Hi. I’m Emma. I’m the person who made Mobile-Friendly Firefox Customizations for Librem 5.
You can find my projects here:
You can follow me on the Fediverse here:
I’m trans 
(she/her)
Appreciate my projects?
Want to support my transition?
Monero:
83DKePztcGMTHbuo7mAVkZ1CLdzPgptASTFGQ7pmoxj16gS6VqssEBMjVWBYcR8NNKb3YGEdeZsZfHCbn9uXhyZjSHb3gJw
Maybe this is off-topic, but I’m curious about something. It seems like in my country people were turning trans into something politicized for the particular gain of particular people who aren’t actually trans and don’t care about that. But when I use Purism technology like my Librem 5 and try to reduce the mind-manipulation of society on my brain, it’s fun to try to find my own answers to questions.
So that’s why I’m curious: what kind of communications sites or tools would you recommend to folks like me who aren’t trans and by chance don’t have trans people in their social circles, to try to learn what’s true and what’s not on the topic?
When I was a kid I played a lot of World of Warcraft. And I had a point in my life in my formative years where I dreamed of that world at night rather than this one. Then, when I got a little older, I played a female character on the game for a bit. In my experience, even though the male and female designation in the game has no impact upon game mechanics, the female character made me less capable and less effective because other players in the game were less willing to work with me and more often assumed I would be not good at the game, or something.
So like in my specific case, male characters in World of Warcraft are the best for me. When presented a choice, I like to win. But other than that, maybe I don’t know stuff on the topic.
Hi there. o/
I had a female pvp character that got honored by other player which called me “Hydra” - like “cutting her head and she comes back with 2 heads and you have no chance anymore”. I was a strong player (at least with specific classes) and had never such issues. The only issue was “your gear is too weak” even if my experience made me stronger than their “good geared same class players”. This was just nothing about ingame gender.
On other games there are indeed few people who’re toxic as that. At the end it’s very community specific.
As hint: just call people as they want to be called. If it’s “fake”, just call them as they wish and don’t care about it. I mean what does gender matters as long as you don’t want to get them into your bed? If you think it’s fake and then it’s not, you just run into a stupid trap.
@Sharon: I dislike ideology in every direction. At the end we spread a language that “includes everyone”, but they don’t see that they especially exclude non-binaries with a special sign inside the word (on my native language) that is spoken … a break (like non existing people). Shooting in own foots…
On the other hand what do you know what they really are or not? Our DNA has a lot of gender specific information. Not all are about the visible body. There are over 1000 DNA-points that we know that creates our gender specific behavior. And just that you know, there is no such typical thing like “male” and “female” in brain research. It’s more like “this is more like male” and “this is more like female” or even something else. A multi-dimensional spectrum of information that forms the personal gender. That’s the view outside of ideology - called science. So it is by far not as “clearly” as you think.
Hey @user0, thanks for your work on making Firefox useable on the phone.
I admit I tend to assume that people who don’t explicitly or implicitly announce their gender (by having neutral usernames and avatars) are male, so in that sense it’s good to be reminded I can be wrong.
To be honest, as long as we are only exchanging on internet forums are discussing topics not related to sex/gender, such as is the case for 99% of conversations here, the number of X chromosomes in people’s cells are pretty much irrelevant. What keeps us together here is a shared interest, not our physical bodies. However as we are conversing in languages that require using gendered pronouns, it’s very convenient to know which one to use for each user. (I do dislike the use of newly-invented pronouns like xe or the French equivalent, but that’s just my opinion.). I generally use they for individual people when I’m not sure.
So anyway, the correct pronouns to refer to me in third person would be “he/his/him”. That said I’ve occasionally been called a she in other forums and didn’t get annoyed or anything.
Hiya. 
Hi and thanks for the appreciation! Also thanks so much for creating that mirror for my code. That is one of the things that convinced me to make an account on Codeberg.
Thanks! I’m so glad that I decided to share that code.
That’s actually one of the reasons that I felt coming out was necessary. I knew about this phenomenon, but I was originally going for anonymity with this account. Then I saw a post mentioning me using he/him pronouns, and I thought about it for several days, trying to decide whether or not to say anything publicly or privately about it.
That’s when I started considering what I want from this account, and I ultimately decided that I want this account to be the real me. Yeah, I could have just pretended to be a cisgender woman, but I don’t like dishonesty; I couldn’t do it.
Also, I eventually reasoned that this would be good for me and others. There are probably some people that use my code that have negative feelings about trans people. Coming out might cause them to reconsider their feelings, and it also says to any other trans people that they are not alone here.
I agree. Neo-pronouns, as they currently exist, add confusion and uncertainty, rather than clearly communicating thoughts and ideas. That said, languages will continue to evolve as long as we do. But I don’t think neo-pronouns will ever become the norm.
Yeah, I find that to be the safest and easiest option. We all already do this all the time without thinking about it. Like if someone says “You’ll never believe what a client said to me today”, a response might be “What did they say?” It’s just a natural part of English, when gender is undefined or ambiguous.
Okay, so this is a great question, but the answer is a little complicated.
For starters, not all trans communities online are the same. Each community has its own unique culture, and there can be significant differences, including political differences. Also, some communities are more welcoming to outsiders than others, and there are generally rules in place to protect community members. Keep in mind that many trans people have been victims of abuse, including physical and sexual abuse.
Even if you want to be a “lurker” that just reads posts/comments and does not participate, I would strongly recommend that you read all of the rules for each separate community that you browse.
If you have questions that you would like to ask trans people, some communities are better than others, and some disallow such questions entirely. Again, the rules will make this clear.
Okay, so with that said, here’s my recommendation:
Next, you might want to browse some LGBTQ+ communities:
If you want to ask questions, you might want to do so here:
For more personal and vulnerable discussions:
( I swear to god you better be nice )
For memes about being trans or questioning your gender:
Even though I started off browsing egg memes on reddit (egg = trans person in denial), I don’t recommend browsing reddit anymore, for several reasons. Many of the LGBTQ+ communities on the fediverse were created during the reddit migration of 2023, but sadly not everyone joined us. Lots of people stayed on reddit, and many migrated to raddle instead of the fediverse. It was a messy situation.
…so this was probably a way longer response than you were expecting…
I’ll just add that you can also ask me questions, if you’d like my perspective.
Everyone has their own experiences and perspectives. Being a guy playing as a girl does not necessarily have anything to do with being trans. But it is possible for that to be a sign or clue that someone is trans. It all depends on the individual and how they interpret their experiences.
Yes, thank you. It really is that simple. We can only truly know ourselves.
Blaming each other will only create more division among us, so I suggest refraining from doing so in favour of more productive intentions.
I just sat down to eat a little breakfast while poking the keyboard on my Librem 14, and have not yet invested the time to review the resources that you linked me. So, you may find my perspectives to be ignorant. But, many years ago in some communications course that I had somewhere in life, I encountered a really interesting suggestion. I forget who it was, but they told me that if I am in an a disagreement or argument with someone else, the result of the discussion is more likely to be positive if I reword statements starting with “You” and especially “You are” to instead be phrased “I think you…” or “I think you are…”
For example, were I you, I might have said:
I think you are one of these people. I think you just can’t help yourself. I think you publicly reveal yourself to be someone who should be avoided.
Apparently, according to what they said in that class, there are situations where this leaves open opportunities for the other person to try to re-explain or re-examine themselves subconsciously. In some sense, maybe they are led to believe that you have reached a situation of mutually exclusive truths with “You are” statements about them; the reply may more commonly be, “No I’m not. You’re wrong!” And maybe that does not increase the likelihood of reaching a common understanding. But with “I think you are” statements they’re more likely to respond towards some conflict resolution. Maybe they didn’t want you to see them that way. The answer you get in such case might be different in a positive way.
Yeah, in hindsight when I think about it more, that was a situation where the entire imaginary virtual world that I was taking part of at the time was sold off to a rich guy that is often portrayed within the game as an exceedingly obese, money-hungry goblin. And once the sense of the innocent fabric of escapist reality is replaced by the imposed pressure of the game developers needing money now – wherein it is evident that the only reason we exist to those in the highest positions of power is to start from the base assumption that the digital reality doesn’t exist and it should be used only as an information tool to make us send money to the company – I suppose at that point it’s natural to feel like the digital reality is a parody of innocence, existing instead only for some lost desire for human vice. My male character in the game, for several years, was my digital identity. Once our digital identity is sold for a profit, and we are reminded that we do not own ourselves but are instead for sale, it creates a split wherein the video game character has a sense of “other” and not of “self.” In that world of lost identity, it is entertaining when being mistreated by the machine to respond to the machine in kind, perhaps, as if a form of asking for help – therein, having the game be about a female character that is both attractive and also does anything I say regardless of how stupid or bad my instructions are, becomes enjoyable. If I tell the female character to remove her armor, she removes her armor. If I tell the video game character to dance for me, she dances for me. In much the same way that if the obese goblin who purchased the rights to the game tells the player to open their wallets and send more money or else get kicked out of the game, they all open their wallets and send money. Everyone is manipulated everyone else for short term gain instead of having a good time. And thus, pretending to live in some kind of “Lord of the Rings” fantasy world is replaced by mutual antagonism and the destruction of one’s digital identity.
I’m not certain that I ever really thought through it that way before. Maybe I was “thinking out loud” and I hope that this has not wasted your time. But I am now even more convinced that you are correct: that my experience playing the female video game character was even more irrelevant than I thought at first.
In the physical world outside the computer, for about the last year and a half I have existed in a social space where the other people are politically anti-trans because they are told to feel as such. Prior to that, for about two years, I existed in a social space where the other people were in favor that everyone should be whatever they want and we should be supportive of LGBTQ because hating people is wrong.
So this might come from my current manipulation, and maybe I want to ask a question that you feel it is emotionally unsafe for you to answer. If it’s like that, I guess I would say, don’t answer. Nobody should get hurt.
But during my formative years, I would say the sex ed at my school was lacking. They fired the sex ed teacher during my year because of some school board politics, and she was replaced with someone afraid to cover the same content basically, probably for fear of losing their job. As such, there was a period of time for me where my desired identity and my physical reality diverged; I had been raised as a religious protestant Christian by what I would largely say were incredibly friendly and supportive people and my desired identity was to be what I was raised to be. I liked these people who raised me. But because there was no sex ed, I desired to be an entity without sexuality and to think of myself as the mind or expression of day to day life. The stability of that, and of who I wanted to pretend to be – one unaffected for example by the sight of attractive women – was at odds with my physical reality. The physical reality was a programming to pursue the opportunity to see the secret beauty of women and get pleasure from it, if possible.
I was never able to deprogram that. In my physical body’s experience, it is impossible to shut off that part of desire totally from existing, even if I can ignore it sometimes for long periods of time at a time. By contrast, what I do have control over to deprogram is to stop identifying as a protestant Christian and instead identify as a religiously agnostic human being who does whatever I want. This eliminates internal conflict so that I can live happily, and live with myself. I can identify as someone with no religious faith and then I get along well with others, and I am internally consistent in their eyes. But I cannot identify as one with no interest in women, because even if I act that way among the people I care about the most then I would go and secretly trying to find ways to feel good about my desire for women in ways and in places where no one else looks. Claiming to identify that way would cause me to become inconsistent, as though I were a lie as a person. And I hate being a lie as a person. I prefer social friendships that are totally honest, where my identity is the same as what I am.
Because of this experience, although I think people should be allowed to act however they want, I am able to be swayed by folks who say kids should not be allowed to take hormone blocking drugs because of the kids’ desire to identify differently than what they are physically. Because, in some manner of thinking, I believe that at a certain age in my formative years people could have convinced me to take drugs like that if such drugs had existed, because of how much I would have wanted to remain identifying as a socially consistent religious Christian child with no sexuality. But even if they had been able to convince me at that age to chemically hack my body to match the identity I desired back then, it would have been wrong for me. Because in my case, the human evolution was smarter than my brain and consciousness. In my personal body’s experience, it’s better and more enjoyable to say religion is misinformed and instead identify as one who is attracted to women than to identify as what gender-less child I would have wanted at that age.
So, now that I blabbed about my personal experience, I think that gets to my question – in a world where obviously people should be allowed to dress however they want and act however they want and say whatever they want, do you believe that the need for hormone treatments to be available is some mostly universally accepted thing among trans people, or is that a psyop I was presented with to make those people seem crazy to me? And, if it is not a psyop but actually a universally accepted position that such treatments should be allowed when young, how do you know if a kid is wrong about their identity during their formative years? Because I was wrong at that age. So, we cannot say all kids are right. How is that to be measured?
I think there are 2 kinds of kids that are actually trans or similar. 1) Kids that are this way for ever … I saw a reportage where a born boy always indicates herself as girl since very low age. This family had 3 kids I think and the other 2 were “normal”, so it’s likely nothing done by parents. Also the other adults like teachers or dance trainer were acting like this is a boy that wearing dresses (so they called that person “he/boy/…” etc). Doctors agreed to the kids feeling and without that there is no chance that children can make use of hormones or blockers or anything else in this direction.
The second thing are people who realize it on early puberty. That happens especially for gays and lesbians (because sexuality becomes important), but also for some trans or non binaries. Realizing does not mean understanding or accepting themselves as such. That is also a not so easy process, especially in a world where the society has a strong impact on this topic.
Of course it can be a “phase” or a “on TikTok all are trans now, so I am too” (what could be fake). There are always “false positives”. That’s a problem that should be addressed. But on the other way far more people hide what they’re, if they find not the acceptance they need. Remember all the gays that married a woman they never could love. This hurts a lifetime and not only the one person. That’s the issue the other way around, also for trans people and so on.
The society cannot protect all people. As you said “we cannot say all kids are right”. But we also cannot say it the other way around. So whom protecting? I think it’s quiet simple. The personal choice should be respected, even if it’s a failure. We just can clarify consequences (doctors have to do so) and ask “are you really sure? You cannot got back as before!”. There are even trans people who don’t risk OPs or hormones. But people who do usually have a strong feeling about and it’s usually the right choice.
And btw, for trans kids: there are things to delay puberty. It’s a way between making an early decision. Not free from danger, but a more controlled state.
For completeness, the Discourse forum software used here does not out-of-the-box support adding your desired pronouns to your profile. Instead it can only be achieved by some kind of admin action after installation of the forum software.
So perhaps @JCS could put this item in front of the Ops Team to see whether they are prepared to look into what would be involved.
Weirdly, the forum about Discourse itself (which I assume is hosted using the Discourse forum software) has added that customisation - but they decline to ship that as standard, forcing each individual forum instance to make that customisation if desired.
(Even if such a field is added to the user profile, there is of course no obligation on the new forum user to provide a value for it. A user can be fully anonymous if desired.)
Fascinating. When I played a female character (Dungeons & Dragons, Quake), I kicked ass and noticed only one difference – I got flirted and propositioned much more often. Which was funny, because playing a female was mostly just another level of obfuscation for privacy purposes.
That’s okay. Everyone is ignorant about lots of things. What is not okay is unwarranted hostility, like Sharon’s initial reply. Note that her posts and my reply were flagged, and my reply was edited to remove the part that directly responded to her.
Yes, I am aware of this and always try to keep it in mind, but it is not applicable in all cases. Sharon demonstrated in her first reply that her mind was made up, and based on her other posts in this community, I determined that coddling her would be a fruitless endeavor. I am not going to soften my language when stating facts, in order to spare the feelings of someone that is being rude and disrespectful.
I don’t think that a reasonable person would disagree that her initial reply was a negative response, as I said. This is an “About Me” post in a category for introducing ourselves to this forum, and she decided to reply with hostility, saying that she was offended that I shared the fact that I’m trans. She made my post all about herself and her negative opinions about LGBTQ+ people. That is not reasonable or acceptable behavior.
I think it would be difficult to find a trans person that does not believe in the importance of bodily autonomy, and that certainly includes access to hormone treatments. You will, however, find disagreements about the types of hormone treatments that should be available to minors and the acceptable age ranges for accessing them.
This is a really good response. I would add that it is important to respect the findings of the scientific and medical communities when considering such questions.
The “trans issue” appears to be a manufactured distraction for political reasons by US politicians and their owners, serving to divide the people in order to continue consolidating wealth and power.
Ask yourself, “When and why did this become such a contentious issue?”
It seems that acceptance for LGBTQ+ people in younger generations has presented itself as an opportunity for motivated actors to create division. Companies like Google and Facebook, known for collecting and selling data, likely helped political groups to determine that this could be used as a wedge issue.
Thank you for looking into this without being asked. You are very kind. And no worries if it’s too difficult or time-consuming of a task.
I feel like there’s more I want to share, but I don’t know what to say or if anyone is interested. I guess anyone that’s not interested can mute this thread. Is anyone curious? Feel free to ask me anything.
I’ll be back later
bye for now
Hmm. Yeah, maybe that’s another reminder of how irrelevant the experience of mine I mentioned turns out to be. It may have been highly specific to the one game I was playing, and the bad corporate leadership making design decisions for that game.
This is easy to say but I feel that as more time passes, and data mining and “AI” technology becomes increasingly advanced, it seems increasingly difficult to find what is true and what is not. I found a few years ago that I can open an internet search and type, “Is sucralose bad for you?” and it replies with a highlighted box that says, “Yes,” with some notes. But if I type in, “Is sucralose good for you?” it likewise replies “Yes,” with some notes. We live in a world that is evolving quickly towards only telling us the truths we want to hear, and increasingly divided. If there are not schisms in “the scientific and medical communities” yet, I would reckon that with the power to digitally divide people that is growing so well, in time there will be.
In my particular case, during the pandemic I was sitting at the kitchen table with family reviewing the 2020 US presidential election and I concluded that there were three possible outcomes of the election. (1) democratic candidate wins, (2) republican candidate wins, (3) each party believes their own candidate wins, meaning that evil wins and society gets even worse.
So, as the results came in and it became evident that option 3 was primarily the outcome, wherein evil wins, rather unsurprisingly the leader of the party that was listed as losing on paper tweeted that they were going to have a “wild rally” to go and “stop the steal” wherein I think it was pretty obvious that anyone from that side who was passionately a patriot would join to overthrow the government because their truth was that the government had failed and it is – quite literally – spelled out in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence that one must overthrow their government if/when it has become evil. So, that is a legitimately patriotic (i.e. logically consistent) manner of thinking if that is your truth that the republican party candidate won the 2020 election. I would almost go so far as to make fun of anyone who believes that candidate won but did not partake of the attempted overthrow, because pursuant to their truth they are unpatriotic. But, as it happens, my subjective truth and information flow was that the democratic candidate won so I simply sat at home and painfully watched the video footage of the people trying to figure out if or how they would overthrow the government at their “wild rally.”
And it was there, in that video footage, that I first became aware that anyone cared about who was trans and who was not at all, because the son of the leader of the folks at the “wild rally” said that the trans people were the ones they were there to overthrow to take back the government.
So, in my subjective experience, it did always seem extremely manufactured. But, I still believe that evil disjoint information and an absence of truth won in 2020, and apparently nothing got better because it looks like plans are in motion for the same thing to happen again this year.
And so, in a world where the absence of truth is the leading power, I don’t really know how I could believe scientists. It just seems like everyone is just going to say disparate things while the fabric of society breaks apart. Genderless machine intelligences will probably destroy us all eventually, and possibly replace us with genderless biologically engineered drones to serve their common hivemind goal function.
In the face of that doom, I’m pretty confused. If one of you guys does some internet investigative work and comes up with the name of my level 100 female World of Warcraft character and calls me by that name for the remainder of this thread, and intentionally uses she/her to describe me while doing so, in my particular case I would do nothing more than laugh about it and it’s conflict with my real world identity. I would simply see it as a form of trolling.
Were I to think hard about what matters, I suppose I would conclude that I should focus more on working towards a future where all humans survive and do not die – and this includes the trans humans. Because I like humans more than possible alternatives, as the dominant species on Earth. I recently argued with Google Gemini on this. It says I must become more inclusive and expand the definition of “human” to not simply refer to the tribe of 7 billion beings on this planet, but instead include AIs too. It’s wrong. I know what a human is, and I like those guys, and I want us to continue to be the ones who rule the Earth.
We’re already at 8 billion for already over a year.
About “the truth” … There is no need to find the real truth. I just work with probabilities and sort things about “how much sense it makes”. It depends on my experience and knowledge, the source (primary, secondary, what kind of, …) and its whole content of new information. This makes it easier to understand complex things in 3 ways.
There is no need to drive the brain in binary state (true/false) and over time you become closer to the truth without struggling all the time. Populists like binary states, because it’s easier to manipulate people (that’s why they know “the only true truth”).
Just a random observation … this topic is in General / Introductions, as it should be, but that category is public and indexed. By contrast, General / Round Table is not public (registered users only) and in theory is not indexed. So remember that whatever you share in this topic, you are sharing with Google and other “Be Evil” corporations, and forever 
etc.