Disqus - Latest Comments for metasynthie

Re: Radiator Blog: "Succulent" as hypnotizing homo hop homage

metasynthie — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:19:05 -0000

Best new teaching example for "Game Feel," 2015

Re: In Things To Which I Can't Relate

metasynthie — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:33:27 -0000

Thanks for the thoughts on group atheism, reactionary atheism, and anti-theism, Liss. I might have to cite your post.

I'm a dystheist, meaning I'll happily believe in any number of gods, but I wouldn't trust them any farther then I could throw them, and everyone knows you can't throw gods because they cheat at wrestling (Gen 32:26). So from that point of view, it totally makes sense to have an un-baptism, to try and shake off the hold of whatever religion baptized you. And I guess it makes sense even as a psychological symbol of that, for closure -- but either way, the mockery and light-heartedness kind of run counter to that, if you ask me.

Re: The Trials and Travails of Transness: The Intersection Between Feminism and Transgender People

metasynthie — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:20:40 -0000

Awesome post, alexmac! Good introduction, good length, 5/5 stars from me. :) I hope you don't mind if I or others link to it as a good Trans 101 in the future, and I look forward to more posts in the series.

I'll weigh in about gender-variant vs. gender non-conforming since my thoughts were referenced earlier in the thread: I don't see any reason not to use both, especially if you are being sciencey. I tend to use the latter more, probably because I tend to write more about trans liberation as a political struggle, and I have heard concerns that gender-variant feels like part of a system of medicalization or pathologizing, bad-science stigma and lab-ratting, etc. However, I don't think that needs to be the case. If you are working to Use Science for Good (and I would certainly count Julia S in that category) then gender-variant can make total sense as a word to use. In conclusion, yay for words.

Holly@Feministe

Re: WoW/Shakesville Update

metasynthie — Sat, 09 May 2009 18:20:55 -0000

What a great name! It's too bad you've joined the Alliance, which is way less monstrous and way more conventionally gendered and conventionally fantasy-heroic than the Horde! kek kek kek

Re: We Matter

metasynthie — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:19:06 -0000

LOL simultaneous identical suggestion

Re: We Matter

metasynthie — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:18:27 -0000

DarthVelma, in the spirit of not arguing and derailing, I just want to make a respectful suggestion for more reading and research. Can I recommend to you Julia Serano's book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity ? Big chunks of that book are about precisely the issues you are bringing up, and even if you don't find her arguments persuasive, reading it would definitely shed more light on how many trans people (and cis femmes too) feel on the subject. I don't agree with everything Serano says either, and I've also known to get bothered by certain modes of gender presentation and expression, but I think she makes a VERY good case for why the "scapegoating of femininity" is destructive to queer and feminist movements alike.

Re: Over at Shakes Manor...

metasynthie — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:03:47 -0000

I might agree with you about normalizing if this was an actual game. But I don't know how you can normalize something with fifteen powerpoint slides that you just use as an entry in a live game show. It's an autobiographical work by two women talking about their experiences as teens with sex; normalizing? And yeah, there are a lot of games about sex, especially in Japan, and there are a handful of autobiographical games. Nobody was really unaware of that; one of the former contestants, who helped with judging this year, was Brenda Braithwaite, one of the longest-running women in game development, who's spent much of her career studying and working on games about sex. But those other games -- sex, autobigraphy -- are also most definitely at the game developer's conference in san francisco, which is dominated by mainstream console and PC games that you can buy in places like Toys R Us or Gamestop, and which you see all the time in mainstraam media. That's the context this is set in and that the presentations were intended to challenge and the audience (mostly like-minded, since plenty of other people were probably attending some competing session about how to make explosions look cooler) no matter who reports on them. Lume -- you can contact me at gmail (same username) and I've also written some stuff about being a woman in the game industry on my blog: http://feministe.us/ (under the name Holly)

Re: Over at Shakes Manor...

metasynthie — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:35:24 -0000

Well it depends on who you mean by "they." The "they" that decides to make Grand Theft Auto is not the same "they" that does the Game Design Challenge. The GTA series is driven by the popularity of violent, breakin'-the-law centric entertainment, and marketing and business pressure, and Scott Madin is right. This challenge is an event put on by the International Game Developers Association (the closest thing we have to a union) at the yearly conference for professionals, and was definitely not created by a business for any business reasons. It was created for shared creativity and fun and thinking about our profession, as I understand it. And well... on top of that, one of the reasons that the Grand Theft Auto series has been around for so long is that it really does have a lot of merits as a series of games, no matter what you think of the politics (and even some of the politics are not bad, but I wouldn't extend that as a blanket for everything in the series). I've played almost all of them, although I have the excuse that I play even games I find reprehensible for professional and creative reasons.

Re: Over at Shakes Manor...

metasynthie — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:10:12 -0000

Last note -- Kim did design an entry, but I don't know what it is, and even if I did I wouldn't share it for her sake. She tried to organize a small event where she could present it outside the "official conference," but that too was shut down. I feel like this is a huge shame, because I would really like to see where two different teams of women went with this topic. You may or may not like the three ideas that were presented in public (although Sulka's was so inoffensive it would be hard to see why) but I definitely believe that it should be possible to tackle topics like this -- the first time of physical intimacy, the many things that can mean, the idea of "virginity" and all the problems surrounding it -- through the media of games. If this was the only topic this competition ever tackled, that would be horribly problematic too. Of course, this is the one that ended up on CNet, not the one about Dickinson or social change, because it's way easier to sensationalize it. sigh.

Re: Over at Shakes Manor...

metasynthie — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:00:40 -0000

Oh, and those were the only three "entries" by the way. It's more like a mock-game-show than a contest, it's not open for public entries, just by invitation. There aren't any real prizes -- I think Eric bought a few jokey sex games from Babeland this year to give to all the contestants.

Re: Over at Shakes Manor...

metasynthie — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:59:17 -0000

I was actually in the audience for this and I know the two male designers that didn't win. I don't know Heather and Erin, but I clapped loudly for them (it was an applause-o-meter from the audience that decided it) and I thought their game concept was pretty good, in part because it so clearly drew on their own experiences as well as summoning up many of the awkward, horrifying, and downright wrong tropes that swirl around "losing your virginity." It's hard to get the gist of exactly what the designs were like from a dry CNN report, but let me see if I can help:

- I've seen every Game Design Challenge, and the games are almost always absurd or games that could never really be made. The idea is for designers to explore a theme and apply their creativity and ingenuity, nothing more. Heather and Erin's contribution explored a lot of the bullshit things that as teens or college students they "had to do" in the awkward nervousness of "oh man maybe I'm going to have sex for the first time," but it was more descriptive than prescriptive. Their idea reminded me more of Natasha Lyonne in "Slums of Beverly Hills" than anything, and that's not a film I would describe as trying to present a better spin on "losing your virginity" or teen sex. On top of that, they combined the awkward personalness of their subject matter with an awkardly personal style of play, using the Wii to have players make awkward and difficult gestures. Overall I'd describe the game as being about the awkward of young intimacy amidst a bevy of uncomfortable social pressures, and frank talk about their sexual experiences from two female creators.

- The other two entries were not that creepy. Sulka Haro's was not really autobiographical at all, which was maybe part of why he came in third. (He felt uncomfortable talking too much about his own sex life in public, in part because he runs a website for teens.) His game involved players picking from an assortment of themed (and non-pornographic) images from Flickr, then telling stories to each other about something from their own lives. He had people actually play this game, and a lot of the stories were really sweet, and not about sex but about young romance and feelings around closeness to others, etc. Steve Meretzky's presentation was probably the most crude -- as in past years, he led up to his actual design by making a bunch of bad puns and silly referential jokes, and this year many of them were downright lewd or pornographic. His actual game, however, was autobiographical but didn't really revolve around the act of sex. It was about being the only nerd in high school and being targeted with homophobia and ostracism as as result, about going to MIT and coming out of your shell, and finally about being grown up and more sure of yourself, and being married and having a good life. (The game was in three acts.) The central theme was that even if you don't lose your virginity in high school and you think your life is hell because you're a geek, eventually "this too shall pass" and your life will go in new directions. So it was called "Wait... time passes." in an homage to early text adventures. It was probably the most artistic idea of the three, although the lead-up to it was pretty dorky-crude.

I did cringe when Eric (who I also know) mentioned Lolita among his examples of non-game works that explore sexuality. He sticks his foot in his mouth a lot. He does come up with the idea for the challenge every year, and he is kind of into being "transgressive" sometimes, so it didn't surprise me that he finally decided to do something related to sex (even though only one of the entries, the winning one, really involved sex). It was fairly controversial and one of the major topics of controversy this year was that Valve pulled Kim Swift, the designer of Portal, out of the competition against her will because they didn't think it was appropriate. A lot of people were wondering if they would have done the same thing to a male designer.

Past examples of Eric's topics are:
- a game about love; will wright, designer of the sims, won this with a game about being stuck in war-torn europe and trying to find your spouse;
- a game about emily dickinson; will wright won again with an artifical intelligence on a USB drive that would talk to you and form an evolving realtionship with you;
- a game that could win the nobel prize; this one was really hard, but harvey smith won with a game designed to produce spontaneous "flash mob" style social actions in the real world for any number of causes;
- a game that you can play with another species; steve meretzky won this one with a game that you play with bacteria, pitting them against each other in a petri dish in order to evolve new species of bacteria for good or evil purposes.

Obviously most of those games are either not really possible, or would never get made for "market" reasons. Which is kind of the point, and which is why a lot of times the challenge has been won in part through the use of humor, as well as trying to come up with something compelling inside the medium of games. It's very easy to view a game concept as frivolous or "not taking something seriously," especially when they are presented or designed with humor, but that doesn't have to be the case. I've been working in the game design industry for five years and I've commented plenty about the structural and direct sexism that women designers and developers like me face. And the challenge continues to be one of my favorite yearly events, which is why I never miss it, and that's mostly because the goal is to stretch how people are thinking about this fairly constrained medium, usually just used for violent or hyper-competitive play. It's not the Pulitzer Prize of gaming by any stretch, the ideas are pretty silly and not meant for real application, but they're still brain-stretchers and the contestants are almost always some of the brightest designers (at least, out of well-known designers) in the industry.

Re: On the Compliment Guys, Street Harassment, and Arguable Compliments

metasynthie — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:46:41 -0000

This is one of the first things I ever noticed about passing as female vs. passing as male. Nobody compliments guys or yells "nice things" at them on the street; it just doesn't really happen -- unless, I suppose, you are on Folsom Street in San Francisco on the last Sunday in September and a guy in black leather compliments your chaps. In most circumstances, it would be suspicious or "gay" for another man to do that; it could be potentially (and dangerously) interpreted as a brazen come-on for a woman to. For women, however it's a totally routine occurrence that you're just supposed to accept and get used to, not to mention learn when it's intended to be "nice" vs. "dangerous."

There are obviously different levels of threat involved with various kinds of "compliments." I am not afraid of the old guys in my neighborhood sitting on the street playing dominoes when they say "hey there pretty lady" or "looking good today" in easy-going voices. I know they THINK they're being nice. They also probably realize that a group of guys walking behind a woman saying "you smell real good, where you going?" is threatening, even though some assholes would defend that as a compliment. What they don't understand, what is impossible to understand without experience or education, is what it's like to be on the receiving end of all sorts of "compliments" and harassment from a stranger whose motives you don't know and can't trust. *I* never understood that until I had experienced it myself and gotten more severely street-harassed, followed home by a creep who wouldn't leave me on the subway, and so forth.

I think what's missing in the neural connections here is the understanding that it's not just a "nice compliment" and "creepy harassment" binary, good stuff and bad stuff. Average guys who I've seen grapple with this kind of thing are shocked when they hear about stuff that "crosses the line" in their head. I'm thinking particularly of a fatherly boss of mine who was horrified to find out that his female employees got harassed at a busy conference full of all kinds of people, and didn't understand why we weren't surprised, just pissed off. He couldn't get it through his head emotionally, despite being told, that harassment of some degree, even minor, is an everyday occurence for most women. It's possible for average guys to understand that different men have different "lines they won't cross" in terms of what they think is acceptable to throw at women, that it's different in various contexts (like the office, c.f. the classic "sexual harassment" griping) and that it's more boorish, rude, and misogynist to put your line of acceptability further towards overt, threatening sexual catcalls. What too many men don't get is that it's all part of a bigger picture, the culture of sexual threat towards women (aka "rape culture") and how women are expected to tolerate that or live with it, and they don't get what it's like to deal with that on an everyday basis.

Re: Seen

metasynthie — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:34:16 -0000

When I saw that image the first thing I thought was "why would someone photoshop stereotypical 'indian' accoutrements onto Hilary Clinton?" Then I realized it wasn't Hillary Clinton -- but it still looks like a slightly larger face photoshopped onto a slightly smaller head.

Re: How Odd

metasynthie — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:28:28 -0000

Just to put it in context, Japan's previously announced "special cultural ambassador" was a blue robot cat from the future with a perfectly spherical head. No, really.

Re: Here Comes the Bride(s)...

metasynthie — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:16:18 -0000

Wow, am I ever glad you wrote this, and I hope a LOT of people read it. Even taking some of these suggestions goes a long way towards making ALL your wedding guests comfortable and ensuring that a marriage is a shared event for an entire community of friends and family. Of course it's about the wishes and dreams of the people getting married too, but I'd like to think there are a lot of possible harmonies there.

I have been to a lot of weddings of friends, and only a few of them tried to do this kind of thing. I almost can't count, at this point in my life, how many weddings I've been to where I've been screaming on the inside and feel like running away in terror, because of one or more of the things you mention above, while maintaining a smiling, happy, flower-handing-out, bridesmaid-dress wearing facade on the outside. Because I really do want my friends and relations and community members to be happy and have the kind of wedding they want, and even though I have a curmudgeonly streak I'd never want to ruin that. So I've just sucked up all the alienation, and weird heterocetnric gender-role divisions, and all of it, until I can go home and emotionally upchuck everywhere. How great would it be if that no longer had to happen?

Re: Not Assvertising!

metasynthie — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:06:08 -0000

My favorite trans-positive commerical is still this one from Ikea in Spain, 10 years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

It's a little more laid-back and easy to "get it right" than the Argentinian commercial, because there's no awkward difficult conversation. And the bank commercial is amazing in that it tackles transphobia and tries to show a relationship (a community?) healing. But the IKEA spot is kind of amazing in that it is even more normal and undramatic somehow, but shows a trans woman going through some major life events that are moments of huge joy for so many trans people -- re-embodiment, getting rid of your old ID, redecorating your life. It's not a social message like "we are committed to change and tolerance," it's a much more conventional "consume stuff to express yourself and change your life" typical ad message. But it feels so much more like it's from a trans person's point of view, like it's celebrating her life. It feels like it was made by a trans woman, honestly.

The bank ad, for all its blub-worthiness, doesn't really feel like it's quite as much from the woman's point of view -- in fact, it feels a bit more like the lens of the community that's finally making amends to her. Everyone's feelings about this are different, but I've been in those situations before and it's bittersweet. Of course it's touching that someone's realizing that they were wrong and didn't know what to do and should have treated you better, but it doesn't necessarily make you that much less pissed off at them, at least not at first. I read her expression as having the same kind of slightly surprised but polite lack of reaction that I feel like I've had in similar situations. It's sweet, but bittersweet too, and I came away with a feeling like trans women were a little more objectified / exotified than in the IKEA ad, where the woman gets to be all subject.

Re: Survival of the Twittest

metasynthie — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:09:27 -0000

I have over ten dozen followers on Twitter and I don't think I've ever successfully tweeted. I don't really get how it's supposed to be used or how to read it -- do people follow Twitter by just keeping their browser open on Twitter? I understand how all of it works functionally, just not how it should actually be used. Maybe it's the overlapping conversation thing -- I kind of can't stand not understanding who I am broadcasting to. When it's "people in this chat channel" or "anyone who loads this web page or is pulling the RSS feed" or "the person I'm IMing with" I'm fine. But it's much more vague on Twitter. So I am definitely in the "I don't get it" group.

Re: COPPA Kids: Born too late. - hey [WRONG NAME] my name is [BLEEP] like the car...

metasynthie — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:16:17 -0000

it's totally Lexus

Re: But It's Only a Game!!!!11!eleventy!

metasynthie — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:10:37 -0000

(btw this is Holly from Feministe)

Melissa, I hope you know that I agree with you on a lot of what you've written about video games from my post about Fat Princess on Feministe. I also agree absolutely that Resident Evil 5 is an idiotically and needlessly racist game that has probably been created out of a "nobody will really care, or controversy will generate sales, we can do what we want" privileged attitude. But when you write this:

And, since other people might actually want my own answer to your question, no, I wouldn't make the same statement about all media, for the obvious reasons that video games do not have the same purpose, construct, or perspective of literature, film, and music, so we can stop this entire line right in its tracks.

... I totally held my breath for a second. Then you went on and clarified and I let my breath out.

One of our reactions to the kind of bullshit in Resident Evil should be to try and support the parts of the video game industry that actually are trying to bring more independent voices to the table, are trying to foreground socially conscious messages, and so forth. You're totally right that games are not there yet, and there are a lot of game developers, and a smattering of gamers, who gnash our teeth about it. I spend a lot of my waking hours working to make video games better and more meaningful and more politically responsible, and the culture of video games better and more inclusive too. It's an uphill battle, and as a relatively young medium compared to comics, film, you name it, there are many decades to go. But things are moving, slowly. We have Games for Change. We have brilliant storytellers and designers trying to actually express something meaningful. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes what they do is trite and stupid.

If I play Resident Evil -- if I can stomach it as a woman of color and a person of conscience -- I will do so because I want to know what exactly is wrong with the game, precisely. Obviously we can see some of it right away, but if I feel like it's worth it (and it might not be, in this case) I want to know more precisely what went wrong and what the hell they were thinking. This is valuable information for me. And I'm sure that, tragically, there is probably much about the game that works well too, marred by the needless racial stereotyping. There's stuff that can be learned. There is a culture not only of production and creativity that has automatically grown up around games, but a culture of criticism and afficionados as well. All of these people play not just for sheer entertainment -- which is perhaps what you were referring to as indefensible, and I might agree with that -- but also to understand, appreciate, and critique the game as a designed object, as a piece of art, albeit one created largely for the purpose of commercial entertainment sales.

That culture still needs to grow, quite obviously, to be more progressive, more inclusive, and less myopically stupid and ass-headed. There are many people who are trying -- me, Latoya from Racialicious, mightyponygirl, and plenty of other bloggers and journalists from outside this neck of the blogosphere. The article from Eurogamer, one of the big gaming news sites, is a good example -- they are calling RE5 out, not as vehemently as I might like, but it's a step further than has happened in the past.

When you mention video games, or "routine experiences with games" I assume you mean "games as they are right now, not having gotten to where other media have, and not every game that's being made, but just the big blockbusters that you see at Best Buy, not independent games or social change games." And that's true. It's also true in some ways of a lot of the "dominant content" in many media, right -- until there was enough space for "good television" to emerge, a whole lot of it was retrogressive social-more-enforcing garbage. Even most blockbuster movies these days are not brilliant social commentaries, but you can pick and choose which ones you go to. Independent gaming and socially progressive gaming has to grow to be that big. It needs players and criticism and attention to do that.

This has made me eager to post a roundup of non-traditional games about relationships that I have been thinking about for a while. It also makes me want to finish designing a game that I am not supposed to talk about yet, but which has a very central and game-native way of expressing and conveying an idea about consciousness of our own and others' oppression, on a global scale related to the struggles of women of color. I hope you will play it if and when it is developed and released.

Re: Assvertising

metasynthie — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:53:11 -0000

This is pretty much exactly what police brutality looks like when I've seen it happen, but why that makes a great showcase for fancy clothes is beyond me.

Re: More Wow. With a Little "You've Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me" Thrown In

metasynthie — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:10:47 -0000

I actually believe in immersive role-playing exercises as a valuable teaching method. A lot of people learn from direct experiences -- even simulated ones -- where they have to react and make decisions in ways that simply don't get across from reading a newspaper or watching a television. "Games," as a broadly construed term, are incredibly valuable for this kind of learning, moreso when they are able to create a feeling of connection and identification with a situation or a problem.

That said, there are some big problems with this article. For one thing, it's not clear exactly what the learning was supposed to be here, other than "conditions are beyond terrible for refugees." This should not be news to anyone, even the ultra-elite CEOs of the world. Especially not to them. That kind of understanding -- that the existence of many refugees is utterly inhumane -- should not require an immersive experience in order to grasp it. If there was some more complicated exercise going on, where the participants were forced to make difficult choices in order to survive, to convey the gut-wrenching nuance of some kinds of situations that are difficult to understand fully from the outside, this kind of thing would make more sense.

Second, there is definitely a risk of trivializing real people's lives with this kind of thing. Too often the subjects of these types of exercises or games are people who have terrible lives, and the message is simply "look how terrible." There's a lot in the living experience of being utterly dispossessed, marginalized, and threatened with extinction that simply can't be communicated like this. Again, there are better subjects to try and teach people about through direct simulations.

Finally, the WSJ piece is kind of glamorizing the fact that CEOs are actually being asked to learn things in this way. It's partly because it's not the most common way to become informed about something, so maybe it's newsworthy. But would we really applaud or consider it "lowering themselves" if they gained greater understanding of an issue through a more conventional means, like watching a documentary film? Of course not. And they're not really doing any more than that here, either, even if the teaching method may be more effective for some participants than a film. It's not worth valorizing, even if it might be newsworthy as a technique.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Start Heterocentrically Sexualizing Your Children!

metasynthie — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:33:59 -0000

One of the families that I'm closest to has this problem, and I'm always unsure of how to bring it up. Ever since the baby was old enough to express interest in other individuals, I keep noticing his mother referring to how he's trying to charm the ladies, or he loves women, or that he's got a crush on little baby girl X or that little baby girl Y is his girlfriend, etc. She seems to have some (incredibly premature) anxiety about her son's sexuality, since she also used to say while she was pregnant that she was sure he was going to be gay. The thing is, none of it is really presented in a homophobic way at all, his parents are lefty progressive types and when she was sure of his gayness, she'd talk about how she'd love to have a gay son. But it drives me a little bit crazy -- it's not like I can't understand some anxiety about what your kid's life is going to be like, but when you start spouting off about it doesn't that begin to interfere with a kid actually growing up and finding their own way to become the person that they're going to be, without feeling lots of parental anxiety/pressure that often leads to shame or secrets? It also weirds me out because I'm one of their few queer (and trans) friends, so I have no idea if there's some part in the back of their heads that's wondering if I'm a good role model to have around. I'm sure they'd deny that strenuously, but then they'd probably blow off all the "crush" and "he loves the ladies" comments off as silly unimportant jokes too.

Re: Do I Hear Four Million?

metasynthie — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:16:47 -0000

It may be entirely a hoax, but like many outrageous online bids on outrageous items, the bidding price is the MOST likely to be a hoax.

Re: Question of the Day

metasynthie — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:39:21 -0000

I have to admit, I'm also kind of surprised that most of you just accepted that you have to be whatever gender you wake up as tomorrow. Because you really don't, of course. I can understand how you might have subconsciously tacked on "and you can't do anything about it" to the end of the premise, or "and you identify as that gender too" or something like that. But it wasn't implicit in the original statement, and a good chunk of your identity, who you are, is wrapped up in your history and your memories, the person you are tonight before you go to bed. Plus it's not true that you can't do anything about it -- really, all of you, no matter who you wake up as tomorrow, can still struggle to determine your own genders, can still follow your hearts in that regard. And if your heart told you something different than it does now (and I know it's hard to hear that part of your consciousness if it's lacked dissonance for most or all of your life) then you'd be such a different person, probably with very different ingrained amounts of gender privilege / lack thereof, that it's almost impossible to answer the question.

Part of the answer to this question is about the options that you'd still have regardless of how you wake up. And those options exist because of the hard work and bravery and ongoing civil rights struggles of a lot of pioneers, experimenters, physicians, authors, activists in the courts and the streets, and everyday people living out their lives in ways that open up the right to self-determine gender. Please don't forget about that.

Re: Question of the Day

metasynthie — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:44:06 -0000

You guys have such fascinating ideas about what it would be like to wake up as the opposite gender. They're more or less correct but they have such an interesting slanted perspective, like looking diagonally through a frosted pane of glass and missing half of the picture. I guess that's not surprising! It's simultaneously less different than you would think and more different. I mean, humans can adapt to just about anything.

As for me, I would just groan in disappointment and start making a to-do list of all the annoying gender-reconfiguring stuff that I'd have to do all over again. I mean, it's not like anyone's going to make me stay a gender that I'm not fond of; I make my own gender, thanks very much!