Most people seem to divide the world in a binary way – those who look normal and those who look weird/different.

With time – by which I mean progress – what is acceptable in the normal range is broadening.

Not 100 years ago men were expected to wear suits, a tie, a hat and have short hair.
Now, we have casual attire in offices, men with blue hair, and face tattoos, all accepted by a good portion of society, and (mostly) no longer going to get in the way of employment.
The envelope of self expression keeps widening.

The most common argument about trans people is that they were born one gender and that is fixed. Which is true genetically, but they aren’t disputing that, they simply want to present themselves how they wish.

A trans woman is a man who identifies as a woman, and puts their bodies through extremes to try and perfect the appearance. How that fits into society (yawn, bathrooms), is for us to work out, not them.

Women dye their hair, falsies, high heels, botox, lip filler, makeup… that isn’t their natural self. That is how they present themselves.
Men get ripped at the gym.
People wear ears and call themselves furries.
Beatles and Stones had long hair.
Some people cut their tongue in half.
Tattoos were once just for sailors and now for young folk they are the norm.
Sex Pistols wore torn clothing.
Elon Musk walks around with a chainsaw.
Some massively obese women have “feeders”.
Donald Trump dyes his face orange.

These are all the same type of thing. Some we are used to, some we are not, and all are valid. With time they all become okay to most people, although the elderly will still mutter “never in my day”. Acceptance is a high form of love.

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RFKjr has reinvigorated the vaccine causing autism lie. It is easily dismissed, via numerous studies, retractions of studies he highlights, and the very clear and obvious increase in what qualifies as a diagnosis.

If Kennedy wanted to go purely down the correlation is causation path, even that fails. The uptick in autism diagnosis massively outnumbers any increase in vaccine application. In fact vaccines are probably down since COVID yet autism keeps rising.

Yet, the more I look into to, the more I want to applaud his placing importance on the rise of autism and a search for answers. If the experts can look beyond vaccines, they might actually come up with a cause.

My parents are autistic, my brother is, my niece is, some of my children are, my best friend is, I hang out with a lot autistic people. We are all fine, non-obvious, “functioning” people.
I have never known a non-verbal, rocking in the corner, drooling autistic person, but they make up 25% of those diagnosed which is a significant number of people, and a growing number. We don’t see them because they are not a part of society. Increased or improved diagnosis does not account for their numbers. They have always clearly had something wrong with them.

The mystery is why the numbers are increasing. It isn’t vaccines, or anything else environmental, that we know of. It is massively genetic, and that could be the simple answer  – more people are inheriting it, especially if autistic people match up romantically. Even so, the increase is still too much, so I would suggest (easy to to do when you are the savant type) that nature is selecting autism. That this is a type of evolution. Unfortunately this will not be provable, but perhaps could be offered up by experts as an explanation where no others exist.

In summary – it is easy to dismiss Kennedy, who is a dangerous fear-mongering dickhead, and think that the vaccine argument being wrong is the end of the story. It is not, autism is on the rise, and a lot of people (and their families) are suffering.

The post Autism and Vaccines appeared first on Fuck Binary.

A Republican politician, Senator Tuberville, was consequently interviewed where he said he supported the ruling because we need more children, which of course makes no sense. Trump and other leading Republicans then said they support IVF.

So which is it?

Conservatives have got themselves in a pickle because they are trying to find a binary answer to a complicated question. They have tried saying that life begins at conception, but now that does or doesn’t apply to frozen embryos, like a Schrödinger’s Cat policy. In different states, and according to different politicians, abortion is okay as long as it is early enough – yet that number of weeks varies greatly, meanwhile life begins at conception.

Tuberville actually got it right, if he only he (and other such politicians) had the decency to tell us that this was all about religion, and they want their followers to have as many children as possible, and so the binary solution is to never kill an embryo. Which would be admitting that, just like the Catholic Church forbidding abortion (and contraception), this is just a numbers game and not about the souls of unborn children at all.

Choices in fertility and pregnancy are too complicated for binary laws. The only fair and decent solution is individual choice, not enforcing a religious numbers game onto non-believers and non-adherents.

The post Embryos and Abortions in the US appeared first on Fuck Binary.

• Health – preventative
• Health – in response to ill health
• Taste – don’t like the taste or texture of meat – especially after shunning it for a long time
• Morals – eating animals is wrong
• Ethics – an animal suffering because of you is wrong
• Fashion – yes, absolutely, people do it to be cool
• Religion – for example Jains
• Climate change – less meat could save us all

In each of the above, being in the direction of veganism is better than not. Eating 10% less beef than before is a win. So is 50%.

Few people will cite more than one reason.

Also, according to studies, few people are actually 100% vegan, no matter how much they want to be. Late-night drunken lapses are one of the common reasons.

Also, despite high vigilance, you probably accidentally use or consume something animal-sourced sometimes.

So, it definitely is not a binary choice, and everyone has their own story and levels of compliance. Militant vegans have little understanding or respect for that, and their hardline attitudes do more harm than good.

Most of those reasons have no scientific or logical basis. You are not more likely to get into heaven or be reincarnated. There is little proof that vegetarian diets are better than simply healthy omnivore diets.

Animals suffering is also debatable. Yes, at the time of death, in some contexts, there might be suffering. But how do you measure that? Is 1 second 10x worse than 0.1 of a second? Is all suffering, no matter how minuscule, unacceptable? Doesn’t life itself involve suffering?

Plants, we hear, can feel pain and communicate it. But a vegan can’t dare go there, or else they will starve.

Rarely mentioned is what happens to cows and sheep and goats and chickens if all of humanity goes vegan? There are a hundred kept in some special farm to save them from extinction? That brings up one final angle – is the life of a sheep, who is ultimately killed for food – better than never existing at all? Who decides?

My thought – there is no absolute answer. A good person is someone who considers all the angles and makes a considered decision. A vegan, if they arrived there by choice, is more likely to be a good person, because many meat-eaters simply don’t even question that choice.

Me personally, I am trending towards veganism. I eat less meat than ever before, and substantially less beef and lamb. I’m enjoying roast cauliflower! I buy organic and sow-stall free and cage-free whenever possible. I wear vegan shoes by Cariuma, but I won’t throw out a perfectly good leather belt.

The post Veganism appeared first on Fuck Binary.

Let’s start with gender, seeing as it has taken the word binary hostage. Let’s start with transgenderism.

For most of the educated western world, most worldly and intelligent people don’t give it much thought. If someone needs to transition, good on them. How they look can be a bit out of the ordinary, but we will cope and adapt. Next topic.

In the US, opinions have been split left and right, with both taking extreme views. I am generalizing here, of course, for that makes this easier, in short form.

The right consider transgenderism an abomination, because it is new and different and scary and confusing. And because the Bible probably forbids it.

The left think it is wonderful, the more woke types are happy for it to be discussed and for transformations to even begin at young ages.

Yet transgenderism is a very individual, nuanced, complicated, emotional and weighty topic, and neither the left or right treat it with the respect and concern it deserves.

Here are some points worth considering:

• Teens are highly impressionable and latch onto fads. Some children will transition because it is cool.
• Parents opinions do matter, as with the rest of parenting. Not letting a child have candy even if they identify as immune to sugar, is good parenting
• Knowing at a younger age about transgenderism, that it exists and is an option, could be a life saver for some kids.
• Some children are arbitrarily assigned gender at birth. This is rarely discussed
• In a for-profit health system, advice could be biased.
• In religious communities, advice could be biased.
• It is not a switch. It is years of drugs and surgery and therapy and battling for acceptance and ridicule and discrimination and all the rest.
• It can both save/improve lives and end/destroy them.

It is very much not black and white and how dare anyone, especially those who chose filtered sources of information, how dare they reduce it to binary, single sentence, frigid opinions. 

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