Secret bonus advice ep! 25% off merch! Greetings from a 1990s café!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re hanging in there and having a nice, sunny(?), holiday(?) weekend. I’m in a coffee shop and they just started playing Semi-Charmed Life so what more can I ask for, really.

(It's very basic for me to love this meme but I do, sorry!)

First and foremost: I was going to leave the merch shop empty, but Teespring is paying for us to run a 25% off sale between now and April 17, so I figured I should toss some stuff in there! I’m currently running a brand new design that I commissioned from Jude Mooney that I’m really hyped about…

Photo: a graphic that says "transsexuality is good, actually."

…plus our two other Jude Mooney designs in case you want to complete the set. I also tossed in a couple other recent reprint requests — if you’d like to see us reprint something, let me know and I’ll try to make it happen.

Oh, but you’ll need the 25% off code!!! It’s FRIENDS&FANS25, which is very funny; I did not pick it. You can choose if you are a friend or a fan. You’ve got like a week to use it.

(Update: the coffee shop is playing Hand In My Pocket now. They cannot miss.)

Anyway! I hope you all had a lovely Trans Day of Having a Nice Snack. I stared so hard into the spreadsheet void that I got a literal eyestrain injury, which I didn’t realize was a thing that could happen, lol lmao. But the good news is that the eyestrain of it all was due to a completely unprecedented level of support: we received more than 1200(!) Individual Trans Day of Snack donations!!! That’s more than 4x what we received in 2021! What a nice reminder that lots of people actually do care about our community and want us to have little treats. :)

Thanks to that overwhelming support, as well as the hard work of Ozzy and our wonderful team of volunteers, we sent out 635 snack payments by the morning of April 1, and 251 mutual aid payments by April 9, for a total of $37,800 in payments to trans people in tough situations! That rules, y’all. I’m so proud of us as a community.

We also expanded our trans resource list, which lives at bit.ly/tdos23links. Feel free to share with anyone who might benefit from it.

Oh, and I got to do a little interview with Quinn Rhodes about TDoS, which was very cool! Read it in VICE here.

(Update: they just played Goo Goo Dolls’ Slide and now we are having a No Doubt moment. I am having a great time here in 1998.)

We’re still a couple months away from new Gender Reveal episodes, but I recently appeared on Danny Lavery’s Big Mood Little Mood, where we tackled a few Gender Reveal advice questions that we had originally planned to answer at the Bell House live show. (Actually, we did answer a couple of these at the live show, but they didn’t make the podcast version for various reasons.)

I haven’t listened to the episode yet, and I remember the recording being significantly unhinged, but take a listen and maybe you’ll even hear your advice question answered!

(Sorry, I was going to stop updating you on this coffee shop soundtrack but they just played Sugar Ray’s Every Morning followed by SPICE GIRLS and I’m so delighted.)

(Why does it take me a full song to write one paragraph?? I don’t know!!! I am also surprised and concerned by this.)

Anyway, here’s Links & Stuff:

• Speaking of Danny, he wrote this important Q&A about the concept of three dogs
• Friend-of-the-show Rose Eveleth wrote this piece on our fascination with inaccurate predictions
• Friend-of-the-show Shay Mirk (who just stayed with me for a week! What a delight!!!) made this comic about nonbinary body image that really resonated with me
  
• Not a friend of the show lol, but I loved this little story about this cue card guy
• Nice Ramadan news from my neighborhood
• I made a short playlist of all the songs that have played in this coffee shop while I was writing this for the full immersive experience, lol. (I swear that last song really happened last!)

Oh hey, before we go! Thanks so much to the ~300 of you who filled out our second annual patron survey! Ozzy did an incredible job going through all the replies and pulling out the big trends and funny replies; I’ll try to remember to share a few takeaways in a future newsletter.

…but the biggest takeaway, perhaps, is that many of you are not listening to the bonus episodes in your podcast app! If you use Spotify or, uh, PodBean(?), you’re just out of luck, I’m afraid. But everyone else, it’s totally possible to add Gender Conceal to your podcast player! You just need to find your personal RSS feed and copy-paste it into your podcast player. More info is here.

Oh, and if you enjoy taking little gender surveys, the 2023 Gender Census just opened! (I haven’t taken it yet because it literally opened as I was writing this.)

OK, that’s it for this week. Thanks for reading this far. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb.

Photo: Ruby sniffing a 32oz Dunkin' drink that's almost as big as she is.

Xo,

Yr resident gender detective