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In relation to the recent Indiana ban for transgender youth care, some thoughts that I think have a broader outlook as rebuttals of a commonly held trope that adolescents can't give medical consent to gender treatment.

Also consider this BBC article about a judge deciding under 16s might not be able to consent to gender care in the UK AFAIK this had been later overturned on appeal . As for one of the cases explored in the dishonest Reuters article debunked by Vaush it turns out one of the cases (the trans boy one) under Ontario laws where he lives, he had medical consent since he was 15. So Why is it different for transgender care specifically?

Here are my thoughts:

Adolescents presented as "technically kids" always gets my gears grinding, since it is dishonest to equate adolescents and children on so many levels. For example they might have medical consent which should be enough. They might drive in some places, and also they can have intimate relations to another adolescent. Toddlers can't do any of that. There are grades of consent that are legally and rationally different between adolescents and kids, so "technically a kid" is a far fetch, a dishonest prevarication, and just plain wrong on so many levels.

They just don't say that when kids of essentially the same age are allowed to get married and become "technically" parents. They don't say a word for actual infant mutilation in the cases of intersex genital normalization surgeries, nor circumcision. They did not get out of the way to ban breast enhancement in teenage cis girls. They just never fucking uttered "they are technically kids" in any of these equivalent cases.

And there is another underlying problem, that most advocates fail to bring up while they are distracted by bullshit like the "technically kids" fallacy. That in contrast to strictly sexual orientation and needs that start during and after puberty, gender identity is something that manifests way earlier, typically in early childhood. This is extensively documented before the 2020s craze with transgender condemnation.

Mind you, transphobes have dealt with and exploited this fact for a long time. It is not that they do not know it. They do, but they strategically suppress it all the same. There are at least two ways they know and leverage this fact: in separating trans people into genuine and fake, like with the "homosexual transexual" pseudoscience; and in developing and popularizing concepts of social contagion of transgender ideation in adolescent. Even though implicitly, both notions require that true transexuals manifest themselves during childhood, but none of the real trans people we hear about are true trans. This is in turn the True Scotsman fallacy.

Recently some group published an interactive, javascript based, website, to graphically explore data broker companies. This is just one group doing similar research work in different fields. I applaud the cause, but I take issue with the format.

An organization, that is, or group that frequently needs to provide structured data. In turn, developers might want said data, in order to deliver apps.

Interactive websites seem flaky to me, since no one guarantees they will still be there two years from now. I think it is only natural that groups doing important work would do a great service to communities if they served a RESTful or GraphQL API, depending on the complexity of the data.

But even in this case, when the group stops serving the API let alone be coerced to stop, or access to the API is blocked, this great service will be discontinued. Obviously the raw data must be shared for this to work.

Lately I was thinking about these edge cases. Journalists or activists doing this type of work may lack the sophistication to structure the data in useful ways. They probably do the journalist work and then have some developer they either hire, or is part of the group, make the important backend decisions, including structuring the raw data.

Regarding the retention of the data in case the group disbands or goes away, there are some existing solutions like torrenting or IPFSing the datasets. Both methods can help the data be online forever, but what about content integrity and versions? They would still need a static webpage or something to provide the hashes, and IPFS is by its design not very well suited for versioning.

There are no clean cut guidelines on how to go about this, or at least, what is a handful of good ways to go about this, so that a current or future group can rely on to deliver this type of work.

Another idea that popped into my head is that the ecosystems of repositories and package managers are very mature in all major distributions. Structured data could be uploaded to distro repositories (including FDroid and the like), just like any other software with underlying data structures. Hashing and versioning would be then natively taken care of by existing package managers. But the question still remains, what data structure is the best for this kind of relational data, and what kind of API should best be exposed to the user.

So, if you feel like it, I would like to hear your thoughts on:

1. Skills and preparations required by investigative teams to publish structured data to the world.
2. Assessment of the torrenting and IPFS solutions to ensure recovery of the data in perpetuity.
3. Assessment of the RESTful or GraphQL format to disseminate investigative data.
4. Assessment of using established package managers and repositories to disseminate investigative data.
5. Ideas on what should be eventually exposed to the user, who can be assumed to be a developer as well.
6. Further comments.

I would be glad to get some feedback on these thoughts.

I hope someone will find those helpful

Is this for real? I can't draw no other conclusion than US defaultism in trans activism gives a free pass to TERF politics in Europe. This kind of news from Germany cannot mean anything good.

According to Wikipedia:

In 2019, the German Language Association VDS (Verein Deutsche Sprache; not to be confused with the Association for the German Language Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, GfdS) launched a petition against the use of the gender star, saying it was a "destructive intrusion" into the German language and created "ridiculous linguistic structures". It was signed by over 100 writers and scholars.[11] Luise F. Pusch, a German feminist linguist, criticises the gender star as it still makes women the 'second choice' by the use of the feminine suffix.[12] In 2020, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache declared Gendersternchen to be one of the 10 German Words of the Year.[13]

In 2023, the state of Saxony banned the use of gender stars and gender gaps in schools and education, which marks students' use of the gender stars as incorrect.[14][15] In March 2024, Bavaria banned gender-neutral language in schools, universities and several other public authorities.[16][17] In April 2024, Hesse banned the use of gender neutral language, including gender stars, in administrative language.[18]

Here are the original Wikipedia references

11. "Der Aufruf und seine Erstunterzeichner". Verein Deutsche Sprache (in German). 6 March 2019. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
12. Schlüter, Nadja (22 April 2019). ""Das Gendersternchen ist nicht die richtige Lösung"". Jetzt.de (in German). Retrieved 5 April 2020. "GfdS Wort des Jahres" (in German). Retrieved 13 December 2020.
13. Jones, Sam; Willsher, Kim; Oltermann, Philip; Giuffrida, Angela (2023-11-04). "What's in a word? How less-gendered language is faring across Europe". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
14. "Schools in Saxony are forbidden to use gender language". cne.news. Retrieved 2024-04-05.

I got into this rabbit hole from this news article

News article in German

Archived

Due to the nature of my work, I have been in different places over the world, building websites for different causes, usually community projects with a tech angle. Most of the funding proposals I have laid my eyes on are rife with buzzwords.

Even when (either me or other devs) clean up proposals to get rid of all superfluous hype, I have noticed that middle management tends to puts those back in, or worse, they chastise us for taking them out in the first place. The argument they make is that the committees that will evaluate the proposal will need to see the buzzwords. Few things are as disheartening as seeing people having prepared a robust life cycle for a tech or outreach project, and middle management chiming in, to literally say "Great now we need to beef this up with as many buzzwords as possible".

I don't know if this is supposed to mean "we will fool them with the buzzwords" or "they are fools that only understand buzzwords". If anything, I believe that the buzzword salad would make us come down as less-than-credible windbags. I just think is wrong, and if this is happening at scale, then I think lots of funding goes to crap projects, that end up being an abandoned website somewhere on the internet, just to commemorate that this project was once funded.

What is your experience? What projects would you rather see be funded, be it community empowerment open-source tech or other domain?

I recently made a post about Shinigami Eyes and BlockParty and started thinking about activist tools.

The ones mentioned are of course merely mitigation tools, but speaking of activist tools more broadly, like some people suggest Signal and Tor Browser for activists, as a fine balance between security and a low technical bar for entrance.

I am not really sure that any of these differ substantially from Matrix and Firefox and why they are so special.

The ActivityPub protocol. the one Lemmy uses, is a mature protocol and people have put thought in various aspects of it.

Apart from Lemmy, there are ActivityPub applications that foster activist and IRL communication, like Framasoft's Mobilizon.

The main issue I would think of about ActivityPub instances for community organizing is the lack of specialized features for this type of work, like polling.

And the major issue of course is the pseudonymity/anonymity and completely open signups renders existing apps like Lemmy untenable for community activism organizing.

In your opinion, what would it take for an Activity Pub application to be a secure, efficient tool for community activism?

These archived versions might give you an idea.

• Archive.org - German
• Archive.org - Russian
• Archive.org - French
• Archive.org - Italian

To be honest, I don't know about the PDF versions you can find in Anna's Archive or similar archives/libraries. These methods had apparently been optimized for printed, pocket-sized books.

I consider these methods among those things that have not been necessarily superseded "just because" we have more advanced technology. They were very sophisticated for their time, marketed like many courses of this type to the busy working person, and at the same time were effective and entertaining.

We always had a couple of those books lying around the house (German and French). The annotations and explanations for native English speakers are superb, and the overall presentation of the volumes was of very high quality with minimal typos and errors. I only have found a couple omissions over some three hunded pages or sth which is virtually excellent.

With a good command of the English language that many possess, these books are accessible and effective in language learning, and if I don't omit some books, then you can teach yourself German, French, Italian, and Russian, using these methods. Let me add, they have accompanying cassette tapes (yes! Tapes!) which you can also find ripped in some online libraries.

The texts are tastefully chosen, they involve funny stories, anecdotes, proverbs. The culture and gender roles depicted in these books are dated of course, but it is like traveling back in time to simpler times, where you have to call the music teacher on their landline to tell them they forgot their umbrella, but you don't find him at home, so you have to leave a message to the housemaid, whatever. I look at these stories with a time traveler's curiosity. I do find this kind of thing enjoyable, but this might be a matter of taste.

There is no need to say that the grammar progression is gradual. and there is some opinionated, sublime structure you can vaguely discern, but well perhaps ...you shouldn't? The books make you feel you are in the good hands of some wiser people who have in store for you more and more tips on the language you are trying to learn, which is comforting and takes a load of your head. At some point you do have to pull up a notebook for some grammar stuff, but unless you are serious about learning the language you can as well skip this part and consult the self-contained appendices all the same.

Now there are several things that I think are quite special about this series.

Page numbers are transcribed in a simplified pronunciation system. Lessons are numbered too. Under the text you can find a phonetic transcription, which is not IPA but a custom system, that somehow makes sense to a speaker of English, for instance u with umlaut in German sounds like the last syllable of "view". This is not a novelty of course, but it is very well thought out how discretely it is placed on the page, that you can seamlessly ignore it for pages and pages over, without ever looking at it, but when you actually need it, it is consistently there.

Then, there are some footnotes, as well as some proper notes that are part of the subject matter. These are very thoughtful. Every time you wonder "what now?" about either a grammatical or a cultural thing, you will find the explanation right in the notes.

Everything is made to fit in pairs of pages (English on the left, Target language on the right), so you can look up translations both ways. Everything is discretely numbered so you can cross-reference everything: sentences, notes, lessons, appendices. (See note 7 in lesson 24). After the various stories and episodes that form the main lesson, there is one exercise (also numbered and phonetically transcribed) that delves deeper in grammar stuff and is more bland/repetitive, but usually relates to the main story. The hidden treat here is the comic. Yes, there is a comic strip next to the boring exercise always , so you are tempted to go right through the exercise to get the joke. Every now and then there are some revision chapters that are blocks of English text breaking down different grammar phenomena.

That is enough said about the design. Everything is designed and placed on the page with taste and sophistication that not all modern apps provide. The whole book fits in a pocket and is dense with compressed, promptly retrievable, information for a language learner.

Design issues aside there is the actual method. At first you just read the texts and the exercises. When you start to get better at it, you have to be able to translate the whole lesson and the exercise. At some point they ask you to get back to first lessons and try to reverse translate from target language to English. Later on they ask you to stop memorizing the main text, but you have to keep on memorizing the exercise and continue the reverse translating. Each lesson can take you up to 20 minutes tops.

Anyway, I don't know if this works for everybody or if it is demonstrably any better than other methods or apps, but I think it is very advanced for its era because every little thing seems to be very well thought out, and it is very smartly designed, so it has set some standards for me personally as to what a good piece of work should look like, be it on paper or on screen. The stories are enjoyable to me, and I reach out to these books as a pastime quite often, and I have picked up some German and French on the way. Now I have found the whole series in Anna's Archive and I am tempted to look into Russian and Italian too, but let me tell you, these books really shine in the printed book format for which they are designed. I tried to use them with a PDF viewer and they are not as easy to handle as the printed book. So if you happen across any of them in a thrift store or something give them a chance, they might become treasured items of your collection, especially if you are into languages.

Still bugs me how this level of detailed organization and proof-reading was even possible before computers, but it is really impressive!

Shinigami Eyes is an indispensable tool for trans people and allies alike, as it lets others know whether an account/username is transphobic or trans-supporting across several websites/social media.

I sometimes look up some new transphobe and they are not highlighted yet, so I suppose the popularity of the extension has dropped?

Shinigami Eyes is an important activist tool and we should not let it be forgotten. In my opinion it has been under-harnessed by journalists and other outlets, as it could - possibly - protect from spreading transphobic disinformation.

Let me take this opportunity to remind you of other important tools like Tweeter extension BlockParty, for example, which used to allow you to block en masse anyone who has liked or retweeted a particular tweet. Among other mass blocking options.

Here is an archive of this app's hiatus announcement , but this together with shinigami can be said to form the seed of a toolbox for safer experience online for trans, feminist, queer and other groups.

Don't forget Activity Pub itself, the protocol Lemmy uses, has this philosophy built-in, and it was designed with these people in mind that want to evade "unsolicited communication".

For an inclusive and activist open-source enthusiast community it is important that the Internet is equally safe for all people to use, and with the global developments we see, it is daily getting more and more important for tech-savvy activist communities to invent and foster similar technology tools.