Field Notes

they should invent an existence where the sweetest, most thoughtful people you've ever met don't suffer an endless series of indignities and injuries at the hands of gormless, self-obsessed monsters

Treehole antlion, Cymothales sp., Myrmeleontidae

Photographed in Mabira Forest, Uganda by Frank Deschandol

Shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

half baked morning rant

I do want to make it clear that the reason I talk about HRT and its biological effects so much is not because HRT or medicalization defines your gender.

Its because, for me personally, the interface of my biology education and my transition was mostly centered around figuring out what sex hormones do. I learned about basic biology principles like DNA organization, gene regulation, cell biology, and physiology in high school and undergrad. Taking that understanding and extending it to the mechanisms that hormones use to change gene regulation, and by extension, the rest of your body broadly, was something I did as my understanding became more complete in later undergrad and grad school. It was the key to me starting my own transition.

Why?

Because it was the first time I realized that the "basic biology" arguments of transphobes were complete and utter bullshit. From that point, it was a cascade. As in, wait, if dynamic changes in gene expression aren't considered "biological" to them, then why am I believing anything they say about anything else? When they talk about gametes, and try to include infertile cis people in their definitions of biological sex by talking about what gamete you're "intended" to make, what do they even mean? Why does my current gene expression not define that "intent"? And wait, back up, why is the brain suddenly not considered part of our biology? Why are neurological differences suddenly not "biological"? Why can we say someone's thinking patterns aren't "biological"?

Backing up even further, why does any of this matter more than psychological gender, or sociological gender? If the way we navigate society is gendered, that affects a lot of our lives, and we're just throwing that away?

Basically, being educated about how deep the biological changes of HRT really go was the first domino to fall when I worked through my internalized transphobia.

This is one of many reasons why I hate, hate HATE the concession that uninformed allies and even many trans people themselves give: "well NO ONE is saying that you can change your biological sex, sex and gender are completely unrelated, sex is binary and gender isn't!!!!!"

Well. I am saying that you can change your "biological" sex, I am saying that biological sex isn't binary, and I am saying that misunderstanding of those points has set back transgender advocacy. It makes medical decisions surrounding us less informed, it poisons conversations about how we interact with society, and it makes trans people feel like their gender and sex are less "real" than cis people's.

Not to mention the horrific way it discards intersex people from the conversation entirely.

Recently, I've seen this point enter the mainstream a little, by using intersex people and variation of sex in other species as a "counterargument" to "binary biological sex" thinking. It still doesn't sit right with me. One, because it uses intersex people as a prop for trans advocacy while not actually addressing the needs of either group. And two, because it completely disregards that your current biology and physiology is not 100% predestined from birth, and using people who were "born this way" as a prop does absolutely nothing to increase people's acceptance of trans people who change their biology later in life.

Ugh. This got away from me but yeah. That's my sipping coffee ramble for this morning. If anyone wants to add comment or correct me on discourse here, please do. Especially if you're intersex- this is all the observations of a perisex trans woman.

people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing

Remember what generative "AI" does, kids: it GENERATES. That means it generates answers to questions based on whatever garbage has been fed into it. Not "goes and looks up the answer." Not "already studied and knows everything." It's just reaching into its sack of word salad and dumping a pile on your desk. Sure, maybe the words fit together to form sentences, but that doesn't make it correct.

a generative AI search result vs the exact article it is citing. the website it scrambled that information from also just happens to include info on winged roaches. gisborne cockroaches are completely wingless. even if it's pulling info straight from one reliable source, there is every chance it'll mash up that info into something false.

If you need a visual, here’s how poorly AI performed when asked to create citations for news articles. And that’s just for citations, imagine what it’s doing when you ask it more complex questions and tasks.

On the cornsnakes subredit someone there used generative AI to "answer" someone's question about what the raised black lump on their corn snake could be. Another person called them out and AI-user responded with "I can do what I want, and what's the harm anyways?"

I stepped in and explicitly detailed everything that the list got wrong, which was about 95% of it, to show why is was harmful. After an hour they deleted their comment plus they deleted most of their comment history.

AI is a lie generator. Don't use it.

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

Maybe this therapy shit is working

You know, rivers catching on fire used to be a regular occurrence.

Boring, even. Mundane. People just accepted that rivers had oil slicks floating on them that could be lit by somebody throwing their cigarette in the wrong place. Cities had regular protocols in place on what to do when the river caught on fire.

The modern environmentalism movement wasn’t just started by hippies you know. Regular people cared about this stuff because their rivers caught on fire and existing near farms gave them cancer and by the 1970s they weren’t even seeing that much economic benefit from it.

If you don’t live in a world where rivers regularly catch on fire it’s because of stuff like the clean water and air acts. A lot of rivers in the US that in the first half of the 20th century regularly caught on fire are now safe to swim and fish in.

A lot of environmental damage is reversible if we act. We’ve got a lot of success stories like this actually. A lot of formerly endangered species have come back, fish have returned to American rivers, the ozone layer is being restored.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the environment but I hold out at least a little bit of hope. Because rivers used to catch on fire and now for the most part they don’t.

Look at this beautiful green soldier fly (Odontomyia cincta) that landed on my hand while I was sitting next to a pond!

Soldier flies are best known for the species that feed on decaying matter like manure and compost, but O. cincta is one of many where the larvae are aquatic and feed primarily on algae.

(Massachusetts, 6/17/22)

FLY PLAY-LIKE BEHAVIOR

FLIES VOLUNTARILY ENGAGE WITH ENTERTAINING SPIN DEVICE

AAAAAAAHHHHH