Please please stop assuming that everyone is okay with being caled "dude" or whatever other masculine-centred "neutral" term you use. Please stop doing it on an opt-out basis where you just keep doing it until you hurt someone enough for them to ask you to stop. I know you're one of the good ones. I know you only mean it in a congenial neutral way. I don't need to hear why. I am just telling you that it hurts me and a bunch of other transfeminine people I know.

So, let's talk about @PrideToronto / #PrideTO and how their new Terms & Conditions--made to supplement a new program for them to sell liquor & allow Pride attendees to carry it anywhere without the Pride grounds--are a betrayal of the LGBTQ+ communities. pridetoronto.com/wp/wp-content/… At first blush, a skim of this 10 page document may make it seem like normal event T&C. But let's look at how this change by @PrideToronto destroys access to Pride for many of the more marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ communities.

Consider: a kindly dragoness whose hoard consists of trans people of all races that don't have supportive homes The villages surrounding the dragoness's lair misunderstand and think she wants sacrifices. So they offer her their unwanted, the ones they see as strange and different. She takes them, carries them back to her lair and cradles them against her wing.

Last week a friend asked about my favourite animal, real or fictional.

My brain had an immediate and baffling but Very Me answer:

"The hedgicorn. They're a hedgehog with a unicorn horn. They don't have any magical powers but they're doing their best." The hedgicorn has never met another of their kind. They don't really know where they came from. They don't mind.

They like quiet. They hide in libraries a lot. They brush up against people's feet that are in there, reading, and try to get bugs or berries from them as treats