using gender neutral language doesn't pretend that women don't exist. gender neutral language is gender neutral, and should be used because menstruation and anything related to it is gender neutral. using "women + people who menstruate" still puts a focus on menstruation being a "woman thing", which it is not.

to say that menstruation only affects the female sex regardless of gender is also incorrect as some intersex people have a menstrual cycle. and not all cis women have periods either, so "people who menstruate" is the most inclusive term for all.

Yeah, sure, serial killers deserve human rights too, but isn't there a more obvious demographic you're sliding right by? Isn't there a demographic of people so thoroughly erased by human rights discourse that their rights aren't even debated, it's just taken for granted that human rights don't apply to these people?

I take a poll: "how many of you would agree that 'everyone deserves the right to privacy' is a pretty uncontroversial statement?"

when 95% of them have put their hands up, I say "now, what if I clarify that 'everyone' includes children?"

Pedophiles, rapists, serial killers, the most evil people you can imagine are, in fact, still people.

All of them, if we're humoring the idea that your government has your best interests at heart and can be relied upon to do the right thing. Which, lol. Lmao, even.

But also, this has nothing to do with *forgiveness*. I don't have to "forgive" a person for that person to be *a person.* I don't think that only good people are people. I don't think that your humanity is dependent on your innocence or moral purity, and I think it's actually really dangerous to literally dehumanize people, especially as a way to justify state violence against them.

You must have a lot of faith in the inherent goodness of all governments.

But we're going to have to disagree on that.

Here's something to consider- the atrocities of the American prison system (functional slave labor and all that) aside for the moment - did you know that in the mid 2010s, a tribunal found that the Chinese government was illicitly executing and harvesting organs from prisoners, to then sell those organs to foreigners for transplants. The vast majority of these prisoners being religious minorities, and the conviction rate in China (so the % of people accused of a crime that are found guilty) is more than 99%- suggesting that the opportunities for people to demonstrate their innocence is.....limited.

A major new survey from The Trevor Project released on Wednesday (6 May) has found that transgender and nonbinary young people who wanted hormone therapy but were unable to access it were nearly twice as likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year compared to those currently receiving hormones.

According to the report – which included over 10,000 responses from trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people – 15% of trans youth denied access to hormones reported a suicide attempt, compared to 8% of those able to receive care.

"hey....are you a therian?" "yeah!" "what kind of animal?" "eh, some kinda dog" "😲😀 im like a wolf coyote hybrid" "that's fuckin awesome"

tags from @k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl

So, you know, it's not JUST a "quality of life" improvement. It's also a *quantity of life* improvement.

how about this: when i was 9 and my stepdad beat me until i passed out and i told my friends at school, my teacher over heard and i was interviewed by cps. they also went to my house when i was at school. when i got home, my step father was waiting on the couch, and told me who visited him that day. he told me if i ever snitched again he would beat me to within an inch of my life.

how about this: my mother locked me out of the house when i was 14 and when i cried so loud the neighbors called the cops, the cop told me i should have been respectful of my mother who was trying to sleep.

how about this. the demon you know is less scary than the demon you don’t.

children in abused households are raised to fear the idea of being taken away. children in abusive households see that help makes things worse.

Then only privilege going on here is being so privileged you believe your taste buds are more important than another individual’s life.

It presumes there is morality in the consumption of living matter. But only in matter they consider relatable to their experience and not in the consumption of living matter that they -don't- find relatable to their experience. Plants SCREAM when they are cut on ultrasonic frequencies. Plants release chemicals to warn the ants that live inside them of the danger when they are harmed. Plants communicate through connected root systems and fungal messengers. But because vegans can't hear it, it's morally okay to eat a plant, but not a chicken, because the vegan can empathize with a chicken but not a plant. Much less the microscopic organisms that live on the plant.

The destruction of environments and populations to sustain monocultures. Yes. Beans like soy and lentils are able to sustain vegans. And in order to sustain a vegan population we need MASSIVE QUANTITIES of them in vast monocultures of plantations which result in communities being priced out of local staples because shipping it to America yields more profit. Add in the potential for global supply collapse due to the spread of hypereffective fungus or other crop-destroying disease...

The people who literally cannot survive on a Vegan diet. Whether due to genetics or later acquired traits, there are folks all over the world who are unable to sustain themselves on a vegan diet. People with Crohn's, for example, often have to avoid foods with high insoluble fiber content and the best possible proteins they can consume are fish or chicken in order to avoid malnutrition.

When someone tells me they're a Vegetarian I go "Oh, okay." and in my mind I know this person doesn't eat meat. Maybe because of dietary restrictions, religious tenets, moral identity, or simple preference.

When someone tells me they're a Vegan I go "Oh, okay." and in my mind I know this person considers themself to be morally superior to me because for them it is an explicit moral position and I exist in a state they consider immoral.

Veganism, by its very structure, is designed around in-group out-group boundary generation with the Morally Superior Vegan in group and the Morally Inferior Meat-Eater out group.

And they hold themselves in that state due to their own ignorance. Because plants do not communicate to us their pain in a way they can personally hear and understand it is okay to eat -that- living thing, but not one that can moo or quack or oink. Because the vegan can hear the moo, the quack, the oink.

Trying to build morality around the consumption of nutrients is, at best, a fool's game based on assumptions and nothing more. And I hate it, deeply.

1: I get that, and considering the life of living things is something I always try to do. It can be worthwhile to consider the ways in which we harm all living beings, not just animals. In fact, Buddhist thought has a lot to say about this, and is a tradition with a long veg history - far longer than any in an english speaking country. However, contemplation on the suffering of the bugs we step on aside, we have to eat. Ultimately, if your concern is for the wellbeing of plants and animals, the answer is harm reduction: how do you consume where the least beings are harmed?

If you look into how plants and animals are used for consumption, reducing animal products is by and large more efficient. We grow mountains of corn and soy, mostly to feed animals. This is a waste of both plant life and human life. If most people were to go vegan, than a lot of the land currently being torn up for both animal agriculture and the monocultures that feed them could be rewilded, benefiting the ecosystem in huge, tangible ways.

Veganism isn't simply a concern for just animals. It's trying to reduce the harm we do.

2: I mentioned this in the previous part, but most of the soy we grow is not for people. The US soybean board's report from the '24/'25 states that ~6 million metric tons of soybeans were used in human food total, most of that for soybean oil. Compare that to the amount used in animal feed: 35.8 million metric tons, about 96.5% of all soybeans used. This is not even accounting for eating the soybeans as their own food or in tofu, tempeh, ect. This falls under "other edible products", and only accounts for 0.4 million metric tons.

3: Yeah, some people can't go vegan. Some people could, but it would be exceptionally hard. This is true. However, most people are not in this camp. Most people can go vegan. They do not want to.

To start with, plants do indeed emit ultrasonic sounds when they are under stress, such as when they are dehydrated or physically damaged. These sounds resemble popping or clicking noises and occur at frequencies that are inaudible to humans, but not to many animals. These are sounds that are the result of a physical process, for example with dehydration, air bubbles form and collapse in the stems of the plant, creating vibrations that result in these ultrasonic noises. These noises are what we mean when we talk about plants "screaming."

Screams in plants are highly unlikely to be the expression of a subjective experience. This is simply a misunderstanding of what scientists mean when they talk about plants "screaming," and honestly, is more often than not the result of reading the clickbait headline but not the study itself... We can't know any of this for certain of course, just as I can't know for sure that you experience pain, but none of the available evidence even implies the existence of subjective experiences in any organism that does not have a central nervous system or a brain.

Compare that physiological response to a stressor, with a scream in an animal. A scream for an animal is a way to alert others of distress, it is indeed likely that plant "screams" function in the same way. They key difference is that in animals, a scream reflects a subjective experience, which is the state of being scared, shocked or in pain. The scream of an animal is not simply an automatic response to a physical process, it is the expression of a subjective experience. Suffering is the morally relevant factor, not relatability, and not empathy.

Plants are complex organisms, and can respond to their external environment in relatively sophisticated ways. Through our recent discovery of what we call "The Wood Wide Web," we understand better the extent to which they can communicate and even share resources with one another, However, we have no compelling evidence whatsoever that plants experience anything even resembling the pain we observe in animals.

I am not aware of any respected botanist who takes seriously the idea that plants feel pain, or a peer reviewed study which demonstrates or even suggests that they do. Plants not only lack a central nervous system or pain receptors, they don't even have nerve ganglia. More fundamentally, plants lack the brain that is necessary to process those signals into a pain sensation, even if those signals did exist. Plants lack all of the biological apparatus we believe is required to experience pain, or any subjective experience of sensation at all. That plants emit sounds and chemical signals is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether or not they are capable of subjective experience.

You can disagree with me on philosophical or spiritual grounds, and it is completely fine if you do. That said, it is dishonest to pretend that this conclusion is based on the current landscape of scientific knowledge, or that this is anything other than an unsubstantiated belief. Nothing we know about plants suggests that suffering, or subjective experience of any kind is possible for them, and there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on that.

The implication that the physiological response to stressors is somehow morally comparable to animals who we know suffer at our hands, is not just inaccurate, it is morally repugnant. I use that term seriously. I find it genuinely revolting to be asked to take seriously the comparison between the suffering of a pig in a factory farm and the chemical response of a sunflower getting their leaf cut. I think that this rhetoric is cynical in the extreme.

This is not an attempt to centre the experiences of plants or to encourage people to value them more. If it was, you’d be encouraging people to eat less meat, since farmed ruminants take in far more calories in crops than they will ever produce in meat, meaning that most meat eating diets require more plants to sustain than a vegan’s does, to say nothing of the vast swathes of formerly forested land now used for grazing. This is less about valuing plants and more about devaluing the pain of non-human animals and put it on the same level as an automatic physiological response in a non-sentient being.

Slitting a pig's throat and picking a strawberry are not morally comparable, and realistically, I think you already know that. I do not believe you are out there in the world behaving as if you believe that every plant you touch, stand on or eat is experiencing pain. I think that this is something you only talk or even think about when you’re arguing with a vegan. To imply that you think that electrocuting a chicken and picking weeds are morally comparable is engaging in mental gymnastics in a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue.

In short, the morally relevant issue is subjective experience, not simply "living matter," or the fact that plants are not "relatable." To pretend that this is why vegans eat plants but not animals, as if there were no other morally relevant difference, is either wildly ignorant of what vegans believe and what the current research actually says, or it is an intentional misrepresentation of both.

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

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.

...Then you fucking suck and your server's vibes are rancid. Like. Really? "Knife eared tree fuckers"? Just say r*dskin at this point you clearly want to lmfao.

Point- generally, we call them assless chaps when they are worn *without pants*- with just a codpiece or thong. It's more of a whole-outfit description.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.