*ira @ ira @beehaw.org

Yet another tech witch person.

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2 yr. ago

Similarly, one cannot be "straight" without acknowledging existence of same-sex attraction, so people uncomfortable with that won't describe themselves and expect everyone to assume they're "normal". These people don't teach kids to say "they are straight", they prevent them from obtaining any knowledge about human sexuality at all to avoid even the possibility of admitting "exceptions" exist

By most current definitions, if a person claims not to be trans they are not trans and by default that means they are cis, regardless of other things; what you would probably mean is something like a person that obtains a gender affirming care not matching their gender assigned at birth who also objects to being called trans, and obvious cases when cis people do that are eg prescribed usage of puberty blockers to slow down puberty of cis kids, or breast reduction for purely aesthetic reasons. As such, the care received is distinct from identity (today we broadly define trans as people who do not feel comfortable with gender role/expression/identity assigned at birth).

There is a gray area of people that are doubting, exploring, fluid, and non-binary and will call themselves "not cis but not sure trans applies" and that's also fine and follows from contextual usage of these terms. A possible individual's explanation: a non-binary person that presents more like the opposite sex than assigned at birth (therefore matching the above definition) but otherwise not sharing social experience with most trans people so they don't want to be called trans even though they are not cis by the above definition. This is however much more specific, individual, and nuanced discussion that happens around the tweets.

The key here is, many words have multiple very contextual definitions and usage patterns and are deeply anchored to different social norms. That's why there's so much emotions around questions like "what does being a woman means?" even in purely cis feminist world (it also comes close to other linguistic/philosophical discussions, like Wittgenstein's "game" - can you clearly define "a game" and contrast it with say "a toy" to make these distinct? What about "a sport"? Vegetables as more taxonomical concept and more culinary concept?) That's why we ask for precise language: I may be non trans but receiving HRT. I may be a woman legally and experience both misogyny AND privilege from presenting "manly" and having "manly" professional image.

Some people feel like this needlessly muddles things because they claim "they know what the words mean and there's one definition and languages do not change unless dictionary publishes a new definition", but honestly, they either have not thought things through, not met enough diverse people, or follow a bigoted agenda".

But again, this is too nuanced for the tweets; the simple answer is "unless there's a specific other context that forces a different definition, you either claim to be trans, or you're cis".

It's up to you to sit down and write your goals. Work through how you feel about things and what bothers you. Maybe try getting into the mindset of not "transitioning", but "gender unmasking" - focus on letting your inner needs shine, rather than go through a checklist of what you "have to do".

Also if possible, the most generic advice, get more out to people (in real life!) to learn which interactions and opinions make you feel good and which you'd like to correct. Get support from the local community (and contribute back). I'm an awful introvert, so I know this can be hard, but even a bit of IRL interactions goes a long way when you're working through stuff and in doubt

I was taking it slowly ta first and basically waiting until my if photo would match target gender better. Now I slightly regret not starting earliest possible, as the weight of having non-matching names grew heavy quickly, and the bureaucrats in my regressive citizenship country made sure it's taking years instead of months (happy I still have the option at all though! If I had to get another citizenship/asylum and never have the option to correct a birth certificate, it'd really suck)

<3

Looks amazing, happy Pride!

Forgive Me Father. I rarely play shooters these days but this one is a quite pleasant for short sessions so far with just a tad of old doom-like tactics, but more streamlined, and has nice aesthetics too

The Old Reader is supposed to be a clone that showed up immediately after GR closure. Not sure how good it is now compared to the alternatives.

The trick to enjoy curated content via RSS is to subscribe to sources that curate your content rather than to raw news sources, e.g. subscribe a blog of a person that does important news reviews rather than to a newspaper raw feed. Otherwise the classic mailbox-like RSS reader experience indeed requires you to sift through content on your own and aggressively. That said, some commercial readers do try to algorithmically prioritize content based on your interest or offer discovery functions (a different kind of experience than direct community-based sorting of course, but there's trade offs here)

You've already hinted at the first step: learn more about different queerness flavors than your own. If your company has trainings or allyship meetings organized by your queer coworkers, attend them to get to know them better and learn more about how to help directly from them. If not, maybe it's time to help to start an initiative like an employee group and celebrate pride together? Personally I feel like my visible coworkers helped me a lot just by being there, in addition to a lot of resources and their work on systemic communication and support from my company.

From more personal experiences, as long as you're not insensitive about it, ask people about their needs rather than assume and guess. If you feel some help may be helpful, ask rather than act without consultation. Do not ignore anyone's identity but do not walk around on toes either - it's as othering to be ignored, infantilized, or belittled due to who you are, as it is to feel constant "positive" dishonesty and lack of feedback from someone who is afraid of talking openly about anything including work stuff. You want to be aware, not to treat people specially in any direction. Bring awareness to other teammates - normalize pronouns in introductions and on title slides, mention local pride events during fun part of your team meeting, share what movies on the subject you found emotional (but do not do it in a way which seems to bring obnoxious attention to your one queer report, that won't be appreciated by neither side...). All of these apply to shades of queerness same as being a woman, a neurodiverse person, or any other minority.

This is the game to come back to regularly, and a rare multiplayer enabled builder too!

Seconded, I use restic with a remote blob storage and works nicely

Most of my family luckily is still finding signal okay. Dropping sms was confusing to some, but i also get the argument for it, as some other struggled with selection of what kind of a message to send. Either way, hard to find an acceptable alternative to move them to

I’ve seen way too much “well gee you’re holding a conversation with me, there’s no way your autistic”

Twice in my life I tried to start a conversation on this topic with a medical mental health professional, like "Doctor, this feels relatable, can we...", and both times the reaction was basically "we've talked for 10 minutes and that's definitely not relevant, I won't even ask you where that came from or explain why", in a way that made me feel like a bad person even for considering. And then proceeded to blame me for any follow up miscommunications... One time this was a "specialist" on the subject and I fear for any kids coming to them, they were all around a condescending patronizing asshole that could not even be on time 90% of the meetings