Everyone else: “I’m making little laminated pastry cups filled with creme anglaise and dotted with tangerine-lemon curd, with curls of white chocolate and toasted meringue on top!”

Ruby was perpetually on the edge of a psychological breakdown, and it was excruciating to watch. Like, I can be anxious and insecure and get a little down on myself sometimes, but MAN. Other really young contestants on the show would start out a little nervous and in need of validation, but Ruby was a WHOLE other…

HOWARD! Oh my god Howard. He was so awful! But delightful to watch. “IIIII think IIIII’ll maike a gluuuuten-free flaaaax loaffff” “But Howard, you’re supposed to make a delicious and indulgent buttery pastry.” “IIIII liiike spelt.”

That season was a TRAVESTY. Kimberly should have won. Frances NEVER took the criticism they gave her seriously, and she continued to fuss with little fondant sculptures instead on focusing on the flavors and the quality of the baking over and over and over. The same criticism again and again, and she just kept at it…

Oh, for sure, agreed on all counts. (And maybe ... “people who need to see an OBGYN?”)

How is that relevant to the discussion?

Well, yeah ... I was literally just addressing a vocab question.

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Trans women are excluded from male privilege in a lot of ways even before they’re out/transitioned.

Yeah, claiming you’ve undergone FGM because you’re a woman who had her penis circumcised as a baby is incredibly misleading, and seems insincere at best.

You’re showing some ignorance here. There are plenty of trans people who choose not to have gender confirmation surgery (or intersex people with ambiguous genitalia who choose to keep it that way), and end up with genitals that don’t match what we typically think of when we think of men’s or women’s bodies. But it…

An article about FGM is not an appropriate place to discuss that.

Yeah, but I do think it’s a little more complicated than that. (I also think that piercing babies’ ears is kind of awful in itself, so I’m going to set that aside.) The health benefits of circumcision are pretty minor, and basically nonexistent if you have reliable access to clean water and practice good hygiene.…

Actually, it’s probably a better idea to find women who actually come from cultures where FGM is performed who are working against it, and to follow their lead and support their efforts. When people from outside those cultures try to take charge and force change, it usually backfires (and it reinforces western…

Actually, emasculation is removal of the penis and testicles. Castration is just the testicles. (Not sure if there’s a word that refers to the removal of just the penis.)

This is really transphobic. Trans women don’t have male privilege.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty widely understood that FGM is a cultural practice, not a religious one. But since there’s some overlap there, I think that religious communities—as arbiters of morality within their larger communities—might be well-positioned to help reduce FGM in some cases.

Almost!

Desensitization from removal of the foreskin is not really similar to desensitization from the wholesale removal of the clitoris. If circumcision involved removing the head of the penis (to make men clean and pure and to prevent husbands from running around on their wives) we could maybe talk about the two as…

I’ve heard suggestions about things like allowing a doctor to make a “ritual nick” instead of full-on FGM. The idea being that it can fulfill the cultural imperative to have the procedure done without really altering the genitals or impacting sexual function later on (and preventing families from taking their children…

OH GOD.