Ah, it's been a while, Green Site!

Ok, there's a great deal of confusion I see here. It's a question of use-case.

Drag queens are performing artists. See Rue Paul or Pandora Boxx, neither of which iirc use HRT or intend to transition to adopting their performing identities as their own 24/7. Companies get FB pages, so why shouldn't their performing identities get FB pages in addition to their own personal pages?

I find it odd that FB is apologizing to drag queens or that they would even target drag queens. (I'd also like to add that one curious thing I read in Whipping Girl is that drag queens are often welcomed into the female restroom, but trans women are shunned from that place.)

In the case of trans men and women, if FB has targeted them (I haven't been), FB is clearly wrong and the apology is justified. Especially in the case of trans women, proceeding with a legal name change is a risk that can land one homeless in a gutter. I'd also like to add that in my personal experience that I'm gendered female by others quite often (just lucky I guess), however changing my real name without being able to go without a job for a year or two would be suicidal. Employers have this little habit of demanding documents that contain one's legal gender. If one's legal gender doesn't match with the gender of one's identity and the gender others assign to one, it's OMG fucking holy shit GTFO.

There's also the complication that a name change is not enough to get those documents to match one's lived gender. My state requires bottom surgery before the documents can be amended, although some clever trans women are able to get the gender on their driver's license changed at the DMV with a little social engineering (others aren't so lucky). Other states make it impossible to change those documents even with bottom surgery.

My friends know me by one name. My employer and clients know me by another. However, FB is not a network for professionals so instead I have a LinkedIn profile with one name and a FB profile I haven't touched in probably two years with another name (just a few more years and it'll be my real name), the one my friends know me as.

What is straight peoples' clothes, exactly? Do homosexuals wear something different to the office? In my experience, gays and lesbians tend to dress just the same as their heterosexual peers.

Yes, I'm intentionally being obtuse. I hope I addressed the confusion about drag above. This is a question of identity.

I'd also like to give you something to think about. Currently I'm between genders, so it's all wibbly-wobbly. However, should I obtain bottom surgery after going full time as a woman, I will then be a heterosexual woman and indistinguishable from any other straight woman who cannot have children due to whatever medical problem.

Your head will asplode the day the procedure for a barren cisgendered woman to receive a transplanted uterus (I'm too lazy to find the link, but I believe the procedure involved transplanting her mother's uterus into her so that she could have children) is expanded to transgendered women.

Why would a cisgendered woman want to have a male identity? If this is a case of a trans man or somebody experimenting with presenting a male identity, then I would say it's justified.

I've met a few trans men, and the decision to undergo gender transition is an even bigger hurdle for them than trans women. There is no bottom surgery they can hope for, and they have to be absolutely certain before they expose their bodies to testosterone. Estrogen is easy, and its changes to the body can be hidden or even reversed. That's not true of testosterone.

The voice drops, facial hair develops, and it's all permanent. If there were a magic pill I could take that would change my brain from female to male, I might take it. My breasts can be easily removed, and the other changes will fade over time as testosterone becomes established in my body. A trans man does not have this option of an easy out once he makes the decision to transition .

It's been established that homosexuality and transgenderism exist in the animal kingdom, at least as far as mammals are concerned. However, I can't comprehend why somebody would make a FB profile for a pet, so I don't think I can advise on this one.

Coming back to this to summarize, I'm confused that FB didn't limit the apology to the transgendered or why they were even targeting drag queens. Drag queens are performing artists. If companies can have a FB profile, their performance should also clearly get a FB profile.

Let's also be more clear. The term "cross-dresser" can mean any number of things and is too vague to be useful.

At any rate, this all illustrates how brain-damaged a "real" name (I hope I've called the idea of a real name into question) policy is.

Gender transition isn't something where you just throw a switch and it's done in 5 minutes with liberal hounds chasing down anyone who doesn't recognize the new identity. There is a period of time--years and years--where one is in varying degrees of legal limbo, and free Obamacare sex changes are a delusion of Faux News. Not every trans woman is perceived as a woman as easily as I. Assume your ability to spot a "cross-dresser" is infallible and perform the Crocodile Dundee maneuver enough times, and eventually you'll grope a cisgendered female and find yourself in a world of shit while I go unquestioned.

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.

Going way off topic here, but it was pretty harmful to me.

It's at best a cosmetic procedure. The troubling thing is that we perform this cosmetic procedure on patients who have no ability to report problems during healing. When something goes wrong, the patient has no way of knowing what's normal or not. I'm not the only person who went through a big chunk of their life thinking that something abnormal and utterly wrong was just a normal part of being a man. Hell, I didn't even know it had been done to me until I had already taken drastic measures to correct the physically painful problem I had that I had thought was a completely normal part of being a man.

And maybe it really is. I don't know. My doctor said that my female mind might have been interpreting something that should have felt pleasurable as intolerable pain. I'm not sure I entirely buy that. Despite the help he provided me, his idea of gender transition was Rocky Horror Picture Show. I've never heard another account like mine from another trans woman, and side effects that aren't cosmetic or don't revolve around sexual pleasure later in life simply aren't studied, so there's no evidence to support or refute his claim.

I feel sorry for my ex-parents. If they had just kept their hands off my dick, they might have had the grandkids they wanted so much. Well, shit happened, and now they'll never have grandkids.

"Mutilation" or not, the ethics are apalling. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the primary reason we do this to infants is to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases. How much sex does the typical infant have?

There's the UTI argument, but that barely holds any water. UTI is a routine condition that infants develop, and female infants have a higher rate of UTI. The way I see it, why can't we just accept that maybe male infants in their intact state just have a little higher rate of incidence of UTI than female infants? Why don't we research cosmetic surgeries to perform on female infants to bring their rate of incidence of UTI down in line with the rate of incidence for circumcised male infants?

If the evidence is to be believed, then it would be more ethical to perform the procedure on a child after 24 months. The foreskin is not fully developed until then, and many side effects such as skin bridges could be completely avoided if the procedure were performed after the foreskin had fully developed. It would also allow a better opportunity to administer local anesthesia, since any kind of anestesia is risky to perform on a newborn.

I don't see any kind of rationality surrounding the issue like what I proposed above. I mean, for FSM's sake, it's a cosmetic procedure at best. Nobody seriously believes that it's more effective at preventing transmission of STDs than a condom! Well, unless you're a victim of this practice in rural Africa. They do, and the results have been tragic. Relying on circumcision to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS/GRID and other STDs has led to widespread infection there. Clearly, circumcision is ineffective at controlling infection, regardless of the percentage point here or there that the AAP reported.

All I can figure is that the point of performing it on newborns is so that the patient never knows that he is missing a body part that is design to protect the glans from external irritation. The patient might protest and advocate against the practice if he were to be aware that before the body part was amputated, there was no pain or irritation, and afterwards there was. The patient might report more complications instead of beliving those complications are simply a part of being a man, and the rate of incidence recorded would probably increase.

Iirc the AAP currently reports that 1/500 circumcisions have complications. How much higher would that be if we preformed this procedure on 4 or 5 year olds the same way we wait until a child is about that age before removing their wisdom teeth? I don't know, and by performing this procedure on infants who come into consciousness never knowing what it's like to be intact with a foreskin protecting the glans from irritation, it's impossible to know.

Based on that, I believe we can call it a "mutilation" and even a form of child abuse. The fact is that if it were simply a procedure such as removing wisdom teeth that was based on medical wisdom, we would wait until the patient were old enough to report problems that would indicate follow-up care. It's a pet peeve of mine that anti-circumcision groups ("intactivists") throw around arguments based on some kind of sexual pleasure or somesuch. I would be happy just knowing life without genital pain.

In Windows, win+R for the run box, win+D to go to the desktop, win+E for my computer. There are a few others, but those are the ones I use most frequently.

In Linux, it's much more useful. I have it set up as a 3rd level shift. I hacked together an XKB map that gives me greek letters; punctuation such as em and en dashes, typographical quotes, proper ellipsis, less than/greater than or equal to, etc; and arrows plus times and divide on my numpad. Combined with remapping capslock to the compose key, it makes for a versatile keyboard layout.

If one wanted, one could also map say some of the F keys (F1-F12) to things like volume up/down, play next track, pause, calculator, run, etc with 3rd level shift, but I haven't bothered.

On the topic of keyboards themselves, I'm loving my Unicomp black buckling spring USB keyboard. The trackball is wonky, though, and as far as I can tell the extra two mouse buttons are mystery buttons that do nothing (no middle click!), so I'd recommend skipping that to anyone who wants a decent 5 lb USB klacker. The thing in indestructable, and the tactile feedback from the buckling springs makes it a pleasure to type on, improving both speed and accuracy.