Dr Attercop

@drattercop.bsky.social

562 Followers 776 Following

Lecturer in children's lit and linguistics. Tiny bisexual spider. Here for fun, not work. (she/her)

Homebody, a graphic novel by Theo Parish, was on the 2025 shortlist. It starts promisingly, as a tale of rebellion against feminine stereotypes. The unnamed heroine is annoyed when she’s snubbed by the boys at chess club. At first, she realises she fancies a girl at secondary school. Homebody could have been a lesbian Bildungsroman or dyke romance – a story that encouraged same-sex attracted young women to feel good about themselves. But in a later section of Homebody, the protagonist (who likes upper case) opts to, ‘FLATTEN MY CHEST TO GET A MORE MASCULINE SHAPE’. It is disappointing when an author, who could have dished up a cracking yarn, gives us half-baked stuff about gender identity instead.
"Many of those spreading this vitriol are using doctored imagery and illustrations that are not present in the UK version of the book, further stoking hatred all in the name of culture wars.
Cartoon image of person lying on grass topless showing top surgery scars. The text reads "The day I will call this house home". The caption undernead reads "Homebody by non-binary identifying female, Theo Parish, includes illustrations of mastectomy scars, painting extreme body modification as ‘radical self love’. This book won a Carnegie medal for illustration!"
British English /kiː/ kee U.S. English /ki/ kee
Symphony in Yellow An omnibus across the bridge Crawls like a yellow butterfly, And, here and there, a passer-by Shows like a little restless midge. Big barges full of yellow hay Are moored against the shadowy wharf, And, like a yellow silken scarf, The thick fog hangs along the quay. The yellow leaves begin to fade And flutter from the Temple elms, And at my feet the pale green Thames Lies like a rod of rippled jade. Oscar Wilde 1889
A statement from Notts Pride You may have seen recent announcements from other Pride organisations choosing to exclude political parties from their events. We can confirm that Notts Pride will be taking the same position. We hope this sends a clear message that many of our Notts LGBTQ+ community feel let down. We hope that this decision gives rise to serious reflection and a renewed commitment to shaving when every member of our community, every day of the year.
In its report, the OfS found four elements of the policy to be "concerning". These included a requirement for course materials to "positively represent trans people and trans lives" and an assertion that "transphobic propaganda… [would] not be tolerated".
Red t-shirt that says "ERIK BLOODAXE RULES OK"
Screenshot of a profile labeller which reads: Bouba User has been judged and deemed bouba. The appeal button has been circled with yellow highlighter.
That’s where the left comes in. As well as a need for the timid Greens to find their voice, the Labour left should stop being the punch bags of the soulless hacks using Starmer as their hapless puppet. Seven of those MPs were suspended for voting against keeping Tory benefit cuts that drive children into poverty. Some may never be let back in; others only if they pledge slavish obedience – and then what’s the point of being there anyway? Call the bluff of your assailants: leave, and form an alliance with the Green and leftwing independent MPs. There are other leftwing Labour MPs who haven’t been booted out – such as Clive Lewis – who would be a good fit. Such an alliance, with the right strategy, could suddenly put formidable pressure on Labour from the left, and force a conversation about redistributing wealth and power that would force Labour, Tory and Reform UK alike on to the defensive.
And if you'd said, "No, T as in 'transgender'. Why does your sign only say 'LGB'?", they'd probably have replied: "Because LGB stands for 'lesbian, gay and bisexual' - which are all forms of sexuality. Transgenderism, by contrast, has nothing to do with sexuality. IT's to do with gender identity, whcih is something completely different and unrelated. Having a society for 'lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people', therefore, makes no more sense than having a society for 'lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trainspotters'. Obviously, we've got nothing against trainspotters. We're just saying that there's no logical reason for them to be added to the name of our society."
Quick fire Bats or great crested newts? Neither because I want growth. Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage? Neither! Keir Starmer. Traitor or faithful? Are they programmes? Donald Trump or Ursula von der Leyen? Uh. Are there going to be any [questions] that are fun? I don’t think we should choose between [them]. Packed lunch or state banquet? Packed lunch. Downing Street or the family home in south London? For now, Downing Street. For ever, south London.
Screenshot of my skeet in reply to a now deleted post. Text reads: Hello! I have been reading this, and I have a question: can a bisexual person have a "sexually consistent" relationship, according to this?
Screenshot of a text message saying "Tyger is a pretty good book tho" and then some ASCII code of a smiling face. The time stamp is 11:21pm.
Key findings include: For the first time in its history, the annual CLPE Reflecting Realities survey reports an overall drop in the percentage of racially minoritised characters featured in published children’s books reviewed – from 30% in 2022 to 17% in 2023. The report shows the number of racially minoritised main characters has dropped by half to 7% in 2023, compared to 14% in 2022. The 7th CLPE report calls for renewed commitment from the publishing industry in improving the volume and quality of inclusive output, alongside a review of practices and investment.
Photo of ginger and white cat, sleeping on a green cushion on a desk. The little pink beans on one white foot are in focus.
Photo of an old black and white cat lying on a desk, with his lovely white paws with little black toe beans pointed at the camera.
Photo of three small holly bushes, variegated with yellow, a few red berries, and a lovely dusting of snow.
Close up of a happy cat's face
"I am lesbian" written in children's handwriting.
Three books: The Farthest Shore, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, all by Ursula Le Guin. These copies are all from the 1970s.
The name “slash” comes from the punctuation mark in the first slash pairing to develop a devoted following: Kirk/Spock. Those Star Trek-inspired stories were shared at sci-fi conventions and in small-circulation home-made fanzines. But the arrival of the internet and enormous repository sites where anyone can post their own fic mean that fanfic in general, and slash in particular, are now both easy to find and enormously popular. I think this may be playing a significant part in the epidemic of teenage trans-identification, especially among girls.
I find it fascinating now to read something I wrote a year before I discovered that something was up on sex and gender. Without even realising that soon I wouldn’t be able to do this in any mainstream outlet, I wrote frankly and fearless about psychosexual differences between the sexes, and why people of one sex might imagine themselves into the skin of the other. And the people I interviewed spoke the same reality-based language. For example, take this quote from Donald Symons, an expert in sexual psychology: “To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.” He and a slash aficionado ended up writing a book together about what slash tells us about women’s psyches, which relied heavily on concepts from evolutionary psychology—concepts that become meaningless if you confuse the sexes, or pretend that there are only minor differences between them, or that those differences disappear once someone identifies as tra
BY DR H JOYCE IN JOYCE ACTIVATED — DEC 1, 2022 Joyce activated, issue 29 Recent years have seen the formerly niche genre of fanfic explode in popularity. Much is pretty hardcore—and a surprising amount features couplings between two men who are straight in the source material. I think this may be part of what is fuelling trans-identification among teenage girls. Image of a fountain pen writing on lined paper.
In her book, “nasa/Trek”, Constance Penley, a media theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, points out that Spock’s alien nature means that K/S fits rather neatly into Fiedler’s schema. But his discussion related solely to male writers and their readers. K/S is written by women, for women – and plenty of it is far from immaculate. Penley concludes that female fans of “Star Trek” were reshaping the canonical homosocial coupling observed by Fiedler into a form more to their taste. She describes K/S as an “ingenious melding” of the American adventure novel, centred on an intense, often inter-racial, male relationship, and the domestic or sentimental novel written and read by women.
Charlotte Hill (a pen name) started going to “Star Trek” conventions with her mother as a teenager in the 1980s. She read her first slash fic, “Long Way Home”, aged around 16, in an anthology called “The Sensuous Vulcan” that she picked up from a box hidden under a dealer’s table. Kirk is planet-side, bored and drunk, when Spock comes to take him back to the Enterprise. “Spock and me. It could happen,” thinks Kirk. It took the teenager a few seconds to work out what “it” was. “Then I thought: ‘Oh my gosh! It not only could happen; it should happen!’” she recalls. She has been reading and writing slash ever since.
1843magazine To boldly go... lash fiction – a branch of fan fiction that imagines straight heroes getting together – is strangely popular among straight women. Helen Joyce examines the light it sheds on female sexuality. Illustration of Kirk and Spock touching fingertips in a flirty way.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.
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Tweet one: It means a lot that you stand up for us Lesbians. Reply from JK Rowling: You're my sisters.
A big spider and two smaller bats made out of pastry and chocolate.
Picture of a chair made from sheepskin with three sheep heads attached. Caption reads: exotic chair (not satanic) $2,200.