I suppose I'm confused what your issue with the trans characters is then. I thought at first you wished there were more, but now you're saying you don't understand why it comes up so often?

I understand the difficulty getting used to new pronouns. It's great that you're doing your best to understand despite not having much experience with it. I was just trying to point out that the portrayal in Trek is already showing a world that accepts trans and nonbinary people far more naturally than IRL, even if there could be more representation of actual queer folks.

I just don't understand this "Vulcan powers" criticism. She was a prodigy, sure, and pretty good at doing anything she wants, but that's a broader issue. I don't recall any point where she showed any Vulcan abilities that would be implausible for a human to learn from being raised in that culture. Even if you could argue it contributes to her being good at too many things, that has nothing to do with Vulcans specifically.

And I find it very ironic that you're complaining about the portrayal of trans characters not being progressive enough while misgendering Adira. Adira is non binary. They are not a girl, and they explicitly make it clear in the show they use they/them pronouns. Girl refers to gender, not sex, and furthermore sex isn't relevant to 99% of conversations so you don't need to disambiguate by finding a replacement word.

Frankly, I think Adira and Gray's transness was handled quite well. I'm not sure what makes them tokens to you. Adira has more lines than most of the bridge crew, and the little queer family unit of Stamets/Culber/Adira gets quite a bit of development and screen time. Gray gets his time in the spotlight too, and gets a bit of character development of his own.

Both Gray and Adira are immediately accepted and never questioned by anyone on the crew. That's a far cry from presenting it as if it were still our time. No one trips up on either of their pronouns once. You yourself refer to Adira with she/her in your comment.

The main difference between Adira and Gray is that Gray already came out and transitioned off-screen, while Adira comes out on-screen. I think their coming out scene is well done and realistic; even in the Trek future people will have to come out to some extent because people clearly default to binary pronouns. They aren't mind readers, and they haven't replaced all pronouns with they/them, so it's only natural that one would have to explicitly tell people their pronouns.

Stamets immediately accepts Adira, with zero questions about nonbinary identity or pronouns, and then seemingly informs the rest of the crew off-screen. I don't know what you think coming out nowadays is like, but that's not the reaction most of the time. Adira comes off as kind of nervous in the scene, but they're talking to someone they barely know at this point who arrived from hundreds of years ago. Plus they're just a nervous person in general. I think it works well.

And Gray doesn't have to come out at all, he's accepted as male from day one. His transness only ever comes up as vague references to transitioning. Seems pretty accepted to me!

I don't think Adira is a nonbinary girl, I think they're just nonbinary. Their boyfriend was also trans for what it's worth.

Georgiou is also pansexual, though that's not particularly progressive (classic depraved bisexual trope), and Jett Reno was married to a woman.

So while you're right, most of the major cast is cishet, I think there's more people who hate it for being "woke" than for being not progressive enough, as I haven't heard the latter much but the former is annoyingly common from the usual suspects. There simply hadn't been actual representation of any of those groups (except the depraved bisexuals) in Star Trek before Discovery.

Also, as for "Vulcan powers": we've always known that Vulcan logic is learned and not innate. Vulcans are naturally wildly emotional, their logic is basically just advanced meditation techniques, so it makes sense that a human raised by Vulcans could learn them. We've also seen non-Vulcans use the iconic nerve pinch before, it's essentially just a Vulcan martial art and nothing to do with Vulcan biology. Picard and Data could both do it.

The only "Vulcan power" tied to their biology really is the mind meld, and that's because Vulcans are mildly telepathic. Non-Vulcan telepaths could learn it too. I don't think we ever saw Burnham initiate a mind meld though.

I think Picard was worse than Discovery. Discovery had major flaws but there were moments when it really shined. It had some interesting ideas too. It just wasn't an ensemble show.

Picard is just awful. Mediocre S1-2 that doesn't know what it's trying to achieve, and then S3 abandons every plot thread that they bothered to build up in favor of nostalgia baiting and bringing back the Borg, which was very tonally confusing after S2.

The tone is also just bizarrely dire throughout. People complain about Discovery not feeling like Trek, but I had that problem way moreso with Picard. And now it's this minefield in the canon of the early 25th century that every show that comes after will have to figure out what to do with. At least Discovery going immediately jumping to the far future means it wasn't able to fuck up the timeline much, and what it did do was cheekily classified.

Little known fact about D&D succubi: since 4e succubi can change sexes freely. Incubi and succubi are just different forms of the same monster.

So this is just a thing now? Removing media from the world?

They found out it works so now it's gonna become a trend.

It's kind of ironic taking a project that's already written in Rust and writing a replacement for it in Java.

Usually things get ported to Rust, not the other way around.

This alone doesn't seem like something worth defederating over. It seems like they just got baited hard by Hexbear. Did the comment chain get censored? It doesn't seem like there's much active transphobia here, just ignorance of the issues at worst.

From my cursory read, the only thing that reads as actually transphobic to me is when they say "And getting offended by it really isn’t helping your case here." in response to someone getting mad at being referred to as "they", and that itself was due to technical issues and not transphobia.

Frankly, one angry snapback and a slap fight with Hexbear doesn't seem worth defederating over. I'm all for defederating bigots, but I don't want hapless allies getting caught in the crossfire.

The annoying thing about that is that if you don't long rest enough in BG3, you miss a lot of story beats. Unlike tabletop, it wants you to long rest, and will punish you for not long resting rather than punishing you for long resting.

I'm doing a second playthrough and I'm realizing just how much I missed during my first playthrough where I used my tabletop mindset of "rest only when absolutely necessary". And even then sometimes watching other people's playthroughs I see scenes I never saw.

This is a weird one because despite being a "good" spell, it entails the mass murder of innocent neutrals. It really doesn't seem like a good action to me.

It seems like anyone who was okay with this would fall to neutral or evil simply by virtue of being okay with mass murder, and in turn fall victim to the Great Neutral Purge.

I don't think I'd describe hexbear as polite, they seem to get pretty rowdy, even antagonistic at times. Otherwise I agree though. It would be a shame to cut off one of the largest queer friendly instances out there.

To be clear, the report doesn't claim it's proven that trans women have no advantage in elite sports, but rather that the biomedical evidence is inconclusive and that the methodology of existing studies has been highly flawed.

It does go into some sociological factors which is good, and it draws attention to the fact that these studies are seemingly often conducted from a place of transphobia to begin with.

I suppose it's hard to do science on it as it's such a loaded topic, and the number of trans athletes is relatively small.