Congratulations! I’m so pleased for you!

Oh great question! I always say everyone should consider whether they might like to change their name - i hear so often people saying they can’t or don’t have a reason, and you don’t need one!

I took my grandmother’s first name cos she’s real special to me, and took my second from my favourite comic book character at the time 😅 but they sound great together!

It’s so interesting seeing the discourse on fedi about threads and meta - like I absolutely think it’s the right call for so many instances to not federate with meta because they for sure will be scraping user data and it will be a moderation nightmare, but this article raises a really valid point. Federation is almost a harm reduction approach for so many users who aren’t so privacy aware and are keen to be connected to their friends and family on threads.

I’m not a fan of the fedi superiority complex we so often see - people who use meta products aren’t a monolith, they’re people just like us, and a huge majority of them simply aren’t aware of the privacy implications of meta’s approach, or it’s not a huge priority for them.

Absolutely - we have to get so much better at letting people talk about gender, presentation, style, and how they feel about it without making assumptions or getting pushy about it. I can totally understand where it comes from - there are so many moments in my life where I feel like I totally should’ve realised about my gender earlier, and I think that eagerness comes from similar experiences and wanting to help, but people need room to have their own experiences. We could absolutely use far more discussion with/from/about cis people with styles and presentations outside the standards and norms - there’s so much room for everyone to feel free exploring and playing more.

I totally hear you, and that sounds real complex! I don’t have any easy answers here unfortunately, other than recommending what it sounds like you’re already doing - having an open mind and feeling comfortable with having a play. I think doing some intentional reflection about masculinity and femininity, how you feel about them both, what you associate with them, and how you feel most comfortable presenting might be a useful and interesting exercise here! Because you’re wanting to look cooler, it might be interesting to do some style research on both feminine and masculine styles you think look cool - remembering that both of those are just social constructs we’ve created and that there are heaps of ways to be feminine and heaps of ways to be masculine.

Happy to help in any way I can!

I think the difference between gender and expression is a good one here - how you express your gender and present to the outside world is and can be totally different to what your gender is - leaning more masculine/butch in your presentation, like you say, doesn’t have to mean anything about your gender.

It can also be useful to detach styles of presentation from the idea of masculine or feminine - when it comes down to it, clothes are just fabric - the gender is something we code into it. I hear you about your feelings around femininity and internalised misogyny - but that could be something you figure out in tandem with your appearance. Humans are complex, and it’s not always possible to figure out one thing after another so neatly, and you might be doing yourself a disservice by trying to figure out your feelings around it first, when you could be trying it and figuring out how you feel about it at the same time!

The issue here is exactly the issue affirmative action aims to help resolve - if you leave it so universities can if they so choose look at how someone’s experience of race has impacted on them, many of them won’t, because of structural racism and how ingrained it is. This decision is not requiring universities to consider their admission practices and what barriers might be in place - and many won’t.

It’d be great if they did, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need requirements like this because universities and other organisations would proactively consider how their processes and decisions might be creating or removing barriers for all their students. Currently, that isn’t happening.

A few years ago I was playing a gig in an adjoining town and after, everyone (we’d all had more than a few) piled into a car to drive back home. I just assumed the driver was all good - it wasn’t until a few hours later I realised he was pissed out of his mind and had a moment of “oh thank god we made it home”

Not a teen, but when I would have been 10 or so we lived out in the country, with a big eucalyptus tree in the back yard. I used to climb it a lot, and was real into building things like platforms and little (shoddy) tree houses. We also had a great trampoline, which I often used to get down out of the tree.

You might be able to see where this is going.

One day, I was up in the tree building a little ladder with the trampoline below me. I went to get down, dropped my hammer to the trampoline, and immediately followed it.

Time slowed, i witnessed it all happening in slow motion as I was thought “oh fuck, that was dumb” as the hammer hit the trampoline, i landed, and the hammer flew in a perfect arc and hit me in the forehead with the head of the hammer.

I stood there, stunned still for a second, and then immediately went “oh god, that could have been so much worse”. Thankfully I was completely fine!

Not sure if this person is in the same place but Aotearoa NZ recently extended copyright from 50 to 70 years after death due to a UK trade deal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the UK have pushed it. We’ve recently fast-tracked the change due to an EU trade deal, though, so it’s not the UK alone.

Oh absolutely- I feel like the best representation we have is characters who just happen to be part of the rainbow community, rather than it being a focus of the plot. Queer-specific stories are important and useful, but it’s so important for everyone - us, allies, young people, general public - to see rainbow characters just living their lives in tv and movies without it being a huge part of their character or storyline.

This is so interesting to me because for the longest time, the only queer stories ever told in Hollywood were the tragedies - happy queer characters are relatively new, and I think space for both is so important. Hollywood can absolutely be doing more in showing some of the current issues our communities are actually facing, but there’s huge benefit in showing possibility models - especially for young people and their parents. So many parents are terrified of what their kid’s life is going to be like, because how they think of queer people has been influenced by decades of tragiqueer storytelling - those positive stories can help a lot.

Both - $12.90nzd/yr or $41.90 outright

I think this is actually pretty clear and useful information on Republican support for same-sex relationships - what-abouting between ‘moral’ and ‘acceptable’ isn’t useful here, particularly when you take this research in the (very important) context of recent lawmaking around rainbow communities.

Yeah, I’ve been out 10 years and for a good five years at least being trans wasn’t even a factor in a lot of my decision making any more - that’s changed in the last 18 months with all the negative attention on us.

Hey, you’re welcome here - so don’t worry about that.

No one can tell you who they are, but we can absolutely share and try help you along in that process. Lots of what you’ve described is pretty common for lots of trans folks, for sure. I spent a long time going back and forth and questioning myself a lot, and a big barrier for me was being really worried about what it would be like to be trans, and how hard it would be - and while it’s been challenging at times, my life is so much richer and more full for it.

All i can recommend is continuing to have an open mind - if you’re comfortable with asking this of yourself, and comfortable seeking out and learning more, that will help guide you on the way - and even if it turns out you’re not trans, at least you’ll have learnt a lot along the way!

I think what so often gets missed in these conversations (and they’re conversations that happen a LOT in lots of social media spaces and off-line spaces) is that this discussion - about inclusion and access in high-end competitive sport - is absolutely having a negative impact on any trans person trying to engage in any sport and recreation at any level.

We know that sport, recreation, and exercise is a great protective factor for our health and wellbeing - and that trans and non-binary folks are engaging in those activities less often than our cis peers. The excessive attention on inclusion in sport (primarily conversations being had by laypeople, i might add) mean that those of us trying to play sport or exercise in our communities are hyper-aware of the discourse, are even more worried about what people might think of us - - and in some cases are experiencing heightened transphobia in our communities as a result.

Lots of sporting codes have introduced some great standards for trans inclusion that really work, and reflect the evidence base - and those decisions have been made by sports medicine experts and experts in those codes - and that’s whose opinion i really trust, not people making assumptions based on what they think about sex and gender.

In my day job i spend a lot of time doing education and professional development around supporting and including rainbow people - in healthcare, education, business, across every sector. We did the math recently, and figured out we’ve done this with over 15,000 people in the last three years - and I can count on one hand the times someone has been hateful or not willing to learn. Absolutely overwhelmingly people are wanting to know to better support our communities - it’s just that the opposition are so good at being very loud and taking up lots of space.

That’s something I keep coming back to when it feels overwhelming - there’s so much noise and so much hate, but I know it’s coming from an absolute minority. I know this is far more complex in the states, where that minority have a lot of power - but they are still the minority, for sure.

This is such an important point to make - social media is such a double edged sword for our community. Recently the US Surgeon General, when warning about the use of social media in young people, made an exception for rainbow young people, saying it can be a lifeline

Thanks for that debloat link, that’s super useful!

Oh, this is so neat, thank you! I’ve just had a play - especially for a work phone that has real specific uses, Niagara makes a lot of sense! Do you subscribe to pro? Have you found it useful?

Oooh thanks for lawnchair, that’s great!

Thank you, that’s super helpful! I’ll have a hunt to disable bloat and have a play with adb if need be. I’m the one in charge so I can basically do what I like 😅

Yeah, I see that launchers are way more common now! Got any you’d recommend?

Oh, that’s interesting to hear, I had no idea!

Thanks team - this is a big decision to make and I’m sure it’s a challenging one, but I think it’s the right one - both for beehaw and its users and the wider fed/lemmyverse as a whole. I’m really appreciating beehaw’s values and how we’re sticking to them, here.

Absolutely - mastodon had similar moments in the big twitter waves where some pretty large instances defederated from some other large ones (some of them even mastodon.social) over moderation policy. Defederation like this is also a means of moderating the fediverse as a whole - if the admins of an instance are unwilling to moderate their users, other instances can encourage action like this.

Likely because the research this piece is based on just looked at gay, lesbian, and bi folks - lots of research is restricted like this for a whole number of reasons. But yeah, no surprises here!

(Lots of good other research on trans health and wellbeing in particular, too, that shows the same thing)

Absolutely - happy to help put one together if people want to reply to this comment with some suggested resources?

Alyaza, does lemmy have a wiki-like feature we can make a resource list on if the list gets very long? Or is it easier to just make a post and link to it?

Absolutely - and I think there’s huge benefit in beehaw being that example, especially as we see big migrations onto lemmy and the wider fediverse.

Aotearoa in general is pretty good - keep an eye on what happens here in the next six months ago. We’re seeing the same rise in anti-trans disinformation that everywhere else is, unfortunately, and we have an election in October - some parties have already made gender an election issue.

I remain optimistic - I know the opposition is an absolutely tiny minority - and we’re pretty good in terms of general inclusion and access to healthcare, but it’ll be an interesting few months!

So much of how this clinic gets about terfs is so unhinged and (surprise) absolute disinformation, it’s wild. We get a lot of comments on this side of the world about how we should stop the work we’re doing because look at Tavistock, while the Cass report actually recommends the model we have in my region (ie care available in the community in partnership with primary care teams)

Kia ora! Nice to meet you! I’m also @jennifilm@misskey.pixelfilm.nz

You’re so welcome! Truly - you’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out, and cis women have years and years of getting to play with how they look - you deserve that play, too!

It’ll be interesting to see how this and ig interface, and how this will play out in the fediverse. Imagine a future where instagram users could follow pixelfed accounts!

Oh snap, i didn’t think about it from that perspective! Instagram is still the place where sharing my work gets the most reach, I hadn’t thought about what this app might mean for that.

There are some real great practical suggestions here already, which is wonderful! I’ll add that so much of how we feel about ourselves can really be influenced by how other people see and treat us, and we shouldn’t underestimate that. It’s so good that you’ve got good, supportive friends - asking them to gender you as femme as much as they can can really help and really shift how we think of ourselves, too.

Something that really helped me, too, that took me far too long to learn, was getting comfortable with just playing - with clothes, make-up, hair, anything gendered. We can take it all so seriously, because it’s important to us, but that meant whenever I did something to my appearance and it didn’t turn out exactly how I imagined I felt real stink about it. Actually thinking to myself “I’m just having a play with this and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t turn out right” made a huge difference, and made it way easier for me to keep experimenting!

I really enjoyed the Mario maker race - it’s always thrilling! Excited to catch up on blindfolded botw too!

I second this! I’m really proud of who I am - I work in a rainbow community org and am really proud of the work I do, too. I’ve been out for a decade or so and two years ago I barely thought about being trans any more - it’s just a part of who I am. But the big increase in anti-trans rhetoric (here in Aotearoa - significant but still not close to what’s happening in the states) mean that I have to be more mindful and more aware of it, not in the least because my role means I do lots of work in the areas that have some of the biggest negative attention - healthcare, schools, bathrooms and changing rooms.