Angling For Myself: A Jane and Jessie Story

Jane lounged in her camping chair, nearly dozing. Her grip on her fishing rod was loose, and she might have lost it already if Froslass hadn’t been keeping an eye on it. She wasn’t losing any fish, at least, on this slowest of fishing days.

She had earned this relaxation. Jane had come a long way, and the crowd of Pokémon surrounding her had borne witness to her progress. Not so long ago, the thought of napping outdoors in shorts, sandals, and a tank top, legs and arms taking in the gentle sun, a thin seam of midriff peeking out between the pieces, would have been terrifying. She feared for her life, then, with Team Rocket still livid over her defection. Before that, she feared herself, and what becoming herself would mean. But now, with Arcanine (“Growly” to her) and Cacturne napping vigilantly behind her, Sylveon curled up at her feet, Froslass and Chimecho on her lap, and Joltik enjoying the view from atop her head, she never felt so free.

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Angling For Myself: A Jane and Jessie Story
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Learn Your Birthfish

Western culture is full of quirky superstitions and traditions. Many of them are leftover bits of former religious practice, retained long after the traditions and beliefs that gave them meaning fell away, while others are more recent inventions designed to convince people to spend money or part of quasi-religious traditions still gaining ground. I have one (las doce uvas de la suerte) I maintain for cultural reasons. Humans are peculiar creatures, and derive much benefit from activities whose instrumental utility is opaque or absent.

Perhaps the best-known such traditions are horoscopes and birthstones. Both of these connect the date of one’s birth to something in nature (a constellation and a gemstone, respectively), and have been used to generate loads of money for people who convince others that the association has magical or predictive significance. Horoscopes in particular get treated with bizarrely outsized seriousness in some circles, but for many of us, they’re a cute little game.

And why should folks interested in gems and stars have all the cute little games?

So here’s a new one: Your Birthfish. You’re now symbolically linked to this kind of fish, and obligated by the same rules that make people obsess over Gemini and Taurus to tell everyone that you’re now a Chinese high-fin banded loach or pumpkinseed sunfish. May this amusing bit of fake superstition entertain and confuse your friends and family, and lead to some seafood-themed birthday dinners and greater appreciation for the beauty of fish.

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Learn Your Birthfish

Folding Laundry in the Elevator

There are many incidents that remind me of my mental difference, the divergence in my neurology that makes “normal” people a ceaseless, discomfiting puzzle. One stands out in my memory, though, for the sheer spectacle of that difference: the time I was stuck in an elevator for the better part of an afternoon.

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Folding Laundry in the Elevator

Wherein I Catfish an Irish Chaser Named Niall Corbally

CN ableism in quoted messages

I don’t often check my “filtered messages” on Facebook. I don’t get many, and by the time I get around to remembering the secret extra inboxes Facebook helpfully uses as a preemptive trash bin, many of the people messaging me there have already had their accounts disabled on account of being spambots. It’s a short queue of “Facebook User” interspersed with men from overseas asking outrageous things of me.

Which brings me to Niall Corbally, the drift-race enthusiast and proud Tweeter who decided that messaging overseas trans lesbians to get them to perform sexual violence upon his gonads was a good use of his time. This is the message he sent me at the beginning of the month, that I found earlier today:

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Wherein I Catfish an Irish Chaser Named Niall Corbally

Cracking the Closet Door: Covert Transition

The time between one’s first questions about their gender and the resolution thereof can be anxious and scary. Transition is a big deal, and contrary to the bigoted idea that it’s something we do on a lark or for fun, most of us agonize over that decision for a long time, for many reasons. Many of us fear how our social environs would react if they knew we harbored such questions, and especially how they’d react to us deciding to transition. Another lot of us figure out what we’d like to do long before we’re comfortable doing it, and must exist in that dysphoric hinterland until our circumstances free us.

For this in-between group I inhabited for years before I recognized where I was heading, there are options. There are many ways to explore one’s gender or assuage dysphoria until one feels safe acting on it in larger, more visible ways, discreetly and at one’s own pace. What follows is specifically from a transfeminine perspective, but will contain occasional nods to transmasculine variants.

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Cracking the Closet Door: Covert Transition

Seven Reasons J. Lee Grady Doesn’t Convince Me There’s A God

A writer for Charisma News wrote a listicle of reasons he believes in, not just a Christian deity, but the one he specifically gleans from his reading of the Bible. Lists like this come in two forms (scientific “mysteries” and trite emotional manipulation), and this one somehow managed to be both of them, which makes it oddly fascinating to deconstruct.

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Seven Reasons J. Lee Grady Doesn’t Convince Me There’s A God

Why I Am Not Two-Spirited

Particularly in Canada, much is made of the “two-spirit” identity claimed by many queer indigenous people in North America. It might seem natural for me to claim it, as part of my assertion of my Taíno heritage as having primacy over the Spanish within my experience of my Hispanicness. No such ease appears to me, however. Two-spirit is an idea I cannot claim, for many reasons.

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Why I Am Not Two-Spirited