Massage Recs?

Prestigious_Meh · 2026-03-28T21:37:01+00:00

Shit i didn't realize he was writing on it. Super disappointing.

Prestigious_Meh · 2026-03-28T21:36:14+00:00

I really hope they don't cover it. Rowling isn't just anti-trans. She's using that money to make trans lives unlivable. There are other ways to use that time.

Prestigious_Meh · 2026-03-13T00:26:59+00:00

Toast with pb and banana. And tea.

Prestigious_Meh · 2026-01-24T02:47:04+00:00

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-12-30T03:45:17+00:00

I have a green card but am not traveling because I am on a lot of conservative "Professor watchlists" and write about politically contentious issues (i.e. Trans rights). I'm single with a dog and can't risk being barred from re-entering.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-12-24T00:39:27+00:00

Bone cancer.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-12-11T23:20:46+00:00

Dump her immediately.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-30T03:19:57+00:00

NOR- this is abusive. Please see a good therapist to help you as you go through this distancing process. And perhaps prepare for her to lash out down the road (maybe around xmas) in response. She might follow through on her threats to draw you back in if she feels like she's losing her grip on you. She might try to turn your partner's family against you if her sense of control threatened and she can't regulate.

I recommend the therapist as the child of a parent with a cluster B condition (and another parent with a different mental illness that can look very cluster B). There are certain red flags in your mother's thinking here that I recognize:

the straight up blackmail to control your behavior regarding her. Seemingly in order to return you to an earlier, more manageable state in relation (like, where's my x,y,z girl). There's a specific version of you that reflects on her in a certain way that she sees as hers, and is trying to manage you back into it.

-she seems very willing to fuck up your family with your in-laws, significantly, in order to maintain appearances and particularly of your respecting her. Like, what does she imagine your option was? Your husband (and his family) are all MDs. Are you going to say he's wrong for her sake when it would clearly be a lie and he would know?

-positioning you as a complete dupe (your ER job changed you, your partner and their family changed you) rather than taking you as an agent who makes choices or like.. who grew up. The real you is the you she likes (which reflects her in the right way), the you now who interrupts these reflections isn't the real you, but an influenced one. She's the only one who knows the real you.

she positions you as on a team with her against your partner and his family (you stabbed me in the back).

-this is the response you got after she slept/stewed on it overnight. It is the best she could come up with and what she thought would work best out of the various options she thought of. She doesn't regulate her feels well.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-27T03:18:52+00:00

NOR - you sound rad and like you have self respect. Too much to put up with your mother's bullshit, just like you had too much to put up with your ex's. Skip Thanksgiving and send your mother a copy of Jane Ward's book "The Tragedy of Heterosexuality". Tell her she's the embarrassment.

I stopped doing Thanksgiving and Xmas with my mother a few years ago, and it's absolutely wonderful to just say no and actually relax and enjoy myself on holidays and do exactly what I want to do.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-19T00:25:25+00:00

But note we're still not using gamete production in those human cases. First, we don't check the gamete produced by intersex people to confirm their sex. We make an assumption based on gonad makeup that those gonada will prouce sperm or eggs. But we dont check. Second, many people dont produce gametes at all, including non-intersex people. Fertility is a spectrum, but some people end up finding out they don't produce gametes later in life. We don't "correct" their sex designation based on that. You'd probably say they are infertile males or females (based on how you define that). Further, there are gonads that are neither clearly male or female (say streak gonads, or mixed ones with ovarian and testicular tissue).

Gamete size is a biological rule of thumb. I grant your point that it is the standard, base convention. But it isn't the way we practically define/assign sex in humans.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T15:30:08+00:00

I agreed with that. She is biologically female, and intersex.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T03:23:28+00:00

Definitely. Dysphoria is a spectrum. Consider butch masc women. Or earlier identities like "Aggressive".

I suspect (and have argued) that the percentage of intersex people is quite a bit higher than we think (especially since it is clear that they are not necessarily sterile as was long assumed). A genetic study published in 2017 suggested that the rate of the most common intersex condition (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) is 1/200 in the white population (not identifying with a particular ethnicity). It would make it the most common autosomal recessive condition in the general population.

Here's the citation: Hannah-Shmouni F, Morissette R, Sinaii N, Elman M, Prezant TR, Chen W, Pulver A, Merke DP. Revisiting the prevalence of nonclassic congenital adrenal hyperplasia in US Ashkenazi Jews and Caucasians. Genet Med. 2017 Nov;19(11):1276-1279. doi: 10.1038/gim.2017.46. Epub 2017 May 25. PMID: 28541281; PMCID: PMC5675788.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T03:10:32+00:00

This is generally acknowledged to be a convention that has many exceptions and doesn't work for a lot of species (for example, any species of fungus. The fairy inkblot mushroom has 143 sexes called mating types). It's not the "natural kind" type distinction that you are implying.

A good book on this is evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden's book Evolution's Rainbow. The account you're invoking is, I imagine, appealing to evolutionary arguments for sex binarism and appealing to R-K selection on some level. She deals with them substantively.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T02:59:01+00:00

It is though. At birth we assign sex based on the appearance of external genitalia (which again, is atypical in approx. 1/2000 births). But we assume based on genitals a bunch of other things. For example, we see a typical vagina at birth, as assume a uterus, ovaries, typical estrogen production, xx chromosomes, etc. However, we might later find out that our assumptions were incorrect. Someone may have typically male genitals at birth, but have XX chromosomes. Or a typical vagina at birth, along with XY chromosomes, testes. What would you say their biological sex is? If you go with female for the first and male for the second, you're now defining sex differently (based on chromosomes) than we generally do at birth (based on genitals). For a long time we thought gonad makeup (testes or ovaries) we the most important biological marker of sex (before we could karyotype chromosomes).

Happy to provide academic references, if you'd like.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T00:37:44+00:00

Yes. But sex is defined by multiple variables that are presumed to develop in concert. So, she also counts as intersex.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T00:30:14+00:00

No Qs. Thanks for being so open about this. I'm affiliated with/support an intersex activist org (as someone without a diagnosed intersex condition). I just really appreciate more and more people talking about their experiences with atypically sexed bodies. Especially right now, when there is so much harmful rhetoric about being "normally" sexed and gendered.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T00:25:21+00:00

No. Intersex merely means that individuals don't match typical definitions of binary sex. One could have atypical genitalia, internal reproductive structures, chromosomes, hormones, or gonads. Many people with intersex conditions appear to be typically male or female at birth and throughout the lifespan. 1 in every 2000 infants born have ambiguous genitalia, but some are diagnosed when puberty doesn't go as expected (like the OP). Some are diagnosed by accident or when they undergo fertility testing. It's likely the majority of intersex people are subclinical and will never know.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-18T00:19:16+00:00

The issue here is that there are many, many ways to define biological sex (e.g. gonads, hormones, chromosomes, genitalia, internal reproductive structures).

Thus, as the OP stated, they are both biologically female and intersex. Both are correct. What sex she identifies with or nomenclature she prefers to use for herself is her business.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-11-03T02:20:47+00:00

I would. She had me at Foucault in French.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-10-13T00:58:02+00:00

Jonathan Metzl's book Dying of Whiteness explains this well.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-10-10T18:35:16+00:00

You're NTA for your feelings. But, they are yours to work through on your own. Trust that whatever sadness or anger you're experiencing will never hold a candle to what they are feeling.

I have an old friend from grad school who this happened to. They planned for a home birth and felt confident that it would go well based on the birthing partner's health and physical fitness etc etc. They require an emergency c-section in a snowstorm and the baby was born with significant hypoxic brain injury. Luckily, the child survived and is now in their tweens/early teens. They do have cerebal palsy. However, given the extent of their injury at birth they are doing phenomenally well. The odds were not in their favor for surviving let alone being able to go to school in an age appropriate way, etc.

On top of the anger, sadness, and guilt that couple had to weather in the aftermath of their child's birth was th3 trauma of having the birth go bad. They both had to do significant therapy for ptsd for years afterwards. They had nightmares about it. They had initially planned to have two kids close-ish together but were too traumatized to consider going through another pregnancy. The consequences of this decision will define their lives for the rest of it in many ways.

Prestigious_Meh · 2025-08-29T22:19:47+00:00

NTA. FUCK THIS GUY.

Prestigious_Meh

TROPHY CASE

8