#i have so many questions for the algorithm

[thriftedtchotchkes]

alright pinterest, go off

[psychic-waffles]

Tumblr ads have never been even remotely normal but can someone explain to me why for WEEKS they've been trying to sell me copious amounts of hazardous chemical dichloromethane

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co

[syoish-aot]

Does anyone else get frustrated by late stage capitalism's obsession with the monetization of free time?

[elibeeline]

Its uni season and im once again debating online courses i cannot afford

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

i think what it boils down to is that if it was some rando here who commented that shit on that post, i would have a very strong, quite visceral reaction to it. along the lines of "uh no dumbass, if your anticapitalism relies on antisemitic dogwhistles (or excusing and handwaving away of said dogwhistles) then it's not actually very good at all. bringin in israel for good measure as well when it was literally not about that at all. it really sounds like youve done little to no work at all in deconstructing your own antisemitic biases" but bc shes my friend on fb i feel like i have to be gentler and nicer than that. when really that is the gist of what im trying to say. it keeps turning into 3 miles long paragraphs. ive been trying to respond this comment for like 4 days

[phishykunt]

[anaquariusfox]

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine!

edit: ArtStation is not AI free! So make sure to read that when signing up if you do! (this post is also on twt)

[Image descriptions: A series of infographics titled: “Opt Out AI: [Social Media] and what I found.” The title image shows a drawing of a person holding up a stack of papers where the first says, ‘Terms of Service’ and the rest have logos for various social media sites and are falling onto the floor. Long transcriptions follow.

Instagram/Meta (I have to assume Facebook).

Hard for all users to locate the “opt out” options. The option has been known to move locations.

You have to click the opt out link to submit a request to opt out of the AI scraping. *You have to submit screenshots of your work/face/content you posted to the app, is curretnly being used in AI. If you do not have this, they will deny you.

Users are saying after being rejected, are being “meta blocked”

People’s requests are being accepted but they still have doubts that their content won’t be taken anyways.

Twitter/X

As of August 2023, Twitter’s ToS update:

“Twitter has the right to use any content that users post on its platform to train its AI models, and that users grant Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to do so.”

There isn’t much to say. They’re doing the same thing Instagram is doing (to my understanding) and we can’t even opt out.

Tumblr

They also take your data and content and sell it to AI models.

But you’re in luck!

It is very simply to opt out (Wow. Thank Gods)

Opt out on Desktop: click on your blog > blog settings > scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle

Out out of Mobile: click your blog > scroll then click visibility > toggle opt out option

TikTok

I took time skim their ToS and under “How We Use Your Information” and towards the end of the long list: “To train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms.”

Regarding data collected; they will only not sell your data when “where restricted by applicable law”. That is not many countries. You can refuse/disable some cookies by going into settings > ads > turn off targeted ads.

I couldn’t find much in AI besides “our machine learning models” which I think is the same thing.

What to do?

In this age of the internet, it’s scary! But you have options and can pick which are best for you!

Accepting these platforms collection of not only your artwork, but your face! And not only your faces but the faces of those in your photos. Your friends and family. Some of those family members are children! Some of those faces are minors! I shudder to think what darker purposes those faces could be used for.

Opt out where you can! Be mindful and know the content you are posting is at risk of being loaded to AI if unable to opt out.

Fully delete (not archive) your content/accounts with these platforms. I know it takes up to 90 days for instagram to “delete” your information. And even keep it for “legal” purposes like legal prevention.

Use lesser known social media platforms! Some examples are; Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, et. As well as art platforms: Artfol, Cara, ArtStation, etc.

The last drawing shows the same person as the title saying, ‘I am, by no means, a ToS autistic! So feel free to share any relatable information to these topics via reply or qrt!

I just wanted to share the information I found while searching for my own answers cause I’m sure people have the same questions as me.’ \End description] (thank you @a-captions-blog!)

[r0semultiverse]

Woah.... tumblr hasn’t recommended my blog to new users since I woke up, I think. Damn... (was hoping more people would follow my twitch and stuff) now out of the 5k+ new people, I wonder how many are bots. Guess we’ll see as the follower numbers fluctuate.

I still wonder what qualifies a blog to be recommended in the onboarding process. Is it that I use the “art” tag a lot as one of my popular tags? Is it that I’ve been here since 2013? Is it a mix of both things? Maybe it’s like Pinterest where you follow or select a certain number of interests that correlate to blogs in this case? Is it also attributed to the fact that I’ve made so many posts (reblogs count towards total post count) from being active on here for so many years?

Keep in mind, I have no idea what the 2023 tumblr sign-up process is like. I’ve only heard that supposedly you have to follow a couple blogs before you can do stuff, whatever that means and encompasses is outside of my knowledge sphere.

[hcneymooners]

the odd soft launch of homophobia is starting to truly irk me.

there’s been a lot of conversation lately about paige and azzi and the nature of their relationship, and to be honest, it feels so clear to me that what they have goes beyond friendship. there’s something about their connection that feels deep, unspoken—like they’re soul-tied. but amid the speculation, i've also seen people call out the "deniers," saying things like, “at this point, y’all are just being homophobic.” and while i’ve hesitated to say anything, i do think this conversation is worth having—because, honestly, yes.

yes, a lot of the reactions to it are rooted in something deeper and more uncomfortable.

for a long time now, i’ve seen people deny anything could possibly be going on between the two of them. they say it’s to protect the girls or to respect their privacy—but under that, i think there’s a fear. a fear of what it would mean if they were together. because then they’d be “those” people. part of a group that still gets othered, questioned, and in many cases, rejected. and when you factor in paige’s strong christian faith—which has drawn in a lot of religious, often conservative fans—it gets even more complicated.

i think it’s easy to believe we live in a progressive world when you’ve tailored both your real life and your algorithm to reflect that, but the truth is that culture has shifted heavily to conservatism. people are bolder now in the ways they talk about marginalized people, even if they’re trying to dress it up as concern. i saw someone comment on a video calling paige a “real woman”—and it just reinforced this feeling i’ve had.

there’s this uncomfortable desire to fit them into a narrow, safe idea of womanhood and straightness. and to be even more honest, for a lot of people, it’s about wanting paige—blonde, blue-eyed, that “all-american” look—to not be with a mixed, black woman like azzi. no one says it out loud, but the silence is loud enough.

i think a lot about how society still doesn’t take relationships between women seriously. we see it over and over again—sapphic relationships being dismissed as “just a phase” or romantic friendships. there’s a safety in calling someone your best friend, especially when the world isn’t safe enough to call them your partner. and people eat that narrative up because it lets them ignore what’s right in front of them. and i see that happening constantly with paige and azzi. it’s almost like people need to believe it’s not real, just so they can stay comfortable.

at the end of the day, they’re free to conduct their relationship however they want—it’s theirs. they don’t owe us anything. but i do think some of you need to partake in some serious self-reflection: why does the idea of them being together make you uncomfortable? is it really about protecting them? or is it about protecting your idea of them? how much of your reaction is shaped by internalized homophobia or racial bias?

and i say this gently, but also truthfully: some of y’all are projecting strange fantasies onto these girls, especially paige. there’s a level of obsession, of placing her on this untouchable pedestal, that honestly starts to feel more about possession than admiration.

it’s worth questioning what’s really going on there because it’s uncomfortable to witness.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gandersauce

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for<p>placehold://://er </p> my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in AUSTIN on MONDAY (Mar 10). I'm also appearing at SXSW and at many events around town, for Creative Commons and Fediverse House. More tour dates here.

It's true that capitalists by and large hate capitalism – given their druthers, entrepreneurs would like to attain a perch from which they get to set prices and wages and need not fear competitors. A market where everything is up for grabs is great – if you're the one doing the grabbing. Less so if you're the one whose profits, customers and workers are being grabbed at.

But while all capitalists hate all capitalism, a specific subset of capitalists really, really hate a specific kind of capitalism. The capitalists who hate capitalism the most are Big Tech bosses, and the capitalism they hate the most is techno-capitalism. Specifically, the techno-capitalism of the first decade of this century – the move fast/break things capitalism, the beg forgiveness, not permission capitalism, the blitzscaling capitalism.

The capitalism tech bosses hate most of all is disruptive capitalism, where a single technological intervention, often made by low-resourced individuals or small groups, can upend whole industries. That kind of disruption is only fun when you're the disruptor, but it's no fun for the disruptees.

Jeff Bezos's founding mantra for Amazon was "your margin is my opportunity." This is a classic disruption story: I'm willing to take a smaller profit than the established players in the industry. My lower prices will let me poach their customers, so I grow quickly and find more opportunities to cut margins but make it up in volume. Bezos described this as a flywheel that would spin faster and faster, rolling up more and more industries. It worked!

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/10/at-amazon-the-flywheel-effect-drives-innovation/

The point of that flywheel wasn't the low prices, of course. Amazon is a paperclip-maximizing artificial intelligence, and the paperclip it wants to maximize is profits, and the path to maximum profits is to charge infinity dollars for things that cost you zero dollars. Infinite prices and nonexistent wages are Amazon's twin pole-stars. Amazon warehouse workers don't have to be injured at three times the industry average, but maiming workers is cheaper than keeping them in good health. Once Amazon vanquished its competitors and captured the majority of US consumers, it raised prices, and used its market dominance to force everyone else to raise their prices, too. Call it "bezosflation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

We could disrupt Amazon in lots of ways. We could scrape all of Amazon's "ASIN" identifiers and make browser plugins that let local sellers advertise when they have stock of the things you're about to buy on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

We could hack the apps that monitor Amazon drivers, from their maneuvers to their eyeballs, so drivers had more autonomy and their bosses couldn't punish them for prioritizing their health and economic wellbeing over Amazon's. An Amazon delivery app mod could even let drivers earn extra money by delivering for Amazon's rivals while they're on their routes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

We could sell Amazon customers virtual PVRs that let them record and keep the shows they like, which would make it easier to quit Prime, and would kill Amazon's sleazy trick of making all the Christmas movies into extra-cost upsells from November to January:

https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00007nmv9XSAQ/why-arent-all-the-christmas-movies-available-through-prime-its-a-pandemic-we-are-stuck-at-home-please-add-the-oldies-but-goodies-to-prime

Rival audiobook stores could sell jailbreaking kits for Audible subscribers who want to move over to a competing audiobook platform, stripping Amazon's DRM off all their purchases and converting the files to play on a non-Amazon app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Jeff Bezos's margin could be someone else's opportunity…in theory. But Amazon has cloaked itself – and its apps and offerings – in "digital rights management" wrappers, which cannot be removed or tampered with under pain of huge fines and imprisonment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Amazon loves to disrupt, talking a big game about "free markets and personal liberties" – but let someone attempt to do unto Amazon as Amazon did unto its forebears, and the company will go running to Big Government for a legal bailout, asking the state to enforce its business model:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-bezos-opinion-trump-market-liberty-97a7d8113d670ec6e643525fdf9f06de

You'll find this cowardice up and down the tech stack, wherever you look. Apple launched the App Store and the iTunes Store with all kinds of rhetoric about how markets – paying for things, rather than getting them free through ads – would correct the "market distortions." Markets, we were told, would produce superior allocations, thanks to price and demand signals being conveyed through the exchange of money for goods and services.

But Apple will not allow itself to be exposed to market forces. They won't even let independent repair shops compete with their centrally planned, monopoly service programs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Much less allow competitors to create rival app stores that compete for users and apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

They won't even refurbishers re-sell parts from phones and laptops that are beyond repair:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/108049/apple-repair-critic-louis-rossmann-takes-on-us-customs-counterfeit-battery-seizure

And they take the position that if you do manage to acquire a donor part from a dead phone or laptop, that it is a felony – under the same DRM laws that keep Amazon's racket intact – to install them in a busted device:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24097042/right-to-repair-law-oregon-sb1596-parts-pairing-tina-kotek-signed

"Rip, mix, burn" is great when it's Apple doing the ripping, mixing and burning, but let anyone attempt to return the favor and the company turns crybaby, whining to Customs and Border Patrol and fed cops to protect itself from being done unto as it did.

Should we blame the paperclip-maximizing Slow AI corporations for attempting to escape disruptive capitalism's chaotic vortex? I don't think it matters: I don't deplore this whiny cowardice because it's hypocritical. I hate it because it's a ripoff that screws workers, customers and the environment.

But there is someone I do blame: the governments that pass the IP laws that allow Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants shut down anyone who wants to disrupt them. Those governments are supposed to work for us, and yet they passed laws – like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – that felonize reverse-engineering, modding and tinkering. These laws create an enshittogenic environment, which produces enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Bad enough that the US passed these laws and exposed Americans to the predatory conduct of tech enshittifiers. But then the US Trade Representative went slithering all over the world, insisting that every country the US trades with pass their own versions of the laws, turning their citizens into an all-you-can-steal buffet for US tech gougers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#necensuraninadados

This system of global "felony contempt of business-model" statutes came into being because any country that wanted to export to the USA without facing tariffs had to pass a law banning reverse-engineering of tech products in order to get a deal. That's why farmers all over the world can't fix their tractors without paying John Deere hundreds of dollars for each repair the farmer makes to their own tractor:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

But with Trump imposing tariffs on US trading partners, there is now zero reason to keep those laws on the books around the world, and every reason to get rid of them. Every country could have the kind of disruptors who start a business with just a little capital, aimed directly at the highest margins of these stupidly profitable, S&P500-leading US tech giants, treating those margins as opportunities. They could jailbreak HP printers so they take any ink-cartridge; jailbreak iPhones so they can run any app store; jailbreak tractors so farmers can fix them without paying rent to Deere; jailbreak every make and model of every car so that any mechanic can diagnose and fix it, with compatible parts from any manufacturer. These aren't just nice things to do for the people in your country's borders: they are businesses, massive investment opportunities. The first country that perfects the universal car diagnosing tool will sell one to every mechanic in the world – along with subscriptions that keep up with new cars and new manufacturer software updates. That country could have the relationship to car repairs that Finland had to mobile phones for a decade, when Nokia disrupted the markets of every landline carrier in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

The US companies that could be disrupted thanks to the Trump tariffs are directly implicated in the rise of Trumpism. Take Tesla: the company's insane valuation is a bet by the markets that Tesla will be able to charge monthly fees for subscription features and one-off fees for software upgrades, which will be wiped out when your car changes hands, triggering a fresh set of payments from the next owner.

That business model is entirely dependent on making it a crime to reverse-engineer and mod a Tesla. A move-fast-and-break-things disruptor who offered mechanics a tool that let them charge $50 (or €50!) to unlock every Tesla feature, forever, could treat Musk's margins as their opportunity – and what an opportunity it would be!

That's how you hurt Musk – not by being performatively aghast at his Nazi salutes. You kick that guy right in the dongle:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

The act of unilaterally intervening in a market, product or sector – that is, "moving fast and breaking things" – is not intrinsically amoral. There's plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn't disruption, per se. Don't weep for the collapse of long-distance telephone calls! The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.

If Uber had been able to nuke the entire taxi medallion system – which was dominated by speculators who charged outrageous rents to drivers – and then been smashed by driver co-ops who modded gig-work apps to keep the fares for themselves, that would have been amazing:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things

The problem isn't disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.

We need some disruption! Their margins are your opportunity. It's high time we started moving fast and breaking US Big Tech!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

[mariacallous]

Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

Full text of the podcast episode below for those who don't or can't go to the NYT page or listen

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

President Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he intended to do.

Archived clip of President Trump: As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.

Starting the day of that speech, Trump began an all-out effort to roll back trans rights, using every power the federal government had and some that it may not have.

Archived clip: President Trump has signed an executive order which declares the U.S. government will no longer recognize the concept of gender identity. Archived clip: President Trump directing the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that teach what he calls gender ideology. Archived clip: This afternoon, Trump makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender kids. Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons. Archived clip: Ban on transgender troops serving in the military. Archived clip: These executive orders, many of them have not actually gone into effect yet, but when I look across the country, we’re already hearing stories of impact. Archived clip: In a time when we are struggling to find people to volunteer to do this, we are begging to be allowed to continue our service, and you’re just going to wash us away. So today I’m not OK. Archived clip: It’s a complete dehumanization of transgender people. Years and years and years into who I am, and I’m supposed to out myself? It’s about privacy and dignity for me to be able to change my passport to male.

A lot of the things Trump is doing in this term have put him on the wrong side of public opinion — but not this.

In a recent poll where Trump’s approval rating was around 40 percent, 52 percent of Americans approved of how he’s handling trans issues. Another poll showed that was more than approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Far more than approved of his handling of tariffs. And if you look more deeply into polling on trans rights, the public has swung right on virtually every policy you can poll.

Trump didn’t just win the election. He and the movement and ideology behind him had been winning the argument.

Sarah McBride is a freshman congresswoman from Delaware, where she was formerly a state senator. She’s the first openly trans member of Congress, and her view is that the trans rights movement and the left more broadly have to grapple with why their strategy failed — how they lost not only power but hearts and minds, and what needs to be done differently to protect trans people and begin winning back the public starting right now.

I was struck, talking to McBride, by how much she was offering a theory that goes far beyond trans rights. What she’s offering is a counter to the dominant political style that emerged as algorithmic social media collided with politics — a style that is more about policing and pushing those who agree with you than it is about persuading those who don’t.

Ezra Klein: Sarah McBride, welcome to the show.

Sarah McBride: Thanks for having me.

I want to begin with some polling. Pew asked the same set of questions in 2022 and 2025, and what it found was this collapse in what I would call persuasion.

They polled the popularity of protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. That had lost eight points in those three years. Requiring health insurance companies to cover gender transition lost five points. Requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex gained eight points.

When you hear those results, what, to you, happened there?

By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago. And that’s not isolated to just trans issues. I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression. Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to five, 10, 15 years ago.

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So there’s a larger regression from a gender perspective that I think is impacting this regression on trans rights. But I think it has been more acute, more significant in the trans-rights space.

Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.

I think a lot of it can be traced to a false sense of security that the L.G.B.T.Q. movement and the progressive movement writ large began to feel in the postmarriage world. There was a sense of cultural momentum that was this unending, cresting wave. There is this sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.

The support that we saw for trans rights in 2016, 2017 — it was a mirage of support in some ways. Because I think, in the postmarriage world, there was a transfer of support from the L.G.B. to the T. for two reasons.

One, I think people said: Well, the T. is part of the acronym. I support gay people, so I’ll support trans people — it’s all the same movement. Two, I think in those early days after marriage, a lot of people regretted having been wrong on marriage in the 1990s and 2000s. And they said: I didn’t understand what it meant to be gay, and therefore I didn’t support marriage, and I regret not supporting something because I didn’t understand it. So I’m going to, without understanding, support trans rights because I don’t want to make that same mistake again.

I think that resulted in a lot of us — a lot of our movement — stopping the conversation and ceasing doing the hard work of opening hearts and changing minds and telling stories that over 20 years had shifted and deepened understanding on gay identities that allowed for marriage equality to be built on solid ground.

And I think that allowed for the misinformation, the disinformation — that well-coordinated, well-funded campaign — to really take advantage of that lack of understanding. And the support for trans rights was a house built on sand.

I want to connect two things you said there, because I hadn’t thought about this exactly before. You made this point that there’s been a generalized gender regression — which is true. And you also made this point that people had this metaphor in their minds: I was wrong about gay marriage, I didn’t understand that experience, so maybe I’m wrong here, too.

But the one thing that’s maybe different here is there’s a set of narrow policies, like nondiscrimination, and then a broader cultural effort — everybody should put their pronouns in their bio or say them before they begin speaking at a meeting — that was more about destabilizing the gender binary.

And there people had a much stronger view. Like: I do know what it means. I’ve been a man all my life. I’ve been a woman all my life. How dare you tell me how I have to talk about myself or refer to myself!

And that made the metaphor break. Because if the gay marriage fight was about what other people do, there was a dimension to this that was about what you do and how you should see yourself or your kids or your society.

I think that’s an accurate reflection of the overplaying of the hand in some ways — that we as a coalition went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.

I also think there were requests that people perceived as a cultural aggression, which then allowed the right to say: We’re punishing trans people because of their actions. Rather than: We’re going after innocent bystanders.

And I think some of the cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people. We became absolutist — not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement — and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it. Part of this is fostered by social media.

We decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready. And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and, frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.

We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us. And I think a lot of the conversations around sports and also some of the cultural changes that we saw in expected workplace behavior, etc. was the byproduct of maybe just getting too far out ahead and not actually engaging in the art of social change-making.

The position for more maximalist demands is that you need to be in a hurry — trans people are dying now, suffering now — and that there isn’t time for decades of political organizing here. And also that maybe it works, or there’s a reason to believe it works.

You’ve been in more of those spaces than me. How would you describe how the more maximalist approach and culture evolved and why?

Well, first off, I think you’re right. It is understandable. This is a scary moment. I’m scared. As a trans person, I’m scared.

I recognize that when the house is on fire, when there are attacks that are dangerous, very dangerous, it can feel like we need to scream and we need to sound the alarm and we need everyone to be doing exactly that. I get that instinct. I understand that people would say: If you give a little bit here, they’ll take a mile.

We’re not negotiating with the other side, though. In this moment, we have to negotiate with public opinion. And we shouldn’t treat the public like they’re Republican politicians.

When you recognize that distinction, I think it allows for a pragmatic approach that has, in my mind, the best possible chance of shifting public opinion as quickly as possible. It would be one thing if screaming about how dangerous this is right now had the effect of stopping these attacks, but it won’t.

You call it an abandonment of persuasion that became true across a variety of issues for progressives. Also for people on the right. And sometimes I wonder how much that reflected the movement of politics to these very unusually designed platforms of speech, where what you do really is not talk to people you disagree with but talk about people you disagree with to people you do agree with — and then see whether or not they agree with what you said. There’s a way in which I think that breeds very different habits in people who do it.

I think that’s absolutely right. Again, we’re not in this place because of our community or our movement. Or because we weren’t shaming people enough, weren’t canceling people enough, weren’t yelling at people enough, weren’t denouncing anti-trans positions enough.

I think the dynamic with social media is that the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most condemnatory content is what gets amplified the most. It’s what gets liked and retweeted the most, and people mistake getting likes and retweets as a sign of effectiveness. Those are two fundamentally different things. And I think that, whether it’s subconscious or even conscious, the rewarding of unproductive conversations has completely undermined the capacity for us as individuals — or politically — to have conversations that persuade, that open people’s hearts and minds, that meet them where they are.

And I think the other dynamic that we have with social media is that there are two kinds of people on social media. The vast majority of people are doomscrollers: They just go on, and they scroll their social media. Twenty percent, maybe, are doomposters: 10 percent on the far right, 10 percent on the far left — the people who are so, so strident and angry that they’re compelled to post, and that content gets elevated. But what that has resulted in for the 80 percent who are just doomscrollers is this false perception of reality.

Take a person, let’s say they’re center left — it gives them a false perception that everyone on the left believes this, and it pulls them that way. And then it gives them a false perception that everyone on the right believes the most extreme version of the right.

It creates this false binary, extreme perception, availability bias. Because all of the content we’re seeing is reflective of just the 20 percent, and it has warped our perception of reality, of who people are and where the public is.

One of the best things about being an elected official is that I have to break out of that social media echo chamber — that social media extreme world — and interact with everyday people. And yes, there are real disagreements, but 80 percent of the doomscrollers or the people who aren’t even on social media are actually in a place where we can have a conversation with them.

When I ask this question, I don’t just mean on trans issues, but: You represent Delaware, which is a blue state — not Massachusetts blue — but blue. If you took your sense of what Democrats want or what the country wants from your experiences in social media versus your sense from traveling around your state, how would they differ?

I think they would differ in two ways. One, they would differ in the issues that we would focus on. What you hear on social media is a preoccupation with the most inflamed cultural war issues that you almost never hear when you’re out talking to voters in any part of the state. What you hear is an understandable catastrophizing around democracy, which you don’t hear nearly as much when you’re out talking to voters.

What you hear about when you’re talking to voters is the cost of living. You hear about the bread and butter issues that are keeping people up at night — people who aren’t on social media or aren’t posting on social media. And so you hear a difference in priorities, but then you also hear a difference in approach.

People are hungry for an approach that doesn’t treat our fellow citizens as enemies but rather treats our fellow citizens as neighbors, even if we disagree with them — an approach that’s filled with grace.

On social media we have come to this conclusion, rightfully so, that people’s grace has been abused in our society. That the grace and patience of marginalized people have been abused. And that is true.

But on social media, the course correction to that has been to eliminate all grace from our politics. It’s: How dare you have conversations with people who disagree with you? How dare you be willing to work with people who disagree with you? How dare you compromise? How dare you seek to find common ground with Republicans?

And when you go out into the real world — Democrats, independents and Republicans — there is a hunger for some level of grace for us to just not be so angry at one another and miserable. They want to see and know that we actually do have more in common. And therefore it gives you hope that persuasion is not only necessary but can actually still be effective.

What does grace in politics mean to you, and when have you either seen it or experienced it?

I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people. I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition. I think it’s a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue.

I saw it in the Delaware State Senate on both sides of the aisle, whether it’s Republicans in Delaware joining on to be cosponsors on an L.G.B.T.Q. panic defense bill that I was the prime sponsor of. Whether it was the discourse being much kinder and more civil on a whole host of culture war issues — I saw that grace has the effect of lowering the temperature, removing some of the incentives to go after vulnerable people in this country, in our state.

I saw it with my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, who didn’t vote for bills that were deeply personal to me, and yet we still found ways to work together. We still found ways to develop friendships.

And look, I know that places more of a burden on me than it does on them. I know that when you’re asking a marginalized person to extend grace in a conversation, you’re asking much more of that marginalized person. But change-making isn’t always easy, and it’s not always fair.

And why would we expect that the extra burdens and barriers of marginalization would cease at the point of overcoming the marginalization, of creating the change necessary to eliminate prejudice and create equal opportunity in our society?

No — that’s where the barriers are going to be greatest. That’s where the burdens are going to be greatest.

It reminds me of a line that I hear less now, but I used to see it a lot, which is: It’s not my job to educate you.

I always thought about that line because on one level, I understood it. It’s probably not your job to educate anyone.

But if you’re in politics, if what you’re trying to do is political change, I always found that line to be almost antipolitical.

Yes.

That if what you want to do is change a law, change a society, change a heart, and you’re the one who wants to do it — well then, whose job is it? And who are you expecting to do it?

It’s an understandable frustration, but it’s the only way forward.

I don’t believe that every person from an underrepresented or an unrepresented community needs to always bear the brunt and burden of public education. I don’t believe that every L.G.B.T.Q. person has to be out and sharing their story and doing all of that hard work. But for the folks who are willing to do it, we need to let them.

One of the problems we’ve had is that we’ve gone from: It’s not my job as an individual person who’s just trying to make it through the day to educate everyone — to: No one from that community should educate, and frankly, we should just stop having this conversation because the fact that we are having this conversation at all is hurtful and oppressive.

Maybe it is hurtful, but you can’t foster social change if you don’t have a conversation. You can’t change people if you exclude them. And I will just say, you can’t have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism.

The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not a bug of democracy. It’s a feature of democracy. And yes, that is hard and difficult — but again, how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair?

The discourse has taken this understandable critique of society and the way we operate and the burdens we place on marginalized people, and we’ve somehow said: Well, the one place that we have control over whether we allow for that marginalization is in the strategies we use to overcome it. So we’re not going to engage in that because it’s self-oppression.

And I think that is such a self-defeating and counterproductive approach.

We are in the most illiberal era of my lifetime in American politics. And I don’t mean liberalism in the sense of supporting or not supporting universal health care but in terms of due process, in terms of tolerance, in terms of the basic practice of politics and living amid each other.

It has also made me think about the need to clearly define what the practice of illiberalism itself is. What do you think it is?

I think it is the recognition that in a free society, we are going to live and think differently. It is the allowance of that disagreement in the public square and the tussle of that disagreement in the public square.

And that is uncomfortable. That is not easy. And yes, there are going to be people in that conversation for whom it’s going to be more difficult and more uncomfortable. But in the internet world, you can’t suppress diversity of thought. It will always bubble up. But it will bubble up, if suppressed, with an extra bitterness and an extremism fostered in that echo chamber that it’s been suppressed to. It will inevitably bubble up like a volcano. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now.

I will say, while the left made this mistake of fostering an illiberalism based on a false sense of cultural victory, the right is now making the exact same mistake. I think they’re overplaying their hand.

They’re interpreting the 2024 election to be a cultural mandate that is much greater than what it actually is. And if they continue to do that, there will be a backlash to the illiberalism — the cultural illiberalism, not just the legal illiberalism — of the right, in the same way that there’s been a backlash to the cultural illiberalism of the left.

I couldn’t agree with that more. We’re going to get to that.

I want to talk for a minute about the 2024 election and the aftermath. There’s been a lot of rethinking and self-recrimination among Democrats.

One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when your colleague Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

What did you think when you heard that?

One, that it wasn’t the language that I would use.

But I think it came from a larger belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation about our illiberalism. That we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves. We were fighting fights that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, or fighting fights in a way that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, rather than maintaining proximity to the public and being normal people. [Chuckle.]

The sports conversation is a good one because there is a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there’s room for nuance in this conversation. The notion that we created this “all-on” or “all-off” mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you are a bigot, you’re an enemy. When you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re going to have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option.

What ends up happening is the left excommunicates someone who not only — Seth voted against the ban on trans athletes, but we would excommunicate someone who uses imperfect language — yes, again, not language I would use. But we would excommunicate someone who’s saying that there’s nuance in this conversation and use this language that we don’t approve of — yet still votes “the right way”? That’s exactly what’s wrong with our approach.

And look, Seth is not going anywhere, but for a lot of everyday folks, if they think how Seth thinks or if they think that there’s room for nuance in this conversation and we tell them: You’re a bigot, you’re not welcome here, you’re not part of our coalition, we will not consider you an ally? The right has done a very good job of saying: Listen, you have violated the illiberalism of the left, you have been cast aside for your common sense — welcome into our club.

And then once you get welcomed into that club, human nature is: Well, I was with the Democratic Party on 90 percent of things, maybe against them on 10 percent of things or sort of in the middle on 10 percent. Once you get welcomed into that other club, human psychology is that you start to adopt those positions. And instead of being with us on 90 percent of things and against us on 10 percent of things, that person, now welcomed into the far-right club, starts to be against us on 90 percent of things and with us on only 10 percent of things.

That dynamic is part of the regression that we have seen. Not only that, but the hardening of the opposition that we’ve seen on trans issues.

We have been an exclusionary tent that is shedding imperfect allies, which is great. We’re going to have a really, really miserable self-righteous, morally pure club in the gulag we’ve all been sent off to.

[Laughs.]

I think this goes to your point in a way. After Moulton made those comments, The Times reported that a local party official and an ally had compared him to a Nazi cooperator, that there were protests outside his office.

I was always struck by which part of his comments got all that attention. It was the part I just read to you, but he also said this: “Having reasonable restrictions for safety and competitive fairness in sports seems like, well, it’s very empirically a majority opinion.” He’s right on that. “But should we take civil rights away from trans people, so they can just get fired for being who they are? No.” He was expressing opposition to what was about to be Donald Trump’s agenda.

Yes.

And this space of his divergence, from an issue that had already been lost — the polling was terrible on it — that was where people on the left focused. And his expression of support and allyship, as I saw it, barely ever got reported or commented on. It struck me as telling.

I think it absolutely is telling. The best thing for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now, and that we need all of the allies that we can get.

Again, Seth voted against the bans. If we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need those individuals in our coalition. If you have to be perfect on every trans rights issue for us to say you can be an ally and part of our coalition, then we are going to have a cap of about 30 percent on our coalition. If we are going to have 50 percent plus one — or frankly, more, necessarily 60 percent or more — in support of nondiscrimination protections for trans people, in support of our ability to get the health care that we need, then by definition, it will have to include a portion of the 70 percent who oppose trans people’s participation in sports.

Right now, the message from so many is: You’re not welcome, and your support for 90 percent of these policies is irrelevant. The fact that you diverge on one thing makes you evil.

It also misunderstands the history of civil rights in this country. “You can’t compromise on civil rights” is a great tweet. But tell me: Which civil rights act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country? The Civil Rights Act of 1957? The Civil Rights Act of 1960? The Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Voting Rights Act of 1965? The Civil Rights Act of 1968? Or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s?

That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward. And right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus.

And that is so counterproductive. It is so harmful, and it completely betrays the lessons of every single social movement and civil rights movement in our country’s history.

We have an example of a very successful social movement in recent history with marriage equality. Where would we have been in 2007 and 2008 if not only we had not tolerated the fact that Barack Obama was ostensibly not for marriage equality then, but if we had said to voters: Even if you vote against the marriage ban, but aren’t quite comfortable with marriage yet, then you’re a bigot and you don’t belong in our coalition — where would that movement have been?

The most effective messengers were the people who had evolved themselves. We had grace personified in that movement, and it worked beyond even the advocate’s wildest expectations in terms of the speed of both legal progress and cultural progress. Because we created incentives for people to grow, we created space for people to grow, and we allowed people into our tent, into that conversation who weren’t already with us.

You mentioned the period in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for president, and at the very least his public position — many of us suspected it was not his private position — was that he opposed gay marriage. That was the mainstream position at that point in the Democratic Party, and there was a compromise position they all supported, which was civil unions.

Is there an analogy to the civil unions debate for you now?

In the sports conversation, it’s local control. It’s allowing for individual athletic associations to make those individual determinations, and in some cases they’ll have policies that strike a right balance. In some cases, they’ll have policies that are too restrictive. And I think that is the equivalent to the civil union’s position in that debate.

By allowing for democratic voters, independent voters — even some elected officials — to take that civil unions position, one that met voters where they were, it gave some of our politicians who needed it an offramp so that they didn’t have to choose between being all-on or all-off. And it allowed that conversation to continue and prevented more harm from being inflicted.

I want to pick up on the polling. There’s this YouGov polling from January that looked at all these different issues. There are a lot of issues around trans rights that actually poll great. Protection for trans people against hate crimes: plus 36 net approval. Banning employers from firing trans people because of their identity: plus 33. Allowing transgender people to serve in the military, which Donald Trump is trying to rescind: plus 22. Requiring all new public buildings to include gender-neutral bathrooms: This surprised me — plus seven.

Then there’s the other side. Everybody knows that the sports issue is tough in the polling, but banning people under 18 from attending drag shows — that’s popular. Banning youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones — that’s very popular. Banning public schools from teaching lessons on transgender issues — that’s popular. Requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex — that is popular.

When you look at these lists of issues, what do you see as dividing them? What cuts the issues that you could win on now from those that have heavy disapproval?

Well, I think that there’s very clearly a distinction that the public makes between young people and adults. There is a distinction that is made in many cases when it comes to what people feel like is government support of or funding of — versus just allowing trans people to live their lives, allowing trans troops who are qualified to continue to serve, allowing trans people who are doing great jobs in their workplace to continue to work.

It all goes back to this notion of: Get government out, let people live their lives, and let families and individuals make the best decisions for themselves. That should be the through line of our perspective, a libertarian approach to allowing trans people to live fully and freely. There are some complicated questions, but those questions shouldn’t be answered by politicians who are trying to exploit those issues for political gain.

I was struck by your use of the word “libertarian” there. Because when I look at this polling, what I see is something quite similar, which is: Americans, by and large, aren’t cruel. Their view here is pretty “Live and let live.”

Yes.

They have different views, which we can talk about in a minute, on minors. But where the question is whether the government coming in and bothering you — “you” being any trans person — they don’t really want that.

What they don’t want to do is change their lives, or think something is changing for them in their society. Maybe those two things are not in all ways possible, certainly over the long term, but there are a lot of places where they are possible.

It seems to me that in 2024 and over the last couple years, what Republicans did very well — their approach to persuasion — was to pick the right wedge issues.

You would think that the entire debate over trans policy in America was about N.C.A.A. swimmers. Like this was the biggest problem facing trans people, the biggest problem in some ways facing the country. When it’s a pretty edge-case issue, and questions like nondiscrimination and access to health care are much more widespread.

What they did was they used their wedge issue, and they’re now attacking those majority positions. Trump is attacking discrimination — he wants people discriminated against. He doesn’t want trans people to be able to put the identity they hold and present as on their passports. Which is not a huge winning issue for him.

So there’s this question of picking the right wedge issues. Is there a wedge issue for you that you wish Democrats would pick?

Listen, I think that we do much better when we keep the main thing. Defending Medicaid in this moment is the main thing.

For everybody.

For everyone, for everyone. And look, I think abortion to some degree had been a wedge issue that was to the Democrats’ advantage, not to the Republicans’ advantage.

But I think we have to reorient the public’s perception of what our priorities are as a party. When we lean into the culture wars and lean into culture war wedge issues, even if they benefit us, they reinforce a perception that the Democratic Party is unconcerned with the economic needs of the American people.

When you ask a voter: What are the top five priorities of the Democratic Party, what are the top five priorities of the Republican Party, and what are the top five priorities for them as a voter? Three out of the five issues that are the top issues for that voter appear in what their perception of the top five issues for the Republican Party is. Only one of their top five priorities appears in their perception of the top five priorities for the Democrats. That’s health care — and it was fifth out of five. The top two were abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.

And I don’t care what your position is on those two issues, you are not going to win an election if voters think that those two issues are your top issues, rather than their ability to get a good wage and good benefits, get a house and live the American dream.

We have to, in this moment, reinforce our actual priority as a party — which is making sure that everyone can pursue the American dream, which has become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible; that everyone should be able to get the health care they need; be able to buy a home; be able to send their child to child care without breaking the bank, if they can even get a spot. That needs to be our focus.

When we have this purity politics approach to L.G.B.T.Q. issues or abortion, what we communicate, even if we’re not talking about those issues, is those are threshold issues, and therefore the voter reads that as those are priority issues. The only way to convince the voter that those are not our priority issues, that that’s not what we’re spending our capital and time on — but rather on giving them health care and housing — is to make it abundantly clear to people that our tent can include diversity of thought on those issues.

Something that I notice in the broad coalition of groups and people and funders who identify as or support Democrats is that they all want the issue they care most about to be the issue that gets talked about the most. People who fund anything from climate to trans rights, to any of the hotter issues in American life — you could actually imagine a strategy where those groups and that money went to making every election about Medicaid, because Medicaid is just a killer issue for Democrats. And then the people who get elected are better on those other issues, too. But it doesn’t. That money, those groups that are organizing, what they often want Democrats to do is publicly take unpopular positions on their issues.

I think all the time about the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that asked candidates, and in this case Kamala Harris, whether she would support the government paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. Even if your whole position in life is to make that possible, the last thing you’d want is for anybody to claim it out in public. You would want nobody to ever think about that question ever at all.

And it’s something I’ve heard Democrats talking about more after the election — just rethinking on some level, this question of: Is the point of all this organizing to get politicians to commit to the most maximalist version of your issue set? Or is the point of this organizing to somehow figure out how to win Senate seats in Missouri and Kansas? So you have very moderate Democrats who nevertheless make Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader rather than John Thune.

I think that there is an incentive from money and from social media — and those also go hand in hand sometimes with grass-roots donations — that incentivize the groups to want to show their influence and their effect by having politicians fight the fights that they want them to fight in ways that feel viscerally comforting to their own community that they’re representing.

I get that. I understand that. One, we have to be better as elected officials in saying no, in saying: Public opinion is everything. And if you want us to change, you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you’re asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of the day, representatives who have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent.

At some point, you will represent the people’s positions — or they will find someone else who will. So it is just an unsustainable dynamic for the groups to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are. They have to do the hard work of persuasion.

There’s always going to be a tension between the groups and elected officials. Everyone has to do their own job, but there has to be some degree of understanding.

I always think this is such an interesting question for politicians to work with because there is the internal and the external push to authenticity.

Yes.

We don’t want these poll-tested politicians. And it’s also your job to represent.

Yes.

On issues personal to you, on issues not as personal to you, how do you think about balancing “They elected you” versus “You are their servant”?

Look, all of these decisions inevitably require a balancing of my own views, my own principles and the views of the people that I represent. But I think one thing you always have to do is you have to go: OK, here’s an issue that I feel very strongly about. If I vote against this, what are the second, third and fourth order consequences of voting against or voting in favor?

You might abstractly agree with something as an ideal, but if you were to pursue that or implement that policy, it would have, in the medium- to long-term, a regressive effect because there’s a backlash to pushing too hard or taking too maximalist of a position by the mainstream in our politics.

One of the problems we’ve had is that we have said: Not only do you have to vote the way we want you to vote, but you have to speak the way we want you to speak.

And I always have said, even when I was an advocate: If we can get the policy vote that we want and the compromise we are accepting is essentially a rhetorical compromise, that is a pretty darn good deal.

Again, we have to be willing to have these conversations out in the open. We have to recognize that there’s complexity, there’s nuance — and that means not just in the policy space but in the political space. That it’s authentic, to say: These are some really difficult conversations, and sometimes I’m going to get it right and sometimes I’m going to get it wrong, and sometimes I’m voting exclusively with what I think is the right thing to do, even if my voters disagree. But also, sometimes I’m going to have to take a balanced view of this. And that’s democracy.

I want to pick up on speech. It’s true on trans and gender issues — it’s also true on a bunch of other issues in the past couple of years — that a huge number of the fights that ended up defining the issue were not about legislation. They were about speech.

I’ve always myself thought this reflects social media, but the number of people who have talked to me about the term “birthing persons,” which I think virtually nobody has used, or “Latinx” was a big one like this — there is in general this extreme weighting of: Can you push changes of speech onto the people who agree with you and possibly onto society as a whole?

And the strategy worked backward from the speech outcome, not the legislative outcome. How do you think about that weighting of speech versus votes?

There is no question in my mind that the vote is much more important than the rhetoric that they use. We have discoursed our way into: If you talk about this issue in a way that’s suboptimal from my perspective, you’re actually laying the foundation for oppression and persecution.

Maybe academically that’s true, but welcome to the real world. We are prioritizing the wrong thing, and it’s an element of virtue signaling — like: I’m showing that I am the most radical, I’m the most progressive on this issue because I’m going to take this person who does everything right substantively and crucify this person for not being perfect in language.

It’s a way of demonstrating that you’re in the in-group, that you understand the language, that you understand the mores and the values of that group, and it’s a way of building capital and credibility with that in-group. I think that’s what it is.

It’s inherently exclusionary. And that’s part of the thing that’s wrong with our politics right now. All of our politics feel so exclusionary. The coalition that wins the argument about who is most welcoming will be the coalition that wins our politics.

I think that’s such an interesting point, and I think probably true.

I’d also be curious to hear your thoughts on this: I think there’s a very interesting way that speech and its political power confuse people because it’s two things at once. It’s extremely low cost and extremely high cost.

Pronouns, for instance, are a very easy thing. And basically, if you won’t use somebody’s preferred pronouns, I think you’re an [expletive]. That’s my personal view of it. But trying to execute a speech change where everybody lists their pronouns in their bio, where every meeting begins with people going around the circle and saying their name and their pronouns — that feels very different to people.

It seems small. You don’t have to pay anything out of pocket, you don’t have to go anywhere — and yet the language we use is very, very important to us.

Yes, I think you’re absolutely right there. And I think the thing with pronouns, too, is a prime example of where we’ve lost grace, though.

Me calling people [expletive] is not graceful? [Laughs.]

Well, no, no. I think there is a difference between someone who’s intentionally misgendering someone and people who make mistakes.

Yes, totally.

And I think that there has been, whether warranted or not, the perception that people are going to be shamed if they make mistakes.

But then I think you’re absolutely right, too, that there is a distinction between treating me the way I want to be treated, and everyone changing their behavior and requiring this sort of in-group language that exceeds just calling the person in front of you what they want to be called.

And I think it gets to something we were talking about earlier. There are two pieces to the politics of this. One is fairly popular, at least for now, and the other is a much tougher lift.

I think most people have that basic sense of politeness. If you want to be referred to in a certain way, yes, I might slip up. But if I’m being a decent person, I’m going to try.

Yes.

Versus the move from pronouns to the move for calling things cisgender — that was a much bigger effort that in some ways wasn’t described as such.

And I feel like there’s been a dimension to the politics here where things that were very academic arguments became political arguments, and then people were a little bit unclear on what the political win would be.

To destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand as operating is touching something very deep in society. Versus treating other people with respect and courtesy and decency and grace is a much easier sell. And I think it’s OK to want to do the former, but I think people kept mixing up which their actual project was.

At the end of the day, the thing that we lost is that we’re just talking about people trying to live their lives, trying to live the best lives they can.

We got into this rabbit hole of academic intellectual discourse that doesn’t actually matter in people’s lives. We got into this performative fighting to show our bona fides to our own in-group, and we lost the fundamental truth that all of those things are only even possible once you’ve done the basic legwork of allowing people to see trans people as people.

When you allow trans people to be seen as human beings who have the same hopes and dreams and fears as everyone else, once that basic conception of humanity exists, then all the other things, all the other conversations sort of fall into place. Language inevitably changes across society, across cultures, across time, but it is a byproduct of cultural change.

And I just think we started to have what maybe were conversations that were happening in academic institutions, or conversations that were happening in the community, and we started having those out in public on social media. And then we demanded that everyone else have that conversation with us and incorporate what the dominant position is in that conversation in the way they live their lives.

And that’s just not how this happens. Let’s just talk about human beings who want you to live by the golden rule. Let’s just talk about the fact that trans people are people who can be service members and doctors and lawyers and educators and elected officials, and do a damn good job at that.

That is the gateway to everything else, and it has always been in every social movement.

The place where not just the politics but also the answers are complicated is around children.

We talked about the N.C.A.A. swimmers and the edge-case nature of that. But schools are broader. And a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, a lot of what you see Republicans are doing in states, is around schools and minors. And that’s tougher.

Parents want to know what their kids are doing. On the one hand, if you’re a kid with gender dysphoria, taking puberty blockers early matters. On the other hand, there are a lot of things parents don’t let their kids do young because they’re not sure what they’re going to want in a couple years.

How do you think about that set of issues? The leave-them-alone approach makes a lot of sense for adults. But we don’t leave kids alone. Kids exist in a paternalistic system where their parents and schools have power over them. So the question of policy there becomes very profound.

Yes. First off, I think in that instance we rightfully acknowledge the important role that parents play in decisions for their children.

Look, you can recognize that there’s nuance here. You can say that there needs to be stronger standards of care, that maybe things got too lenient.

But ultimately politicians aren’t the people who should be making these decisions. The family should be making these decisions. The family, in consultation with a doctor, should be making these decisions.

And I think that is a fair balance in recognizing the need for every child to get medical care and also the right of parents to make decisions, including health care decisions for their children.

But in some European countries right now, you do see the government setting tighter standards. There have definitely been a lot of arguments about whether or not the research was good, whether or not the research was ideologically influenced.

So there’s some government role here, some role for professional associations, some context in which families and doctors make these decisions. What is that role?

I think you just hit on that distinction, which is that in many European countries, the distinction between the health care system and the government is fuzzier. In many cases, you have government-operated hospitals.

Here, you have health care systems. You have standards of care developed by providers in those medical associations. And that is where those decisions should be left up to, in terms of establishing the standards of care. And then when applying those standards of care, allowing the practical application of those standards of care to happen between patients, families and providers. Because it’s fundamentally a different kind of system.

I think the critique and the fear from the right that I hear is that some of these same dynamics — toward pushing out people who question the evidence, toward there being things you can say and things you cannot say — took hold. And that the results of that can’t be trusted — that everything you said is happening in politics is also happening in medicine and elsewhere.

We actually started to see a pretty difficult but important conversation within WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, about the standards of care for youth care before government started intervening. They started having a conversation about how to adjust the standards of care, recognizing perhaps that they needed to tighten them.

And that’s true across health care: Standards of care across different forms of care are constantly evolving.

That conversation was starting to happen. You cannot tell me that it’s the role of the government to pre-empt those conversations. Those conversations should not be settled in legislative bodies by politicians who aren’t looking at the data, don’t understand the data and certainly aren’t objectively interpreting the data.

And look, the conversation changes when people understand what it means to be trans. Because I think right now we think of it as a choice. We think of it as an intellectual decision. Like: I want to be a girl. I want to be a boy. And I want to do this because of these rewards, or I don’t want to do it because of these risks.

But that’s not what gender identity is. It is much more innate. It is a visceral feeling. It’s not the same as whether you get a tattoo or what you have for dinner. It’s not a decision. It’s a fact about who you are.

I think the challenge in the conversation around gender identity that differs from sexual orientation is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust. And so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience.

The challenge in the conversation around gender identity is that people who aren’t trans don’t know what it feels like to have a gender identity that differs from your sex assigned at birth.

For me, the closest thing that I can compare it to was a constant feeling of homesickness, just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself.

And I think that because we stopped having that conversation, because we stopped creating space for people to ask questions, for people’s understandable — perhaps invasive, but understandable — curiosity to be met with an openness and a grace, not by everyone, but just the people who were willing to do it — we stopped people having an understanding of what it means to be trans. And it allowed them to start to see it. Or it allowed for their pre-existing perception that this is some sort of intellectual choice to manifest.

And in some cases, the perfect “discourse” started to reinforce that.

Say how.

We started to get to this place where you couldn’t be like: I’m born this way.

We policed the way even L.G.B.T.Q. people or trans people talked about their own identities — to be this perfect sort of academic —

Why can’t you say “I’m born this way”? I’m not saying you’re saying it, but this is a thing I’ve not been aware of.

There was sort of an academic perception that people should have agency over their sexual orientation and gender identity, even if it’s not “innate.” And there was this acceptance of a mainstream perception of sexual orientation and gender identity that was a one-size-fits-all narrative around L.G.B.T.Q. people that didn’t necessarily include people whose understanding was more fluid or whose understanding evolved over time or those who feel like they want to transgress gender norms because of a reason that’s not this innate sense of gender.

And when you take that capacity for us to authentically talk about our experience away from us — because it’s not academically the purest narrative that creates space and room for every single, different lived experience within that umbrella — you give people justification to say or think: This is a choice, and if it’s a choice, the threshold to allow for discrimination becomes lower.

I’ve known a number of people who have transitioned as adults.

The degree to which most of us avoid doing anything that would cause us any social discomfort at all times is so profound — how much we live our lives trying to not make anybody look at us for too long.

It must be such a profound need to make that decision — to come to your family, to your wife or your husband, to your kids, to your parents.

So the right-wing meme that emerged around it — that people are transitioning because they opportunistically want to be in another bathroom or in another locker room or get some kind of cultural affirmative action — always struck me as not just absurd but deeply unempathic. Not thinking for a moment what it must mean to want that that much. So then it’s interesting to hear you say that there was a pincer movement on that.

I’m sure there is agency, and people make decisions here. But the pull from inside of everybody I’ve known is really profound. Usually they’ve been trying to choose the other way for a long time — and eventually just can’t anymore.

That’s exactly what my experience was.

It’s funny because sometimes there’s discourse that the only reason I’m an elected official is because I’m trans. I see on the right this notion that I’m a diversity hire.

But it’s like: Well, voters chose me. It’s kind of an insult to voters that they didn’t choose me because they think that I’m the best candidate or reflective of what they want, but they just chose me because of my identity.

But it also just undersells such a larger truth, which is that my life would be so much easier if I weren’t trans.

I’m proud of who I am. I’m proud that this is my life experience for a whole host of reasons. But this is all a lot harder because I’m trans.

Are there moments where I get a microphone or — if I were a nontrans freshman Democrat, would I be sitting here? Maybe not. Maybe I would, but maybe not. We probably would be having a different conversation.

But navigating this world as a trans person has always been — and even more so now — it’s incredibly hard. And all any of us are asking — or at least all that most of us are asking — is to just let us live the best life we can. A life with as few regrets as possible. A life where we can be constructive, productive, contributing members of society.

You might not understand us. It is hard to step into the shoes of someone who is trans and to understand what that might feel like. But I spent 21 years of my life praying that this would go away.

And the only way that I was finally able to accept it was: One, realizing this was never going to go away. Two, becoming so consumed by it that it was the only thing I really was able to think about because the pain became too all-encompassing.

And three, the only way I was able to come out was because I was able to accept that I was losing any future. I had to go through stages of grief. And the only way I was able to come out was to finally get to that stage of acceptance over a loss of any future.

It’s really scary, and it’s really hard. And right now it is particularly scary and hard.

And to your point earlier, most people are good people, and they just want to treat other people with respect and kindness. But unfortunately, in this moment, in our politics — we were recently at something where someone gave us some information, and they said that when a voter was asked to describe the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, it was “crazy” for the Republican Party and “preachy” for the Democratic Party.

I think that undersells something that’s more true, which is that a voter will look and say: The Republican Party is [expletive] to other people. I don’t like that. But the Democratic Party is an [expletive] to me. And if I have to choose between the party that’s an [expletive] to me because I’m not perfect or a party that’s an [expletive] to someone else, even if I don’t like it, I’m going to choose the party that’s an [expletive] to someone else.

When you entered Congress, you were quite directly targeted by some of your Republican colleagues, led by Nancy Mace, on which bathrooms you could use — a thing that would not have happened if you were not a trans legislator.

This is the majority party in the House. You have to work with these people. You’re on committees with them. What has your experience been like both absorbing that and then trying to work with people whom you know may or may not have given you much grace in that moment?

The first thing I’d say is that the folks who were or are targeting me because of my gender identity in Congress are folks who, at this point, are really not working with any Democrats and can barely work with their own Republican colleagues.

I’ve introduced several bills. Almost all have been bipartisan. I’ve been developing relationships with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Part of my responsibility in this moment is to show that when someone like me gets elected to public office, we can do the whole job. And that means working with people who disagree with me, including on issues that are deeply personal.

The folks who are coming after me — I mean, look, that’s been hard. But I know that they are coming after me not because they are deeply passionate about bathroom policy. They’re coming after me because they’re employing the strategies of reality TV. And the best way to get attention in a body of 435 people is to throw wine in someone’s face. That gets you a little attention. But if the person you’re throwing wine on, if they respond by throwing wine in your face, it creates a beef, which gets you a season-long story arc.

I knew that they were trying to bait me into a fight to get attention, and I refused to be used as a political pawn. I refuse to give them not only the power of derailing me but the incentive to continue to come after me.

And this was a prime example of fighting smart that is demonized on our own side. Because the grace that I didn’t get wasn’t just on the right. There was a lot of critique on the left.

I understand that, when you’re a first, people viscerally feel your highs, and they also viscerally feel your lows. But what would my fighting back in that moment have done? It wouldn’t have stopped the ban, and it would only have incentivized further attacks and continued behavior like that.

Sometimes we have to understand that not fighting, not taking the bait, is not a sign of weakness. It’s not unprincipled. Discipline and strategy are signs of strength.

And I think in the social media world, we have lulled ourselves into thinking the only way to fight is to fight. It’s to scream and it’s to yell and it’s to do it in every instance. And any time you don’t do it, you’re normalizing the behavior that’s coming your way.

It’s a ridiculously unfair burden to place on every single human being — to have to fight every single indignity.

But also by that logic, the young Black students who were walking into a school that was being integrated in the late ’50s and ’60s, who were walking forward calmly and with dignity and grace into that school as people screamed slurs at them — by that definition, that student was normalizing those slurs by not responding.

Instead, what that student was doing was providing the public with a very clear visual, a very clear contrast, between unhinged hatred and basic dignity and grace, which is fundamental to humanity.

And for me, one of the things that I struggled with after that was the lack of grace that I got from some in my own community, who said that I was reinforcing the behavior of the people who were coming after me, that I was not responding appropriately to the bullying that I was facing.

When the reality is: That behavior has diminished significantly because I removed the incentive for them to continue to do it. Because the incentive was so blatantly about attention, and I wasn’t going to let them get the attention that they wanted.

You’re reminding me of something I heard Barack Obama say many years ago when he was getting criticized for trying to negotiate, trying to reach out to people who, by that point, many on the left thought he was naive for trying to work with.

And he said something like: He had always felt that the American people could see better if the other side had clenched their fist, if he opened his hand.

I always thought there was a lot of wisdom in that.

Yes, absolutely. Early on in those first few weeks, I had some folks text me as I was responding the way that I was. And they said: You should watch “42,” which is the movie about Jackie Robinson.

I am not comparing my experience to Jackie Robinson’s at all. At all. But there’s a scene in that movie that’s so illustrative of these dynamics: He’s meeting with the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers is trying to provoke him into anger. And when he sort of succeeds, the owner basically says to him: You have to understand that when you are a first, if you respond to a slur with a slur, they’ll only hear yours. If you respond to a punch with a punch, they’ll say: You’re the aggressor.

If we go in and say to these folks: We’re never going to work with you, because you’re never going to work with us — then we get the blame for never working with them. Not them.

If we go in and we respond to their hatred with vitriol and anger, they’re going to blame us. And that’s the reality of the double standard in our politics. That’s the reality that a first always has to navigate.

Let them put their anger, their vitriol, on full display. Let us provide that contrast with our approach.

Look, it’s not going to always work out, and it’s not always going to create the outcome that you desire. But people need us to demonstrate that contrast to them, for them to truly see it.

I’ve been having a conversation in a very different context than this, but I’m curious to hear your answer to it.

I’ve been having this conversation about whether or not good politics always requires clear enemies. Do you believe it does?

No. I believe that you can tell a compelling story with an enemy. There’s no question. It sometimes is an easy out in our politics.

But I think that there’s something to be said about a politics that is rooted in opposition to an enemy that is fundamentally that regressive. That anger is fundamentally conservative in its political outcome.

Barack Obama — and Bill Clinton, for that matter — did a good job of putting forward an aspirational politics that wasn’t defined by who we are against but by what we are for and about who we can be.

And I think that is a more successful path for progressive politics than an enemies-based politics, which so often devolves to anger. And which, more often than not, facilitates in the medium- and long-term, a regressive politics.

Look, I’m not saying it can’t always be effective politics. But you can have effective politics and good politics and better outcomes with an aspirational politics. With a politics that isn’t just about what it’s opposed to, but about what it can build and about who we can be.

Because I think everyone has their own internal struggle between their own better selves and their better angels and their base instincts.

Much earlier in the conversation I had asked you about liberalism, which was a little bit of a weird question to drop in there.

I don’t really have a question here, it’s just something I’m thinking about. But you actually strike me as one of the most liberal as a temperament — liberal in the classical sense — politicians I’ve talked to in a long time.

And I’ve been starting to read a lot of older books about liberalism because it feels to me that it is an approach to politics that even liberals lost.

Yes.

And one of the reasons I think we lost it — and I very much count myself as a liberal — was a feeling that liberalism’s virtue was also its vice. That its openness to critique, its constant balancing, its movement toward incremental solutions and its skepticism of total solutions — that those had been conditions under which problems never truly got solved. Systemic racism and bigotry festered.

And as it began to absorb that critique, it lost a lot of confidence in itself.

In a way, Barack Obama was the apex of the liberal leaders, and he hadn’t brought about utopia. And so liberalism seemed exhausted.

And I think alongside that, there was some way in which I cannot — I still need to figure this out, but I’ll say it because I believe it’s true: I think there’s something about the social media platforms that is illiberal as a medium.

We now have X and Bluesky and Threads, and none of them are good. They all lead to bad habits of mind. Because simplifying your thoughts down to these little bumper stickers and then having other people who agree with you retweet them or mob you just doesn’t lend itself to the pluralistic balancing modes of thought that liberalism is built to prize. They’re illiberal in a fundamental way.

So I don’t think it’s an accident that as liberalism began to lose its own moorings, illiberalism roared back.

And just one experience I’ve had of this whole period with Donald Trump’s second term is realizing that the thing that we were trying to keep locked in the basement was really profoundly dangerous. Even compared to his first term.

The attacks on due process, the trying to break institutions, the disappearance machine — if you let that all out, things can go really badly.

And there’s something about liberalism that is so unsatisfying. The work you just described having to do sounds so unsatisfying and frustrating. And yet.

I guess just that — and yet.

And yet it is the approach and the system that, while imperfect, is the most likely and most proven to actually lead to the progress that I and so many others seek.

Look, people have one life. And it is completely understandable that a person would feel: I have one life, and when you ask me to wait, you are asking me to watch my one life pass by without the respect and fairness that I deserve. And that is too much to ask of anyone.

And that is. It is our job to demand “now,” in the face of people who say “never.” But it’s also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

I truly believe that liberalism, that our ability to have conversations across disagreement, that our ability to recognize that in a pluralistic, diverse democracy, there will inevitably be people and positions that hurt us. But when you’re siloed and when you suppress that opposition underground in that basement — to use your word — they’re alone in there. And not only does that sense of community loneliness breed bitterness, but it also breeds radicalization.

Liberalism is not only the best mechanism to move forward, but it is also the best mechanism to rein in the worst excesses of your opposition.

Yes, the compromise is that you don’t get to do everything you want to do. But that is a much better bet than the alternative, which is what we have developed now — an illiberal democracy in so many ways in our body politic.

One where, yes, we might have temporary victories, but as we are seeing right now, those victories can be fleeting, and the consequences can be deadly.

Was this always your political temperament, or was it forged?

I have grown and changed. There are things that I did and said five, 10, 15 years ago that I look back and regret, because I think that they were too illiberal. Because I bought into a culture online that didn’t always bring out the best in me.

But I do think that those were exceptions, and even when I was an advocate, I was always perceived as one of the more mainstream respectability advocates. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work across disagreement and engage in conversations that we shouldn’t be having. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work within the system.

And so I think I’ve fundamentally always had the same perspective and fundamentally have always believed that we cannot eliminate grace from our politics and our change-making. And that’s rooted in watching my parents grow and change after I came out.

My parents are progressive people. They embraced my older brother, who’s gay, without skipping a beat. But I knew when I shared that I was trans with them, it was going to be devastating — to use a word that my mother uses. And I knew that if I responded by shutting down the conversation, by refusing to walk with them, by refusing to give them grace and assume good intentions when they would inevitably say and do things that might be hurtful to me, I would stunt their capacity to take that walk with me.

I saw us as a family move forward with a degree of grace toward each other, that we were all going to inevitably say and do things that we would come to regret, that might hurt a little bit, but that if we assumed good intentions and walked forward, my parents would go from saying: What are the chances that I have a gay son and a trans child? — from a place of pity to a place of awe and the diversity of our family and the blessings that have come with that diversity. And that only came from grace.

And then I saw it working in Delaware, passing nondiscrimination protections. I’ve seen it time and time again. And so I have borne witness to change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid that it was almost incomprehensible not only become possible but become a reality, in large part because of grace in our politics. And yes, because I was willing to extend that grace to others.

Grace, blessings, witness — are these, for you, religious concepts?

They tap into my religion. I’m Presbyterian. I’m an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church.

But I think they go to something for me that transcends religion and my faith, and tap into my sense of beauty toward the world and my sense of beauty at life and the joy that I get to live this life, that I get to be myself and that I get to live a life of purpose.

I know I’m lucky in that respect, and I want everyone to have that same opportunity. And I have seen that approach and that grace. It has allowed me to be a better version of myself, a happier version of myself, which I think has actually unlocked those opportunities.

That’s interesting. Is it a practice?

When you say that it has allowed you to be a better version of yourself, is that something that you cultivate intentionally? And if so, how?

Yes. I think it’s often an intentional choice.

So many of the problems that we face are rooted in the fact that hurt people hurt people.

And I think that we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain. Where the left says to the right: What do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man? My pain is real as a queer, transgender person.

And then the right says to the left: What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite? My pain is real in a postindustrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.

We are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around. And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. While it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized that we don’t have to believe that someone is right for what they’re facing to be wrong.

I also think that there’s one other aspect of this that I think we have lost, which is the intentionality of hope. We have fallen prey in our online discourse and our politics to a sense that cynicism is in vogue, that cynicism shows that we get it.

And I think one of the things that we have to recognize is sometimes hope is a conscious effort. And that sense of inevitability, that organic sense of hope that we felt in this post-1960s world, is the exception in our history.

And you have to step into the shoes of people in the 1950s, people in the 1930s, people in the 1850s, and to move past the history that we view with the hindsight of inevitability and go into those moments and recognize: Every previous generation of Americans had every reason to give up hope.

And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness then.

So you’re saying there’s something audacious about hope?

There is something audacious —

Some audacity in it.

You have to summon it. You have to summon it.

Optimism is about circumstance. It’s about evaluating likelihood. Hope is something that transcends that.

And when we lull ourselves into this sense of cynicism and we give up on hope, that is when we lose.

My editor has this habit of sharing these very Delphic sayings that I have to then think about for a while afterward. A week ago, he said to me that cynicism is always stupidity. In the conversation we were having, I didn’t ask him about it.

He is not here to tell me I’m wrong, but I think that what he meant is that cynicism is the posture that we both know what is happening and we know what is going to happen — that we’ve seen through the performance into the real, grimy, pathetic backstage, and we know it’s rigged. We know it’s plotted and planned. And so it’s this knowing posture of idiocy.

It’s that. And it’s easy. It’s easy.

I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

To this conversation, I think one of the best books on political leadership and understanding how to foster public opinion change is “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s one of my favorite books.

Two, I’ve been reading over time — it’s not new — “These Truths” by Jill Lepore, a one-volume history of the United States that helps to reinforce that so many of the challenges and dynamics that we face in this moment are actually not unique, even if the specifics are, how cyclical our challenges are and our history is.

And then the final one that I’m actually rereading — I read it in the first term of Trump — is “The Final Days” the sequel to “All the President’s Men.” And you realize, reading that, how often it felt like Nixon was going to get away with everything. That he’d stay in office and it would be fine for him. And how many instances that it appeared to be done and that he had won — until Aug. 9, 1974, happened, and he resigned.

And I think for me, it’s a helpful reminder that it often seems impossible until it’s inevitable.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride, thank you very much.

Thank you.

[bernardsbendystraws]

a brutally honest post from me to you.

to preface, I know this is a corner of social media where we fangirl and write fanfiction. i'm aware that these issues are not as severe as irl problems, but just because it's not that serious doesn't mean that a stress/frustration/sadness just goes away.

so yeah, i do know that these aren't the biggest issues that people are gonna face in life, but it's some i wanna talk about. if you don't wanna hear it, scroll. this is a judgement free space and i'll block anyone who disturbs that.

[ posts not doing well hurts. ]

when you're brand new, it kinda sucks. getting traction is hard. people like familiar names with familiar writing styles and layouts. they know what they're getting into.

its not because you're writing sucks, it's because you're different. maybe you have some weak points, but everyone has those at some point. so no, it's not you or your skills, it's because you're new and people like gravitate towards familiar things.

when you're not new, it can really suck. now you know you can get the readers, but sometimes that's almost worse. you'll feel like there's more pressure, that you'll never be able to top xyz. and it really hurts, especially if you make something that you're so proud of and it doesn't get as much traction as you hoped it would.

its not because it's bad. there's so many factors. sometimes it's because one of the triplets posted, maybe just an active period on tumblr where the algorithm is really in your favor, or maybe it was because the readers were sharing your work behind the scenes because they loved it so much.

it varies and it sucks. there's pressure to 'do better' but then you feel kinda stuck. you can't always do better, but you can always do your best.

either way, it's not truly your fault. there's so many factors that contribute to how well a post performs. your efforts are still something you should be proud of regardless.

[ friends ]

this is something i've really struggled with. it's really difficult. social ques are not my strong suit, I take things as they are presented to me. every friendship is different and not all of them are created equal.

some people want to be friends for interaction as a transaction. some people want to be your friend to make it seem like they have a place on sturniolo tumblr publicly. some people want to be friends to be your friend. there's a difference.

doesn't matter who you are, how many followers, or how many fics you have. not all intentions are genuine, even if they aren't necessarily bad.

[ drama ]

i've been in drama and i've also watched it. i've tried hard to avoid it but sometimes it is necessary to call out. when i was a smaller blog there were a lot of big blogs people loved that were straight up mean.

i can say confidently that i've never been mean to someone right off the bat for no other reason than thinking i was better than them. that has and will never happen because i know exactly what it feels like.

talk to a person in private first. i don't care what it is. ask them questions and have them give you direct answers. if it is something deeply concerning like a predator, that is an instance where it is important to speak up since it directly effects people on here.

it broke my heart when the juno / bri situation happened and i had dozens of minors dming me saying something happened but they were too scared to speak up.

i really hope that never happens again, but if it does, people need to feel safe enough to go to an adult on here. i'm happy i was that person for a lot of people because i needed a person like that when i was a kid.

put mdni on all you want, but please don't isolate minors when they are wanting to feel included. that's puts them at an even more vulnerable position and people know that. draw boundaries but keep all of this in mind.

i can and always will admit when i'm wrong even if i'm still hurt by the other person. apologizing isn't something that says 'oh this person is wrong, that person is right,' it's something that is required for basic human decency and respect. if i hurt someone, i want them to at least have the closure of having an apology.

i can't take back the actions or words, but i can validate their feelings and that's really important since we're all human and have feelings.

agree to disagree if you need to at the end of the day, but leave people alone. exposing people for things that aren't necessary is never gonna make you feel better.

interacting and creating genuine friendships will you give a lot more peace and joy then hate and conflict ever will.

point is, treat others how you want to be treated. we're all humans with feelings and coming here for an escape to fangirl and write. do things to make the community better. do things to make yourself happy and proud in the long term.

i appretiate anyone who has stayed to read this, truly. i don't know how much of a difference it will make but i don't care. i said what i said and i meant it. if this helps one person, that already makes it worth it in my eyes.

i love being apart of this community and i hope we can build it to something we're all proud of and wanting to be apart of at the end of the day.

with love and big tits, rose 🫶🏻

[fixyourwritinghabits]

How to Tell If That Post of Advice Is AI Bullshit

Right, I wasn't going to write more on this, but every time I block an obvious AI-driven blog, five more clutter up the tags. So this is my current (April 2024) advice on how to spot AI posts passing themselves off as useful writing advice.

No Personality - Look up a long-running writing blog, you'll notice most people try to make their posts engaging and coming from a personal perspective. We do this because we're writers and, well, we want to convey a sense of ourselves to our readers. A lot of AI posts are straight-forward - no sense of an actual person writing them, no variation in tone or text.

No Examples - No attempts to show how pieces of advice would work in a story, or cite a work where you could see it in action. An AI post might tell you to describe a person by highlighting two or three features, and that's great, but it's hard to figure out how that works without an example.

Short, Unhelpful Definitions - A lot of what I've seen amount to two or three-sentence listicles. 'When you want to write foreshadowing, include a hint of what you want foreshadowed in an earlier chapter.' Cool beans, could've figured that out myself.

SEO/AI Prompt Language Included - I've seen way too many posts start with "this post is about..." or "now we will discuss..." or "in this post we will..." in every single blog. This language is meant to catch a search engine or is ChatGPT reframing the prompt question. It's not a natural way of writing a post for the average tumblr user.

Oddly Clinical Language - Right, I'm calling out that post that tried to give advice on writing gay characters that called us "homosexuals" the entire time. That's a generative machine trying to stay within certain parameters, not an actual person who knows that's not a word you'd use unless you were trying to be insulting or dunking on your own gay ass in the funniest way possible.

Too Perfect - Most generative AI does not make mistakes (this is how many a student gets caught trying to use it to cheat). You can find ways to make it sound more natural and have it make mistakes, but that takes time and effort, and neither of those are really a factor in these posts. They also tend to have really polished graphics and use the same format every time.

Maximized Tags (That Are Pointless) - Anyone who uses more than 10 one-word tags is a cop. Okay, fine, I'm joking, but there's a minimal amount of tags that are actually useful when promoting a post. More tags are not going to get a post noticed by the algorithm, there is no algorithm. Not everyone has to use their tags to make snarky comments, but if your tags look like a spambot, I'm gonna assume you're a spambot.

No Reblogs From The Rest of Writblr - I'm always finding new Writblr folks who have been around for awhile, but every real person I've seen reblogs posts from other people. We've all got other stuff to do, I'm writing this blog to help others and so are they, the whole point of tumblr is to pass along something you think is great.

While you'll probably see some variation in the future - as people get wise to obviously generated text, they'll try to make it look less generated - but overall, there's still going to be tells to when something is fake.

I don't have any real advice for what to do about this (other than block those blogs, which is what I do). Like most AI bullshit, I suspect most of these blogs are just another grift, attempting to build large follower counts to leverage or sell something to in the future. They may progress past these tattletale features, but I'm still going to block them when I see them. I don't see any value in writing advice compiled from the work of better writers who put the effort in when I can just go find those writers myself.

[frownyalfred]

How are you live what's happening with ao3 and the AI? Does it discourage you in any way from publishing your stories?

Great question. I haven't archive locked my stories and don't plan to. That's a personal decision I've made for myself and my own content, and that doesn't mean I don't wholeheartedly support my fellow authors who do so. But I'm of the (again personal) opinion that my works already have been scraped, and will continue to be scraped in some capacity. As have all of my texposts on here.

I appreciate the work the OTW is doing to take down data on other sites where it has been scraped. I think that's absolutely the right course of action. But personally, I am under no illusions that by archive-locking my fics, I am 100% preventing the scraping/sharing/AI use of my content. And at this point, even when we first learned of that big "scrape" a while back, it was too late.

My goal is to make my content as widely available for readers as possible, which comes with drawbacks. Archive-locking fics came with a significant reduction in hits/comments/kudos for some authors, and I decided that was a risk I personally did not want to take. Especially when, again, I was of the belief that many of my fics had already been scraped/were vulnerable to being scraped before we learned about these mass-scraping incidents.

Additionally, I'm quite certain people have been feeding my fics into AI processors, ChatGPT, etc, for a while now. It's not something I have control over, and people will continue to do it even when they know it's wrong. Even with ao3 accounts.

I don't own my fanfiction content, I can't make money off of it, and I don't want to. This would be a very different conversation if I did. Truthfully, my only hope is that by continuing to write a/b/o, and large amounts of it, I can "spike" whatever dataset is using my fics. That thought brings me joy, even if it's a little silly and far-fetched with these better algorithms.

[backfliips]

As someone who admittedly has attention issues of my own, I think it's important to talk about how attention is a skill that can be learned and often requires conscious and focused effort to build. I think a lot of people despair over the current state of media --- short-form algorithm-driven content that is built to snare and lure and diminish people's attention spans for profit --- and while that despair is certainly built off of legitimate concerns, I want to stress that the damage being done is not irreversible.

Over the course of the COVID-19 lockdowns I fried my brain so intensely with tik toks and instagram reels that I was getting bored 2 seconds into a 5 second video and was finding myself scrolling so quickly that I wasn't even watching anymore. I was lethargic and unhappy and though my mood was definitely simultaneously impacted by the hovering doom of COVID-19 and living in complete isolation for months at a time (I don't recommend that, BTW), I found myself losing passion for the things I loved doing: drawing, reading, and writing. I felt miserable and useless and incredibly guilty for leaving my productive and fulfilling hobbies behind while I chased... not even happiness. Just something to occupy my brain and turn it into mush.

As time passed I realized that I wasn't even having fun on tik tok anymore. I'd see funny videos and get a rush of endorphins, and then the next second I would have completely forgotten what I just watched. I was refreshing social media pages to see numbers I didn't even care about. Everything was an endless loop of swapping between different apps, just time passing and passing and my attention span dipping lower and lower until I would go for days without feeling any sense of joy or accomplishment.

And this was most definitely aided by the fact that I was unemployed and stuck in a terrible worldwide epidemic, but as soon as I deleted the tik tok app and put harsh time limits on instagram (15 minutes a day, which I rationed compulsively) I suddenly wanted to draw again. I started reading books again. I started writing and spending time outside and getting inspiration from the world around me.

Now, years later, I work with teenagers whose lives are dictated by their phones. My coworkers often lament the state of the world today --- which, again, is a valid stance to have --- but in the few months after my workplace implemented a no phones policy, I watched disengaged students bounce back to productivity. Instead of scrolling during lectures they paid attention and asked questions and engaged their peers in conversation. During lunch they played board games and talked to each other. Students even told me about how they didn't even want to go on their phones when they got home from school!

It isn't perfect, and I'm not advocating for a world devoid of phones, but I just want to highlight that these neural pathways can be built and exercised. People's brains are resilient and fascinating and much stronger and more adaptable than many people are willing to give them credit for.

I've expanded my time limits across more apps on my phone, setting days where I can't even access social media at all from my phone, and in that short period of time I've found myself far more engaged with the world around me. I've been zipping my phone up in a bag instead of keeping it in my pocket, adding a step to access it, and I've found that that alone is keeping me from using it to a huge degree. I'll toss my phone across the room when I find myself on it when I don't have any reason to be scrolling. And it's helping!

My main message here is that it's never too late to focus on your focus. Change and improvement doesn't happen until you make an effort on your own.

[sightseertrespasser]

"I have a whole other tangent I could elaborate on about Tacnet specifically" Staring at you with big HUGE eyes. I would love to hear the tangent

Alrighty then.

First things first, what is Tacnet?

Sometimes also referred to as a Battle computer, Tacnet is short for Tactical Network and its ostensibly the worlds most demented excel spreadsheet.

In more literal terms, Tacnet is a type of supercomputer.

Supercomputers are incredibly useful pieces of technology. Able to run simulations, predictive algorithms and utilizing real world statistics to essentially speculate the past, present or future. The bottleneck for a regular old supercomputer is that someone has to sit down and manually input all the information necessary for those calculations.

You want to know what kind of gun made that specific bullet hole?

Well first the supercomputer needs the ballistics data off as many kinds of guns as possible, then it needs data on the material that was shot, and it also needs as much information as possible on the bullet hole in question.

You skip out on any of that input and the odds of the supercomputer being correct gets progressively lower.

Problem is, the supercomputer can’t actually think, and therefore can’t estimate how accurate its own calculations are. A computer works in total binary. If it only has the ballistic data for three kinds of guns, it doesn’t matter how much the bullet hole doesn’t match the data sets its been provided, the supercomputer will select whichever of the three matches the hole the most closely.

A computer, no matter how advanced, is incapable of knowing when it doesn’t know something.

But people on the other hand. . .

We turn now to an ambitious young R&D developer many millennia ago.

Once upon a time, this member of Research and Development was on the team responsible for designing new Cold Constructed mechs for Sentinel Prime. And they had a GREAT idea.

“I’ve got it!” They say, unaware of the ominous music rising in the background.

“The great powers of the supercomputer cannot be realized within its current limitations! Its greatest flaws are that it must be stationary, it must be manually fed information and all calculations it does generate must be reviewed by a thinking mech!”

Their coworkers groan. It’s too early in the morning for this shit.

“Therefore!” The mech says, quickly sketching out a box full of smaller boxes that is supposed to be a computer and the miserable approximation of a mech.

“We simply remove the separation, and make the mech itself the data intake for the supercomputer!”

Lightning crashes in the distance, someone tiredly gets the fire extinguisher. Again.

It’s not a hard sales pitch for a totalitarian government to go “Yeah we want super-cops. Here’s the money, make it happen.”

And in a tale as old as capitalism, an untested feature was rolled out with catastrophic consequences.

If you’ve read my tangent on how Crashes work, then you already know about logic cascades.

Tacnet is a supercomputer. A tool. Like any tool, it’s only as good as the person using it, and someone who really doesn’t know what they’re doing is liable to hurts themselves.

So what can Tacnet really do in the hands (or processor) of a master?

Some psychic-type level nonsense. Anyone who’s gotten the hang of their Tacnet, in their own fields of expertise, are able to know exactly what will happen before anyone else.

Let’s compare Smokescreen, Bluestreak and then Prowls Tacnets and how they’re used.

Every Tacnet starts the same, but can be developed and trained to excel at different things.

Smokescreen - Place Your Bets

Smokescreen has trained his to work best for gambling. “Training” can be anything from downloading tables of statistical analysis to personally observing the phenomenon and making notes.

Let’s look at rolling dice. If you rolled a six sided die, any number is equally likely to be rolled. Or 16.67 % odds for each.

So if 3 dice are rolled, then every total value outcome from 3 to 18 must be equal odds as well, right?

Nope! If three six sided dice are rolled, there is a 12.5 % (or 25% if you combine them) chance it’ll be a 10 or 11. And that’s out of sixteen possible outcomes.

So if you know the difference but your opposition doesn’t, then suddenly you have a huge advantage while betting. And this is just the most simplified example I can think of.

If you’ve got the time, statistics are absolutely wild and there’s a mathematical equation for pretty much anything.

All Smokescreen has to do to get good at a game is learn the rules and then plug in the numbers. You know how card counting will get you banned from most casinos? Well Smokescreens worked that out too. Talking to other players (collecting preexisting data points) he can find the average of how much he can win in a night before people get too pissy.

Another thing Smokescreen has going for him (especially over Prowl) is that Smokescreen is much better at reading people. He doesn’t just have statics on the games, but the players.

Mapping out the connections between individuals and taking personal motivations into account, Smokescreen at his peak can not only predict who the winners will be, but he can also predict who will loose on purpose, who will bet the most, who will cheat and who will seek to take their winnings by force.

Experience, experience, experience is the golden ticket.

Also, it’s Smokescreen himself who has to craft the profiles of his victims gambling buddies. Once fleshed out, Tacnet can do wonders mid game, giving Smokescreen room to focus on his social schemes instead.

Luckily, after the burning of Praxus, most people don’t really know what a Tacnet is truly capable of. So Smokescreen looses just often enough to keep folks from realizing that he always knows how every game will play out before they even start.

Bluestreak - Shoot Your Shot

Going in the opposite direction of utility, Bluestreaks Tacnet is all about kinetic calculations.

This fucker is doing the type of math that’s more letters than numbers. Constantly.

Air resistance, velocity, acceleration, gravity, weight, density, temperature, vector, displacement and time.

There’s equations that call for each and every one of those factors, usually in combination.

Your average sniper, even a good one, is usually considering wind speeds, the pull of gravity and the distance from the target when lining up a shot. Bluestreak is taking in all that and then working out the influences of about 15 more factors on top of that. Even before he’s picking where exactly on the target he’s going to hit. Since remember, if he’s got data on not just his own weapons but his enemies defenses, then it really becomes as simple as “would you like them disabled or dead?”

Aim is no longer a question of ability, but an equation to be solved.

Still, physical capabilities does play a part since a steady hand goes a long way towards realizing those calculations.

Tacnet may crunch the numbers, but Bluestreak is the one who has to find all the details relevant to the shot and pick which ones to feed to the machine.

Additionally, Bluestreaks Tacnet in particular has the experimental feature of massively increasing the amount of sensory data he can take in per second, effectively causing him to perceive things in slow motion. This is less something Tacnet is doing, and more a case of Bluestreaks own processor utilizing the bandwidth normally taken up by Tacnet.

Tacnet itself takes a substantial amount of power to run. Normally, it causes problems by siphoning too much power from other systems to do its job (see logic cascade crashes). But Bluestreak has the funny little quirk of somehow doing that in reverse. So when his sense of time dilation becomes maxed out, Tacnet isn’t running the formulas to help him shoot anymore, it’s just Bluestreaks own skills at that point.

Outside of that rare circumstance, Bluestreak is effectively playing with aimbot in real life.

Prowl - Know Your Fate

So we’ve established that Tacnet is powered by mathematical formulas and data collection.

What would happen if someone just, kept going? Kept feeding it? Building up more and more infrastructure for Tacnet to grow around until it has a point of reference for almost anything?

You get an oracle.

Prowl puts the Tactical back into Tacnet. He’s essentially the Jack of all Trades and Master of several of those subjects actually.

Sure, Smokescreen has him beat for behavioral analysis, and Bluestreak is leagues beyond what Prowl can calculate for trajectories. But no one has doubled down on what Tacnet can really do like Prowl has.

You know that (not actually true) statistic about how humans only use 25% of their brains? That’s your average Tacnet user.

Prowl just happens to be insane.

He is constantly taking in new data. He is constantly taking notes, making observations, stripping it down to the raw numbers involved and packing it away into monumental resource centers for Tacnet to refer to.

You ever see someone who’s really good with excel sheets and then see them do some shit you didn’t know excel sheets could even do?

It’s kinda like that.

If you’ve ever read the classic Sherlock Holmes stories, a lot of what makes Sherlock so effective is having such a detailed knowledge of the world around him.

Let’s go back to the bullet hole analysis.

Prowl could look at the bullet hole and tell you after two minutes: “It was this specific Cargo vessel at this time with an illegal weapon.”

From the outside, this looks like a baseless guess. But to Prowl it looks like this:

a) The gun must be a new imported weapon as nothing he currently has on file matches the marking its made in that kind of material.

b) The shooter not only missed their shot, but was shooting downward at an excessive angle. Indicating this was a very large mech firing downward at a much smaller target, likely a mini bot.

c) The shooter can be exactly tracked by looking at the local registry for recent out bound flights, specifically ones with no cargo.

Why? Because the shooter is most likely a transport shuttle. Easy access to imported goods, very large but not a war frame (hence the missed shot) and having failed to kill their victim, would flee town immediately without waiting to take on cargo.

Of those two minutes it took, he spent 1:30 waiting for the flight records to load so he could look up the name of the shuttle.

Scale those skills up to a war room, and Prowl not only knows why an enemy troop is retreating, but where they’re retreating to, what losses they must have taken and whether or not it’ll be worth it to finish the job.

Prowl isn’t smart because he has a Tacnet. Tacnet is OP because Prowl is that smart.

When I write his perspective, Prowl often has an accuracy percentage attached to his calculations. Tacnet isn’t the thing making those estimates. Prowl is the one judging how accurate Tacnets suggestions are.

Dudes just a freak.

—————————

In summary, Tacnet is like if you had every kind of calculator in your pocket and the only limit was how many equations you’ve added on and the amount of information you can feed it.

That last bit is the biggest challenge for Tacnet, as conflicting or flawed data can cause. . . Issues. Aka Logic Cascades. Aka “Why can’t I make it make sense.” Disease.

Let’s just say there’s a reason not many people know what Tacnet is capable of, as a lot of early Praxian Enforcers could be taken out by confusing emotions, plot holes, and particularly well executed magic tricks.

Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when your new shiny police force can be hospitalized by watching Back to the Future 2.

Being one of the first Cold Constructs built with a Tacnet, Smokescreen figured out how to mostly get around that glitch early on and taught Prowl and Bluestreak how to do the same. In this particular setting, Tacnet is poorly understood and best kept mostly secret for those reasons.

(Bizarrely, between Tacnet and the radar uses of doorwings, Prowl and his brothers would actually be really good at predicting the weather.)

———————————————————————

Bonus bit: Good fucking lord it would absolutely terrifying if you could somehow combine Smokescreen, Prowl and Bluestreaks skills into like a Tacnet hivemind or something.

Though with wing speak, to an outsider that’s probably what it already looks like.

———

The three brothers look at the same bullet hole, silently communicating in a way the local non-Praxian officer couldn’t pick up on.

“Oh yeah, looks like Rotor didn’t like Brick cutting into his half of the dirty money. Slippery little guy but you can find both their hideouts here and here.” Smokescreen, the eldest, pulls up a map for reference.

Prowl is already out the door, Bluestreak is lining up a shot through the window.

“What is he. . ?” The other officer looks from Bluestreak. Then to Prowl, trailing off, “Where is the other one. . ?”

“Oh Prowls off to arrest the shooter.”

“But he’s a grounder, can’t Rotor fly?”

A shot rings out.

“Not anymore!”