You are living during the time of masculine emancipation my friend. Men are allowed to be cute af these days and more and more women are catching on that this is a good thing. Some of the guys I know who register this way have found a lot of success dating in the non-binary scene where gender expectations are more generally negotiable. Non-binary circles are encircled with exterior connections of cis communities who have a more dynamic understanding of gender so if you are in a market to find likeminded souls that’s where I would look.

And also… Cute is sexy. It’s not everyone’s vibe but there’s definitely a desire out there for true gentlemen emphasis on the gentle. Most of the cis ones I know are married to ride or die partners whom exude an aura of sweetness out to 20ft.

It’s less about giving money to the woman herself and more about how HP and JK Rowling are used as memetic weapons. Every release of a new property has seen a rush of transphobic actors invading trans spaces for years. Invoking the name of the author and showing solidarity in a lot of contexts is a not subtle way of showing support to the veiws expressed by the Terf ideology during a time when being trans is becoming criminalized in more places. The news isn’t generally covering it well but Texas is passing laws where it is a criminal offense to misrepresent your birth sex at work or in public government spaces.

“Oh but it’s just money” isn’t so much the problem. It’s the cover this entire conversation about ethical consumption or the lack thereof in daily life is providing to people throwing up open flags of anti-trans bigotry in public and using that as a tool to band together to attack the community and send open messages that trans people are not welcome in ways that the average cis person will dismiss as just “they like kid wizards”.

It isn’t for “no real effect”. Harry Potter is a merchandise empire and it’s important to see how that empire is being utilized. Open fan support of Harry Potter is often used as a direct open signal of anti-trans support and Terf ideology. Here in Vancouver where we have a larger than average population of trans and non-binary folk and more open accommodation to the community a billboard was put up saying “I❤️ JK Rowling” downtown because it’s a more nebulous dogwhistle that wouldn’t immediately ping Canada’s hate speech laws so that the whole “Freedom of Speech” ploy could be envoked.

Whenever a new HP franchise item comes out there’s a wave of people who flood online and sometimes in person trans spaces who use the barest veneer of support of the franchise as a means to say some truely awful things about trans people. Some don’t even bother mentioning the franchise they just participate in the storming because they have the opportunity. Those spaces are often filled with vulnerable people seeking support and solidarity and these rushes can leave isolated trans people without community for weeks.

Here in Van someone wearing HP merch in any queer space is throwing up a flag that says “I am potentially an unsafe person.”

Article of the billboard.

http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5722244

You don’t have to give up your books. All we ask is that people do not white knight the author or the publication and merchandising empire which keeps making her influence into an active memetic weapon.

Read their stories yourself. They are right there. You want me to do all the work for you? Piss off.

Honestly a lot of news doesn’t actually cover this stuff as it should. Covering trans topics is usually something that causes backlash or requires a high degree of finesse in reporting and explaining so these modern lynchings go largely uncovered by the big mainstreamers except when they think they have a winner that’s straightforward enough to report in a short quippy segment.

Who the hell says “transsexuals” anymore except folk who were out in the 90’s?

If you would like to read some articles how about Forbes?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiewareham/2023/11/13/beaten-stabbed-and-shot-320-trans-people-murdered-in-2023/

NBC?

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna125783

Congress? Bonus points they give you the stories of a bunch of the victims.

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117016/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20240321-SD015.pdf

How about a long term view over ten years? Statista

https://www.statista.com/statistics/944726/murders-transgender-gender-diverse-people-us/

And these are the murders we know. They are difficult to find because a lot of coverage buries the lead on the trans nature of the victims so we only learn about them being trans after the fact. A lot of newspapers use dead names and pre transition photos and don’t mention current names and identities so in some of our communities we only know when someone has died except through word of mouth because when they show up in the paper they aren’t recognizable. This is also why articles tend to use the words “at least” or have inconsistent counts per year. New ones are always coming to light as friends and family struggle to get the word out.

You do not see these news articles because your news silo filters them out. There are vigils every year where the names are read out. The circumstances of those vigils are that the main reason for the violence was because of the victims gender identity. You asked for sources. Have at em.

Oookay, you’re trying to pick a fight but not exactly landing an interesting hook. This entire sentiment is pretty empty if the best you have is to heckle my spelling. Are you new to trolling? I feel like maybe you should read a tutorial or something.

Come on mate, gimme substance! Refute the argument with something other than just “nu uh!”

I understand it being a sticky issue for people because there’s so much of society and choice we put into the realm of adults. But here’s the thing. Psychology has been obsessed with trans people since the origin of the field. We have a ton of data on what happens when trans people recognized at an early age grow up and what that looks like when there’s no intervention whatsoever. The reality of it is that there’s certain things that there is no medical fix or take backs for once you experience your first puberty.

We know very well that gender identity observed in trans kids is stable. We have a rubric of diagnosis stable enough to have gone up against several National medical ethics boards and survived the scrutiny nessisary to opt for attempting risks.

The first generation of kids to grow up utilizing this process are now adults (the oldest cohort are now in their 30’s) and the results have been promising with an almost absurdly low rate of regret reported across the population…

But now you have to recognize why that rate of regret is so low. You need the signoff of a team of professionals who put the bar very high to allow candidates to attempt these risks and any of them can pull support if something doesn’t go to plan. Furthermore a child alone does not make these decisions the informed consent has to be demonstrated by the child and their parents. So when people say “kids shouldn’t make these decisions” you’re missing that they aren’t making these decisions. A kid and a panel of adults who are experts in their field, social workers and dedicated parents who have watched the difference in their child’s behaviour go from very obviously not thriving in a multitude of ways to massive improvements through social transition make these decisions.

People act like it’s as simple as a kid showing up and asking for a lollipop. It isn’t. We have literal generations of data about what happens if we do nothing. The outcomes are miserable. We can afford to try something different than known miserable outcomes.

It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.

Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.

Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.

If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.

If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.

What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.

Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.

Violence tends to be a double edged sword. Whether or not things get better as the result of an outbreak of violence is hit and miss. A lot of authoritarian regimes in history just get replaced with new authoritarian regimes that have a better PR team and create a leniency period before cranking back the progress once people figure everything has been fixed. Long term it’s not great prospects. Anarchist activities tends to create this sort of thing. It creates a power vacuum to which the first one to break the faith and assemble a new loyal hierarchy while murmuring a smokescreen of empty hymns of the old cause is rewarded by becoming the new tyrant. Oftentimes there is a promise of whatever state of oppression being a transitory period. You aren’t supposed to notice that the transitory period after which they say that they will surrender their stranglehold to the rightful inheritance of the people never comes to fruition and instead just becomes a new dynasty of effective monarchs living it up.

But other times it’s just another tool in the box of movements that are fighting against occupation. It usually helps if there’s a peaceful arm of the movement who will get most or all of the credit after the fact whom can hold the dialogue space. Every Civil rights fight that had a non-violent movement leader also had “unrelated” people in the field under a different banner solving some problems with violence. Black Panthers, Butterfly Brigade, bomb weilding suicide suffragettes, indigenous anti colonial movements… These are part of the landscape and the actions they took were given space to be picked over by contemporaries because provocative acts lend punch to rhetoric. If you have no legitimate means to solve the violence done to you other than violence then the problem still needs solving so violence it is. What is effective in this model is collective directed action with planned objectives to fit into existing systems or that come with fully drawn up replacements for old systems. Not as sexy as anarchy but the wins are on the whole more stable and enduring. If you want a democracy then your problem solve should at least should have a true core of people whose ultimate intention is to operate democratically. Violence has a seat at that table too but weilding it justly is a commitment.

For me it’s been longer than that. I am a queer Canadian and anytime I have travelled the US or stayed with friends and seen any group carrying or wearing American flags that hasn’t given me the “ick” so much as rung alarm bells that those people are not safe.

Thing is, it’s the same thing with the Canadian flag. Any group flying too many Canadian flags outside of Canada Day is likely to be Conservative and anti-queer. Anti-Trans protesters or anti-vaxxers on highway overpasses? Canadian flag. Lifted truck soaring down the highway with a “Fuck Trudeau” bumper sticker - Canada flag. Hoard of protesters demanding book bans, group of people protesting Pride with a “you are gunna burn pedos” sign, antiDEI crusader mob - Canadian flag. It doesn’t take long before one starts to draw certain conclusions about a person’s character when they wave it around. For those of us trans folk who can it’s a sign to hide. A literal red flag.

Amoungst the left up here the flag is a complicated symbol. Many of us on the West Coast see it as a symbol of colonial practice and an insensitive declaration of an occupying nation on stolen territory for people who are still here and whose original sovereignty is still not properly acknowledged. It’s not a symbol of pride and if personally used as such it’s a sign of insensitivity and work to be done. At the same time I would not say that I am not proud of my Country for how far we’ve come. We are a nation in therapy who has the opportunity to put the work in to getting over some really bad murderous and selfish flaws and try new things to make things right. When I had an American friend up here it took a bit for him to understand how seriously the effort is to recon with our past and he treated us like a utopia of leftist sentiment but it is like therapy, yeah we might be putting the work in - but we can see how much further we need to go and praise doesn’t hit us as “job well done” it’s a reminder of how shitty it still is. But if anyone ever thinks that this complicated and nuanced relationship to country would stop us from rallying together to fight to preserve our rights to keep working towards that better future they would be dead wrong.

So I understand pretty well where you’re coming from but for a lot of us this isn’t a particularly new thing. It just is affecting more and more people as they wake up to realizing how these symbols are used.

It may seem like a pedantic difference but you are missing a key part of what’s going on here. Nobody is challenging that gender dysphoria is a bad thing to experience… This policy is saying it’s kosher to proclaim “transness is a mental illness” which means in effect that encompasses gender euphoria and all expressions of gender incongruity as symptoms of a mental illness. It’s a subtle linguistic difference but one makes it possible to publicly derride trans people as being delusional or harmful to people around them or dangers to themselves and push for “curing” all transness by approaching being trans as a failure state.

For me I had to make a value judgement in regards to transition because my partner’s got phenotype preferences that don’t match where I would like to go and ultimately I had to break ot down as to whether keeping him as my romantic partner or transition would bring me more net happiness and chose my partner. It’s still a struggle because all that dysphoria doesn’t go away I just have to feed it different things to placate it enough to function.

I have a weird relationship with a lot of photos of myself pre social transition. Any photos of weddings or big family events where a dress code prompted me through soft pressure to try and “clean up” is sort of just interpreted as me being in drag but I never look happy in them. My Mom ended up taking down a bunch of family photos where I am so dressed because she started interpreting me as having “dead eyes” in them and they make her feel weird.

I can’t really erase all existence of my past self as I feel that’s kind of unfair to the other folk who were there with me at the time but we’ve definitely had conversations of “hey, using my old name and pronoun set to describe past me isn’t cool, please don’t.” but stories where the tale’s context involves me being interpreted as my birth sex by other people still feel bad. It doesn’t feel like a clean chapter break. It feels messy and threaded with compromise like I made some kind of fairy bargain- rewarding true love in exchange for staying the frog and never becoming the prince but I make it work. At my worst I feel like I stuck in the middle of a story. If my partner ever dies or leaves me then there’s a whole heartbroken third act that could kick off but as is I feel like I would still take a bullet for him any day of the week so this could just be the end of the tale. My relationship with act one is as compassionate to all involved as I can make it. It happened. It sucked. If I could go back and do it all over again from scratch I would have to know for certain that I would end up exactly back where I am now to not make different choices and as precarious as that is it’s enough.

Honestly there’s not really a way to know short of them telling you. There’s a difference from folk just not liking the gender box people put them in and rejecting all the cultural trappings of gender (being a tomboy or a femboy) from them being trans. Transness goes a little further than just cultural markers, it’s a reaction to one’s body. Oftentimes that struggle on the outside just shows up as them not flourishing… And sometimes you don’t recognize what them actually flourishing actually looks like because they never did until after they changed.

I grew up in the 90’s and from sheer lack of exposure just didn’t have words for what I was going through. I was aided by being fairly androgynous but really didn’t talk to anyone about how good it felt to be read by strangers on occasion as my gender. I relied on gender neutral nicknames. I starved myself or overexercised to stay lean at points to keep myself from putting on weight that would go to areas that would outwardly show my body through clothes and avoided mirrors while naked but none of that clicked as me being trans until when I was 21 and living abroad in Japan where basically everybody read me as being what I was, either assuming me as a trans man or reading me as a cis man. None of this really caused me to self reflect until I was near the end of my visa and realized that going back to all my friends and family whom I loved dearly was a double edged sword. I would be locked back in to where people would enforcing my gender, lightly mind you. They weren’t trying to force me to act any way at all but there was a gentle tyranny just by them correcting people who “got it wrong” or using my name or by men I saw as friends and peers treating me as a delightful oddity like I was some sort of ideal romantic though not nessisarily sexual conquest because I liked hobbies and masculine dominated spaces that few women participated in which in modern context would probably outwardly make me appear as some kind of “pick me”. This realization that I didn’t want to go back cascaded into me crashing hard up against all the novel fantasies I had neen distracting myself with that I would somehow go through some kind of magical event and instantly change body type and all my friends would just have to except me because “oh well magic…” I never believed this would actually happen mind, I wasn’t delusional but I would amuse myself while walking around with these little daydreams. All at once though I realized that that was never going to happen. I was gunna be in this form until I died and I broke into a full on dispair. I didn’t even know trans men existed and my only experience with trans women was representation where they were ridiculed. I backwards engineered that trans men must exist because that was the only thing that made any sense.

I stuffed it all under my hat for another 10 years, growing more distant with old friends and not making new friends. I read a bunch of feminism and chased out my internalized misogyny thinking that was the problem. It muddied the waters awhile but I couldn’t shake that no matter how I told myself that being a woman and being a man were value neutral it didn’t shake my feelings like I was playing out Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and all people saw was the roach. I tried non-binary pronouns and a name change more or less as proof to myself that I was okay without and discovered the opposite.

My mom took me coming out hard only in the way that she felt she should of seen it sooner and it threw into sharp relief all those times where she’d tried to pressure me in little ways to be more fem. I don’t begrudge her any of that. She says it should have been obvious but really no. If I had known that there were options I could have asked instead of hurting myself the way I did and struggling with the isolation then I might have. But I lived in a conservative town where just growing up in an agnostic household had seen me get literally have neighbor kids throw rocks at me growing up. Even if knew my friends and family were cool, there were medical options that would reduce all the regrets that I have now I might have buried and denied my needs anyway. My family had kept me alive by being awesome in other ways and I always knew that me dying would have destroyed them… And that’s really all you can do. Let your kid know they are loved regardless of anything and let them sort themselves out. No need to brace and seek the signs one of them potentially trans, just let them know that you love them and if they are then you will still love them and want to do right by them.

My hometown has a bookstore like this. It’s open every day of the year and was the first business in the town to display a pride flag. The lady who runs the store is a bloody hometown hero who is forefront to organizing both the small town Pride and the Mural festival. They partner with the local animal shelter to foster adoptable cats in the store and whenever you purchase a book you get a poker chip to determine where a small portion of the sale gets donated to pick between three non-profit options.

It sells all manner of gifts from quill pens and fancy dice to LGBTQIA+ jewelry and does new and used books. Back before other businesses started showing support as being safe places it was the one. The town it is in is majority conservative and the people who work and frequent the shop are known to be grassroots fighters who show up to city councils to fight for all manner of progressive causes. Whenever I go back to my hometown I visit that store and I buy at least one glossy new book or a cool set of dice.

It has not been easy as over the years the store has been physically attacked. It’s had windows smashed and employees targeted by bigots… But everytime I’m in there I see happy faces on teens and adults excitedly browsing or chatting who love the place.

It is possible to make these places but it requires a lot of support. It’s not enough to just run a business, you gotta make a networked community who protects you back.

Shelters often share resources and many are more flexible than you would expect. They might not take you personally but dollars to donuts they can point you in the direction of other specialized resources.

You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.

It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.

That the tech has evolved to be better actually is an assumption. The novel data problem hasn’t been meaningfully addressed really at all so mostly we assume that progress has been made… but it’s not meaningful progress. The promises being made for future capability is mostly pretty stale hype that hasn’t changed year to year with a lot of the targets remaining unchanged. We are getting more data on where specifically and how it’s failing, which is something, but overall it appears to be a plateau of non-linear progress with different updates being sometimes less safe than newer ones.

That actually safe self driving cars might be decades away however is antithetical to the hype run marketing campaigns that are working overtime to put up smoke and mirrors around the issue.

My Grandmother always called this sort of thing being a “red letter Christian”. Basically like you take a highlighter to everything Jesus specifically did or said and discard the rest.

My Mom’s family all followed this principle since like the 70’s thus saving my trans ass from any hint of intergenerationally inflicted religious trauma so I am a fan. My 92 year old great uncle went to bat to fight for non-binary gender accommodations in his seniors home because one of his nurses is an enby who was getting a raw deal from a number of their paitents. Honestly, though I don’t think the Christian God is what he says he is, his kid seems weird but as a rules for life kinda thing the results seem good. .

Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn’t really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.

I didn’t think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.