Talinn

The transition process is fundamentally an internal process, and you should understand that before suggesting any reforms. A lot of people start the transitioning process in the closet by secretly cross-dressing in their rooms outside of the view of the parents, until they can move out. The child initiates the suggestion that they want to transition based on a calculation if it will help them , and the parent largely controls how much they can express it in public, and how much of their bodies they can change... It is a JOINT process... So should it be the parent's choice to barge into their room and stop this transition from happening even if they do no medical interventions or do nothing yet with other people, in your view? You seem to say it's the parent's choice if a trans child can begin transitioning, that means they can barge into their rooms and look through their drawers and draw accurate conclusions? Transitioning begins with a thought and the parent can't control their kids thoughts. Parents have a duty to try to ensure their kids don't drive themselves over a bridge and harm their life, but they can't control their kids internal thoughts. Just because a kid began transitioning at age 15 in private and couldn't really begin in earnest until 18 doesn't mean the parent protected them, it just means that the parent was an obstacle in the way. You're just drawing false conclusions about how transitioning works because you've never done it and can't imagine it.

Sometimes a kid tells the parent that he wants to transition, and the parent just verbally harasses them, takes away their possessions, pulls them out of a school if applicable, and tells them to never mention it again. Which is why a lot of trans people don't even tell their parents until they can move out. I hope we don't have to go in circles about this again. Where is the acknowledgement of this happening and this being an obstacle to kids transitioning? It was Elon's job as a parent to read what was in front of his face before signing. There's a good chance he signed it while he was replying to a work email. His comment is so disingenuous to the medical profession. Also who cares if the parent is unhappy you transitioned. It's your life and it's not your job to please your parents if it costs you your soul and your happiness. There's no evidence that the person transitioning here regretted anything so what's the problem? We are going in circles far too much so I hope this makes sense.

So it's fine for Jazz Jennings to have started her 13-14 year transition process at ages 4-5? As I've alluded to, transition is a multi-step process over a lengthy period of time, and you usually start the process by wearing cross-gender clothes. You can't legislate what parents allow children to do in their own homes, and if they're clearly ecstatic that they can wear feminine or masculine clothes, should they not be allowed to begin hormones at age 13 or 14 if they're one of these select clear cut cases?

Jesus, these quotes like "Did Leo miss something" are so cringe. Course he missed something, we all miss and gain things according to our perspectives.

Yeah spiral dynamics is used too much in this forum.

I mean nothing is really gained from bashing Musk on the internet, but I view him as a kind of avatar or representation for Americans' inner greed, to the extent that he built his life in a way that some Americans aspire to... Musk does have a massive drive to help humanity and he does have some type of obsession to see it in the best place that it can be, but this casts a shadow over his family and social life. He has over 20-30 kids in addition to the time he spends with his company. When he took his 2 or 3 year-old to Auchwitz, which has disturbing images and is not a place for kids to be, I viewed him primarily negatively. You can have bad politics and a good family and professional life, and I'll still have some measure of respect for some person. But when you throw everything on the altar of "trying to help humanity" while being a terrible parent, that doesn't sit well with me. Then you're playing a pure numbers game where people are like, "oh well he's helping lots of people through Tesla and SpaceX, it's okay if he's not the best parent, nobody is". No - his parenting is atrocious! Then these same people turn around, Musk himself, say other people are terrible parents. And he's also helping getting Trump get elected which would be so awful, it'd at least balance out all the good that he's supposedly doing. And he already turned Twitter into a right wing social media website. It's almost like people wish they could be such shitty fathers or husbands, and be so materialistically wealthy, that they look up to Musk. Which frankly is sickening. But in this moment, as reality stands, maybe he still has done some net good for humanity. But the tide is swiftly turning on that count.

I mean you can just go to the Wikipedia page of Jazz Jennings. She'd been allowed to transition immediately and didn't suffer at all because of it. Now think about it, does it seem likely that Jazz is the only child who is this happy about transitioning? Do you expect her to de transition or think she shouldn't have made those 'big adult decisions'? Children aren't as stupid as you think, they can KNOW some things about themselves, but because you only think of confused troubled teens on Tumblr you think they can in no instance know anything about themselves. You took the 'children are stupid" line way too far...children are still human beings, and while they need GUIDANCE, their wishes should still be respected to some extent in such personal and intimate matters. You think it should be logical that we should regret transitioning because YOU couldn't imagine transitioning. Now blend the caution you have surrounding this issue with the awareness that people like Jazz exist, Not everyone is like Jazz, but there's some really clear cut cases.

What do you mean by "develop"? The corruption, malice and despotism within that country is too severe for any international agreement to make much of a difference within that country. It might help the Kims, but it will benefit the average person there exceedingly little.

Testosterone increases your drive for sex more than estrogen does in my experience -- in a more, maybe I'll say "primal" and (my personal note, disgusting) way, but neither of them can really alter your base sexual orientation. They may tweak it a little but it's not really that significant. It is interesting to contemplate their similarities, though. You'd notice what feels more "pure" to you, if you had one or the other in your body, and that might make think they make unrecognizable differences, but yeah they don't generally change this specific area.

I didn't even think it was that low.. but it makes sense. To go to a doctor to get hormone blockers you have to pull your kid out of school, miss work potentially to go to the doctors, then the parent has to pay for that etc. etc. I don't know, the narrative that you just get puberty blockers and these other things without any effort is just so annoyingly false. These things don't just land on your door. But perhaps I'm starting to beat a dead horse.

So where's the possibility that a kid takes a puberty blocker for two weeks and then drops it, deciding he or she isn't trans? Is this a scary possibility? It seems like you have some inherent fear of puberty blockers due to the media narrative around them, not because they're inherently very bad for children. There are toxic LGBT obsessed, narcissistic weird parents that might actively want their child to be trans and try to brainwash them into becoming trans, I'm sure they exist. But they're outnumbered 5 to 1 at least by parents who abhor trans people, who frankly want to see us dead in some corner of their mind. There's real fear to the process of coming out in virtually every trans person, because they think their family will react poorly. A lot of people won't even bother coming out. The amount of hate you get for being trans frankly feels slightly higher than whatever portions of society encourage you to be yourself. Again, who is encouraging anyone to transition? If a trans child even has supportive enough parents to let them go on puberty blockers (even after extensive deliberation and thought, careful planning), chances are just as good that they'll go on puberty blockers as they'll brood in some version of depression, not doing anything about the gender dysphoria. Of course social contagion is a problem, but it's just statistically impossible that *every* trans youth who thinks he or she is trans' first impulse is "let's go to the pharmacy and make my LGBT friendly parents go get me some puberty blockers!" Something non-trans people don't realize is that it is usually a loooong process. If your mind was playing games with you and you're not really trans, chances are good that you'll stop yourself from doing real and serious damage. Because it's not uncommon for it to take 10+ years.. The very length of the process filters peoples out, not to much the money involved.

OMG the dark Crystal.. Youre too cool Emerald..

It will help in some instances, but I'm perfectly willing to cede this area to the right. I don't how much it helps the trans community in general anyway, it seems to backfire in some damaging ways. Let the schools be free of transgender stuff and don't cede another inch elsewhere. Sports are case-by-case basis.

Afraid to say that when I was in high school, and had no testosterone running Cross Country, the XY chromosomes conferred no innate advantage ...I was 17 years old and attempted to run a 5k race in under 25 minutes and could barely get to 26:00 on flat terrain (I was in Colorado so we had a variety of races, in the mountains and in the plains). The girls were running like 21-23 minutes and didn't pass out and almost go to the ambulance from trying so hard, as I did. Due to having no testosterone due to my genetic disorder I just couldn't run as fast as the girls no matter how hard I tried, but man those XY chromosomes sure did give me an advantage over them. I guess 26 minutes is a faster time than 21-23 minutes, my bad. I agree that transgender issues shouldn't be addressed in public schools, probably not even in high school. Puberty blockers are pretty harmless if taken for a short time in conjunction with no other cross-hormones, and the science will get better with this. You think of testosterone and estrogen as immense cosmic forces but they're really just substances both of which I saw firsthand and they're simultaneously not as scary as you think as they are, and more potent than you realize my man. 7 years old aren't given puberty blockers that much either. Not going to reply to your other culture war stuff because it's mostly irrelevant.

If you're yellow and you "side" with green more, then that's because they are generally more positive about things, and not just concerning the trans issue -- but any issue. They're funner to be around even if they can be a little stupid or silly. That's just how it is. It's really easy to understand how you oranges or blue think about gender because it's how I thought of it when i was 8 or 9.

At least a little rhetoric towards transgender people within society is pure red... Follow a line of reasoning within Project 2025 1) classify all transgender people as pedophiles (in one section of the document) 2) recommend sentencing of all pedophiles to execution (in another seection of the document) 3) voila, institutionalized violence against transgender people I prefer to not follow this fear-based line of speculation too closely, and there are many guardrails against this of course, but at the same time the rhetoric is there. Remember that it was only in the 1940's that FDR started the incarceration of Japanese Americans. I don't see it as likely at all, but at the same time I'm aware of history. I'd like to think of myself as a yellow-stage thinker, but in reality I have to work through some of this fear-based (sort-of) nonsense myself... + Glad there's some people like Emerald

@questionreality Society hurt us even before the 2000's, and this is the response, and if you don't think there should be a response it's because you're afraid of too much personal autonomy and think society can't handle the stress of this new idea. Trans ideology is a response, like any other ideology is, to societal structures that existed prior to our ideology. There were far more instances of the ideology being "shoved down my throat" that I should be happy the way that I was. The reason why you have to go to the internet to find the culture wars is because you don't even see many transgender people in public in the first place! Who is really shoving down it your throat unless you go online? Maybe at maximum one person asked you to call them a female name when they had a deep voice, and that's shoving stuff down your throat? Let's get real, most people like talking in public about pizza, their puppy or garden, or their annoying co-worker, not the fact that they hate their genitals. It's simply weird to talk about this stuff in public which is why everyone goes online to do it! Why should we just roll over on our backs like dogs to whatever you say a woman is? I'm not going to roll over and play dead and act like a male just because it threatens your ideas of how a society should function. You don't have Kallmann Syndrome or the makeup of my mind, and I don't think you'd be willing or perhaps able to imagine the initial conditions that create transgender people in the first place. Trans ideology does share many of the toxic elements that any other ideology has , but this is nothing special. You fixate on it more though because you think it will destabilize or hurt society. Saying it was "shoved down your throat" carries the implication that it came out of nowhere and we just decided to transify society for no reason. And further, the ideology isn't even always spread by transgender people themselves, there are a lot of other things going on. There are people who try to convert people to try to respect trans women, sure, but you're also missing the fact that media narratives concerning trans people are often inaccurate. That in short, whatever you think reality is, you're missing many pieces. I have many critiques of the trans community but you just don't understand these issues clearly.

He didn't say anything about preaching his ideas about gender to the masses. I'm fairly sure he's only referring to the situation where youre alone in your room thinking about gender, as it relates to personal development. Why do you always think we're trying to convert everyone? I don't actually go to elementary schools to convert anyone to be trans, no matter how many times the right says I do.

I think few people want to transition to a "trans-woman" which, for the majority of people is code or cipher for a lesser kind of woman, or even worse, a mentally confused man. (Some people are capable of some nuance to the extent where this label would be fine, but they're in the minority.) If you bake a batch of cookies, you don't eat half baked cookies, and if you transition, you don't want half-baked results. That's why I don't tell anyone I'm trans except online, because to too many people you're just a half-baked woman. Sports -- I've heard different standards brought up. And everyone is different. I heard of some swimmers' association say that you can't compete if you had finished male's puberty. So what if I had finished male puberty 30, 40, 50 , or is 60% too much? I don't know what percentage of it I completed, but I have Kallmann Syndrome and I took testosterone to start it when I was 17, stopped after a little while , then switched to estrogen. I did grow some after taking some testosterone so suppose I tried to compete. There would probably be bickering to say I did complete male puberty, that I undersold how much I took testosterone. In reality it's obscure & hypothetical how much male puberty I did complete, and this is just one of the many examples of how obscure and arbitrary this whole debate can get. You can take it on a case by case basis, but of course on the internet facts always get distorted, and then when you hear a crazy absurd case, that will get all the attention on the internet while all the other trans athletes that compete relatively fairly and normally get a shoe in the face because of that absurd case. Teaching about transgenders shouldn't probably be done in schools. It's well intentioned but probably only backfires, leading to more social contagion of the idea (which is a problem, though likely exaggerated by the right), and it leads the right to go ballistic that they're brainwashing people, which just makes people loathe us more. Also practically speaking being "prideful" about your trans status is only useful in the first stage to give you a confidence boost to complete the transition, or if you're unable to "pass" as a woman in most or all situations, after that it's useless, so the schools in a few instances celebrating pride is just not pragmatic in my opinion. Because outside of these two situations, "pride" is mostly useless and you try to forget you're trans as much as possible because you're just happier if you're really good at bullshitting people about this and hey I'm honest about that.

Trump said his presidency was the greatest 4 years ever, then says Biden immediately destroyed his legacy and now we're in the worst 4 years ever. If he's president for another 4 years, then speculatively, it should be possible for Democrats to ruin it again in 2028/2029 according to this logic ...

I really loved the book series The Wheel of Time as a lens to understand the Nazis. There's a group of villains in these books called the Forsaken. All the Forsaken are based on the Nazis. Our heroes in this story have heard horrific stories about these people on account of their terrible deeds in the distant past, and they have a mythic reputation. But they haven't met them in person, and when they do they are struck by how normal, banal, unremarkable, and in some cases how cowardly and inept they can be. There were thirteen Forsaken to showcase the variety in the Nazis. They are not all equally competent and they don't all think or act in the same way, but they are all still quite dangerous. (And I really like WoT's analysis that some Nazis will eventually be forced to do laundry and normal things and they will be seething and pouting about it)

I didn't mind any of it except that one person on the left where you can see possibly testicles hanging down. That's excessive. Put some clothes on. That's just my bias though.

I hope Kamala picks Mark Kelly too. Everyone in Tucson loves Gabby Giffords. In 2011 everyone here was praying for her to recover, even people living under a rock felt it back then. Having a vice president that has gone to space also sends a message of hope and optimism. Having a campaign that has a theme of space exploration could be a winning strategy because the Democrats in this country wants to move beyond this petty Trump bullshit and what better person to pitch than an astronaut?

He's walked out of interviews before.

Yeah that's true but also remember that in the context of his original statement, "puberty blockers are essentially sterilization drugs". This is strictly not true, at least not entirely. There's evidence to suggest that if you take a puberty blocker for a few years, and then decide to not transition, your fertility is completely unaffected. The body will in most cases attempt to correct for the drug after you stop taking it, as long as the HPG axis is working correctly. While the discussion around trans issues can be at times complicated, I think that people misrepresent the facts around this issue for drama..Sterilization is very scary to people and even the slightest threat to sterilization makes people run around in circles screaming. And for good reason, but they need to think about this issue more carefully. There should be more research to investigate this, but the fact that most Americans ingest plastic and other garbage in their body, and they're still alive should speak to some of the resilience of the human body. Going on a puberty blocker (and nothing else) for a year or two to resolve identity issues probably won't kill anyone..If we eliminate the other issues affecting fertility in the U.S. , such as poor diet, there's probably even less risk to fertility. We know that sperm counts have been dropping forever, and frankly it's easier for them to blame us transgenders than their cheeseburger. I'm being used as a proxy for blame for this plastic cheeseburger. Alea jacta est the die is cast.....