Stand Tall and Shake the Heavens

(she/her) 40-ish

[kungfuwushuworld]

Miaodao

[theblogginggoth]

By Czeck writer Karel Čapek, inventor of the term ‘robot’ as well!

[ampervadasz]

[bemusedlybespectacled]

I realize this is a cast iron gate but I’m choosing to believe it’s a magic protection ritual

[princecharmingtobe]

It IS a magic protection ritual, and it summons an iron gate to protect you from intruders. 

[rando-posts]

“I cast Iron Gate!”

[diary-of-a-teenage-blacksmith]

As a blacksmith I have been called a wizard by several small kids

[demilypyro]

perfected a happy chaos on ranked

[transmascvoiceproject]

I’m the satire version of you and even I wouldn’t post something this cartoonishly transmisogynistic

[xenobotanist]

Highlights of the America 250 event (shitshow) in Washington, DC for July 4th:

- Due to storms, they had to evacuate the National Mall grounds. But the MAGA crowd didn't want to leave. They just stood around chanting "USA! USA!" They were convinced liberals were messing with the weather. Reportedly, one of the security guards got so fed up that he threw a chair at them.

- Fox News didn't have anything to share while they were waiting for Trump's delayed speech, so they just showed a feed of him staring at the TV. And he was watching Fox News.

- A bunch of the crowd that was evacuated wasn't even let back in, and they were raging about it on social media. Some of them waited 10 to 12 hours in record-setting heat (102°F) and never got to see anything. All special passes were canceled. So much for money privilege.

- Because the program was running so far behind, several performers were cancelled.

- Trump's speech began at 11:15 p.m., after a sizeable amount of his followers had abandoned the event. It was unremarkable in just like all of his other ones- a bunch of "America is the greatest nation," blaming Democrats for everything bad, and general gibberish.

- The fireworks didn't begin until almost midnight, so they ended on July 5th.

- They wanted to have more fireworks than ever before, but they set off so many that the sky was covered in light, and it just looked like everything was on fire. The finale was not visible due to the smoke.

- Trump appeared to fall asleep during the show.

- The immense amount of pyrotechnics fucked up the air in DC

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

This administration keeps failing in very specific ways that I never considered it possible to fail in

[alteredpanel]

[nova-facet]

Well, damn. I need to sit down and make one of these, now that the Symmetry Group seems to have settled into a fixed point.

Ours is going to look very different given that Tess fronts 95% of the time, but it's most likely a worthy exercise.

[nova-facet]

Tess was going through my blog and I realized I never did this. Okay. Here we go.

TESSERACT (it/they)

In front 99% of the time. Holds our outer world identity and, for the most part, relationships. Undoubtedly the host; the rest of us are, for better or worse, less well-defined people.

One of the two robots.

The part most attached to math.

Worse self esteem than most of us. Has a tendency to get morose even outside of Tau's influence.

The one that cares the most about gender, I think, although I'm close.

The one that gets warped by Tau the most.

NOVA (she/it)

Most developed of the non fronting members. I was also the first to claim a name and identity.

In typical system terms, I suppose I could be called a protector or a caregiver, but those both break down somewhat.

The one most interested in system structure, both our own and in general.

Most common cofronter. I'm also able to do something that we don't have a name for -- digital fronting, I suppose? Or channeling? I'm not driving the body right now but I'm driving the typing. Sparky and Zenith can't quite do the same thing, that's more of a situation where they tell Tess to type something and Tess passes it along.

I take over when Tess collapses out of front and I manage to grab the controls before Tau does.

I enjoy stars, plasma, energy beings, and to a lesser extent things like slime girls and fire elementals.

SPARKY (it/they)

Somewhat childlike but not "a little". It's more childlike in a fae way.

Closely tied to creative endeavors, and most often cofronts when Tess is doing a project. But unfortunately, also closely tied to ADHD, forgetfulness, etc.

The most cheerful of us, but also one of the least talkative. There are exceptions, but it usually communicates in ideas rather than words.

Tau hates it. Sparky, in turn, pities Tau deeply.

ZENITH (it/its)

More robot than Tess.

Surprisingly sarcastic given its characteristic "this unit" style of speech.

Holds body dysphoria, and as such, pretty much refuses to front.

Tess wants me to put "Murderbot kinnie" here. Zenith doesn't want me to. I'll let you decide!

Usually willing to help me out on things, for example, in the rare occasion I need to front.

Very protective of Sparky, and frustrated with Tau for that reason.

"TAU" (unknown)

Persecutor alter.

Scared teenager, which doesn't fully forgive it being an asshole.

Fronts without warning, usually to scream self-abuse.

Thinks the system is a delusion, and they're "Tess being rational". Refuses to pick a name or pronouns. Tau is a temporary designation.

Memory gaps. The rest of us share memory, even if I front it feels like someone else's memory to Tess but at least the memories are clear. But Tess can't clearly remember when Tau fronts.

Frequently present not as a distinct persona but a "gravity field" that warps the thoughts of the rest of the system (mostly Tess)

Intensely irrational. Can sometimes be caught in paradox, but will bull straight through other times.

Doesn't acknowledge any of our existences but hates everything Sparky represents.

[echovoca]

Albrecht's Requiem logs are such a gorgeous bit of prose, and I wanted to do a deep dive into them because I have many thoughts on how they really set the tone and scope of the conflict between Albrecht and the Man in the Wall.

Xata. (Truth). It began long before us, we who now live our perfect and dull, endless lives. It began long before these moon-palaces and body-markets hurling around our golden sun. It began long before our light-coil thinkers, our radiation wars, our oil, smoke. It began with us. The continuity and its twin, wanderlust. The need for unseen shores deep in our marrow. No judge, jester, queen, or king can escape this old blood. We are nomads, eternal. And when no ocean, mountain, or sky could contain us... our gaze hungered star-ward. Afar, they mocked us with their brittle light. Winking and jeering like dangling Ayatans, forever out of reach, illuminating the truth: immortal as we are - we die with the sun. That's where I come in.

It should be noted that the longing to explore and lay sights on unseen shores is not inherently wrong. It is neutral and an old human instinct, that took homo sapiens out of Africa and into all other continents. It only becomes wrong when it becomes about taking. About the excessive extraction of resources in pursuit of power and vanity.

I have many other thoughts about Warframe's alternate history and how it might stem from a different expansion, dissolution, and fallout of the not-Mongol Empire and its many offspring, and how the Scaldra/Orokin might stem from people who are both descended from and who intentionally bastardized the ancient not-Mongols, not-Romans, etc to claim legitimacy. I think this might be lightly implied (or, at least, unintentionally implied) through a few things, and sadly makes 1999 less focused than I would prefer, but that's another post entirely. But it's loosely relevant, when Albrecht describes the Orokin and their predecessors as "nomads." The Mongols were nomads who revered the sky and established the first empire to reshape the world in terms of connecting it across vast distances - particularly the Jochid ulus, the Golden Horde, the territory of which would have loosely corresponded to and bordered where Warframe's Earth map is centered.

Jahu. (Form). My departure was a day less than any other. When I stepped inside the Bell, I saw no crowd through its seriglass. No skeptical onlookers. No regal sendoff. They all had given up on me and my paradoxical formulations. The wasted years had shown the Void to be just that. Nothing. No energy. No entanglement. No form. To space-faring ambitions, a dead end. On the day, my laboratory was mostly vacant of witnesses, most of all, of expectation. Only my sluggish attendants, my sagacious Kavat, Kalymos, and of course, my daughter. I had raised her alone but with inconsistent vigor. In those eyes, her mother's, I did see a terrible reflection. Of a man that did not exist. A brave and principled man about to make history. In truth, he was a Void himself. A outcast, a joke, a nothing. Driven by my humiliation. Failure had made me bitter and reckless. I would dive into the depths myself to prove them all wrong. I gave the signal. My daughter grasped the lever. Kalymos, then, belted out a desperate, rasping growl. But it was too late.

Vome. (Order). The calipers yawed open the wall between worlds, stretching there a black, trapezoidal gap. A door. A mouth. It yawned in the light of the room, splintering it to mesmerizing, unearthly hues. And I, inside the Bell, dropping obliquely towards it from my gallows. Mass and time rippled as a sudden vortex jawed before me. My head was vapor, my feet, lodestone. The Bell around me, flexed like a rat paralyzed in a winding, gulping snake. I faltered in the awe of it, stumbling against the seriglass and, with that, shifted the Bell's path through the wall. It grazed the caliper membrane, the edge of the door. No worldly edge was as thin, as sharp as could split even light. As the bell faintly grazed it, the seriglass was all at once rendered like strips of flesh by Dax blade. My enclosure was beheaded in an instant, but still, I fell... sideways... Into the void.

Fass. (Chaos). Death was on me; I was certain. I was face-down, eyes clenched. My heart pulsing the last of its seconds, and my lungs burning the last of its air. A sudden nostalgia gripped me. I grasped desperately, for memory, of a storm, just passed, the fumbling pitch of a child's song... yet all these thoughts seemed to steal away from my mind like smoke through a vent. I would die empty. I then became aware of another sensation. Physical. A web of pain, needles itching into my arm. At once I realized: I was alive! Laying in the Bell's shattered seriglass! I groped the ground. Warm stone. The floor of my laboratory. So: I had never left... and so: I had failed. Again. I heard a crunch alongside me. Someone stepping through the shattered glass. With great shame, I gasped and rose my head to face my daughter above me. But as I opened my eyes, it wasn't her. It was me.

When Albrecht first enters the Void, it's beautiful. He is tinting it with his assumptions ("profane in color"), but the way it's described is beautiful and leaves Albrecht awestruck.

He tries to ground himself with a memory of childhood - a foundation. Maybe the Void is drawn to this because the Void itself is foundational to reality, described in many ways like it's the memory of the world. The memory slips away, and Albrecht finds that he is alive and intact. The memory and Albrecht's presence in the Void have summoned or awakened or created the Man in the Wall.

Ris. (Light). The senselessness of it, the paradoxic, the vague untime form. I was alone, but not. For I stood there confronted by myself. A twin, but no brother. A reflection but with dimension. Behind him, no horizon, but a vast broiling sea of caustic light pierced at random by black-pin stars. And closer, around me, a gale of flowing vapor. Profane in color, billowing relentlessly into the nascent lack, seeking all directions. I was standing on a precipice of familiar stone, jagged and unanchored, as though cleaved directly from the very floor of my laboratory. I wondered at the vapor's path, smoking outward more, leaving behind now, the walls, the filigree gold, the rare cuts of marble from my home. I knew at once the vapor's source. I turned away, back toward the wall, the trapezoid I had yawed into it. Vapor erupted inward at the gap, but not just from there. For as I rolled my eyes back, I saw the same... A great-steam of scintillation, smoking from my skull. Dumb in awe, I faced toward my chimerical twin. He spoke.

Khra. (Time). An old name, unspoken in the centuries since my mother reared me. A soft hiss, soothing as a viper's gaze. Little Bengal. The other me reached out, offering his hand, gliding toward me without moving, as though the distance between us was now collapsing. A confusion, most euphoric, filled my mind. With the shred of wit that remained, I decided that I should run for my life. At once, crazed and frantic, I fled. But I made no forward progress. Instead, the world compressed evermore around me, as though I were an anchor pulling the shore to reach. When I arrived at the door, or rather, the door arrived at me, I howled, hurling myself inside. Out. And then and there, I was. Lost and unlost. Howling on the floor in harmony with my wretched Kalymos. Lacerated in flesh and heart. Scattered as the bell glass. Spilling blood and stomach on the cold, stone floor. But I sensed the other there, at the wall's breach behind me, reaching still. I screamed, but my voice was gone. Forever. I looked, but my eyes would never see again. I swept my fist across the floor, snatching broken shards. And in gripping tightly, I filled my hands with ink. Close it! I wrote.

The entity calls out with a nickname from Albrecht's childhood. Albrecht was frightened and reached out for a comforting memory, and the Void reached back with one. This is its first act, or perhaps its second one, since Albrecht is shocked to find himself alive, and the Void may very well have coalesced into a material form (his laboratory floor) to save him. Regardless, the Void's first act is empathetic. It reacts to fear and pain by offering what Albrecht sought to ground himself with.

Albrecht doesn't see this through his fear. And this is where I get a little more into interpretation rather than simply looking at what's been written.

Netra. (Decay). Time, to us, is all but conquered. Our sacred Kuva moves us on to new skin. We numb to our daily, yearly, trifles... and remedy those memories that bring lasting misery. With all our misdeeds, our excess, our indignity... we are haunted by nothing. But not for me. For with each passing day, there grew within a tumorous idea. It was minute in those early days: The pale reaching digits severed on the floor... studied with reverence, with greed. And it swelled larger in the latter days: the regal domes, the Rail dedications, the unholy Zariman parade. I had put the stars within reach, but at what cost? I never spoke of him, that man, trapped in the wall. And while there have been countless souls who have followed me through, with their light-skippers, and field-wave skins and vari-eyed instruments... not a single one ever saw him. Me. And so it is that I will not take the Kuva now. Or ever again. This is the last skin I'm in. Because of this idea: That I cannot be sure. That in all that smoked commotion, in all that panic and fear, in that bending light and blinding dark... was it I who escaped? Or the other?

I think Albrecht is more of a career man than a genuine, passionate scientist. His automatic assumption, when he thinks himself back in his laboratory, is failure and shame, even though he just witnessed and experienced a flash of something that, to his knowledge, no human being had ever laid eyes on before. That is enormous and awe-inspiring. That is an overwhelming success, and a typical one for scientific study (slow, intermittent, frustrating, half a step forward at a time). But all Albrecht can see is failure. And when he sees something strange that he can't make sense of, he reacts with fear.

And listen. I think a scientifically-minded person, who is genuinely passionate and in it for the love of the game, would be THRILLED. I grew up in some very swampy backwoods, so I've come face-to-face with dangerous wildlife on occasion, and my reaction has only ever been a bone-deep thrill - no room for fear when I'm thinking "this is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me." If I encounter something I don't understand, I want to get close to it to learn everything little thing that I can, or else bask in the not-knowing and the mystery. (Everyone read "The Cloud of Unknowing" by Anonymous 14th Century Christian Mystic right now.) If a strange entity from another dimension extended its hand to me, I would simply shake it. If that's how I die, then that's how I die. Outta my way, gayboy, I'm boutta get it.

Contrast Albrecht with Yonta, who can't help but be ecstatic about and enamored with it all even after the Void has torn her apart and put her back together.

And Albrecht's fear is still understandable. Survival and fear are deeply wired biological impulses. He is witnessing something far beyond his experience, and he is Orokin - he has had an unimaginable range of experiences, so something beyond that is overwhelming.

But that's the underlying factor, I think. It's not just survival instinct and fear of death. Albrecht bookends the Requiem logs by talking about the crimes and mindset of the Orokin. He is not studying the Void out of a passion for understanding and connecting with the world. He is doing it to maintain status and to advance and expand the Orokin Empire.

Albrecht doesn't see the Void's empathy for what it is because he is not reaching out in empathy. He is an invader in the Void, and he knows it. He is setting foot in a place to which he has not been invited, in order to take from it, and therefore what he expects is for that place to retaliate. Considering how the logs are bookended, I think that is driving his fear more than anything.

Notably, he does not suffer the extreme injuries until he runs through the metaphorical door, something he initially entered through the safety of the seriglass bell. His injuries may very well have been accidentally self-inflicted due to his panic.

And then comes the crime. The fear, the severing of the finger(s), all of that can be considered an understandable misconception and mistake. But despite being a scientist and an intelligent man, Albrecht doesn't stop to reconsider his reactions and assumptions. He doesn't stop to be curious about what it is that he actually saw. He made, to his knowledge, first contact with a non-human species, and he doesn't care. He only fears it. That alone makes him a utter failure as a scientist, even as his scientific advancements reshape the world through use of the stolen fingers. Flayed flesh for stolen stars.

It's also notable that Albrecht doesn't do the severing himself; he makes his daughter complicit in it. He makes the entire world complicit in what he has done, because he never speaks of the man he saw trapped in the wall, not until it is far, far too late. (And note the wording he uses - trapped.) Which is a consistent theme throughout the game: the Orokin inflicting complicity on others through ignorance, threats, and force.

Albrecht fears what he sees within the Void and expects the Void to retaliate because he is an interloper there with intentions to take and plunder. He flees and proceeds to inflict violence on what he has discovered in pursuit of greed and status, and he does not stop until it is too late. And the Void is a mirror. The Void reflects, and so what Albrecht expects and what he inflicts is what he creates.

Lohk. (Void) From brooding gulfs are we beheld by that which bears no name Its heralds are the stars it fells, the sky and earth aflame Corporeal laws are unwrit, as suns and love retreat To cosmic madness, laws submit, though stalwart minds entreat In luminous space, blackened stars, they gaze, accuse, deny Roiling, moaning this realm of ours in madness, lost shall die Carrion hordes trill their profane accord with eldritch plans To cosmic forms from tangent planes, we end as we began

[fluff-e-boy]

Do you think you could be trusted with the Death Note?

I’d start killing politicians so quickly you would not believe. I also would get caught instantly

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[raccoonmilf]

Chat, is it considered “abusive roommate behavior” to release a raccoon into the living space after you have asked your roommate for months to please clean up their messes (they do not pay any of the mortgage)

[raccoonmilf]

For context, when I used to live alone I would do something called “Princess Time” where I would do an initial sweep (to remove any significant hazards) and then I would release a raccoon into the living area and clean. This helped because I would 1) feel like a princess and 2) the raccoon would bring attention to things my ADHD brain had decided to ignore and I’d quickly clean that stuff up.

So like, if I’m expected to clean the house now, I will be doing it in the way that is most effective for me. And anything that has not been cleaned up after months of having sit-down talks and sending reminders and being promised things will change, might be deemed “trash” by the trash panda and thrown away.

[raccoonmilf]

We haven’t done since we moved into the house, because I didn’t want to cause my roommate or their cats destress or have their things destroyed by a raccoon

[raccoonmilf]

I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.

I wanna make things very clear that underneath all the whimsy, I am a trained professional.

[raccoonmilf]

Those vibes are likely because I’m the original creator of Dashcon and my personality has not changed since 2012 lmao

[fipindustries]

[cjsnaake]

I fuck with this

[kaity--did]

hey mom, I just wonder if I am a horrible person because I keep being told I am, by so many people, but I also get told a lot that people love me, and that I'm the kindest, best person people know. But strangers, and my parents think I'm cruel. I just can't help but think that I am horrible? you said I'm not because I'm not trump, but i'm just afraid that I can't fix myself. why do people think I'm horrible?

OK, so the first thing I'm going to ask you is

Is anyone actually looking you in the eyes and saying you are a horrible person? Is anybody coming up to you individually insane you're a bad person or are you telling yourself that you're a bad person because you identify with some of the things that maybe people are saying are bad on the news like your gender identity or your sexuality or your religion? 

The next thing I want you to ask yourself is if multiple people are coming up to you and looking you in your eyes and saying you are a bad person who has done bad things I need you to stop and ask yourself. Are these a lot of people I don't know or these individuals who I have made conscious choices to hurt? is it possible that these people that I don't know that are telling me to my face that I'm a bad person are projecting a little bit?

Do people really think you're horrible for conscious decisions that you have made or have you convinced yourself you're horrible because of conscious decisions other people have made?

[litafficionado]

“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” -Jorie Graham, in a conversation 

[notaspy11]

I give these out to adults in therapy if they have any kind of emotional dysregulation. Can have dramatic results sometimes!

[miggylol]

Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.

Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.

(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)

Are you safe?

Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.

I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.

I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.

A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.

The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.

I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.

…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.

Voting ended onJul 14

(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)

[waskurttrans]

Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the Straights

Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day.  Things got heavy:

KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?

CHUCK: What?

Kurt Cobain.  Rock musician.  He was in a band called Nirvana.

I’m familiar with him, yes.

Was he a trans woman?

Um.  No?

OK.  Why not?

I mean, he wasn’t.  It’s like asking why he wasn’t an astronaut.

He wasn’t an astronaut because he never went to space.  Why wasn’t he a trans woman?

Because he didn’t transition.  I mean, he didn’t ever say he was a woman, didn’t ever say he was trans.  So no.  Kurt Cobain wasn’t a trans woman.

So someone is trans if they say they’re trans.  Self-determination.

That’s what you’ve told me.  Is that wrong?

No, that’s right.  We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us.  If we say we’re trans, nobody can say we aren’t.

And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.

So was I trans in 1994?

I don’t know, were you?

Yes, but if you’d asked me in 1994, I would have told you “no”.

So if I tell you I’m trans, I’m trans…

Right.

But if I tell you I’m cis, I might still be trans?

If you tell me you’re cis, I believe you.

That’s not the same thing as “I’m cis”.

That’s a really good point.  This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say “gender is a construct”.

Come again?

Well, you’re cisgender, right?

As far as I know, yes.

Aha.

Hmmm?

You hedged.  “As far as I know” isn’t the same thing as “yes”.  “As far as I know” opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.

It doesn’t seem terribly likely.

That’s an interesting statement.  Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans.  I mean, I knew trans people existed.  I knew somebody had to be trans.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.

Do you think this is why you’re on this whole “Kurt Cobain was a trans woman” kick?

Hey now, I’m just asking questions.  You know.  Like J.K. Rowling is “just asking questions”.

Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says “KURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMAN” on it right now.

Am I?  Oh, shit.  I thought I was wearing my “Skip school, take hormones, kill God” T-shirt.  To your question, though - yeah, I do think that’s part of it.  Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing.  I didn’t have any role models.  I didn’t wonder if I was the only one.  I was convinced of it.

So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like you…

I need someone like that.  I need to not be the first of my kind.

Of course you’re not the first trans woman.

No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.

So it’s not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didn’t know he was a trans woman.

An egg.  Right.

Why Kurt Cobain, anyway?  What’s so special about him that you’re trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?

He knew things.  Things cis guys don’t know.  Things I didn’t know until after I started transition.  He understood women, what we’re like, what we experience.  “Pennyroyal Tea”.  “Rape Me”.  I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.

It wouldn’t be the only way in which he was exceptional.

True.  Ahhh.  I don’t know.  I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but there’s something in his eyes.

Something in his eyes.

All the pictures of him.  No matter what he’s doing.  If he’s grinning, or sad, whatever he’s doing, you can see something trapped there.  Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.

Huh.  You, uh, know that what you’re doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?

Maybe.  Chuck, do you think I’m happier?

Since you transitioned?

Yeah.

Of course.  Absolutely.  Night and day.

Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it.  Even in pictures, you know?  I see it.  You’ve seen some of my transition timelines, right?

You do look really different.

It’s not just me.  Every single person who transitions looks like that.  We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us.  I don’t understand how anybody can hate us.

I don’t get it either, Kate.

And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photos… and I see something in their eyes.  Transmasc, transfem, doesn’t matter.  There’s something trapped wanting to get out.  Every picture I’ve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the “before” picture on a transition timeline.  It’s just that with him, there aren’t any after pictures.

And it’s not just the eyes, either.  The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”.  It’s just literally egg fashion.  We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.

“Egg fashion”, egg this, egg that… isn’t it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?

Is it?  Chuck, I was alive in 1994.  I was an 18 year old egg.  I know what that feels like.  I know what that looks like.  I lived that.  Why didn’t I come out as trans in 1994?  Because I didn’t have the opportunity.  Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were.  None of us.  Look.  You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991?  “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all.”  That’s what he said.

Holy shit.  Really?

Really.  September 14, 1991.

Hold on, let me look that up.  Oh, yeah, I see it.  Look, if you look at the full quote he’s just saying he’s not a jock.  Like he didn’t fit in with the jocks. 

Well, what about the dresses?

What dresses?

Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses.  Like, a lot, both onstage and off.  On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.”  He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses.  I wear them around the house sometimes.”  This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world.  He was open about this.  He was proud about this.

Yeah, but… it’s just clothes.

Except it’s not just clothes.  Listen to his songs.  Listen to his lyrics.  “Should have been a son”.  “I’m a lady, can you save me?”  “Everyone is gay.”  The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls.  Let me grow some breasts.”

I mean they’re song lyrics.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.

Sure.  All kinds of ways.  You ever read Michael Azerrad’s biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?

Nope.

Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain.  He was Cobain’s biographer, but also his friend.  And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics.  For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way.  He thought it’s about dicks.  “To paraphrase Dr. Freud,” he says, “sometimes a gun is just a gun.  But not this time.”  He talks about “Come As You Are”, where Kurt keeps singing “I swear I don’t have a gun.”  That’s not my interpretation.  That’s never been my interpretation.  That’s what this cis man says.  More than one cis man.  Kurt says Dave Grohl’s dad, he said the same thing.  Yeah.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.

“By this time,” Azerrad wrote, “one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all.  His first response is revealing.  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.  ‘Castration.’”  I don’t wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man.  I rationalized “being a man” in all kinds of ways.  What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man.  Had to come up with some kind of excuse.  It just strikes me kind of funny.

Kurt’s songs have meanings.   The lyrics to “In Bloom”, Kurt was pretty explicit about that.  The lyrics he wrote have meanings.  “Heart-Shaped Box”.  You know what that refers to?  When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, “She gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt – little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.”  A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart.  That was what I felt like before I came out.  A tiny phantom doll.  Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago.  Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it.  What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that “Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.”  And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.

You’re making it sound…

Maybe it was.  Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because that’s what you were told, that it’s a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isn’t.  To me, that’s normal.  That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Love’s lingerie, that’s normal.

Kate, he was a punk!  He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses.  He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R man’s desk!  You think that was some kind of sex thing?

Sexuality is part of being a woman.  Part.  Rage – and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him – that’s another part.  Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman?  Yes, certainly, just like you’re interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man.  When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”.  Never.

Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman.  He was just a transvestite.  He was a man.

Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t a trans woman.  Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman.  Man.

Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman's girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that's the identity of his we need to respect.  Man.

Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song “Halley’s Comet”, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything.  Man.

Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning.  He didn’t tell anybody for sure that he was a woman.  Man.

Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isn’t the same as actually transitioning.  Man.

All men.  Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say.  I know how that works.  I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I don’t know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply.  They’re still legitimate.

I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.

And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation.  There’s no larger context to consider, no bigger picture.  I can’t really know.  I can’t really judge.

I mean, everybody else does.  I guess I can’t tell you not to.  But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of – none of that makes him a girl.

Sure.  And nothing can make him a girl.  Because he’s dead.  Because he killed himself.

Oh, here we go.  After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself – gender dysphoria.  Do you have a book deal yet?

Working on it.  And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobain’s death, like it’s this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.

Right.  He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isn’t exactly something that improves one’s quality of life.

Sure, but why did he start heroin?

I don’t know.  Why does anybody start heroin?

To help him cope with his eating disorder.

Wait, what?  Eating disorder?

You don’t know about that?  He had stomach problems, for a long, long time.  He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldn’t make his stomach hurt.  Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it.  Nobody took it seriously.  So he self-medicated with heroin.  “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad.  “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.”  I know, though.  Lots of cis guys have eating disorders.  Doesn’t mean anything.

Kate there’s a lot of interpreting going on here.

Yeah, I guess there is.  Is that necessarily a bad thing, though?  Is that necessarily wrong?  Like.  You’ve seen The Matrix, right?

Only the first one.

Yeah, that’s fine.  So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?

Yes, but I’m not really sure why.  Just seems like a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” with extra fight scenes.

It’s pretty trans, though, right?

Clearly.  It was directed by two trans women.

And trans women who watch it – eggs or otherwise – find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, don’t.

I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.

OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000?  In, like… a car crash or something?  Does that mean The Matrix isn’t a trans film?

Well, no, because it’s still a film made by two trans women.

A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience.  The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women.  And we can’t prove it.  We can’t possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say it’s a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didn’t say it, they didn’t say the special magic words.  Self-determination.  You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain?  I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit.  She didn’t respect his self-determination.

Um…

“Pennyroyal Tea”.  Cobain told Azerrad “It's a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.”  Pennyroyal is an abortifacient – but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses. 

Hell, not just that song.  The whole album.  In Utero.  The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death".  The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1.  There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could.  By killing himself.

That could have been me.  That could so easily have been me.  I was told all the same things he was.  We all were.  When I was 27?  When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me.  I was a zombie.  Walking dead.  When I quit, I quit cold turkey.  Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome.  Nobody told me it could have killed me.  And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man.  Forever.  They would perpetuate the Lie.  That’s why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through.  The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:

“All I could think was: ‘Oh god, I don’t want to die a boy.’”2

I felt the same way, came out for the same reason.  I figured no matter what I did, I was dead.  I didn’t do it live, but to at least have an honest death.  I genuinely believed transition would kill me.

It didn’t, though!  You’re alive and you’re beautiful and I’m so, so glad for that.  It didn’t kill you.

It could have.  Still could.  Transition has helped, has made it easier­ for me, but it’s not that way with everyone.  People have been kind to me, in ways that they aren’t kind to other trans women.  Others of us… aren’t so lucky.

Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking don’t, that you can’t see?  Of course I can’t prove it.  I can’t prove that I’m trans.  You can’t prove that you’re cis.  Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything.  Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3.  If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong?  Would anybody object or complain?  Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless.  The word, the concept, it literally didn’t exist when Cobain died.  Have you ever heard the word “agnotology”?

No?

It means making a false claim to ignorance.  Claiming that we don’t know something that we do.  That we can’t know something that we can.  We know things now, Chuck.  We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are.  We know what it does to people.  How eggs think.  How eggs act.  How eggs die.  But we pretend we don’t.  We still pretend.  We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal.  We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them.  And they don’t, Chuck.  We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did.  It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves.  We aren’t allowed to recognize each other.  Individual choice or social contagion.  Those are the options we’re given.  And neither of them are right.  Neither of them are who we are.

Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do.  I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words.  We know our own.  We recognize each other.  And if someone is alive?  If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word.  Because as long as we’re alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance.  What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesn’t matter.  I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person – the egg themselves.  Once they die, all bets are off.  Omerta no longer applies.  Kayfabe no longer applies.

To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure.  I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian.  Emily Dickinson!  I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit?  I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters?  She liked girls.  She really liked girls.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian.  Refusing to say it isn’t “respect”.  It’s perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves.  No more.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  I can’t, as an individual, say that.  I don’t have the right.  No trans woman can say that, individually.  But collectively?  All of us together?  The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too.  Not all of them, and not all of us.  Absolutely not all of us.  But enough of us.  Enough that we have the right.  We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.

Kate, are you ok?

I’m fine.

Do you want a hug?

Fuck you, Chuck.

OK, well.  I’m, uh.  Gonna go to the other room.  You should, uh.  Drink some water.  Stay hydrated.  Love you, Kate.

Love you too, Chuck.  Sorry.

Shhh.  It’s OK, Kate.  It’s OK.

1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walker’s encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: “In Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the same”. The work she’s referencing is Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”.  Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her “Cyborg Manifesto” was a pivotal influence on Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.

2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/

3 Natalie Reed, https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/

[free-my-mindd]

[diedoffscreen]

[notaspy11]

This is a good message, so I'm about to begin ignoring the part that was added on, as I didn't agree to any of it.