Talking Trans: Carrd Project

-

I've been working in a pride org at work to advocate for a better understanding of health benefits for trans people and more representative, humane language for trans people in general. I've been blessed to not have had to deal with much bullshit in my life, but nowhere have I dealt with as much bullshit than from: consultancy firms who ask for millions of dollars to misrepresent trans people's experiences and throw them under the bus for political convenience; HR demons who invoke those consultancy firms to speak over actual trans voices; and gay people who already got their bag and want to retire to drag brunch for ever and ever, amen.

I'm tired of this shit. I'm irritated that conservatives, liberals, and leftists alike willfully misunderstand our experiences. I'm angry that this 'misunderstanding' is the ideological foundation of how society mistreats trans people. Correcting the misunderstanding will not correct the mistreatment; rather, the misunderstanding emerges as a 'natural' rationale for the mistreatment. Still, what can you do? We at least deserve our own language to narrate our own experiences, rather than accepting language from on high which asserts an essential difference between us and others.

That's what I'm trying to gesture towards with Talking Trans. I'm not every voice, but at least I'm a voice and not an echo of the same ideological slop. Hopefully!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

-
Image
Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D —be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder , or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone. So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone. Fifth Edition: Born in 2014 Of course, nobody plays D&D as ...
Read more

OSR Rules Families

-
Image
So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not even a scientific research person. That’s my partner’s job. Not mine. So, instead of walking you through every single step I took, I’m going to take the journalistic approach and start with the big picture before I zoom into it and tell you about the little details. I read, reviewed, and statistically organized 38 different rulebooks considered to be OSR or OSR-adjacent. These include four rulebooks from TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons , as well as ten rulebooks from the 2000s and 2010s. The remaining 24 rulebooks postdate the closure of G+ in early 2019. Please refer to the bibliography at the bottom of this post for more information. After having collected and organized a dataset with ~90 variables, I found the statistical similarity between each pair of rulebooks based on that data. Finally, I ran an algorithm to determine clusters of these bo...
Read more

Bite-Sized Dungeons

-
Image
Workbook Now Available On Itch! Bite-Sized Dungeons by Traverse Fantasy Edit: This whole time, I said that a first level dungeon hoard had 100 times d6 gold pieces when it actually has just 10 times d6. This means the average hoard has an XP value of 70 without gems, or ~110 with gems. By extension, the eighteen-room dungeon only has 350 XP without gems, or ~550 XP with gems. That is downright dismal and I don’t think works out with modern play sessions and party counts, so let’s pretend it said 100 times d6 anyway. I just read an article by Yora of Spriggan’s Den about extrapolating a scheme for an eighteen-room dungeon from the procedural generation rules in B/X (1981) [1]. As Yora points out, eighteen rooms is a great size for a mid-to-large dungeon or for a floor of a multi-level dungeon, and the checklist of rooms makes it easy to make sure that the final product has a variety of interesting play interactions. But, being as large as it is, it can still be a tall order on the ...
Read more