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Wellness Wednesday for February 22, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I have some trans friends (who I love dearly) and they are offended by some of J.K. Rowling's remarks and beliefs. When they see Harry Potter content (including streams and clips of the new Harry Potter game), it can be offensive and threatening for them.

Growing up, I had a fondness for Harry Potter. I read all the books, watched all the movies, and to this day I have a deep nostalgic attachment to the franchise. I don't personally have an issue with Harry Potter, and all I have seen in terms of criticism of J.K. Rowling was Dave Chapelle's stand-up special (not particularly critical) and a blog post about an inflammatory tweet J.K. Rowling made about a male rapist transitioning and asking for internment in a women's prison (this seems like the edgiest of all edge cases and only useful as an inflammatory wedge).

I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing (like harry potter content). But I also sympathize with people who want to play the new Harry Potter game or watch their favorite streamer play the new game.

Furthermore, there's an issue where if a streamer has trans viewers (I'd imagine most of the top 100 streamers have at least a couple, and the top 10 streamers in any channel have many trans viewers), by playing the new Harry Potter game the streamer is knowingly streaming content that will offend (some of) those trans viewers (admittedly not all trans people will be offended by the Harry Potter stuff).

My current position is that I hope the hubbub and streamer playthroughs of the game will subside in a week or two and we can just forget the whole thing. But I think this kind of tension will come up a lot. Like the next time Dave Chappelle releases a special. I will want to watch it.

How can I support my trans friends while also being okay with people enjoying the new Harry Potter game?

How should I feel about streamers who choose to play the new Harry Potter game on stream? In some sense they have disregarded my friends' feelings and excluded them from their community!

Any response is much appreciated.

I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing (like harry potter content).

How can I support my trans friends

Teach them that uBlock is not just an adblocker, and that they can use it to hide any youtube videos with specific words or phrases in the title, by adding a rule that looks like

youtube.com###dismissable:has-text(/harry\s*potter|rowling/i)

I think "trans people should be able to browse the internet without seeing content that disturbs them" is a perfectly reasonable opinion. I think the best way to achieve that is to teach them how to filter out the bits of the internet that disturb them on their end, rather than trying to change the internet as a whole so that an unfiltered stream is not disturbing.

This is cool, I will keep it in mind and recommend it if the opportunity arises. Thanks!