wizzwizz4

@Potatos_are_not_friends @awesome_person Yeah, that’s right.

The terminology is confusing, so here’s an easy way to remember it: List all men in one column, and all women in another column. If you can draw a relationship diagram using only straight lines between the columns, the relationship is “straight”; otherwise, it is probably gay.

(NB: a relationship being “straight” does not imply that the relationship’s participants are straight.)

At first glance, it might seem weird that we have special terminology for such an arbitrary subset of relationships, especially when it fails to line up with other senses of the word. However, “straight” relationships hold special ritual significance in many cultures, including the dominant cultures of most current and former colonial powers.

Presumably, the young 'un knows, but hasn’t told anyone.

It’s probably mainly operating system.

The trans flag is not encoded directly in Unicode. By convention, it’s implemented by combining a white flag with the transgender planet symbol (Linnaean).

>>> import unicodedata
>>> list(map(unicodedata.name, “🏳‍⚧”))
[‘WAVING WHITE FLAG’, ‘ZERO WIDTH JOINER’, ‘MALE WITH STROKE AND MALE AND FEMALE SIGN’]

(Sometimes it also has a variation selector at the end.)

Some systems will replace this with an image; others fall back on the client-side font renderer.

Many pride flags have obvious encodings (e.g. 🏳‍☿, 🏳‍⚢, 🏳‍⚣, 🏳‍⚤, 🏳‍⚲), but I haven’t found one for :nonbinary_flag: : the obvious symbol (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nonbinary_Gender_Symbol.svg) is not in Unicode.

It’s possible to petition the Unicode consortium to add characters, but it looks like a lot of effort: https://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html (and I’m too shy). They don’t accept direct proposals for flags: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag-emoji.html

@Cethin @Mr_Blott To be fair, there was a big thing in schools about it being “improper English” for a bit. Some n+1th language speakers don’t find it comes naturally, and *in theory* there might be native variants of English where it isn’t present (though I have yet to see one – even anti-singular-they teachers tend to use it).

Linguistic prescription is bad, but that goes both ways. I find the ‘correctness’ argument much less compelling than the ‘common decency’ argument.

I thought Vibia Valentine was breaking the rules with their post here, but apparently there’s no “this is a meme sub for memes” rule here, so she’s not going to make the mods sad or anything.

Edit: ooh, found it. Rule 6. (Oops, spoke too soon.)

Btw, Vibia, do you think you can add a transcription as alt text to your image? (If it lets you edit it in.)

Queering the cis trans binary!

Interesting findings, but intersex is a different thing to transgender (though more than a few people are both).

It’s my firm belief that there’s no such thing as a masculine voice.

I know, I know, but: consider After Ever After by Paint (https://yewtu.be/watch?v=diU70KshcjA), or direct speech in a well-read single-narrator audiobook. There are objective sonic qualities of a voice, but that’s not how human perception works. I can guarantee you’re overthinking it. (Though if you want to mix up your speaking habits, by all means go for it! I recommend learning to do impressions and accents, for awesomeness purposes.)