The doctrine of Trans inspires few decent
wordsmiths.
Clare Flourish is one.
He – I'm reverting to the nonfiction
pronoun – specialises in lovely wordy blog posts with arty illustrations, which are right up my alley. I was sufficiently charmed to attempt to engage in conversation last year, a mistake worth making but not worth making again.
I revisited his site in the vain {in both senses of the word} hope that he had stumbled upon
my old post and directed traffic my way,
exceedingly unlikely as that seemed. There have been anomalous readings from the engine room which could be explained by hatescrolling. Stranger things have happened.
Reassured that our cloaking technology remains unbreached, I stuck around long enough to drink in some of his prose and enjoy the pretty pictures, then got the hell out because he's too preposterous to be spending much time on.
"You had me at cock."While I'm happy to read people who identify as transgender, it's tough going with so many pretty and not-so-pretty lies in the way. There's a lot of suspension of disbelief expected. Yet I persist in trying to understand. Either that or I'm guilty of a bit of hatescrolling myself; it can be a fine line.
The US lefty attack dog Daily Kos has been one of my regular hunting grounds. [Can a hunting ground also be an attack dog? - Ed.] Like
Jon Stewart <
multiple sighs>, it helped keep me sane during the dark days of Dubya. Now we're in new dark days and I'm on
the wrong side barking in.
Take the recent diary
Dr. Phil Attacks Trans Women Athletes.Of course Phil, who at the risk of offending anybody who's successfully defended a thesis against an academic firing squad isn't a
doctor doctor, doesn't attack trans women. If you've got 40 minutes to kill and can make it past the emetic opening credits, here's the evidence:
Everybody involved all but bends over backwards to #bekind.
The diarist
was an audience member. Unsurprisingly he was far more concerned with Lia Thomas's happiness than that of the women facing him in competition and changing rooms. He said he'd love to hear comments, which reminded me of a certain someone.
I girded my loins to bring my
wrongthink to the game, but even if I hadn't been 403'd for some reason
it would've been a pointless suicide mission. I'd doubtless get downvoted into invisibility for airing my preferred solution to much of what ails us here: widen the bandwidth of 'man', naturally.
While I'd have done my best not to unnecessarily antagonise him in his safe space, for example by refraining from using the correct pronouns if they came up, nothing short of complete affirmation of his and the Kos Borg views and a repudiation of actual science will ever be good enough. That's just the way these guys roll.
Talking Forward is a forum set up "with the intention for people to be able to discuss the big issues without all the shouting and extremism that comes along with many of the popular social media platforms and websites." Their logo is an olive branch, "to represent the coming together of opposing sides." Sounds lofty, but it's clear which side they want to cede more ground before peace can commence.
An unabashad plug over at Mumsnet pulled in punters and a few threads were started, one on
third spaces amassing dozens of posts. Then it went as
dead as NACF but without the narrator.
Speaking of olive branches,
the US
protection racket military has reminded those
born male that they stay male, at least for the purposes of cannon fodder.
Fun fun fun 'til daddy takes the T-word awayFinally for today we have Eva at The Happy Talent, who
Accidentally Used The Men's Room At Disney and is Now Convinced Anyone Who Would Do This On Purpose is a Sociopath.
It's kind of like bikes.
If someone wants to steal your bike, they're going to steal your bike. I've heard of bike thieves following people home, watching where they put their bike, and breaking in to steal it later that night. I've heard of thieves cutting entire bike racks off of cars and throwing the whole assembly in the back of their truck so they can cut the U-lock later.
If someone wants to steal your bike, they're going to steal your bike.
But you can make it so fewer people want to or can steal your bike. You can reduce how many people steal bikes by using a cable locks. You can further reduce it by buying a hefty U-lock. You can further reduce it by keeping your bikes in your sight at all times, or never leaving it on the bike rack when you're not using it.
Same with male predators in women's bathrooms.
The easier you make it for males to enter women's bathrooms -- say, by fighting for self-ID laws versus a legal standard of transition -- the more predators who will enter women's bathrooms.
For those who don't know, "self-ID" is the idea that literally any male can say, "I feel like a woman today," and enter women's bathrooms.
Women are a lot of incredible things -- but one thing we are not... is mind readers.
We can't magically tell by looking which males are here to hurt us and which genuinely "just want to pee." All we know is that, if someone hurts us, there's about a 100% chance it's a male and almost a 0% chance it's by a female.
For our comfort and safety, we need to prevent males from entering female-only spaces.
Stay out of Minnie's space, Mickey.
