The complete customization of Linux is just so appealing to trans people for some reason… No idea why changing anything and everything about something at a whim would be a big draw to the trans community…

Continuing from before…

Pass/Passing - Passing is a term that means that when you’re among strangers, your appearance and behaviours so closely mimic your chosen gender that strangers aren’t aware that you’re transgender unless you choose to share that information.

Clocking/Getting Clocked - This is a term transgender people use to describe a situation where you’ve been publicly outed as a transgender person. It’s basically the opposite of passing.

Misgendering - This is a term for when someone uses the wrong pronouns to refer to a transgender person. Usually transwomen are she/her, transmen are he/him, and non-binary people are they/them. That’s not always the case, but try to respect people’s pronouns.

TW/CW (Trigger Warning/Content Warning) - These are not specifically terms of the transgender community but it’s something you’ll often see in safe spaces. It’s just a warning that the proceeding content might trigger sensitive people. You might see something like “TW/CW transphobia” which warns you that if you’re particularly sensitive to transphobia, you might not want to read ahead.

This post is getting really long so I’m gonna wrap it up. I hope that was helpful!

I just want to end with a concept rather than terminology. The most important thing in being a good ally is don’t draw unwanted attention to transgender people.

A good example of that is the issue with pronouns. If transgender people are the only ones that introduce themselves by saying their name and their pronouns, then they’re essentially clocking themselves by introducing themselves that way, but if they don’t then they’re risking people misgendering them.

It’s also not great for you to ask for a person’s pronouns because if you ask a transgender person that question, they could easily interpret the question as implying that you’ve clocked them. Instead, it’s best if allies insist on introducing themselves by using name and pronouns even if they’re cisgender.

It’s like with the word “partner”. It used to be that if you said “my partner” it basically meant you were gay. So gay people would be forced to out themselves by saying (husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/etc) or trying to be ambiguous and saying “partner”. Allies have taken it upon themselves to start using the term “partner” even in cis-straight relationships to help give gay people the option on whether they want to out themselves or not when referring to their partner.

Basically, just try to be kind, try not to clock us, and listen and learn when corrected by a transgender person. And you might have noticed that I try to say “transgender person” as much as possible. That’s a good habit to get into because it humanizes us and reinforces in your head that we are people and deserve the same rights and respect as everyone else. Thanks for reading! 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

I gotta say I appreciate you taking the time and effort to learn! Allies are very much needed and I’m sure we all appreciate any effort you take.

It can be difficult to navigate the waters of transgender issues because opponents of trans rights will often use a tactic called sealioning which in short is “pretending to ask questions from a place of innocent ignorance” but really their intention is to insert their true hateful opinions into the conversation, or simply to waste the time of everyone involved.

It doesn’t seem like you’re that type of person, but just be aware that sometimes asking questions, no matter how innocent, will sometimes illicit a skeptical, or downright suspicious response because of that.

Anyway, I’ll try to be helpful with a list of commonly used terminology that you can look up.

AMAB/AFAB - Assigned (Male/Female) At Birth refers to the gender that a transgender person was born as

Sex vs Gender - Sex is biological, but gender is societal. People will often say that gender is a construct, by that they mean that the stereotypes and behaviours that we are not born with the stereotypes or behaviours that define genders in our society, they’re learned and they can be changed and unlearned.

Gender binary (or gender spectrum) - This is a term for the 2 common types of gender that most societies have, which is male gender and female gender. Although it uses the term “binary” which implies only 2 options, it’s often thought of more as a spectrum with the 2 extremes being on each end of the spectrum.

Transsexual - An outdated term and considered very offensive by most of the transgender community. NEVER call a transgender person a transsexual unless they use that word to describe themselves. As far as I understand it, a transsexual is specifically a person who doesn’t actually believe that they are a gender other than their assigned gender at birth, but instead they simply wear clothing of the opposite sex either for shock value, or for sexual purposes. Basically a crossdresser, or a drag queen would fit into this category.

Trans/Cis - These are Latin affixes, cis being “on this side” and trans being “on the other side of”, but with reference to gender cisgender people are those who are happy with the assigned gender at birth, and transgender people have chosen to change their assigned gender at birth.

Transwoman - A transgender person that was AMAB but has transitioned into a woman

Transman - A transgender person that was AFAB but has transitioned into a man

Gender neutral - Gender neutral transgender people are a specific subset of non-binary transgender people in that they do believe in the gender binary (male/female and everything in between) and they usually will try to be as close to the middle as possible.

Non-Binary - An AMAB or AFAB transgender person whose transition goals are to be neither distinctly male nor female in their gender presentation.

Transfeminine (or transfemme) - I see this term misused a lot even by transgender people, but I think the true definition is a transgender person who is non-binary, but leans slightly towards the feminine side of the binary gender spectrum.

Transmasculine (or transmasc) - Again, often misused in my opinion, but this is a non-binary transgender person that leans slightly towards the mascule side of the binary gender spectrum.

HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) - Medication to suppress the hormones of a transgender person’s assigned gender at birth and replace it with the desired hormones. Sometimes referred to as Gender Affirming Care (GAC).

E/T/Blockers - These are terms for different medications used in HRT. E is short of Estrogen, T is short for Testosterone, and blockers are medications that inhibit natural hormone production, for transwomen this will block the production of testosterone, for transmen this will block the production of estrogen.

GRS (Gender Reassignment Surgery, or sometimes called Bottom Surgery) - Usually this is specifically in reference to a surgical procedure to change the genitals of the transgender person into that of their chosen gender.

Top Surgery - Top surgery is another type of surgery that I think is distinct from GRS because it’s a secondary sexual characteristic. For transmen this is the removal of breasts, for transwomen this is the addition of breasts (breast implants).

Chaser (or Unicorn Chaser) - A term for people that don’t really see transgender people as people, but instead they see us as a rare commodity for their sexual gratification. They don’t truly see transgender people as their chosen gender, because to them the thing that piques their interest about us is simply that we are transgender.

Wow, I’ve hit the character limit, gotta break this up into multiple posts…

I think he actually started his climb towards the spotlight by causing people to call for his expulsion as a professor at the University of Toronto for refusing to call a transgender student by their name and refusing to use their preferred pronouns. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the protest against him simply made him reach a wider audience with his hate speech.

Yay! Happy to help! Enjoy!

@Stefh so a quick follow-up. I actually have this game and tinkered with it this morning to get it working. Here are the steps to get it working:

Click the Settings icon on Hyper Light Drifter (the 3 stacked slider bars icon) then click on WINETRICKS. Once Winetricks loads, click OK, select Install a Window DLL or component, then scroll to d3dcompiler_ with versions 42, 43, 46, and 47. Try installing any of them, I used the latest version, 47. But if you get an error, go back and try a different version. You can confirm that it was installed by going back into Winetricks and the version you installed should now be checked.

That should be it. It should work now. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll try to help you out.

Alternatively, if you’re more comfortable with command line stuff, go to the prefix folder for Hyper Light Drifter and run: winetricks d3dcompiler_47 or try changing the version number to 42, 43, or 46 if that doesn’t work.

ALSO! I just want to point out that this actually isn’t an issue with proton specifically. There are many Windows users complaining of this exact same issue.

At it’s very basic, the only thing preventing Windows software from running on Linux is the order in which commands are called to start the program. What WINE (and Proton) do is reconfigure the order of command calls. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that because of proprietary third-party software like DLLs, DirectX, and .NET redistributables. The difficulty is increased by nearly all of these being closed source, and so, developers just have to make educated guesses at what’s going on behind the scenes much of the time.

As for getting games working specifically with WINE and Proton, it’s nearly always better to run the game through a terminal window so you can see the logs output in real time. A lot of times, I find a big log at the start saying something like “{LIBRARY NAME} not found” or something along those lines, and simply installing the missing library through your package manager usually fixes the error. For example if it said “libssl errror” then try typing “sudo apt search libssl” and usually there will be a library literally called that letter for letter and install that, or try installing the closest candidate like maybe libssl3 or libssl-dev.

So, the way to actually launch games through a terminal window is this. Substitute your actual steam path for {your steam path} in the following examples. Then you’d type ~/{your steam path}/steamapps/common/{the name of the proton version you want to run}/proton run ~/{the path to the .exe you want to run}/{the .exe you want to run}.exe.

It’s as simple as that. You might immediately get an error saying KeyError: ‘STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH’ or KeyError: ‘STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH’.

For STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH, simply add or update the environment variable for that key by typing export STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=~/{your steam path}/compatibilitytools.d and for STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH type export STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=~/{your steam path}/steamapps/compatdata

It’s not the color, it’s the lack of outline around the text. You can put any color text on anything and as long as it has a contrasting outline color then it’s perfectly readable.

For games, there’s Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris which allow you to run non-steam games easily.

It’s funny, I learned recently that you don’t have to mash the button, you can just hold it down, but I still don’t trust it and mash anyway.

@burndown okay so I installed it using Heroic Games Launcher and used Proton-GE-latest as the proton version. No other tweaks necessary. You can use Heroic Games Launcher to add your Epic Games games to Steam so you can launch it directly from the Steam Deck Library.

I’ve never played Rocket League, but I have it, I’ll try installing it and see if I can figure it out. Generally if you’re looking for help running games on Linux then ProtonDB or Lutris.net will usually have some useful information.

There were big changes in personality for me as well, and I believe it was mostly due to no longer being deeply depressed.

Epic Games hasn’t done it much lately, but when they first launched they paid a few big games to be Epic Games Store exclusives which is obviously anti-consumer behaviour. That and they’re owned by China, so the chances of your data being funneled out to China is practically 100%. Also, Epic has historically been critical of gaming on Linux with the CEO going so far as to say that Linux users are a bunch of whiners and that Epic will never support Linux just to spite them. A very immature response to say the least.