Asking the AI won’t give you a reliable answer — As a writer, I’ve been contemplating a post on this topic for some time, but a disturbing trend on the ChatGPT subreddit pushed me to actually follow through on the idea. Firstly: I’m not using ChatGPT to write any of this, nor do I think I could, as the post…

Biden’s trans athlete “protections” look a lot like appeasement — Yesterday, we published a piece about how Republican bans on gender-affirming care have the “unintended” (completely expected) effects of driving trans youth closer to suicide and pushing their families out of red states. Today, the Biden administration — entirely ignoring the significantly greater threat posed by healthcare bans — proposed…

The genocidal reasoning behind bans on gender-affirming care — Content warning: Discussion of suicide among transgender youth Every time another state passes a ban on minors’ access to gender-affirming care into law, we start to hear the same arguments — generally citing suicide rates among trans youth. Last week was Tennessee and Kentucky. Today, Indiana. These hit close to…

How college educators ignore the elephant in the room — We just passed halfway through the quarter, and my partner hasn’t gone to his classes in a week. He hasn’t done much schoolwork at all this quarter. I started off the quarter strong and started to break down in Week Three, which was mid-April. …

A case study in how not to talk about disability — Last Monday, NPR’s All Things Considered aired a four-minute package, reported by journalist John Hamilton. A podcast episode from NPR about ventilators — specifically, post-intensive care syndrome (PICS) — recycled this package earlier this week. In it, I noticed an unsettling quote from a critical care specialist, Dr. …

Delivery work was hard enough before the pandemic. Now, it’s flat-out unsafe. — Around two weeks ago, I cancelled all of my upcoming DoorDash shifts. I had only managed to get my location updated from Southern California to Washington state a few weeks earlier after moving in September, and I’d hoped I could re-establish a steady income stream. …

Or, the mundane consequences of doing too little, too late — Every week for most of the past three years, I’ve given myself an intramuscular injection of testosterone. This is common among transgender people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB), like myself. Like any self-administered injection, though, this process has its risks. And today, after three hours of class via…

Advice, not inspiration, from an Autistic adult during COVID-19 — In the last week, my expectations for at least the next six weeks of my life have radically changed. Much of the global population had, is having, or will have a similar experience as we try to mitigate COVID-19. The thing is, as an Autistic adult with a convoluted and…

Late winter snow and spring’s new growth in Olympia, Washington — I don’t know if anyone in the South Sound area expected snow this morning. One of my housemates had to tell me to look out the window before I got dressed for entirely incorrect weather. …