I’ve always found it fun at the time and painful the next day

Finally, someone treating my stance as it actually is rather than just calling me a simp for bigots.

But I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I also do think that it’s really easy to overestimate how much the average person knows about what we care about. That’s something generally true about everyone who cares about anything.

And you’re right she is baiting these responses so she can play victim, my problem is that it’s rarely considered a good idea to take bait. I’m not saying don’t denounce her, I’m not saying don’t be mean to her, what I am saying is to not hand her the screenshots she’s angling for.

You’re right that we’re damned no matter what we do, and I’m deeply sympathetic to the people who are angry and frustrated and just want to lash out. Gods know I feel similarly, and even moreso when I was hormonal as hell and new to navigating the world as an out trans woman. But I wish that when I was that age an older trans person had sat me down and explained the difference between productive and unproductive expressions of that anger.

You gave reasons you believe it wasn’t destructive, and that’s fair, I disagree because it’s a screenshot for her supporters to use as propaganda, but I get where everyone is coming from. However, I believe there’s nothing it can really do to help. She’s not going to take the advice. She’s not going to stop posting bait or funding the loss of our rights. As everyone seems to be in agreement, there’s no course of action to cause that. It won’t even hurt her feelings, because as already said, she wants this. But it’s also not going to invigorate our allies or lead to further support. It’s not going to make her fans who are uncomfortable with her bigotry stop consuming her media. At best it’s impotent catharsis that doesn’t spread a message.

I see the median voter as an amoral idiot who decides opinions largely based on vibes and emotions. I’m calling for our public expressions of anger to be ones that invite sympathy when taken independently of context. Not necessarily because of this specific situation, but because it’s a good habit, and because even those who support us judge us harshly. It’s not fair and I’m not calling for this because I think it’s some moral responsibility or anything, but because over the years I’ve seen our community utilize different tactics and we got a lot better results when we played to sympathy and likability. It was an underrated flank in the fight for gay rights as well. I’m not calling for mattachine style respectability, but PFLAG style sympathy.

Sigh, idk

So do you see where you’re misrepresenting my statements? Because I didn’t say they were right, I implied that people who never met us and don’t care might think so.

Yeah and we can provide them with easy screenshots pre made or we can make it so random people stumbling across us on the internet don’t think “well that’s a really hateful response”.

Once again, I’m not talking about appealing to the bigots, I’m talking about appealing to the undecided and those uncommitted to their side. They actually can often be won over or at the very least made to not be convinced by right wing attacks. Or they can see our behavior and conclude the right was telling the truth about us.

Forgive me for not wanting us to pointlessly depict ourselves the way people who hate us do.

Yeah, but there are a lot of people they’re trying to convince to be bigots and you sure can aid in their arguments or hinder them. I’m not going to pretend that people who are undecided on if I deserve rights or who only kinda lean one way are good people. But I want us to make the bigots have to work for it to make us come off badly, or at the very least when we come off badly for it to actually have a chance at advancing anything.

So I guess really my attitude is: what good do posts like this and replies like depicted in it actually serve? Because as far as I’m concerned if I were conducting an anti trans psyop I’d absolutely be encouraging that behavior. It feels good while being easier than activism, community building, and being a positive first interaction with trans people, all while giving plenty of room to allow bigots to claim that they’re the victims of the people they’re actually taking rights from.

You don’t play it to her, you play it to the crowd she’s trying to convince. When we’re being rougher around the edges we should be targeted. The Stonewall riots are a great example, we had been attacked by the law and resisted violently. ACT UP was loud and disruptive and never let you forget that it was about our people dying.

I’m not saying we should be quiet about her or play nice with her, I’m saying when you go on the offensive make sure that someone who has no idea what’s going on here and might be sympathetic to your cause doesn’t think you’re the bad guy. Constantly saying “kill yourself” to a children’s author turned bigotry financier without even bringing up why she’s evil when you do it is just venting your anger, not advancing our cause.

The woman is horrible and I mostly just want her to stop hurting people, but I do think that replies like this do more harm than good for trans people. Transphobes want to depict us as extremely violent and unsympathetic, and this image sure doesn’t come off sympathetically unless you have all the context and already think that she’s a horrible person. It gives her rhetorical ammo to further fight our acceptance in society.

Nah it’s more like she’s become a conduit to it at a rate she’s unable to control

When you climb the mountain

Butter on the outside, mayo on the inside

Technology connections remains awesome thankfully. Hell him touching on politics made me respect him more as he did it sparingly because he felt an obligation to use his platform to speak up

It was supposed to come out a month or two ago. It’s fine, his videos are always worth the wait

This is funny because as a teenager the main argument for why I (amab) was allowed to get the hpv vaccine was to prevent risk to any potential afab partners. These days we know that hpv causes all sorts of cancers in anyone with any functional anatomy (if someone has neither a throat nor genitals I’m very sorry for their situation, but they’re an extreme outlier).

The ubiquity of HPV reminds me of the ubiquity of chickenpox. Neither was immediately fatal and most people got them so a lot of people didn’t get that these were very bad diseases that needed to be actively controlled. I stand by my disgust at the parents who refused their daughters the hpv vaccine on the grounds of sexual purity. I don’t have kids, but I can’t imagine not giving my child a vaccine that can prevent cancer, no matter how much I disapprove of the actions they’d have to take for them to get that kind of cancer.

Oh I’m a mess with wired earbuds but my carabiner causes me no issues except how long it dangles hitting my thigh

It’s a signal with a lot of false positives. If I see a woman wearing a carabiner I don’t assume she’s gay, but I might start looking for other signals.

A lot of the more subtle signals exist to be deniable or because they’re practical things that might be seen as not particularly traditionally feminine or unattractive to more traditional men.

And because of social changes over the years this has made a lot of them go from things lesbians are a lot more likely to do than straight women, to things that a lot of lesbians do associating it with our community and culture while plenty of straight women do them because they’re practical (such as wearing carabiners) or became fashionable in general (such as having a bunch of tattoos and piercings) or subculturally (such as wearing flannel shirts) or for any number of other reasons

Hanky codes are also used by women in the leather community, there’s even a color for being into boobs!

But yeah, carabiners are just a really practical way to carry keys without a purse or big pockets and so lesbians latched on to them. Some of us even wear them on the side corresponding to where we’d typically wear a handkerchief, but that’s rare and I’d only suspect that if the woman is also wearing a handkerchief.

Oh I would absolutely hit on a woman carrying a sword in her carabiner

8/25, my wife will be disappointed at my femceliness

I’ve always just called those people cis by default.

I had to get a catheter put in while I was awake once, and yeah it feels really good. Unless your urethra is swollen and in pain, in that case it’s brutal agony. Unfortunately the majority of my time being catheterized while awake is the latter.