Blogaround

1. RIP Tony Campolo (1935-2024) (November 20) "It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming."

2. Journal Club: The Bedroom and the Laboratory (November 20) "This chapter discusses some of the problems with the methodologies used in sex therapy, and the clinical study of sexuality." This was really eye-opening to me. I had always assumed sexology was about getting to the bottom of the grand mystery of why people like to have their partner do things to their genitals. Turns out it's not. Turns out it's the same confusing concepts of "how do I increase my sex drive" etc.

3. D&D Combinatorics (November 22) Love this xkcd.

4. House passes bill that would allow Treasury to strip nonprofits of tax-exempt status (November 21, via) "The U.S. House passed a bill Thursday that would authorize the treasury secretary to designate nonprofit organizations as supporters of terrorism and strip them of tax-exempt status." This is worrying.

5. The Adult Vaccine Assessment Tool (via) The CDC has a little interactive tool which can recommend vaccines you may need. Cool!

6. Sarah McBride And The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Criticism (November 24) "If McBride is caving in fear (and Yr Wonkette does not think she is), that’s not McBride’s fault. That’s the fault of 200 House Dems and 200 million Americans who oppose anti-trans bullying and could choose to step up (or step up more) but don’t."

So the story here is that Sarah McBride is the first trans person to be elected to Congress, and the Republican members of Congress are being weird about it and making rules that she can't use the women's bathrooms because she counts as a man. McBride responded by saying she will follow the rules; her intention is not to get involved in that drama but to do the work that her constituents elected her for.

Some trans people and allies have criticized McBride for not fighting back. (See this post from Erin Reed.) The post I'm linking here is from Crip Dyke, who says it's NOT COOL that people are criticising McBride for this.

Yes- she is the first trans Congress person, she is going to have to deal with a lot of this kind of bigotry, and you can't expect her to respond in whatever way *you* think a perfect activist would respond. She's just 1 person. It's not fair to put all that on her. Really, this is a moment where allies need to step up and take a stand against the bigots, rather than expecting McBride to do that all by herself.

Also, initially when I read McBride's statement that she would "follow the rules as outlined", I took that to mean she would use the men's bathroom (and maybe this would be a form of protest- everyone would see how ridiculous it was that she is forced to use the men's bathroom). But then after reading Erin Reed's article, I thought maybe trans people don't really consider that a real option because of the worry of being harassed in the bathroom, and actually this means McBride is gonna have to walk all the way to wherever the gender-neutral bathroom is, and it will be a huge inconvenience for her and won't affect the Republican bigots at all. But then Crip Dyke's article talked about getting a bunch of trans people together to protest by using the bathroom the bigots apparently want them to use. So. It could go either way I guess.

7. The Sanitary Pad Scandal Causing Uproar on Chinese Social Media (November 26) "In one clip, an influencer measures the lengths of the absorbent pads inside products made by leading Chinese brands including ABC, Sofy, and Space 7, and compares them with the product sizes listed on the packaging, which refer to the total pad lengths." 

Here's something really interesting about China: The lengths of pads (in cm or mm) are very explicitly advertised. Like it will be right there as part of the product name on the packaging. Zero effort is required to see "oh these pads are 25 cm, these pads are 29 cm" and so on. When you buy pads in the US... in the US I never thought about the length in inches or cm. (Assuming nothing has changed since I bought pads in the US a decade ago.) You have "long" or "super long", or you have "day" vs "night" with "night" being designed to go much farther in the back- but does anyone ever think about "well how many inches is that?" I'm sure you could find it in the fine print on the packaging in the US, but it's not big and obvious like in China.