Five years ago, the East Of England Liberal Democrats posted a photo of two transgender women, me and @Zoë O'Connell, wearing “Bollocks to Brexit” T-Shirts.
It is a sign of how far UK politics has fallen that that is utterly unthinkable now. Both the total erasure of transgender people’s existence and acceptance of Brexit are utter orthodoxy across the political spectrum there now.
Do you reckon Brexit, at least in part, is to blame for the rise in British transphobia? Transphobia sadly exists in every country, but few countries are as trans-obsessed as the UK. Brits no longer have the EU to blame for all their problems, so they need another scapegoat. For that purpose, trans people are like low-hanging fruit.
@Llwynog @Zoë O'Connell it helped it along, but it was already building before then. The TERFs were well into their quest to capture the establishment by the time of the referendum, and making progress. Too many people made the fatal mistake of thinking that if they ignored them, they would go away.
@llwynog No, but I think they and at least one of the other great disasters of our era, climate change denialism, come from the same cause: Clickbait media and populist parties selling fear of “other” and disdain of experts.
The public is not as transphobic or xenophobic as the press likes to make out, though. But “trans people not a threat” and “asylum seeker actually had a bit of a rough time” doesn’t generate as revenue or get the voters out.
Something that's not as important as the hatred, but seems incredibly weird to me, is how it's suddenly become important for politicians. Doesn't that seem really weird? Compared to like the 90s and 00s. That this is suddenly so important for non-trans people who have no real contact with trans-people other than them being a part of the population. I mean, what's going on in their head that it's suddenly important for them? If it's because of social media /éminences grise/, why is it important to *them*? It just seems bizarre. I mean I suppose I *understand* it, but it's always like *so, that's a thing*.
"The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can’t cure, Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor. Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won’t buy, but it’s very funny - Have you ever tried to buy them without money?"
People who have what they want are…
And I wish I could afford to gath…
I dont’ mind their having a lot of…
But I do think that they damn wel…
But no, they insist on being steal…
The people that say "money can't buy happiness" always have some stupid hobby that makes them sad instead of happy. People with creative hobbies get happier with more money they have. I have a dozens of things i want to do that i can't because i don't have money.
Elon bought a social media because people made fun of him there.
Mark spends his time stalking millions of people and running psyops with CIA.
Bill Gates is testing how awful a OS can be before people stop using it.
Remains to be seen if this was a one off but the first water quality test by the Environment Agency in the River Cam found E-Coli was offscale high.
Most other sites the graph only goes up to 2 000cfu/100ml. Cambridge levels are 2 700, and the limit for bathing is 900. environment.data.gov.uk/bwq/pr…
Hats off to the Cam Valley Forum for campaigning to get this monitored!
I feel like the trauma is the point. Like they'd be happy to just traumatise trans children but are highly pleased to have as wide a scope for harm as possible.
@celesteh I think this is actively intended to affect all kids including the cishet ones; and is an attempt to roll back the "permissive society", particularly the gains in freedom that occured in the late 1980s and 1990s (which during the Tories time in power only occured as an unintended consequence of neoliberalism, and Thatcho herself said she regretted this a few years before she kicked the bucket)
My experience with schools teaching this stuff is that they're doing just fine at the moment with how and when they introduce things.
I remember in the eighties this vague stench of bishops permeating bedrooms. These days it's cabinet ministers which are having folk rush to throw open the classroom windows.
Tory policy soundbites are designed to motivate Tory voters in the coming election.
Tory voters (and brexiters) tend to be older and poorly eduated: the average Tory party member is over 60.
So no, they mostly don't know any current generation kids/teenagers, don't understand the cultural changes of the past 30-50 years, and they resent the young and educated.
So this policy is working precisely as intended (not to fix anything, just to energize Alf Garnett and make him vote).
@cstross Which explains why so many of their policy announcements are best understood only as announcements, with some kind of follow-up and implementation to be expected only if someone stands to take a nice cut out of it.
I'm 67, and got a good state education in a rural and conservative area. I was a fairly narrow-minded teenager as were my friends and probably would have remained so had I not left the area, travelled widely, and ended up in suburban London.
Those left in the country are still conservative and narrow-minded; easily disturbed by social trends, by immigration that has zero effect on them; and oh yes - "anti-woke".
@cstross Unfortunately, I think in cases like this, “Next election” often means the Tory leadership election in 2025 and the policies are pitched accordingly. Sunak has to go along with it or the right wing of his already rather right wing party will try to oust him.
@cstross #Sunak is toast, no matter what’s coming. Many of my school friends never left Galloway- the epitome of rural living- and have closed minds about so many things. Change is scary for those who have never forced themselves to experience it. #tacticalvoting
Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes 👉 This deployment is starting today and we will post another update in a few weeks when it is completed aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats… #AWS #Storage #FinOps
since the discourse on whether #pineapple belongs on #pizza seems to have died down a bit, i think we need new pizza crimes. I submit for your consideration the swedish (which is how you know it's gonna be a banger) delicacy that is the calskrove. cw: delicious delicious food crime
@ajlanes in case you want even more heart disease by proxy, i once went to a place in northern sweden that had a pizza bolognese which included the spaghetti.
Me, in southern Portugal: you seen that Spain and Morocco are contemplating a rail tunnel?
@Zoë O'Connell, also in southern Portugal: But they won’t build a rail line to here? WHY EVEN IS SPAIN?
Me: That would be HARD, Zoe. They’d have to build a rail line over at least THREE KILOMETRES of line across land nobody lives on and construct a bridge of about TWO HUNDRED METRES.
@João Tiago Rebelo @Zoë O'Connell Also, were a bridge to be constructed, it would face the insurmountable engineering challenge of water that is thousands upon thousands of millimetres deep.
Spanish railways were originally built to six (Castilian) feet. Portuguese ones to five (Portuguese) feet. These are, however, only 8mm different - Portugal being 1664mm, Spain 1672mm.
When the two networks joined up (1880s), they agreed a compromise "Iberian" gauge of 1668mm, and gradually all track was switch to that, which was officially completed in 1955.
So yeah, they already fixed *that* problem 70 years go.
There is a decent chance of seeing the #aurora tonight, over a huge chunk of Northern Europe (perhaps as far south as Switzerland) - space.com/solar-storm-coronal-… - the sun is having a major geomagnetic event. #space #science
In this post, our commercial director, Richard Horne shows the steps of how to design, 3D print and build a full sized replica of the worlds very first video arcade machine (Computer Space) from 1971.
whenever Vanuatu is mentioned I always think of IHP and feel grateful to the nation of Vanuatu for helping me through the first months of my transition while the gatekeepers were keeping gate
@revk there is a venerable and primitive programming language called m4 which is (many would say alas) still in use. One of its weird quirks is that it uses “dnl” as its comment syntax “delete through new line”.
Relationship counsellor here. Part of my process is to ask each half of the couple (separately) which song best reminds them of their partner - to date, no-one has topped Size Of A Cow as the answer that gave me the most difficulty in keeping a straight face.
#ukpol #transphobia Why does anyone still think the Guardian is a progressive newspaper? Their latest fun is an “exposé” of being able to buy HRT on the internet.
One thing I didn't get from you post is — you mention web apps to cross security boundaries — and that doesn't make any sense to me. But maybe I've just been stuck in a cave for far too long. Can you provide an example of such a web app?
i was thinking of the self-service commands a sysadmin might provide for their users on a university timesharing system
in the past i have had colleagues who used ssh with forced commands for similar things – i should have said more about ssh
there’s also the fact that systems are always distributed, so a single-box utility like sudo is less likely to be the right kind of tool than something natively distributed like a web form
interesting post! I like using sudo and I feel like there's an attribute of my workflows using it that isn't captured in your post, apologies if I noodle here.
My interactive shell environment is pretty rich, and I like those affordances. (History, fancy prompt, editor settings, aliases, various app configs and bindings). I want to use those features while doing sysadmin. But I don't want to set them up for root!
And, I often want to poke around and think about things, testing theories, before I do something "for real". For example, I might build an awk and for-loop contraption to perform some admin task, iterating on it on the command line, safe in the knowledge I can't accidentally overwrite /etc/fstab, and after I get it working right, add a sudo to execute.
I even also do use the auth.log entries? Both to remind myself what I've done, and to figure out who changed something in the lab. It's pretty low stakes stuff tho.
i tend to use Many Windows with key shortcuts to make them convenient, so in the experiment -> for real workflow i use another terminal when i need rootly powers
(tho for serious stuff it’s more like experiment -> script -> for real)
when i’m sharing ops duties with others i typically `. ~fanf/.bashrc` to make a root shell palatable
6. All that universal use of sudo does is encourage everyone to be in the habit of prepending "sudo " to any system-level command, without actually thinking about if this is a good idea. See all the tutorials that just *assume* you're using sudo always, so include "sudo " as a prefix on the commands.
If you'd always "sudo <command>" where someone else would "<command>" in their root login, then the only real difference is the logging. If that logging is of little value, then what's the real difference ?
7. Use of sudo makes the user's password in effect a root password, actually *expanding* the attack surface for gaining root. You'd better be sure that the user's password is *always* transmitted/used in a secure manner. No TLS-less *anything*.
@hlindqvist i have been slightly surprised by how many people told me they like their complicated sudo setups, but they tend to be 1990s university sysadmins, which is much less surprising
Pharmacies in Portugal (verified) and Spain (unverified) will often sell oestrogen HRT over the counter to tourists without a prescription. If you watch Ryanair prices, you could day trip there for £50 or less.
This will likely be cheaper and potentially safer than using an internet pharmacy.
@Siguza Like, I’m frequently named personally by connected TERFs in the UK as the trans woman they hate the most, and I use FAO/STN like it’s a city bus. I’m at the, “oh, you again, hi! Usual in flight meal?” stage with some of the cabin crew and I can confirm that UK Border Force find me wholly and entirely uninteresting. They are looking for some people. They aren’t looking for us.
(As in on Wednesday, I was in my own kitchen in the UK, making tea, exactly 40 minutes after the Ryanair flight I had been on touched its wheels to the ground and engaged its brakes. Barely broke stride for the border).
@Siguza And as for the usual in flight meal thing, the green chicken curry on Ryanair is surprisingly good, and also gluten free. It’s my meal plan for Sunday, when I will be eating one about 10km above the Bay of Biscay.
The “recommended legal max” was mentioned to me by the Thai doctor I visited because I don't have the energy to fill out all the forms in the UK, let alone wait that many years.
There may have been a misunderstanding I dunno.
It sounds like maybe I'm one of those folk who struggles with estradiol valerate as my level was 60-something I think and they said the 'target level' for a trans woman was 100.
I bought 6 months' worth of E before I left Thailand though so I'll stick with that for now.
Do you know if estradiol hemihydrate is available in Thailand? If my levels aren't great in November, maybe I can ask to go on those.
@StuffByBez the 8mg limit tends to be what the NHS and UK private providers stick with. There are patches/gel you could try. Different people react differently.
@StuffByBez @jen To my understanding this is mostly if you use overly high doses, which is sadly kinda common because medical professionals are idiots and often don’t take into account that E is an anti-androgen and prescribe full 50mg pills.
The linked document is being circulated amongst NHS service providers for young trans people. It advises cessation of ALL medical intervention for transition but goes further. It suggests that if the patient or parents continue to access trans healthcare outside their system, they should be reported to social services with the implicit threat that the children will be taken from their parents.
IF YOU ARE A YOUNG TRANS PERSON OR A PARENT OF ONE, IT IS LIKELY UNSAFE TO ENGAGE WITH NHS MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.
@JamieR Exact same experience here. CAMHS recommended some group Zoom sessions but that's about it. I got the impression they were so overstretched, if the kid wasn't an immediate self harm risk they just didn't have the resources to do anything. We are also now going private but it sucks for the many people out there for whom that's not an option 🙁
@ian I think they do what they can, within limits, to meet bare minimum standard … if they get 6 months to respond to something, they’ll take 6 months, which is why they process with them could be 5 years before anything significant happens.
Yes, those fortunate enough can take the easier route and pay to go private, but I genuinely fear for those that don’t have that luxury, it’s heartbreaking
@grayface_ghost @StrangeNoises @cstross You're giving the British public more credit than they deserve,don't forget these are the people that gave the albino orang utan and 80 odd seat majority to do with as he wished to which he started wrecking the country. Mags happened on both sides of the Atlantic ocean we've gotta make sure it doesn't happen on this side again.
@sesquipedality I did vote for a police commissioner this time, though often I spoil the ballot. I've been less worried since it became clear they do nothing at all. But I should get back into the habit of spoiling.
I probably shouldn't have been told this, so I won't name names, but I've heard some hilarious Police Commissioner spoils from counters, from people venting about the police and their conduct to votes for Inspectors Morse, Frost, and Clouseau: it's a bit of an art-form, apparently, particularly for that particular post.
Since apparently some of my friends are unaware, these are the things that are bothering me and other UK trans people: theguardian.com/society/2024/a… - the UK government’s latest transphobic shit. 1/3
#ukpol #transphobiarcgp.org.uk/representing-you/p… - GPs’ representative body calling for end to shared care with the private sector, and restricting their role in other aspects of trans healthcare. 3/3
Like, there’s this person who I barely knew existed until I heard that they are now on a multi year deep dive obsession with me making a post saying that getting rid of TERFs was akin to getting rid of bedbugs.
I didn’t name this person; I had no fucking idea that they existed, until I started hearing on the grapevine that they are habitually walking around showing screenshots from this server and complaining that “Sarah said I am like bedbugs and pubic lice”. Bit self-important, but whatever.
Apparently recently they presented it as justification for their revolting behaviour towards trans women. “Sarah, who doesn’t know me, said mean things about a group of people which I took to include me, based on my own evaluation of my own behaviour, and I am now VERY OFFENDED”.
Ok, so here’s the thing:
I know you’re almost certainly reading this because you’re obsessed with m
Like, there’s this person who I barely knew existed until I heard that they are now on a multi year deep dive obsession with me making a post saying that getting rid of TERFs was akin to getting rid of bedbugs.
I didn’t name this person; I had no fucking idea that they existed, until I started hearing on the grapevine that they are habitually walking around showing screenshots from this server and complaining that “Sarah said I am like bedbugs and pubic lice”. Bit self-important, but whatever.
Apparently recently they presented it as justification for their revolting behaviour towards trans women. “Sarah, who doesn’t know me, said mean things about a group of people which I took to include me, based on my own evaluation of my own behaviour, and I am now VERY OFFENDED”.
Ok, so here’s the thing:
I know you’re almost certainly reading this because you’re obsessed with me. I fled the country to avoid people like you, so yeah, I don’t like you much. I think you’re objectively terrible human beings. You’re worse than my mother in law, and she steals tips off of restaurant tables.
And the fact that you’re still letting this live rent free in your head months and months, going into years later, and that people you think are your friends are laughing at you for it and then telling me about it, is clearly something that’s bothering you.
So I’m going to try and offer you a bit of insight, and maybe you might find it helpful. I dunno.
Anyway, were some random TERF to liken me to pubic lice or bedbugs, even if they specifically named me (and I sure as fuck didn’t do that; I’m not stupid), I know exactly what I’d feel:
NOTHING
Absolutely nothing. The fuck should I care what some random arsehole I don’t respect thinks about me? It’s not like I’m relying on their opinion for anything.
Maybe if I thought they had a point, I might be upset, and dwell on it tho.
@Alisdair Calder McGregor aaaaasanyway, must dash. Got a subtropical sunset to watch over my citrus trees, safe in the knowledge that I have no pubic lice.
Bottom line, anyone who protested as a student knows you simply don't have the education and sophistication to really understand the complexities of the Middle East.
In contrast, I look forward to the predominantly male Supreme Court ruling on women's bodies.
So I've got a VCR that I can control over serial. If I got a second one, I could stick tapes into them and cross-wire them so that each plays into the other. I could then set up a program to record from tape 1 onto tape 2, then back from tape 2 to tape 1. Attach a capture device and I can get video files of each generation.
Then we just watch the generational loss compound.
sounds like a good opportunity to get a linear editing controller and experience what it was like to edit video back in the good old days (and why everyone switched to non-linear editing as soon as the hardware became affordable and the software caught up).
As you likely know, Brexit import checks start in earnest on Tuesday... but at facilities which are (mostly) inland; in the case of Dover 22 miles inland....
Now, of course most shippers can be trusted to drive those 22 miles for a check, and then either 'enter' the UK or drive 22 miles back with their refused shipment....
Hmmmm.... so that 44 miles of driving when, for the less scrupulous, a little bit of clandestine unloading could take place... this is a system built to be circumvented!
Ha! I escaped Kent fifty years ago and rarely venture back so I can’t say with certainty. It was all far more bucolic in my day. Jack Hargreaves rendered in chalk and hop fields.
I understood that most of the testing locations are at the ports. The exception, and it's a major one, is Sevington, which is 22 miles inland from Dover, our busiest port. FWIW it wouldn't need a roundtrip, as Sevington is near Ashford, Kent, just off the M20. I suppose they could use ANR to track the lorries going to Sevington, and pick up any doing illicit diversions, but I don't think they are. But as it is, no one, apart from our Govt, thinks this is a good idea.
It’s the stupidity of the Solcitor Generals actions that terrify me the most. If they are willing to be so obviously wrong to secure a conviction it’s hard to know where they will stop.
Great article. I remember jury equity from my undergraduate law degree thirty years ago. I did not go on to practice and haven't thought about it since - I didn't know it was controversial and might have assumed it was part of jury swearing-in. The case will surely stand as a monument to a delusional Solicitor General who thought they might achieve anything other than being slapped down by a gleeful judge?
The Trudi Warner #contempt case brings to mind a significant so-called 'perverse' verdict from 1991.
Michael #Randle and Patrick #Pottle were charged with helping a spy escape from prison in 1963.
The judge told the jury the defendants had no defence. The jury knew they were guilty - the pair admitted it in a book - and yet the jury unanimously found them not guilty.
My language learning web page (linguno.com) has gone all political today on this 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. This means I know how to say "I will abolish the death penalty".
I have got literally the happiest thing in the history of everything ever for you today! And that is no exaggeration whatsoever! In fact it is an understatement! Here is My Baby Goat! Get the mp3 f…
Llwynog
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Llwynog • •Zoë O'Connell
in reply to Llwynog • • •@llwynog No, but I think they and at least one of the other great disasters of our era, climate change denialism, come from the same cause: Clickbait media and populist parties selling fear of “other” and disdain of experts.
The public is not as transphobic or xenophobic as the press likes to make out, though. But “trans people not a threat” and “asylum seeker actually had a bit of a rough time” doesn’t generate as revenue or get the voters out.
kæt
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown likes this.
Sarah Brown
in reply to kæt • •