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Lol if it wasn't so tragic. So there are people who unironically think all out war will not increase the number of people willing to become terrorists? Worked so damned well with Iraq and Afghanistan. Got rid of the head of Al Qeada in dramatic and much celebrated fashion. We got ISIS for their troubles. The US and its friends keep assassinating heads of terror orgs and yet it seems to have little effect. It's almost like demonising and oppressing whole populations makes them not like you very much and creates people willing to do bad things. When are people going to learn that Islamic terror isn't a snake, it's both a hydra and a worm. Cut off a head and two grow back. Slice up the body and each bit grows into a new worm. Peace is the way to kill the hydra and the worm, but it seems a bunch of people persist in believing it's war that will do the job. Violence begets violence. In nature positive feedback loops pretty much always end in an explosion, I think that is also true about human conflict. If someone doesn't break the cycle what we're seeing now is just a prelude to something much worse. For those thirsty to see certain people suffering, it won't just be the one's you want to suffer who will suffer.

I don't want to quibble, but because this is relevant to health of transwomen, the "tiny fraction" is that transwomen appear to be 42% as likely as cisgender men to develop prostate cancer (14 in 10,000 vs 33 in 10,000). This is a not a negligible change, it's a reducton little over half, but I think "tiny fraction" might be taken to mean it's non-existent. If you were likely to be subject to screening at some point in your life before transition, you should still get screened post-transition.

You'll have to ask @Heartofice why he believes what he believes. That's certainly not what I believe, if you're referring to me as a cool gotcha. They were the one wanting to refer to biological sex as a euphemism for sex assigned at birth. But yes, I would imagine that it shouldn't be that weird to think that if you have your genitalia changed you would not be subject to illnesses specific to that genitalia. If you don't have ovaries it would be difficult to get ovarian cancer. Is that a real gotcha then? My point all along is that if you're going to view certain characteristics as defining biological sex then you need to also assume that the lack of them also implies a lack of that biological sex. I don't personally view it as so easily cut and dried, and as usual making things that are complicated simple makes things stupid and more wrong.

I really do think he decided to write a 10 X 1,000 page series first, and then tried to figure out a story that would fill it rather than coming up with a story and figuring out how many pages/books it would take to tell it. The result is bloat.

From December 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect

My comments haven't even focused on the Gaza protests. They are more general. By that logic, every other comment on some other topic has distracted from the horrors the students are protesting. Why am I singled out? I wasn't trying to be condescending; just confused and exasperated with this suspicion around my comments. If you don't want to follow the particular thread I've been responding to, by all means ignore it.

Thank you. I understand a bit better.

Good news - trans woman develop prostate cancer at a tiny fraction of the rate of cis men, so no need to panic on that front. If you are truly concerned about the potential for undiagnosed health issues threatening trans women you might want to get concerned about things that will cause people to withhold their medical history from doctors, like kicking them off hospital wards because at one irrelevant point in the past they produced the wrong kind of gamete. That's exactly the kind of shit that leads to not telling doctors your full history and potentially receiving the wrong treatment as a result.

I responded to Ran because he was denigrating Kal for having a different approach to what “biological sex” actually means and to show there are peer-reviewed studies that have concluded the definition is not necessarily as narrow as insisted upon here, e.g “biological sex is 100%” about procreative abilities. To answer your question, yes, I disagree that biological sex is absolutely binary and solely defined by gametes and/or gonads. The first paper I cited (Bauer 2023) in particular emphasizes multidimensionality in measurement, which as a researcher myself makes sense to me. As for what or when I changed my mind I honestly can’t give you a precise answer, but yes it is generally due to personal experience and being exposed to people during my adult life that I did not interact with growing up.

My response is, like the media's breathless coverage, your question is a distraction from the horrors the students are protesting, and making the reason they are protesting irrelevant. Which is the plan, yanno, so thnx so much for falling for it. And, o yes, thank you also very much for your patronizing, condescending attitude.

When we get a jab or go to the dentist, we are informed of “dos and donts”, not to mention all types of cirurgies and procedures. Isn’t it reasonable to expect the professionals involved in the process to pass on this type of information? IMO failing to do so would be malpractice. And given the terror docs have of malpractice suits and how hard they work to cover their arses (not a criticism, just a fact) I would imagine this type of information is given w/ possibly other medically pertinent stuff.

One should be very careful about such predictions. One should not even try to make book on it. Bibi has done everything to make the entire world hate not only Israel but Jews all together. This is a tragedy and a great horror in the making.

Show me how many cases there are. You also just stated that trans people are not smart.

What happened to this guy? I mean, why? Too much plastic in his diet?

What in the world is preposterous about someone coming to believe a false thing like they have had their biological sex changed and are no longer subject to illnesses specific to that sex? We have a very smart professional person on this board managing to believe this, so what prevents a trans person from also believing this? FYI, the Canadian health service put out a FAQ to inform transwomen that most of them do not actually need to have a cervical exam, except for the small proportion that have had a particular type of neo-vagina creation procedure that could leave them subject to cancer based on the tissue that was repurposed to help create the neo-vagina.

When this happens here, it's because Partner failed to set the alarm correctly.

O for pete's sake! That's on the same preposterous level as insisting there are men who will transition in order to gain entry into women's safe spaces and commit horrors upon women. You know what? Trans women are as subject to rape as are, well, women are, and they need safe shelter too. Good grief, grow a pair you guys and get some basic understanding of what any of this is. It's not hard. And yes, sexuality is a fluidity. Something most of us figured this out while we were in college, along with diversity and equal pay for equal work, if we were fortunate enough to be born in the liberated, sexual acceptance narrow window of decades. Some of you clearly were born in the frackin' comstock era if not before.

Almost. The 2.20-2.40 bit looks about 95% photorealistic, the closest I've seen in a game (though not in a game vanilla, that's Alan Wake II). The rest of it has some sort of weird frameshifting effect going on, so it looks real, but like real model cars driving around. The scaling feels really off, possibly the lighting effect they're using. Would probably look better at night. The characters wreck it though, they just look like vanilla. That's when you realise it's smoke and mirror with the lighting and surfaces. Once they can nail people, we'll be cooking for real.

Executions! Iron maidens! And for whoever is left, put them to the question! They'll beat the curve with just a taste of The Rack!

DMC, I am curious. Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to disagree with @Ran--and with Dawkins--about the binary nature of sex. Assuming I have that right, can you tell me why you disagree? Was there a time you thought sex was binary and then changed your mind? If so, what convinced you? I'd like to try to understand. EDITED TO ADD: I'm not asking you to persuade me; I just want to know what persuaded you.

Seasons 3 and 4 of Discovery have been fine, with the caveat that the resolution to Season 3 was dumb as a box of frogs, but the season up to that point was solid. I also liked the kind-of-Iain-Banks-ish direction the far future Federation was going in. A lot of the weaknesses Discovery had are shared by Strange New Worlds, but it seems to get a pass on those things because of Anson Mount's hair. I do agree that Discovery does have the characters acting very casually for no apparent reason, often annoyingly. Earlier Trek shows did have the characters crying but usually in moments of extreme duress (Troi when Tasha died, Picard when turned into a Borg and breaking down in front of his brother etc). Burnham's Batman/Littlefinger voice in the later seasons is also bizarre.

I ran a 4.7 forty right before senior year of high school. Our basketball team did testing over the summer.

Also, definitely a tangent, but just wanna say I volunteered at a woman’s shelter during high school. The idea that they would or should turn away a trans woman is not something I’d ever even consider. This seems like a hypothetical that is completely divorced from reality irt a person using their gender identity in order to gain entrance for nefarious purposes.

Oh come on, it was only known by some rando people like *checks notes* Led Zeppelin