I see that the press is once again trying to present terfism as nuanced: “we don’t want to stop trans women wearing skirts, we just don’t want them in our (SIC) spaces”.
Stop press, Joanne. They’re our fucking spaces too, because as we’ve been explaining for fucking years: trans women are women.
Trans women get breast cancer, therefore we need breast cancer screening.
Trans women get gynaecological problems, therefore we need gynaecologists.
Trans women get raped, therefore we need rape crisis counselling.
Trans women suffer disproportionate levels of domestic violence, therefore we need DV shelters.
It ends up naked, with zero personal hygiene, surrounded by empty pot noodles, hunched in front of a monitor yelling on social media about how you lost custody of the kids because of the trans.
Since getting a prescription in Portugal, I had become complacent about my HRT stock. Previously, I maintained a stockpile of between 6 and 12 months' worth. I figured this was no longer necessary, as Portugal isn't being so comprehensively weird about trans people as the UK, and also they don't officially know I'm trans.
I was shocked out of complacency last month due to a supplier shortage. The pharmacies ran out.
@Zoë O'Connell and I got within 10 days of going cold turkey.
Lesson learned. As of today, and thanks to the grey market, I have 5 months' worth, and that will soon be getting upped to 7.
In case anyone asks, there is a way trans men can stockpile too - but only if they self-inject. All they need to do is put an extra week between each injection (for example, instead of taking a Sustanon injection every 3 weeks, as prescribed, it's every 4 weeks). In terms of effect on mental health, this will barely be noticeable. Obviously, the prescriber must not be told. Over time, that extra week will translate into spare ampoules of T.
I have the luxury of not needing to vote Labour to keep anyone out, but I had let myself believe there was some sort of political hope. I guess it's just as well Labour let us all know it's not them.
Honestly what with Tony Blair, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting all sharing their _aperçus_ on the subject of trans rights – short version, trans people don’t exist, should be shunted into “side rooms” in hospitals – I’m swinging very firmly back towards voting Green. They have their own terf wing, sure, but they seem to have largely locked them away for the duration of the campaign – rather than free-associating the abolition of trans rights on LBC, say
@considermycat I am utterly unconvinced by those of my friends who are honestly claiming that the larger his majority is, the more Starmer will feel emboldened to be more radical in Government.
I believe that he has already shown us exactly who he is, and that the larger his majority is, the more he'll be encouraged to behave exactly as he has done in opposition.
IMO, it is *Labour* that need to be tactically voted against, not the Tories (who are toast). 1/
@considermycat A bloody nose, a few winnable seats lost to a split progressive vote will, IMO, do far more to buck his ideas up.
Given the sort of political animal Starmer has shown himself to be, I feel the goal is to make him realize that if he wants a second term, he cannot treat us with the contempt that he has done thus far.
Far from a "ming vase", he's implemented a "Ming the Merciless" strategy, and I'll have none of it. /2
Unlike Ben(*), I do think that a larger majority will make the government more radical. I agree that I don't think that Starmer will want it, but I think the natural Peoples Front of Judea tendencies in the party will make it happen. Maybe I'm just overused to the Labour/TUC conferences of the eighties, but there's gonna be factions, right?
I don't see much point voting elsewhere, tbh. The tories are worse, the Lib Dems are untrustworthy (given bastards will always exist, look which party enabled the 2010 government which set this whole disaster going, and achieved none of their major policy goals) and the others don't have enough of the population agreeing with their policies, to make it just an ethical-vanity vote.
(*) The wider ActivityPub world is still a bit of a mystery to me. I can't comment, but I don't know if I'm not allowed or can't find the button.
Wikipedia says the House of Lords is formally "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled". And the full list of the king's titles are quite something...
There's a lot of competition for ridiculous sounding things.
As a result of “Sir Knight Commander of the British Empire” Kier Starmer’s performative cruelty against trans women within the last day, I have voted Green.
In partnership with the Good Law Project, today (18th June 2024), TransActual alongside an anonymous trans young person acting as Second Claimant have issued court proceedings against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
Deep fat fryer is caked in sodium stearate, which should tell you terrifying things about how I clean it and deal with the problem of disposing of used cooking oil.
@Adam Portugal, having been blessed without a domestic terrorism problem, has DIY barns in which NaOH is at the milder end of what you can just plop into the self checkout. I call that section, “the bomb making aisle”. It’s quite fun.
Anyway, upshot is, I’ve got bloody kilos and kilos of the stuff.
Just noticed that in DS9 the Dominion are first mentioned… in a silly Ferengi episode. Can’t decide if that’s better than Q waving the Enterprise at the Borg.
#ukpol Apart from the nonsense of the Tories' blithering about handing Labour a "blank cheque", how many people still know what a cheque is or what a blank one means?
In other blast-from-the-past news, I've heard the phrase "purdah" return for what we're now I hear we're supposed to call "the pre-election period of sensitivity".
From what I can see it's now called either "the pre-election period of sensitivity" or (and I refuse to say this in public company) "the pre-election period of heightened sensitivity".
Reform is about to overtake the tories in the polls. This just removes the last obstacle to the media making their love affair with Farage a 24/7 on-screen thing.
The drift to the far right and subsequent implosion of the Conservative Party is going to leave a void in UK politics that seriously risks being filled by actual nazis, and competent ones at that. I fear for the future.
The Tory party going hard right as a knee-jerk response to the challenges of the modern world, and then falling apart from its own insistence on refusing to adapt to reality, is a grim foreshadowing of what is going to happen to the west in general in the face of climate change and demographic reality.
Watching the birds in the garden, I find myself wondering about their inner life. Why does a bird decide to do what it does? If it's sitting on the fence and nothing apparently changes, why does it decide at a particular point to fly away? They're not just instinct response machines, I think. Do birds get bored? Do they post on bird twitter about the blob sitting at the black oblong and why she suddenly gets up to do something else?
Obv I have no insight into a bird's inner state though I'd be unsurprised if they had at least some emotional existence. But one can posit things that incentivise it to move without needing to invoke boredom.
Like it's got hungry enough that it's gone off to feed; or some kind of patrolling setup where it wants to check each of several territories at least so often. Or it's spotted something that you or I wouldn't notice - perhaps overhearing calls of another bird?
The cleaner and gardener are both here at the same time. I feel so middle class. (Obviously not upper class, or I'd have sent the butler to the Post Office rather than going there myself.)
@lnr @chiffchaff There *is* (as I understand it) significant disagreement in the intersex community as to whether they want to be included. That would be my charitable interpretation.
@sparrowsion @lnr Similarly with Black communities (BIPOC as the call it in the US: we don't seem to be as organised with our acronyms as they are over the pond, even their anarchists have a brand).
That was my first thought. *Then* I saw that he'd said "antagonistic" and other folk also did comment archaeology convincing me otherwise.
@lnr Sorry for the daft answer. I'm only in the mood to snark and eat too much ice cream at the moment.
That was the gap between my replies. I've been to Tesco and back and bought a big tub of Häagen-Dazs "Strawberries and Cream", and I need to eat it all tonight because the way the week's going, it will probably want to invade Poland, tomorrow morning, if I don't.
@chiffchaff @sparrowsion @lnr One problem with the term BIPOC over here is that the people yelling about the rights of British "Indigenous" people aren't quite in the same part of the political spectrum.
@mobbsy @sparrowsion @lnr Quite. "People of Colour" doesn't seem to have caught on over here, either. Maybe it's because it's got the kind of contorted grammar that comes with HR and train announcements. I'm happy to take direction on this, of course.
I'm mainly impressed by America's ability to turn everything into a noun with a badge and a day and a song and a flag and a page in a book of etiquette.
Okay, they then seem to mainly throw their creation into the basement and forget about it, but that *machine* which turns problems into product is quite awe-inspiring.
Speaking of the Chinese, how about some of these flags being made on home turf for once. The Chinese benefit from all of these gatherings. Peeps in the community could benefit greatly if this were so.
A fine evening, and lovely to catch up! (For the rest of you, we've known each other since the last time I had long hair, but hadn't seen each other for decades.)
Also, you'd have got a much better photo if you'd just taken one and asked for permission afterwards. When I'm asked for a photo, I have an awkward tendency to pull a Lembit Öpik half-smile.
Thank you for purchasing item packaged in cardboard. For your convenience, it has a resealable flap, stuck down with glue, which is guaranteed to be far stronger than the cardboard it’s stuck to.
Anna Harrold has hit back at online trolls who called her ‘disgusting’ and a ‘disgrace’ after she won the women’s half marathon at the Great West Run in Exeter
Prime example of statistics at work, more cis women gonna be hurt by gender policing rules cos as you say trans women better at keeping head down (or avoiding sports).
That article could have been SO much better written about how this is the impact of shitty transphobic gender policing.
@Catherine is Tired @Sarah Brown Notionally because she would have had the advantage (citation needed) of a "male puberty" (citation needed) and stronger bones (citation needed) and deprived a "real" woman (citation needed) of a win.
Cetacean needed - maybe we can persuade the orcas that terfs are more fun than rudders.
@sparrowsion @pseudomonas Probably all male trees so there's no fruit for people to eat. So the air will be full of pollen. Can we leave Badenoch there to suffer horrible hay-feaver and go to the pub with the transwoman?
Not sure I'd want to be in those woods in the first place.
Trans women over TERFs every time. My earliest experience of single-sex spaces online as a baby cis bi woman was TERFs gender policing other women and they were unsurprisingly biphobic and like 14yr old mean girls. I didn't like it age 17 before I knew many trans folks, I'm certainly not liking it now I'm 40+, know hundreds of trans folks and have zero fucks left to give for bullshit and hate.
The irony of the TERF brain worm trust going on about “female homosexuals” (god help us all if TERFs ever master the ability to sound like a normal human being) is that cis lesbians are pretty much the least transphobic demographic and entirely sick of TERFs’ bullshit.
People often ask what it's like to be trans, because it seems to be a very hard thing to imagine.
A friend, sadly no longer with us, once put it absolutely perfectly to me, when she said, "It shouldn't matter what sex you are while you're cleaning the oven, but it does."
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Yamiyume Disagree.
It ends up naked, with zero personal hygiene, surrounded by empty pot noodles, hunched in front of a monitor yelling on social media about how you lost custody of the kids because of the trans.