Newtowner @danielle@octodon.social

@craigmaloney Thanks!

On the faustian bargain of trading your mental health in exchange for the perks of male privilege:

https://theestablishment.co/what-trans-women-have-is-far-more-complicated-than-male-privilege-a39af51fde62

I do love parenting, but every now and then I think about he decision to have a second child and I think "she swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."

I never quite know how to feel about the use of my given name. I don't want to undermine the norm that deadnaming is considered offensive, but I don't share that feeling about my own name? For myself, I have a long personal and professional history as "Daniel", "Dan" and "Danny". I didn't hide "Danny" when I became "Dan". Similarly, I don't want to obscure or disavow "Daniel" when becoming "Danielle" either. I can't be the only transgender person who feels like that, can I?

http://www.academia.edu/267518/Changing_Race_Changing_Sex_the_Ethics_of_Self-Transformation

Took me a while to get around to learning it, but I'm very happy with jsPsych as a tool for running behavioural experiments through the browser.

http://www.jspsych.org/

@prismatic7 Makes sense to me :-). Biological sex, gender identity and gender performance are all distinct things, but they the feel quite related to one another. A perspective I like from a trans philosopher:

https://transphilosopher.com/2016/11/27/trans-without-transition-a-critique-of-gender-identity/

Admittedly, I think there's room for differing opinions on this, but I tend to agree with her a lot.

@prismatic7 Huh. Weird. Makes total sense, and yet completely at odds with my own experience.

I have exactly that same feeling about anything that *isn't* correlated with biological sex: fingernails, head hair, etc, sometimes the maintenance is fun, sometimes it's tedious. But facial hair, androgenic body hair, etc, they all mark my body as masculine and they've made me feel gross ever since they appeared.

Hm. Some days I start to think I really am trans. Go figure.

A question for men: do you really like having facial hair? Like... really?
And it's not Stockholm syndrome?

I disliked my facial hair from the start, but I begin to suspect that -being trans - I might be a terrible judge. Still, I cannot imagine how beard - or worse, beard shadow where the hair is still clearly growing under your skin but you can't get rid of it - doesn't feel like body horror?

Help me understand the beard love.

Bagels with vegemite feel like a crime against two cultures, and yet I still kind of like them.

To me, a gender identity category serves as an explanatory framework, a conceptual tool that helps make sense of disparate experiences. It's a useful label that summarises a persistent pattern of thought and action that attaches to my body, my preferences, my social performance. It's a tool I use to control the dysphoria. "Trans woman" does feel like a better theory of myself than "cis man", but it really doesn't feel like the discovery of a "true self".

I wish people would stop making essentialist claims about gender identity categories.

http://www.metafilter.com/166957/The-Hypatia-Affair#7026377

I've spent 40ish years living as a man. I hated it, but it doesn't feel like I "discovered" my gender, as if it were just somehow sitting around under a rock waiting to be found? By this logic either my entire life so far is false consciousness, or I'm stupid, or I'm not really trans. It makes me miserable.

I am also convinced that "GCU Release the Chocolate
Accompaniments" is a minor character in a Culture fanfic novella somewhere

https://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs2LLcgkH

All I am saying is that I desperately want to read

"The Story of the Star Trek: The Secret of the Story of the Star Wars"

https://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs2L1dL9H

I think what upsets me about how transphobia gets called out is when allies insist that "trans women are real women" and shut down any and all sentiments to the contrary. It plays into my "not trans enough" fears. I don't *feel* like a "real woman" (whatever that is) and I'm not in a position to medically transition, so hey maybe I'm not really trans? Maybe I really am that gross manbaby I hear so much about on the internet? And the self-doubt, it grows...

@CBrachyrhynchos "If you were holding your breath for gays in space in 2017, you might want to hold it a bit longer".

Damn you I had no idea that I was waiting for gays in space. I suppose bisexual kindoftrans femme boygirls in space isn't really going to be a thing in the foreseeable future either.

@tiffsming the thought of being required to watch R+J in class and while sober is just depressing. Like being forced to write an essay about how The Usual Suspects is tediously predictable to every 60-something Agatha Christie fan... Totally relevant but utterly unfair.

So how does Romeo + Juliet come across to anyone who wasn't born in the 70s? Because I can't listen to Radiohead's "talk show host" without this weird mix of feels about the cruelty of my life and the bitterness of like, stuff, and the recognition of how utterly ordinary those feels are: that Shakespeare dude had me pegged rather a long time ago and the only reason I missed that in English class is that King Lear didn't have a cool soundtrack.