• She or They

your local trannic pissy meme girl


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

1.
I have been trying to figure out how to write this and I don't think I'll ever figure out a coherent structure before this site shuts down. So I'll just put down sections and paragraphs. I have a friend showing up in 45 minutes to pick me up in her car so I'll probably just keep writing and then post whatever I got before she arrives.

2.
I saw a good post circulating around here saying to keep an eye on where everyone says they're going and what they plan on doing cause you never know what they may create together. I think that's a good idea. I don't particularly like Bluesky but it is cool seeing clusters of Cohost folks showing up there. It's like okay here are the people who embody Cohost values, who likely have thought deliberately about what they want social media to be, who are aware of the dangers of clout chasing and mass harassment. Also been seeing folks move to the fediverse, and Cohost has made it less intimidating to follow them there. Since Cohost is a slightly more technical website than your basic Twitter or Tumblr, it can be kind of like training wheels for the fediverse.

I was recently rereading Samuel Delaney's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and mulling over the ideas about social spaces and city life. When I first read the book I thought to myself, man I'm sad I never got to live in the vanished "Times Square Blue" of porn theaters and sexual encounters and queerness lived in public. After finishing the book I found myself thinking about it almost on a daily basis, and it influenced the way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I held myself around strangers. I found myself talking to people on the street more, approaching public spaces with a more expansive set of expectations, and a few weeks later I had a very Times-Square-Blue sexual encounter. Times Square Blue is a vanished place and time, but also it's something you can build a little bit of around you right now. I'm hoping the same is true of Cohost. (On second reading I decided to actually look at the introduction and was pleased to see Delaney saying the same thing I figured out on my own.)

3.
I also think of the person at the beginning of the documentary Queercore: How Punk A Revolution who said that the best way to start a punk scene in your city is to pretend it already exists and then people start coming to it.

Gotta go for now! More later!


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

4.
Before I was on social media I read webcomics a lot. I recently got back into them and I'm currently reading a furry webcomic that started in the 2010s, and I'm finding that older-internet mix of painfully earnest and tongue in cheek to be really refreshing. I didn't know how much I was missing it because I never noticed how slowly it slipped away.

Was the 2010s internet better? Who the fuck knows. Recently there's been a strong anti-nostalgia push in my corners of the internet. Stop saying the 90s were better. Stop glorifying the 2000s. The past sucked. And I think it goes too far and misses the point. Yes nostalgia can be mindless reactionism, but at its best it fulfills a similar function to traveling or learning a new language: not so much showing you a world where everything is better as showing you that the world can be different. I will cling to my memories of a world before digital cameras not because I hate digital photography but because I value privacy. I want to use my memories of the old days to help build a world where we actively maintain people's privacy not just passively grant them privacy by now having the technology to spy on them. Things were different. Things can be different. I have proof.

5.
Privacy functionality is something I'm gonna miss about Cohost. Other websites do it but Cohost does it better. Nobody sees who I'm following. Nobody sees who follows me. Nobody sees my super-secret contact information unless I follow them. I can make a private account, or multiple private accounts. I can post experimental interactive text pieces on my private account. I can write a little note on someone's profile reminding myself why I blocked them, and use it to consider unblocking them. I can put an 18+ tag on some of my posts and not have to subject myself to endless discourse about putting adult content in front of minors.

I try to maintain a "holy shit two websites" mindset whenever I can but I can't help being mad as fuck that Cohost is dying while Bluesky, which has practically the exact opposite approach to privacy, is thriving. Bluesky makes your follows and following public. Bluesky makes your likes public. Bluesky makes your blocks public, and seeing discourses like "hey I noticed this person is blocking this other person and I think that's suspicious" makes me wanna drink rat poison. Bluesky only just recently added the ability to remove yourself from a list by blocking the list's creator, which, as someone who used to get added to Twitter lists with names like "hitlist may 2020" and "idiot tranny", I'm less than happy with how long it took.

Of course they're not going to call the list "idiot tranny" on Bluesky. No no no, that would defeat the purpose of marketing your website as the trans-friendly alternative to Twitter. Instead you call the list something like "pedophiles" or "zoophiles" and you can still populate it with mostly trans people and if anyone questions you on it you can question whether their motivations might be impure. Or, and Bluesky especially loved to do this, you make a list called "people who are shitty to [minority group #1]" and fill it up with your least favorite people from [minority group #2]. Bluesky has a problem with anti-[#1] prejudice; subscribe to my blocklist or you're part of the problem. Or you make a list called "bad people and bad people apologists" where you use the publicly accessible following data to incriminate anyone who has contact with a persona non grata. What you call the list is less important than what it does. My Bluesky account is on one list called "interesting people with interesting opinions" and one list called "pickle toast with peanut butter" and for all I know those mean the exact same thing as "idiot tranny".


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

6.
There's so much you could write about what a shitshow the moderation list scene was on Bluesky especially in the early days, how the staff subcontracted the serious work of keeping a website safe to a bunch of hobbyists who were chasing clout and maintaining grudges and going through second puberty and sleeping with each other and using clout to get sex and sex to develop new enmities and enmities to grow more clout. What stands out above all is that Bluesky's "move fast and break things" approach has succeeded in a way that Cohost's mindful approach has not. @alyaza has written that if Cohost tried be a social media site that was good for its users and failed, it makes you wonder how much social media is worth having in the first place. I've sure been reconsidering that.



DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

1.
I have been trying to figure out how to write this and I don't think I'll ever figure out a coherent structure before this site shuts down. So I'll just put down sections and paragraphs. I have a friend showing up in 45 minutes to pick me up in her car so I'll probably just keep writing and then post whatever I got before she arrives.

2.
I saw a good post circulating around here saying to keep an eye on where everyone says they're going and what they plan on doing cause you never know what they may create together. I think that's a good idea. I don't particularly like Bluesky but it is cool seeing clusters of Cohost folks showing up there. It's like okay here are the people who embody Cohost values, who likely have thought deliberately about what they want social media to be, who are aware of the dangers of clout chasing and mass harassment. Also been seeing folks move to the fediverse, and Cohost has made it less intimidating to follow them there. Since Cohost is a slightly more technical website than your basic Twitter or Tumblr, it can be kind of like training wheels for the fediverse.

I was recently rereading Samuel Delaney's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and mulling over the ideas about social spaces and city life. When I first read the book I thought to myself, man I'm sad I never got to live in the vanished "Times Square Blue" of porn theaters and sexual encounters and queerness lived in public. After finishing the book I found myself thinking about it almost on a daily basis, and it influenced the way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I held myself around strangers. I found myself talking to people on the street more, approaching public spaces with a more expansive set of expectations, and a few weeks later I had a very Times-Square-Blue sexual encounter. Times Square Blue is a vanished place and time, but also it's something you can build a little bit of around you right now. I'm hoping the same is true of Cohost. (On second reading I decided to actually look at the introduction and was pleased to see Delaney saying the same thing I figured out on my own.)

3.
I also think of the person at the beginning of the documentary Queercore: How Punk A Revolution who said that the best way to start a punk scene in your city is to pretend it already exists and then people start coming to it.

Gotta go for now! More later!


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

4.
Before I was on social media I read webcomics a lot. I recently got back into them and I'm currently reading a furry webcomic that started in the 2010s, and I'm finding that older-internet mix of painfully earnest and tongue in cheek to be really refreshing. I didn't know how much I was missing it because I never noticed how slowly it slipped away.

Was the 2010s internet better? Who the fuck knows. Recently there's been a strong anti-nostalgia push in my corners of the internet. Stop saying the 90s were better. Stop glorifying the 2000s. The past sucked. And I think it goes too far and misses the point. Yes nostalgia can be mindless reactionism, but at its best it fulfills a similar function to traveling or learning a new language: not so much showing you a world where everything is better as showing you that the world can be different. I will cling to my memories of a world before digital cameras not because I hate digital photography but because I value privacy. I want to use my memories of the old days to help build a world where we actively maintain people's privacy not just passively grant them privacy by now having the technology to spy on them. Things were different. Things can be different. I have proof.

5.
Privacy functionality is something I'm gonna miss about Cohost. Other websites do it but Cohost does it better. Nobody sees who I'm following. Nobody sees who follows me. Nobody sees my super-secret contact information unless I follow them. I can make a private account, or multiple private accounts. I can post experimental interactive text pieces on my private account. I can write a little note on someone's profile reminding myself why I blocked them, and use it to consider unblocking them. I can put an 18+ tag on some of my posts and not have to subject myself to endless discourse about putting adult content in front of minors.

I try to maintain a "holy shit two websites" mindset whenever I can but I can't help being mad as fuck that Cohost is dying while Bluesky, which has practically the exact opposite approach to privacy, is thriving. Bluesky makes your follows and following public. Bluesky makes your likes public. Bluesky makes your blocks public, and seeing discourses like "hey I noticed this person is blocking this other person and I think that's suspicious" makes me wanna drink rat poison. Bluesky only just recently added the ability to remove yourself from a list by blocking the list's creator, which, as someone who used to get added to Twitter lists with names like "hitlist may 2020" and "idiot tranny", I'm less than happy with how long it took.

Of course they're not going to call the list "idiot tranny" on Bluesky. No no no, that would defeat the purpose of marketing your website as the trans-friendly alternative to Twitter. Instead you call the list something like "pedophiles" or "zoophiles" and you can still populate it with mostly trans people and if anyone questions you on it you can question whether their motivations might be impure. Or, and Bluesky especially loved to do this, you make a list called "people who are shitty to [minority group #1]" and fill it up with your least favorite people from [minority group #2]. Bluesky has a problem with anti-[#1] prejudice; subscribe to my blocklist or you're part of the problem. Or you make a list called "bad people and bad people apologists" where you use the publicly accessible following data to incriminate anyone who has contact with a persona non grata. What you call the list is less important than what it does. My Bluesky account is on one list called "interesting people with interesting opinions" and one list called "pickle toast with peanut butter" and for all I know those mean the exact same thing as "idiot tranny".



nex3
@nex3

(This is also cross-posted to my blog)

This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website seems like as good a forcing function as any.

In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspective of disability justice, specifically as someone who remains extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for many of us are inescapably part of our networks and communities.

COVID in the Social Model of Disability

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it. Or to be more precise: you're disabled with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off opportunities for social interaction and employment to you, that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without putting your health at risk.

This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves. To use a lightly clichéd example: my severe nearsightedness doesn't function as a disability, because I exist in a society1 that accepts it as "normal" and provides easy access to socially unremarkable assistive devices (glasses), or even invisible assistive devices (contacts) if I so choose. But my sleep disorder is a disability—society doesn't consider it "normal" in the same way, and so it's seen as my personal failure and I have to work to make sure it doesn't affect my relationships2 or employability.

Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to avoid catching this disease is itself a disability. Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation3, lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines, prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment. Depending on the specific activity and your risk tolerance, public existence while taking reasonable COVID precautions ranges from requiring serious equipment and preparation to being outright impossible. Even if your body isn't any different than it was in 2019, you are functionally disabled by the society you now exist in.

If you have an existing disability, including Long COVID or even just the incremental damage that each COVID infection does to your immune system4, the situation is even worse. Your risk tolerances are likely to be lower, and you may already suffer from ableist limitations on your ability to engage in the world that are compounded by COVID. You become intrinsically multiply disabled just by virtue of the total failure of our social structures to create a world in which it's safe to exist.

The Category Myth of the Abled

I don't remember when exactly it was that I started taking seriously the possibility that I could become disabled at any time. It could have been in college, when my friends would share blog articles that often discussed disability justice. Certainly once my wife was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in her 20s the point was driven home with terrible force. But for most of my adulthood, I have taken it as a fact of life that something unexpected could happen out of nowhere that would radically change the parameters under which I lived my life.

This is not how most people think.

The categories of abled and disabled are not broadly considered to be permeable. Certainly, people recognize that someone can get in a car crash and lose the use of their legs, but they don't expect it will happen to them. When it happens to someone they know, people desperately claw for reasons why unreasoning fate took this turn—were you driving recklessly? did you eat too much sugar? did you displease G-d?—because they feel a need to shore up their confidence in their own security in the category of "abled".

This is what I'm calling a "category myth": the tale people tell themselves that being abled is a rigid ontological division that cleanly separates those who are from those who are not. Although the categories of "abled" and "disabled" do exist in the ways people's relationship to the society around them is mediated by their bodies and minds, their blurriness and the ease of movement between them is critical to their structure. To insist on clean boundaries, to buy into the category myth, is not just to internalize an inaccurate understanding of humanity but to enter into a way of thinking that is predisposed to doing harm.

Because this category myth isn't just incorrect, it's oppressive. All axes of oppression are wrapped around similar myths. This is why sexists are so threatened by transsexuals, why racists invented the crime of miscegenation. An oppressive mindset demands a clear and permanent division between oneself and one's victims; a mode of thought that relies on clear and permanent divisions is at high risk of enacting oppression, knowingly or not. Those who are unable (or unwilling) to imagine themselves becoming disabled are the ones who do the most harm to people who already are.

Understanding Denialism

I have struggled tremendously with the emotional weight of seeing more and more people in my life succumb, to one degree or another, to denial about the risks posed by COVID-19 and the precautions necessary to proportionally mitigate those risks. At the end of 2021, I saw first Delta and then Omicron cause wastewater levels to rise higher and higher, while more and more businesses dropped mask mandates. Through 2022, friend after friend posted unmasked selfies out in public or invited me out to bars. I fought with my parents to try to keep them taking precautions, and then gave up and just tried to accept the heavy knowledge that their life expectancy would simply be substantially lower than I had thought.

I began to succumb to despair. I couldn't stop wondering, why? Why would people do this, when all the evidence is there for them to see? Succumbing to the "COVID is over" propaganda campaign was part of it, sure, but there was too much overt cognitive dissonance in the way people spoke about the disease for that to be everything. It was in seeking an answer to this question that I began thinking through the ideas I'm presenting here.

In our collective retrospective vision, the relatively brief period of lockdown during 2020 is spoken of as a deeply traumatic thing. And I think that's accurate, but not (or not entirely) for the reason it's usually framed as. I think it was traumatic specifically because it shattered people's category myths of being "abled". Everyone was disabled in that moment5. Something unexpected happened out of nowhere that radically changed the parameters under which they lived their lives. Suddenly they found they had to use assistive devices (masks), they had limited access to spaces and people they had taken for granted, they were forced to consider the fragility of their own lives.

This was traumatic not just—not even primarily—because of the specific facts of the lockdown. It was traumatic because it forced people to confront just how thin the barrier was between them and someone who could only enter the grocery store masked at 1am even before COVID. And that knowledge was, broadly speaking, intolerable. People could not bear the enactment of themselves as part of a category that they considered to be lesser, weaker, broken.

And so they find the prospect of taking COVID precautions, which is to say voluntarily re-entering a state of disability, essentially unthinkable. Even to protect their loved ones, even to protect themselves, it doesn't matter. They cannot allow themselves to consider a world where that would be necessary, because that would be a world where they are all the things they think of disabled people as.

So when you hear someone say, "I can't let COVID control my life," understand that they mean they can't let themselves think about becoming disabled. They can't open the floodgates that would force them to reevaluate everything about how they conceptualize disability. They can't conceive of doing what millions of disabled people do every day and play with the cards they've been dealt.

Whether this will help you feel a bit less despair or not, I don't know. It helped me. I hope at least it can give you a path to a clearer understanding of why people arrive at these arational points of view and what keeps them there, and maybe even give you a few clues as to how to break them out of it.


  1. And, it's worth noting, a minimally precarious position in that society. For someone without vision insurance, the same level of nearsightedness could be a severe disability.

  2. The people around me are very chill about this because my friends are wonderful people, but someone with less wonderful friends might have a lot more trouble here.

  3. Especially audited sanitizing ventilation. Venues can update their HVAC (or just say they updated their HVAC) but without accountability for achieving a certain level of ventilation or a clear scientific understanding of what different ventilation levels actually mean for the likelihood of spread, it's near impossible to factor that into a risk calculation.

  4. What Is COVID Actually Doing to Our Immune Systems?

  5. Or, arguably, some people who were already disabled briefly became much less so by virtue of the societal standard of "normal" shifting to the point where their access needs were unmarked and easy to fulfill. But as far as challenging the category myth goes, that's the exact same thing.


ireneista
@ireneista

well said. couldn't agree more.



pervocracy
@pervocracy

Cohost memorial meetups are happening, so let's do one for Bostonish Massachusetts!

We'll meet at:

Davis Square (the central park bit with the picnic tables, outside JP Licks) at 1 PM on Sunday, September 29

The square is across the street from the Davis Red Line stop and parking is free on Sundays; a map of parking lots is below and the meetup spot is marked with an eggbug.

Masks are required and will be provided if you do not have your own; I will be there with a sign (though I suspect it will be pretty easy to tell which group is Cohost).

Last minute parking update: The Buena Vista Lot (1) has a flea market in it. The Herbert/Day Street lot (2) had plenty of spaces as of 12:45. Street parking is permit-free on Sundays but you may have to go a few blocks away to find a spot.


 
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