My favorite category of government program to run across is "program you've never heard of doing extremely important work to solve a major problem which you have also never heard of." On that note, the US drops millions of pounds of sterile bugs over Panama each week in order to prevent a parasite infestation from moving into North America. Everyone say thank you to the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Borer Worm (COPEG)
This program had its funding cut during the DOGE cuts last year and now the parasitic worm they were trying to slow the spread of has officially arrived in the United States.
they had no evidence then with the blogs they terminated & they have no evidence now either so ig its always been your blog gets deleted for "any reason or none at all" when they dont like you for being black or transfem
There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.
"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t
pretty sure I did the chrome//flags thing a while ago, but also i switched to firefox, which is not without the occasional bullshit, but is vastly less bullshitty than chrome.
This is why I treat genai "features" like the invasive blackberry bushes they are: cut, root, burn, and vigilantly watch for new shoots to uproot. I'm 54 years old and the world got by fine without genai for most of my lifetime.
tags via@KKglinka #psa#having read the article#it's not clickbait#chrome is reaching#across all chromium browsers#to link a prepatory structure#this malware packet#will therefore occur#with all chromium browsers#it has nothing to do#with the actual ai interface#instead chrome is either#using your personal computer#as part of a cloud server#the way bitcoin malware works#or it's recording your own#actions on the computer#with a continuously active#background module#either way#that's malware#a 4gig trojan virus
people love the idea of the mean girl nurse pipeline because it problematises medical abuse as a personal perversion rather than understanding it as a product of broadly held ableist values and its like, if this was only about ontologically evil teenage girls choosing to enter a profession because of their unique sadism then you really wouldnt expect to see the exact same forms of abuse pervading all arrangements of paid, unpaid, formal, ad hoc, and familial caretaking as well -- its more comforting to believe the nurse was just a preexisting bad person than that most of the world broadly hates disabled people and will abuse, neglect, and gaslight them if given power over their care
every time I've ever seen a Tumblr post mention a porn ban or how people are reblogging something because of a porn ban it honestly feels like fucking gaslighting because I've never perceived a ban on explicit content only trans women. porn is on here with no issue and no one cares. what tumblr cares about is getting rid of trans women
Rare hard disagree: I’ve watched SWers, trans (predominantly transfemme) and cis, get nuked over and over again trying to survive under the premise of the porn ban while bots and aggregators can post and share whatever.
Transfemme SWers just get nuked at like 3x the rate 🙃 but don’t underestimate how whorephobic tumblr is too.
Like. As a Black, transfemme, former SWer who’s been on this shitass site on the same blog somehow for a decade and change, the institutional focus on transfemmes is happening after they mostly ran out of SWers and Black folks to ruin the lives of first. They’ve always hated transfemmes, don’t get me wrong, but the past purges focused on Black folks and sex workers.
Literally every website that has gone through the process of exorcising marginalized groups has done it roughly in this order, even more recent sites like Bluesky. Bluesky’s example was the Black tech Twitter folks bringing in other marginalized groups, SWers and transfemmes helping build up the “wider site appeal” while Black folks built/investigated a lot of the user-side tools and features, then Black folks getting run off (down to 2% Black user population! By comparison, tumblr is like 6-8% depending) by horrific institutional antiblackness, SWers getting censored and making it harder to work, and then transfemmes who had carried the site culture mostly alone at that point getting targeted.
I know we are getting targeted more, but pretending that this is novel to us and not just another wave in a long line of wiping out marginalized populations from social media is frustrating because it shows how little so many of y’all cared until it affected one of your groups specifically, or are simply too new to the game to know what they’ve already been doing for years.
They are targeting predominantly transfemmes now. But pretending the whorephobia, antiblackness, etc. never existed ain’t do shit for us now either.
Not stupid! I have a bunch of overall ‘structural’ complaints about the way these diagrams theorise sex/gender, and also a bunch of more minor/petty complaints about individual components. My overall critique is that they are transphobic and intersexist despite their (supposed) function to do the opposite.
First, I think it’s important to state what the purpose of these diagrams are. They are an educational tool that act as a theoretical intervention into dominant societal conceptions of gender - ie, vagina = girl, penis = boy. The central way this intervention happens is by disaggregating various components of what usually get lumped together as “gender” (but NOT sex, which is an important distinction I will return to later). This is meant to show people that gender is actually a lot more complicated than they might think, and by disaggregating these various gendered components, you can demonstrate how LGBTQ+ people ‘fit into’ these components.
I think it’s also important to talk about the visual tradition these diagrams are drawing from, which are anatomical diagrams of the human body shown to children and students for the purposes of teaching them about the human body. These “gender diagrams” metaphorise the concept of ‘anatomy’ by superimposing non-anatomical traits onto various organs of an abstracted human form (bear/unicorn/gingerbread). The fact that they are animals or baked goods as opposed to human bodies is very important in their visual language - they are necessarily metaphorical. This ‘anatomy of gender’ is a social anatomy.
So what’s the problem with doing this? I don’t think there’s any inherent problem with this - for example, trans people often have to explain that sex is an assemblage of traits that are not binary, mutually exclusive, or immutable. You could make a “sex trait unicorn” to show that sex isn’t ‘just’ genes or gametes or sexual organs or reproductive capacity or physical traits or birth certificates or etc, and I think that would probably be fine. But these specific diagrams are, perhaps contrary to their purpose, reaffirming this sex/gender aggregation through disaggregating them.
So, getting to the structural critique, I think the biggest theoretical problem with these diagrams are their ‘organ-ness’ - the heart is where sexuality is contained, the head is where identity is contained, and the… chromosomes between your legs are where sex is contained. It visually communicates that bodily organs are distinct containers for gendered/sexed traits. There are several problems with this, so let’s go organ by organ:
(this is getting long so I'm putting the rest under a cut)
The brain 🧠 - this is where identity is ‘stored’ in the human body. Identity is a thing inside you that arises from your thoughts, the ‘contents’ of your brain. If I were being really uncharitable towards these diagrams, they argue that gender identity is the delusion of how you see yourself that doesn’t interact with/reflect the rest of your body or person. I can “identify as a man” while every other gendered component of myself “is a woman.” Which like, I don't “identify” as a man, I am a man lol. More charitably, I think it’s trying to communicate the fact that trans people discover that their gender identity is in conflict with the rest of themselves, and seek to address this conflict through various forms of transition.
Even taking the charitable view, I think this is still deeply problematic. Just using my own experience, I did not ‘discover’ my gender identity in my head, I discovered it socially - dissociating during sex, friction in romantic relationships, problems with family members, difficulty socialising, being ostracised by peers, forcible assignment of femininity by my parents and especially my mother, and so on. Placing gender identity in the brain visually argues that gender identity can be discovered/thought of in isolation to the social world, because it is a symptom that comes out of a discrete organ, the brain (this is the transmedicalist view of transgenderism - gender identity is a mental illness that needs to be medically treated). This is where the visual tradition of anatomical diagrams works against these gender diagrams, reinforcing the biological view of gender despite the attempts to challenge it.
The heart ❤️ - Now this one is a bit more abstracted and ‘apolitical,’ because the diagrams all use the heart symbol ❤️ as opposed to the anatomical heart 🫀, but I think my criticism still stands, because it is part of the anatomical metaphor of the diagram. I don’t think you can extricate the fairly inoffensive visual association of heart = attraction from the rest of the diagram. The heart is the organ that stores sexuality and attraction, just like the brain is the organ that stores identity, and this sexuality/attraction can be isolated and identified from the rest of yourself. It is just as internal and divorced from the social world as identity is. It’s also bizarrely disaggregated in the unicorn and bear diagrams as physical and emotional attraction lol? What does emotional attraction even mean. I became emotionally ‘attracted’ to all my friends after getting close to them even though I’m not physically attracted to most of them, so I guess I’m demi-pan-emotional? This feels like a more minor nitpick, but it’s part of this containerisation of gendered traits, the idea that you can neatly divide emotional and physical attraction. They are ‘separate symptoms’ of the heart.
The chromosomes 🧬 - probably the easiest one to critique, and imo is the most egregious. Even mainstream pro-trans critiques of sex, which heavily rely on medical authority as the basis of their critique, argue that chromosomes are not “what sex is.” As I laid out above, sex is an assemblage of things that are ideologically bundled together for the purposes of enforcing a set of social systems, such as patriarchy and cissexualism. Using chromosomes to represent sex is an argument that sex is an immutable facet of the body that cannot be changed - even if you take HRT, have surgery, change all of your sex markers on your documents, and live your life as your gender, your sex hasn’t changed because you didn’t “change” your chromosomes. You will always be a biological male or female. Sex, these diagrams argue, is a biological essence, and ‘biological’ is a stand-in for immutable, mutually exclusive, and unalterable.
The other insidious part of this is that the chromosomes replace genitals in the diagram - you can’t show a penis or vagina to your audience, that’s icky and gross, so you use chromosomes instead. It’s the only place on the anatomical diagram where the organ is replaced by a non-organ, and the absence of genital organs only draws attention to the ‘genitality’ (to use Butler’s term) of chromosomes as a stand-in for sex. It is straightforwardly a transphobic and intersexist depiction of sex. The associated graph with it is even worse, placing “intersex” in between “male” and “female,” as if intersex is an undifferentiated amalgam of male/female sexual traits. It upholds the idea that intersex people are just sexually fucked up and have the “wrong” parts of M/F sex combined together, which again, can’t be altered. Which is ridiculous and contrary to reality! One of the core bases of intersexism is that doctors are very much invested in changing the sex of intersex infants, children, and adults through forced surgery and hormones to ‘correct’ a pathological incongruence of sex to either an acceptable ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex. This is what I meant earlier when I said this diagram might attempt to challenge was gender is, but not sex. It partitions sex off from gender as the stable immutable part of the body, which gender is then overlaid “on top of” (Butler also critiques this view in Bodies That Matter), which is, again, a transphobic and transmedicalist view of sex and gender. These diagrams beat you over the head with this point - the gender expression component is a dotted line traced over the body of the unicorn/bear/ginderbread. It is segmented and ephemeral in contrast to the solid lines of the body. Crucially, gender expression never touches their bodies. Gender expression is a thing that can be removed or changed, revealing the true biological essence of the body, which remains intact beneath its facade.
My more minor grievances are that these diagrams are visually ugly and infantilising. It is the queer equivalent of telling children to call a vagina a hoo-ha and a penis a ding-dong. I hate how infantilised and cutesy mainstream queer art and branding is. I’m an adult, I’m not a fucking unicorn or bear or “gingerbread person,” use plain visual language in your educational guides for the love of god. Trans minors also deserve proper representation and education that isn’t this quirky horseshit. The amount of abstraction going on in these diagrams, coupled with the ugly-ass cutesy aesthetic, obfuscates what is trying to be communicated and ends up (imo) being a poor educational tool, even setting aside the many, many ideological problems with them.
So I think these diagrams are deeply transphobic. They represent “components” of gender by assigning them to various organs, which re-inscribes gender as biological. They are also really ugly
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
This is a comment that I and many of my fellow racial justice commentators have made when truly horrible things happen, just as they were intended to... Although the phrase may seem alarmingly coldhearted, it is our way of reminding ourselves that the greatest evil we face is not ignorant individuals but our oppressive systems. It is a reminder that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland are not isolated cases. It is a reminder to refuse to let our shock and outrage distract us into thinking that these incidents do not all stem from the same root source, which must be dismantled. That source is white male supremacy.
White men lead our ineffective government with almost guaranteed reelection. They lead our corrupt and violent criminal justice system with little risk of facing justice themselves. And they run our increasingly polarized and misinforming media, winning awards for perpetrating the idea that things run best when white men are in charge. This is not a stroke of white male luck; this is how our white male supremacist systems have been designed to work.
And when I say "white supremacy", I'm not just talking about Klan members and neo-Nazis. Blatant racial terrorists- while deadly and horrifying- have never been the primary threat to people of color in America. It's more insidious than that. I am talking about the ways our schoolrooms, politics, popular culture, boardrooms, and more all prioritize the white race over other races. Ours is a society where white culture is normalized and universlized, while cultures of color or demonized, exotified, or erased."
cheese sits on the toilet while we take showers, and i like to stand on my tip toes and draw his silhouette in the steam from a high angle, then stand back to see how warped it is from his actual shape
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