I buy vanilla extract from Costco.

We have yet to buy new living room furniture. Our last several couches were bought from DH's best friend when he was buying new and needed to get rid of the old. So, known source that eliminated worries about bedbugs.

Mom: siblings who live near her (mostly my sisters J and K) help. They make sure she has company when she has been hospitalized, and that the kids (youngest two sibs are 11 and 9) are taken care of. Dad: He's stepmom's problem. No one else wants to put up with him long enough to actually assist in caring for him should he need it. We love him, but we've all learned something about boundaries.

In the crowds I am in that do potlucks, the rule of thumb is to provide the ingredient list for home-cooked foods, and people with special food needs can 1. bring something they know they can eat, 2. stick to things they can read store-bought labels for, or 3. trust the ingredients people wrote down, depending on how serious their limitations are.

The last 2 potlucks I went to I took: Hawai'ian rolls. Barbecue wings (air fried then kept warm w/ sauce in crock pot) The latter was on a day I was feeling more motivated; the former, I had other things to do before going to the potluck and didn't have time to cook.

Walmart gift packs of cocoa or coffee can be broken up into individual stockings. Look in the seasonal candy/treats aisle. A couple of years, when I pretty much had to fill stockings mostly with SNAP funds, we did a can of each kid's favorite kind of soup in each stocking, and their favorite no-refrigerator-necessary round fruit (orange, pomegranite, etc.).

This article might be some food for thought: https://blackpast.org/perspectives/black-presence-pre-20th-century-europe-hidden-history I fully expect to find some African ancestry on my father's side, because cousins have. It likely stems from Spain/Iberia.

Congrats to the winners. I didn't even break 10K this year. Hopefully next year goes better.

This whole post would make more sense if your DD was my DD's age. We anticipate because of health issues our DD may be slow out of the nest, so to speak, but I can't imagine imposing things like a curfew on a young adult. Courtesy, of course (if you're going to come in at 3 A.M., please have given us a heads up about it, and be quiet), but really? Young women are on average MORE mature at 19 than young men. Our goal with DD is to slowly add more to her plate so that by the time she is 19, her independence is only curtailed by her personal financial and health resources, not arbitrary rules imposed by parents.

A new wallet would be nice. I've been carrying the same, very beat up one for almost as long as DS has been alive. It's not the sort of thing I'll replace myself until this one is completely nonfunctional.

Evolution and the Avian expansion from NorthStar Games. We have the Evolution: Climate standalone game and have been greatly enjoying it, but want some of the cards that are in the base game, and want to try the avian expansion. It's the only game lately I've been able to get DS to play with me lately that isn't on a screen, so I'm running with it!

There might be a way to PM the pain clinic--but that would require me being able to figure out how to get in to the patient portal again. It's one of those things where it seems like no matter what I do, I can't remember the password from the time before, or the right username, the app is buggy, or etc. Completely separate rant. We're going to the psyNP regardless. If this isn't an option worth trying, we're still likely going to need to adjust meds, or something.

It sounds like there is sound decision-making going on.

When I had my chest surgery a few years ago, I was also told "two weeks" but the doctor was willing to sign off on longer away from work. And that was surgery while healthy, and didn't involve lymph nodes. Be gentle with yourself! If you feel you need to follow up with your doctor, do it.

For those who have had this recommended or approved by a medical professional for anything other than seizures, what type of medical professional was it? We're thinking about running it by DD's psychNP. We just missed the opportunity to talk to her neurologist. I'm not sure if it's worth the $$$$ of going back to the children's pain clinic just to ask about a supplement. Does anyone know of good info out there about possible interactions between CBD as a supplement and medications? She's on so many of them...if we could find something that gives her some relief from fibromyalgia pain, anxiety, trouble sleeping, and migraines, without further increasing her medications, it might be worthwhile, and the anecdotal evidence is that at least some people have found CBD oil to help with some or all of those (while clinically controlled studies seem not to have been done for any of these purposes).

Take them with you!

I did an early ballot, then volunteered this morning with Native Vote and stood/sat outside a local polling place for 5 hours. It was really cool to see such a diverse crowd, age-wise. I remember the last time I went to vote in person, the crowd was definitely on average much older than me. Today I saw a lot of young folks too, which was good.

As I already said, the guidelines which have been developed (and which I cited) call for housing transgender people appropriately based on individualized factors, not a blanket rule based on ideology. Which means someone like Karen White who was a convicted rapist should OF COURSE not have been put in a women's prison general population. But there are other transgender women who are not there for reasons of violence towards other women, who are at greater risk of sexual assault in male prisons and would appropriately be placed in a women's prison. It's not ideology that put Karen White in the wrong setting for the safety of all concerned. I didn't say anything about ambivalence about biological sex. I said it would be great to be able to raise kids without the burdens of gender expectations which we assume for them based on their biological sex. And other than Stella (who has been insisting on using the term "transsexual"), no one on this thread has been making any categorization or using language that implies that gender change involves changing actual biological sex. What we can change are some of the physical manifestations of biological sex, as well as the social perceptions of a person's gender.

You want to redefine transgender people on your own terms, and thereby relegate us to third class (at best) status in relation to other (cisgender) men and women. The very language you use demands this. We might fit some third category, but transgender women don't get to belong to the category you label "women" without qualifiers. You want them to be a subset of the social category "men" based upon biological sex, and would support protecting their rights only through separate protections using different words than those protecting other women from sex-based discrimination. Except those separate protections don't exist. Not in my state. Not at the Federal level in the U.S.. So your position leaves us out in the cold. You have yet to demonstrate that there is some steep cost to what we are asking for. Society has a long way to go before we are free from all forms of sexism. I'm not denying that. No one is asking you to abandoning advocacy for women's issues that you consider most important. There is a balancing act that needs to be done to ensure fairness and safety for all women without prioritizing safety of transgender women over cisgender women (or safety of cisgender women over transgender women). You know full well the power of language in this debate, which is why you insist on the language of critical feminism while claiming ignorance of the language of critical gender theory (which has been discussed, and definitions linked to, in other threads in which we both have participated). When you base your advocacy for this "separate but equal" categorization and separate treatment, on the same footing as those who seek to marginalize and dehumanize us and deny us any consideration whatsoever, all you're doing is helping the patriarchy erase us. This thread started with a discussion about raising children without gender. I think it would be great if we could do that. If we could somehow parse out all the trappings of culture that we unnecessarily tie to biological sex, and just let kids be kids, so they can figure out for themselves who they are and what they like and who they love without burdening them with any unnecessary assumptions. Children growing up in such a world would be free of sexism, and would be able to answer the questions we aren't going to settle with our clashing language. Trying to do that as a single family in isolation is unlikely to be a successful experiment. We are all too steeped in gendered expectations around everything we do. But it's kind of sweet that the OP's cousin at least wants to try.

I would tell the parents of the girl. I would then watch and see if appropriate action is taken to get the girl help, and maybe tighten up supervision of interactions with her for a while, but I doubt I'd cut off the friendship.

You have a point there, and I don't think anyone so much objected to the OP telling her husband, as the OP telling her husband behind her daughter's back. Which she did not do. Her DD is bound to know enough about her parents to know whether it is reasonable to tell her mother something and expect her to not tell her father. It sounds like she told the parent she felt it would be easier to break the news to, and then was able to avoid a direct confrontation with her father by letting the OP tell him.

Recommendations under the Prison Rape Elimination act, from Transequality.org : It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a critical feminist to figure out that it's a bad idea to put a transgender woman who has a history of violence against women, especially sexual violence, in the general population of a women's prison, especially if she's had neither surgery nor a long time on HRT. Cases like that of Karen White in the U.K. (where they are supposed to use similar guidelines) are simply unacceptable, and that's got nothing to do with being pro- or anti- woman. But to say that such a bad decision means ALL transgender women should be placed in men's prisons where they are at higher risk of sexual assault is just as wrong as to say that ALL transgender women should be placed in women's prisons without individualized consideration of what is appropriate. Obviously, there is more research to be done when it comes to transgender and gender nonconforming children. When it comes to the desistance statistics, we don't have any that are scientifically rigorous enough to quote with the certainty you seem to give them. There are some important criticisms out there of how those numbers were derived, most notably in my opinion that the definition for gender dysphoria in children under the DSM-V is different from the definition for Gender Identity Disorder in Children under the DSM-IV, and that in one of the studies, children who couldn't be found to ask for the follow-up were assumed to have desisted. Given that for a long time transgender people who would, after transition, then be situated in non-hetero relationships based on their sexual orientation (i.e., if you were 'straight' you weren't allowed to transition), there was at that time some legitimacy to the critique that the binary transition model served to erase gay and lesbian identity. Under that older model, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to transition, because I am married to a man. It is only more recent changes removing some of the gate-keeping and revising definitions to make room for transgender people to be allowed to own our sexual orientations and our gender identities both that have removed that barrier. Your insistence that gay and lesbian people are still erased by transgender identity is, to me, nothing more than a way of trying to erase transgender identities. It is not necessary to extend some people's personal preference in sex partners into wholesale erasure of the identities of other people. A lesbian or heterosexual man saying, "I would not be comfortable dating or being intimate with someone with a penis" or a straight woman or gay man saying "I wouldn't see the point in a sexual relationship with someone without a penis" is not the same thing as them saying "I would not be comfortable dating or being intimate with a transgender person." Again back to the pie: When it comes to sports, a medically transitioned transgender woman is not going to be on a level playing field with cisgender men any more than a cisgender woman is. Hormones make a most significant difference there. So if you insist that she can't play with women, a transgender woman athlete is being shut out of any opportunity to play, and that is just as unfair. Setting reasonable standards for whether someone has undergone age-appropriate medical transition that evens the playing field isn't unfair, however. The solution if there is a sense that there aren't enough opportunities for women to play is to work to expand those opportunities, which are still far from reaching parity with men's sport, not to shut some women out of them. If it's really a pie, let's bake a bigger one instead of denying someone a piece. Likewise, a transgender man who has undergone medical transition (HRT in particular) is going to have unfair advantage over cisgender women, so he should be allowed to compete against other men. As long as you insist that erasing our identities is part of your political stance, you cannot credibly claim to support human rights for some of us (transsexual being a term that defines only a subset of those who fall under the transgender umbrella). People with nonbinary identities, and people who are transgender but choose not to transition, or who cannot transition medically even though they want to for economic or health reasons, are also deserving of human rights and dignity.

And there is where we disagree, based largely upon differences in choice of vocabulary and the respective meanings we give words in critical gender theory vs. critical feminist theory. I would argue that the tools of patriarchy are gender discrimination and the rigid gender binary, forcing people into particular gender identities and gender roles based upon biological sex. You in turn insist that gender has no meaning except as the cultural baggage of the patriarchy, or whatever. And round and round we go, while those who think the patriarchy is just the way the world is supposed to be are probably rolling their eyes at us, at best.

It's so strange to me that some people are blind to the reality that the same root of misogyny is also why gender nonconforming and transgender and gay people have historically been and are presently marginalized. Somehow, you seem to think asking for recognition of this is itself an act of misogyny.

I was speaking to different points. One, on the biological/evolutionary role of LGBT and gender nonconforming people, the other on how sex discrimination operates in India vs. our own society respectively.