This was already explained to you earlier in the thread. “Male” and “female” are, biologically speaking, not distinct and mutually exclusive categories in humans. This is the case naturally, and the terms become even less useful once you account for those who modify parts of their biology, whether by surgery or by artificially triggering natural biological processes, to bring those parts into congruence with other parts of their biology.

“Biological male” is a slur. It has no basis in science. It’s a term coined by bigots to misgender trans people with sciencey-sounding words so their abuse looks reasonable at a glance, in much the same way that proponents of Scientific Racism use pseudoscience in an attempt to legitimize white supremacy.

Also the term is referring to their original status pre-hormonal or other gender affirming care so no.

We already have a far less problematic set of terms for that: Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) and Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB). “Biological male” is a scientifically misleading phrase that bigots invented to slander trans people and it should not be used by anyone.

Just as some AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth) men want to look more masculine and will work out at the gym or take testosterone supplements, some AMAB men are femboys and may temporarily take feminizing HRT to look less masculine.

Both are trying to change their bodies to better fit their gender identity, and femboy is clearly a different identity from gym bro, but they are both male gender identities.

The same reason anyone would be: because their current body doesn’t match their gender identity and they want to change that. This person just happened to start inside the same arbitrary social category as their destination.

I’m aware that Purgatory isn’t scriptural, and the community I was raised in believed a lot of stuff that wasn’t found in the Bible. (It’s one of the reasons I left.)

The point I was trying to make there is not “What is Heaven according to scripture?” I was speculating what heaven would need to be for me to consider it a paradise. And the answer I came to is that no place can be a paradise as long as I’m in it. Not because I think I’m a bad person, but because I have so much trauma and other mental baggage that I would be bringing with me. I would be too suspicious of a place with nothing bad in it to be able to enjoy it. I would unintentionally hurt those around me because of the pain I’m in. And those people would hurt me, and each other, because how many people actually manage to reach a state of complete emotional health before they die? No one is ready for paradise.

There would need to be a place and a time for healing the traumas of life before we could enter any kind of heaven. For this I borrowed the name Purgatory, because it seems to me a similar concept. And maybe the person who emerged from such a place would be so different that you couldn’t really say they were me anymore, but I think I’m okay with that. I don’t want to stay the person I am now; I want to become something better.

I guess that doesn’t have much to do with your original point about people not understanding eternity, other than being in agreement that it wouldn’t be a fun thing for humanity as we know it.

I made .iso files and mounted them in virtual drives to do the same thing. I could have used cracks but I didn’t want a virus and I still had the delusion that doing things “fairly” actually meant anything.

As an ex-Christian I find it amusing that you chose to explain via parable. :)

However, I think there are some flaws to your story. You seem to assume that Heaven would be like getting permanently sealed into your own personal holodeck, alone, no contact with anyone but the entity that put you there, the computer loaded with complete records of everything that had existed up to the moment of your death but never updated beyond that. It’s all so very static. Of course you would eventually go mad; what you’re describing is just a more comfortable version of solitary confinement!

It’s also not how Heaven was described to me when I still went to church. Some claimed we would all be sitting on clouds singing praise songs, forever experiencing a state of mindless ecstasy. (Which doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.) Others claimed the Bible says we will be rulers in Heaven, and how can you be a ruler without something to rule over? (That seemed a little better, but I also don’t really want to be some kind of king imposing my will on others.)

The most appealing concept of Heaven I’ve encountered so far is the one portrayed in the Housepets! comic. It’s just another place, but one where everyone has agency and security and has been healed of whatever traumas ailed them in life. They are free to build, create, share, and grow as they like. You can still fuck off and become a hermit if you really want to, but most people choose to hang out in a big city. Some have jobs but there is no money or material needs; they work because they enjoy it or because they believe it’s worth doing. One of the characters even chose to open a free massage parlor because they like helping people relax and wanted more opportunities to do that. And the mortal world still exists, so there are always new people to meet and new stories to read (or write!)

I could maybe spend eternity in a place like that. And if I had to change to make eternal existence possible, well, I’m not the same person I was five years ago and I have no desire to still be the same person five years in the future. I think if Heaven did exist, then Purgatory must also. Not as a place of punishment, but of healing. This world will crush your soul, and even the purest of saints (perhaps especially the purest of saints) carries too much pain and trauma with them for any place they exist to be a paradise. I think you’re right that in order to be okay with eternity we would need to be changed into something unlike our current selves.

Sorry this got so long and rambley. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what kind of hypothetical afterlife could possibly make this all worth it.

They’re not talking about natural monopolies. A natural monopoly is when there’s some barrier to entry that prevents competitors from entering the market, like a need for prohibitively expensive infrastructure.

What OP is talking about are situations like Walmart opening a store in a new location, operating it at or near a loss to drive the local competition out of business, and then jacking up prices once no competitors remain. The government isn’t forcing them to do that.

I spent 30 years thinking I was cishet (and suffering for it). When I finally realized that I’m trans, it was like a dam bursting; suddenly everything about my identity was in question. I’ve gone from “Maybe I’m a girl” to “I’m a trans demi ND plural therian” in three years and I don’t think I’m done discovering things about myself yet.

How big does a minority need to be before it’s “relevant” enough to be acknowledged and its members’ rights respected? People with 4 or 6 fingers exist. People whose chromosomes don’t match their physiology exist. People whose gender identity doesn’t match their genitals exist. It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, because every single one of us is a unique minority of one.

But you asked for numbers, so I’ll give you some numbers.

According to this article, around 1.7% of people are intersex, meaning they have physiology that doesn’t fit neatly into the common conceptions of male or female. That’s close to the number of people with red hair, which is estimated to be 2% of the world population. I have never heard anyone suggest that redheads are too small a percentage to matter.

I think you were asking specifically about chromosomes, though. There’s a table in the linked article that breaks down intersex conditions by cause. The first entry is “Non-XX or non-XY (except Turner’s or Klinefelter’s)”. This refers to people with XY chromosomes whose bodies developed female characteristics (Swyer syndrome) and people with XX chromosomes whose bodies developed male characteristics (de la Chapelle syndrome). It does not include people with X, XXY, or XO chromosomes. (Those are the next two entries in the table.)

The estimated frequency for this condition is 0.0639 per 100 live births, equivalent to 0.0639% of population. That looks like a really low number, right? Surely not enough to be “relevant”! Except… There are 8.1 billion people on this planet. 0.0639% of 8.1 billion is 5,175,900 people, which is roughly the current population of New Zealand.

Remember, that is only women with XY chromosomes and men with XX chromosomes. If we include all intersex people that number rises to 140 million, which is nearly the population of Russia.

To be fair, it’s kind of hard to come up with a defense when your premise is “Cancer treatments cause cancer” 😄

Which specific puberty blocker drug do you believe increases the risk of cancer?

Okay, this one I’m sending to my DM.

I was going to send this to my DM, but then I remembered that he would absolutely do it.

I was responding specifically to the implication that Biden isn’t trying to do loan forgiveness, which is factually incorrect. It’s the courts that keep blocking the plan and forcing it to be narrower in scope, not Biden.

As for this proposed cap on rent increases, I fail to see how a limited increase is worse than an unlimited one. Is it less action than we need? Definitely. Is it insulting that it took the credible threat of a fascist dictatorship to extract this tiny concession? Absolutely. Am I going to kick and scream because it isn’t everything I wanted? Hell no! Just the fact that the President is seriously discussing this is an improvement, and we need all the leftward momentum we can get if we ever want to start pushing the Overton window on economic issues.

I used to scoff like this at early efforts to decriminalize marijuana. “Lower penalties? State-issued medical cards with heavy restrictions? None of that actually solves anything! It needs to be completely legal!” Now look at where we are: Fully legal in 24 states, partially legal in most others, and the DEA has started the process for rescheduling to a less-restricted category. It was slow going and we’re still not quite where we need to be, but that’s way more progress than I ever thought we would get!

Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.

No mention of trans people, which is odd given that Florida is a Do Not Travel state for its government’s efforts to criminalize being transgender.

This was before they added F2P, but ten minutes a day of checking my two hisec market alts (who didn’t have a lot of skills because it meant pausing my main’s training) was making me just enough to pay for my account and there was room to expand further. Granted, it did take me several months of trading to build up enough funds to support this operation, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to do this on day 1.

It’s because the furry fandom, when it was founded back in the late 70’s by a gay polycule of sci-fi fans, was one of the only communities in existence that accepted openly gay and trans people. (And the only non-fetish community.) For many queer people, the furry fandom is the first place they ever feel welcome.

I support UBI. I just have issues with the claim that jobs in a capitalist system exist for a purpose other than generating profit for owners. I also resent the implication that some workers don’t deserve a living wage. Without UBI, all jobs should pay at least enough to cover living expenses. If a full-time job (or job that expects full-time availability) doesn’t pay enough to live on then it’s not a job that needs doing.