You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.
It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.
Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn’t really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.
I didn’t think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.
To be honest no… Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
“The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
Alberta adopted this model and saw an increase in public health wait times and a sharp increase in the required government spending required to run the public system.
Creating a two tiered system means that it bleeds doctors, nurses and admin into the private sector which is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy that everyone deserves the right to life sustaining care. If the rich want to dodge the cue then they can quite frankly afford the plane ticket. If the system is being undermined by politicians - oust the politicians. Let them know that that system is of the highest priority and should be first to see reinvestment.
But we should all be aware that Canada is one of the most challenging landscapes for delivery of any kind of health care. We are diffuse over a large landmass and the commitment to the system means that if you live in a remote place 2 hours away from the nearest surgery then the government is on the hook to spend an outsized amount of budget to uphold the commitment of care for you. The temptation to cut corners is always there and each Provincial trust is its own battleground. That we have the level of service we do is a credit to the efficacy of public health systems… Which means upping the costs to create competitive private sector development hurts us all.
It may be a step up for Americans to have any system at all as a right to health safety net but it’s a sharp step down for anywhere running a full public system.
That is actually one of the major issues at play. One of the kind of predatory things about right wing politics is it plays into a fallacy that the truth is simple, easily recognizable and can be rendered down into axioms a child can understand. Anything that doesn’t fall under these parameters cannot be the truth.
But science moved away from big axiomatic stuff like 50 years ago. It became the study of variation and nuance.
The left attempts to have a aspects of this simple explanation stuff in sections by adopting almost slogan-like things - take “Trans women are women” as an example. That easily digestible slogan sits on top of a whole bunch of consequentialist based philosophy, psychological research with a focus on harm reduction, a history of uphill public advocacy to just put trans issues on the radar and being trans itself isn’t easy to explain. It is simple and quippy - but not axiomatic. So a lot of people on the right tear into it as a target because the optics of defending a short quippy but nuance laden argument in slogan form while keeping it short and easily digestible is basically impossible.
This issue is throughout progressive political thought. Any short form word we use to describe practically anything has a whole swack of addendums, hidden complications, edge cases and multiple historical definitions. If you use very technical language you can be more specific but then you can easily talk over the heads of your audience.
Well… Short answer talking about “the left” and “the right” is effectively doing something called “constructing a public”. These are are not just political constructs, they are political constructs that do certain things. Neither of these constructs have hard boundaries and throughout time they shift.
But there is a distinct difference. When you look at the right, while the presentation changes they have a fairly straightforward citable group of guiding philosophy traceable through a small handful of writing. If you read Thomas Malthus and Edmond Burke they will sound like slightly more archaic versions of modern pundits on the right. When you listen to the modern pundits you will notice that they are very repetitive and what differentiates one from another is more or less just presentation style. That repetition of talking points changes it’s arguements but never it’s foundation. Since it’s mostly in service of protecting a status quo where hereditary privilege is upheld it doesn’t have to get complicated. It just has to justify the world as it has been and that humans are sneaky, fundamentally flawed and morally defunct but that by structuring society as a winnowing process where playing the game the rightful and just few will rise to the top.
But when you look at “the left” it’s not an easy gradient, it’s a loose scattering of little clusters of very different ideologies and guiding philosophies. Since it largely works of a guiding concept of dissolution of established aggregated personal fortunes and radical anti-supremacist framework of various forms it’s not uniform. There’s anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist, anti-discriminatory, pro-neurodiversity, expanded personal rights, pro public service, pro democratic and anti democratic groups, pro freedom of movement, anarchists, and acedemic political theorists each with individual theories about how to bring about a state of all these things when none of this has in living memory existed. It’s not generally trying to defend a status quo but trying to feild test different ways of doing things… So basically everybody and their dog has a slightly different opinion of what is a good idea.
It’s kind of hard to see " bad faith actors" as it were because any two leftists might have almost no ideological overlap as far as praxis. They might not see each other as being part of the same tribe even if outsiders looking in would classify them as “left” and they might all claim to be “left” themselves… It’s not that it’s contradictory, it’s that the branching paths of divergent evolving philosophies have rambled off in a whole bunch of different directions and effectively become whole other creatures entirely.
This is just a bunch of gestures. The reality is that AES states are truly guided by Marxism, and are true attempts at Communism, but haven’t made it to the Communist stage of development.
Why are you including things which have not yet made it to the Communist stage of development as examples of success of Marxist theory? That isn’t a proof that Communism is great yet. It’s calling the experiment before actually seeing if it works.
And I am not quick to call the USSR or Cuba particularly Dictatorships of the Proletariat. They became actual Dictatorships that carried forward the heirachy of the paramilitary organizations that spawned them never ceeding them to the workers councils like they were supposed to do instead creating new dynasties of career politicians…Career politicians of a one party state are not “working class”.
It really is a hype based philosophy. I look at Marx as a bit of a stochastic terrorist of his time. His ideas aren’t dangerous particularly taken with a grain of salt but because they are written to lead one to become angrier and angrier without being given an outlet to work towards things on a constructive way Communist communities start hopeful and sour over time.
He always dances around how that limiting of other classes authority and individual inequities is going to be handled because the answer… Is violence. A generous read is that he is naive to believe everyone will see he’s right and kumbaya the whole thing into existence but more likely because of the language he uses other places he’s flat out for the nessisary purge required to achieve his aims.
Issue being is anarchic mobs are generally fairly weak… So to make a successful change you basically need paramilitary leaderships and military like heirachy to achieve that purge… And then so far in history that paramilitary heirachy never has effectively dissolved after the fact because if everybody is doing communism correctly creating competeting heirachy is antithetical… You are just supposed to ignore that the paramilitary heirachy that becomes the state isn’t strictly playing by Marx’s rules either but by then a population isn’t in a position to argue.
It depends on what ideas you deem to be “correct”. He was very good at elucidation of the nature of how European models of property rights were impacting large swaths of the population at large… But its difficult to say if he had everything figured out because his “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t seem to ever actualize in a lasting fashion. It usually ends up as an authoritarian state arguably because the system is vulnerable to the first group that decides to break faith with the covenant. A lot of Communist hopefuls tend to either take the examples of this happening as “not true Communism” or try to minimize the bad aspects of regimes that adopted the principles… It does seem once power is too laterally spread it becomes weak to any hierarchy that as long as they can talk a good game and use Marxist language.
In either case a lot of us would not call those outcomes “proven correct”. I would say he had some very lasting ideas which are useful tools… But the fact that none of the places where attempted enactment have particularly lived up to his hype means that like a lot of philosophy of his time that the answers are a lot more complex and nuanced than he could have forseen.
Actually I find that it allows more range of Socialism strains to be discussed. A lot of Marxists tend to look rather poorly at any mixed Socialism blends as either heretical or as liminal states with Communism as a complete end goal instead of being legitimate in their own right.
Where ever Marxism tends to particularly flourish erasure of a lot of other Socialist philosophy tends to be the norm. Socialism is a big range of different veiws of how publicly held and private property domains intermix with a lot of foundational philosophy some of which pre-dates or were contemporaries of Marx. Marx may have coined the term but it’s important to remember that when he was writing his work there were specific peers in his feild that some of it was directed at who he was sort of in agreement with and sort of not. Many wholeheartedly adopted his term for the broad stroke of their own philosophy even though they would later be at loggerheads about details. Later in life Marx really did not get along with other prominent Socialists of his era. Those who subscribe very heavily to his text tend to follow his tradition of being very dismissive of other Socialist strains and rather combative because the text is very fiery and segments well into calls for violence
If one wants to go talk Marxism the other instances are always there and are generally better venues. It’s valuable to have spaces that have differences so that other schools of political thought have air. As far as Marxists here go, since having a group that usually denies others the very words they use to self identify by, demanding they be called illegitimate, sucks all the air from the room they are generally not particularly welcome in the space unless they demonstrate they can play nice with others.
Love the idea… But let’s be real, Conservative rhetoric has depended on attacking peoples trust in acedemia, administrative government positions and anyone who is an expert who doesn’t reinforce the vibe of being a “dissenting voice”. Fact checks make those of us who understand sourcing feel like we’re owning the idiots, but for the Conservative audience iit very rarely shifts people out of their steadfast adherence and instead tends to make them distrust the medium the debate is held in.
Conservative rhetoric has been a poisoned well for a long time. To play by their game one has to look more at a vibes based playbook. Their voting block generally have a misplaced overconfidence in their own ability to read body language and tone. It’s literally not the words and definitely not the facts, it’s the affect they are delivered in.
It’s part of why they dunno how to think about Harris and have conspiracy theories about her earrings piping her answers. She is outperforming Trump on affect of delivery based on their playbook and they don’t know how to interpret that.
I would say less than on reddit but still a thing. Being cisgender still is treated as a norm and the sort of folks who openly display misogynistic tendencies are fewer and farther between… But any innocuous mention to being trans will very get you a couple of dedicated downvoters or people who use gender essentialist arguements, silencing tactics (oh you’re just being devisive) or transphobic rhetoric.
Not to say that it is bad comparatively. This is one of the most trans neutral places on the internet. It’s not “trans friendly” mind you, I would categorize that as places where concensus about trans people being a normal thing to be has been reached and attention has shifted away from our basic rights as being up for debate… But trans neutral spaces are important too. We need holding spaces away from places where trans people talk openly where people can get to know us where the majority of support shuts down open hostility towards us prompting more nuanced interaction.
A lot of trans hostile spaces exist out there where being openly trans or advocacy for our needs invites a lot of death threats, calls for suicide, doxxing attacks and so on. If you see a comment section on youtube on a queer creator for instance that’s overwhelmingly trans positive that generally means there’s heavy moderation at play because they are trying to create spaces safe for their queer audience to interact with each other. What you as a casual visitor generally don’t see is the mental cost being taken on by that moderation team to artificially create the illusion of that positive space. Here on this instance that level of moderation is unnecessary because generally speaking the volume is manageable.
A demonstration that the person is not interested in a conversation, they just want to grandstand and use rhetoric tricks to feel like they are superior and are strictly aiming to used the conversation as a way to inflate their sense of self worth at the cost of treating you like a human being.
“No way I am reading all that” on a average sized post while expounding their opinion in an equally lengthy paragraph is usually the same start of the end. These people are generally not actively trolling they are just up their own ass. If they cannot demonstrate basic intellectual mutual respect after having this pointed out to them blocking them is both for best of us.
A particular pet peeve is people who quote every bit of a post in sections to refute it. It’s lazy and I have witnessed it from people in my life who are extremely narcissistic. Writing your own brief is respectful. Essentially writing over someone else’s entire post with red pen isn’t. It’s not a block, but it’s a contributing factor
If it’s someone using very bad faith rhetoric like moving goalposts or extreme cherrypicking - basically any stuff that demonstrates obvious trolling I don’t block, I counterpunch. My goal becomes making sure you do not leave the arguement with what you come there for.
All in all I have blocked about 3 people. I believe in second chances so someone has to show no signs of improvement after about an average of 7 replies.
Yeah dysphoria/euphoria runs a gamut of severity. Some folk only experience the effects of the dopamine hit of it being what you want, some just have the perpetual downer… most of us it’s a combo plate of both.
And anorexia does have a somewhat similar approach to lessening body dysmorphia. Stay away from mirrors, avoid people who focus too much on your appearance… We as a society just have come to a concensus that making commentary about people’s weight is really rude and harmful. Anorexia however is socially based. It’s a response to a societies beauty standards and you don’t find it in cultures that don’t have those beauty standards. Transness however just pops up everywhere often in complete opposition to beauty standards, cultural norms or religious doctrine across time and place.
A lot of us go through this phase right before we accept being trans where we try to be like the apex version of our birth sex. We try to over gender perform because if you are the perfect cis man or woman you should be fine living off the external validation of others the way cis people do… But when that ultimately fails to fix the problems and actually often makes them worse the reality becomes there are only a few options. Be miserable until you run out of strength and die either by suicide or a life shortened by stress… Or you explore ways that might solve your rocksolid internal need but also potentially cost you family, friendships, careers, respect, safety and basically turn up the heat on external pressures to conform.
QED the pilot thing was probably a bad example I won’t use again.
How about this, if someone changed their name and you saw a picture of them from before that update… Maybe a baby pic let’s say, what name would you use when identifying the person in the picture?
How does one actually identify if they are a “man” or a “woman”? What list of criteria makes one of a certain gender?
Okay so “am I a trans person? 101”. A lot of what cis people perceive as gender is best described by gender performativity theory. Basically at birth you were coded using physical sex characteristics as a guideline and a whole complex kicked into gear. You were probably praised for performing gender well and informed and shamed by others when you did not conform. This creates an external goad of social expectation that trained you how to feel about yourself. Most cis people don’t appear to really question this because as long as nothing interferes with your ability to fit this model and cause social friction it’s fine. Some challenge the conventions but not really identity. Gender is a thing you do rather than are under this model because it’s a mass social phenomenon of culture clustered vaguely around sex characteristics. Being a Femboy for instance is something you perform. It’s not a trans identity even though they might be easily mistaken for a trans woman.
But then there’s a VERY different experience… And this is the rough thing to explain to cis people because it literally does not make sense. That’s the hard part in this dialogue. How gender works for trans people is strictly not logical and if you experience this phenomenon you cannot logic yourself out of it no matter how hard you try… Because now we are dealing with a subconscious function. Importantly this is not a delusion. A delusion would be belief in something that doesn’t exist, this is the opposite. This is intense but uncontrollable feedback about observable physical reality.
It you are trans, for whatever reason, your brain has an internalized feedback system that targets your physically held sex characteristics. Your perceptible sex characteristics make you feel things completely independent of anything external. You feel intense envy for sex characteristics you see other people have that you do not. Emulation of those characteristics make you feel incredible for literally no logical reason…it’s like getting hit by a truck full of dopamine even when you acknowledge it makes no sense to feel that way. Reminders that you don’t have those characteristics make you feel completely deficient. You can feel disconnected from your body and in social spaces you can feel fake or invisible, unable to express yourself. Oftentimes this friction between constant internal feedback and external pressure to conform to the opposite of that feedback causes stress which means you get stress related illnesses. Digestive issues, headaches, skin problems, harmful nervous behaviours, depression, social anxiety, escapist self medication or addiction issues… Some get metaphysical about this in the idea that there is a sort of spiritual aspect that never aligned but it’s probably some kind of brain structure thing. But the idea of “being a (enter whatever here)” stems from the very consistent feedback that aggregates around a specific sexual phenotype. If you feel like your life essentially sucks because you don’t have the physical characteristics that come from a masculine puberty then you can backwards engineer that feeling into the sentiement “I should be a man”.
So when you face this friction between external feedback and internal feedback you have two routes to combat that stress.
Option one : You physically change the features that cause the feedback. You no longer are envious because you have the feature you want and you don’t feel deficient or self conscious anymore because your physical reality has changed. The internal feedback loop is satisfied and you get that nice hit of dopamine from all forms of witnessing your physical body in action.
Option two - you remove the external feedback.
One way to not obsess over what you feel you are missing is to not be constantly reminded. Changing how everyone addresses you is part of this. When people generally call you a woman for instance what they are doing is adding up all your physical features, coming to a conclusion based on what they physically witness and spitting it back out as a physical assessment of you. Your internal feedback system is VERY AWARE of this computation happening and reverse engineers it instantly. Internally it is something like this : "This person called me ‘she’ because they noticed my high voice (oh how I wish my voice was lower!) and because I have boobs (fuck I wish I could just slice the damn things off) and because of my narrow shoulders (Gotta work out more) and is now creating an expectation of conforming to a cluster of social garbage and treat me like I am different from men which sucks but makes sense because I have a high voice (fuck I should talk less) and boobs (maybe if I starve myself…) " and the thought spiral continues.
So what you can do is trick the brain. You ask to be called by male forms of address and ask to be treated as culturally male and what happens is basically your mind fills in the empty room. You might not have the physical characteristics but it becomes theoretically possible to the mind that maybe those physical features aren’t actually being noticed. It creates a sort of protective uncertainty. It obscures the witnessable physical assessment aspect of someone else’s calculation of your sex. Even if logically it’s pretty obvious what your birth sex is and you are absolutely sure someone is just gassing you up it denies that internal feedback immediate purchase. It creates room to consider - maybe my physical features aren’t all that different from what I desperately wish they could be. “Man” in this usage is not just a social category. It’s verbally applied medicine.
Of course the issue with option 2 strictly is that it’s kind of only good at handling the feedback that comes from interacting with other people. No amount of people calling me a man is gunna help when I am in front of a mirror, or when I talk and hear my own voice or demonstrate some kind of physicality that my cis male counterparts do not have. But sometimes you get what you get and it has to be enough. Not all fully baked transitions make us perfectly indistinguishable from cis people. The process is imperfect so we ask other people to socially make up for physical shortfall.
A lot of trans people realize how important these things are once that friction is resolved. Like if you suddenly have like five different physical maladies that suddenly clear up because they were caused by stress you have normalized your entire life and you suddenly feel like going outside your house takes half the energy it used to it becomes really obvious what you’re doing is working and nessisary. The experience can be a lot like quiting a very bad job that was slowly killing you.
I suppose that assumes a woman cares about fashion and that fast fashion is something every woman wants to buy into. A lot of women I know shop vintage because they want items they can wear reliably for years and modern items do not offer that level of quality. If you want to buy out of the fast fashion assumption of “need” it seems like you have to literally go back in time because if you buy fast fashion it is literally trash in a year. Nobody will thrift it worn because it will be worn out. It doesn’t seem like brands have options for women that lie outside of this system in addition to those junky options or offer those junk items at a lower cost. If all you can buy new is junk then stepping outside of the system requires you to avoid the ease of simply buying new off the rack. It requires work and luck. If you grew up inside that system that’s your established normal.
We can say that mens fashion is static… But why can’t both gendered fashion silos have more static options or at least price fast fashion at a different price point to reflect those cheaper materials? It seems like saying one sex has inherent requirements for fubgibillity which seems honestly kinda sexist. There’s a lot of men who want more interesting fad like stuff and women who want staples that will last a decade.
Shelters often share resources and many are more flexible than you would expect. They might not take you personally but dollars to donuts they can point you in the direction of other specialized resources.