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I’m fairly sure https://www.deviantart.com/haasap-gasko/art/FtM-problems-542836120 is the original: perhaps someone can grab a higher res version (and attribute it properly).

I think that’s mostly an American thing: they think that their “racial” categories are the same thing as ethnicity, and since race is defined by racists (who believe that it’s an innate inherited trait), it’s constrained by them too.

“I was born French, but now I consider myself Corsican.” is an uncommon but perfectly normal thing in Europe.

American racism is just absurd, even by racism standards. That absurdity even influences American anti-racism.

If you have to go out of your way to find (or invent) a joke, you haven’t found the right angle on it. Satire is qualitatively different to bullying.

Shows like South Park are at their most funny when the contrivances are kept to a minimum, or are so absurd that they’re obviously farcical. The best satire is when they’re teasing their target *and* their target’s detractors at the same time.

There are so many other takes they could have made. (I’d give examples, but I’m too prudish to say 'em.)

I’m confused. What action are you proposing? As far as I’m aware, the state-of-the-art treatments for trans people have precisely zero to do with the origins of transness. (That’s one of the reasons I reckon the research in the area is understudied: as with autism, when the actual experts turn their hands to practical matters, they tend to focus on adapting things to better suit people in question, rather than trying to eliminate the development of non-conforming traits.)

@Azzu We can work with what we have: but what we have cannot be used in the way you’re trying to use it. It is very much early days: what we’re discovering is barely more than trivia, and our conclusions routinely get overthrown when we figure out we were looking at the data wrong.

You’re saying “some studies try to apply the ‘it’s innate’ model, and get results, therefore it’s innate”, and I’m saying “there is as yet insufficient evidence to support that reasoning”. Why do we disagree here?

These studies show that the measured effects are statistically significant; that doesn’t mean it’s universal, only that it’s prevalent enough in the population to be detectable. It doesn’t mean that this is *the* reason: only that it’s part of the puzzle.

Loads of trans people have “always in some way felt like this” – and loads of trans people haven’t particularly noticed anything for decades. Academic explanations are very much incomplete: many don’t even know what they need to be explaining.

That dichotomy is non-exhaustive. What about innate conditions that are majorly, but not entirely, affected by circumstance? What about conditions that present identically, but are “really” multiple different things, each with distinct causes?

When we don’t know, I don’t think it’s useful to try to talk about things as though we do.

You don’t know enough to classify those things the way you’ve classified them – or if you do, please share the research because I’m interested in this topic!

All conditions have an innate genetic cause: ever seen a diabetic rock?

I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t one of those things where allele X causes phenotype Y. At best, there’s genetic predisposition.

Mammal brains are quite generic. Perhaps the body map is hardcoded, but not even the visual system is hardcoded, and humans with >5 fingers or tails rarely have problems using them, so that would surprise me. If it develops from body feedback, a “disruption” to that could cause all sorts.

@HawlSera @Azzu Gender dysphoria is a neurological thing in the same sense that *everything* is a neurological thing. Afaik, they haven’t found anything reproducable in the neurological department beyond “the brain lights up in pain when pain is experienced!”, so I find it weird to say that one’s neurological and the other isn’t.

In a utopian anarchist sci-fi setting, would they be treated much differently? Or would it just be “oh, you want your body to be different? Marcy’s down the hall”?

Oh, I’m not making an abstract philosophical point: I’m saying that if people think you look like a girl, and that’s their initial impression of you, most people won’t be quick to re-assess that impression. You’ll just be another datapoint for “sometimes feminine people have deep voices”.

It’s my firm belief that there’s no such thing as a masculine voice.

I know, I know, but: consider After Ever After by Paint (https://yewtu.be/watch?v=diU70KshcjA), or direct speech in a well-read single-narrator audiobook. There are objective sonic qualities of a voice, but that’s not how human perception works. I can guarantee you’re overthinking it. (Though if you want to mix up your speaking habits, by all means go for it! I recommend learning to do impressions and accents, for awesomeness purposes.)

Interesting findings, but intersex is a different thing to transgender (though more than a few people are both).

Queering the cis trans binary!

I thought Vibia Valentine was breaking the rules with their post here, but apparently there’s no “this is a meme sub for memes” rule here, so she’s not going to make the mods sad or anything.

Edit: ooh, found it. Rule 6. (Oops, spoke too soon.)

Btw, Vibia, do you think you can add a transcription as alt text to your image? (If it lets you edit it in.)

@Cethin @Mr_Blott To be fair, there was a big thing in schools about it being “improper English” for a bit. Some n+1th language speakers don’t find it comes naturally, and *in theory* there might be native variants of English where it isn’t present (though I have yet to see one – even anti-singular-they teachers tend to use it).

Linguistic prescription is bad, but that goes both ways. I find the ‘correctness’ argument much less compelling than the ‘common decency’ argument.

Many pride flags have obvious encodings (e.g. 🏳‍☿, 🏳‍⚢, 🏳‍⚣, 🏳‍⚤, 🏳‍⚲), but I haven’t found one for :nonbinary_flag: : the obvious symbol (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nonbinary_Gender_Symbol.svg) is not in Unicode.

It’s possible to petition the Unicode consortium to add characters, but it looks like a lot of effort: https://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html (and I’m too shy). They don’t accept direct proposals for flags: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag-emoji.html

It’s probably mainly operating system.

The trans flag is not encoded directly in Unicode. By convention, it’s implemented by combining a white flag with the transgender planet symbol (Linnaean).

>>> import unicodedata
>>> list(map(unicodedata.name, “🏳‍⚧”))
[‘WAVING WHITE FLAG’, ‘ZERO WIDTH JOINER’, ‘MALE WITH STROKE AND MALE AND FEMALE SIGN’]

(Sometimes it also has a variation selector at the end.)

Some systems will replace this with an image; others fall back on the client-side font renderer.

Presumably, the young 'un knows, but hasn’t told anyone.

At first glance, it might seem weird that we have special terminology for such an arbitrary subset of relationships, especially when it fails to line up with other senses of the word. However, “straight” relationships hold special ritual significance in many cultures, including the dominant cultures of most current and former colonial powers.

@Potatos_are_not_friends @awesome_person Yeah, that’s right.

The terminology is confusing, so here’s an easy way to remember it: List all men in one column, and all women in another column. If you can draw a relationship diagram using only straight lines between the columns, the relationship is “straight”; otherwise, it is probably gay.

(NB: a relationship being “straight” does not imply that the relationship’s participants are straight.)