The inherent tension between "no one post can capture every facet of the human experience, and you need to learn to ignore stuff that doesn't apply to you," on the one hand, and "some people's existence is forgotten or disregarded constantly, and it's legit to be mad when you see a statement claiming universality that does not and cannot apply to you, especially when this happens many times per day every single day," on the other hand.
i confess i don't really understand what people mean when they say they cannot find good books to read anymore. like. go to the shop or library and choose a book??
the problem generally seems to be something along the lines of 'everyone on tiktok is telling me to read books i think sounds bad' and its like ok i do not think those people have your best interests at heart
looking back over storygraph i think over the last 5 years i have read 3 books i did not like & one of them was a gift rather than something i picked out for myself
"nothing's stopping you from getting a flip phone again just do it" <- I Get the sentiment but the world has become more and more (esp since the COVID) smartphone dependent.
last month my brother, a life long touchscreen hater, had to get his first smartphone because he couldn't pay his rent without one since his bank website no longer allows him to use his personal card reader (given by his bank) to make payments. most public transports outside the main city Require that you use the App to get tickets. the other day I went to a brunch place that wouldn't let me order food without going through the App.
I personally think smartphones have ups and downs, and I won't lie I really like having Small Games in my pocket at all times but the way smartphones have become a necessity/requirement to live in society is so fucking annoying and honestly fucked up.
My husband still has a flip phone - but the only reason he's able to do that is because *I* have a smartphone. The university we both work for has stopped allowing 2FA via text, only the app - so I added his account to my app and now when he needs to log into something I let him in. We've parked in several places where you could only pay by either app or website (which was accessed via QR code).
It's not quite as bad in the US as in China yet - when we went there, 80+% of restaurants and maybe 20% of stores made you pay via their mini-app within the Alipay app, or something similar. But it's getting bad enough.
One of the funny, and by funny I mean infuriating, things about the trans discourse on this website is how everyone screams themselves hoarse "read Whipping Girl" as if its the only book written on the experiences of trans women or transfeminism. But also, people scream at you to read Whipping Girl to.....understand trans men? Julia Serrano is a trans woman who admitted that her book doesn't cover the scope of the trans masculine experience. So here, here's some nonfiction books written by actual trans men. Enjoy.
• Hung Jury: Testimonies of Genital Surgery by Transsexual men, edited by Trystan Cotten
• From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond, edited by Morty Diamond
• We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan
• No Poster Boy: Trans Fag Essays by Elliot DeLine
• Side Effects: on Being Trans and Feeling Bad by Hil Malatino
• A Trans Man Walks Into A Gay Bar by Harry Nicholas
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
• Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America by Miriam J. Abelson
• Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography by Mario Martino
• Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits by Loren Cameron
• The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals by Dean Kotula
• FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society by Jamison Green
• Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities by Jason Cromwell
• Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men by Henry Rubin
• Manning Up: Transsexual men on Finding Brotherhood, Family and Themselves, edited by Zander Kieg
• Just Add Hormones: An Insiders Guide to the Transsexual Experience by Matt Kailey
• Self-Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinity in Time and Space, edited by Eli Clare
• Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man by Thomas Page Mcbee
• Amateur: A True Story About What Makes A Man by Thomas Page Mcbee
• Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green
• Both Sides Now: One Man's Journey Through Womanhood by Dhillon Khosla
• What Becomes You by Aaron Raz Link
And, because I believe in my heart that all trans people have more in common than differences and there's really no such thing as separating our community, I am including here transgender book recs written by non-binary, genderqueer, trans feminine and trans woman authors. Enjoy these too.
• Gender Outlaws: on Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein
• Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe
• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg *(this book is fiction but intensely important to the butch and trans masculine lesbian community)
• Tranagender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg
• Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam
• Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey
• A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson
• Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex by Eric A. Stanley
• Surviving Transphobia by Laura A. Jacobs
• Transgender History by Susan Stryker
• The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice by Shon Faye
A lot of the books on this list are on the older side for nonfiction, my interest leans more towards the 90s and 00s and that shows. I encourage anyone with any other book recommendations to add on.
Transgender History by Susan Stryker just got an updated and revised third edition that @thetransfemininereview has been live-blogging her way through on Bluesky. It seems like the updates and revisions were really good, from what I've seen on Beth's live-blog. I bet Beth could add a lot to this list if she chooses to.
A strange genie appears and has an offer for you. You’ll be cured of all, you’ll have a stable job you’re happy with, and you’ll basically just live the best life you can imagine. However, there’s a catch—you’ll have to relive one specific grade level from middle or high school (the genie is American).
Listen, fellow trans women, I love you all, but if you think that trans men or transmascs are an oppressor class you need to log the fuck off because you are being brainpoisoned by discourse-mongers. That is a legitimately rocks for brains take
There is a HUUUUUGE gap between "transfems experience a unique intersection of oppressions which are not experienced by transmascs", which is true, "some passing trans men benefit from male privilege", which is true, "trans people are not immune to transphobic rhetoric and this can sometimes take the form of transmascs engaging in transmisogyny", which is true, and "transmascs should be treated as equivalent to cis men because trans men are men and therefore as men they are a danger to trans women" like do you see where the gigantic leap of logic comes in here?
There is something personally offensive to me about accounts that go out of their way to post about transmascs being dangerous or untrustworthy or transmisogynistic when the primary danger to trans women right now is the goddamn United States government. Like we've got people in the white house who would outlaw all HRT if given the opportunity and you're gonna post about trans men?? I don't even mean this in a "we have bigger fish to fry" sort of way I mean this is the sense that building solidarity is one of the most important things you can do when faced with a hostile government and society. It's not just that the claims being made are bullshit and transphobic it's that the whole thing feels actively self-destructive toward creating any kind of community that's of any use to anyone
Transgender woman faces two felony charges after drawing a firearm during an altercation.
A Wyoming transgender woman is facing two felony charges after drawing a firearm during an altercation she says began with anti-LGBTQ+ and a
Ríhanna Kelver, a bartender and trans rights advocate in Laramie, has been charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent after a 13 September 2025 confrontation outside the Crowbar & Grill, whereshe worked. Kelver could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted on both charges.
Kelver says one man in a group of men across the street from her started shouting homophobic and transphobic insults at her before the man allegedly shoved her to the ground in a downtown crosswalk, as reported by The Laramie Reporter.
There's more, as it pertains to Black trans people's right to self-defence:
Despite Wyoming’s “Stand Your Ground” statute, which allows people to use reasonable force in moments of self defense, Kelver faces up to 15 years in prison for both charges, as well as up to $11,000 in fines, per Cowboy State Daily. Kelver faces an additional year and $1,000 fine for a charge of interference with a peace officer. [...]
As pointed out by Slate, self-defense laws are often put into question when people from marginalized communities, especially trans people, use them, including Cece McDonald, a Black trans woman who served time in a men’s prison for defending her friends during a racist and transphobic attack. Ky Peterson, a Black trans man from Georgia, was also arrested and imprisoned for killing his rapist in self-defense.
Kelver's attacker has also been identified as a member of Patriot Front.
Kelver corroborated a report identifying the attacker as Scott Wayne Durham, a Patriot Front member from Aurora, CO. First unmasked as Patryck “Scott” Durham, he has posted fascist, white supremacist, and Patriot Front propaganda since high school, operating under the online handles “Kevin – CO,” “Fedposter,” “WallaceCarden,” and numerous others. Durham was barred from his high school graduation after being unmasked in 2022, and in 2023 left enrollment at the University of Colorado Boulder after a flyering campaign alerted students to his history. On June 10, 2025 he changed his name (p. 26) to Scott Wayne Durham and is now listed as an honor roll student at the University of Wyoming, located in Laramie.
So whether they know it or not, the prosecutors are helping a Neo-Nazi who tried to commit a hate crime.
(She's also been having her crowdfunding campaigns nuked. If you want to donate to her defense find her here.)
one of the underrated lessons from lotr's Aragorn is to avoid responsibility for as long as humanly possible, possibly in the woods, possibly without showering, until the small folk need you or whatever
we all know adult humans dont get enough enrichment but the other day i was walkin home past an empty playground and impulsively ran over to spin myself on this zipline merry-go-round contraption for a few minutes and it really did feel like it unlocked some neglected part of my brain. like damn we really should all go outside and play more. fuck. they werent kidding with this play time thing. have you guys heard about play time. it could be huge.
Let's put authors in the panopticon and let all their haters invade their privacy!
Emboss touts itself as a sort of insurance against false accusations of AI usage. It's marketed to authors as "here, you can use this if anyone questions your writing!" and advertised to readers as a sort of "If your favorite author can't share their Emboss with you, you can definitely assume they used AI. ONLY accept books written in Ellipsus with the Emboss feature enabled! We PROMISE you our software is more reliable than any other at catching CHEATERS!"
Yeah, it comes across a bit like extortion!
It claims to track your keystrokes and use some (non-AI) algorithms to determine if you write like a "natural" and "normal" human.
Who decides what is natural? Who determined what the benchmark is for normal? None of that is explained in their documentation. But they promise you that their Emboss metrics can definitely tell you if someone used AI.
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These people then demand that the artist record their screens and themselves during the entire process. They want artists to be livestreaming--one camera focused on their screen, one on their body. Artists must expose everything about themselves or be deemed AI.
And some artists are keeping their privacy and saying, "Fuck you, I owe you nothing." But beginner artists? Who are just getting started? Who don't have a decade of proof on DeviantArt already? They are feeling coerced, even if they don't want to, into sharing their lives for fear that not doing so will ruin their ability to pay rent.
This Emboss feature? It's saying that not only is it right and fair that people demand this of artists, but it should be done to writers, too.
It should be done to nobody.
This is cop mentality. This is putting people in a panopticon; this is assuming people are liars until they can prove they aren't.
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A second feature of Emboss is the metrics and statistics it collects. If your metrics meet certain parameters, you can get a Human Authorship Badge. This feature tracks your keystrokes and uses some sort of algorithm to determine if your WPM (words per minute) are "Normal" and your typing flow is "Natural." It measures how often and how long you pause, it looks at how much a sentence changes between revisions, and calculates if you spent either too long or not long enough writing something.
Nowhere in Ellipsus' help documents can I find a source for how they determine what is a "natural" number of "thinking pauses" and what is "unnatural."
Nowhere can I find how they determined that 30 - 70 is a human WPM (especially when touch-typists, like myself, can easily and accurately do more than 120 words per minute, and when some people with mobility and join issues can struggle to do five words per minute unless they have adaptative technologies).
None of their metrics have sources for how they determined what is human and what is not.
But it is especially obvious that they never considered that people with disabilities write.
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... it's really kinda convenient that the marketing for Emboss kinda makes it seem like anyone who doesn't draft, revise, and edit in Ellipsus in a very mechanical way isn't really an author and shouldn't be trusted and probably is a devious monster using AI. Just when they come out with a paid plan.
...
...right now Ellipsus' marketing is positing itself as the only ethical writing software and I think that's gross. They aren't saying "Don't like us, don't use us." They are saying, "Don't like us? Enjoy your justly earned AI accusations."
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The Ellipsus Emboss feature accepts and is preparing for a future that techbros want: one where genAI is the default, it is the standard, it is what should be expected when opening a book. The Emboss feature and its stamp--as well as the Author Guilds badge--presuppose a future where humans are the marked category. We are what needs to be called out.
I refuse to accept this as the inevitable future. We humans should not be marking ourselves; we should not be accepting the premise that AI is the new standard just because billionaires might lose money otherwise.
found this article and this related thread, both by Dax Murray, really interesting. That doesn't mean I agree with everything in it, but I thought it worth sharing.
To me, the fundamental issue is trust. As frustrating, infuriating, upsetting, awful, garbage, and pervasive as genAI is, as much as we question everything we look at now, we have to find the bandwidth to trust that when people say they aren't using it, we believe them until we get evidence to the contrary. The "not trust" position cannot become the default without destroying us.
we can all say after the fact that we cared for our friend who committed or disappeared or whatever. we can even mean it when we say it. we can think about them. but did we ever act on it? did we ever even make them feel like we were there? "nobody would care if i disappeared" is not a literal phrase. of course they know that people would care. what the phrase conveys is a deep sense of alienation that can't be mended by implying stupidity on their part.
I love how varied and universally weird the circumstances for making lifelong friendships are. Here's this guy I accidentally messaged once and I could not imagine my life without them now. Here's this girl I was so scared of when I met her, I would kill for her and remind her to rest on the regular. Here's this other guy we have so much in common we used to joke we were the same person in different timelines. It took us years to meet in person and I attended his wedding. There are also people who entered my life in absolutely unremarkable ways but changed it forever for the better. It's wonderful how easy it is to find people to love.
