Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You keep referencing talking points from ahistorical views of two societies as though they represent the entire world. I suppose to you, they do? You might be better served by reading about the world at large. Off the top of my head, Japan provides an interesting case study in views of homosexuality (and bisexuality) pre- and post- western influence.
So these are typically not conversations that queer people have outside of queer circles, because people like you cannot be trusted to engage in good faith or in a way that respects us as people, and your attempt to rules lawyer the complexities of human attraction and identity as though it’s some fun intellectual exercise for you (when for us it is often life or death) is evidence of why.
Anyway, it is incredibly disingenuous to imply that there is an equivalence between sexual orientation and the loud proclamation that one could never date anyone trans given that it is often impossible to physically distinguish between cis and trans people after medical transition. Those people don’t have a problem with their orientation, they have a problem with trans people.
The words themselves are modern inventions, reflecting the western medicalization of the concepts, which in turn reflected bigotry — declaring something an “illness” is a great way to get people on board with eradicating it. But gay people and gay relationships existed in pretty much every society for which we have records, long before the British decided to coin a new word. (And in fact, so did trans people.)
A rose by any other name smells just as sweet, etc.
Something like less than 1% of trans people regret transition, and of those half of them regret it because of social costs, i.e., bigotry from transphobes, and another big chunk regret that they transitioned as binary when they were in fact non-binary or vice versa. Fundamental to your argument is the idea that we should not trust trans people about their lives or their feelings. It’s bigotry.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, your argument is disingenuous, unscientific, gaslighting propaganda pushed by bigots, and it has the direct result of harming trans people.
No. Don’t claim to speak for lesbians when there are actual lesbians here. (Hi! You don’t know what you’re talking about.) This is the propaganda bigoted lesbians spread in order to cast themselves as the victims. This is a classic abuser tactic. Nobody is forced or compelled to be attracted to anyone, and nobody believes that should be the case. If you make blanket statements like “I’m not attracted to people of X group,” you likely have some unexamined prejudice — you have not met all people of that group, and you have made a bunch of prejudicial assumptions about them.
But your own language betrays you. No one who has respect for trans people refers to trans women as “males who identify as women.”
You have no idea what you’re talking about. “Gender critical” people (they are not feminists) regularly harass trans people, including kids, to the point of suicide. They lobby for discriminatory legislation that makes life-saving medical care difficult or impossible to access for trans people. They are instrumental in spreading bewilderingly unscientific anti-trans propaganda with the deliberate effect of harming and demonizing trans people, with the predictable effect of inspiring more hate crimes. They organize in order to harass and abuse trans people out of employment and housing. They just straight up lie. And if you were to peruse that subreddit, you’d also see them regularly joke about lying to AFAB trans people in order to exploit them for sex because those were the “hot butches” in a way that was incredibly hateful and, honestly, pretty rapey.
These people are abusers and bigots. They’re no different than any other hate group, except that they often use the language of victimhood to cloak their primary mode of social aggression. (This is the mode of aggression that it is most acceptable for AFAB people to express, so they get really, really good at it. It has a lot in common with the dynamics of emotional abuse, and, for lack of a better term, mean girling (which is, especially after adolescence, a particularly effective form of abuse)).
So you have no idea what you’re talking about, but based on your other comments in this thread — you genuinely seem to think homosexuality is a modern invention? And that it came out of some sort of predatory behavior? — it seems this is a willful ignorance that accommodates the hate and disgust you already feel for certain minorities.
I bet you will. Try to be kind to yourself as it happens. My experience is that it can be very painful — like when your leg falls asleep and then you suddenly get circulation back, but for emotions — but worth it.
Reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. spoiler warning
The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive.
If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.
I would add that this can be extremely challenging (and possibly triggering) for people who had traumatic childhoods. In those cases it is best to start with loving compassion towards a beloved pet, for example — something simpler, that is not so emotionally charged.
Either way the metta instruction I’ve encountered has often failed because it failed to emphasize the sensation of emotion. It’s not lying there thinking about how much you love something. It’s thinking of the thing or person you love and trying to locate the specific sensation in your body, and then grow it.
Many people mistake ritual dissociation for meditation, which can be really really harmful.
I’m curious about why you talk about Apple as though it’s a monolithic entity making coherent decisions. Tim Cook doesn’t need to have signed off on his himself as part of a grand strategy for it to have happened, and indeed the only evidence we do have available indicates that monopoly abuse of power is a tactic Apple has deliberately used before. Even if this is, as RileyJames posits, just the head of one team asking another for a favor in pursuit of an acquisition, it speaks to the corporate culture at Apple. Regardless, given the balance of actual evidence, it seems more absurd to extend the benefit of the doubt to the corporation that has abused market power in the past.
And while I don’t know if this was deliberate or a mistake, I think the more interesting point is that even if it was a mistake it demonstrates the danger of monopoly. The problem is structural. When a company has the market dominance of the FAANG companies, abuse is inevitable.
I think RileyJames’ comment provided a clear and realistic hypothesis of how Apple might come to abuse its monopoly power in this way without the sort of reasoning you assume, but it’s also probably relevant to note that Apple got caught conspiring with five major publishers to fix ebook prices largely because they had a private dinner where one of the publishing CEOs took literal notes on their conspiracy to fix prices. (Yes, really.)
Apple has been really dumb about antitrust law before. It’s not unrealistic to think they’d be dumb again. It’s not even dumb if you’ve been doing it routinely for years and only suffered consequences once or twice. Which I don’t think is unique to Apple — I think all the FAANG companies have gotten very accustomed to being able to do essentially whatever they want as long as they pay a minor fine every few years.
Yeah I think this is how things often happen. Just people being people, and using the tools available to them to get what they want. It’s the monopoly power behind it that makes it so damaging.
Did you read the article? The claim is that Apple delayed and denied app approval while trying to acquire the app, while approving the scam apps and approving other apps that incorporated his tech.
ETA: I find the dismissive reference to “conspiracy theories” to be a little weird. It’s not as though there isn’t a rich history of abuse of monopoly power, including restricting access to market. It’s unclear why FAANG companies would be uniquely immune to such temptations.
Of note is the claim that Apple deliberately sabotaged his app as a negotiation tactic for the purposes of acquisition.
IANAL, but this seems bad. Even if it’s legally permissible, it’s the sort of outrage that’s both easily understood by non-technical people and hits a kind primal reflexive outrage against unfairness.
In addition, I’ve heard of this with other FAANG companies (notably Amazon). They’d likely all be vulnerable to these arguments. Proving such abuses of power might prove more difficult, though.