CameoAppearance and the Blog of Many Things

kai, who is 15 and just bought a binder and his parents think it's a silly phase and he's in a red state where politicians writing laws about whether he can chop off his beautiful womanly breasts

joe, who is in his 40s and entirely stealth and has a wife and two daughters

oliver, who is 22 and on hrt and passes pretty well, but is still legally female and is read as female in some contexts

sarah, who is 30 and in a conservative environment where he's forced to be a housewife and mother and doesn't exactly know he's trans, just that he wishes he was born a man

and so many other trans men because every single one of us is a unique individual with a unique relationship to male privilege

and it's not that trans men can't have male privilege. joe certainly does, though he would likely lose some of that privilege if he were outed. oliver is probably privileged in a lot of everyday ways, like not being catcalled or getting taken more seriously at work, but is still very much subject to more structural forms of misogyny. and there are ways in which trans men are privileged over our trans sisters. our capacity for privilege is something to be aware of, not something to instinctively deny.

but also, for non trans men, listen to us when we talk about our experiences not being treated like men and not having male privilege. listen to us when we talk about our experiences with misogyny (crucially, without treating us like being subject to misogyny makes us Honorary Women)

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

It’s when AI produces discriminatory outcomes as a result of being trained on data that is biased which results in these AI systems replicating and reinforcing those biases.

That very well could be why Google Doc’s spellcheck is regurgitating this kind of bigotry because it’s literally what it was trained to do.

Side note this is why BAME folk are so concerned about the rise of facial recognition for criminal investigations. Cause not only is facial recognition less accurate for us than it is for white folk (cause they make up the majority of that trained data) but also because the police systems are institutionally racist.

It isn't until days later, after he's sobered up and the rumors about him have quieted, that anyone realizes it was Ryland Grace's birthday those days before. That Carl was missing his friend.

He doesn't celebrate alone the next year. Army Guy Steve brings Skittles. Stratt sits awkwardly until someone asks her a question about Grace, and she cautiously tells a story about him. It's cold - the sun is dying, after all - so they drink mulled wine and sit by an astrophage heater and Carl isn't alone. He isn't alone.