Laurentide

Laurentide , 3 hours ago

Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping.

Are you seriously suggesting that trans women, the people taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone production because testosterone is literally poison to them, are doping themselves with testosterone to gain an advantage in sports? Is that really a thing you believe?

They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.

Why don't we take a look at what the British Journal of Sports Medicine actually said:

One of the most noticeable disparities between gender groups was in height and mass (table 1), with (cisgender men) and transgender women being taller and heavier than their cisgender and transgender counterparts (table 1). Body composition measures (fat mass % and fat-free mass %, table 2) between transgender women and cisgender women found no difference. However, transgender women are, on average as a cohort taller and heavier.

So you're partially correct in that trans women do, on average, have more mass than cis women, but only because trans women tend to be taller. Does that translate to an advantage in athletics?

Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and (cisgender men). Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women.

Apparently not. Trans women, despite being larger on average, performed worse than cisgender women. This is from your own source. Did you not actually read the study, or are you intentionally cherry-picking to misrepresent its conclusions?

When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.

Imagine a woman training her whole life for an event and being beaten by Brittney Griner. That actually happened, and I bet it was emotionally devastating.

Imagine training your whole life, and then finding out that you were born with a permanent medical condition that will require taking drugs that reduce your athletic performance to below the average of your peers, and this condition will also make lots of sexist chuds want to ban you from sports entirely. I bet that would really be unfair, wouldn't you agree?

Laurentide , 2 days ago

Let's also not forget that a lot of those "lazy" people are actually struggling with illness, insecurity, lack of critical resources, discrimination, burnout from "the grind", or just plain don't see the point in contributing much to a system that never seems to contribute anything back. Guaranteed housing, food, and healthcare would fix a lot of the problems that cause "laziness".

Laurentide , 3 days ago

I used to believe the "shitpost that got out of hand" excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:

I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.

It also happened to take place on International Women's Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.

Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.

Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don't know if they're still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the "media fell for a 4chan prank" story for plausible deniability.

Laurentide , 7 days ago

If I use my Persuasion skill to help someone think their way through a problem, is that a "mind-effecting affect"?

Laurentide , 10 days ago

There's a novel titled Glasshouse, by Charles Stross, where members of a far future civilization sign up to live in a simulated mid-20th century town. At one point the protagonist disassembles a flashlight and discovers that it's just a flashlight-shaped case containing a small wormhole whose other end is in close orbit around a star. No one knew how to make an LED or incandescent bulb, or understood enough about early electronic components to hook one up to a switch and a battery. It was easier to make a wormhole generator and stick it in a metal tube.

Laurentide , 11 days ago

That gay and trans people are all disgusting perverts who hate me and want to destroy everything good. My queer friends provide more emotional support in a day than I ever got from my family, the church, or anyone else inside the Evangelical bubble I was raised in.

That people in "The World" (those outside the church) are all evil or unknowingly controlled by Satan and will always try to hurt me. Textbook cult programming from the people who were emotionally abusing me.

That God is speaking directly to me through a voice in my head, except when that voice says I'm a girl, then it's actually a demon or something. (It was likely undiagnosed DID as a result of childhood emotional neglect and repressed gender dysphoria.)

That scientists are all part of a massive satanic conspiracy to trick people into leaving the church.

Dungeons & Dragons being a satanic conspiracy. Satanic Panic stuff in general.

Lots of anti-evolution propaganda that turned out to be misrepresentations of science or complete fabrications.

That they actually believed in all that stuff Jesus said about loving thy neighbor, helping the poor and the sick, and being kind to immigrants, instead of spending their whole lives voting to hurt all of those people as much as possible.

Laurentide , 11 days ago

Conservatives are still quick to suppress speech they don't agree with, though. Their criticism of censorship isn't a cause, it's a smokescreen.

Laurentide , 11 days ago

My father pulled that "just ignore it" shit, too. Somehow it wasn't the bully's fault for attacking me, it was my fault for being such an entertaining target.

Laurentide , 13 days ago

I already turned down a free copy of this game because it installs a rootkit, and now this happens. I hear the game itself is a lot of fun, and I feel bad for the actual developers who are watching people shit on their work because of management and publisher bullshit.

Laurentide , 1 month ago

My oven uses some weird "eco-friendly" self-cleaning process that involves pouring water into it and steaming the dirt off, which doesn't sound like it would be good for the pan. Got any alternatives? I found a Griswold at the thrift store a few years back and I'd like to be able to restore it without damaging it.

Laurentide , 1 month ago

When a friend of mine moved away to be with his trans girlfriend, my parents said it was a sign of the world's corruption in the End Times. That's how most Christians think, in my experience. Anything they personally agree with is God's will, anything they don't like is Satan's corruption, and anything they don't understand is "mysterious ways".

Laurentide , 1 month ago

Hey now, that association is very unfair to wolf scrotums.

Laurentide , 2 months ago

I'm sure a lot of white women felt uncomfortable sharing a locker room with black women when segregation ended. Comfort isn't a good enough reason to have "whites only" locker rooms so why the hell would it justify "cis only" ones? It's not Lia's responsibility if Riley can only handle being around certain types of women.

Laurentide , 2 months ago

The medical consensus already exists. This isn't some experimental drug; puberty blockers have been widely prescribed to children for decades. We know how they work, we know they are generally safe, and we know that blocking access to them will result in needless suffering and death.

Here are the "huge questions" you should really be asking:

If these drugs are so dangerous, why are people only bringing it up now and not sometime in the 40 years since they entered widespread usage?

Why are people suddenly claiming that a drug we've been using for decades has "too many unknowns" and "not enough evidence" for its safety?

If all of this controversy is really genuine, and not the result of a moral panic rooted in bigotry, then why is nobody proposing a ban on puberty blockers for cisgender children? How can they be "dangerous" and "untested" for one group of children but safe and effective for a different group of children when both groups are taking them for the same purpose (to delay puberty)?

If you really care about the welfare of trans people, then you should support giving us the healthcare that we and our doctors say we need.

Laurentide , 2 months ago

I eat two meals a day. I drink mostly plain water, with some black coffee and unsweetened tea. I cut out soda over a decade ago and sweets are a rare luxury. I can't afford to eat massive amounts of food even if I want to. So why am I still fat?

Laurentide , 2 months ago

I'm friends with multiple women and non-binary folks who are in poly relationships, are very much not being preyed upon, and actively hate anything "patriarchal".

Laurentide , 2 months ago

It's also another brick in Florida's road to queer genocide. If a gay or trans child has bigoted parents, social media is often the only way they can learn about the existence of other people like them.

Laurentide , 3 months ago

I think (hope) they're referring to the last panel of that comic.

Laurentide , 3 months ago

Non-furries love anthropomorphic animal characters. Our culture is full of them; all cultures are. Furries didn't invent sports mascots, Looney Tunes, the Easter Bunny, Aesop's fables, or the Egyptian pantheon. Obviously it's not the appreciation for talking animals that people actually hate. So why is it that, out of all the weird subcultures that exist, the one that gets the most hate thrown at it is the one centered around a love of something universal to all human cultures?

It's because the founders of the modern furry fandom were gay and poly, and the fandom has always had an overwhelmingly LGBT membership because it used to be the only non-fetish community that openly accepted gay and trans people. All anti-furry hate is either a negative reaction to the fandom's queerness or a deliberate attempt to attack the LGBT community by proxy.

Laurentide , 4 months ago

That sounds fun. I had a similar idea once, but it was mechs protecting a massive rolling city with its convoy of industrial vehicles. Many of the game mechanics would be enabled by specific vehicles that were vulnerable to attack.

Laurentide , 4 months ago

American Evangelicalism is a tulpamancy cult. I was raised Evangelical, sent to a private Evangelical school, and made to attend several Evangelical churches until adulthood. In all of these communities, it was universally believed that God directly speaks to each person through a special voice in their head. I was very strongly pressured to find, listen to, and obey this voice, and made to feel like I was not a "true believer" for being unable to channel it into glossolalia.

Laurentide , 5 months ago

Inertia. I hate that word. I’ve been hearing it my entire life from my father, who clearly noticed this trait of mine, but instead of helping me he turned it into a means of piling on guilt and shame. “You have too much inertia.” “You need to stop having so much inertia.” “Why aren’t you fighting the inertia? You said you wanted to do this.”

I hate that word.

Laurentide , 8 months ago

lonelygirl15? I remember a friend telling me about that series because she wanted to share a funny video reply (Remember those?) by somebody who managed to find the same animal plushies that the girl carries around; it was a parody episode where the plushies talk about the current situation in the story and suggest that maybe the girl should drop all the teen drama stuff so they can all focus on running for their lives instead.