Soon, you might be able to watch Amazon Prime shows on an Amazon TV. Hooray?

According to a new report from Insider, Amazon has been working on Amazon-branded TVs for the last two years.

There are two versions in the works: One made by a third party, TCL, that will carry Amazon branding and be integrated with Alexa. And a second TV that Amazon engineers are reportedly developing in-house.

The former could come out as soon as October. There isn’t pricing information available yet, but they’ll reportedly be 55-75 inches.

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It’s easy to see why the prospect of watching Amazon TV shows via an Amazon Prime subscription on an Amazon device itself is attractive to the company. As its (possibly anti-trust law violating) Amazon Basics line shows, there’s nothing Amazon loves more than that sweet, sweet vertical integration.

Plus, just as the Amazon website showcases AmazonBasics products, an Amazon TV could place Prime movies and shows front and center. Apple doesn’t have an actual TV, but the AppleTV interface certainly places Apple TV+, as well as Apple Music and other Apple media options, right at the top of its menu.

Why Amazon wants a TV is clear. But, even if it’s an affordable, attractive product, should you? This is the company that has turned home security Ring devices into a surveillance network for the police. It collects mountains of data on users in order to sell us as many products as possible. Alexa has been known to eavesdrop. Forgive us if giving the corporation yet another physical anchor in the home doesn’t sound like an exciting opportunity to us.

Amazon already makes a Fire TV stick, a TV attachment, and remote that serves as an Amazon-powered streaming app platform. It’s not clear whether an actual Amazon TV would use the same interface. It has actually already dipped its toes into branded TVs, too. It released an AmazonBasics TV in December 2020, but it was only available in India. That device cost about $410.

But, apparently, the TV project hasn’t been smooth sailing. The Insider co-reporter of the piece, Ben Bergman, tweeted that ” the rollout has been beset with logistical bottlenecks.”

Will Amazon get its TV out in time for holiday shopping? Considering how much Amazon and Jeff Bezos absolutely love money, it’s probably a safe bet to take.

After a long wait for fans, it appears a live-action version of the beloved manga series One Piece is actually in the works at Netflix.

On Friday, Netflix’s “Geeked” Twitter account posted a photo of the script of episode one. It’s called “Romance Dawn,” written by Matt Owens and showrunner Steven Maeda.

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One Piece is a manga (Japanese comic) that follows the adventures of a boy with the superpower of a rubberband body, named Monkey D. Luffy, and his band of pirates in their quest for the world’s most powerful object known as One Piece. It’s written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda, and has spawned an animated TV show and many other media properties.

Netflix first announced that it would adapt the series in January 2020. However, there’s been little released confirming that it was truly, actually happening.

We still don’t know much, but Netflix also posted the show’s official logo, which they hint is filled with easter eggs.

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Maeda also posted about the show after “a long wait.” The show’s slogan is apparently “No matter how hard or how impossible it is, never lose sight of your goal.” How appropriate!

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Welcome to Porn Week, Mashable’s annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.

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If you live in America and have spent any meaningful amount of time on Pornhub this year, you may have noticed that its video search results for popular terms — like anal, blowjob, teen, or variations thereof — look significantly different than they did in prior years. Most notably, and universally across these categories, there are far fewer clips pulled from scenes shot by major, and predominantly American studios, either presented as is or collected into fan-made compilations like the infamous Cock Hero masturbation control challenge videos. Instead, many of these results pages feature far more content produced and uploaded by independent creator-performers, most of whom are what Porbhub refers to as “verified amateurs.”

And if you’ve watched a meaningful number of these uploads, you may have noticed that you hear a bit less English dialogue and background chatter than in the past — and more foreign accents and languages, especially from Central or Eastern Europe. Or you may catch other telltale signs of such a setting, either in the background of a shot, the title or description of a video, or the bio information of a creator.

“That international content is fun to watch,” says the Australian creator-performer Charlie Forde. “I’m a sucker for accents, even if I can’t understand what’s being said.”

These apparent trends don’t reflect big, sudden shake-ups in the demographics of porn creators, what they make, or their approaches to putting content on Pornhub. And they aren’t ubiquitous across every category or tag on the site. Some users may not even notice them, given how aggressively the interplay between platform algorithms and search histories can affect what each individual sees on Pornhub.

Rather, these shifts are just a few notable apparent after-effects of Pornhub’s decision to delete millions of videos back in December. This was not a Thanos-style, across-the-board cull; it targeted specific types of uploaders, and its effects on content volume and diversity varied wildly from one pornographic category to the next. But as Maggie MacDonald, a University of Toronto Ph.D. student who studies digital pornography platforms, points out, the net effect was a serious flattening and narrowing of Pornhub’s offerings, which has drawn underlying trends in porn production into sharp focus.

That includes potentially providing greater visibility for many creator-performers from beyond the Western world, long active but obscured within what MacDonald calls Pornhub’s “relentless, bottomless pit of anything you wanted to see.”

The Clipocalypse

Pornhub built its bottomless, diverse pit of content in part by allowing any and all users to make accounts and upload whatever they wanted to the site from the moment it launched in 2007. This free-for-all system generated over 6.8 million uploads in 2019 alone. Much of this content was always ephemeral, as accounts were regularly abandoned, and countless videos were pruned after a few days or weeks in response to copyright infringement complaints, or any number of other content moderation flags. But by December 2020, Pornhub hosted about 13.8 million videos.

However, early that month a New York Times opinion piece put a spotlight on the presence of child sexual abuse, and other forms of non-consensually filmed or shared, materials on the site. The article drew heavy criticism from many sex workers and industry observers. While it spoke to legitimate and longstanding concerns about Pornhub’s upload and moderation policies, it drew primarily on the dubious and distortionary findings and arguments of one anti-sex work conservative group, failed to meaningfully contextualize its findings, and generally seemed designed primarily to stoke a cultural panic about the site, and porn in general. But regardless of its validity, the article kicked up such a shit storm, notably prompting MasterCard and Visa to stop servicing the site and thus fundamentally threatening its viability, that Pornhub took drastic action.

It removed every video uploaded by an unverified account. It withdrew verification from every blue checkmark account that wasn’t owned by one of its studio content partners, or by someone in its Model Program, which gives individuals a share of the ad revenue generated by their uploads and access to tools for further content monetization. And it put a pause on new account verifications until it was able, towards the start of this year, to develop and implement a more rigorous protocol.

Several performers also claim that, although their verified accounts were left intact, Pornhub removed some of their potentially controversial clips. “Like consensual non-consent or daddy dom-little girl roleplay, and more hardcore or rough content,” explains Suzanne Ferrari, the creator and director behind the studio, and Pornhub content partner, SlutInspection.com.

Although it’s hard to get exact numbers, at one point there were just under 3 million videos left on the site. That number bounced back up significantly over the next few days. Pornhub did not reply to a request for comment.

However, MacDonald stressed that “the scale and speed of the purge was unprecedented. It was certainly not done with a great deal of care towards its users.” Even Tumblr gave people two weeks to prepare for its ban. Meanwhile, Pornhub gave no public notice.

This swiftly eliminated most of the pirated and dubious content — clips that uploaders pulled or compilations that they created from professionally produced content without permission; grainy amateur footage with no clear attribution or provenance — that had long defined the platform for many users. Pornhub has spent years ostensibly fighting piracy, but its limited approaches to the problem allowed the issue to persist.

“I used to have to spend a whole work day every month searching… pegging and other keywords for content I’ve created, looking for pirated content to get taken down,” says Lucy Hart, a prominent studio operator and performer. “I’d always find shit. It was endless.”

“I did that for the first two months following these changes, and never found anything again.”

This has led numerous professional content producers and performers to applaud Pornhub’s purge. “As a content creator, I see it as more of a cleanse than a purge,” says Ferrari.

Many have noted that they’d actually been calling for more stringent verification standards for uploaders for years, both to fight revenue-sapping piracy and limit abusive materials from slipping onto the site — and that, if anything, they’re upset Pornhub only made these changes in response to a moral panic, as opposed to ample informed insider advocacy.

However, Brandon Arroyo, a porn researcher and host of the podcast Porno Cultures, argues that Pornhub’s promise of anonymity fostered not just rampant piracy, but also vibrant communities of real amateurs, as well as semi-professional content creators serving highly niche and often marginalized sexual groups.

“Users that were just posting their sex acts out of passion, and not for monetary value, have perhaps been hurt most by the purge,” he says. In recent months, he added, he also believes that the site has lost a vital “sense of wonder and excitement that came with exploring mystery, watching people take risks because they knew they could maintain their anonymity.”

In the weeks following the purge, Vice’s Samantha Cole thoroughly documented how animated, audio erotica, and furry content on Pornhub largely collapsed, as much of it had been produced by people who didn’t want to reveal their identities to the site. Forde adds that some of the biggest accounts creating content for “fetish niches that mainstream companies don’t cater to as much,” like giantess and shoe porn, also vanished, decimating their genres.

Although some new verified accounts have emerged to fill these content gaps, Arroyo and others stress that the end of anonymity has taken a serious toll on the number and extent of Pornhub’s fetish rabbit holes. While they were niche, these warrens had notable followings — and MacDonald notes that it was entirely possible for users to stumble upon them, disappearing into worlds of diverse discovery.

“That’s a big loss,” Arroyo lamented.

The European Connection

But how could the decline of amateur, niche, or pirated content lead to the increased visibility of independent creator-performers — and audibility of some languages — in key porn categories?

After America, Hungary and the Czech Republic had the most porn stars of any nation — far more than the U.S. per capita.

Well, the answer is surprisingly simple: There’s been an incredibly vibrant adult content creation scene in Central and Eastern Europe for decades now. Even before the democratization of content creation hit full steam, an analysis of the bios of 10,000 professional porn stars active across the globe between 1981 and 2013, pulled from the authoritative Internet Adult Film Database, found that, after America, Hungary and the Czech Republic had the most porn stars of any nation — far more than the U.S. per capita. The Czech Republic became an especially notable porn hub, rivaling California and drawing in performers from neighboring countries, in large part because of its cheap labor and operating costs, the high returns offered by selling porn to international audiences, and the nation’s liberal sexual attitudes and permissive legal framework. Prague is currently home to WGCZ Holdings, the owner of major Pornhub competitor xVideos, as well as numerous porn studios and ancillary service providers.

Over the last decade especially, the number of adult performers and content creators not just in these nations, but also in Romania and Russia seemingly exploded. These nations have long histories of relatively high youth unemployment and underemployment. And in recent years, they have rapidly gained access to cheap and robust telecoms infrastructure — at the same time as Pornhub and other platforms have made it easier than ever to produce adult content, put it in eyeshot of consumers in higher-income markets, and profit, all from behind closed doors. This has drawn in some members of these nations’ already sizable populations of sex workers, many of whom may appreciate the added safety of not having to meet with strangers IRL, as well as tons of young folks just eager to make a buck, and often not as hung up about sex work as previous generations. A 2019 analysis found that Russia has actually surpassed the Czech Republic in absolute number of porn performers, although it still trails behind the U.S. — and the Czechs still dominate in per capita terms. Recent estimates also suggest that there are about 100,000 sexual cammers in Romania.

As one of the most visible platforms in the West, uploading content to Pornhub was always a good avenue for independent creator-performers from these nations to build up fanbases in high potential markets, make some decent ad revenue and initial sales, then drive followers to other sites for more engagement and monetization. Although the rankings constantly change, any time you dig into the 100 most popular “verified amateur” content creator-performers on Pornhub, you’ll usually find that a sizable chunk of them either started out, or are still based, in Central or Eastern Europe.

Notably, a major adult industry trade publication recently profiled Eva Elfie, a Moscow-based indie creator-performer whose homemade content performed so well on Pornhub that the site unilaterally bumped her from its verified amateur to its professional porn star rankings. (She currently sits in third place sitewide.) The feature explains in detail how Elfie and a number of other Russian indie darlings consciously deconstruct content that performs well with Western audiences, then build clips that they believe will earn them a solid spot in the results for popular search terms (although seemingly not any of those that might run them afoul of Russia’s notoriously homophobic authorities) — often minimizing dialogue or adopting accents to hide their ethnicities.

As Susanna Paasonen, a professor at Finland’s University of Turku who studies porn sites, points out, the abundance of pirated content, usually from scenes made by U.S. studios, historically amplified the visibility of a few American faces — or gave them functional dominance over key content categories. Arroyo and MacDonald add that Pornhub’s algorithms seem to perpetuate aggressive feedback loops, giving the most ubiquitous and popular creators and performers ever more visibility, while making it exceptionally difficult for new or long sidelined faces to break through.

So, Paasonen says, now that Pornhub is no longer overrun with pirated content that artificially boosts a few faces into extra-heavy rotation it makes sense that “U.S. commercial studio content may currently have less relative visibility.” It also makes sense, she adds, that indie creators would benefit the most from this shift. Put those two developments together, and you have an environment that finally gives a little more visibility to a preexisting and vibrant pool of content creators from across the globe — and especially from the best-developed non-American markets.

“Because I’ve done a large number of mainstream studio scenes, when the stolen versions I’d been tagged in got removed in December, my ranking on Pornhub went down, despite my having a large collection of my own independent content available on the site,” says British performer Adreena Winters, who has worked with American and European studios.

However, this is hardly the only trend to arise from the numerous and multifaceted shifts created by Pornhub’s content purge. Alan X, a producer-director, points out that the sudden drop in real amateur content on the site has given greater visibility to studios that shoot “amateur or reality style content.” Lilly Sparks, the founder of xoafterglow, a studio that bills itself as a source of “high quality porn by women,” suggests that Pornhub’s increased demands of documentation proving the age and consent of everyone in a scene will nudge small, indie creator-performers towards “more solo content in the short-term, because it’s easier to meet the new guidelines” when you’re just shooting yourself. MacDonald suggests that the decline of niche and amateur videos has given more space to the “lowest common denominator” content that pros tend to veer towards, because it performs well with a wide, traditional paying audience: “Hot, thin, white couples having very boring, kind of mechanical sex, in a very performative and posed way.”

There are likely many more trends as well which only affect niche corners of Pornhub, narrow user bases, or have yet to become clear. The December purge’s reconfiguration of Pornhub’s library was so fundamental it may take years for content creators to fully figure out how they fit into this rapidly shattered and reconfigured ecosystem — and for a new normal to stabilize.

Indie Performers Still Get Screwed

Even if the dust of Pornhub’s content shakeup is still settling, you might expect the space created on a flattened and narrowed Pornhub for independent creator-performers from across the globe to shine would translate into clear and notable gains. However, while a few independent creator-performers, like Serene Siren, say they have enjoyed “much more attention,” many like the Russophone model MollyRedWolf says that she and other performers she knows have actually seen declines of at least 50 percent in their typical video view counts since December. Most creator-performers say that, even if and when their visibility has gone up, their profits have plummeted. “My income post cull is approximately one fifth of what it was prior,” says Forde.

It’s entirely possible for indie creator-performers to gain relative visibility within a porn category yet see their absolute view counts plummet in this peculiar post-purge Pornhub ecosystem.

This apparent paradox — more visibility, less success — likely reflects several more knock-on effects of Pornhub’s disastrous December. Notably, initial analyses suggest that Pornhub took a major hit to its overall traffic right after its purge, although it’s not clear how much of that has to do with concerns about its reputation, displeasure with its altered content pool, declining SEO due to a massive loss of content, or something else. If these traffic declines are not uniform across user demographics, they would explain wildly varied traffic drops from one category, performer, or video to the next. Or, if arcane algorithmic calculations led a performer’s niche or content tags to lose out against others in Pornhub’s overall content-and-consumer reshuffle, that would likely compound their traffic losses relative to overall site dips as well. So, it’s entirely possible for indie creator-performers to gain relative visibility within a porn category yet see their absolute view counts plummet in this peculiar post-purge Pornhub ecosystem.

Performers also say that Pornhub’s ad revenues have seemingly dropped significantly in the wake of its December crises. It still doesn’t have the ability to process credit card payments. And while elements of the site are set up to take cryptocurrency, few consumers seem willing to learn to use what is still for many a new and complex payment system, and performers can’t use crypto to receive fan tips or sell paid clips — key former revenue sources. So, blows to the site’s reputation and payment processing systems have largely decoupled improved visibility from increased profitability.

MollyRedWolf and a few other performers seem to believe that, on top of all of this, Pornhub is trying to sabotage them as well. She and Sweetie Fox, another Russophone performer, point out that the site’s main page seems to mainly promote its studio partners’ content, rather than that of independent creators. They also accuse the site of depressing some amateur models’ visibility; MollyRedWolf believes Pornhub is specifically suppressing Russian performers’ content because, she asserts, they want to focus on performers and keywords that earn them the most ad revenue for the site, a trend that she argues favors American creator-performers above all others.

Pornhub, MollyRedWolf acknowledged in a recent YouTube video on this topic, has denied these claims. And Hart points out that the mechanisms on the site that dictate visibility, payouts, and the relationship between the two are so opaque and complicated that it’s all but impossible for performers to draw such conclusions firmly. But the very existence of these doubts speak to the erosion of performer trust in, and willingness to deal with the ups and downs of, a seemingly battered and volatile Pornhub. MollyRedWolf openly stresses that she, like several other models, has started to wind down her commitment to putting content up on Pornhub, refocusing on other platforms.

“I don’t think performers will leave Pornhub that quickly,” says MacDonald. But it is possible that Pornhub will experience a slow bleed that continues to shake and shift its content equations.

Given continued anti-porn crusades against the site, even after it moved heaven and earth to allay fears about abuse on and off its platform, it’s possible that some other external shock could upset the site’s new, emerging balance as well. “I honestly believe Pornhub is doing everything in its power to avoid disruptive shake-ups like this again,” says creator-performer Bea York. “But I do worry about the anti-porn movement moving the goalpost and creating new problems.”

It’s unclear what such future shocks, slow burn or rapid, could do to the visibility of independent creator-performers, American or otherwise — or what other unexpected trends they could create or reveal on the site. Save to say that they’ll likely be equally surprising and complex to outside observers, and even more painful for every creator and performer who has to live with them.

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The pushback against Apple’s plan to scan iPhone photos for child exploitation images was swift and apparently effective.

Apple said Friday that it is delaying the previously announced system that would scan iPhone users’ photos for digital fingerprints that indicated the presence of known Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). The change is in response to criticism from privacy advocates and public outcry against the idea.

“Previously we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and to help limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material,” a September 3 update at the top of the original press release announcing the program reads. “Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.”

Announced in August, the new feature for iOS 15 would have checked photos in an iPhone user’s photo library — on the device before sending the photos to iCloud — against a database of known CSAM images. If the automated system found a match, the content would be sent to a human reviewer, and ultimately reported to child protection authorities.

The fact that the scanning happened on the device alarmed both experts and users. Beyond it being generally creepy that Apple would have the ability to view photos users hadn’t even sent to the cloud yet, many criticized the move as hypocritical for a company that has leaned so heavily into privacy. Additionally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the ability as a “backdoor” that could eventually serve as a way for law enforcement or other government agencies to gain access to an individual’s device.

“Even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and narrowly-scoped backdoor is still a backdoor,” the EFF said at the time.

Experts who had criticized the move were generally pleased with the decision to do more research.

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Others said the company should go further to protect users’ privacy. The digital rights organization fight for the future said Apple should focusing on strengthening encryption.

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While other companies scan cloud-based photo libraries for CSAM, like Google, and the overall goal of protecting children is obviously a good one, Apple thoroughly bungled the rollout of this product with privacy concerns justifiably overshadowing the intended purpose. Better luck next time, folks.

“The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society.”

That’s the opening line of British author Shon Faye’s powerful new book, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, forming the core of her hopeful, compelling, necessary manifesto. But if you’ve been anywhere near British press anytime over the last few decades, you might have been constantly pummelled with a different, bigoted story.

Though trans people make up less than one percent of Britain’s population, they are constantly subject to toxic abuse and harassment by the British media and influential famous figures. Trans people increasingly endure discriminatory, negative coverage in British press, and this obsessive tirade of open bigotry comes disguised as a ‘debate,’ a barricaded culture war in which trans people themselves are rarely heard. Instead, trans people constantly find their wide range of experiences distilled into the same anti-trans subjects.

Faye points all of this out in her extremely needed, meticulously researched, and powerful book, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, in which she reclaims the catch-all phrase “the transgender issue” and centres different experiences of trans people, both young and older, today.

“Typically, trans people are lumped together as ‘the transgender issue’, dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives, reducing them to a set of stereotypes on which various social anxieties can be brought to bear,” Faye writes in the book’s prologue.

“By and large, the transgender issue is seen as a ‘toxic debate’, a ‘difficult topic’ chewed over (usually by people who are not trans themselves) on television shows, in newspaper opinion pieces and in university philosophy departments. Actual trans people are rarely to be seen. This book intentionally and deliberately reappropriates the phrase ‘transgender issue’, in order to outline the reality of the issues facing trans people today, rather than as they are imagined by people who do not face them.”

Faye examines questions of power in these so-called ‘debates’, that public conversations about trans people happen without or around them (I recognise that writing about this book as a cis journalist in the UK myself is a significant privilege). As she writes in the book’s introduction, “Trans people have been dehumanised, reduced to a talking point or conceptual problem: an ‘issue’ to be discussed and debated endlessly. It turns out that when the media want to talk about trans issues, it means they want to talk about their issues with us, not the challenges facing us.”

But The Transgender Issue offers hope. Dubbed a “manifesto for change” by publisher Allen Lane, the book calls for a healthier, more representative conversation about trans lives that reflects this range of experiences. Faye argues for the liberation of trans people in order to create a truly free and just world, and promotes solidarity between all marginalised people fighting for social justice.

In her book, Faye covers a lot of ground addressing the real challenges trans people face that aren’t adequately addressed in public ‘conversations’, starting with how the press has distorted the conversation around trans people and the double-edged sword of social media as both empowering and toxic. Beyond this systematic media misrepresentation, the book predominantly looks at everyday life and challenges for trans people, from children to older people, including stories of family, parenting, and relationships, navigating school and education, finding housing, work and employment, inadequate access to healthcare, and trans lives in prison. And Faye also addresses how systemic discrimination and state violence against trans people restricts them “from moving freely in public spaces with privacy and dignity.”

Faye also examines how trans people fight for justice alongside other marginalised people, and unpacks trans relationships within the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities. As she writes in the book, “Trans people have endured over a century of injustice. We have been discriminated against, pathologized and victimized. Our full emancipation will only be achieved if we can imagine a society that is completely transformed from the one in which we live. This book is primarily concerned with explaining how society, as it is currently arranged, often makes trans people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. Yet, in posing solutions to these problems, it does not limit itself to thinking solely about trans people, but also encompasses anyone who is routinely disempowered and dispossessed.”

The book has already seen exceptional praise in the UK, with journalist Vic Parsons calling it “an important work of non-fiction that should change the tired conversation we’ve been having about trans people.” In a personal response to the book on Refinery29, they noted, “It’s radically different to much of what has been published about trans lives previously, politicising our struggles and situating them in solidarity with those of other marginalised groups of people.”

Mashable is lucky enough to have an extract from Faye’s The Transgender Issue, adapted from the book’s prologue, which you’ll find below. Everyone should read this.

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The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye

Adapted from the prologue

The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society. I say ‘liberation’ because I believe that the humbler goals of ‘trans rights’ or ‘trans equality’ are insufficient. Trans people should not aspire to be equals in a world that remains both capitalist and patriarchal and which exploits and degrades those who live in it. Rather, we ought to seek justice — for ourselves and others alike.

Trans people have endured over a century of injustice. We have been discriminated against, pathologized and victimized. Our full emancipation will only be achieved if we can imagine a society that is completely transformed from the one in which we live. This book is primarily concerned with explaining how society, as it is currently arranged, often makes trans people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. Yet, in posing solutions to these problems, it does not limit itself to thinking solely about trans people, but also encompasses anyone who is routinely disempowered and dispossessed.

Full autonomy over our bodies, free and universal healthcare, affordable housing for all, power in the hands of those who work rather than those privileged few who extract profit from our vastly inequitable system, sexual freedom (including freedom from sexual violence) and the end to the mass incarceration of human beings are all crucial ingredients in the construction of a society in which trans people are no longer abused, mistreated or subjected to violence. Such systemic changes would also particularly benefit everyone else forced to the margins of society, both in the UK and across the world.

The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands, in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be. For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it.

“Typically, trans people are lumped together as ‘the transgender issue’, dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives.”

In order to neutralize the potential threat to social norms posed by trans people’s existence, the establishment has always sought to confine and curtail their freedom. In twenty-first-century Britain, this has been achieved in large part by belittling our political needs and turning them into a culture war ‘issue’. Typically, trans people are lumped together as ‘the transgender issue’, dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives, reducing them to a set of stereotypes on which various social anxieties can be brought to bear. By and large, the transgender issue is seen as a ‘toxic debate’, a ‘difficult topic’ chewed over (usually by people who are not trans themselves) on television shows, in newspaper opinion pieces and in university philosophy departments. Actual trans people are rarely to be seen. This book intentionally and deliberately reappropriates the phrase ‘transgender issue’, in order to outline the reality of the issues facing trans people today, rather than as they are imagined by people who do not face them.

Today, representational equality and true redistributive politics elude trans people, even as more and more trans people are coming out than ever before. Trans people have now become one of a number of targets in right-wing media, alongside, for instance, Muslims, immigrants generally, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, Black Lives Matter, the fat acceptance movement, and feminists challenging state violence against women. All these groups and more have been reduced to issues in a toxic and polarized public rivalry between value systems. The past few years have seen discussions around trans people become not only poisonous but, crucially, banal. The ‘topic’ of trans has now been limited to a handful of repetitive talking points: whether nonbinary people exist and whether gender neutral pronouns are reasonable; whether trans children living with dysphoria should be allowed to start their transition; whether trans women will dominate women’s events in the Olympics; and the endless debate over toilets and changing rooms.

This book will not regurgitate these talking points yet again. I believe that forcing trans people to involve themselves in these closed-loop debates ad infinitum is itself a tactic of those who wish to oppress us. Such debates are time-consuming, exhausting distractions from what we should really be focusing on: the material ways in which we are oppressed. The author Toni Morrison once spoke about how precisely this tactic is employed by white people against people of colour: ‘The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction,’ she told students at Portland State University in 1975. ‘It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being . . . None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.’ In much the same way, the public discourse over trans people’s experience is distorted and derailed.

With this book, I want to change the trajectory, to move beyond this discussion of trans people as framed by those who want to stoke a so-called culture war, and to start a new, healthier, conversation about trans people in the UK and beyond. Something that this book is not: a memoir. You don’t have to know the intimate details of my private life to support me. Don’t worry about the ‘why’; act on the ‘what’. What does being a trans person in a transphobic society produce? At the moment, too often, it is still violence, prejudice and discrimination.

Throughout this book, cis (non-trans) readers will recognize inequalities often endured by trans people that they personally, or other minority groups they are familiar with, are also experiencing. This is a good thing: the framing of trans people as ‘the transgender issue’ has the effect of cutting us off from solidarity and making us the ‘other’. A new conversation, then, must necessarily start to undo this estrangement and consider what we share and where we overlap with other minorities or marginalized groups. It is only through solidarity, compassion and radical reimagining that we can build a more just and joyful world for all of us.

Taken from The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye, published by Allen Lane on Sept. 2, 2021.

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Like so many things in 2021, Prime Video’s Cinderella is a bippity boppity bummer.

With pop star Camila Cabello as the titular princess and the writer-producer behind the Pitch Perfect trilogy at the helm, you’d think Kay Cannon’s adaptation of this classic fairytale would be magical — an incandescent blend of glittery costumes and contemporary jams enchanting enough to transport you away from our cursed reality.

But like a glass slipper that won’t quite make it over your heel, this Cinderella never gets comfortable enough to take you anywhere. From the beginning, it instead comes off as cloyingly calculated, with an opening number that captures so much of what doesn’t work about its approach.

“Once upon a time…” fairy god person Billie Porter begins, before launching into a smarmy monologue all about how villagers in this “old-fashioned” kingdom are stuck in a rut. But just as the prescience of that particular premise settles in (A society where everything kind of sucks, has for years, and nothing is changing? Tag yourself!) a mash-up of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” and Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be” arrives as anachronistic as — and no more subtle than — a bulldozer.

With breakdancing laborers of unspecified professions spinning shovels in the town square, it’s easy to see what the movie was going for: A feel-good start to a feel-good movie that, if you just give it the next 1 hour and 53 minutes of your time, will make you feel good. Still, it’s a weird choice. As the town lights up with intricate choreography and strong-lunged chorus members belting ‘90s R&B, the sense that everything is just fine and dandy in this picture book world clashes with the reality just described to us.

The lack of stakes continues as we’re introduced to Ella’s homelife, where her not-so-wicked stepmother Vivian, played by Idina Menzel, presents as vicious as a declawed house cat. In this telling, Vivian is more concerned with Ella being married off alongside her daughters Malvolia and Narissa, played by Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer, than with her ungrateful stepchild cleaning the cinder. So instead of letting Menzel at the merciless cruelty tapped by Cate Blanchett in Disney’s 2015 version, she’s reduced to a half-baked character with little purpose outside of covering Madonna’s “Material Girl” in the second act.

Ostensibly, defanging the wicked step family allows this story’s main conflict — that women are banned from conducting business in the kingdom, and Cinderella wants to open a dress shop — shine brighter. But as countless critics on social media have already pointed out, that #GirlBoss premise collapses under the weight of its remarkably ill-advised reasoning fast, and sacrificing the most fun acting opportunity in this story wasn’t worth it.

It’s these miscalculations that make Cinderella feel disingenuous. There are fun moments, sure — namely, Pierce Brosnan badly serenading his queen Minnie Driver; Nicholas Galitzine’s Prince Charming having an earring; and a bunch of shenanigans with talking mice, played by James Corden, Romesh Ranganathan, and James Acaster. Plus, Cabello brings a tenacious commitment to her role you have no choice but to admire, and Porter is, as always, a flawless creature of which we are not worthy.

But for every other moment you should be seeing stars in your eyes, marveling at the wonder of this fantastical fairytale world, Cinderella presents you with bold decisions that will make you ask “Why did they do that?” long before you even care about “How?”

Inoffensively fine but never good, this Cinderella is yet another take on a classic with nothing new to say. Sure, you’ll be reminded that women should have the right to own property. But if that passes for a winning fairytale in 2021, we’re in real trouble.

Cinderella (2021) is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

It might seem counterintuitive to recommend a workplace dramedy set in the world of higher education for Labor Day weekend — three days historically used for anything but work and school. And yet, Netflix’s The Chair, released on the streaming service Aug. 20, is too enjoyable of a new release to pass up. Think of it like a shiny red apple perched on the teacher’s desk, best bitten into while it’s still fresh, and devoid of any bruises a possible Season 2 might bring.

Like a shiny red apple perched on the teacher’s desk, ‘The Chair’ is best bitten into while still fresh.

In this six-episode series from creators Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, Sandra Oh stars as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim. An English professor at the fictional Pembroke University, Ji-Yoon is a fearless educator with the work ethic of Agatha Christie, the progressive politics of Gloria Steinem, and a tell-it-how-it-is demeanor akin to Joan Didion or Toni Morrison.

Even still, Ji-Yoon’s first day as head of her department — a position never before held by a woman or woman of color — is a doozy. It’s such a doozy that the fallout from it drives her emotional journey and its many juicy subplots for the remainder of this perfectly short season. (With each episode running just half an hour, Season 1 breezes by in the time it’d take you to watch some feature-length movies.)

The most glaring of Ji-Yoon’s problems, we learn, is the state of Pembroke’s once-prestigious English department. At no fault of Ji-Yoon’s, it’s depleted in funds and weighed down by some seriously antiquated (read: white) views. Panning through dusty faculty halls over an orchestral score, the camera introduces us to a school frozen in time by the success of yesteryear with no plans for the future. It’s an immediately interesting arena that pits academic ego against real-world progress — a school-place struggle practically as old as classroom teaching itself.

An uninspired leader more concerned with budget than brilliance, Dean Paul Larson (David Morse) makes matters worse by prizing seniority over talent, to the point of keeping the best literary voices on his staff in the shadows to avoid hurt feelings among those with tenure.

As Dr. McKay (Nana Mensah), a young Black professor with a flair for engaging students, struggles to gain the professional recognition she deserves, Pembroke’s Three Horsemen of Incompetence — Dr. Hambling (Holland Taylor), Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban), and Dr. McHale (Ron Crawford) — who have been on staff for years, run rampant with tactless demands. When pitted against Oh, these three heavyweight actors present a funnily formidable force that will almost make you care how many students their characters’ have and where those characters’ offices are.

It’s a triumph of narrative multi-tasking — picking up and putting down problems with a rapid messiness that endears and enrages in equal measure.

At the same time, the formerly popular professor and flirty friend of Ji-Yoon Dr. Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) sends his career into crisis when a thoughtless gesture made during a lecture outrages his students and lands Pembroke in the news. His story of redemption soon dovetails with the last leg of The Chair‘s major conflicts: Ji-Yoon’s daughter Ju Ju (Everly Carganilla), whose hobbies include exercising her fierce independence and scaring the shit out of adults.

It’s the collision of these conflicts and Ji-Yoon’s complex grappling with them that makes The Chair a compelling series. Really, it’s a triumph of narrative multi-tasking — picking up and putting down problems with a rapid messiness that endears and enrages in equal measure. Just as Ji-Yoon manages a staffing win or squashes a PR nightmare, suddenly her daughter is giggling and sprinting towards traffic. Conversely, when all seems right with Ju Ju, Pembroke explodes into chaos, most often thanks to some ill-advised move by Dr. Dobson. Ji-Yoon’s constant efforts to keep her many responsibilities under-control play a bit like an ill-fated attempt to get out the front door — a scene countless women trying to “have it all” will recognize from a mile away.

To be sure, Oh is an ideal shepherd for this self-propelling comedy of errors. Fusing the dramatic multitudes she perfected on Killing Eve with the razor-sharp comedy voice she forged on Grey’s Anatomy, Oh makes Ji-Yoon’s story leap from the screen with a snappiness that’s smart but never unlikable. You’ll be on Ji-Yoon’s side when you need to be, but The Chair allows ample room for Oh to explore her character’s flaws with care and consideration.

And although The Chair makes some iffy choices with our protagonist’s story — namely, her thoughts on cancel culture that at best will make you think and at worst will make you tired — Oh’s consistently dazzling performance elevates the entire show. Season 2 has yet to be greenlit, but Season 1 make a great argument for it. It’s not at A+ by any stretch, but it’s a show with a passing score and plenty of potential.

The Chair is now streaming on Netflix.

Related Video: Sandra Oh and the cast of ‘The Chair’ on making a super complex workplace comedy

For once, Twitter is considering a host of changes that users might actually embrace — assuming they ever get the chance.

The social media company confirmed to Mashable on Thursday that it intends to test a host of new privacy features beginning as soon as next week. First reported by Bloomberg, the broad range of tweaks have the potential to rework fundamental aspects of what it’s meant — at least up until now — to have a Twitter account.

“We understand that there’s no one size fits all approach to privacy, so we’re excited to roll out more features and tools to empower people on Twitter to customize their experience,” explained a Twitter spokesperson over email.

Those new features, as reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by a Twitter spokesperson, are wide-ranging and address long-held gripes about the platform. Importantly, not all of them may end up being incorporated into Twitter. Even so, they suggest that when it comes to user privacy the company is at least aware that more needs to be done (like, ahem, encrypting direct messages end-to-end, which as far as we know Twitter is not officially considering).

For starters, the teased features include the ability to automatically hide old tweets after a predetermined amount of time. This isn’t the same as having tweets auto-delete, but is a step in the right direction. Another potential feature is the power to remove specific followers (which users do now by blocking and then immediately unblocking a follower’s account). Yet another is the opportunity to make your likes visible to only certain subsets of users — your followers, everyone, or other as-of-yet undefined groups.

“Our focus on social privacy is inspired by feedback we received through a series of global research studies we conducted to better understand people’s perceptions of and needs for privacy around the globe,” added the spokesperson.

SEE ALSO: Twitter finally launches Super Follows as OnlyFans stumbles

Twitter sadly would not specify which of the above will be tested next week, or where the tests will run.

When it actually does launch these privacy tests, it will be important to see if Twitter puts real resources behind them — or if Thursday’s announcement is more of a trial balloon meant to gauge the public’s appetite for more granular privacy controls.

Because great ideas are one thing, but when it comes to online privacy — as is so often the case — it’s the followthrough that counts.

Apple developer Cher Scarlett wishes her employer would tell her fellow employees not to harass her.

“If you trust Cher, you’re an idiot,” a commenter in the Apple channel of Blind said, which is only open to Apple employees. The thread was about how Scarlett is “ruining the company.”

On Aug. 7, Scarlett posted a survey in the company Slack and on Twitter that allowed coworkers to share their salary data. Discussing salaries with fellow employees is protected by U.S. labor law, and is a tool employees can use to make a company more equitable.

By Aug. 11, she began receiving obscene submissions to the survey. Harassment on Twitter and in emails followed. One user on Blind recently doxxed her. (That thread has since been deleted.)

Mashable has viewed screenshots of the Blind forum posts, tweets and DMs, junk survey responses, and emails. Apple did not return Mashable’s request for comment.

Tweet may have been deleted

The closed nature of the forums and surveys, and the details included in the tweets and DMs, leads Scarlett to believe that many of the anonymous messages come from people who also work for Apple.

Mashable wasn’t able to verify who wrote these messages. Many of the Twitter accounts that harassed Scarlett have been deleted. But the Blind threads require Apple credentials to gain access, and people who want to fill out the survey need a password from an internal Apple Slack channel or Scarlett herself.

“I’m on sick leave today because I literally can’t handle doing my job and dealing with this at the same time,” Scarlett told Mashable on Friday of last week. “I have to try to get my head back in the game on Monday, but it’s hard when there’s so many people you work with who have such hateful things to say about you, and you don’t even know who they are.”

Scarlett is the only public-facing member of a new employee group called “AppleToo.” During the last four years, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, there has been a wave of employee activism at other tech companies, like Google, over workplace discrimination and inequality. Though there have been reports and lawsuits alleging workplace discrimination at Apple before, the company has largely evaded the same level of scrutiny as its Big Tech peers, and Apple employees have not risen up in the same way other tech workers have.

Now, Scarlett and fourteen organizers are asserting that “Apple Too” needs a reckoning. They began with the salary transparency form, so workers could determine whether there are gender and racial pay gaps without relying on Apple’s data. Exposing pay gaps can put pressure on a company to make salaries more equitable.

Later in August, the organizers launched an AppleToo website, and a Discord channel on an Apple employee’s Discord server that verifies all members are current employees. These avenues allow the group to collect stories from Apple employees about discrimination, racism, sexism, and other problems they’ve witnessed or been victims of in the workplace. The group says that Apple’s internal systems for dealing with these issues are inadequate and unresponsive, serving to protect the company more than the employees themselves.

To date, the group says it has compiled more than 500 stories.

“It’s sort of proof that people needed this outlet, and they wanted it,” Scarlett said. “They wanted a way to connect with each other.”

Tweet may have been deleted

Scarlett said she has received support from employees in person and online.

That’s similar to what Apple engineering program manager Ashley Gjovik said she experienced.

Gjovik is not affiliated with AppleToo, but has been speaking out publicly about workplace issues at Apple. That included criticizing Apple’s plans to make workers return to the office in September, a timeline she viewed as unsafe and arbitrary. (Those return-to-office plans have since been pushed back to January.) As she told The Verge, she also raised issues of “sexism, a hostile work environment, sexual harassment, unsafe working conditions, and retaliation” to Apple, and tweeted about them. Soon after, Apple placed Gjovik on paid administrative leave while looking into her complaints.

Tweet may have been deleted

Still, she said via email, “I’ve been met overwhelmingly with support from current & past colleagues, the press, and the public. I also have many friends who are senior leaders at Apple who continue to support me through all of this.”

The effort to shine a light on workplace equity issues, however, hasn’t gone over well with all Apple employees.

Messages and forum posts accuse both Scarlett and Gjovik of betraying the company, complaining about nothing, violating company protocol, and causing security breaches. Comments on Blind criticizing Gjovik contained information that could compromise her personal safety. Blind removed those comments at Gjovik’s request.

Tweet may have been deleted

When it comes to both its products and the company itself, Apple is notoriously secretive. Scarlett views the vitriolic criticism levied at her for breaking the Apple cone of silence as “a reflection of the culture.”

Gjovik also attributes the “conflict” she’s faced online as “rooted in folks simply trying to understand my story and motives, and trying to reckon with challenging their perspectives of a highly respected company with deep brand loyalty.”

Those intensely loyal Apple fans could be fueling the AppleToo backlash.

Gjovik says she has “some suspiciously over-invested trolls,” and Scarlett went so far as to write a piece of code to hide tweets from the alias accounts of one of her especially pernicious trolls. A tweet from AppleToo organizers was mistakenly flagged as spam by Twitter, and received limited distribution. Twitter says this was not the result of user flagging, but could not provide further explanation, despite the fact that the tweet did not meet Twitter’s description of spam.

“The world generally admires Apple,” Gjovik said. “I think it is difficult for employees and the public to reckon with Apple the company misbehaving, when we often mentally combine the company and brand. I think folks are having a difficult time coming to terms that Apple the company appears to have major, systemic issues while at the same time folks have deep loyalty to and admiration of Apple’s products.”

Apple has been largely silent on the AppleToo campaign. It has taken down multiple pay equity surveys (for collecting gender-based data, it says), though Scarlett’s most recent survey remains up. It also recently removed a Slack channel for discussing pay equity.

Tweet may have been deleted

Scarlett wishes Apple would weigh in, specifically about the harassment she’s faced online. But since it has not, she thinks Apple’s silence speaks volumes.

“Apple says nothing, and to me that sort of enables the behavior,” Scarlett said. “You’re not telling these people who are very loyal to you that I’m, you know, not a bad seed, or a bad apple, as it were. That I’m doing the right thing and that clearly my heart is in the right place. To me, they’re enabling the hostility and harassment.”

UPDATE: Sept. 2, 2021, 4:35 p.m. PDT This story was updated to include more detail about a post criticizing Gjovik.

One down, far too many left to go.

On Wednesday the Federal Trade Commission announced it had banned SpyFone, the maker of a so-called stalkerware app, from the digital surveillance business. As their name suggests, stalkerware apps grant abusers the ability to secretly monitor the digital lives of anyone’s phone they can get their hands on.

“The company’s apps sold real-time access to their secret surveillance, allowing stalkers and domestic abusers to stealthily track the potential targets of their violence,” reads the FTC’s Sept. 1 announcement.

Notably, SpyFone (now doing business as Support King, LLC) and its CEO, Scott Zuckerman, neither admitted nor denied the FTC’s numerous allegations — allegations which even go beyond the already numerous horrors of stalkerware.

“SpyFone’s lack of basic security also exposed device owners to hackers, identity thieves, and other cyber threats,” writes the FTC.

It appears a lot of innocent device owners are wrapped up in this. A consent order agreement accompanying the FTC announcement points to SpyFone.com, a website which claims that it’s the “World’s Leading Spy Phone App” with “Millions Installed.” Clicking through to the linked Google Play store, which is still up as of the time of this writing, shows “1,000,000+” downloads.

While undoubtedly a scourge of the modern age, stalkerware itself is not a new problem. Eva Galperin, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity, spoke with Mashable back in 2019 about the tech’s wide reach.

“Like other forms of domestic abuse, the use of stalkerware on phones affects people from all walks of life,” she explained at the time. “I have been contacted by men being spied on by women, men being spied on by men, and women being spied on by women, but the majority of cases that I see are of women whose phones are being spied on by a partner or a former partner, who is usually a man.”

SEE ALSO: How to find stalkerware on your smartphone

Interestingly, part of the FTC’s proposed settlement requires SpyFone to notify potential victims — displaying a warning message on their compromised devices:

Someone may have secretly monitored your phone.

The Federal Trade Commission has alleged that Support King sold illegal monitoring products, which may have been installed on this phone. The software has been disabled.

This phone may still not be secure. Photos, emails, texts, and location were collected from this phone.

For details, visit [hyperlink to FTC blog] or call 877-382-4357.

For help, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline 800−799−7233 using a secure phone. If you’re in danger, call 911.

This is not the first time the FTC has moved against the maker of a stalkerware app — in 2019 it was the developer of MobileSpy, PhoneSheriff, and TeenShield — and it hopefully won’t be the last. The stalkerware industry is one predicated on abuse, and the sooner companies like SpyFone are forced to exit the world of digital surveillance the better.