A Reminder About Allies

An ally is not a friend. An ally doesn’t even have to like you very much. An ally doesn’t have to support all your goals. They may even dislike some of your goals. An ally can be someone you harmed at some point, or someone who harmed you. An ally can be someone who gave […]

An Odd Gendercritical Ally?

I came across this on my YT feed. Not sure whether I’d like this dude if I met him:

Gender Enforcement at Five Megahertz

A picture from an old Lego advertisement from 1981 has been going around lately that shows how toy marketing has changed in the last thirty-five years. I recommend reading this article from 2014 where the woman that girl from the ad grew up to become talks about what she thinks about toy marketing today. It’s an interesting article and […]

Is “Trans”Predicative?

“Trans women are women!” they say. Not everyone agrees, but wait a minute? Aren’t trans women a subset of women just by the structure of that sentence itself? After all, “Black cats are cats” is true just by virtue of the conceptual connections in that sentence. And it really does seem to work like that […]

Bathroom Defenders

I’ve seen all kinds of nonsense in comment threads in some of the places I hang out. Folks somehow think that North Carolina’s recently passed HB 2 somehow requires that there be some kind of guards at restroom doors who will check either ID’s or undies. I don’t really think they believe this, but they do like […]

Oklahoma Sexology

Recently on a Noted Scottish Blog we were discussing stories of our grandparents in the comments. I wrote a little bit about about my mother’s family during World War II in Oklahoma. That discussion got me thinking about another story from Oklahoma, a story about how people in that community thought about sexuality and gender. You […]

Magic Potions

I was reminded yesterday that very intelligent people can come to believe that there are such things. I’m not nearly as bright as the person who reminded me of this, but I know a magic potion when I see one. I’m talking about puberty blockers, of course. The way a lot of people talk about them […]

What’s so bad about Essentialism?

“Essentialist!” I see that word thrown around in conversations about gender like it automatically ends a discussion. But why? I would think that just being essentialist doesn’t automatically mean you are wrong. Don’t you have to show that something is both essentialist and wrong? Nevertheless, there are good reasons to be suspicions of essentialist claims. This […]

Dance to the Euphemism Tango

“Euphemism, we see, renders neutral terms pejorative.” as Quine said. This is usually called the “euphemism treadmill”, though Quine does not use that term himself in his discussion of euphemisms in Quiddities. It’s a great metaphor, but this post isn’t about metaphors. I think the terms “sex” and “gender” have both gone for a run on […]