Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time
Sorry for the hiatus, folk - it's been a busy month for lots of us. To make up for it, here's a bumper edition of all the links we've been saving up...
It's the start of term, and mixosaurus has written a fantastic guide on accessing mental health support as a student.
Labour has promised that if they are elected in 2015 they'll create a new offence of disability hate crime - and they've promised to sack Atos from carrying out Work Capability Assessments, a deeply flawed test to establish whether people are too ill to work.
[Content note: addiction] Revisiting a landmark establishment on addictive behaviour in rats shows it's not the morphine, it's the size of the cage - with serious implications for "wars on drugs" and medical gatekeeping surrounding "addictive" substances.
Also in science-and-animals news, tumblr wants you to have a review of non-reproductive and apparently-homosexual sex among animals. Fascinating but sweary! [Content note: rape.]
In the trans news corner, we've got:
- The Transadvocate runs an article entitled Creating a world without fear, an appeal to cis people (by a cis person) about how to be less awful
- LashFriend and all-round magnificent being CN Lester has written an article on misgendering
- Open-Minded Health features a Trans 101 for Trans People
- there's a collation at Storify entitled The Gingerbread Plagiarist, highlighting a cis dude taking credit for work that originated among trans communities
- ... and, distressingly, Wikipedia has gone all-in on cissexism
In the arts, The Belle Jar wrote an open letter to David Gilmour; Bad Reputation is fed up with the salacious fascination with Jack the Ripper; and Sondheim is working on a revised, queerer version of the 1970 musical Company!
In awesome geek ladies news, Miss America holds a degree in Brain Behaviour and is a Star Wars cosplayer... and this doesn't seem to have been celebrated anywhere, because of the overwhelming interest in being staggeringly racist about her. Related reading at Sociological Images.
Raisa Kabir has written a solid article at the f-word about the horrible tack discourse in the UK is currently taking with respect to veiling.
And finally for this bumper edition, have some cheerful science stuff:
- Mystery alignment of planetary nebulae discovered!
- Knitting used to visualise crystal structures in a massive community art project!
- You can't vaccinate octopuses!
- ... and a global social community of geek-types with anti-oppression as a core principle has been set up!
