Spyke

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Hey could we defederate with exploding-heads.com/

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I was very interested to see examples, as I do not like to judge without knowledge, and I am a very firm believer that toxic positivity is harmful.

That being said, I saw no toxic positivity in that thread or harmfully "positive" comments. Instead, what I saw were many people encouraging OP to explore the ideas thoughtfully while keeping in mind that no one can tell them if they are trans except themselves. I saw encouragement to seek out therapy instead of doing this alone, encouragement to consider the ideas of doing mundane things as a woman (such as doing taxes, grocery shopping, commuting, etc) and see if it still felt right (instead of just the attraction or sexual aspects), reminders that the whole concept is a spectrum and not to get hung up on labels and instead focus on actions that feel right.

I fail to see how any of that is toxic positivity.

The only worrying comment I saw was yours, and even moreso because you indicated that you were biting your tongue because of the community's rules. You used negative slang terminology to indicate this person merely has a fetish and that this big bad world is too confusing so OP should look to the past when these things were handled more simply "scientifically", and insinuated they were only going to blindly follow the answer given to them about whether or not they are trans instead of explore their identity given the info from the thread.

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Hey could we defederate with exploding-heads.com/

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Again, literally NO ONE in that thread encouraged transition. The only thing being encouraged was that OP had to explore to figure it out themselves and that no one could tell them if they were trans except themselves.

I've spoken with many people who got on hormone therapy because they were "encouraged" by communities like this.

No, you haven't. Because that doesn't exist except in people's made up anger-fantasies in their heads when they try to come up with more reasons to get upset at trans-allies for.

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I’m sorry Miss Jackson

I will never not upvote this. I can't even remember the actual words to the last line anymore, it's been "I am several fish and not a guy" to me for a decade, and I don't mind not looking it up to remember what the real words are. I prefer this version.

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U.S. Navy Heard What It Believed Was Titan Implosion Days Ago — The Wall Street Journal

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A man who blatantly skirted safety regulations and not only fired, but sued, employees/contractors that called him out on safety concerns. He complained that these safety concerns were stifling innovation and bragged that NASA and other agencies were consulting on the design (hint, they didn't, they only recommended what material to use for the hull, and that was the extent of it).

All of this was to try to get billionaires' money for adventure tourism under the guise of it being a research team and calling them "crew". Others on previous dives said that he likened the risk to the innovation of the industry as a whole and that if the Wright Brothers had fallen during their flight, at least the industry would have known flying was possible and would have continued on and learned from it. He neglected to point out that the industry already has many, many successful submersibles, so much so that there are industry standards for safety! Additionally, this man didn't contribute any research to the scientific community based on these dives. Truly just a grifter trying to exploit the titanic for tourism.

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Can't win with some people

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The instant I saw this picture, I thought of the Parks and Rec scene:
"That's not really the attitude I expect from an award winner."
"Everything I do is the attitude of an award winner, because I have won an award."

That should be the case for the picture "Everything I do is manly because I am a man." And the same for the person you are responding to "Everything I do is gay/straight/other because I am gay/straight/other." That one part of someone's identity has no bearing on defining the rest of them - ie, being gay means that he's attracted to men but doesn't define what he wears, how he acts, etc.

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Hey could we defederate with exploding-heads.com/

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I am not denying that there are people that have detransitioned for various reasons (though it is no where near the percentage the ridiculous, far-right 'reports' claim it to be), and I do not deny that there people who have had surgeries that have not gone as planned ("botched", or unpleasant, or left them not feeling whole as they expected, or many more reasons). I'm also not denying that people that went on therapies ending up not becoming the person they expected and still not feeling whole.

What I AM denying is that there exist "harmful communities" that are needlessly "encouraging" transitions to those that don't need it. Instead, what I believe is happening - and it is very important that I am saying believe, because there is a very wide range of things happening in these instances - is that those seeking out these treatments are looking for a "solution" instead of realizing that they are going to have to go through a journey to discover who they are. They are in pain, anguish, confused, and are looking for something to make them whole. In any solutions involving the mind, such as depression, anxiety, OCD, etc, it takes multiple tries or combinations of treatments to what works, and there's no reason to think gender identity and expression would be any different. As you can see in the comments to the thread you linked, multiple commenters suggested not getting hung up on labels and to explore multiple options. I believe those that you are referencing got hung up on the first "solution" deciding that must be it and then (even subconsciously) deciding the community was the one that "encouraged" them into it when it ended up not being what felt right.

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Hey could we defederate with exploding-heads.com/

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Your do realize that people can "rush into things" against their therapist's opinion as well, correct? Decide "obviously this is the solution, time to book a surgeon. Oh, well, I can't afford that good one, so I'll go to this other one over here" all the while the therapist is trying to say "wait! We're no where near getting to a diagnosis!”

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Hey could we defederate with exploding-heads.com/

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Literally everything in this comment is YOUR EXPERIENCE, at least your perception of it. If you were to go around saying "here is what I experienced" that would be absolutely FINE! But that's not what you are doing, you are saying "speak with a gender therapist who will likely urge you to transition" is objective fact. Don't even share the stories of those you've spoken with as lived experience because those are second hand stories and therefore unreliable. I'm not saying that the people you've spoken with can't be trusted, but the mere nature of the fact that the are secondhand means they are coming from an unreliable narrator.

You are literally incorrect about that law in California - I live in California, and that is one thousand percent not a law, and I know the law to which you are referring that got distorted over social media and you didn't even get that correct and twisted even further to fit your narrative.

No one in those comments said anything about lying to therapist's to get on hormones. Meds were never mentioned except in people's anecdotes. The only things commenters were encouraging OP to do were to think things through. And no, misinformation does not change from person to person. There are things that are factual and things that are not. You went from stating items as facts in the being to later revealing them as your anecdotal experience, which may simply be your perceived experience.

What exactly about my comments do you find harmful? I explained, multiple times, that your anecdotal experience does not equate to the entirety of the profession or the community.

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Commuting across timezones

Way back in college (20ish years ago) I had a friend that was living on the Illinois/Indiana boarder. He lived in Indiana but went to college in Illinois, so he was going to school in one time zone and working in another. To make matters worse, in those days Indiana had some counties that observed daylight savings and some that didn't. So he had to keep track of what shift he was on for work in his own county and if it was daylight savings or not, and in case he was making plans with any friends in other counties or just going to stores or appointments or anything, and what times he had to go to class in the other time zone. He says there were days he would show up places three hours late even though he only lived 20 minutes away because he didn't realize time had sprung forward and he had his watch set on the wrong state.

This was before smartphones, and I think the state has done away with that partially observing the time switch thing.

Personally, I'm a SuperCommuter and commute long distances for work, but only occasionally. So I'll live on the West Coast but my office is on the East Coast, so I think in office time. For me, 4am is 7am because that's what time it is for the rest of my team. Occasionally I'll have to set my internal clock to Guam Time or Amsterdam Time for a couple weeks at a time until a project is done, and it makes it much easier when I fly out there because my brain is already on that rhythm.

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Here's why people are being so mean about the Titan going down - CBC

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But the thing is, he wasn't a smart guy and was a swindler.

His background is in aeronautics, not marine engineering, so he was trying to apply knowledge meant for 0-1 atm of pressure to engineering a vessel to withstand 400 atm of pressure.

Just like everyone in the submersible world is coming out of the woodwork saying they all knew about his designs and told him not to do it, he was also known in the oceanography world (my field of research) - he (or others from oceangate) would show up at the conferences and be on the tech expo floors, especially in his early years, and try to convince us all that we should be using his subs to do our research. He wasn't pitching for us to do anything new or innovative with our research, just that he could attach our tech to his sub and go out there with it instead of towing it behind a boat, taking measurements remotely, using an ROV/AUV, etc. A) we already have tried and true methods of collecting or data, and in order to publish our data it needs to be reproducible in order to be peer reviewed, so why would we collect data with a method that would be best impossible for anyone else to do, B) why would we go through that risk of an untested method when the method isn't our research, C) there wasn't a chance that our research grants would cover the cost, D) there wasn't a chance that our research institutions would insure us or our research for it. He really wanted to be part of the research world to show this was an important part of research and prove the legitimacy of his creation, but he was barking up the wrong tree. He was coming to those of us that were doing acoustic data collection of the seafloor and saying we could be in the sub while the data is being recorded - but there's no benefit to that, or teams that take measurements that are taken regularly over a period of time which would require multiple deployments instead of planning a sensor that is checked remotely regularly. He really tried selling it hard though. Maybe if he went to the animal behaviorists that always say "I wish I could just see when they do ______" whatever behavior it is that has never been seen by humans because it's underwater and too far to dive - but chances are the appearance of a strange bubbling metal vessel with a light will scare it off.... This is what ROVs are for.

Anyway, since he couldn't get anywhere with the research angle, he started hawking it to his rich acquaintances and friends of friends. He still claimed to them that the overall goal was to have it be used as a research tool, so I don't know if the Titanic dives were a means to an end or a detour that would continue, but either way, he knew he had these acquaintances that had the will and the means to pay massive amounts of money for limited access adventure experiences and exploited the Titanic.