Dear clueless “allies,” please stop helping us

=AtG=

Content notice for mostly clueless cissexism.

With the recent surge in transphobic bigotry, there’s been an increase in (attempted) support for trans people as well. The problem is that a lot of this “support” is actually perpetuating transphobia.

First example will have no links, because it involves a young transgender girl and I’m not going to shine a spotlight on her Facebook for the hate shitstorm she’s already dealing with. Let’s call her Jane. Jane’s mom posts a photo of her young daughter in the style of a magazine cover–edited to all hell, airbrushed, enviable eyeliner and make-up to the nines. She’s even sporting a fantastic resting bitch face to match. She’s wearing a sort of country girl outfit, blue denim jeans and a stark white tank top. Her hair is long, half way down her back, curly and wavy like a shampoo model. All in all it’s a picture that screams high femme, unattainable without digital assistance as are most beauty standards.

Then the mom posts a caption along asking if it would be okay for you to send someone who looked like that into the men’s room.

The implication being that you should be comfortable sending your daughter in the men’s room if she doesn’t look like that.

[Read more…]

Anti-vaxxers convicted for negligence in death of child

=AtG=

Some anti-vaxxer Albertan parents who decided to treat their infant child’s meningitis with hot peppers and garlic have been charged with “failing to provide the necessities of life:”

David Stephan, 32, and Collet Stephan, 36, were charged a year after their nearly 19-month-old son Ezekiel died in March 2012, under Section 215 of the Criminal Code which deals with “failing to provide the necessaries of life.”

…

Shannon Prithipaul, the past president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, thinks it would be unlikely for the couple to receive “something close to the maximum.”

“It’s not like they were not feeding their child or they were purposely withholding medication that they knew would assist the child but didn’t,” she said.

Emphasis mine.

See, shit like this is why I consider myself a consequentialist thinker. We spend way too much time giving people the benefit of the doubt for intentions. Because yes, they absolutely withheld medicine despite all evidence suggesting the treatment was well understood, and that resulted in the death of their child.

Oh, and the real kicker? Alberta has socialized medicine. It is in fact more expensive to self medicate in emergencies than it is to take your kid to the hospital.

Anyway, my home province seems to be doing pretty good. First we elected an ostensibly socialist party, then we started taxing the stupidly rich, and now we’re convicting people for what should be rightly considered criminal neglect.

Stay cool lovelies.

-Shiv

Breaking news: Rust is a secret SJW plot and not a survival game

=AtG=

Oh dog, lovelies, I can’t stop laughing.

So, what is Rust? From their About page:

It is a massive multiplayer game (currently up to 300 players per server) where you and other players are attempting to survive through the awful conditions, where humanity has been reduced to cavemen.

Rust’s world is harsh. The environment is not kind. Bears and wolves will chase and kill you. Falling from a height will kill you. Being exposed to radiation for an extended period will kill you. Starving will kill you. Being cold will kill you. Other players can find you, kill you, and take your stuff. Fortunately for you, you can kill others and take their stuff. Or maybe you can make friends and help each other survive, using the game’s building tools to create a safe haven.

We provide the tools. How players survive is up to them.

So what’s so funny about that? Oh man, guys, this is so good. The irony is catastrophic. I’m practically giddy. Are you ready? This is the best punchline I’ve seen in ages. 

The game randomly assigns your avatar’s sex and race based on your Steam ID–a fixed number beyond your control.

Predictably, entitled and fragile white cis men were (still are) freaking out.

[Read more…]

Coming up on AtG, May edition

=AtG=

Hello interwebs. I hope you’re having a lovely weekend! I had my first 8.5 hours of uninterrupted sleep in 6 weeks. No nightmares, no imaginary arguments, no staring at the ceiling and waiting for sleep to claim me. Acute episodes of PTSD suck. And at least part of that healing process has been trying to expand on some of the issues affecting me into broader discussions about how the issues permeate into society. Here’s what to expect for the May program on AtG:

[Read more…]

Proper Canadian Values

=AtG=

Trudeau tries to keep his gains in support from minorities and women by maintaining, and in some cases expanding, social programs such as childcare benefits. But the federal government is trying to do this without going overboard on the deficit–so what’s one of their strategies to make up the difference? Are they cutting their military spending? Raising taxes? Nah.

They’re selling combat vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

I understand and support deficit spending on make-work projects in order to dig one’s country out of a recession. But surely there’s improvements to be made at home, where we aren’t handing weapons over to an authoritarian monarchy with a shitstain for a human rights record? Seriously, at least part of the reason the Middle East is a mess is because the Americans sold them military hardware years ago. Haven’t we seen how that turns out?

I don’t really want a bolstered childcare benefit paid for on the backs of Saudis protesting for democracy and human rights…

-Shiv

 

True Canadian Values

True Canadian Values

Quality education shouldn’t stop because the subject matter is ‘gross’

=AtG=

Today we are discussing an instagram user that is both: 1) a science educator; and 2) a human pathologist. This comes with a rather obvious Content Notice: We are discussing a person who is granting a platform of education regarding death, bodies, and forensics. Their photographs feature human bodies in various states of decay and injury. Follow the links at your own risk.

[Read more…]

The REAL reason the world ended in the Fallout universe!

=AtG=

Was the apocalypse in the Fallout universe caused by single-resource dependencies for energy grids? Was it caused by desperate governments hellbent on nuclear proliferation? Was it caused by an extended practice of imperialism which never truly ended?!

No. I have discovered the truth.

It’s because The Cambridge Diner has a gender neutral washroom:

 

The horror!

The horror!

Take care of yourselves, lovelies. I know you’re just ruined by this information.

-Shiv

Things to Say to Survivors

=AtG=

You’re not a mental health professional (unless you happen to be a counselor of some variety). As a friend, acquaintance, or partner to a survivor, you can’t–and probably shouldn’t–try to manage someone’s mental scars. Healing is a long, complex process, and even professionals with years of study always know to personalize their approach to their patient/client rather than trying to ram them through a one-size-fits-all technique.

But the pernicious thing about mental scars is that they are difficult wounds to see, and despite our best intentions, we (both the survivor and those peripheral to survivors) may accidentally reopen them. The probability of this occurring is probably directly proportional to the amount of entanglement with a survivor: I would hazard a guess that an acquaintance is far less likely to encounter an issue than a partner.

The last thing survivors need when this happens is for the other party to exacerbate the issue with a poorly informed choice of words. So I’ve gathered some suggestions for what to do and not to do to avoid making the situation worse.

[Read more…]

Can you not?

=AtG=

An article in the Examiner headlined “Butch Lesbian Mistaken for Male Ejected from McDonalds” is positively ripe for deadly facepalms. Emphasis mine:

The LGBT community’s crusade to make bathrooms gender-neutral has claimed its first casualty, and it is one of their own.

Excuse me, I have to go puke in a (woman’s) toilet.

It’s bad enough that we have turds panicking over something that shouldn’t be an issue, but let’s toss incompetent media coverage into the mix too. After all, it’s only a casualty if it’s a cis person who’s harassed in the washroom, right?

The study focused on people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming/genderqueer in the Washington, DC area and found that an overwhelming majority — 70 percent — had experienced some sort of negative reaction when using a bathroom.

Again, old stats, but I doubt the trend has changed. If anything the Genital Police are even more zealous nowadays. But it’s still not a problem, at least for the Examiner, until a cis person has been targeted.

Oi vey.

-Shiv

 

 

Bathroom Bill selfie protests still make their point at the expense of trans folk

=AtG=

So-called “bathroom bills” are all the rage these days, legislation that attempts to regulate what washrooms trans people are “supposed” to use. They often feature rhetoric about predators claiming to be trans women to access women’s facilities, or how women would be uncomfortable around “people with biologically male [sic] characteristics.” This prompted bathroom selfie protests wherein trans folk took pictures of themselves in facilities where they clearly don’t fit in, a move praised by Joe Sands on our own network.

However, this is not the strategy I can endorse to protest these absurd attempts to police washroom access by trans folk.

The bathroom selfie campaign only works because the people participating in it “pass” as cisgender. I don’t mean to say that gender conformity is bad per se, but those of us trans folk who get by on our day-to-day without getting clocked are not and were never the targets of transphobic bathroom bills–not until someone somewhere is Orwellian enough to literally require genital inspections prior to entry to a washroom. We can shock on-the-fencers into seeing, correctly so, that men would be required to use the women’s washroom and vice versa, because those same ignorant on-the-fencers overlooked the rather obvious fact that some trans folk are binarist conformers who are trying to blend in, not stick out.

[Read more…]