#grousing

[valeriehalla]

man i was literally going to roll out a gimmick blog this month too. i was feeling it. tumblr would have been the perfect hole for that peg. it was the only site left in the no man's land between twitter-scale microblogging and blogger-scale macroblogging...

[morlock-holmes]

Sort of related to this, the current White House attack on trans people is ostensibly about protecting women and children, so I feel like they've realized it's in their best interest to try to pretend trans men don't exist.

Can I just start by saying that I have always been incredibly irritated by the claim that trans people are denying biological reality? A while ago I was talking to a co-worker, and he mentioned he was trans while talking about some discrimination he had faced in a previous job.

I had no idea the guy was trans; he had a masculine voice, no breasts, bald head, beard. The White House says that it's vitally important that we know which kind of reproductive cells people produce. Well, as soon as he came out I got a much better idea of which cells his body produces then any of my coworkers, most of whom I only presume to be cis for statistical reasons. Someone who is out and trans has told you more about their birth sex than someone who is cis and closeted, this has bugged me for years.

But that's more a digression, my real question is, does the White House actually want him in women's spaces? Do they want the bald guy with the beard walking into the women's restrooms, using the lady's locker room at the gym, staying at the battered women's shelter, playing on women's sports teams?''

Look, we all know the answer to that, which is, "Of course they don't, if he used the women's restroom they'd decide he was a pervert pretending to be a trans woman and become enraged at him for doing exactly what they demand."

But the moment you actually admit that is the moment that you've revealed the truth, which is that we actually care a great deal about the mutable sex characteristics.

If a trans man walks into the women's room I gaurantee that all the transphobes will suddenly stop caring about reoproductive cells and chromosomes and become very concerned about facial hair, vocal quality, and the shape of a person's body.

All of which, you know, we can change.

When people talk about sports, I'm pretty ignorant, but it seems like if you were going to segregate them based on some physical sex category, you could do it by reproductive cell production like the White House wants, or you could do it by chromosomes, or you could do it by mutable sex characteristics like hormones. I'm not at all clear on why the third option is fundamentally less fair than the other two options.

I was listening to a podcast taking down the Daily Wire's comedy Lady Ballers, and I found out that there's a Ben Shapiro interview where he talks about proposing doing it as a kind of Borat style documentary, but finding out that nobody actually wanted to take hormone treatments to qualify. I think he was talking about the WNBA. I was googling a little bit and found this FindLaw page which has a link to the Women's Tennis Association, which requires transgender members to have a stable gender identity for four years, to have been taking hormone treatments that maintain their testosterone below certain levels for 12 months before participation and to allow the league to monitor testosterone levels during competition.

Look, I'm dumb, I don't know why we segregate sports, but like, I don't know, if we're worried about men invading women's sports by pretending to be trans this seems like it would prevent that pretty thoroughly, just as well as segregating by reproductive system or chromosome? Like I don't quite understand why this approach isn't a workable compromise if your concern is keeping men from gaming the system by applying to play in women's sports leagues.

Looking around, very few states have bothered to ban trans men from competing in men's sports, because... Yeah, they can't really justify it ideologically so why bother?

I just don't really buy this idea that it's only the unmutable sex characteristics that we care about, I think we actually do care about the mutable ones quite a bit.

Science doesn't tell us the words we have to use to refer to unmutable sex characteristics in a certain way and it doesn't tell us that the unmutable ones are more important than the mutable ones, all that stuff is ideological, and I am so fucking tired of people pretending it isn't.

[fireheartedpup]

My parents when I finally relax: it's criminally offensive to take showers at this hour. This needs to stop right now immediately

My parents when I want to take advantage of their earlier bedtime so I can be alone in the front of the house: what's a bedtime

[fishing4stars]

unpopular opinion: I don't like most current animation

it's not a genre - anything can be animated, I know

I literally just hate looking at it. Digital animation looks like plastic dolls and I haaaate it. The quality of the light looks weird. Not to mention the bizarrely exaggerated sexual dimorphism irritates me. Also probably part of my aversion to video games. They are both so incredibly far from an aesthetic I enjoy.

I'm sorry to miss good stories sometimes. But NO. Not my preference. I'll stick to TV and shows that were made live action in the first place.

[prawnlegs]

strongest potions for my bastard of a shoulder please, I really hoped to have this page fully inked before the end of the month but chronic pain makes fools of us all

[cephalopodinspace]

"This sounds like it was written by AI" actually, the AI text sounds like it was written by us. Mimicry is its intended function. AI, much like humans, can produce language that sounds "normal" as well as language that sounds weird or incorrect, whether that's for deliberate reasons or undeliberate ones. The fact that AI can produce weird art does not mean that all weird art is AI-generated. The fact that AI can produce bad art does not mean that all bad art is AI-generated. The desire to avoid engaging with AI content is reasonable, but don't let it limit your understanding of the scope of human creative ability--and especially don't let it make you be rude to real human artists and writers whose creative processes and goals are not immediately obvious to you.

[monsterkissed]

you can get away with a Lot of just overt transphobia in ostensibly trans-posi spaces if you just say you're specifically talking about non-binary people and idk that seems like an Issue

just straight-up undisguised stuff about it being delusional or a childish phase or that we're lying about needing better rights or that we're predatory grifters or literal attack helicopter crap or basically whatever you want so long as you remember to replace the words "trans people" with "they/thems" or "people with names like leaf or squash or railroad lmao"

[lifeattomsdiner]

As if I needed another reason to despise Twitter, every single notification I’ve gotten for weeks now has been “hey didja see this tweet?  hey didja see this tweet?  hey didja--” die.