It's weird. There was a time when I would desperately read any trans memoir I could get my hands on, and then by the time my transition was "done" (inasmuch as we can ever call transition "done"), I had moved to really not caring about other people's trans narratives, especially as they tend to be written for cis consumption. But I actually do want to read this one. Perhaps because he's roughly my age.
There's also "too old" in the sense of "too old to give a shit". I don't think my grandad "gets" me being trans, but he had definitely decided he is too old to care and was like "Okay, name, pronouns, got it, don't bother explaining" and proceeded to be the only family member who was perfect at it.
(It's actually kind of fascinating to see what language he comes up with on his own. Somehow, he has never learned what "transition" is and says things like "When he was being a girl..." which is simultaneously "getting it" and kind of cringe.)
That doesn't mean it's not tiring.
But also, why does the norm need to be hetero vs "people are varied". Sure, most people are straight, but that doesn't mean it automatically has to be the default assumption, that's just a choice made by a... heteronormative society. Most of the time, we aren't in situations where we actually need to assume someone's sexual orientation, so we don't need to play the odds, as it were.
Southern Europe generally isn't particularly progressive. A number of southern European countries are quite conservative in the sense of "things are slow to change".
Both "biological sex" and "legal gender" are considerably more nebulous than you're assuming.
Let's say you define "biological sex" by genotype, seems unambiguous enough, right? It's a pretty good bet someone is 46,XX or 46,XY based on sex assigned at birth, but generally people don't actually know for sure.
Likewise, in many jurisdictions, you don't have a legal gender, you have a collection of gender markers. Ironically, trans people are often the only people who actually have an explicit declaration of their gender by a court or other legal mechanism. For cis people, the fact that it's a fractured mess generally doesn't matter.
I realise it's kind of unhelpful to say "labels don't matter", but... labels don't matter. Or, perhaps more precisely, they come with time.
A lot of the time, as a (presumed) cis person, you get a trans 101 that is really simplified, where genders always fit into neat boxes and everyone "just knows" which of those boxes they fit into and they care very much about being in that box. Even the non-box, being non-binary, gets made into a box. But really, gender is this whole universe of possibilities, and we each have our own. We live in societies that clump that infinite array of possibility into two, or if we're lucky, three categories, but that doesn't mean your own individual gender fits neatly into one of those categories, nor that your gender is just like that of people who ended up in the same category as you.
You have the freedom to figure out what your own gender looks like, to figure out how you do gender. That can mean experimenting with clothing, makeup, names, pronouns, whatever feels interesting to explore. You might be trans. You might be a gender non-conforming cis person. You might be a cis person who's just not particularly strongly gendered and going with the flow. But you get to define how you do gender and if you figure out that that comes with a label that's useful to you, great. If it doesn't come with a label, it's a bit tiresome, to be honest, but you've not done something wrong.
The library assistant (not even a trained librarian) had such a huge impact on the culture of my high school. He wasn't particularly well-liked, as he was the rule enforcer (no playing Flash games on the computers during lunch -- I think you could play before school), but he'd put a stack of photocopied NYT crosswords out on his desk at the entrance to the library every morning and so many kids did the crossword.
It's not just steering kids to books like the quoted parent said; at the schools I went to, it was often non-teaching staff who you felt were looking out for you as an individual, often because you interacted with them mostly one-on-one. Certainly, there were teachers who played a huge role in my life, but I will remember the name of the custodian at my primary school for far longer than I'll remember the names of some classroom teachers. (I already don't remember the name of my 2nd or 5th grade teachers, now that I'm thinking about it.) The library is basically the only place you can stash a kid "to do an independent study" (aka let the smart kid amuse themselves), or take a make up test, or hang out when the school elevator is busted and they can't get upstairs. I guess you can use a "disciplinary center", but let's be real.
Please don't. If there's some of particular interest, link to it with some commentary.
Honestly, did we ever de-pathologize dysphoria?
Call you GP and make sure they actually sent the referral and get the specialist's information. It would in no way shock me if the referral was never sent, not out of malice, but out of incompetence or overwork.
Depending on your province, there may be one or two clinics seeing all the trans people, and there's nothing stopping you from phoning them and trying to self-refer--the worst that can happen is they'll say no, and even if they do, you can go back to your GP and say "refer me to these people please".
It has become someone fashionable over the years to slag off the "genderbread person" as overly focused on the binary. However, long before there was an infographic (or honestly before anyone had coined the word infographic), this was floating around the west coast as a workshop exercise called Gender Gumby, and part of the point was that framing things as a spectrum between two poles doesn't really work and it's a fairly futile exercise--no one, cis or trans, is going to end up being able to place themselves on these lines and explain their choices without resorting to gender stereotypes.
Though not "news". Studies have been reaching the same conclusion for decades.
I'm guessing what they're referring to is that it waits to fetch the next page of the timeline until relatively "late". There's a definite hitch in scrolling for me when it's fetching more posts.
That said, I'm perfectly satisfied with Jerboa.
I'm quite drawn to the ritual aspects of religion but there's another part of me finds it all hopelessly silly.
What does stealth mean for you? What aspects have you worrying that it'll result in isolation?
I'll be honest, I have a bias here -- I do find being in situations where I feel I can't talk about being trans isolating and find/found stealth (or even the state of "waiting to make up my mind") fairly unhealthy. But my definition of stealth is something like "willing to take steps to ensure others do not find out one is trans even in scenarios where safety isn't a consideration". I probably fit some people's working definitions of stealth, though -- I generally tell people I'm trans in two scenarios: it's immediately relevant or I feel like our relationship has become close enough that I would like them to know. That has been how things have evolved naturally as I've gotten further from the "active" phase of transition and moved around the country. I actively talk about being trans at work (okay, that's maybe no one's definition of stealth), but only in diversity-focused contexts, so do my immediate coworkers know I'm trans? Nope, they don't show up to that stuff. I personally value having trans friends/community, but if that's not important to you, you're not obligated to seek out trans people in a new place (and, honestly, a lot of trans spaces are very transition-focused by necessity, so finding community can be hard if you're in a more steady-state transition-wise).
On the top surgery front, I have a friend group who figured out I was trans after, oh, a decade of knowing me. My entire medical transition, including top surgery, took place in front of their faces. I met them at a time where it was a tossup how people read my gender and it was more important to me then that they read me as a guy than that I be out, and then a decade went by and I'd became close to them (i.e. at least some entered the category of "people I actively want to know I'm trans") and it was like "So, uh, funny story..."
tl;dr Moving as an adult is kind of isolating by definition and you have to rebuild community. If you don't seek out trans community as part of that rebuilding, odds are you'll end up as stealth as you want.
I think you're dismissing their point too readily. It's true that there's nothing I share with every other afab person on the planet other than a box that got ticked by looking at our genitals when we were born, but if I'm looking for someone who shares a particular gendered experience, my best bet is probably another transmasculine person, particularly one who transitioned at a similar age. It's reductionist and transphobic to argue that one's socialisation is determined by gender assigned at birth, but it's also reductionist to pretend it's irrelevant.
Twitter had the Arab Spring as this odd formative event, where it suddenly became a source of news information. I think it's really hard to know how Twitter would have developed without that.
It's worth noting that the surgeons who do top surgery and the surgeons who do mastectomies or reconstruction for breast cancer often aren't the same people (on top of that, I believe it's common for the person doing the actual "cutting out cancer" part and the person doing the reconstruction to be separate people)--they're fairly distinct medical communities. This may be changing a bit in the US now that there's insurance coverage for top surgery, but they're still pretty different worlds, afaik. (I actually knew someone who had discovered he had breast cancer as he was preparing for top surgery. It did upend the plan somewhat, but he happened to be seeing a surgeon who actually saw cancer patients, so it was less disruptive than it could have been. I suspect the surgeon I saw would have said "yeah, sorry, can't help you".)
Though it's worth mentioning that it's crap as an "am I trans" thought experiment. I am long post-medical transition and my reaction is "well that'd be weird, but whatever, I'd get on with life, I suppose" and then I remember I've been there, done that! Somehow transitioning was very much about my body (top surgery was like a switch flipping) and also not about my body.
Yes--elementary school (K-3) in Illinois, early 1990s. I was crap at it. We also had gymnastics rings.
I'm pretty sure none of the other schools I went to had ropes or rings in the gym, used or not.
I ended up with like half an autism diagnosis a bit over ten years ago. (Basically, I saw someone for other reasons and they said "Um... I'm pretty sure you're autistic, you should go talk to these people for a proper diagnosis" and I never did.) Occasionally the idea resurfaces (and is again at the moment, to some degree, because I'm having problems at work that are surely neurodivergence related) and I end up dropping it. Mostly, as far as I can tell, as an adult who is able to live independently, maintain employment, and isn't going to return to education, there really aren't many/any resources out there, so it feels a bit pointless. Some people do get a lot of benefit from the confirmation/certainty that comes with a diagnosis, so you may feel a diagnosis is worthwhile for you, even if it doesn't get you access to any concrete resources. I can't decide if I'm one of those people or not, to be honest.
Now, there are concrete downsides to diagnosis--some countries will use an autism diagnosis as grounds to deny a visa; in the US it's not an unrealistic worry that it'll make accessing medical transition harder if you're trans; I have a friend who has come down on the side of "no official diagnosis" for fear it could jeopardise his access to ADHD meds in the future. (I picked up an ADHD diagnosis a couple years ago -- I'd been taking meds for anxiety and switch psychiatrists and they were like "Umm... I'm not saying your not anxious, but you're actually describing ADHD". I suspect my brain lies in the autism/ADHD uncanny valley. I mention this as a lead in to say that I don't share my friend's fear, but it's also not an unrealistic fear.)
This argument doesn't make much sense and is honestly weirdly condescending to unhoused people. Donating money to an organization is almost surely the most efficient way to use that money, but it doesn't follow that you shouldn't give money to individuals. Unless you are really truly going to go home and send that $5 you didn't give to a person to an organization immediately, that's $5 that's not helping anyone.
There's definitely an argument that organized giving should be directed to organizations (though folks deep into mutual aid would question whether something organized enough to have executives is the right place, but that's more a philosophical question, I think), but when I give the singles in my wallet to someone of the subway or whatever, that's not organized giving.
The one thing that bugs me about Weawow is that the logic for when to display rain or thunderstorms in the widget is way wrong. It seems to show the rain or thunderstorm icon at the slightest possibility of precipitation.
I believe the Norwegian weather service (which is the default option, IIRC) does worldwide forecasting.
No, no. The "oh god that'd be terrible" reaction is probably a pretty good indicator one isn't trans (or at least I've never encountered a trans person reporting that pre-transition), it's just that people sometimes assume the "well that'd be odd, but whatever" reaction doesn't exist in people both cis and trans.
Have you tried doing the exercise, including the part where you have to explain to others why you have positioned yourself where you did? Particularly the one about how others perceive your gender. At a minimum, you have to talk about other people's understanding of gender stereotypes and how it relates to your presentation.
There are routinely people who say "this line is stupid, I'm putting myself somewhere not on the line", and I should have mentioned that (because it's a possibility often discounted in the dismissal of the activity), and you may well be one of them. (I mean, I have been running the damn workshop and stuck myself not on the lines, not least because I genuinely don't know how others perceive my gender.)
It's true that I'm only familiar with two country's legal systems (and both are common law jurisdictions), but as I understand it, your "legal gender" in the UK is only well-defined if you acquire a GRC, which is something only trans people do, and plain old doesn't exist in the US. (To be fair, I imagine if you brought a discrimination case on the basis of gender in the UK your gender might be established as a result, but among the long list of things I am not is an attorney (anywhere, never mind in one of the UK's multiple legal systems).)
Amusing, the letter that comes with the GRC asserts that it should suffice to establish your gender for any interested entities, which is decidedly false overseas.
I'm probably five years younger than you. We had rope climbing but it wasn't part of the Presidential Physical Fitness Award (which I am seemingly deeply proud of actually having managed in the third grade, despite being crap at pull ups, and I was even worse at rope climbing).
I guess it's not actually a widget, it's a silent notification (that shows current conditions plus hourly if you expand it). The actual hourly forecast in the app is like that too, but since you can see the percentage chance of precipitation, it's less annoying. I switched from the Norwegian Met Office to the NWS in the hopes Norway was just rubbish at forecasting the US, but it's the same--it's how Weawow maps the forecast data to icons.
I'd take a screenshot, but unbelievably Weawow doesn't think it's going to rain today.
Out of curiosity, is most of your exposure to people doing voice training for trans folks online?
My default assumption would be most providers are cis, but I have approximately zero exposure to online voice resources and my limited exposure to IRL professionals has been entirely cis people. (A quick google does not tell me whether the authors of The Voice Book for Trans and Non-Binary People are cis, which seems to be the "modern" book rec.)
Extremely retro, but currently available on the Mac App Store: Mess O' Trouble. It was a WorldBuilder game--think Infocom, but with static pictures you could interact with. I believe your choice of Daredevil Dawn or Fearless Frank had some impact on the gameplay if you got far enough, but child me never did.
I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'm content with Manjaro. I don't dual boot, though I do have access to an older computer with Windows 10. I haven't had cause to use it for games, though.
The first time they come is really hard (so much shame), but it gets easier. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not sometimes up at 5am cleaning before the cleaner comes, though.
Just ask around and google. Word of mouth is your best bet for finding someone running a one person business, though you can look at any noticeboards in shops near you--my local coffee shop generally has someone with a flyer up. Yelp and Google will turn up worker-owned cooperatives, which makes me feel better about the ethics of paying someone to clean.
What's your reasoning for sorting people into bathrooms based on their genitals?
I'm assuming you're thinking it means someone is "done" with transition. It doesn't work that way. A good portion of trans people don't have genital surgery, both due to access issues but also simply not wanting surgery. And, then, depending on where you live, not having surgery may prevent you from updating your gender marker so you don't have ID, either. (US citizens can change gender markers on passports/passport cards without surgery. Yes, this does mean you have people with different gender markers on different forms of ID.)
Signed, a transmasculine person who was harassed in women's bathrooms pre-social transition (never mind medical!). (ETA: I mention this because it goes to show this is ultimately about policing women's genders--I was seen as "woman-ing wrong" while living as a woman. I have also been harassed in a gender neutral bathroom, believe it or not.)
Doubtful, though it might be possible to emulate System 6 or System 7 and get it running on Windows or Linux.
I've found that the PWAs (both the Lemmy/beehaw one and we feed/voyager) are prone to crashing(?) on open like that. Generally swiping up and closing the "app" fixes it. I think it's something about PWAs rather than Beehaw.
It depends a lot on the religion. A few are probably positive signs (but then you probably wouldn't be asking), many are real wildcards that are hard to generalize and some are strong negative signs.
You misunderstand me, I think. I'm not suggesting that you're relying on stereotypes to conclude your gender is "woman" (I assume)--part of the exercise is explaining how your gender is perceived by others, which is both about presentation and how that presentation interacts with society.
It's been a long time since I've run Gender Gumby. I used to answer the "presentation" question with "I don't know", because I didn't -- so much of my day-to-day was occupied by trying to figure out how people were reading my gender for the sake of safety. These days it's unambiguous--I get assumed to be a man. But my gender identity is the same--it's off doing its own thing, getting put into a box by society.
Russia used to be one of few countries that was a destination for phalloplasty, mostly for people in eastern Europe (it was hard-to-impossible to find information in English, but the English-language transmasculine internet knew it was a thing). This was when US people largely went to Serbia.
I normally hate posts like these--they're almost inevitably too "I'm now the expert" but I actually thought this one was lovely, I think because it was mostly reflecting on the author's experience.
And, really, part of me aches for the world of fifteen years ago where trans people were ignored. One of the great lessons of my transition was that people are generally decent and will try to do the right thing and treat others well, and I don't know that that would happen today--clueless cis people can default to being decent, even though they're steeped in a transphobic society, but a lot of those once clueless cis people now have been primed to actively hate trans people.