The Thing About Standing Ovations Is That They Are Like After Care For Actors: It’s Ok That You Dressed

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html

SO many thoughts about this article, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that extreme parental control over children is so widely accepted even in liberal and leftist circles, and that’s intensely disheartening. A lot of what’s presented as neutral in this article is stuff like ‘parents should be involved in all major life decisions for their children’, which, frankly, is deranged. Parents should not be everything for their children – it’s bad for both parties. Most parents are not perfect – which is fine! you cannot expect them to be – but a child with even the most perfect parent might not want to share everything about their private life with their parent. Oftentimes, you want to share things with someone less close to you because then, if you change your mind or realize you made a mistake, there’s basically no consequences. Also, god, is this really that hard to understand? Children are their own people. A lot of people in the comments are saying things like ‘well of course parents have the right to know information about their children, but in the case of gender identity, it’s a matter of safety’. Really? Do – or rather should – they have the right? Is safety where we want to draw the line? If your boss was revealing details about your behavior at work to your siblings or parents or spouse without your consent, would you be okay with that, even if it didn’t jeapordize your safety? This is not something we should be ceding any ground on. No privacy guarantees, fears of mandated reporting, and lack of clarity on where administrators and teachers drew that line is exactly what prevents many from disclosing things to adults in the school and why you, as a high schooler, were often the primary point of support for a number of your peers at any given time. This isn’t even particularly a secret, like this is a widespread and well-known phenomenon. I really struggle to give people the benefit of the doubt on this at this point, because, frankly, for most, it’s not that they just haven’t considered the potential harms, it’s that those harms are acceptable sacrifices if it means keeping children in a state of extreme societal control.

I love Conan Gray!

what do you mean you think I'm gay and depressed?

Another thing I've noticed working as a children's librarian is like... kids get so Paralyzed By Choice and the adults in their lives never really register why. Like, for example, we have little scavenger hunt sheets in the children's section and when a kid completes it, they get to pick out a cute eraser from our prize basket. We also have a little toy prize chest as part of our "1000 books before Kindergarten" challenge for when kids complete 100 books--and kids will spend minutes carefully picking through everything while their parents are shooting us anxious looks like "sorry they're taking so long! I know this is silly and it's completely ridiculous that my child is taking so long to choose between a bath toy and a cube puzzle because these are cheap and arbitrary objects! Hurry up, Harper! Just pick something! You're embarrassing me!!" But in the kids' perspective, they already have so little control over what objects come into their lives, and in this case, the object represents labor and effort on their end, so of course they feel they must choose very carefully. I've always been an anxious and indecisive person, so it's striking to see how being rushed really doesn't help that and really only makes it harder for kids to figure out what they want.

3 day hiatus over, the really fucking epic pukicho arc begins... now

"irreversible side effects of HRT" all of life is irreversible. i cannot go back a single second in time

irritating that both the percy jackson movies and the tv show take things that annabeth did (showcasing her personality and her dimensionality and whatnot) and giving it to percy or grover

like why write a female character if you’re going to butcher her in the adaptation

like they did the same bull shit to katara in the avatar movie and the live action show

#stopbutcheringfemalecharacters

cried for like an hour today nonstop because i hate my job and all i want is a remote job that pays well so i don’t lose my mind

i raise you: percy tying his camp necklace around annabeth's neck before she goes on the mark of athena quest.

They used to say shitpost. I think I just got fucking demoted. what the fuck