Grant, creating. @vaguegrant - Tumblr Blog

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

lucieslucidity

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

fleshengine

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

dancinbutterfly

Progress.

Onwards!

onthedriftinthetardis

I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

quasi-normalcy

lierdumoa

Okay I want to talk about this reply I saw in the notes:

straight trans people exist, and i literally just saw one a few minutes ago saying it hurt to encounter this kind of rhetoric. our pride *has* to be more intersectional than this—otherwise it’s just shaming.

I think @7ff00's reply is conflating the word "straight" with the word "heterosexual" out of a gross ignorance of cultural and historical context, and to what end?

The term straight means strictly adhering to conventional morality. The term only came to be associated with the concept of heterosexuality in the 1940s because conventional morality aligned itself against non-heterosexuals, declared us deviants, and criminalized our existence.

From etymonline.com: straight(adj.2)

"conventional," especially "heterosexual," 1941, a secondary sense evolved from straight (adj.1) in one of its senses, probably suggested by the stock phrase straight and narrow (implying path, road, or way), "course of conventional morality and law-abiding behavior" (ca. 1794), which is based on a misreading of Matthew vii.14 (where the gate is actually strait); another influence seems to be strait-laced.

And now, conventional morality has aligned itself against the trans community, declared us deviants, and criminalized our existence.

I know a lot of us have been avoiding reading the news, but it's important y'all know that Trump's new counterterrorism strategy specifically blames trans activism for the assassination of Charlie Kirk (based on zero evidence) and then goes on to specifically equate pro-trans activism with terrorism.

With FUCKING TERRORISM.

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/it-could-happen-here/trumps-new-counterterrorism-jmNlAMX_gs3/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/trump-counterterrorism-strategy-vows-to-counter-violent-left-wing-extremists-with-transgender-ideology-00909284

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/05/trumps-new-counterterrorism-strategy-focuses-on-combatting-transgender-ideology/

It's fucking bad out there, y'all.

I've been saying for years that one of the biggest roadblocks to queer solidarity is people nitpicking the constantly evolving language we are allowed to use to discuss threats to our community, in a way that effectively derails any conversation that directly addresses the ACTUAL threats to our community.

And although I believe @7ff00's reply was not written in bad faith, that's exactly what it's doing in this post. Another derailment that turns a conversation about fighting conservative authoritarianism into yet another pointless semantics debate.

Trans people will never be "straight" no matter how heterosexual some of us may be. All LGBTQIA+ people will always be faggots in the eyes of the oppressor.

At least Gritty's managed to figure that out.

cheaphalloweencostume

“be gay do crime! but sex is yucky and crime is wrong!” ass website

cheaphalloweencostume

literally 😭😭😭

manuciruja

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

manuciruja

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

smadsel

would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.

smadsel

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

manuciruja

hey staff what the fuck

villainessbian

hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose

shrodingers-catgirl

HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE

politijohn

Source

Happy Pride Month!

virtualgirladvance

BE LOUD

MAKE THEM KNOW YOU'LL RIOT IF YOU HAVE TO

yesornopolls

Would you consider the hate for AI at the moment “excessive”?

Yes

Remaining time: 3 days 3 hours

hacvek

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

olyia-stories

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

dragonpyre

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

serinos-kitt

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

dragonpyre

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

serinos-kitt

So what is a rain shadow?

lethalbutterfly

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

roach-works

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

beatrice-otter

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

whetstonefires

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

beatrice-otter

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

maryellencarter

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

sunflowergardens-world

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

mysteryteacup

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

queeranarchism

#my wife is on the SOR for being gay #no joke #she hit on a girl in a straight bar once #in 1997 #and while the girl was into it #the off duty cop sitting nearby was not #and so he arrested her for ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ #which in our state was still a felony #in 1997 (and would remain so until Lawrence v Texas in 2003) #and since ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ was a felony and a sex crime #she got put on The List #she is still on there to this day #because it costs MONEY to ask a judge to take you off #and she has tried four times#since 2003 #to get taken off the SOR #but every time the judge has said something like ‘no you pled guilty to the crime i can’t possibly take you off the sex offender registry’ #with no acknowledgement of what the actual crime was #(the crime of being a butch lesbian hitting on a cute girl who was into it) #(in 1997)

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.

ashelyskies-deactivated20241121

Listen!

When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.

Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.

Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).

Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.

Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)

“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.

The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.

It has been used against us time after time and it will continue to be used for that.

cluegrrl

And this is where the push of purity discourse in fandom shows its fetid, fascist underbelly.

gwydionmisha

This is why they are making being trans in public a felony in some states.

harperhug

When you decide that people who commit a certain crime or category of crime should legally lose their humanity, you create incentive for more people to be charged with that crime.

kuragin

this is the most underrated part of rockin’ and rollin’ yoda

bunjywunjy

Luke’s face is what makes this.

alanaisalive

The Tattoo: part 1

For a number of years, my husband and I have had a running joke about trying to find the stupidest and unsexiest tramp stamp possible. Some of the contenders were Grandpa's janky bed from Stardew Valley or maybe SuperGrover, but none of them seemed quite right.

A year ago I noticed in the notes that my infamous bear post was 9 years old. I joked to my husband, "What if I got that as a tramp stamp?" We laughed. We paused. "But no, for real maybe I should do that," so I set a challenge. The post had just over 400,000 notes at the time, and I thought, "Maybe if it gets to half a million before the 10 year anniversary," but then decided, "That's too easy. They'll do that in a month or two." And you would have, so I upped it to the next nice round number of a million, knowing 2 things: 1: you'd never make it to a million (especially since I had comments turned off for the first six months until I figured out how to turn them back on), and 2: I was always going to do it anyway.

I was hoping to get more of it done before the deadline and was even scheduled for another session, but then my husband broke his foot and I had to reschedule and my tattoo artist left for France, so I won't be able to get it finished until probably July or August. There's more to be added and cleaned up, including colour, but here it is right now. I did not want to share my butt crack with the entire internet, so please enjoy the surrogate butt crack.

vaspider

Yes, I did have that post scheduled to repost once per day at times. I am more excited about this tattoo than I have ever been about any tattoo that isn't mine.

happymeals27

shoomlah

Fun fact: I drew this Lunchables ad during my first summer working at Neopets

iswearbyalltheflowers

Imagine if, during Black History Month, the British Museum advertised an event highlighting artefacts in their collection about ancient blac

depsidase

thingsfromthedirt

warming carafe with a stained glass pattern (ca. late 50s-early 60s)

#oh my god I want this so much

kdhumecurios

There was a massive shift in how our culture understood morality when, after World War II, the general public realized “just following orders” was not an excuse for crimes against humanity. Now we need another moral shift in which we decide, as a culture, that “for the benefit of the stockholders” is not an excuse for anything.