Laurentide
@Laurentide@pawb.social
[She/They] A quiet, nerdy arctic fox who never knows what to put in the Bio section.
- Comment on Anon is straight 4 weeks ago:
Just as some AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth) men want to look more masculine and will work out at the gym or take testosterone supplements, some AMAB men are femboys and may temporarily take feminizing HRT to look less masculine.
Both are trying to change their bodies to better fit their gender identity, and femboy is clearly a different identity from gym bro, but they are both male gender identities.
- Comment on Anon is straight 4 weeks ago:
The same reason anyone would be: because their current body doesn’t match their gender identity and they want to change that. This person just happened to start inside the same arbitrary social category as their destination.
- Comment on The mod who bypass' the PSN login for God of War Ragnarök got removed on Nexus Mods 5 weeks ago:
I made .iso files and mounted them in virtual drives to do the same thing. I could have used cracks but I didn’t want a virus and I still had the delusion that doing things “fairly” actually meant anything.
- Comment on X goes offline in Brazil after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws 2 months ago:
They’re not talking about natural monopolies. A natural monopoly is when there’s some barrier to entry that prevents competitors from entering the market, like a need for prohibitively expensive infrastructure.
What OP is talking about are situations like Walmart opening a store in a new location, operating it at or near a loss to drive the local competition out of business, and then jacking up prices once no competitors remain. The government isn’t forcing them to do that.
- Comment on Simples. 2 months ago:
How big does a minority need to be before it’s “relevant” enough to be acknowledged and its members’ rights respected? People with 4 or 6 fingers exist. People whose chromosomes don’t match their physiology exist. People whose gender identity doesn’t match their genitals exist. It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, because every single one of us is a unique minority of one.
But you asked for numbers, so I’ll give you some numbers.
According to this article, around 1.7% of people are intersex, meaning they have physiology that doesn’t fit neatly into the common conceptions of male or female. That’s close to the number of people with red hair, which is estimated to be 2% of the world population. I have never heard anyone suggest that redheads are too small a percentage to matter.
I think you were asking specifically about chromosomes, though. There’s a table in the linked article that breaks down intersex conditions by cause. The first entry is “Non-XX or non-XY (except Turner’s or Klinefelter’s)”. This refers to people with XY chromosomes whose bodies developed female characteristics (Swyer syndrome) and people with XX chromosomes whose bodies developed male characteristics (de la Chapelle syndrome). It does not include people with X, XXY, or XO chromosomes. (Those are the next two entries in the table.)
The estimated frequency for this condition is 0.0639 per 100 live births, equivalent to 0.0639% of population. That looks like a really low number, right? Surely not enough to be “relevant”! Except… There are 8.1 billion people on this planet. 0.0639% of 8.1 billion is 5,175,900 people, which is roughly the current population of New Zealand.
Remember, that is only women with XY chromosomes and men with XX chromosomes. If we include all intersex people that number rises to 140 million, which is nearly the population of Russia.
- Comment on Anon gets an ultimatum 3 months ago:
I support UBI. I just have issues with the claim that jobs in a capitalist system exist for a purpose other than generating profit for owners. I also resent the implication that some workers don’t deserve a living wage. Without UBI, all jobs should pay at least enough to cover living expenses. If a full-time job (or job that expects full-time availability) doesn’t pay enough to live on then it’s not a job that needs doing.
- Comment on Anon gets an ultimatum 3 months ago:
None of this changes the fact that a job’s purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn’t care how many teenagers need to learn that “working retail sucks”. That’s not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.
If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That’s something that can be discussed. But don’t lie to us that Walmart is this program.
“[job type] is intended for teenagers” is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald’s open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?
- Comment on Anon gets an ultimatum 3 months ago:
My mental health improved considerably after I was fired from my basic retail job and was no longer spending 8 hours a day having panic attacks and dissociating. It’s not good, but it’s a lot better than it was and I can’t go back to living like that. Even a year later I still sometimes wake up in a panic from nightmares about working in that place.
I want to work and be productive, but every job I could reasonably qualify for has a sanity cost and I’m all tapped out.
- Comment on How to know you'll turn out trans? 3 months ago:
Yes, I meant no negative or unintended consequences.
- Comment on How to know you'll turn out trans? 3 months ago:
Thank you. It doesn’t feel like I’ve done much journeying, as I was essentially trapped in emotional stasis for most of my life and circumstances have so far prevented me from doing anything with my newfound knowledge, but at least I know which way is forward now.
- Comment on How to know you'll turn out trans? 3 months ago:
If you feel like a man, like being a man, and enjoy having man parts, you’re probably a man. Your interests are not your gender, and dancing isn’t exclusive to women. Even ballet has male dancers.
Still, a little bit of exploration never hurt anybody. If you are trans, if living as another gender would make you much happier, wouldn’t you want to know sooner rather than later? And if you aren’t trans, you might still learn a thing or two about yourself that you never would have discovered otherwise. Most people go their whole lives without ever questioning their gender or closely examining what it means to them, and I think they’re missing out. There is power in truly knowing yourself.
Do some thinking. Ask more questions. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. What do you like about being a man? Can you imagine not being one? How does that image make you feel? If you could instantly become anything, with no rules or consequences, what would you pick? Don’t shut anything down; there are no wrong answers. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.
It may help you to stop thinking in the binary terms that society imposes on us. Gender isn’t just a question of Male or Female; there are many different kinds of men and many different kinds of women. There is a large area in between where the two overlap and the lines get fuzzy, and even places that aren’t on the same spectrum at all. I myself am a demigirl. My gender identity is mostly female, but also a little bit male and a little bit something else. You don’t need to feel obligated to be what anyone else is.
As for how I found out, I’ve already posted that elsewhere in this thread. It looks like you’ve gotten a lot of answers from others as well. I wish you good luck in wherever this journey takes you.
- Comment on How to know you'll turn out trans? 3 months ago:
This was my experience. I was raised in a very conservative, very religious community where I was never exposed to the concept of transness. I was fully convinced that I was a boy and could never be anything but a boy. And yet, I could tell I was different from the other boys.
As I got older, that feeling turned into an ever-present sensation of wrongness. My body felt tainted, somehow. Unclean. Contaminated. It possessed an inherent grossness that could never be washed away. I lived with that feeling every day for 25 years. No medication, no counseling, no hard work ever did anything to alleviate it or the severe depression that was my typical mental state. Then a bunch of things happened all at once, and I started questioning my gender. A few days later I shaved off my beard and rediscovered what joy feels like. That’s when I knew.
I was never a boy.
- Comment on Money, please! 4 months ago:
This is the Price Master.
- Comment on As a leftist when I saw this post in twitter I had to be rushed to the hospital. My blood pressure read 2567 over 1547 5 months ago:
I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:
I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.
It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.
Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.
Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.