This weekend’s open thread is hosted a camouflaged otter, via I Can Has Cheezburger.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
I got to four Shakespeare performances over the summer, and was waiting for the last with the plan of putting up a combined review on my blog. Of course what’s happened instead is weeks of nothing going up because the task had got unwieldy. I’m still planning to put them up one by one, so As You Like It is there now. I wanted to get Much Ado About Nothing up today, but I can’t seem to find any spare time.
Yeah, I’ve not found time for many things this last week. My neck has found time to play up on me again though, although at least it managed to behave itself moderately well last night when we went to see Lady Sings It Better – it was good to be able to introduce the family to the harmonic satirical experience.
Blech. The lurgy that’s been hinting at its arrival since Wednesday swept in with a vengeance this morning – I’m the whole package of aches, sniffles, coughs, wheezes and febrility. Do Not Want.
The family are watching season 4 of My Little Pony, and the fanservice in episodes 10 & 11 is quite amazing. The show’s creators have taken names and pony personalities and occupations from fannon before, but this is really gratuitous (and in one or two places really not appropriate and sexistly horrifying to boot, but in a way that I hope goes over much of the audience’s heads. Alas, I have discovered that much of Brony fandom is vile and lowest common denominator crap. So disheartening, over a show that could be such a positive for promoting femaleness in many forms).
Aphie: Ohyes. The grossness of a lot of bronydom was pretty thoroughly demonstrated back during the “Derpy Hooves” clusterfuck. Blecch.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/13/transgender-facebook-expands-gender-options
Facebook has generally disappointed me lately, with its crappy advertising and privacy settings and allowance of horrible groups and pages etc, but I’m impressed at their new settings that allows for people of all genders to be included and referred to in the way they prefer.
I’m curious why 10 of the 50 or so options are different ways of saying cisgender. Maybe because I have never had to give it much thought before.
I’m not seeing the new gender options on my account yet. I presume they are rolling it out in stages.
Enjoying this weekend’s rain immensely. Even with the 4yo’s cabin fever and the 5wo’s cloth nappies! Somehow my psyche needs a good fortnight of solid downpours. (As does the state.)
TT I can’t see them but if you use the custom radio button and type in cis the options appear.
Clear skies here, this morning. But it’s cool! I guess Autumn is finally starting to arrive (a little early?)
Theremin fun to be had. I’ve been practising the theme from Dr Who. Beach Boys are next.
The expanded gender options are only available if you switch language settings to US English – localisation to countries with particularly gendered pronouns may take some time.
I blogged a little about it, seeing as for me the option allows me to explicitly state my gender; while many trans women of my acquaintance are happy with the binary defaults, I’m aware of a few trans* people who aren’t happy with 56 options to play with as their particular self-description has been overlooked.
Declaring gender diversity on social media
Mindy, multiple identities (since definitions don’t tend to always capture the complexity of our lives) are actually a nice option to have since up to ten custom options can be selected and saved and that many should be enough for anyone; so I’d be comfortable with someone claiming one of the cisgender identities as well as gender questioning, thus being an examplar of someone who might be regarded as ‘normally cis’ but also might have some claim to being under the gender diverse umbrella; I suppose it might also be possible for someone to have a cis and a trans identity because of their being gender fluid.
The transsexual separatist movement, which would like to pretend that they’re entirely normal and that it’s all those queer gender diverse folks who are perverts, seems to have gone quiet in regards to the change; they would not see trans visibility as being a good thing for a more open and inclusive society.
Thanks Xanthe.
So apparently this is an actual play. Probably NSFW.
HOT TIP FOR ASPIRING PLAYWRIGHTS: Never describe your asshole as a tunnel of despair filled with ghosts.
Mindy has a point. Not all the people who helped formed the P.M.’s policies are dead yet, so “ghosts” is not totally accurate.
It sounds like a very Catholic description of anal sex actually, where the ghosts are from all the babies you never conceived because you are having anal sex…
BTW, WordPress seems to have suddenly decided that nearly all commentors need to be moderated without any of the configuration options having been changed. Not quite sure what’s going on there, but apologies in advance for any delays in various Hoyden moderators dealing with backlogs in the moderation queue.
Great post http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-long-history-of-transgender-exclusion-from-feminism
So this morning I saw an apparition on King St Newtown after seeing the dentist, but I don’t think it was anaesthetic induced. A not all that young fellow was strolling along in tight short shorts and long socks, tank top with braces and a black beanie wearing a possibly fake moustache, holding a (brand-new) toilet brush out in front of him as if it was an Olympic torch, and the toilet brush had about 20cm of silver curling ribbon dangling down from the handle. Some sort of Mardi Gras newbie hazing ritual, or just another Newtown-being-Newtown moment?
I recently started playing with haiku writers on wordpress. The prompt for this particular haiku was the Medicine Buddha. Amongst a whole list of things he is good for, he also can help a woman reincarnate as male. No. 8 on the list. I responded appropriately. … woman insists on self, as the end line. So far so good. I got on my high horse and told the host of the blog that I shall stop following these prompts as I was really offended. One of the writers followed my blog. I investigated what this new follower was about and was more or less ‘attacked’ with overly sexual images of females. I wrote a subsequent poem of why I seldom post purely feminist topics because one gets trolled, stalked and blasted. I just haven’t the same courage as people on this site.
On Women’s Day in South Africa, a worker of the garden service told me to go into my house and let the men (not) work. I reported him to his supervisor who then told me the same thing! Things just haven’t let up from there and am now tired and disheartened.
Hooray for a couple of days of 20C weather! I’m able to wear my new knitwear at last (indoors, since the door’s open at work). Just finished my new cable beret after a marathon effort last night.
Watching the winter Olympics lately, I’m reminded of the thread about the summer Olympics and the difference between what the male and female athletes wore. Apart from the ice skating and ice dancing, where you would expect there to still be a great deal of difference in clothing between the male and female athletes, to my eyes, the rest looked actually quite similar and equal. It has been refreshing.
Good point Arcadia. I guess that there are practicalities of sports involving ice and snow that preclude skimpy clothing. Thank goodness.
Mindy @ 7 – being slightly cynical, the more precise the information that you give Facebook, the more valuable it is to them for the data analysis. So its certainly in their interest to allow you to be very detailed if it doesn’t cost them much in overhead.
And now I’m kind of curious as to how it ends up affecting the ads that you get shown.