Only in the cattiest and worst circles does it live on but I know some folk who are still quite sensitive to it.

Apologies, I wasn’t sure where it was coming from and it’s one of those things that strikes me as something people outside the 2SLGBTQIA+ say without realizing that it’s even a thing. I do know folk who still have a pretty visceral reaction to it… I think it depends on what part of the community you have a history on interfacing with as some folk found their initial community in places which were very solidly terrible and unlike “queer” there’s never really been a solid attempt to reclaim “hon”.

Gunna preface this as “knowledge few outside the trans community and even some inside aren’t aware of” so please don’t feel like you did anything at all wrong because this is DEEP lore and like, we know you’re good. This is just my PSA attempt to make future support avoid a potential trigger and be more effective.

Inside the more toxic aspects of the trans fem community “Hon” is a derogatory slur used to refer to non-passing trans women with the implication to belittle or condescend.

A lot of the fear of “conversion” really feels like parents getting ornery because someone might “damage their property” by telling them that being gay is perfectly fine. They want to have the whole heterosexual experience they had but lived vicariously all over again through someone they can pilot through life like a little low maintenance automoton. They want to narrow the field of choices to the ones they want.

You see it expressed all over the place. If you choose not to want kids or marry, pick a career they don’t understand or would pick for themselves they tighten the thumbscrews. So often they don’t love their kids they just love what they represent… Genetic legacy or bragging rights or a vehicle for constant validation. Being LGBTQIA+ is a threat because that represents paths that they would not have chosen. They can’t empathize or desire it…

But estrangement has always been a thing. Kids always become adults and adults always have choices… but we never forget what it was like to be a kid without autonomy. One day that kid is going to be able to make their own choices and there’s not a thing their parent can do about it. I love and value my parents because they always treated me like my own person. I always consider their advice seriously and give them a high priority. Fillial piety is no burden when it feels like returning the support and love. It never sits uneasy. I know a lot of people who struggle because they are biologically programmed to have a bond but they just can’t because the choices their parents made amd continue to attempt to make for them has left lasting damage.

I find it very strange as someone as comfortably far away from French Canada one can be while still being on the continent that I technically am described as French by this diagram. I failed French so hard in 8th grade my teacher passed me on the promise that I never take another French class.

Who wants to deal with people on a day off?

I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.

That’s kind of my reasoning for thinking this whole bear thing is out of proportion. I grew up knowing how to deal with bears. If you’re talking black bear you make a bunch of scary confusing noise and look big or… If you are already noisy they just steer clear and leave you the fuck alone. You gotta be pretty deep woods to encounter Grizzlies and most of the time they are chill. If they aren’t, play dead or go up a tree.

I don’t care if all a rando person, male, female non-binary whatever - does is try and strike up a conversation, I don’t go to the woods to socialize. Act like a proper bear and gimme my gorram space!

Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren’t generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

It’s just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren’t somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we’re well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch… But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies… chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something “only you are smart enough to believe” - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.

You are unlikely to if you aren’t in Canada. It seems like Indigenous folk down in the States don’t have quite as much success spreading widespread awareness. I produced some stuff and had to explain to a bunch of Americans what a land acknowledgement was. For the past 5 years where I am they are performed before any meeting or performance. Up here 2S gets top billing at the beginning of the LGBTQIA initnialism to give deference to gender categories that were suppressed by European supremacist colonization.

At the same time Stonehenge has some delicate evidence of ancient painted designs that requires special imaging equipment to detect that may have been wiped out bu this. There’s a reason why they tend to keep people at a distance from the thing.

Yup. Bonkers.

It’s bonkers that you have to actively sign up for it. Canada had conscription on the books as an available tool but like… you never actively signed on or were penalized for not doing that paperwork. In 2021 they ended all mandatory military service and two months ago they removed conscription entirely. Not that it’s possible for conscription to not come back as technically it’s not actively banned, but if it did it would have to be written and implemented as law entirely from scratch and be re subject to the full process of new constitutional challenge and could now be subject to gender discriminations to strictly men as required by current civil rights .

There’s something about coercing someone to sign their name to paper to register for conscription that feels wrong to me that just accepting a call to conscription doesn’t. Like they want to reduce your resistance to it by making it “voluntary”.

I think it’s a lot more black and white being trans than people realize and I have my own pet theories about what gender euphoria /dysphoria is that I observe as being two independent factors.

Half of the problem I think in reaching people is that the vast majority of cis people don’t have an observed internal gender preference. We are trying to build empathy with something we as trans people assume they have too - but maybe only a small minority of cis people experience it. I don’t think we actually understand cis people, we just assume a bunch of things about them using trans people as a false opposite.

Thing is… If I am correct, the assumed massive earth shaking regret of what would happen if a cis person went through gender reassignment… Is they might just adapt and be fine.

I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage…

But there’s another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don’t see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.

Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors… And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.

Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade…

But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.

It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.

In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.

There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.

It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.

Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn’t as trans affirming as you would think… My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a “People of Color sport league”.

Ditching us all into a new category like we’re quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we’re implicitly not cis… Isn’t something I would appreciate.

Well burning a lesbian flag and burning a lesbian candle are two different things.

You are halfway there. Those examples you gave define constructs but a lot of these things are not what philosophy uses to define social constructs. Scientific taxonomy constructs and linguistic constructs are things but they are fairly useless in discussion surrounding social constructs because while different cultures might draw the line differently around what exactly constitutes a “chair” vs say a “stool” or some such that’s more of just a linguistic boundry. Its basically always a thing you sit on.

Philosophy uses a bunch of different ideas labeled as different forms of construct to break down the idea of how different types of categorization or subjection happen… but when they start talking about “social” constructs they are specifically talking about categories of human interactions with something that have incredibly variable different potential contexts based on culture. It also requires things which are included or excluded from those category for not entirely practical reasons. Philosophy uses this to talk about how social categories are subjective creating or allieving tension between different cultural groups.

Food is actually a good example. There are a lot of things culturally considered food and non food items despite those items all having nutritional value and being safe to consume. In our increasingly cosmopolitan world a lot of expansion has happened to increase the size of the category. Like raw fish was not considered a food item by a lot of people when and where I was growing up. Now sashimi is everywhere and no one bats an eye. Digging for another example mice are technically edible but even raised and slaughtered cleanly very few would consider them valid as food. Whether what I put on your plate is deemed an disgusting insult or a delicious delicacy is really in the eye of the beholder and has caused a number of historical diplomatic and cultural issues around other cultures veiwing each other as inferior.

Just because something is a construct does not automatically make it a social construct.

Food is a social construct. For a social construct to exist you have to have a social category with shifting goalposts based on different context and cultural factors that are not rigidly defined. Like “Fat” - what is considered fat for a person is based on context. A supermodel is fat for being 5’9 and 145lbs but we would call a constructiom labourer skinny as fuck at those same dimensions. Each culture constructs it’s own version of what defines “fat” which is different and distinct from something than the medical guidelines for obesity or an expectation of reasonable health. “Fat” is in the eye of the beholder and represents overlapping cultural circles with varying degrees of consideration of what is excluded from the category.

The scientific concept of nutritional substance is not how we always define “food”. Culturally people contest what is considered food vs non food items based on cultural factors. Like eating mice for instance does have nutritional value but there are a lot of people who would contest them as being a valid food item even if they were raised in clean conditions due to cultural adversions. “That isn’t food.” has been uttered in all sincerity by people encountering strange delicacies that their culture has taboos against eating beliving it dangerous, unpleasant or just categorically not something intended to be eaten. Thus “food” would be in part a sociologically constructed category.