no kids means no slaves means no slavery

"Slave" like any word has contextual meaning. In this context I'm using it to refer to the workers who find themselves caught in a coercive political-economic system. Other similar words are wage slave, proletariat, or just working class. The point is that there is an involuntary aspect which likens it to slavery in the more narrow sense. (The narrow meaning of slave I have in mind being "someone forced into labor without pay".)

All that said, in the U.S. there are still slaves as defined narrowly as people who are forced to work without pay. Slavery is used in prison systems, for example, and is not uncommon among human trafficking victims and immigrants (e.g. read Tomatoland). If your children are women, indigenous, black, are born or become disabled, or belong to various other minority statuses they are at even greater risk of getting swallowed into those forms of "literal" slavery as well.

they debunked the myth that caffeine causes pancreatic cancer:

https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc2015235

EDIT: Caffeine might make you more likely to have issues with your heart, and isn't good for your blood pressure.

FYI, the trick to making caramelized onions is boiling the onions. After you cut up your onions and add them to your pan, add a small amount of water, enough that the water will cook out after a few minutes. The water will steam the onions and cook them more quickly, which will them make them faster and easier to caramelize.

Here's a video to demonstrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovqhzil3wJw

This trick works well to make mushrooms more flavorful and all sorts of other foods!

If you would like to traumatize yourself more, here's a video about another dangerous water slide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIcekOTOqg

Maybe it's faux-pas to post a reddit link on lemmy, but here's a list of EU FFS surgeons: https://old.reddit.com/r/TransSurgeriesWiki/wiki/ffs/europe

I recommend a gaff from origami customs, as they don't charge for making your gaff to custom measurements, and they have a free gaff program.

EDIT: Origami Customs is based out of Canada and they ship internationally. Since I don't see any of their in-person free gaff programs partners in Austria, your best bet will be their online free gaff program through Point of Pride, here are their requirements:

We have only two requirements in an effort to be as inclusive as possible:

• You identify as transgender (MTF, genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, and every other non-cis identity assigned male at birth within the trans umbrella.)
• You cannot afford to purchase femme shapewear, or you cannot safely obtain femme shapewear.

We accept all requests for support, and applications are open year-round. Once you complete your application, your request will be added to our waitlist. Shipping is discrete and 100% free, and we ship internationally to 90+ countries and counting.

Point of Pride sources their gaffs from Origami Customs. You have to take measurements, fill out an application on this Google Form, and they will contact you when it's ready to ship. They do ship internationally for free.

I think the main "catch" is that there is a wait-list and presumably a long wait time. Even buying a gaff directly from Origami Customs I placed my order in December 2023 and it didn't ship until March 2024. I suspect it will be a much, much longer wait for a free gaff through Point of Pride.

In 2017 Cory Bernardi, an Australian conservative politician, accidentally ended up in a photoshoot organized by the Labor party to promote voting yes to the question "Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?" in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

The survey had a turnout of 79.5% and the results were:

• yes: 61.6%
• no: 38.4%

As a result of the survey parliament was able to vote and legalize same-sex marriage. The survey results happened in November 2017 and same-sex marriage was legalized in December 2017.

See:

Bernardi accidentally walked through the marriage equality photo of Western Australia Labor politicians wearing rainbow "It's Time" shirts in Parliament House on Monday night.

Bernardi is firmly against legalising same-sex marriage and is campaigning for the "no" camp in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

Source: BuzzFeed News

I'm in a red state; so far my healthcare has been denied and the new censorship laws targeting education are making me realize I need to flee if at all possible. It will take a lot of time, money, and effort to move, but the writing is on the wall.

It helps if you look at it from the perspective of the capitalist class. Workers are a form of free capital. Capitalists don't have to assume any of the burdens involved in creating life, raising a child, acculturating them to social standards that make them suitable workers, etc. They don't even have to pay for the education or training that makes them capable as human capital in various industrial contexts.

All those costs are dumped onto the working classes, not just as parents (usually the woman) who are expected to deliver a baby, nurse the baby, raise the resulting child until they are the age of the majority all without any wages, access to benefits like retirement plans or health insurance, etc. but also onto taxpayers who subsidize the rest of the costs outside of the home such as their schooling and transportation to the schools.

There is a huge leverage here that the working class does not take by organizing the production of themselves. If we all agreed to not have children and demanded fair compensation for any new production of human capital, society would be much more just and the capitalist class would have less room to exploit us.

First of all, I think I completely understand where you are coming from. This was the same reaction I had when I heard words like "slave" or "slavery" being thrown around to describe contemporary working conditions.

Coming from a U.S. context where slavery overlaps with racism, it seemed even racially insensitive to me that an office worker would be compared to a slave, which in my mind was an African slave working in a cotton field.

The reality is that working conditions vary considerably in the U.S., so when we speak of the working class we include everyone from the undocumented immigrant who is forced to live in shacks and pick crops without pay or even basic access to sanitary or safe conditions all the way up to cozy financial workers who work in skyscrapers. Something as big as an economic or political system is a difficult thing to analyze and talk about.

But I noticed you did not answer my question. If you're not open to a discussion I understand, at least I have had a chance to put some of my thoughts out there. I just want to offer the opportunity to discuss the topic if you would like to, but no worries either way.

Dysphoria increased for me when I finally confronted I was trans. Women in general are under intense pressure to conform to femininity and certain gender norms, so all that internalized sexism seemed to act like gasoline to my dysphoria, turning it from a fire to a conflagration.

yeah, the hormones are like doing drugs 24/7, that's an apt metaphor 😆

Congrats!

All I needed to start HRT was a referral from my primary care physician to an endocrinologist, and neither my PCP nor my endo required a note from my therapist or informed consent. (This could be because of the doctors I see, though - both are supportive and have other trans patients.)

It's unfortunate how much gatekeeping is in place on trans healthcare. On paper and at first glance it can sound like a good idea, but when you think about all the other medical procedures and medications that are handed out without all this gatekeeping it increasingly only seems to be explainable as transphobic.

Yet Caitlyn Jenner isn't exactly using her money to help the trans cause... It requires more than just money, there has to be a political movement and adherents to that movement who have the money and other relevant resources to effect change.

In your view, what's the most important feature of slavery that makes it slavery and not something else?

Thanks, I love how genderqueer the underwear models are 😁

I do have one of their gaffs and it works for me really well. I tend to wear underwear over the gaff, and while it doesn't entirely eliminate all bulge or completely smoothes out the area, it does a much better job than just underwear. I wore the gaff through a couple TSA pat-downs and it was perfect for that kind of situation. It also lets me wear dresses that otherwise show too much, if you know what I mean.

Congrats on your promotion! Glad you had a quiet weekend at home, those are the best IMO.

On my end I've been painfully, patiently waiting for the results of a karyotype test I had blood drawn for over a month ago. Found out today there was a communication break-down and the test was never ordered. So I got the blood drawn for the test today!

I also came out to my grandfather and he was supportive, so that's nice.

I wonder what you mean by non-biological here, why is that a helpful distinction?

I don't see why we couldn't think of human coercion of other humans isn't "biological" in some sense, so I also don't understand what distinction exactly you are making with "non-biological", but I might just be a bit slow today.

Still, I agree with you that coercion seems central to the idea of slavery.

So, back in 2001 the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) managed to get weapons inspectors into Iraq which pissed off the U.S. because it undermined their justification of the invasion.

In response John Bolton told the head of the OPCW:

You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you. ... We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.

Here's an article about it.

Congrats!! Wishing you an uneventful recovery! ❤️

why didn't I say working class instead of slave? I don't think most people have in mind the same meaning of "working class" as I intended, while the term slave immediately communicates the situation and the reasoning of the meme

Sure, my communication could have been more specific, but then it would have been more verbose as well. This is just how we use language, to communicate effectively. I don't want to dismiss your point that being too glib or broad with our language can be offensive to some, but I also think the TJ Maxx worker is closer to that literal slave in the field than you think. To me, solidarity for the working class and cooperation is preferable and pragmatically more likely to achieve political successes than gatekeeping suffering.

cauliflower wings properly made are amazing, but you should definitely not follow a recipe that results in nasty mush 😆

Ah, that's definitely a good idea. My endo initially told me to inject 5 mg estradiol valerate every 10 days (I chose to inject subcutaneously). I couldn't last longer than 8 days, the dysphoria got so bad (I started to wonder how I possibly survived without HRT for so long, it really seems insane to me how I used to live).

I changed to every 5 days with 5 mg, but I kept lowering my dose (I was afraid of my endo forcing me onto a lower dose if my blood work showed too high E levels). I tried lower doses more frequently. All in all, lower doses were a mistake, I kept having a few days of horrible-ness in the trough. Eventually I went back to 5 mg every 5 days, and found around day 4 I started to feel weird, so to avoid issues I started injecting 5 mg every 4 days.

I know the half life is supposedly every 3.5 days, and I'm essentially relying on the estrogen to act as the anti-androgen (bicalutamide didn't seem to have any effect on my mood, positive or negative, so I stopped using it), so I'm intending such a high dose, I'm just not sure what those upper limits are or when I might be taking too much.

On the one hand, more frequent but a lower dose (even 4.6 mg) seems to have less of that anti-androgen effect that 5 mg has, and it feels less euphoric (mentally, I mean - estrogen sometimes feels like a recreational drug). On the other hand, less frequent doses means unevenness and potential troughs where things get dicey. I think as long as my injections don't fail (like when I injected into a vein or capillary), it seems like this dose / frequency works well enough for me. Still, it's a bit concerning that my basic functioning is so fragile, I wish I had better coping strategies.

For example, I wonder if anyone uses gel in conjunction with injections, or if anyone injects a partial dose when it seems like something didn't go right. I get the impression this just isn't as frequent of a problem, I've never heard that hitting a capillary caused such dysphoria as a result.

Another factor: I started HRT three months ago, so it could be that my body more easily slides back to testosterone right now and I just need to get over this initial transition to a new hormone regime.

Thanks for reading my post and for the suggestions! 🥰

I think it depends on the squash you use. Sure, buying a cheap pie pumpkin or butternut squash at the store might not taste that much better, but a home-grown squash or good local squash can far exceed the flavor of canned pumpkin. As usual, a lot of cooking is about using fresh, good quality ingredients.

hey no worries - the trans community on reddit is pretty big and strong, so whenever I'm stuck on something like this I search with site:reddit.com in ddg.gg and it usually gets me something helpful 😆 I just got lucky in this case, glad I was able to help ❤️

I wish you luck, I'm really so sorry to hear about the EU's ridiculous transphobic policies.

I would take bio-identical progesterone (P4) prescribed by a doctor. The common recommendation is to press the pill (normally taken orally) up into the rectum, since taking it orally causes the liver to filter most of it. Bypassing the liver by putting it up the rectum allows it to absorb readily in the lower intestines.

See:

https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/#rectal-progesterone

A common recommendation is to start progesterone a year or two into HRT once the breasts have reached Tanner stage III, as taking it too early supposedly can negatively impact breast development (take this with a grain of salt, may or may not be true; there is also no empirical evidence progesterone helps breast development, it's all anecdotal reports).

I only learned about Lemmy from word of mouth at work. I wonder if there's a way to engage on Reddit in a way that will help migrate people to communities here? (Maybe that would violate Reddit rules, but certainly linking to Lemmy isn't entirely disallowed, no?)

Yeah, before HRT my life had two modes: stress and depressed. I preferred stress, it gave me agency and movement and made me feel alive. I think it's part of why I became a workaholic, the stress of work became addictive and necessary to me.

I didn't know how HRT would impact me, but I was shocked when I read about "biochemical dysphoria" in the Gender Dysphoria Bible. I became hopeful the HRT would help. The first two days after my first injection it wasn't clear to me how I felt about estrogen, there were mixed feelings. By day 3 I think the testosterone was starting to get suppressed and I became euphoric and that's the first time I would just lay there and feel delicious euphoria all over my body. I felt high, like I had taken drugs. It was delightful. I took that as a good sign.

I was surprised at how much estrogen changed my life. I have struggled to create stability with HRT, but in the periods where my hormones were right (I am guessing), I become much more able to handle everything. It suddenly became easy to do things that felt impossible before. I have a garage full of clutter that has built up to the point where I can barely get into my car anymore, and every time I need to drive out of the garage I have to move a bunch of items out of the way to make room. One day, just during breaks from my job (working from home), I was able to significantly clear out and organize the clutter. Something I wasn't sure would ever happen.

I was suddenly finishing projects that I had sat on for years. It just became easier, more matter-of-fact, and less stressful. There was a kind of stress, but it didn't take the same toll. Some when I would plan meals and go grocery shopping. Before HRT doing that would take up half of my day and would leave me completely drained afterwards, I would barely be able to put up groceries when I got home. Now with HRT I can feel the stress, but when I leave the store it doesn't wreck me, I even have energy do other things after putting up the groceries.

Before HRT I could sleep 11 - 12 hours every night and still not feel that energetic. With HRT I sleep more like 6 - 8 hours and wake up rested and with more energy than before.

It is a huge change for me.

But my story shouldn't set any expectations for anyone. I don't think being trans is a monolith, and the causes of dysphoria which I believe are likely both social and biological in nature are probably multiple or quite complex. I have read a study which found a correlation between left interior parietal cortical thickness (Cth) and reported congruence with self and body (for both trans men and trans women, by the way - the Cth in cis controls different in the same ways from trans people regardless of whether they were trans men or women). The study compared baseline levels before HRT and after taking HRT, and what I found interesting was that some trans study participants after HRT actually had both thicker Cth and increased reported incongruence between self and body.

So while HRT is helpful in many, many cases, it's not guaranteed that a person suffering from gender dysphoria will respond to HRT the same way as others. There might be more complicated mechanisms that explain this that we don't understand yet. Some trans people don't find HRT helpful and that's OK. Some people try HRT and find it doesn't make a big difference mentally, but they take it for the physical transformations.

My primary goal in taking HRT is to improve my mental health, above and beyond the transition.

I feel constant pressure to know whether the HRT is helping, to know whether I'm "really trans", and so on - but ultimately even if the HRT didn't work for me, that doesn't necessarily invalidate my "transness". So take my account with a grain of salt, it may or may not happen for others. Lots of people start HRT and experience more depression or anxiety (esp. if there are other things going on in your life that are creating stress or might cause that depression and anxiety, and transitioning is definitely a such an event for most people).

Whatever struggles you are having, I hope you find a way to cope and even overcome them! I ultimately transitioned and took transitioning seriously precisely because I was hurting the people around me by not doing so, I realized I needed to be more self-compassionate so that I could be a good person (whereas before I felt my welfare should come last, and I wasn't sacrificing enough to be a good person). I can really relate to the struggle, and I'm so sorry you're going through that.

yesss! and any broth really could work here in substitute for more flavor, but beer and onions is a bomb combo, especially with brats

yeah, obvs the daughter

Those words can mean those things, but communism is also used to describe a political system. After all, part of the definition of communism is statelessness which is entirely about the politics and not the economics (source).

Also, just as democracy might be used to describe a political system, it commonly taken to mean liberal democracy, and thus in most contemporary contexts implies an economic system of capitalism.

So I just think it depends on the context what people mean by these terms. Of course you can try to define communism only in economic terms, but since the term is so abused and "inflated" it's hard to claim it has any singular or absolute meaning.

Depending on who you are talking to, communism has practically opposite meanings, for example, in public schools in the U.S. they teach that communism is when all economic activity is controlled by a centralized state, which is ironically the exact opposite of how Marx defined communism.

The same can be said of democracy.

I started injecting into tummy around mid March, so I guess it's been a month since I gave up on injecting into the thighs. I started the 5 mg / 4 days in mid February, so I guess it's been two months at that dose.

In that case it seems like injecting into the tummy shouldn't be the reason I started to experience dysphoria. I do think sometimes that some injections depot better than others, and that it depends on various factors like whether I hit any blood supply, how much bleeding I cause when I inject, etc.

Thanks for the tip on the thigh - I can't remember if I've heard that as well, but it's good to hear what people are experiencing.

❤️

aww, thank you - I don't expect I have a chromosomal intersex condition, but I think I would regret not getting tested to find out. I think any outcome is fine with me at this point, I just want to know my chromosomes.

I had to get blood drawn anyway to test estradiol levels and liver enzymes, etc. and I had a really good phlebotomist. I've nearly passed out when I've had less good phlebotomists, though, so I feel you - I really wish I could get over my needle phobia.

Came here to say the same. I've seen other people claim Leviticus 18:22 was mistranslated, but all the actual Biblical scholarship and evidence I have found does not support this and the word is indeed a generic word for "male" that doesn't imply age. Would love to see evidence to the contrary, though!

However, there is a debate about what "Paul" (the author was probably not actually Paul) meant in the New Testament in Corinthians by malakoi ("soft") and arsenokoites ("man-bed") and some people argue this is about pederasty and not about homosexuality, and that is at least more plausible than the claims about Leviticus 18:22.

Of note perhaps to @June and OP: a documentary was also recently produced called 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture, which makes these kinds of arguments.

Can confirm, I still don't know that I'm trans, all I know is that I started HRT and transitioned socially and I still like it so I keep doing it. Sometimes you just have to admit it's scary and you're taking a gamble, but you can always take stock and see if the transition is still right for you. It can feel like you have to commit up-front and know for sure, but I'm not sure anyone knows for sure.

When I'm feeling the most doubt I like to sit down and write out the reasons I think I'm trans or why I think I might not be trans. Usually by writing it out I am confronted with all the reasons I have for transitioning and I feel better, more grounded in my choices. I think this is probably just fear and internalized transphobia that causes me to endlessly doubt and question whether I'm actually trans.

yes, Reddit has a surprising amount of useful information; I wish there were a project like Wikipedia (or to a lesser-extent, stackoverflow) that organized and made this kind of information and community wisdom an accessible and well-maintained Commons for anyone to benefit from (like online community as a long-term humanist project, haha)

hey hey, I'll take it!

It can be hard being an alien, but learning how to interface with people and navigating the bizarre world can be a rewarding (if at times exhausting) endeavor. I wouldn't place disconnect in terms of blame, though it is easy to do so - better to think of it neutrally, as information to help orient yourself.

I find when I blame myself and get caught up in being wrong I have a harder time staying emotionally aware and doing the right things, so even if just for pragmatic reasons it is good to be easy on yourself.

It's more important to be going the right direction and to persist, to have an element of quick recovery and trying again, than to punish yourself for failures. It's even less useful when the failures are caused in part or by whole by the conditions you are in rather than the way you are; for example, if you were on-time according to a schedule but the bus didn't follow the schedule, it's good to know that you might have to come earlier than the schedule says to eliminate that possibility of missing the bus, but it is also reasonable for you to follow the schedule and it's not entirely on you that you missed the bus.

Either way, sounds like you are on the right track and doing a great job considering your circumstances, and that's the best anyone can do. Exploring the city and riding the bus to get more familiar is really smart, it's much better to miss the bus and learn the lesson under these circumstances than when the consequences might be worse (like if missing the bus made you miss a job interview, or something like that).

So, well done, you're doing great!

Ah, I don't know much about the laws and the way healthcare works in the Netherlands. I'm in the States, and after the doctor referred me to the endo, my first appointment with the endo was scheduled two to three months away. It felt like a long time, and in that time having socially transitioned but having no HRT I suffered much more than before. It was like I was giving up all of my repression and previous coping strategies, and that left me rather exposed to the dysphoria, to the point of having strong suicidal ideation.

In retrospect, knowing how I responded to HRT, I regretted waiting and not trying DIY first. It was easy before seeing the endo to rationalize not taking the DIY route, as I wouldn't have baseline blood tests showing my hormone levels before HRT. I also didn't want to come across as non-cooperative or acting in bad faith with my doctors. But I sacrificed my well-being for that, in ways that makes no sense.

In the U.S. estradiol is not a controlled substance, even though you generally need a prescription to acquire it. You can order it online and have it shipped to your house, and the quality of some of the estradiol on the market is the same as what you get at the pharmacy here (obviously not all sources are equal). The issue is really money for most people.

I don't know how you might react to HRT, or what situation trying DIY might put you in. However, I would completely understand taking the DIY route, and I wish I had taken my well-being more seriously. I know in the UK people often turn to DIY because it can shorten the timeline for getting HRT through the clinics there, I guess the clinic feels a pressure to engage in "harm reduction" and will waive some of the transphobic policies that require waiting arbitrarily long times before being given HRT.

Much luck to you, sister. I hope you are able to find a way to help yourself and feel better. <3