Julchen In Red

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

"An article can’t change the world, and the world feels pretty bleak at the moment. Besides, you know what’s going on: you’re taking in the news (or as much of it as you can handle at a time), and you know that it sucks and it’s sucked for a while now and it probably will suck for a while still. You don’t need someone you don’t even know to tell you that. So instead, I offer this letter against the current moment, in hope of providing some words that help, or at least make you feel less alone.

I’m writing to you as a trans person who’s seen a lot in my relatively short time on this earth. I came out⁠ to everyone in my life in 2010, a little bit after my 18th birthday, and before many people had heard of the transgender⁠ “issue.” In secret and in private, I had been trans and online for a long time before that, haunting forums and poky little bespoke websites, sharing with a few very trusted friends, and knew absolutely no other trans people IRL."

1. Find your people. First off, we don’t have to go it alone.

When I was struggling to know who to trust and where to be myself, I found I had three categories of people in my life:

People I was honest with but who didn’t have enough information to harm me, such as people online who I was a girl with, but who didn’t know my name or where I lived

People I lied to so they couldn’t out or harm me, which were most of the people I knew IRL

People I was honest with and trusted them to look after me, like a best friend or a blood relative who’s a steadfast ally⁠.

Having these groups in mind helped me to make immediate decisions about where I could share information and still be safe, like how I was able to be myself online as long as I was using a different name and not sharing anything identifiable. Your people could look like friends IRL, or on Scarleteen, Discord or somewhere else online, it might be family members, the relatives of a friend you know, fellow gamers, or a pen pal.

2. Find the safe places to be yourself in. While the increasing reach of fascists can make it harder to feel safe to be ourselves in public, they can’t take away our ability to know who we are and to be that self in private. This might be in your own home, whether around trusted friends and family or in private; it could be online, talking to friends or strangers (like in the community spaces here). Maybe it’s playing a game as a character that feels closer to how you want to be, or in a written form, like in a diary or private blog. Whatever it is, having an outlet to be yourself can make the times you aren’t able to be just a bit easier to bear.

3. Find trusted information networks. Trans people have always found ways of sharing information, even in the most restrictive and risky circumstances, because there is a truth in us that will always be there. This information has been hard to access in the past—from paper copies of zines or letters, from the occasional medical publication, and by word of mouth.

If you haven’t come across a trusted source before, you’re in luck: you’re reading one right now! I really recommend looking up zines and other publications by and for trans people, which are more accessible than ever online. Some favourite topics of mine include comprehensive hormones information, sexy sex ed, trans dating and blogs or personal essays about why being trans is cool and hot.

4. Look to those who’ve come before. At my darkest moments, when it all feels at its most hopeless, I always turn to our histories. Despite everything, trans people have existed for as long as humans have (which is a really bloody long time).

I really encourage you to read things about and by the trans people that came before us, and in particular to people who lived and loved and fought in the same part of the country or world as you. If you can find copies, try Susan Stryker’s Transgender History, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors, and Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans, and round it out with the beautiful I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom—if you’re taken with any of them in particular, hit the reference list and keep reading!

Read Liz's full letter here: A Letter to the Teen Who Can't Transition Yet

All Star but it’s in a minor key so it makes you question life and realize the years start comin and they don’t stop comin

aka, the theme song to Shrek 9: Shrek’s Third Divorce

Levi's said yes, actually. Assless chaps and a biker vest. Happy Pride.

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"

The implication of removing the space is that being trans isn't just one way a woman can be, like being tall or being brunette, but that women who are trans require a whole other noun.

No, not everyone who doesn't use the space is your enemy. Some might not speak English as their first language, and their native tongue might write words together. And that's all.

and i just want to know what you all think the point of this post is, if not to warn you not to use this dogwhistle, nicely, because you might not know.

I'm aware not everyone knows. that's why it works as a dogwhistle. and why I wrote a post. to let ppl know.

and it was written politely!

I learned about this dogwhistle from a similar tumblr post 12 years ago and since I've noticed this convention popping up weirdly frequently recently, I wanted to give people a heads up like what I got.

so you would know.

because I'm not assuming malice, because this post is addressed to my own political allies, people I'm assuming will WANT to know the dogwhistle is there.

people who will WANT to stop unknowingly using this convention yourselves, and notice it from others, so that it loses some of its ability to function as a dogwhistle.

I know theres been some worry about being on a "list", but like. We already are. There are other easier ways to find out who is trans, and the things you can do with a GRC can't all be easily reversed even if the GRA is scrapped. It's certainly going to be harder to change your legal gender in most other places, if it comes to that.

I really would not put it off as it does take a fair bit of time. It will take 22 weeks to get a response (better get your evidence right the first time!). It's only £6, if you want your chosen name on your birth certificate you must change it beforehand, and if you are in a marriage or civil partnership and your partner does not agree, you will have to get divorced.

Remember changing your name is free, do not enroll your deed poll.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.