this is the next biggest city about half an hour from me and where I do my shopping and bruh, the state of illinois is gonna slap down a major lawsuit on these fucking clowns lmao bc illinois enshrined the right to abortion in their constitution in 2019 I believe. also, it wasn’t even the aldermen who wanted this!! it was a group from Texas. keep that shit down there u cunts

idk how conservatives and other bigots can ever think that more diversity = less safe of a community. the more queer, interracial, and muslim a community, the safer i feel. like how can you not see a whole load of people from different cultures and lives peacefully vibing in the same area minding their own buisness and NOT go 'oh thank god theres some level of tolerance here I can just be myself and not have to be constantly on edge all the time bc of it'

Nooo the trans allegory is also a Big one for me in that song, but I know not everybody is about Trans Aoki so I figured it went well with his disabilities regardless. And like yeah blah blah basic whatever, idc y'know, I'm here to enjoy life so imma listen to music people don't like 😂🤣

But you're so real for the trans Aoki thoughts okay.... I love both cis and trans interpretations of the Boy bc he's fits very well in both categories. It's all just spice y'know!! You sprinkle some of this... Some of that... And tomorrow you make a new dish! Love moving head canons around for funsies

Anyway ty for validating my music choices 🫡 good luck charging your phone

i dont really hc charas any particular sexuality or gender since i always feel weird about it its called being BORING its what I AM but its the way i was playin y7 and just kept jokin bout it every time the game gave me a chance until the very last scene then i was just like.. hm... feels less like a joke to me now... its just what my eyes perceive at this point.. sorry...

but i got you covered with music choices man !!!! i like most music even if it can be considered 'overplayed' or 'generic' like idk man... if it makea me feel ima listen to it..

so are phoebe and chandler<3

yes <3

it’s all been said before but the whole pronouns thing for some people is getting so ridiculous it’s honestly just sad

i need desperately 2 meet more adult xeno in real life. i know 1 (once 2 but not anymore) by pure luck on god.

.

So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

gender critical people, especially women, will spend all their time tearing down the appearances of trans people, especially trans women, and then when trans people dare to retaliate and make a joke about their appearances, they act like they’ve just been shot

u ever notice how trans women arent allowed to be openly frustrated or angry about anything without getting an unreal amount of hatred sent at them. and god forbid someone "in good faith" responds to your venting with a half baked "solution" to your problem that if you dont perform for them youre obviously just so helpless and want to struggle-- because obviously to them transgender women love to play the victim (our struggles cant be real if they dont awknowledge them, and if they do awknowledge them theyre obviously not important or they can be fixed easily). cis people are allowed to be angry all the time. theyre allowed to be joyful too. if a trans woman is happy in her identity if she adores herself if shes feminine and loves pink and loves being trans thats "cringe" and "reddit" and obviously not how youre supposed to act. cis people are in love with their identities all the time and hate us when we are. we cant be the opposite either-- if we're sad instead of angry, they say we need to just pick ourselves up and stop bringing down the mood. if we aren't feminine, then they ask "why did you even transition at all?" if you aren't filled with joy every waking moment (which, again, they would hate you for), they say its because you're trans, and they hate you anyway. a lot of cis people (and a lot of trans people) dont want a trans woman to be angry like cis people are allowed to be, sad like they can be, happy, feminine, or masculine, or anything else-- its a catch 22. they hate you no matter what you do but especially if youre visible about it. so fuck em.

idk why ppl are surprised. what did they think would happen by supporting j/ames g/unn, who even if you ignore his horrendous jokes n shit bc ‘he apologized for the party!!!!’ STILL insulted R/ichard G/rayson for daring to be drawn in a female gaze, implied if he got to write the i/ron m/an movies, he wanted T/ony to ‘fix’ a lesbian, and that S/tephanie B/rown was his type because she’s a teen mom ‘which means shes easy and has daddy issues’.

Palestine and the US election

I’m done with Twitter soundbite takes that voting blue = supporting genocide. I see a lot of people making an argument that goes like this: "Biden has sent arms to Israel, helping its government commit genocide against Palestine. Therefore, voting for him in the 2024 US election, if he is the Democratic nominee, is supporting genocide, and NOT voting for him helps Palestine." There's a lot wrong with this view, so let's break it down.

It's true that Biden has sent a lot of arms to Israel and bypassed Congress multiple times to do it, and it's indefensible. I'm ashamed that any US politician would help Israel wage its brutal, genocidal war against the Palestinian people. As one of Israel's closest partners, the US could actually be using its leverage right now to put pressure on Israel’s government—I’m thinking about how apartheid in South Africa fell, in part, because of international pressure. That's what should be happening, but instead the US government is literally just helping Israel kill Palestinians.

I wish there were a strong pro-Palestine candidate in the upcoming election. The best bet in that regard would probably be Bernie Sanders, since he's prominent enough, well-liked enough, and has good ideas, not just on this issue but on many things (and yeah, he's way too old, but so are the current frontrunners). But he's already ruled out another run. Unless an amazing candidate materializes and wins the Democratic nomination (please vote in the primaries where you live), it will probably be Biden running against Trump. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s likely.

Here's what people need to understand: the election will not be "genocide Joe" vs. "pro-Palestine candidate." It will most likely be a choice between these two candidates:

On the one hand, Biden, who has armed Israel, but can be pressured to change his policies because he can be pushed left; who is not a wannabe dictator; who will not destroy what's left of the country's democratic norms; who will not encourage coups, political assassinations, or jail his political opponents; who will not utterly stifle dissent.

Or on the other hand, Trump, who is beholden to a fanatical evangelical base that backs Israel no matter what, that actually wants more conflict because they are part of a death cult. Trump, who is not susceptible in any way to pressure from the left, but is susceptible to pressure from the right and the far right. Trump, who has been clear all along about his desire to be a dictator; who will destroy what's left of democratic norms; who has already encouraged a coup to overthrow a democratic election, encouraged the assassination of his own vice president, and is openly planning to jail his political opponents if he returns to the White House.

(This isn't even touching on Trump's positions on trans rights, gay rights, women's rights, the environment, policing, immigration, or his racism against every group he could be racist against, or his liability for sexual assault, or a whole bunch of other issues).

There's a very convincing argument that Netanyahu actually wants Biden to lose the US election and Trump to win. That's because Netanyahu knows that Biden has in the past responded to pressure from his own party and the public. If there are a lot of people criticizing his policies, it gives him pause. Trump doesn't operate like that. If millions of Americans criticize his policies as inhumane he just lashes out at them. In short, Biden views criticism from the left as a liability that he has to act on. Trump views criticism from the left as an incentive to be even worse.

Biden is not the candidate I want. But you need to understand that if Trump wins the election, he won't just arm Israel like Biden is doing now: he will do that and more. Not only will he help Israel escalate its war, your very freedom of speech to support Palestine will be under attack. Trump might even decide that financial support for Palestinians or charities that help Palestine = financially supporting terrorism, and use that as a pretext to arrest and jail people. You think he and his far right goons wouldn't go that far? If Trump wins this election, you shouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing happens, and much worse.

Do you want the US to accept Palestinian refugees? Because it won't accept them under a Trump presidency. A key Republican talking point in this election is "the US shouldn't take Palestinian refugees because they're probably all terrorists." This isn't just a Trump thing, it's something other Republicans are saying, but obviously you can imagine where Trump would fall on this issue given his infamous Muslim ban and conflating refugees with terrorists. These are just a few examples of how Trump would actually be even worse for Palestine than Biden—which is saying something.

In this upcoming election there is no neutral option. There is no morally pure option. There just isn't, I'm sorry. Refusing to vote will not help Palestine. Refusing to vote will only help Trump win, and will give every single person in the United States who is fighting for a better world a significantly harder battle to fight.

It goes without saying that there are things everyone should do to help Palestine besides voting in an election. But I'm writing this post that is about voting because I'm genuinely worried by how many so-called leftists want to give up their right to vote—a right that older generations had to fight tooth and nail for—because they think it won't achieve anything. If voting didn't achieve anything, Republicans wouldn't be trying so hard to suppress your vote.

I'll conclude by saying that nuance is not this site's specialty, but please try to understand what I'm actually saying here before attacking me in the notes. Finally, people being antisemitic or islamophobic on this post will be blocked. People denying that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine will be blocked. Trump supporters, tankies, and people who say that Biden and Trump are the same will be blocked. So will people who say "voting is pointless" or "but Biden did this bad thing—" Biden fucking sucks, I know that very well, so if you're going to try to make that argument to me then stop right now and read the post again.

Kallitsounaki and Williams found that transgender participants did in fact report alexithymia symptoms at an elevated rate, compared to their cisgender peers. This effect also held strong when eliminating all Autistic participants from analyses, which indicates that even non-Autistic transgender people are worse at naming and recognizing their feelings than non-Autistic cisgender people are. The study’s authors concluded from these findings that non-Autistic transgender people appear to exhibit “subclinical” Autistic traits. “Future studies mighty usefully examine whether alexithymia is a potential “marker” of autistic traits in transgender people who do not meet full criteria for autism,” they write. To put it another way, they believe the alexithymia that non-Autistic trans people report is still caused by (mild) Autism. But this conclusion carries with it a faulty and as-yet untested assumption: that alexithymia must be caused by Autism directly, when in reality it could just be a natural consequence of living in a marginalized and othered body.  Just because a transgender person struggles to name and recognize their emotions doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Autistic. It could very well be the case that both Autistic people and transgender people struggle to understand our feelings, because we have experienced a lifetime of questioning and invalidation. And if we look to the broader research literature on alexithymia, we see even more evidence that this might be the case. … It’s not just Autistic people who have been found by researchers to experience alexithymia. Sufferers of trichotillomania, or compulsive hair-pulling, have repeatedly been found to be alexithymic too. Some research also links alexithymia with early exposures to trauma and abuse. People who do not know they are pregnant (also known in the literature as pregnancy-deniers) tend to be alexithymic, for instance. They also tend to be victims of childhood sexual assault. These two things are not unrelated. We know that when vulnerable people (particularly children) are sexually assaulted, their minds tend to dissociate from that upsetting reality. Their consciousness “floats away” to a point elsewhere in the room, or they pretend the abuse isn’t happening to them or that the world around them is not real. Additional research has also found that alexithymia is associated with early childhood abuse, especially emotional and physical neglect. It makes sense that a mind that’s well practiced in the art of detachment might stop checking on its internal states entirely. A body that has often been the site of your abuse is one you can’t dwell in comfortably. If you can’t count on your caregiver to provide you with regular nourishment, there’s little reason to make note of your own feelings of hunger. And if your cries for help or comfort are never heard with sympathy, you may quickly learn not to even recognize sadness within yourself at all. These findings also dovetail with an observation that Kallitsounaki and Williams make in their paper, but don’t take much time to dwell on: they found that the cisgender men in their sample were significantly more alexithymic than cisgender women. This finding also suggests that there are environmental and social factors that contribute to a person’s awareness of their own emotions — and populations that are discouraged from sharing how they feel are far worse at understanding their feelings as a result.

Women aren’t innately more attuned to emotions than men are. They’re simply expected to be more emotionally aware, and given more tools to make emotional recognition and expression possible. Men, on the flip side, are denied the freedom to be openly emotional, and also relieved of the responsibility to look after their own or others’ feelings. This results in them understanding emotions a whole lot less. If we can’t assume that the alexithymia of men is innate, then we shouldn’t assume it’s innate in Autistics or transgender people either. For just as men are discouraged from openly crying, asking for help, or showing other signs of supposed “weakness,” both transgender people and Autistics are actively discouraged from expressing discomfort or seeking emotional aid for ourselves.

read the rest of the article for free here.

god, stuff like this is such a punch to the gut. i usually don’t feel that emotionally affected by comments like this other than being angry at them, but it’s so different when it’s someone i genuinely really respect, who seems to be very conscious of these things, who’s making a point of being a vocal ally, and they still just don’t see how people really treat us.

so much of the current legislation against trans healthcare (i would argue the vast majority of it, if not literally all of it) is founded upon denial of our bodily autonomy and fearmongering about our transitions. people call us predators and abusers for having and feeding our children. a huge number of people pretty recently jumped on a singular incidence of violence as “proof” that testosterone turns us all into evil monsters. people talk about how we’re stealing our bodies from them and say that if they could just grope us or have sex with us, we’d see that we’re really women. we ask for something as simple as the use of language that includes us so that we can better access the healthcare we need, and even that is asking too much.

but sure, people don’t really have a problem with us being men, so everyone can just stop bothering with affirming that we are who we say we are because clearly people are already on board with that idea, right?

and of course, it’s upsetting on a personal (one might say parasocial) level because it just sucks to see someone you respect openly state that they don’t think the things happening to your community are really happening. that was the initial reaction i had — i know this is one person, a fallible person, who i have no true relationship with, but it still feels like a betrayal of some sort to read that.

the thing that really gets me, though, is that there are a lot of people who trust him (whether rightly or not) to be a good source of info, and a lot of those people are going to see this and just take it at face value. they’re not going to look into it, they’re just going to accept that people really don’t have a problem with us and they’re going to feel empowered to look the other way when we’re under attack. i’m sure he wouldn’t want people to take the things he says at face value without fact-checking them, but the fact remains that most people will do just that and will proceed to not give a shit about us because they don’t think they have to.

it’s one thing to see this coming from some random person. it’s another entirely when it’s someone you already liked and respected, and who has a large audience who are likely to trust the things they say.

and it just…would’ve been so easy to not say it, to just say “they’re men!” and let that message stand without immediately undermining its importance.

they/them pronouns can be used to de-gender people. Queer people need to understand this.

I'll tell you a story to illustrate my point: my parents suck. They're conservative and think that the generational trauma they're inflicting on me is normal. They refuse to listen to my experiences. They've gotten violent before. I've had to flee my house.

Before I was ever outed as a trans guy, my best friend used they/them and identified as non-binary. They still do. I would say they definitely helped me sort my own shit out.

My parents knew about this, and they consistently deadnamed and misgendered them. They pulled out the "they is for multiple people, it's too confusing" card many times. This is one of the reasons I completely shut my feelings and emotions off from them, because obviously, blatant transphobia was not acceptable to me. I defended my friend openly and corrected them every time they would say "she". It got heated, sometimes.

Fast forward to when I was outed. My mom now suddenly insists that he/him is too hard for her to use, and that only NOW she can choose to use they/them for me.

This is de-gendering. I pass more nowadays ever since I started testosterone, but I'll hear a "they" coming from my boss at work even though he knows I'm a trans man, or even people in queer spaces when I have a he/him pronoun pin on me, clearly visible.

It's frustrating because now, my parents being assholes, I think I legitimately might have mild trauma sourced from being called "they" by my parents, who have actively humiliated and abused me ever since I came out.

So, I ask: please do not use they for people who have explicitly outlined otherwise. This should be simple. Apparently, for a lot of people, it's not.

If you're surrounded by people who call trans people by their deadnames, you're most likely in a hate group. But a possible alternate explanation is that you're in academia. And it's not because that many academics are openly transphobic -- they just don't know that the site they fully trust, Google Scholar, is telling them to do it. Google Scholar was developed in 2004 and has changed very little since then. It supplanted a lot of hard-to-use library search indices by providing a Google-style interface with a single search box. Now it's the most name-recognized site for searching for almost any paper by almost anyone. One aspect of the design was, authors are just a kind of search term. An author is a cluster of different ways to abbreviate a name, like Firstname Lastname, Firstname M. Lastname, and F Lastname, and you might see different forms in different places, but the underlying name will never change. This is because Google Scholar was built by, and for, cis men with unchanging Western-style names. The "almost anyone" who you can search for excludes trans people, among a lot of other people it represents poorly. And because Scholar will not change, it should perish.

I fought the goog, and the goog won I changed my name in research, retroactively. I broke the assumptions of Google Scholar, and Google Scholar hid my papers from search results when it couldn't model what was going on with them. It would particularly suppress search results for my new name, which were just confusing distractors for the results it really wanted to show, for my deadname. If you ask it how to cite me, it will auto-generate you a citation of my deadname. I fought hard to remove citations of my deadname, replace PDF files, take down papers I couldn't replace, take away all the evidence of my deadname that I possibly could. Not to keep it from the eyes of people, but to keep it out of the Google Scholar model. I partially succeeded in making my new name more searchable, and even got it to show up in the auto-generated citations in some circumstances. For a fleeting moment, I claimed victory. But Google Scholar countered by finding my absolute most obscure things that count as publications, ones that I can't kill because they were not really alive in the first place, and bringing them to the top of my search results, so it can use them to keep helpfully directing you to my deadname. Signing in and claiming papers on an "author page" doesn't help, because author pages are one tiny link in search results that nobody clicks through, because the papers are already right there. Most trans people quit research rather than deal with this, and even though I found myself with more energy and opportunity to fight for my name than most, I quit research too.

There! We fixed it for cis people Google knows about this. I raised the issue with them in February 2019. It became an internal bug report in July 2019, which I have never seen, but from what I've heard about it, it quickly went far astray from what I was trying to tell them. "Allies" inside Google came up with extremely dumbass theories of how to represent trans people in a way that fit Google's preconceptions. I've posted about the problem at various times on social media (mostly Twitter when that was a thing). I tweeted about how Google's name model doesn't even work for cis women, given that many women change their names at some point in their lives. This got some traction and led to an amazingly quick response, along the lines of "oh shit! We fixed it for cis women." The new feature they added allowed a person (who had claimed papers using a Google account) to link together their multiple names, as long as they were okay with all the names being shown at the top of their search results. The first trans person to try using the feature was extremely surprised and dismayed by the prominence it gave to their deadname, and asked "do you think they talked to even a single trans person about this feature?" Nobody has ever heard Anurag Acharya, the creator of Google Scholar, say anything about the problem of name changes on his platform, or really anything attributable to him at all. But I know he knows about it.

The one time we got their attention Google got banned as a sponsor of Queer in AI, partially because of Google Scholar, though if you ask most people now they'll say it's because they profit from AI weapons systems. Which is also a thing. But Google Scholar was enough of a part of the issue that an exec actually got on the phone with non-Googlers about it for the first time. The exec was Jeff Dean, head of AI, whose organization does not actually include Google Scholar. When pressed on the issue by Queer in AI, he defended Scholar's lack of name changes, saying -- I believe this to be a direct quote -- "we have to ensure accurate information". Calling trans people by their names does not fall under the category of "accurate information" to the latently transphobic Jeff Dean. In another rare instance of public communication, a couple of painfully assimilationist trans Google FTEs promoted a horrible idea where publishers would have an API for informing Google that someone's name had changed in their archives. That's right, you wouldn't control your own name, dozens of publishers would, all with their own processes ranging from gatekeepy to nonexistent, and you'd have to out yourself and beg to every one of them to press the Here's A Trans Person button. The only good thing about this proposal is that it was so obviously unworkable that they didn't do it. Aside: If you are a Google full time employee, and you are trans, you are assimilationist. I'm sorry. I know your life circumstances mean you have to be. There used to be non-assimilationists there, and they joined the union and got illegally fired in 2019, or they quit in solidarity with the people who were fired in 2019 or 2021, and that leaves you, keeping your head down and keeping your job. You're still reading this paragraph, and that's amazing, so here's what I need you to know: from your position, you cannot advocate for the needs of trans non-Googlers, unless you allow trans non-Googlers into the conversation. Contract workers, though, you're cool. You fought for a trans man, working at a Google data center, to stop having to wear his deadname on his badge, and you won.

There is a solution I know that Google would not invest a lot of development effort into fixing a pet project like Google Scholar (though, again, "we fixed it for cis women" came remarkably quickly). I know that Google is institutionally incapable of letting people control their own identity without being a gatekeeper, that it's just not in the realm of things they dream of. There is still a solution. It's so easy. It plays to Google's strengths. There's even a business argument for it. They just need to shut it down. Google Scholar can have a plot in the Google graveyard next to Hangouts, Picasa, AngularJS, Cardboard, Inbox, Orkut, Knol, and the dearly departed Reader. It will be missed, for a bit, and then real librarians and archivists can get back to doing the job that Google monopolized. They'll know how to do it better this time. The Internet Archive is already doing it, and they let trans people change their names. I made a site about all this, scholar.hasfailed.us. I haven't been raising the issue enough since the fall of Twitter, and I think it's time that I get back to it.