@trogdor Right, but in this horrid mashup Maui is Dany, saying "you're welcome" for getting rid of the baddie (C.L.), and so his/her niece/nephew has to choose.
In any case, if we're on spoiler-watch for GoT I should just move this all to the NAB.
@trogdor yeah, I'm not sure why they showrunners did that :/ it would have benefitted from a full season FWIH, and HBO would have let them run a full season too
No deliberation or build up for several characters doing things that it's not impossible for them to decide to do but were like poorly executed heel face turns
And then somehow they all decide who's king with practically no squabling at all
Like,... This show is about people fighting over this
(personally, I'd have found it funny had the finale landed on oh, June 22, but that's because I wanted to be able to say to all the people at the finale parties who asked me what I was watching at the time "oh, well, step aside Drogon, cause he's got nothing on 5.1 million pounds of thrust capable of putting a multi-ton payload within meters of its intended orbital trajectory, or even taking over a ton on a ride out of our planet's gravitational well for good" ;)
I have a friend that recently came out as trans. I've known them for over 10 years, and have been involved in their life for that whole time
When they told me, I was surprised, obviously, as anyone would be given the situation. It wasn't a shock, and my response was very much "well, thankyou for trusting me, good on you" type response.
My twin told me a few months back that they're questioning/figuring out their gender identity, and that they use they/them pronouns now. I think they just started HRT
However, outside of, directly talking about it, I was thinking how should I behave? At this stage it's new still, I'm not sure if I have questions, or if they want to discuss it more...
That sounds.. odd though
@V2Blast Yeah he said he's on HRT as well.
I can honestly say I'm not sure what version of "trans" he means... though I'd say I can probably rule out transvestite
@Ben I think it's fine to just say you're there for them if they want to talk about stuff. And it's generally fine to ask what pronouns they'd prefer you use.
I've got a few issues of my own, and I know that we all consider our gaming group a safe space. We all have stuff going on, we all trust each other... I suppose I'm worried about making him feel like "my issues are more important".
This sort of news is fairly life changing, after all
@V2Blast Yeah, that's a good start I guess
The pronouns especially. He said he only learned about it 8 months ago, so...
What I want to do is make him feel like he's no different in my mind. He's still my friend... He's still the Godparent of my daughter, and he's still the 3rd wing of our gaming trio
I do think however that a response of treating him differently is not the route to take, this is the same person you've just learned something new about him
But I think instead of worrying about what you should do about it you should ask in private if he is ok with wtv questions you have or if there are specific ways you can support him
If he hasn't figured out exactly what he wants in that regard yet, he's only had 8 months XD
Apparently
I could easily imagine that taking years
At least to fully hammer out
It could also just be that he wanted to tell someone and didn't want anything else
I'd just like to say, that it's conversations like these that speak volumes about the SE community. We are effectively strangers - sure, we do talk regularly enough that we are familiar with each other, but beyond that - we don't really know much about each other. And it's the level of respect everyone has for each other; listening, providing advice where/if they can, and doing what we all can to help.
@trogdor My housemate is like that :( he "answers" for his partner sometimes. Apparently he just doesn't think - it's not intentional, but ignorance isn't an excuse
@Ben Everything that's been said here jives with my understanding and limited experience, but I'd like to add that I recently told a friend, very bluntly, that I want to be an enthusiastic supporter of whatever parts of her life she wants to share with me but I know that I'm going to screw up and say or do something insensitive at some point.
And this is the important bit: that the one thing I can promise is, if she wants to tell me when I screw up, I won't get defensive or aggressive, I'll listen and apologize and fix what I can and work to become better. She can tell me I'm wrong and I will not become a threat.
I think that was important for me to say to her, and it was an appropriate time to say it.
For some friendships it may not be necessary to say, but QUILTBAG+ people spend a lot of their lives like Neo in the Matrix, knowing that anyone who's still plugged into the Matrix, even someone they trust, could suddenly become Agent Smith.
As a person who is, or close enough is, an ablebodied cishet white English-speaking American man of faith living above the poverty line, I'm plugged into the Matrix in just about every way possible and sometimes it helps to let people know I know that and I'm grateful for being told when I'm Agent Smithing--though I don't expect it because I know it can be dangerous for them.
But that's not something I'm gonna blurt out randomly, there's times and places for that conversation.
Leading with it would be changing the conversation to be about me.
not knowing the specific circumstances, I'd also take care to know who they are and are not out to and try very hard to avoid letting the cat out of that bag to anyone they were not prepared to come out to yet
well, at the time they made the matrix they were still presented as the wachowski brothers. They were only publically known to be the wachowski sisters some time after the fact, and they're very private people so that news wasn't exactly being shouted from all the rooftops
@Carcer well, it'll be easy for me. I either have no-one close to tell, or anyone I can tell, is too far disconnected fit it to be an issue. That said I'm not going to point them out, of course
@Ben It's pretty cool! The Wachowskis haven't talked about it directly a lot, but there's a large body of gender study academia on the subject, dating from immediately after the film was released; the sisters coming out was met by the trans community with a loud "well THAT makes sense."
(Lana more recently gave a public speech about wrestling with her identity prior to coming out, which included an anecdote that reinforces the Neo-vs-Smith subway scene in really powerful ways.)
the last thing I'd say for now is that what probably is helpful (though you could check with them if they would like you to do it) is that you politely correct other people who should know and use the wrong pronouns for them, because if they have to do it themselves, all the time, that is upsetting and exhausting
this wisdom is brought to you by Having a Trans Partner
@Carcer that is completely understandable. At this stage though, I don't believe that would be completely wise - they have only come out to a select few - not publicly yet.
Yeah, you can ask if there's any labor like that you can do for them, and to let you know when it's appropriate to do it.
Always put them in the driver's seat on choices, but keep your eyes open for things you can offer to do which they might not think of or wouldn't be willing to ask.
(Which is, you know, the same thing we ought to be doing for EVERYBODY? But we tend not to have the habit.)
I've found that working and playing alongside people who are subject to more harm and have fewer tools to mitigate it (QUILTBAG, disabled, NAT, Indigenous, etc), is helping me identify and develop basic skills and habits I should be using with everybody and it's really kinda embarrassing how I wasn't before.
my calibration is maybe a bit off since my primary experience here is with my partner, who to some degree I don't need to explicitly ask to know what they want and also we had most of the actual conversations we needed to have about it several years ago
Some people thing "atypical" implies a defect that "diverse" does not. Others think "diverse" is something which only groups of people can be and you can't claim to be, personally, diverse anything.
It's a whole thing, and I'm just happy to go with whatever my friends tell me makes 'em happy because I know I don't have any right to weigh in with an opinion.
I have issues with the specific assertion that you don't have the right to an opinion about it, but what the affected person wants obviously does weigh much more heavily in such a case
I use Chamoru in my personal life, because Chamorro is the orthography of the colonizer (but it's also the orthography of the ancestors, so I'm totally sympathetic to supporters of that), CHamoru is a political statement I can't make, and Chamoru is the most commonly accepted compromise (IPA is still the colonizer's orthography, but it's used to make a statement about their place in the international stage).
(To wind this waaay back around to RPGs, thinking about what sorts of stories I can tell without walking over other people, is what got me to eventually produce Where Are We Going?)
made a "funny" discovery today. Do you know how one of the popular defenses that are used to justify the fact that no one is expected to provide constructive feedback thru comment when downvoting some content? The usual "you should be happy I used my time to vote so don't ask me for clarification about what I meant"?
(May be a little more common on other sites in the network - I guess that as usual the situation may be better here)
Well... guess what? The official "expected behavior" page for the network says exactly the opposite ^_^'
> Above all, be honest. If you see misinformation, vote it down. Add comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong. Provide better answers of your own. Last but not least, edit and improve the existing questions and answers! By doing these things, you are helping keep Stack Exchange a great place to share knowledge of our craft.
I stopped commenting most of my downvotes a while ago because I no longer have the time or the patience to get into an argument every time I downvote (which is a lot).
Yeah. I strongly disagree with that "official" advice; comments should be about helping to improve, which is a narrow and not completely overlapping subset of "indicating what is wrong."
that is actually just a little passage of a longer text. While I agree with your point there, my focus was that there is actually an (implicit) acknowledgement that downvoting alone: a) doesn't fix the problem an answer may have b) doesn't help anyone learning
Basically, I take that as admitting that voting alone is not sufficient. And that I find funny since every times Meta.SE returns on the forever-ongoing argument of "please promote commenting while downvoting answers" the usual answer that is made in the following flame wars is "votes are perfectly fine, no need for any further information"
Well, in the world of Internet Arguments it's either "don't comment" but you know some people will anyway but a lot of the trash will stop, or "everybody comment" and then it's ALL THE TRASH.
Meta discussions aren't tuned toward nuanced positions.
Agree with you. The main problem is that if the question has low traffic (which means 1-2 vote if lucky - good answers may get 3) a single downvote will often give the impression that the answer hide some issue. Maybe this is true, but if all we got is the vote... you will never know. — SPArchaeologistJan 23 '13 at 8:33
@JoelEtherton - I don't need them to stand and show their name if they dont want to. But I would really like that the "this is wrong" downvote would be something more. No need to post a whole answer that spans 100 pages. Just a little comment "This is wrong why "/"this can cause problems if" etc. So that if there is a mistake someone may discover it before it create problems to other. — SPArchaeologistJan 23 '13 at 8:37
for example.
4 hours later…
user15026
2:25 PM
@Ben some scattered thoughts before I leave for the day - I advise just...letting said friend know you are there if they wanna talk, and then just letting them choose what they say, don't push it to be about you and your desire for knowledge, let them keep their agency. Respect their choice of pronoun and/or name even when they aren't around (this sounds easy but a lot of people suck at this), just...make it clear you are welcoming to conversations but that you aren't expecting them
user15026
Like...sometimes I wanna talk about my queer self or my NAT self or whatever, and sometimes I don't (even if I mention it in passing its not always an invite for more questions or a broader discussion, respect their right to not peel themselves open for public viewing)
user15026
(also please remember that comfort levels etc can change moment to moment, keep checking in, ask if it's okay to talk about xyz if you aren't sure)
user15026
(okay that's enough words from me time to find pants)
@Ben I mentioned this conversation to a friend, and she said that if you or your friend need to chat with a trans woman about things she's willing to be that person.
