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…
Category: Other essays
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…
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…
FB: On Trans Women in Sports
This next sentence may seem odd coming from me, but keep reading. It’s not transphobic to say that trans women athletes have a physical advantage over cis women. The medical truth of that statement has been debated, and I believe that, on the whole, it’s not true. There are certainly cases of trans women who…
Canceling is Not Censorship
(A Twitter thread) Effective censorship requires systemic power. This is related to the conversation about *ism and the non-existent “reverse *ism”: I can have prejudices that are negative about cisgender people, for instance, but I don’t have the power of the system behind me. When we transgender folk “cancel” JKR and DC, our power is…
Two Post on The Alpha Ideal
On Facebook:The term “Cancel Culture” is a part of a larger system of domination and, frankly, is used itself to cancel conversation to avoid uncomfortable conversations and accountability. “It was just a joke” is part of that, too. The image below is framed in terms of men, but it’s part of the greater system of…
“God Knows I’m Good”
I used to call myself a libertarian. I used to say that meant that people could do what they wanted as long as it didn’t hurt other people. I used to be the final arbiter of whether my actions hurt people. It’s easy to declare that one’s own actions don’t hurt other people: “My actions…
On the bread and circuses of “Squid Game”
So, last week, we watched Squid Game. Spoiler alert: Non-specific reference to the ending below. Let me get this out of the way: The program was very well written. I didn’t really find the themes particularly original. The very idea of “bread and circuses” goes back thousands of years, and a glossy production (estimated budget…
On “the” National Anthem
A certain libertarian white rich man on HBO thinks there should only be one National Anthem. He’s okay with getting rid of the current one, but we all have to agree on the replacement. The idea of one National Anthem, included in his argument, is founded on the idea that there is one USA. Except…