Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services: For a prima facie case of employment discrimination under Title VII, a plaintiff who is a member of a majority group does not need to show background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is an unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.

Worst Supreme Court case of the year. KBJ is a coon confirmed. Thomas has somehow been rendered reasonable. a hearty RIP to procedural affirmative action.

“Pro-DEI” is one of the dog whistles of all time.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW_WUmHxtGI

I would like you to think, for a minute, about what it would be like to be that kind of feminist: To give your life to a cause, to put absolutely everything you have into it, and to be told that your work is worthless because you didn’t die.

Which coming-out, which medication, which surgery, which friendship, which sex act, which relationship, which instance of survived bigotry, will ever make me feel like enough?

Half of falling in love is timing. I didn’t meet the right women at the right times. I can count the missed opportunities […] but time only moves one way.

Too many good quotes to leave here.

Poptimism failed, not because of its commitment to social justice – which was a good thing – but because it had no material analysis. It cast pop stars as underdogs, outsiders, underestimated and dismissed by the Rockist Establishment, without pausing to recognize that they were vastly more powerful than any critic ever would be. […] It’s all the times when the music cracks open and something shining and huge and true falls out, some feeling too powerful for words alone. In those moments, music does what it was made for — it lets us put our own weird, unique, messy, unprecedented human hearts into each other’s hands, and proves that our oppressors, for all their power, cannot shut us up or limit who we are.

This Article studies the intersection of race and gender, examining it through the lens of Western imperialism. Even though both critical race and feminist scholarship have addressed this intersection,few if any offer a precise theory for understanding the imperialized experience. This Article seeks to fill that void. The social inequality minority women face, in particular those of Asian descent, can be best articulated by a theory this Article calls white sexual imperialism.

This is an extremely harrowing piece, but it does show there is a way.

Cooties Simulator 2009™

This is exactly why I refuted Paul Graham’s “Good Writing” post. Zombie facts poison discourse.

A nice linguistic principle, even absent of the post’s content:

we don’t have much conscious awareness of a lot of the patterns in our own speech, let alone much insight into the reasons for them

Excellent programmer who’s now pivoted to writing and book publishing.

To me there’s nothing powerful or subversive about this lexicon: it smacks more of a (literally) infantile fixation. Which makes it difficult to see why women would want to reclaim it.

When the research being promoted is about sex-differences, the soundbite/clickbait approach involves leading with some attention-grabbing statement about men and women that basically accords with most people’s preconceptions. The message is that Science has now confirmed the accuracy of a commonplace gender stereotype.

Unfortunately paywalled, but one nice idea in here:

Pronouns in email signatures are a good idea in any place where you email strangers from a different culture than yours or who are named things like Madison or Skyler, which is to say everywhere. Trans people are a tiny minority of the people whose lives are improved by pronouns in email signatures; most of the benefit goes to people who don’t want to spend twenty minutes googling whether “Prasanta” is a woman’s name. It is irritating to me that such a convenient practice has become associated with the culture war.

A tempered wokeness. Pairs well with the Paul Bloom post so read the other day.

But many people who ask questions about trans people are just curious and have no intention of being offensive. And most cis people are as ignorant, and as reasonably ignorant, about trans people as I am about little people, hijabis, seasonal migrant laborers, or Eritrean American immigrants. All things equal, it is good if your response to someone sincerely asking “what does it mean to be nonbinary?” or “so you’re a man, but you got pregnant? How does that work?” or “do you think trans women should play in women’s sports?” is taking a deep breath and trying to explain as best you can.

I think the philosophy of “educate yourself” came from black folks; wondering if the author would believe that there are enough black people around in the US that one cannot be reasonably ignorant.

As said by a colleague in response to this tweet.

all boys ritually emasculate/are emasculated by other boys as part of showing you are a real man. Trans women do not respond to this phenomenon the way that boys do and, as a result, are treated differently long before anyone realizes they are trans.

Title is a bit clickbait-y, but it is quite a good historical overview of transphobic science and ideology in the United States.

In this sharp manifesto, veteran author and activist, Jude Doyle, reunites feminist and trans politics through a common belief: that all people deserve to have the final say about who they are…

An excellent book on transfeminism from the transmasc POV. A terrifyingly easy read: I zoomed through its 200 pages in about a day.

Yet again, cis men ruin a neat thing for everybody.