I will never reveal the Wu-Tang secret

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

christian dior by john galliano, look 2, evening dress of golden armor with embroidered gold “chain mail”, haute couture autumn/winter 2006

The problem is that everyone has to work 8 hours, pretty much no exceptions, and with getting ready time + (unpaid) lunch + commute, “8 hours” is actually anywhere between 9 and 12, every single day, with more work to do when you get home because our society and culture was built around having one member of the household home full time and nothing has changed now that almost everyone works.

The trans community has a specific type of transphobia towards nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth, and that is forcing womanhood onto them posed as purification or salvation.

The reverse, forcing nonbinary people assigned female into the man role, also exists, but it's frequently done with open hatred (e.g. "those they/thems are actually men trying to sneak into women's spaces") and therefore it has been called out by several people I interact with.

The former, not so much.

Many tend to see misgendering of someone amab towards womanhood as fundamentally benevolent or unserious. Real people develop new kinds of dysphoria and quit trans spaces because of that, including some of my acquaintances, but it's all seen as accidental collateral damage for the noble goal of making more women discover themselves.

"But what if you're denying a closeted self hating trans woman a chance to be called a woman" is seen as a more valid argument than the distress being actively done to people of other genders, and it's fucking bonkers.

I refuse to keep centering non-abinary* perspectives in this conversation.

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

Feet