#i don’t care about algorithms and views

[ffoulkes]

I was hoping you’d find me here.

[meazalykov]

nazareth 18

kika nazareth x f!influencer!reader

when your millions of followers discover who your longtime girlfriend is

a whirlwind of light, a beacon on tiktok with over ten million followers hanging onto your every post, you were known for being so bright.

your content with beauty tutorials, travel vlogs, and that genuine, humble charm has made you… somewhat known to most people.

your face, glowing under golden-hour light or bright in casual settings, is synonymous with aspiration. yet, despite the fame, you’ve kept a piece of yourself private, tucked away from the prying eyes of fans and algorithms. 

no one knows you’re in love. 

no one knows you’re in love with a woman. 

no one knows it’s kika nazareth, the portuguese stargirl at barcelona.

it started in barcelona, nearly two years ago. a mutual friend introduced you during a night out. kika, then ten months into being with the city’s club, was magnetic. the girl’s laugh is warm, her eyes bright with a quiet confidence, and her smile pulled you in. 

you were struck by her ease to say the least. it’s the way she carried herself like she belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once. 

“you’re the girl from tiktok, right?” she teased the first time you’ve met, her accent curling softly around the words. 

you laughed, nodding, and said, “and you’re the footballer, right?” 

it was light, playful.

over time, that undeniable spark grew. texts turned into late-night calls and coffee meetups became weekend getaways. you’d fly into barcelona between brand deals, and kika would sneak away from bonding with the team to steal moments with you instead. 

when she tore her ankle ligaments, requiring surgery and months of recovery, you were there. you’d sit with her in her apartment, her leg propped up, and you’d talk about everything. for kika, the way the world felt too big and too small all at once, but you made it bearable. 

“i don’t know how i’d do this without you,” she’d whisper, her hand finding yours. 

you’d squeeze back, heart full, and say, “you don’t have to.”

now, almost a year into your relationship, you’re careful. your followers know you love barcelona since you’re always in the city somehow. you’ve posted about it enough, from selfies at the stadium to beachside vlogs.

still, they don’t know about kika. not yet at least. 

you and kika have talked about it, about how to share your love with a world that’s both adoring and invasive. 

“we’ll do it our way,” kika says one night, her head resting on your shoulder as you lie on her couch. 

“slowly and softly, i hope.” you nod, tracing circles on her palm. 

“wait– wouldn’t that be a soft launch?” you murmur, and she laughs kissing your cheek, “yes, exactly.”

the first hint to your fans comes by accident. 

it’s a champions league group stage match, barcelona versus ajax. you’re in the stands, cheering, your face painted with the club’s colors. you’re not hiding since you’ve always been a fan, but cameras catch you and social media does the rest. 

clips of you clapping, smiling, singing the anthem spread like wildfire. 

“y/n is at a barcelona game again,” one post reads, “she’s basically part of the team.” 

however, someone notices something. 

they notice the way you linger near the tunnel, the way you wave at someone on the pitch. speculation begins. 

“i know she is at the women's game but she seems very close with players on both the mens and womens team? is she dating someone?” a fan asks. 

“gotta be,” another replies, “she’s too invested.”

you lean into it, just a little. 

a few days later, you post an instagram picture. 

y/n.l/n

liked by kika.nazareth, ferrantorres, and 189,719 others

y/n.l/n gold

~click to view all 3,910 comments~

it’s you, standing on a barcelona street at golden hour wearing the black away kit. the breeze catches your hair, making it dance, and the kit’s sleek lines stand out against the soft light.

you’re turned slightly away from the camera, casual in blue levi’s, but the vibe is effortless, magnetic. 

the caption is simple with “gold” and within hours, the post has hundred thousand likes. from the mens team, ferran likes it. lamine likes it. pedri likes it. 

the comments explode.

“y/n and ferran??” 

“lamine’s got a crush, i’m calling it!”

“pedri would be cute for her tho!” 

you see the speculation during a tiktok livestream at home at nighttime once, your phone propped up as you do a quick q&a. a comment pops up: “are you dating pedri or ferran? spill the tea!” 

you laugh, shaking your head. 

“guys, no,” you say with your voice light but firm, “not them. not anyone on the men’s team. let’s chill with the rumors.” 

the chat goes wild, but you don’t elaborate. kika, watching from her apartment, texts you a heart-eyes emoji. 

kika: 

you’re cute when you’re dodging

y/n: 

just wait.

you and kika plan the next step carefully. the champions league group stage match against arsenal is the moment. at first, you were doubtful but kika assured you that she is okay with everything.

you’re in the stands again, this time wearing the home kit, the number 18 and “nazareth” emblazoned on the back. you’re not subtle, but you’re not overt either…you’re just you, cheering for your girlfriend. 

during the game, a fan snaps a photo of you talking to salma, who sits beside you since she is sidelined with an injury. you’re turned around from the fan’s camera, the “nazareth 18” clear as day. 

the image hits x and instagram like a tidal wave. 

“y/n’s wearing kika’s kit???” 

“wait, is she…?” 

the game ends with a 3-0 win, kika scoring a stunner in the second half. the crowd screamed, and you’re on your feet, screaming her name. after the whistle, kika jogs to the stands, her smile wide and unguarded. 

you lean over the railing, reaching down, and she stretches up to hug you. it’s quick but electric, her arms tight around you, your hands cupping her face for a split second. 

“you’re my hero,” you whisper, and she laughs, her eyes sparkling. 

“and you’re mine,” she whispers back. cameras catch it all, and the internet loses its mind.

by morning, your social media is a storm. 

“y/n and kika nazareth are dating???” a tiktok with a full discussion blows up. they’ve been stitching together clips of your interactions: kika liking your posts, you commenting heart emojis on her posts, a blurry photo of you two at a café last summer. 

“how did we miss this?” 

“they’ve been soft-launching for months, and we thought they were just friends.” 

“y/n as a wag is everything,” 

“and a woman’s wag? iconic.”

you and kika sit on her balcony that night. she’s in a hoodie, her hair loose, and you’re wrapped in a blanket, your phone buzzing endlessly. 

“not like i would’ve cared anyways, but they’re happy for us,” you say, scrolling through comments. 

“they’re freaking out, but they’re happy.” 

kika pulls you closer, her lips brushing your temple. 

“good,” she says softly, “because i’m happy. i want them to know how much i love you.” your heart skips, and you turn to kiss her, slow and sweet. 

“i love you too,” you murmur against her lips. 

“always.”

you hear footsteps come out towards the balcony, the light door opening as you look up to see vicky looking down at y’all, “get a room.”

“oh, i forgot you were here.” 

you joke, everyone laughing as vicky sits down beside on the bench. 

a week later, and people are not over it. tiktok edits of your hug after the arsenal match are everywhere, set to popular tracks with heart emojis flooding the comments. your followers, once clueless, now scour your old content for crumbs of your relationship, and they’re finding plenty.

there’s a fleeting glance in a vlog, kika’s laugh in the background of a story. you’re still the beauty and travel influencer they adore, but now you’re also a footballers girlfriend, and they’re obsessed with the shift.

you’re in your barcelona apartment, the one you’ve been staying in more often since kika’s recovery. it’s a cozy space, with sun streaming through the windows, casting warm patches on the hardwood floor. 

you’ve set up your phone on a tripod in the living room for a casual tiktok livestream. you’re in a loose sweater, hair tucked behind your ears, chatting with your followers about your latest skincare routine as per usual. 

the vibe is relaxed, your voice soft and easy as you read comments. 

“yes, i’m still using that olehenriksen serum,” you say, laughing at a fan’s question. 

“i'm not even sponsored but it is so good, i highly recommend.” the live has been going for about twenty minutes, with almost 29,000 people tuned in, their comments scrolling fast.

you’re mid-sentence, answering a question about your favorite travel destination, when kika’s voice floats in from the kitchen. 

“babe, come try this!” she calls, her accent warm and lilting. 

you glance toward the sound, a smile tugging at your lips. 

she’s been in there for the past hour, clattering pots and humming to herself, determined to perfect a recipe her mom sent her…a portuguese caldo verde, she said, though she’s been tweaking it with her own spin. 

you hold up a finger to the camera. 

“one sec, guys, kika’s cooking something,” you say, your tone bright. the chat explodes with heart eyes and “kika!!!” comments.

kika appears in the doorway, a wooden spoon in one hand, her dark hair pulled into a messy bun. she’s in a barcelona hoodie, sleeves pushed up, and there’s a smudge of flour on her cheek that makes her look impossibly endearing. 

“come on, it’s almost ready,” she says, beckoning you with a grin. she steps into the frame, unaware of the thousands watching, and holds out the spoon, a small pool of steaming broth glistening on it. 

“taste,” she urges, blowing gently on the spoon to cool it down. her eyes are bright, focused on you.

you lean forward, letting her guide the spoon to your lips. the broth is warm, savory, with a hint of something smoky and rich. your eyes widen, and your jaw drops as the flavor hits you. 

“wait, hold on!! that’s so delicious,” you say, your voice rising with genuine surprise. you grab her wrist, keeping the spoon close as you take another tiny sip. 

“hold on, what is this?” you’re already standing, following her toward the kitchen like a kid chasing a treat. 

kika laughs, glancing back at you with a playful roll of her eyes.

you’ve completely forgotten about the livestream. your phone, still propped up, captures the empty couch for a moment before the comments start bursting through.

“did she just leave???” 

“kika’s cooking for her omg” 

“this is so cute i’m dying.” 

the kitchen is just out of frame, but your voices carry through the phone as you talk. 

“okay, so what’s in this?” you ask, leaning against the counter. you can’t see kika’s face from the phone’s angle, but her voice is animated. 

“potatoes, kale, some chorizo for the kick to it,” she says, “and i added a little smoked paprika because, you know, i’m extra.” 

you laugh, the sound bright and unguarded. 

“i feel like you’re always extra, sweetheart,” you say, the name slipping out naturally.

kika’s laugh is softer, closer, like she’s stepped toward you. 

“shut up!! you love it,” she teases, and you can hear the smile in her voice. 

“i do,” you admit, your tone so fond it’s almost tangible. there’s a clink of a pot lid, then kika’s voice again.

“okay, try this one now…it’s got more garlic.” you make a dramatic “ooh” sound, and she giggles. 

“don’t mock me, this is serious business,” she says, but she’s laughing too. the livestream audience is eating it up, the chat a blur of “SWEETHEART???” and “they’re so in love” come in rapidly.

you’re in the kitchen for a good five minutes, tasting, joking, bantering. kika tells you about the time her brother tried to make the same soup and ended up with something “like dishwater,” and you’re wheezing, clutching her arm as you laugh. 

you don’t realize how much time has passed until you glance at the clock and gasp. 

“oh no, my phone!” you say, suddenly remembering. 

kika raises an eyebrow. 

“what, you’re still live?” she asks, and you nod, already jogging back to the living room.

you grab the phone, and your eyes widen at the screen since 17,000 people are still watching, the chat moving so fast it’s a blur. 

“oh my god, guys, i forgot i was live,” you say, laughing as you sit back on the couch. your cheeks are flushed, partly from the kitchen warmth, partly from the realization that your entire love-soaked exchange was broadcasted. 

kika follows, leaning over the back of the couch, her chin resting on her folded arms. 

she’s still holding the spoon, and she waves it at the camera with a grin. 

“hola!!!” she says, her voice playful.

you turn to kika, mock-exasperated. 

“i left you guys for, like, ten minutes, and you’re still here?” you say to the camera, but your smile betrays you. kika laughs, reaching over to ruffle your hair. 

“they’re a bunch of barca fans who are here for me, obviously,” she teases, and you swat her hand away, giggling. 

“rude,” you say, but you’re leaning into her touch, your shoulder brushing hers. 

you glance at the chat, catching a comment, the sweetheart moment was everything.

you groan, covering your face with your hands, “oh noooo you guys heard that?” you ask, peeking through your fingers. 

kika just laughs again, loud and unselfconscious, and wraps an arm around your shoulders.

“guys please clip that, so she can’t deny the simp allegations,” she says, her voice warm against your ear. 

you groan again, but you’re smiling, your head resting against her. 

“whateverrr,” you say, softer now, and the chat fills with hearts. 

the livestream ends a few minutes later, but not before kika makes a few jokes and reminds your chat to watch the next upcoming women’s clasico on friday. 

you laugh, happy that your life has brought you to this point.

[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.

[aventurineswife]

ok uhhh dr ratio with an s/o who is just as intelligent as he is

so when they have their first kiss, the reader gets so nervous that they start mumbling random facts about ancient egypt / etc. :3

Facts Between the Kisses

Summary: In the grand library of the Intelligentsia Guild, Ratio shares a rare moment of vulnerability with you, his equally brilliant partner. After hours of intense discussion, a surprising first kiss leaves you so flustered that you begin rambling about ancient Egyptian medical practices.

Tags: Ratio x Reader, Fluff, Romantic Comedy, Kiss, Nervous Reader, Banter.

The Intelligentsia Guild's library was vast, a labyrinth of shelves and tomes brimming with knowledge. Ratio sat at one of its ornate desks, the golden owl ornament on his shoulder glinting in the low lamplight. His eyes, framed by his wavy hair, scanned the pages of an ancient manuscript. A faint smirk curled his lips as he heard the approaching footsteps—light, deliberate, and unmistakable.

“Late for our discussion on temporal mechanics, are we?” he said without looking up.

You grinned, stepping into view with a stack of books tucked under your arm. “Only because I was busy proving your theorem on recursive algorithms incomplete. Again.”

Ratio’s smirk deepened. “I expected no less from you. Care to enlighten me?”

You set your books down with a soft thud and leaned forward, gesturing at one of the diagrams in his manuscript. The two of you dove into an intense debate, trading ideas and insights like dueling swords. Your conversations were always this way: sharp, challenging, and utterly exhilarating.

After hours of discourse, the library grew quieter. The steady hum of your voices faded into a companionable silence as you both sat back, basking in the afterglow of shared brilliance.

Ratio’s gaze lingered on you, his expression uncharacteristically soft. “You know, it’s rare to find someone who can keep pace with me,” he said. His tone was casual, but there was an undercurrent of sincerity that made your heart skip a beat.

You laughed nervously, feeling the heat rise to your cheeks. “Well, someone has to keep you grounded. Otherwise, your ego might collapse into a singularity.”

He chuckled, a low, melodious sound that sent a shiver down your spine. “Perhaps. But you’re not just an equal—you’re… more.”

The words hung in the air, heavy with unspoken emotion. Before you could respond, Ratio leaned closer, his striking eyes locking onto yours. His confidence was palpable, but there was a hint of hesitation, as if he was stepping into uncharted territory.

“May I?” he murmured, his voice softer than you’d ever heard it.

You nodded, your breath hitching as he closed the distance. His lips brushed against yours, gentle at first, then firmer as the moment deepened. The world seemed to fade away, leaving only the two of you in that perfect, fleeting instant.

When you pulled back, your heart was racing, your thoughts a jumbled mess. Instead of saying something romantic or profound, your nerves got the better of you.

“Did you know the ancient Egyptians used honey as an antibacterial ointment?” you blurted out.

Ratio blinked, clearly caught off guard. You clapped a hand over your mouth, mortified, but the corners of his lips twitched into a grin.

“Fascinating,” he said, his tone teasing. “I assume this is your way of processing… overwhelming stimuli?”

You groaned, burying your face in your hands. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

He gently pried your hands away, his smile warm and uncharacteristically tender. “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s endearing.”

You gave him a skeptical look, but his gaze was so earnest that you couldn’t help but relax.

“Besides,” he continued, leaning back with a smug expression, “it’s fitting that our first kiss would be followed by a discussion on ancient medical practices. I wouldn’t expect anything less… unique from you.”

You rolled your eyes, but a smile tugged at your lips. “You’re insufferable.”

“And yet, you adore me.” He reached for your hand, his touch sending a thrill through you. “Shall we continue our discussion? Perhaps this time, you can focus on me instead of ancient Egypt.”

Despite your embarrassment, you found yourself laughing. “Deal. But only if you can keep up.”

Ratio’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “Oh, my dear, I always do.”

[fatphobiabusters]

Hello. I’ve never sent a message on here before, although I’ve been following for awhile, but I was hoping I could vent a bit (anonymously, if possible. Thanks.). So I came across a disgusting YouTube video (channel name is Asmongold Clips so people can avoid it) where a guy mocked a fat airline passenger and joked about essentially locking fat people up in concentration camps to lose weight, all while using very dehumanizing language. Against my better judgment, I left a reply (my first-ever YouTube comment at that) since I didn’t come across anyone calling him out. I immediately got attacked for it, and while I’ve gained a lot more confidence in myself and my ability to handle offensive things ever since coming across blogs like this, it still bothered me. Probably doesn’t help that I’m also autistic as well as a minor and can’t process things like this very well. Not long after this, I also heard that leaving comments on any kind of YouTube video supposedly gives the channel money if it’s over a certain amount of words. I’m not positive if this is true, but it left me feeling guilty/worried. I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to see what your all’s thoughts are on this and if I handled it well, or if there are better ways of dealing with things like this. Thanks for listening, and sorry if it became a bit rambling. Also, know that I really appreciate this blog; it’s helped a lot.

____

Mod squirrel:

People in the youtube comments are uniquely out of pocket and Im not sure why. To be frank no one will listen if they want a fight. If you leave a comment you do it on the off chance someone else relates but not in hopes of changing minds. Ive actually disabled notifications for comment replies because I argue too much in YT comments. I try a one and done approach with comments and dont wait around or care if someone who can't even upload a pfp has to say.

All that said:

You aren't obligated to fight every battle. Its definitely a skill that has to be trained up. You can leave a dislike and move on. Like I said youtube doesn't work for changing minds in the comments. If you want to make comments look into disabling the notifications for replies, say your peace and not look back.

The money thing I have no idea. I thought everything was about views and retention time. Either way thats not your burden. You can try the dislike button instead (at a minimum this teachers the algorithm what you don't want to see giving you more peace, hopefully).

And because this got me thinking: I dont suggest minors going full face forward like, say Greta Thunberg. As sad as it is to say. Any minor, on any issue, leave it to the adults because these bigots and trolls can be vile. You can support and stuff but dont become the "face" of anything. Being swatted or something is a possibility and I especially don't want any minors getting caught up in that. You can help in other ways but yall gotta stay safe. Greta has had absolutely horrid things said about her and if you want to care about issues there's levels between 1 and 100.

The occasional youtube comments won't put a target on you. That level of stuff is fine. Reading books and educating yourself is a foundational level that can take years.

I dont think you, anon, specifically are going to run off to do something wild but your ask got me thinking about how in movies there's always the teen who wants to save the world. Today's digital climate is so murky and dangerous. Its a balance between safety and realizing your full activism goals.

Anyway a bit of a tangent there.

Tldr you're doing great, you didn't do anything wrong. 🫂

[rosalietodd013]

Tbh I wanna agree with you (and in an ideal world maybe I would) but… it’s brutal out here for writers. They already don’t get constructive feedback or reblogs, and get treated like shit by entitled readers who think they owe them free stories.

It honestly doesn’t take it out of any of us to just scroll past a story we don’t like—it certainly doesn’t for me. But for a writer, even one interested eye would make their day.

It’s valid to be upset about these things but we gotta be real—the fanfiction scene sort of sucks and it’s only getting worse. These people pour their hearts out and churn out quality content for free. The algorithm works against them. Their own audience and fandom works against them. A lot of people give up on writing or get depressed when work they spent weeks on barely gets a comment. Or gets a slew of likes.

The least we can do is acknowledge the hustle. It’s not like it’s harming anyone to see an OC story on their timeline. Just because some writers don’t care about engagement doesn’t mean the vast majority don’t as well. They care a lot. This is just a small thing people can tolerate so a writer can actually get their story out there to the masses. It isn’t “views”. It’s someone wanting to get their art acknowledged. I’m sure many writers on here relate to that.

As a writer, I’m want to agree with you. I see the same thing with my writings. But the same way readers aren’t entitled to the stories, writers aren’t entitled to responses. I understand how frustrating it is when things like that happen. That doesn’t give anyone the right to force their unrelated story on me just so I know they wrote it. That’s not something I’m looking for or want to see.

The reason tags exist is to make it easier for people to find what it is they are looking for. Some of these writers are also throwing tags on for content and fandoms the story isn’t even about. I see it so much and it honestly makes me respect the writer even less. As someone who suffers from depression and anxiety, sometimes that recognition is what makes my day, but for me it’s just about expressing myself through my writing. If people don’t like it or don’t want to respond or share, that’s perfectly fine. It’s better than seeing comments about how I messed this or that up because I put on the wrong tags so people have a reason to come at me.

The same thing happens with published authors who do it and make money. Their content isn’t always well received by their community either. It still gives no one the right to mislead an audience.

I’m not in any way saying this to be mean or come after anyone specifically. I’m just voicing my own frustration with how people do things on here. It’s frustrating, it’s not fair and it genuinely sucks but respect for things like this goes a long way. At least for me.

[jenniekrj]

“I said,delete it.”{Roommate!Dom!Hyunjin x Sub!F!Reader}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Warnings:Mentions of drinking alcohol and smoking weed,blowjob,fingering,cum play,daddy kink,choking,spitting,riding,unprotected sex,spanking,creampie,oral sex and just straight up filth.

A/N:The tumblr algorithm works on reblogs,so please consider rebloging so it can reach more people,enjoy!! 💖

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hyunjin has been your roommate for over a year now and it has been great.Sure you didn’t know much about each other,but you still really liked his company around the place.

All you knew about him is that he would often go to parties,come home late at night drunk and high,bring girls over and have the nastiest sex with them,smoke lots of weed and just smoke in general,have parties at your shared apartment and cook really good food.He seemed very popular and like everybody just wanted to be around him.

At some point,all the pornographic moans that came out of his bedroom did annoy and bother your sleep,but his kindness and calm energy made up for all the disturbances.

Last week,he started following your Instagram.All he did was just view your stories and very rarely like anything you post.You guys never chatted on there,but why should you? You have his number and you literally live with the man.

Hyunjin was almost everyone’s type,he was muscular,tall,handsome,funny,smart,he had a few tattoos,charismatic,strong and he was two years older than you.Just your type.

It was your second year of college and you made a few friends,they were the best.On the other hand,Hyunjin had a whole group and there might be more that you don’t even know of.

Every weekend he would invite his friends over and pull an all-nighter with them.You knew his friends since they follow you on Instagram.You only ever said a simple ‘Hey,how are you guys?’ whenever you saw them.

-

It was a Saturday night and you were very bored,all you did all day was lay in your bed.You were thinking of ways to cure your boredom when you suddenly got the idea to post some pictures on your Instagram account,so you got up and picked an outfit from your closet.

After you put the outfit on you posed in front of the large mirror and snapped a couple of photos.You were wearing a baby blue lace mini crop top with a white mini skirt and some knee high socks.

You weren’t lying if you said you dressed this slutty just for Hyunjin to see,you had the most massive crush on the older and it wasn’t just some random crush,it was a sexual type of crush and you couldn’t help it.You posted the photos with the caption, “Is this sexy enough for you?” It was obvious you were trying to get someone’s attention,and it might’ve worked.Not even five minutes later and your post had so many likes and comments,people loved this look,especially Hyunjin.

You were scrolling around on your feed when a notification pops up,it’s from none other than Hyunjin,he sent you a DM.Of course,you rush to his profile and check the DM.

“Delete the post,I saw it already.”

Is all he said.

“What? Who said it was for you?”

You replied back,you wanted to seem hard to get even though this post way mainly for him to see.

“I said,delete it.”

He said before barging into your room.

“You really think I’m gonna let other people see what’s all mine,hmm Y/N?” Hyunjin said as he grabbed you by the arm and pinned you against the wall. “But,we’re not even dating,why do you care?” You replied back,trying to push back the urge to just kiss him right there.Your voice was shaking and almost filled with stutters,but you couldn’t show him your weak side,you wanted to see how far you could push him. “You belong to me,Y/N.I’ve seen and heard how you touch yourself to the sounds of me fucking other women,so don’t act all dumb right now.”

What? How’d he know? How’d he know you get wet by just the thought of him? It’s insane how well he knows you when you’ve barely spoken to each other,but you liked it.

“Mmm,how about you get the fuck out of my face?” You said,trying to seem intimidating,but Hyunjin wasn’t having it. “How about I fuck that attitude out of you? You’d like that,wouldn’t you?” It’s almost like he read you,and you enjoyed everything about it.

“Make me.”

“Bet.”

Was all he replied before smashing his lips onto yours,he pulled you closer into a rough but sloppy kiss and you just let him have you.His hands ran all over your body and your arms were wrapped around his neck,occasionally caressing his face and tangling your fingers in his hair.

Hyunjin moved his lips down to your neck,he slightly bit on your skin only to find your sweet spot,once he had found it he started sucking hard.He grabbed your ass,giving it a few light smacks.

“Get on the bed.” He said after he pulled away,signaling with his head towards your bed.You laid yourself onto your bed,with only your elbows holding you up.

Hyunjin dropped to his knees and kissed all over your inner thigh.You sighed a little before you had realized he was getting higher.He ran his fingers up and down across your clothed clit.He then slid your panties off and almost immediately attached his lips to your swollen cunt. “Fuck,you’re so wet.All for me,right?” Hyunjin said before licking up your folds while maintaining eye contact.You cried out a ‘yeah’ only for him to slap your thighand say “Use your words,princess.” Even though he knows you can’t utter a proper word,he still wanted to tease you a little. “Come on,don’t make me say it again.” Hyunjin says into your pussy which makes your head fall back. “Yes yes! Oh- please just go faster,I’ll do anything for you daddy,please.” You practically scream,not yet processing what you had just said.

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Since you’re so nice.”

He said before his tongue thrusted in and out of your pussy.It drove you insane at how good he was.Though,you were expecting this because of how loud the women were whenever he brought them over.

“I- cum please..” you managed to speak as you rolled your hips. “Go on,cum for me like a good slut would.” Hyunjin encouraged you and you came almost immediately after he spoke.You came all in his mouth and all over his face. “Fuck,you taste wonderful.” He praised.

He sat next to only to say, “Get on your knees.” and of course,you did as he said.You almost immediately dropped to your knees and started undoing his sweatpants.Once they were off,your eyes widened at how large he was and he just smirked.

“Too big? Or are you just weak?”

“Don’t fucking call me weak,Hyunjin.”

“Cutie.”

You rolled your eyes and started stroking his dick,he rolled his head back and his right hand went to your head. “Open up.” And you did.

You licked the slit on his tip as he groaned,you could tell how much he enjoyed this.Your eyes started getting watery as you slowly took his whole dick in. “Come on,be a good girl and take all of me.I know you can.” Hyunjin said with a moan coming after his words.

You started bobbing your head as tears fell down each one of your cheeks,even though it hurt you still loved it.His grip on your hair tightened as he moved your head closer to his veiny cock. “Fuck,right there baby.I’m so close.” He moaned out and came right after his announcement.

You felt your mouth get filled with a warm and thick liquid that tasted sweet.You were about to swallow,but Hyunjin stopped you and said, “Open your mouth.” You did as he said and he stuck two fingers in,he moved his fingers all around your cum-filled mouth and soon took them out,only to put them into his mouth and lick all of the cum off of his fingers. You swallowed and got up to sit next to him,but Hyunjin had other plans.He laid down and pulled you on top of him.

“Ride me.”

“What?”

“Come on,don’t run away from it.”

“I’m not,I just..”

“What? What is it,sweetheart?”

“I’ve never done this before.”

“It’s fine,I’ll teach you nice and slow.”

You nodded your head and positioned yourself above his still hard dick and slowly lowered yourself onto him.You gasped at how much he stretched you out and he just let out a dark chuckle. “Hyu-Hyunjin it’s too much.” You stuttered as you breathed out. “I know ma,but you can take,right? Aren’t you a good girl?” He said as he caressed your face. “Ye-yes I am!” You said as you started moving your hips.

“You like that?” Hyunjin said as he thrusted up into you and your response was just moans and whimpers. “I’ll take that as a yes.” He chuckled.You bounced up and down on his dick and all you could think of was how good it felt.

“Go faster,ma.” Hyunjin said after spanking your ass and grabbing onto your neck,basically chocking you.You tried to go faster even though your legs gave up a long time ago,but you went on and soon felt a knot in your stomach.His thrusts were becoming sloppier and you knew he was close. “I’m gonna c-cum,daddy.” You said. “Me too,princess.” Hyunjin said before you both came together.

His cum filled your cunt and now it was oozing out of your heated hole.Once you both came down from your high,you fell down onto him,your head now on his chest.Hyunjin flipped you over,now he was on top of you.He grabbed your jaw and said, “Open up,baby.” He spat in your mouth and you swallowed.Hyunjin leaned down and kissed you,but this time it was a passionate kiss,slow but still somewhat messy.Your tongues moved in sync as his hands slowly massaged your tits.He pulled away,leaving you panting and breathing heavily.

You laid there for a couple of minutes when it hit you that his friends are still coming over in a few minutes.Your eyes widened and you tried to push him off of you. “What’s wrong?” Hyunjin questioned. “Your friends,aren’t they coming?” You looked at him with a slight pout. “Yeah,but that’s nothing to worry about and you said you would do anything,

right my love?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[ultred]

if your sp is not treating you the way you want to be treated, i beg of you, please, do not argue with them and send those damn paragraphs and pitiful text messages. 🙏 i promise you, no amount of “you should treat me better” will change anything. if you truly think you deserve better, you’ll just leave that mf or not care that much about that version of them but you’re still here. still arguing with them. still trying so hard while they keep doing the same shit over and over. obviously they will not take you seriously because you do NOT take yourself seriously. eiypo ? right ? why is it that when you’re in an undesirable situation, you completely forget that. here is the thing, the more you react to something in the 3d, the more it will show up. it’s exactly like an algorithm. the more you interact with certain topics, the more they’ll show up to you. whether positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. the algorithm doesn’t know the difference. it just gives you what you interact with. what you accept. what you choose to be aware of over and over. for a second, say, fuck that sp. i choose myself. i choose to have the best version of anyone because i deserve the best treatment. ask yourself, do people who TRULY believe that they deserve the best treatment and get everything they want in life sit anxiously on their phone waiting for someone to treat them well, begging them while crying on the floor to give them what they deserve ? send those text messages ? waste their energy writing those paragraphs ? hell no. so, why can’t you be like that too ? what makes them more special than you ? what makes them more worthy than you ? it’s just a matter of how you view yourself and others and what you select to experience. that’s it. you want to get what you want ? understand the law and stop going against it. stop doing what everyone is telling you not to do. i don’t care. if you feel the urge to react or argue with them, have the self-discipline to not do that. you can do anything else. cry. let it all out. do something you enjoy. do breath work. meditate. go to the gym. do pushups. do a cartwheel on a table. do absolutely anything but NEVER lower your value or self-esteem for anyone !! never beg anyone for anything. never tell anyone how to treat you. never ASK for ANYTHING from anyone. you do not ask for what you are worth, it simply just comes to you because it is YOURS. here is what i do. when people in my life are pissing me off, i close the lights in my room, lay down on my bed, put on my airpods, open youtube, listen to self concept vids from my favorite manifestation coaches as reminders or neville goddard’s audiobooks (listen to whatever you want, that’s just what works for me), say fuck the 3d it is not real, and completely live in my imagination as if it’s already actually happening. and guess what, that never fails to work. it always works because yes, imagination is the true reality. i want y’all to become so lazy and careless that you don’t care about reacting to the 3d anymore. stop putting so much effort. stop wasting your energy. stop doing too much. they will never change if you keep on selecting and reacting to their bullshit over and over. they’ll “change,” once your inner world does. once you finally accept that nothing out there matters. just you, how you react, and what you select to experience in imagination.

[retellingthehobbit]

….I’m suddenly realizing that I posted chapter 17 of The Hobbit comic on January 13th of 2024, so it’s been almost exactly one year since I last posted a chapter XD.

Really though, Ive realized my new Webcomic Goal is to be more like my favorite YouTube video essayists — who post one excellent high-effort video a year, and then vanish to work on their next video privately for another year (only giving rough draft updates to their Patreon members.)

I think a lot about Hbomberguy’s video essay on the widespread problem of plagiarism on YouTube, where he talks about how the incentive to Post More Content All The Time leads to creators producing plagiarized poorly-researched insincere videos about topics they don’t know/care about, videos that are horribly constructed and riddled with severe mistakes— and how the rise of AI is only going to make that kind of insidious plagiarism much easier to get away with. I also think about how I’ve seen webcomics I used to like start using AI-generated imagery for backgrounds in order to keep up with their rigid update schedule, assuming their readers won’t care as long as they get New #Content.

But people actually do care about quality and sincerity, is the thing! People like having things that are created with love, that they can slow down and revisit multiple times and appreciate more each time. People like things that aren’t shallow, and that the creator put their heart into making. I know that I value that, and I think most people actually do! Social media algorithms want us to prioritize frequency and regularity, and shove that data-driven content in our faces all day, but people actually do value things that are made with love and care even if they take a long time!

I know that I would rather wait an entire year for each video from Defunctland or Folding Ideas or Lindsay Ellis, than follow a thousand YouTube channels that keep to a rigid update schedule via lazy shallow poorly constructed plagiarized content. XD

Similarly, I’m always surprised every time I update that people are still Around and check on this goofy little fanfic comic project regularly? ;_; It’s still ultimately just a small fan-project, but it’s cool that people are still following it after all these years.

And I hope people can sorta view this comic that way— something that takes a long time to update, but only because anything worth reading takes a long time to create.

Anyway, I need to prepare some stuff so I’ll probably post the next chapter in the next couple weeks— I’ve been considering February 1st?— but in the meantime the full 30-page draft of the next chapter is on my art patreon, and you can see the full archive of the entire comic on my website RetellingTheHobbit.com :3.

Thank you again for continuing to follow me even during the Long Hiatuses! I really do appreciate having a small group of readers still sticking around in this fandom!! <333

[delicateperspective]

Hey!

You’re so kind with your answers, so I wanted to ask—how do you manage to not let the general public’s or other fans’ perceptions of H and L get to you?

Like, for example, I’ve always had Twitter because I think there’s some interesting stuff there… and also because of FOMO haha. But now that I’m back in the fandom, my algorithm is constantly showing me not just larrie tweets, but also posts from the general public—the ones who fully buy into H and L’s public images and narratives, and for them that’s just the truth.

And since we know both of their narratives are honestly awful, it makes sense that public opinion can be awful too. Sometimes they twist things or straight-up make stuff up, and if you go digging deeper into what they’re saying, you find really painful takes about two artists you genuinely support and care about.

It even makes me question myself sometimes and I feel guilty—like, if so many people believe that, then am I the one who’s wrong?

How do you not let that get to you?

i think anyone who says that none of the public perception ever gets to them is either lying (to us or themselves), or so deep in their own echo chamber that they’ve stopped letting in anything that challenges their view. and honestly, neither of those is very healthy. it’s important to be grounded. to stay open to new info. to occasionally be wrong. because if we don’t, we just become this fandom ouroboros — feeding ourselves our own narratives until we lose touch with the bigger picture.

part of the reason this corner of the fandom even exists (in its current state) is because of that disconnect — between the public-facing image and the actual actions, words, and patterns we’ve seen from H and L for over a decade. we all know the womanizer image pushed on H at 16 was a marketing tool. we all know how much effort went into reshaping L into someone unrecognizable — someone cold, superficial, and homophobic — to distance him from mastermind queercoding and soften his image for a straight narrative. those things didn’t just “happen”; they were done to them when they were too young to fight against it. and while things really have gotten better the deniability is still baked in. it has to be.

seeing the general public just... take the surface-level stuff at face value hurts sometimes. but i also try to give those people a little grace. most don’t have the time or tools or even interest to look deeper. they see what they’re shown. they form parasocial bonds with what’s marketed to them. and that’s not really their fault.

some have fallen for the fictional overlays and they cling to those because they feel real. and not just emotionally. like, literally neurologically. your brain can’t tell the difference between the endorphin rush of a real interaction and an online one. so when someone gets that little flutter in their chest over a version of these men that they’ve been sold, it feels like love. and you don’t want to let go of that. even when the facts don’t add up. even when the real person is clearly someone else.

so they twist things. they bend things. they watch DWD and completely ignore My Policeman. they hear the "she" in She Is Beauty We Are World Class but don't listen to the rest of the lyrics. they defend narratives that don’t make sense, because the alternative would be losing the version they’re attached to.

and then, on top of that, there’s all the messiness that comes with closeting. inconsistent stories. contradictions. weird branding. silence where there should be advocacy. so then people yell “queerbaiting” or “hypocrisy” or “fence-sitting” — because they don’t know what else to make of it. they only have access to the headlines and the pap shots and the press-trained interviews. they don’t see the fuller picture. they’re not meant to. WE aren't meant to exist. we are only here because what is done in the dark always leaks out into the light. we are here because the truth cannot stay fully hidden (especially when the two active participants don't want it to).

so yeah, it does get to me sometimes. and i think that’s okay. it means we’re still thinking critically. it means we still care. but i try to remind myself that there’s a difference between the truth and the narrative. and that the loudest voices aren’t always the most informed. and that just because something is widely believed doesn’t mean it’s right.

you’re not wrong for questioning things. in fact, the questioning is what keeps us sane here. just don’t forget to give yourself grace too. this is a weird little corner of the internet, and you’re allowed to feel a little lost in it sometimes.

[starryeyed-bi]

Alright I’ve finished the episode I took some pretty extensive note. The notes are kind of all over the place so please excuse that.

He’s cried over breaks as have we all

Ted is very secure in relationships

If he’s not happy in a relationship he’ll leave

He’s trying to take his next partner to space

He wants to have the first marriage on the moon (same)

From what I’m hearing he doesn’t like clingy partners

Also he’s exclusively using the term partner we love an inclusive king

He gives the best relationship advice wow

“A healthy relationship is built and series of successful compromises over time”

Ted says it’s unreasonable to expect a text every hour

When Ted is looking for an artist to hire he looks for someone who makes fucking cool art all the time

If your posting art don’t worry about being to loud or annoying

His advice for content creators and artist is to engage with the community and just post on all algorithmic platforms

He also says just post the shit whatever it is

He’s notice the people who don’t think take it easy will be as big as chuckle

He’s been latching on to the negative comments but trying to stop doing that

He’s trying to get to a place where he can post his shit and not care what people think

Ted has had issues where he compares himself to others

He used to be into legos

Talk to yourself like an Anime character???

Challenge your skill level

If your friends are degrading you or bullying you and you’ve already talked to them and they keep doing it talk to them individually

If you make the stakes serious enough and they still don’t listen those aren’t your friends

Set boundaries!!!!

Ted does not fuck with bullying

Ted says Tucker is like a brother to him and would take a bullet for him

If your friends are bullying you drop them like it’s hot

Be strong with your boundaries and don’t push back if they don’t adjust their behavior fuck them

Over all Ted gives very sold advice and I’ll probably use some of this.

Also some pics for your viewing pleasure.

[ibikus]

one thing that really bothers me is how social media platforms have basically forced us to be one-dimensional in how we present. like, if you want people to see your posts you have to stay mono-thematic or the algorithm punishes you, you can’t do gaming and fashion and books and whatever else you’re into. you can’t even be into multiple different styles, games, genres at this point, you’re supposed to fill a niche, not allowed to change. and then people will believe others really are so one-dimensional and judge them for it, like omg these girls only care about makeup, this guy only cares about the gym, this person only reads smut books.

people are so used to only seeing the specific thing they want to see that they have unlearned scrolling past other things or learning about things they didn’t know about, or even viewing the people they follow as more than what they post. you have to make sideblogs or have multiple different accounts for every interest now because i didn’t follow you for xyz. we treat humans like flat pieces of paper or we don’t treat the people we follow as humans at all, just some type of content machine. then we’re surprised it’s so easy for people to dehumanize others.

[platosworstnightmare]

Just some fun little anecdotes from being on the practitioner/care giver side of medicine that have nothing to do with any current events:

Insurance companies will refuse to cover some tests that pathologists/oncologists want to run on their patients. This puts the pathologist/oncologist in the really fun scenario of choosing whether to run the test away and potentially put the patient into debt when they have to pay out of pocket or not running the test and sort of hoping you caught everything already, putting the patient’s life at risk.

I worked with a woman whose job it was to assess if people were dying fast enough to be put on the state’s hospice plan or if they weren’t sick enough yet and had to be left to the mercies of their insurance, which is often notoriously shitty when it comes to end of life care. Resources were extremely limited so any person she approved for the plan meant less or nothing at all for someone else. It’s like choosing who gets to be on the lifeboat of the dying.

Anesthesiologists are some of the most underrated practitioners in the hospital, especially in the view of laypeople. Trust me it’s so much more complicated than “drugs go in”; it takes skill and trained instinct to know what drugs, when, and how much is needed for any operation. I would NEVER trust anyone not a trained anesthesiologist to assess how much anesthesia I needed for a procedure and certainly not some insurance-run algorithm.

Another fun hospice one, this one less general and more personal. I remember a very fun conversation about a man with dementia who refused to (or couldn’t) urinate. He would hold it until he physically couldn’t anymore. We were all really scared his bladder would rupture, which at his age and condition would almost certainly kill him. Painfully. However, the family’s insurance said any sort of catheter to help prevent this was “unnecessary”. We had to sit down with the family and talk to them about the choice they had of going thousands of dollars into medical debt for something that might never happen (because he died of something else before it could) or risking their father dying of an extremely painful internal rupture instead of going peacefully.

Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of shitty doctors and nurses and medical professionals out there, but trust me when I say it’s not only patients and families who have axes to grind

[toomanywatchers]

My Thoughts on WatcherTV

Hi, I am here to put away my meme-making skills to express my genuine thoughts on Watcher’s announcement; WatcherTV. Before I get into it, this is for any of those at Team Watcher who might be seeing this message: Just know we love and support everything you do for us. Y’all truly do not get the credit you rightfully deserve. I hope with this change to a separate streaming platform you guys can create the content you want to make, pull in creators that you’ve always wanted to work with, and share voices/topics that may have not had the chance to shine because of YouTube’s heinous algorithm. I know myself, and many others, are excited to see what WatcherTV brings. For instance, I already watched Road Files and the trailer for Travel Season on the new platform. And guess what? I love it! I just love BTS-centric shows and seeing the vibes established on Travel Season. Along with more Lizzie/possibly-more-sightings-of-other-Team-Watcher-peeps content?!? If this is what holds for the future of WatcherTV- oh boy, do you already have me more on board than I already was.

I also send my sincerest regards too. We all know that the internet can be a negative space with many sharing their uncensored thoughts, and I hope none of you take the hate to heart. I also hope you can take the weekend to breathe, drink some water, spend time with loved ones, and celebrate this huge step you all are embarking on. I am truly excited to see what is to come on WatcherTV will be there with each step to support.

Now to my fellow fans of Watcher. I understand the concern and it is okay to have concerns. It shows that you truly care for Watcher as a company and don’t want anything negative to come about with this decision. BUT on the other hand, spreading hateful messages? Not. Fucking. Cool. It is quite simple to express concern in an appropriate/respectful manner. Remember, this is a company full of living and breathing human beings. Trying to justify “who is to blame” and pointing fingers is just childish. Guess what? No one is to blame, it was a company-wide decision that they all made and spent months upon months to create.

Yes, it does suck to see content that was free for years be moved to a paywall, but remember they are independent artists that have to pay employees, freelancers, locations, and themselves! Have we not been advocating for fair pay among creative individuals when it comes to WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes and then AI art taking jobs away from artists? If this is what the company needs to do to survive while not sacrificing the high-quality content they make for us, then we should give it a shot! Plus with the current discount available, the subscription is not that pricey for the amount of shows they produce! Literally for January and a bit of February, they were uploading 2 podcasts and 2 separate shows… that’s a lot of content! If you have never sat down to produce, direct, write, perform, edit, and all other aspects it takes to make a fine-polished YouTube video, it takes a lot of work!

To add to this, Watcher already makes content that far expands past what is recognized as normal for YouTube. They build individual sets for each show that is produced, and they travel all over the place for Ghost Files and soon-to-be Travel Season. It costs money to produce content and YouTube?- It’s just not how it was years and years ago. Views on long-form content have been dipping and with the over-saturation of sponsorships, I am assuming they are not making enough profit to sustain the business on the current platform. Also, monetization on YouTube has been a killer for many channels because of vulgar language issues and just being demonetized for no rhyme or reason. By moving over to a streaming platform of their own they can continue to create what they want to create, and make it without any restrictions or rules holding them back. Too pricey? Find some friends who also like the content and split the pricing evenly. Only want to watch certain shows? Then make a monthly subscription for the time that show airs. There are many solutions that you guys see as a huge problem, and don’t get me wrong I have my concerns. I shared those concerns briefly in my theory post about them still being a young channel, but I’m also unaware of the actual analytics and revenue that is currently being brought in currently to the company from YouTube alone. 

It’s a huge step that has garnered negative feedback from those spreading hateful messages about the company and to other individuals for supporting the boys *cough cough I see your messages and comments cough cough* is truly uncalled for. I will be taking a bit of a break from my socials as I wait out the storm though if I have the energy, I might stream on Twitch again and talk through this with y’all if you can sit down and have a civil discussion. As for now, it’s your choice if you continue to support. My goal is to continue to make funny little memes, and if I am allowed to I will be working on a crack video pt.2 after Travel Season premieres. Remember to be kind and to put yourselves in their shows. Just the boys even though they are receiving the brunt of the hate, but for everyone at the company.

Your local memester watcherina - Fritz.

[polizwrites]

Picking Up the Pieces

This is a fill for my final  @sweetspicybingo  Beginnings Bingo fill:   C3 - First Victim and an older  @flashfictionfridayofficial   prompt [FFF#293 - Unbridled Rage].

Fandom:  MCU/Marvel Pairing:  Tony Stark  & Bruce Banner Rating: General Tags:  Post Captain America: Winter Soldier, Post Iron Man 3, Science Bros,  Canon Convergence,  Summary:  As Bruce and Tony pore through the SHIELDra files, they talk about the Winter Soldier and what should happen next.   Word Count: 425 words

“I can’t help but think,” Bruce commented, as the two of them took a break from examining the technical schematics JARVIS had pulled out of the massive SHIELDra data dump,  “that much like the first country the Nazis conquered was Germany,  that the first victim of the Winter Soldier was Sergeant Barnes.”

After hearing from Steve and Natasha what had really gone down in  Washington DC - including the revelations provided by cyber-Zola - Tony had instructed his AI to  comb through the files for anything relating to his parents as well as the Winter Soldier.   The last thing he’d expected was for the requests to overlap.    

The files detailing the Soldier’s mission had been bad enough, but the security video of the brutal attack had been a shock to Tony’s system that he was still recovering from.     

 “I don’t care,” Tony replied tightly, “He killed my mom.”   He’d recovered - more or less - from the unbridled rage he’d felt immediately after viewing the video. If Barnes had been standing in front of him at that moment, well - it wouldn’t have been pretty.  

“Hydra killed your mother.  Barnes was just the weapon.” Bruce replied mildly.  “I’d think you’d understand how that works.” 

Tony took a long, slow breath, clenching his teeth against a stab of pain from his rebuilt sternum.   Maybe he shouldn’t have made his Science Bro an impromptu - and only semi-willing - therapist.   That said, Bruce had a point.  They both had been appalled by the recordings of the ‘reconditioning sessions’  Barnes had been subjected to. 

“Yeah, yeah  - it’s  a wonder the guy has any mind or memories left at all.” Tony grudgingly admitted.  “But it’s not just me holding a grudge -  Hydra used the Soldier for political purposes across the globe.” 

“Which is why we need to find Barnes first.”  Natasha sauntered in, fresh from yet another Senate hearing.   “Get him somewhere safe and then leverage what we’ve found in Hydra’s files  to control the narrative.” 

“I have an idea for the finding part.”  Bruce said,  tapping at his keyboard.  “Tony, remember how we searched for the Tesseract?   I think we could use the same algorithm  to search for the power source that Barnes’ prosthetic uses.” 

“And JARVIS can tap into surveillance feeds and run facial recognition software to try to track him down,”  Tony added. 

“What then, Tony?” Natasha asked, her expression unexpectedly soft, as if she understood at least some of the emotional upheaval he was dealing with.  

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.  “I guess it depends on who we end up finding.”  

[abbysworldsastage]

I don’t know if some of you guys are being purposefully dense, or if you’re just trying to be edgy, or if you’re falling for some of the bullshit the US and their funders have been spouting, but I don’t think you guys understand what is happening with the tiktok ban and why you should be worried.

“Whatever. We need an app for the people and by the people. I don’t care about tiktok.”

This ban sets a precedent for allowing them to ban any app they SAY they view as a threat. We all know it isn’t really because of ccp involvement (senator im Singaporean), but because the people on tiktok are speaking out and organizing. AND Zuckerberg, Elon, and bezos are jealous of the platform and want to buy it so they are trying to force a sale. Even if we did manage to create an app “for the people by the people” that reached that level of success, if people started being so pro-Palestine and started organizing and talking the same way they do on tiktok, the second the government got wind of it they could make up some “national security” bs and use this as a precedent for a much faster ban. Remember, they have been working on this for YEARS. And maybe some tech bro would swoop in and say “hey, I’ll buy the platform and clean it up for the government so they don’t have to worry about the threats anymore *wink wink $$* and then there goes that platform too.

“Idk why people think they are getting one over on the government by going to RedNote. Do you all think you’re actually doing something?”

None of us believed going to RedNote would be a long term solution. It is a form of protest on many levels, AND calling out the government on their  fear mongering and xenophobia. They keep using the “China will steal your data” excuse and we very vocally said “we don’t care, and here is proof.”

AND

We are making a statement to Zuckerberg that we won’t go back to meta, even without tiktok. He spent MILLIONS lobbying for this ban in order to get rid of the competition one way or another. Either it goes away, or sells. And just like vine, he would probably buy it up and either shut it down after a while to get people back to instagram, or just fuck up the algorithm to suppress the creators that actually make the app special. The writers, artists, POC, queer people, etc. who have found an audience that they never would have found on Instagram or YouTube would be pushed to the background again.

Remember how we always say “money talks”? In a world where these platforms are profiting off of our data, we are taking that “digital currency” that they have been stealing for ages, and actively CHOOSING to give it to their competitors. WHILE withholding it from the people who have been profiting off it. That includes the politicians who have been getting paychecks from meta in order for all of this to happen.

“Tiktok has radicalized so many, and spread misinformation, is too addictive, and helped trump win the election!”

I have not been on a single app or social media network in my LIFE that you could not say that about. INCLUDING TUMBLR! Are we forgetting the fucking Russian bot accounts in the 2016 election? The fucking hairless purple eye condition people actually believed? I have seen rac*sts, and bigots, and “maps” on this app for years. It is on Facebook. It is on Instagram. It is on Reddit. it is on Twitter or X or whatever you wanna call it. The biggest difference with TikTok is that it is loud. It is popular. And it is making a lot of money for a billionaire that is not from America. I have spent the same amount of excessive hours doom scrolling on Tumblr that I have on TikTok. You can do that on any app. and I am going to be real with you all for a second: As someone who has spent a ton of time on both apps, I honestly feel like the content on TikTok feels just like Tumblr except in video format. 

I could rant for ages, but honestly at this point, I don’t know how else to tell you guys that you should care about this whether or not you like tiktok. And what TikTok users are doing in response to this ban is actually having an impact whether you want to see it or not. it might not be the thing that makes our politicians go “we are so sorry. you are right. We will fix this.” But it is making our voices and opinions on the matter loud and clear, so that when they do go against what we are telling them we want, they can’t claim ignorance for our reaction. It is forcing them to go out of their way to oppose what the people have been asking for. it is forcing them to out their true intentions to the people who don’t clearly see what they’re doing. Like there are so many layers to this and I am not eloquent enough to explain them all in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a rambling maniac please I am begging you all to take a second and think about this beyond an app.