If you like medieval marginalia, go play Pentiment. I played it with a friend who was a medievalist, and ze said that all of the weird marginalia were ones ze recognised from real manuscripts. Very cool

Is the video series you’re thinking of the Alt-Right Playbook, by Innuendo Studios? Because that was something that really helped me to understand how conservatives think — I hadn’t realised just how central “zero-sum thinking” is to their ideology

I agree with your choice to include the author’s name. Even without reading the article, it seems significant that Doctorow is writing in such a mainstream publication. I’m glad to see it

A point that I want to raise is that sometimes people who are trans don’t necessarily want to present in a straightforwardly binary way.

To give an example of what I mean, I had a friend, who I met when she was presenting as a boy, in school. Whilst she liked hanging out with girls more, she was never much of a girly girl, in terms of her interests. For a couple years after she transitioned and began presenting as a woman (we were adults by this point), she spent a while dressing in a conventionally feminine way. She later said that this was probably in part due to how gatekeepy gender affirmation care services can be if you don’t present in a straightforward manner. But also she said she was (in hindsight) trying to jump through hoops to be what she thought a woman should be.

Eventually, as she became more comfortable, she leaned into a more tomboyish aesthetic that suited her, and picked up old hobbies that she had dropped due to feeling too masculine. Someone very unkindly once told her “I don’t see what the point of you transitioning was if you’re just going to go back to where you started”. This was a silly perspective, because her adopting a lightly more masculine presentation wasn’t a regression, but progress. It’s honestly analogous to how I, a cis woman, had a phase as a teenager where I hated all things pink and girly, but now have a more mature view, where I can engage in femininity in a more healthy manner. It’s growth.

This is all to say that your son may identify as masc, but give him space to explore what that means for him. There might be times where he enjoys more stereotypically feminine pursuits or aesthetics, but this doesn’t diminish his identity in any way. Terms that he prefers might change as he grows to understand himself better, but if you keep an open mind, you can be there with him for it.

“Eventually I realized that I was suddenly seeing a kid I hadn’t seen in years, he had been very depressed even self harming at times, but with therapy, and gender affirming care it was like we got the kid we had lost back.”

Damn, this has got me tearing up. Thanks for sharing this story. I’m glad your son has you there to support him.

This is incredible! I love how the natural irregularities in the lines give a real sense of texture, especially on the fabric

I feel you. I struggle with this too. I’ve got better at it in recent years, but it’s still tough, and I’ve found that when circumstances get rough in a manner that makes me need more help, it becomes harder to ask for help.

It’s weird to think of “asking for help” as a skill that can be trained, but that’s certainly my experience. Thinking about it that way helped me though, because it pushed me to try asking for help on smaller, low stakes things first, which made things easier in the future.

I often saw that when I did ask for help in these smaller things, that the person helping me would often be super happy to be able to help, especially if they have a lot of stuff going on in their life that they’re struggling with. Being able to help me seemed to give them a slice of agency that they desperately needed. Sometimes having helped me with a thing made them feel more comfortable asking for help for themselves, which is a dynamic I’m much more comfortable with. I like to feel useful.

Showing my own vulnerability as a stepping stone towards being able to be of service to other people is some pretty intense mental gymnastics (compared to, you know, just valuing myself and treating myself as inherently deserving of help), but whatever works, works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Glad you liked it. I always appreciate an opportunity to practice my science communication skills (I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO FIND THIS STUFF AS DEEPLY FASCINATING AS I DO. I AM EXTREMELY NORMAL.)

Yup. A friend of mine almost died last year from bladder complications that ultimately stem from being assaulted almost 20 years ago.

To an external observer, rape may not seem likely to leave lasting physical trauma, but that’s because the injuries aren’t as likely to be visible, or things that peopl feel comfortable speaking about openly (plus society has a bad track record on how it treats survivors of SA)

My point is that the whole psychological Vs physical trauma question is a false dichotomy when we’re talking about sexual assault. Rape can and often does leave a person with lifelong physical trauma

So until around 1902, it was near unanimously agreed that light was a wave, because it does all the stuff that waves do, like diffracting — we wouldn’t have rainbows, or the cool Pink Floyd album cover with a prism splitting light into a rainbow otherwise.

What changed in 1902 is that an experiment (called the photoelectric effect, if you’re curious) produced results that would have only been possible if light was a particle. The photoelectric effect had been observed a bunch of times through the 1800s, but in 1902, a variant of the experiment produced results that would be impossible to explain if light were a wave. So then people start asking “okay, maybe we were wrong, maybe light is actually a particle”. Except that didn’t square with the centuries of evidence showing that light was a wave.

It turns out that light is both a particle and as wave. Or maybe neither. Because the key concept here is that particles and waves don’t exist. They’re just conceptual categories that we made to put boxes around phenomena to make them more understandable, much the same way that binary gender is a simplifying framework that works until it doesn’t.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the underlying phenomena, like light being diffracted, or the photoelectric effect, aren’t real. The problem was in our framework of how we labelled them. Once physicists got their head around the possibility that light could be both a particle and a wave, they realised that there were a bunch of other situations where we could model light as a particle and discover interesting stuff. Most people don’t need to understand this, because the simplified model of everything being either a particle or a wave works well enough that even if it’s not correct, it’s still useful — these categories developed for a reason, after all. By analogy, it’s like if I said “women have breasts”. It’s true in most instances, so it can still be a useful observation, even if it’s not strictly accurate.

However, it gets even more interesting. At first, scientists thought that light must just be a special kind of phenomenon, able to exhibit both particle and wave characteristics. But then, in the double slit experiment, they found that under certain circumstances, electrons (which were near unanimously considered to be particles) could diffract — i.e. act like waves. This was the result that really drove home the notion that when we’re studying stuff that are super small and specific, our existing rules and categories sort of fall apart. It’s even been suggested that other things that we squarely consider to be particles could show wave nature too, but the larger you get in scale, the harder it is to observe quantum phenomena (which basically just means that our rules work well when they’re applied to the circumstances we developed those rules under. “Quantum phenomena” mostly just means “shit that happens when we’re so zoomed in that our existing frameworks stop working”)

In a sense, we could say that light behaving as a particle is analogous to a non binary man, and electrons behaving as a wave is analogous to a non binary woman. Maybe it would be more sensible to dispense with these categories entirely, but there are many phenomena and many people who find the terms useful.

Indeed, and I’m glad you highlighted these things. It’s something I have been trying to do, as well as increasing people’s awareness of these choices. It feels like it makes so little difference, but it’s not nothing.

“(assuming no HIV etc)”

That’s not a safe assumption though, and the dread of waiting to find out whether you’ve been infected with something awful is a part of why rape is so traumatising. It can take weeks for tests to come back.

This goes way before the Spotify thing. This is just a court ruling that took a long time to come through.

At a certain point, if your entire raison d’être is to do illegal things, you might as well fully commit

It’s possible you might be agender. Many cis people, myself included, have a deep, inexplicable attachment to their assigned gender at birth, and the prospect of living as a different gender causes them deep discomfort or distress. Whether you find that agender is a term that resonates with your experience, know that the degree to which people experience attachment to their gender is just one of the many dimensions of the variety in human gender, and that you don’t need to label your experience if that doesn’t feel useful or right for you

To add a counter example to emphasise your (and others’) experiences: I am a cis woman who, after getting into learning about queer theory, concluded that it was irrational to be so attached to my assigned gender at birth, and that it would be more logical to use they/them pronouns. I tried this for a few weeks and found that it was deeply uncomfortable and I had to stop. In hindsight, I find it utterly hilarious that I basically tried to brute force my way out of being cisgender.

I’m also a scientist, and due to the fact that women in science still face a lot of misogynistic bullshit, I have sometimes wished that I were a man so that I wouldn’t have to deal with that. At first, when I had those thoughts, I wondered if this might mean I was actually a trans man, and that I should consider whether that was a path I wanted to take (“we have the technology, we can rebuild him”_robocop_meme.jpeg). However, I found that imagining myself living as a man filled me with an unpleasant gnawing sensation, like an itchiness of the soul. I think this was effectively simulated gender dysphoria?

So yeah, cis people do exist, and I’m proof. I don’t understand it, but I probably never will. Gender is weird, and I just have to acknowledge it as a fact of my reality. Part of why I’m sharing my experience here is because I’ve contributed to the cracking of at least three people realising they were trans. I was able to recognise the discomfort of simulated gender dysphoria because of the contrast against what I usually felt, but it can be much harder to notice if it’s just a background discomfort that, for some people, is mostly tolerable.

And on a nicer note, being in community with trans people helped show me that cis people absolutely can experience gender euphoria. Queer community was a huge part of how I worked through all my internalised misogyny, and now I’m at a place where I can get angry at all the patriarchal bullshit women face while also feeling free to explore what it means for me to be a woman.

“My 11-year-old, who is autistic, keeps talking about it,” Destiny told Kare11. “He was talking about it all night. I couldn’t sleep because I was scared.”

When I was a kid, someone threw a brick through my bedroom window as I was heading off to sleep. It scared me so much that I had trouble sleeping for literally years after that. I can’t imagine how much worse the trauma of this must’ve been.

God, my heart hurts to hear these stories. I’m not in the US, so all I can do is spectate with growing dread and horror.

I’ve been trying hard to not let myself become numb to this though, nor become too focussed on the big picture of thinking about US’s descent into fascism. I’m equally powerless on that scale of things as I am when witnessing stories like this, but I’ve found it’s better to keep my focus on the small stories. It hurts to hear them, but that hurt is one that is fundamentally good, because it is compassion for my fellow humans. In an odd way, the hurt feels grounding because it’s meant to hurt, because what is going on are crimes against humanity. I’d rather feel this than nothing because it reminds me of the humanity I share with the people who are being oppressed.

You’re right that car accidents happen pretty frequently, and carry a high risk of lasting harm to those involved. This is why people have to pass a test in order to be allowed to drive, are legally required to have insurance, why speed limits and other road safety features exist, and why one of the roles of the police is to monitor and respond to dangerous drivers. Despite all these measures, road traffic accidents happen all the time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things to try to reduce the likelihood and severity of car accidents. None of these precautions are airtight, but they do reduce the risk that road users face. We don’t ignore the risks of car accidents, we just do what we can to mitigate those risks and get on with our lives as best we can.

That’s how things are for the majority of women. Most of us are far from petrified of unknown men, we have just learned that there are things we can do to reduce the risk of us being harassed or assaulted — many of which don’t take much additional effort and are entirely reasonable precautions to take. Having to do these things is just a background annoyance for most women, because it sure would be nice if we didn’t have to spend time or energy of these things, but most of us have enough lived experience with having to interact with predatory men that it would be irrational not to take precautions.

There certainly are some women who do feel a much higher level of fear, but this is often associated with specific trauma, and is no different to how someone who had been in a bad car accident may feel uneasy driving at first. Risk exists everywhere, and learning what precautions you can easily take to reduce risk, and incorporating them into our lives isn’t us being controlled by fear, but quite the opposite. It can become harmful if it dominates too much of our thinking, but dynamically responding to mitigate risks is something that we all do, every day, to keep ourselves safe and well.

A fun probability fact I like is around the question “what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?”, so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it’s basically zero.

However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult’s life is effectively 1, — i.e. it’s almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.

The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it’s something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it’s not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It’s no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.

If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that’s a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I’d be exposing myself to. If that wasn’t something that was available, it wouldn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.

The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it’s also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I’ve never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It’s only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.

Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just “risk of being kidnapped”, because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I’ve been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.

That’s unironically a good way of thinking about it.

One of my proudest achievements in life is having used particle-wave duality to explain non-binary gender to a bunch of cis-het physics-bros, and also using non-binary gender to explain quantum physics to queer folk. I’m disproportionately pleased with having been able to use this explanation successfully both ways.

(I also think it says a lot about me that I have found myself in situations where it isn’t uncommon that I get an opportunity to attempt this. Explaining gender to passively bigoted cis-hets feels like it’s part of my ethical duty to the world, but menacing my friends with quantum physics monologues is just for fun)