I like the taste of coffee a lot, I also really don’t like the caffeine high so I order decaf more often than not. Some people don’t like the taste; they drink it for the caffeine high, although most of them end up getting white chocolate mochas or frappuccinos is something

yeah, most of us over here tend to be upset about the fact that our tax dollars get spent on genocide and then people get defensive when we even say it. I’m frustrated by a lot of defenders but I answered the question honestly, those are the worst.

Defending US military intervention. I’ve heard people defend US intervention in Korea, I’ve heard people defend US intervention in Vietnam, I’ve heard people defend US intervention in the middle east, hell, I’ve heard people defend dropping the bombs on Japan. Shit’s wild.

OHH lmao that’s what I get for trying to focus on three things at once, no that’s actually hilarious now that I actually read it correctly without my brain doing word swaps

“documented” is tricky because very little of this is super well documented, seeing as trans people are a super small and, even proportionately to their small numbers, understudied minority in medical science. this is largely a community communication effort and a lot of the knowledge is not done through academic study. that being said, it does seem like it’s talked about a lot less in the transmasc community, so possibly? on paper, the mechanism of action (tendon/ligament/muscle changes) goes both ways, but I haven’t really seen many transmascs talk about it, so I don’t know for sure!

I’d even go further and confidently call it causal. This is very much a thing that happens soon after ( < 1 year but mileage varies) you start gender affirming hormone therapy, at any age. nobody’s fully sure on the exact causes, but the one most certain thing is that it’s a multitude of factors - potentially, but also not limited to, the blend of tightness/looseness of ligaments and tendons that hold your pelvis neutral, the muscle mass and strength of muscles involved in posture, the amount of fat/weight your pelvis has to carry, and for trans people lucky enough to start gender affirming hormone therapy during puberty, the actual bone shape of your pelvis (although this last one shouldn’t be too overstated - again, transfems transitioning well into their 50s and 60s notice changes in gait, balance, and posture).

lol yes, you’re spot on. Facial Masculinization Surgery exists as well for transmascs, but it’s a lot less common because, well, I’m not fully sure? but getting a beard for the first time in your life does wonders for transmasc gender euphoria and is often plenty enough for most transmascs.

I’m not sure of the rates although I know a huge number, probably a very large majority, of transfems only take E and sometimes a T blocker. I can also tell you that after a while on E, facial fat and muscle will redistribute to create a more feminine face. Many people are happy at that but some more want additional feminization and that’s where FFS comes in!

(statistics are very poor because us trans folks are an extremely under-studied minority as well as a moving target because of changing culture and treatment modalities, so I wouldn’t trust most studies purporting to know statistics on things like how many transfems get FFS besides being a ballpark range)

hi! just so we’re clear, there’s no “the” surgery, there’s a number of surgeries that trans people get: phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, mastectomy, breast implants, FFS, the lot of them. generally, most of these surgical interventions don’t do too much to whole body musculature and are more localized, although having/not having a pair of boobies that you weren’t/were used to can do a lot to your balance, but that’s not the main thing that changes posture, center of gravity, etc.

possibly more relevant to the question, one of the most common medical interventions is hormone therapy, and this will absolutely change your musculature, flexibility, strength, and more. Transfems on E will see dramatic changes in their strength, muscle mass, and flexibility to be much more in line with cisfems, and transmascs will see similar but opposite. it’s a super common meme among transfems who are dating cis women that they have to hand over jars to their cis girlfriends to open after starting E. Transmascs often report gaining an inch or two of height on T, transfems often report losing an inch or two of height on E, with no other interventions. Some people see shoe size changes, postural changes, more. there’s no universally agreed upon cause for this but the current leading theories are that it’s a combination of fat redistribution, muscle mass changes, and changes in tension in various tendons and ligaments. Anterior Pelvic Tilt is probably the largest cause of changes in postural change in trans people (and it’s caused exclusively by GAHT), so if you’re looking to learn more, that’s probably the first thing you may want to read up on!

so to more explicitly answer the question, starting E will add a lot of fat to your lower body and remove a lot of muscle from your upper body, cause your pelvis to tilt, and more, and starting T will add a lot of muscle to your upper body and remove a lot of fat from your lower body, cause your pelvis to tilt, and more.

i’m super comfy with good faith questions btw so if you have more, feel free to ask me!

Remember, when a corporation says they’ll donate something when you buy something, like rounding up to the nearest dollar or donating $0.25 for every purchase, they are doing it because they were going to throw their money at some 501©(3) for tax reasons anyways and they figured they’d make it a big opportunity to publicly launder their reputation as an ad campaign

If you want to donate, never let a grocery store round up for you and take your tax write-off so they can pay even lower taxes subsidized by you, just donate $10 every month or so and take the tax writeoff yourself.

allllmost

Titanius Anglesmith, that’s 8 out of 18 letters for 44%

That was my intention with plugging The Will to Change, it’s definitely not a “here’s why men suck” piece, it’s a feminist analysis on all of the unique harms that men are subjected to under patriarchy, how those manifest, and how to heal from them. Any analysis of the suffering of men under patriarchy that lands on individual responsibility as a cause for psychological suffering is a bad one.

I will say it every time it’s even slightly relevant until I die, The Will to Change by Bell Hooks should be mandatory reading for men. Men suffer unique mental health crises at the hands of patriarchy and need specialized care just as much as anyone else.

To address your specific question though, I think possibly, but not much, because the men who need help and care most are the ones most resistant to reaching out and the ones most insistent on rugged independence and getting up, dusting themselves off, and jumping back in the fight without treating their wounds.

I think you nailed it, it’s flashy virtue signaling/techno-mysticism to make people feel like they’re secure while using a closed source app with incomplete E2E and backdoors

wanna talk about it?

I will say, for one, this is being sarcastic, and for two, when anyone talks about the “libs” from an instance like mine, we are punching right - we sit to the left of liberals

Because they’re unable to distinguish between a state that enforces human rights and a state that enforces human rights violations. To them, the state doing things is always fascist.

One random guy said that. That doesn’t really hold water.

“Democratic” and “Authoritarian” are extremely loaded here. The tankie line, that I believe, is that modern Marxist nations face ruthless ideological attacks from both without (imperialism, foreign influence, infiltration, demands to liberalize, war) and within (vestiges of the former bourgeoisie). Two schools of thought exist in how to go about implementing socialism: the friendly, open process that allows external and internal forces to collude and infiltrate and institute genocide, pain, and destitution (Sukarno’s Indonesia, Allende’s Chile, Revolutionary Catalonia, Iran, anywhere touched by Operation Condor…) and the more aggressive form of socialism that clamps down tightly on dissent and develops socialism with ideological protection and close management (Vietnam, Cuba, the USSR). Nations in the category of the former invariably see mass death, starvation, and the ultimate repurposing into a state managed by imperialist powers (Suharto, Pinochet, Hitler…). States in the latter category (verify this information for yourself, I don’t want you taking what I say as gospel) invariably see world-best ascents in literacy, employment, public health, GDP, life expectancy, gender equality, income equality, and more.

This terrifies the imperialist powers. These actually existing socialism (AES) countries demonstrate an ability to thrive despite America’s and the west’s interests and attempts at destabilization. So what can be done? You lie about them. There is absolutely precedent for the US lying to its people about their enemies, in fact there is no precedent for the US not lying about their enemies. So us tankies decide that the truth exists somewhere between the US state line that Stalin is more evil than Hitler, and that the Soviet Union was a Utopian paradise. It is just as foolish to go with one side as it is the other. The only thing we know for sure is that the US has a long track record of genocide, torture, propaganda, imperialism, and lying about all of it, so why would we trust them?

So to sum it up, if I were to believe the line that reactionary insurrection is “Democratic” like the US state line says, and if I believe that AES states are “Authoritarian” and forcing policy on the people without consent like the US state line also says, then no, I don’t support bringing in the tanks. I also believe it never really happens like that. I believe that AES countries make lots of mistakes, and I’ve never met a tankie who doesn’t, but I believe that countries that are hard on reaction are better for it.

btw, thanks for engaging in good faith discourse. It’s super hard on this topic and while I don’t like your framing I recognize that it’s not because you’re trying to antagonize me, it’s because you’re faithfully portraying your beliefs.

I prefer to think of this as the liberal safe zone and the rest of lemmy as leftist, as it has been for years before lemmy.world exploded from the massive influx of reddit refugees

Have you ever made an effort to try to understand why us tankies believe what we do, or even what we actually believe? I’d be happy to talk with you about it if you’re curious.