turn back, o man

tamsin adriane michael | 33 | genderqueer trans lesbian | they/she | disillusioned queer feels; mental health talk; reclaiming christianity; intermittent Star Trek shitposting | queerituality sideblog: @androgyne-acolyte | conlang sideblog: @valirani

[rhinco]

i understand that it's unreasonable to expect a band on world tour to play in every country in the world but i do think they should only be allowed to call it a world tour if they play in every continent. we need to make it embarrassing to say world tour and then not even step foot in africa

[tamsythepansy]

"Elizabethan theatre has three types of guy: Don Pedro from the Sicilian islands, Stabba Badguyman, and John"

[planetarytransformation]

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation, the goal of which was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-denial that so many of us once learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

[snydog17]

they love me because I be saying shit like alas and perchance

[tamsythepansy]

Bits that'll go over like a lead balloon at the affirming workshop, part 1:

"Good evening, _____ United Church, I'd like to share my story of how I escaped from the cult of manhood. You see, I myself was once a man... but with the help of the Holy Spirit, I found Jesus, and I got better. And I want any of you in here who might still be struggling under the yoke of masculinity to know that, yes, there is hope..."

[etakeh]

[thecygnetcommittee]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

(Stephen Gould, "The Panda's Thumb")

[catboybiologist]

I was wondering if you had any readings on the biological aspects of transitioning, especially with the info you use to deconstruct the transphobia argument that being transgender is ‘against biology’. Im a biological sciences major, but haven’t gotten to discuss (much less find resources on) this topic.

Thanks in advance.

Long and rambling response incoming! Sorry for leaving this in my inbox for a few weeks.

This is a very interesting topic to me, and doesn't really have a clean answer. Because its not really about the biology itself, its mostly about the philosophy of science, and how it interfaces with ethics, etymology, and societal understanding. The primary thing to understand is that science is *descriptive*. Morality or classifications are societal determinations that we use to "wrap" scientific observations- gender is therefore the societal "wrapper" to sex, which, over centuries, has snowballed and taken a social definition well past any biological system.

That being said, most of my arguments hinge on the totality of changes that are possible with HRT, and how they affect the molecular mechanisms of sex determination. To me, this sheer totality means that a trans man with significant time on HRT can actually be considered a "biological man", and vice versa for a trans woman. To me, the sheer extent to which cell expression patterns change, and structural elements of the body change, means that the way that transphobes use terminology like "biological sex" is bullshit. And as I've said before, this is NOT a transmedicalist argument, and if I ever sound transmed, I am sorry. Part of the totality of this biological definition includes the interface of genetics, pyschology, and sociology that comprehensively includes all trans people, even those not on HRT. Rather, I use the changes of HRT as a way to demonstrate the plasticity of sex in humans and other animals, and how thin the barrier between sexes actually is. This punches holes in a lot of the propaganda that transphobes tend to roll out, and helps demonstrate how flimsy their talking points are. All of this is to say, something can't be "against biology" because biology is morally neutral. It's not morality. It's not static definitions. It's a set of observations. But, our thinking about definitions and classifications can reflect and be advised by these observations. For me, it helped to think about HRT changes, because my personal mentality is one of a constructed identity. I define myself by what I am in the moment, and if I can document my current state, that helps define who I am- which is a woman. The biology of transition told me how deeply that is true, and continually becomes more true, on a molecular level. So. Here's some individual papers and points that help guide my thinking on the topic, and how each helped me find peace with transitioning: Medical descriptions of changes on HRT:

PENDING REVISION 2024 Second Edition Madeline B.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with this and the WPATH, but from the perspective of medical expectations. Instead, take a look at the changes documented here, and start thinking about how deep and profound they are- these cell types and body structure are sitting there just waiting to happen, and they are literally the same as their cis counterparts. This was huge for me in accepting that my post-HRT body wouldn't be "fake", and actually is literally the

Review paper of sex determination pathways in the animal kingdom:

Molecular patterns of sex determination in the animal kingdom: a comparative study of the biology of reproduction - Reproductive Biology and

Determining sexual fate is an integral part of reproduction, used as a means to enrich the genome. A variety of such regulatory mechanisms h

Transphobes use chromosomes as a prescriptive definition of sex and gender. However, if you take a broader look and see how sex determination works in animals with similar genetic mechanisms as us, it becomes pretty clear that chromosomal sex determination is a late addition to the party. Essentially, most animals use a fairly random mechanism to ensure an advantageous sex ratio in their population. This is often environmental or based on some random gene on chromosome that looks nothing like XY sex determination, but if a large chromosomal deletion comes along, its a convenient way to keep the big version of the chromosome always paired with the small chromosome- for example, the X chromosome always being paired with another X, or its half-deleted pair, the Y chromosome. But there's nothing intrinsic about the chromosomes itself that define sex, its just an evolutionary ride-along mechanism.

So what does actually determine sex? Well, as with any broad scale developmental effect, one signalling molecule or gene can cause extensive downstream genetic effects, and that active, lived set of gene expression then defines what secondary sex characteristics develop.

Estrogen receptor signaling mechanisms

The primary female sex hormones, estrogens, are responsible for the control of functions of the female reproductive system, as well as the d

Testosterone signaling and the regulation of spermatogenesis

Spermatogenesis and male fertility are dependent upon the presence of testosterone in the testis. In the absence of testosterone or the andr

(even though the main point is about spermatogenesis, it does provide a lot of nice summary figures about testosterone signalling) While these papers don't talk about trans people, the introduction of cross-sex hormones will activate these pathways, and cause the wide variety of downstream transcriptional changes in gene activation. Essentially, the active genes in your body will follow the dominant upstream sex hormones in your body. If you're transfemme, on HRT, the active genes in your body are female ones. If you're transmasc, on HRT, the active genes in your body are male ones.

While I never explicitly studied trans people in my biology education, studying principles of gene regulation, chromosome biology, and just a tad of reproductive physiology means that I started to think about how all of those interface with the way we define ourselves in a lot of ways. And usually, that is dynamic- you can have developmental changes kicked off by signalling molecules later in life, and it would be deranged to ignore those changes out of spite and insist that the biological system is still the thing it was before. Sex determination is not exempt from that.

Again, I use HRT changes as an example, but you can find many similar papers on the psychology of transness even pre-HRT. But, I would caution against trying to find a "root biological reason" for being trans pre-HRT- its likely too polymodal to accurately characterize. It's why I stray away from neurological papers and arguments here. That is an ENTIRELY different argument and this post is already long. But hey, every ask I get like this helps formalize my thoughts on the matter. Hope this helped!

[spocksocksrock]

thinking about ‘big shoes’ again

[exoflash]

a concerning amount of witchblr will be like "um actually new years was stolen by europeans from the ancient god scroobus mcdoobus" and then you actually try to research scroobus mcdoobus and it turns out he was invented in the 1940s by a conspiracy theorist who powdered every meal with ketamine and thinks that queer people are reincarnated fish

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remote, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[fishing-lesbian-princess]

[fishing-lesbian-princess]

she’s kinda right actually

[nevver]

Circling the Sun, Angela Lane

[homoluigi]

[officialunitedstates]

my 4D printer is great. it always prints on time

[inthesensethat-deactivated20240]

[strix-alba]

#I feel like we're all conditioned to give these corporatized apologies or statements for every interaction#because when you talk like a regular fucking person online it's much more easily misinterpreted by people who just want to be pissed off#you know the Tweet that's like “I like pancakes” “so you hate waffles?” “no bitch that's a whole new sentence what are you talking about”#corporate apologies and statements read the way they do because they're intentionally structured to prevent ambiguity or misunderstanding#while also conveying a certain tone that will hopefully prevent people from getting mad while they read it#and when we have to buffer everything we say with conditional statements to prevent some rando from ripping us apart over a perceived slight#everything we say starts to sound sanitized and corporate (x)

[the-last-teabender]

Reeducating myself on how to say “You are willfully misinterpreting me so this conversation is over.”

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Recently watched a youtube video about tips for trying to buy sustainable and high quality textiles and the narrator started with several minutes of "I am not shaming anyone for having to buy fast fashion, no ethical consumption under capitalism etc., these are just some tips for if you have the means and desire to source these sorts of fabrics, I know being able to buy sustainable things is a privilege --" and the fact that that disclaimer is necessary, that we live in a culture so ready to read anything in bad faith that providing tips for something is assumed to be shaming people for doing anything else unless you do the "you're valid too! <3" speech at the start, made me want to eat my own face.

[roychewtoy]

my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?

[tamsythepansy]

Symptoms of reading The Mi'kmaw Grammar of Father Pacifique for decidedly non-missionary purposes may include weird comics, apparently.

[Scene: somewhere in Mi'kma'ki, 17th century CE] Angel: bonjour Abbé Maillard, I'm here to show you a vision of the future Maillard: oui s'il vous plait! I bet Catholicism is flourishing among these charming Gaspesian nomads Angel: behold! Maillard: 😶‍🌫️ Maillard: 😳 Maillard: ... I implore you, angel, what is signified by the words "two-spirit pussy got me in the land of fog"?