The horrors persist, but so do we

A Real Yakuza cares for their Pokémon

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Something I notice is, when men discuss the manosphere, they either centre the reason boys fall down that pipeline on some inner weakness or defectiveness of the boy, ie. "they're just autistic weirdos who want rules for women because they can't get their dick wet," or they centre the reason on women, "feminism had made women too woke, mean and impossible to socialise with."

What I noticed while working is that every single little Tate goblin I had to work with had conservative parents, and I have never once seen that aspect of all this discussed. Boys will reflect the social norms they are raised in within their household. The biggest preventative for manosphere bullshit I saw in the boys I worked with was a dad who isn't a fuckwit and a household that isn't LARPing the 1960s.

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.

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.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Hey, this was almost my exact experience in my early 20's!

I LIKED being "mistaken" for a boy, but I didn't mind being referred to as a girl, even if I really didn't feel like I was a REAL one. So I settled on 'genderfluid' and honestly I still kinda feel like this nebulous nonbinary space in-between it all

But then I figured. Well, hell, I'm not just gonna wake up and BE old one day. But if I really, really cannot imagine myself being an old woman, then all I can do is get to work on being an old man.

I don't think I have anything AGAINST being an old woman. I think I'd be a pretty cool old woman. I've MET cool old women. But I'd be a happier old man, and it's not really my job to represent Old Women Of Planet Earth anyways, so why not be what will make me happy?

And if we were to define that by the concept of being "for" or "against" anyone anyways, you'd also have to ask yourself, "well. Do I WANT to be an old woman, or do I just have something against old trans men?"

Which is a decent question to ask yourself as a self-examination technique but a bit silly to do with every choice you make about your own identity all the time forever

I had a sandwich for breakfast. Do I have anything AGAINST eggs? No. I just wanted a sandwich