Everyone needs three hobbies: one to give you carpel tunnel, one to leave you sore and bruised, and one for your distant relatives to insist you monetize

i went for the 3 in 1 with crochet

The gender binary is uneven by design. Women in every demographic, yes even trans women, do in fact have it "worse" because of the patriarchy. That is what patriarchy does. Women are an oppressed class. Rejecting this fact is a rejection of the very obvious existence of patriarchy.

is it actually a list of "canon nonbinary events every single nb person ends up experiencing 😂🤣" or is it a list of experiences largely or entirely exclusive to cafab nonbinary people, again, because you forgot about camab nonbinary people, Again

am i allowed to publicly acknowledge that Kris is definitely TMA yet or are we still at the point where i'll get hunted for that

I told a guy his total was 13.21 and he said “wish it were that year, could actually get some good music on the radio”

breaking news from the AP, our boys on the front have just sacked constantinople. take that, heretics. coming up next are the soothing lute dirges of bing crosby

*screams of a witch burning at the stake*

THOU ART CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

*Gregorian chanting*

13.21

*leper bell ringing*

HIGH MEDIAEVAL FM

*recording of John Lackland sobbing as he signs the Magna Carta*

WHENCE COMETH NAUGHT BUT LITURGIES

LITURGIES

*Templar knights praying out loud*

THIS ISN’T THY GRANDMOTHERES STATION

*Imagine Dragons - Radioactive starts playing*

So a trans guy friend came over to my house for dinner last week. Somehow we got onto the subject of public toilets and bathroom bans, and I made the point that back in 2010-2011, when I co-founded a feminist society/pressure group at University in London, desegregation was basically our main policy position.

And this was not unusual for feminist groups at that time. There was a sense that we were close to the end of a century-long struggle to desegregate society: Universities and most schools were now mixed (my own former school had just become co-ed at this point), youth groups like the Scout Association had recently made it mandatory for all groups to admit girls, there was growing public pressure on men-only spaces like The Garrick Club to admit women, most modern swimming pools had co-ed changing facilities, and gender-neutral bathrooms were starting to become more common.

One of our campaigns was to make all bathrooms in the Students' Union building gender neutral. In the end this failed because of pressure from a group of (white, wealthy, English) men in the Conservative society who insisted that sharing bathrooms with women violated their devout Christian beliefs - they weren't even Christian actually but they managed to spook the lawyers enough in light of the recent Equality Act.

We also frequently discussed desegregating sports - it was widely understood by our (pretty much entirely cis women) members that sex-segregation was a misogynist project that resulted principally in women being paid less. The long mission to get equal prize money at Wimbledon had been won only a few years earlier, and there was pressure on other sports to follow suit. Now we were discussing introducing mixed-gender University sports teams to play competitively.

Bear in mind that the issue of trans women basically never came up in these discussions (mainly due to ignorance: the only reference to trans women I had ever encountered at this point was Ace Ventura). It was principally a matter of desegregation as a moral position that positioned the logic of segregation as part of the systemic oppression of women. The fact that it was right-wing men who were the ones objecting to desegregated toilets (something that has been true throughout the history of toilet segregation) just solidified this point.

Anyway, I gave all this as context to my trans guy friend to explain why I felt frustrated at recent attempts to paint bathroom bans as a win for feminism. That it's depressing to see the feminist activism of 15 years ago sacrificed on the altar of transmisogyny.

This guy has been medically transitioning for a little over a year, and has been discovering feminism in that time too. He recently learned about things like the gender pay gap, and will try to explain it to me like he thinks it's news to me. The gendered nature of domestic abuse is also a favourite topic of his. Before he transitioned, back when he referred to himself as a woman, he tended to take a more liberal normie "men and women are equally oppressed by gender expectations, just let everyone do what they want" line, but tbf we didn't talk about feminism much back then anyway.

The combination of being an early-transition trans guy who is also learning baby's first feminism can be a really dangerous one. He is only now discovering how much he has suffered at the hands of this form of oppression called "misogyny", but at the same time he is a man. He is reading all this literature that positions "men" as the oppressor but also positions people like himself as the oppressed. The easiest way for him to resolve this conflict is to mentally transpose "men" with "AMABs" and "women" with "AFABs", even if he's not aware that's what's happening in his brain.

So in response to my frustration with bathroom bans he starts saying all this stuff about women's reasonable concerns about male violence, how it's difficult to balance the various needs of different groups, how trans men are "obviously" not a threat to women so they should clearly be allowed to use women's toilets. He views the existence of trans women as a spanner in the works of an otherwise rational system with cis men on one side and AFABs on the other.

I try to point out that toilet segregation is actually a real concrete problem for me, the flesh-and-blood person in front of him who he has been friends with for years. That I am risking violence no matter which toilet I use, no matter what clothes I'm in, no matter whether I'm wearing make-up or not. If I use the women's I will get harassed for sure. If I use the men's I have a high chance of being assaulted. His only response is that he also is nervous about using the women's because after a year on T he already passes for cis in nearly all situations. The idea that he should just use the men's since he's a man who looks like a man gets a blank look from him: why should he not be able to use the women's, he's experienced "AFAB oppression" too, hasn't he?

By this point I'm getting quite frustrated. We're talking about feminism as a leftwing movement and I bring up the kind of socialist guy we all know well who says stuff like "misogyny isn't really a priority for me". He hasn't really been listening but he hears me quote this hypothetical man and assumes I'm saying it in earnest. "Did you say misogyny isnt a priority for you?"

Suddenly I, the woman who has been involved in feminist activism for 15 years, am having to defend myself against accusations of misogynist bigotry from a man who discovered feminism a year ago because he decided to not bother listening to what a woman was saying until it was something that sounded incriminating as a soundbite.

At this point I sigh and put my head on the table, exhausted of trying to explain this to him. Later he messages to say that the way I behaved made him feel really shit about himself, like sighing is the rudest thing he's ever heard. I apologise for sighing and go and wash up the dishes from the meal I cooked for him. He goes home and thinks about his innate connection to womanhood.

here is my best worldbuilding tip for authors who want a thick, dense world with real verisimilitude. i stole it from gundam and now i'm giving it to you.

lesser worldbuilders start from what they want the story to mean or contain. i am here to give you formal permission to reverse that: start from what you want to exist. "i want to write a science fiction melodrama about the ethics of teleportation" - wrong. "i want teleporters" - yes!!

the failure mode comes in two disguises, which is why this advice is hard to give. disguise one is theme-first: you decide the thesis and then build a world backwards to prop it up, and readers can smell a rigged demo. disguise two is trope-first: "there are kamen riders, and evil organizations, and they make robot monsters, and it's themed around such-and-such" - you've imported the genre's conclusions (evil orgs! kaijin!) without the causes that produce them, so nothing load-bears. same crime, different trenchcoat: fixing the outputs.

instead: find the stupidest, most childish version of the idea you're most excited about. "what if kamen riders were real." then work backwards and invent the FEWEST possible things that can justifiably load-bear - "why would a technology exist that lets one person become the functional equivalent of a tank, and how, specifically, does it print its armor so quickly?" establish your minovsky particle. then roll the tape forward.

and here's the part everyone skips: you have to keep the consequences you didn't ask for. that's the whole trick. your themes should be exhaust, not fuel - if you roll the tape honestly, the story you were trying to order off a menu shows up on its own, plus three better ones you'd never have thought to want. verisimilitude is just the reader failing to find the seam where you cheated. only tell one lie and there's only one seam.

passing in public makes me feel like white shrek

literally how it feels

nip over to troy, bit of rough and tumble, big horse, bish bash bosh, back home to ithaca. simple as

crazy how many ramifications there are to just being like "y'know. i don't think this "man" thing is for me. I'll have what she's having"

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

And- And death is intrinsically intertwined with ephemeral beauty. The intricate patterns of one's wings, their new but vibrant colors, their fan-like antenna and larger bodies. How death would be culturally linked to flight too. It kinda reminds me how many cultures link butterflies as psychopomps, carrying the soul or being manifestations of the soul fluttering into the afterlife.

And- and your offspring being the final pieces of your legacy, the last mark and trace left on the world. Family members waiting mournfully outside of one's cocoon, speaking to it like how a human holds the hand of a loved one in death. Two moth-people, post-metamorphasis, clinging to one another, their final moments now fatally intertwined to one another, knowing that fate has brought them together in death and recreation only. A sort of unspoken sacredity in their fleeting connection. Maybe society is set up so that certain moths can choose to die with one another. Or maybe there's a societal profound freedom in the winged ones taking flight and finding one another sporadically.

I... I think it would be fun too

Hey guys did I mention I live on a fucking weird island and sometimes land crabs with 8-inch claws try to get into my house

cute puppy what breed is he

sideways

Pamela Lee

I think it's very important we never *see* anybody abstract in the whole series. We always follow the other characters as they *find* someone who's already abstracted off-screen. The closest we get is Jax nearly abstracting in her bedroom but notably that instance is interrupted when Pomni knocks on her door.

Abstraction always happens in solitude. It happens when someone is isolated and beyond hope, and then one day, you check on them, only to find they're already gone. The thing that remains isn't them anymore.

The suicide metaphor is... pretty apparent when you realize that.

hot autistic adult women are always saying they're doing fine really and everyone is nice to them and they just need to figure out a few little things and then everything will be perfect

excuse me for dipping lower and lower into Neurodivergent Exceptionalism here, which I do not like, but the autistic assumption that everyone else is just as well-meaning and altruistic and empathic and informed as you are is one of the most dangerous parts of being Like This and I wish I knew the magic words to disillusion especially girls about this in about 5th grade. because the only other way to get there is through being personally brutalized and frankly not even that always works

hot adult autistic women are always looking up at you from a quarry full of trash and car batteries where they live and like shielding their eyes from the sun and smiling guardedly and saying oh yes I'm actually very lucky. i have everything I need. my life is actually very privileged. and a plastic bag blows in on the wind and clings to their face like a jellyfish and theyre like haha yeah that happens

your homework assignment is to actually get angry at the next person who either intentionally or through callous disregard for your needs makes your life worse. then, if possible through circumstance and safety, either make that anger their problem, or eject them from your life. enough already