Notices by Tattie (tattie@eldritch.cafe)

Kinda galling talking to my brother and realising he's already written his own son off due to his gender.

"Yeah, he's just destructive, he can't help it. That's just how boys are. You know, because of the testosterone."

"He's four years old. His body hasn't started producing testosterone yet."

"No, I'm pretty sure boys always have testosterone, throughout childhood. You can see it in the way they act."

As far as I can tell, this absolute lie was popularised by a popular book called "raising boys", which claims that boys have a "testosterone spike" when they're four years old.

The paragraph in question says "one scientist has claimed that", followed by admitting that this is "controversial" (that is to say, unsupported by any evidence whatsoever).

But it's really convenient to the argument made by the book, of implicit behavioural differences of girls and boys, and so the author lets the conjecture stand with a wink and a shrug.

People seem to really want to believe this right now, and in a large part I think this is part of a pushback on trans rights. People are clinging to biological essentialism because the presence of people blithely switching from one sex to another Makes Them Uncomfy. They want to keep their boys and girls in very definite boxes, so said kids don't get ideas.

The other part is of course the antifeminism sweeping society. Presented with the evidence of all the shit that men are responsible for, we seem to have just given up on the entire gender. "Boys will be boys"— testosterone fates half the world to just Being Bad People so we just have to accept that.

Of course, these are not independent factors. They're very much linked.

And fuck the demonisation of a sex hormone anyway!

I've said it before: testosterone might make you hairy, horny, hungry, and hot, but it does not make you violent. It does not make you destructive. It does not make you anti-empathetic. Those are choices; gender behavioural norms that boys and then men are encouraged by social pressure to conform to, and may reject if they have the strength and the support to do so.

The fact that "testosterone made him do it" is being projected onto a four year old boy is proof of how ridiculous the demonisation of a simple sex hormone has become. The lie is taking on a life of its own, free from any sort of scientific rationality.

Biological essentialism of gender is a complete load of balls, if you'll excuse me for that. 😅

First Christmas decoration up, and I feel a heaviness. I feel grief.

Celebrations are never the same after profound loss. There's a wistfulness to them, a strange mix of loneliness and presence. She is here, always, and she is gone, forever.

She'd be putting up decorations, she'd be writing cards. She'd have her presents all bought, and the turkey ordered. Such busyness, such worldliness, offsetting my more spiritual, romantic nature.

Even before widowhood Christmas was more complicated for me, more about human persistence, and quiet gratefulness. A light in the darkness of winter, a feast to keep the spirits up. Joy did not come easy.

And yet grief is a strange sort of joy. What was, once, is, always.

She'd be dragging me away from my reflections, telling me to come help her with something. She was always one more for distractions than contemplation.

Christmas has begun. I hope it brings comfort to all those who celebrate it.

@hellomiakoda mind you, we are community animals, and we shouldn't all have to have all the skills for survival.

Befriend a geek today.

I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.

The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.

So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.

What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?

Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.

And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.

I can be so fucking stupid, it turns out.

Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.

It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.

We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.

I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.

It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.

It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.

Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?

I think about that a lot.

LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.

When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.

@astronomerritt forgive me

Let's talk Blåhaj

Some say that a mass-produced product from a multinational corporation shouldn't be the de facto mascot of the international #transgender community.

I say that it's precisely because it's a mass-produced product from a multinational corporation that xe is the de facto mascot of the international transgender community.

Look, there isn't even a lesbian bar in Scotland, let alone a space set aside for trans people specifically. There's sporadic meetups and events and projects and demos, but does that a community make? Where do I go to be trans?

The internet.

Reddit. Fedi. Bluesky. Tumblr. Discord.

The internet has always been freedom to me, a place to find my fellow weirdos, as I engage unwillingly with the physical world, trying to project as best I can a mask of cisheteronormative acceptability. Or latterly, a mask of "acceptable, nonthreatening, friendly trans woman".

The physical world was not shaped with me in mind. But the internet? The internet is where trans can happen. Transformations, transgressions, transferences, transcendences. Translocality, trans :flag_transgender: 🫡 nationality.

The internet is criticised rightly for privileging white, English-speaking, middle-class US voices. It is Americanised, but not American. Because hiding behind ambiguous usernames and profile pics are a huge multiplicity of identities, backgrounds, dialects, and experiences.

In contrast to this diversity, Blåhaj is homogeneity. A hyperreal representation of a shark, produced to exacting and unvarying Swedish standards how many times a day? Distributed to how many stores, in how many countries?

Blåhaj is legion, and xe is singular.

The same shark in the same white crates in the same maze-like blue and yellow store, in multiple cities of multiple countries. Where not locally available, trans people make pilgrimages to neighbouring countries, or have a more privileged internet friend .tgz and ship a Blåhaj buddy to be unpackaged on the other end. Or we construct our own bespoke Blåhaj from carefully measured and transmitted patterns.