Notices by Legally Faith :v_tg: :v_lb: (faithisleaping@anarres.family)

Trans folks who know Europe better than me: I got invited to a conference in Riga, Latvia. Anything I should know about Latvia when deciding whether or not to go?

Saw a headline:

Twitter accuses Meta of hiring former staff in cease-and-desist order

Well, maybe you shouldn't have fucking fired them all, then. 🙄

Sorry Elon, that's the way tech works. You fire people for no good reason and they go find new jobs, often doing basically the same thing only, for one of your competitors. That's kinda the way it works. Thanks to California labor laws, there's nothing you can do about that. Unless someone took the Twitter source code with them on a thumb drive, it's all in the clear.

Unless you can prove they literally copied code or are violating a patent, it's 100% okay for them to re-implement the same idea for someone else. In fact, every one of those engineers probably has a laundry list of technical debt they hate and things they'd like to do better next time around. They're probably all reveling at the opportunity to start fresh and "do it right this time" or at least avoid some old mistakes.

You don't get to fire all the people with all the knowledge and then claim Facebook stole it because they hired the people you didn't think were important enough to get paychecks. Knowledge is valuable, code isn't. You're a fool who threw away their most valuable asset.

Note: this is not an endorsement of Threads in any way. I expect it to be a catastrophic failure and have no interest in joining the platform. It's just that musk is an idiot. 🙄

Feeling this comic hard today:

https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/sxf6l0/sometimes_it_comes_hitting_just_like_first_time/

@roadriverrail I'm not super familiar with all the gender trauma arguments but I suspect it gets into the last bit of what I said. Because the medical system is looking for a disease to treat, the medical definitions and diagnoses focus on things like depression and anxiety. You have to prove you're in enough gender-related pain to be worth it for them to pay to treat you. 🙄 Before transition, I would lay awake nights wishing I could be a girl and fantasizing about how that could happen. They don't care one iota about my desire, just the fact that I was losing sleep. It's the worst sort of capitalist gatekeeping. In that sense, maybe the symptoms they're looking for would be better described by the word "trauma" but that's because they're largely looking for the wrong things.

When you instead shift from a disease and treatment model to asking "what does this person need to thrive and what's standing in their way?" we can look at things in a far more nuanced way. I can say "I'm far happier on estrogen" and that's enough of a reason for me to be on HRT without having to prove that I'm miserable on testosterone.

@YouShallNotPass @Ghostynn @Terra @Dani @AlwaysAutumn

@roadriverrail Splitting off before the transphobia discussion...

I don't think that's accurate. I think dysphoria, the trauma many of us have are separate, usually unrelated things, and neither are really intrinsic to bring trans. Being trans just means that your internal sense of gender doesn't fit the category you were assigned at birth. That can be true without causing you unbearable pain or trauma. It's also possible to have dysphoria or gender-related trauma without a strong sense of gender identity different from you both category. (That can get confusing as hell.)

Dysphoria is a bit of a bucket term but what many of us experience is a sort of body horror at having the wrong parts. That isn't caused by anything as far as anyone can tell. That's just or brains being wired to expect something other than what's there. It can be traumatizing if it's bad enough but often isn't.

This body horror is categorically different from when someone looks at themselves in the mirror and doesn't like their weight or wishes they were more muscular. That's wishing for things in-line with your biological programming. Dysphoria is when your body is just wrong.
This is part of why dysphoria is so hard for cis people to understand. Their bodies are fundamentally right so they've never experienced that feeling. They just want more defined abs or something.

Many of us are also traumatized. Often that comes from having to fake a social fever role that doesn't fit you. My "favorite" example is the special hell (for me) that is guys church BBQs. Lots of just standing around trying to be a guy and have guy talk. The important thing about that example is that no one was intending to hurt me, they were just treating me like a guy. Many of us also experience more direct physical or emotional abuse. I was picked on all the time by the jocks in my class for being, well, not a jock? It may not have been gender related but it also kinda doesn't matter. They treated me like crap and left scars.

Where this all gets messed up is diagnoses. Because the medical system works on terms of disease and treatment, it's not good enough for you to say "I hate my penis and want a vagina", you have to prove that having a penis is causing you harm that they can fix with a vaginoplasty. This means that if you look at a psychology textbook definition of dysphoria, it's going to focus on the depression and anxiety, not on the root cause that is having the wrong body parts or the wrong hormones flowing through your body.

@YouShallNotPass @Ghostynn @Terra @Dani @AlwaysAutumn