Tattie

Edinburgh-based root system of starchy tubers posing as a trans woman. Trans liberation, autistic pride. :autism: :heart_transgender: 🥔 :heart_lesbian: 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I write things on Medium! Click #TattieWrites for a list of my articles on being trans and other thoughts.

#woman #trans #sapphic #lesbian #plural #witch #feminist #ActuallyAutistic #ptsd #widow #Scotland #Edinburgh

See pinned posts for introduction and image descriptions

Age: mid forties
Pronouns: she/her
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

Public Key

npub1qyr35n05fgvc30kk4xjg5lf7hnyflkskfy9tpgwzfhn9j34hh46qdhrefj

NIP-05 Address

tattie_at_eldritch.cafe@momostr.pink

Profile Code

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1qyr35n05fgvc30kk4xjg5lf7hnyflkskfy9tpgwzfhn9j34hh46qdhrefj

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Published at

2026-04-21T17:51:38Z

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Last Notes

2026-04-05 18:47:23 UTC

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oh yeah, I remember Mastodon. Wonder what happened to it?

2026-03-27 10:29:27 UTC

Cis people sometimes demand #trans people rigourously define what "gender" means and explain what drives us to embody a gender other than the one assigned to us at birth. If we can't do that, they say, how can they believe us?
But trans people shouldn't have to be philosophers and psychologists all wrapped up into one to have our experiences believed. 1/

2026-03-19 11:55:11 UTC

Just one trans woman's opinion, but I hold that the ideal way to recover from accidentally misgendering a person and being called out is to *simply repeat the sentence, corrected*. No apologies (or just a quick "sorry" or "pardon" if it flows), no justifications. It happens. We get it. Nobody's looking to shame anyone, only correct a mistake before it perpetuates.
A: "And then he told me that he wanted to..."
B: "They"
A: "And then they told me that they wanted to meet me at this coffee shop..."

2026-03-17 10:06:24 UTC

Folks in #Edinburgh and #Scotland more generally, who are passionate about #MentalHealth and the arts:
The wonderful *Out of Sight, Out of Mind* exhibition needs your help!
https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-mental-health-art-exhibition
A good friend of mine both exhibits and helps run the project, and it's fantastic. The work it does to destigmatize mental health issues is so important, but many of its sources of funding are drying up. Can you spare a little money to keep the project going?

2026-03-14 12:06:40 UTC

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"I love gender euphoria so much," I remember an early transitioner writing, "but I fear it will go away. Does it go away?"
And it's like... it's like the feeling of taking a nice long drink of water. It feels different when you haven't drunk in half an hour versus a whole day. But it's always the same essential feeling. A feeling of rightness.

2026-03-14 12:00:37 UTC

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*No, wait*
I catch myself, and sit there a little longer. That was #GenderEuphoria. I remember the sense of unbelievable joy and relief that moved me to tears when I first felt it. (Painted nails on my fingertips as I worked from home).
When did it change into this everyday thing? This feeling that I have to actively stop myself taking for granted?

2026-03-14 11:55:43 UTC

Getting dressed, I lift my skirt to pull on my Doc Marten boots, and then pause for a second— just a second— to appreciate the scene.
Long, flowery black skirt lifted to above the knee. Translucent black tights stretched across a rather nice pair of long legs. Stompy black leather boots embroidered with red roses.
I notice a felt sense, like a sort of lifting within my abdomen accompanied by a purr of contentment, and move on.

2026-03-13 17:59:39 UTC

New music service, tell me what you think: a *guaranteed advert free* playlist of around an hour of a particular artist's works, carefully curated and mixed *by the artist themself*. It gets better: *pay one flat fee* up-front for unlimited replays, even when offline!
...you've probably spotted that I'm just describing albums, but it increasingly sounds like a really good deal, doesn't it?

2026-02-28 10:27:02 UTC

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as usual, it's UK vs US English
@npub1gsa…q4wj

2026-02-28 10:03:51 UTC

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I think if I were to point to a moment where things truly shifted, it would be over two decades ago— the Stop The War protests, and Blair's ignoring of them.
That solidified what I had been seeing for all of my voting life: that Labour were authoritarian, war-hungry centrists beholden to the forces of capitalism.
Of course, a certain Jeremy Corbyn was at those protests on the side of the people, and Labour did have an opportunity to reclaim its soul many years later. When Corbyn was ousted and ejected from the party I think that was truly the end of any starry-eyed hopes of a left-wing Labour re-emerging from the history books.

2026-02-28 09:35:30 UTC

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the politics I'm being promised by the Green Party have *never belonged* to Labour as long as I've been alive. Sure, I read in history books how they used to be, but that's *history*, not reality. I have always associated genuinely progressive and socialist politics with the Green party. (With watered-down versions being promised by the Lib Dems and SNP).
No vote in my lifetime have I ever considered a "protest vote" against Labour because I never even seriously considered voting *for* Labour in the first place.

2026-02-28 09:23:58 UTC

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I am now above the median age in this country. And voters tend to skew older, but not *that* old. I'm probably just about a median age voter.
*I have never witnessed a left-wing Labour government in the UK*

2026-02-28 09:18:14 UTC

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I strongly disagree with the last paragraph. The implication seems to be that voters are voting Green with the hope that Labour will return to being the left-leaning party they remember it being in the seventies.
But. Like.
I wasn't even *alive* in the seventies.

2026-02-03 19:05:43 UTC

Zeph being utterly adorable
#CatsOfMastodon
https://eldritchcafe.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/008/242/724/756/086/original/bfed5e4d886c81c7.jpg

2026-02-03 00:34:09 UTC

Going thru my late wife's things, I found the documents from that time she wasn't allowed to take a promotion because she was "business critical" in the position she was in and understandably became severely depressed but the doctor found her "fit to work" and then her work threatened to fire her and I am *filled with rage* for the *contempt* with which the fucking establishment treats a fat woman from a working-class background.
I hate them.
She was never the same again.
They tore down the love of my life, for no reason but their petty greed and bigotry.
I wish I could say she got the sweetest revenge upon them by thriving despite them, but she did not. She died in servitude to these cunts.
I hate the world we live in.
I hate patriarchy, and British class snobbishness, and fatphobia.
I fucking burn with the injustice of it.

2026-01-27 19:20:06 UTC

"Man" who insists back in 2009 on a wedding announcement that eschews all gendered language such as "son", "daughter", "husband" or "wife" in favour of just using names— justifying said choice with a fair amount of hand-waving about feminism.

2026-01-26 22:31:26 UTC

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and because they've been convincing themselves that this is all being done "for" white women who "need protecting".
The fact that said women have refused to be grateful, but stood up to them instead and shown them the middle finger, is taking away their main justification.
@npub1hpk…88gd

2026-01-21 16:32:05 UTC

Note: unlike some previous threads recently this one is not solely targeted on the experience of whiteness, but about how white people treat people of colour. I invite anyone to engage with it but I ask white folks to be self-aware and able to take critique. That includes me, lol! 😅
Ok so I've been reading and processing articles on race recently. One of the things that's come up a lot is the Enlightenment fetishization of "rationality", the rational mind. This was identified with white European thinking and contrasted to supposedly "primitive" cultures which are supposedly more emotional and given to magical thinking.
At the same time it was identified with adulthood. Rationality was something desirable to acquire as you grow up, leaving emotionality and *feeling* in childhood. Stiff upper lip, and that. 1/

2026-01-17 12:26:06 UTC

I only noticed quite recently that there's a magic word that you can put at the beginning of Fedi comments that will significantly reduce the number of silly disagreements you have here. Noticing this, and using the word intentionally, has made my experiences so much calmer.
The word is "yes".
Or "yep", or "so true", or "I agree", or "absolutely", or any other affirmative. The point is, you are making clear that you hear and agree with the parent post/comment, you just want to add a little more to it.

2026-01-16 17:32:03 UTC

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I would so not trust myself to run a public blocklist, lol, I'm petty, I'm touchy, and I know it.

2026-01-16 17:18:50 UTC

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blocklist drama seems to happen from a place of "it's not enough that *I* blocked the Bad Person, everyone else must, too".
It's so toxic.

2026-01-16 17:09:53 UTC

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erm I was with you til this point. 😅 Being blocklisted seems to be only the start of the harassment in many cases, it has seemed to me. 🫤

2026-01-15 15:56:26 UTC

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Kid: "damn, the world is magic"
After a few years of studying science: "no, the world works by simple, explainable laws"
After a few more years: "damn, the world is magic"

2026-01-10 12:18:50 UTC

AI hype isn't so much about technology; it's a way of communicating within the oligopoly that they intend to drop product quality in concert.
It's the same as how they used to collaborate to keep prices artificially high-- only now consumers have no money left, they're chasing a profit margin by reducing production costs and therefore product quality. The stuff AI produces is objectively bad and unmaintainable, and it's not that businesses don't see that, it's more that they've decided that producing this level of output is a good business strategy.
Consumer choice has been an illusion for a long time. We can't take our money elsewhere because everywhere we might go is in on the conspiracy. (By which I simply mean "people conspiring". This isn't a conspiracy of dark smoke-filled rooms, but a bland one of coded language and tacit agreements). And this swing was happening well before AI became its favoured tool-- when was the last time you bought a piece of technology that Just Worked?
AI is terrible in its own terms, yes. But it would have been just a stupid novelty had it not happened to coincide with the spiraling end stage of capitalism.

2026-01-01 23:15:50 UTC

Not only is your personality not defined by the stars in the sky when you were born, your personality is not even *fixed*.
I've done the Myers-Briggs test multiple times in my life, and over the course of my life I've gone from INTJ to INFJ to ENFJ.
People *change*. There are no fixed fates, no fixed "types". You are what you say you are, and that's not necessarily what you have been.

2025-12-26 13:44:03 UTC

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my favourite of that genre is "être humain" in French. The verb to be + human = human being. 🎉

2025-12-16 13:34:55 UTC

The single biggest thing we can all do to fight injustice is to heal our hearts of the suspicion of the Other. To stop being scared of those who suffer from oppressions that we don't, or resentful of those who escape oppressions we suffer from.
Pitting us against each other is how the monsters stay on top. (They who have made monsters of themselves.) But walk around town and you will see that the basic human attitude we default to is "live and let live", despite all the poison our media and our politicians can muster. If the people chose overnight to follow that principle in their politics as well as their everyday actions, there would be a global bloodless revolution, and a better world.

2025-12-12 23:05:29 UTC

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I feel this. I post here "as a non-passing trans woman..." and people jump to my selfies and say "no you totally pass" but like there's a reason people react to me the way they do irl. I'm just *big* in all dimensions, and my voice is resonant. At least these days I tend to be interpreted as female, but that's very different from passing.

2025-12-11 18:33:47 UTC

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oh yeah, "thank, don't apologise" has been a life-changing tip for me, and something I still have to remind myself.

2025-12-03 12:35:29 UTC

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Me: ok, so, you're selling me glasses that have a narrow band of good distance at the top, a narrow band of good reading at the bottom, and kinda just shit everywhere else
Varifocal sellers: well I wouldn't say 'band'
Me: uh. Whu... you're saying the sides are another thing entirely? What are the sides like?
VS: we recommend you don't use the sides

2025-12-03 12:26:32 UTC

Varifocal sellers: so right at the top of the lens we'll put your distance prescription, and at the bottom your reading prescription.
Me: ok, cool, so what about the middle?
VS: well it'll be a gentle gradient from one to the other, neither one thing not the other
Me: so what would that be good for?
VS: well, it'll kinda be not *great* for anything, but not unbearably bad either
Me: ...
VS: just wear them for like a week and you'll get accustomed to it, I promise!

2025-12-01 00:28:09 UTC

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questions such as: "are Brits in fact a massive bunch of racists?". And answers such as: "yes".

2025-11-30 15:39:37 UTC

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I *assume* mine is clear enough but idk

2025-11-29 21:01:45 UTC

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can we make an LSD milkshake?

2025-11-27 14:41:02 UTC

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on the other hand, the fact that people look at work like Klein's and feel repulsion is significant. I've always felt that deep repulsion for this sort of art, and while I've grown out of naive rationalisations for that feeling such as sneering that "a four year old could've done that", the feeling remains.
And I think I have to interrogate that feeling. A big surface layer seems to be that I feel *laughed at*, like the artist has made something that isn't art but is being passed off as it thru erudite language and social pressure.
Deeper. *Why* doesn't it feel like art? What do I see in art which seems to have been *removed* here? A human connection, a *liveness*. What jumps up for me is a video of a baby in a "still face" experiment, promised human warmth and given emptiness in its place. That's the nature of my disquiet.
But disquiet is hard to sit with, so we throw it back into the external. I blame Klein. I *hate* Klein.
(And it's true, he's at the top of the short list of artists I *actively hate*)
Maybe that means he's "produced an emotional reaction", thus justifying his work as art. I don't know, I'm not an art theorist. At the very least, understanding my reaction without either justifying or rejecting it seems to lead me somewhere more useful-- a greater appreciation for the sense of liveness and humanity in what *does* feel, to me, like art.

2025-11-22 18:35:31 UTC

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no nachos for Nazis

2025-11-22 11:00:48 UTC

The male loneliness epidemic: firstly it's real, and secondly we know the fix. The fix is men reaching out and talking to other men.
The problem persists when men keep trying *literally anything other than this*.

2025-11-13 11:17:05 UTC

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I've noticed a weird attitude to Finnster like he's public property somehow. It goes beyond parasocial into deeply disturbing territory.
@npub1fg0…cxa7

2025-11-01 02:27:48 UTC

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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.

2025-11-01 02:11:34 UTC

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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*.

2025-11-01 02:09:08 UTC

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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.

2025-11-01 02:03:17 UTC

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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*.

2025-11-01 01:55:08 UTC

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.

2025-10-31 12:21:42 UTC

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I think I've all but stopped questioning my beauty with "but do I see a *woman*?"
I see myself. And she's fucking gorgeous.
How did I never notice before?

2025-10-31 12:16:34 UTC

Looking into the mirror and exclaiming "god *damn* you're so beautiful" is the transition goal I never dared to claim.
And yet. 😊

2025-10-26 12:05:49 UTC

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When a human being, of any gender, is allowed to operate without accountability, they go *nucking futs*. (Technical term.) Look at Musk. Look at Trump. Look at the manosphere.
They've got to be told "no". And they've got to learn to understand it. 4/

2025-10-26 12:05:27 UTC

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I remember when this was first pointed out to me years ago, and then suddenly I started seeing it *everywhere*. Even progressive female friends were perpetuating it. I was flabbergasted.
"Boys will be boys" is insidious, and "testosterone causes violence" is the scientific-sounding gloss of it. 3/

2025-10-26 12:05:09 UTC

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What you've got to understand about this is that it's a *self-fulfilling prophecy*. We tell boys "oh you can't help being violent, it's just in your nature", and then they go out and do violence, and we say "well this just proves it".
It's a core part of what we call the "boys will be boys" phenomenon, where we forgive any manner of misbehaviour from boys and men, and shift the responsibility onto women and girls. We blame what a girl was wearing, or the fact that women keep refusing to go out with some dude. Or we blame mothers. It never seems to land on the guys themselves. 2/

2025-10-26 12:04:47 UTC

"But if testosterone doesn't cause violence then why are cis guys so violent?"
*Grimaces*
Ok look. I'm sure I once believed this, so I'll treat the question in good faith. It's a common pseudoscientific dogma, one spread by high school science teachers and shitty "feminist" YouTubers alike. But it's bollocks. 1/

2025-10-21 18:04:45 UTC

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fantastic insight! The question in my mind is: "what are they comparing humanity *to*?"
I suggest that being raised firmly in the oppressor class requires an ongoing process of de-empathisation. It's communicated to boys that they have the right, nay *duty*, to mock and belittle girls, and also all that is feminine in themselves and each other. Queer people are shunned, and also any love they themselves have for one another. Disabled folks are mocked, and any weakness within their own ranks. People of colour are othered, and so too anything within themselves that doesn't fit norms of whiteness.
The act of repressing that of the Other within themself has a further effect: they lose the power of introspection, they begin to habitually project. "I'm not angry, *you're* angry!"
They are cut off from humanity and from their own humanity, isolated and paranoid. And *something within them screams that this is wrong*. The human organism was not meant to live in this impossibly constricted emotional space.
But they can't see their own wounds, so again they project. Something is wrong with *everyone they encounter*; they wonder why nobody else notices this. It must be *humanity itself* which is desperately broken and dysfunctional.
It can't be them.
It couldn't be them.

2025-10-16 09:06:19 UTC

Good hunters know when to incorporate elements of camouflage into their technique
#CatsOfMastodon
https://eldritchcafe.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/383/039/909/151/020/original/9ce1ccb2aa7c16f5.jpg

2025-10-06 20:08:49 UTC

I'd like to bring to everyone's attention Freud's original notes for his structure of mind (id, ego, superego, etc) 🤔
https://eldritchcafe.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/329/005/979/711/169/original/179c16249be35ba7.jpg

2025-10-06 11:41:56 UTC

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Womanhood is freedom.

2025-10-06 11:39:55 UTC

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But we are *not* going down without a fight. A growing consciousness is hard to suppress. They've got a lot of dangerous tools at their disposal-- book bans, internet censorship, mass media ownership, AI bullshit. But people still have an instinct to resist.

2025-10-06 11:32:09 UTC

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We had to be returned to the place *we* represented in the eighties and nineties-- a figure of mockery, a message that *it's bad and ridiculous to be feminine*.
Cis women were starting to see us as inspirational, not shameful, and *that had to be stopped*.
And so the propaganda campaign began. And boss ladies were recruited, as helpful TERFs.

2025-10-06 11:22:36 UTC

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And as we became more visible, patriarchy as a whole sat up and realised the danger we represented.
They could deal with a handful of boss-ladies as supplementary patriarchs.
They could deal with a handful of scared and hiding trans women.
But if liberatory femininity spread? If women *as a whole* embraced their womanhood, their femininity, with the same zealousness as trans women? That would represent a *change of consciousness* that would bring down patriarchy.

2025-10-06 11:12:55 UTC

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Trans women are "supremely unashamed* of being female. Far from disguising it, we proudly embrace it.
Boobs? God yes. They are wonderful.
A cunt? Abso-fucking-lutely; always wanted one.
Dresses? In every colour in the rainbow.
Emotional growth and softness? My tears are powerful.

2025-10-06 11:05:09 UTC

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Trans women tend to be complete anathema to people like this because we represent *liberation in femininity*, which their internalised patriarchy long ruled out as a possibility. The way to power is being *less* feminine, they say. What are you doing? This must be a trick!

2025-10-06 11:02:03 UTC

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She (the boss) liked me, tho. She did recognise that I was intelligent and hard-working and a really fucking valuable employee, to be fair. I brought out this weird mothering instinct in her. She encouraged me to be more assertive, more forceful. More masculine.
I think she'd have a fucking fit if she saw me now.

2025-10-06 10:55:45 UTC

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My first boss was a holdover from this, she had this booming voice and was into classic cars and would have all the other women in the office make coffee for her and the guys.
My coworker was this willowy, blonde, soft-spoken young woman, and the boss displayed a visible disdain for her and her femininity. I guess she was everything the boss had strived to unbecome.

2025-10-06 10:51:19 UTC

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And what that really brings up for me as someone who grew up in the eighties is the supposed "feminism" of the career woman, wearing wide-shouldered jackets to look more masculine, and lowering her voice to sound more masculine, and eschewing emotionality in favour of being "hard-nosed", and tearing down other women in order to be accepted as one of the guys.

2025-10-06 10:46:58 UTC

Reading Paulo Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*; near the beginning he talks about some oppressed people identifying with their oppressor, wanting to merely take over from them rather than deconstruct the framework of oppression.

2025-09-21 15:18:11 UTC

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and one thing I've noticed is that the people pushing this food purity thing rarely seem to be making political efforts to reform farming practice, etc.
They frame it all as *personal choice*, lecturing us on how we're "choosing" to be sick by eating "ultra processed foods" or whatever the latest buzzword phrase is for Sinful Food.
And this lets capitalist systems off the hook, shifting the blame onto the poor, who can't afford to make the food choices that the middle class can.
Yet another example of fascism pretending to be anti-capitalist whilst secretly carrying water for it!

2025-08-31 13:46:03 UTC

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Subtle French humour /s 😅
https://eldritchcafe.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/123/656/242/004/174/original/1647bf100890144a.jpg
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2025-08-31 13:38:00 UTC

Marseille image dump!
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2025-08-26 12:37:04 UTC

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that is a threat of violence, and should be treated as one

2025-08-24 12:12:35 UTC

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even so, she's not a fucking sexual predator! She's a woman who simply didn't dare to tell her partner a truth about herself-- a truth which could have exposed her to violence in the moment.
Worse, this is a massively sinister ruling which could be a precedent for any trans woman-- including me-- being put on the sex offenders list for supposed "dishonesty" about our sex, just for accurately stating to a partner that we are women.
But it's most likely to be used against the most vulnerable of us-- trans women in the sex work industry, or those coerced into sex.
It's easy to find the "she should haves" with the benefits of hindsight, of distance, of relative privilege.
This country is tightening the noose around trans people's lives, waiting for one after the other of us to make a mistake so that they can come for us-- through the courts, through parliament, through media shitstorms and public harassment.
This is a terrifying time to be trans, and we need all the support we can get.

2025-08-14 11:24:28 UTC

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hold up:
> The Worth Matravers young man, on the other hand, was buried in a double grave with an older man he was not biologically related to.

2025-08-05 11:27:32 UTC

Huh, these *are* my onions, actually. #gardening
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2025-07-31 13:27:26 UTC

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how about we separate some artists from their keyboard?

2025-07-31 11:32:46 UTC

Many poppy #bloomscrolling
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2025-07-27 19:12:33 UTC

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I wouldn't ever have chosen to be trans. I know this from all the times I wished to not be.
Had I grown up cis, I'd never have broken out of that loop of white liberal privilege. Why would I give that up? I do like to think I'd be one of those ladies at Pride marches wearing a t-shirt saying "free mum hugs". That I'd give any TERFs an outraged earful. That I'd have a library of very woke and thought-provoking books.
But willingly put my own skin in the game? Not in a million years.
Being trans has forced me to confront oppression on a deeply personal level, has given me an empathy and a humility I never asked for. It has almost certainly made me a better person.
It has given me a deeply wonderful community I never knew existed. It has given me a depth of appreciation for life I never would have looked for. A courage and a power and a *conviction* I probably never would have unlocked.
I wouldn't have chosen to be trans. But neither would I, now, choose to be anything else.

2025-07-20 16:43:03 UTC

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*suddenly wonders whether screen readers will even pronounce the star in "trans*", or if my thread made zero sense to them*

2025-07-20 14:16:23 UTC

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I never believed my journey would take me where it has today. I could now claim the old label that once excluded me. I'm on hormones, I'm getting "The Surgery™" next year. I own pearls, and my hair is fantastic, darling. Nobody would complain if I rocked up at the transsexual country club.
Yet I'm still the same Spud; the transvestite, the crossdresser, the fetishist, one of the bad ones. One of the ashamed ones. I'm not ashamed anymore. Of who I am now *or* who I've been.
I am trans*.

2025-07-20 14:12:11 UTC

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It's not enough that we adopted an umbrella term. We've got to keep it umbrella. We've got to resist slamming the gates shut, pushing others away. Our power doesn't derive from cis acceptability, but unity.

2025-07-20 14:11:13 UTC

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I occasionally see people trying to "reclaim" transsexual as a term, and my mind plays a message: "This term is not a term of honour. Nothing valued is here". If you want to reclaim something, go for the T-slur; at least *that's* an umbrella term. 🙃
And far more often I see trans people proclaim angrily that they're "not one of those crossdressers". That same old stab of defensiveness, prompted by the same old threat-- that cis people will see them as one of the bad ones, one of the fetish-y ones, one of the ones who don't take it seriously, don't *commit* to life as another gender.
The same internalised transphobia.

2025-07-20 14:10:17 UTC

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There are still some who cling onto older terms (including the horrible self-identified "true transsexuals"), but most people shifted to the new terminology. The last time STAR mobilised, they were the Street *Transgender* Action Revolutionaries. This coming together was the most empowering thing the trans community has done.
So here's my answer to the question posed by a friend; "Q: What's the difference between Transgender, Transsexual, and Transvestite?" "A: Prejudice. Only prejudice."

2025-07-20 14:09:02 UTC

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So, there was a confusion of terms. I'd see the community as a whole referred to under the awkward initialism "TS/TV/TG". And then someone coined "trans*".
It's fallen out of favour now, but it was the first real stab at an umbrella identity. Saying that we had far more in common than we had differences.
Eventually, "transgender" replaced everything as the preferred umbrella term, and rightly so-- of the three, it's the term we came up with ourselves. But also, we started using just "trans", which I would argue is "trans*" with a silent "*".

2025-07-20 14:08:26 UTC

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But this distinction was always artificial. There was a joke acknowledging this: "Q: What's the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual? A: About two years."
Where did "transgender" come in? Earlier, it turns out, than I thought. A number of trans people-- notably including Christine Jorgensen-- rejected the medicalised terms, saying that being trans was not about your clothing, your sexuality, or even your physical anatomy, but the *gender* you live as. Hence, "trans-gender".

2025-07-20 14:07:39 UTC

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Rather predictably, this divided in practice along lines of race, class and sexuality. There's a famous picture of a group of transsexual women in the middle of the twentieth century, and they are all notably white, high femme, and well-dressed, their hair and pearls immaculate. 💅
Meanwhile those on the streets fighting for our rights would include the likes of Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera, of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).
Animosities developed between the two groupings, driven by prejudice, but also by the gatekeeping of the sexologists themselves, who were pushing the now-discredited theory of *autogynophilia*, which said that some trans people were "true" transsexuals, and others were motivated by sexual fetish. Patients had to prove they were "one of the good ones", or risk losing their life-saving medication. Some, sadly, internalised this transphobia.

2025-07-20 14:06:44 UTC

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But it was, and remained, a gatekept term. To be a transsexual you needed to live "full time as the opposite sex", and in those homophobic times that also meant pursuing male/female romantic and sexual relationships. You had to obtain hormones and surgeries, or at least be *obviously striving* to obtain them, especially bottom surgery, which was considered to be the act that finally "changed your sex".
Everyone who didn't fit through that gate remained under the transvestite label, or used terms like "drag king/queen" or "crossdresser".

2025-07-20 14:05:27 UTC

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When I first encountered trans topics in the late nineties/early noughties, the distinction was still being made between *transvestites* and *transsexuals*.
"Transvestite" is the earlier term, and is simply the Latin for "crossdresser". This is the term that early sexologists used to refer to all trans people, even those who transitioned to live fully as a different sex/gender.
The objection was raised that that's both inaccurate and offensive. If people are literally changing their bodies to conform to a different sex, then it goes far beyond clothes. This was why later sexologists started using "transsexual" instead.

2025-07-20 14:04:14 UTC

Why do you see older trans resources use the term trans*, and why does it matter even today? A thread.

2025-07-12 09:30:48 UTC

Spud's guide to friendship, for the disordered attachment lot of yas:<li>People are friends if they like each other and spend time with each other.</li><li>People don't choose who they like. They just like them, in the same way you like a piece of music.</li><li>Friendship is not transactional. It cannot be earned with favours or gifts.</li><li>You cannot "deserve" friendship, nor can you "not deserve it". Having friendships or not is not a reflection of your moral worth.</li><li>Beware the urge to change who you are to please someone. I mean, yes, friendships can prompt us to explore new sides of who we are, that's one of the deep joys of them, but if you feel <em>obliged</em> to be a certain way in order to meet another person's approval, you're building friendship on unstable ground.</li><li>Try, oh try, not to be suspicious of people saying they like you? I mean I know we all struggle with self-criticism, and are keenly aware of our own flaws, but try to believe that others can see you as you are, flaws and all, and like you regardless.</li>

2025-07-06 11:58:29 UTC

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"All the information is on the internet"
*Not all information has the same value*, motherfucker.
True expertise is in learning to distinguish and contextualise. And preserving that meta-information is a vastly undervalued skill.
*(Salutes librarians)*

2025-07-06 11:50:21 UTC

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At least with a Google search you can have a squint and see if the information comes from some government department or "homeschool-moms.com". LLMs flatten both the source and the intent of the information into the same officious tone, which is why you see them echoing Reddit shitposts as fact.

2025-07-06 10:15:07 UTC

LLMs are mansplaining as a service, but more specifically that type of mansplainer who googles your question and replies authoritatively with the first result that comes up, despite having zero understanding himself.

2025-06-23 07:11:22 UTC

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merci pour le partage ! 😊

2025-06-17 01:07:11 UTC

Poll: do you know what "body doubling" means?

2025-05-30 14:40:50 UTC

Spotted this gal flying around with a leaf, and that's how I discovered leaf-cutter bees were a thing!
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2025-05-29 12:31:22 UTC

"That's the rule, but they barely ever enforce it."
*Hits translate*
"This rule is used solely to harass poor people and minorities."

2025-05-24 03:03:38 UTC

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I make sure to always have a few days worth of beans, tuna, pasta, just in case.
Started when Brexit rolled around, and the world has continued to feel low- to high-level unsafe since then.
[@dalias](https://hachyderm.io/@dalias )

2025-05-23 14:17:34 UTC

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Capitalism is tearing itself apart, with stunning speed. Many businesses close down early. Some try to stay open, taking paper money for payments, recording transactions manually. But there's a shortage of cash to go around-- ATMs hold such a small float these days that they're cleared out in short order, and who has more than fifty quid stashed away in an envelope for emergencies?
Prices begin to skyrocket, and it's barely past noon before the first reports of looting begin.
You decide not to go into work this afternoon. Because yes, you can just about scrape together enough physical change for the bus, but can you trust that public transport is going to still be running by the time you need to go home?
You consider of the paycheck that your work issues every month, incrementing figures in your bank account. Figures which today are rendered abstract and useless, without any way to turn them into actual currency. It's all a mirage, you think giddily, all of it.
You start to wonder what you might barter, and to whom, for tomorrow's dinner.
4/4

2025-05-23 14:15:59 UTC

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"A fix is imminent", the press release from Google says; "we've got our best programmers on it."
And they have. But the programmers in question have never touched this system before. It was vibe-coded on the cheap by a contracting company which has since dissolved. All the function names *look* helpful, but do something slightly different to what they claim.
A simple rollback to the previous version of the code was the first suggestion, of course. But the last deployment was a month and a half ago. It was working fine, until it wasn't.
"We could just rip this whole module out," someone suggests. But it needs to correctly encode the TLA details in the WTF wrapper, otherwise everything five steps down will break. And *none* of this is documented anywhere.
Do they continue trying to trace the source of the problem, or do they just *rewrite* the whole damn thing? Tensions are rising. Management is throwing a fit, obviously, and the programmers are not immune to the affects of the outage themselves. They have friends and family-- some of them vulnerable-- who are starting to worry about how long they'll have to go without vital goods and services.
3/4

2025-05-23 14:14:54 UTC

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You turn to the socials, and learn it's not just you. It started overnight-- a few scattered payments started to stall, and then more and more frequently. At a certain critical point, the entire system ground to a halt as it tried to cope with endless timeouts and retries.
"Why *every* payment system is affected", reads an article posted by your techy friend Jen. It's some arcane verification module deep within Google. "That's bizarre", reads the first comment. "I don't even have an Android phone!"
Ah, but everything is interlinked, these days. So many steps, so many parties desperate to get a finger in every pie. Once upon a time it was a customer, a merchant, each party's bank, and a single intermediary managing it. Now nobody can tell how many steps a transaction's going to go through.
"You'd have thought if there was anything capitalism *wouldn't* break, it'd be taking money off people," another comment reads. "Shut up and take my money"; the meme with Fry from Futurama.
Ah. But it has. Capitalism breaks everything, eventually, even capitalism.
2/4

2025-05-23 14:13:47 UTC

Capitalism has broken.
You're not aware of it until you put in your weekly online shop of a Friday morning. It all works fine until you come to pay, and then the spinner spins indefinitely, neither accepting not rejecting your card details.
You cancel and try the payment via Apple Pay instead. The same thing happens.
"Wow. Some programmer at ASDA is in hot water", you think to yourself, as you head to Sainsbury's site instead with a tired sigh. Why does everything not *work* so frequently these days?
Only, Sainsbury's site does the same thing. Fuck. Your heart sinks. Must be a bank problem.
You load up your banking app, and click on the chatbot which is what passes for customer help these days. "Online payments not working", you type, tersely. You jump the usual hoops -- no, the card isn't expired, yes, you're using your correct CV2 number.
"Please wait while we check the source of the issue," the bot relents. Then: "hold on, this is taking longer than usual." And: "thank you for your patience while we continue to check the source of the issue". You leave the app open, and make yourself the second cup of tea of the day, wondering what you can put together for dinner with what little you've got in. Tuna pasta bake it is.
The chatbot stops responding. You reload the app, ask to chat to a human instead. "We are experiencing an unusual load", it informs you. "We will aim to message you back within six hours."
Capitalism has broken. It cut too greedily, and too deep. Bots are programming, bots are manning the help desks. Nary a human to be seen, to be *accountable*. The system has chugged to a halt.
1/4

2025-04-25 13:22:16 UTC

Cis people: I've heard more than one of you tell me that it's "not entirely safe" to go round wearing a trans flag pin, which is why you don't.
And you're right, it's not entirely safe.
But.
If I can go around *existing as a very obviously trans woman* for four years, then it's safer than your fears are telling you.
When I first started transitioning, I was *terrified*. Even at the very first step; painting my nails a clear gloss. Would people laugh at me? Would they shun me? Step by step I discovered: no. I started getting supportive comments and compliments. Women started to treat me with trust and openness.
*The vast majority of people are kind, decent, supportive*
So I challenge you to start wearing that pin that you're scared of. It's just a pin. See how people react to it. You might see some smiles.
Because trans people might be a single percentage of the population, but what about their families? Friends? Co-workers?
Go ahead and take a pocketful of spares, as well. Offer them to your friends, or anyone who asks.
In this darkest time, when every message from the media tells us that we should hate and mistrust those around us, you deserve to discover, like I did, that this mistrust is a lot less well-founded than you might think. So be brave, and wear that empathy on your sleeve. Or lapel. :heart_transgender:

2025-04-19 21:50:46 UTC

Which one of you Fedi weirdos* was at the Edinburgh trans rights demo holding the sign saying: private String gender
> notpublic const bool gender
* affectionate

2025-04-17 13:47:06 UTC

I'm gonna be even more trans, just to fucking spite this fascist shithole of a country.
I'm gonna clench my trans joy tightly, tend it like a fire against a storm.
They won't win.
We will win.

2025-04-14 20:28:25 UTC

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Even in Tarot, I'm a heretic. The system I've developed for reading the cards explicitly gives the querant the right to arrange the cards how they see fit, or even outright reject any they disagree with-- I tell them in that case to invert it and push it back towards me.
I told my witchy mentor this, and she looked slightly scandalised. I understand why: it goes against what most people consider Tarot to be.
But rejection of an assignation can reveal volumes about the person doing the rejection. It's a powerful and very queer act, which is why I retain room for it in my system.
We cannot control the fortunes that befall us, but fate, ultimately, is what we make of it. I feel incredibly strongly about this.