Witch Way is Left

we are not just backsliding, we are back at the milquetoast assertation "love is love." for the record: when people ask us why we need pride this is literally fucking why. when other queer people ask me if we really need all the rainbow shit, this is why. when we make a fuss about so many shows not having any positive queer rep: this is why.

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!

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"

This is the miniature @wildgingerofnyc is talking about. The manuscript (containing Evrart de Conty's Problèmes d'Aristote, as they said) was created in Paris, c. 1400.

Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Ms. El. f. 81, fol. 2r.

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!

that's right

- Mavis (from the book The Sorrows of Satan, 1895)

- Pamela (from the book The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, late 16th century, but popularized by the 1740 novel Pamela)

- Imogen (from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, c. 1611. possibly a typesetting error on the earlier name Innogen)

- Enola (from the book Enola, or Her Fatal Mistake, 1886)

- Vanessa (from the poem Cadenus and Vanessa, 1812)

- Cedric (from the book Ivanhoe, 1819. transposition of letters from the earlier Saxon name Cerdic)

- Dorian (from the book The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891. similar masculine names had previously existed, like Dorus, Doros, and Dorios, but Wilde is believed to have coined this specific usage)

– Cora (from the book The Last of the Mohicans, 1826.)

– Lorna (from the book Lorna Doone, 1869.)

– Miranda (from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, c. 1610-11.)

Oh this is perfection, meet world famous detective - Beignet Blanc

Late edit.... Actually, I stand corrected

Kimberlé Crenshaw was the Black feminist scholar who coined the term "intersectionality." You can read her initial article coining and describing the theory "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989), her follow-up article expanding on it "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" (1991), and a (shorter and easier to read) interview with her about what she meant and what she thinks about it "Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later" (2017).

Adrienne Rich was the lesbian feminist scholar and poet who coined the term "compulsory heterosexuality" in her article "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).

Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who coined the term "death of the author" in his essay "La mort de l'auteur" (The Death of the Author") (1967). This one is 6 pages long.