This. Absolutely this.
"While much has been written about the vulnerabilities of contingent faculty, there has been almost no discussion of the academic freedom needs of one of higher education’s most rapidly growing workforces: third-space professionals." #HigherEd #Staff #AcademicLibraries

Something something spiderman meme

It was strangers who made it work for me too. I started playing with she/they, and most folks I knew went "great, so still 'they' when I remember". We had a tour group at work and they consistently gendered me she/her all day. I came home feeling seen for the first time

Over time I got more comfortable with the "or she/her, if you want" to leading with "ideally she/her, because we live in a binary society and the cognitive load of not just putting people in 1 of 2 bins with an optional sticker on their forehead is too much for most people in their daily lives"

When I first came out, I asked people to use they/them because it was an honest reflection of how I felt about identity "or she/her, if you want". what that looked like in practice was most people updated their mental model from "guy" to "guy who uses they/them" which felt even more wrong.

Big if true

I was looking back at archived versions of our website recently, and our staff today is about half what it was in the early 2000s.

Khruangbin is an April-May band for me. I think because I'm usually on allergy meds and hazy.

Having a Great Time Being Transgender in America Lately, by Jackie Sabbagh
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Update: appears to have been a technical issue; it's back online now.

Any #medlibs (or others) have info on transcare.ucsf.edu/guidelines going offline? Hoping it's a technical issue, but given the times I'm wary.

Equality Caucus Rep. Mark Takano calls on Speaker Johnson and GOP House leadership to reign in their party's extreme rhetoric in trans people per this statement that just hit my inbox:

"Well I'm given to understand that for an extremely limited time, members of our nation's political violence party are shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame." www.the-reframe.com/gambling-in-...

Every once in a while one of the names in the nonstop parade of creative folks showing their transphobic asses really hits me where it hurts. This is one of those.

here we go again, folks. it’ll take a lot of pressure on dems again to get them to fight!

i’ll thread after i’m out of meetings, but if you’re raring to go, this is secs243-246 of the FY26 budget &, yes, this is basically the hyde amendment for trans care as predicted last fall.

contact: reps.fyi

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Banning trans people from owning guns is a really REALLY significant escalation and I think the scariest part about it that's not being discussed at all is that the plan is to declare that trans people are mentally ill

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

edition.cnn.com/2025/09/04/p...

For no real reason, thinking about this piece about the "headline news about famous guy saying transphobic thing" industrial complex I wrote for Paste two years ago. Just before everything got worse.

www.pastemagazine.com/music/transp...

No, I agree that it's meaningful. I had a similar perspective on my PC from an RPG campaign last year. She died (pre-campaign) while still closeted, and the supernatural force that revived her enabled her to mold her reanimated body in essentially the same ways HRT would have. She's very not cis.

I'm also focusing on what type of person spends an entire afternoon lecturing trans people about the need to give up on having rights while repeatedly asserting he's an ally, and reflecting on how to identify dipshits like this in my own life so I can proactively ignore them

So, not only is my kid's healthcare illegal for doctors to provide him in the state we live in, he can no longer be treated out of state and risks losing access to the evidence backed peer reviewed medication that has changed his life for the better because we are ruled by monsters and cowards

Or they're still wasting decades to dissociation and depression because transition was unimaginable when they were younger and it can take ages to break free from that. I only moved from the missing 2% to the 1% after 10+ years of being pretty sure I should, but of course I *couldn't*

I made a cat lure (blanket + lamp) for my home office earlier in the week so they would sit next to me, not on my keyboard (or lap, which is fine except one of them likes to reach up and put her paw in my mouth to shut me up when I'm on a call.) This was the result.

NEW:

“I’ve had enough…I’m refusing to back down.”

Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier speaks to MSNBC from the Texas State Capitol. She is stuck there after the Texas GOP required police surveillance as condition for release. She is refusing to sign a waiver for the law enforcement escort.