Cass // she/her 🏳️‍⚧️ // shieldmaiden, tech artist, bass freak

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That’s a good question! It’s definitely very rare that a birth name is entirely necessary to use in conversation, but an occasional situation comes up where I’m talking to an old friend about someone who’s since transitioned and I need to use a deadname to let them know who I’m talking about. Generally I say something like “so I ran into Denise, you knew her as Brett back in the day, etc etc etc” and just use Denise from there on. If the person I’m talking to isn’t caught too off guard by that, it’s a very smooth and natural way to handle that as a matter of circumstance and move on to using the preferred name quickly.


  • Generally, using their current preferred name/pronouns (or neutral pronouns) is best. She’s still the same person, so it’s true to say Caitlyn Jenner won the 1976 Olympic Decathlon. If any other facts about the event itself were directly relevant to the conversation, that’d be ok - e.g. it would be accurate and inoffensive imo to say she won the men’s division.

    But name/pronouns change all the time otherwise so it’s more normal to use the current ones. If Ms. Jones gets married and is now Mrs. Smith, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to talk about Mrs. Smith’s car breaking down last summer.


  • As much as I pretend to be one, I’m not really a fighter. I think this war may not need me to be one. The time to respond has already begun, and while front-line protests aren’t my strong suit, supporting protestors in my community is the place for me right now. If a greater conflict escalates, I’m probably not like doing the active fighting, but I can sure as shit help with supply lines as well as helping people who need to recover in the backlines. If I ever need to be in a fight I intend to be prepared, but there’s a lot more to do in a war than fight. And by the time anything like that would happen, I hope to have a resilient community around me who can support each other through hell. The fight’s already begun to an extent, and it’s important to remember that our best place may be “back-of-house” so to speak.


  • I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was… both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like path().unwrap().to_str().into() etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.

    Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it’d be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that’s on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn’t need.

    So whether it’s helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I’m interested to see how it improves, but right now it’s too much of a nuisance for me to justify.



  • +1 to this for sure. Applies for gender identity too. Speaking just for myself, the longer it’s been since I transitioned the less my actual labeled identity has mattered, to the point that these days I just say “nonbinary” and move on. It’s what makes a lot of the “what is a woman” rhetoric baffling, given the label and definition matters so little in day to day life.

    My bf comes off pretty much straight, but he describes himself as pansexual and attracted to feminine people. It’s cool to see him engage with the queer community despite being more or less able to “pass” as cishet if he wanted to, and his nebulous labeling was really helpful in settling my nerves as a newly-out trans woman. Less worrying about whether or not I was woman enough, more just hearing him say he likes me and that’s that.




  • Yep absolutely!

    For me, it felt like my life was quickly progressing away from a youth I was not ready to leave for inexplicable reasons. In the end I ended up taking a nuclear option once I realized how uncomfortable I was with my future, and while it’s not been easy it’s been absolutely worth it.

    Even though you may be stuck in the same habits and mistakes, they can be rewritten and you’ll be surprised how quickly life changes once you find what makes you authentically happy. A lot can happen in 3 years and I guarantee you’ll still be young at 24. You can still be young at twice that. There’s a lot of life ahead of you, especially once you take calculated risks to improve your future and make the most of the youth you still have. You may not know what exactly will make you happy, but trust in yourself and your judgement to find it as you go.


  • I’ve heard this as a sticking point for some people, and I think it’s fair. Some don’t enjoy putting themselves in the shoes of a complete fuckup main character who’s already made a ton of terrible decisions before the game’s even started and will continue to do so despite your best efforts.

    But, worth noting this is part of the appeal for a lot of other folks, and the game is going somewhere really special with it. It’s not bad writing, it’s a necessary component of the story being told.


  • Wasn’t really allowed to harbor or express anger as a kid. Now I can’t summon an ounce of rage, even when it’s appropriate and helpful. It’s not ideal, so I spend a lot of time meditating, dropping away other emotions in hopes of finding a spark of something in there. Nothing yet, but I’ve found a number of other useful things in the process.

    Mindfulness is a great skill to build to debug issues like this. It’s slow, painful sometimes, and doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but it’s definitely worth taking the time to try meditating to get closer to your base emotions and how they appear.

    Worth remembering too that what you’re looking for probably isn’t a huge shift in thinking, at least in the short term. Incremental progress over time is all it takes. Some people are shades of tightly wound and that’s okay. You’re who you are for a reason and it’s worth being kind to yourself when unhelpful thoughts appear. Not to excuse yourself of behavior you don’t want to maintain, but to care for and guide yourself toward a simple step in the right direction.






  • eupraxia@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlSo, on pronouns.
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    11 months ago

    Yeah, I think that’s pretty much all that is generally needed. I’ve had people assume but ask me first, just asking “she/her?” as a question, I respond yes, we go about our business. If you don’t want to assume, you can also pretty much universally use they/them in passing, or if it’s someone you interact with more frequently, people really don’t tend to mind if you ask.

    I mean I’m trans, I get around quite a bit in queer spaces, I haven’t met anyone who would get super mad about initially assuming pronouns rather than just saying “hey I prefer XYZ” and moving on. Generally when people react strongly to being misgendered, it’s due to ongoing conflict over their identities, having to deal with people who use pronouns to casually disregard your Identity, familial abandonment, etc. It is often a response to complex trauma from elsewhere. That’s not really your responsibility, but I’ve been there and if you can offer them any grace in those moments, it’s extremely helpful.