Simone J. Skeen 💥🤍
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simoneskeen.xyz
Simone J. Skeen 💥🤍
@simoneskeen.xyz
850 followers 900 following 1.2K posts
Tracing the collisions of systems and psyches | biopsychosociotechnical sciences, HIV, digital, global mental health | 💉transsexual 🔪 | Postdoc @ <redacted> | Opinions my own | simoneskeen.xyz
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simoneskeen.xyz
Tediously humiliating to be a trans HIV researcher who has to look at this shit constantly (interspersed with broken links) while I’m just trying to do my job.
HIV Diagnoses, Deaths, and Prevalence For Everyone FEBRUARY 7, 2025 Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59PM ET, February 11, 2025. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.
November 2, 2025 at 6:03 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Exhausted after a show in Queens last night so we’re respecting The Classics on this Halloween.
A spherical room dominated by a contraption of interlocking rings and lights: the infamous gravity drive of the Event Horizon
November 1, 2025 at 12:33 AM
simoneskeen.xyz
I can never rove around the Mississippi River levees without thinking of Stalker. The exact same sense of wild de-industrialized menace and repose is just everywhere.
A photo of a shabby rusted steel construction, not unlike a table frame, but seven feet tall. In the background is a ragged grassy landscape with dead trees, overcast skies, and a steely gray river.
August 6, 2025 at 11:53 AM
simoneskeen.xyz
“He has a penchant for chess, vodka, pistols, and obnoxious sarcasm.”
An illustration of Behemoth, the devilish giant black cat from Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.”
July 5, 2025 at 1:15 AM
simoneskeen.xyz
Post a ten year old picture of yourself.
A white woman with bottle blonde swept-over hair scowls at the viewer standing on grimy Third Avenue beneath the BQE. The glare of oncoming traffic fills the right side of the frame.
June 11, 2025 at 12:54 AM
simoneskeen.xyz
Black Penny, early spring.
A blonde white woman wearing a black suede Lieutenant’s cap, studded black leather jacket, black leather boots, and a gray denim dress, smiles from a barstool facing sunny Rampart Street in New Orleans.
May 26, 2025 at 9:35 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Saying goodbye to what’s probably the best view I’ll ever have.
A 15th-floor view of New Orleans’s Warehouse District on a bright partly cloudy late spring day: tall modern buildings in the foreground interspersed with preserved 19th century offices and warehouses, and in the background the Crescent City Connection: a steel girder bridge spanning the Mississippi River
May 26, 2025 at 8:54 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
I’m on backbreaking moving chores duty today, so the wife showed up with surprise replenishments.
A Viet-Cajun crawfish boil: seasoned red crawfish, potato, corn, pineapple, and dumplings in paper cartons. A woman’s pale tattooed arm is visible eagerly digging in.
May 26, 2025 at 8:34 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
My office, making a cameo in Lucio Fulci’s “gore classic,” THE BEYOND
A photo of a computer monitor showing a movie scene, a group of mourners in a historic New Orleans cemetery full of above-ground crypts. In the background, a single brutalist office building looms.
April 18, 2025 at 6:15 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
I actually caught another of these recently doing a standard digital-hygiene name search and apparently I'm an expert on...cisgenderism (I am, of course, paywalled from the summary of my own work here).
A screencap of Google search results, which reads "Consensus, https://consensus.app › results, What is cisgender? Write as an article with headers ... Simone J. Skeen et al. AIDS and Behavior. AIDS and Behavior. DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2021.1938467. When Cisgender, Heterosexual Men Feel Attracted to
March 18, 2025 at 12:07 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
As good an excuse as any to share Taylor Dayne presiding over the 2024 Krewe of Orpheus parade.
A green tractor with a sign reading “Taylor Dayne” pulls an elaborately crafted Mardi Gras float behind it, featuring a red and gold crown and large red sculptural flowers and red banners. A crowd stands behind metal street barricades A closer shot of the float showing the elaboratly molded gold crown, large red and orange flowers, and Taylor Dayne presiding from the seat of honor
March 16, 2025 at 4:46 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
I've been thinking about RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE a _lot_. A slept-on cyberpunk classic, the collapse of liberal democracy and the rise of a savage misogynistic techno-oligarchy through the eyes of a teen girl whose UWS parents are desperately trying to hold their bourgeois lives together.
The front cover of Jack Womack's RANDOME ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE, paperback edition. A saturated red city skyline, a black indiscriminate foreground, and a collapsed brick wall with what could be a young girl's silhouette.
March 9, 2025 at 1:00 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
I dislike the indiscriminate and often-doctrinaire blocklists here (some of which I'm on; apparently I'm an "AI bro")...but X accounts rage-baiting for X content are really not worth a big huffy #CancelledForTruth moment
A Newsweek excerpt reading: 'On X "End Wokeness," a popular conservative account with 3.2 million followers, shared a video which appeared to show it posting "There are only two genders" on Bluesky, a message that was almost immediately flagged as "content blocked." The account said: "Got banned from BIuesky within the first 30 seconds for posting a biological fact."'
March 9, 2025 at 12:53 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Bacchus Sunday
A smiling whit woman in a tricorn hat and studded leather jacket between parades on St. Charles street.
March 2, 2025 at 11:48 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
New Orleans, 9:42 a.m.
A photo taken from a high-rise showing snow-covered city rooftops obscured by ice pellets seeping down the windowpane and active blustery snowfall.
January 21, 2025 at 3:53 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Witness “my” governor pushing a LoTT-style harassment campaign against a professor at his own state’s flagship university on X. Stoking the exodus of educated “elites”* to convert these institutions into New College-style propaganda and corruption mills is very much the point.
A tweet by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, reading: “this professor has defied the 76 million Americans who voted for President @realDonaldTrump - to silence and belittle those in his class who voted for our nation’a president. This is not the kind of behavior we want at @LSU and our universities.”Surveillance footage of a lecturing instructor follows.
November 18, 2024 at 1:30 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Witness the grim splendor of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center “medical walkway.” This thing is actually dingier and longer than it appears here. It’s just hard to photograph
A dingy gray and burgundy pedestrian bridge stretches over a street and between office buildings Another shot of the dingy gray and burgundy pedestrian bridge, over a weedy parking lot and under a highway overpass
November 7, 2024 at 12:56 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
This, from the first, second to third para, is a _wild_ inferential leap. When has surveillance of school-issued devices _ever_ prevented a rape or suicide?

Genuinely, I’d be curious to see a report. But this is appalling technosolutionism with developmental implications I don’t want to imagine
A screencap of the article under discussion, which reads: According to the most recent youth risk behavior survey from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly all indicators of poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviors increased from 2013 to 2023. During the same period, the percentage of high school students who were threatened or injured at school, missed school because of safety concerns or experienced forced sex increased, according to the CDC report. And the threat of school shootings remains on many educators’ minds. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school, according to The Washington Post’s count. GoGuardian CEO Rich Preece told Stateline that about half of the K-12 public schools in the United States have installed the company’s platforms.
October 22, 2024 at 12:44 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Not be only does my latest gmail preview include text that isn’t in the actual email body, it deadnames me. I changed my name in 2013. (And this isn’t even the first time gmail “features” could’ve outed me to an onlooker.) Killer deployment, guys
Screencap of a gmail preview, which reads [scratched-out deadname], we’re on it.
October 16, 2024 at 3:54 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Funny, this is a plot point in Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, portrayed (in 1938) as the musings of a hack
A highlighted excerpt of a New Yorker article describing a plot point of Laughter in the Dark, which reads ‘Albinus’s idle musings about financing a film “of a picture by Rembrant or Goya.” Nabokov moves this to the beginning and expands it into a long, strikingly visual paragraph about an animated Bruegel that sweeps the reader into the story’
October 15, 2024 at 10:05 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
I was at the Stedelijk with my SICSS cohort this summer and we (alone) got to nerd out at those gorgeous early data visualizations
Hand-crafted and highly decorative charts in rust-gold and white, featuring Dutch titles and labels
October 11, 2024 at 2:00 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
This is a key point re the framing: does the “prevalence” of trans kids really, truly, matter? Only to those who consider us a disease
A tweet by Corinne Green, which reads: “nyt: 2 articles, 2 hours apart. the ad one uncritically accepts and repeats gop framing, quoting multiple transphobes while a single trans woman - a legislator, not a student - gets two sentences. survey story should lead with 70% sadness/bullying/sui, not 3% existence. hateful.” This is followed by a New York Times headline reading “3% of High Schoolers Identify as Transgender, First National Survey Finds”
October 8, 2024 at 11:35 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
Is it because we’re just that cackhanded and garrulous, or is it because we understand the unprecedentedly vast, entangled, complexities of the world we’re tasked with modeling, and terms like “intersectional,” “interference,” and “metatextual” express that complexity - parsimoniously, even…
Screencap of a tweet, which reads: As a reviewer, it is lbvious when something is written by a brand new grad student and very obvious when it is their first paper submission ever. Really heavy on the jargon and misuse of GRE words. The writing is floral without fragrance”
October 6, 2024 at 4:47 PM
simoneskeen.xyz
I broke down in tears, at 24, a “guy,” when I first saw Arshile Gorky’s Summation at MoMA. I’d just moved to Manhattan and had never been more exhausted and alone in my life. The intertwined majesty and grief in the work, which has glowing brassy undertones you can’t see digitally, it just undid me
Summation: a painting of twining delicate organic abstractions, featuring small flushes of red and teal, and black smudges like burns or orifices, writhing atop a tarnished wash of gold
October 4, 2024 at 12:23 AM
simoneskeen.xyz
Lol.
Bluesky proudly informing me that I was user #1,270,360, joined Sep 29, 2023, on a white card with the Bluesky butterfly logo in the upper left corner.
September 16, 2024 at 10:51 PM