Oookay, you’re trying to pick a fight but not exactly landing an interesting hook. This entire sentiment is pretty empty if the best you have is to heckle my spelling. Are you new to trolling? I feel like maybe you should read a tutorial or something.

Come on mate, gimme substance! Refute the argument with something other than just “nu uh!”

I understand it being a sticky issue for people because there’s so much of society and choice we put into the realm of adults. But here’s the thing. Psychology has been obsessed with trans people since the origin of the field. We have a ton of data on what happens when trans people recognized at an early age grow up and what that looks like when there’s no intervention whatsoever. The reality of it is that there’s certain things that there is no medical fix or take backs for once you experience your first puberty.

We know very well that gender identity observed in trans kids is stable. We have a rubric of diagnosis stable enough to have gone up against several National medical ethics boards and survived the scrutiny nessisary to opt for attempting risks.

The first generation of kids to grow up utilizing this process are now adults (the oldest cohort are now in their 30’s) and the results have been promising with an almost absurdly low rate of regret reported across the population…

But now you have to recognize why that rate of regret is so low. You need the signoff of a team of professionals who put the bar very high to allow candidates to attempt these risks and any of them can pull support if something doesn’t go to plan. Furthermore a child alone does not make these decisions the informed consent has to be demonstrated by the child and their parents. So when people say “kids shouldn’t make these decisions” you’re missing that they aren’t making these decisions. A kid and a panel of adults who are experts in their field, social workers and dedicated parents who have watched the difference in their child’s behaviour go from very obviously not thriving in a multitude of ways to massive improvements through social transition make these decisions.

People act like it’s as simple as a kid showing up and asking for a lollipop. It isn’t. We have literal generations of data about what happens if we do nothing. The outcomes are miserable. We can afford to try something different than known miserable outcomes.

It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.

Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.

Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.

If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.

If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.

What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.

Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.

Violence tends to be a double edged sword. Whether or not things get better as the result of an outbreak of violence is hit and miss. A lot of authoritarian regimes in history just get replaced with new authoritarian regimes that have a better PR team and create a leniency period before cranking back the progress once people figure everything has been fixed. Long term it’s not great prospects. Anarchist activities tends to create this sort of thing. It creates a power vacuum to which the first one to break the faith and assemble a new loyal hierarchy while murmuring a smokescreen of empty hymns of the old cause is rewarded by becoming the new tyrant. Oftentimes there is a promise of whatever state of oppression being a transitory period. You aren’t supposed to notice that the transitory period after which they say that they will surrender their stranglehold to the rightful inheritance of the people never comes to fruition and instead just becomes a new dynasty of effective monarchs living it up.

But other times it’s just another tool in the box of movements that are fighting against occupation. It usually helps if there’s a peaceful arm of the movement who will get most or all of the credit after the fact whom can hold the dialogue space. Every Civil rights fight that had a non-violent movement leader also had “unrelated” people in the field under a different banner solving some problems with violence. Black Panthers, Butterfly Brigade, bomb weilding suicide suffragettes, indigenous anti colonial movements… These are part of the landscape and the actions they took were given space to be picked over by contemporaries because provocative acts lend punch to rhetoric. If you have no legitimate means to solve the violence done to you other than violence then the problem still needs solving so violence it is. What is effective in this model is collective directed action with planned objectives to fit into existing systems or that come with fully drawn up replacements for old systems. Not as sexy as anarchy but the wins are on the whole more stable and enduring. If you want a democracy then your problem solve should at least should have a true core of people whose ultimate intention is to operate democratically. Violence has a seat at that table too but weilding it justly is a commitment.

Gods, this old chestnut… Hey, on behalf of the Trans-Non-binary community can we retire this please? Not because it’s offensive, it isn’t, we just heard it more on average and it was always just bland weak sause shit. Reseting the clock on this boring ass joke from reddit five years ago is cringe. You wanna troll somebody at least make an effort greater than “I know you are but what am I?!”

For me it’s been longer than that. I am a queer Canadian and anytime I have travelled the US or stayed with friends and seen any group carrying or wearing American flags that hasn’t given me the “ick” so much as rung alarm bells that those people are not safe.

Thing is, it’s the same thing with the Canadian flag. Any group flying too many Canadian flags outside of Canada Day is likely to be Conservative and anti-queer. Anti-Trans protesters or anti-vaxxers on highway overpasses? Canadian flag. Lifted truck soaring down the highway with a “Fuck Trudeau” bumper sticker - Canada flag. Hoard of protesters demanding book bans, group of people protesting Pride with a “you are gunna burn pedos” sign, antiDEI crusader mob - Canadian flag. It doesn’t take long before one starts to draw certain conclusions about a person’s character when they wave it around. For those of us trans folk who can it’s a sign to hide. A literal red flag.

Amoungst the left up here the flag is a complicated symbol. Many of us on the West Coast see it as a symbol of colonial practice and an insensitive declaration of an occupying nation on stolen territory for people who are still here and whose original sovereignty is still not properly acknowledged. It’s not a symbol of pride and if personally used as such it’s a sign of insensitivity and work to be done. At the same time I would not say that I am not proud of my Country for how far we’ve come. We are a nation in therapy who has the opportunity to put the work in to getting over some really bad murderous and selfish flaws and try new things to make things right. When I had an American friend up here it took a bit for him to understand how seriously the effort is to recon with our past and he treated us like a utopia of leftist sentiment but it is like therapy, yeah we might be putting the work in - but we can see how much further we need to go and praise doesn’t hit us as “job well done” it’s a reminder of how shitty it still is. But if anyone ever thinks that this complicated and nuanced relationship to country would stop us from rallying together to fight to preserve our rights to keep working towards that better future they would be dead wrong.

So I understand pretty well where you’re coming from but for a lot of us this isn’t a particularly new thing. It just is affecting more and more people as they wake up to realizing how these symbols are used.

Yup, already had the “flee or stand and die” convo with my partner a few weeks ago. I am firmly willing to risk death to defend the progress we’ve made as a Province and Nation. We aren’t perfect and are early in the process but we’re trying to recon with our history of colonial genocide and embrace a truer multiculturalism which the US refuses to even acknowledge. We have made commitments to the health and well-being of all citizens, not just the productive bodies which fuel the markets. It’s incomplete but aspirational and walking it back would be a disgrace.

The American democracy is an outdated shambles that has fallen into ruin and I will not be bound by it by choice. There is no freedom or opportunity the USA can offer us. Only more oppression on rights we already have enshrined.

Elon Musk has a well documented track record of supporting far right causes that mirror Nazi ideology. At the Inauguration he performed two Nazi salutes (one to the crowd and one to the flag). He routinely promotes the methods of genocides of trans people and Palistinians through both verbal parlance and through direct funding and uses well known euphemisms in support of white supremacy causes. He has authoritarian leanings tasked with removing from government service entire administrative arms that previously were not electable or apointable positions (because they were staffed with experts whose task is to stick to their guns of scientific or proven best practice and not simply be yes men telling the administration what they want to hear).

He also has never denied making a Nazi salute in the days since it’s happened instead deciding to make Holocaust and Nazi featured jokes.

At this point what evidence can be put forward that he is not a Nazi?

It may seem like a pedantic difference but you are missing a key part of what’s going on here. Nobody is challenging that gender dysphoria is a bad thing to experience… This policy is saying it’s kosher to proclaim “transness is a mental illness” which means in effect that encompasses gender euphoria and all expressions of gender incongruity as symptoms of a mental illness. It’s a subtle linguistic difference but one makes it possible to publicly derride trans people as being delusional or harmful to people around them or dangers to themselves and push for “curing” all transness by approaching being trans as a failure state.

If you got a foot fetish sure. But in bible foot or feet is used so many times for dick it is decently unlikely. “Foot water” is my favorite biblical euphemism for piss.

If you like that then you might enjoy the funny possible euphemism of the whole “washing of feet” thing. It could be read as the actual act of washing feet but there’s some places where it’s definitely being used as a euphemism for getting your dick wet.

That slight ambiguity could mean that the last supper included an orgy with a lot of same sex pairings - which to be fair is pretty in keeping with the MO of a lot of other cult leadership throughout history. Most of the prudish sex negative stuff comes more from Paul’s additions than directly through Jesus. But hoo boy do Christians get real mad when you imply this as a possibility.

For me I had to make a value judgement in regards to transition because my partner’s got phenotype preferences that don’t match where I would like to go and ultimately I had to break ot down as to whether keeping him as my romantic partner or transition would bring me more net happiness and chose my partner. It’s still a struggle because all that dysphoria doesn’t go away I just have to feed it different things to placate it enough to function.

I have a weird relationship with a lot of photos of myself pre social transition. Any photos of weddings or big family events where a dress code prompted me through soft pressure to try and “clean up” is sort of just interpreted as me being in drag but I never look happy in them. My Mom ended up taking down a bunch of family photos where I am so dressed because she started interpreting me as having “dead eyes” in them and they make her feel weird.

I can’t really erase all existence of my past self as I feel that’s kind of unfair to the other folk who were there with me at the time but we’ve definitely had conversations of “hey, using my old name and pronoun set to describe past me isn’t cool, please don’t.” but stories where the tale’s context involves me being interpreted as my birth sex by other people still feel bad. It doesn’t feel like a clean chapter break. It feels messy and threaded with compromise like I made some kind of fairy bargain- rewarding true love in exchange for staying the frog and never becoming the prince but I make it work. At my worst I feel like I stuck in the middle of a story. If my partner ever dies or leaves me then there’s a whole heartbroken third act that could kick off but as is I feel like I would still take a bullet for him any day of the week so this could just be the end of the tale. My relationship with act one is as compassionate to all involved as I can make it. It happened. It sucked. If I could go back and do it all over again from scratch I would have to know for certain that I would end up exactly back where I am now to not make different choices and as precarious as that is it’s enough.

Honestly there’s not really a way to know short of them telling you. There’s a difference from folk just not liking the gender box people put them in and rejecting all the cultural trappings of gender (being a tomboy or a femboy) from them being trans. Transness goes a little further than just cultural markers, it’s a reaction to one’s body. Oftentimes that struggle on the outside just shows up as them not flourishing… And sometimes you don’t recognize what them actually flourishing actually looks like because they never did until after they changed.

I grew up in the 90’s and from sheer lack of exposure just didn’t have words for what I was going through. I was aided by being fairly androgynous but really didn’t talk to anyone about how good it felt to be read by strangers on occasion as my gender. I relied on gender neutral nicknames. I starved myself or overexercised to stay lean at points to keep myself from putting on weight that would go to areas that would outwardly show my body through clothes and avoided mirrors while naked but none of that clicked as me being trans until when I was 21 and living abroad in Japan where basically everybody read me as being what I was, either assuming me as a trans man or reading me as a cis man. None of this really caused me to self reflect until I was near the end of my visa and realized that going back to all my friends and family whom I loved dearly was a double edged sword. I would be locked back in to where people would enforcing my gender, lightly mind you. They weren’t trying to force me to act any way at all but there was a gentle tyranny just by them correcting people who “got it wrong” or using my name or by men I saw as friends and peers treating me as a delightful oddity like I was some sort of ideal romantic though not nessisarily sexual conquest because I liked hobbies and masculine dominated spaces that few women participated in which in modern context would probably outwardly make me appear as some kind of “pick me”. This realization that I didn’t want to go back cascaded into me crashing hard up against all the novel fantasies I had neen distracting myself with that I would somehow go through some kind of magical event and instantly change body type and all my friends would just have to except me because “oh well magic…” I never believed this would actually happen mind, I wasn’t delusional but I would amuse myself while walking around with these little daydreams. All at once though I realized that that was never going to happen. I was gunna be in this form until I died and I broke into a full on dispair. I didn’t even know trans men existed and my only experience with trans women was representation where they were ridiculed. I backwards engineered that trans men must exist because that was the only thing that made any sense.

I stuffed it all under my hat for another 10 years, growing more distant with old friends and not making new friends. I read a bunch of feminism and chased out my internalized misogyny thinking that was the problem. It muddied the waters awhile but I couldn’t shake that no matter how I told myself that being a woman and being a man were value neutral it didn’t shake my feelings like I was playing out Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and all people saw was the roach. I tried non-binary pronouns and a name change more or less as proof to myself that I was okay without and discovered the opposite.

My mom took me coming out hard only in the way that she felt she should of seen it sooner and it threw into sharp relief all those times where she’d tried to pressure me in little ways to be more fem. I don’t begrudge her any of that. She says it should have been obvious but really no. If I had known that there were options I could have asked instead of hurting myself the way I did and struggling with the isolation then I might have. But I lived in a conservative town where just growing up in an agnostic household had seen me get literally have neighbor kids throw rocks at me growing up. Even if knew my friends and family were cool, there were medical options that would reduce all the regrets that I have now I might have buried and denied my needs anyway. My family had kept me alive by being awesome in other ways and I always knew that me dying would have destroyed them… And that’s really all you can do. Let your kid know they are loved regardless of anything and let them sort themselves out. No need to brace and seek the signs one of them potentially trans, just let them know that you love them and if they are then you will still love them and want to do right by them.

This is basically it except the trick was Netflix wasn’t actually all that profitable based strictly off of customers to start. It was a long con. It was ostensibly funded by people placing a bet. They offered a service that wasn’t just disruptive, it was operating at a loss. People piled into the service so licences started to get dicey. Netflix started producing and filming, initially at independent rates amd sweetheart deals in my union territory because everybody looked at as being a little baby studio that needed nurturing and to be fair working a Netflix show back when it started had perks. They placed bets on creators who wanted to make something different. Not nessisarily great but different giving their production teams a lot of creative freedom. Paid lunches, cell allowance, sometimes better hours and crew gifts when a number of studios like Disney were pulling penny pinching bullshit and trying to pretend they were an independent studio to get lower rates while letting their producers act like skeeze.

Thing was it was a cuckoo all along.

They flushed the market with a business model sustained by outside money so everybody else started doing the same thing. It destroyed all the union and contract protections syndicated television once had particularly erasing residuals. That was the main thing. Creators used to make money off of the amalgamation of their lifetime work by being owed a small amount everytime a rerun was aired… But streaming didn’t do that. They had those sweetheart deals that made streaming services exempt from on demand access counting as replays. So you cut off the career curve of creators from building security and only paid them for stuff they made once turning them effectively gig worker.

Once everyone was playing by the same rules the funding at the top cut out because they got what they wanted out of it they started jacking prices, removing titles, selling advertising because what the hell were you going to do, go back to cable? Now the boom is over and our local Industry is a bloody dust bowl. My seniority has jumped up more in the past year than it has in the full ten years before as folk have been retiring or dropping from the union to find new careers.

This isn’t as simple as you are implying as if you want to be a bro to trans people more nuance is generally required. Male and Female are not used strictly scientifically in context. Male and Female are often used as adjective forms of man and woman. Take the example of a male or female firefighter - if a trans man is a firefighter refering to him as a female firefighter using this reasoning comes across as fairly transphobic because it feels like you are either trying to utilize some sort of technical linguistic dodge to find an occasion to misgender them or your purpose is to out them to people unawares of their trans status.

Even when people use male and female as nouns instead of adjectives this transphobic reading applies because a lot of fairly obnoxious people will try and use these words as shorthand to imply that trans identities don’t matter and to avoid calling you by terms that align to your identity or to isolate trans identify out of discussions. This is why you hear the phrase “Assigned male/female at birth” used by the trans community (though it actually originates from the intersex community) or “birth sex” to refer to groups that include non-binary people instead of just male or female. That linguistic abstraction is important because it implies removal by way of time. In trans terms one can be treated as female at birth given the assumption of cisness for infants implying that that term could be inaccurate in the present day.

By contrast “Trans Identitied males/females” is a transphobic dog whistle. “Biologic males/females” has the same vibe because from a scientific prospect the term is so bloody vague it is practically meaningless. The speaker is just trying to imply the social category is irrelevant or putting emphasis on an assumed physicality. Like if someone says for example “biological males in women’s sports” you know the entire point they are going to be making is total exclusion before they even bother to elaborate further.

The reality is words Male and Female still represent social categories unless you append onto them more specific adjectives in term like Phenotypic, chromasomal or so on. These words are not immune from the cultural moment of negotiation of trans inclusion.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and… Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there’s usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay “must” is a strong word) be obeyed.

Ohhh no… As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.

Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn’t cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips… This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.

Due in large part to cultural bans on showing explicit (not sexually explicit, just undeniable romantic coding) same sex relationships in cartoons during it’s production if you know what the creator’s intent was for you are looking at… Kora’s arc sort of plays out like a very common struggle queer women have with compulsory heterosexuallity.

Wow, your name is pretty accurate huh?

Wow, lucky you.

While I won’t argue that the media is causing a number of problems thinking it’s a storm in a teacup is your privilege showing. Even though I live in one of the most trans accepting places on the planet I have had the unique experience of having to sneak past protesters who are trying to remove people like me from public life, using slurs over megaphones and openly marching hundreds strong in the streets… And again this is rated one of if not the most trans friendly place in the world. There is no safer place to go.

It’s a lot harder to see it as a storm in a teacup when the world is dramatically becoming a smaller place for us personally because laws keep passing that people do not understand or do not care how they actually impact us. The media doesn’t report a lot of us who are murdered even when it’s a hate crime. This year in the US there was 41-ish such hate motivated crimes which is near double 2023’s total… But we can’t be sure of the actual number because a lot of the time the transness of the victim and the nature of the motive is obscured by the media reporting. Some of the media shenanigans only gets caught only by loved ones as media frequently uses vagueness and dead names that friends and community members don’t recognize because that person hasn’t gone by that name for decades.

Your opinion comes from the fact you don’t personally have a horse in the race so whether you engage with it or not is a choice. The safe places are radically shrinking. The next government projected to win federally here is known to be openly hostile to trans people and I know that at least one of my friends will die directly as a result from them removing the supports currently in place. So enjoy the storm you aren’t living friend but realize saying it doesn’t exist is really crass to those who cannot find shelter.