Erin Elkin

@shadell

Disaster trans woman with a PhD in media studies. I write stuff sometimes. (she/her) Buy my book:

717 Siguiendo2825 Seguidores1798 Publicaciones

Bluesky

trans

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y shadell.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Erin Elkin@shadell· 1d

Reading about A Doll’s House and… Great white dude playwright: “here’s my great feminist play certifying my place in the literary canon; it’s based on that time a woman in a similar situation begged me for some minor help and I did nothing and watched her get sent to an asylum instead.” KAM

Real-life inspiration
A Doll's House was based on the life of Laura Kieler (maiden name Laura Smith Petersen), a good friend of Ibsen. Much that happened between Nora and Torvald happened to Laura and her husband, Victor. Similar to the events in the play, Laura signed an illegal loan to save her husband's life-in this case, to find a cure for his tuberculosis. 10] She wrote to Ibsen, asking for his recommendation of her work to his publisher, thinking that the sales of her book would repay her debt. At his refusal, she forged a cheque for the money. At this point, she was found out. In real life, when Victor discovered Laura's secret loan, he divorced her and had her committed to an asylum. Two years later, she returned to her husband and children at his urging, and she went on to become a well-known Danish author, living to the age of 83.

Ibsen wrote A Doll's House when Laura Kieler had been committed to the asylum. The fate of this friend of the family shook him deeply, perhaps also because Laura had asked him to intervene at a crucial point in the scandal, which he did not feel able or willing to do.

Instead, he turned this life situation into an aesthetically shaped, successful drama. In the play, Nora leaves Torvald with her head held high, though facing an uncertain future given the limitations single women faced in the society of the time.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jul 5

I really should have moved on when it became clear they were just an antifeminist, not a confused queer tumblr type; but it really is remarkable how much the “all biology agrees with me,” crowd is dying to prove they never went past high school biology.

Skeet’s first asking if hormones are immutable, followed by a random terf responding

“If you mean "hormone contents of an organism's bloodstream", no.

The genetic body plan encoded in a human's cells? Yes.”

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 23

Summarizing the article.

Meme of two people grasping hands in solidarity.

One is labeled "Sheila Jeffries", the other is labeled "Forcefem mindbreak doujins"

Over their hands, text reads "feminine sexed embodiment is so inherently tempting and corrosive that any engagement risks permanent corruption.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 21

Finally finished with the Detective Precure conspiracy Prediction bingo board. Now let's see how we do.

A Meitantei Precure Conspiracy Prediction Bingo Board:

Squares include:
Cure Eclair secretly named after pastry
Phantom thieves hang out as mascots after losing
Kurea=Ex-Eclair (but not new)
Usonoir grown up Pochitan
Everyone takes turns as Eclair
Usonoir = Emiruru's child from doomed future
Anna is Mikuru's Mom
Anna is also Anna's other mom
Eliza writes the book of prophecies
Pochitan + Makoto Jewel = king of ruin
Usonoir = Future Jett
CONAN RETURNS AS 5th CURE
Free! (Mikuru is Anna's Mom)
Jett shows up at school for Parent-Teacher Conference
Phantom Thieves ex-London Office
Nijee and Ageseine are quietly motivated by dysphoria
Shiruku= Shushutan
THERE IS NO LONDON OFFICE
Nijee one off Precure
Jett does 9/11
Usonoir from the future
Arcana Shadow is an actual traitor
Pochitan closed timeloop
Usonoir is Mikuru's missing dad
London Office are the real Villains

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 20

Like, to reference Pihlak and Cousens (2025), the historical record is very clear that these women existed and their repeated omission from scholarship is fairly damning of the work.

Instead, recent scholarship has typically treated the ‘lesbian transsexual’ as largely hypothetical despite robust contrary evidence. Jules Gill-Peterson notes the ‘ample evidence that desire between femmes played a central role in trans social life’ prior to the 1970s, but due to many of these relationships being between transvestites assigned male at birth and non-trans women, they are often simplistically reduced to heterosexuality.16 Gill-Peterson proposes a reading strategy that refuses a rigid separation of gender identity from sexual orientation, which if followed can attune historians to the many historical trans femmes who were involved in tacitly lesbian relationships. While a valuable counter to lesbian trans femme opacity in the historical record, such an intervention overlooks the presence of the many self-described lesbians who were not cis that were active in the mid-twentieth century.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 20

From the same author's Transsexuals and Transvestites. Trans women being out, explicitly, as lesbians in the 70s, recognizable in both trans and lesbian circles, working class and professional alike, negotiating feminism, transition, and their space in gay communities. archive.org/details/tran...

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 19

Most of her actual results are simply inadequate or not presented at all. Of the many measures, she covers conflict framing, trans voice centrality, and then other voice and topic measures, but omits many scores entirely.

Treating the three models as independent coders, Krippendorff's alpha (interval) reaches 0.84 on conflict framing and 0.83 on trans voice centrality — above the conventional 0.80 reliability bar — with 0.71 on care stance, 0.71-0.76 across the other voice dimensions, and 0.52-0.70 on topics. Pairwise correlations between Claude and Qwen run 0.72-0.94 across dimensions. More importantly, every directional finding (the era trends) replicates on each model individually — the models disagree about exact magnitudes, never about direction.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 19

Broadly, I think this analysis of the NYT Is necessary and important. I think her findings are probably correct. I cannot stress enough how little the details in this actual codebook make any sense whatsoever as an analytical approach.

Every article is scored independently by three AI models from three unrelated labs: Anthropic's Claude Haiku, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, and Alibaba's open-weights Qwen 2.5 32B running locally on consumer GPU hardware via Ollama. All three receive the identical rubric (versioned prompt, currently v3) and identical article text at temperature 0, and return ~20 dimensional scores in four groups:

Topic (0-10): medical, legal, cultural, violence, personal, science, politics, international, youth focus
Framing Direction (-5 to +5): skepticism → affirming, restrictive → protective
Framing Tone (0-10): conflict framing, pathologizing, both-sides treatment, alarmist tone, normalizing
Voice / Sourcing (0-10): trans voice, expert voice, advocate voice, opponent voice (narrative weight, not mere quotation)

The rubric's central instruction separates what happened from how it's covered: framing scores measure the article's own tonal and structural choices — loaded language, whose terminology becomes the unmarked default, source ordering and narrative weight, what's treated as settled vs. contested — not the valence of the event being reported. A neutral report on a trans-protective ruling scores 0, not positive. The open-weights model matters for reproducibility: cloud models change and get retired, but anyone with a GPU can re-run Qwen with pinned weights and check our numbers.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jun 7

Everyone is QTing this to tell you how *edgy* and *intense* Murcielago is; but I am sorry, the bitter truth is that this is very normal Exhibit A: Even the prime minister likes it!

Screenshot from the anime Dead Mount Death Play where the prime minister of Japan is kidnapped and reads Murcielago.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Apr 29

A dating app that puts trans women first, by forcing them to give you their legal names may, just maybe, not be it. In addition to the everything going on here.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Apr 28

Hoyo is bad, and HI3 is their least popular game. However! Consider Songlema. Like, there’s hoyo lesbian-coding and then there’s bratty puppygirl con-artistXmean forcefem witch who wants to keep her as a treasured pet. Like look at the dog collar scene! Look at their summer skins’ flavor text!

"Que, ever since we put on these outfits, you've been avoiding eye contact and mumbling things I can't even make out."
"B-Because I've been trying to find the perfect way to say how I feel... but every time I think of something, I get too embarrassed to say it out loud"
"If you've got something to say, just say it. Once filming starts, it'll be too late."
"Okay, then I'll just say it! This outfit looks so good on you, so good that...! don't even know where to look, ahaha."
• • •
!.Thelema? Why don't you talk?"
Since they met, this was the first time the girl had looked away from her.
"You said exactly what I was going to say, no need for me to repeat it," she murmured.

"You two are about to feature in the summer special. As the planner, I'd like you to....
...show real emotions through natural interaction. The key is breaking down barriers, finding points of connection, and the soul of it is eye contact and reading each other's body language.
Don't worry! Thelema and I have rehearsed countless times, we've got great chemistry~"
"From where I stand, this shoot was flawless. Thank you all for your hard work."
"It's an honor to have your approval, Miss Thelema. Miss Songque... huh?
Why did she run off in such a hurry?"
"She can't stand the heat. Probably went to find somewhere cool."
"In that case, you should go with her.
Your face looks pretty red too!"
"Ahem. I'll just stay here. I.. don't mind."

Erin Elkin@shadell· Apr 25

Contrast to what have always felt to me like more insightful critiques of intracommunity harm from e.g., Freeman or Gleeson. These manage to critique movements’ uncharitability without imagining an ontologically evil class of bad actors (conviently detached from any actual behavior) to defeat.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-do-gender-transitions-happen/

“For as long as trans people operate in the face of a capitalist state, we will break in two directions: atomized struggle and the fashioning of a trans-specific mode of civil society.

Trans people oscillate not only out of their atomized state but often enough back into it: many of our worst traumas are inflicted by other trans people, and many drop out of activism with an embittered set of scare quotes placed around the words "trans community." Every petty corruption, frustrationm and normativity-enforcing eccentricity finds itself empowered by the raw necessity of communal work to avoid trans life becoming heteronymous to the whims and outdated protocols of state provision. In other words, to exist on our own terms immediately follows through into ferocious rows about exactly who "we" are.

The result is that trans communities are despised and relied upon by trans people in equal measure, and for the exact same reason. These ever-imperfect and ad hoc circles of shared interest are the best (and worst) stopgap against the total immiseration provided by the existing capitalist division oflabor.
Surpassing this divide requires a new movement, which we so far have only the haziest picture of: an anti-capitalist struggle fully responsive to, and in part growing out of, the existing struggles waged to secure our basic subsistence.”

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

have never seen women get as angry at other women as they do in the Movement. In part this is because our expectations of other feminists and the Movement in general are very high, and thus difficult to meet. We have not yet learned to be realistic in our demands on our sisters or ourselves. It is also because other feminists are available as targets for rage.

Rage is a logical result of oppression. It demands an outlet. Because most women are surrounded by men whom they have learned it is not wise to attack, their rage is often turned inward. The Movement is teaching women to stop this process, but in many instances it has not provided alternative targets. While the men are distant, and the "system" too big and vague, one's “sisters" are close at hand. Attacking other feminists is easier and the results can be more quickly seen than by attacking amorphous social institutions. People are hurt; they leave. One can feel the sense of power that comes from having "done something." Trying to change an entire society is a very slow, frustrating process in which gains are incremental, rewards diffuse, and setbacks frequent.

It is not a coincidence that trashing occurs most often and most viciously by those feminists who see the least value in small, impersonal changes and thus often find themselves unable to act against specific institutions.

The Movement's emphasis on "the personal is political" has made it easier for trashing to flourish. We began by deriving some of our political ideas from our analysis of our personal lives. This legitimated for many the idea that the Movement could tell us what kind of people we ought to be, and by extension what kind of personalities we ought to have. As no boundaries were drawn to define the limits of such demands, it was difficult to preclude abuses. Many groups have sought to remold the lives and minds of their members, and some have trashed those who resisted. Trashing is also a w…

Erin Elkin@shadell· Apr 25

I’ve heard of the essay ofc, but never actually read it before and wow lmao, this is just really badly argued, huh. “All those people (literally every single one of whom is middle class and anxious about it) are sooo essentializing and reduce everyone to identity, unlike me and the boys.”

Excerpt from Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle:

The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluraity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip. Once the VC has mustered its witch-hunt, the victim (often from a working class background, and not schooled in the passive aggressive etiquette of the bourgeoisie) can reliably be goaded into losing their temper, further securing their position as pariah/ latest to be consumed in feeding frenzy.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Apr 18

More people need to be reading Idolatry. It may be bait or not, but even if so there is some beautifully deranged lesbian energy in this one.

Screenshot from the manga Idolatry featuring a girl with her hands wrapped around another’s neck saying: “If I told you “I love you” and then proceed to kill you, would you smile and tell me that’s a wonderful reason too?”

Erin Elkin@shadell· Mar 31

oh shit. Second place in books! (granted, that's entirely off the back of just giving away copies for free for the past few days, but I'll take it!)

Page of top selling books on Itch, showing A Little Vice in the second place; followed by WARHOUND and Magica Riot in 3rd and 4th respectively.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Mar 19

Wasn't the Squid Game trans character like... last year?

Screenshot from Instagram, of an NYT story about how John Lithgow plays a lot of diverse roles (and once played a trans woman in "The World According to Garp," but wouldn't be able to do that today.)

Erin Elkin@shadell· Mar 6

I know next to nothing about Gokurakugai, but it did pick the absolute funniest thing to call its monsters.

Manga page showing one of the protagonists summoning a knife from his chest. The other announces that “the source of a Maga’s special powers is their blood. Al was born with that blood. A child born between Maga and man.”

Page from the same manga showing the same boy charging at a monster. Dialogue reads “Al is half-maga. Don’t let your heart become maga, Alma.”

Erin Elkin@shadell· Mar 5

Sure, let’s do this!

A My 9 Games screenshot showing that the games that make me are Honkai Star Rail, Hollow Knight, 9 Sols, Wrath of the Righteous, Hexcells, Arknights, FFXIV, Timespinner and Nier Automata

Erin Elkin@shadell· Feb 15

"This teenager gives me gay vibes. Hey girl, try watching Fried Green Tomatoes" is a scene of all time.

Scene from Journal with Witch, a currently airing anime featuring Makio, an adult, looking through her DVD collection and saying "I'm not sure if you'll like it," as she selects a DVD to give to one of her ward's friends.

Same as before, but handing the girl the dvd saying "I may be completely off the mark, but here."

Screen now showing that the DVD is of Fried Green Tomatoes, with Makio explaining "No matter who you fall in love with, or who you don't..."

Erin Elkin@shadell· Jan 30

Editing the response letters to adjust for the fact that the number of appendices continues to increase..... (Plz send help.)

Edit screen from google docs showing "Appendix K" where K is a suggested replacement for J, indicating that the number of appendices keeps increasing.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 22

QTP with a robot that's not Star Wars or Transformers Hard Mode: No Gundam series, Battletech or Macross allowed.

Screenshot of a gothicmade from the movie Gothicmade/the Five Star Stories universe.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 13

Anyone else remember Minami-ke? You know, that incredibly forgettable slice of life about three sisters making it on their own, but also one of the supporting cast members is slowly force femmed over all three seasons?

Screenshot of the anime Minami-ke featuring local force fem victim “Mako-chan” happily wearing a skirt

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 6

There is, I think, some value in an adopting a rhetorical position of degendering everyone. At least, I can see an argument. But the author has no trouble gendering people he deems cis.

In the case of clergy, to transcend the dualities of sex and gender was an aspiration. But even as clergy understood the main social boundary as dividing them collectively from the laity, they remained aware of the difference of sex among themselves. This is especially clear for Buddhists, who maintained rigid sex segregation in their institutions, but it can also be seen in the elaborate efforts of Daoists to overcome that difference, the disciplines of their "internal alchemy" differing by sex. Moreover, the terminology used to refer to clergy consistently differentiated by sex, as can be seen in the language of the Qing code, which uses distinct gendered nouns for Buddhists (sengren for monk, niseng for nun) and Daoists (daoshi and nüguan), respectively.

For all of these reasons, it makes sense to me to retain gendered pronouns for these categories of people, even though they all clearly moved away from the gender they had been assigned at birth in a number of significant ways. 45 In fact, for all of these categories, the gender status that resulted from such movement was contested to some degree, and its very ambiguity became the focus of suspicions and tensions, as we will see.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 6

Like, the author clearly put thought into how to use pronouns, but ended in a very cisnormative place anyway. Some people, when tortured, misgendered themselves; so who can know how they felt.

I am fully persuaded by Manion's approach, which I emulate in this book, especially with regard to the protagonists of chapters 2, 4, S, and 7.
We actually know less about the people in my legal cases than we do about many of those studied by the scholars cited above, and nowhere in my sources can we be absolutely sure that any given individual is really speaking for themself, without duress. In fact, we will see clear evidence that testimony changed in response to torture, better to fit the expectations of interrogators. Therefore, caution seems warranted.
Any policy on pronoun use that I adopt in this book is likely to seem anachronistic in one way or another, and no policy is likely to please every-one. To be sure, gender-neutral pronouns can create some awkward turns of phrase, and, for someone of my generation, at least, they take a great deal of getting used to. But to use gendered pronouns in this book in an indiscriminate way might constitute the most insidious anachronism of all, because its apparent naturalness would mask my assignment of gender to

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 6

Recced an interesting looking book looking at Ming/Qing China transes via unpacking legal archives from the era; and the historical material looks super rad; but “their subjective identity as a woman,” is, perhaps, not it at all.

“again, I was not really sure what to make of all this. I was especially perplexed by Xinxiang's statement that they were really a woman, when it was clear that they were treated as a man throughout the case record. It was only later (after reading Susan Stryker's work) that I came to perceive Xinxiang's career as a series of transgender maneuvers, with the underlying reality perhaps being their subjective identity as a woman.”

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 4

Okay, this is both extremely fashy and absolutely 1000% this CEO desperately wants to be the next Elizabeth Holmes.

Screenshot from the linked website showing you can select for “autism” with control over the % chance.

In a statement last year, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics said the practice of genetic screenings and use of polygenic risk scores for embryo selection has "moved too fast with too little evidence."

"In this statement we do not address either individual or broader social, ethical, and regulatory issues this testing raises," the group noted.

But Sadeghi said he remains confident in the data.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 3

The list is actually pretty solid! BUT ALSO FOR REAL THOUGH.

Screenshot reading: "Girls Last Tour by tkmiz (Manga, with a nice adaptation). Essential for the girl who likes to think about standing wistfully in the snow, or the girl who cries thinking about Homura/Elster/Yuno Hidasketch. Somebody really needs to release Shimeji Simulation in english already."

The last sentence is highlighted.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Dec 3

While far from the most horrifying part of it all, I really despise how institutions and people can be consistently on the wrong side of history over and over again without ever having a moment of reflection on the underlying logics that got them there or giving anything more than a token apology.

Said Mr. Jones in 1910:
"Women, subject yourselves to men."
Nineteen-Eleven heard him quote:
"They rule the world without the vote."
By Nineteen-Twelve, he would submit
"When all the women wanted it."
By Nineteen-Thirteen, looking glum,
He said that it was bound to come.
This year I heard him say with pride
"No reasons on the other side!"
By Nineteen-Fifteen, he'll insist
He's always been a suffragist.
And what is really stranger, too,
He'll think that what he says is true.

From Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People

Erin Elkin@shadell· Nov 29

I was shocked and amazed when we hit $6k. We're at, umm, well, it seems we're about to hit $12! Really, this is incredibly spectacular. Anyway, there's only one day left to get toxic lesbians! itch.io/b/3364/poiso...

Screenshot of the "Poison Lilies November" bundle on Itch.io showing we've raised 11,970$ usd with 23 hours and 56 minutes left before the bundle ends.

Erin Elkin@shadell· Nov 26

Fascinated by the 15-20% of brits that are like "yes, the government should act to stop me from discriminating against transes." (I know this is not actually how that works.)