That Trans Thing

So here's my take...

The aim of the Trans movement is, one assumes, to help Trans people establish productive, stable, emotionally-satisfying lives in society, and to help them deal with, and get legal remedy for, the occasional ignorance and prejudice they may meet(1). Sounds like a nice part-time gig for a few lawyers, medical advisors and social workers. Not something an FTSE 100 company needs a policy on, and certainly nothing trillion-dollar hedge funds such as Black Rock and Vanguard need to be involved in.

The core demand of Trans activism is that people of one sex(2) should be able to claim the legal and institutional rights, privileges and protections accruing to people of the others. Since women already have all the legal and institutional rights of men, Trans activism reduces to the demand that men should have access have to the many rights, privileges and protections of women in Western societies that are not shared with men(3).

Unlike religious conversion, where considerable changes of behaviour are required of the convert, the Trans movement insists that no changes of phenotype or behaviour are required of the Trans person. Men should get the special rights and privileges of women simply by professing that they "identify as a woman". This has been a really terrible decision, opening the door to a parade of chancers, frauds, and grifters who have tarnished the Trans brand badly.

Another terrible decision was to copy the feminist tactic of "Invading male spaces": this was the idea that anywhere men gathered together should be subject to female supervision and policing. In Western societies this has been more or less completely successful. In the same way, Trans activists insist on the right to "invade female spaces": women must have nowhere they can feel safe from male intrusion, observation, and competition.

Another series of bad decisions has been to fail to distance itself from...

a) children who use it to irritate their parents and bully their teachers 

b) trillion-dollar hedge funds using it to advance their profitability and influence (cf "ESG / DIE") 

c) the social-work / teaching / NHS / local government / civil service / media nexus, who are using it to silence or remove their opponents 

d) governments who are using it as a distraction from the serious issues 

e) media who use it as click-bait and to put on a freak-show

How the Trans movement shakes off these mistakes, and becomes useful again... I have no idea.



(1) I know. But it's what they should be doing 

(2) There are men, women and hermaphrodites. "Man" means anyone with at least one Y in their chromosome, "hermaphrodite" means hermaphrodite, and everyone else is a woman. 

(3) Don't pretend there aren't any.

Ship on the Thames

 

It didn't look like this, but a) it should have done, and b) this is the way anyone would paint it. 

I've been reading Tom Ang's Photography: The Definitive Visual History from Dorling Kindersley. (Superbly printed in China.) Early photography was far more painterly, mainly because of the longer exposures. The film types and lenses also created a softer look closer to an 'accurate' painting, than today's ultra-sharp lenses and 20+ megapixel cameras. Somewhere in the middle were the Glory Days of 35mm Black and White - which is nowhere near as sharp as we think it is.

The adjustments I've made to this are deliberately painterly. I'm starting to think that maybe the default settings on my X-E4 need changing. The catch is this: some changes seem to trigger a bunch of processing in the camera to create the jpeg, as I found taking photos in Mile End Park using someone's Kodachrome-emulation settings.

Epping Forest Pond (Reduced Glare Version)

 

With glare it's just a Meh landscape. Like this... it has real presence.

Mile End Park - Glare vs No Glare

This is a little corner of Mile End Park. The weather was overcast, and the light was diffuse. The X-E4 saw this...

... but my camera was tricked. Deceived. As were my eyes. We didn't see what was there, we saw what was there behind the glare-y, diffuse light. The photograph below is a lot closer to what was really there. What we would have seen if the light was clear.

The light in this photograph seems to be coming from the left-hand side of the photograph. Probably half-a-dozen of those big movie lights.

Across Blackheath Redux

The image a modern digital camera takes is not what the eye sees, and it's not "what's there", it's what the camera takes given the parameters you've told it to work to. In this photograph, it shot to get good detail and light int he sky, and the land and buildings followed on behind. Play around with the light variables in Photos, and the sky remains remarkably stable, while the buildings and grass get more or less clear and visible. On the day, the light was diffuse, but the Heath and the buildings weren't dim.

Within a dull-looking photo there may be a really neat one hidden by cookie-cutter development and printing. Ansel Adams said that the photograph is the script and the print is the performance. A chunk of the work of photography is taking the photograph, but another chunk is making the print. What makes the snap-shot aesthetic is its refusal to use the printing process to bring out the image. I've been a snap-shot guy for a long time. (Maybe all those hours trying to find a guitar tone is changing the way I think.)

Anyway, here's a re-print of one of the photos I took about nine months ago (it feels like at least two years) and thought was a bit dull.

Much more interesting.

Joy-Rides at Epping Forest

A recent trip to Epping Forest found us passing by a collection of joy-rides. The sky was half-overcast and the light was diffused. I took some shots anyway because... "this sure is a bizarre sight in the middle of this s**t" as the movies says.

Both shots are cropped. There is a lot more sky in the original, and the camera weighted accordingly, so that the land is darker than one would want.

I twiddled around with the light settings in Photos. Cranking the Exposure up brought everything up, but turned the sky grey. Instead I cranked the Brilliance and Brightness up, which gave much the same effect but kept the sky blue. Then I took a little Saturation out and cranked up the Vibrancy for the colours.

The trees have stopped being a lumpy dark green mass and now have shape and texture. So does the grass. The colours are slightly lighter. The overall effect is a little bit post-card-y. But it's a useable image. The original is just Meh.

Man Up and Use Photoshop

I like taking photographs when there's a clear blue sky.

Partly because clear-blue-skies are nice, but also because the light is good.

When the sky is lightly covered with clouds, there's a lot of glare.

Light coming from all directions, indistinct shadows, watered-down contrast, washed-out colours.

A haze over every pixel.

Makes a photograph of anything look dreary, in the same way that clear blue skies make a photograph of anything look attractive.

I'm sure that the old-school film pros had a trick or two for making a decent print out of such photographs.

We can do it way more easily with even something as simple as Photos.

I have been (braces for honesty) too darn lazy to do so. I've disguised that laziness behind a theory of photography-as-realism, aka "Photoshop is cheating". Painters have been cheating since the moment they put colour to canvas. So it's time to get some decent photos out of what I've been doing this year.

Starting with this.

Yes, I know. Vignettes are supposed to be really naff.

But this looks really good.

And I used Photos.