If you have ever attempted to change your name you know it is way more annoying to change your name than accept someone else’s change of name. The amount of admin it takes to make that update in your social circle even before you try and make it legal is a test of social fortitude and willpower.

Remember when someone is changing their name they are very aware of the imposition of the mental load they are placing on you. Grace goes a long way.

In the case of JKR that talking point kind of sailed on. Nobody really cares if you enjoy something second hand or where the money and interest played out years ago. The books, the old movies, the merch you picked up at a garage sale…

Problem is when you support the latest and greatest newly licenced thing that lines her pockets with cash because she is USING that cash to do direct damage to the community. She’s been financially backing anti-trans groups and lobbying in the UK. Just ONE of her little go fund mes was chipping in a 700,000"£ donation to the lawyers who got gender recognition certificates made worthless in the UK Supreme Court. Ticket sales to events, merch deals, video game titles, remakes… It propells demand which means a nice big chunk of that coin passes right through her pockets and right into directly funding her hate and her fans go on to brigade trans support spaces which often are necessary emergency mental health support for weeks after a big release online. More than one suicide can be laid at the feet of these mobs.

The difference between that and Kevin Spacey is at least he’s moldering quietly.

Yeah, it can actually a fairly useful way to pick up on reporting that is from a source that is anti-trans as folk who purposefully forget the space will use that as a dogwhistle to distinguish their pieces. It is so subtle you generally don’t notice it but of a specifc era of anti trans propaganda (around either side of covid particularly) you start recognizing it in places that try and appear to be ’ trans welfare centric’ to unwitting cis viewership while providing some heinous misinformation.

The right trying to spin that this is a problem with the left or trans people generally is dangerous. Shooters from the right murdered democratic politicians and made attempts on their own candidates and people. It’s not the left. The entire damn country right, left and center is at a flash point because of the policies that are getting enacted by this government and the relief that isn’t coming and they are using the rhetoric of a trans person, who was only tangentially involved, for calls to persecute all trans people as terrorists or imprison them in mental institutions. Laws are coming into effect so that a trans person posting a fully clothed picture of themselves online could be considered porn. They are creating a class of “non person” who cannot be seen or heard or walk free simply because they are exercising their freedom to exist as they choose to. Wear clothes that they want and find happiness in their own way.

The Government is censoring media, calling for people’s dismissal and vowing direct personal vengeance on private citizens who criticize this influencer. This is what a real collapse of freedom of speech looks like. If you have any claim to care about free speech some trans person with a violent roommate reacting on behalf of their misery in ways they likey didn’t even ask for isn’t your priority.

Unsure what this has to do with my comment which was in reply to your statement about not knowing what the statement in the original post likely meant by “relaxing”. I never stated the friends must be women.

Trans guy here - in part what I think might be meant is the pressure of expected romance. Like it is certainly a thing when younger AFAB people are trying to find regular old cis male companionship that there’s often this sort of pressure where you can tell when someone is crushing on you and it’s a matter of if and when they make their move. That time can be dreaded because a lot of the time once someone makes their move if the romantic advance isn’t accepted the friendship disappears and the feeling left behind is that you were never a friend at all. That you were tricked into valuing a friendship that wasn’t real because it was a down payment on an expected return of sexual or romantic affection.

And yes, I am aware it’s awkward and hard to stay around someone who rejected you romantically. It’s also hard to lose a friend because of something you had literally no control over and to mourn that. Sticking around and remaining a friend and getting past your romantic flop is a service to all sides involved if what you actually feel is cut off from friendship. Otherwise it really makes the assertion that this isn’t about sex ring very hollow.

In my 20’s an asexual closeted trans person who counted men as my tribe and wanted nothing but friends that felt normal and lasted - at one point I got so desperate I agreed to a sexless “romantic” relationship by way of fear of losing my best friend. Even though my “boyfriend” was a perfect gentleman during the time we were “together” I ended up in a two year long situationship that in the end felt skeezy and colors that time of my life in a sense of wrongness. I never developed romantic feelings and that whole set up ended up being sickening and oppressive. After it ended that friendship became remote and I lost what I valued somewhere along the line anyway.

It doesn’t surprise me that so many women aren’t all that empathetic to the male loneliness epidemic even though in this post it is being expressed in a really shit way. It doesn’t take many guys dumping you on your ass simply because they got attracted to you and decided not to stick around afterwards before you start feeling like their lonely heart is not your problem to solve. It feels just like if you had a friend who was using you for your money or some sort of service you were providing. Feeling used and discarded is traumatic. People who get hurt this way start getting very suspicious of new friendships and maintain distance because they are guarding from getting hurt again.

In summary - It’s really hard to relax around someone who is coming at you with an expectation you might not be able to meet. The more obvious it is the more you can potentially save yourself the trouble of not getting invested early.

Her last name is Wilson… Is there some really terrible Wilson I don’t know about?

Absolutely. I belong to a non cheating group. It’s just seems completely unfathomable that it could happen. Most of us are in 15+ year relationships and are friends with everyone. It’s not just a “the women are friends with the women, the men are friends with the men” situation. We got a blend of genders all participating in the same hobbies. There would be so much social cost to cheating it would be kind of insane.

Where I work though there’s a decent amount of drama in that regard though and I have noticed that one common factor is that the relationships are atomized. They either keep their old friends going in and there’s almost zero expectation of their partners integrating into each other’s friendships or there’s just this expectation that men and women are fundamentally different creatures. That whole men are from Mars women from Venus shtick. From the outside it seems like emotional distance where people look at each other like they aren’t targets of empathy - more like they play by a book as if they can just put the right inputs in they will get the desired outputs.

I know this is entirely anedotal and that anybody could theoretically cheat for any number of reasons… It’s just something that I noticed about the groups of cheats that I am aware of.

It’s not nessisarily skewing the narrative, it’s just not providing context. Terrorist acts have a narrow definition in Canadian law. This guy could be a spree killer motivated by racism but unless that killing is for premeditated ideological, religious or political reasons to coerce a specific result or change of policy from the population / Government it doesn’t fall under the definition.

No manifesto or claim of reasoning or connections found to groups that claim responsibility - no terrorist designation.

A terrorist attack has a narrow definition in Canadian law where it is specifically part of a premeditated ideological, religious or political attempt to influence government policy or to intimidate a section of the public to a specific end. Basically if this guy didn’t have a manifesto or ever stated his reason within this rubric and was not part of a group that has specific aims then it follows under a regular old spree killer homicide unless it was racially motivated in which case it is also a hate crime.

Whether one uses cars or guns is not a factor in determining what counts as a terrorist act. The reporting on this has not been great ar clearing up this point.

There’s a very specific rubric for what counts as a terrorist attack in Canada. Probably the level of calculation and premeditation involved was a factor and that he’s not a part of an ideologically organized group that is trying to influence behaviour of a government or political body.

A spontaneous hate crime made against a population is technically not a terrorist attack by Canadian definition. To count you have to have done it for a narrow slice of very specific reasons.

Hey can we not do this?

While there is an endemic issue with toxic variations of masculinity that looks at sex as a tool of domination erasing the experience of people who have been assaulted by women and other gender minorities isn’t the way to go about this. There are lots of ways to get this point across without turning around and being gross towards other groups affected by abuse.

Sloganizing these issues in this way doesn’t make the allies needed to combat abuse.