Dunno what to tell yeh mate, it’s about as oldif not older than Furry culture. Weeki Watchee springs started a whole thing with their Mermaid shows and the subculture basically took off from like the early 60’s… And was probably about as horny as a lot of other subcultures that started around the same time.

Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.

It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.

To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.

That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.

But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?

Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.

They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.

I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.

After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.

We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.

So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.

Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.

It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .

So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”

Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.

It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.

Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.

Or

“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.

But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.

Hey there, kid who was diagnosed back in 1993 here…

Depending on when you were in school might not have helped at least being diagnosed. Accommodations were basically non-existent for all of my schooling career and meds, while situationally useful, were diminishing returns. The system just wasn’t designed for us in mind and from what I have seen from my friends kids current accommodation is at times lackluster and spottily applied.

Schooling is kind of designed for adults to teach rather than kids to effectively learn since even neurotypical kids have cycling attention spans that aren’t all synced up. So while it sucks we didn’t get good help you also may not have missed out as much as you would think.

It’s funny being neurodivergant and dealing with neurotypicals who really don’t get it and then finding someone who is your exact brand of neurospicy and then watching them sit back in confusion as all of a sudden they are the odd one out.

“How about we verbalize our intentions?” “Pppft! You’re the only one here who needs verbal cues. Try reading body language and not just assuming anything SUSAN.”

I feel like so much of it comes from really not doing the work to understand. It doesn’t help that With trans issues people get flat out lied to and because there’s nobody on hand to say reality check stuff like : "What the fuck do you mean ‘The uptick of trans men is causing a wave of hysterectomies in a mass sterilization plot’ … one of the largest reason for temporary detransition is for pregnancies. Also STOP TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE BREEDING STOCK. " You get a rolling problem where the disinformation is layers deep and they only trust the sources who are financially rewarded for saying the bullshit- because they believe so hard that everything is a conspiracy and have this backwards perception that if only a tiny handful of people in a field are saying something that contradicts a varitable mountain of concensus then that thing is automatically somehow more believable…

I feel like having someone in your family who opens your eyes to the realities because of the immediate demonstratable contradictions of observed reality makes sense. These people caught in transphobialand have by and large been duped. They were ignorant and a bunch of people took advantage of that for financial and political gain. While I can see how not being immediately empathetic isn’t great I dunno if I am as mad when observing from the angle of these people just being kind of dumb enough to be played.

Political correctness was fired in the early 2000’s. It was dissected as something called “cold politeness” that wasn’t really doing anything but making corporations and beaurcratic systems feel better about doing something to fix problems by slapping a new coat of paint over the mold. They subtly hired “Hey maybe just stop being a dick to people” into the role but nobody noticed it was a totally different guy.

Now when people talk about what PC would say “Don’t be a Dick” struggles with feelings of never being acknowledged for the actual work they’re doing. Forget what that ass PC did and try getting to know “Don’t be a Dick” on their own terms will ya? They are not so bad and probably very supportive of your opinion on sexy rabbits. They attend some furry conventions I’m sure.

There are many examples of House Elves in the books who treat essentially the single one who was freed and happy about it as an abnormality. Look at how Dobby is reacted to by every other house elf. Hermione’s advocacy that they have autonomy is ultimately treated as being something only an extreme minority of their population would want and her continued efforts treated as comedy.

Effectively house elves are narrativly speaking a subservient slave species whom treating poorly is narrativly punished… but emancipation is not desired by the whole and they feel fulfilled as long as their masters treat them well. The profiting from their labor is framed as mutually beneficial.

I don’t know if Hermione is strictly a self insert any more than her other characters are, we just sort of assume that because she’s the girl. Oftentimes we see Rowling pop up in the framing devices and not the characters themselves. We are always drawn to some conclusion the plot wants us to. Often what Hermione does is a lampshading technique. She brings up the issues around moral issues but we are lead to see her concerns and advocacy as invalid as the plot makes them inconvenient or proven to be incorrect. It’s the actions speak louder senario. What the characters individually say is not wholly important because from an authorial standpoint some of them are intended to be misguided and Hermione is framed as good-hearted but ultimately misguided.

Hermione’s sense of moral objection is treated more often as a flaw, an annoyance to her peers and unneeded or even counter to the needs of by the people she is advocating for. She is more closely aligned to a caracature of how JKR veiws advocates of minority rights then a reflection of her own advocacy. That every other character tends to just ignore Hermione isn’t veiwed as a tragic instance. It’s played for comedy.

Yeah… But mine started developing a ring of concrete dust and I got tired of looking like a dingy anime character. Bodily fluids were not my problem.

Oh yeah, any kind of dusty or gritty job shampoo is a requirement. Having natural hair oils is like inviting trouble in those situations. I tried to go the route of just water and my pillow slips noticeably suffered.

I throw no shade on Mildred… As long as she’s one of those girls who like dress in 1950’s fashions and is way too into electroswing.

Then it’s only fitting.

You miss my point. What mens advocacy groups are missing is that they aren’t doing the primary work required. They just kind of expect that stating the issues are enough.

Like let’s take the mens shelter thing. Cool. I agree… So Where do I donate? Who is doing the admin? What’s the aim, the targets. What is the method? Who’s talking to the accountants and doing the paperwork and signing the papers. Are you seeking a grant? Who’s filing it? Who’s name is on the lease for the property? Who do I contact to volunteer my time?

… Wait you want me to be that guy who creates all that framework? You want me to pay for the lawyers and, wrangle the committee and spend my nights arranging experts and to set up the charity? Okay… Why me exactly? I am a transmasc non-binary person fighting for my union to cover trans healthcare and showing up to city halls to stop book bans and bathroom bills. I totally have like 5 hours free on a Tuesday you can have or maybe $50 out of my pocket to an organized cause but that’s not exactly gunna help you unless someone does the framework to make that useful…and I am sorry but like hell am not about to throw myself on that particular beaurcratic sword. Doing that for a cause that directly effects my security to exist in public is hard enough.

Saying “we should have men’s shelters” is not giving someone a actionable task. People love actionable tasks! They are easy : show up here and protest, go here and donate, go here to run a fundraiser, volunteer here sign this petition etc etc etc… But just plunking "We need mens shelters somewhere is basically low key implying you aren’t personally asking the listener to do anything… Or you are asking them to do everything. Like I can totally agree all these things are worthy endeavors… But you aren’t giving me a framework here for my endorsement to translate into anything helpful. Okay. Shelters got it I agree. Job done, argument won. Victory. Woo.

Doing the primary work is not fun or intuitive or easy. But what it CAN be is managed by a very small team. The initial investment is always in personal time money and extreme frustration and growing the thing takes patience.

Look to the LGBTQIA model and you will find a myriad of different small independent groups generally focused around singular letters of the acronym who have a diehard core and damn near always the people who founded them were the people who experienced the problem directly or the surviving loved ones of people who died. The circle of secondary supporters are usually more varied but the Leaders basically need to be able to devote at least around 100 man hours apeice per year doing pretty intense work that involves a lot of key decision making. If you really are fired up about making this thing real that’s the bit that needs to be done so other people can push it. Or find someone already doing the thing and support them. Amplify their message and organization. Grow them.

Allies are also more likely if you create solidarity. Try partnering with a women’s shelter group to learn their process, reach out to the Gay community to tap their activism networks by explaining how your interests intersect, cross promote. Be prepared to reciprocate. Nobody likes selfish people who take up all the oxygen in the room. People will find time to help people who make reasonable direct asks that respect the time and resources needed to attend to their own admin first.

But in general I don’t see this engagement style from cis straight men’s activism groups. A lot of the time they seem to be fairly unhealthy because they just want to ruminate on how life sucks while practically nobody steps up to the plate to do the critical and nessisary front work. I just hear “women don’t care”, “nobody cares” “this should happen”… But what I NEVER hear “Okay, here’s our plan. Let’s meet.” “do this.” “support this.” “here’s how to effectively ask for this”, “support this court case” “I’m throwing a fundraiser” “let’s build our own shelter”… If you aren’t asking these things of each other then you have zero business demanding it of anyone else.

And if someone comes at me with “well I DO run or support a thing but nobody seems to care…” there’s usually some kind of reason why people aren’t latching. Chances are good if you aren’t crowing your most modest successes as wins and keeping hope and optimism as your center people are going to doubt your ability to deliver on your intentions. You can’t afford to mope, you need to change your approach, experiment and figure out what your winning formula is, replicate it, amplify it CELEBRATE it.

Because if no one actually cares… If you can’t advocate, If that actually is the implicit nature of the world there is no sense in complaining. You are fucked. You might as well go down fighting.

I keep wanting to light a fire under your asses. These things are worth fighting for but so often you don’t realize what you are doing to yourselves. You keep reinforcing your learned helplessness while looking at stuff that people worked damn hard to make real through individual personal effort and sighing over how that isn’t happening for you. That stuff didn’t just pop up out of the ground because someone clapped their hands and believed in fairies. Somebody get boots on the fucking ground already!

If you can’t find someone doing the admin for the thing that’s your ride or die issue then you have to create one and chances are good that person is gunna have to be you. Nobody is generally lining up to take that gig… You can keep trying to convince rando people to try and take on your heaviest burdens but chances are all its going to do is make you angry when they just shoulder their own pack leaving you with nothing but a few kind words of encouragement before moving on down the road. You get a lot more faith in humanity when you hand them an item or two from your pack to carry for you as most people will help you out under that circumstance.

That’s not quite what I mean. It’s not that they are enemies of each other it is just that reciprocity is a road to success. A lot of the LGBTQIA for instance is solidarity based. Everyone has their main concern that focuses their own needs. Like folks who push for asexual stuff is different than say trans stuff. You wouldn’t go to an allosexual trans person to get your marching orders for organizing for Ace things or vice versa. They have independent agendas and groups who do the main work. Successful adgendas put in the primary effort and give lower effort tasks to do to allies.

Like okay, example. There’s the regular list of regular concerns from men’s advocacy groups. Education accommodations to close gaps for students and resources for domestic abuse shelters for men. Those are two very common issues. On their own however it doesn’t matter how often you say it, I could agree with you those would be good thing but that isn’t enough…

You need someone dedicated to actually create the initiative. Maybe organize a group of psychology professionals to advocate to a school board for changes or set up a non-profit to get shelters going… Governments generally only adopt things once a model has been tested so just getting shit done to prove your model has to usually be grassroots : That’s the stuff that a primary organizer does. It’s tough work. It takes a lot of free time and dedication. There’s admin aspects where you need to talk to professionals, get a dedicated core of like minded people together and point them in a direction, deal with a lot of very impassioned ideas clashing against each other and hours of effort. It’s a frustrating blood, sweat and tears endeavor. Most people have the energy at most to do one of these maybe two during their lifetime. A lot of people can’t manage it even once. Chances are nobody is going to sign on to help you with this generally unless they got enough skin in your game.

Look back at the history of the LGBTQIA and you will find hundreds of fairly small groups working this way for very specific initiatives. The main people of those group’s cores are usually either people of that specific queer minority who are directly effected or family or friends of a minority member who died.

But what a primary group creates is secondary tasks. Maybe they create the charity that does the main work and other people who want to help but don’t have time to volunteer kick money into it. The primary group organizes the protest and post the posters and reach out to allies… and all the allies need to do is show up.

With a lot of men’s advocacy groups there’s this toothless helplessness where they aren’t asking people to join in to do secondary tasks. They just state problems that exist. It kind of comes across to groups that are more used to organizing like they aren’t giving trying to give someone a job they are trying to convince you to start their small business for them from scratch.