Hexagons [e/em/eir]

I understand your point of view more than most of the arguments I’ve seen against mandatory pronouns. So please take my comment as friendly, I’ll do my best not to be a rude asshole.

How would you feel about (any) for your pronoun choice? That’s functionally the same as not listing them, people can still choose which ones they want to use for you, but it still shows you’re supportive of people prominently displaying their pronouns. That or you could consider maybe a neopronoun. I personally really like e/em/eir. They’re nice and genderless, easy to use, and, bonus, a mathematician came up with them in like the '70s (I could have the year wrong and I refuse to look it up), not because he was trying to be trans inclusive, but because he hated that math books assumed their readers were all men and he wanted to include women in his writing. (Singular they was considered ungrammatical at that point.)

No, they don’t. I personally know a cis person who has their pronouns on hexbear set as they/them or comrade/them. Those aren’t the pronouns they use in real life.

If someone assumes you’re trans simply because your pronouns are set to something other than she/her or he/him, that’s kind of on them. People are allowed to lie on the internet. Choose any pronouns you like, it doesn’t matter.

I personally assume absolutely nothing about the cisness or transness of someone with “any” or “none/use name” as their pronouns of choice.

Exactly.

This is a partial answer, with possibly some misinformation. Should I just shut my mouth and hope that someone who actually knows what’s happening will answer you? Yes. Yes I should. But I’m a bit drunk, so you’re just going to have to read my incomplete (and possibly wrong) explanation.

Brianna Wu got famous from gamergate. She got harassed by gamers. I don’t remember what for, possibly they thought she slept with someone for good reviews on a game? That or she criticized a game that maybe an ex had worked on. Shit, I dunno, I’m actually absolutely making stuff up. Well, I’ve come this far, let’s keep going! TERFs are certain she’s trans, I’m not certain she’s trans, but maybe she is? I’m unsure. Not that it matters, she was a woman that gamergate targeted, of that I am certain. She’s now just the most annoying lib of all time, but keeps trying to draw on progressive cred from being harassed by gamers during the gamergate era. I suspect she’s going to do a “why I left the left” situation, but maybe you don’t even have to do that to be a grifter these days.

Long story short, she was harassed during gamergate, she’s extremely, unfortunately lib, and it’s better if you pay no attention to her twitter takes.

This article is so fucking funny. “Yes, Ansar Allah said they’re responsible for this attack, yes, all the evidence points towards them being responsible for this attack, but are we really sure it was them, really?” It really feels like whoever wrote this piece is really trying to minimize how capable Ansar Allah are, especially since they blame “human error” (by the Israelis) for the lack of warning about the attack when Ansar Allah has said this is a new type of drone that is undetectable by radar.

I guess I’m just more willing to take Ansar Allah at their word than whoever wrote this article, and I find it deeply amusing how much hedging you have to do if you refuse to believe that Ansar Allah is capable of doing the things they say they’re doing.

(Civility is a long-standing bit account here at hexbear. The whole shtick is replying with happy emojis when people are being civil but awful and angry emojis when people are being morally principled but uncivil. Check out Civility’s post history to see what I mean)

Careful, we’ve got lemmitors in this thread, the (in my opinion pretty obvious) irony of your comment might be lost on them

I just started Cult of the Lamb yesterday. What a strange little adorable game! I’m having a great time with it so far

I played Control, and apparently it’s set in the same universe as the Alan Wake games, which I had never heard of until I googled WTF was up with the Control DLC that deeply confused me. It turns out, it’s all references to Alan Wake. Which is why I was so confused. I should play them, I really enjoyed Control.

Oh yeah? I should probably check it out again then. It most certainly didn’t work several years ago when I quit twitch (Ublock origin is still the adblocker I use) (I don’t remember exactly when I stopped using twitch, time is a fuck)

Edit: oh you seem to be correct! I just went on twitch for the first time in years, and, uh, no ads? That actually might be pretty bad for me. Because I will watch streams all day if I’m not stopped from doing so somehow. Well, damn, but also, it’s objectively good, so I’m torn

Edit again: oh wait no, just saw an ad, and I’m unwilling to figure out exactly why or what I could do to mitigate it, since twitch is bad for me anyway. Ah well, no twitch for me, it’s ok!

Hahahaha, this is what made me quit twitch, for good. I’ll do the same with YouTube. It’ll suck, yes, but it’ll ultimately be good for me and my mental health. 3 years from now I won’t miss YouTube.

Oh you’re right of course. I’ve read the rest of the thread, but still, I couldn’t resist trying to pin him down on something. I was mostly curious to see exactly what kind of weasel speak I’d get in response, you know?

Ok, this seems contradictory to me. Democratic centralism isn’t your strategy, but it is how you function. Can you please elaborate? What actually are you saying here and how isn’t it a contradiction to have something be both “how you function” and yet also “not a part of party strategy”?

Well alright, that’s fine, but then, like, so what? How is it helpful to think about “subconscious sex” if really the idea there is no more than “some people are more comfortable if certain parts of their biology are changed from what their bodies would do without intervention”? What do we gain by saying something like "everyone has a subconscious sex that may or may not match the gender we’re assigned at birth and could even have very little to do with what society calls ‘sex’ "?

Am I underselling the idea somehow?

(Thanks for talking with me, I’m really not trying to be argumentative or contrarian. )

If sex is entirely constructed, than the only reason we have to explain dysphoria is as internalized patriarchal norms.

I think fundamentally this is what I don’t agree with. I don’t believe I feel better with a testosterone-dominant endocrine system because of societal norms. It’s a body thing, not a society thing, at least for me. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean “sex” isn’t socially constructed. Why does feeling better with testosterone necessitate that I be “subconsciously male”?

Let me say a little more: I had tits once, and I got top surgery to remove them. That choice was purely societal. In a perfect world, I would have kept my tits while being on testosterone. Would you still say I’m “subconsciously male” if my ideal body would have large (they were big and wonderful) boobs, but also facial and body hair? If so, what exactly does “male” mean? If not, what is my “subconscious sex”? Something other than male or female?

(I do actually agree about transsexual being a word that perhaps we should keep. I far, far preferred when my official diagnosis was “transsexualism” rather than “gender identity disorder”. I’m trans, but I’m not disordered.)

I don’t think Julia Serano is totally and completely right about that. She’s great, and Whipping Girl is great, very worth reading, it really helped me flesh out my understanding of gender, but still, I think she’s wrong about, at least, the subconscious sex theory she posits.

I’d like to recommend Judith Butler’s new book here, but I’ll be honest, I can’t read Butler, I find them extremely confusing. For an easier time, you could instead watch Philosophy Tube’s newest video, because Abby talks a little about this issue, following Butler. If you’re interested, I also could see if my sister would be ok with me posting an excerpt of an essay she wrote on this subject, because that’s my exposure to Judith Butler, filtered through my sister’s writing.

I’m sure this isn’t a complete answer, but from what I’ve seen from TERF rhetoric, it seems to be basically “girls rule, boys drool”. They need to believe that men and women are different so that they can easily split humanity into a very basic us vs them dichotomy, with themselves in the “good” group. I don’t know why they want to make sex/gender the fundamental contradiction in their lives, it seems to me there are way more explanatory ways of looking at the world, but every single TERF argument seems to boil down to hating people they perceive as men and thinking the people they hate are biologically programmed to be evil.

But then they rarely take this idea to its logical conclusion, which would be cis-female only enclaves without any cis men or trans people present at all. Even the most rhetorically strident TERFs tend to have a cis man or two in their life who they don’t seem to hate. And I have to admit I think that’s odd. If someone truly in their heart of hearts believed that evil lived in the penis (or XY chromosomes or whatever), you’d think they would try harder to avoid people with those traits. You’d think genital inspections and maybe even chromosome tests would be a prerequisite to friendship with someone with that (incredibly shitty) belief.

I dunno, I do think hatred and disgust are at the root of TERF beliefs, but I don’t think most TERFs really interrogate their own beliefs very much.

Oh hey, are you me?! Went to bed last night at 5:30 pm, woke up at 1:30 am, it’s weird, but it works!

How has no one mentioned Outer Wilds yet? That’s usually right on up there in these kinds of threads, because it’s great. An absolute masterpiece of a game.

Pathologic 2 is also a masterpiece, but a (purposefully) miserable game to play. It’s so beautiful and the world is so rich, but it definitely demands perseverance to make it through, because it will do everything it can to make you hate it.

A Short Hike isn’t quite as narratively satisfying as the other two, but it’s short and fun and extremely adorable. Just a pleasant little world to spend an afternoon in.

But then why ever talk about it at all? He didn’t need to bring it up in this article. I dunno, I’m sure I’ll never get a satisfying answer. Probably even Jonathan Chait doesn’t understand why he does the things that he does