Jesse…What the fuck are you talking about?

The prefix trans comes from Latin and means “On the far side of” wherever you’re currently standing. So transportation takes you from one place to another.

To be transgender, your gender identity, expression, etc. Moves from one gender to another. So that could be in a binary way, from male to female, or vice versa.

Or it could mean you’re going from male, to something in the middle, or otherwise not related to the traditional gender binary. You’re still trans, you’re just moving to a less expected part of the proverbial map.

The word transgender was pushed heavily by Leslie Feinberg, who was nonbinary. They also considered themselves a lesbian, and even transitioned to living as a man for many years in their youth.

I bring this up because I find that cis people, and even some trans people, want to put everything into nice neat little boxes, and queerness has just never worked that way. A term like LGBT implies that each of those letters is a discreet identity box, when in reality, all of these ideas and labels are a complex overlaping series of ven diagrams and umbrella terms.

Source: am Nonbinary and Bisexual.

I keep seeing reports that Nex walked into the living room the next day, complaining of a headache, collapsed, and was rushed to the hospital where they died.

Everything about that, and their initial state, immediately after the fight, are classic head trauma symptoms. If what ultimately killed Nex was something like a subdural hematoma, then I guess you could argue that the death was not directly a result of the trauma? But the causal chain of events is incredibly obvious.

Mao and Stalin (though to a noticably lesser extent) actually had insightful things to say though. Mao’s essays on epistemology are genuinely really fantastic. And that can be true alongside all of the show trials and sparrow murder which was genuinely really fucking bad.

Pol Pot meanwhile admitted to never having really ever read Marx, and his faction of the Communist Party of Cambodia was more concerned about Khmer ultranationalism and anti-Vietmamese sentiment that had been brewing over the course of French colonialism, then with anything to do with building socialism.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that we ought to take a nuanced, grounded view of historic socialisms that accounts for their success and failures, and doesn’t fall into either mindless exoneration of awful shit, nor reflexively screeching “TANKIE TANKIE!!!” Every time anything vaguely socialist oriented comes up in discussion.