My understanding is the majority of detransition occurs due to financial reasons. So basically “I can’t afford my HRT anymore,” or “I can’t afford top surgery right now so I’ll go back to presenting as a woman,” or what have you. Then once the financial issue is gone a lot of those resume transition.

Full on “I thought I was trans but I’m actually not” detransition seems to be pretty rare. Almost like the current standard of care does a pretty good job at weeding out the people for whom transition isn’t the best treatment option. But to the conservatives who’ve decided this is their new culture war front if literally a single person ever regrets their transition, that’s enough to ban it for everyone.

So most of these bills ban pretty much all medical interventions for anyone under 18. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, surgery, the whole nine. Some go further and are trying to ban it for anyone under 26. You could theoretically still get counseling but you wouldn’t be able to actually do anything.

And yeah sure, on its face that might seem reasonable. Wouldn’t want impulsive teens rushing into big irreversible medical changes on a whim right? But those safeguards already exist. You can’t just walk into a gender clinic as a 10 year old boy, say the magic words “I’m actually a girl,” and walk out with an appointment for bottom surgery and a prescription for titty skittles. It takes long term counseling, social transition steps like trying out a new name and pronouns, wearing clothing that aligns with your gender, etc.

In reality that hypothetical 10 year old boy walking into the clinic is going to get extensive counseling. From that counseling he might try out using a different name, she/her pronouns, or dressing in more feminine clothing. She then might get prescribed puberty blockers here to make sure she has time to do all of this and be sure of herself without being forced into male puberty. A few years go by and last statistics I saw something like 2% of people at this point say, “No I think I actually am a boy,” and they go through that slightly delayed puberty. But almost all progress to HRT and later surgery.

Do some people later truly regret their transitions and try to go back? Of course they do. But realistically, transition already has basically the lowest regret rate of any medical procedure out there. A higher percentage of people regret getting something like a hip or knee replacement surgery than regret transition.

Puberty already forces your body through permanent changes that can range from easy, to nearly impossible to reverse. That’s why puberty blockers are so important. Imagine if as a young cis boy through some rare medical issue you start going through female puberty. But you’re a boy! You know you are. You’ve got a penis and everything.

But now you’re growing breasts. Like big enough that you can’t really hide them. Big enough that they get in the way, they’re heavy, and you have to wear a bra otherwise they hurt like hell. The other boys in your grade stare at you or bully you because you’re a boy but you’ve got bigger tits than a lot of the girls in your grade. Soon everyone starts mistaking you for a girl. Guys start hitting on you even though you’re a guy and you’re attracted to girls. A lot of the girls aren’t interested in you because they’re attracted to more… Traditional looking guys. You get told that you should just accept it. After all you look just like a girl. But you’re not a girl damnit. You’re a boy. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Now imagine they tell you they can’t do anything about it until you turn 18… Or maybe 26. Sounds terrible right?

Delaying until after the election was the main point yeah. He did get a couple other goodies from it though to my understanding. Presumption of immunity and not being able to admit testimony or communications of the president and his staff being the big ones from what I’m reading.

But absolutely Remand is the big prize for Trump here. Having the case remanded back to the lower courts all but guarantees that it won’t be concluded before the election. Hopefully it doesn’t entirely gut the other prosecutions as well but I don’t have a lot of faith that it isn’t going to basically kill the other cases.

Biden has the chance to do quite possibly the funniest Thing™ in American history.

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {

Long long x = 0x7165498511230;

while (x) putchar(32 + ((0xC894A7875116601 >> ((x >>= 4) & 15) * 7) & 0x7F));

return 0;
}

Might be wrong on a few things here as I haven’t done C++ in a while, but my understanding is this. I’m sure you can guess that this is just a very cheekily written while loop to print the characters of “Hello, World!” but how does it work? So first off, all ASCII characters have an integer value. That 32 there is the value for the space character. So depending on what ((0xC894A7875116601 >> ((x >>= 4) & 15) * 7) & 0x7F)) evaluates down into you’ll get different characters. The value for “H” for example is 72 so that first iteration we know that term somehow evaluated to the number 40 as 72 - 32 = 40.

So how do we get there? That big number, 0xC894A7875116601 is getting shifted right some number of bits. Let’s start evaluating the parenthesis. (X >>= 4) means set x to be itself after bit shifting it right by 4 bits then whatever that number is we bitwise AND it with 15 or 1111 in binary. This essentially just means each iteration we discard the rightmost digit of 0x7165498511230, then pull out the new right most digit. So the first iteration the ((x >>= 4) & 15) term will evaluate to 3, then 2, then 1, then 1, etc until we run out of digits and the loop ends since effectively we’re just looking for x to be 0.

Next we take that number and multiply it by 7. Simple enough, now for that first iteration we have 21. So we shift that 0xC894A7875116601 right 21 bits, then bitwise AND that against 0x7F or 0111 1111 in binary. Just like the last time this means we’re just pulling out the last 7 bits of whatever that ends up being. Meaning our final value for that expression is gonna be some number between 0 and 127 that is finally added to 32 to tell us our character to print.

There are only 10 unique characters in “Hello, World!” So they just assigned each one a digit 0-9, making 0x7165498511230 essentially “0xdlroW ,olleH!” The first assignment happens before the first read, and the loop has a final iteration with x = 0 before it terminates. Which is how the “!” gets from one end to the other. So they took the decimal values for all those ASCII characters, subtracted 32 then smushed them all together in 7 bit chunks to make 0xC894A7875116601 the space is kinda hidden in the encoding since it was assigned 9 putting it right at the end which with the expression being 32 + stuff makes it 0 and there’s an infinitely assumed parade of 0s to the left of the C.

I guess it’s a special kind of character called a ligature. They apparently are characters for combined operators. So in this case it seems to just be >>= all as one character?

Technically the US is sending lots of weapons to Russia. Ukraine are even being real Bros about it and trying to deliver the munitions first cuz Russia keeps misplacing their stuff. Not their fault Russia is doing a very poor job of accepting their deliveries.

For me it’s even weirder than that. Those pictures exist in my mind and I can “feel” them there but the conscious part of me that’s supposed to see them can’t see shit. I can describe to you the things that are in them or even draw them out as they exist in my mind, but I can’t see them. The part of me that’s giving directions? It can “see” the map of the building and my position in it just fine like it’s staring straight at a live minimap, but the conscious part of me that should be able to visualize that stuff? Nothing. I close my eyes and try to visualize that dog and I see nothing but black. But I can feel the presence of the image that the part of me that does the mental conjuring of images is making.

It’s like turning the monitor off on a computer. Everything is still running even though you can’t see it.

I have ADHD too but in my case I don’t actually “hear” any of the thoughts. But they exist similar to how you describe. At any given time I can feel multiple different thoughts kind of floating around. When music gets stuck in my head I don’t so much hear it in there as I feel the presence of a song. So I have to talk out loud in order to keep from losing the thread of what I was thinking about.

It’s hard to describe for me. Cuz I don’t actually “see” anything I try to imagine. If I close my eyes and try to visualize say an image of a desk at a window all I see is darkness. The image exists, I can I guess I’d say “feel” it there and i could even draw it. But I can’t “see” it. Like the part of me that’s making the picture is drawing it on a live stream but the part of me that should be seeing the stream has the monitor off.

Same with the whole internal monologue thing. I don’t “hear” the words in my head or “see” them written out in my imagination but I kinda just “feel” them there. It poses a problem when my mind really gets going because there will be often like half a dozen different distinct thoughts I can feel in there. So I end up having to talk to myself out loud in order to keep from losing whatever thread I’m trying to follow.

Yet another example of Joanne specifically, and reactionaries as a whole having only The One Joke™

It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so damn frustrating.

Years ago I had really severe anxiety and intrusive thoughts. I noticed though as my anxiety got better through among other things therapy that the intrusive thoughts took on a new form; Unbidden and often times inappropriate shitposting IRL.

Personally, most of the time I don’t really hear my internal monologue. It’s there but it kinda tends to get drowned out by a constant swirl of other random thoughts unless I externalize it and talk to myself, but I do hear the intrusive thoughts loud and clear. Add those things together and I like to joke that I accidentally manifested a shitpost tulpa.

Then because I found this thought amusing I came up with an entire character to put to it.

I too have ADHD