Oh, that’s bad. I’m not a Microsoft user, but one of the reasons I avoid third party mail apps is that I don’t want them to hold onto my mail on their own servers. That a $3T company is doing it is really disturbing, because it’s something I have only associated with slimy startups.
SatanicNotMessianic
joined 1 year ago
There’s two tricks I have that work pretty well for me.
The first is like the advice from Hitchhiker’s Guide about the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Think about the problem long enough to get an idea about where the trouble is coming from, then go do something else, like take a shower or work on something else. Don’t watch tv - that will fuck it up - but basically it’s distracting your conscious mind to give your subconscious time to work on it without being bothered. When it comes up with something, that’s when you’ll become aware of it. Going for a nature hike or bike ride is also a great approach.
The second is to try to prove the opposite. Try reversing the argument and say “such-and-such is impossible” and try to build an argument around that point. When I do that, it makes the other part of my brain - the annoying and iconoclastic part - say “But what if…” and the answer might lie somewhere down that path.
I think a lot of people in the comments don’t know what “transitioning” actually means. The most basic and common meaning is that it is the act of changing how you present to the world. It can include clothes, makeup, play activities, names, haircuts - all of those external markers we as a society treat as gendered. Conservatives are pulling off the exact same thing they did with the satanic panic, the red scare, and other artificially constructed crises. Allowing your child to transition means allowing them to present in a way that matches their self-identity. Most of the rest of their hysteria is driven by Chick Tract level bullshit.
Different studies show different statistics, but in general between a quarter and a third of all trans persons get surgery at all. It is much more common among trans men than trans women, with the most common operation being gender conforming mastectomy. The reason should be obvious - it is far harder to present as a man if you have breasts that show through your clothing. Trans men with smaller breasts will often opt to simply wear a binder, which is basically an article of clothing that compresses the breasts to make them less noticeable. That obviously includes young people.
So when you’re arguing against “letting a child choose their gender” (they’re not choosing it, they’re expressing it just like every other single child does), that’s pretty much what you’re arguing against. You’re arguing that “Boys can’twear dresses” and supporting laws to that effect.
We’ve had those laws already, until we realized that they do society no good and are needlessly cruel, so we got rid of them.
I have never heard of a study of child abuse resulting in a child having a trans identity. Child sexual abuse can have an effect on sexuality going forward, but that’s different than gender identity.
Generally the abuse associated with LGBT kids is coming from a parent who thinks that the abuse can alter their identity. Gender identity formation can start as early as during fetal development.
Another important factor to consider is that, like the concept of race, these categories are social constructs. They are different in different societies, and even within a society they change over time. A man who had sex with other men or both men and women was not considered gay in the 1930s, as long as they were male presenting. They would be considered libidinous and socially conservative people would look down their noses at them, but those people did the same to women who smoked cigarettes and went to jazz clubs. There’s an old saying that runs “Fish don’t know what water is.” It means that when we’re completely immersed in a culture, we think that what we’ve been taught and have absorbed are accurate and objective descriptions of reality.
But in any case and to answer your question - no, I am not aware of any studies that found that reverse causality. Kids know their genders at a very young age. It is a combination of neurological formations which began development during gestation and interactions with cultural artifacts.
In our current society, girls wear dresses and play with Barbies and take ballet, while boys wear sneakers and play sports and like trucks. Each of these things have culturally defined semiotic content - there’s layers of symbolic meaning. How they resonate with a person will depend on that person’s biology.
The abusive behaviors - especially the most problematic ones - come from socially conservative, often religious households. They correlate with a preference for traditional social roles for men and women, misogyny, and a phobic approach to change. Can you think of how a right wing abusive environment leads to the development of a trans identity? Is there a hypothesis there? The data actually indicates the opposite - as social approval grows, the number of people identifying as LGBT goes up. If it was intolerance and abuse causing the formation of an LGBT identity, we’d expect it to be highest in the most conservative times and places.
I’m going to be talking about abuse here, just as a warning for anyone reading this.
I absolutely believe conversion therapy is abusive. I’d like to answer this followup in two parts.
First, I think that conversion therapy should be illegal. I believe that the companies and organizations hosting those services should be shut down and that the people operating them should be investigated and prosecuted if their practices constitute defined definitions of abuse, such as physical punishment, forced isolation, and so on. The organizations sponsoring them should be fined and dissolved. That’s going after one end of the problem.
The second one is looking at the parents. It doesn’t matter whether they think it’s abusive or not, any more than a man who beats his wife because she deserves it thinks he’s just giving her discipline. It’s abuse.
However, this is another one of those indicators I was talking about. It’s part of a pattern of behaviors, but again I think we’d need more information on the parents’ conduct to their kid to establish whether removing them from the home would result in an improvement in their life going forward. It’s not like we have a clone army of Jonathan van Nesses to rehome these poor kids with.
Abuses that I’ve seen LGBT kids suffer under include withholding of food, physical abuse, and what amounts to forced incarceration. I’ve spoken to kids who have had their clothes physically torn from their bodies, resulting in injury. One of the most common ones you see is children being thrown out onto the streets. I think that under those circumstances, the state should be empowered to act. That doesn’t necessarily mean taking the child from their parents, but it might. There’s also things like court mandated counseling and required followup visits from child services. Any intervention has to be proportional to the facts of the given case.
That’s one hell of a question. I’m a cis-gendered gay man who has been active in LGBT rights since the days of ACT UP, for context.
My honest feeling is that it should be evaluated on a case by case basis. I think that it can be a sign of abuse - trans children face incredible rates of physical and emotional abuse, and there are clusters of behavior that can be used to identify them. This would be what I’d call an indicator.
I think that parents should be supporting their children with regard to their gender identity and sexuality. I think it is vital to the mental wellbeing of the child, and non-support can have consequences that last for years and decades including things like changing how their brains are wired, which changes their probability of self-harm, substance abuse, and so on. These are very real, clinical outcomes.
However, removing a child from a home also has very real consequences. The foster care system is also quite challenging for children and can also be associated with long lasting clinical outcomes. It might not improve the child’s life to remove them, even if their home life is sub-optimal.
So my proposal is that the situation be investigated by appropriately trained personnel. If there are additional aspects of emotional or physical abuse, then they’d have to make a very difficult call. Otherwise, I think something like family counseling would be preferred.
“AI Winter is coming”
-Ned Stark
It’s also not clear that any Ars users visited the about page.
Are weblogs not a thing? They should be able to tell how many times that page was accessed and by whom with a single query.
He looks so much like The Mandarin from Iron Man that it creeps me out.
If you’re talking about bio 101-102 and genetics and courses like that, my recommendation would be to check out the community colleges in your state. That’s generally going to be the lowest cost way to go, and should be sufficient for what it sounds like you need. I don’t know how much they’ll have moved online, but I suspect that post-covid there’s going to be more available like that than before. Even if you do need more advanced courses, I’d still say to do the prerequisite courses at a community college just to save on the money part of it.
If your employer is paying for it most of the big universities have online courses and don’t require an admissions process for non-degree seeking students, but you’d have to confirm that they’d count as “college credits.”
TiVo has entered the chat.