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Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

That’s 1972

29 years before AVEN was started online,

and 47 years before the present.

And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.

Am I breathing?

Have I blinked?

Are my feet touching the floor?

Am I touching something typically fatal or painful?

Have I damaged the environment in some unexpected way?

Am I responding to sensory input not available to humans?

Oh … I’m not breathing…

Have some opening action scene where Superman shows up to stop crime and the robbers try to run him over at top speed.

Obviously it doesn’t work and Clark stops the car - wrecking it a bit and stunning the criminals inside but not harming them.

Then the scene repeats much later but this time Clark is distracted, stunned or suffering some phlebotinum effects - anything that causes him to not react.

So much of what he does, both as Clark AND and Superman, is for other people’s comfort.

The way he tilts his head to show he’s hearing something you can’t.

The way he dresses for weather he can’t feel.

The way his glasses obscure the too-intense blueness of his eyes.

The way he lifts his feet over cracks, and ducks under overhangs.

The way he eventually purchases oven mitts and other protective gear to wear before touching dangerous substances.

The way he leans into blows so people don’t shatter their hands.

The way he tries to only respond to words and tone, rather than heartbeat, increased/decreased sweating, breathing changes, ‘inaudible’ mumbles, and all the other things people don’t know they’re communicating.

A Clark that forgets to do those things is fascinating to observe.

(I’d also love to see more of various Karas and Kon dealing with similar things, because their perspectives are all so different.

Kara grew up without powers, but not around humans, and so her blind spots would be really different.

If we go canon there is plenty of cases when Clark X-ray scans people around him and tells them to look into potential problems( ie. in a comic he tells Jim Gordon he should quit smoking)

One I always like to use in my own AU: kryptonians can detect electric signals well enough to feel all living things(animals, plants, fish, insects), electronics/machines, changes in weather and the earth’s own electromagnetic field, from up to 500 kilometres away.

Because this is just one of their regular senses, it doesn’t weaken or go away if their powers are compromised (suffering from Kryptonite, under a red sun erc) Because they can feel the earth’s electromagnetic field, they also, coincidentally, always know exactly where they are.

So. Imagine the Us Government or something has arrested superman in like, his first year superhero-ing and as they’re trying to transport him to a secure location to Question/study him for his powers, all of a sudden he just goes:

“oh hey, We’re already past the us-canada border. Another 50 miles to go, right?”

“…how did you guess that ?”

Bruce is asking, praying, begging to know what the hell they’re feeding Dick at college. Look at him.

I often come back to this comic because its just so cute and heartbreakingly wholesome.

Bruce and Clark are currently going through a divorce 😆 They had a huge argument in the previous comics, so they haven't spoken for a while. So in this story, Bruce gets infected with a lethal virus during one of his cases that has no cure on earth. Upon hearing this, Clark, despite not having spoken to Bruce for months, stubbornly refuses to let him go. He searches the entire universe, and scans every planet for a cure, until he finds one. Then using his powers, he constructs a machine that is capable of synthesizing the alien comet that will produce the cure Bruce needs.

I love this comic because not only does it show how much Clark loves Bruce and how far he will go to save him, but it also displays how incredibly brilliant Clark is. Clark and Bruce are both geniuses; With the amount of alien knowledge and technology that Clark has been exposed to in his travels, Bruce would have a field day just nerding out with him in the Fortress. Its one of the many reasons Bruce loves his bestie 🥰