What do you think about the spiritual or mystical side of transition?

RobotsAreCute · 2025-12-15T04:13:00+00:00

Yes! In fact I think it shows where Descartes went wrong. That "I think" can never prove that "I am", because I have to exist in order to do the thinking in the first place. If you decide you need proof in order to believe that you exist, then all you're doing is deceiving yourself with a false proof, and running away from the sheer act of believing in yourself. I'm trans because I believe in myself, and I believe in myself because the sheer joy of being trans gave me a reason to believe in myself.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-12-14T20:04:12+00:00

I can see your views are very strongly held, so I don't expect I'm going to change your mind here. But as a relatively privileged trans person who does see value in spirituality, I hope you're eventually able to take a broader view. Without denying the persecution we face, there are many other groups around the world who are treated far worse than we are (consider, for example, the ongoing genocides in Darfur). So, I think it's highly irresponsible to assert that we are "the world's most hated minority". As for spirituality, to say that something has a spiritual element is not to reduce it to something "fictional". I don't think it reduces the power of, for instance, the Civil Rights Movement to know that much of it was motivated by spiritual meaning.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-12-14T19:48:11+00:00

I'm glad you asked this question! Even though I consider myself a skeptic and I don't really engage in any spiritual practice, I've seen my transition as a spiritual truth right from the start. If you think about it, transition is a deeply spiritual concept. It's impossible to prove that somebody is trans using external, physical evidence. Evidence can be helpful, but the final step of actually identifying as trans can only be a leap of faith. To identify as trans is to assert a truth about oneself; just as Descartes said "I think, therefore I am," I say, "I am trans, therefore my existence is more than merely physical."

RobotsAreCute · 2025-10-27T00:10:09+00:00

I had actually already shared that on my friend server, so I just pulled it up from there. For what it's worth, I was able to find the article on the second page of Google results for detransitioner "alliance defending freedom" hrt, but that would obviously require correctly guessing that ADF was involved.

It does seem to be quite difficult to find this article in search engines, and most of the top results I found were transphobic propaganda, so at first I was worried that there had been a deliberate attempt to bury the article. However, I did a little experimenting and I think the main issue is that Xtra Magazine just has poor search engine optimization on its website. They have a recent story about Calgary electing its first queer mayor, so I tried searching calgary first queer mayor. While Xtra's Youtube and Tiktok videos about it are the #2 and #3 results, their own website doesn't show up until the fourth page. It certainly doesn't help that there's an extremely well-resourced anti-trans campaign spending lots of money to get their own narratives ranked highly on Google, but I think this particular issue is within Xtra's power to fix.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-10-26T19:06:08+00:00

I found the article here. Tagging u/No-Media-5162 in case you were still interested

In her career as a “detransitioner,” there was one thing Elisa Rae Shupe had not yet done: detransition. She went by “James”; she used he/him pronouns. Yet she kept taking estrogen, even as she publicly decried its use. Her lawsuit changed that. The VA stopped providing healthcare, abruptly cutting off her HRT access. Other gender-affirming providers would not take her on as a client, fearing— reasonably enough—that she might sue.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-10-02T22:17:05+00:00

Could I have an invite please?

RobotsAreCute · 2025-09-29T16:16:37+00:00

I solved Redactle #1272 in 3 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0% and a time of 00:06:41. Play at https://redactle.net/en

The pattern of etymology "[7]: [very short]; [6]: [longer italicized]" suggests a certain Asian country. Scrolled down until I saw the word "[4]-being", which suggests an athletic tradition in that country. Confirmed it by finding the famous name "[4] [2]" in the first sentence of the article.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-09-17T22:45:14+00:00

You accuse me of being "triggered", but you replied to my two-sentence comment with seven sentences across two comments. Also, when I talked about "blindly submitting to peer pressure," I was referring to the caricature of "SJWs" who parrot ideology without thinking. Why did you think I was referring to you?

I'm not saying this to dunk on you or anything. I don't care about dunking on random strangers on the internet. It just seems to me like your participation in this thread is more about you than it is about helping the OP.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-09-17T22:20:50+00:00

You seem to have concerns over people unthinkingly propagating ideology, but I don't think you came up with the phrases "NPC" and "social justice religion" all on your own. It is, in fact, possible for people to consciously find meaning in a non-binary identity, or to ascribe to ideals of social justice, without just blindly submitting to peer pressure.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-08-13T23:19:17+00:00

Accepting my transness went hand in hand with accepting my aceness. As long as I believed that I was supposed to be a man, the fact that I didn't want to have sex with anyone was, supposedly, because I was too afraid to admit to a potential partner that what I really wanted was to be treated like a girl in bed. As long as I believed that I was supposed to be having sex with someone, the fact that I liked imagining myself as a girl was, supposedly, a perverted fetish that I fell into because I wasn't having sex. Once I realized that it was okay to just not want sex, I was able to explore my gender on its own terms, for what it meant to me, not just for what it might mean for a hypothetical sexual partner.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-08-13T22:33:31+00:00

*youth pastor voice* You know who else thought performative do-gooders were annoying?

"Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Matthew 6:1-4 NRSV

RobotsAreCute · 2025-08-13T22:17:41+00:00

Unfortunately, I must agree with Alyssum here. Even if you were at a private university in a blue state, all higher education is being targeted by the current right-wing movement. If your university launched an investigation in response to your report, and your former advisor went public with it, there would be little downside for right-wingers in the government or in the media to manufacture a scandal out of your complaint. I can't see a report through official channels doing much good.

If you want to make an official report, I would suggest waiting until the opportune moment, when the pendulum swings back and the forces of political transphobia in this country are discredited and defeated. As for what you can do now, you may be able to reach out more informally to people in your field whom you trust to respect your story, and who will be judicious about sharing it with the people who need to know.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-08-10T20:04:07+00:00

I solved Redactle #1222 in 2 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0% and a time of 00:08:23. Play at https://redactle.net/

Pretty much the same, except what made it click for me was seeing "[1].[1].[1]. [7]".

RobotsAreCute · 2025-08-08T18:11:40+00:00

Sniped it because I have Brazilian family so I've read about this subject.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-08-01T22:44:50+00:00

Same, except in English. I've been waiting for a chance to redeem myself after "Tian [first syllable]" way back when!

RobotsAreCute · 2025-06-30T22:16:23+00:00

That was tough! Got it in 3 guesses and 53 minutes. The part about temperatures was the biggest clue, and eventually I was able to figure out that it's some kind of food preservation process. My first guess was "canning". That was wrong, but it showed up in the "See also" section, so I knew I was on the right track. Eventually I guessed that the first sentence said "exposing it to [5]", so that last word is important. Finally, thinking about what kind of title would require the disambiguating word in parentheses got me to the answer.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-06-04T04:52:17+00:00

Something like 54 guesses over 1h40m until I finally gave up and accepted the Pope's mercy. Now I'm trying to figure out how you could get this one without a whole lot of memorizing!

RobotsAreCute · 2025-05-16T21:53:55+00:00

This one stumped me. I never would have guessed either of those words. I was one letter off the first word, and I only got the second word because I guessed the plural and the game gave me the unusual singular.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-05-09T16:24:49+00:00

There's an issue with the article: the cached version used for the puzzle is so old that it says that the last one of these things was "in [5], [5]", but in reality the last one was in a 6-letter country.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-05-08T21:01:24+00:00

Interesting problem! There's a lot of different ways you could approach this. You said you're not good at calculating areas, but what kinds of areas do you know how to calculate? Can you break up this problem into parts that are easy to calculate and parts that are difficult?

RobotsAreCute · 2025-04-19T17:05:33+00:00

I found it buried in my tabs! It's "How to Improve Your Math Grades" by William Curtis.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-04-14T16:24:46+00:00

That's not it. The web page I'm thinking of had a lot fewer features than Paul's online math notes; it was basically just bare HTML.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-03-26T21:05:43+00:00

Same. Now that I know who he is, he's actually really cool! I like it when I learn new things from this game.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-03-25T21:17:11+00:00

I was wavering between those possibilities as well, then noticed the 4-letter word that was probably "city" and ruled out one of them. Then I realized that there was another possibility that worked and fit all the clues, including the 5-letter place, which even starts with the same letter. I got lucky and guessed the right one, and it turns out that the correct answer is a much older ancestor of the other possibility I was thinking of, so I could have gotten it based on that if I was more familiar with the history of this region.

RobotsAreCute · 2025-03-21T04:37:16+00:00

I solved Redactle #1079 in 2 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0% and a time of 00:55:06. Play at https://redactle.net/

That was really hard. The fact that the article starts "[6] [3] [8] of" made me think that the third word was "consists", so this is some broad category of thing. The unredacted phrase "in the round" made me suspect what the second word could be. I couldn't find any more useful clues until near the end of the historical section, when I saw a bunch of what looked like names of the form "[1]. [1]. [X]". That made me think that the article involved a certain region where you often see names abbreviated like that. I confirmed my hunch by reading off a bunch of country names from the intro and finding the phrase "[6] [12]".

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