Incoherent Thoughts

So the thing is, this was Yugioh back in the days of the original series, circa when the original manga series hadn’t even concluded yet. The series, as you might or might not know, was all about the Millennium Items and the spirits contained within them. When certain people wore those items, the spirit could possess them, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes…not. Some dispensed justice, in a rather violent way. Others simply did what they pleased, up to and including violent murder. So they were dark alter egos in a way!

The fandom took that and ran with it. This was way before we found out that all those spirits were ancient Egyptians sealed inside those items, so everyone just treated them as generic alter egos - and if you were anyone in the YGO fandom at that point, you had one of your own. Mostly just interfering in the author notes, but sometimes also in the middle of chapters……

Yes, it seems more than a little weird now, but a not insubstantial amount of the YGO fic of those days actually had mid-chapter intermissions where the author and their Yami (the dark alter ego) would argue more or less endlessly about the direction the story was going, or where each ’side’ wanted it to go.

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"

If I tell you this is a horror dance number it still won't prepare you. That last move was so terrifying even the judge was like "Let go! Let go!" If you told me they're actually possessed I'd believe you.

The music is a remix of the song Mere Dholna from the Bollywood movie Bhool Bhulaiyya, a remake of the classic Malayalam horror-comedy Manichitrathazhu. It's about a young bride that seemingly becomes possessed of Manjulika, a dancer of the ancient royal court whose tragic death has turned her into a vengeful spirit, one who evokes the wrath of the goddess Durga Kali. In the iconic scene that is repeated across remakes, the groom and his family discover his bride dancing in the dead of night in a manic, disassociative fugue, wearing a moth-eaten dancer's costume and a face smeared in kohl, ash and vermilion. She's hallucinating that she's Manjulika dancing carefree for the court with her lover. The upbeat music is deliberately incongruous with the pathos and creepiness of the scene in reality, especially as it crescendos in the bride's head to the moment when the king decapitates Manjulika's beloved in a fit of jealous rage.

This specific number is by the all-male troupe B Unique, performed for the Indian reality talent contest Hunabaarz. It's a modern fusion based on Bharatnatyam that turns up the creep factor by 200% and is basically a showcase of contortionism and synchronicity. One of the most perfectly choreographed and executed dances I have ever seen. Truly incredible!

Source

so instead of paying for your link to be top of google but I can scroll past your sponsored link to dozens of other results and use MY judgement filter for what I need, I have no say I just have to ask your stupid ai again and again and again. great

Plenty of transphobic cis folks are green. Virtually every trans-positivity account is red except for the ones who are unapologetically transphobic to at least part of the community. Countless trans women who vocally uses the term transandrophobia are marked red. Several trans women who dont even use the term but have at least on one occasion defended or sympathized with trans men are red. Several trans women who are bigender/NB/Etc with inclusion of any "male" or masc terms are red regardless of whether they seem to have anything to say about trans men.

It is BLEAK. I've been trying to remove reds and greens as I assess, but it is really really gross that it was a pretty well-known soft rule a decade plus ago that you didn't mark trans people red at all even if they were shitheads, unless they were actual proud terfs, because the flagging was guaranteed to isolate them from community.

Inability to assess risk and a total aversion to narratives that contradict what you assume to be the case for others is getting people into a lot of trouble.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. and this isn't necessarily something that's done maliciously, which is key. its not about people twiddling their fingers and thinking about how to contribute to a massive conspiracy against transmascs. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

even though the explanations are entirely flipped (one relies on male gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people assigned male more than those assigned female, the other relies on female gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people transitioning towards femininity more than those transitioning towards masculinity), they are both trying to take the model of "women suffer because they are women and men benefit because they are men" and contort it to explain transmasculine experiences.

this is why these explanations make very little sense when you really look at them. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you can only analyze gender through a cissexist lens, everything looks fundamentally cis.

cisfeminism struggles greatly to actually deal with social hatred for androgyny and intersexuality and transness, because you can make feminist arguments and feminist theory that can explain many (though clearly not all) women's experiences without ever questioning the binary.

If you're raised as a girl, the cultural expectation is that you make yourself small and that you put up with your problems quietly. If you're a trans man, you're told to step aside, don't center yourself, and definitely don't make your problems everybody else's problems because that's what those loud, self-centered cis men do and if you're gonna insist on being a man you better not act like one.

Hello, Tumblr. I've never posted here, only lurked. But this is one of the most important things in the world to me, and I honestly need to ask you for help. Please reblog if you can.

This will be a long post. It will be summarized with a TLDR at the end, including ways that you can help.

With over 9,200 pages, we are the biggest collection of gender identities on the Internet, especially the biggest source that is readily available. We are a community that has existed since 2009, and has taken off in terms of growth in the last few years.

Today, Fandom decided to close the Gender Wiki. We were given absolutely no warning, and they've only given us a two-week deadline to move the entire wiki to a new host, which we are utterly unprepared to do. The download would also not include any of the 17,000+ images on the Gender Wiki, many of which do not exist anywhere else on the Internet.

Here is a link to the post Fandom staff gave us today, and a paraphrased summary of it below:

https://gender.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000000132176

Fandom staff says that they won't continue to host our wiki because it "spreads harmful misinformation". They believe we have gone too far in "positioning everything as a gender identity", referring to xenogenders. They mention pages with xenogenders referring to suicide/self-harm and violence --- which we, the staff members, were /already/ in the process of deleting before this notice was given to us. They decided that the best solution was not to ask us to delete those pages, or even delete the pages themselves, but instead to remove our entire database.

There are many other wikis on Fandom with much worse references to violence than the Gender Wiki, which Fandom appears to have no problem with whatsoever.

I cannot express enough that this is erasure, and it will absolutely negatively affect the LGBTQ+ community to not have this treasure trove of information readily available.

I am an admin on the Gender Wiki, and I can assure you that our entire staff team is already trying to appeal to Fandom staff. I'll add any updates if they decide to respond to us, but they have no yet given staff any more information than the above

PLEASE help in any way you can. Reblog, spread awareness, or sign this petition if you have a Fandom account, OR sign this petition instead if you don't --- please DON'T sign both, as this causes counting problems & can make the point seem less legitimate. Archive any Gender Wiki pages, especially ones that don't have pages elsewhere, with the Wayback Machine or alternatively archive.is, or even write posts about them here or on other sites. Archives will be organized on this spreadsheet; please include the archiving site you used so they can be found later. Please help us save this information. It can't possibly be done this quickly without help.

TLDR: Fandom staff decided that, in two weeks, they will close the Gender Wiki, the biggest gender resource on the Internet. They gave us no warning. It will be impossible to save all of the information on the wiki. Please reblog or sign this petition if you have a Fandom account, OR this one if you don't (please don't sign both, it'll cause problems). Help save the data by archiving pages here or here (organized on this spreadsheet). Help spread awareness. Post about this with #save the gender wiki

One consistent aspect of anti-transmasculinity I've noticed (particularly when it comes from other trans people) is the implication or outright statement that they want their own oppression.

In this post, for example, transmasculine people are described as wanting to be viewed as different kind of men, to whom different rules apply.

When really, this is simply trans men describing their lived reality. Trans men are, objectively, viewed and treated as a different kind of man, and experience different rules and standards then cis men do. This is assuming that they're even seen as a type of man in the first place, which is not true for many trans men.

Which is interesting, because these same people have no issues when trans women described being degendered or other-sexed. Furthermore, they understand intuitively that trans women are treated with different rules and standards than pericis women.

But when trans men explain similar concepts, that they're overall affected by different systems of oppression than pericis men, suddenly they "want" to be seen as a different kind of man.

there's a lot of talk about "basic transphobia" and "just transphobia" and whatnot. but like. it feels like in the desperation to be accepted into cisfeminism, we often cede the ground that transness in itself — not merely when validated by a binary, cis-accessible gender identity — is bad theory, because it blurs the lines too much.

like. what is being critiqued here? trans men correctly identify that, in our material lived experiences, we are not the same as cis men, and that understanding our material political-social circumstances requires starting from that understanding.

this is not incompatible with insisting on trans men's manhood. if this woman actually spoke to a large number of these trans men, she'd find there's a large amount of diversity — including people who aren't even actually trans men, they are just transmasculinized and thus need these conversations as well. there are trans men who feel strongly their gender is just "man" and that they are a man in the same way a cis man is a man, and yet, also must make sense of his lived experiences of being treated as a woman and a dyke and a tranny far more than he is treated as a cis man. analyzing your experiences as a man does not require sacrificing analysis of your experience as trans.

is he supposed to ignore his material position... for what? for the ideological purity? he needs to prove to... who, exactly, that he's a Real Man by insisting he's the positionaly same as cis men? should he just roleplay as a cis man for your comfort?

and again, why must we downplay trans people's transness? why is this not allowed to be central in our analysis, even moreso than the specific (almost always binary) gender identity? why do we treat transness as a just modifier for a binary, cis-centric idea of gender? this idea of a transfeminism that is only for women who happen to be trans, with transness pushed as far to the periphery as possible but excused because the people doing the pushing are trans, so that makes it trans + feminism, right?

just like. as a nonbinary person, it is so incredibly obvious how exorsexism / misandrogyny / transphobia warps our idea of transfeminism. people who consider themselves "transfeminist" get mad at trans men for centering their transness. why the fuck even bother calling it transfeminism if you are gonna get mad when other trans people go any deeper than "cisfeminism but with diy E" !! this is the same kind of person who insist that there is no material analysis to be done of nonbinary experiences, that nonbinary gender identity is all counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie idealism.

Please DO be that 'obnoxious' guy who brings up non-western trans men whenever other westerners start talking about issues of transphobia and misogyny like we don't exist.

A lot of the time, the risks for us bringing it up ourselves is much greater than that of a fellow westerner. Or we may not even be invited to the table to be able to say anything. We genuinely do need others to speak for us.

They might call you 'obnoxious' or 'reaching' but in times like that please remember that we are not a rhetorical tool

Trans men in the global south are REAL PEOPLE. Bringing us up is never 'strawmanning' or 'missing the point' or any other stupid ass excuse because we are not an imaginary 'other'.

It is always a good idea to bring up global southern trans men. And DO NOT let them make you feel guilty about it