update of all against all
Jan. 15th, 2025 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit1) I am legally in possession of a new name!
The process was more awkward than it should have been, because I foolishly relied on information from a co-worker who had just changed his name, rather than calling the court to check. Co-worker told me that (a) all the hearings are over Google Meet only, and when I checked the form I was sent, it did say in small print on the bottom "All hearings are on Google Meet," and (b) the judge wouldn't ask me any detailed reasons for the change, and "personal reasons" was sufficient, which was also what the clerk told me when I was filling out the form.
I'm sure nobody deliberately misled me (my guess is that my co-worker saw a different judge with different procedures), but neither thing turned out to be quite true.
I attended via Google Meet even though I would have preferred to do it in person because video meetings and cameras stress me the hell out; the judge, seeming surprised, said that the bailiff had been trying to find me in the courtroom. And I was too embarrassed to say "but the form says . . . " I guess Google Meet must be an option? And maybe you're meant to say in advance? But none of that was made clear to me.
Then the judge did ask for reasons, and specifically mentioned that all I had put on the form was "personal reasons." So, unprepared, already feeling awkward, uncertain how many people were listening or whether this was all being permanently recorded, I immediately felt my mind go blank. I eventually stumbled through something about wanting a gender neutral name (which I don't, really, I just feel like that's a slightly safer route in these times). Because I'm also changing my last name, I added something equally vague about not wanting that family name anymore. And apparently that was enough.
If pressed, I guess I would have gone straight for "I am transgender, and also when I changed my last name to my mother's maiden name 30 years ago it was because my father was an asshole who abused my mother, only it eventually came out that HER father was much, much worse and I don't want to have his name either." Because apparently when I feel on the spot I lose all tact, and I'm left with either incoherent evasion or the nuclear option. Luckily incoherent evasion worked in this case and I could put the nuclear codes away again.
The process was not joyous, but it's over, and now there's just all the annoying bureaucratic stuff. I have to pick up certified copies of the forms, and update my social security card and my driver's license, and then my bank account and my lease and etc. out to the crack of doom.
I will be very glad when I can stop dreading having to show ID.
I think I've decided to ask for a M gender marker on the ID after all, even though in principle I don't think my gender is the state's business. My reasoning is thus: Trump is likely to go after X gender markers first, because they're an easy target, and if he does so, he'll also try to make it a rule that your replacement (for X) gender marker has to match your birth certificate. But hopefully I can get the M marker before Trump can push any of that bullshit through, and it'll be a lot harder to enforce some rule that an existing M or F marker has to match your birth certificate.
*shrugs* Who knows? I'm not sure the president or Congress legally has the right to dictate what states allow on ID, but minor details of constitutionality haven't stopped Trump before.
As for my housing, which was the practical reason I was thinking of an X marker rather than M: well, who actually looks at gender markers on an ID anyway? Maybe they just won't notice.
2) Not much else is going on. My life is dull, apart from looking at the news in ever-mounting horror.
I want to stop getting my news from Twitter, in part because I'm in the process of leaving Twitter altogether. I'd like to support actual journalism by subscribing to an actual newspaper, but my god, the options are grim. The New York Times: transphobia, soft-pedaling genocide, cowardly refusal to say anything critical of Trump. The Washington Post: same. The Guardian: so much transphobia, although less of the other stuff (the US Guardian is better on trans issues than the UK paper, but there's no way to only support the US one). Local newspaper: don't make me laugh. NPR: middle of the road and not actually a newspaper (which I'd prefer), but not owned by a billionaire; occasionally shows some guts. Everything else is too small for general news (e.g. Pro Publica), or too fucking annoying (the Nation, which is also at least intermittently transphobic anyway).
Suggestions welcome. I guess I should donate to NPR and maybe Pro Publica, and try reading French newspapers online to get some perspective on US news. It would be good for my French, at least. And it would be time better spent than what I'm currently doing, which is stupidly looking at comments on Twitter posts, blocking the first dozen or so Nazis, then giving up in despair; lather, rinse, repeat.
3) I'm not even reading much. I buy a zillion books (on sale, on Kindle, yes I know), but the general state of everything everywhere is making me hugely risk-averse when I can be. So I re-read, or look at YouTube videos of Dylan Hollis baking or the chocolate guy making fully-functional superconducting supercolliders filled with raspberry ganache, or I watch low-stakes British comedy panel shows.
However, I am reading one thing I've never read before: The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation. Recently Twitter had another round of ignorant right-wing douchebros giving her shit about how bad and woke her translations of Homer are, so I bought one.
And it's very good. Which I was expecting, because I've read some bits of interviews where Wilson talks about her choices and her process. I can't speak to the accuracy of her translation because I don't know Greek, but I can say that the spareness and clarity of the language she's chosen really work for me as a reader. It's powerful language, and that power comes from a directness that would be lost in the olde-worlde deliberate archaisms that Wilson has rejected.
The right-wing loathing of Wilson is fascinating, in that it really does seem to boil down to: she's getting girl cooties on their big manly foundational western texts. If a man had produced the same style of translation, they'd be praising its masculine, muscular vigor to the skies. But because a woman did it, and furthermore had the audacity to acknowledge the text's weird positioning of conquest and violence, the centrality of slave labor, the conflicts that run all through its portrayals of women's sexuality and agency, they're all screaming "WOKE!" And not one of these douchebros knows archaic Greek any more than I do; they probably haven't even read any other translation. It's the usual thing: the ones baying about protecting the Western tradition know fuck all about it.
I'm planning to buy Wilson's Iliad translation as well, and see if I it's good enough to get me through a text I've resisted reading for many years.
3) A bit late to mention this, but I wrote a thing for Yuletide.
Puppets (2312 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Astreiant Series - Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Philip Eslingen/Nicolas Rathe
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: It's only an old story.
This is a story idea I may revisit at some point; there are things I'd like to explore about Astreiant's matriarchy without having a deadline at the most exhausting time of the year for me, and also not needing to keep the result suitable for gift-giving. (Basically: what if Astreiant had a men's rights movement? But even in the very different context of an actual matriarchy where men actually do have fewer rights than women, I realize that "men's rights movement" is not a phrase to necessarily spark joy.)
I don't know if it's perverse of me to want to focus on that (maybe? I tend to have the urge to pick a canon up and shake it). And I don't think Scott presents Astreiant as a utopia at all; I do however think some fans see it as one. Which requires a certain effort of will--while men in Astreiant have a lot more rights than European women did at the period the Points series is based on, the inequalities are still clear. (To be fair to utopian readers, though, the canon of the Points books is shall we say variable, so some picking and choosing is inevitable.)
If I ever actually wrote all the fics I intend to write someday . . . I'd have a lot more fics.
The process was more awkward than it should have been, because I foolishly relied on information from a co-worker who had just changed his name, rather than calling the court to check. Co-worker told me that (a) all the hearings are over Google Meet only, and when I checked the form I was sent, it did say in small print on the bottom "All hearings are on Google Meet," and (b) the judge wouldn't ask me any detailed reasons for the change, and "personal reasons" was sufficient, which was also what the clerk told me when I was filling out the form.
I'm sure nobody deliberately misled me (my guess is that my co-worker saw a different judge with different procedures), but neither thing turned out to be quite true.
I attended via Google Meet even though I would have preferred to do it in person because video meetings and cameras stress me the hell out; the judge, seeming surprised, said that the bailiff had been trying to find me in the courtroom. And I was too embarrassed to say "but the form says . . . " I guess Google Meet must be an option? And maybe you're meant to say in advance? But none of that was made clear to me.
Then the judge did ask for reasons, and specifically mentioned that all I had put on the form was "personal reasons." So, unprepared, already feeling awkward, uncertain how many people were listening or whether this was all being permanently recorded, I immediately felt my mind go blank. I eventually stumbled through something about wanting a gender neutral name (which I don't, really, I just feel like that's a slightly safer route in these times). Because I'm also changing my last name, I added something equally vague about not wanting that family name anymore. And apparently that was enough.
If pressed, I guess I would have gone straight for "I am transgender, and also when I changed my last name to my mother's maiden name 30 years ago it was because my father was an asshole who abused my mother, only it eventually came out that HER father was much, much worse and I don't want to have his name either." Because apparently when I feel on the spot I lose all tact, and I'm left with either incoherent evasion or the nuclear option. Luckily incoherent evasion worked in this case and I could put the nuclear codes away again.
The process was not joyous, but it's over, and now there's just all the annoying bureaucratic stuff. I have to pick up certified copies of the forms, and update my social security card and my driver's license, and then my bank account and my lease and etc. out to the crack of doom.
I will be very glad when I can stop dreading having to show ID.
I think I've decided to ask for a M gender marker on the ID after all, even though in principle I don't think my gender is the state's business. My reasoning is thus: Trump is likely to go after X gender markers first, because they're an easy target, and if he does so, he'll also try to make it a rule that your replacement (for X) gender marker has to match your birth certificate. But hopefully I can get the M marker before Trump can push any of that bullshit through, and it'll be a lot harder to enforce some rule that an existing M or F marker has to match your birth certificate.
*shrugs* Who knows? I'm not sure the president or Congress legally has the right to dictate what states allow on ID, but minor details of constitutionality haven't stopped Trump before.
As for my housing, which was the practical reason I was thinking of an X marker rather than M: well, who actually looks at gender markers on an ID anyway? Maybe they just won't notice.
2) Not much else is going on. My life is dull, apart from looking at the news in ever-mounting horror.
I want to stop getting my news from Twitter, in part because I'm in the process of leaving Twitter altogether. I'd like to support actual journalism by subscribing to an actual newspaper, but my god, the options are grim. The New York Times: transphobia, soft-pedaling genocide, cowardly refusal to say anything critical of Trump. The Washington Post: same. The Guardian: so much transphobia, although less of the other stuff (the US Guardian is better on trans issues than the UK paper, but there's no way to only support the US one). Local newspaper: don't make me laugh. NPR: middle of the road and not actually a newspaper (which I'd prefer), but not owned by a billionaire; occasionally shows some guts. Everything else is too small for general news (e.g. Pro Publica), or too fucking annoying (the Nation, which is also at least intermittently transphobic anyway).
Suggestions welcome. I guess I should donate to NPR and maybe Pro Publica, and try reading French newspapers online to get some perspective on US news. It would be good for my French, at least. And it would be time better spent than what I'm currently doing, which is stupidly looking at comments on Twitter posts, blocking the first dozen or so Nazis, then giving up in despair; lather, rinse, repeat.
3) I'm not even reading much. I buy a zillion books (on sale, on Kindle, yes I know), but the general state of everything everywhere is making me hugely risk-averse when I can be. So I re-read, or look at YouTube videos of Dylan Hollis baking or the chocolate guy making fully-functional superconducting supercolliders filled with raspberry ganache, or I watch low-stakes British comedy panel shows.
However, I am reading one thing I've never read before: The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation. Recently Twitter had another round of ignorant right-wing douchebros giving her shit about how bad and woke her translations of Homer are, so I bought one.
And it's very good. Which I was expecting, because I've read some bits of interviews where Wilson talks about her choices and her process. I can't speak to the accuracy of her translation because I don't know Greek, but I can say that the spareness and clarity of the language she's chosen really work for me as a reader. It's powerful language, and that power comes from a directness that would be lost in the olde-worlde deliberate archaisms that Wilson has rejected.
The right-wing loathing of Wilson is fascinating, in that it really does seem to boil down to: she's getting girl cooties on their big manly foundational western texts. If a man had produced the same style of translation, they'd be praising its masculine, muscular vigor to the skies. But because a woman did it, and furthermore had the audacity to acknowledge the text's weird positioning of conquest and violence, the centrality of slave labor, the conflicts that run all through its portrayals of women's sexuality and agency, they're all screaming "WOKE!" And not one of these douchebros knows archaic Greek any more than I do; they probably haven't even read any other translation. It's the usual thing: the ones baying about protecting the Western tradition know fuck all about it.
I'm planning to buy Wilson's Iliad translation as well, and see if I it's good enough to get me through a text I've resisted reading for many years.
3) A bit late to mention this, but I wrote a thing for Yuletide.
Puppets (2312 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Astreiant Series - Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Philip Eslingen/Nicolas Rathe
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: It's only an old story.
This is a story idea I may revisit at some point; there are things I'd like to explore about Astreiant's matriarchy without having a deadline at the most exhausting time of the year for me, and also not needing to keep the result suitable for gift-giving. (Basically: what if Astreiant had a men's rights movement? But even in the very different context of an actual matriarchy where men actually do have fewer rights than women, I realize that "men's rights movement" is not a phrase to necessarily spark joy.)
I don't know if it's perverse of me to want to focus on that (maybe? I tend to have the urge to pick a canon up and shake it). And I don't think Scott presents Astreiant as a utopia at all; I do however think some fans see it as one. Which requires a certain effort of will--while men in Astreiant have a lot more rights than European women did at the period the Points series is based on, the inequalities are still clear. (To be fair to utopian readers, though, the canon of the Points books is shall we say variable, so some picking and choosing is inevitable.)
If I ever actually wrote all the fics I intend to write someday . . . I'd have a lot more fics.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-15 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-15 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 01:45 am (UTC)Nationally, I'm hoping to strike a balance between drowning in the flood of Trump shenanigans and over-relying on what filters through from social media and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. I think what I really want is executive summary + reliable analysis, and that's to be found ... nowhere?
no subject
Date: 2025-01-15 11:59 pm (UTC)Yeah, a reliable news source is a real problem. I have ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) news which is politics-heavy but pretty good, but that won't help you! The Australian version of the Guardian is also less transphobic than the UK one, but again, no way to support one without the other.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 01:48 am (UTC)(*I was in that position before, long ago when Good News Week was still airing.)
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 12:51 am (UTC)Mazel tov!
It's the usual thing: the ones baying about protecting the Western tradition know fuck all about it.
Ayup.
I am glad you are enjoying Wilson's Odyssey. I liked some of her translation choices immensely.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 01:53 am (UTC)It seemed clear that the whiners don't read poetry and have no interest in language at all.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 10:08 am (UTC)It is! It does not encompass the external sense of turning contained in πολύτροπος, but it brings forward the weaving which is the literal text of the epic and the nexus of everything to do with Athene and Odysseus and Penelope: strategies, textiles, stories, songs, lies. Which would have biased me no matter what because that motif is one of my major investments in the epic, but it's also a clever, compact, and itself textually intricate choice—the full effect depends on the reader knowing the roots of the word—so it's meta-appropriate on top of everything else. Lattimore's "the man of many ways" is still the most straightforward rendering of the Greek in a major translation, but I can't think of any other that actually handles it well, cf. Fitzgerald's "the man skilled in all ways of contending" (over-specialized, favors only one expression of μῆτις) or Fagles' "the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course" (over-elaborate, also drives too hard in only one direction) or whatever Stanley Lombardo did that I never remember because I didn't like it, either (I think it was in the Fagles line of expanding the Greek too much). Wilson overall is very stripped down, which in some cases did not work for me because Homeric Greek is a weird, archaic, artificial, polyphonous dialect which grabs whatever morphology it needs to make the meter and sounds like pieces of it fell out of the eruption at Thera, which is also my issue with some of her modernization both rhythmically and linguistically, but it's an absolutely driving piece of storytelling, it has been crystallinely thought through, and I would hand it to people who don't know Greek, which I would never do with Fitzgerald or Fagles, I don't care how famous they were for their versions. I have similar feelings about Sarah Ruden's Aeneid (2008).
It seemed clear that the whiners don't read poetry and have no interest in language at all.
Which of course makes them the authoritative arbiters of taste.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 02:54 am (UTC)Congrats!!!
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 04:33 am (UTC)You might consider subscribing to the Star Tribune in Minneapolis if there's no regional newspaper near you--I currently subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle (where I live) and the Philadelphia Inquirer (where I'm from). They don't cover everything nationally, but the columnists and the editorial boards aren't afraid to tell it like it is.
I need to read the Wilson Odyssey, I bought it when it came out because it makes men angry. I'd like to read her Iliad too, although I need to not do what I did the last time and read it all in three days, because then I was depressed for a few days after.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 05:19 am (UTC)Damn that what should be respected newspapers are now so partisan, but then the whole world is turning fascist. I pretty much ignore detailed news (and have for years); the big picture is enough to disgust me.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 06:25 am (UTC)I actually don't remember if I had to state a reason for my name change. I did have to put an ad in the paper that I was changing it, which was annoying. But I don't remember having to put a reason anywhere.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 07:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 04:38 pm (UTC)I adore the Emily Wilson Odyssey and have been teaching it since it came out. Weirdly, her Iliad didn't grab me the same way, but I need to give it another try.
[If you do audiobooks, I really enjoy reading and listening at the same time. LMK and I'm happy to share.]
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-18 09:40 pm (UTC)Regional papers along with the Associated Press may be enough to give you good news coverage. Depending on where you are, you may have a local public library or academic library that allows public access so that you can peruse the articles and see what kinds of slant are present in a paper and find one that you are interested in.
I've heard very good things about the Wilson translation of the Odyssey, and you are also helping me think that it's a good idea to find it and read it. That it's also making all of the people who think they are the preservers and defenders of superior European (white, male) culture get mad that some girl is making their texts accessible and talking about some of the problems is even more of a joy and benefit to everyone.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-19 07:17 pm (UTC)