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almost home
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if i look back, i am lost
shark vs the universe
KIROKAZE
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium
@theartofmadeline
Kaledo Art
Andulka
Jules of Nature
Product Placement
trying on a metaphor
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#extradirty
Cosimo Galluzzi
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@kiricat
Average Deep Space Nine A plot: "What are you willing to sacrifice for the chance at a better world? Who are you willing to hurt? Will the pain you cause now outweigh the peace that it might bring? When both choices are bad, and you do what you think is best, can you live with yourself after? Could you live with yourself if you made the opposite choice?"
Average Deep Space Nine B plot: "What do we do with all this hot sauce!?"
neovaginas can get wet naturally
a neophallus can get erect with an implant (this will either be a bendable rod or a device that inflates with saline at the press of a button, usually in the testicles)
both can feel sexual pleasure and experience orgasm
most neovaginas will be able to tolerate larger insertions with enough dilating/training
the nerves in neophalluses take a while to regrow but it is incredibly rare to experience no sexual nerve growth
both can look and feel "normal" if that's what you want, just take good care of your scars and look at your surgeons' results portfolio (and don't be afraid to be picky! its your genitals, you get to decide!)
in fact it's possible for many people to stealth and for their sexual partners to never know. even for phallo, some people with natal penises have erectile implants too, ED is common. neocaginas are often indistinguishable from natal vaginas
many surgeons are starting to offer preservation options for patients who want a more mixed look/don't want to lose what they have
YOU HAVE OPTIONS! demystify bottom surgery
ngl, this thing wishes that 'older trans woman' was not synonymous with 'dominant' in the eyes of younger trans women.
y'all are gonna love that 40+ trans woman when she's not dominant, right? you're gonna love her when she's submissive, right? you're gonna love her when she's little, right? you're gonna love her when she's just a kitty, right?
you're not just gonna love her for how she slots into your fantasies, right? you're gonna love all of her and not just the parts that get you horny, right? you're gonna love her even when she won't force you to take care of yourself, right?
you're gonna love the 40+ trans woman for who she is, right?
People are unfazed if you hate women but if you dislike dogs they assume you're a bad person
I have had a lot of evil people say to me that nothing taste as good as skinny feels and every time im like no im pretty sure food tastes really super good actually
trans women make this place better
not just the website but da world!
There's straight up no such thing as an apolitical fandom space btw, there are participants in fandom who are privileged enough to not notice the politics, and there are people who, if they speak up about bad experiences in fandom, are Making It Political.
There's a choice being made when saying you want a space where people can escape from political issues and just have fun, which is between the following options:
Address the issues that prevent particularly vulnerable, marginalized people from joining the fun
Silence the ones who bring up the issues, contribute to the barriers that prevent them from participating in the fun, and squeeze them out of the space
There's a wrong choice here. It's made way too often by people who claim to be progressive.
Every once in a while I’ll see a post that’s like
“Hot take: it is NOT immoral to fold your towels!”
And I wonder what the fuck kind of discourse I missed and if anyone was ever really arguing with OP on that matter to begin with
What always gets me are the ones like "Reminder that it's totally okay to fold your towels if you feel you need to!" and I'm like oh, we are inventing things to beg permission for that not even god himself could have imagined
im sorry but i cannot take the ff7r series seriously when they didn't call the third one reunion
@eraofstories @starrygazingpie
write it anyway even if you think it’s bad. a badly written fic is still better than a nonexistent fic.
I want to add that I have read some fic that I felt were bad but they had something about them - story, theme, a specific moment, etc. - that was so interesting or chewy that I think about it to this day, even years later.
So what if you're not someone's next great author? You could also haunt their dreams and nightmares simultaneously, and be the ghost in their daydreams. Don't ever give them peace.
Trans Women Face More Injuries Than Cis Ones (It's Not Even Close)
A new study found that injury rates among transgender women are significantly higher than injuries among cisgender women, based on radiologi
❝Transgender women in the study group suffered 8x times as many head injuries as the controls, 36x as many facial injuries, and 5x times as many chest injuries.❞
So much for "protecting women".
For all those wondering why the title doesn't say this, it's because the study doesn't say this either.
While the cause of the injuries may be obvious, it's not technically known, and science speaks for what is known.
Some (a minority) of the trans women injured reported that it was violence, and some (a smaller minority) reported that it was intimate partner violence, but most did not report anything and the stats are just from the fact that they needed treatment and so went through the radiology department with their injuries.
Getting a lot of reblogs saying "undescribed" and "no image ID" etc, so please be aware that I did add alt text shortly after posting (it was a pain to copy on my phone so I did it on my desktop), but by then, it had already been reblogged by a couple of big blogs, so this alt-texted version is languishing, please do reblog it!
why are you always bitching about cis women having boundaries and not cis men who are the ones who are statistically far more likely to murder you? god forbid women don't spend all their emotional labor on centering you 24/7. go after the transphobic politicians or something, those are the actual fascists who want you dead.
those "boundaries" get us murdered lol. trans women who can't access women's shelters or other forms of housing because of cis women's "boundaries" are left on the streets to be assaulted and murdered
if you want trans women out of women's spaces, and the rationale for those spaces existing is to protect from violence, then you are saying that trans women don't deserve protection from the same violence despite being at an even higher risk of it than you
terfs have gotten crazy good at framing discrimination through the language of consent. systemic discrimination is not "boundaries"
Think tanks explicitly founded to "abolish transgenderism" will publish a report that's like "there's no evidence that trans healthcare works if you ignore all the evidence" and be taken seriously, meanwhile actual researchers go "there's seriously NO evidence that gatekeeping helps" and get ignored
Like on the one hand there's new papers each year going "So it turns out that there's literally no fucking reason to restrict transition access based on these arbitrary criteria, and in fact, they were explicitly made up by some Danish fuck because he was personally obsessed with the idea that trans people were demons, and as it turns out the only measurable impacts of this policy are to increase risks to the patient" that have no impact on the healthcare systems they're criticizing whatsoever.
And then, on the other hand, you've got "Shockingly, this life-altering treatment that massively impacts how the patient is perceived by others in all facets of life is primarily supported by observational studies, as opposed to the enormous violations of bodily autonomy and human dignity necessary to perform a true randomized control trial. We recommend that treatment ceases immediately because you don't understand how evidence-based medicine works." And that becomes a linchpin of the politics of multiple European countries' trans healthcare politics for the next several years.
It's fucking clown world. Nobody who enabled this should be in a position of any power whatsoever.
So for those of us who are less familiar with medical studies, what exactly are cissexist institutions like this saying should be done?
Like, I keep hearing "gold standard" thrown around in anti-trans news articles when it comes to double-blind studies. As a layperson I understand it as a way of combatting the placebo effect when studying, say, the effectiveness of some specific pill. (Versus what you said about transition affecting your life so much overall that it's better measured observationally than trying to isolate it down to one specific variable)
Basically, I'm trying to understand what kinds of violations of bodily autonomy and human dignity these think tanks are suggesting we should undertake to "actually prove transgenderism" or whatever. Like, what does a blinded study even mean for HRT? Give someone a placebo for 5 years and gaslight them into thinking it's actually feminizing/masculinizing them when it's not?
Well how do you do a double-blind study, i.e. one where neither patient nor doctor knows who's getting the placebo, of a treatment that visibly changes your body, while remaining within ethical constraints?
You don't.
Not only is it impossible to actually remain unaware of who's getting placebo'd for long, recruitment would be a nightmare. You ask a bunch of trans people to sign up for a 50% chance at committing to x number of years spent not transitioning, you're going to get a lot of people saying "fuck that" and going elsewhere.
The surveillance and violations of bodily autonomy that would be needed to begin to approximate a true double-blind study on this are directly downstream from how ridiculous the idea is.
“you win some you lose some” Well At This Point I’d Like For Us To Start Winning Some
text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]
And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.
They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?
I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.
AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and to make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.
cuz it got wiped from the internet: transfems it's so cute to want to be cute. do what you think makes you cute, it's ok if you feel awkward that's cute too. you can be yourself, even if you don't think that's very cute, you will still be the worlds cutest girl. i love you
Before coming out I used to work at a mental health crisis line. There were so many problems with this place, that I will probably talk about some other time, but generally stemming from issues relating to social class and demographics more broadly.
90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.
Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.
We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."
People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)
It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.
It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.
And now many years later I often see queer groups near me directing people to this crisis hotline in case of emergency, and I always have to make a fuss to get them to remove it as a categorically non-safe institution. But it's so well-known and respected where I live (by people who have never used it, but they are typically the ones in positions of power ofc) that it can be really hard to get people to believe it is actually that bad.
