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The day I returned home from the championships, the blood report was leaked to the press, alongside the results of a second test conducted while I was in Berlin. There it was. The things I did not know about my body. I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspapers reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher than normal levels of testosterone. They went on to call me a hermaphrodite. In my culture, this term does not apply to people like me, but the world media forced that label on me and that is what I am called to this day.

It was as if some kind of bomb had exploded … and the fallout just kept getting bigger and bigger. I couldn’t escape it. My face and story was plastered across television screens and newspapers all over the world. It was as if the entirety of humanity had discovered some kind of alien that had been living amongst them. I remember thinking: “Now what? Am I going to run again? OK, so this explains why I haven’t gotten a period. All right. If these people are saying I don’t have a womb, then this means I will never be able to carry a child. I want a family.”

[…]

I kept thinking: “This thing can never be undone.” The girl I had been before I got on that plane to Berlin – happy, joking, innocent, eager, hopeful – she’d been disappeared on the way back. And in these early days of my exile, there was nothing to put in that empty space. Imagine you are told one day that because of some medical this or that, you are actually not a woman. Think about it. In the eyes of the entire world, you are now something other than what you know yourself to be. And the entire world will not stop talking about you. Ever. Until the day you die, you will be the punchline of a joke about genitals or gender or sex or whatever.

Caster Semenya found out she was being gender tested when she showed up for the test, she thought it was a doping test. She found out the results - that she’s intersex - on the news with everyone else. She was 18 years old.

Having moral conflict over your porn use (PPMI) does turn out to be bad for you. But that's not because of the porn. Instead, higher levels of moral conflict over porn use predict higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and diminished sexual well-being, as well as religious and spiritual struggles. In one study by Perry and Whitehead, pornography use predicted depression over a period of six years, but only in men who disapproved of porn use. Continuing to use porn when you believe that it is bad is harmful. Believing that you are addicted to porn and telling yourself that you're unable to control your porn use hurts your well-being. It's not the porn, but the unresolved, unexamined moral conflict.

When studying addictions, there are known relationships between certain stimuli and reactions in the brain. These reactions have, in some instances, become the benchmark for what constitutes an addiction and addiction-based behaviors.  There has been heated debate over the very existence of porn “addiction” and what that addiction would look like when studied. In the largest neuroscience study of porn addiction to date, research conducted at UCLA found a clear reversal of the brain’s typical addiction response in study participants when they were shown sexual images. With the use of brain wave monitoring, participants who reported major problems controlling their viewing of sex films showed decreased brain reactions when shown the sexual images, rather than heightened activity as having a “porn addiction” would suggest. The study shows that the brain does not react the way an addict’s brain would react to cues for their drug of choice. In fact, the study shows that the hypothetical “sex addict” brain reacts in the opposite way that a drug addict’s brain reacts, questioning whether sex addiction actually exists. “This finding is important, because it shows a reversal of a part of the brain response that has been consistently documented in other substance addictions and gambling disorder,” Prause said. She also noted that this was consistent with their previous study, in which participants served as their own control and no relationship existed between the severity of their sex film problems and their brain response. Many self-identified “hypersexual” people say they have an uncontrollable urge for sexual stimuli, and that it has resulted in negative life consequences such as loss of jobs or loss of relationships. For this reason, many clinicians have suggested that "sex addiction" be diagnosed much like drug addiction. “While we do not doubt that some people struggle with their sexual behaviors, these data show that the nature of the problem is unlikely to be addictive,” said Prause.

Steve Dain (1940 – 2007) was an FTM who transitioned in the late 70's and lost his teaching job, he was a gym teacher in Union City. Although the court would eventually decide in his favor, and allow him to go back to teaching, he was not able to find a school that would hire him.

It is not Cool and Radical to advocate for the dissolution of the entire public education system in favor of Everyone Doing Their Own Thing. what you're describing is libertarianism, and a system that directly and dramatically benefits fascist right-wingers and child abusers.

the community-centered child rearing yall love to talk about exists. it desperately needs to be improved, but the bones are here, and they're already doing a lot of legwork in the fight against aggressive nuclear family isolation.

Educating children is a community task, that's WHY public schools exist. and a lot of people that currently take their child out of schools and home educate them either do that for the wrong reasons (like those not wanting schools to teach them the wrong things like evolution is real and racism is bad) and a lot that fall into the trap of being hyper-individualist with their education.

The school system currently fucking sucks but there is proof that the solution isnt to get rid of the system itself.

kind of off topic, but the right way to home educate by the way is to basically do it as a community with several other parents and people who are experienced in certain teachable things. this is how i got my education, and if you noticed, this is also how public schools and the school system works.

The school system works, it just needs massive improvements.

yes I would love a return to the old ways.

no that isn't something staff have control over, it's a systemic issue with puritanical groups intentionally strangling online infrastructure to make adult content impossible to platform.

no that doesn't mean the ban was value neutral and I will fucking kill you with my mind if you start going on about how 'it just meant all the annoying people left'

sex workers left, and so did the high spending customers who made tumblr a viable platform for a lot of other small creators

a lot of sex educators and queer outreach groups also left, and nobody seems to remember that they were a huge part of the landscape here

you have to take the eradication of sexual content from online spaces seriously as an issue that affects more than whether you personally can post catgirl balls on one specific platform

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

"But you'll have more money!" does not completely put this to rest for me. Neither does "Buy care insurance!" Even if I can afford direct personal care, who is going to advocate for me to get it? Who is going to navigate bureaucracy for me when I'm 80?

"If you do have kids, there's no GUARANTEE that they'll take care of you when your old!" That's true, but doesn't solve my problem.