Consider that those shootings are getting way more frequent. We get a Columbine about four times a year now and around 43 other shootings where there might be only injuries or singular casualties. Kids grow up in the States with lockdown drills. That entire voting block is going to be old enough to vote in 12 years.

I expect anti gun sentiments are growing now as each year new voters are growing up in that system where these events aren’t considered rare anymore. Where parents who came of age in the 2000’s have kids and are now front row to that milliterization and afraid because their families have skin in that game.

These laws are gunna happen one day.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.

It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.

To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.

That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.

But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?

Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.

They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.

I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.

After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.

We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.

So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.

Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.

It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .

So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”

Oh but there is an implied value - superiority. When you give a group of people a descriptive property with no inverse you are basically creating a construct of “assumed default”. This comes with other issues of those falling outside the default having no way to effectively talk about people of the assumed default group without using words that have value judgements baked in. Like if I am calling you “a normal person” the implicit value judgement is that I am an abnormal person. I am “othered”.

This sort of denial of language assumes that a group that you are given tools to talk about never and should never talk about your group back utilizing those same tools.

Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.

It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.

Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.

Or

“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.

But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.

It’s Union film. It gets weird when you involve teamsters as technically if we don’t work well together folks from my union are way less protected than they are. They may work for my boss but my boss has no firing power.

I am not even kidding when I tell you he is leagues better than the last teamster I worked with who thought it was perfectly chill to play all the hardcore right wing pundits… Particularly Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson who uses the T-slur pretty liberally while I was riding the cab of the truck and couldn’t remove myself (I am trans).

There’s a lot of really fucked up stuff in the film industry that nobody really talks about.

Good gods… This is a complete tangent but I have a coworker who went on a a full rant about how DEI is terrible and they lowered standards to get in poor black people… So straight up bulshit tech bro racism.

But then he starts talking about how he heard from a doctor in South Africa was talking (complaining) to him about how when they started hiring black doctors because of DEI the standards tanked and people were worse off.

And I was like “So a WHITE doctor from post apartide South Africa was complaining about how hiring black people ruined everything and that seemed like a legitimate source to cite huh?”

Which of course sent him on a whole thing about how the doctor being white had nothing to do with anything and how that was a super racist thing for me to imply… But I think the reframing was a bit of a shock to him.

Arguably for a lot of stuff that folk encounter that some count as “subliminal” just means they don’t understand the language and employ of framing devices, juxtaposition, abstraction or rhetoric. We need to start teaching that shit as basic literacy in schools because once you understand them it’s not “subliminal” anymore as it becomes readable text.

The simple presence of an ad in your peripheral vision definitely counts as properly subliminal though and it’s still a menace.

Basically yes? Antichrist is pluralized in the Bible in places and thus is not necessarily one individual. The false Prophets are described similarly.

Most of the pop culture picture of the Antichrist as a more singular entity is more like the Thessalonians “the man of sin”… Also known as the Man of Lawlessness, Apostasy, Insurrection, rebellion… One particularly agregious Antichrist that Jesus himself must come down and take out with a breath that exposes his naked wickedness to the worshipping masses who will realize that they are not among the saved. It’s sometimes interpreted that this kicks off the second coming but it doesn’t actually say that… It just says it happens sometime before the end of days which could mean it’s distinctly apart from and not feature of the revelation. Like some kind of Jesus warm up cameo.

Really its kind of tempting to paint Trump and Evengelicals in that role. He wouldn’t be the first nasty to wrap himself up in an altar cloth.

I wouldn’t say that’s the sentiment expressed when people remind others of the limitations of freedom of speech. More like it’s a reminder that knowing exactly where those boundaries lie because somethings aren’t the government’s job to mediate. Sometimes it’s our collective job to resist because nobody is coming to fix it for you.

Realistically rights like the freedom of speech and expression are notoriously weak by way of actual protection by a culture. Russia technically has freedom of speech on the books but you can still be hauled off to prison for spreading “LGBTQIA propaganda”. What actually protects those rights are the expectations and moreover the outrage of a culture’s people against these acts of censorship regardless of who is perpetuating it.

Wouldn’t that be if they were connected at the tail? This is more of a disorganised avian garroting caused by a constant futile bid for meaningful independence.

I think of America more as a swarm of 50 plus angry pigeons tied together at the neck with string.

This feels like it was not an intended reply to my post as it seems to be dealing with entirely different subject matter , are you sure you are replying to the correct person?

If your point is that intentionality of harm is required for law to be enacted then that isn’t particularly true either. Things like manslaughter charges exist because intention isn’t always nessisary when determining criminal fault for harm. Negligence, lack of adherence to pre existing law or willful ignorance are still criminal factors… And they have their own individual criminal burdens of proof that must be met to stick a conviction in court.

It is simply a nature of law that intent is always considered and proof of it is nessisary to bring forth particular types of charges that are weighted more heavily based on proof of premeditated knowledge or intent. Lack of intent does not always mean no damages are criminaly found to be your fault that must be answered for. Law makes allowances in many cases for the potential of the purest of pure accidents.

However since the UK has hate speech law, libel law and laws against provoking violence or harassment and damages are now measurable the person in the original article can be proven to have violated a law and damages happened as a result meaning that she cannot claim pure accident. Knowingly or not she broke a pre-existing law and people and property was damaged as a result.

Just like a charge of vehicular manslaughter only really sticks if you were speeding or broke a traffic law. If you are truely blameless and followed all law it is ruled " actions leading to accidental death" which is not a punishable crime. Speeding in a school zone is usually a pretty mild punishment if one is caught doing it and no one gets hurt usually it is a pretty mild fine… But if someone dies as a result of your speeding you go to jail. Same premise here just different laws.

Agreed, but you also said :

I’m okay with this phrase except for the word “intent”. If we give someone the power to try to assess our intent, it can easily go the way of totalitarian states where they say you have a bad intent any time you criticize the government.

And I am pointing that the power to assess intent is actually a norm in the justice system. Too many people on here are very quick to catastrophize things that are actually very culturally normal and stable in systems of law. Your point is not the same one I was making, hence why I referenced your likely intended point in my post.

We have always lived with exceptions to freedom of speech. Libel, slander and obscenity law as examples. The sanctity of medical records is another.

The UK also technically does not and never has had any freedom of speech enshrined in law and the government has always been able to squash print and media publications that post things deemed a danger to security.

Russia on the other hand holds a constitutional freedom of speech and the press… But will also send you to prison for publishing “LGBTQIA propaganda”

Americans treat this misplaced concept of freedom of speech as this full access pass as a universal good that is the only thing holding us all back from totalitarian regimes. In reality however speech has both never been totally free even in America as plenty of exceptions have always existed and having those protections is way more optional in other democratic nations then they would believe. It also does not protect from abuse on it’s own.

Remember that any and all tenants of free speech aren’t nessisarily a universal good. If there are measurable harms being done to people your nation is allowed to carve out an exception. It’s on you to critically evaluate the individual exception for potential issues but not specifically on the basis of a dogmatic adherence to an idea of free speech. Totally free speech itself could actually be harmful to a society and in fact has already proven to be hence libel/slander laws.

But all criminal law already has a concept of Mens rea (guilty mind) baked in. The reasonable proving of intentions is nessisary for the severity of the sentencing in almost all cases under review and has been at least as long as anyone here has been alive. It isn’t the sole factor of creating a criminal charge because - as you stated you also need to prove harms but saying people are not punished for intent and treating that as only the tool of strictly authoritarian government is factually untrue.

“Being Hot” is never someone’s entire personality. Most of the time it’s just the veneer used to keep people at a distance. There are advantages to not being hot - mainly you are not hassled by people for attention. Getting approached by people who want something from you all the time tends to make one put up walls. It’s easier to be kind when so little is generally expected of you because it’s not being demanded regularly.

Not everyone has the strength to be as nice and polite to the 50th person trying to score their number that week as they are to the first. We as a society spend way too much time dehumanizing people because of this shit. I am not conventionally attractive and I bless my lucky stars that I grew up never being denied affection by family or friends because I wasn’t good looking. I see people at my job talk about the pretty actor folk behind their backs and it sounds just as catty and insecure as the shit people said about me for being unattractive.