Maëlys McArdle

Blog

  • United States follows Russia in labeling trans people a terrorist threat

    The White House has released its new counter-terrorism strategy, which includes the following quote:

    In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.

    2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy

    This is the same White House that said that trans people were “mutilating children” by advocating an end involuntary conversion therapy and being able to access the same puberty blockers already prescribed to cis children. That it was “gender ideology extremism” for trans people to update identity documents. This is what they mean by “violence”. They’re equating a 9/11 with trans people filing paperwork and cis parents loving their gender non-conforming children.

    This lack of proportionality is a feature of authoritarian governments. Russia under the dictatorship of Putin added “LGBT movement” to the list of extremist and terrorist organisations.

    Trump 2.0 has been obsessed with trans people from the start. The president has been inserting attacks on this population at every opportunity while his administration and those of Republican-led states wield the full powers of the government to persecute them.

    It’s a scary time.

  • Finding Contentment

    Finding Contentment

    I kicked off my weekend by going to an Ottawa Charge game on Friday after work.

    On Saturday, I stopped by a Mexican bakery, and got a few donuts that were literally just out of the oven. Afterwards, I biked to the Tulip Festival and spent some time by Dow’s Lake. I had just fixed up my bike, and this was its first go of the year. Then that evening, I went to Port Elmsley to watch The Sheep Detectives with members of the Jeep Club.

    On Sunday, my best friend and I did some writing. I was then lazy for the rest of the day, taking naps and watching the peaceful OVA Yokohama Shopping Log. I try to be active like this not just weekends, but on weekday evenings as well.

    (more…)

  • Anti-Trans Rally a Failure

    A few weeks ago I got wind of an anti-trans rally occurring in Ottawa. It was the same old actors peddling conspiracy theories about trans people. The new one by its keynote speaker, who was flown in from the US, is that estrogen turns trans women into mass shooters.

    They started off the day with a press conference at 10:30 am in Room 135-B of the West Block of Parliament Hill. CPAC described it as “a group of activists opposed to what they see as “gender ideology” in public policy”.

    They might have directly reached out to the Parliamentary Press Gallery to get booked, which doesn’t require the backing of an MP or senator. That might explain the absence of a politician in the presser or mention of one in their social media posts.

    Then at 1 PM, they had a rally on the Hill. About 30 people were present. It was a pittance compared to the two unrelated demonstrations on the Hill happening at the same time, one of which had an entire marching band. The transphobes were relegated to a small corner of the lawn. Opposing them was at least 17 counter-demonstrators.

    This rally was by all accounts a failure: there were more organizers and influencer wannabes than attendees. It appeared to be fairly disorganized; people remained clustered in small groups taking videos for their livestreams or whatnot – I didn’t observe any speech.

    Signs included “WE’RE HERE! WE’RE QUEER! WE’RE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN! -PRIDE PARADE CHANT NYC, 2023” and “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A TRANS CHILD“. I also saw one with a crossed out pride flag that I recognized from an earlier anti-trans rally.

    Finally at 6PM the bigots gathered at the Biker Church in Vanier for what they termed a town hall. Given the ample ties both the church and this event’s organizer have to the Covid conspiracy convoy that occupied Ottawa, the location isn’t surprising.

    The rally’s dismal attendance was the best possible outcome, short of it not happening altogether.

    It was a show-and-tell for a handful of miserable people to each other. No one will remember it.

  • Shame

    Shame

    I feel shame at not being enough of a man. When I can’t pull off a male-coded task, I fear a man glancing at me with the “don’t you know this?” look. I feel like a pig with lipstick when I femme up. I feel emasculated when I lose my cool. I replay a moment from gym class in high school. I dread correcting my bank for the umpteenth time that it’s miss not mister. It’s shame inherited from my youth.

    I also feel shame at being too much of a man. When a woman is ahead of me on the sidewalk for more than a few seconds, I’ll deviate to a longer route to avoid being clocked as a threat. I avoid entering the women’s clothes section and instead walk on glancing at items from the aisle. I beeline in and out when I spot what I want. God forbid there’s a child entering a public washroom ahead of me: I might sacrifice my plans outright to use the toilet at home.

    This shame I inherited from the news and social media that frames trans women like me as predators. Even sympathetic coverage starts from this framing. I’ve witnessed malevolent fabrications poison the attitudes of strangers around me.

    Topping it all is this other layer where I entered adulthood believing my needs were too much – the same message being told to trans women everywhere.

    How do I undo this shame when my shame isn’t just the perceived disgust of others, but how this disgust moves them to violence. Where my world is a minefield and simple tasks like going to the washroom has to be paired with asking myself whether this is the time, because other times were that time. Where I remember not just the perpetrators, but that no bystander ever stood up for me.

    Every self-help book around shame promotes self-acceptance as the way out. But none of them discuss how to deal with shame when self-acceptance accomplishes nothing. The problem isn’t whether I accept myself, it’s whether others do, because they’re the difference between whether I’m going to be hospitalized or not.

  • Dead Occupation Walking

    Dead Occupation Walking

    Software engineering will never fully disappear as a field, but we’re on the cusp of a vast permanent contraction of the workforce.

    I’ve been a professional software developer for eighteen years. In that time, one of the things I’ve learned is that unremarkable code is good code. As is following industry standards. Doing both reduces cognitive complexity which mitigates bugs, as well as eases onboarding and refactoring.

    In other words, exactly what AI is good at: being derivative.

    Another lesson is that it’s more productive not to reinvent the wheel, but only write what doesn’t yet exist: mostly glue code. Everything we do is to realise new features for a product faster and cheaper than competitors.

    That’s everything for market capture. Consumers don’t reward reliable products; because higher-quality means fewer features, higher cost, or taking longer. They instead spend their money on the product that has the features they want in a state that’s good enough today. Those of us who want bullet-proof products are in the minority.

    In this ecosystem, consumers tolerate outages because the competitors are either more pricey, or lack the features. Those companies that do enjoy this exclusivity can then leverage their position to take more shortcuts around quality – thus allowing for more features faster.

    This incentive structure makes AI’s major current downside, low-quality code, a non-issue. That slop still amounts to more features.

    (more…)