As all two of you may have noticed, the blag went silent for a bit. There’s nothing wrong in my meatspace, thankfully, but I recently concluded that a lot of the discourse on gender variance hasn’t been rewarding for me. The same myths continue to be stubbornly peddled, even in respected media outlets, and the material I’ve written to debunk them remains relevant. There just isn’t much point in constantly re-litigating the same lies over and over. At this stage I can just link to the work that’s already done, and can likely continue to do so until there is some major development that shifts scientific consensus. The discourse is stale, and giving me nosebleeds.

The bottleneck for progress now isn’t typically that the research hasn’t been conducted–instead, it’s how willing you are to look for it. Dedicated antagonists to trans rights have an entire industry that creates the trappings of a scientific veneer while selling the same snake oil, and I know no amount of fact-checking will get through to them because it’s not the consensus they’re motivated by. As for the on-the-fencers, the only success I’ve had reaching them is in meatspace, where it is harder (possible, just harder) to dehumanize someone face to face. It seems to be a waste to try over the internet.

In combination with that, I’ve started to receive some traction getting non-fiction work published. This is partly the work I’ve figured out I want to pursue. While I don’t mean to disrespect FTB, it’s certainly nice to do the same work and get a fat cheque at the end. I can paint a picture of what pursuing this work full-time might look like, which makes it all the more tempting to set it as a goal. But it also means my blag has become superfluous as I originally conceived it.

It’s not that I’ll never discuss gender variance again, it just seems that there is more fertile ground on applying existing theory rather than further developing it. I’ve got some preliminary findings that suggest ways to marry labour organizing to minority liberation, for example, and that seems to me more interesting than rehashing Sarah Ditum’s repeated lies and also too niche for corporate media. Anti-authoritarianism has been the north star in my political activity for the past year, so it seems more fruitful to discuss prison abolition or widespread surveillance or questions about the sales pitch you received on law enforcement in your history class.

I’m under no illusions that these issues, too, will likely be subject to the same lies over and over. Perhaps when I’ve hit that point I’ll need to re-calibrate again. But for the time being it’s more interesting to me, and there’s no point to investing this much time in a blag covering a topic that has ceased to satisfy me. It doesn’t pay enough to do something that feels onerous.

Aside from that, I’ve had a fiction project I’ve been sitting on for too long, and publicly announcing it might nudge me into being accountable for finishing it. So look forward to that in the near future, too.

New content to come soon.

-Shiv