“Doesn’t believe in transgenders”

Genuinely funny.

I think your prejudice is blinding you to something that makes good sense in context. I don’t expect to change your mind, or even that I could, but it seems odd to blanket denounce a behavior present throughout North and South America on such a weak premise as “we don’t do it here.” How can you be blind to the use in communicating shared histories in an increasingly multicultural society? I think you’ll find that the same behavior is present in many primarily immigrant nations. The US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and others. It’s just a shortcut we make because those categories, however arbitrary, mean something to us and allow quicker sharing of information. “America bad” is such a tired argument. Americans may have a generally high opinion of themselves, but I think you’ll find similar behavior in the defensive nature of those that belittle them as well. Humans are humans wherever you go. Step down off your high horse and recognize that maybe a behavior that naturally develops among hundreds of millions of independent people from different backgrounds entirely might be due more to its intrinsic value than some bizarrely specific American thing. Because it isn’t. Americans are just an obvious example of it since they have such an overwhelming presence online.

It’s not about the overall age of the country, it’s how long on average most people have been here. The majority of Americans haven’t had family here for more than a few generations, and that number is skewing rapidly towards the shorter side as more and more people emigrate and mix with people already here. How can you expect a people where most come from a different country far more recently than the founding of the US to have a shared cultural heritage? It’s the same type of talking points the American right espouses to denounce immigrants, as though they need to assimilate into a shared culture, when they’re really just being racist.

There isn’t some shared culture; America is a very rich blend of cultures. My first generation neighbors are no less American than I am, who have had family here for three generations, and I’m no less American than my friend who can trace their family back to the original 13 colonies. The cultural heritage of America isn’t a shared one, unless you only care about the culture of the European settlers, a minority. Most countries just don’t experience this level of blending of different people from around the entire world. It isn’t the most diverse country, and doesn’t have the most immigrants each year, but it’s mostly populated by people that trace their heritage back to somewhere else. A lot of the Americas share a very similar tradition of distinguishing what parts of their past trace to different cultures, because the people that live on these continents now, unfortunately, are almost entirely not the original people that lived here.

America is a melting pot of ethnicities and cultural heritages, so it’s useful to be able to identify when those of a common background. I’m German and Jewish, and saying so lets me find common ground or complimentary differences with those I meet that are of similar or different backgrounds. I might discover that someone I met has a shared culrural heritage including foods or traditions I share, or have experiences entirely different than mine. I’d rather know the difference if the person I meet celebrates one set of holidays or another, so I might be polite and not assume. I don’t think it’s strange at all, as though culture isn’t entirely tied to ethnicity, they frequently overlap greatly. It often has nothing to do with ethnicity as well, as often someone will reference how they were raised as a cultural background and not as the arbitrary boundaries we place between people that look slightly different.

It has nothing to do with useless categorization and everything to do with a country filled almost entirely with immigrants from around the world. Other than indigenous peoples, everyone that lives here has only been here a few generations at most. The people around me during my day to day life have dozens of different backgrounds and languages, which is true in many places around the world but especially in a country of immigrants. We don’t have a long shared cultural heritage like most countries do. We bring our histories with us from everywhere else. Race is an entirely social construct, so being able to distinguish oneself as German rather than French, or Turkish instead of Armenian, or Japanese rather than Korean can help the person you’re speaking to have an idea of what cultures you’ve been exposed to, since such a blend of different ethnicities means it might not be apparent. I certainly don’t have any of the common traits of anyone of my heritage except my skin tone, so when I meet someone with shared heritage we can connect by simply saying so.

I’m not religious, but I grew up in a religious home. It’s worth noting that “everything happens for a reason” and “God has a plan for everything” are not in the Bible and are not doctrine, as far as I remember. These are platitudes people with a poor understanding of their religion say, but not actually part of the belief system. This pastor likely has a more nuanced, and possibly more painful, view of this event through the lens of their belief.

You saw it too huh

It’s a reference to Noah’s Ark, where God supposedly flooded the whole world except two of each animal and Noah’s family, then put a rainbow in the sky as a symbol that He’d never do it again. Young Earth Creationists and their like take the story as fact, despite the fact that such an event would have put humanity well below the number of people needed for a stable gene pool, and that two of an animal likely wouldn’t repopulate an entire species. I digress.

Fascinating. I do have a lot of childhood trauma, though I wouldn’t consider it “early” childhood. And I do misplace things often, though that might be more due to ADHD or my general scatterbrained forgetfulness.

Thank you for your genuine curiosity! I like talking about things like this, and it’s nice to not be confronted by people telling me I’m wrong about my own mind. As far as my fiancée, we do collaborate using music as well! I’m a musician and play dozens of instruments, all of which I hang around our house among her drawings and paintings. We like to mix her animation and my music.

What others have found interesting in the past is how I conceptualize spaces around me, especially when imagining things like my DnD campaign that I run. I don’t see things in my head visually, but more have a general special sense of them. I don’t need to visualize my foot or my hand to know where it is. I don’t need to visualize the wall of my room that I’m very familiar with; even with my eyes closed I know my relative position in the space and can find the light switch in the dark, or the fan. It’s the same for my spacial reasoning. I can navigate the world perfectly fine, or conceptualize a fictional DnD battle, not visually, but more like through touch, though that’s not exactly the sensation. I cannot rotate the proverbial cube in my mind, but I can conceive of what another face might feel like, and, if it’s not too TMI, I have a very good mental map of my fiancée’s body, and could draw her accurately, even if I can’t see her.

No, certainly not. It’s a condition known as aphantasia, and isn’t something that can be cured with practice. I have a lifetime of practice in conceptualizing in a different way though. I don’t feel that I’m missing out on anything really, just experiencing the world differently. I didn’t even know that I was any different than most until I was an adult, and a friend of mine made me realize it.

Someone with aphantasia might be able to learn how to conceptualize in a different way, but I don’t think you can train what’s not there, any more than a blind person could train themselves to see. There isn’t a lot of study into it though, and I’ve found it difficult to get solid information on my condition, so perhaps there’s more to learn. Why, for example, do I have a very vivid imagination of sounds? I can imagine an entire song in all of its different instruments as if I could hear it, but I can’t even conceive even a little bit of what it means to see something in my head.

I’ve had it explained to me very often by people with varying degrees of sincerity or understanding, and I still don’t quite get it. Is it like dreaming, or like a hallucination, or like an image you can’t really see but still know is there? It’s foreign to me, and no description I’ve heard makes it clear. I dream quite clearly and in color, but that’s like I’m there experiencing it in person. I’d love to learn more about aphantasia, especially since my fiancée has the opposite, hyperphantasia, and it would be nice to more easily collaborate as artists.

I love reading, and I love writing and storytelling. I think books can be for anyone. I wouldn’t let a difference in perception preclude you from enjoying an entire form of media, entertainment, and information. For me, audiobooks work best to hold my attention, as I struggle to sit and read words in front of me without keeping myself busy. It’s not a fit for everyone, and not everyone will like reading, but I think it’s a very simple joy that so many people have had hammered out of them by bad parents, bad teachers, or bad education systems that taught them to dread or hate books and reading. I got back into reading as an adult, and it’s one of the most fulfilling parts of my day.

I can do that too. You’re misunderstanding the concept. I’m perfectly capable of drawing, eyes closed or not (though it’s much harder eyes closed, obviously). I do digital art. I just conceptualize things differently. I don’t have a mental image, it’s more like a knowledge of what shapes go together to make certain forms. I build things piece by piece from fundamental shapes that I analytically know make certain objects or creatures, but I don’t have an image of what it is until I have actually put it down in paper.

I don’t know if I worded that in a way that makes sense, as I’ve always struggled with explaining how I conceptualize to people that have an ability I don’t. I know what shapes make up a dog, but I can’t see the dog, if that makes any sense.

It really fucked me up when I realized that “picture this” wasn’t an entirely figurative saying, and everyone else does actually see stuff in their “mind’s eye.”

I’ve never seen any sort of logical response to this argument.

Person A: Maybe we should reduce harm

Person B: But Biden is bad and evil!

Person A: I agree, but Trump is worse and more evil.

Person B: These are both the same!

Clearly, there are people that will be under attack under Trump that won’t under Biden. I’m not voting Republican or Democrat in the primaries, but I’m voting against Trump in the general. Not for Biden, but against Trump, because he’s far more dangerous in the same ways that Biden was, and spreads out his harm to others as well.

Isn’t this obvious satire? This isn’t a right wing meme, it’s making fun of right wing memes.

Expressed well or not, you didn’t use any logical fallacies or resort to ad hominem attacks. I could disagree on every point and still enjoy the discussion just for the sake of respectful debate. Hope to run into you again.

I happened to read your last reply before it was deleted, and I have to give you props for disagreeing respectfully. I don’t see nuanced debates online often, and I’d much rather have a respectful discussion where we don’t see eye to eye. Have a good one, you seem dope.

I think the issue is that the “new” usage of “they” is seen as different, or incorrect, when that’s simply not the case. The strict usage of “they” as only a plural pronoun is not “correct.” It’s revisionist. Historically, “they” has been used as both a singular and plural pronoun, and it can be found in conversation and literature going back hundreds of years. At some point, we revised that they should be only plural, and that’s why it feels like things are changing in our current lifetimes. We aren’t changing how the word is used, we’re going back to how it’s been used for centuries.

Language is not a set of rules and strictures. It’s fluid, and the way people use words becomes grammatically correct. If these things could not change, then language couldn’t exist. You can feel uncomfortable that language has changed from what you’ve known, but don’t hold it back, or complain about the next generation. Language will change in their lifetimes too. Overall, it’s a good thing and pushes us to understand each other in the manner appropriate for the times. Right now, an easily recognizable and commonly accepted gender neutral, singular pronoun is more valuable to language than a strict usage or a new word for the use case.

“They left their bag.” “They went that way.” “I’ll find them later.”

All these examples could refer to either singular or plural cases, and maybe that confuses some people, but I think it’s very simple to determine with even the barest bit of context. It’s better than defaulting to “he” for any unspecified gender, as was “correct” for the last few decades, and allows for non-binary people to be referred to without needing oft-criticized neo-pronouns.

TLDR: Times change. We need to get with it.

It’s my name