sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2020-12-02 11:51 pm

I could be yours if you write me a letter

Me, eating the object in question: "A rice cake covered with prune jam really feels like a Depression-era snack." [personal profile] spatch: "You could've just chewed on a sugar beet."

(Technically speaking, the prune jam is lekvar left over from Purim, which was so early this year it was still normal. It's just every holiday since that's been strange. Have some links.)

1. Sign of the 2020: I forgot it was only this April that I watched the first season of Homecoming (2018) and therefore need not feel like an idiot for taking so long to realize that my feelings about Shea Whigham's Thomas Carrasco are closely aligned with my feelings about William Daniels' Albert Amundsen, even though one is a pen-pushing gift of a co-protagonist and the other a two-scene wonder. I genuinely thought it had been at least a year.

2. Mildly edited from the swearier textbrick with which I hit [personal profile] selkie when I heard about the UK's high court ruling on puberty blockers, which I had previously missed:

The thing about the furor over blockers that I find silliest, by which I mean the most transphobic, is that it's not as though the human body doesn't have a complicated relationship to sexual maturity to begin with. I had a childhood friend who effectively went through puberty in a matter of months because until then she'd been an Olympic-track gymnast and the intensity of exercise had held her body at a ten-year-old shape even when she was thirteen. I imagine a significant percentage of children who train seriously for sports have similar experiences. We can argue about the pros and cons of the global sports-industrial complex, but the fact is, it can stop your clock even if you didn't ask it to. Anorexia will do it on purpose, malnutrition by accident—Audrey Hepburn's celebrated gamine figure was pure hunger winter. As far as we can tell, my late onset was strictly genetics. But that's all fine, that just happens naturally. A person makes a decision for themselves—even if that decision is simply to buy time to consider further decision-making—and oh, God, won't somebody think of the children. Well, not those children. The other children. You know. Choir, preaching, but it's so stupid. I hate stupidity on general principle and it should not be permitted when it isn't even real stupidity, just malice playing dumb.

3. I had either forgotten or never properly made the connection that Louise Fitzhugh was one of the creators—the other being Sandra Scoppettone—of Suzuki Beane (1961). It never occurred to me as a child that the book was a parody of Kay Thompson's Eloise (1955), but I loved it. It was my introduction to Beat slang. I will have to tell my mother that her crumbling paperback copy is rare.

My current music comes courtesy of [personal profile] aurumcalendula's "What Could've Been." I recommend the vid not just because the song is stuck desperately in my head, but because I have never seen either Supernatural (2005–2020) or Warehouse 13 (2009–2014) and the parallels were still very clear.
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[personal profile] asakiyume 2020-12-03 06:48 am (UTC)(link)
Hadn't seen the news about the UK ruling on puberty blockers but 100 percent agree w/ your text block. How stupid.

Re: your Depression era [COVID era] snack, sometimes what the situation calls for is something that reinforces the general sense of misery. "THIS is what the world feels like right now," etc. In comparison, chewing on a sugar beet seems to be rounding the corner and taking things upward again?
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

[personal profile] davidgillon 2020-12-03 04:33 pm (UTC)(link)
There are two further layers of appeal - to the Appeal Court, and then the Supreme Court. It's possible there might be an opening for a further appeal to the European Court.

The irony is the type of consent being discussed - Gillick Competence - originated with an anti-contraception activist parent, Victoria Gillick, trying to have contraception for under 16s ruled illegal as it was 'encouraging sex with a minor'. She lost the case when the court ruled children could be competent to consent to contraception whatever their parents said. It's worth noting that she lost at the High Court, won at the Appeal Court, but then lost in the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court).

(She must absolutely loathe that the competence to do the thing she wanted to block is known by her name.)
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[personal profile] davidgillon 2020-12-03 10:04 pm (UTC)(link)
" Do you mind if I ask, if it's an answerable question, how the current wave of transphobia got its foothold in the UK? It feels from the outside like a sudden worsening upsurge in the last few years, but I haven't been tracking from the inside."

Absolutely no objection to you asking, I just don't think I'm competent to answer. I've enough trans friends I almost certainly pay more attention to it than most, but I'm very much shouting support from the outside.
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[personal profile] tree_and_leaf 2020-12-03 08:05 pm (UTC)(link)
The other worry, of course is that despite most of the noise coming from the (rad)fem end of the transphobic pool, some of its backers, including the law firm that was involved, have been itching to erode Gillick competency for *years*. I don't understand why the radfems haven't spotted what they're enabling.
Edited 2020-12-03 20:06 (UTC)
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

[personal profile] davidgillon 2020-12-03 10:08 pm (UTC)(link)
So much of the support for the man still in the White House has struck me as the same kind of self-sabotage, and that's the only way I can explain it. You just have to hate someone else more.

That's pretty much how all the far right orgs work, give people someone to hate/feel superior to, even if they won't acknowledge that's what they're doing. "I'm not racist, I just voted for UKIP to win back our sovereignty"
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

[personal profile] davidgillon 2020-12-03 11:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Just found a link to a Pink News article giving the lawyer's background, he's a serial litigant on abortion and 'Christian rights' cases, so it's pretty easy to spot his real agenda. https://t.co/35RzmKU4vG
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

[personal profile] davidgillon 2020-12-03 10:08 pm (UTC)(link)
That's a particularly interesting point I hadn't heard.
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[personal profile] asakiyume 2020-12-04 10:09 pm (UTC)(link)
I like prune lekvar! --fair enough! I have never had it (I don't think; when the healing angel's SO made us hamantashn it was with apricot filling (some) and strawberry-rhubarb filling (others).

... Maybe it's the rice cakes that lend the air of desperation. Even though rice cakes, too, are objectively not bad.