Hi! Are you cis in the UK and you'd like to support trans rights? Great!
How: buy a trans flag pin and wear it in public.
Why: chaff is an overwhelming amount of false positives so that when a missile gets close to the plane, it hits the chaff and not the plane.
In practice: the goal is to make it DIFFICULT to identify trans people to target with bathroom bans, and to create many FALSE POSITIVES for businesses.
Basically, you might get accused of being trans and kicked out, because of the badge. You say: I wear the badge because trans rights matter.
You follow up with a letter to the business saying you're fucking furious because some nosy dipshit just tried to play fucking genital police with you in the loos. You know lots of trans people (don't name any, if you do) and you wear the pin in support and you're disgusted at them for allowing this.
Blame the business for allowing the behaviour.
Businesses see that their cis customers are getting bothered over a badge and may clarify trans-inclusive policies, so they can kick out the bathroom botherers instead of nice cis allies.
You only need to buy and wear the badge, and you are protecting trans people. You can be genuinely heroic. Even one cis person doing this helps, and everyone you get to join in helps even more.
its so sad when a fanfic trope initially centered around noncon/dubcon gets popular enough that it turns into a watered down extremely consensual healthy-relationship version of it
as retribution i think i'm going to start taking vanilla tropes and making them noncon. the barista is putting roofies in the coffee. there's only one bed and the other guy is getting chained to the radiator. there's no social or legal protections for assault within soulmate matches
Just learned about Bull Press, a tabletop publisher that focuses on games that are prison compliant (no hardcover, no dice, no maps), and their catalogue seems sick as hell. Def gonna pick smth up when I get paid next. They do a lot of donation work with books for prisoners programs!
As mentioned, Bull Press donate playbooks to prisons out of their own pocket. If you know somebody in prison you'd like to refer to receive books, you can email them with requests.
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.
This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.
Not an exaggeration. Gamergate led directly to the redpill/incel movement, which white supremacists exploited and colonized. Not to say that most of the white men in those movements weren't already racist to some extent, but that wasn't an active part of their politics until white supremacist recruiters came along and convinced them that the women ruining their videogames were part of the conspiracy to destroy the white race.
That's a very brief summary but you can go back step by step over the past decade and see how they did it.
Robert Evans, the host of anarchist podcast Behind the Bastards, suggests in his book chronicling the history of American neo-Nazism that Gamergate was, from the ground up, a neo-Nazi recruitment tool. Considering the antisemitic memes suggesting Anita Sarkeesian is Jewish (she's of Armenian-Iraqi descent), I'd believe it.
If it was really about protecting kids, they'd ban football - not trans people
I'm 1000% serious about this.
Study finds CTE in 40% of athletes who [were exposed to repeated head impacts and] died before 30
A new study has diagnosed the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in more than 40% of youth, high school and college athletes -- primarily football players -- who were exposed to repetitive head impacts from contact sports and died before age 30.
The study was conducted by the Boston University CTE Center and based on an examination of 152 brains that had been donated. BU said the study represents the largest case series on athletes who died young.
"The fact that over 40% of young contact and collision sport athletes in the UNITE brain bank have CTE is remarkable, considering that studies of community brain banks show that fewer than 1% of the general population has CTE," said Dr. Ann McKee, lead author on the study and director of the BU CTE Center.
-via ESPN, August 28, 2023. Emphasis here and in all other quotes is mine.
Including the fact that research has started to show exactly what factors cause CTE and how they can be minimized and prevented!!!
But you see, FOX News made $800 million USD from airing the Superbowl in 2025.
Official quote from Lachlan Murdoch, current CEO of Fox Corporation and Rupert Murdoch's son, on the 2025 Superbowl:
“The clear winners Sunday night were the Eagles, the NFL, and FOX. Congratulations to our teams at FOX Sports and Tubi for a record-breaking and historic Super Bowl LIX, the most-watched, most-streamed, and most successful Super Bowl ever.”
-via FOX, February 12, 2025
What are they going to do? Value saving kids' lives over their profit margins? Not at the Rupert Murdoch's Family's FOX News, and certainly not at the NFL!!!
Quite a few more quotes and details below the break, including clarifications on what I mean and info ownership of media megacorps.
Study of Former NFL Players Finds 1 in 3 Believes They Have CTE
New study of nearly 2,000 former NFL players found that 34 percent think they have CTE, a condition it is not yet possible to confirm in a living person...
The study — conducted by a team including researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital who are part of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University — is published Sept. 23 in JAMA Neurology.
According to the study, players who believed they had CTE reported significantly more cognitive problems and a higher proportion of low testosterone, depression, mood instability, headaches, chronic pain, and head injury compared with those who did not have concerns about CTE.
-via Harvard Medical School news, September 24, 2024. And look, the can even get more juicy headlines fearmongering about testosterone levels!! For a reason that actually fucking exists this time!!
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In fact, they don't even need to ban football entirely - we're starting to have the data that COULD be used to launch a massive public health and reform campaign to protect kids from debilitating injuries, mental health crises, and suicide!!
But you know, then we wouldn't be able to force teenage girls (trans and cis) to have a doctor look at their genitals.
We'd have to go after football, which makes billionaires and media companies a fuck ton of money, instead of going after trans kids, who both in the US and globally incredibly vulnerable and, oh yeah, disproportionately likely to have no money.
Example of vital data that we COULD be studying instead of spending millions and millions of dollars faking anti-trans research findings and massively defrauding the public:
New Study Reveals Number and Strength of Head Impacts, Not Concussions, Drive CTE Risk in Football
Does a football player’s number of concussions drive the risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)? In a new study of 631 deceased football players, the largest CTE study to date, scientists found that the number of diagnosed concussions alone was not associated with CTE risk. Instead, football players’ odds of developing CTE were related to both how many head impacts they received and how hard the head impacts were.
The study, conducted by researchers at Mass General Brigham, Harvard Medical School, and Boston University (BU), was published today in Nature Communications. It used an innovative new tool called a positional exposure matrix (PEM) that synthesized data from 34 independent studies to estimate the number and severity of football players’ head impacts over their careers.
“These results provide added evidence that repeated non-concussive head injuries are a major driver of CTE pathology rather than symptomatic concussions, as the medical and lay literature often suggests,” said study senior author Jesse Mez, MD, MS, Associate Professor at the BU Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and Co-Director of Clinical Research at the BU CTE Center.
The new data could provide football with a playbook to prevent CTE in current and future players, according to researchers.
-via Mass General Brigham, June 20, 2023
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Notes for clarification:
This post is not saying I think we should ban football, although I do genuinely believe that we do have an ethical obligation to massively overhaul how football
All of this also applies to and has been found in other contact sports involving head impacts, including soccer (also aka football), hockey, rugby, and wrestling - all huge high school and professional sports
I'm using the sports terminology I am because I am in the United States (and so are most of the fearmongering media billionaires who own the vast majority of news outlets)
That last point specifically includes all major television news, plus over the course of the past two decades, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and like half of AM radio and local news
And of course lest we forget, it includes Fox News, which COULD use its influence to save the lives and health of literally millions of teenagers who are at massive risk of CTE - or have already developed it!! - due to sports injuries
But the executives at Fox have decided to endanger the lives of different teenagers, whom they like way less, by spreading anti-trans conspiracy theories, propaganda, and lies instead.
So next time, try telling your conservative aunt or neighbor or churchmembers that the REAL danger to kids in sports is brain damage from collisions:
"Do you know if your school uses equipment that's rated to help prevent head injuries? Have you seen the statistics on how many kids get lifelong brain damage from playing high school sports? Have you seen the numbers on how many former student athletes commit suicide? That's what I'm worried about - as many as 40% of student athletes might have brain damage, while only like .01% of student athletes are trans. If we want to protect millions of kids, we should start with the thing that affects millions of kids!"
Happy pride month specifically to folks on the asexual and aromantic spectrum who oftentimes feel isolated and left out of the conversation. You belong here as much as the rest of us and I hope that you are all loved in a way that is comforting to you.
ive invented (note: dubious claim) something i call the bear diet which is mostly fruits and vegetables with fish as the main protein source and something like once a month you eat a few hyperprocessed foods of your liking because that is when you, the bear, raid a dumpster in the suburbs
I can actually answer this! So the latex/rubber they used, while standard for Hollywood at the time, reacted REALLY BADLY to being doused in pouring water nonstop for an entire day of shooting. They ended up corroding, which caused them to stink really badly and glob together at the seams. The original plan was to hand out masks to various crew members on the final day of shooting as souvenirs, but the sopping wet, melting, rotting rubber got so gross that by the end of that shooting day they’d already thrown most of them out. Somewhere in a landfill are hundreds of disgusting, bloated, slimey Hugo weaving heads fused together into a nightmarish rotting amalgam :)
You Have More Power Than You Think You Do: A Case Study In Getting Shit Done
I don't live in a walkable city.
I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.
People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!
I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.
Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.
Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.
I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.
A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.
Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.
It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.
And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.
It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.
They're just bike racks.
But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.
It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“
So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"
Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.
Reblogging again because I was thinking about how this ties in with people using "none of us are free until all of us are free" as a cudgel. Passing up small wins for not being pure enough doesn't bring the big wins any closer.
