Well, in that regards, they’re similar to blahaj, as in, our instance doesn’t just have trans communities. Our user base is focused on trans and gender diverse folk however. Hexbear, similarly, has all sorts of communities, but their userbase is focused on shared politics, even though their areas of discussion are not restricted to that.

Hexbear is very protective of it’s trans users and it has a lot of them. But its “specialist area” is politics.

I think it’s a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.

And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don’t enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be “the trans instance”, when I’d much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.

Sorry, I was trying to be outright hostile, not passively.

There are no widely federated edgelord instances at this point in time

The thing that makes them right wing is the exclusions they place on their “progressive” policies. It’s always the vulnerable

Swedish right-wing populist party Sverigedemokraterna explicitly support that:

They don’t support housing for everyone because they don’t believe that non western foreigners should be allowed in to the country, and they don’t believe that people who aren’t “culturally Danish” are citizens.

So they don’t believe in housing for all

German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland is led by a lesbian who calls her party "the only real protective force for gays and lesbians in Germany

They’re an explicitly transphobic party who doesn’t extend queer rights to trans people, even if they’re gay or lesbian. They actively practice discrimination against LGBTQ folk.

The distro I find easiest to recommend to folk in my life looking to move to Linux is the distro that I’m using/most familiar with, because it makes it easier to help them out if they run in to an issue.

I use CachyOS, and previously, I was trying to support Mint etc, but having zero experience with the way the way Mint handles packages, with its default apps, update process etc, I found myself having to research an OS I don’t use, and offer 2nd hand advice. I moved them over to CachyOS, and even though technically, it’s not as beginner friendly, my day to day familiarity with it meant that it was easier to help out when troubles arose.

Not sure about the “fine with learning” part. I’m fine with learning, but learning isn’t my primary motivation, but more like a bonus!

That being said, it did neatly capture why I chose CachyOS over Arch!

Yes! It has automated scans which will pick them up

I just got my NSW gender marker updated because of this legislation change! I had GRS years ago, but even then, it was simply too onerous to change your gender marker on your NSW birth certificate, so I never bothered, given that I was able to update my passport and everything else.

My birth cert remained the one thing left, and it’s finally done too now that it’s not a gatekeeping nightmare!

To answer it seriously, for me, it’s not specifically cis, but more broadly, queer. I need someone who has faced the assumptions that society forces on them and knows how to exist in the world anyway, having faced those assumptions, questioned them and found their own relationship with themselves.

tl;dr I need people who have had to question who they are and find themselves, rather than someone who has never had to answer those questions.

In my experience (as a trans woman who has experienced both sides of this coin), I can no longer get away with being topless in most situations. However, I can get away with wearing less in more situations. It’s acceptable for me to wear a short cut, sleeveless tank top or boob tube in situations where it would be difficult for a guy to wear a singlet or other sleeveless top.

The term threadiverse to describe the “reddit like” fediverse network predates Zuckerbergs latest bigotry factory.

The instance stance is that we don’t allow people to undermine other folks identities. Transmeds think they’re doing the “right thing” for trans folk because they think that they’re protecting the “real” trans folk. People who want to undermine non binary identities, people who want to undermine therian identities etc, people who want to undermine neopronoun users, will always have a reason for it, often based around acceptability in the eyes of broader cishet society.

Just because you think there is a good reason to undermine those specific identities doesn’t make it ok. You and I, and anyone else is not the arbiter of anyones identities except their own, and the moment you feel that you do get to have an opinion on the validity of someone elses identity, is the moment you have put yourself above them.

There are absolutely trolls who will misuse this kind of acceptance. But even that doesn’t make it ok for you or I to install ourselves as arbitrators of other folks identity. The answer to the trolls doesn’t change just because they’re trolling by bad faith use of identity. The answer still remains that you remove them when they’re trolling becomes apparent. But on this instance, that removal is done in a way that doesn’t empower folk looking for excuses to invalidate others.

I have complete aphantasia. No mental sounds, imagery, etc.

But even so, I think I probably didn’t word my reply as well as I could have.

Stuff with genuine interpersonal interactions, with characters that have personality and feelings, that stuff I can read. But that’s because it doesn’t rely on the visual.

But if the erotica is just a verbal description intended to help picture a scene, then it’s not of any interest to me

So my intuition is wrong there, thanks

Maybe, maybe not. Your own intuition about your experience of gender may not be wrong. There’s not really any way to know. What we do know though is that at least some cis people have a strong sense of their own gender, that can cause dysphoria in certain circumstances.

So, much of gender is a social construct, but being a social construct doesn’t stop it being real. Society has a bias towards a gender binary, and that creates the social context in which we come to understand and experience our own gender. These social frameworks creates the lens through which we learn to understand ourselves.

Lets say I grew up on an island full of men. I had never seen or met a woman, and didn’t have a concept of women. In that environment, my experience of gender would have been different. I’d still have experienced the discomfort, and disconnection, I’d still have experienced dysphoria, but it would have manifested very differently. I wouldn’t have identified as a binary woman in a world without women, and I wouldn’t have had the language to describe my experiences, but I’d still have had a discomfort I couldn’t address, and I’d still have known that I was different to the men around me in ways I didn’t have the language or the concepts to explore.

But I didn’t. I grew up in country town Australia in the 80s, when societies bias towards a gender binary was strong. And my own gender is binary too.

I do sometimes wonder what my experience of my own gender would be like if I’d have grown up in a different context, if society allowed space for genders that don’t have to fit a binary. Would I still be binary? The truth is, I don’t know. But what I do know, is that my experience of my own gender does fit on the binary, and knowing that, and thinking about it doesn’t change it, because however I got there, my gender isn’t a choice. It’s just who I am.

What I was getting at with saying I wouldn’t be comfortable switching now, but I would have been fine born into

David Reimer was forcefully transitioned as a child, when he was young enough to not remember. It created a lifetime of dysphoria for him, and he transitioned back to his birth gender as soon as he understood what had happened to him, and was able to.

But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to

The few cases we have of cis people being medically transitioned in some way without their consent suggest that this simply isn’t the case, at least for many cis folk.

Alan Turing and David Reimer are both examples of cis folk who were medically transitioned without their consent, one as an adult, one as a child, and both experienced severe dysphoria. They ultimately both took their own lives