If Google had any alternative, a plan better than shutting down Scholar, we would have heard of it by now.
But instead they’ve done nearly nothing for 4 years, they’ve never even responded to the Name Change Policy Working Group, and the one thing they tried (while taking no input from non-Googlers) just outed and deadnamed trans authors _more_.
This is not a defense of the status quo. The solution is one Google knows well and is clearly capable of.
Google Scholar must shut down.
You’ll manage, cis people. There are others ready to do the job, right now, if Google didn’t suck all the air out of the room.
The things Scholar would have to change, to stop driving trans people out of academia, would depend on deep cultural changes at Google.
They can’t even make those cultural changes for the sake of profit, so they clearly can’t make them for the sake of not being giant assholes.
To catch up on why Google Scholar is a uniquely trans-exclusionary force in academia:
This article by an Xoogler illustrates why things at Google are hard to change.
From the point of view of my own issue, it shows why Google Scholar, with all its unearned academic authority, will never be able to change to be inclusive of trans authors.
https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a
“Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews,… and reorgs”
https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a
It's 1986 and pinball is BACK. #pinball #silverballcentury
https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/1020894-1986-pinball-is-bac
I’m playing the Total Nuclear Annihilation pinball machine and the mystery award blinks through fake ones like “choose your score” and “tilt next player” before settling on the real one.
One of them is “Add more beep” and it made me think of @lenalia
Mystery Mystery randomizer this afternoon, probably #alttprandomizer
This is how you review an antisemitic, transphobic, piece of shit video game: you roast it in the review and turn the buy link into a donation to Trans Lifeline.
https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/
last race of the #alttprandomizer Doors League
Silver Ball Century: Replay
https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/997040-silver-ball-century
It's just very bad design to ask a user to do something that they literally cannot do, and this is the first thing we ask of new users. "Choose wisely!" Okay, what does that mean? How do I do that? "Choose wisely!"
When people talk about how alienating getting started on Mastodon is, this is a big part of it.
"I know you," said Alice. "Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?"
"Oh no," said Bingle-Dum.
"We both lie," added Googl-E.
"But there must be a clue," pouted Alice. "For how else am I to tell when to trust what you say?"
"That's the point!" laughed Bingle-Dum.
"We don't know when we're telling the truth either!" said Googl-E, finishing the other's sentence.
I will be semi-contrarian and say that I have made Mastodon my primary social network home for the past month-ish, and I still find a lot of it clunky and unintuitive. I think it is designed to do the things it is designed to do, but they don't line up very well with the sorts of things I like to use social media for.
I like games that you can play again and they're different the next time: such as randomizers, roguelikes, and gender expression! Twitch stream: https://twitch.tv/arborelia
also at: https://cohost.org/arborelia