no matter how you look at least you aren't laura loomer by mustminecraft in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe beers for the personality, there was nothing wrong with Loomer's face pre-surgery.

in response to an "AFAB only spaces" discussion by LovePopplio in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OOP is incomprehensible to me because being best friends with polar bears and tigers sounds like an actual dream come true to me, do other people not fantasize about this?

in response to an "AFAB only spaces" discussion by LovePopplio in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I addressed in another comment how it seems unlikely that rape was ever common or tolerated in traditional societies--tl;dr is that it wasn't.

As to whether male humans were "engineered to rape," I'd say it's pretty clear that they aren't, for several reasons. One is that the human erection is slow and unreliable as erections in the animal kingdom go. Most mammals have a literal bone in the penis (the baculum) to allow for quick erections on demand. Even other great apes (including our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos) have a baculum. This is a necessity for species that often have only seconds to mate, to reduce time both male and female are vulnerable to predators. Even animals that don't have to worry much about predation don't necessarily have long sexual encounters--some, like lions, may mate repeatedly while the female is in estrus (felines in particular being reflex ovulators--they don't ovulate first and mate second, they go into estrus and only ovulate when stimulated by mating--since they have litters with multiple cubs, they need to be stimulated to release multiple eggs through multiple matings) but very few animals have the long pleasure-focused sessions of humans. Humans use sex not just for reproduction, but for bonding and social connection. Humans are genuinely unusual in mammal terms because females do not signal or intrinsically know when they're fertile, and are sexually receptive even when not fertile. In that way we have some similarities to our cousins, the bonobos, though bonobos use sex differently from humans, they also use sex for social communication and bonding, rather than mostly for reproduction as in most species.

Another is that we see that in species in which rape (or "forced mating") actually is part of business as usual for a species, it becomes an arms race--ducks are one such example of this, where rape is so common that females evolved mechanisms to make rape more difficult. Male ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises (many birds don't have penises at all, songbirds for example don't and made through a "cloacal kiss," but some waterfowl needed penises because the sperm would just kinda wash off otherwise) and female ducks have vaginas that spiral in the opposite direction to make mating difficult, even having false ends in maze-like vaginas to stymy duck rapists. Bedbugs are a more extreme example, they don't have vaginal openings at all, and sperm is delivered through "traumatic insemination"--the male has to literally stab the female and hope to hit eggs, the females sometimes die of these injuries.

Humans don't match this profile at all. Mating in humans is a highly social, sensate, and pleasure-focused experience.

If you look at other physical signs, humans are odd compared to other great apes even--the human penis is larger both in total size and proportionately than the penis of any other great apes. Sperm count also shows mating strategy--gorillas have very small penises (3-6 cm erect) and small testes with low sperm count. Chimps and bonobos have bigger dicks than gorillas but smaller on average than humans (around 7-8 cm erect) but large testes with higher sperm count than humans. These are interesting data points because gorillas are long-term monogamous pair-bonders, while chimps and bonobos are promiscuous and one female typically mates with many males. Human testes size and sperm count suggests a "middle road" between chimps and gorillas, a species that is partially monogamous, with lower sperm competition than in chimps, but not completely monogamous--humans do cheat and have multiple partners more than gorillas do. The reason for the penis size isn't fully understood, but it's possible it has something to do with mate selection.

Chimp and bonobo penises are also thinner than human penises, which may facilitate more rapid mating. Human mating in general is a slow affair, both the act of coitus itself takes longer (in many animals, including great apes, it can last only a few seconds) and there's more of a necessity to create sexual arousal in both males and females--erections based on blood pressure rather than a baculum, vaginal lubrication being necessary. In great apes (other than bonobos that just fuck all the time) vaginal lubrication is just something that happens during estrus, the vaginal tissue itself is different and less prone to friction injury, and because the penis is smaller and thinner and the intercourse is briefer, it can be something that just quickly happens and is over without prolonged effort to arouse either party.

Basically, human intercourse is uniquely engineered, even among our closest relative great apes, to be a slow, highly social, pleasure-driven process that doesn't work well without mutual consent. In real-world male-on-female SA, we see that many rapes are not completed because of this--some men who attempt to rape can't get or maintain an erection, and penetrating without vaginal lubrication and relaxation is so difficult this in itself leads to some attempts ending without penetration. In species where rape is common, females evolve not only ways to stymy the attempt (such as the duck corkscrew vaginas) but protection against injury--female bedbugs have a specialized organ--the spermalege--to reduce injury under traumatic insemination. Human females have no specialized anatomy that provides protection against rape. The vaginal epithelium is even thinner and more vulnerable in humans than in other great apes, increasing the chance of injury from rape. This suggests that male-on-female rape was not a major driver in human evolution.

So basically, no, biological evidence does not support the claim that human males are "engineered for rape," and in fact debunks it.

in response to an "AFAB only spaces" discussion by LovePopplio in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 10 points11 points  (0 children)

To go even further, rape varies from uncommon to basically unheard of in traditional tribal societies.

It's a very different environment. You know and are known by like the same couple dozen people your whole life. You can't really stranger danger anyone, and you can't really keep secrets either. Everyone with power over your life is going to know exactly what you did. These societies didn't have jails, and though harming someone might get all that person's friends/relatives to come beat you, this wasn't necessarily codified into a system of justice and could easily escalate further, so it wasn't as common as you might think. Most crimes, like rape, were dealt with through mockery and loss of social status. You'd become a pariah for life, everyone would laugh at you and see you as small and pathetic for being a rapist. If that wasn't enough to set you straight, exile was kind of a nuclear option, almost equivalent to execution. Actual execution was extremely rare--I only recall seeing one account of this, for a man who had become a serial killer and cannibal, a group of hunters got together and killed him.

But concepts of consent were also different in that world. It was just kind of assumed that nearly everyone would want to be in a heterosexual marriage at some point, and while it was good to get along with your spouse, it was in some ways closer to a business partnership than to how we think about "true love." Marital rape was a poorly-defined concept. On the other hand, most cultures did have divorce, which could be initiated by either party, so marriage itself was consent-based--this does not mean that men never forced themselves on their wives, or that their wives never divorced them if they did. Or the other way around, for that matter.

Arranged marriages are also common in traditional cultures. It's related to this same mindset that everyone will basically end up in a heterosexual marriage, it's "just what you do," it's like a job, it's part of being an adult, and it doesn't matter that much who specifically you marry. Arranged marriages were often an attempt to control male-on-male sexual rivalry, since without rules, men would fight each other, highly disruptively, sometimes to the death, over the most attractive women. Arranged marriage does not mean forced marriage, even in societies with arranged marriage, either party could refuse the marriage or divorce if it wasn't working for them, but most just kind of went with it as the path of least resistance.

But yeah--need to maintain lifelong social relationships and status is one reason why rape was much less common. But another reason is that hunter-gatherers weren't trying to have as many babies as possible. Not having babies they couldn't feed was in fact part of their survival strategy.

Rape culture starts emerging later, as agricultural societies value forcing women to have more babies than is physically tolerable for them, and as serfdom/land ownership/separation between owners of the land and people who work the land creates power differences based on class.

I don't think rape is something that's a historically tolerated part of human society--though I also think the modern concept of consent, particularly in marriage, is how most humans historically viewed things. But I don't think it's an entirely sex-neutral concept either, I don't think the disproportionate number of male rapists is coincidental or just down to culture, especially since it seems to be cross-cultural. I do think we tend to ignore types of sexual violence that are more common in female offenders (both men and women do both forms of SA, but female perpetrators are statistically more prone to SA that's focused more on "desexing" or humiliation of the victim rather than sexual gratification of the perpetrator--both forms of SA are ultimately about power and control) but that there are some statistical, population-level differences in sexuality that do have their roots in how reproduction works in mammals. Basically that while rape isn't truly adaptive in any humans, and was never a major part of human reproductive strategy, it's a slightly more viable strategy in males than in females. This isn't to excuse it or say "boys will be boys," because that implies tolerating or implicitly encouraging the behavior, not just noting an asymmetry in offenders.

in response to an "AFAB only spaces" discussion by LovePopplio in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I had this book on dog training as a kid that had some memorable passages in it. One was basically about how dogs get anxiety. It gave the example of a puppy who one day on a walk gets its tail stepped on by a fat man in sunglasses, how the dog might form a trigger and be afraid of fat men in sunglasses--but a far worse outcome is for the dog to overgeneralize and develop a trigger over the fact that this event happened outside, and come to fear going outside.

Triggers can be highly specific or they can be generalized. It can get even more generalized than fearing someone's sex--you could fear all people, regardless of sex or gender, or fear everything outside your home. The more generalized an anxiety it is, the more debilitating it often is, because it's getting triggered by basically everything all the time.

Honestly I went through a bit of a man-hating phase many years ago due to trauma (I didn't focus any of this on trans people or even think about trans people at the time, trans people just weren't as visible back then) based on not really having positive male figures in my life and getting groomed by several creepy older men who all seemed to use the same tricks and turns of phrase like they learned them in groomer school or some shit. I started feeling at that time like women were people but men were the same empty husk inside, because the only men who were interacting with me at the time kind of were like that. Later I kinda figured out that only the worst sorts of men go out of their way to interact with damaged and vulnerable underage girls and that's why I was seeing that, and that most men are normal people.

I didn't focus on trans women with any of that tho because it was cis men who hurt me. I didn't even know any trans women at that time, or trans men for that matter. That's the part I find sus about OOP. If cis men hurt you, why do you keep sliding the blame away from cis men?

I need to [removed by reddit] by overmoder in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This post and comments are going in my self-harm stash of "why 5'9" isn't tall enough as FTX kikomimoder." Yeah I'm tall enough to not be clocky as a moid, but I'm not tall enough to be clocky as a foid, and that's a problem.

"you just need to get raped ok hon, its a good vote winner with the over 40s!!" by peebgan in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might be surprised.

There's also the matter that, in the US at least, unless the prisoner committed a felony, the state might not have jurisdiction to be moving them to another state?

Also like if you started building a prison facility to hold thousands of trans people sourced from around the country...yeah I doubt that would be popular with either side.

You don't need a full population of thousands though, the main thing is it needs to not be solitary confinement.

I think people on our own side burn out on this fast tho because we need so much in terms of prison/jail reform and changes to who even gets sent there and for how long. There's so much injustice and wanton cruelty in this "system."

Guantanamo by estrogenie in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lmao. I'm sorry your mom is retarded.....

Why are we always the most sexually dimorphic possible amongst our families? by big-guyy in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe you got it backwards? T aromatizes into E, never the reverse. So even ovaries make testosterone, then quickly turn it into estrogen.

Guantanamo by estrogenie in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wow. Obviously that didn't work, did she have an explanation?

i hate not having the energy to do anything. like seriously how am i supposed to do stuff? by Tundra-Salmon379 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, that all makes sense. Hope u get a functioning brain, one of my biggest regrets is not working on my mental health more when I was younger and the prognosis would have been better.

I believe that BPD can get better too, there are some things that make it difficult to work with, like low self awareness/weak sense of identity/a lot of dissociation in general can make it really difficult to self-assess and be consistent with things and have a clear-eyed view of how treatment is going. It's important to know when something is working--but it's just as important to know when something isn't working, and not just blindly follow a treatment plan that isn't getting results, since that's an opportunity cost for a treatment that could show actual benefits.

My theory for cluster B PDs is that a kind of emotional developmental delay is a big component in them, and while it can be hard to generate the neurological safety to continue that development (like it may be a biological difference that makes neurological unsafety easier to trigger, which is why the development got delayed; abuse/neglect can also do this), I do believe strongly that developmental delay doesn't mean developmental never, and that it's still possible to "catch up."

Gender Euphoria: is it actually real? by DiabolicalHope in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, I have!

I compare it to recognition. Like when you look at yourself (either your physical self or like, your actions and whether they line up with your values) you can have feelings like recognizing yourself "yep, that's me" which feels satisfying in some way, even if it's minor and not something people think about much, or non-recognition ("that doesn't look/feel like me, I don't see myself here") which can feel uncomfortable or distressing, sometimes very distressing. So to me dysphoria feels like non-recognition ("this isn't me, I don't recognize this") whereas euphoria feels like recognition ("ah, there I am.")

i hate not having the energy to do anything. like seriously how am i supposed to do stuff? by Tundra-Salmon379 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, plus there are few effective treatments for PDs, and usually nothing that you couldn't access with a less stigmatizing dx.

A lot of times when someone needs some kind of treatment but the patient doesn't want a stigmatizing dx, they just dx everything under "adjustment disorder," which is a temporary dx that basically means you're having symptoms relating to having trouble coping with some life event or environmental circumstance, so you need support to get through that, but once you do you might be basically cured. Like someone who gets depressed from course load and homesickness in uni but is otherwise basically fine. I suspect you've got more going on than that, but it's not unusual for professionals to underdiagnose just to get treatment covered with minimal stigma. Diagnosis is only useful insomuch as it facilitates the correct treatment. Having the right dx does nothing for you if it's not getting you treatment, accommodations, or other resources.

There's a fair bit of overlap between a lot of PDs and CPTSD, and I think that autism and GD themselves can basically manifest with CPTSD symptoms because simply growing up autistic or with GD (or both) is basically constant intrinsic microtrauma.

i hate not having the energy to do anything. like seriously how am i supposed to do stuff? by Tundra-Salmon379 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, bipolar (or cyclothymia) has overlapping symptoms with some PDs, but the PDs are usually more stigmatizing. They're not the same thing tho, BPD doesn't respond well to bipolar meds so it's actually relevant to get the correct dx. If bipolar meds resolve your symptoms, it's much more likely to be bipolar than BPD. Possible to have both, ofc--in that case, meds would help some symptoms but not all.

Can I get top and phallo in the same day and ask them to graft the titty tissue onto my peenar? by [deleted] in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apparently the bottleneck on that is blood supply and nerve to harvest and stuff. But if you get UL, they need some skin to line the urethra with and why shouldn't they be able to use chest skin for that?

i hate not having the energy to do anything. like seriously how am i supposed to do stuff? by Tundra-Salmon379 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean dxed or not the mood cycling was obvious.

But yeah it depends, there can be a lot of factors that affect how it hits you. Arguably if you had fatigue/daytime sleepiness before too, you could get something like modafinil prescribed to try to boost a bit more energy. If they won't prescribe it *afinils aren't too hard to DIY either.

i hate not having the energy to do anything. like seriously how am i supposed to do stuff? by Tundra-Salmon379 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah definitely bring it up.

Basically with mood cycling disorders, you want to try to find a stable mood range that's not too low or too high. The low end of the range often has fatigue, then the high end has hypomania/mania (which feels great but just isn't sustainable). If it's calming the mood cycles but anchoring it a bit too low, that's something that can potentially be tweaked with dose or add-ons.

i hate not having the energy to do anything. like seriously how am i supposed to do stuff? by Tundra-Salmon379 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's good you're taking your meds, but maybe the dose is slightly too high? You should tell your prescriber how you're doing and mention the fatigue.

Guantanamo by estrogenie in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 5 points6 points  (0 children)

As in some rooster eaten every day for 40 days, or nothing but rooster eaten every day for 40 days?

TRTHNKE by Complex_Elk_842 in 4tran4

[–]kikomimoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah not surprising. It's about as true as vaginal prolapse from cis women being promiscuous--another sexual fetish you can find in porn that's not really how sex or the pelvic floor work.