The first photo is from 1956. It shows a Black woman watching members of the Ku Klux Klan (a terrorist, racist, far-right organization focused on white supremacy) walking along a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama (USA). I couldn't find the photo's author, but most sources state that it was taken in 1956.
The second photo shows members of the Patriot Front group (a white supremacist and nationalist group, formed in 2017, that openly advocates what they call "American Fascism") traveling on the subway during the 250th anniversary of the U.S. independence in Washington D.C., while a Black woman watches them. The photo is by photographer Cheney Orr, taken on July 4, 2026, 70 years after the first photo.
Via Jurunense
"Dogwhistles" are called that based on real "dog whistles", many of which are pitched too high to be audible to most humans, but are still perfectly audible to dogs.
Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.
The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!
So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.
- this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.
- the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.
The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less rhetorical ground we cede to the degendering and misgendering of trans women.
I don't actually think ceding this ground is LESS divisive than pointing it out politely.
you notice over time that some people clearly understand the concept of thinking critically about the media they consume and who its created by but dont want to do the critical thinking themselves so they just like. wait for people on the internet to tell them what theyre allowed to like in order to keep their Good Person score high or whatever. which doesnt seem very productive to me i think.
if I see one more "why age verification is bad" post that doesn't even bother to mention that locking young people out of huge sections of the public sphere - literally the stated goal and primary impact of this shit - is wrong in and of itself I will simply start hitting people with bricks
yes yes biometric data privacy blah blah adults can hypothetically by harmed by this too. what about the immediate and deliberate and not at all hypothetical harm to youth. why are you acting like a potential data leak about what your face looks like, which if it ever happened would at least be generally recognised as a problem, is a more serious issue than cutting millions of people off from information and community and public expression which is happening right now in the open with large scale support
it's got the stench of fucking "banned books week" on it. thousands of adults congratulating themselves for reading books literally no one is trying to stop them from reading while doing nothing to improve access for the young people who are the ones actually having those books made off-limits to them.
Since Canada is currently trying to sell itself as an "ethical alternative" to Iran's oil, I would just like to remind folks / share some quick information:
- More than 50% of Indigenous communities in reserve areas in Canada are at high risk of pipeline spills. When there is a spill, reserves are disproportionately impacted.
- The National Energy Board and Supreme Court of Canada has a history of declaring the "public interest and economic interests outweigh Indigenous and treaty rights." Basically, Indigenous peoples don't count enough as "public" to matter.
- Pipelines are built without proper consent from the Indigenous Nations they choose to occupy. Keep in mind I say choose, because this is the case even when alternative pipeline routes are suggested that could avoid reserve land. This is a direct, constant, and often violent threat to Indigenous sovereignty.
- The MMIW crisis is funded by the oil industry through the creation of worker's "man camps" near reserve land. These "man camps" are nothing but pits of sexual violence and human trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. I am not exaggerating; this is well studied and well documented.
Resources & Sources:
- To become an ‘energy superpower’, Canada wants to bulldoze Indigenous rights (START HERE!)
- Indigenous Resistance to Alberta Oil and Gas Development Report
- When the environment is destroyed, you're destroyed: Achieving Indigenous led pipeline justice
- First Nations Consent Ignored as Canadians Asked to Subsidize LNG Expansion
- Oil pipelines and food sovereignty: threat to health equity for Indigenous communities
- Is Violence against Indigenous Women in “Canada’s interest”? Liquified Natural Gas in B.C., Sexual Violence & Narratives of Terra Nullius
- The colonial playbook never ended, Canada’s pipeline deal proves it
- Stand together: Alberta's First Nations and non-Indigenous unite against Big Oil
On Reading
In the 10 years that I have worked on sharing queer history, I have never been attacked as intentionally and with as much consistency as I have in 2026. Most regularly, I'm called a groomer or harassed for mentioning Palestine.
I joke about it to my friends, because I don't actually have anyone in my life under the age of 20, how could I possibly be a groomer? It is easier to cope with all of it when I can laugh with people. No one finds it funny anymore, not even me.
When the first waves came calling me an anti-Semite, I felt compelled to ask some of the Jewish people in my life whether there was something I wasn't seeing. They assured me that I was doing nothing wrong, and I dug further into my studies. The further I got into researching the accusations levied against me, the more I was harassed for the moments I shared of my journey.
As a 29 year old adult, when I share that I read queer (often specifically trans) books, the comments are predictable. When I share that some of the books I read include sex, things get worse. When I post a book that discusses the experiences of queer Jewish people during the holocaust, I know that there will be immediate backlash, and there is. Then I am asked to edit a book synopsis to remove mentions of genocide from a poetry book about Palestine.
All of this to say, I have experience in what upsets these people and it is books that are being targeted. It is reading, readers, and anyone who encourages literacy that activates the worst people to respond. Which is why I HAVE to keep pushing you to read more. Read widely, read anything, read books that disagree with you, read porn, read queerly, read physically, read ebooks, read audiobooks, and fight the book bans sweeping North America.
I need you to know that people get the angriest when I read, so I cannot take my foot of the gas, and I hope this encourages you to go to your library.
Please call your representatives: VOTE NO on the FEDERAL BOOK BANNING BILLS HR 2616, HR 8705, and HR 7661!
Transcript below the cut.
Maia always makes these actions clear and accessible and I so appreciate eir work.
If you don't know who your Senators or Representatives are, you can use Ballotpedia's Who Represents Me tool! (Note: there's a field for you to input your email address on their page, but it's not necessary to get your results. They just need a mailing address to confirm who your reps are.)
Once you've got names, you can look up and save your Reps' phone numbers in your phone. I find this makes it easier when I'm wavering about feeling brave enough to place a call. Just pressing a button instead of going and looking up the phone number all over again makes it just a liiiiittle easier, and sometimes that makes the difference between calling and not calling!
YOU CAN DO IT.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
Question 2/3
Question 3/3
Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!
🫶
I agree with all of this. But! I think it is also important to recognize that there are subgenres where it is significantly harder to find certain things, and it's actively unhelpful to readers to pretend that you can just find whatever type of book you want to read if you just know how to look for it, especially if you are sticking to trad publishing.
It is possible to find both sapphic SFF and M/M fantasy. It is significantly harder to find, say, aro urban fantasy. Or trans romantic suspense. Or intersex mystery.
A lot of the advice above only really works for trad published or popular books and for identities/subgenres/content that aren't too niche.
So here's some advice if the advice above isn't working for you (either because you can't find books with what you want or because the books you are finding don't end up being the vibe you want), from someone who reads a few hundred books a year:
- Find websites or lists dedicated to the specific thing you are looking for. They will generally have more variety and will post you to examples that don't show up in regular rec lists. (ex: aro book recs, ace book recs, intersex #ownvoices database, sapphic books). Goodreads lists can (sometimes) also be your friend.
- Get comfortable reading self-published and small press books. Trad publishing has its blind spots.
- Check Reddit for recommendations
- Start figuring out what it is specifically that you like and then start making your searches more specific. This can be subgenre (if you want urban fantasy, you're rarely going to find it just searching "fantasy"), tropes, plot devices, vibes, etc.
- Look at the "readers also bought" on Goodreads/Amazon, similar books on Storygraph, etc. if you read a book you like. Even if you don't end up reading the one you click on, it can show you similar authors (similar to looking at the blurb on a cover), especially because far fewer books have blurbs now.
- Check out the Literature Map for similar authors.
Another fantastic resource is @queerliblib !!
They have lists on Libby with very specific topics and will answer questions on Tumblr about recs for people after very niche stuff and almost always have a starting point for someone!
“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.
You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”
oh so some people can just listen to a song and understand the lyrics
what if you’re all lying
not even an exaggeration
I’ve been trying to share this since I found out. They are moving onto harassing people in Memphis.
Everyone was lovely in getting the word out about Chicago and Minnesota. I want to spread that awareness for folk in tennessee.
As a librarian I know that a lot of people get scared or embarrassed about telling us that they damaged a book, but I need everyone to know that it actually has a really important reason, particularly for water damage, like if you got the book wet. Tears and such are relatively mild problems depending on the rarity of the book, but wet paper molds very easily, so if you get a book wet and we don't know, it can mold and that mold can spread to other books and potentially become a health and safety hazard.
So when librarians tell you to report any damage, please don't be too scared to! We're not going to yell at you, there are actual reasons why we need to know!!
