My wife had to explain to me that a girl I went to college with was into me years after the fact. She stumbled across some pictures I had on Facebook that this girl had liked and commented on and asked me about her. At the time I didn't think anything of it but she was interacting with old posts from long before we'd even met at school.

My wife actually facepalmed when I told her this one story in particular. I was in the Commons on campus suffering from a pretty bad migraine. I'd been there for like an hour when she came in and sat next to me and asked me what was wrong. I told her and she sat next to me petting my head until she had to leave to go to her next class.

Don't know how to tell you this, but I think that means your boyfriend is actually a woman. I don't make the rules, sorry.

I joke. In all seriousness though, you can be straight and have a dynamic that's more typically seen in Yuri manga. My partner and I joke all the time that we're so straight it looped all the way back around to being gay again. We're technically "straight" too, but I'm asexual and nonbinary, while she's gay as the day is long. I can't tell you how many Yuri memes I've sent her with the caption "look, it us" because it's absolutely something one of us would have done.

More that they have no idea what they entail. Most people hear "gender affirming care for minors" and think it means HRT and surgery. They think that kids are too young to be making those kinds of permanent changes to their bodies.

As for the sports bans, most people "know" that whole bit about men being generally stronger than women. So it inherently feels unfair to them to let trans girls participate in sports with cis girls. They don't know that virtually everywhere it was ever allowed they already had guidelines in place to mitigate exactly what they feared.

The right weaponizes both of these misunderstandings to make bans seem like common sense protecting children. But these people don't ideologically hate trans people like the right does.

I feel like that's probably the most likely scenario yeah. She might not have even known she was trans when she joined it. Getting closer to the other girls might have been the thing that helped her realize she didn't want to just be part of the cheer squad she actually wanted to be one of the girls.

They don't. If you look into them it's entirely a company owned by the same guy that owns The Daily Wire. It's literally only there to grift from their audience and further their culture war.

For a couple reasons. Some cynically wanted to continue to use abortion as a political football. Codifying Roe in any meaningful way in their minds would have meant they had to find a new wedge issue to drive turnout and donations. We saw this on the other side when SCOTUS actually overturned it and the right didn't know what to do with themselves for a while.

Then maybe in part because of the former, there were a bunch of people that naively didn't believe they'd actually entirely destroy Roe. They genuinely thought the worst that could possibly happen was some minor restrictions at the margins. So those people were not motivated enough to actually do something about it.

So most of these bills ban pretty much all medical interventions for anyone under 18. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, surgery, the whole nine. Some go further and are trying to ban it for anyone under 26. You could theoretically still get counseling but you wouldn't be able to actually do anything.

And yeah sure, on its face that might seem reasonable. Wouldn't want impulsive teens rushing into big irreversible medical changes on a whim right? But those safeguards already exist. You can't just walk into a gender clinic as a 10 year old boy, say the magic words "I'm actually a girl," and walk out with an appointment for bottom surgery and a prescription for titty skittles. It takes long term counseling, social transition steps like trying out a new name and pronouns, wearing clothing that aligns with your gender, etc.

In reality that hypothetical 10 year old boy walking into the clinic is going to get extensive counseling. From that counseling he might try out using a different name, she/her pronouns, or dressing in more feminine clothing. She then might get prescribed puberty blockers here to make sure she has time to do all of this and be sure of herself without being forced into male puberty. A few years go by and last statistics I saw something like 2% of people at this point say, "No I think I actually am a boy," and they go through that slightly delayed puberty. But almost all progress to HRT and later surgery.

Do some people later truly regret their transitions and try to go back? Of course they do. But realistically, transition already has basically the lowest regret rate of any medical procedure out there. A higher percentage of people regret getting something like a hip or knee replacement surgery than regret transition.

Puberty already forces your body through permanent changes that can range from easy, to nearly impossible to reverse. That's why puberty blockers are so important. Imagine if as a young cis boy through some rare medical issue you start going through female puberty. But you're a boy! You know you are. You've got a penis and everything.

But now you're growing breasts. Like big enough that you can't really hide them. Big enough that they get in the way, they're heavy, and you have to wear a bra otherwise they hurt like hell. The other boys in your grade stare at you or bully you because you're a boy but you've got bigger tits than a lot of the girls in your grade. Soon everyone starts mistaking you for a girl. Guys start hitting on you even though you're a guy and you're attracted to girls. A lot of the girls aren't interested in you because they're attracted to more... Traditional looking guys. You get told that you should just accept it. After all you look just like a girl. But you're not a girl damnit. You're a boy. This wasn't supposed to happen. Now imagine they tell you they can't do anything about it until you turn 18... Or maybe 26. Sounds terrible right?

I too have ADHD

Basically yes that's my understanding. When Congress appropriates money for something, the Executive Branch is obligated by law to spend that money on what Congress appropriated it for.

As much as I hate the whole border wall thing if Biden just said "Fuck Congress, we're not doing that" it almost certainly would lead to a world where the next Republican president uses that same idea to essentially end things like Medicaid or SNAP.

Nah, I'm good. I'll continue to vote for Biden because he's infinitely more likely to be swayed to stop the genocide than Trump who if I'm not mistaken has literally expressed a desire to accelerate the genocide on top of all the other heinous shit in Project 2025.

You can hate me all you want for not lining my family up to starve to death in "muh glorious revolution" or to lose our means of continuing to live when Trump tries to gut the Social Security that my family lives off of, or the SNAP benefits that feed us, or however they decide they want to eradicate my disabled trans ass from public life. Call me selfish for wanting myself and my family to continue living in addition to doing what I can to stop the genocide. I really don't care. LARP away my dude.

Except neurodivergence is a scientific concept. It's been being studied and discussed in the social sciences for like 20 years now. And unironically implying that someone isn't disabled because you can't see their disability is in fact ableist. My son literally gets services from the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities for his ADHD and Autism. He's legally considered disabled. But you would never know he has a disability looking at him.

I'm theory I like this idea, make the person that killed the parent and remove that support try to replace it. I just don't know how well it's going to work in practice. Like, I don't know how many drunk drivers have a high enough income that any meaningful amount of child support would be derived from this. Not that a drunk driver being poor or not should get them out of consequences. But like my dad weaseled his child support payments down to $25 a month and it was just ridiculous. It didn't help at all. But some nice karma on him was that all those years of working under the table to lower his child support meant that when the piece of shit got injured and needed to try to get disability he hadn't gotten enough work credits in the previous ten years.

I feel like it would probably be better if the state established a fund that they could use to pay out to those kids that they could fund at least partially with fines brought against drivers convicted of DUI. That way we could guarantee some level of support for the kids that lost parents and still force the drunk drivers to at least partially fund it but a kid won't get screwed just because the drunk driver that killed their parent particularly happened to be poor.