There are 23 movies in the Air Bud cinematic universe. Everyone always talks about the first Air Bud. The basketball one. The dog does a trick and boops the basketball into the hoop. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. If I’m on the losing team to that, I can applaud that. That’s fine, whatever, I’d hurt my nose doing that. Cool. The rest of the team played well, too.

Now imagine being a kid on a sports team six years later. You arrive to your beach volleyball court and see you’re playing against a dog. You might think, woah, the dog is just gonna boop the ball with his nose, right? Cool fucking trick, he’s old as shit and has no new ones. Wrong. In Air Bud: Spikes Back, the fifth Air Bud movie, the eponymous Air Bud jumps up to the net and spikes a ball down on the opposing team. If I’m on the losing team to that, I fucking quit volleyball forever. There’s no going back. Your dad doesn’t ask how the game was, he saw the dog spike that shit on you on ESPN. What were you supposed to do? My fucking bad, our libero is a piece of shit who can’t dig it up from a FUCKING DOG??? Where the FUCK is our middle blocker??? Which one of you assholes let’s the dog go unmarked after that??? Slam the fucking ball into him, holy shit! No wonder we lost, they were too busy laughing their asses off while we floundered to get the ball over the net! Holy fucking shit, Andre, if you set the ball up so the FUCKING DOG GETS A CHANCE TO BLOCK ME WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU THE SETTER?!? No way, there is NO WAY anyone plays volleyball on that team again. Half that team kills themselves from the ridicule after that. The other half moves across the country and changes their names and faces. That dog ruins their lives. All to win a volleyball game.

I always get extra disappointed by the Outer Worlds, because I always confuse it with the Outer Wilds and would rather play that game.

There are 23 movies in the Air Bud cinematic universe. Everyone always talks about the first Air Bud. The basketball one. The dog does a trick and boops the basketball into the hoop. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. If I’m on the losing team to that, I can applaud that. That’s fine, whatever, I’d hurt my nose doing that. Cool. The rest of the team played well, too.

Now imagine being a kid on a sports team six years later. You arrive to your beach volleyball court and see you’re playing against a dog. You might think, woah, the dog is just gonna boop the ball with his nose, right? Cool fucking trick, he’s old as shit and has no new ones. Wrong. In Air Bud: Spikes Back, the fifth Air Bud movie, the eponymous Air Bud jumps up to the net and spikes a ball down on the opposing team. If I’m on the losing team to that, I fucking quit volleyball forever. There’s no going back. Your dad doesn’t ask how the game was, he saw the dog spike that shit on you on ESPN. What were you supposed to do? My fucking bad, our libero is a piece of shit who can’t dig it up from a FUCKING DOG??? Where the FUCK is our middle blocker??? Which one of you pieces of shit let’s the dog go unmarked after that??? Slam the fucking ball into him, holy shit! No wonder we lost, they were too busy laughing their asses off while we floundered to get the ball over the net! Holy fucking shit, Andre, if you set the ball up so the FUCKING DOG GETS A CHANCE TO BLOCK ME WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU THE SETTER?!? No way, there is NO WAY anyone plays volleyball on that team again. Half that team kills themselves from the ridicule after that. The other half moves across the country and changes their names and faces. That dog ruins their lives. All to win a volleyball game.

An intersex person is typically assigned a gender at birth, but so is everyone else. Being intersex just means you aren’t biologically male or female (though I think this might also include people who have sex chromosomes that develop as though they were the other binary sex, but I’m not an expert). Most intersex people don’t typically know they are intersex, and thus they would count as cisgender so long as they identify as the gender they were assigned at birth and transgender if they do not. Thus, if someone had, say XY chromosomes, but was assigned female at birth, they would probably be cis if they identified as female.

However, trans can be a bit of a self-identifying label, and thus someone in that situation might just as well consider themselves trans. There’s a lot of different definitions for trans. Many non-binary people would consider themselves trans since they don’t identify as their assigned gender at birth.

Long story short, gender is complicated. Sex doesn’t change (put a couple asterisks here), but gender is super flexible (also asterisks here.)

It sucks way worse for all those people born in 1488.

Because they’re dead.

I think you actually don’t like the message of the comic, because if you didn’t like it or thought it was lazy, you would probably move on.

For me, this comic represents my lived experience. I have had people in my life literally say “It’s just politics” and call trans people sexually deviant pedophiles at the same time. And if you haven’t had that happen to you, good for you. But I like the comic because it is simple, short, and pretty good at conveying that feeling.

Sorry if that feels lazy to you, art is subjective, but I think the message of this is pretty fucking obvious because of its simplicity.

I think you misunderstood, but I’m not presupposing otherkin isn’t a thing. I am saying it doesn’t have the same type of intellectual backing as transgender experience does, so it isn’t treated the same. I think that is unfortunate, even if there are studies done as well as expressed experiences, especially within indigenous peoples (and you could argue that is part of the reason fewer studies are done on it.)

I’m not really here to debate whether fish exist because I know fish exist and I can drive to most lakes and find fish in them and I can go to a few museums and see fish remains and I can go to pet stores and find fish for sale and I can go to a grocery store and find fish to eat. Doing that same thing with people and their personal experiences is much harder since it’s more of a personal experience and not, you know, a visible phenomenon, and so it’s going to be harder to convince people a personal experience is real if it’s not their experience and especially if it’s not a common one.

where does one determine where to draw the line?

Short answer: By what the experts say, and they say transgender people should be treated as the gender they identify as. Period.

Long answer: A lot of PhDs did a fuckload of research over a century plus and showed that, yeah, gender is super fucking complicated and doesn’t map out to male/female based on your genitals at birth (let alone for the reason that, you know, maybe you might be born with a penis AND a vagina or ovaries AND testes or female chromosomes AND male genetalia, etc.), and if people get some simple gender affirmation, they live better and happier lives, and that applies to cisgender people, as well.

Easy answer: You can claim to be fucking anything you want. Who actually gives a shit? Let people be themselves if it don’t hurt anyone. What’s the problem with being a transgirl or a transboy? Why do we even have multiple bathrooms? That just seems to punish all sorts of people for no reason.

If you WANT to say transracial or transspecies or transnational is a thing, by all means do some research and prove it through studies and peer review. Until then, it is unlikely to be recognized the same way that transgender has because it has a lot of supporting evidence.

Idk, I think it’s VERY SPECIFICALLY about trans rights, but I just can put my finger on why…

I heard that’s what they did for your mom’s house.

Nobody has ever yelled at me for eating or posting a picture of my American Midwest grocery store sushi, get the fuck outta here.

The irony here is that the term cultural appropriation has been politically appropriated, the same way that many of these explorative racial theories are, like woke, like social justice, like critical race theory. They are taken from their academic settings and eventually used to suppress actual concerns raised by denegrating it and reducing it to something that is both laughable and fundamentally not what it is.

What you’re talking about is something bigger than simple novelty. It kinda sounds like depression, and that’s a lot harder to fight against than breaking routine. I mean, breaking routine helps me a little bit, but it’s certainly not the cure.

But if you want to argue there’s only a limited number of things to do for free, you can spin that the other way, too. There is only a limited number of things to buy. I dunno, that kinda makes me feel better, but I’m weird like that.

Not all new things cost money. You can walk a new way to the same places. You can find new books at the library or online. You can just do things you already do in a different way, and that can be novelty.

By that logic, forcing any name on a child is selfish, so they should pick their own name, since they are the ones that would have it. Although, in that case, temporary names would probably be a thing, so I don’t really see the issue (or you could use other cultural naming conventions like that, but that is one that exists.)

Unless your argument is nonconformity is selfish? I personally think some people will find a reason to make fun of another person, but nominative determination does have its appeal if you don’t believe that.

All names were unique at some point, but that’s a moot point. Eventually they will either become more popular or less popular.

How is it a stupid name? Are rarer names stupid? It’s just a name, if a very uncommon one, and it’s not even particularly hard to spell or pronounce, nor is it without thought. Combination names can sometimes produce odd results, so this one feels fairly mild.

Are you arguing that variants of names meaning blessing shouldn’t exist, or are you just against a new name? Because every name was new at one point, and lots of new names are variants of older ones.

Eh, the kid could have worse, and it seems pretty fitting for the name’s origins.

If you think of children as blessings, and want to change an existing name a little – in this case, Jessica – it makes sense. The first recorded instance of Jessica is from Shakespeare, who could’ve changed the biblical Iesca (Jeska) to Jessica by mixing Jesse into it (or making Jesse into a woman’s name… or other potential origins like the word jess being turned into a name.) And you consider Bless to be a name (though rather unpopular), so it wouldn’t even be particularly odd for the name.

I can’t believe you would trample on my freedom to extinct an animal like that.

I’m not sure I understand how that applies here or changes what I posted.

I used to as well until I looked into it, which is why I now know way, way more than anyone really needs to (there is… a lot.) Anyway, figured I’d explain just in case. You didn’t seem like you had bad intentions, so thanks for being understanding.