@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."
Forget the brig, forget having a pip removed from your collar so you're the same rank as Kim... the absolute worst punishment possible on Voyager is Janeway's "disappointed" look.
Get up, fed, showered, sit down at desk. Then stare out of the window. Get coffee. Attempt to remember what I was doing on Friday. Stare out of the window. Cry.
Apparently the Tory press is going to lead with their desire to remove all equality protection in law for trans people.
Ineptly because, it turns out, they don’t understand equalities legislation.
And also they’re going to get annihilated so they can’t do it anyway.
But it seems this is now accepted political discourse in the UK, and I would like one, just one opposition party to have the balls to say in response, “you are terrorising trans people and you need to stop”.
But they won’t, because all parties in the UK (yes, all of them) have quite a few people who actually agree with the Tories on this, and it’s more important to avoid upsetting these people than it is to take a stand and say that what amounts to state sponsored terrorism against a minority of your population who just want to live in peace is wrong.
Boosting this as it's interesting: Medicines regulation is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998 (Sch. 5 (II)(J4)), so Holyrood cannot legislate in this area and Atkins is not stepping on Holyrood's legislative competence toes here.
@Lisa DiFalco @Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖ The subject matter of the Medicines Act 1968 (under which this Order was made) is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998.
I remember canvassing my council ward in 2012 as a well regarded Liberal Democrat councillor. They phoned their neighbours so they could get their abuse ready.
And after I lost my seat 2 years later, they all told me how much they liked me.
I can’t imagine how much worse it must be for this guy.
Still, I find it difficult to have sympathies for the people who stole our EU citizenship and declared war on trans people.
Aaron Bell said it was ‘with a heavy heart’ that he was stepping down, raising questions about why he had been on the campaign trail since Rishi Sunak called the snap summer poll
What’s the suspected motivation for standing down beyond no hope of reelection? If I read the article correctly, the PM is putting his allies in easy to win districts - is that’s what’s going to happen here?
Thank you and apologies but I barely understand my own country’s politics.
@Sarah Brown @Dawn Blackbird Weirdly I had some a couple of days ago without changing dose etc. Wonder if there's a hormone-absorbtion related bug going around. (I remember the first time you got Zumenon in Portugal you tried to learn the words "not that one it makes my tits hurt")
Reading r/BestOfRedditUpdates and thanking whatever deities that be relevant for not being cishet because, OMG you guys, a lot of these people are in relationships that are basically wars of attrition.
A lot of people play the Game of Life(1) because they think that's what they're meant to do. Then, halfway around the metaphorical board, something makes them self-examine for the first time, and they realise they don't have to play. But because of the sunk cost fallacy, they can't quit. But if they can make their partner give up instead, then they "win".
And it happens less among people whose sexuality, gender, neurotype, or thing I don't know enough about to name, differ from standard issue.
Because, I think, realising that we are one or more of those things, early in our lives, mean that we learn to self-examine sooner. It does still happen, of course, and heaven knows there are plenty of arseholes in those categories. But it means we can see the issue, more of the time.
@shinydan @kincaid I think you're right about that. I think it also kind of weans people off identifying themselves with the system (I don't mean "identify" in the modern sense, but as in a kind of lack of resolving of the person and the norm into distinct objects).
A thing I have noticed. 2 decades ago, there was decent pharmaceutical knowledge in the trans community. We knew what GnRH agonists were and how they work. We knew that for trans girls, if you couldn’t get them, then a cocktail of spironolactone and finasteride would do a pretty good job as a replacement. We knew that cyproterone acetate worked even better than spiro, but was hepatotoxic, so be careful.
I feel like that’s all been … lost?
I suspect that until this sentence, most currently transitioning people won’t even know that GnRH agonist is the proper term for what is frequently and misleadingly called a “puberty blocker”.
How did we let all this knowledge get lost? We, as a community, used to know how to outflank attempts to stop us accessing medication.
Now the British government just go, “we’re banning prescription of puberty blockers” and everyone throws their hands up and goes, “oh well, no alternative but unopposed testosterone I guess”.
We were better than this. Why did tha
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A thing I have noticed. 2 decades ago, there was decent pharmaceutical knowledge in the trans community. We knew what GnRH agonists were and how they work. We knew that for trans girls, if you couldn’t get them, then a cocktail of spironolactone and finasteride would do a pretty good job as a replacement. We knew that cyproterone acetate worked even better than spiro, but was hepatotoxic, so be careful.
I feel like that’s all been … lost?
I suspect that until this sentence, most currently transitioning people won’t even know that GnRH agonist is the proper term for what is frequently and misleadingly called a “puberty blocker”.
How did we let all this knowledge get lost? We, as a community, used to know how to outflank attempts to stop us accessing medication.
Now the British government just go, “we’re banning prescription of puberty blockers” and everyone throws their hands up and goes, “oh well, no alternative but unopposed testosterone I guess”.
What makes you think it’s lost? My egg cracked in 2020, and within a couple of weeks I’d learned basically all of this info from an introductory article on transfemscience.org.
Trans people can and do become amateur endocrinologists so we can DIY if we have to. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t scream about it when the cis ineffectually try to cut off our access by restricting medicalized channels.
yeah I mean, all I know is that back in 2015 bottom surgery was $20k out of pocket, whether you stayed in the US or went to Thailand. Estrogen was always cheap, but the only cheap anti-androgen here is spiro. Doctors here won’t even prescribe Cyproterone because the FDA considered too risky, and Finasteride is really expensive.
in Ireland it's very hard to get a prescription for any HRT, public has a 10 year waitlist and will tell your GP they're at risk of losing their license if they prescribe HRT (this is a lie), so most of us were relying on UK-based GenderGP, which is now imploding. The website "HRT Cafe" and this dosing chart transfemscience.org/articles/e… have been a godsend for a newly hatched trans girl I know. I just count myself lucky that I've gotten what I needed from testosterone and my body's stock hormones are good enough for me going forward.
@llwynog it depends on where you're based - and possibly if you're open to moving or very very cautiously picking up some mail in another country. (I see the EU flag in your profile, that gives you options re: moving.) In Ireland it's not a controlled substance, and when I was checking the list of sellers on HRT Cafe for E patches I saw some that had injectable testosterone. Anecdotally, I pass much more easily in Ireland, I think because short and soft spoken men aren't out of the ordinary here.
in my generation at least DIY is kinda underground but we still have knowledgeable people you just have to find them scattered across discord servers and DMs
@geekylou :transgender_flag: @Katie Fenn I think that’s a huge factor. In the 2000s, the de facto online UK trans community was LiveJournal where nobody gave a shit if you talked about grey market HRT. Now its places like Reddit and Facebook groups, where central moderation will nuke your whole group for it.
@alexandria I started diy because I had no interest in socially transitioning and that wasn't an option.
Anyway when I did go to my gp she said "I assume you won't quit if I tell you to" yup. Here's a prescription, being monitored by a Dr is way more healthy than doing it yourself. I'll read up on the subject, come see me in 3 months
also a lot of people do #DIYHRT all the time, even when it's theoretically possible to get meds in their juristiction simply because of #privacy being compromized and other risks ...
The trick is to be rich enough that you can keep all the most important things in your airship, from which you may then look down with your monocle upon those fools whose lives are immovably tethered to the earth.
Different water quality? When I still lived in Germany, the same brand of coffee, made in exactly the same way at my parents' house and at my studio flat in Nuremberg would taste completely differently. The water in my hometown is quite soft, the water in Nuremberg is particularly hard.
Just saw this via the London Reconnections blog and, oh my god, I think you could not do a worse job of redesigning the tube map if you tried.
“Paint all the lines the same colour. Send a train into London centre from Zone 6. Which identically coloured line does it emerge from on the other side? Fuck knows. Good luck!”
I mean, look at Oxford Circus? Which are the through lines? No? Me neither.
And this is promoted as “accessible”. God help us all.
@Girl on the Net who needs to know where they’re going when they can tell at a glance which lines were built using cut and cover, which are deep level tubes, and which are national rail loading gauge? EVERY TOURIST MUST KNOW THIS VITAL INFO
Ugh. Oxford Circus is awful, as you say, but both ends of the Waterloo and City aren't much better. It's not at all clear that that line doesn't filter into one of the other ones out of the far side.
Ah, another cartographer convinced that Harry Beck had it all wrong because he wasn’t a cartographer when in fact he got it all *right* because he wasn’t a cartographer.
there are some nice ideas, like the thickness of the lines (not that I noticed), and different stations and connections. Losing the proper colours is obviously not going to work for anyone. Who cares if something is overground or underground anyway?
@girlonthenet It feels so wrong on so many levels.
Even the train frequency is rather confusing rather than helpful on the map. It doesn't offer choice. If I want to get from A to B I usually can't choose a more frequent lines but have to choose the lines which get me there. Same applies to mode of transport.
Additionally, this would mean all maps need to be reprinted if the frequency is changed.
Oh, and the frequency distinction is ridiculously precise. And is there any line with ❤ minutes frequency? I certainly can't see any at the first glance
Someone on Bluesky yesterday was like, “actually how about national service for Boomers and Gen X doing customer service jobs?”
And I’m like, you want to put me, a nerd with zero fucks given and oppositional defiance tendencies, into a customer service job that I can’t get fired from?
You know Police Academy, right? You remember Mahoney, right?
I would have SO MUCH fun!
(And yes, I have worked customer service, but back then I needed to be polite to the ghastliest of customers)
Y'know, I'm struggling to find work and it's bloody depressing just being no earthly use to the world.
I volunteer as much as I can, but I'm not really the type (doing charity work takes a certain kind of *good* person who has a *vision* for the Universe).
So if someone told me that I had to report here or there to serve coffee, or whatever, I'd happily do it. Having some kind of purpose would be wonderful.
I get on quite well in customer service jobs (being top 50% doormat, bottom 50% whetstone), but there are so few that hire at the 21-and-over minimum wage rate..
@Ghost of Hope William Hill and Ladbroke in my case. People who thought that being able to throw a hundred quid at a dog race made them better than you.
@Ghost of Hope I remember in the first year of cadets, the senior NCOs had been to Germany camp and it was raining so they were made to give us a presentation about it.
And they reeled off the list of aircraft they saw, and then said, “what else do you find in Germany?”
Changing from crossrail to the jubilee line highlights how badly the 90’s “techno” styling of the jubilee line extension is ageing. It just feels gloomy and oppressive.
yeah canary wharf specifically has a bit of a dystopian feel to it seen in the current time. It used to just look scifi but now it looks ‘the bad guys in scifi’
@marlies my enduring association with all the docklands redevelopment style is the classic TV show "Bugs" which was filmed around the area! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_(…
It's always seemed a slightly depressing riff on grey-and-vast Estate Agent Fascist.
I think about that time there was quite a lot of aesthetic fetish for spies and the security services, paramilitary police units, vigelante cops, etc (the GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies era) a kind of "Dirty Harry"-seque uptick.
Especially with it being Westminster it all just seems like a tired and vaguely offensive cliche.
So my real fear if the Tories die (and to be clear, they absolutely need to) is that the uk media will fucking gleefully embrace Farageist fascism as the defacto legitimate heir.
After 97 it was clear that their drifting rightward had been rejected. Now it very much is not. The instincts of the post 97 Tories was to try and persuade the electorate that they had learned to stop being abject cunts.
The reaction of the British right this time is going to be to dial up the cuntery, and the media will entirely uncritically embrace it, because they think it makes good telly.
Unless the sentiment on the ground shifts back to a rehabilitation of social democracy in the next decade, this means that the UK basically gets a 10 year reprieve, and then when the grey Starmer regime runs out of steam after being fucking useless for a decade, you get full-on V for Vendetta.
We are already seeing the start of this in the US: a proto fascism regime was defeated 4 years ago by an opposition made up of people who clearly wanted to be civil servants rubber stamping stuff, and n
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So my real fear if the Tories die (and to be clear, they absolutely need to) is that the uk media will fucking gleefully embrace Farageist fascism as the defacto legitimate heir.
After 97 it was clear that their drifting rightward had been rejected. Now it very much is not. The instincts of the post 97 Tories was to try and persuade the electorate that they had learned to stop being abject cunts.
The reaction of the British right this time is going to be to dial up the cuntery, and the media will entirely uncritically embrace it, because they think it makes good telly.
Unless the sentiment on the ground shifts back to a rehabilitation of social democracy in the next decade, this means that the UK basically gets a 10 year reprieve, and then when the grey Starmer regime runs out of steam after being fucking useless for a decade, you get full-on V for Vendetta.
We are already seeing the start of this in the US: a proto fascism regime was defeated 4 years ago by an opposition made up of people who clearly wanted to be civil servants rubber stamping stuff, and not actual politicians.
And now the US stands at the cusp of finding out that Trump Series 1 was just the dress rehearsal.
this was my fear during much of May's rule : that if the tory Party shattered, one of the shards would be Norsefire. You're right, I think, that this is another route to the same.
Actually, the key to Labour getting much done may turn out to be whether they can wrench the Overton window back a bit. This is just another reason why that's important...
@Simon Waldman My fear with Labour is that they don’t want to. We see both with them and the US Democrats that they simply accept the clear and obvious deliberate sabotage to democracy and civil society that the other side do as legitimate and do nothing to undo it when they have the opportunity.
I don't think they individually see it as legitimate... But whether they want to spend their time in office reversing tory stuff rather than making their own mark... Yeah.
@Colman Reilly The Trump regime deliberately and systematically stacked the US legal system, all the way up to the Supreme Court, to deliberately sabotage any and all attempts to hold them to account.
It doesn’t matter whether the press would or would not cover any undoing of this, because the Biden regime has clearly just accepted this state of affairs and the constraints it places upon them.
The guy did an insurrection. Not only is he running around free three and a half years later, he’s about to get re-elected.
This is the exact same shit that the Weimar Republic did with Hitler (actually, it’s worse; Hitler actually did jail time, just not what was warranted). They never fucking learn.
@Colman Reilly honestly, “the media won’t cover all the good stuff” is at the level of, “why is nobody reporting my brilliant chess opening after my opponent shat on the board and knocked all the pieces over?”
Specific to the UK, I expect Reform to take over the remnant Tory shell as there will be nobody to oppose them except the rw loons who will welcome them. Reform get their hands on the Tory electoral machine, agents, membership and fundraising lists for pennies. And once that becomes private company data, not very reversible.
Such a reverse takeover would also get them over the fptp lose-your-deposit hurdle, one more step to normalising them. It also allows them to drop any inconvenient history “that was the other guys” while claiming any positive-for-them Tory legacy as their own.
@Colman Reilly Trump, the man who tried to stage a coup, is probably going to win anyway.
That he’s even in a position to be able to do that means that “the thing” doesn’t exist, and possibly never did.
Fuck the media. Do the right bloody thing.
It reminds me of Gordon Brown in 2010 when he kowtowed to the media and rowed back on the Mrs Duffy thing.
He was going to lose anyway. He bloody WANTED to lose. The absolute bare minimum he should have done given he had the platform is say, “the things she said are bigoted. People should be ashamed to say things like that. It’s not right, and I’m not sorry”.
Sarah Brown
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in reply to Sion [main] • • •@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.
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Unknown parent • • •@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.
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in reply to mobbsy • • •@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.
Ged|Net
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •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.
#MakeHomemadePrideFlagsAThing.