dandelion

fucked up question, I know - but ultimately it's a question about suffering and experience of personhood - did "you" really experience the torture for an hour if you don't remember it later?

What about the hour where you were awake and present, before the memory is wiped? How much does that suffering matter? Does the fact that after the torture you won't remember override the suffering you will experience in the present during the torture, relative to suffering you will remember the rest of your life?

I love this space and I keep wanting to share photos of outfits I have put together, but I don't know how to do that in a way that protects my privacy ... It seems like a lot of effort to use software to edit the photos to make them safe to share, for example.

I was wanting to check with the community and see how women solve this problem generally, and maybe brainstorm a list of ideas of ways to safely share selfies / photos, here were some ideas I had:

• take photos with neutral backgrounds that don't disclose private information (e.g. location)
• use something like an emoji to cover up face
• find a way to share the photo in a password protected way (with what service?), and only distribute the password to users you trust (unclear on the logistics here)
• share the photo with an expiration feature, e.g. allowing only a certain number of times to view it (Signal has a feature like this) or that expires after some amount of time

Was wondering how you all find online spaces for women where it's safe to share outfits.

I know on Reddit, some of the subreddits for finding a good bra make every post a spoiler, making it harder for prurient men to easily browse and preview photos, etc.

Someone at work that used to be my direct manager had a meeting with me to introduce themselves. They didn't recognize me at all and I didn't want to out myself by disclosing who I was, so I went along with it.

I don't like lying, and when they asked about my work history I was honest even though it created immediate suspicion (how could we have not worked together given when I started working and my job experience?), and I just shrugged. It's obviously a kind of deception to not out myself, and I don't like that - but my instincts say it's better in this context to not out myself.

Probably relevant to the context is that the boss is male, older, conservative, and an immigrant from a non-Western culture that is not open minded about these things.

I am pretty sure based on things they have said in the past that they wouldn't be tolerant of a trans person.

Anyway, to my trans elders: how have you handled situations like this?

I've been thinking about getting a manicure and getting something sorta pearly and opalescent, it's light and I guess reminds me of the ocean.

Anyway - what nail styles do you all do for summer, what are the 2025 trends?

Hi there, I was trying to link an article written by Julia Serano in 2011:

https://juliaserano/.blog[no space]spot[dot]com/2011/09/transsexual-versus-transgender.html

(sorry, it replaces it here with removed as well, imagine there is no space and make the dot into . in your mind I guess)

When I click Save, it replaces blog[no space]spot[dot]com with *removed*:

https://juliaserano.*removed*/2011/09/transsexual-versus-transgender.html

Any idea what's going on?

EDIT: when I tried to submit the title of this post as blog[no space]spot[dot]com becomes *removed* I couldn't submit and I got a warning message saying "slurs" - I'm not familiar with blog spot dot com being a slur ...

I lived a lot of my life as a boy and man (gross), so relationships I had with women were visibly heterosexual in that period.

Nonetheless, because I was so effeminate as a man, I was commonly seen as gay and I often felt like I was not "straight-passing" even though my relationship was viewed as straight, even when I insisted I was straight, etc.

After transitioning, it feels like for the first time my effeminate nature aligned with my perceived female gender, and people no longer perceived me as gay - it's like I became "straight" for the first time in my life.

Simultaneously, my relationship went from straight to gay. When I was visibly trans and not cis-passing, the relationship was obviously "queer" or "gay" to other people, which made my partner very happy (she loves being visibly queer, which is not something I enjoy as much).

Once I started to pass as a cis woman, suddenly our relationship became perceived as platonic - people started asking if we need one or two checks at a restaurant where before they assumed we were together. Even when we are affectionate with one another it seems like people don't assume we are in a romantic relationship. It's like the relationship has become invisible.

I know from communities like /r/reallesbians that we often struggle to be visible to one another (esp. it seems for people to know who is a candidate to date), and people talk about what signals lesbians commonly use to identify to others that they are gay or bi, etc. - so I suspect others might feel the way I do too, it's like society doesn't consider my relationship "valid" anymore.

When I clarify that we are partners, it feels like we are given a second-class designation as a relationship, as though it were a relationship between young people or children. Whereas when we were perceived as straight I felt like we were treated like we were really together, that the relationship was serious.

Been thinking about this, so I thought I'd put it out there. Part of the problem is that I live in a homophobic and conservative place, so I know that doesn't help - does anyone have experiences moving to more liberal places where they felt suddenly like their queer relationship was taken more seriously?

Even when I was visibly trans, I think a lot of people still took our "queer"-visible relationship seriously because they coded it as still a kind of "heterosexual" relationship (between a male and a female). I feel like the cis-passing woman with woman relationship is considered less valid, taken less seriously by comparison.

Yesterday I was in a car accident. I'm really OK (some mild brain injury and bruising), the car is not.

I had gone running, so I was wearing a t-shirt and leggings with an athletic skirt to cover my bits, I had no makeup on and was perhaps the least feminine I could be.

What surprised me was that the EMTs, firemen, and police all saw and interacted with me me as a woman, and not in that "being polite" way that some trans affirming liberals can be, I just think they had no idea I was trans. My gender survived even having to talk to the emergency responders, answering questions, etc.

In some sense none of this is new, people on the phone have correctly gendered me as a woman for maybe six months, but it doesn't stop my brain worms from making me hear a boy. Likewise with countless interactions in public now where people seem to see a woman. Still, all I see in a mirror is a boy most days.

In the ER, the nurses and office workers all assumed I was a woman. I was asked twice by the doctors if there was any possibility I could be currently pregnant.

All I'm saying is that yesterday was one of the most gender affirming days in my life. I don't think if they suspected I was trans they would treat me the way I was treated, I just managed to seamlessly navigate the world in ways that I never thought was going to be possible. It's not real to me, but I'm definitely just going to keep replaying those interactions over and over again. Maybe it will sink in.

Less than a year ago, the equivalent experience would have been very difficult, I was very much not passing and I looked like a man dressed as a woman to most people. I assumed it was just going to be like that the rest of my life, and that's still what it's like in my head.

I felt pretty emotional about it yesterday, about the culmination of so many hours put into voice training, struggling without a sense of hope about the future and arriving here anyway. I feel like I owe the trans community my whole life.

Autogynophilia (AGP) is a debunked pseudo-science concept that trans women are motivated to transition primarily as a sexual fetish, and Mike White confirmed on a podcast with the anti-trans conservative Andrew Sullivan that the Sam Rockwell monologue in s03e05 is autogynophilic.

Here is a clip from the podcast on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1joh7dd/creator_of_white_lotus_mike_white_appears_on/

For more about autogynophilia, see Julia Serano's article on the topic.

(see also Julia Serano's post on the White Lotus episode before Mike White went on to confirm he meant to reference AGP)

This comes after Mike White removed a scene mentioning a non-binary character from the show after Trump won the election:

“You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” Coon said. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”

“It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world,” Coon added.

According to the actor, Trump’s re-election made series creator Mike White hesitate about including that character detail in the final cut.

“The season was written before the election. And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation,” Coon continued.

Coon also said that White handles his characters with nuance: “They’re not just one thing.”

In another article it was clarified the scene was cut due to a political "vibe shift":

“The Trump thing becomes much more offensive to Laurie because of her daughter, but this was before Trump was reelected and before this war on the trans community was escalated,” Coon said, despite the fact that Republicans have been filing anti-trans legislation at the state level for the entirety of the 2020s. The actor added, “Mike felt that it was actually too political, or too far, or too distracting.”

White responded, saying that that conversation “felt right in March of last year.”

“Now, there’s a vibe shift. I don’t think that it was radical, but that’s not the kind of attention I want,” he said. “The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about. And a lot of it was about time. Every episode is bulging at 60 minutes.”

I also got the sense from this season that conservative Christianity was given a more serious place, a kind of reverence, alongside Buddhism (which is a departure from the previous two seasons). There is the relevance of the Christian choir to the husband character, but there is also a Trump supporting conservative character:

In the far-ranging conversation, the cast discussed the reveal in episode three that Leslie Bibb’s character, Kate Bohr, is a Republican. “I do think people like Meghan McCain and her community are really gratified to see a conservative person on television,” Coon said.

The characters are bad, yes, but it's a thin line between satire and representation. In conjunction with going on a conservative podcast and using anti-trans terminology, there is a sense that Mike White is at best naive and negligent, and at worst bigoted.

Regardless of Mike White's character, meanwhile the anti-trans movement is claiming White Lotus for themselves and using the show to help push AGP into the public consciousness, are attempting to use the moment to promote their junk science ideas that trans women are just fetishists.

I was having breakfast at a restaurant, and seated at the table nearest to me were two older ladies, one of whom was loud enough that I could hear what she was saying.

She was saying "females" need to do more to reach out and grab opportunity like they used to (I assume she was referring to second-wave style women's lib, breaking into the workplace, etc.? very confusing tbh). This was after some comments about female athletes that I caught the end of, she was saying how crazy the world is now and I think she was saying now that trans women are being included in women spaces.

I'm sitting to her left, and more than anything else I just wanted to ask her if she thought I was a woman. Instead I sat and listened to her talk at her friend about how much a victim Zelenskyy is because he didn't get enough support from Biden (!?), and that the U.S. military has fallen behind other countries and we're losing arms races (!!??), how she prays to God about it all, etc.

I think there's something wrong with me if my reaction to publicly aired transphobic comments is the desire for validation from the transphobe.

First of all, she's clueless and didn't clock me so I should have some sense of whether she perceives me as a woman, and second of all, her opinion is worthless precisely because she didn't clock me.

I tell myself what I want to know is what I'm doing wrong, so I can finesse my passing or at least be aware of my limitations & weaknesses and mitigate them. I've realized most cis people (and maybe especially older, conservative, or transphobic people) notice minor gender differences less and are more likely to overlook those differences.

But maybe this is less rational and more psychological, maybe it's just more satisfying to pass in front of a transphobe, maybe it's more emotionally validating if the person who thinks the world is crazy for letting men into women's restrooms sees that "man" is a woman.

Sorry, this story feels self-absorbed. I think this is like a confessional or something.

Some possible discussion topics:

• tips or observations on how to overcome these insecurities?
• any stories of interactions with transphobes of your own you want to share?
• thoughts on Biden's absolutely tragic failure as a president to provide sufficient aid to Zelenskyy in his moment of need?

EDIT: oh, and I remember her talking confidently about how the pilot who crashed the helicopter was a DEI hire

hi, I suspect if I did some searching I could find my answer (so apologies up front for being lazy and not doing enough research up-front 🙊) but I have noticed every time I type : and then start typing the name of an emoji, for example :sob: (i.e. 😭), there is a list of emojis that start to match what I'm typing:

The emojis rarely match the auto-complete I'm expecting (which is based on doing this in other contexts like Slack with standard unicode emojis), and often there are custom emojis in addition to the standard ones that if I accidentally tab and hit enter to accept, results in an embedded image.

Incidentally, my fingers somewhat automatically start to type emojis like :sob: and this auto-complete feature is essentially "broken" for me by the large number of custom image emojis (notice the emoji I'm looking to autocomplete when I type :sob isn't showing up in the top part of the list).

Admittedly this breaks my flow, but I'm not complaining as much as wondering what this custom image emoji feature is, whether it's a Lemmy thing or an instance specific thing, and how much other people use it (do other users like these custom emojis, and their easy / automatic finger flow is accustomed to these options)?

The custom emojis are cute, tho 😄

content warning, I'm going to be glib and talk about misogyny and transphobia in a joking manner - I don't mean to harm anyone, and I don't want to upset anyone.

OK hear me out: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, at least the actual radfems who are often middle-aged and still stuck in second-wave feminism, should love gender-affirming care ... doesn't it do exactly what they would love to do to men? Like, a lot of these women are cultural feminists, they essentialise men and women and view women as superior and men as inherently violent, oppressive, and bad. At least that's been my experience.

So, for example, if a man wants to suppress testosterone and take estrogen, shouldn't TERFs' fear about violence from men and the (admittedly simplistic) narrative that testosterone is responsible for that violence and aggression motivate them to embrace enabling as many men as possible to suppress their testosterone and chemically castrate themselves with estrogen?

Even if they don't believe that makes the man a woman, shouldn't they believe it's an improvement?

It just sounds like a revenge fever-dream concocted by second-wave lesbian separatist: a woman goes about secretly injecting abusive men with estrogen to calm them down ... it just sounds like a revenge fantasy they would be into.

The plot of The Gate to Women's Country literally centers around this fantasy of castrating men to make "good" men.

And if that's not compelling, I know they love the stories about chopping off dicks - come on, if they really believe trans women are a bunch of men, shouldn't they support access to gender-affirming care like vaginoplasties that do exactly that?

TERFs should support gender-affirming care even if they don't believe trans women are women. If men are the enemy they should be the biggest fans of chemically castrating and cutting the dicks off men.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.