the photographer was definitely like, "ok everybody, look tough!" but we know they're all just reading tweets with their arms crossed in a country club dining room divided up by bedsheets tacked to the beams

No one knows how little blood ties mean like trans people do.

The stakes for producing sound and factual knowledge are high in a world filled with misinfo and literal pseudoscience funded and marshaled to stand in as legitimate knowledge by federal governments. But the way knowledge-making is gatekept counterproductively undercuts its relevance in that world.