I think the point being made is that often women are called upon to do emotional labour by men who are often only acquaintances who look at them as resources that should be on the cultural hook to dispense emotional intimacy. A lot of women are fed up with the gendered nature of that expectation because you have a lot of men taking of that resource but not seeing it as being something they should actively be doing too and that their lack of reciprocation and participation in that space is a problem.

The fact that cultural norms prevent men from seeking solace from other men is a problem not just because it’s root lies in a lot of homophobia but because it creates both a category of gendered work for women and isolates men from their peers. Women are often pressured into that role which means if they don’t want to perform that function for any reason they can meet resistance as that emotional intimacy can be treated or assumed as being mandatory.

Nor is it a good idea to lay all your problems at the feet of an intimate partner regardless of gender. They have a lot of investment in you generally and it is easier to talk with them but they are generally ill equipped to shoulder all of your problems because they lack emotional distance to set you right if you are going astray. They often have other investments in you as well which means they cannot always tell it to you straight because if you disagree or react poorly they might lose you or jeopardize life goals and plans.

Being approachable and available to provide support should be a genderless issue with neither automatic expectation of providing or expected coldness laid at the feet of anyone.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

You are assuming a lot here. The USA also procecutes victims for not running away fast enough and causing harm to their attackers. There is a history of people in your country as well who have been charged after defending themselves from a violent assault / rape / murder attempt even in states with more protected self defense clauses

( non exhaustive examples : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/us/marissa-alexander-released-stand-your-ground.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/how-far-can-abused-women-go-to-protect-themselves)

So I posit that your concept of how law works in the case of self defense is a lot more similar between our two countries than you think. The difference lies in how much power and authority we grant police as a society. Here becoming a cop is either a 2 year standardized college course or a 6 month intensive boot camp for RCMP hopefuls as a primer and then an apprenticeship cadet program working under a seasoned officer. The techniques taught as absolute basic are soft skills, psychology, critical thinking, legal knowledge as well as self defense and weapon skills. While they are granted some extra authority over a regular citizen for the most part their rights are the exact same as any regular citizen in terms of how excessive force works.

Your citizenry’s permissiveness in wild west style police justice kills people needlessly. It’s the people’s expectations as a whole that grant them the sort of powers of an occupying military force. The entire model of policing is needlessly dangerous and values following orders more than people’s welfare.

They may gain the legal justification needed to avoid prison in the States but here in Canada they would be fucked and they would have had the legal duty to retreat. The duty of police here is to merit only so much force as is required in a situation for all parties to get to safety and reassess if the situation merits any harm. Even if someone takes a swing at you with a weapon lethal force is only justified if all other potential options for resolving the conflict have been exhausted. Since she was rolling very slowly the potential threat to life was low. The officer had time to both draw and aim a weapon which means he also had time to remove himself from the psth of the car. Also the scope of the percieved crime comes into play. It was a non-violent supposed theft of property. Here unless someone has seen the uninterrupted process of selection, concealment and removal from property the crime is not chargable. Stores however are able to ban customers from their premises based on the criteria of suspicion of prior theft. So an arrest made under the circumstances of incomplete suspicion of theft would likely just fall apart in court. Escalating to yelling at her and making her feel her life is threatened in the first place for such a mild offence would have been considered at least a little dodgy. Ideally here police are supposed to utilize means to de-escalate conflict. Losing their cool for a minor charge and escalating the conflict to yelling even if the case was airtight would have been seen as a need to retrain them.

Here’s what thia would have looked like in my country. They would have stated the person was under arrest and was to leave the vehicle, tell them the legal consequences of resisting arrest but to do so in a calm.way that keeps the situation safe for all. If the cost to safety of themselves and the public of enforcing the arrest is too dangerous given the nature of the crime then any force applied would be potentially considered improper use of force. Since the he only thing endangered is a small amount of property the authority of the officer neither of those things are worth more than the safety of all involved. Legal ramifications can happen safely elsewhere after everyone has cooled off. They had the tools to do that.

The police here would not be justified. The limitations of their powers are that their first duty is to the safety and to protect the lives of the public and themselves. Their authority to command is entirely second to this. The question of “were there ways to resolve this safely for all parties without a non-violent resolution” would be asked. But even if something is lawful does not make it just.

Regardless of ruling, what happened here is essentially that these officers placed more value on an inflated idea of their authority than the safety of themselves and the woman. They placed themselves in the path of harms way for a percieved stolen property under $50. They shot someone and effectively killed two because they felt justified doing so for a charge of property under $50. Their first reaction they made to being lightly jostled by a car was not to remove themselves from her path and pursue the charge later with the tools they had or even to draw a weapon to warn her to stop and give her a second chance of compliance. Their first reaction was to draw take a second to aim and then fire a lethal shot. At the end of the day she was killed for an improper reaction to authority over a tiny amount of property that the police valued more than her safety.

If that is the society you want I am at least glad that I don’t have to live in it. For a country that calls itself “land of the free” the powers you give to police is inhumane.

Rhe police had her license plate number. Her physical description. They had the nature of her offence being a non-violent crime. The car did not quickly accelerate and the police officer against all common safety advice put himself in the path of the vehicle.

That his first action was to pull a gun and fire and not just get out of the way and approach the problem at a later time in a less heated situation is excessive force. Back when I worked security I watched lots people pull this stunt on police officers before and surprise - none of them got shot and none of the police got hit by a car and everybody still got their resisting arrest charge at the end if the day.

If you are scared enough your psychological reaction is to stay in a place of safety or to flee and cars provide the opportunity to both… Which is why you aren’t supposed to put yourself in the path of someone’s potential escape with your body. People are panicy animals who can divert entirely to basic instinct, particularly when they are hurt or in a lower estimation of being able to defend themselves like pregnancy.

This is an example of someone killed because of bad police training and decision making that ignored entirely how scary even normally benign police interactions can be to black women. If she was worried about harm to her baby because of the police’s habit of putting people forcefully on the ground or slamming them against cars she would be placed under extreme distress having one yell at her to leave her car like they meant to do her violence.

The police here created wholecloth the “need” to shoot this woman. From the moment they started escalating, blocking her route of egress and not taking the moment of thought to ask if this could not be de-escalated and addressed later safely given the minor nature of the complaint.

Not saying that I am blaming her. The people who hurt her were definitely not good people… Just saying that I feel weird about her being called “poor woman” - like it minimizes the guts of what she did.

Weirdly I don’t know if I could class her as a “poor woman” ? She was the one who set up all the objects on the table which included ones that were potentially lethal and she specified the parameters of the piece and very specifically could have stopped the performance at any time by moving of her own volition and speaking. She went into it accepting her own murder as a potential outcome and was committed to carrying on regardless of what happened. It being an art peice would not have protected a participant from a murder charge while assult charges have to be made by the victim of the assault… So there was at least that.

While she may not have been able to account for the long term psychological effects and may have had some initial optimism that people would not choose the darker options made available… I think terming her a “poor woman” might actually be dismissive of the actual volition and personal grit she had in the construction and performance of the piece? While it may have been ballsy to the point bordering madness dangerous stunt performances where athletes risk death for their audiences are a thing and those performers go in with the same expectation of potential fatality.

It was real and loaded. The actor was commited to any outcome including being murdered on stage.

The audience first tested the waters and gradually escalated to more extreme forms of violence. When the violence started the audience factionalized into those who were committed to stopping her from being shot, arguing and shaming aggressors or physically stepping in.

While I don’t know if I can condone the piece ethically it certainly says more about human nature than most art pieces.

Umm… I hate to tell you this but this is propagating some pretty harmful misinformation…

The reactions to medications are actually more closely tied to the hormone balance and body fat distribution of a person than their sex. It’s a common issue in the trans community where birth certificates are non-updatable that a doctor will prescribe meds for a person’s birth sex but because they are fully transitioned through HRT they get the effects more common to their phenotype presentation. This means that treatment is more commonly in line with their gender identity because of their hormonal medication and other procedures like an orchiectomy that make a person more similar to where they transitioned to then where they transitioned from.

With trans paitents by and large the safer way to behave is to go with the “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and talks like a duck… If you are in a pinch and can’t ask them for specifics because they can’t talk - treat them like a duck.” While a lot of doctors aren’t super well versed in trans specific healthcare it remains a huge problem inside the community for trans women particularly being dosed like cis men which often means they respond like cis women to a lot of different things which is on average a little more scary because meds often linger longer than is expected in trans women’s tissues just like cis women. Sometimes this causes some cascading problems.

Pharmacology wise the way trans folks react to different medications is still a bit of a frontier science… But dollars to donuts “just treat em like their birth sex and call it a day” is way too simplistic a take. The lived experience and often physical nature of gender do not stay nicely behind a cordon marked “politics”. Trans ignorance in healthcare can be very scary for someone whose endocrinologist has informed them what they should be given and treated like and then some hotshot resident could just decide to not listen should the trans person in question be placed in a position where they are in extreme distress and have to self advocate and educate the person caring for them on what may be the worst day of their life.

As a Canadian this is what I fear for my American friends. While I have heard lots of people whine about how people “die on wait lists” in the Canadian system that really hasn’t been my experience. While yes things like joint surgeries and electives can take a while I have had relatives of friends flown via helicopter ambulance from small towns for month long stays for serious stuff at the drop of the hat at no cost to the family.

Anything seriously life threatening has gone into treatment immediately. Hospice stays are mostly covered so compassionate end of life facilities cost half of what a dirt cheap hotel does. The cost to the taxpayer for healthcare is, determined by tax bracket is tiny. If I make $80,000 it costs me about $350 for the year.

Because it’s a drain on the government’s bottom line there’s a lot of harmful food additives that are banned in Canada because the ethos is that it is unlawful for businesses get to make profit at the expense of consumer health if people can not be easily informed of the health risks. The Covid Vaccine was also given a lot more push society wide because the beggaring and allotment of resources away from the healthcare system for preventable incidents directly effects everyone.

Deciding that healthcare is a right has society wide advantages. People will do anything to stay alive a little longer including beggar themselves so it makes sense that adding business interests into that market to jack up the prices for profit is just unethical imo.

Aa the ban only applies to uniformed and armed cops and not plain clothed off duty ones they seem to be more outraged by the lack of convenience.

They seem to have wheeled out their Victorian fainting couch over the barest hint of being told to respect a PTSD trigger safe space for people who have been terrorized by uniformed and armed people. Oh the bigotry! (snerk)

It would not be required as off duty cops or non-visble ones are allowed. The ban is only on uniforms and guns which makes sense given thw article states some of the employees and regular clientele come from war torn places or have PTSD triggers around uniformed officers.

Also the distinction is “no uniforms, no guns” off duty police are still served. It’s actually a little closer to “no shoes, no shirt, no service”.

As listed in the article some of the employees and regular customers come from war-torn places or have histories of traumatic interactions with police. Hence the ban comes from a place of limiting PTSD reactions.

It’s a non-binary so neither male nor female aligned and it’s basically not something someone who is not of the tribes where it’s a thing can use the label. So that’s basically the cliff notes.

To get more granular it’s a partially ceremonial category of gender that is neither male nor female. Culturally this third gender has unique cultural and social roles similar to how male and female do that are unique to that culture. It’s a social category that has it’s own modes of dress, rituals and social expectations applied to it. Western culture doesn’t exactly have a rigid third gender classification in this way so there’s not much that two Spirit can be easily compared one to one with making it difficult to explain. Two Spirit people are sort of formally recognized by their people and assume the cultural trappings of this third gender role.

It’s not linked to a specific tribe and is kind of an umbrella term, these third gender roles are a feature of a lot of different tribes that all call them something specific in their own languages so “two spirit” is just an English speaker’s short cut to referring non-specifically to a person occupying one of potentially dozen different varieties of these different culture’s third gender categories.

Two Spirit is a non binary identity with a specific cultural context within the history of indigenous peoples. In Canada, due to the increased focus on dealing with the reconciliation of Indigenous peoples the current Acronym is 2SLGBTQIA as it sort of symbolicly puts precedent on amplifying indigenous voices in the movement.

Pretty sure that’s a yeerk friend. Brain slugs attach to the brain through the skull where they mount from the outside and they have little antenna.

Anybody remember what flavor of instant oatmeal you use against yeerks by any chance? I need to make a run to the store.

There are a fair number of Democrats who think abandoning trans issues is the right path to take to make themselves more acceptable to “centrists” reasoning that the democrats will make things better in the long term when they have the safety to do so…

But they have no idea how much damage can be done. How many people in that time will give up hope that things will be better or who will be driven to that point by feeling alone and weird because they don’t see themselves reflected anywhere and there’s no one out there to tell them that people like themselves exist and that their lives are not always defined by pain, loneliness and want.

When people act like it’s something that should just be put off so some bigots feel like maybe they might halfway consider voting democrat (which they usually don’t. Even some of my trans accepting friends who agree with all the leftist talking points still self identity as conservative in their heart of hearts in part because they’ve been brainwashed to equate the word “conservative” with “reasonable” ) they forget that so many of us are down to clinging to the very bricks by our fingernails. It’s quite in character for the Democrats to shelve trans issues to try and appease Republicans by trying to wheedle and play nice to encourage them not to be horrible by trying to become some sort of model of respectable comprise instead of finding new ways to defend against and fight the systemic prejudices and correct the disinformation surrounding trans health care… News flash to Democrats. Republicans will never wake up and see you as the model Paladin of democratic dignity and process. They will never be courted to be better if you compromise now so they might owe you one later. They don’t ever pay back those favors for the compromises you make. They will just take every concession and compromise and turn around and call you obstructionists. You just will lose more ground until eventually there’s none left to hold.

It is dealt with on a case by case basis. There is no one size fits all solution for being trans at any age.

I will say We are in a weird situation at present where people’s lack of acceptance about trans people is the cause of making the choices harder than it need be. In an ideal world gender non-conforming people are accepted and you make choices based purely based on your own comfort. But at present there are a lot of people out there trumpeting to the rooftops that if you look trans you deserve to be misgendered or segregated. If people can clock you as a trans person at a distance there is a cost in the form of getting hassled by bigots, higher chances of assault and possibly of being detained by security in airports, discriminated against for housing and job applications and there becomes more places in the world where it is not safe to go. The pressure to conform more neatly to one sexual phenotype’s presentation is at least in part a safety issue… One that can driven by the existence of transphobia in the world at large not strictly by personal desire. In any case the risks of the issue complicated as they are are for individuals to navigate case by case. Nobody forces anyone into surgery or horomones it is ultimately the choice of the paitent and if they are 16 (the minimum age for HRT and top surgery) their legal guardians.

So you are afraid of doing any mental work. Not surprised. Also this particular person, Elliot Page, is one of the most famous trans men out there and even if he weren’t famous you are grandstanding about how you want to call trans people whatever you feel like.

When you are nasty behind someone’s back it’s still you showing off how much of a mean killjoy you are practicing up to be to somebody’s face someday and that you are proud of being a mean ass killjoy. Then you get upset because ta da - people treat you like a mean killjoy. How unpredictable!

So you are saying you must constantly remind yourself and everyone you are talking to of someone’s genitals at birth in every conversation you have constantly or else what - you’ll forget?

Are you a goldfish?

People aren’t asking you to ignore your eyes dude. They are asking you to allow people space to use their mental tools so they can more easily get through their day. They are legit telling their friends and the people they are around most what way to treat them will make them happiest to make them the most comfortable to be themselves. When you present yourself as a obstacle to someone else’s joy and/or wellbeing yeah, people treat you like an ass. You are not the arbiter of truth here. People know that trans women were born phenotypicly male. They are just able to prioritize more than “monkey see, monkey speak”.