When we talk about health research, we usually stick to two biological sexes: male and female. But this ignores many important factors for our health and well-being, including gender.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/gender-in-health-research-why-it-matters-be5fd3b0f296

CONSERVATIVE MORALITY?

"The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

(Kevin D. Roberts, Foreword to Project 2025)

So conservatives think that "transgender" is inherently "pornographic"?

PS Why is it conservatives who are always arrested for forcing their exposed dick on someone?

If J K Rowling is so against identifying as a different #gender, why does she also write under a male pseudonym?

Asking for a friend

Edit: added the "#" symbol

Also, nur damit ich es richtig verstehe. Das hier ist dieser "sympathische Reformer" und "Anwalt der Armen" wegen dem jetzt wieder alle Anteilnahme heucheln?

#PennedPossibilities 649 — What research did you conduct for your WIP, and did you uncover anything surprising or fascinating?

When you are writing 31 chapters in 31 days and posting a chapter a day, having only come up with the idea and character the day before starting, research is a concept dealt with by quick and dirty searches. I did have one interesting factino in my pocket, though. I'd found an article about growing fungus to make building blocks for construction on Mars, and knew the blocks might help repel radiation. Another recent article spoke about inflating a balloon for a habitat. I combined both ideas in the 4th chapter titled Glue. Beyond that, I spent quite a bit of time Googling things about 16 Psyche (an asteroid) and learned that Martian dust is poisonous, and like moon dust, pernicious. Recent NASA tests lofted by a private company to the moon proves that electostatic grids can capture or repel dust. I used that. Much of the rest of the technology I punted on. I realized green minerals on Mars might be rare, so I backtracked on some red-green-black ferric metaphors. Yesterday, I read up on planetary transfer orbits and made changes to the revised novel. I also learned about the Lunar Gateway space station concept, and will revise that concept when I get to revising the relevant chapter.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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NATO tries sound less ‘woke’ in attempt to get Donald Trump on board | World | News https://www.byteseu.com/940880/ #Climate #CultureWar #defence #DEI #diversity #DonaldTrump #Europe #EuropeanDefence #Gender #Military #NATO #Russia #USA #Woke

If you are in the group of men who think gender equality has “gone too far”, please punch yourself in the neck and disappear into a dark cave where you belong.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-21/men-and-women-are-more-divided-and-it-could-sway-the-election/105188052

#WordWeavers 2504.20 — If someone gave you a million dollars (or equivalent) to never write again, would you take it?

I spent a lifetime scrimping, saving, investing, and being frugal to get to this point. Retirement. Now they offer me a million dollars? Sheesh. Gonna have to make me a better offer to stop me from doing what I like to do. [Sticks out tongue, makes raspberry.]

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.20 — What rôle does religion play in your writing?

Religiosity is important in many of my stories, even when it is as prominent as vacuum by its absence. Usually, I don't write in the point of view of the religious, but I did write an SF novel in the point of view of a shaman. I'd lived in Bali for awhile, and having studied the culture and theatre of the island during college, felt I had a feel for animism. At university, I studied religions and non-western cultures as part of my degree, as well as folklore and mythology. I find it fascinating. At least as far as my writing goes my degree has proved useful.

More often I write about how people wield religion to abuse society. My latest novel (now in revision) pits a fictional religion and a theocratic plutocracy (where our world is headed) against one woman's quest for freedom. It is the background main antagonist. For the people in the other WIP, the concept of a supernatural or the divine is absurd; they don't even have words for it in their vocabulary. Nevertheless, the MCs are destined to face people who bear unusual ideas about how reality actually functions, who might react badly when upon meeting a woman with bull horns and a man with ruby-edged white feathered wings.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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Are cute #children's #books teaching #kids about #gender and #sexuality? #SupremeCourt to weigh in

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/20/supreme-court-lgbtq-storybooks-religion/83123106007/

we shouldn't overlook how #gender plays a role in the #fact that it has been largely #immigrant men being kidnapped and imprisoned, how #patriarchal views on maleness is fundamental to the racist fearmongering around immigrant criminality and violence towards specifically white citizen women & girls. just as much as patriarchy is always a factor in how society interacts with people seen as women, it is always a factor with people seen as men. labeling all immigrant men as violent gang members...

https://www.europesays.com/uk/35671/ Supreme Court case pits religious rights versus schools’ use of LGBTQ books #BillyMoges #Books #Censorship #Children #Courts #Discrimination #Education #Entertainment #gender #GeneralNews #LGBTQ+ #Maryland #MarylandStateGovernment #MDStateWire #Royalty #SchoolCurricula #Schools #U.S.News #UK #UnitedKingdom #WashingtonNews

On Radio 4's PM show on Friday, Lord Sumption said many people were misinterpreting the UK Supreme Court's judgement around The Equality Act. He said the judgement means organisations *can* exclude trans women from women's spaces/competitions, but that they are not *obliged* to do so. Yet today's #Observer editorial repeats the compulsory exclusion line.
Personally, I'm gonna try and find time to read the full 87 page judgment.
#gender #trans
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029zg9?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

#PennedPossibilities 648 — MC POV: Tell us about your home.

[Streak:] I live in an apartment building near the edge of the better part of town. It's remarkable for being in a neighborhood populated by day angels because it's not a village tree nor built into a hill, but a conventional building. I live there with my sisters and my mother, and I'm the middle child. My room is little better than a small pantry or a large closet, but I'm happy for it. My sisters hate me because I had to raise them and set rules (long story), so I'm thankful for a window I can fly in and out of, a black lacquer floor desk, where I keep my books, and a place to unroll a sleeping mat. Baskets and hampers hold my things. You would call the place a boarding house where you live. The apartment is only three bed rooms and a kitchen. The rain room (showers) are on the shared entry floor at the end of the hall, opposite the entry with the post boxes, next to the squats. Both utility rooms are unisex, so you'd better knock before entering.

[Thorn:] I'm a daemon, but live in what many consider a bad neighborhood populated by day angels. It's a village tree house my mother bought because she feels safer there than amongst people who look like us but refuse to accept us as their equals. Our entire nest is called an aerie, and it once belonged to a famous day angel who rebelled against the government a century and a half ago. It requires us to climb ladders to enter it and to levitate provisions to stock it.

My room is a chamber grown from a flattened lateral branch, in a crotch between an auxiliary trunk and uprights. The floor slopes upward and my bedstead is in a hammock across what amounts to a raised dias. I've a nightstand that is a cut-off stump. It's opposite from the casement windows installed at the lower end of the space. I'm thankful for the door like crank windows because they're convenient for when Streak comes to visit—when Mother isn't home, obviously! They provide light despite the tree's heavy canopy, and are enough that foliage forms an interior ceiling and I can culture moss and lichen as carpeting so I don't have to wear slippers to protect my feet from the bark. Smaller windows with rainbow-stained wedged rock glass also provide light to fill in shadowy corners during day light, and can be tilted to encourage convective circulation.

My desk is a form of wood ear mushroom, the top of which is polished to a glassy sheen. The shelves scattered up and down the walls for my hundreds of books are a combination of the same myco-archeculture and woven smaller branches.

I've hung posters by red ribbons, so as not to hurt the living tree, including a grand one Mother bought me of an exploded diagram of the structure of the crystal spheres. After our adventures with Rainy Days, I've also hung enlargements of pictures the woman gave us of her and Streak, though I know he finds them embarrassing. I can't help but admire my boyfriend's best attributes.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.19 — How do you feel about using real people as look-alikes for your characters?

I don't. I don't imagine faces very well. That could be due my shyness; I didn't learn to look people in the face until I was in my late teens and I attended EST; learning to look people in the eyes, and to hold it, was a necessity for graduation from that seminar.

As a result, I can't imagine faces. Never learned how? People were voices or hands as I grew up. As a corollary: I don't need to. Mostly, I only minimally describe characters. Interestingly enough, if something gets described, if is almost inevitably eye color.

If my latest story, the MC is never described directly. Her only attributes we learn are she's a woman, she looks like she could bear children but is otherwise very average, and she has dark hair because some of her daughters take after her in this respect. She could be Asian, she could be Sicilian with this description.

Who knows? The reader will imagine what they think she looks like, and that's probably better than what I could come up with.

As for creatures and vehicles and places? I find pictures help me describe them. Go figure. The linked image is what I've used to imagine and describe the "red dragon" in Inklings, which is a giant bat wyvern.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b3/8f/7b/b38f7b59d5eb5afddc25d1187a4d6e91.jpg

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Very positive gender feels from just being soft and smooth after self-care day

#WordWeavers 2504.19 — Have you ever learned something about yourself from your characters?

Almost every creative writing course instructor I've met has justified students taking the course on psychological grounds, not as a vehicle to learn the craft. They say something on the order of "write to get it out of you," the "it" being anger, trauma, toxicity, anxiety, unaddressed or unadmitted abuse or guilt.

Me? I scoffed. Of course, I did, because I was young and naïve.

For the vast number of people, creative writing won't become a craft—it'll become an outlet, maybe a confessional booth. It can lead to journaling or short stories nobody ever reads, something hidden in a dusty box or burned ritually in a fireplace. It might remain totally private. Or, these folk might write novels.

People tell stories about "somebody they know" in distress. Don't they?

We write from experience. I do. I admit it. My thinking my SF and fantasy wasn't that, also, was what I meant by my being "naïve" before. Yes, I've realized, and should have from the beginning, that my characters are how I work out my emotions and frustrations, how I learn about myself—and I've learned so much! However, since it's also personal, all I'm going to admit is that beyond my attempts at entertaining you and trying to say something meaningful about our world so I'm not simply contributing to the noise, my writing (the verb) has been therapeutic and my characters have taught me much about myself.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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