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"School districts that don’t respect transgender and nonbinary students’ pronouns or force them to use restrooms that don’t align with their gender identity could be committing federal civil rights violations beginning this fall.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the issuance of a final rule under Title IX to protect people in public schools from sex-based discrimination and harassment. The announcement marks a significant update in federal efforts to combat sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. During a call with reporters, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona emphasized the administration’s dedication to ensuring that Title IX effectively serves all students by providing safe, welcoming, and rights-respecting educational environments."

Read the full piece here

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If readers are curious as to why in this house we do NOT use turbo tax:

https://www.propublica.org/article/what-to-know-about-turbotax-before-you-file-taxes

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

and propublica's MANY years generally of showing us all how shitty TurboTax/Intuit really is can all be found here: https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap

#do NOT use turbotax #resources #life resources #isabel says things #ariel says things #ily propublica

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I have a good disability accommodation story.

I use a medium sized backpack instead of an over the shoulder bag, because chronic pain has my shoulders all jacked up and when really carrying it I need to distribute the weight. I pass as femme so it's essentially a purse (which I'll call it) that holds like my cash and cards and keys but also my epipens and inhaler and other medical essentials.

I took my 10yo to the art museum today. About 20 minutes into our visit I was told they have a bag policy and while my bag was essentially small enough i could keep it, they need it by my side so I'm not knocking it into shit via it being on my back. Some people just aren't aware of their surroundings sometimes, blanket policy. Cool i get it. They really just needed me to single shoulder it. So I did. But like another 10 minutes in despite switching between shoulders, I just couldn't. Disability just made it impossible. So back on my back it went i was just really really careful.

Of course I was approached again though by someone new. I patiently and politely explained I knew and understood the rule but disability made it so I couldn't single shoulder my bag, I really did need to distribute the weight.

And she was like, welp ok we'll just get you a sticker for your bag so security camera guy will know you're an exception to the rule I'll be right back. 2 minutes later she was back with a shiny sticker and that was that.

In a museum full of priceless art I get the bag size and how you carry it (people really do be backing into a monet with their fucking backpacks) rules. But they were happy to accommodate me without me laying out my medical history. I didn't have to explain why my shoulders are fucked up. I didn't give them the details of last weeks especially bad pinched nerve. I simply said i was disabled. I don't even think i needed to offer up the part about distributing the weight. I just offered that bit up freely so it made general sense to them. And they gave me a reasonable accommodation and stickered me so i could explore and not be stopped every 5 feet. And in return i did actually work really hard to mind my bag in relation to the art around it.

I just really appreciate when the world goes right!

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Sámi artist Mari Boine joiking the village Máze.

[ID: 1: Sámi activists in gáktis (traditional clothing) holding a banner that says “we came here first” in norwegian. A banner in the background says “we will NOT move”. 2: sámi man in gákti standing with his fist raised in front of big stones that have the word “let the river live” painted on them]

Joik is a type of traditional sámi singing that’s meant to evoke/express a person, animal or place through rhythm, sounds and energy. You don’t joik about someone, you joik them. Joik is mostly sounds, and often have no lyrics or short lyrics. “Máze” has lyrics calling Máze beautiful and saying “Under water they would put Máze church, Máze school”, which is referring to the Alta conflict in the 1970s and 80s.

Máze is a small village on the norwegian side of the borders in Sápmi. Around 98% of the population is sámi. In the late 1960s, the Norwegian government announced plans to build a hydroelectric power plant and dam in the Alta river, which would have huge consequences for sámi reindeer herding and fishing in the area, preventing sámi people from continuing to practice their traditional way of life. The earlier plans for the dam would have put Máze under water, displacing all the people living there and destroying a village that has existed for hundreds of years. After resistance from sámi activists, the plans were altered in 1973 so that Máze would survive.

Sámi people fought against the construction of the power plant for years, with protests, peaceful civil disobedience (like chaining themselves and creating blockades around the site), and a hunger strike where they slept in lávvus in front of the norwegian parliament in 1979, and a second hunger strike in 1981. 10% of the norwegian police force was sent to the construction area and there was talk of sending the military to assist the police, but this was stopped by the minister of defense at the time. several hundreds of people were removed by force from protests and arrested.

The Alta hydroelectric power plant was finished in 1987 and is still in operation. This is one of the most famous examples of Norway’s green colonialism in Sápmi, but it’s also one of the biggest examples of Sámi spirit and resistance. Máze continues to exist, more than 50 years later. Sámi people are still here and we’re still fighting for our right to continue our traditional lifestyles and culture, for example with the large civil disobedience actions in 2023 over the Fosen case.

Čájet Sámi Vuoiŋŋa! show sámi spirit! ❤️💚💛💙

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"HB 777 not only would fine libraries and librarians, but it would possibly require hard labor by those found guilty. Read that again: librarians would be sentenced to hard labor for daring to join their largest professional organization.

The bill would also potentially kill one of the largest graduate school programs in the state of Louisiana, Louisiana State University’s Masters of Library and Information Science program. Like all Master of Library and Information Science programs, it is accredited by the ALA and goes through a rigorous process to ensure that the curriculum is up-to-date and aligned with best practices in libraries.

Even if the bill is limited “only” to the use of tax money to support membership or attendance/enrollment in ALA-sponsored professional development, take a moment to look into whether or not police, fire, or other public entities are subject to similar legislation in Louisiana or elsewhere. You probably know the answer–and you probably won’t be surprised that one of the few institutional benefits offered to library workers is such membership.

If you haven’t been paying attention until now or you’ve thought these fears when laid out over the last several years were hyperbole and this is your wakeup call, there’s no time like the present to get to work advocating on behalf of your library. If you live in Louisiana, contact your representatives as soon as possible (here’s a very easy way to do that!). You can also reach out to Kellee Dickerson by phone at [phone] and email [email protected].

Then, reach out to your own libraries and offer your support, either by showing up at board meetings and/or running for those board positions when vacancies occur. Go borrow books from the library and get your writing hands going with letters to your local papers.

EveryLibrary also has a petition you can sign related to HB777."

Please take the time to sign the petition, spread the word, and support your local library.

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I love you translator notes I love you translators caring that I fully grasp the meaning of the original text I love you translators adding cultural context and specifics so I can better understand what's going on I love you long rants on why a joke is impossible to translate I love you translators adding their little comments to the scene I love you translators feeling human and involved in the material I love you translating as a form of art I love you little t/n abbreviation

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#they are bugs #that is a type of animal #but they are bugs firdt and foremost

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hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

#resources #writing resources #art resources

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Symbiosis isn't just mutualism. Parasitism is symbiosis. It's uncomfortable to confront parasitic relationships if you want to see your human ideas of good and bad reflected in Nature.

But gazing into something huge and utterly Other, being uncomfortable means you're engaging your mind with it. "Uncomfortable" is actually a whole spectrum of emotions that become a vivid and satisfying rainbow.

There was a post a while back with some artwork of Dendrogaster, a crustacean that parasitizes starfish, and its body is like this branching fractal of fleshy lobes made to fit inside the body of the starfish mirroring its structure, and I was absolutely horrified to look at this, and this horror was the same emotion as a strangely visceral wave of sympathy for this parasite.

Creative works about parasites often invoke the horror of bodily invasion, which is visceral and strong for me, but this artwork inverted that horror, instead showing the horror of being made so perfectly for fitting within someone else that you lose everything you are and become unrecognizable.

I also think of the post about the cowbird chick. It's awful that the bird pushes its siblings out of the nest as it grows, and the mama feeds it because she instinctively must feed her chick, but the cowbird is just a baby. Was it wrong for him to hatch, to be alive, to be hungry, to be a baby and to need love?

Symbiosis is intensely beautiful, and sometimes it's beautiful because it's grotesque and terrible. Of course, the symbiosis between two organisms isn't an allegory for a relationship, it just is a relationship, but looking at the way organisms become entwined feels like you're seeing things that, if words described them, would also be human experiences.

Being invaded by a parasite is a horror of powerlessness and loss of autonomy, but being a parasite is also defined by powerlessness. In many cases, the parasite will die without the host, but the host can live without the parasite. I wonder why it is expected to sympathize with one and not the other.

Your immune system fights against internal parasites like a tapeworm...Imagine being a tapeworm. The body of your host is your universe. Do you find your world to be kind? Benevolent? Does your god love you?

Sometimes people call disabled people "parasites." When I think about my future sometimes I'm uncertain and afraid.

But when a rare non-photosynthetic orchid blooms in the forest, this is not the forest's weakness and failure, but its crowning glory.

#bloodchild #op did you know you are Octavia butler posting #love to see some butler posting out in the wild

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REGULAR REMINDER THAT IT IS COMMON COURTESY TO SEND AN ASK TO THE PERSON YOU REBLOGGED AN ASK GAME FROM !! THIS PART OF TUMBLR CULTURE HAS BEEN LOST OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS SO PLEASE KEEP ASKS GAMES ALIVE BY SENDING ASKS !!

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Why Millennials aren’t leaving Tiktok

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The news that Gen Z users have abandoned Tiktok in such numbers that the median Tiktoker is a Millennial (or someone even older) prompted commentators to dunk on Tiktok as uncool by dint of having lost its youthful sheen:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns

But "why are Gen Z kids leaving Tiktok?" is the wrong question. The right question is, why aren't Millennials leaving Tiktok? After all, we are living through the enshittocene, the great enshittening, in which every platform gets monotonically, irreversibly worse over time, and Tiktok is no exception:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To understand why older users are stuck to Tiktok, we need to start with why younger users relentlessly seek out new platforms. To some extent, it's just down to youth's appetite for novelty, but that's only part of the story. To really understand why people come to – and leave – platforms, you have to understand switching costs.

"Switching costs" is the economists' term for everything you have to give up when you change products or services. Switching from Ios to Android probably means giving up a bunch of your apps and purchased media. Switching from an airline where you're a high-status frequent flier to another carrier means giving up on free checked bags and early boarding.

In an open market, rivals have lots of ways to lower these switching costs (it's an open secret that you can call an airline and say, "Hi, I'm a 33rd Order Mason on American Airlines, will you make me a Triple Platinum Diamond Sky-Baron if I switch to Delta?"). Of course, big incumbents hate this, and do everything they can to increase their switching costs, finding ways to impose high switching costs that punish disloyal consumers who have the temerity to go elsewhere.

With social media, lock-in comes for free, thanks to the "collective action problem." Getting people to agree on a given course of action is hard, and as you add more people to the picture, the problem gets harder. It's hard enough to get half a dozen people in your group-chat to agree on where to go for dinner or what board-game to play. But once you're reliant on a social media service to stay in touch with friends, relatives around the world, customers, communities (say, rare disease support groups), and coordination (like organizing your kid's little league car-pool), the problem becomes nearly insoluble. Maybe you can convince your overseas relatives to switch to a Signal group, but can you do the same for your small business's customers, or your old high-school pals?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Taken together, switching costs and collective action problems make platforms "sticky," and sticky platforms inevitably enshittify.

Platforms, after all, generate value. They connect end-users with each other (say, little league parents) and they connect end-users to business customers (you and your small business's customers). That value needs to be parceled out among end users, business customers, and the platform's shareholders. A platform can make life better for business customers at its end users' expense by increasing the number of ads (hello, Youtube!), and it can make life better for its shareholders at its business customers' expense by decreasing the share of ad revenue given to publishers or performers (oh, hello again, Youtube!).

From a platform's perspective, the ideal state is one in which end users and business customers get no value from the platform, because it's all being captured by the platform's shareholders. But if Youtube interrupted every 30 seconds of video for ten minutes of ads and paid the video creators nothing, both users and creators would ditch the platform – and advertisers would follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dab8sKg8Ko8

So platforms seek an equilibrium: "what is the least value we apportion to end-users and business customers without triggering their departure?" Maybe that means giving more value to end-users (for example, keeping Uber fares low by suppressing wages), or to business-customers (crowding more ads into your social media feed).

Every business – including brick-and-mortar, non-digitized ones – wants to find some kind of equilibrium between the value going to its suppliers, its customers and its owners, but digital businesses have an advantage here: digital systems are flexible in ways that analog, hard-goods businesses are not. Digital businesses can alter pricing, payouts and other dynamics from moment to moment – second to second – and make a different offer to every supplier and customer. They have a bunch of knobs, and they can twiddle them at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Well, not quite at will. Businesses face constraints on their twiddling. If they get too greedy, users or business customers might weigh the cost of staying against the switching costs and decide it's not worth it. But the more expensive – the more painful – a platform can make leaving, the more pain they can inflict on the people who stay.

In other words, there's two ways to keep a customer or supplier's business: you can make a better service so they won't want to leave, or you can make leaving the service so painful that they stay even if you mistreat them.

There's three ways a digital company can make things worse for their customers and users without losing their business.

First, they can eliminate competition (think of Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram to recapture the users who'd fled Facebook to escape his poor management):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Second, they can capture their regulators and avoid punishment for trampling their suppliers' or users' legal rights (think of how Amazon has raised the price of everything we buy, both on- and off Amazon, through its "most favored nation" deals):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Third, they can use IP law to prevent competitors from modifying their services to claw back some of that value (think of how Apple used legal threats to block an Android version of Imessage, blocking Apple customers from having private conversations that included non-Apple customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Companies can't just use this tricks at will, of course. Antitrust laws can block companies from making anticompetitve acquisitions or mergers. Regulators can punish companies for cheating their customers, workers and users. Technologists can come up with clever ways of modding or reconfiguring existing services with "interoperable" add-ons that let users bargain for better treatment by refusing to accept worse:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Day in, day out, the decision-makers at tech companies test these constraints, twisting the knobs that shift value away from users to shareholders. Their bosses and boards motivate them with "KPIs" that dangle the promise of huge bonuses and promotions for any manager who successfully enshittifies part of the company's products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Decades of pro-corporate, pro-monopoly policy has loosened those knobs. 40 years of lax antitrust meant that companies had a lot of leeway to buy or merge with rivals – that's changing today, but it's tough sledding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

As sectors grew more concentrated, they found it easier to capture their regulators, so that they no longer fear punishment for price-gouging, spying, or wage-theft, so applying the same amount of torque to the "break the law" knob cranks it a lot further:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Once you've captured your regulators, you can aim them at your competitors. A monopoly-friendly policy environment has transformed IP law into a bully's charter, allowing powerful companies to strangle would-be competitors who dare to offer their customers tools to shield themselves from enshittification, like scrapers, ad-blockers and alternative clients. Big companies can crank the enshittification knob all the way over and know that smaller rivals knobs won't turn at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

At one point, bosses faced one more constraint on knob-twiddling: their workforce. Many tech workers genuinely cared about their users' welfare, something bosses encouraged as a sneaky trick to get techies to put in long hours without exercising their leverage by quitting rather than destroying their lives to meet arbitrary deadlines. These workers would fearlessly slap their bosses' hands when they reached for the enshittification knob, threatening to quit rather than allowing the products they'd given so much for to be enshittified. Today, after hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, tech workers are far less like to challenge their bosses' right to twiddle, and far more likely to get fired if they try:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

All this means that tech bosses don't have to change their approach at all, and yet, their services will grow steadily worse. The boss who twiddles the enshittification knob in exactly the same way as he did a year or a decade ago will find it turning much further, because his customers are locked into his platform, his regulators won't protect them, the same regulators will stop his competitors' attempts at countertwiddling, and his workers fear losing their jobs too much to speak up for their users.

That's the contagion that produced the enshittocene: the forces that constrained companies (competition, regulation, self-help and labor – all melted away, allowing every company's MBA-poisoned knob-twiddling leaders to shamelessly caress their knobs with every hour that God sends:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

Which is why people want to leave platforms. When a platform loses its users, those users have weighed the switching costs against the pain of staying and decided that it's better to bear those costs than to stay.

So why have Tiktok's younger users found the costs too high to bear, and why have their elders remained stuck to the platform?

For that, we have to look at the unique characteristics of young people – characteristics that transcend the lazy cliche that kids are easily bored, fickle novelty-seekers who hop from one service to another with unquenchable restlessness.

Whether or not kids are novelty-seekers, they are, fundamentally, a disfavored minority. They want to do things that the platforms don't want them to do – like converse without being overheard by authority figures, including their parents and their schools (also: cops and future employers, though kids may not be thinking about them as much).

In other words, kids pay intrinsically lower switching costs than adults, because a platform will always do less for them than it will for grownups. This is a characteristic kids share with other supposedly technophilic, novelty-seeking "early adopters," from sex-workers to terrorists, from sexual minorities to trolls, from political dissidents to fascists. For those groups, the cost of mastering a new technology and assembling a community around it is always more likely to be worth bearing than it would be for people who are well-served by existing tools:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Pornographers didn't jump on home video because of its superiority as a medium for capturing flesh-tones. Home video was a good porn medium because it was easier to discreetly get into the hands of porn consumers, who could, in turn, discreetly view it. The audience for porn in the privacy of your living room is larger than the audience for porn that you can only watch if you're willing to be seen marching into a dirty movie theater.

Every new technology is popularized by a mix of disfavored groups and neophiles, who normalize and refine it – and yes, infuse it with their countercultural coolth – until it becomes easy enough to use to become mainstream. As more normies drift into the new system, the switching costs associated with leaving the old system declines. It gets easier and easier to find the people and services you want in the new realm, and harder and harder to find them in the old one.

This is why tech platforms have historically experienced sudden collapse: the platform that gets more valuable and harder to leave as it accumulates users gets less valuable and easier to leave as users depart:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

If you're a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you're a Millennial who isn't leaving Tiktok, it's not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn't have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven't gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who's leaving Tiktok and where they're headed to next). Middle-schoolers don't have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

This is why Facebook is filled with Boomers. Yes, their kids bolted for the exits to avoid having their parents (or grandparents) wading into their sexual, social and professional lives. But the reason the Boomers were late joining younger users' Facebook exodus – or the reason they never joined it – is that they stand to lose more by going. Facebook deliberately cultivated this dynamic, for example, by creating a photo hosting service designed to entice users into uploading their family photos while disguising how hard it would be to take those photos with them if they left:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The irony here is that tech has intrinsically low switching costs. All other things being equal, a new platform can always build a bridge to ease the passage of users from the old one. There's no (technical) reason that moving to Mastodon, or Bluesky, or any other platform should mean cutting ties with the people who stayed behind.

A combination of voluntary interoperability (where old platforms offer APIs to allow new services to connect with them), mandatory interop (where governments force tech companies to offer APIs) and adversarial interop (where new companies hack together their own API with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots, and other guerrilla tactics) would hypothetically allow users to hop between networks as easily as you change phone carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Tech platforms tend to offer APIs when they're getting started (to ease the inward passage of new users) then shut them down after they attain dominance (locking the door behind those users). The EU is tinkering with mandatory APIs through the Digital Markets Act (though bafflingly, they're starting with encrypted messaging rather than social media). Restoring adversarial interoperability will require extensive legal reform, which is getting started through Right to Repair laws:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/oregon-passes-right-to-repair-law-apple-lobbied-to-kill/

The people who are stranded on social media platforms shouldn't be mistaken for uncool, aging technophobes. They're not stubborn, they're stranded. Like the elders who can't afford to leave a dying town after the factory shuts down and the young people move away, these people are locked in. They need help evacuating – a place to go and a path to get there.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platformsr

#finish reading kater #tech #teaching ref

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This is the Over-Achiever's guide to deprogramming essentially. That mega capitalistic productive drive they tried to beat into you in high school? It'll kill you in college. This is the pamphlet that helps you prevent that. The front is here and on the listing, but to get it front and back, you can buy it for $2 here.

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Amelio Robles Ávila was an interesting man, but not one that would usually find himself written so largely into the history books. He joined the Mexican Revolution in either 1911 or 1912 and had a successful career as a colonel in the army throughout the revolution. He would be decorated for his service after it was complete, and then settled with his wife in a small town and lived in relative quiet. What draws so many eyes to his story, in particular, is one facet: he was assigned female at birth.

#latinx transmasc history

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realizing that sticking to the "do it bad" "do it scared" mentality implies theres also a "do it bored"

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hi y’all our government is trying to ban tiktok specifically and explicitly because it has been so effective as a tool for information sharing, organizing, and action.

Bisan and other members of the press living through a genocide have relied almost exclusively on Tiktok and Instagram reels to spread the truth of what is happening to their people.

Y’all look so ridiculous saying stuff like “haha good I hate that app.” There is literally nothing good about our government banning our access to social media with the explicit intention of cutting us off from primary, on-the-ground sources during a genocide.

Like it or not, Tiktok has become instrumental for information-sharing and community organizing. If you haven’t seen that, you and I don’t follow the same people. Our government is afraid of Tiktok because it has become such an effective leftist resource.

And I don’t care that kids bully each other there or that the trends are toxic or any of the other arguments I’ve seen in support of this ban.

All of those things happen on Instagram & Twitter & Reddit & if you’ll believe it, on Tumblr. In fact Instagram is so bad, that if you post a video to TikTok that people find “cringey,” a common comment people leave is, “post this to Instagram reels.” Because they know you’ll get bullied there despite getting positive feedback on Tiktok.

This ban isn’t about protecting Autistic kids from mean classmates or saving our children from dangerous trends or any other strawman I’ve seen today.

I cannot believe so many of you are so detached from the reality of what this means that you actually think our government banning access to global social media could be a good thing. You need to wake up!!!

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As Green describes it, the WPATH revision effort was being protested by trans men, who noted that the guidelines were only written to cover trans women’s medical care. Green was part of the crowd of protesters, and he was also a recognizable face, which led to him being selected to advise the board pretty much by fiat. After the protesters had beaten down the doors and charged the room where the WPATH committee was meeting, Green says, “The guy who was in charge of the revision effort pointed at me in the audience and said, ‘All right, you can look at the draft over and give us some feedback.’ Me? I wasn’t even a member of the organization.” Nonetheless, Green went over the proposed guidelines with a group of trans men, and wrote a 12-page document giving feedback on things like hysterectomy (which trans men sometimes require for medical reasons other than gender, but which doctors could withhold simply because they were trans). He stayed up for 24 hours straight to meet the deadline. When the WPATH revision came out, it contained none of his suggestions, but it did have his name on the front— essentially, trying to avoid activist critique by saying that a trans man had looked at it.  In 1999, when the WPATH performed its next round of revisions, Green’s changes were incorporated, but his name was nowhere to be found. “Did I get any credit for that?” Green says, sounding audibly frustrated, before biting it back. “You know, that’s okay. The most important thing was to get these changes.” 

— How Jamison Green’s visibility paved the way for a generation of trans men by Jude Ellison S. Doyle (emphasis mine)