Edgerunner Alexis

I mean, there’s a whole huge contingent of “feminists” getting popular these days who have explicitly and extremely bioessentialist misandrist beliefs, TERFs, so sadly I’m not super sure you’re right, but it’s entirely possible. You do tend to have to look holistically at people’s actions and speech to figure out what they really believe, oftentimes.

I don’t know. I’ve just always felt like it was weird to come up with a term for “normal” people. I don’t understand why it was necessary

Would you be fine with a straight person saying “I’m not straight, I’m normal” then?

Or would you realize that by choosing one aspect of the human experience to label as normal, instead of actually having a name for it, you are automatically labeling the others as abnormal — which means they’re not just a naturally-occuring human thing, but something that’s disordered or wrong or unnatural? If you decide to label being trans, but just call cis people “normal,” then that’s the implication.

Moreover, “cis” is a label for understanding a way of identifying regarding your assigned gender at birth, same “trans.” I really don’t see how it makes sense for it to be okay to have a word for one option — trans — but not the other. If it’s okay to have a label for one option so we can accurately communicate about it, why isn’t it okay to have a label for the other one, just because it’s more common? That doesn’t make sense. We have labels for all sorts of common things. Moreover, having a word that designates someone as not-trans is extremely useful for linguistic clarity: now instead of saying “normal” and having to infer from context in what respect the person is “normal”, since that could refer to a million things, cis gives us a way of actually saying what we mean. Scientists label both common and uncommon options for things all the time.

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t understand the obsession with labeling everyone and putting them in a well defined box… Can’t we all just be ourselves without the labels?

This talking point always hurts me deeply. Taking away the words and concepts we use to understand ourselves and communicate with others about that, find common ground and community and understanding, is the perfect way to erase us. That’s why conservatives and TERFs so often say the same thing.

Unlike for conservatives, labels for the LGBTQ community aren’t about putting everyone inside a well-defined box at all. Unlike conservatives with their traditional gender roles and expectations, our labels are actually not rigidly defined like that, they’re fuzzy, socially constructed, often with multiple shades and versions of meaning and ways they can be understood. Neither are they supposed to be normative — if you associated with a label once, that doesn’t mean you have to always do so (or have to have always done so), and if you don’t perfectly fit a label, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to “live up to it.”

(Except, I guess, in terminally-online Tumblr “discourse.”)

And the fact that labels, at least how the queer community uses them, are not “boxes to put people in” is a function of how we use them: they’re crucial tools to be able to communicate aspects of the incohate mess that is our experiences to others, and therein find community and solidarity with others, to know you’re not alone because there are others that share those experiences, who can comfort you and even guide you, and so you can use those words that helped you make people able to finally understand you as a rallying point.

We need the words to describe ourselves.

Taking away our language, the language we need to explain some important part of who we are or the lives we life, is fucking horrible.

Do you know how painful it was to grow up without labels like trans and cis so I could understand what was happening to me and why I was different from others? The first moment I found a word that seemed to describe what I was feeling, even though it was a wrong one (crossdresser), I clung onto it desperately. And then, when I finally found the word to describe what I actually was, it was a watershed moment.

Have you stopped for a moment to listen to the queer people who will tell you that finding out there was a word to describe what they were going through was one of tbe most powerful moments in their lives? Remember, without words for things, its difficult to have concepts for things, and that means its almost impossible to think them.

This is an excellent post, thank you for sharing! You should put these in the wheel of time community: !wheeloftime@lemmy.ml

🫂

This was an absolutely wonderful read, thank you so much for sharing

Concerns about cultural changes from an influx of ten times the users the entire Fediverse currently has from a platform that is known for having a particularly toxic, algorithm-poisoned userbase aren’t specious or something you can ignore — even if the fears are “vague” in some sense they’re very valid.

Yeah I really don’t want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we’ve built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭

No, I was pointing out that it’s dropped significantly for Democrats too, and the overall point is that we can’t rely on society as a whole to do/believe what’s right and protect us.

Key info:

Only 41% of Republicans say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, according to Gallup. That is a 15% drop from 2022, the largest single-year change since Gallup began asking the question. Democratic approval also fell from 85% to 79%.

I’ve always said that ultimately the only people we can rely on are ourselves, the queer community.

I read Great North Road and Pandora’s Star, and they were both pretty damn good, although not what I’ve been looking for lately in my fiction. I really need to pick up Judas Unchained at some point and actually finish the commonwealth saga, but it’s been about three and a half years now that I’ve been putting it off, so I feel like at this point I’m going to have to reread Pandora’s Star to know what’s going on lol

Yeah I’m hosting a video streaming service, a Discord clone, a CMS, git web, and my blog on a $120 ThinkCentre (4 cores, 8GB RAM, 1TB SAMSUNG SSD) in my home, and it works wonderfully. Basically no upkeep costs, the extra electricity used is not even noticeable.

People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button

longer support for software and hardware

Not to rain on your parade (I love the idea of the Fairphone!), but that’s actually a bit of misadvertising on Fairphone’s part — the SoCs they use are very outdated and near the end of their vender firmware and driver support, meaning they get maybe 2 years of the full support you’d expect when you say a manufacturer “supports” something, and then however many more years of hobbled support. Additionally, they’re just really bad about security.

I wish this would and bring replaceable phone batteries back to the US as well, since it would theoretically be easier for brands to just have a single model for all countries, but unfortunately I highly doubt that we’ll be the case, as demonstrated by Apple taking extra effort to put geolocation code in their phones that unlocks “sideloading” when you are in Europe but then locks it again when you’re outside of your Europe. As it turns out the extra effort it takes to create an exception to your hardware and software for Europe is far outweighed by the extra profit of being able to keep giving a more locked down products to everyone else.

Using GraphineOS on a Pixel 6. It’s very nice! I haven’t had any problems with it.

I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock

Gotta be a tie between Pet Semetary and Blindsight, although for different reasons.

This article is also really good: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including

It goes into detail on a real world athletics study (instead of studies on individual factors like muscle mass or grip strength that may not be representative at all of sport performance) in running that shows that after transitioning, trans women perform the same relative to their cis women peers as they did to their cis male peers prior to transitioning — i.e., same place in the distribution curve.

Yup, that’s honestly the history of the world — people giving up their autonomy and independence and concern for what’s really going on in the world to authorities for ease, comfort, convenience and just out of habit, then being surprised when those authorities turn around and begin taking advantage of them. It’s the eternal struggle against apathy.

Here’s the money part of the article for anyone who doesn’t want to click through:

the most clear-cut example of this suppression is happening in Montana, where a drag ban was passed this year. Like most of this crop of drag bans, the Montana law was so broad and overly vague that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra could be considered “obscene” if its third clarinet player was transgender. Despite assurances from Montana Republicans that their drag ban had nothing to do with transgender people, the first application of the law was to ban a transgender person from speaking at a public library, based on the legal advice of county attorneys.

The event was not drag. It was a presentation on the history of trans and two-spirit people being given as part of Pride month. The speaker, Adria Jawort, was not presenting obscene material. She was not dressing or acting in a way meant to titillate. She was going to give a history lesson in a public library, and the government effectively said, “No, it is illegal for that person to do so because they are trans and dressing in a manner consistent with their gender identity, even if the way they dress is legal for other individuals.”

In other words, if a cisgender (non-transgender) person presented that same material, it would be legal. But for a transgender person to present it, they would have to detransition (i.e., erase themselves). When the government tells a class of people that they cannot speak in public and cannot express themselves in a way that everyone else can (with clothing that is perfectly acceptable in public for everyone else), this is a clear violation of the First Amendment. And yet there’s nary a peep from the people who promised to march with trans people or defend freedom of speech to the death, because they cared first and foremost about ensuring that they retained their own commercial platforms, while painting trans people as the villains.

…

When it comes to trans people, the right seemingly wants to go even further to curtail their constitutional rights. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has been campaigning on the idea that transgender people are why teen girls attempt suicide. This is patent nonsense, of course: Teen suicide rates are lowest in states where trans people are protected by law and highest in the state (Idaho) that has led the charge to ban them from sports and locker rooms. Haley, however, singles out comedian and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney in particular as a cause of teen girls contemplating suicide.

“Make no mistake. That is a guy, dressed up like a girl, making fun of women. Women don’t act like that. Yet everybody’s wondering why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?” Haley said of the TikTok celebrity. Most of Mulvaney’s videos are fluff—a video diary along with makeup, hair, and skin care tips: stuff that any cisgender social media influencer would have no trouble posting. But the implication by Haley is clear: Transgender people, and content, must be removed from anywhere that might be seen by people under 18, even if the content itself is innocuous.

Pause for a moment to consider: This is a serious GOP candidate for president strongly implying that the government should ensure that a class of people are denied access to social media and forbidden from putting content featuring themselves on the internet. It is hard not to draw comparisons to Germany’s banning Jews from writing for newspapers in 1933, then banning them from stage and screen in 1934.

On that last point, the literal Lemkin Institute, the organization founded in memory of the man who invented the term genocide, thinks today’s anti-trans movements are possibly genocidal.