#ITS THE FACTUALLY CORRECT INTERPRETATION

[these-godforsaken-halls]

listen i will be the first to say that we need to stop harassing cc's about their opinions on shipping and stuff. leave them alone keep it awayyy from them keep it out of their public spaces

that said.

finding out on stream that scott smajor himself ships scarian rpf and in fact considers them significantly more husband-coded ooc than ic? he thinks the ONLY reason a viewer can't see them as husbands is because they don't know scar and grian irl like scott does? funniest thing to EVER happen

[carriesthewind]

Oh dear.

So as some of you may know, I love to point and laugh at bad legal arguments. And as fun as legal dumpster fires are when they are made by people who aren’t lawyers but think this whole “law” thing seems pretty simple, it’s even funnier when an actual, barred attorney is the person dumping gallons of kerosene into the dumpster.

And oh boy folks, do I have a fun ride for y’all today. Come with me on this journey, as we watch a lawyer climb into the dumpster and deliberately pour kerosene all over himself, while a judge holds a match over his head.

The court listener link is here, for those who want to grab a few bowls of popcorn and read along.

For those of you who don’t enjoy reading legal briefs for cases you aren’t involved with on your day off (I can’t relate), I will go through the highlights here. I will screenshot and/or paraphrase the relevant portion of the briefs, and include a brief explainer of what’s going on (and why it’s very bad, but also extremely funny). (Also, I’m not going to repeat this throughout the whole write-up, so for the record: any statements I make about how the law or legal system works is referring exclusively to the U.S. (And since this is a federal case, we are even more specifically looking at U.S. federal law.) Also, I don’t know how you could construe any of this to be legal advice, but just in case: none of this is, is intended to be, or should be taken as, legal advice.)

First, let’s get just a quick background on the case, to help us follow along. In brief, this is a civil tort suit for personal injury based on defendant’s (alleged) negligence. The plaintiff is suing the defendant (an airline), because he says that he was injured when a flight attendant struck his knee with a metal cart, and the airline was negligent in letting this happen. The airline filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds that there is an international treaty that imposes a time bar for when these kind of cases can be brought against an airline, and the plaintiff filed this case too many years after the incident.

The fun begins when the plaintiff’s attorney filed an opposition to the motion to dismiss. (So far, a good and normal thing to do.) The opposition argues that the claim is not time-barred because 1) the time bar was tolled by the defendant’s bankruptcy proceedings (that is, the timer for the time limitation was paused when the defendant was in bankruptcy, and started again afterwords), and 2) the treaty’s time limit doesn’t apply to this case because the case was filed in state court before the state statute of limitations expired, and the state court has concurrent jurisdiction over this kind of case.

I’m struggling a bit to succinctly explain the second reason, and there’s a reason for that.

You see, the whole opposition reads a bit…oddly.

This is how the opposition begins its argument, and it’s…weird. The basic principle is...mostly correct here, but the actual standard is that when reviewing a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim (which is what the defendant filed) the court must draw all reasonable factual inferences in the plaintiff’s favor. But even then, you don’t just put that standard in your opposition. You cite to a case that lays out the standard.

Because that’s how courts and the law work. The courts don’t operate just based on vibes. They follow statutory law (laws made by legislature) and case law (the decisions made by courts interpreting what those laws mean). You don't just submit a filing saying, "here's what the law is," without citing some authority to demonstrate that the law is what you say (or are arguing) it is.

Again, this isn’t wrong (although I'm not sure what it means by new arguments?), but it’s weird! And part of the reason it’s weird is that it is irrelevant to the defendant’s motion to dismiss. The defendant filed a motion stating that based on the facts in the complaint, the plaintiff has not stated a claim based on which relief can be granted, because the complaint is time barred by a treaty. There is no reason for this language to be in the opposition. It’s almost like they just asked a chatbot what the legal standards are for a motion to dismiss for a failure to state a claim, and just copied the answer into their brief without bother to double-check it.

The opposition then cites a bunch of cases which it claims support its position. We will skip them for now, as the defendant will respond to those citations in its reply brief.

The last thing in the brief is the signature of the lawyer who submitted the brief affirming that everything in the brief is true and correct. An extremely normal - required, even! - thing to do. This will surely not cause any problems for him later.

The next relevant filing is the defendant’s reply brief. Again, the existence of a reply brief in response to an opposition is extremely normal. The contents of this brief are…less so.

Beg pardon?

Just to be clear, this is not normal. It is normal to argue that the plaintiff’s cases are not relevant, or they aren’t applicable to this case, or you disagree with the interpretations, or whatever. It is not normal for the cases to appear to not exist.

Some highlights from the brief:

Quick lesson in how to read U.S. case citations! The italicized (or underlined) part at the beginning is the name of the case. If it is a trial court case, the plaintiff is listed first and the defendant second; if the case has been appealed, the person who lost at the lower court level (the petitioner/appellant) will be listed first, and the person who won at the lower level (the respondent/appellee) will be listed second. There are extremely specific rules about which words in these names are abbreviated, and how they are abbreviated. Next, you list the volume number and name of the reporter (the place where the case is published), again abbreviated according to very specific rules, then the page number that the case starts on. If you are citing a case for a specific quote or proposition, you then put a comma after the beginning page number, and list the page number(s) on which the quote or language you are relying on is located (this is called a “pincite”). Finally, you put in parenthesis the name of the court (if needed)(and again, abbreviated according to extremely specific rules) and the year the case was decided.

So the plaintiff’s response cited to Zicherman, which they said was a case from 2008 that was decided by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. However, the defendant was not able to find such a case. They were able to find a case with the same name (the same petitioner and respondent), but that case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996, and the lower court cases associated with that case weren’t in the 11th circuit either. (The United States Reports is the only official reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court, and only includes SCOTUS decisions, so it’s not necessary to include the name of the court before the year it was decided.)

Just to be clear. The defendant’s brief is saying: the plaintiff cited and extensively quoted from these cases, and neither the cases nor the quotations appear to exist. These “cases” were not ancillary citations in the plaintiff’s brief. They were the authority it relied upon to make its arguments.

This is as close a lawyer can come, at this point in the proceedings, to saying, “opposing counsel made up a bunch of fake cases to lie to the court and pretend the law is something different than it is.”

That, “Putting aside that here is no page 598 in Kaiser Steel,” is delightfully petty lawyer speak for, “you are wrong on every possible thing there is to be wrong about.”

By page 5, the defendant has resorted to just listing all of the (apparently) made up cases in a footnote:

(skipping the citations to support this proposition)

This is where I return to my struggle to explain the opposition’s second reason why the motion to dismiss should not be granted. I struggled to explain the argument, because they failed to explain why the argument they were making (that plaintiffs can bring lawsuits against airlines in state court, and the state court have specific statutes of limitations for general negligence claims) was relevant to the question of whether the plaintiff’s specific claim against the airline was time barred by the treaty. Because 1) this case is in federal court, not state court, and 2) federal law - including treaties - preempts state law. Again, it’s almost like plaintiff’s attorney just typed a question about the time bar into a chatbot or something, and the machine, which wasn’t able to reason or actually analyze the issues, saw a question about the time to bring a lawsuit and just wrote up an answer about the statute of limitations.

We also end with a nice little lawyerly version of “you fucked up and we are going to destroy you.” The relief requested in the defendant’s original motion to dismiss was:

In their reply to the opposition, however:

“The circumstances” in this case, being the apparent fabrication of entire cases. Because courts tend to take that pretty seriously.

And the court took it seriously indeed. The defendant’s reply was docketed on March 15th of this year. On April 11th:

AKA: you have one week (an extremely prompt time frame for federal court) to prove to me that you didn’t just make up these cases.

On April 12th, the plaintiff’s attorney requests more time because he’s on vacation:

The judge grants the motion, but adds in another case that he forgot to include in his first order.

On April 25th, the plaintiff’s attorney files the following:

(And he lists the cases, with one exception, which he says is an unpublished decision.)

But he says of all of the cases except two, that the opinions…

Which is…nonsense?

First of all: if you cited a case, you had to get it from somewhere. Even unpublished opinions, if you are citing them in a brief, you are citing them because you pulled them off of westlaw or whatever. Which means you have access to the case and can annex it for the court. (There are even formal rules for how you cite unpublished opinions! And those rules include citing to where you pulled the damn case from!)

Secondly: remember that long digression I went into about how to read case citations? Remember that bit about how you include the name of the reporter (the place the case was published)? Yes, cases are published. They are printed in physical books, and they are published online in databases (e.g. lexis or westlaw). If the specific online database you are looking in does not have the case, you look somewhere else. If you have a judge telling you to get them a copy of the case Or Else, you track down a physical copy of the reporter if you need to and scan the damn thing yourself. You - literally - can’t just not have a copy of the case! (Especially published federal circuit court opinions, which multiple of these cases are! Those aren’t hard to find!)

And what kind of “online database” doesn’t include the entire opinion anyway? I’ve literally never heard of a case research database that only included partial opinions, because that wouldn’t be useful.

Maybe if we look at the attached annexed copies of the cases, that might give us some answers.

...

My friends, these things are just bizarre. With two exceptions, they aren’t submitted in any sort of conventional format. Even if you’ve never seen a legal opinion before, I think you can see the difference if you just glance through the filings. They are located at Docket entry #29 on Court Listener (April 25, 2023). Compare Attachments 6 and 8 (the real cases submitted in conventional format) to the other cases. Turning to the contents of the cases:

In the first one, the factual background is that a passenger sued an airline, then the airline filed a motion to dismiss (on grounds unrelated to the treaty's time bar), then the airline went into bankruptcy, then the airline won the motion to dismiss, then the passenger appealed. And the court is now considering that appeal. But then the opinion starts talking about how the passenger was in arbitration, and it seems to be treating the passenger like he is the one who filed for bankruptcy? It’s hallucinatory, even before you get to the legal arguments. The “Court of Appeals” is making a ruling overruling the district court’s dismissal based on the time bar, but according to the factual background, the case wasn’t dismissed based on the time bar, but on entirely other grounds? Was there some other proceeding where the claim was dismissed as time barred, and it’s just not mentioned in the factual background? How? Why? What is happening? Also it says Congress enacted the treaty? But, no? That’s…that’s not how treaties work? I mean, Congress did ratify the treaty? But they didn’t unilaterally make it!

In the second case, there’s an extended discussion of which treaty applies to the appellants claims, which is bizarre because there are two relevant treaties, and one replaced the other before the conduct at issue, so only the new treaty applies? There isn’t any discussion of the issue beyond that basic principle, so there is no reason there should be multiple paragraphs in the opinion explaining it over and over? Also, it keeps referring to the appellant as the plaintiff, for some reason? And it includes this absolutely hallucinatory sentence:

…the only part this that makes sense is that the argument is without merit. I’m not going to discuss the actual merits of the legal arguments in the opinion, because they are so bizarre and disjointed that even trying to describe them would require a Pepe Silvia-sized conspiracy board. Like the previous case, both the facts and the legal posture of the case change constantly, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

The third one…oh boy. First, large portions of the “opinion” are individual paragraphs with quotations around the whole paragraph. What’s happening there? As far as the content of the opinion itself - I can’t. I mean that, I literally can’t. What is being discussed seems to change from paragraph to paragraph, much of it contradicting. It makes the first case seem linear and rational by comparison. The court finds it doesn’t have personal jurisdiction over the defendant so dismisses the case based on a lack of subject matter jurisdiction? But also the defendant hasn’t contested jurisdiction? And also the court does hold that it has both subject matter and personal jurisdiction over the defendant? And then it denies the motion to dismiss the case? Also, at one point it cites itself?

…also, even if this was a real case, it doesn’t stand for the propositions the plaintiff cited it for in their opposition? I’m not going to go into the weeds (honestly it’s so hallucinatory I’m not sure I could if I tried), but, for example, the plaintiff’s reply brief states that the court held “that the plaintiff was not required to bring their claim in federal court.” The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a federal court, and there is no discussion of any filings in state courts. The closest the “opinion” comes is with the statement, “Therefore, Petersen’s argument that the state courts of Washington have concurrent jurisdiction is unavailing.” (This statement appears to be completely disconnected from anything before or after it, so I am unsure what it is supposed to mean.)

Moving on, case number four is allegedly a decision by the Court of Appeals of Texas. It includes the following line:

Honestly, the plaintiff’s attorney best defense at this point is that he wasn’t intentionally trying to mislead the court, because if he was doing this on purpose, he would have edited the cases to make them slightly more believable. (Context in case you’ve lost track: these documents are supposed to be copies of the opinions he is citing. The screenshoted line makes it clear that what he is actually citing is, at best, someone else’s summary of an "opinion". It would be like if a teacher asked a student to photocopy a chapter of a book and bring it into class, and instead the student brought in a copy of the cliffs notes summary of that chapter. Except that the book doesn’t even exist.)

The actual contents of the “opinion” are, as is now standard, absolutely bonkers. First, the court decides that it doesn’t have personal jurisdiction over Delta because “Delta did not purposefully avail itself of the benefits of conducting business in Texas.” This was despite the fact that the factual background already included that the appellant (sorry, the plaintiff, according to the “opinion”) flew on a Delta flight originating in Texas. Like, this is just wrong? It’s not even hallucinatory nonsense, it’s just facially incorrect legal analysis. Then the court starts discussing the treaty’s time bar, for some reason? Then it goes back to talking about personal jurisdiction, but now the trial court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, and the appellate court agrees with the trial court that it does have personal jurisdiction, even though this is the plaintiff’s appeal from the dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction and the court already ruled it didn’t have personal jurisdiction? And even though on page 1, the plaintiff was injured during a flight from Texas to California, now on page 7 she was injured on a flight from Shanghai to Texas? Also the trial court has gone back in time (again) to grant the motion to dismiss that it previously denied?

Also, I’ve been trying to avoid pointing out the wonky text of these submissions, but:

Everything ok there?

Case number five is similar enough to number four that it’s not worth repeating myself.

Thank god, cases six and eight, as noted above, are real cases, so I’m going to skip them. The defendant alleges that the cases do not stand for the propositions the plaintiff cited them for, and I’m going to assume that is true, given the rest of this nonsense.

Case number seven looks legitimate on the surface. But neither the defendant nor I could find the case through any legitimate search mechanisms. The defendant looked up the purported docket numbers on PACER and found completely different cases; I was able to find a case with the name “Miller v. United Airlines, Inc.,” but it was for a different Ms. Miller, it was a California state case (not a Second Circuit federal case), it was decided on a different year, and the substance of the case was entirely different from the alleged opinion filed with the court.

On top of that, this might be the most morally reprehensible fake citation of them all? Because it is about the crash of United Airlines Flight 585, a real plane crash. Everyone on board - 25 people in total - was killed. 

The individual cited in this fake court case was not one of them.

I cannot imagine conducting myself in such a way where I would have to explain to a judge that I made up a fake case exploiting a real tragedy because I couldn’t be bothered to do actual legal research.

Now, I know you all have figured out what’s going on by now. And I want you to know that if your instincts are saying, “it seems like the lawyer should have just fallen on his sword and confessed that he relied on ChatGPT to write his original brief, rather than digging himself further into this hole”? Your instincts are absolutely correct.

Because obviously, the court was having none of this b.s. On May 4th, the court issued an order, beginning with the following sentence:

That is one of the worst possible opening sentences you can see in an order by the court in a situation like this. The only thing worse is when judges start quoting classic literature. If I was Mr. Peter LoDuca, counsel for the plaintiff, I would already be shitting my pants.

“I gave you an opportunity to either clear things up or come clean. Now I’m going to give you an opportunity to show why I should only come down on you like a pile of brinks, instead of a whole building.”

We are getting dangerously close to “quoting classic lit” territory here.

If I learned that the judge in my case called up the clerk of a circuit court just to confirm how full of shit I was, I would leave the legal profession forever. Also, the judge is now also putting quotes around “opinion.” When judges start getting openly sarcastic in their briefs, that means very very bad things are about to happen to someone.

So I’m guessing the delay between this filing and the court order was because the judge’s clerk was tasked with running down every single one of the additional fake citations included in the "opinions", just to make this sure this order (and the upcoming pile of bricks) are as thorough as possible.

If you are following along with Dracula Daily, the vibe here is roughly the same as the May 19th entry where Dracula demands Jonathan Harker write and pre-date letters stating he has left the castle and is on the way home.

Also, hey, what’s that footnote?

Wait, what?

Folks, it appears we may have notary fraud, on top of everything else! Anybody have bingo?

So on May 25, one day before the deadline, Mr. LoDuca filed his response. And oh boy, I hope ya’ll are ready for this.

Hey, what’s the name of that other attorney, “Steven Schwartz”? Where have I seen that name before…

...I ran out of room for images on this post. So I'm going to have to leave this as an accidental cliffhanger. Part 2 to follow once I refresh my tea.

[lousycapy]

How statistics can easily be manipulated to fit a certain agenda in Formula 1

Hello! I’ve seen a lot of f1 fans or media sources bring up statistics incorrectly to prove their points recently, which is really getting on my nerves. So here is a comprehensive guide, with examples, of how statistics work and why they are not the be-all and end-all some people might think them to be. This is a pretty long post, so the explanations are all below the cut. With that, I hope you find this useful!

Multiple factors come into play when analyzing a statistic, so I’ve separated them in different categories: what data set is used to make the stat, how the stat can be interpreted and how being factually correct doesn’t equate a valid argument :

THE DATA SET

To make a statistic, you first need values which correspond to a data set. What said data set is made of is very relevant to the exactitude of the stat and how much regard should be given to it.

For example, to determine the average lap times of a driver over a stint you would need to divide the sum of all lap times by the number of laps executed. Which means that theoretically you could use a single lap as an average, e.g. 1:57:325/1 which gives an average lap time of 1:57:325s.

However, as you might imagine this stat is not representative of a driver’s stint, since the lap chosen to be analyzed could very well be an outlier. That’s why sample sizes matter, the more values make up your data set, the more representative of reality the result obtained is.

It is also important to know what the data set consists of. Let’s reuse our average lap times of a driver over a stint example, are outlaps/inlaps included? Is it based on clean air, dirty air? Are there laps excluded due to driver mistakes (e.g. going off track)? A stat being presented without any explanation of how it was calculated is absolutely worthless.

Finally, comprehension of the data set is very valuable as well.

Let’s imagine this fictional scenario where Ferrari makes Charles and Carlos compare average lap times. They both use the same car, on the same track, on the same tires, at the same time, for a stint of a total of 10 laps. Both drivers average a lap time of 80.125s over their whole stint, so is the conclusion that they have both done the exact same thing accurate? No!

Despite having the same average lap times in this scenario, the data set suggests a different conclusion, and different trends. Considering stints in a race are going to be longer than 10 laps, it can be assumed that Charles would average better lap times thanks to his consistency compared to Carlos, who would get worse lap times as time passes as can be observed thanks to the trend line in his graph.

2. INTERPRETATION OF THE DATA

Now that we can recognize the importance of the data set and its constituents, it is time to understand how the data provided can be used to make a statistic.

More than one answer can be correct based on the same sample of data. Despite using the same set, depending on how the data is used it can lead to different statistics that drive different arguments both being factually correct.

For example, I’d like to refer to the wonderful basspro24chevy World’s Destructor Chamionship from Brazil 24 on Reddit in an effort of determining who is the most destructive driver. Here is a chart I’ve made which also includes number of races each driver took part in (Ollie not included I was too lazy to recalculate how it affects the drivers he’s replaced’s damage bill) and the average cost of damage per race of each driver.

Based on these statistics, both arguments could be made to justify either Checo being the most destructive driver, since he’s the one who’s cost his team the most damage over the whole season, or Franco, since he’s the one who on average costs the most for his team per weekend.

Depending on someone’s biases, they could make some drivers look better than others despite using the same data set as another person, and depending on how their argument is justified even if they end up with a different conclusion it doesn’t mean they aren’t right as well.

3. FACTUALLY CORRECT ≠ VALID ARGUMENT

Even if you are factually correct with your statistic’s interpretation, and it is based on an acceptable data set, it doesn’t mean it has a direct link of causality with your argument and provides validation to the point you are trying to make.

For example, someone could argue that Checo is a safer pair of hands in races than Pierre, because over the course of the 2024 season he has DNFed 2 out of 21 races, meanwhile Pierre has DNFed 3 out of 21 races. However, the point being argued here is which driver is a safer pair of hands, and other variables than the drivers come into play when discussing those two’s DNFs.

Indeed, Checo drives a RedBull with a Honda engine, whilst Pierre drives an Alpine with a Renault engine. Out of Checo’s 2 DNFs, 2 were caused by driver mistakes. Out of Pierre’s 3 DNFs, 3 were caused by engine issues. The World’s Destructor Championship can also be used as a counterpoint to Checo being a safer pair of hands than Pierre by comparing damage bills.

Thus, instead of the conclusion being that Checo is a safer pair of hands than Pierre, the DNFs statistic is more appropriate to conclude that the Honda engine is more reliable than the Renault engine.

Which means that to make a valid argument, you need to be able to explain why the statistic presented is relevant and what it suggests. Alleviating circonstances also need to be taken into account to solidify the point being made.

For example, let’s imagine a scenario where Fernando is 1.235s off Lance during a qualifying run. To use this stat in an argument, you need to be able to justify why he was so far off. Was it genuine pace? Did he make a mistake which ruined the lap? Were they on the same tires? Was it track evolution? Are they on the same setup? Did Fernando come across traffic? Did Lance get a significant tow?

Contextualization matters twice as much as the actual statistic being presented, because the statistic without context can easily be manipulated in a way to drive a certain agenda.

4. CONCLUSION

All in all, what I’m trying to say is that even maths can be used to drive agendas. Statistics can not be taken at face value, because there are multiple factors that can influence their relevance. I hope you found this little guide helpful, and that it will help you analyze better the information you see online on how drivers are performing (or argue better with crazed fans, you do you 🫡)

Thanks for reading and have a good day!

[orchideous-nox]

Regarding Ethan/p4perback

Upon reviewing the stream that Ethan/EJ/p4perback did on October 11th 2024 called "clearing up some stuff", there is a specific thing that he said that needs to be discussed because I have not seen a single person mention this. And yes, we are using names now. I will be speaking factually about this one particular thing Ethan said in this livestream and this thing alone. Yes, I have opinions on other things he said, however, these are down to my interpretation of Ethan's words and attitude and therefore do not have a place in this post. Maybe in the future I will speak more openly about other my opinions if I feel like it, but not in this post. I am in no way speaking on anyone's behalf either, this is purely from me.

At 02:34:32, Ethan reads out a comment explaining that the mod who made a thread about Ethan uses it/xin/they pronouns on Twitter (it has since made a post saying it does not use they pronouns) but told Ethan directly it uses it/its. Ethan then replied by saying:

"Maybe it's because it's a day-to-day thing, I know that there are people who are genderfluid. Or they just did it to trip me up. Could be one or the other."

As someone who identifies as genderfluid, I find it incredibly hurtful to insinuate that someone who is genderfluid or uses multiple pronouns or neopronouns would give someone the incorrect pronouns to "trip them up". This is disgusting and hurtful and it shouldn't take being genderfluid to understand why you should not say something like this.

The person Ethan was referring to told Ethan its pronouns directly and therefore he should believe that it was being sincere and honest rather than misgendering itself to "trip" Ethan up.

I'm going to address the rest of this directly to Ethan, not that I expect him to see this, but I hope people pay attention. Not everybody has a constant agenda to catch you out Ethan, I understand this stream was following a Twitter thread regarding you, however, I believe the mod/ex-mod wanted accountability for current actions as well as past ones. But its gender and pronouns have nothing to do with this. If somebody had said you told them you were using he/him pronouns to trip them up, you would be enraged and rightfully so, please consider this and look back at what you said in your stream.

You said this on a stream of hundreds if not thousands of people who look up to you and admire you and expect explanations for things outlined in the thread. Like I said, I'm not going to acknowledge anything said in that thread right now, but I understand it was a stressful situation to go through. You were tired, exhausted, and in pain from filming and travelling, but this does not excuse what you said about your ex-mod's pronouns and frankly, it would be appalling if you used that as an excuse. If you were tired to the point of saying things you did not mean in a stream where you are trying to be genuine, honest and authentic, end the stream. If you were tired to the point of accusing someone of purposefully misgendering itself for the same of tripping you up, please consider where this came from within you.

I appreciate you really tried to get its pronouns correct in the stream, adjusting to pronouns you are unfamiliar with and how to use them respectfully can be a struggle, I say this as someone who has had to be patient with a lot of people getting used to they/them pronouns for my sake, but you can be angry at someone without saying things that are hurtful not just to that person but to an entire community of people. I would expect better from you.

Finally, I want to end with a message to Ethan's fans if they have read this far. I have seen some a lot of people including Andy in the comments of posts on multiple platforms that about Ethan, who very clearly want to defend and support Ethan and see him happy. I think it is great that you support someone so faithfully and defend them. However, there is a portion of the community who fail to recognise that people don't have to like Ethan and they will have their reasons for this. We are entitled to our opinions. You are entitled to like Ethan, we are entitled not to. You can think of him however you like, I used to watch Ethan's tiktoks and like them and share them with friends, but you do not need to tell people they are jealous of what he has and that they're bullying Ethan for no reason simply because they don't like him. This post is not bullying, it is accountability.

Please give that same kindness to others that you say Ethan gives to his community. I know this saying is overdone but it is free to be kind, it is also free to be respectful and understand what spaces are for you and what aren't. Yes, people are talking about Ethan now and eyes are on him, but they are on you too. I will not stand for harassment and bullying for expressing how his words made me feel. Please be respectful.

[moonshynecybin]

everyone has their own interpretations but 2me marc’s primary erogenous zone is the racetrack

factually correct information. literally in my head my man marc sees vale do an asshole overtake on him as a hey. fuck you. while they were testing those bikes in portimao in preseason and he goes okay motherfucker ! and they just start fucking racing each other. can’t help it! they did the same thing on a familiarization or practice lap in assen 2016 if i’m not mistaken ! like genuinely they’re both just wrong in the head. i digress. vale passes marc, marc hits back immediately (vale voice he bites down harder….) and then they realize there’s limited media presence to report/annoy them on this SOOOO they can go buckshit crazy and suddenly it’s a real fucking race. academy kids like uh what the hell. alex like. cmon. enea’s in a raybans commercial. ALL THIS TO SAYYYYY the thrill of earnestly getting to race vale for the first time in a hot minute (they’re on unfamiliar bikes. his arm is healthy. it’s been a while…) and vale like. GIVING IT TO HIM a bit on track gets him so hornyfrustrated he’s pissed off for the rest of the day just wanting something he can’t have. explains these pictures to me VERY well. a mix of repressed sexual frustration and anger because he KNOWSSS hes only gonna get this precise blend of emotions when vale is out there with him. penis starts throbbing my arch rival is near.... of course little does he know that its the most alive on track that vale has felt in literal YEARS and hes in the exact same little sexy boat. and then he knocks on marc's door in jerez

[comiverse]

...Okay but hear me out; DID!Ink.

Just- just think about it! What if each paint vial represented/switched to a different alter every time he drank them? Like--

❤️ Red would be a very pissed off and violent alter, and they would probably be to blame for most of Ink's outbursts. However, they would also be known for their determination, and the fact that they will not give in easily to anything that they don't see fit.

🧡 Orange would definitely be a leader type; a strong, stubborn, and sturdy alter who more often than not knows what they're doing. They would be very street-smart, knowing how to easily defend themselves and possibly others if needed.

💛 Yellow would be a bubbly, sunshiny, happy-go-lucky alter who saw the bright side in anything and everything. Sure, they'd be irresponsible and mayyybe a little unhinged, but hey! They'd be the warm ball of joy that lit up everyone's day.

💚 Green would be a very... judgmental alter. They would point out every single little flaw in everything with zero regards, and they would tend to also be narcissistic. However, they are indeed good for creating aus, since they'd make sure each one had no code glitches.

🩵 Light Blue would rarely be used, but they would be a quiet, shy, fearful alter who just wanted to be left alone. They would be a more panicky and pessimistic type who's a bit of a Debbie Downer, and they would likely get very concerned over the smallest of things.

💙 Blue would be a gentle, protective, and bittersweet alter who tends to be depressive. They'd try not to bring others down, but it would be their nature to be like a melancholic rain cloud that hovers around, trying to find a purpose. They'd also be quite empathetic.

💜 Purple would be prickish as fu-- *ahem*, I mean, they would be a mysterious and distant alter who is very knowledgeable, especially when it came to aus. They would also be very book-smart, but they don't tend to 'grace people with their expertise' very often.

🩷 Pink would also rarely be used, but they would be a flirtier and softer alter. They would either be seen as annoying for flirting so often, or they would be loved for their gentleness. They may also be quite clingy at times.

🖤 Black... cannot be switched to via a vial, nor is it represented by one. It is characterized by its complete lack of morals, and its use as a last-ditch survival resort. It could not care less about anything or anyone other than itself, and it will do anything to stay alive.

🤍 White would be the host of the system! They would be numb, emotionless, but not without morals like Black. They would pretty much be a blank slate for all of the other alters to inhabit, but they otherwise wouldn't really serve a purpose.

Don't ask where this idea came from, I have no clue either- ;-;

I haven't named any of the alters yet, this is just the basics! I don't know if I'll actually keep the au, but maybe. We'll see.

Also, I cannot say that this is actually accurate to real life DID cases; this is just a fictional au with fictional interpretation, so I'm sorry but not sorry if this isn't a correct portrayal of the disorder! Remember that this is just for fun, and it isn't meant to be either fully factual or offensive in any way.

[professorspork]

Hey, a little while ago, you reblogged that post about AI learning when people insert fics into AI text generators, and I wanted to offer good news and bad news: the good news is that AI learning models mostly don’t work like this. The publicly accessible text generator isn’t the whole learning model, it’s a single machine that the learning model generated. It won’t get fed directly back into the AI.

The BAD news is that there’s not really anything stopping them from saving that information separately to use later, and (much worse) anything that’s publicly available has probably already been scraped and saved. The good-in-this-context-but-depressing-overall news is that these models operate on the scale of billions of words, so, like. Idk. Individual fics ending up in a database mostly isn’t going to matter. That’s part of why the data-scraping isn’t something devs think about, ethically. This info is a paraphrase of another post I’ve seen going around saying the same thing, but I can personally corroborate it; before AI was a “crypto people hate when artists can earn a living” thing, I took some college courses on it and followed blogs about AI stuff for years. The last year or two of AI news has been really shitty :P It’s been really cool to me for a long time, but it is now clear that it’s even-more-vulnerable-than-usual to “capitalism uses every tool for oppression first” Knowing how it works is exhausting because anti-AI people are sometimes not all that much more accurate about how it actually works than the fervently pro-AI “I think chat-gpt is a person and human-generated art is dead” people, and then both of them skip talking about the more concrete problems like the “chat-gpt is propped up by slave labor” stuff.

I really appreciated this series of asks and wanted to make it available for all!

I think what we run into here is where like. A rhetorical device to invoke a sense of stakes and a bit of a guilt trip ("this is plagiarism because it feeds the AI" and its many permutations) can run up against misinformation (it's not literally becoming part of the AI's knowledge base, though as you noted it certainly COULD.) Because like

Where that post was coming from was someone being like "but why shouldn't I do this?" and the answerer resorting to "because it takes my work away from me" and this is still true in like, the rules of community and creativity if not necessarily in the hard lines of code. it's harder to articulate "this makes me uncomfortable because it's violated my ineffable sense of mutual belonging with and ownership of my own work, which I already felt on shaky ground on because it's fanwork but still FEEL with my WHOLE HEART" than it is to say "this concretely makes my words fuel for the machine" which I think people grok as a more sort of understandable breach of that social contract.

Which is why I like this post a lot because it gets at the WHY of why this is so perturbing and violating and isolating

Fandom was never meant to be a solo endeavor! when I write fic and put it out into the world, it's like echolocation. the words I put out are only half of what gives it shape and meaning to me-- the other half is the sound of it reverberating back to me as it bounces off the people it hits by way of comments, tags in reblogs, and DMs and they tell me their reactions and interpretations. that's what makes it a complete picture and not just screaming into the void.

to be removed from that process at all is a heartbreak to me; to have my words taken without my consent is insulting and misses the point and just. ultimately makes all of us that much more alone. which is to say that it's factually correct to say individual fics ending up in a database won't matter because it's probably already been scraped anyway because that's true for the AI and for the data. but individual fics DO matter insofar as like, these are choices people are making about what this hobby is and means and why they like it and what they think it's for and how they enjoy it, on a communal and social level, and THAT matters to me a great deal, in the same way that like, people now might end up getting videoed for a tiktok without their consent or whatever. it's about the erosion of privacy and respect.

but also yeah ChatGPT also runs thanks to exploited and underpaid workers, consumes horrific amounts of water in a time of increasing drought crisis and emits tons of carbon to boot.

[saintsenara]

I love your Riddle/Gaunt post, its brilliant, just one tiny issue. The closest city to them would be York, they all live in Yorkshire. Liverpool was more a recent party weekend destination, in the 1900s it was the beach resort, but still a travel. York on the otherhand has been around since Roman times and likely before and its on their doorstep. If any gossip were likely to reach a city, it would definitely be York.

thank you for the comment, anon. i am - however - going to reserve the right to disagree with the idea that there is any issue here...

little hangleton is not proven to be in yorkshire - the only detail that we get about it in canon is that it is 200 miles north of little whinging. this may be 200 miles in a straight line, or it may be 200 miles in a looser sense [in the same way that i could describe my hometown as 200 miles north of dublin, when it's actually around 175 miles northwest, and not be understood as spatially illiterate in context]. the outskirts of liverpool are around 220 miles northwest of guildford, in surrey - and a scouser who was driving to visit the dursleys saying they were driving "200 miles south" would be understood as correct in informal conversation. locating little hangleton near to it is entirely justifiable on the scant information we receive in canon.

i also like this as a location for the village because "gaunt" is a name historically associated with lancashire, the county which borders the city of liverpool.

this doesn't mean that other people can't prefer to locate little hangleton in yorkshire [and to have gossip about the riddles' doings hit york] - but just that it isn't an unreasonable misinterpretation of canon to shift it across the country. england is pretty narrow, after all...

but while this aspect of the question is entirely open for personal interpretation, there is a part of what you've said which is completely factually wrong.

in 1900, liverpool - owing to its position as a port city on the atlantic - was one of the most important cities not only in the united kingdom but in the british empire - in the nineteenth century 40% of the entire world's trade passed through liverpool. it was a major industrial centre, was enormously diverse in terms of population [it has the oldest chinatown in europe], and was - prior to the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 - pretty much as rich as london.

you have confused it - i suspect - with blackpool, a seaside resort slightly further up the lancashire coast.

york, in contrast, was in 1900 [and remains] an average-to-large provincial city - populous and economically active in comparison to many places, but dwarfed by a city like liverpool. and its long history is irrelevant to this late victorian context - lots of places in england have been around since [pre-]roman times, and while some [chester, york] have evolved into cities, others [cirencester, dorchester] are small towns.

i hope this helps.

[forthoseinterested]

Sex, gender, & transsexuals

This is an informational post intended to help people better navigate the sometimes-confusing dialogue surrounding sex, gender, and transsexuals. I made it because I find even well-meaning people with progressive attitudes often get basic information about these topics wrong, starting all the way down from fundamental questions like the very meaning of sex and gender—questions and distinctions that practically didn’t exist in public discourse fifteen years ago. This has been accelerated by oversimplifications and misunderstandings that spread on social media faster than any accompanying corrections or clarifications.

About me: It’s often difficult to address this topic in short format because emotions are high and people are understandably defensive, wary about taking a point or correction from somebody whom they aren’t convinced is coming from the right place. This is why I’d like to clarify that I’m a transsexual woman, I’m progressive when it comes to trans acceptance, and I have an overall positive view of the trans community. I’m not trying to sell myself out or throw any other trans people under the bus in order to gain acceptance from people who are typically anti-trans but who might buy that I’m one of the good ones. I don’t usually comment on my identity in the body of these posts, but in this case it may be important to help set the tone and context of why I’m even bothering to write about this, and why I’m making the claims that I’m making. It’s not to argue against transgenderism, or to invalidate anybody. It’s to help you talk about trans people in a way that’s more clear and correct.

I’ll be making some claims about biology. I don’t have any formal background in biology, medicine, or any related field. However, I’m capable of looking up academic texts about the things I’m interested in, and telling you what they say. The biological facts discussed are not complicated or contrived, and the things I claim about biology are not controversial. I am simply reporting to you what the consensus in biology is and has been for a long time. I’ve also consulted with people who do have backgrounds in these areas, to be sure that I’m not sharing anything factually incorrect.

Sex

Sex is a model we’ve come up with to classify organisms by the role they play in sexual reproduction, where sexual reproduction means the fusion of gametes. Gametes are cells that come together to a new organism. With this framing in mind, nearly all species can be interpreted as one of three categories:

asexual, meaning they don’t reproduce sexually at all;

dioecious (die-ee-shiss), meaning they have some kind of male–female distinction;

monoecious (moh-nee-shiss), also known as hermaphroditic, meaning they don’t have a strict male–female organism distinction.

Nearly all individual organisms can then be interpreted as one of four categories:

male or female, the complementary roles in most sexual reproduction;

hermaphrodite, meaning an organism that fulfils both the male and female function, either simultaneously or at different points in its life (there are different sub-types of hermaphrodite);

or asexual, meaning a member of a species that doesn’t have this distinction.

In some species, sexual reproduction is more complicated, and as a result you’d need more than two categories in order to model the roles of its member organisms. This is very rare and limited to things like algae, fungi, slime moulds, and microscopic organisms like ciliates. In many cases there are multiple different types of a thing, and any pair can come together to reproduce so long as they’re not the same time. In some cases, reproduction may require more than two participants, including a group of things coming together like the pieces of Exodia. Though fascinating, keep in mind this is a tiny category of strange exceptions, and that no birds or mammals work anything like this.

If you’re a human, then your body probably has a type of cell called a gamete: either a small gamete (sperm), which your body produces regularly, or a large gamete (egg, or ovum, plural ova), which your body has a finite store of and is slowly releasing throughout your life until depleted. Through sexual intercourse, sperm enters into an ovum, fusing together to create a zygote, the beginning of a new human.

If you’re a sperm-producing human, we’d categorize you as a male, because the way that you’d pass on genetic material to your offspring is through the production of small gametes. If you’re an egg-bearing human, we’d categorize you as a female, because the way that you would pass on genetic material to your offspring is by the production of large gametes. That’s what all this sex business boils down to.

I sometimes hear people say sex is a spectrum, or make the related claim that sex is bimodal. This is erroneous and not what any real scientific sources claim. It likely stems from a mistake about what sex actually refers to. There are various traits that correlate with sex, such as hormone levels, body hair, height, or bone structure, where if you take measures from every person in society, you could end up with what resembles a spectrum with a bimodal distribution. But sex itself is not like this, because none of these traits are sex.

For all intents and purposes, sex in humans is a binary classification, as it’s intended to be. We consider all humans to be one or the other. Even when we’re discussing other species that could have more than two sex designations, sex as a concept deals in discrete categories. If you’re trying to describe something more complex and variable, like the social behaviour of an organism, then sex isn’t the term you’re looking for.

This isn’t my opinion about what sex ought to mean. I don’t care how words are used in the grand scheme of things. I’m very ‘descriptivist’ when it comes to language. I’m just observing how the word is, in fact, used. I consulted many different sources about how sex is used in academia, and what I found is not a divide or debate, but an obvious, overwhelming consensus. I’ll include a few random citations from a variety of sources:

“Sex: either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions” — Oxford dictionary, 2011 “An individual organism’s biological sex relies upon the definition of sex organs (ovaries or testes) and the types of gametes (reproductive cells) they produce — either eggs or sperm. ... Sex is a biological construct, used as a binary descriptor of biological maleness or femaleness.” — The Biology of Sex, by Alex Mills, p.19 (2018). “There is an agreement by convention: individuals producing the smaller of the two gamete types �� sperm or pollen — are males, and those producing larger gametes — eggs or ovules — are females.” — The Evolution of Parental Care, 2012.

If your opinion is that the word should be redefined to mean something else, that’s not an invalid opinion to have and somebody could make a prescriptive case for that. However, at the time of writing, that change has yet to happen, so for now, sex means as described above.

What about a sterile person?

Though true in essence, what I wrote about sex above isn’t comprehensive. It’s more of a starting point. If I define a male and female simply as sperm-producing and egg-bearing, respectively, then what about a sterile male who doesn’t produce sperm? You could also ask about a child, or an 80-year-old, or a woman who’s had a hysterectomy, or somebody who’s infertile for any of the other reasons people are infertile sometimes. The point is, what about a person who lacks their primary sexual function?

What is a definition? It’s what a word means, but there’s more to it: what it means for a word to mean something is for that thing to be what real people intend when they use the word. A definition is therefore a functional description of the bounds of the intended referent of the word being defined. This is sometimes a work in process.

If I were making the world’s first dictionary and I had to define the word ‘vehicle’, I might say it’s a thing used to get around, like a bus or car—because when people make that noise out of their mouth, that’s what they have in mind. But what about a bicycle? Is a bicycle a vehicle? I don’t think people consider it one, so we can’t just say it’s a thing used to get around. What if I said it’s a thing used to get around that requires fuel? That might work. But what about a horse? Or a train? Wait, do people consider trains vehicles? I’m actually not true. And then what happens in the future, if people change their mind and now they do consider bicycles vehicles?

Even what feels like a simple concept that we use all the time without having to stop and think about it that much can unfold into something complex if you try and comprehensively define the boundaries of what does and does not qualify. But notice that throughout this process, what we’re doing every step of the way is asking not what should be a vehicle, but what people consider vehicles. That’s the job of a lexicographer, chasing after the ever-changing reality of what real people mean when they say words. Definitions are observed.

Let’s imagine I have a large collection of vehicles. I want to store them all in one of two different warehouses. I label one ‘car storage’ and the other ‘boat storage’. I provide a working definition for both terms: a car is a thing that drives on land, a boat is a thing that floats at sea.

What if I then found a boat that had a big hole in it? It can’t float at sea. So is it no longer a boat? Are we just going to get confused about how to interpret this item and not know where to put it? Does the fact it’s not a boat anymore mean it’s a car?

It’s obviously just a broken boat. It could’ve floated at sea, before something went wrong that prevented it from doing that function. But my first attempt at a definition didn’t take exceptions like this into account. It would be like if I defined swans as white birds before making the discovery that black swans are a thing.

What happens when we stumble upon an exception that a previous definition didn’t account for is that we update our definition to integrate it into our model—or we don’t bother, depending on the necessary specificity of the context in which we’re speaking. For the most part, I could probably still say that boats are things we use to float on water, and it’s not actually going to cause any confusion, because people can do the one-step extrapolation on their own about how to interpret a boat with a big hole in it that doesn’t float anymore. But if I wanted to be precise, I could write into my definition that a boat is a vehicle whose intention, design, or emergent purpose was or is to be propelled across the surface of water, or other water-like liquids without being submerged in said liquid and which is capable of serving as a means of travel for some kind of entity, typically a human, without being submerged in said liquid under normal operating conditions, and which has some kind of mechanism for propulsion other than being pulled along by the motion of the water itself, such as but not limited to oar, engine, or sail. And even this definition isn’t perfect, but it’s more comprehensive than ‘a thing that we use to float at sea’.

If I first say a male is a sperm-producing organism and a female is an ova-bearing organism, most people don’t even bother thinking about the exceptions where a person in actuality fulfils neither function, because they understand that an infertile or immature male would still just be interpreted as a male because they have all the features that would lead to sperm production under normal circumstances or later in their life cycle. But if you really want to rules-lawyer me on this, a male is a human whose design or model is of the sperm-producing variety, while a female is a person whose design or model is of the ova-bearing variety, identified by the presence or absence of sexual development toward ovaries or testes.

When a human is in utero, meaning in the uterus of their mother before they’re born, they have a gland called gonads, which develop into either testicles, which make sperm, or ovaries, which come with a set of undeveloped, dormant ova in the body that are gradually depleted through the ovary’s process selection, maturation, and release, which for the sake of simplicity is sometimes called ova production (though the female body doesn’t produce new ova in the same way the male body produces new sperm).

The question ultimately remains: if this organism were to pass on its genes, would it do so as a male or as a female? And if something were to get in the way of its development and prevent it from reproducing, then the question becomes: what if that hadn’t happened? Then would it have engaged in reproduction as a male or as a female?

Chromosomes

What determines whether your gonads develop into one or the other? This is where most people start talking about chromosomes, which can also be misleading. Your sex is not your chromosomes. Your sex is not defined as, nor does it boil down to, what chromosomes you have. Instead, your chromosomes—really, just one specific chromosome—is the thing that typically causes you to become one sex or the other. There’s a big difference between a causal relationship, where P leads to Q or P gives rise to Q, and an identity relationship, where P is Q, or is defined as Q, or is an alias of Q.

The biology: A chromosome is a thread-like structure made up of DNA and proteins. These come in pairs for some reason, typically 23 pairs, or 46 individual strands, per cell nuclease. Why 23 pairs? I don’t know. Why do you have 10 fingers? Why do you have 26 bones in your foot? It’s just a number. So there’s 23 pairs of these things, and one specific pair, usually shown as the very last, is called your sex chromosomes.

The reason we call them your sex chromosomes is because under normal circumstances, they seem to be what causes, triggers, or induces sexualization. (In this context, ‘sexualization’ means “causing a thing to be distinguishable as male or female”.) The first chromosome in your sex chromosome pair is always what’s called an X, while the other is either also an X, in which case the embryo probably develops into a female, or instead there’s a Y chromosome, which has a special protein called an SRY gene (which literally just stands for “Sex-determining Region Y”), which probably causes the embryo to develop into a male. The reason I say probably is because this isn’t always the case—it’s only normally or typically the case (>99 percent), as opposed to it being so by definition (we don’t need to say triangles “probably” have 3 sides).

Think about a person who has a male reproductive system, who’s born with a penis, their body makes sperm, they can impregnate females—but, they have an XX sex chromosome pair, which is typically female. Is this person male or female? This question has a clear answer: they’re male. This is what I mean when I say your sex isn’t defined as nor does it boil down to your chromosomes. Your chromosomes being female-typical wouldn’t override everything else about you and make you female. This would just be a male with a chromosomal abnormality.

In fact, there’s a condition that causes exactly this, called de la Chappelle syndrome, or XX male syndrome, where a person with female sex chromosomes develops as a male for some reason, likely because they somehow got an SRY gene from somewhere other than a Y chromosome. The human body is so complex, so many things go wrong in our development, and there are so many people in the world to choose from, that strange variations are bound to happen in some number. And the point is, when they do, the final question of what sex a person is has never been their chromosomes. That just correlates with sex.

A comparison: Imagine we figure out some other trait, like being left-handed, or being gay, or having red hair, is caused by a simple gene. Let’s say having red hair is called by having the RH gene. We assume these things are connected because every redhead we test has this gene, and none of the other people have it, so it seems like having this gene is what activates the red hair trait. What happens if tomorrow, we find a natural redhead whom we karyotype they don’t have that gene? We might have an explanation for how this person’s hair is red, and we might not. But what we wouldn’t do is say this person doesn’t really have red hair because they lack the thing that normally causes red hair. Nobody would say the definition of being a redhead is having the gene that causes it. Being a redhead means having red hair. We don’t conflate the thing itself with the thing that causes the thing.

Intersex people

Some people are what we call intersex. This is an unfortunate term that is misleading for some people, because it sounds like it means something that’s between sexes, which suggests that it’s some kind of third sex, or an alternative to male or female. There is a term in biology for an organism that performs both male and female functions: a hermaphrodite. And there’s a term for an organism that’s part of a species that doesn’t have sexual reproduction: an asexual organism. Intersex people are not either of these things.

Intersex people are still considered male or female. The meaning of the term is somebody who has atypical sex characteristics, or as you could put it, they have characteristics that are in between what is typical for males and what is typical for females. An intersex male is a male who has atypical sex characteristics, and vice versa for intersex females.

For example, one of the most common intersex conditions is called Klinefelter syndrome. This is caused by a chromosomal abnormality, where instead of having two sex chromosomes, a person ends up with three, making them not XX or XY but XXY. However, that means they still have an X chromosome, so they develop as males, but they experience various abnormalities, especially during puberty. This person is intersex, but speaking biologically they’re still a male organism. If they were to reproduce, they would do so by passing on their genetic material via the small gamete they produce in their testicles.

In some very rare cases, a person with an intersex condition ends up with an especially atypical combination of traits that could lead a reasonable person to ask if we could justify conceptualizing a third sex designation to catch the exceptions, rare though they may be. Let’s consider some examples:

If a person has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, their body may begin a process of masculinization as their gonads differentiate into testes, but they won’t descend and instead their body develops a vagina with a mostly female phenotype. However, this person may have XY chromosomes, and lack a uterus. This person would be considered male, but is one of the most atypical males you could possibly come across.

If a person has something called XY gonadal dysgenesis, or Swyer syndrome (s-why-ur), their gonads, insteads of developing into testicles or ovaries, fail to develop one way or the other. Instead they’ll develop female features including a vagina, but they’ll be infertile, never develop ova, and never menstruate. This person has the DNA to become a male, but doesn’t fully do so, and then starts developing as a female, but then doesn’t fully do that either. So what are they? A male, from the sounds of it, because they end up with testicles. But again, this is very far from what you’d expect a male human to be.

If a person has ovotesticular disorder, or a similar condition called mixed gonadal dysgenesis, they may end up with a combination of testicular and ovarian tissue, and may also have ambiguous genitalia (partially a vagina and partially a penis, due to sexualization not completing in a typical way). There has never been a case of a person like this who is capable of both male and female reproductive function, but the classification of such a person is still awkward due to their combination of features, and people both with and without Y chromosomes have been grouped in here, but it’s also such a rare disorder that very little is really known about it.

In cases like these, you may be tempted to say the sex of the person being described should be either both or neither, but we don’t really have those as an option in our model, because humans aren’t an asexual species, and there have never been any known cases of hermaphroditism in humans (it seems to simply not occur in our species). The people with Swyer syndrome or CAIS are males, and it sounds like most cases of people with an ovotesticular disorder were males too, but the most ambiguous case imaginable is still not going to render a ‘both’ or ‘neither’, but a “we don’t know”. If this person were to reproduce, would they do so by passing on small gametes or large gametes? In some cases the answer might end up being that we’re unable to discern how a person would’ve developed if they hadn’t had a developmental abnormality, and as such we’re not sure whether they would’ve been a male or female organism. In principle, it’s the same answer you’d come to if you asked scientists what sex a zygote is the moment after it’s fertilized.

However, for the sake of discussion and understanding, let’s suppose that’s not the case. Suppose instead I agree and say people like this aren’t compatible with a binary model of sex and the solution is to have a third category for people who are especially ambiguous. The result would not be a spectrum, nor sex being bimodal. It would still force a binary for 99.99999 percent of people, but with a tiny third category for some extremely rare exceptions. This would still be discrete options, just three instead of two. In that case, we might call sex a ternary, or trinary, or trinity, rather than a binary—but not a spectrum, and not bimodal.

Sex characteristics and phenotype

Sex itself isn’t the most important quality. Often what actually matters when we look at and interact with other people is not sex itself, but the various things that correlate or arise downstream from sex. These things are called sex characteristics, a term for anything that tends to differ between sexes. This can be broken down further into primary sex characteristics (things like that are directly related to reproduction, like the penis or uterus) and secondary sex characteristics, which are not (e.g. females having larger breasts, males having more facial hair, females having wider hips). This is also how we categorize things like the males of many bird species being more colourful than their females, or male lions having more prominent manes, or a simple difference like female bears being significantly smaller than male ones.

A related term is phenotype, which is often contrasted with genotype. These are general terms that refer to your genes (genotype), and the observable characteristics that result from genes (phenotype). When it comes to the conversation about sex, technically it’s more your phenotype, or rather a specific part of your phenotype (your gonads and their function), that define what your sex is. However, the phenotype of a person also refers to many other features that are not part of your sex. For example, what your face looks like is part of your phenotype.

Gender

By the mid 1900s, beginning in the 60s but remaining on the fringes til gaining more steam in the 90s, writers in various fields converged in wanting to distinguish between the underlying biology of sex and its related characteristics on the one hand, and the way that these biological differences play out socially or in cultures on the other.

We might say, for example, that in a given society, men are expected to pay the bill if he goes to a restaurant with a woman, but is this a sexual difference? Is that part of their sex? No, it’s clearly something else, but something that arises downstream, as a result of their sex. But because we’re pattern-seeking machines, and virtually every person in society is clearly male or female, we tend to form generalizations about these differences. The resulting phenomenon didn’t have a proper name, so they gave one, and the name they chose was gender. This is now largely how the term is used today.

Gender is far from the only instance where we draw a distinction between an underlying, concrete, or base reality, and the more imaginary, conceptual, or abstract idea that our experience of the concrete gives rise to. Consider fathers and fatherhood, leaders and leadership, professions and professionalism. In each case, the concept wouldn’t exist without the underlying reality, but once established, they can be spoken of, thought of, and even exist independently from their origin. A person can exhibit fatherhood without technically being a father. A person can act professionally outside the scope of their job, and so on.

It doesn’t take much for us to recognize patterns, and patterns that affect social organization can create a feedback loop, or compound upon itself, or become self-reinforcing. If all the girls at a school play basketball and all the boys play baseball, that likely influences what sport a new student at the school is going to play, because for various reasons, people like the environments where they feel like they fit in. They’re going to look at the baseball team, look at the basketball team, and the girls are going to go where the girls are and the boys are going to go where the boys are. People self-select for where they feel most welcome, and we have a desire to meet perceived social expectations.

Now think about how that might apply to ancient human tribes. Just the fact women get pregnant and men don’t could alone result in their occupying different social roles, and once that norm is in place, people will select for it. The most socially successful men will be the ones who the boys of the next generation look up to, and vice versa, girls and women. The elders teach the young, the young try to emulate the elders. Once a division like this gets going, it keeps going. Then you realize it’s not just pregnancy. Females are smaller, shorter, weaker, more vulnerable, they have a different psychology, different personalities, they hit puberty earlier, they seem to be more interested in social or interpersonal labour, they occupy roles within family structures. They’re different all over, in so many different ways. There’s no way that any society isn’t going to notice all of these differences and carve out different ideals in their head for what males tend to be like and what females tend to be like, which is essentially all gender is, when half your society clearly fits one pattern and the other half clearly fits the other.

Societies do also differ in their specific gendered ideas. Perhaps in one place wearing earrings is masculine, while in another society they’re feminine. Maybe in one place wearing red is masculine, while in another place wearing red is gender neutral. Maybe 200 years later, it had become a feminine thing. These little details all shift around depending on the time and place, but also overlap in broader themes, because the social development of all these different societies have what are essentially the same starting point: the average biological differences between males and females. It’s like different streams that are branching off from the same riverheader—there’s just some baseline facts that are true in every society, so we’re all forming generalizations and coming up with cultural trends based in similar experiences and observations, even if the more granular things can differ.

History of terms

The discourse about gender originally focused on social roles or gender as a category of association, the idea that some things are for girls and some things are for boys. This led to derivative terms like gender identity, roles, presentation, and more, which can cause confusion because now two people can both say the word ‘gender’ without qualification, and they’re unknowingly talking about different things.

Language like this began appearing in American psychiatric literature in the 1950s, albeit the meaning has shifted since then. The term roles was used at the time to capture the social phenomenon, while the term identity, or core gender identity, was used for the persistent internal or private experience of that social phenomenon. They also talked about sexual identity, i.e. your sexuality, which was another piece of a person’s broader social identity, i.e. the way in which a person is self-aware of how they fit into their society.

Today people use a multitude of terms, like gender performance, gender expression, or gender presentation, to describe the ways in which a person actualizes a certain gender role—any behaviour, attitude, or appearance associated with a person depending on if they’re perceived as a man or woman.

We may then combine this with a description of sex and phenotype to create a thorough report of a person’s place in a given social situation: a person may have a male genotype, a female phenotype, a male gender identity, but attend dinner with their grandparents where they adopt a female gender expression. However, for the vast majority of people this is all unnecessary because these things will align (male genotype, male phenotype, male identity, male expression, or vice versa).

If a person uses the term ‘gender’, it’s their responsibility to ensure the context is understood via some type of qualification; but if no qualification is given, then it becomes your responsibility as a listener to figure out what is actually being spoken of, because ‘gender’ can be the first half of a number of different terms for different concepts, and the truth of a statement about gender can vary depending on what sense of the word is actually under examination.

A great example of this is the statement “gender is a social construct”.

Is gender a social construct?

This phrase has become less commonplace, but in, say, 2013, it was something any person who used the internet regularly heard in someplace or another: gender is a social construct. What does this mean, and why does it matter? The claim gets a lot of mileage for something most people don’t seem able to explain if you ask them, and I’m doubtful of how many people know why it matters either.

”Gender is a social construct” became a progressive canard, something people said out of habit, an utterance whose main purpose was not to convey any specific meaning but to indicate to others which side of the issue I aligned with. It reminds me of a modern joke about how during any meeting at work you can, without even listening or paying attention to the conversation, interject with “it’s all about finding the right balance”, and people will nod in agreement as though you’ve said something meaningful.

And on the other side of the issue, people realized that progressives kept calling things social constructs, and therefore felt obliged to disagree, before they were even sure what they were disagreeing with.

A social construct is anything that is so only because we’ve all agreed that it is. A good example of a social construct is the meaning of words. The fact a rock is hard or sinks into water isn’t a social construct; it’s a truth about the natural world that we observe. But why does the word ‘rock’ refer to this object, or with any given meaning? There is no truth of the universe to that association. We just needed a noise and some symbols to refer to this thing, and ‘rock’ is what we came up with and agreed to. It’s only ‘true’ by convention (or by observation of that which has been agreed to by others).

We could go on to say any other aspect of language is socially constructed, from the words to the spelling and grammar. Another common example is law. What makes something legal or illegal? The universe itself has not given this to us as observable knowledge—the truth is up to us. If every human in the world decided that something was illegal, then it would be. That’s the ‘magic’ of social constructs: the truth is whatever we (as a society) decide it to be. We are the truth makers.

Some other examples: morality, good manners, what year it currently is, when the weekend starts.

Is that the same as it being subjective? It may sound similar, and the two often overlap, but no. A quality being subjective or objective is a matter of whether it’s a property of the object or if it’s something that arises or takes form only via the relationship between object and subject (‘subject’ meaning the outside entity that is observing or otherwise interacting with the object). The most common example of a subjective quality is beauty. What makes a thing beautiful, if not that there is some kind of observer who considers it beautiful? And if nobody considers a thing beautiful, then how can it be said to have beauty? What else does ‘having beauty’ mean? Not all qualities are like this.

A different example that may be more helpful here is the taste of food. Why does honey taste good? I don’t know. It just does. Another person might disagree, however, and say honey tastes terrible. Whether honey tastes good is subjective, because tasting good requires a taster to evaluate it as good-tasting. It’s possible that a space-alien species that visits Earth tomorrow tries honey and to their tongues, it tastes disgusting, and from their perspective we’re all crazy for enjoying it. But the taste of honey isn’t socially constructed, because I don’t only think it’s good because my society has decided that it is, or developed that as a convention and taught me that I’m supposed to like it. My enjoyment of it is independent of any social influence.

(It may be possible for some aesthetic preferences to be like this, not in whole but in part. If a whole society tells itself that a certain thing is supposed to be enjoyable, could they induce an enjoyment for that thing? Possibly. For example, some people argue that how we feel about popular music is socially induced to a degree, and our idea of what music is ‘good’ is going to be different depending on what society we grow up in. There are also some aspects of music theory that seem to be natural and don’t need to be taught or induced. There is probably very interesting discourse to be had on this topic. However, this is clearly not what happened with honey.)

If I were to say gender is socially constructed, what I probably mean by that is to say gender roles entail socially-constructed associations. To wear a perfume that smells like flowers—is this masculine or feminine? It depends on the society. Maybe it’s a unisex thing everybody does. Some aspects of gender as a social phenomenon are socially constructed. There are some qualities that feel as though they get closer to objective observation rather than frivolous cultural fodder like food or clothing, such as the association between men and violence, bravery, physical strength, risk-taking. It’s not beyond imagination that a society could think women are more violent and men are more peaceful, but I don’t think there has ever been such a thing, because it goes pretty directly against the reality created by hormonal differences.

At this point, some people have the intuition that some aspect of our gendered associations, the base or foundation perhaps, are not social constructions but instead an underlying reality that we’re tapping into. This isn’t quite right: a convention that forms based on some kind of observation is still a convention. However, in that world, it would still be so that we socially construct many things atop that foundation, leading to a granted area of agreement where we can say things like which colours are for girls and which colours are for boys is socially constructed. This also indicates that such associations are clearly malleable, because we all know and acknowledge that such associations change over time.

But this is using ‘gender’ to mean gendered associations. What about gender identity? That’s a funny question. What would it even mean for a personal identity to be socially constructed? I assume what a person means by this phrase is that how a person’s identity formed was influenced by social factors. In other words, it’s not actually about socially constructed ideas, but an instance of another long-standing topic of debate within biology and sociology known as nature versus nurture. This means trying to determine the extent to which a given thing is caused by genes (nature) or caused by the conditioning that you experience growing up, interacting with other people or other physical aspects of your environment (nurture). Let’s say we notice girls cry more than boys. Why is that? Is it nature or nurture? It could be something innate, like a hormonal difference, but it could also be that we teach boys growing up that crying isn’t okay, while we don’t discourage it as much in girls, thus creating that difference through nurture? Then again, it could be a combination of both. But if so, then which factor is greater? Is it equal? Is it 20 percent nature and 80 percent nurture? This is the kind of thing people disagree on for many observable differences between people.

Not many things result entirely from nature without any influence by nurture. An example is your blood type, which is unchanging after being genetically determined. Some things result entirely from nurture, like what language you speak. There is no natural language that comes pre-built into your brain. It’s something you learn from other people around you, and if you had been born into a different part of the world, you’d likely know different languages. But many things are influenced by both. When it comes to your personal, core gender identity, is that determined by nature or nurture? It could be influenced by socialization to some extent, but today we believe it’s mostly a matter of nature. However, as recently in time as the 1970s, there were people who supposed core gender identity was determined entirely or nearly entirely by nurture, or, to use the term they used at the time, by rearing.

In the 1960s, a researcher named John Money saw an opportunity to test and hopefully demonstrate this hypothesis when a baby, at an age of 1 year and 10 months, had somehow lost most of its penis in an accident. Money somehow convinced the parents to let Money give the child cross-sex hormone treatments and raise him as a girl. Money thought if you raise a child as a girl, the child will accept that role and go along with it, because in Money’s view core gender identity was determined by socialization, and with this child he hoped to prove it. And for some time, people thought he did, but later Money came to be seen as having lied about the results of the experiment by hiding details of what happened to the boy, yet referring to it as a success story and as proof of how malleable gender identity supposedly was.

In actuality, it went very badly. For one, Money was accused of grossly mistreating this child during his upbringing, until the child eventually rejected what they had been taught and went back to living as a boy by the time he was 14. The experience was traumatizing, not only for the confusion but for the strict treatment the boy endured, along with his twin brother, whom Money also got to work with. He not only saw and worked with both boys naked, but instructed them to pretend to be acting out sex acts with one another, supposedly to enforce to the main boy that he was supposed to be in a woman’s role, which Money claimed was part of how the child would learn their new identity.

Later in his career, John Money went on to say he didn’t think pedophilia was necessarily harmless, writing in 1991, among other instances, that a 10-year-old boy could have a sex relationship with a man in his 30s and that would not be pathological. This coming after his unethical experiment that he lied about, John Money became a controversial figure and is now remembered almost exclusively in a negative light. He passed away in 2006.

I have no interest in trying to rescue Money’s legacy or reputation, which are deservedly negative. However, in the interest of accuracy, I’ll clarify a few things:

John Money wasn’t a pedophile. There’s no evidence that he was one. If he had been a pedophile, it sounds like he was in a position where he could’ve easily sexually abused the children he had access to, yet decades later he had never been accused of that. It seems safe to say he wasn’t one. He did work with naked children, but so do many other medical professionals whom you don’t consider pedophiles. Let’s not overstate our condemnation: Money was a researcher who did some aggressively unethical things in effort to prove himself right. Sadly, this happens sometimes with scientists and other intellectuals, which is why they need oversight and ethics rules.

Decades ago, when you were dealing with a vulnerable group of people who were generally looked down upon, you could get away with a lot more than usual, and far more than now. There is likely a great amount of abuse in the history of study of gender and related topics.

John Money isn’t, like, “the founder of gender theory” or anything like that. Nor is he somebody to whom modern progressives owe their beliefs. John Money’s beliefs were directly at odds with what is believed today, because if children simply accepted whatever gender identity was given to them by their upbringing, then how could trans people exist? The failure of Money’s experiment is, if anything, a confirmation of the modern position. Trans people can’t just be conditioned or willed out of being trans, just like the boy that Money experimented on couldn’t be conditioned out of his being a boy. However, anti-transgender figures to this day love to bring up John Money and talk about him as though his sins discredit modern beliefs about gender or trans people. This is the main reason most people ever even hear about him.

Even if John Money had been the first person to propose every facet of modern beliefs about gender, got all of it correct, and then ran around being a racist pedophile serial killer who loved torture and cannibalism, that would all be irrelevant to the accuracy or inaccuracy of his findings. If Einstein were a bad person, would that make relativity any less true? The type of argument people are making when they attack Money in this way is called a genetic fallacy or fallacy of origins, whereby an idea is evaluated not by its merit, but how we feel about where it came from.

Why does it matter?

I asked this earlier. Let’s get back to it.

At best, the notion gender is a social construct is offered in reply to somebody who’s speaking of gendered associations as though they’re timeless, or something that can or should never change. It can sometimes be useful to point out or remind people of the fact humans are in control of these standards, not the way around, and we know our standards can change and have changed in the past. However, there are also many conversations in which that isn’t a relevant thing to say, and people blurt it out anyway. The message becomes unclear, unless the intention is, as it seems, to say “this thing is a social construct, therefore it doesn’t matter or is unimportant, because it’s just a social construct”.

A more focused response in that context may be to say that our standards are demonstrably malleable. A malleable thing is one we can change or alter over time without breaking. We understand that laws are malleable, and that language is malleable. We understand that fashion changes. So do gendered associations. There’s no reason to bring the language of social construction into the mix. It doesn’t add anything to the discourse, and is often confusing.

Transsexuals

There has always been some disagreement about how precisely to define a transsexual person. A simple description is that a transsexual person is a male who identifies with and wants to live in a way that’s more consistent with females, or a female who identifies with and wants to live in a way that’s more consistent with males, in their respective cultures.

Let’s consider the history of terms:

The term ‘transsexual’ came to English in the 1940s, derived from the equivalent German “transsexualismus”, used in 1923 by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

‘Gender’, in its modern sense, first emerged in the mid 1900s, but became more popular in the 1970s, and then again in the 2010s.

‘Transgender’ was first used in the 1960s, intended to be an alternate term for the same phenomenon as ‘transsexual’. It was introduced by psychiatrist J. F. Oliven, who said ‘transsexual’ was misleading because it made people think it was describing something sexual in nature, like ‘homosexual’.

‘Cisgender’ first emerged in the 1990s to describe the non-trans population, simply by taking the existing cis- prefix, the opposite of trans- in various contexts.

Magnus Hirschfeld should probably be regarded as one of the great heroes of queer history. In addition to his well-meaning work with transsexuals, he wrote about homosexual love and racism. For his work, he was assaulted and exiled from his country by the Nazis. Their paramilitary groups also destroyed his research facility and burned his library in 1933.

Transsexual vs. transgender

Why are there two different terms that mean roughly the same thing? Today, some trans people reject the transsexual label, and some trans people reject the transgender label. Many other people consider the two synonyms, or view transsexual as the outdated, legacy term for transgender. Other people may consider transsexual to be a subset of transgender, with different meanings. I often shorten it to ‘trans’ in order to sidestep this entire dispute, but it’s interesting enough to review.

The term transsexual came first, and then in the 1960s people started saying transgender, which really caught on by the 80s. Christine Jorgenson, one of the most famous transsexuals, probably the first ‘celebrity’ trans woman in the US, famously rejected the transsexual label, then in vogue, and insisted on being called transgender instead.

She, too, cited her rationale as being that ‘transsexual’ sounded like it meant something to do with her sexuality, so that seems to have been what led to change broadly, as the country was then still divided on its view of homosexuals.

The term transsexual didn’t fully disappear, however. It just became less popular, and then later back into some popularity, like a fashion trend coming full circle.

But the reason, in both cases, was more than a random trend. In the last couple decades, the meaning of transgender was expanded to include more than it originally did, becoming an umbrella term for a set of people that’s mostly transsexuals, but also some other people, who would probably claim to be trans, but not transsexuals. This left transsexual as the obvious choice to communicate that distinction, if you so desire.

This is what I’m signalling when I refer to myself as a transsexual. I’m transgender, but unlike some people, I’m also transsexual. I’m using it as a more specific designation. The people who consider theirselves transgender but not transsexual are, generally speaking, people who say they identify with the other gender, but don’t actually transition their body or identify with the other sex. They might refer to theirselves as nonbinary, agender, or something else. There have been various proposed umbrella terms for these people (an umbrella within the larger transgender umbrella), such as gender-nonconforming, gender-queer, gender-variant, or gender-diverse.

There is sometimes conflict or tension between these two groups (transsexuals and non-transsexual transgender persons). In using a more specific term that communicates which subgroup I’m a part of, my intention is clarity and specificity, not to denounce or exclude anybody else. It’s important to me that society protect the rights of gender-diverse expression. I would never choose to live in a place where a bearded lady doesn’t feel safe in public.

Why are people trans?

The short answer is nobody is sure. It’s one of the many little quirks of nature, like how some people are gay, or left-handed, or psychopaths, or enjoy cilantro, or only have nine fingers. But unlike some of those other things, it’s still a mystery what exact mechanism induces the quality of being trans. There are proposed hypotheses, but the truth of the matter is not yet settled. For now, we can just accept that every new generation of people is going to have some transsexuals in the mix. It’s been estimated to affect roughly one in every 200 to 300 people, or in other words something like 0.3 to 0.5 percent. It could be more or less. (I’d personally argue those early estimates now seem to be slightly too high and the actual figure is more like 0.1 to 0.2 percent, but it’s difficult to know any of this for sure.)

A trans person is born into society with no knowledge they’re trans. They’re raised in a gender-based social order where some people are boys and some people are girls, and depending on which you are, you’re treated differently growing up, and then sorted into different rooms for some reason. At some point, that person may become self-aware and realize they’re a girl but they really wish they could be a boy, or the other way around, and it’s more than just a passing thought; it’s a complex, a kind of obsession, something they can’t easily get over or stop thinking about, because it’s coming from a deep, fundamental part of theirselves. The question then shifts to how they want to navigate that situation.

In a sense, the ‘trans agenda’ is a proposal made by trans people to their community. “I’m not a male. I’m female. I was born female, and I was raised as a girl. However, my intention is to live as a man from now on. I’d like it if you could think of me like a male, treat me the way you treat males, and refer to me using male-coded language.” And think of it the other way around for people born male. Importantly, this doesn’t require disputing any of the facts about biology presented earlier in this document. Trans people don’t have to claim or believe anything about theirselves that isn’t uncontroversially true.

The language that we use for a trans person actualizing their identity is ‘transitioning’—either a female who transitions from living as a woman to instead living as a man, or a male who transitions from living as a man to instead living as a woman. Transsexual women are males living as woman, while transsexual men are females living as men.

Note at this point that it’s become common to use man and woman for gender, but male and female for sex. This isn’t always the case, and hasn’t always been the case, but if we agree on a common distinction like this, it prevents having to clarify each time in the future. As such, I use this distinction in this document and in most of my other writings.

Are trans people mentally ill?

If you’re willing to respect the conclusion of modern psychiatrists, the simple answer is no, it’s not considered a mental illness. It was sort of considered one in the past, when the condition was less well understood. Trans people typically had a lot of distress and confusion, high rates of other disorders, and their insistence on their own identity could be interpreted as some kind of irrational compulsion, so they’d go in to see medical professionals who would say “well something seems to be wrong with this person”, and they tentatively threw us in the “mental disorder of some kind” bucket, where we stayed for a few decades until enough researchers decided to investigate the matter more.

What is a mental illness, or disorder? It’s something that causes significant impairment to your ability to live your life in a normal, healthy, functional way. It’s possible for you to experience a certain symptom but not so severely that it interferes with your ability to, let’s say, have a job, go to school, maintain friends, family, a relationship, etc. If there can be people who lead normal, healthy lives while being trans, then ‘being trans’ is not itself a mental illness.

The belief that trans people are mentally ill—many people seem to think they’re mentally ill by definition—comes from misunderstandings about ‘gender dysphoria’, a term listed in the DSM-5 that people interpret as a renaming of an older term, “gender identity disorder”. If you look up that name change, you’ll find sites claiming it was only renamed to help spare trans people’s feelings, because the term ‘disorder’ was too stigmatizing—not because calling it a disorder was technically inaccurate. The impression people walk away with is that trans people have gender dysphoria, which is essentially still a mental disorder, so it’s fair to just say trans people are mentally ill.

However:

The shift from “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria” was not just a renaming, but also a reconceptualization of what it is we’re even talking about. It shouldn’t even really be thought of as the same disorder under a new name, but a new disorder that better explains similar real cases, rendering the previously conceptualized disorder obsolete. We went from talking about the identity itself and calling that a disorder, to talking about the experience of distress or discomfort that arises from the divergence between a person’s identity and the social expectations they experience in their society.

Being trans doesn’t just mean having gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria refers to something trans people often experience (distress or discomfort that arises from the incongruity between their identity and the social expectations they face in society), but not something that all trans people experience at all times, and which some trans people no longer actively experience after transitioning (which is why some people refer to transitioning, or the social actualization of gender identity, as the ‘treatment’ for dysphoria).

There’s a colloquial mix-up between gender dysphoria as a general experience versus gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis. This is similar to people who say they feel anxiety about something compared with people who have an anxiety disorder. Trans people may describe “feeling dysphoric” or “feeling dysphoria”, but they aren’t really describing having those feelings in a way that is so significant they would be classified as a mental illness. To make that distinction, some people have adopted the more specific term clinical gender dysphoria, while gender dysphoria without qualification can also include a general feeling that doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of a disorder.

Even if trans people were necessarily mentally ill—as in, if ‘being trans’ was considered a mental illness—this likely wouldn’t accomplish anything for the people who are most interested in the distinction. The purpose of claiming trans people are mentally ill is to imply that we should doubt the validity of their identity or experiences. That could make sense if you consider how, in many other cases, people who experience mental illness are likely to exhibit cognitive distortions, which can affect their judgment or reasoning. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to gender dysphoria or with identifying as a trans person. The trans people who claim to identify differently from the gender of their sex go on to live as the opposite gender and this does make them happy. There doesn’t seem to be any real mistake in their reasoning or perception of the world.

A similar claim I sometimes see is that if somebody is mentally ill and claims something that isn’t true—e.g. you’re a schizophrenic and you think the government is watching you while you sleep—then we shouldn’t affirm that delusion. The problem (aside from that I’m not certain we should never affirm the delusions of a crazy person—what if that is the right thing to do sometimes?) is that unlike a person who’s hallucinating or experiencing a delusion of causality, trans people don’t claim anything about the world that isn’t factually true. This is itself contentious and leads to the next point.

Are trans people delusional?

The people who dislike transgenderism and don’t want it to be socially accepted sometimes claim that trans people hold a false belief, or deny some aspect of reality, by stubbornly asserting, perceiving, or believing in something that isn’t true. This is called a delusion: a fixed belief that is held without justification and despite the presence of evidence that it’s false. However, if you ask such people to identify the belief that is supposedly false, they immediately run into some problems.

Answer 1: “Trans people think they can change their sex.” This is a misconception that could, charitably, be blamed in part on the language of sex and its derivatives. The term ‘transsexual’ could sound like it means somebody whose sex changes, and transsexual people do get procedures that used to be called “sex change operations” (this term is outdated and no longer commonly used), and take what we still call cross-sex hormones. However, if we set aside these confusing labels and misnomers, trans people don’t believe or assert they’re actually changing their sex. Trans people understand they’re able to change some aspects of their body, but not all aspects, and the amount of change possible with our current level of technology is not enough to justify saying the sex of any person has changed. Trans women haven’t become biological females—a trans woman is a male who has feminized their body to some extent (they undergo feminizing hormone therapy), but they’re still not able to get pregnant or have periods. They don’t have female reproductive function. They can’t pass on their genetic material through large gametes that fuse with the sperm of another person. And vice versa for trans men. There is no real confusion about any of this, except for the confusion that sometimes arises about what language is best to describe this reality.

Answer 2: “Trans women think they’re women.” How can this be a delusion? If somebody says it’s a delusion, they’ve failed to distinguish a factual dispute from a linguistic one. The latter is not categorically able to be a delusion, or even a false belief. As such, there must be a misunderstanding. Let’s ensure we understand the difference.

If I tell you this jar has 23 beans in it, but you disagree and say it only has 20, then we’re having a factual dispute. There is some underlying fact of the matter, and we disagree about what that is. The reality may correspond with one of our claims, but not both, assuming our claims are contradictory. (We could also both be wrong.)

If I tell you there’s an elevator in the lobby, but you’re from Britain so you call it a lift, then we’re having a difference in language. We mean the same object, but we refer to this object using different names. There is no disagreement about the underlying reality we’re both describing.

If I ask you for chips, thinking of potato chips, but you’re from Britain so you come back with what I’d call french fries, there is again a difference in language, but this time of a different nature: we’re using the same name, but we had different objects in mind. So remember, it happens both ways.

A word is just a noise or series of symbols that directs us to a meaning. It’s like a signpost, pointing to a location. The meaning is what matters. There can be interesting discussion about linguistic differences, as in asking why one way of wording something might be better or clearer than another—but linguistic differences can’t be a ‘delusion’, because they aren’t a matter of one’s perception or understanding of reality. In other words, a linguistic difference is not evidence of a factual dispute.

Disagreements about the word ‘woman’ are a matter of people using the same term, but intending two different things. The comparison I often use is if I say there’s a crane in the park, but you look in the park and don’t see a crane, that may sound like a factual dispute at first, but if you realize that I was talking about a crane, the type of bird, and you were looking for a crane, those industrial lifting machines used to move heavy objects around, then we’re actually not having a factual dispute at all. We’re just experiencing a difference of language, but mistaking that for a factual disagreement.

I like to write out the different meanings as though separate entries in a dictionary:

crane noun [ kreyn ] 1: a member of the family Gruidae, tall birds with long legs and a long neck which is extended during flight 2: a machine that uses a hoist and pulley to lift objects, typically during construction or to load and unload freight

This allows us to replay that interaction: I say there’s a crane(1) in the park, but you look and say you don’t see a crane(2) in the park. This time, there’s clearly no conflict between our statements.

Now imagine woman is defined like this:

woman noun [ wo͝omən ] 1: an adult human female 2: an adult human, usually a female, but not necessarily — I’ll expand more on this later

An anti-trans person claims that trans women aren’t women(1), but trans women don’t claim to be women(1). They only claim to be women(2). As such, there is no factual disagreement between the two statements, because the trans woman isn’t claiming to meet the woman(1) criteria.

What is a woman?

Yes, that’s the question the arguments in the previous section are naturally leading to.

The concept of a woman came about to describe the general qualities of females, but now the proposal is that it doesn’t need to be taken so strictly, and it’s possible for a male to become part of what people intend when they say women, provided such males are sufficiently female-like, in some way or another (where precisely that line is drawn varies from person to person, so it’s hard to nail down beyond this).

But why? What’s the point in adopting a less rigid definition of ‘woman’? This is an interesting point in the dialogue that many people never reach, instead getting stuck on one of the points before this. There is a natural shift in meaning that occurs when the intended referent changes, due to the language being pegged to something other than the qualities we actually care about or are meaning to select for. This is especially likely to happen when there are changing circumstances (e.g. the invention of hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgeries that make ‘transsexual women’ more of a realistic phenomenon for the rest of society to experience and integrate into their understanding of the world).

Think about a similar concept: fatherhood. To be a father in the biological sense means to be the male progenitor of another organism. From this point, though, we develop a concept of fatherhood, meaning the way fathers do or should behave in society or the type of relationship or commitment they do or should have to their offspring. It’s then possible for a person to exhibit fatherhood toward a person without actually being their male biological progenitor. The concept derivative is able to exist independent from its concrete foundation.

Now suppose I live in a society where people have only recently started adopting children, as a new practice. I say to a class of children, if you don’t know anything about hunting, you should ask your fathers to teach you, and two of the children raise their hand and say they don’t have fathers—but I learn one of them is being raised by a man who adopted them, and the other is being raised by their mother along with another man whom their mother married after their father died. To clarify, I say that in their case, whenever I say ‘father’, they can just assume I mean those men instead, since for the purpose of what I’m talking about, it’s not actually important for this person to be your biological progenitor. What’s actually important is just that he’s the man who’s committed to raising and taking care of you.

Though imaginary, you can see how in this case, you can see how there’s a divergence between the previous, literal definition of the language being used (father: male biological progenitor), and the idea that I was actually trying to capture, for which I merely used ‘father’ as a shorthand for lack of better term (father: the man who’s raising you). But when an exception arose, I effectively redirected or rerouted that word from one meaning to the other by establishing my intention to the listener. It typically means one thing, but in this context, for you, take it to mean something else.

We may then develop language for this distinction, to be used whenever necessary. In this case: adoptive father vs. biological father. There are some circumstances where I need to specify one or the other, but there are many other cases where the distinction is unimportant and I can just use the unqualified unifying term ‘father’.

This works out especially well in the father example because in many cases the distinction isn’t apparent, i.e. you can’t tell by looking. You’ve probably encountered people in your life whose father was not their biological progenitor and you didn’t notice. In many cases, their children theirselves don’t even notice. This isn’t necessary for the linguistic rerouting, but it helps the transition happen more smoothly.

Now ask the question: Why choose a less rigid definition of father? To some degree the answer is we didn’t directly choose it, so much as it happened, or that it comes about naturally under certain circumstances (a divergence between the intended and previous meaning of a word that’s used as an approximation for some other, more important thing). The advantage conferred is ease or convenience. Instead of calling the adoptive father a father too, I could have always made the clarification “ask your father—or, if you don’t have a father, then any male who is raising you like a father—to help you with this”. But it’s easier and more convenient to establish that “for our purposes here, that person counts as a father, so when I say ‘father’ in this context, he is included”. We could say this person is an honorary father.

This analysis and rationale seems no less applicable to the concept of womanhood. Consider what I said earlier: the trans ‘agenda’ is a person making a proposal to their society to be treated like the sex they’re not. Regardless of your personal attitude toward this phenomenon, the fact by this point is that in many communities, that proposal has been accepted. There are, in fact, biological females who are thought of, spoken of, and generally accepted as women, even by people who know full well they aren’t females. The exact criteria varies, but suffice to say if a male expresses a persistent psychological desire to live as a woman and makes a significant change to their hair, clothing, behaviour, and body to be more female-like, then society at large, at least where I live, will accept this person as a woman, similar to the adoptive father being accepted as a father. I dare say they’re honorary females.

Consider the effect this has on our language: if I tell all the women to go to one place, but my intention is not only for females but also for males who are thought of like females to go to that place, then I could specify that each time—or to make things easier, I could establish that, for my purposes in this context, when I say ‘women’, I mean both females and this special category of males that we treat like females. In this way, the language of ‘woman’ has been redirected or rerouted, to better match what is actually intended when it was first used.

Trans women didn’t need to be considered women. ‘Woman’ is just a word, after all. I could imagine an alternate timeline where this linguistic shift never happened, where trans activists never said “trans women are women” and everybody in society insisted on a strict, unchanging definition for the term. What would be the fate of trans women? A person might ask me if trans women are women, and in that timeline I might reply “no, but we should treat them like women, even though they technically aren’t”. And what difference would that make? Aside from the worlds we use to describe it, not much. And remember, it’s ultimately the treatment of people that is more important than the names we give them. We tend to care about language only because it often affects treatment, or it affects how people think, which affects treatment.

Why didn’t that happen? Because it’s weird and unnatural. It makes more sense that the language we’re most used to would evolve. If I’m at a restaurant with a trans woman and I say to somebody “yeah I’m at the table with that man over there”, pointing to somebody who looks like a female to everybody else, people are going to be confused. And nobody wants trans men who look like males in the female washrooms. Nor does anybody want to have to bother updating the way that we talk about gender in order to integrate these exceptions as clearly as possible. It makes more sense to integrate the exceptions into the language, by shrugging and saying “trans women are women and trans men are men”. It’s the simpler, more natural, more common-sense solution to the dilemma.

Why did trans people become such a popular topic in the 2010s?

To many people this seems like a completely random cultural shift, like society got bored of its previous struggles and went out looking for some shiny new cultural thing to obsess over. That could be true to some extent, in a way that’s less of a cynical conspiracy theory than it sounds, if some popular writers didn’t have much to talk about and started paying more attention to issues they had previously overlooked to fill the attention vacuum—but I also don’t really see anything to suggest that’s the case. The shift was instead a consequence of systemic and institutional changes, some of which were resulted from research and understanding of trans people reaching a critical mass, where the opinion of establishment medical professionals was changed in response to accumulating evidence.

In 2011, a major professional organization dedicated to research and treatment of trans people, known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (est. 1979), or HBIGDA, was renamed to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. In the following year, it published version 7 of its Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, often shortened to just the Standards of Care, or the SOC. A major change from the previous version published in 2001, version 7 finally discontinued the Benjamin Scale for diagnosing gender identity disorder. Although progressive for its time, being developed by the well-meaning Harry Benjamin (another hero of queer history) as part of his 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon, the Benjamin Scale had become inconsistent with a modern understanding of gender identity, and, out of caution and an attempt to reduce liability for practitioners, it set much higher requirements for diagnosis than we have today. The language and framing about transsexual, transgender, or gender-diverse people was also updated, stressing that such people are not necessarily disordered. This contributed to destigmatization, and led to transitioning being far more accessible for normal trans people.

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (the APA) issued their fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often called the DSM. This update not only replaced gender identity disorder with gender dysphoria, but reframed how we even think about these things, from the identity itself being a disorder and a problem, to instead our goal being to address the anxiety or distress that such people experience, and that being the disorder. Like the WPATH changes, this contributed to destigmatization and helped increase accessibility of care.

The emergence of social media was also a factor to increasing awareness of numerous social issues, including transgender identities, as it allowed emergent dialogue that might’ve not happened otherwise, at least not nearly to the extent extent. In 2005, nobody had a smartphone and there was no such thing as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. A mere 7 years later, in 2012, all those websites had become mainstream (except TikTok, which took another 8 years or so). There are still people who don’t recognize how much of a change this was for our culture, because of how it enabled people all throughout society to access information and to connect and engage in conversation about anything they wanted in a pseudonymous manner. This was huge for minority voices, or anybody who would have been marginalized in the previous decades and had difficulty breaking through the more centralized landscape of mainstream legacy media. The amount of discourse that took place focusing on race, gender, and sexuality suddenly exploded. It was a decade of freedom and self-expression that people who grew up before this time rarely had access to.

Then, in and around 2015, there were major breakthroughs in mainstream cultural representation. This is when Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, probably the most high-profile person ever to do so. It shocked the world and sparked god knows how many conversations in how many households across America. It was also in 2015 that I am Jazz, a reality television program spotlighting transgender teen Jazz Jennings, debuted on TLC with mainstream support, funding, and attention. Even just these two changes, Jenner and Jennings, effectively taught millions of people what being trans even meant. This language was not even known to most people only a year prior.

There is something very empowering about discovering or developing the language and concepts with which to make sense of the world around you. The random lines become a pattern, the noise becomes music, the mess becomes a system that you can predict and navigate.

If a society goes from nobody knows what trans people are, to that concept being the talk of the town, there’s probably going to be some increase in the number of people who think about it and realize something about theirselves. It’s similar to the way I’ve heard some people talk about mental health patterns, where if you have something like autism or ADHD, but you’ve never heard of those terms before, and you were living back in 1305, you might never know what’s wrong with you.

Some remaining questions

How many genders are there?

This is a question that got a lot of attention 10 years ago, which led to people defiantly claiming there’s only two genders, in opposition to those who would entertain any other answers. Traditionally, gender was an abstraction based on observations about sex, which led to most cultures developing a simple binary understanding of masculinity versus femininity, which is enduringly intuitive for us today. However, there’s no strict rule that prevents us from imagining other categories, if doing so feels useful. We could imagine that space between the two ends as its own category of some kind. We do this with colours, for comparison, when we label that space between red and blue ‘purple’.

The proposal is, at least, that we carve out a middle category called ‘nonbinary’ (this is the name everyone has settled on).

The argument for doing so is that our society has use-cases for such a concept, i.e. very androgynous people who identify and present as something in-between being very masculine or very feminine. However, it seems most discourse about this ends up being about the plausibility of creating such a category rather than whether there’s a social need for it.

There are numerous things to consider:

If it’s not intuitive or doesn’t click for enough people, it may simply never catch on and become socially meaningful. There’s a good chance this is the case for a third gender. After all, dealing with only the concepts of masculine and feminine as a one-dimensional spectrum where the vast majority of people—i.e. something greater than 99 percent—are clearly and apparently one or the other is the norm and has been for centuries. It’s the only real paradigm that most of us are used to. Our language and culture have developed around this being the case.

The idea of somebody who is something other than a man or woman raises immediate questions for the way in which we think about such a person in relation to others, considering we live in a society with a gendered social order. If that person has sex with a man, are they gay or straight? If they use a gendered facility, do they use the men’s or women’s area? I don’t know the answer.

It’s often so that people who self-identify as something other than ‘man’ or ‘woman’ are still seen or interpreted as either men or women by others in society, or in other words as nonbinary males or nonbinary females. This is probably what people would use to base their answers to my previous questions (a man who has sex with a nonbinary male would feel like he’s having gay sex, while a man who has sex with a nonbinary female would not—and people would probably recommend the nonbinary male use the men’s washroom, not the women’s). Unless that nonbinary person is also a transsexual, in which case this flips. In conclusion, a nonbinary person’s internal identity notwithstanding, their social experience tends to be gendered according to their phenotype.

There are some nonbinary people who claim they aren’t “between” masculine and feminine, but off the spectrum entirely. What does that mean? For most people it’s incoherent, comparable to somebody saying “I’m not tall or short, nor am I in between tall and short; I don’t have a height” or “I’m not hot or cold, nor am I in between hot and cold; I don’t have a temperature”. It doesn’t make sense to us, or at least it’s not something whose meaning is easily interpretable for people who don’t already “get it”.

The most I’ve been able to make sense of it is as follows: some people have an inner sense of thinking about theirself as a masculine person and therefore trying to do masculine things. They want to walk in a masculine way, talk in a masculine way, do things that people consider masculine. And they want to avoid doing anything feminine. And vice versa for people who consider theirselves feminine instead.

Imagine if a person said rather than holding one of these two attitudes, they feel no connection or aversion to either side, and just do what they want without consideration for the gendered associations of their choices or behaviour.

The way that I try to relate to this is thinking about possible distinctions between two categories where other people might have a preference but I don’t. Let’s try to come up with a couple examples: do I try to listen to music made in England, or America? I don’t know. I don’t really think about it. Some bands I like are English and some are American. How about when I buy coffee, do I favour beans grown in South America, Africa, or Asia? I don’t know. I think the popular brands where I live are usually grown in Africa, but I’m not sure about that. There could be another aspect, where a person feels some kind of anxiety about being put in a box, made to choose between, and commit to, one thing or another. That could be how a person like this relates to the feeling of dysphoria, if they claim to.

What are the social consequences of any of this? I don’t know. Possibly nothing. It’s like asking what the social consequences are of somebody who claims to be aromantic. They don’t experience romantic feelings at all. What does that mean to you? If you aren’t trying to date them, then maybe nothing, you have no reason to care. But you get to learn a little bit more about how their brain works. When you live in a place where people have a lot of freedom to express what they want, you’ll end up with people who express uncommon feelings, and sometimes they might come up with language to describe those feelings, even if it’s not particularly consequential.

Perhaps confusingly, there are some categories of personal identity that don’t seem to entail or require any particular external performance, and therefore are not necessarily visible to an outside observer. A person who claims to be nonbinary, agender, or some other gender-divergent identity might not seem to be any different from a normal man or woman, except in their self-reported internal feelings.

Overlapping categories

Intersex people are not necessarily trans. There are intersex males who are also trans women, but there are some intersex males who remain men, and similar for intersex females.

Nonbinary and other gender-nonconforming people might also identify as transsexuals if they transition. There are some people who refer to theirselves as nonbinary trans, or trans nonbinary, meaning they transitioned, but after transitioning they consider theirselves nonbinary rather than the opposite sex.

These three categories can all have some overlap, but they’re also distinct enough ideas that people can be one without the other two, or two without being the third.

That’s all for now. Say, does Tumblr have a character limit? This is the longest thing I’ve posted yet, but I have another topic in mind that will end up being even longer when I get around to it.

[mkenvs3000f24]

Unit 10 Blog Post

Developing My Personal Ethic as a Nature Interpreter

Interpreting nature is an opportunity to inspire, educate, and foster deep relationships between humans and the natural world, not just a job or duty. As I cultivate my own ethics as a nature interpreter, I think carefully about the values I uphold, the obligations I have, and the methods that best suit my character and life experiences. These components will be examined in this blog post, which will weave together the knowledge I've gained from this course, my past experiences, and my future goals.

Beliefs That Shape My Approach

My conviction in the inherent worth of nature is the foundation of my work as a nature interpreter. My early upbringing in an environment with well-kept parks and gardens gave me a deep appreciation for the natural world. These areas served as more than just backgrounds for my life; they were havens of inspiration, happiness, and comfort. Nature can be a source of serenity, concentration, and sensory engagement, as Richard Louv stated in Last Child in the Woods. These encounters shaped my conviction that nature merits our protection not because it is useful but rather because it is valuable in and of itself.

The value of developing a close relationship with nature is another guiding belief. The notion that people protect what they love inspires me greatly. I want to encourage people to take care of the environment by giving them the chance to feel amazement and wonder in natural environments. This viewpoint supports the notion that interpreting nature is about fostering a closer bond between humans and the natural world rather than only dispensing knowledge.

Responsibilities as a Nature Interpreter

I recognize the responsibility that comes with being a nature interpreter. First and foremost, it is your role to convey important and correct information. In a time of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change, it is critical that I base my interpretations on facts while also making difficult subjects approachable and relatable to a wide range of audiences.

Promoting accessibility and inclusivity is a further responsibility a nature interpreter would have. Everyone has a right to nature, yet access to its wonders may be privileged; restricted by obstacles, whether they are educational, cultural, or physical as discussed in Unit 3. By developing interpretive experiences that speak to people of all backgrounds and skill levels, I hope to dismantle these boundaries. This entails taking into account various learning preferences and making sure my language and teaching strategies are welcoming and inclusive.

My obligation to future generations is just as significant. Children are not only participants in the events of today, but they will also be the future stewards of the environment, as Richard Louv discussed in Unit 8. Young people can develop lifelong curiosity and compassion by being exposed to the wonders of nature, whether through up-close interactions with wildlife, an engrossing tale, or a practical activity.

Approaches That Reflect My Personality and Skills

My approach to interpretation is both disciplined and dynamic, as I thrive on organization, passion, and goal-oriented communication. Presenting factual information while fostering moments of wonder and engagement is something I try to balance. One of my favorite methods is storytelling, since it enables me to relate relatable anecdotes to scientific principles. For instance, in our first Podcast instead of just outlining the ecological effects of outdoor cats, I might tell a tale about a particular species of bird that is impacted by predation, allowing my audience to sympathize with the difficulties that wildlife faces.

Another essential component of my strategy is interactive experiences. I place a high value on conversation and active engagement whether I'm presenting a workshop, leading a nature walk, or producing a podcast. In addition to keeping the audience interested, questions, observations, and comments provide them the chance to influence the event in ways that are significant to them.

Another aspect of my evolving strategy is the careful integration of technology as mentioned in Unit 8. The significance of employing platforms like blogs and podcasts to reach people who might not be physically present in the field was emphasized in this session. I can share tales, photos, and thoughts with a worldwide audience while preserving the warmth and genuineness of in-person encounters by utilizing digital platforms to expand the reach of my interpretive work.

Balancing Challenges with Hope

Addressing the gravity of environmental issues without overpowering the audience is one of the biggest challenges in nature interpretation. Being an environmental educator can be like attempting to use a teaspoon to halt a rushing river, as Jacob Rodenburg points out in Unit 9. The enormity of the issues we confront such as plastic pollution, habitat devastation, and climate change can seem intimidating. But hope, in my opinion, is a powerful remedy for despair.

To balance honesty with hope, I focus on actionable insights and success stories. Promoting regional conservation initiatives, outlining easy activities people can take to lessen their influence, and acknowledging any advancements made, no matter how miniscule, can give people the confidence that their actions count. For example, to provide participants a practical approach to support biodiversity, a pollinator program can incorporate a hands-on lesson on growing native flowers.

The possibility of regeneration is another source of hope. According to Rodenburg, communities that are rich in nature should be established where kids may both maintain and revitalize the natural systems in their immediate surroundings as mentioned in Unit 9. I see my job as a nature interpreter as fostering this regenerative mindset and assisting others in progressing from awareness to action and, eventually, advocacy.

Making Interpretation Meaningful

In my opinion, the key to meaningful interpretation lies in authenticity and passion. The inspiration for my interpretive work comes from my own relationship with nature. I can provide programs and content that are not only educational but also profoundly personal and influential if I remain loyal to my experiences, values, and voice.

Adapting experiences to the audience is another way to make interpretation meaningful. I can create messages that connect when I know who they are—their needs, interests, and degree of nature acquaintance. A program for a group of young children can emphasize sensory exploration, such as discovering edible wild berries by their leaf patterns or acknowledging the differences in birds based on their chirp. A guided hike for adults could cover ecological principles or conservation tactics.

Finally, I will try to use every interpretative experience as an opportunity to improve, both for my audience and for myself. A crucial step in this process is reflection. What went effectively? I ask myself after every program. What might be made better? How can I learn more about the subjects I'm presenting? My work will always be effective, current, and new because of my dedication to learning and adapting.

Carrying the “So What?” Forward

This course has forced me to reflect critically on my identity as a nature interpreter, reaffirming that nature interpretation is a calling rather than merely a career—an opportunity to uplift people, build relationships, and support the survival of the earth. I carry with me as I go ahead the knowledge that interpretation may lead to change, the obligation to make good use of my education and privilege, and the conviction that even a modest act of connection can have a significant influence. I'm dedicated to making every minute matter, whether I'm hosting a forest walk or producing a podcast, for the sake of the environment and its inhabitants.

[bnhaobservation]

I think people didn’t understand the context of the scene is that Endevor views his own fathers action, he views his action of saving the girl but getting killed as a failure He treats his fathers failure as his own but about him he was looking down on him for it the example would be in how he Calls his corpses of Lump of meat. There was no empathy or understanding towards the father's actions, just his reaction. This scene is focused on how Enji feels than his own father's feelings. 

Hum...

...I'm not sure what triggered this ask (maybe this reply to another ask?) but the charming part of a manga being a narrative and visual story is that, unless the text or the author say something explicit, the rest is up to interpretation.

So, unless I'm backed up by Horikoshi's statements or by something factual in the manga, I can't tell others how a scene MUST be read, just list various possible readings or merely my own.

For example you say Enji calls his father's corpse a lump of meat because he looks down on him.

It's an interpretation. Another possible interpretation is that it's merely a factual description of his father's remains along with the girl's remains (he calls them both lump of meats) as the area is devasted as if a great explosion has taken place, Enji's father's body could have been mangled beyond recognition and Enji seems to be in shock.

People in shock can distance themselves in this way by refusing to accept what remains of their beloved is what once was their beloved in a 'that's not my father, that's a lump of meat'... or just by being coldly factual because they find relief in it.

Am I trying to say THIS IS THE CORRECT INTERPRETATION? How should I know? This is just a possible interpretation and I'm not Horikoshi.

It stands on equal ground with all the possible interpretations.

We don't know how was Enji's relationship with his father, if he loved the guy or hated the guy, we don't even know if his father was a Hero or just a common person, if he was a well known coward who had a sudden moment of heroism but lacked the ability to save people or a braggart who liked to claim he could defeat any villain with ease.

Everything is possible.

If we analize the scene from a visual perspective, Enji's eyes are wide open and with no pupils inside, which is generally the visual used to represent shock. The rain on his face can be viewed as symbolically representing tears, and therefore sadness.

So if we extrapolate from the visual Enji felt shock and sadness at his father's death but, again, this is not written in stone, this is an analysis done by comparing Enji's image to similar ones and extrapolating from it the recurring visual tropes and their meaning.

Again, it's interpretation, nothing is factual, people are free to disagree.

Narratively though, the scene is shown in relation to a discussion about weakness, or, more specifically, about Enji's innate weakness (生来の弱さ seirai no yowasa), not about failure.

Enji's themes were always tied with "strenght" (強い 'tsuyoi') and its opposite, "weakness" (弱い 'yowai'), the one tied to a theme of failure, or more specifically of "failed work/creation" (失敗作 'Shippaisaku') is Touya, who's haunted by that word to the point it triggers him even when he hears it in the orphanage.

Of course you can interpret this as weakness= failure because, again, we're free to interpret things and the connection 'if you're weak you'll fail' can be done. It's not in the text since the whole thing continues with young Enji telling old Enji he has to continue cursing his true enemy, his own weakness, as this is the only thing that had kept him alive and, in the following chapter he insists he'll keep raging against himself (anger is another of Enji's themes)... but also that he must win.

Failure/fear of failure isn't really considered, not even when he lists the big four that lead to expose the weakness that was always within him...

Said all this, I don't mean to say your interpretation is wrong. I'm not Horikoshi, I don't know which interpretation is right.

The fact that multiple interpretations of a manga scene can exist is what for me, makes things interesting so I'm actually grateful you shared your view with me.

I like to read of different possible readings for scenes, even when they don't match with mine and don't make me change my opinion. For me they're still interesting because they express the different ways in which things can be read.

So again, thank you for sharing your vision for your ask and for allowing me to talk again about the Todorokis as I love to do it.

Let's wait together and see if Horikoshi will give us more bits of Enji's past (or more info about the Todorokis in general, or more scenes with them at least... I'll really take anything at this point...)!

[namethatghostling]

Please tell us EVERYTHING about your dyke scarecrow au🎃🐦‍⬛

ghjk its not even rly like a full fledged au or anything i just resonate so heavily w the character and i was like. sure ok everyones making their own version of their fav rogues, why not me? so basically shes just like a mishmash of all my favorite interpretations and adaptations of the character with a heavy sprinkling of Gender

(also some vaguely paranormal spooky shit bc im so obsessed w scarecrows potential as like an actual horror character. in my version its left deliberately unclear if scarecrow the villain is %100 a persona made up by jon or if its a literal possessing force that has haunted her from childhood. make of it what u will.)

the whole origin story thing goes a little like this. jon crane (she/he/they/it), born johanna keeny, was raised by his fundie xtian grandma, mary keeny, in a farming town in georgia. from childhood she was kind of an oddball, and had a strange preoccupation with fear, loving ghost stories and occasionally menacing the crows that were common on the family land just to see them scatter.

they were always booksmart but also pretty socially inept. bullied at school and either ignored or brutally "disciplined" at home, she found consolation and comfort in books, everything from classic literature to dense scientific texts to trashy pulp horror. jon also struggled with (largely undiagnosed/untreated) chronic pain and, as a result, sleep issues. when she was able to sleep she often experienced sleep paralysis which manifested in nightmares and waking hallucinations of the scarecrow in the field outside the window speaking to her. its voice was wretched like nails scraping glass, but it spoke kindly to them, promising to protect them from the true nightmare that was yet to come. jon tried not to listen. she considered herself too sensible to believe in boogiemen. but as she got older things got worse, her body and mind continued to act against her, certain secrets regarding her sexuality came to light, followed by a confrontation with her granny after she began to threaten her with the promise of "exorcism"...

eventually, jon was left with no choice but to let the scarecrow handle things.

more assorted infodumping below the cut

after using the meager inheritance left by dear departed granny to pursue higher education in gotham, jon legally changed their name both in order to make it harder to track down their history and as a final spiteful gesture, taking the surname of the man grandma keeny had blamed for the corruption of her daughter.

legally she is still johanna and doesnt necessarily mind her given name but still vastly prefers jon. a very select few people are allowed to call her jonny, and NO ONE is allowed to call her joni/joanie any variant thereof.

their rise to villainy is still mostly the same since thats one thing that is generally p consistent in canon. professor of psychology, not well liked by students or staff, secretly working on a pet project involving testing the affects of fear on the human mind with some less than willing test subjects, yadda yadda yadda

scarecrow both is and isnt a separate entity from jon. jon, being scientifically minded, most of the time considers scarecrow to be the natural result of a traumatic childhood manifesting in a protector figure that gains control of their shared body during moments of intense stress or panic. this is true! in certain less rational moments however she believes it to be a completely foreign being, a literal demon that has plagued her family line for generations, like granny always said. this is also true! how can both of those things be factually correct? figure it out yourself!

scarecrow is always eager to wreak some havoc on anyone who gets in jon's way, but as for jon, he has refused to directly inflict violence on anyone since his grandmother. she was his first and last. jon's far from a pacifist, but hes also not bloodthirsty, and scarecrow begrudgingly respects his wishes. after all, its better if the test subjects stay alive as long as possible anyway.

jon has hypermobile eds. as a kid they used to freak out their classmates by messing around with their double joints and stretching out their skin. it became a lot less fun for them in adolescence when the background hum of joint pain suddenly teamed up with their growing pains, also made worse by grannys dislike of doctors delaying their diagnosis for years and their refusal to use mobility aids when they needed them out of fear of the bullying getting any worse. they finally gave in and started regularly using a cane in college but sometimes theyll still try to go without it. not great.

also related to the above, she has had kind of a fucked relationship with self medicating to deal with pain in the past. and in the present to a degree. also kind of a fucked relationship with pain in general.

probably autistic and definitely experiences some flavor of paranoid psychosis and ptsd but was never diagnosed with either because 1) they knew it would impact their ability to pursue their field of choice since they would always be considered "too close" when it came to matters of psychology and 2) theyre pretty sure theres nothing another doctor could tell them about themself that they dont already know and better.

masks like their life depends on it in public and pretty well most of the time. people for sure know theres something up with that crane guy but not enough to really give a shit most of the time. fucking hates stimming around other people. fucking HATES being treated as infantile or less capable.

one of the many benefits of becoming scarecrow, whether in terms of the villain persona or the being that is and isnt jon, is being able to be a lot more visibly bizarre without being treated like a child. instead people just treat it like a threat, which it prefers greatly.

vocal stim of quoting lines from favorite books, old nursery rhymes, and even the occasional half-remembered church song. jons grandmothers religion was largely a burden she dropped as soon as she could, but unfortunately they kinda went off with the southern gospel.

she had her first kiss with a girl from her class after sneaking away from a halloween party together. they got caught and after the news got out the girl hurriedly got back together with her ex boyfriend to protect herself from the inevitable backlash. scarecrow thinks she should have gone the way of dear old granny, but jon stubbornly disagrees to this day despite it all.

people generally think jon is older than he is. this used to bother him but now hes kind of into the whole weathered old butch vibe. certified queer elder moment.

still as much of a nerdass bookworm as she was as a kid. cried until she made herself sick the first time she read carrie. will take this to her grave.

of course theres more but once again this is fuckin long enough already.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

"Social media is gravely affecting political discourse" isn't a new take by any means, but in this case I have a theory concerning Western advocates for Russia and China. Social media's primary form of political discourse, moreso than any other format, is to attempt to dunk on your opponent and make them look stupid and cowardly no matter how factually inane your comments are--and the greater social norm is that the more snide, aloof and snarky you are, the more correct you are. The more epic a clapback you make in a brief headline fit for being screenshotted and spread by your advocates with no intention of digging deeper, the more legs your narrative has.

Russia and China, either by intention or whether translators pick the most hostile interpretation possible for a given translation, play into this perfectly. While American and Europeans attempt gravitas, dignity and professionalism, every press release concerning the West from China or Russia is a sneering, smug remark hurling insults in a frequently nonsensical fashion (hypocrisy of any involved aside as pertains to accusations of imperialism and such, you'll see statements simultaneously calling Westerners bigots and insinuating that they're all contemptible homosexuals) and thus Westerners who have little ideology besides being contrarians and hating their birth nations as a way to deflect that their station in life might be to some degree a consequence of their own actions proceed to clap and honk like seals.

Action rather than words means absolutely nothing on social media, so toothless threats and assorted tough-talk gets its full mileage in the new political theater no matter if it's the third "grave final warning" this week.

TL;DR, the anti-Western bloc has growing popular traction among young Westerners because their official statements are written to come off as Twitter clapbacks

[idkaguyorsomething]

Shitty Superhero Tournament Rules and Bracket

Finally, ¡the tournament is about to begin! The bracket will be posted under the cut, but first let’s get some clarifications and rules out of the way:

The movies here have been selected (with two exceptions*) based on their Rotten Tomatoes movie scores and do not reflect my opinion of their quality. The tournament will be divided into six rounds.

Each movie will come with a quick summary of some of its highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view) but feel free to create and submit your own propaganda.

You may vote in any way you want, rooting for whatever gives you the most entertainment in a train wreck sort of way, the movie that’s the most incompetently made, a film you feel is actually really good, or however you want to interpret what the winner of a Shitty Superhero Movie Tournament entails.

Personal attacks/bigoted comments and propaganda WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. If you are here looking for an excuse to be racist/sexist/homophobic/anti-semitic/body-shaming/a dick to people trying to collect a paycheck under the corporate grindstone, fuck off. Just because these movies may be shitty doesn’t mean you should be.

If I make a factual error, feel free to correct me on it. Reblogs are encourage, ofc.

¡Have fun and be kind to each other!

THE BRACKET:

Superman III (1983) vs Green Lantern: First Flight (2009)

>

Fant4stic (2015) vs Ghost Rider (2007)

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Black Adam (2022) vs Man-Thing (2005)

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Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) vs Dick Tracy (1990)

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Constantine (2005) vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

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X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) vs Morbius (2022)

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The New Mutants (2020) vs Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

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Catwoman (2004) vs Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

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The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) vs Batman and Harley Quinn (2017)

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Elektra (2005) vs The Amazing Spider-Man (1977)

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Howard the Duck (1986) vs The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) vs The Amazing Bulk (2010)

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Man of Steel (2013) vs Spider-Man 3 (2007)

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Blade II (2002) vs Captain America (1990)

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Blade: Trinity (2004) vs The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

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Batman Forever (1995) vs Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (2008)

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Supergirl (1984) vs Superman: Doomsday (2007)

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Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) vs Punisher: War Zone (2008)

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Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) vs The Fantastic Four (1994)

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Justice League (2017) vs Tank Girl (1995)

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Jonah Hex (2010) vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

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X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) vs Eternals (2021)

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Daredevil (2003) vs Dark Phoenix (2019)

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Steel (1997) vs Super Buddies (2013)

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Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) vs Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore (2013)

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Fantastic Four (2005) vs Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) vs The Punisher (1989)

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Suicide Squad (2016) vs Hellboy (2019)

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Green Lantern (2011) vs The Flash (2023)

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X-Men: Origins; Wolverine (2009) vs Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

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The Punisher (2004) vs Venom (2018)

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Batman and Robin (1997) vs Superman/Batman: Apocalypse (2010)

[lunanoc]

I've been feeling some type of way about the DMBJ fandom for a while now but never really publicly talked about it for a variety of reasons, mostly because I generally prefer to mind my own business and avoid conflict when possible. But as time goes on, and I come across more and more people who feel the same, or who like I did, ultimately chose to isolate themselves because it's become the only alternative, it makes me feel like it's something that needs to be said in a public space, if only for cathartic reasons, and also for other people to realize they might not be as alone as they think.

I'll preface this by saying that this isn't intended as drama, which I understand comes across a bit hypocritical given the content of this post that's more of a frustrated rant than anything else. But it's also for this reason that I don't expect anyone who's uncomfortable with these kinds of topics to engage with it. This is also not a post meant to say that I'm right, and that anyone who disagrees with my stance is wrong, because no opinion is universally shared nor objectively correct unless backed by factual evidence. That being said, civil discussions around this topic are of course welcome.

I love DMBJ, and I would never discourage anyone from getting into it or joining the fandom. I've been in it for long enough that I can safely say I've not only discovered fantastic characters and stories, but have also met equally wonderful people. However, contrary to a very pervasive misconception that part of the fandom is happy to spread as fact, the DMBJ fandom, like every other fandom, has its share of problems, and is far from being the 100% accepting and unified front some purport it to be.

All of what I'm about to say is entirely my own personal experiences and observations in certain fandom spaces, and as such, isn't meant to be a universal reflection of the fandom as a whole, nor do I pretend to be 100% objective for precisely that reason.

That being said, I think using an example of what I'm getting at is a good place to start.

There's an apparently prevalent fandom opinion that DMBJ canon is a mess of plot holes that makes absolutely no sense. In and of itself, there's nothing inherently wrong with this take, but it does serve as a great segue into illustrating my point. The problem isn't the opinion, but the WAY in which it's treated. It's a very prevalent FANON idea, and while there's nothing wrong with fanon interpretations of things either, it however DOES become a problem when that fanon interpretation is purported to be a universally accepted truth within the fandom as a whole when that most definitely isn't the case. For the record, I personally disagree with this take, and find the books (the main series especially) to be incredibly cohesive in terms of both characterization and plot. The fact a lot of the sequels are unfinished does complicate things and leave some things either unexplained or open-ended, but there's still a consistent cohesion to them despite this, especially in regard to character development and consistency.

But that's beside the actual point. What I'm getting at here is that DMBJ fandom's greatest problem is that for all certain parts of it purport it to be a chill, accepting and fun space, it's also these very same parts of it that are blind to the fact that intentionally or not, they impose what in all reality are niche opinions and effectively shut out anyone who doesn't conform to what they consider a universal truth. As far as the example I used goes, my personal opinion isn't an isolated one, but from the way these more visible parts of the fandom are happy to present it, it may as well be an egregious opinion that doesn't exist and must therefore be silenced.

This is essentially what my general experience has been with parts of the DMBJ fandom. Nothing I've ever seen has ever escalated to the proportions it tends to in most fandoms, that's true. However, I find that presenting the fandom as unified in opinion and preferences is disingenuious at best, and insidious at worst. This also goes for character and ship preferences, though again, the issue at its core isn't about either characters or ships, but rather people's behaviors regarding them. You'll for example see a certain number of people claim that the DMBJ fandom has a tendency to find interest in minor characters, or that everyone in it is a multishipper, or shares the same fixations. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these preferences. But pushing them as universal statements about the fandom at large is both untrue and in bad faith. And herein lies the heart of the problem.

The problem isn't having these preferences. It isn't talking about or indulging in these preferences in public spaces. It's the shutting out of anyone who has different ones, of people being intentionally ignored by what I've come to perceive as an incredibly cliquey environment, of justifying talking over and excluding people from discussions under the guise of acceptance and open-mindedness, never putting that behavior into question. The problem of the DMBJ fandom is that a loud portion of it has a hard time understanding that not everyone wants to be bombarded with a certain type of content or discourse despite taking no issue with the fact that other people enjoy it, and has a tendency to quietly push people out of their spaces so that they can continue to present what's essentially an isolated opinion among others as a majority one, which ultimately leads to an ironically heavily fractured fandom space.

It's unfortunate that a fandom that presents itself as accepting and open-minded resolves its 'differences' by creating an environment in which they give people no space to exist outside of an openly catered to single-mindedness that's then all the more easily purported as fact. It's frustrating for anyone who exists outside of that circle and feels intentionally ostracized.

My point isn't to say the DMBJ fandom is an awful place that no one should ever engage with. It isn't. I love the people I've met through this fandom, and they've made sticking around for the wild ride of Wu Xie and co's tomb robbing extravaganzas one of the best fandom experiences I've ever had. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that the fandom is far from a perfect one, that no fandom is devoid of problems, and that the DMBJ one has its very real issues that merit being addressed despite some suggesting they don't exist to begin with.

[mach1ne-g1rl]

Saw your most recent post on dhmis and tma and I've got opinions to say I believe Computers is an Eye episode because Colin's whole deal is stealing personal info and being smart but its not my strongest I see Jobs as a buried because while it doesn't involve much claustrophobia its more about harmful workplaces and overworking which ties in with the buried in a symbolic sense. I will argue so strongly Death is an End episode. The End is LITERALLY the fear of death smh. While I can see the argument its a Stranger because of Stain Edwards the theme of death is so strong that it isn't that relevant. I see Family as both Stranger and Corruption, Stranger because the whole episode feels very uncanny with the design of the family and set being a "real" place. It's also Corruption because the episode is about toxic family relations. I still cannot believe how you thought Friendship was originally a Vast episode. While I can see why you would assign it Lonely it's clearly a Corruption, it's literally about toxic friendships. Also bugs. Tbh i don't know what to assign to Transport my closest guess is Vast but my argument isn't very strong Electricity is a hard one, I don't think i can assign it to one entity. I think Electracey is a Extinction avatar because she's a robot and the "everything in the home will be plugged in and part of the electric family" line. I could see Charged Yellow being either Eye, Stranger or Extinction. Eye because he's want to find the truth and also green eyes, Stranger because Yellow gets replaced, and Extinction because he gets replaced using specifically technology. The power outage is probably Dark because darkness. Lesley is a Web avatar, I will fight you on this. She's controlling them, she's the literal puppet master. You said that Lesley isn't the main one pulling the string making her less Web aligned but I would argue that makes her MORE web aligned because she's knows she's not fully in control. I interpret becoming a web avatar as not only being manipulative, but accepting your lack of free will. As Annabelle said in 147, "let it never be said that I do not dance the steps I am assigned." Sorry this is long and probably sounds a little rude i just have very strong opinions on tma and dhmis have a lovely day

COmputer being eye was also on my first post but i removed it bc i didnt think it was part of the big Fear factor ? but the way you phrased it does make it work

jobs being buried makes sense too !! my main reason for it being spiral is just Duck calling everything out and then Also going weird ? and then going back to "this is all wrong" very strongly (also the episode is reminiscent of Sculptor's Tool to me with only duck pointing out how this is Odd)

death SHOULD be end ur right , i just didnt think anyone in dhmis seemed very scared of the Death there ? so i thought it wasnt very important but Yeah when you mention it its definitely end ty (Or desolation bc it also feels like . theyre more focused on the grief of losing someone n not the Fear of Death ? if that makes sense=? but i dont rly get the End and Desolation anyway so)

CORRUPTION FOR FAMILY IS SO RIGHT i think i considered corruption for it at one point but i second guessed myself enough to remove it again . and stranger never reallly seemed correct to me but it was the closest and i had no one to discuss with so i ran with it:sob:

IM SORRYY LSITEN OK i hadnt listened to tma in full when i made the first list. i just read the entities wiki page and heard season 5 ..!!!! honestly idk if i agree with corruption bc , while thats probably the deeper meaning of the episode (toxic friends) warren always seemed like just an autistic asshole to me so i never saw the whole . toxic thing ? and he never really actually seemed friends with any of them ?? yea taking advantage of their kindness but i wouldnt call it a toxic relationship bc there never Was a Relationship to me (probably factually wrong n im being ignorant here but its my list and blehh :P im biased towards warren) and im probably just forgetting something bc i havent rewatched it in a while but are there bugs besides warren (are worms bugs)?

transport i assigned Web bc red guy being like . aware of the whole They're Trapped There thing and trying to escape and Lonely bc they're trying to get to other people/ civilization/ community but are just . stuck ? and in some episodes the lonely just takes ppl to endless places that they cant leave (cul-de-sac is the only one i remember) and it just (again) reminded me of that

ELECTRICITY /SHOULLD/ be more than 1 or 2 very true but i just Really hate assigning more than 2 to these idk why ive set that rule for myself but it just feels wrong, disorderly and i dont like it . but yes i can see electracey being extinction (tbh i feel like teachers being avatars/ assinging them patrons/fears could be a whole other list itself) Charged Yellow being stranger i disagree. yes hes replaced but it feels more like . if s1 jon got replaced by s5 jon ? does that make sense ? I HAD DARK For this episode too bc the power outage but it didnt feel like a big fear factor here ? and i just didnt think it was significant enough (the dumb self-imposed rule) Lesley IS web coded i completely forgot annabelle for a second when i made this :sob: ive had too much michael on my mind and i thought being trapped wasnt enough of a theme here ? not like it was in Transport or like Dreams but yea it definitely should be Web

IM GLAD this is long i like hearing other ppls thoughts and input on this silly stuff (it did sound a little rude at times but dw i get it) I think at the end of the day the way we judge these is just Very different? Unless you disagree, i dont think the web series is this "up for debate" as the tv show is bc it just has . Less. There's maybe 3 lines at the start, then the teacher comes in and starts singing about what they embody, then the horrors and the end (only the last 3 episodes rly made me question which Power would be associated with them bc it kinda follows a plot so they could all a little be taken as web and lonely with red guy?) Theres just so many more ways the TV show can be interpreted. These could be judged on the Teacher, the Lesson, the thing that scares the characters, the thing that scares the Audience, symbolism/manifestations, etc. (i think i just went with whatever seemed the most relevant to me / what scared the characters ? but i was also being pretty inconsistent there lmao) i feel like there would probably have to be multiple lists or just one BIG list of everything that could count as one of the entities ? or maybe im blowing this out of proportion and its really simple for you, and only i struggled with this :,) either way it was fun ! and i think thats all that matters maybe the real dhmis tma entities assigning list were the friends we made along the way aww