Hexagons

I don't think Julia Serano is totally and completely right about that. She's great, and Whipping Girl is great, very worth reading, it really helped me flesh out my understanding of gender, but still, I think she's wrong about, at least, the subconscious sex theory she posits.

I'd like to recommend Judith Butler's new book here, but I'll be honest, I can't read Butler, I find them extremely confusing. For an easier time, you could instead watch Philosophy Tube's newest video, because Abby talks a little about this issue, following Butler. If you're interested, I also could see if my sister would be ok with me posting an excerpt of an essay she wrote on this subject, because that's my exposure to Judith Butler, filtered through my sister's writing.

I'm sure this isn't a complete answer, but from what I've seen from TERF rhetoric, it seems to be basically "girls rule, boys drool". They need to believe that men and women are different so that they can easily split humanity into a very basic us vs them dichotomy, with themselves in the "good" group. I don't know why they want to make sex/gender the fundamental contradiction in their lives, it seems to me there are way more explanatory ways of looking at the world, but every single TERF argument seems to boil down to hating people they perceive as men and thinking the people they hate are biologically programmed to be evil.

But then they rarely take this idea to its logical conclusion, which would be cis-female only enclaves without any cis men or trans people present at all. Even the most rhetorically strident TERFs tend to have a cis man or two in their life who they don't seem to hate. And I have to admit I think that's odd. If someone truly in their heart of hearts believed that evil lived in the penis (or XY chromosomes or whatever), you'd think they would try harder to avoid people with those traits. You'd think genital inspections and maybe even chromosome tests would be a prerequisite to friendship with someone with that (incredibly shitty) belief.

I dunno, I do think hatred and disgust are at the root of TERF beliefs, but I don't think most TERFs really interrogate their own beliefs very much.

Oh hell yeah!

I've recently started to use (a tiny fraction of) the power of grep sometimes and similarly I always feel like such a badass, even though my use case is super duper basic.

Linux command line is fun

Oh hey, are you me?! Went to bed last night at 5:30 pm, woke up at 1:30 am, it's weird, but it works!

I'm sorry you got such uncomfortable responses to that post! I thought it was a really good post and I was in the middle of typing up a comment that was a rant about my own nonbinary experiences when you deleted it (an understandable deletion, I want to emphasize).

Thank you for being unapologetically nonbinary and anti-assimilationist here, it makes me feel more at home, for sure! It's wild being nonbinary in this binary world.

Also, for anyone reading this who isn't nonbinary themselves, I want to emphasize the following: there is no single nonbinary experience. Do not make the mistake of thinking there are three genders (man, woman, nonbinary). The way I'm nonbinary (extremely agender) is very, very different to the way someone else might be nonbinary. For me, the answer to "what gender are you?" is "no thank you", but I can easily imagine someone for whom the answer to the very same question might be "all of them, I'm all the genders", which, again, is different to someone who might answer with "I'm mostly a man, but occasionally something else" or "I don't really have an internal sense of gender but people treat me as a woman, so I'm more or less a woman". And all of these are valid gender feelings that could fall under the nonbinary umbrella.

How has no one mentioned Outer Wilds yet? That's usually right on up there in these kinds of threads, because it's great. An absolute masterpiece of a game.

Pathologic 2 is also a masterpiece, but a (purposefully) miserable game to play. It's so beautiful and the world is so rich, but it definitely demands perseverance to make it through, because it will do everything it can to make you hate it.

A Short Hike isn't quite as narratively satisfying as the other two, but it's short and fun and extremely adorable. Just a pleasant little world to spend an afternoon in.

Wait, people are still talking about these movies? I enjoyed them, I'll watch any more that get made (Daniel Craig's accent is so, so funny), but you're extremely right that they're shallow. They're fun, amusing slop, but that's it, really. They're neat little whodunnit's with fairly satisfying conclusions. They're Hercule Poirot for people who will never read Agatha Christie. They're good at what they do, but I can't imagine giving either of them a rewatch, really. Not now that I know the twists.

beanitalia?

beanitals?

That is really handy! Where can I learn this power?!

(I'm hungover)

But then why ever talk about it at all? He didn't need to bring it up in this article. I dunno, I'm sure I'll never get a satisfying answer. Probably even Jonathan Chait doesn't understand why he does the things that he does