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Fool me once: shame on you. Fool me twice: shame on me.
Yes, I’m that old. mumbles something about getting off my (weedy) lawn
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A celebration of short memories. Perfect for 2025.
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I just finally got this done and mostly tried to stick to this point and how nonsensical it is to try to identify someone by their appearance as a newborn baby rather than their appearance based on their current gender identity (as well as pointing out that, hey, intersex people actually exist, even as newborn babies, so the whole “M/F only” thing is nonsense to begin with). It’s not as eloquent as yours or Mindy’s, but at least it’s unique and hopefully gets the point across. I’m less perfectionist about it than I would normally be, knowing that these comments are more likely to be thrown away or used to add us to some retaliation list than they are to be seriously reviewed, but it feels good to actually have SOMETHING I can do to resist and to have gone ahead and done it.
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Ah, more fodder for my failure anaylsis workshop. Can’t wait.
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I know this is shrieking into the void, but it goes way beyond what is typically seen as “intersex.” There are many, many variants of chromosomal distribution (XO, XXY, XYY, etc, etc) not to mention disorders of sexual development (androgen insensitivity, testicular feminization, etc) as well as factors of intrauterine development leading to lack of concordance between neural development and physical development. In short, it is not simple. And no matter how much the fascists want it to be binary, it quite simply is not. No more than “tall or short” or “skinny or fat” are. Facts do not change due to fascist beliefs. Which is why they hate facts so much.
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Often it feels like the real battle of our time is between people who are convinced that whatever they learned in middle school is the unshakeable foundation of all human knowledge and those who realized at some point that most of it falls apart under a little scrutiny.
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I’ve been trying to come up with any other area of general knowledge where anyone accepts the “basic” version covers the topic enough for functional real world applications. Basic math? Well, that might explain why so many people can’t grasp that a 1/3 lb. burger is larger than a 1/4 lb. Basic computer programming? That’s okay, I’m sure you’ll never need to build a data structure object for anything. Are there any subjects where the basic version doesn’t come with a list of exceptions, corrections, and refutations at higher levels?
Even beyond that, a lot of what’s supposedly taught as “that’s just basic fill-in-the-blank” isn’t really taught at all! Until you’re discussing sexual characteristics, does any biology text actually divide the world into male and female?
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Dunno what is going on bottom right in the last seconds.
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There’s basic history, where you don’t have to know more than the patriotic narrative learned in school and how dare you suggest it’s misleading.
Also, it’s not really the same thing, but something was happening when scientists argued it made more sense not to treat Pluto as a planet and started getting death threats from the general public. Apparently a lot of people are happy to respond to “turns out reality isn’t like that” with “I hope you die” even in cases where it can’t possibly affect them…
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“don’t try to unlearn me what i done been learnt! i ain’t goin’ back to no school, so stop changin’ the world on me.”
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But realising how far apart the basic and applied versions are takes work too.
In fourth year engineering school, a bunch of us were sitting around moaning about how difficult it was to be us. One popular professor walked past, and someone in our group said “Dr. [redacted], I’ve been here four years and I know less than when I got here.”
The prof stopped and his face lit up. “That’s great! You’ve learned! When you got here, you were very very smart and knew almost everything, and you just had a few years of courses and then you’d know everything. But instead you learned that things are actually pretty complicated, and there’s so much we don’t know. Not everyone gets it. You’ve made my day.”
ETA: You’d think a decade or two of adulthood would alert people to the fact that life is complicated. It feels like MAGA is made up, in part, of people who didn’t make the connection, and like to believe that life’s difficulties are all because of those people.
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It’s always that much easier to just blame somebody else for whatever than putting in the hours to learn and understand and actually solve problems.
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I jokingly suggested a topic for “Today’s Aviation Mishap” a while back. Maybe I should do it.
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I think that’s a great idea, yeah!
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Done!
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Wunnerful wunnerful!