CHip, F11 to take over the screen is a feature, not a bug, of MSIE. To undo that takeover, just hit F11 again.
Oooh! Thank you for the link to Yuebing. How wonderful that his acquired-around-Chinese-New-Year's bunny is named "Mooncake".
Oooh. Like the new look!
To Mitch:
Are there lots of non-Mormons in relationships consisting of >2 adults? Depends on your definition of "lots", but I'd say yes, there are a significant number of households consisting of >2 in a romantic/sexual grouping.
If it were possible to do this legally, they would be less closeted. As it is, it sets one up for ugly battles with child protective services, if there are any children in the family, and with legal tangles regarding bigamy.
You're right about certain rights being restricted to husband/wife pairings. Insurance benefits immediately spring to mind, with the few exceptions for domestic partnership.
I agree with Jon, I think that "yuja" is probably the Korean pronunciation of "yuzu".
Meanwhile, I love fresh citrus, and citrus used as flavoring, and various citrus curds, but I really dislike marmalades.
I made vegan gumbo, ages ago*. Now, I like okra, so there was lots of it in my recipe, but I found that the one strange-but-effective secret ingredient to make it taste right was, of all things, creamed corn.
Without it, the gumbo was lacking in a certain umami.
*I was having a Buffy viewing party wherein I was serving gumbo. Having a few vegetarians in the viewing party, I made two versions.
Asparagus alters both men's and women's secretions, urinary and sexual.
I'm looking at that "throwing up/violent reaction on discovery" bit, and seeing a disquieting similarity to certain sorts of racist reactions to "passing".
Now, I don't hold with the "hide it until the last minute" game, nor the deliberate maliciousness of concealing information you know will be traumatic on revelation. But "eeeew, I got touched by a trannie!" reaction...how is that different than "eeeew, I got touched by a..." anything else? My general reaction to unwanted touch is that it's touch that I don't want, regardless of the toucher's characteristics.
Just noticed this:
With transitioning, while it may be a similar experience, I don't think it's the same experience. Regular teenagers don't take hormones until they're satisfied with their degree of chest hair or the size of their breasts. It's a lot more uncertain.
Buh? Who told you this is how it works?!
Sorry, I don't buy the "it's just a JOOOOOKE!" defense.
Meanwhile, I think if you're going to claim paranormal powers of trannie detection, that you might want to augment that with some understanding of actual processes undergone by people who go through SRS/GRS, and the psych evaluations and all the other hurdles.
Kevin:
What are you hoping to convey with the link that you labelled "some people deserve to be mocked" ?
It's sounding like you want to live in a world where "men are manly, women are womanly, and everyone is heterosexual". Maybe you'd like to spell it out more clearly so that there's less confusion.
And as for your question regarding what makes a cup a cup, and a bowl a bowl...Custom.
To rephrase, I'm a man. I've grown up all my life learning what "being a man" is about, both from societal education/consensus, and the simple fact of biology, having a male body going through puberty and whatnot.
Y'know what? FTM's go through a second puberty from the hormone treatments. They grow up around "being a man", and they experience "being a man" when they're not being shoved back into the "you were born female" box.
A woman, deciding at twenty that she's actually a man who somehow got a woman's body, is not going to have had the twenty-odd years of societal training or the biological experience of growing up in a male body.
That's not usually what happens. Most people with gender dysphoria know from much younger than age 20. I'll buy the line that they're *trans* and not *male* at the end. FTMs are not women in the same way that someone with XX chromosomes without gender dysphoria is a woman.
People can wax poetic all they like about the "inner eye" and personal conception, but a woman telling a man what it's like to be a man has all the authority of a virgin telling a hooker what it's like to have sex, since she's been imagining it for the past twenty years.
Not quite an apt analogy. More like "someone who was a virgin until just recently has a different experience than someone who has been having sex for 20 years". And I think you're ignoring the process of transition.
But perhaps you're saying that mocking gender presentation is different than other forms of mocking.
I find it equally offensive to hear "oh, so&so should act like a REAL MAN(or woman)" as "oh, so&so is really a man PRETENDING to be a woman".
I don't have a problem with the sort of genitalia I got, but I don't see why I should care if someone else has a problem with theirs. I think they're still in the same boat as me if we're both getting "act like a $defined-by-others-person". I've had quite enough of being slammed for not being *sufficiently my gender* to want for anyone else to get that as well.
Oh, and in conclusion, this is one example of what privilege is: being reasonably sure at any time that there isn't a discussion going on somewhere about whether you're real people.
I don't think I or anyone else ever said that transsexual's weren't real people. The question is whether anyone takes them seriously in their chosen gender.
"Oh, isn't she cute, acting as if she was a man or something, doing a man's job..." Yeah. Women who were put down for doing "men's work", or men who are put down for doing "women's work", sure, they're being treated as if they had validity, treated decently.
How is mocking someone's gender presentation "treating them as real people" ?
Since everyone else spends a lifetime in a gender they didn't choose (unless we go into the odd metaphysical theory) discovering what it means to be a man or woman, I don't think it's unfair to say that transsexual individuals are a decided disadvantage in figuring it out or even "getting it right," assuming of course that manhood or womanhood is defined by group consensus, not just individual conception.
Huh? Perhaps you mistyped, but I have *no* idea what you're trying to express, there.
I suppose I'm more annoyed at the FtM because their status games are dirty pool.
All FTMs, or just the ones that are embodying the worst of male caricatures?
It sounds to me like your crankiness with transsexuals has more to do with your own unresolved issues than anything to do with *them*.
Tell me, why do you have to fight back to the male posturing with some sort of stereotypical response? Why not respond to them with the same question you'd asked the twerps who were harrassign you way back when?
Frankly, after seeing the attitude you've displayed here, I would be inclined to bet that an FTM giving you guff was after your pissy attitude toward transsexuals in general, and not just engaging in macho posturing.
Ah...the "honorary Texans" from the rescue of the Lost Battalion. Yep.
Kevin, I didn't repunctuate, I quoted all but the last sentence. "GG" in the trans community generally means "genetic girl". I didn't choose the word, I'm just using it as it's used there. Your ignorance about the term tells me a lot about your familiarity with transfolk.
I'm *still* not clear on why you're SO concerned about someone trans who is going to the extreme with their gender presentation. How do *YOU* know that they are _feigning_ their ignorance, rather than being truly ignorant? Isn't this somewhere along the continuum where SNAG gets upset at a black man for being "an oreo", and not knowing about {$thing which SNAG feels that "African American Man" ought to know as member of $group} ?
Why are you pissed off about the FTM who is inhabiting the role to the point of taking on the trappings and doing the posturing and status seeking? Why are you *more* pissed off when it's being done by an FTM?
See, the thing is, when it comes to "helpless female behavior", I'm just as hard on GGs as on MTFs. I'm annoyed by it on a *human* level, and I don't see the purpose of singling out someone whether they were born into the gender or not.
But back to the question "ablebodied men." I have very little tolerance for helplessness, but I especially despise feigned helplessness. It's one thing for a woman to not know how to fix a broken sprinkler pipe because her father never showed her how, and likewise with a man not knowing how to cook because his mother chased him out of the kitchen, but it's another for an individual who knows how to do such things to not do them because the tasks do not fit his/her new persona. A woman who refuses to do/learn "man's work" is a prissy missy (not an attractive trait) and a man who refuses to do/learn "women's work" is pretty damn insecure in his sexuality.
Why single out transsexuals? Is it because you have a perception that they were once "really men, or women", and that they *did* learn that task, and now are feigning ignorance? You don't remember that kid who was bullied for not doing "gender appropriate tasks" ? Maybe that FTM or MTF never did learn the other set.
Why not just be cranky at people who *stay* in their gender-defined task boxes? I'm not my gender, I'm a person who has a certain chromosonal makeup and certain external sexual characteristics. Others may choose to self-identify strongly with a gender, but why do you excuse GGs (and whatever the male equivalent is called) but not MTFs and FTMs?
Is this a case of "Kevin can identify their birth sex, so therefore they should not be allowed to forget it" ?
Being unsettled is different, however, from feeling "personally attacked".
Maybe it is for you. For me, it's not quite so clearcut. Even in legistlation that's actualy aimed at "the category of people I fit into", I don't usually find myself reacting to it as a *personal* attack. An attack that affects me personally, yes.
Cases of various constituencies voting in reactionary rightwingers who're in bed with the racists and the religious right? Yeah. It makes me take note of that region, and put it on the "I don't think it would be safe for me to travel there" list. It's in the same bin for me as "awareness of areas likely to pull over for DWB".
I try to keep a level head about the historical situation in which I find myself, and in my opinion the level of privilege I enjoy by virtue of having been born in North America in 1978 outweighs, by several orders of magnitude, the level of privilege I enjoy by virtue of being Irish-German. The latter hasn't saved me from poverty, menial jobs, rustbucket automobiles, houses collapsing around my ears, attempted muggings, or getting screwed over by Wells-Fargo, long may they roll a boulder up a hill in Corporate Hell.
I was born in North America in 1970, and I've encountered discrimination both for my non-white ancestry and my non-male gender. Just datapointing.
Meanwhile, Kevin, why are you treating "ablebodied men" differently than women? Is this the origin of needing to identify gender? I find it saves a great deal of wear and tear to simply treat people with courtesy no matter their gender, even while I'm occasionally IDing someone "passing" as the other gender. Why does it matter whether someone was born into a different set of sexual bits than the ones they present now? If you're not trying to interact with their bits, do they really concern you?
- not feeling personally attacked when the nation elects supporters of the Confederacy to high office (Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, John Ashcroft, Dick Armey)
Jenn, I *do* feel a bit unsettled when that happens, and I'm an American of Asian ancestry. There was plenty of anti-Japanese or anti-Chinese stuff going on outside the South, by people who had pro-Confederate leanings at the time.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 7 |
| 2003 | 14 |
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