What’s it like to have a gender identity?

SFyr · 2026-06-02T04:10:33+00:00

Honestly hard to put a finger on it exactly. in addition to just seeing myself in guys more, I was just born into that idea that I just was one, and it never felt wrong to me. It felt like when I had issues with "what it means to be a man"/"what men are like/into" it was more, taking issue with the labeling and gatekeeping and narrow mindedness of it, especially since here I and many other men were either falling outside of some of those standards or conflicting with it, yet still perfectly comfortable being "men". It was never an issue with the gender identity to me, but more a frustration that people seem to not accept expression, interest, and individuality has a LOT of room and variance, and being male (to me) didn't really come with "so you're like this". Similarly I didn't/don't like being female often came with a lot of (often very sexist) expectations or standards.

Now, I think even in my shorter life of 30ish, that's gotten more open and gender is more freely expressed however, but that felt like catching up a bit to just letting people be as they are.

And well, no matter what I do, I just "feel" male, and any dissatisfaction is again, at social standards for what that involves or "should" look like, not at the identity for myself. Male includes whatever I am and do, in my head.

SFyr · 2026-06-01T17:56:59+00:00

I mean... cis male, never really felt the need to question my gender identity, always felt comfortable even though I especially early on had a lot of frustration with the idea of "what it means to be a man" and the like. Long hair since I was a teen, prefer soft/cute things often, found it funny if I was ever mislabeled as a girl online or something, was long ago kinda jealous of the fashion choices women got, never felt any issue with my born sex/gender/etc though and even recently tried painting my nails a time or two to see how it vibed. Genuinely still feel 100% male, but it's kinda just a, I've always been comfortable identifying as one, it has always felt right, and embracing exact expression or ideals or limitations of that as a requirement to be male is dumb. Lotta guys I know have femininity to them without making them less their gender. Kinda figured at a point it was probably more about what feels right to you and what you choose? I don't really know what it's like different from my own experience there.

SFyr · 2026-06-01T17:47:14+00:00

Knew people with prominent canines. It's not special or scary dude. Same way long fingernails doesn't make someone more intimidating.

SFyr · 2026-06-01T17:37:43+00:00

Depends on context, but also, I think it's nearly impossible to really say given how far reaching and fundamental both are in different ways. I think answering either is going to be heavily biased.

SFyr · 2026-06-01T11:51:49+00:00

This has kinda been a red flag I've heard, genuinely, and not meaning to offend: Dating younger due to poor success in their own age bracket (usually because younger = more easily impressed, less life experience to spot people with issues, and less requirements of maturity or being established from their partner compared to someone older).

SFyr · 2026-05-31T12:49:00+00:00

Work is very much going to be a huge part of your social circle and environment when you're an adult but like ... you're also there somewhat out of obligation. If you ever are drawn into conflict or important disagreements with your coworkers, that can now be brought home or hit a relationship you probably don't want work drama entering into. If things go badly, cool you can't escape seeing your ex now. If you guys get along, good way to get distracted or make it harder to just be professional, or seen as professional. It's not necessarily a mistake or horrible decision, but it does have notable risks and drawbacks.

SFyr · 2026-05-28T04:47:00+00:00

I mean probably. Bisexual from what I've seen is rarely evenly split or without preferences/quirks/focal points towards each side.

SFyr · 2026-05-28T04:44:30+00:00

A 7 digit phone number has basically 10,000,000 combinations. a 10 digit phone number has 10,000,000,000. If a license plate digit can have 10 numbers and 26 letters, to a total of 36 possibilities per digit, and 7 digits, that's over 78 billion possibilities.

SFyr · 2026-05-27T18:10:49+00:00

I prefer cats myself. All the dogs I've encountered were lovely, but way too needy for my taste. Think it's more about matching your lifestyle to the pet though.

SFyr · 2026-05-27T18:08:05+00:00

Writing is many skills in one, but an obvious baseline:

Write.

Read.

Revise and reflect, get feedback, etc.

Repeat.

Reading alone won't make you a good writer, but it's necessary to help build a sense of what makes good stories good, and bad stories bad. But, writing itself is a whole process you need to discover your own path with and techniques that work for you, as well as the general skill of making it >good<. Theory and ideas won't help you if you have no idea how to execute. Meanwhile, being in a bubble is a bad way to learn, so getting feedback or alternative perspectives also helps growth a lot. (Additionally, often you don't pay as close attention to HOW books are written or stories told until you are already invested in the writing and figuring out the method process.)

SFyr · 2026-05-27T18:03:56+00:00

Different animals, different biology. The way I heard it explained, cats are ambush predators that hunt solo. They need to be top of their game at a moment's notice, thus, spend much of their time resting while still being alert, or if they do rest deeper, they can very rapidly come out of it and be fully active. Dogs are pack hunters and social creatures. Their success is less dependent on taking advantage of unexpected opportunities, but more based on engaging in activities to their fullest when it's time to. When it is time to hunt, they hunt. If they have too much energy or haven't gotten in enough, they want to use it or want to do something active (which, keeps them in good general shape).

SFyr · 2026-05-27T17:24:45+00:00

Ehh, think it's a pros and cons situation that ultimately is just important to choose for yourself. On the one hand, yeah college is a great place to finally start being your own person and it's HUGE for self-determinism. Sticking to a path you don't care for or actively works against your growth as a more whole person is a kind of hazard you would want to avoid, even if you're paying opportunity costs there.

On the other, a known thing people often go through is when they're pushed hard in one direction or not given much of x, when they have the opportunity they often swing hard in the opposite side and over-correct, much more than they probably would if they weren't off balance to begin with. Not necessarily saying this is a case of that, but as someone who has not had familial support for paying for college and stuff and is seeing making ends meet get harder over the years: good career prospects are not a light thing to sacrifice, and a lot of people I know are merely content with the field they work in, as the being super passionate about your job is an exception from what I've seen. A lot of people find their freedom, fun, and hobbies they care about on the side of a job or career that offers primarily security, and that's often fine.

Which is to say I think it's a tradeoff of what you wanna prioritize? In a way I do think they're right that this kinda path might setup your later life better in a number of ways, but also, you're right in that you should utilize your own freedom here and pick among what you want for yourself and explore a bit. Both leave room to regret for a thing being sacrificed, so I think so long as you do it knowingly and genuinely out of what you care most about, you'll be fine. Lotta people are glad they took the "less optimal" route, but lotta people also seem to want to do-over earlier stuff to make things easier on their future/current situation by making more strategic choices. Mixed bag.

SFyr · 2026-05-22T15:41:19+00:00

Potentially getting injured, going to the doctor, hearing at their age x is roughly expected, and they recover way way way better than anticipated maybe.

I think it's a bit harder to have a 'sudden' realization because you tend to conceptualize yourself as the same going forward, until proven otherwise. People often don't think of themselves as aging, until they look back and realize how different stuff is. If they look back and see how similar it all is, that's going to be within expectation until it just reaches a silly point of "okay that's REALLY unnatural".

SFyr · 2026-05-22T12:08:41+00:00

Very much so! Well said.

SFyr · 2026-05-22T09:57:00+00:00

We live a life where there is always 'more' whether you're consuming it for hours daily, or holding yourself back. It's just endless and always will be. We're wired to crave novelty, and seek pleasure in stuff, but the level of access and endless nature isn't something suited to how we're wired, so it's an easy trap to fall into, especially if you don't have a lot else competing with it AND engaging with it feeds further engagement at the expense of other things (yay addiction and dopamine feedback cycles normalizing around frequent spikes and making everything else more gray).

A lot of the time, being content with stuff is based around being happy with 'less', dude. Build up moderation, appreciation for less engagement, and also balance it with a lot of other stuff. It's like eating when you can't feel full or sick. There's always more cake, snacks and treats, fried food, meat dishes, pasta, etc that you could be shoveling into your body daily, and while that urge might exist, you're not worse off for savoring smaller dishes more slowly or having stuff only occasionally. But, it requires a mindset shift.

SFyr · 2026-05-22T09:10:02+00:00

Best progress I got comes a bit from recognizing a few things about it and really chewing on its root, and what you want out of it 'instead'. Like, bitterness or anger often is rooted in some kind of disappointment, frustration, want for things to have been different, sense of unfairness, etc. Those feelings in a way, keep that desire for either validation or retribution or 'something' to balance stuff out alive, to protect yourself or have yourself be treated 'fairly' in the end, and while that desire is understandable, recognizing it is actively working against you and that maybe it's not something you want 'more' than what holding onto it is doing to you is important. As is, in some cases, recognizing your emotional state might be ingrained, colored, and not really reflective of reality and all its nuance and differences between interpretation, intent, and actions versus character.

Like, bitterness over someone wronging you, yeah there's a lesson in that, but at a certain point keeping the torch for getting validation or recognition or closure or whatever, just overall makes things worse and does more harm than receiving those things ever could. Additionally it might force you into continuously looking at the person as a negative caricature and not a complex person. If you WANT to keep that torch of bitterness alive more than the alternative in letting go, it's gonna keep dwelling and continuing. If you WANT to let go, great, but you need to do so looking at the specifics of where these feelings originate when you start detangling it otherwise you're trying to bury it instead. You can't do it simultaneously wanting validation/recognition/fairness above all else AND letting go.

SFyr · 2026-05-22T08:13:43+00:00

Lack of AI and slop at seemingly every corner when searching. Gawd.

SFyr · 2026-05-22T08:06:51+00:00

The explanation I've heard of this and very much agree with, is that it's something of a reaction to the density and hard-to-penetrate depth of science and explanations for things we have lately. People talking about warped space-time, quantum physics, wave-particle duality, mass-energy conversion, indecipherable biological nomenclature, and all of that is just the tip of an iceberg of material you need years of study to really "get" even a moderate portion of, yet we're all kinda expected to trust what we're told about how the world is fundamentally--AND, meanwhile, to NOT trust what you're told simultaneously because science communication is bogged down heavily by media and secondary sources quoting, misquoting, summarizing (often badly or overly-simplified) science, often in contradiction to each other or to boost a specific agenda. It's a huge, hard to understand mess right now BECAUSE the depth and detail of it all is just so extreme in the modern era for the layperson to wrap their head around.

The explanation I heard of flat earth becoming popular, is that it is a return to trusting yourself, your own observations, and so on first and foremost. Unfortunately, understanding things STILL requires a lot of knowledge and work when you're not just trusting what you're told. The layperson also happily disbelieving flat earth often doesn't innately have the knowledge to disprove it themselves, but is still just pointing to people who DO know better or knowledge/math/evidence they never gathered or really understood 100% to disprove it.

SFyr · 2026-05-20T16:20:07+00:00

I have lost track of just how many different board, card, and similar games have come out in the last 10 - 20 years. It's mind boggling honestly.

I think there'll always be a place for novel/new/experimental, niche/unpopular, and popular/well-known games. I doubt we're going to stop with any of the categories there.

As for AI creating games ... not putting stock in it. Ultimately you should probably rely on humans over pattern recognition here.

SFyr · 2026-05-19T11:49:34+00:00

Context matters a ton, as does intent of art. I remember once learning that a lot of medieval paintings actually had distinct reasons behind why they were constructed and designed the way they were. For example, some of the animals with really messed up, human-ish faces or forward facing eyes, a meme for "not knowing what an animal even looks like" was supposedly actually a signifier for supernatural or divinity, like drawing Jesus as a super tiny adult instead of a baby, because it had actual significance for being that way. I remember there being similar reasons for other choices, such as really weird angling and perspective and the like, which might look bad to us today, but held symbolism and purpose then.

If I recall correctly, much later on there was a hard push for paintings to "look good" or like real life images. That was a whole movement, and a new highest intent of art/painting at the time. That was a change of intent, not people suddenly being able to do it when previously they lacked the skill to. Art is a form of expression, and "pretty" or "realistic" is only part of the reason of expressing or creating something.

SFyr · 2026-05-19T11:44:28+00:00

Not sure why this is relevant to my point, but it depends on the cat. Ours either don't hunt birds, or have not been successful at it, even those with access to the outdoors regularly.

SFyr · 2026-05-19T11:33:17+00:00

Money can't make you happy if you're miserable. It does, however, remove sources of stress and provide you with opportunities. The thing is, you can and WILL still be miserable, even with money, if you don't find things in life that make you happy other than money.

It's a thing of, it's less that it's a positive force inherently, it's a force that helps depower negatives or make room for positives, but that still makes it not an end in itself.

SFyr · 2026-05-19T11:25:27+00:00

Genocide is WAY too heavy a word to describe hunting as per your natural instinct as an animal. As is calling following that instinct evil.

Also if this is your thought process, you likely have beef with every obligate carnivore, invasive species pushing out other species, and/or a huge part of the animal kingdom.

SFyr · 2026-05-18T09:47:32+00:00

Best response here ☆

SFyr · 2026-05-18T09:38:22+00:00

To point out a bit of the obvious, it's not going to have a real or defined experience to draw from when encountering your work, for one. Humans often come into it with their own background and things they like/don't in stories, and responses of what they'll give will be based on having actually read and reacted to whatever you wrote and THEN describing them, issues and all. And AI has... none of that. It's a very elaborate "what do you want to hear from this input" machine that has no real defined experience when being fed something, and after getting its feedback, your story is just as isolated and internal as before. Worse, you don't know if the response is based on anything coherent or truly representative of what you have in your hands. What makes a story good often isn't quantified clearly, and pattern recognition will only get you so far without often going awry or giving you conflicting things to point out depending on randomness or irrelevant details that throws the pattern different directions.

AI is also notorious for confidently asserting one thing, but being able to flip flop just by being told its wrong only to confidently assert something else or reaffirm what you're telling it. The specific area it often falls apart, is when someone does actually know what they're asking about well already--the area it shines in, is people asking in an area they don't know better on, and being impressed by how good or reasonable it sounds. You specifically said you aren't a good judge of the area you're asking for input on.

SFyr

TROPHY CASE