"Sometimes I dream"

1. Why Busy Beaver Hunters Fear the Antihydra

(tags:mathematics computers numbers )

2. Trump Defends Demolition Of Yggdrasil, Ancient Tree Of Life

(tags:satire politics USA )

3. No One Actually Knows What a Moon is

(tags:language space moon )

There's research that if you leave people in a room with an electro-shock shock device long enough to get bored they will deliberately shock themselves.

In other news I took Sophia's phone away from the kids while they were in the bath and now they're repeatedly pouring cold water over themselves while shrieking like baboons.

1. Battery storage in California has grown more than 3,000% since 2020, entirely getting rid of blackouts

(tags:electricity batteries infrastructure USA )

1. The nerdiest music video of all time

(tags:wargames video music history uk france )

2. The Reform Backlash: Caerphilly By-Election Result Shows Nigel Farage's Party Is Much Weaker Than It Looks

(tags:politics uk wales )

3. 'Mind-boggling' poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

(tags:poker fraud mafia )

4. Armed police surround teen after AI mistakes crisp packet for gun

(tags:ai guns epicfail )

5. Bad therapy is causing 'emotional Thatcherism'

(tags:therapy counselling society )

6. What the new Northern Cyprus election result means

(tags:Cyprus turkey )

7. ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web

(tags:viaPatrickHadfield browser OhForFucksSake ai )

8. Bosses of Dungeons & Dragons club in £150k court fight sparked by alleged 'dungeonmaster cuddle'

(tags:roleplaying business law UK )

1. Settlers of Catan has been licensed by Netflix. I look forward to finding out the true lore behind "I've got wood for sheep".

(tags:netflix SettlersOfCatan EpicWTF games tv )

2. Tracking down the Romans who survived the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius

(tags:Rome history volcano viaPatrickHadfield )

3. Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

(tags:ai news fraud )

4. Brainwave study sheds light on cause of 'hearing voices' in schizophrenic people

(tags:hearing schizophrenia )

5. Amazon unveils prototype AI smart glasses for its delivery drivers

(tags:cameras Amazon technology delivery )

6. How to get men to share their feelings, by an Army psychologist

(tags:psychology emotion men advice )

Every so often I see some politician Gotcha'd with "Can women have penises?" - and the results have always either be flailing or in a very rare case (new Greens leader Zack Polanski) just saying "Yes", in a way which basically hands everything to the interviewer.

And I know that it's really hard to deal with an interviewer who is determined to make you look bad. But it bothers me occasionally that people don't try and explain "But here is my point of view, and where it comes from" - because while saying "Yes" might be very reassuring to people already on your side, it does nothing to persuade others who are just confused by/mildly hostile.

So here, in a simple set of 4 steps is my view.

1) Nobody is choosing to be transgender. It's a difference in brain development.
See here. This isn't new, it's the medical view, and has been for many years.

2) Forcing people to live in the gender that they don't identify as is incredibly destructive to their mental health.
This is also long well known. The vast majority of attempts to raise boys as girls and vice versa have appalling impacts on people. The poster-boy for this was David Reimer, who suffered a terrible accident as a baby which destroyed his penis (in the 60s), never knew he was born a boy, and was raised a girl (on the advice of a doctor who believes that gender was just cultural conditioning). And it made him *incredibly* unhappy - within weeks of his parents breaking the rules they'd been given and telling him (at age 13) that he had been born a boy he'd changed his name and presentation. Details here.

3) Most transgender people are not publicly out.
You might get the impression that trans people are all out activists. But the vast majority aren't. They don't want to be "The person who was born one way and is now another", they want to be the person that they are on the inside. So almost nobody they interact with on a daily basis knows that they are transgender. The ones where "Everyone knows about this transgender person" are the exception, most of them are not public about it. As a friend said "My identity is female and back when I transitioned the advice was to deal and vanish into the big bad women's world."

4) Therefore, as a society, we have a choice between either forcibly outing people whenever they want to use a toilet, get married, throw a ball, or otherwise interact with society, or letting them live in the gender that they are presenting*.

There you go. That's the humane, liberal approach to transgender people. And every time you get hooked into arguments about the definition of the word "woman", you get pulled away from those very simple things: Nobody asked to be born in a body that destroys their mental health. Most people don't want to be public about that having happened to them (because it stops them just living as the gender they are in their brains). So we can either be supportive or we can torture them.

*And that's the approach that the European Court of Human Rights took, in Goodwin vs The United Kingdom in 2001. They balanced the right of someone to not have to out themselves, against the the negative consequences thereof. And found that the proven negative consequences were basically nonexistent. Which is what then led to Labour being forced to pass the Gender Recognition Act. The rights coming from that, to live in the gender that you choose, are what is currently under attack.

Feeding the ducks
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Sophia: "So mummy took a year off from her job when I was born and then she went back?

Incredulously: "And they remembered who she was?"

1. Leading OpenAI researcher announced a GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened

(tags:maths AI )

2. Something from "space" may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah

(tags:airplanes space )

3. Eastern Australian humpback whale population now well above pre-whaling levels (from 150 to 50,000)

(tags:whales Australia GoodNews )

4. 10% more people support the UK railways being "publicly owned" than support them being "run by the government"

(tags:polls language trains )

5. Take an elevator to space and see what you can see

(tags:space earth )

1. I just went to see Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer At The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Recommended

(tags:art photography history Edinburgh Scotland )

2. No, There Is Not A New Survey Showing Trans Identity Is Decreasing

(tags:transgender society USA statistics )

3. Minimal office socialising advice for introverts/autistic people

(tags:advice socialisation work )

4. Da Vinci and Michelangelo drawings go on display in Scotland for first time (Kings Gallery in Edinburgh)

(tags:Scotland art history )