Friend asked me on how to help her trans kid. I couldn't find a good guide for this, especially with states like Iowa stripping us of our rights.

I want to be clear that this should not be done without the child's input. Always, always trust the kid to understand and always give them the chance to participate. There are ways to adjust the language for the age of the child, and children often have creative ideas when given the chance to participate. The goal here is to give the child the tools to help them thrive, okay? Thanks for understanding.

So without further ado, here's steps on how to help trans kids navigate all of this.

1. Identify safe groups where the child can be themself. Remember, the child likely will have ideas on who to ask. So be sure to ask the child who they trust for this conversation.

*NOTE: Talk with those on the "trusted" list and/or leaders of the trusted groups and verify they will defend the kid's right to be themself and support them. (Child doesn't necessarily have to be present for this, but let the child know how it went to ease anxiety.)

2. Identify which friends are safe and will honor their pronouns. Again, the child will have ideas on this too. Make a list together!

3. Sit down with the kid and explain this process.

* (For my friend, I shared with them how I also wrote up a safety plan and harm reduction plan on how to navigate an increasingly hostile society such as my state stripping me of my civil rights. Having examples of others who have done this can help solidify the need and make it more approachable and less scary).

4. Share the list of groups and people who support the kid and will have their back 100%. (Be ready to hold those people accountable as a behind-the-scenes thing). Ask the kid if there are others they think you should work with to get them on board. Add them to the "talk to" part of the list."

5. Build a harm reduction and safety plan with the kid. This includes:

* Talk about how to handle strangers in public spaces in a way that avoids too much misgendering but also keeps the kid safe. (Maybe use only their name and avoid pronouns entirely for instance).
* Talk about how to handle medical professionals who are not known for being trans-friendly; how in those instances the kid will be wearing a "costume" as a safety strategy where they pretend to be x gender.
*Talk about parks and other public spaces.
*Talk about how to handle when meeting new people. How to test the water to see if it is safe to take off the 'x gender costume' or not.

6.Make sure the kid signs off on the harm reduction and safety plan, and that they feel included in it. Try to make it fun by drawing out scenarios, and explaining how sometimes we have to act like we're in a play for that scenario. We put on our "costume of x gender" and act out a play. Then when we are out of that scenario, we can take off our "costume of x gender" and enjoy being ourselves again around our safe groups and people.

(I'll write this up as a blogpost eventually. But for now, wanted to put it out there for folks to think about since transphobia and anti-trans legislation and policies are ramping up again. Please share any tips or resources you know of that can help!)

#Trans #Transgender #TransJustice #TransKids #Transphobia #SafetyPlan #HarmReduction #TrustKids #ChildAutonomy

AirDrop apologists have some opinions

Who knew suggesting that an Apple interface enabled undesirable outcomes and ought to be changed would be so controversial? Me–I’ve been critiquing Apple’s products since before the company was doooomed in 1996.

But even so, the level of enraged techsplaining that greeted last weekend’s Yahoo post about AirDrop file-sharing has been something else. To recap that briefly: While AirDrop’s default contacts-only setting is safe, accepting a file transfer from somebody not in your contacts requires setting it to “Everyone”–a setting that does not time out but does automatically display a preview of the incoming image. The predictable result: creeps spamming strangers who had set AirDrop to Everyone and then forgot to change it back, and by “spamming” I mean “sending dick pics from iPhones with anonymous names.”

(For more details, see my Aug. 2017 USA Today column or this Dec. 4 post from the security firm Sophos.)

Suggesting that Apple have the Everyone setting time out or not auto-preview images did not go over well the people–most apparently men–who filled the replies to my tweet Sunday sharing the post. Let me sum up the major points these individuals vainly attempted to make, as seen in quotes from their tweets:

• “It’s contacts only by default.” Yes, and if nobody ever interacted with people who weren’t in their contacts and offered to use this handy feature to share in a file, you would have a point. As is, this request comes up all the time–my wife saw it from Apple Store employees–as I explained in the post that these techbros apparently did not finish reading.

• “Still trying to make a big deal of something I’ve never experienced.” Thank you, sir, for proving my exact point about the problems of having development teams dominated by white men. As writing about “Gamergate” made obvious, things are often different for the rest of humanity, and “I don’t have this problem” is not a valid defense of a social feature without confirmation from people outside your demographic background. Sorry if asking you to acknowledge your privilege is so triggering, by which I mean I’m not sorry.

• “At some point, you have to take some goddamn responsibility.” Ah yes, the old blame-the-customer instinct. I hope the multiple people who expressed some version of “why are you coddling people too dumb to turn Everything off” don’t and never will work in any customer-facing role.

• “you don’t have to accept every airdrop item that comes in.” What part of “automatically display a preview” don’t you understand?

• “What I don’t understand is why these creeps aren’t reported by the receivers to authorities.” What part of “iPhones with anonymous names” don’t you understand? And before you next resort to victim blaming like this, you should really read up on the relevant history.

• “There are far worse UX issues in iOS if that is what you are concerned about.” News flash, whataboutists: I write about problems in the tech industry all the time. Stick around and you’ll see me take a whack at a company besides your sainted Apple.

And that brings me to the annoying subtext beneath all these aggrieved responses: The notion that questioning Apple’s design choice is an unreasonable stretch, so we should look anywhere else for solutions to what even most of my correspondents agreed was a problem. Well, if that’s your attitude, turn in your capitalist card: You’re not a customer, you’re a supplicant. And I don’t have to take your opinion here seriously.

#AirDrop #empathy #harmReduction #ios #mansplaining #misogyny #sexism #techBro #userEducation #userExperience #UX

Rob Pegoraro

2018-10-27 22:43:41

Of course I didn’t see how social media could be an accelerant for bigotry

It took a few years after I first reviewed Windows XP for me to realize the enormous omission from my initial assessment of that operating system: It didn’t even include the word “security.” It feels like I’ve devoted much of my work since to making up for that shortfall.

I’ve had the same unpleasant realization over the past few years about social media. Just as my first look at XP showed no imagination about how an OS designed to run on trusted networks would fare on the open Internet, my early writing about social networks evidenced inadequate foresight about how they might help bigots to bond.

Consider, for instance, the Twitter explainer I wrote for the Post in 2008. I loved writing that almost exclusively as a series of 140-character-compliant paragraphs, and I think as prose it holds up well. But although Twitter was still figuring out the basic mechanics of @ mentions then, the piece reveals no consideration of how Twitter’s architecture might let bigoted trolls recruit like-minded people to scale up a Twitter mention’s compelled attention into a denial-of-service attack.

The evidence was there: A year before, writer Kathy Sierra had endured a hail of death threats for the crime of having two X chromosomes while expressing value judgments about technology. But my attention was elsewhere.

I can file away my naïveté about Windows security on not doing enough background research, but I can’t untangle my lack of imagination about social networks from having used them exclusively as a straight white man with an Italian (read: Catholic) last name. On every social network I’ve used–from Usenet newsgroups to Slashdot to the Post’s comments to Twitter and Facebook–I’ve had the unrequested benefit of not being routinely attacked for my gender, sexuality, race or religion.

But I never quite realized that until writing about Gamergate. I spent the day before that Yahoo Tech post ran locking down every important account and steeling myself for a toxic response online. Then nothing bad happened and nobody tried to destroy my critique by impeaching my identity. I can now confirm that white privilege is a hell of a drug.

Since then, we’ve had another unforeseen development: a president who has bragged about sexual assault, regularly evokes such anti-Semitic memes as “globalists”–a laundered code word for international Jewish financiers–and said neo-Nazis in Charlottesville last August included “very fine people.” Trump’s dog-whistling seems to have encouraged some bigots to crawl out from under their rocks and look for company.

Some have also been inspired to look for ways to kill people they see as “the other.” This bigotry boom has a growing body count–in C-ville last year, where I paid my respects at the memorial to Heather Heyer earlier this month, and today at a synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Last week’s pipe-bombing attempts could have added to that toll.

I’m sorry that I was asleep to so much of this before. I think I’m awake now, but I want you to tell me if you see otherwise.

#antiSemitism #bigotry #Charlottesville #dogWhistle #HeatherHeyer #mailBombs #misogyny #racism #SquirrelHillSynagogue #TrumpGlobalists #whitePrivilege

The Origins of the 'Globalist' Slur

President Trump recently used the epithet to describe his outgoing National Economic Council director—but the seeds of its disparaging use were firmly planted 75 years ago.

^{Ben Zimmer (The Atlantic)}

One more step in my X exit: replacing its Android app with a home-screen Web shorcut

Last week, X’s visible presence on my phone was an icon buried in the all-apps list, past where I’d usually scroll in that alphabetical index. This week, X’s icon is lodged next to the calendar widget on one of my home screens, ensuring I’m frequently reminded of that toxic platform. This is an overdue upgrade.

Uninstalling X’s Android app and replacing it with a Web shortcut was the latest step in a spiral of estrangement since Elon Musk began destroying the former Twitter’s value as a medium for real-time information and commentary.

First Musk’s paid membership scheme limited the reach of tweets from people who didn’t feel inclined to give the world’s richest man $8 a month while elevating some of the stupider people on the Internet into our replies. Then him inviting loathsome conspiracy liar Alex Jones back on terminated my own interest in supporting the platform with more free writing–leading to my switching to Bluesky as my primary public notebook.

Musk’s own descent into conspiracy lies led me to yank the app’s remaining permissions and turn off the notifications that had stopped enlightening me to useful activity on the platform. Seeing this tech oligarch then turn X, as the Washington Post’s Will Oremus put it, into a digital Mar-a-Lago that he rules as a two-bit tyrant left me realizing that I was starting to see the app as more of a threat than a distraction.

(The ransacking of the digital and HR infrastructure of multiple federal agencies by Musk and his minions–with him scoffing online while leaving humans abroad in the blast zone–has not improved my judgment of the unelected plutocrat who seems to think he’s starring in a buddy flick with President Trump.)

I do still have to read X as part of my job. But Android¹ provides a safer way to use a service that you may no longer deem trustworthy: saving a home-screen shortcut to a site that looks and generally functions like an app.

But a Web-app shortcut benefits from the better security defenses of a browser–and, since I created this shortcut in Firefox for Android, it also gets stronger privacy protections than what Chrome for Android would provide. These make Web shortcuts a good harm-reduction option that more people should consider. So that’s how I now have an X icon badged with a small Firefox logo next to my calendar widget, since I can’t park a Web shortcut in the all-apps list.

All this is more than I can say for another short-form social app under the control of a different tech billionaire who made his own public conversion to Trump courtier: Meta’s Threads. I don’t have time for a vapid platform that, unlike Facebook and Instagram, doesn’t connect me to friends or family, so I deleted that app from my phone without bothering to save a Web shortcut. I don’t miss it.

1. Apple provides a similar Web-shortcut feature in iOS and iPadOS, but those operating systems also provide app-privacy protections unavailable in Android. That’s why I’ve yet to subject X’s iPad app to the same eviction as its Android app, although after writing this post I am leaning towards doing so. ↩︎

#AddAppToHomeScreen #ElonMusk #FirefoxForAndroid #harmReduction #oligarch #Threads #TikTok #Twitter #WebApp #websiteShortcut #X #XAndroidApp

Rob Pegoraro

2022-11-11 06:26:13

Whither Twitter

Twitter has occupied an embarrassingly large part of my online existence since the spring of 2008–a span of years that somehow exceeds my active tenure on Usenet. But the past two weeks of Twitter leave me a lot less certain about how much time I will or should spend on that service.

I did not have high expectations in April when Elon Musk–who, never forget, already has two full-time jobs at just Tesla and SpaceX–offered to buy Twitter. He had already revealed a low-resolution understanding of content moderation on social platforms but took the advice of a clique of tech bros and told Twitter’s board that he had the answers: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

Seeing Musk then spend months and what could be $100 million in legal fees trying to squirm out of his accepted, above-market offer of $54.20 a share did not elevate those expectations.

Just before a court case he probably would have lost, Musk gave in, threw $44 billion ($13 billion borrowed) on the table and took over Twitter on Oct. 28. He quickly sacked a handful of top executives before firing about half of the workforce with careless cruelty. One friend figured he’d gotten canned when he couldn’t log into his work laptop.

Things have skidded downhill since. On Twitter, Musk keeps showing himself an easy mark for far-right conspiracy liars and the phony complaints of online trolls; in its offices, he’s ordered a rushed rollout of an $8/month subscription scheme that grants the blue-circled checkmark of a verified account, on the assumption that credit-card payment processors will catch fraudsters.

The predictable result: a wave of fake but “verified” accounts impersonating the likes of Eli Lilly, Nintendo, George W. Bush, Lockheed Martin, Telsa and Musk himself.

Also predictable: Twitter advertisers reacting to this chaos and their fear of wobbly content moderation (rejected by Musk) by smashing the Esc key on their spending plans until they can figure out what’s going on. Musk has responded by whining that companies pausing ad campaigns amounts to them “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

As for legacy verified accounts like my own, Musk has oscillated from saying that they’d require the same $8/month charge to suggesting they’d continue to saying they will be dropped–while also introducing, yanking and then resurfacing gray-checkmark icons for certain larger organizations over a 36-hour period. Oh, and not paying your $8 a month might mean your tweets fall down a bit bucket.

After a Thursday that saw Twitter’s chief information security officer, chief privacy officer, and chief complaince officer resign by early morning, Musk told the remaining employees at an all-hands meeting that “Bankruptcy isn’t out of the question.” Since Twitter now owes more than $1 billion a year in interest on the debt from Musk’s acquisition, that warning seems reasonable.

I am not writing this out of schadenfreude. As much as Twitter can drive me nuts (what is it with the militantly stupid people in my replies?), I’ve found it enormously helpful as a public notebook, a shortcut to subject-matter experts, an on-demand focus group, and an ongoing exercise in short-form prose. As (I think) my Washington Post colleague Frank Ahrens once observed, Twitter lets journalists write the New York City tabloid headlines we couldn’t get away with in our own newsrooms.

If Twitter really does implode, which now seems a much more real possibility even if a roundtrip through Chapter 11 is more likely, I don’t know how I’d replace it.

Many of the people I follow there are advancing evacuation plans on a federated, non-commercial, somewhat confusing social platform–not Usenet, but Mastodon.

I have taken tentative steps to do likewise, in the sense that I created one account on the well-known server Mastodon.Social and then realized I’d created a separate account on the xoxo.zone server in 2018 after hearing Mastodon talked up at a meetup during the XOXO conference in Portland. Now I need to decide which account to keep and which one to migrate, and indecision over that makes it easier to stay on Twitter and watch it burn.

Meanwhile, seeing Musk’s stark, public display of incompetence continues to leave me baffled when I compare that to the Musk venture I know best, SpaceX. If Musk ran SpaceX this impulsively and with this little willingness to learn from others, multiple launch pads at Cape Canaveral would be smoking holes in the ground.

Instead, SpaceX is the leading provider of launch services in the world, sending Falcon 9 rockets to space and landing their first stages for reuse on a better-than-weekly basis. “Transformational” is not too strong of a word for what SpaceX has accomplished since it first orbited a prototype Dragon capsule in December of 2010; this part of Musk’s career ought to be Presidential Medal of Freedom material, with bipartisan applause.

(I got to see that reentry-singed Dragon capsule up close in July of 2011 when NASA hosted a Tweetup at the Kennedy Space Center for the final Space Shuttle launch, yet another experience I owe in some way to Twitter.)

I keep hoping that I will see this sort of steely-eyed focus in Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. Instead, he appears to be off to an even worse start than I could have imagined. And I can imagine quite a bit.

#contentModeration #ElonMuskTwitterAcquisition #federatedSocial #Mastodon #microblogging #socialMedia #SpaceX #Tesla #tweetup #Twitter #TwitterVerification #XOXO

joint-highest civilian award of the United States, bestowed by the President

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Fundamental Attribution Error and Harm Reduction Theater

‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health’

ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education

Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us

Yet, individualized mindfulness programs pay virtually no attention to how stress is shaped by a complex set of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives. Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer argue in “The Wellness Syndrome” that the mindfulness movement exemplifies an ideological shift, which turns an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness into a moral imperative. This “biomorality” urges the individual to find responsibility via the “right” life choices-whether through exercise, food, or meditation-to optimize the self.

Corporate mindfulness is bullsh*t: Zen or no Zen, you’re working harder and being paid less | Salon.com

Consider “fundamental attribution error” when evaluating mindset marketing like mindfulness, grit, growth mindset, etc.

twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…

twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…

The notion that each of us isn’t entirely the master of his own fate can be awfully hard to accept. It’s quite common to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment—so common, in fact, that psychologists have dubbed this the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s a bias that may be particularly prevalent in our society, where individualism is both a descriptive reality and a cherished ideal. We Americans stubbornly resist the possibility that what we do is profoundly shaped by policies, norms, systems, and other structural realities. We prefer to believe that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that overweight people simply lack the willpower to stop eating, and so on.81 If only all those folks would just exercise a little personal responsibility, a bit more self-control!

The Fundamental Attribution Error is painfully pervasive when the conversation turns to academic failure. Driving Duckworth and Seligman’s study of student performance was their belief that underachievement isn’t explained by structural factors—social, economic, or even educational. Rather, they insisted, it should be attributed to the students themselves, and specifically to their “failure to exercise self-discipline.” The entire conceptual edifice of grit is constructed on that individualistic premise, one that remains popular for ideological reasons even though it’s been repeatedly debunked by research.

When students are tripped up by challenges, they may respond by tuning out, acting out, or dropping out. Often, however, they do so not because of a defect in their makeup (lack of stick-to-itiveness) but because of structural factors.

Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (p. 170). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

Lee Ross defined FAE as a tendency for people, when attributing the causes of behavior, “to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour”. That’s very aligned with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. It’s at the heart of what I go on about with equity literacy, structural ideology vs. deficit ideology, designing for the edges, and changing our framing.

American culture and education are vast engines of FAE. Special Education is a gauntlet of FAE attitudes. Our family gets tired of wading through bad framing.

Compulsory, top-down mindfulness (and mindset marketing more generally) is too often used to situate structural problems within individuals while “disguising the ways they kill us.” It contributes to the gauntlet.

This is harm reduction theater. Practicing pluralism, for me, for now, means triage and harm reduction. Harm reduction theater wastes resources and bikesheds deficit ideology instead of embracing equity and structural ideology.

twitter.com/HowWeTeach/status/…

Recognize and prioritize minority stress.

As we come to understand depression in the transgender community more accurately, it’s become clear that the major cause is what’s referred to as “minority stress;” that is, “stressors induced by a hostile, homophobic culture, which often results in a lifetime of harassment, maltreatment, discrimination and victimization.”

When Worlds Collide – Mental Illness Within the Trans Community – Lionheart

Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,

“The increased rates of mental health problems in these minority populations are often a consequence of the stigma and marginalisation attached to living outside mainstream sociocultural norms (Meyer 2003). This stigma can lead to what Meyer (2003) refers to as ‘minority stress’. This stress could come from external adverse events, which among other forms of victimization could include verbal abuse, acts of violence, sexual assault by a known or unknown person, reduced opportunities for employment and medical care, and harassment from persons in positions of authority (Sandfort et al. 2007).”

Ann’s Autism Blog: Autism, Transgender and Avoiding Tragedy

We’re awash in behaviorism and mindset marketing that directs thinking away from systems and toward individuals, individuals who are structurally stressed.

Design is tested at the edges, and you need structural ideology to do something about it.

Corporate and ed-tech mindfulness aren’t structural or equity literate. When you aren’t equity literate, you risk engaging in harm reduction theater. When you aren’t equity literate, you fail at triage and harm reduction.

Investment in universal mindfulness training in the schools is unlikely to yield measurable, socially significant results, but will serve to divert resources from schoolchildren more urgently in need of effective intervention and support.

Mindfulness Nation is another example of delivery of low intensity services to mostly low risk persons to the detriment of those in greatest and most urgent need.

Those many fewer students in need more timely, intensive, and tailored services are left underserved. Their presence is ignored or, worse, invoked to justify the delivery of services to the larger group, with the needy students not benefiting.

Unintended effects of mindfulness for children | Mind the Brain

“Instead of treating stress situations as fringe concerns, it’s time we move them to the center of our conversations-to start with our most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users, and then work our way outward. The reasoning is simple: when we make things for people at their worst, they’ll work that much better when people are at their best.“

There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.” Structural ideology-an ideology shared by intersectionality, the social mode of disability, and design for real life-is necessary to good design.

Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life – Ryan Boren

Education workers, healthcare workers, coworkers, everyone: We need you to check your FAE. We need you to confront injustice. Are you practicing harm reduction theater? Are you contributing to the gauntlet while telling us it’s good for us?

stimpunks.org/glossary/fundame…

stimpunks.org/glossary/harm-re…

stimpunks.org/edges/

stimpunks.org/glossary/minorit…

#equity #fundamentalAttributionError #harmReduction #mindfulness #mindsetMarketing #pluralism #structuralIdeology

Weekly output: Apple’s AirDrop privacy error

I’m home for the shortest interval ever between trips, but it’s not my work’s fault. After four days getting an update on consumer-electronics trends at the IFA Global Press Conference (this year, that event took place on the Spanish coast; as in prior years, the organizers covered most of my travel costs and those of the other invited journalists and analysts), I’m flying to Cleveland early tomorrow morning for my Uncle Jim’s funeral.

If this post gets you to call or e-mail an aunt or uncle you haven’t talked to in a while, then it’s been more useful than most of these roundups.

4/27/2019: The feature Apple needs to change in AirDrop, Yahoo Finance

I’ve written about how the design of the AirDrop file-sharing feature in iOS enables harassment from creeps trying to send dick pics and other unwanted images to strangers. But hearing my wife talk about how a visit by our daughter’s Brownie troop to the neighborhood Apple Store end with a store employee offering to AirDrop pictures of the kids to the parents there—an invitation they could only accept by setting AirDrop to accept files from “Everyone,” which would in turn leave them open to “cyber-flashing”–led me to decide to take another whack at Apple for leaving this flaw unfixed.

To all the men who have commented that they’ve never had this problem and, come on, it’s not that hard to change the setting back: Thanks for making my case that we need more diversity on development teams, and please don’t join any yourself.

#AirDrop #cyberFlashing #harmReduction #IFAGlobalPressConference #IFAGPC #ios #spamdrop