I pretty much made the same shift over this time! The trans community I see today is far larger than 7 years ago, and also far more likely to claim “man / woman” as primary “public” ID. For reasons honestly too complicated to be worth spilling out in mixed company

Even if the decline is 3/4 shifting away from transness and 1/4 shifting towards more “binary” transness, we still land at a trans population share far greater than anything ever estimated or claimed or hoped until like 5 minutes ago.

way back in journalism undergrad, we had one of our states famous elder statesman journalists come in, and he told us 'of a career-long regret over having gone easy on Nixon once for exactly this reason. the lesson was, don't do this. That was abt 20 years ago, like... they know, it's not ignorance

There used to be a preschool a block away from the Portland ICE building but it had to move because goons kept shooting so much tear gas at modest nonviolent protests. Realizing few people know that

Fake Portland problems: antifa-ravaged war town hellscape

Real Portland problems: my kid is too cool for goodwill or the child consignments but the good vintage shops don’t stock anything that fits her

The whole “president and henchmen boldly lie about Portland and media both-sides it” is extra brain melting when you lived through 2020 and remember what mass sustained protests here actually look like. This isn’t even that. Nothings happening here. Nothing is fucking happening.

Follow the money 👀

That middle aged transsexual lifestyle thing where you’re out in the yard watering some shrubs with the sun beating down and your brain won’t stop looping that québécois franglish drag influencer saying her pronouns are Go / Habs / Go

I should also say that Persona is the first novel I've read since maybe Nevada that made me go, "I didn't know how much I (we) needed this."

Would have made the first words in this post “In a New Netflix film,” but I’m built different

Yeah. Though I will say as a proud South Montavilla resident we're one of the last corners where this stuff is still actually kinda there, near the 82nd / Division hub at least.

Well you see we famously have quadrants, and we liked having them so much we added two more. So now there are six of them. The quadrants.

It’s in the only one of Portland’s six quadrants with zero good coffee, so no

Couch

Boy in my kid’s graphic novel has a lot of trouble talking to girls and I’m stuck, like actually do not know how to explain this to a trans femme six year old

the fact that everyone says franchise instead of series nowadays is so insidious

portland frog you smoke too tough. your swag too different. your rubber suit is too bad. they’ll kill you portland frog

It’s not bad, I very much appreciate the sentiment and gesture on multiple levels. Just, as a trans woman who stopped sharing pronouns professionally for safety reasons years ago, here in the heat of a whole-federal-government elimination campaign, it hits weird

It’s so bizarre to get HR emails encouraging pronoun sharing in October of 2025

Fortunately once SCOTUS says courts can't stop Trump from sending Texans to kill Oregonians the Democratic leadership will have some strong points about kitchen table issues

When your custom character appears in a cut scene

The maddening thing from on the ground in Portland is that these are not small lies or debatable points. It’s whole-cloth fabrication. And it’s bewildering to see a lot of media fail to call that out with the clarity needed. Like how can you “he said she said” whether there’s a war or not

much gratitude to @themountaingoats.bsky.social for crafting the definitive rhyme and resolving this one forever.

It’s cool how social media is just a relentless machine for disempowering and destroying any meaningful opposition to fascism, even as it creates a lot of space for people to talk about fascism