__chelsea__

I've limited my Reddit usage purely to subreddits that I can't find a reasonable substitution for. Lemmy is small, a bit complicated to get at first, so naturally there's going to be some communities that just aren't going to make it here. For me really, I go back to participate in r/ChangeMyView and r/AskTransgender.

The first to help provide a voice for trans folk in the seemingly ceaseless threads about trans people, and the second (more important one) to hopefully provide advice or information to people who're just trying to figure things out. It's a tiny little way I can give back and hopefully help at least one person here and there, so I'm not going to give that up just because Reddit itself has shit the bed.

Oh, it's her! I remember seeing her video of the incident in the cheesecake factory. I'm so happy that she's continuing. Not only that I love that she's using her platform to push some education about trans people, though certainly it's not her responsibility to do so. :)

No worries, and no need to apologize!

I'll admit coming off of other social media spaces (looking at you, Reddit), I'm consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at the kind of interaction here. I'm so used to having to defend myself that I sometimes read hostility where there's really no hint of it at all.

And yeah, I'm happy that we're starting to see some representation out there. As a kid I pretty much just had Jerry Springer or Ace Ventura as far as representation of what trans people are, and let me say that was not at all helpful to a young kid trying to figure out what these feelings were.

We stopped punishing left-handedness. As an example: children used to be taught only how to write with their right hand, and using the left hand would result in punishment -- such as the hand being hit with yardsticks or the child being verbally abused -- until the child forced themselves to write with their right hand.

It's not that this instance is meant to be an echo chamber, it's that it's meant to be welcoming, inclusive, and queer friendly. Saying that we're over-represented, ackshually, isn't really contributing to the discussion other than to tell us that our lived experiences of being under-represented are wrong. It implies that a statistical/percentage-based over-representation of a minority group is a somehow a bad thing. Less charitably, it sounds awfully similar to being told to sit down, shut up, and be happy with what we've got.

Oh, I by no means think that other minority groups are more well off when it comes to representation.

I'm just coming at this from my own personal lens, being well aware that any representation of trans folk as normal would have gone a long way for me as a child. So that's what I advocate for, but by no means do I feel we need to tear others down to get where we need to be.

Whether or not that stat is true, I don't think that minority representation should be accurately reflected based on the percentage of the population the minority represents. Just as an example, if we're talking about television shows, and let's just throw out a number that there are 100 major characters across all of the major networks/most watched shows. That would mean all LGBTQ+ representation is contained to 5 characters.. The chance of any one non-invested viewer seeing those characters becomes minimal -- which means that both cishet folks aren't getting exposed to minority representation (something that helps normalize us), and LGBTQ+ folks aren't getting exposed to minority representation (something that helps our own confidence and mental health).

Yeah, these replies are not at all what I expected to see coming into this thread. When did we decide that this is enough representation, and why did no one ask me?

What the everloving fuck was that ad, holy shit. Seriously, that's a political ad? Supposed to make us like the guy?

Well, no, I suppose it's supposed to make people like me afraid. And I suppose on some level, yes, I'm very afraid for myself and for the country in general if Desantis somehow gets his way and wins the presidency.

Oh thank god my home state of MN is on that list!

Honestly, Minnesota (at least in the cities) is super queer-friendly from my experience. The latest legislative session has put some pretty positive things in the books and have enshrined the state as a trans refuge.

In the last year I've been in the process of transitioning and my coming out couldn't have gone smoother. No one's given me anything more than a passing glance as, I assume, they try to figure out my gender. But even that's been kept to themselves and I've heard nothing but respect for my name and pronouns when I've been out and about.

I don't know if I'd say Minnesota is a "new" blue state. It's voted democrat consistently in presidential elections for longer than any other state (going all the way back to 1972).

What we do have is a relatively balanced makeup in the state legislature -- we don't often see a trifecta, with one party controlling the house, senate, and governorship. That's happened only three out of the last twenty years, and it's led to a DFL party that's motivated to get shit done now that it's in control and can break the gridlock we were in.

The problem I see, is that bathrooms need to be legislated somehow, otherwise it would let cost cutting places not install any, or keep them “for staff use only”, while public places can’t really do anything without some legislation in place. So the question is more of what that legislation should look like.

Sorry, I meant more to keep bathroom legislation as it was prior to any legslation re: trans people.

As far as trying to shift culture towards mixed/all-gender bathrooms, I have mixed opinions. I've heard there have been studies done that show you can have as many/more people serviced by a space filled with single-stall non-gendered bathrooms, using the same footprint as our current separate men's/women's rooms set up, maybe that's a way to go. But it feels kind of odd to me. Women's bathrooms have served as a somewhat "safe" space for women, and from my understanding there was a big push by feminists to have men's and women's segregated bathrooms that I don't feel a need to undo.

Honestly, it feels like you're still buying the right-wing arguments that men are going to dress up as trans women to harass/assault people in women's bathrooms. This is a made up problem created by bigots who are looking to come up with more ways to hate and belittle us, and spending time trying to find a better solution is only giving credence to the made-up bigoted bullshit in the first place. It feels like you're only halfway accepting what trans people are saying.

If I tell you that the problem is completely made up on false pretenses, the response shouldn't be "yes, but how do we solve that problem?" -- we don't. It's not actually a problem. Trans people, by and large, aren't upset that there are men's and women's rooms -- we're upset that we're getting legislated out of the bathrooms that we belong and fit in. The solution is to recognize the bull it's based on and stop any of that legislation, not to re-write how we do bathrooms altogether.