I am once again canvassing among the fancy people. It takes longer because the houses are so spaced.
Based on advice in a previous thread I splurged on a pretty powder-blue step through e-bike and it's an instant hit. There's really no better way to get around our part of the East Bay and honestly I feel pretty cute on it. Surgery in three weeks will curtail biking for a bit though.
2: That's what lots of people said. People canvassing in less rich areas are less reassured.
Also, if I take two minutes to find a house number in daylight on a sunny day, how long will it take an ambulance driver in the dark?
I have an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon on Tuesday for my fucked up knee and also may have another one soon after at the specialist sports hospital. The latter are really hard to get, the place is world class.
And Thursday a doctor is going to be looking up my butt for the first time, I've been putting this off for way too long.
I hope your knee gets better and they find your watch.
It is amazing how hilly even the un-hilly parts of the East Bay are...
Took 140 lbs. of dog on a 4-mile 800-foot climb hike in Sibley Volcanic Preserve this morning. They are not less destructive. And I am totally unproductive.
I couldn't carry a dog half that far.
You're brave to bring a herd of 28 5lb chihuahuas on a hike.
Kid #2 qualified to row 4-man in the world's biggest regatta today only to have some clowns from NJ illegally cut them off and knock them out of the top half of finishers (top half get a place in next year's race.)
That sucks. I hope you can deflate their tires before they try to drive home.
Can I describe an unexpected thing about having a nonbinary kid without it sounding like I'm being judgmental? I like discussing things but I don't want to step in it. (Or maybe I am a judgmental ass and will need it gently pointed out to me! I don't think that's going on here, though.)
Ace is 9 years old, which is on the younger side for these kinds of things, which means they're not wholly attuned to the ways teenagers and adults think about gender. They've never been masculine in any sense - no clothes that would code as masculine, not enjoying traditional boy activities.
The thing that's unexpected to me is that my nonbinary kid is still skewing so feminine in how they dress and wear their hair. They range from the gender-neutral side of kid-dom to feminine. They are not making an effort to match their presentation to the cultural norm of what "nonbinary" usually looks like.
The part that I'm hesitant to say is that I'm wondering if this is contributing to why I'm struggling with pronouns when I'm working so damn hard on it. Part of it is the slow process of re-wiring. But is part of it that I'm having trouble actually reading them as nonbinary because they don't match how I expect nonbinary to be?
They're only 9! They just haven't had the kind of exposure to nonconformity that you get in middle school, I think. It's hard to invent how to not conform from scratch. (And also, they'll hit puberty and will grow and change in unexpected ways, like any other kid.)
One of the ways that I've heard that kids realize they are nonbinary is that they experience acute dysphoria with a traditional gender presentation. Your kid doesn't appear to be experiencing that, so you don't have that thought pattern to latch on to. It doesn't seem weird to me that you wonder at its absence.
Oh yes! Thank you for putting your finger on that. Yes, there's no dysphoria associated with dressing in a feminine style. It's more of a positive affirmation with identifying as nonbinary.
Not surprising at all. That is, one of the things that I think older/more conventional people (like me!) find most confusing/hard to adjust to about newer gender norms is the disaggregation of things that used to be more firmly associated. Not only is gender not tightly associated with bodily phenotype, it's also not necessarily tightly associated with appropriate pronouns or with preferences in matters that used to be thought of as constituting gender presentation -- all those areas can vary independently.
You'll manage to adjust to what Ace needs, but if it's hard for you to keep track I wouldn't feel bad about it so long as you're trying.
I think it's also helpful for me to discuss this now, because I'm anticipating what relatives are going to ask me when we all get together over winter break. This helps me put language together to respond to skeptical questions that I may get.
Specifically, you are both being very validating of my experience in a way that doesn't invalidate Ace's experience, and I think that's important for me to carry forward. "Yes, Aunt X! I hear what you're saying. And to Ace's generation, blah blah blah."
(My aunts are both extremely progressive and kind and would be people I could literally ask for advice on this topic, so I feel bad for impugning them.)
And it's all super individual! The things I was talking about being disaggregated may be importantly linked for a particular person, they just don't have to be.
Iris recently told us that they're taking they pronouns, which isn't very surprising--they're in a Gender Nonconforming Dormitory*, and none of their college friends use their birth pronouns. Genderwise they dress mostly neutral/masculine, but also wear cute dresses and were very femme for prom. Likes girls but identifies as queer rather than lesbian.
It's all hard to tell how much of what's going on is sort of subculture-specific. I'm not suggesting any of it is "just a phase" or whatever, but they are very specific in their friend group (IRL and online) and media consumption in a way that feels a little hothouse, if you take my meaning. It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
*approximately official name
Oh, and their friends call them Snake. I'm sorry, but if you want to reject your birth name, you need to pick a real name as an alternative.
I mean, Hermes is right there.
To Ace's situation, Iris' roommate takes they pronouns but uses their feminine birth name and presents traditionally femme. So I guess I'd frame it was rejecting the binary but not the feminine.
26: Counterpoint: Insisting people call you "Snake" is awesome and everyone should watch Escape from New York again.
On the internet, nobody knows you're Kurt Russell.
I wonder if the kids know that movie. It'd be awesome if everyone they introduce themselves to says "Snake Roth? I thought you were dead."
So I guess I'd frame it was rejecting the binary but not the feminine.
This is a really good way to put it, too!
Gender Nonconforming Dormitory
Oh, the Nonconformitory?
25: I'm all for reclaiming 'phase' as totally fine. It might be a phase due to being terminally online/in college/hothouse etc, but -- so what? "Just a phase" can used to dismiss someone's preferences, but it can be the case that something both a phase and worthy of respect.
(Not directed at you, exactly -- just a jumping off point. But I think exploration is fine and healthy and we need not pretend that one's identity has to be permanent in order for it to meaningful.)
Anyhow, on gender: the kids are wearing masks to school because I still am testing positive for COVID, and according to the Calabat, pink masks with cupcakes and rainbows and kitties in milkshake cups are fine, and so are blue masks with pandas, but pink with unicorns is a bridge too far into GIRL and so could I please reserve those for his sister?
I think Meghan's got it. If one is thinking that 'being nonbinary means rejecting masculinity or femininity', what Ace is doing doesn't make sense. But if it's about enjoying the ambiguity without rejecting anything -- then it's fine.
Honestly, most of this stuff is confusing to me. The only thing that makes sense is trying to get called "Snake".
And she calls him Little Bastard
And she says it to his face
And he says, "Don't call me Little Bastard
Call me Snake"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6S2i_7M5ZQ
I trust we can all agree that Snake is preferable in this instance.
34: Unfortunately "phase" is squeezed from two sides: obviously the bad guys want to say it in an intentionally dismissive way, but also there's a lot of inherency thinking in activist spaces these days--whatever you are, you were always that. Obviously it's more correct than the idea that someone or something could turn you gay, which used to be commonplace thought, but it certainly closes off the possibilities of fluidity over time, not just between identities.
I guess we just had a thread about this.
AWB once said something elsewhere about how it's better to think of traditional gender identity as being about the rejection of identification with the "opposite" gender than a positive affiliation with one's own gender, and that's been a helpful perspective for understanding nonbinary identity for me.
That is, it's not that "nonbinary" is a third gender with its own signifiers. Instead, it's a refusal to reject any gender and its associated signifiers, an opting-out of the whole framework rather than out of any particular set of signifiers, including those assigned to one at birth. As I've mentioned before, both of our (AMAB) teens identify as nonbinary, but they both present very masculine with occasional nods to femininity through things like painting nails or wearing pink.
(That sort of presentation does make remembering pronouns harder. We still fuck it up all the time, but less than we used to. It's a process.)
The problem is that they can't both be "Snake."
And here I would have thought "Ladder".
That's why read helped me pick a pseud instead of you two. Even though she later went into threatening violence or whatever.
40: what's hard for middle-aged conventional frumps like me is that every message of my youth was that one ought to be able to opt-out of signifiers without thereby being excluded from identifying as a gender.
47: I don't think anyone's being excluded from identifying as a gender if they want to. Just being given the option of not. It's definitely a major change in how to conceptualize gender as a fundamental concept.
We are about 50% getting pronouns correct in person for our friends' nonbinary kid. We do better privately, honestly, because there's more of a rhythm of using third person. Said kid has changed nothing about their dress (joggers, sweatshirts, gym shoes) or hair (short, shaggy) and now sports a deeper voice than when we last saw them (they're a sophomore in high school). I figured they'd want to experiment with a more gender-neutral nickname (very easy with their given name) or play around with literally anything about their appearance, but no. So, I guess what I'm saying is that seems very similar to what Ace is doing.
Yeah, and to be clear, I'm cool with it. The kids are much more adjusted from what I can see. The kids are breaking down the same categories but they're doing so by reifying the kinds of things I would have rejected as being *important* to the concept.
teo (and AWB out in the ether), that's a very helpful way to frame it. Obviously I'm familiar with the phrase "reject the gender binary", but I hadn't quite conceived of it in those terms. Like, my conception was something to the effect of "I don't really identify as a boy or a girl," but I think that the spread of enby is driven much more by 40: "I embrace both genders within myself."
It also helps me reconsider trans men who self-present as pretty femme (and vice versa). It didn't quite make sense to me to go through all the effort of transitioning only to end up in the presentation of your AGAB, but if it's about a kind of All Of The Above feeling, I can get that (not that anyone needs me to get it).
To zoom out a bit, it's also helpful to understand just what's so toxic about toxic masculinity. It's not exactly novel to observe that that sort of masculinity is driven by terror that one could in any way be mistaken for being even a little feminine, but recognizing that standard masculinity is also driven by a milder version o the same, and also that the rise of toxic is driven in large part by a society that's a little less uptight about that.
Toxic men natter on about "soy boys" and always try to claim that any man who isn't toxic is utterly feminized, but what is actually freaking them out is that a typical liberal man is cis and straight and basically masculine but doesn't live in fear of doing something feminine-coded (although, to be clear, most are also still passively and actively perpetuating the patriarchy--they're only comfortable going so far).
Patriarchal assumptions usually get me quicker service in bars is the thing.
53: Have you done a controlled experiment, or is this more a process of pure reason thing?
teo (and AWB out in the ether), that's a very helpful way to frame it.
Thanks! It's been a super helpful perspective for me and I'm glad to hear it's helpful to others too. I think you're spot on about the connection to toxic masculinity too.
54: Induction has issues so I'm playing it safe by making things up.
If I understand Alaska at all then they're called Fish and Choice.
I think one thing that can be tricky generationally is that I think it's typical in our generation for someone who cares about the stuff in 52 to not only not identify as non-binary but to have a lot invested in the idea that rejecting standard masculinity is an allowed way of being a man. Like I don't think the sort of non-binary person we're talking about in this thread is very different from me and most of my theater friends, there's just a different language for talking about it.
For people who experience strong dysphoria there's a real strong impulse to make a change, so people in their 40s and 50s do still come out as trans. But there's not a lot of impetus for someone like me (or probably several other people on this thread) to identify as non-binary as an adult even if that's what we'd do if we were kids now. Which makes it all a bit more foreign if you don't experience it through your kids. We all know adults who are gay and adults who are trans, but we basically don't know adults who identify as non-binary but present in a way that's mostly gender-traditional.
There's another thing that I find interesting or at least unexpected about this kind of disaggregation -- the ambiguity about how public or high-stakes it all is for the person involved. My baseline sense is that gender identification is a sort of deep, important thing, and what you're wearing or what your hair looks like is much more superficial. On the other hand, a non-binary kid whose visual presentation stays conventional for their assigned gender at birth can pick and choose when they want to be public about their gender -- they can be out to friends and family, but still not worry about getting hassled about it in the supermarket.
It's odd to me to think of gender as a private, rather than a public, fact, but I think there's at least some movement in that direction.
what's hard for middle-aged conventional frumps like me is that every message of my youth was that one ought to be able to opt-out of signifiers without thereby being excluded from identifying as a gender.
This is also helpful for me to have articulated. It used to be that what made the olds uncomfortable was broadening the tent of what counted as "female" and "male". This is a whole different paradigm from that.
So now I'm thinking about the progress of hair length as signifier. On the male side, the deprecation of long hair was essentially before my time: by the late '70s, hair longer than the early-era Beatles no longer had any particular salience in media (IOW, a dude w longer hair could be anything other than old; it didn't mean he was a hippie or a dropout or a f**) and even country music stars wore their hair long. But I think fashion shifted back and shorter hair became more common, and so now I'm wondering if it's now a heavy signifier again. Does a 30-yo Republican dude assume any males he sees with long hair are not of his tribe?
Among the youth, I mostly see long hair on boys who are nonconform-ish, but I don't have a huge sample to work with. Hair color is much more common but also doesn't seem to mean much; it's certainly not femme-coded (although I guess "girly" colors still are). Like, athletes who color their hair aren't even heckled for it by opposing fans (whereas 25 years ago Dennis Rodman was a freak for doing it).
And then there's short hair on women. 20 years ago AB had more or less a pixie cut and absolutely got harassed for it (on the presumption she was gay). And certainly boyish styles have often been chosen by women who are rejecting traditional femininity. But, again, does it have that much salience now? Do mainstream girls & women feel like they can get a shorter cut (let's again use 1964 Lennon as a measure) without signaling something they don't want to? There's a whole other thing about short haircuts on moms that's really not related; I'm talking about non-maternal, pre-middle aged lady folk here.
Among the youth, I mostly see long hair on boys who are nonconform-ish
Should clarify here that I mean truly long hair here: ponytail-eligible cuts, not Andy Travis from WKRP. I think you have to be a literal Nazi these days to think that Don Draper ca. 1967 was the limit of acceptable hair length.
Newt has blond hair down to the middle of his back and occasional nail polish, but otherwise presents mostly masculine and reports being at least occasionally hassled about it under the presumption that he's some kind of intentional gender-nonconforming-type-person (which is accurate -- he hasn't identified as non-binary, but the hair and so on are at least in part intended to convey what side he's on to the extent there are sides). Nothing super stressful as far as I know.
I have gray hair down the middle of my back.
Our twins both have long hair (shoulder-ish length), and one has it currently dyed blond. They've both dyed it various colors in the past and may in the future. I'm not sure to what extent it signifies anything in context. They're obviously part of the queer/nonconforming community where long hair on masc-presenting people is common, but their school is very diverse and includes lots of ethnic communities that have various cultural attitudes toward hair length. So I don't know that the hair itself reads queer in practice, though they have many other indicators that do. (Sometimes explicitly! They wear shirts and hats with pro-trans slogans and so forth.)
They wear shirts and hats with pro-trans slogans and so forth.
Iris has a trucker hat that reads "Women love me/Fish fear me" and a t-shirt that says "I
I'm sure she also has some more conventionally political queer stuff, but those are the items that stick out in my mind.
One of ours has an ACLU ballcap that says "Trans People Belong." They wore it on the sidelines of football games after a season-ending injury, which I thought was an excellent encapsulation of our family's unusual position at the intersection of the gay community and the football community.
59: Right. Like my theater/music guy friends who wore eyeliner and nail polish but were otherwise masculine were definitely men. Suggesting that wearing nail polish in anyway signified that they were not men was something that olds would wrongly think. (The expceted question was about sexuality, not gender.) Anyhow, this isn't saying much besides it's hard to learn about gender as the kids understand it even if you keep up with the literature.
Utah is still crazy gendered, except at the arts school, full of faculty brats, who are all genderqueer, partially in response to the conservative aesthetic which is pretty strict. The Calabat wore nail polish to a track meet once and got teased, except that he's really hard to ruffle and didn't quite get that they were trying to be mean. ("What do you think about that?", I probe. "They probably weren't raised properly.")
Does a 30-yo Republican dude assume any males he sees with long hair are not of his tribe?
A couple of them in a RAM tried to run me off the road not long ago. A long-haired guy on an e-bike is definitely not in the tribe.
I thought long hair meant you were a computer engineer?
Only if it's in a poorly kept ponytail.
72, 73: Hey now!
NMM to Jacob Rees-Mogg's Cabinet career, at least I sincerely hope so.
70: Oh, dammit, I didn't even see that. The t-shirt is "I [heart] MILFs"
I have one of those and I'm not allowed to wear it to soccer games.
I understand why! The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is bad news.
I remember being both baffled and amused when I saw a car with a "Fish tremble at the mere mention of my name" bumper sticker, but now it seems those kind of goofy fishing brags are everywhere.
Sometimes it is. (A lot of the souvenir shops around here carry versions of that one.)
I mean that they were having sex with fish, but whatever.
83 was really spawned with Roe v Wade.
84 The best of us. This one hurts.
The story about the Chinese police stations in the Netherlands is crazy
Rascal woke up about 10 pm last night, and couldn't get back to sleep until probably 4 am. We weren't exactly staying awake with him, but it gave me insomnia knowing that he was sitting there, ticking the minutes away, not sleeping.
He must be such a wreck at school today. But we couldn't keep him home, because he'd sleep, and then tonight would be a disaster. Or that's my reasoning at least.
So, Heebie U gives faculty members a small research budget, but we're not supposed to spend that on students. To take students to a conference, you're supposed to go through the insanely stupid student government allocations process. The students obviously turn over each year and have no institutional memory and are generally on a bit of a power trip about their precious funds, which are not scarce. I'm taking students to a conference on Saturday. The allocations meeting was on Tuesday, and by today I was very cranky that we hadn't heard yet, since I had a back-up funding source from the conference, and my friend-organizer had set aside some money but was waiting on me to let her know.
Which brings me to this email I got today from the student-comptroller:
Hello Heebie, (yes, they used my first name)
As a committee we met yesterday and came to the conclusion that we require more information to approve your allocation request.
Per your request you want $120 for 2 vehicles to make the trip to [Big City]. I spoke to one of your board members and they told me that you only have 5 members. Which my question is why do you require 2 vehicles?
Thank you, Student-comptroller
WOW, STUDENT, WHY DON'T YOU BITE ME.
Also, $120 is the total allocation for everyone's registration fee plus transportation and parking. We did not request $120 for two cars to [big city].
The middle seat isn't really usable when everyone is an adult.
And it's because some students are going to the Friday portion of the conference and spending the night, and others are staying until Saturday. But I'm almost hesitant to give the reason (here) because the original question is so over-the-top.
What I actually did was bust out my most severely authoritative grown up speech and smother the jerk in $2 words and calmly explain to the small, small child why this is necessary.
Send it back in adding a case of Keystone Light and an economy-size box of Slim Jims.
Here was my actual answer:
Hi Small Child,
There are several reasons. Most importantly, the conference starts on Friday. Some students are going on Friday and spending the night, while others are going up on Saturday morning. In addition, not all students are coming from Heebie U Town, making it difficult to carpool. Finally, my personal advice for students was to err on the side of planning for multiple contingencies, rather than not having enough flexibility on the actual day of the conference.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Dr. Go Fuck Yourself
Students are driving themselves and just getting reimbursed, and they also forgot to ask for parking costs to be covered.
Then I hope it's a KIA that gets stolen by TikToking kids.
I'm still pondering cars. Allegedly, you can buy a small, basic car for like $17,000 still. That's like half the price of a plug-in hybrid. I'm wondering if the cheaper price isn't reflecting lower environmental costs even though mpg isn't as good as a hybrid?
That is a different LBJ than our usual LBJ.
105: I don't think anyone assumes an NMM announcement is an admission of an actual sexual fantasy, so there's no need to go presidential.
So, ah ... Twitter.
Maybe worth an FPP. (or maybe I am more engaged with it than many here). My fantasy was something like an #OKEveryoneoutofthepool hashtag and a mass exodus or something like that*. But..
My follows have become my internet curation mechanism and it is excellent for following election results so will probably stick around on until then. But I think it is over for me sometime relatively soon. Main thing I would miss other than election stuff would be some niche follows I have discovered; I guess most will also have some other channel. But I have gotten spoiled by the aggregation.
At some point I do think continued engagement will be come willingly being a pawn in the global urge to autocracy... or maybe leaving will be. The pawns are uncertain on how to best avoid being used in the service evil banality..
As someone I follow pointed out, if you want to know who is celebrating on Twitter do a search of the N word and see the accounts glorying in now being able to use it.
Have had a number of main platforms for engagement over the course of my internet life, so what is one more. Which will be?
*I really do want to help inflict some financial pain on the fucking dickhead.
Should I just put up a twitter thread?
109: Yes. I'd also like to learn what platforms people are migrating to.
Maybe. I had not been paying close attention, and was surprised how quickly it happened once it really got in motion.
110 is a reason to do so. I know some are advocating Tribel but there are some significant concerns about that platform. Probably significant concerns about any platform.
I'm thinking of trying the comments section of Crooked Timber.
I am going with newspaper comments sections. I think those would be full of well-informed people ...
I can't get my iPad to update to OS 16 or even 15.75. I think it's because there isn't enough space on the drive. I think the reason is that I have too many e-mails downloaded on the thing. There area bunch that go into one of my Gmail accounts that I think Google moves to another filter so I don't see them. I think it's called promotions. Some of them are twitter but a whole bunch are the incessant Democratic fundraising e-mails.
13: I think they closed the comments section. Maybe that's part of the joke, and I'm missing it somehow.
Until just now, I hadn't looked at it in years.
Yay for the Brazilian election results. I feel glad and a sense of relief.
Does Brazil do a relatively quick transfer of power or do they follow the lead of the last best hope for democracy and freedom and spend 2.5 months fucking around and hoping not to be found out?
To answer my own question in 125, the inauguration is January 1st, so lots of time to spend hoping for a peaceful transition.