"And then everyone in the book gets pregnant at the same time!"

After an excoriation of Nineteen Minutes, Vanishing Acts and My Sister's Keeper last night, Jill and I determined that Jodi Picoult is actually writing romance novels gussied up to look like Big Important Literature. I personally have a great appreciation for both romance novels [good and bad], as well as Big Important Literature. What particularly pisses me off about Jodi Picoult, though, is that her writing has such transparent, sweating pretensions to Big Important Literature, but her bad form betrays her. 

And by bad form, I mean that

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If there aren't words for things that need words...

 ...make them up.

Blaming the victim in transphobic violence

Talia Mae Bettcher writes an interesting article in Hypatia about transphobia and its connection to murders of trans people. Basically she points out that there's this persistent theme that trans people are deceivers and that, if one checks what's in their pants, one sees what they "really" are. So what we have here is the essentialist notion that gender depends not on how one dresses, acts and identifies, but what one covers up with one's underwear. 

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When you're cold and clammy already...

You hate getting any colder. Will explains.

Will is freezing in part because he has no scarf. I can't find a decent scarf anywhere, so I'm so annoyed that I have to model one by my own damn self...

Jacket is  actually part of a Chinese set that I bought specifically for Chow, but it goes along with Will's atrocious sartorial sense.

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