Hilarious! You want the last word to salvage what little pride you can. 😂
Hilarious! You want the last word to salvage what little pride you can. 😂
Pfft! Really hit the bottom of the tank huh? This shit is so 2017 paint by numbers it’s not even good trolling. Philistine made me laugh though so points there.
Oh I am not dragged down. I am an old troll counterpuncher from the old pre reddit flight days. If they try and take me down they will find I do not make it rewarding.
Ah yes, “just stating your opinions” “echo chambers” and the calls that you are being oppressed and policed, that I am both a narcissist and a weak little trans weenie who needs to shut themselves away where I can’t hear your big strong ideas.
It’s the full right wing bingo card. Do you lot ever get tired of clutching those pearls?
Don’t answer I know you will die with those things in a death grip.
And in your second paragraph, see how you had to add ugly to my statement to make it malicious and false, that is you projecting onto me, not me
Ah so “barely even cosmetically complete” doesn’t register as you calling them aesthetically displeasing? Fuck off.
The framing as it being a personal choice not to pursue those options are the thinnest veneer of setting yourself up for this reaction to be shocked and appalled that someone would call you out. Even if you were trans yourself framing it the way you did before would register as you being an ass to other people in your community.
Troll behavior.
You are living during the time of masculine emancipation my friend. Men are allowed to be cute af these days and more and more women are catching on that this is a good thing. Some of the guys I know who register this way have found a lot of success dating in the non-binary scene where gender expectations are more generally negotiable. Non-binary circles are encircled with exterior connections of cis communities who have a more dynamic understanding of gender so if you are in a market to find likeminded souls that’s where I would look.
And also… Cute is sexy. It’s not everyone’s vibe but there’s definitely a desire out there for true gentlemen emphasis on the gentle. Most of the cis ones I know are married to ride or die partners whom exude an aura of sweetness out to 20ft.
Well yeah. It’s openly critical of the sexual function of people who have had those proceedures. The trans community as a whole are often depicted as mutilated and less functional by transphobes or people who want to devalue them as valid romantic options. Since access to those medical services are actively under fire that critique isn’t value neutral and it isn’t in the context of what unaltered sexual function is like for people with dysphoria whom often register a marked improvement in overall function from getting over the mental blocks.
The people I know who have had surgeries have been quite happy with the outcome. While it’s true the surgery options regarding bottom surgery for trans men require one to make some decisions about what functions to focus on, framing them as ugly and “barely functional” is insulting. Think about what it would be like to hear someone else critique the choices you’ve made that have improved your life experiences in a way that frames you as deficient and devalued.
Edit : During this comment chain this guy has self identified as a cis man - so to summerize, this is a random guy saying a set of surgeries and care plan created to address body issues he does not experience is not something he would choose because they are subpar. Yup. Real valid opinion right there. Totally not a smokescreen for anything nasty. /s
Please don’t fall for this dreck.
It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.
Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.
Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.
If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.
If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.
What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.
Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.
Violence tends to be a double edged sword. Whether or not things get better as the result of an outbreak of violence is hit and miss. A lot of authoritarian regimes in history just get replaced with new authoritarian regimes that have a better PR team and create a leniency period before cranking back the progress once people figure everything has been fixed. Long term it’s not great prospects. Anarchist activities tends to create this sort of thing. It creates a power vacuum to which the first one to break the faith and assemble a new loyal hierarchy while murmuring a smokescreen of empty hymns of the old cause is rewarded by becoming the new tyrant. Oftentimes there is a promise of whatever state of oppression being a transitory period. You aren’t supposed to notice that the transitory period after which they say that they will surrender their stranglehold to the rightful inheritance of the people never comes to fruition and instead just becomes a new dynasty of effective monarchs living it up.
But other times it’s just another tool in the box of movements that are fighting against occupation. It usually helps if there’s a peaceful arm of the movement who will get most or all of the credit after the fact whom can hold the dialogue space. Every Civil rights fight that had a non-violent movement leader also had “unrelated” people in the field under a different banner solving some problems with violence. Black Panthers, Butterfly Brigade, bomb weilding suicide suffragettes, indigenous anti colonial movements… These are part of the landscape and the actions they took were given space to be picked over by contemporaries because provocative acts lend punch to rhetoric. If you have no legitimate means to solve the violence done to you other than violence then the problem still needs solving so violence it is. What is effective in this model is collective directed action with planned objectives to fit into existing systems or that come with fully drawn up replacements for old systems. Not as sexy as anarchy but the wins are on the whole more stable and enduring. If you want a democracy then your problem solve should at least should have a true core of people whose ultimate intention is to operate democratically. Violence has a seat at that table too but weilding it justly is a commitment.
For me it’s been longer than that. I am a queer Canadian and anytime I have travelled the US or stayed with friends and seen any group carrying or wearing American flags that hasn’t given me the “ick” so much as rung alarm bells that those people are not safe.
Thing is, it’s the same thing with the Canadian flag. Any group flying too many Canadian flags outside of Canada Day is likely to be Conservative and anti-queer. Anti-Trans protesters or anti-vaxxers on highway overpasses? Canadian flag. Lifted truck soaring down the highway with a “Fuck Trudeau” bumper sticker - Canada flag. Hoard of protesters demanding book bans, group of people protesting Pride with a “you are gunna burn pedos” sign, antiDEI crusader mob - Canadian flag. It doesn’t take long before one starts to draw certain conclusions about a person’s character when they wave it around. For those of us trans folk who can it’s a sign to hide. A literal red flag.
Amoungst the left up here the flag is a complicated symbol. Many of us on the West Coast see it as a symbol of colonial practice and an insensitive declaration of an occupying nation on stolen territory for people who are still here and whose original sovereignty is still not properly acknowledged. It’s not a symbol of pride and if personally used as such it’s a sign of insensitivity and work to be done. At the same time I would not say that I am not proud of my Country for how far we’ve come. We are a nation in therapy who has the opportunity to put the work in to getting over some really bad murderous and selfish flaws and try new things to make things right. When I had an American friend up here it took a bit for him to understand how seriously the effort is to recon with our past and he treated us like a utopia of leftist sentiment but it is like therapy, yeah we might be putting the work in - but we can see how much further we need to go and praise doesn’t hit us as “job well done” it’s a reminder of how shitty it still is. But if anyone ever thinks that this complicated and nuanced relationship to country would stop us from rallying together to fight to preserve our rights to keep working towards that better future they would be dead wrong.
So I understand pretty well where you’re coming from but for a lot of us this isn’t a particularly new thing. It just is affecting more and more people as they wake up to realizing how these symbols are used.
Isolation really is an American mentality but it’s not particularly great for actually striking out. If you want to atop things from getting worse Collectivist activities and thinking is your best chance.
Reach out to the people who are already doing stuff. If you have a union or a political action group, go to it and start organizing. If someone has already started organizing then join them and be subordinate. Find people who understand democratic systems and collective action and offer your time. In fighting is the luxury of peacetime so learn to do that which is not your own exact process. Set aside differences and petty disagreement and work to mutual benefit.
Learn the Roberts rules of order or how your local and state governments function and utilize channels that exist. If you have a gardening or farmers market society reach out and looking at replacing your lawn for gardens and pool with like minded neighbours. Learn first aid and stock a kit. Train your body to be fit and learn self defense. Prepare yourself to be disobedient on someone else’s behalf.
Your votes at a federal level are no longer being considered but will your protest be toothless? If you are feeling doom, reach out and find hope in solidarity.
Because they are a Canadian and your dumbass president keeps trying to start the process of annexation. Do you have any idea how angry folk up here have become?
We are a tiny country in terms of people and a massive one in terms of land. We cannot legally participate in your systems of government in a meaningful way but we have always been effected by US political decisions and the lack of co-ordinated resistance nessisary from it’s citizens to fix the issues that affect all of us. We’ve been Cassandra warning you of what doom is about to befall us all and so often we’ve been dismissed.
I have compassion that you guys honestly didn’t want this. That this was a co-ordinated attack on your freedoms.
But I am also angry that it was slacktivist feel good measures of defiance that was the go to for so many on the left when a lot of folk on the right were using the system against you directly because finding the way to apply and lobby and interface with the system directly gets poo pooed as having to deal with and act like a Democrat…but is how the system is designed to function.
The truth is that other countries can’t help you. The only legal interface we have is through proper channels because there are bodies of law and military systems that keep us in check from interference. Technically your country hasn’t tripped the switch where we can directly meddle because that would mean a war during which we would need be defending because we have a total citizen count only slightly larger than California.
You have no such restrictions. You can use sabotage, soft resistance, legal avenues, press to leave the union, show up at your municipal and state governments with petitions, organize into actual milltias like your own constitutional documents say is a good thing for when your country had gone rogue. Your founders were edgy mistrustful bastards who designed your country with the idea that it might need to be overthrown. None of this is easy. Up here a lot of people are preparing - taking relevant coursework, getting firearm licencing and training proficiency, working with aid programs to assist refugees and using measures that change our behaviour, sometimes at personal cost to future plans or to pocketbooks.
You can ignore Canadian and Mexican voices in this squabble. Let’s face it, we’re used to it as most of your discourse likes to pretend we don’t exist. But everybody gets an opinion here and we are relevant… Because your country will crush us with the combined weight of individual inaction eventually.
We can’t. We’re way too small. There are only marginally more Canadians than there are Californians spread out over a country 1.6% larger than the entire US.
We’re gunna try to land some lawsuits against the administration and accept refugees from the States like we did last time but it’s unfortunately asking a mouse to take on a cat.
Elon Musk has a well documented track record of supporting far right causes that mirror Nazi ideology. At the Inauguration he performed two Nazi salutes (one to the crowd and one to the flag). He routinely promotes the methods of genocides of trans people and Palistinians through both verbal parlance and through direct funding and uses well known euphemisms in support of white supremacy causes. He has authoritarian leanings tasked with removing from government service entire administrative arms that previously were not electable or apointable positions (because they were staffed with experts whose task is to stick to their guns of scientific or proven best practice and not simply be yes men telling the administration what they want to hear).
He also has never denied making a Nazi salute in the days since it’s happened instead deciding to make Holocaust and Nazi featured jokes.
At this point what evidence can be put forward that he is not a Nazi?
Sorry, read too much and live with a programmer who uses me as a soundboard and forgot how to talk like a human. I’ll simplify.
It was implied above being an “actual” Nazi is linked somehow to being brave. I suggested that being a Nazi isn’t linked to being ballsy. A coward Nazi doesn’t just exist it’s just as deserving of being smacked in the face as a brave Nazi the only difference is their defense tactic is make you feel bad about doing so.
Maybe a downgrade from a punch to an open hand slap for legal retaliation reasons? Season to taste? Won’t tell you how to live your life.
Framing being a Nazi as having a defining rubric of out and proud suggests a false spectrum linking being brave and cowardly to a range between Nazi and Not Nazi. It’s more of a boolean function. A Nazi coward hiding in linen cupboard and an audacious Nazi in the streets willing to take a punch are still both just Nazis.
It may seem like a pedantic difference but you are missing a key part of what’s going on here. Nobody is challenging that gender dysphoria is a bad thing to experience… This policy is saying it’s kosher to proclaim “transness is a mental illness” which means in effect that encompasses gender euphoria and all expressions of gender incongruity as symptoms of a mental illness. It’s a subtle linguistic difference but one makes it possible to publicly derride trans people as being delusional or harmful to people around them or dangers to themselves and push for “curing” all transness by approaching being trans as a failure state.
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The whole thing with trans health is that being trans is not considered a mental illness but gender dysphoria still has a diagnostic rubric and has health problems associated. So saying trans people who have transitioned aren’t sick anymore isn’t quite accurate because they were never considered sick in the first place. One of the ideas behind this way of thinking is a trans person’s issues aren’t caused because they are trans, it’s caused largely due to the lack of acceptance and support in the society around trans people. Framing transness as a mental illness also ignores the flipside of dysphoria - gender euphoria which is a very specific joy experienced by trans people expressing themselves healthily, it’s not simply from lessening pain around dysphoria, it’s basically something mostly unique to the trans experience that is overwhelmingly positive.
Also there’s not a one size fits all response to dysphoria. Some chose to physically transition and others choose to use other management techniques to help. There isn’t a “cure” to gender dysphoria. There are limits to what can be achieved through physical transition even if one goes all the way. One can have dysphoria around stuff like not having periods and child bearing capabilities even if they are fully transitioned or there are things that are irreversible if the transition happens too late. Being trans can be a kind of complicated state of being where one needs to learn and implement how best to be supported. Framing it not as an illness removes the stigma of looking at the experience entirely clinically as something to be solved. The fix isn’t to be “less trans” as it is when one approaches something as a disorder to be removed and minimized.
So… You’re leaving then and going cold turkey?