You’ve declared someone you disagree with is making things up while criticizing the debate skills and tactics of those who disagree with you. What a fucking joke. You got some peer reviewed numbers to support your position about votes and arguments? Because from where I’m sitting, this nonsensical notion that people vote rigorously based on debate acumen and never with their emotions and libido along the lines of their existing beliefs is just as much a made up story. I’m not going to find numbers for a bad faith participant like you, but we already know people vote for real, important, world changing things with their emotions. The idea that the general populace is wildly more reasonable and responsible when the votes don’t matter at all is ludicrous.

Fuck off. You’re exactly the fucking same. If it didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t exist! Childish.

I’m not saying people don’t pick sides in an argument

What I’m saying is that these weren’t arguments. These were people weaponizing the voting system to keep minorities from self representing. I was downvoted below zero on a car repair sub for having runflats instead of a spare because I worked in and commuted through a bad part of town, often after midnight, where I wouldn’t feel safe stopping to change my tire. They made it clear that I was unwelcome because I am a woman, because my description of this gendered experience was unacceptable subreddit content.

If you’re getting downvoted in an argument, guess what, that means you’re bad at making arguments.

I pretty much agree with your second sentence/point, but this is bullshit. I got so many downvotes on reddit for literal descriptions of my perceptions and experiences as a gay woman. Half the time there wasn’t even a debate or argument happening. As reddit culture skewed more and more conservative, many technical and nerdy communities became actively hostile to the basic facts of my existence. Then there are all the downvotes I got for believing in human and minority rights while downthread with some bigots. My more visible posts on the same topic would be solidly upvoted, while everything below the arrow was smashed below zero because only angry little shits followed the discussion that far. I agree that the system on Lemmy isn’t meaningfully different and will inevitably have the same effects, but sorting by voting over-centralizes the meta and destroys real discussion and diversity of experience and opinion. It literally only works in limited circumstances within subjects that have objectively correct answers. Anywhere else it introduces so much chaos.

Come to the Midwest. A crazy number of people smoke here, like straight up cancer sticks smoke. I moved here from Florida, where I felt like you: was a low class thing of the past. In Missouri the booze is cheap and the tobacco plentiful. It’s wild.

Personally, I stopped using Firefox when mobile became my main computing device. When I had shitty phones and mobile browsers were newer, Chrome was much more stable for me than FF. I should try to break the habit and go back to FF now that they are both structurally sound, but by now I have years of stuff saved to and remembered by Chrome. It would be a hassle to switch, and somewhat more control of a portion of my data isn’t worth the trouble to me. I’m still gonna use Instagram for professional networking and personal posting, so I’m gonna be in packaged data anyway.

Tbh, this doesn’t feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That’s all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.

Totally not me clicking your link entirely because I know there’s gonna be a hot guy behind it >_>

I’m gonna throw a common metaphor at you. See my previous post in here for a more thoughtful exposition on my gender experience.

Gender is kind of like shoes. If you have the right kind of shoe, well fitted, on the right feet, you don’t think about your shoes much at all. You know you have a certain type or brand of shoes on, but it’s not an essential element of your daily life. You’re not constantly aware of them. This parallels the common cisgender notion that the self isn’t gendered, that “there is a just a human in your head.” If your shoes are too small, on the wrong feet, or made wrong for your feet, it’s a whole problem all fucking day. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting. It’s distracting and persistent. Over time, it becomes painful, and you use increasing amounts of focus and energy dealing with your footwear incompatibility. This is what being gender incongruent is like. You spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to deal with a profound discomfort and incompatibility that nobody else understands or acknowledges because their shoes are fine.

Okay, this description was really funny, but gender is more complex and inherent and can’t be totally reduced to the social aspects. I say that getting my hormones corrected “fixed me” because, after years of antidepressants and anxiolytics and therapies, turning off testosterone is what finally alleviated a constant, lifelong feeling of something being inherently, unquenchably wrong. This was a feeling I’d had all my life. Treating it psychologically never touched that feeling. Even as my depression and anxiety and truama responses improved, that feeling remained. Even social transition just made it easier to cope with. HRT turned it off. If you or anyone else reading this is familiar with the Dark Tower books, I’ve long made comparisons to Jake’s split timeline. You know implicitly that you should be having a different emergent experience of life, of body, of puberty, but time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses. You’re stuck living in two timelines, and every step towards transition brings them closer to harmony, and at least for me, HRT totally collapsed them into a single life. This is the human experience that has the cultural mapor code of pink vs armies laid over it.

Not that this is really relevant to your fantasy of a Glorious Civil War of Separation, but I am a trans woman with a history of winning over conservatives and helping them grow to understanding in the rural Midwest. When I worked at a trucking motel, I led a series of truckers to the conclusion that trans people are just normal people, except this particular one who is the best damn front desk agent they can get for under $200 (for the record, our CDL rate was under $100). Now I work at the single busiest dispensary in the city where I do the same thing because even fascists love weed. Even without any group affiliation, I put myself in danger to do important and successful grassroots work in my day to day life that I could not do if separated from the people who need to see and hear me. I am pushing for change every day in one of the battleground locations for trans rights and have never lived somewhere that was safe for and accepting of me. Separating into a fascist and free state abandons people like me, people who fight where it counts because we were born where minorities don’t get rights.

So assuming the fascist nation doesn’t restrict the movement of or exterminate lgbtq people, will your theoretical progressive nation provide relocation expenses and therapy for the ~20 years of abuse that is growing up lgbtq in a house of hate? Because there’s no way the fascist faction is just sending their kids to the enemy. They have to make it to adulthood in a dangerous environment, figure out their circumstances without education or information on the subject, and make the decision to leave behind everything they know for at best total mystery/at worst every lie they’ve been told about the enemy. Considering the extreme disparity of lgbtq acceptance and safety already extant, this idea changes very little. It lumps all the safe and unsafe places together, making it more difficult to get to a safe place.

let them have their own fascist christian everyone-that’s-not-a-cishet-white-man-phobic country

Gay and trans people would still be born there.