I’ve given you a 7 day temporary ban to reflect on how you might better engage with the community in the future. Bee better

I don’t think that someone’s behavior choice is comparable to their clothing choice

I completely agree, but victim blaming across choices and especially towards women and POC individuals is part of the reason we have really shitty reporting of fraudsters. Creating an environment which discourages them from speaking up is harmful to society as a whole.

everyone in this case is trying to take advantage of someone

We don’t know this, and we shouldn’t assume this of the victim. I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis, but focusing on talking about the victim here when there are actors which are clearly out to harm or take advantage of others is harmful framing. If this is a discussion you wish to have, I personally believe the appropriate framing is necessary - we must acknowledge the existing structure of power and how it silences certain people and also blames them before talking about potentially problematic behavior. But even then, it’s kind of jumping to conclusions about the victim here and I’m not so certain it’s a discussion that should even be entertained.

We cannot possibly know her intentions. We do know his intentions. Please stop shifting focus away from the person actively causing harm here.

Again, can we please not victim blame? Calling this a failure, saying that they must be “so shallow” to fall for a fame scam is analogous to saying “she was asking for it because of the way she was dressed” to a rape victim. Being a human is complicated and there are many reasons a victim can fall prey to a scam. It’s not as one dimensional as you’re painting it and regardless of how shallow a person is, no one deserves to be taken advantage of. The focus of discussion here should not be the victim, but rather the perpetrator and the fact that they are out to take advantage of others. That’s abhorrent behavior and we should keep the focus squarely on them.

I think it’s completely fair to have an honest conversation about what could cause someone to be enticed by a large number of followers, but I don’t think that OP was making space for that conversation. It came off as victim blaming because there was no attempt at nuance or unpacking the fact that these women were targeted by a conman and that we really shouldn’t be blaming them at all.

This boy is purposefully being misleading about himself - he is presenting a con. We shouldn’t be victim blaming.

Companies get sued all the time for insider trading or other violations. Stock owners will often get offers for class action suits that are on offer for whatever time frame a company is being sued for. It sounds like Vanguard is now offering a service to just ‘auto-enroll’ or whatever, and reduce the admin burden of filling out the class action claim for a fee.

This blog post sums up the major points and places their relevance in recent history

I wonder if eventually we could sidestep the use of bactiophages and instead manufacture the microscopic structures themselves as sunscreen.

There’s a good number of biological processes that are much simpler, cheaper, and require much less materials when the biological process is preserved. A good example of this is water cleaning/breaking down sewage with bacteria which give off methane which is also collected as fuel. Given that the main outcome here is sunscreen that doesn’t damage biology and it’s generally not that expensive to keep sustain life like this, it might make the most sense to simply leave it at production/farming of bacteriophages.

There is no need to be tolerant towards the intolerant. If someone says they want to do some ethnic cleansing, that’s not exactly a nice gesture and pushing back against that message is both cool and good.

what

I can’t help but wonder how in the long term deep fakes are going to change society. I’ve seen this article making the rounds on other social media, and there’s inevitably some dude who shows up who makes the claim that this will make nudes more acceptable because there will be no way to know if a nude is deep faked or not. It’s sadly a rather privileged take from someone who suffers from no possible consequences of nude photos of themselves on the internet, but I do think in the long run (20+ years) they might be right. Unfortunately between now and some ephemeral then, many women, POC, and other folks will get fired, harassed, blackmailed and otherwise hurt by people using tools like these to make fake nude images of them.

But it does also make me think a lot about fake news and AI and how we’ve increasingly been interacting in a world in which “real” things are just harder to find. Want to search for someone’s actual opinion on something? Too bad, for profit companies don’t want that, and instead you’re gonna get an AI generated website spun up by a fake alias which offers a "best of " list where their product is the first option. Want to understand an issue better? Too bad, politics is throwing money left and right on news platforms and using AI to write biased articles to poison the well with information meant to emotionally charge you to their side. Pretty soon you’re going to have no idea whether pictures or videos of things that happened really happened and inevitably some of those will be viral marketing or other forms of coercion.

It’s kind of hard to see all these misuses of information and technology, especially ones like this which are clearly malicious in nature, and the complete inaction of government and corporations to regulate or stop this and not wonder how much worse it needs to get before people bother to take action.

I work for an academic medical center that’s fairly well known both locally and in the world. However, we haven’t been known for stellar queer health. In fact, I’d say we’ve been lacking, quite a bit. Recently the school put on a talk about the medical needs of people who have detransitioned and even featured a speaker who had themselves detransitioned. It was an absolutely fascinating talk, which highlighted some of the trends they have been seeing, talked about the many reasons that people tend to detransition (mostly social pressures, as described by Devon in the piece) and talked rather frankly about the kind of online harassment these individuals had experienced for detransitioning. It was really sad to hear about the harassment, although unfortunately not something that surprised me.

Having been in plenty of online trans spaces, it’s been clear to me that there are a lot of people out there struggling and many of them can lash out at others for plenty of extremely valid reasons. Being trans means you’re constantly under attack - people invalidate your experience which prompts defense, but perhaps more importantly one often has to fight tooth and nail and expend significant resources in order to get access to medical care which in many cases can be life saving. People often convince themselves that access is more prevalent if they fall into certain boxes. Trans medicalism is one such example, a viewpoint in which advocates distill transgenderism into a very medical definition. It’s entirely an issue of nature, with no nurture component, and it has well defined symptoms and resolutions. Trans medicalism is almost always purely binary and assumes there is an “ideal” endpoint of transitioning. What this often means, is that trans medicalists will attack people who don’t agree with their viewpoint and make the argument that promoting any other viewpoint or life experiences will result in jeopardizing their access to already limited medical care.

Trans medicalists causing infighting in the transgender field is just one such example from these trans spaces where infighting (and outsiders attacking) happens and there’s some level of harassment. Luckily there’s a lot of folks who will back you up if you are attacked by these folks who are often deeply scared and hurting, but there’s a lot less support for folks who talk about detransitioning. Detransitioning highlights the fact that there are folks who will undergo some level of transitioning and regret it and reverse course. This makes the idea of transitioning scary to cis folks, and it also gives them a reason to gatekeep it, at least until adulthood, an idea which can be catastrophic given the high suicide rates of trans folks, especially those who are young and watching their body change in ways which cause serious distress. However, the literature reveals that the vast majority of folks who do detransition do so because of social pressures (averaging around 80% of the primary reason and >90% of folks citing it as at least one of the reasons) which reinforces the narrative that social acceptance of trans folks is the most important factor to their success. Regardless, the perceived invalidation of transness (that some people could choose to reverse course) means that folks who try and talk about their experience of detransitioning often get attacked online.

It would be difficult to talk about the harassment that detransitioning folks get online without also addressing that there’s a weirdly large number of people making up personas online as a way to push their political agenda. Having moderated transgender spaces online, I have personally witnessed individuals who come back, time and time again, and spread a false story about detransitioning. I say that it’s a false story because some of these individuals have been discovered to post elsewhere on the internet about the this behavior and celebrating the fact that they are sowing discord. In fact, this happens so often, that in many trans spaces I’ve been in online, they either explicitly ban or more discreetly clean up this kind of noise, likely catching some folks who truly did transition and were not indulging a false persona online.

This was the first time I had even spotted an academic talk on detransitioning and it really signaled to me the beginning of acceptance and the emergence of a group from the shadows where they have been shoved, and to stumble across an article like this from a well known semi-public trans figure was really amazing for me to see. A lot of the narratives that Devon brought forth in this post highlight a lot of the struggles that trans folks deal with and puts words to some of the tough ideas we’ll need to struggle with as a society and as an in-group (a call to action for trans folks to more vocally/actively support detransitioning). It also highlights some more non-traditional paths and viewpoints on gender. As someone who is both non-binary and agender, I personally resonated with a lot that Devon brings to the table here. I don’t often talk very vocally about my own experience because I’ve both experienced and worry about the push back that narratives like mine and Devon’s can garner. For example, being agender, I don’t experience gender based feelings - gender dysphoria and euphoria are both things I do not experience. Many people might question why I decided to transition in the first place, and my answer might also be wholly unconvincing to many.

I suspect this subset of individuals is going to be thrust into the limelight (they already have, at times, by journalism and political forces) more presently, especially as we begin to better address their health needs. Mental health, especially given the amount of harassment they receive or the need to conceal their detransitioning, seems to be especially prescient. I’m glad that we have some figures such as Devon speaking out about their experience, and helping to draw attention to all the nuances that go into one’s decision to transition and how the experience itself can be a lot messier than the media makes it out to be.

I identify as non-binary and agender. In ways I resonate a lot with what Devon and you all have written in this thread, but figured I’d share a few words about my own experience. The closest thing I’ve found to gender euphoria (I don’t experience gender-specific feelings but this describes a positive experience that involves gender expression and the perception of gender by others) comes through the lens of transgressing gendered norms. In particular, I get a lot of delight out of causing confusion in others and making people reconsider what they think they know about gender. For example, one time at a party a person used she/her to refer to me and I simply replied “I’m not a girl”. Their response was to apologize and use he/him on me, to which I replied “I’m not a boy”. This poor confused soul then asked “well what are you then?” to which I replied in as upbeat and cute as I could muster “I’m a bunny!” I truly wish I had my phone at the ready to record the very visible thought process on this poor lad’s face as my words both disarmed and confused him. It is one of my most cherished memories.

I enjoy the experience of being difficult to put into boxes and there is no strong compelling force for me to align with all the gender expectations of the gender I’m presenting as. In fact, I often find myself adapting how I act as a direct response to how I am perceived. For example I tend to move my vocal inflection in the opposite direction of perception - upwards if people are reading me as a man and downwards if they’re reading me as a woman not because I want to fit into a third box but because I want people to question where the box starts and ends. Liberation from the boxes that we are placed in brings me joy, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to lay claim to an identity as a gender non-conforming binary gendered person, or even have an internal identity that’s a reflection of the external perception and pressures that brings.

Tagging @naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com and @flora_explora@beehaw.org because they might also like to see this

Ah yea, I thought the author did a great job touching on that

I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying. Could you rephrase?

You don’t need to be privileged yourself to be drawn into it’s appeal. Surely it’ll be there for you, if you just do the right things! After all you’re not all that different, right?

Ah, yeah, privilege

That sounds like a rough person to have to work with, but I think that’s more accurately described as a mismatch between values and priorities. He probably feels his time is more valuable than receiving a good grade. Well, either that or the idea of taking longer to create better quality is just undesirable to him for some reason.

love that for you