Pretty much. The character I have in mind would have begun transition already with some other characters already referring to him/her as "she." It's kind of the situation I'm in now; write what you know I guess, just as long as it doesn't turn into some kind of self-insert fantasy.

One of the things Goldsmith does in Genma's Daughter, which is a Ranma 1/2 fanfic, is to refer to Ranma as he or she depending on which form he/she's in but always as Ranma until he/she decides to lock the Juusenkyo curse and go full time living as a woman for a few weeks. At that point, the author begins referring to the character as Ranko. Not to give spoilers if you haven't read it, but there are only a few times when Ranko is in male form after that, and Goldsmith reliably refers to the character with the name "Ranko" and the pronoun "he."

In the non-fiction book Whipping Girl, Serano observes that pronouns are often a matter of presumption and contextual guessing that one has to make within the first few moments of meeting somebody. After all, we generally don't go around performing a "Crocodile Dundee" manuever to verify which body parts a stranger has between their legs before we decide whether to use "he" or "she" when referring to that person. Checking others' genitals would also lead to ambiguity in the case of trans women who have the female gender and a woman's name on their driver's license but have not yet undergone (or does not desire) surgery.

One might argue that the state of one's genitals is of utmost importance, which is one thing that feminists and right wing authoritarians can both agree upon. However, because we do not check others' genitals regularly, it becomes a moot point unless there's romance involved. The zombie flic Wild Zero presents one such situation.

As Serano also notes, sometimes we get it wrong. As an example, I used to work with a perfectly cisgendered man when I used to do fast food who would often be ma'amed when talking to customers over the drive-through speaker because he had a feminine way of speaking. Sometimes when I'm very tired, I'll get ma'amed by strangers who have only my appearance to go on when clearly presenting as male simply because when I'm tired, I forget to use masculine body language. So, it's not as straight-forward of a process as we'd like to imagine it is.

I feel that getting the language thing down would be one of the challenges of presenting something like that to a wider audience. One solution might be to write from first person, but it would be more interesting to use third person omniscient so I can use the same technique as Goldsmith. I feel that the way other characters use he or she can be an effective way to demonstrate what other characters think of the protagonist's gender---the narrator's choice of pronoun being dependent on whether the character is presenting as male or female---, and which particular name the narrator uses to refer to the protagonist can demonstrate the state of his/her own identity at that point in the story.

It works, that's why. I believe given that [FUCK] BETA is going to happen, that we carefully question the validity of transphobia in greater discussions of gender.

On the one hand, there's Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs is actually a good movie if you can accept the premise that Buffalo Bill is not actually a trans woman (evidence provided by the character Hannibal).

However, there's the powerful feminist lobby (that's made of cis women and trans women who are grovelling to cis women to have their status as women of some kind at least).

The idea is that trans women, fundamentally, are Buffalo Bill, however that doesn't hold water. But then here come the feminists who are saying that trans women are Buffalo Bill, but perhaps on a metaphysical sense. Nobody knows that to believe because most individuals have a "cis blind spot;" that is, they cannot separate their mental gender from their reproductive gender.

The bane of the American system is freeloaders. The argument is that nobody would hire a trans woman because she would be masturbating all the time. Therefore, a trans woman wouldn not be able to pay for her own cosmetic surgery. Therefore, any arguments that being a trans woman has any basis in physical reality are clearly attempts to create communism. Q. E. D.

All that, and FUCK BETA.

Thank you. I sitll intend to participate in the slashcott next week, however. I believe that there is a political element at Dice that would not mind seeing the wretched hive of men's rights activism and anti-feminism that is Slashdot in mothballs.

Godspeed to those who are working on altslashdot.org. I'm afraid that Code.org and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have given orders from On High that the community that questions feminism at Slashdot must be disbanded.

I've encountered sexism many times in my life before. Usually the argument is that because I was assigned the male gender at birth, despite the physical gender of the wetware between my ears, THEREFORE I am sexist. Q. E. D.

I wished many, many times during my male adolescence thatI had been born female instead. None of those wishes came true. However, if any of them had, I suspect that my school's administration would not have attempted to threaten me with FBI incarceration because I wanted to have a computer club nor would they have attempted to paint me as a plagarist because my code was "too good" for somebody of my age back then.

More assigned males are speaking out against this problem. There is nothing you can do, Dice or Code.org. More and more of us are becoming aware that the feminist narrative is wrong-headed.

As much as I wish more cis women would go into programming, I am not their mistress or their Borg queen. I do not control their actions.

There needs to be a different approach.

Exactly.

I would be happy with [FUCK] BETA if it weren't for the superfluous sidebar that continues down the page to infinity and beyond, limiting space for comments and the various other layout issues. The font size is too big for another thing. Now I know I can hit ctrl+- a few times, but I mean, come on! I want comments to be the full width of my window, and I want to choose whether I want to see all comments when I'm moderating and whether I just want to browse at +1 or +2 depending on my attention span any particular day. In fact, I don't give a FUCK BETA whether a comment was modded up because it was funny, insightful, or interesting or whatever. All I care about is how many moderators thought the comment was noteworthy when I don't care to browse at 0 or -1.

FUCK BETA is like everything I hate about the mobile site brought to a desktop site. I even do "request desktop site" on my phone when browsing Slashdot because the mobile site is worthless. I once tried modding on the mobile site, and not a single mod ever took place! (Still had my mod points when I got home!)

We can argue about whether or not it's too AJAXy or whether JQuery is too onerous. All I want is the Slashdot I know and love for its threaded comment system and moderation/meta-moderation system. More power to Dice if they can realize a functional AJAXy vision of that in my opinion as long as it degrades gracefully for browsers such as elinks (yes, I actually do use elinks on occasion!) and screen readers, but FUCK BETA is not that.

Just voted it up.

It seems from some of Soulskill's comments that this is a change that's being rammed through from the Higher Ups and the Powers That Be.

It'll be interesting to see how this will play out, and I'm glad to see that there are people already working on building a new "slashdot." I was thinking about doing some hacking on slashcode or coming up with something new entirely this weekend when I'll be more free, but it looks like the initiative is well underway by individuals with better experience at such things than I have.

Something occurred to me today while browsing through all the FUCK BETA comments. I might need to loosen my tinfoil, but who knows. The way things go will be telling. I mean, I like the freaking MS Office ribbon and I'm looking forward to Wayland! FUCKing BETA is just an absolute disaster, but maybe it's intentional.

We know that Dice is a backer of Code.org, and Code.org has been involved in some proposals one might use the euphemism "affirmative action" for, but I prefer to call it what it is: sexism and discrimination based on assigned gender at birth.

This place is one of the few places I know on the internet I can come and participate in discussions about alternate theories about why there are no cis women in programming and whether that's even a problem or not (and get properly downmodded when I cross the line into misogynistic ranting). Personally, I think it is, although others disagree. All of those discussions are completely contradictory to the narrative that Code.org and feminism would like us to believe: that lack of interest from cis women must needs imply some kind of sexism and oppression on the part of all assigned males.

Perhaps the higher ups at Dice think that if they torpedo this site with a horrible excuse for a redesign (it looks like something I would design! and I'll freely admit I'm a terrible graphic artist!), that opinions such as mine and others that run contrary to the feminist narrative that constructs gender as a dichotomy of rapists and victims would lose their soapbox.

Maybe my tinfoil is on too tight, but Dice seems to be demonstrating that in the face of falling revenues from this property, they're willing to have it commit seppuku.

Hopefully I'm wrong and if the boycott next week goes well, Dice will see the light. However, I believe there may be a political element present in Dice that wouldn't mind seeing Slashdot in mothballs.

Replying instead of modding.

Try working in a nearly all female working environment. You will receive sexual harassment and be held accountable for the actions of others because you were assigned the same gender some other person was at birth. You'll hear all the same old jokes that "all men" are the butt of on a near daily basis, and you'll get as tired of them as feminists are of jokes about women drivers.

It took me a long time to learn to not act on the feeling of disgust that overcomes me when a woman is flirting with me and to also communicate to my co-workers that it was not acceptable to expect me to return the flirting.

Sexism and acting as a chauvenist pig are not things that are unique to any particular gender and are not things that being assigned the female gender at birth prevents one from engaging in.

Yes. You displayed a wonderfully forward-thinking application of the "one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself" version of the golden rule.

The dilemma is that religious fundamentalism and its various manifestations of Puritanism and Biblical literalism tend to work against that verson of the golden rule so we're left with "he who has the gold makes the rules" and "all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent" taking into consideration that money is speech. (The only problem I have with Citizens United is that I believe it's a misapplication of corporate personhood because a corporation is a legal construct and not natural. Therefore, a corporation has none of the examples of natural human rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights as natural rights, only privileges.)

Personally, I would be much more tolerant of religious fundamentalism and Puritanism if the limits of its intrusions into my personal life were a few crappy ice cream joints my money is no good at because I'm trans and some well-meaning witnessers that might walk by and strike up a conversation when I'm mowing the lawn. The US Constitution lays down a powerful framework for attempting to make that so. As is lamented in every NSA/DEA/FBI/Snowden thread, it seems that document doesn't mean as much as it did in that nostalgic yesteryear that never quite existed.

There's always a flux between authoritarianism and libertarianism (small L). The question I suppose is one of how to impede authoritarianism without violating the human rights of individual authoritarians. The problem is that authoritarianism by definition implies top-down enforced conformity, and the only solutions I can think of given the larger sociological picture are different top-down enforced conformities.

Ok, I'm going to call you out as a troll.

This has been seriously pissing me the fuck off. Where the hell do I sign up for one of these free Obamacare sex changes?

Is the right just misinformed and free phalloplasty and testosterone HRT are available and they assumed that assigned males would also be given free vaginoplasty and estrogen HRT?

I don't know and don't care. Unless that's the case, you are completely full of shit. At the very least it doesn't excuse this rhetoric that Obamacare is so evil that it's giving out free sex changes! My insurance won't even cover my meds because when estrogen and an anti-androgen are prescribed to an assigned male, it's cosmetic by definition, and no fucking insurance company will cover anything cosmetic.

Dipshits like you who want us all to believe that Obamacare is giving out free sex changes and the fact this bullshit works are telling. Transphobia is a better argument apparently against this train wreck of a law than logic, philosophy, and data about the 9,999 out of 10,000 (or 49,999 out of 50,000 depending on who you listen to) individuals who are not transgendered that are getting fucked by this law.

I'll admit, I was naive two years ago about how insurance companies were going to milk this. I knew it would be a hand-out to insurance companies, but from what I've been hearing, it's ridiculous. Nobody is giving out free sex changes you troll. You can't name one single actual insurance company that gives out free sex changes or any other cosmetic operation. Just die in a fire.

Two more things that will fucking blow your mind. First, not all trans people are liberal socialist commies. I vote Libertarian. I pay with my own cash for my meds, and I see no problem with that. Second, being trans is NOT a sexual fetish that revolves around scamming other people into paying for cosmetic surgery. This will blow your mind because there's a significant number of trans people who don't desire bottom surgery. Disclaimer: I'm not one of them.

I don't see why others should be forced to pay for a routine, daily medicine for me and a cosmetic surgery. I do however want to know why I have to pay for so much shit for so many of you straight folks so you can have your all important grandkids before your own kids are 20 like food stamps, free housing, birth control (that whoopies the Mother forgot to take the entire last month!), and the list goes on.

I give you free child support, give me this mythical free Obamacare sex change, and we'll be happy. No, I think it's better if you and your children starve because you couldn't afford birth control and condoms before having wild sex, and if I pay for my sex change with my own hard-earned cash. Get a damned job and be responsible if you want to have sex instead of having children you can't afford.

This law hasn't affected me personally one bit. It can't actually because as long as my employer even offers a health insurance benefit, I can't qualify for any subsidies. There is no insurance company that will cover a sex change. Well, the only concession I'll make is that perhaps one of those "platinum plans" might. Who knows, maybe. Except riddle me this: why would I get an "insurance" plan for the sole purpose of getting a sex change when the premiums would cost me more in a year than getting a sex change and implants?!

There are no fucking free Obamacare sex changes. You want to know why everything is falling apart in this country? It's idiots like you and the idiots who listen to you who are more concerned about somebody getting a free sex change and then going out and fucking a hot guy than you are about what's going on around you.

Pick a better argument.

I may not be much of anyone, but I'm getting sick of transphobia from the right. So much so that maybe it's time I give up even voting for Libertarians.

Well, that's what you and I think.

You should spend Thanksgiving with my ex-family. A typical Thanksgiving involved a debriefing about how my brother and I would go to hell if I we believed the differences in interpretation that my grandparents believed.

You get folks who believe themselves linguistic Biblical scholars. You get arguments based on whether that appearance of "is" comes from this Aramaic word or was later inserted by some monk by accident.

People get very serious about this and very emotional. I suppose that's what happens when one's been convinved that they'll go to hell and burn forever based on some nit-picky interpretation of the etymology of some word or whatever. Imagine meeting someone who can walk you through an argument that their god is mad at us because we don't practice racially-based slavery any more!

(From what I remember, it has something to do with how caucasians are the lost tribe of Isreal [insert scriptual evidence I never cared enough to memorize here] and because some guy got smashed drunk once in a tent and passed out without any clothes on.)

I don't know what the solution is. By the FSM, the country I live in will be a 3rd world country in 50 years because when the going gets rough, the tough turn to superstition, and there's nothing I can do about it.