There’s an urban legend going around that says that furry youth are demanding–and getting–litter boxes in high school bathrooms. I have yet to see any credible evidence that a single such box has been seriously demanded, let alone installed. But that doesn’t stop people from railing against these fictions. This morning I saw a photo…
Author: Clio
Broken Systems
This morning I saw a headline that said that some 400 police officers were on site in Uvalde before an off-duty non-police-officer border guard showed up and killed the shooter. My first instinct was to sarcastically comment “That’s a lot of bad apples”, but I didn’t. Instead, my brain decided to compare the standard police…
7/21
The other day I was watching a video on Imposter Syndrome and disability. One thing that Jessica Kellgren-Fozard said (at about 5:30) that really stood out to me was that because they’ve been disabled for so long, they don’t really have a good meter for what’s it like to not be disabled. My primary physical…
FB: On automatic gender identification
Let us assume for the moment that transgender and intersex people don’t exist. Let us assume that every single human has either XX or XY chromosomes and genitals to match. This is not true, but let us assume it is. Even under this assumption, recognize that our brains are culturally programmed to identify within seconds…
FB: Changing My Name
Yesterday I saw a FB ad for a credit card offering cards with your chosen name, and several comments were sneering about “Why don’t you just get a name change? Anyone can.” So. Having just finished the court process of changing my name, here’s what it involved: 1. I mailed in my application on May…
4/10
For anyone reading this blog and not my other social media, I wanted to let you know that my inertia isn’t gone, I’m just working on a long piece that’s taking up most of my creative writing energy. Basically, a November novel, just not in November. So I’m writing more each day than I have…
Bird, You Can Fly
i keep my wings clippedso that i cannot fly away i keep a hand over my mouthso that my words can’t be heard i keep a shadow in my brainto suffocate my thoughts and who has wrought these chainsthat keep me in my place? this is fear: that i will try and failand so i…
I Don’t Know What To Wear Today
I don’t know what to wear today. Sometimes I think about wearing a dress, long and flowing and covered with flowers. Wisterias, perhaps, to match my nails. Or lavender, or purple hyacinths. But then a voice inside says: “What a joke. You’re a joke. You don’t have the body for a dress like that. You’re…
On Jada Pinkett Smith and the “Joke”
I’m not going to talk about the slap. I’m not going to talk very much about the joke, because there are at least three levels to it. I’m going to talk about one of those three levels. I want to make it clear that this is a small part of The Incident. The Incident and…
Basic Operators: Addendum
One thing I realized while writing and editing the previous article is the depth of the mismatch between notation for addition and multiplication (on the one hand) and exponentiation (on the other). Students struggle with understanding the notation \(y = b^x\), and one reason that’s been clear to me is that there’s no overt operator….