It wasn’t that long ago that being a gamer meant you were a regressive asshole. Here’s the segment of hbomberguy’s long twitch stream in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows up to talk about the importance of trans rights while the gamer bounces a gorilla around the screen. I know, that part seems weird, but hey, AOC is taking this opportunity to make a clear statement, so you can’t complain.

I have no idea what’s going on on the screen, but the words make sense.

If you’d told me in my youth that someone named hbomberguy would raise over $340,000 for a trans charity called Mermaids by playing Donkey Kong online, I would have said that I’ve heard of Donkey Kong, but could you repeat the rest slowly and explain what each of the words mean, and could you possibly tell me how it all works? Donkey Kong is that big box in the arcade that you push quarters into.

If you then told me that major political figures (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) were dropping in to talk to hbomberguy about the cause…well hang on a moment, this is getting silly.

Then to learn that what motivated this whole episode was that an Irish television writer had become obsessive about denying trans people rights, that’s just too much, I’m going to have to go lie down for a bit.

Sometimes it’s nice how the future turns out to be nothing like what you expected. Although sometimes it’s not so nice. This is one I’m happy to have seen.

By the way, I have met Graham Linehan. He was at a talk I gave in Dublin, and joined the bar crowd afterwards. He seemed nice, but didn’t say much — maybe he hated the talk. I would never have expected him to become such a flaming asshat over trans rights.

By the way, the stream is still ongoing and still accepting donations, although that lazy hbomberguy has taken a break to sleep. And I hope, shower.

I know this kind of argument won’t have any effect on the proponents of purity culture, who are resistant to the whole idea of evidence, but the evidence says the abstinence movement didn’t work. If anything, it had the opposite effect, and people are dealing with the fallout now.

For example, in the early 2000s, Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers began noticing an alarming trend. A clinical sex therapist, family therapist, and associate professor at Seattle Pacific University, she would ask the grad students in her human sexuality class—most of them aspiring therapists—to write the stories of their own sexuality. After years of asking the same questions, she suddenly saw a sharp uptick in students describing feelings of humiliation and disgust toward their bodies and sexual identities. These students all seemed to share a sense of general ignorance and naiveté about sex and relationships, as well as a deep discomfort with natural sexual urges. “This dramatic increase in self-loathing was really heartbreaking for me to see,” says Schermer Sellers. When the trend continued into a third year, she decided to investigate what was behind it.

Digging deeper, she found that many of her students had been involved in youth groups that taught them not only to abstain from sex before marriage, but also that they should not feel any sexual desire at all. “They learned that if you feel [desire], you’re compromising your relationship with God or with your future partner,” she explains. She heard story after story of teenagers circled up in youth group meetings. “They would pass around a slice of pizza, and tell everyone to take one bite out of it, explaining that if you give your heart away while you’re growing up, it’s like giving pieces of yourself away,” she says. “The piece of pizza would go around the circle, and all that would be left was the crust—and this is what you’d give your future partner.” She heard similar tales about shiny pieces of foil being crumpled, or flowers with petals ripped off, or a cup everyone was asked to spit into.

I remember the purity balls and chastity rings and all that other crap that was being pushed off on young kids — it was extreme and bizarre. I wasn’t hoping that my kids were virginal until marriage, which seemed like demanding that they never exhibit any symptoms of illness while not worrying whether they were actually healthy or not. Rather, I was hoping that they developed strong relationships of mutual respect, and what they did with their bodies was their decision, not mine.

I hoped they understood that pizza was something you made fresh, and that it was a bad idea to save the pizza you made at puberty and give it to your partner ten years later. Yuck.

You might want to read this Twitter thread by Siobhan points out how Jesse Singal delicately carves up his sources to only allow views that align with his own perspective through.

Nearly all trans women with any kind of journalistic or public speaking role in their lives has at least come into contact with Jesse Singal's work, if not his person.

Here's my story.

— Siobhan O'Leary (@SiobhanFTB) January 16, 2019

Short version: Singal reported that the controversial “conversion therapy” lab of Kenneth Zucker was shut down for purely political reasons by omitting the words of scientists who pointed out that he was far out of the mainstream of clinical practice.

That kind of slanted reporting is why transgender individuals, you know, the people most endangered by his biases, consider him to be shady and untrustworthy.

This is a really good commercial.

Without saying a single outrageous thing, by presenting a purely optimistic message, it has generated a huge amount of controversy and has everyone talking about it (gosh, I just put it on my blog). It’s selling razor blades, and it doesn’t show any razors — none of the male models in the ad are lathered up, or even in need of a shave or a trim. Nobody is shaving. I’m impressed with how neatly capitalism can exploit both good and bad sentiments to serve the cause of selling stuff.

From another perspective, it’s also cool how it has maneuvered a lot of men into whipping out their manly six-shooters and blasting away at their feet. The message is that bullying, sexual harassment, and condoning bad behavior with silent assent are bad, but that good men can and will oppose such behavior, which has provoked the peculiar, guilt-ridden response of “how dare Gillette accuse me of bullying and harassment!”, completely missing the opportunity to identify with the good-looking, well-groomed men who are stopping bullying and harassment. You’ve got a chance to see yourself mirrored in commendable behavior, or oppressive behavior, and thousands of men are screaming, “How dare you criticize my choice to catcall, or mansplain, or punch people!”

And now everyone is selling razors for Gillette. It’s a marvel.

That’s a challenge. I’d like to see him try. He and Tucker Carlson have this thing going where they screw up their faces and pretend to ignorance, as if it were to their credit, and the routine is getting old fast.

His latest schtick is to declare that women are disgusting if they don’t shave off all their body hair.

Morgan and co-host Susanna Reid were discussing the new campaign ‘Januhairy‘, which encourages women to not shave their armpits and embrace their natural hair.

But Morgan was repulsed by the idea, and after being shown images of celebrities who have decided not to shave – including Lady Gaga, Madonna and Julia Roberts – the GMB presenter said he died inside.

Reid asked Morgan if he shaved his pits, to which he replied a firm, No.

“Is that laziness?” Reid then asked.

No because women don’t have a problem with that. But men don’t fancy women who let it all out in January.

Apparently, someone needs to urgently inform Lady Gaga, Madonna and Julia Roberts, and all other women, that it is their duty to satisfy Piers Morgan’s sexual kinks. I think they need to grow even more body hair, because if a few tufts of armpit hair make him die inside, a bit more fuzz might make him die the rest of the way, which would be nice.

Also curious if women out there really want to know anything about Piers Morgan’s armpits, because I didn’t. I could have lived a long, contented life without ever considering Morgan’s body hair, and I feel like him forcing me to think about it was a terrible violation.

Here’s something even worse: Kate Smurthwaite appeared on Susanna Reid’s show (Morgan is just the dull sidekick there) to talk about why women shouldn’t feel compelled to shave, and he got totally sidetracked with the revelation that Smurthwaite is polyamorous…so he had to jack up the creepiness quotient by pestering her with prurient little questions.

Kate Smurthwaite, a comedian, was describing how her hairy armpits have never stopped her from finding a lover, and Piers was desperate to get back to his conversation.

He asked her: Can I talk about your polyamorous thing for a minute, because I’ve never heard of this thing? What does that mean?

Oh god. He’s never heard of this thing. Right. That was just an excuse to continue to probe into a woman’s sex life, in public.

Why does this horrible little man appear on television? Promise me, English-type persons, you’re not going to someday elect him to be prime minister, are you? Because that seems to be a common trajectory in our little colony, rising from cheap bigoted ‘entertainer’ to high office. I’d hate to see it happen to you.

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If you’d like to see the whole episode, here it is. Morgan was more of a sleazy prat than I imagined, and Smurthwaite was smart, classy, and funny.

I’ve been told that an old friend has become profoundly illogical. This bothers me.

It’s a reply to a fairly mundane tweet.

Hello cis friends, here is a reminder that it's okay to feel confused about trans rights. It's something very much outside of our experience and therefore hard to imagine.

Do you know what our role is when we feel confused like this? It's to shut the hell up and listen.

— Fiona Longmuir 🍂 (@EscapologistFi) December 22, 2018

Here’s the response:

Bad beginning, taking “cis” as 1) a meaningful and useful descriptive and 2) an obviously privileged and dominant group that needs to check itself. I don’t recognize “not thinking I’m the sex I’m not” as a form of privilege, any more than I recognize “not thinking I’m a bird” as a form of privilege. The word “cis” is pretty much designed to make people feel guilty and defensive simply for not having a bizarre delusion. Granted, it’s convenient not to have a bizarre delusion, but convenience isn’t exactly the same thing as privilege.

1) Cis does have a sensible meaning. It refers to someone whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Even if you don’t like it, you have to acknowledge that there are people whose gender identity does not match their assigned sex, making this a meaningful and useful descriptor. Or do you think trans people are actually comfortable and identify with their assigned sex? Are they just making it all up? Why?

2) Our society favors people who conform to cisgender expectations, so of course if you don’t conform, you’re disadvantaged. Right here in this post the author is expressing scorn for people who don’t fit her expectations. I rather despise the “oh so you identify as an attack helicopter” criticism, since birdness or helicopterness aren’t in the range of human behavior, but the “bird” argument doesn’t hold up either. There are people who find social gratification in identifying as an animal — look up furries sometime — and yeah, they face mockery for it, and lacking those desires is a privilege.

Also, if you regard trans people as mentally ill as this person does (I don’t), that doesn’t get you out of the claim that you aren’t privileged for not being mentally ill.

I’m cis. The person who wrote that tweet is saying they’re cis. I don’t feel guilty or defensive, and neither do they. Cis is a non-judmental description of a state that fits most people, used to distinguish them from the minority who are trans. It certainly was not “designed” to provoke guilt, just as heterosexual is not a term calculated to instill shame in us straight guys, and just as white is not a dirty word calculated to make European-Americans feel miserable and embarrassed about their ancestry.

There’s some projection going on here. If someone uses “trans” as an expression of contempt, then maybe they’re only able to see the complementary, neutral, descriptive term “cis” as carrying similar intent. These are the same people who see the accurate and neutral term Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) as some horrible defamatory slur, for the same reason.

This is coming from a person I tried to defend as not a TERF, once upon a time. Boy, was I wrong.