I don’t think I’ve ever met or heard of anyone literally claiming that kids are identifying as helicopters. The “I identify as an attack helicopter” thing was originally used as an absurdist critique of gender identity, not as a serious claim, if I remember correctly.
Edit: Also, there was a pretty good sci-fi short story that took the idea seriously.
Harrison says he’s seen photos online that purport to show children who have undergone these procedures. “When I saw them circulating on social media—and honestly, it’s hard to avoid them at this point—of these young, beautiful children post-surgery:
What the fuck??? He openly admitted to this? Hard to avoid? What??? So… is anyone investigating Texas state representative Brian Harrison for CSA? Because it appears they should be…
In his defense, it is legitimately hard to avoid if you search for “trans teen cumsluts” as much as he does.
I legitimately don’t know who these people think they are fooling by doing the internet equivalent of standing on the corner and yelling “I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO SEXY FEMBOY TWINKS” unsolicited at random passers by.
The thing is, if you view accounts from transphobes the “it’s hard to avoid” bit is not even an exaggeration. If you only follow them you can’t avoid it because it’s all they post. They post “teenage girls” (usually 18+ trans men) who have either just got out of surgery or have hypertrophic scarring (raised, sometimes discolored scars) so that the photos look as shocking as possible. They love posting pictures of trans men who haven’t been on testosterone as well, so they look as “girl like” as posible. Sometimes they post unhealed/unfinished phalloplasty photos and say they’re doing it to children. It’s just a firehose of disinformation and bigotry.
Maybe that’s the thing for me. There are no transphobes in my circles. People I know are either accepting/supportive or neutral (they take a “it’s their life” approach) of people whoever they are… and they post travel photos and family event photos on social media.
A person named Jamie Reed is saying that children are using words like “mushroom”, “rock”, and “helicopter” as pronouns. That’s not the same as claiming that children are identifying as those things.
According to wikipedia, noun-self pronouns have been in use since the 2010’s. I doubt that people using kitten/kittenself could be said to identify as kittens.
It’s part of her backstory, established roughly when she shows up. She went to robot jail for trying to steal quite a lot of money. You see - she wanted to be a fighter jet.
Had somebody tell me about schools keeping litterboxes for furries, and I just looked at them and asked “Does that really sound like something that’s actually happening, or does it sound like something someone said as a joke?”
They insisted that it actually happened, and I was like, “I don’t believe that. I’m surprised you believed it.”
It wasn’t the most thorough debunking I could have come up with, but I was proud of myself that I actually called them out on it, instead of giving them a high eyebrow smile-and-nod.
This is probably the best way to deal with someone in these situations. No insults, no arguments, just “I thought you were smarter than that”. It might actually make them think about it rather than dismiss you out of hand.
Technically schools are keeping litterboxes in classrooms, but the reason is very different. It’s because in the event of a school shooting, kids don’t have to leave to go to the bathroom. But if people were talking about that they might start thinking about the real problems, and they can’t have that.
In Maine, the GOP was being led by a CONVICTED child molester who was claiming this was happening and had the Republicans rallying behind him. He was invited to speak AT A SCHOOL and had to be forcibly removed after shouting obscenities at kids
I’m still pretty sure she was doing some sort of performative protest against transgender tolerance. Like “Oh, we’re going to have to accept trans women? How about if I wear enormous fake boobs and dress in tight clothing? Will you tolerate me then?”
And the school said “Yeah, we support you,” and they received bomb threats. This just proves once again who the real enemy is. No children were corrupted by her giant fake boobs, but terrorists threatened to indiscriminately murder children to keep her from being herself.
My friend tried to convince me that a coworker of his pulled a kid out of school because a classmate identified as a cat and all the kids were asked to communciate with the child in meows. I dropped everything and stared at him for a while. Eventually asked, “do you believe that story” and he back tracked a bit.
I mentioned the way that “kids are identifying as cat gendered” can be the cry of the antitrans movement but friend changed the subject shortly after.
Any chance to question, inquire, redefine these kinds of stories, try to take ‘em on. Especially with the people you care about that could use help seeing the other side.
IIRC that was true in one school, but it wasn’t to accommodate furries or anything like that – it was to have an emergency bathroom in the event of a school shooting.
The veracity of the claim is not the point. It’s like the groomers claim or if we go old enough, blood libel and the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
It’s a justification for outrage and violence and requires a willingness to believe without healthy skepticism.
Deceptions like this work only because its intended audience wants to believe it, especially when alternative, fact-based explainations are complex and uncomfortable.
I hear that they have been telling people that school bathrooms now have litter boxes for the kids that identify as cats, something that is completely absurd, and yet for some reason people believe that
I mean I’ve met someone who actually identified as a fox… I’m like 95% sure they were just doing a bit, but they were pretty adamant and actually never let on that they were joking, and there was a lot of detail to it… so I actually don’t know
But I mean that has nothing to do with being trans but instead the furry subculture, so irrelevant anyway here
Actually they may have been a Therianthrope or an Otherkin, but this kind of person wouldn’t use a god damn litterbox and the claim there is usually spiritual and not neurological as it is with gender dysphoria.
@HawlSera@Azzu Gender dysphoria is a neurological thing in the same sense that everything is a neurological thing. Afaik, they haven't found anything reproducable in the neurological department beyond “the brain lights up in pain when pain is experienced!”, so I find it weird to say that one's neurological and the other isn't.
In a utopian anarchist sci-fi setting, would they be treated much differently? Or would it just be “oh, you want your body to be different? Marcy's down the hall”?
The neural circuitry must exist for people to think like this, so naturally every human behavior is neurological.
But what they were referring to is that gender dysphoria is likely (some evidence has been produced) a condition with an innate genetic cause. Some chemistry related to hormones being different makes it very “easy”/logical that a born man may feel like a woman (and vice versa), the genetic code is almost completely identical. However it’s much harder, if not impossible, to make the link to feeling like a completely different species, thus it is more akin to religion, “just” a culture-based belief system.
All conditions have an innate genetic cause: ever seen a diabetic rock?
I get what you're saying, but this isn't one of those things where allele X causes phenotype Y. At best, there's genetic predisposition.
Mammal brains are quite generic. Perhaps the body map is hardcoded, but not even the visual system is hardcoded, and humans with >5 fingers or tails rarely have problems using them, so that would surprise me. If it develops from body feedback, a “disruption” to that could cause all sorts.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about/what point you’re trying to make. I understand that all our behavior is genetic in some way, since that’s what we’re built based on. However there is still a qualitative difference between an innate condition that is not majorly affected by the individual environment/circumstances (gender dysphoria), and a condition that only manifests through a specific environment/circumstances (identifying as a fox). One you can do something about, the other not really.
That dichotomy is non-exhaustive. What about innate conditions that are majorly, but not entirely, affected by circumstance? What about conditions that present identically, but are "really" multiple different things, each with distinct causes?
When we don't know, I don't think it's useful to try to talk about things as though we do.
You don't know enough to classify those things the way you've classified them – or if you do, please share the research because I'm interested in this topic!
We always work with incomplete information. We know nothing for certain. It seems to me like you’re essentially arguing to just throw our hands up in uncertainty and say “we can’t know so nothing we can do”.
But even with incomplete, weak, non-95%-statistically-significant data we can make better decisions than without any data. If there is a 51% chance for the one thing being right instead of 49% chance for the other thing, it makes rational sense to act 51% like the one thing is true and 49% like the other thing is true, so in other words, lean towards the 51% thing. On average, you’re going to make better decisions this way. You should look into Bayesian epistemology if you want to know more.
I obviously don’t know the exact percentages for the things I claimed. But there is decent evidence for gender dysphoria not being entirely environmentally (still acting on our genes of course) caused, but relatively independent of the environment.
One, of course, is the mass of reports of transsexuals that they’ve “always in some way felt like this”. While not being scientific data, as a rational person you should not ignore this evidence. Of course you don’t weigh it as heavily as a peer-reviewed scientific study with proper methods, but it should still have some weight.
Then there are a few studies that have found differences in genes responsible for sex hormones, specifically androgen which seems to reduce its effectiveness in binding testosterone. I’ve heard of other such studies on sex hormones.
There are also twin studies done. They have found that identical twins have a much higher likelihood to both be trans than dizygotic (non-identical, i.e. different genes) twins, further pointing towards significant innate genetic predisposition towards gender dysphoria.
Of course, the topic of identifying as a fox has not been studied this deeply. However, based on all I know on human behavior, it is extremely likely that this condition has nothing really to do with foxes or fox-based genes somehow causing this behavior. From the way I talked to the person that identified as a fox, if I were to take it seriously, I would say that they have a deep feeling of not belonging anywhere and having found companionship with other people of similar interests. But I would be pretty sure that this interest could have been something else, filling the same need for companionship, without much friction, thus my claim that it is solely culturally/environmentally-based.
These studies show that the measured effects are statistically significant; that doesn't mean it's universal, only that it's prevalent enough in the population to be detectable. It doesn't mean that this is the reason: only that it's part of the puzzle.
Loads of trans people have “always in some way felt like this” – and loads of trans people haven't particularly noticed anything for decades. Academic explanations are very much incomplete: many don't even know what they need to be explaining.
You seem to not understand the reasoning I’m applying. Just because something is incomplete does not mean we can’t work with what we have. But I’m pretty sure I will not be able to explain this to you.
@Azzu We can work with what we have: but what we have cannot be used in the way you're trying to use it. It is very much early days: what we're discovering is barely more than trivia, and our conclusions routinely get overthrown when we figure out we were looking at the data wrong.
You're saying "some studies try to apply the ‘it's innate’ model, and get results, therefore it's innate", and I'm saying "there is as yet insufficient evidence to support that reasoning". Why do we disagree here?
Because it is relevant to people and what they should be doing right now. Life can not stop or stay in limbo until we have more evidence. Most often it is better to act on the best guess than to do nothing.
It’s fine if stuff changes and one thing turns out wrong later.
I'm confused. What action are you proposing? As far as I'm aware, the state-of-the-art treatments for trans people have precisely zero to do with the origins of transness. (That's one of the reasons I reckon the research in the area is understudied: as with autism, when the actual experts turn their hands to practical matters, they tend to focus on adapting things to better suit people in question, rather than trying to eliminate the development of non-conforming traits.)
I mean a “treatment” that has been suggested and applied is trying to help trans people be not trans anymore, through some form of therapy, mostly because it was believed that it’s “unnatural” and a mental illness, a way that people shouldn’t be like. The treatment now is the polar opposite effectively, not treat it like an illness at all, instead letting trans people embrace their preferred gender, because it’s generally believed that it’s not a mental illness that should be worked against.
Like idk, social anxiety disorder, while probably for some people having an innate component, is mostly believed to be caused by trauma during development. Twin studies have also been conducted for social anxiety disorder, however the risk increase was only 30-50%, while for gender dysphoria it was an increase from absolute values of ~2% to ~30%, so an increase of something like 1500%. As such, it is treated much differently, trying to figure out the triggers of the social anxiety disorder and doing some kind of therapy to continually lessen its effects.
in the 1850s young ladies wore 18-foot-wide dresses and played party games where they’d put candies in a giant bowl of brandy and set it on fire and you had to get the candy out without burning yourself
The venn diagram of people who claim kids are identifying as attack helicopters or believing that schools have litter boxes for kids to use the restroom in, and people who fall for Nigerian Prince scams is just a circle.
well one school did have litter for students to use, just not for the thing the GOP/the right would ever want to have in the news so they created a nice moral panic around it bending the truth like they are the fucking last air bender bending air.
the litter was there so that in case of a school shooting kids being locked in their classes have somewhere to go so that piss doesn’t go all over the place
When I was a kid we sometimes ran around with our arms outstretched, imitating airplanes. Yet, even as a dumb kid, I knew I was not under some asinine belief that I was actually becoming an airplane. Playing "helicopters" and imitating what they see around them is what kids do. It is not the same thing as identifying as if you were that thing. We have to stop this insane and perverted usage of kids' behaviors to justify bigotry against others.
If someone were to go about wearing a helicopter costume, hanging out with other helicopters, in short if their lived experience were such that they could reasonably say they identified as a helicopter, then I’d have no problem with it.
The world needs more weird people and less authoritarian followers.
Unfortunately most people claiming to identify as attack helicopters are actually self identifying as cunts.
I see no problem people identifying themselves as helicopters or mouse, whatever. How on earth would it impact me? It’s a free country, so to say. Where I would have problem is if the law of the land would require to call them so. It should be my choice.
Where I would have problem is if the law of the land would require to call them so. It should be my choice.
I don’t disagree and ultimately it’s one of those things that gets fixed with time. But also as someone who lives in the Southeast US and hears on a pretty often occurrence old shits calling black guys just doing their job “boy”, I can understand why folks get upset about using terms to demean others.
I don’t think we should require legally the racist fuckers to not be themselves, but I’m pretty okay with younger people calling out the older fuckers that demean others. So no, no need for legal requirements, I think social shunning and embarrassment good enough.
Yeah. And it’s perfectly acceptable to legally require people in government jobs to be respectful – a teacher who used racist language would also be fired, and rightly so.
I’ve (thankfully) never encountered a reference to helicopter genders IRL, however I can’t seem to escape the fucking “they’re putting litter boxes in classrooms!!” myth. It’s such an utterly absurd, inane, asinine idea yet I’ve seen real people, who are seemingly functional adults, actually believe this.
Even if you buy into the conspiracy theories and think that the education system is some globalist socialist catgirl plot, do you think teenagers equipped with cell phones and social media wouldn’t meme the shit out of the classroom litterbox? And yet, we still haven’t seen a single picture proving this has ever happened anywhere. That doesn’t stop people from believing it though, and somehow using it as an excuse to delegitimize and attack trans people.
Wikipedia has a source for the “lockdown kitty litter” concept mentioned above:
The only known official instance of cat litter being placed in school classrooms for potential use by students was in the late 2010s by the Jefferson County Public School District in Colorado, where the 1999 Columbine High School massacre took place. Some teachers were given “go buckets” that contained cat litter to be used as a toilet in an emergency lockdown situation, such as during a school shooting.[4][43][44]
Weird, but I suppose it’s sensible. Better than having kids pee themselves in an extended lockdown.
There was a very real conversation about putting litter boxes in classrooms as a way to give kids locked in a classroom during a school shooting for hours a way to use bathroom. That got twisted by far-right pundits that kids are identifying as cats and that's why they are putting litter boxes in classrooms. It's just another way to attack people that "identify" as the "wrong gender". It's complete bullshit and anyone with more than 2 brain cells to rub together that can use Google could figure it out, if they weren't completely focused on denigrating anyone outside their strict interpretation of gender.
They believe it in part because transphobia is itself inherently irrational. They already carry around the hatred for no reason, so it’s not like they’re suddenly going to have standards before they believe whatever story they hear that caters to their outrage
Because they’ve been taught Jesus will hate them if they’re gay, and if they see an attractive person that turns out to be trans, then that means they’re gay, and they’re going to hell.
…er, not that it’s rational, but that’s my best attempt at figuring out most of these people.
I completely diffused someone who believed in the litterbox thing by laughing as hard at it as it should be laughed at and pointing out how hard republicans are getting trolled
There have been issued cat litter to schools. The reason is in case of a lock down due to a school shooting the kids can urinate and defacate somewhere.
It’s incredibly sad. The gun nuts believe it’s their right to shoot up a school, but they won’t allow cat litter to be issued to the class rooms.
On the contrary, there’s overwhelming evidence of this being just the case, It’s just not in the mainstream media just like how they covered up the cloning of famous wrapper Eminem per-se. I recommend you get some more reliable news sources to further your educational development.
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