MechanizedPossum [she/her]

Either fart or running away from smth real quick

Its not so much about swearing off religion as it is swearing off idealism which is necessary.

Exactly, and this also means swearing off reddit atheism, which posits a fundamentally idea-driven functioning of hierarchies when it puts the blame for hierarchies on religious dogma.

The Marxist critique of religion has always understood religiosity as a reaction to unbearable material conditions. “Opiate of the masses” means self-medication of pain caused by fundamentally hurtful circumstances, and it is these agonizing circumstances, not the painkillers, that deserve the most attention.

cinephiles

A more proper term for connoisseurs refined enough to fully appreciate the Œuvre of auteur filmmakers like monsieur Diesél is actually cineáste.

a Freudo-Marxist school that overlapped with the Frankfurt School

The only reason i’m not already smelling the revisionism of that approach is that i just made a very strong and delicious coffee.

Psychology nowadays is an empirical, clinical science that has very little regard for the works of Freud (and Jung as well, who is even more openly esoteric and full of quackery), and i’m glad about them discarding such holdovers. Understanding Freud is still useful in the humanities due to his outsized cultural impact, but that should be understood as an analysis of a deeply unscientific branch of pop culture, not as something that allows you to analyze the workings of the human mind, let alone other people’s mental illnesses. When you understand Marxism as a scientific approach towards economic and political theory that changes and adapts with new evidence, it is advisable to disregard Freud’s writings, as his theories are not replicable, and have a marked tendency to produce a mysogynist, homophobic and transphobic bias that has led to all kinds of stigmatizing, persecutory concepts like paraphilia theory, a general openness to conversion “therapy” and later outcroppings of academic transphobia like the AGP and tr*nsvestitic fetishism discourses. While Freud himself wasn’t outstandingly homophobic for his time and for the psychiatric community back then, he still developed a treatment approach that relies heavily on the therapist enforcing their own biases on their patients, openly encouraging to question and disregard their accounts whenever possible, and this makes Freudian psychotherapy inherently gaslighty and risky for queer, especially trans patients. From first- and especially ample second hand experience within the queer communities i’m active in, i’ve just heard too many accounts of boundary-violating, invalidating and traumatizing sessions. Psychoanalysis is not up to today’s standards of clinical care, and from a philosophocal standpoint is deeply rooted in a universalist liberal idealism, which is inherently at odds with a genuine Marxist approach.

Fair enough, but in the first example, it’s perfectly understandable why people would be under the assumption that their pronouns would be visibly on display and somebody not using them would purposefully misgender the user. I still remember how in the first days of federation, some guy would accuse us of being Russian bots because his replies had people with he /him, she / her, they / them and comrade / them as pronouns and that amount of “gender diversity” already was so overwhelming to him that his assumption was that we had randomly assigned pronouns for our bot army. The early days of federation weren’t exactly a relaxed time for trans people on this site, we had dunk threads about somebody accusing us all of being fake trans on a fairly regular basis. When your experience with the rest of lemmy are things like that, it’s 100% reasonable to think that somebody using they / them instead of she / her is doing that on purpose and not due to simple technical difficulties. How much benefit of the doubt are you demanding from people in a situation like that? I’m not saying that this isn’t something that causes avoidable confrontations and can be a bad look, but i am definitely arguing that it’s unfair to blame trans people in that situation for lashing out. Hurt people act mean, it is how it is. When you want our community to act more agreeable, you first need to provide an environment that doesn’t constantly shit on them, simple as.

And don’t even get me started on the cesspool that’s reddit. Being thin-skinned and prone to jump to conclusions is a state of mind that site just gets you into as a trans person, i doubt i have to tell you that. It’s part of why i do not use it anymore, reddit had actual “i have to talk to my therapist about this” consequences on my mental health and i didn’t even wade that far outside of the trans boards after coming out. I’m not kidding, back then i was forced to attend gender counceling as part of the medical gatekeeping for gender affirming care in my country and talking about reddit-induced detorioration of my mental health was one of the few actual uses i got out of that. Turns out i also wasn’t alone with these problems, either (although my therapist had the most problem with trans 4chan users in her practice for fairly obvious reasons). Being too online in a chronically lowkey invalidating environment really, really fucks with people even before we account for the outright hostility, the targeted harassment, the chasers creeping into our DMs or the people falsely reporting us for suicide risks. And logging off is something a lot of us have to actively work on due to these sites being literally designed to habituate you and keep you permanently online. It’s honestly kinda mean to call it “ridiculous” when trans people in an environment like that overreact to something that, while unintended, is still objectively very hurtful from that person’s perspective. I mean, yes, i agree, it’s an overreaction, it is uncalled for from the other person’s perspective, but come on. We both know how people get into such a headspace, and honestly, it’s not the trans person’s fault.

The problem here is that they / them is only generic to people who speak English as a first language. In my first language, it’s a neopronoun, one that you’ll see being used if you know a lot of nonbinary people, but that’s a good deal less common than several local neopronouns. And none of these neopronouns are so common that they would come off as gender neutral, all of them will come off as “i’m assuming that person has some heavy gender thing going on”. Now, that’s something that literally goes for almost everybody i hang out with, but still, none of all the genderdiverse people i know use a gender neutral default pronoun for others, not even the majority that at least sometimes uses neopronouns for themselves, not even the ones that are the most into gender abolition.

It’s just not a thing we do around here, firstly because neopronouns are so personal and specific here, secondly because our neutral option is “none / use name”. And when we don’t know the name, we use neutral descriptors like “that person.” And that option works just as well in English, so i seriously encourage making more use of it when we’re still in a phase were all of this is in flux.

Yeah, that’s definitely the impression i’d be getting in that situation, but that situation isn’t exactly ideal to begin with. I know that there’s edge cases like people who are questioning or closeted, which make practices like pronoun circles tricky for those people because that either forces a premature outing or a self-misgendering on someone. There’s really no ideal solution that will cover all cases. But as a rule of thumb, i think we should just normalize stating your pronouns without making that something that feels coercive, and if that falls flat for some reason, i prefer pronoun avoidance over they / them, because that actually is a neutral option.

If you know somebody’s pronouns, using these pronouns and nothing else isn’t “better”, it’s the only correct option.

Anyone who says this practice is transphobic is just being ridiculous

Who is saying that, tho? From my experience, the issue is always brought up when people use they / them in a context where they know it’s misgendering somebody. And when i see that or when i’m bringing this up myself, the initial complaint is never “you’re being a transphobe here”, the complaint is always just “this person is using she / her and not they / them, can you please correct your post?” Unintentional misgendering is still misgendering and should always be corrected, even if you know the misgendered person is never going to see it. And if the misgendering was a perfectly understandable accident or not doesn’t matter, either. When i know somebody’s pronouns and see that they’re not being used, i will bring that up. But why would i call people transphobes at that point, like who even does that?

Accusations of transphobia only enter the picture when people are being dicks about this. Which, unfortunately, happens a lot. Some people just prefer to enter full debate dingdong mode until they get banned instead of just hitting the edit button, correcting a mistake that can and does happen to everyody and saying sorry. Unfortunately, i’ve been part of such discussions on a fairly regular basis. And honestly, when people place their insistence that they cannot make a mistake towards a trans person over treating that person with respect, yeah, that reeks of transphobia to me, there’s no way around that. That’s just a cis person telling us when we’re allowed to be offended and when we’re supposed to stay quiet and remember where our place is.

That’s all there is to this and i’ve literally not once seen somebody say that they / them for unspecified people, for groups, for people you can’t know the pronouns of would be transphobic. And i’m saying this as somebody who is a hardliner on this question and thinks it’s reasonable to either avoid pronouns entirely or to have people look up pronouns before writing about somebody. But that’s just my highly subjective opinion about which ways to adress somebody we perceive to be the most inclusive. Gender neutral language by necessity is a part of that, but so is gender affirming language.

washable

Important opossum fact: Opossums are immune to rattlesnake venom and the reptiles are, indeed, on their menu. Opossums also make adorable ASMR munching noises and often hold their meal in their little paws while eating, which is unbelievably cute.