Some Links You Might Like 5
New week new links!
Michelle Starr: Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs
Have you heard the news? Eating ants is the next big thing in animals!
Patricia Taxxon: mental health update
I'm just going to soapbox for a second. You might have DID without knowing it. It's far more mundane and common than you think it is. You don't need to hear voices in your head or wake up in random places without knowing how you got there. It can be a kind of depression that makes your memory spotty. A sense that something terrible has happened to you, but that feels like it happened to someone else, leaving you suspiciously unscathed.
This is genuinely just a mental health update from a youtuber I follow, but there's a lot of really good bits in here. I have rewatched it a handful of times, which is impressive when it's only two days old, just to hear the specific ways she phrases stuff. I think that it's a mark of a good writer when even the functional writing sticks with you.
Dr. Devon Price: Is Your Fear of Gender Transition Really the Fear of Aging?
Even the fear of transition regret is a resistance to the irreversibility of time. Life’s options inevitably winnow down as time advances, whether we make decisions or not. It is a loss of exit routes, but it’s also act of cementing and building upon what’s been there before.
Before I ever admitted I was transgender, I kept a log of male style inspirations on my Tumblr that I tagged #boysonas. The “boys” that captivated me were largely effete, soft spoken creative men with greying temples and lines around their lips. People like Ira Glass, Mads Mikkelsen, Rami Malek, Damon Albarn, Anthony Bourdain, Richard Ayoade, and Raul Esparza.
These were not boys, these were forty- and fifty-something men with a tired reflectiveness and a dry, sad wit about them, and they were beautiful to me, just beautiful. I had always wanted to be like them, yet I started to recoil when I saw those same lines and greys on me. Why?
This is the good good writing about being trans I crave. There is a lot of writing on being trans, but what I wish I had more of is writing by trans people for trans people about some of the messier aspects. This is making me think about Maddie's On Being Trans and the Importance of Passing, which also talks about some messy and maybe not fun parts of transitioning. We really need more of this and if any of y'all send some my way (don't forget, there's comments!!!), it'll almost certainly get linked in next week's roundup.
Wendy Brenner: Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife
I have never heard of the Oxford American before I read this, and since I mostly read articles on my e-reader, I didn’t even hear about it until after I read this. It’s one of those stories that make you desire more—more of the writing, more of the world, more of the characters—the moment I finished reading it on the little e-reader, I immediately searched for the article, pulled it up, and scrolled through the whole page again in the hopes that there would be more article that I had missed somehow, hoping for a parsing issue of some sort that would result in me finding out I had a little bit more I could read. There was not.
Horse on VHS: Nothing Doing
I swear I had one more link ready, but I guess I lost it? My backup is reminding y'all of Nothing Doing, my second favorite webcomic. (my first is still Please Forgive Me!!)
