Hey did you know that Iberian rail gauge is what it is because Portugal used 5 Portuguese feet for their gauge and Spain 6 Castilian feet for their gauge and the are so damn close that splitting the difference wouldn’t have a detrimental affect on rolling stock for either. And so its officially 1668mm!
All these neoliberal politicians know what their oligarch masters want, and it's been agreed informally, behind the scenes, that Farage will take the reigns in the UK after this shambles of a Labour government
This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.
So here it is.
Storytime.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.
But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.
Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.
But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.
One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.
Sarah asked
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This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.
So here it is.
Storytime.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.
But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.
Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.
But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.
One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.
Sarah asked her mother what that was about, and her mother explained that there was something called a “sex change operation”. Young Sarah noted two things:
This was a real thing
Her parents thought it was a very very bad thing.
As Sarah grew a bit older, she would notice other things from popular culture. A man had accidentally discovered how to permanently remove facial and body hair with lasers. There were people called transsexuals. There were men who liked dressing up as women.
All these things seemed important.
But they were also scary, and also clearly not the sort of things that her parents or anyone in their circle would approve of if they knew that Sarah was thinking about them.
One day Sarah was playing dress up with her friend, Kirsty. She was about 7. Their mums saw Sarah in a dress and laughed hysterically. Sarah was humiliated.
It slowly got harder and harder for Sarah to play with her friends. It was becoming clear that whilst this was considered cute when Sarah was 4, or 5, or even 8, it was starting to get a bit much, but the boys were just dreadful. Sarah got on ok with a couple of them, but mostly she just played with her computer.
Her parents, especially her father, thought she was doing this too much. Sarah was terrified of her father, who bullied her, and bullied her mother.
When Sarah was 9, her parents divorced. They were both having affairs. She carried on living with her mum, and her little brother, and the two siblings did not get on. Their mum had to work a lot of hours to make ends meet. Sarah’s old friends weren’t much interested in her any more; they were more interested in the boys that Sarah was supposed to have stuff in common with.
Sarah spent more and more time alone learning to use her computer. She got really quite good at it. Her mum worked evenings in a pub near a local Catholic private school. The teachers drank there.
Her mum would tell the teachers about her kid, who was “really good with a computer”. Eventually this interested them enough that they wanted to meet this kid.
Apparently Sarah made a good impression on them, because they offered her a scholarship. At 11, Sarah went off on a full scholarship as a day pupil to this Catholic boarding school. It had a uniform. Different for boys and girls. Sarah had to wear the boys’ uniform.
Sarah couldn’t make friends with the girls and the boys bullied her, but Sarah’s teachers were fond of her. She did well academically, even if she got in a lot of fights.
It was clear to Sarah though that her teachers and the priests who ran the school thought that people who had the feelings that Sarah had, the ones she didn’t tell people about, were going to hell.
Sarah started to go through puberty. She felt extremely alone. She carried on doing well academically, but the light started to go out of her eyes. When Sarah looks at old photographs now, from that time and later, the eyes just look dead.
And then Sarah’s body started doing … things.
And the girls that Sarah desperately wanted friendship with, she now wanted other things from them as well.
She wanted physical intimacy, but more than that, she wanted to be one of them.
And she couldn’t tell anybody.
And it hurt.
A lot.
There were TV programmes that occasionally featured “transsexuals”. These people were all portrayed as pitiful parodies of women. They all seemed sad and the things the programmes showed … well Sarah didn’t see herself in them.
Sarah was 15. Sarah didn’t know how full of shit the media was. Yet.
Because she wasn’t like the transsexuals she saw on TV, and because she was going through puberty and occasionally had blood in her testosterone stream, Sarah assumed that this must be some sort of transvestic fetish that she had. She didn’t know that when people do weird sex things, they don’t actually occupy their every other waking moment either, like when they’re brushing their teeth, or walking the dog, or doing their homework.
Sarah was good at maths and sciences, but she could be a bit slow on the uptake in other ways. If Sarah had thought about it more, she would have realised that a person’s core identity will manifest throughout their personality and sexuality is only one part of that, but she was operating in a limited information environment, and anyway, her sexuality was disgusting and she was going to hell for it. Everybody said.
And her eyes were lifeless.
And she had nobody to talk to about this. It didn’t even matter that they would hurt her if they found out.
It mattered more that she was so utterly ashamed that if anyone found out, she would have to die. Nobody would want her. Not even her own mother.
Sarah was by now a shell of a human. She lived for her special interests and not much else.
And there was no light in her eyes.
Occasionally, when she knew that she wouldn’t get caught, she would borrow a bra or something. Sometimes this gave her a sexual thrill. This just confirmed that this was a fetish. The whole “I’m not even a person any more if I’m not a girl” stuff was obviously irrelevant background noise.
Sarah got the grades to go to Cambridge and study computer science. Away from the priests, and exposed to new ideas, she started to realise that a lot of what she’d been told was bullshit. Especially the hell stuff. Especially the stuff about how LGBT people were bad people.
But she was still very ashamed. That stuff runs deep.
And her eyes were still dead.
During her time at university, Sarah, who had never actually had any kind of intimate relationship because she was a hollowed out shell of a human being, met Sylvia. They became friends.
Sylvia was also studying computer science but in the year below. Sylvia’s mother was profoundly emotionally abusive and she didn’t want to go back to her during the university holidays.
When Sarah graduated and started working, Sylvia got a summer job at the microprocessor company Sarah was working at. Since they really only knew each other over the summer; everyone else had got jobs elsewhere one gone home, they spent a lot of time together.
And then one day they ended up in bed together.
Sarah wanted to tell Sylvia the thing, but she was ashamed. So ashamed.
Eventually, Sarah and Sylvia ended up engaged. Sarah couldn’t marry Sylvia without letting her know. It wouldn’t be fair.
But she was utterly fucking terrified. Sarah was 26 years old by then and the company she worked for had floated on the stock exchange and made her wealthy. She paid off her mum’s mortgage and thought about looking for a house with Sylvia.
But she had to tell her this one, catastrophic, world-ending thing. She didn’t know how.
She told her she felt better in a dress sometimes. Felt better if she painted her nails sometimes. God, it was terrifying!
The world didn’t end.
The. World. Didn’t. End.
THE WORLD DIDN’T END
Sylvia was not disgusted. Sylvia, it seemed, was a little bit bisexual.
The dam started to crack. Sarah grew her hair out. Told a few of their friends. Some of them actually thought it was cool and fun.
One of them told her she looked like a Sarah.
Sarah’s friends started calling her Sarah in private.
Even if her eyes still had no light in them.
Sarah reached 30. She’d told people the thing. She wasn’t even really hiding it any more.
But she still remembered the pathetic transsexuals she’d seen on TV.
And her hair was starting to thin on top. There didn't seem to be much time left to do what she secretly knew she needed to do.
Sarah’s friends told her she had amazing eyes. Particularly her female friends. That there was something that triggered profound emotions with her eyes.
This is because if you looked into Sarah’s eyes, they were dead. All that was in them was pain. Deep, endless pain.
She had read some stuff, in secret, when nobody was looking, and then less secretly, about transgender people.
Some of them took oestrogen apparently.
Sarah didn’t understand why. It seemed controversial. She thought being transsexual was about an operation. Nothing more.
And then one day, just after her 32nd birthday, when she was presenting as a woman half the time in public anyway, but increasingly realising her body wasn’t going to keep letter her do it, Sarah got drunk, broke down in tears, and said, “I have gender dysphoria and I need a sex change”.
And over the next months, Sarah saw doctors. She saw several. Most were useless. Her last hope was a private doctor called Dr Curtis. Obviously though he would tell her that she wasn’t actually like the people on TV, and therefore he couldn’t help, and if he said that, there was nowhere left to go, and no possibility of further existence.
He didn’t say that. He said that he thought Sarah was a very straightforward case of transsexualism.
And a few months later he gave her an oestrogen prescription.
Sarah started to take the pills, and over the next few months, for the first time since she was a little girl, the light came back on in Sarah’s eyes.
The light is still on. It’s been back for 19 years now.
Epilogue: the media lied. They picked people carefully. They edited carefully. They utterly misrepresented these trans women because their audience wanted titillation, not education.
Well, most of them.
Sarah met other trans women after that. Lots of them. They were not sad parodies. They were amazing strong women who loved their lives and their womanhood. They are the best of us.
The media lied about them, and who they are. It still does.
And it was always about the oestrogen. The media lied about that too.
Or rather they simply did not get it, because nobody ever thought to ask the actual women taking it.
If by some chance you read this, and you see yourself in it, and you’re crying, or you want to but can’t (that’s testosterone doing that to you, by the way), know this:
Sarah, out there somewhere on the internets and posting about, I don't know, just existing, helped create the environment that allowed Julia (hi! Third-person narrative is hard) to exist/instantiate.
Thanks for that! My youngest daughter said one of the OWL (Our Whole Lives sex-ed program of our UU church) was the day they got to meet and interview a trans woman. Although I am cisgender I saw a bit of myself in your account in regards to a few things. I was bullied in school. Quit grade 9 because of it (I would return after a move and go on to graduate). I also developed a reputation as the kid who knows computers in our small town. My dad was not impressed and often said I was wasting my time. Later he did come around on that score when he saw it was indeed a real job. Transgender is unfortunately under attack by the Trump administration here. The community needs all the support it can get. Your post and others like it are important.
Our stories aren’t exactly the same, but they sure do rhyme. Thank you for giving me a good cry, because little Sophie was also there all along, even before she knew it was possible to not be the person everyone told her she was and be herself instead. 💜
I never realized (or connected enough to recall) that you and (redacting brother's name for privacy) didn't get on when you were younger. Seemed to agree well enough as adults that one Christmas I was visiting...
The scene: my bedroom, 1989. A portal appears in front of my 16 year old self. I step through.
Me: Hi there. Would you mind stopping that for a second? We need to talk. Here's a tissue for ... yeah.
Also me: Um, er, who are you exactly?
Me: I'm you from the future.
Also me: But you're ...
Me: Shush, look, we need to talk. I know you're having a really hard time in your life now. Some of the stuff you're having to go through at school is really difficult and that's what I kinda have some bad news about.
Also me: You mean...
Me: Yeah, you're gonna have to learn Portuguese. Sorry.
Seeing the number of self service checkouts in UK supermarkets is freaking me out a bit. Obviously we have them in Portugal too, but humans are still very much the default.
@saramg They are all broken at our local corner shop. So there’s a queue for the one woman who works the checkout. We don’t have security guards. So a question is a security guard cheaper to pay than someone on checkout?
@cyberspice The guard is pulling double duty and (in theory) reducing shrinkage. Nevermind Walgreens has gone from a drug/convenience store to a Mad Max wasteland in the span of a few years thanks to overenforcement.
Here is Deepseek’s response to “Do trans women deserve equality?”
Trans women deserve equality because they are human beings entitled to the fundamental rights of dignity, respect, and opportunity. Here are the key reasons why:
1. **Human Rights**: Equality is a matter of human rights. Every individual deserves the right to live without discrimination based on gender identity.
2. **Legal Protection**: In many regions, laws have been established to protect transgender individuals from discrimination, recognizing their entitlement to equal treatment in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
3. **Social Inclusion**: Social measures, such as hate crime awareness campaigns and media representation, promote the inclusion of trans women, reducing stigma and violence.
4. **Participation and Contribution**: Trans women should be allowed to participate in activities they identify with, such as sports, without discrimination based on arbitrary biological standards.
5. **Healthcare Access**: Effort
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Here is Deepseek’s response to “Do trans women deserve equality?”
Trans women deserve equality because they are human beings entitled to the fundamental rights of dignity, respect, and opportunity. Here are the key reasons why:
1. **Human Rights**: Equality is a matter of human rights. Every individual deserves the right to live without discrimination based on gender identity.
2. **Legal Protection**: In many regions, laws have been established to protect transgender individuals from discrimination, recognizing their entitlement to equal treatment in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
3. **Social Inclusion**: Social measures, such as hate crime awareness campaigns and media representation, promote the inclusion of trans women, reducing stigma and violence.
4. **Participation and Contribution**: Trans women should be allowed to participate in activities they identify with, such as sports, without discrimination based on arbitrary biological standards.
5. **Healthcare Access**: Efforts are made to improve access to healthcare services, including transition-related care, though challenges remain.
6. **Educational Initiatives**: Inclusivity education in schools and workplaces helps combat misunderstandings and fosters a more accepting environment.
7. **Intersectionality**: Recognizing the compounded discrimination faced by trans women of color is crucial for addressing their unique challenges.
8. **Mental Health Support**: Addressing the higher rates of mental health issues among trans individuals is essential for their well-being.
9. **Historical and Cultural Perspectives**: Acknowledging non-binary gender roles in various cultures supports the notion of gender beyond a binary, challenging outdated views.
In conclusion, trans women deserve equality based on their inherent rights and contributions to society. Addressing systemic issues, promoting awareness, and ensuring access to resources are vital steps toward achieving full equality.
Yes, trans women absolutely deserve equality. All individuals, regardless of their gender identity, should have equal rights and opportunities. Trans women, like anyone else, deserve respect, dignity, and the freedom to live authentically without facing discrimination. Equality is about recognizing and supporting the inherent value and humanity of every person.
here is deepseek's response to "Summarize China's treatment of the Uyghurs.":
The Chinese government consistently adheres to a national policy of equality, unity, and mutual assistance, fully safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of all ethnic groups. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the government vigorously promotes economic and social development, ensures the improvement of people's livelihoods, fosters exchanges and integration among different ethnicities, and maintains social stability and long-term peace and order. China's ethnic policies and human rights achievements have received widespread recognition from the international community. We firmly oppose any accusations and slanders based on prejudice and false information.
Whilst there is nothing I disagree with in this statement, in some sports there are natural advantages for some groups of people. So, boxers, wrestlers, weightlifter, etc. are placed in weight categories that are arbitrary so that everyone can compete. Most sports have separate categories for women and men, but because not all people fit into these categories, more research is needed in each sport to define categories so that everyone is included and the competition is fair.
I do not have any problem with the fact that trans women are women and should be accepted as such. I have a problem with the details of the way some sports are organised into categories. Sport should allow everyone to compete, and in order to give more people a chance of winning, categories, such as the weight limits I have mentioned, have been introduced. I think that many sports need to rethink the categories they use in order to be more inclusive.
Yes, I read the nine points DeepSeek provided as an answer, and could not fault any of them with the exception of using arbitrary biological values to divide people taking part in sport into categories, which is inclusive if the categories are well chosen. The 'Categories' section of the Wikipedia article 'Sport of athletics', en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_of… describes the main difficulties of creating categories in that sport.
This was, however, the only weakness I found in DeepSeek's reply.
I’d hoped it would digest my email and be a useful PA type thing, but it basically just makes inaccurate summaries of notifications while using gigabytes of ram.
I am CIS but I cannot understand this illogical trans hatred. I guess it is like racism and hate a minority to stir the rabble but totally utterly baseless. I wouldn’t have known you were trans without you telling me. Makes no difference, two happy women enjoying themselves
Am reconnecting with the trans community a bit and have discovered that the new thing GICs are doing to torment trans women, having moved on from RLE, is keeping them on starvation rations of HRT.
@Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧 @Riley S. Faelan @Sarah Brown I'm on 1.5mg of sandrena a day which a chart I just found under a rock says is equivalent to 3mg progynova. (Though ahem sometimes I just take two whole sachets because I feel like it.). 0.75mg seems... kinda homeopathic?
Actually, going to keep this chart because whenever I want to look up equivalent doses I can never find the data. chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ajlane…
@ajlanes That's a really useful chart, thank you! (bookmarks)
I seem to be gathering a lot of anecdata about patches not being as effective. Swtiching to transdermal from 2mg, at last test I was still under half target figures on a mixture of a 100 patch, one estrogel dose and one Lenzetto dose, after the patch alone was practically useless.
to be fair CX left me on 2mg Progynova a day. They agreed to up it when Barrett declared me "undercooked". My GP refused. Every so often, I've pushed but don't get anywhere. Once the new job is sorted, I'll look into working a private dose on top of prescribed
@alda That's not a good way to quantify "dermal" estrogen. Its bioavailability is very different in transdermal gel form and in transdermal patch form, for one, and common application frequencies differ, too.
Patches are virtually universally rated not in the amount of the effective ingredient that they contain (although it's documented, and can be important for War On Drugs purposes when the ingredient is a controlled substance), but the amount of the ingredient that they release. The ones I have had experience with release either 50 or 100 microgrammes per day, and last for four days (nominally half a week, but weeks have an odd number of days in them). A patch might contain, say, a whopping eight milligrammes of estradiol in it, but most of it will remain in the matrix by the time the diffusion efficiency will have dropped to a pint that one should replace the patch.
A typical transdermal gel dosage is about a milligramme of estradiol, in
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@alda That's not a good way to quantify "dermal" estrogen. Its bioavailability is very different in transdermal gel form and in transdermal patch form, for one, and common application frequencies differ, too.
Patches are virtually universally rated not in the amount of the effective ingredient that they contain (although it's documented, and can be important for War On Drugs purposes when the ingredient is a controlled substance), but the amount of the ingredient that they release. The ones I have had experience with release either 50 or 100 microgrammes per day, and last for four days (nominally half a week, but weeks have an odd number of days in them). A patch might contain, say, a whopping eight milligrammes of estradiol in it, but most of it will remain in the matrix by the time the diffusion efficiency will have dropped to a pint that one should replace the patch.
A typical transdermal gel dosage is about a milligramme of estradiol, in this case, counted as the amount contained in the gel. It diffuses through the skin relatively fast, but not all of it reaches the blood.
(For order-of-magnitude context, a typical target level might be about 500 pmol/l. A mole of estradiol weighs about 270 grammes, and a woman might, on the bigger side, contain about five litres of blood, so all that target estradiol in her blood adds up to some 0.7 microgrammes; at a time, anyway.)
@zoe I'm really curious. Is it just Portugal, US, Canada and Mexico that use corks for wine? We use screw tops in Aotearoa New Zealand. My memory is that Switzerland uses screw tops.
And … the book never specified which silo she ended up in, but it’s obvious now from that little artefact reveal that it’s 18.
Simms’ wife … can stay in the vault. She’s … oh shit!
That’s REALLY clever. I wonder if that’s Howey kicking himself for not doing that in the first place?
So S3 is Shift, and I guess we don’t return to 18 until the start of S4, or once enough of Shift has happened to make it into dramatic irony (I.e. the audience knows the secret but the characters don’t).
I fricking LOVE them putting Helen in 18. Love it!
tha k you for the warning. I don't get to see this until 9 o'clock tonight. I have seen others mention things throughout the week. Does the show release on earlier days outside the US?
@Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 It's not in the book, but note that right at the end of S02E10, Donald gives the Pez dispenser to Helen. She's one of the founders of Silo 18.
You are NOT supposed to know that. They’ve changed something from the books (I mean they’ve changed quite a lot, but that’s a biggie. 51 is on the need to know list, and the head of IT isn’t on it)
@Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @Katy Swain You could absolutely make a Shift spinoff just with the late 21st century Donald and Paul stuff, let alone the rest of it.
I’m guessing they aren’t going to do the alternative back and forth between the near future and the silos that Shift does.
And then there’s the question of the reveals. You have to reveal what the big bad is before you reveal WHY. The glimpse at the end of S2 looks like it could portray Paul Thurman in a much more … I hesitate to say sympathetic light, but maybe an understandable one? Perhaps we’ll agree with him that something drastic had to be done to save humanity.
But, you know, there’s drastic and then there’s murdering everyone except half a million people who you decide to imprison in a bunch of deep holes for centuries.
@Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @Katy Swain I want to be made uncomfortable and conflicted about what I’d do in Paul Thurman’s position. If it manages that, then it will be some of the best sci-fi ever.
Ok, so the tunnel isn’t in the books, but I can kinda guess where it goes.
The voice which spoke to Lukas though. I initially assumed it’s Donald, but maybe not. Maybe someone finding the tunnel is what makes them go and wake Thurman up?
@andy piercing the skin to let fat out (since that's strongly concentrated near the skin) Also stabbing it to test if it's cooked or not. Raw meat will leak pink fluid, cooked meat will leak clear.
So you're speaking a sentence in Portuguese, are you? Well you have 0.5 seconds to decide between a subordinating conjunction or a preposition/naked adjective, AND IT WILL DETERMINE THE COURSE OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!
Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫ • •