Drivebyhaiku

Drivebyhaiku , 11 hours ago

I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.

Drivebyhaiku , 3 days ago

You are unlikely to if you aren’t in Canada. It seems like Indigenous folk down in the States don’t have quite as much success spreading widespread awareness. I produced some stuff and had to explain to a bunch of Americans what a land acknowledgement was. For the past 5 years where I am they are performed before any meeting or performance. Up here 2S gets top billing at the beginning of the LGBTQIA initnialism to give deference to gender categories that were suppressed by European supremacist colonization.

Drivebyhaiku OP , 4 days ago

At the same time Stonehenge has some delicate evidence of ancient painted designs that requires special imaging equipment to detect that may have been wiped out bu this. There’s a reason why they tend to keep people at a distance from the thing.

Drivebyhaiku , 5 days ago

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.

Drivebyhaiku , 5 days ago

How the absolute hell… During the reply section the correct comment was featured and I swore I double checked… Jerboa, why dost thou forsaketh me?!

Sorry stranger. Keep on being awesome.

Drivebyhaiku , 4 days ago

Oh good! I accidentally replied to the wrong person a couple days ago and had a moment of wondering if maybe my app was fritzed.

Drivebyhaiku , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

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… And that self advocating in that environment is going to be an uphill struggle of dealing with people who are convinced they know what’s best for us more than we do…

Drivebyhaiku , 4 days ago

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.

Drivebyhaiku , 7 days ago

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”.

Drivebyhaiku , 6 days ago

Yup. Bonkers.

Drivebyhaiku , 8 days ago

Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn’t as trans affirming as you would think… My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a “People of Color sport league”.

Ditching us all into a new category like we’re quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we’re implicitly not cis… Isn’t something I would appreciate.

Drivebyhaiku , 8 days ago

It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.

In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.

There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.

It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.

Drivebyhaiku , 8 days ago

I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage…

But there’s another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don’t see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.

Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors… And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.

Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade…

But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.

Drivebyhaiku , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

I think it’s a lot more black and white being trans than people realize and I have my own pet theories about what gender euphoria /dysphoria is that I observe as being two independent factors.

Half of the problem I think in reaching people is that the vast majority of cis people don’t have an observed internal gender preference. We are trying to build empathy with something we as trans people assume they have too - but maybe only a small minority of cis people experience it. I don’t think we actually understand cis people, we just assume a bunch of things about them using trans people as a false opposite.

Thing is… If I am correct, the assumed massive earth shaking regret of what would happen if a cis person went through gender reassignment… Is they might just adapt and be fine.

Drivebyhaiku , 10 days ago

Food is a social construct. For a social construct to exist you have to have a social category with shifting goalposts based on different context and cultural factors that are not rigidly defined. Like “Fat” - what is considered fat for a person is based on context. A supermodel is fat for being 5’9 and 145lbs but we would call a constructiom labourer skinny as fuck at those same dimensions. Each culture constructs it’s own version of what defines “fat” which is different and distinct from something than the medical guidelines for obesity or an expectation of reasonable health. “Fat” is in the eye of the beholder and represents overlapping cultural circles with varying degrees of consideration of what is excluded from the category.

The scientific concept of nutritional substance is not how we always define “food”. Culturally people contest what is considered food vs non food items based on cultural factors. Like eating mice for instance does have nutritional value but there are a lot of people who would contest them as being a valid food item even if they were raised in clean conditions due to cultural adversions. “That isn’t food.” has been uttered in all sincerity by people encountering strange delicacies that their culture has taboos against eating beliving it dangerous, unpleasant or just categorically not something intended to be eaten. Thus “food” would be in part a sociologically constructed category.

Drivebyhaiku , 10 days ago

You are halfway there. Those examples you gave define constructs but a lot of these things are not what philosophy uses to define social constructs. Scientific taxonomy constructs and linguistic constructs are things but they are fairly useless in discussion surrounding social constructs because while different cultures might draw the line differently around what exactly constitutes a “chair” vs say a “stool” or some such that’s more of just a linguistic boundry. Its basically always a thing you sit on.

Philosophy uses a bunch of different ideas labeled as different forms of construct to break down the idea of how different types of categorization or subjection happen… but when they start talking about “social” constructs they are specifically talking about categories of human interactions with something that have incredibly variable different potential contexts based on culture. It also requires things which are included or excluded from those category for not entirely practical reasons. Philosophy uses this to talk about how social categories are subjective creating or allieving tension between different cultural groups.

Food is actually a good example. There are a lot of things culturally considered food and non food items despite those items all having nutritional value and being safe to consume. In our increasingly cosmopolitan world a lot of expansion has happened to increase the size of the category. Like raw fish was not considered a food item by a lot of people when and where I was growing up. Now sashimi is everywhere and no one bats an eye. Digging for another example mice are technically edible but even raised and slaughtered cleanly very few would consider them valid as food. Whether what I put on your plate is deemed an disgusting insult or a delicious delicacy is really in the eye of the beholder and has caused a number of historical diplomatic and cultural issues around other cultures veiwing each other as inferior.

Just because something is a construct does not automatically make it a social construct.

Drivebyhaiku , 11 days ago

Democrats are bad at marketing because a lot of them come from the school of political jousting. It’s easy to lose touch with what the regular person believes politics is rather than the reality of the system where you can’t make solid promises because things can go very wrong and playing the game means setting up long term strategy where best case scenario you have to suck short term losses. They are mostly invested in long term preservation of the system so over promising and under delivering is a held fear. In vulgar terms it is shitting where ideologically eat.

Republicans however basically promise the moon the sun and the stars and then when it doesn’t happen they just rile up their base with anti-federal sentiments to make them rabid. There’s no brakes on the anger machine which means there isn’t a cohesive long term strategy. It’s whatever does the job right here and now so they can as a group benefit off the short term gains. It’s why so many of them are individually crashing and burning. No exit strategy - just commitment to scalp what you can out of the system and ditch before you get consequences. They know they can basically say anything and get what they want.

It’s a major FUBAR situation and Democrats are only now learning how to publicly perform a sense of political urgency.

Drivebyhaiku , 11 days ago

Canadian here, we don’t do that either. Primaries is one of the many additional structural barriers to representive voting being adopted in the US and a step away from having more than two parties in their system. It also increases the campaign costs for candidates and exacerbates the issues with first past the post voting meaning running people becomes an exclusive exercise for the wealthy or people with wealthy patrons who make handshake agreements.

As I understand it, Instead of having parties internally figure out who they are running on the docket as party head like sane people they open it up to basically a second first past the post election of internal candidates. You register as a member of those parties when you register to vote to participate (or not) in the election before the actual election. Personally to one outside that system that just seems like an additional bundle of problems to deal with by doubling down an already outdated voting system that creates further issues of populism but some Americans are very fond of archaic systems. You know something something founders of our nation blah blah can’t change anything our fathers who art in 6ft of dirt didn’t personally come up with blah.

Forgive my glibness. Being a neighbour is hard sometimes.

Drivebyhaiku , 11 days ago

It might be more about what vehicles share the road. SUVs and pickups tend to cause the majority of fatalities in crashes because their bumper height basically being non compatible with cars and vans and their larger blindspots… That design might not play particularly well with the Keis in crash situations.

But that being said SUVs and raised pickups are menaces to road safety across the board and we should be looking at phasing them out.

Drivebyhaiku , 11 days ago

How often do you sit cross legged on the floor? A lot of stretching routines are basic maintenance but getting to actual comfort is a different thing entirely. Getting up regularly and relaxing into floor sitting while watching tv has done me wonders personally. The first while is rough though.

Don’t get an SUV or Raised truck. They might be comfortable but they are dangerous to other vehicles on the road.

Drivebyhaiku , 12 days ago

While some of the posters are tackling the loss of constitutional rights through judicial limitations of those rights… Which is part of the design of those rights… I would like to highlight that you are correct in pointing out some unique flaws in the American system. Utilizing non-violent drug convictions to deny voting rights targets vulnerable populations and make your voting base generally comprised of wealthier individuals and exaggerates the power of racialized police targeting. Both the US and the UK have this… But not all democracies practice this. Many countries have zero restrictions based on felony conviction or imprisonment. The intersection of drug use, rights and the churches involvement in 12 step programs are also not living up to a lot of modern discussions of ethics or the separation of church and state implied in the design of the US.

Practice and design are two different things. Canada does not have a specific division of Church and state anywhere in the body of law. On paper its got an official religion. In practice however it is incredibly secular and most of the citizens believe whole heartedly that religion has no business in government which is backed by a constitutional freedom of religion. The use of 12 step programs is being challenged and dismantled as a breech of these rights. ( www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5391650 )

The 2A rights particularly are more difficult to engage with using international comparison because there are only four democratic countries that have a specific constitutional right to bear arms and two impose further restrictions and deference to law inside the body of right itself. The only countries with so broad a written constitutional right to bear arms is the US and Guatemala. Other countries that guarantee those rights do so inside their body of regular law which means that right is not elevated. It can be more easily ammended and changed by sitting bodies and it interacts with criminal law and licencing programs more fluidly.

This structural difference is important. It is supposed to provide additional protections. However the cultural nature of guns is under public challenge. The US isn’t nessisarily playing by it’s intended design because in part from a written standpoint the 2A is a mess. The issue with old democracies is that they were kind of in Beta and the wording of those laws do not match the modern standardized code that comprises the body of active civil and criminal law and that leaves more than normal room for personal interpretation. The cultural nature to hold the constitution as a holy document that cannot be updated for function sake for mostly sentimental reasons means that you basically don’t get the last word on these things or a solid grasp of whether something is constitutional until a Supreme Court majority interprets the archaic document in basically whichever way they please. There are logistical issues with treating law like a precious artwork instead of a practical tool.

Drivebyhaiku , 12 days ago

It depends on context. If you are dealing with a percentage of overall types of ingredients by volume without changing the variety of ingredients you would probably use “less”. Like if you reduced the mix of milk related ingredients. You would use “fewer” to indicate that the number of individual ingredients had changed. Like if they got rid of two of the ingredients of an original ten.

This could be a category error?

Drivebyhaiku , 11 days ago

I mean it could be using the percentages of another number. Like if there’s 20 ingredients and you drop one it’s a 5% reduction or if you added other non natural ingredients that would cause the percentage to drop… But whether it’s less or fewer would depend on information we don’t readily have because we don’t know if it’s ingredients by volume or of it’s a reformulation of ingredients… and may be at the crux of this grammatical problem depending on what you assume is going on?

Drivebyhaiku , 15 days ago

Yeah… If anyone starts talking too much about the shape of the human skull as if that means anything whatever they are selling ain’t worth the pitch

Drivebyhaiku , 15 days ago

Yes it does suck on your end but on the other side of the phone your perspective date is probably having a whole mental breakdown about it. For a lot of trans folk disclosure is absolutely nessisary as early as possible and preferably for safety reasons not when you are face to face…

Buuuut they also are very likely to get really vile transphobic backlash from a perspective date as much as they are honest rejections based on genital preference which sucks to be rejected for but is nobody’s fault. There’s a lot of trans people out there who feel like they are never going to be given a chance. Either way steeling themselves for one form of rejection or a vile reminder of the awful people out there who think you are subhuman and are offered up a nice juicy target on which to let loose their bigotry does tend to make for disordered social niceties. Once someone has been burned enough they get pretty damn shy and the procrastination is more of a case of battling personal traumas until the last possible second where one absolutely must do the right thing.

I would advise not taking it too personally.

Drivebyhaiku , 17 days ago

Truth, Saskatchewan tends to echo a lot of the transphobic legislation of the States. They passed a law requiring parents to give consent to use requested pronouns in schools. The place isn’t what one would call “trans issue forward”. I could totally see some ass backwards planning committee thinking it would be great before belatedly remembering the sort of people who attend these sorts of charity events actually tend to be fairly empathetic to their fellow humans…

Drivebyhaiku , 17 days ago

Are you kidding? It’s a comedian’s job to read the room and tell when their set isn’t landing for shit and change tactics on the fly. Maybe he’s got his own shit niche but he should learn the basics of tact if he wants gigs.

It’s not the audience’s fault when a comedian bombs. It’s his own damn fool self.

Drivebyhaiku , 17 days ago

Branding. Democrats, for all their ills, do care about playing by the rules and optics of potential unfair conduct. Republicans generally know their base will believe anything they feed them but Democrats know people at home who make up their support are following along with the rule book. If they ditch their brand as the moral high ground between the two choices their goose is cooked.

Drivebyhaiku , 18 days ago

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

Drivebyhaiku , 21 days ago

Social democracy is a subsection inside the umbrella of Socialism. So she’s both.

Drivebyhaiku , 24 days ago

Diplomatic Immunity is granted by a host country and by the country the diplomat came from. It’s not automatically extended. The US historically automatically grants a President diplomat authority but a country can refuse even the highest ranked ambassador if they so choose.

I might be mistaken but whether or not Trump would be admitted to a country with one of these policies it would likely go to a individual vote or decision making authority of whatever governing body runs the country whether or not to grant him a personal exemption due to his political position.

It is also worth mentioning that Trump made some really petty and genuinely awful political decisions that created a lot of hardship for some of the countries on this list. A lot of his wheeling and dealing has been picked apart in courts and actually caused the US some issues since in international trade courts. It may be entirely possible that a country with a grudge would disallow a US president entry which could be quite the setback for the US in multinational bargaining and soft diplomacy.

Drivebyhaiku , 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

Technically speaking the wickedness of the cities that were under divine review were because they were narcissistic, enjoyed excess and “prosperous ease” without considering properly the poor and did “abominable acts” before God. Those abominable acts could have been anything. We get the homosexuality related misconception because the test involved hosting two angelic dignitaries disguised as humans whom a mob decended on an demanded they let them “know”…

Funny trick here. The original Hebrew text used for the angels was anashim and the OG word Lot uses for them when he greets the dignitaries is non-gendered as analogous to “master”. Anashim is a non-gendered term, it encompasses specifically both the terms woman and man and means “of mankind”. However, the English translations of the Bible use male gendered terms like “Lords” “Gentlemen” and “Men” for the angels… Meaning the lust for the angels in the original story was probably not gendered. The angels in the original are not named nor gender coded in any way but there were specifically two of them. We might interpret this to mean there were either angels that appeared to be of both genders or that the genders were deliberately not important because the pluralism means they are never gendered by any other mention in the story. Just as in English when a plural is used it disguises the individual nature of the particular makeup of the group. The crowd calls to know “them”.

The test was ultimately a litmus test failure of the town to show it lived up to the laws of hospitality and morality but there’s nothing specifically outlining gay sexuallity in the original text of that story moreso than any other sexuallity. The abominations could have been anything and the horny onslaught against the angels was potentially supposed to be coded as lust to defile or possess the divine or even just a lack of consent. The crowd isn’t asking if the angels want to come out and play, they are demanding it.

In the end it was a bunch of English translators who had very specific cultural ideas about who was worthy of the term “Master” that occluded any potential of the feminine potential reading and were the ones who through the cultural game of telephone made it a story about gay sex. It kind of benefited the Church to make it less a story about hoarding wealth and comfort because a lot of individual Churches were very VERY wealthy.

Drivebyhaiku , 24 days ago

I have a lot of compassion for people who have been poisoned with toxic masculinity. The toxicity comes from a place quite abusive to men. It demands a vision of a man who is what I think of as emotionally castrated. Completely denied any exhibitions of passive sadness, outward facing compassion, grief, fear or desire for anything outside a small range of approved desires. In return they are given tools of violence, silence, denial and anger to express virtually everything. To ask for help is framed as failure. The people whom they love have to interpret their sense of love and compassion only through grandiose acts or through that narrow conduit of allowed emotional reactions… But it is so hard to connect with someone through the medium of anger.

When people are told “suck it up! Be a man!” it make those things aspirational… But it’s just the sugar around the outside of the conditioning. The inside is bitter isolation. I will always remember my Mom telling me that my Dad was so scared to have sons. He didn’t think he could do right by sons. He struggled so hard with his own conditioning but it never suited him. It never suited my grandfather to whom my Dad always felt like he communicated with always at a distance, the mask only cracking when he was sick in hospital and my Granddad never left his bedside. A deep reservoir of feeling that could never be expressed except in silence between men except under extremes. A strict taboo of self denial… For what?

Undoing that damage is so hard even when you are aware of it. The toxicity can’t always be healed and some of that damage is permanent.

Drivebyhaiku , 26 days ago

I was a localization playtester at Koei for their release of Gundam Musou and played the game 40 hours a week as a job looking for errors in the Subtitles. We started with the subtitle with Japanese version and so about two weeks in I get a massive anime style fever and end up living stuck in the video game’s stupid hackneyed story mode. Everybody in the dream was speaking Japanese way beyond my extraordinarily basic level so I was frustrated that I couldn’t understand anything, It was a dull and repetitive hack and slash which I would occasionally revive and wake up from briefly to sigh with relief that it was over at last before passing out and going right back in. I was rescued 16 hours later by my housemates who were worried when I didn’t check in.

It was bizarrely hellish.

Drivebyhaiku , 28 days ago

I usually go for processesing them into kibble route while the non-cannabal friendly colonists take a walk to the next colony over. If you cross me then my ducks will feast on your pulped and dried flesh. Thems the rules.

Drivebyhaiku , 28 days ago

It’s a little different with gender. Like consider if I was ugly and I hate the experience of living in my body despite It’s generally considered pretty impolite to comment on that sort of thing. A barista saying “Good day ugly person, how would you like your coffee?” would probably elicit frowns and gasps from onlookers. Like it’s generally possible to go around knowing you’re not great looking because you are no surprise to yourself but it’s possible to exist in a state where you are not always conscious of the perceptions and thoughts of how other people code you because your attention can be allowed to drift. But the constant feedback snaps you back into place.

Gender comes with a whole bunch of assumptions, way people unconsciously react, restrictions on places and events where you are considered an oddity and commentary. How often does a person refer to you in the third person where you can hear? How often are you called “sir” or “ma’am”. Every instance of that happening in society is lke that person being called ugly by the barista above. You are suddenly aware of the way your body is preceieved and all the social baggage in your life that you have to deal with. For the rest of the world being called mister, sir, miss or ma’am doesn’t strike the same cord as “ugly” does in everyone. The people who feel nothing from those gendered words don’t even notice them. But when you are trans you are reminded the same way you are if you stand naked before a mirror.

Because when I was figuring myself out there wasn’t much information about the existence of trans people I didn’t really know surgery was an option I could pursue. There were issues with my body that puberty had already made irreversible and there’s a moment you realize no fairy godmother is going to come out of the woodwork to make things right. So I sobbed long and hard in the shower just in complete dispair that this was it. No one would ever see the real me, I would be invisible trapped my life would never be better. That this was it.

I ended up not transitioning for reasons of love. My partner whom I love more than life has a phenotype preference. Normally I have a lot of tricks to get through my day. I distract myself, I try never to linger in front of mirrors and when I do I try to focus on the clothes I am wearing or my hair or the scraps of my physical appearance I like. I ask my friends to use names, pronouns and social aspects of gender to help me continue on crutches through my social interactions… But whenever I am misgendered in public or on the phone a part of me goes right back to that moment in the shower every single time. It can happen multiple times a day because I don’t pass. People freely remark on my biggest hatred of my physical experience on this earth directly to my face and there is not a damn thing I can do about it but take the hit most days because out there what’s happening is normal. I live in that world because the sacrifice I made ultimately brings me joy regularly…but my relationship isn’t typical. It’s not everyone who finds someone they feel is worth making daily sacrifices to be with and it requires a lot of things to be going right in my life to be okay. But I still have bad days… If I remained stuck in that moment in the shower over and over again with nothing to show for my trouble and no way out that feels like relief I would be tempted to do a lot worse than just slice off a couple of chunks of flesh.

Being fat holds social stigma sure… But how strong could you be in the face of that if people, not just cruel ones, everyone, made oinking noises in your wake everywhere you go?

Drivebyhaiku , 28 days ago

I think you would probably see a massive upset in the binary trans community if there was a push to a fully “gender free” world. Consider that a lot of binary trans people don’t like the custom of introducing themselves with their pronouns. They want to allow the cultural signifiers to do the talking for them and some feel like having to constantly say their pronouns is essentially people not reading and validating their physicality. Pronoun introductions are an accommodation specifically for non-binary trans people who don’t have cultural visual signifers that allow that read. Gender presentation is a form of language. Like if you like to dress and culturally act like a woman that doesn’t nessisarily mean you are trans. Femboys might strike some as being trans people but they aren’t. Being trans ultimately comes down to a combo of how you feel about your physical body

Also just because two things are social constructs doesn’t mean they operate on the same rules. Fat is a social construct that we are actively working as a society to deconstruct. It’s basically on a culture by culture basis but because all human populations have differently sized people that’s a universal fight. Race however isn’t like that. It is tied into long histories with complex power dynamics. People around the world do have medical procedures to lighten their skim because of beauty standards caused by occupation by European powers that treated being the lightest beige as a moral issue. We are in the midst of trying to deconstruct that narrative and divorce it from the legacy of supremacy. Maybe in the far future when we’ve put those supremacist narratives to bed and not treated different peoples like the things that they hold as culturally sacred is something we can play dress up in for giggles then we could talk about cross racial stuff… But ultimately respect comes from honoring boundaries.

As for the question about black people in the states. I am not black. I can’t speak for that community with authority but I understand that a lot of the people I personally know would rather widen the constructs that exist around beauty to recognize what they have is also beautiful and wonderful. Like the people you love are beautiful to you. If the faces of the people who raised and loved you are a color that society values less it doesn’t mean you value it less you want other people to see them the way you naturally do.

Your last question is difficult because it’s not the gender construct but the construct of sex… Which I know is really weird but sex is also a construct. The preservation of the idea of what is phenotypically male or female has it’s own history as being constantly proven to not be a binary. “Gender” had the original origins of existing to try and preserve the idea of a sexual binary by applying a sort of sex supremacist narrative. There is a LOT of pressure trans people face to adhere to a cultural idea of sex and a lot of gatekeeping that happen regarding treating someone’s gender as valid only if they look the part… But that’s only half the story. I know trans women who would sell their souls to have periods and get pregnant and breastfeed and experience all the messy aspects of physical femaleness that women routinely complain about. That’s not a cultural desire. Personally I don’t care so much about ever having kids. I am functionally a gay man. Do I wish I could properly be a top and have boners and ejaculate and all that stuff. Yeah sure. It’s really hard to get aroused when you are limited by hardware you don’t like interfacing with but because I care more about other functionalities of day to day of getting by in society. Even if everyone called me by the correct pronouns without fail and didn’t treat me like I was at best a preteen boy and invited me to the cookouts it wouldn’t stop me from falling into a week long depression every time I had to buy a new pair of pants. I can never look good to myself this way. People who know what I need still fuck up from time to time and I can tell their brain codes me based on my physical characteristics. As much as they try to stop it that reflex is baked in and me asking them to help me is introducing a cognitive load that they don’t have with people who have physically transitioned to the point where the switch in the veiwer’s brain actually flips. So the answer to your final question is both yes and no. Some people would be fine with using non-binary coping strategies which would cause some people to be more content without resorting to surgery but ultimately others would not because the root isn’t always strictly cultural.

Drivebyhaiku , 27 days ago

As much as you seem to want trans racial stuff to be a thing at present it’s a pretty frowned on practice. Most of the trans community look at broaching the discussions about it to be straight up transphobic because there is at present one guy out there named Oli London who currently has used his desire to look like a Korean popstar and other antics more or less as stunts for attention and has become the sort of thing transphobes point to to regularly use to discredit both trans narratives and questions around disrespectful cultural appropriatation as being crazy or to derail and discredit people of color who have been very clear that they are not a costume or an identity group that accepts new members that way. If you want to try cosmetically race swapping that’s basically up to you but at present you’d likely be pretty isolated and potentially make a lot of enemies because you’d be seen as trying to pit trans people against people of color. Beyond what is ethical or not the subject makes me personally uncomfortable not the least because it’s a narrative that often seeks to try and pin trans people into some kind of double standard. We are a group of people who feel the way we do about sex and gender. We have zero insights into people who want to change racial characteristics. If they exist at all and not just for attention seeking troublemaking then what they are doing is a conversation to have with them and whatever racial group they seek to emulate.

Something I also notice is that you keep saying being trans is dependant on beauty standards… Which is misguided. While there are trans people who seek to be beautiful a lot of that os more from a hunger for validation. Cis people desire beauty just as offen. But most of the trans people in my immediate circle are more… How do I say this… Aiming for personal comfort rather than beauty? Like don’t get me wrong I would like just once in my life to dress up for a wedding and not feel like a dysphoric wreck for trying to find clothing that doesn’t bring attention to the issues of being the opposite proportion from what I wish I was…but I don’t feel the need to be a handsome bloke. I just want to wear clothes to a special event that don’t need to be tailored all to fucking hell, clean up a little nicer than usual and not feel like a complete steaming pile of shit… But if my partner was properly bi and someone was like “Okay you will be instantly fully transformed into a man but you will look like you hit every branch on the ugly tree.” yeah. I wouldn’t mind that.

I use being ugly as a parable to cis people because generally from what I have gatherered its not like the vast majority have an intrinsic internal gender preference at all. Most of you have, as far as I can tell, never experienced anything like actual gender euphoria so I can’t use the experience of what gender incongruity feels like directly. Because of that I have to use things as analogs though they are always imperfect. Description of some of the paradoxes of gender dysphoria and euphoria are really difficult to conjure properly because it properly has to do with a sense of recognition…

You know that reaction you have when you see another human and you instantly recognize whether they are of a masculine or feminine body type and if you encounter someone who could be either it inspires that curiosity and attention while you try and figure it out because there’s a chunk of your brain that treats that information as vitally important? Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria works through that mechanism. Your internal sense of yourself is one thing but your external peices register to yourself as not matching so it causes this strict mental disconnect. The result is you feel very empty. Your name never feels like it belongs to you. It’s something you respond to as a function but it feels like it belongs to someone else. Your existence feels like you are performing a part in a play. Your friendships exist behind this barrier where you want desperately to feel connected but they never quite understand you or it feels like they are somehow keeping you at arms length. Nothing feels authentic to you, you might as well not even really be there because it’s all functionality happening to someone else. Then enevitably you play around with gender performance somehow. Doesn’t matter what, a short haircut, you wear a dress, someone says “oh sorry sir!” when they bump into you and you get a sudden flash of existing. For that little moment you suddenly feel real. It’s a thrilling feeling like you have been invisible all your life but suddenly someone saw you! Desire flares up to connect and ne present and exist in your own skin because for a second it feels like you are actually THERE for once. Dysphoria can feel like intense jealousy for the things that make you feel more alive but more often than not it’s this sort of numbness.

Cis people often don’t nessisarily understand it until they actually experience a trans person they know transition and then there’s a moment somewhere along the line where that recognition mechanism kicks in and they actually start experiencing that person as their gender… or they see the difference in how someone who used to struggle and seem sort of listless, anxious and absent suddenly is very vibrantly living in the moment and is sharp and attentive. Unless you’ve properly transgressed that boundary yourself it’s difficult to properly explain the phenomenon.

Drivebyhaiku , 27 days ago

I think there’s something of a difference between the nature of being praised for gender conformity and the mechanisms of gender euphoria. The main thing is that euphoria and dysphoria is completely independent of any external reward systems and often contradicts social rewards for conformity. If you are reacting to someone’s praise that isn’t gender euphoria that’s more like social conditioning. Cis people definitely do gender as per the philosophy of Gender performativity and we as social animals react to praise for doing something correctly… but Gender euphoria as trans people experience it is something more like a built in reward system which continually fires off feedback.

I have met cis people who definitely have described experiencing gender euphoria or dysphoria but they really aren’t common. Ask cis folk if you were to wake up tomorrow and you were physically the other gender how would you react to that and more often than not the answer is basically that you think you’d adjust after a period of weirdness to your new role just fine. If you fall into that category I think you are not actually a person who experiences internal gender preference, you just experience gender as a source of praise for participating in culture. It is a much rarer cis person who answers that they would feel a profound sense of loss and horror in that situation. It’s lead me to believe that there is a cis equivalent of the trans experience of gender silently living their best lives but are about as rare as trans people are demographically while most cis people are functionally null gender. While null gender people may register that they are part of a group it’s a matter of practicality. Whatever box they get sorted into they just want to perform the box well. They do not see their gender as being intrinsic to them at a level of fundamental need.

My controversial opinion is I think some people do soul searching regarding this trait and eventually end up in the non-binary community and come to a sort of agender or gender politic where they simply feel societies gender norms are limiting and bullshit because they recognize it means nothing personally to them. While non-binary is under the trans umbrella and some non-binary people experience euphoria/dysphoria just regarding a mix of phenotype or experience it on an inconsistent basis some people use the term “non trans non-binary or genderqueer” to describe that particular state of feelings that gender isn’t something that resonates with them deeply… But that identity may lie on an assumption that cisness is dependent on a internal inante sense of gender and that all cis people basically have an innate gender sense it just is in alignment.

The thing is with the cis experience is that people don’t really ask “what makes a person cis?” We as trans people are driven to try and figure out internally and legitimize to cis people why we are the way we are because we present to them as something broken. Cis people are just assumed to be functioning so we don’t really dig into their mechanisms to understand the other half of gender from an veiwpoint that treats transness and cisness from a neutral standpoint that values the two states of being as equal. From a trans point of view we can tell that what most cis people describe doesn’t at all sound like what we are experiencing. When they try to assert that they do they sub in things that made them feel good that was gender related but the thing that made them feel good about it was feeling confidence knowing that they are being rewarded externally somehow.

But we as trans people also understand being showered with compliments or feeling reaffirmed by milestone social rituals that have a gendered component come from the outside world and sink in. I experienced a lot of compliments and social ritual for my gender performance back when I was performing cis normativity and while I did feel rewarded and flattered for the efforts of essentially performing gender it was like someone was complimenting a costume I was wearing. I did great job on the costume woo! Attention and acolades yay! ! But it felt like doing a drag performance or a wearing a Halloween costume. Most trans people have a period where they try and perform their birth sex’s gender norms intensely, better than anyone trying to fill that numbness with a different form of external praise from extreme conformity. It’s why so many trans women end up in the military. They are trying to overide the innate internal voice by utilizing the methods of validation. Performing the socially expected archetype does have a reward system that can feel good. But it’s like trying to drink water to combat being hungry. It will fix your thirst if you are thirsty but a fundamentally different need is what is demanding satisfaction.

While we haven’t typified if there is a specific physical structure of the brain that underlies transness I do think that there is something rather specific. When I speak to other trans people my age even though we all grew up isolated there are parts of our experience that is intimately recognizable to each other. However it’s my worry that if we ever figured out a mechanism that underlies transness people would essentially try to fix that structure as being “the problem”.

Throughout history trans people have existed on the axis of gender having come to their identities entirely in a vacuum which makes me think that it’s got something to do with potential structures of the brain we do not yet fully understand and that identifing cis people who experience actual gender euphoria might be the key to actually pinpointing it. I have definitely had some involved conversations with this variety of cis person and a number of them also recognize that they do not experience gender like other cis people do. That there is a fundamental difference in their experience between brain and body than other cis people and when they talk to us they understand us almost instantly more implicitly.

Trans racial people thus far seem to be a minority amoung minorities. It seems to me the people who describe their experiences point to pop culture depictions or idealized stereotypical notions of their desired cultural experience rather than a lived experience the same way people want to be medieval knights or jedi or fursonas and adopt those aesthetics as being identities but it’s entirely possible that I am wrong. I am not their psychologist. I just know that if it’s honestly held belief based out of a biological based imperitive it’s got about a thousand tons of cultural baggage to wade through and of that’s the case I wish them luck.

Drivebyhaiku , 27 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

I think there is a misunderstanding there. Like I said gender incongruence is really hard to explain. You keep describing gender from the perspective I commonly see from cis people which treat both gender and physicality very flippantly. You said it yourself - you don’t think you feel or percieve gender but look at is as a series of universal characteristics and that genetalia are just body parts… But that is not how I experience gender nor does that explanation resonante with most trans people I have talked with. Within many of us dwells a deep preference to embody a certain physicality and cultural spot in it’s physical, mental and spiritual aspects.

When I am speaking with women there is a deep feeling that they are alien to me. I understand them from a place of having experienced their socialization and I may be friends and admire them but my brain registers them as distinctly not like me. The company of men, cis or trans, however there is a spark of recognition and feeling of likeness. With my body there is not just a preference but a sharp sense of repugnance for aspects that do not align. Pregnancy is not just off the table - the idea is abhorrent - like I used to routinely punch myself in the guts over and over again when such considerations arose to the point where I risked perforating organs and was told my my doctor that I needed to stop. But the idea of fulfilling the biological role of pregnancy or experiencing the faintest brush of motherhood was so alien to my sense of identity that I knew that if I were ever in a place where I was forced to go through that it wouldn’t matter what happened afterwards, even if things were to conclude with no lasting physical damage the result of that history in my experience would be so at odds with my sense of self that there is literally no force on earth that would keep me alive. I would find something very tall and jump.

I experience what some would term an extreme gender preference/aversion. My exterior secondary sex attributes are ultimately more tolerable. It is an understatement to say I do not like them but I can value them as things my partner likes. My main issue with them being that they create a distance between me and other men. My male friends who despite my wishes still subconsciously react to me as though I am “other” ranging from them treating me like a young boy or with the sort of physical touchy dynamic they reserve for their female friendships. They do not subconsciously react to my friends who have gone through HRT that way… Not even close.

I grew up in a household with lax gender norms. I fundamentally believe that being one sex or another should present no limitations. I live in one of the most trans friendly cities in the world where there is fairly widespread acceptance… But as much as the discussions of gender egalitarianism try and place things in the strict realm of being just performativity that is not my experience. I think actually the belief is way too optimistic and the invention resulting from null-gender genderblindness . It doesn’t matter how open minded people individually become at some level they still subconsciously react to perceived sex characteristics and we as trans people are hyper aware of this and whatever compells us comes from within. I have torn apart my own mind trying to pinpoint it’s source but it’s ineffable as much as it’s all consuming.

There’s something in the satisfaction rate of gender affirming surgeries for trans people which is incredibly unusual. The common satisfaction rate for run of the mill cosmetic surgeries is about 75% to 90%. With trans bottom surgery, the biggest scariest one most likely to have complications that effect your pelvic floor muscles and represent a potential loss of ability. A surgery where 15% of the total surgeries basically do not meet the requirements medical professionals have for considering it to be a success. That surgery has a regret rate of 2%. That’s an incredible statistical anomaly. I know people in the 15% one of them spent 2 years unable to walk more than two city blocks without crippling pain and will likely not ever recover her pelvic floor to full… She is emphatic that even if she got the guaranteed same outcome all over again she would not hesitate to have that surgery over again rather than live as she was. That is not how most surgeries are recieved. For contrast very safe fast procedures with no downtime fhat are strictly aesthetic in nature for both cis and trans patients even minor imperfections in results cause massive craters in the data.

It’s why we trans people tend to react aggressivively when people try to trivialize the issue. We regularly meet resistance by people who as far as we can tell are not capable of understanding the actual severity and experience of gender preference. We can explain it over and over again but 9/10 cis people will keep trying to tie it to your own experiences with self perception and it never works. It never accurately describes the journey we are on or our takeaways from our interactions with other people

Drivebyhaiku , 26 days ago

The whole “women do not feel alien to cis men” is part of my point about internal gender preference. Though I do think some cis men do experience it through a “I do not understand women” mindset or treat them as they are fundamentally and irreconcilably different than men. It’s difficult to untangle that from the male supremacist cultural understanding of women in practice but I think the sentiment also exists in part neutrally as part of the experience of cis men with internal gender preference.

And in regards to your assertion about it being externally motivated, while it took me awhile to untangle my feelings from internalized misogyny I really don’t think the two are at all related. I long ago came to the conclusions that yes culture tends to create narratives of female inferiority and that I was not immune to those narratives and questioned whether I was simply running away from that. I managed to neutralize my veiws on the matter in an attempt to self soothe and I lived in that space for a few years. It doesn’t touch dysphoria or euphoria but it does made it easier to spot it’s source, but the strength of aversion can only be passified by feeding it something else. In my case I have to continuously feed it a lot of logic. And I do mean a LOT of logic. This can be survivalist logic (if you let this stop you from participating in public you will eventually become miserable which will weaken the ties you have to other things ) the logic of my decisions (personal quick mantra - I would take a bullet to this person I am in love with I can make smaller daily sacrifices) or cultural logic (cis men exist who don’t fit this paradigm either) or ideological logic (you believe that society is shallow and your plight regarding your physicality echos prifoundly harmful beauty standards. You have the strength to manage and see the benefits inherent to being ugly, you can apply that as needed to your body)… But the thing is with that logic pool is it has to keep being applied as a coping mechanism. I can literally never stop. The source is never based in logic. It’s like trying to bail out a boat with a hole in the bottom. I can stay afloat but it takes continuous applied effort. I have embraced a stoic philosophy approach to try and weaken my reaction to external hits… But it the size of the hole in the bottom of the boat is a constant. Being reminded of my physicality by outside sources is just a wave that forces more water through the hole in the bottom. It’s a reaction below and not goverened by the conscious mind.

As to suicide. Touchy subject. My dad died in early 2019 and the way he managed it we will never find his body. It is a loss that continues to fuck my family up and the only reason I made it to adulthood at all was knowing that my family would never get over my loss. I have a friend right now who is at constant risk but after thinking about it pretty intensely I realize that there is no bulletproof logic to keep someone alive if their misery is intense enough. My lifeline relied on surgical fixes. I have never needed an abortion (thankfully. I do not want to think about what sort of panic I would be in if that was a reality) and it took me a long time to convince people medically that I was a candidate for sterilization… But that is in part gender related care for trans people. In a reasonably pro-choice country my chances of survival were not bad. In a post hysterectomy situation I closed off that loophole for good but holy hell did I need to fight for it. No one would give me one in my 20’s so I lived in constant fear for a decade even with the best contraceptives money could buy. I literally had to refuse to leave a gynecologist’s office peacefully and get emergency backup from my GP on the phone that I was hurting myself before they gave their signoff and I was 32 and still facing “But you’re still young you’ll probably regret it!” bullshit.

But it cannot be denied that the reason for that pushback is because a low percentage of cis women who have hysterectomies report a profound and constant sense of loss. Essentially they seem to me they are experiencing cis gender dysphoria. But the thing about that is the vast majority of cis women don’t experience that symptom. Only about 2-3% of the post surgical population surveyed expressed that particular symptom. It strikes me that might be a window into the number of cis people who actually experience true internalized gender preference…which would put it in the statistical ranges of other recognized populations of structural neurodivergence like Autism (1%) or ADHD. (3% - 5%). It is my belief that being transgender is a further subset of the population who experiences internalized gender preferences but with an additional complication of that internalized compass pointing other than what their physicality supports. However because cis people with internalized gender preferences supply no burden on the systems that exist and oftentimes the people themselves are unaware until something goes wrong with their sexual conception of themselves we have no recognized population to study.

Anti-suicidal lifelines can break if you don’t do what’s nessisary to keep yourself alive or if you are not provided with lifelines. A lot of trans people lose a lot of their lifelines when they come out as trans. If you find yourself out of a job with no close relationships what keeps you alive becomes precarious. Suicidal episodes can occur as periods of intense logic overriding hysteria. They can come over you very quickly at a heightened strength and it’s not everyone’s fault that they fall prey to it. Not everyone who commits suicide is anywhere near their right mind at the time. That said there are people for whom life isn’t ever going to get better. They have done all their thinking and the benefits of death outweigh the trouble of maintaining life. Their deaths almost always leave people behind who are traumatized by their passage by different degrees so while our cultural aversion to suicide is founded you can’t fix the problem by simply adding more social pressure through stigma to stay alive. If someone really wants to die they will do it. If someone has circumstances for a hard out then there’s not much you can do to stop them. You can imprison them and leave them no opportunities to easily kill themselves quickly and efficiently but you can’t really make them want to live long term. If you can’t fix the underlying problem you just leave a timebomb. Ultimately suicide is something we as a society should try and prevent. Individually the cause collateral damage, but you have to be active at addressing a bunch of personal issues.

On a completely separate note.

It is also probably worth correcting a misconception. I do not fully rationalize or identify myself as a man. Part of my coping mechanisms involve partial denial of fulfilling that role in it’s entirety and compromising utilizing a non-binary function. I recognize and conceptualize myself as existing lodged in a halfway state which allows me to manage my situation. My desire for physical maleness is pretty much on par with any binary trans man but I try logic my way into seeing myself as a complete being as I am now as a matter of the compromises I routinely make. I am a part of the trans masculine non-binary community if you want to be specific about it.

Drivebyhaiku , 26 days ago

I am not rolling my eyes about a shift to a more non-binary society. I think absolute destigmatization and democratization of gender roles, stereotypes and culture at large would be a boon to a lot of different groups. Heck they/them pronouns being the norm until you know someone’s preference actually benefits non-binary and non-gender conforming people and put to bed more toxic femininity and toxic masculinity. Allowing humans to just be whatever appeals to them personally would allow us to better appreciate the individual natures of people. It also will reduce the pressures that do exist for some people which will stop some people from feeling the need to aggressively align with the sexual binary for the sake of survival or who have to keep their identity quietly under wraps at present. It would be ultimately a good and healthier place to gravitate towards. Ultimately treating gender more flippantly does allow people to feel less like it’s a chain around their neck and more of a toy that can be engaged with for the sheer fun of it. Because gender euphoria is just that - joy. Trans narratives often center around pain and dispair but it’s one half of the equation. The other half is just experiencing at it’s most extreme a very wild almost drug-like illogical emotional high. People like to play and a lot of people deny themselves play because of these cultural narratives of shame and tradition. It’s in part why the gay community has ballroom culture and drag. A lot of that doesn’t from a place of transness, they are just doing it because once you’re considered a failure of the standard it’s easier to transgress other rules. If they are gunna hate you anyway for the thing that you can’t change why care what they think?

Just as political lesbianism was a thing in the 80’s we are seeing I think a rise in political non-binary identities. If you think a more non-binary society is a good thing than I agree!

But conversely I think gender affirming care that deals with physical transition is probably going to remain a nessesity even in that kind of senario and we’ll probably see more instances of gender “kit bashing” as the walls around sexual stigmas are further challenged.

The society you mention already is having it’s trial run. Where I live there’s a much wider swath of the community that participates in the genderqueer social conventions of society. It is of course seeing pushback from Conservative groups as they are trialing things like gender neutral bathrooms in K-12 schools but as far as the conversations around LGBTQIA+ issues we’ve always been about a decade ahead of the States.

Drivebyhaiku , 24 days ago

Ah, I was being glib. It’s from the Warhammer modelling community. Basically where you take multiple models types and meld them into unique configurations. Some of us in the more geeky enby community use it to mean ideal physical transition goals that do not align to a strict binary sex phenotype.

Drivebyhaiku , 22 days ago

I’ve played my share of MTG but dripped out of it pre covid. I could only ultimately afford one money sink at a time. Warhammer is very good at creating an addiction to paint. I would warn you off it if you wish to safeguard your funds. There’s ways to go about it responsibility supposedly. Necromunda or Killteam are toted as such options… Probably just a gateway drug though.

Dollar for dollar though Gaslands is where it’s at. Way more fun at the table and you play with whatever Hot Wheels and Matchbox you want to mod into Mad Max nonsense. Game takes about the same time to play as a Warhammer game but is way more entertaining.

Drivebyhaiku , 22 days ago

Mostly paint. Once you get that sweet sweet high pigment paint and all the fun technical paints it’s hard to go back. One little bottle will set you back like 8 bucks. 3D prints generally don’t have the detail of the character models and while lots of people use prints for terrain the actual models exist under severe copywrite and you can’t participate in tournament events unless you have official models fully painted at least three colors (This exists basically to keep the core a painting based community and funnel more people towards the part of the hobby where gamestores make more money).

Like I said… Gaslands or if you really must - Mordheim. If you go Gaslands your local Toys R Us will supply you with everything you need for a game for 5 bucks. Your entry level Killteam is about 70 bucks just for the models.

Drivebyhaiku , 27 days ago

I mean I am having a blast writing a novel here. This has been one of the funnest interactions I have had on one of these platforms in years. I came from a family that couldn’t afford to put me through a philosophy or literature based degree and had to be more practical about vocational training for the job that would feel more fulfilling because I didn’t want a job in acedemia. I have way too much ADHD for that. Still I imbibe to a god awful number of podcasts and books on the subject and pick the brains of my buddies who did go to school mercilessly. My sibling actually wrote their dissertation for their Masters on dystopias in science fiction and became a librarian and got a lot of benefit telling me about the major points as a way to codify their own understanding. It has been requested that if they ever display a desire to go for their PHD that I should smack them… But I secretly hope they do.

I love Dune particularly as an example because it’s got a lot all of these weird neat sticky points that intersect with the field of indigenous philosophy and unpacking colonialism which has become a personal interest. I would shake your hand if I could button masher. This has been a good time!

Drivebyhaiku , 27 days ago

Same!

I think I am hardly a mover and shaker politically aside from showing up to town councils a few times a year and doing some union safety and advocacy stuff and occasionally hyping Raven Trust. It’s a weird place to be because with indigenous issues you want to be kind of tasked with something to do or at least have a signoff that what you are doing is helping but if you don’t belong to those groups you really don’t want to recommend any courses of action? I mostly do a lot more LGBTQIA+ related stuff because that is my wheelhouse. A couple buddies of mine are way more personally impactful in their work regarding Indigenous advocacy because they operate inside more exclusive power strucrures. I think I am kind of the layabout.

I think one of the most nerve wracking things on the indigenous front I ever did was run a D&D one shot for the former National Chief of Canada. Like I have done a lot of thinking on the implicit colonialist history of the game and the implicit bias wherein that reinforce that mindset through mechanics… But it’s one thing to know that intellectually and another one entirely to pick through your homebrew materials with a fine tooth comb looking for fault.

I also feel like there is no silly in acedemia. Stories tell us a lot about a culture and picking things apart can tell us a lot about psychology, culture or philosophy. Like RPGs they have mechanics that inform the tale though everyone interprets those mechanics differently and sometimes they aren’t really there to “say” anything. Sometimes there is no moral of the story you’re just being invited to have fun. Like Star Wars I think is one of those. Like the Jedi give the veneer of mysticism but I don’t think their internal logic is meant to be extrapolated out to be the author’s world veiw. I think they are basically just a warrior stoic fantasy… But there are thousands of acedemic papers on Star Wars. Every student who goes through the system is there to demonstrate they can think and dissect thought using the current methodology. It creates a body of convention which then they might use to pointed effect in their own work one day. The process refines and changes the process which in turn alters the process and the cycle goes on. It’s fascinating.

If you are into podcasts I might recommend “Revisionist History” “Invisabilia” “Radiolab” and the like for wonky dives into minutia and seeing stories from interesting angles. On YouTube I recommend the trans philosophy suite of Philosophy Tube, Shanspere, Kat Blaque and Alexander Aliva, the history and lit stuff with Crash Course, Extra History, Kaz Rowe, J Draper… I wish I had more indigenous forward stuff to offer but I tend to get a lot of that through books or personal connections willing to talk shop. The book “The Red Deal” was pretty evocative but also at odds with a lot of the things that we tend to have going on with local efforts. The books deal with efforts to make society at large run less on a western colonialist mindset but through a more combative nature. Like you can lock horns with the government as the book more suggests … Or you can just change the dominant culture at ground level to normalize forms of reconciliation and restorative justice and work inside those systems indiginizing and hybridizing the structures. Like there’s surprisingly little stopping my union department meetings or say public library management from adopting a restorative justice circle model for arbitration. Anyhow I hope that list of things has some fun stuff on it for you!