SFF I'm currently excited about, cats, asexuality, and occasional chronic illness and ex-evangelical content || linguist in tech, and I don’t talk about research much here, but tumblr is where I can get the most comedy out of referring to my degree as a PhD In Pronouns || they/she
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Correct, it’s useful to be cautious about participating, but some entries in this thread have made some incorrect assumptions about how the research works.
The important thing is that if you see a study that you’d like to participate in — and it’s really important that we continue to understand the experiences of queer people — the consent form will tell you exactly what data is being collected, and you can ask questions about anything you’re concerned about. Anyone researching LGBT+ people knows there are a lot of reasons participants are concerned about privacy, even with a less hostile federal government, and keeping your data safe is a key part of designing this research. Any legit study will make this information clear to you and address any concerns you have.
Here’s what this looked like when I was doing my dissertation research about how people learn to use singular they:
Before starting to recruit people, I had to get approval from my university about what data I was collecting, what I’d tell people, and how I’d keep it private (not connecting any study to real names).
If you signed up online via a site like Prolific, I never saw your name or contact info.
If you came into the lab, you signed up using your university account, but the name you signed on the consent form and the payment didn’t have to be your legal name. There is no way to link your survey responses (including info about sexuality and gender) to your name.
I regularly answered questions from participants about how the contact info we collected so the university could do its taxes and we could prove we weren’t embezzling grant money was not able to be connected to their study data.
If the university IRB (who decides what privacy standards we need to uphold) or the NSF (who gave me grant money to pay participants) asked us for the names and contact info of which participants said they were queer, we would tell them that we didn’t know, because it is standard to not be able connect that information.
To be honest, if the federal government wants to find lists of queer people, they’re much more likely to do so via who has changed their IDs (data they already have), who has gotten gender affirming medical treatment (there have been lawsuits to hospitals about this), or who is posting about it on publicly available social media. Linking demographic data to contact information in federally-funded studies is hard, changing the policies to make people collect that data in a way that’s easy to link is harder (because it’s also up to individual university IRB offices), and pretending to be a fake study to collect data is even harder. It’s not remotely the most effective way of trying to collect a list of targets, so I don’t think is the area you should be most concerned about your privacy.
Finally, the reason I’m writing this is not to convince people to participate in studies they’re not comfortable with, but to combat the assumption that academic and medical researchers are inherently suspicious and dangerous. There’s a lot of anti intellectualism going around on the internet these days, and it ignores that fact that so many of these researchers (often queer themselves!!) are doing important work to understand queer experiences and make the world better for queer people.
#a rant written from my lunch break before I go back to doing participant privacy paperwork for my job#queer#research#academia
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This is a good rant, and it’s interesting (read: infuriating) to see that there’s a line of “research” explicitly debuting defending CAM as a placebo effect. I mostly get the “western medicine is treating the symptoms not the root causes” flavored woo (not without trying! We haven’t figured out the causes yet because they’re so much more complicated than your vibes theory of inflammation or toxins or whatever). If someone told me a placebo is just as good, I’d be legally allowed to commit a murder. This is “you just have anxiety :)” but in pseudoscience language.
Hey friend! So while I'm incredibly skeptical, I'm not strictly against alternative medicine, like you are. I saw you mention reiki, and thought you might geek out on this article like I did:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200308195914/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/reiki-cant-possibly-work-so-why-does-it/606808/
It's called "Reiki Can't Possibly Work. So Why Does It?" and I highly encourage reading the whole thing. It first of all thoroughly debunks a lot of the claims reiki practitioners make but it also details all of the studies that have proven its effectiveness and provides what I find a pretty compelling explanation: that much of modern western medicine is stressful and traumatizing. Of course laying in a quiet room with the lights dimmed while a kind person sits with you and wishes for you to be well is effective. It reduces stress and all of the negative biological processes it triggers, which promotes healing.
The article mentions that for years we didn't understand the mechanism by which acetaminophen worked - we just knew it did. I knew a man who was really into "chakra therapy" in the 90s where he had a set of colored sunglasses that, supposedly, would rebalance one's out-of-whack chakras through light therapy. He found that attending to his throat chakra, yellow, helped him sleep better. Years later, formal studies found that yellow lenses filter blue light and can help regulate circadian rhythms.
When I was really little, my uncle sold magnet therapy products (which claimed to promote circulation?? I think??). I had a huge meltdown at a family reunion and no one could get me to calm down. My uncle put a blanket full of magnets on top of me, and I immediately relaxed. Imagine my surprise hearing that story for the first time as an adult who now uses a weighted blanket for stress.
I agree that people need to be really careful about these practices, about getting scammed, and especially about herbal supplements that can have dangerous interactions. I also think there's an extent to which you can analyze the risks and benefits and say, "Okay, I have no idea why this works but it does and there's no major downsides."
Hey so I get a bit heated in this response but I want you to know that I approached this ask in good faith because I know you and I know that we have a lot of the same values and interests and this touched a nerve that was not at all your fault and once I get past the direct response to the article I think I come off a little less. Um. Like the aggression there is not directed at you, it's directed at the article and at one person mentioned in the article specifically who is part of why my reaction to the article is so not good. But I promise after the last bullet point I come off as less reactive, I think. (I'm also publishing this publicly because I think it may be helpful for people to see how CAM stuff often gets away with a veneer of skepticism-that-isn't-actually-skepticism - the article claims to be skeptical but then makes a ton of assumptions and cites some truly mind-bogglingly bad sources that a lot of people won't recognize as bad if they don't have a hair trigger trained by far too much time on the bad CAM parts of the internet).
I've actually read that article a few time times, and would like to do a quick rundown on why I find it unconvincing:
She doesn't cite any decent studies on reiki; one that she does cite is just a self-reported questionnaire response from 23 people in 2002.
While we don't know the exact mechanism of action for acetaminophen, we do know that it does work - it measurably reduces fever and in double blinded RCTs produces reproduceable results in reducing certain kinds of pain. The Science Based Medicine authors cited in the article who called for an end to studies on reiki did so both because there is no plausible mechanism of action for reiki (specifically as energy work, not as 'being in a room with a patient person who listens to you') and because there is no good evidence that it works. (And they wrote a follow-up to the Atlantic article; I like SBM but it's quite sneery, as are most of their write-ups of reiki). When Kisner asks "why should this be different?" when comparing reiki and acetaminophen, the answer is: because there is not only no plausible way that reiki *could* work, there is not any good evidence we have that it works better than placebo.
"Various non-Western practices have become popular complements to conventional medicine in the past few decades, chief among them yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all of which have been the subject of rigorous scientific studies that have established and explained their effectiveness." This one sentence needs probably twenty or so links in response, suffice it to say that western medicine has emphatically not established and explained the effectiveness of AT LEAST acupuncture and the casually credulous way Kisner accepts that acupuncture is effective (effective FOR WHAT?) throws some serious doubt on her ability to assess these kinds of things.
The title of the article is "Reiki can't possibly work, so why does it?" and that's probably the Atlantic's fault more than Jordan Kisner's fault, but she doesn't ever demonstrate that it works. She says she got a buzzy feeling after her training, she says that patients at the VA were asking for reiki as treatment for pain and sleep disorders, she says that people remembered "healing touches" from parents and loved ones and that the same mechanism might be what makes reiki 'work.' She says that reiki "has been shown by various studies that pass evidentiary muster to help patients in a variety of ways when used as a complementary practice" and the two studies that she includes that weren't just a questionnaire were 1) a non-blinded study of heart rate variability post heart attack where the reiki arm involved continuous interaction with a trained nurse and the other two arms involved resting quietly or classical music (so relaxation as a result of additional focused attention by attentive medical professionals could account for this? Why was the control for this study not having a med student sit and hold the patient's hand?) and 2) a study of patients who sought out reiki who were surveyed after treatment and noted improvement on one of twenty mental or physical markers (this study is like, GOLD for an example of a bad study; no control, self-selected participants who believe in the efficacy of the intervention, exceptionally broad criteria for a positive result - I find it really really really challenging to grant any credence to someone who confidently cited this as an example of reiki "working")
Near the end of the article she says "At the same time, this recalled the most cutting-edge, Harvard-stamped science I’d read in my research: Ted Kaptchuk’s finding that the placebo effect is a real, measurable, biological healing response to “an act of caring.” - if she read any of Ted Kaptchuk's research she didn't link to it; what she did link to was a 2018 New York Times profile of him and Kathryn Hall, researchers at Harvard's Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter program. Being any flavor of journalist and citing Ted Kaptchuk as your source for cutting-edge, institutionally-backed science is disqualifying.
I now need to do some yelling about Ted Kaptchuk.
For clarity: I have as much medical training as Kathryn Hall and Ted Kaptchuk, which is to say: None.
Hall is a microbiologist with a PhD in Public Health, so she at least a background in science. Kaptchuk is an acupuncturist with a BA in East Asian studies and a doctorate in Chinese medicine - notably NOT a medical degree; he was forced to stop calling himself a doctor and had papers retracted after enough people questioned whether the school he claimed he attended even existed and the documents he presented to claim that he was an "OMD" were conclusively translated and did not have any indication that the granted a medical degree of any kind - Science Based Medicine was involved in investigating this because they've been comprehensively anti-quack forever and Ted Kaptchuk has been a quack forever (after recieving confirmation from the government of Macau that Kaptchuk's alma mater was not a medical degree granting institution SBM STILL gave him the benefit of the doubt and had people translate his documentation for final confirmation).
He is also an author on of one of my most beloathed ever studies, which showed that sham acupuncture, placebo, and albuterol all produced the same effect on patient-reported well-being, coming to the conclusion that patient reports can be unreliable and that "placebo effects can be clinically meaningful and can rival the effects of active medication in patients with asthma." That fucking line, that stupid goddamned line, gets cited in every piece of woo bullshit about how acupuncture or chiropractic or some scam-ass diet all work, I've run into this study while looking through at least twenty bibliographies and it is one of the biggest, reddest flags that whoever is writing the paper you're reading is full up on some bullshit. Because, see, the paper found that "placebo effects can be clinically meaningful and can rival the effects of active medication in patients with asthma" in terms of *patient-reported* markers, but the fucking study found that only albuterol produced an actual effect in lung function. Here's the sentence BEFORE the one that gets cited all the time: "Although albuterol, but not the two placebo interventions, improved FEV1 [forced expiratory volume in one second - the measure for lung function used in the study and used to diagnose asthma] in these patients with asthma, albuterol provided no incremental benefit with respect to the self-reported outcomes." It doesn't matter if the patient *feels* better if they can't actually breathe! It doesn't fucking matter - feeling better but still having poor breathing leaves you more vulnerable to dying of a fucking asthma attack! I hate this goddamned study so fucking much and it's used all the time to claim that placebo can be just as effective as medicine for making people FEEL better but, like, they're still sick even if they feel better! I HAVE HAD PEOPLE CITE THIS STUPID FUCKING STUDY TO ME AS EVIDENCE THAT I DON'T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT TREATING MY FUCKING ASTHMA BECAUSE I DON'T GET ACUPUNCTURE TO TREAT MY FUCKING ASTHMA. If sham acupuncture makes you feel better when you've got the flu but doesn't lower your fever or make you less contagious, you shouldn't act like you don't have a fever or aren't contagious this study makes me INSANE.
Okay done yelling.
I think this look at placebo in the midst of her article about reiki is really interesting because it's very common for CAM practitioners to claim that it's as effective as placebo - which just means that it's not effective. This is a great explanation from The Skeptic on why placebo isn't and can't be what Kaptchuk, Hall, and the like claim. It's also interesting to me that Kisner didn't choose to link to a 2011 New Yorker profile of Kaptchuk that is somewhat less rosy about his placebo studies and includes this absolutely crushing statement: "the placebo effect doesn’t appear to work with Alzheimer’s patients. Trivers suggests that this is because most people who have Alzheimer’s disease are unable to anticipate the future and are therefore unable to prepare for it."
But to the actual point of the ask: I honestly think it's fascinating how much CAM success probably rides on "well did you listen to the patient and pay attention to what was wrong with them and sympathize with them and help them lay out plan that made them feel like they had some agency in this exceptionally frustrating situation (chronic illness, newly diagnosed issue, totally undiagnosed issue) that they're dealing with?"
I know part of why people with chronic illnesses turn to CAM is because they're ignored and dismissed by allopathic practitioners who are largely looking for horses, not zebras - this is one of the reasons that I'm really big on reminding people that (at least in the US) DOs are fully licensed physicians who use a holistic and patient-centered approach so if you are someone with a chronic illness who has had trouble getting diagnosed or had trouble getting doctors to believe you, swapping your MD for a DO as a primary care physician might be really, really helpful to you.
But the flip side of that is that is that I worry deeply about the question of where harm starts; the example with your uncle is really great because you do have a solid instance of something working but for totally the wrong reason (pressure being the mechanism that actually helped, versus magnets being the reason given by the person who did the treatment). Some of this stuff has very little likelihood of causing direct harm, but has the distinct possibility of having indirect harms, which people in the anti-CAM space generally divide into two categories, treatment delay and unnecessary costs (opportunity costs, monetary costs, wasted effort, etc.)
I'm going to step outside of your specific example and look at magnet therapy generally, which really is a spectacular thing to focus on because it honestly doesn't have any direct harms; nobody is allergic to magnets, the kinds of magnets used aren't strong enough to interfere with medical devices, it's even safer than the whole "well herbalism is sometimes just a cup of tea" thing because there are "safe" teas that can do real harm to large populations! But simply being around magnets is not going to hurt anyone (unless they're swallowed; nobody swallow magnets please).
One of the things that I think goes under-discussed when talking about placebo and CAM is that the people trying the alternative solutions desperately WANT the alternative medicine to work (I suspect that this is why the self-selected study of reiki patients has such a significant finding). They are pulling for it; they may be looking at it as a last resort, or they may be hoping that it will work to avoid a treatment that is more frightening, expensive, or inaccessible. I think this actually contributes a lot to the delay of care that we see with CAM.
The absolute worst case harm I can imagine from magnetic therapy is delaying treatment. Let's suppose we've got a diabetic patient with gradually increasing peripheral neuropathy; they have reacted poorly to gabapentin in the past and are looking for something more natural, and they hear from their chiropractor that magnet therapy can be used to treat neuropathy. They buy some compression socks with "magnetic and earthing properties" and sleep in the socks. Whether through the compression controlling some edema or through the simple desire for the socks to work, they feel some relief from the nerve pain they were experiencing and decide that this is a success. The socks work! They continue wearing the socks with occasional pain, but less than before. However, because they are focused on the lack of pain, they don't notice that it's accompanied by increasing numbness. The numbness significantly increases their risk of injury to their feet, which significantly increases their risk of amputation.
It probably sounds like catastrophizing to say "using magnets could lead to amputation" but honestly I don't think it's that far out of the realm of possibility (every time I post on this topic I get flooded with the saddest stories in the world about people whose loved ones died because of delayed treatment for cancer or heart disease).
The second category of harm is cost, which is honestly pretty minimal with magnet therapy, as long as you aren't spending $1049 on a magnetic mat
or paying a chiropractor to give you magnetic treatments. For some other medically harmless treatments like reiki, cost is the thing that I worry about - while I was looking up information related to the article I found that people are charging anywhere from $60 to $225 a session, and selling multi-session packages for thousands of dollars - and if someone thinks that something works, even if it only works by being in a soothing space where someone cares about you - they'll pay for it.
I'm aware that all of this is also extra complicated because of the cost and lack of access to allopathic medicine - a chiropractor broke my spine because I could pay her $60 per appointment but I couldn't pay $125 to see an MD when I didn't have insurance. People who are sick are going to look for treatment; people who have been denied treatment or dismissed by doctors are going to look for alternative treatments.
But man, I really wish I'd spent that sixty bucks on half of a doctor's appointment because the chiropractor didn't know about the benign tumor that I had that weakened the structure of that particular bone when she did her adjustment; it also didn't make the pain go away, it made a different pain start and get worse because it turns out I was having debilitating muscle spasms that then had a bone injury added in on top.
(Chiropractic, for the record, goes with chelation therapy and many many many many cases of herbalism where it's NOT just cost or delay; people claim these treatments are harmless and they are not. They can do tremendous harm).
But yeah I'm not going to deny at all that all of this would be a hell of a lot better if people (especially marginalized people) didn't have to jump through hoops to prove to a doctor that something is wrong with them, and didn't have to do so in an appointment that attempts to cram whole person care down into fifteen minutes, and didn't have the possibility of bankrupting you. Interacting with allopathic medicine is a nightmare and I totally understand why people want to look outside of it for treatment.
I've just heard too many horror stories and seen too much predatory CAM to cut much of it any slack.
At the end of the SBM response to the Atlantic article, the author (I can't remember if it's Gorski or Novella) makes the point that reiki is a spiritual practice, and that we've known for a long time that spiritual practices can improve a person's well-being in a number of ways; they can reduce anxiety, they can provide community, they can give people a space to feel and express emotions that they certainly aren't going to be able to process in a doctor's office. Spiritual practices can be wonderful, and we know there are a lot of people who they can help. But they aren't medicine, and attempting to replace medicine with them (which I don't think that most reiki practitioners are trying to do, to be fair, but which Ted Kaptchuk DEFINITELY is in trying to 'harness the power of placebo') is a disservice to people who need an inhaler instead of acupuncture.
Also, and I know this was not your point but I have to bring it up because people ask about it whenever discussions of placebo come up:
The placebo effect is not treatment. The placebo effect, whether achieved through deception or when someone says loud and clear "this is a sugar pill" does not improve an illness, but it may improve how a patient *feels* about an illness. In some cases, this may as well be the same thing - if you're dealing with muscle pain because you're stressed and no matter what you do it doesn't go away because your shoulders are always up around your ears and you're grinding your teeth and you're sleeping poorly, then literally just talking to someone who is in an office and says "this is a sugar pill, go ahead and take it" may make your muscle pain feel better, but it isn't going to reduce your stress and it isn't going to last, and if your muscle pain is because you're feeling angina as a result of a partially blocked artery then it SURE AS FUCK is not going to make you better and may mask symptoms that were a warning sign of a much more serious problem. People who are sick deserve actual treatment, and placebo is not treatment, which is part of why Ted Kaptchuk makes me want to tear my hair out.
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What would you guys consider the worst movie you've ever seen? Not something that's fun to make fun of, nothing you ironically enjoyed, I mean just an absolutely miserable moviegoing experience that you paid for, hated every second, and wish you had walked out of and asked for a refund.
For me, no joke, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. It did not even feel like a real movie to me. It made me see red! I was SEETHING with anger and annoyance throughout the entire thing, and I cannot for the life of me articulate why. I saw it once in 2012 when I was 15, I remember almost nothing about it now, but it struck a nerve with me like no other movie ever has before or since.
Tell me in the tags, which movie makes you disproportionately angry just thinking about it?
#THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST#was not allowed to watch anything with even references to sex#but my parents had their middle school kids watch two hours of gore and torture p*rn#i was more pissed than traumatized
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one thing that I think is missing from discussions about fiction as fantastical wish fulfillment, particularly fanfiction as fantastical wish fulfillment, is that textbook-perfect communication and boundary setting can also be fantasy material. sure, sometimes characters talking to each other like they're trying to get a good grade in therapy can be a form of virtue signaling by an author or the author's desperate attempt to avoid their audience getting mad at them, but I can guarantee there's a whole load of people pawing at the screens of their ao3 windows thinking "god, imagine if people were this nice to me" in exactly the same way that others read their favorite making-each-other-worse fics to indulge in little a tragic catharsis as a treat.
#EXACTLY#I personally don’t always find this compelling in stories#but it’s often very clearly a fantasy of relationships with good communication and mutual respect#not an author who is virtue signaling or can’t write conflict or doesn’t know how people work#like yes bestie I wish IRL people talked like this more#internet culture
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People will talk so dismissively about transmasc infantalization as if there are no material or psychological consequences to being treated like you're incapable of full autonomous thought and need to be "guided" by someone who thinks they know your best interests better than you do.
#this is how I got treated being raised as a girl in evangelicalism#everyone knows what you are feeling and what your life should be better than you do#the last thing I ever want to do is reproduce that with my queer siblings#self determination about your body sexuality and relationships is the foundation of queer liberation#queer#trans
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WITH A LATEX PRESS RELEASE, IT’S SO OFFICIAL
Ok I am once again liveblogging the Word of the Year vote
• For informal word of the year, multiple people have gone up to the mic announcing themself as “team rawdog”
• One respected professor threw his support behind “W”, saying (I’m paraphrasing) “double the u, double the pleasure”
• In lieu of an institution, one person announced themself as a “tumblr shitposter”. That person? Was me.
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Here’s the official press release! That you can cite, or just enjoy the fact that there was a fancy formal latex template ready to go to insert “rawdogging” results into:
Ok I am once again liveblogging the Word of the Year vote
• For informal word of the year, multiple people have gone up to the mic announcing themself as “team rawdog”
• One respected professor threw his support behind “W”, saying (I’m paraphrasing) “double the u, double the pleasure”
• In lieu of an institution, one person announced themself as a “tumblr shitposter”. That person? Was me.
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AND THE OVERALL WORD OF THE YEAR:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1911db4961c68819bbdf45e98a173973/56a46a016dabe184-23/s540x810/d0d909bf4ff9c30fe976f0d6d33898b7a2f3d64a.jpg)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5195667e353f0f819480dbf017f81471/56a46a016dabe184-45/s540x810/681206b4804a72a09da94ffd3fd978e0d07639bc.jpg)
this has been dispatches from the nerd event of the year
Ok I am once again liveblogging the Word of the Year vote
• For informal word of the year, multiple people have gone up to the mic announcing themself as “team rawdog”
• One respected professor threw his support behind “W”, saying (I’m paraphrasing) “double the u, double the pleasure”
• In lieu of an institution, one person announced themself as a “tumblr shitposter”. That person? Was me.
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The full stats!!
Most creative:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/bca5c9c4c184693fbc991a525d3f0dab/eed4226256be0e00-f9/s540x810/3be04ca52f0188bb8e33ac3805965bdd2f05fef2.jpg)
Informal:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/3d0487ba17081df5a7e147c345501b40/eed4226256be0e00-ef/s540x810/7607dd2e8037e7b016964573a83a9f19136c017f.jpg)
Political:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/15db6d98007fd068a8dff4f8b22fb643/eed4226256be0e00-09/s540x810/72203aaf4318aefa6b0611f6f9620c4dc2f4a5be.jpg)
Digital:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5dbb5cacceb46080470f86a70fe3f95a/eed4226256be0e00-6b/s540x810/32a25b1896db6a9ff19e1f084ed5ca5e602e2c03.jpg)
Most useful:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7cfa9dd4f3844acbdec138a8c1666262/eed4226256be0e00-ba/s540x810/7c2931e602c9b970640ef0e8a898622c2aca2651.jpg)
Most likely to succeed (and the runoff):
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/668d3165048fa68d5d1e75b5dc5bd678/eed4226256be0e00-58/s540x810/9e28c709dc5de7659d2fb7599a3833e5e66de1a4.jpg)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6a34d239e0c9eb0bb453b30d4a628328/eed4226256be0e00-65/s540x810/a0feee2e820daf6563c683761c1f177d288e1eed.jpg)
Most fun while it lasted:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f7ef1e5dc1f7100c5ca2ee98ef5dc05c/eed4226256be0e00-14/s540x810/ecb837fcf5d8af0fe6d442114f9490a08cfda3d4.jpg)
Ok I am once again liveblogging the Word of the Year vote
• For informal word of the year, multiple people have gone up to the mic announcing themself as “team rawdog”
• One respected professor threw his support behind “W”, saying (I’m paraphrasing) “double the u, double the pleasure”
• In lieu of an institution, one person announced themself as a “tumblr shitposter”. That person? Was me.
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something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement
#NOTHING makes me block faster than this#and its cousin ‘but it’s a privilege to be able to look away’#internet culture#politics
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Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.
It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.
To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.
This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.
Join me below, if you would.
2004 was an election year, and much like conservatives are whipping up anti-trans hysteria and anti-trans bills and propositions to drive out the vote today, in 2004 it was all anti-gay stuff. Specifically, preventing the evil scourge of same-sex marriage from destroying everything good and decent in the world.
Enter Gavin Newstrom. At the time, he was the newly elected mayor of San Francisco. Despite living next door to the city all my life, I hadn’t even heard of the man until Valentines Day 2004 when he announced that gay marriage was legal in San Francisco and started marrying people at city hall.
It was a political stunt. It was very obviously a political stunt. That shit was illegal, after all. But it was a very sweet political stunt. I still remember the front page photo of two ancient women hugging each other forehead to forehead and crying happy tears.
But it was only going to last for as long as it took for the California legal system to come in and make them knock it off.
The next day, we’re on the phone with an acquaintance, and she casually mentions that she’s surprised the two of us aren’t up at San Francisco getting married with everyone else.
“Everyone else?” Goes I, “I thought they would’ve shut that down already?”
“Oh no!” goes she, “The courts aren’t open until Tuesday. Presidents Day on Monday and all. They’re doing them all weekend long!”
We didn’t know because social media wasn’t a thing yet. I only knew as much about it as I’d read on CNN, and most of the blogs I was following were more focused on what bullshit President George W Bush was up to that day.
"Well shit", me and my man go, "do you wanna?" I mean, it’s a political stunt, it wont really mean anything, but we’re not going to get another chance like this for at least 20 years. Why not?
The next day, Sunday, we get up early. We drive north to the southern-most BART station. We load onto Bay Area Rapid Transit, and rattle back and forth all the way to the San Francisco City Hall stop.
We had slightly miscalculated.
Apparently, demand for marriages was far outstripping the staff they had on hand to process them. Who knew. Everyone who’d gotten turned away Saturday had been given tickets with times to show up Sunday to get their marriages done. My babe and I, we could either wait to see if there was a space that opened up, or come back the next day, Monday.
“Isn’t City Hall closed on Monday?” I asked. “It’s a holiday”
“Oh sure,” they reply, “but people are allowed to volunteer their time to come in and work on stuff anyways. And we have a lot of people who want to volunteer their time to have the marriage licensing offices open tomorrow.”
“Oh cool,” we go, “Backup.”
“Make sure you’re here if you do,” they say, “because the California Supreme Court is back in session Tuesday, and will be reviewing the motion that got filed to shut us down.”
And all this shit is super not-legal, so they’ll totally be shutting us down goes unsaid.
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We don’t get in Saturday. We wind up hanging out most of the day, though.
It’s… incredible. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have never experienced so much concentrated joy and happiness and celebration of others’ joy and happiness in all my life before or since. My face literally ached from grinning. Every other minute, a new couple was coming out of City Hall, waving their paperwork to the crowd and cheering and leaping and skipping. Two glorious Latina women in full Mariachi band outfits came out, one in the arms of another. A pair of Jewish boys with their families and Rabbi. One couple managed to get a Just Married convertible arranged complete with tin-cans tied to the bumper to drive off in. More than once I was giving some rice to throw at whoever was coming out next.
At some point in the mid-afternoon, there was a sudden wave of extra cheering from the several hundred of us gathered at the steps, even though no one was coming out. There was a group going up the steps to head inside, with some generic black-haired shiny guy at the front. My not-yet-husband nudged me, “That’s Newsom.” He said, because he knew I was hopeless about matching names and people.
Ooooooh, I go. That explains it. Then I joined in the cheers. He waved and ducked inside.
So dusk is starting to fall. It’s February, so it’s only six or so, but it’s getting dark.
“Should we just try getting in line for tomorrow -now-?” we ask.
“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.” One of the volunteers tells us. “We’re not allowed to have people hang out overnight like this unless there are facilities for them and security. We’d need Porta-Poties for a thousand people and police patrols and the whole lot, and no one had time to get all that organized. Your best bet is to get home, sleep, and then catch the first BART train up at 5am and keep your fingers crossed.
Monday is the last day to do this, after all.
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So we go home. We crash out early. We wake up at 4:00. We drive an hour to hit the BART station. We get the first train up. We arrive at City Hall at 6:30AM.
The line stretches around the entirety of San Francisco City Hall. You could toss a can of Coke from the end of the line to the people who’re up to be first through the doors and not have to worry about cracking it open after.
“Uh.” We go. “What the fuck is -this-?”
So.
Remember why they weren’t going to be able to have people hang out overnight?
Turns out, enough SF cops were willing to volunteer unpaid time to do patrols to cover security. And some anonymous person delivered over a dozen Porta-Poties that’d gotten dropped off around 8 the night before.
It’s 6:30 am, there are almost a thousand people in front of us in line to get this literal once in a lifetime marriage, the last chance we expect to have for at least 15 more years (it was 2004, gay rights were getting shoved back on every front. It was not looking good. We were just happy we lived in California were we at least weren’t likely to loose job protections any time soon.).
Then it starts to rain.
We had not dressed for rain.
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Here is how the next six hours go.
We’re in line. Once the doors open at 7am, it will creep forward at a slow crawl. It’s around 7 when someone shows up with garbage bags for everyone. Cut holes for the head and arms and you’ve got a makeshift raincoat! So you’ve got hundreds of gays and lesbians decked out in the nicest shit they could get on short notice wearing trashbags over it.
Everyone is so happy.
Everyone is so nervous/scared/frantic that we wont be able to get through the doors before they close for the day.
People online start making delivery orders.
Coffee and bagels are ordered in bulk and delivered to City Hall for whoever needs it. We get pizza. We get roses. Random people come by who just want to give hugs to people in line because they’re just so happy for us. The tour busses make detours to go past the lines. Chinese tourists lean out with their cameras and shout GOOD LUCK while car horns honk.
A single sad man holding a Bible tries to talk people out of doing this, tells us all we’re sinning and to please don’t. He gives up after an hour. A nun replaces him with a small sign about how this is against God’s will. She leaves after it disintegrates in the rain.
The day before, when it was sunny, there had been a lot of protestors. Including a large Muslim group with their signs about how “Not even DOGS do such things!” Which… Yes they do.
A lot of snide words are said (by me) about how the fact that we’re willing to come out in the rain to do this while they’re not willing to come out in the rain to protest it proves who actually gives an actual shit about the topic.
Time passes. I measure it based on which side of City Hall we’re on. The doors face East. We start on Northside. Coffee and trashbags are delivered when we’re on the North Side. Pizza first starts showing up when we’re on Westside, which is also where I see Bible Man and Nun. Roses are delivered on Southside. And so forth.
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We have Line Neighbors.
Ahead of us are a gay couple a decade or two older than us. They’ve been together for eight years. The older one is a school teacher. He has his coat collar up and turns away from any news cameras that come near while we reposition ourselves between the lenses and him. He’s worried about the parents of one of his students seeing him on the news and getting him fired. The younger one will step away to get interviewed on his own later on. They drove down for the weekend once they heard what was going on. They’d started around the same time we did, coming from the Northeast, and are parked in a nearby garage.
The most perky energetic joyful woman I’ve ever met shows up right after we turned the corner to Southside to tackle the younger of the two into a hug. She’s their local friend who’d just gotten their message about what they’re doing and she will NOT be missing this. She is -so- happy for them. Her friends cry on her shoulders at her unconditional joy.
Behind us are a lesbian couple who’d been up in San Francisco to celebrate their 12th anniversary together. “We met here Valentines Day weekend! We live down in San Diego, now, but we like to come up for the weekend because it’s our first love city.”
“Then they announced -this-,” the other one says, “and we can’t leave until we get married. I called work Sunday and told them I calling in sick until Wednesday.”
“I told them why,” her partner says, “I don’t care if they want to give me trouble for it. This is worth it. Fuck them.”
My husband-to-be and I look at each other. We’ve been together for not even two years at this point. Less than two years. Is it right for us to be here? We’re potentially taking a spot from another couple that’d been together longer, who needed it more, who deserved it more.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.” Says the 40-something gay couple in front of us.
“This is as much for you as it is for us!” says the lesbian couple who’ve been together for over a decade behind us.
“You kids are too cute together,” says the gay couple’s friend. “you -have- to. Someday -you’re- going to be the old gay couple that’s been together for years and years, and you deserve to have been married by then.”
We stay in line.
It’s while we’re on the Southside of City Hall, just about to turn the corner to Eastside at long last that we pick up our own companions. A white woman who reminds me an awful lot of my aunt with a four year old black boy riding on her shoulders. “Can we say we’re with you? His uncles are already inside and they’re not letting anyone in who isn’t with a couple right there.” “Of course!” we say.
The kid is so very confused about what all the big deal is, but there’s free pizza and the busses keep driving by and honking, so he’s having a great time.
We pass by a statue of Lincoln with ‘Marriage for All!’ and "Gay Rights are Human Rights!" flags tucked in the crooks of his arms and hanging off his hat.
It’s about noon, noon-thirty when we finally make it through the doors and out of the rain.
They’ve promised that anyone who’s inside when the doors shut will get married. We made it. We’re safe.
We still have a -long- way to go.
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They’re trying to fit as many people into City Hall as possible. Partially to get people out of the rain, mostly to get as many people indoors as possible. The line now stretches down into the basement and up side stairs and through hallways I’m not entirely sure the public should ever be given access to. We crawl along slowly but surely.
It’s after we’ve gone through the low-ceiling basement hallways past offices and storage and back up another set of staircases and are going through a back hallway of low-ranked functionary offices that someone comes along handing out the paperwork. “It’s an hour or so until you hit the office, but take the time to fill these out so you don’t have to do it there!”
We spend our time filling out the paperwork against walls, against backs, on stone floors, on books.
We enter one of the public areas, filled with displays and photos of City Hall Demonstrations of years past.
I take pictures of the big black and white photo of the Abraham Lincoln statue holding banners and signs against segregation and for civil rights.
The four year old boy we helped get inside runs past us around this time, chased by a blond haired girl about his own age, both perused by an exhausted looking teenager helplessly begging them to stop running.
Everyone is wet and exhausted and vibrating with anticipation and the building-wide aura of happiness that infuses everything.
The line goes into the marriage office. A dozen people are at the desk, shoulder to shoulder, far more than it was built to have working it at once.
A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence is directing people to city officials the moment they open up. She’s done up in her nun getup with all her makeup on and her beard is fluffed and be-glittered and on point. “Oh, I was here yesterday getting married myself, but today I’m acting as your guide. Number 4 sweeties, and -Congradulatiooooons!-“
The guy behind the counter has been there since six. It’s now 1:30. He’s still giddy with joy. He counts our money. He takes our paperwork, reviews it, stamps it, sends off the parts he needs to, and hands the rest back to us. “Alright, go to the Rotunda, they’ll direct you to someone who’ll do the ceremony. Then, if you want the certificate, they’ll direct you to -that- line.” “Can’t you just mail it to us?” “Normally, yeah, but the moment the courts shut us down, we’re not going to be allowed to.”
We take our paperwork and join the line to the Rotunda.
If you’ve seen James Bond: A View to a Kill, you’ve seen the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda. There are literally a dozen spots set up along the balconies that overlook the open area where marriage officials and witnesses are gathered and are just processing people through as fast as they can.
That’s for the people who didn’t bring their own wedding officials.
There’s a Catholic-adjacent couple there who seem to have brought their entire families -and- the priest on the main steps. They’re doing the whole damn thing. There’s at least one more Rabbi at work, I can’t remember what else. Just that there was a -lot-.
We get directed to the second story, northside. The San Francisco City Treasurer is one of our two witnesses. Our marriage officient is some other elected official I cannot remember for the life of me (and I'm only writing down what I can actively remember, so I can't turn to my husband next to me and ask, but he'll have remembered because that's what he does.)
I have a wilting lily flower tucked into my shirt pocket. My pants have water stains up to the knees. My hair is still wet from the rain, I am blubbering, and I can’t get the ring on my husband’s finger. The picture is a treat, I tell you.
There really isn’t a word for the mix of emotions I had at that time. Complete disbelief that this was reality and was happening. Relief that we’d made it. Awe at how many dozens of people had personally cheered for us along the way and the hundreds to thousands who’d cheered for us generally.
Then we're married.
Then we get in line to get our license.
It’s another hour. This time, the line goes through the higher stories. Then snakes around and goes past the doorway to the mayor’s office.
Mayor Newsom is not in today. And will be having trouble getting into his office on Tuesday because of the absolute barricade of letters and flowers and folded up notes and stuffed animals and City Hall maps with black marked “THANK YOU!”s that have been piled up against it.
We make it to the marriage records office.
I take a picture of my now husband standing in front of a case of the marriage records for 1902-1912. Numerous kids are curled up in corners sleeping. My own memory is spotty. I just know we got the papers, and then we’re done with lines. We get out, we head to the front entrance, and we walk out onto the City Hall steps.
It's almost 3PM.
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There are cheers, there’s rice thrown at us, there are hundreds of people celebrating us with unconditional love and joy and I had never before felt the goodness that exists in humanity to such an extent. It’s no longer raining, just a light sprinkle, but there are still no protestors. There’s barely even any news vans.
We make our way through the gauntlet, we get hands shaked, people with signs reading ”Congratulations!” jump up and down for us. We hit the sidewalks, and we begin to limp our way back to the BART station.
I’m at the BART station, we’re waiting for our train back south, and I’m sitting on the ground leaning against a pillar and in danger of falling asleep when a nondescript young man stops in front of me and shuffles his feet nervously. “Hey. I just- I saw you guys, down at City Hall, and I just… I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of what you could do. I’m- I’m just really glad, glad you could get to do this.”
He shakes my hand, clasps it with both of his and shakes it. I thank him and he smiles and then hurries away as fast as he can without running.
Our train arrives and the trip south passes in a semilucid blur.
We get back to our car and climb in.
It’s 4:30 and we are starving.
There’s a Carls Jr near the station that we stop off at and have our first official meal as a married couple. We sit by the window and watch people walking past and pick out others who are returning from San Francisco. We're all easy to pick out, what with the combination of giddiness and water damage.
We get home about 6-7. We take the dog out for a good long walk after being left alone for two days in a row. We shower. We bundle ourselves up. We bury ourselves in blankets and curl up and just sort of sit adrift in the surrealness of what we’d just done.
We wake up the next day, Tuesday, to read that the California State Supreme Court has rejected the petition to shut down the San Francisco weddings because the paperwork had a misplaced comma that made the meaning of one phrase unclear.
The State Supreme Court would proceed to play similar bureaucratic tricks to drag the process out for nearly a full month before they have nothing left and finally shut down Mayor Newsom’s marriages.
My parents had been out of state at the time at a convention. They were flying into SFO about the same moment we were walking out of City Hall. I apologized to them later for not waiting and my mom all but shook me by the shoulders. “No! No one knew that they’d go on for so long! You did what you needed to do! I’ll just be there for the next one!”
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It was just a piece of paper. Legally, it didn’t even hold any weight thirty days later. My philosophy at the time was “marriage really isn’t that important, aside from the legal benefits. It’s just confirming what you already have.”
But maybe it’s just societal weight, or ingrained culture, or something, but it was different after. The way I described it at the time, and I’ve never really come up with a better metaphor is, “It’s like we were both holding onto each other in the middle of the ocean in the middle of a storm. We were keeping each other above water, we were each other’s support. But then we got this piece of paper. And it was like the ground rose up to meet our feet. We were still in an ocean, still in the middle of a storm, but there was a solid foundation beneath our feet. We still supported each other, but there was this other thing that was also keeping our heads above the water.
It was different. It was better. It made things more solid and real.
I am forever grateful for all the forces and all the people who came together to make it possible. It’s been twenty years and we’re still together and still married.
We did a domestic partnership a year later to get the legal paperwork. We’d done a private ceremony with proper rings (not just ones grabbed out of the husband’s collection hours before) before then. And in 2008, we did a legal marriage again.
Rushed. In a hurry. Because there was Proposition 13 to be voted on which would make them all illegal again if it passed.
It did, but we were already married at that point, and they couldn’t negate it that time.
Another few years after that, the Supreme Court finally threw up their hands and said "Fine! It's been legal in places and nothing's caught on fire or been devoured by locusts. It's legal everywhere. Shut up about it!"
And that was that.
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When I was in highschool, in the late 90s, I didn’t expect to see legal gay marriage until I was in my 50s. I just couldn’t see how the American public as it was would ever be okay with it.
I never expected to be getting married within five years. I never expected it to be legal nationwide before I’d barely started by 30s. I never thought I’d be in my 40s and it’d be such a non-issue that the conservative rabble rousers would’ve had to move onto other wedge issues altogether.
I never thought that I could introduce another man as my husband and absolutely no one involved would so much as blink.
I never thought I’d live in this world.
And it’s twenty years later today. I wonder how our line buddies are doing. Those babies who were running around the wide open rooms playing tag will have graduated college by now. The kids whose parents the one line-buddy was worried would see him are probably married too now. Some of them to others of the same gender.
I don’t have some greater message to make with all this. Other then, culture can shift suddenly in ways you can’t predict. For good or ill. Mainly this is just me remembering the craziest fucking 36 hours of my life twenty years after the fact and sharing them with all of you.
The future we’re resigned to doesn’t have to be the one we live in. Society can shift faster than you think. The unimaginable of twenty years ago is the baseline reality of today.
And always remember that the people who want to get married will show up by the thousands in rain that none of those who’re against it will brave.
#this is lovely#also it gives me hope because I just moved to the Bay Area and California doesn’t hate me like Tennessee does#queer
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you ask basira "wow, you are being really stoic about this situation, are you sure you're paying attention to your emotional needs as well?" and she says "psh, yeah, I'm just being very practical and putting objectivity over subjectivity while giving myself space to process when I'm alone on my own time." then as soon as you leave the room she takes out her phone and says "siri, what would be the normal emotional response to this scenario?", reads the results, doesn't like it, drinks four cups of coffee, and destroys all of her interpersonal relationships in the space of twenty minutes.
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assuming that people like you and want to spend time with you is crucial to making friends. unfortunately this is the hardest thing to do in the world
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The word you are looking for is an ensemble cast. You like the ensemble cast. Not found family.
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I am firmly of the opinion that if an economic problem can be Solved With A Machine (TM) it should be, provided that most of the people affected by that problem want it to be.
#EXACTLY#if you’re going on about how leftists need to be ok with never traveling on planes#you just want to preach and feel morally superior in your asterisk#we can make more sustainable fuel!#Luxury Space Communism > Amish But Progressive as a dream#politics#internet culture
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I know there’s a flavor of leftist who thinks only jobs with manual work are Real Labor, but I think this sort of hyperbole results in dismissing the way labor exploitation works for white collar/knowledge workers. Like it’s great that you’re not in dangerous environments where cutting corners to save money can literally kill/maim/poison you, but that doesn’t mean you’re ok.
“Don’t avert your eyes from the slaughter” nah I would rather understand how labor exploitation works in a variety of contexts and degrees, not just flatten it into Cartoon Villain or nothing
where's the room for "in general i agree with your broad positions but i mean, dont you think this rhetoric is maybe a little much"
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