Weasels in Space

Butch identity doesn’t just go hand in hand with trans manhood and transmasculinity: they are chosen family, they’re friends and comrades, lovers and beloved.

If you deny the lived experiences of trans men and transmasculine people you don’t get to pretend like you see the beauty in the complexity of butchness.

nestle owns fucking everything and the simple reality is that most of the brands of anything, not just pet food, that are anywhere close to affordable are owned by the same 5 evil megacorporations

If you really believe harm is bad, and eliminating harm is a worthy goal, you have to start with small steps: eliminate a small harm, not all harms all at once. Reduce a great harm a little, perhaps by helping one individual impacted by that harm, and then another individual, and another... You cannot tackle all harm at once; you must take smaller bites. Set this reality against your need to feel right & correct & pure & perfect. Reducing some harm instead of all harm is not failure! You are not a failure! You may fail now and again, but failing once or twice or ten thousand times doesn't change the fact that you can still try again and succeed! You are not a failure even when you fail to reach your impossible goal of perfection.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

I think there’s a specific subset of person who get a specific dog that works extremely well for the Task they are interested in, and they forget or fail to consider that other dog personalities exist. For the type of general training thing you’re talking about it’s often herding breed folks, but it can occur in any breed. Here are some specific examples I’ve encountered in person:

I took an online bikejoring course and also traveled to visit the trainer in person about fifteen years ago. I worked harder than any other student and made the least progress. Bindi found the combination of pulling into harness + being in front of me + being responsible for navigation to be too much pressure. I never was able to get her to pull me on a bike. After about a year of frustrating wheel spinning, my trainer said, “Well MY dogs love pulling and they love seeing what’s around the corner. That’s how Bindi should be motivated.” She had Alaskan huskies.

My first nosework trainer did not approve of me hunting with Kermit and at least once a month would comment that he would be ruined for nosework if I continued. I struggled a lot to find a reward that was worth his time because Kermit hates toys and food is a medium reward at best. He’s a very difficult dog to motivate and it’s been a real learning experience for me. My trainer told me, “Well MY dogs do it because I ask them to. I expect them to work purely for the love of the game.” She has shepherds of varying flavors.

I once agreed to help someone start her dog in tracking. I told her to bring hot dogs. She did, but didn’t want to use food. When she does barn hunt her dogs are able to go purely off instinct. When I was going over how to introduce the concept of AKC tracking, she kept interrupting me, “Well MY dogs do it because they love me. I tell them Mommy is proud of them and sometimes I pet them.” She has dachshunds and greyhounds.

You will look at it

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.