Thufie 🏴 @thufie@pixie.town

https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1245374377757040640
"Cloudflare, swearing it is not a joke, have launched a censored DNS product that out the gate blocks LGBTQ support and aid sites as well as sex education resources. (They have unblocked some of these now in response to complaints, but many remain inaccessible via their filter)"

#FuckCloudFlare

copyfarleft/copyleft/liberatory software is certainly a form of subversive praxis now, but people should keep in mind its just a temporary tactic until we get rid of copyright, the legal system, and the state entirely. Clinging onto it forever just makes you plain reactionary.

If I am denying your follow requests, please consider the following:

- You may not have enough or any info in your bio and that might be all that federates before I accept the follow request. Consider adding your age (or just above or below 18), pronoun, and some mention of political orientation before trying again.
- Your bio says you are "above/beyond" gender and you are clearly a cishet dude just refusing to post your preferred pronouns because of some weird anxiety (seriously, stop even "any" is acceptable)
- You might be using national flags outside the context of indicating which languages you speak, which I see as a red flag.
- You use exclusionary slurs (not cuss words, I don't give a fuck) including anything homophobic or ableist
- All of the above apply to you and I seriously have no fucking clue why you want to follow me or why I should follow back

As a conlanger I can't help but mention that grammatical gender and our society's concept of gender are not necessarily even remotely related. Its just romance languages which are widely known famously have grammatical gender that attempts to mark social gender. There are real languages, natural and constructed, which have grammatical gender which does not map to social gender (masc/femme/neuter), but marks things like animate or inanimate. These languages, when the culture doesn't have a corresponding reason for marking this distinction, often retain the trait of grammatical gender not for the purpose of mentally dividing all nouns in existence or making the language harder to learn, but to make it easier to understand. When someone is yelling something from far away you may not make out every word, but if you can pick up the grammatical gender that can give you clues about the subject (is it animate?, is it human?), so it acts as redundant info for resolving errors, essentially.

There have been very creative systems in conlangs as well which go beyond that, even. But my point is: grammatical gender is not necessarily tied to our social perception of gender (what linguists unfortunately insist on calling "natural gender" ughh) and we may even be able to intentionally break our conscious connection between those things if we really tried (but honestly if it is masc/femme it isn't worth trying to keep).