Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

Consider that those shootings are getting way more frequent. We get a Columbine about four times a year now and around 43 other shootings where there might be only injuries or singular casualties. Kids grow up in the States with lockdown drills. That entire voting block is going to be old enough to vote in 12 years.

I expect anti gun sentiments are growing now as each year new voters are growing up in that system where these events aren’t considered rare anymore. Where parents who came of age in the 2000’s have kids and are now front row to that milliterization and afraid because their families have skin in that game.

These laws are gunna happen one day.

I am sorry, but this take is founded on a lack of knowledge about the spoiler effect in first past the post voting systems. Until more representative forms of voting are introduced this is an idealistic but ultimately misinformed take.

The spoiler effect is a system powerful encumbant politicians use to manipulate populaces at large in part by taking advantage of your better nature and belief in a flawed system. Voting your heart will just not be enough and it’s got hidden dangers. Pressure needs to be applied after this election to change the voting structure to a more stable and open system.

https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE?si=qCvPLnk4u6FJ0ec2

Here’s a video that explains fairly susinctly what the spoiler effect is and how alternative voting systems disrupt it.

So intersex reassignments of babies born with ambiguous characteristics?

Some Teamsters are wild man. One guy I rode with went on a whole thing about how he thought “Swamper” was such an outdated thing to call my position and I brought up the whole thing about how he wasn’t driving horses either and he went on a 40 minute tyrade about how very dare I/ it’s still called “horsepower” / proud history of the union…

Cocaine is one hell of a drug.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamper_(occupational_title)

Old devilry. The same sort that has union truck drivers called “Teamsters” even though most of them have never been near a horse or mule.

The trucker I swamp for has swapped rhetoric from “Kamala laughs like a hyena/ Trump is fine” to declarations about how he doesn’t care about politics and how maybe we should all just stop talking about it.

Very funny how fast that disengage happened.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.

It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.

To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.

That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.

But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?

Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.

They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.

I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.

After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.

We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.

So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.

Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.

It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .

So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”

Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.

It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.

Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.

Or

“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.

But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.

It’s Union film. It gets weird when you involve teamsters as technically if we don’t work well together folks from my union are way less protected than they are. They may work for my boss but my boss has no firing power.

I am not even kidding when I tell you he is leagues better than the last teamster I worked with who thought it was perfectly chill to play all the hardcore right wing pundits… Particularly Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson who uses the T-slur pretty liberally while I was riding the cab of the truck and couldn’t remove myself (I am trans).

There’s a lot of really fucked up stuff in the film industry that nobody really talks about.

Good gods… This is a complete tangent but I have a coworker who went on a a full rant about how DEI is terrible and they lowered standards to get in poor black people… So straight up bulshit tech bro racism.

But then he starts talking about how he heard from a doctor in South Africa was talking (complaining) to him about how when they started hiring black doctors because of DEI the standards tanked and people were worse off.

And I was like “So a WHITE doctor from post apartide South Africa was complaining about how hiring black people ruined everything and that seemed like a legitimate source to cite huh?”

Which of course sent him on a whole thing about how the doctor being white had nothing to do with anything and how that was a super racist thing for me to imply… But I think the reframing was a bit of a shock to him.

Hey there, kid who was diagnosed back in 1993 here…

Depending on when you were in school might not have helped at least being diagnosed. Accommodations were basically non-existent for all of my schooling career and meds, while situationally useful, were diminishing returns. The system just wasn’t designed for us in mind and from what I have seen from my friends kids current accommodation is at times lackluster and spottily applied.

Schooling is kind of designed for adults to teach rather than kids to effectively learn since even neurotypical kids have cycling attention spans that aren’t all synced up. So while it sucks we didn’t get good help you also may not have missed out as much as you would think.

Well the way laws tend to work they scale to consequence.

Like think about speeding in a school zone. You get caught by a cop doing it it’s a fine. Nobody is going to jail.

But say you speed and hit someone and cause injury. You probably face big fines or a few days in jail or community service.

But then imagine you are speeding in a school zone and you hit and kill a kid. That’s not ruled a no fault accidental death as it would be if you weren’t speeding. Because you broke the smaller law you get the upgrade to manslaughter because you were found criminally at fault.

Cyberbullying applies the same logic. As long as there were no criminal harms and measurable damages it’s a little fine to remind you that that’s not cool. But the more recordable damages the cyberbullying causes the more you are on the hook. If you are a person with millions of followers chances are you have a lot of potential destructive power and it is wiser to keep your facts straight and your nose clean when it comes to calls to action to harrass someone who has comparatively very little ability to defend themselves.

As a trans person I find myself working backwards to try and figure out what makes a person cis and this experience you’ve described actually seems to me to be the most common. I theorize that most cis people (though not all) are actually defined by an absent or fluid internal gender.

I theorize that a lot of cis and trans people talking past each other has us trans folks assuming that you, like us, experience gender as something rigid and stratified. Like one of the aspects of my experience is that I have zero ability to feel neutrality about my body’s sex characteristics or about the way people culturally react to my body. Every interaction where my physical sex comes into play in how my life is lived is absolutely hard wired. Some make me feel deficient… Generally anxious and depressed because I feel almost indescribably cheated of comfort and invisible to the people whom with I feel an affinity which makes me feel utterly alone and stranded. Dysphoria - a gulf not between just body and mind but between life and something that feels like an opposite. Not death persay but an empty facsimile of existence where I am a non-entity obscured by a series of barriers.

Others make me feel inexplicable joy and connection and vibrantly alive. The random vendor who called me “sir” over a year ago when I was sure I didn’t pass isn’t just memorable it made my month. Gender euphoria is well named as it is heady and intoxicating. Not simply a respite from dysphoria but a golden shimmering stand out where the memory can be relived vividly.

The stratification of feeling - dysphoria and euphoria is so concrete but neither is at all logical. I believe very firmly that the sexes are equal and being a man is not better or worse than being a woman if you were to look at those things in a purely objective sense… But that doesn’t change a damn thing. This isn’t a logical thing. I can keep feeding it logic but it will never change the fact that as I go about my day I feel constantly slapped with intense feelings about my body.

But cis people don’t seem to feel anything about their gender so their uncertainty is natural. When they are completely non reactive to them the question of “how do you know?” is natural because when you reach down being told that you have an internal sense of gender and don’t find one then the natural response is doubt. But I think there is an underlying reason why the satisfaction rate of trans specific gender affirming surgeries is so low… If you are cis a change of physical kit might not actually be terribly alarming because that fluidity might work in your favour. The only risk to transitioning a cis person by accident might just be to fertility which not all people, particularly trans men, actually give up when they surgically transition. Meaning we might just be assuming incredible levels of harm from a population that a) is unlikely to care about sex enough to prioritize physical transition and b) might not be lifeshattering adversely effected and c) if they want to transition back they can. The culture that supports trans people is also nessisary in the rare event someone does want to go back because they will likely be externally still be read as a trans person and would essentially basically require the exact same accomodations.

As a trans person this strikes me as not really understanding what transness fully is? Like I know there are non-binary folk who more or less feel that they are beyond gender and feel like they have no internal gender compass - but I can’t help but wonder if that is actually part of the cis experience as the more I talk to cis people the more I think the majority of cis people actually don’t have a an internal gender. To them it is very much performative as they don’t really have any internal reward system.

Gender to a lot of cis people seems a nebulous thing that they may feel attached to the same way they might be a sort of arbitrary team. They might feel praised for performing it “correctly” but that has almost nothing in common with actual gender euphoria. Ask what they think it would be like swapping bodies with a member of the opposite sex and they are usually more concerned with practically or on whether or not they are attractive in their new form. Most binary trans people are less concerned with being attractive as they are with seemlessly passing. It would be better to be an ugly but undeniable flawlessly recognizable member of their gender than the most attractive specimen of their birth sex. Sometimes that is because it is a matter of safety and security because passing means avoiding harassment but moreover it is because we do not care to appease our casual external viewer. The exact comfort is ours to benefit when we are alone because our drives were never externally driven.

Speaking as one who experiences it gender euphoria makes literary no logical sense. It operates entirely outside of logic and is entirely internal. It often comes mixed with guilt because a lot of the time the social conditioning that we should not like the things we do is at war with the truth that we have zero control about how we actually feel. The theory of gender performativity is incomplete and describes a fluidity - an almost liquid nature of internal gender. But gender can also be entirely and mandatorily rigid, enforced by internal triggers which slap and stroke by turns entirely independent of society. It is this rigidity rather than it’s liquidity that most cis people seem to have a hard time grasping. Some definitely recognize it and have that same rigidity but it seems comparatively rare.

Being trans I recognize that my euphorias and dysphorias are not based out of performance. Performance is something I utilize as a tool to communicate people to not bring attention to the things that pain me and to make me feel comfortable. The company of people do supply a sort of reflective quality but that is just one way to be conscious of my physical body. If you call me by a pronoun set that references the physical things I hate about my physical experience of living it brings my attention onto those things. I could be naked and alone on a deserted island and the way I feel about my body would be the same. The things which make me feel generally bad are things like the way the weight of my body is distributed and my muscular structures which I can be aware of every time I need to move in a way more physically demanding than sitting or walking. I can hear my own voice and feel it insufficient and ghastly. I can see in any reflection the features of my face or shillohette. These things don’t go away when I am alone, in fact oftentimes being alone with them offers less distraction from them.

Abolishing gender often is counter to a lot of the desires of trans people because it holds a language we can adapt to and profit from. Removing the limitations of toxic forms of masculinity and feminity is a universally good thing but removing the distinction entirely undercuts the actual joy to be revelled in embracing and speaking that cultural language.