sassyonsunday
It's not theoretical for me. My FIL doesn't know I'm trans and he loves Fox News and called some person getting covered by Fox a t-word in a really hateful way about two years ago and it's made me feel less comfortable around him. He could have just said "I don't know about this trans stuff" which I get totally but by jumping to a slur he put a barrier up. I've begged my husband to "out" me to his family at some point and now I don't even bother because I can't get the stuff he said about people like me in front of me out of my mind. He's my FIL so I have to maintain a relationship with him but I don't go out of my way to more than the minimum. I just hang out with my MIL and focus on that relationship instead.
It would be the same with a stranger. If you call me a slur or use the slur around me without knowing that I AM ONE OF THOSE "SLUR WORDS" it would prevent me from being able to form a relationship with you on equal footing and would make me want to hide who I am from you which just amplifies the level of misunderstanding in the world.
Some people might say it's my fault because I take slurs personally but... I'm just human here. I don't wanna spend my life placating people who use slurs to describe me.
I have met trans women, especially those who came out of the gay community like me, who use the t-word with vicious intent because of hate they have for themselves and others. They're disgusted with being trans and they're disgusted by other trans people and they throw the slur the same way a non-trans person would and in doing so give moral cover to non-trans people who hate us. "See they even hate each other and they use that word the same as we do!" If you call these self-haters out they'll claim it's fine for them to behave the way they do because they're trans too, but, no.... The reason you shouldn't use slurs has nothing to do with the slur itself, it's about the impact of it and the impact doesn't change just because you're trans yourself.
So anyway, imo, normalizing the use of slurs by publicly broadcasting them is a bad idea in general outside of very specific contexts because slurs are not just words, they are symbols for an entire series of related negative stereotypes so when we normalize those words we also normalize the ideas associated with them. AI doesn't get an n-word pass. /rant
I'm not saying what I felt was true. It was just my instinct and because I was already richer than my wildest dreams (I come from a lower middle class background) so I didn't care to overthink it. An "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this way and since unions require popular support it's a data point toward understanding why software engineering unions aren't widespread.
> In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
We'll see if that comes to pass. I'm guessing it won't, but if it does I'll adjust accordingly to the new reality as will we all.
All you've told me here is that the people you personally associate would laugh at the idea that Tesla is a toxic brand. The world is not made up of a single social group with a single set of norms. In the groups I associate with, and no we are not blue haired SJWs I am married with a family in the suburbs and work a boring corporate job, Tesla is toxic.
Some things I try to keep in mind as much as possible:
- We are all operating from different frames of reference.
- Social networks are fundamental to our survival: people will go to great lengths to stay in the good graces of their families, friends and associates.
- "Society" is a huge tapestry of interlocking social networks, each with its own internal logic and reward systems.
- The logic and reward systems of the most powerful networks tend to leak into all the others over time to some degree.
Ironically pretending that we don't play social signaling games and critiquing others for playing them is itself a sort of social signaling game. These games can't be avoided because they are a fundamental part of human interaction, so much so that when we aren't good at playing those games for whatever reason we are unable to function properly in society and are pathologized as a result.
Elon Musk's involvement with the companies he is associated with is not the usual involvement that an executive team would have. His personal brand is intermingled with the products he sells and cars are a way of signaling social status whether we like it or not. There are certainly people for whom buying a new Tesla would decrease their social capital which could have negative impacts in other areas of their life (relevant to HN, social capital converts to actual capital in many cases by opening up business opportunities).
We're in a grace period right now when it comes to driving a Tesla, where people who already owned one can't really be blamed for supporting Musk, but the day has already arrived when buying a new one will signal poor taste and lack of social acumen to much of the white collar class.
Vulgarity is relative so if your crowd isn't this crowd, fine. But you can't blame people for wanting to avoid putting stigma on themselves when there are other EVs on the market nearly as good as Teslas which don't have the same toxicity.
Could it be cruel to put it this way? I'm imagining people living in pain and misery having their suffering distilled into some sort of artistic achievement or pretty "chicken soup for the soul" anecdote that you can consume from the comfort of your home office or living room.
It's almost like saying that their suffering causes you enjoyment, albeit in a roundabout way.
I grew up Southern Baptist in the rural South where "chicken soup for the soul" type fare was very popular and until I was about 12 I would sit with the women in my family after church listening to them swap stories and many of them would have this sort of flavor. Of talking about people's misfortunes and sharing how sorry you felt for them, or how their struggling led them to do something heroic or noble or caused them to get "saved." Sometimes I would be so moved that the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up and then I would feel bad about the enjoyment I was obviously getting. Like we were emotional vampires sitting around relishing all this bad stuff in our little circle.
Is it bad to share stories of people's suffering and bond over them? I suppose not. It just feels off and I don't know why.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bmjyda/the-rise-and-fall-of-... (Zoklet was shut down I guess)
I agree with you 100%. When I was in middle school I wanted to look very neat and proper and it caused me problems with boys. I can remember getting picked on for looking too... well groomed? I feel like the opposite pressure exists for people assigned female. I was born with the default option of not needing to look "pretty" in the sense of enhancing my feminine features with clothes and makeup but I enjoy life a lot more when I'm allowed to.
It did thanks.
> I think it is fine for society to be critical
Of course. Critical in the sense of skeptical. However a lot of "critics" of trans people act much more like schoolyard bullies or people worried that rock 'n roll music will make the children worship satan than people with fair concerns about the wellbeing of others.
> I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets
There isn't any decision that people can make that will leave 100% of people satisfied. Gender therapy has existed in its modern form for about 100 years now and in that time study after study shows that people who go through with it are happy with the results 90%-98% of the time. This is higher than most treatments of any kind.
You'll find that almost every commentator who talks about detransitioners or trots some out for a political show has the end objective of ending all gender affirming care for all people and replacing it with conversion therapy due to their ideology. In the case of someone like Janice Raymond that reason is radical feminism. For someone like Matt Walsh it is traditional Catholicism. In both cases they are misleading the public by insinuating that gender therapy is some sort of factory process where hapless victims are swept onto a conveyor belt and mutilated haphazardly.
People who transition and then regret it will always exist. Just like people will regret getting any sort of elective surgery. Just like people will come out as gay and then later regret it and then later regret that they regretted it and so on.... It's a story as old as time.
This study tracked people over a 50 year period and found a regret rate of 2%.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262734734_An_Analys...
> The FM:MF sex ratio fluctuated but was 1:1.66 for the whole study period. There were 15 (5 MF and 10 MF) regret applications corresponding to a 2.2 % regret rate for both sexes. There was a significant decline of regrets over the time period.
The worrying thing is not that 2% regretted their decision, the worrying thing is that the people who are against trans people would be LESS happy if the figure were to be 0%. They want 100% of trans people to regret transition and repress because that would make reality conform better to their ideological leanings where "men are men" and "women are women" because God made them that way.
They've gotten consistently worse since about 2015.
I started transitioning in 2009 when I was 18. I come from a very conservative environment and growing up I'd even tried to come out as gay a few times only to be "shot down" more or less but in college I used my own money and I found doctors to help me look how I wanted and I started dating men openly and as awful as it is to say, because I looked and acted the part people got over it pretty fast and begrudgingly accepted that I - at least - wasn't a man. My parents even got upset with me a long while ago when I insinuated that I was a part of the gay community because they said it was disrespectful to my then boyfriend who is now my husband (he had only dated cis girls before me and is straight to anyone who hasn't run a DNA test on me ha).
These days I can feel a change even from people who were kind to me before. All the coverage on conservative media outlets, the JK Rowling "trans women are a threat to women" and the Matt Walsh "trans women are mentally ill perverts" talking points have eroded goodwill so much that more religious and conservative members of my own family avoid me now as where they didn't before and I feel that I'm only able to have a good life because I'm in the fortunate position of being "passable" and attracted to men.
In 2012 when I came out to someone they'd usually just be curious about my experiences. Even conservative Christians and Republicans. In 2022 almost nobody is curious except about which surgeries you've had because they've already made their mind up about how they feel about you. For about 50% of the population that means you're a piece of scum who deserves ridicule and punishment (if it looks like you could still pass as male physically) or excommunication (if it looks like you're so feminine and far gone that you couldn't fit in as a man), for about 40% of the population that means indifference akin to what you'd get back in the good old days and for about 10% it means an outpouring of support and love in an attempt to make up for the 50% who are openly hostile.
I think more and more trans people are taking the Wendy Carlos approach these days because of this. Much of the community wants to avoid attention and get along with their lives. There's a growing trend of people "boy moding" or "man moding" which is where they take hormone replacement therapies but dress in drag to try to fit in as their gender assigned at birth in public the same way that Wendy did. As an amusing sidenote, many of these people begin "male failing" which is where the hormone replacement therapies make it impossible for them to pass as their gender assigned at birth and so they are read as being trans still but coming from the other direction.... It's so sad that it has to be this way.
She didn't become world famous like she may have if she'd been lucky enough to be born cisgender, but the thing that matters most is whether she found happiness in her private life. I hope she did.