"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. 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.
ELIZABETH WARREN AND NATIVE COMMUNITIES
Before I talk about Senator Warren, I have some things to say: I’m not Native; I’ve never been a part of any Native community and I had no exposure to any, growing up. Because of that, I refuse to identify as Native or to wear Native regalia. I do have a Native ancestor possibly as recently as 3 or 4 generations ago, but that doesn’t mean anything because of that lack of cultural exposure.
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