Interesting post. I wish I had mod points. I think nuclear is going to have to become viable soon, though. Where I live solar would work to power, say, air conditioners in the summer (which would be a bonus), but there's almost no sunny days between November and March so unfortunately it would not work in the winter. If I decide to buy a house when my current lease is up, I will definitely be looking into solar for summer months, but I will need the grid in winter.
I think you missed the part where I'm not attracted to females. -1, fail for missing the point of my post.
I'm only a guy on paper, just because society is still completely backwards yet in respect to subconscious gender (despite the fact it can be measured, somewhat accurately at least, using brain scans). Any interest in dating females I still have is just the result of being brainwashed for the first 19 years of my life that not having stuck my girl-cock in a female means there's something inadequate about me. I might do it one day, but it's probably going to wind up hurting her badly, and it might hurt me, too, if I start becoming friends with her.
But you're probably so full of yourself and heteronormative chauvinism the whole previous paragraph flew over your head and I'm wasting my time. This thread is too old anyway.
Probably something similar actually did happen once upon a time.
I think it'll be about 100 or 200 years, and the USA at least will be in another dark age. When a buffoon can get on a major broadcast "news" network and claim that tides prove that god exists and have no other explanation for happening, the USA is already in deep shit. Always remember that the Ancient Ones had worked out that the earth was roughly spherical and had calculated a pretty accurate figure for its diameter before the last dark ages. Hopefully the world at large has gained enough momentum not to be drawn in as well, so all that will happen is the USA becomes a 3rd world country while India and Japan become the first space-faring civilizations, probably starting with asteroid mining.
All that's left, really, is to take up fiddle playing while I watch the USA burn around me. The Vandals and Visigoths of our age are the anti-intellectual, Luddite, religious parasites that seem to have become so popular.
You had implied that your day itself was shorter referencing both sunrise and sunset. Perhaps it was bad phrasing. The sun rises earlier for you than it does over here in Michigan on the western end of EST/EDT. I do share the same depressing experience, though, of going to work in the dark and going home in the dark. It's why I wish the world would get over this whole 9 to 5 mentality so I could work 7 to 3. 7 to 3 makes the winter so much more bearable.
Alas, allowing people to work different hours would require allowing people to know what they're doing when they get in the office ahead of time, you know, forcing clients to plan more than 5 minutes in the future. Won't ever happen in an ever increasingly increasing 2.0 world.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I forgot to add that I think redefining noon to be anything other than when the sun is at its highest point in the sky is tantamount to redefining pi to be 4 just because 4 is an easier number to work with. The fact that cities don't all have their own local time with regards to the sun's position in the sky any more is a compromise like working with 22/7 when calculating numbers that involve pi.
9 and 5 are just numbers for christ's sake! It gives you 3 hours before noon and 5 after! Already the arrangement is lopsided. Yet for some reason people find it easier to redefine an astronomical fact to mean something else than challenge the superstition of 9 and 5.
Or people should just start working the shift I wish I could work again: 7:00 till 15:00. You get off work at 3 PM and have like a whole EXTRA TWO HOURS OF SUNLIGHT. It's like Oh MA GAWD! I onced worked 6:00 till 14:00 and had an extra three hours of sunlight, but I found that was a bit too early for a social life.
Feh, fuck those magic numbers nine and five. I don't even have a job I need to be there regular hours for except that new customers always need their accounts set up YESTERDAY because we live in a society that can't plan five minutes into the future. Never mind if they planned the decision to have undereducated females answering their phones after hours (I work at a call center) even 48 hours in advance, I could work literally whenever I wanted to. I digress.
What you're doing is the equivalent of taking an 800x600 image, scaling it down to 1x1, saving it, re-opening it, scaling it back up to 800x600 and complaining that all you have is a single colour image rather than the original.
Hey, man, I see that work on CSI all the time! You ain't foolin' me!
It gets even more weird. A lot of male to female transsexuals require the extensive training our society provides to cissexuals to be their assigned gender (male) and find that being a woman requires very little "training."
The contempt you show in your post for a male to female transsexual desiring the training that's openly available to cissexual girls is disturbing as is the assertion that "out of the box" girls know anything innately.
One does not "try" to become a girl. One is born that way, irregardless of what some stupid doctor says based on the presence or absence of a phallus. If one is forced to undergo testosterone because some doctor was an idiot and one isn't old enough to be legally able to fight for one's rights, then it's up to the individual to decide what to do about the fact that she remains a girl yet having been forced to wear masculine features.
I used to do computer work for females at work, since I considered it a friendly gesture. (I'm not terribly attracted to girls, btw, most times I was looking for friendship.) Then I noticed that after the work was done, just like straight guys have found, you get entirely shut down. I noticed there were two things going on: 1.) the girl assumed that I was fixing her computer because I was interested in her tits and 2.) actual attraction to said tits has nothing to do with it, i.e. there's nothing I was doing wrong like drooling all over her.
I don't fix anyone's computers for free anymore. I started telling the girls at work that it would cost $100 per hour for a minimum of one hour for me to even look at it, and they stopped asking after about the 3rd time.
Sadly true. For some reason people will continue to want faulty human drivers on the road who kill tens of thousands of innocents every year.
I guess it must be because when a computer error results in a death, who do you blame? When a human error results in a death you can blame, cuss, guilt-trip, defame, and more. It's a much more satisfying experience when you have someone to blame.
This is the fault of email client developers. I haven't used KMail in quite some time (I've since switched to a GTK/XFCE desktop so Claws-Mail is the client of choice these days), but when I had a KDE 3.x desktop, I remember that I was struck by how seamless KMail made GnuPG, even S/MIME. If all email clients made GnuPG as seamless as KMail, you'd see more use of encryption.
Really, encryption need not be difficult, not much more difficult than typing https or getting redirected to https when you just type foobar.com. It's simple. Your email client should generate a key or detect if you already have one in your OSes security system (GnuPG, etc). Then it should advertise that you have a key by attaching the public half to your messages. When another client sees a public key, it should cache it, and wa-lah! Now that client can send encrypted emails back with no problem.
I'm sure I'm over-simplifying, but the number 1 reason nobody encrypts their emails is because of this: look at who your popular email programs are. There's Outlook, Yahoo, GMail, and HotMail. Do a single one of those support OpenPGP out of the box? Absolutely not. In fact, the only one of those that even supports S/MIME is Outlook, and its support is a pain-in-the-ass at best!
One of my former co-workers once got into an argument with her provider's office about a policy change of theirs. It just so happened that office was also a client of my employer's (answering service). So, the office took it upon themselves to put two-and-two together, and they managed to have her fired. Yes, fired because she had an argument off-the-clock in a situation where she was supposed to be the customer.
I think it's good that HIPAA is being enforced. If you med types want to arrogantly view yourselves as gods or even scientists because you know a little biology, you could at least use a bit of ethics in your daily lives. Dicking around with confidential information and using it for your own amusement/revenge is not ethical.
People think it's scary to talk to a woman who's oddly wearing boy-clothes then to have a man's voice answer them.
People think it's scary to talk to a woman for a year and then learn that she was assigned the male gender at birth.
People think it's scary to flirt with a girl and get her to giggle, and then when they excuse each other to go to the bathroom, the girl winds up in the same bathroom as the guy.
So, yes, I can see that people might find interacting with an object that's supposed to be one thing but is actually another scary.
Oh well, let's just have a pre-emptive Butlerian Jihad and we'll be all set.
It's a macho thing. I've seen this with Christians as well. People who believe they're being persecuted tend to want to take up the most extreme, literal position possible.
*sigh* I'm sure I'm going to get modded troll for the next part.
The other problem is that in order to take the position you're taking, you have to ignore wide swaths of religious law. I haven't given the Quaran a read-through yet, but there's a lot of things Christians are supposed to do that they don't. For example, women aren't supposed to allowed outside of their rooms during their periods. There's a lot more scripture that says when women need to be confined, beaten, stoned, etc than any scripture that says that homosexuality is bad. But, filthy, nasty homosexual men make an easier target than pretty, sexy women.
I agree with most of your post except this. You're spot on that Obama has mostly failed to do what he promised.
put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.
Who are these people? How, exactly, are people with group-identifying prefixes or suffixes benefiting or escaping being screwed in the same way? Can you name something specific? Women who have children outside of wedlock with no way to pay for their babies would fit within your rhetoric, but I have a sinking feeling you probably weren't thinking of them as one of your prefix/suffix groups. Maybe you were, I don't know.
Where are the "normal Americans" going? Are they being recruited to become abnormal Americans? What groups are they being recruited into?
Don't mix up xenophobic (homophobic?) paranoia with otherwise valid points. I happen to have a group-identifying prefix. It's given me some interesting experiences (that you can read about in my other posts), yet I hope some day I can drop it. However I need to cough up the cash myself to get surgery done that will let me drop that label (nobody wants to be caught helping someone with my group prefix, even my health insurance, which would rather buy me a new liver if I continue making the choice to drink like a fish rather than helping me with something I was born with), so it's not going to happen tomorrow or next week no matter how much I want it. Even then, some people would prefer that I not be able to drop it, so that they can refuse me service, but whatever—it's a free market, and I don't want to give my money to those people anyway when I can go across the street and get customer service that doesn't care if I'm a lizard monster from Neptune.
I have a job. I pay my taxes. I applied for Selective Service because of another group-identifying label I have to live with. I vote (and not for Republicans or Democrats, either, unless those are the only two parties running for a certain office). I contribute to local food pantries, although every time I hear a chest-pounding red-blooded American saying something like this, I question why I do so when I could be putting the money in my savings account instead. I like eating steaks and chicken wings. I'd donate blood, but my blood isn't good to the Red Cross (because of said group-identifying prefix), so whatever.
What, exactly, constitutes a "normal American?" Do HIV-negative homosexuals fit in? Do HIV-positive women fit in? Do children born HIV-positive fit in? Well, I suppose the last two are mostly a problem in Africa, not North America. Does a straight guy living in his father's basement with no job and no education fit in? What are the criteria?
I have a feeling we might just wind up seeing eye-to-eye, but every time I hear this idea that the "normal" group is vanishing and that special groups are somehow benefiting or at least doing better than the "normal" group, I get a chill up my spine. There are assholes out there who believe I'm receiving money from some magical government program that only exists in their minds, and I've had a business owner try to steal from my friends before on that basis. Well, I don't know that for sure, but something made him think he could take their money and then refuse to give them their order. He called the cops to have us escorted out, and when the cops showed up, they didn't quite see it the way he'd expected. But I'm sure he was just a victim of some special privilege my friends or I have as part of whatever group he thought we were in since the cops wouldn't let him effectively steal my friends' money. And hey, the best part of that story is that the cops didn't even need to do anything for me to decide to never give him my money again! In fact, I posted a warning to others who might be in my group several places on the internet to avoid his business. Win-win!
I'm sure I'm going to get modded offtopic, but it's amazing to me that in the 21st century there are females out there in 1st world countries who refuse to get any control over their reproductive systems.
Then again, how do you explain to someone that believes that contraception is killing unborn babies that as part of a female's normal cycle, an unfertilized egg is discarded each month? There again, my folks accused me of the murder of their unborn grandkids (their! as though it was something that would have happened without my involvement!) and told me I was addicted to drugs when my doc gave me estrogen. I guess I shouldn't try to analyze it logically. These are people who believe that removing a necessary part of the male reproductive system at birth, causing discomfort and pain later in life, is necessary for the economy to continue to function. Only conclusion I can draw is anyone who's not currently having unending heterosexual sex is murdering unborn kids!
Oh wait. This is/. You all might take my conclusion seriously! eep
Thank you for the update. I suppose I have a few things to look into again. I still get scared shitless about being listed on a pedophile list every time I think about using the women's room. I wonder if there's any legal precedent to back up what you're saying. If there is, it'd sure make things easier if I'm ever able to say "I'm a woman" and believe it again.
You have a good point about being in the wrong field. I work at a call center, and intelligent and articulate females usually don't last more than about a month before they find a better job. And I usually don't interact with clients until the only thing they're articulating is how unintelligent we are, simply due to the nature of my position.
Sorry, I guess you deserve a little less ranty reply. You seem to be from Canada, so let me tell you what it's like south of the border, as it were.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress.
To 99% of the population, a post-op transsexual is a man in a dress yet. You'll note I put crossdresser in quotes. There was a reason for that.
People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper.
This is true. If I'm sufficiently tired to not carry on the macho charade, people will think I'm female even when clearly dressed as a boy.
And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female.
That's not how it works down here. If I presented the letter from my psychologist, they'd be sure to keep the M on my license. The best way to do it down here is to make sure you're passing 110%, preview your license, and then suggest the worker somehow changed your sex from F to M, and then she'll "correct" it back to F. The system down here is designed to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy that transsexual women are "traps" and deceivers.
I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female.
How do I emigrate to your utopia?
That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented across most of the US, and *is* implemented everywhere else in the English-speaking world (outside of parts of Africa), as well as all of the EU, most of South America, and most of southeast Asia.
It's been a while since I've tried to be a lawyer about this. Around here, people hate transsexuals. Is WPATH different from Harry Benjamin SOC? I don't believe I've read a SOC that gives a government obligations to honor gender transition.
Behaviour like *you* describe would be seriously illegal in this part of the world, as it would be a violation of my human rights (and was recently read into the constitution as such, yay Canada!).
Transsexuals aren't humans and don't have human rights here. This is a Capitalism, and if an Owner wants you kicked out, the police will kindly escort you out.
Even in the US, the human rights tribunals have pretty much unanimously agreed that a transsexual has the right to use the bathroom of their preferred gender, as long as they're presenting as such, regardless of what their documentation says.
The Detroit PD released a statement that one should use the bathroom of the gender one is presenting as. My city's PD has not. And I think you know very well that presenting that statement to a judge would not prevent me from being listed on the list of Sex Offender's Registry (or whatever it's called, you know, the pedophile list) if I were caught taking a piss with my dick between my legs by some damn female who suspected something who was peeping over the barrier, even in Detroit.
Thank you. Again, how do I emigrate to your paradise?
Well, to be fair, if I were fluent in French or got a master's degree, I'd be able to apply for immigration. I don't know anymore. I just wish I were female so that life could make sense to me. Even if I were a bit of a tomboy who likes computers and sci-fi, I wouldn't be a faggot. Instead I'm stuck with this bullshit because I was born male.
I used to think of myself as a real woman who'd just been through some bad things, one of which was trying to force myself to be a boy for the first 19 years of my life. I used to view women as Equals, just with different bodies. I got a letter of recommendation for a name change, and I had my transition planned out 2 years ago, and then things fell apart when I realized most of what I posted about. Two previous times in my life I thought I'd finally be able to transition and just be me instead of pretending to be a boy, it was financial stuff getting in the way. The last time it was only partially financial. As I've said in other comments, I work in a 95% female environment. I was shocked to learn that women are incapable of written communication and incapable of math. It made me question thing's I'd felt about myself since I was 7, strongly since I was 12.
I don't know what category I fall into anymore, but I cannot stand being off HRT. Fortunately or unfortunately, after 8 years, my body's barely changed. You talk about tits! Every now and then I'll find a bra that's small enough to fit. Oh, they developed, and grew, then promptly stopped 7 and a half years ago. The doctor told me that's just my lot in life. I don't even have to bind when I present as a man.
I guess I realized that women are simply children, and I questioned why I wanted to be a woman myself. I still want to go full-time, to at least give it a try and see if it makes anything in my life a little better to just have one identity that I can call me rather than two identities with two conflicting sets of goals. (I don't have MPS—but yet there's the me I know I am, the the me I let white folks see, as the folk song goes.)
I don't think I'm going to be able to see women as equals again, and I don't know what to do about that. I've seen how careless they are with the reproductive systems they've been blessed with. I've seen how fickle they are with the guys they claim to love. I've seen them talk about being raped just to manipulate others, when no rape had ever occurred. I've seen how incapable they are of understanding a system that's any more complex than getting their next period and any less user-friendly than getting knocked up. Speaking of rape, you know that behind your back, most women agree with Janice Raymond's famous quote, right? Females are mostly responsible for transphobia.
I wish I could unsee the things I've seen and live in a world where Ada Lovelace is my hero again, but I just can't. Every day I watch these women lead dream-lives where fucking 5 guys a week is somehow not immoral, but me trying to be who I am makes me an abomination before the lord and me trying to find love in life is a sin worthy of the 7th circle of hell. Every day I realize that I just will never have enough money to go full-time, get fired because everyone thinks I'm a pedophile and everyone will be too afraid to bring their babies to work to show off, and try to find a new job. Women are just pieces of shit who have it too good in life.
I've met plenty of women, and I keep hoping to find a counterexample who isn't a man-hating chauvinist pig. I work in a 95% female environment. I get to hear some simply shocking things when the women don't think there's a man around. Perhaps using "chauvinist pig" to describe a woman is cognitive dissonance at first, but I've found that the term adequately describes some of the women I've come across. Other women are just sadly swept up in this whole mess that teaches women that knowledge is not for a woman (well, at least the kind of knowledge Wikipedia offers—women use other epistemological positions that don't fall in the realm of the way I'm using the word knowledge).
The troubling thing is that the women around me agree with at least 75% of the stuff I spout off, usually right up until I get to the point where I start insinuating that there's something insidiously wrong with the whole situation (which I did not do in my comment above). They seem to think it's all a-ok because they can have babies. After all, "factual" knowledge that men use just doesn't apply to their world, and it's depressing to me. To them, mathematics is just something silly that guys do, and their world is a world of babies and motherhood, where all is provided by sugar-daddy government either directly or by strong-arming the father to cough up child support.
Well, I guess I do know a counterexample, but we don't have a lot in common so I don't see her a whole lot, and she has this bad habit of expecting me to carry things for her.
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Interesting post. I wish I had mod points. I think nuclear is going to have to become viable soon, though. Where I live solar would work to power, say, air conditioners in the summer (which would be a bonus), but there's almost no sunny days between November and March so unfortunately it would not work in the winter. If I decide to buy a house when my current lease is up, I will definitely be looking into solar for summer months, but I will need the grid in winter.
Slick? Pick up line?
I think you missed the part where I'm not attracted to females. -1, fail for missing the point of my post.
I'm only a guy on paper, just because society is still completely backwards yet in respect to subconscious gender (despite the fact it can be measured, somewhat accurately at least, using brain scans). Any interest in dating females I still have is just the result of being brainwashed for the first 19 years of my life that not having stuck my girl-cock in a female means there's something inadequate about me. I might do it one day, but it's probably going to wind up hurting her badly, and it might hurt me, too, if I start becoming friends with her.
But you're probably so full of yourself and heteronormative chauvinism the whole previous paragraph flew over your head and I'm wasting my time. This thread is too old anyway.
Probably something similar actually did happen once upon a time. I think it'll be about 100 or 200 years, and the USA at least will be in another dark age. When a buffoon can get on a major broadcast "news" network and claim that tides prove that god exists and have no other explanation for happening, the USA is already in deep shit. Always remember that the Ancient Ones had worked out that the earth was roughly spherical and had calculated a pretty accurate figure for its diameter before the last dark ages. Hopefully the world at large has gained enough momentum not to be drawn in as well, so all that will happen is the USA becomes a 3rd world country while India and Japan become the first space-faring civilizations, probably starting with asteroid mining.
All that's left, really, is to take up fiddle playing while I watch the USA burn around me. The Vandals and Visigoths of our age are the anti-intellectual, Luddite, religious parasites that seem to have become so popular.
You had implied that your day itself was shorter referencing both sunrise and sunset. Perhaps it was bad phrasing. The sun rises earlier for you than it does over here in Michigan on the western end of EST/EDT. I do share the same depressing experience, though, of going to work in the dark and going home in the dark. It's why I wish the world would get over this whole 9 to 5 mentality so I could work 7 to 3. 7 to 3 makes the winter so much more bearable.
Alas, allowing people to work different hours would require allowing people to know what they're doing when they get in the office ahead of time, you know, forcing clients to plan more than 5 minutes in the future. Won't ever happen in an ever increasingly increasing 2.0 world.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I forgot to add that I think redefining noon to be anything other than when the sun is at its highest point in the sky is tantamount to redefining pi to be 4 just because 4 is an easier number to work with. The fact that cities don't all have their own local time with regards to the sun's position in the sky any more is a compromise like working with 22/7 when calculating numbers that involve pi.
9 and 5 are just numbers for christ's sake! It gives you 3 hours before noon and 5 after! Already the arrangement is lopsided. Yet for some reason people find it easier to redefine an astronomical fact to mean something else than challenge the superstition of 9 and 5.
DST should be made permanent.
Or people should just start working the shift I wish I could work again: 7:00 till 15:00. You get off work at 3 PM and have like a whole EXTRA TWO HOURS OF SUNLIGHT. It's like Oh MA GAWD! I onced worked 6:00 till 14:00 and had an extra three hours of sunlight, but I found that was a bit too early for a social life.
Feh, fuck those magic numbers nine and five. I don't even have a job I need to be there regular hours for except that new customers always need their accounts set up YESTERDAY because we live in a society that can't plan five minutes into the future. Never mind if they planned the decision to have undereducated females answering their phones after hours (I work at a call center) even 48 hours in advance, I could work literally whenever I wanted to. I digress.
What you're doing is the equivalent of taking an 800x600 image, scaling it down to 1x1, saving it, re-opening it, scaling it back up to 800x600 and complaining that all you have is a single colour image rather than the original.
Hey, man, I see that work on CSI all the time! You ain't foolin' me!
It gets even more weird. A lot of male to female transsexuals require the extensive training our society provides to cissexuals to be their assigned gender (male) and find that being a woman requires very little "training."
The contempt you show in your post for a male to female transsexual desiring the training that's openly available to cissexual girls is disturbing as is the assertion that "out of the box" girls know anything innately.
One does not "try" to become a girl. One is born that way, irregardless of what some stupid doctor says based on the presence or absence of a phallus. If one is forced to undergo testosterone because some doctor was an idiot and one isn't old enough to be legally able to fight for one's rights, then it's up to the individual to decide what to do about the fact that she remains a girl yet having been forced to wear masculine features.
Make sense? Good. Thank you.
I used to do computer work for females at work, since I considered it a friendly gesture. (I'm not terribly attracted to girls, btw, most times I was looking for friendship.) Then I noticed that after the work was done, just like straight guys have found, you get entirely shut down. I noticed there were two things going on: 1.) the girl assumed that I was fixing her computer because I was interested in her tits and 2.) actual attraction to said tits has nothing to do with it, i.e. there's nothing I was doing wrong like drooling all over her.
I don't fix anyone's computers for free anymore. I started telling the girls at work that it would cost $100 per hour for a minimum of one hour for me to even look at it, and they stopped asking after about the 3rd time.
Sadly true. For some reason people will continue to want faulty human drivers on the road who kill tens of thousands of innocents every year.
I guess it must be because when a computer error results in a death, who do you blame? When a human error results in a death you can blame, cuss, guilt-trip, defame, and more. It's a much more satisfying experience when you have someone to blame.
What'll be interesting is if some of those masses had watched that video and find themselves in hot water. Over watching a video! In a free country!
Well, maybe not so free any more. Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
This is the fault of email client developers. I haven't used KMail in quite some time (I've since switched to a GTK/XFCE desktop so Claws-Mail is the client of choice these days), but when I had a KDE 3.x desktop, I remember that I was struck by how seamless KMail made GnuPG, even S/MIME. If all email clients made GnuPG as seamless as KMail, you'd see more use of encryption.
Really, encryption need not be difficult, not much more difficult than typing https or getting redirected to https when you just type foobar.com. It's simple. Your email client should generate a key or detect if you already have one in your OSes security system (GnuPG, etc). Then it should advertise that you have a key by attaching the public half to your messages. When another client sees a public key, it should cache it, and wa-lah! Now that client can send encrypted emails back with no problem.
I'm sure I'm over-simplifying, but the number 1 reason nobody encrypts their emails is because of this: look at who your popular email programs are. There's Outlook, Yahoo, GMail, and HotMail. Do a single one of those support OpenPGP out of the box? Absolutely not. In fact, the only one of those that even supports S/MIME is Outlook, and its support is a pain-in-the-ass at best!
Intriguing. I think you're on to something.
Ah, a med student. How quaint.
One of my former co-workers once got into an argument with her provider's office about a policy change of theirs. It just so happened that office was also a client of my employer's (answering service). So, the office took it upon themselves to put two-and-two together, and they managed to have her fired. Yes, fired because she had an argument off-the-clock in a situation where she was supposed to be the customer.
I think it's good that HIPAA is being enforced. If you med types want to arrogantly view yourselves as gods or even scientists because you know a little biology, you could at least use a bit of ethics in your daily lives. Dicking around with confidential information and using it for your own amusement/revenge is not ethical.
People think it's scary to talk to a woman who's oddly wearing boy-clothes then to have a man's voice answer them.
People think it's scary to talk to a woman for a year and then learn that she was assigned the male gender at birth.
People think it's scary to flirt with a girl and get her to giggle, and then when they excuse each other to go to the bathroom, the girl winds up in the same bathroom as the guy.
So, yes, I can see that people might find interacting with an object that's supposed to be one thing but is actually another scary.
Oh well, let's just have a pre-emptive Butlerian Jihad and we'll be all set.
Oh, good grief. Not all cannabis plants contain THC, just cannabis sativa.
And why do teenager need to smoke their shoes? Can't the free market step in and provide a more cost-effect alternative to meet this demand...?
Oops, I see what I did there.
It's a macho thing. I've seen this with Christians as well. People who believe they're being persecuted tend to want to take up the most extreme, literal position possible.
*sigh* I'm sure I'm going to get modded troll for the next part.
The other problem is that in order to take the position you're taking, you have to ignore wide swaths of religious law. I haven't given the Quaran a read-through yet, but there's a lot of things Christians are supposed to do that they don't. For example, women aren't supposed to allowed outside of their rooms during their periods. There's a lot more scripture that says when women need to be confined, beaten, stoned, etc than any scripture that says that homosexuality is bad. But, filthy, nasty homosexual men make an easier target than pretty, sexy women.
Cheers
I agree with most of your post except this. You're spot on that Obama has mostly failed to do what he promised.
put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.
Who are these people? How, exactly, are people with group-identifying prefixes or suffixes benefiting or escaping being screwed in the same way? Can you name something specific? Women who have children outside of wedlock with no way to pay for their babies would fit within your rhetoric, but I have a sinking feeling you probably weren't thinking of them as one of your prefix/suffix groups. Maybe you were, I don't know.
Where are the "normal Americans" going? Are they being recruited to become abnormal Americans? What groups are they being recruited into?
Don't mix up xenophobic (homophobic?) paranoia with otherwise valid points. I happen to have a group-identifying prefix. It's given me some interesting experiences (that you can read about in my other posts), yet I hope some day I can drop it. However I need to cough up the cash myself to get surgery done that will let me drop that label (nobody wants to be caught helping someone with my group prefix, even my health insurance, which would rather buy me a new liver if I continue making the choice to drink like a fish rather than helping me with something I was born with), so it's not going to happen tomorrow or next week no matter how much I want it. Even then, some people would prefer that I not be able to drop it, so that they can refuse me service, but whatever—it's a free market, and I don't want to give my money to those people anyway when I can go across the street and get customer service that doesn't care if I'm a lizard monster from Neptune.
I have a job. I pay my taxes. I applied for Selective Service because of another group-identifying label I have to live with. I vote (and not for Republicans or Democrats, either, unless those are the only two parties running for a certain office). I contribute to local food pantries, although every time I hear a chest-pounding red-blooded American saying something like this, I question why I do so when I could be putting the money in my savings account instead. I like eating steaks and chicken wings. I'd donate blood, but my blood isn't good to the Red Cross (because of said group-identifying prefix), so whatever.
What, exactly, constitutes a "normal American?" Do HIV-negative homosexuals fit in? Do HIV-positive women fit in? Do children born HIV-positive fit in? Well, I suppose the last two are mostly a problem in Africa, not North America. Does a straight guy living in his father's basement with no job and no education fit in? What are the criteria?
I have a feeling we might just wind up seeing eye-to-eye, but every time I hear this idea that the "normal" group is vanishing and that special groups are somehow benefiting or at least doing better than the "normal" group, I get a chill up my spine. There are assholes out there who believe I'm receiving money from some magical government program that only exists in their minds, and I've had a business owner try to steal from my friends before on that basis. Well, I don't know that for sure, but something made him think he could take their money and then refuse to give them their order. He called the cops to have us escorted out, and when the cops showed up, they didn't quite see it the way he'd expected. But I'm sure he was just a victim of some special privilege my friends or I have as part of whatever group he thought we were in since the cops wouldn't let him effectively steal my friends' money. And hey, the best part of that story is that the cops didn't even need to do anything for me to decide to never give him my money again! In fact, I posted a warning to others who might be in my group several places on the internet to avoid his business. Win-win!
Cheers
I'm sure I'm going to get modded offtopic, but it's amazing to me that in the 21st century there are females out there in 1st world countries who refuse to get any control over their reproductive systems.
Then again, how do you explain to someone that believes that contraception is killing unborn babies that as part of a female's normal cycle, an unfertilized egg is discarded each month? There again, my folks accused me of the murder of their unborn grandkids (their! as though it was something that would have happened without my involvement!) and told me I was addicted to drugs when my doc gave me estrogen. I guess I shouldn't try to analyze it logically. These are people who believe that removing a necessary part of the male reproductive system at birth, causing discomfort and pain later in life, is necessary for the economy to continue to function. Only conclusion I can draw is anyone who's not currently having unending heterosexual sex is murdering unborn kids!
Oh wait. This is /. You all might take my conclusion seriously! eep
It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
nanos gigantium humeris insidentes
Thank you for the update. I suppose I have a few things to look into again. I still get scared shitless about being listed on a pedophile list every time I think about using the women's room. I wonder if there's any legal precedent to back up what you're saying. If there is, it'd sure make things easier if I'm ever able to say "I'm a woman" and believe it again.
You have a good point about being in the wrong field. I work at a call center, and intelligent and articulate females usually don't last more than about a month before they find a better job. And I usually don't interact with clients until the only thing they're articulating is how unintelligent we are, simply due to the nature of my position.
Sorry, I guess you deserve a little less ranty reply. You seem to be from Canada, so let me tell you what it's like south of the border, as it were.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress.
To 99% of the population, a post-op transsexual is a man in a dress yet. You'll note I put crossdresser in quotes. There was a reason for that.
People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper.
This is true. If I'm sufficiently tired to not carry on the macho charade, people will think I'm female even when clearly dressed as a boy.
And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female.
That's not how it works down here. If I presented the letter from my psychologist, they'd be sure to keep the M on my license. The best way to do it down here is to make sure you're passing 110%, preview your license, and then suggest the worker somehow changed your sex from F to M, and then she'll "correct" it back to F. The system down here is designed to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy that transsexual women are "traps" and deceivers.
I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female.
How do I emigrate to your utopia?
That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented across most of the US, and *is* implemented everywhere else in the English-speaking world (outside of parts of Africa), as well as all of the EU, most of South America, and most of southeast Asia.
It's been a while since I've tried to be a lawyer about this. Around here, people hate transsexuals. Is WPATH different from Harry Benjamin SOC? I don't believe I've read a SOC that gives a government obligations to honor gender transition.
Behaviour like *you* describe would be seriously illegal in this part of the world, as it would be a violation of my human rights (and was recently read into the constitution as such, yay Canada!).
Transsexuals aren't humans and don't have human rights here. This is a Capitalism, and if an Owner wants you kicked out, the police will kindly escort you out.
Even in the US, the human rights tribunals have pretty much unanimously agreed that a transsexual has the right to use the bathroom of their preferred gender, as long as they're presenting as such, regardless of what their documentation says.
The Detroit PD released a statement that one should use the bathroom of the gender one is presenting as. My city's PD has not. And I think you know very well that presenting that statement to a judge would not prevent me from being listed on the list of Sex Offender's Registry (or whatever it's called, you know, the pedophile list) if I were caught taking a piss with my dick between my legs by some damn female who suspected something who was peeping over the barrier, even in Detroit.
Thank you. Again, how do I emigrate to your paradise?
Well, to be fair, if I were fluent in French or got a master's degree, I'd be able to apply for immigration. I don't know anymore. I just wish I were female so that life could make sense to me. Even if I were a bit of a tomboy who likes computers and sci-fi, I wouldn't be a faggot. Instead I'm stuck with this bullshit because I was born male.
I used to think of myself as a real woman who'd just been through some bad things, one of which was trying to force myself to be a boy for the first 19 years of my life. I used to view women as Equals, just with different bodies. I got a letter of recommendation for a name change, and I had my transition planned out 2 years ago, and then things fell apart when I realized most of what I posted about. Two previous times in my life I thought I'd finally be able to transition and just be me instead of pretending to be a boy, it was financial stuff getting in the way. The last time it was only partially financial. As I've said in other comments, I work in a 95% female environment. I was shocked to learn that women are incapable of written communication and incapable of math. It made me question thing's I'd felt about myself since I was 7, strongly since I was 12.
I don't know what category I fall into anymore, but I cannot stand being off HRT. Fortunately or unfortunately, after 8 years, my body's barely changed. You talk about tits! Every now and then I'll find a bra that's small enough to fit. Oh, they developed, and grew, then promptly stopped 7 and a half years ago. The doctor told me that's just my lot in life. I don't even have to bind when I present as a man.
I guess I realized that women are simply children, and I questioned why I wanted to be a woman myself. I still want to go full-time, to at least give it a try and see if it makes anything in my life a little better to just have one identity that I can call me rather than two identities with two conflicting sets of goals. (I don't have MPS—but yet there's the me I know I am, the the me I let white folks see, as the folk song goes.)
I don't think I'm going to be able to see women as equals again, and I don't know what to do about that. I've seen how careless they are with the reproductive systems they've been blessed with. I've seen how fickle they are with the guys they claim to love. I've seen them talk about being raped just to manipulate others, when no rape had ever occurred. I've seen how incapable they are of understanding a system that's any more complex than getting their next period and any less user-friendly than getting knocked up. Speaking of rape, you know that behind your back, most women agree with Janice Raymond's famous quote, right? Females are mostly responsible for transphobia.
I wish I could unsee the things I've seen and live in a world where Ada Lovelace is my hero again, but I just can't. Every day I watch these women lead dream-lives where fucking 5 guys a week is somehow not immoral, but me trying to be who I am makes me an abomination before the lord and me trying to find love in life is a sin worthy of the 7th circle of hell. Every day I realize that I just will never have enough money to go full-time, get fired because everyone thinks I'm a pedophile and everyone will be too afraid to bring their babies to work to show off, and try to find a new job. Women are just pieces of shit who have it too good in life.
Transsexual women, oddly enough, aren't "most guys." I hope you're not advocating kicking lesbians out of the women's room.
At any rate, the women's room is pretty disgusting, too, sometimes more disgusting than the men's room.
I've met plenty of women, and I keep hoping to find a counterexample who isn't a man-hating chauvinist pig. I work in a 95% female environment. I get to hear some simply shocking things when the women don't think there's a man around. Perhaps using "chauvinist pig" to describe a woman is cognitive dissonance at first, but I've found that the term adequately describes some of the women I've come across. Other women are just sadly swept up in this whole mess that teaches women that knowledge is not for a woman (well, at least the kind of knowledge Wikipedia offers—women use other epistemological positions that don't fall in the realm of the way I'm using the word knowledge).
The troubling thing is that the women around me agree with at least 75% of the stuff I spout off, usually right up until I get to the point where I start insinuating that there's something insidiously wrong with the whole situation (which I did not do in my comment above). They seem to think it's all a-ok because they can have babies. After all, "factual" knowledge that men use just doesn't apply to their world, and it's depressing to me. To them, mathematics is just something silly that guys do, and their world is a world of babies and motherhood, where all is provided by sugar-daddy government either directly or by strong-arming the father to cough up child support.
Well, I guess I do know a counterexample, but we don't have a lot in common so I don't see her a whole lot, and she has this bad habit of expecting me to carry things for her.