Wendy Nather

@wendynather@infosec.exchange
4.6K Followers
362 Following
12.9K Posts

Recovering industry analyst, research director & CISO. Senior Fellow at @AtlanticCouncil @CyberStatecraft. Single, childful cat lady.

General Content Warnings: snark, bad words, even worse puns, occasional flashes of borrowed insight, plugging of selected $employer events and publications, random brain radio songs, multilingual commentary

Note: Sufficiently advanced shitposting is indistinguishable from thought leadership. — @jwgoerlich

StageVānaprastha
PronounsShe/her
ChocolateYes please
#ScalziRuleshttps://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/16/the-official-john-scalzi-social-media-faq/
@Sempf If you’ve got a hair shirt, I could use one right about now
I am a horrible person and I fucked up bigtime.

@Aphelion

are you really living if you aren't r'lyeh cthulhu fhtagn? ïA! ïA!

@phoenix @davep Banana llama ding dong (cc @jerry)
We have been doing bananas all wrong.
@angusm If the Fediverse represented a THREAT to money, then it would get all the attention 💡
Feed me, Seymour
@cstross @pluralistic The sad thing is that many of the bubble blowers I see are really old enough to know better. FOMO still plays an outsized role in this.
@StefanThinks If you break things, you ain’t gonna move fast
×

I'd like to take a moment to congratulate all Americans for now legally being defined as women.

According to Executive Order 14168 (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02090/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal), the "biological truth" of the genders has been legally defined:

(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

Here's the problem, turns out that the universe isn't taking attendance at the time of conception and handing out little pink and blue genderino badges before your gonads even exist. At the moment of conception, EVERY embryo's default state is set to produce, eventually, the larger reproductive cell (the ova). It's not until 6-8 weeks AFTER conception that the Y chromosome, if present and activated, decides to show up to the party and begin the process of differentiation into a body that will, eventually, produce the smaller reproductive cell (the sperm).

So, once again, I'd like to congratulate literally everybody in America for, at this moment, being legally AFAB.

@Lana AFAC maybe?

Sorry, I'll get my coat. And I'll change out of these pedantry pants once I'm home, I swear.

@Lana Oh, great! Now I can fuck myself and still be cis-gendered! 😂

EDIT: Actually, not. 🤔 But why let reality stand in the way of a good bit. 😆

@Lana Any attempt to define male and female in narrow terms is going to hit loads of inconvenient exceptions.

This one seems particularly hillarious though.

@Lana Not quite the equality of the sexes that many have been fighting for, but it's a start, I suppose...

@Lana

Ignorance with a dose of idiocy

@Lana
My wardrobe choices have just expanded, but the accompanying cut in pay makes it difficult to afford.
@bitsnpieces Welcome To Womanhood
@Lana
Thank you. Good thing I'm at a post-menopausal age.
@bitsnpieces Girl I've Been Perimenopausal My Whole Life
@Lana
I normally hit the star to acknowledge I read a reply, but I'm not going to "like" that.
@Lana @bitsnpieces I’m a cis man, and I’m feeling a little perimenopausal these days
@wendynather This scene makes so much more sense to me now.... ;)
@kidko92 @Lana It’s always just us girls around here 😉
@Lana too much nasty #science in here - what about God’s astonishing #creation? Ignore x’s and y’s, they are at the end of the alphabet for a reason.
@Lana
But ...
If you can't be ignorant under this administration -- when the heck CAN you be ignorant?

@Lana

Well, first of all, I, for one, welcome this unexpected change to my gender.

I have to say I don't really mind, as long as I can dress fabulously! Does that sex change means I can wear a skirt now?

@ParadeGrotesque @Lana everyone should feel free to wear skirts, don't you think?

I won't try to start an argument about kilts, or should I?

@Lana And there are several genetic disorders that prevent formation of sperm or ova. These individuals, then, are neither male nor female. So under this definition, there has to be at least a third gender for these individuals.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cell-and-developmental-biology/articles/10.3389/fcell.2021.634536/full

Frontiers | Genes Regulating Spermatogenesis and Sperm Function Associated With Rare Disorders

Spermatogenesis is a cell differentiation process that ensures the production of the fertilizing sperm, which ultimately fuse with the eggs to form a zygote....

Frontiers
@rspfau @Lana That third sex (or non-sex) exists nevertheless (and be it just because nothing in biology ever works at 100%), but fun that even the Insane Cultists have realized it.

Which means, no matter what one believes, this is the minimum definition:

sex ENUM('m', 'f') NULL

Orange, orange...
@Lana individuals displaying Dunning-Kruger syndrome seldom feel the need to do research. There are so many genetic variations in humans we probably need a dozen more "sexes" not less https://genetic.org/variations/
@bigrobpage @Lana I would want to ask the other way round - do we need them for any purpose other than science? Why do we put the sex (or gender) on government documents at all? What does the government need this information for?
@divVerent @Lana Historically, and currently this information is mostly used to deny rights to certain groups. Governments likes their databases.
@Lana who will we know to hate

@joe @Lana

Don't worry about that! Our Republican leaders will tell us who to hate.

@killick Don't be silly, I take all my clues on who to hate from the fediverse. My peers have left me without anyone to like.

@Lana

The feminization of the American male is complete.

Larry Laffer approves this message!
@Lana Colbert agrees, sisters, it's time to recognize. https://youtu.be/jzYZR9cMfwU
We're All Girls!

YouTube
@Lana
#AltText4You pink badge that says Its a girl!

@Lana
Every day, I think "they can't get dumber than this."

Every day I'm surprised by how naive Past Me was.

@Lana Ignorant White Christian Supremacist bigots are adorable when they try to speak Sciency.
@Lana this certainly explains why I've always felt confused when visiting USAia. I was sure it was jet lag; turns out it's just natural, I'm #MOOUSA (Male Outside Of USA).

@Lana

So... Donald Trump has declared that he is, himself, a woman.

Got it.

@TimePencil @Lana Which makes Melania the SLOTUS.
@Lana "differentiation into a body that will produce the smaller reproductive cell" you mean.. a male body, right? you can call it by it's name, you're not fooling anyone by avoiding the word.

@darkmatter_ @Lana

Forgive me for commenting on US executive orders, when I ill understand them, but for a document ostensibly trying to speak very precisely about precise things (science!), it's very unclear to me what this means (or rather, it is clear, and what they have written is not what they want to say). I would advise them that this is the sort of thing that a retired judge ought to be employed to write, rather than burdening whoever produced this with the job.

#uspol #executiveOrders #gender #sex #trans #EO14168 #law #lawfare #policing