EXHAUSTION

Between last week being the (second) anniversary of my dad’s death and developments in the US and elsewhere, I’m feeling…overwhelmed, I think, is the word I want. And I don’t know what to do about it, so I’m just going to list off the shit I’m dealing with.

• The Wi Spa incident, which was manufactured by transphobes in order to protest the spa’s trans-friendly policies.
• The Democrats have repeatedly failed to rise to the moment, as among other things:
  • They trimmed a $2000-check promise down to $1400, a promise made after $600 checks already went out, claiming that $600 plus $1400 equals the promised $2000.
  • They continue to seek bipartisanship despite McConnell being very clearly opposed to working with them, which means that…
  • the Equality Act will likely omit the queer rights and protections that form the bulk of the bill,
  • voting rights are in peril because the Voting Rights Act won’t pass with the filibuster intact, and it’s necessary to overturn the wave of voter suppression laws Republicans have passed this year,
  • the $3.5 trillion infrastructure deal has been significantly watered down to the bipartisan version which omits necessary infrastructure,
  • Black Lives Matter has mainly resulted in, at the national level, a push to give police more money despite plenty of video evidence of police brutality,
  • and the SSI Restoration Act is unlikely to pass, either, in this political environment.
• The Olympics are being held in the midst of a pandemic, with racist and ableist consequences for athletes who would have otherwise performed. ( could have ended the previous sentence after ‘held’, frankly. Or ‘pandemic’.)
• MAGAts are moving in to Wyoming so they can oust Liz Cheney for daring to stand against Trump.
• The Department of Justice is failing to prosecute Trump associates for their crimes, including politicians who were involved in the 6 January insurrection.
• Because of the Wi Spa incident, I feel like I need to be armed if I want to go unmasked in public. (And I don’t mean a face mask, just to be clear.)
• Because I follow a lot of trans people on Twitter, I end up seeing whatever the transphobes are up to on a daily basis.
• I still don’t have a formal diagnosis for ADHD, nor any expectation that I’ll be able to get one. (I have a lead, but I’ve been afraid to follow it in case the answer is “haha have a lot of money up front”.) Nor do I have documentation for my autism diagnosis from 1999. Without this, no therapist wants to talk with me about it.
• It is not possible for me to live independently basically anywhere in the US, particularly if I want to start a woodworking business.
• Still working on bringing my eye pressure under control, since a cornea specialist I saw a couple weeks ago says we can do new cornea transplants if I manage to do so. I want to get the left eye taken care of, at least, since at the moment it’s not really useful for much.

I’m sure there’s other shit I could put in the list, but this is quite enough to be getting on with.

"FICTION AFFECTS REALITY"

This is a statement I’ve seen several times over the past year or so, and I want to break it down and address some of the issues surrounding it. Primarily, I see “fiction affects reality” specifically for content involving underage characters in sexual situations. Very occasionally I’ve seen it in reference to violence toward marginalized groups, and that’s an issue as well but not the majority of the discourse.

First of all, fiction and reality have some interconnectedness. What we see in TV, film, and written works is predominantly white, cis-heteronormative, allosexual, neurotypical, monosexual, and, most importantly, kyriarchical. Kyriarchies are systems that distinguish the population into oppressors and oppressed. Most Western societies fall under this category, and they bleed in to marginalized spaces as well, frequently.

EMOTIONS

Recently I came across a thread on Twitter that taught me the word ‘alexithymia’. In broad strokes, alexithymia is a deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions. It’s co-morbid with a bunch of things, including autism and ADHD.

I was diagnosed with autism back in 1998 (when the clinical term was a Nazi psychologist’s name), and back in 2012 I had another psych evaluation done. The psychologist who performed the evaluation put, I think, too much weight on my having had my deafness unaddressed until I was three, as she said when she performed her evaluation she considered each of the criteria for autism individually. The diagnosis she came up with was social anxiety, dysthymia, and personality disorder (not otherwise specified) with schizoid features. That last bit is the important part here, since she described it as being unable to form strong emotional bonds and instead forming relationships based on mutual interests.

TRANSAGENDER

In my last article, I talked about dysphoria, and particularly the axes I experience. Thinking about it, the part I continue to find difficult to work with is my gender identity. Because, being trans-feminine aside, I actually largely don’t have one. My pronouns are she/her because that’s more comfortable for me than they/them, and he/him just plain doesn’t fit.

I’m autistic and ADHD, which means I’m more inclined to see how my observations of others apply to myself. And, well… I was male for most of my life because the single biggest sources of feminine identity in my life, growing up, were my sisters, my parent (who turned out to be trans-masc), my stepmother, my grandmother, and my aunts. If I wasn’t like any of them (except my parent), then I couldn’t possibly be female, right? And… I don’t think I ever met any agender people when I was growing up. Nor nonbinary. Nor genderfluid. But I’ve known trans people literally my entire life, even if it’s in retrospect, and certainly since I was a teenager if we discount my parent.

DYSPHORIA

So, in my last post, I mentioned that I have dysphoria, and that it’s not limited to gender dysphoria. I want to expand on that a bit, because it’s a complicated subject for me given the multiple axes involved. The dysphorias I experience are age, gender, and species, and I’ll tackle them in that order.

Content advisory: brief mention of underage sex

“What the heck? I thought ‘dysphoria’ only referred to gender dysphoria…”

TRANS QUESTIONNAIRE

So, last weekend I (re)posted a ‘one like equals one answer’ meme specifically for trans people on my Twitter account. I’m not nearly popular enough to have been able to answer even half of the questions it posed, so I’m going to do that here. Because this isn’t Twitter, I can get more verbose (and change my answers). Rather than include the image, I instead typed up the questions (in boldface).

ON SOFTWARE FREEDOM AND THE FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION

I have been using free software for literally my entire literate life. My earliest memories of actually using a computer involve writing emails to my dad in pine on my stepdad’s computer (circa 1993 or so). However, it wasn’t until I started interacting with free, open-source software (FOSS) communities that I really became aware of the Free Software Foundation. But more on the FSF later.

My nearly-lifelong history with free software has, in part, led me to support FOSS and, more importantly, community-oriented software development. It is my belief that FOSS can, should, and must empower marginalized communities, and it is in fact a fundamental component of justice.

PARASHAT NOACH

I accidentally deleted my first round of notes for this parashah, so it took a bit for me to get back on the horse, so to speak.

I’m already familiar with the Great Deluge, having picked it up through Sunday School and Rugrats, but they glossed over the important details, like the cause and the Covenant.

Judging from the Covenant of Noah, God’s main concern was bloodshed. It’s weird, then, that the punishment to be meted out, post-Deluge, is more bloodshed rather than the wandering exile God set for Cain. This also serves as Biblical support for the death penalty, but the perpetuity it would seem to impose if taken literally would depopulate the world in a hurry.

PARASHAT B'REISHIT

I’m familiar, in general terms, with the early parts of Genesis, having had some Sunday schooling as a child. That was, of course, a Christian interpretation, and so I expect to encounter differences. Anyway, this is the first of hopefully 54 articles following my reading of the Torah.

For reference, I will be referring to The Torah: A Women’s Commentary as ‘AWC’, and Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A Translation and Commentary as ‘RA’ — I will not be reading any Christian Bible alongside, as my goal here is to receive Torah, not to perform any sort of comparative analysis between Jewish and Christian interpretations thereof.

OSI CONSIDERED HARMFUL

In 1986, the first draft of the Free Software Definition was published, and included three freedoms; a fourth, freedom 0, was added in 1996, and together they read as follows:

0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Because software is written by human beings, it is a form of speech, and the four freedoms establish the requirements for exercising that speech. Human beings are a natural source of bias, and the best possible way to reduce bias is by allowing anyone the fullest possible access to the code underlying the software they use.