I mean…Antlers are shed naturally every year so I guess if someone decided to sacrifice some rando on a bed of my family’s collective families nail clippings I would be pretty perturbed too.

This highlights a contradiction between Christianity and the modern secular world. Biblically speaking children are chattel property of their parents. In modern law children have their own universal set of human rights, so essentially by that model children belong to themselves and rightful guardianship goes to a succession of people if parents and family do not follow those rules.

But you see constant tension with this idea of child being property to do with as one pleases. It’s also the history of why we use the term “disowned”.

Having grown up under a model of parental stewardship where my parents always saw me as a person they were to train to become an autonomous adult I gotta say the difference between my family and my biblically raised neighbours is pretty stark. That kind of stability has had knock on effects throughout my entire life where I have become a life raft of sorts for friends of mine who grew up with religious trauma.

Dunno what to tell yeh mate, it’s about as oldif not older than Furry culture. Weeki Watchee springs started a whole thing with their Mermaid shows and the subculture basically took off from like the early 60’s… And was probably about as horny as a lot of other subcultures that started around the same time.

Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

Wow… The Incellionare speaks.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.

It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.

To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.

That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.

But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?

Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.

They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.

I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.

After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.

We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.

So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.

Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.

It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .

So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”

Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.

It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.

Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.

Or

“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.

But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.

Buy hards?

Huh… I had no idea my partner of 15 years was quietly slinging above the pornstar mean. This is what you get when you are an ace trans masc guy who never dated around and doesn’t watch porn…

Sitting on this embarrassment of riches all this time and never knew! (pun absolutely intended).

I think I am just thankful for the giant feature length works of art that descend once a year crafted with the forethought and precision of one who refuses to compromise on the lengthy process of research.

Yeah I got a older co worker who behaves in a way that strikes me as very undiagnosed autistic of his generation. He went on a whole rant about how the Olympics should be like a family reunion where you have to mask your less socially acceptable behaviours and cannot just be yourself because you shouldn’t always be yourself around your family for the sake of overall unity…

And yeah… I was just thinking how sad that was. Like bro. We’ve since realized how toxic that is to people and our generation is trying to undo that expectation and damage. The neurotypical flattening of self expression always was a tyranny, you just normalized it.

Political correctness was fired in the early 2000’s. It was dissected as something called “cold politeness” that wasn’t really doing anything but making corporations and beaurcratic systems feel better about doing something to fix problems by slapping a new coat of paint over the mold. They subtly hired “Hey maybe just stop being a dick to people” into the role but nobody noticed it was a totally different guy.

Now when people talk about what PC would say “Don’t be a Dick” struggles with feelings of never being acknowledged for the actual work they’re doing. Forget what that ass PC did and try getting to know “Don’t be a Dick” on their own terms will ya? They are not so bad and probably very supportive of your opinion on sexy rabbits. They attend some furry conventions I’m sure.

This strikes me as a common misconception. A cat’s affections are more difficult to earn than a dog’s and they regularly have only a few people they legitimately attach to. Cats must be approached on their own terms, to connect with one you must adapt your behaviours to it. Dogs however have pack instinct and adapt to what norms humans set. They want affection as one of their primary needs and they will compromise their own behaviours to learn and assimilate. Dogs basically are much harder to fail attaching to.

It doesn’t surprise me that most groups whose needs are not often centered in society that favors the comfort of cis, straight men and require understanding on their own terms to flourish because they often comprise on their own needs to assimilate to get by… Enjoy the company of critters whom must be approached on their own terms to flourish and refuse to compromise because they have no need.

You only really understand cats once you become part of one’s true inner circle. They become incredibly attached, loyal and work to understand you back. Like if your cat keeps bothering you at your computer and messing with your keyboard one solve is to give them their own keyboard because what they really want is to mirror your behaviour and do what you are doing even if they don’t quite get the appeal.

I like both but it took me awhile to understand the appeal of cats because when they are around outsiders they avoid PDAs with their owners and some owner and cat combos just never unlock that affection at all.

There are many examples of House Elves in the books who treat essentially the single one who was freed and happy about it as an abnormality. Look at how Dobby is reacted to by every other house elf. Hermione’s advocacy that they have autonomy is ultimately treated as being something only an extreme minority of their population would want and her continued efforts treated as comedy.

Effectively house elves are narrativly speaking a subservient slave species whom treating poorly is narrativly punished… but emancipation is not desired by the whole and they feel fulfilled as long as their masters treat them well. The profiting from their labor is framed as mutually beneficial.

I don’t know if Hermione is strictly a self insert any more than her other characters are, we just sort of assume that because she’s the girl. Oftentimes we see Rowling pop up in the framing devices and not the characters themselves. We are always drawn to some conclusion the plot wants us to. Often what Hermione does is a lampshading technique. She brings up the issues around moral issues but we are lead to see her concerns and advocacy as invalid as the plot makes them inconvenient or proven to be incorrect. It’s the actions speak louder senario. What the characters individually say is not wholly important because from an authorial standpoint some of them are intended to be misguided and Hermione is framed as good-hearted but ultimately misguided.

Hermione’s sense of moral objection is treated more often as a flaw, an annoyance to her peers and unneeded or even counter to the needs of by the people she is advocating for. She is more closely aligned to a caracature of how JKR veiws advocates of minority rights then a reflection of her own advocacy. That every other character tends to just ignore Hermione isn’t veiwed as a tragic instance. It’s played for comedy.