No. They didn’t vote lesser of two evils. You need to get out of the headspace that the only option is to vote for one of the two parties. That’s an ahistorical viewpoint. They just voted Republican until their candidate won. The Republican party was only founded after “voting for the lesser evil” failed after decades of trying. This is what I mean when I say people need to learn their history. We’ve been in this situation before, and our ancestors did not escape it by voting for the lesser evil.

We live in a two party system. We’re going to have two parties. However, the parties themselves are not eternal. We’ll always have two parties, but which parties those are can change. And often it’s easier to completely swap out parties than to reform one from within.

If you want to create a new party in the US, the only way to do so is to destroy one of the existing parties. Namely, that means making the other party completely electorally nonviable.

Imagine if the most liberal 20% of the electorate simply refused to ever vote for the Democratic Party again and switched over to the DSA. Yes, that would mean losing for a few cycles. But again, history shows that sometimes you have to put up with pain now for a better future later. Centrists will slander this as “accelerationism,” but this isn’t really that. You’re not hoping things get worse before they get better. You’re just recognizing that the only way to create a new party is to destroy an old one. Politics becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make one of the existing parties nonviable, then a power vacuum is created, and the whole electoral alignment shifts. If leftists completely abandoned the Democrats, the Democratic party would completely collapse. It would go the way of the Whigs. When a party dies, the electoral coalitions realign. And they would realign around the old Republican Party and the new DSA or other chosen party.

I know this is hard. But really, this is just learning from history. Yes, it means you sometimes lose ground in the short term to gain ground in the long term. And that is hard. It’s painful. But compare that to what we’ve been doing instead - hoping to gain ground in the short term while losing even more in the long term. Voting for Democrats now is just voting for the lock on the ratchet. They have no real desire to change anything. At best you get a temporary reprieve from creeping fascism, while nothing changes in the circumstances that lead to the fascism.

Yeah, people seem to forget history. Often institutions become so sclerotic that the only way forward is to work outside of them. Look what it took to defeat slavery in the US. Slaveholders had co-opted both major parties. Abolitionists tried for decades to work within the existing two party system, voting “lesser evil” election after election. In the end, this strategy failed at ending slavery. It took the founding of a new party, the Republican Party, to really make progress on abolition. It ended up leading to the Civil War, but slavery would have continued for another generation at least if abolitionists had just kept voting defensively election after election.

But there is no way to justify that importance and not see that it is no where near as important to them as actual gender affirming care is to a trans person.

Sorry. I cannot parse this sentence, it’s a triple negative and I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. My apologies.

To minimize or reject the later while choosing to seek the former is outrageous.

Performative outrage perhaps. But anyone outraged at this shows they really haven’t put in the time to understand or respect trans issues. This is the difference between real allyship and just putting pronouns in your bio. The difference between simply tolerance and actual respect and understanding. If you can’t understand the difference between a trans person getting gender-affirming care and a random cis person just getting a nose job they want, well I have to say, you really don’t understand trans people at all. Being trans is not just a quirky body mod people do for fun. This stuff kills people. This is life-saving medical care. I would be dead without the healthcare I received as part of my transition. I would literally be in the ground right now. To compare that healthcare to a random 18 year old who would just prefer her boobs be a little bigger is insulting.

I know it’s tempting to ignore all nuance and just say, “everyone should get what they want. Love and rainbows. Looking at hard reality and real world limits are too difficult. I love everyone and just want everyone to be happy! #uwu” That’s lazy liberal hugboxxing. Here in the real world, the hard truth is that insurance will never be able to pay for absolutely every cosmetic treatment people want. The difference is that trans healthcare has decades of research behind it showing that it greatly reduces suicide rates and directly saves lives. When a similar body of evidence exists to support cisgender access to an otherwise cosmetic treatment, I will consider them equivalent. Until then, you’re directly hurting trans people by comparing the two.

Again, if you can show a treatment is similarly effective at preventing suicide in cis people as GAC is for trans people, I will consider them comparable. But if that isn’t the case, it’s trivializing and demeaning the life-saving care that many trans people rely on to literally keep living. It’s the difference between someone taking ozempic because they’re morbidly obese and will die if they don’t take it, and someone taking it because they would like to lose ten pounds to fit in their summer swimsuit. Would it help both people to feel better about themselves? Sure. The already skinny person will have their well-being increase slightly. But to say the two situations are remotely comparable is insulting and outrageous. Same medicine. One is life-saving medical care, while the other is cosmetic. Nuance matters and we shouldn’t take the lazy hug box approach and just say, “well I guess all the people who want this must be in the same boat!”

As a trans person, I still get really uneasy when I hear people comparing cis cosmetic treatment to gender-affirming care for trans folks. It always seems trivializing to the struggles trans people face and the deep need trans people often have for these treatments.

The problem with equating cis cosmetic treatments to trans gender-affirming care is that you’re then implicitly arguing that trans treatments are cosmetic. Yet trans rights activists have had to fight for decades to stop insurance companies from considering trans care as “cosmetic” and to recognize it for the life-saving reconstructive treatments that they are. Comparing GAC to cis cosmetic treatments directly hurts trans people’s ability to access medicine.

Comparing SRS to a cis gal getting breast augmentation is implicitly playing into the hands of bigots that have always labeled trans care as cosmetic.

Trans rights advocates have had to argue for decades that trans medical care isn’t like a cis person getting a boob or nose job. They’ve had to argue that trans care is more like the kind of serious reconstructive medicine you get after a severe car crash. If trans care is no different from a cis person getting a nose job, then there’s no reason for trans care to be covered by insurance.

Unless the cisgender “gender affirming care” you’re citing is commonly paid for by insurance, you are directly harming trans interests whenever you make this kind of comparison.

That’s humanity. Reaching towards the stars while buried to their waist in the mud.

I would fuck myself, but honestly, I just can’t handle a partner with that many mental health issues. I’m sorry. I wish I were a better person. But I can only handle so much. I’m only human! I can’t have a partner like that. I have enough of my own issues to deal with! 😂

In my vision she’s leading an LGB-drop-the-T pride parade as the parade’s Grand Marshall. At some pivotal moment she gives a grand speech, ending with phrase, “and thank you to the LGB community!” Immediately after, a deafening sound of thunder echoes across the square, and all is obscured by a blinding flash of light. As the crowd’s eyes adjust, they see a sight before them. JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter and arch-demon to the trans community worldwide, is dead on her feet, struck down by lightning as if by the wrath of an angry God.

Sometimes you just have to go with the classics. And nothing quite says “wrath of God” like a literal lightning strike.

Whoops!

Seeing someone as sexy? No. Seeing someone as a sex object, yes.

“Seeing someone as an object doesn’t dehumanize them!”

Really?

We can do better than that if we want to abuse a time machine to forge Lovecraftian horror!

I would use my time machine to steal Neil Armstrong’s corpse from his funeral and then dump it right at the landing site of Apollo 11. First thing Neil sees when he hops onto the lunar surface? His own aged corpse.

One head canon I like:

This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.

But time travel isn’t like in movies. This isn’t one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn’t just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.

This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It’s not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.

As such, there’s only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it’s only useful for scenarios where you’re content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn’t come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.

To maximize this effect, sleep floating in a pool of mercury with a chain mail blanket atop.

I use 31g 5/16" long needles. Docs usually prescribe hormones as intramuscular injections, but they work just as well as subcutaneous injections. These little guys here. Unless you’re injecting something really thick and viscous like castor oil, injecting with anything else is just an exercise in needless masochism.

For needle anxiety, there are two things you could try. First, an autoinjector can help. These are basically little spring loaded devices that turn your regular syringe into something more like an epipen, where it just quickly forces the needle in before you can even feel it. Plus it creates a bit of disconnect which can help. Second, try an ice pack! It’s such a simple thing, but it helps me immensely with pain. Just a few ice cubes in a plastic bag, numb the injection site immediately before injection.

Also, if you want to practice injections to try and get passed your anxiety, there’s a way to do it without using your actual E vials. You can order bacteriostatic water. This is literally just sterilized water with a little bit of preservative in it. It has no active ingredients. It’s usually used for reconstituting dried peptides, but it would work just as well for injection practice.

It’s got carbs, fat, a bit of protein in the cream, and some fiber in the strawberries. What more do you need?

Ugh. Tell me about it. My beau has been recovering from a weightlifting back injury for several weeks. Been unable to do anything beyond just hand work. I really want him to heal to feel better. But also… :3

Still waiting for one brave soul to undergo the combined phalloplasty/vaginoplasty. That’s where they first take your existing dick and surgically transform it into a vag and vulva. Then they take a piece of your arm skin and construct a replacement dick for some reason.

Fine. That’s it! We’re calling the Ghost Busters! Time to bring out the proton packs!

What happens if I use a large fan and air pump to direct your mist form into a small propane cylinder and then seal it closed?

This is…umm…why my DM hates me. 😅

This just doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Why would they need to go to the trouble? It’s not like they can’t figure out who is trans through name and gender change court records, health records, etc. Even if these aren’t gathered in one list anywhere, it wouldn’t be hard to have an AI run through name change records and flag anyone that changed their name from a typically masculine to a typically feminine name, and vice versa.

Sure, there are some very paranoid/privacy-minded trans folks that never put their transness in government or medical records. They never change their name legally, they DIY HRT, etc. And those folks would be difficult to find. However, I imagine most such folks would be far too cautious to join a trans-specific dating app.