Bayesian

anything short of perfectly gender conforming and straight

Shit, I fell directly into that category & I still delayed my sex change by 10 years after my first attempt at coming out.

It worked until it didn’t. And yes it was hell, I lost years of my life, and wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I think about how much I missed every day, but also, younger me wasn’t wrong.

asexuals undergoing mitosis

Clearly, you do. And they’ve convinced you to blame your neighbor for the boot on your neck.

Right? I feel like this is so obviously not about sex & my life is a clear example to that.

For context, I’m a trans woman who works in tech.

Five and a half years ago I was miserable as hell from relying on external validation. I’d never been happy with my birth sex, but I’d stuck it out for years, duct-taping my happiness together with academic or career achievements, working myself to the bone just to achieve some degree of stability at the cost of my mental health, relationships, happiness, sex life, etc.

For all intents and purposes, I was treated by society as male during that era of my life… albeit of the gay sort of feminine and very depressed variety. I also had a laundry list of accomplishments each year and could not fathom being happy with myself unless I collected them all like pokemon.

Sex changes are like the world’s most opposite thing to external validation. I went from being a white cis male to… well look at what society thinks of trans women. There have been many many times in the past half-decade in which I felt like I’d jumped off a cliff, that I might lose my career, that I’d struggle harder to get ahead, that I wouldn’t be taken seriously anymore.

And some of that was true—I definitely deal with misogyny and transphobia now in a way I never would’ve before. I do feel I have to perform 2x better than before in order to achieve the same sorts of recognition… and I have to now for some reason look good doing it (whereas before I could basically ignore my body, wallow in dysphoria/depression, and still be given credit).

But… what have I done career-wise during the past 5 years? I’ve flatlined. Honestly? I “met expectations” for a half-decade straight. No awards, no accolades, just “did that thing and went home.” I was too busy both emotionally and practically with a whole freaking sex change outside of work. And nobody has come to eat me, even though at this phase of my life most coworkers don’t even know I was once male. Heck, if anything, I look at a lot of my cis female peers and they’re having kids which (unfortunately/unfairly) amounts to practically the same thing.

Before my sex change this would have been unthinkable to me. My entire happiness and sense of identity was pinned to my career. And that was was literally THE duct tape on the joke that was my life. The thing I only way I could manage to keep myself male. Literally the biggest lesson career-wise that my sex change has taught me is that it’s okay to have eras in your life where your career just vibes for a bit while you short your shit out.

So… I just don’t think this is a male vs. female thing. It’s a running away from oneself and trying to cope with your misery via external validation thing. It IS true that when you’re read as female you DO have to push ahead. Chances are, similar to how I felt I had to alienate myself for my career in order to get to a place where I could afford a sex change, this woman felt she had to do the same in order to establish herself as a woman in tech. The barrier to entry is higher.

But once you’re there and established it’s like, girl you can chill now, it’s gonna be fine if you’re fine, maybe with a bit more stability and a bit less pay.

If you think democracy is to blame here, you need to educate yourself about how things work down there. Capitalists have bought and paid their way through elections playing both parties for decades & pumping out propaganda from the media networks they own.

There is no party for the working class in the US. Voters largely did NOT vote for Trump. They voted to abstain or held their nose and voted for the least-bad option. And of those who did vote for Trump they did so in protest & a lack of better options. That’s why Trump is in office, and the oligarchs are just playing you into believing otherwise lest the working class realizes we outnumber them.

Blaming common folk for the exploits of billionaires is exactly what your owners want you to be doing. Your anger and outrage is important and valuable, but you need to wake up and place the blame where it belongs.

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

This is one of the best initiatives I’ve seen from a government in a long-ass time. Such a railway would be a boon for our economy. As a Montrealer, the only thing I can say is I’m pissed it didn’t already happen three decades ago.

$80 bn is chump change for something this critical. It will in the long run pay for itself via increased productivity and other benefits to our Canadian economy.

This is a class war, don’t get it twisted. The working class in the US are a bulwark against that shit coming here.

By all means, fuck the Cheeto & large American corpos. But working class is working class. Don’t be selling us out to Loblaws just because you decided some farmer in Minnesota is to blame for the broken system they have down there.

Yeah, no. Ban the tags. Thank you.

H1-B visas. They keep working there because they don’t want to leave the US. Often they have entire lives and family in the US and have not simply been there for a few short years.