hoyland

The first time they come is really hard (so much shame), but it gets easier. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not sometimes up at 5am cleaning before the cleaner comes, though.

Just ask around and google. Word of mouth is your best bet for finding someone running a one person business, though you can look at any noticeboards in shops near you--my local coffee shop generally has someone with a flyer up. Yelp and Google will turn up worker-owned cooperatives, which makes me feel better about the ethics of paying someone to clean.

I went back to a trackball maybe two years back and it is glorious. For whatever reason, my family had trackballs growing up and then I never had one as an adult.

I mean, the vast majority of people are able to sit to pee. Now, men's bathrooms are chronically underprovisioned when it comes to stalls (there is a formula, and, yes, it assumes cis people, but OMG so many airports have too few stalls), and that's annoying and a social interaction one has to learn to navigate, but hardly a big deal. The fact I can't stand to pee has been awkward exactly once, and it was totally all in my head--I was on a train in Japan and didn't speak Japanese. I totally hadn't noticed that there was a separate urinal available (in addition to the "Japanese" toilet and the "western" toilet) and a Japanese woman pointed it out to me and I had to convey that, while I hadn't noticed it, I wasn't going to use it. (We're skirting the boundary of "trans info I will not discuss online with cis people", but not all genital surgery options for transmasculine people result in being able to stand to pee.)

When I was in grad school, there was a multiuser gender neutral bathroom in an adjacent building. If I had time and needed to use the bathroom, I'd go across the street to the union (which had a couple of single user ones) rather than climb five flights of stairs. This bathroom had been won after a good deal of lobbying and it was a re-signed women's restroom. There was even a bright orange sign on the door telling you where the nearest gendered restrooms were. While it had two stalls, you could actually lock the door to the entire bathroom if you so desired (a fact also mentioned on the sign). Nonetheless, a woman who worked on the floor believed only people who met her standards of womanhood should use it. Instead of the usual "this is the women's", it was "the men's is at the other end of the hall, you should use that".

Eventually I discovered the unicorn of all bathrooms--a single user men's room near a lecture hall that was somehow consistently clean. (If you are an apparently able-bodied person, single user all gender restrooms are fraught too, especially if they're signed as "family restrooms". You're not disabled, where is your kid, etc, etc. The all gender restrooms at SFO have paper signs saying "anyone may use this restroom" that were clearly added because people were being hassled.)

What's your reasoning for sorting people into bathrooms based on their genitals?

I'm assuming you're thinking it means someone is "done" with transition. It doesn't work that way. A good portion of trans people don't have genital surgery, both due to access issues but also simply not wanting surgery. And, then, depending on where you live, not having surgery may prevent you from updating your gender marker so you don't have ID, either. (US citizens can change gender markers on passports/passport cards without surgery. Yes, this does mean you have people with different gender markers on different forms of ID.)

Signed, a transmasculine person who was harassed in women's bathrooms pre-social transition (never mind medical!). (ETA: I mention this because it goes to show this is ultimately about policing women's genders--I was seen as "woman-ing wrong" while living as a woman. I have also been harassed in a gender neutral bathroom, believe it or not.)

Please report back if you do. I'm currently in the middle of "what if I hosted a Mastodon instance???" (waiting for DNS to propagate) and the Bookwyrn thought has crossed my mind.

Yeah, let me take another attempt at that thought. I think it's still only half-formed.

All this comes with the caveat that I am not a reliable reporter of women's experiences--I functionally was never an adult woman. You're "rewarded" in the sense that there is sexism you get to bypass--I've never been catcalled, for example. You can get a certain ease of access in male-dominated spaces--I had a friend (who, for context, did not know I was identifying as trans at this point.) tell me how acutely exposed she felt when she wore a skirt in one of our courses and followed it up with "but of course it's different for you"--even if I was notionally the other woman in the course, I didn't stand out visually.

But conversely, what is panic about trans people in bathrooms actually about? Policing women's genders, whether they're cis or trans. People keep going "omg, I'm cis and got challenged in a public restroom" and it's like... duh, ask a butch about that. What's mildly interesting about this round of trans panic is that they're going after gender-conforming women.

There are all sorts of social norms that demand a certain level of gender conformity from women. Think about weddings--you certainly can get married wearing whatever you want, but there's sure as hell social pressure to wear a white dress. I have this deep appreciation for Angela Merkel (who I disagree with on, oh, every political issue) because it's really obvious (or I'm projecting) that she has a zillion copies of the same suit in different colors because it's sort of the bare minimum that's "allowed". (Let's be clear--Angela Merkel is plenty gender conforming, but also seems to be "playing the game" because she has to.)

It's worth noting that I'm really looking at gender conformity vs non-conformity. There's quite a large scope of gender presentation that is still "broadly gender conforming", and depending on your frame of reference, we may be talking about two completely different kinds of "masculine". People with ultra femme presentations are going to be outliers, too.

Read Halberstam's Female Masculinity. He literally handwaves me out of existence in the introduction because I both break the book's thesis and the trans chapter (which you should skip, to be honest--I normally tell people who might be questioning their gender to skip it, but everyone should just skip it), but it's the only thing I've ever read that fit my experience into a larger arc of history.

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd tell you they mistook internalized misogyny for being butch or transmasculine. It's not really something that happens. However, we've probably all worried about it or been told that explicitly. The very reason reading Female Masculinity was so powerful for me was because society doesn't acknowledge masculinity in afab people of any gender, which also kind of rules out the internalised misogyny take--the fact that sexism often targets women for being "too" feminine doesn't mean that masculinity is rewarded--you just get hit differently.

Doubtful, though it might be possible to emulate System 6 or System 7 and get it running on Windows or Linux.

Yeah -- while I have a deep and abiding love for Ocean, most of my favorite spirits are from Jagged Earth, I think. I kind of like playing the ridiculously complicated ones to figure out how they work, like the Hummingbird one.

I like both "solitaire" solo and play two-handed by myself. They're different kinds of challenges, which is nice. Most of my board game friends aren't local so I'm basically constantly on the lookout for things that work well solo.

I am basically permanently obsessed with Spirit Island.

Mouse over it and it says collapse.

Extremely retro, but currently available on the Mac App Store: Mess O' Trouble. It was a WorldBuilder game--think Infocom, but with static pictures you could interact with. I believe your choice of Daredevil Dawn or Fearless Frank had some impact on the gameplay if you got far enough, but child me never did.