Notices by Christine Burns MBE 🏳️‍⚧️📚⧖ (christineburns@mastodon.green)

Gendered Intelligence, a longstanding charity that supports trans and non-binary youngsters, is recruiting for a Director of Services. Please share the attached description around your networks.

Until the last few days six precious recordings of the First International Symposium on Gender Identity, held in London in July 1969, were archived and made available by USC dot EDU. The URL now returns a 404 error because of the purge. Fortunately I downloaded and kept copies when researching Trans Britain in 2017. Now seeing if a UK archive will take them.

@Lazarou It was all smoke and mirrors, aided immeasurably by Hollywood creating myths. Turns out Russia's supposed military might was a myth too. If you believed the stories crack teams of government assassins would have seen off the jokers threatening to take over America before they'd even got close. Every film portraying the US president as smart and wise: make believe. Mission Impossible: pretend. Jack Ryan: pretend. Name your hero: pretend. All bumbling amateurs.

With one of a new wave of budget-priced EVs just launched in Ireland it's interesting to see how this Irish correspondents takes to it. At around €19k the Hyundai Inster isn't the cheapest EV (that crown is currently held by the Dacia Spring) but it looks like people may well take to it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gKoGiLoedm0&si=1qBEmH618JSASqYd

@quixoticgeek @drewbob @eedly Gee thanks! I've been hunting for that for years. ° !

In 1933 Hitler's forces invaded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the leading centre of research on trans and gay people at that time) and burned all of the books and records (after taking care to note down the details of all the patients to round up later). Philosophically this is what the US CDC is now doing by purging everything to do with trans people.

It amazes me how so many supposedly expert political commentators act surprised that Trump's first ten days have panned out like this. It doesn't say much for their expertise.

@ChrisMayLA6 What the fancy schools teach, above all, is how to sound right and perform a simulation of authority. And, unfortunately, a lot of people fall for it, especially when peppered with a bit of Latin.

@goatsarah You could say that for features right across the iOS platform. Every major release I now expect stuff to be less reliable than before.

If anyone has noticed an improvement in the spelling and punctuation of my posts lately it's because I turned off all of Apple's correction and autocomplete features.

@goatsarah That would seem like a way to get your arm ripped out.

Overton window spotted hiding behind a bush...

Seven years ago this week i was busy signing preorder copies of the launch edition hardback of my book Trans Britain, destined for people whose pledges financed the entire production. As we enter the eighth year I'm tickled to bits that new readers are still coming along, bookshops still carry stock, and my publisher still keeps printing new stocks to spread the word.

Well! After years of trying to unearth the details I've finally found the parish birth record for my paternal great great grandfather James Byrne, born 20th August 1828 in Myshall, Co. Carlow Ireland (not Wicklow as I'd previously assumed). The next shock was to find he had been sent to prison for a month in 1848 for 'Hiding in a Haycock' (the precursor to a haystack). Why that was imprisonable isn't clear but the chap sentenced before him was stealing potatoes (this being the great famine)...

...Two years after being released, James married my g-g-grandmother Mary and then six years after that they resurface in Deptford, SE London having their first child (another James) in 1856 (my great grandfather). Interestingly, father and mother married again in 1857 in a London church. Whether they'd lost the record of their Irish marriage or it simply wasn't accepted i guess there was some need to make the marriage official for the baby's sake. They then had another five children.

These new details reopen the question of whether I would have enough heritage for an Irish passport. If great grandfather James had been born six years sooner in Ireland it would certainly be the case. Anyway this is the thing with family research: you never know when you'll find something new. I first started researching fifteen years ago and it's taken till now to narrow the date of James and Mary's emigration to England to just six years. Next: Can i find their date of passage?

@ChrisMayLA6 In a country where coupledom really doesn’t require marriage or civil partnership I’m not sure this claim can be reliably stood up. Yes, we know that the birth rate has declined (thank god) but to see that as a problem feeds a certain far right agenda. To associate it with an alleged decline in measurable coupledom (I.e. conventional hetero marriage) just dives in to the right’s obsession with ‘traditional families’ — an obsession really about the ‘right’ people reproducing

If you’re shocked by the thought of the US talking openly about subverting and overturning European liberal democracies spare a though for countries in Central and Southern America and (at various times) a large proportion of everything east of the baltics. It’s one of the prime missions of the CIA, even though we tend to know because of the times they’ve been crap at it. To only be insensed because they’re doing it to people like us points to some wilful blindness over the last 80 years.

Whilst folks are talking about the supersized distortion of Greenland by the Mercator projection it’s a good moment to point out that the size of the British Isles is also exaggerated. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-countries/

At £46 billion (far over budget) Hinkley Point C is reckoned to be the most expensive project of its kind ever constructed. Britain just can’t do infrastructure can it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI&si=VTebV9YmNi85faAn