📖 Preliminary analysis: The HHS anti-trans report's omissions on undisclosed conflicts of interest in the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" study and its ties to anti-gay conversion therapy groups (2025-05-16)
files.genderideology.org/hhs/twitter_...
“There is no clear precedent for what DeSantis and the president are doing."
Experts question the legality of deploying National Guard officials as immigration judges.
BREAKING: Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the health dept, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.
(Gift link)
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/h...
Do you ever come up with a cissona cover story in case you ever need it for anything? Mine is Mike or Bob or Dan or something and his favorite movies are Joker and John Wick 3
"As a preteen [girl], Ziz grew depressed. She saw puberty as 'evil,' ... and was horrified at the idea that she would be 'killed-overwritten' by a new self. She began to feel 'like the world was a hypothetical'"
Basic literacy on dysphoria and depersonalization at puberty could have prevented this:
Ziz claims: "Vassar has had, I think about 6, transfems gravitate to him, join his projects, go on his quests, that I’ve heard. Including Olivia, and Jessica, and I think Devi. Devi had a mental breakdown and detransitioned IIHC. Jessica had a mental breakdown and didn’t detransition."
The New York Times leaving out the Bay Area rationalist and startup cofounder who was most directly and intensely transphobic to Ziz? It's more likely than you think bsky.app/profile/zinn...
In a 2021-04-21 comment on her blog, Ziz says "Vassar kept loudly ostentatiously calling me 'he/him', Emma brought it up, he made it clear that if I wanted 'she/her' pronouns I’d have to earn that personhood" WOW (web.archive.org/web/20230228...)
"As a preteen [girl], Ziz grew depressed. She saw puberty as 'evil,' ... and was horrified at the idea that she would be 'killed-overwritten' by a new self. She began to feel 'like the world was a hypothetical'"
Basic literacy on dysphoria and depersonalization at puberty could have prevented this:
Ziz's 2019-11-13 post (web.archive.org/web/20230228...) quotes Alyssa Vance from MetaMed as saying Michael Vassar believes trans women "are definitely men and definitely shouldn't transition", and that he "is a self-described TERF" and "seems to try to push people he knows away from transitioning"
Vassar continues: "A class action lawsuit by the Zach Davis reference class could generate a great deal of wealth and of political power."
So Michael Vassar, founder of a Peter Thiel-backed startup, thought spurious detransitioner lawsuits could be used to gain wealth and political power. Fuck him!
"As a preteen [girl], Ziz grew depressed. She saw puberty as 'evil,' ... and was horrified at the idea that she would be 'killed-overwritten' by a new self. She began to feel 'like the world was a hypothetical'"
Basic literacy on dysphoria and depersonalization at puberty could have prevented this:
If information on this condition and its treatment had been widely understood and accepted at the time she was experiencing this, much of what happened could have been averted: genderanalysis.net/depersonaliz...
The Times article does a superficial and meaningless check-in with a few big names in the Bay Area rationalist movement who want to distance themselves, but completely omits any mention of the Bay Area rationalist who was apparently closest and most influential to Ziz: Michael Vassar (🧵)
So my wife and I freelanced remotely for founder Michael Vassar's MetaMed in 2013 - a regrettable experience. We started reading this (www.wired.com/story/deliri...), and then we found out that MetaMed's Scott Alexander alleges that the Zizians are "a Vassarite splinter group" (archive.ph/xv9zl)
This is the sort of thing that should never, ever be allowed to happen again. The elite transphobes are MAGA in spirit and frankly should be hounded out of any decent institution that wants access to non-MAGA money. I wish a Democratic elected official would say this.
The expansion of American transphobia from a minority position is almost wholly astroturfed (more like astroTERFed) by a few writers, editors, and capitalists at the Times, the Atlantic, and maybe NYMag.
There was an elite consensus against transphobia so strong Texas’ Republican Speaker of the House Joe Straus refused to pass a transphobic law, the public broadly agreed, and then a few elite liberals took it upon themselves to make transphobia popular and more or less succeeded.
This is hard evidence that Wes Streeting’s “new” GIDS for children are basically just Conversion Therapy centres.
@niagriffith.bsky.social unless your bill to ban Conversion Therapy includes stopping what Streeting is doing here, it will be worse than nothing, it will help these child torturers.
This whole process philosophy thing means I'm going to have to revisit and reconceptualize whatever earlier work of mine treated gender identity as merely a discoverable object
If I want to recall some of the mindset and sensation and gender-feels of what it was like earlier into HRT with the newness and clarity of veering more strictly binary-trans-woman while the initial physical groundwork was being established, I can put on music from 2015-2016 and get into the mood
This whole process philosophy thing means I'm going to have to revisit and reconceptualize whatever earlier work of mine treated gender identity as merely a discoverable object
Transitioning in one way or another has constituted essentially my entire adult life from 20-21 onward, so those stages of self-concept and gender development are completely entwined into the overall personal history, memory associations and feelings
This whole process philosophy thing means I'm going to have to revisit and reconceptualize whatever earlier work of mine treated gender identity as merely a discoverable object
You might have already transitioned a decade ago, and a decade later you're starting to notice some aspects of how your initial labels might not be a perfect fit or a complete description for your experience of gender - why? Because they're from a decade ago and you've grown and changed as a person
Transness transitions: 🪼
- Data from 2016 and 2018 surveys found 32% of trans adults in the US were nonbinary (williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/u...)
- In a 2022 Pew survey, a majority of adult trans people in the US, 63%, were nonbinary (www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...)
This whole process philosophy thing means I'm going to have to revisit and reconceptualize whatever earlier work of mine treated gender identity as merely a discoverable object
Because it's not an artifact to unearth, it's a living thing that travels with you in your history and has an ongoing process of development going forward too
The Republicans are doing this shit, and the Democratic Party elders are doing everything they can to stop the most exciting young politician in the country in favor of either a disgraced sex pest granny killer or a walking corruption magnet
"Right now, 90% of people in immigration detention are in a facility operated by a private detention corporation. GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two main corporations, and we’ve heard from their earnings calls that they’re very excited about getting more money & expand detention."
so to be clear, Microsoft is using a tool it's embedded into its operating system and many (all?) of its softwares to promote conversion therapy against trans kids, disguised to fool their parents into thinking it isn't purely anti-transition
Since the release of the HHS report, both Copilot and ChatGPT have begun to reference "gender exploratory therapy" as a "first line approach" for gender dysphoria by elevating the Therapy First website to the top of the SEO food chain.
Sometimes I feel like the only thing that can bring humanity together at this point is some kind of universal catastrophic threat that requires us to unite for our survival, then build a series of giant humanoid combat robots
The government has made it very clear they see us as expendable. They aren’t coming to save us, they’re rooting for our demise.
We must save each other.
We must work together to ensure no one gets left behind.
We must refuse to see anyone as expendable.
www.disabledginger.com/p/heat-waves...
🟡 NEW: The New York Times pushed ahead with its story about Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University to avoid being scooped by Christopher Rufo.
Seems like a real problem that much of the media and literary elite in this country is convinced that the most serious and respectable intellectual position is Nazism.
Tbh I can be a little more cold-blooded on sourcing questions than most, but the core journalistic issue here is the NYT story heavily suggested in its opening paragraphs Mamdani was doing some sort of Dolezal situation, which was unsupported by its own reporting.
www.semafor.com/article/07/0...
According to Semafor, the New York Times quickly published that story about how Zohran Mamdani filled out his college application because they were competing with Chris Rufo on the scoop.
www.semafor.com/article/07/0...
Claudine Gay's credentials as *President of Harvard* were suspect because she was Black woman.
A rando white man named Jordan Lasker shitposting racism on the Internet from a basement in Lubbock, Texas keeps getting credentialed as an 'academic' by @nytimes.com and @semafor.com.
STOP IT.