hoyland

I remember Eudora. Whatever happened to it? I seem to remember it made a rooster noise when mail arrived. Or maybe that was an extension we had.

Also, I just made the connection that it was probably named after Eudora Welty, whose book I hated in school.

I've found that the PWAs (both the Lemmy/beehaw one and we feed/voyager) are prone to crashing(?) on open like that. Generally swiping up and closing the "app" fixes it. I think it's something about PWAs rather than Beehaw.

Twitter had the Arab Spring as this odd formative event, where it suddenly became a source of news information. I think it's really hard to know how Twitter would have developed without that.

Chess is an interesting case study. For this whose don't know, it's not separated by gender, rather there are some competitions open only to women. At the same time, everyone knows Women's GMs aren't "real" GMs (they may even have killed off the Women's GM title by now for this reason, I can't remember), so it's not clear that women's chess isn't at this point suggesting women are second class chess players. I'd expect women's chess to disappear at some point (or for a few tournaments to stick around for historical reasons)--I'm pretty sure it's less of a thing now than when I was a kid.

The value of women's competitions is that it increases participation in sports where women were historically excluded (women were literally banned from FA football grounds in Britain) or where women's participation was under-resourced (see... Little League softball, probably, which came into existence after a Supreme Court ruling saying Little League couldn't bar girls from participating, so they made a separate competition to steer girls to). In some utopian future, that becomes unnecessary. However, over time, the women's game sometimes develops a distinct flavor (men's and women's lacrosse require decidedly different skills, even if the difference in rules presumably originated in sexism) and then we have the problem of merging them back together without defaulting to losing the women's game. There are sports where it wouldn't be too hard--the ones where there's little/no drift (shooting sports, maybe cricket) and the ones where everyone thinks the games are distinct (see baseball and fast pitch softball)--but others that are much harder. On the other hand, we manage with the fact there are two totally unrelated sports called "handball", two lacrosse variants can't be harder.

Shooting sports in the Olympics had one all-gender competition until a woman won. Mysteriously, she was prevented from defending her title because it became a "men's" competition the next time round. (I want to say they didn't even have a women's event in the next Olympics, but I could be misremembering.)

The US-Mexico border, which is militarized because ... racism. The extremely remote stretches of the US-Canada border are monitored remotely, I believe, probably by both militaries, but on the whole it's less militarized. I think that's it for US land borders. (Unless there's half an island colonized somewhere.)

No, no. The "oh god that'd be terrible" reaction is probably a pretty good indicator one isn't trans (or at least I've never encountered a trans person reporting that pre-transition), it's just that people sometimes assume the "well that'd be odd, but whatever" reaction doesn't exist in people both cis and trans.

Though it's worth mentioning that it's crap as an "am I trans" thought experiment. I am long post-medical transition and my reaction is "well that'd be weird, but whatever, I'd get on with life, I suppose" and then I remember I've been there, done that! Somehow transitioning was very much about my body (top surgery was like a switch flipping) and also not about my body.

There's also "too old" in the sense of "too old to give a shit". I don't think my grandad "gets" me being trans, but he had definitely decided he is too old to care and was like "Okay, name, pronouns, got it, don't bother explaining" and proceeded to be the only family member who was perfect at it.

(It's actually kind of fascinating to see what language he comes up with on his own. Somehow, he has never learned what "transition" is and says things like "When he was being a girl..." which is simultaneously "getting it" and kind of cringe.)

Call you GP and make sure they actually sent the referral and get the specialist's information. It would in no way shock me if the referral was never sent, not out of malice, but out of incompetence or overwork.

Depending on your province, there may be one or two clinics seeing all the trans people, and there's nothing stopping you from phoning them and trying to self-refer--the worst that can happen is they'll say no, and even if they do, you can go back to your GP and say "refer me to these people please".

I have the Elecom DEFT Pro, which is a finger trackball, but Elecom make thumb trackballs too. I'd never heard of them before I started looking at the current state of the trackball market and took a risk, but have been happy. And they make a left-handed one, believe it or not.

If you haven't guessed, I have many thoughts on airport bathrooms in particular. (You can totally chart my transition according to my relationship to airport bathrooms, by the way, which may be TMI. As a kid, I hated peeing on airplanes, to the point I once made it an entire trans-Atlantic flight without going to the bathroom. But in college, I was avoiding bathrooms in the airport because it was too fraught. I'm now back to disliking airplane toilets, but still reflexively catalogue and rate airport bathrooms.)

Terminal 1 at SFO has at least one set of restrooms where people are naturally funneled towards a multi-user all-gender one with proper isolated cubicles (even more so than in Europe--they're little individual rooms) and common sinks, but they have gendered multi-user restrooms to the sides (imagine a |__| shape -- the __ is the all-gender and then the gendered ones are on the |). That honestly seems like a setup no one can really object to. It probably takes a bit more space, but it was a fairly high traffic area and I had to wait like 10 seconds for a cubicle. I grew up in Chicago and O'Hare has massive bathrooms, so I'm constantly baffled by some of the tiny ones you find in airports. It's an airport, more than four people need to use the bathroom at once!

Thank you for sharing the extra info.

I will seriously answer questions until the cows come home, for you or anyone else. I won't discuss bottom surgery except in high-level generalities, but that's honestly pretty much the only thing that's consistently off-limits.