The Erisian Liberation Front of SW and Rural Missouri, on the other hand, fully supports naming diseases and pestilences after the Goddess, Unstable May She Reign, and objects only to the application of the moniker to such a benign viral variant. In the future, we and/or I would request that her name be applied only to particularly virulent and/or unpredictable diseases and pestilences. May her sudden wrath never find you.

Right? Shit politicians too. Ron DeSantis got me rootin’ for fucking Disney. I hate Disney in general, but I wish they’d play more serious Illuminati hardball with DeSantis.

I’m stoned as all fuck and read “ninja soldiers” several times >_> I was trying to figure out the joke. I’m going to hell.

The real question is the hell did people downvote me?

You shut someone down without informing or educating them on a text based discussion centric community with an academic stick up its ass. A one word response to a complex technical question is terrible etiquette in this sort of social environment.

If you leave mainstream, radio country even just a little, it becomes apparent that progressive gays are taking over country and Americana. If there are people and places in your life that need country music, bring S.G. Goodman, Melissa Carper, Orville Peck, Iris Marlowe, and none of these people have what I would call a niche sound. (I don’t expect to convert anyone to the cult of Little Mazarn, but that’s maybe my favorite country act.) And some of them are blowing up! They’re making country music for me these days, and I fucking love it. It’s all I listen to lately. Folk, country, and Americana are for everyone.

Tbh, this doesn’t feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That’s all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.

Totally not me clicking your link entirely because I know there’s gonna be a hot guy behind it >_>

I’m gonna throw a common metaphor at you. See my previous post in here for a more thoughtful exposition on my gender experience.

Gender is kind of like shoes. If you have the right kind of shoe, well fitted, on the right feet, you don’t think about your shoes much at all. You know you have a certain type or brand of shoes on, but it’s not an essential element of your daily life. You’re not constantly aware of them. This parallels the common cisgender notion that the self isn’t gendered, that “there is a just a human in your head.” If your shoes are too small, on the wrong feet, or made wrong for your feet, it’s a whole problem all fucking day. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting. It’s distracting and persistent. Over time, it becomes painful, and you use increasing amounts of focus and energy dealing with your footwear incompatibility. This is what being gender incongruent is like. You spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to deal with a profound discomfort and incompatibility that nobody else understands or acknowledges because their shoes are fine.

Okay, this description was really funny, but gender is more complex and inherent and can’t be totally reduced to the social aspects. I say that getting my hormones corrected “fixed me” because, after years of antidepressants and anxiolytics and therapies, turning off testosterone is what finally alleviated a constant, lifelong feeling of something being inherently, unquenchably wrong. This was a feeling I’d had all my life. Treating it psychologically never touched that feeling. Even as my depression and anxiety and truama responses improved, that feeling remained. Even social transition just made it easier to cope with. HRT turned it off. If you or anyone else reading this is familiar with the Dark Tower books, I’ve long made comparisons to Jake’s split timeline. You know implicitly that you should be having a different emergent experience of life, of body, of puberty, but time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses. You’re stuck living in two timelines, and every step towards transition brings them closer to harmony, and at least for me, HRT totally collapsed them into a single life. This is the human experience that has the cultural mapor code of pink vs armies laid over it.

I lived someplace with an old sticker inside a cabinet door with a bunch of basic, useful conversions. It was neat.