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just realized I should probably link this here to make sure people see it. I do commissions! they'll probably be open perpetually unless my laptop shatters or something ridiculous like that...
Please put on your N95s. The same ones used for covid will filter particulate pollution. I lived in a city with yearly winter pollution levels like this. If you can pay for it, you might as well get an indoor air filter to sleep in.
If you can't afford a proper air purifier or can't find one in stock, these are sometimes cheaper to build:
Make sure you get the best rated furnace filters you can. If getting all those is too expensive, even one of those furnace filters taped tightly to a box fan (to force the air through the filters so it doesn't come in through the cracks) can help pretty substantially in a small room.
Her name isĀ Gazal Dhaliwal and sheās a screenwriter. She talk about her lifeĀ hereĀ andĀ here.
Sheās the writer for Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, anĀ upcoming Indian coming-of-age romantic comedy-drama with a lesbian couple.Ā
She was also the dialogue writer for Lipstick Under My Burkha,Ā which depicts the secret world, including the sex lives, of four small-town Indian women.
She contributed to the screenplay for Wazir and Qarib Qarib Single.Ā
Discord is supposedly saying this is going to affect "only 10% of users", but I really don't believe them at all. It's always going to be way worse and affect more people than what they claim.
So in case anyone needs it:
After Discord announced plans to require age verification for all users, a free, HTML-based tool emerged that aims to bypass facial scans on
makes me so sad when my friends refuse to pirate things and insist on paying for a streaming service EVEN when i offer to do it for them or teach them. like pleaseeee i have a vpn i have a plex server i can get you whatever you want. don't buy disney+ i can be your little poob i have it for you.
if you want to dress gay but arenāt sure how, you need to focus more on finding clothes you actually like and that make you feel good when you look in the mirror. develop your style independently of what you think looks gayest and trust the homosexuality will follow. it goes where confidence and self acceptance are
I'm not gonna get into the trans infighting thing yet because tbh I'm over it, but when looking at posts like this it's really important that we remember to actually read the studies that people are talking about, instead of inferring facts from out-of-context screenshots taken from news reports that only quoted the study and didn't get into the big picture.
so for anyone else who (like me) saw this post and wondered what the numbers actually said, I've broken it all down:
(TL;DR at the bottom!)
here's the full paper, by the way. it's called "Transgender and Nonbinary Deaths Investigated by the State Medical Examiner in the Portland, Oregon, Metro Area and Their Concordance With Vital Records, 2011-2021". it's a study about discrepancies in death certificate data and medical examiner records, with the goal of helping people make death certificates more accurate in the future.
it's important to remember that this data is:
local to the Portland metro area
from January 1st, 2011 through September 30th, 2021
a very, very small sample size (only 47 people!)
like to give you an idea of how small a sample size it is, the article says this:
Estimates of the transgender population in the United States vary; a recent estimate is 0.6% of the adult population (or around 1.4 million); for Oregon, the estimate is nearly 20 000 individuals. This article focuses on the Portland, Oregon, metro area (Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington Counties), which has an estimated total population of 1.8 million residents; 0.6% of the adult population is an estimated 9500 transgender individuals.
also it seems this study only included information about violent deaths, or deaths that were investigated for potentially being violent, because that's what was available.
Oregon was one of the first states to participate in the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which contains detailed information on violent deaths, including homicide, suicide, and overdose. The NVDRS has a variable to collect gender identity (for violent deaths only) via a checkbox for transgender status but does not have specific gender categories. This difference is important, because research has demonstrated an increase in violence among nonbinary transgender persons versus other transgender individuals.
In Oregon, the Office of the State Medical Examiner investigates certain types of deaths (Oregon Revised Statute 146.090) in its jurisdiction, including by possible suicidal, homicidal, and accidental means.
Note that ānaturalā deaths are not under the purview of the ME system.
and very important to note that these are only deaths where investigators knew and recorded that the dead individual was transgender. there are likely many other trans people in the system whose deaths were not included in this study for that reason.
Moreover, if death investigators did not ask about the decedent's gender identity, then the data would not be included in the case narrative, thus never making it into the NVDRS pipeline. Furthermore, there is a multiple year lag time with NVDRS data, and generally data at the county level are not easily accessible.
and the study goes even further in saying that the MEs probably wouldn't have recorded a patient's trans identity unless it was relevant to their death
Gender identity is collected in the narrative portion of the report if it is perceived as forensically germane to the death investigation. However, sex at birth on a decedent's official documentation may differ from the self-identified or preferred gender of the decedent. The 2015 US Transgender Survey reported that only 11% of respondents had all their identifications with the name and gender they preferred, while more than two-thirds had none of their identifications with their preferred name and gender. Thus, evidence collected by the investigator regarding gender identity and transgender or nonbinary status may be inconsistent.
(the bolding here is mine)
I want to make sure everyone here sees what I'm seeing: we really have no idea how many people in their death records are trans. we have no fucking idea, because people straight-up do not record that shit, and to pretend that this study is a great and balanced example of every single trans person who died in the Portland metro area would be very weird.
we can't know how many trans men were only listed as female, or how many trans women were listed as male, or how many nonbinary people were listed as either male or female. that is an unknowable thing for us!
this is one reason why erasure is a kind of violence: even when people are trying to study it, the lack of information being recorded means that we do not have a way to do that.
even if someone combed through every single death record, looked at everyone's social media on the wayback machine, talked to people that they knew, they would have at best a vague guess of what some of those individuals' identities might have been.
that's why the researchers in this study put it out there, to say hey, maybe we should make it easier for trans people to be remembered the way that they want to be:
Typically, the funeral home director adds the final information about the decedent's sex in the official death certificate, based on informant interview (legal next of kin in Oregon). However, the next of kin may not be aware of or disagree with the decedent's preferred gender or sex. This phenomenon can lead to what has been termed nonconsensual de-transitioningāa type of gender bias after death.
In this study, we used narrative information from the Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington County Medical Examiner case investigations between 2011 and 2021 to determine and describe transgender status of decedents. To further investigate the concordance between transgender status and the official death certificate sex, we matched data between the ME system and the death certificate. We expected poor concordance because gender information is not a required element of the death certificate. However, reporting on this discrepancy is an important step in determining whether individuals are being nonconsensually detransitioned.
(bolding still mine)
got that? that this study was written by some very nice people who want trans people to get to have a legacy that they choose? and who expected the data to be transphobic, but put it in writing it and published it in hopes that maybe it will help trans people in the future?
okay cool. moving on.
here are the death stats:
We identified 51 deaths from the ME narrative and/or suicide form in the Portland metro area between January 1, 2011, and September 30, 2021, in transgender persons (Table 2). More deaths were identified between 2020 and 2021 (n = 27) than all the other years combined (n = 24). The most frequent gender reported was transgender female (36/51, 71%), followed by transgender male (11/51, 21%). Suicide was the most frequent manner of death (36/51, 69%), followed by accident (7/51, 14%) and natural death (7/51, 14%).
so 51 deaths: 36 trans women, 11 trans men, and 4 nonbinary people.
(the above paragraph I quoted doesn't mention that the remaining four were nonbinary, but the rest of the study does; you can check if you don't trust me)
(also fuck, it's bleak that so much of their data came from just 2020 and 2021. I'm hoping that that means an increase in people being able to be identified as transgender and not more trans deaths, but this is yet another thing I can't extrapolate from a sample size this small)
Table 3 presents the results of matching the ME reports to vital statistics death certificate data (n = 47). Excluding the death certificates marked with āunknownā sex (n = 4), there were 47 deaths to compare. The Īŗ coefficient for this table was ā0.0657, indicating poor concordance.
the study says that three trans women and one trans man had death certificates that were marked as "unknown" when it came to sex. the researchers excluded these from the study, dropping our number of people to 47.
"why exclude those people from the study?" you may be asking, and there is an answer for you:
We excluded 4 deaths marked as unknown sex in vital records for a total of 47 deaths to compare, because unknown in vital records is reserved for cases when sex cannot be determined after verification with medical records, inspection of the body, or other sources and does not correspond with any ME category.
(I'm not a scientist but as far is I understand it, because they're specifically looking for cases where ME data and death certificates match, the ME not having a category for "unknown" would mess with their study.)
here's table 3, and now we can see that on their death certificates, 13/33 trans women were gendered correctly, 5/10 trans men were gendered correctly, and 0/4 nonbinary people were.
also good to note that in Oregon, they do have X as an option on their death certificates, though as of 2022 it seems like maybe nobody was using it:
The state of Oregon did add a new category of āXā to the death certificate in April 2018 to indicate nonbinary. āXā is inclusive of individuals whose gender identity is not exclusively male or female; however, āXā is not descriptive in terms of the individual's transgender status. Use of this category āshouldā match the sex on other legal documents, especially the birth record. Each epidemiologist checked his or her jurisdiction's vital records for āXā and did not find any records (J. Walters, MPH, M. Mew, MPH, and K. Repp, PhD, MPH, unpublished data, 2022). It is unclear whether āXā is not used because it is unclear, uncommon, or not considered respectful of a person's gender identity.
and, the study mentions that while people can also have X put on their legal documents in Oregon (which could make it more likely for X to end up on their death certificate), there are still things that make it hard for a lot of people to change their gender information:
Changing a driver's license or ID card requires making an appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles office, requesting a new card, meeting the requirements for issuance of a new card including proof of address, getting a picture taken, and paying a $40 to $70 fee. Obtaining a new birth certificate with a corrected sex requires an application signed by the applicant in front of a notary, a completed order form, a $35 fee, and a photocopy of the applicant's ID. Because of these lengthy processes, it is likely that only a small proportion of transgender persons have all their official identification matching their preferred gender. A person may go through life relatively unencumbered by mismatched identification but, upon his or her death, the inconsistencies cause gaps in data that obscure death disparities among gender minorities.
so what's the result of all of this?
To our knowledge, this is the first report to assess concordance of sex on death certificates and gender identified through death investigations for transgender individuals. Our findings demonstrate the significant implications for transgender individuals in a death system in which they are systematically unable to be recognized as their chosen identity after death in nearly every part of the death process.
shit sucks. for all of us. that's the result.
I don't know that I agree with all of the writers' suggested options for trying to fix this problem (but I'm not a medical examiner so I'm no expert), but the results of this study really are: in the Portland metro area from 2011-2021, it seems like trans people had a pretty high chance of being misgendered on their death certificates.
now.
if you're going to say, "yeah, and trans women have it worse than trans men! they're definitely less likely to be gendered properly!" I will say sure, in this study of 47 entire people from an area with an estimated 9500+ trans people, sure, trans women had it worse than trans men.
and nonbinary people had it worst of all in this study, with absolutely none of them being gendered correctly upon death! which is deeply sad for them, though I was honestly glad to find out Oregon even has an X option on death certificates, as I'm betting a lot of states don't.
but if you read this post, and look at this study, and for some reason decide that you're going to use it to try to argue with other queer people on the internet instead of like...idk, telling your next of kin to help you preserve your legacy when you die? calling your representatives about whatever censorship bullshit the government is up to? organizing in your community? or even like, watching Speed Racer for the 12th time and playing minecraft? then I cannot help you.
there are better ways for all of us to spend our time than starting shit (or even continuing shit!) with people who largely believe in our beliefs. if you disagree with other queer people, that's awesome because all people disagree on things all the time! but in an era where trans people have to keep a Do Not Travel list of states that are unsafe for us to even visit, we need to learn to stop doing the facebook boomer mom thingā¢ and actually read the data when we see posts like this.
like ideally we shouldn't start our days ready to pull out, "yeah but I'm more likely to have my memory desecrated by the government!" as a gotcha to make ourselves feel better, especially not when referencing a study of 47 people from Portland who had potentially-violent deaths over the course of a fucking decade.
TL;DR: This study was about 47 trans people from the Portland metro area who died in potentially violent ways from 2011-2021. The point of the study was to point out that it sucks that trans people can't always have the legacy that they want, or have their legal documents match their identity.
The results show us some solid examples of people being misgendered on death certificates, but teach us absolutely fuck all about which specific people are more likely to experience this, because trans people across the board are misgendered and erased so constantly that we can never know what the actual numbers are. This is something the study itself pointed out multiple times.
Also you can't extrapolate shit from a study with a sample size of 47 people.
actually annoyed by long distance friends again. i want to go for a walk i want to get drinks i want to sit in the grass and write i want to go to the fucking store together
After 13 years of this, it's still funny to me that detailing a full mental breakdown on tumblr is standard fare, but posting a nice selfie is a fraught decision.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I own this book and itās about 600 pages and itās ALL this good. You can play as hamlet, Ophelia, or hamlet sr, who is a ghost. You can murder everyone in the play. You can fire yourself out of a cannon and use your uncle as a skateboard. There are dozens of endings and places where you can diverge from canon and do something wacky instead. 10/10 would recommend
it makes me smile when you're reading a webcomic and the person is clearly very good at drawing and at drawing people specifically and then an animal crawls onscreen and it's like this
having completely opposing headcanons at the same time is important for the diversity of the fandom ecosystem. yes I believe this would happen. but I also donāt. hope this helps
