Because it’s sexist to ask me to look better for you

What the actual fuck‽

They were remarkably fast for a vaccine, they were effective and also the most unpleasant vaccine I’ve had. And they involved the industrialized world dumping huge amounts of resources into their creation. They also took significantly longer than the study proposing hydrocychloroquine. The study refuting it wasn’t on a timer so it was able to take it slow and go at the pace of normal science.

There’s also a feedback loop. He rants about what they want to hear and they worry about what he tells them to worry about frequently enough. This is how people who had been afraid of immigrants but otherwise normal wind up terrified of antifa and queer people making them stop eating meat. And while this is happening there are people like Steve bannon who’ve been intentionally developing techniques to indoctrinate people to the far right.

I’ve never seen people sneer at doctors of physics talking about physics or doctors of medieval literature discussing the influences on chaucer (though they do get routinely mocked for thinking themselves employable).

What people do sneer at is doctors of electrical engineering claiming that they’ve disproven speciation by evolution and doctors of law declaring medical establishment wrong about medicine.

A doctorate just means you’re an expert at something not everything

Yeah ivermectin is a miracle drug …in antiparasitic medicine. Virology not so much

I assume it took that long because good science is rarely fast and fast science is rarely good

Well obviously an ied hidden in a wall and hooked up to a unmarked lightswitch is the ideal means of home defense, but you need a gun in case there’s a second wave of home invaders.

Yeah, the sin of gluttony is more like getting up for seconds before everyone has had firsts then taking all the leftovers. It’s feasting on your seed grain. It’s the sort of shit that sparked the first French revolution

Yeah and like I know fat people who could kick the average ass, they tend towards being more in the longshoteman body type. But segall isn’t one of them. They know they’re no action hero.

He looks like the guy that only appears in the final picture of a married woman’s tinder profile

Yeah, that’s absolute fucking torture, because of crimes he committed partly due to ptsd. Solitary confinement in general is considered torture by psychologists who study it.

90 days in solitary is still insanely high. It should be like a weekend max if that

I really don’t think we should be trying to raise the age of majority. Sure raise the military age, but 18 year olds should be allowed to make their own mistakes

What’s hope got to do with it? You survive. That’s it.

But for real, because my people have endured persecution before. As I look at our incoming persecution I see that we got further this time than in a long time and so we must endure and survive and go further again.

But no matter what you survive

So I want to start with the pretext that I’m a lifelong defender of euthanasia. I’ve watched my mom slowly die of brain cancer as she lost function.

That said, euthanasia is easy to combine with removal of the autonomy of the disabled and can lead to very bad places. Especially since less severely disabled people is a positive incentive for governments.

In a less direct way one standing theory is that it’s tied to cultural issues with gender relations and due to the lack of a cultural role for us (at least in cultures where that applies or where those roles were damaged during colonialism, which was very common). Then there’s also the oversexualization of trans people.

For the first one Julia Serrano does a good job going into a lot of detail for a big chunk of it, but the quick summary is that there’s two axes of sexism: traditional (one sex and that which is associated is better than the other, traditionally prioritizing the masculine over the feminine) and oppositional (that that which is associated is deeply connected and immutable). All sorts of people run up against oppositional sexism, from cis gay people to dudes who like to sew. But it’s likely necessary to reinforce traditional sexism.

Then there’s the lack of cultural space. It’s being built, but it isn’t done yet and until it’s been uncontroversial for some time it’ll be at risk. It’s the issues of “I don’t know how to treat them” and “it’s against god”. It’s people angry that their understanding of one of the most vital parts of their culture is being called to make space for something that’s new to them

Then there’s the oversexualization. Trans people all throughout the world have a long history of resorting to sex work to survive. That means that to many people our existence is seen as inherently sexual. I grew up where trans people only appeared on tv as tragic sex workers, jokes of erotic disgust, or Springer style freak shows, and the next closest depictions were as murderous erotic crossdressers (which many saw as the same thing). And so now here I am, one of them, demanding you treat me as an educated professional and a peer and a decent chunk of bigots will see my face as inherently pornographic and therefore unfit to display around children. They hear about teenagers wanting to transition and think of it as sexualizing them. And for a certain portion of people they’re mad that a porn category and type of exotic hooker is demanding rights

There’s more, and I didn’t say it all the best I could (typed it out off and on over a while between doing things as well as it being something I mostly break down in discussions with other trans people). But yeah, we’re different and we challenge basic understandings of some of the foundations of society and culture, but our liberation helps break down the issues you’re already facing and a lot of the time the requests we’re making make life easier for cis people once y’all get used to us being around.

Yeah my mom talked to me about her mixed feelings when I came out. On one hand she saw I was no longer miserable and was extremely happy about that, but on the other hand she was terrified. I lucked out, she’d gotten involved as an ally to the trans community before I came out to her (and I believe she was actually surprised when I did), but yeah she was very scared for me.

Funny enough one of my first thoughts after realizing I was trans was “fuck my life isn’t going to be easy”, so at least the concern for my safety was something we shared lol

We haven’t opened the new ones but Mr Takei did grow up in one being a Japanese American of a certain age

Yeah, we’re a strangely resilient nation. Things that topple other nations have been crises to us. This may be the end and this may be a disaster so great we dismantle the right wing media dominance or any number of things.