LGBTQ+

Midway through Benedict Nguyễn’s propulsive trans volleyball novel, Hot Girls with Balls, Six, one of the book’s two heroines, struggles with mounting nerves as she prepares to play an important match. She is less worried about the actual gameplay than she is about the performance of her public persona, which she knows will be screencapped, shared and dissected by fans and haters alike: “For what sports arena was not also a theatre?”

Six and Green are the larger-than-life protagonists of Nguyễn’s dizzying satire. The two are both “very hot” Asian American trans women who play in a fictional men’s global volleyball league; they work tirelessly, not just in their volleyball training sessions, but also to curate and maintain their social media star status. Six and Green, who are also very publicly dating each other, are as canny and self-aware as they are hot—they know that their athletic careers depend just as much on their ability to bring in brand deals by amassing more and more followers, as on their prowess on the volleyball court. Hot Girls with Balls brims with charisma, envy, sabotage and taut, taut muscles. You don’t have to be a sports fan to be utterly compelled by Nguyễn’s vision—and to become just as obsessed with Six and Green as their fictional followers are.

Nguyễn’s knack for recreating the chaotic, hate-it-but-can’t-look-away nature of online discourse makes this, her debut novel, a text in perpetual motion. She is an athlete herself—a dancer and self-professed gym buff—and writes as deftly about the stresses, training regimens and team choreography of competitive sports as she does about the micro-details of being trans in the public eye. Hot Girls with Balls is an expertly structured text, its central narrative arc intercut and propelled by scrolls of livestream and forum comments from Six’s and Green’s supporters and enemies. Reading it is a dizzying experience, as overwhelming as scrolling through a constantly updating online comment section, while straining to follow the various polarized arguments that are being thrown around. Six and Green have taken the sports world by storm, showing volleyball fans that the game “wasn’t just balls but endless unspoken feeling filtering back and forth across the net.” Nguyễn crafts a text that mimics this emotional back-and-forth—the novel darts between the perspectives of our two star players as they train for a major tournament; curate their online personas; publicly manage their romantic relationship; navigate brand deals, media appearances, blatant transphobia, obsessive adulation and the pitfalls of solidarity and visibility discourse.

Reform councillor’s boast about removing ‘trans-ideological’ books from children’s library sections falls flat

A boast by a Reform UK councillor that he ensured the removal of “trans-ideological material and books” from the children’s section of his county’s libraries has fallen flat after it emerged that no such material ever existed there.

One of the most telling things about queer history is that so much of it has to be gleaned by reading between the lines.

There are the obvious tentpoles: the activism, the politics, the names and accomplishments of key cultural heroes. Without the stories of lived experience behind them, however, these things are mere information; to connect with these facts on a personal level requires relatable everyday detail — and for most of our past, such things could only be discussed in secret.

In recent decades, thanks to increased societal acceptance, there’s been a new sense of academic “legitimacy” bestowed upon the scholarship of queer history, and much has been illuminated that was once kept in the dark. The once-repressed expressions of our queer ancestors now allow us to see our reflections staring back at us through the centuries, and connect us to them in a way that feels personal.

One of the most effective formats for building that connection, naturally enough, is documentary filmmaking — an assertion illustrated by two new docs, each focused on figures whose lives are intertwined with the evolution of modern trans culture.

Viewer discretion is advised, both companies are subject to calls for a queercott, and HBO/Max is engaging in wizardry.

A Pride parade held at an IKEA is going viral on TikTok. [...] The video, posted by user kenyavargas98, has gotten over a million likes so far. It shows people pushing small floats through an IKEA store while others cheered and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” plays.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) vetoed three anti-LGBTQ+ provisions in the state’s latest budget bill yesterday, in a partial victory for civil rights that still leaves several assaults on LGBTQ+ identity signed into law.

Over the past year, we’ve completely rebuilt the Namesake app. It has a new design, more accessible forms, improved security, and is now open source. This new app builds a foundation for us to support name changes in many more locations and for different types of activities. You can sign up today.

Esther Fallick wants her comedy to be an escape from the horrors. But that escape has a purpose: to make it easier to face these times for what they are. By poking fun at something that can feel so heavy, like the president pitting his administration against transgender people, Fallick wants to find ways to bring people together and laugh off the darkness creeping in on everyday life.

“We could be having a little more fun as a community, as a country. I just feel like so much of what we’re talking about as trans people right now is so dire. There’s reason for that, but I just wanted a space to be intentionally silly,” she said. Intentions aside, she still spent the first episode of her podcast — aptly titled, “Having Fun” — joking about fleeing anti-trans violence in America with fellow comedian Ella Yurman. The gallows humor is inescapable.

Her weekly variety show in Brooklyn, titled “While We’re Here,” is also a dark joke: We’re only here, alive and on this planet, for so long. And life is only getting harder. So what should we do in the meantime? Fallick suggests laughter, to start, followed by music, reading and teach-ins on topics ranging from transmisogyny — how trans women are hurt by both misogyny and transphobia — to demilitarizing New York City’s police force, especially in Brooklyn.

• Russian courts have issued over 100 convictions for “extremism” for participating in the “International LGBT Movement” or displaying its alleged symbols.
• Russian authorities weaponize and misuse the justice system as a tool in their draconian crusade to enforce “traditional values” and marginalize and censor LGBT people.
• Russia’s international interlocutors should call on the Kremlin to end its persecution of LGBT people and their supporters; governments should provide safe haven and meaningful protection to those fleeing Russia for fear of prosecution.

A longtime music teacher at a Catholic school in the New Orleans area recently lost his job when it was revealed to an evidently “disgruntled” parent that he was another man’s widower, igniting a scandal within an archdiocese that has otherwise largely been occupied with trying to reorganize its finances in federal bankruptcy court after its clergymen spent decades sexually molesting children.

In an email to community members at the archdiocese-run school from which he was dismissed, Mark Richards explained that he had been fired because a parent notified officials about an obituary for his husband, who died of a heart attack in September 2023.

Richards’ email alluded to how his employment contract at St Francis Xavier school in Metairie, Louisiana, contained a morality clause prohibiting educators from “contracting a marriage in violation of the rules of the Catholic church” and “actively engaging in homosexual activity”, along with other conduct that the document maintains is inconsistent with the teachings of the religion that does not recognize same-sex matrimony.

In the 1990s, a small cir­cle of inter­sex peo­ple came to know one anoth­er. They met face-to-face and con­nect­ed over the inter­net (then a nov­el­ty). As they shared life expe­ri­ences, med­ical records, and per­spec­tives on the injuries and neglect they endured, a con­sen­sus quick­ly arose. They found shared strug­gles, caused not sole­ly by wide­spread igno­rance of ordi­nary human vari­ance in repro­duc­tive devel­op­ment, but also by the ways they were known over.

At worst, this know­ing over meant surg­eries and oth­er treat­ments car­ried out with lit­tle regard for their con­sent, then usu­al­ly con­cealed from them. Med­ical jar­gon and vague euphemism had been lay­ered along with scar tis­sue. The truth of their treat­ments was left impos­si­ble for inter­sex peo­ple to reach indi­vid­u­al­ly — but was eas­i­ly recog­nised when they gath­ered. Then, they could intu­itive­ly grasp the shared wound­ing and neglect that pre­vi­ous­ly iso­lat­ed inter­sex peo­ple (that had caused them to know them­selves only as med­ical freaks — best off cor­rect­ed and hid­den away — and not as their own cat­e­go­ry of human, who might under­stand themselves).

Inter­sex advo­cates first focused on dia­logue, both inter­nal and exter­nal, by rais­ing con­scious­ness at small com­mu­ni­ty meet­ings and on pur­pose-made web forums and devel­op­ing con­nec­tions with allies in fem­i­nist schol­ar­ship and the LGBTQ+ move­ment. Inter­sex advo­ca­cy of this era had an unmis­tak­able imprint of both the fem­i­nist and les­bian and gay move­ments. Inter­sex peo­ple drew slo­gans, strate­gies, insights, and approach­es from ear­li­er twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry coun­ter­cul­ture – and merg­ing with the pre­vail­ing provoca­tive style of ​’90s queer campaigners.

After just three years of under­ground con­scious­ness-rais­ing organ­i­sa­tion, inter­sex advo­ca­cy took to the streets (first in Boston in 1996, then quick­ly world­wide). Their first protest fea­tured signs read­ing ​“SILENCE = DEATH”. Just two inter­sex demon­stra­tors were flanked by trans­sex­u­als, hold­ing a flam­boy­ant pick­et to con­front doc­tors with ​“feed­back” from those who they’d harmed. From 1996 to today, advo­cates began con­fronting the pro­fes­sion­als respon­si­ble for the harms done to inter­sex chil­dren, with the hope that future gen­er­a­tions could be spared the devel­op­men­tal injuries that so many in the move­ment had endured.

How to Disappear Completely - by Lilly Ryan
Linux.Conf.Au (2019)
https://lca2019.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/250/

i'm late to post this..!
there are techniques known since 2019 about disabling surveillance cameras, i wanna remind everyone so here's a post

takeaway:

1. disrupting the camera itself
   1.a) wearing reflexes around your head
   1.b) shining blinding lights into the cameras

2. disrupting the gen AI calculations
   2.a) shining small infra-red lights onto your face, which makes you appear as someone else completely
   2.b) having really avant garde bangs (wigs exist) and wearing facial jewellery in straight lines (make-up glue)
   2.c) wearing face patterns all over your clothing
   2.d) wearing pins which make the AI hallucinate once processing the pin's image

3. disrupting the recognition of personhood
   3.a) goggles or glasses to cover eyes & nose region of face, where the most data points are.

let me know if i missed something or you happen to know more tricks-
i'm also curious about setting up a personal "try-out if your outfit disrupting AI surveillance" station for those near me, let me know if you've done anything like it before because i and others will gladly learn!

A group of Democratic senators and Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller are hosting a Pride celebration at the Kennedy Center Monday evening. But the Kennedy Center has nothing to do with programming it.

For the past nine years, the transgender flag was included among those that flew around the Stonewall National Monument in Christopher Park during Pride Month. However, the National Park Service(NPS) will no longer be displaying the Transgender Pride flag or the Progress Pride flag, stating a change of protocol as the reason.