KSera
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Posts posted by KSera
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Do we know what percentage of the population is vaccinated in Singapore? Those stats look significantly better or worse depending on whether they are mostly unvaccinated or mostly vaccinated.
eta: looks like 37% fully vaccinated and 57% with one dose (those numbers would’ve been a little lower at the time the recorded infections happened).
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33 minutes ago, MercyA said:
it's really not cool to ask children to care for, raise, and bond with an animal and then send their friend to slaughter. 4H asks children to take their natural affection for animals and push it aside and beat it down.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
There are a lot of animal projects through 4H that don’t involve raising an animal for slaughter. Seems to me the majority of them, actually. No one is slaughtering their dog, cat, horse, reptile, bunny, guinea pig, etc. Do you know that that was what the tears were about in those pictures you posted? I’ve been to a lot of 4-H fairs, and never saw anything indicating any animals were going right from fair to slaughter. I did see tears on a number of occasions when a kid or their animal didn’t ribbon in their event, though.
I agree 4H can be super confusing and we tried to enter at one point and failed due to that, but later we were successful with a different club. I think it works best if you can find someone running a club for a specific thing, like a cat 4H club, for example. Then you’ve got someone who’s leading the kids through exactly what it is but they are supposed to be doing. I think the open ended ones are a lot more confusing to figure out.
eta: I see after looking it up that there is a market day at the end for those whose animals are being sold. Seems like cows and sheep, primarily. I agree that must be super hard for the kids. That was never something I saw at all during the years we were doing it. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/30/545603450/for-4-h-kids-saying-goodbye-to-an-animal-can-be-the-hardest-lesson
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My dc had all their test scores and DE transcripts in their birth name, and applied with that as their official name, but the university’s application had a place to put preferred name. I Recall some questions about whether that preferred name was to be used on everything or only certain things. My dc chose for it to be used universally by the school. Their preferred name that they go by is what’s on their student ID and in their student portal and on all their documents everywhere there. So, somehow this school seems to have a system that works pretty well for the situation. Not sure how standard that is.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to write that all out and sharing. As you said in your last paragraph, your story gives me hope for one of my young adults who has significant difficulties. Right now it’s hard to see how she’ll reach a point of having a job and/or being independent. Your story is a good reminder that things don’t stay the same as they are now.
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2 hours ago, Melissa Louise said:
Speaking of media, and their role:
That was very fair and well balanced, clearly not coming from a transphobe. It’s unfortunately it’s unlikely to be published in more main stream media, for the reasons he says. Frankly, it’s equally unfortunate if it’s picked up by right wing media and used for their purposes, as I think that would set back the goal of actually figuring out what’s going on with these kids and how to do right by them by continuing to make any concerns about this look like religious bigotry.
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36 minutes ago, Melissa Louise said:
Ok. So why would it be ok the other way around? Women's everything becomes open and men's stays single sex?
If men (males) are entitled to privacy and dignity, why are women (females) not entitled to privacy, dignity AND safety?
It’s not okay the other way around either. I’m not sure if I said something that made it sound like it is. I was suggesting single sex spaces for both sexes and then one for coed. Or private spaces plus open.
26 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:Some problems are not solvable. Or at least they won't be by the people who have the power to solve them, which in this case, is all the men who have taught women to be afraid.
QFT.
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8 minutes ago, Melissa Louise said:
Open and female.
Yes, it's unfair to men who want dignity, but it's not unsafe for them in the same way it is for women.
The mixed sex nature of the open facilities mitigate against harm to female NBs. The multi-gender nature of the open spaces mitigate against harm for trans people.
I’m not okay with that for men and boys. I agree it’s not a danger to them, but I have guys I care about that this would be a real issue to, and that matters to me as well. There would be the exhibitionist women who enjoyed doing similar as this guy in the open space, and I don’t want to subject my teen son to the awkwardness of that in a space he’s changing, and I don’t care for the idea of my husband being there to see that. So sue me 😬.
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54 minutes ago, Clarita said:
I just don't believe single biological sexed spaces will mitigate abuses. I mean people put secret cameras in these "safe" spaces, certain women feel it's OK to sit and chat with their friends directly behind my toweled body (honestly that feels pervy to me) and pervs have done things to me in spaces where everyone is clothed.
Then, at some point enforcement is an issue. I mean how is anyplace suppose to enforce the biological gender rule ( or have a penis or vagina rule), have a perv sit in these spaces to check everyone's genitalia. (I'm pretty sure that's a pervs dream job.) In that case, I absolutely prefer changing next to a biological male than to be subjected to that.
Of course all these thoughts may come from my own messed up experiences. I'm not an expert at all. It just saddens me how we can't just punish actual wrong-doers and instead we have to resort to throwing other innocent and vulnerable people under the bus instead. BTW I don't know the intentions and the actions of the accused in the video, and I believe that the woman who complained should have been listened to and respected (even if she is to be told that under the law they can't do anything about it).
I quoted you to reply, but the Katie said what I wanted to say, but better:
26 minutes ago, LucyStoner said:I think genital checks for bathrooms are a red herring. No one sane is advocating for that. No one is well served by that.
A lot of this murkiness is introduced by self ID. Self ID has problems. It wasn’t always like this. Trans men and women have been using the bathrooms they felt most comfortable with for a long time and it was basically never an issue. Even if someone doesn’t “pass”, people are not stupid. We can all tell if someone is making an effort to present as male or female and sense when someone is pushing a boundary for less than honorable reasons.
Of course no one thinks genital checks are the answer. And this didn’t used to be a problem. Trans people used the appropriate bathroom for them, with no drama. I expect if they still had male genitals, they made sure that stayed their own business. I still think the best solution for where we are at this point is either private spaces for those that want them and mixed space for those that don’t care, or single sex spaces combined with either private or coed spaces. Businesses can’t be expected to provide six different options, though. Three seems reasonable to me.
I also still can’t see comparing the threat from pervy women to that from men. The fact that one can impregnate and one can’t makes a huge difference to me (in addition to the differences of strength and likelihood of danger). Not to say both couldn’t be traumatic, just that the stakes are much different in one case than the other.
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2 minutes ago, Melissa Louise said:
Right. I guess not keeping up has benefits. Delta is around in my city ATM. I just assumed I wasn't going to be particularly protected.
I think AZ is still most likely to protect you. There’s a chance you could get it and you likely wouldn’t be very sick, but it’s still a greater chance that your vaccine will protect you from getting it at all. I’m forgetting the percentage right now, but it’s pretty decent.
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2 minutes ago, Melissa Louise said:
I always understood that being vaccinated was about reducing risk of hospitalization and death, and not about avoiding infection/transmission?
That was initially as much as we hoped for, I think. As time went on and we found the vaccines could prevent infection and transmission in most cases, along with finding that even asymptomatic cases could lead to long Covid, I think an increasing number of people have the goal of not getting infected if they can possibly help it. From a public health standpoint, the former is all we need. From an individual standpoint, the latter makes sense for a lot of people. If it turns out I might transmit delta even though fully vaccinated, that changes how I’m going to interact with my elderly parents, whose vaccines may not be sufficient to prevent serious illness for them.
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3 hours ago, Pam in CT said:
Wow, that (quite recent) discrepancy between the born-female vs the born-male rate is STRIKING. 3 to one and it looks from the graph (?) like the gap continues to widen even as the absolute numbers (particularly for the born-males) may be leveling off.
Yes, and it is so, so recent that this has happened. It means that none of the pre-existing research from 2010 and earlier can really be applied to this current population. And it means we have no long-term information on this group at all.
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2 hours ago, Sneezyone said:
Is it really that straightforward? There were lots of women who gave me the evil eye when I brought my 8yo son into the dressing room after swim lessons. Guess how many Fs I gave? I didn’t feel safe with him in a men’s dressing room alone and I didn’t have a male partner around to do the duties.
I frequently had that situation with my ds when he was younger, and wished there were far more family changing rooms. One of the places we did swim lessons at didn’t allow boys over 4 in the women’s locker room. That’s just ridiculous (we didn’t start there until he was much older—no way I could have sent him in alone at 5). I got the dirty looks sometimes, too. On the other hand, there was a point when there was one boy that joined his mom in the locker room, who had way too much interest in staring at the girls’ bodies in the room and his mom never diverted him. I started taking my kids to change in a different area because it was odd and uncomfortable. He was likely just curious, but he should have been getting instruction from his mom on proper behavior.
2 hours ago, Joker2 said:I do agree with the above poster that there have definitely been a lot of anti trans threads on the board lately. It’s getting old.
I don’t feel like the threads themselves have been anti-trans, except for this one. I was wary of this going that way when this one started, because bathrooms seem to be one of the primary anti-trans hot button issues. I think part of what the discussion on the other thread has tried to do is move past labeling any concerns about some of the current transgender issues and trends as being transphobic or anti trans, and allow more nuance. I felt like that was (miraculously) able to happen in that space, though as I I have mentioned perhaps more than once, I have been worried throughout about having such open conversations in a space where they may be used by anti trans people. The bathroom issue is personally a bit fraught for me, because as a nb person, my kid has no ideal way to navigate it in spaces that don’t offer private spaces.
2 hours ago, LucyStoner said:My older son really never learned to swim before this spring. I finally bit the bullet and started paying ~1/2 a gazillion dollars a week for 1-1 private adaptive swim lessons. He’s never going to be a serious swimmer but he can finally float and stick his face in the water and is starting to learn to paddle a bit. He was motivated to do this because he wants to go to canoe camp this summer and he wants to row crew next year and I told him boat sports = needing to know the basics of not drowning.
So the gazillion dollar lessons work well enough to make it worth it? I looked into that for one of mine who has not progressed with standard lessons, but the price was shocking. But I don’t know how else they’re going to get swimming, and they have reached the age they are not going to be able to join friends for swimming parties, the lake, camp, etc.
1 hour ago, LMD said:Female spaces for females. I wouldn't think women would be uncomfortable with females who have body/facial hair and mastectomies under any other circumstances (pcos, breast cancer etc). So no, it wouldn't bother me at all to share with an NB female or transman.
If a female has so modified their body to be unrecognisably female, and to be read as part of the sex class that is responsible for 98+% of sex crimes, then the courteous thing to do imo is not be naked in female only spaces.
I agree most women probably wouldn’t mind once they realized the person had no male sex organs, but how does that person initially enter the space if they don’t “read” as female when clothed? If someone looks like a man, but has a female body, women are going to feel uncomfortable when he enters their space. Such individuals don’t have an ideal space unless private, because changing in the men’s room and exposing their female body in there is something that (from my parent point of view) feels very risky to them.
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16 minutes ago, bethben said:
I find it interesting that the more countries get further away from God's ways and God's moral order, the more women are oppressed.
As a fellow Christian, I wish that reasoning wouldn’t be brought into this. It’s not going to reflect well, as it’s not really true, unfortunately. People are people. There are lots of reasons to discuss the issues raised by this (including several valid ones you brought up), none of which have anything to do with God or morality. I actually think what bathroom people use would be waaaaaaaay down God’s list (to the point of likely not appearing). We don’t want to legislate things in this country based on religion anyway.
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12 hours ago, Melissa Louise said:
Nice paper summarising some issues. From Cambridge University Press.
Thanks for sharing this. I was struck by many things, but especially this from right after the part Chrysalis quoted:
“In the rapidly moving and politicised debate, psychiatrists look to the RCPsych for guidance. Those providing and interpreting the scanty evidence from published research need to be independent and impartial, using best-quality measures rather than ideology. It is confusing to liken open-minded working with young patients as they figure out who they are to conversion therapy. Holding an empathic neutral middle ground, which might or might not include medical transition, should not be equated with this. Psychiatrists need to feel empowered to explore the meaning of identity with their patients, treat coexisting mental illness and employ a trauma-informed model of care when appropriate.”
My dc (when upset) sometimes says they want to find someone who would do “conversion therapy” and I try to explain that exploring more deeply what is going on and addressing pre-existing issues isn’t conversion therapy, but that is the clear message they have gotten from everything they read.
I also noted the graph of Tavistock referrals and the way it looked like it had leveled off, and I wondered if that had continued to hold, and I also wondered what the same graph would look like in the US. I know it’s not unusual for us to be a little behind trends that begin in the UK, so I’m wondering if the UK saw the leveling off earlier than we did here. I don’t get the sense that it’s leveling off here yet, but I have no numbers to base that on, only personal experiences.
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27 minutes ago, aggie96 said:
I also wonder how much the pandemic shutdown delayed any actions from 2019 to present. Action on this stuff is slow at best, but then a sizable chunk of 2019 was "shut-down" and 2020 was a hot mess with resources and politics. All of this would dampen any urgency in spending millions of dollars on repairs that no one really flat out said were imminent. I mean it seems like bids and repairs were started as soon as "life" resumed.
Shut downs didn’t start until March of 2020. So, they certainly may have caused delay after that point, but wouldn’t have explained delays in 2018-2019. I don’t know how long construction was shut down in Florida. Seems like in general they didn’t shut down as much as other places, but I also have no idea at what point the bidding process in this had started.
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10 minutes ago, PeterPan said:
My dad was a completely broken man before he was willing to take what they said. And the crap they use destroys your memory, fries you, makes you drool, leaves you with tardive dyskinesia.
Then you can understand why some people have problems with med compliance. On the other hand, the "crap" they use also gets a lot of people their lives back, and lot of people with psychosis live good lives, hold down jobs, etc, with the help of the crappy meds.
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3 hours ago, PeterPan said:
Not sure about injustices, as he seems to be making some odd, less than helpful choices.
He has severe mental illness. When someone is dealing with psychosis, they’re not purposefully making bad choices.
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16 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:
this (from ABC) is both reassuring and concerning. Reassuring that those vaccinated were safe but concerning that 100 pc of those who weren’t all got infected. Earlier in this pandemic most outbreaks only seemed to hit a quarter or a third of people in an environment.
“Hi Myla, I don't have those exact numbers to hand right now, but I can tell you that 30 people attended that house party in West Hoxton. Of those, 24 tested positive. The six people who didn't test positive were all vaccinated health workers, according to NSW Health”
This seems concerning to me as well. Seems like this is the third one of those kind of outbreaks I’ve seen, where everyone unvaccinated caught it and everyone vaccinated didn’t.
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2 hours ago, SlowRiver said:
They seem to have no concept of a private self.
I think that’s largely a side effect of social media.
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3 hours ago, elroisees said:
In Germany and nearby countries, there are many, many spas with coed nudity. Nobody flips out about it unless it's unexpected and out of context. Nobody stares at others - that would be rude. And most of the people using the spas are elderly, normal, non-buff people. It's just not a sexual space.
I think we'll wind up with private spaces here. We're very sexualized. Perhaps too much so.
I think in our current context, private spaces are the only practical option. That’s very expensive, though. Perhaps there could be a combination of private spaces for people who want them, and then mixed spaces for people who don’t care. That gets around the problem of people feeling discriminated against if required to use the space for people of their sex. Plus, just separating by sex doesn’t work for everyone anymore, because a trans man in the women’s area is a different set of problems, as does a trans woman in the men’s area. And I don’t even know where a non-binary person goes. With Covid, dc hasn’t had to figure that out yet, but will very soon. They think they belong in the men’s rooms, because they think it’s not fair now for them to go in the women’s ones, since they don’t look clearly female. I find that very scary 😢. They don’t look male either, and are tiny. I’m pretty sure no one would think a thing about them in the women’s room. They wouldn’t be like it sounds this guy was, making a spectacle of themself (I don’t actually know if that’s true in this story, because I didn’t want to click on a video and couldn’t find the story on a middle of the road kind of source. It’s all over the place on very right wing sites, but not at all on middle or left-wing sites that I could find. That’s possibly telling in both directions. Or, it just didn’t actually happen like that. I don’t think specifics of this particular case actually matter to have this discussion, though.)
Do the countries with mixed space nudity have lower rates of sexual assault overall than we do in the US? While I would be uncomfortable changing around a stranger with male anatomy, but with others around, it would be an absolute no way, no how, if I were the only one in a changing room except someone with male anatomy. That just goes against all my fear instincts 😢.
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1 hour ago, alisoncooks said:
DH put a message in to his GP, who wants to do the monoclonal antibody treatment. I'm glad -- so far DH seems to be doing okay, but he does have some risk factors (cancer survivor, high BMI, prone to respiratory illnesses).
That is great! I keep reading there is plenty available right now, but physicians aren’t ordering it, so it’s great he has a proactive GP. I hope it helps him feel better quickly!
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47 minutes ago, Corraleno said:
Germinal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane. “Usually by four to six weeks, there’s not much left,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are “still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people.”
Any ideas why it would be that the mRNA vaccines would stimulate the germinal centers differently than other vaccines? It seems like the mRNA is just the method for getting the spike protein produced by the body so the immune system can respond to it. I’m trying to think why the method by which the spike protein comes about would change the immune response to it (I’m not an immunologist, clearly). I would think they would need to look at the same germinal centers in people who have been given different kinds of COVID-19 vaccines, to see if it’s specific to the type of vaccine, or if it’s more to do with to this particular spike protein, and similar would be seen with any of the vaccines that introduce the spike protein in one way or another.
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1 hour ago, Kanin said:
So... This says that 117 people have died from Delta in the UK, and half of them were fully vaccinated?
That seems bad on the surface, but over 85% of adults over 50 are vaccinated in the UK. That means 57% of the cases came from the less than 15% who were not fully vaccinated.
eta: while this shows the vaccines are working very well, they’re not perfect and it illustrates why I don’t think anyone should think poorly of the fully vaccinated elderly who are still masking everywhere. Or the fully vaccinated young people, for that matter.
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17 minutes ago, SKL said:
I am not used to the idea that kids can't be comfortable defaulting to either "I'm straight" or "I'm not into that right now."
You left out “I’m gay.”
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in The Chat Board
Posted
This is what I was thinking, too. Seems like you would be able to get it even earlier in the process than your DH, and that would be helpful.