for men to wish to be a woman
Homophobia
I was raised in a right wing, rural area, and i didn’t meet a gay person til higschool. When he said he was gay, i assumed he was joking.
Im trans now lol
Dude tells you he’s gay, immediately turns you trans. The danger is real, people! 😭
if my grandma were to be believed my dad’s babysitter when he was 4 years old infected him with homosexuality then he passed it onto his children because one (me) is trans and the other is bisexual
She’s not very harmful about it but is just really damn confused lol
So if I get this right, your dad turned homosexual from his babysitter… Then proceeded to have two, presumably biologic, kids?
Nah the dad was too strong to be brainwashed by the babysitter’s sexual deviance. But those poor baby sperm overhead everything and became infected with the gay.
presumably biologic kids
Yeah, my dad fell for the “get a woman to protect you from same sex attraction” propaganda. Over the years he changed his mind and learned that it’s not something to be ashamed of, but he was in a relationship with kids now.
when I came out and my mom was very verbally abusive he kinda had the realization that the relationship wasn’t benefiting the children either. Also my mom was very very controlling over who he could talk to/make friends with.
He is currently in the process of a divorce after 22 years and is coming to terms with how he let fear control his life for that long.
It’s kinda sad.
These must be the so called trans reading bed time stories turning kids gay i keep hearing so much about. /s
Small towns are terrible for this. And racism
There’s a reason cities are more liberal. Turns out being surrounded by different cultures, races, sexualities, and beliefs shows you that maybe they’re not so different. In a town of 15k middle American white folks, it’s hard to see another culture equally, let alone at all.
Same thing with college. There’s no such thing as a liberal or democratic college. It’s just that people are simply surrounded by other people. You learn all of those weird rules and things you were taught don’t actually hold up, and that everyone is kind of the same
Grew up semi-rural south and same thing but my parents took me to see The Birdhouse for some reason (I was 14) and I was like “OH!”
Not gay myself, but thankfully I did not grow up to be the bigoted person my parents wanted me to be.
it was semi-common in the early 2000s in cities, but not anymore after 2010.
I remember one day realizing it was odd that my dad would hug my mom but my mom would never hug him back. She would just stand there and let him hug her. Yeah he was an abusive husband and I was very happy for her when she finally left him after over a decade!
Knee pain. Everyone told me it was normal growing pains, until one little league coach notice I run weird. Queue years of doctors and specialists and tests and scans and surgeries, and now I’m a 40 something guy with advanced arthritis that could have been much much worse if left untreated.
way to go attentive little league coach!
also wtf parents?
“Well it’s not hurting me so it can’t be that bad.”
My parents took me to see doctors, who told them it was just growing pains and suggested I exercise more to lose weight. I saw three specialists and had a bunch of xrays before anyone noticed the shady spots on my cartilage. Osteochondritis Dissecans occurs in 15-30 people out of 100,000, and most of the primary care doctors I’ve had in my life had never heard of it.
I can’t blame my parents for that. I can blame them for a lot of things, but they did their best.
I don’t know if this counts, but when I was little I’d go to friends houses, then later in high school to my first serious girlfriends house, and I remember their families were like… loving? I loved spending time at my girlfriends house especially, hanging out with her Mom and her Dad even if my gf wasn’t there. They were so nice, and you could tell had genuine affection for their children (and to some degree, me). I miss you Mr. and Mrs. Miller!
That’s me. I had no idea other families were affectionate and said crazy stuff like, “I love you.” My god, they even hug.
To this day I struggle with affection, even though I love it. If you touch me unexpectedly I’ll involuntarily flinch. I don’t mind, at all, but I still jerk and can’t help it.
I think my family was the same but I turned out cuddly, maybe the difference was the cats?
Heh that was my experience too. But I grew up with a single parent who spent all his time working, so most people’s childhoods weren’t spent climbing 5 floors of scaffolding for fun
Met my partner and was astounded by her loving family
Being unable to think of something without a prompt.
I guess most people can just remember things without sticky notes and calendars.
i have approximate knowledge of many things; accessing it without the right trigger may take a while though.
i know i know something but i have accepted that my brain will often only grant me access days later in a completely unrelated situation 🤷🏼♂️
You ADHD? I was almost 40 before I learned about inattentive type ADHD. As far as I knew, ADHD was spastic kids that couldn’t sit still. Since I was more of the daydream and fall asleep type, I never would have thought I was part of that crowd.
Pretty sure, yes.
I’m over 40 and i’ve had this and many other symptoms my entire life.
No official diagnose though; but this 160 questions-test for example says i’m pretty high up there: https://www.adxs.org/en
I’m also the daydream and fall asleep type ☺️
Undiagnosed adults club!
Genuinely. This is sadly how my memory works. It’s gotten better since I had a partner who I would talk to everyday with the inane question, “so how was your day?”
Then suddenly I had to learn how to summarize recent aspects of my life.
And then you’re like, “shit, that happened to me today? shouldn’t I be angry about that?”You can actually train for this!
You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.
You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.
Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).
You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.
Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)
We are normal, it’s the others who are weird
This is me to a large degree. Give me a cue and a whole encyclopedia is at your fingertips. Just say think of something and I’m at a loss.
Singing to me the song of my people. Where you all at?!
Omg, this is me. I thought I was alone. I love all you people in this thread, FAM!
Same
Excruciating period pain that would leave me fainting and vomiting every. Single. Time.
“Every girl goes through this” said the doctor, convincing my parents that I was just “dramatic”.
Turns out I had huge polyps growing out of control! Left scarring in my uterus and high-risk when pregnant.
Dealt with that hell every fucking month since I was 11 until I got onto birth control in my 20s.
Poor you! It must have been terribly frustrating that the doctor wouldn’t take you seriously. Seems to be a frequent thing women go through in the medical world. Hope you’re okay now.
Thank you.
Birth control was my savior and actively allowed me enjoy life again. 💕
Amazing! I wish it worked for my GF but that gave her (we found out very late), terrible side effects.
My wife went through something similar. Took until she was in her 30s and we were pursuing IVF for someone to take her seriously and actually do the investigation to realize she had crazy scarring from endometriosis causing all kinds of issues.
It’s insane to me how much the modern medical community seems to normalize or straight up ignore this shit, like you said.
I realize we could have pushed harder, but when multiple doctors tell you “yeah, some women just experience periods differently, here’s 500mg Naproxen to help you through” you tend to believe it.
I’m so sorry. I hope that the two of you are doing well.
It’s an actual tragedy how women’s health is dealt with. They get brushed off because “women have been giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years!”, ignoring that it’s the number one thing that kills women!! So our reproductive health and concerns are ignored while the ability to reproduce is put onto a pedestal.
I fucking hate it.
My pop history theory is that it’s a latent cultural memory of the Biblical tradition. Remember how Eve was cursed with the pain of childbirth after giving Adam the fruit? Western culture has a history of seeing women’s pain as a result of this ancient curse. Now, I imagine few doctors today are explicitly thinking about the Garden of Eden when diagnosing patients, but the cultural memory remains, if greatly diluted and distorted.
alot of doctors are jaded asf, even to the point of laughing you out of thier office. i think women are often ignored for symptoms of pain.
Sucks when doctors just assume things, it can cost lives.
It’s barbaric. They assume that if you’re girl/woman, most problems are basically “female hysteria”!
Not even “it could be [blank], you might want to keep an eye on that and report back if it doesn’t go away.” Nope! Diagnosis: dramatic.
And women die from this shit. Or become disabled / handicapped. Or it affects their long-term future if they want children. It’s awful.
Some people did a thing with a specially configured tens machine where the woman would turn it the levels up and up until it was at the level of their normal period pain and then the man would go through the same levels stages and be gasping and writhing before it got there.
Turns out men have been massively underestimating period pain for centuries.
That said, some women experienced far, far higher levels than normal and were encouraged to take that data to a non-dismissive healthcare professional.
As a dude, I want to believe that it’s less than it is because that’s just wholly unreasonable that women have to put up with that.
They’re were a lot of men who insisted on immediate medical attention who got told that their partners had tried that and absolutely nothing would come of it.
Hey, I know this is random, but was the pain, like, in the lower abdomen and like… Not really a muscle cramp, but deeper?And did physical activty make it better or worse? Asking for a friend. 👀
Pain was deep, ye. Can’t answer the question about physical activity because it rendered me unable to do any! But, yes, exerting any kind of physical effort seemed to make it worse.
I would lie on the cold bathroom floor every month with a heating pad / hot water bottle on my stomach, but it gave little relief through the simultaneous hot flashes and cold sweats.
Two things that actually helped somewhat if I could catch it hours before it started were: eating bananas (I suspect potassium helped with cramping), and, weirdly… drinking pickle juice. Idk what that was about, but it worked.
But have “your friend” get checked for endometriosis and PCOS!!! That shit can actually escape your uterus and scar up / destroy your other organs!!! No joke!!!
She might just do that because your experience sounds very similar to her “stories.” She also can’t move when it happens and is left pretty hobbled until it passes, but moving makes it worse… So I’ve heard. 👀
Social democracy
In general the political system you grow up in seems to becomes a normalcy in your mind when in reality there’s so many different ways of governing
Most fish probably never even realize that water exists till they are yanked out of it by the fisher’s net
Good analogy haha
Not everyone has tics they must surpress while in public.
Why is there no helpful suggestion under this comment? I have multiple tics too and I want someone to tell me “just sprinkle some cinnamon on your ass and they will go away!”
Have you tried sprinkling cinnamon on your ass?
It hurt to learn this
Reading.
Or rather, how so many people seem fear and avoid it, or can’t do it. Something like 21% of adults in the US are illiterate, and the majority – 54% – read at or below a 6th grade level.
I’ve been a sight reader probably since I was about six years old. I absolutely cannot look at any words legibly written in my native language and not understand them. You couldn’t force me to look at words written in English and not digest them if you held a gun to my head. I fear no wall of text, no matter how tall it is.
It takes some effort to wrap your head around the notion that not only can most people not do this, but statistically speaking most or at least a plurality of people have to struggle or exert conscious effort to read and many of them are loathe to do so. And roughly one in five people simply can’t. This did not sink in for me when I was younger.
I can’t imagine having to live my life that way. You nerds have seen how much bullshit I write in a day; I’d go absolutely bats.
This was a really recent realization for me. I am one of the people who can voluntarily activate the tensor tympani muscles in my ears to create a low level rumbling sound. I recently tried explaining this to someone else and they still think I am making it up.
Mine are all pretty mild.
Everyone reading all the time at home. Pretty much every room had bookcases, full to bursting with books. When I was old enough to have friends around they all said how weird it was to have so many books.
My parents were really emotionally distant. I don’t recall either of them telling them they loved me - or each other for that matter. No hugs or kisses. More than one of my girlfriends called me an emotional cripple.
Home-cooked food every night. We never ate out, never had takeaway. My mum was a great cook though so although my friends seemed to think it was weird I’d never had a MacDonalds when I finally did try it I didn’t understand the hype.
Oh, and the poop knife, of course.
Reading.
When I got to high school I started taking book out from the library there. Over three years I took out about a dozen books that had never been read; they’d just been sitting on the shelves for years.
When I was a kid I noticed most books hadn’t been checked out by more than 2 or 3 people. At one branch they’d just stamp the back inner cover of the paperback, no checkout slip and I asked “What happens when you run out of space to stamp?” and she just laughed sadly
Two things.
“How Can I Help You” by Laura Sims. Serial killer disguised as a small town librarian. Anyone how likes libraries will recognize and enjoy.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-can-i-help-you-laura-sims/19108763?ean=9780593543719&next=t
The other thing is that when you’re a reader you get a skewed view of the world. You hang out with other readers and talk about books, and grow up thinking that everyone knows who Sylvia Plath was.
gun assault survival training for kids
yeah, no, this is just locally normal
On this same note, as an European it was insane for me to learn that school shootings like Sandy Hook, those are just the ones that go famous for some reason.
But in reality hundreds more happen throughout the year that don’t go “viral” so they don’t get reported at all.
Truly mind-boggling.
Not true. If a single child is shot, or even shot at, it’s national headline news. Caveat: That doesn’t apply to inner-city children shooting each other. We, uh, don’t talk about that.
If you look at some stats a “school shooting” is any time a gun goes off on school property. I could go down to the elementary school and pop one off at midnight. School shooting.
“Mass shootings” go this way as well. We all have an event in mind when that term comes up. There’s quite a gap when you look at lies, damned lies and statistics. :) You might note that Mother Jones and The Violence Project are anything by conservative sources.
Four victims is what it takes for a shooting to be considered a “mass shooting”.
This is a ridiculous number, because it seems too low & too high at the same time.
That wasn’t even a thing when I was in school, but I imagine columbine and after changed that.
I went to high school shortly after Columbine. We didn’t have active shooter drills.
i am also not sure how this started, but i recently saw some armored school backpacks which made me realize how strong someone’s love for the uneducated is.
Honestly I’d kind of liked more gun assault survival training as a kid
Long, skinny stools. Turns out it was because of a precancerous blockage.
They’re called bar stools smh
/jk
Hope you’re doing ok now!
