There are plenty of cis gay folks. “Straight” just doesn’t work if you’re trying to describe non-trans people.

The book has actually been out for a few years… this article was written in 2021. I’m not really sure why it was posted now.

sure, yeah, maybe you’ll end up about the same if trump gets in. However, as someone who would be made to massively suffer under a second Trump term, I’m sick and tired of seeing people not treat this election with the gravity that it merits. If you’re anything other than a cis white Christian male, Trump Part II is going to be a nightmare(and, to be fair though those cis white Christian males may not be aware of this, but they aren’t exactly going to have the best time of it either, especially if they’re not rich).

Yes, I agree, the Democratic party sucks and does little to actually help us. But, THERE ARE TWO, AND ONLY TWO OPTIONS UNDER OUR CURRENT SYSTEM. A Green Party vote accomplishes nothing, for they’re never going to be in enough numbers that anyone actually notices. Most people stuck voting in this stupid first-past-the-post system understand that a protest vote in a general election only serves to benefit the party further from your actual beliefs. Therefore, third parties are an utter and complete waste of time, and those voting for them were taken for fools. Not voting simply sends the message that you can be safely ignored. The time for protest votes and voting your conscience is the primaries.

Part of being an adult is having to make difficult and unsavory choices. I don’t like Harris much. I don’t like how the country is completely captured by corporate interests. However, Trump is so completely unacceptable in so many ways that not making the crappy choice to strategically vote against him is both monumentally stupid and, quite frankly, a slap in the face to every minority and every woman who stands to go through hell if that monster comes back. That’s the hand that we have been dealt. If too many people fuck around when fascism comes knocking, I’ll be one of the first to find out, though everyone will, eventually.

This is why I never really understand when people go “Just use Linux!!”. It isn’t a feasible option for everyone. For me, I work full time and I don’t have the energy to constantly fix things if they break. When I switched to Linux, I took great pains to ensure that my computer use case is one that could work in Linux, built a computer with parts known to be fine in Linux(including an AMD graphics card) and run Debian Stable on because I wanted something that wouldn’t be constantly updating. I’m in a comfy situation now, but I did a lot of planning beforehand that you can’t really expect people to do. Like, it’s great if we get more people using Linux, but that’s not a trivial ask.

Yeah, as soon as I saw the word “satellite”, I knew it was a nothingburger. If a submarine is on the surface, it isn’t trying to hide. If it’s submerged, it’s impossible for a satellite to detect it. You’d need sonar to pick it up.

oof. Yeah, they did the right thing pulling the plug on this for now. You’d probably spend more time waiting for a match to queue up than actually playing the game.

Wow, this is absolutely wild. From launch to delisting in two weeks. Yeah, there’s a good chance that this is temporary while they pivot to a free-to-play model, but holy crap. Guess the PS5 player count must not be substantially higher than the abysmal Steam player count.

Yeah, hopefully the inclusiveness trend continues.

Then we’d be going back to having the vast majority of games having a cis male protagonist. No thanks. I don’t mind playing as them from time to time, but I want a choice, especially if the main character is one of those blank slate types.

Yikes. Well, at least we have something easy to point to when we’re asked why we’re defederated from lemmy.world.

I agree completely. Our collective minds in the U.S. have been warped by decades(if not centuries) of propaganda by the rich and powerful. Things aren’t exactly going to change overnight. Change needs to come from the bottom up, and that’s not going to happen until we start working together to build a culture of compassion.

I’m doing a replay of Dragon Age Origins. Slogging my way through my least favorite part of the game(the Deep Roads) right now. I’m not that good at the game, so for the harder encounters, I’ve cheesed them by having one member of my party run forward to aggro one group, then run back to where the rest are in order to deal with them one group at a time. If I let my party fight normally, they accidentally aggro multiple groups and they get overwhelmed. That plus saving after every difficult encounter is helping me get through it.

My warden is an elven mage; she’s mostly built for casting ice magic and healing. I usually use Alistair as a tank, Zevran as a dual wielding damage dealer and Leliana as an archer/support unit.

Just so you know, you’re commenting in a Beehaw community, and we expect that people be(e) nice here. Being gatekeepy isn’t nice.

Super Mario Bros. 3 was the first game I ever played, waaaay back in the early 90s. That hooked me into gaming for life, and every few years, I do a no warp playthrough of the game that started it all for me.

Then, a few years later, I tried Super Mario 64 in a Toys R Us. It blew my mind and I absolutely had to have an N64.

I despise Nintendo’s business practices, but there’s no doubt they had a formative influence on my childhood.

I definitely do have to walk a tightrope here, and I am erring towards assuming good faith. A lot of the comments so far have done a great job of pushing back on this, so most of the official actions I have made so far have been to try to prevent tempers from flaring.

But, yeah, I will say that I also am uncomfortable with the implied reverence given with capitalized pronouns. I’ve held my tongue because I don’t want to get sucked into this, and other people have already made my point better than I would have. I don’t want anyone to feel as though I’m disregarding their feelings or ignoring your concerns. Moderation of Beehaw often takes a wait and see approach and actions are often only made after the mod team thoroughly comes to a consensus. But, yeah, the thread’s run its course and we’re locking it now.

I have issued a warning. We’ll see how things go.

Speaking of bans, if you are indeed DroneRights, then one of your other accounts has been banned on Beehaw. I’m not entirely sure of the ban evasion procedure here, so I won’t act on this. Someone else might, though.

You’ve been rather hostile in your comments so far. Knock it off. This is a beehaw community and we expect you to be(e) nice here. Sounds like you’d be best off just disengaging and blocking Grail, tbh.

Please keep in mind that OP is the author of this piece. I have seen in other threads people who have viscerally disliked Their writing and Their opinions, and I ask everyone to treat Them with respect, and to respect Their pronouns, even if you disagree with the concept of capitalized pronouns. Be(e) nice.

🫂

I think I disassociated heavily as well. I wanted nothing more than to be alone with my thoughts, because at least there I was treated as a woman. Daydreaming got me though a couple decades of the closet. It may not have been the healthiest way to cope, in retrospect. I ended up completely aimless in life, going where others pushed me because I had no real will to run my own life.

I had the bad luck of having the 2008 recession happen a couple years after I graduated high school. I hadn’t gotten my feet underneath me yet, and college wasn’t an option due to my mediocre grades(thanks a fucking lot, adhd), and the fact that my sister lost her full ride scholarship, so my parents had to pick up the bill. They had to straight up tell my brother and I that they wouldn’t be able to afford helping us go to college. I was jobless and living at home when the recession hit, and I could not find a job for the life of me. I applied to a McDonald’s and never even got an interview. I struggled for about a year before my dad abruptly told me “You’re joining the navy.” I didn’t argue. I didn’t fight it. I was terrified, because I knew I’d be a terrible fit for the military, but I accepted my fate.

However, because the military was so backlogged, I had to wait a year to report to boot camp after I enlisted. When you enlist in the military, you are made to report to a processing station. We were given a hotel room for the night and would be woken up a 4:30 AM. I have always been a nightowl, and I had almost never woken up that early. Still groggy, we took job aptitude exam(which I actually did very well on; I was appalled at the fact that there was so much stuff on there I learned in freaking elementary school). Most of the rest of the day was spent standing in line, doing various physical exams, and filling out mountains of paperwork. Finally, at the end of the day, my barely awake ass is dragged to a clerk that asked me what I was interested in doing. I told him that I’d like to be an interpreter. The clerk nods and tells me that requires another test, but before I can take it, I need to sign up for another job in the interim, in case I don’t pass. He asked me if I liked computers, to which I murmured agreement. “How about Submarine Electronics and Computer Field?” I was completely fucking fried at this point, so I go, “yeah, sure, whatever”. What this asshole didn’t tell me is that once you volunteer for submarines, you can’t get out of it. I had been bamboozled into an all male service, and there was nothing I could do.

Of course, I was livid. But I kept my mouth shut, and endured five years of military life on the submarine base. For five years, I was the only woman around. And submarines are hard, annoying work. Every fourth day I’d have to stay behind as everyone else left, and spend the night on the sub and stand watch. When I went on deployment, I spent 60 consecutive days underwater and was glad to see Bahrain, of all things. I think I may have gone crazy had I not had a year and a half spell on med hold. Somehow, I think that maybe people subconsciously knew something was up with me. Nobody questioned that I seemed to hate the boat more than anyone else, even the people who had more bullshit jobs. I never got the same kind of treatment as the guys, like they knew they needed to be a bit more gentler with me. I don’t know. I do know that I was generally well-liked, despite the fact that I wasn’t very good at this navy thing.

I did get into college once my enlistment ended, and I started to get more serious about finally transitioning once I got my feet underneath me. Then Trump happened, and all I could see were the chuds flirting with fascism. That scared me back into the closet. I would later drop out of college(thanks a fucking lot, adhd, again) and move back across the country to my parents’ house. It took a year or so to get my independence back. I get settled down in Seattle, annnnnnd covid. Honestly, the pandemic did a good job of helping convince me to go ahead and transition.

This essay really resonated with me. Like the author, I had figured out my transness at at fairly early age. I almost always had a messy mop of long curly hair throughout my girlhood; oftentimes I was largely indistinguishable from the other girls. It wasn’t until I was 12 or 13 that I really started having thoughts about how I wished I was born a girl. I saw all the girls starting puberty, and suddenly I was obviously, painfully, visually male. I wanted what they had. It was so intense that I would have fantasies about running away from home and cutting off my junk(in my defense, it was like the year 2000. I didn’t have the internet, and wouldn’t for years. I had to endure it in ignorance.) It was a few months afterward that I found a word for what I was feeling. Weirdly enough, it was my mom listening to the Howard Stern show while we were cleaning that made it come up. I heard the word “transsexual”(it was 2000 or 2001 at that point, after all) and I realized without a shadow of a doubt that that was what I was. What was left of my egg shattered into a thousand pieces.

Knowing my condition did me no good back then, though. Even if I were brave enough to speak up, how would I even broach the subject? All I knew was that trans people were a thing and I was one of them. I was afraid of my father, my mother wouldn’t understand, and I never seriously considered anyone at the school as a resource. Looking back, I have no idea why I never thought to hop on one of the school computers and look up some of this trans stuff on the Internet. I was helpless to do anything but watch and wait as the wrong puberty warped and disfigured my body. There’s little now I can do but try to mitigate the worst of it. HRT is a wonder drug, but it’s not perfect. I will carry reminders of my first puberty for the rest of my life.

What wouldn’t I have given to be able to go on puberty blockers at 13, rather than wait until I was 33 to start HRT and try to salvage what I could with my body? By the time I was independent enough to pursue transition, I had gotten too used to playing the role as a “man” to go through with it. “I’ll wait until my parents pass away, then I’ll do it,” I told myself. It wasn’t until 2021, post-Trump, that I allowed myself to lurk in trans spaces. I saw people who were living as their true selves. They seemed happy, an emotion that had become alien to me by that point. I think that was the final kick in the ass I needed to get over my fear and give transition a go. I’m not going to lie and say it’s gone perfectly for me, but being my true self is a lot less draining than constantly having to act.