Christian

So my intuition is wrong there, thanks. I clarified my question to the other guy just a minute ago to hopefully make what I’m asking more clear, (I didn’t fully understand myself tbh), I’d be curious to get a response to that.

I really apologize if it came across as hurtful. I was being overly wordy trying to be sensitive to how this question would come across (hence using this thread for it) and it didn’t convey great. It just seems like it would be very similar to the mental and emotional struggles I’ve gone through and comparing and contrasting to to my own experiences helps me understand people better.

Took some time to reflect, I communicated my question quite poorly and that is on me but I’m gonna try to ask it in a better way.

I feel somewhat strongly that trans-affirming care is the only appropriate approach to treating being trans. I have the impression that as a trans person you feel this is wholly incompatible with my sense that it is a mental health issue. I’d like to explicitly ask why my two beliefs are contradictory.

I’m asking because I am just in the past year or so suffering with severe physical and mental illnesses, and when I try to picture what the trans experience is like, I find that what I am imagining aligns very closely with my mental illnesses and not closely at all with my physical illnesses. I was extremely reluctant to accept that I have a mental illness because of both societal stigma and because in my situation, no one in their right mind would choose to treat my mental illnesses with therapy and pills when a change in living conditions would actually help enormously more, which seemed analogous to treating being trans.

That is what’s made me feel my two beliefs aren’t contradictory - I hadn’t understand how deeply I had internalized stigma against the mentally ill until I was asked to apply it to myself. I am imagining that other people would resist identifying as having mental illness in the same way I was. I picture the trans experience as emotional anguish with all physical threats as consequences of that emotional anguish. One where, also like many cases of mental illness, physical treatments are the correct option. But I don’t understand a way to liken it to my experiences with physical illness, so maybe it would be helpful to understand the physical danger and physical suffering explicitly.

I think there are extremely few situations where a mental illness should be treated as something to correct rather than accommodate without the patient being fully on board with thinking of it as something that needs to be corrected. In many cases, the only reason a patient would be fully on board is societal stigma and designed inaccessibility of accommodations, which is the impression I have of the trans experience as well. That’s the reason I don’t think of options other than trans-affirming care as okay.

I reacted badly because of recently surfaced mental health issues (blehhh) where I obsess over my character and respond to perceived character attacks as an attack on my identity even though I should just be listening. Your response seemed to focus on why I should agree with gender-affirming care and I read that as a character attack, rather than considering that you don’t see it as even possible to believe being trans is a mental health issue that should only be addressed by gender-affirming care. I was being overly wordy to try to be clear that I’m trying to understand how your experience compares with mine, and look, we’re back again.

Also I tend to read comments like that as a disgust and a need to distance from the mentally ill, and that’s something I very much need to work on because I know it’s not the intention at all. It stung more than usual in this case because I was looking to build camaraderie and tried my best to clarify that I don’t want mental illness to be an attack and that I am in favor of gender-affirming care.

This time I promise I will have the good sense to wait at least a few hours in responding to something that makes me feel bigoted. I apologize for being hurtful earlier and I’m hoping this one is less so.

tl;dr - The core stumbling block for me is this one - when I try to picture what the trans experience is like, I find that what I am imagining aligns very closely with my mental illnesses and not closely at all with my physical illnesses. I’ve elaborated way too much on why that is. I need to hear what I have imagined incorrectly, what I have overlooked.

Before I do that though, I’m commenting a follow-up to ask you to elaborate on if there’s something specific I can introspect on. I’ll read and think over the next few days.

One last edit:

Logging off is because I know this is an issue I have. Right now I don’t have much to be proud of other than my character, so in a moment I’m bad at listening and taking in criticisms that might suggest bigotry, because it feels like an attack on my identity. I’m aware that in reality I should be listening and not fighting, it just takes me an unreasonable amount of time and I act like a jackass until I’ve processed. Hence, logging out to introspect. Better late than never.

I’ll introspect on that. It generally takes me time to digest. I’m embarrassed here. But I do agree that gender-affirming care is the correct treatment. I read your response like I was not explicit about being in favor of it.

I think I should log off and mull on it because right now I’m just being an asshole. I’m a very slow learner and it generally takes a few days after I argue vehemently against something for it to sink in that I was wrong. I interpreted the first response like you thought I was arguing it should be addressed in a way other than gender-affirming care and responded like that was an attack, which is really shitty of me and pretty embarrassing.

We also see that cis people who are forced to take cross-sex hormones, like when homosexuals were given criminal punishments of estrogen treatments in the UK as in the case of Alan Turing, that those people become gender dysphoric in the same way. Gender dysphoria is not just for trans people, forcing cis people to be on the wrong hormones make them depressed too - are cis people just mentally ill when they have symptoms from being forced to live and medically transition to the other sex? It’s not different for trans people.

What I was getting at with saying I wouldn’t be comfortable switching now, but I would have been fine born into it is there there’s a shock that would come with a change from what you’ve lived, and that being cisgendered wouldn’t negate that shock, it would be miserable, but I don’t feel an attachment in the sense that I feel glad I was born a man. That’s what I meant when saying if I had been born a woman I wouldn’t be happy with the idea of changing to be a man.

So gender dysphoria could be classed as a mental illness in a way, but it’s important not to be confused by this and think it’s a fabrication or that people with gender dysphoria could just think their way out of their condition - it’s biological and not able to be solved with therapy or anti-depressants. Trans people respond really well to living as their gender (go figure!), and we see the same with cis people who are raised as the wrong gender (like in the case of David Reimer).

This is what I was trying to get at with the difference between suppression and accommodation, and gender-affirming care being accommodation. But I don’t think it’s fair to reduce all mental illnesses to being not biological and being “solved with therapy or anti-depressants”, I think that is part of the stigma against them. Some of them should be accommodated and not suppressed. Physical treatments are often more helpful than those things, different illnesses need to be addressed in different ways, not treated as a generic umbrella for characteristics society doesn’t approve of.

Sorry for not addressing all of it but I’m skeptical that you read what I wrote there because I explicitly spoke in favor of gender-affirming care as the treatment and your response reads to me like I was arguing against it.

This is super longwinded but I’m having trouble putting the ideas together concisely, apologies in advance to anyone reading.

I generally hear people describe being trans as feeling like you were born into the wrong body, like biologically male with a woman’s soul in some sense. But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to. I identify as a man and would feel out of place in a woman’s body, but if I had been born into a woman’s body I would feel out of place in a man’s. That’s my mental picture of what being cisgendered is. I’m not sure I’m articulating this great but hopefully it’s coherent.

That gives me the impression that being transgendered is an emotional discomfort, and I’ve wanted to hear an opinion on if the resistance to labelling it as a mental illness is because of the societal stigma against mental illnesses and how some people think successful treatment should always mean suppression and never accommodation (which would look like gender-affirming care if being trans counted).

Part of where this is coming from is I’ve been dealing with my own mental demons lately after some traumatic experiences in the past couple years, and the way I think about it is different when I’m looking inward. If it’s another person behaving strangely it is easy to say they are suffering and deserve care, but when it’s me I am a crazy person doing crazy things and I know better.

I do feel inclined to see being trans as a mental illness (for the reasons I’ve given above). I believe I’ll be open to hear what I’m getting wrong there. It’s not something I’ve ever been comfortable enough to ask though because I expect that statement to be received offensively (for the reasons given above). I get a lot less hostility in general over who I am and I still sometimes have a very strong gut reaction to perceive that stuff as an attack.

When I was an arrogant asshole teenager I had made up my mind that I was too smart for counseling to help me and I needed antidepressants to fix the issue. I received both and just told the counselor things he wanted to hear me say until I could be on my own. I make no claim that the meds do not have real, meaningful benefits to many people, but in my case I feel like they were marketed to me.

I am still on bupropion, but I strongly suspect the difficulty in stopping it is withdrawal symptoms. I decided many years ago that I’ll have a serious discussion with psychiatry about going off it once I have some sort of stability in my life, but thinking that might come anytime soon was pretty naïve.

Counseling was what really helped me, once I matured enough to be open to the idea. In particular, the benefit came from just being forced to articulate my thoughts and argue vehemently against whatever piece of advice I am given and then accept that it actually is good advice a couple days later once it has finally sunk in. This is still how therapy works for me, I have not matured one iota.

To answer your question, what recovery feels like is walking out of a therapy session and realizing that the past few months you’ve mostly been spending these sessions shooting the shit and unloading random thoughts and emotions that are not explicitly sad. In my opinion it is worth continuing to go (although maybe with reduced frequency) because depression can return just as silently, and having regular sessions helps maintain stability.

I began writing this comment with the intention of answering your question, but it actually ended up mainly being me venting myself.

Obviously no, it’s never been a flawless experience, but a few months back I decided I wanted to try gaming so I put an nvidia card in my pc and reinstalled linux to start fresh. All of the examples you’ve given sound like the sort of problems I’ve had since then, but never in the ten years before when I was using intel integrated graphics. I was aware going in that nvidia is massively more problematic than AMD, but this card was a spare from someone I know.

Obviously there are games I can run well now that were unrealistic before, but there are also a couple 2D games with SNES-quality graphics that I’ve tried which spike my CPU to 100% and lag like crap in spite of working perfectly before I installed the card. I’ve had two experiences where a game suddenly has issues immediately after an update to the nvidia-utils package. I’m not new to linux, but I am new to gaming on it and I’ve kind of given up on troubleshooting this stuff in favor of “maybe there will be an update tomorrow that fixes this”.

There’s reason for optimism, everyone is saying the situation is steadily improving because nvidia has been much more cooperative in the past couple years. It’s not realistic to say you won’t find annoyances regardless, but it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of your struggles are a direct result of decades of one company’s deliberate decision to ignore pleas to stop making life as hard as they possibly can on software developers trying to support their hardware.

This is a GPL project. Other than restrictions on relicesnsing, the one thing the GPL doesn’t allow is redistributions with the same name and logo, because anyone could rebuild the source code with malware added and the developer would be perceived as responsible.

You, today, can literally rebuild strawberry with a changed logo and name, and write “my program exactly strawberry except with a changed logo and name” and make that repository publicly available for free and it cannot be taken down as long as it is licensed the same way. No developers are losing sleep over lost sales from piracy of their GPL program. Otherwise they would not use the GPL in the first place.

If a developer sees that their program is being rehosted on codeberg with the same name and logo, what steps do you think they should take to verify that the binaries being shared were not rebuilt from the publicly available source code with a cryptominer added? I can’t think of a way to prevent that other than requiring a name and logo change and taking it down otherwise. It’s not enough to verify just once, because the new code author could change a legit binary to an infected one at any time.

And, again, there is no target audience for this “scam”. What do you believe might motivate the kind of customer who would regret purchasing this to pay for it in the first place? There is no need to litigate possible reasons why something might be a malicious moneymaking scheme when there is no imaginable target that would be victimized.

Which is the reason I thought it was obvious that no one will pay that without a sincere affinity for the project in some way beyond just using the app itself. Who do you imagine would pay here just to get access to the player? You’re talking about this like it’s a scam, but a scam has an intended target audience that we can at least imagine.

I can’t picture someone choosing to buy a $60 subscription to this with no reason other than being a windows user who is dead-set on using strawberry over any other music player. There’s no way the devs are raking in cash from windows users. They’ll maybe get a couple people who like strawberry because they are already foss advocates and are forced to use windows on one of their pcs, ie people who already understand what strawberry’s development priorities will be and also understand that what they are buying could be built from source code without paying.

It’s essentially a policy to ignore those operating systems except when someone cares enough to make a donation, under the reasonable assumption that bug reports from donors will still be worth their time. Windows users who have no knowledge about the project beyond “it plays music” will not shell out $60 by mistake. Literally no one is aware of strawberry’s existence but unaware of alternatives.

What is wrong with this policy? Strawberry is GPL, this sounds like the dev is committed enough to FOSS to not care too much about issues that come up on proprietary operating systems. This is very obviously not going to bring in a lot of money, how many people do you picture using windows or mac who think strawberry is so much better than other options that it’s worth paying for? They’re not advertising this in any way, there’s no plot to trick poor souls into paying.

It strikes me as an easy and effective way to dismiss without argument bugfix requests on operating systems the developer doesn’t care to touch. It’s saying we don’t want to neglect any users on other platforms that sincerely care about our project, but otherwise we just want to prioritze FOSS, so let’s write off essentially all proprietary OS users while providing an avenue in case someone actually does care about our project that much.

I think this might be at a sweet spot between being a well-known track and an unexpected top choice to answer this question - Kefka’s theme is iconic.

I’d still put FF6 as my top game soundtrack, but I’ll admit it’s easily possible that’s just a consequence of me not playing many games the past couple decades.

And PassTheHeadphones is Redacted. I’m actually surprised to see someone drop that name without any mention of Redacted, since they’ve been around almost nine years and I’m pretty sure the name change happened less than one month in.

RED was better than APL by almost every metric but after the APL ownership neglected the site and let it die, a bunch of the old staff rebirthed the site as OPS after maybe a year offline and they’ve done a shockly good job improving it. The difference is night and day. I still prefer RED because the userbase active on their forums got entreched much earlier on and they’re fantastic. RED also has a larger library available, but that’s not as meaningful as it sounds since in either case if you make a request for an album already on the sister site you can expect it to be filled pronto.

I wasn’t sure I had anything so I opened my reddit page just now to see, had to be from there since the only other major social media account I’ve had is a facebook that I deleted in 2011. Then I realized I actually kind of did have something that counts, even if it wasn’t a post. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t make public posts at all on facebook when this started getting me reactions, you needed a university email to use the site in the first place.

I had tried to upload some silly photo I found accidentally on an image search to be my profile picture and it was declined for being too big. That image was absurdly large for some reason, I wasn’t sure why a photo of five overly serious-looking German businessmen standing in front of a sign that read “PEES” needed to be taken with a camera with a resolution that high, but I had figured facebook would just rescale it for me the same way the image search had done before I opened the original. Trying to dodge this restriction, I realized that rather than a filesize limit, facebook had limits on how many pixels wide and how many pixels tall an image could be. I set out to test those limits and was successful in doing that.

Not being satisfied with my search for those numbers only being a five-minute excursion, I next set out to test the limits of when facebook would resize your photo, but I found it would only resize if it went over the width. I had the amusing idea to put the width at the resize limit and give it the maximum height, so that anyone opening my page had to scroll for an eternity to post on my “wall”. I thought that was pretty funny.

But then! I realized that I could use an image the same width as a thumbnail and it still wouldn’t resize it. I just left the words “testing how tall I can make the picture” on the image. That took four or five lines since “testing” already took up almost all of the thumbnail width with a legible font size, but I had more than four or five lines worth of space to work with.

If someone was friends with (for example) my friend Ryan, anytime one of Ryan’s friends opened his profile and my name made it to the randomized list of six friends, they would have to scroll an absurd length just to get to the bottom of Ryan’s page to leave a comment on his wall. Since everyone’s friend list was only like fifty people it would usually only take a few refreshes to show up. I heard from basically all my existing friends that they were getting complaints about me, but I also was getting a bunch of friend requests from people I had never met to leave praise on my wall. People thought I was a social butterfly who obsesses over adding every acquaintence because I had like 400 friends at a time when that was absurdly uncommon.

When it opened up that you could dm people you weren’t friends with I got a few of those every week. At some point facebook did start resizing for height too and I still like to believe that my profile picture was the one that forced their hand.

I agree, but I think Hillary does, and it would be a personal embarrassment to her.

I went camping with my family, was probably seven or eight years old. There was a sign right next to our camping spot to notify people about something not to do, who knows what the message was in reality but I like to imagine it as “do not bend this sign backwards to use it to catapult rocks you find laying around nearby”.

Anyway, while my parents were preoccupied with setting up our tent, my makeshift catapult hit me right by the eye. Thankfully it did not actually injure my eye itself, just huge cuts both above and below the eye, but I had a pretty good talent for screaming at that age regardless of which part of my body was hurting. I remember after an hour or something my parents kept pushing that all the other campers were going to think I was being abused, and then we packed up and left our week-long camping trip a couple hours after arriving.

A lot of us were genuinely cheering on the announcement that the Oxford vaccine would be opensourced, it was the reason people were actually following updates on that vaccine specifically. It was a big point of discussion here on lemmy at that time and when the decision was reversed the focal point of every criticism was that it would very obviously limit vaccine accessibility at a time when we desperately needed the population vaccinated as quickly as possible. People were angry over his justifications because even if we assumed the best-case scenario where he was somehow correct and it wouldn’t restrict vaccine access at all, it still would not be an improvement over not having a patent at all. The absolute best case scenario for that reversal would have been vaccination rates being just as high as if it stayed open-source.

I don’t doubt some morons found those headlines after-the-fact and did their own spin without reading, but the idea that antivaccine sentiments and blind Gates-hatred were the motivators for people being upset with him when that happened is wrong.

It’s very hard to talk about but I had a mental breakdown worse than I had ever imagined was possible. I have almost a full week after that I have no memory of, but after being taken to the hospital I have a lot of memories that are still extremely vivid in my mind of experiences there that did not actually happen in reality. I was living in an alternate universe for about three or four weeks.

So the answer is that initially we had parted on good terms, but right now our contact is entirely formal, I assume to look out for her own mental health.

The decision was made at the end of October last year, so still very fresh and still very painful. Legally still married for a few more months.

I watched her spirit die in slow-motion from my health issues making me unable to meaningfully contribute and turning her into a caretaker while being the breadwinner. It wasn’t one single thing with my health, it was a series of one issue setting off new issues, and after a long enough time of that you stop feeling optimistic that getting through your current problem will be the end, and emotionally the new ones hit harder. I know this sounds bad on her, but she tried so hard for so very long. I knew it was killing her, it was killing me watching what she was going through. It wasn’t her fault for giving up, and anyone who watched what I did would understand that.

I’ve moved back in with my parents as a man in his late thirties. I wish I had had the courage to make that decision myself a year ago rather than forcing her to decide to give up. I kept trying to have faith that if I just kept pushing I could get back to a better place and fix everything. My parents are a nine-hour drive away, with my mom having severe cat allergies, so moving out also meant abandoning my best friends, and obviously my human friends too.

Counseling helps a lot but I feel like twice a week is still nowhere close to enough. And of course, almost every single problem I’m going through has health insurance fighting tooth and nail to not treat and I feel limited in my emotional ability to be constantly fighting on all of that.

I also had a really good relationship with my parents before but I am absurdly sensitive to the weight I’m putting on them right now, which I think is a trauma reaction. They are doing everything they can for me and I just totally withdraw and don’t feel like myself at all around them now. They want the best for me but right now I do not have the emotional strength to make any requests of them, no matter how light.

This mostly turned into venting, but given the thread topic it’s probably expected. I don’t really want suggestions for actions to take because right now I’m still too dead inside to follow through on anything.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with “Proud New Dad” and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.