no worries; if you’re ever interested, I personally really enjoyed Susan Stryker’s Transgender History!

interesting, I would definitely love to read about it if you ever find that!

thanks for introducing me to that wikipedia page, it was definitely interesting to me <3

not sure what to take from what you are saying, do you mean they didn’t have hormones, or … that they drank horse urine (like, are you assuming context from the fact Premarin was derived from horses?)

so cool, thanks for sharing - I wonder if there was anything more specifically about the use of hormones? Just wondering how that might have been working in ancient contexts (I can only imagine a few ways it might work, such as by trying to isolate hormones from urine and then taking those orally.)

hey no worries, maybe later if you’re feeling up for it we can chat more - I’m especially interested in any sources you have about the transfeminine horse archers, I’m having trouble finding anything about it from searching online.

Implying money is power isn’t urging assimilationism, why are you so quick to accuse them? Money is crucial to funding militant movements, these are not separate tactics.

Sorry, perhaps I positioned myself as more contradicting what you said when I meant for it to be more like a “yes, and” situation. I agree with your point about money, I was just thinking of all the other factors and got a little too excited XD

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply we shouldn’t still appreciate when the president of the United States calls trans people the “fabric of our nation”, I think the words themselves are undeniably good.

I was only trying to say we shouldn’t shut down criticism of those acts as realpolitik, especially if as a community we can possibly leverage that kind of criticism to help accomplish our own political ends.

It is bizarre to me that the UK has somehow slid even further right than the U.S. in some ways, considering the U.S. is somewhat known for that political brand (where our “left” is still right of the conservative Christian Democratic party in Germany).

Yet Caitlyn Jenner isn’t exactly using her money to help the trans cause… It requires more than just money, there has to be a political movement and adherents to that movement who have the money and other relevant resources to effect change.

I’m not sure how much solace we should take from inauthentic political posturing, but we should certainly try to use being a political football to our advantage (since we can’t help that we’ve been victimized this way, but we can try to make something of the national spotlight being put on us).

To that end I think it’s beneficial for us to raise our standards and demand more than just words from politicians claiming to be supportive allies. Biden wants to be seen as supporting trans folks? Well, we demand the VA cover gender affirming surgeries. That’s a specific transphobic VA policy that needs to be overturned, and Biden can show he’s an ally by doing something about it.

I get why people are so freaked out about voting third party, especially when mass political actions like voting don’t seem to handle nuance well. So advocating a simple slogan like “vote third party” might be irresponsible, but people seem almost irrationally afraid of third party voting in contexts where it should be entirely rational to vote third party.

For example, in a swing state it’s clearly useful to vote for the Lesser Evil (in recent U.S. elections that would be the Democrats, of course). But in states where there is a supermajority and there is almost no chance the state will flip, for example California which will certainly go to the Democrats or Arkansas which will go Republican, voting third party becomes helpful because it might enable the third party to receive federal funding.

There are various objections I have considered to this strategy, the one I think that comes up immediately is that if you vote third party it takes a vote that might otherwise contribute to changing the status of a state as stronghold or swing state, basically those margins matter and you should always be pushing the margin even if not likely to make a difference (just on the slim chance it does make a difference).

In that instance I think it’s just a matter of weighing the good: does the good from voting for the third party justify the slight risk of not being part of an unexpected shift in votes? This is clearly contextual, see recent upsets in Georgia (who went to Biden in 2020) and Pennsylvania (who went to Trump in 2016). I think the responsibility is on the voter to research their state demographics and those probabilities and make a decision. If you want to do less work, sure, just vote for the Lesser Evil.

What I don’t understand is the kind of blind dogmatism that refuses to acknowledge that there even could be reasons to vote third party, and that doing so is wrong a priori.