Egregoros

@7666 @feld @georgia I am sympathetic to the argument that queer category people should be resistant to legal categories completely because they reify and limit and ultimately punish people outside those categories, which is kind of what queer movement is meant to get away from. but governments are fundamentally rule-making machines and all the rights any gay person has, isn't exclusively because of government, but wouldn't exist without top-down government. there's a real contradiction there and I don't know how to resolve it.

@feld @georgia it's really not unless you're pedantic and insisting on "2 standard deviations," and even then it's just barely "significant." usually the number i hear is something like 5% detransition.
A better satisfaction rate than basically any surgery (to be clear you don't have to have surgery to be trans)
I think this 'regret' thing people harp on almost exclusively comes from cis people who don't understand why someone else would want to transition or can't get past their own view because they think _they_ would personally regret it if they did it. It could also be bad faith concern trolling, not sure.
A few years ago before i started i was worried i might regret it but honestly i don't think i regret anything except not doing it sooner. It's been awesome.

Clarence Thomas is a cunt. He makes that clear when he says "Because “gender dysphoria” is a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment, it does not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny."
Not everyone who transitions even had dysphoria, by the way. Some simply would prefer to be someone else, even if they are basically 'fine' with how things were before, so they try to become someone else. Equating dysphoria with being trans is stupid and wrong. And the letter and the spirit of the law differ, clarence thomas knows it, but he would prefer to make things worse for people that are currently a punching bag of the right after they lost on gay marriage and had to pivot.

@sun @feld @georgia I am sort of done with the concept of democracy and "the people", but don't want this to be read as "this guy's gonna make tranny centric fascism!".

Like, no, I am done with it in its entirety because any system that can be so completely and utterly subjugated by idiots, malicious pillagers, or foreign stooges at any point in time doesn't deserve power, because one grant of power at one point of time becomes a weapon to be used against us at another point in time, so either it needs to be bulletproof against subjugating factors via the reduction of powers so that a misled populace cannot destroy itself (yeah right), or just dismantled and rebuilt entirely, and that rebuild will likely require some tough decisions about mitigating how we got here in the first place.

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach yeah i agree that "gender is a feeling" is reductive and counterproductive but i also think that the neuroscience of gender is kinda dubious , lowkey eugenics-coded , and reinforces the psychiatric-state-industrial complex so i do think that we ought to use something somewhat better . same thing for the "gay brain" . using these things is not conducive to a liberatory biopolitics . my foundational text for this is "American Eugenics" by Nancy Ordover , i highly highly recommend it

@anokasion @feld @georgia @scathach

sexual attraction comes about because of the genetics and environment (ie early hormonal exposure) of each individual, e.g. there's a statistically significant difference in the ratio of finger lengths and facial ratios between men attracted solely to women and men attracted to other men even before these sexual feelings develop

couple of studies i found on differences in body structure based on male sexuality:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12872893/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24132775/

@sun @feld @georgia
point was that "immutable" ought to be irrelevant to the discussion. of the things considered protected characteristics in the states, the majority change over time (religion, age, pregnancy, familial status, disability, veteran status). even "race" (socially derived categorisation dependent on zeitgeist) and "genetic information" (subject to chromosomal loss, other mutations, donor or other foreign cells proliferating, etc) are things that change with time. the only one on the list that doesn't is "national origin"