help

As someone with lifelong sleeping issues, pink is the only "must have" for me. I've daydreamed so much about not having to plan my days around sleep that may or may not work. Plus, that's an extra 50% waking time every day to do things! Some commenters said that it would get boring or challenging if you spend time with people who don't have this pink power. I think the cuddling challenge aspect is fair, but people cuddle then sleep in separate beds and manage, so I don't think that's a showstopper.

Purple is intriguing because it nullifies to need to travel by plane ever, and it gives you access to anywhere in the world with an airport. I could visit my family whenever, AND leave on a dime when the misgendering starts up. Two questions that remain: what teleports with you? Can I carry a bag? Do I teleport without anything that isn't pierced through my body? If I arrive nude, that would suck. International travel could get dicey as well, because it almost certainly bypasses or at least majorly disrupts immigration procedures. Maybe check with an embassy before teleporting and register your travel.

Orange is cool, extra cool if language includes those which are not spoken, such as programming languages, body language, whatever language cats are using, etc. If it does, hell yeah. If not, it's a hell of a combo with purple.

Green is funny, but having cats be assholes is also funny when they aren't your cat, so I'll pass. Stay sassy!

Blue is interesting, but I'd be concerned that I'd record something and want to forget it, or regret not recording something. It goes hand in hand with my reservations with the copperminds in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series about memory decay while remembering. I think the pressure of choice might hurt me with this one.

Gray has the similar drawback of choice. Also, I need the reminder to eat a variety of things to be healthy. I'll pass, but I can see the appeal for some people!

Red is super interesting. Does this mean that I no longer sweat as well, because sweating (outside stress sweating) wouldn't be necessary? Damn, that would be nice.

Maroon/dark red (I can't tell on this screen) is useful if you live in a swampy area. I suspect that people who can't see the appeal never lived along the Gulf of Mexico, among other places. It's a solvable issue with sprays and clothing, though, and given that I don't really want to live in areas with mosquitoes for unrelated reasons, others would be better for me.

White is funny. Would wearing shoes and hitting a president with them count?

Can I talk to the fairies? Would that be a bad idea? If I took orange, could they teach me their ways? If I took pink, could we help my friends with severe ADHD with their chores when they need to rest (with their consent, of course)? So many questions.

Lime - intriguing. Feels a bit close to mind reading, which gives me pause. But, w.r.t. autism, I'm fairly neurotypical so the relative benefit to me is probably lower, if the notes are any indicator. What if we as a society established a culture of communicating our emotions more explicitly?

Black - nope, but I'm transfem whose biggest source of disphoria is far and away facial hair. I know a number of transmasc people who would probably love it, though!

So, all in all, definitely pink, then purple, then orange. Purple and orange would be a hell of a combo, and I wouldn't need to continue my struggle to find good language learning resources for Gaelic. Maybe with my bonus time from pink, I could make language resources for others!

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Happy Moth Monday, everyone!

And now at our table my mom explained this because it was my first time going, and she wanted to make sure to warn me it was liquor because she knows I don't drink- she just said "if he offers to shoot at your mouth, say no because it's alcohol".

And so the chef does his thing and it's all very impressive, but the time does come where he pulls out this squeeze bottle of booze and asks me if I wanna try

I of course say no, because I really don't do alcohol, so he moves on to someone else

And I watch, and slowly come to understand that this is some sort of game, because once someone is drinking from the continuous flow the chef starts counting "ONE! TWO! THREE!"

I realize that we're trying to see who can keep drinking the liquor from three feet away without choking or spilling, and its a bummer cause i kinda wanna try and I CAN'T

But he goes around the table with everyone there, and I think my mom makes it to three, one friend makes it to five, I think my brother got to three as well, and he comes back to me

And I'm REALLY bummed out now but I will not drink alcohol, so I sort of sadly repeat that I can't when he pulls out a SECOND BOTTLE and grins and goes "juice?"

And Im like FUCK YEAH LET'S GO and I'm a bit worried he's gonna spray it into my eye or something but he doesn't, it hits me right at the back of the throat, and I start drinking while the whole fucking table counts "ONE! TWO! THREE!"

And like

It just sorta

Kept going?

And Im looking at the chef and he starts freaking out by the time we get to six, and at around seven I kinda start looking around and my auntie is staring back in shock, my brother is laughing his ass off and my mom has her face in her hands

And then at like nine or ten it gets like. Super tense and quiet, and only the chef is still counting

And I guess it got too much for even him cause we're at eleven and I don't believe in quitting early and it is almost painful how awkward it's getting

So he cuts me off at twelve and raises his hands in the air and everyone else cheers and claps like a dumb movie

and I just sit back in my seat to look back at my mother staring at me surrounded by everyone she knows, bright fucking red in the face and choking with honest to god tears in her eyes and she puts her face back in her palms and starts chanting "I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't want to know"

So I give her the biggest, proudest grin and tell her, "I won."

So now every time something suggestive happens in a movie, or in conversation, or something shocking happens around us and she goes to jokingly cover my ears, I just ask her, "Remember when I won?" And she goes face-down and groans, because I know EXACTLY how she thinks I trained to develop that particular skill and she HATES knowing that about me

The truth is though, I'm a whole ass 28 year old virgin. I've never so much as kissed anyone in my life. I had no idea I could do that trick until that exact moment

knit a scarf so long it can wrap around the world and squeeze the magma out of the earth like juice from an orange

turn a driving nightmare lucid, intentionally crash the car, and piss on the flaming wreckage

reach through the mirror and cup the jaw of my reflection so I can see what it feels like

disassemble the leasing office of my landlord brick by brick and keep throwing them until they replace my fucking faucet

get my parents to stop misgendering and deadnaming me

outrun a train going full tilt

This is a fantastic explanation for why the term faces skepticism and I appreciate it because it's finally made the argument against it click for me

The remaining issue is, I don't have a different word to use when I specifically reference "transphobia that is distinctly directed towards trans men in ways that combine transphobia bioessentialism and mysoginy, that is similar to but also slightly different from that which is directed towards trans women" that still acknowleges that trans men are not women

IE, "You're not a man, you just hate facing oppression as a woman", "You're not trans, you just have internalized mysoginy", "You don't have to be a man to accomplish your goals, You're just pretending to be one so you don't have to face female gender discrimination", "Transitioning to male means you're eager to oppress women", "Now that you're a man you don't have to deal with mysoginy or gender-based violence", etc

"hermeneutical injustice" is a type of epistemic injustice, the other type being "testimonial injustice." these terms were coined by Miranda Fricker in 1999 to describe a framework by which particular marginalized groups or people are barred from expressing, describing, or sharing their understanding of their own lived experience.

to briefly explain the two subtypes, testimonial injustice refers to someone's descriptions of their own experience to be distrusted, erased, or silenced based on the belief that they are not a reliable narrator or are otherwise being disingenuous somehow. Trans men often experience this too, but my main focus here is hermeneutical injustice, which is an imposed limitation on someone's ability to interpret their own experiences - limitations on which types of inferences are considered valid or acceptable, or what vocabulary and concepts are allowed to be used in discussions.

Think of the aim of the fictional constructed form of English known as "Newspeak" in George Orwell's 1984 - in the book, the intent of the language's architects was to limit the types of ideas that could be entertained in conversations and even thoughts, removing ideas like "bad" and replacing them with ideas like "un-good." The goal there was that anyone dissatisfied with the Ingsoc regime would be forced into discussing it in terms of mere shortcomings (ways it wasn't good) and not the active evils that it perpetrated (ways it was bad).

So by limiting trans men and mascs' ability to create terms for ourselves, this is what is being done - we are not able to name and specify the forms of oppression that affect us specifically unless we have the language to do so; without terms like "transandrophobia" (or transmisandry, or antitransmasculinity, or any of the other more niche terms that have been coined in an attempt to avoid this hermeneutical injustice) we must refer to "transphobia that is different than what transfems face" or constructions that are similarly awkward and circumscribed. Notably, these constructions force us to compare our struggles to transfems or cis women - much like "un-good" forces one to think in terms of a certain ideal of perfection while "bad" allows us to directly name problems, depriving us of our words for direct oppression against trans men do not allow us to discuss our own experiences without reference to the experiences of others.

"Men's rights activists" dont need to exist because we alreadu live in a patriarchy- men already have rights, they just exist as pushback against feminism.

Just like how "white power" movements don't need to exist because white people are already getting preferential treatment- they exist as pushback against civil rights movements.

But when I, as a transmasc, need to say, "I am continuously being reduced to a mysoginistic caricature of female victimhood in a way that denies my identity as a man", that does NOT exist as pushpack against transfemmes

In this case, having a word to describe an experience is NOT an "all lives matter" reactionary movement- a counter-protest to a valid protest designed to undermine the movement- it's just. Developing vocabulary to speak on a different problem

like. Why do you say "seafood allergy" when we ALREADY say "peanut allergy"? If it's not an allergy to peanuts, you should just say "allergy".

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Chapter II- One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue

~ Horst Rauchfuss,  Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life

Obligatory ping at @degenerate-mystery-inc-whore for her appearance in this comic. The DS2 story is one of her favorites.

Honorable mention to Skyrim as well. I installed a Mod in my PC version that let me access a cave with custom items. One of them was a ring that changed your main character's sex. I would make a new file, head immediately to the cave, and then get the ring and wear it for the remainder of the game.

This led to a fascinating experience wherein I found a letter that an NPC was carrying that referred to me with female pronouns. I re-read that note a few dozen times. It made me feel something.

Like:

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.