This isn’t as simple as you are implying as if you want to be a bro to trans people more nuance is generally required. Male and Female are not used strictly scientifically in context. Male and Female are often used as adjective forms of man and woman. Take the example of a male or female firefighter - if a trans man is a firefighter refering to him as a female firefighter using this reasoning comes across as fairly transphobic because it feels like you are either trying to utilize some sort of technical linguistic dodge to find an occasion to misgender them or your purpose is to out them to people unawares of their trans status.

Even when people use male and female as nouns instead of adjectives this transphobic reading applies because a lot of fairly obnoxious people will try and use these words as shorthand to imply that trans identities don’t matter and to avoid calling you by terms that align to your identity or to isolate trans identify out of discussions. This is why you hear the phrase “Assigned male/female at birth” used by the trans community (though it actually originates from the intersex community) or “birth sex” to refer to groups that include non-binary people instead of just male or female. That linguistic abstraction is important because it implies removal by way of time. In trans terms one can be treated as female at birth given the assumption of cisness for infants implying that that term could be inaccurate in the present day.

By contrast “Trans Identitied males/females” is a transphobic dog whistle. “Biologic males/females” has the same vibe because from a scientific prospect the term is so bloody vague it is practically meaningless. The speaker is just trying to imply the social category is irrelevant or putting emphasis on an assumed physicality. Like if someone says for example “biological males in women’s sports” you know the entire point they are going to be making is total exclusion before they even bother to elaborate further.

The reality is words Male and Female still represent social categories unless you append onto them more specific adjectives in term like Phenotypic, chromasomal or so on. These words are not immune from the cultural moment of negotiation of trans inclusion.

Ohhh no… As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.

Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn’t cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips… This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.

Wow, your name is pretty accurate huh?

Wow, lucky you.

While I won’t argue that the media is causing a number of problems thinking it’s a storm in a teacup is your privilege showing. Even though I live in one of the most trans accepting places on the planet I have had the unique experience of having to sneak past protesters who are trying to remove people like me from public life, using slurs over megaphones and openly marching hundreds strong in the streets… And again this is rated one of if not the most trans friendly place in the world. There is no safer place to go.

It’s a lot harder to see it as a storm in a teacup when the world is dramatically becoming a smaller place for us personally because laws keep passing that people do not understand or do not care how they actually impact us. The media doesn’t report a lot of us who are murdered even when it’s a hate crime. This year in the US there was 41-ish such hate motivated crimes which is near double 2023’s total… But we can’t be sure of the actual number because a lot of the time the transness of the victim and the nature of the motive is obscured by the media reporting. Some of the media shenanigans only gets caught only by loved ones as media frequently uses vagueness and dead names that friends and community members don’t recognize because that person hasn’t gone by that name for decades.

Your opinion comes from the fact you don’t personally have a horse in the race so whether you engage with it or not is a choice. The safe places are radically shrinking. The next government projected to win federally here is known to be openly hostile to trans people and I know that at least one of my friends will die directly as a result from them removing the supports currently in place. So enjoy the storm you aren’t living friend but realize saying it doesn’t exist is really crass to those who cannot find shelter.

Kinda reminds me of the time Ken McElroy was murdered in the middle of Skidmore Missouri during an altercation where most of the town was present and “nobody saw anything”.

Does that look like a “gentleman” to you? By familiarity of this particular sort who broadcasts his open distain for trans people on his shirt I warrant he is not a chivalrous, courteous, or honorable man.

I think “male” is probably polite enough and better than he deserves.

Huh, I’ve been banging on about this for awhile in isolation after talking to a lot of cis people about gender and it’s really weird to see it in an article by someone else.

Weird and validating.

Depends on your context of “proud”. Pride movements for instance aren’t nessisarily about being specifically proud of your gender / sexual orientation in the same way one is of your accomplishments. The movement co-opted the word to mean something subtly different. When some says “I am a proud gay man” for instance the statement does not imply “I think I am particularly special given this trait and am worthy of praise because of it” what is actually being implied is "I am not ashamed by this trait and will not be treated as if I should be. "

The movement has it’s own language and “Pride” specifically was chosen as being the opposite of shame which was the affect people were expected to have by society. The people who created the idea did so out of participation in gay support groups at the time where the social norm was always that you had to perform a performative regret like being gay was a habit akin to a drug addiction. You were reinforced to adopt a narrative that you were unhappy and struggling - even when actually your partner and community might be a source of great joy. Gay Marches were shirt and tie events where one soberly asked for people to see you as a human that passes for straight, all the culture and actual proclivity tucked behind a neat mask where that undercurrent of shame was still at play.

True Emancipation, according to the Pride movement, was fighting the narrative that there was anything shameful about being happy. They decked themselves in rainbows as an allusion to the joy they wanted to show the world, modeled Pride events on Independence day events and affected instead of performative shame performative pride. Something that would allow them to be unapologetic in their fight for actual rights to exist in the light of day as opposed to the former affect of shame that turned them into pitiful beggars asking for scraps of patchy tolerance to exist in the shadows as people who would treat their own way of being as a failure state.

I dunno if it is much a right of passage as it used to be. Where I am we’ve had bathroom freedom for a long while now and since we have a larger than usual trans population (Vancouver BC) folk transition bathroom use a little earlier than double take type passing but like anybody who crosses into the other side at minimum definitely looks properly trans. Abroad I have been bodily chased out of bathrooms by women when I was younger and passed for more androgynous even though I am an AFAB who never went on T. I ended up using the gents for awhile just because it meant nobody tried to clock me in the head with a purse but like… it sucked worrying that someone would clock me the other direction while I was waiting for a stall. Never personally happened so I never figured out how that experience shakes out but I was definitely trying to lay low.

Even with it being a city that puts “trans people welcome” over the bathrooms us enbies / non physically transitioned folk tend to have a pretty brutal self assessment of how we clock before we pick which restroom to take. It’s really sucky how people take the whole “We don’t owe you presentation” quote to infer like the way we personally choose to present doesn’t actually factor into how we make choices or navigate the world… Like we still don’t want to make people uncomfortable! Half of us enbies are so socially anxious that causing social friction gives us the bloody horrors and we accommodate other people at our own expense more often than not.

Like really… It boggles the mind how so many straights seem to think we operate as some kind of all powerful gender authoritarians who can force people to unquestioningly not even glance at us sideways or else we trot them to the censorship guillotine!

Hi, trans person here.

So what gets left out of these arguments a lot or misunderstood about being trans is not that this is a ‘belief’ based system. We are very individually aware of what we look like to other people and how we are being “clocked” by others. Take me, I am trans masculine but bodywise I have opted not to transition because of specific reasons. I don’t automatically feel comfortable using the gent’s washroom.

All of us are looking to find the path of least resistance in this binary that wasn’t designed for us. Trans women I know who don’t seemlessly pass often get stares regardless of what bathroom they use but while women might be horrible, going to the mens means that transphobes can follow you to a secondary location to assault you. If there’s an individual third non gendered option that’s often what we use because for me, I feel weird about being in women’s spaces even if they don’t hassle me and my clockable trans grildfriends don’t have to deal with the anxiety of other people staring.

If I did go on hrt though it would be a different story. I, like all of us, want to use the option that makes everyone around me the most comfortable and the whole thing pass by without any incident.

Under a system that allows trans people to make the call to use what allows us to make the call about what is safest and the least path of social resistance you really don’t find trans people who look like big scruffy men entering women’s washrooms and claiming to be a women because that isn’t a path of least resistance move. It’s not that we “believe” we are our preferred gender and just automatically switch to everything right away. We are very aware that we do not fit in but why we’re doing what we are doing is that our brain looks at our natal sex characteristics as abhorrent which means visually speaking we do dress so that other people can pick up on our deal and don’t keep reminding us in language.

Non-binary folk are kind of the standouts but generally speaking we make the exact same sort of social risk assessments and do our business in the bathroom that other people tend to clock our gender as, not nessisarily the one we feel closest aligned with.

So really under a situation where bathrooms are a free for all a fully masculine looking and coding person wandering into a women’s room not making any attempt to pass IS still a red flag worthy of heightened caution… But if you are in a place where trans men are forced to use a women’s room then more than likely that’s a person following the law and in following that law is risking getting the security or police called in because they had to pee and then spending the next hour being treated like a sex offender while they have their documents checked all because they weren’t permitted to make the bathroom choice of social least resistance for themselves.

Bit weird to so publicly and enthusiastically proclaim you’d tap that, but whatever I guess.

It’s not just that.

One thing that the Republicans got real good at was piping the idea of election fraud into their base. Part of what they’ve been doing is getting devoted citizens to target individuals they suspect to be democrat friendly and pouring over their registration paperwork. If they find anything amiss they report it which has made it nessisary to show up and defend one’s right to vote to the administrative bodies on a schedule.

https://youtu.be/CkK3W0lOKcc?si=OT4mOCnlZosTGbld

It’s meant that relatively small wildcat groups of citizens have managed to target literal tens of thousands of voters in swing states to cause confusion and delegitimize voters based on minute errors.

They find new ways to rig the game because they believe that they are owed this.

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

Oh, it’s worse than that for Canada. Trump during his last term tanked entire sectors of our economy with executive orders he spat out like tweets. Those “deals” were all taken apart in International court filings but the damage was already done.

Remember we are a very big landmass staffed by only a sliver more people than exist in the state of California. If the US goes under we will be ripped apart as no more than collateral damage.

Conservatism is a worldwide problem and they all borrow each other’s notes. It’s not going to be a fun time for us coming up. I can only hope that when the shit hits the fan down there those up here start rethinking their bullshit.

Not saying our shit doesn’t stink but there’s a certain matter of scale to consider. Leastaways we don’t have nukes we can hand over to the psychopath we are looking at voting in.

The national identity of being Canadian over the last while has been every four years wondering if the downstairs neighbors are going to decide to restart up the meth lab they keep tinkering with and bracing for the sounds of domestic violence to resume.

Neither Zeus nor Odin is canonically all seeing or all knowing. Zeus was tricked by Prometheus by accepting bones wrapped in fat as his sacrifice leaving what he really wanted, the nice juicy meat, as the human’s share. He had to get word of Persephone’s last known location from Apollo and has routinely been tricked by other clever Gods and mortals in his myth.

Odin was not able to discover the plot behind the murder of Baldur until the confession of Loki nor did he know the location of Thor’s hammer when it was stolen (they had to ask Heimdal). He may have sacrificed his eye to trade one form of perception for another… But we aren’t really let on to what that perception actually is. In Norse myth only Mimir is functionally all seeing and Odin takes his council from his severed head, he has to ask for information he doesn’t implicitly know himself.

There is a difference between simply very knowledgeable or powerful and actual omniscience or omnipotence it is not a matter of scale based on perspective, it’s a boolean function - one is either all powerful/all knowing or they are not. If ever a god or other character needs to ask someone for information, is tricked by something obscured or fails to know something they are automatically proven to not be omniscient… In storytelling omniscience tends to make for very boring characters because it means that most conflicts are automatically resolved and the cleverness or stupidity of a God is undercut when they simply know everything. Odin’s stories are ones where he goes and scouts, learns, adapts, formulates a plan and then gets away with murder because we are supposed to admire the process.

We assume omnipotence from Gods but it’s not wholly true. Most gods out in the world of myth are limited in their reach and ability. If they are in a pantheon then often that implies that they have no direct power over each other and thus they are not all powerful.

Interestingly omnicence or omnipresence is not something claimed even by the monotheistic religions. No God is actually all seeing. Plenty of times in script things have been hidden from God or something has to be told to God to bring it to his attention.

This has nothing to do with his dick persay… Just the assumption of omnipotence. If the Christian God exists he coulda just be lying about what he’s capable of and what human is gunna be able to check the math? Guy seems like the kind of dick who would pull that shit.