Evan Spotte-Smith (they/them)

About: The Trans Rights Readathon is an annual call to action to readers and book lovers in support of Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) on March 31st. How to participate: read and uplift books written by and/or featuring trans, nonbinary, 2Spirit, and gender-nonconforming authors and characters. Donate and fundraise for trans aid organizations in your community.

#TransRightsReadathon begins soon. It's a decentralized event, which means you don't have to sign up or do anything in particular, you just have to love trans people and trans books. Here's what I'm doing this year 🧵

@trreadathon.bsky.social

The majority of faculty on campus work on semester contracts w/no job security. Even those with tenure can be denied due process. Don’t cut us out of collective bargaining. The higher ed lobbyist agenda is NOT pro-worker! @donscott757.bsky.social @senlouiselucas.bluesky.bot @ssurovell.bsky.social

a map of openai's influence on other media companies

Amazing site here via @timnitgebru.bsky.social - a map of big tech influence on media and media companies.

imo this goes a decent way to explaining why coverage of AI specifically has been so shockingly bad recently. Very useful resource!!

nananwachukwu.github.io/media-captur...

The Irish Times view on Ireland Reads Day: embrace the silence The habits cultivated by serious reading are precisely what is required of citizens in a democracy

Ireland Reads Day: embrace the silence

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/edit...

important on LLMs for academics:

1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems

2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism

3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills

4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution

5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI

6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense

The Role of Gender in Understanding Adverse Drug Events YouTube video by GenderSci Lab

We’re excited to announce our latest video explainer, which summarizes our work to date on gender and sex disparities in Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCym...

I have a document called "Ideas". Partly it's so that I'm ready for proposals, but mostly it's so I don't forget. Within that document is a subsection called "Ideas that I probably won't actually do but sound like a lot of fun". And that's just for my personal joy.

I feel like this on so many genAI-related things. If you think genAI can do your job better than you then you either suck at your job or you have low respect for the work you do.

She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. — Assigned A trans Kansas resident recently changed her name but not her gender marker on her license, fearing what Kansas may do if she did. The Kansas DMV still flagged her ID.

This story, from @natezuke.bsky.social, is absolutely wild. A trans woman who never changed her gender marker was issued a letter invalidating her license. At the DMV they cut up her license, which had an "M" marker.

www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

I'd like to be added to the list. Would love a more structured space to think about this!

I'm co-running a weekly online reading group on trans philosophy. We're now meeting Thursdays, 16:00-17:00 UK time. If you want to be added to the mailing list, please drop me a message :)

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

This spells out what we've always known about institutional and community contempt for trans people in death, and elaborates on how that is intensified by anti-Blackness and transmisogyny.

Transmisogynoir means Black trans women's deaths are dismissed, lied about, and not investigated.

Many alleged suicides of Black trans women are in fact modern-day lynchings, report finds Jill Collen Jefferson, the founder of JULIAN, explains what happens when a transgender woman’s death is ruled a suicide and a community calls it something else.

This is terrifying

www.advocate.com/news/crime/b...

#AcademicSky give me some examples of things which intuitively seem like cases of Epistemic Injustice to you please

Mad knowledge, including self-knowledge and lived experience, is systematically devalued and frequently ignored/distrusted/disbelieved by psy/scientific/medical "experts".

Somewhat similarly, informal community knowledge of trans healthcare and medical transition is denied as such by doctors.

And also because I care about you! If there's a simple tool that is very effective at preventing this awful disease and helping you avoid my experience, I want you to know about it.

This resonates. It's silly little things, like seeing papers I want to read, and knowing I can no longer get through the paywall. Having to pick the "right" RSC journals to subscribe to on renewing my subs, when before it really didn't matter.
Fellowship proposals that want current affiliation.

In academic spheres, email addresses are so important. It os your access to so much and a form of credentialing.

Losing access to that, even for a brief period can be damaging professionally.

#chemsky

Come work with us!! Oregon State University is looking to hire two instructors, one to teach Gen Chem/Org Chem and another to teach Gen Chem/PChem.
We have a good group of instructors and an active CTL for support.
Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

US moving pregnant immigrant girls to Texas to avoid providing abortions, critics say Ex-official calls transfer of unaccompanied girls as young as 13, many pregnant due to rape, a human rights violation

Appalling. All unaccompanied immigrant children who are pregnant, many by rape, are being moved to a single facility in Texas in order to avoid providing abortion services in a significant human rights violation, critics say.

Some are as young as THIRTEEN.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

#phdlife #academiclife #highereducation | Jonas Heller | 40 comments Leaving academia is apparently still a taboo subject. Nature just published a career podcast piece on it, and I think it is worth talking about openly. Researchers who leave for industry often descri...

"Framing people who leave as not committed enough is incredibly convenient for the system. It puts the blame on individuals and keeps attention away from the actual problems: underpaid postdocs, broken publication incentives, grant treadmills." #IchBinHanna

while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article

But we can demand better. We should keep demanding better. People have to DIY because there's nothing better. There are still risks - and not everyone has access to the same communities of knowledge many of us do. It's not acceptable. We must demand better.

We've had to build these networks of information and medication out of sheer epistemic neglect and malicious pathologising, and until and unless healthcare providers catch up and have a serious reckoning with the rampant abuse they pass off as treatment, we have no choice but to continue as we are.

Work led by industrial PhD student Sofia Larsson and in close collaboration with Susanne Winiwarter and @filipmiljkovic.bsky.social at AstraZeneca.

📄 Paper: chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....
💻 Code: github.com/tsofiac/drug...
💽 Data: zenodo.org/records/1874...

The Retreat from DEI: The Impact of Legal and Political Developments on DEI Language in U.S. Private Foundations Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, large private foundations in the United States widely adopted language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on their public-facing websites. In 2023, a series of legal and political developments began reversing the institutional pressures that had encouraged this adoption: first the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), then state-level anti-DEI legislation, and culminating in President Trump’s Executive Order 14151 (2025). Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we constructed a longitudinal corpus of 3,612 archived web pages from thirteen large U.S. private foundations and tracked the frequency of sixty-seven DEI-related terms from 2019 to 2025. Among the nine foundations with data in both years, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicates a decline from 2023 to 2025 (one-sided p = .029, two-sided p = .059), with median usage falling approximately 40 percent. The decline was broad-based across many terms. These patterns are consistent with coercive isomorphism: the same process that drove widespread, convergent adoption of DEI language after 2020 now appears to be reversing it. The findings establish an empirical baseline for tracking how political pressure reshapes organizational communication about equity.

🚨What if some intrepid students and I decided to see if private foundations' public stances on justice were thin enough to fold under anti-DEI pressure? We tracked their website language using Wayback Machine. The retreat is real and it seems political vibes alone supercharged it. osf.io/29gda_v1

Well, yes, trans people are getting drugs; yes, from entirely unregulated sources; yes, without counselling; yes, without blood tests; yes, they are self-administering; yes, without clinical oversight; yes, risking long term harm; yes, it is highly suboptimal.

What did you think would happen?

Bureau of Prisons: February 19, 2026 PURPOSE AND SCOPE To establish professional guidelines for the mental health evaluation and treatment of inmates meeting the diagnostic criteria for Gender Dysphoria (GD) to assist their progress toward recovery, while reducing or eliminating the frequency and severity of symptoms and associated negative outcomes.

This week it was uncovered that the Trump regime is trying to "cure" trans prisoners of being transgender, while doing everything they can - from labeling our mere existence as explicit to stripping us of our legal documents - to ensure we *all* end up imprisoned in their ever-growing camps.

DHS's Office of Industry Partnership was hacked by a group called "Department of Peace" and info about ICE contracts with over 6,000 companies is now published on @ddosecrets.org!

Enjoy 🧊🔨 ddosecrets.org/article/ice-...