So basically, James Somerton stole literally all of his content from other queer creators while positioning himself as the de-facto queer creator to support. And by "all his content", it really means all his content. Every. Single. Thought. Was plagiarized from someone else's writing. And the extremely few that didn't revealed that James Somerton is a crazy misogynist Nazi-loving lesbophobic transphobe.

Basically, he's a massive piece of shit who's comically evil to a mind-numbing degree.

title is some crazy unsubstantiated clickbait, and the article itself is a massive nothing burger. Basically, there are more trans people recorded in the poorer parts of the UK, and they generally have poorer mental health than cis people. Which is entirely unsurprising and unhelpful at this broad of an analysis.

To be clearer, the distinction I'm drawing is that the title implies causation when all the study is is a correlation. "There are more trans people in poorer areas" is not the same statement as "poor people are more likely to be trans."

Because we've hit the point of capitalism where the system is imploding on itself, and so those in power turn to fascism in order to protect their capital.

Democrats 🤝 Republicans

Fucking the poor. The only point they have in common.

Gonna have to disagree here. The social aspect of it all is just as important of the medical aspect. While there are trans issues that are mostly medical in nature, there are equally trans issues that are more social in nature.

I'm not sure what contexts you've seen truscum being used in, but from what I know it's a term used for people who insist on a medical diagnosis in order to be trans. The problem with this, imo, is twofold. There's a long history of medical gatekeeping that enforced cisheteronormativity in order to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, leaving out all other forms of self-identity (among a whole host of philosophical issues). And the second is just the lack of understanding and research of the broader medical community. Treatment guidelines are all over the place, often misguided, and usually inadequate to achieve the goals of the patient.

Truscum rhetoric often reinforces cisheteronormativity which is mostly antithetical to what being trans is about in the first place. That's not to say that the trans community doesn't struggle with medical diagnoses or that that's not important, but to use a diagnosis as the benchmark of what being trans is, is usually needlessly exclusionary.

Don't know how to do quotes here but:

"Any community always ends up attracting downvotes and trolls, and the conventional resources such as the suicide hotline chat are only meant to keep you talking and don't help discuss chronic problems."

This is pretty much it right here. It boils down to qualifications, money, and the anonymous nature of the internet. It's hard to give real and useful advice to someone based off of only a couple of internet posts.

Offline, are you gonna run into shitty therapists who deserve to have their license revoked? Yes absolutely. But the people who can help have qualifications and charge a lot of money for their time. They're not gonna come on the internet and dispense useless or generic advice to strangers. It would be a waste of everyone's time, not to mention the whole issue with separating work from life.

Am i mistaken in believing that cloud computing naturally lends itself to only having a couple of big players in the space? The whole point of the technology is to have someone else do the hosting for you, and the people doing the hosting win out by economies of scale.

This would be a different conversation if they found evidence in the software that it was throttling smaller competitors, but without any more information this seems like a lot of nothing?

ah, yes. because respecting someone's identity and being willfully evil by refusing to are exactly the same things, yup. Brilliant deduction there, sir Watson!

Freedom of speech my ass. You just want to be an asshole without facing the consequences.

Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven't checked other browsers) there's a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it'll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.

I appreciate your sentiment and do think that it's important to defend trans rights and not let the right split us up. But I also want to say that just because horrible shit is happening in one place doesn't mean we can't address other issues in the community while we're at it. We don't need to play suffering olympics, and if we do then we lose out on valuable intersectional experiences.

I'm sorry that that shit happened to you. People can really suck sometimes :/

This study seems to me to be a retreading of old ground by cis people. Like I can appreciate getting more data that yes, trans people aren't freaks, but the study just seems like a massive "duh".

Why did they think hrt changed vocal chords in trans women in the first place? It's pretty well known that hrt cannot take away the things that first puberty already changed. I also don't like how the article presents voice feminization surgery as if it's a common and normal choice for most trans women. Even beyond the implication that trans people need surgery to be successful in their transition, voice feminization surgery is extremely risky and is only ever recommended in extreme cases. If they couldn't even do that amount of research, it doesn't make me feel confident that the study is all that worthwhile to think about.

Secondly, why only focus on trans women? It'd be more interesting if they included trans men in the picture since on their side of the fence, hrt actually does affect their voice. It would be interesting if the study compared their trans participants with cis benchmarks at all, actually. Maybe the study itself does that where the article does not, but for reason #1 I don't feel like it's worth my time to check.

Lastly, the actual results of the study are pretty "duh". Just by the physics of how the human voice works, it's pretty easy to see that yes, having a breathier and higher pitched voice will lead to having thinner vocal folds. Because having thinner vocal folds is what causes those effects on the voice in the first place. The study mixes up the cause and effect here, so it isn't exactly groundbreaking research. What would've been more appropriate to examine is the vocal chords at rest compared to either cis benchmarks or the speaking voice average. Since the conventional wisdom is that voice training can't really change your voice at rest, that would be more interesting to look at.

Overally I appreciate having more data about trans people, but didn't find the study or article to be particularly knowledgeable about trans people in the first place.

When people are starting to starve and there are no more monkeys that can entertain the masses, the spirit of rebellion starts to rise from the ashes.

So the established powers that be have two options: violently suppress the masses. Or acquiesce some level of control, power, or ultimately capital.

The powers that be would rather die than give up their money. So fascism it is!

I found this mostly to be a satiric nothingburger that doesn't make any meaningful observations at all.

Based on the title I expected it to go a little bit deeper into how "AI" technology will destroy society if it doesn't get regulated, but instead it was just a couple of short quips about how some of the big tech companies nowadays have changed what life looks like nowadays.

I felt like I was reading a boomer say "get off my lawn! Kids these days..." without any additional nuance or context.

I appreciate seeing the wins in court and am glad that there are at least some controls in place still to reign in conservatives, but let's not forget that the R's have been trying to stack the courts in their favor whenever they can. Heck, the supreme court has already been captured by them and they've already legitimized discrimination based on "religious reasons".

There's going to be a long battle ahead for us yet. Still, I try to appreciate the wins where we get them.

I think the original commenter's point is that calling grown women "girls" is a commonly used tactic to infantilize women and make the situation seem not as serious as it's supposed to be.

Take for example the headline that we're talking about here: "girl" vs "woman" is the difference in thinking that this is some 16 year old who made dumb decisions and someone who probably understands the consequences of what they're doing and takes proper precautions to prevent it.

This is not to say that I personally believe that one abortion is more justified than the other (because I don't), but just want to point out the semantic difference here.

That's not what the original comment said if you read it at all. The commenter was making the point that okcupid was pretty good before it was enshittified. There was no direct judgement about whether the world is better with or without OLD. And the subtextual judgment seems to be positive or at least neutral, so I'm not sure what you actually have a problem with.

Well excuse me for trying to write an entertaining explanation while the earth is burning down from unchecked capitalist greed.

I guess people just aren't allowed to have fun anymore :/

Here's your award for being a boring and unhelpful person 🥇

Well, that's the thing. I didn't jump to that conclusion. I can see how the way I worded it may make it seem that way though.

And that passage is part of my point. The title makes it seem like being poor will make you more likely to be trans, while the study itself in fact says the opposite. That there are a number of different explanations for their observations, and that one shouldn't draw the conclusion that being poor makes you trans. The title of the article is clickbait at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.

Hbomberguy makes long videos yes, but he doesn't make six hours long videos. He still makes his points concise and presents them in interesting and entertaining ways. Only in his last video does he cross the threshold into 3 hours long videos, and in that one he even says, in the video, that there was an entire section that he wrote and edited and then cut out because it muddied the point of his video.

Maybe it's a question of where to draw the line, but I think hbomberguy is very much not the norm for long-form content creators. And I do not appreciate having long videos for the sake of having a video be long.

I'm not trying to argue with your lived experiences here, but as a neurodivergent person myself, I don't think that judging intent is a meaningless endeavor. Yes, it can be messy and difficult, but I do find it worthwhile to examine writing from the perspective of what the author is trying to convince the audience of. I personally don't think that the answer is to just stop trying to interact or be understood by neurotypical people, because like it or not, we can't avoid neurotypical people in life. Yes, I do wish neurotypical people were more accomodating to neurodivergent people but I don't think being antagonistic is helpful. I think it's pretty unfair to say that because you don't like using intents, that everyone else needs to stop as well.

As for your point on the web of cause and effect, I think it's important to remember that there often isn't a clear cut path from A to Z. And people with different life experiences will come to different conclusions about whether A leads to C or B leads to C. If you want to communicate to others that A leads to Z, you need to thoroughly explain how you reached that conclusion rather than assuming that everyone knows that A leads to Z 100% of the time.

You say that our senses of empathy are flawed and limited but I also haven't gotten the impression that you're making any real effort to understand other people. I've tried to read your words several times over and each time it feels like you think you're absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong. I don't understand half the things you've written and you never explain them or try to present other opinions. You bulldoze through everyone else and shut down when they ask you to slow down and explain where you came from.

To be clear here, I actually sympathize with a lot of the sentiments you've mentioned here. But just because I feel frustrated that someone does not see things exactly the same way I do, does not mean that I can automatically assume that they're wrong and evil and it's okay to be mean to them.

I think it's important to note that almost every step in transition takes a lot of time, so you must be patient. Getting on hrt is a big step for sure and congratulations! But be prepared that it will take time to start seeing tangible results from it. Don't be afraid to get started on some of the other aspects like makeup and clothing in the meantime.

That being said, (and this is also partially a personal gripe of mine,) don't be afraid to shop around for a good doctor. Far too many doctors are unwilling to give trans people proper dosages, either out of malice or ignorance, and this can make the process of second puberty much harder of a process than it should be. I hate to reference the infamous Dr. Powers (his personal views are pretty... Weird, to but it lightly. And a lot of doctors practically despise him), but I can't help but admire his patient-first attitude. Even though his personal opinions are kinda gross, he takes his patients seriously and does more in depth testing than any of the doctors I've had throughout my own transition. Too many doctors will give you a bare minimum dose that barely does anything for you and refuse to increase it, citing poorly researched statistics or basing it off of cis hrt which was never designed to induce a second puberty. Listen to your body, keep track of changes and when they happen, and be patient. But don't let a doctor gaslight you into thinking that things are happening when they're not.

And on that note, take some good before pics that you can compare yourself to down the line! It can really help when you're feeling down or feeling like things are too slow, to see how far you've come and what changes have actually happened.

I was feeling pretty frustrated about my transition progress up until earlier this year when I finally switched to injections and was taking a way higher dose. And now I can confidently say that my boobs show through my shirts. As it turns out, I don't think having sub 100 E levels is enough to actually start going through puberty. It did do some changes for sure, but they're basically nothing compared to how my body has changed since I managed to switch.

Not sure if OP actually read the article but the title of it is clickbait. The author of the article is not trying to actually say that the single problem of society is single-parent families or anything like that. The article mostly goes into how conservatives will present some pretty banal data but then sneak in some normative assumptions of how things should work to make a conservative conclusion. This author is illustrating this point by specifically using a book about the data of single parent homes that makes the conclusion that we need more two parent households.

Imo was a pretty good read and probably one I'd show to someone who's a moderate or a fence sitter, but it was nothing new to me. The author pretty cleanly lays out several of the tricks conservatives like to use to make it seem like their batshit crazy and bigoted ideas aren't actually batshit crazy and bigoted.

Let's not forget how the war on drugs was also am excuse to discriminate without being as obvious about it, since weed was disproportionately used by mexican and black communities(? The details are a bit hazy to me, truth be told).

And since capitalism needs its blood sacrifice, and our constitution explicitly states that slave labor is still allowed for imprisoned people, we now have a permanent underclass of drug possessors to extract slave labor from. Not to mention that since we don't have any robust ways to rehabilitate former criminals into society, and most jobs categorically deny the applications of anyone who has had a felony on their record, it just funnels these people back into the industrial prison complex. I mean what else are you supposed to do when you have no money and nobody will hire you?

Capitalism is working as intended and the criminalization of drugs is just one of those levers it can pull. It was never about the actual harmfulness of drugs, and that's why problems like this have never been fixed.

Get your eyebrows shaped! They change the framing of your face so much and nobody ever talks about it.

Nowhere was I trying to say that Britain didn't mistreat its colonies. Not sure where that came from.

I mean that's fair enough but this article is specifically talking about how conservatives specifically use these tricks in this specific scenario. Which the author implies can be generalized to how these tricks are used in in other areas of discourse.

But let's not mince words here. The entire conservative platform is built on ignorance and misinformation. Sure, misinformation can happen in other places too but the techniques the author analyzes here are part of the standard conservative playbook.

Okay that makes more sense. I do think that "online dating is awful" is a very different statement from "well it used to be good but now it sucks" and the two phrases come with very different qualifications and conclusions.

The former phrase is a pretty blanket judgement on this aspect of society in relation to the whole. But the latter statement has more to do with the enshittification of the internet and the capitalist systems woven inbetween. The latter statement is a historical comparison while the former is a value judgment of society.

As for your opinion itself, I don't have any strong feelings one way or another. The nature of the internet has paradoxically connected more people than ever before while simultaneously isolating us more than ever before. I personally don't think that online dating really differs from that mold. I think that this is one small part of a larger problem where capitalism has commodified almost every aspect of humanity, which is accelerated by the internet.

Yeah. You're absolutely correct in that the two parties aren't remotely equal. I guess my comment stems from the frustration I feel seeing democrats constantly trying to "take the upper road" while conservatives block anything the democrats do on principle. They'll take a thousand concessions to get bills passed and even when the democrats are in power, somehow still don't manage to enact very meaningful change.

So when I see the democrats slip up sometimes it feels like they undo whatever little progress they managed to make with all the conservative bad faith actors.

Maybe you could prod them by asking them questions designed to highlight their unconscious biases? Assuming that they're not a malicious actor of course and actually genuinely trying to learn and expand their worldview.

I do think it's important to determine whether the person you're arguing with actually cares to grow and learn or if they're just trying to start fights with people and "win" arguments with comments that take a lot of nuance to address. In the cases where they don't care, don't waste your breath on arguing with someone who's sole purpose is to make you angry. They don't care about your nuanced answer.

I forget how the original phrase goes, but someone once said that these people use language as a toy to play with, while the reasonable person uses it to justify their actions.

Op, do you just hate fun? most of these are pretty cute or funny and just because they're not the most efficient design doesn't mean they're not allowed to exist?

Y'all do my eyes deceive me or is the "L" using the lipstick lesbian flag instead of the sunset?

Are there any benefits to doing this over having a dedicated server with a vpn you can connect to for outside the network?

Because otherwise this seems like unnecessary performance overhead on a device which I'd like to squeeze as much performance out of in order to play games...

Maybe it's because I'm risk averse or maybe I'm just not as well read on it, but I do personally think it's generally riskier than other transition surgeries.

For vaginoplasty, even if the job is botched, you'll still be able to walk normally. FFS, you'll still be able to talk and eat and smell normally. Breast augmentation, you can still lift your arms normally. Plus since these three are the "main" options available, there's more people doing it and more people experienced in handling the complications.

For vocal surgery, if the job is botched, you can permanently damage your voice and not be able to shout. And even then it still takes a degree of voice training to get a good result (althought it does lower the bar). The relative rarity of the procedure also does not inspire me to take that kind of risk.

I'm open to being convinced that it's not as risky as I think it is, but I do think that it's a pretty risky option. Especially when you compare it to voice training on its own, which is way harder to fuck up. And voice training will get most people across the line.

I mean they're right that the US was founded by a bunch of religious extremists and rich fuckers who didn't want to pay taxes. For which we do in fact see the ramifications still to this day.

But to draw the conclusion that somehow it's a good thing and we need more of it in public life is pretty twisted.

I'm no comic book expert but doesn't making spider-noir live action defeat the point of his whole aesthetic?

While I don't disagree with anything you said, I'm not sure how this answers the OP's question. At least without a little bit more elaboration on what assumptions you're making and why you're bringing up feminism specifically in this case.

Just to take a stab here though, I think you bring up feminism because more often than not men will discredit women because "women get emotional". And since the men in this situation aren't crying from whatever casually horrendous shit is being said in the name of "debate", that to them, they think they are just and unbiased and have a more unbiased opiniom than women. Which ignores how men will often react angrily to a woman who buts into their conversation and not even realize that anger is an emotion too.

Well the thing with trans healthcare is that it's been hardly researched so what I'm about to say is not official medical advice. Especially considering that everyone's body is different and will develop at different rates. If you have a sister, you could use her as your benchmarks for approximately what changes you'll see. Otherwise, your mom may be a second option. If you don't have either of those people available to you, you're basically just taking a shot in the dark.

In terms of more scientific stuff. Again this is not medical advice so I urge you to make your own conclusions. You may want to check out the dr powers subreddit for the types of tests he uses. Just a warning though, don't look at any of his personal opinions. Because honestly he kinda sucks. But people also generally love his care and it's pretty radically different from the status quo, so tread with caution.

In a nutshell, some of the key differences include that he tests for not just total E levels but more importantly free E levels (don't ask me what the difference is, I didn't study biology or medicine). Also more generally, he tries to match up the low point in your hormone cycle to the low point of the average E level of a cis woman. Being below the low point of the average E level when you're at your trough level means that you're not getting enough E. Testing at peak levels can be pretty unreliable and I personally don't think it really makes all that much sense to match up the peaks of your cycle to the lowest point of the average.

As much as I wish we could take our time with developing safe and well-tested technology before commiting to more large-scale efforts, the earth is on fire and we need drastic action now. The way I see it, even if it goes bad, we're on a fast downward tumble already so how bad could it be?

Not sure how old you are or how jaded by society you are just yet, but conservatives don't come to their positions from facts and logic. They hold their positions because conservative media has fanned their fear of the unknown. Conservatives are deeply emotional, and aren't going to be convinced by any kind of studies or data to renounce their positions.

To provide an example, the infamous 41% statistic was referenced in this study. 41% referring to the stat that 41% of trans people have contemplated suicide ever. Conservatives don't take this stat as an indicator that "hey things are kinda fucked up. we should be nicer to trans people!", they take it to mean that "all trans people are mentally ill psychos and shouldn't be allowed to make decisions for themselves or exist. You can't be mentally ill if you're not trans and this stat proves it!"

OP, your heart might have been in the right place, but my opinion is that it's pointless to try to convince conservatives that they're wrong.

I mean let's be real here. Did anyone expect the NYPD (or any PD, for that matter) to actually put all their offenses on display? The NYPD in particular is among the worst of all the PDs in the country.