If you have ever attempted to change your name you know it is way more annoying to change your name than accept someone else’s change of name. The amount of admin it takes to make that update in your social circle even before you try and make it legal is a test of social fortitude and willpower.

Remember when someone is changing their name they are very aware of the imposition of the mental load they are placing on you. Grace goes a long way.

Not quite. The Conservative party mostly put their money on a bunch of culture war stuff and were aiming to defang a bunch of regulatory bodies. Carney is basically an Old School conservative who is trying to appeal to the conservative votership who ditched the actual Conservative party by pulling a bunch of moves that flatter areas that are dependant on oil so he can compete with what are essentially American psy-ops to goad Canadian resource heavy provinces into making policy which favours private American business.

He’s trying to be a unifying force since most of the country was going to vote blue and the political situation with the states requires a lot of solidarity. He is basically a fiscal conservative Monarchist wet dream while keeping quiet on not rolling back Progressive social agendas of yesteryear. So… Lesser of two evils mostly.

The word in trans communities for this is “ew-phoria”. Calling it a fetish is also kind of… Not great. Fetishes are tied into sexual gratification and gender euphoria /dysphoria is an independent mechanism that ties more closely with identity. It doesn’t make trans people horny and the idea that that’s what is what is happening is used often to trivialize trans experiences.

Think of the typical nature of being cis as (mostly) ascribing no value to sexually dimorphic physical features. Like you can have feelings about whether those things are attractive and the validation you receive for meeting a social standard but that’s an external reinforcement system working its way inward.

Being trans is the opposite. Every sexual characteristic is not value neutral. Perceiving sex characteristics in relation to yourself either makes you feel amazing like someone has shot dopamine directly into your soul or bad like you are not actually a human. All forms of perception of these characteristics causes this effect and it is automatic and instant. Logically even if you believe these things should be valueless, obtainable by all genders if you have this feedback system you don’t get to decide on how or what these things make you feel or in what proportion. The source of the feedback is entirely internal which is why it is often is at complete odds with external systems of validation and if you tried to logically explain it or lessen these feelings with logic you often just can’t. The heart doesn’t only want what the heart wants the heart has a shock collar on you.

In the case of facial hair particularly because it’s not something you have to experience with your eyes to know it’s there touch is fundamentally important. Remember dysphoria is more than being strictly about being perceived by others it is about being perceived by yourself. Other people looking at you and using your pronouns is just another way of perception of yourself. Like other people performing the job of being a mirror. Experiencing your own body however is in things like how you move, what bits of your body bump into things, your height, your weight distribution. Imagine if everytime you touch your face the slight scratch of the existence of thicker hair caused your neurological system to fire depression meds directly into your system. That’s what’s happening. Touch perception.

Sometimes this internal reward systems finds things about a social portion of experience that people that sucks really bad but because it equates to other people reacting to your body’s sexually dimorphic characteristics when it happens to them it hits the same feel good button of other positive external recognition by a third party of having those sex characteristics.

So even while you experience the massive illogical dopamine hit from the internal reward system you can recognize logically at the same time that the phenomenon causing the reaction is a societal problem that is bad and should not exist.

Hence Ew-phoria.

Okay. Can we take a minute to just acknowledge that this comment has a little neurotypical ableism and regional bias? Some people literally need more context than others do to understand the tone of a text. Just because you do not need that assistance with context clues in play doesn’t mean everyone also doesn’t need that.

Kindness and extending a little help costs us so little.

A lot of folk are going to start going on about how one refers to sexual phenotype and one is about social gender but that isn’t coming from the trans camp. I will help simplify it from a trans lens.

Male and Man are basically interchangeable from a trans perspective because people use them basically the same way - as a social Category. Calling a trans woman “male” is doing the exact same job as calling her a “man”. These are not strictly scientific terms.

Male and Female are what are on legal documentation like licences or medical documents and you can get those changed and it’s important to have that flexibility because a trans man rocking a full beard and having an F sex marker on his passport can get him routinely flagged by police or security with the concern his documentation is fake or erroneous and potentially cause him to be treated like a criminal and his documents tested because he doesn’t look female.

Where the difference culturally matters is people sometimes do not like male or female in usage because it sounds depersonalizing. Like you are putting out an All Points Bulletin or talking about a prisoner or animal population or using medical sounding language to refer to them.

Look beyond the meme my friend. When you exclusively start talking about the science of the matter or taking it to mean that the responsibility should be exclusively shifted to men you are ignoring a generation ls deep frustration pregnancy capable people have been experiencing on this subject. You end up implying through negative space that this is a responsibility that should stay in the camp of women- and women have been more under attack for their reproductive choices.

Women’s frustration with the attitudes of men wanting to control their bodies is valid. What this person is doing is returning a little of that. What other women in these comments are seeing is men react like you are here and that sends an unconscious message that the underlying problem is not one that is going to be addressed because unless the problems they are routinely subjected to specifically targets men, men won’t care.

Just because someone gives you a certain energy doesn’t mean you should add to it or return it. Intended or not you start making yourself look like an enemy. Sometimes you have to see beyond the conversation being had and realize to what use your commentary is being put. You are falling into the hands of the poster by being made to look like the worst sort of man.

Okay… so? We’re supposed to feed into this premise by making seem like how women’s birth control is more nessisary and softly validate the idea that men don’t care and can’t be bothered? There’s not an unfair stereotype out there that there’s a lot of men being very callous about not wanting to take any measure to protect their partner if it inconveniences them too much while female hormonal birth control is known to have a bunch of horrible side effects that their relationships just expect them to take on so both partners can have fun.

Under those conditions it does not to me feel unreasonable that women get embittered by having to behave like all the unfair sacrifice for making sex safe enough to participate in is falling on female shoulders at present. Feelings don’t care about facts and strictly debating the scientific difficulty of the task is missing the point where the feelings that create this sort of post are coming from.

Barrier protections are great - but have one of the highest perfect use condition failure rates against pregnancy. If you used them under perfect condition correctly every time there’s still a 2% chance of failure every time…

Typical use however like, people hurrying, using bad technique of application or removal, improper sizing, not inspecting them before use or using expired product or other sundry defects of the condoms themselves means condom’s real life failure rate condition is about 18%.

Not to knock the condom but it’s not foolproof. Even paired up with the pill which has a decent track record when under perfect use conditions but one of the highest rates of imperfect use because of missed or improperly timed doses you still are rolling the dice.

Let’s lay some ttrpgs here. Everytime you have sex under that pairing it’s like you are rolling two individual dice. Let’s take the typical use of condoms and the pill. Roll a six sided die to represent the condom and a 10 sided die for the pill. If both die show up with a 1 then you get a pregnancy. Not bad odds until you realize this is repeated every time you have sex.

Adding another die to the equation in the form of a hormonal birth control for the other partner alters the chances to be more airtight. Also sometimes you as the male partner might want assurance because you generally don’t know of your partner is taking their pills right.

Counterpoint to your counterpoint- no form of birth control has a zero percent failure rate under perfect use conditions and not all women respond to all forms of birth control well meaning pregnancy capable people cannot take perfect control of their family planning choices without the extreme surgical intervention of a hysterectomy as even getting medically sterilized in other ways can potentially undo itself. Doubling up from both sides means a much lower chance of failure rate resulting in life changing or difficult consequences and distress on behalf of the partner who faces higher risk outcomes.

Doing your part in a relationship’s reproductive planning is good partner behavior. This shouldn’t be a game where just one person is on the hook and the other is just along for the ride. Male and Female birth control do not exist as a one or the other dichotomy. Stoking division of the sexes over which one is more nessisary is counter to the real point. These are tools couples can use together to be safer.

Hey, non-binary person in one of the most trans places on the planet. I have in the past 8 years of Pride events and non-binary meetups met only about three people who ever attempted to use a neo-pronoun and only one memorable person who wanted to be called “puppy”. They were like 16 and by the time they were 20 they’d cringe at their past behaviour.

Some people are weird. Particularly when they are on the internet. They are usually young and most of them would make it through maybe an irl day being called “dragon rider” before the effort it takes to keep that up would wear them down.

In the case of JKR that talking point kind of sailed on. Nobody really cares if you enjoy something second hand or where the money and interest played out years ago. The books, the old movies, the merch you picked up at a garage sale…

Problem is when you support the latest and greatest newly licenced thing that lines her pockets with cash because she is USING that cash to do direct damage to the community. She’s been financially backing anti-trans groups and lobbying in the UK. Just ONE of her little go fund mes was chipping in a 700,000"£ donation to the lawyers who got gender recognition certificates made worthless in the UK Supreme Court. Ticket sales to events, merch deals, video game titles, remakes… It propells demand which means a nice big chunk of that coin passes right through her pockets and right into directly funding her hate and her fans go on to brigade trans support spaces which often are necessary emergency mental health support for weeks after a big release online. More than one suicide can be laid at the feet of these mobs.

The difference between that and Kevin Spacey is at least he’s moldering quietly.

Yeah, it can actually a fairly useful way to pick up on reporting that is from a source that is anti-trans as folk who purposefully forget the space will use that as a dogwhistle to distinguish their pieces. It is so subtle you generally don’t notice it but of a specifc era of anti trans propaganda (around either side of covid particularly) you start recognizing it in places that try and appear to be ’ trans welfare centric’ to unwitting cis viewership while providing some heinous misinformation.

Dude, Raymond Holt being gay is central to his character. He struggled up through the ranks of the NYPD as a openly gay black man and that fact routinely backs his actions where he uses that experience to choose fairer more equitable choices over petty or self interested ones. He regularly cites his sexuallity as being core to who he is. While it certainly doesn’t encompass his entire personality because all of Brooklyn 99’s characters contain layers and multitudes it is undeniably central to his theme.

He just doesn’t present as a stereotypical gay character.

I imagine the closest we are gunna get modern wise is Ostrich meat which tastes like the midway point between chicken and beef.

Yeah “Liberal” as an insult from a Conservative from the leftist perspective is very funny and also sad. Conservatives often utilize the wrong terms for things which muddy the waters and make it harder for their flock to swap sides because messing around with diction makes following leftist discussion impossible if you have an understanding of the terms gleaned from a non-academic source.

Take the term “neo-liberal” the right uses it in its most literal translation to mean “new liberal” and uses it to evoke the far end of the progressive spectrum of the left.

In actuality the term was coined in the Reagan/Thatcher era to mean the sort of generally conservative policy of privatizing swaths of government services entirely, defunding government social programs, removing regulations/ depowering regulatory bodies and practicing so called “trickle down economics” policies. The philosophical term is frozen in time just the same way terms like “neolithic” or “neoclassical art” is. Republicans are literally more Neo-Liberal than the Democrats (who are sort of more passively status quo preserving liberal. Neo-liberal mostly by virtue of inaction. )

Linguistically the well is very poisoned. The left wing could try adopting new terms but the right wing is faster to disseminate their counter to that by just creating new bastardized meanings of the terms because the right has a more unified media structure. The left is fractured. It deals often with trying new things rather than preserving status quo which means it exists in a lot of subgroups.

Liberal is sort of two separate things - a brand adopted by usually a party that markets itself as socially progressive and a philosophy of property forward law that creates a punch out of individual rights to citizens (and to a much lesser extent subgroups) to things like freedom of movement, freedom from unlawful seizure of property, freedom of expression and “style of life”.

If you have existed on the outside of the left wing you might only be familiar with the brand aspect. The criticism of the wider left in general of these “Liberal” branded parties is that they are often performative in their progressive nature. The brand is just marketing.

The hotbutton discussion however inside the wider left in regards to the political philosophy of Libralism is that both the Republicans and Democrats are by technical definition Liberals and that base philosophy has within it the political prerogative of constantly upholding protections on keeping the absurd aggregation of wealth in private firms (something Libralism at it’s core is designed to do). A large number of different leftist philosophies see this as a core problem. Therefore in leftist spaces self identifying Liberals are usually flagged as dupes of a branded center-right party - not as progressives who support social causes of wider acceptance.

Libralism as a philosophy is kind of the air we breathe. It’s not left nor right. It creates a body of individual rights but Capitalism is used as a measure of what constitutes personal autonomy. Someone dying from a lack of success is acceptable because at it’s core Liberalism is designed to coerce (most) people to perform perpetual labour in return for protection inside the system. The system creates classes of people who are citizens who are protected and by doing so it creates exceptions to citizenhood (like prisoners, refugees, immigrants or indigenous peoples) who can be exploited.

Most Democracies are philosophically a sort of blended patchwork of Liberalism and Socialism with some other stuff mixed in. The two are either compatible or opposing depending on which school of Socialism you are talking about.

1. Being an anecdotal case with extenuating circumstances does not invalidate the criticism of an overall societal trend.

2. You are not being an absentee father. You are actively trying to be a part of your children’s lives. This trend does not describe you.

It is best not to borrow offense when it isn’t aimed in your direction. It’s better overall for your mental health and allows you to understand better other points of veiw without unnecessarily feeling attacked.

As part of the trans community in Canada it’s devastating watching our American kinfolk suffer. Because of the Safe Third Country Agreement American citizens cannot claim refugee status here. I have been writing to every politician I can to try and punch out an exception. The minute I can I am opening up my home to as many folk as I can.

The right trying to spin that this is a problem with the left or trans people generally is dangerous. Shooters from the right murdered democratic politicians and made attempts on their own candidates and people. It’s not the left. The entire damn country right, left and center is at a flash point because of the policies that are getting enacted by this government and the relief that isn’t coming and they are using the rhetoric of a trans person, who was only tangentially involved, for calls to persecute all trans people as terrorists or imprison them in mental institutions. Laws are coming into effect so that a trans person posting a fully clothed picture of themselves online could be considered porn. They are creating a class of “non person” who cannot be seen or heard or walk free simply because they are exercising their freedom to exist as they choose to. Wear clothes that they want and find happiness in their own way.

The Government is censoring media, calling for people’s dismissal and vowing direct personal vengeance on private citizens who criticize this influencer. This is what a real collapse of freedom of speech looks like. If you have any claim to care about free speech some trans person with a violent roommate reacting on behalf of their misery in ways they likey didn’t even ask for isn’t your priority.

I feel validated in an opinion I have had for ages : that in all the talk about 2nd Amendment rights Americans do guns are nothing but a security blanket they clutch to make them feel like Democracy will be saved or be maintained as long as they clutch their emotional support weapon. They will watch rights be stripped from them, their neighbours carted off in wagons and none of them will shoot even if they have the weapon on their person while this is happening. They will protest, they will write and verbalize their dissent and they will appeal to authority and band together democratically but the ownership of the weapons themselves are useless. Realistically if someone from the government comes for them they will likely go quietly because no one is coming to save them. At that point it’s basically over. The system is too big to fight.

The real resistance is in numbers not armaments. It doesn’t matter what you are wielding if you have solidarity and organization and the bravery to misbehave. Resistance can be in attacking the gears that make things run by not doing your job or doing it poorly. Refusing to comply in a multitude of ways like sending things to the wrong place or making ‘mistakes’ that cost time and effort to fix. A government can only force compliance so much and at the end of the day runs on good faith. Guns are a distraction to jingle in your face so you stay isolated. Building walls between you and other humans with dreams you will defend your own little fort against the tides of tyranny.