Their admin is an open transphobe.
She wears a placid, pretty expression
That is not how I'd describe her expression. To me, that expression looks smug/condescending/knowing
im too old and unfit to compete at anything!
To be fair, I am too! I still run, but lets just say, my halcyon days are behind me :P
There also never seems to be any situations of FTM people excelling at sports like is reported of MTF. Happy to accept that might be a media bias issue.
There are no cases of trans fem folk excelling either. At least not trans fem folk on hormone replacement for a decent period of time.
You'll find studies talking about individual elements of physiology, and drawing extentions from that that. You'll find studies that don't take in to account the impacts of hormone replacement. And you'll find studies written by transphobes with an agenda that outright lie.
But what you won't find, no matter how hard you look, is any kind of evidence of systemic advantage. What you won't find is any kind of study that looks at real world sporting outcomes, and shows evidence of trans folk winning more than they should. You'll find plenty of examples of trans folk being accussed of having advantage for performing well, but unless your position is that trans folk can't compete unless they are actively disadvantaged, you should expect to see trans folk win sometimes, and place highly sometimes. That only becomes an issue when it occurs more than you would expect given the participation numbers, and it's at that point, the evidence evaporates.
I want to bring up Lia Thomas as a classic example of what the media portrayal looks like. She is portrayed as a mediocre swimmer, who became a great swimmer when she transitioned. But, there is bias at play in the way that story is told. In order to swim in the women's category, she needed to be on hormone replacement for a period of time (2 years from memory). During that time, her performance was impacted, but she was still forced to swim with men. And those are the stats that the transphobes will bring up, to call her a mediocre swimmer. If you look at her stats from before she started hormones, her performance was at an elite level. And after the impact of hormones, her performance was elite by women's standards too, but she set no world records, and she was soundly beat by many cis women. Yet the stories you hear, tell of a trans women breaking records, and magically becoming a contender. Because the stories are part of a wedge tactic, designed to normalise the idea of seperating trans women from cis women.
I'll also point you at this study...
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586.full
Conclusions
This research compares transgender male and transgender female athletes to their cisgender counterparts. Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and CM. Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women. Therefore, this research shows the potential complexity of transgender athlete physiology and its effects on the laboratory measures of physical performance. A long-term longitudinal study is needed to confirm whether these findings are directly related to gender-affirming hormone therapy owing to the study’s shortcomings, particularly its cross-sectional design and limited sample size, which make confirming the causal effect of gender-affirmative care on sports performance problematic.
Now, it's guilty of the very thing I pointed out earlier. It looks at a single attribute in isolation, and draws conclusions from it. But when you compare it with studies that find advantage in other areas, it becomes clear, that the answer will not be found in studies highlight individual areas. What does an advantage in height mean for example, if offset by cardiovascular disadvantage?
There is a reason we don't see trans women dominating sports. And that's because they don't. Anything telling you otherwise, is pushing an agenda.
And of course, I'm pushing an agenda too. But my agenda is to not be excluded from the sports I love, and not to have sports used as an excuse to exclude me from other arease of society. My agenda is my safety.
I've posted things like this many times before, and rarely does it get anywhere, because people have already made up their mind. You claim to have not made up yours, but if you are reading this and your first instinct is to try and find rebuttals and arguments, then I'd suggest to you that maybe you have made up your mind already. If your first instinct wasn't a defensive desire to argue and debate the topic, then well, you're one of the rare ones...
Before I respond in detail, let me ask, are you open to the possibility of changing your position? Because most folk aren't, because facts don't change minds when positions are held emotionally.
If sporting bodies/scientists etc can find ways of managing the situation so it is proven to be fair then great (the paralympics have various categories for instance, off the top of my head why can't other sports?), but until then this insistence upon something that in many instances isn't fair in a sporting sense creates a wedge issue right wing types can and do exploit because the average sports fan
The vicious irony here is that the limited science there was, did show that trans folk competing with cis folk of the same gender either had no advantage, or the advantage was too small to identify without further study. Study that was impossible due to the very small number of trans folk actively in involved in sports to begin with.
Yet despite that, the right wing types created a wedge, and folk like you jumped on board
How they think rather than what they think. I recognised it in myself and have really tried to get passed it.
Then I'm genuinely asking you to do so here as well. For me, I'm trans, I used to be a semi elite runner, and a roller derby player. I've ran with men and women, and I've played roller derby with men and women. I also know the science around trans folk in sports. So I've lived this, experiencing it first hand, as well as having a very strong personal interest in following the science.
You are wrong on this.
your refusal to deal with simple reality
The irony here is that "simple reality" shows that in most sports, trans women don't have advantage, and sometimes, have disadvantage in comparison to cis women. But that reality doesn't align with peoples intuitive expectations of how it works, and thus, it's incredibly easy to mislead people in to anti trans positions by using sports as a wedge tactic, which is exactly why it's happening, and exactly why it's working.
I could show you the studies backing up my claim, but experience tells me that you won't be open to them. Facts alone don't generally work convincing people to change their positions, because rarely have they arrived at those positions through facts alone. And given that you are vehemently arguing with people about a topic that doesn't directly impact you and that you didn't care about until politicians and talking heads started to use it to stir up fear and hate, chances are, facts have little to do with how you arrived at your position. Hell, you're even waiving the need to look at the facts, by declaring that your position is reality, completely closing down the possibility you might be wrong.
Does the changes to bone structure and density and muscle composition fade away?
Literally, yes...
I don't care if I like them. I very much care if I'm making money for people who are actively trying to take away my rights
I haven't banned you from any communities. I instance banned you. Which I did, because you implied that Arab folk are all sexist.
Which comes on the back of previous comments removed for transphobia, insults and posting swastikas.
I'll be instance banning you again now.
You really need to listen to what you're saying.
You're arguing for the right to deny people their own identities in their own safe spaces whilst claiming that somehow, the real issue is letting queer folk choose the language that works best for them.
t would be fine if you said "He was kind of pushy about trying to make his point and although he clearly wasn't coming from any hostile place,
He was repeatedly and deliberately gatekeeping people's identities. I don't know how to make that any clearer to you.
Whether or not any given person is a troll, it's not an excuse to make people's identities a reward for good behaviour.
If you decide that taking away peoples identities "because they're a troll" is ok, then you're telling the gender diverse people around you that you don't see them for who they are, and that you're just pretending to accept them as long as they behave in ways you find appropriate. Normalising the idea that we can decide other peoples identities is literally the goal of trolls, and so when you see a troll and decide that's a good reason to invalidate people, you're feeding the troll, and hurting the gender diverse folk around you.
I will respect a trolls identity, even as I ban them, because opening the door to deciding which identities are valid does nothing but hurt vulnerable people.
This was all explained to PJ, several times, and he doubled down. And tripled down. Whilst explicitly denying people's identities.
He was coming from a hostile place, and refused to leave it, even when it was explained to him.
I mean... aren't you positioning yourself as the arbiter of other folks' validity and identity?
The fact that you're equating the creation of protective rules in explicitly safe spaces as being morally identical to gatekeeping other folks identities makes me doubt your intentions. If you genuinely believe they're the same thing, you've got a lot of work to do. And if you don't believe they're the same thing, but are comparing them to win an internet discussion, then you're the one stirring up drama...
Is blahaj drama free?
I hope not.
We're an explicitly protective, safe space for a minority group that is actively targeted by governments, political institutions, churches, and bigots in general
So of course we create drama. Bigots will make sure of it.
He was banned from blahaj for literally just showing up and saying reasonable things. If that's against the rules of your instance
Nah. He was banned for repeatedly, deliberately, and knowingly breaking the rules. Whether or not you think gatekeeping someones identity is acceptable, blahaj.zone has rules against it, and his response to it was to deliberately break the rules and stir up shit.
A lot of people feel like, if they think something reasonable, they're allowed to say it, and it's weird and controlling for some other person to say that opinion is the incorrect opinion and demand that they not say it within certain spaces.
Tough shit. When someones "reasonable" opinion involves positioning themselves as the arbiter of other folks validity and identity, they're doing harm. When they choose to repeatedly and deliberately do that in a safe space for those folk, they're repeatedly and deliberately doing harm and breaking the rules.
All of which to say, even if you're a gatekeeper like him, who thinks that you have the right to tell other people their own identities, if you come in to a blahaj community and do it, you're breaking blahaj rules. If you choose to knowingly and repeatedly do it, whilst then complaining about it in various meta spaces, then you're breaking rules and stirring up drama.
movies @piefed.social The Dysphoria (Short Film) | Trailer
Drag is banned from blahaj. Gatekeeping people's identities and pronouns is still against the rules.
And if it was a single comment, you'd have a point, but it was ongoing, repeated and deliberate arguments in a space that had explicit rules against what he was doing, rules that he understood. And rather than following the rules, or posting in other communities, he brought it up over and over again, arguing that he has the right to decide other people's identities.
And when banned for it, he made sure to keep adding flames to the fire.
Whatever else he is, he is not drama free.
He left Mozilla (chased out because he's a homophobe) and went on to found Brave, where he still remains
The fact that the dev behind brave is a homophobe isn't opt in though...
Except research conducted by men like Sam Parnia rules that out and shows that conciousness persists after death.
That's not what he showed though. What he was saying is that brain death isn't the hard on/off line that we think it is, and that in some cases, it's possible to restore some brain function in a brain that had been declared to have died.
Only problem is that even if the person is barely clinging onto life there's still the issue of conciousness being strong and present where none can exist.
Sam Parnia quite explicitly talks about "restoration" of brain function. This does not mean that consciousness exists independent of the brain, he's stating that he believes we can return consciousness to some brains that we believe are beyond that point, and the boundary at which the brain/consciousness "dies" isn't quite as clear cut as it seems.
He also claims that the experience of consciousness might not be centered in the brain, despite interacting with it, but at this point, he is no longer backed by research or medical experience, and is just theorising.
Which is to say, the research and experiences he talks about do suggest that our "time of death" and treatment of brain death as a binary yes/no situation may be incorrect.
However, it doesn't say anything new in regards to life after death, souls, or anything along those lines, and Sam Parnia's talk in these areas is supposition rather than evidence based.
It was probably Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog, though it didn't stick. I tried other versions of Ubuntu and even gentoo again over the following years, but none of them would stick. I would eventually tinker with something I couldn't repair, and rather than re-installing and starting again, I'd just return to windows.
Linux finally stuck for me last year, and Linux (Arch and then CachyOS) has been my full time OS for about the last 18 months