yosh

Its an interview with multiple (mostly Black) trans men about their experiences in prison, starting with strip-searches:

The officer [at the men's prison] asked me to lie down on a table, then told me to spread my legs and hold them open,” Graham said, adding that he was then instructed to pull his genitalia back so the officer could “get a better look.” He said he could see that the officer was getting an erection. When the search was over, Graham said, he told a counselor at the facility what had happened.  [...] After having spent several weeks at an Austin jail, Graham was transferred to a women’s prison run by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. But rather than offer him greater safety and security, the women’s prison “was a million times worse,” he said. Upon his arrival, Graham said, he underwent a strip search in view of a large group of incarcerated women. “They forced me to bend over and open up my legs to make sure I didn’t have a hidden penis,” he said.

They talk about being violently misgendered, denied hormones and surgeries, & forcibly detransitioned:

In addition to what he said was routine verbal and physical harassment from prison staff members, Graham also said he was prevented from dressing and grooming himself in a way that aligns with his gender. Correctional officers told Graham he would get written up unless he grew out his hair, and they forced him to shave his beard, which he had permission to maintain on religious grounds, he said. He also alleged that they told him he was required to wear women’s underwear and a bra, even though he had had his breasts removed. Several other trans men incarcerated in Texas and contacted by NBC News said they had encountered officers who required them to wear sports bras and women’s underwear, as well as to grow out their hair to longer than 2½ inches or risk “catching a case” — getting written up for breaking the rules. According to advocates and currently and formerly incarcerated people, trans men in the state have no routine access to boxer shorts and are unable to buy chest binders, which are used by those who have not yet had top surgery to flatten their breasts.  “I’ve tried to request boxers and chest binders and was denied, which made my depression worse,” Angel Ochoa, 49, another incarcerated trans man in the state, said in a letter. Asked to clarify the state’s position on clothing for transgender people, Hurst, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson, said, “Inmates are to dress according to the sex assigned to them at birth.”

It goes into the sexual assault experienced in women's prisons, and that trans men are "protected" through solitary confinement, which discourages them from reporting:

Graham said women on his unit would undress and climb into his bed at night saying they were going to have sex with him or would try to look at his body while he was showering, even though he was supposed to be permitted to shower alone.  Prison staff members did not take steps to keep him safe, he said. After staff members were alerted to one particular incident, he spent about 10 days in “safekeeping,” a form of isolation also known as protective custody. Incarcerated trans people often end up in protective custody for their purported protection, because they are uniquely vulnerable to sexual and physical assault when they are in the general population. But the conditions in protective custody generally mirror the conditions faced by those in disciplinary isolation. When he was in safekeeping, Graham said, he was fed through a door and had very limited access to showers or his property. After a third time in safekeeping, Graham said, he was fed up and vowed never to end up there again.

And it talks about how trans men are seen as violent and hypersexual, and that they are an easy target for blame:

Trans men may also be unfairly identified as threats to other inmates and punished, said El Sabrout, who said others “perceive them as threatening” and “dangerously sexual,” particularly when they begin taking testosterone.  Ochoa said he was once placed in solitary confinement after he was accused of having a sexual relationship with a correctional officer. “Anyone can say anything about you and it’s believed, especially if you’re a trans guy,” said Ochoa, whose prison records were not independently reviewed by NBC News.

Roses come in almost every color except blue (and black). We've worked very hard to breed all sorts of roses: climbers, shrubs, long-stem, tea roses, scented, and on and on. But in true human fashion, we want the one we don't have, and that's a blue rose. A true blue rose. We can't get them naturally, roses don't carry the gene(s) necessary to be bred blue on their own.

So of course, when genetic modification became real, one of the first projects started, and in fact still ongoing, is to create a blue rose. Efforts have been ongoing for about forty-something years now, and not from small labs. The first one to the finish line will have the patent on the color [yes, rose colors are patented] and the process. They will make money hand over fist. Not to mention the progress it will represent in the entire field.

40+ years.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A photo depicting a smiling Japanese woman with two large bouquets of Suntory's "Applause" roses, which are a lavender-grey color]

Closest we've gotten. And these make money, don't get me wrong. They're beautiful. But they're purple. Lavender. Technically blue, in the sense that "purple" doesn't exist in horticulture. (Thus why in the rhyme, "violets are blue")

"But when I put 'blue roses' in a search engine -"

Those are either photoshopped, or they're white roses that have been dyed blue. It's a really easy process. Florists do it all the time for specialty requests. It's so commonly done it even comes in spray paint form. They don't grow that color. They cannot grow that color.

(Yes, whatever one you think is real is photoshopped or dyed. Yes, I'm sure.)

All that work, from some of the best labs in the world. Decades of work. Absolute dedication to the task, the science needed being created just to do this, this one thing, make a rose blue. And we still can't do it.

Screenshot of a post on Threads by "ztwang87". The post reads:

A techbro told me that biology is easy because DNA is just code, right? I told him that DNA is 4 billion year old, completely undocumented, vibe-coded spaghetti, built by a blind evolutionary algorithm, which codes for its own compiler and runtime environment. His confidence popped like a balloon. I think of that programmer investigating Team Fortress 2, who found a jpg of a coconut in the game files and has no idea what it's doing there but if you remove it the game doesn't start. Biology is full of coconuts

End ID.]