Me Too!

Me Too!

This has always been fascinating to me, because even in female dominated industries like nurse practitioners, men make more than women! And it's always chalked up to the whole 'women are taught to take what they can get so they don't ask for more' thing. I also wonder if it makes a difference who is doing the hiring: a man or a woman, or both if more than one person is involved.

Are men better at negotiating for a higher salary, or are sexists better at granting a man a higher salary following any quality of negotiation?

I’d love to see a study where a man and a woman approached salary negotiation word-for-word identical, and see who got afforded more.

i’m sure teenage girls know that eating disorders are unhealthy, but i feel like they don’t really know why. it’s not their fault: they don’t know because they haven’t been taught. they haven’t been taught because we just found out, and we just found out because, honestly, research into women’s health has been extremely lacking, historically.. women are just small, weak men with breasts and uteruses, right? WRONG.

every system, every organ, every cell in a woman’s body moves to a complex symphony of hormonal signaling that is circadian (cycling once a day), mensual (once a month), and seasonal (once a year). this beautiful dance is directed by the endocrine system, which consists of glands. the high chieftesses of these glands are the incredibly sensitive gonads, the ovaries. 

these almond-sized glands are so delicate that they will go dormant at the first sign that the outside world may be a less than optimal environment in which to birth and raise a baby. and only now, in the last decade or so, are we finally starting to understand the devastation that is wrought on a developing girl’s health when this happens.

back in the 80’s, when endurance sports were starting to go mainstream, the saying among elite female endurance athletes was “if your period stops, you’re training enough.” those women are now at the tip of the spear of our emerging knowledge of the long term effects of the “female athlete triad”.

the female athlete triad consists of 1) not eating enough, 2) no menstrual cycle, and 3) low bone density. grouping them together like this is rather misleading, because it makes it sound like these symptoms can occur in any combination. the actual relationship is one of definitive and terrifying cause-and-effect.

when a teenage girl stops eating enough to fill her calorie needs, or deliberately exercises beyond her caloric intake, her ovaries receive signals that there’s a famine afoot, that the outside environment is a hostile place, and they shut down. they fucking shut down! can you imagine a male marathon runner saying “fellas, if your testicles still work, you’re not running enough”?

the ovaries are responsible for releasing estrogen, which most teenage girls probably know is responsible for menstruation, breast development and female fat distribution in puberty. what they probably don’t know, because nobody tells them, is that estrogen is also an incredibly powerful steroid that is the primary hormone, in both sexes, that is responsible for mineralizing growing bones. bones are rapidly expanding in volume during puberty, and if a girl’s estrogen is depleted because her ovaries are on strike, she won’t even be able to maintain the bone density she enjoyed in childhood (and her bones are supposed to be getting significantly denser as she grows!).

if she is ignorant of this, a talented and driven teenage female athlete will write off an estrogen crash with “well i didn’t really want periods, tits and hips anyway, they’d just slow me down”, not realizing that she is inducing permanent osteopenia in herself... because she can’t just remineralize her bones after she’s done growing. once she attains her full adult height and her growth plates fuse, that’s it! 

the same women who, in the 80s/90s/00s, were saying “if your period stops, you’re training enough” now suffer from brittle bones. they get multiple compound fractures, shattered bones, just from tripping and falling on a hike. i know many such women. and this is irreversible.

we didn’t, and still don’t, know everything that the ovaries do. how irresponsible we were, to think we could just kneecap our most important glands, with no consequences.

i know some teenage girls follow me, and i want to say this: research nutritional requirements for girls your age, be vigilant about eating enough, and eating a variety of things. take responsibility for your health now: you will thank yourself in 10 years, when you can still stand up straight, when you can fall on a wet floor at work and just laugh it off and move on. you are the only one who has to live with yourself 24 hours a day, and you’ve got to keep yourself safe. you’ve got to.

Merry Christmas Jo!

Can we all wish JK Rowling a happy Christmas this year please. Like can it be a thing. Let’s all wish JK a happy Christmas, on December 25th.

Second vid

This is crazy! I pay for the NYT and they literally disable comments on most trans stories to prevent people from even having a conversation about anything instead of just accepting their 'facts'. The only time I have seen them present anything that shows the view point of those 'average Americans without an agenda' was a recent story about how some teachers are calling students by different names and pronouns based on student preference, and purposely not alerting their parents to these changes. The article discussed how many parents are upset by this blatant dis-involvement and purposeful hiding of information related to how their own children feel about their core identity.

The Bradshaws have been startled to find themselves at odds with the school over their right to know about, and weigh in on, such a major development in their child’s life — a dispute that illustrates how school districts, which have long been a battleground in cultural conflicts over gender and sexuality, are now facing wrenching new tensions over how to accommodate transgender children.

The Bradshaws accepted their teenager’s new gender identity, but not without trepidation, especially after he asked for hormones and surgery to remove his breasts. Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety. He had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, and, to his parents, seemed not to know exactly who he was yet, because he had repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.

Given those complexities, Mrs. Bradshaw said she resented the fact that the school had made her feel like a bad parent for wondering whether educators had put her teenager, a minor, on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee.

The only 'agenda' this article discussed was a parents' right to be involved in major decisions about changing how their child is referred to and thus how they are perceived by their classmates and the world at large. And most of the parents voted liberal on other issues but discussed how they could not talk about their frustrations because people are so quick to label anyone with a dissenting voice or even a questioning one as 'transphobic', thus leading them to seek out allies on the other side of the political spectrum.

But how schools should address gender identity cuts through the liberal and conservative divide. Parents of all political persuasions have found themselves unsettled by what schools know and don’t reveal.

Mrs. Bradshaw said she wouldn’t align herself with Republican lawmakers who sought to ban L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but she also felt as though her school’s policy left no room for nuance.

“It is almost impossible to have these discussions,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. “There is no forum for someone like me.”

Other self-described liberal parents said they registered as independents or voted for Republican candidates for the first time as a result of this issue. Although they haven’t sued, some have retained lawyers affiliated with the largest legal organization on the religious right to battle their children’s schools.

The best part of this random call to eliminate 'anti-trans' stories is that even some transgender people support the right to have an actual discussion about social transition and for parents to be involved in their own children's major life decisions, so I'm not sure how they can possibly claim articles like these ones as being biased against trans ideology when they are going out of their way to get the opinion of both sides.

In November, Erica Anderson, a well-known clinical psychologist who has counseled hundreds of children over gender identity-related issues and is transgender herself, filed an amicus brief in a Maryland lawsuit in support of parents represented by a conservative law group. The parents have argued that their district’s policy violates their own decision-making authority.

Transitioning socially, Dr. Anderson wrote, “is a major and potentially life-altering decision that requires parental involvement, for many reasons.”

She told the Times that she had to push aside her qualms about working with conservative lawyers. “I don’t want to be erased as a transgender person, and I don’t want anyone’s prerogatives or identity to be taken away from them,” she said, “but on this one, I’m aligned with people who are willing to advocate for parents.”

So far, this is the first and only article I have seen from the NYT actually having a discussion about gender ideology rather than blatantly shoving it down our throats as 'science', and if an article showing both sides of an issue is really so offensive to some people, then those people don'tunderstandhow journalism works. All they are doing by shutting down any dissenting voices is proving the point that many of these parents made regarding how quickly anyone questioning these liberal doctrines are slapped with the 'transphobic' label.

There is a network of internet support groups for “skeptical” parents of transgender children, some with thousands of registered members. Detractors have called the groups transphobic, because some want to ban gender-affirming care for minors, or have amplified the voices of people who call transgender advocates “groomers.”

But members say these groups are some of the only places to ask questions and air their concerns.

One Saturday morning shortly before Christmas, a meeting of one such support group was held in Westchester County, just north of New York City. Sitting in a circle in a member’s living room, 12 mothers and one father spoke of the ways they said they had been sidelined by their children’s schools.

One mother said her middle-schooler had secretly changed names and pronouns without her knowledge, even though she had worked as a teacher at the same school. Another mother shared how high school teachers had hidden her teenager’s social transition from her until graduation because they thought she wouldn’t be supportive enough. A mother of a 14-year-old who had spent time in an inpatient therapy facility said she had sent her school a letter from the student’s psychiatrist outlining concerns that the school had ignored.

Most said they identified as liberal, and that the living room was a rare safe space for them to voice their fears. Some parents didn’t think their teenagers were really transgender. Others thought it was too soon to know for certain. Most said their children had mental health conditions, such as bipolar disorder, or autism.

Here they could ask: What if their children had been unduly influenced by their classmates to ask for hormone treatments and surgery? What if teachers were encouraging students to see their families as unsafe? And were right-wing partisans their only sympathetic audience?

“It’s just been such a hard thing to navigate, because on the one hand, I’m dealing with my very extreme liberal values of individuality, freedom, expression, sexuality, wanting to support all of this stuff,” said a tearful mother. “At the same time, I’m afraid of medicalization. I’m afraid of long term health. I’m afraid of the fact that my child might change their mind.”

Collecting information on and being empathetic to the indivuals on both sides of an issue in order to try and understand the influences on and made by that issue doesn't make a journalist phobic of anything, it just means that person did their research. TRAs need to stop this absolute insanity of trying to emilinate discussion on gender ideology. They are pushing people out of their own political circle by refusing them a voice, and the consequences of a political spectrum where neither of the major parties allows for free speech and discussion in a respectful manner could be drastic.

last line is me circa 1543 when that loser galileo dared to suggest that the earth revolves around the sun

This is why I can't stand websites like goodonyou.eco that have a rating for "animal impact" and then negatively rate brands that use leather while giving brands that use "vegan leather" (aka microplastics) great ratings on both animal impact and sustainability, when in fact, vegan leather wears out far faster than real leather and will end up in a landfill long before real leather would.

Not to mention, sustainable farming for all those vegan vegetables requires dead animals and animal feces! What do they think is in fertilizer? The crime of meat and leather goods industries is not their existence altogether. The crime is the inhumane conditions in which many animals for large corporate farms are kept and the mass production of leather goods with unethical labor and poor craftsmanship which are then turned around and sold at cheap prices for maximum profit. The way to protest that crime is by voting for sustainable practices with your dollar which means buying meat from a local butcher instead of the prepackaged stuff at the grocery store, getting eggs from a friend with a hobby farm or perhaps a local farmers' market, buying well made leather bags from local or online artisans instead of designer brands, buying a down comforter that will last you a decade instead of a cheap duvet with an alternative material, etc.

would love to join an ecofeminist discord

I am actually ideologically opposed to vegetarianism and veganism though

I do not see them as feminist ideological positions