medley56

futurebird , 9 days ago to random

I decided to find out if any progress had been made on the science behind why some ants are attracted to electrical fields. After filtering out exterminators (it's so demoralizing to search for information on creatures you love and find nothing but people who know nothing about them boasting about how they will kill them all) I found what looked like a blog. But, who the heck is "James Brown"? Never heard of the dude. Maybe he could be my new friend if he likes ants enough to blog about them!

alice , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

"Hey, totally unrelated, and if this is too personal then please just ignore me, lol. What exactly was your experience like, figuring out that you're nonbinary, and roughly when did that happen?
" —Someone I know on Matrix

I responded in chat, but figured my answers might be of broader interest to people who are enby(or Alice)-curious 😋 So here it goes...

⚠️ CW for some slurs and gender stereotyping ⚠️

The short of it is that a couple years ago my kid expressed to me that they weren't sure if they were their assigned gender. To be supportive, I started learning everything I could about being trans. Eventually, they decided that they were okay with their birth gender (at least for now, and maybe forever), but I realized I wasn't okay with mine.

I've always been :_gaysparkle: queer™ :_gaysparkle:, and I've always sort of skirted gender norms (leaning more heavily one way or another as I grew up), but I was raised in a time (the 80s/90s) and environment (latchkey kid with no [living] LGBT+ family members) where transgender people weren't really "a thing". There were "cross-dressers", and "trannies", and several other slurs, but it all got reduced to a "fetish" or "sickness" at the end.

I didn't feel like I had any sort of (relevant) fetish, and I didn't think I was sick, so it must be "something else".

Basically, I didn't have the vocabulary to express that I was nonbinary, or to know it was even an option not to be my assigned gender.

But don't get me wrong, I've never identified particularly strongly with either extreme of traditional gender presentation. Looking back through the lens of what I know now, there were a lot of things I was dysphoric about (and several that still get to me), but at the time I just thought I was weird or that everyone else felt the same and no one mentioned it.

So I didn't mention it either.

Now that I'm older, better informed, and give even fewer fucks what other people think about how I express myself, it's surprising to me that it took so long to figure things out.

So unlike some trans people who strongly associated with their non-assigned gender from an early age, and some nonbinary folk who collect genders like Pokémon, I'm the kind of enby who just gives a lot less importance to which gender I take my influences from—as long as I like the aesthetic or it makes me feel more "me", then we're all good.

So I think I'm probably somewhere around a...um, Alice(?) when it comes to my gender expression 🙃

It's still a work in progress, but as it stands now:

• I hardly wear makeup 💄 (except nail polish 💅🏻)
• Most of my clothes are marketed as being for women, but are pretty unisex —save for my cute socks and underwear 🧦👙
• I like pinks and purples...a lot 💜
• I like having muscle definition 💪🏻
• I can't stand body hair 🪒
• I like my tits, but I'm glad they're small 🧁🧁
• I've had short hair for most of my adult life, but I'm having fun growing it out again like when I was a kid 👩🏻‍🦲👩🏻‍🦰
• I dislike most sports, except of course for locksport 🔓 and Bloodsport (1998) 🩸

It feels super-awkward listing off all the stereotypically gendered things about me that I can think of. The idea of a color or a haircut being "for boys" or "for girls" just seems weirdly restrictive and arbitrary.

If you made it this far, neat! You get a cookie 🍪

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me anything.

If you have any comments or relevant experiences, please share.

Thanks for reading 💕

#Nonbinary #LGBTQ #Trans #AMA

futurebird , 2 months ago to random

bad bad bad little ants
sneaky little ants

There is always one that gets out when I give them water and then she's sitting there wanting to be let back in like a cat 5 min later.

The next ant that does this is getting a green dot on their gaster.

futurebird , 4 months ago to random

What is Tucker talking about? No one in NYC is "scared to ride the subway"

The worst thing about the subway is the ADA wasn't funded so there aren't elevators at every station.

Do people not in NYC really think it's still the early 80s in NYC? WTF.