You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don’t want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make “nature” arguments (like “evolutionary psychologists”). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I’d have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that “regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others”. That’s a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

I don’t think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be “queer” until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ve been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.

I dunno, I’m still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don’t want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

I think the examples in the article are a bit too high level, although accurate - even more interesting when they affect grammar, like both MS Office and Grammarly leading a crusade against the passive voice.

More interesting to me though is how Microsoft Windows (not just Office) lead to the extinction of a whole punctuation point in my native Greek. The “Greek semicolon” was not included in the default Greek keyboard layout for Windows. While it remained as an option on the IBM keyboard that big organisations could choose to order, it vanished from retail and therefore from home users and the language simply lost an entire punctuation mark within a decade.

If there’s a clear example of how technology can drive language change (to the extend that writing is part of language), I feel like that’s one of the clearest examples.

Why was there this law in the first place?

In Europe at least, it was often explained as “same-sex marriage and parenthood are not allowed, and a legal gender change cannot be a loophole to that”. But it appears to be a post-hoc rationalisation since the forced sterilisation programmes have many more targets in the past until it was progressively abandoned for more and more groups. It was also becoming untenable since more and more countries were legalising same-sex parenthood.

So, if we are being more honest, it’s eugenics.

Oh, you are serious that you don’t get this pragmatic construction. You need not to interpret this as a literally-meant possessive, because it isn’t a literal possession. If you cannot do that, we aren’t getting anywhere.

Could you provide some German examples?

Mir ist kalt. Sie ist mir bekannt. Mir ist dieser Preis viel zu teuer.

I see your sarcasm tag so I will take this rant as lightly as possible.

In any case, not only it’s a normal turn of phrase in English, it’s also relatively common in Greek. Maybe a bit less than English, but all the examples could work.

It also reminds me of a similar but not identical construction in German, where the dative personal pronoun is used to relate an event to the person’s feelings and point of view, instead of objectively describing a situation.

To the best of my knowledge, the convention is based on history. In previous decades, neo-pronouns like xe were proposed to serve as gender-neutral alternatives to he and she, and since they were new coinages, they didn’t have commonly known objective and possessive forms, so all three forms where listed.

The pattern was so established that it carried over to he, she and they even though their declined forms are commonly known.

There have been a lot of articles in press about TikTok being responsible for the rise of interest in literature by young people, as the article also mentions.

At the end, it probably was either a planted story, or memetic evolution triggered by one journalist noticing something in their environment that wasn’t a general trend.

I don’t find automatic reposts ideal when I subscribe to communities, especially since there’s an RSS feed so people can rely on that to receive updates.

I find it more worthwhile if another user shares a post intentionally, because they believe that particular post is relevant.

Very much on point, and this is where the age-old tension between “a duty to come out” versus “a right to choose if and when” remains still relevant.

I do not want to take the position that there is such a duty, but I have to admit that I’m uneasy that our 2010s-present queer media does not even acknowledge the tension.

The article reads so generically, as if it’s soul it isn’t there and it’s only forced to talk about this issue but it rather it didn’t.

But the issue is existentially important. Seems like I’m not ready to write in which ways, but definitely it’s not so clinical and buzzword-heavy like the article presents it.

Did I miss the line in the linked article where it says that one or more of the affected families actually previously supported the extreme-right government, or is your meme simply totally misplaced?

Homophobia was so widespread in the ambient environment for my entire life, so it’s not easy to say. The earliest incident that I specifically remember which fits the textbook definition was during a high-school Physics class, were a teacher known to go on about her personal views on anything all the time once, and one day homophobia was on the menu.

The reason it didn’t stink as much as other incidents was that a group of kids that recently found out I was gay immediately started challenging her (with very naive arguments, but their heart was in the right place).

For clarity, I refer to an emphasised line in OP where I very clearly write that it occurred to me that it doesn’t have to be meaningless and that I’m looking for examples where the better-case scenario happened.

Why not just hop on twitter and search #seattlepride ? There’s probably (maybe?) tons of businesses who partook in that circus and hashtagged all about it…

I didn’t have any reason to think that that city’s pride month is particularly relevant to my question to go search it in advance.

Besides making people feel recognized and accepted, what do you think corporations should be spending their money on that would make potential customers feel better about themselves?

Before I asked my question, I was thinking if two things:

1. Companies, where relevant, can let us know what policies they enacted that make them stand out. E.g. maybe they are an employer that will give parental leave even to families not recognised by the law in that jurisdiction, or that they just finished an internal project that saw or their internal and external documents to stop collecting gender information where it’s not justified and where it is justified, that they do it in an inclusive way.

2. They do something to mitigate anti-queer hatred in their area of operations that has an action plan backing it up. For example, where I live, there’s this Emergency Entrance programme where companies can enrol and display a sticker identifying them as refuges for people targeted by right-wing extremists. It looks like just marketing too, but it actually comes with an action plan that those participating are supposed to implement which adds a more tangible layer to the display of symbols to show support. (EDIT: The idea is, if you are being harassed or attacked, participating venues will offer you shelter, they will jump in to de-escalate, and contact emergency services and the right-wing violence registry to handle the incident)

Oh! Good point. That’s the case for my local libraries too - I took it for granted but I shouldn’t have.

It’s quite shitty that despite all the heart-warming stories and potential to make folks feel less alone, my first thought was how this self-disclosure on a map can endanger said people.

EDIT: I already found a pin in the city near where I grew up that I’m pretty confident I know who wrote.

EDIT2: If I was creating this website, I would try to think of ways to use coarser locations or maybe display local stories in a way that is disconnected from the dropped pins.

My question is this. What could your manager do to better support you at work?

This one is something that my manager thankfully understands and is very supportive of: many of us, because our sexuality and/or gender identity were not accepted growing up, became adults who need to come to terms with stuff through regular therapy sessions.

This means: flexible options to take time off and attend such appointments, even on a weekly basis. Ideally, you understand that what is more valuable to the company is me doing my job (rather than clocking a certain number of hours) and for that my good mental health is a productivity boost and so you don’t even ask me to make up the time.

Second best is that you allow me to flexibly make up for that time later during the week.

Another thing that would be nice, especially in the context of tech, is that any queer group in the company is not just there either for networking (which is fine) or for being used for promotional material exploitation (which isn’t fine), but you also make us part of product design when relevant.