72 million voters voted for Trump, that’s not equivalent with embracing Trump’s hatred. Trump’s base is bigoted and hateful, but that doesn’t mean every voter is. A lot of them seem clueless, by all accounts. I think a lot of them were just voting against the incumbent because they were upset about price gouging and inflation.

yeah, for context I’m a trans woman, this is my community - I personally know trans women who have conceived of themselves as just femboys, and I’ve struggled myself for decades with that kind of denial.

Regardless, I consider it a matter of harm-reduction to protect their right to HRT which does require clinicians acknowledging those people are trans. Denying they are trans and are really cis men does undermine the legitimacy of their access to HRT, since it requires a diagnosis and prescription. The way we conceptualize them can have consequences in healthcare contexts.

Furthermore I think we should be prioritizing supporting people embracing what they are and working past that denial (which clearly comes the socially oppressive conditions we find ourselves in, especially the hermeneutical injustice trans people experience and the pressure from transphobic stigma to remain closeted).

Just like the way the gay community tries to help people who are closeted without just forcing them to come-out (just like “men who have sex with men” I pointed out above), we should be clear-headed about the reality that this is closeted behavior while being polite, patient, and supportive as they work through that denial.

Meanwhile, insisting femboys on HRT can only be cis men because that’s how they identify comes across to me as particularly ignorant of the reality of how we as trans people struggle to conceptualize themselves and what that process commonly looks like. There is a lot of variety in trans experience, but there are also patterns and trends that emerge, and this greentext captures a very common story of how trans women conceptualize themselves.

I appreciate that you are so sensitive that you are defending the way someone is identifying, that is definitely the right way to go. My point is not to force a perspective on someone, but to clue you into the larger trans context of the greentext which your comments made me think you were oblivious to. Maybe I should have approached that educational moment in a better way, so I apologize for being so glib.

Hope you take care as well - thank you for your response and for being so considerate, it would be nice if more people were like you.

uh, my brain is thinking the one about Slurms MacKenzie, I think there was a sewer in that one?

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fry_and_the_Slurm_Factory

Hey, I get this might be well intended but the context is a likely fictional greentext that whether by coincidence or design describes and captures a common trans experience. If that femboy was someone I was talking to or interacting with, of course I would respect his pronouns and so on, but it is important in lots of contexts to be able to read between the lines.

Taking a literal or dogmatic approach to the idea that people are only what they claim to be causes for example transmedicalists to argue that transmaxxers seeking HRT should be denied hormones - whereas I think it’s much easier to see that transmaxxers are more likely to be trans people having a hard time accepting they are trans, that is denial here is clearly more likely than fraudulence.

This is the same argument transmedicalists will make about femboys on HRT, and again I think we should read between the lines and reject the gatekeeping and moral panic about cis men stealing trans healthcare and recognize that if a self-identified “man” is on estrogen for their feminizing effects, they are probably a trans woman in denial and of course should be given access to hormones. Cis men tend to become depressed and anxious when on estrogen (see: David Reimer, Alan Turing, cis men who have used estrogen to treat prostate cancer, etc.).

(The same thing happens in the gay community around “men who have sex with men” refusing to acknowledge they are gay. I don’t have to disrespect those people by calling them gay to their face, but obviously we need to think of them as “gay” in some contexts.)

Of course reading between the lines shouldn’t result in being rude to someone by denying their prima facie identity to their face, but that’s not what I’m doing here by commenting on a greentext and pointing out the larger context for you.

She’s obviously trans, a guy doesn’t enjoy taking estrogen.

a lot of trans folks live in extreme denial, it’s very hard to accept

My problem is with associating it with feminism, it’s offensive to me and factually inaccurate. TERF talking points are usually gender essentializing in a way that is contrary with radical feminist viewpoints, for example, and lots of TERFs now distance themselves from feminism intentionally as they coalition with the right-wing. “Gender critical feminism” is not feminism at all, and better characterized as fundamentally anti-trans rather than fundamentally feminist.

Oh, sorry - it was hard for me to follow your comment as well, but here’s my understanding:

We read about OP sharing nudes with a friend.

TERF warns OP that they are sharing nudes not with a fellow woman, but with a man (TERF is assuming friend was a trans woman, assumes OP is a cis woman).

We expect OP to reveal they are actually a trans woman, but instead we learn OP and his friend are cis men.

Does this seem right?

Sorry, these moments make me feel like I must be autistic or something, lol

I’m not sure I understand what the transphobe is saying (I don’t want to call these people radical feminists, they’re not).

She sees an exchange where two people talk about exchanging nudes, and she assumes they were both trans women, so she thinks she’s exposing them as men because they aren’t acting like women (who would never share nude photos of themselves)?

It’s honestly confusing to me (lots of cis women share nude photos, though not usually to their friends AFAIK).

That does assume the kid has the time and resources to hang together a costume even if homemade. I was maybe a preteen when this happened, so that may have played into some adults’ hesitancy to give me candy, but also looking back I just think the people in the neighborhood I was in had bad values. I also had zero time for a costume, I wasn’t planning on trick-or-treating at all, and it was only because my friends were kind enough to invite me anyway.

But I would give candy to teens, adults, or kids regardless of whether they have a costume or not. :-)

Are you, in your estimation, intelligent?

No. Particularly I get the impression other people get things faster than me, and I seem to have to do more cognitive labor than my peers. I guess I would ask what “intelligence” is, that seems like a difficult thing to quantify or answer.

Are you wise in the way you apply that intelligence? (interpretation yours)

No, I generally consider myself unwise. (It takes me a long time to learn from my mistakes or change self-destructive behaviors, etc. - it often feels like I have trouble “adulting”.)

Do you view yourself as unique and individual, or as a data point on the spectrum of humanity?

Both, how else could it be? (We are both subjects and objects, unique but usually only slight variations of a theme.)

The only time I went without a costume as a kid was because I lived in a dysfunctional household and I was super stressed and didn’t have enough time or support to plan a costume - so I threw on an oversized coat and went with my friends; some adults tried to give me trouble and refused me candy, and that was a bummer because I felt like I had failed … anyway - I guess my point is that maybe some kids are being lazy or something, but you don’t really know.

I personally would definitely give kids candy regardless, but I wish people would actually trick-or-treat where I live, it makes me so sad that nobody does.

It’s commonly regarded as sexist in most contexts, at least that is / was my understanding. The thesis reiterates the harm outside of a workplace setting:

This suggests that the infantilizing label girl has the most impact and is most harmful in contexts where qualities of maturity, leadership, and adultness are most critical, such as in workplace and leadership settings. I do not mean to suggest, however, that being called girl in a non-workplace setting is unproblematic, as it is possible that such labels could have a cumulative effect over time in any setting: the connotations of naivety and innocence may take their toll on women in the long-term.

While referring to a man as a boy likewise has problematic features (esp. as a racist slur, like when a white man referring to a black man as “boy”), I think it is considered more harmful to refer to a woman as a “girl” due to the context of women being marginalized historically and presently by undermining their sense of personal autonomy and authority (e.g. the way Hegel described women as akin plants, or the way Aristotle argued women are natural mutilations and aberrations of the proper male form who do not exercise their will and require men to manage their affairs for their own good, the way parents must for their children).

This is all contextual though - women peers referring to one another as “girl” can be affirming or positive without the infantilizing meaning or impact, so part of the problem is the context of a man referring to a woman as “girl”.

And of course you probably didn’t intend this, or even been aware it has any sexist connotation, in fact I suspect this kind of behavior is rather common (lots of men can be clueless about the subtle differences in language and the impact it can have on women).

This is somewhat touched on in the article as well:

Indeed, this study may be the first to show that a commonly used label for a group of people (and one that is even preferred by members of that group in many contexts) can have a detrimental effect on members of that group. Previous research (e.g., Boeckmann & Liew, 2002; Carnaghi & Maass, 2007; Evans & Chapman, 2014; Leets, 2002; Leets & Giles, 1997) has documented the effects of hate speech and overtly derogatory labels on minority group members. The term girl reveals another insidious type of language effect that passes by relatively unnoticed and is deemed “normal,” yet has deleterious consequences.

By the way, I want to be clear that the take-away here isn’t that you’re sexist or bad, the take-away should just be that many women feel infantilized by being referred to as a girl and that it’s good to be aware of and sensitive to that.

Besides the harm it can cause, it’s also probably just pragmatically useful for you to know that other women seeing you refer to another woman as “girl” might have a chilling effect or even spark anger, since it is seen as sexist. I think the context matters here, but a lot of women are victims of physical and sexual assault on top of all the other ways they can be marginalized in this society, and the resulting trauma can cause outsized / disproportionate responses or outbursts. It’s just worth noting that if someone seems to be overreacting to something you don’t see as that big of a deal, there might be deeper issues there. I don’t want you to feel like you have to walk on egg-shells, but it’s also good to be aware and empathetic if you are willing to.

That just wasn’t the part of the title I was focused on / expecting to be fixed.

Sorry, I was so focused on how you called a woman a “girl” I missed that you also misspelled reishi.

(narrator): but it was not fixed

thank you!!

pleasantly surprised myself

accurate

Innuendo Studio

I went looking for their video on gamergate and didn’t find anything - do you have a link?