BC SOCIETY
Saved by @jacobhtml

What are old-school transsexuals?

They are the ones who made it into the media, or the front of a tabloid, the ones who had the juicy details of surgery that made people wince or cross their legs while reading it.... clickbait, before there was anything to click.

1/

 What you hear about old-school transsexuals or 'OST's' is largely the witterings of cishet transphobes who have constructed a MYTH.
2/
If you listen to accounts from transsexuals in the decades gone by when trans care wasnt available for 99.9% of trans people, what is a recurring theme is that they made incredible sacrifices to forge a life for themselves with no other option but assimilation.

3/
What often goes hand in hand with these stories, is prostitution, sex work, risking their own life for basic healthcare and treatment, many never got that far, many were MURDERED, and swept under the metaphorical carpet.

4/
Thats before they even got to surgery, which was equally dangerous and precarious unless you somehow managed to raise enough money to go to one of the very places in the world where the operations were performed with competence and care.
5/
Did all OST's have surgery??

Here's the trick...

If you had surgery you could be called a transsexual....

If you didnt, you couldnt...

So we are not comparing people, we are comparing outcomes.

6/
If you take two trans people who absolutely 100% want surgery, with identical psychological profiles and manifestation of GD...

One is prepared to die for surgery, the other isnt.

7/
Imagine that scenario where one trans woman risks everything and forges herself some happiness...

The other trans woman didnt get surgery, she suffers more intense GD for the rest of her life and is called illegitimate in her identity.

hardly seems fair.

8/
How many OST's can people name?

I bet you a thousand people together couldnt name more than 10 pre 1990.

With checkable surgery.
9/
We've all seen photos and footage and various anonymous 'transsexuals' from era's gone by, are we supposed to believe that more people got trans surgeries in the 30s/40s/50s than they do today?

Some people literally pretend more trans surgeries happened in the past!!

10/
In truth gender incongruence has always been a spectrum, there was never a discrete and separate group as transsexuals, and everyone else....

It has always been a blurred mush of different manifestations of gendered identities.
11/
Gender identity is in the head.
Its in our consciousness and its in our psyche.

How people interpret that and other frameworks of anthropology, sociology, culture... individually... with bodily autonomy to seek peace of mind, is absolutely nobody else's business.

12/
Of course socially conservative people loved it when trans people wholly assimilated as cis people...or were murdered trying...or were forced to hide from polite society.

They love the 'queer bashings' of anyone who didnt try to pass as cis.

13/
Nothing has changed.

Not a damn thing.

The cis community, the trans community....whatever labels were used.....human diversity is the same today, as it was 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago.

14/
The difference is today, more and more of us, dont give a fuck about kow-towing to dreary conservative people, we express ourselves as trans people, not framed by cis people.

15/
The vast majority of trans people targeted on social media have AT LEAST a formal medical diagnosis....

The vast majority are also taking hormones, which cause real physical changes.

That is a fact.

16/
I know plenty of trans people for who this alone has caused immeasurable peace, and has quieted the mental tempest GD can cause...

For those, surgery for themselves, would bring no extra peace. So why should they have surgery to make transphobic cis people happy?

17/
Old-school transsexuals, is a term mired in suffering, and forced mental subservience to public attitudes.

Now we have become a political movement, a homage to the trans people who came before us, who suffered whilst being the ones who built all of our foundations.
18/
Our respect and gratitude to trans people of the past, must never be sullied by deplorable, pathetic transphobes trying to use their lives against us.

And by the way, plenty are still around, and fighting with us every step of the way!!

19/19

More from Society

History Under Your Feet
History Under Your Fee...
@HUFToday
Today is also death anniversary of P.V.Narasimha Rao, the man who liberalized the Indian economy, and opened it up. And more than anything else, provided the much needed stability for India in the turbulent 90s. One of the best PMs IMO. #PVNarasimhaRao


The man who dismantled India's Licence Raj, opened up relations with Israel, adopted a Look East Policy. P.V.Narasimha Rao took over as PM, when India was faced with multiple challenges both on political and economic front in 1991.

Assasination of Rajiv Gandhi, Economic crisis, India was facing a bleak scenario, in 1991 when PVNR became the PM. It is to PVNR's credit that when he stepped down as PM in 1996,more people in India were optimistic about their future, more confident. #PVNarasimhaRao

I was one of those who grew up during the PVNR era, experienced the initial changes he bought along. He introduced far sweeping reforms( forced or otherwise) , when he was just running a minority Govt dependent on allies support. #PVNarasimhaRao

Heading a minority Govt,PVNR managed to pass through crucial bills on economy, not a mean feat at all. He had to deal with the Nehruvian-Socialist lobby in his own party, apart from the Left, but managed to push through the economic reforms. #PVNarsimhaRao
SOCIETY
What The Trans!?
What The Trans!?
@WhatTheTrans
A thread on how absurd the UK is on transgender issues and how the UK got so transphobic

In 2015 Parliament held an inquiry looking into the state of Transgender equality. Trans people of all stripes outlined many different problems across many, many different areas.

As a result Parliament created a list of recommendations including legal recognition for non binary people, gender recognition act reform, allowing 16 year olds to change their legal gender and reform of NHS gender identity services.

The government under Theresa May ignored everything that was recommended except for Gender recognition act reform. This act came into law in 2003 and gave trans men and women (but not non-binary people) the ability to legally change their gender on their birth certificates.

The process at that time to change your birth certificate under the GRA was to make an application to a panel of cisgender people who would decide if you were sufficiently trans based on your payslips, photo ID and bank statements. You would not get the option to speak to them.

(Also this process cost £140 which is just a tax on being trans)
SOCIETY
Advertisement
Miss C
Miss C
@Credible_Intel
1. Most people are aware of the fail doxes posted by Jamilla Moor on @Snakeeater36 and myself. I'm going to go into the details (in layman terms) of exactly how a specific group of duhnonymous idiots came up with these fail doxes & I'll prove that they're wrong.

2. @Snakeeater36 posted this screenshot on his TL. He had exposed the page source code on tweet which included an image. Anyone can do this in Chrome by opening a tweet, clicking on the image, then right click on any open space on the screen, select "inspect", then "network".

3. In fact I did the same by pulling up a different tweet and image. You'll see the IP highlighted in yellow and the region Dallas TX. It's not my IP. It belongs to Akamai which is identified. Why is that important.......


4. Well Akamai is a Content Delivery Network also known as a CDN. A CDN, is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers (make note of the term "proxy" servers) and their data centers. More later on why this is important relative to the fail doxes.

5. CDNs allow companies like Twitter to provide better performance in uploading content, like images, by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. Rather than pushing content directly (left), Twitter uses CDN networks (right) to push/pull images from end users.
SOCIETY
Dant\xe9 Stewart (Stew)
Danté Stewart (Stew)...
@stewartdantec
As many of you know, I was apart of the white evangelical tradition. I have talked about things I learned about being Black in white spaces. Now I want to say some things about what I learned about once being a Black evangelical returning back to the Black church.

A thread.

Spending years in white evangelical churches and schools, specifically from 2012-2018, shapes Black people in more ways than we would like to admit. It shapes us to diminish Blackness, devalue our people’s story, and always test what we have against the white logic and litmus.

This is particular reality for us Black men in that space. White Christians exploit our vulnerabilities, give us the room to speak, while simultaneously subverting and devaluing Black women and their struggles and their grievances. Opportunities abound for us and we take them.

We are invited into the meetings, we are given the mic, we are asked to lead groups on race, the Black church, etc. We are asked though often we actually haven’t read or thought deeply about each. We become a weapon. Profiting and policing/punishing those who get out of line.

All the while, white Christians feel good about themselves and other Black people are left to clean up the mess we’ve made, the ways we’ve made fools of Black folk, and the harmful ways we’ve learned to think, and to preach, and to be around us. It is profoundly depressing.
ALL , SOCIETY
Bradly Mason
Bradly Mason
@AlsoACarpenter
Okay, let's do this summary again since there seems to be a collective amnesia relating to Christian Abolitionism in America.

Here again is a summary of the Christian Abolitionists’ arguments against enslavers’ appeals to the Scripture: Thread
SOCIETY

You May Also Like

\U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
🇮🇳
@Aamani_03
॥ॐ॥
अस्य श्री गायत्री ध्यान श्लोक:
(gAyatri dhyAna shlOka)
• This shloka to meditate personified form of वेदमाता गायत्री was given by Bhagwaan Brahma to Sage yAgnavalkya (याज्ञवल्क्य).

• 14th shloka of गायत्री कवचम् which is taken from वशिष्ठ संहिता, goes as follows..


• मुक्ता-विद्रुम-हेम-नील धवलच्छायैर्मुखस्त्रीक्षणै:।
muktA vidruma hEma nIla dhavalachhAyaiH mukhaistrlkShaNaiH.

• युक्तामिन्दुकला-निबद्धमुकुटां तत्वार्थवर्णात्मिकाम्॥
yuktAmindukalA nibaddha makutAm tatvArtha varNAtmikam.

• गायत्रीं वरदाभयाङ्कुश कशां शुभ्रं कपालं गदाम्।
gAyatrIm vardAbhayANkusha kashAm shubhram kapAlam gadAm.

• शंखं चक्रमथारविन्दयुगलं हस्तैर्वहन्ती भजै॥
shankham chakramathArvinda yugalam hastairvahantIm bhajE.

This shloka describes the form of वेदमाता गायत्री.

• It says, "She has five faces which shine with the colours of a Pearl 'मुक्ता', Coral 'विद्रुम', Gold 'हेम्', Sapphire 'नील्', & a Diamond 'धवलम्'.

• These five faces are symbolic of the five primordial elements called पञ्चमहाभूत:' which makes up the entire existence.

• These are the elements of SPACE, FIRE, WIND, EARTH & WATER.

• All these five faces shine with three eyes 'त्रिक्षणै:'.
ALL
Katie Mack
Katie Mack
@AstroKatie
Light travels at about 1 foot per nanosecond.

Hold your hand up 12 inches from your face: you’re seeing your hand as it was a nanosecond ago. Everything you look at is, to one degree or another, in the past. The farther away in space, the more ancient in time.

You can’t see the Sun as it is now, but you can see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. You can’t see Alpha Centauri now, but you can see it 4.4 years ago. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million years in the past. And so on.

With powerful telescopes, we can see galaxies whose light has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion years. We see them shining in a universe that’s still young, where gravity has just begun to pull matter together into stars and galaxies.

We can see something even more distant, and more ancient, than the first galaxies. If we peer out far enough, in between the galaxies, we can see parts of the Universe that are so far away, it has taken the light from that distance almost the entire age of the cosmos to reach us.
SCIENCE
Advertisement
James Clear
James Clear
@JamesClear
My top 10 tweets of the year

A thread 👇

https://t.co/xj4js6shhy


https://t.co/b81zoW6u1d


https://t.co/1147it02zs


https://t.co/A7XCU5fC2m
BUSINESS , ALL
Roger Grosse
Roger Grosse
@RogerGrosse
Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ


The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.
MACHINE LEARNING
Danielle \U0001f1e7\U0001f1f4
Danielle 🇧🇴...
@dinkydani21
❤✈️🌎 2 years ago today @JamesIvings and I sold all our belongings and left the UK to travel for a year. We've never been happier and we have no plans to ever return there 🙂

Thread 👇

Since then we've started a remote web dev company @SquarecatWebDev and been lucky enough to have completed several freelance projects 💻 that have kept us on the road.

In the last few months we've become a huge part of this amazing new Maker community and have found so many new friends from @makerskitchen, @women_make_ and several others! 🥰

We love travelling together (even if I'm only a glorified laptop watcher 😒) but we're both much happier being able to share our ideas outside of our own little bubble and our products have benefitted too!

Here's to another year of nomading with my favourite person and to the Maker community continuing to grow with our help! Maybe one day we'll all get to meet each other ✌️ 💛
LIFE