If you feel like a man, like being a man, and enjoy having man parts, you’re probably a man. Your interests are not your gender, and dancing isn’t exclusive to women. Even ballet has male dancers.

Still, a little bit of exploration never hurt anybody. If you are trans, if living as another gender would make you much happier, wouldn’t you want to know sooner rather than later? And if you aren’t trans, you might still learn a thing or two about yourself that you never would have discovered otherwise. Most people go their whole lives without ever questioning their gender or closely examining what it means to them, and I think they’re missing out. There is power in truly knowing yourself.

Do some thinking. Ask more questions. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. What do you like about being a man? Can you imagine not being one? How does that image make you feel? If you could instantly become anything, with no rules or consequences, what would you pick? Don’t shut anything down; there are no wrong answers. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.

It may help you to stop thinking in the binary terms that society imposes on us. Gender isn’t just a question of Male or Female; there are many different kinds of men and many different kinds of women. There is a large area in between where the two overlap and the lines get fuzzy, and even places that aren’t on the same spectrum at all. I myself am a demigirl. My gender identity is mostly female, but also a little bit male and a little bit something else. You don’t need to feel obligated to be what anyone else is.

As for how I found out, I’ve already posted that elsewhere in this thread. It looks like you’ve gotten a lot of answers from others as well. I wish you good luck in wherever this journey takes you.

This was my experience. I was raised in a very conservative, very religious community where I was never exposed to the concept of transness. I was fully convinced that I was a boy and could never be anything but a boy. And yet, I could tell I was different from the other boys.

As I got older, that feeling turned into an ever-present sensation of wrongness. My body felt tainted, somehow. Unclean. Contaminated. It possessed an inherent grossness that could never be washed away. I lived with that feeling every day for 25 years. No medication, no counseling, no hard work ever did anything to alleviate it or the severe depression that was my typical mental state. Then a bunch of things happened all at once, and I started questioning my gender. A few days later I shaved off my beard and rediscovered what joy feels like. That’s when I knew.

I was never a boy.

And you can’t just dismiss all their worries, either. Seeing a military vessel in a civilian sector can be genuinely worrying for some crews that aren’t used to having converted ships around, especially if they’ve had encounters with pirates in the past. I get that, I really do, but I’m not trying to scare anyone here. I just want to drop off my cargo and leave, and this is already way more stressful for me than it needs to be.

I was raised Evangelical, and this guy sounds a lot like a true believer struggling to reconcile the actual words of their messiah with the culture and beliefs of the fascist death cult that has co-opted said messiah as tribal identifier. My guess is, he has since become either the chillest agnostic you could ever meet or a literal domestic terrorist.

Yeah, and sometimes your meat ship comes with the wrong parts installed but if you ask to swap your torpedo launcher with a scanner module they say you can’t possibly have a science vessel because only battleships come with torpedo launchers. Then you try to explain that your ship really isn’t designed for combat and you don’t even have any torpedoes on board but they just send you into battle anyway and then get mad at you when your shields fail.

I fucking hate Meatfleet.

I think you replied to the wrong person? I drink a cup of coffee every morning. Sometimes it wakes me up and sometimes I end up napping on the couch right after. I also drink a ton of water every day.

Something I have noticed is that, whenever I want to get rid of a stim or a habit, I can’t just stop doing it. The impulse can never be destroyed, only shifted to something else.

Remember the NYPD who were jumped by a gang of illegal immigrants?

No, but I do remember the NYPD harassing a small group of migrants that were just minding their own business on a public sidewalk (without blocking it), ordering them to leave, and then assaulting one of them while he was attempting to comply.

Hey, that’s farther than I’ve gotten! I’ve only recently discovered that I’m AuDHD, after a lifetime of failure and then the pandemic completely wrecking all of my (terrible) coping mechanisms. I also fidget with my dice and my character is canonically narcoleptic now because I can’t show up to sessions on time to save my life.

Old media has become such a minefield because there’s just so much awful stuff that went over my head at the time. I’m scared to recommend anything that I haven’t rewatched/reread in the past few years.

It wasn’t all bad, though. One of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5, a 90’s sci-fi that I watched as it aired but hadn’t seen again until late last year. All I really remembered were the cool space battles and devious political maneuvering, but it turned out to also be an incredibly progressive show. One of the main characters is first introduced while wearing robes that appear to have been partially made from a trans pride flag!

I was mentally halfway into composing a rant about how unfair you are being to Pablo when I got to that last paragraph. “He has ADHD! He’s obviously stimming and self-medicating and you are terrible for criticizing him for that! This is just what untreated ADHD looks like!”

I’m glad you were able to turn things around and I hope you can be a little easier on your past self now.

I don’t think streamers and video creators are more likely to be sex pests. You’re just more likely to hear about a sex pest if their career involves trying to be seen by as many people as possible.

Oh, sorry, I had the wrong guy. I was thinking of Dan Vasc, whose red-faced screaming meltdown is embedded in the article you linked. Must have gotten the names mixed up.

Let me try this again.

Why am I not surprised that the guy who turned out to be a pedo also gets upset about other people having pronouns?

Why am I not surprised that a guy who had a full crying meltdown over the existence of pronouns would turn out to be a pedo?

I really need to watch/read The Expanse.

Space Mom and Space Dad are fighting again and the kids are getting sick of their shit.

So would a cisgender man with De la Chapelle syndrome, who has XX chromosomes, be required to compete with cis women? Would a person with XY chromosomes whose body was assigned female at birth due to Swyer syndrome or complete androgen insensitivity be required to compete against cis men?

Or would you just disqualify anyone who has any intersex characteristics, which are about as common as having red hair?

So… After they have been on HRT for a while? Periods are triggered by hormones, and there’s a lot more to a period than just bleeding. Many trans women experience cramps, bloating, mood swings, etc. on a monthly cycle. There are also some cis women who have irregular or no periods; would they still be allowed to compete or would you ban them as well?

A Pharisee (politically powerful religious faction) lawyer decides to test Jesus by asking what the most important commandment is. Jesus answers by stating two commandments: Love God wholeheartedly, and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. All the other rules are based on these two.

The lawyer asks for clarification: “Who is my neighbor?” (He can’t mean everyone, right!? Some of them are, you know…)

Jesus responds by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan: A story about a Jewish man, much like the lawyer, who is violently mugged and left to die in the street. A priest and a Levite (member of the tribe in charge of the temple), both highly respected leaders in Jewish society, pass by while pretending not to notice. The only person who stops to help is a Samaritan, a member of a hated ethnic and religious minority that had recently defiled the Jewish temple in an act of terrorism. (The Samaritans’ own temple had been destroyed a century earlier and the date of its destruction made into an annual holiday, they were hated so much.)

“Which of the three men was a neighbor to the one who was robbed?”

“The one who showed mercy to him,” the lawyer admits, unwilling to utter the name of his mutual enemy.

“Go and do likewise.”

It says to love everyone, especially the ones society hates.

All the “I like Republicans’ fiscal conservatism” people in this thread need to read this. “Fiscal conservatism” and “small government” are and always have been dogwhistles for racism and other forms of bigotry. “Government waste” does not refer to inefficiency in government spending, it’s code for programs that help the poor and minorities.

The core of Conservative ideology is a belief in the existence of natural hierarchy, where all people owe privilege to the wise and righteous beings above them and are obligated to punish those below for their inferiority. The Conservatives themselves, having designed this hierarchy, are oh-so-conveniently at the very top of it. Everything that Republicans do makes sense when viewed from this perspective.