MystValkyrie

Honestly, I think people like Governor Tony's vibe but some are racist and didn't want to elect a Black senator and swung the vote right last time around.

Which is a shame, because Mandela Barnes would have been an amazing senator.

I have not! I'll have to check it out!

I love high-waisted jeans for the same reasons! I can get into all my old dresses, but they can be a little tight, so those are for special occasions only until I have a flat tummy again 🙃

Rotten Pumpkin by Simon's Nest is my favorite perfume ever. It smells like fall, with notes of patchouli, cinnamon, and pumpkin.

It's been my go-to fragrance for years, though I also like Wistful Hedges and Kitchen Witchery, by the same maker, Burberry London, although that's tecnically a men's fragrance, and Hattai Le Couvent, for what I can only describe as "Cinnabon stand at a mall."

I mostly just buy drugstore makeup lol. When I do my goth look though, I really like Manic Panic products.

I'm not considered overweight based on my height, but I weigh about 5-10 pounds more than I'd like to, since any excess weight seems to go to my tummy. I was a little mortified when the internet invented a new word to make people feel inadequate -- skinny fat -- because, yep, that's me. 😮‍💨 I can hide my stomach pretty well with clothes, and people say I'm thin, but it can hurt a little looking in the mirror, and swimming is out of the question.

I work out every day, but I just can't seem to get get the flat tummy I had in my college days.

Today, nothing feels like it’s meant for me. I want to go camping. I want to drink a sour by a bonfire

I feel this on a profound level. I never feel more feminine than when I'm in nature, mostly since it's nice to just escape and not have to worry about things like societal expectations.

My campfire drink of choice is a milk stout, preferably if it's chocolate-y or maple-infused.

A lot of times I'm not sure what's definitively feminine or masculine because the social norms tend to shift. This is stuff that feels feminine to me though:

I love the gothic side of femininity. Pentacles and black dresses and dark makeup and horror movies. One of my best friends is pagan, and I'm in her coven for moral support and the much cooler Pagan holidays (Yule > Christmas). I'm actually not embarrassed to say I was big into the Twilight craze in high school and I still love bands like Evanescence and Lacuna Coil to this day.

I think we're at the point where fantasy novels are female-coded. I too get the feminine urge to slay the Witch-King.

Is hiking and camping a femme thing? I'm a nature girl 🍁

Aside from that, sewing, gardening, manicures, aromatherapy, Aggretsuko, fall, pumpkin spice lattes, and rom-coms if they're written well. (My fave is "The Holiday.")

Everything involving this topic makes me so angry and sad. How do you trust any man now that this technology exists?

I think we should all think twice about having photos publically accessible, or even visible to friends, on social media. Between deepfakes, Kiwifarms if you're trans, and Clearview AI, Facebook and Instagram was a mistake.

It's illegal in other countries and eventually I think it will me in my country too, but it's already too late.

Like others have said, raising men properly, but also monitoring their internet usage during formative years. If they aren't given unlimited tablet/internet access, which is often the case, boys will always still find ways to outsmart parental locks, and parents need to stay two steps ahead.

I've heard so much messed up stuff involving the internet and Gen Z/Alpha in the news that's even worse than Andrew Tate exposure.

I'm kind more worried about future Gen Alpha men and younger Zoomers than Baby Boomer men at this point, but hopefully I'm wrong. There's still time.

Yep, most male gamers who take issue with Aloy can't tell she has some light coverage, and then criticize her for not wearing makeup and being ugly, which is amusing. And sad too, that even wearing makeup doesn't satisfy their impossible standards because it's still not enough makeup.

Maybe Aloy plucks? Some people just have great eyebrows without having to do anything, and I am jealous of those people.

I want to preface my experience by saying the wage gap is a serious problem and women deserve to be paid the same as our male coworkers for the same job, not to mention women being overlooked for raises and promotions.

Early in college, I took a job working summers at a newspaper manufacturing warehouse for $7.50 an hour to try to get my foot in the door in the journalism field. The starting pay and job titles were the same for all the entry-level folks, but the actual work was sex-segregated, and they put me with the men, which really sucked. For the cis women, it was mostly standing in place, feeding newspapers into a machine and making sure there weren't any jams. On one occasion when I got randomly put on the elusive morning shift (which never happened again), I was put on the feeders, and it was pretty easy; the worst part was pulling out a paper jam since that would halt the whole production line, but that rarely happened. Otherwise, for the cis men and one trans woman (me), we would do the packaging and loading. It was two or three people doing a physically strenuous job that required more workers to perform optimally, with one person frequently calling in sick, constant multitasking/running back and forth, lots of overtime and a handful of OSHA violations, including me being expected to operate a forklift without being certified. I don't know why they didn't hire more people with certifications or spread out the tasks more evenly. Things were so frantic all the time I'm glad I never got hurt on the job.

It was a lot of overtime, with random scheduling often landing me in the graveyard shift, so I didn't have a social life during that time and I wasn't sleeping very well. I put my two weeks' the moment I was offered an internship writing and editing for a local magazine. The one positive is that I was in really amazing shape for those summers.

even if you could theoretically tell a story that sounds somehow “unfair” depending on your storytelling skills.

Yeah, they sure do love pulling the Riley Gaines card even though she came in fifth, making it a total nonsequitur.

And I totally agree that this debate is too big considering it only targets a tiny handful of athletes. I say it's complicated because some arguments used feel, circumstantial? As in, "Trans women should play with women because there's only a couple of them anyway?" Would acceptance of that argument lead to tokenism? BWhat if, for whatever reason, a sports team happened to take on a lot of trans woman? I think that would be okay, but I worry it would dredge the debate up all over again.

Or, people often say, "Trans women should be allowed to play with women because they rarely win anyway." But what if a trans woman ends up on a winning streak and then another controversy erupts? I feel uncomfortable that our condition for entry is framed as our failure to win, and that if we win, then by implication we get othered as opposed to just being a woman who won a sports game one time. This recently happened, actually. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/ca-school-sports-authority-panders

This is to say, I'm just thinking aboug how we come to a supporting argument that ages with grace? And what argument should that be? Not that I think any pro-trans argument would satisfy some people, with it being the wedge issue that makes TERFS out of people originally left of center. I guess I don't know the answer at this point.