• 1 Post
  • 50 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Depends on the approach. In a lot of queer friendly spaces men’s issues are generally accepted as incredibly valid as gay and trans men tend to get pretty hardcore beat down by failing to pass the bar of the expectations of cultural masculinity and on average they require more outside help from services or others because they are less likely to be able to return to their families to escape abusive relationships and face addictional precarity.

    But the difference tends to be a general understanding that while women definitely get it and can absolutely sympathize they also aren’t in a particularly great position to change things in a general sense because women also have to regularly fight against social power of systems that depower their autonomy that are fronted by men and they generally have to see to their own needs before being able to do the administrative work on men’s behalf.

    It’s emergency airplane crash logic. Put your own supply of air on before you help the person next to you. If your job, legislature, judicial system and potential funding structure is only made up of a minority of women you are asking a lot of people who don’t have institutional power to flex even on their own behalf and a lot of women have deep seated anger regarding that disparity so when someone tries to pile more on their plates the gut reaction is to throw it back. Women might be willing to assist, but they aren’t going to accept doing the lions share of the required admin for another group when they have other priorities. The same goes for queer groups, racial minority groups, religious minorities, disability affected groups and so on. They might have room on their plate to show up to your protest… But usually that requires you to you show a willingness to reciprocate and show up to theirs.



  • A lot of the fear of “conversion” really feels like parents getting ornery because someone might “damage their property” by telling them that being gay is perfectly fine. They want to have the whole heterosexual experience they had but lived vicariously all over again through someone they can pilot through life like a little low maintenance automoton. They want to narrow the field of choices to the ones they want.

    You see it expressed all over the place. If you choose not to want kids or marry, pick a career they don’t understand or would pick for themselves they tighten the thumbscrews. So often they don’t love their kids they just love what they represent… Genetic legacy or bragging rights or a vehicle for constant validation. Being LGBTQIA+ is a threat because that represents paths that they would not have chosen. They can’t empathize or desire it…

    But estrangement has always been a thing. Kids always become adults and adults always have choices… but we never forget what it was like to be a kid without autonomy. One day that kid is going to be able to make their own choices and there’s not a thing their parent can do about it. I love and value my parents because they always treated me like my own person. I always consider their advice seriously and give them a high priority. Fillial piety is no burden when it feels like returning the support and love. It never sits uneasy. I know a lot of people who struggle because they are biologically programmed to have a bond but they just can’t because the choices their parents made amd continue to attempt to make for them has left lasting damage.


  • That there is no tried and true fix for. The US is an old Democracy with a massive cultural complex around not changing anything a founding father sneezed on. There’s some weird exploits in the 9th and 10th Amendments that could potentially cause a massive melt down if a sitting government decided to ever try and use them but it is just theoretical and anti-originalist so it’s unlikely.

    I look at the US government being in a death spiral as a separate but related problem. If your air conditioning isn’t working and your engine is busted, the air conditioner isn’t really your first priority.


  • Basically pass something through government channels to wrest the service from the hands of individualized businesses wearing the skins of hospitals and the business complex of health insurance… Like every other nation who has a social system did at some point in the past.

    It’s kind of easy to forget but like sanitation, fire service, post, police services, hospitals, secular school systems … Those were all exclusively the domain of for profit businesses once. Just because something currently lines someone’s private pockets doesn’t mean that makes it untouchable. It has all been done before. Just wiping out the third party insurance companies alone and socializing the insurance would probably do wonders.




  • That’s kind of my reasoning for thinking this whole bear thing is out of proportion. I grew up knowing how to deal with bears. If you’re talking black bear you make a bunch of scary confusing noise and look big or… If you are already noisy they just steer clear and leave you the fuck alone. You gotta be pretty deep woods to encounter Grizzlies and most of the time they are chill. If they aren’t, play dead or go up a tree.

    I don’t care if all a rando person, male, female non-binary whatever - does is try and strike up a conversation, I don’t go to the woods to socialize. Act like a proper bear and gimme my gorram space!


  • I would argue that the connection is a lot older than Nazis. The era around 1250 responded to a nasty wave of the Black death by Christian leaders collaborating to simultaneously fight abortion by criminalizing abortion friendly midwifery and ostracize and subjugate gender and sexual minorities because they feared the collapse of society due to a population bust. As such what was taught by the church up to that point began to get new connotations. Jewish populations were persecuted and killed as scapegoats for the cause of the plague. Folk medicine women and non-conforming men were killed and condemned for witchcraft. While women stepped up to fill the roles of men during the plague once the population was rebounding their power of place in society was to be broken as the Church leaned on it’s misogynistic practices and preached of the dangers to society and the family…

    Nazisim is just a more modern echo of well established means to break the power of non compliant of groups who can be scapegoated or subjugated into subservience to Christians who feel threatened, a group that centers nominally celebate and wealthy men whose only contact with women is in a subordinate role.



  • Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren’t generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

    It’s just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren’t somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we’re well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch… But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies… chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something “only you are smart enough to believe” - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.



  • Yes you did do it right, lol…and pokemon is pronounced Po- kay (or like Quay) and the same mon as in monster.

    And I absolutely don’t intend to put you on blast. It’s just you can kind of look at language as a kind of technology. That tech can be used to spot minute differences to inform people of a lot of things… Trans people often have to live a little bit like spies in high risk situations so dogwhistles can actually be helpful technology to us assess an environment and risks. Muddying the water can actually make things harder.

    Like I for instance pass mostly as a cis person… though not in the way I would hope for. I am not physically transitioning for partner related reasons so while a lot of people can suspect I am some kind of queer they often falsely assume my gender and pronouns based on my body.

    Because I am always working with new people I basically take mental hits every all day at work that other people are entirely unaware of. It tends to absolutely wreck my self esteem and makes me feel really isolated…But it’s sometimes safer than being “out”. People who make a mistake because they don’t know are trans are a lot easier to deal with then people who know and aren’t adapting well. Like when someone is making a bunch of mistakes with my pronouns it brings way more attention to the fact their brains do not register me as my gender and they are undertaking an artificial process. When they undergo that process I have to work a little harder to teach, and let them know that I am okay, that I understand, reassure them they are doing fine… It takes a lot out of me to do. EVERYONE fucks up pronoun changes. Coming out and getting people used to me is work that I am gunna be doing over and over and over. If I am gunna have to do that I am gunna pick candidates who I know will be worth the personal effort of onboarding or who make my job easier who already have the playbook down and just haven’t put it into practice.

    Currently I am out selectively only to people I judge as safe. How I judge rather people are safe are not is by how they comport themselves. What sort of language they use, how attentive they are when I use they/them pronouns when referring to friends of mine when trading stories, how they react to different conversational topics, what do they find funny and how willing they are to defer to someone else’s needs… It could be veganism, or a religious practice done for comfort or making adjustments for a person with a disability, if you show that you are willing to make concessions or small behavioural changes because you value other people’s comfort that’s a MAJOR green flag.

    It sucks but I am literally running an active risk assessment of everyone I meet in a professional setting. I do this because even if they aren’t actively bigoted they can make my life a hell.

    I had a boss who just wanted to debate trans talking points all the time while we could not leave our posts and I lived in constant fear he’d figure me out… because becoming his personal entrapped ambassador for a community he had zero understanding of was going to add way more patience and effort just to get through my day than any of my coworkers would be required to muster. I would likely lose my job because even if he was not intentionally mean dealing with being the subject of his intensified curiosity and questions that are generally invasive would drive me to either need to leave or do something that would get me fired.

    We trans folk are generally skittish of folk who take a little too much interest in us because of our transness. It’s can be a lot of work to just get people to calm down, not be self conscious around us like you’re scared doing of something wrong and not treat us as special. Just making us feel like comfortably normal people doing regular people things is a wonderful gift. In the case of your store based acquaintance it’s generally safer to like compliment her clothes or jewelry or something. It’s like saying “I think you’re cool” without making her feel self conscious that people are staring at aspects herself that trigger that fear of being observed as something abnormal.

    So if it helps think of the adaptation as learning to speak trans safety code. If you are saying “trans people” in an office full of co-workers who use “transgenders” you are using language technology to fly your green flag in a sea of ambiguously checkered red. We’ll spot you.


  • The thing about that… Is that whether or not something registers as cool or not generally needs to come from the group. As an example you could try to “take back” an n-slur from bigoted use … but if that initiative isn’t coming from the community to whom that term is levied you are basically just using an n-slur because you believe yourself entitled to use the slur for your own personal reasons.

    It’s not just about sticking it to the Conservatives, it’s about listening to the why that comes from a community that is often talked about rather than talked directly to… At best trans people who hear you are going to think you are out completely of touch like people who pronounce pokemon like “Poh-key-man”… Or that you cannot be counted on to listen, that you are a different kind if problem and you are someone to hide from being openly trans around if they can because it’s ultimately safer than rolling the dice against whether you are a transphobe or not. Places (for example a work place) where terms like “transgenders” is openly used without challenge from other people is a message to us that that community is either not safe or at least very very ignorant.







  • Small nomenclature heads up “Transgenders” is a common conservative dogwhistle. In correct use trans and cis or transgender and cisgender are adjectives , it’s always paired with a noun. For example “Transgender people” , “trans woman” , “trans man”. It’s like the rules for the racial term “black”. Drcently cool to use as an adjective but when you hear someone nounify it to “the blacks” it leaves a certain impression.

    The space between the words is actually important as well. In the UK changing the adjective into a noun by removing the space is used by TERF groups when they operate in more public discourse to signal to each other they imply that they aren’t talking about a specific type of man or woman but a distinct second category. As in "That’s not a man, That’s a transman™.

    It’s not a huge deal, nobody’s offended or anything, the post body is obviously trans supportive so nobody is gunna think you are repping the anti-trans agenda or anything but I figure it’s something you’d probably want to know? I am not intending to be pedantic just sorta handily educational.


  • It’s bonkers that you have to actively sign up for it. Canada had conscription on the books as an available tool but like… you never actively signed on or were penalized for not doing that paperwork. In 2021 they ended all mandatory military service and two months ago they removed conscription entirely. Not that it’s possible for conscription to not come back as technically it’s not actively banned, but if it did it would have to be written and implemented as law entirely from scratch and be re subject to the full process of new constitutional challenge and could now be subject to gender discriminations to strictly men as required by current civil rights .

    There’s something about coercing someone to sign their name to paper to register for conscription that feels wrong to me that just accepting a call to conscription doesn’t. Like they want to reduce your resistance to it by making it “voluntary”.