eupraxia
This was 100% how I felt when I played Dota more.
Plus, it makes the toxic people I'm probably going to mute later reveal themselves immediately!
It’s a culture issue, it takes time and advocacy to improve...
It's true! And one of the most effective forms of advocacy for this sort of thing is integration. Being in public spaces, doing the same things cis people do, respecting norms that ensure everyone's safety there, is one of the most direct ways for us to be understood as pretty much like anyone else. Not an exception, but a peer and an equal member of a community. If you construct spaces to protect people from being uncomfortable at our mere presence, you deprive them of the exact experience that is most effective at alleviating their concerns.
"Bullshit" is shorthand for "bigoted, based on inaccurate assumptions, and very possible to overcome with exposure to the group these opinions are targeted at." I say this with love and respect for my younger self that held many of the same "bullshit" opinions. And a mild frustration and willingness to draw clear lines in the sand now that I know better. Thanks for hearing me out while I vent a bit regardless. ✌️
I understand there's no solution here that doesn't result in discomfort for someone, it will always be a balance, but I'm pretty opposed to declaring spaces off limits for trans people for cis people's comfort. That does nothing but push the discomfort off into the future and deny us access to public spaces simply due to the fact that people don't feel like seeing our bodies. Would it be appropriate to enforce acceptable BMI ranges, or require patrons to have all their limbs, or require them to have a particular skin color? All these things make some uncomfortable too, for bullshit reasons, and we wouldn't allow for discrimination on those grounds - why are trans bodies the exception?
Not going after you in particular, this is a pretty common hangup. But it just irks me given that going to a spa every now and then is extremely important to my health due to chronic pain. If this was the norm for spas within reasonable distance of me, I'd have nowhere to go to meet that need. Denying services in this manner is not trivial or harmless.
I guess I'm of the mind that if you're showing up to be nude in a spa around other nude people, does it actually tangibly matter which genitals are present, so long as all other norms of the space are respected? Bodies are just bodies. The rules of engagement (read: "don't") are still the same. Trans women are not coming into women's spaces to harass cis women, in fact we're a lot more likely to be harassed ourselves if we're required to use mens-only facilities instead.
This is a spa in with locations in Tacoma/Lynnwood WA, relatively near there is a nude beach that seems to handle this just fine.
for me I just... couldn't stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn't believe these were people that "should" be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (!!??) I was fully checked out.
The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I've had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn't need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I'm glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.
I mean, are trans people who haven't had bottom surgery not supposed to use gender-separated locker rooms? Which one should we use? I go to a spa where I can change in the women's locker room and it's just very normal. I'm not concerning anyone with my dick and nobody's concerning themselves with mine. Granted, it seems patrons of this spa remain nude while using the facilities, but it's still a comparable example. If harassment / unwanted sexual advances are one's concern, then unfortunately that is just possible anyway and needs to be mitigated regardless of genital configuration. They could at least let her wear a swim skirt or something y'know?
Yeah, amateur sports mimicking elite sports is a big part of this issue and a microcosm of another issue with exercise culture at large. We're more sedentary than ever, but when we go to the gym or train for a sport, we mimic what elite athletes do, which isn't very appropriate for beginners. An example might be doing a lot of strength building in isolation without bringing it together into broader multi-joint movements, which results in poor motor control.
but anyway I digress. This really all should just be a hell of a lot less serious for the vast majority of us and gendered divisions in amateur sports is another arm of that problem imo.
if organizers judge that having been AMAB is a physical advantage for that sport.
Good idea in theory, pretty unfair in practice. Think about the "physical advantages" that we already accept in elite sports - Michael Phelps, for instance, obviously is an impressive athlete but also has some obvious genetic physical advantages. Think of the shortest man you know and the tallest man you know - are they automatically on an even playing field in basketball because they're both men? Don't we kind of just look past that kind of physical advantage?
My experience in fencing/HEMA is that height is the greatest physical advantage, far beyond AGAB. It's a pretty obvious advantage - more height generally means more reach which means you can hit an opponent before they can hit you. So practice tends to be co-ed, if people are paired off to make equal matches there's a tendency toward equal-height matchups. Then, when we go to compete, there's gender divisions for very little practical reason.
The ultimate issue is that AGAB alone is not a great indicator of athletic performance. "Physical advantages" exist even among cis athletes and trans athletes really only call attention to a problem that exists in elite sports anyway. It's also worth saying that sports science isn't a solved field and we're just now coming around to a better understanding of fascia and just how important it is to movement. Fascia is extremely responsive to hormonal changes and with time will more closely reflect a trans person's hormonal composition than their AGAB.
These sorts of advantages maybe matter in elite competitions, and I am willing to accept that AGAB isn't meaningless when discussing physical advantages, but at an amateur level (where the vast majority of athletes are at) it's a lot less relevant. But unfortunately, our amateur sports mimic elite sports and if elite sports buy into the idea that trans people are just inherently physically different to the extent that they cannot compete in the same way, alongside others' genetic physical advantages, then amateur sports take that attitude too and suddenly you get people pushing for genital inspections in kids' sports.
I think it's really important to think of sexuality as a vast array of different activities, each of which you can separately consent to and define your own rules around. "Asexuality" as a label doesn't mean being a completely nonsexual being, and it doesn't have to be a permanent label either. I think of it as a kind of asterisk - something in here needs clarification, please ask! So things like not enjoying penetrative sex, enjoying close physicality more than intercourse, all that stuff can be asexuality if that's a useful term for you to communicate your needs. But also like any label there's shades to it and it never means exactly the same thing to two different people.
I'm disabled and while I definitely enjoy sex, being an active partner is often pretty difficult and oftentimes I'm too out of my body to enjoy it much anyway. And some of the time I'm gonna be best at meeting my own needs. But even in that case, I still enjoy intimacy, being perceived as sexy, etc. people that care enough to ask will be able to find ways to engage, people that don't care enough to have a real conversation about it aren't a good fit for me anyhow. It's been very helpful!
In the age of early access viral hits, optimization is just something no publisher wants to put resources into before they know the game's a success or not.
True story, a game I worked on at my last job shipped on Xbox One and PS4, the PS4 version was not even built until a month before shipping.