Shaleesh

Thats SO cute. I love quirky little fixtures like this, Ill have to go ask around, thanks for the tip!

Jeeeeeeesus christ okay yep, fucking horrifying. That makes a lot of sense and demonstrates why this is a bad fucking idea. Thank you.

Yeah that makes sense. Coming from that angle I can see how this could open things up for even more exploitation. I was thinking more "well if this is happening anyways might as well get paid, right?" Rather than "this is going to be an incredibly degrading new form of exploitation that should not be encouraged."

I think I could have worded my reasoning better but I do not appreciate being equated with a zionist colonizer.

Regarding the issue I want to make it more clear that my perspective is that of someone who regularly donates blood (because it feels good). I produce blood, which is arguably a form of labor. This blood is then harvested and sold, however I am not compensated but find the idea of compensation appealing. I have noticed that many people in this thread seem to be opposed to something I support and am genuinely trying to understand how I might be wrong.

I hope this didn't come off as needlessly confrontational but I feel that I was misunderstood and was compared to something I find repulsive. Which hurt my feelings a little bit.

Not trying to troll, genuine question here.

The way this is framed as a solution to poverty is disgusting but what is wrong with being paid for a blood donation? Blood is needed for medical applications, can't be manufactured, and will be sold at a profit anyways, so why shouldn't the donor be compensated?

A post so good that the mods put it on the fridge

Referring to the intentional decision to not reproduce as "the ultimate personal sacrifice" is so aggressively heterosexual and patriarchal. So like, does that mean that I am damned to live a pitiful, empty life because of my infertility? What about gay couples? Orphaned children and the adoption thereof are never mentioned once in the entire article and the challenges of parenting are only briefly touched on, so its not about the experience of raising children, its about producing more humans. The interview sucked and the author's point was that declining birth rates are bad because of a bunch of nonsense reasons like the potential extinction of humanity. They offer no concrete solutions. Its white supremacist anxieties mixed with a breeding fetish dressed up as erudite concerns about economies and quality of life.

This segment about 2/3rds in is pretty illustrative of how utterly detached these people are:

[Spears makes an argument that population growth is a primary driver behind scientific progress and improved quality of life]

Rosin (the interviewer): This is actually a quite beautiful notion of humanity or vision of humanity, just this idea that collective knowledge is a good; more of it is better. I think I’ve come to associate, particularly at this moment in time, you know, collective action as oppressive or—at least, I have a lot of examples of it now in my world, where masses of people getting together can also cause disinformation and push us backwards. And maybe that is just very present in our minds right now.

Spears (the interviewee): Yeah, I mean, it’s not the whole story. It’s not just about innovation. I think that there are other ways that strangers’ lives are not only good for them, but good for you. So, you know, here’s another way of looking at it: We’re used to thinking of other people as, potentially, rivals that consume the resources that we want, and part of what I’m trying to say is that we should think of other people as win-win.

"I looked around, horrified, at the children filling the rows and rows of chairs; girls as young as 5 attending with their mothers and grandmothers, young mothers rocking babies in their strollers, and high schoolers hanging on every word."

I couldn't finish the article, that was incredibly bleak. How astroturfed is this movement? There is no way that young women and girls are seriously buying into this, right?

Ok so I reread your post and realized that you meant for US ask YOU a few questions... ngl you're reminding me of myself right after I gathered the cohones to actually transition, I really wanted someone to do that too.

Umm...

So, how does cilantro taste to you, is it soapy? Genuine question.

What is something that you would like to go do, now that you are a little more "you" than you used to be?

Hello, you may be a stranger to me but I am very proud of you. It always takes courage and strength to get to where you are now and you should be proud of yourself for that.

Don't ask too much from yourself, but ask for more. The key is to make sustainable incremental changes over time, trying out new things and seeing what sticks.

Is this thing you're speaking of happening when you go back to change it?

No, I applied for a new passport in janurary, just after Donny decreed that the federal government would only recognize sex at birth. When my passport came back it said I was a man. There's been some successful litigation since then and even though the state department is supposed to comply and give trans people documents that match their identities, its unclear as to what they're actually doing. Some people say they got through and some people say they got rejected, the official help line is useless because they don't get told shit and the last I heard is that they're putting anyone who gets a gender marker change onto a list. I was instructed to send mine in as an error correction, I did so two weeks ago and I have yet to get any word from the state department... so we'll see I guess.

I sadly didn't say I'm nonbinary because of fear of mistreatment

Good call tbh. I once asked an NB friend who got an F on his drivers license, why he didn't go for the X. He said "the absolute last person I want to come out as nonbinary to is the man with a gun and the full force of the law who just pulled me over". Which went pretty hard and made a lot of sense, especially now, with the trajectory being as dismal as it is. Its an injustice though, lets be clear our nonbinary siblings deserve to be recognized and feel safe doing so.