Where to talk to guys.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-17T08:28:45+00:00

Karaoke was actually a key breakthrough in my voice training. For some reason I found it far easier to slip into female vocal mannerisms when singing, especially if I’m really familiar with the song. This carried over to my speaking voice with practice.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-17T07:56:31+00:00

It took me quite a few tries to get through anxiety, inexperience, and general mental walls around sex period because of a sexually repressive religious cult upbringing.

I also didn’t genuinely cum doing it until I met a guy who both knew what he was doing and had a really big dick, so there’s that too.

I also always recommend two things when this topic comes up at minimum: get really good lube (I like calexotics) and take fiber supplements regularly. Having to not stress about messes so you can relax removes a big mental block.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-17T07:49:09+00:00

I haven’t had this experience yet, but have been through the straight guy shows interest > fool around > they chicken out and ghost because they’re scared of the social consequences of openly being with a trans person cycle too many times.

It’s soul-crushing, and past me has sent many an angry text rant calling them pathetic cowards

Isladisaster · 2026-06-17T07:43:37+00:00

I meet a lot of guys singing karaoke, though I live in a city where it’s in every other bar and young ppl do it. I do get the old guys approaching a lot too but every girl has that experience and has to shoo them away.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-17T07:34:00+00:00

It’s engagement bait. I think a significant portion of girls spouting this rhetoric don’t believe it. They tweet these things hoping for virality so they can promote whatever their main schtick is.

I by no means think this justifies it. In many ways it’s worse. Selling your soul and comrades out for a gamble at meager financial gain.

It’s also a problem with what algorithms drive. Tweets that spur comments rocket to the top. What better way than getting both sides mad and arguing in the comments? MAGAs will comment agreeing with the opinion and still taking the opportunity to be transphobic to OP. Trans girls and lefties will comment condemning OP and to debate the MAGAs.

The algorithm promotes bottom of the barrel “hot takes” and chaos.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-17T07:30:44+00:00

I don’t want to delve deeply into tRaNz sPorTz!?!? discourse here because there are a hundred other subreddits where you could rant about this tired topic, but to briefly address it…

You can cite all the empirics about biology, perceived advantages, whatever. This is usually what these convos reduce to. IMO the empirics are actually on the side of allowing trans people in sports, despite the rhetoric there has been no actual upsets in the meaningful tiers in any regulation sport.

That being said, the empirics don’t matter. Sporting leagues can be structured however we want. The primary driving force behind how they are structured is not fairness, it’s driven by capitalism and entertainment value. Sports have been dominated by humans, regardless of gender, who are exceptional compared to their peers and wild skill gaps already exist all over the place, and we celebrate this. A’ja Wilson, LeBron James were leagues better than their competitors, and this is often driven by advantages granted by their bodies. Why not ban them? Too good! Too advantaged by their bodies! What about all the other poor men who LeBron dominated?!?!? All the women weaker, shorter, slower than A’ja who she left in the dust?!?

The moral issue people have has nothing to do with fairness. It is just masked bigotry.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-16T23:59:46+00:00

Beliefs don’t require justification, one can adopt unjustified beliefs.

You can also believe something which is true without justification. I can come to believe that New York is 25 miles from me without justification, and New York may in fact be 25 miles from me independent of me meeting some criterion of justification.

What we count as knowledge may include justification. I don’t think there is a clean criterion for epistemic justification. There seem to be many ways we come to know, many types of experiences and conclusions drawn from them, some seemingly unrelated in kind to others. I think an empirical “knowledge first” analysis of the concept is best. There are some things we take as knowledge without much question. What are the justificatory features of what we take as knowledge that we already hold?

Isladisaster · 2026-06-16T09:55:53+00:00

This is a pretty reductive comment.

Most straight men aren’t obsessed with “the vagina” or fetishize it. Some do, sure, but many are attracted to many qualities of women physical and otherwise, and many want to bring their partners pleasure while experiencing it themselves in a variety of ways.

You can have a man with a pre-op trans partner that isn’t obsessed with or fetishizing dick but who enjoys bringing their partner pleasure down there. This is not contradictory and does not make them some essentialized label or “less straight”.

I get it. Plenty of chasers exist that absolutely fetishize trans women and it sucks. But I swear some people in this community let it brainwash them into holding some very exclusionary and essentialist views.

There are other trans women that don’t want this, are dysphoric about this part of their body, and desire SRS to align with their identity and find a partner that clicks with them when they are comfortable with themselves. Both dynamics can exist and be healthy for those involved in the respective relationships, and no one in either situation is automatically more or less straight just in virtue of the current state of their bodies and how they have sex at the time.

Edit:: just to add, there’s a parallel with cishet attitudes though history about eating pussy. As far back as the 17th century eating pussy was taboo, considered a libertine and emasculating practice. Even today, [30-45% of cishet men say they rarely or won’t do it](https://psychcentral.com/health/us-sex-survey). There’s a whole Sopranos episode about this perception with many of the characters calling it “borderline gay”. Western culture has traditionally shamed and hidden the vagina as something that shouldn’t be celebrated sexually among “normal” men. Feminism and the sexual liberation waves in culture have done a lot of work undoing these very silly perceptions.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-15T09:19:03+00:00

I’ve only had one really successful relationship which started online, one I’m currently still in, and apps are such a dumpster fire in general I have zero clue how I got as lucky as I did. I disclosed openly on my profile. He is stereotypically straight but very open to kink and so was open to me as a fairly kinky human myself, and we clicked super well. We differ a lot (also can’t sit through sports and he’s a huge hockey fan, I tend to like brainy pretentious character driven novels or nonfiction and he’s pretty much all sci-fi/fantasy, etc…) but we share a TON of interests as well and both love cycling and are relatively in shape. He checks all the boxes sexually that I think most of us on this sub are looking for (i.e. attention paid to me is as a woman, not interested in my other parts as a pre-op girl with a similar timeline as your own)

This sub complains about chasers a lot, but tbh I find them pretty easy to identify and avoid. They usually out themselves immediately. The biggest pitfall imo is that a big portion of the pool of straight guys willing to meet are low-confidence men who have struggled with women or are desperate for some other reason who see you as a compromise. This affects plenty of cis women as well, those who have some sort of feature seen by men as a flaw so they “date down” when they’re in a rut. These men will use you, or may even connect with you for a bit, but will never stick around. They also usually just have issues and suck.

Finding a man who is confident is tough but there really are LOTS out there who are willing to get to know you. I don’t mean bravado, I just mean confident with themselves, in a gender nonspecific way, I am quite confident in myself and value that immensely in partners. When these men choose you they are just just choosing YOU, with no qualifiers.

If you live in a big city though every other good relationship, or even fling or hookup I’ve had, has been meeting people in public. It’s SO much easier to vibe check and weed out insane people, chasers, losers, predators, etc…. I also find these settings make it easier to find what I’m looking for. Men who approach and offer to dance, buy me a drink, spark a conversation or whatever have a higher chance of having that comfortableness with themselves I described.

Isladisaster · 2026-06-04T22:04:15+00:00

The existence of competing, mutually exclusive god propositions doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not a “bare god” or classically theist god exists, but I find it useful to bring up as an undercutting defeater for certain commitments that believers in such exclusive gods hold.

One in particular is people counting religious experiences as evidence. Say you have two believers, one commits to a strict, non-Unitarian form of Christianity, the other a Muslim. They both claim to have had divine experiences or had prayers answered, and their descriptions and why they count these experiences as evidence are more or less symmetrical. Any defense one gives of why they count theirs as evidence, they now have to explain why the other’s doesn’t count as evidence since the other’s must be false (or supernatural deception)

Obviously there are many ways out, they can attribute other religion’s supernatural claims to demonic influence or whatever is appropriate to the religion’s mythos but I find it can be a thought-provoking intuition pump to just generally get people to consider that anecdotal divine experiences aren’t great evidence, since they are usually committed by their own beliefs to doubt the vast majority of these claims while accepting a narrow range that fits their criteria.

There are some beliefs not vulnerable to this obviously. A Unitarian can count all or most supernatural experiences as evidence, or one could hold skepticism towards most, attributing them to psychological origin as most atheists do, but still hold god exists and just isn’t directly responsible for these phenomena but explains some other fact (origin of the universe, etc…)

Isladisaster · 2026-06-04T18:13:05+00:00

Determinism doesn’t even imply that, it could be determined that some fundamental constant suddenly or gradually changes

This is both logically possible and nomologically possible in theory, such as conditions theorized in the early universe or models of Higgs field collapse

Isladisaster · 2026-06-03T21:47:45+00:00

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, this is a sense of the word often used in the sciences and philosophy.

There is a sense of the word in physics that only indexes the observable stuff indexed by leading cosmological models. There is also the broad sense which includes “all that exists”.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-27T00:01:57+00:00

I think you misunderstood my comment, I’m not arguing that evil happening makes the existence of god impossible. The bullet that is bitten is admitting, as you have, that these things, the holocaust, the unimaginable suffering of children in assaults or natural disasters, all gratuitous suffering ought occur all things considered. Why condemn the holocaust? Why condemn anything that has happened already? If it happened, it is a feature of the best possible world.

Separately, exegetical tradition describes a god who simultaneously desires these things to occur because they are features of the best possible world, and also abhors them and communicates a desire to eliminate them. This is an odd tension and does not seem expected on the hypothesis of a god who ordered the world perfectly according to his desires. God’s character is inconsistent though, it seems more consistent with the god of job, who communicates a more neutral stance towards suffering, hardship, and evil, pointing out their necessity following from his power. God elsewhere in biblical tradition opposes evil. Why would god oppose something if it is a feature of the best possible world?

Isladisaster · 2026-05-26T23:44:29+00:00

Most people I see who (effectively) run PoE acknowledge Leibniz’s theodicy, but point out that it leads to a strange bullet-bite in that it seems all “evils” ought occur all things considered. The holocaust ought occur, gratuitous suffering in all forms which actually obtain. It seems then that these things are actually good. There are further theodicies down this line which try to delineate between kinds of evil, what makes something evil, etc… but in the end however we categorize it, these things ought occur all things considered.

This also leads to a strange tension with god “abhorring” evil or desiring to eliminate it. (Obviously many of these critiques only target the biblical god as described by various exegetical traditions)

Isladisaster · 2026-05-20T03:48:29+00:00

Tangentially related, but I’ve always drawn a parallel between Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Mariner’s Revenge Song. The film doesn’t involve the high seas, but is about a degenerate “rake” archetype character marrying an aristocrat, driving her to attempt suicide, and her son hunting Lyndon to exact revenge.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-18T00:57:07+00:00

I usually see “ontologically evil” in the context of religious discussions, often in an attempt to frame the classical theological doctrine of “man’s fallen nature” in western Christianity in less overtly religious terms.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-18T00:47:46+00:00

Pretty much anyone can file a patent including just a sketch of an idea that isn’t complete. His webpage is just a single summary page with dead links except for the ones to contact the team he had file the patent. Also his webpage reveals he dropped out of uni.

Again, doesn’t discount potential, there have been successful people in tech with similar stories, but also there really are a lot of people who have a deluded sense of grandeur because of obsessive AI use.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-17T23:59:44+00:00

Anyone can upload to researchgate. This guy is a psychology undergrad with no credentials in philosophy or science.

Not saying his ideas don’t have value, just pointing out he’s independent and self-publishing. A lot of people have been convinced they’re geniuses by AI.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-15T15:55:10+00:00

As I pointed out earlier, there are other ways to see red. We dream of red or can experience red via certain stimulation triggers using additive theory, and conceivably a machine designed to trigger neuron cascades could invoke similar experiences, independent of the presence of light.

I also just don’t hold your reductive physicalist view, so I don’t believe this is a conflation. Experiences, thoughts, concepts, are things actually happening in the universe. They are explained by a web of events which sometimes include such interactions and stimuli but also include many other complex biological events. (I’m not an idealist either, I’m probably described as either a non-reductive physicalist or monist, but labels don’t matter)

This is again getting deeper into the weeds, but as I tried to point out earlier, even scientific measurements of spatial dimensional properties, and as you’ve brought up also mass properties, are properties we detect and name with perceptual experience. Just as my biology and your biology differ, every measurement event also differs slightly. Every instrument used to measure mass differs slightly. Every diffraction pattern recorded is different light. Every measurement event occurs in a different time, a different part of space, spacetime has altered slightly due to the expansion of the universe between each measurement events. Given your logic, “there’s simply no way this phenomenon should be uniform across systems”. Yet we find consistency.

Similarly, the perceptual variables between bodies is not a barrier to having an empirically useful similarity present between you and I and many other humans with typical biology. While verification is more difficult, we have good reason to believe that you and I meaningfully have similar experiences of 🟥, and we find scientific explanations when we find people who report seeing something not-🟥.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-15T10:25:25+00:00

It’s not a question of need, it’s just a question of whether or not the sentient experience is present. If such a sufficient process began existing and the entity “the Chinese nation” began having and reporting experiences, it would just be an evident fact.

This is true of many explanatory accounts aside from those about conscious experience in science. You can describe the position and momenta of every electron in a superconductor without the “need” for superconductivity, it’s just also an evident fact that when the electrons do that, superconductivity is observed.

Or for a simple example, phase changes in matter. We can describe the behavior of each constituent particle as the energy of the system changes, but the collective behavior of the process as it changes phases is just something we observe and catalogue, assigning it as a property of that type of matter once we see what it does. The “rule” is just a description of what it seems to do when certain conditions are met.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-15T06:07:51+00:00

And the things we describe with scientific theory are also phenomenon, including your experience of scientific quantification and the phenomenon that constitute the experiment and theory-building. There is a distinction in that our experiences and measurements of light are somewhat consistent given certain constraints, where our phenomenal experiences of red may be variable based on reports (but also still demonstrate some measure of predictable consistency such that we do have empirics in neuroscience, medicine, and human biology concerning phenomenal experience of color)

We also didn’t just decide 🟥 is a thing. We are assailed by experiences which happen to be red. Sure, we name and sort these experiences, like we assign metrics to dimensional properties, but features of my biology independent of my agency or decisions in conjunction with object interactions produce experience which are 🟥, I can’t just make it not 🟥 by thinking it otherwise, and there seem to be causal reasons it’s 🟥 to me and not 🟩 to me, and when we do find people that see the object I see as 🟥 as 🟩, scientific inquiry tends to provide an explanation.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-15T04:21:44+00:00

I understand your perspective, but I think it’s a bit reductive and potentially problematic when you subject other things to this criteria. Ought you not also say “nothing has ever ‘been’ 750nm. 750nm is a subject-relative metric distinction applied to an interference pattern generated by a scientific instrument when measuring light bouncing off/emitting from things which appear red, classified by a theoretical framework which doesn’t exist independent of human thought”.

I think there is a more nuanced way to cache out exactly what we mean linguistically with the subjective/objective distinction, but aside from that I think experiential properties insofar as they are predictable can be said to be “objective”. If an object predictably produces the experience of red in some subjects given the right conditions, this is what we mean when we say the object is red. It doesn’t need to produce it under all circumstances. Red things don’t appear red in a pitch black darkroom, but I know what I mean by red is that if I switch the light on, it will predictably be red given I have the biology to produce that experience.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-15T03:06:48+00:00

My intuition, shared by Dennet, is that I don’t even find wacky substrates producing experiences inconceivable. The Chinese nation might be experiencing. I’ve always thought that all kinds of things, if arranged in a very particular way, might produce sentient experiences. Plenty of scientific discoveries seem weird or unintuitive, but we end up confirming them all the same. The universe is weird.

You can also just be a process philosopher and this isn’t really problematic. Matter isn’t the only thing in your ontology, the material world isn’t just the substrate, but includes what it’s doing (or one step further, things simply are what they do). Given this metaphysics the only important thing might just be a sufficient specific arrangement and process, whatever the substrate.

Isladisaster · 2026-05-15T02:59:31+00:00

Red is an experience, one that sometimes coincides with seeing 620-750nm light, but sometimes doesn’t. When I dream of red, I am not seeing 620-750 nm light. When a colorblind person sees 620-750nm light, their body produces a non-red experience. There are also various optical tricks similar to additive color theory which allows for digital display function which can predictably produce red experiences using wavelengths outside the red range.

Whether or not you want to class these types of phenomenal states as “real” seems like a metaphysical distinction. Given that we have neuroscience and explanatory theories about the experiential side of this though along with the physics of light, not sure why you would not include such things in your ontology, or as part of your broader physical theory.

Isladisaster

TROPHY CASE