Constructing masculinity consciously and intentionally

In an article for Between the Lines Kelli Dunham wrote about masculinity, as in assigned female at birth, but wanting to be masculine. Dunham was the youngest in a large farm family so grew up in the midst of masculinity. “It drove tractors. It fixed things. It wore work boots…” It seemed like a club but no one said whether admission was possible or where they kept the application. In 2008 the Butch Voices conferences were founded. Dunham could now discuss what it means to be masculine.

Suddenly, masculinity wasn't just something I wanted access to; it was something we could examine together. What parts had we inherited? What parts had hurt us? What did we love about it? What kind of masculine people did we actually want to be? For the first time, I was having those conversations with other masculine-identified people instead of just quietly standing near the power tools hoping gender would somehow eventually explain itself.

All these years later Dunham is in a position to mentor young trans people.

Watching young trans men construct masculinity consciously and intentionally is almost like watching a painter create a watercolor landscape. They aren't starting with a blank page exactly — the colors are already there, handed down by family, culture, every man they've ever loved or feared or wanted to become. But they get to decide which ones to use, which ones to dilute, which ones to let bleed into each other and which ones absolutely do not belong in this particular painting.

Dunham’s brother is career military and the picture of masculinity. Yet, he cares deeply for his children.

I used to think healthy masculinity meant removing the bad parts: Don't suppress emotion, don't dominate, don't confuse anger with strength. But maybe that's only half the work. Maybe we should also notice what's already there.

Such as empathy and caring. EagleOfFreedom of the Daily Kos community wrote:

Climate Change has always been an anondyne phrase that does not offend. Maybe that was a good option when things were not dire as they are now. But just look out your window, if they haven’t been blown out by high winds, to know that a non-descript “change” is not what we are experiencing. What humans are doing to the planet is Climate Disruption. And what humans are experiencing right now is a rolling, widening Climate Catastrophe. ... Climate Disruption? This is something different. It evokes what happens when a supervolcano blows and suddenly disrupts the atmosphere and thus also the climate. It evokes what happens when an asteroid or comet impacts the planet and kicks up so much debris that it disrupts the climate, creating a global catastrophe. ... So I’m not going to call it Climate Change. That’s simply not enough.

Kos of Kos wrote that the United Nations voted 164-1 to, as Kos wrote, “encourage the use of world maps that more accurately represent the relative size of nations and continents, moving away from the familiar Mercator projection.” The frequently used Mercator projection shows far northern countries, such as Greenland and Russia to be much larger than they are in comparison to African countries. Greenland is seen as about the same size as Africa when Africa is actually 14 times larger. That single no vote? It wasn’t Russia, which benefits considerably from the Mercator projection yet approved the resolution. It was the US.

“While this initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions, the United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to—as its most vocal and committed proponents plainly and openly state,” explained the U.S. mission to the U.N.

That “radical” ideological agenda is “cognitive justice” and refers to the way knowledge is produced and presented which can privilege some perspectives over others. That includes which projection is used to create a map as that influences how we perceive different regions of the world. The resolution endorsed the Equal Earth projection because it preserves the relative size of landmasses. The size of Africa is in proper proportion to the size of Russia. About the same time the nasty guy tweeted a map of North America showing everything from Nicaragua to northern Canada plus Greenland and Cuba under an American flag. Kos wrote:

So would Greenland hold quite the same fascination for Trump if the map he grew up looking at didn’t make it appear nearly as large as Africa? Would Canada? That’s the fascinating part of this entire controversy. The African nations pushing this resolution argue that distorted maps aren’t merely cartographic curiosities—that maps shape how people perceive the importance and power of different places. And here comes Trump, essentially volunteering as Exhibit A.

Of course, map geek that I am, I had to learn more about the Equal Earth projection. A page from Sakshi Education shows Mercator and Equal Earth side by side. It also covers the vote in the UN, then gets into the differences between the two projections. It also explains why the Mercator has been in use since it was created in 1569 – it is great for maritime navigation. I add the mathematics of converting from latitude and longitude are much simpler than many other projections. Sakshi notes what the UN passed is a recommendation. It is not mandatory. A page from Equal Earth explains the projection, compares it to a few others, and gives the mathematics. One could even download a map. In the comments of Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos and after a tweet of another nasty thing done by the nasty guy Raelerin wrote: “I sure wish I understood why no one is willing to tell him “NO!’” RandomNonviolence replied:

Some like what he is doing, some have been bought, some are afraid. Trump is a mob boss who has no empathy for others. He is willing to do anything to get his way and now that he controls the government, he has a lot of power to give people gigantic gifts, make or destroy careers, and physically hurt people. He shows us this every day with his grifting, the detentions and deportations, his attacks on Republican politicians, etc. There has always been a lot of grift, fraud, and corruption in our society and in Washington. Trump is a master at seeing that and using it for his own benefit. Trump is completely ignorant and incompetent at being a normal human being, but he is a genius at being a sociopathic mobster.

In the comments of today’s roundup exlrrp posted a tweet from GOP Ls:

Trump is now single handedly responsible for 27.7% of the national debt. This is dramatically more than any President in American history.

Politics in the Wild added:

Huge congratulations to President Donald J. Trump for achieving his 7th bankruptcy.

With the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Friday the nasty guy said he was at the World Trade Center and that “Two firemen, big strong guys, I’m not the smallest guy in the world, they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here,’ and they literally lifted me up.” No, he was a few miles away in his own tower. But the comment was great for meme creators. Several of their images are in these comments: Being guided out by state mental hospital orderlies. Being carried out by really buff firemen and giving them longing looks. Being carried out by Jeffrey Epstein. Being carried out by Hulk Hogan. A cartoon by Nick Anderson posted on Kos shows the triumphal arch the nasty guy is planning to build.

Woman: Triumph over what? Man: Congress, the Supreme Court, the Constitution, common sense, taste...

Dolly Parton picked up the phone for queer press

I have a good reason why I didn’t post at the end of last week. At 11:00 Wednesday night I stood outside and watched a lightning show with flashes more frequently than once a second. The wind was rising. The city’s severe weather sirens went off at 11:30. But the rain didn’t start until about 12:15, after I had gone to bed. My electricity went out 12:30 am Thursday morning. The loss of power was exactly timed to a lightning strike. The next morning the electric company sent me a text saying they detected my meter was not online. Even so I used my phone to file an outage report. The power was back on at 10:15. Total time without electricity was 9:45. Reason for outage was given as wind damage (though I still think it was a lighting strike). I heard the weather report for the afternoon and recharged my phone. Another storm hit mid afternoon Thursday. Again the city’s sirens went off. I got an extreme weather alert on my phone (for once accurate). At 4:00 the power went off again. I heard later a tornado had touched down in Detroit. I tried calling the electric company, but the call wouldn’t connect. I tried several more times, no go. I used the texts they sent earlier to get to their outage website and filed a report. There was a bit of “but we fixed that one!” but I persisted in reporting the problem. At the time their overall outage page said there were over 360,000 customers without power. A while later I got a message saying the expected time of restoration would be Sunday, September 6. Yikes! I read for much of the rest of the day, then prepared for bed by candlelight. Friday morning I figured the food in my refrigerator was still good. I went to a restaurant for lunch and supper. I spent some time in the city library as a place to sit and read – and recharge my phone. Then another evening by candlelight. On Saturday I had lunch with Sister and Niece. During the meal I got a text saying the power was back on. Total time off: 44:20. Thankfully, this was a day earlier than their estimate. Reason for the outage was “Private property tree damaged equipment.” I had checked a website on what foods to keep and what to discard after a long outage. Once home I did what it suggested. Then I went to the grocery store. Along with the food I bought another candle. My Sunday movie was the documentary Bad Axe. At the start of the pandemic son David saw the times were of historic importance and began filming his family as they ran the family restaurant. That restaurant was Rachel’s in Bad Axe, Michigan. By the end David got a pretty good story. I remember Bad Axe was featured in the Detroit Does Docs film festival in 2023. I didn’t see it then, though it got rave reviews. The father of the family is Chun. He and his five siblings and their mother made it out of Cambodia during the Killing Fields. His father didn’t. Chun knows the power of hate and might have some PTSD from watching so much death. Chun married Rachel, who has Mexican ancestry. Their children are David, Jaclyn married to Mike who is white, Raquel with boyfriend Austin who is black, and a few more. They’re quite the ethnic mix. David documents the pandemic shutdown and the pivot to takeout only. Chun doesn’t want to isolate to stay safe. Bad Axe is a small town in rural Michigan and very much nasty guy country. The Lower Peninsula of Michigan is shaped like a mitten and this farming region is known as the thumb. The family tries not to comment on other’s political views, just serving everyone as best as they can. Even so there was some mask backlash. Then the George Floyd protests began. Jaclyn felt she needed to speak out against racism. Many in town were on her side, but there were a few guys in skull masks holding guns. And Jaclyn, Austin, and the rest of the family stuck out and were memorable. Add to that the nasty guy’s rhetoric about COVID coming from Asia. Some customers could be so rude! Kos of Daily Kos wrote that Republicans have been mighty effective at claiming allowing transgender girls to play on girls teams is unfair.

Democrats are stuck between two crappy options: They either fully embrace a maximalist “trans women are women” position that, while morally correct, is poison with voters, or they do the thing they used to do with abortion and run away and hide—also poison with voters. However, political strategist and Substacker Eric Schmeltzer has the perfect response. The goal is to stop playing defense on the issue and instead go on offense. And Schmeltzer has identified exactly how to do it. 1. Acknowledge that sure, it can be an issue of fairness, and while there haven’t been any notable instances of trans-related unfair advantages, sports governing bodies are well equipped to handle them if they ever arise, just like they do with issues such as drugs and weight classes. Then, here’s the coup de grâce … 2. How would the government enforce these bans, anyway? With beyond-creepy genital inspection schemes.

In 2022 Ohio Republicans passed through their House a bill that would required a physical exam of a child’s genitals if anyone, such as a sore-loser coach, disputed a girl’s sex. That could be aimed at girls who are more tomboyish than their teammates. That horrified the public and that language was pulled. And a horrified public is the only thing that slows them down. Yes, there may be a fairness problem. But it is not on the scale of the panic being sold. So let’s keep the government out of your family – and out of your daughter’s shorts. Kos posted the Associated Press obituary for Gloria Steinem, who died last week at 92. Throughout her long life she spoke out about women’s right. She recognized women needed control of their own bodies and that was regardless of sex or race. She traveled the world with that message. She didn’t like being called glamorous because that implied she got where she was because of her looks, not because of how hard she worked. She hated public speaking though she would be the most rousing speaker on the program. She co-founded Ms. Magazine as a way to discuss a wide range of feminist issues and not have editors assign her to cover food and fashion. Steinem would have gaining her voice about the time I was old enough to be aware of voices like hers. She has been speaking about women’s issues, and doing quite well at it, my entire life. Alix Breeden of Kos wrote about some of the many people who posted remembrances of Steinem, usually about how their lives were influenced by her. They include Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kerry Kennedy, and Zohran Mamdani. Chris Azzopardi is a reporter for Between the Lines and has an interview with an arts figure in nearly every issue. In the latest issue he talked about his several interviews with Dolly Parton.

Here's the thing nobody's obituary is going to lead with, so I will: Dolly Parton picked up the phone for queer press. Not just the glossies with the biggest circulation — she talked to a small LGBTQ+ paper out of Michigan, the one I write for, the same way she talked to Rolling Stone or Playboy, at a time when most of country music wouldn't return that call at all. There was no algorithm rewarding her for it, no cultural mandate yet that made it the safe or expected thing to do.

The LGBTQ+ press was not “a liability to be managed. She treated it like a call from a loved one.” She is a person claimed by both sides in America. But that isn’t because she stayed quiet or being vaguely agreeable so neither side could find fault.

She got there by answering hard questions in a way that made it very hard to be mad at her for the answer because it was honest, and honesty was Dolly’s default.

She could see the God light in everyone, including LGBTQ+ people. She didn’t criticize or condemn. And in 1991 – way back then – her song lyrics for “Family” included:

Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, some are strays, but not a one is turned away, when it's family.

She didn’t say it to be provocative, but because it was true. She said that we all have LGBTQ+ people in our lives, though we may not know it. “They're ours and they're who they are and we know they're wonderful and they're like us.” She had LGBTQ+ people working for her company because they were “told it was safe to be honest.” There was a time that an Azzopardi interview of Parton was what was quoted by other news sources. Another of his interviews was collected into a book of her interviews. It was included by an editor that had no stake in the queer press, but saw that interview as essential to record.

I once asked Dolly why she'd taken that step, becoming one of the first major country artists to stand up for LGBTQ+ equality. She didn't treat it like a stance at all. Just unconditional love. "Why wouldn't I stand up for everybody, for all people?" she said. "In the country field, we're brought up in spiritual homes, we're taught to 'judge not lest you be judged,' and it's always been a mystery to me how people jump all over things just to criticize, condemn and judge other people when that is so un-Christian — and they claim to be good Christians! We're supposed to love one another. We're supposed to accept and love one another. Whether we do or not, that's a different story. But that's what we're supposed to do." Not a one is turned away, when it's family. She meant her own. Turns out she meant ours too.

A couple of Azzopardi’s articles about Parton are here:

Counts of death by heat are way too low

I finished the novel Gwen and Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher. Art is a descendant of the legendary King Arthur many generations and a few centuries back. Or maybe the line goes through Mordred. He’s the son of a lord and has no interest in doing the things lords do and a lot of interest in being a playboy. Gwen is a descendant of Guinevere and probably not King Arthur and she is glad her full name is Gwendoline. Her father is the current king of England, who has relocated his capital back to Camelot. Gwen was betrothed to Art when she was an infant – something that happens with royalty at the time. But while they were growing up Art acted like a bratty brother and they still despise each other. The summer Gwen turns 18 and Art is 19 Art’s father sends him to live in the King’s castle for the summer in hopes the two will turn their spat into love. Within a day of arriving Gwen sees Art kissing Mitchell the assistant to the master of the hounds and Art sees Gwen swooning over Lady Bridget, a female knight who has arrived for the summer to take part in the season long tourney. They agree to cover for each other, which means they have to spend time together acting like their relationship is developing. And it works – they no longer hate each other. But will someone please call off the wedding? In the meantime Art notices the bookish Gabriel, Gwen’s brother and crown prince, looks mighty cute. The story is enjoyable and the writing pretty good, though not to the high quality of Fredrik Backman’s work I praised in my previous book discussion. There is a sequel. Alas, I think its title and book cover are somewhat of a spoiler for this book. I had recently written about projections that high heat could kill off half of humanity by 2050. Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to investigator Alejandra Borunda who, along with Quinn Adams of Boston University, took two years to investigate how many people die each year of heat-related causes. The segment I am linking to is one of several being aired this week. US Federal numbers day 1,700 people die each year from high heat. Boruda’s reporting made her think the number was much higher. Her research suggests the real count is about 9,000 deaths a year. Boruda explained the difference:

So to show up in those official counts, heat must be marked down on someone's death record, but that doesn't always happen, and that's because it can just be really hard to figure out how heat influenced a death. There's often multiple factors at play, like a preexisting heart condition, and so doctors or medical examiners or coroners often have to really look for heat role - heat's role. And that takes time, it takes training, it takes money, and there aren't really clear national standards, so everyone is kind of figuring this out for themselves.

She talked to people who lost family to heat. Factors can include: Living in a manufacture home. Addiction and drug use. Medical conditions. Financial pressure so the people couldn't afford to run or fix an air conditioner. What do do? Count deaths more accurately. We can’t fix a problem we don’t understand. A barrier to doing that is heat may not leave a mark on the body. The medical examiner may not think to ask whether the deceased had just been in a hot environment. Other needs: Understand who is most at risk. Teach people and their caregivers what to do. Pay for cooling. Pay for insulation. A comprehensive article of the series is here. It includes a chart showing the CDC counts compared to their models and a chart showing maximum temperature across the US – 2026 is at the top as the hottest. It also includes the study methodology. In the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos exlrrp posted a meme:

You know you’re a terrible person when the photos of you with Jeffrey Epstein are real, but the ones of you with Dolly Parton are fake.

I’d revise that a bit. He’s not going to know he’s a terrible person. So it should say, “We know he’s a terrible person...” and “...photos of him...” A tweet from Headquarters News posted by paulpro:

Fox News complains that underage teenage girls aren’t getting pregnant enough: “The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 70% in the last 2 decades, which means we are telling people who are young not to have babies.”

Something is profoundly wrong when a dude insists that 15 year olds should be getting pregnant. That seems way too adjacent to being a pedophile. I went to the tweet where Midatlantica added, “Teen pregnancies and single mothers were literally sold as the root of all societal ills by this same cohort through the 70s, 80s, and 90s.” A cartoon posted by paulpro shows an AI robot sucking resource, wages, and intellect out of a worker.