A woman with terminal cancer felt more comfortable wearing her mask bc I was wearing a mask last night. It matters!!!

looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago

If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency.  It was most likely started as a sanitary concern.  Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.

this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this

Thanks for speaking up! The last four healthcare workers I've interacted with about this topic told me I was a hypochondriac wokescold virtue-signaler who spreads misinformation about healthcare safety and hates workers! I wish empathy, care, sensibility, and forethought were just a bit more common among your peers...

"No one's going to die," they say. Factually incorrect and honestly we don't have good data on what a society that's normalized explosive diarrhea looks like, but y'all have an idea what the cholera era looked like, right?

Mass disease is not normal and preventable. One of the number one causes is how large agricultural companies refuse to treat their employees like humans: people picking the food you eat don't have bathrooms, so when they get sick, they're left with a choice to shit their pants and get back to work or squat in the field and get back to work. I know which I'd choose in their shoes...

Mass illness isn't just a public health issue, it's a workers' rights issue and more!

Vol. 1 Chapter 15 of Kapital:

Machine and Modern Industry

Excerpt from Section 9: The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same. Their General Extension in the Workplace.

“What could possibly show better the character of the capitalist mode of production, than the necessity that exists for forcing upon it, by Acts of Parliament, the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health? In the potteries the Factory Act of 1864 “has whitewashed and cleansed upwards of 200 workshops, after a period of abstinence from any such cleaning, in many cases of 20 years, and in some, entirely,” (this is the “abstinence” of the capitalist!) “in which were employed 27,800 artisans, hitherto breathing through protracted days and often nights of labour, a mephitic atmosphere, and which rendered an otherwise comparatively innocuous occupation, pregnant with disease and death. The Act has improved the ventilation very much.” [214]

At the same time, this portion of the Act strikingly shows that the capitalist mode of production, owing to its very nature, excludes all rational improvement beyond a certain point. It has been stated over and over again that the English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the work is continuous, 500 cubic feet is the very least space that should be allowed for each person. Now, if the Factory Acts, owing to their compulsory provisions, indirectly hasten on the conversion of small workshops into factories, thus indirectly attacking the proprietary rights of the smaller capitalists, and assuring a monopoly to the great ones, so, if it were made obligatory to provide the proper space for each workman in every workshop, thousands of small employers would, at one full swoop, be expropriated directly!

The very root of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the self-expansion of all capital, large or small, by means of the “free” purchase and consumption of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought to a deadlock before these 500 cubic feet of breathing space. The sanitary officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity for those 500 cubic feet, and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus, in fact, declare that consumption and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary conditions to the existence of capital. [215]

Heads up to the daytime people who might miss it, but I update the archive every night and not every article makes it to tumblr (especially the science). Check the archive frequently for the latest news, and never be afraid to post what you find yourself or just say hello! Anyone can post, and you don't even have to make an account!

Excellent. Here she is, being super brave:

It became apparent that my brand of gender-nonconformity was somehow more attractive to men than Alok and Jacob’s, and as the night wore on, I found myself sincerely befuddled. The looks I gave in my pictures were just as funky as theirs, with my partly-shaved head and my geometric bodysuit plus oversize platform heels, or a close-up of me sans makeup that showed off my strong brow and flat chin in all their androgynous glory. I wondered aloud why Alok and Jacob weren’t getting matches, if there was some algorithmic mystery at play—whether guys were racist against Indians, in Alok’s case, or if they found Jacob’s bright makeup too intimidating.

“Meredith,” Alok finally blurted out, interrupting me in a tone replete with tolerance. “You look cis.”

With those words, Alok exposed the key difference between me and them. Though I’ve come into my own gender-nonbinary identity, to many, my body reads as cisgender because I’m short and don’t have body hair. I’ve also taken hormones and had reassignment surgery, because I went through a period when I thought I was a binary trans woman, before figuring out I wasn’t comfortable with that identity either.

What I didn’t quite grasp until Alok pointed it out was that now, regardless of how GNC I tried to present, cis people still predominantly read me as a cis woman. If I told a stranger I was trans, it’s likely they might think I’m an early-transitioning trans guy more than anything else. So on Tinder, I can still get dates, since there are plenty of guys who like the androgynous female look. On the other hand, Alok and Jacob’s features haven’t been softened by hormones, and they have visible body hair that marks them as more obviously trans, so they have a much harder time. Nonbinary femmes like them are too masc for the straights, too femme for the gays, and too out for nearly everyone else.

from "Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid?" by Meredith Talusan (she/they)

for reference, here's photos of Meredith, Jacob, and Alok:

I would argue what is depicted here as "femme" androgyny is (one example of) what I would describe as maximalist/genderful androgyny; it is read as "femme" as opposed to "masc" because minimalist/genderless androgyny focuses on minimizing gendered characteristics to be neutral (non-masculine non-feminine), and neutrality in patriarchal society is read as diet-masculine by default — and perhaps cis by default, because both of those things are more comfortable for people in a patriarchal society to assume of a person who minimizes intensely gendered traits.

But the treatment Alok and Jacob experience, in my opinion, while shaped by femmephobia, is not reducible to femmephobia alone. It is the combination of explicitly masculine traits (like body and facial hair) and feminine traits (makeup, feminine clothing), their failure to pursue and perform a non-masculine femininity, that leads them to be seen as undesirable. This is misandrogyny.

Although, I should also note that "guys who like the androgynous female look" are, not always, but not infrequently chasers, and they do not always treat people they see as "androgynous females" with genuine respect even if they sexually desire them. See, for example, Lou Sullivan's experience being fetishized and manipulated by his chauvinist cis boyfriend, who desired him as an "androgynous female" and so pressured him to not transition and tried to convince him that his desire to be a gay man was unhealthy and unattainable & as mentioned in the og post, being seen as more palatable in certain context does not mean that androgyny like Meredith's is not punished, even violently, in many others. The point being, this kind of androgyny is not straightforwardly "privileged" and this article is more focused on hoping that Meredith's friends can find genuine love and good sex, rather than interrogating how different forms of androgyny are perceived and treated under patriarchy.

#i think also part of it is that like the non-marked androgyny is something that others then think they can impose gender onto#in order to binarize the person#where there is a degree of if we add something to you you will then become a gender#(and then there's the assumption that the person hasn't transitioned medically in order to achieve the unmarked androgynous)#or if they have it has not crossed the event horizon of being read as too masc or too fem in one direction in a way that would#prevent the person from being read as a man/woman

#basically the unmarked androgyny is perceived as a blank slate from which gender can be imposed on the individual with the potential for#eventual conformity (aka the can still be saved by detransition theory)#while marked androgyny is to show both masculine and feminine traits in ways that refuse to be conforming#and which would have to take active steps towards eliminating traits in order to force the individual to conform to masculinity or feminity#so the marked androgyny is a threat that refuses to be silenced and refuses to allow the plausible deniability of being non-conforming#where neither is actually truly desired#just the ones that is perceived as easier to 'fix' and impose a binary gender on is seen as more desirable and less threatening to the syst

#adding on: also there is the you look cis they think you're a cis woman#like the idea that unmarked androgyny is just someone who is perceived as a cis woman not presenting feminine#and how marked androgyny almost always has facial hair#like the hostility towards unmarked androgyny within the queer community absolutely overlaps with the hatred for the transtrender theyfab#like i see a lot of talk about how we need to show more appreciation and visibility of marked androgyny but we also need to just have more#for everything bc 90% of the time if im seeing something about unmarked androgyny it's not actually uplifting those who are#this post is i think the most positive thing I've seen regarding unmarked androgyny in months

great points made here.

& yeah, a lot of people use the different ways that marked/unmarked androgyny are treated as a cover to be misogynistically exorsexist to "theyfabs." which, as mentioned above, completely ignores... so much. that there are people assigned male who are relatively hairless and slim and would be better able to achieve unmarked androgyny than certain people who are assigned female who are quite hairy with large breast and hips, or that nb/gq/gnc people can and do medically transition; like Meredith above, and there are plenty of people assigned female who look exactly like Jacob and Alok. the fixation on making this about transmascs vs transfems or amab vs afab is just more exorsexism and it prevents us from actually discussing the misandrogyny at play.