You’re more likely to alienate people who could have been allies than achieve anything of merit

Someone who thinks giving up Rowling is too big an ask was never an ally in any way that actually means anything…

Too many people see trans people making any comment at all as something that needs to be downvoted.

lbz doesn’t do downvotes, which means communities hosted on lbz don’t do downvotes, and any downvotes received are ignored, without federating them out.

Basically no. At least not at the time you wrote your comment. Community ownership changed a couple of hours after your post though!

Headline: Exactly 49 days

First sentence of article: 49 days, 17 hours and change

This is the third time now I’ve removed one of your comments for this kind of gatekeeping of other peoples identity. You’re no longer welcome in blahaj zone communities

CachyOS does the same

So is fanny for that matter…

To be clear, the blahaj one is for people to talk about the awful shit she’s doing and the impact it’s having on her victims. It’s not a community for people who support her or just want to have polite conversation about her that ignores the harm she is doing

What’s interesting about this, is you post it as if it’s a question, and despite getting an almost universal “Fuck no” as the answer to the question, you’re just arguing that we should do it.

If you want to do it, do it. But stop looking for validation for it. You’re asking for approval to celebrate and recognise someone who actively targets and harms trans people. You’re not going to get that approval. So either take that as the answer, or stop pretending it was ever a question.

Plus, it would help to bring in a ton of new users, to the Fediverse.

Yay, more folks who are happy to fund the erasure of trans people. Can’t wait! /s

It’s a little different for me. I transitioned 9 years ago, and I largely resolved my struggles with dysphoria.

What still gets me a little though is the life I didn’t get to live at a younger age.

And if my transition happened “when it was meant to”, that means that life was never mine even in an ideal world.

So I frame my own journey as having transitioned when I could rather than when I should. I didn’t get all of the opportunities I wish I could have, but I’m absolutely grabbing the opportunities I can now!

Appeasing the bigots and fearmongers has never once in the history of people lead to success and protection of minority rights. All it is is a slowly closing ratchet.

The only method that has ever worked is pushing back. It doesn’t have to mean violence, but it means making people uncomfortable, and challenging their harmful beliefs, not letting them sit comfortably with them

For me, saying that I transitioned “when I was meant to” just doesn’t land right, because I know it’s not when I was meant to. Making me wait all that time wasn’t the right thing, it wasn’t what was “meant” to be.

From my perspective, in an ideal world, “yesterday” was the time to transition. But the world isn’t ideal, and it made that impossible, so “today” is what I was able to achieve despite the world trying to get in the way! (though “today” was 9 years ago for me)

Your statement was “first took off”. That’s what I was addressing. It definitely hit critical mass later than that, but the first big explosion was the 90s.

I don’t love this meme.

I prefer some variation of “The best time to do it was yesterday, the second best time to do it is today”

Which is to say, I don’t perceive that my late in life transition happened when it “meant” to. It happened when it could. And I’m so glad it happened at all! But if transphobia hadn’t have gripped the world so hard, it also wouldn’t have been as late as it was.

It’s hard to imagine now, but, when the internet first took off, Twitter was basically the world’s social media.

That came quite a bit after the internet took off! The world wide web too off in the 1990s, and the broader internet (email, ftp, usenet etc) before that

If transphobia wasn’t rampant, that would be ideal. But transphobia is rampant, and it just means each and every sport defaults to exclusion. That’s how it worked before this IOC ruling. That’s how it worked at the last Olympics, in which zero trans women were able to compete.

Idealised scenarios that assume fairness and good will don’t work. They just lead to exclusion, and worse, they make it impossible to gather more data.

And the reason for that is that everyone thinks like you. Which is to say, everyone thinks “Biology matters”, but for some reason, is never working to challenge that assumption by acknowledging that trans folks biology changes with the introduction of hormone replacement. It’s also a space with a lot of bad faith and actively misleading research, because of the aforementioned transphobia.

Excluding trans people from sport is an openly acknowledged “first step” of a where they’re using to normalise exclusion of trans folk in wider society. These are the folk generating much of this research, research that normally would be laughed out of the room, but when it’s about trans people and aligns with the “common sense” belief that trans folks have an advantage in sports, somehow the research gets taken seriously.

That’s the environment we live in. And that’s the environment that tried your approach, as a stepping stone to the outright exclusion we have now.

Welcome!

The only trans woman to ever compete in the Olympics was a power lifter. She came last.

Your intuition about trans athletes is wrong.