Notices by Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social), page 2

It's no wonder why America is a country where homes and healthcare are unaffordable and basic rights get peeled away from us on a daily basis when even our heroic defenders of the liberal democratic order seem more concerned with backing fascists and lining their own pockets.

And if you don't like it, they'll sic the riot cops on you.

NASA recovered a space probe's 47-year-old computer with about as much memory as my old Commodore 64 over a distance of 15 billion miles so it can (hopefully) continue to do science work, and it reminds me of how much ingenuity used to go into computers back when the assumption was you couldn't consume the water and electricity of a small nation just to power Ask Jeeves.

I have to admit, the biggest thing I never expected about the world was the number of people who don't want to make things better.

It would be helpful if people at least considered in the abstract what the US response would be to a country that massacred civilians, destroyed cities, bombed hospitals, blocked humanitarian aid, attacked UN groups, and shot starving people trying to get food if that country wasn't named Israel.

It won't matter to dedicated anti-trans activists but the history of trans healthcare is something I wish more cis people understood.

None of the science is particularly novel or experimental. Trans people were obtaining hormones and surgery decades ago, since the early 20th century, at least, and the techniques have been steadily perfected, tested, and proven to be safe.

The medical establishment agrees this care is valid and necessary, outcomes are generally good, and regret rates are considerably lower than for many other medical procedures which are now considered routine, some of which are actually much more recent.

There have been an increased number of people transitioning under the new, more relaxed system and as adults via informed consent, but that doesn't imply anything other than there was a pent up demand not being met.

Regret and detransition have been vanishingly rare under this system, now under attack, even among minors. Most people who detransition do so because of financial problems or social pressure, not because they're not trans, and go on to transition later in life.

The old system was barbaric. It was severely and punitively restrictive. It was misogynist, racist, and homophobic, with male doctors judging your validity based on how much they wanted to fuck you.

It was also essentially out of reach of anyone not independently wealthy.

The standards of care were relaxed BECAUSE of the failures and abuses of that heavy-handed gatekeeping system, which was designed to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible.

Anyway, I bring this up on a regular basis because the arguments made by anti-trans activists are lies and based on fake or faulty "science" designed to provide them with talking points.

It's all bullshit. The goal is not to protect anyone but to shove trans people back in the closet, kill us, and prevent us from publicly existing at all.

We've seen this movie before. We know what happens.

I wish cis people would learn it, too.

If you're concerned about sports, research has consistently shown that trans women specifically have no special advantage compared to cis women, especially after a few years of HRT, and trans girls who received puberty blockers or hormones before natal puberty are essentially identical to their cis peers.

And obviously, there is no such thing as "biological advantage" in areas like quiz shows or chess where physical capabilities are irrelevant.

As a trans person, there is nothing more absurd and exhausting than arguing with someone who believes people like me only came into existence in the past 10-15 years -- I'm 46, thanks, and transitioned decades ago -- or that trans kids don't exist even though stories of us abound. I was one!

Like, read a fucking book.

The only lesson to be had in the OpenAI drama is the money always wins.

By the time you're rationalizing that the enemy is so evil that 100 dead civilians is worth it to "take out" one terrorist, maybe, and that you can't stop bombing or allow humanitarian aid because the enemy will take advantage of it, you're completely past the slippery slope. And yet, these people are treated as decent, rational actors on the world stage.

Fascism makes swift inroads when people start accepting the dehumanization and destruction of entire groups of people, and fascism's favorite response to those who invoke moral and humanitarian concerns about it is to label them "traitors" who are "supporting the enemy."

“'Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.' Over and over again, the worst states for children are clustered around the 'pro-life' Bible Belt, and the map of the states that are the worst for children looks a lot like a map of red-state America."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/human-rights-watch-usa-child-abuse-labor-report.html

There isn't a "crisis in masculinity."

There are just guys who can't cope with there being any standards or expectations for their behavior at all after being told they could literally do whatever they wanted and treat people like property.

There's a reason every proposed "solution" is misogynist as hell and involves forcing women into a social position where their lives, bodies, and livelihoods are entirely controlled by men.

Because these men are pigs and want to live life on easy mode.

The anti-trans pogrom isn't going to look like concentration camps, at least not at first, because there just aren't a lot of us. It's going to be a rise in teen and adult suicides. It's going to be evictions. It's going to be police attacks on homeless camps. Because we'll be drummed out of schools and employment and public life and healthcare and have nowhere to go.

The only camps other than homeless camps are going to be evangelical conversion / torture centers where trans and queer kids will be sent after being taken away from their parents by mandatory order of the state.

Speaking of, have you noticed these things are already happening?

Probably not.

And it will all largely happen out of the public eye because cis people don't care, don't want to care, don't want to know.

See no evil, hear no evil.