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caffeineandsociety · 2 years

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If there is such a thing as a universal AFAB experience, it is being told constantly - even in queer spaces - that it's not your turn to have your issues heard. It is being told constantly that your problems aren't serious, or aren't real, or aren't what you say they are. It's being told over and over and over again that you're overreacting, and that other people have bigger problems so you need to sit down and wait. It is having violence against you downplayed with "but did you die?" in some hat or another.

Scared at the loss of abortion rights? Well, just stop having so much sex then, slut! It's not a REAL problem! Frustrated that you're being obsessively micromanaged by dress codes while your male classmates or coworkers aren't? Ugh, first world problems, don't you know that there are countries where women are still treated like property? You ARE being treated like property? Well why don't you just leave him or call the cops, you hysterical clown? You clearly just want something to complain about! Assaulted because some guy wouldn't take "I'm a lesbian" for an answer? Well you must have been very rude!

No problem you ever face is REAL and SERIOUS to anyone but you. To the rest of the world you're just a child LARPing at having problems for attention, trying to take away from people with REAL struggles. Even if one of these problems is acknowledged as systemic, "well, did it happen to YOU personally? It did? Well you clearly didn't get the worst of it, you're alive, stop complaining!"

And if you transition? Suddenly it starts coming from "feminists" too. If you're a trans man? Well, if you go stealth you might get paid almost as much as a cis man, so corrective rape and medical gatekeeping are part of a privilege, they're not real violence. If you're nonbinary? Cool cool we'll play along with your little game acknowledge you but we need to know your REAL gender what you were assigned at birth so we can tell whether you're a scary predatory man or an annoying frivolous baby girl looking for attention by stealing a narrative from real oppressed people properly assess your privileges!

There's a subset of "trans-inclusive" "feminists" absolutely frothing at the mouth for someone to treat the same way cis men treat them - but if you call them out on it, they turn on the fucking crocodile tears and start crying about how DARE you accuse them of being sexists they're FEMINISTS and you're not a WOMAN so YOU'RE just a misogynist and they will PROVE they're better and more progressive people than you by violently ripping away every piece of support you have.

They're so thorough, in fact, that simply by mentioning how they treat trans men, some of you are probably assuming I mean to imply that they treat trans women any better. I do not. I am well aware that these are the very same people who uplift trans women as flawless powerful queens and goddesses until they set one toe out of line and suddenly they're predators - no, no, it's not because they're trans women, it's because they openly indulge in a children's cartoon on the same blogs where they make sex jokes, so OBVIOUSLY they're PEDOPHILES.

But I'm tired of only being able to discuss my problems under that framework. I'm tired of not being allowed to discuss my problems in isolation. Other marginalized people are allowed to, but me? Hell, AFAB queer people in general? Lesbian issues, if not framed in terms of how the same issues affect gay men, get treated as divisive and seen as a likely sign of radfem nonsense - not because they inherently are, but because those vile communities are damned near the only ones that allow it. Discussing transmasc issues, and not framing them as lesser collateral damage to transmisogyny, is seen as denying that transmisogyny exists.

I'm tired of discussions of my own struggles having to come with disclaimers that I Know My Place, because you all still think of me as a caricature of a woman - a screeching harpy whining about non-issues, a permanent baby with a massive victim complex, too weak to protect myself from mild discomfort so I must spin it as the end of the world for attention - and blend that with the Born This Way narrative and blame it on me being an entitled man.

Unity should not mean "you must frame your issues in terms of how they affect us, while we barely pay you lip service in discussing ours."

So, when will it be our turn?

When will you admit that you're just as prone to bioessentialist misogyny as anyone else?

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tearsofthemis · 4 years

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Tears of Themis : Chapter 1 “Social Snobbery” Part 1

[Masterlist] | [Next Part]

youtube

Location- Industrial Warehouse

(Early in the morning, a bustle of movement disturbed the quiet night at a raw chemical warehouse situated in Stellis City’s Industrial Zone. A group of warehouse clerks that should have been on break opened the warehouse doors as they manned robots that lugged barrel after barrel of raw materials which were loaded on carts.)

Man on Comms: “Raven, please report on the investigation progress.”

(The man called Raven moved to hide himself behind storage containers, and adjusted his night-vision goggles, turning on thermal imaging.)

Man on Comms: “Raven, do you copy? Did something happen to you?”

(Raven tapped on his earpiece three times and silenced it. The voice in the comms was effectively cut with it.)

Warehouse Clerk A: “These late night shifts are awful, what sorta business couldn’t we have left for tomorrow morning?”

Warehouse Clerk B: “Shut your trap; the sooner you stop complaining, the faster we can finish our job.”

Warehouse Clerk A: “Speaking of, where did Minister Xu go? He was…”

Warehouse Clerk B: “I told you to shut it! Are you daft?”

(The reprimanded clerk scratched their neck and went quiet. Soon after, the raw materials were loaded into the truck, and they drove away. The opening and closing of the warehouse doors, and even the workers’ small dispute, was semi-audible through Raven’s earpiece. His brows furrowed. He must have picked up something in their conversation… either that, or he was simply dissatisfied with the quality of his gear.)

Raven: “An abnormal delivery…”

(His fingers were like a blur as he typed away on his smart watch, pulling up information on the warehouse owners. Raven pressed his earpiece, and sent his last transmission of the night.)

Raven: “He Yin, Ya Ning, no anomalies detected. Mark Hai O’Sen.”

Without waiting for a confirmation on the other end, Raven turned and stalked away with the stealth of a black leopard, fading into the pitch black tar of the night…

~~~~~~

Location- Outside the Law Firm

(It’s Saturday morning, and the CBD building is quiet. Compared to the usual hub hub from workers rushing about on a business day, the silent streets were quite unsettling.)

MC: “Should I go pick up something sweet? It’s been tough working overtime to prepare for the exam, I ought to treat myself! I guess that’s decided!”

(Just as I walked through the office doors, I nearly crashed into a deliveryman as he halted me on the way to the dessert shop.)

Delivery Man: “Excuse me, is uh… mis Law Firm in this building?”

MC: “This is Themis Law Firm, who are you looking for?”

MC: (Themis, the goddess of good council’s, name is difficult to pronounce… Even if Zhai Xing came up with the name with good implications, she seems to have failed to consider whether or not the name would even stick with others.)

Delivery Man: “Does Zuo Ran work here? I have a package under his name.”

MC: “Lawyer Zuo? He’s off today, so he won’t be in. Can I accept the parcel on his behalf? I’m also a lawyer at Themis, I can show you my work badge.”

[Game Instructions: Enter your name]

Delivery Man: “By our policy, it does have to be the intended recipient… but a lawyer is worthy of being trusted; I’ll have to ask you to forward it then.”

MC: “I-it’s heavy! I should put this down before heading to the dessert shop.”

~~~~~~

Location- Zuo Ran’s Office

MC: “Huu… what a heavy package. It must be case files again, why can’t they just send it over electronically…”

MC: “Eh? Lawyer Zuo?!”

(I-is this the Zuo Ran I’ve come to know? The chief of Themis, the youngest elite lawyer in the industry, Zuo Ran? He sat, slouched in the leather chair, as the first rays of the morning sun shone through the windows and onto his face, but it did little to erase the fatigue that had settled between his brows. At this moment, he appeared almost as if he were a traveler who had just returned from a perilous and long journey, and had finally put down his heavy bags and had a moment to breathe. But not before the weariness settled in.)

MC: “Lawyer Zuo, you....” Zuo Ran: “MC, it’s you?”

MC: “I- I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in here, so I entered without knocking…”

(Zuo Ran loosened his tie and sighed. Compared to his usual immaculately pressed suit, seeing him like this was like unlocking something that wasn’t meant to be seen by others.)

Zuo Ran: “It’s alright…”

~~~

[Investigate Zuo Ran’s tie]

MC: (Lawyer Zuo changes his tie everyday… This is the same tie that he wore yesterday, it seems like he stayed overnight at the Law Firm.)

~~~

[Investigate books]

MC: (What’s this? I’ve never seen these books in Lawyer Zuo’s office before. “Undecided Event Book”... the name is so strange. Is this Lawyer Zuo’s new case? Unless… it’s some kind of weird novel he’s been reading?

~~~

[Investigate papers]

MC: (Isn’t this in regards to the trans-national trade dispute? The client has been quite unreasonable; perhaps that’s the reason for Lawyer Zuo’s troubles. Zhai Xing has urged Lawyer Zuo to find someone to help him with his workload many times. Although I don’t know how Lawyer Zuo feels about her suggestion.)

~~~

MC: “Lawyer Zuo, you look really pale, are you sick? “

(Zuo Ran pressed his temples as his brows knit together.)

Zuo Ran: “I’m alright, nothing’s wrong.”

MC: (Are you really alright?)

(Zuo Ran’s voice sounded raspy. It seems like he is mustering up strength just to respond to my questions.)

MC: “I’ll go make you some coffee, I’ll leave your package on the ottoman.”

Zuo Ran: “Alright, I’ll have to trouble you for that much.”

~~~

Location- Break Room

MC: “Lawyer Zuo must’ve worked overtime the entire night, right? Those strange books and files on his desk… did he take up a new case? If that’s how hard elite lawyers work, I have to ramp up my efforts! I must pass the intermediate exams!”

(An enticing aroma wafted from the coffee maker. Just as I was preparing Zuo Ran’s mug, someone’s device started vibrating.)

MC: “Hm?” (The notifications were coming from a tablet beside the coffee maker. I pressed the power button, and the screen lit up to life.)

~~~

[Investigate notification]

MC: “‘Sky-high copyright lawsuit verdict: XueYu Jewelry won the case!’... The push notification is from a news outlet. XueYu Jewelry’s case was handled by Lawyer Zuo; of course he would come out on top! I’ve never heard of Lawyer Zuo losing a case, but everyone else claims he wins 99% of the cases he handles… perhaps he lost a case before he came to Themis?”

~~~

[Investigate passcode]

MC: “Unrecognized fingerprint, I can’t unlock it…”

[Investigate back of tablet]

MC: “A YingYuan sticker? Isn’t this the idol that ChengCheng has been obsessing over? This must be ChengCheng’s tablet. She’s so scatterbrained, always misplacing things. I bet she’s probably at home searching for her tablet...”

~~~~~~

(Just as I was about to set the tablet down, the screen lit up with yet another notification.)

MC: “A Genetic drug for cancer treatment released, YanNing Biology Company writes a new chapter in medical advancement! A new medicine, again? There’s been a lot of funding being invested in the development of medicine. Aside from YanNing Biology, the HeYin Pharmaceuticals development isn’t trivial, either. That market’s competition must be fierce! Though, that’s just good news for patients.”

~~~~~~

Location- Zuo Ran’s Office

MC: “Lawyer Zuo, coffee’s ready.”

Zuo Ran: “I appreciate it, thanks.”

(By the time I came back, Zuo Ran had begun to organize the case files. He was focused as he poured over the information, and the fountain pen between his fingers did not rest as it took notes and circled important details. Judging by the parcel wrapping in his trash bin, I’m guessing he has already begun looking into the new case. I carefully brush aside some of the documents and place the coffee mug by his hand.) MC: “Is this an urgent case? I think you should rest for a bit.”

Zuo Ran: “No need. It’s Saturday, why are you here?”

MC: “I’m preparing for the intermediate lawyer exam. I thought if I studied at Thermis, it would be easier to reference information.”

Zuo Ran: “I see. If you need help, you can come find me, I’ll be here the whole day.”

MC: “That’s great! Thank you, Lawyer Zuo! Lawyer Zuo, you probably haven’t had anything to eat all day, have you? I’m about to go…”

(The office doorbell suddenly rang.)

Zuo Ran: “We have guests?”

MC: “I’ll go take a look.”

Zuo Ran: “If it’s anything you can’t handle, send them to my office.”

MC: “Will do.” ~~~~~~

Location- Themis Law Firm’s Reception Area

(By the front door, a man and a woman are arguing.)

Man: “Xue XinRan, the old man has already accepted his fate. Why do you need to go to such lengths? Filing a case is just a waste of money. If you really wanna go through the hassle, why not employ our MeiWeiKa PR agency? We can guarantee your ‘QingPing Restaurant Scandal’ be served without any dirt.”

Xue XinRan: “What nonsense! Lu HaiYang, you’re lying through your teeth! MeiWeiKa only looks to squeeze money from us merchants; you’ve never cared about anyone’s well-being!”

(Suddenly, the man named Lu HaiYang stepped toward Xue XinRan and grabbed her wrist.)

Lu HaiYang: “Watch what you say, Xue XinRan. Our company has prestige, and it isn’t something that can be uprooted by the words of a country bumpkin.

MC: “Sir, this is a Law Firm, I ask that you remain respectful!”

(I separated the two, and pushed XinRan behind me.)

-------

[Masterlist] | [Next Part]

-------

《CREDIT》 Translator: @humi-and-co Editor: @hallowsivy 《未定事件簿》Tears of Themis is a 2020 Chinese otome game by 米哈游Mihoyo. All original credits go to 米哈游Mihoyo.

《VOICE ACTORS》 Xia Yan | Jin Xian: https://weibo.com/riceranger Zuo Ran | Zhao Lu: https://weibo.com/mzhaolu Lu HaiYang | Zhang Pei: https://weibo.com/u/1937059462 Xue XinRan | V17-Su Wan: https://weibo.com/u/2925530143

《OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS》 Official website: https://bbs.mihoyo.com/wd/ Official WeChat account: 未定事件簿 Mihoyo official website: https://wd.mihoyo.com/

#tears of themis #tears of themis translations #otome #otome game #otome game translations #otome game trans #zuo ran #未定事件簿 #左然

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coille-sunmane · 4 years

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Since I've been thinking about it again, which is obvious given the posts about Contrapoints I recently reblogged, I guess I just wanna air my thoughts.

I don't like sharing pronouns. I just don't. The reasons for that are layered, so I will try my best, and understand that this is just my experience. I'm sharing this to maybe help give insight for people who don't understand (mainly the cis people who continue to weight in against what Contrapoints explained).

Back when I was a baby trans and didn't pass and was excitedly out, I was at the end of my time in college and really wanted to make a statement to everyone that I was trans. I told everyone I was trans, I told my pronouns to everyone, I pushed for sharing pronouns in classes and a said "as a trans person" before a shit load of my arguments because that's literally all I could focus on. I did similar things regarding my recently out asexuality to equal levels of, what would later seem to me to be, obnoxiousness.

As I was on T for longer, and began to pass, I stopped doing this as much. For one, it was clearly getting on people's nerves. I was diverting conversations away from their intended discussions and talking over other people to put my experiences into the conversation. That's on me, and was shitty behavior, and not at all fair to others. But for two, I was passing more and more, and so anytime pronouns were brought up, it felt like I was welcoming others to clock me, especially if someone in the room already knew. It would also drudge up my eye to all the ways I felt I was failing to pass. A cruel critical eye many a trans person develops while they are non-passing, unfortunately.

So now, about five years on T, and basically stealth and passing at work and in public, it is just an all around uncomfortable situation to share pronouns. It reminds me of my early ears of transition where I was obsessed with the performativity of my transness and was honestly rude and pushy with others about it. This came about out of a desperate attempt to be recognized for who I really was, and for what felt like me trying to make the world better, but it doesn't change the fact I acted like an annoying brat. But it also acts as what feels like a societal reminder I'm trans, and sometimes feels like it's the people in the room subtly telling me I don't pass and so we all need to say our pronouns, because the one transgender person is in the room. It sometimes really gets me stuck in the past in a bad way. I like people to assume my gender. I want people to assume my gender. I like just looking and being read as a man. And every time I feel like I have to remind the casual stranger that I am a man, feels like some acknowledgement that I'm not truly a man. Just making the sharing of pronouns more normal, or teaching cis people to not act weird when asked what their pronouns are doesn't really fix this sort of discomfort because it is built from a change in perception about oneself (and also my own particular brattiness, but that aside). I am passing now, and feeling reminded of a time I didn't sucks.

Now, will all of that out if the way, I think that, for the sake of enby and non-passing trans folks, we should still be sharing pronouns. Contrapoints said this herself in the Tweets that got everyone going, and in her video "Pronouns" where she said exactly what she said in the Tweets. But, we should also be allowed to and able to explain a clashing of needs within the community when it arises. And this is one of those times. It doesn't mean that anyone hates anyone else. It's just a simple difference of needs and access that we have to work around.

An example: Someone who suffers from sensory overload is trying to watch a film with a friend who is hard of hearing. This person has a hard time focusing on the film if there are subtitles running because they find it distracting, and they basically miss most of what the movie is trying to do because of it. But their friend needs the subtitles to be able to enjoy the film at all.

Neither of these people are bad or wrong for having different needs. As a person who is also very easily distracted by subtitles and prefers not to use them, it is better that I have a slightly less enjoyable time with the film than keep my friend from being able to enjoy it at all.

Same situation here. Just because I don't like sharing my pronouns, just because it makes my experience with others less enjoyable, it doesn't keep me from participating, nor does it invalidate me in anyway. It just makes me a little I comfortable. But the alternative is some others in our community feeling unwanted and unseen, it keeps them from participating in a way that is true for them. So while all my above feelings are true, so is my final one. Sharing pronouns kinda sucks for some passing, binary trans people, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means that there is a clashing of needs and being able to be aware of and being free to acknowledge this will help us deal with clashes like this in the future.

#long post #transgender #contrapoints discourse #opinion #lgbt #sorry it's rambling but it's been stuck in my head

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serkonans · 5 years

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i would legit love to know ur answer to all of those dnd questions tbh

so many gfsljgf thank you antonia i love ask memesputting #13 up here for the anon who requested it and the rest below the cut!13. Introduce your current party.I currently DM a few games! School is hectic and I don’t get to play very often but all the characters are GoodI have one group campaign titled “When the River Bleeds Red” (which is probably news to you, Antonia, and everyone else who plays, idt I ever mentioned that slkfjglfskj) that has a blacksmith (half-elven cleric, @the-idiot-who-stood-still) named Brigitte Faestrum, a pumpkin farmer (halfling druid, @beesgnees) named Cathal Headrig, a former stage performer (fire genasi sorcerer, @merrigold) named Emelia Sparks, and a former mercenary (gnome fighter, @jacqmutiny) named Nyx!I also DM one-on-one campaigns for @merrigold (who plays an aasimar druid named senua tasked with undertaking journeys on behalf of the gods in “The Glacial Erratic”) and @fictitiousbees (who plays a kenku wizard named scribbles called to the service of a high dragon in “Luck of the Draw”)Everything else below the cut!

1. A favorite character you have played.

I’ve only played two characters! One was Carran Warset, who is my Son and like the bulk of the reason I know I’m trans, and one was Chim from your one-on-one campaign. I rly like both of them tbh but Carran is my child gkjlsfgjs

2. Your favorite character that someone else has played.

Excluding anything I’ve DMed, Sivarna by @pluviance!

3. Your favorite side quest.

In the group campaign we played in together, there was one session that idr if you were able to be there for but we like,,, went into a forest and bought a really ugly belt from a stoner for zero plot reasons and I count it as a side quest in my heart

4. Your current campaign.

Well, you know everything about all my current campaigns that you’re allowed to know rn, but for anyone who might be reading who isn’t in them:

The group campaign is being used as scapegoats in the brutal murder of an ambassador’s daughter and is fleeing a city through secret tunnels -- we last left off at Cathal becoming a giant badger and burrowing upward

In the solo campaign with Senua, she’s attempting to deliver a large, magical object from the goddess of earth deep inside a mountain, and she’s facing down a basilisk with three NPCs

And in the solo campaign with Scribbles, he’s just played a card game that was really more of an interrogation, where he found out a high dragon has taken interest in him, and he is, in unrelated news, taking a package to the local apothecary

5. Favorite NPC.

Of someone else’s, I love Lucy from the Chim campaign!

Of mine, I will never stop loving Mr. Kretever Tatell. Kret is a goddamn idiot but he’s my goddamn idiot

6. Favorite death (monster, player character, NPC, etc).

Carran once killed an evil poison merchant by seducing her in an enemy king’s bedroom and stabbing her when he went in for the kiss gkfsljgfsj. Then he and Sivarna wound up hiding with her corpse under a bed discussing the concept of threesomes in whispers while the king wandered around his room. Not as like, a possibility. Just because the topic came up

7. Your favorite downtime activity.

S,,,hop,,,,,,, money tiem $

8. Your favorite fight/encounter.

I liked the fight where I balanced the combat correctly lkgsflkjskljg, the one with guards in the tunnels

9. Your favorite thing about D&D.

Storytelling!

10. Your favorite enemy and the enemy you hate the most.

Homebrew enemies are coolest imo but hard to balance; the giant gemstone ant I had you fight would’ve been my favorite if it’d been able to get more than like two attacks in gskjgksj

And insect swarms are very annoying to fight

11. How often do you play and how often would you ideally like to play?

How often I play is whenever every single one of the stars align and ideally I would play like every other day fksjglskfjg

12. Your in game inside jokes/memes/catchphrases and where they came from.

God the current ones haven’t gone long enough for those yet really and I’m blanking on most from the group player campaign

I do remember Carran was 1000% convinced basil was poison at one point and his pet rat killed an evil, powerful sorcerer by chewing his ear

14. Introduce any other parties you have played in or DM-ed.

Just the group player campaign with Carran, which didn’t get to the heavy plot stuff before it ended tbh, and then the solo one you ran with Chim in what was rly a Very cool world concept of like hellish Las Vegas that I’d like to steal at some point

And then you ofc know this but for anyone reading who doesn’t, I’m going DM a maybe-oneshot, maybe-a few more than oneshot post-apocalyptic campaign for you and @fictitiousbees, set in a world that’s been destroyed by fast growing invasive fungi which is like. only The sexiest apocalypse scenario

15. Do you have snacks during game times?

Yes, religiously. Game time snack time

16. Do you play online or in person? Which do you prefer?

I’ve never played in person other than a single test game for new players! I prefer online tho; you can look things up and type if you’re shy

17. What are some house rules that your group has?

I have a rule about only two players being able to try the same sort of check, but that’s it for us so far that I can think of

18. Does your party keep any pets?

Not yet! Cathal has a way with animals though

19. Do you or your party have any dice superstitions?

I Do

20. How did you get into D&D? How long have you been playing?

I got into it bc Critical Role made it look super super fun, and I’ve been playing off and on for two years now

21. Have you ever regretted something your character has done?

I’ve regretted everything any character I’ve controlled has done I think that’s just dnd

Realistically tho, big yes for a lot of what Carran did, most notably snooping on another player character who had cast Alarm on her room

22. What color was your first dragon?

Haven’t had one yet!

23. Do you use premade modules or original campaigns?

100% original babey

24. How much planning/preparation do you do for a game?

3% planning 97% “oh fuck I need to have an idea Now” babey

For DMs

25. What have your players done that you never could have planned for?

Everything, it’s why I never know what I’m doing

I never expected Cathal to become a large badger and dig out of the underground, how do you prepare for someone to, in all seriousness, tell you they’re going to become a badger and scrabble to the surface

26. What was your favorite scene to write and show your characters.

I really tend to enjoy the one-on-one scenes; I think my favorite was having you roll that insane wild magic surge and detailing What Happened At The Theatre

27. Do you allow homebrew content?

Yes if it can go in DND Beyond

28. How often do you use NPCs in a party?

In group campaigns, not often, although we have two with us right now. In solo campaigns, if you want combat you’re getting an NPC party, at least for a bit

29. Do you prefer RP heavy sessions or combat sessions?

Personally I love RP heavy sessions; combat is fun but I crave Story

30. Are your players diplomatic or murder hobos?

I think mostly diplomatic with a dash of murder hobo

For Players

31. What is your favorite class? Favorite race?

I’m so so so boring but I love humans gksfjgsk

Humans, elves, and half-elves are my favorite

And then I Would Die For Every Rogue, it’s hands down my favorite class

32. What role do you like to play the most? (Tank/healer/etc?)

Rogue role

Lemme stealth and steal and stab

33. How do you write your backstory, or do you even write a backstory?

For Carran it was,, A Whole Process

I came up with a basic idea, then journaled as him several times and wrote and rewrote until I had what felt Right, and then I kept toying with it and adding more details throughout the campaign -- I love playing and would really like to again but the obsession with expanding upon his story made me realize I need the freedom of worldbuilding that goes along with DMing; I don’t think I could be a player without DMing a separate campaign bc I just try to take over

34. Do you tend pick weapons/spells for being useful or for flavor?

Both!

35. How much roleplay do you like to do?

So much, I usually use old acting techniques and get fully into character

thank you again antonia!!! these were fun

#fox speaks #long post #in case the cut doesn't work bc tumblr bad #merrigold

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mattska · 5 years

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Oh my god I am so fucking tired of the truscum/Tucute debate cmon dudes just shut the fuck up and worry about real trans issues like radical transmisogyny and getting our rights to exist taken away from the government...everyone needs to get the fuck over it make up your minds on whether or not you need dysphoria to be trans and while you’re at it stop being obsessed with other people’s transness. Oh and being Trans isn’t a trend nor is it fun or a good experience. I wish I was cis so I wouldn’t have to go through this shit of “picking a side” or even decide what makes someone an “actual” trans person. I’m planning to go into stealth once I go on testosterone so I don’t have to deal with this bullshit.

If you align with some dumb as fuck made up tumblr terms that are used to divide the trans community then I don’t really want to be involved with you. Finally, in all respect I don’t CARE if you’re violently a Tucute or violently a Truscum/Transmed, just don’t push your shit on me.

#matthew fucks #rant #tw transphobia #tw cursing #dni i dont care what you have to say #also if anyone wants to know #i do think you need dysphoria #but like i said if you claim that you dont #i dont care its not my life #do what makes YOU comfortable #but RESPECT the trans EXPERIENCE

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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An unspoken assumption of most political punditry is that the political positions taken by, and the policies supported and enacted by, politicians play a significant, perhaps decisive role in determining the outcomes of elections.

This is the premise of basically every piece of commentary about, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th District. To fellow democratic socialists, Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is evidence that ideas like Medicare-for-all or a job guarantee aren’t just popular in opinion surveys: They can win elections. Even radical-sounding ideas like abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement might fly! To conservatives and squishy moderates, Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of a 10-term incumbent is proof that Democrats are willing to commit electoral suicide for the sake of ideological purity.

Each of these arguments has specific problems. But all of them share one big issue: They dramatically overestimate how much the actual issue positioning of candidates matters for how people vote.

What I want to propose is a null hypothesis for political punditry: Outside of truly extreme proposals, there’s basically no plausible position a politician or political party can endorse or enact that will have a meaningful impact on their likelihood of retaking political power. The US has for decades had a stable system where liberal and conservative policy coalitions (which have sorted out under the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively) semi-regularly alternate in power, with long periods of divided rule and gridlock in the middle. Dramatic shifts in the ideological makeup of both parties during that same period did not upset that alternation of power. It continued apace.

The upshot of this phenomenon is that parties should be a little less nervous about sticking to their guns and arguing for what they believe, whether or not it polls well. Call it, if you like, the “do what you want” theory of politics.

It’s possible to push the “do what you want” theory to ridiculous extremes. Obviously if the Democratic presidential candidate were to suddenly start calling for dissolving Congress in favor of decentralized rule by workers’ soviets, that would probably hurt them. And on certain issues, particularly race, American voters’ baseline apathy tends to fade. There’s a reason even the most left-wing Democrats don’t tend to emphasize the need to integrate public schools through busing anymore. That’s something that white voters will wake up to stop.

But as a baseline position, I think assuming a null effect is a more reasonable guess than assuming that voter preferences are heavily influenced by candidates’ issue statements. We just have too much evidence that this isn’t how voters really make their decisions.

Instead, we see evidence that Democrats and Republicans exchange power at regular intervals, in spite of massive changes in the beliefs of those parties’ elected representatives. Maybe it’s time to argue that parties should adopt positions by arguing for those positions on the merits, not because they’re electorally useful or mandatory.

My basic mental model is that the typical American voter thinks about national politics and elections with roughly the frequency I think about professional football (I’m borrowing a bit here from the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein).

I have a football team that I root for; I maybe check in on standings two or three times throughout a season. I watch the Super Bowl. But I don’t typically watch other games, I couldn’t name many players (even on the Seahawks), and if you asked specific questions about football strategy, about which players should be traded or whether the Seahawks should focus more on developing their wide receivers or their running backs, I wouldn’t really be prepared to give you an answer.

And that’s fine! I have other stuff going on that it turns out I’d prefer to spend my time on. And while the stakes of electoral politics feel startlingly real if you’re a naturalized citizen facing a vociferously anti-immigrant government, or a black family in Flint, Michigan, whose water has been poisoned, or a trans woman forced by a state government to use men’s restrooms, for Americans outside marginalized communities, politics can feel like a game to which you can be indifferent.

Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh has described much political activism in 21st-century America as a kind of hobby. “The stakes in political activity can sometimes seem low. In a large republic, an individual’s contribution is almost always non-pivotal. Policy in the U.S. often changes very slowly,” Hersh writes. But that’s what makes it an ideal hobby for some people: “Low stakes are what make hobbies restorative … they are a release from the pressures of work and other obligations.”

A natural corollary of something being treated as a hobby is that other people can simply choose to not have that hobby. This is the camp into which most American voters seem to fall, and if you’re in this category, then you’re not going to be obsessively watching to see if, say, a candidate supports abolishing ICE or Medicare-for-all or what have you. You just don’t care enough. It’s not your hobby.

“Most people have strong feelings on few if any of the issues the government needs to address and would much prefer to spend their time in nonpolitical pursuits,” University of Nebraska political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse write in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. “The people as a whole tend to be quite indifferent to policies and therefore are not eager to hold government accountable for the policies it produces.”

There’s tons of research reaffirming this finding. The University of Michigan’s Donald Kinder and Louisiana State’s Nathan Kalmoe show in their book Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public that most Americans don’t really have stable ideologies in a way that matters. This isn’t an original insight of theirs; they view themselves as replicating the work of Philip Converse, who laid out a similar argument in 1964.

American voters aren’t down-the-line liberals or conservatives the way the people they elect are. Astonishingly, what a respondent said their ideology was — liberal, conservative, moderate, etc. — had “little influence over opinion on immigration, affirmative action, capital punishment, gun control, Social Security, health insurance, the deficit, foreign aid, tax reform, and the war on terrorism.” Ideology seemed to matter on LGBTQ rights and abortion, but even that went away after they controlled for religion.

Kinder and Kalmoe looked at a study that asked the same people questions about politics in 2000 and 2002. The finding was even more astonishing. “If you asked an average voter in 2000 whether they were liberal, moderate, conservative, or none of the above, their answer was only 63 percent predictive of what they’d tell you two years later,” my colleague Ezra Klein summarizes. That’s wild. That’s a two-year period — if people have durable political beliefs, you should expect 90-plus percent of them to say they’re liberal in 2002 if they said they were liberal in 2000. That’s not what happens.

Berkeley political scientists Sean Freeder, Gabriel Lenz, and Shad Turney conducted a related study measuring stability in views on individual policy questions, and examining whether voters were able to correctly match policies with politicians. They find that only 20 to 40 percent of Americans “hold stable preferences on salient economic public policies.” In one mid-’90s survey they review, only 19 percent of respondents could correctly answer five simple questions about where the parties stand on abortion, defense spending, government services/spending, guaranteed jobs, and whether the parties were liberal or conservative. Another 18 percent got four of the five right. Most respondents, however, were fairly ignorant.

This perspective is not unanimous among political scientists; UChicago’s Anthony Fowler has issued a forceful paper arguing that policy voting — people holding coherent opinions about what policies they want and voting based on those opinions — is more common than the above research indicates. But the weight of the evidence suggests, to me, that voter ignorance is the norm and that relatively few voters have the kind of stable policy views you’d need to have to vote on the basis of candidates’ issue statements and voting record.

“Numerous studies have demonstrated that most residents of democratic countries have little interest in politics and do not follow news of public affairs beyond browsing the headlines,” Vanderbilt’s Larry Bartels and Princeton’s Christopher Achen conclude in their 2016 book Democracy for Realists. “They do not know the details of even salient policy debates, they do not have a firm understanding of what the political parties stand for, and they often vote for parties whose long-standing issue positions are at odds with their own.”

The finding that most voters don’t have stable opinions on policy questions is not, on its own, enough to prove that politicians can hold whatever policy opinions they want without any electoral consequences. It could be the case that the 20 to 40 percent of people who do have stable opinions on economic issues are swing voters who use those preferences to determine the outcomes of many elections.

But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. Michigan State professor Corwin Smidt has shown that the share of “floating voters” — voters who switch their party allegiance from one election to another — has plummeted in recent decades. In 2012, only 5.2 percent of Americans voted for a different major-party presidential nominee than they had in 2008; from 1952 to 1980, the average rate was 12 percent, indicating that swing voting has fallen by more than half (Smidt’s study predates the 2016 election, when there appears to have been a greater number of swing voters). Smidt doesn’t find that rates of floating voters were higher among the politically ignorant, but it’s still a quite small group, and the share of it that is highly informed and has stable preferences is smaller still.

The best evidence I’ve seen that a critical mass of policy-sensitive voters exists, such that parties would be making a huge mistake by ignoring their candidates’ policy positions, comes from Stanford political scientist Andrew Hall. In two papers, one solo-authored and the other with Stanford’s Dan Thompson, Hall looked at a number of different closely contested primaries for US House elections, in the first paper from 1980 to 2010 and the second from 2006 to 2014. He specifically analyzed “coin flip” elections, where the moderate candidate barely defeated the extremist or vice versa.

His big finding was that a party picking the extreme candidate hurts that party — a lot. In the 1980-2010 study, he found that nominating an extremist cost the party about 9 to 13 percentage points of the vote, and reduces the odds of victory by 35 to 54 percentage points. “These,” Hall writes with almost hilarious understatement, “are large effects.” His study with Thompson clarifies that this seems to happen not because swing voters are turned off by a candidate’s extreme positions, but because that candidate’s presence mobilizes the other party’s base more than it mobilizes that of the extreme candidate.

These are extremely well-designed studies, and I learned a lot from them. But I’m not sure they prove that extreme positions on specific issues themselves hurt candidates. Hall estimates ideology by using candidates’ donors, assuming that candidates with similar donors have similar viewpoints. This is a clever methodology, pioneered by Stanford’s Adam Bonica, but it has its limits.

As Hall and Thompson discuss, this measure doesn’t correlate perfectly, or even particularly well, with actual roll-call voting in Congress. The donor-based ideology measures might tell you something about which faction of donors are backing a candidate — whether, say, a Dem is getting Wall Street backing rather than union backing, or a Republican is getting Tea Party-linked money or more traditional business interest money — but that doesn’t always tell you precisely how they’re going to vote. That makes the data less than determinative when you’re trying to figure out if taking individual positions, of the kind that show up on roll-call votes, hurts or helps candidates.

“The goal is not to isolate the ‘causal effect’ of candidate positions, themselves,” Hall and Thompson write. “In fact, it is not even clear that there is such a thing as a causal effect of candidate positions.”

Moreover, these are studies about contested primaries. The finding that an extremist narrowly winning endangers a party in a general election jibes with examples like, say, Tea Party activist Christine O’Donnell defeating moderate Rep. Mike Castle in the 2010 Republican primary for Joe Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware. Given polling showing that Castle would almost certainly win if nominated, it makes sense to think that nominating O’Donnell caused the party’s defeat.

But much current discussion concerns, instead, the choice of incumbents such as Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to come out for controversial policies like a job guarantee or abolition of ICE or single-payer health care. It’s not clear to me that in the absence of a primary campaign that causes voters to learn to view such positions as “extreme,” such moves would have much of any electoral effect at all. Indeed, the micro evidence on voter behavior makes me guess there’d be little to no impact.

It’s less precise evidence than that limned above, but arguably the best case for the “do what you want” theory of politics is the mere fact of alternation of power.

“In well-functioning democratic systems, parties that win office are inevitably defeated at a subsequent election,” Bartels and Achen write. “Moreover, voters seem increasingly likely to reject the incumbent party the longer it has held office, reinforcing the tendency for governmental power to change hands.”

There are some exceptions to this rule, in which a party becomes dominant for extremely long periods in otherwise democratic countries — the longstanding dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the Social Democrats’ rule of Sweden from 1936 to 1976, the Conservative Party’s 1979-’97 period of control in the UK — but in the US, no party since World War II has ever held the White House, or even won the popular vote, for more than three terms in a row.

That is despite the fact that from 1945 to the present, the Democratic Party underwent a dramatic shift toward a more egalitarian stance on race issues, shedding its Dixiecrat base in the process; that it largely abandoned traditional labor politics after the 1984 election; that the Republican Party moved right on race and very far right on economic issues toward a more stridently laissez-faire stance; and that the electorate itself has changed its composition dramatically in demographic terms.

All that — the whole history of post-World War II American politics and the grand ideological shifts of parties it included — was not enough to disrupt the basic fact of power alternating hands. Even when the House was firmly under Democratic control, the presence of conservative Democrats meant that Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan could pass their agendas. That implies that parties can undertake rather large ideological shifts without jeopardizing their chance of one day, eventually, taking over again.

In a world where this is the reality, and where the public is largely indifferent to public policy, mass politics and attempts to affect public opinion become a lot less important. Instead, the main lever of influence is lobbying of party elites. Those elites might mistakenly believe that public opinion matters and so public opinion polls become a compelling way to lobby them, but ultimately, if you want to abolish ICE, you don’t need to persuade the American people. You need to persuade Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Shifting public opinion might help with that, but it’s only a means to an end.

Conversely, if you want to dramatically cut taxes on corporations, you don’t need the American people on your side — and by God, the Republican Party did not have the American people on their side when they cut corporate taxes in 2017. Insofar as Americans cared, they hated the idea of giving big companies a tax break. But Republicans did it anyway. Convincing Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to give it a go was, it turned out, enough for corporate tax cut advocates.

Ryan and McConnell might or might not have thought that the cuts would be popular. They might not have cared at all. They probably knew that majority parties are always doomed in the midterms, and decided to do what they wanted anyway, since their time in power would be brief. Democrats could learn a lot from that example.

Original Source -> The “do what you want” theory of politics

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