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.

There is no F.D.A.-approved testosterone product for women. Insurance won’t cover it. Many doctors won’t prescribe it. It’s become a cultural phenomenon.

I guess T is Ozempic now; SMH.

A story as old as time.

Yes. But so are men.

Never so quickly has an article made me transition from confusion to laughter to rage so quickly. Conservatives are weird. Everything’s here: pseudoscience, denial of the existence of racism and sexism, bio— and gender essentialism, and so many false dichotomies. The point of this article is to get a conservative white man’s dick wet. Furthermore, it’s one of those frustrating unfalsifiable “theories”: if I disagree with the author on the merits of what they’re written, then they can just claim I’ve been “feminized.” Utter bull crap.

via: https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/are-women-unsuited-for-the-pursuit

why is there such a strange and ritualistic male quest for meaning? look to the beats to find out.

My research is situated in the interdisciplinary field of sociocultural linguistics and takes a mixed-methods approach to the relationship between language, identity, embodiment, and social power. It also grows from a community-based agenda that centers the experience of transgender people, broadly defined. Major areas of investigation include the gendered characteristics of the voice, trans-inclusive language practices and linguistic activism, the discursive construction of “biological sex,” the changing status of singular ‘they’, and the relationship between gender and race in drag-related media.

via: Montell, Wordslut