If I were a TERF, and I wanted to ensure institutional capture of a political party to further my bigotted rubbish, I wouldn't bother going for the tories, who are already there, I might go for Labour or the greens who seem susceptible, but in the name of all that's unholy I wouldn't go for the lib dems...
How many times do we have to vote overwhelmingly in favour of trans rights at conference?
How many times do we have to move next business on their poison as they misgender people from the stage?
It's a waste of everybody's time, including theirs. I wish they'd just sod off.
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But maybe this is just laziness; remembering a set of things to CW is probably significantly easier than getting individualsโ pronouns right, which I regard as mandatory brain work.
That's a pretty significant bump in global mean Daily Sea Surface Temperature this year, to say the least.
Yes, this should be on every newspaper. And importantly it should be analyzed more deeply than a daily "reminder" of or, even worse, "evidence" that #climatechange is happening (which only confirms the idea, that this is something worth discussing by now, which it isn't). climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sstโฆ
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So, let me get this right...
Musk is obsessed with the letter X. At some point he suddenly decided he wanted to rebrand Twitter as X just changed it to the Unicode X character i.e. uncopyrightable.
Now it turns out even the trademark is owned by arch-rival cage-fighting lizard Zuckerberg.
And they didn't even tell the owners of their HQ building they were changing the logo, so police got called on the signage engineers replacing it.
But this guy is a genius?
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The problem with X? Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name
Billionaire Elon Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated legally: companies including Meta (META.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.Blake Brittain (Reuters)
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- James Vincent, "Beyond Measure"
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Are you finding Mastodon to be less vibrant/active?
Iโm worried that we are not getting as much engagement on our Ukraine war reporting as we used to.
Weโre trying to decide which social media platforms to continue posting on, given how much effort it takes to replicate across all of them.
If you want to send a signal to us that we should keep posting here, will you sign up for our newsletter? Counteroffensive.substack.com
Iโm only asking Mastodon users today so we can gauge impact.
The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak | Substack
A war correspondent's open notebook, reporting live from Ukraine. Click to read The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of readers.The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak
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Typo of the day: diuretic debit.
Kind of appropriate I guess, since apparently donating to Stonewall was pissing money away.
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Todayโs new word: wankflange.
Definition: Richard Foord MP (Lib Dem), who thinks there is intolerance on both sides of the issue of trans rights, and thinks that parents should know if kids change pronouns at school.
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Erik Demaine proved that any pattern of straight cuts can be implemented by folding a piece of paper then making a single straight cut!
Here is what this looks like for a Koch snowflake:
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I was just reading up on various parasites (trying to figure out what's biting us) and came across this sentence about agromyzid midges: 'The midge adults would have caused the holes back when the leaves were still folded up inside the bud, resulting in a โsnowflakeโ like pattern of holes once the leaves expanded'.
(Parasites on the midges are known to bite humans too.)
I haven't found any pictures that look like snowflakes, though you can clearly see the symmetry.
bygl.osu.edu/node/1967
Holey Oaks and Chestnuts
Whatโs causing holes to appear in the leaves of oaks and chestnuts in Ohio?bygl.osu.edu
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Beelzebub has the Devil for a sideboard.
Which doesnโt sound very convenient, although I suppose you could hang your keys on the horns.
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I'm so sick of biological TERFs. They just drive me biological wild with their biological bigotry. They should get a biological life.
@NightlyBye I genuinely don't think they know what "biological" means and they just use it as an amplifier like "fucking"
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I witnessed another trans person's deed poll today. A bit more involved, necessitating a trip to the solicitor, because he's 14, but nevertheless it reminded me of the surreal socially distanced signing dance I did during lockdown for my deed poll with @Zoรซ O'Connell and @Sarah Brown
It didn't have to be me that signed -- it could have been anyone who knew him and his parents -- but I felt privileged to do it, passing on some part of the support other trans people gave me.
Me: Chatty as all hell, wants to babble at the world constantly
Also me: Terribly shy about one-on-one conversations, hasn't used Telegram regularly in months
Also also me: HI HELLO GIVE ME ATTENTION
Also also also me: NO NOT LIKE THAT
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I first wrote about having a gender other than "male" or "female" in 1994 (as far as I can trust dates on old files.)
That's 29 years ago.
I've transitioned to change my outward appearance since then, but the same gender identity has remained at the core of it.
People were still scraping around for words to describe this experience in English back then. The web as something the general public, for such of the general public as had internet access, was less than a year old. Eventually it became something where we could connect, sort out our terminology and titles, raise a flag.
๐งต 1/2
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So now I can say, I'm agender, one of the many expressions falling under the non-binary umbrella. And I've known and identified (although not necessarily using that word) for nearly 30 years. And I'm in my 50s now.
Being non-binary is not a new thing. It's not a fad, not just something "the kids" are into.
We have always been here.
(Although it usually feels like I'm having to carve out the elder non-binary pathway on my own.)
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About myself, I still get that sinking feeling you get when you first walk into an overwhelmingly messy room. Over a decade of talking therapy didn't help. I'm just trying to help now and find out what could be useful to do and be, and not worry too much about it.
โI feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.โ
โ Soren Kierkegaard
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I also don't want to blunder around with the privilege of my upbringing and trample on things, which I'm fearful of. I've made lots of mistakes and I don't trust myself any more. I just don't have a good brain for this kind of stuff. It's too cotton-wooly.
I'm really pleased that there are more words and groups today, and people who can find their place. On the other side, the political landscape is much worse. It's been wonderful seeing so many of my friends grow.
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I was going to write some more, but I'm doing the write, delete, think, write, delete thing, which is basically where I've been for a long time in my head, so I'll stop.
But even though I don't write or do much about it, you and the other of my friends absolutely have my support, and it is a comfort to me to see that it is possible for other folk to work this stuff out, and I'll do my best to support.
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@chiffchaff What decades (on and off) of therapy have done for me, although I've only comparatively recently realised it, is bring focus on one corner of the messy room of my head, and help sort that out in such a way that it *stays* sorted. It *is* too overwhelming to sort out in one operation, and trying to do so, or thinking that this is what you're going to achieve, is just going to lead to failure and more clutter.
(Talking generally here. Gender was just one corner of the room for me, which I mostly managed on my own and just needed the professional help to make sure it wasn't going to get messy again.)
yup! I first identified myself as "not a boy, not a girl, but both and neither" in 1997 or so, though I didn't dare express that truth to anyone else.
Now there are thriving communities of us, and I've got labels to describe myself that I'd never heard of before: non-binary, genderfluid, bigender.
But I'm still that same person. I was always here, I've just stopped hiding. 
@Anya_Adora Oh, I cut out the thing about the effects of colonialism when trying to get it down to a reasonable length, didn't I?
Yeah.
There were words there (like "epicene" -- that one's not survived) but under the weight of cishetetc normativity and without a ubiquitous internet, it was difficult to find each other, to find the community that could even safely talk about what it meant to be like us, to find the commonality (and differences) that would let us develop a language beyond the medicalising, the othering, and the purely personal.
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Please, please, please YouTubers of the world.
"The essay" is an educational tool, not an engaging presentation format. That "paragraph intake of breath" is so depressing. There's so much great material in these things, but I do wish people would study public *lectures*.
For millennia people have been perfecting it in all kinds of varieties to suit personalities, access, etc.
"Like a video message from someone being kept hostage by an evil history postdoc" is one of the *less* successful.
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Mental Health
My mental health remains somewhat wobbly, as it has been for a month or two now. There have been two absolute low points, one "head buzzing so much with despair" and one of the form where the world is a treacle of minor chords and even being present feels like an effort that can't be guaranteed. In between it's been recovery and walking a sort of narrow path on the edge, as if solid rock can be felt to one side and an abyss to the other. A forgetfulness of joy, too, as if I have lost the object permanence of love.
I have CBT starting next month. I have an appointment with my GP potentially to adjust antidepressant doses. I've got the endocrinologist tomorrow. The things I can do apart from just hanging on, I am doing. (To be clear, I'm not a danger to myself or anyone else.)
Caster Semenya won her case in the ECHR yesterday. Only the legal summary is currently available in English: โDiscrimination against professional athlete with differences of sex development who was required under non-State regulations to lower her natural testosterone level to compete in womenโs category in international competitions: violationโ.
The judgment in French is at hudoc.echr.coe.int/%7B%22appnoโฆ ; Iโll toot the official English translation when it appears
๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her)
in reply to ๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her) • • •This toot brought to you by me having to take time out from my life to respond to yet another substanceless bullshit complaint from someone objecting to me using the word TERF.
I'm so tired.
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๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her)
in reply to ๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her) • • •Oh no I said TERF again.
TERF TERF TERF TERF TERF.
If they're going to kick me out of the party for that good luck to them, and good luck finding someone else to do all the sodding work I do as well.
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๐ถMark Nicoll 3.5%๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ๐ฌ๐ง๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ณ
in reply to ๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her) • • •Apparently TERFS a are marginalised people and only Nazis compare marginalised people to insects, so I'm bringing the party into disrepute...
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๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her)
in reply to ๐ถMark Nicoll 3.5%๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ๐ฌ๐ง๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ณ • • •Tattie (old account)
in reply to ๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her) • • •๐ฆ Jennie Rigg ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ (she/her)
in reply to Tattie (old account) • • •