yell Heah...

i feel so seen!!

I'm asexual. I figured that out not long after I first came across the term in high school. But figuring out my gender took a lot longer. I didn't really think about my gender identity for years, it wasn't until I was in college that I started trying to figure out what my gender was. That process took years.

I didn't really feel attached to my assigned gender, but I also didn't feel the gender dysphoria that trans people described. I didn't particularly feel like I was neither of those either. For a long time, I honestly didn't feel like any of the gender descriptions and identities I was coming across really fit. I just didn't care that much about what my actual gender was. Eventually I decided upon the agender label as that seemed the most apt. As the paper says, it's really hard to be truly without gender in this highly gendered world. Agender is a way of defining myself in a way that people who experience gender might be able to understand when "I'm just me." isn't really an acceptable answer to the "what's your gender?" question.

I don't mind being perceived as a gender, none of them are offensive to me. While I do like when I am perceived as male or at least not female, I think that more has to do with growing up female and not wanting to be pushed into traditional female roles and values than a connection or repulsion to any gender. I'm impossible to misgender because I frankly don't care.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with my gender, is trying to define it to people. There's been a large push in recent years for asking people for their pronouns, or including pronouns in things like email signatures and surveys. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is a bad thing! This is very affirming for a lot of people. But it feels like I need to pick something that doesn't quite fit. At pride, for instance, there's always pronoun buttons. But they're all she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, it/it, xe/xir, etc etc. And that's great. I'm always glad that there are a lot of options for people. But there's never any pins for any/all pronouns. I've never picked up a free pronoun pin at pride, despite always looking, because they all feel like picking what pronouns I don't want poeple to use and the answer is that I don't care. I fround an any/all pronoun pin once at a queer museum and I cried.

I've recently discovered the term "gender apathetic", & from looking around the tumblr tag, I've noticed that sexuality wise most ppl fall into two categories: Those that are aspec (& often full on aroace, too - like the ppl in this survey) & the second category, ppl who are bi/pan (that would be me) - I guess that just as if theres no target, it also becomes less important to mark yourself a 'valid target' for any one group if the target can be anyone, or maybe it works the other way around.

I would never have described myself as trans or even nonbinary because I don't feel an urge to change my body & to me those words imply much stronger preferences, like ppl who will be upset & suffer if they're not referred to a certain way. (in that way not so diffrent from cis ppl, definitely experience some similar suffering; I mean look at all those grifters getting rich off convincing young boys they're not "man enough") - I wouldn't wanna, like, appropriate ppl's suffering.

On the other hand I've always liked terms like "person with [body part]" or "assigned X at birth" cause that's simply been my experience, like it's just an externally imposed sorting, just everyone gets arbitrarily sorted into bangmaid and canon fodder. Might as well sort ppl by the size of their kidneys.

I thought everyone else was also just kinda playing along & no one really identifies with it until one of my sisters informed me otherwise (I've always been a loner by choice/ very unsociable person, might've also played into it.)

I mean, there's ppl like trans women who are willing to experience awful shit & risk getting hatecrimed on the street because they want to be women so badly & it seems to make such a big QoL difference to them that they can't just have drank some koolaid. Especially since when they transistion there's an observable reduction in despair similar to leaving an abusive household or being allowed to have hobbies/ things that bring joy.

But if other ppl can't be making it up that's the point where I have to conclude my experience is just differnt.

It's just dawned on me recently that I can just opt out of the social construct if i want to, like I opted out of organized religion or like quitting some social club your parents signed you up for.

The laws in my country have been changed from the only option being to get papers from 2 separate therapists to get the whole man hardware, to where you can just fill out a form & be listed at whatever you want to be (including 'something else' or having the struck alltogether) 3 months later.

i'd half seriously thought of having it done because "what business is it of the governments anyway" in hindsight thats not a thought a lot of ppl think, theyd want the government to have them listed "correctly" if only for convenience.

Anyway, you can find "All pronouns" pins on etsy, which I know cause I got one a while ago.

I'm sure the nuances of the experience are somewhat different between ace & bi/pan gender apathetics for many obvious reasons, so, I hope this lands as adding extra info of a different variant, not taking spotlight from the ace side of it.

Both guys & some lesbians (though it varies alot, can have their own complex relationships with that) are gonna want a partner who identifies with femininity to some extent. I had this one ex say something like he maybe you don't have a fully female brain or something.

The default response might be to get angry at him for having stereotypic expectations of women or whatever, but in hindsight part of me kinda felt he wasnt wrong. if he wants/needs girl then im wrong for him. i mean there were many other reasons why we broke up and me being young & stupid was probably one of them.

source

A common story is that several people started throwing insults and/or rocks at the carriage they thought contained his French-born mistress Louise de Kérouaille, calling her the "Catholic whore" until Nell Gwyn leaned out the window and noted with a smile:"Good people, you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore."

But then the speakers of Gallo-Romanic dialects went even further and they got rid of the "k" sound entirely and started just saying the l and the vowel, which eventually got us to the Old French "leu".

Now the thing is, right, that in the old languages the spelling is very much a sort of consensus thing. It's not perfectly phonetic, because it can't be: all of the languages in question had phonemes that weren't exactly the same as the Latin that existed when and where the Latin alphabet was formalized, right? So as people wrote down the Old French vernacular, they basically took the letters they were taught and they used them to represent the sounds they were making.

This happens with all the languages; there's a really neat thing where if you look at Visigothic manuscripts, writing in the area that would become Spain and the vernacular form that would eventually be Spanish, you can see the difference between the sound of "v" and the sound of "b" disappearing, so that there are manuscripts where "Ave Maria" is written "Abe Maria", because to the people reading it, b and v made the same sound.

This is relevant to the question because of a fun little fact about mediaeval orthography! Which is that the characters that we now feel are absolutely separate, different letters - that is u and v - were both used for both sounds. It's not that "u" and "v" were the same letter exactly - they weren't - but that the character you used was the same and which you used depended more (properly) on where in the word the letter came, than which one it was.

So the word "hut" would indeed be written with "u", but the word "university" might well be written "vniuersity".

But it gets worse from here, because the sound of the letter we now call "v" and the letter we call "f" were also often used interchangeably. So it might actually be written "vnifersity".

If your eyes are crossing, remember that we still randomly stick "qu" in places to be "kw" and there's quite complicated rules about when the character "c" says a hard back of throat sound the same as the letter "k" and when it says a soft sibilant like "s" and also sometimes when it does something completely different.

Now as it happens the point of writing is to be able to take words from your head, put them on paper (or parchment, in this case), and then send them much farther away in both time and space to someone who absolutely cannot hear you say these words, and then put those thoughts in their head.

Which meant that you have this sort of weird liminal thing where "leu" could be spelled "lev", because u and v were interchangeable, and then also this thing where v and f were interchangeable, and both were being sent around to various places and read to others who may, or may not, do a lot of reading as opposed to a little, or may be reading in a different dialect than they speak (because remember, we're talking about mediaeval France, which means we're actually talking about a country with two major language divisions - Langue D'oc and Langue D'oïl - which then inside of them have a reasonable fuckload of languages that are mostly mutually intelligible most of the time), and so on, which means that the noise for u and the noise for f meet in the middle and may both be represented by "v" and while we're at it they may all just be pronouncing the word differently, and as you saw in the whole move from "locus" to "leu" in the first place, that can involve ending up in quite a different place through a totally logical means.

We don't know for absolute certain if this is why the word "leu", ported over to English with the Normans and added to our language, changed its pronunciation and spelling to "lief" or "liev". You will note that along the way both to Middle English and to Middle French, it grew an "i" in before the "e" sound, because words do that.

We do have some records of Old French that are spelled "leuf" or "lef"; we also got our Frenchishness from the Norman Conquest, which is to say the brand of French very specifically spoken by a bunch of Francicized Scandinavians who spoke a very specific one of those Langues D'oïl. So we do know that the idea that this word ended in the sound we might associate with the letter "f" had already took up in a bunch of different places.

The original idea of "lieutenant" is quite literally a "placeholder" - it was someone you left in your place. So if you were your overlord's "lieutenant" you were the person who gave other people orders in his place, the person he delegated to. Much like "captain", when these words were first used they did not designate a specific rank in a highly developed system with rigid relationships, but rather were the names for roles that people occupied in relationship to the enterprise/activity/whatever.

This is why in the books, the Witch King of Angmar is referred to frequently as Sauron's "lieutenant" - Tolkien knew this shit preeeeetty well and liked using words in those contexts.

So in French, they moved along the path of saying "lieu" as the word is said in French today, with no consonant at the end. Their "lieutenant", their "placeholder", maintained that pronunciation. Americans then actively wanted to distance themselves from the British and were at the time buddy-buddy with the French, so they took that pronunciation on.

Meanwhile at some point Middle English - arising from Old English and Norman French - had shifted to the "liev", the one that had a fricative on the end, which was one of the pronunciations attested in the spelling shift to "leuf".

1. "Five second rule!" while scrubbed, after dropping a sterile scalpel on the floor (no they did NOT pick it up again but I swear everyone's buttholes puckered)

2. (spoken during the closing of a particularly long and difficult case) "Nurse - my tunes." :heavy metal starts blasting:

3. Gently to a fretful patient, pre-anaesthesia: "It's going to be okay. I promise, I've dealt with worse." As soon as the patient is unconscious: "This is literally the worst thing I've ever seen."

4. [okay this one was a med student] "Wowwww, that's so gross!!" Reg: "Please remember that [patient] is awake for this procedure." Student to patient: "Oh my god. I am so sorry, that was really unprofessional - " Patient, cheerfully, also engrossed with what's happening inside them on the screen: "Nah - it's, like, super gross, right?"

6. Elderly surgeon to the anaesthetist who is gossipping with their reg: "I need you to pretend you're in church." [weirdest way to ask people to be quiet, but whatevs]

Anaethetist's new reg with big, horrified eyes: "You mean we should start praying???"

7. Panicking rad tech: "Uhhhh my machine broke. I need to jump on this part and kick it, but I am not paid enough if I break it. Can you - "

Surgeon, casual as: "Yeah, sure."

:violently beats up the C-arm until it starts pumping out those sweet, sweet x-rays:

8. ODP to theatre assistant: "Saw the new tasche earlier. Suits you."

Theatre assistant: "Thanks! it grew on me :)"

9. Surgeon using the electrocauter, leaning over the incision and inhaling deeply: mmmmm, that smell always gets me hungry. I'm having barbeque tonight.

Spinal surgeon: hey, that scoli's getting bad. want me to fix it for ya?

Me: I mean. There's a pretty long wait list

Spinal surgeon: yeah but I could do it tonight

Me: that would be very illegal, Jeff

you know, this delightful little guy? an image from 2017?

not only is it on the static cling page, it's also on the pages for static electricity, triboelectric effect, electric field, eletrostatics and electrostatic induction (and you can also find it on this user page captioned "my fav photo", which i thought was delightful, and way down on this user's page)!

it's full description on wikimedia also reads: "Styrofoam peanuts clinging to a cat's fur due to static electricity. The triboelectric effect causes an electrostatic charge to build up on the fur due to the cat's motions. The electric field of the charge causes polarization of the molecules of the styrofoam due to electrostatic induction, resulting in a slight attraction of the light plastic pieces to the charged fur. This effect is also the cause of static cling in clothes."

except, i left out the last bit. the last bit reads: "Image cropped losslessly from File:Cat and styrofoam – electrostatic charge (235112299).jpg using cropgtk"

now, this means this isn't the full image.... so what is the full image? it's this!

now, what i find really endearing about this photo, is that, while this file was uploaded to wikimedia in 2015 (as opposed to the cropped version being done in 2017), the original picture is actually from february 2006! you can see this in the summary!

the picture itself actually originates from flickr, and it has a DELIGHTFUL little description:

here’s the link and the story, it’s Amazing

In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.