Vuijlsteke is right. This is a brilliant song. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it reminds me of Jacques Brel, the anguish Stromae puts in his voice.
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The trans life
A while back NBC’s Dateline did a surprisingly good and respectful documentary about Josie Romero, a nine year old trans girl and how she and her parents dealt with the fact that their little boy was actually their little girl. It also looks at the medical challenges young trans children have to deal with, those who start transition before puberty. If you know your physical gender doesn’t match your real one, going through puberty is hell, as that’s of course when the physical differences between boys and girls really start to matter in all sorts of way. Going through that, then going through physical transition to get to your chosen gender does all sorts of things to your body. Therefore the best practise for children like Josie is to start them on hormone blockers to delay puberty a few years, then start hormone treatment when they’re old enough for it to get the physical transition going. It all sounds scary if you haven’t had to think about it before, but the Dateline documentary does well in presenting it as honest and positive as possible.
If you want a slighter wider view of what living your life as a trans person means, take a look at the Trans Scribe series over at the “girl on girl culture” magazine Autostraddle. It’s a honest, at times moving series, that shows that trans lives don’t have to be tragic.
The cake is no lie
Mother of Storms
Living as I do in my cozy little corner of northwest Europe, where things like volcanos or earthquakes, let alone tornadoes, just don’t happen, it’s hard to understand the sheer scale of destruction a tornado like the one that hit Moore, OK yesterday can leave behind. Seeing videos like the one above just leave me gobsmacked. Luckily it’s not all doom and gloom and finding your dog alive though your house is flattened must give this woman some sort of comfort:
Some reasons why science fiction needs more diversity
Science fiction and fantasy can be incredibly whitebread at times, though it is slowly getting better. One of the things that having more writers of more diverse backgrounds brings to the genre is new and interesting perspectives, as the two examples below make clear.
First, in a review for the LA Review of Books Nalo Hopkinson made the point that the Caribbean makes a good hjumping off point for a colonional or post-colonial sf setting that would be more interesting than the usual American frontier nonsense:
To my delight, in Lord’s afterword, she claims the Caribbean as the post-colonialist convergence of cultures that it is, pointing out that it is thereby an apt jumping-off place for speculative extrapolation. Sing it, sister. It’s all too common for the rest of the world to assume that the Caribbean is a bucolic vacation playground of villages and beaches, incapable of initiating any real scientific or technological progress.
Then I also found an old post of Aaron Hawkins (RIP), who quoted Mark Dery on why science fiction is so relevant to African Americans:
African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).
No real conclusions here, just some things that made me think.