've got an emergency plan that's just straight up not working, and brainstorm from there.

All people are equal... well, except for Sally of course.

I walked in late on a conversation somewhere on civil rights somewhere and this one sentence jumped out at me somewhere in it: "Neurodivergent queer computer engineers aren't being chemically castrated by the state in my country anymore." I always feel guilty quoting people at random like this, particularly when I agree with the overall point they're arguing, but the specific wording here really struck me because, well, I'm a neurodivergent queer computer engineer and I was totally chemically castrated by the state in my country. Now I'm not sure what country the person saying this lives in, but I don't think its true of any of them.

From context, this seems to be specifically referencing Alan Turing, for reasons I assume you know or can easily look up, and that would suggest we're talking about the U.K. and WOW is that country not an exception here. If I recall correctly there's at least one other country that will full on accept refugees from the U.K. with how badly they're persecuting queer people. And like, yeah, obviously what we're invoking here is a law, at the time, in the place, where being gay was illegal and this one cool nerd who wrecked Nazis' stuff accepted "chemical castration" in lieu of a prison sentence for it, and what I'm thinking about are the hoops trans people have to jump through getting medical treatments they don't need or want to get proper legal recognition and protections, but that's not comparing apples and oranges, that's comparing like... apples and red apples.

I have a larger point than this, but I'm gonna need to take you down a quick rabbit hole with me. I was just about to start going off about how "chemical castration" is a particularly emotionally charged term for testosterone blocking medication, then launch into how those get pushed on trans women to access a lot of medical treatments and rights even when they actively don't want them, and frankly they have really awful side effects for anyone taking them, at least at that dosage, and the more I look into things the more support I see for the idea that we should maybe just give trans femmes various estrogens and trust that if their T levels are too high they'll come down just from that, without having to deal with a powerful diuretic that trashes energy levels and causes other issues. But I like to be accurate, so I double checked, and holy crap what they actually forced Alan Turing to take was diethylstilbestrol. Functionally speaking, that's synthetic form of estrogen which used to be what they'd give trans women (and menopause sufferers, and everyone else who takes it) instead of estradiol, but stopped because it was kind of an extra strength version with more serious side-effects. So turns out, and I'm sorry, there's really no other way to put this- They force-femmed Alan Turing. That's far worse than what I thought he was put through and what I thought he was put through as already pretty monstrous.

But yeah, point still stands. While there's plenty of trans people who can't or don't want to get HRT, for all sorts of reasons (it not working on them, health risks for some people, the point I was going to make about T blockers making people feel awful, potential sexual performance and/or fertility issues, that stuff ain't free, the only options being to push the hormone sliders to absolute extremes of testosterone or estrogens at the exclusion of the other, which doubly sucks if you're nonbinary and actively avoiding that very choice, etc.) it's generally a formal requirement to go pretty hardcore with it for years before you can have anything else done, whether we're talking about other sorts of medical care, or basic legal recognition. Actual literal surgical-removal-of-gonads castration is also required for any sort of legal rights in decidedly more places than you'd think, and plenty of trans people would very much like to keep those before even getting into what an ordeal that sort of surgical procedure is to even access, if it's even possible for a given person.

So yeah, if you're looking at stuff specifically from the perspective of a cis guy who's gay or bi (or from any of the various demographics who'd never be in such a situation) you can look at what happened to Alan Turing, and go "wow what horrible bigotry-soaked times we used to live in. I couldn't even imagine that happening now. We sure have made some progress." And OK, sure, but like... seriously I personally know at least a hundred neurodivergent queer computer engineers who don't have to imagine that happening now, because it's an actual fact of life we really do have to live with, on top of this whole other thing where the horrible effects this had on Turing's body and mind being basically what all trans people have to live with for significant percentages of our lives jumping through hoops for decades to access what we need to correct weird endocrine issues causing that crap to happen "naturally."

Now I'd hope most of us would agree that this crap is horrific and nobody should have to do with it, with this big cognitive divide between people who sincerely believe nobody HAS had to deal with it for decades, because that's what they learned in school, and people who deal with it, and would very much like to stop doing so. And this causes big huge arguments between people demanding basic equality and people who don't comprehend that we don't actually have it and think people must be asking for something else... but you know, there's also bigots. Who not only don't agree that nobody should have to do with it, but were in the room when the sort of laws that ruined Alan Turing's life were struck down (or not actually struck down but we all agree not to enforce them, for now, until they gain enough power to start doing so without too much fear of reprisal), specifically digging in their heels to get some sort of weird compromise where OK they'll give up on making some of these people's lives a living hell, but only if some exception for some smaller group specifically gets carved out so they still have someone to bully and firmer grounds to rationalize it.

And the thing of it is, this pattern is all over the whole civil rights movement. And you know, legislation in general really. OK, we can have government health care for the ultra-poor, but only if we can really screw over people in SOME income bracket, and also sabotage the whole thing with weird arbitrary restrictions. We can give people financial aid, but we have to make the application and renewal processes a full time hell job with a ton of triggers that get it pulled, including getting their feet partway under them financially.

There's been a whole thing in the past 5 years where people are shedding light on how it's not really true that women in the U.S. were categorically given to vote when the 19th amendment passed, pointing out various sub-groups who still couldn't vote, and what sort of legal reforms it took for each to be able (and honestly, there's still plenty who can't for various reasons). And then we have further conversations on how it's not like all these loopholes weren't being discussed within the suffrage movent. People were quite aware, but white supremacists and people who wanted not to alienate white supremacists pushed to exclude all these other people and focus the whole movement on white women specifically.

And hey, speaking of amendments that didn't actually do what we're all taught they did, you ever actually read the 13th? Here's the actual wording:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

That is a HELL of an exception in the middle there! Slavery is totally illegal... unless we send you to jail first. Oh by the way, we're hiring all these now out of work slave-catchers to work as cops and building more prisons than any other country in the world and having those prisoners do a bunch of manual labor for which the owners of those prisons get paid.

Anyway, the real obvious take away to all of this is that bigots will always cling to keeping some group of people they can kick around no matter what, and efforts to compromise with them will always involve sacrificing people to that sick desire, which is morally indefensible and should never been done.

The less obvious takeaway is that we all collectively turn a blind eye to that because we keep teaching these sanitized "arc of history bends ever towards freedom" success myths rather than be honest and point out how these exceptions get carved out. Pretty sure we'd be in a better place politically if we actually taught kids things like "so that slavery thing the civil war was fought over didn't even actually stop after that. It's still being done today even, because the horrifically evil pro-slavery managed to get this loophole carved out to keep doing it." Let's test my theory or something.