My worst experience was when I was on an 8 hr flight from Montreal to Amsterdam. I was 11 years old and got my first period midway through the flight. No change of underwear. There was a veritable dosage of blood and thankfully, I knew what a period was at that point and knew that I needed a maxi pad, which my mother…

I was pretty much done with male OBGYNs when one male gyno thought that my open friendliness/enthusiastic bantering was a sign of flirtatiousness. He and the female nurse did not speak to me once during a routine pap smear - they had a conversation and totally ignored me while I was laying there with the speculum…

I invited a friend for dinner once - he failed to inform me that he had a tomato allergy until he arrived - by then, the food had already been prepared... with tomatoes. Seriously. A new dish was prepared after that, but it kinda killed the ambiance of the evening.

Anyone who tells me that abuse is so rare and that I couldn’t abuse my children (if I ever had them) because “it’s different when they’re your own...” needs to fuck off and die. Seriously. Look at how many people have abusive parents. The hell with this ‘maternal instinct’ crap. I’m out.

This has been a day of nauseating anxiety attacks. Articles such as this make me feel less alone, even though I feel as though my family has black sheeped me into a corner in favour of my emotionally manipulative and narcissistic cunt of a mother. Thanks for being my first bully, mom.

People actually still give cheques at establishments? What is this madness?

I can't even be judgmental about this - my mind has been blown wide open.

Um what? Some higher risk people are often immuno-compromised in some ways - They're often more at risk because their immune systems can't properly even develop immunity to a virus because they can't even develop immunity that is imparted by a vaccine. Some people, like transplant patients depend on…

It works both ways - I've met women who act hideously towards servers. Such behavior raises a red flag indicating a terrible personality overall. My mother is like this - to me and to others. She has no tact and no sense of what other people might be dealing with personally.

Hung out with a guy whose natural odor reeked simultaneously of human faeces and naphthalene-based mothballs... and I don't even know how one achieves the latter.

I had a lot of people, including my mother, tell me that I was "really slow" at doing things. It irked me because part of the reason I took my time was because I really wanted to a damned good job. I have excellent manual dexterity, but as soon as I have to put any muscle into any precise manual operation, my fingers…

Hah, I too work in a lab. While I've never (erm... rarely) had issues with pipettes, I have to say that when it comes to big, expensive machines, ie. electron microscopes, microtomes, freezing machines and the like, finding something that can be designed to be ergonomic for both left and righthanded people is more…

"Ergonomic" designs are often only ergonomic for right handed people. I wish designers of any new technology would realize that. It's entirely asinine that people often don't realize that left handedness pertains to more than just writing. Not to hijack the colourblindedness thread.... :-)

It's entirely unfortunate that the defacto colours used in fluorescence microscopy tend to be red and green. Given the predominance of green (when contrasted with red) in nature, why is it that red-green colourblindness is so predominant? It makes me wonder whether there is some evolutionary explanation.

Yes they can be colourblind. Colourblindness is X chromosome linked, and a woman would have to inherit two X chromosomes that result in colourblindness. That is why colourblindness is very rare but still entirely possible in women.

Regarding whether I pick up signals: this is something that I've had to learn but it depends on the circumstances. I'm usually good at avoiding people with truly awful intentions... i.e. I've avoided men who are more likely to rape as I tend to not be as 'desperate' or as 'trusting' as some women (I reject abusive…

The, if you're ace, you still have to deal with people who 'want to date' you, who then get angry when you show zero interest in pursuing a relationship with them. I'm aromantic as well as asexual, and I've unwittingly wrecked a lot of relationships that I've had with males simply because I just wanted to 'hang out'…

It's a bit bizarre that you even brought up abortion since that wasn't even the issue at hand.