Gonna have to disagree here. The social aspect of it all is just as important of the medical aspect. While there are trans issues that are mostly medical in nature, there are equally trans issues that are more social in nature.

I'm not sure what contexts you've seen truscum being used in, but from what I know it's a term used for people who insist on a medical diagnosis in order to be trans. The problem with this, imo, is twofold. There's a long history of medical gatekeeping that enforced cisheteronormativity in order to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, leaving out all other forms of self-identity (among a whole host of philosophical issues). And the second is just the lack of understanding and research of the broader medical community. Treatment guidelines are all over the place, often misguided, and usually inadequate to achieve the goals of the patient.

Truscum rhetoric often reinforces cisheteronormativity which is mostly antithetical to what being trans is about in the first place. That's not to say that the trans community doesn't struggle with medical diagnoses or that that's not important, but to use a diagnosis as the benchmark of what being trans is, is usually needlessly exclusionary.

This study seems to me to be a retreading of old ground by cis people. Like I can appreciate getting more data that yes, trans people aren't freaks, but the study just seems like a massive "duh".

Why did they think hrt changed vocal chords in trans women in the first place? It's pretty well known that hrt cannot take away the things that first puberty already changed. I also don't like how the article presents voice feminization surgery as if it's a common and normal choice for most trans women. Even beyond the implication that trans people need surgery to be successful in their transition, voice feminization surgery is extremely risky and is only ever recommended in extreme cases. If they couldn't even do that amount of research, it doesn't make me feel confident that the study is all that worthwhile to think about.

Secondly, why only focus on trans women? It'd be more interesting if they included trans men in the picture since on their side of the fence, hrt actually does affect their voice. It would be interesting if the study compared their trans participants with cis benchmarks at all, actually. Maybe the study itself does that where the article does not, but for reason #1 I don't feel like it's worth my time to check.

Lastly, the actual results of the study are pretty "duh". Just by the physics of how the human voice works, it's pretty easy to see that yes, having a breathier and higher pitched voice will lead to having thinner vocal folds. Because having thinner vocal folds is what causes those effects on the voice in the first place. The study mixes up the cause and effect here, so it isn't exactly groundbreaking research. What would've been more appropriate to examine is the vocal chords at rest compared to either cis benchmarks or the speaking voice average. Since the conventional wisdom is that voice training can't really change your voice at rest, that would be more interesting to look at.

Overally I appreciate having more data about trans people, but didn't find the study or article to be particularly knowledgeable about trans people in the first place.

So basically, James Somerton stole literally all of his content from other queer creators while positioning himself as the de-facto queer creator to support. And by "all his content", it really means all his content. Every. Single. Thought. Was plagiarized from someone else's writing. And the extremely few that didn't revealed that James Somerton is a crazy misogynist Nazi-loving lesbophobic transphobe.

Basically, he's a massive piece of shit who's comically evil to a mind-numbing degree.

title is some crazy unsubstantiated clickbait, and the article itself is a massive nothing burger. Basically, there are more trans people recorded in the poorer parts of the UK, and they generally have poorer mental health than cis people. Which is entirely unsurprising and unhelpful at this broad of an analysis.

To be clearer, the distinction I'm drawing is that the title implies causation when all the study is is a correlation. "There are more trans people in poorer areas" is not the same statement as "poor people are more likely to be trans."

ah, yes. because respecting someone's identity and being willfully evil by refusing to are exactly the same things, yup. Brilliant deduction there, sir Watson!

Freedom of speech my ass. You just want to be an asshole without facing the consequences.

Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven't checked other browsers) there's a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it'll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.

Democrats 🤝 Republicans

Fucking the poor. The only point they have in common.

Am i mistaken in believing that cloud computing naturally lends itself to only having a couple of big players in the space? The whole point of the technology is to have someone else do the hosting for you, and the people doing the hosting win out by economies of scale.

This would be a different conversation if they found evidence in the software that it was throttling smaller competitors, but without any more information this seems like a lot of nothing?

Don't know how to do quotes here but:

"Any community always ends up attracting downvotes and trolls, and the conventional resources such as the suicide hotline chat are only meant to keep you talking and don't help discuss chronic problems."

This is pretty much it right here. It boils down to qualifications, money, and the anonymous nature of the internet. It's hard to give real and useful advice to someone based off of only a couple of internet posts.

Offline, are you gonna run into shitty therapists who deserve to have their license revoked? Yes absolutely. But the people who can help have qualifications and charge a lot of money for their time. They're not gonna come on the internet and dispense useless or generic advice to strangers. It would be a waste of everyone's time, not to mention the whole issue with separating work from life.

When people are starting to starve and there are no more monkeys that can entertain the masses, the spirit of rebellion starts to rise from the ashes.

So the established powers that be have two options: violently suppress the masses. Or acquiesce some level of control, power, or ultimately capital.

The powers that be would rather die than give up their money. So fascism it is!

Because we've hit the point of capitalism where the system is imploding on itself, and so those in power turn to fascism in order to protect their capital.

I appreciate your sentiment and do think that it's important to defend trans rights and not let the right split us up. But I also want to say that just because horrible shit is happening in one place doesn't mean we can't address other issues in the community while we're at it. We don't need to play suffering olympics, and if we do then we lose out on valuable intersectional experiences.

I'm sorry that that shit happened to you. People can really suck sometimes :/