What was here once is no longer

but at the same time I know (from my own experience) that their pain is real and they deserve compassion and understanding

That said, I see a lot of data quoted which seems to show that young people who transition generally remain glad that they did, that preteens who go on puberty blockers generally wind up deciding to transition, etc. (and ironically, it's generally from "the anti-trans side" that I see the latter brought up!). There is clearly an agenda in the way the former set of data is presented, and it really goes against my intuition about the whole societal situation, but I don't know.

I am not super plugged into this stuff any more, but I used to be (at least on the study participant side) and pretty much all these studies are designed in such a way that they will not detect detransitioners. The calls for participants always go out to heavily-queer/trans communities where you'll find few detransitioners, and are often directed specifically at people who currently identify as trans. So obviously, if you only ask people who currently identify as trans if they still identify as trans, you will get a result that tells you that nobody ever detransitions, or that people who detransition always retransition.

(I used to be a participant in some study that aimed to be a longitudinal study of trans and gay people over time, where people would answer an in-depth survey every year. There was no way for me to indicate on the survey that I had detransitioned and no longer consider myself queer. I do not know if these studies are designed this poorly on purpose or if it's just incompentence; regardless, it seems like any research on the topic is subject to an agenda, from one side or the other.)

I have also participated in a couple of studies specifically on detransition but they were more qualitative, eg "why do people detransition, and what are their experiences like," rather than trying to see how common it really is. But if there are new studies that I'm not aware of I'd be interested to read them.

[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]

OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?

Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.

Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.

What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.

Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.

You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.

When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.

Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.

It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!

I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.

Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.

And sometimes I load the washer, including the detergent, and then open the lid. The laundry automatically stops itself, and I just let it sit overnight. This is great for stains (I have a 5 year old) and for clothes longevity.

It's also fragrance free (so great for many allergies), CHEAP, and Eco-friendly.

What Isotta and Albertini came up with was a gun design that is actually bent sheet metal. Like, everything on this can be made with essentially a press brake. So you're literally just folding pieces of steel instead of complex stamping dies and then instead of welding even, this is held together by rivets which are, again, a simpler process to actually manufacture.

Ignoring the whole "Tobias is trans" idea and its likelihood from the text on the grounds that the thread isn't claiming this time that it's textual but rather imagining a hypothetical alternate universe where Tobias is a trans girl, it looks like evidently Rachel isn't straight after all, which supposedly should have been clear the whole time since Tobias lives by default as a bird, thus her attraction to Tobias has nothing to do with his physical form (as if she never knew him, or periodically still hung out with him, when his form was that of a human boy); let us leave aside this argument's implication that Rachel just doesn't experience sexual preferences for anything physical which is contradicted blatantly in the books. And evidently Rachel, one of whose defining characteristics is being superficially extremely conventionally feminine to the point of being obsessed with the art of "how to be a girl in superficial presentation" in late '90's teenage girl culture, would be totally happy to dress partly in men's clothes.

I used to only observe this in the webcomic Questionable Content, where it seems the cartoonist wants to make almost every single character, no matter how straight they initially appeared, turn out to be bi or queer in some other way, but it's clear to me now that this feeds into a much larger subculture, and I have to lean towards Tumblr user northshorewave's explanation that this comes from a "folk religion" of no universe being interesting or worth investing in and nobody being worthwhile unless a queer identity is involved.

Asking a yes/ no question that narrows the pool from 11 options to 1 gained you 3.459 bits of information. Which means if the answer had been no you would have narrowed the pool from 11 options to 10 and gained 0.138 bits of information.

The expected information gain from the question is the probability weighted average of the yes/ no responses, which works out to 0.439 bits.

You could have asked a question with an expected information gain of 0.994 bits by asking something that would split remaining options into 5 vs 6.