The Cesspool of Hate and Bigotry Right Under Many Parents’ Noses

Jul31

Let me make some feminist observations coming from a place you probably wouldn’t expect to find feminist observations at all – online video gaming and especially massive multiplayer online video gaming (MMOs).

One game I’ve played is called Black Desert Online (hereafter abbreviated BDO). It has one of the most extensive character customization editors in the entire online gaming world. The character face alone has 39 separate small regions that can be adjusted in every conceivable dimension including the ears. The body has 19 separate regions adjustable via sliders and that’s not counting the hands, each of which has 3 adjustable regions per finger and the palm region which is a total of 51 potential adjustments across the body from neck to foot. (Toes are not individually adjustable.)

You can create a character template and then save it. You can share saved templates publicly. And shared templates can be named.

I’ve seen some incredible templates done, which look nothing like the default character that Pearl Abyss has created. I’ve seen hundreds of celebrity templates that, depending on the gender of the specific class (classes are gender locked), look like famous actors, actresses, sports figures, or even a few politicians.

But for all of this extremely creative work, we then find the other templates. You don’t find this with male gender classes, only female gender classes.

Templates in which the character’s breasts are so large you wonder how the character can possibly stand. Character templates with buttocks so large that you wonder if something is medically wrong with them. Character templates titled “Mommy”, “Waifu”, “Cutie”. There used to be a lot of “Ho” templates but Pearl Abyss apparently cracked down and forced those to be retitled or deleted. You do still see some character templates with “THOT” in them.

Another game I’ve played is Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). SWTOR doesn’t have character creators. You can basically choose one of 4 body types but you can make extensive face adjustments, just nothing like BDO. But SWTOR’s brilliance is that it has so many character outfits you can put your character into. Mandalorian armor sets (a few dozen choices), Jedi robe or armor sets (a few dozen choices), Sith robe and armor choices, several dozen choices that look like smuggler and bounty hunter type armor. And the beauty of this system is that almost any class can wear almost any outfit set. (A tiny number are gender locked.)

And given these choices, as a role-player, I almost always had my female characters dressed in full coverings most of the time. The rare time they were not was usually some in-character function, like attending a gala and wearing an evening gown.

And further, you can have dozens of potential companions in SWTOR to fight alongside you (one companion at a time but you can switch any time except in the middle of a fight). And many of those characters are female too.

So what do many of those female characters and companions get dressed in most often? The least covering most revealing outfits possible.

Then let’s talk about MMO game chat systems. Most MMOs have channels that are pretty wide reaching. In BDO there are several channels that reach the entire instance of the game world. In SWTOR there are general channels that reach wide sections of the game world. In WOW, there are general channels that reach wide segments of the game world.

These are a built in feature of almost every MMO in existence. And if you listen to these channels, you find yourself immersed in a total culture of absolutely pure misogyny and hate. Hatred of women, hatred of anyone not white (the use of the N-word is common), hatred of anyone who is queer but especially hatred of trans women and gay men, and more.

These channels are among the most toxic, abusive channels of communications in the world today. And none of these companies police these channels. No policing action is done. The most vile, hateful things are said in these channels.

There is non-stop racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic chatter going on in these game channels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week except when the servers are down for maintenance.

People talk about 4Chan and 8Chan as toxic places on the dark web but MMO game chat systems, and the cultures they create which are inhabited by MILLIONS OF YOUR MEN AND TEENAGE BOYS are conditioning these young men and teenage boys to become bigots in every part of their corrupt little souls.

Are there those that resist? Sure, but most don’t fight the tide. Those who don’t want to hear it, because they have no real policing powers and the owners of the games refuse to police their chat systems, usually just turn off global or wide reaching channels that becomes hotbeds of bigotry.

The online social media culture of hate and negativity that we see on Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, X, and other social media platforms did not arise overnight from whole cloth. It arose from these MMO game chat systems that have been unpoliced since the mid-1990s, places of toxic hate and abuse against anyone the majority deems “less than”. Then those people grew up and moved on to other social media where they brought their sense of entitlement, hatred, and bigotry with them.

You cannot clean up social media systems without first going after related communication systems like MMO game chat systems, the systems that start programming kids who are in their early teens to hate and mock anyone different from themselves.

And that’s going to require legislation that neither major party wants to touch right now.

Big tech is out of control, not just in AI, but in its open support of sexual abuse, its support of production of child sexual assault materials (CSAM), it’s production of openly racist materials.

If this is not reigned in on a society wide scale, it will destroy civilization. Elon Musk fears people of color and people of religions other than Christianity. He and his tech bros are a bigger threat to civilization than any other single factor right now.

Trans Women Are Not Men And Never Were

Jul6

In the last 20 years there have been 50 peer reviewed scientific studies examining over 6099 trans athletes asking whether trans women have an advantage in sports over cisgender women. None of these studies have shown any advantage, yet ignorant people continue to claim that “common sense” insists this is true.

Body composition and physical fitness in transgender versus cisgender individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis

New Study Once Again Shows Trans Women Have No Physical Advantage Over Cis Athletes

The critical error of most transphobes is in thinking that transgender women are just men making a choice.

But there are now 30+ years of biological research showing that trans women are biologically distinct from cisgender men. Neurologically, trans women have brain structures that closely match cisgender women. Frontal cortex thickness and neuron density matches that of cisgender women. Multiple structures in the hypothalamus match those of cisgender women.

A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality

Male-to-female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus

A sex difference in the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus: relationship to gender identity

There are other signs as well. Well over 90% of cisgender men have ring fingers longer than their index fingers. Cisgender women have index fingers as long as their ring finger or longer. Most trans women have female index to ring finger ratios, not male ratios.

Digit ratio (2D:4D) and transgender identity: new original data and a meta-analysis

There are physical things that men generally cannot do but women can. Trans women can often do those actions but cisgender men almost never can. These “tricks” rely on women having a lower center of gravity than men, usually due to more combined muscle/fat mass in the lower body. After several years on HRT many trans women can do these tricks too, because they’ve acquired female proportions, not male proportions.

The US Air Force discovered that, even before starting HRT, trans women performed 18%-30% lower on average than cisgender men. They also showed that after 2-4 years of Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy (GAHT), that trans women showed no advantages over cisgender women in lower body strength, or in run speeds and only a tiny advantage in upper body strength.

The goal of the study was to determine when transgender Air Force service members, both MTF and FTM, should begin to be tested on the scale that matches their gender identity and not the scale that matches assigned sex at birth. It gave a definitive answer to that and showed that after 2 years of GAHT they should be tested on the same scale as their gender identity, and that after 4 years or GAHT, any remaining advantages they saw early on were gone or nearly gone.

Fit Transitioning: When Can Transgender Airmen Fitness Test in Their Affirmed Gender?

A British study showed that trans women, after 2+ years of GAHT, had decreases in VO2 Max (amount of oxygen reaching the muscles) that matched the VO2 Max levels of cisgender women.

Strength, power and aerobic capacity of transgender athletes: a cross-sectional study

Over and over again, science tells us that transgender women are biologically distinct from cisgender men. It tells us that, except for genitalia, they are biologically more like women than men.

I recently saw one discussion where a pro-trans advocate answered the question “What is a woman?” from a medical perspective. Her response was that a woman is any individual born with a neurological template that more closely matches the average female neurological template and that a man is any individual whose neurological template more closely matches the average male neurological template. And that’s a scientifically correct answer that is grounded in the research that has been accomplished over the last 31+ years. (Zhou et al. discovered the initial BSTc differences in the hypothalamus in 1995, which opened the floodgates for transgender neurological research.)

I’ll accept a call for more scientific research into this question but right now, today, in 2026, there is NO DATA that supports the claim that trans women have an unfair advantage over cisgender women in sports. I’ll even accept a call for each sport to study the issue, scientifically, as to whether trans women can play that sport. Would more research help? Yes. And perhaps sport by sport rules would alleviate concerns.

But if you claim otherwise, that trans women have some inherent “advantage”, you are a scientifically illiterate bigot and your opinion is garbage unworthy of serious consideration.

America’s Odds Of Collapse Keep Rising Thanks To Trump

Mar26

The Bulwark, a set of political blogs I sometimes read but don’t always agree with (too right wing sometimes) is sounding the alarm about the dollar. A collapsing dollar, becoming irrelevant to the global economy, is one of the preconditions I’ve mentioned in the past that can lead to the collapse of the United States as a single coherent nation. Below is the comment I left on their page about this article.

Years ago, I began pointing out that Putin’s then ongoing support for white nationalist and state secession movements was mirroring how US policy in the 1980s and 1990s helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin had a front row seat to what we did to the USSR, and he took notes. The most important point for Putin was that once the USSR shattered, international pressure led to nuclear disarmament of several former Soviet states.

Apply this backwards – if Putin can cause the Balkanization of the United States, will the world simply allow Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado to retain those ICBM silos? No. In all probability, those new nation states would be pressured to disarm in order to receive international financial aid to rebuild and stabilize their economies.

So there’s a rational underlying goal behind Putin supporting white nationalist and secession movements. This explains Putin funding racist organizations and even Russia supporting Republicans who screamed bloody murder about idiocy like Jade Helm even before Trump was elected.

Then we arrive at Trump’s election. Putin now has a completely vain idiot leading the US, whom he can manipulate with ease by playing on Trump’s narcissistic ego. Before Trump’s election the first time, the dollar was close to parity with the euro. Under Trump, the dollar fell to 0.83 dollars per euro.

Under Biden, the dollar climbed back to 0.96-1.04 versus the euro.

In Trump’s second term, in the first 12 months, the dollar again dropped clear down to 0.83 dollars per euro.

At that point, add in the Iran war, add in the growing white nationalist anti-Israel sentiments, add in Trump trying to withhold funding to blue states, and the pressures at the state level to ask “why are we part of this union anymore?” start to feel obvious.

California alone has the 4th largest economy in the world. They don’t need Trump’s BS to live successfully. California could easily cut deals around the entire Pacific rim within a few months that would be better for California than the current mess. If Oregon and Washington joined California, it would be the 3rd largest economy in the world.

Likewise, New England, as a group of states together, would be a top ten economic powerhouse in the world if they broke away. If Pennsylvania and Maryland joined them, they’d be the 5th largest economy in the world.

So think about it. Trump and the GOP, slashing government services AND wrecking the dollar, are creating a situation that can lead to the collapse of the United States as a single coherent country. Slashing government services alone doesn’t create that situation, but if the dollar is also becoming irrelevant or even worthless, some of the larger blue regions of the country will be left asking themselves, “why stay in this union?”

And when we reach that point, coupled with white nationalism becoming a structural security threat to the rule of law in America, then the potential for the collapse of the United States, will reach a peak.

I think Trump is too stupid to do this himself but he is clearly vain enough to be manipulated to where the US dollar and the federal government both become irrelevant to the everyday lives of the American people. And when that happens, the US dies, and Putin gets to remove American nukes from the global chessboard without firing a single shot.

And THAT will be a moment that will go down in history showing the power of espionage and diplomacy.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/kill-the-dollar-bill?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Wrong Life

Jan28

This was written by a friend. I have attempted to strip any identifying information from the original piece to protect the author. It expresses how it feels to be transgender in America in 2026. Right now, in 2026, transgender people are the target of government genocide. Each step becomes more explicit. Each action becomes more violent towards the trans community. This is how The Holocaust happened. You are living through such a moment right now. What you do, other than just posting on social media, will determine what happens to trans adults and children in the near future. If you let them murder us without a fight, you are complicit.

Wrong Life

Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps re-frame how I see the world. Such is the case when I came across this quote by Theodore Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany, and the origins of the Holocaust:

“A wrong life cannot be lived rightly”

Out of context I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (e.g. Jewish, Sinti, disabled) nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones.” No matter their character, achievements, capability, “wrong life” can only have a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling, and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world, and what I was seeing that was external to me.

I am wrong life. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character, and not government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

But none of it matters. My government, and the people that voted for it, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the President explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life was a feature and not a bug. The GOP spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading the narrative that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the herrenvolk.

At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. For most other marginalized groups in American history it was still possible to be one of “the good ones”. For black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place”. Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics were long used for their agricultural labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today, and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as non-citizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second class citizens.

This quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than the US. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans are targeting transgender people with literally over a 1000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either leave the country, detransition, or live in a country where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: it looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican that does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power.

I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of “well, I don’t think of you that way.” While appreciative of such support, they simply don’t matter because the people who express these thoughts have no institutional power. My own sense of self worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if my transgender son and I are spending our last moments holding our breath and trying to claw our way through concrete with our fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers. All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”

Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes, and the eyes of the people keeping the government in power. That government has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost. I will always be wrong life if I remain in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it will be when I do not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong-life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, here you find my soul laid bare in Hell.

The Truth About Sapphic Divorce Rates

Jan7

This information was originally posted as a thread by bambi_girl_wlw (Sumaya Si) on Threads. I have consolidated this thread here for easy reference for anyone that wants to use the data. Everything between the separators here is her work.

Lesbian divorce rates are not unusually high. Reality is lesbians have the lowest rates of cheating and some of the highest relationship satisfaction. This thread debunks a widely misunderstood statistic—using real data.

The “70%” figure comes from ONS data from England and Wales, but it is often misunderstood. The data do not say that 70% of lesbian marriages end in divorce. What the ONS data actually state is that among all same-sex divorces, about 70% involved lesbian couples and 30% involved gay male couples. Importantly, the absolute number of divorces is low for both groups.

If we look further into the ONS data, the percentage of same-sex divorces involving lesbian couples was:

  • 2017: 74% female couples, 26% male couples
  • 2019: 72% female couples, 28% male couples
  • 2021: 67.2% female couples, 32.8% male couples

From this, we can conclude that the gap has been narrowing each year.

You might still think this is high compared to gay male couples. However, lesbians are more likely to get married than gay men. In England & Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the female share of same-sex marriages was:

  • 2014: 56.1%
  • 2016: 55.7%
  • 2018: 57.2%
  • 2020: 57.2%
  • 2022: 62.8%

This shows that the marriage rate among lesbian couples is increasing. If we look closely at 2021–2022, the share of marriages and divorces was almost the same. 

According to the 2021 Census and recent surveys (which measure individuals, not couples):
About 2.8% of men identify as gay
About 1.2% of women identify as lesbian
This means there are fewer lesbians overall, yet they make up a larger share of same-sex marriages, suggesting that a higher percentage of lesbians are getting married. 

Yes, in most countries, lesbians do have higher divorce rates than gay men. However, there are exceptions. For example, in Taiwan, gay men actually have a slightly higher divorce rate. From Taiwan MOI / GEC data, when used consistently:
65–70% of same-sex marriages are female couples
~30–35% are male couples
~60–63% of same-sex divorces are female couples
~37–40% are male couples
When these numbers are normalized, gay male couples show a slightly higher divorce rate per marriage. 

Reasons why lesbians may initiate more divorces compared to gay men 

  1. Lesbians are more likely to get married A summary of LGB adults from the Williams Institute showed that: About 51% of women who identify as lesbian were married or cohabiting Only about 35% of gay men reported being in a partnered relationship In most countries, there are more gay men overall, yet lesbians make up a larger share of marriages. I reviewed multiple datasets across different countries, and most showed the same pattern. This suggests that many lesbian women getting married earlier.
  2. Multiple studies suggest that gay men are more likely to be in open relationships than lesbians: In an analysis by Blumstein & Schwartz (cited in Peplau & Beals), 82% of gay male couples reported being non-monogamous, compared to 28% of lesbian couples According to Wikipedia’s summary of available data, about 33% of gay men reported being in open relationships, versus only about 5% of lesbians This suggests that gay men may be less likely to divorce due to adultery or cheating.
  3. Parenting and child-related stress According to U.S. Census data (2019): 22.5% of female same-sex couple households had at least one child under 18 6.6% of male same-sex couple households had at least one child under 18 Overall, lesbians are more likely to have children than gay men, which may mean that parenting-related conflicts are less common in gay male couples. Additionally, lesbian women are more likely to experience pregnancy- and postpartum-related stress, which affect marriages.
  4. Lesbians are the group least likely to cheat on their partner. According to the study “Extradyadic Sex and its Predictors in Homo- and Heterosexuals” by J. Haversath & Kröger (2014):
    4% of lesbian women
    34% of gay men
    29% of heterosexual women
    49% of heterosexual men reported extradyadic sexual contacts (aka cheating).
    This explains that lesbians are individuals who leave the relationship instead of committing adultery.
  5. Lesbians are the happiest and most satisfied among all couples. This suggests that lesbians tend to leave bad relationships earlier. Studies show that lesbian’s tend to be the happiest and most satisfied among all types of couples. For example, a longitudinal study tracking lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual couples over time found that lesbian couples consistently reported the highest overall relationship quality on average across all assessments
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18855506/

In another Swedish follow-up study of couples after assisted reproduction, researchers found that lesbian couples reported greater relationship satisfaction and maintained stable, happy feelings—even when facing the stress of treatment.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12905-014-0154-1

When comparing lesbians specifically to heterosexual women, research also reveals significantly higher levels of satisfaction for lesbian couples.

Again, this information was compiled by bambi_girl_wlw (Sumaya Si) on Threads, and all credit should be extended to her.