Is there a side that’s in favour of cheating and the subjugation of women?

Well yes, that's the status quo. That's what you and I are about, with the systems we support and maintain. I get it, there's a nice abstraction that separates us and the subjugation, but it's our way of life that perpetuates it.

But not what I meant.

I meant the circumstances, the situations people are in and the experiences they have that compel these changes. Do you know much about that?

Or is it just some "leftist" agenda, driven by a secret cabal cooking up what will be most offensive to the right?

Man, I left academia too soon

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10....87941221096600

Irish Rugby Union excludes males from female competition:

https://www.outkick.com/irish-rugby-...womens-league/

Taika is cancelled for transphobic tweets

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...ns-tweets.html

Do you feel at least a little bit of embarrassment when you have to stoop to the Daily Mail to promote your agenda?

My new favourite form of content is NZ social campaign posters. Now that my eyes have stopped bleeding from the monkeypox flyer, we have this beauty from Women's Health Action, which would like you to know that brown women's bodies exist to be milked so white dudes can pretend to breastfeed or something oh god the bleeding has started again

lolz, yes Ab, we can live any fucking life we want on the fringes. We don't have to participate in your mainstream.

Aww, but what if we don't show up to work every day, and what if sport isn't fair?

I feel for you bro. Look to your kids, they'll help you out.

Speaking of life on the fringes, like, in Dunedin, spare a thought for this poor woman who is being marginalised by the patriarchy for (checks notes) chasing a man into a church, beating him into submission, and anally raping him with her penis

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/woman-...SJKUH4TG4F76A/

and people say that MALE violence is a problem, sheesh

Ugh, you're gross Ab.

I withdraw and apologise, it was mean of me to denigrate Dunedin like that.

It's hateful right? Your behaviour.

Ok, I'm now lost at this point...I am now identifying as a car. Driving my car is fun at this point until the dead dino's run out...

Important new academic research:

https://archive.ph/iNWoP

(now removed pending ethical review but archive sites have long memories)

Abstract
I wanted to understand how my research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading shota, a Japanese genre of self-published erotic comics that features young boy characters. I therefore started reading the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating. In this research note, I will recount how I set up an experimental method of masturbating to shota comics, and how this participant observation of my own desire not only gave me a more embodied understanding of the topic for my research but also made me think about loneliness and ways to combat it as driving forces of the culture of self-published erotic comics.

“ Boys are like kittens, it’s hard to take your eyes off them.”

What a nutbar.

Oh CNN , what are you implying???

https://www.mpi.govt.nz/news/media-r...ngs-to-thrive/

Our tax dollars at work

Is that political correctness?

Looks more like the government trying to get funding where it's needed.

A tree-planting program that only works on a marae, only works when its managers believe in horoscopes, and only works when they pray to the seeds.... isn't really scalable.

Yeah, but the government is supposed to be there for all of New Zealand, not just the industrialised and colonised. Not everything has to be ticked off by a physicist (and you'll find necessary physicists are often absent when they're there's money to be made cutting corners, as the bodies of 29 men in the Pike River mine can attest to).

LOL

Dam about to burst in Oz:

‘Absolutely devastating’: woman sues psychiatrist over gender transition

https://www.smh.com.au/national/abso...23-p5bbyr.html

A failed transition as a child seems like a good backstory for a supervillain

Unfortunately the underlying issue of young people looking for belonging and struggling to find it will remain unaddressed.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria is OVERWHELMINGLY a phenomenon of teenage girls who are active on social media. It's this generation's anorexia. The thing about anorexia is... a girl who gets over it can pick up a fork. A girl who gets over ROGD but only after she has had her breasts and uterus and ovaries removed and been on testosterone injections that have given her a permanent deep voice, facial hair, and an adam's apple, well she's fucked for life.

Now, some of the girls fucked for life have grown up and are hiring lawyers.

Yeah, but it's just what's popping through on the surface.

The underlying phenomena is what it always is: inequality. People growing up in need trying to do what they can to get their needs met, with the stunted insight they have.

Will be interesting to see if it goes anywhere as they were 21/22 when they got the surgery.

Why is her age relevant? Bad medical advice is bad no matter the age of the person it's given to.

Age is relevant in the context of informed consent. One's capacity to be informed differs with age.

It's only bad advice in hindsight, but for many the same advice would be good advice.

I get it, you're happy with your house, the hopes you have for your children. If inequality was the problem here, if we were concerned about children groping blindly for identity, meaning, connection, belonging, that might put those things at jeopardy. Resources you're hoping your children will be able to exploit might not be as easily accessible if everyone has equal access to those opportunities.

Hysteria feels better.

What LS said. If they were under 16 then they would by default not be capable of making decisions about their health.

Which would be more straight forward to prove whether or not there was - “no psychiatric evidence of incompetence regarding making medical decisions”

And mental state. As well as being overwhelmingly young females, the people presenting with rapid-onset gender dysphoria are far more likely to be on the autism spectrum. Can a person whose neurodivergence causes her to see the world in either/or black/white binaries even grok advice of "give it a few years, this is probably just a phase"?

I find the usage of that word here extremely ironic and topical - although I doubt it was intended.

When I chose the word I wondered which layer of it would get picked at.

My dance teacher friend has a majority of girls in her classes, and was saying that this gender stuff is quite ridiculous, and some in her teens class are even feeling confused because they're /not/ identifying as one of these new "cliques" eg. non-binary, lesbian/gay, transgender etc.

I understand there are legitimate cases, but I would also suggest that there are significant numbers just "on the bandwagon" - similarly confused by all the "options". You could argue I'm just making shit up, but it's no less made up than hypothetical young people saying they were all "born in the wrong body". Teenagers are trying to find their identity, and we're advertising mental health disorders like it's a menu.

It's one thing to be accepting, it's another thing entirely to encourage it.

/thread

agree

People are compelled to find ways to get their needs met in a society that has all value production tightly controlled. We can keep trying to find other things to blame, as evidenced by this thread, but we're just children having tantrums.

Every time some institution that controls access to resources, like medicine, makes a determination "people who fit these criteria deserve resourcing", of course there's going to be a scrabble to see if you or yours can fit that criteria. Periphery concerns become more primary, more personally pressing issues are pushed aside.

I get it tho. Addressing inequality might mean recognising you could go with a bit less. And less is a step on the path to not enough. And we know how poorly it goes for those with not enough.

So let's not talk about inequality, how tight control of resources creates these distortions. Let's not focus on the forces creating these bulges, let's focus on the bulges themselves. Try to squash them back down.

That'll work, right? Surely.