The appropriate response to older people trying to pass on the problems of the world to the young, implying that it's your job to save the world now, is to remind them that they are in fact still alive

seen a surprising number of cis women's toilet selfies in my life. never seen anyone else do that. what gives

When God sends me to hell I hope there are statistics for my crimes. I hope he goes down the list saying things like "wow you're the fourth person to have done this ever. Last time someone did this specific one was in 1754. Pretty crazy"

Strict class attendance policies post-covid are ridiculous. The students want their little points because they want a beautiful GPA to get into med school or whatever, and unless they're dying they're not going to get a doctor's note, they're just going to tough it out in class and wander around the halls coughing and sniffling. Even if I wear a mask, none of the students will, so the class is becoming a pool of disease, and eventually I do get sick unless I become a 100% masker (and even back when I was doing that I've gotten unlucky several times), and then I have to sit around shivering and dying in my bed not getting much work done, and have a lingering disgusting cough for weeks, because some professor wanted to enforce discipline, penalizing self-isolation unless the student jumps through a hoop that wastes doctor's time and that they'd sooner not do anyway.

Seems really incomplete to frame restriction on children's ability to affirm their gender through the lens of parental domination when in fact many children in the United States cannot pursue gender affirming care despite their parents' consent. The state is not intervening on behalf of the parents, but in the name of a cloud of semiconsistent views of biological normativity: children will be doomed to unhappiness because transition is a kind of harm, regardless of whether it's a harm to be trans is to be bad, we can't let children do anything permanent because they might regret it, etc. etc. Certainly parents' rights get invoked, and the only reason this invocation is effective is because parents' rights are ordinarily overvalued. But they aren't the real justification or we would find that transition care is easy to access for any trans child with supportive parents. It's only the parents with the correct attitudes who get to exercise these rights, which means that it's not about rights but about a comprehensive view about what kind of life is good for a child to enter into.

I think I'm becoming convinced that the centrality of the monogamous romantic couple in culture is ideological. At the same time I think "best friends who love each other to the point of deep commitment and have an erotic relationship and sometimes kids together" is a really natural and also good human relationship to appreciate

looking forward to getting my articles published and watching people in my field jump me and tear me down -- you might say that soon pdfs will be the new tumblr

A lot of my students write in their assignments that some view is "more grounded," "more realistic," "more intuitive;" things like that. I have no idea what they're talking about and they don't explain what they mean. What are you saying...