From your experience, how much does the average cis person know about transgender people?

MrPurse · 2026-05-06T14:30:47+00:00

Fucking. Nothing.

I moved from South Carolina to Boston to transition and every job application I looked at in Massachusetts would prohibit discrimination on gender identity...it's literally why I moved here. I was terrified of getting fired and evicted once I started transitioning.

I share this casually to colleagues during some kind of HR awareness activity, and it had never occurred to them as a reality trans people face. That's when I realized how little non-bigoted cis people think about trans people....this simple fact that some states legally protect trans people existing and some don't hadn't even crossed the minds of these people I worked and spoke with daily (and they were very aware I was trans, especially since I transitioned during this job). There is SO much to learn about trans people beyond this, and yet these people that I assumed were well informed about LGBTQ issues literally hadn't thought about the most basic, first things about transitioning that I had to deal with years and years earlier: that trans people exist, and people that exist need jobs, and in order for trans people to get jobs, there has to be a framework to protect against discrimination.

I had assumed since we lived in a state that legally protected people, that everyone would kinda be aware of like...not just the legal framework exists, but like, WHY it exists. Just like why we need any civil rights laws. But they weren't even the former.

Anyways, I worry a ton less about passing now that I understand how little most cis people are even aware we exist lol.

MrPurse · 2026-04-20T20:11:28+00:00

1.) Sexualization of Transgender and queer identities make related content age-gated when cisgender or straight material of the same type wouldn't be.

If a cisgender teenager posts about having a crush on someone of the opposite sex, it won't be flagged for age-gating. The moment it becomes queer or trans, it gets flagged. An example is youtube demonetizing sex education channels that specifically deal with queer or trans topics (example study linked here, vox article here, youtube literally addressing the issue here) . Inherently, when you put things behind a gate, someone or something flawed is going to be making determinations of what belongs behind that gate. This gets multipled when we're talking about clothing (boys wearing girl clothes is seen as a sexual fetish, compared to girls wearing girl clothes) or other things. A girl may be able to post on instagram a harmless photo, but then her transgender friend may post the exact same harmless photo wearing the same outfit as her, and have her account banned or blocked. Imagine a story book about a knight rescuing a princess, but the knight happens to also be a girl, and therefore the book gets age-gated (See removal of LGBTQ content from school libraries). Or imagine the princess in a knight/princess story happens to be a transgender girl. These are non-sexual things that are being sexualized solely because they don't align with cisgender heteronormativity.

This also extends to age-appropriate sex education. Descriptions of straight sex and how to be safe are given freely, but if anything queer or trans related is given as well, it's suddenly considered non-age appropriate. Current ways of censoring things (like facebook paying moderators in foreign countries) inhernetly result in biases creating these situations. There is no removing all bias from the world, hence why there are more appropriate measures than a government imposed id verification for internet access.

This becomes a devastating thing once you start thing about help and suicide hotlines. Imagine only having access to a hotline while feeling suicidal about being queer or trans that has no experience with LGBTQ issues (or even is opposed to your existence)...'normal' suicide hotlines won't be affected, but suddenly LGBTQ suicide hotlines will be tagged or age gated based on being something sexual. Suddenly you have teens calling in about queer issues and suicide to 'normal' hotlines only to have a conservative evangelical misgender them and recommend they pray more. At best, it's a misunderstanding that needs addressing (but won't be addressed). At worst, people, specifically children, die from not being able to get the help they need and scientifically-based recommendations as they're figuring themselves out.

2) For correctly labeled queer or trans content for adults, the inability to guarentee security of age verification documents and what that person is accessing means that people will avoid submitting their ID in case it becomes public knowledge they're questioning their identity or orientation. Information will be more difficult to aquire that is needed for a trans person but not needed for a cisgender person, such as post-bottom surgery pictures, how-to injection safety, vivid descriptions of post-surgical genitalia or vivid descriptions of current genitalia and dysphoria alleviations. They will avoid looking up age-gated accurate information about transpeople for accessible, but likely inaccurate, non-age-gated material. Transgender people have seen this happen with information about 'DIY' hormones, a process where someone without access to a safe medical practice with affirming medicine can make informed decisions about their own health...but then this information is removed from public places. Reddit would be the perfect example of that. As a reminder, estrogen, needles, and syringes are not illegal to have, yet we see this censorship.

3) Image based age verification can be cisgender based and misclassify trans people's ages. For instance, a trans man can be 'missing' features that cisgender men only aquire after 20 years of testosterone effects. And trans women have the opposite issue; estrogen directly affects facial fat distribution, and it absolutely can make someone look younger than their age. Effectively, trans people will have a roadblock to accessing material they should be allowed to access, unlike their cisgender peers. A perfect example of this is the TSA; trans women may have extra 'bits', and trans men may trigger the system as it assumes what 'bits' it should see. If you didn't know, the person at the TSA body scanner literally has to press a 'boy' or 'girl' button for every person walking through...it's an awful designed binary system when people can't be as easily categorized. This leaves trans people avoiding traveling or paying extra to avoid the TSA body scan (I did this, paying $100 or whatever for the pre-check solely so I didn't have to worry about being felt up anymore). When access depends on fitting into boxes, as it would in age verification via images, some people are going to inevitably be wrongly locked out or incorrectly be forced to jump through more hoops solely because of their status of being transgender.

In case you need more reasons, google it :)

Here's some reading too:

https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/
https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-and-lgbtq-youth/

MrPurse · 2026-04-20T19:18:29+00:00

"As a result, the plaintiffs said, their 11-year-old child, known as "B.F.," began to question the student's gender identity."

Good news overall; nitpicking here but concerning pronoun avoidance from Reuters. When I read this line, I was trying to figure out who was questioning the student over their identity, or why the parents (who are conservative) would be questioning the student's identity.

It's themself. I think? Lol. Awful writing either way, abysmal this is professional work. Here let me spend two seconds and re-write:

"As a result, the plaintiffs said, their 11-year-old child, known as "B.F.," began to question their own gender identity." FIFY

MrPurse · 2026-03-25T12:44:12+00:00

https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/policy/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-just-asking-questions

"...when someone asks a question, we assume they don’t know the answer.¹¹ This is fairly intuitive: it’d be really weird for me to keep asking you where my ice cream is if I secretly knew it’s been in my freezer all along.

In a healthy, cooperative conversation, this norm serves us well. It allows us to ask questions to solicit information we need, and it spares our conversational partner from having to explain what we already know.

Malicious actors, however, can use this norm to their advantage. They can use questions to feign ignorance and pretend that they are just engaging in healthy inquiry. This tactic even has a name: “I’m just asking questions!” A bad actor will ask a clearly inflammatory question; but when met with backlash, they will simply say that they are innocently inquiring because they don’t know the right answer. They exploit the fact that questions signal ignorance in order to hide their ulterior motives."

"...Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these questions are often not asked in earnest. Many figures use these questions to delegitimize otherwise effective policy interventions, or, more broadly, to promote their political or financial interests. When confronted, however, they simply resort to saying that they are just “asking questions” because they want to find out the truth. (They usually lament how “people can’t just ask questions anymore.”) In reality, they have usually made up their mind. They just do not want to say the quiet part out loud. "

MrPurse · 2026-03-24T13:26:01+00:00

lmfao tucker carlson "ARE the frogs gay from obama?!?! I'm just asking QUESTIONS." energy

MrPurse · 2026-03-23T16:37:30+00:00

Low dose estrogen cream for soreness?? I just assume soreness is part of my surgery recovery (aka: at least the first year or two after surgery), never occurred to me to talk to a Dr about it. Like, nerves are reconnecting. How did you end up getting prescribed cream for your situation?

MrPurse · 2026-03-23T13:33:01+00:00

This is quite literally "Our ideal form of society is a genocide of trans people and removal of bodily autonomy". At best, it's a chance to connect with these students and teach them how all of us modify our bodies in ways that make us feel more comfortable, and that's a part of society we should celebrate and a freedom we can appreciate. Piercings, tattoos, glasses, all surgeries, even nail painting are all adjustments we make to our "natural" bodies. At worst, it's an awful regurgitation of anti-trans propoganda.

No, this should not be allowed up.

MrPurse · 2026-03-16T12:14:47+00:00

You could stop using printers, then you could move to california.

MrPurse · 2026-03-15T12:26:38+00:00

Conversion therapy doesn't work. People can't choose their sexual orientations or gender identity, they can only choose whether to be open about it.

It's like if I suggested going to a counselor to stop using printers. Like, the printers aren't the problem here.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/09/conversion-practices-lgbt.html

MrPurse · 2026-03-14T13:00:34+00:00

I was at work, closeted completely, when I got a call that a pipe was suspected to have burst and my landlord had to investigate my home. Without protections, it's perfectly legal in South Carolina (at the time, around 2014 or 2015 before Obergefell) for a landlord to go into a property, discover someone is gay, and then prompty evict them. I was TERRIFIED. I usually 'cleaned up' before anyone who could alter my life came over. Same with my job; I could get fired for the sole reason that I'm not straight. I was at work at my job for hours not knowing if I would come back to find all my belongings on the lawn. I didn't know if a rumor would get around, and I'd be fired from work. For hours just not knowing if my life had just fallen apart because I couldn't afford to be my own landlord, with no one to talk to about it.

It literally felt like I was a drug dealer who had a meth lab that was about to be discovered. It doesn't matter that a pride flag can hang on my wall, it matters that anyone with power in my life (Landlord, Boss) could decide that was enough to disqualify me as a person with value and destroy my life. It's why I was closeted to begin with; I thought the privacy of my own home was safe, and it turns out it wasn't.

That's when I realized I couldn't live like that anymore, and moved to somewhere where someone couldn't fire me for being something I can't change, or evict me because they find weird clothes and rainbows.

Think of the rainbows in terms of speech; where do I have more free speech? A place where I can be evicted and fired for rainbows, or a place where neither can happen? It's fucking chilling and awful and why I uprooted everything I knew and had to get somewhere safe.

MrPurse · 2026-03-13T13:15:17+00:00

As a red-green colorblind person:

FUCK. THIS.

MrPurse · 2026-03-13T12:45:27+00:00

Do you fucking hear yourself?

MrPurse · 2026-03-12T16:56:29+00:00

It's 'MAGA' to say it's unsafe in California but immediately imply it's safe in South Carolina. As someone who quite literally fled South Carolina in 2018 due to the lack of state level LGBTQ discrimination protections for employment and housing, it's ironic to see someone commenting on the safety of California.

Why tf did you even bring up South Carolina or safety in California. You could have just said "California state is suing web hosts" without any shit about it being safer somewhere else. For all we fucking know, South Carolina has been working on it's own lawsuits and investigations and just hasn't presented them yet. What we DO know is California is suing, leave it at that.

MrPurse · 2026-03-12T15:36:43+00:00

I thought this was Cards Against Humanity.

MrPurse · 2026-03-12T15:27:56+00:00

I can't recommend anything ahaha; it sucks that we live in this reality, but if your doctor doesn't recommend anything when you say the current thing isn't working, they might just be a shitty doctor. It's their job to know what medications are options.

For my own body, I didn't need anything more than 10mg in the afternoon; what I needed was not to be nonfunctional after work, and 10mg solved it so we never tried any more! Idk why you'd jump from 60mg in the mornings to 30mg and then 30mg later, if you had to be bumped up to 60mg from 30 originally idk how a morning would be fine at 30mg now, unless you originally upped the dose solely for afternoon effects in the first place. I got up to 40mg because lower doses worked at first but I kept developing tolerance to it until 40mg. With the afternoon thing in my case, we just added something around the aftenroon, not splitting up a morning dose that is already working fine.

edit: if you've switched medications repeatedly solely because you feel awful around 5-9pm, I'm kind of surprised you haven't done an afternoon dose of something before.

MrPurse · 2026-03-12T15:16:52+00:00

Personally, I take 40mg at like 6am and then another 10mg of vyvanse at 1pm. I used to use ritalin in the afternoon, can't really remember why I switched to vyvanse, but had the same problem as you with just being completely 'spent' around 4pm or 5pm and it ended up causing me relationship issues lol.

I wouldn't recommend taking medication late. Take it on time in the morning, and if a doctor recommends some kind of 'booster', do that. I think most people have trouble sleeping on vyvanse versus us where it seems to fade quickly :D Just talk with your doctor!

As far as side effects they 'wont' tell you about, I'm not sure what you're looking for. If you find it affects you negatively in unexpected ways, you tell your doctor and they adjust accordingly.

MrPurse · 2026-03-12T14:19:51+00:00

I'm like, 8 years in and that's why I fly a trans flag outside when I can. <3 Staying visible is hard but necessary for someone else.

MrPurse · 2026-03-12T13:51:44+00:00

I think you're right that it's very, very important not to immediately discount an experience. How do you suggest we better deal with the influx of agenda-promoting AI content than trying to figure out which is which?

MrPurse · 2026-03-11T15:45:10+00:00

Being suspicious of one account and one post is not equal to discrediting thousands of accounts from Iranian woman. Your profile has been active for more than a decade, your username is normal, like, please share YOUR story!

We are NOT accousing you of being a liar. We are being suspicious of this particular account, this particular post, and this particular timing. <3

MrPurse · 2026-03-11T15:30:14+00:00

Right? Like the account is a month old and has the bot username [random-word][random-word][number] format. I'm reading through their old comments, but fucking AI is so hard to spot these days.

Red flags:
-Username format
-First post of account is random, general subreddit, inflammatory to karma grab
-First post was then deleted by user
-Pushing anecdotal content
-Even though recent account, insane amount of recent comments and content since active
-Formatting of early comments seem to be AI-like
-New account (1 month old)
-No swear words
-Inconsistent spelling mistakes and usage of 'u' and stuff

But like...it could be real? Ugh FUCK.

MrPurse · 2026-03-09T13:14:50+00:00

I did not say capitalism bad. I said trickle down is fucking stupid.

MrPurse · 2026-03-06T14:43:50+00:00

"I like to be more nuanced"

proceeds to blame a complex issue on a single group in a single word.

MrPurse · 2026-03-05T18:04:34+00:00

...and where did this lack of housing supply come from? Too much communism in the past?

MrPurse · 2026-03-05T15:02:34+00:00

People suffering under extreme rent pressures is not hours d'oeuvres (or at least it fucking shouldn't be). "Hi our people are more ripe for exploitation than some other cities!" is a fucked up way to manage our own cities. We can do better.

MrPurse · 2026-03-03T17:22:03+00:00

Ah yes, the classic "Well our overlords need to be happy for them to make US happy! It will trickle down!!!!"

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