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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Honestly a lot of news doesn’t actually cover this stuff as it should. Covering trans topics is usually something that causes backlash or requires a high degree of finesse in reporting and explaining so these modern lynchings go largely uncovered by the big mainstreamers except when they think they have a winner that’s straightforward enough to report in a short quippy segment.



  • This is actually in part an issue of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of one of the situation law enforcement and people forced into dangerous circumstances face. Ever played that game where you have your hands out and a person puts their hands under yours and you have to withdraw your hands before you get slapped? It’s the same principle. Reaction is slower than action. When someone states they have a weapon and they reach for it you could be dead in about a second, maybe two if they pull it and instead fire at you. This means your “safe” reaction space is about a second to a half second long.

    If you duck out of the way you get a person with a weapon who can choose to turn it on bystanders or retaliate by getting you into another situation where you have even less reaction space. While it is realized that cops, particularly US ones tend to escalate situations more quickly in part that is because in the US there’s a higher chance someone is packing heat and in part because of a culture of standing one’s ground. When we are talking about ACAB events a lot of the time those deaths occur in circumstances where the cops either should not have been there at all, escalated far too quickly or the death happened when the person was restrained and no longer an active threat. In Canada for instance improper use of force applies to everyone. If you had to be violent as a citizen, including as a cop then you are vulnerable to legal reprocussions unless your use of force was judged appropriate to mitigate damage to life. Not property, only life. If you exhaust every other de-escalating option only then you are cleared to use violence but the initiation of this reaction window is the point of no return. People who experience this window basically operate strictly on instinct and often are traumatized to some degree after the fact.

    In this instance the officer’s life was at risk the moment the gun was indicated to be in the vehicle and the person in question stated they would use it. Could the entire traffic stop have been a series of inappropriate escalations on behalf of the officer, yes. Is there zero justification for an officer shooting this guy? No. We don’t know the first part, you would have to pick apart the senario starting from when he stopped the car. But if you end up in a situation where you have a gun trained on you and you escalate the situation further by saying you are reaching for a gun then basically this is effectively how you suicide.


  • The whole thing with trans health is that being trans is not considered a mental illness but gender dysphoria still has a diagnostic rubric and has health problems associated. So saying trans people who have transitioned aren’t sick anymore isn’t quite accurate because they were never considered sick in the first place. One of the ideas behind this way of thinking is a trans person’s issues aren’t caused because they are trans, it’s caused largely due to the lack of acceptance and support in the society around trans people. Framing transness as a mental illness also ignores the flipside of dysphoria - gender euphoria which is a very specific joy experienced by trans people expressing themselves healthily, it’s not simply from lessening pain around dysphoria, it’s basically something mostly unique to the trans experience that is overwhelmingly positive.

    Also there’s not a one size fits all response to dysphoria. Some chose to physically transition and others choose to use other management techniques to help. There isn’t a “cure” to gender dysphoria. There are limits to what can be achieved through physical transition even if one goes all the way. One can have dysphoria around stuff like not having periods and child bearing capabilities even if they are fully transitioned or there are things that are irreversible if the transition happens too late. Being trans can be a kind of complicated state of being where one needs to learn and implement how best to be supported. Framing it not as an illness removes the stigma of looking at the experience entirely clinically as something to be solved. The fix isn’t to be “less trans” as it is when one approaches something as a disorder to be removed and minimized.