Ramblings Of A Gay Athiest Created By Science.

I dunno. I woke up like this.

[owa-tagoo-siam]

[alicepire]

Happy 10th anniversary to the two bros Chillin in a hot tub incident

[alicedkc]

'Tis The Season To Be Sapphic

TV & Film Podcast · In each episode of 'Tis The Season To Be Sapphic, Alice Clarke, Angharad Yeo and Jess Zammit review and discuss a differ

Hello friends! Three sapphic games and technology journalists from Australia have started a podcast reviewing and discussing sapphic holiday movies. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, you should subscribe to 'Tis The Season To Be Sapphic on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts.

[turing-tested]

contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid

#i would describe my gender as not exactly ‘idk dude i just work here’ #more like…..when someone assumes you work somewhere that you don’t #but you know how to help them so you do it anyway #my gender is wearing a red shirt at a target

These are the best tags

[cobblepottery]

A portion of people in the notes are like ‘but that makes you trans. That’s called being agender’ and another portion of people are going ‘this is how the majority of cis ppl feel and it’s NOT agender’ and personally I feel like both of them are missing the point here. Yes a lot of people identify as agender because of this feeling. Yes a lot of people with this same feeling still identify as cis. These are not mutually exclusive experiences and it doesn’t mean the agender people are secretly cis or the cis people are secretly agender. It just means they have very similar experiences of gender that they choose to conceptualize and label differently, and neither of them are mistaken or wrong to do so.

[toastybugguy]

[alicepire]

My understanding of my gender is that I have a gender in the same way I have a footy team.

Where I live, a lot of the casual conversations at work, events, out socially with strangers, etc is around football. That's the safe, neutral conversation that everyone understands and has in common. But if you say you don't have a team, that starts a whole other conversation.

So, I say I barrack for Essendon.

I have no idea what Essendon has been doing for the last 20 years. I know roughly three things about them that allow me to participate in the conversation, but I'm not really invested either way and I'm just doing it to be polite and make social interactions easier.

That's what gender is for me. I'm pleased if I learn "my side" is doing well, but I don't know any of the rules, I'm not going to games, and I'm not paying for a membership.

[rednines]

[maimonideznuts]

I think Australia actually had the best answer to the question "what do we do with phone booths?"

In Australia anybody can make free calls from any phone booth, also most phone booths also provide wi-fi.

So many people benefit, in so many situations.

The free phone booths have been so popular and important that new(fancy) phone booths are being installed.

Making phone booths a free public utility 👍

Ripping them out in the assumption that everyone has access to a phone or internet 👎

How free public payphones are proving to be a lifeline for thousands of Australians

There has been a sharp increase in calls to helplines and emergency services using the free calls service provided through public payphones

[alicepire]

It should be noted that Telstra is only doing this because they make big money from using them as billboards, which is why the payphone are getting bigger and bigger. At least in Melbourne, they don't need council approval to install payphones, so it became a problem when they got so big and plentiful they were making paths inaccessible for billboards. People got so upset about the billboard thing that Telstra made them free for good publicity so they could keep placing billboards.

A genius PR move that genuinely helps people. But they didn't do it because they wanted to, just because they had to. Bullying corporations works!

[ex]

[hiveswap]

the idea of a 21 year old being engaged is so scary. stay safe dont do that do yourself

[alicepire]

This person would hate One Tree Hill so much.

[alicepire]

Uh oh

So, I saw the James Gunn Superman movie last night and I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate the Supergirl movie. Unless the Supergirl movie is going to show major character growth, the set up has me sure they're going with a version of the character that just isn't what I'm interested in (trying to be vague to avoid spoilers).

I forgot how bad James Gunn is with female characters in general. That's really on display in this film. That man really needs to grapple with his inability to see women as equals. Some truly horrific things were played off for laughs in this film, and he squandered arguably the best Lois Lane portrayal ever.

Aside from the women thing, the movie was mostly pretty good. It was fun. I acknowledge that it was mostly a good story and just wasn't the kind of Superman story I'm interested in. I'll go into more detail once enough time has passed that I can say spoilers.

[gallopinggallifreyans]

two bros, both alike in sexuality

in a hot tub, where we lay our scene

[thebibliosphere]

My neck subluxated while on a video call with my therapist, and her reaction was akin to when the child's head starts spinning in The Exorcist.

She went white as a sheet. I saw her pupils contract.

And there was me muttering "mother fucker" under my breath and slotting my neck back into place like a mild inconveinance.

It's wild the shit you get used to.

[thisusernameisunique]

Is subluxation just a fancy word for internal decapitation

You just... plopped your head back on your neck

[thebibliosphere]

Subluxation is a partial dislocation, not total. Decapitation implies things are being severed, which isn’t the case. Just crushed and pinched.

My cervical vertebrae slips out of place and my skull crunches a bunch of nerves. It’s why I have so much chronic and debilitating nerve pain in my face and head.

Which brings us to our regularly scheduled reminder: Don’t let chiropractors touch your neck. You might die or be left with severe injuries that make you wish you were dead.

[alicepire]

Ooh. Subluxation sounds like a very helpful word for what my knees, hips, elbows, sternum and something in my neck do a few times a week. Thank you! Dislocation was too extreme, but also the bones weren't where they belonged and I didn't know what else to use. Thank you for this!

[ratbastarddotfuck]

really not sure when it happened or why but personally I'm pissed that the queer community at large seems to have given up ground on the "people with penises/vulvas/testes/ovaries" language to sex & gender essentialists in exchange for the much less precise, much more demeaning "AGAB" language.

is it because you're scared of the word vulva? of acknowledging out loud that some people have penises? of recognising that many many people, including but certainly not limited to trans people, have mixed sex characteristics that cannot be accurately summarised by "afab/amab" as shorthand for "female/male"?

"in [GENITAL RELATED] situation AFABs will need to do X and AMABs will need to do Y" there are "afabs" with penises and "amabs" with vulvas. Saying this shit makes you look so unserious & honestly transphobic (given the ongoing erasure of post-op trans people within broader community). Intersex people and GRS have both existed for long enough (fucking forever and, decades, respectively) that we should well past making this basic fucking mistake.

quit referring to people by a vague & often violent event that happened at their birth as though it defines ANYTHING about how they & their body currently operate, and start using precise language so you at least look like you know what you're fucking talking about.

[angrylittlesliceofpizza]

i agree, and will add:

do NOT say 'people with a vulva/vagina" when you talk about PERIODS AND BIRTH CONTROL. the term you want is FUNCTIONNING UTERUS.

lots of trans women and transfem people (including intersex ppl, *including cis women*) can and do get bottom surgery. the procedure in itself does not make actual-blood-loss periods happen, though, because long-lasting uterus transplant is Not A Thing (yet?) and *the blood comes FROM THE UTERUS*. if it's about *side effects* related to *hormones* (so, not punctual iron deficiency, bc that's linked to the blood loss…) then… it's about HORMONES. again, not external(ish) physical characteristics like a vulva or vagina!

agab language can be useful and appropriate in some contexte, but when talking about medical stuff, PRECISION is indeed what we need. and "assigned gender" is anything but that.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

DING DING DING we have a good addition to the post!!!!!!

precision is key.

"estrogen dominant" and "testosterone dominant" endocrine systems are also useful terms, especially when interfacing with doctors.

[alicepire]

This is awesome for trans and intersex people, and something I wholeheartedly encourage from that lens. But by being deliberately exclusionary in this way, these people are also making these health messages less useful for cis people.

When "women's health" comes up, it's always a mystery of "is this for breasts, vaginas or uteruses?" Which body part are they avoiding actually mentioning today? Hysterectomies are far more common than you'd expect, I was shocked to find out how many people have had them. If your "women's health" message is only subtly alluding to functioning uteruses and periods, then it's not relevant to menopausal women, trans women, many intersex women, and a surprisingly large number of cis women of "child bearing age". It also might not be reaching non-binary people or trans men who might actually need it. Not all vagina owners are uterus owners, whether the vagina is original or handmade.

The amount of time I have wasted trying to work out if a "women's health announcement" was relevant to me, only to discover it was about cervical cancer or pregnancy or something mentioned in cutesy terms at the end is maddening. It means I start disregarding "women's health" messaging that could actually be relevant for me.

Being precise when talking about medical things isn't just for "woke" or whatever term pearl clutches are using to refer to people who are different to them and they are afraid of. Precision means advice reaches the people who need it, even if they don't fit the incredibly narrow definition of whichever binary sex you're imagining exists.

[pseudomantis]

Molting male cardinals are so funny looking and whenever it's time for them to molt birding groups are flooded with concerned posts like is there something wrong with this bird? And it's like no he's fine he's just bald right now

[pseudomantis]

#Bald

[alicepire]

They do the same thing with Prince William

[nicolegendary]

weird to think we're all on here interacting with australians. any given user on ur dash could be an australian, if you think about it

[alicepire]

No, it’s ok. Australia isn’t real.

[feministism]

[swiftlywiththefoxes-deactivated]

January 2019:

[suite-dee-reynolds]

I lost weight when I went on my medication initially because it made me very sick and when I told people that was why, more than a couple would say stuff like “I wish I could get some of that” like you want a weird disorder that is awful and to be violently ill? just to be skinnier?

[existentialismandmakeup]

“After I got the biopsies, they did another mammogram. And I had to have my shirt off. And I was standing there at the machine. And the technician said, oh my gosh, you have such a flat stomach. What is your secret? And I was like, oh, I’m dying.“

-Tig Notaro

[theconcealedweapon]

More proof that the ideal of thinness never had anything to do with health.

[deramin2]

People would rather you be dead than fat, but they refuse to acknowledge that if you call them on their bullshit.

[alicepire]

Easiest weight loss I ever had was losing over a litre of tumours when I had my hysterectomy. Telling people my secret when they commented on it made them very uncomfortable.

[thisbibliomaniac]

Gatekeeping is so good and important

[msburgundy]

[kirkendauhl-v2]

What's she saying in the photo

[thisbibliomaniac]

[helpmepleaseicantfindaname]

[fiollaigean]

[alicepire]

I have been on this website too long

[chongoblog]

Can’t wait for, like, 2025 when we look back on the 2018/2019 era and say “hey, remember when we were all really freaking depressed? That was a crazy time! Glad we aren’t like that anymore”

[ampersketch-art]

Hey,

[chongoblog]

Don’t say anything

[viktor-sbor]

Studies show that babies are not afraid of snakes

Scientists launched reptiles into the nursery to assess the reaction of the kids. The result killed: the crumbs perceived the reptiles as toys, and some tried to eat them

[dogsuffrage]

A snippet from this study:

I find this interesting, it really counters the unfounded but popular notion that fear of certain animals is evolutionary and intrinsic within our DNA.

[alicepire]

As an Australian with a toddler, this is deeply concerning.