Call Me Ash

Her husband’s job

Her child-care arrangements

How she nurtures her underlings

How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field

How she’s such a role model for other women

Still, the virtue of some rules in Aschwanden’s test is difficult to see at first. Take the rule of “no firsts.” In the comments section below her post for Last Word on Nothing, Finkbeiner explained that no sooner had she taken the vow to ignore gender, than she caught herself writing that the astronomer she was profiling was the first to win a certain award. After a reader urged her to stick to her pledge, she removed it.

“The fact that she’s the first woman to do that says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her,” Finkbeiner explained in our interview. “So if I were going to put that into a story, it would be a story about prejudice in that prize committee.”

I’m not here to validate your smug feelings about not liking a children’s book series 20 years ago. I’m here to discourage others from spending money on it and to give myself and others words and space to work through some feelings. I’m a trans person that made Harry Potter one of my cornerstone interests. One of my favorite things. I’m not some cis person doing cope.

Harry Potter was a big thing. Like. Big in a way that’s difficult to fully understand. It still is. If you were caught up in it during your formative years it’s normal to need to process all of the horrid things now associated with it.

Both Spock and Kirk get essentially assigned to a kind of exemplar-of-masculinity role in the episode, both by Charlie and by people around them. But they don't respond the same ways. Kirk is viscerally uncomfortable verging on hostile, and only forced into trying to "step up" as a masculine role model by the drive to protect his crew (especially Spock himself). He's ultimately unable to maintain that role in the long term and control Charlie, and they're only saved by the deus ex machina intervention of the Thasians.

For example: I can't read any ABO AUs set in England or France because while I can suspend my disbelief far enough for a gender trinary set up, I can't suspend it enough to believe those two countries would still be distinct entities in a alternate history where Richard the Lionheart could have impregnated Philip II.

If there was a viable dynastic future with Richard, Philip would have climbed him like an oak and dragged him to the altar if he had to. It's a match that makes perfect sense from both their points of view: Philip gets Aquitaine back under French rule, the best general in Europe on his council, and a powerful check on the Angevins... then unexpectedly (after Henry the Young bites it) the entire Kingdom of England for his Capetian dynasty. Richard meanwhile gets to stick it to his father, secure Aquitaine's prosperity, and gets the leverage to start pushing for his mother's release. Then when Henry kicks the bucket Richard doesn't actually have to be King of England in anything but name: Philip can run the countries and unify the Crowns and what not while Richard runs off to go Crusading.

Plus they also like, loved each other and stuff and being able to get to be together long term instead of being torn apart by politics would have been cool. But I'm mainly obsessed with the historical and dynastic implications.