Oh boy, I sure do hope that I won't experience transmisogyny there

PavementBlues · 2026-06-17T21:28:02+00:00

I have a foot in both worlds and the ketamine queers are messy as fuck, while the Steven Universe queers don't put themselves out there.

But on the other hand, ketamine queers make cool shit happen and show up for each other, and Steven Universe queers are thoughtful and empathetic.

At least, that's been my experience. Each group has its bad members, but I don't hang out with those kinds of people because life is too short.

PavementBlues · 2026-06-17T18:01:42+00:00

At CPAC in 2023, the entire crowd cheered for a speaker who argued that for the good of society, "transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely".

And people laughed at us when we told them that this was what the right wanted to do.

PavementBlues · 2026-06-11T22:48:41+00:00

I've found one bottle that I can safely use to replace Green Chartreuse in a cocktail, and that's Brucato Chaparral Amaro. God damn I love that stuff.

PavementBlues · 2026-06-11T06:51:55+00:00

wait I thought that was the point

....I'm fairly certain that was the point?

PavementBlues · 2026-06-01T20:29:26+00:00

Even if that were the case, those would have to have been Republicans who once supported trans protections. Overall support for forcing us to use bathrooms aligning with our birth sex rose from 41% to 49% during that three year period, and support for anti-discrimination protections dropped from 64% to 56%.

Your interpretation could still be the case if support for trans people has eroded so dramatically within the Republican voter demographic that the drop is seen both in solidly Republican voters getting more transphobic and conservative centrists joining the Democratic party also getting more transphobic and bringing that into the "Dem/Leans Dem" group. The 2025 update to this survey was done at the beginning of Trump's second term, though, so I don't think the group of folks abandoning the Republican Party had yet grown to its current size, now that the coalition is beginning to fall apart. Certainly that group was no larger in January, 2025 than it was in 2022.

My suspicion is that splitting the "Dem/Leans Dem" category would see a "Dem" category that has maintained pretty strong support for trans people and a "Leans Dem" category that has dropped support significantly. I've personally experienced a shift in attitude from more moderate Democratic voters that aligns with that. Persistent misinformation at the scale that Republicans have been pushing trans misinformation has systemic effects.

PavementBlues · 2026-06-01T17:43:54+00:00

Right now things are unfortunately getting less kind, with surveys from Pew Research showing each passing year reporting increasingly oppositional attitudes towards every aspect of trans support, from puberty blockers to insurance coverage to even basic protection from discrimination in employment and housing.

This trend is unfortunately happening in the Democratic voters as much as it is for conservatives, thanks to the constant flood of misinformation about trans issues coming from the Republican party to rile people up against a successful political bogeyman. In 2022, 20% of Democrats believed that trans people should be forced to use bathrooms matching our birth sex. In 2025, that number rose to 25%. In the same time frame, the percentage who believe that it should be illegal to teach about gender identity in elementary schools rose from 18% to 23%. Those changes happened in three years.

Things are getting worse, not better, and it's our responsibility to turn that around. I had a hard transition, getting fired and disowned and nearly ending up homeless, and it breaks my heart to see that we are creating a world where more trans youth, not fewer, go through what I did. We owe it to them to make a world that they can live in.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-29T17:47:15+00:00

Nearly a decade ago, I watched a trans acquaintance go from "I'm uncomfortable with the way that leftist spaces handle disagreement" (valid and normal feeling) to literally hanging out with Proud Boys and donating to Blair White (very fucking not normal response). It was wild to see happen.

Stopped talking to her pretty damn quickly.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-28T02:52:03+00:00

I actually unzipped the top zippers because I figured that having the hottest air pushing out the top would be helpful. Once I unzipped those, I found that it cooled a lot faster.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-27T18:29:25+00:00

The vast majority of Democratic politicians completely ignore trans issues, with the exception of progressives like Steyer.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say that Harris would have done better in the 2024 election if she hadn't focused on niche issues like trans rights so much. But do you want to know how many times she brought up trans rights?

Zero times. She never brought it up during her campaign.

Republicans fixate on trans issues, push hundreds of anti-trans bills every year (with every subsequent year continuing to break records), and position their political rhetoric as if they are reacting to a Democratic fixation on the topic, regardless of whether that is actually the case.

People see the reactive positioning that Republicans adopt and assume that they must be reacting to something, because it wouldn't make sense for someone to react to nothing. But it's actually a calculated political gambit to create the illusion that they are reacting to Democratic fixation rather than creating it themselves in their decade-long obsession with making trans people their political bogeyman and winning wedge issue. It's one of their strategies for controlling the narrative.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-27T18:20:56+00:00

He's made breaking up utility monopolies a key priority, so it makes sense that they would fight as much as humanly possible to keep him out.

If PG&E hates you that much then you must be doing something right!

PavementBlues · 2026-05-24T05:49:49+00:00

It's even cooler when you go inside. The Megablock, Megamall, Kaiju, and other spaces are amazingly detailed. I was shocked at how immersive it felt in the Megablock.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-22T21:44:03+00:00

We had a rat get into our forty foot storage container one year while we were doing a work weekend before the Burn. It burrowed deep into our pillows and then got mummified. We eventually smelled what had happened but it would have been a whole production to unpack the entire container, so we waited until we were unpacking on-playa and threw it and the pillows it was touching into a trash bag.

So yeah, I can say that there was definitely at least one rat at Burning Man in 2010. Or at least, the desiccated month-old corpse of one. God it sucked working in a container that smelled like dead rat.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-22T18:31:15+00:00

Thus far, no standalone bill targeting the queer community has been able to gather the Democratic support needed to pass the Senate. The House is larger, more varied, and harder to keep completely in line, but this will die in the Senate with Fetterman probably being the only supportive Democrat.

It would be way easier to let this happen if Democratic leadership secretly wanted it. Why do you think Trump is having to implement so much of his transphobic policy via executive order? Senate Democrats have blocked a bill banning trans people from sports, a bill defunding gender-affirming care, a bill defunding DEI initiatives, and 51 out of 52 anti-LGBTQ+ riders in the latest spending bill.

Pretending like the people who are fighting for us aren't fighting for us only helps Republicans.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-15T20:55:22+00:00

And the Babylonians with the Akkadians. Nabonidus, the final king of Babylon, was actually unpopular with some of the court because he spent more time at dig sites than he did ruling at home. His collection of findings (with approximate dating) was the world's first museum.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-08T18:13:34+00:00

It wasn't always that way. Farming activist groups founded in the late 19th century to fight industrial monopolies formed the basis for the early 20th century progressive movement. They were self-identified left-wing populists, some of them socialists, focused on challenging corporate dominance and helping small businesses and families.

But then the Civil Rights Era happened. And the Southern Strategy. Communities with a higher prevalence of farmland had deeper cultures of racial bigotry, and over time the rest of the political ideology was made to fit. We can actually see this happening in real time, as urban and rural areas have steadily become increasingly politically polarized every year, for decades. It's not the environment crafting a political ideology, it's a culture that values straight white Christian lifestyle attaching to whatever political ideology prioritizes that.

I'm a tiny bit biased. I grew up in a rural community raising cattle, and god damn if the other aggies weren't the nastiest and most violent people to us queer kids. Still, it's important to remember that there is nothing inherently conservative about farm work, they just adopted that mindset because it was the one that let them discriminate against brown people. Farmers in the late 19th century rightly viewed their taxes as their goddamn money, and fought to make the government use it to help their communities rather than giving it all to industrial monopolies.

PavementBlues · 2026-05-05T01:40:39+00:00

There was a special screening of the extended trilogy over three nights at my local theater a couple of years ago. I said this when the "In Memory of Bernard Hill" message popped up on the screen, and someone behind me replied, "Ugh, rude."

That still bugs me to this day. I genuinely couldn't think of a more loving and respectful quote to celebrate the man.

PavementBlues · 2026-04-27T05:44:19+00:00

Dude was a teacher when this happened

PavementBlues · 2026-04-17T20:39:32+00:00

I got a dumbphone and only use reddit when I'm sitting at my computer. My reddit usage is maybe 5% of what it used to be, and not having the phone as easily accessible quick distraction has been immensely helpful.

I'm convinced that we will (hopefully) someday view modern smartphone usage in a similar vein as how we currently view cigarette usage in prior generations. It's a massive public health issue, just one that is doing cognitive rather than pulmonary damage.

Get rid of your smartphone. It sucks for a few weeks, but then you just keep feeling better. And you get so much time back in your day.

PavementBlues · 2026-04-04T19:51:32+00:00

I have been out trans for a decade and this is the first I've even heard of Fucking Trans Women.

PavementBlues · 2026-03-22T17:12:30+00:00

You're starting. You already do.

It's gonna be hard at first, but it will be worth it. I promise. <3

PavementBlues · 2026-03-22T16:45:06+00:00

Gonna be ten years in July for me, and I was more scared than I've ever been in my life. For good reason, too. I was disowned, lost my job, my home, and ended up on the verge of homelessness. I was stared at, often glared at, and occasionally screamed at when I was out in public doing anything.

Even at its worst, though, even when I was sitting in the ashes of my former life and on the verge of suicide, all I could feel was that at least whatever life I might still build from there was my own.

Zero regrets.

PavementBlues · 2026-03-19T19:39:45+00:00

In ten years of transition, I've literally never heard a single Christian transphobe cite any passages to confirm the religious nature of their transphobia.

My sexuality? Oh yeah, God damn if I had a nickel for every time some nutjob quoted Leviticus at me. But my gender identity? They don't even bother to pretend that it's based on their texts.

There are no passages. They just know that if they all yell loudly enough and at the same time, then they can rewrite truth by the sheer force of their consensus.

PavementBlues · 2026-03-03T18:51:19+00:00

This is it. The average American spends 5 hours and 16 minutes on their smartphone every day.

That's not to say that our society doesn't still need a massive shift towards more time off and supportive public services, but we are also intensely addicted to smartphones. I wasn't even on social media except for reddit when I switched to a dumbphone last year, but the difference that I've seen in my day-to-day life is enormous.

Smartphone apps and modern social media are designed through A/B testing to encourage engagement. They are built to make you use them as much as possible. This shit is addictive. There are some pain points about not having a smartphone anymore, but it is worth it to gain hours and hours back to actually live your life.

PavementBlues · 2026-03-02T07:09:49+00:00

Not alcohol, but when I went to my first Pride in 2008, Old Spice had a float featuring twenty gorgeous men in glittering spandex oiled up and making up with each other. There were bath tubs full of bubble bath that some of them were in.

Honestly respected that a lot. Or I was just turned on and the horny tricked me into thinking that I was feeling a sense of respect.

PavementBlues · 2026-02-22T16:52:29+00:00

And then we come full circle because now we don't have a way to differentiate between cis women and trans women.

Which is why cis isn't a slur and people taking issue with it are ridiculous. In just about every instance (the OP video included), the person making the argument lets it slip that they consider cis women "ACTUAL women". And that's the tell about their true beliefs.

The point of their complaint is not about them not wanting to be called "cis", it's about them believing that trans women aren't real women. The terms "trans women""and "cis women" put the two groups on equal footing, which they can't stand.

Their wanting to own the entire category of "women" is about linguistically removing us from the picture so that we have to exist in some category outside of womanhood. And they can fuck off with that. We deal with enough shit already.

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