LGballT encouraging teens to identify as trans: "If you want to date someone and they're not into your gender, then just come out as another gender so you can date them!"

JFVG · 2021-01-18T13:19:32+00:00

I'm so glad these message weren't around when I was a teenager. I had depression, I constantly felt like I had a horrible dirty secret about being same-sex attracted that would mean my life was over if anyone ever found out, plus there was the whole AIDS hysteria going on, which was the basis of a lot of very negative comments about gay people. On top of that I was pretty darn flamboyant so really didn't fit in. I used to be so envious of women that they could just be into men without having to deal with any of the stuff I did, it felt like they definitely had the greener grass of the deal to me at the time. If I'd been getting bombarded with messages along the lines of 'well just be one then', and that anyone who disagreed was a horrendous person, I'm sure the message would appeal to me.

JFVG · 2021-01-18T13:10:19+00:00

In terms of weird-stuff-porn-users-end-up-getting-off-to, this is pretty vanilla. Just stop spending your free time jerking off over a laptop and your brain will eventually go back to normal.

JFVG · 2021-01-12T18:56:42+00:00

Plus without downvotes, you don't have to see a hundred twatty comments along the lines of 'Sorting by controversial, wish me luck!' on every post that has more than one point of view in the comments.

JFVG · 2021-01-10T00:38:22+00:00

Can't websites do 'progressive web app' versions of themselves? Like when you go on a website and it says 'do you want to add this site to your home screen?'. That's basically the same as an app isn't it?

JFVG · 2021-01-07T22:07:03+00:00

"It's OK to be homophobic as long as you're racist as well" basically.

JFVG · 2021-01-04T23:45:38+00:00

It's a myth, people have tried to test it by studying women living in dormitories together, it doesn't happen, there's no magic pheromone in the air that's controlling people's bodies. But of course any time people living together are on their period at the same time (even if it's just for one of the days) they're probably going to bring up the thing about being synced up.

JFVG · 2021-01-04T19:23:10+00:00

I suspect most people on the bird app who talk about being 'neurodivergent' probably have a low bar for what gets counted as such. Everyone seems to want a label.

JFVG · 2021-01-04T10:50:28+00:00

Here's the text in response to 'which app is the best for femme-on-femme dating?' just in case it disappears:

Your terms could use a bit of work, but thank you so much for the detailed information!

I mean, the HER thing is not confusion on our part. It's cis women not knowing we're just as much women as they, and I assume you, are. We're not "woman kind"; we're women. If they're looking for other cis women then it's on them to state their bigoted positions. "Woman kind" would be anyone whose gender aligns with women (such as non-binary femmes) unless you're using an outdated, transphobic version of it. The use of terms like that is exactly how the TERF movement started in the 1970s. Please don't perpetuate it.

I'm the kind of trans woman that other trans women typically can't even clock. I'm the kind that tends to shatter expectations of what we're supposed to look like. Harassment is the only thing I personally worry about, and it sounds like most of those would be fine for me. Though, I likely wouldn't use HER anyway given the sheer amount of TERFs and men I've heard of on it.

On a personal note, jfc I really wish I didn't have to consider whether I'm going to get death threats just for using a lesbian dating app. Wtf is wrong with people that they think that sort of behavior is acceptable.

JFVG · 2021-01-03T11:34:54+00:00

In the vast majority of cases, people who identify as transgender are unambiguously one sex or the other. I don't see why people think it's useful to keep going on about extremely rare cases. It's like, the message used to be that sex and gender weren't the same thing, but now the message is more like 'they're not, but they might be, because it's a mystery'.

JFVG · 2021-01-03T11:28:54+00:00

I've seen a lot of social media profiles which start off by listing a billion ways to give them free money for no reason. What's that about? Does anybody actually send them money? Or is it just there as some sort of 'the world owes me a living' statement?

JFVG · 2021-01-03T11:11:42+00:00

Or 'bots'.

JFVG · 2021-01-02T15:57:06+00:00

That's how I see it. Having anorexia doesn't mean you're actually fat, having OCD doesn't mean you actually left the iron on at home.

JFVG · 2021-01-02T15:43:29+00:00

A speech being interrupted every ten seconds by people calling out 'point of personal privilege' is like something from a sketch show. Absolute insanity.

JFVG · 2021-01-02T12:56:14+00:00

I'm really looking forward to when people can't play the literal 'Trump card' any more. It just seems like no matter the conversation, someone has to point out they don't like the US president.

JFVG · 2021-01-01T17:57:33+00:00

Call me a gatekeeper, but I feel there should be some sort of threshold for how actively a term is used before it can be considered 'a thing'. It seems like there's a term (and a flag, of course) for a huge amount of 'sexualities' which could just be explained with words that already exist. Or not explained. The world doesn't need to know the ins and outs of what turns you on.

JFVG · 2020-12-31T16:09:48+00:00

That's like saying if you could ever possibly like the smell of bacon then you're not a vegetarian. Unless you're sticking it in your mouth, don't bother labelling yourself because of it.

JFVG · 2020-12-30T14:44:09+00:00

This is really interesting. I wonder if at some point there'll be some sort of 'T drop the NB' discussion group.

JFVG · 2020-12-30T10:21:29+00:00

Sleep's just weird in general. I stayed over at a friend's house once, sharing a bed. I woke up in the middle of the night and realised I had my hand up her top on her boob. To this day I have no idea if she thinks I'm some sort of weirdo who goes around groping sleeping people.

JFVG · 2020-12-30T09:33:13+00:00

People certainly are asking this question over on the bird app.

JFVG · 2020-12-29T11:12:46+00:00

I had a friend who used to keep a hammer by his bed, just in case. One night he woke up to find a man standing over him. He realised at that moment he wasn't quite up to the task of hammering someone to death so rushed out of the bed and turned the light on, only to find it was his housemate sleepwalking. He started locking the bedroom door after that.

JFVG · 2020-12-29T10:15:22+00:00

I know some people who always refer to the Drag Race contestants as 'she', which I always find a bit odd since they're not claiming to be women, but apparently (I am told) the thing to do is to use their persona's pronouns. I wonder if they'll do that in this case.

JFVG · 2020-12-29T10:10:54+00:00

I saw a comedian once who said the worst fetish to have would be one where you liked looking at your own flaccid penis. Your comment reminded me of that.

JFVG · 2020-12-29T09:25:24+00:00

The Hanging Stranger's good, definitely worth a read. It's one of his that has stuck with me for some reason, along with The Preserving Machine.

JFVG · 2020-12-29T09:20:19+00:00

I would guess that less than 0.1% of the world's population have defeated both a franipani tree and a possum with a katana. 99.9% of us bow before your katana mastery.

JFVG · 2020-12-27T18:50:02+00:00

I've just spent a couple of minutes looking up 'headmates' and the concept sounds like literal insanity.

JFVG · 2020-12-24T14:43:46+00:00

Millennials are in a very strange situation. They get called boomers, but it's still a lot of people's go-to name for young people.

JFVG · 2020-12-23T11:23:19+00:00

Not people. Genital owners.

JFVG · 2020-12-23T09:35:10+00:00

I have a bit of a fascination with CHAZ. I really hope one day a good documentary comes out about it.

JFVG · 2020-12-22T11:02:51+00:00

Interesting that 'used to be a sex worker' is there in the bio, I can't imagine what kind of circles I would have to socialise in in order to think that was something that needed to be in there.

Also (complete side-note, and not something that necessarily applies in this case) I feel people have quite a low bar as to what counts as 'sex work' nowadays. I've known a few people who worked as strippers, but if you referred to them as 'sex workers' I am fairly sure you'd end up with a punch in the mouth. Maybe that's just me, I think of prostitution when I hear it rather than someone trying to sell a picture of them in a bra.

JFVG · 2020-12-22T10:52:29+00:00

Back before this was such a hot topic the explanation I would often hear as to why gender identity and sexuality were together in the initialism is that a lot of T identify as L, G or B. As if to say, well, they're in there anyway so they might as well have a letter. I don't know if that's a common explanation any more, and it didn't really make much sense to me at the time. You could say the same about hairdressers.

JFVG · 2020-12-22T10:36:52+00:00

Exactly now you're getting it!

Is there some reason people like this type everything in this weird condescending way? I hope this is just something they do online. If they actually act like that in real one-to-one interactions that would be bizarre.

JFVG · 2020-12-20T19:34:25+00:00

Let's just take it. Japan has 'ice cream' from us, we can have 'chunibyo' from them.

JFVG · 2020-12-20T19:28:31+00:00

Fingers crossed for 'Generation Alpha', I suppose.

JFVG · 2020-12-20T18:26:49+00:00

Is it millennials, do you think? They're coming up to 40 now.

JFVG · 2020-12-20T14:15:07+00:00

A very interesting point indeed. I suppose one factor to consider is whether people who describe themselves as 'sapiosexual' are generally intelligent.

JFVG · 2020-12-18T17:20:16+00:00

Same, I find it astounding how often I'll see someone's Twitter and their pinned post is just a list of fifty ways to give them free money. If they were actually offering something in return I think I'd donate out of shock.

JFVG · 2020-12-15T23:09:08+00:00

Could be worse. Could be 'titty Skittles'.

JFVG · 2020-12-14T11:54:34+00:00

The latter, is what I'm wondering about. I was just curious to know if anybody had attempted to explain that, as the proportion is huge compared to those who do not identify as transgender.

JFVG · 2020-12-13T14:43:01+00:00

Well, yes, it's the official explanation I was wondering about. It just seems rather odd that they wouldn't go, oh, that's odd, people identify as this rare thing and also this rare thing, and so do so many others.

JFVG · 2020-12-13T10:23:57+00:00

People just don't like landlords, they feel they're parasites. Housing's a limited resource, and they go around buying it all up to profit off of people who need somewhere to live. Plus you've got the fact so many of them are dodgy, don't repair anything, cram too many people into properties etc. Perhaps in countries where the rental market is better regulated there is less ill-feeling towards them, but in some places it's like the wild west.

JFVG · 2020-12-13T09:46:36+00:00

Maybe. A lot of the recreationally offended people I've seen online seem to list mental illnesses like they're collecting stamps. It's like the first five things they list in their Twitter bio.

JFVG · 2020-12-13T09:41:07+00:00

It's just a way to harass people, there'll usually be one or two people in a car and if there's a whole bunch of people surrounding it, that can be quite scary. Most people won't drive through them.

JFVG · 2020-12-12T16:28:33+00:00

I love the 'can everyone please go and look at the mean answers I got somewhere else' parts.

JFVG · 2020-12-11T20:47:10+00:00

These ones were out of sight for the most part, we had them hanging outside on the wall by the window to stop flies coming in.

JFVG · 2020-12-11T16:44:33+00:00

I bought some fly traps by a company called 'The Buzz' and they caught more flies than I could even comprehend existing. I ended up with plastic bottles packed full of dead flies, it was revolting but strangely fascinating. The traps had a very strong smell to them, so definitely for outdoor use only.

JFVG · 2020-12-10T13:20:42+00:00

I know this isn't exactly the key part of the article, but someone would need to offer me more than £40 to deliver a pair of pants to a lake at 2am.

JFVG · 2020-12-09T16:42:23+00:00

Probably self-diagnosed in most cases, I'd take it with a fair amount of salt. A lot of young people seem to want to tick as many boxes as they can.

JFVG · 2020-12-09T12:22:57+00:00

I tried the thing of watching well-known movies with the audio and subtitles set to French, I picked up a few key phrases like 'encore un peu du vin?' from that. Books might be a bit beyond me, maybe a magazine might be a good way to ease into this.

JFVG · 2020-12-08T22:29:39+00:00

I sometimes wonder if they deliberately make the installation huge, to make the game seem more impressive. Certainly if it were under a certain amount, I bet a lot of people would turn their noses up and think 'is that all?'.

JFVG · 2020-12-08T22:17:45+00:00

I was playing Galaga a couple of weeks back funnily enough, I bought one of those knock-off handheld NES consoles a while back and have certainly got my money's worth out of it. Occasionally I'll find something new that captures my interest, most recently Division 2, but it's certainly a rarity that I'll see any through to the end.

That's really interesting that you mention the space is used on graphics, that's funny to think that a 100GB installation might have around 8MB of actual code.

JFVG · 2020-12-08T22:08:55+00:00

A few vague reasons, which is probably why I didn't have a massive drive to get it sorted. I've been over to France a few times and felt I should be able to do a bit more than say yes, no, thank you, can I have, etc. I've got friends that speak it and recommend shows to watch, which would be interesting I suppose. I think initially I just found the idea of learning a language interesting but then after the initial learning-so-much-every-day part wore off my enthusiasm dropped.

JFVG · 2020-12-08T17:33:53+00:00

I notice that a lot with the trophies / achievements. Sometimes I'll do something fairly ordinary like beat the first level or play online and it'll tell me that only something like 50% of players got around to doing that.

JFVG · 2020-12-08T13:15:50+00:00

That's just small sites in general, there are probably a fair amount of people reading it though. The amount of posters compared to lurkers is tiny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

JFVG · 2020-12-07T19:40:58+00:00

It always irks me when people past the first three letters in the LGB etc initials call themselves 'queer'. If they went with 'flaggots' I could accept that.

JFVG · 2020-12-07T12:21:17+00:00

Paradoxsexual.

JFVG · 2020-12-07T12:21:01+00:00

Or flags. Why does everything need a flag?

JFVG · 2020-12-04T13:09:45+00:00

You should probably chuck in 'rooted in white supremacy' for good measure. That seems to be the go-to phrase for 'I won't / can't explain why, but if you disagree with this then you're some sort of racist person'.

JFVG · 2020-12-03T23:57:25+00:00

I saw it when it came out. The only thing I remember about it is the main character being drowned on a big wheel. Maybe I should watch it again if this bloke's saying it's so good.

JFVG · 2020-12-01T15:48:52+00:00

Glad to see the membership snowballing. I suspect however that this might also become the only post in s/interesting.

So, that's kind of interesting.

JFVG · 2020-11-28T10:22:04+00:00

That's got to be the absolute main thing, to just say 'gay' instead of reeling off that whole fifty letter thing. I've seen people take pride in saying as many as they can remember as if they're reciting pi to the hundredth digit but the fact is the other letters aren't relevant to a lot of discussions. People focus a lot on the difference between the first three and the fourth letter but really, everything after that is just as much its own thing.

JFVG · 2020-11-26T22:10:01+00:00

We have the traffic light labels on a lot of food in the UK, it does help to make it obvious that something's full of sugar or salt. Sometimes it can be quite surprising how much sugar things have got in them.

JFVG · 2020-11-26T16:16:07+00:00

I'm so baffled. What grounds could somebody possibly believe they have for contacting the police over this?

JFVG · 2020-11-26T11:54:38+00:00

If a post starts with 'PSA' or ends with 'thanks for coming to my TED talk', it can be safely ignored.

JFVG · 2020-11-22T23:46:29+00:00

I mean really, imagine if he had punched him and HR got involved. His online friends might cheer him on for it but ultimately he's punching someone because he didn't like the sound of his sexuality. In the real world that's frowned upon.

JFVG · 2020-11-22T22:43:52+00:00

I've looked up 'heteromantic' (which I note gets a red squiggly line under it in this browser) and I'm no closer to working out what they're going on about. At this point it would be easier if someone just clarified who isn't in the 'community'.

JFVG · 2020-11-22T22:34:03+00:00

I can just picture the 'I had to shut down the conversation' part, I've seen that a few times. It's basically the blind panic people like that get into when they encounter someone who thinks differently to them.

JFVG · 2020-11-22T22:31:50+00:00

It's such a quick jump from saying he wanted to punch someone to saying he preaches tolerance and acceptance.

JFVG · 2020-11-20T15:07:46+00:00

Recreational outrage. I've known a few people like that.

JFVG · 2020-11-18T20:14:34+00:00

They probably don't like the term homosexual since it has an actual concrete meaning rather than just being a vague term to use to sound interesting. I saw an article last week about a singer who had 'come out as queer' and by the end of it I couldn't tell if she was actually claiming to be same-sex attracted or not.

JFVG · 2020-11-18T16:53:16+00:00

I sometimes suspect the majority of people who describe themselves as 'queer' are heterosexual.

JFVG · 2020-11-14T10:02:21+00:00

I listened to a podcast about that, The Last Days of August. It was quite interesting.

JFVG · 2020-11-01T15:58:57+00:00

What would this person be like without the internet? Better, I imagine.

JFVG · 2020-10-26T22:16:33+00:00

TWAW is 'trans women are women', TMAM is 'trans men are men'.

JFVG · 2020-10-26T12:42:05+00:00

I love the idea of a 'no politics' place online, the way it gets shoehorned into everything on some places is quite tiresome, especially to people who don't live in America.

JFVG · 2020-10-25T21:58:16+00:00

It might encourage them to write a bit about what the link is and why they're sharing it, rather than just spamming a link and leaving.

JFVG · 2020-10-25T11:47:15+00:00

Either that or it's the person who made that website, trying to get hits.

JFVG · 2020-10-24T22:48:52+00:00

I'd be up for just getting rid of link posts altogether. People can put links within the post itself if they're relevant. Constantly seeing spam posts for that 'my time' website all over the site is quite annoying.

JFVG · 2020-10-21T21:21:21+00:00

Could be worse, could be 'problematic'.

JFVG · 2020-10-18T15:31:50+00:00

The overwhelming majority of the time, people who go on about about their 'gender identity' are unambiguously one sex or the other, and certainly don't need some sort of chromosome / DNA investigation to work it out. I find it bizarre that we've gone from hearing 'sex and gender are different things' to 'sex is not a real measurable thing' so quickly.

JFVG · 2020-10-17T09:03:03+00:00

I have seen Bill Hicks on television. Checkmate, Bill.

JFVG · 2020-10-16T22:49:22+00:00

Things you shouldn't say:

things you shouldn't say.

JFVG · 2020-10-15T18:27:04+00:00

I hope this is actually how they introduce themselves in real life.

JFVG · 2020-10-13T18:13:56+00:00

I think a lot of people who just follow whatever the currently-acceptable opinions are know that they don't agree with some of them, or maybe even a lot of them, but they just find it easier to go along with it all if the alternative is getting abuse over it, especially the ones who pretty much live their entire lives online. It's like with those black squares people were posting on Instagram to support BLM. I reckon plenty of people were just doing that so they'd have a bit of protection against being called racists for not posting one.

JFVG · 2020-10-09T15:17:32+00:00

Caffeine drinks exist on a spectrum, please use the term pancaffeine in future.

JFVG · 2020-10-07T13:35:32+00:00

People always try to shoehorn race into things to give their argument more weight. I've seen that come up a lot when people are discussing who should and shouldn't be able to participate in women's sport, you'll see people claiming that that's basically the same thing as saying women of different ethnicities shouldn't compete together.

JFVG · 2020-10-04T20:26:09+00:00

Happy birthday, thanks for putting this together.

JFVG · 2020-10-04T19:05:21+00:00

I was talking about this exact scenario yesterday, weirdly enough. It was a place that had a bit of a reputation for troublemakers hanging out in which for some reason had 'wine bar' in its name, a sign saying 'no under 21s' on the door, and bouncers on the door most nights despite it just being a small bar in a row of shops rather than an actual pub. As 16 year olds it was absolutely off-limits to attempt to get into, so I forgot about it for about a decade until one day the bouncer randomly upwards-nodded at me and pulled the door open a bit as I walked past. Rather than have an awkward conversation about how I wasn't intending to go in, I said hello, wandered in, and then became a regular at the dodgy bar for the next few years.

JFVG · 2020-10-04T18:43:12+00:00

I've noticed this with some people from my work, their social media accounts are full of things only relevant to the US. I think it's probably because they follow American celebrities and see them going on about it and just blindly assume it applies to the rest of the world. Saying that, they go on about Trump a lot as well and they presumably know he's the president of America and no other countries, so who knows what's going on in their heads.

JFVG · 2020-09-23T09:33:29+00:00

I used to know a bunch of people in the 90s who would often go on about how 'everyone was bisexual', but they only ever meant it to mean 'nobody is 100% heterosexual'. They were fine accepting that people could be homosexual for some reason. They'd say things along the lines of 'if you love someone, what does it matter what body they've got?' which sounded sensible when you were in a group that agrees with all that sort of stuff and calls you names if you don't, but don't really hold up to how humans actually work (as I found out on a couple of occasions when trying to parrot this stuff to people not in that group).

JFVG · 2020-09-22T20:41:14+00:00

This seems like the sort of thing that could be covered in a book, really.

JFVG · 2020-09-22T08:35:15+00:00

I've noticed that, the account that keeps posting irrelevant links to a site called 'My Time'. Maybe it's one of those things where a site's paid someone to get them hits, so they just spam them all over the place.

JFVG · 2020-09-22T08:29:15+00:00

What was that sub about? I used to see loads of posts from it on the 'new' page and couldn't figure out what it was. Actually that's the case for lots of subs, I'll click on them and they don't explain what they are in the sidebar.

JFVG · 2020-09-22T08:23:37+00:00

I love the random 'rooted in white supremacy' chucked in there, and would be really interested to hear it explained. I suspect it's something along the lines of 'well society as a whole is something something white supremacy so any ideas people have that I think are bad are part of that'.

JFVG

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