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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, I grew up in a small American town and my cousins were more like my siblings than my actual sister because they were the same age as me. We all fled that small town, so the next generation are all growing up not surrounded by extended family.

    I think there are good and bad sides to it. It was nice to grow up surrounded by family with a strong sense of belonging. But my cousins’ children are growing up knowing people from far more diverse backgrounds than I ever had access to, which is good for them in a different way.

    Overall, I think the effects are probably neutral












  • Not even N95s. If people just did the bare minimum and wore a surgical mask and washed their hands frequently the instant they felt like they might be sick, we would work wonders to reduce spread, morbidity, and lost wages/productivity. We just need the same simple politeness around respiratory illnesses that already exists in some Asian nations.


  • What you are seeing in public is a phenomenon of Evangelical Christianity being amplified for political gain. There are religious puritans who genuinely and sincerely believe that the mere exposure to the existence of non-cis hetero people will cause actual cis hetero people to “become sexual deviants.”

    Which, in their world, it probably looks like that. Oh your perfect totally-and-completely-straight child “suddenly became” gay after learning online that gay people exist? To these ignorant puritans, it really seems like a magic transformation when in reality it’s just standard-issue coming out of the closet. They have zero understanding that, if you wouldn’t repress people in the first place, this wouldn’t happen because there wouldn’t be a closet to come out of.

    But back in the 90s, they fully lost the crusade against cis gay people. Cis gay people are normalized to the point that my very evangelical aunt now happily accepts her lesbian daughter.

    The politicians who used to leverage this bigotry against gay people to drum up votes know this, so they moved on to the new bogeyman of the day: trans people. I see the exact same verbiage used now against trans people that was used against gay people (and especially gay men) in the 90s. “They’re really pedophiles, they’re a cult that’s recruiting and corrupting your children, they’ll turn cis people into something they’re not, it’s not safe for children to be exposed to this ideology.”

    Those exact same things were said about gay people in the 90s, literally word for word. Even the “trans agenda.” In 1992, it was the “gay agenda” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda

    This is why I have a patch on my bag that reads “Evil is boring.” Because these bigots can’t even come up with a new script. It’s the same old thing over and over and over, just with new targets.

    It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t completely terrified of sexuality that the existence of trans people is not a threat to anyone anywhere ever. What you’re seeing is nothing but bigotry being leveraged for political gain.