A lot of the fear of “conversion” really feels like parents getting ornery because someone might “damage their property” by telling them that being gay is perfectly fine. They want to have the whole heterosexual experience they had but lived vicariously all over again through someone they can pilot through life like a little low maintenance automoton. They want to narrow the field of choices to the ones they want.

You see it expressed all over the place. If you choose not to want kids or marry, pick a career they don’t understand or would pick for themselves they tighten the thumbscrews. So often they don’t love their kids they just love what they represent… Genetic legacy or bragging rights or a vehicle for constant validation. Being LGBTQIA+ is a threat because that represents paths that they would not have chosen. They can’t empathize or desire it…

But estrangement has always been a thing. Kids always become adults and adults always have choices… but we never forget what it was like to be a kid without autonomy. One day that kid is going to be able to make their own choices and there’s not a thing their parent can do about it. I love and value my parents because they always treated me like my own person. I always consider their advice seriously and give them a high priority. Fillial piety is no burden when it feels like returning the support and love. It never sits uneasy. I know a lot of people who struggle because they are biologically programmed to have a bond but they just can’t because the choices their parents made amd continue to attempt to make for them has left lasting damage.

I find it very strange as someone as comfortably far away from French Canada one can be while still being on the continent that I technically am described as French by this diagram. I failed French so hard in 8th grade my teacher passed me on the promise that I never take another French class.

Who wants to deal with people on a day off?

I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.

That’s kind of my reasoning for thinking this whole bear thing is out of proportion. I grew up knowing how to deal with bears. If you’re talking black bear you make a bunch of scary confusing noise and look big or… If you are already noisy they just steer clear and leave you the fuck alone. You gotta be pretty deep woods to encounter Grizzlies and most of the time they are chill. If they aren’t, play dead or go up a tree.

I don’t care if all a rando person, male, female non-binary whatever - does is try and strike up a conversation, I don’t go to the woods to socialize. Act like a proper bear and gimme my gorram space!

I would argue that the connection is a lot older than Nazis. The era around 1250 responded to a nasty wave of the Black death by Christian leaders collaborating to simultaneously fight the population decline by criminalizing abortion friendly midwifery and ostracize and subjugate gender and sexual minorities because they feared the collapse of society due to a population bust. As such what was taught by the church up to that point began to get new connotations. Jewish populations were persecuted and killed as scapegoats for the cause of the plague. Folk medicine women and non-conforming men were killed and condemned for witchcraft. While women stepped up to fill the roles of men during the plague once the population was rebounding their power of place in society was to be broken as the Church leaned on it’s misogynistic practices and preached of the dangers to society and the family…

Nazisim is just a more modern echo of well established means to break the power of non compliant of groups who can be scapegoated or subjugated into subservience to Christians who feel threatened, a group that centers nominally celebate and wealthy men whose only contact with women is in a subordinate role.

So… The law isn’t static. With the previous Supreme Court ruling lending more power to the constitutional right to own and carry guns all those laws that you mentioned that originally banned him no longer have rock solid ground for existing at all.

Basically a state can pass any law it likes, it’s only once it gets used against someone that it can go through the process of being tested as a valid law by punch testing it’s capacity as constitutional violation. If there is a change to the precedent of the Constitution then then anything still in the appeals process can invoke the law as long as they can bring up reasonable proof that a current trial can support questions of constitutional violations.

His defense was basically capitalizing on a change in the law to bring into question every gun law on the books that was, prior to the new Supreme Court ruling was considered fairly standard… If the Supreme Court judged the state law in conflict with the new established constitutional interpretation basically the arrest isn’t valid and the persecution would have to reconstruct the case from scratch and re-trial… And creating a domino effect potentially destroying all state gun restrictions. It’s not surprising that they ruled how they did. They’d get so much kickback…

If someone’s fundamental rights are violated in the process of enacting the law the trial conviction is considered invalid. So he’s kind of has been under shrodinger’s conviction for a federal crime, neither considered a vaild nor invalid convict until this box was opened.

As a non-binary trans person I gotta say that lines up. A lot of women are not well equipped to intuit men’s emotions as they are set behind a veneer of distance and a lot of men often aren’t able to apply appropriate empathy to women because they don’t afford them the same level of respect and attention as people who have that same veneer. So women get coded to men as over emotional and men often feel angry and isolated because women aren’t trying particularly hard to empathize and there is a lot of times when their feelings are dismissed as not as important. Then everything becomes extra strained when anxieties about heterosexual extra partner sexual liasons means one gets separated from a general population into strictly people whom your partner feels you may safe being around.

I am very lucky. I exist in an excellent personal community. The cis folk I am friends with are all friends across any concept of gender and there’s other trans folk in my cohort which create additional inroads to understanding different experiences. We also don’t specifically gender anything, nobody is ever teased for not living up to gendered expectations and discussions are frank and open. I only experience this anxious distance between the genders in groups of co-workers or at family functions.

You are unlikely to if you aren’t in Canada. It seems like Indigenous folk down in the States don’t have quite as much success spreading widespread awareness. I produced some stuff and had to explain to a bunch of Americans what a land acknowledgement was. For the past 5 years where I am they are performed before any meeting or performance. Up here 2S gets top billing at the beginning of the LGBTQIA initnialism to give deference to gender categories that were suppressed by European supremacist colonization.

The concept of the European style family is a tool of conservative control. When you create specific boundaries on what is considered kinship you create subjects of economic categories. If you get a bunch of kickbacks for playing by the rules then there are also people who are purposefully excluded from playing to create additional economic goads. Like if you are disowned from your family you can lose generational wealth and support which is designed to keep young people in line by way of fear . Welfare and social securities weakens the economic ties of the family politic control to make you reliant on the support of the people you are related to by blood and to keep people who might be your chosen family at a distance unable to help.

So called “family values” aren’t lovely dovey nice things. They are to make being an individual with different needs a failure state.

At the same time Stonehenge has some delicate evidence of ancient painted designs that requires special imaging equipment to detect that may have been wiped out bu this. There’s a reason why they tend to keep people at a distance from the thing.

Yup. Bonkers.

It’s bonkers that you have to actively sign up for it. Canada had conscription on the books as an available tool but like… you never actively signed on or were penalized for not doing that paperwork. In 2021 they ended all mandatory military service and two months ago they removed conscription entirely. Not that it’s possible for conscription to not come back as technically it’s not actively banned, but if it did it would have to be written and implemented as law entirely from scratch and be re subject to the full process of new constitutional challenge and could now be subject to gender discriminations to strictly men as required by current civil rights .

There’s something about coercing someone to sign their name to paper to register for conscription that feels wrong to me that just accepting a call to conscription doesn’t. Like they want to reduce your resistance to it by making it “voluntary”.

I think it’s a lot more black and white being trans than people realize and I have my own pet theories about what gender euphoria /dysphoria is that I observe as being two independent factors.

Half of the problem I think in reaching people is that the vast majority of cis people don’t have an observed internal gender preference. We are trying to build empathy with something we as trans people assume they have too - but maybe only a small minority of cis people experience it. I don’t think we actually understand cis people, we just assume a bunch of things about them using trans people as a false opposite.

Thing is… If I am correct, the assumed massive earth shaking regret of what would happen if a cis person went through gender reassignment… Is they might just adapt and be fine.

I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage…

But there’s another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don’t see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.

Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors… And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.

Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade…

But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.

It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.

In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.

There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.

It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.

Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn’t as trans affirming as you would think… My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a “People of Color sport league”.

Ditching us all into a new category like we’re quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we’re implicitly not cis… Isn’t something I would appreciate.

Well burning a lesbian flag and burning a lesbian candle are two different things.

I mean I exist in a very LGBTQIA+ city. My friends across the spectrum of the rainbow have expressed sentiments about how men’s mental health is an issue but it is really hard to interface with it because men like to talk about it… but they seem to want to nope out of and defer spearheading an initiative. Because it’s not easy. It never is easy.

Most of the LGBTQIA have a model. A group who is directly plans a thing and then the people who are adjacent show up. People generally have the spoons to make one to two issues their main. This is usually where they take the effort to spearhead the thing, be part of the committee, figure out the logistics and run the getting the word out. That issue because it is so energy intensive usually is one they feel most directly affected or endangered by… but they can make time and energy to show up for like 10 other things to do fundraising, protests or whatever because they support friends. Stuff where they just need to know where to be and what to do. That’s comparitive low energy.

You could look to the LGBTQIA as help and go to like a Pride committee but generally speaking when approaching people for help you have to expect imperfection.