the heavenly ballet of the wonderplane

Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.

The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!

So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.

this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.

the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.

The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less rhetorical ground we cede to the degendering and misgendering of trans women.

- middle aged man who ordered matcha and then just Stood There and watched me make it. when i handed it to him he said i did a good job whisking it and handed me $1.25. ten minutes later when he and his wife left he shouted across the store that i have "good whisk technique" and "don't lose that!"

- woman who ordered a drink with the word "salty" in the name and then said "but with salted caramel." and when i said yeah that one comes with salted caramel she said "really? not just normal caramel?" and it took every ounce of my self control not to say yeah girl that's why it's called. Salty.

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight