but, it is what i want you to think of me.

obviously.

i'm not technically a virgin, but i'd might as well be.

well, what do you expect to happen?

i'm 38 years old, and have been in gender transition since i was 19 because i don't have a financial or medical path to get through it. i'm stuck in suspended animation, and probably will be until i die.

any arrested development that set in when i was a teenager (which was already substantial at 19, given that i lost five years of female development as a teen) has just maintained itself in stasis. i never really got through puberty; i neither developed into a male, nor a female. i've been in a holding pattern...

you shouldn't expect anything other than what i'm saying, because i haven't had the opportunity to mature. when a person has what are essentially the sexual experiences of a pre-teen girl, namely nothing more than unrealized fantasies that are assumed will happen one day, the behaviour is going to align with the experience.

i wouldn't even know what to do.

i have the emotional and sexual maturity of like a 12 year-old girl.

i just couldn't fathom it.

i'm just imagining what would happen if i showed up in a room with some stranger looking for sex.

i would never get that far. if i somehow had the nerve to start it off, i'd pretend i had an appointment and cancel, then delete the account. but if i was going through some kind of breakdown that week or something, i'd probably start crying when i got there, and the thing would no doubt stop - or, if i were unlucky about it, i'd get raped.

it's just beyond the realm of anything i could imagine actually doing.

if there is some dating site with my pictures up on it, it's not me. it would either be some pathetic person trying to trick people or it would potentially be a set-up by the cops.

i've never done it. i probably couldn't.

i'll ask the same question i've asked in this space so many times before.

if a cis-female dresses up at a party, does that mean she's looking for sex? i think we've come to the collective cultural decision that it doesn't, actually - that you can't deduce motives from wardrobes.

then, why do you think it's ok to make this same deprecated assumption about trans females?

of course, it isn't. my wardrobe says nothing about my intentions. at all.

now, that doesn't mean that i don't have the right to dress up and go out and dance and have fun.

it just means that i'm not particularly interested in getting laid when i do.

it's not complicated, really.

but, i mean, i'm not actually looking for anybody.

i'm celibate by choice, and prefer to spend almost all of my time alone.

if i did have a dating app up, it would say:

trans female looking for straight cis male

i don't use dating apps because i don't date.

and, i don't use hookup apps or whatever the lingo is for them because i don't have sex.

you can look all you want, there's nothing there. and, if you're disappointed, it's a consequence of your own delusions, not anything i've ever projected of myself - i've been clear on the point for years.

don't misunderstand me: i don't think there should be much tolerance for assholery at a concert, or other live event. if people are being disruptive or oppressive they should be asked to leave.

but it's perhaps actually fairly predictable to learn that when you advertise a space as being heavily policed that people don't want to hang out there anymore.

just get off twitter....

i mean, something i've been noticing for a while is that a pattern opens up.

the moment a bar or coffee shop or political movement or whatever else starts advertising itself as a "safe space", attendance seems to dwindle, and the place eventually shuts down.

"safe spaces" seem to actually be terrible for business. it's like putting a giant "squares only" sign in your window. the bookings start to suffer, the place picks up a reputation for being lame, etc. it's a death knell....

if twitter wants to walk down this path, you should help the arab dictatorship that operates it along to it's own demise. i mean, do you realize who is running this?

just use a different platform.

#deleteyouraccount

you should really stop being worried about being thrown off of twitter and rather go out of your way to actively avoid using it.

let's shut down twitter altogether.

#boycotttwitter.

and, just to be clear on the point.

what the government does here in the prohibition regime is two things:

1) it claims to prevent the sale of narcotics. this is with minimal, if really any, success. what it actually does is just inflate the price.
2) it protects drug dealers from violence at the hands of the community.

this is really just an instance of the same error that the libertarian right makes over and over and over again. it seems to think that if you just take the government out of the way, you'd have this perfectly free market and you'd be able to sell whatever you want at whatever price you want, because property rights exist in the ether or something. there's this broad, general lack of understanding of the need to have a state come in and actually define what a property right is and then uphold it and enforce it with violence.

so, you might think that all drugs would be decriminalized in an anarchist society, and there would be acceptance and permissiveness and the whole thing. but i have to disagree - and you just need to ask the family members and friends of drug users to learn this. the more substantive effect of removing the state would be removing the protection that dealers enjoy. they'd get lynched in public; it would be more dangerous than it is, now.

mushrooms are certainly a least concern, and i might imagine a level of permissiveness for adult use, however obscure it may actually be. but if i caught you selling to my underage daughter, i can tell you you'd walk away with a pretty busted up face over it.

"but i don't really want equality! i only want equity!"

yeah?

cry me a fucking river.

you get equality, not equity. deal with it.

i'm actually fucking sick about hearing about #metoo.

this is not a populist movement. if it is anything at all, besides a mainstream media construction, it's a vanguard movement inside the elite of the democratic establishment.

if it has any effect on the upcoming cycle at all, it will strictly be in reaction to it.

this isn't because people don't want equality, it's because the way it's being presented by this particular clique of people is puritanical and extreme - and very much outside of the mainstream. again: if you live inside twitter, you wouldn't know that. but, nobody uses twitter; well, nobody outside of the establishment, anyways.

i don't expect the reaction to be very noticeable, though. more likely is crickets. perpetually. and, people getting up and walking away....

"me too" has a previous usage in a context of demeaning internet jargon. we would once speak of the annoying "me too" posters that would interject themselves into a thread, offering nothing of value. there is even a long history of shit posting and sarcasm constructed around this, where people would disingenuously post "me too!" on threads just to be annoying and pointless.

in the long run, it will be the original usage that predominates.

and, the hashtag may even end up subsumed - as an example of something that people don't like.

put another way: the fact the mushroom users are a small market, and they're consequently a little harder to find (you have to know a bigger dealer, usually), is probably a good thing that you want to maintain. you don't want people to be free to throw shrooms around - you want them to be hard to find.

so, the ideal thing is not to decriminalize it technically so much as to just not enforce the laws around it.

but, on the theoretical scenario that you find somebody selling shrooms to kids, should that person go to jail? yeah. absolutely.

this is what pompeo was talking about.

it's been in the works for years.

and, i'd like to thank him for drawing attention to it.

https://canadians.org/fr/node/11895

it happens.

don't pretend it doesn't.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evgj3k/what-makes-people-on-shrooms-jump-off-buildings-and-die

actually, peter mackay is wrong (as usual) and mike pompeo is actually right.

what pompeo is talking about is a chinese proposal to ship tar sands oil to asia through the arctic, an idea that has been floated for a while due to difficulty getting through bc, and a desire to avoid working through the united states.

we can debate aspects of this. i am opposed to all pipeline expansion; the united states wants to steal the oil; my government wants to sell it to china at higher prices than it can get in the us market. these are competing interests, no doubt.

but, to suggest that pompeo was making things up is disingenuous. the chinese have, in fact, heavily infested in tar sands infrastructure, and they're not doing it for our benefit.

https://canadians.org/blog/did-canada-china-fipa-influence-trudeaus-decision-buy-kinder-morgan-pipeline

doing mushrooms in your 20s is about as socially acceptable as watching saturday morning cartoons or wearing pajamas.

you should have grown out of it by then.

again: i don't exactly want to say that denver made the right choice in rejecting the decriminalization. smoking mushrooms is not unheard of, but you usually eat them, so it's hard to come up with a context where simple use would be infringing on the rights of anybody else. this is in contrast to marijuana or tobacco, where you have to infringe upon the rights of the people around you in order to use it.

it's consequently easy to make the free market or right-libertarian argument that you hear from "real capitalists", namely that the state doesn't have the right to tell you what to do with your own body. and, as mentioned, i don't actually disagree, really. i don't think i would vote for it, but i wouldn't have any active opposition to decriminalization, either; if i were in denver, i'd just be sitting this one out. i would probably abstain from a vote. nor would i see the need to push for the kind of bylaws that i would support around marijuana use, to keep it out of residential neighbourhoods and stop it from becoming a nuisance for non-users. unlike marijuana use, you can really have a trip in your basement without bothering anybody, it is true.

but, a left-wing perspective needs to consider the picture more holistically and look at the broader health implications, and i will reiterate the following truths:

1) adults don't do mushrooms; they're a drug that is almost entirely for kids. i mean, i'm sure you can point me to some 29 year-old that does mushrooms, but an analysis of their life isn't going to produce a flattering profile for a potential user base. adult mushroom users are going to be losers, through and through.

2) it follows that you're proposing decriminalizing something with a very small potential adult legal market that is going to be largely full of undesirables and a much larger potential underage market. if you're going to legalize mushrooms with an attempt to control a market, you're not going to get anywhere unless you put the legal age somewhere around 14, as that is really the target usage age, about 12-19. you're going to see use fall off dramatically after that - and that's a good thing. you don't want adults using mushrooms. i'd rather have my kids do mushrooms than meth, granted. but, is making it easier for kids to get the stuff really what you want?

3) the idea that psilocybin has some kind of clinical benefit is a marketing lie being pushed to you by capitalism, not an actual scientific reality. mushrooms make you crazy. if you want to mess with your hormone levels, there are ways to do it without stimulating schizophrenia; any potential benefits, however controversial, could be arrived at with a far less dangerous delivery mechanism. further, the term "spiritual" should obviously be outright banned from any scientific or medical discussion around anything - these claims are not worthy of serious scrutiny. "microdosing" is pseudoscience through and through.

4) there are real dangers not just from overuse but from a bad trip. mushroom use is currently marginal; it's not something very many people do. you shouldn't confuse the fact that use is marginal with a misperception that there aren't consequences from it. i mean, how many people are hospitalized for drinking bleach? does that mean drinking bleach is safe, or that almost nobody drinks bleach?

and, you just have to ask somebody that's used the drug to understand that you need to approach it with caution. you're not going to find anybody walking around saying "mushrooms are harmless", like you do with these ignorant hippies around marijuana. even the advocates know you have to be careful.

so, it's more like that decriminalization would be pointless - this is neither a drug that is currently used by many people nor a drug that has the potential to develop widespread use among adults. it's just going to open up the market for kids. but, if there was potential for widespread use, or if widespread use ever became a reality, the inevitable consequences would be widespread problems with mental health as a result of it.

opiates were supposed to have clinical benefits, too. that's how we ended up with an opiate crisis....

but, i mean, the snake oil industry doesn't care, right? the big pharmaceutical companies aren't concerned about your well-being. if they think they can profit, they will. they don't care if it kills you or not...