I munch your popcorn. I munch it up.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

got a few requests for a shiny alt of my recent espeon drawing, here it is with the original under the cut :)

Three beasts, born under a rainbow wing

Happy pride! Feel free to use these as icons.

Reader, I have never considered that as the reason to ship something before.

This also made me go huh, because sometimes I write stuff where I think people assume it's a sexual interest of mine (there's another poll I think about whether sexual context is always appropriate to tag if there's an assumption it's a consensual romantic relationship context but that's for another time...)

So, for science:

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"

or the concept of a pride flag is considered to be inappropriate for 13 year olds.

happy pride 2026. here's a pride flag for when corporate interests of a site run by dogshit transphobes, handwringing pearlclutchers, and "powerless" "allies" tell you that pride and your gender is no one else's fucking business:

See the First-Ever Photos of Cozumel’s Mysterious Dwarf Fox

Many believed the tiny fox had gone extinct

Strange things happen to animals when they colonize islands. Some of them get larger, like the enormous rabbit Nuralagus rex of ancient Menorca, while others get smaller, like the dwarf fox of Cozumel. This mysterious species of gray fox is estimated to be only around 60 to 80 percent the size of its larger mainland brethren. Fossils indicate it first arrived on the Mexican island around 5,000 years ago, predating the arrival of humans...

no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?

no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.

no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.

the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.

when it's framed as a "so just get married for legality reasons" and im like. you mean like how gay people married/marry people of the opposite gender for legality reasons? and that's considered to be a symptom of a problem, not the solution? you want people to "just" get married against their will because it's the only solution this system has available?

if people cannot or will not get married for whatever reason -- not just for being aromantic, but, say, due to inefficient disability support measures within marriage, because of having had bad experiences with marriage in the past, because of being polyamorous, because some element of marriage is ineffective, unwanted, limited, discriminatory, or hell, because you can't find somebody to marry or nobody wants to marry you, or maybe because you just plain don't want to without there being a distinct Reason -- then it's a problem that this is the only framework in place for people to be afforded certain legal and social protections.

i am glad for others that more people can get married, but it's a flawed institution with gaping holes that isn't for everyone and builds social structures that leave so many people behind and unsupported. this is abundantly obvious in the way that we saw why people pushed for the need for equal marriage in the first place.

that's what's said when making a point that it's a social construct. and also what's meant (partially) when pushing against the idea that "love" as concept isn't at the core of queer (amongst others hinted at in this post) activism, because it's about building better structures. if the only people we care about are those we "love" within a family unit, or those who successfully manage to pretend that unit without actually really wanting it, and if not being in that unit for whatever reason means that care isn't going to be/is no longer afforded, then are we really doing any better than heteronormativity?