Two Serious Ladies

The ladies talk about a whole host of things: the competing ontologies surrounding linguistic 'understanding' through the lens of so-called artificial intelligence, the engineerification of academic linguistics, the cultural ethics of orality and literacy, the question of what is 'naturally' human, technologies like lapis lazuli, and, uh, reptile sex.

The ladies talk about Orange County, phone sex forced feminization domination, vanilla sex and taxonomies of desire, the economics of trans surgery and GoFundMe.

The ladies shoot the shit about transvestism, nation state formation and standard language ideology, African American English, and the mysteries of Yerba Buena Island, San Francisco, California.

Helen and Lucy present Trans on Film: the Disclosure documentary and He Him Ahimsa: Pronouns in the Modern American Scene          

Lucy and Helen talk all about meaninglessness: open letters about Steven Pinker, cancel culture, JK Rowling, lesbian bar Jolene's in San Francisco.

Helen and Lucy talk with "transamorous" advocate, Geoffrey H. Nicholson, about his recent piece in the Transgender Studies Quarterly and his views on attraction to trans people.

The ladies talk about gender performativity and cognitive competence, the poetics of colloquial Finnish's pronouns, philosophy of science and inborn schemata regarding bodily sex.

Lucy and Helen talk about Red Scare, Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan's podcast, slurs, trust, linguistic prescriptivism, JK Rowling, cottagecore, etc.

The ladies talk the acoustics of vowels, voice feminization cults, Danielle Carr's piece in n+1, The Bad Feature; neoliberalism, ordinary language, concern trolling, and more.

Helen and Lucy talk ~current events~ and so-called chasers: desire vs. fetishization, recognition, etc., with particular attention paid toward the pseudonymously published Transgender Studies Quarterly piece about "Transamorous" men.

Lucy and Helen talk about sports: trans people in sports, basically.          

Lucy and Helen talk about word meaning, what concepts are, adjective ordering preferences and how these preferences relate to how we talk about people's identities, TERF logic, the word 'transgendered'.          

Helen and Lucy talk nonbinary gender identities and people who are neither cis nor trans.

Helen and Lucy discuss force fem covid cures, judge languages on their aesthetics, and try to figure out Charlotte Clymer.

Lucy and Helen talk about ambiguity in language, the oxford comma, romance, consent, violence, apes, brow bones, why men and women look and sound different, and what it means to transition. Read Fodor's piece in LRB here.