"But I could be more efficient" killed me & my friends too many times.

The first post sounds normal. Like yeah of course trans people don’t transition for fetish purposes. That’s a harmful lie.

The second post comes in. “Actually these poor women are pretending to be men because they want to escape misogyny, because they don’t want to be lesbians, and these men are pretending to be women because they want to be ‘the victim and get clout’, and it proves bioessentialism actually”

And then a little call for compassion at the end to throw off the skim-readers

And then the transphobe pats themselves on the back when people agree with the first post because of COURSE that means you agree with the second post.

The inevitable reaction from some quarters to such complaints is to tell women to stop being delicate flowers – or for feminists to stop painting women as delicate flowers. And of course some women aren’t bothered by the leering and macho posturing. But women who do avoid these spaces are not being irrational, because there are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces. Like transit environments, then, gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.

The good news is that this kind of male bias can be designed out and some of the data collection has already been done. In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly’. But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks. And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data.

What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space. But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed. They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities. Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in. Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz-Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances. And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in. These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased. And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.

The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration. The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti. The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities. It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10-20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. And again, rather than shrugging their shoulders and thinking there was something wrong with the girls for not wanting to use such spaces, officials turned instead to data collection.

In 2010, before they began work on their next regeneration project (converting a car park to a leisure area) city officials asked the girls what they wanted. The resulting area is well lit and, like the Viennese parks, split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels. Since then, Christian Resebo, the official from Malmö’s traffic department who was involved in the project, tells me, ‘Two more spaces have been developed with the intention of specifically targeting girls and younger women.’

This rage against "vote blue" in leftist spaces often feels like watching people get upset that someone said "drinking plenty of water is important"

"UM EXCUSE ME, ANYONE WHO SAYS YOU ONLY NEED TO DRINK WATER TO SURVIVE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU! YOU ALSO NEED TO EAT ACTUAL FOOD" 

This is mostly a repost of a Pillowfort comment I made a few days back, and I want to be able to refer to this easily.

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This change might be hard to track unless you're looking for it, but Bluesky recently changed its TOS to allow users to orchestrate harassment campaigns, as long as they're orchestrated on a non-Bluesky website. This change explicitly allows people like Jesse Singal to join Bluesky, tell users to look at his Twitter, and then those users can come back to Bluesky and harass people for being libs / trans / furries / whatever his favorite target is today. Users have been clamoring for mods and owners to ban him, but they started making waffle jokes together instead.

techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/waffles-eat-bluesky/

Bluesky's TOS largely refers to its Community Standards for rules about what it allows users to post. In one of the earliest web.archive.org snapshots of the Community Standards, you'll find this sentence about reporting off-site behavior that the team can consider when processing reports about someone's behavior that breaks the rules. Harassment based on gender, gender identity, sexuality, etc., is explicitly against bsky's rules (supposedly). 

web.archive.org/web/20240206174249/https://bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines

No such sentence, paragraph, or section exists in the new Community Guidelines that go into effect next week. There is no longer any consideration for a user's behavior when they're posting bsky material to other websites, nor consideration for the user's behavior on other websites in general.

bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines

The concern about this topic becomes obvious when you hear that Jesse Singal joined Bluesky and that the mods and owners of Bluesky have declined to ban him. One of Jesse Singal's favorite hobbies is screenshot queer bsky users to encourage his followers to harass them.

bsky.app/profile/hazelcakes.bsky.social/post/3lczt2idiq224

This is, of course, when he's not harassing them himself.

juliaserano.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-jesse-singal-story_11.html

And all of this is, of course, not counting all of the things Singal has done to violate bsky's rules and guidelines around harassment, like evading blocks.

bsky.app/profile/rvbdrm.com/post/3lcy4td5kos2n

Block evasion used to be in the Community Standards, too! This is in the 'labels' section, but bsky's rules have been notoriously poorly-organized and composed.

bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines-deprecated

You won't find any mention of block evasion in next week's Community Standards either. I guess they're really doubling down on the "well you can just use another instance" for every problem they don't feel like addressing.

All the "we refuse to vote until Democrats run a more progressive candidate in November, that will SURELY make them nominate more progressive" people out there

How's going?