Why do we have so many confusing identities and why should I remember them?
To be honest, you don't need to remember them unless they're relevant to you or those in your life. The only real reason to remember large quantities of them is to help people in their journeys and to help people feel not alone.
Labels, and especially micro-labels, aren't there for you. They're there for us. They're to help us communicate to ourselves that we're not broken, and to communicate to others that we're not just making it up from nowhere (not that you would be any less valid for doing so).
I'm trans because I'm not some broken confused man, I'm a woman, but also because my experience differs from cis women.
I'm gray-sexual, because I'm not defective, it's not some "performance issue". It's genuinely less interest and significantly less need. (Part of the asexual spectrum, it means significantly less sexual attraction or significantly less intense attraction, but not none. Not to be confused with libido which is the need for sexual release.)
I'm polyamorous, because I'm not non-committal or "want permission to cheat", but because I see relationships as ours to define, be it with a single partner or many. I can commit to one and I can commit to many, it's all about the agreements I have with the people I'm in relationships with.
@Ned Hairston :hehim: :theythem: to be clear I didn't assemble that image, I just found one with a set of flags and avoided ones with straight ally or straight flags
One of the things that pisses me off the most is the people always saying "violence is not the answer".
Do you know why Nazi punching is a thing? Why it goes beyond just "fuck nazis"?
Let me break it down a little:
Is violence in self defense okay when someone is attacking you? Obviously, because they're attacking you and "please stop killing me" isn't going to make much difference to someone in the process of killing you.
How about when they're just pointing a gun at you but haven't fired? Yes, because if they pull that trigger you're going to die.
What about when they're just threatening you? Like if someone says "I have a knife and the moment no-one is looking I'm going to stab you"... do you just ask them nicely not to? Do you wait for them to start stabbing before you think it's okay to fight back? You probably recognize that words can be violence then.
Let's go a bit further... let's say someone is stealing and destroying a diabetic's insulin? This is a life saving drug, do you think it's valid to use violence to stop them even though it's not directly killing them? Then you probably recognize that violence isn't just physical attacks on a person.
How about someone rallying people to get together and kill someone? Do you just debate them or do you stop them?
So if someone says they believe trans people shouldn't be allowed to exist? That we shouldn't have access to basic rights like being ourselves in public, or access to our medications? These are people rallying others to attack us, to destroy the things that keep us alive. They may not be actively stabbing us in the moment, but it's still violence against us.
Nazi speech, Terf speech, etc. IS violence. And violence is the appropriate response to violence.
Note how we're not talking about punching someone for just being capitalist, for shouting about free market bullshit. We're talking about punching people calling for our eradication.
Again: violence is the appropriate response to violence.
As someone taking the opposite path from the below image:
I navigated it most of my life by constantly and obsessively managing my threat presence. It felt like a constant battle with the toxicity of other men. I had my guard up not because there was some threat of women assaulting me, but because watching their guard go up around me felt like being stabbed in the gut, like a lifeline getting cut off.
It took trauma and ego death for me to really start building an actual community for myself. I had bits and pieces I had gathered carefully and with great effort, but all that toxicity kept me from knowing what to do with it.
Now, even later, transition has been a massive weight lifted. (For those in the closet or eggs cracking: people clocking you doesn't make much difference here, if they put up that anti-creep guard around you they're a bitch anyways)
I feel like I can breathe. Connection is so much more casually there. I can see it in people's eyes, I can be in a crowd of strangers and I feel drastically less alone.
Unfortunately, those years of malnourished pain don't just disappear. I still have all of those threat management patterns, I feel like I'm scarred and sometimes even bleeding from that. There's a caution in me, afraid that people will misinterpret, that this wonderful person I want to make friends with will abruptly shut down on me and then disappear from my life if I relax too much, if I'm too open... I still feel like I'm emotionally walking on tip toes...
I go off when presented with historical revisionism, even minor stuff with good intentions.
Like people arguing that the modern definition of a word has always been and the old definition as false.
Or my favorites (sarcasm) that I see all the time is the expanded proverbs treated as the original, claiming that people are misquoting when they're using the actual provably original quote. Yes, the expanded ones are better... but they're not the original!
For example I commonly hear people "correct" the proverb "blood is thicker than water" to claim that it's a shortening of "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." I get pissed every time I hear that.
@CORRUPT ... are people suggesting support groups make trauma worse? That's the most hair brained thing and screams "A person's trauma became more obvious after they started processing it, so clearly that means things are worse".
Then I see your profile says you're against middle-eastern religions and "pro-israel" which kinda tells me everything I need to know when you're replying to someone who's anti-zionist and follows one of those middle-eastern religions...
I'm all for people having negative views of AI, there's alot that's wrong. There's alot that's debatable (albeit those debates are painfully heated).
What I am tired of is the misinformation, especially the "AI is useless and you're deluding yourself if you think it's had any positive impact on your life" crowd.
I try to avoid getting into fights about things like the ethics questions, I will say I absolutely agree with shaming it's use in art, especially anything for-profit. And I hate that I feel the need to make a post about this because I know how visceral the response is in so many.
It's my values that we shouldn't take a tool away from people based on falsehoods.
If you want to say AI should be eradicated because it "steals" artist's works, have at it, let me know if you want to chime in on IP law topics and questions both for and against. (Not a lawyer, just a special interest in IP law a ways back).
If you want to call out it's environmental impact, fire away. (Let me know if you want me to tell you about how that's not an inherent problem but instead a corporate/capitalist one!)
If you want to call out it's negative impacts on education and skill building? Oooh boy, show me that thread because I'm on your side!
Propaganda? I can tell you it's baaaaaaad
But for the love of god don't flood my feed with "It's wrong 60% of the time" or any other variation of "it's fundamentally useless". Let alone pushes to shame all AI users.
Like I said, it's in my values to not deprive people out of falsehoods and to think about broader consequences. It's not a simple situation.
I sometimes wish I could just throw away some of my values because I have lost someone I love dearly over this... but I can't just throw it into the fire because people are upset, because people are pointing their hurt at a tool.
Just please... try and temper your hurt some so that it's not blindly lashing out? Just consider that other people are hurting too and sometimes hurt people hurt other people.
"Revenge quitting" is the inevitable result of a workplace evolution that’s been brewing for years, and business experts predict why the trend will boil over in 2025.
100%, but it's even worse b/c they're doing the passport checks on domestic travel now, and anyone with the "X" vs "M" or "F" is gonna get sent to prison, so air travel isn't an option.
And, troopers in Ohio are randomly stopping people, so I'm not sure it's a safe state anymore.
@boB Rudis 🇺🇦 I haven't heard anything of people being arrested over passport markers, only of their passports being confiscated? Do you have links to any stories on this?
I'll grab the links. Atlanta airport started requiring passports for domestic this week, which will mean they will do "X" checks (there's an EO forcing the passport change). We have turned trans humans back from overseas due to solely trans.
This past year has been intense, and especially these past few years... I look at the me from a decade ago and I barely recognize them. Hopes and dreams have changed, life upended multiple times. Disowned my relatives and now I've adopted a large chosen family. Gone from alone to feeling loved by so many people, and one especially in particular. My egg finally cracked. I started HRT. Changed my name twice. Been traumatized multiple times. Unpacked so much fucking trauma. Moved so many times. My profession took off. My profession crashed and burned. And I'm about to start it all over again.
I just turned 39 last friday... and honestly I feel really hopeful for my future... even with a new holocaust looming over my head. But I also look back and am happy where I am...
I get incredibly anxious now when someone I care about is uncomfortable, especially if I might be connected to that discomfort. It goes beyond fawning and can easily turn into me pestering them with excessive check-ins and an overbearing effort to try and comfort a discomfort that may not even be there.
I'm scared of physical intimacy... I've always craved it, I need it... but I don't really pursue it like I need anymore.
I've realized I can get callous very quickly when I sense potentially malicious manipulation, it serves me well but I recognize now that it's definitely the sign of something broken that I can become coldly calculating so quickly
I have a powerful resistance to gaslighting that I've developed from a lifetime of people attributing reasons and understandings to my actions that were not there, from just accusing me of non-existent disrespect (#autism) to calling me lazy when I'm suffering from executive dysfunction.
I am constantly terrified of how I'm perceived and especially that I might be distrusted... I spent most of my life wanting to connect with people, predominantly women (go figure I wanted to be friends with women more than men in retrospect...) and being shut down because I was seen as a man... because there was not a single action I could take that they didn't already do to try and manipulate women... (well... I finally found one action they won't take lol)
While I no longer have a broadly negative self-image, I can say positive things about myself and believe good things about myself... a nugget of dissonance still remains. A part of me still struggles to believe I can be loved despite all the blatant evidence in front of me. I know that part is wrong, but it makes all my love given and received feel so very very raw.
I spent so very very long isolated, especially emotionally... What love I felt wasn't healthy, it was mostly the love of obligation that you get in dysfunctional conservative families. Having spent my whole life without feeling it, genuine love is incredibly overwhelming... I think about my family and it feels like I'm stretched taught over a creaking barrel ready to blow from pressure... So when the people I love give me a way to show them love, it feels like an intense pressure valve release.
I made a guide, it's clumsy and sloppy but it's something.
This is for setting up GPG on Android for people who need secure communication that can't be shut down and doesn't rely on government services, especially trackable services.
I'm getting older and I hate it... aging with chronic pain sucks.
The whole day has been a struggle, struggle to move, struggle to think, struggle to motivate.
I've still lived my life, but it's moments like how hard it is getting out of bed from a nap, or just how hard it is to get myself to do simple things like putting away the groceries...
My muscles just don't want to move, and I'm just so tired...
Bill Text (2025-02-26) Relating to the provision of procedures and treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, or gender dysphoria and the use of public money or public assistance to provide those procedures or treatments. [Filed]
Stonewall & LGBTQIA+ history is being re written, but the 'LGB' is not safe either. Removing Transgender history is generally the first step.Support my conte...
Article about search engine I use, even wilder they just introduced an absurd business practice. You know how companies try to trap you in trials then hope you forget so they can charge you forever for something you don't use?
They just announced that if you're not using it they'll stop charging you. If you use it again then they'll charge you next month.
@bgrinter I've had a browser tab open on the Kagi sign-up screen for months now. Like many, I’m quite subscription-fatigued, but this one is REALLY tugging at me to try.
Something I felt like i should share, because I really don't think many realize...
I don't say this to surrender, I say this to say how big the fight is and how important each and every one of you is to it.
Do you know when the vast majority of people realized how real the threat was of the holocaust?
... when they saw a pile of shoes when the camps were being cleared out.
The holocaust meant nothing to those fighting the war, it would have been trivial for the allies to save so very very many lives... they simply didn't really care, they didn't see our suffering as real... until they saw that pile of shoes.
Don't count on Trump or the Republicans to finally be recognized for the Nazis they are and the majority to suddenly be in revolt.
Prepare for a fight and know that every fighter counts.
And know that every life saved matters, especially when the threat is extinction.
Reminded yet again how I'm pissed at people surrendering and calling it victory...
A reminder: if you're part of the "Block Bluesky/Threads By Default" crowd, you're just handing over victory.
Enshittifying the fediverse because you're afraid of big corpos and think everyone who isn't already here can just die in the hellhole fire of the other networks, "How DARE People Suggest We Build Fire Exits!".
So yeah, screw that self absorbed bullshit.
People are leaving the fediverse for Bluesky, why? Because people over here demand purity to random ideals, because people over here think it's unreasonable that someone might want to connect with friends and loved ones who made a different choice of network.
This is part of a much bigger problem... pissed that I'm surrounded all my life by people who think holier than though infighting and rejecting anyone who isn't pure enough in their ideals, instead of y'know actually pushing for changes that protect people.
I'm staring down the barrel of a gun in my life as my country falls apart to fascism and I'm in the top two of most hated and most at risk minorities... but at least y'all kept people on Bluesky from realizing the fediverse even exists...
This is why I'm pissed at defederating threads just because it's meta, or the bluesky bridge, let alone people bullying the dev into crippling it with "opt-in" systems.
Good arguments by @pluralistic on why we need to focus on liberating people who are forcibly locked into Big Tech.
> #Mastodon 's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free – but the fact that #Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it. Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to *shatter those locks*, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.
Day One: They're starting an investigation that will probably lead to them revoking my passport in the near future.
They're starting another investigation into supposed harmful effects of HRT (odds are results will be complete bullshit), which they'll use to enact further actions prohibiting me from getting my HRT.
Put up family photos on the wall... to be clear, my found family not the relatives.
I'd been fussing over a proper way to put them up, but eventually just settled recently on ordering some adhesive clips. Perfect is the enemy of good.
There's now a nice spread of family photos on the wall, and it makes me feel loved. These weren't people born into a family with me... these are all people who chose to call me family. It takes up so much space on the wall and it might not do much for other people, for me it drastically brightens up the space just glancing over seeing the faces of the people I love and who love me.
Seeing talk again about Neil Gaiman as more people become aware of his abuses, and reminded of something I wrote earlier that absolutely relates.
The short of it is, as always, we want to simply repaint people as inhuman monsters the moment we find out behaviors like this. We want them to be "them" not "us", because if they're regular people who do awful things then all of "us" can be awful and I can't conveniently ignore the awful things people do around me.
Likewise, in the case of artists, there's a tendency to immediately see all of their art as complete trash. Not just tainted, but as being poor quality to begin with. Sometimes there's validity when it was rose-colored glasses before (ie. JKR's blatant bigotry throughout her writing that we glossed over mostly because we were kids and not paying attention), but often it's not based in the actual quality and experience of the work itself... just the tainted associations around it.
I'm not suggesting you should ignore the artist and just "get over yourself" or anything like that. I'm saying it's important to not automatically associate good artist with good person.
Because it's such a clear and easy example I love to point out Joss Whedon with this. His good stuff doesn't stop being good, it just becomes unenjoyable because you see him reflected in it. And what I think happens in both Joss Whedon's case and Neil Gaiman's is that their awfulness contributed to the quality, it didn't just fly under the radar.
In the case of Whedon, it's because his fetish was "breaking strong women", to fulfill that fetish in his writing that meant he had to write strong women. Because he so often wrote series, it mean he also had to write stories of them recovering their strength after being broken (so he could ultimately break them again). We connected with the strength of these women, that's what often made his stories so good and he hid behind that.
Dismissing all of that because it's come out that he's awful means we're not paying attention to how other artists show themselves, or how seemingly positive people might just be awful people with the mirror opposite abuses to the positives being celebrated.
*(Reposting because my node crashed and lost all my posts and I want to keep this one pinned)*
I've been mulling over making this post for a little bit, but I think it's really **really** important.
It's critically important that you remember and acknowledge the humanity of monsters. Not for their benefit, but for *everyone else's* benefit.
When someone commits a monstrous act or shares a monstrous belief, we want to think of them as an inherently vile and non-human thing.
But doing so shields and protects other monsters.
When you make a Nazi, or any kind of abuser, into a one-dimensional monster. When you make their whole existence *center* on this monstrous act or belief... you make it hard to see their humanity. And that's the point, you don't *want* to see their humanity.
*** You Don't Want To Believe That Someone You Know And Trust (Maybe Even Love) Is Capable Of Such Atrocity. ***
And that's the problem. Because when you reject their humanity, that humanity becomes their shield. Your friend Bob can't possibly be a Nazi or a child-abuser, he's such a loving father and he helped you move!
Because you see their humanity, you can't possibly imagine them as monsters because the monsters have no humanity in your eyes.
There's a reason that when serial killers get caught their neighbors say they couldn't imagine them doing such things.
So don't ignore their humanity, keep it in your mind... so the next one can't use it as a shield.
And if anyone on the other side of the Bluesky bridge wonders why I can't tag ecoandrewtrc.bsky.social, it's because they're not bridged (This can be fixed by them following ap.brid.gy)
Random thought occurring to me after I struggled to sleep last night...
There's a thing for a lot of people with ADHD where caffeine is kinda like rolling dice... sometimes it helps you wake up and sometimes it puts you to sleep.
I realized last night I was having a mild dopamine crash (spent all my dopamine on the workday) and I was craving caffeine so I said screw-it, if I can't sleep might as well... within half an hour I think I was out.
So it dawned on me that it could be simply related to our dopamine levels at the time. If we're spent then it's practically impossible to settle down. So when you're spent and otherwise tired, then caffeine is reducing the barrier to sleep as well. It backfires on us because we're still up from the combination of drowsiness and low dopamine, but because it's milder than say ritalin it doesn't drop our drowsiness as much as it raises the dopamine to let you settle...
Wanted to share for what other people think of this possibility?
@donburnside Same here. First day I was on Ritalin I slept all day. Caffeine is it formme now, but if I overdo it it can make me jittery but mostly it helps me chill. It's usually not that stopping me sleeping, I always assumed it was.
Thank you for being my family and all the love and kindness you've given me over the years! And thank you for gifting us another trip around the sun together ❤
If I wasn't terrified that I'd have to drop everything and run in a few months, and y'know poor on top of that*... I'd seriously consider setting up a sharkey or similar instance on the side just so I could recommend a place with a friendly UI that I could 100% vouch for... (there's plenty of other instances I like, but so many of them make restrictive decisions that I don't like like blocking Bridgy).
(* mostly just don't like the idea of setting up a server, getting users, and then having to run for my life and the server just disappearing... same reason I limited registration on my current instance)
I could use more recommendations for fediverse servers to suggest to people. Both to refresh lists but also because I need some that are more accessible.
One thing I've run into is the number of places that block threads and bridgy which is a major negative to my recommendations... I'm trying to convince people and those are two great ways to help convince people to move to the fediverse over just moving to threads and bluesky...
"Ad Hominem" is a logical fallacy in which they dismiss the argument by addressing the person not the argument.
Ad Hominem is not calling the person a douchebag while addressing the points of the argument.
Ad Hominem is saying those points should be dismissed because they are a douchebag.
It's thrown around (improperly) often by people who want to basically say "you've lost the argument because you're angry" but what to add elitism on top of entitlement.
Easy test: if you can remove all the insults from the argument and it still makes sense, then it's not Ad Hominem.
My little fur niece and my family still need help. While the goal has been met, it's the bare minimum, if things go well and luck is good things will work out... but things are really hard even then.
Please consider donating more to improve her odds and help support my sister, her husband, and my nephew through this.
Hello to all the big hearts out there. My name is Zee and Bluebell (aka Baby… Tanya Laird needs your support for Help Bluebell Get Well & Stay With Her Family
@Henry willow to be clear, this is my sister's campaign. As far as I know they're stable, they're just holding their breath for worse and cutting back on their own care to cover and prep (ie. my sister has severe health issues, my nephew has dietary issues, and they're cutting groceries).
So donations right now are toward breathing room, toward either avoiding possible bad news putting them back under or if all goes well then toward getting them back on their feet.
Shiri Bailem
Unknown parent • •