I shared this 3 years ago today before my egg even cracked...

And honestly, rereading it is chilling a true. I never experienced dysphoria before transitioning, but I definitely felt that those were not my spaces or my people.

On top of that, when around other women I was incredibly self conscious... in the spaces that felt the most natural, the relationships that felt the most natural, I felt like I was intruding.

I was so intimately aware of the threat of men and because I thought I was one I was so terrified of being threatening and making the women around me feel unsafe... because doing so would mean being feared and ostracized by the people I felt most natural with.

For the longest time I thought this was maybe just because I was autistic, and even then I still couldn't understand why I felt natural around women and those socialized as women... It was a sticking point in my mind constantly because I know I wasn't socialized female and I have a bio-brother who lived through similar circumstances and didn't remotely turn out the same way.

And honestly as I finally found true family... I was low key terrified for the longest time because the people I adopted were almost all women (at least, we thought so at the time... funnily enough most turned out to be trans-masc sometime after adopting them, but that didn't change the terror...)

All this is to say we're not men who decide to become women... we're women who decide to stop pretending to be men. Who grew up being forced to pretend to be someone other than who we are, and being told that the idea of being who we are is impossible, gross, and wrong. And even after we have to live in terror of people accusing us of pretending to somehow abuse other women.

Original Tumblr Post via Archive.org

Tumblr by Opiumbug

it’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman

Reply by valkyriethunderbitch

This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.

When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.

Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.

Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.

Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?

If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.

Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.

Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.

A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.

Reply by thecuckoohaslanded

“exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around”

So many people have no idea how true this is. Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.

One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.” This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).

There can be benefits, here and there. But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.

Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces. That does not mean we belong in them. Or feel comfortable anywhere near them. Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying. Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying. You are in a constant state of panic around men. And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family. We NEVER feel safe. And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men. They’re horrifying. What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk. Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this. I have never been an athlete. My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable. I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports. The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING. Men don’t see women as less than human. They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.

Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them. Your LIFE depends on whether they notice. That’s not safety. That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place. Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.

We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people. Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe. Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity. We have to lie to get them. We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are. We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.

Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make. If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:

Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.

Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.

For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces. But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women. Everything else is social. Everything else is acting. Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die. We can never really be anything other than female.

Womanhood is not the thing trans women have to fake.

#LGBT #LGBTQIA #Trans #TransFemme

You know what's great to learn at 38, right before bedtime one night, after a whole life time of struggle...

That your mother traumatized you with ADHD to the point where actually pushing myself against ADHD is a trigger... making it so no amount of coping skills can help me push myself for any real length of time...

I'd try and do something that requires a push, even a little one... and be crying... and I thought it was just the feeling of hitting my dopamine... but nooooo... now I'm unpacking that it was me getting triggered at the feeling of pushing my reserves at all...

That explains so damn much and makes me feel so damn hurt and angry...

I was forced to push myself so far so often as a kid and she didn't ever relent when I was critically over-extended on dopamine... usually around cleaning. I'm remembering so many times crying and sobbing on the floor because she demanded I clean to an extreme standard and I wasn't allowed to do anything else until I met her approval...

And I've been running my whole life fucking kneecapped by this... I thought I just had it worse than most (with ADHD) on my ability to push myself on tasks... but no... it's because I realize now I can't fucking push myself at all because my fucking brain just jumps straight to that extreme pain and trauma right away...

Now I'm fucking crying when I should be trying to sleep...

#ADHD #Neurodivergent #Trauma
@adhd group @actuallyadhd group

I shared this a few years ago but a lot has changed since then...

Not a perfect graph regardless, but I like it for communicating.

Mozilla announces on-device (as in not using the cloud) AI image recognition to generate alt text for users who need screen readers...

And people are flipping out over AI still in the comments

Mozilla

2024-06-03 09:35:50

Firefox 130 is bringing a game-changing feature: automatic alt-text generation for images using a fully private on-device AI model! 🙌🏾

Initially available in the built-in PDF editor, our aim is to extend this to general browsing for screen reader users. hacks.mozilla.org/2024/05/expe…

Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.

^{Tarek Ziadé (Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog)}

I made something to scratch an itch that's been bugging me for years... will save me a lot of time and trouble on some of my work (and possibly personal) projects...

In other words, I made something: pypi.org/project/pyasdb/

(For anyone wondering my current use case, I have a tool I wrote for work that's sitting on top of peewee and sqlite and it's been a massive pain to expand it out... this isn't something super special, but for the 20k-40k or so entries this should do just fine searching/querying/etc, even before adding indexing... and it'll make rebuilding my toolkit faster as well as easier to maintain since there's no firm structure to the resulting database)

pyasdb

A simplified NoSQL offline database built on top of shelve/pickle

^PyPI

Want to learn real quick that "leftist" does not automatically mean "good person" or "free from bigotry"?

Call them out on body shaming or misgendering monsters.

It's also a painful reminder that so much "acceptance" is just performative.

If you think I'm valid for being fat, but then insult a monster for being fat, it tells me that you never actually saw me as valid.

If you think my gender transition is valid, but then purposefully misgender an awful trans person, it tells me that you never saw my transition as valid.

Because if these things are true and valid, then being an awful person wouldn't matter!

#lgbtqia #leftist #bigotry

OMG I'M WHEEZING!

#GoodOmens #GoodOmens2 #NeilGaiman

... now, to cry in relief...

Server News

2024-05-23 03:53:25

<Insert Profanities>

So the temporary system had some sort of failure, I'm not even 100% sure what caused it to be honest. It went down sometime yesterday and some of the virtual drives got corrupted, which caught the database and the virtual gateway device.

I was able to restore the system... most of the way. Thankfully there are backups of the database, but some of them were also flawed as well, the most recent intact one was from 5/16, so 5 days were lost.

To be clear, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there's not as much redundancy in the temporary setup (sadly it looks like it'll be a few more months before I have a place of my own and can spin up my own hardware again). But I'm going to still look at how I might get those in better shape.

As far as how long it took: I had a busy day yesterday and didn't see that the server was down until I was too exhausted to do anything about it, so it had to wait until I got off work today... each attempt at restoring the database takes around an hour, so that took *a while* to get restored.

... ugh...

youtu.be/DlFkfOqtgR8?si=2e-AF2…

#ADHD #neurodivegent @actuallyadhd group @adhd group

What Don't You Understand? - A Short Film about ADHD

ADHD is a very complicated thing, and it is very hard to explain, especially to those without it. This film takes you through common experiences that come wi...

^YouTube

The raw surrealness that hits you from time to time when transitioning...

I thought I was a guy... now I'm thinking of myself as a woman.

I used to look in the mirror and always feel blah, and unmemorable unattractive face... now I see a face I genuinely recognize and remember, a face that I can feel attractive wearing (even if I'm not my own type and will never really see it myself)

My hair which was always just an uninteresting mess... turns out it likes to naturally grow into a cute bob (though I'd still like to try styling it more).

Oh... and boobs, just boobs.

#trans #transfemme #SecondPuberty #lgbtqia

Rant about AI:

Sadly there's no reasonable way to differentiate AI content from "real" content. And regardless of your opinions on AI there's no "stopping" it (it's a "cat's out of the bag" situation, you can run these things on your home computer with open source software... there's no way short of an apocalypse to stop development from here).

What we do have is a lot of fighting and little effort to work on solutions of living with this. And I think worse yet many taking the anti-AI stance, especially the loudest of them, are basically making things worse because real solutions are anathema to them (ie. anything short of an outright ban on the technology is unacceptable, which means they tend to push back against even efforts to rein in AI or talk over those who want to push those efforts).

On top of that you have the borderline predatory push of "AI Detection Tools" and "AI Poisoning". The detection tools are a question of "How many real lives are you okay with ruining to catch a handful of bad uses cases in AI because there is zero way to have any certainty on the accuracy of these tools?" while poisoning tools are a security blanket that leads to people dropping their defenses because they don't stop AI, just slightly delay it's access to your content (even the creators of those tools acknowledge that AI will quickly bypass them, at which point there's no difference in whether or not you used that tool), worse yet as AI gets further incorporated in search tools it can make it harder to get visibility and exposure over AI generated content.

What we really need to be focusing on to address the problems with AI:

• Learning how copyright works (in my experience artists tend to have a woefully bad understanding of what is or isn't covered) and making sure corporations don't lobby the government into allowing copyright on AI works (under current law they are public domain, aka. no copyright, but there's already been one case of pushing that they can copyright "arrangements" of AI works). This means if they want to actually have a copyright on art, they've got to pay a human artist
• We need to push for reporting requirements/standards. One of the most toxic elements is how much AI floods spaces and bumps out human artists, especially when they attack the prompt containing the artist's name (meaning searching for that artist can turn up more AI work than their actual work)... there needs to be a requirement that AI art be labeled. This also works with the previous point as it is similar to being able to search for something released Creative Commons.
• Push for copyright responsibility in outputs rather than training data inputs. This sounds like something that is already one of the loudest arguments, but really isn't. Most arguments I hear try to go after AI tools for copyright content in their training data... but if you actually learn copyright you realize that a victory here largely means that major companies get more of an advantage because copyright only applies when content is copied (ie. when the training data is made available for smaller companies to run their own) vs when content is transformed (despite popular opinion, the vast majority of AI output does not violate copyright and qualifies as a transformative work... see again learning copyright law, plus a dash of learning how these tools actually work). Responsibility in outputs means that an AI can violate copyright (if I ask an AI tool to give me the first chapter of a copyrighted book and it does so... that is a violation and they need to genuinely be responsible for taking measures to prevent this from happening, but there should also be leeway for "forced violations", ie. when you bend over backwards to make it break copyright vs just saying "give me the first chapter of...")
• Work on learning and developing responsible usage. Again despite popular artist opinion, there genuinely is a lot of responsible use cases for all these AI technologies, from using LLMs to help debug code, summarize text, prioritize lists to voice duplicators used, with the license of the original VA, being used for dynamic speech (ie. voice assistants or actually speaking a player's name in a video game in the middle of otherwise pre-recorded output). And that's not to ignore image generators which can be used for enhancing/repairing old photos, or just used for general visual effects on your own art (ie. the filters everyone uses on instagram or the like... much of them are the exact same tech as AI Image Generators)
• And as always... fighting capitalism because the real threat of AI is the same as any other technology advancement: if CEOs can replace you with a machine, they will, and we live in a society where no employment means risk of death.

#AI #ResponsibleAI #Rant

youtube.com/shorts/kenDWpNu6Go…

#ADHD #AuDHD

Brennan just learned the word "Deltohedron"

If you need to distract Brennan, talk to him about dice names #shorts #dimension20 #fantasyhighFor select free seasons of Dimension 20, clips, and more, visi...

^YouTube

My sister Chelsie is struggling emotionally with potty training her kid, so I edited a popular meme to be more relevant.

#StarTrek #Parenting #PottyTraining #StarTrekTNG

Had a really long night at a charity LARP event I was invited to, I thought I felt slightly pretty for a moment in the last one picture I shared... But after last night I felt much much more happy and sure of myself.

Edit: alt-text provided by @Janet Logan 🏳️‍⚧️

#selfie #transfemme