Names are hard

The most jarring thing was, the apes are completely unable to learn grammar, and would say things like "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you" (actual quote by Nim Chimpsky), which their handlers would interpret as a sentence, when in reality the apes are simply mimicking signs in hopes of getting a reward. Those hearing handlers would see things like "Nim eat" and "eat Nim" and intepret those as equally meaning "Nim wants to eat".

More damning, the lack of understanding of ASL by the hearing scientists meant that most of what Koko and Nim Chimpsky "spoke" was purely the scientists just seeing what they wanted to see. A Deaf person was brought in to interact with Nim, and they were instructed to not give him any food until he signed "food". They spent hours with an increasingly distressed chimp who did not sign anything, but Nim's hearing handlers would see him move his hand close to his mouth and go "oh! there it is! he signed it!", and while they spent the whole day signing, they didnt see Nim signing back.

With Koko, her handler would claim Koko would sometimes mix up signs like "need/knee", "I/eye", "people/nipple" because they "sound alike/rhyme" but... they don't. Those words rhyme in spoken English. They don't rhyme at all in ASL. Koko wouldn't know those words rhymed in english because she DIDN'T speak english, she "spoke" modified ASL. Of course, as the scientists did not speak ASL either, they didn't realize it, and just assumed random movements Koko meant were signs, and tried to think what she "could have meant instead" by thinking of what words sounded like the ones equivalent to what she had just "signed", even though an ASL speaker would not make a mistake like that.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that almost all of what those apes signed was due to direct prompting from scientists, the fact that they did not use language when alone, or the fact that most of what they answered was complete gibberish (which resulted in videos like Koko's climate address (yes, really) having to be heavily edited and cut to make it seem like she was actually speaking anything that made sense).

One really nasty side effect of this was like. The amount of hearing people who decided to try learning ASL and other sign languages because of the vague possibility of being able to communicate with apes, instead of, you know, the ACTUAL possibility of communicating with and appreciating Deaf people. (one person even said that Koko inspired them to learn ASL so they could communicate with their deaf friend, like... why the fuck did your FRIEND not inspire you to learn ASL??? did you really have to wait for a fucking gorilla failing to learn sign language to think "hmm, maybe talking to my friend would be nice!"??????)

Additionally, while I'm not a scientist of any kind, based on what I've seen on posts about this and in the video, while non-human animals like apes and dogs or cats or lizards even can learn to associate specific sounds with an action or item—like your dog knowing when you say outside or walk they get to go outside or on a walk, or that ball means you have a ball to throw for them, or that lady on tiktok who trained her bearded dragon to follow simple commands—they can't actually comprehend language or communicate with it, so I don't know that baby sign would have really helped.

Unlike human babies, who around two understand their native language fairly well internally even if they struggle with communicating their own needs and thoughts, apes fundamentally can't fully understand and utilize human language. A two year old deaf human using baby sign has a better understanding of their native language than an ape literally ever could of english or any other language. If you actually taught the apes and monkeys baby sign, and they could sign it with their very limited (afaik much more limited than even a two y/o human would be), and left them to their devices...they would only use the signs when they're interacting with humans to get something they want like food or a toy. There's never been any documented private speech, nor attempts for one gorilla to talk to another in sign, or the ape/monkey ever starting a conversation with a human without being prompted, and that shows they haven't learned anything other than the hand motions that make the humans give them what they want. That's it. A more coherent form of sign wouldn't magically make them able to hold a conversation, because the signs being bullshit isn't the reason the apes can't use language, it's just because they can't.

(Legit if you actually watch the head scientist at the Gorilla Foundation when she was talking to Koko, she legit had to ask Koko questions dozens of times before Koko responded in a way that made even a little sense and most of the time the scientist just gave up and made a joke about it. It's extremely obvious when you watch that Koko knew basically nothing and her handlers were making everything up.)

There's also a reason the Gorilla Foundation never hired any deaf workers. The Nim project did, but from what I've heard the Foundation was deeply opposed to hiring deaf people fluent in ASL, likely because they knew those people, like the ones in the Nim study, would instantly be able to tell that this is all bullshit and call them on it/go to the news. Abled folks with no background in sign, however, would have no way of knowing what they were being told was wrong.

So, Koko probably knew her name at the very least, and recognized words/signs for food, but she, like most non-human animals, could not actually understand or utilize language in the way a human can. We don't know why exactly, but overall there is something different about humans that lets us use language in a way no other animals can. And while some will debate this, language is far more complex than just word association.

I do reccomend the video, at the end the essayist says that it's silly to think animals need our language to communicate with us, because we've always been able to communicate without it. Your dog can't say the word outside or walk, but you and your dog both know what your dog wants when it sits by the door or sniffs at the leash hanging in the entryway. I can't explain to my cat that she needs to let me clean out her ear so she chills out about it, which sucks, but after a while she realized it feels better clean and now will "fake" scratch her ears in front of me and my fiancé to signal that she wants us to help her not be itchy. We've always found ways of communicating with animals that never involve them learning to speak a human language. I don't need my cat to be able to say she loves me because after being in the hospital for 2 weeks she wouldn't leave my side for days. And she knows I love her because I take care of her, buy her toys, play with her, cuddle with her, make sure her food and water bowls stay clean and full, all that. Neither of us needs to say it.

I remember the fight for mixed gender sports, but now we’re fighting for trans people’s rights to be included in gendered sports. The only justification for gendered sports that exists is Those Men Will Crush Our Weak Little Women. It’s sexist. Segregation is always a means of oppression.

Both of which, if youll note, are species that we race in non-sexgender-segregated sports. There's not one derby for boy horses and another one for girl ones.

The majority of the dimorphism that we *see* is social and cultural. Women are discouraged from sports from a much earlier age than men. Women who are naturally tall and muscular may choose not to pursue body building because of social pressures for women to be small and dainty. Women who have broad shoulders, double jointed ankles and webbed toes (the things that make Michael Phelps such a good swimmer) may never touch a swimming pool in their life because of similar stigma surrounding women's bodies that men are not subject to.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

"because of The Curse?"

1. tweet by miguel @/itshemiii:

i'd abuse the fuck out of the bat signal like mr. wayne they're overcharging me for this sandwich. kill them

2. tweet by yaz @/yaznotyasss:

mr softee charging $10 for a cone. help @/NYCMayor

3. tweet:

A young man in NYC shared a video on TikTok at the start of his day tagging Mamdani about a pothole and by the end of the day, it was fixed

attached to the tweet is the presumed tiktok of a person looking at the camera with a slightly furrowed brow and the caption, “Naw wtf 😂”.

4. tweet by Brian Allen @/allenanalysis:

NEW: New Yorkers have started a trend of tagging Mayor Zohran Mamdani to report problems around the city and the fixes are happening so quickly that the videos are going viral.

A dangerous playground hazard was repaired after a resident wrote a letter. A pothole was filled the same day it was posted online. And ahead of this week's heat wave, the city installed temporary water fountains in Prospect Park.

The message from City Hall: no problem is too small to fix.

I came from reading your "I am not a vessel for your good intent" in the context of disabled people post, and I'm trying to understand what are some examples of what this would look like in real life. If you're comfortable explaining it to me, I'd really appreciate it! No worries if not, though.

Also, your blog is very fun :D hope you have a lovely day and are staying cool, wherever you are!

Aw thank you, and I don't mind explaining. I think the best way I ever heard it described was as the difference between help and "halp" where say I ask an abled person to bring me a bag of potato chips because my POTs is acting up and they bring me a bag of carrots because it's "healthier". Help would be what I asked for, potato chips because they're salty and filling and thus can help alleviate my POTs symptoms and prevent me from say, throwing up and fainting, and halp is what the abled person decided was the best option and not at all what I asked for, as carrots, while tasty, have no salt and are not filling, and will not do anything for my POTs.

Abled people do this kind of thing a lot, unfortunately, because many of them deep down assume they know better than disabled people, as disabled people are essentially children and thus cannot be trusted to know what's good for them. What matters to the abled person isn't actually helping the disabled person, what matters is the abled person feeling like they did something good. They often, as a result, get very upset if the disabled person explains that they haven't helped at all because they meant to help and that means what they did was helpful even if it actually wasn't. Thus the disabled person becomes an empty vessel to hold an abled person's good intentions.

It can also manifest in abled people offering help without ever asking the disabled person if they want help. There's a reason many wheelchair users will buy spikes for our chair's handles, so abled people can't push us without our permission as our permission is often seen as 100% optional or at least secondary to what an abled person thinks they should do "for" us. Nevermind that being pushed suddenly can hurt you, break your chair, legally counts as abduction and assault, and is scary because there's often not much you can do to stop them, that doesn't matter. What matters is them wanting to help. Or say I was working on opening a door with my hands in my chair, something I am perfectly capable of doing all by myself, and an abled person ran up and yanked the door out of my hands, potentially hurting me, and held it open in a way where I couldn't actually get through, like standing in the doorway and expecting me to go under their arm when I literally can't, when I straight up did not ask for nor desired help.

I would also argue the fact that many ambulatory wheelchair users and folks with invisible disabilities will be harassed by abled people who think we're abled fakers when we aren't, enacting ableist violence against a real disabled person in the name of imaginary disabled people who apparently need the abled person to protect them, is another example of this mentality. It doesn't matter that disabled people say again and again and AGAIN that fake-claiming does far more harm than good and almost always involves a disabled person being hurt, mentally or in the worst cases physically, and if abled people actually want to help us they could just fucking leave us alone, what matters is an abled person's intentions and their desire to feel like they did a good thing. The disabled person basically doesn't factor in at all. It's not actually about us. We are vessels for good intentions.

I guess for one last example it could be say, me asking that everyone mask at a get together, and someone doesn't wear one because they got vaccinated recently and have a HEPA filter set up so think they don't actually need it. But they do, there are illnesses you can't get a vaccine against, many that have weeks long incubation periods where a person has no idea if they're sick or not but are contagious, and crucially, that is not what I said I needed them to do.

Time and time again, if the abled person thinks they know what a disabled person needs they will enact it without the disabled person's input because it's not about what the disabled person needs. It's about what the abled person thinks we need and their "good" intentions. Our personhood, needs, and autonomy are all secondary to an abled person getting to force their good intentions upon us, which again is driven home by how abled folks often get extremely upset and offended when we point out that they did not do something good and in fact did something cruel and disrespectful. That's what I meant.

If you are getting gender affirming surgery, especially if it’s your first major surgery, PLEASE be aware that you can become SEVERELY depressed afterwards ESPECIALLY if you have a history of depression or suicidal ideation.

Post op depression is a natural reaction to the crazy mix of hormones your body goes through after major surgery as well as the stress and anxiety of recovery. Think of it like an adrenaline crash, but dragged out longer.

For me it kicked in about 6 weeks after top surgery and the worst of it lasted until about 10 weeks post op. EVERYTHING felt IMPOSSIBLE. None of the skills I’d been practicing worked. I thought everything was going to be bad forever. I didn’t attempt, but I was in the hospital. If it wasn’t for my support system I probably would have attempted.

This is not regret, but it can feel like it. I remain happy about my results to this day (going on six years later).

This is not you failing to maintain your mental health, but it can make you feel like a failure.

Things are not hopeless, but through the haze of this depression they can feel hopeless.

It can be terrifyingly sudden or it can sneak up on you. I didn’t even realize what was going on until after the depression finally passed and my mental health went back to normal.

I am writing this post because nobody told me about this before my top surgery. I was caught completely off guard. For my subsequent surgeries being aware has made all the difference. Being able to treat those symptoms as an expected and normal part of the healing journey has made them far easier to deal with. Because even when my emotions go to dark places I *know* they will pass. I have been able to tell the bad thoughts to take a bad seat and focus on healing.