Is there a rule that daydreams have to be visual? Spending lots of time thinking up extremely detailed strategies for unlikely hypothetical scenarios definitely qualifies as "elaborate daydreams", in my opinion.
Okay, this one I'm sending to my DM.
True, but it's still the right thing to do. At the very least it will force some members of Congress to clearly and undeniably declare themselves as supporters of tyranny.
That gay and trans people are all disgusting perverts who hate me and want to destroy everything good. My queer friends provide more emotional support in a day than I ever got from my family, the church, or anyone else inside the Evangelical bubble I was raised in.
That people in "The World" (those outside the church) are all evil or unknowingly controlled by Satan and will always try to hurt me. Textbook cult programming from the people who were emotionally abusing me.
That God is speaking directly to me through a voice in my head, except when that voice says I'm a girl, then it's actually a demon or something. (It was likely undiagnosed DID as a result of childhood emotional neglect and repressed gender dysphoria.)
That scientists are all part of a massive satanic conspiracy to trick people into leaving the church.
Dungeons & Dragons being a satanic conspiracy. Satanic Panic stuff in general.
Lots of anti-evolution propaganda that turned out to be misrepresentations of science or complete fabrications.
That they actually believed in all that stuff Jesus said about loving thy neighbor, helping the poor and the sick, and being kind to immigrants, instead of spending their whole lives voting to hurt all of those people as much as possible.
I already turned down a free copy of this game because it installs a rootkit, and now this happens. I hear the game itself is a lot of fun, and I feel bad for the actual developers who are watching people shit on their work because of management and publisher bullshit.
- Democratize the workplace.
There are probably many ways you could go about this: Requiring that employees have a representative on the board of all corporations, forcing companies to give a certain amount of equity to employees, all businesses have to be worker co-ops, maybe some kind of automatic unionization? The point is to give workers more say in how businesses are run and a fairer cut of the value they produce, which would probably end up fixing some of the other things on this list as a byproduct.
- News reporting must be factual and clearly distinguishable from opinion and other non-news programming.
Something needs to be done about deliberate propaganda and misinformation. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but maybe having some rules for what can be called "news" would be a start.
- Enumerated right to bodily autonomy
This would cover abortion, prostitution, and marijuana consumption, and would also cover many forms of trans healthcare that are currently under attack. Speaking of which...
- Strengthened protections for minorities, including legal recognition of trans and intersex people. Something like the Equal Rights Amendment but for all minorities. Let's explicitly get it into law that you can't discriminate based on something people are born with.
I don't agree with merging the House and Senate; uncapping the House fixes the proportionality issue and the Senate is a useful check to ensure that smaller states still have a voice.
Adding 5% to the highest tax bracket seems way too low. There should be a new top bracket with a rate so high it's almost confiscatory; anyone earning that much is a resource hoarder and should be made to share with the rest of society. We used to have a top tax rate of 95%, so this isn't unrealistic.
Banning tax prep is redundant if the IRS is calculating it for you, and I wouldn't want to outright ban it for those whose financial situations may be complicated enough to actually need it.
Why are we including a ban on tipping? I feel like we're getting lost in the details here. This should be a shorter list of high-level changes. If you don't like tipping, wouldn't it be better to do something about employers not giving fair wages in general?
I'm sure a lot of white women felt uncomfortable sharing a locker room with black women when segregation ended. Comfort isn't a good enough reason to have "whites only" locker rooms so why the hell would it justify "cis only" ones? It's not Lia's responsibility if Riley can only handle being around certain types of women.
I didn't pick my fursonas' species (genus, really) so much as it picked me. At some point during my teen years I suddenly began noticing fox stuff everywhere. Random unexpected appearances in TV shows, pictures in odd places, a nature documentary about foxes discovered while flipping channels. I realized I knew almost nothing about these creatures despite them being so common and culturally important, and that felt wrong to me.
So I resolved to fix that, and started reading up on everything fox-related I could find. The more I learned, the more I began to identify with them. The idea of these small creatures that lack the power and social benefits of their larger canine cousins and have to rely on their intelligence and evasiveness really resonated with me, the unpopular and oft-bullied nerd who didn't seem to have a place among the "wolves" of high school society. Even the fact that foxes are most often depicted as feminine, which bothered me at the time, became meaningful after I discovered that I'm transfemme.
Yeah, an engineer with a doctorate sounds like exactly the sort of person who would want to go No Thoughts Head Empty once in a while.
I've heard this is happening because they refused to pay for their cloud hosting with Google and got cut off. They need to throttle the entire service to stay afloat until they get some sort of backup plan in place.
I've always felt more comfortable around animals than people, so of course I would be drawn to animal and animal-like characters in media. (And there are a lot of them when you're a kid!) It didn't become anything of note until my teen years, however.
One day I was flipping channels on the TV when I came across a documentary about foxes. It was meant for children, but the information was new to me and I found myself watching to the end. A day or two later I was watching something on Cartoon Network when the main character suddenly held up a fox as a prop for a joke. The next day I noticed a random picture of a fox somewhere, and then it was like foxes were suddenly everywhere.
And yet, despite foxes being such a common animal with great importance in folklore and popular culture, I realized that I knew almost nothing about them. This felt like a problem that I needed to solve. I read everything I could about the creatures, both in my father's old encyclopedias and later on the internet when I got access to it, and the more I learned the more I started to identify with them. As a socially-awkward teenage nerd I really resonated with the idea of these small, solitary creatures struggling to get by on intelligence alone, without all the easy advantages given to their larger canine relatives. Now I began to imagine myself as a fox, and would often spend the last moments before sleep imagining the adventures of this other me. This idea of an "inner me that is a fox" would become a useful tool for exploring my identity.
While I consider this the start of my furriness, it would be many years before I actually joined the furry fandom. There was a lot of misinformation on the early internet that kept me away, and I won't repeat it here but I'm sure many of you know what I'm talking about. Then one day a friend of mine shamelessly held a brony birthday party and I decided that if he could embrace his weird interests so openly then I could at least admit mine to myself. I started lurking on r/furry, realized they were actually cool people, and was shocked to learn that the weird little fox people in my head are something other people have and that they're called "fursonas".
How big does a minority need to be before it's "relevant" enough to be acknowledged and its members' rights respected? People with 4 or 6 fingers exist. People whose chromosomes don't match their physiology exist. People whose gender identity doesn't match their genitals exist. It doesn't matter how many of them there are, because every single one of us is a unique minority of one.
But you asked for numbers, so I'll give you some numbers.
According to this article, around 1.7% of people are intersex, meaning they have physiology that doesn't fit neatly into the common conceptions of male or female. That's close to the number of people with red hair, which is estimated to be 2% of the world population. I have never heard anyone suggest that redheads are too small a percentage to matter.
I think you were asking specifically about chromosomes, though. There's a table in the linked article that breaks down intersex conditions by cause. The first entry is "Non-XX or non-XY (except Turner’s or Klinefelter’s)". This refers to people with XY chromosomes whose bodies developed female characteristics (Swyer syndrome) and people with XX chromosomes whose bodies developed male characteristics (de la Chapelle syndrome). It does not include people with X, XXY, or XO chromosomes. (Those are the next two entries in the table.)
The estimated frequency for this condition is 0.0639 per 100 live births, equivalent to 0.0639% of population. That looks like a really low number, right? Surely not enough to be "relevant"! Except... There are 8.1 billion people on this planet. 0.0639% of 8.1 billion is 5,175,900 people, which is roughly the current population of New Zealand.
Remember, that is only women with XY chromosomes and men with XX chromosomes. If we include all intersex people that number rises to 140 million, which is nearly the population of Russia.