Honestly a lot of news doesn’t actually cover this stuff as it should. Covering trans topics is usually something that causes backlash or requires a high degree of finesse in reporting and explaining so these modern lynchings go largely uncovered by the big mainstreamers except when they think they have a winner that’s straightforward enough to report in a short quippy segment.

Who the hell says “transsexuals” anymore except folk who were out in the 90’s?

If you would like to read some articles how about Forbes?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiewareham/2023/11/13/beaten-stabbed-and-shot-320-trans-people-murdered-in-2023/

NBC?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna125783

Congress? Bonus points they give you the stories of a bunch of the victims.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117016/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20240321-SD015.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiwkbLZm-yLAxXsJzQIHWcVH0cQFnoECE4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3j7JSMJN6lNK6qWRWk6gTC

How about a long term view over ten years? Statista

https://www.statista.com/statistics/944726/murders-transgender-gender-diverse-people-us/

And these are the murders we know. They are difficult to find because a lot of coverage buries the lead on the trans nature of the victims so we only learn about them being trans after the fact. A lot of newspapers use dead names and pre transition photos and don’t mention current names and identities so in some of our communities we only know when someone has died except through word of mouth because when they show up in the paper they aren’t recognizable. This is also why articles tend to use the words “at least” or have inconsistent counts per year. New ones are always coming to light as friends and family struggle to get the word out.

You do not see these news articles because your news silo filters them out. There are vigils every year where the names are read out. The circumstances of those vigils are that the main reason for the violence was because of the victims gender identity. You asked for sources. Have at em.

It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.

Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.

Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.

If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.

If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.

What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.

Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.

For me I had to make a value judgement in regards to transition because my partner’s got phenotype preferences that don’t match where I would like to go and ultimately I had to break ot down as to whether keeping him as my romantic partner or transition would bring me more net happiness and chose my partner. It’s still a struggle because all that dysphoria doesn’t go away I just have to feed it different things to placate it enough to function.

I have a weird relationship with a lot of photos of myself pre social transition. Any photos of weddings or big family events where a dress code prompted me through soft pressure to try and “clean up” is sort of just interpreted as me being in drag but I never look happy in them. My Mom ended up taking down a bunch of family photos where I am so dressed because she started interpreting me as having “dead eyes” in them and they make her feel weird.

I can’t really erase all existence of my past self as I feel that’s kind of unfair to the other folk who were there with me at the time but we’ve definitely had conversations of “hey, using my old name and pronoun set to describe past me isn’t cool, please don’t.” but stories where the tale’s context involves me being interpreted as my birth sex by other people still feel bad. It doesn’t feel like a clean chapter break. It feels messy and threaded with compromise like I made some kind of fairy bargain- rewarding true love in exchange for staying the frog and never becoming the prince but I make it work. At my worst I feel like I stuck in the middle of a story. If my partner ever dies or leaves me then there’s a whole heartbroken third act that could kick off but as is I feel like I would still take a bullet for him any day of the week so this could just be the end of the tale. My relationship with act one is as compassionate to all involved as I can make it. It happened. It sucked. If I could go back and do it all over again from scratch I would have to know for certain that I would end up exactly back where I am now to not make different choices and as precarious as that is it’s enough.

Honestly there’s not really a way to know short of them telling you. There’s a difference from folk just not liking the gender box people put them in and rejecting all the cultural trappings of gender (being a tomboy or a femboy) from them being trans. Transness goes a little further than just cultural markers, it’s a reaction to one’s body. Oftentimes that struggle on the outside just shows up as them not flourishing… And sometimes you don’t recognize what them actually flourishing actually looks like because they never did until after they changed.

I grew up in the 90’s and from sheer lack of exposure just didn’t have words for what I was going through. I was aided by being fairly androgynous but really didn’t talk to anyone about how good it felt to be read by strangers on occasion as my gender. I relied on gender neutral nicknames. I starved myself or overexercised to stay lean at points to keep myself from putting on weight that would go to areas that would outwardly show my body through clothes and avoided mirrors while naked but none of that clicked as me being trans until when I was 21 and living abroad in Japan where basically everybody read me as being what I was, either assuming me as a trans man or reading me as a cis man. None of this really caused me to self reflect until I was near the end of my visa and realized that going back to all my friends and family whom I loved dearly was a double edged sword. I would be locked back in to where people would enforcing my gender, lightly mind you. They weren’t trying to force me to act any way at all but there was a gentle tyranny just by them correcting people who “got it wrong” or using my name or by men I saw as friends and peers treating me as a delightful oddity like I was some sort of ideal romantic though not nessisarily sexual conquest because I liked hobbies and masculine dominated spaces that few women participated in which in modern context would probably outwardly make me appear as some kind of “pick me”. This realization that I didn’t want to go back cascaded into me crashing hard up against all the novel fantasies I had neen distracting myself with that I would somehow go through some kind of magical event and instantly change body type and all my friends would just have to except me because “oh well magic…” I never believed this would actually happen mind, I wasn’t delusional but I would amuse myself while walking around with these little daydreams. All at once though I realized that that was never going to happen. I was gunna be in this form until I died and I broke into a full on dispair. I didn’t even know trans men existed and my only experience with trans women was representation where they were ridiculed. I backwards engineered that trans men must exist because that was the only thing that made any sense.

I stuffed it all under my hat for another 10 years, growing more distant with old friends and not making new friends. I read a bunch of feminism and chased out my internalized misogyny thinking that was the problem. It muddied the waters awhile but I couldn’t shake that no matter how I told myself that being a woman and being a man were value neutral it didn’t shake my feelings like I was playing out Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and all people saw was the roach. I tried non-binary pronouns and a name change more or less as proof to myself that I was okay without and discovered the opposite.

My mom took me coming out hard only in the way that she felt she should of seen it sooner and it threw into sharp relief all those times where she’d tried to pressure me in little ways to be more fem. I don’t begrudge her any of that. She says it should have been obvious but really no. If I had known that there were options I could have asked instead of hurting myself the way I did and struggling with the isolation then I might have. But I lived in a conservative town where just growing up in an agnostic household had seen me get literally have neighbor kids throw rocks at me growing up. Even if knew my friends and family were cool, there were medical options that would reduce all the regrets that I have now I might have buried and denied my needs anyway. My family had kept me alive by being awesome in other ways and I always knew that me dying would have destroyed them… And that’s really all you can do. Let your kid know they are loved regardless of anything and let them sort themselves out. No need to brace and seek the signs one of them potentially trans, just let them know that you love them and if they are then you will still love them and want to do right by them.

This isn’t as simple as you are implying as if you want to be a bro to trans people more nuance is generally required. Male and Female are not used strictly scientifically in context. Male and Female are often used as adjective forms of man and woman. Take the example of a male or female firefighter - if a trans man is a firefighter refering to him as a female firefighter using this reasoning comes across as fairly transphobic because it feels like you are either trying to utilize some sort of technical linguistic dodge to find an occasion to misgender them or your purpose is to out them to people unawares of their trans status.

Even when people use male and female as nouns instead of adjectives this transphobic reading applies because a lot of fairly obnoxious people will try and use these words as shorthand to imply that trans identities don’t matter and to avoid calling you by terms that align to your identity or to isolate trans identify out of discussions. This is why you hear the phrase “Assigned male/female at birth” used by the trans community (though it actually originates from the intersex community) or “birth sex” to refer to groups that include non-binary people instead of just male or female. That linguistic abstraction is important because it implies removal by way of time. In trans terms one can be treated as female at birth given the assumption of cisness for infants implying that that term could be inaccurate in the present day.

By contrast “Trans Identitied males/females” is a transphobic dog whistle. “Biologic males/females” has the same vibe because from a scientific prospect the term is so bloody vague it is practically meaningless. The speaker is just trying to imply the social category is irrelevant or putting emphasis on an assumed physicality. Like if someone says for example “biological males in women’s sports” you know the entire point they are going to be making is total exclusion before they even bother to elaborate further.

The reality is words Male and Female still represent social categories unless you append onto them more specific adjectives in term like Phenotypic, chromasomal or so on. These words are not immune from the cultural moment of negotiation of trans inclusion.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and… Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there’s usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay “must” is a strong word) be obeyed.

Ohhh no… As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.

Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn’t cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips… This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.

You do you. Everybody’s circumstances are different and if you think that they give no positive value to your family life then that’s the way to go. This would only be a potential strategy if you didn’t want to give them up.

Baptism is also a hard line a lot of Christians get on because they think it’s basic hell proofing moreso than the average rituals. It’s not like they will stop their general pressures if you agree… but on this particular point people have been known to risk it BIG because they believe the mortal soul is imperiled and it comes at a point when the kid is at their most physically vulnerable being practically newborn.

Risk assessment should be holistic. It’s not necessarily compromise and framing it that way risks it becoming more about a battle of egos. it’s about recognizing and having a real situation assessment free from personal emotional triggers about how best to respond to potential dangers that center the baby’s safety first in a way that can stop the police from getting involved because faith is not reasonable.

While I realize that hard boundry setting is the new norm sometimes harm reduction is a better strategy. While a lot of folk have religious trauma to deal with that makes them want to do exactly zero church stuff one aspect of not believing in God is that a lot of the ritual aspects are pretty low stakes once one you strip away the mysticism. One way to handle the worry of your Mom wanting to do something dangerous to essentially just splash water on your kid is to participate in the silly ritual safely so that it’s done with minimum risk.

There definitely are hills to die on but if you give an order you know won’t be obeyed because the stakes from your Mother’s perspective are incredibly high then one way to look at it is baby’s safety comes first. Not because of the possible existence of the soul but because risking kidnapping to perform at end of day a boring nothing ceremony that ultimately means nothing isn’t a good idea. If it is distasteful to participate because of trauma then recognizing that you can deputize somebody you trust to get the hurdle over with is an option but realistically, your kid will never gain that same trauma from this. They will grow up with a completely different belief system as their basic. If them simply being baptized is a personal trigger it is wise to unpack exactly why because whether they are or not isn’t something your kid is likely going to care about. Having grown up in an agnostic environment and having a number of friends in the same situation some of us were baptized for the sake of family peace but for everyone I know it’s a complete non-event. One advantage of these things actually meaning nothing is that there is no change of state. A baptized baby and a non baptized baby are the same.

To my crew anyway a lot of us our parents aversion or reactions to church stuff seems out of proportion due to them having a history. Theirs is a more volitile strongly opinionated atheism as opposed to the more passive naturalized one we developed because we do not feel betrayed by belief. Sometimes their aversion causes them to do things which from the outside display that they are still letting their rejection of religious upbringing effect their judgment in an outsized way because they didn’t ever really heal.

Well yes… Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We’ve had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.

But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it’s a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.

Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it’s evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.

This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase “God given rights” but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.

Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn’t about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.

Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it’s on the books doesn’t mean it’s in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.

There is an idea of an international code of human rights… But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.

There’s a hidden usage of “hon” from the history of the toxic trans communities message boards to mean “trans women who don’t pass” and is used condescendingly. That usage is basically dead in the water and barely known outside of a pretty narrow sliver of the queer community but it can still get you a side eye in some places.

I feel like I have watched in real time as Y’all has gained usage up in the Canadian Queer community.

I am old enough to still regard “hon” as demi hostile but “dude” seems to be drifting more and more gender neutral. At heart we may all just be ninja turtles all the way down

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

Neither Zeus nor Odin is canonically all seeing or all knowing. Zeus was tricked by Prometheus by accepting bones wrapped in fat as his sacrifice leaving what he really wanted, the nice juicy meat, as the human’s share. He had to get word of Persephone’s last known location from Apollo and has routinely been tricked by other clever Gods and mortals in his myth.

Odin was not able to discover the plot behind the murder of Baldur until the confession of Loki nor did he know the location of Thor’s hammer when it was stolen (they had to ask Heimdal). He may have sacrificed his eye to trade one form of perception for another… But we aren’t really let on to what that perception actually is. In Norse myth only Mimir is functionally all seeing and Odin takes his council from his severed head, he has to ask for information he doesn’t implicitly know himself.

There is a difference between simply very knowledgeable or powerful and actual omniscience or omnipotence it is not a matter of scale based on perspective, it’s a boolean function - one is either all powerful/all knowing or they are not. If ever a god or other character needs to ask someone for information, is tricked by something obscured or fails to know something they are automatically proven to not be omniscient… In storytelling omniscience tends to make for very boring characters because it means that most conflicts are automatically resolved and the cleverness or stupidity of a God is undercut when they simply know everything. Odin’s stories are ones where he goes and scouts, learns, adapts, formulates a plan and then gets away with murder because we are supposed to admire the process.

We assume omnipotence from Gods but it’s not wholly true. Most gods out in the world of myth are limited in their reach and ability. If they are in a pantheon then often that implies that they have no direct power over each other and thus they are not all powerful.

Interestingly omnicence or omnipresence is not something claimed even by the monotheistic religions. No God is actually all seeing. Plenty of times in script things have been hidden from God or something has to be told to God to bring it to his attention.

This has nothing to do with his dick persay… Just the assumption of omnipotence. If the Christian God exists he coulda just be lying about what he’s capable of and what human is gunna be able to check the math? Guy seems like the kind of dick who would pull that shit.

Shelters often share resources and many are more flexible than you would expect. They might not take you personally but dollars to donuts they can point you in the direction of other specialized resources.

You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.

It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.