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So I recently noticed that my state has quietly removed the word "mother" from every official documentation I've seen, replacing it with "birthing parent" or some other euphemism. Iirc Colorado has already switched its language the same way, as have most Dem-run states.
Wasn't it only a few months ago we were told this was an insane conspiracy theory and only a few weirdos would ever try to abolish "mother"? Now it's been done so neatly and without fuss or any sign of resistance. Things that only last year would have sounded like insane paranoid delusions just... Happen with unanimous support.
What is there to even say? The insanity keeps coming so fast they hardly need to gaslight you any more. Has anyone here been "corrected" for saying the M-word yet?
There’s also some Celebration Parallax in the mix: “That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.”
Replacing “mothers” with “birthing persons” is a totally brave and stunning practice if you’re supportive of it, otherwise it’s but a paranoid rightwing conspiracy theory.
Sure, when progressives call women “bodies with vaginas” they get an “awww, how sweet,” but when I do it I get a “hello, human resources?!” Hmph… ruuude.
I feel like some of the "celebration paradox" could come down to nuance around what is considered to be a specific thing happening.
I could see something like:
In this case, Person A may either consider X' to be basically the same thing as X, and so feel like Person B is basically saying, "X is not happening, but it totally is and that's good."
I feel like a good instance of this would be:
I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection. I suspect that most people raising concerns about ROGD specifically are actually concerned more generally about the rise in trans people, and are happy to go to fringe theories to justify that concern. But if ROGD had never been conceptualized, it would have been another fringe theory, since trans skepticism has to be skeptical of the "mainstream medical opinion" of organizations like the APA.
Basically, if you don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities, you are going to rely on fringe sources. You see the same thing happening in reverse with trans activists and the Cass Review.
Uh, is ROGD fringe? I thought it was a topic which made pro-trans doctors uncomfortable but was documented as a thing.
It seems somewhere like autogynophilia. There's definitely people who suddenly have Revelations about their gender -- even in trans communities, 'cracking the egg' is a metaphor for a reason, and before the 2010s people with long histories of gender stuff realizing that it's even a category -- but just as AGP-as-a-theory is more than 'some trans people get off on dressing up at some point', ROGD-as-a-theory is more than 'some people become trans rapidly'.
Exactly what it is, well, that's harder to nail down: there's no ROGD-Blanchard or ROGD-Bailey, even pointed to literally Bailey gets you kinda vague mutterisms (about cults, because he's nothing if not unpersuasive). That people who come out as trans in younger generations tend to have a lot of other trans people in their social circles and either did not have or obfuscated a lot of gender stuff before identifying publicly as trans is pretty uncontroversial; that they're doing it because of those social circles is really hard to measure and the data is messy; that it's just a phase for a large portion and they'd be happier not transitioning or likely to detransition (which not all ROGD advocates are suggesting!) may not even be measurable in a perfect world.
I have no idea what point this comic is trying to make. Unrelatedly, I absolutely hate how this CAD-adjacent muck is the default art style for all Western webcomics. Cyanide and Happiness is unironically more expressive and aesthetically pleasing than this.
El Goonish Shive is a long (loooooong)-running transformation and especially gender-transformation comic. The character on the right has spent a little over a year in-universe and around twelve years real-world being declared Just That Girly and having access to a magical (well, alien magic science) transformation gun regularly used to change gender. This was a bit of a Genre in that era of the internet, complete with sometimes not-exactly-kosher-by-modern-progressive-standard jokes. Unlike most of that Genre, the same comic has continued mostly uninterrupted for the whole time.
The timeline for the comic is weird and kinda alternate universe, but it's probably set somewhere between 2005 and 2012, with a world mostly like ours, but where magic is weakly available. While there are a lot of other bigger questions that the availability of magic set up, though, that alien magic science transformation gun is a little unusual in-setting for having both extreme reliability, mass production, and having some real-world uses, without being especially dangerous in terms of side effects or weaponization. (The gun itself can make disguises, but a stripped down version that just changes primary and secondary gender traits can be produced in minutes.)
Which produces a problem because it's something the character basically never considered, even as the author was increasingly getting bombarded with questions about why he wasn't actively working toward it, because after the first decade of a gender transformation comic you tend to pick up a trans fanbase, and the comic as a whole was and remains pretty unusual for almost everybody being mostly sane, reasonable, and compassionate.
The explanation that people didn't realize that was a possibility handles at least part of that, albeit by making the question suddenly relevant. And, indeed, the author didn't know, back in 2003 (cw: bad art).
((The character on the left is a lab experiment who escaped after a superpowered nutjob who may or may not have been a competing test subject took over the lab, but there's plot reasons she has surface-level familiarity with the topic.))
Ok, but I'm even more confused now than I was before.
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