gender is an n-dimensional hypervolume

I write stuff! I have opinions on science! I draw! I talk about plants! | icon by layaart | 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ QUEER | SWITCH TO FIREFOX. DO IT.

[errorschacha]

Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions

A public resource tracking the legal challenges to the Trump administration's executive orders and actions.

Thought I'd share one of the things I like to look at during my scream breaks.

[odyver]

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Remaining time: 6 days 7 hours

[odyver]

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Remaining time: 6 days 7 hours

[odyver]

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Remaining time: 6 days 7 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

[mikkeneko]

thepioden

Reblogged imhereformysciencefriends

2h

odyver

13h

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive0.1%

under 18, AI is a net negative3.7%

18-29, AI is a net positive1%

18-29, AI is a net negative50%

30-45, AI is a net positive1.1%

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive0.1%

46-60, AI is a net negative3.2%

over 60, AI is a net postive<0.1%

over 60, AI is a net negative0.4%

19,681 votes • Remaining time: 6 days 10 hours

odyver

13h

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)15.6%

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)31.3%

Rarely (once every couple of years)13.7%

Never :(1.5%

17,250 votes • Remaining time: 6 days 10 hours

odyver

13h

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined<0.1%

under 18, less inclined3.5%

18-29, more inclined0.2%

18-29, less inclined50.9%

30-45, more inclined0.2%

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined<0.1%

46-60, less inclined3.2%

over 60, more inclined<0.1%

over 60, less inclined0.4%

17,318 votes • Remaining time: 6 days 10 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

#as a trained museum professional (nonpracticing):#there are usecases for large-model analytical AI in museum research#such as leveraging the frankly nonsensically large datasets in ex. natural history collections databases#but using generative AI for curation and exhibits is inimical to the spirit of the enterprise imo#pay designers#if you can't afford designers that is why god created grad students - via @thepioden

[mousidy]

a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"

then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric

[mousidy]

you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them

[mousidy]

in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"

"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions

but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery

so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!

[mousidy]

a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance

[mousidy]

see also "why can't you just be a femboy/feminine man/etc"

[winkingrain]

to celebrate the first day of pride month, I will be watching Project Hail Mary

[kenta-nikki]

きょう、6月1日はコジローの誕生日（推定）🎂🎉🥳

8歳になりました👏👏誕プレは、お気に入りの爪研ぎを買い足してダブルにしました✌️そしてスペシャルディナーでお祝い🎁これからもコジローが元気で健やかに過ごせますように🙏✨

[winkingrain]

コジローさんお誕生日おめでとうございます！

[yesornopolls]

is there a movie you thought was really good but you will never watch it again?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 2 days 6 hours

[thequeenoftheentiregoddamnworld]

Hey, hey, look me in the eyes when I tell you this okay? The whole "do trans women or trans men have it worse?" debate going on right now is the most obvious CIA bullshit on earth cause honestly we've both got it pretty shitty and fighting each other isn't helping anyone

[cat-found-in-an-allie]

"Do I, the person thrown into the right end of the volcano, have it worse than them, the person thrown into the left end of the volcano?"

[heartattackinblackdye]

it/its pronouns appreciation post

[rylandgraces]

Lionel Boyce as CARL Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller

[zudz]

Carl is so great. I love that he's the straight man to Grace's scattered mad science energy in the early scenes. I love that his personality just does not mesh with Grace's big classroom energy. And I love that they get to be friends, however briefly, anyway.

Carl is the kid who sits in the back of the class and tries to turn invisible, but there's no one else in this class. And at the same time, he's the taciturn kid stuck in a group project with a kid who's got skittish excitable dog energy. A real Odd Couple, y'know?

Also, I cried when I realized there were Skittles in the Hail Mary when the gravity goes sideways. That has to be from Carl. They really were friends.

I hope Carl sees the Beatles. I hope he gets to be there when the world is saved by his friend. Obviously there's much ado about Stratt betraying Grace and sending him to die in space, but Carl must carry a similar weight. I hope he gets to see Grace's video and know it really did all work out in the end.

[winkingrain]

got a drink at the pub and was not carded. at no point did anyone ask how old I am. after having my age chronically underestimated all my life this is a novel and perplexing experience and I'm not sure what did it

[fhtagn-and-tentacles]

WE'RE JUST LOOKING

by Alex Andreev

[mascingtape-deactivated20230626]

[quietwingsinthesky]

like the betrayal’s always going to be worse if they cared about you and it didn’t matter. someone discards you because they didn’t give a shit, then you can be angry about that, you can feel vindicated in that, you can get over it. but if they can look you in the eyes and say “I love you. I would make the same choice again.” You will never sleep peacefully again, is all.

[quietwingsinthesky]

“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.

“I thought they cared about me, and I was right, and every minute they were there for me, every time they said they were proud, every laugh we shared leaning against each other bruised and breathless, all of it was real. and they still left me behind. They could put their love aside. I couldn’t.” <- insane. will never leave you alone. reminds you that even the worst people are still people and can still care about even the ones they hurt the most and that undoes neither the harm nor the love.

[pollsforadults]

You get transported into the universe of the last media you consumed. How are you doing?

This is better than my real life

I'm doing well

I'm doing fine

I'm not having a good time

I'm absolutely cooked

There is nothing different about this universe and my own

Voting ended onMay 29

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

would you still be alive without modern medicine? looking back at your life, would you survive without any to the moment where you are now?

yes

no

barely

yes but it would affect me for the rest of my life

results

Voting ended onJun 2

I'd have my knee fucked up forever 🫪 alive but yeahhhhh

[razortouched]

This will probably be my most controversial post by far, but it needs to be said.

Gendered socialization is unequivocally real. Boys and girls are treated and socialized differently before they're even born.

Female babies are disappearing en masse, because male babies are more valued.

From an extremely early age, parents respond to their childrens' emotions differently based on gender. Mothers over-estimate the crawling abilities of their infant sons compared to infant daughters.

Mothers speak to their infant daughters more and talk them more about emotions than they do their sons.

By the age of 2, boys already show an avoidance to the color pink and other items traditionally seen as feminine, laying the ground work for early demonstrations of misogyny in childhood.

When children enter pre-school, there is no difference in math abilities between boys and girls. But such gaps begin to appear as children grow older.

The vast majority of girls report feeling unsafe going outside, and at least 2/3 of girls have reported experiencing sexual harassment at school by the time they 16.

Further on in education, women will understimate their scores, while men will overestimate their scores. Women will perform worse on tests when first told that women, on average, perform worse.

Researchers argue that the prevalence of sexual assault against women is so high specifically because of early gendered socialization. The men who commit sexual violence consistently demonstrate specific ideals about gender and perform hostile masculinity.

The patterns reach well into adulthood, influencing occupational choices.

I could literally go on and on and on. There are countless studies and entire fields of academia dedicated to researching this. The fact that children are socialized differently paced on assigned or percieved gender is really not debatable.

I am sympathetic to the fact that transphobes have warped the concept of socialization to insinuate that trans women are destined to be violent or predatory, or that trans men are destined to be submissive and helpless. However, people weaponizing these frameworks does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.

Furthermore, individual people's nuanced experiences with gendered socialization does not mean that these patterns don't exist on a large scale. Any interaction with society will confer the influence of gender biases, especially upon children to are extremely vulnerable to both subtle and overt social cues.

Again - gendered socialization is real. This is a core aspect of feminist analysis. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

[disco-pony]

I'm sure I remember a time when it was a big part of trans theory that missing out on typical gendered socialisation was a big part of the abuse of trans people by a cisnormative society.

Thinking of it as like a language, where so much stuff is taught by exposure, all the "gendered manners" that are taught in single-sex situations (the proverbial thing of "girls act differently when there are no boys present/boys act differently when there are no girls present") which are the situations where a kid is taught how to perform "their" gender in the most nuanced and complicated ways that signal to other people of the same-gender that "we are the same type of person" - and, trans people are often cut off from that until they come out, meaning that they have to learn the "basics" as adults.

Likewise I see so many trans people say "Bold of you to assume I was socialised! I was treated as a weird thing." And I don't know how to point out that the things that get a child treated as a "weird thing" and put outside of the bounds of propriety are themselves different for children being raised-to-boyhood or raised-to-girlhood. Thinking about England because I don't want to extrapolate outside of where I personally know, a "girl" might get treated as a tomboy-outsider-weirdo for wanting to play toy soldiers or play in the woods, but a "boy" would probably be seen as normal for that. Likewise, a "boy" might be punished really badly for liking makeup and dresses, but a "girl" wouldn't be. Seeing "You can't say I was socialised as a boy, I was constantly getting in trouble for putting on my sister's clothes, and treated like I was disgusting for crying and being emotional!" And just... Yes! Because people that the patriarchy wants to turn into "boys" will be punished for showing femininity, that is how male socialisation works! Likewise "I was treated as a tomboy and put in a third gender category because I was sporty and outdoorsy, and punished and called monstrous and sent to see a psychiatrist for not playing with dollies" - That's female socialisation, because a "boy" who was sporty wouldn't be put into into third gender category for it, and wouldn't be called monstrous for having no interest in dolls.

Obviously the exact things that are gendered change from culture to culture, but that applies to everything, everything is culturally bound and affects different people in different ways and to different degrees, but we still try to talk about the broad trends which carry through cross-culturally (which has been a big part of feminist consciousness- Recognising that although the ways that women are treated worldwide aren't the same, that there are repeating themes...)

I don't know, it feels like we shouldn't have to ignore that gendered socialisation exists and is often a horrible locus of abuse (for both cis and trans kids, even before getting into how it's often SO MUCH WORSE for intersex kids regardless of whether they're cis or trans!) just because terfs also want to use it.

[doomhamster]

Yeah. I think it's important to keep in mind that not everyone who believes in (the observable and measurable phenomenon of) gendered socialization believes that socialization is somehow an INDELIBLE MARK ON YOUR SOUL, or that being PERCEIVED as a given gender by your parents/society when you were younger means you ever WERE that gender.

The whole point of modern feminism is that gendered socialization CAN and in many ways SHOULD be unlearned.

[myfootyrthroat]

I think people also gotta keep in mind that everything with gender is going to be a bimodal distribution. It's not "boy result" and "girl result", it's "range of boy results" and "range of girl results". And they almost always overlap.

[grison-in-space]

The other thing I think is useful to keep in mind is that socialization is different for children perceived as intersex or insufficiently gender conforming: adults will treat children intermediately if they are labeled with an intermediate level, and gender policing also begins very early and can shape a child's relationship with the whole schema of gender itself. I think this is often missed for people who were identified as gender non conforming at an early age hitting the concept of gender socialization: when one's nascent gender has been identified as a potential problem by the people around you in a way that is different from the gender conforming children, socialization studies that largely focus on gender conforming case examples land in a way that doesn't always align with one's lived experience.

This is one reason that paying attention to intersex theory and experiences is really important for trans liberation and gender liberation both: I don't think you can really understand gender socialization without paying attention to case studies of children whose gender has been problematized at an early age as well as those who are perceived and socialized as "normally" gendered children. Obviously trans adults can come from children from both normatized and problematized childhood gender experiences, and individual caretakers of a gender or sex divergent child may respond to that child in a range of ways. But it's really worth noting that socialization theory does have room for socialization experiences that differ from the presumed-cis, presumed-perisex norm, and I think that talking about those examples can resolve some of the rejection of gendered socialization among trans communities.

(I'm on my phone at the moment, but if people want I can get into the literature and source some additional examples for folks who are interested.)

[bodyclocked]

intersex people need to unironically take these words back ngl

[bodyclocked]

[Image ID, Tags reading "but why though, why do we have to use terms in a way that outs us a a group or not? and what am i supposed to say instead when i feel this captures my experience as a perisex trans person the best? dont get me wrong i am fully behind advocating for intersex rights and more conversations about intersex struggles, but this feels like bioessentialism again. Like i would'nt bat an eye at an intersex person calling "assigning themselves to any gender identity" transitioning either. End ID]

Just so, SO much to unpack in this, but I will try my best to educate for those that don't understand. "AGAB" means Assigned Gender at Birth, it is not a noun, it is a verb, used to describe the process of being assigned a gender at birth, not the fact that you have one, everyone has one, the process of having a doctor pick it for you. This term was coined by intersex people to describe our experiences of doctors picking and choosing which gender we were assigned as based on often times no evidence, sometimes a baby's genitals match up with what they were assigned as, often times they don't. "AGAB" was intended as a way to describe how intersex people were put into a binary of biological male or biological female despite that not being the case. The usage of "AGAB" by perisex transgender people changes this definition entirely, overwriting the voices of intersex people and our experiences and using our own terms in ways that make no sense given the actual original definitions. To Perisex transgender people, "AGAB" is a noun, you are an "AFAB" or an "AMAB" person, it means you were born a biological female or a biological male and implies you no longer identify with this term. I understand fully that people may feel comfortable using these terms under these definitions, but it doesn't change the fact that these are the incorrect uses of terms made by a different, smaller, community and bastardized of their original intents and meanings.

You are finding comfort in calling the skies green and the grass blue, and to intersex people who named them you look silly.

As to what you are supposed to use, the terms Müllerian and Wolffian have been coined as alternative terms to biological female and biological male, designed to be detached from gender entirely.

If you are "Fully behind advocating for intersex rights and more conversations about intersex struggles", please do not cast aside the intersex people speaking up against intersexism in favor of your own comfort in these misused terms. Being an intersex advocate, and any form of advocate in general, comes with listening to the people you are advocating for, especially when it discomforts you and calls into question your biases.

I am confused as to how this is bioessentialism, "AGAB" were coined specifically *against* bioessentialism, against the idea that intersex people, and people in general, being put into boxes at birth. It is used to describe genders being inflicted upon us without our consent, and is a term describing a harrowing experience. It is not bioessentialism to give bioessentialist tools a name. Especially when that name is used with hate. Intersex people hate "AGAB", we hate being put into boxes and being expected to conform to the idea of biological male and biological female. Calling this post bioessentialist is silly, please learn the meaning of words before you use them.

As for the thing about intersex people describing themselves as transitioning when describing their gender, this, unlike your earlier comments, is blatant intersexism rather than the covert accidental ignorance kind. Intersex trans people can use whatever terms they like to refer to their experiences thank you very much. If an intersex person describing their experience of identifying as the gender they feel comfortable with as transitioning makes you uncomfortable, you are not only intersexist but transphobic too.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt, nobody knows things before they know them, nobody has already learned the things they are actively learning. I hope you can take this post to heart, both you and other readers who were questioning my post.

Have a nice day :)

[bodyclocked]

I'm trying to be patient but the amount of perisex people on this post asking what other terms they can use and insisting AMAB/AFAB works best for them is insane.

I will say this one final time, AGAB does not mean biological sex.

Anyone asking how they can describe their experience without saying their AGAB is missing the point entirely. AFAB does not mean biological female, it does not mean müllerian, it does not mean someone who was born with a fully functioning vagina and a uterus and went through a estrogen puberty. AMAB does not mean biological male, it does not mean wolffian, it does not mean someone who was born with a fully functioning penis and testes and went through a testosterone puberty. Every time you use "AFAB" to refer to your experiences as a perisex müllerian person, you are using it wrong. Every time you use "AMAB" to refer to your experiences as a perisex wolffian person, you are using it wrong. If you are a person who was AFAB there are people who were AMAB or AXAB who went through the same puberty and transition you did. If you are a person who was AMAB there are people who were AFAB or AXAB who went through the same puberty and transition you did. Your experiences are not limited to people who were assigned the same gender at birth as you, so every time you use your AGAB as an example of how being transgender works, you look silly as you are ignoring intersex people's existence in your analogy, and using our words wrong to do so.

Using intersex terms when you wish to describe a fully perisex bodily development is using them wrong. There will always be an intersex sized hole in every analogy you use for perisex development and transition using intersex-made terms.