There is evidence of a number of uses of vernacular written language in archeological sites. The matter of literacy as mentioned around the advent of the Doomsday Book was not a measure of who could read common vernacular they way literate tends to mean today. It was a measure of who had completed their letters. A set form of schooling that covered about six years worth of language education and numeracy. So it’s kind of hard to track actual literacy rates given sources at the time because the bar to count as “literate” by census records was specific. The majority of college level modern users of language would be unable to clear that bar. I would not be considered literate because I can only write vernacular. So you are semi-correct in that sense yes only nobles and men of the church were “literate” by standards of the time.

There are a number of archeological finds throughout the medieval ages that showed a general upward trend of the skill of being able to read and write fairly basic missives amongst humble people. A lot of our surviving evidence of peasant writing is on very rudimentary materials like bark and it is very practical use. People learned the skill from other people for doing stuff like writing IOUs or orders for goods or as reminders and most examples that survived were under 20 words in length. In a lot of places being able to read and write wasn’t considered remarkable enough to record as a special skill unless you could do it in Latin. This is why you find books written for common people like the Dite de Hosebondrie ( Husbandry) for the peasant farmer or guides for common housewives in the 13th century in “rustic” language styles. Books were uncommon and expensive and you had to go to them to read them but the people who they were written for weren’t always nobles or clergy.

https://www.medievalists.net/2024/11/medieval-daily-life-on-birchbark/

Not quite true that nobles and priests were the only ones that knew how to read. Lower classes absolutely knew how to read they just didn’t use that knowledge for writing books - they used it for communicating and for legal purposes. The lower classes were actually quite litigious and a subsect of them required literacy as a means of self advocacy, occasional resistance and survival.

The concept of the peasantry being unschooled, idiot commons without the brains and means to aquire knowledge has always been a way to keep you and I, people who came after as their legacy, distanced from their history so we could instead align ourselves with the rich and powerful who could be seen as the “creators” of society and culture.

Those peasants and serfs were a lot more like us than people think.

Looking at humans from a capitalist standpoint, since we are living in a highly mechanized and optimized labor society there will always be a surplus of labour. Not everyone needs to work and over time less and less people will need to work to sustain the whole. Defining humans as worthy to live or not based on their capacity to work means you accept some humans as surplus, fungible and ultimately liquidatable because the system has no use for them even if they are healthy and ablebodied.

This is not how you treat people. This is how you appraise livestock.

If you have ever attempted to change your name you know it is way more annoying to change your name than accept someone else’s change of name. The amount of admin it takes to make that update in your social circle even before you try and make it legal is a test of social fortitude and willpower.

Remember when someone is changing their name they are very aware of the imposition of the mental load they are placing on you. Grace goes a long way.

Technically depending on where you are staying on property after you have been asked to leave counts as different types of crime. In America it’s a tresspass misdemeanor with fines usually a couple of hundred dollars so it’s not uncommon for folks to just pay the fee to be a nuisance. In Canada it’s called “Assault by Tresspass” and is considered for criminal purposes a form of assault and the fines are about 10 grand.

Generally speaking if you want cops to enforce a law with enthusiasm you have to make it worth the systems while.

Not quite. The Conservative party mostly put their money on a bunch of culture war stuff and were aiming to defang a bunch of regulatory bodies. Carney is basically an Old School conservative who is trying to appeal to the conservative votership who ditched the actual Conservative party by pulling a bunch of moves that flatter areas that are dependant on oil so he can compete with what are essentially American psy-ops to goad Canadian resource heavy provinces into making policy which favours private American business.

He’s trying to be a unifying force since most of the country was going to vote blue and the political situation with the states requires a lot of solidarity. He is basically a fiscal conservative Monarchist wet dream while keeping quiet on not rolling back Progressive social agendas of yesteryear. So… Lesser of two evils mostly.

It’s not just family and upbringing it’s kind of enforced by basically everyone a little bit. House is a mess - oh (fem partner) must be struggling poor dear. The state of the house just sits in a corner of their mind all day everyday like a weight dragging them down like the telltale heart.

Once you see the effect of it you can’t really unsee it.

No kidding. The enforcement is often kind of brutal too. As a couple the house not being clean creates a pervasive sense of judgement that falls on the feminine half of a couple. It doesn’t matter if they are a killer breadwinner with an amazing career and winning at life the messaging and conditioning from childhood and enforced by older friends and relatives is still that they are at their core a failure if their house doesn’t meet regulation. That judgement is not extended to the masculine partner because he’s kind of expected to be a hapless subordinate who maybe helps but is not responsible for it. That old “sorry about the state of the place” is practically just begging for social leniency from deeply ingrained shame.

If your fem partner is neurotic about cleanliness that’s basically why. They are made to feel horrible about themselves when company comes calling.

I did not call Americans morons nor was my intention to tell you what to do to solve the problem. I simply told you why there isn’t more help coming from the outside. It’s not a matter of people deliberately sitting on their hands.

Unless American leadership breaks the International rules enough to get the sign on of multiple countries to work in concert against America in a world war you are on your own because of rules designed to allow countries to self govern. Other countries cannot alter another country’s government for good or for ill. This is not an indictment of the voting habits or a rebuke of the process of citizen power the American public.

Whether you or any other country solve your problem democratically or through violent collapse the world is handcuffed. There are civil wars going on right now in other countries and the rules are the same for them as they are for you. The world will recognize whatever government is effectively in power once the dust settles but outsiders cannot lawfully tip the scale and go kingmaking unless one side of the conflict violates the rules of war. War itself is not internationally illegal. The US falling into a full on civil war is kosher from an international law standpoint.

The USA has a historic tendency to ignore that international legality and go kingmaking themselves utilizing the resource of spies and subterfuge ONLY because they are singularly powerful enough on the world stage to get away with it. America essentially declared itself a world police force and the sheer infrastructure they have worldwide means that no individual country can compete. Look for yourself how many bases America has on foreign soil compared to every other country. How many armaments and millitary force and how, their ethics policies of their intelligence agencies differ. America is singularly unique. It may be why you believe the rest of the world will help you “fix” things but that’s not in the interests of the rest of the world.

Foriegn leaders are “standing up to America” but they are doing so by cutting themselves free of American coercion for the security and benefit of their own citizens. By framing America out of the picture and moving reliance to other countries and letting America starve itself once the supply chain contracts and treaties expire they will decrease American influence on world policy. It doesn’t benifit those countries to try and swoop in and shore up a crumbling empire which has held guns to their heads for generations. International help currently isn’t coming for American citizens. Unless your country fixes it’s problems itself fairly soon the “standing up to America” that is happening will level your economy and diplomatic power as other governments profit from the diminishing of American hard power that will continue for decades.

Believing that someone is or should be coming to your rescue may not be in your best interest. Not when so many stand to gain long term from your division.

The word in trans communities for this is “ew-phoria”. Calling it a fetish is also kind of… Not great. Fetishes are tied into sexual gratification and gender euphoria /dysphoria is an independent mechanism that ties more closely with identity. It doesn’t make trans people horny and the idea that that’s what is what is happening is used often to trivialize trans experiences.

Think of the typical nature of being cis as (mostly) ascribing no value to sexually dimorphic physical features. Like you can have feelings about whether those things are attractive and the validation you receive for meeting a social standard but that’s an external reinforcement system working its way inward.

Being trans is the opposite. Every sexual characteristic is not value neutral. Perceiving sex characteristics in relation to yourself either makes you feel amazing like someone has shot dopamine directly into your soul or bad like you are not actually a human. All forms of perception of these characteristics causes this effect and it is automatic and instant. Logically even if you believe these things should be valueless, obtainable by all genders if you have this feedback system you don’t get to decide on how or what these things make you feel or in what proportion. The source of the feedback is entirely internal which is why it is often is at complete odds with external systems of validation and if you tried to logically explain it or lessen these feelings with logic you often just can’t. The heart doesn’t only want what the heart wants the heart has a shock collar on you.

In the case of facial hair particularly because it’s not something you have to experience with your eyes to know it’s there touch is fundamentally important. Remember dysphoria is more than being strictly about being perceived by others it is about being perceived by yourself. Other people looking at you and using your pronouns is just another way of perception of yourself. Like other people performing the job of being a mirror. Experiencing your own body however is in things like how you move, what bits of your body bump into things, your height, your weight distribution. Imagine if everytime you touch your face the slight scratch of the existence of thicker hair caused your neurological system to fire depression meds directly into your system. That’s what’s happening. Touch perception.

Sometimes this internal reward systems finds things about a social portion of experience that people that sucks really bad but because it equates to other people reacting to your body’s sexually dimorphic characteristics when it happens to them it hits the same feel good button of other positive external recognition by a third party of having those sex characteristics.

So even while you experience the massive illogical dopamine hit from the internal reward system you can recognize logically at the same time that the phenomenon causing the reaction is a societal problem that is bad and should not exist.

Hence Ew-phoria.

Because that would require either a terrorist action or a bunch of Internationally illegal tampering with American Democracy or declaring war against the World power with the the largest standing army and deepest pockets for arsonal. The rest of the world is effectively held hostage while Americans solve their own problems.

It’s the reason why a lot of bad people in power stay in power. There can be tariffs and sanctions and all manner or soft power deals but the rules are rules. Sovereignty and a right to run your country mostly the way you want is protected as a right and and the US used its positioning as the least devastated megapower/millitary supremacy post WWII to basically bend the world over and get a lot of acceptions to a lot of rules.

Okay. Can we take a minute to just acknowledge that this comment has a little neurotypical ableism and regional bias? Some people literally need more context than others do to understand the tone of a text. Just because you do not need that assistance with context clues in play doesn’t mean everyone also doesn’t need that.

Kindness and extending a little help costs us so little.

Some folks of the unaltered female phenotype can pee standing by angling and sort of tactically spreading everything apart with their fingers but it takes practice. Generally they can’t aim well enough to do it pants on. Testosterone will cause a lengthening of the clitoris in some trans guys making it easier but it’s not universal that pre op trans guys put in the work for this skill and one of the main advantages of Phalloplasy is gaining the function to easily piss in a stall.

Honestly, from most of my experience in dealing with fox news poisoned people who are not total wastes irl : pedophillia is an actual hard line. Most of them have this fantasy of if they found a child predator that they would beat their face in. It is the act inexcusable.

They also are quite fond of the language of conspiracy theories and just the implication has gotten some of them to start thinking.

Will actual hard proof and just hearsay of not just Trump but a number of his people hit some of them like a truck? Yes. Will it sway every Republican? No. But considering how much of their power is based off the Evengelical idea that they are morally on high I would expect a shockwave. His support is already diminishing but add in the firey rage of having a known pedo in that holy of holy offices valued so intensely by the American-supremacists of the crowd and some frozen gears will start moving and every little bit helps.

A lot of folk are going to start going on about how one refers to sexual phenotype and one is about social gender but that isn’t coming from the trans camp. I will help simplify it from a trans lens.

Male and Man are basically interchangeable from a trans perspective because people use them basically the same way - as a social Category. Calling a trans woman “male” is doing the exact same job as calling her a “man”. These are not strictly scientific terms.

Male and Female are what are on legal documentation like licences or medical documents and you can get those changed and it’s important to have that flexibility because a trans man rocking a full beard and having an F sex marker on his passport can get him routinely flagged by police or security with the concern his documentation is fake or erroneous and potentially cause him to be treated like a criminal and his documents tested because he doesn’t look female.

Where the difference culturally matters is people sometimes do not like male or female in usage because it sounds depersonalizing. Like you are putting out an All Points Bulletin or talking about a prisoner or animal population or using medical sounding language to refer to them.

Marriage makes locktight a lot of “privileges” that matter. Your “roommate” of several years can be denied a place at your bedside when you or the child you are raising together are dying. In regards to kids a lot of joint non-married/divorced mixed sex custody is held on the name placed on birth certificates… but same sex couples will have only one name on that certificate. Marriage is super important in a queer context for making sure you are able to participate in your childrens lives.

In the same way a lack of formal marriage can make your next of kin parents who do not “agree with your lifestyle” make critical health decisions on your behalf. They can stick your partner in hellish limbo spaces with banks if you die and you didn’t make a will leaving you without support of pre existing programs or survivor benefits. A bunch of legal doors can close meaning you are more easily separated from your nearest and dearest when traveling, emigrating, interfacing with the criminal justice and court system. Queer marriage is a legal sheild that protects the pair of you in many ways more than straight couples because it stops a lot of institutional bias that dismisses your relationship as potentially not relevant to the authorities who gatekeep access.

Look beyond the meme my friend. When you exclusively start talking about the science of the matter or taking it to mean that the responsibility should be exclusively shifted to men you are ignoring a generation ls deep frustration pregnancy capable people have been experiencing on this subject. You end up implying through negative space that this is a responsibility that should stay in the camp of women- and women have been more under attack for their reproductive choices.

Women’s frustration with the attitudes of men wanting to control their bodies is valid. What this person is doing is returning a little of that. What other women in these comments are seeing is men react like you are here and that sends an unconscious message that the underlying problem is not one that is going to be addressed because unless the problems they are routinely subjected to specifically targets men, men won’t care.

Just because someone gives you a certain energy doesn’t mean you should add to it or return it. Intended or not you start making yourself look like an enemy. Sometimes you have to see beyond the conversation being had and realize to what use your commentary is being put. You are falling into the hands of the poster by being made to look like the worst sort of man.

Okay… so? We’re supposed to feed into this premise by making seem like how women’s birth control is more nessisary and softly validate the idea that men don’t care and can’t be bothered? There’s not an unfair stereotype out there that there’s a lot of men being very callous about not wanting to take any measure to protect their partner if it inconveniences them too much while female hormonal birth control is known to have a bunch of horrible side effects that their relationships just expect them to take on so both partners can have fun.

Under those conditions it does not to me feel unreasonable that women get embittered by having to behave like all the unfair sacrifice for making sex safe enough to participate in is falling on female shoulders at present. Feelings don’t care about facts and strictly debating the scientific difficulty of the task is missing the point where the feelings that create this sort of post are coming from.

Barrier protections are great - but have one of the highest perfect use condition failure rates against pregnancy. If you used them under perfect condition correctly every time there’s still a 2% chance of failure every time…

Typical use however like, people hurrying, using bad technique of application or removal, improper sizing, not inspecting them before use or using expired product or other sundry defects of the condoms themselves means condom’s real life failure rate condition is about 18%.

Not to knock the condom but it’s not foolproof. Even paired up with the pill which has a decent track record when under perfect use conditions but one of the highest rates of imperfect use because of missed or improperly timed doses you still are rolling the dice.

Let’s lay some ttrpgs here. Everytime you have sex under that pairing it’s like you are rolling two individual dice. Let’s take the typical use of condoms and the pill. Roll a six sided die to represent the condom and a 10 sided die for the pill. If both die show up with a 1 then you get a pregnancy. Not bad odds until you realize this is repeated every time you have sex.

Adding another die to the equation in the form of a hormonal birth control for the other partner alters the chances to be more airtight. Also sometimes you as the male partner might want assurance because you generally don’t know of your partner is taking their pills right.

Counterpoint to your counterpoint- no form of birth control has a zero percent failure rate under perfect use conditions and not all women respond to all forms of birth control well meaning pregnancy capable people cannot take perfect control of their family planning choices without the extreme surgical intervention of a hysterectomy as even getting medically sterilized in other ways can potentially undo itself. Doubling up from both sides means a much lower chance of failure rate resulting in life changing or difficult consequences and distress on behalf of the partner who faces higher risk outcomes.

Doing your part in a relationship’s reproductive planning is good partner behavior. This shouldn’t be a game where just one person is on the hook and the other is just along for the ride. Male and Female birth control do not exist as a one or the other dichotomy. Stoking division of the sexes over which one is more nessisary is counter to the real point. These are tools couples can use together to be safer.