Trans “healthcare” is, ultimately, not health related, it is cosmetic surgery or changing your body for cosmetic reasons.

In the same way someone getting their face reconstructed after a brutal car accident is “cosmetic.” Both are ultimately about making people comfortable in their skin.

Trans care saves lives. It saved mine. I don’t know what kind of monster can look at a 41% suicide attempt rate, look at the only care proven to massively reduce those rates, and then try to trivialize that care. Trans health care is one single most effective classes of medical care in modern medicine. Gender reassignment surgery has far better long term outcomes than knee replacements.

As for why there are so many trans people on Lemmy. Most of us left other spaces, often to get away from enlightened centrists who see our lives, healthcare, and civil rights as privileges to be granted if it’s politically convenient.

Don’t get me started on “Latinx.”

No. I said Democrat for a reason. Stop thinking in terms of a single election. I’m talking about coalitions and power balance within parties. You need to get past “Democrats good, Republicans bad.” Both parties are themselves coalitions, coalitions whose fortunes can rise and fall within the party.

Republicans are always going to be evil. But if the Democrats turn against us, now both parties are out to get us. That is the real threat, where trans persecution gains bipartisan support. We’re completely and utterly fucked if that happens. I fear a future where transphobia becomes so entrenched in both parties, that advocating for trans rights becomes as politically radioactive as a politican advocating for the rights of pedophiles in today’s world. I am willing to lose an individual election to Republicans if it means transphobic Democrats do not gain power within the party.

A transphobic Republican winning means pain for a few years. For me, ensuring that at least one party is not militantly transphobic is a far higher priority than winning a single election. I personally had to flee my home to escape Republican political persecution. I became an internally displaced refugee in my own country because of them. But at least now I live in a blue state with solid protections at the state level. If Democrats turn the way of Republicans, I will have to flee the country entirely.

Again, stop thinking of things just between parties. Parties are not a monolith.

One should not slander people who simply have stricter ethics than oneself as “both sides are the same.” That’s how you lose elections.

But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism.

I really dislike this kind of thinking. People citing that we’ve never had a communist country tend to think:

1. Only true Communism counts as communism. (So no failures of any real nation can ever be attributed to it.)

2. Any country with any degree of market economy counts as capitalist. (So the sins of any nation can be attributed to capitalism.)

They use an extremely tight definition for communism and an extremely loose definition for capitalism. I’m a leftist myself, but I can recognize the intellectual inconsistency.

By the same logic, I could argue that the Catholic Church never covered up sex abuses by priests:

True Catholicism has never existed, as there’s never been a time it’s been truly universal. (The word “Catholic” means “universal.”) Obviously we can only ever talk about the failures of Catholicism once we’ve actually achieved true Catholicism. Until literally every single living human being is a devout Catholic, any discussion of the merits of Catholicism is purely theoretical and shouldn’t serve to guide our decisions.

For certain kinds of communism/socialism, authoritarianism does seem pretty much inevitable. It’s not inevitable for more distributed community-oriented forms. But for any socialist/communist government organized at the national level, authoritarianism seems inevitable to me.

In order to seize the means of production, you have to do just that - seize it. You have to send scores of armed men out with guns to physically take control over all the productive assets in a country. And those assets are then available for the state to use, for whatever reasons it wants. Sure, the people in power will promise to use those resources for the greater good, but who is going to stop them if they don’t?

If we’ve seen anything in the last 20 years in the US, it’s that power and wealth are interchangeable. Wealth is power. Power is wealth. It’s why I oppose the very existence of billionaires - no individual should have that much power. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t care so much about them. I really don’t care if a billionaire builds an obnoxiously large yacht. I do care if they start throwing their money around and controlling national policy. And whenever a government seizes control of the entire economy, it now owns the entire wealth of a nation. And if you have all the assets, have complete authority to decide who works what job, have complete say on where people get to live? Well that government now has total power over everyone’s lives.

Any government that powerful immediately falls to authoritarianism. Why? Because there is one and only one locus of power in that country now. Ambitious people can’t start a business or seek power through some other level of government. All resources are controlled by the central state. If you want to have any influence at all over that society, you need to get in power of that central government. The government is all-powerful. The stakes are total. Power is completely centralized. You as a leader either control everything or nothing.

It’s rather impossible not to end up with authoritarianism when a form of government requires, as a first step, to gather all power and wealth under the control of a single authority.

When did we start seeing a handful of DNC candidates shifting on this position? When the candidates winning elections, the GOP, went transphobic. So the DNC losing more elections won’t make them less transphobic, it will make them more. We’ve seen this in real time in the last 2 years.

It depends entirely on why they lose. Democrats didn’t lose in 2024 because of transphobia. Polls show trans issues were near the bottom of voter priorities.

When a party loses an election, politicians start to innovate. They change their messaging and start modifying their platform to try out something different. If those changes improve electoral results, those changes will stick. If they’re a net negative, they’ll end.

What we’re seeing with the Democrats is experimental transphobia. They’re testing the waters to see if it improves their odds. I as a trans person need to do everything I can to make sure that experiment is a resounding failure. Most Democrats aren’t openly transphobic…at least not YET. It’s unusual and “innovative” to be a transphobic Democrat. If a Democrat experiments with transphobia, and they win an election, that teaches every other Democrat that transphobia is a winning strategy. If they lose in landslide because the queer vote abandoned them for their betrayal, the experiment fails, and other Democrats will be less likely to take up transphobia.

WTF. Its a good thing I never said anything of the sort. I don’t even think you need me in this conversation when you’re the one putting words in my mouth, and then criticizing me for it.

You were almost certainly going to. After all, you just said I advocated for the GOP. Which should be pretty obvious I don’t support. Whenever I point out that sometimes trans people need to vote against some Democrats for larger strategic reasons, someone with a room temperature IQ will come out of the woodwork and say, “well that must mean you love Trump!” I wasn’t accusing you of putting words in my mouth. I was asking you not to do that. However, you still did it anyway when you accused me of advocating for the GOP.

You are the one advocating for the GOP and voting for GOP candidates directly opposed to trans rights. You are directly hurting my trans sister. You are the person with the torch setting fire to the country.

That is not the case. In almost all scenarios, I support voting for a Democrat over a Republican. But a Democrat experimenting with transphobia against a Republican? Regardless of how that race goes, a transphobe is going to win. From my perspective, that particular election is already lost. At that point my priority is making sure the transphobic Democrat has as little credibility as possible. And that’s achieved by making sure they lose by the largest margin possible.

You will only see this as advocating against trans issues if you have the future time horizon of a fruit fly.

Ok.

A lot of us who disapprove of the party are still going to vote for them. It doesn’t mean anything.

That’s what Hillary said.

You need to think of power coalitions and long term policy positions.

Again, you’re stuck in binary short term thinking. I need to be more long term and strategic than you do.

And yes, transphobic DNC candidates losing makes the party less transphobic in the long run. We need to make transphobia completely toxic in the Democratic party, and that’s only possible if transphobic candidates lose. Every win by a Dem transphobe means more transphobes winning the next primary cycle. Look at Labor in the UK now. They’ve been completely taken over by TERFs.

Again, you’re still stuck in this thought pattern where the only election that matters is the one in front of you. I’m thinking decades into the future here.

Right now, we are seeing a transformation of the Democratic party. DSA candidates for instance are pulling the party further left than it has gone in decades. Do you think that could have ever happened without Trump being elected. (Please don’t put words in my mouth and pretend I’m saying that means it’s a net positive that Trump won. You’re better than that.)

The only reason the DSA candidates are doing well now is that the old common sense understanding that corporate centrists are “more electable” has been completely shattered. That would not have been possible without the 2016 and 2024 elections.

Remember, parties are coalitions. There are both trans allies and TERFS in the Democratic party. And TERFS need to be seen as complete losers. Elect a TERF? Lose the general election as all the queer people sit it out.

Small minority groups have no real political power on their own. Queer people are never going to be able to win elections on their own. The only power small minority groups have is the ability to work as a spoiler. And if you’re not willing to exercise that power, you will have none.

And frankly, if both parties turn transphobe, this whole country can burn to the ground as far as I care. You don’t get to expect someone’s political support after you’ve decided they don’t count as a human being.

That’s what Kamala said.

Not always. For example, I as a trans person need to vote against any transphobic Democrat. I can’t afford to myopically pretend that only the election in front of me exists. If the Democrats go the way of Labor in the UK, I will lose civil rights for the rest of my life. If a Republican wins, there’s always the possibility of Democrats reverting things after the next election.

For me personally, a transphobic Democrat is far more dangerous to my safety and well being than any Republican. It’s more important to make sure at least one party isn’t transphobic than it is to win every election.

That doesn’t really have any relevance to the case here though. He’s not being accused of serving bad food. And the worst companies for legal compliance and worker treatment often treat their customers great. It’s generally not profitable for non-monopolies to anger their customers.

Despite that, the Democratic party has a lower approval rating than Trump. People see Trump as evil. They see Democrats as shiftless empty suits that believe in nothing.

I mean, to be fair, we’re not actually talking the ancient Roman mines here. Those people had incredibly short life expectancies. It’s hard grueling and dangerous work, but it’s not like California is seeing scores of prisoners incinerated either. I certainly haven’t heard of any mass fatalities among these enslaved firefighters.

I would start accusing her of all sorts of horrible things.

“Nobody is this aggressively preachy unless they’re trying to deflect from something!”

“What are you trying to hide!”

“Let’s get the cops to look at your hard drive!”

“I wonder if you’re in the Epstein files!”

Normally I don’t casually accuse people of pedophilia. But frankly, among this obnoxious of a Christian, the odds really aren’t that bad.

As an American who has had to flee states due to political persecution, my saying of late has been:

“You can ignore politics. Politics will not ignore you.”

As an American who has had to flee states due to political persecution, my saying of late has been:

“You can ignore politics. Politics will not ignore you.”

Install new ones on a moonless night. When they tear those out?

DO IT AGAIN.

Get a hobby. Find people in your area that share that hobby. Form social groups around that.

You do realize that, as an adult, you can just start a club, right? Why do you think your high school had all those clubs and activities in it? The hope was that you could keep doing things like that as an adult. Every aspect of schooling is meant to serve as practice for adulthood.

Hell, you could start a “third places” club. Get a number of people together. Every Saturday afternoon, on a rotating basis, someone’s home becomes a “coffee shop” that everyone goes and hangs out at. Don’t even need to plan a lot of programming. You don’t need to worry about any kind of business license, as you’re not running a business. It’s just a friend group that holds rotating social gatherings.

The Universe gave you an imagination for a reason. USE IT. Find something that interests you or some need in your community. Find others with that passion or interest. Find something that brings you joy and meaning, something within the limits of your talents and resources. If it doesn’t exist, will it into being.

Build the world you want to see. The labor will buy your sanity.

Yes. California uses involuntary prison labor to fight forest fires.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/la-wildfires-prisoner-firefighter-program-criticism-rcna187436

We call it involuntary prison labor. But if we are talking about one of the countless ancient societies that used to punish people with involuntary labor, we have no problem calling those people slaves. Rome sentenced thousands of people to slavery in its various mines, and we refer to that as slavery.

We have no problem recognizing slavery in ancient cultures. But when it comes to our society, we find all sorts of euphemisms to avoid using the word “slave.”