Jessica Kant

I was in public health school before the pandemic and at the immediate beginning. Before no one knew beyond broad strokes what it did. By a month in, everyone I knew was talking about how we should have funded the CDC better and will need to keep it flush with cash forever after if we made it out.

It’s demonstrably not true, and it serves the exact same purpose repeating “border crisis” over and over did: to convince people it was not only a problem but that any solution was acceptable so long as it was grievously rash.

If you asked most people in 2024 what absolutely needed to change in America, no one who isn’t a professional grifter would have put gutting the CDC at the top.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said the agency must restore public trust following the Covid-19 pandemic, shift its focus away from chronic disease and center its efforts on infectious-disease response.

I’m so tired of seeing this line about restoring trust repeated. Appreciation for public health reached a new high with the pandemic. The majority of people understand that science made *incredible* progress in a staggeringly small amount of time. The people who “lost trust” never did to begin with.

It should absolutely not be necessary to remind Americans that having despotic leadership does not magically make the citizens of a country expendable.

Sure.

Quick editorial suggestion: if you’re currently drafting something framing the slaughter of civilians as a problem of economics, you can vastly improve it by just formatting your computer instead.

You’re not exactly talking to an intellectual iconoclast here

In order to understand UK politics in 2026 you must realise that a plumber & plasterer doesn't represent the interests of the working class because she is left-wing but a wealthy broadcaster & former academic does represent the interests of the working class because he is right-wing. Hope this helps

Sure does! From part one: "But this headline was eventually rearranged by an aggregator which re-ordered some of the words and omitted a critical verb. It additionally lost the scare quotes, and while this is a slight shift in language, the meaning changed substantially."

jessk.org/blog/ai-and-...

It’s such a nightmare

I’m also going to go ahead and say it’s bullshit either way? HIV drugs are expensive and it’s a fucking public health crisis

yup. it's not like no one ever mashed the words together, but look at the astronomical rise starting 2016. ngram viewer is super cool, thank you

Near any army base? or are you being extremely specific on purpose because your point doesn’t match that most countries have schools near or on bases?

Florida Cuts HIV/AIDS Funding, Blocking Thousands from Access to Meds The emergency rule comes just one day before a planned hearing between the DOH and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

Background on the underhanded maneuvering behind this, attempting to circumvent the courts

“The Florida DOH’s emergency rule was filed on Tuesday, February 24, just one day before a hearing was planned between the DOH and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF).”

I had Eliza on a 68k Macintosh just after the Cretaceous period

Florida just cut off HIV meds for 16,000 people.

Can definitely see a connection but I don’t think it’s a primary one. I do think obergefell convinced them they needed to pick on us instead of lgbtq people as a whole

You can see how little it caught on until recently when it was laundered by outlets like the Atlantic in 2015/2016.

Call me a raving radical but I literally do not care whether your imperialist massacre of children is “constitutional” or not.

Obviously this is a bad faith argument you’re making but the nuance in language trends is co-reflective of the rising awareness of both: the existence of trans people, and differences of sexual development. It’s not to claim trans people are intersex. And physicians have used “trans” for decades.

Gender critical folks also don't believe us when we tell them "sex-based rights" is an idea they themselves made up in just the last handful of years.

It has aged me a bit

You need to flush that cache boo

It would be inaccurate to read this as if the term became more salient somehow, but rather was largely not useful to anyone until recently. We always had a word to describe trans people. It was “transgender” and “sex” was just that.

"Biological sex" is virtually non-existent by comparison to other keywords, and doesn't really emerge until very recently in the news media. Most outlets didn't really bother with the term until 2024. This is reflected in search trends as well.

all search terms wiith transgender being the highest except for 2006-2009ish where transsexual is

all search terms wiith transgender being the highest except for 2006-2009ish where transsexual is

2006-2009ish there's a spike in transsexual that's overcome by transgender there after

"sex change" search is stable across time, but transgender overtakes 2009ish

The word "Transsexual" collapses by 2010 after a brief heyday starting in 2005. "Sex change" is mostly stable across time but overtaken in 2016. For reference Jazz's first TV appearance is in 2007. Danish Girl comes out in 2015. "Biological sex" is searched an average of zero times.

"transgender" Search term manage_search "biological sex" Search term transgender is always at the top for US results

US "transgender" versus "biological sex" and as in all of these, "biological sex" barely registers compared to transgender

The term existed only inside small pockets of the general population because it's extremely imprecise. By the time this graph starts, the word "transgender" has been in regular use for a very long time. Interest first gains steam about a year before the first election of Trump, in time for HB2.