DM Collins

Linguistic prescription is authoritarian. It’s one of the things trans activists have used, with enormous success. Seeking to control what people are allowed to say is a hallmark of cults and totalitarian regimes. I do not subscribe to the post modern ideas that changing language changes reality, that redefining something alters its nature, that our conception of a thing is of more importance than observable facts about the thing itself. To me, this kind of thinking is a dead end full of people pontificating and obfuscating, enjoying the sounds of their own voices while the world burns outside. Some gender critical people seem to think that demanding we all use correct sex pronouns will return the world to sanity. This is an attempt to make the tail wag the dog. You cannot fight linguistic prescription with more linguistic prescription, and no rights campaign can succeed if its adherents are more interested in creating a purity spiral than allowing the smallest space for nuance or for the complexities of human nature and feelings.

Nothing's changed. I was being honest about how I feel about an individual trans woman I know, who was a gay man pre-transition, and who I met for the first time post-transition. Objectively speaking, she has physical characteristics that make it fairly obvious she wasn't born female, but she's a gentle, funny person I've never referred to as anything other than 'she' and 'her'. I find it perfectly easy to reconcile my fond feelings towards her, and my experience of her as someone with very female-coded energy, with a belief that she hasn't literally changed sex (and incidentally, she doesn't believe she's literally changed sex, either).

Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering

Years of pain and discomfort vanish in 30 seconds. Hero diver!!

One union spends more on political contributions in Washington than the entire tech industry.

It's fine to be a boring two-state solution person, but if you're unable to engage with the reality on the ground--which is that the majority of Palestinians do not want two states, because they still want to destroy Israel--you can't reasonably claim to be a serious person.