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I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

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West Virginia State Senate Republicans think that my existence is an indecent display of a sexually explicit nature.

Bill text includes: "For the purposes of any prohibition, protection or requirement under any and all articles and sections of the Code of West Virginia protecting children from exposure to indecent displays of a sexually explicit nature, such prohibited displays shall include, but not be limited to, any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display to any minor."

You can't even "just not be trans" out and about in the world and keep your transness in private - which would be oppressive and unhealthy even if you could.

This isn't even a separate and unequal segregation proposal.

This is one of 126 anti-trans bills in the statehouses so far this year, less than three weeks in, three times more than there were by the end of January last year.

In all of 2015 there were 21. In all of 2016 there were 36. In all of 2017 there were 15 just among the bathroom bills In all of 2018 there were 19. In all of 2019 there were 25. In all of 2020 there were 60. (or 79 as per SPLC) In 2021 there were 131

Last year there were 174.

Many of these carry the same language assembled through model legislation by groups such as

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) The Heritage Foundation Family Policy Alliance Family Research Council (FRC)

I've posted information like this before but with a link in the top post and I'm not sure if the algorithm reduces views to those. Plus I wanted to combine info from multiple posts.

#trans

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Don’t play the TERF game.

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One week into the year and the anti-trans bills are in the statehouses again.

(In AZ, KY, MO, OK, SC, TN, TX, UT, and VA so far. MT & NH on deck)

Stuff to make trans health care illegal for people under the age of 26 (pre-frontal cortex not fully developed before then?) 21, or 18 depending on the state. They're trying to shift the Overton window so that 18 is a compromise position.

Stuff that very broadly defines drag in ways that anyone wearing "clothes associated with the gender opposite that to which they were born" and monologs, dances, or sings in front of an audience, would be limited to doing so in strip clubs. So... my next physics lecture will be at The Lion's Den off exit 43 on I-70. I know I needed some extra motivation to improve my cardio routine and increase my flexibility, but this is not it.

Stuff that will let parents sue if their student winds up sharing a bathroom with a trans kid in a public school. https://19thnews.org/2023/01/trans-health-care-bills-2023-legislative-session-lgbtq/

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Thinking about a Zatana cosplay for the next con.

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He's making a list And checking it twice Gonna... WTF is he going to do with a list of all the trans Texans who have changed their gender marker on their driver's licenses over the past two years?

#trans #trans rights #transphobia

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Wednesday (2022 - ) chgph. Jenna Ortega Sweet Charity (1969) chgph. Bob Fosse

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Overly optimistic...

Oh, oh you sweet summer child…

Me in June 2002 after 2 laser sessions writing on alt. fashion. crossdressing: "I'm having my face, chest, abdomen, bikini area and buttocks done at around $800 per session, but it should only be about 4 sessions or so before the hair is all gone."

#trans laserhairremoval

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[Jess]"...I never thought I'd spend so much of my life fighting over which bathroom to use." Ruth nodded. "I've seen people risk their lives for the right to sit at a lunch counter. If you and I don't fight for the right to live, then the kids coming up will have to do it."

-- from Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg 1993

#trans

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Goncharov Mystery Movie

You'd think with lead-ins like Columbo and McMillan & Wife it would have done better, but I was disappointed to learn that the Goncharov TV adaption made it less than one season. Not enough episodes for its own syndication package, you can sometimes find it bundled with Banacek

#goncharov

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Hey PLEASE be wary of Dr. Gallagher and spread the word. Rylan (testosteronejew on Twitter) got top surgery from her in August. Here's the thread he wrote about his horrific experience.

He had severe complications that were completely dismissed by Dr. Gallagher. She kept telling him everything was fine, that it was because of his weight, and made a joke about him "menstruating" as he was bleeding from a torn incision. When he was rushed to the ER weeks later, he had over half a foot of dead tissue removed. He could have died from the infection (that she blatantly denied he had).

And in Rylan's own words, "My only desire is to keep our community safe. There are so many trustworthy top surgeons in the world. One of them saved my life. Transition is a beautiful process and we deserve safe access to it. I do not regret top surgery. I regret choosing Dr. Gallagher as my surgeon."

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This morning's adventure in ADHD-land has been:

failing to load up my week's pills and take my ADHD meds,

looking to special focus info org my booklist on Goodreads by *tracking down when I first read a book,

by hunting through old Usenet posts,

getting sidetracked into cataloging such posts and dumping them in chronological order into a Google Doc

Wondering where the past three hours went. [No, I still haven't taken this morning's meds]

#adhd

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"If it cannot hatch from its shell, the chick will die without ever truly being born. We are the chick; the world is our egg. If we don't break the world's shell, we will die without truly being born. Smash the world's shell!" Is it any wonder that egg me identified strongly with Utena Tenjou over 20 years ago?

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Last week.

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Restored!

I'm back!

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You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

--

I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.