and better infrastructure, and about how dangerous and morally reckless cars are

this is giving Orphan-Crushing Machine 😬

Gender Reveal might be relevant? Some of the interviews are with notable trans folks like Susan Stryker, Imogen Binnie, Casey Plett, and Torrey Peters.

Where I live the government literally built a useless freeway just to separate poor black communities from the middle class white ones. This is actually very common.

You imply people make their identity around race and thus choose to be separate because they are only comfortable in their culture, but you have the causality the wrong way around. People for the most part don’t make their race their whole identity and voluntarily separate their communities based on that - most people actually seem keen on interacting and sharing culture and space, but there are racist policies still that keep people segregated and create dramatically different lived realities among populations. These racist policies physically separate people, and the economic impacts keep the disadvantaged folk stuck in ghettos and make it hard to integrate into more affluent “white” and mixed spaces.

Black folks are treated differently by the police, by educators, by employers, and this translates to different economic, health, and political outcomes for many people of color (tbh viewing this as “black” and “white” is not how race works in the U.S., it’s more like “white” and “not white” with a spectrum and some inconsistency based on how “white passing” some in-between people are).

Not to mention that property taxes are what fund local schools and infrastructure, so if you live in a more affluent “white” neighborhood you have better funded schools and are more likely to go to college, get a good job, afford a home, etc. and growing up in a poor neighborhood means your schools are not as well funded and the opportunities available to you are limited.

I’m in the U.S. and I just called up my primary care physician and asked them to refer me to an endocrinologist for gender dysphoria. No therapist was required, a letter was only required for surgery. I just wonder if you might be in the UK or somewhere else, where the requirements are different.

Either way, I would talk to your therapist about the need to start HRT ASAP and get that ball rolling, no reason to wait.

And regarding detransition: where is the evidence that the rates are higher than they are? This is just asking us to ignore evidence in favor of speculation … And it’s hilarious that they then claim that the wait ensures reduced regret and detransition rates - which is it, is the wait effective at preventing detransition and the rates are low (as we know they are), or is it actually the case that loads of people are detransitioning that we have no evidence for like originally argued?

This makes no sense to me.

The way to walk through someone arguing for trans-specific gatekeeping is to walk through the same scenarios for cis people and ask why their regrets don’t matter and why only trans regret matters. Teenagers can get breast augmentations or reductions without forced wait times. Cis people can get on puberty blockers for precocious puberty, and it’s even becoming a pseudoscience fad for young men to take testosterone under misconceptions that testosterone is waning and they need exogenous sources to make them manly enough. Again, no gatekeeping, cis people have free access to gender affirming care.

Pretty soon it’s obvious the rules that are only for trans people are because they are trans, and not because there is a good, medical reason for it. This is also why informed consent is used now and why WPATH doesn’t require forced wait times for starting HRT, etc. and yet the detransition rate hasn’t suddenly exploded.

It just turns out, cis people don’t tend to want to take cross-sex hormones, and even if they do, they find out quickly it isn’t great for them.

The evidence we have is that of the few who detransition, they usually do so not because they’re cis but because they don’t have support from their family and society - transition is too difficult so they detransition because they don’t have enough support.

EDIT: some actual evidence:

https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

4. Regrets following gender transition are extremely rare and have become even rarer as both surgical techniques and social support have improved. Pooling data from numerous studies demonstrates a regret rate ranging from .3 percent to 3.8 percent. Regrets are most likely to result from a lack of social support after transition or poor surgical outcomes using older techniques.

whoa, I remember your previous photo - this is a huge change!! 😍

I caved and watched the first two episodes of s03 and I agree, I like the new season 😄 Thanks for the encouragement!

I see you’re a fellow radical freethinker 🫡

Would there be any issue with abuse? Not saying we shouldn’t do this, I’m for it, but I wonder what downsides we would need to mitigate - I assume trolls and bigots could use this to evade bans?

Maybe users that login with Tor would require special approval for their account before being able to post?

I just don’t want to add significantly to moderation burden.

That’s convenient, just have to remember the number seven - it takes up to seven years to go back seven years 🥳

This is great news, I have hairline dysphoria and I assumed I wasn’t going to get any of that back since it’s been a year and I haven’t noticed any obvious changes.

Thanks as always, Ada ☺️

Read everything Julia Serano has ever written 😆

EDIT:

1. parents’ rights

Anti-trans legislation removes parental rights - it takes away the right of a parent of trans children to give them gender-affirming care. Checkout this interview with the Arkansas Attorney General about making gender affirming care for minors illegal - this doesn’t support parental rights, it strips rights from parents. See around 2:25 mark, she mentions it’s just about getting a second opinion, Jon Stewart points out the state law doesn’t let you choose, you are forced to not get treatment under criminal penalty.

2. “What is a Woman?”

Ask them if they think the definition “adult human female” is any better, since it essentially just claims gender = sex, a woman has to be female, etc.

If they go for that definition, then show them countless examples of women who are not strictly 100% female, e.g. ask if they saw Alisha Weigel in public, would they think that is a woman? She has XY chromosomes and is a male with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. She looks and lives as a woman, but isn’t an “adult human female” - this definition fails in lots of cases, this is just a great one to get the intuition pump going.

If they just think that Alisha Weigel is “technically” not a woman because she’s not “technically” a female, remind them that nobody knows anyone else’s chromosomes when we call them a woman, nor usually their genitals, nor loads of other information about their biology … and yet we somehow manage to squeeze people into one of two boxes labeled “man” and “woman” anyway - and Alisha Weigel was easily put in that woman box, and if they’re arguing she should be in the “man” box instead, ask whether she should use the men’s restroom, whether she should be treated as a man when considering her risk for breast cancer and so on …

Hopefully this kind of reasoning re-establishes that actually our notion of being a woman is the common sense one, and that the anti-trans definition of a woman requires we violate our eyes and intuition.

3. your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25 [bad science btw.]

Explain that most people have a sense of their gender at an early age, that we don’t question a cis person’s sense of their gender at a young age just because their brain isn’t fully developed, and that most trans people have some knowledge that their gender is wrong from a young age even if they don’t know how to interpret their experience and don’t realize this means they are trans.

Furthermore, gender identity doesn’t change, it seems to form during fetal development, and if someone has a persistent sense of their gender younger than 25 (which all of us do), then there is not much reason scientifically and medically to question that. Finally, we don’t require cis people to wait until 25 to decide they are men or women, what justifies having a special rule for trans people?

There is a cost to forcing trans people to go through the wrong puberty and to wait for crucial gender affirming care, not allowing them to take puberty blockers because they aren’t 25 is insane, it shows a disregard for their life and a willingness to allow a lifetime of suffering and increased likelihood of suicide simply because … what, trans identities are suspicious to cis people? This isn’t controversial in the medical and scientific community, why do you think you know better than nearly every association of scientists and doctors?

4. “why is there a whole pride month?”

Why is there a Black History Month? Besides, why does this matter, pride month doesn’t hurt anyone and it implies homophobia - ask why it matters and see if they can articulate what is wrong with it, I guess.

5. trans regret

Regret rates are extremely low: https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

Regrets following gender transition are extremely rare and have become even rarer as both surgical techniques and social support have improved. Pooling data from numerous studies demonstrates a regret rate ranging from .3 percent to 3.8 percent. Regrets are most likely to result from a lack of social support after transition or poor surgical outcomes using older techniques.

whoa! do you know how long roughly it takes to get that regrowth?

I wouldn’t delay on HRT, I think it should be the first thing people do.

You have a medical condition that needs treatment. No one earns medical care, it’s a necessity.

this a thousand times, shout it from the rooftops: transition is not earned, is not a luxury, is not optional - it is a medical necessity

What crap are people going to give you about detransitioning, I’m confused by that …

Are you in the U.S.? Wondering why your therapist is a gatekeeper …

ah, I can’t see the downvotes to know whether they lost or won 😄

note: some instances like blahaj don’t have downvotes enabled, but maybe that’s fine if the voting is meant to be local to this community’s instance …

lol, I came to the comments to say the same thing - this gif is distressing 😆

I’m only three episodes into High Potential, but it’s uneven I would say - the second episode made me not want to watch another, it was low-quality CW type stuff. The show feels trope-ish. I doubt a second season would be better, it is already so formulaic, I would guess they would farm out more and more of the talent to reduce costs and streamline production.

It was just something to watch after finishing s02 of Silo, which was another show that made me want to quit early on, but I was glad I stuck it out - so I guess I’m contemplating the value of giving shows second chances.

such a good show!!