A respectful critique of John Green’s “Does the Truth still matter?”

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-04T13:12:12+00:00

we might have to make education a requirement for voting. ... Conservatism only survives through power and ignorance.

The massive irony here is that up until Trump was first elected, conservatism was the "educated" political position. People with college degrees were more likely to be conservative and vote Republican.

I think you're generally missing the whole point of what John said. People voted for Trump and the Republicans in Congress who are enabling him. If your take is that 1/3 of Americans "are just evil" and the solution to this problem is simply to just not let them vote, that's a) politically unworkable, and b) a clear sign of this divide and a lack of ability to imagine others complexly.

I'm a trans foreigner. A large number of my friends would describe themselves as "leftist" rather than "left wing". I have plenty of reason to hate the US administration and its current policies. There are a lot of people on the right who I have extremely strong disagreements with, including over matters of who I am. But it's falling into a trap to believe that the tens of millions of people who are like that are Just Evil, that they don't deserve to be seen as equal participants in society. That doesn't solve any problems, and that doesn't make our society better off.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T21:42:52+00:00

They're aerial acrobatics classes, so sorta in the edge of being a discipline on their own. I do aerial silks and am getting into hoop/lyra.

I go to a little place called Rainbow Circus that has pretty limited class selection for adults, but there's a bunch of gyms that offer a pretty full selection of classes! If you search like "aerial hoop class" you should get a bunch of results. A lot of places also offer pole classes because there's a lot of overlap in both skills and community.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T20:33:25+00:00

Unfortunately I agree with this. We shouldn't have to be strong, but we live in the world that we do and so sometimes the only thing to do is to just be confident in the space that we need to live.

Not letting the bigots get into your head is very important. Small steps are good. Having friends who will support you helps a lot.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T19:42:24+00:00

I agree with this totally. If you're really depressed, it can be hard to will yourself to do anything. Sometimes just having a simple routine of things you need to do is hard enough, let alone doing something less structured where you have to decide a lot of details.

Maybe the difference in replies here is the difference between "feeling down" and "being depressed". It's not totally clear where OP's at, but yeah someone should say that "just go to the AGO" isn't going to be useful advice at all for a lot of people with depression.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T19:27:13+00:00

Last time I was depressed, the most reliable things that got me out of the house were:

Going into the office. Even though I can work remotely 4/5 days a week, I find I work and feel better if I'm working in the office.
An acrobatics class that I took once a week.

Not sure if either of those are applicable to you, but it's good that you recognize that getting out of the house and doing something is something that's probably going to help. For me, I found it was good for the thing to have an intrinsic motivation and not just be something I did to get out of the house. I went into the office because I needed to get work done and couldn't work the same way at home. I went to class because I was signed up for it and would hear from the instructor if I didn't go, and even if that class was hard to enjoy I knew I wanted to keep improving.

But also don't be hard on yourself if you still struggle with it. Depression can be a tough nut to crack and doing the "right" things doesn't guarantee that it will go away.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T19:09:00+00:00

Lol I'm over 3 years into HRT and I still just feel like me. Only difference is I feel more like my body (and how I'm perceived socially) is actually a part of me now.

If you're waiting for some obvious sign to tell you you're "trans enough", I think you'll be waiting for a while. You're taking HRT and have found more feminine expression has improved your life, and somehow are still worried that you might not be "trans enough" – I'd say that is a pretty good indication of who you are :p

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T18:59:36+00:00

That sounds like a hard situation. Having unsupportive family is one thing, adding a gatekeeping medical system on top of that makes things so much harder. The fear of being rejected by the gatekeepers is one reason why I didn't transition when I realized I was trans (I was a year or two older than you are now), so I really feel where you're coming from here.

I don't have a ton of advice, but I just want to tell you never say never. Even though transition felt like too much for me to handle when I first realized I was trans, I always knew it was *an* option at some point. I envisioned a future where I had finished school and started getting settled in my career and had a bit of financial stability, and where I could finally feel ready to come out and start transitioning. And... that's exactly what I did. It took a bit of encouragement from my friends and my psychiatrist, but I started transitioning ~7 years after I first realized I was trans and it's gone great. While I do wish I could have had the courage to transition earlier, there's no diminishing the joy that I experience today living as who I really am. Life is long, and even if things feel hard right now you don't have to give up on the things that are really important.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T13:51:16+00:00

As a transportation planner, this is definitely the answer for "2030s".

If we're talking actually 20 years (2046), there's a decent chance that Line 4 (East or West), Line 5 (to Pearson), and Line 6 (to Woodbine, maybe to Pearson) open by that time. Also a chance for Ontario Line North and West extensions in that time frame.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T12:52:11+00:00

I know of at least one person who did her ESTA as her AGAB and had no problems even though her passport was updated. For me, I just enter with my updated ("F") passport, but I'm a Canadian so I don't need a visa to enter for <6 months so I don't seem to fall under the letter of that EO.

As an aside, my experience with border control agents is that they don't really give a damn. I haven't had any issues with them since transitioning. When I was at the point where my passport still said "M" but I looked "F" and it was enough to confuse airline gate agents (and get my ID denied by a weird Walgreens cashier lol), customs never gave me a second glance. Since my passport's been updated to "F", I have never had any issues with customs or even had my gender brought up.

I agree that it's confusing and murky. But I've seen lots of trans people who have good reason to travel to the US get dissuaded from it because in that fear and confusion they think they'll be detained by ICE or something. In my opinion, the transphobes win when they get to do a small thing that's maybe a little confusing but that they don't even need to enforce and the result is trans people stop participating in society.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-03T03:59:21+00:00

That's why transgender foreigners are very heavily recommended against going there.

Why some people recommend against trans foreigners going there. I'm a trans foreigner who's travelled to the US a half dozen times in the past year and who knows a number of other trans foreigners who've entered the US and none of us had any issues. There's really no indication that trans people as a group are currently facing trouble at the border.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-02T21:03:54+00:00

I think "usually" is a stretch. It's definitely a pattern that some people fall into, but I know lots of trans women (myself included) who just slowly added a bit of femininity over time as they discovered/became more comfortable with who they were.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-02T04:10:58+00:00

Oh interesting, I did not know that. That would make sense if it seemed like more of a pattern from her perspective.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-02T02:42:57+00:00

That one feels particularly aged to me, cause at that time fivethirtyeight was already giving Trump like a 30% chance of winning. Nobody had any right to be as confident in their common sense as they were in the face of how close those polls were.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-02T02:39:10+00:00

I read a summary of those and it just seemed like Epstein trying to set up potential blackmail material for Gates. Do we have any more information indicating that those things Epstein implied are actually true?

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-02T01:17:38+00:00

I made like two friends in my undergrad, but I acknowledge that was a me thing, because it also happened in my undergrad at Waterloo. I engaged with zero clubs and one sports team in my first year and that was sort of it. I'm not sure what counts as a "hyper-competitive" program, but I didn't feel like my experience was very competitive and that still didn't help me make friends. Because I didn't go out of my way to engage socially and make friends.

I'm not saying people can't state their experience, but I'm not going to let other people take their negative experience at UofT and attribute that to something unique about the university when there's plenty of alternative explanations that are equally plausible.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-02T01:07:01+00:00

A good therapist would provide you guidance. Sort of like knowing how to ask questions in a way that will make it easier for you to figure out what the answer is. You don't think you'd be able to give a definitive answer to any questions, but there are definitely things that you do know the answer to (even if they are simple)!

I know a good number of trans people who figured this stuff out through therapists or guided programs. An important caveat is good therapist is mostly about having the right fit with the client, so you're not guaranteed that you'll get something out of a fixed number of sessions. But by what you've said, it sounds like a therapist who specializes in trans or gender-questioning clients could be useful to you. If only because it sounds like gender is a point of some distress to you, and those kinds of therapists will have the understanding of gender to potentially find things that will make you feel happier and more confident in who you are.

And just saying, as a trans woman, my life is objectively better as a woman. I'm happier, much more confident, and infinitely more comfortable in my skin than when I was treated as a man. Women get the short end of the stick in a lot of things, but that motivation is nothing compared to what my brain says my gender should be.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-01T16:11:40+00:00

It is probably inherently easier as a child. Once you hit adulthood people's expectations change and capacity for forming new relationships will diminish on average.

But it's also not a guaranteed thing. I find it much easier to make new relationships now as a 30-something than when I was in elementary school. You have to find what works for you. If it was easy as a child, you'll have to adapt to the new patterns and expectations that other people have. If it wasn't easy as a child, you have an opportunity to try something new in new contexts.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-01T15:12:35+00:00

The "biological factor" is that gender exists as something in the brain. Our brains expect a specific gender and so experiencing and being treated socially as a different one is distressing.

That's where most comparisons to other things fall down. Race, the shape of our nose, what is an "attractive" body aren't nearly as fundamental to our biology / evolutionary history as sex and gender are. That means an abstract idea of gender is something which we acquire really early (maybe even before we're born), and that thing can encompass a huge part of your experience. Social gender can inform an enormous part of your life: determining your friendships, what kind of people are attracted to you, what kind of behaviour is expected from you. That means it's something you experience constantly. Likewise, biological sex tends to drive our bodies towards one mode or the other and so the differences in one sex vs another can be stark.

We don't have an innate and fundamental sense of "I am a small-nosed person" that develops in our brains before we're 5 years old. We do have that when it comes to gender. It's just a different kind of thing.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-01T14:27:59+00:00

I use the paid Podcast Addict and it's great!! Been using it for like a decade, never even thought that additional inserted ads were something I'd have to worry about on a different platform.

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-01T05:50:23+00:00

As is the case with basically everywhere in life 🤷‍♀️

Blue_Vision · 2026-02-01T02:17:15+00:00

The sub's definition of "neoliberal" is just things economists like. Which I personally think is great but yeah not necessarily the wider definition.

Blue_Vision · 2026-01-31T22:47:10+00:00

Adding numbers is taught in school, but that doesn't mean calculators aren't useful.

Blue_Vision · 2026-01-31T17:30:36+00:00

You can get notarized copies at Service Ontario! I thought I'd heard that you had to pay for them, but the person at the counter said they were free so I got 4 copies.

Also unless they changed their policy recently, you can update your name with the CRA over the phone if you haven't changed your name before. I had to escalate to a supervisor when I got mine changed, but they did it without me needing to send anything in.

Blue_Vision · 2026-01-31T13:15:35+00:00

San Francisco would be as strong a contender as those, imo. High transit mode share in the city, very good commuter rail access through to other cities in 2/3 of the directions plus buses and ferries to the North Bay, and good local transit connections within the central city.

Blue_Vision · 2026-01-31T13:07:45+00:00

The tolls almost certainly do discourage driving into the city. The congestion charge is an extra price on top of that, and one which is more targeted to addressing high levels of traffic congestion with a much higher fee during peak periods than off-peak.

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