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feb 2, elle emerson (@transsextual)

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utah bans gender affirming care for people under 18. / south carolina is following suit and worse. / i'd cry but i can't anymore, not like i used to. / my girlfriend tells me they're so tired but she doesn't know why – / "i wasn't even doing anything today" / our anniversary is this month. / i feel like a puppy when i see her. / i get high and rearrange my friend's fridge magnets / queer sentences cover the freezer door. / "eat the skin and hearts of men it attracts dykes" / "i kiss fags" / "feel it up partner" / "you may do it but use condom" - / we laugh about that one. we watch star trek. / their roommate calls me cool; we grew up on the same books. / another friend of mine is taking a gap year to go to brazil, relearn portugese. / the boy i dated who is now my best friend is coming up with my family in a few weeks. / we're going thrifting together on the weekend, and i / am going to try to get an extension on my paper. / dance rehearsal on sundays. / my roommates want to go to ikea. /

my uber driver mentioned his husband when i asked about his day. / i thanked him for it at the end of the ride, and he laughed and pointed out the trans flag sticker on the dash. / on my way into the clinic i think i saw him crying. / i introduced myself to the lab tech and she asked me to say my real name. / she took six vials of my blood. /

so many of my friends are named after gods. / this has to be for something. 

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every dnd character I play slowly morphs into a weird little dude so I guess small autistic man is the asymptote of my soul

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Reminder that y'all should just say what you mean instead of "AFAB" or "AMAB".

If you are referring to penises, say penis.

If you are referring to having a period, say the word period.

If you are referring to being raised female or male, say that.

If you are referring to the ability to get pregnant, say that.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

The terms "AFAB" and "AMAB" do not tell you anything about a person's reproductive, hormonal, or chromosomal profiles. It does not tell you what body parts they have. It does not tell you anything about their life experiences or what gender they were raised as.

Using "AFAB" and "AMAB" as if they are synonymous with [perisex] "female" and "male" excludes intersex and trans people. Using the terms "AFAB" and "AMAB" in this way is only recreating the sex binary of female and male but masking it as more progressive when it really isn't. Just say what you really mean.

There are trans people who have the same equipment as a cis person of the "opposite" assigned sex. There are intersex people who were assigned a sex at birth while having completely different internal reproductive organs or hormones, or who were raised as a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth.

There is no such thing as "AFAB" or "AMAB" experiences. AGAB language only describes what you were assigned at birth. It says nothing about your body or your life experiences.

I know that people tend to shy away from using direct language when talking about anything related to sex (even as it relates to biology and not anything actually sexual) but using the actual terms for these things isn't bad. It's extremely counterproductive to movements to view sex as a fluid and broad category when you use AFAB and AMAB as if they are anything more than a sex designation given at birth.

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If you use maps, you should use (and contribute to) OpenStreetMap. OSM is an open geographic database. It has information about all kinds of things you would like to see on a map, like roads, restaurants, and houses with addresses. But, unlike other maps databases from the likes of Google or Apple, OpenStreetMap is entirely created by users, and their data is all under an open license.

Because of that, the map is organized around features that humans care about, rather than around features corporations can profit off showing you. This also means that _you_ can contribute to OSM, and when you do, the data you added will be available to everyone.

Here are some examples of how powerful that can be for you:

Imagine you've just moved to the Southeastern United States, where people have been brainwashed into believing that 'grid cities are so boring', so 1/3 of all roads are dead ends, none of them are straight, and none of them take a direct route between any two points. You're new in town, you ride a bicycle because driving sucks, and the hills everywhere are a real challenge. One day after work you get cocky, you think 'this road is pointing toward home, surely I can bike down it a little ways before I have to filter into a bigger road'. You've biked down a big hill and there isn't an intersection in sight. You check Google Maps and curse your hubris, this road dead ends not a hundred feet before it would intersect the road you live on. But before surrendering to slogging back up the hill and riding vehicular home, you decide to check OSM. Someone has marked a footpath connecting the end of this road through to a parking lot on the road you want to be on. The surface quality is tagged, so you know it'll be fine for your bike, it might just have some big bumps you'll need to walk over. Your day has been saved, because at some point some college kid wanted to mark an easier way to walk from campus to their apartment so their friends wouldn't have to go around. Google would never show you an unsanctioned path to get home on, it's just not in their scope, but OSM will.

Now imagine you live in a shitty apartment complex with multiple buildings. The buildings have poor signage and are unlabeled on google maps, and you live in the last unit in the last building in the row, so lost delivery drivers always come knocking on your door to ask "Are you M. Stopheles? Unit H2?" You are not in fact M. Stopheles, nor is this H2. You could tell every delivery worker every time that you're really so sorry, but you don't know where to find your neighbors, ooooorrr, you could label the buildings in OSM and show the drivers where to find it on the map, and how to access OSM themselves. Editing open data is cool because the work you do to benefit yourself will also benefit everyone else. You've now done the same thing for these delivery workers that some college student did for you when you were having a rough day on your bike, and the best part is that it benefited you to help them.

These examples are predicated on real life experiences; I take that connector pretty often now, and I haven't seen any wayward delivery drivers since.

One last cool feature of OSM: Its data is openly accessible, so it gets built into a lot of other maps and databases, and there are several specialized subsets of its data that can be easily accessed, for example CyclOSM, which is specifically structured around bicycle infrastructure.

Another last last cool feature: OSM is open source.

If you want to try OSM: openstreetmap.org If you want to contribute to OSM: wiki.openstreetmap.org

If you want it on Android: Organic Maps, OSMand~

You deserve maps made for people.

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jurassic park makes me cry all the time.

specifically when alan and ellie see the brachiosauruses for the first time. all alan is able to say is "they do move in herds."

just the idea of an academic spending his entire life on something that he loves so much, trying to understand it and ultimately never being able to do so fully because the answers have been lost to time, having theory turn into fact in front of his eyes in the most spectacular and beautiful way imaginable. he gets an answer on something that seems so insignificant and unprovable but that he would have been wondering forever, because there really is no way to absolutely confirm whether or not brachiosaurus moved in herds or not, and god what he wouldn't give to be able to jump in a time machine and see for himself.

the thought of the time machine coming to you to show you the answer, that is an emotion i simply cannot describe but that is so visceral to academics studying pre/ancient history. no matter how hard we look or how much we study, we'll never know for sure if our theories are correct. i can only ever imagine what it would feel like to know absolutely and unequivocably one way or another.

so seeing the dream of any student of history unfold on screen with john williams' damn music playing in the background? i absolutely tear up every time.

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#beauregard lionett coded

i don’t think people realize how much of modern life we owe to ball bearings everyone say thank you ball bearings

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I really do think an important component of activism is to make sure your motivation is based on a desire to help/improve things for the people being harmed by a system, and not hatred for the ones doing the harm. both for mental health reasons, and because either way you're training your neural pathways and it's gonna turn out a lot better for literally everyone if the question on everyone's mind after achieving a goal is "how/which people can we help next, what's the next step for improving things" and not "who do we need to attack next."

I'm not saying don't be angry, there are a lot of good reasons to be angry right now and it makes for an excellent kick in the pants, just don't define yourself by it or it's gonna poison you and potentially do collateral damage.

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Me, a GIS professional in an office: I hate my job. Goes home, does the same job, but unpaid and with a less powerful interface: This is nice

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At a red light, I pedaled up next to a driver who had recklessly endangered me earlier on the road. They had rolled down their window so they could lecture me. This person in a luxury sedan had nearly killed me on the road in a maneuver that ultimately saved them no time at all, and still they had the temerity and unshakeable arrogance to lecture me, who had been legally riding vehicular per state law, about how I should've been "in the bike lane". The bike lane which was in fact an unmaintained shoulder that dumped without transition into an auxiliary lane and unprotected intersection. And when I told them that the bike lane was unsafe they started yelling. Yelling about how the bike lane could not possibly be unsafe because it was a bike lane, whether or not it was maintained it is a bike lane. As the light turned green they screamed out that if we went to court I would lose. I didn't get to reply that if they had clipped me at that speed I wouldn't have survived to go to court.

Later I realized that this driver had no knowledge, experience, or sense to apply to this situation, but a person in a luxury sedan is going to be sure he's right anyway. In a vehicle like that you can be so insulated from the world outside that you don't even notice the condition of the road or how the lanes connect to each other. You have room for five people, and cargo space for all their experience, kindness, emotion, and empathy, but somehow drivers manage to leave all that behind when they step, alone, into their individuality and status machine.

This person never would've cared if they had killed me on the road. And the American justice system wouldn't have encouraged them to after the fact. After all, under current ordinances there just isn't enough room on the road for empathy.

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A pretty significant part of my job is visiting new developments in meatspace (as opposed to staring at them virtually all the damn time for the rest of my job). This has had a very subtle but very potent radicalizing effect. I drive a Town vehicle to these places, park, and then survey stormwater infrastructure on foot. Many of these places, especially the most expensive developments, were never designed with humans in mind. Even the grocery store I visited yesterday was clearly not designed for humans to exist there. It only took into account the needs of cars. It had multiple sprawling parking lots, extensive signage within those lots, and two separate frontage roads to separate it from the high speed stroads its property abuts. More subtly, it was actively hostile to pedestrians, with knee high prickly hedges banking all the grassy spaces surrounding the lots, and the lot islands, to discourage walking anywhere but on the asphalt with the cars. And the thing about exploring these places as a human on foot, really spending time in them looking for things and investigating how they're laid out, navigating them with a map and a high vis vest, is you see other humans existing in them, too. You see the obviously broke college student with a poorly patched reusable grocery bag navigating across the ocean of pavement with wary eyes. You see the elderly woman with the mobility aid crossing the six lane stroad at the light, the pain on her face making it obvious that she can't comfortably move quickly enough to make it across in the time a beg button will purchase. You see the helmetless student athlete biking in to his shift, making truly remarkable time on a road designed to kill him in the gap between school and work. You see the middle aged immigrant on a bike three sizes too small pedaling for his life to make it through an intersection that was made with no consideration of even the existence of people like him. This is a place to get food for gods' sake! Cars don't need food, people need food! But owners and designers of places like that would rather wage a class war on people who can't afford a car than let them get food as human beings. You also see the cops, parked across three stalls each in the shade, idling their engines and running their air cons until the condensation drips off their vehicle, puddles, runs to the curb and drips down an inlet. And you go to that inlet and make some notes and hope that this cop is too lazy to bark at someone dressed like a hippy trying not to glare at them as you widely circle around the same police vehicle for the fourth time in the three hours you've been surveying and working while this cop runs their air con in an idling SUV big enough to make you wonder if they would've even seen the old lady with the mobility aid crossing at a light before running it. In the back of a lot someone who ought to protect you sits, on standby to protect the capital of wealthy food sellers who care more about car ownership than human beings.

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the snake is the perfect mascot animal for the queer community. demonised by christianity, downtrodden and feared, generally docile but will defend itself with lethal force if necessary.

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intersex kids deserve the world. intersex teens deserve the world. and intersex adults? I love you and I am so proud of you for continuing to exist despite it all

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im not a train autistic but i believe their beliefs

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RWRB and Richards

Ok, so, obviously, Red, White, and Royal Blue is a really important movie as well as book, yada yada yada, good faith criticism, etc.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the changes made between the book and the movie, and across the board a lot of those changes made me sad (rip June). I want to talk about the changes made to Richards in the film, specifically his home state. In the film, Richards is from Michigan. I imagine this change was made to allow Richards to capture the Midwest vote and create more tension with Texas, or whatever. In the book, though, Richards is from Utah, a state that always has been red and probably always will be. Alex specifically refers to the Richards campaign as “Utah ugly, Christian ugly, ugliness couched in dog whistles and toothy white smiles”. This kind of ugly is lost in the movie, and Alex and Henry aren’t even outed by Richards campaign, and instead by some random (queer??? jealous???) journalist.

This change, for me, was incredibly painful. To be a successful politician in Utah, membership in the Mormon church is a necessity, and the LDS church has immense political power within the state. As a queer, intersex kid growing up in the heart of Utah’s LDS enclaves, I experienced Utah ugly firsthand. I even experienced a privacy violation when one of my religious leaders outed me to other adults in my parent’s church community without my consent, a type of violation that is encouraged within the church.

I first read RWRB when I was 19, during my second year of college. It changed my life. I had never read a book where queer characters, characters like me, got to be happy. I think part of the reason the story resonated so much with me is that the primary acute threat to Alex and Henry’s happiness is from my home state, acting on the same values and principles that were and are so harmful to me. I don’t know, that was just lost in the movie, and that made me sad. Obviously, changes have to be made when adapting from one medium to another, and I understand that. This tiny change made a huge deal to me, though, and I think it just goes to show that it’s really hard to adapt a story that means so much to so many people. That’s all.

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One thing about researching world around you is that it becomes a bit friendlier once you know it better. If you see a random spider- you get scared. You see plants and consider them just weeds. You look at night sky and see a bunch of stars.

And then, you learn names.

Now, it is an orbweaver, and you consider them a friend. The greenery around is a laurel, or an alium, or osmanthus, and you know which of them to keep away from, and which of them are great herbs for tea. Now, you look up and see a whole parade of Venus, Ursa Major, or Orion. You now know their names, and, if you respect them- they become allies of yours.