no more assigning babies a legal sex at birth. i feel like this should go without saying, but no more surgeries on intersex infants. no more surgeries on intersex children. embrace intersex traits as natural. because they are.
no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?
no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.
no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.
the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.
i'm not asking for the end of gender, i'm calling for an acknowledgement of gender and sex that understands the infinite diversity of the human species. i'm suggesting an end to binary systems that only benefit the ruling class. just think about it. okay?
i know its the NHS which basically answers my question. but why are most of the doctors who usually do hysterectomy allowed to just not treat trans people. oh sorry i don't want to do that part of my job
I have no idea. It's genuinely wild. There's literally zero reason for them to send me through some special trans pathway that's going to take a million times longer - Because for obvious reasons actual oncology patients need to take priority.
My gynaecological issues are long standing for over a decade before any transition. It's not related. Testosterone hasn't done anything on top of that, that wouldn't also be a consideration for a cis woman going through menopause, and needing a hysterectomy. The regular hysterectomy pathway should be perfectly adequate for this. It's ridiculous and unfair.
I think if I put aside like, the poltical and hateful aspect of it, part of the reason people react so strongly and are so frightened of me when I’m in public is because of horror. Like. Their immediete association with a faceless human shaped figure draped in all black is more like
like straight up im pretty sure if you asked people on campus they would have a “ghost story” of their experience seeing a terrifying ghost but in reality it was just me like, getting some mail or working at night. its interesting how peoples brains in my experience jump to “holy fuck a ghost” and start screaming as being the most logical interpretation of seeing me instead of “hey maybe its a muslim woman”.
Anyways this is all to say if I saw a shadow demon or grim reaper i would probably be psyched and say “Assalam alaikum” and then go about my day.
I wanna expand a lil on this cuz its interesting and important, sorry to get a bit more heavy.
I had work today, here’s what I look like often when I go to work, sleeved black jilbab, black niqab, closed toed shoes, exam gloves, headphones.
And here’s also a picture of me, now just at a distance walking down the hallway
And a lot of people’s initial gut reactions to seeing me is fear (including screaming or backing away/turning around) and thinking I’m something scary or a ghost or monster, because I guess their more familiar and ready to believe in ghosts than realize I’m just like. A regular person. In that photo I’m literally just walking and listening to music while working as a custodian.
And like, you might say “well thats an understandable reaction, its not good but its not hurting anyone”. Straight up, in my 3 years living and working on campus, I haven’t made a single friend, no one talks to me because they’re so put off or frightened by my niqab. And each photo of me here is a photo of an exact recreation of what I was doing prior to hatecrimes I’ve experienced. Standing? Suspicious and scary. Walking by myself? Suspicious and scary. Cleaning tables? Suspicious and scary, worthy of confrontation and considering calling the police.
This is all to say like, I think people should look at how they react to seeing an all-black figure. Because if you do, it’s highly unlikely its a ghost, and more likely a normal person.
I made another post about this but I thought I should include it here so people see it.
I’ve gotten messages and tags along the lines of “I might be startled/scared at first but when I realize you’re just a person I would talk and befriend you!” which is very sweet, honestly, and many many steps ahead of how most people treat me. However, part of the post is about that, about how when people see me their immediate reaction is fear and not seeing me as a human being.
Like I said in the inital post, people’s main association with someone looking like me is horror (shadow demons, wraiths, ghosts), all black figures in media are spooky or evil otherworldly monsters. Most people’s only other exposure is islamaphobic news that again frames someone who looks like me as a scary oppressed other. When people talk about hijab bans or “burka bans” the image that has been pushed is people that look like me. There’s no big mainstream media with someone who looks like me, hell Momtaz from We Are Lady Parts is the first niqabi I’ve seen in the main cast of any media. Otherwise the only exposure to someone that looks like me is horror at best and Islamaphobic politics at worst.
The main issue that makes day to day life in America hell for me is that when people look at me, even if its just for a few seconds, they don’t see me as human. Whether people jump to thinking I’m an actual ghost, a spooky decoration (I’ve quite literally been mistaken for being part of a Halloween display), or see me as a caricature of oppression, or a terrorist, or a criminal (tons of people think I’m dressed in all black to avoid being noticed while I commit a crime, and plenty of people think my niqab makes it so I can get away with crimes) the one common thread is people do not recognize my humanity.
Sure, for some people that only lasts a few moments, but for most it lasts longer or forever. If people talk to me, they’ll likely come to realize I’m just a person, but most people don’t, and countless people only see me in passing in public, and for as long as I exist in their mind, I am never a full person. And too often I’m pressure to talk to people purely just to prove my humanity and that I‘m not some tragically oppressed person who needs saving.
[ID: 1. Collage of shadowy black figures and daemons. 2. OP wearing an all-black outfit, including a niqab which covers their whole face except the eyes. 3. OP walking down a hallway in the same outfit. 4. OP cleaning a table. /end ID]
cannot emphasize enough that if you are currently pursuing a mental illness diagnosis out of your own volition with a professional and you do not absolutely unquestionably need it in order to access something specific and unattainable otherwise (accomodations or disability benefits or surgery coverage or custody or substances) then you should stop wasting your time and money and get out of there. you will not get validated. people will not treat you better. ranges from useless to actively harmful in the future. psych professionals have nothing of value to tell you about the world or about yourself
Just got a letter about an appointment with gynaecological oncology next month. I have no idea why. If I have cancer, no doctor has told me. I've had ultrasounds and MRIs which were supposed to have come back clear, though I guess no one ever talked to me about the results in any depth. So I guess there's a possibility someone finally had a proper look at the results, saw some bad news, and booked the appointment.
If I have to find out I have cancer from an automated appointment letter I am going to be so angry.
Either way now we have to wait until at least tomorrow to be able to call and try to get more information. I don't know how I'm supposed to cope with the rest of today, and especially get any sleep tonight. I feel so panicked and upset.
Had the call - Apparently the only person who deals with both hysterectomy + trans people is in gynaecological oncology for some reason. And they didn't think it was worth mentioning at any point. Fucking wild.
Just got a letter about an appointment with gynaecological oncology next month. I have no idea why. If I have cancer, no doctor has told me. I've had ultrasounds and MRIs which were supposed to have come back clear, though I guess no one ever talked to me about the results in any depth. So I guess there's a possibility someone finally had a proper look at the results, saw some bad news, and booked the appointment.
If I have to find out I have cancer from an automated appointment letter I am going to be so angry.
Either way now we have to wait until at least tomorrow to be able to call and try to get more information. I don't know how I'm supposed to cope with the rest of today, and especially get any sleep tonight. I feel so panicked and upset.
Just got a letter about an appointment with gynaecological oncology next month. I have no idea why. If I have cancer, no doctor has told me. I've had ultrasounds and MRIs which were supposed to have come back clear, though I guess no one ever talked to me about the results in any depth. So I guess there's a possibility someone finally had a proper look at the results, saw some bad news, and booked the appointment.
If I have to find out I have cancer from an automated appointment letter I am going to be so angry.
Either way now we have to wait until at least tomorrow to be able to call and try to get more information. I don't know how I'm supposed to cope with the rest of today, and especially get any sleep tonight. I feel so panicked and upset.
Hi again, it's me, Casi, once again asking for help to get through the month.
Basic background info: I'm a disabled enby who is the sole caregiver for my elderly disabled mother and We are Homeless. The area where we live is being gentrified to all hell and its made it near impossible to find affordable housing. We're staying in a hotel because its the safest option we have.
At this point we have the room paid for until Saturday the 23rd
Moms SSI is our only stable income, though I have Redbubble and Ko-Fi shops where I sell my art and I am looking for other work but being chronically ill and disabled makes it difficult.
Mom doesn't get paid again until the 1st and we have 9 days left of the month to get through until then. Literally any amount of help would be incredibly appreciated.
The room is $72 a night / $556 a week / $716 for 9 days.
Hi again, it's me, Casi, once again asking for help to get through the month.
Basic background info: I'm a disabled enby who is the sole caregiver for my elderly disabled mother and We are Homeless. The area where we live is being gentrified to all hell and its made it near impossible to find affordable housing. We're staying in a hotel because its the safest option we have.
At this point we have the room paid for until Saturday the 23rd
Moms SSI is our only stable income, though I have Redbubble and Ko-Fi shops where I sell my art and I am looking for other work but being chronically ill and disabled makes it difficult.
Mom doesn't get paid again until the 1st and we have 9 days left of the month to get through until then. Literally any amount of help would be incredibly appreciated.
The room is $72 a night / $556 a week / $716 for 9 days.
Rooouke I'm so glad you posted about dry herb vapes forever ago because I've been needing to rely on cannabis a lot more for symptom management, but lately combustion has been exacerbating some nasty side effects. Luckily I new what to get! And lucky where I live it's legalllll so I just went to a head shop and got one and tore down some Patriot Front posters while I was out.
I'm decorating my new vape with stickers c:
Yayyyy I am so glad to hear that!! I hope it works great for you and helps manage everything well 💜
Americans be like it is totally normal for an entire stadium (including military members) to stand at attention while a fast food clown mascot sings the national anthem
when we say "it is functionally impossible to parody Americans in a way that will actually insult them" this is the sort of thing you're up against. is your sick burn funnier than corporation burger clown sing national anthem baseball game? no?? of course it isn't.
Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”
TODAY (May 14), I’m doing a free virtual event for the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Wendy “Abolish Silicon Valley” Liu, on the theme of “How to Disenshittify the Internet.”
My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them:
Reverse Centaur is a book about the realpolitik and the political economy of AI, written by a tech critic (me!) who is sick to the back teeth of hearing about AI. Central to the book's thesis:
The AI bubble is part of a lineage of pump-and-dump swindles created by monopolists who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow even after they've saturated their markets:
The workers who say that their jobs are worse and the things they produce are much worse as a result of AI are correct; but the workers who say their work is much better thanks to AI are also correct. This only seems like a riddle until you understand that the most important fact about any technology (including AI) isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:
When a boss fires a worker and gives their jobs to an AI, it usually means that they don't care if that job is done well, which is why customer service jobs are being handed over to AI:
Bosses also love firing coders and replacing them with AI – first, because bosses are really angry about the decades when tech workers were in short supply and bosses had to pretend to like them, and second, because if you're selling AI as a way to replace workers, what better way to convince a potential customer than to fire the workers your own company depends upon? (All that said, the coders who are excited about their new AI coding tools have a point – when a worker is in charge of their work and thus when and how they use a tool, we should defer to their own experience):
Artists are also a favorite target of AI bosses, which is weird, because the wages of creative workers add up to a total that rounds to zero when compared with the unimaginably large sums AI companies will have to take in if they are to pay back the trillions they've spent to date (let alone the trillions more they're proposing to spend in the near term). All of this raises a foundational question: can AI "art" ever be good? (Spoiler: probably not):
Media companies say they have the answer to the AI art question: they'll create (or assert) a copyright that lets them control AI training. This is an incredibly transparent ruse: media companies are artists' class enemies, and if we get a new right to control AI training, our bosses will demand that we sign it away to them as part of their non-negotiable, one-sided standard contracts:
For creative workers, the answer to these new would-be tech bosses isn't asserting a new right that will be expropriated by the old media bosses who've been ripping us off forever. Our salvation lies in leaning into the US Copyright Office's interpretation that holds that AI-generated works can't be copyrighted, because copyright is only for human creations. That means that the only way our bosses can get a copyright over the things they want to sell is to pay us to make them:
Many of the seemingly urgent AI questions that people won't shut up about are distractions, because they assume that AI will lastingly infiltrate every part of our society. In reality, the AI companies are losing unimaginable amounts and have no path to profitability:
Despite AI's manifest unsuitability to do jobs that should exist, bosses keep firing people and replacing them with chatbots that do their jobs very badly. This allows bosses to indulge their solipsistic fantasy of a world without people, in which customers, workers and suppliers are statistical artifacts and bosses are unitary geniuses who simply imagine a product or service and then it is delivered, without any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things:
This is catastrophic, and not just for the parties involved today. The AI bubble will pop, and when it does, the chatbots that do these jobs (badly) will be switched off. Meanwhile, the workers those chatbots replaced will have retrained, retired, or become "discouraged." No one will be around to do those (necessary) jobs. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
The real existential AI threat isn't that we'll accidentally teach the word-guessing program so many words that it awakens and becomes a vengeful god. The real risk is that when the bubble bursts we'll indulge the ruling class's reflex to austerity, and that this will continue the decades of mass economic traumatization that makes people into easy marks for fascists:
But when the AI bubble pops, that won't be the end of AI – it will be the end of the bubble. When the AI bubble pops, we'll have mountains of GPUs at fire-sale prices, skilled workers liberated from the imperative to help their bosses promote their stock swindle, and open source models that will yield tremendous dividends to anyone who sets out to optimize them:
As you can see from the links above, I developed The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI in the same way that I developed Enshittification: in public, through a series of essays, which I periodically synthesized into major, widely shared speeches:
It's a method that's let me produce a string of international bestsellers, published by some of the largest publishers in the world. Nevertheless, Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks:
That's because I have an iron-clad requirement that my work be sold in open formats, without the "digital rights management" that blocks you from moving the books you bought on Amazon to someone else's apps. Digital rights management (DRM) enjoys bizarre legal protections so that it's a felony for me to give you the tools you need to move the books I wrote out of an Amazon app and into a competitor's app:
What's more, these outrageous legal rights extend around the world, because the US Trade Representative spent decades bullying America's trading partners into passing laws that criminalize the act of fixing the defects in America's tech exports, which is why farmers can't fix their John Deere tractors, hospitals can't fix their Medtronic ventilators, and no one can sell you an app that stops Apple and Google from spying on your phone:
Amazon's Audible controls 90% (!) of the audiobook market, and they will not sell any book unless they can permanently lock it to their platform. That means that every time a writer sells you an audiobook on Audible, they create a "switching cost" that stops you from leaving Audible for a competitor. Not only is this fundamentally unjust, it's also terrible for creators: if our audiences can't leave Amazon, then we can't leave Amazon either, which means Amazon can (and does!) steal millions of dollars from writers without losing our business:
Which is where these Kickstarter campaigns come in. Whenever I sell a new book to a publisher, I arrange to make my own independent audiobook for it, which I sell everywhere except the platforms that have mandatory DRM: Audible, Apple and Audiobooks.com. There are some very good DRM-free audiobook stores, notably Libro.fm and Downpour.com (Google Play also sells audiobooks without DRM). But most people have never heard of these, so it wasn't until I started pre-selling my audiobooks on Kickstarter that I was able to make my stubborn refusal to sell out to Audible into a paying proposition. My agent tells me that if I'd sold out to Audible, I'd have paid off my mortgage and I'd be able to give my kid a full ride through a fancy US college. I don't make that kind of money from these Kickstarters, but they do very well nevertheless, and they're a critical part of my family's finances.
You can pre-order print copies of Reverse Centaur, as well as DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks (narrated by me!) for Reverse Centaur and Enshittification. Normally, I offer custom-signed copies of the print books, but Enshittification was so successful that I haven't stopped touring it and I'm in a new city every couple of days, so there's no way I can reliably get into a warehouse to sign the latest batch of orders. Instead, I'll be posting the contact details for every bookstore that's hosting me on my tours (US in June, UK in September) and you can order signed copies from them, which I'll personalize after my events there so they can ship them to you.
I've also decided to raise money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), the nonprofit I've worked at for nearly 25 years. EFF is the oldest, best and most effective tech rights organization in the world, and its mission has only gotten more important over the years. EFF's outreach folks are offering a special membership package for backers of the Kickstarter, which includes an EFF hat and stickers, as well as an Enshittification pin and two Enshittification stickers:
It came out great (as always!), thanks to the terrific direction of Gabrielle De Cuir of Skyboat Media and editing from Wryneck Studios' John Taylor Williams. Gabrielle's directed all my audiobooks since 2017, and John's been mastering my podcasts since 2006 (!!), so we constitute a very well-oiled machine.
Working out my ideas in public allows me to produce my Pluralistic newsletter, and with it, a large volume of free, high-quality work that's licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that lets anyone reproduce, translate, redistribute and even sell my articles. If you've enjoyed that work, I hope you'll consider backing the campaign! Selling books is how I pay the bills and keep the lights on, and as ever, this is the only way you can get a major publisher's ebooks and audiobooks with no DRM and no "terms of service." These are truly ebooks and audiobooks that you own. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them out – so long as you don't violate copyright law, we're all cool:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"The AI bubble is part of a lineage of pump-and-dump swindles created by monopolists who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow even after they've saturated their markets..."
I've seen these two in ads at the cinema since I first moved to the UK, not being 100% fluent in English + whatever accent and funny voice combo they got going on meant I couldn't understand basically anything they were saying. However it left me with a strong impression they were canonically married (you'd understand if you saw the ads too) that I didn't question for the next +10 years of cinema going until I mentioned it off hand to @queer-adhd and he had to break it to me that's not even fucking true
Autistic Queerness and Discourse @queerautism - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
