so, let's go over a small amount of context, for the class:

• over the course of a year, a wave of people get increasingly bold with their transmisogyny on the blue website, culminating in a massive shitstorm that gets dozens and dozens of trans women ejected unceremoniously and undeservedly from the website either by staff or by choice
• those women appear here, along with a lot of their friends, and talk about the nightmare experience they've just had
• several people get Very Uncomfortable with this, because of course you see said nightmare experience was largely the fault of a group of tme trans people, and to talk about (or worse, vent about) the situation was introducing Discourse into their otherwise quite tranquil little pond
• some of them, in their infinite wisdom, decide to go up to the traumatized primary target of the previously-mentioned mass harassment wave and feel that it's an appropriate course of action to start an argument about how she's actually the transphobic one against trans men, or whatever, and get jumpscared when she spits something mean back at them (the classic "kys 👍" combo)
• i, and several other trans women, watch this happen and get, rightfully, Pissed As Fuck about it what with having just witnessed this entire thing already play out once (with several of us also having been, yknow, secondary victims of the situation)
• the people who thought it was a Grand idea to get in rita's face then decide that it'd be Even Better to keep the party train rolling, searching for posts and users that they can Also start bombarding with bad-faith argumentation
• i, personally, wake up this morning (read: it was like 4 pm, listen my sleep is fucked) with like 45 notifications or something, a hefty chunk of which are all multi-paragraph bad-faith comments on basically anything i've said at all in the past day and a half
• making the choice to not get bogged down in stupid debate club style nonsense, i block someone in particular who is absolutely flooding my comments section and clearly antagonizing me on purpose
• said person then Immediately block evades (and i mean immediately, like, within 10 minutes) to send me an anon message continuing said antagonism
• i spit something mean back at them (the classic "kys 👍" combo)

but, yeah, you know if we delete literally the first 9 bullet points here then maybe you have a point. guess i'll think better next time

My latest piece, Pact and pike, is an in-depth look at the deep networks of aid and resistance built by peasants across feudal Europe. Often dismissed as mindless mobs with pitchforks they instead sparked revolutions in communal organizing and fought their oppressors with a wide array of innovative tactics.

Over a year in the making, this anarchic history winds its way through community pacts, masked secret societies, revolutionary conspiracies, skilled ambushes, peasant militia breaking whole armies and a whole hell of a lot of dead nobles.

(If you like the piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or supporting my writing by donating a few bucks.)

The Notes essay gives some more on the sources behind this history of medieval European peasant revolt, how my interest in the era started as a poor kid in the '90s South and why I think this part of the past is important, especially for anarchists and leftists.

hi everyone,

we wanted to share an update regarding our previous financial update. If you haven’t read that post yet, go check it out first.

in this post we want to respond to some common questions and suggestions, provide an update on what we’re planning to do next, and tell you how you can help.

the numbers

first off: an update on how numbers have changed since our update on Monday. we’ve seen a large increase in cohost plus subscriptions, exceeding our expectations significantly. these numbers are accurate as of yesterday, March 14th (stripe only updates every 24-48 hours):

this is all, objectively, really great! it has been motivating over the last few days to see how much cohost means to a lot of y’all. even with this boost in MRR, we’re still operating at a loss of, on average, $17k per month, so we’ve got some other plans to help make that up.

the good news is the cash infusion from this recent subscriber wave (a bit over $20k after payment processing) combined with some funding offers we’ve received means we’re comfortable saying we’ve got at least six more months to make up that shortfall in one way or another.

more details follow! keep reading!

There's two layers to it. One is fairly utilitarian: if you're trying to hook up for gay sex it's kind of useful to know who's going to be doing what.

The other is that i think a lot of queers don't actually unlearn the harm of sexual binarism and basically recreate the old structures they hated but with fancy fun gay colors instead.

It's fully reasonable to realize your queer identity and breath a huge sigh of relief, to go "wow, I'm so glad I've found a space where I'm not forced to be in that role." But the trap is in taking that relief and moving on without interrogating it.

Why did that suck? Because it hurt you. Okay, true. Why did it hurt you?

A common mistake i see many queers make is that they, feeling an intense resentment to their former enforced identity, respond with "because the identity was bad!"

No. The enforcement was bad. Maybe the enforcement was so bad you can never even approach similar identities again! But it was the enforcement that caused harm.

Gay men who leave enforced heterosexuality may very well turn around and say "heterosexuality was the problem!" And then recreate the most comically misogynistic "women are submissive, men are dominant" dynamics imaginable except with "top" and "bottom" replacing "man" and "woman". Ctrl+F. Because the freedom of homosexuality became about escaping heterosexuality to this strawman, not about escaping the rigid enforcement of heterosexuality.