The Fenworks

Our books as epubs in chronological order, day 3: OUTSIDER - https://sunspot.world/our-books-as-epubs-in-chronological-order-day-3-outsider/ Excerpt:

Normalize using small words with aac.

Normalize not bullying or making fun of someone who is verbose when able to speak but isn't when using aac.

Normalize being patient for an aac speaker to type.

I hope this was a misclick because if it's not I feel bad for the "lil babies only" system out there

This headmate is of the strong belief that it also exists in some way inside of every psyche.

Our books as epubs in chronological order, day 2: NI'A - https://sunspot.world/our-books-as-epubs-in-chronological-order-day-2-nia/ Excerpt:

This one’s tricky, but there are some nice ones out there. What I’d mostly recommend though is going into a shop and asking to feel samples. We kept open bottle so people could feel different consistencies.

A gynecologist working at a differences in sex development clinic told us to use coconut oil for dilating and masturbation, saying that it was fine and did a good job of conditioning the skin and tissue there without throwing things off too much.

We tend to trust sex workers and sex store employees a little more than doctors, for Reasons. And the thing about trapping bacteria for too long is definitely the primary concern.

This one’s tricky, but there are some nice ones out there. What I’d mostly recommend though is going into a shop and asking to feel samples. We kept open bottle so people could feel different consistencies.

A gynecologist working at a differences in sex development clinic told us to use coconut oil for dilating and masturbation, saying that it was fine and did a good job of conditioning the skin and tissue there without throwing things off too much.

We tend to trust sex workers and sex store employees a little more than doctors, for Reasons. And the thing about trapping bacteria for too long is definitely the primary concern.

And not one person thought to bring it up.

When I was talking about how horrifying puberty felt. When I was cutting myself. When I was in inpatient care. When I attempted suicide. When I talked for YEARS in therapy about how dissociated and trapped I felt in my body. When I felt like I never truly fixed something that was deeply wrong about me that started at puberty.

Not one person said it was a possibility. No one thought "hey, maybe this kid should go to someone trained to identify dysphoria". No one mentioned that trans people weren't some weird other group of people. It didn't have to be pressure. It didn't have to be "forcing" me. Just mentioning that trans people exist and it could be me. That it was possible and it was easy. No pushing, just laying the option out there.

HRT is treated like this last ditch option. This horrific, mutilating thing that I GUESS we can give to you if you have NO OTHER options. Because did you know it's permanent? Did you know you'll be on it for the rest of your life? Did you know the health risks? Did you know it'll make you infertile? Did you know that it's deviant? Did you know that it's an alternative lifestyle for other people?

No one said it was okay to WANT it to be permanent. Or noted that most people are reliant on the medical system in one way or the other anyways (and it's not even necessary for HRT). Or that the health risks are the normal parts of having that hormone, even in cis people of your gender. Or said it was okay to not want kids, or mention that you can just freeze gametes. Or acknowledged that the "deviant" people are just people, living their lives, that have been violently pushed out of "normal" society.

I grew up in an area that Republicans mock for being a kind of "woke central". And even then it's just. Not treated as an easy option. It was never on the table if you don't specifically already know you're going through gender stuff, and no one will help you get to that point. At which point, it's still treated like the last ditch option. Did you know you can be a feminine man? Did you know you can slap a "she/her" in your twitter bio and be done with it? Did you know that you're oh-so-valid without it? Did you know that you shouldn't take HRT? Maybe don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't ta-

When you've been in it a while, HRT is the easiest, most casual thing in the world. Just pop a shot on a Saturday as part of your "everything shower" routine and you're done.

I will admit I will occasionally find a cute pile of foxes somewhere around me,

but i cant be sure if they're here for me or for the bunnies that also show up...

We are a pile of dragons, and we share our bed with a single fox.

However, it is the hare we both live with that brought us together. It's a wiley thing. Very tricksy.

And then, on the other hand, you've got "Shockingly, this life-altering treatment that massively impacts how the patient is perceived by others in all facets of life is primarily supported by observational studies, as opposed to the enormous violations of bodily autonomy and human dignity necessary to perform a true randomized control trial. We recommend that treatment ceases immediately because you don't understand how evidence-based medicine works." And that becomes a linchpin of the politics of multiple European countries' trans healthcare politics for the next several years.

Kermit was on a steady downward trajectory which did not meaningfully alter with the debut of Sesame Street. That slope just keeps going down steadily. No noticeable effect whatsoever from Sesame Street. Kermit himself was a long-extant character by the time Sesame Street started, and in fact shortly after he started to become popular there's a minor INCREASE in the number of times the name is used, before the overall trend reasserts itself.

Elmo the character had a minor debut in 1980 but did not become a regular character until the mid-1980s, so the date of Sesame Street's debut is wildly irrelevant to the name's trajectory. I haven't gone and regraphed the name data because I have better things to do with my time but you can see that name was also sliding downhill. 1985 is just about dead center between 1951 and 2021, and there is a minor increase there, again, so, fuck the above analysis IT IS BAD. Also, a name that is outside of the top 1000 names, as Elmo already was -- in the 3000s! -- is already quite rare and depending on how those names are graphed (there's no source attached), that could affect the slope of the line.

First, methodology: I downloaded the United States Social Security Administration 2025 data set . This contains data on US names, by year of birth, from 1880-2024. In the 1980s, you started getting a Social Security card at birth, so what's in the data since then is different than previously. In particular, if you only get a SSN when you start to work, and child mortality was higher in earlier data, you don't QUITE get accurate comparisons. In addition, you only get names given to more than 5 people in that year, for privacy reasons.

I downloaded the zipped version and unzipped it into text files so that I could use command-line tools on it. There are individual files for every year.

I then collated every instance of the text strings Kermit, Grover, and Elmo into individual files. I did this by using the command "grep" over the contents of the directory. grep takes every instance of whatever string you give it, and grabs the whole line that string is in. So it would grab every instance of the name, and all the other info on that line, for me. I passed the results to a single csv file.

So for example, I used the command:

grep Kermit *.* | cat >> kermit.csv

and that would give me a file called "kermit.csv" with every single line containing the string "Kermit" in the whole directory.

At this point I needed to do some data cleaning, because what the data looks like is:

I needed to turn, for example, "yob1925.txt:" into "1925," to end up with a nice csv file. That's easy enough to do in a text editor. Then I opened it up in a spreadsheet. I like to use Numbers personally for this kind of thing because you can put multiple tables next to each other on the canvas.

Now I had to make some decisions: am I combining M & F instances of the name Kermit in the same year? Also, does "Kermitt" or "Kermith" count as "Kermit"? Most of the name charting things you can get online a) separate by assigned sex and b) are restricted to the exact spelling, so I decided I was going to use only M data (matching the characters' genders) and only the exact spelling (to match the data usually out there). There's 5 years with F Kermits, 14 years with F Grovers, and 26 years with F Elmos. All gone.

Elmo had the most name variations I had to filter out:

Now I have this nice filtered table that has all the years in which each name appears in the data. It looks like so:

Then I charted each data set.

We also need to look figure out what's going on when the graphs get a little weird. For example, this in Elmo data:

That means there's not 10 years of data between 1990 and 2000; the next time it got to 10 lines of data was 2003. And indeed:

This means there were fewer than 5 Elmos in those years so they aren't in the original data set. We know what's going on there, and in this case I'm just going to let it be instead of filling in the years with 0s or 4s. The trend is clear enough.

Here we go, real charts for each of those names, sex M, exact spelling, from their first appearance in the data until 2024:

[ID: Kermit began trending downward in the 1910s/1920s, had a brief leveling out the 1940s, and then went steadily downward. It has a brief resurgence around the introduction of the character Kermit the Frog in the late 50s/early 60s but then resumes downward until it is nearly gone.]

The Grover chart is fun because I made all the charts top out at the same count (500 individuals) for these, and Grover was more popular than that at its peak, so the tops are cut off on its individual graph.

Grover is falling sharply through the 1920s, levels out until around 1950, then falls sharply until it nearly vanishes. No major change in downward trend in 1969.

Elmo peaked around 1920 and then fell off a cliff. The downward slope gentled out around 1930 but kept falling steadily until around the 1980s, where it leveled out at a nearly-nonexistent count.

Sesame Street had absolutely nothing to do with the dropoff in these names. ALL of them were already on the downslope.

In 1969, there were 116 Kermits, 105 Grovers, and 35 Elmos in the data. Those are not popular names. For reference, the most popular name for boys in 1969 was Michael (85,159); 100th was Henry (3,057); 1000th was Titus (60).

In 1974, 5 years later, there are 71 Kermits, 74 Grovers, and 18 Elmos. Percentage-wise, those are huge drops, but RAW NUMBERS-wise, they aren't huge drops at all. (We are ignoring for the second that Elmo hadn't debuted yet.)

Now we're not ignoring that anymore:

1979 Elmos (pre-debut): 15. 1981 Elmos (post-debut): 16. 1985 Elmos (Elmo starting to become popular character): 12.

In fact, the most Elmos in the Social Security data in ANY year since 1980 is 18 (1983 and 1994). This is not a popular name. At all. At any time since the character debuted whatsoever. The most popular name for boys in 1980 was Michael, again (68,687); 100th was Billy (2,991); 1000th was Mohammed (82).

For funsies, here's all of them from 1880-2024. Any years with no data for a name have been set to 0 for the purposes of this graph and this graph only: