Briagne

Define your music taste with 8 artists:

* Backxwash
* Lingua Ignota
* underscores
* Saya Gray
* Khruangbin
* Massive Attack
* Lucinda Williams
* Judee Sill

What’s wrong with the Cass Review? A round-up of commentary and evidence [last updated 15/10/25] Wednesday 10 April 2024 saw the long-awaited publication of the final report of the Cass Review. This report was commissioned by NHS England, and provides a review of eviden…

So much bad stuff is happening. The Cass Review feels like it got lost in the noise. Yet this incredibly biased £3m project continues to warp discourse around trans healthcare.

I've therefore updated my megapost with 6 new major critiques from clinicians, researchers, and a child abuse survivor.

Academic Staff Need Academic Freedom, Too (opinion) Colleges cannot continue to operate as if all staff work is identical, Aaron Stoller writes.

This. Absolutely this.
"While much has been written about the vulnerabilities of contingent faculty, there has been almost no discussion of the academic freedom needs of one of higher education’s most rapidly growing workforces: third-space professionals." #HigherEd #Staff #AcademicLibraries

Something something spiderman meme

It was strangers who made it work for me too. I started playing with she/they, and most folks I knew went "great, so still 'they' when I remember". We had a tour group at work and they consistently gendered me she/her all day. I came home feeling seen for the first time

Over time I got more comfortable with the "or she/her, if you want" to leading with "ideally she/her, because we live in a binary society and the cognitive load of not just putting people in 1 of 2 bins with an optional sticker on their forehead is too much for most people in their daily lives"

When I first came out, I asked people to use they/them because it was an honest reflection of how I felt about identity "or she/her, if you want". what that looked like in practice was most people updated their mental model from "guy" to "guy who uses they/them" which felt even more wrong.

Big if true

I was looking back at archived versions of our website recently, and our staff today is about half what it was in the early 2000s.

Khruangbin is an April-May band for me. I think because I'm usually on allergy meds and hazy.

It is day infinity of everyone wanting me dead. People are having fun bringing lemon squares and automatic artillery to the anti-trans community meetings. Divorced legislators harangue about pedophile cults and surgeried infants and what ever happened to forever ago. I am more beautiful than you and I would like to be loved. I am getting concerned about the monomaniacs who make their entire lives about deadnaming and transvestigations: obviously it’s working but aren’t you exhausted, don’t you remember when someone loved you without knowing what you were? I am eating shortbread on a patio table overlooking the enormous green ocean. Somewhere an octopus is being eaten by an octopus and not panicking. Black dress to the floor, red acrylic nails, silver teardrop earrings, waterproof mascara. I am excited to do this for the rest of my life and be terrified. I hear a noise behind me and I don’t turn around

Having a Great Time Being Transgender in America Lately, by Jackie Sabbagh
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Update: appears to have been a technical issue; it's back online now.

Any #medlibs (or others) have info on transcare.ucsf.edu/guidelines going offline? Hoping it's a technical issue, but given the times I'm wary.

"Over the last several months, Members of Congress have used increasingly derogatory language to refer to transgender people, including one member repeatedly using slurs on the House floor," said Rep. Mark Takano, Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus. "Now, Representatives Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson are calling for transgender people to be locked up against their will and institutionalized. These comments are abhorrent and have no place in our society, especially coming from elected leaders. This demonization of the transgender community must end. Speaker Johnson and Republican leadership have a duty to reign in these extremist Members and put a stop to this vile, hateful rhetoric."

Equality Caucus Rep. Mark Takano calls on Speaker Johnson and GOP House leadership to reign in their party's extreme rhetoric in trans people per this statement that just hit my inbox:

Gambling In Casablanca Being blamed for a world of political violence by the people who force us to live in it, and are now shocked-shocked!—by it. Navigating the daily trauma of living in a bully's paradise.

"Well I'm given to understand that for an extremely limited time, members of our nation's political violence party are shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame." www.the-reframe.com/gambling-in-...

Every once in a while one of the names in the nonstop parade of creative folks showing their transphobic asses really hits me where it hurts. This is one of those.

here we go again, folks. it’ll take a lot of pressure on dems again to get them to fight!

i’ll thread after i’m out of meetings, but if you’re raring to go, this is secs243-246 of the FY26 budget &, yes, this is basically the hyde amendment for trans care as predicted last fall.

contact: reps.fyi

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Trump DOJ is looking at ways to ban transgender Americans from owning guns, sources say | CNN Politics Senior Justice Department officials are weighing proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms, according to two officials familiar with the internal discussions.

Banning trans people from owning guns is a really REALLY significant escalation and I think the scariest part about it that's not being discussed at all is that the plan is to declare that trans people are mentally ill

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

edition.cnn.com/2025/09/04/p...

Always The Topic, Rarely The Voice Paste Magazine is your source for the best music, movies, TV, comedy, videogames, books, comics, craft beer, politics and more. Discover your favorite albums and films.

For no real reason, thinking about this piece about the "headline news about famous guy saying transphobic thing" industrial complex I wrote for Paste two years ago. Just before everything got worse.

www.pastemagazine.com/music/transp...

No, I agree that it's meaningful. I had a similar perspective on my PC from an RPG campaign last year. She died (pre-campaign) while still closeted, and the supernatural force that revived her enabled her to mold her reanimated body in essentially the same ways HRT would have. She's very not cis.

I'm also focusing on what type of person spends an entire afternoon lecturing trans people about the need to give up on having rights while repeatedly asserting he's an ally, and reflecting on how to identify dipshits like this in my own life so I can proactively ignore them

An email we got from the University of Michigan Health: A message to our patient community Our health care teams share a commitment to meet the needs of our patients and our communities, and we work earnestly to provide compassionate, comprehensive, and evidence- based care to every person, every time. We are honored to have had the opportunity to provide comprehensive gender affirming care for our communities, and we are disappointed to share difficult news regarding this care for patients under age 19. In response to unprecedented legal and regulatory threats to our clinicians and our institution, we have made the difficult decision to stop prescribing puberty blockers and gender affirming hormones for patients under age 19.

So, not only is my kid's healthcare illegal for doctors to provide him in the state we live in, he can no longer be treated out of state and risks losing access to the evidence backed peer reviewed medication that has changed his life for the better because we are ruled by monsters and cowards

Or they're still wasting decades to dissociation and depression because transition was unimaginable when they were younger and it can take ages to break free from that. I only moved from the missing 2% to the 1% after 10+ years of being pretty sure I should, but of course I *couldn't*

Two Siamese cats curled up together on a red and white blanket.

I made a cat lure (blanket + lamp) for my home office earlier in the week so they would sit next to me, not on my keyboard (or lap, which is fine except one of them likes to reach up and put her paw in my mouth to shut me up when I'm on a call.) This was the result.

NEW:

“I’ve had enough…I’m refusing to back down.”

Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier speaks to MSNBC from the Texas State Capitol. She is stuck there after the Texas GOP required police surveillance as condition for release. She is refusing to sign a waiver for the law enforcement escort.

The me who took your class could never have imagined that transitioning:
1. was possible and
2. right for me;
3. brought me closer to family and friends and
4. helped me make new ones;
5. resolved crippling depression;
6. gave me the confidence to flourish professionally;
-and at least 4 more things

Header text: "HEY YOU! YES YOU! TAKE THIS SHIT OUT OF LINKS!" This is followed by a couple example urls, with a red square highlighting the sections with source identifiers. The rest of the text is as follows: Source identifiers are used to track your activity on a site. Where you came from, what device you use, and even who you talk to. Whether it's written clearly in the url or tied to a random string of characters, it's assigned to your activity. When you send a link containing a source identifier to somebody and they click it, it signals to the website that you two are connected. And that data goes right back to the website operators, and thus their advertisers. Whenever you select "share" or "copy link" on a social app or website, it creates a link like this. If you give even the smallest shit about online privacy, it's important to remove them. Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue, especially sections starting with "si=" or "utm_source="

I saw an infographic a couple years ago about how to remove source identifiers from links and why it's important, but I can't find it again and too many people I know are sending me links with them so here's an infographic straight from the oven

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/