Just as some AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth) men want to look more masculine and will work out at the gym or take testosterone supplements, some AMAB men are femboys and may temporarily take feminizing HRT to look less masculine.

Both are trying to change their bodies to better fit their gender identity, and femboy is clearly a different identity from gym bro, but they are both male gender identities.

The same reason anyone would be: because their current body doesn’t match their gender identity and they want to change that. This person just happened to start inside the same arbitrary social category as their destination.

I’m aware that Purgatory isn’t scriptural, and the community I was raised in believed a lot of stuff that wasn’t found in the Bible. (It’s one of the reasons I left.)

The point I was trying to make there is not “What is Heaven according to scripture?” I was speculating what heaven would need to be for me to consider it a paradise. And the answer I came to is that no place can be a paradise as long as I’m in it. Not because I think I’m a bad person, but because I have so much trauma and other mental baggage that I would be bringing with me. I would be too suspicious of a place with nothing bad in it to be able to enjoy it. I would unintentionally hurt those around me because of the pain I’m in. And those people would hurt me, and each other, because how many people actually manage to reach a state of complete emotional health before they die? No one is ready for paradise.

There would need to be a place and a time for healing the traumas of life before we could enter any kind of heaven. For this I borrowed the name Purgatory, because it seems to me a similar concept. And maybe the person who emerged from such a place would be so different that you couldn’t really say they were me anymore, but I think I’m okay with that. I don’t want to stay the person I am now; I want to become something better.

I guess that doesn’t have much to do with your original point about people not understanding eternity, other than being in agreement that it wouldn’t be a fun thing for humanity as we know it.

As an ex-Christian I find it amusing that you chose to explain via parable. :)

However, I think there are some flaws to your story. You seem to assume that Heaven would be like getting permanently sealed into your own personal holodeck, alone, no contact with anyone but the entity that put you there, the computer loaded with complete records of everything that had existed up to the moment of your death but never updated beyond that. It’s all so very static. Of course you would eventually go mad; what you’re describing is just a more comfortable version of solitary confinement!

It’s also not how Heaven was described to me when I still went to church. Some claimed we would all be sitting on clouds singing praise songs, forever experiencing a state of mindless ecstasy. (Which doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.) Others claimed the Bible says we will be rulers in Heaven, and how can you be a ruler without something to rule over? (That seemed a little better, but I also don’t really want to be some kind of king imposing my will on others.)

The most appealing concept of Heaven I’ve encountered so far is the one portrayed in the Housepets! comic. It’s just another place, but one where everyone has agency and security and has been healed of whatever traumas ailed them in life. They are free to build, create, share, and grow as they like. You can still fuck off and become a hermit if you really want to, but most people choose to hang out in a big city. Some have jobs but there is no money or material needs; they work because they enjoy it or because they believe it’s worth doing. One of the characters even chose to open a free massage parlor because they like helping people relax and wanted more opportunities to do that. And the mortal world still exists, so there are always new people to meet and new stories to read (or write!)

I could maybe spend eternity in a place like that. And if I had to change to make eternal existence possible, well, I’m not the same person I was five years ago and I have no desire to still be the same person five years in the future. I think if Heaven did exist, then Purgatory must also. Not as a place of punishment, but of healing. This world will crush your soul, and even the purest of saints (perhaps especially the purest of saints) carries too much pain and trauma with them for any place they exist to be a paradise. I think you’re right that in order to be okay with eternity we would need to be changed into something unlike our current selves.

Sorry this got so long and rambley. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what kind of hypothetical afterlife could possibly make this all worth it.

They’re not talking about natural monopolies. A natural monopoly is when there’s some barrier to entry that prevents competitors from entering the market, like a need for prohibitively expensive infrastructure.

What OP is talking about are situations like Walmart opening a store in a new location, operating it at or near a loss to drive the local competition out of business, and then jacking up prices once no competitors remain. The government isn’t forcing them to do that.

I spent 30 years thinking I was cishet (and suffering for it). When I finally realized that I’m trans, it was like a dam bursting; suddenly everything about my identity was in question. I’ve gone from “Maybe I’m a girl” to “I’m a trans demi ND plural therian” in three years and I don’t think I’m done discovering things about myself yet.

Okay, this one I’m sending to my DM.

I was going to send this to my DM, but then I remembered that he would absolutely do it.

No mention of trans people, which is odd given that Florida is a Do Not Travel state for its government’s efforts to criminalize being transgender.

This was before they added F2P, but ten minutes a day of checking my two hisec market alts (who didn’t have a lot of skills because it meant pausing my main’s training) was making me just enough to pay for my account and there was room to expand further. Granted, it did take me several months of trading to build up enough funds to support this operation, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to do this on day 1.

It’s because the furry fandom, when it was founded back in the late 70’s by a gay polycule of sci-fi fans, was one of the only communities in existence that accepted openly gay and trans people. (And the only non-fetish community.) For many queer people, the furry fandom is the first place they ever feel welcome.

I support UBI. I just have issues with the claim that jobs in a capitalist system exist for a purpose other than generating profit for owners. I also resent the implication that some workers don’t deserve a living wage. Without UBI, all jobs should pay at least enough to cover living expenses. If a full-time job (or job that expects full-time availability) doesn’t pay enough to live on then it’s not a job that needs doing.

None of this changes the fact that a job’s purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn’t care how many teenagers need to learn that “working retail sucks”. That’s not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.

If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That’s something that can be discussed. But don’t lie to us that Walmart is this program.

“[job type] is intended for teenagers” is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald’s open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?

My mental health improved considerably after I was fired from my basic retail job and was no longer spending 8 hours a day having panic attacks and dissociating. It’s not good, but it’s a lot better than it was and I can’t go back to living like that. Even a year later I still sometimes wake up in a panic from nightmares about working in that place.

I want to work and be productive, but every job I could reasonably qualify for has a sanity cost and I’m all tapped out.

I’ve never heard it put that way before, but it’s an interesting observation. A lot of animals are culturally associated with personality traits (e.g. clever foxes, loyal dogs, proud lions) and furries usually choose a species they relate to, so it creates a system where people tend to self-sort into various tribes based on values and personality type. Look at any decently popular species and you’ll likely find that most of the people repping it share a common set of traits.

Yes, I meant no negative or unintended consequences.

Thank you. It doesn’t feel like I’ve done much journeying, as I was essentially trapped in emotional stasis for most of my life and circumstances have so far prevented me from doing anything with my newfound knowledge, but at least I know which way is forward now.

If you feel like a man, like being a man, and enjoy having man parts, you’re probably a man. Your interests are not your gender, and dancing isn’t exclusive to women. Even ballet has male dancers.

Still, a little bit of exploration never hurt anybody. If you are trans, if living as another gender would make you much happier, wouldn’t you want to know sooner rather than later? And if you aren’t trans, you might still learn a thing or two about yourself that you never would have discovered otherwise. Most people go their whole lives without ever questioning their gender or closely examining what it means to them, and I think they’re missing out. There is power in truly knowing yourself.

Do some thinking. Ask more questions. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. What do you like about being a man? Can you imagine not being one? How does that image make you feel? If you could instantly become anything, with no rules or consequences, what would you pick? Don’t shut anything down; there are no wrong answers. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.

It may help you to stop thinking in the binary terms that society imposes on us. Gender isn’t just a question of Male or Female; there are many different kinds of men and many different kinds of women. There is a large area in between where the two overlap and the lines get fuzzy, and even places that aren’t on the same spectrum at all. I myself am a demigirl. My gender identity is mostly female, but also a little bit male and a little bit something else. You don’t need to feel obligated to be what anyone else is.

As for how I found out, I’ve already posted that elsewhere in this thread. It looks like you’ve gotten a lot of answers from others as well. I wish you good luck in wherever this journey takes you.

This was my experience. I was raised in a very conservative, very religious community where I was never exposed to the concept of transness. I was fully convinced that I was a boy and could never be anything but a boy. And yet, I could tell I was different from the other boys.

As I got older, that feeling turned into an ever-present sensation of wrongness. My body felt tainted, somehow. Unclean. Contaminated. It possessed an inherent grossness that could never be washed away. I lived with that feeling every day for 25 years. No medication, no counseling, no hard work ever did anything to alleviate it or the severe depression that was my typical mental state. Then a bunch of things happened all at once, and I started questioning my gender. A few days later I shaved off my beard and rediscovered what joy feels like. That’s when I knew.

I was never a boy.

Old media has become such a minefield because there’s just so much awful stuff that went over my head at the time. I’m scared to recommend anything that I haven’t rewatched/reread in the past few years.

It wasn’t all bad, though. One of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5, a 90’s sci-fi that I watched as it aired but hadn’t seen again until late last year. All I really remembered were the cool space battles and devious political maneuvering, but it turned out to also be an incredibly progressive show. One of the main characters is first introduced while wearing robes that appear to have been partially made from a trans pride flag!