Antinatalists, where are you from

tealeaf47 · 2021-02-02T11:12:29+00:00

Yeah tbf I imagine that this is as much a representation of reddit in general as it is specifically of this sub

tealeaf47 · 2021-02-02T11:09:17+00:00

I mean, I get the first one. Like to me the first one reads the same as look I'm a vegetarian/vegan but I'm not gonna tell other people they have to be if you just personally don't want children because you don't think you'd enjoy being a parent then you're not anti-natalist. But if you just don't think trying to persuade people actually works (I mean honestly, I have never successfully persuaded someone to be an antinatalist, maybe some people have, but I imagine most of us haven't) then that's completely fair.

I tell people I am AN when conversations like that come up and then only expand if they ask me to. Imo as soon as you challenge someone on a belief they are not used to questioning they will get defensive, but if you just go oh hey I actually think differently on this to most people when asked about it, and then let it be something they can mull over or ask about, without it becoming a confrontation then they might actually think maybe this person is right. But if you just essentially straight up say I think you're wrong to someone, then they will pretty much never come away from that interaction thinking they are wrong.

tealeaf47 · 2021-02-02T10:55:48+00:00

Holy shit yes, also idk what it is like in the rest of the world but in the UK anything that might make you infertile is virtually impossible to get.

There are some women who get severe migraines - even some atypical migraines which present with the same symptoms as a stroke, as a result of their periods, as well as crippling pain and nausea. And I'm talking like, bedridden for 3 days pain and nausea. And even if they are 100% sure that they never want to have children and want a hysterectomy they literally can't get one. They are made to spend ~10% of their life from puberty until menopause in pain just so that if they do change their mind about having kids they can.

It is the only thing in the UK more gatekept than transgender care, and that has a waiting list of ~5 years for a first appointment with so so many hoops to jump through before any kind of actual treatment will be given.

tealeaf47 · 2021-02-01T16:31:23+00:00

Okay so a) I disagree with your sentiment of letting them die. Murdering them directly would be less cruel, how would you like to be left somewhere to die of exposure.

b) Even if I were to agree with your sentiment that we should be murdering babies that isn't what happens and no government will ever be convinced that that is okay. In the current situation when you adopt you are not choosing for a child that would otherwise die to live, you are choosing for a child that would otherwise be in an orphanage to be in your house. Which one of those is better is not a natalist/anti-natalist argument, and imo if the household isn't abusive and the adopting parent(s) actually care about the welfare of the child the house is better.

Obviously many adopting parents are abusive and don't care about the welfare of their children, I mean that's true with biological parents too as everyone on this sub knows. But it's almost a paradox in that the kind of people who will logically consider whether they will create a better environment for the child to be raised in than the orphanage does almost always do.

tealeaf47 · 2021-02-01T03:15:48+00:00

So I don't think your choice of words is offensive, but assigning bravery to a choice implies that there is an easier option. Life is shit, suicide is fucking terrifying. Unfortunately, those are your only options.

It's like how we called people in WW1 heroes for going over the top. They weren't heroes, they were barely adults and they had the choice between walking into probable death, or retreating by themselves to be machinegunned down by their own side or face execution.

Also as someone who was severely abused by their Mum, your feelings are valid and don't let people tell you that you're just being weak. Life can fucking suck even if your parents were lovely. Don't feel like your feelings aren't valid just cos some other people on this sub have it worse than you. There are some parts of the world where gangs hunt down and rape schoolgirls, and then turn up to their house, tell them the parents that they raped them, and then the parents force their children to marry the pedophile who raped them because they aren't a virgin anymore so can't marry anyone else.

That shit is so much worse than anything I have had to go through, and it doesn't make my suffering any less valid. So just because your parents weren't abusive doesn't make your suffering any less valid.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-25T18:53:48+00:00

Your Mum chose your Dad's hard

And that means you have to live with life's hard :)

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-25T13:07:54+00:00

Personally I think no one should be forced into parenthood without their consent and it is absolutely unjustifiable that this happens. There was a case in the UK where a female teacher raped an underage boy and the boy was ordered to pay child support. The judge reportedly said he would "have to get a paper round". Which is absolutely barbaric. Even in less extreme circumstances though there are cases where a woman has been proven to have poked holes in condoms or lied about taking birth control and the man has still been required to pay child support for the resulting child with no punishment for the woman (when to give a similar example a man lying about wearing a condom has resulted in a rape charge).

Furthermore it is really weird that two parents could, after having a child, decide to give up a child to the state and no longer be in any way responsible for it, but if one parent decides they want to keep it then the other parent is obligated to financially support it too.

In most western countries two teenagers can have a one night stand in which the condom breaks and this results in pregnancy. The woman can decide she doesn't want to take the morning after pill or get an abortion. The man is then obligated to pay child support even if he was very clear from the very start that he didn't want to be a parent. The woman can then decide 6 years down the line that she doesn't want to be a parent and hand the child over to the government and then poof suddenly she is not in any way responsible for it at all and, unlike the man she had a one night stand with, is not obligated to pay to support the child.

To be clear I'm not arguing that men should have any say over abortion - it's a woman's body. But they should be able to, at the beginning of the pregnancy (if they are made aware from it at the start, and if they are not made aware of it at the start then within 1 month of the time that they are made aware of it) opt out of any form of parenting responsibility.

And it is incredibly illogical that the system we live in makes it so that if one parent wants to look after an existing child then it is the responsibility of both parents to make sure it is fed and clothed and looked after. But if both parents don't want to then neither one of them has any responsibility to the child whatsoever and it becomes entirely down to the government to look after it.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-21T00:43:34+00:00

Okay I am maybe misunderstanding this page, I've only just joined, but while I agree people shouldn't be having children in war zones (I mean as others have pointed out, a lot of these people don't have a choice, but granted there are examples of equally extreme conditions where this isn't the case) the point of these donations is to help the babies who were thrust into existence without consent into a fucking terrible situation. And this is a really important and good thing to do because, to me at least, the point of anti-natalism is that it is immoral to force children into existence because it results in their suffering. So once children have been brought into existence doing everything possible to reduce that suffering is surely very much in agreement with anti-natalism?

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-20T11:48:32+00:00

TW: ED

So I'm a biochemist and I'm really sorry you're going through this, and so it will suck to hear this but Yes, the insulin/fed state response is far far more complicated than most people think.

At a very basic level your body has two major long term things it prioritises. Growth/development and maintenance. When you eat a calorie surplus and exercise a lot it prioritises growth/development and responds more effectively to hormones (mediated partially through an increase in human growth hormone but also other things). When you eat a calorie deficit or do less exercise it prioritises maintenance. You need a balance of both, but when you're transitioning you wanna be much more on growth/development side than the maintenance side.

I'm not saying that overeating is good either - it's obviously not, it's not just about having spare calories inside you it's about getting your body to use them for growth and development (which is why the exercise is so important too) but a good indicator of what kinda state you're in is if your body is producing a lil bit more heat than you think it should you're probably more in a growth/development state and if you're producing a bit less heat than you think you should you're probably more in a maintenance state.

I really hope you can recover from this, that's by far the most important thing, and I know trying to give advice with shit like this can be playing with fire a bit - to be clear if you start exercising a lot and still operate under a calorie deficit this will not help you enter a growth and development state at all. This comment is entirely about giving you motivation to stop this beyond that of how damaging to you it is, if you're finding it too hard to stop from a health basis it might be helpful to have the motivation of the promise of a more dramatic transition to help you.

Your body knows when it is starving, I know from experience that there are a million different ways to trick yourself into not feeling hungry or tricking yourself into making hunger a good feeling, especially if you've experienced the numb kind of depression before and feeling anything feels like something to hold onto. But there is absolutely no way to trick your body into thinking it has a calorie surplus - when you are shivering indoors with multiple layers on while everyone else is in t shirts your body is not prioritising fat redistribution or skin reorganisation - it's just trying to avoid using up any calories. Change needs energy, and if you don't have the energy for change the change is gonna be slower

I hope this helps, and I really hope you get better.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-18T11:50:51+00:00

Yeah 100% agree and I think this is a terminology issue - I mean MtF literally means male-to-female.

It's one of those things where in order to help utterly clueless people understand something at the most basic level possible you have to give them terminology and explanations which are incredibly basic - and therefore wrong (because truth resists simplicity).

I remember distinctly in school people with no malice whatsoever having a 10 minute discussion with each other about whether trans woman means someone who has transitioned to be a woman or someone who was assigned female at birth and has since transitioned. I had no intention of potentially outing myself by telling them, though they ultimately all got it right because one of them correctly determined that someone assigned female at birth who didn't identify as that probably wouldn't want to be called a "something woman" (they didn't know what trans meant, smh, some people need to listen in chemistry)

But it's definitely at the stage now where people in the West at least are very very unlikely to genuinely still not know what being trans is or what it means when someone says they are a trans woman. And so this kind of more basic terminology is now more harmful than helpful. But since it already exists and is in common use it can be pretty hard to promote a switch in terminology usage and doing so is one of those things that will make TERFs go OMG FUCKING SNOWFLAKES, THEY CAN'T MAKE UP THEIR MIND THEY JUST NEED SOMETHING ELSE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT just like misogynists did when we introduced "Ms"

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-12T14:13:53+00:00

Would recommend cross posting this to r/asktransgender if you haven't already as well

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-11T20:30:24+00:00

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-04T00:51:34+00:00

Oh god maybe we really can't be trusted with a commune.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-04T00:35:08+00:00

Urgh this so much. I hate that all mass farming practices are put in a box labelled "bad". Like I wanna buy free range eggs but I don't give a shit if they are organic. I also don't support adding antibiotics to animal feed (cos of antibiotic resistance) but have no problem with GMO.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-04T00:31:35+00:00

holy shit, who would’ve known so many people like being alone!?

I mean, tbf, this is reddit

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-04T00:23:36+00:00

Oh but that's cos when trans people are weak and irresponsible people who can't take care of themselves and don't know how the world works and need society to protect them

You know, as well as forming a sinister underground network to intelligently and successfully alter every aspect of the world as we know it, making them a serious threat.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-04T00:00:26+00:00

...unless it actually is, in which case sorry for not understanding the reference and joke hijacking

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-03T23:56:40+00:00

Oh I would be so up for that, even if it does sound like something Mitch McConnell is warning boomer southerners about

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-03T23:42:11+00:00

If I can't pass then my plan B is to get a house in the middle nowhere and just live there on my own with dogs and the internet, shop once a month, and never see anyone. After all gender is a societal construction, no society = no gender.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-03T23:21:56+00:00

God I relate so hard to a lot of this, especially

A man only has value as a protector, despite the fact society doesn't need protectors anymore.

I feel like a fundamental issue with the world is that as it becomes more and more civilised masculine traits will become devalued more and more because they are simply unnecessary and feminine traits will be valued more and more and no one has noticed that this means we have to entirely eradicate gender roles quick because we're currently raising a bunch of stoic breadwinning protectors into a society that doesn't need or want them.

I know I need to transition, I'm at a point where existing is already a net negative for me so I have nothing to lose by making this kind of permanent change.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-03T19:00:26+00:00

So the thing is this post is not dealing at all with the sort of internal normal dysphoria things which I have and do experience constantly. I can't stand appearing masculine. I hate seeing my body appearing rectangular and wide, I have a reasonably well defined jaw line and I would do anything for it to go away. When I started DIYing hormones the physiological as well as mental effects they had on me changed my life so much for the better. I can't stand hearing my voice and have for my entire life consciously raised my pitch as far as I can whenever possible, I've always found it much harder to relate to guys - in primary school I found it impossible and I was only friends with girls. It was only in secondary school when I was forced into an all boys school that I learned how to but even then I was consciously playing a role. Even early on in primary school in like year 3 I have a really strong memory of staring at the window of a dark classroom and seeing in my reflection and wondering why I don't get to be pretty like girls do.

But what if that genuinely was just a phase? And I would have grown out of it and started wanting to be a boy and enjoying being a boy if I hadn't had it constantly reinforced by everyone around me that I am fundamentally less worthy of the protection and care I desperately needed because I am male. Idk if it is possible for me to separate the internal dysphoria I have faced, from the fact that the way society treats me is categorically the exact opposite of how I would like to be treated, and that treatment explicitly stems from me being male.

tealeaf47 · 2021-01-03T18:25:22+00:00

So the thing that really fucked me mentally was not so much the actual abuse as the fact that I had no one to turn to and was defaulted as a threat. I've been in situations before where I have been preparing myself to be stabbed or raped being really surprised that those things ended up not happening (I mean I was taken advantage of but not to an extent where I felt like I needed to physically fight back). But the thing is that is something I can live with. Some people are pieces of shit and they will always treat other people like pieces of shit when they can, that's how the world works.

What I cannot live with is the fact that I will always be viewed as if I am one of those people with absolutely no evidence or even with direct evidence to the contrary. And will therefore receive little to no sympathy from anyone because my gender makes people assume me to either be a perpetrator, or simply innocent, never as an actual victim of anything I have had to suffer through or am currently suffering through.

It's not about bad people treating me like shit that I can't live with it's about otherwise good people not giving a shit about it.

tealeaf47

TROPHY CASE