Newtowner @danielle@octodon.social

I'd forgotten that I still had this account. I've missed Mastodon. I should hang out here more often

"The transcendence of pi implies the impossibility of exactly circling the square, as well as of squaring the circle."

It's probably the beer talking but somehow I find this funny. All I can imagine is my four year old child drawing a circle around a square and saying "see? it's easy?"

I do wish well-meaning guys would stop writing these self-flagellating pieces:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-28/confessions-of-a-confident-mediocre-man/8562708

While the literature is pretty clear about gender differences in average confidence, the within-gender variance is very large, and many "mediocre dudes" are marginalised on other, non-gender axes.

These pieces just invite pushback from malicious parties, and the people harmed aren't the authors of these articles.

Well apparently I pass as female, at least as judged by the nice cleaning lady who pointed me to the women's bathroom because I couldn't remember the code to unlock the men's. It's sweet but I feel like an intruder. So glad there was no one else there.

More confusion about the deadnaming taboo. How could I, as a mid-career academic, possibly handle my gender transition without permitting deadnaming? I've got over a hundred papers and a couple million dollars of grant funding under my given name. I *need* to explicitly refer to that history every single time I apply for a grant or a promotion, and every time I give a student a copy of an old paper. Deadnaming just feels like an unavoidable necessity to me. What am I missing here?

More questions for cis guys: why *don't* you wear skirts? They're super practical garments (in some contexts anyway) very comfortable and work really well in the summertime. Like, I know why I don't... I've got so many old fears about being seen as the sissy or the tranny (fuck it: I've been called those slurs enough, I get to use them if I want), and feel like I've taken quite enough beatings for one lifetime already. I kind of assumed that was cis dudes worry too... But is that actually true?

Right, that's it: next grant application gets F.D.C. Willard listed as a PI.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1975-a-cat-coauthored-a-physics-paper

Days since getting irrationally annoyed at the Cramér–Rao bound: 0.

"What a type you must consort with that you not fear beating for such an insult?" - Al Swearengen

The truly terrifying thing about that Deadwood quote, to me, is the belated realisation that the people around me have not in fact spent the last few decades expecting disproportionate violence to be the consequence of the smallest misstep or the tiniest hint of self-assertive behaviour. Sigh.

Signs of middle age #345: You psych yourself up for a big day by listening to your favourite high-energy music... which is Big Block Sing Song

On the faustian bargain of trading your mental health in exchange for the perks of male privilege:

https://theestablishment.co/what-trans-women-have-is-far-more-complicated-than-male-privilege-a39af51fde62

I do love parenting, but every now and then I think about he decision to have a second child and I think "she swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."

I never quite know how to feel about the use of my given name. I don't want to undermine the norm that deadnaming is considered offensive, but I don't share that feeling about my own name? For myself, I have a long personal and professional history as "Daniel", "Dan" and "Danny". I didn't hide "Danny" when I became "Dan". Similarly, I don't want to obscure or disavow "Daniel" when becoming "Danielle" either. I can't be the only transgender person who feels like that, can I?

http://www.academia.edu/267518/Changing_Race_Changing_Sex_the_Ethics_of_Self-Transformation

Took me a while to get around to learning it, but I'm very happy with jsPsych as a tool for running behavioural experiments through the browser.

http://www.jspsych.org/

A question for men: do you really like having facial hair? Like... really?
And it's not Stockholm syndrome?

I disliked my facial hair from the start, but I begin to suspect that -being trans - I might be a terrible judge. Still, I cannot imagine how beard - or worse, beard shadow where the hair is still clearly growing under your skin but you can't get rid of it - doesn't feel like body horror?

Help me understand the beard love.

Bagels with vegemite feel like a crime against two cultures, and yet I still kind of like them.

To me, a gender identity category serves as an explanatory framework, a conceptual tool that helps make sense of disparate experiences. It's a useful label that summarises a persistent pattern of thought and action that attaches to my body, my preferences, my social performance. It's a tool I use to control the dysphoria. "Trans woman" does feel like a better theory of myself than "cis man", but it really doesn't feel like the discovery of a "true self".

I wish people would stop making essentialist claims about gender identity categories.

http://www.metafilter.com/166957/The-Hypatia-Affair#7026377

I've spent 40ish years living as a man. I hated it, but it doesn't feel like I "discovered" my gender, as if it were just somehow sitting around under a rock waiting to be found? By this logic either my entire life so far is false consciousness, or I'm stupid, or I'm not really trans. It makes me miserable.