DrivebyHaiku

Counterpoint to your counterpoint- no form of birth control has a zero percent failure rate under perfect use conditions and not all women respond to all forms of birth control well meaning pregnancy capable people cannot take perfect control of their family planning choices without the extreme surgical intervention of a hysterectomy as even getting medically sterilized in other ways can potentially undo itself. Doubling up from both sides means a much lower chance of failure rate resulting in life changing or difficult consequences and distress on behalf of the partner who faces higher risk outcomes.

Doing your part in a relationship's reproductive planning is good partner behavior. This shouldn't be a game where just one person is on the hook and the other is just along for the ride. Male and Female birth control do not exist as a one or the other dichotomy. Stoking division of the sexes over which one is more nessisary is counter to the real point. These are tools couples can use together to be safer.

Hey, non-binary person in one of the most trans places on the planet. I have in the past 8 years of Pride events and non-binary meetups met only about three people who ever attempted to use a neo-pronoun and only one memorable person who wanted to be called "puppy". They were like 16 and by the time they were 20 they'd cringe at their past behaviour.

Some people are weird. Particularly when they are on the internet. They are usually young and most of them would make it through maybe an irl day being called "dragon rider" before the effort it takes to keep that up would wear them down.

I think there is more to the word choice of Conservative rhetoric that is more insidious than I think we give creedence. It underlies a misconception spread through the right wing that trans people veiw their situation as primarily metaphysical. Like we have an essence or soul that is at odds with our physical bodies. When they talk about "gender ideology" they aren't talking about theory - they are talking religion. They took the slogans used to reduce a fairly complex situation into an understandable entry point for people who do not experience anything like transness and elaborate that into the entirety of the stance.

"Trans women are women... " and "X living in an X body" are examples of this at work. They take this as it's most literal interpretation. "trans women are" becomes That trans people believe that they are physically indistinguishable from their cis counterparts - they render this as a delusion rather than the reality - that trans people are reacting to their physically observae original sexual phenotype and are utilizing social engineering to not be reminded of their physical bodies all the damn time.

The warped lens creates a concept of transness that most people would find completely wackadoo because it isn't based on anything solid. The average cis person does not experience an innate internal gender preference. For example a cis man of this type does not specifically ride or die on riding around in the body of a man. He might care about being perceived as attractive or fulfilling his cultural role as one thereby smoothing his way through society and social expectation but if he were asked how he would feel if he woke up in the body of woman there's not a reaction of horror or loss. Perhaps there's a reaction of novelty and curiousity but not that this is a change of self. There is a flexibility present there which trans people and a minorty of cis people lack. Appealing to the typical cis man's internal sense of "maness" isn't going to work. That's applying an incompatible trans person's framework to a cis person's experience and the two do not resemble each other closely enough.

Since this vast majority do not ascribe value to the sexual dymorphic aspects of their bodies and have zero reference point of any internalized preference misrepresenting a very reliable innate reaction to perceivable stimuli as a delusion or a religion has been an incredibly useful tactic and when someone uses the term "gender ideology" it is worthwhile stopping them and asking what they actually mean and combat this misconception directly.

In the case of JKR that talking point kind of sailed on. Nobody really cares if you enjoy something second hand or where the money and interest played out years ago. The books, the old movies, the merch you picked up at a garage sale...

Problem is when you support the latest and greatest newly licenced thing that lines her pockets with cash because she is USING that cash to do direct damage to the community. She's been financially backing anti-trans groups and lobbying in the UK. Just ONE of her little go fund mes was chipping in a 700,000"£ donation to the lawyers who got gender recognition certificates made worthless in the UK Supreme Court. Ticket sales to events, merch deals, video game titles, remakes... It propells demand which means a nice big chunk of that coin passes right through her pockets and right into directly funding her hate and her fans go on to brigade trans support spaces which often are necessary emergency mental health support for weeks after a big release online. More than one suicide can be laid at the feet of these mobs.

The difference between that and Kevin Spacey is at least he's moldering quietly.

Oh no they think we're cute! Nobody move! Give them space to recover!!!

The flagrant misgendering throughout the piece, the lack of any quote or attempt to get a statement from the trans person in question, the use of "biological male", the quotation marks around "inclusive", the published unsubstantiated rumors about a person's potential personal family planning choices with over the top medicalized languaged like "inseminate"... This piece is the most hateful thing I have read in a minute and even the BBC, that shithole of anti trans reporting should be fucking ashamed at how flagrant the transphobia is.

Yeah, it can actually a fairly useful way to pick up on reporting that is from a source that is anti-trans as folk who purposefully forget the space will use that as a dogwhistle to distinguish their pieces. It is so subtle you generally don't notice it but of a specifc era of anti trans propaganda (around either side of covid particularly) you start recognizing it in places that try and appear to be ' trans welfare centric' to unwitting cis viewership while providing some heinous misinformation.

This surprises me absolutely not at all. Even in the Vancouver film industry where I make my living, one of the most queer friendly left leaning places in Canada, the Teamsters are often ridiculously right wing and pro Trump.

Less so maybe now that the leopards have actually started gnawing on their faces directly but the die hards are still at it. Riding swamper with them is often an exercise in extreme patience as they have swallowed racist, sexist, transphobic garbage without realizing the extent of the contents.

Literally had one tell me verbatim the opinions of a white south African doctor who claimed the inclusion of black Doctors during their desegregation ruined everything as anecdotal evidence that DEI was bad. (When I pointed out that was maybe not the best example to prove his point I got called racist 😅)

Dude, Raymond Holt being gay is central to his character. He struggled up through the ranks of the NYPD as a openly gay black man and that fact routinely backs his actions where he uses that experience to choose fairer more equitable choices over petty or self interested ones. He regularly cites his sexuallity as being core to who he is. While it certainly doesn't encompass his entire personality because all of Brooklyn 99's characters contain layers and multitudes it is undeniably central to his theme.

He just doesn't present as a stereotypical gay character.

I imagine the closest we are gunna get modern wise is Ostrich meat which tastes like the midway point between chicken and beef.

Yeah "Liberal" as an insult from a Conservative from the leftist perspective is very funny and also sad. Conservatives often utilize the wrong terms for things which muddy the waters and make it harder for their flock to swap sides because messing around with diction makes following leftist discussion impossible if you have an understanding of the terms gleaned from a non-academic source.

Take the term "neo-liberal" the right uses it in its most literal translation to mean "new liberal" and uses it to evoke the far end of the progressive spectrum of the left.

In actuality the term was coined in the Reagan/Thatcher era to mean the sort of generally conservative policy of privatizing swaths of government services entirely, defunding government social programs, removing regulations/ depowering regulatory bodies and practicing so called "trickle down economics" policies. The philosophical term is frozen in time just the same way terms like "neolithic" or "neoclassical art" is. Republicans are literally more Neo-Liberal than the Democrats (who are sort of more passively status quo preserving liberal. Neo-liberal mostly by virtue of inaction. )

Linguistically the well is very poisoned. The left wing could try adopting new terms but the right wing is faster to disseminate their counter to that by just creating new bastardized meanings of the terms because the right has a more unified media structure. The left is fractured. It deals often with trying new things rather than preserving status quo which means it exists in a lot of subgroups.

Liberal is sort of two separate things - a brand adopted by usually a party that markets itself as socially progressive and a philosophy of property forward law that creates a punch out of individual rights to citizens (and to a much lesser extent subgroups) to things like freedom of movement, freedom from unlawful seizure of property, freedom of expression and "style of life".

If you have existed on the outside of the left wing you might only be familiar with the brand aspect. The criticism of the wider left in general of these "Liberal" branded parties is that they are often performative in their progressive nature. The brand is just marketing.

The hotbutton discussion however inside the wider left in regards to the political philosophy of Libralism is that both the Republicans and Democrats are by technical definition Liberals and that base philosophy has within it the political prerogative of constantly upholding protections on keeping the absurd aggregation of wealth in private firms (something Libralism at it's core is designed to do). A large number of different leftist philosophies see this as a core problem. Therefore in leftist spaces self identifying Liberals are usually flagged as dupes of a branded center-right party - not as progressives who support social causes of wider acceptance.

Libralism as a philosophy is kind of the air we breathe. It's not left nor right. It creates a body of individual rights but Capitalism is used as a measure of what constitutes personal autonomy. Someone dying from a lack of success is acceptable because at it's core Liberalism is designed to coerce (most) people to perform perpetual labour in return for protection inside the system. The system creates classes of people who are citizens who are protected and by doing so it creates exceptions to citizenhood (like prisoners, refugees, immigrants or indigenous peoples) who can be exploited.

Most Democracies are philosophically a sort of blended patchwork of Liberalism and Socialism with some other stuff mixed in. The two are either compatible or opposing depending on which school of Socialism you are talking about.