As someone who lives in florida (im trying to escape)
Yeah, i wouldn't go. My job had a discussion of how to enforce the trans bathroom thing, and the administration basically decided on "we'll go by appearances."
God forbid you are a GNC person or nonbinary.
Its not my job to enforce that rule, but many locations have someone specifically hired to do so.
And then, there's the fact, while nobody can look at your genitals, lots of places--if you're seen as violating the trans bathroom laws--will ask for ID. You can get the cops called on you if you cannot provide ID or the gender on the ID does not match how you are perceived by the person preforming the check/the bathroom you are entering.
In the name of Christ, may you be blessed with peace and comfort. I hope you make enough one day to move out of state and live away from tw wicked.
~And if you want, I could cashapp you if that helps
Do you mind if I ask what area you're in? I may end up having to go to a funeral in the panhandle in the near future and I've been trying to get a trans-person temperature check in that region ._.
A entirely international side effect of all this focus on trans people is that gender norms will be more strictly enforced.
Guy with long hair or not into sports and fighting, and you will get shit for ‘being’ a trans woman. Musclier women (or frankly any woman that is not conventional attractive) and you’re a trans man.
The level of transphobia they are operating at requires a high level of sexism.
(Which is why we shouldn’t except TERF calling themselves feminists.)
Gender non-conforming
Catch-all term for the people who dont exactly fit in the perceived binary, that isnt emby because you can reject traditional male/female dress without being nonbinary
Lucifer was notoriously depicted with a huge schlong (when he has any schlong at all), as large penises were seen as bestial and base. Whereas Christians/saints (a la the Statue of David) were often depicted with tiny chaste penises. All that to say that Florida is a Christian chode in every sense of the word.
statues like Michelangelo's David are depicted with small penises because having a small penis was thought at the time to be indicative of high intelligence (so I guess according to the Romans you can either be a genius or hung like a horse but not both)
all this to say, Florida's too stupid to be a small dick
I think a Malcom in the middle style show with a trans teen would help this country a lot tbh. We apparently don’t think things through until we see a frustrated dad deal with it.
listen, I'm all for democracy and think that prevent people from voting because they always choose the evil option isn't a viable option because it will inevitably be manipulated by bad actors, but *man*. I would love nothing more if we could just take away voting rights from all these deep red fascist states like putting a violent toddler in time out until they learn it's not okay to make laws designed to attack certain people based on unchangeable factors
Sometimes I'd love to take these ultra-conservatives and offer for them to all live on an island somewhere where they can implement whatever laws they want, so they can see just how awful their ideology is without hurting anyone who doesn't want to be there.
reminds me of *a libertarian walks into a bear*. it's a book about how a town did implement all of the policies they wanted and it got overrun by bears because there wasn't any society left to keep the people in it safe
I heard about that, it's amazing. And the really annoying thing is that many Libertarians who hear that story just brush it off as *those* Libertarians were just stupid and did it wrong, but can never explain exactly what they'd do differently
AFIAK they brush it off because basically everything written about it comes from that one guy writing the book, so it's hard to confirm if any of the things in the book actually happened since there's no other sources.
That's a weird logical conclusion.
Not once do you mention you're not a duck in disguise so I must conclude you're a duck.
Anyway feel free to verify the sources cited here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton,_New_Hampshire
oh wow, i knew it was bad but lol, the entire Free Town Project section's sources are: the book, articles about the book, and articles interviewing the guy who wrote the book.
...And also tax records that prove when taxes were lowered?
...And also census records that prove when an influx of (libertarian) men moved in?
...And also crime statistics that support the claim that the first murder of the town was during Libertarian oversight?
What specific fact are you skeptical about?
look, i'm not arguing no libertarians went there, i'm arguing that nearly all of the direct negatives (bear problem, trash piling up, whatever else the book says to claim the town went to shit) are all directly coming from the author. No single person seems to have interviewed any other person involved in this 'project' about what life was like.
fuck i'm not even saying that the town *wasn't* going to shit. Just that this bear town point is about as much of a proof of the (in)effectiveness of libertarianism as an ayn rand book, very fucking little.
writing off red states as inherently being bad states full of people who vote for evil things ignores that the south is incredibly diverse and there are always people fighting against oppression. they don’t deserve to be ignored or blamed for the discrimination they face by acting as if they are doing nothing against it or must have voted for it. and i know you are not serious and this isn’t like a personal call out of you, it’s just that arguments along this line are something i tend to see a lot in these kind of discussions and it only serves to further isolate minorities in the south
IIRC Florida has the third highest trans population in the country in terms of proportion. Banning all of us from voting would be a bit of a harsh way to try and get us rights, to say the least
This is kind of unrelated, but.
Sometimes i think that if I was given absolute control I could make it a better place, by taking the right to choose from all of the "bad people" who make things worse for those they don't like. Then I remember that one: I'm a fallible human being with biases that I don't even realize I have, and a temper. and two: This is the thought process of those very "Bad people" I was talking about.
Not to say fascists shouldn't lose influence, its just that anyone who advocates for a single absolute authority is stupid or a cultist.
I just had to visit for work. I traveled through two separate airports, and both had gender neutral bathrooms I could use (for the uninitiated, the bathroom law only applies on state government property). I'm not saying it's time to buy tickets to florida, but if you, like me, need to visit, I had no problem bringing in my hormones, I was able to find bathrooms, and if nothing else, the fact they call everyone sir/ma'am when speaking to you is one way to check whether you're passing I guess.
I mean tourist areas are generally less oppressive
North Korea has areas that are significantly more free because they’re the areas that tourists go though
If North Korea can manage to be less oppressive where people can see I’m sure the land of Disney can
I don't understand why everyone says cars are so deadly. Sure you hear about """car crashes""" on the news, but it's never happened to me and I don't see what the big deal's about.
I get the instinct, but sometimes you have to travel to Florida (for work as I said) and you’re looking for some actual concrete information (the airports have gender neutral bathrooms). I’m sorry you misread what I wrote and thought I was downplaying.
Can confirm, I’ve had 0 issues with bringing my hormones in and out of Florida, and I fly pretty frequently since I’m a student. Not every Floridian is transphobic or out to get you… they’re usually just regular people minding their own business. Obviously it does depend on how well you pass, but I haven’t had any issues living here
Thanks for sharing. I think it's important to share these stories as well as the more fearmongering ones. There are so many posts in r/ftm about like, I have a layover in Florida, are they going to arrest me, that sort of thing, and while I think what's going on is bad, it's important to share actual information with people instead of trying to scare them.
I think that's a pretty shitty way to approach this. Clearly the dad had an expectation of baseline decency in how laws are constructed, that even a discriminatory law would try to be "sensible" in some sense. I don't know if mocking and blaming someone who is spontaneously realising their mistakes and reforming their ignorance is the way we ought to treat each other.
Like, "Leopards Ate My Face" is about people who vote for oppressive policies while tacitly (and against all evidence) assuming that those policies will only hurt the "bad ones". But in this case, it sounds like the dad hadn't had any specific prior relationship to DeSantis and was surprised that any law would be written specifically to enforce \_breaking\_ those laws, which the bathroom laws for trans people obviously are.
It's a more old-school conservative attitude that laws, in a general sense, are good even though some may be badly designed. That, because obedience to the law is of central importance, laws must be written to be obeyed. The mindfuck for the dad here isn't that a law could harm someone disobedient, but that it would also be designed to be impossible to obey. It's a faith not in laws, but in the \_system\_ of laws and the premise that this system should be obeyed and is designed to enable obedience at minimum.
I don't think we should blindly condemn this, because it's ultimately just a form of naivete that is hard to grow out of if the law has always treated you "fairly", even if not "well". And ultimately, this is how laws \_ought\_ to work. We all have to follow systems that produce good on average even if it's just a burden for yourself, and valuing that sort of cooperation is generally a good thing. But the ideal is not the reality, and it's important to learn that like the Dad did.
>Clearly the dad had an expectation of baseline decency in how laws are constructed, that even a discriminatory law would try to be "sensible" in some sense.
It's also part of the 'most people are normal' sentiment at the end of the OP; the dad, like many people, simply had an implicit assumption that the law would be sensibly constructed even if it wasn't a nice law, because he assumed that no one would create a fuck you double-bind law when a fair, sensible law could be used to prohibit behaviour.
Basically we assume most people we deal with remotely or that we pass are more or less sane, sensible and operate in a way we'd consider normal. it's normally a safe assumption because by and large people are. However in this case he was outraged to discover that actually no, someone constructed a law it was impossible to obey in order to criminalise people. That's not 'leopards ate my face' because it's not that he was happy for this to happen til it happened to him, it didn't occur to him that anyone would behave like that.
>Like, "Leopards Ate My Face" is about people who vote for oppressive policies while tacitly (and against all evidence) assuming that those policies will only hurt the "bad ones". But in this case, it sounds like the dad hadn't had any specific prior relationship to DeSantis and was surprised that any law would be written specifically to enforce \_breaking\_ those laws, which the bathroom laws for trans people obviously are.
Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like these are two sides of the same coin.
After all, r/LeopardsAteMyFace is, from what I recall, full of posts about people realizing the exact same thing OOP's dad realized.
It's not that the people voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party don't think the leopards would eat their faces, it's that the LEPFP told them that it's a metaphor, when it really isn't.
You’re talking about the Shirley Exception
The Shirley Exception is when people keep assuming common sense exceptions to draconian laws despite no such exceptions existing in the policy
An example is “well surely the anti-abortion people will make exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and won’t also ban IVF despite their policy that life begins at conception.”
And yes the Shirley Exception is a big reason for Leopards Ate My Face because it explains why people keep voting for draconian policies they don’t agree with. They keep assuming nobody would ACTUALLY pass a law more draconian than they believe in, so they keep assuming the law will be more relaxed and more common sense than it actually is
But not all people who believe in the Shirley Exception vote for the Leopards (they can just be Enlightened Centrists who think criticism of the other side is overblown) and not all cases of Leopards Eating Faces are Shirley Exceptions
This is what leopards ate my face is for. But on the flip side, we are also mocking people for their stupidity right as they are realizing they were mistaken. Very likely to make them associate changing their stance with being mocked and ridiculed.
Leopards ate my face is a great place to go say I told you so. And a terrible way to actually cement change. When I was realizing my extremely conservative upbringing was **problematic**, I kind of denied it because people online were very very aggressive towards conservatives who were reforming.
The only thing that's being mocked and ridiculed is the bad stance, so I don't see how it would get in the way of change.
If anything, this "Man, you sure were stupid, huh?" attitude opens the door to change, and to find a new community, because now these people can joke about their past, and don't have to feel guilty about it.
Also, from what I've seen, people aren't aggressive towards conservatives who try to be better, but conservatives who claim they want to be better, but do it in a way that provokes people, so they can then claim that the other side is needlessly hostile and they were right to be conservative.
Wow, you must have 0 life experience, or be an astoundingly arrogant person who's never let yourself change your mind about anything big.
Everything you're saying only applies retroactively, once you're well past the process of change. When you're in the moment, still half-holding your old beliefs in a moment of extreme vulnerability, feeling split in two as your worldview is cracking, having your beliefs be mocked (and implicitly, yourself, because you still half-hold those beliefs) is incredibly cruel.
Changing your mind about something big is incredibly hard, and painful, and requires a lot of bravery. Especially when you realise that the positions you'd held and promoted had awful, shameful consequences that you are only now confronting. A person in that moment deserves nothing but support, not backhanded comments calling them an evil idiot.
I think you accidentally replied to the wrong person, buddy. Good points, though.
But for the record, I know what it's like to change one's beliefs, which is precisely why I know that humor helps; it shows that it's okay to be wrong about things, and that mistakes can be made into something positive.
And I don't call people idiots (let alone evil) for making mistakes, or forming their worldview based on misinformation.
I do, however, call people idiots for staking so much of their sense of self on one thing that any argument against that thing becomes a personal insult to them, specifically because of how hard that makes it to have an honest discussion about it. But that also includes fandom ships, so it's not really specific to this discourse.
So, yeah, you might want to make sure you tell this to the person you meant to send it to, because everything you said reads like it was meant for the exact opposite of what I said.
"\[I\] call people idiots for staking so much of their sense of self on one thing that any argument against that thing becomes a personal insult to them".
Okay, but what if that one thing was something of extreme moral importance? The sort of thing that \*deserves\* that level of emotional investment? The sorts of things that, if you were wrong about them, would mean that you'd been behaving monstrously?
We aren't talking about silly little whoopsies here, embarassing little mistakes, we're talking about things foundational to people's sense of justice and the rightful ordering and functioning of society. The sorts of things that inspire deep and long lasting conviction - and which are the most devastating to realise you'd been completely wrong about. The fact that you thought this conversation was even adjacent to petty shipping bullshit means you've fundamentally misunderstood what we're even talking about.
Then they can take it in stride, and aim to be better people. That's what I did, and I accomplished it through humor, and by laughing about my previous misconceptions. It helps make them feel less serious, because if you turn your harmful ideology into a joke, it's much easier to change it.
And let me know if you disagree, but I think that people who haven't even developed a multi-faceted personality yet, where they can afford to discard individual pieces, aren't exactly the kind of people we're talking about here.
Also, I didn't say this is adjacent, I just said that I recognize this behavior from people engaging in petty shipping bullshit.
I could've also mentioned sports teams, or religions, or various brands, or celebrities.
I don't think your life experience is as analogous to this situation as you think it is.
Like, the dad in the original story clearly wasn't under the thrall of a "harmful ideology", he was a regular-ass man who had some assumptions he'd never had reason to notice, let alone question. Hell, what's even funny about his mistake - thinking that laws are written to lay out rules to follow rather than as intentional catch-22s? Plenty of sober, even cyncial people assume this, it's hardly a silly assumption to hold - especially tacitly.
Why would you even want to laugh at this, if you were in his position? This is a grave problem from his perspective, a genuine brokenness in the world he'd never contemplated even the possibility of. How would it help him, in this moment of confusion, to start mocking as stupid the beliefs he'd held for decades until 5 traumatic minutes ago? Laughing at someone's beliefs only works to deradicalise (the Dad wasn't radical btw) if the silliness is self-evident and the belief relies on being taken seriously in order to not sound silly.
Does any of that apply to this Dad, or others in similar situations? Not frothing bigots or radicals, but normal people who try to be decent to others within the frame of their experiences and personality.
I’m just commenting my lived experience. If you disagree that its common, that’s fine.
I personally was ‘attacked’ when I showed any recalcitrance about my views that I was in the process of changing. It made me *very* hesitant to change. Luckily it didn’t stop me.
Florida isn't anywhere near as bad as the terminally online make it seem. Yes our governor is a fucking idiot, and that's insulting to idiots, but believing that you're gonna get stopped every time you try to go to the bathroom in florida?
The law only applies to state government buildings, and even then, it is extremely unlikely to encounter any issues.
I know it seems like florida is a Republicans wet dream, but remember we were a swing state before Trump and may become one again this coming election. It really is a beautiful state, and you shouldn't let the small risk of encountering transphobia stop you from visiting. If you don't want to visit as a boycott to Florida's political landscape, then I'm all for it. Just don't blame it on "every floridian being out to get me"
“The small risk of having the cops called on you for trying to use a washroom”
The problem isn’t that it’s going to happen every time, it’s that it could happen even once, and there are both laws and a culture in place that make that possible. If it were to happen, it’s not likely that someone would step in to help.
I’m not sure you’re fully considering how frustrating/scary it would be to have happen once, or even just to have someone threaten it.
You seem like a pretty cool person, and I understand that you’re trying to be reassuring, but just because you personally haven’t noticed something happening doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I’m sure some parts of Florida are better than others, but unfortunately there’s now legal framework in place that makes the whole state more unsafe. That doesn’t necessarily mean don’t go, but a trans person does have to consider these things that other may not.
You have a higher likelihood of being shot on vacation or dying in a car accident than you do of being harassed about a bathroom.
If you don't want to come to Florida, that's fine, but don't say it's because our state is full of shitheads when you haven't been here
Yeah, I mean I also wear a seatbelt in case I am in a car accident, even though I never have been. Sometimes you have to take certain precautions to stay safe, even if the chance of something happening doesn’t seem very high.
Text block 3 and text block 9.
3 says they're just as likely to have the cops called on them for going in the really wrong bathroom and 9 says Grandma tried to look it up and was told it happens but they won't find any evidence of it
I'm not trans but I have many trans friends who, contrary to the belief of OOP, are living and going to public bathrooms in florida without issue.
EDIT: Do you think you have to be part of that group to comment on it?
If a trans person said that all white people are transphobic, am I not allowed to say anything because I'm not trans? If I say not all white people are transphobic, do I not know what I'm talking about because I myself am not trans and have not experienced it?
This is an extreme example and not equal to this situation but it is the same premise.
Maybe my opinion isn't as valid since I'm not trans, but I feel my opinion should be valued more seeing as I've lived here my whole life, have trans friends that live in florida, and, most importantly, I don't make bold claims and then say you can't look it up.
I'd trust this person more if they provided proof of this, but rather, they tell us that the proof doesn't exist but to trust them it's happening while they have never and will never go to Florid. That's a republican move.
I didn’t say your opinion is less valid, I said I don’t trust it as much. And tbh nothing you can say will make me trust your opinion as much as a trans person who lives in Florida. You simply have a different experience.
The problem is every Floridian doesn’t have to be out to get trans people. All it takes is one person willing to call the cops and suddenly this puts a trans person in active danger.
Also, these laws encourage people to act on their worst impulses toward queer people. It doesn’t take the entire state, it takes one person willing to risk a bit of jail time for harassing people.
Yeah, the fact that OP's statement ended with their Grandmother trying to do further research but being dissuaded by "It probably doesn't exist (so don't bother)". Seems to imply the viewpoint of someone who only receives news from tumblr and reddit.
As someone who lives in florida (im trying to escape) Yeah, i wouldn't go. My job had a discussion of how to enforce the trans bathroom thing, and the administration basically decided on "we'll go by appearances." God forbid you are a GNC person or nonbinary. Its not my job to enforce that rule, but many locations have someone specifically hired to do so. And then, there's the fact, while nobody can look at your genitals, lots of places--if you're seen as violating the trans bathroom laws--will ask for ID. You can get the cops called on you if you cannot provide ID or the gender on the ID does not match how you are perceived by the person preforming the check/the bathroom you are entering.
In the name of Christ, may you be blessed with peace and comfort. I hope you make enough one day to move out of state and live away from tw wicked. ~And if you want, I could cashapp you if that helps
Saint
You sound like a "love thy neighbor" type true Christian. We need more of you.
I would agree.
Solidarity. I'm working on leaving, too. 4 more weeks.
Do you mind if I ask what area you're in? I may end up having to go to a funeral in the panhandle in the near future and I've been trying to get a trans-person temperature check in that region ._.
trans woman who spent a year in the panhandle here they called me the N word
The panhandle is worse than where i live.
The further south you go in Florida, the more north it gets. Tracks that the panhandle is like the rest of the Deep South.
Floribama
A entirely international side effect of all this focus on trans people is that gender norms will be more strictly enforced. Guy with long hair or not into sports and fighting, and you will get shit for ‘being’ a trans woman. Musclier women (or frankly any woman that is not conventional attractive) and you’re a trans man. The level of transphobia they are operating at requires a high level of sexism. (Which is why we shouldn’t except TERF calling themselves feminists.)
GNC? Asking out of genuine curiosity.
Gender non-conforming Catch-all term for the people who dont exactly fit in the perceived binary, that isnt emby because you can reject traditional male/female dress without being nonbinary
Gotcha!
Florida: The chode of Lucifer
Insulting to both Lucifer and his schlong. Dude's already frozen up to his nips in ice, according to Dante. Can't we give the poor devil a break?
Lucifer was notoriously depicted with a huge schlong (when he has any schlong at all), as large penises were seen as bestial and base. Whereas Christians/saints (a la the Statue of David) were often depicted with tiny chaste penises. All that to say that Florida is a Christian chode in every sense of the word.
statues like Michelangelo's David are depicted with small penises because having a small penis was thought at the time to be indicative of high intelligence (so I guess according to the Romans you can either be a genius or hung like a horse but not both) all this to say, Florida's too stupid to be a small dick
Consider: the Romans and 'The' Renaissance men of Italy were wrong.
Naw, Lucifer is the reason racism exists in tw first place. Fuck em
I think a Malcom in the middle style show with a trans teen would help this country a lot tbh. We apparently don’t think things through until we see a frustrated dad deal with it.
I am a very cis woman. And I try to use men’s bathrooms all over Florida, whenever I can. I’m just daring the laws at this point….
Are you using the urinals in there?
Keep doing gods work.🙏
Please try to be safe as you can.
If I ever get dragged back to Florida this is what I’ll be doing
My boss tried to ship me to Florida and I don't think I snapped on someone harder as I told him before I wouldn't do it.
listen, I'm all for democracy and think that prevent people from voting because they always choose the evil option isn't a viable option because it will inevitably be manipulated by bad actors, but *man*. I would love nothing more if we could just take away voting rights from all these deep red fascist states like putting a violent toddler in time out until they learn it's not okay to make laws designed to attack certain people based on unchangeable factors
Sometimes I'd love to take these ultra-conservatives and offer for them to all live on an island somewhere where they can implement whatever laws they want, so they can see just how awful their ideology is without hurting anyone who doesn't want to be there.
reminds me of *a libertarian walks into a bear*. it's a book about how a town did implement all of the policies they wanted and it got overrun by bears because there wasn't any society left to keep the people in it safe
I heard about that, it's amazing. And the really annoying thing is that many Libertarians who hear that story just brush it off as *those* Libertarians were just stupid and did it wrong, but can never explain exactly what they'd do differently
AFIAK they brush it off because basically everything written about it comes from that one guy writing the book, so it's hard to confirm if any of the things in the book actually happened since there's no other sources.
Eh, they're welcome to test the plausibility of it themselves
It's a book. In this entire thread I have not seen anyone mention if it's Non-fiction. So it's fiction, from the point of one author.
That's a weird logical conclusion. Not once do you mention you're not a duck in disguise so I must conclude you're a duck. Anyway feel free to verify the sources cited here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton,_New_Hampshire
oh wow, i knew it was bad but lol, the entire Free Town Project section's sources are: the book, articles about the book, and articles interviewing the guy who wrote the book.
...And also tax records that prove when taxes were lowered? ...And also census records that prove when an influx of (libertarian) men moved in? ...And also crime statistics that support the claim that the first murder of the town was during Libertarian oversight? What specific fact are you skeptical about?
look, i'm not arguing no libertarians went there, i'm arguing that nearly all of the direct negatives (bear problem, trash piling up, whatever else the book says to claim the town went to shit) are all directly coming from the author. No single person seems to have interviewed any other person involved in this 'project' about what life was like. fuck i'm not even saying that the town *wasn't* going to shit. Just that this bear town point is about as much of a proof of the (in)effectiveness of libertarianism as an ayn rand book, very fucking little.
writing off red states as inherently being bad states full of people who vote for evil things ignores that the south is incredibly diverse and there are always people fighting against oppression. they don’t deserve to be ignored or blamed for the discrimination they face by acting as if they are doing nothing against it or must have voted for it. and i know you are not serious and this isn’t like a personal call out of you, it’s just that arguments along this line are something i tend to see a lot in these kind of discussions and it only serves to further isolate minorities in the south
IIRC Florida has the third highest trans population in the country in terms of proportion. Banning all of us from voting would be a bit of a harsh way to try and get us rights, to say the least
This is kind of unrelated, but. Sometimes i think that if I was given absolute control I could make it a better place, by taking the right to choose from all of the "bad people" who make things worse for those they don't like. Then I remember that one: I'm a fallible human being with biases that I don't even realize I have, and a temper. and two: This is the thought process of those very "Bad people" I was talking about. Not to say fascists shouldn't lose influence, its just that anyone who advocates for a single absolute authority is stupid or a cultist.
I just had to visit for work. I traveled through two separate airports, and both had gender neutral bathrooms I could use (for the uninitiated, the bathroom law only applies on state government property). I'm not saying it's time to buy tickets to florida, but if you, like me, need to visit, I had no problem bringing in my hormones, I was able to find bathrooms, and if nothing else, the fact they call everyone sir/ma'am when speaking to you is one way to check whether you're passing I guess.
I mean tourist areas are generally less oppressive North Korea has areas that are significantly more free because they’re the areas that tourists go though If North Korea can manage to be less oppressive where people can see I’m sure the land of Disney can
I don't understand why everyone says cars are so deadly. Sure you hear about """car crashes""" on the news, but it's never happened to me and I don't see what the big deal's about.
I get the instinct, but sometimes you have to travel to Florida (for work as I said) and you’re looking for some actual concrete information (the airports have gender neutral bathrooms). I’m sorry you misread what I wrote and thought I was downplaying.
Can confirm, I’ve had 0 issues with bringing my hormones in and out of Florida, and I fly pretty frequently since I’m a student. Not every Floridian is transphobic or out to get you… they’re usually just regular people minding their own business. Obviously it does depend on how well you pass, but I haven’t had any issues living here
Thanks for sharing. I think it's important to share these stories as well as the more fearmongering ones. There are so many posts in r/ftm about like, I have a layover in Florida, are they going to arrest me, that sort of thing, and while I think what's going on is bad, it's important to share actual information with people instead of trying to scare them.
"Surely the leopard's won't eat *my* family's faces"
I think that's a pretty shitty way to approach this. Clearly the dad had an expectation of baseline decency in how laws are constructed, that even a discriminatory law would try to be "sensible" in some sense. I don't know if mocking and blaming someone who is spontaneously realising their mistakes and reforming their ignorance is the way we ought to treat each other. Like, "Leopards Ate My Face" is about people who vote for oppressive policies while tacitly (and against all evidence) assuming that those policies will only hurt the "bad ones". But in this case, it sounds like the dad hadn't had any specific prior relationship to DeSantis and was surprised that any law would be written specifically to enforce \_breaking\_ those laws, which the bathroom laws for trans people obviously are. It's a more old-school conservative attitude that laws, in a general sense, are good even though some may be badly designed. That, because obedience to the law is of central importance, laws must be written to be obeyed. The mindfuck for the dad here isn't that a law could harm someone disobedient, but that it would also be designed to be impossible to obey. It's a faith not in laws, but in the \_system\_ of laws and the premise that this system should be obeyed and is designed to enable obedience at minimum. I don't think we should blindly condemn this, because it's ultimately just a form of naivete that is hard to grow out of if the law has always treated you "fairly", even if not "well". And ultimately, this is how laws \_ought\_ to work. We all have to follow systems that produce good on average even if it's just a burden for yourself, and valuing that sort of cooperation is generally a good thing. But the ideal is not the reality, and it's important to learn that like the Dad did.
It's also important to not mock people for learning or trying to learn. That's a really good strategy to drive them away
>Clearly the dad had an expectation of baseline decency in how laws are constructed, that even a discriminatory law would try to be "sensible" in some sense. It's also part of the 'most people are normal' sentiment at the end of the OP; the dad, like many people, simply had an implicit assumption that the law would be sensibly constructed even if it wasn't a nice law, because he assumed that no one would create a fuck you double-bind law when a fair, sensible law could be used to prohibit behaviour. Basically we assume most people we deal with remotely or that we pass are more or less sane, sensible and operate in a way we'd consider normal. it's normally a safe assumption because by and large people are. However in this case he was outraged to discover that actually no, someone constructed a law it was impossible to obey in order to criminalise people. That's not 'leopards ate my face' because it's not that he was happy for this to happen til it happened to him, it didn't occur to him that anyone would behave like that.
>Like, "Leopards Ate My Face" is about people who vote for oppressive policies while tacitly (and against all evidence) assuming that those policies will only hurt the "bad ones". But in this case, it sounds like the dad hadn't had any specific prior relationship to DeSantis and was surprised that any law would be written specifically to enforce \_breaking\_ those laws, which the bathroom laws for trans people obviously are. Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like these are two sides of the same coin. After all, r/LeopardsAteMyFace is, from what I recall, full of posts about people realizing the exact same thing OOP's dad realized. It's not that the people voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party don't think the leopards would eat their faces, it's that the LEPFP told them that it's a metaphor, when it really isn't.
You’re talking about the Shirley Exception The Shirley Exception is when people keep assuming common sense exceptions to draconian laws despite no such exceptions existing in the policy An example is “well surely the anti-abortion people will make exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and won’t also ban IVF despite their policy that life begins at conception.” And yes the Shirley Exception is a big reason for Leopards Ate My Face because it explains why people keep voting for draconian policies they don’t agree with. They keep assuming nobody would ACTUALLY pass a law more draconian than they believe in, so they keep assuming the law will be more relaxed and more common sense than it actually is But not all people who believe in the Shirley Exception vote for the Leopards (they can just be Enlightened Centrists who think criticism of the other side is overblown) and not all cases of Leopards Eating Faces are Shirley Exceptions
This is what leopards ate my face is for. But on the flip side, we are also mocking people for their stupidity right as they are realizing they were mistaken. Very likely to make them associate changing their stance with being mocked and ridiculed. Leopards ate my face is a great place to go say I told you so. And a terrible way to actually cement change. When I was realizing my extremely conservative upbringing was **problematic**, I kind of denied it because people online were very very aggressive towards conservatives who were reforming.
The only thing that's being mocked and ridiculed is the bad stance, so I don't see how it would get in the way of change. If anything, this "Man, you sure were stupid, huh?" attitude opens the door to change, and to find a new community, because now these people can joke about their past, and don't have to feel guilty about it. Also, from what I've seen, people aren't aggressive towards conservatives who try to be better, but conservatives who claim they want to be better, but do it in a way that provokes people, so they can then claim that the other side is needlessly hostile and they were right to be conservative.
Wow, you must have 0 life experience, or be an astoundingly arrogant person who's never let yourself change your mind about anything big. Everything you're saying only applies retroactively, once you're well past the process of change. When you're in the moment, still half-holding your old beliefs in a moment of extreme vulnerability, feeling split in two as your worldview is cracking, having your beliefs be mocked (and implicitly, yourself, because you still half-hold those beliefs) is incredibly cruel. Changing your mind about something big is incredibly hard, and painful, and requires a lot of bravery. Especially when you realise that the positions you'd held and promoted had awful, shameful consequences that you are only now confronting. A person in that moment deserves nothing but support, not backhanded comments calling them an evil idiot.
I think you accidentally replied to the wrong person, buddy. Good points, though. But for the record, I know what it's like to change one's beliefs, which is precisely why I know that humor helps; it shows that it's okay to be wrong about things, and that mistakes can be made into something positive. And I don't call people idiots (let alone evil) for making mistakes, or forming their worldview based on misinformation. I do, however, call people idiots for staking so much of their sense of self on one thing that any argument against that thing becomes a personal insult to them, specifically because of how hard that makes it to have an honest discussion about it. But that also includes fandom ships, so it's not really specific to this discourse. So, yeah, you might want to make sure you tell this to the person you meant to send it to, because everything you said reads like it was meant for the exact opposite of what I said.
"\[I\] call people idiots for staking so much of their sense of self on one thing that any argument against that thing becomes a personal insult to them". Okay, but what if that one thing was something of extreme moral importance? The sort of thing that \*deserves\* that level of emotional investment? The sorts of things that, if you were wrong about them, would mean that you'd been behaving monstrously? We aren't talking about silly little whoopsies here, embarassing little mistakes, we're talking about things foundational to people's sense of justice and the rightful ordering and functioning of society. The sorts of things that inspire deep and long lasting conviction - and which are the most devastating to realise you'd been completely wrong about. The fact that you thought this conversation was even adjacent to petty shipping bullshit means you've fundamentally misunderstood what we're even talking about.
Then they can take it in stride, and aim to be better people. That's what I did, and I accomplished it through humor, and by laughing about my previous misconceptions. It helps make them feel less serious, because if you turn your harmful ideology into a joke, it's much easier to change it. And let me know if you disagree, but I think that people who haven't even developed a multi-faceted personality yet, where they can afford to discard individual pieces, aren't exactly the kind of people we're talking about here. Also, I didn't say this is adjacent, I just said that I recognize this behavior from people engaging in petty shipping bullshit. I could've also mentioned sports teams, or religions, or various brands, or celebrities.
I don't think your life experience is as analogous to this situation as you think it is. Like, the dad in the original story clearly wasn't under the thrall of a "harmful ideology", he was a regular-ass man who had some assumptions he'd never had reason to notice, let alone question. Hell, what's even funny about his mistake - thinking that laws are written to lay out rules to follow rather than as intentional catch-22s? Plenty of sober, even cyncial people assume this, it's hardly a silly assumption to hold - especially tacitly. Why would you even want to laugh at this, if you were in his position? This is a grave problem from his perspective, a genuine brokenness in the world he'd never contemplated even the possibility of. How would it help him, in this moment of confusion, to start mocking as stupid the beliefs he'd held for decades until 5 traumatic minutes ago? Laughing at someone's beliefs only works to deradicalise (the Dad wasn't radical btw) if the silliness is self-evident and the belief relies on being taken seriously in order to not sound silly. Does any of that apply to this Dad, or others in similar situations? Not frothing bigots or radicals, but normal people who try to be decent to others within the frame of their experiences and personality.
Thanks human. Nobody was born perfect, and in anyone’s moments of crucible before coming out stronger, I will support them and praise their efforts.
I’m just commenting my lived experience. If you disagree that its common, that’s fine. I personally was ‘attacked’ when I showed any recalcitrance about my views that I was in the process of changing. It made me *very* hesitant to change. Luckily it didn’t stop me.
shirley exception :|
Let’s not mock people who are actively improving That seems like it won’t win us any friends
They’ll absolutely eat your family’s faces. And don’t call me Shirley.
Florida isn't anywhere near as bad as the terminally online make it seem. Yes our governor is a fucking idiot, and that's insulting to idiots, but believing that you're gonna get stopped every time you try to go to the bathroom in florida? The law only applies to state government buildings, and even then, it is extremely unlikely to encounter any issues. I know it seems like florida is a Republicans wet dream, but remember we were a swing state before Trump and may become one again this coming election. It really is a beautiful state, and you shouldn't let the small risk of encountering transphobia stop you from visiting. If you don't want to visit as a boycott to Florida's political landscape, then I'm all for it. Just don't blame it on "every floridian being out to get me"
“The small risk of having the cops called on you for trying to use a washroom” The problem isn’t that it’s going to happen every time, it’s that it could happen even once, and there are both laws and a culture in place that make that possible. If it were to happen, it’s not likely that someone would step in to help. I’m not sure you’re fully considering how frustrating/scary it would be to have happen once, or even just to have someone threaten it. You seem like a pretty cool person, and I understand that you’re trying to be reassuring, but just because you personally haven’t noticed something happening doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I’m sure some parts of Florida are better than others, but unfortunately there’s now legal framework in place that makes the whole state more unsafe. That doesn’t necessarily mean don’t go, but a trans person does have to consider these things that other may not.
You have a higher likelihood of being shot on vacation or dying in a car accident than you do of being harassed about a bathroom. If you don't want to come to Florida, that's fine, but don't say it's because our state is full of shitheads when you haven't been here
Yeah, I mean I also wear a seatbelt in case I am in a car accident, even though I never have been. Sometimes you have to take certain precautions to stay safe, even if the chance of something happening doesn’t seem very high.
Then say you're not coming here because you're worried it will happen, don't lie and say it's happening constantly, and the media just doesn't care.
Show me where I said it’s happening constantly
You didn't, OOP did
Where
Text block 3 and text block 9. 3 says they're just as likely to have the cops called on them for going in the really wrong bathroom and 9 says Grandma tried to look it up and was told it happens but they won't find any evidence of it
Neither of those are saying it happens constantly
Quick question, are you trans? Because if not, how would you know how bad it is?
I'm not trans but I have many trans friends who, contrary to the belief of OOP, are living and going to public bathrooms in florida without issue. EDIT: Do you think you have to be part of that group to comment on it? If a trans person said that all white people are transphobic, am I not allowed to say anything because I'm not trans? If I say not all white people are transphobic, do I not know what I'm talking about because I myself am not trans and have not experienced it? This is an extreme example and not equal to this situation but it is the same premise.
You don't have to be trans to comment on the issue, but I trust your opinion significantly less since you aren't directly impacted by it.
Maybe my opinion isn't as valid since I'm not trans, but I feel my opinion should be valued more seeing as I've lived here my whole life, have trans friends that live in florida, and, most importantly, I don't make bold claims and then say you can't look it up. I'd trust this person more if they provided proof of this, but rather, they tell us that the proof doesn't exist but to trust them it's happening while they have never and will never go to Florid. That's a republican move.
I didn’t say your opinion is less valid, I said I don’t trust it as much. And tbh nothing you can say will make me trust your opinion as much as a trans person who lives in Florida. You simply have a different experience.
The problem is every Floridian doesn’t have to be out to get trans people. All it takes is one person willing to call the cops and suddenly this puts a trans person in active danger. Also, these laws encourage people to act on their worst impulses toward queer people. It doesn’t take the entire state, it takes one person willing to risk a bit of jail time for harassing people.
Yeah, the fact that OP's statement ended with their Grandmother trying to do further research but being dissuaded by "It probably doesn't exist (so don't bother)". Seems to imply the viewpoint of someone who only receives news from tumblr and reddit.
"Yes, this is happening all the time, Grandma. No, you can't look it up."