#And letting people explore themselves and change their identity if they feel more comfortable or feel like it describes them best

[itsawritblr]

Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain �� long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

[mywitchyblog]

Reality Shifting and Race Changing Explained: A Deep and Comprehensive Analysis of the Practice through the Perspective of a Person of Color.

Introduction :

Reality shifting, a practice where individuals consciously move their awareness to alternate realities or dimensions, has gained significant popularity and attention. Within this phenomenon, race changing—where shifters assume a different racial identity in their Desired Reality (DR)—has become a particularly contentious topic. Proponents of race changing see it as a way to explore different perspectives, foster empathy, and experience personal growth. However, critics raise concerns about cultural appropriation, identity integrity, and ethical implications. This essay will delve into the shifter's perspective and debunk arguments against race changing in reality shifting, examining the diverse viewpoints and underlying controversies.

Disclaimer : before interacting pls read the entire post carefully if you do not understand a part of it do not hesistate to tell me and i would gladly explain you in more details.

And as the title says im a person of color (POC) so i will give my opinion on the matter. I am lowkey (more high key lol) pissed that i see white people telling and talking about it as if they opinion is law its time you let people directly concerned by the matter speak on a subject that concerns them.

Taglist of people who might be interested in this post that i will update progressively i will also at the end provide a pdf version of the document if this post reaches 100 reactions if it reaches 150 to 200 i will also provide the one against age changing) :

@shiftinghoe @shiftersroom @leydenkilgore @jolynesmom @shiftinginferno @norumis @angelscatastrophe @thanossnap

My Age changing Post for those interested

Masterlist

Part I: The Shifter's Perspective

A-Immersive Nature of Reality Shifting

Reality shifting goes beyond elaborate daydreaming or role-playing. It's a full-fledged immersive experience where individuals become their "Desired Reality" (DR) selves entirely. This deep embodiment isn't just physical; it encompasses cultural, emotional, and even historical elements.

Shifters often perceive themselves with entirely different physical characteristics in their DR. This goes beyond appearance – they feel comfortable and familiar in their new bodies, experiencing unique sensations and abilities tied to their DR race. Imagine an East Asian shifter feeling their epicanthic folds affecting their vision or an Afro-Caribbean shifter experiencing the textures of their hair and the specific needs of their skin.

But it's not just physical. Shifters become integrated members of their DR culture. They might find themselves fluent in the language, complete with cultural nuances and dialects. They possess an intrinsic understanding of traditions and social norms, not just intellectually, but on a lived level. Family histories, community connections, and social networks become as real and meaningful as those in their original reality.

Perhaps the most profound aspect is the emotional and psychological alignment. Shifters report feeling emotions differently based on their DR cultural background. Their worldview, values, and beliefs shift to reflect their new identity, offering unique perspectives. Many even have a full set of memories associated with their DR life, from childhood experiences to major events.

Shifters don't just inhabit a new identity; they become part of a complex historical and societal narrative. They understand the weight of historical events that shaped their DR community and experience firsthand the societal advantages or disadvantages of their DR race. They feel a deep sense of cultural pride alongside the challenges and discrimination that may come with it.

For example, a Japanese shifter might not only speak the language fluently but also understand the intricacies of keigo and feel the emotional weight of concepts like "gaman" or "uchi-soto." They could have memories of local festivals, the excitement of catching goldfish, or the solemnity of a New Year's visit.

Similarly, a Latinx shifter might effortlessly switch between languages, understand the cultural significance of quinceañeras, and feel a deep connection to their abuela's traditions. They could have vivid memories of family gatherings filled with traditional foods, laughter-filled conversations, and the warmth of close family bonds.

This immersive experience allows shifters to see the world through a completely different lens, gaining insights otherwise impossible. In their DR, their new identity isn't a costume – it's as authentic and valid as their original self. This creates a profound sense of belonging and allows them to explore different aspects of identity in a meaningful way. This depth of experience is what proponents of race changing in reality shifting often highlight as a potential benefit.

B-Personal Growth and Empathy Development

Reality shifting, particularly when it involves changing race, offers a powerful pathway for personal growth and empathy development. Proponents believe this to be one of its most valuable benefits. Here's a breakdown of its potential:

Expanded Perspective: Shifters inhabit a different racial identity, gaining visceral, firsthand experiences. Imagine a Black shifter feeling the sting of racism, or an Asian shifter navigating the pressures of the "model minority" stereotype. This fosters a deeper understanding of racial dynamics beyond textbook knowledge.

Cultural Competence: Shifters become immersed in a new cultural context, enhancing their cultural competence. They gain insights into cultural nuances, values, communication styles, and nonverbal cues. For instance, a shifter embodying a Middle Eastern identity might understand the significance of hospitality, appreciating the cultural roots of seemingly excessive generosity.

Challenging Biases: The immersive nature of shifting exposes personal biases. Shifters confront and work through unconscious biases and stereotypes that may seem harmless from the outside, but feel hurtful or limiting from a different perspective. This uncomfortable process can be ultimately transformative.

Emotional Intelligence: Experiencing life through a different racial lens boosts emotional intelligence. Shifters develop empathy for the struggles and joys specific to different races, better understand emotional cues across cultures, and gain enhanced self-awareness through reflecting on their reactions in their new identity.

Social Justice Awareness: Shifters often report a heightened commitment to social justice and equity. Experiencing discrimination firsthand motivates them to become allies in their original reality. Understanding privilege (or lack thereof) associated with different races fosters nuanced discussions about systemic inequality.

Personal Identity Exploration: Race changing in shifting can prompt deep reflection on personal identity. Shifters might question aspects of their original identity, explore their cultural heritage and family history, and gain a greater appreciation for the fluidity and constructed nature of racial categories.

Linguistic and Cognitive Benefits: Shifters who become fluent in new languages experience cognitive benefits like enhanced cognitive flexibility from thinking in different linguistic frameworks and improved problem-solving skills as they navigate cultural and linguistic differences.

Artistic and Creative Inspiration: The rich experiences gained through race changing can serve as a wellspring of artistic and creative inspiration. Writers might create more authentic characters, while visual artists gain new perspectives on color, form, and cultural symbolism.

Professional Development: Insights gained through race changing can translate into professional growth. Shifters develop a stronger ability to work in diverse teams, enhance their cross-cultural communication and negotiation skills, and gain a deeper understanding that can be valuable in multicultural environments.

Healing and Trauma Processing: In some cases, embodying different racial identities has helped shifters process personal or intergenerational trauma. For instance, a shifter with a family history of racial oppression might find healing in embodying an identity free from that specific trauma. Conversely, embodying an identity that has experienced historical trauma might help shifters connect with and process their own unrelated traumatic experiences.

Part II: Debunking Arguments Against Race Changing

A-Cultural Appropriation

One of the primary arguments against race changing in reality shifting is that it constitutes cultural appropriation. This issue is complex and sensitive, requiring careful consideration.

Cultural appropriation involves adopting elements from one culture by members of another, often without a full understanding or respect for the original culture. This practice is typically characterized by a power imbalance, where the appropriating group holds more social, political, or economic power than the culture being appropriated. It also involves a lack of attribution, where the source of cultural elements is not acknowledged, leading to stereotyping and commodification of cultural symbols, often out of context and for profit.

Applying this argument to reality shifting, critics assert that when individuals assume a different racial identity in their desired reality (DR), they may trivialize the lived experiences of that racial group. They argue that such individuals might cherry-pick enjoyable aspects of the culture while avoiding its challenges and potentially reinforcing stereotypes or misconceptions about the culture.

However, several counterarguments challenge this perspective. Many shifters approach race changing with the intention of understanding and empathizing with different racial identities, rather than exploiting them. The immersive nature of shifting often involves a deep engagement with the culture, as opposed to the superficial adoption of isolated elements.

Moreover, cultural appropriation typically involves a dominant culture taking from a marginalized one, but in shifting, this power dynamic isn’t present. Shifters embody the new identity fully, integrating their experiences into the fabric of the DR, which can make their engagement more authentic.

Unlike typical cases of cultural appropriation, shifters often report experiencing both the positive and negative aspects of their new racial identity, including potential discrimination and societal challenges. This level of immersion extends far beyond wearing traditional clothing or using cultural symbols, as it involves a comprehensive engagement with the culture's values, traditions, and worldview.

Reality shifting is a personal and introspective practice, usually conducted privately or in small groups, rather than as a public display that might perpetuate stereotypes or commercialize the culture. This personal and nuanced approach differentiates it from more harmful forms of cultural appropriation seen in popular culture or commercial contexts.

Despite these counterarguments, there are still ethical concerns to consider. The ability to "opt out" of a racial identity at will is a privilege not available to those who live that identity full-time. There is also a risk of oversimplification or misrepresentation, even with the best intentions. The personal nature of shifting does not negate the potential for internalized stereotypes or biases to influence the experience.

Instead of viewing race changing in shifting as clear-cut cultural appropriation, it might be more accurate to see it as a complex form of cultural engagement. This practice has the potential for both positive outcomes, such as increased empathy and understanding, and negative outcomes, like reinforcing stereotypes or trivializing experiences. It requires careful reflection and ethical consideration from practitioners and might be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, considering the shifter's intent, approach, and outcomes.

The argument that race changing in reality shifting constitutes cultural appropriation could be seen as a false analogy fallacy, inaccurately equating the personal, immersive, and often respectful experience of shifting with the exploitative and superficial nature of cultural appropriation as traditionally understood. Some proponents suggest that, when conducted respectfully and thoughtfully, race changing in shifting could be seen as a form of cultural exchange rather than appropriation. This perspective posits that the immersive nature of shifting fosters genuine understanding and appreciation, with shifters often feeling a responsibility to respect and honor the cultures they embody. The insights gained can contribute to more meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and understanding in the shifter's original reality.

In conclusion, while the argument against race changing in reality shifting raises important ethical considerations, the issue is more nuanced than it might initially appear. The deeply personal and immersive nature of shifting, coupled with the often sincere intent of practitioners to gain understanding and empathy, sets it apart from more straightforward cases of cultural appropriation. Nevertheless, it remains crucial for shifters to approach the practice with respect, self-reflection, and a willingness to grapple with its complex ethical implications.

B-Fetishization

Another significant criticism of race changing in reality shifting is that it may lead to or represent a form of racial fetishization. This concern is both sensitive and complex, and warrants a thorough examination.

Racial fetishization involves reducing individuals to stereotypical racial characteristics, objectifying people based on their race or ethnicity, and exoticizing racial features or cultural elements. Often, though not always, it includes a sexual component. Critics argue that race changing in shifting might encourage shifters to focus on stereotypical or exoticized aspects of a race, leading to a superficial engagement with racial identity that is more fantasy than reality. This practice could potentially reinforce harmful stereotypes or racial preferences.

However, several counterarguments challenge this perspective. Many shifters who engage in race changing are not primarily motivated by sexual desire or attraction to stereotypical racial attributes. Their goal is often to understand and embody the full spectrum of experiences associated with a different racial identity, rather than to indulge in fantasy or stereotypes. The immersive nature of reality shifting encourages shifters to deeply engage with and appreciate the culture they are exploring. This process frequently fosters empathy and understanding, rather than objectification, as shifters report experiencing both positive and negative aspects of their new racial identity, extending beyond surface-level engagement.

Additionally, many shifters approach race changing as a means of personal growth, aiming to challenge their own biases and expand their worldview. This experience often leads to increased cultural sensitivity and awareness, rather than reinforcing stereotypes. In their desired reality (DR), shifters often experience a fully realized and complex identity that includes family histories, cultural practices, societal challenges, and individual personality traits, going far beyond mere racial characteristics.

Despite these counterarguments, it is important to acknowledge potential risks. Shifters might unknowingly bring racial stereotypes or biases into their DR experiences. There is also a risk of focusing on more "appealing" aspects of a racial identity while downplaying its challenges or complexities. The ability to "try on" different racial identities at will is a privilege that could lead to a form of racial tourism if not approached thoughtfully.

From a psychological standpoint, the experience of race changing in shifting could be seen as a form of identity exploration rather than fetishization. It serves as an exercise in perspective-taking and empathy development and provides an opportunity to confront and work through internalized racial biases.

Culturally, it is worth considering whether race changing practices in shifting might lead to more nuanced representations of diverse racial identities in media and art, foster more open dialogue about race and identity in society, or risk oversimplifying complex racial issues.

Ethically, shifters should be encouraged to reflect critically on their motivations and experiences, seek diverse perspectives and real-world knowledge about the races they embody in their DR, and be mindful of the line between appreciation and fetishization. The argument that race changing in reality shifting constitutes fetishization could be seen as a straw man fallacy, as it misrepresents the shifters' intentions and the nature of their experiences, reducing a complex and often empathetic practice to a simplistic and objectifying one.

Some proponents argue that race changing in shifting could help deconstruct harmful racial categories by highlighting the constructed nature of race, encouraging people to see beyond racial stereotypes, and fostering a more fluid understanding of identity. Comparing this practice to other activities, such as actors portraying characters of different races, virtual reality experiences designed to foster racial empathy, or imagining oneself in someone else’s shoes through literature or film, reveals that race changing in shifting may differ fundamentally from these practices in its approach and intent.

In conclusion, while the criticism of fetishization raises important concerns about the potential risks of race changing in reality shifting, a closer examination reveals a more nuanced picture. The deeply personal and often transformative nature of these experiences, combined with the typical intent of fostering understanding and empathy, sets it apart from more straightforward cases of racial fetishization. Nevertheless, it is essential for shifters to approach the practice with self-awareness, respect, and a commitment to genuine cultural engagement rather than superficial or stereotypical representations.

C-Race Changing is Racist

The argument that race changing in reality shifting is fundamentally racist is a serious allegation that requires careful examination. This perspective is based on several concerns: it may trivialize the real struggles and discrimination faced by racial minorities, allow individuals to "play" at being another race without encountering the associated societal challenges, perpetuate the idea that race is something that can be donned or discarded at will, and reinforce the notion that race is merely about physical characteristics or stereotypical behaviors. This criticism often stems from worries about cultural insensitivity, fears of minimizing systemic racism, and the historical context of racist practices such as blackface and yellowface.

However, this argument can be contested on multiple grounds. Firstly, many shifters engage in race changing not to mock or belittle other races but to gain a deeper understanding and empathy for those experiences. The immersive nature of shifting often results in increased awareness of racial issues and a stronger commitment to anti-racism in the shifter's original reality. Furthermore, shifters in their desired reality (DR) often experience life as an integrated part of the culture they embody, including facing discrimination and navigating societal challenges associated with that racial identity. This depth of experience goes beyond superficial engagement.

Additionally, race changing can lead to significant personal transformation. Many shifters report profound growth, challenging their own biases and increasing their cultural competence. These experiences foster a deep sense of connection and solidarity with different racial groups. Race changing could also be viewed as an immersive form of education about racial experiences, potentially offering more impactful learning than traditional methods.

Despite these counterarguments, it is crucial to acknowledge potential issues. Shifters have the privilege of opting out of their new racial identity and returning to their original reality, a luxury not available to those who face racism daily. There is also a risk of oversimplifying complex racial experiences into simplified narratives. Without proper reflection, shifters might misuse or misrepresent aspects of the racial identities they embody.

To address these concerns, shifters engaging in race changing should approach the practice with humility and a willingness to learn. Complementing their shifting experiences with real-world education about racial issues and using insights gained to actively combat racism in their original reality can help mitigate potential problems. Critical reflection on their experiences and motivations is also essential.

From a psychological perspective, race changing in shifting can be seen as a form of perspective-taking, which has been shown to reduce prejudice, an exercise in empathy development, and a way to confront and work through unconscious racial biases. Sociologically, it is worth considering whether widespread engagement in race changing might lead to increased racial empathy, contribute to a more nuanced understanding of race as a social construct, or challenge existing racial categories.

A comparative analysis with other practices such as diversity training programs, role-playing exercises in anti-racism workshops, and the concept of "passing" in racial identity reveals that race changing in shifting might differ fundamentally in its approach and intent. The argument that race changing is inherently racist may be seen as a hasty generalization fallacy, drawing broad conclusions based on limited understandings of shifters' experiences and motivations.

Some proponents argue that, when approached thoughtfully, race changing in shifting could be an antiracist practice by fostering a deeper understanding of diverse racial experiences, motivating action against racism in the shifter’s original reality, and challenging fixed racial categories. Considering how race changing intersects with other aspects of identity, such as gender, class, or sexuality, further complicates the discussion and could lead to a more nuanced understanding of intersectional identities.

In conclusion, while the argument that race changing in reality shifting is inherently racist raises important ethical concerns, a closer examination suggests a more complex picture. The potential for increased empathy, understanding, and antiracist action indicates that, when approached thoughtfully and ethically, race changing in shifting might contribute to combating racism rather than perpetuating it.

Part III: Community Dynamics : 

A. Shiftok Culture and Hypocrisy

The community of shifters on platforms like Shiftok has become a significant space for discussing and sharing experiences related to reality shifting. However, this community is often marked by striking inconsistencies in its attitudes and practices, particularly when it comes to race changing. These inconsistencies reveal underlying biases and a selective application of ethical standards within the community.

One of the most glaring examples of this hypocrisy is the community's disparate treatment of shifts involving fictional races versus real-world racial identities. Users enthusiastically support and celebrate shifts into races from popular fiction, such as elves from "Lord of the Rings" or Veela from "Harry Potter." These shifts often involve adopting stereotypical characteristics of these races, such as ethereal beauty or magical abilities, without any criticism. Similarly, shifts into anime characters, even when these characters are explicitly Japanese or of other Asian ethnicities, are widely accepted and applauded.

In stark contrast, when a user mentions shifting to experience life as a different real-world race - for example, a white person shifting to be Black, or an Asian person shifting to be Latino - they often face harsh criticism and accusations of racism or cultural appropriation. This double standard extends to cultural practices as well. Users might criticize someone for shifting to experience a traditional Japanese tea ceremony as a Japanese person, calling it appropriation. However, they remain silent when shifters adopt fantastical versions of cultural practices, such as magical rituals in The Vampire Diaries Universe, which are often based on real-world cultural elements such as Hoodoo and Voodoo.

The inconsistency becomes even more apparent when considering shifts into races that face oppression or discrimination in their fictional universes. Shifting to be a Na'vi from "Avatar," who face colonization and violence from humans, or becoming a vampire who must hide from hunters and deal with societal prejudice, are widely accepted and even romanticized. These shifts often involve experiencing fictional forms of racism or oppression, yet they don't receive the same scrutiny as shifts involving real-world racial experiences.

This romanticization of struggle is particularly problematic. Users might enthusiastically describe the thrill of being a hunted vampire or the nobility of fighting against oppression as a Na'vi, while simultaneously criticizing those who wish to explore real-world experiences of discrimination through shifting. This glamorization of fictional oppression trivializes real-world struggles and reveals a lack of critical thinking about the implications of different types of identity shifts.

The community's acceptance of shifts into historical periods further highlights this hypocrisy. Shifting to experience life in different historical eras, which inevitably involves a change in cultural context, is generally supported. For instance, shifting to be a noble in Victorian England is rarely questioned, while shifting to be a person of color in modern-day America might be condemned. This inconsistency reveals a troubling bias in how the community views and values different cultural and racial experiences.

Perhaps the most striking example of this double standard is the widespread acceptance of shifting to become a Na'vi from the movie "Avatar." This shift involves taking on a completely different racial identity, often with spiritual and cultural elements inspired by real-world Indigenous cultures. Yet, this is rarely criticized, while shifting to be an actual Indigenous person would likely face significant backlash.

These inconsistencies in the Shiftok community undermine the credibility of criticisms against race changing and point to a need for more consistent and reflective ethical standards within the shifting community. They reveal that many users are more comfortable with the idea of exploring different identities and experiences of oppression when they're framed as "fictional," even though the immersive nature of shifting means these experiences are just as real to the shifter as any "real-world" shift would be.

This hypocrisy not only stifles meaningful dialogue about race and identity within the context of shifting but also reflects broader societal discomfort with addressing real-world racial issues. It highlights the need for the shifting community to engage in more nuanced, thoughtful discussions about the ethics of identity exploration, the nature of reality in shifting, and the responsibilities that come with experiencing different racial and cultural perspectives.

B. Judgmental Attitudes and Ignorance

The shifting community, particularly on platforms like Shiftok, often displays a complex web of judgmental attitudes and ignorance about the nuances of shifting practices. This creates a challenging environment for shifters exploring different identities, especially when it comes to race changing. (in this part and all the other parts of this essay, “real world”=CR aka this reality ik they are no such thing as the “real world” but for the sake of the argument i employed that term).

Many users within the community are quick to condemn those who shift into different racial identities, particularly when these involve real-world races. This rush to judgment often stems from a superficial understanding of shifting practices and a lack of empathy for the motivations behind such explorations. Harsh comments, gatekeeping behaviors, and in extreme cases, online harassment, have become unfortunately common responses to shifters who engage in race changing.

However, this judgmental attitude is starkly contrasted by the community's acceptance and even celebration of shifts into fictional races or non-human identities. This inconsistency reveals a deep-seated ignorance about the nature of shifting and its implications. Users often justify their acceptance of shifts into fictional races like Elves or vampires from various mythologies by arguing that since these races are fictional, they're somehow "safer" or less problematic to explore. This reasoning, however, fundamentally misunderstands the core principle of shifting: that all realities, whether based on fiction or the "real world," are equally real and valid from the perspective of the shifter.

This ignorance leads to a troubling double standard. Shifters who explore the experiences of fictional races facing discrimination - like the Na'vi battling colonization or werewolves hiding from hunters - are often met with enthusiasm. The community readily engages with these narratives of struggle and oppression when framed in a fictional context. Yet, when shifters attempt to explore real-world experiences of racial discrimination, they face harsh criticism and accusations of appropriation or fetishization.

This attitude demonstrates a lack of critical thinking about the ethical implications of different types of shifts. The community fails to recognize that from the perspective of shifting theory, the distinction between "fictional" and "real-world" races becomes arbitrary. The experiences of discrimination, cultural immersion, and identity exploration are just as real and impactful for a shifter whether they're embodying a Na'vi or shifting into a different human race.

Moreover, this ignorance extends to a misunderstanding of the depth and complexity of shifting experiences. Many critics within the community underestimate how fully shifters can embody and experience a different identity, regardless of whether it's fictional or based on a real-world race. They often fail to grasp the profound impact these experiences can have on a shifter's perspective, empathy, and personal growth.

The judgmental attitudes and ignorance prevalent in the community have serious consequences. They stifle open and honest discussions about race and identity within the shifting context. Shifters who feel judged may withdraw from the community or hide their experiences, limiting opportunities for collective learning and growth. The hostile environment can discourage exploration of different identities, potentially limiting the personal growth and empathy development that shifting can facilitate.

Furthermore, this environment of judgment and ignorance often leads to the mischaracterization of shifting experiences. Complex and nuanced explorations of identity are frequently oversimplified or dismissed. The potential benefits of respectful identity exploration through shifting are overlooked, while stereotypes about shifting and shifters are reinforced.

To address these issues, there's a clear need for more education within the community about the nuances and complexities of shifting experiences. Promoting a deeper understanding of the psychological and experiential aspects of shifting could foster more empathy and less judgment. Creating spaces for open, non-judgmental discussions about controversial shifting practices could help combat ignorance and promote a more nuanced understanding of the ethical implications of different types of shifts.

By confronting these judgmental attitudes and areas of ignorance, the shifting community has the opportunity to create a more inclusive, understanding, and supportive environment. This could not only improve the experiences of individual shifters but also contribute to more nuanced and productive discussions about identity, race, and the ethics of shifting practices. Ultimately, addressing these issues is crucial for the growth and maturation of the shifting community as a whole.

C-Understanding Morality and Multiracial Identity in Shifting

The concept of infinite realities in shifting brings about profound implications for our understanding of morality and identity, particularly when it comes to race. Each Desired Reality (DR) has its own unique set of morals and cultural norms, presenting a challenge when applying Original Reality (OR) ethics to these varied experiences. This moral relativism in shifting creates a complex landscape where what is considered ethically acceptable in one reality may not hold the same value in another.

The shifting community's approach to fictional races inadvertently highlights this moral complexity. Many shifters enthusiastically embrace identities like Na'vi from "Avatar" or vampires from various mythologies, often without the same level of ethical scrutiny applied to shifts involving CR races. This discrepancy reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of shifting itself. If we accept the core principle that all realities are equally real and valid, then the distinction between "fictional" and "real-world" races becomes very blurry to a point where said distinction vanishes since what is fictional in this reality is 100% real in that DR.

This paradox becomes even more apparent when we consider that many of these fictional races face discrimination, oppression, or complex social challenges within their realities. Shifters who take on these identities are, in essence, experiencing forms of racism or societal prejudice, yet these experiences are often romanticized or seen as less problematic than explorations of real-world racial discrimination. The Na'vi fighting against human colonization or Mutants from the X-men hiding from societal persecution are, within the context of shifting, as real and significant as any historical or contemporary struggle against oppression.

The romanticization of these fictional races raises its own set of moral questions. For instance, the glorification/romanticisation of vampire culture in shifting could be seen as problematic on multiple levels. It potentially trivializes issues of consent and power imbalances, and could even be construed as a form of necrophilia, given the undead nature of vampires (vampires are dead not alive ergo necrophilia in a way. This argument that I use is to further emphasize the hypocrisy of the shifting community since yall wanna talk about fetishization and romanticisation). This level of ethical scrutiny is rarely applied to fictional race shifts, despite the community's readiness to criticize CR race changing on similar grounds.

For multiracial shifters, this moral landscape becomes even more complex. A multiracial individual might choose to shift to embody only one aspect of their racial heritage in their DR, reflecting their sense of connection and belonging to that part of their identity. This choice doesn't negate their other racial identities but rather reflects the fluid and personal nature of racial identity itself. However, the community's inconsistent approach to race in shifting can create additional challenges for these individuals. They may find themselves navigating not only their own complex identities but also the arbitrary distinctions and judgments imposed by the community.

The multiracial shifting experience underscores the limitations of rigid racial categorizations and highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of race and identity within the shifting community. It challenges shifters to consider how their experiences across different realities might inform and expand their understanding of racial identity in their OR.

Moreover, the moral relativism inherent in shifting raises questions about the nature of ethical growth through these experiences. If a shifter encounters and adapts to vastly different moral frameworks across their DRs, how does this impact their core ethical beliefs? This moral fluidity could lead to a more nuanced and empathetic worldview, but it also risks ethical inconsistency or moral relativism taken to an extreme.

In conclusion, the intersection of morality and racial identity in shifting presents a rich area for exploration and discussion. It challenges our understanding of ethics, identity, and the nature of reality itself. By engaging with these complex ideas, the shifting community has the opportunity to foster more nuanced, empathetic, and inclusive approaches to race and identity. However, this requires a willingness to apply consistent ethical standards across all forms of shifting, whether they involve "real" or "fictional" races, and a commitment to deeper reflection on the moral implications of these profound experiences.

Conclusion : 

Ultimately, we can argue that race changing in reality shifting isn't inherently problematic and can, in fact, be a powerful tool for personal and societal growth. The ability to experience life from diverse racial perspectives has the potential to challenge deeply ingrained biases, foster genuine empathy, and contribute to more nuanced discussions about race and identity in our society.

However, we must tread carefully to ensure that these practices do not veer into appropriation or fetishization. This requires:

Approaching race changing with respect, humility, and a genuine desire to learn.

Engaging in thorough self-reflection before, during, and after shifting experiences.

Complementing shifting experiences with real-world education about racial issues and histories.

Being mindful of the privilege inherent in being able to "opt out" of a racial identity.

Using insights gained from shifting to actively combat racism and promote understanding in one's original reality.

Fostering open, honest dialogues within the shifting community about ethics and best practices.

Developing clear community guidelines that address the complexities of race changing.

By maintaining this careful balance, race changing in reality shifting can serve as a unique and valuable tool for promoting intercultural understanding, challenging racial prejudices, and fostering a more empathetic and inclusive society. As with any powerful tool, its value lies not in the practice itself, but in how we choose to use it. With thoughtful consideration and ethical guidance, race changing in shifting has the potential to contribute positively to our ongoing dialogues about race, identity, and human experience.

[who-is-page]

I've seen (typically older) therians talking about how they feel that their subculture as animal-people and nonhumans is slowly disappearing. This is a point that, in all honesty, I'm inclined to agree with-- although I think I'd perhaps frame it less as "disappearing" and more as just "changing."

Because let's be honest with ourselves here: is the subculture actually vanishing, or is it just evolving into radical new dimensions as excited newbies join and find different focal points for their nonhumanity? As they express themselves in whole new dimensions and ways, as they explore a digital landscape that didn't exist ten, twenty years ago? As the older members lose touch with the newer members, and no one bridges that gap between the two?

I think I'm also extra frustrated because when I see these discussions go down, a lot of the time they're either 1) self-pitying, or 2) finger-pointing.

It's not bad or wrong to look around and realize that the community you found comfort in has changed in ways you could have never predicted and which leave you feeling off-kilter. But approaching these changes with a complete lack of curiosity, with an absolute woe-is-me sort of perspective, where you drag your feet and glare bitter daggers at everyone else, isn't the way to do anything.

And going around trying to pin blame on whoever happens to be at hand is an even worse way to approach it. "It's the furry fandom's faults!" "It's the alterhumans' faults!" "It's the humans' faults!" Who does this approach realistically help? What does this do, beyond ostracize people and make whoever is saying it feel temporarily vindicated in their solitude, in a vicious cycle where they never step out of their ivory tower and always use how alone they are as "proof" that they're right?

I think having discussions about the ways the subculture has changed is extremely worthwhile. But I think that they're at their best when enthusiasm over sharing takes a main, central point. When you see people excitedly telling others about Werecards for the first time, or when you get to introduce someone to the concept of personal websites and webrings, or when you link someone who's only just starting to learn that there's others like them to old and new groups and forums alike. These are the ways you keep those traditions alive, these are they ways you get people both informed of and really excited about them.

And like, maybe I'm just cheesy and optimistic, but building bridges is way more fun than building walls! And more than that, I also think it's fundamentally something that's significantly more helpful and productive. I'm always so hype when I see community projects taking off that involve connecting many different people, especially if they're centered on a specific group or identity, but I also think that those sorts of things are how we keep a community healthy and moving, how we avoid things getting stagnant and rotting away.

I've said it before in past essays I've published and I'll say it again: alterhuman communities survive through their internal momentum. We're still around and kicking because we're a bunch of opinionated, passionate animals and objects and entities and people and concepts and and and-- this is what we are! This is how we all, both together and individually as separate groups, continue to be around. We write. We argue. We dance. We leave tracks. And then others see all those things, months or years down the line, and they know they're not alone. They know that it's okay to join in around the campfire, and they end up leaving their own tracks, and the cycle repeats.

So I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm not just beseeching people to create, but I'm asking you to create with others. To extend that paw towards the people around you in your immediate community spaces and wider, and to realize that yeah, the digital grains of sand and time might erode and change the landscapes we're all in, but we can still have a damn good time exploring the new nooks and crannies around us and showing others our old hidey-holes and favorite spots to watch the sun set.

[synchodai]

A bit of a serious question and maybe a controversial opinion. I've liked jacegan ever since I read the books. I've always thought there's a lovely strong, mutual connection between them, regardless of whether you see romantic or sexual overtones. 

And of course I was waiting for hotd to show that. And unfortunately got crumbs. But let's get to the main point. What I didn't realize when there were only books and not much has changed since the series came out. It's Jace and Baela. These two as a couple never interested me in the book or the show. And given the current agendas, fans of the Jace/Baela pairing are especially "aggressive". Because if you're a jacegan fan, you're automatically a racist and misigonist. But.... I didn't like her when she was a white canon Targaryen. I have no hatred or anything like that. The character just didn't hook me, nor did their connection to Jace. On the show, I'm sorry, Baela barely has a chance to develop as a character in season 1. Season 2 has some cool moments with her, but she's still more of an appendix to Rhaenyra and Jace. And yes, I'm sorry that such a character is neglected, as well as many other interesting characters, but given the format of the show and the number of episodes, they have to sacrifice something (the jacegan line is almost completely cut). And back to the serialized Baela and Jace. Their pairing is more of a favorable union for me. There's no spark, no love, no passion. They literally haven't seen each other in years since Rhaenys took her away. Then they met and were unexpectedly announced to be engaged. And there was a shaky situation all around. There was no room for any romance. Then the diplomatic mission, Luke dies and the whole of season 2 Jace is busy with anything but Baela. She's the one who's more of a comforter. And the rare "cute" moments are improvised by the actors who are trying to create/show some kind of relationship in place of the writers, because they are engaged. But it doesn't help, imho, for me personally. I just see two early matured people who are in a stressful situation. They support each other as best they can. I'm sure their marriage would be strong, secure because they are more like friends/family than lovers. And that is my main complaint. I'm sorry, but even in Jace and Cregan's 3 minute scene, there is more chemistry through looks than in the entire time Jace and Baela interacted. Of course that's still a matter of taste. But then again, why would anyone allow themselves to criticize another person for their tastes and hobbies? Why is it that if I'm not interested in Jace and Baela's pairing, I'm immediately misogynistic and racist, and don't support the characters' geth, but cling to white men in homosexual relationships. Like...what do you want? I don't want to be a hypocrite. I just don't care for Baela's character and her relationship with Jace in either the books or the show. That's it. 

Jace and Kregan's relationship is much more interesting, colorful, tragic and carries more meaning and love. I won't describe it in detail, because there are some great methinks on the blog. And that's it.

Wow...uh... I sincerely hope you feel better getting that off your chest, anon. Thankfully, I've never interacted with people who react negatively to my jacegan posts or fics. I'm sorry you've had that experience and thank you for taking the time and effort to share it with me. If you encounter people like that, you should really block them and not allow them access into your mental space.

If your question was what I feel about jacaela, then I don't really feel strongly about it either way? I was also neutral to jacegan until I started writing about it, to be fair. I mainly got into it because I wanted to explore the idea of Sara Snow being Jace and/or Cregan and relate that to masks, identity, and performance of masculinity/femininity/gender.

I'm willing to bet if I start a jacaela project, I'd see the merits of that ship, too. I probably won't write about show!Baela though, because she doesn't have much of a personality and seems to be more loyal to Rhaenyra than Jace? She only ever speaks for Rhaenyra's interests and never Jace's. Honestly, her one scene with Rhaenyra made me think she's more enamored with the mom than the son. When Jace was having valid issues about his legitimacy, Baela was quick to dismiss him as "pouting" even though both their lives and positions rely on the strength of his claim to the throne. It was honestly baffling. If I was gonna write for show!Baela, I'd ship her with Rhaenyra before Jace — makes a lot more sense with the text.

In the book, Baela was eager to get married to Jace and had some really compelling tension with him. Him delaying their wedding after going north? Really juicy stuff. Baela is only noted as getting more promiscuous after Jace's death (and after she was left alone in Dragonstone) — so another writer (who isn't me) could explore the conflicting emotions of feeling free of the shackles of arranged marriage while also grieving a future that Baela very likely once dreamed of. There's also the incest angle, the fact that Rhaenyra and Daemon's marriage could have only happened if the parent they both loved died, how Baela doesn't want to act like a lady/princess but Jace desperately wants to be seen as a lord/prince — lots of places a competent writer can take it for sure. It can be a great friends-to-lovers, shared trauma/mutual healing, marriage-of-convenience-turned-real kind of thing. Baela as a tsundere, Jace as an angsty anime protag.

I don't think one ship is more meaningful or loving than the other — it really depends on what you're looking for and who's writing. For now, I'm full throttle manning my current ship and I've already made so many posts about why. I'd like to think I do a good job exploring the potential of jacegan, and I am fully aware it is a ship made of crumbs, but that's the fun of it. Embrace that it's a hidden gem that you unearthed! Embrace the tinfoil.

[wickmitz]

lo and behold, here’s my sexuality list for some of the lackadaisy characters! i am well aware most of these aren’t canon and that i’m being a little ‘too fruity’ with it, though that’s alright! these are just my opinions and, frankly, i don’t want nor need them to be canon in any way -- they are just aspects added to the characters mostly for my enjoyment. some of these are subjected to change ( due to a variety of reasons ) and some of these i may consider ‘canon’ in the sense that i read the characters with these headcanons in mind. i could also write an essay on some of the hcs listed here, but for the sake of simplicity i kept them as brief as i could … but without further ado, lets get on with it! :

rocky : he’s rather confusing, sexuality wise. tentatively would say he’s bisexual to some degree given how little someone’s gender matters to him, and that he also falls under the asexual umbrella ; being either demisexual or greysexual perhaps! he mostly just yearns to be loved and to serve as an invaluable object in someone’s life, taking his devotion to the extremes even if it’s unasked of him to do so. i don’t think he actually thinks about romance and any of his romantic feelings for people are more so vague and metaphorical … while he wouldn’t turn down a relationship, especially with someone he ‘desires’, i don’t necessarily think that’s his goal either. rocky is too easily caught up in outside factors to function normally in a traditional romantic sense, and any such activities that come with dating is the furthest thing from his mind. he likes being someone’s number one, their one and only, the most important force in their life … but if he can achieve that without romance, then he’ll be fine with that too. rocky will die for his crush ten times over but is rather okay with never getting to kiss even their hand. he’s an enigma!

freckle : transgirl and she’s too nervous to figure out the rest of her identity as it stands, though would probably be best described as demisexual. might have a phase where she adopts the lesbian label due to a preference for women only to find out she’s still attracted to men … swears off labels after this due to embarrassment! overall, freckle’s whole thing is about exploring her gender identity more than anything else ; finding a skin that’s actually comfortable for her to wear and easing some of that inner turmoil and anger inside of her. wiggling into something that feels freeing rather than being eternally tied down by her mother’s intense catholic views. ivy helps freckle out a ton too, making for a great mentor when it comes to embracing femininity and enjoying the girlish birthright of crushing on stupid boys, and speaking of ivy …

ivy : heteroflexible plain and simple! is primarily interested in men while showing little to no attraction towards girls, and wouldn’t have ever dated one had it not been for freckle transitioning. she staunchly refused to break up with freckle after, and decided ( rather brazenly ) that she’s got a girlfriend now and that’s really cool actually!! plus she now has a loophole to present to viktor so he doesn’t try to kill her paramor. love wins <3

viktor : straight. he is not sexually nor romantically into men, sadly. has mostly sworn off love in general though, so he doesn’t think about this stuff as it stands ; and he’s kinda behind on all these terms anyway. but despite this, he wouldn’t be opposed to being life partners ( or being in a qpr ) with a man if things fell that way. see my mini essay on vikdecai for additional info on that!

mordecai : transman, homoromantic(?), and asexual … mordecai keeps all of this under lock and key, with the only people knowing about his trans identity being atlas, mitzi, and viktor ( who all found out through various means ) -- though serafine and nico also heavily suspect it themselves. he’s more oblivious to his homoromantic inclinations though, as well as his asexuality to an extent. will typically dismiss his repulsion towards touch as something else he’s just being ‘neurotic’ about, rather than holding any real significance. the reason for the question mark near homoromantic is simply due to the fact i could see mordecai still being interested in women! so i sort of flip between homosexual labels and demiromantic labels for him. but he definitely, and without a doubt, has a heavy male preference regardless!

mitzi : straight and polyamorous … kind of. she’s experimented with women before ( on the road, most notably ) and has no qualms about being with them sexually or doing minor romantic acts with them either. she’s just never been particularly attached to them the way she is with men, hence her more serious relationships being exclusively with the opposite gender. still, she’s more casual and loose with her sexuality than most are, and is more than willing to be with a girl if it suits her needs or makes her happy. might become bisexual down the line after meeting women that fit her type, or she might always be straight with a few ‘exceptions’ … being kind of heteroflexible in that regard! and as for her polyamory, while she enjoys that lifestyle and could commit to it again, she much prefers monogamy now, usually. see my mitzi’s type post for more info on all of that!

zib : oh boy. i don’t think zib cares for labels and prefers being an unlabeled mess of a thing ( calling himself and resonating with ‘queer’ is as far as he’ll probably ever go ) but to make this simple, he’s sort of a … bisexual, genderqueer, demiromantic, and polyamorous cocktail. and even those labels are almost too restricting for zib, who’s rather unashamed and free where it concerns existing as his disastrous self. he likes men, he likes women, he likes people who aren’t men or women, he likes people who are both … he’s a man, and sometimes a woman, or at the very least enjoys dressing like a woman … he likes casual and multiple partners … he struggles with more traditional romantic commitment but wants it nonetheless … etc, etc. he’s sort of everywhere! views life through a simplistic lense of ‘if i like it, then i like it’ and doesn’t bother with it further.

wick : a man who is straight by design and default, since his type is as standard as it can get … aka being primarily interested in curvy women who are extremely feminine. he still likes all manner of women though! but he’s not really into men really, even if he’s extremely open minded about lgbtq+ overall and almost wishes he could have a queer experience of some kind. if only because everyone around him thinks he’s gay or has assumed it at some point in time. though there is some wiggle room despite this! wick could become romantically attracted to a man, i think, if certain things aligned -- but will never be attracted to them in a standard sexual manner. it’s too complicated for me to thoroughly explain here ( and @churchwick is more qualified to talk about this than me anyway, as the wick expert ) yet i do think wick could fancy himself an exception or two. he’d be rather awkward about the whole thing though </3

serafine : lesbian who barely ever bothers with men and isn’t shy about showing off her lady-type preference. she also has some gender stuff going on, occasionally embracing he/him pronouns alongside her feminine ones whenever she so pleases. operates on very hedonistic grounds too, constantly adorning herself with pretty girls until her arms are full and keeping her furniture warm, since she sleeps better that way if nico is unavailable. enjoys taking in girls who are ‘blind’ and need to be shown the truth … likes offering them a better life within her cult and by her side. although it’s worth noting that serafine is rather casual with her conquests and hardly ever takes on a permanent and more personal ‘lover’, but she’s semi open to the idea of it regardless. she is merely going through life and enjoying wherever it leads her, after all.

nico : i’ll be honest, i have no clue! i do not think about nico enough to have an opinion on his orientation, but it felt wrong to seperate the savoy siblings, so here he is anyway. he’s certainly cisgender and is extremely comfortable with being a man. and, like his sister, he’s more prone to casual arrangements rather than actual dating. i could see him being pansexual perhaps! i don’t think he cares for gender much, and will go for anyone who is ‘hot’ enough or ‘interesting’ enough if that makes sense. he’s a little shallow about it! but again, those are just my rather quick thoughts on the matter. i seriously need to think more about nico sometime, whoops.

lacy : extremely repressed bisexual! she is rather inexperienced with dating in general, having been strictly study focused in school and now that she finds herself as wick’s secretary, she still has little room left for a love life. her entire schedule is mostly just wick, wick, wick, and wick … keeping sable stone & quarry afloat business wise while also tending to her employer’s personal health and safety as well. such a busy life ( on top of tennis and the occasional lunch with friends ) has her rather closed off to meeting men or being courted by them, with her crush on wick being no help in this regard either! she is rather content with his company and has made little effort to seek out new men to converse with, or engage with women in a flirtatious manner. but eventually she’ll have a rather violent bisexual awakening that sends her reeling and leaves her confused, a little caught up in the almost teenage throes of envy, admiration, and hate towards the women she’s attracted to. over time she’ll get over herself and her perpetually reserved demeanor enough to explore this side of her -- though it will come with many bumps along the road and won’t be as seamless of a transition for her as it would be for some people.

church : homosexual through and through. he’s unmarried and is taking great advantage of the pansy craze happening underground. engages in more casual relationships with the same rotation of men due to a.) not caring for romance and b.) also being keenly aware of the fact that there are plenty of people out there who would use this to ruin him, blackmail him, or worse. so to say he’s extremely careful and secretive about it all is almost an understatement. hasn’t ever required a beard due to his disdainfully bored personality … but not having a wife to feign care towards leaves him with ample room to explore and carry himself as he pleases behind closed doors. if anyone knows the ins and outs of some queer scenes in st. louis, it’s him, surprisingly. and he’s rather tight lipped about the whole thing.

atlas : like the man himself, nobody knows, not even me! he definitely loved mitzi, though whether or not he was equally into men is a mystery.

so tada! those were my very brief and incoherent notes on the lackadaisy crew and what’s going on with them, sexuality and gender wise! i originally planned to discuss other characters here as well, like asa, the arbogasts, ruby, virgil, etc … basically anyone else i could think of, or whoever else that was listed on the lackadaisy characters page that i hadn’t covered yet. although to be frank, i don’t have many thoughts on those characters where it concerns their orientations! so i left them alone for now. maybe one day i’ll update this or make a part two -- who knows! though i’m more than content with this being my list for now haha

[stargazer-sims]

pointless rambling below the cut...

I accidentally deleted my post from yesterday where I mentioned wanting to retcon timelines to remove child characters because it almost never fails that when I make my OCs have a child, I stop being interested in them. But anyway, maybe having to start over with a new post is good, because it gives me a chance to elaborate and to be in less of a mood about it. I'm still not happy with my writing lately, but that's not entirely connected to the child character issue. That's more of a me problem.

So, first off, let me just say that I'm not opposed to child characters in general, either in my work or in another writer's work. I have no problem "going back in time" and writing my established OCs as children, and I also see the utility of having a child character if their purpose is to advance the plot.

My problem is that when i give my established characters a child or children, it almost invariably feels awkward, burdensome or just plain forced and wrong, either from my perspective as the writer or from the perspective of the character(s) themselves.

That having been said, it's not normal or realistic for people (and characters in a realistic setting) to not have children. At least some characters must have them, because that's what many normal adults do, and it wouldn't be a credible setting if literally no one had kids. Enter the child characters, whether I want them or not.

It's not just the fact of the child characters being children that bothers me either, because even time-skipping to a point where they're teenagers doesn't fix it. Logically, they had to be babies and children at some point, and well-developed parent characters can't reasonably be expected to have no memories or feelings about that.

And it occurred to me that I can't actually retcon anyone's timeline and be comfortable with it. I mean... I could, but that would fundamentally change what I feel is canon (for better or worse) and would completely negate entire stories such as Au Ciel Étoilé and Caroline & Co.

So, I guess what i really get to do is explore the parent characters' feelings of regret, resentment, fear, frustration, loss of individual identity and loss of freedom in the cases where I probably should not have added child characters to the mix. It's not that these characters hate their kids - the majority of them love their kids - but that doesn't take away from the thought that their lives would be vastly different (and in some cases happier and better) without children.

Yuri, for example, should never have been a parent. He doesn't like children and doesn't like being a parent, and even though he's learned to live as a parent and be a good one, there'll always be an undercurrent of resentment there whether he's fully aware of it or not. He and Caroline love each other, but they don't necessarily like each other, and Caroline knows just as well as Yuri does that Victor is the glue holding the two of them together.

I actually feel bad for forcing Yuri into that corner. The experience has made him grow, but it also ruined the image of the future he wanted and pushed a wedge (tiny, but still...) between him and Victor that he's constantly trying to pretend does not exist.

Fox and Takahiro, my "super parents", completely lost their individual identities when they became parents. They absolutely love their kids and find immense joy in parenthood, and definitely should be parents, but for me as their author, they are no longer of much interest to me as characters themselves.

With Au Ciel Étoilé, I feel like almost every character, with the exception of Félix and Davian, are there for the sole purpose of having a child. Even though the premise of the story is weird and kind of science fiction-y, I think the real reason I lost interest in it was because it was basically "have kid, end of story".

I think Caroline is the character I regret the most, honestly. On her own, she's very interesting to me as a character, but I think she would've been equally interesting with different parents. I went back and forth on whether or not to even add her to the same universe as Yuri and Victor, to say nothing of how much I wavered on whether or not to make her their foster child. While I can't deny the bond between Caroline and Victor, I also can't reconcile the idea that it came at a cost to Yuri, who never wanted to be a parent.

It's perfectly in-character for Yuri to agree to foster Caroline even though he wasn't one hundred percent comfortable with it, though. That's kind of his M.O., doing stuff that Victor wants, even if he doesn't necessarily want it himself. It was a difficult adjustment for Yuri to have a kid around, and although he can't imagine his life without Caroline in it at this point, he often wonders what it would've been like if he'd said no in the first place. Of course, this isn't something he feels he could ever say out loud. Like a lot of things, he's just learned to accept and live with it.

Ironically enough, the child character I'm the least put off by is Belle Blanchet, even though she's not all that interesting. Maybe it's because Félix and Davian don't really think of themselves as "parents" in the traditional sense, and have always treated Belle almost like another adult. Belle isn't a psychological or literal burden to them and almost nothing has changed about their lifestyle. They're still the globe-trotting, thrill-seeking party animals they always were, and Belle is more or less along for the ride.

I don't know... There are probably a dozen story ideas in all of this, now that I see it all written out. Ugh...

[sapphic-agent]

Momo rewrite anon here!

I've been toying around with the idea of trans girl Izuku for the rewrite, and I'm really liking. I was thinking of her preferred name being Izumi. Izumi means "spring" or fountain", I think it is still in align with her character. Izumi is someone who grew up not knowing a lot about queer stuff, and kept all of their thoughts and feelings about their identities to themselves. They get to see and explore with their classmates, who are more openly queer. Which causes her to question her own identity, and knowing her, does extreme research. Like holy Hell, you can change your gender?? Just like that?? She's very conflicted about the whole thing and it takes awhile for her to be comfortable, and open about it. One of Izumi's flaws is that she is terrible at opening about her feelings. Once she does, the girls are excited to have another girl in class. Since UA can allow things like hair dye and piercings, I'm sure it'll be fine to get Izumi a girls uniform. Izumi still does get... assholes who are transphobic and stuck in their old ways. However, due to her getting more confident she stands up to them. I think it would be really cute if she grew out her hair, puts it in a high ponytail, and ties a yellow bow around it. Bc obviously to resemble All Might. Also a tie in with Nana for the ponytail, as well. Ik Horikoshi's trans rep is just... could be a lot better, let's put it that way. Also we get a protag that still has the next generation tie into it. The next generation being more open minded, and let go of harmful ideologies, and accepting of people. Izumi sheds her old skin and embraces who she is, is like peak trans to me. Again, this is just something I'm playing around with as an idea. Plus sapphic Izuocha (And if anyone is wondering, I am a trans male!)

I can definitely get behind MTF Izuku! I've played around with fem (trans and cis) Izuku in my head a lot. It goes well with Izuku as a character and could fit very nicely. I definitely like it a whole lot more than trans Bakugou because it feels like a tactic to make Bakugou more sympathetic, as Bakugou fans tend to do.

And like, it's fine. I don't care that people hc Bakugou as trans. It just doesn't do anything to endear me towards him. Whereas with Izuku (or Todoroki or literally anyone else), it would just add a lot of meaning to the character.

Also, as my user suggests, I'm weak for sapphic ships. So sapphic IzuOcha is a win for me

[oliverferrie]

It's Trans Day of Rememberance, time to support your local trans author while they are still alive

I originally put this thread up on blue birb hellsite, but I wanted to make a longer, more nuanced post for Tumblr. TDOR is a heavy day for me, and every time I see the list of names it makes me want to squirrel away and cry. So instead I want to spread around some books by trans authors, to uplift our voices. The books themselves are not necessarily about trans characters (mine is not) but my experience as a trans guy does inform the text, and when I read these other works, I feel a kinship to the author in that regard, however imagined that is.

I'll start, it's me, buy my horrific (seriously, read the content warning) fantasy book about young queers surviving atrocities: SUGAR PEOPLE

Next up: Δάιος, by Andromeda Ruins (@andromedaexists). A heavy anti-establishment retelling of the fall of Icarus that leans heavily into the reality of queer folk as outcast and put at risk by the powers that be. I have yet to finish it but the prose really slaps you with its urgency.

Next up: FEMININ GANGE (Feminine gait), by Molly Øxnevad, a contemporary novel about the trans healthcare system in Norway. It's written in Norwegian (bokmål) but I really hope to see it translated in English one day because it's such an important piece of literature on the state of our centralised transmedical health system here in norway.

Next up, MAO SIN RAUDE KJOLE (Mao's Red Dress), by Jan Elisabeth Lindvik, (also norwegian, nynorsk) a coming of age novel set in the backdrop of the sixties. It's only really available in Norway, and it's another one I hope to see translated someday, but it's worth knowing about, as it's a seminal novel by a trans activist with so many decades of lived experience, as the country slowly changed its views around trans folk.

Next, we have JACK OF THORNS, Book 1 of INHERITANCE by AK Faulkner, a dark urban fantasy featuring messy queers and LOTS of trauma. I had the pleasure of meeting Faulkner at a con earlier this year, and they have got an awesome thing going with the Inheritance universe. I've been enjoying Jack of Thorns a lot, it does not hold back.

Next, it's the astounding FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi, a magical contemporary novel about dissociative experiences and trauma, and how they interplay with culture and growing up. A very intense and beautifully written book that isn't afraid to tackle dissociative identities AND gender identity (something those of us who have both often have to mask for fear of being denied treatment).

AND THEY LIVED... by Stephen Salvatore, a very contemporary YA romance that deals with societal issues around being gay and nonbinary. It's written from the POV of a cringey, hopeful teen, and dances between happily-ever-after romance and a pointed exhumation of incredibly dark things.

Finally, LARK & KASIM START A REVOLUTION by Kacen Callender, a contemporary YA written in a comfortably snappy rhythm, about love, friendship and a social media mishap that spirals out of control.

If you are an author listed here and you want off this list, just let me know! If you are an author and you want ON this list, feel free to reblog and add your stuff.

Otherwise, go forth and support a trans author today! Connect with our stories, real and imagined. Increase empathy and understanding around the world. Maybe TDOR will be a memorial of the past one day, instead of a memorial of the present day.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Pamela Paul

Published: Feb 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help��growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only just agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The real threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “ Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

[ Via: https://archive.md/ercav ]

==

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

It would, but that's also why activists won't do it. This isn't about "healthcare" and it's not even about "rights." As Duchess Lois of Alberta asked "what rights do I not have as a transsexual?"

It's about conducting a social revolution, and revolutionaries don't compromise.

[kumraa]

Writing Prompt/Challenge

Two characters/things who are so deeply entangled with each other but are on the other sides of the world

What isn’t enough for you is everything for someone

For one life there is one death as a simple matter of consequence

Take all of them and make them the bases of the parts of the story you are going to write

For example lets make 1. The bases of the magic system

Lets go with two people rather than things. That would mean these two are important. So then with a little brainstorming, we can make it so that

1) the special people are generational and the magic gets transferred through bloodlines

2) these people are hunted/worshipped

3) since they are on other sides of the world, one side hunts the magic holders cause they are evil and different | the other side worships and rids the magic holder out of their humanity

4) Lets make them siblings (therefore their bloodlines connected) and make the decisions one does change the course of fate and affect the other

{We can play around with these and add time related abilities/other gods [specifically related to fate (like the sisters in Greek Mythology)]/canon events (like every magic holder lives through this experience maybe a dream)

Then lets make 2. the character dynamic between almost everybody with simple but big enough differences that they are not the same relationship plastered on to different mannequins

The biggest and the easiest way to make that difference would be to make the ‘everything’ and ‘what isnt enough’ for all the characters different (for one rship its money while for the other its freedom)

One of them is poor and needs money to live while the other is rich but isnt happy with their life (cliche yeah, but it works)

Or going a bit deeper we can make them have two different goals with the same path, so for one the path isnt enough while for the other its everything (for example studying for a hard exam and the path is to study but for one it dosent give them everything they need to advance in life while for the other studying leads them to the goal they want to achieve)

Well in simple principle this works with one commonality. The characters desire different things(a good step with making them unique) but they have the thing that leads to their ‘desire’ the same (ie money, studying etc.)

The other thing is to change their reactions, so as to say the poor character getting angry at the rich for not being happy with the money they have or the the one content with just studying struggling to understand why someone would push themselves more when there is an option to just study and live

This dynamic creates great conflict between characters, especially if their reactions to the other is negative

So now to include this dynamic to our story our main ‘desire’ could be freedom but it can also be humanity. Both of these magic holders dont live like humans but we can go even deeper make it more simple. Like ‘connection’ or even ‘empathy’ this does connect to the theme of humanity however rather than focusing on it as a whole we make it more specific and it allows the characters to explore it to its full extent

Lets go with connection and make the worshipped character arrogant and in full belief of their god-hood. But deep down there is this almost animalistic desire for connection that they dont understand. They have worshippers and their fellow right and left hands, their mentees but there isnt anything that satisfies them, and always this deep scratching feeling in their heart. (Lets call them kall)

The other is completely ostracized. They dont have anyone to have an actual connection with. All the magic users are in hiding and its dangerous for them to band together and get too comfortable with their(all magicians) identity. So they are all alone talking with animals, their magic and to themselves. (Lets call them ellen)

So from ellens perspective kall has everything they need and want so this creates this chemistry of envy and rage from ellens side towards kall, while kall pities and looks down on ellen for their poor situation and even poorer life

Truly the enemies to best-siblings trope

Now lets take the 3. Idea to make the beliefs of this world (we can use it to deepen or even add a secondary magic system) but beliefs dont match up with every single person and country therefore we can make it so that the meaning of this phrase is interpreted uniquely by everybody

Lets make it so there are two major cultures that run in these countries, one with worship and one with hatred towards magic. We can have it so that back in the past there were multiple cultures but two of them survived and affected the world now the most. So lets do it that in different countries the worship is done with slight changes.

For the worshipper culture maybe one country makes them wear make up, another country does their ritual in the form of three weeks of sexual activity and service (or the opposite), another does it with sacrifice and so on

For the hatred culture we have ostracization but we can have it form in various ways for one lets say its ignoring that person, for the other its spewing hatred and violent reactions, with one of them it can be execution, we can even have cannibalism involved as this culture dosent believe that magic holders are human and even have farms for them to be eaten, we can use slavery as well so the list goes on

But in the bases of these beliefs and cultures there is belief in consequence

For the negative one it makes the magic holders the perpetuators therefore the people who suffer the consequences while the worshippers see themselves as simple beings and as a consequence of their existence to their holy creator and forgiver for letting them live with their pathetic lives

Annnndddd with this example i really hope i could help or spark some ideas within ya u can use my example or make ur own

the best way to create this is to interpret the phrases literally and metaphorically and then digging deep sometimes even exploring the opposite of the meanings of them so its mostly exploring it comepletely and sincerely with all your might

GOOD LUCK WITH WRITINGGGGG!!!! HAVE FUN WITH THE PROMPTTTT

[autisticlee]

the whole "you shouldn't identify as X, don't form an identity when you can't/don't know yet, you're too young, what if/you might change your mind!" etc etc. it's so silly when you think about it. what's wrong with changing your mind anyway? why did we all decide that gender/sexuality identity has to be static and can never change? why did we decide that it's a bad thing to change? because the old generation tells us change is bad? because they (mostly conservatives) want to conserve "the good old days/the way things are supposed to be" in their minds???

WHO CARES if someone says they're gay then realizes 5 years later they're bi. WHO CARES if someone says they're a girl and realizes after trying it out they're not. let people explore who they are until they figure it out even if they go through every lable available to them! maybe none fit and they make up their own! who cares! who cares if they change it every year for the rest of their lives! humans change. that's the only constant about us! why is it a bad thing, even taboo, to accept change and exploration within sexuality and gender specifically?

there's always so much shame that comes with someone realizing they were wrong, changing as a person, or discovering something new about themselves. i've seen people afraid to explore themselves more or afraid to talk about a change in identity, for fear of the queer community pushing back on them the same way they're afraid to come out to the cishets in their life who are trans/homophobic. that's just not fair that their own community can become hostile towards them, too. being in a closet within a bigger closet essentially. everyone is always told to figure it all out first before claiming an identity, because then you're locked in it for life, apparently. you can't change your mind after that. why though? what's the point of that really? why can't we embrace fluidity a bit more? why can't we accept that humans do change all the time? why is making and trying to prove that these identities are static/unchanging/innate the only way to validate them? why can't they just, I don't know, BE VALID. without reason. why must we jump through hoops to be valid when we should just automatically be valid because we are human. stop letting the cishets gatekeep everything, leading to us gatekeeping each other!

I am sometimes very hesitant to talk about my own identity. I identified as a gay/biromantic trans guy for like idk 8-10 years? transitioned and everything. then like a year or two ago, I realized/decided that doesn't fit right anymore. now i'm a nonbinary, but also kinda fluid, aroace person. sometimes I don't like to talk about that because of the stigma behind changing your gender/sexuality identities. but you know what. i'll talk about it anyway and people have to learn to accept it.

what were the consequences and bad parts about changing my mind/identity like that? none. absolutely none. (outside of people being weird about it for no reason) but the benefits are feeling more comfortable with myself, and that's no one else's business.

[peachypede]

(I feel like this is the most Rawst I have ever drawn. Big changes is that Rawst can literally see real ghosts and they're nonbinary now so pronouns have changed.)

Voice Claim: TBD

Pronouns: They/Them

Battle Theme: Battle! Ghost Type Expert by Maxo

Height: 5'4”

Weight: 130 lbs. (58 kg)

Birthday: October 13th

Current Residence: Nimbasa, Unova

Likes: Horror games and films, goth and emo fashion, ghost types, dark color palettes, painting/drawing, junk food, playing guitar

Dislikes: Overly touchy people, catching feelings/crushes,

Fears: Letting someone in only to get hurt, telling someone they can see real ghosts

General Backstory (tw: abuse and neglect in second bullet)

Rawst was born (assigned female at birth) in Nimbasa, Unova to their father, Calhoun Webb, and their mother when they were only 21 weeks in gestation. Rawst would be in the hospital for a long time after their birth, having multiple scares and times when it looked like they passed away. Calhoun would be at his baby's side and would surprisingly be joined by a Mimikyu who seemed to wander into the hospital. The Mimikyu would follow them home once Rawst was cleared safe without constant hospital care.

Although Calhoun would take care of his children most of the time, his wife often would neglect their older sister, Pecha, and Rawst when he was working or on work trips (which he tried to keep seldom). The parents' marriage would end when Pecha and Rawst were left in a car alone on a sweltering summer's day when Pecha was 5 and Rawst was 3. Calhoun managed to get full custody of his children. After this, their grandparents became a bigger presence in their lives as they stepped up to help their dad raise them. All five would live in the same household for the rest of Rawst's childhood.

After their parent's divorce, Calhoun would take Pecha and Rawst on many of his work trips which involved lots of camping and bug hunting. Rawst was a quiet, spacey child who would often be caught staring at nothing. Unlike their father and sister, Rawst would attract ghost types instead of bugs around them.

Once the kids were reaching their teen years, their grandmother, Leppa, would press Calhoun to enroll his children in school instead of just traveling with them around the world. Naranja-Uva Academy, being one of the best schools and in their grandparent's home region of Paldea, was the one Leppa pushed for and Calhoun decided was best for his children. Their cousin, Aman, would also attend this school which helped them not be totally alone when they first started.

It was during his time at Naranja-Uva that Rawst would become more comfortable with themself and begin exploring their gender identity, until they felt that they are nonbinary. This choice was very supported by their family wholeheartedly.

They would finish schooling when they were 18, their track having been in humanities, and they was aimless for a small period of time. They mostly waited tables at their Tita's restaurant during this small wait time.

Rawst, in attempts to cover up the loneliness and other problems they face in life, started to play video games and watch horror movies more until one fateful day they decided to post on youtube. Their deadpan nature and funny commentary won a lot of subscribers until Rawst suddenly found themselves as one of the more famous Youtubers

Their youtube channel is still constantly growing subscribers. They've taken up streaming as well and also finds it enjoyable.

Extra

Possibly due to their unique birth and also having their Mimikyu, Annabelle, there at the hospital then (Also Annabelle possibly decided to stick Rawst's soul back into their body multiple times during this), Rawst seems to attract both ghost types and real ghosts. They have been able to see ghosts their entire lives, but keep this hidden. They haven't even told Pecha and usually live by a "pretend they're not there" rule because of a bad experience they had with a malevolent spirit when they were very young.

Ships

Phasm Cam Shipping | Ren x Rawst (Ren belongs to @bellafragolina )

Strawberry Bloom Shipping | Rawst x Reina (Reina belongs to @outoutdamnspark )

Gaming Bros Shipping | Gabi x Rawst (Gabi belongs to @bubblymilkgalaxy )

[mcmactictac]

So I’m trying to write a paper on the pros and cons of fandom culture for a media class right. And let me just say it makes me SO MAD trying to find sources because there are so many genuinely wonderful things about fandom and there are many complex social issues reflected in them. Yet so many of these articles are all just based so heavily in sexism? Like playing into that “crazy fangirl” stereotype. And listen I get it yk some people are like that. But I want to talk about WHY fandom is so important to so many people.

Everyone is so quick to judge without getting any understanding of where the sense of attachment comes from. Yes, fandoms have bad people. Yes, there is fetishization, doxing, and a shit load of other problems. It just drives me nuts that those problems are pointed out and no academic sources make an effort to figure out why those problems occurred. Like the relationship between society and fandom is so fucking interesting and its really interesting to see how different fanbases reflect different viewpoints on things.

Also I’m tired of everyone saying we control the media. I have not sat through years of queerbaits; through all of November 5th and the hell that came after it for people to say that producers always listen to fans and give them whatever they want/target everything towards them. Like yes ofc massive media companies are going to take advantage of people cause sadly that’s just how so many of them are. But that doesn’t take away from the genuine meaning and support that media gives us? 

Like brief academic moment here we’ve been talking about Stanley Hall’s model of communication and the idea of encoding and decoding, and how media can have multiple different meanings. I fully agree that people’s own cultural experiences and personal contexts change the way they interpret something. And it’s absolutely fascinating to see how fanbases can have such a large majority of people who draw the same conclusion from media based on their experiences. Especially with queerbaiting and queer coding. I've been thinking about BBC Merlin a lot recently and how interesting that show is not only on its own but in relation to it’s fandom. How so many people can watch it and see magic as something so clearly queercoded, and identify themselves with that characters, and then other people can insist that we’re grasping for straws. 

I just wish it was taken more seriously yk? Like the good and the bad that comes along with it are both very real and intense emotions, especially with so many neurodiverse people in fandom space who become hyperfixated on media. That’s something that has a massive impact on people. Fandom can be a space to connect with others, to explore your own identity, to critically reflect on what you’re consuming, to inspire yourself to create! 

Whenever people outside of fandoms talk about fanfiction it’s always about slash fiction and YES that is a part of it but I have read some truly incredible and impactful fanfictions that has understood the target audience better than a majority of media sources. Fanfiction that can speak to you, reflect your own feelings, provide a sense of comfort or a way to express emotion. Like yes there’s fic’s that are just smut but I’ve seen just as many 100k+ fics that are like focused around found family, mental health issues, AU’s with incredible worldbuilding, fans who put the devotion into creating well rounded characters and expanding upon the foundation placed before them. I’m tired of all that being ignored, because it should be appreciated. I’ve seen so many people who manage to communicate a certain feeling or emotion through fanfiction better than in books I’ve read.

And as so much of adolescent culture shifts online I think fandom spaces are HUGE in terms of self discovery. I’m tired of adults invalidating fandoms because it’s just “made up of obsessive teen girls” there is so much more to that and every day I am tempted to write an essay (not for class) on it because I have so many thoughts on it and I absolutely hate that people refuse to take it seriously.

Wow ok clearly had some feelings there thanks for coming to my TED talk 

[impeerpressure]

Coming out again, because sometimes that’s important.

Hi. If you know me already, you can skip this first chunk. If you don’t, I’m Ben. I’m a teenage boy from the great midwest. I write, read, play DND and different video games. I like Splatoon and fried rice and fantasy and different futuristic aesthetics. I grew up on dystopian fiction and that’s part of the thing that’s made me so optimistic for a future for people like me. For the minorities, the marginalized, the attacked and abused. We’ve won before and we’ll win again, no matter how long the fight.

I’m a transgender, gay, and asexual boy. It took me a very long time to reach these labels, but now that I have I’m comfortable with them. They may change in the future, but for now, this is who I am.

I came out as bisexual at eight years old. I wasn’t ‘groomed’ into it- I was raised in a straight family with straight grandparents and straight aunts and uncles. None of my neighbors were openly queer and I almost solely consumed straight media. The only reason I was able to figure this out was because I had friends who were already figuring themselves out. The labels they used taught me that there were other options than straight and cis. I was curious and confused and a little hesitant, but that’s normal when you come across things that aren’t common to you. I learned and that was that. I sat down with my mom and told her I was bi and she said “me too.” That was my first realization that people like me were everywhere. We’ve always existed, just maybe not so openly.

I tried different labels and gender identities for years after that. Different pronouns, different names, but nothing quite stuck. Somethings felt better, but nothing felt good. I wrestled with attraction for a while. I’m autistic, and that can cause me to struggle a little with understanding my own feelings. The boys in the area I grew up in were downright cruel, too. I didn’t know any of them that I could possibly be actually attracted to. I was bi, pan, lesbian, aro/ace, pan again- it kept changing. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was testing out labels until I found what felt comfortable and that’s okay. Most self exploration isn’t linear.

And then I grew older and I started meeting boys who actually were decent. Around that time, I was starting to dip closer and closer to he/him pronouns. I was slowly learning that masculinity and boys aren’t inherently evil; the place I was raised in had a strong ‘boys will be boys’ culture. They were expected to be loud and rough and cruel. Then I found boys who wouldn’t make fun of you for your identity or your race or your mental or physical disabilities or simply just for being different. Masculinity isn’t inherently evil and I was allowed to be masculine.

So I let myself try he/him pronouns and a boy’s name and I let myself admit I’m attracted to boys and more masculine people. I still remember how it felt like a weight off my chest when people started using he/him pronouns for me. I started looking at gay ship art and reading gay fiction and once I’d had my fill of projecting myself onto one of those guys, I moved on to just generally queer media. I watched people like me thrive and create and exist exactly as they were.

We were always here, we always will be here. Coming out is one of the scariest queer experiences I can think of, even when it’s just coming out to yourself. But it is worth it, even if you’re the only one who knows. It’s okay to not come out to other people or to only come out to specific people. This is a beautiful, personal part of you and no-one is entitled to it. Never let anyone tell you your identity makes you less deserving of a gorgeous, beautiful, happy life.

[nithiyanantha]

 The Relationship Between Fashion and Body Positivity

Fashion and body positivity are deeply intertwined, influencing and reflecting societal attitudes towards diverse body types. In recent years, the fashion industry has made significant strides in embracing body positivity, challenging traditional beauty standards, and promoting inclusivity. This shift is not only transforming the way we perceive fashion but also empowering individuals to embrace their unique bodies with confidence. One way this is manifesting is through the rise of personalized fashion items, such as the best customized T-shirts in Bangalore, which cater to a wide range of body types and personal preferences. Let’s explore how fashion and body positivity intersect and how customized fashion plays a role in this movement.

 1. Breaking Traditional Beauty Standards

Historically, fashion has often perpetuated narrow standards of beauty, which can alienate those who do not fit these ideals. However, the body positivity movement has challenged these outdated norms, advocating for a more inclusive approach that celebrates all body types. This shift is reshaping the fashion landscape, leading to a more diverse representation of bodies in fashion media and runway shows.

One notable example of this change is the growing popularity of the best customized T-shirts in Bangalore. These T-shirts offer a personalized fit that caters to different body shapes and sizes, reflecting a broader understanding of body diversity. By providing options that are tailored to individual measurements, customized T-shirts promote body positivity and ensure that everyone can find stylish clothing that makes them feel good about themselves.

 2. Empowering Self-Expression Through Customized Fashion

Body positivity is not just about challenging traditional beauty standards; it’s also about empowering individuals to express themselves authentically through fashion. Customized clothing, such as the best customized T-shirts in Bangalore, allows people to choose designs, fits, and styles that reflect their personal tastes and identities. This level of personalization helps individuals feel seen and valued, reinforcing their self-confidence and self-worth.

Customized T-shirts, for example, can feature unique graphics, slogans, or colors that resonate with the wearer’s personality or beliefs. This form of self-expression through fashion enables individuals to embrace their bodies and celebrate their uniqueness, contributing to a positive body image and fostering a sense of pride.

 3. Promoting Inclusivity and Accessibility

An essential aspect of body positivity is ensuring that fashion is accessible to everyone, regardless of body size or shape. The fashion industry’s move towards inclusivity involves creating clothing options that cater to a diverse range of bodies, making it easier for individuals to find items that fit well and look great.

The best customized T-shirts in Bangalore exemplify this approach by offering customizable options that accommodate various body types. Whether someone prefers a loose fit or a more tailored silhouette, these T-shirts can be adjusted to meet individual preferences, ensuring a comfortable and flattering fit for all. This focus on inclusivity not only supports body positivity but also helps to break down barriers that have historically excluded certain body types from mainstream fashion.

 4. Shifting Industry Standards

As the demand for body positivity grows, the fashion industry is beginning to embrace more inclusive practices. Brands are increasingly featuring models of all sizes and promoting a broader range of body types in their marketing campaigns. This shift is crucial in reflecting the diverse reality of today’s society and in challenging outdated beauty standards.

The trend of offering the best customized T-shirts in Bangalore aligns with this industry shift towards inclusivity. By providing customized options that cater to various body types, these T-shirts contribute to a more inclusive fashion landscape. This change not only benefits consumers but also encourages other fashion brands to adopt similar practices, further advancing the body positivity movement.

 5. Encouraging Positive Body Image

Ultimately, the relationship between fashion and body positivity is about fostering a positive body image and encouraging individuals to feel confident in their own skin. Fashion has the power to influence how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others. By embracing body positivity and offering customized fashion options, such as the best customized T-shirts in Bangalore, the industry can help promote a more inclusive and accepting view of beauty.

Customized T-shirts that fit well and reflect personal style can enhance self-esteem and make individuals feel more comfortable in their own bodies. This positive reinforcement is essential in building a healthy body image and in promoting a broader acceptance of diverse body types.

 Conclusion

The relationship between fashion and body positivity is evolving, with a growing emphasis on inclusivity and self-expression. Customized fashion items, like the best customized T-shirts in Bangalore, play a significant role in this transformation by offering personalized options that cater to various body types and preferences. As the fashion industry continues to embrace body positivity, it is important to support and celebrate these changes, ensuring that everyone can find clothing that makes them feel confident and valued.

[ereviewsach]

The Power of Letting Go: A Review of "The Power of Letting Go" by John Purkiss

Review of "The Power of Letting Go" by John Purkiss

The Power of Letting Go: A Review of "The Power of Letting Go" by John Purkiss

In the fast-paced and demanding world we live in, it's no surprise that many people find themselves feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and unable to let go of the things that hold them back. In his book, "The Power of Letting Go: Learn How to Let Go for Freedom," renowned author John Purkiss explores the transformative power of letting go and provides practical strategies for achieving true freedom in all areas of life. In this article, we will delve into the key concepts of the book and provide a comprehensive review of its content.

The Essence of "The Power of Letting Go"

"The Power of Letting Go" is a profound exploration of the human experience and the art of releasing attachments that no longer serve us. Purkiss delves deep into the psychology of attachment and how it hinders personal growth and happiness. Through his insightful analysis, he highlights the importance of letting go and embracing change as a means to achieve true freedom and fulfillment.

The book offers a step-by-step guide to help readers develop the necessary mindset and tools to let go and experience the liberation that comes with it. Purkiss emphasizes the need to break free from negative patterns, toxic relationships, and limiting beliefs that prevent individuals from reaching their full potential.

The Key Themes Explored in "The Power of Letting Go"

1. Understanding the Nature of Attachment

In the first part of the book, Purkiss explores the foundations of attachment and its impact on our lives. He explains how attachments can manifest in various forms, such as material possessions, relationships, or even our own identities. By understanding the nature of attachment, readers are encouraged to reflect on their own attachments and consider whether they are serving them or holding them back.

2. The Power of Surrender

Purkiss introduces the concept of surrender and highlights its transformative power. He explores how surrendering allows individuals to release control, accept the present moment, and create space for new opportunities and growth. Through practical exercises and real-life examples, he guides readers on a journey of self-discovery and surrender.

3. Embracing Change

Change is a constant in life, yet many people resist it out of fear or a desire to stay within their comfort zones. Purkiss emphasizes the importance of embracing change and the lessons it brings. He provides strategies to overcome resistance to change and encourages readers to view it as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth.

4. Cultivating Inner Peace

Inner peace is a state often sought after but rarely achieved. Purkiss explores the connection between letting go and finding inner peace. He provides techniques and mindfulness exercises to help readers cultivate a sense of peace amidst the chaos of daily life.

5. The Art of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is not only a powerful act of compassion but also a means to release ourselves from the burden of resentment and anger. Purkiss delves into the art of forgiveness, providing practical steps and insights on how to forgive others and, most importantly, ourselves.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1: How can letting go benefit my personal growth?

Letting go allows you to release emotional baggage, negative thoughts, and limiting beliefs. It creates space for personal growth, new opportunities, and a deeper connection with yourself and others. Learn more about the benefits of letting go here.

Q2: Can letting go improve my relationships?

Absolutely! Letting go of toxic relationships and attachments that no longer serve you can lead to healthier and more fulfilling connections with others. Discover how letting go can improve your relationships.

Q3: Is it possible to let go of past traumas?

Yes, it is possible to let go of past traumas. The process of healing and letting go takes time and effort, but it is essential for your emotional well-being. Explore strategies for letting go of past traumas here.

Q4: Can letting go help me find inner peace?

Absolutely! Letting go of attachments, expectations, and the need for control allows you to cultivate inner peace and live in the present moment. Discover how letting go can lead to inner peace.

Q5: How can I start letting go in my life?

To start letting go, it's important to develop self-awareness, practice mindfulness, and embrace change. Learn practical tips for incorporating letting go into your life here.

Benefits of Letting Go

Letting go offers numerous benefits for personal growth and well-being. By releasing attachments and embracing change,we create space for new opportunities, personal transformation, and a deeper connection with ourselves and others. Some of the key benefits of letting go include:

Freedom from Emotional Baggage: Letting go allows us to release pent-up emotions, grudges, and negative experiences that weigh us down. It frees up mental and emotional energy, allowing us to experience greater clarity, peace, and joy.

Enhanced Relationships: By letting go of toxic relationships and attachments that no longer serve us, we create room for healthier and more fulfilling connections. We can form deeper bonds with others based on mutual respect, understanding, and authenticity.

Increased Resilience: Letting go helps us develop greater resilience and adaptability in the face of change and challenges. When we release our attachment to rigid expectations and control, we become more open to new possibilities and better equipped to navigate life's ups and downs.

Improved Self-Awareness: Letting go requires self-reflection and introspection. When we release attachments, we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, our values, and our true desires. This self-awareness allows us to make choices that align with our authentic selves and lead to a more fulfilling life.

Greater Inner Peace: Letting go cultivates inner peace by detaching ourselves from the constant need for external validation, approval, and material possessions. We find peace in the present moment, accepting things as they are and embracing the impermanence of life.

Letting Go for Healthy Relationships

Letting go plays a crucial role in fostering healthy relationships. Here are some ways in which letting go can improve your connections with others:

Releasing Toxic Relationships: Letting go of toxic relationships is essential for our well-being. It involves recognizing when a relationship is no longer healthy, setting boundaries, and ultimately walking away from toxic dynamics.

Accepting Imperfections: Letting go of the need for perfection in relationships allows us to accept others as they are, with all their flaws and imperfections. It promotes compassion, empathy, and understanding, leading to more harmonious connections.

Embracing Vulnerability: Letting go of the fear of vulnerability allows for deeper intimacy and emotional connection in relationships. By being open and authentic, we create space for trust and genuine connections to flourish.

Practicing Forgiveness: Letting go involves forgiving both ourselves and others for past hurts. Forgiveness releases the negative energy associated with resentment and allows us to move forward with lighter hearts and open minds.

Letting Go of Past Traumas

Letting go of past traumas is a deeply healing process that requires patience, self-compassion, and support. Here are some strategies for letting go of past traumas:

Seeking Professional Help: Trauma can have long-lasting effects on our mental and emotional well-being. Seeking therapy or counseling from a trained professional can provide the necessary support and guidance for healing.

Expressive Writing: Writing about your traumatic experiences can help process emotions and gain perspective. Journaling or seeking a creative outlet can be incredibly therapeutic.

Practicing Self-Care: Engaging in self-care activities such as mindfulness, meditation, exercise, and spending time in nature can support the healing process. Prioritizing self-care helps rebuild a sense of safety, self-compassion, and empowerment.

Connecting with Supportive Communities: Joining support groups or engaging with communities of individuals who have experienced similar traumas can provide a sense of belonging, understanding, and validation. Sharing our stories and supporting others on their healing journey can be immensely healing.

Letting Go for Inner Peace

Letting go is intrinsically linked to finding inner peace. Here are some ways in which letting go can lead to a greater sense of peace:

Relinquishing Control: Letting go of the need for control allows us to surrender to the present moment and accept things as they are. It frees us from the constant struggle against circumstances beyond our control and creates space for peace to emerge.

Practicing Mindfulness: Mindfulness involves being fully present and aware of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Through mindfulness practices such as meditation and deep breathing, we can cultivate inner peace by grounding ourselves in the present moment.

Releasing Attachments: Letting go of attachments to material possessions, status, and external validation frees us from the constant pursuit of happiness through external means. It allows us to find peace within ourselves rather than relying on external factors for validation and fulfillment.

Cultivating Gratitude: Letting go involves cultivating gratitude for what we have in the present moment. By focusing on the positives in our lives and appreciating the simple joys, we can experience a deep sense of peace and contentment.

Tips for Letting Go: Embracing Freedom and Moving Forward

In life, we often find ourselves holding on to things that no longer serve us. Whether it's a past relationship, a grudge, a missed opportunity, or even material possessions, the act of letting go can be challenging. However, letting go is essential for personal growth and happiness. It allows us to create space for new experiences, opportunities, and relationships. In this article, we will explore some effective tips on how to let go and embrace the freedom that comes with moving forward.

1. Acknowledge Your Feelings

Before you can let go of something, it's important to acknowledge and validate your emotions surrounding it. Whether it's sadness, anger, or disappointment, allowing yourself to feel and process these emotions is a crucial first step. Take the time to reflect on how holding on to these emotions is impacting your life and preventing you from moving forward.

2. Practice Self-Compassion

Letting go can be a difficult and sometimes painful process. It's important to be kind to yourself during this time. Practice self-compassion by acknowledging that it's okay to feel a range of emotions. Treat yourself with understanding, care, and gentleness as you navigate through the process of letting go.

3. Identify the Root Cause

To effectively let go, it's important to understand the root cause of your attachment. Reflect on why you are holding on to this particular thing or situation. Is it fear of the unknown? Fear of change? Understanding the underlying reasons will help you gain clarity and perspective, making it easier to let go.

4. Shift Your Perspective

Changing your perspective can be a powerful tool in letting go. Look at the situation from different angles and consider alternative viewpoints. Ask yourself: What can I learn from this experience? How can I grow as a person? Shifting your perspective can help you see the situation in a new light, making it easier to release any emotional attachment.

5. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of being fully present and aware of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the present moment. Engaging in mindfulness exercises such as meditation, deep breathing, or yoga can help you develop a sense of peace and acceptance. By staying present, you can let go of thoughts and emotions that are keeping you stuck in the past.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Q1: How long does it take to let go of something?

A1: The time it takes to let go of something varies from person to person and depends on the complexity of the situation. It's a process that requires patience, self-reflection, and self-compassion. Give yourself the time and space you need to heal and move forward.

Q2: What are some signs that it's time to let go?

A2: Signs that it's time to let go may include feeling stuck, constantly dwelling on the past, experiencing negative emotions, or noticing that the situation no longer aligns with your values or goals. Trust your intuition and listen to your inner voice.

Q3: How can letting go benefit my life?

A3: Letting go can benefit your life in many ways. It allows you to release emotional baggage, create space for new opportunities, improve your mental and emotional well-being, and cultivate a greater sense of freedom and happiness.

Q4: Are there any exercises or techniques to assist with letting go?

A4: Yes, there are several techniques you can try. Journaling, writing a goodbye letter to what you're letting go of, visualization, and seeking support from a therapist or support group are just a few examples. Experiment with different methods and find what works best for you.

Q5: What are some additional resources for learning more about letting go?

A5: Here are some recommended resources:

Book: "The Untethered Soul" by Michael A. Singer

Podcast: "The Life Coach School" by Brooke Castillo

Online Course: "Letting Go: A Guided Journey" by Jack Kornfield

Remember, letting go is a process that takes time and effort. Be patient with yourself, practice self-compassion, and trust that by embracing the concept of letting go, you are opening yourself up to new possibilities and a life of freedom and fulfillment.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as professional advice. If you are experiencing severe emotional distress or mental health issues, please seek the help of a qualified professional.