Darkoshi

No regrets: Gender-affirming chest surgery in adults has long-term satisfaction (ArsTechnica, 2023/08/11)

HHS Issues Regulations Banning Trans Health Care Discrimination

Federal Register page with link to PDF (scheduled to be published on 05/18)

It even mentions protections for non-binary identified people.

... OCR recognizes that sex stereotypes can include the expectation that individuals consistently identify with only one of two genders (male or female), and that they act in conformity with the gender-related expressions stereotypically associated with that gender. Sex stereotypes can also include a belief that gender can only be binary and thus that individuals cannot have a gender identity other than male or female. OCR recognizes that an individual’s gender identity involves the interrelationship between an individual’s biology, gender, internal sense of self and gender expression related to that perception; thus, the gender identity spectrum includes an array of possible gender identities beyond male and female.

Amazon has the whole first season of Transparent watchable for free (today only), so I wanted to watch some more episodes.

I again spent over an hour unsuccessfully trying to get the video to play full-screen on the TV over the HDMI cable (like I do for YouTube and Netflix videos).

Using Flash, the video is so jerky that I don't want to watch it.
Using Silverlight, the video doesn't even start - it does some kind of looping/buffering thing.

I cleared all application data from Silverlight. I uninstalled and reinstalled Silverlight. I disabled hardware acceleration in both Firefox and Silverlight. I tried using IE and Chrome. The problems persisted. I was able to get a few short clips to play ok... but they weren't full screen, so maybe that is why they worked.

Anyway, back to admitting failure and watching it on the laptop screen.

...

Geez, even playing it on the laptop, the sound stutters somewhat.

Oh good lord, maybe all I had to do all along was click the button to turn off HD? ... ::sigh:: No, even then it's still jerky on the TV.

Lana gives a long speech. I wasn't planning to watch the whole thing*, but it was so entertaining and touching, that I did.


Video title: Lana Wachowski receives the HRC Visibility Award
Posted by: Human Rights Campaign
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c


And her hair is beautiful!

* I was initially intrigued by the following quote from the speech (between 12:34 and 12:47) which a fellow androgyne pointed out:

". . . transition. Parenthetically, this is a word that is a very complicated subject for me because of its complicity in a binary gender narrative that I am not particularly comfortable with."

Having a Dom want me to do those things seems similar to a Dom/me wanting their transsexual MTF submissive to get her hair cut in a short men's style, and to wear men's clothing, and to present as male. While on the one hand, it can seem a great act of submission for the sub to go along with this just to please the Dom/me, it's also obviously going to make the sub feel that the Dom/me doesn't respect their true gender, and actually views them as the other gender, and would really prefer them to be that other gender, instead of who they actually are.

It would also be similar to a Dom/me wanting their non-transgendered male submissive to grow his hair long and to wear women's clothing, or for a Dom/me wanting their non-transgendered female submissive to cut her hair short and to wear men's clothing. Except that in these cases, the sub's physical sex would still probably be quite apparent for most observers, so perhaps the sub wouldn't feel quite as strongly that their own gender, which matches their physical sex, was being hidden/buried. But it would be just as emotionally discomforting for them, and perhaps even more so than for me (since my own gender-id is between that of a man and woman, whereas for them, it would be on the other end of what they were being made to present as).

Submissive females (or bottoms) often have a limit that the Dom can't cut off their hair. At least, I believe I have heard a few people stating that as a limit of theirs. Their hairstyle is a part of their identity. They would feel less feminine and less attractive with short hair. That is the same kind of reasoning as my own gender-related limits (even though for them, they would most likely still be seen as female, even with short hair - so their actual gender would not be in question). So why should these limits of mine be seen as unreasonable, or as a sign that I am not really submissive?

Other than the first Dom I was involved with, no one else has explicitly said that, but that is the feeling I get, of how other people view (or would view) those limits of mine. Which perhaps just means that I feel that hardly anyone truly understands my gender identity.

I feel that the 2nd Dom whom I was (briefly) involved with, understood my gender best. He seemed to treat my gender-id as a positive thing... he took to calling me "boy" (which I was very tickled by)... he even asked if I preferred "boy" or "boi"... he even asked what pronouns I preferred, and he actually used them when referring to me while chatting with someone else! He even seemed to understand that one of my issues with not wanting to gain any weight (in spite of telling me that it would still be wise for me to do so) was because it would make me look more feminine.