Hilarious! You want the last word to salvage what little pride you can. 😂

Pfft! Really hit the bottom of the tank huh? This shit is so 2017 paint by numbers it’s not even good trolling. Philistine made me laugh though so points there.

Oh I am not dragged down. I am an old troll counterpuncher from the old pre reddit flight days. If they try and take me down they will find I do not make it rewarding.

Ah yes, “just stating your opinions” “echo chambers” and the calls that you are being oppressed and policed, that I am both a narcissist and a weak little trans weenie who needs to shut themselves away where I can’t hear your big strong ideas.

It’s the full right wing bingo card. Do you lot ever get tired of clutching those pearls?

Don’t answer I know you will die with those things in a death grip.

And in your second paragraph, see how you had to add ugly to my statement to make it malicious and false, that is you projecting onto me, not me

Ah so “barely even cosmetically complete” doesn’t register as you calling them aesthetically displeasing? Fuck off.

The framing as it being a personal choice not to pursue those options are the thinnest veneer of setting yourself up for this reaction to be shocked and appalled that someone would call you out. Even if you were trans yourself framing it the way you did before would register as you being an ass to other people in your community.

Troll behavior.

You are living during the time of masculine emancipation my friend. Men are allowed to be cute af these days and more and more women are catching on that this is a good thing. Some of the guys I know who register this way have found a lot of success dating in the non-binary scene where gender expectations are more generally negotiable. Non-binary circles are encircled with exterior connections of cis communities who have a more dynamic understanding of gender so if you are in a market to find likeminded souls that’s where I would look.

And also… Cute is sexy. It’s not everyone’s vibe but there’s definitely a desire out there for true gentlemen emphasis on the gentle. Most of the cis ones I know are married to ride or die partners whom exude an aura of sweetness out to 20ft.

Well yeah. It’s openly critical of the sexual function of people who have had those proceedures. The trans community as a whole are often depicted as mutilated and less functional by transphobes or people who want to devalue them as valid romantic options. Since access to those medical services are actively under fire that critique isn’t value neutral and it isn’t in the context of what unaltered sexual function is like for people with dysphoria whom often register a marked improvement in overall function from getting over the mental blocks.

The people I know who have had surgeries have been quite happy with the outcome. While it’s true the surgery options regarding bottom surgery for trans men require one to make some decisions about what functions to focus on, framing them as ugly and “barely functional” is insulting. Think about what it would be like to hear someone else critique the choices you’ve made that have improved your life experiences in a way that frames you as deficient and devalued.

Violence tends to be a double edged sword. Whether or not things get better as the result of an outbreak of violence is hit and miss. A lot of authoritarian regimes in history just get replaced with new authoritarian regimes that have a better PR team and create a leniency period before cranking back the progress once people figure everything has been fixed. Long term it’s not great prospects. Anarchist activities tends to create this sort of thing. It creates a power vacuum to which the first one to break the faith and assemble a new loyal hierarchy while murmuring a smokescreen of empty hymns of the old cause is rewarded by becoming the new tyrant. Oftentimes there is a promise of whatever state of oppression being a transitory period. You aren’t supposed to notice that the transitory period after which they say that they will surrender their stranglehold to the rightful inheritance of the people never comes to fruition and instead just becomes a new dynasty of effective monarchs living it up.

But other times it’s just another tool in the box of movements that are fighting against occupation. It usually helps if there’s a peaceful arm of the movement who will get most or all of the credit after the fact whom can hold the dialogue space. Every Civil rights fight that had a non-violent movement leader also had “unrelated” people in the field under a different banner solving some problems with violence. Black Panthers, Butterfly Brigade, bomb weilding suicide suffragettes, indigenous anti colonial movements… These are part of the landscape and the actions they took were given space to be picked over by contemporaries because provocative acts lend punch to rhetoric. If you have no legitimate means to solve the violence done to you other than violence then the problem still needs solving so violence it is. What is effective in this model is collective directed action with planned objectives to fit into existing systems or that come with fully drawn up replacements for old systems. Not as sexy as anarchy but the wins are on the whole more stable and enduring. If you want a democracy then your problem solve should at least should have a true core of people whose ultimate intention is to operate democratically. Violence has a seat at that table too but weilding it justly is a commitment.

For me it’s been longer than that. I am a queer Canadian and anytime I have travelled the US or stayed with friends and seen any group carrying or wearing American flags that hasn’t given me the “ick” so much as rung alarm bells that those people are not safe.

Thing is, it’s the same thing with the Canadian flag. Any group flying too many Canadian flags outside of Canada Day is likely to be Conservative and anti-queer. Anti-Trans protesters or anti-vaxxers on highway overpasses? Canadian flag. Lifted truck soaring down the highway with a “Fuck Trudeau” bumper sticker - Canada flag. Hoard of protesters demanding book bans, group of people protesting Pride with a “you are gunna burn pedos” sign, antiDEI crusader mob - Canadian flag. It doesn’t take long before one starts to draw certain conclusions about a person’s character when they wave it around. For those of us trans folk who can it’s a sign to hide. A literal red flag.

Amoungst the left up here the flag is a complicated symbol. Many of us on the West Coast see it as a symbol of colonial practice and an insensitive declaration of an occupying nation on stolen territory for people who are still here and whose original sovereignty is still not properly acknowledged. It’s not a symbol of pride and if personally used as such it’s a sign of insensitivity and work to be done. At the same time I would not say that I am not proud of my Country for how far we’ve come. We are a nation in therapy who has the opportunity to put the work in to getting over some really bad murderous and selfish flaws and try new things to make things right. When I had an American friend up here it took a bit for him to understand how seriously the effort is to recon with our past and he treated us like a utopia of leftist sentiment but it is like therapy, yeah we might be putting the work in - but we can see how much further we need to go and praise doesn’t hit us as “job well done” it’s a reminder of how shitty it still is. But if anyone ever thinks that this complicated and nuanced relationship to country would stop us from rallying together to fight to preserve our rights to keep working towards that better future they would be dead wrong.

So I understand pretty well where you’re coming from but for a lot of us this isn’t a particularly new thing. It just is affecting more and more people as they wake up to realizing how these symbols are used.

Elon Musk has a well documented track record of supporting far right causes that mirror Nazi ideology. At the Inauguration he performed two Nazi salutes (one to the crowd and one to the flag). He routinely promotes the methods of genocides of trans people and Palistinians through both verbal parlance and through direct funding and uses well known euphemisms in support of white supremacy causes. He has authoritarian leanings tasked with removing from government service entire administrative arms that previously were not electable or apointable positions (because they were staffed with experts whose task is to stick to their guns of scientific or proven best practice and not simply be yes men telling the administration what they want to hear).

He also has never denied making a Nazi salute in the days since it’s happened instead deciding to make Holocaust and Nazi featured jokes.

At this point what evidence can be put forward that he is not a Nazi?

It may seem like a pedantic difference but you are missing a key part of what’s going on here. Nobody is challenging that gender dysphoria is a bad thing to experience… This policy is saying it’s kosher to proclaim “transness is a mental illness” which means in effect that encompasses gender euphoria and all expressions of gender incongruity as symptoms of a mental illness. It’s a subtle linguistic difference but one makes it possible to publicly derride trans people as being delusional or harmful to people around them or dangers to themselves and push for “curing” all transness by approaching being trans as a failure state.

For me I had to make a value judgement in regards to transition because my partner’s got phenotype preferences that don’t match where I would like to go and ultimately I had to break ot down as to whether keeping him as my romantic partner or transition would bring me more net happiness and chose my partner. It’s still a struggle because all that dysphoria doesn’t go away I just have to feed it different things to placate it enough to function.

I have a weird relationship with a lot of photos of myself pre social transition. Any photos of weddings or big family events where a dress code prompted me through soft pressure to try and “clean up” is sort of just interpreted as me being in drag but I never look happy in them. My Mom ended up taking down a bunch of family photos where I am so dressed because she started interpreting me as having “dead eyes” in them and they make her feel weird.

I can’t really erase all existence of my past self as I feel that’s kind of unfair to the other folk who were there with me at the time but we’ve definitely had conversations of “hey, using my old name and pronoun set to describe past me isn’t cool, please don’t.” but stories where the tale’s context involves me being interpreted as my birth sex by other people still feel bad. It doesn’t feel like a clean chapter break. It feels messy and threaded with compromise like I made some kind of fairy bargain- rewarding true love in exchange for staying the frog and never becoming the prince but I make it work. At my worst I feel like I stuck in the middle of a story. If my partner ever dies or leaves me then there’s a whole heartbroken third act that could kick off but as is I feel like I would still take a bullet for him any day of the week so this could just be the end of the tale. My relationship with act one is as compassionate to all involved as I can make it. It happened. It sucked. If I could go back and do it all over again from scratch I would have to know for certain that I would end up exactly back where I am now to not make different choices and as precarious as that is it’s enough.

Honestly there’s not really a way to know short of them telling you. There’s a difference from folk just not liking the gender box people put them in and rejecting all the cultural trappings of gender (being a tomboy or a femboy) from them being trans. Transness goes a little further than just cultural markers, it’s a reaction to one’s body. Oftentimes that struggle on the outside just shows up as them not flourishing… And sometimes you don’t recognize what them actually flourishing actually looks like because they never did until after they changed.

I grew up in the 90’s and from sheer lack of exposure just didn’t have words for what I was going through. I was aided by being fairly androgynous but really didn’t talk to anyone about how good it felt to be read by strangers on occasion as my gender. I relied on gender neutral nicknames. I starved myself or overexercised to stay lean at points to keep myself from putting on weight that would go to areas that would outwardly show my body through clothes and avoided mirrors while naked but none of that clicked as me being trans until when I was 21 and living abroad in Japan where basically everybody read me as being what I was, either assuming me as a trans man or reading me as a cis man. None of this really caused me to self reflect until I was near the end of my visa and realized that going back to all my friends and family whom I loved dearly was a double edged sword. I would be locked back in to where people would enforcing my gender, lightly mind you. They weren’t trying to force me to act any way at all but there was a gentle tyranny just by them correcting people who “got it wrong” or using my name or by men I saw as friends and peers treating me as a delightful oddity like I was some sort of ideal romantic though not nessisarily sexual conquest because I liked hobbies and masculine dominated spaces that few women participated in which in modern context would probably outwardly make me appear as some kind of “pick me”. This realization that I didn’t want to go back cascaded into me crashing hard up against all the novel fantasies I had neen distracting myself with that I would somehow go through some kind of magical event and instantly change body type and all my friends would just have to except me because “oh well magic…” I never believed this would actually happen mind, I wasn’t delusional but I would amuse myself while walking around with these little daydreams. All at once though I realized that that was never going to happen. I was gunna be in this form until I died and I broke into a full on dispair. I didn’t even know trans men existed and my only experience with trans women was representation where they were ridiculed. I backwards engineered that trans men must exist because that was the only thing that made any sense.

I stuffed it all under my hat for another 10 years, growing more distant with old friends and not making new friends. I read a bunch of feminism and chased out my internalized misogyny thinking that was the problem. It muddied the waters awhile but I couldn’t shake that no matter how I told myself that being a woman and being a man were value neutral it didn’t shake my feelings like I was playing out Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and all people saw was the roach. I tried non-binary pronouns and a name change more or less as proof to myself that I was okay without and discovered the opposite.

My mom took me coming out hard only in the way that she felt she should of seen it sooner and it threw into sharp relief all those times where she’d tried to pressure me in little ways to be more fem. I don’t begrudge her any of that. She says it should have been obvious but really no. If I had known that there were options I could have asked instead of hurting myself the way I did and struggling with the isolation then I might have. But I lived in a conservative town where just growing up in an agnostic household had seen me get literally have neighbor kids throw rocks at me growing up. Even if knew my friends and family were cool, there were medical options that would reduce all the regrets that I have now I might have buried and denied my needs anyway. My family had kept me alive by being awesome in other ways and I always knew that me dying would have destroyed them… And that’s really all you can do. Let your kid know they are loved regardless of anything and let them sort themselves out. No need to brace and seek the signs one of them potentially trans, just let them know that you love them and if they are then you will still love them and want to do right by them.

This isn’t as simple as you are implying as if you want to be a bro to trans people more nuance is generally required. Male and Female are not used strictly scientifically in context. Male and Female are often used as adjective forms of man and woman. Take the example of a male or female firefighter - if a trans man is a firefighter refering to him as a female firefighter using this reasoning comes across as fairly transphobic because it feels like you are either trying to utilize some sort of technical linguistic dodge to find an occasion to misgender them or your purpose is to out them to people unawares of their trans status.

Even when people use male and female as nouns instead of adjectives this transphobic reading applies because a lot of fairly obnoxious people will try and use these words as shorthand to imply that trans identities don’t matter and to avoid calling you by terms that align to your identity or to isolate trans identify out of discussions. This is why you hear the phrase “Assigned male/female at birth” used by the trans community (though it actually originates from the intersex community) or “birth sex” to refer to groups that include non-binary people instead of just male or female. That linguistic abstraction is important because it implies removal by way of time. In trans terms one can be treated as female at birth given the assumption of cisness for infants implying that that term could be inaccurate in the present day.

By contrast “Trans Identitied males/females” is a transphobic dog whistle. “Biologic males/females” has the same vibe because from a scientific prospect the term is so bloody vague it is practically meaningless. The speaker is just trying to imply the social category is irrelevant or putting emphasis on an assumed physicality. Like if someone says for example “biological males in women’s sports” you know the entire point they are going to be making is total exclusion before they even bother to elaborate further.

The reality is words Male and Female still represent social categories unless you append onto them more specific adjectives in term like Phenotypic, chromasomal or so on. These words are not immune from the cultural moment of negotiation of trans inclusion.

Ohhh no… As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.

Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn’t cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips… This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.

Wow, your name is pretty accurate huh?

Wow, lucky you.

While I won’t argue that the media is causing a number of problems thinking it’s a storm in a teacup is your privilege showing. Even though I live in one of the most trans accepting places on the planet I have had the unique experience of having to sneak past protesters who are trying to remove people like me from public life, using slurs over megaphones and openly marching hundreds strong in the streets… And again this is rated one of if not the most trans friendly place in the world. There is no safer place to go.

It’s a lot harder to see it as a storm in a teacup when the world is dramatically becoming a smaller place for us personally because laws keep passing that people do not understand or do not care how they actually impact us. The media doesn’t report a lot of us who are murdered even when it’s a hate crime. This year in the US there was 41-ish such hate motivated crimes which is near double 2023’s total… But we can’t be sure of the actual number because a lot of the time the transness of the victim and the nature of the motive is obscured by the media reporting. Some of the media shenanigans only gets caught only by loved ones as media frequently uses vagueness and dead names that friends and community members don’t recognize because that person hasn’t gone by that name for decades.

Your opinion comes from the fact you don’t personally have a horse in the race so whether you engage with it or not is a choice. The safe places are radically shrinking. The next government projected to win federally here is known to be openly hostile to trans people and I know that at least one of my friends will die directly as a result from them removing the supports currently in place. So enjoy the storm you aren’t living friend but realize saying it doesn’t exist is really crass to those who cannot find shelter.

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

We assume omnipotence from Gods but it’s not wholly true. Most gods out in the world of myth are limited in their reach and ability. If they are in a pantheon then often that implies that they have no direct power over each other and thus they are not all powerful.

Interestingly omnicence or omnipresence is not something claimed even by the monotheistic religions. No God is actually all seeing. Plenty of times in script things have been hidden from God or something has to be told to God to bring it to his attention.

This has nothing to do with his dick persay… Just the assumption of omnipotence. If the Christian God exists he coulda just be lying about what he’s capable of and what human is gunna be able to check the math? Guy seems like the kind of dick who would pull that shit.