Diva (she/her)

I suppose I could look around for laser hair removal but I’m little worried about my budget.

i had saved up a bit in advance, but not a ton. doing it through a school definitely made that money stretch out a lot.

I was thinking patches, I heard they’re just as good?

they are okay, i used them very briefly when my insurance was giving me shit. too much skin irritation and the dose you end up with depends on how well it sticks to you. plus the dosing on those is more for cis women in menopause unless you use a bunch. to get to a therapeutic dose with those i’d need 3-5 of the largest patches, rotated twice a week. they are also relatively expensive and not always easy to source. compared to that i found sticking myself every 5 days is way easier.

you definitely don’t need to start with that, but it’s very easy to do subcutaneous injections. i rarely draw blood and barely feel a thing these days. i ended up injecting in my torso because i’m pretty thin and when i was doing it in my leg i’d always be hitting muscle.

It kind of hurts that a huge swath of local LGBT people now basically hate me with basically no hope for them coming back around.

that does hurt, i hope you are able to find some community. i do hope you are reflecting on this though, it’s not fun having other people (including other trans people) obsessing over you. if someone in any friend group becomes the focus of someone else’s fixation, the group is going to close ranks around that person.

the reason i say to reflect on this is that if your takeaway is that they’re ‘haters’ you’ll carry that and associated behaviors into the next community and it’ll happen again.

if the takeaway is ‘i did something that made someone uncomfortable and i need to understand what that was and not repeat it,’ that’s a thing you can actually work on. plus it leaves the door open to rebuilding somewhere, maybe even with some of these people eventually.

obsessing over a transwoman

i know you don’t mean anything by it, but in my experience ‘transwoman’ with no space is the preferred spelling of people who tend to argue that trans women aren’t women. not passing judgement, just fyi. i prefer to use trans as an adjective, like ‘tall’ or ‘loud’ or ‘annoying’.

I intend to acquire HRT this Friday.

good luck, i started via informed consent at pp and it was not difficult at all, but definitely recommend getting your primary care doctor in the loop for running ultrasensitive estradiol bloodwork routinely

i was in a similar situation to you physically, it’s really never too late to start. i repped for over 20 years before starting transition in my 30s. i didn’t have a huge crashout but hanging out with other trans women made it feel a lot more approachable. it finally got to me and i started hrt.

once you start and get used to hrt, i highly recommend getting on shots if you can tolerate it. multi-day cycles are way better than having swings during the day or based on your metabolism. injectable also doesn’t hit your liver and is pretty easy to stockpile.

if you have any way to get laser or electrolysis, i found that made a huge difference in my mental health as well as how other people interpret my appearance and address me. you can find places to do it on the cheap, esthetician schools often let you get that work done for deep discounts. i started doing that as soon as i started hrt, the androgen suppression means you won’t get as much regrowth.

eating food is another big one, you will get fat redistribution on hrt but it requires that you have some fat to redistribute. i really had to work through a lot of restrictive behavior patterns that i’d accumulated over the years, but it’s been worth it to grow tits and ass.

don’t worry, real life always comes before posting online.

i appreciated the conversation as well, feel free to reach out in the future if and when it’s convenient for you.

Yeah, that’s what I meant (unless I forgot to add it) with voting third party in places where it doesn’t matter. Even in places where democrats lose by a large margin, third party would be a reasonable choice for sending that signal. Imagine their faces if they came in third in a red state… Ah, one can dream.

this is why i get so annoyed at people demanding across the board democrat voting with adversarial derision for anyone voicing dissent about democrats. the whole point is that they should be getting challenged from the left, but online it’s easy for them to dismiss us all as ‘republican supporters’ or ‘russian disinfo’.

In my opinion, they don’t deserve the same hatred, and I feel we should be more precise in that regard.

i count among comrades of mine people who were once liberal activists, they were at that position because they supported the social aspects of liberalism and did not have strong opinions on the political economy. getting disillusioned with democrat abandonment and failures on things like gaza has pushed them out of that coalition and towards anti-capitalist politics. they were definitely exposed to people deriding liberals online and that didn’t prevent them from developing their politics based on their experiences.

i don’t think people need to be coddled, talking to people one on one it’s not difficult to make it clear that criticisms of liberal capitalist political economy and its institutional defenders are not attacks on all people who happen to share a coalition with those people.

I’m very glad you went to this length to talk to me and show me perspectives I genuinely didn’t know. You’ve given me things to think about, to talk to other people about, to check my own preconceptions.

likewise. thank you for your understanding, it’s always tricky to truly communicate people people online. people often forget about the human on the other end.

Maybe there’s a regional difference then? I’m passing on the synthesis of lectures I’ve been given by other transgender communists and people of color, but I don’t know where they’re based. In any case, there clearly are dems that do defend trans rights; I’m sorry that the rest are failing you.

to give you some context, in the US there is no popular vote for presidency. my vote for president in the general has essentially zero impact. the democrats win by such a large margin that voting no confidence or for communists running 3rd party is more ‘useful’ under the reform-electoral framework than voting for the democrats. getting a party that challenges capital to a non-negligible percentage is what communists should do if the option is available.

if anything it’s the ‘blue no matter who’ browbeating which is serving to suppress left-wing dissent in the party. there are a lot of states in the country where that’s the wrong position. if democrats had anti-capitalist 3rd party challengers in safe blue states, they might actually have to be something other than diet republicans.

i would like to return to your original question:

I never understood why “libs” are so broadly hated within the leftist spheres. Pro-capitalist stances in some strains of liberalism, sure, but at least in terms of human rights, equality, rule of law and such, it feels like we should have more common ground with them than this animosity implies.

i vote for whatever progressive challengers there are in the primaries, however this year there has been a widespread pattern of democrats winning their primaries and then abandoning trans people. every day there’s a new campaign ad from democrats across the country talking about ‘protecting girls sports’. some of my comrades did a protest demanding our (progressive liberal) attorney general (top law enforcer in the state) enforce our states equal protection law against hospitals complying in advance with trump on trans healthcare. they were arrested.

the reason ‘libs’ are so broadly hated is because they serve capital and protect institutions over people. those hospitals which complied in advance with trump wield outsized political influence (spend lots of money) in liberal spaces as well as political campaigns. They already did the political calculus on abandoning us, they know can afford to lose our votes. me expressing my disgust with them is not going to move a bunch of mainstream liberals to change their blue no matter who votes.

to paraphrase malcolm X:

The white conservatives aren’t your friends either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps you always aware of where you stand with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to you but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure you, and as you run from the growling wolf, you flee into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.

re:

It’s not a problem of ideology, but of PR. We’re not gonna radicalise voters that perceive us as arrogant pricks, just feed into the “left and right are both bad” centrist narrative of complacency.

i am not going to self-censor in the name of optics and catering to people who don’t see me as human. you can call that arrogant, but i think that people with disgusting beliefs deserve scorn. i have zero faith that appearing unthreatening and compliant will ever placate them.

i’m a trans woman, i have plenty of skin in this, and from where i’m standing the democrats have been actively complying with anti-trans legislation rather than fighting it. Pretty much every day there’s a new democrat ad about how they’re going to protect women’s sports.

those labour protections were concessions extracted by organized pressure, not liberal goodwill. they’re being rolled back precisely because that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.

ice is what it is today because of liberals like obama and his enablers, do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?

i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties and from where im standing the priviliged one is you

the ‘least bad is best by comparison’ logic is a race to the bottom with no floor. it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative

the ‘influence their policies’ approach has a +50 year track record of the left getting played. what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?

my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system. i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.

‘at least they won’t lock us up’ is a selective reading of history. liberals have done exactly that if threatened. the liberal state locked people up for being black and being too critical of the regime before trump. it was democrats that were raiding gay bars and opposing gay rights until the movement got big enough that they rebranded and wrapped themselves in the flag.

the ‘best environment to work in’ assumption only holds if the goal is incremental reform within the system rather than replacing it, which goes back to the core disagreement.

a system that presents the best environment for working toward its own replacement is a contradiction in terms. it presents that environment precisely until you get close enough to actually threaten it.

also all of the things you credit the social liberals for were concessions extracted by organized labor through strike, occupations and political pressure that the liberals were actively resisting until they had no choice.

crediting liberalism for them is like crediting the landlord for not raising rent after a rent strike.

the common ground assumption only holds if you think human rights and equality are achievable within capitalism. from my perspective this is the core disagreement.

liberals believe the system can be reformed to deliver those things, leftists generally think the system structurally prevents it. that’s a fundamental disagreement about what the problem is.

Pro-capitalist stances in some strains of liberalism

pro-capitalist isn’t a strain of liberalism, it’s the foundation. liberalism as a political philosophy emerged to defend private property and individual rights against feudal authority.

you can’t separate the human rights framework from the property rights framework it was built on.

‘rule of law’ under capitalism is the law of property. it protects the existing distribution of wealth and power. leftists who want to upend that distribution are not going to see that as ‘common ground’

i ended up going to sleep as well.

I’m curious how the inevitable bad players are prevented from using/abusing/destroying such idealist constructs,

i gotta point out a nomenclature difference here. you’re using ‘idealist’ colloquially to mean unrealistic/naive, however it has a philosophical meaning too and what i’m doing is manifestly not idealist. mutual aid isn’t a utopian vision, it’s a description of something that already exists and has always existed. working class and marginalized communities have always built these networks because the alternative is not surviving. mutual aid as a concept predates the theory, the theory just names what people were already doing.

mutual aid networks deal with bad actors through community accountability rather than hierarchical enforcement, which is actually more resilient than it sounds because the relationships built through the work create real social fabric.

That’s more than little too vague to help. I guess I’m looking for something concrete & just detailed enough to be able to picture it in action.

are you familiar with the black panther breakfast program or food not bombs? here’s a short article on the subject of mutual aid in general if that’s more helpful, or a pamphlet if you prefer

you may well be right in that there is no return from the dark side.

for me i just try to be realistic about my limitations. i’ve seen enough electoral cycles to find them draining with no payoff. even if you ‘win’ there’s going to be a deal cut and you don’t have any way to really punish the politicians once they’re in office. directing that energy to helping people in my surroundings year-round means i can build something that feeds my neighbors and attracts others to continue the work. it’s not charity, you don’t answer to a board or people with money, you just get together with your friends and work together, everyone takes from it what they need.

why don’t you just call me a slur already, you clearly want to and this is all so cowardly

pelosi + co aging out just means a new crop of corporate democrats take over. the machine does not depend on individuals and there’s plenty of young ghouls waiting in the wings.

‘progressive’ is pretty much branding at this point. someone can call themselves progressive while supporting weapons shipments to a genocide and opposing medicare for all because it’s ‘not politically feasible’

the label does no analytical work at all.

I’m assuming “tankies” are well-versed in this

they tend to be, i’m an anarchist and i’ve had many mls work with me in a positive way locally over the years.

I’m curious how you see that coming about short of a full-on revolution.

i did spell it out in that same statement, but maybe it was not clear enough.

when i said ‘organizing and dual power building’ i’m thinking of things like mutual aid as entrypoint. the idea that building networks where people can take care of eachother outside the market both meets immidiate needs and builds the relationships to make future organizing possible.

the ELI5 version would be summed up as 'build things that work outside the market, make peoples lives better now, demonstrate that another way of organizing is possible. ‘voting’ may be a tiny sliver of your time in the year, but electoral politics takes an inordinate amount of resources and time. despite all that effort any one election can flip the script on decades of work.

i could recommend reading material if you’re interested in de-naturalizing some of the operational assumptions of capitalism.

i promise that i am not trying to get all debate-y, however this is circular.

progressives need to get bigger inside the democratic party before they can leave, but the democratic party structurally prevents them from getting big enough to matter.

the right wing takeover of the republicans was because we have a politics where money speaks louder than people. that’s why i don’t expect a left wing takeover of the democrats will work either.

a workers party isn’t going to emerge from inside the democratic party. it’s going to emerge from the kind of organizing and dual power building that creates enough independent capacity to make electoral politics secondary rather than the primary terrain.

i don’t think it’s as simple as ‘covering bases’ to be going up against a well-resourced party structure on its own terms and expecting change. to me that is an unrealistic expectation.

i’d rather see challengers running under a different party, i just have zero confidence in the democrats at this point.

i still vote because it’s convenient, i even vote in primaries and municipal. i usually just write in bullshit for all the races that are unopposed or where the democrat also sucks ass. we don’t have a national popular vote so my vote for president is essentially meaningless.

the problem i see is that ‘change from within’ makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the party. the party has structural mechanisms to neutralize internal dissent.

thinking about how ‘the squad’ finally came around to endorsing kamala after years of getting boxed out on anything that mattered.

it’s not about waiting for or expecting that ‘the rev’ is imminent either.

what is actually imminent are peoples rising needs. what i think is worth engaging in is the act of creating structures that actually meet people’s needs now, outside the market. something that builds real capacity for change rather than depending on whether the right candidates win primaries inside a party structurally hostile to them.

you should edit your comment, or are you just really invested in proving my point?

The fact is capitalism is all I’ve known

same, you really can’t escape its influence.

i’m at the point now where a significant portion of my weeks are spent organizing locally with other people to create spaces where anyone can get hot food, produce and supplies without needing money.

to me it’s not so theoretical that these things would be not only desired, but fought and sacrificed for. i have had close relatives with first hand experience fighting both for communism as well as against the nazis and that definitely colors my experience.

you seem like you’re being earnest about wanting to understand my perspective at least.

the bulk of the blue side constituency is made up of a significantly wider array perspectives than the red side

literally just had the same reaction that i could have got from some maga dude, right down to the misgendering in this exact thread. i really hope you can appreciate that this isn’t a new experience for me either.

i live in a blue state, my reps at state and federal are essentially republicans with the serial numbers filed off. as long as you don’t openly say slurs it all flies under the radar in a blue state. money dominates the conversation and people challenging entrenched democrat incumbents get accused of helping the republicans anyways.

i don’t see what benefit there is to participating inside the democratic party in any way. certainly not in voting for it; we don’t even have a popular vote.

i use she/her in case you are unable to read display names