Damn that's such a nice blue! Thanks for updating with a pic. You look great!

Can I ask why you felt the need to comment something so dismissive and negative when you also readily admit that this just isn't targeted at you? I just want to understand. I don't think you intend to be hurtful, but that is indeed what's happening. Having to pass on the binary is a safety issue for a lot of trans people just as much as it's affirming and euphoric.

I'm about to go on a two week trip to a bunch of places I've never been before! I'm super excited! Been watching a lot of the Katmai bear cam of the salmon run while I work on packing and some last minute chores. I'm excited to visit some places that are a bit more accepting of trans people than where I currently live, too.

How far removed from the instigating post is that? It doesn't seem all that different if we're immediately diving into fuckables and unfuckables.

Traditional and digital artist here. I do graphic design and illustration. Have always had a healthy interest in tech, though.

I'm a six foot turkey.

"Someone who doesn't identify as male or female" has worked with my boomer family.

I am from a very catholic family. Before I knew what or who I was, I had family members use religion as abuse to belittle and degrade me from the age of 6 onward. My home life was awful and extended family piled on to make sure I really had nothing left for myself to cling to. I was kept on a cycle of love bombing (with church approved rewards only) when the constant insistence on my selfishness and awfulness would periodically succeed in breaking me. It made life entirely unenjoyable by design. Yet the programming they instilled also came with heavy guilt designed to keep me trapped by "faith."

I understand the fear of knowing you need to leave. The abuse ramped up every time I even remotely suggested I be able to live without the church. But my only regret is that I wish I had done it sooner. Religion doesn't stop you from coming out. The toxicity that it bakes into the community and your family does. They make it very hard and painful to stand up for yourself and advocate for life to be the gift it is. As with many such things, the cruelty seems to be the point.

It is not, as has also already been mentioned.

What's cruel is having a pet you never interact with or care for. Inflicting your cat on your neighborhood is just a different kind of cruelty altogether - as is dropping your domesticated animal into a dangerous environment unsupervised. It's not a zero sum game where the cat is either indoors and tortured or outdoors and fulfilled. You can provide more than adequate enrichment with a modest investment of time and money. Insisting on the misery of your cat to persist is ironically the true projection of human emotion here.

Honest question to anyone who disagrees: many small animals are kept inside their entire lives. Is this torture? Do you look down on those who own small animals?

The hostility was exhausting and constant, but equally so was knowing I would have to bake in a bunch of qualifiers into my post to try to head off common bad faith arguments at the pass. When you're doing this for the very real problems you're having just existing in society as a minority, it's absolutely soul-sucking. Even if you know it's by design, you're still just one person dealing with a lot of weighty garbage in real life who then has to deal with redditor JAQing/name calling/strawmanning the minute you try to talk about it to try to offset even a fraction of the emotional burden.

I am pretty happy to watch reddit die. Less happy when I think about how this can further distill the abuse within a lot of current discourse.

I'm confused as to why you'd post such a reddit-esque bait statement when so many of the responses are civil, patient, and respectfully explaining viewpoints without attacking OP. Don't you think discourse can be better than that? Don't you want to at least give it a chance?