They’re not talking about natural monopolies. A natural monopoly is when there’s some barrier to entry that prevents competitors from entering the market, like a need for prohibitively expensive infrastructure.

What OP is talking about are situations like Walmart opening a store in a new location, operating it at or near a loss to drive the local competition out of business, and then jacking up prices once no competitors remain. The government isn’t forcing them to do that.

The child abuse and fear mongering are things that they’re proud of and believe are justified. Trying to address it just makes them feel more powerful.

Calling them “weird” works because their whole ideology is based on them being the normal ones. If you take that away, you also take away their entire (false) claim to authority.

If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.

To be fair, it’s kind of hard to come up with a defense when your premise is “Cancer treatments cause cancer” 😄

Which specific puberty blocker drug do you believe increases the risk of cancer?

Yes, I meant no negative or unintended consequences.

Thank you. It doesn’t feel like I’ve done much journeying, as I was essentially trapped in emotional stasis for most of my life and circumstances have so far prevented me from doing anything with my newfound knowledge, but at least I know which way is forward now.

If you feel like a man, like being a man, and enjoy having man parts, you’re probably a man. Your interests are not your gender, and dancing isn’t exclusive to women. Even ballet has male dancers.

Still, a little bit of exploration never hurt anybody. If you are trans, if living as another gender would make you much happier, wouldn’t you want to know sooner rather than later? And if you aren’t trans, you might still learn a thing or two about yourself that you never would have discovered otherwise. Most people go their whole lives without ever questioning their gender or closely examining what it means to them, and I think they’re missing out. There is power in truly knowing yourself.

Do some thinking. Ask more questions. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. What do you like about being a man? Can you imagine not being one? How does that image make you feel? If you could instantly become anything, with no rules or consequences, what would you pick? Don’t shut anything down; there are no wrong answers. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.

It may help you to stop thinking in the binary terms that society imposes on us. Gender isn’t just a question of Male or Female; there are many different kinds of men and many different kinds of women. There is a large area in between where the two overlap and the lines get fuzzy, and even places that aren’t on the same spectrum at all. I myself am a demigirl. My gender identity is mostly female, but also a little bit male and a little bit something else. You don’t need to feel obligated to be what anyone else is.

As for how I found out, I’ve already posted that elsewhere in this thread. It looks like you’ve gotten a lot of answers from others as well. I wish you good luck in wherever this journey takes you.

This was my experience. I was raised in a very conservative, very religious community where I was never exposed to the concept of transness. I was fully convinced that I was a boy and could never be anything but a boy. And yet, I could tell I was different from the other boys.

As I got older, that feeling turned into an ever-present sensation of wrongness. My body felt tainted, somehow. Unclean. Contaminated. It possessed an inherent grossness that could never be washed away. I lived with that feeling every day for 25 years. No medication, no counseling, no hard work ever did anything to alleviate it or the severe depression that was my typical mental state. Then a bunch of things happened all at once, and I started questioning my gender. A few days later I shaved off my beard and rediscovered what joy feels like. That’s when I knew.

I was never a boy.

Remember the NYPD who were jumped by a gang of illegal immigrants?

No, but I do remember the NYPD harassing a small group of migrants that were just minding their own business on a public sidewalk (without blocking it), ordering them to leave, and then assaulting one of them while he was attempting to comply.

I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:

I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.

It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.

Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.

Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.

Hey now, that association is very unfair to wolf scrotums.

The medical consensus already exists. This isn’t some experimental drug; puberty blockers have been widely prescribed to children for decades. We know how they work, we know they are generally safe, and we know that blocking access to them will result in needless suffering and death.

Here are the “huge questions” you should really be asking:

If these drugs are so dangerous, why are people only bringing it up now and not sometime in the 40 years since they entered widespread usage?

Why are people suddenly claiming that a drug we’ve been using for decades has “too many unknowns” and “not enough evidence” for its safety?

If all of this controversy is really genuine, and not the result of a moral panic rooted in bigotry, then why is nobody proposing a ban on puberty blockers for cisgender children? How can they be “dangerous” and “untested” for one group of children but safe and effective for a different group of children when both groups are taking them for the same purpose (to delay puberty)?

If you really care about the welfare of trans people, then you should support giving us the healthcare that we and our doctors say we need.

It implies that living with gender dysphoria is so painful that people would rather have the surgical complications.

I’m friends with multiple women and non-binary folks who are in poly relationships, are very much not being preyed upon, and actively hate anything “patriarchal”.

It’s also another brick in Florida’s road to queer genocide. If a gay or trans child has bigoted parents, social media is often the only way they can learn about the existence of other people like them.

lonelygirl15? I remember a friend telling me about that series because she wanted to share a funny video reply (Remember those?) by somebody who managed to find the same animal plushies that the girl carries around; it was a parody episode where the plushies talk about the current situation in the story and suggest that maybe the girl should drop all the teen drama stuff so they can all focus on running for their lives instead.