Tech folk seem to not realize that “this image could have been faked!” has been a problem since the very first photographs.

Every step in evidence collection literally served to put someone’s name on it, so those people can go before a jury and say “yeah, that’s the stick i used to get the video from their security system”

They’re rarely called,.AFAIK, mostly because “that video must be faked” needs some corroborating evidence to be plausible. And for that matter, so does “this video shows him robbing my store!”

Follow up thought after dinner: AGP is also auto-misandry and a strong example of toxic masculinity.

For those not familiar with the term, it’s the idea that all trans men are only trans men because they think themselves sexually appealing as women. Which is fairly strongly disproven by “cis women feel that way, too”, but also exposes a wretched opinion about cis men.

We’re SUPPOSED to think that we’re sexually attractive. If we want to get laid that means we need to find someone who finds us attractive, and that’s damn hard when we can’t even think of ourselves as sexy.

“Unsettled science” is putting it far to charitably. From the second paragraph of that wikipedia article:

Scientific criticisms commonly made against Blanchard’s research include that the typology is unfalsifiable because Blanchard and other supporters regularly dismiss or ignore data that challenges the theory

You could keep reading that Wikipedia article down to its sections on “Transfeminist critique”, “Transgender men”, and “Societal impact.” I also recommend reading what Julia Serano wrote on the topic. (Which I find it to be a strong case that AGP is just bad science.) https://juliaserano.medium.com/making-sense-of-autogynephilia-debates-73d9051e88d3

Or, to be brief: AGP is transphobic because it reduces transgenderism to a sexual fetish. There are non-transgender cross-dressers and transgender men and women who are asexual or demisexual, not to mention thousands of definitely-transgender children who haven’t had a sexual thought in their lives.

Kindergartners are definitely old enough to understand “no touching without permission” and “no touching in the underwear zone period.”

When my kids were.tiny, we decided our bodily autonomy rule would be phrased as “the only times you’re allowed to touch someone else are in an emergency and with their permission.”

FWIW. I certainly grew up in an era where some adults didn’t even grasp "no means no "

Godwin himself pointed out that his law doesnt apply when discussing actual fascists.

By “association rights” I infer that you mean the right of free association.

If so, can you be a little bit more specific as to whose “association rights”, specifically, are a more important issue than the right of trans folk to get healthcare, be free from discrimination, and be able to play sports without being harassed?

My inclination is that the most important targets to defend against facist oppression are the ones being targeted, which does suggest one plausible answer, but I really do want to know what you meant in your post.

Please tell.me that you have better sources in the UK than I, and that their recent transphobic swing didn’t make trans care harder to get and keep.

There is a bunch of normalized transphobia in America. That certain views are shared by elected politicians doesn’t make them not transphobic.

“Trans allies aren’t even bothering to debate this white guy, they’re just calling him names” isn’t proof of anything more than the frustration of said allies. It’s essentially the same thing as “Trump derangement syndrome”.

If we want to argue that someone is or isn’t transphobic, it would be a better use of everyone’s time to focus on what they actually said and what justifications their critics give for applying that label.

That sounds like someone took the transphobic AGP theory and made up a cisgender equivalent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology

If the Pope was in charge health care would be single-payer, abortion would be emergency-only, and both gay marriage and capital punishment would be illegal.

I wish I had the faith in human competency that conspiracy theorists demonstrate, but I think the truth is that humans are far stupider than that.

Character age is a slippery, weird thing that’s best to avoid if at all possible.

Take this summer’s Superman as a great counter-example. If it’s set in 2025, and the opening crawl is to be trusted, Clark came to earth in 1995 and started superheroing in 2022. He would have been in preschool when 9/11 happened, in high school for the Sandy Hook massacre, and presumably studying in the fortress of solitude during COVID lockdowns…All of which would have distracted from the story.

In contrast, look at Peter Parker and the Fantastic Four. How much older than Sue is Reed? What year of high school did Spider Man get bit? Heck who’s older – Sue, Johnny, or Peter? None of these are answered in the MCU or consistently in comics, and nobody cares. (And let’s not even contemplate the X-Men or Batman and his Robins…)

So, yeah, a 21 year old superhero dating 30-somethings is fine. But you don’t really need to do more than establish that your character is at least 18/21 to lampshade away any squick from your readers.

TL;DR : Yeah, the age is fine. But you can skip mentioning it at all as a genre staple and nobody will care.

YES.

If you’re an American, our entire history of immigration legislation is racism bundled on racism following in the tradition of racism. Were it not for chattel slavery and our betrayal of the native tribes our racist immigration laws would be the most shameful part of our history.

And if you’re not American, your own country’s immigration laws are almost certainly based on either racism or “nationalism”, with the latter mostly being a holdover from when “French” and “English” were considered different races.

Unlawful emmigration to a country should be, at worst, a bureaucratic fine and probation. Anything more is simply bigotry in a polite suit.

While you’re largely right, it is worth noting that each translation is a distinct work under copyright law, and any translation made after 1929 may be still protected.

And that ignores really young religions, and the copyright status of high-authority extant religions such as Iranian Islam, Mormon and Roman Catholic Christianity, Ron Hubbard’s Scientology or state-atheist communism.

(Whether or not Hubbard, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao count as “religious leaders” is a distinction without a difference in discussion of the copyright status of their works.)

A diesel engine can literally run on vegetable oil. We don’t need fossil fuel subsidies to keep farm tractors working.

If we must distort the market directly, we should do so on the demand side. Give farmers a per-Joule fuel subsidy, and let them use petro-disel, bio-disel, or electric as the market may provide.

Either we believe that markets work or we don’t

My other half had a very good experience with TalkSpace, which accepts our insurance.

Unless you’re in the Republican medicaid-obamacare gap, you should have insurance and they should have at least some mental health coverage. And if you are or they don’t, a professional stranger via an online service is definitely something you should look into.

Whether or not you’re “really” a real person, or a brain in a jar, or a butterfly dreaming you’re Zhuangzi, you and me and everyone else are still “people” we should respect.

Wrestling with the unfalsifiable nature of reality is something all thought traditions have dealt with, and I’d argue that you’re not really an adult in 2025 if you haven’t contemplated that all you know could be a hallucination.

The screwier question always becomes “if this is a dream , what if you’re not the dreamer?”

No, we absolutely should not mark the records of known transgender athletes in any way. Because once you start down that road you wind up asterisking cisgender athletes whose development is outside the norm.

We could get into a long discussion of transgender persons who do or do not undergo HRT, or how there are already rules against transgender women competing professionally if they aren’t on HRT, or whether or not such rules or gendered sports at all are justifiable.

But all of that is just a distraction. The elite in any competitive sport are ALREADY several orders of magnitude beyond the norm, to the point where any advantage a trans woman might have for going through male puberty is essentially a wash with “are you just naturally well-formed for this sport”.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that there ISNT broadly an athletic benefit to having gone through wrong-gender puberty before medically transitioning. Plenty of athletes have done exactly that, and as far as I know exactly none of them wound up being relatively better among their true gender peers post-HRT than their standing among birth-gendeR peers pre-HRT.

And there have been more instances of cisgender women being wrongly accused of being trans than there are transgender women athletes at all.

Not everything is a spectrum. You are either actually pregnant or not-pregnsnt. You’re either free to go when the officet is talking to you or you are being detained. You either had consent for sex or you didn’t.

For example, if the example you provide to bolster your argument is “Hitler had admirable qualities”, then you’ve jumped all the way past Godwin’s law and there’s no use talking to you.

“most people” are (1) a much smaller group that you think and (2) wrong.

If your behavior can at all be described as sexist, then you’re not a feminist. That includes both Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobes like JK Rowling.and outright sex pests like Andrew Cuomo.

Of course I’m a feminist. It’s one of those sublime categories like “alive” or “pregnant” that has only two possible states.

1. Feminist
2. Sexist pig.