he/him

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Because there’s several comment chains about the use of pronouns and I wasn’t quite sure where to add this, I decided to do a top level comment. She wrote an autobiographical retrospective of her transition on her University of Michigan faculty page twenty years ago about a transition that started long before that (and her main faculty page is a fascinating time capsule of trans history). When I came out as trans in 2012 her page was already a bit dated and the start of my transition, as I experienced it, was firmly in the bad old days. Conway was part of a much older generation of trans people, and there were narratives we had to force ourselves into in order to access healthcare, especially the ideas that we always knew and the idea of being born in the wrong body, and (in her generation but not mine) the idea that you had to be heterosexual post-transition. For some, it fit well enough, but for others it was an act for the doctors just to get life saving healthcare.

    The obituary I posted reads like it was written twenty years ago and would have been incredibly respectful back then. It’s narratively in line with the framework of stories trans people had available to explain their lived experiences in the generation Lynn Conway was part of, and ones that Conway herself used extensively in her autobiographical work. I’m glad public understanding has grown and the narrative frameworks available have expanded. I feel like the obituary is in line with her own lived experiences as she understood them.











  • I used to live in a small Minnesota town and the only liquor store was run by the city. The prices were reasonable for how rural we were, and apparently some of the profits helped with city expenses. However, there was a grocery store 15 years ago or so that apparently wanted to open in the town and also have it’s own liquor store, but the town denied their permits for the liquor store for officially unclear reasons, lol.

    Getting someone else to buy it isn’t actually the only way kids get it in states with really loose liquor laws - when I was a teen, I heard of a few places, mostly gas stations, that never carded. Eventually they got busted by the cops, but they sold a lot of booze to my friends before that happened. I don’t think that’s justification for exclusively state run liquor stores though. But I bet the people working at government run stores get better benefits and more stable hours than the ones working for private businesses…


  • I grew up in Florida, where you can buy hard liquor in some gas stations, and now I live in Minnesota, which is now the last state with 3.2 beer - but we got Sunday liquor sales a few years ago (possibly because everyone in the Twin Cities would just go to Wisconsin if they wanted beer on Sunday) and now legal weed. A lot of grocery stores have attached liquor stores and it’s not a big deal, but it’s still silly.

    EDIT: we also passed a right to repair law last year. We’re flat Colorado for cheap!