She was 92. After decades of journalism and feminist activism, she died peacefully at her home.

I have to say it: Death must be drunk. He keeps flailing around and cutting down the wrong people. Come on, Death, you’ve got one important target: he’s fat, orange, reeks of shit, and has clown hair. How can you keep missing?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has announced that she’s freezing her eggs, basically planning ahead to defer reproduction. Some people have feelings about this.

As predicted, a cohort of conservative critics emerged on social media to bemoan AOC’s personal choice, which challenges their prescriptive vision for American mothers: young, married and uninterested in pursuing a career.

Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is a vocal figure in the proudly antifeminist, pronatalist movement known as the “womanosphere”. She once described herself as “unapologetically pro-life” yet sounded decidedly anti-reproductive health, writing on X that Ocasio-Cortez is “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all. You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, chimed in, writing that egg freezing was “one of the reasons why fertility rates are cratering”.

“AOC turns 37 in a few weeks so if she got pregnant tomorrow it would already be a geriatric pregnancy,” added Kolvet, who has no medical credentials. “This is not female ‘liberation,’ it’s a cautionary tale.” (Factcheck: Ocasio-Cortez’s birthday is in October.)

Rightwing commentator Matt Walsh also called out the congresswoman’s age, writing: “I’ll have kids in [their] 20s by the time I turn 50. AOC apparently wants to have a toddler at that age. Totally backwards and ridiculous.”

I say, shut the fuck up you busybodies. It is her body, her choice, you don’t have the right or the knowledge to complain about it.

This is what they want to do with everybody’s reproductive choices.

Isn’t that sweet? Pete Hegseth is imposing mandatory testosterone testing, but is not requiring testosterone supplements, yet. As we all know, good soldiers are in a constant roid-rage, and can be recognized by their chronic bacne.

This policy is being enabled by the ongoing corruption of science by our government.

Hegseth’s announcement comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other Trump administration officials are moving to make it easier for doctors to prescribe testosterone. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration proposed easing prescribing limits on testosterone gels, pills, patches and injections.
…
Last year, the FDA removed a boxed warning about possible risks of heart attack and stroke from the drugs.

Let’s ignore all our prior medical knowledge!

…current medical guidelines generally recommend against blanket testing of testosterone levels. Typically, doctors are advised to discuss testosterone therapy with men who have troubling symptoms and documented low levels of the hormone on two separate blood tests.

Testing for testosterone is challenging because levels of the hormone fluctuate throughout the day. Accurate testosterone readings are typically measured in the morning after fasting.

I have never been tested for my testosterone levels. I know that, for sure, they have almost certainly declined since my 20s, because that’s typical, but I have never experienced problems of the sort that might prompt testing. You can tolerate a wide range of variation without noticing any effects, so barring real symptoms, doping with T is just coping with diminished masculinity of a psychological sort.

But OK, let’s test everyone, new recruits and old generals, and let’s test men and women alike. Pete might be surprised when he discovers that trans men are already pumping themselves up with testosterone, maybe making them better soldiers than AMAB men.

Don’t bother testing Pete, though. He’s so insecure that he’s probably taking testosterone supplements already. Also, he’s a pig, scarcely human.

Hegseth has previously said he does not believe women should hold combat roles and that those positions should be based on the “highest male standard.” He has blocked some military promotions for women or fired female leaders since becoming Pentagon leader.

That alone warrants firing him.

Jey McCreight is an old friend I’ve known since they were a an undergraduate studying biology in Indiana. I’ve been happy to see their accomplishments over the years: grad school, a post-doc, landing a job at 23andMe as a genomics expert. They were also an activist in the atheist movement — Jey was one of the minds behind Atheism+, and we all know how well that effort to incorporate more humanism into atheism went. Now they are still an activist, founding the organization BeyondXandY arguing that biology is nonbinary and that people are more than their chromosomes. Jey clearly is bold and optimistic enough to take on noble causes in spite of all the haters, and doing the right thing as a trans man has got to be one of the braver things they have done.

Last month, this happened:

McCreight said they had been advertising the event with flyers across the city that included their photo and had also appeared in the local LGBTQ+ publication, Windy City Times. They assume the event’s publicity is how the attacker recognized them.

“I’m telling this story now because I’m finally in a place where I can talk about it without really freaking out badly,” McCreight said, explaining that there are still a lot of gaps in their memory of that night, but they think they were walking home alone from getting food.

The attacker asked if they were McCreight, and McCreight cheerfully confirmed, assuming it might be someone who appreciated their work.

“He very quickly pushed me to the ground and started repeatedly punching me in the eye,” McCreight said. “Afterward, I thought he had maybe hit me with a brick or something because it was so painful. I had never been beat up before in my life.”

McCreight said the attacker also used a pocket knife to cut them all over their body, but not deep enough to leave permanent damage.

“It was very scary. He even tried to strangle me briefly with something that thankfully didn’t work well and just kind of left an abrasion on my neck.”

McCreight said they don’t remember how they got away or if the person eventually just let them go. But somehow, they got home. It took them over a day to realize they needed an ambulance because they were in such a daze.

But on May 1, McCreight recounted, they realized they needed help. An ambulance took them to Chicago’s Advocate Health Center, where they said they received excellent care, which included emergency surgery on their eye. After that, it took weeks for their vision to return to normal.

“I think it’s really important for people to know that this is the reality of being trans in the United States,” they said. “I’m a non-violent nerdy cat guy who likes talking about science and wants to be the next Bill Nye, and because of that, someone basically tried to kill me or at least beat me up bad enough to scare me into silence.”

They said for a little bit, they considered giving up their public-facing activism in the wake of the attack. But then, hospital staff of all kinds – from doctors to nurses to the people bringing them meals – all learned about McCreight’s work and told them to keep going.

“They all told me not to give up on my dream.”

Horrifying. That some guy would just turn and attack a friendly, nerdy fellow walking down the street because they are trans is appalling. Listen to them telling their own story, and support BeyondXandY.

I’m not gay, or trans, or bi, but even so, if I were living in Texas, I’d be desperate to escape. And the direction I’d take would be…Northwest, baby.

Amid a glut of anti-LGBTQ+ laws passed by the state legislature over the past half-decade, many queer Texans have decided to pack up and move to greener, more supportive pastures. So many have chosen Seattle that the Pacific Northwest city is now considering declaring an emergency.

As first reported by the Seattle Gay News, the City of Seattle is close to declaring a state of civil emergency in response to LGBTQ+ refugees from red states moving there. That comes after Seattle’s LGBTQ Commission, an advisory committee that counsels local leaders on matters related to Seattle’s queer community, reportedly sent a letter last month asking the city council to make an emergency declaration. The commission said that the city needed “an effective and empathetic response” to protect a “rapid influx of 2SLGBTQIA+ persons seeking refuge in Seattle.”

I don’t have to ask “Why Seattle?” I know Seattle. But for those of you unfamiliar with the place, here’s the perspective of a trans woman:

For some ex-Texans, Seattle has become a haven. Victoria Scott, a trans woman and freelance writer, lived in Houston working as a programmer at NASA after college in 2018. After coming out as transgender, she said that she found both Houston and Texas hostile. Scott moved around and lived briefly in Reno, Nevada, before settling in Seattle with her wife at the end of 2023. In Seattle, Scott found the foundation she had long needed.

“It’s done more for my day-to-day lived experience and mental health as a trans woman than basically any other thing I’ve ever done,” Scott told Chron.

For her, Seattle was everything Houston wasn’t. (For one, it isn’t nearly as hot.) Scott appreciates the city’s relatively decent cost of living and protective state and local laws for LGBTQ+ residents. But Scott also said that there were more queer and trans people out and about in Seattle, noting that she could form physical communities in a way she couldn’t in Texas. She attributed that to Seattle’s long, vibrant queer history.

“Trans people here are normalized to a degree they’re not elsewhere,” Scott said. “I get culture shock visiting other places now because I return pretty suddenly to people staring or murmuring about me … Here, I genuinely feel like just another woman.”

I’m a little bit envious: Why not Minnesota? It’s also socially inviting, but I admit that it does have a few shortcomings. No ocean. No mountains. It gets a little bit chilly in the winter.

I guess I’d also put the Pacific Northwest in first place. But Minnesota is in second place.

Poor Texas. They’re losing a lot of intelligent, creative people in order to pander to MAGA dorks.

The latest scandal: Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryan Noem, has been revealed to be a cross-dresser by the Daily Mail. That’s a terrible source, but it’s been confirmed by others that he was a member of an online fetish community.

“Ms. Noem is devastated. The family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy and prayers at the time,” Kristi Noem’s representatives told The New York Post.

Why be devastated? It’s her husband with whom she has had three children, so she had to have known something…except I guess she may have been distracted by her own cos-playing as ICE Barbie, and her dalliance with Lewandowski. Maybe she should try this kind of play with her partner?

Of course, there’s the usually baseless whining that it made her vulnerable to blackmail by foreign agents, but has that ever been a real thing? There are gay people working within the Trump administration, so that doesn’t scare anyone anymore — I’m sure there are others who have their own peculiar (to a straight Republican, anyway) behaviors. Let them all hang out!

I am mildly distressed by the fact that I might share an opinion with crazy Nancy Mace, though.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) posted that the news was personal matter and a distraction from other “priorities.”

I agree, it’s a personal matter, and I wouldn’t hold that against either Noem. I have other priorities, like seeing corrupt fascists chased out of the government.