EmilyIsTrans

Why is astroturf "woke"?

Where I live rent is usually described in fortnightly periods, despite being paid weekly. I'm pretty sure most of the rest of the west uses monthly, so I don't think it's particularly confusing to describe rent that way (at the very least, I wasn't confused?).

I contribute and run some open source projects. Some projects receive sponsorships and contributions, some are backed by companies, a lot are just someone doing it on their own time, very few can actually meaningfully support the people working on them. Personally, I receive no money for mine.

After a certain point, learning to code (in the context of application development) becomes less about the lines of code themselves and more about structure and design. In my experience, LLMs can spit out well formatted and reasonably functional short code snippets, with the caveate that it sometimes misunderstands you or if you're writing ui code, makes very strange decisions (since it has no special/visual reasoning).

Anyone a year or two of practice can write mostly clean code like an LLM. But most codebases are longer than 100 lines long, and your job is to structure that program and introduce patterns to make it maintainable. LLMs can't do that, and only you can (and you can't skip learning to code to just get on to architecture and patterns)

Thank you, I try my best 😅

It was a female-sex only Australian social networking platform that used AI face analysis and then personal review by the founder to determine if you were a woman.

If Sall Grover, the founder, doesn't have anyone making fun of her, I'm dead

I'm going to take this in good faith and assume you truly are open to being educated here, but I will caution you that this is right on the line of something I would remove (transphobes often use questioning similar to this to troll and harass the trans community).

Grover's insistence on referring to Tickle as a man reflects an (intentionally) limited and outdated understanding of gender, as well as a clearly spiteful attempt to hurt and disrespect Tickle.

Lets first address the biological aspect. Firstly, "biological sex" (itself a fairly outdated term) is more complicated than simple chromosomes. Yes, most people with XY chromosomes are assigned-male-at-birth and have the corollary primary and secondary sex characteristics to match, but that doesn't make it universal. For instance, individuals with Swyer Syndrome are born with XY chromosomes but develop female characteristics, including uteri, and can even give birth with IVF.

Furthermore, the medical community has long generally drawn a distinction between sex (your biological characteristics) and gender (a complex psychological and social identity). This awareness has been present in Western medical thought since the 1950s, following research by J Money and others. Gender identity represents more than biological characteristics and is about how people perceive themselves and live their lives. Grover's ideas also loosely play into the notion of biological essentialism, an outdated idea that a self proclaimed feminist such as herself should be rejecting (Simone de Beauvoir was writing about this in 1949!).

It can be pretty difficult for a cis (not trans) person to understand what it feels like to have a misaligned sex and gender, since yours are largely indistinguishable, so let me give you my personal experience (with the disclaimer that it is not universal, everyone is different). For me, it was a largely unplaced discomfort with my body and hatred of my "masculine" features. I was maxing out about every depression metric, even as a toddler. When I eventually connected the dots and began medically transitioning (taking testosterone blockers and estrogen) this discomfort eased significantly. My body and (occasionally) how society understood me finally matched how I understood myself. It felt like I had been suffocated my entire life and was finally able to breath.

From a practical standpoint, you are almost always using pronouns and titles based on your perception of a person's gender identity and presentation - it is not reasonable to perform a DNA test on everyone you meet. On a deeper level though, when interacting with others, using pronouns and titles that align with their gender identity is not just a matter of politeness but a recognition of their humanity and autonomy. Misgendering someone invalidates a person's identity and can contribute to their distress and alienation. To do this intentionally is fundamentally disrespectful, rejects decades of medical progress, and ignores the personal experiences of the target.

I'm pretty happy, aside from my voice. I'm three years in at this point and the HRT has done it's magic. I can tell I at least sometimes can pass visually because men online have started condescending to me and being kinda creepy sometimes. I wanna lose more weight so I can fit into more clothes etc, but am otherwise pretty happy with my appearance (at least on a good day, I still get intense dysphoria sometimes).

My voice sucks. I'm not exactly outgoing and talkative, so getting the practice in to improve my voice has been hard. I'm pretty sick of the weird looks I get when I give my name in my still-masculine voice. Ditto to the staring oldies and the eshays intentionally "sir"-ing me. On the upside my social transition has gone well, my family and friends are pretty accepting, something I'm certainly not taking for granted!

I finally got off anti-depressants only to find out that I've still got some depression apparently. Reminded me of this comic (credit Haus of Decline):

Either way, guess I'm going back on a low dose of anti-depressants. At least my voice training is going ok!

Same in Australia. Doesn't stop the pious "holier than thou" shits from illegally filling my letterbox with crap advertising their church

I wouldn't say I no longer experience dysphoria when looking in the mirror, on the contrary just a few weeks ago I experienced the worst episode I've had since transitioning (and I'm approaching three years). I would more say that, on many days, I'll catch my reflection and my brain will read it as "woman" (even pretty!). Other days, especially depending on how I'm feeling about myself generally, I'll fixate on what I perceive as the masculine aspect of my face (or mostly my body TBH). It's not perfect, but I'll take the wins when I can get them.

Like I said, I had that happen for the first time around about where you are. But it's really only in the last year or so that it is consistent. I honestly would be quite surprised if you didn't have something similar happen eventually. You'll catch your reflection off guard sometime and your brain will register the gender before it realises its you and distorts it with dysphoria.

Bofa deez nuts