Sarcastic Lemon Soda!

It's common sense here, except for USians, so I'll analyze it a bit more for the dominant demographic here. In a globalized setting, the most dominant culture affects the others and sets the trends. The way our language works, how we think, our levels of politeness and intimacy, and our levels of respect. (flash news, they are going down 😂)

I don't want to imply that there is nothing good in the US. There are plenty of positives in the country. It's just that for the rest of the cultures online it's a constant daily fight to not forget our roots, with the degree US media and brands have permeated our lives. In Greece at least we watch more US American media than Greek media nowadays, and many of our shows are rip-offs of USian ones, with little adaptation to Greek reality and culture.

And to demonstrate the amount of this exposure, a 22-year-old Greek asked me the other day "if something happens we call 911, right?" This might have literally cost them their life, in a dangerous situation! Because all the movies and songs they consumed (not an unusual thing for the Greek youth) were what they knew. And I found a similar comment in this comment thread.

It's about American media drowning out native language media all over the world, and workplaces requiring the English language in your repertoire more and more. It's about proper translations and foreign language dubbing of films disappearing because "everyone speaks/should speak English anyway." All of this is leading to the deterioration of native speaker groups of languages worldwide.

In my country, Dutch language courses can't find enough people who want to study the language, while English language courses are overflowing with people who want to study the language. There is even widespread distaste for the Dutch language for being crude or sounding rough or what have you. That's our native language!!! That is our culture in its purest form!!! That is knowledge we inherit from our parents as they did from theirs!!! That is how we learned fairytales and folk stories and myths!!! That is the language that shapes our communication and our way of thinking!!! To hate your native language is to hate yourself at the deepest level.

And yet it's so normalised. Droves of foreigners living in the Netherlands will never learn a word of Dutch, because "everyone speaks English anyway." We are the world's leaders in non-native understanding of English, but it comes at a cost. A grave cost we will continue to pay.

If you're looking to support your non-American friends in any way that is not performatively shouting "I hate being an American" into the void, first of all, unlearn that hatred of yourself and your culture. You are of no help self-flagellating, and there is a difference between holding your country accountable for its issues, and denying yourself your culture because your country is doing and has done bad things.

(I am not going to get into arguments about whether or not US American culture exists. It does, and if you think differently you are welcome to change your mind.)

Secondly, learn about other countries. Learn a bit of Chinese. Take an interest in the Italian political system. Ask your friends about their countries' folklore. Watch documentaries about art from Nigeria. Absorb information that is not fed to you by American media.

And thirdly, quit expecting your non-American friends to communicate in a way that appeals to you. The French and Dutch will always seem rude to you because our way of communicating is far more direct than the way you communicate. People from other cultures may seem vague to you because their way of communicating is far more indirect, and you're not used to that either. Quit being frustrated when you don't get what we mean exactly. Quit assuming we mean the absolute worst thing you could imagine just because you didn't get what we meant the first time. Ask us to explain if you need us to, and learn to accept that we are different from you.

What the Code actually does

The Code is the EHRC’s interpretation of the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. That ruling redefined “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean biological sex. The EHRC was always going to update the Code. The question was how. The answer arrived on 21 May, and the answer is: badly. The Code defines “woman” as “biological woman.” It defines “man” as “biological man.” For the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means sex at birth. End of. That definition then cascades. Single-sex spaces, the Code says, must be operated on the basis of biological sex. Trans people “should be offered” a third or gender-neutral space. Trans women can be excluded from women-only associations. Trans people are excluded from single-sex competitions for the gender they live in. If a women-only service chooses to admit trans women, it may legally cease to qualify as a single-sex service at all. That last bit goes unsaid in most of the coverage. Read it again. A women’s group that has been trans-inclusive for twenty years, run by women who voted democratically to be trans-inclusive, can now lose its legal protection as a single-sex service because of who its members chose to include. A small group of self-styled women’s rights campaigners can threaten a much larger women’s organisation with court action for being too welcoming. That is the policy. It is being sold as protection. It is, in practice, a way of bullying women out of running the kinds of services women have chosen to run. The Code does not stop at toilets and refuges. It limits access to healthcare. To housing. To social care. To gyms, pools, spas. And then, quietly, it rewrites what “lesbian” and “gay” mean in law. Paragraph 2.50 of the Code says, in plain text: “a trans man with a GRC is a woman and a trans woman with a GRC is a man, for the purposes of the Act.” Paragraph 2.92 then defines sexual orientation: “a person’s sexual orientation towards persons of the same sex (the person is a lesbian woman or a gay man).” And paragraph 2.96 closes the back door: “Gender reassignment is a separate protected characteristic and unrelated to sexual orientation.” Stitch those three together and the consequence is unavoidable. A trans woman in a relationship with a cis woman is legally, under this Code, a man in a relationship with a woman. Heterosexual. Not a lesbian couple. Not protected as one. I had to read that twice. It is in the document the government has just laid before Parliament. You can read it yourself on gov.uk.

Taken from: https://biminibabes.substack.com/p/write-the-letter-babes

I don't tend to write posts like this, but this is something that is going to harm me and so many others in the UK.

Please share this link around if you're not from the UK, and if you are - click on it. It'll give you the link to a petition and it will help you send a letter to your MP asking them to vote against this.

Source: Sparknotes

Let me see if this ship works.

A POLL, MY BLOG FOR A POLL!!!