Here's more on what's happening and what it means: papersplease.org/wp/2025/10/1...

why can a shocking amount of discourse be boiled down to

They argue who is and who is not a woman in tune with the nation state's view on which women it wants to be wifed up and impregnated. It's why they degender both Black cis women (and brown cis women in general) and trans women. We are not doing the imperial role, so we can't be women like them.

....add another six hours of troubleshooting to the counter....

the real question is, what new computer skill will i be forced to teach myself in order to get a playable gamestate this time???

me, staring at Vortex and the NVIDIA app, trying to figure out if the issue is my complex mod setup, my extremely out of date hardware, or unreal engine being a bitch: man, oblivion really is just the same as i remembered!!

and obviously, yes, i could IN THEORY play without mods. we call that "booting up the second copy i bought for xbox".

after 6+ hours of troubleshooting, a 14 hour ram test, and completely reinstalling the game, i've upgraded "crashes to desktop within three minutes of play" to "freezes within five minutes of play" so at least we're getting somewhere!!

at the same time, "calling these people 'trans woman' is Western colonialist but calling them 'non-binary third genders' is a totally value-neutral descriptive free of the discursive taint of the West!" is an opinion sincerely expressed by many such Very Serious Gender Theorists

incoherent

Androphilic trans women are not gay men, or vice versa. But there's something homoousian about our social locations and oppression.

"Homosexual" is a relatively modern construction. Transmisogyny and anti-effeminacy, though, are very old.

This is also why gay communities and other environments in which there's frequent sexual contact between "males" usually have implicit or explicit systems for working out gender hierarchy and proximity to masculinity. "Which one is the man?"

I promise I'll gussy it up in dense academic writing so you can all cite it without being embarrassed, but "IF YOU TAKE IT UP THE ASS YOU'RE A WOMAN, FAGGOT" has been a pretty core component of patriarchy and (trans)misogyny for a long, long time, in many, many cultures.

As a hobby, I have personally laid off 3,000 CIA agents who now have nothing but free time and resentment. This was probably a smart decision