while procrastinating on packing for my tripconscientously browsing the internet to stay informed, i saw that a Trump official claimed that solar was a nonstarter because we'd need more solar panels than there is total land area on the planet.
this is a silly thing to say in the first place. i mean, no one's suggesting we rip up all the other forms of renewable energy. also, many environmentalists are pretty okay with nuclear even if renewables should be what we focus on (more or less the correct opinion imo). i guess maybe he's hoping you'll think all forms of renewable electricity are equally space (in)efficient?
it's also wrong. people pointed out this was wrong because all electricity use could be met by solar panels taking up the land area of Portugal, but the original comment is belligerently but explicitly talking about all energy.
fortunately, a very approximate estimate for all energy is easy to calculate. multiply total energy use by the land use per energy unit1 and you get your answer.
for the record, this is just under the area of Texas and 628,310.5023 in km². this doesn't account for infrastructure or the fact some solar panels are older or in not-very-favorable areas. it also doesn't account for putting solar panels on roofs or above parking structures or augmenting solar with forms of renewable or carbon-neutral energy that are more space-efficient, like offshore wind or nuclear.
by comparison, about 41 percent of the U.S. is already dedicated to meat, dairy, and egg production, more than 5 Texas' worth. i'm hitting my limit for research for an Alys+ post, but producing the animal products to meet the world's meat, dairy, and egg needs almost certainly requires more land than exists in the entire country.
another way you can see this is obviously wrong is that currently 13 percent of world energy comes from renewables. even if we ignore nuclear (a further 7 percent), that means it would take between a 7 and 8 fold increase to cover all our energy needs. since renewable energy takes up relatively little land right now, it's pretty silly to imagine scaling it up 8 times would literally not fit, particularly when you consider all the land we use for other forms of energy generation. presumably at least some of it could be repurposed.
one much more formal study than me copying and pasting numbers from Wikipedia and random sites into a calculator, showed that within the margin of error, solar uses basically the same amount of land as coal. meanwhile, solar on roofs, gas, and nuclear all use a lot less. the graphic puts wind in its own category, presumably because it depends on how much of the area below the turbine is considered to be "used" by it, but offshore wind is pretty safely in the same range as roof-based solar, gas, and nuclear.
of course, virtually all energy on earth comes from the sun, so any fossil fuels are (very indirectly) solar power. with solar panels, we're getting the solar energy radiated2 every day. with fossil fuels, we're burning solar energy radiated and then trapped in a living organism and then buried a long time ago. this doesn't actually disprove his argument (like he could still be right if solar panels were way less efficient), but it is a bit ironic.
I got the total energy of the planet from this Wikipedia article and the energy per square meter from this post. i did a quick check by comparing it to another blogger's solar numbers (3,800 kWh a year for 26 m^2 of panels), and this is probably geared toward sunnier areas.↩
I was reading some German Pascal books from the 80s on Internet Archive, as one does, and i found one that has very crude but very charming images.
For example, there's some code in the book to draw a sign forbidding entry of pests ("Kein Zutritt für Ungeziefer") and one warning of spiders ("Achtung Spinne!")
And here's an image with just a fuckton of ants
The little icons for different callouts seem to be produced in a similar style, if not literally using Turbo Pascal on Windows:
Labels read source code and description, usage example, additional notes, and variation suggestions. They also have the labels: "How will this be cooked?", "How will this be served?", "Warning!", and "How would this be seasoned?"
The cover is also great, albeit not one produced with the techniques inside the book:
"Title reading 100 Grpahics Recipes for Turbo Pascal on Windows" with "Programmer tips with extras for beginners and the experienced" as a message in the corner.
one of the things I don't understand about redistricting is: Okay, so the right "rigs" districts. But why don't you just try to persuade the voters in those districts to vote for you? If Democrats had a winning message no amount of gerrymandering could stop them.
I'm trying to keep this short because I don't want to write too many posts about bad (even slightly bad) takes. While Robinson's probably right that Democrats give up too easily and there are some popular things they could champion, it seems pretty silly to imagine that merely having the right message could inevitably overcome strong headwinds in a bunch of different areas of the country.
I don't want to say that anyone is inherently or permanently conservative, or for that matter, inherently or permanently bigoted in ways that makes right-wing policies appealing. Still, it seems fair to say quite a few people are beyond the point where a few strong campaigns will win them over. I've seen people estimate roughly 35 to 40 percent of the population, or at least the voting population, is extremely devoted to Trump1. I think it would be hard for even Democrats who have a great message and back it up with action to consistently get the 60 percent nationally. Figuring out the actual margin of success needed would probably take a ton of math and simulation, so I may be overestimating it. It probably is going to be in that neighborhood, because when you see people talk about extremely gerrymandered maps, they give advantages of like 10 percent or more.
People also intentionally split their ballot or vote against the party in power largely due to wanting change for nebulous reasons and these factors make it hard to consistently overcome a worst-case scenario gerrymander even with a great message.
So while I think it's totally reasonable to demand Democrats adopt better messages and not to just concede gerrymandered area2, I think it is an unreasonable expectation for Democrats to just overcome such strong headwinds, especially when you consider other headwinds they face, like the closure of polling places near minorities. These things are also inherently unfair, so it also just seems bad and not keeping with Robinson's usual perspective to gloss over that? I think the actual good strategy is to make ending gerrymandering part of your winning message so you don't need to hit a home run every time.
I've also seen people throw around various estimates for how much of the population are either fascists or very susceptible to fascism. It's probably lower than the Trump number because Trump seems to be more popular than the median fascist. It's probably some number like 10, 20, or 30 percent (although hopefully close to 10). I don't think it's like 1, 2, or 3 percent. Obviously there's still enough people to win a commanding margin even once you take out the fascists and crypto-fascists, but there's less extreme people who also are very unlikely to vote for you and that starts cutting into the group of people you can persuade. Bernie Sanders, whom Robinson generally likes, with the notable exception of how Sanders doesn't call the genocide in Gaza a genocide, barely breaks 50 percent approval in his best polls.↩
especially since Democrats aren't actually facing a worst-case scenario. There's a couple of places where things are gerrymandered in their favor and plenty↩
The most visible parts of our community are now shaped by people who were never socialized by women, who don’t know how to relate like women, who were never taught emotional regulation, softness, or interdependence. Instead, they learned their identity through memes, porn, and Twitter pile-ons.
The result is that much of trans culture today is fundamentally male-coded, even when it claims the language of feminism. It is competitive, hierarchical, entitlement-driven, and obsessed with controlling others instead of understanding them.
While there are doubtless transfeminine-only group chats and hangouts or parts of social media that are heavily tilted that way, I'm pretty doubtful there are many parts of the community who were "never socialized by woman."
First, there's the smell test. Do you think in the year of our lord 2025, as trans people are more visible and trans people are coming out at younger ages, and young people remain generally very supportive of trans people, that the average newly out trans woman has less experience around other women than her peers did ten or twenty years ago?
Obviously, there isn't hyperspecific data on this, but we can pull in related figures. Pew actually asked LGBT adults how many of their friends are LGBTQ, and 21 percent of trans people said all of them. That might be a bit higher than I'd guess, but having exclusively LGBTQ friends does not mean they're all T friends, let alone trans women. More trans people also say they are connected to the community as a whole than other groups and they have more in common with other groups.. The most friendly plausible interpretation for Wu is that trans women are befriending relatively few straight cis women, but it seems pretty unlikely they aren't socializing with queer cis women.
We can get a sense of trans people's other connections. The 2022 US Trans Survey shows about 67 percent of adults have supportive family members, up from 60 percent in 2015. So it's at least within the realm of plausibility that these people are spending time with their female relatives, who are probably mostly cis. Also, this possibility has grown over time. I wish I had more comparison numbers, but the 2022 US Trans Survey has unfortunately come out slowly and I don't think those numbers are out yet.
I guess I can't definitively rule out that trans high school girls today are joining homogeneous cliques of other newly out trans girls and not socializing with anyone else. However, this seems pretty out of step with how queer people socialize in my experience2 and impractical at most high schools. Even if a good three percent of a high school is trans, at a (pretty large) 1000-person high school, there would only be 30 trans people, and a bunch of those would be a different gender (e.g., trans boys) or in a different year. (In fact, since Wu is presumably only thinking about who she counts as transsexuals, they're probably even fewer in number.) There's also the fact that there are cis teen girls who socialize exclusively with other teen girls and this usually isn't presented as a problem.
That in fact, is the biggest issue. Why is it bad for trans women to mainly socialize with other trans women but not cis women to mainly socialize with other cis women? I daresay we can probably all conjure up imaginary scenarios where a trans woman—or a group of trans women—have sexualized and caricatured images of womanhood they are aiming for. While these groups have existed, I suspect the ease of imagining that scenario has more to do with transmisogyny than reality.
Look, in a vacuum, is it good for trans women to have cis women friends? Yes! I think everyone is served by having diverse social circles and breaking down the barriers that would separate them. But the idea that trans women need cis women specifically to shave off our rough edges is silly to me.
The rest of this tweet is just transmisogynistic garbage, attributing masculine traits to transfeminine people writ large. Wu might argue that she's saying they were merely socialized male, rather than these being inherently male traits that trans women have due to being biologically male. (She actually does believe trans women, including herself, are biologically male, so who knows.) That interpretation makes it less overtly transmisogynistic I suppose, but is still wrong. People don't respond to socialization, male or otherwise, in a uniform way. I also don't think people "grow out of" past socialization in a uniform way.
It's also just silly and simplistic to act like trans women should definitely want to be resocialized in a "female" way. Outside of attitudes like toxic masculinity, which we could chalk up to harmful socialization, there's nothing wrong with a trans woman deciding to retain the speaking style, nonverbal communication, social role, personality traits, interests, etc. that are male coded and that she picked up from male peers3. For a variety of reasons, wanting to change zero of these during transition is probably not all that common. If she makes that choice, both transmisogyny and good ol' classic misogyny mean a trans woman will be penalized for those traits.
One explanation of this take is that the trans women most visible to Briana Wu do in fact behave in the ways she describes, even if her transmisogynistic explanation is bullshit. This could be because she seeks them out to cringe at or because she spends significant time on Twitter. My suspicion is that relatively few trans people remain on Twitter, and it's conceivable many of those that are left interact in a way that's aggressive and irony-poisoned4. For example, I could imagine some crypto-fascist trans people who spent too much time on 4chan and haven't shaken off their reactionary beliefs might be inclined to stay on a site owned by a fascist. To be clear, these are a tiny minority of trans people, generally, but they might be a noticeable subset of trans people on Twitter.
Relatedly, it's common for people to single out individual posts, selfies, photos, etc. from trans women and misinterpret them. I don't want to do the same to Wu, but when she complains about people learning their identity through "memes," one wonders how much she's jumping to conclusions based on a small number of posts.
One thing Wu is right about is that support for trans rights seems to have receded. Worrying as it is, we don't have a lot of data points, so there's still some ambiguity about how much of a steady trend this is. I'm planning to do some substantial work on this elsewhere. Suffice it to say, her male socialization explanation is probably the least convincing contributing factor and one of the most odious.
Given that I first drafted this post in early June and mostly forgot about it, I have been doing better!↩
Maybe I get invited to the wrong parties, but when I find myself in a social group with other trans women, there are usually also queer people of other genders and sexualities.↩
of course, they may have picked them up from non-male peers or a mixture.↩
Some trans people who seem overall cool and have thoughtful politics still post on Twitter, but I have a sneaking suspicion they may be the minority now.↩
I'm Alys, reporting for Alys+, live from the programming discourse
Phoronix benchmarked a number of recent Firefox releases. (Hat-tip to The Register's Liam Proven, who linked to it in a good piece on Mozilla's issues). Their benchmarks found Firefox got significantly faster and less memory-heavy over the past 21 releases, which sounds like it covers a ton of time until you remember how often Firefox releases (it only covers through 2023). So this doesn't rule out the possibility that Firefox has experience a huge drop in performance since Firefox 4 or Firefox 2.0 or Firefox beta or Firebird or whatever that has only recently been partly corrected, but it does offer hard data about recent performance.
I did notice that a 2019 Phoronix article also benchmarked Firefox using one of the same benchmarks, albeit on a different system. While definitely not an apples-to-apples comparison, it's interesting. Firefox 70 scored in the 40 ms range on ARES-6, where as Firefox 140 scored under 10 ms. This definitely doesn't prove Firefox hasn't gotten slower; it could be all hardware, especially if ARES-6 is highly parallelizable. What it does show is that Firefox is not getting so much slower that we're getting worse or even stagnant performance. Using the highly imprecise metric of Passmark scores, the CPU used on the newest test has double the scores of the one used on the earlier test. So significantly faster, but not the 4X improvement. That suggests Firefox might have actually gotten faster in this time but without testing on the exact same hardware, it's tough to be sure.
Overall, I consider this evidence for my assessment that software performance over time is highly dependent on the particular software you're measuring and isn't reducible to a simple narrative about a broad slide downwards.
I've always been intrigued by polls about the number and makeup of people's friends1 I was nerdsniped (by myself, basically) to actually look up the gender breakdown of people's friends for another post.
I crunched some numbers myself because I wanted to separate "All" and "Most."
Gender/ Number of friends of the same gender
All
Most
Some
Only a few
None
Refused
A man
31.4%
30%
28%
8.1%
2.5%
0.1%
A woman
41.3%
29.3%
18.9%
8.1%
2.2%
0.1%
In some other way
19%
14.7%
34.6%
17.8%
14%
0%
Refused
16.4%
71.3%
12.4%
0%
0%
0%
All People
36.2%
29.5%
23.4%
8.2%
2.5%
0.1%
"In some other way" is from the survey, not me. I think they asked how the person identifies, but it looks a bit strange out of context (although maybe better than a bald "Other").
It's more common for women to have an entirely all-female friend group than men to have an all-male group. Due to toxic masculinity, I probably would have guessed the opposite. Huh!
I don't know what this says about me. Maybe I'll ask my friends next time we hang out!↩
Sometimes things stick in my mind, even when I think they've stopped bothering me.
This post by Nicky Case is one such one, my brain rudely deciding to remember it apropos nothing after a long hiatus. Now, I generally like her work—The Parable of the Polygons and We Become What We Behold in particular are great—but this post irked me.
In it, she argues it's actually okay to put a toaster in the dishwasher as long as you dry it out first, and the common sense reaction that this is a bad idea is wrong. Here's her reasoning:
But, if you actually think about the physics step-by-step, an electrical short happens when there's an unintended path for electricity to travel (e.g. through water), which can cause damage. So, if you were to put an unplugged toaster in a dishwasher, then let it dry for several days, there would be no leftover water in it (toasters are designed to avoid trapping moisture), and thus, no risk of an electrical short.
In addition to this theoretical argument, she shared a post where JD Stillwater put their money where their mouth istheir toaster where their dishwasher is, and it worked afterward.
Nicky Case and JD Stillwater are probably right that people overestimate the risk of putting a toaster in a dishwasher. It wouldn't (ahem) shock me if you asked a bunch of people, they would say washing a toaster in the dishwasher basically guarantees you'll ruin it, similar to driving a car into a body of water. And that's probably not correct! I'm sure a lot of the water dries out if you put a toaster in a dishwasher and then let it dry for several days. And there are those experiments—JD Stillwater might be lying or have gotten really lucky but these explanations don't seem that convincing.
Still, this logic has some holes. The thing is, toasters are designed to avoid trapping moisture in a particular set of circumstances. I'm not a physicist, an electrical engineer, or an appliance designer. So perhaps I'm underestimating how much moisture they're designed for and overestimating the chance of shorts from tiny pools of water that failed to evaporate. Still, a dishwasher has way more moisture than anything you're toasting, even considering that modern dishwashers try to conserve and recirculate water, so they use only a few gallons. Also, if you're washing a toaster, you're presumably loading it upside down, where it will stay for a while. That's not a big factor—you're presumably turning it right side up to dry—but it's another departure from the circumstances it's designed for.
Another factor is that recent toasters are more likely to have electronics and those are more sensitive to moisture. I don't think a short in one of those components is as dangerous because of the lower voltage, but it could ruin your toaster1. If you're genuinely invested in doing the experiment and willing to eat the cost of a toaster so you don't care about this risk, fair enough, but it's a pretty sensible justification for people's intuition that this is a bad idea.
Yet another factor that complicates the overall equation and means the experiments may not generalize is that not all water is equally conductive. JD Stillwater knows this because his post has a tangent about running a hair dryer under water and it only shorting out when he added a bunch of salt. The hardness of the water, the detergent, and (because dishwashers recirculate water) the dirt on the toaster itself and other dishes could all affect what's going on. You can partly mitigate this by not putting anything else in the dishwasher and not using detergent, although these precautions were not actually mentioned in the two posts.
(I'd also be remiss to note that while this isn't probably true of the vast majority of toasters, another risk of putting electronic devices in water generally speaking is that, while they may appear to be off, they may contain a battery or capacitor, so they might not actually be powered off.)
Lastly, the most important thing is that, even if people are technically wrong about the magnitude of the risk, they're right about the call safety wise. People can and do die from electrocution from submerged electronics and although electrocution is fortunately pretty rare overall, kitchen appliances are a relatively common cause among the accidents that do occur (e.g., number three in this study. Even if you have some reason to think a risk is overstated, that doesn't mean it's low. And of course, you could be wrong.
Sorry, JD and Nicky, I think common sense wins this one.
People put keyboards in the dishwasher sometimes. If you look at anecdotes, this often works fine, but not always. These might have more electronics (they certainly have more keys than a toaster has buttons), so it's not a perfect comparison. Still, it shows that washing electronic devices in this way is a bit of a gamble even if you set aside the safety risks.↩
As a service to my dear readers, I'd like to highlight things that may be of interest to topics them on account of the fact I cover similar topics on this blog.
🖙First is Natalie Wynn's "Conspiracy" video, posted on her Contrapoints channel. This touches on some of the same themes that came up in her "Cringe" video, which I cited a few months ago in my post. It's also just well made in Wynn's inimitable style.
🖙Second is "The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that's Everywhere" by Messy Nessy. I've incorporated the manicule (🖙) into this site's design, so you might be interested in a review of where it came from and how it became incorporated into typesetting, user interfaces, digital fonts, and emojis.
🖙Third is "A Bigger Database" by Glyph, which is about AI hype but also about the author's own neuroses growing up.
These are all very good, and I wholeheartedly recommend you watch or read them.
I recently read an, ummm, opinionated article about Jai. I'm not going to talk much about Jai here; you can't make me talk about Jonathan Blow on Alys Plus. (And less snarkily, I"m not going to write about a language that I can't use or read the documentation of.) But one header stood out to me: " The lost era of good software." This seems like the perfect example of what I was talking about in my previous post, "A Lot of Statements about Software Speed and Quality are Just Vibes." This is one of the stronger claims in that section:
The net effect of this is that the software you’re running on your computer is effectively wiping out the last 10-20 years of hardware evolution; in some extreme cases, more like 30 years. The impact of this on things like server costs, environmental footprint, user experience, and overall outcomes for everybody is staggering.
One one level, this isn't as an egregious statement in itself or in relation to the header about an era of software quality. I mean, you need 30 years of hardware evolution to be able to wipe it away. I guess you could write software in the early 80s that wipes out 20 years of hardware evolution, but it would be unusably slow. Maybe the 80s were the lost era of good software? Certainly there was good software produced during that time. Much has been made of George R. R. Martin's use of WordStar. At the time, plenty of people liked it, so I don't think we can dismiss his fondness for it as entirely due to Martin being a curmudgeon or a weirdo. Plenty of people liked WordPerfect as well. I myself use Neovim, which owes a lot to Vim, which came out in 1991. Vim in turn owes a lot to Vi, which came out in 1976. I certainly like Vim, so I definitely believe good software was made during this time.
On the other hand, perhaps I'm overstating the extent to which people couldn't trade performance for other nice features. People still programmed in BASIC, which was much slower, yet people used it for learning and even for useful programs. People also wrote shell scripts, which I suspect were genuinely significantly slower at the time due to the cost of initiating a new process and other overheads that aren't as noticeable now.
And of course, like I said in that prior post, describing the 80s or 90s as an era of "quality" is a bit dubious. Crashes and blue screens were pretty common. I don't have hard numbers on their frequency, but it's pretty clear they're less common now, even if they should be even less frequent. Certainly there were things to like about the era: bad design trends (or bad application of design trends) hadn't undermined the UI by reducing contrast and eliminating useful affordance, software subscriptions were unheard of, and there was a lot less telemetry.
Perhaps you could make a case for the 00s. In fact, after writing all that about the 80s and 90s, I realize maybe he really does mean the 00s, as that would sort of line up with his complaints about dynamic languages, which were taking off in a big way then. Reiterating that earlier post, it had the benefit of technologies that made operating systems much more stable and a reasonably healthy web while mostly predating a lot of trends people rightly criticize. However, there were certainly people complaining about programs being too large and complicated then. Java essentially played the role of Electron, and similarly to critics of Electron today, I think critics of Java had a mix of good and bad points. I guess that could be named an era of software quality, but it seems like a relative term at best.
I also can't escape the sense that the "era" wasn't some sort of stable point that was disrupted or a uniformly golden kingdom ruined by programmers losing the old ways but was just kind of a fortuitous coinciding of different trends. And although I'm trying my best to broaden the view and get beyond whatever nostalgia or other biases, this all feels pretty imprecise.
But I'd really object to this is that this isn't really true of current software on my computer writ large. Glancing at the programs I happen to have open right now in my sidebar, I think the only one that feels clearly like it's "wiping out the last 10-20 years of hardware evolution" is Teams, and honestly part of that might be less its actual performance than my other frustrations with it. Firefox is also a contender, although that gets into the question of how much to blame the browser rather than the webpages in the browser. I guess there's something to claiming the web wipes out years of hardware evolution, regardless of how you assign blame—certainly there are trivial websites that bog down computers and websites that would benefit from a lot less JavaScript. I should also note that while my current slate of apps are using more memory than I'd prefer (roughly 10 to 11 gigabytes as I've sporadically checked free -h while writing), they're pretty light on the CPU, my computer's not actually swapping, and I don't think the programs are doing anything crazy with disk I/O either. I might use more desktop apps and fewer Electron apps than the average person in 2025, but none of these example applications I use have stopped getting updates. I'm not running an all-suckless userspace or a bunch of abandonware or anything.
Curiously, the author isn't too negative about dynamic languages per se, especially Python, but does seem to be pretty negative about dynamic language programmers. If I had to guess, he seems to treat the languages as good tools for their niches, which is a healthy attitude. His statements about the programmers feel pretty disparaging, which is not a healthy attitude. E.g.,
Suddenly programmers were being encouraged to pretend they knew nothing about the hardware their program was destined to run on. Just assume that resources are abundant, that their allocation and deallocation was practically free, and if things started getting sluggish they could just ask management for more servers.
I've definitely seen people suggest a simplistic version of "hardware is cheaper than programmers, don't worry about it!" And similarly, people sometimes present Donald Knuth's adage about premature optimization as though optimization should always happen at the very end or that is worthless 99 percent of the time. But honestly, for some problems, this not-great advice is...actually okay. If you're banging out CRUD routes that hit the database a handful of times, especially if they're not foundational things the user must do (like log in) or the user does frequently, your optimization is likely to be premature and not worth the programmer cost.
My thresholds might not be quite right—I don't have the magic formula for how much you should care about performance. Certainly I've messed this up and written code that could have been faster or less resource-intensive. My point is that we shouldn't treat exhortations to care a little bit less about performance or tools that let you think a little less about hardware as tantamount to advocating for total ignorance.
I mean, people didn't say "Python is fast enough" because they're dumbasses or want to advocate ignorance. They said it because Python is fast enough for a lot of things. I'm sure plenty of people did give versions of this advice without sufficient context or nuance, as people caught up in hype cycles tend to do. Certainly that's a valid criticism of someone like Bob Martin, whose writing, as far as I have read, is a mixture of straight-up bad advice and good advice ruined by being canonized into inflexible rules.
It's fine to vent, of course, and there's plenty to vent about in computing today. But I think if your language advocacy is so rooted in a negative view, especially if the negativity seems overbroad or exaggerated, the community you will build around the language risks not being much fun to be in.
I don't know if I would call myself a "normie," but I do relate to wanting to be seen as just a woman, and I also have a relatively conforming gender presentation1. I'm also white and grew up middle class. So I feel like I could at least theoretically do well under a bargain where binary trans people are allowed to transition, as long as we're fairly quiet about it, and protected against discrimination as long as we keep our end of the bargain. Sort of like Don't Ask, Don't Tell for transness, but marginally friendlier and applied across society. Nonetheless, I think this strategy sucks.
There's a strong moral argument against this, of course, and this argument is the most compelling. I happen to be trans in a way that I could theoretically assimilate or could even go entirely stealth, but what about people whose gender identity doesn't fit neatly into those categories? Why is my identity more valid than theirs? Why be satisfied with half measures?
One response to this is more reactionary: Being a "binary transsexual" is a real, scientifically valid phenomenon and being nonbinary isn't. This is bullshit, and I'm not sure I can convince these people otherwise, although frankly the practical argument should still convince them to shut up and support nonbinary people, if only for selfish reasons.
Another response is that it's easier to make strategic gains by starting with trans rights that are relatively acceptable. Sometimes this reaction is thinly veiled reactionary thinking, but some people genuinely believe this in good faith. Some people mix these together—I'd put Brianna Wu in that camp.
This argument doesn't hold up, however.
First, there's not a constituency for this view. If you look at a snapshot of public polling at any one time, you'll definitely find some people who support trans people on some issues but not others. But short of a handful of pickme trans people, trans people who've accepted their own transness but not others', trans people who've mistakenly decided this is the only way forward, and a handful of cis people who really care about trans women in sports for whatever reason, I don't think this group really cares that much. Obviously, sometimes your best option is a compromise that no one really likes, that's the definition of compromise, blah blah blah, but the compromise itself is not going to rally people to your side.
Take healthcare as an example. While people got excited about Barack Obama, the candidate, they didn't really get excited about Affordable Care Act. In contrast, people rallied around both Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All2. This isn't to downplay what Obamacare achieved. And if Medicare for All is ever passed, it will be less ambitious than the most exuberant slogans and wildest dreams3. But starting by watering it down is going to kill people's motivation. An expansive view of trans rights is going to get trans people excited in a way that "here's a compromise because our backs are against the wall" is not.
Second, even if accepting a compromise is what you eventually need to do, as a matter of negotiation strategy, your campaign shouldn't be for the compromise. If you want to build a bunch of high-speed rail, your spokespeople shouldn't be adding "and we'd accept regular rail too" to every quote they give to the press. If you don't want Medicare to be cut, your slogan shouldn't be "No cuts to Medicare! Although small cuts are not that bad; we'd agree to those if backed into a corner". That doesn't always mean you should push for the maximalist version of your vision 100 percent of the time, but you also don't want to unnecessarily cede ground. Unfortunately, minority groups' completely reasonable requests often get portrayed as unreasonable. Fortunately, activists have some leeway to be unreasonable. They should use it!
Maybe somewhere in the vast multiverse of possible political realities there exists a society where "binary" trans people could maintain a partial, but stable swath of rights by excluding nonbinary people, although I doubt it. But currently, we're in a country where cis gay people and cis straight women are also seeing their rights threatened (not to mention immigrants, disabled people, and people of color). It's not like there's a bunch of conservatives eager to protect a subset of trans rights if only the Democrats become 50 percent more transphobic. Sure, Trump voters who don't like trans women in women's sports but also oppose anti-trans discrimination exist, but they probably voted for Trump because they thought he would lower inflation.
Third, trans people benefit from a healthy, vibrant, and diverse queer community. Selecting some people as normal enough to be the face of the movement creates artificial divisions and makes it harder for these spaces to thrive. We all miss out on their community, their jokes, their wisdom, their art, their performance, their media, their selves.
Fourth, conforming in a conformist society is bad for you even if you would do basically the same thing anyway. Even if you never run afoul of societal conventions, the worry about it is a kind of a tax on you at all times. And there's the obvious risk that the bounds will tighten further and you'll no longer be safe.
Fifth, especially for younger trans people or those who have only "figured it out" recently, you may not actually know your identity neatly conforms to the current bounds. Maybe instead of being 100 percent "binary" transgender who always uses one set of pronouns, you want to experiment with other presentations or other sets of pronouns. Or maybe your next partner is nonbinary. Maybe your child is. Maybe your childhood best friend comes out as nonbinary.
Conformity feels a bit like a flood. Even if you live on a big house with a generous garden on a hill above the current high water mark, it will still circumscribe your life, hurt your neighbors, and bring your community to a halt. And there's always the worry the floodwaters will keep rising. Better to keep the flood out of the city.
Except for the part where I was assigned male at birth!↩
To be clear, I'm not saying more people like Medicare for All than the Affordable Care Act. I'm saying more people really like Medicare for All. A few Kaiser Family Foundation polls—see this article about Medicare for All and this interactive about ACA—I dug up suggest they've had similar popularity between 2017 and 2020. I also found a poll suggesting ACA is much more popular than Medicare for All, although I think that's at least in part because the question wording made Medicare for All seem more disruptive than it actually would be.↩
My review of the literary fiction novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King. I read a paperback edition published in November 2024 by Graywolf Press.
I keep not buying bandcamp merch because I assume they’re like one USPS delivery time away from turning into a horrible platform that I don’t want to be seen supporting. But I just bought a t-shirt, so I’m sorry in advance everyone
]]>
hey friends, gonna start this one off with a request: i’m currently without stable housing and without employment, and i’m in extremely dire financial straits. as of this writing my account is overdrafted and i have very limited options for fixing that. i…
"Title reading 100 Grpahics Recipes for Turbo Pascal on Windows" with "Programmer tips with extras for beginners and the experienced" as a message in the corner.