-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Serious LGBTQ
- Thread starter Chinchou
- Start date
- Status
Maybe a bit late, but if you guys want to help, here's the official GoFundMe for the victims, run by Equality Florida: https://www.gofundme.com/PulseVictimsFund
Counteracting evil is hard but that doesn't mean we can't do our best.
EDIT: If you really want to make a difference you can donate blood. I have, in the past. It's not painful or scary at all and is even quite pleasant.
Here's a list of blood bank donation centers in Florida. http://blood-banks.regionaldirectory.us/florida.htm
Red Cross site for giving blood: http://www.redcross.org/give-blood
Counteracting evil is hard but that doesn't mean we can't do our best.
EDIT: If you really want to make a difference you can donate blood. I have, in the past. It's not painful or scary at all and is even quite pleasant.
Here's a list of blood bank donation centers in Florida. http://blood-banks.regionaldirectory.us/florida.htm
Red Cross site for giving blood: http://www.redcross.org/give-blood
Unfortunately, men who have had sex with another man in the past year are still barred from donating blood. However, I have heard that the city's blood banks have caught up with demand so it may be less necessary. Remember that if you have O Positive, O Negative, or AB blood type, you're usally the most in-demand for donation. There are also height and weight requirements, so check those before you go to donate.
I saw the news break while surfing the internet while covering a night shift. I don't want to process it, I shouldn't rn. Being asked about it on my next shift (the same evening) was more trying as I'm not out at work and just pretended to be impersonal to it. Also, there is a definite connection to marriage rights movements here, but I anticipate it being simplistically and hastily figured in the political shifting that occurs in the response to such a crisis.
On a completely different note.
"No one has ever laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension. No one hitherto has gained such an accurate knowledge of the bodily mechanism, that she can explain all its functions; nor need I call attention to the fact that many actions are observed in the lower animals, which far transcend human sagacity, and that somnambulists do many things in their sleep, which they would not venture to do when awake: these instances are enough to show, that the body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which 'the mind' wonders at.
Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many various degrees of motion it can impart to the body, nor how quickly it can move it.
As no one can fix the limits of the body’s power, or say what can be concluded from a consideration of its sole nature, whereas they have experience of many things being accomplished solely by the laws of nature, which they would never have believed possible except under the direction of mind : such are the actions performed by somnambulists while asleep, and wondered at by their performers when awake. I would further call attention to the mechanism of the human body, which far surpasses in complexity all that has been put together by human art, not to repeat what I have already shown, namely, that from nature, under whatever attribute she be considered, infinite results follow."
I've been feeling lately that, no one knows what a body is capable of doing, that no one knows what a body will do, and finally, that no body can know precisely what a body has done.
On a completely different note.
"No one has ever laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension. No one hitherto has gained such an accurate knowledge of the bodily mechanism, that she can explain all its functions; nor need I call attention to the fact that many actions are observed in the lower animals, which far transcend human sagacity, and that somnambulists do many things in their sleep, which they would not venture to do when awake: these instances are enough to show, that the body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which 'the mind' wonders at.
Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many various degrees of motion it can impart to the body, nor how quickly it can move it.
As no one can fix the limits of the body’s power, or say what can be concluded from a consideration of its sole nature, whereas they have experience of many things being accomplished solely by the laws of nature, which they would never have believed possible except under the direction of mind : such are the actions performed by somnambulists while asleep, and wondered at by their performers when awake. I would further call attention to the mechanism of the human body, which far surpasses in complexity all that has been put together by human art, not to repeat what I have already shown, namely, that from nature, under whatever attribute she be considered, infinite results follow."
I've been feeling lately that, no one knows what a body is capable of doing, that no one knows what a body will do, and finally, that no body can know precisely what a body has done.
So on a lighter subject, does anyone itt have any tips for talking to someone that you like but aren't sure if they're gay or not? Been spending a lot of time with a guy lately and I'm not really sure on the best way to go about asking him out. Everyone I've spoken to keeps telling me to be direct about it but it just seems a bit tactless to go all in like that
Last edited:
so how do you approach the subject? Confidence is really not something i have a lot of lol
You've got to find a way that works for you bud, trial and error. If this guy likes you back, then you can fumble and spaz all you need to and he'll probably think it cute, as long as you build up the courage to do it.
I don't know what kind of friendship you guys have, but i would just ask him one night "hey so we've been hanging out a lot and i really like you, and I was wondering if you'd want to go on a date some time?" (Or better yet have a date in mind but make it clear you want it to be a date).
I'm not LGBTQ personally beyond being somewhere on the gradient between straight and demisexual, but I've got a friend irl who is bisexual and genderneutral so I want a bit of advice surrounding this. I'll be using the pronouns "ve" and "ver" when referring to the post-genderneutral phase and "he" and "him" when referring to the pre-genderneutral phase.
My friend has over the past 12-18 months converted to being genderneutral. I've known ver since I was three and have been calling ver Jake all my life, and when ve made the shift ve demanded that everyone started calling ver Ash (short for Ashley which, unlike Jake, is a gender-neutral name). Ever since then I've been finding it really difficult to approach ver in general, and whenever I meet ver I always accidentally call ver Jake multiple times throughout the encounter (to which ve corrects me every single time). He was always a very pro-gay rights, very pro-feminist/gender equality etc. person, and that is all good; it was hard to have a conversation with him without it devolving into something that I didn't want to talk about, but I got along with him well aside from that. However, I just can't get used to being around ver ever since ve made the shift, and nowadays I always come out from a conversation with ver feeling incredibly drained and have been moving away from ver socially with a timing that directly correlates with the gender identity shift.
Basically, what I want to know are the following things:
My friend has over the past 12-18 months converted to being genderneutral. I've known ver since I was three and have been calling ver Jake all my life, and when ve made the shift ve demanded that everyone started calling ver Ash (short for Ashley which, unlike Jake, is a gender-neutral name). Ever since then I've been finding it really difficult to approach ver in general, and whenever I meet ver I always accidentally call ver Jake multiple times throughout the encounter (to which ve corrects me every single time). He was always a very pro-gay rights, very pro-feminist/gender equality etc. person, and that is all good; it was hard to have a conversation with him without it devolving into something that I didn't want to talk about, but I got along with him well aside from that. However, I just can't get used to being around ver ever since ve made the shift, and nowadays I always come out from a conversation with ver feeling incredibly drained and have been moving away from ver socially with a timing that directly correlates with the gender identity shift.
Basically, what I want to know are the following things:
- Is this a normal reaction to one of your oldest friends changing their gender identity?
- Do you think me shifting away from him socially and finding it uncomfortable/tiring being around ver is related to this shift in gender identiy?
- If the answer to 2 was "yes", do you think that I am "genderneutralphobic"? (IDK if there is an actual term for this so I'll just go with it)
- If the answer to 3 was "yes", how do you think I could adapt to come across as less "genderneutralphobic"?
- If the answer to 2 was "no", do you think that I was probably reaching a point where I would naturally shift away from him due to personality clashes etc.?
Martin. – I'll try my best to answer.
To summarize, I personally believe the issue lies within you becoming uninterested in what you two are discussing. Again, I don't know you or your friend personally, but I hope I've been of some help.
p.s. I just used they/them pronouns since it's a neutral pronoun. However, I'm sorry if they do not like to go by this and I will happily change it and correct this post if I've accidentally used a wrong pronoun.
- Is this a normal reaction to one of your oldest friends changing their gender identity?
- Do you think me shifting away from him socially and finding it uncomfortable/tiring being around ver is related to this shift in gender identity?
- If the answer to 2 was "yes", do you think that I am "genderneutralphobic"? (IDK if there is an actual term for this so I'll just go with it)
- If the answer to 3 was "yes", how do you think I could adapt to come across as less "genderneutralphobic"?
- If the answer to 2 was "no", do you think that I was probably reaching a point where I would naturally shift away from him due to personality clashes etc.?
To summarize, I personally believe the issue lies within you becoming uninterested in what you two are discussing. Again, I don't know you or your friend personally, but I hope I've been of some help.
p.s. I just used they/them pronouns since it's a neutral pronoun. However, I'm sorry if they do not like to go by this and I will happily change it and correct this post if I've accidentally used a wrong pronoun.
Oh finally, a place for this. Okay so this year I recently came out as a bisexual to all of my friends and they were all cool w/ it and stuff, but then I told them I had a crush on a boy and one of them actually told the boy I liked him, a few of them would also just randomly blurt stuff like "lol you're bisexual" out in public and this didn't really bother me too much until I saw the boy giving me dirty looks. He would always just be passive around me and glare at me and it made me feel like trash because he has bisexual friends, but sometimes uses,"gay" as an insult, I still like and respect him because he never told anyone else my secret. I never worked up the courage to talk to him, the school year's over and he's being left behind and i've never once talked to him. I'm crying and I don't know what to do, how am I suppose to cope w/ being heartbroken, kinda being forced to come out, and being looked at in nasty ways because of my sexuality :(?
Something I've been wondering about with regards to the trans* community, in particular those parts of the trans* community that aren't simply ftm or mtf, is what function all these miscellaneous pronouns like "xe", "ze", "ve", or what have you serve. Considering the English language has a gender-neutral pronoun these days, why do some trans* people still feel the need to, more or less, make up their own pronouns?
I know how you feel. I haven't told many people that I'm bisexual because of the fact that it's looked down upon by many others as its "not valid" or whatever. I think that being bisexual is a great thing, it shows the diversity that I have over others. It's ok to love who you love, and I think that you're a valid person for who you are, despite what others say.
Not everyone necessarily sees xe/ve/ze as gender neutral pronouns, but rather associates them with a non-binary gender identity that falls outside of male/female. People also might view them as being actively gender neutral rather than passively gender neutral - they can be used for someone of any gender, for example, but if you called a man or a woman "xe" they'd probably feel offended (many men and women would take offense with they though, depends on the person of course). The use of xe/ze/ve, especially xe, as a replacement for they in some "radical" circles may make someone feel that it has taken on the exact same meaning as they, and create a new variant that eventually gets overtaken, but I do think there's room for one of them to become generally accepted as a truely gender-neutral pronoun in the same vein as "it", but without the negative connotations.
I do find some of the more extreme variants, such as therian (kit/kitself, bun/bunself) pronouns annoying because they're completely ignoring the function of pronouns in everyday language, though.
everyone has their own personal pronoun. It's called their first name.
That's a proper noun, and it's actually really awkward to continually refer to someone by their name in a sentence, just like its awkward to use bunself pronouns in a sentence. If that was the point you were trying to make, I mostly agree.
then if that is the problem, it is resolved by having a unique identifier that is semantically identical to your name but is "less awkward" to say, which is rather similar to a nickname. "They" or "ze" or whatever also fits the bill. Nouns/pronouns collectively serve to identify. A noun is used to concretely identify the object - and a pronoun thereafter as a reference to this noun. The pronoun is not meant to convey any information about the object: it is purely a pointer to established information. The gender-based 'flavour' of pronouns is entirely redundant, as is any other flavour.. Moreover, the aim of these personal pronouns is to have a personal identifier that gives the person listening/reading a constant reminder of this identity: it is rarely relevant enough that you identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter to imbue such a common word with such information. And anyone who thinks otherwise is placing too much importance on intrinsic values to identify themselves, and the need for others to know. And nobody needs to know this shit because who you are as a person is based on what you do, how you do it, rather than some arbitrary label that ironically categorises you.
Gender is how pronouns are sorted in the first place - that is, gender, in its original meaning, refers to the classes that pronouns are sorted into. John Money, when coining the term gender role, used the secondary sex-linked gender classification of nouns as a basis. Pronouns are gender linked because the word gender, and the concept of gender roles, evolved from secondary and tierary arbitrary sex-linked characteristics, which lead to the rejection of the sex dichtomy and the necessity of using a different word - gender - to refer to social roles present in humans. The majority of gender theory relies heavily on this concept and it's only with the very recent complete ideological rejection of biological sex via postmoderist theory that the idea that pronouns are not gender linked could have even developed.
The awkwardness comes from the difficulty in keeping gender identity a secret (which is hugely important; outing someone as trans is a huge deal in real life) and the disruption of sentence flow (which is why using names a billion times is awkward). That's actually part of why using names can be cumbersome; pronouns actively show the role a noun takes in a sentence - it's why he/him/his pronouns exist, rather than them all being he. There's a reason we use pronouns when refering to people with one-syllable names - it offers more information than their name does once their name is known.
The awkwardness comes from the difficulty in keeping gender identity a secret (which is hugely important; outing someone as trans is a huge deal in real life) and the disruption of sentence flow (which is why using names a billion times is awkward). That's actually part of why using names can be cumbersome; pronouns actively show the role a noun takes in a sentence - it's why he/him/his pronouns exist, rather than them all being he. There's a reason we use pronouns when refering to people with one-syllable names - it offers more information than their name does once their name is known.
in that case, isn't there an imperative for fully neutral pronouns? Something that doesn't even convey gender (like he/she/ze). Let's face it, you can tie yourself up in knots trying to guess which pronoun is appropriate: you could offend a staunchly feminine/masculine person by using a genderfluid pronoun, just like you could offend someone genderfluid by using he/she. Avoiding the topic of gender entirely seems the most sensible thing to do, because it doesn't get brought up implicitly.
Honestly thinking about it a bit the idea of using gender-based pronouns is utterly pointless and is purely convention we've adopted. In conversation if gender needs to be conveyed that can be done explicitly - in a way the implicit conveyance of this information provides a vector for discrimination. Gender is not necessary for a pronoun to fulfill its grammatical purpose, is it?
Generally speaking if you don't know a person's pronouns They/Them is the most appropriate choice. Gendered pronouns in the first place are pretty arbitrary and are very much relics from both Romantic and Germanic languages.
That being said, if you know a person's pronouns it's polite to use them when appropriate. The only exception being if they're closeted, but the first two things to ask any trans person who comes out to you are how to refer to them and who it's safe to talk to about the person being trans to.
That being said, if you know a person's pronouns it's polite to use them when appropriate. The only exception being if they're closeted, but the first two things to ask any trans person who comes out to you are how to refer to them and who it's safe to talk to about the person being trans to.
I'm 100% accepting of any member of the LGBTQ community but I seriously don't get or feel comfortable calling people ze/ve/ge or any other pronoun other than he/she/they or other regularly used pronouns. Would they be fine with gender neutral pronouns or am I just being a dick?
- Status