#old is the new new

[biscuitfeatures]

I’m doing it: I’m reintegrating the use of cash into my life. Card fees are an insidious social disease that benefit only the banks who impose them. Cash can’t be tracked. When the internet goes down in a shop, it’s the only way to pay for things. You can’t spend more than you have, and you can’t get caught out by direct debits swiping your cash when you weren’t expecting it.

I’m giving up some of the convenience of card (not across the board, but in more of my everyday shopping) so I can experience again the freedom and fee-free goodness of real notes and coins in my hand. Going retro is, I believe, an important step for society to take across many domains, if we’re to undo some of the many messes we’ve made of our planet and our society.

[communistkenobi]

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

[princehendir]

I swear to god that green day has had this exact same "scandal" like five times now.

[foldingfittedsheets]

It is insane to me that timestamps are optional on this webbed site. A major context clue is just opt in so I’ll reblog something from four years ago and people think it’s happening right just now like babe. Enable your timestamps. Why are you stumbling through the world with one eye closed?

[atissi]

i don't really like when people say dungeon meshi is accidentally good autistic representation, because while i understand not wanting to make conclusions without explicit confirmation from the author, there's always the weird assumption that non-western authors somehow don't know about things like neurodivergency/queerness/etc. (on top of the assumptions that east asian authors are somehow more naive or oblivious to "western" social issues).

given that dungeon meshi started being published in 2014, it's not really a "work belonging to its times"—it's as contemporary as any other media we discuss on this site, which means it should be fair to assume it engages with contemporary topics (and at the very least, you shouldn't say that the representation is accidental with so much confidence)

but anyways, the chapter "perfect communication" in ryoko kui's "terrarium in a drawer" is some of the most straightforward autistic representation I've seen, and from now on I'm going to assume that laios's character writing is absolutely intentional in that regard:

[biscuitfeatures]

Literally, history is the way of the future. Much of the answers to our post-industrial problems seem to revolve around… pre-industrial tech and lifestyles. What a surprise!

[planefood]

rules for thee and not for me

[hinamie]

10 years later

[cyborgrhodey]

THE BANANAS ARE GAY

THESE BANANAS

THE BANANAS IN PAJAMAS ARE GAY

BELATED HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYONE

[krysmcscience]

I have some questions about karaoke night, Alex Hirsch. Very Important Questions. Which I will happily scream at a poor hapless baby triangle who can have no answers for me, and possibly also does not have object permanence yet.

Follow-up that is I guess suggestive, but let's be real here, Bill's a fucking triangle:

Dude slipped right into his birthday suit, lmao

this is so stupid :D

Anyway, I don't care what anyone says, this brilliant individual knows what's up - Bill is absolutely way more of a monsterfucker than Ford could or ever will be, full stop.

[firestia]

Little pony princesses 💗

[communistkenobi]

“It’s so crazy JKR is misgendering a real cis WOMAN who was raised as a GIRL her whole LIFE what a dummy” is such a dogshit argument lol stop ceding ground to the idea that cis women have a more legitimate claim to womanhood because they were “born and raised” a woman and that’s why it makes this misgendering “more” ridiculous somehow. transphobes being constantly wrong about who is “actually transgender” is not their trans clocking radar ‘misfiring,’ they are proudly, openly, and successfully terrorising the public into accepting a very narrow & particular white suprematist notion of gendered divisions in society. JKR is not ‘mistaken’ she’s a fucking white supremacist who hangs out with other white supremacists & advances white supremacy through the language of transphobia. why is anyone still acting like she’s “making mistakes” where have you people been

[allskywalkerswhine]

in fics where luke gets plopped into the prequels i want every jedi within ten metres of him to think hes the weirdest jedi theyve ever seen. he has negative lightsaber form. he doesnt know what a kata is. he handstands when he meditates. his solution to sith is to try and have a chat. hes a political radical who keeps suggesting revolution. you ask him what the jedi code is and he says "kindness and compassion and helping those in need :) ". you ask how he used the force like that and he says some shit about how you are a luminous being limited only by your mind. the councils authority is just a suggestion. he is somehow the new favourite of both qui gon and yoda

[bioethicists]

every time a new SA allegation of a favored celeb arises, i'm reminded of the absolutely soul-crushing experience of the depp/heard trial in which i learned that dozens of ppl i loved + respected + trusted were also willing to engage in the basest form of misogyny if the woman Seemed Crazy Enough. there was a horrifying 2ish weeks on this website + much longer irl where i genuinely felt unsafe voicing my discomfort as i relived something eerily reminiscent of the aftermath of my own assaults playing out on screen, commented on by true crime youtubers like it was a red sox game.

it happens time + time again with every new allegation + it's truly the most agonizing + exhausting part of being a survivor. i am begging you all to consider that survivors are watching you engage with this stuff like theater + it erodes our trust in all of you + compounds our grief.

[thesinglesock]

my mom walked upstairs in her seal skin boots. Fjonka (my rabbit) came running to greet them (her seal skin boots). she sniffed them for a second. nuzzled them, before realizing they weren't breathing. horror dawned on her. she begun to understand she was dealing with something she couldn't comprehend. she backed off, without letting them out of her sight. she STOMPED to let them (the seal skin boots) know that she did NOT like this situation. my mom stomped back. Fjonka stomped harder, exhibiting a bravery and assertedness I had no idea she possessed. mom turned and went back down the stairs. Good job, Fjonk. You sure showed those undead vampire rabbits who's boss.