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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I have such a mess of opinions about Drag Race. I’m glad that it brought the idea of drag to the mainstream so that people understand that drag performers aren’t the kind of monsters that right wingers make them out to be. But in a lot of ways, I feel like it’s done more harm than good to the trans community. With the constant conflation between trans and drag, and also the fact that Ru Paul is a fucking asshole who’s not at all supportive of the trans community, it’s hard to see it in a positive light.

    I also just hate reality competition shows, especially in a scene that should be so much more supportive and uplifting and cooperative, rather than competitive.



  • And people don’t even realize that cis people have it too! My BiL was recently talking about taking Cialis and Testosterone. I have a niece that just got breast implants and other cosmetic procedures. People going through menopause take hormones. Cis children with precocious puberty take puberty blockers so they don’t have to go through that at 8 or 9 years old. And cis people don’t have the self-reflection to realize that these are all gender-affirming care.



  • I really wish for a day when exploring one’s gender and sexuality isn’t seen as aberrant or deviant or “sinful”. People need to feel comfortable to find out what’s right for them, who they are, without judgement. We see so much bullshit scaremongering about detransitioning as though it validates the fact that being trans isn’t real, and that’s not the case. Someone exploring, trying a change, and realizing that’s not the right thing is fine! Of course what isn’t fine is how many people detransition due to social pressure. If your entire family disowns you, you lose your job, etc., then that’s really fucking hard to bear, and no one should have to go through that.


  • For far too long, there’s been this idea in tech spaces that a person, regardless of how shitty they are, is automatically deserving of adulation because they’re some “10x” developer. That soft skills, and wider understanding of the landscape, are completely unnecessary. They think it’s “meritocracy” where all that matters is the code you deliver, and you can be the shittiest person on the planet otherwise. It’s created so much toxicity, so much hostility, and driven so many people away. And it’s so much more apparent in OSS spaces where pull requests seem to be the only currency people have to wield.

    Those kinds of attitudes completely pushed me away from participating is nearly all Linux/OSS communities. I used to be really active on a number of forums and in irc. But that kind of shit became so overbearing it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Not to mention the fact that it felt like 75% of the people there were also 4channers and well on their way down the alt-right rabbit hole.



  • some trans folk can “stop being trans” as a result of their social environment or whatever

    This is what evangelicals and terfs claim. But it’s not true. It’s why you cannot convert a trans person, or a gay person from what they are. It’s why the medical community has acknowledged that the best treatment is affirming care. If you believe being trans is a social issue you’re putting trans people into a position to lose their access to medical care.

    You took this quote completely out of context and inverted the intended meaning to suit your argument. The statement Ada made was

    And hell to take your gatekeeping ever further, even if you’re right, and some trans folk can “stop being trans” as a result of their social environment or whatever, they’re still trans until they’re not.


  • It’s not gatekeeping

    Yes, it is. You are saying that anyone without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria isn’t trans. You do not get to make that kind of statement.

    You are the one erasing others’ experiences

    You are the one arguing against trans people’s legitimacy

    No one here is saying being trans isn’t real. But *you are when you say that it’s only valid if you have dysphoria.

    You also have to think this through: if you believe that you can only really be trans if you have a medical diagnosis, then you have created vast swathes of gatekeepers for being trans: doctors, insurance companies, politicians, governments at every level. In our bigoted, cisheteronormative society, if we say you can only be trans with a diagnosis, and that society doesn’t want trans people to exist, then they can just stop diagnosing people. Doctors can refuse, and decide instead that you’re depressed, bipolar, BPD, etc. instead, and that anyone who thinks they’re trans is just “mentally ill.” Governments can pass laws preventing state run insurances (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, etc.) from paying for anything related to dysphoria. They can also pass laws saying private insurances either don’t have to cover it, or that they can’t. I know for a fact this is already happening because I live in Florida. I’m watching this scenario happen right in front of me. You’re taking away the ability for a person to know their own mind and their own body, and their right and ability to understand their own identity, and handing that judgement over to people with a vested interest in denying it.

    And I can see why you’d think this would be a path to walk: if we say “a medical diagnosis means we’re objectively, scientifically trans, then the bigots can’t deny it”, but that’s not how things work. That’s just pandering to the oppressors. You will never appease them.

    No one is saying that you can just call anyone trans you want, like crossdressers, drag queens, or “attack helicopters” (I honestly can’t believe you even threw that one around). Only the bigots do that.

    No one is saying your experience isn’t valid. It’s exactly the opposite. If you feel dysphoria is central to your experience, that’s fine! You’re just as trans as the next trans person, just as valid. But that’s your experience. You don’t get to generalize your experience and then decide that’s the yardstick by which everyone else must be measured.


  • It should be ok to tell people, for example, that dysphoria is central to the trans condition

    I don’t agree. It’s ok to say “dysphoria is central to my trans experience, though I understand this isn’t universal.” That doesn’t gatekeep anyone. In fact it’s the opposite. But it’s not ok to tell others that dysphoria or medical treatment is required to be trans.

    Sure, in many locations, having a diagnosis is required before doctors will allow you to even begin HRT or consider having surgeries if you want them. But that’s just a symptom of a broken medical system that enforces cisheteronormativity, and prevents self-ID and informed consent. It’s not what actually defines what being trans is all about. It’s just a hoop people are forced to jump through.

    There’s a difference between having honest and good-faith discussions about the role dysphoria, surgery and HRT play in the overall trans experience, and making broad definitive statements. That’s what actually erases others’ experiences.


  • I think the problem comes when it’s framed as “you can only be trans if you have a diagnosis” as opposed to “you’re trans whether you have a diagnosis or any kind of medical experience with it or not.” One can say “it took a doctor diagnosing me with dysphoria before I could accept I was trans, but I understand that this is just my experience, and I know others have their own experience” and that’s totally fine.



  • If that’s your view of it, then you truly do not understand how businesses operate (especially larger companies). “Hey this is free, let’s switch to this!” isn’t a pitch. There are so many factors to consider: service, support, contracts, deployment, on and on and on. It would be great if every business adopted OSS, but they’re not going to. And that’s not a failure of one employee to convince a Fortune 500 company, for example, that LO would be a cost-saving measure.




  • Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.

    I keep seeing this, and I don’t really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that’s exactly what Reddit is. So I’m genuinely curious what’s meant when people say they don’t want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don’t get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.

    But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I’m not convinced it’s actually a benefit at all.


  • Eclipse is a popular IDE that’s super customizable and extensible. They have a huge marketplace of plugins. And swear I remember there being a WYSIWYG editor for it, but now that I’m searching, it seems there might not be anymore.

    I definitely understand the pain though.

    We have experimented with CMS options, but had various issues arising from this - lack of customisation/design flexibility (each individual page we create often has a completely unique design based on the content

    I’m a web dev who got their start back in the 90s. I’m also an enthusiast for classic computers and restoring them. One of the biggest problems is that older web browsers won’t view anything with HTTPS, have no idea how to render modern web languages, and modern browsers make a mess of classic sites (though this is also an effect of much larger screen resolutions). So I was working on a project to try to build sites on the modern web that older browsers could view, using like HTML3, with no CSS nor JS. I had this ambitious idea that maybe there was a way to create a CMS that could build older sites like that. I was trying to use a headless CMS that I could take content from with a modern frontend for a modern experience, and then build a backend that could wrap the content up in 90s-tastic style. And it’s possible if you want just a generic, bland and basic site. But if you want anything that looks like things did then, it’s impossible. Like you mentioned, everything was so bespoke. so often pages then were built largely with images: navigation, layout, styling, etc. Everything was so unique, custom, and specific to the site. It wasn’t like now where everything is based on the exact same grid, or Bootstrap theme, or WP theme.

    The sad part is that there were so many WYSIWYG editors back then that you could use, and even web-based ones (Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, etc) but all that’s gone now. I did find a copy of Dreamweaver 1 and 2 on MacintoshGarden and gave that a spin for a bit on an old PowerMac G4. That was fun, but I can’t remember if they had a Windows version during the 90s. Though as hard as it is to get even 10 year old software to run on Win 10 and 11, that probably wouldn’t work anyway.

    Long-winded way to say: the divide between the 90s and now, wrt web tech, is vast. Not sure how close this is to what you’re trying to do, but thought I’d share it.