It is definitely necessary to have or acquire a solid grasp of French if you plan to live or work in France for any significant length of time. That being said, I lived there for two years, and my French is good but not amazing (and not what I would call fluent), and overall, I found people very willing to meet me…

It’s not always an issue of life and death, even for very Orthodox Jews (although you know, Orthodox Jews are only about 10% of the American Jewish population, and it’s pretty gross to blow off the other 90%, who are in total agreement about the religious requirement to have open access to abortion, as if what we’re…

Uh, we’ve been speaking up about this for years and years. Christian and culturally Christian people are typically too busy insisting that “Judeo-Christian values” exist (they don’t) to listen to us.

Girl, you can’t be that pressed about the men if you insist on raising your sons to be just like them.

... allies are always welcome in LGBT spaces.

Living in the UK, I’m surprised he didn’t bring out his trans stuff over here. Based on the way transphobia is showcased and elevated on the regular in this country, and vastly more socially acceptable than it is in the States, it probably would have killed.

I don’t know whether or not you’re British, but as someone currently living in the UK and experiencing the trans landscape here myself, I will offer that there are a hell of a lot of British people who are not at all equipped to assess what is or is not harmful to trans people or what does or does not constitute abuse…

I mean, look. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t go out of my way to watch content that I know full well is going to make me feel like shit and echo a whole laundry list of the nastiest, shittiest stuff people have said to and about me over the years. Why am I obligated to subject myself to that? I can read on the page what…

I totally agree. I actually find it more objectionable- having .2% Sephardic DNA or whatever doesn’t make you Jewish. It doesn’t mitigate failing to meet with Jewish constituents previously or failing to seriously address issues that affect Jewish constituents, like those constituents getting beaten up and harassed…

I think it looks significantly worse than voting “no,” whether someone supports her position on Iron Dome or not. To people who support her position, she looks disingenuous and milquetoast. To people who don’t support her position, she looks disingenuous and milquetoast. It looks deliberately deceptive but also…

Her logic makes no sense, frankly. If she thought that voting no on the Iron Dome funding was going to cost her that seat, I don’t know why she would think that voting “present” is magically going to preserve whatever support she thinks voting “no” would have lost. Especially when she then comes out and says all of…

I suspect that at this point, they’re afraid that she’ll a) cut them off, b) use her funds to sue the fuck out of them, c) write a tell-all book, or d) all of the above. They didn’t want the gravy train to end.

I actually tried to register when they showed up at our high school in the late ‘90s. They were like, “Oh, no, honey, girls don’t have to sign up,” and I basically said, “Look, if things are that bad that we’re having a freaking draft, then I want to be called up, same as anyone else, and I’d think they’d want anyone…

BIG SAME. It makes me sad that I can never seriously consider living there again, because there are things that I miss about it, and it would be nice to have the option, but I read shit like this, and I’m like, “NOPE.”

We had an almost identical problem. My wife was denied coverage for a pap smear because she was in their systems as male. I called, they said, “Well, your husband...,” and I was like, “No, my wife,” at which point they started trying to change my gender to male, until I spelled out for them, “We’re a same-sex couple.…

I am not at all an anime watcher, as a rule, but I fucking loved Shirobako. I binged the whole thing in the space of a couple of nights. I’ve enjoyed most of the sort of slice of life anime that I’ve had occasion to watch, usually moreso than the more action-packed, fantasy-heavy stuff.

As I was reading this, I kept thinking about Renée Richards and was wondering what her opinion on all of this was, given that she was initially forced out of tennis because of her trans status and had to sue to keep playing. A google search turned up this article, which I found interesting. I don’t know that I agree…

That is my biggest regret of switching from a Mac to a PC for my latest laptop. Typing in foreign languages generally and languages that need diacritical marks in particular was so much easier and more seamless on the Mac, whereas on the PC I either have to use Windows’ “International English” keyboard, where the…

When I worked for Amtrak, I had to have my phone completely off and in my bag at any time the train was running. I wasn’t the engineer, so I wasn’t the one running the train, but even a conductor fucking around on their phone was considered too much of a safety issue to allow. Management could check your phone records…

Yep. My money is very much on William. I think that likely explains the rift with Harry, and I think it would have been much more shocking and hurtful coming from him than it would have been from, say, Philip, precisely because William is younger, theoretically more modern-minded and not someone you would expect to…