Another set of things to look at - Early August 02022

Greetings! Let's begin with something serious. If you are United States-based and oppose the continual attacks on treandgender men and women participating in sport under very flimsy pretenses based in pseudoscience at best, then it may be worth knowing that the federal government has proposed regulations to make sure that Title IX continues to address and prevent discrimination on protected statuses and characteristics (including gender identity), and like all proposed regulations, there is a public comment period. Because anything that looks trans-affirming is targeted, there's a fair amount of copypasta in the commentary about things that the regulations don't actually do or imagined harms that come from making sure that the government has the correct authority and regulatory power to execute Title IX. We'd really appreciate it if you left a thoughtful comment of your own about the proposed regulations. Such that the people who are reading them for information will go "this one's a real human, rather than someone who copypasted their response from a form somewhere." If you're at a loss on where to start, there's some starter language to build on in a thisfinecrew post by watersword. One of the things that's already starting to come to pass is the way that the "you're not really a woman" is being weaponized against athletes, and especially non-white athletes, by people who want an easy way of forcing someone to undergo an invasive test or risk not being able to compete, and hoping that those test results somehow disqualify that competitor for being outside some arbitrary range of hormone or some other such thing. The updated regulations, once put into effect, would certainly help the federal government give a baleful eye to such laws and policies as unacceptable to Title IX.

A field guide to how resistance to transition looks in people who aren't going to deliberately say they resist your transition, because doing so would mean you have an excuse to tell them to get lost.

( And there's so much more inside! )

Last for tonight, a short document-and-comments story about wanting someone to stay around and what lengths a person might go to in the attempt to make it happen. And the consequences of permanent actions, on the geological and the human scales (CW for nuclear energy and for at least one suicide attempt.)

But also delighting the visiting scholar of the tea ceremony by having just about everything that could go wrong with it go wrong with it, and doing later Star Trek incarnations in the style and animation of the first Star Trek animated series.

And perhaps, for the end of this, it's the story of a bull named Civilón, who provided the inspiration for the story of Ferdinand. Both bulls did not fight in the arena, but instead demonstrated a peaceful nature that had their crowds calling for them to be released and returned to the life they had. (Which did happen. Unlike Ferdinand, however, Civilón was killed and eaten by fascists.)

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

On Community and The Jaded Historical Eye

I was watching a biopic on Tom of Finland (because I wanted to see what kind of accessibility and other features were available through Kanopy, now that Overdrive has acquired it and it's working towards integrating it into their larger ecosystem), and if struck an interesting chord with me. The picture itself focuses, as a biopic, on the life of the man who became Tom of Finland, and in doing so, ends up focusing on the need to find community when you're someone different than the majority, and even more so when you're in a community that other people want to demonize and destroy. I think the picture's choice to end with a triumphant note, with Tom of Finland addressing the International Mr. Leather contest, and the note that while the person died in 1991 of emphysema, Tom of Finland lives is a way of reinforcing the idea of finding your community, a place to be who you are, is a good thing in your life.

( The trope of the kids-life crisis, and the lens of the jaded historical eye )

( On the shibboleths of the Purity Brigades )

In such an environment as this, how difficult it must be to find enough community to be one's authentic self, even if no community by itself is (or ever will be) sufficient for the whole of one's authentic self. (Admittedly, there are many people whose authentic self I want nowhere near me and with no power to affect me at all, because they authentically desire to be part of or at the head of a Purity Brigade that would seek to erase me. Functioning society is compromise on so many things, after all.) And that brings it back all the way around, to where we started, to feeling unhappy about my community-building successes being out of whack and longing for a time where I felt like I was having greater success at building both a community online and a community of localish in person for myself. Even though I can see the differences between then and now and acknowledge to myself that many of the things that would advance building that local in person community come with risks that I feel are still too high to chance. I live in hope, though, that the project will be able to resume itself…eventually.