My mom flipped through the small ring-bound book and pointed to one of the pages. “What number is that?” “Uh, 7?” I guessed. “Are you sure?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “What about this one?” She flipped to another page and showed it to me. I glanced at the disk of differently sized colorful bubbles. “There’s nothing in that one,” I said with confidence. While waiting for the doctor to call us into the exam area, my mother and I continued perusing the book. Some of the colorful bubble pictures had numbers in them. In one, a seven made of blue disks stood out against a background of green disks. In another, a red four amidst purple bubbles. Other pages were just fields of different shades of the same color with no recognizable pattern. My mother was clearly flustered by my answers. She stopped at one of the numberless pages. “You really don’t see anything there?” “Nope.” “It’s a three, Daniel.” “What?” “There’s a 3 right there. It’s green. You can’t see it?” she asked, in
Hi, friends. This post breaks the usual theme of my blog. I'm writing to let you all know that I contributed a guest post to another blog. The guest post started as a Facebook comment in a thread discussing J.K. Rowling's stance on trans rights, and the FB friend whose page it was invited me to expand what I wrote into something he could put on his blog. Six hours of writing later, I ended up with a monstrous piece of writing that could have served as a chapter in a book on the delinquency of Rowling. He was kind enough to publish it, despite the length. The post is here: What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth The piece goes into detail regarding the repercussions of two specific aspects of Rowling's views on transgender people. I go over the consequences associated with excluding trans women from women's spaces and some of the consequences for spreading the myth of transness as a social contagion in young people. I wrote that piece for people who do n