phoenix and layton's werewolf wife

Penis makes you evil? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. People who fuck with a strap get hit. Being a top gets you hit. Got penis envy? Must be evil. Can accuse you of penis envy? Evil.

Testosterone makes you evil? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. Intersex people get hit. Masc women get hit. Women of color get hit. Anyone you can force a masculine label on or deny of a feminine label gets hit.

Male privilege is a moral failing you both somehow choose but also cannot opt out of rather than a set of conditional circumstances society imposes on you that may temporarily benefit you? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. Anyone you can accuse of being too close to maleness gets hit.

Masculinity makes you evil? Trans men get hit. Trans women who are masc get hit. Trans women who you can accuse of being masc get hit. Masc women get hit. Anyone you can accuse of being masc get hit (woc, intersex people, ethnic minorities with features assumed ‘masculine’, anyone who rejects aspects of femininity or doesn’t perform femininity in a way you think they ‘should’)

Proximity to men makes you evil? Anyone who dates men is hit. Anyone who likes men is hit. Anyone who is friends with men gets hit. Ultimately people assaulted by men suddenly “had it coming” because they dared stand next to a man, and you call yourself a feminist spouting the biggest rape apologist catchphrase???

You wanna “kill all men” for what theyve done to you, but you’re not doing anything to hurt OR change cis men or society but you are wracking up a body count of women just as hurt as you.

“Feminist” when you’ve pushed more women towards suicide than an incel has? Gimme a break.

1. Dismantling oppressive systems, and

2. Expanding what is means to be a woman (look, identity, body, parts, roles, personality, etc)

And at every opportunity radfeminists of various flavors respond

1. Eh, we are doomed forever and cannot hope to dismantle oppressive systems ever

2. We need to rigorously narrow what it means to be a woman, lest some pervert tries to sneak in and reap all the benefits

A part 2 to the touched starved Grace comic.

I wanna make this a small mini series because I like playing around with all of their dynamics!

(don't worry y'all we'll get to the hug at some point)

Part 1

Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.

The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!

So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.

this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.

the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.

The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less rhetorical ground we cede to the degendering and misgendering of trans women.

The older lady who saw me working the theater district and without a word slipped me a 20, SAVED MY LIFE

The nurse at the ER who refused to buy my bullshit story when I walked in and said I needed STD prophylaxis- she SAVED MY LIFE

The other victims I met while being trafficked, the older girl who told me, "shut the fuck up, don't posture like that," she SAVED MY LIFE

Even the young guy who was in with the traffickers, who got in over his head and snuck us oreos and cheez-its- he SAVED LIVES

The other survivors I've met in the aftermath who have listened and shared their wisdom- they've SAVED LIVES

You know who's never come close to saving my life? The cops. The court system. The Feds. Wider society as a whole, even. I've never been helped or cared for by these systems. I've been helped and cared for by PEOPLE. By regular human people who were all just doing their best.

More than it's ever haunted me that these awful systems and evil people exist, it haunts me that I'll never be able to thank any of those good people who've saved me. It haunts me that they'll never know how much of an impact they've made. The way I repay them is to try to bring that same energy into the world- and maybe do the same for others without even knowing it.

happy new year -------------_--------------------

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

God I don't even know what her point is here. "Trans" as a term is problematic because it pretends that trans women aren't more oppressed than trans men, the solution is to accept that "trans" is meant to be about a dialectic between the "opposite forces" of masculinity and femininity (and uhhhh nonbinary and agender people too or whatever, which Jules constantly bemoans how much she doesn't understand what a nonbinary experience even is but I'm meant to buy that her theory has genuinely considered how nonbinary and agender people fit into this, sure!!!!!) and t4t is here too and we can fuck about it, problem solved.

I have to point out that she says

There is the non-binary denouncement of so-called binary trans women for apparently taking gender too seriously, or perhaps taking beauty too seriously, in medically transitioning.

And then she cites an article, Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid? by Meredith Talusan. And I do not get why. This article is about Meredith (a nonbinary person) talking about her friends Alok Vaid Menon (who is nonbinary) and Jacob Tobia (who is genderqueer), and their collective observation that Alok and Jacob struggle to get dates by virtue of being visibly gender-non conforming and androgynous, while Meredith (who can pass as a cis woman and went through HRT and SRS while still identifying as binary) is seen as much more desirable. They reflects on their friend's struggles with being nonbinary in the dating world while visibly androgynous in the "wrong" way.

There is nothing in this article about how “binary trans women” must be denounced for “taking gender too seriously.” That is entirely a projection on Peterson's part, one she does nothing to explain; just pops this article into this paper I'm guessing because it pissed her off when she read it. The article is about misandrogyny and how it impacts nb/gq/gnc’s people love lives. But of course, to Peterson, this cannot be interpreted as anything other than an attack on “so-called” binary trans women.

Because nonbinary people are never ever allowed to ever imply that being aligned with the binary in certain ways can result in being spared from kinds of transphobia that others, particularly many nb/gq/gnc people, cannot escape as long as we live authentically. Pointing out that a visibly androgynous, hairy and feminine, body is seen as undesirable is, of course, secretly REALLY about how nonbinary people loathe the True Transsexuals and their HRT and surgeries (nevermind that Meredith is a nonbinary person who physically transitioned, a group that Peterson loves to pretend doesn’t exist). Because everything nonbinary people do and say when it comes to describing our oppression is actually about being big meanies to binary trans people, The Main Characters Of Transness.

The "so-called binary" thing is a dogwhistle imo, because while all trans people can be affected by misandrogyny, binary trans people who CONSTANTLY define themselves in opposition to nonbinary people, love to act like being called binary is a slur (hmmm where have we heard that one before, class?). But I just know it grinded her gears to hear Alok joking about how going on E and getting electrolysis would make them be seen as more desirable, to see a person who decided being a binary trans woman wasn't right for them and who is openly talking about exorsexism/misandrogyny (if not by those names).

this isn't even getting into just how much this whole theory of hers is EXTREMELY fundamentally binary, but she thinks she can get around that by mentioning nonbinary people once or twice and suddenly its totally not everyone! like:

I suggest that trans is better regarded as an auto-antonym than an umbrella or an interchangeable prefix: a word that generates two opposite meanings (in this case, masculine and feminine). This auto-antonymic quality in fact produces many more than one pair of ‘opposite’ meanings, considering that trans holds nonbinary and agender significance too, rejecting any singular masculine/feminine master dialectic.

Nonbinary people are brought up three times in this whole paper, and one of those times was the above-mentioned bad faith reading of that article. & anyways, after reading her blame the fucking Skrmetti decision & the legal attacks on trans healthcare on "vainly championing the ostensible superiority of androgyny, or, today, a kind of immaterial, nonbinary idealism" and her doing that whole fuckass article waxing lyrical about how nonbinary people are just playing dress up and aren't meaningfully different than binary people, I'm sorry but fucking Press X To Doubt that she put the line about nonbinarity in there for any other reason than to say she didn't technically exclude nonbinary people if people yell at her on Twitter.

Anyways re: "the trans battle of the sexes can be fixed by t4t sex and everyone just agreeing that transfems have it worse, because that's the only real problem here :)" didn't S.L Void literally write an essay on this exact "solution":

There are also cases where the reaction [from all types of people] to transmasculine people expressing pain they have suffered due to this kind of discourse and the sweeping generalizations being made about transmasculine people that sounds something like: “in real life we don’t talk about this, we all just kiss each other”, and this reaction is just as shitty as dismissing it entirely. It adds a dynamic of something that many trans people are intimately familiar with, that of the “please, I like you when you don’t speak and are simply something nice to look at”, the kind of reasoning that strikes the fear of being abandoned by loved ones into the hearts of many many trans people of all different gender embodiments. [...] It is not helping anyone to pretend like “in real life” these problems do not exist and in real life we all just kiss, cause it’s not true and it creates a situation where transmasculine people feel like to express pain is to be a party-pooper, and to be an ally is to be happily sexually available with no regard for who perpetuates antitransmasculinity or not. [...] So while yeah, its possible that in real life, some of us are just kissing each other, it’s also true that many of us are doing both — we’re acknowledging and working to combat one another's oppression, and loving each other while we do it. It is also very possible that in real life the opposite is happening, and there is antitransmasculinity and transmisogyny being perpetuated in spaces that should be mostly free of them. ‘Irl we just kiss’ is a dismissal of this, and it’s not helpful for anyone. It mistakes attraction for allyship, something we sincerely cannot afford as a unit.

^^^^ this is the problem with Peterson's whole approach to these gender wars and many other people's. While not always productive, some of this discourse is the dialectic, it is a slow addressing of some deeply unaddressed wounds in our community, and importantly, this cannot be done without addressing anti-transmasculinity and exorsexism alongside anti-transfemininity/transmisogyny.

When I said "disses", I meant sharing your thoughts in a pretty negative, unsavory way. Not just sharing an opinion on the ship. Disses as in actually showing genuine hatred towards towards a ship, but mostly its fans.

It is not okay to spread that kinda hate. Saying that you dislike a ship for "a & b" is one thing. I dislike several ships. Saying you dislike all the shippers of a ship for "a & b" and generalizing people into one category is not okay and not respectful.

I absolutely 100% agree that people should not blindly follow the ships of big creators, though.

Also people shouldn't feel like they should hide their opinions, however a lot of "criticism" is super unnecessary. It is often not respectful.