I’m cisgender, and I think it’s pretty damn insulting to be told that I’m just the genitals I was born with. What kind of a man or a woman is defined that way?

Yeah, what’s at stake now is that we’re giving people more opportunities for happier lives than they would have had otherwise.

Hasn’t he done enough damage already?

It’s that you’re saving kids from dying by their own hand because of the trauma of going through an irreversible puberty that they don’t want to go through, because they don’t ID as that gender. If that doesn’t move you to having some compassion, I don’t know what will.

No, you’re describing puberty, which is irreversible and very disruptive to the body while it’s in progress. Puberty blockers block those changes from happening.

ADHD is a real thing, though. I wish Ritalin had been around when I was a kid because I would surely have benefited from it then. It’s a neurological issue that responds well to medication and has a strong genetic component.

Ann Coulter’s straight. I think she and Bill Maher used to date.

Yeah, I think I speak for most mid-30-somethings in that our first excursions into porn watching and owning a credit card corresponded with the peak of the first wave of "child exploitation on the Internet" busts.

I linked to an article in the last post that explains most likely what site Grisham's friend was visiting, given the timeline of when he got caught. The darkest net

This, exactly. I have no need for TOR because I'm never out looking for anything that forbidden that it wouldn't be on the regular Internet, but the Daily Dot did a fascinating set of articles interviewing the child porn collector underground and putting together a history of child porn on computers here.

Actually, I'm pretty sure he meant the ten o's in the colorful "Goooooooooogle" at the bottom of the search results page numbered 1 - 10 underneath, which let you jump to other pages if you click the numbers, or the o's above them.

I think "teen girls" is code for 18 to 40 year old women with small breasts.

The Apple watch was announced with a sapphire crystal instead of glass.

Now that I think about it, the only place I shop regularly where I wanted to try using Google Wallet with NFC on my Nexus 5 was Walgreens, and the one time I tried, they said the NFC reader wasn't active. Interesting that you tried recently and it's the same story.

Yeah, I hear you. I had to go cuddle my dog for a while after reading your reply yesterday. Fortunately I didn't read the Dr. Dobson story until I was an adult, and already disliking him. I couldn't imagine getting that book from my mom as wisdom from a Christian leader. He sounds like a complete sociopath by his own…

The trick is to click the Formatting options button, then click the HTML button on the toolbar, then paste in the script code for the tweet. You can click the HTML button again to go back to regular editing mode.

I think a lot of religious fundamentalists would tell you that children don't have any civil rights, because they're property of their parents, like a car or a house plant. If the parents abuse their kids, that's a private matter between the parents and God. James Dobson famously told a story about viciously beating…

I thought Joseph Smith got pretty inventive with his whole three-tiered afterlife for Mormons, called degrees of glory.

The question I replied to seemed to be conflating FGM with male circumcision (is there some other body parts that people are unnecessarily cutting off of others without their full consent?) and I was trying to point out that not only is it a false equivalence, but that ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists approve of…

I don't think anyone opposes Ayaan Hirsi Ali because they want to enable FGM in the US. That's absurd. Rather, it's because she's really good at scaring reactionary conservatives with the boogieman of Islam, and she's currently on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute, presumably to further their own…