[politijohn]

Source

Let’s go!

[cnc-pet]

i know gender and sexuality arent exactly the same but “i could survive being with a man” is comphet. “i could survive living as a man” sounds much the same. you’re not meant to live in survival mode. it sounds like you do *need* to transition

That’s… fair

[cnc-pet]

with 2+ years of hindsight (and almost 10 months of HRT), I want to thank this anon, because I think genuinely this played a significant role in helping me to start transitioning.

I've been so much happier since then, and especially since starting HRT. Yeah, there are new struggles and anxieties and problems to adapt to, but I'm also learning how to enjoy life and find myself and love myself, and it's definitely worth it.

Over the past year I've laughed and cried and been able to look at myself in the mirror and selfies and enjoy what I look like. I've felt more comfortable with my body, and worn outfits and accessories that I've been daydreaming about for over a decade. I've felt pretty, which was not something that I thought was possible.

If you're on the fence about transitioning, please know that it's enough to chase joy. If you think you'd be happier, that's enough. You don't have to have known since you were a toddler. You don't have to be so depressed that you can't bear another day as your AGAB. You don't have to "earn" or "deserve" to transition. It's enough to want it.

[shamebats]

Trans experiences: wearing a hijab as a trans man.

TT post by @ starboy.cherie (he/him).

This entire comment section ended up being a lot better than expected.

[dogpuppy]

[soundoftheirwings]

Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)

[tlbodine]

From now on this is how all petty fandom disputes should be settled.

[flagellant]

[i-enact-postvore]

You ever think about many peices of media have zero women and thats just perfectly normal but if a peice of media has an all female cast people get... like that? Women should be allowed to kill over this btw

[loveshoplifter]

same but it's black people

[i-enact-postvore]

That's right

[trashcangimmick]

[100493503004422]

I feel FATIGUED like send her to the seaside for her health type fatigue

[bridget-lover]

Listen american football definitely has structural and safety related problems, i enjoy the games but i wish it was better structured

But

If a boxing fan says that football should be illegal because of the injury risk (a real actually type of guy i met once) you have every right to laugh in their face

[penrosesun]

Look intuitively, this sounds correct, but in reality… according to a 2017 study on brains of deceased football players that were donated to a brain bank, 99% of tested brains of NFL players, 88% of CFL players, 64% of semi-professional players, 91% of college football players, and 21% of high school football players had various stages of CTE. (1)

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study on retired boxers, about 11% of all retired boxers examined had a mild case of CTE, and about 6% of the boxers had major neurological problems. And if you just looked at boxers who were over the age of 50 and fought in over 150 fights, the rate of CTE went up to 50%. (2)

I’m sorry, but it is absolutely reasonable for a boxing fan to say that American football should be illegal due to the injury risk, because American football is a much more dangerous sport than boxing in relation to the risk of traumatic brain injury.

And if you’re surprised to learn that American football is more dangerous than the sport where you literally punch each other. Well. I’d say that that’s part of the problem, actually.

(1) Mez J, Daneshvar DH, Kiernan PT, et al. (25 July 2017).

(2) Iverson GL (January 2016). "Suicide and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy". The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. 28 (1): 9–16.

[bridget-lover]

Genuinely didn’t know that, but you are correct

[penrosesun]

I think that a lot of people don’t!

To be clear, I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to outright ban American football. There are a huge number of things that we could do to make the sport dramatically safer, short of just banning it altogether! But I think that part of the issue is precisely that people don’t know the relative risks of these things. Many fewer parents are comfortable letting their kids play the “hit each other in the head” sport than are comfortable letting their kids play American football, and that’s absolutely an issue of informed consent.

We need to start by acknowledging how dangerous American football truly is.

[demonius-darkblade]

my mom once told me i was a ski jumper in a past life because she dreamed about a ski jumper dying in a terrible accident when she was pregnant with me, and said it was definitely true cause the ski jumper in her dream was also blonde. i never had the heart to tell her this is absolutely not something catholics can believe.

[queen-elizabeth-the-3st]

[i-was-today-years-old-when]

TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)

[ancestralia]

In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior.  There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time.  Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.

In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.

(The OP's link leads to a site with a recording of the song sung by both Mary Moran and her mother, Amelia)

[oldshrewsburyian]

Because the original link was broken, I tracked down a news story about how the song is continuing to help Mary Moran's relatives find their African communities:

Also, there's an apparently sanctioned link to the full documentary about tracing the song.

I was really fascinated to learn that the song was originally recorded by none other than Lorenzo Dow Turner, the founder of Gullah studies. Gullah was dismissed (by white people) as a nonsense language until a Black linguist trained on Old and Middle English came along in the early 20th century, and I love him.

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[apes4days]

Unsurprisingly there's no shortage of heinous shit in the proposed rule change. Some more:

A ban on international collaboration with a list of the "scary" countries (like China, one of the US's strongest research partners despite It All), and a presumptive ban on ALL OTHER international collab.

An end to any binding peer review process in funding. All review will be by Trump stooges, deciding what has scientific merit. This isn't the top headline evil thing about this rule change, but it means that even well-meaning, very careful scientific review boards can't try to evade censorship. JD Vance is essentially in charge of deciding whether your metabolic enzyme computational model can exist or not.

You can't work with your network of colleagues, and nobody with a shred of expertise will help decide what's worthy of funding. One of the only systems the US has ever deserved to be even a little proud of, into the shredder for no benefit at all.

[sailorbrazil]

thursday..... and i bet you wish you were her

[theconcealedweapon]

[maarvarq]

Always bear in mind that there is absolutely no legitimate evidence that Luigi was actually the one who killed the insurance company guy.

[theconcealedweapon]

Of course he wasn't. He was at a party with me that day.

[tiny-space-whale]

No but like literally, actually. All bits aside.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.

[bunjywunjy]

How much bigger is a wolf than a coyote? Is it just noticeably larger and bulkier or is it a massive size difference?

Also they're normally natural enemies in the wild but sometimes they occasionally hybridize?

depends on the wolf! for this exercise we'll assume a median coyote size of 30 lbs.

while all north american wolves are technically grey wolves (except the mexican red wolf!) there are more than twenty subspecies of the damn things, all of which can differ significantly in size and appearance! (many now displaced with some extinct)

for example, the mexican wolf is only barely bigger than a large coyote, with adults reaching the 50-90 lb range.

whereas the northern rocky mountain wolf has any coyote massively outclassed, ranging between 80-150 lbs!

most other north american wolves range somewhere in between. but this is why we don't say "the size of a wolf" much as a figure of speech, because they come in so many different sizes!

and when wolves and coyotes hybridize, it's generally because there's no other potential partners in the area for either animal, so they start being willing to look a little farther up the family tree, so to speak!

[bunjywunjy]

!!!

[stjohnstarling]

In light of recent events, I have begun submitting bug reports when I see mature content labels applied inappropriately to posts, especially if an appeal has been rejected.

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

Extremely good idea - how are you doing it? Through the contact us option?

[stjohnstarling]

Yeah it’s one of the options on the Contact Support form:

[sharas-bae]

for what it's worth: after a few months of submitting help tickets as 'feedback' when i saw a post inappropriately flagged as mature, i tried following this suggestion instead. today i got my first-ever response from tumblr support on this issue, letting me know that a post i'd submitted a ticket before has had its mature content flag removed.

[stjohnstarling]

Hey it worked! Maybe if enough of us make a stink they’ll fix the fucking system.

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

[voroxpete]

To be clear, this isn't a bit. This is what they actually did. "Its too late" is the new "Climate change isn't real"... And its still a lie!

Every serious climate scientist agrees that there is no such as thing as too late, just as there is no such thing as too early. We should have done a lot more than we have to fight climate change, and the world will suffer for our inaction, but there is no point of no return. We can always work to reduce the amount of suffering that occurs, and eventually turn things around to the point where our planet is healing once again. Do not believe anyone who says it's "too late".