Patrice Jetter is a force of nature. She’s joyous in her clothes and her hobbies (sewing, painting, model railroading) and her confidence in small acts of kindness. She found love with Garry Wickham and they want to marry. They can’t afford to because they’re both disabled. Marriage would end their access to US Federal health insurance and income support.
I’m seeing more progress pride flags flying in my neighborhood. In the poll, I’m using “queer” in the broadest possible sense: any (sexual or gender) (orientation or preference). The poll is anonymous—even I can’t see who voted how.
When you see this flag flying on an unknown residence, what meaning do you take away?
Someone queer lives there
36 (51.4%)
Someone who lives there has a queer family member
20 (28.6%)
Someone lives there and wishes to show support for queer folks, without any indication of the resident’s queer status
57 (81.4%)
Someone thinks the flag is pretty
2 (2.9%)
Someone wants to say, “let’s queer the universe, motherfuckers, cause the status quo is woeful.”
29 (41.4%)
See my answer in comments
5 (7.1%)
Ticky?
The Tomboy Survival Guide by IvanCoyote explores growing up a tomboy AFAB and then transitioning. Coyote treasures the support they did get from their family, as well as detailing how strange it feels when everyone around you expects something you simply can't deliver. They spent a lot of time growing up in the Yukon, so there's lots of delicious Northern detail. Coyote's description of their tech-school harassment while studying to be an electrician brought back my experience as a "non-traditional student" in the 1970s. I'm very glad nobody pissed in my toolbox, though.
You are going to need to find your freak family. Your misfit soldiers and their weirdo army. Keep your eyes open. That little boy at school that the bigger kids are picking on. Ask him if he has a secret name he wants you to call him. Tell him yours. Tell him he is beautiful. Tell him you see all the ways that he is strong like you and it has nothing to do with throwing a ball. Tell him you will be there at the other end of the string between you, listening into that tin can if he needs you.
The world will be full of messages telling you to be something other than what you are. Telling you that you are too skinny or too fat or too dark or too hairy. Too poor for pretty. Low fat hide your belly quick loss how to love less and find a man maps to time machines that only ever go backward. The magazines are full of this nonsense.
Save those magazines. They can be very useful. You can duct tape them over your jeans to make shin pads for street hockey and quick, cheap armour for fencing or general swordplay. Touché.
Logic is a print-first magazine "with a small digital footprint." (Eventually all content gets online; the most recent is 2017.) The articles are well edited and political in the general sense. I’ve learned a lot browsing their back archive. Two examples from Issue 2 on the theme of Sex:
But what disturbs me most about online cruising, and especially location-based apps like Grindr, is that it seems like a gentrification of cruising. The revolutionary thing about traditional gay cruising is that it is a space that allows for people from radically different backgrounds and classes and categories to come together outside the gaze of any kind of civic authority.
When I think about the kind of people I met cruising in Cherokee Park in Louisville, Kentucky — these were people that everything in my life was organized to keep me from meeting. I think a lot of the radical potential of queerness inheres in its tendency to scramble the usual lines of identification.
https://logicmag.io/sex/garth-greenwell-on-queerness-and-the-internet/
A new sextech site aspires to solve the “problem” of female sexuality. But why is female sexuality still a problem—and where do its “solutions” come from?
So in stroking virtual vulvas, am I an orgasm warrior storming the barricades under the banner of the sextech revolution? Is sextech a resurgence of feminism through “disrupting” orgasms?
Not exactly. The modern interface and shrewd packaging aren’t the only differences between sextech and second-wave feminism—the politics are different too. Second-wave feminists didn’t just rage against women’s alienation from their bodies, they also clearly identified the culprits: capitalism, patriarchy, and the American legal and medical establishments.
The short-run series Articles of Interest by Avery Trufleman just dropped a fascinating episode about how dress suits became the Western uniform for "men."
Trufleman respectfully explores the gendered connotations head on. The 17th century influencer Beau Brummell used clothing to advance an anti-monarchist political statement. Then Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexuality terrified straight men away from his fabulous dress sense and into suit conformity. The history is wrapped in the story of Ray (gender not specified because it’s not relevant to the story) wondering how to dress up for their partner’s wedding.
( 185-word taste )
podcast audio to stream or download or read the transcript
The 44th WisCon was scheduled for the Concourse Hotel here in Madison over Memorial Day Weekend. They’ve swerved to an online iteration. Here’s your chance to try out WisCon and see if you like it.
Online memberships range from free (for those of us who don’t have extra money right now) to $55 (for those of us with extra money). Read more details about programming at the registration page.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roadrunnertwice has been busy updating our elderly codebase right and left. They’d love to have mobile users, particularly Android, find problems with the latest code push.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fictional_fans is a pan fannish community, and yesterday extrapenguin blew my mind with this excellent prompt, which I honestly wish to nominate for Yuletide:
We've probably all heard about tops and bottoms, but why not expand this into the rest of the quark family so we have six options to play with? A character can be not only top or bottom, but also up, down, strange, or charm. (Some sources even call top and bottom truth and beauty, respectively!)
https://fictional-fans.dreamwidth.org/58681.html
are the unicorn chaser, from the NYTimes style magazine, of all places
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/t-magazine/butch-stud-lesbian.html
Lingthusiasm is a monthly podcast about linguistics, hosted by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. It’s just the right level of technical for someone like myself, who’s fascinating by language and how it works but has no formal linguistic training.
The most recent episode with Kirby Conrod on The Grammar of Singular They is particularly germane as I watch the pronoun meme bounce around my d-roll.
I learned so much from the episode that I’m tempted to repost the entire transcript. Aural learners this way or grab episode 43 in your podcast app.
In addition to exploring the linguistic scope of pronouns, the show provides several exceptionally specific, actionable suggestions on how to get better at properly gendering people who use the singular "they".
( 253 words )
The show notes include formal references, where I learned that one of my WisCon heroes, bronwyn, helped organize a great event last June:
They, Hirself, Em, And You Conference
Nonbinary pronouns in research and practice
https://educ.queensu.ca/they2019
cosmolinguist explores the gender pitfalls of defining a space as welcoming to "women and non-binary" people. Relevant to my interests because my wonderful comics club membership policy is "cis men have staffed the gates into comics for too long, so they're not welcome in clubMX." We've tried to express that in positive terms — here are the folks who are welcome — but given our rejection from traditional comics circles, essentially (hah!), the quoted negative definition above is what unites us.
people are doing an unreasonable thing in order to achieve a reasonable goal. I'm sure any of us could think about times in our lives that cis men were horrible to us, all the way from #EverydaySexism to actual trauma. And especially when it comes to groups for people who are queer/kinky/polyamorous/anything about sexualities and relationships, safety becomes even more important. But keeping all the cis men out isn't the way to do that. I'm not even saying "not all men," I'm saying "not only cis men." Not all predatory, boundary-crossing, consent-lacking behavior comes from them. Keeping them out is not necessary or sufficient for a space to be safe or welcoming.
hellofriendsiminthedark precisely captures why disabling metaphor is harmful
In a world where blindness is inherently understood as a debilitating and limiting condition, "you're blind to the red flags" does mean "you're ignorant of the red flags."
In a world where sight is inherently understood to be one of many modes for gathering information, but is also understood to be neutral in value and not in and of itself individually essential in the grand scheme of gathering information and perceiving a legitimate model of the physical world, "you're blind to the red flags" would mean "you may not be able to see the red flags, but you can still intuit their existence. You can still obtain information about their presence using your other senses and other information around you, for example the ways in which the red flags interact tangibly with things you can perceive. You can still understand what a red flag would signify without having to be able to identify that specific denotation of a red flag. You may sense the effects of the red flag using the senses that actually matter in your experience of the world and thus posit their presence just the same as a metaphorically sighted person would by perceiving them through sight."
GwenBenaway is a trans girl, Annishinabe/Mètis writer, and poet who just won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Holy Wild
Her essay on calling in, calling out, finding justice and repairing the ways we hurt each other is very thought provoking. It includes graphic details of child abuse, child-welfare-agencies and transmisia, which is why I’ve quoted so much here
( 350 words )
What would it mean if we said “I’m sorry” more to each other? If we were braver to face injustice, not just the injustice that we experience but the injustice that we do to others? If we made space for everyone to be held in their precarity: victims, perpetuators, and bystanders?
Gretchen McCulloch's daily linguistics blog, All Things Linguistics ![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
atlinguistic_feed, posted: Survey on developing fluency in non-binary singular they
An interesting survey to take about strategies for getting better at using non-binary singular they. The linguists involved have been especially encouraging people who are currently learning or did recently to take the survey. From the description:
As an output of the 2019 They, Hirself, Em, and You (THEY) conference held at Queen’s University, the course focuses on the use of non-binary singular they specifically – that is, singular they as the personal pronoun of reference to refer to a known non-binary person (i.e., the pronoun that a person would like others to use to refer to them in the third person). As part of the process of our design of the MOOC, this informal survey is intended to gather feedback on what types of resources and practices would be useful to speakers who may be acquiring non-binary singular they for the first time, or who have recently made the decision to dedicate time to acquiring it with intention.
Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity by Arlene Stein (Author)
four of four stars
Appreciated this book, aimed at cis folks like me. ( review and long quote )
Lux Alptraum, 2018
ebook, print, audio (Overdrive)
five out of five stars
I enjoyed this educational screed about Western patriarchy. Alptraum examines misogyny through the lens of lies women tell to cope, including:
Alptraum’s accessible prose is bolstered by footnotes to science as well as the popular press. She strategically deploys current media images, and she’s writing directly to the reader. I think it would be an excellent gift for any person on the threshold of sexual maturity. (Opinions from actual parents most welcome!)
content notes: no explicit discussions of violence or assault
branchandroot