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.

I was wondering about this too.

Trump failed a lot in business and left other people holding the bag, while he made sure to pay himself extravagantly. He didn’t pay his suppliers for items like pianos and cabinets. Trump’s net worth seems to be based on whatever he thinks he can get away with saying.

I believe that’s called “leaning in”.

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.

All Chinese OEMs are doing that because Google doesn't offer any apps or services in mainland China. All Google apps and the Play store are pirated.

I'm pretty sure the CEO of Cyanogen knows how Google Play services work. :) It's already been possible for Android OEMs to bundle their own alternatives to stuff like Google Now but then you end up with two versions of everything, like with Samsung's S-Voice or whatever their various S-services are called.

You mean one of the African countries that was created by white European colonists in the 19th century specifically to exploit Africa's resources and divide and conquer the various tribes through force? Which is basically all the countries of Africa, except for Liberia, which was an attempt to send a bunch of free…

I highly recommend David Neiwert's book Strawberry Days about how Japanese-American internment after Pearl Harbor destroyed the farming communities of Washington state. Somehow white land developers managed to steal their land during the internment and repurposed it as the suburbs of Seattle we know today: Redmond…

Interesting story. One correction: Idaho's Chinese population was 28.5% in 1870, but then a series of racist hate crimes caused a mass exodus of Chinese people from the state: Chinese history in Idaho

Portland also rejected a proposal to add fluoride to the drinking water by a large margin. Fluoride, something that's been studied for 50+ years and has no other effects at low levels than strengthening your teeth so they don't rot out.

Yes, very much this! My grandma once owned a house in Inglewood, which was 99% white until black people started moving in, and then white flight turned Inglewood 99% black within a few years. A lot of neighborhoods were also intentionally destroyed through eminent domain when the interstate highways were built.

Everyone should read David Neiwert's book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community about how Redmond, Bellevue, and the other suburbs of Seattle used to be owned by Japanese American farmers, who had their farms stolen from them by their evil white neighbors when they were forced into…

I'm also from SoCal (living in Silicon Valley now) and spent a year in Eugene in 2002. Fair warning: if you move to Oregon, you will be surprised by how white it is and how much you will notice the relative absence of non-European people. Saying this as a white person. It often felt like living in a TV sitcom from the…

Excellent point about how the desire for black sharecropper labor in the South from the end of slavery until the 1950's invention of mechanized cotton picking led to acceptance of Black people and culture that the rest of the country didn't often share.