Admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone

I can also be found on the microblog fediverse at @ada@blahaj.zone or on matrix at @ada:chat.blahaj.zone

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2023

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  • Do you need to be an activist? Absolutely not. You have a chance to live on your own terms in a world that made that really hard. You don’t owe it anything.

    That being said… Visibility makes a huge difference, and it’s super important that some vulnerable folk are visible and loud. But remember, they’re the ones putting themselves on the line, so that in the future, it won’t be as bad for those that follow, and that needs to be respected.

    For me, being trans was always just a medical issue

    This isn’t helpful. Whether you see it that way or not, being trans is not “just a medical issue”. The fact that you were able to live your life as if it were, gives you a position of relative privilege that most trans people don’t share. The truth is, if you get publicly outed one day, it won’t just be a medical issue for you either. So whilst you don’t have to be an activist, you shouldn’t be downplaying the reality that other trans folk do have to face, and honestly, you shouldn’t be pretending to yourself that you are immune to them either.

    Live your life on your own terms, and do so without guilt. But even if it’s just in the privacy of your own thoughts, make sure you build your visible peers up rather than mentally separating yourself from them







  • This is all an interesting hypothetical to you. To me, it’s my lived life. Trust me, I’ve done what you’re talking about. I was active in /r/changemyview, and I’ve spent a lot of time having this discussion with people on social media.

    And in that time, not a single person has changed their perspective or view on the topic. Because they already had a view, and despite the ostensible goal of the sub, they’re largely not open to changing their view. They may want to, but they’re not actually willing to change it. Because ultimately, people arrived at their “concerns” through emotional manipulation, and that can’t be undone by “rational discussion”. Like sure, maybe you’re the single exception, and in my 5+ years of having this discussion, you might be the first to genuinely change your opinion. But even then, after 5 years of normalising the idea that my rights are up for discussion, as if it’s actually ok for people to want them removed because of their “concerns”, I’d have a single changed mind in 5 years.

    But you know what else I’ve done in those 5 years? I’ve told every other person that I’ve had this discussion with that it’s actually ok to debate my rights, that whether or not I deserve rights is based on how well I can debate and argue. And I’ve given the bigots driving this whole discussion exactly what they wanted, which is to make myself a target.

    Fuck that.

    So what does it say about me? It says I’ve got more lived experience in navigating this topic than you ever will, and I’m no longer willing to see “civil discussion” on the erasure of peoples rights, in the pointless hope that it will actually help us. Because it doesn’t.


  • I’m not asking you to argue about it. I explicitly don’t want people arguing about it, which I was hoping my previous comment would make clear.

    There are people out there that were raised a certain way that want to change or perhaps have questions due to ignorance on the topic. By being combative, you’re doing more harm than good for something you clearly care about.

    If someone turns against all trans people because they encounter a single angry trans person, then they were just looking for an excuse to justify what they already felt.

    And it’s not my job to play nice with the people trying to erase my rights in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll stop what they’re doing! That doesn’t work. That has never worked. Every single civil right gain has been made by pushing back.

    So thanks for the advice, but I’ll keep pushing back










  • You don’t “confirm” it. It’s an attempt to describe a system/outcome. It’s a model of a system, not the system itself and no model is perfect, because all models are our attempt to understand and describe things, and there is no such thing as perfect understanding.

    However, it’s a highly accurate model, that explains things very well. So, either we will find that one day, we make a brand new, better model (this seems unlikely given the accuracy of the current model, but possible). Or, more likely, we continue to come to a better understanding of the system, and improve the model we use to describe it.