• 12 Posts
  • 352 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 2nd, 2024

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  • yeah, I am opting for penile inversion as well, mostly because that’s what my surgeon is good at, and because it is more of a “tried and true” method with less risk and faster recovery than the other methods.

    Though I also might have less motivation than some trans women to have a self-lubricating vagina, namely I’m not young and potentially in situations where I would want to be able to have penetrative sex on demand (not wanting to plan and bring lube, etc.).

    My life is much more boring. :-)



  • I didn’t use a particular recipe, if you search around there are plenty of recipes, e.g.

    Basically a patty melt is just a hamburger with Swiss cheese and caramelized onions on rye bread with mayo.

    I used Beyond Beef, Violife slices, vegenaise, and melt butter, and I made a loaf of white bread instead of rye bread (just didn’t have time to source rye flour, etc.).

    For the hamburger adding onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, and a little vegan Worcestershire sauce works well.

    If you want to spruce up the sauce a little instead of just mayo, you can add a little ketchup, dijon mustard, a little garlic powder and cayenne pepper.

    Personally I would have enjoyed this more with some grilled broccoli rabe or pickled peppers, but that would have gone even further from being a patty melt.







  • I don’t really know about fashion, but I do find it helpful to learn about your body shape and focus on the form and what is flattering or not on your body. For example, a lot of trans women have inverted triangle or “strawberry” shape because of their broad shoulders. Others have more of an “apple” or square shape if their waist is large enough (usually due to male pattern fat distribution).

    Reshaping the body by losing and re-gaining weight is a good long-term project, but in the short term it’s good to know how clothes are going to look on you.




  • Well, those distances use a nearby highway, and there are no bike lanes anywhere (let alone sidewalks). As mentioned earlier, being suicidal means I did use a bicycle anyway, and after a couple years I had a brain injury, was hit by cars twice and ended up with permanent injuries. So… yeah, I don’t recommend cycling (if you feel like being alive and able-bodied, anyway).

    What is also not mentioned is that the nearest supermarket is a shitty Walmart, the nearest park is very small and not really worth going to, and the bus is not a practical form of public transit here.

    I have to drive 20 - 30 minutes to actually get to stores, parks, or other places I would actually go to. I think that’s pretty good relative to most people, I live in a centralized location and most places are equidistant. I used to live in a nearby more rural town and I had to drive 45 - 60 minutes to get most places, and that was much worse.


  • I live in a suburb in the U.S.

    • To the nearest convenience store: 322m
    • To the nearest chain supermarket: 2.4km
    • To the bus stop: 2.6km
    • To the nearest park: 5.5km
    • To the nearest big supermarket: 6.1km
    • To the nearest library: 7.7km
    • To the nearest train station: N/A

    Notes:

    • The “convenience store” in my example is a gas station, technically you can buy lottery tickets, candy, cigarettes, beer, and a few things like that - but very limited inventory, it’s mostly for people buying gas. It’s also very unusual to have a gas station like this located basically in a suburban area, most places you would have to go much further to find one.
    • no sidewalks or safe passage, you walk on a dangerous road with ditches on either side to get to the convenience store.
    • the only public transit is a bus, it is used only by poor people, and it doesn’t cover the west half of the city (for example I was unable to use public transit to go to school)

    I have run to the park before despite being far away, but I think most people would (rightfully) think I was suicidal for doing so. A lot of the way to the park requires walking on dangerous streets where people drive fast around blind curves and where there is little to no shoulders to squeeze by if there are cars, most of the way has no sidewalks, and I have to cross busy roads where drivers are going 80+kmh.

    Owning a car here is considered a part of being an adult, people without a car are seen as childish or immature, and usually suspected of being drunks who have lost their license due to DUIs or felons who cannot have a driving license and aren’t allowed to leave the state. It is assumed everyone drives everywhere, alternatives are unthinkable to most people here.



  • The reason cats can’t be vegan is that they cannot produce an amino acid called taurine, which is something dogs and humans can produce (but which we also get sometimes from dietary sources).

    Most dietary sources of taurine are meat. This is why dogs and humans “can be vegan” but cats “can’t”. However, vegan taurine is made and can be bought as a supplement, both for humans (if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet), but also in properly made vegan cat food.

    It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild (where the only source of taurine is meat) and you can’t just start to feed them a vegan diet without taurine and expect the cat to be healthy and survive.

    In fact, cats fed a proper vegan diet tend to have better health:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499249/

    I think the question is really what you are feeding your “vegan” cat: if you have managed to find (or make) a properly fortified vegan cat food it is theoretically possible to feed your cat a vegan diet.

    This all feels a bit like the “controversy” around feeding young children and babies a vegan diet: done poorly it can be catastrophic (pun not intended), but it’s entirely possible to have a healthy vegan diet when enough effort is put into ensuring nutritional needs are actually satisfied.

    That said, I also know of two other vegan responses:

    1. for some vegans, having pets is not vegan to begin with, so a “vegan cat” is a contradiction in terms even if you fed them a vegan diet, you still wouldn’t be an ethical vegan by owning a cat. This is admittedly a less commonly held view which centers ethical veganism on the rights of animals to have autonomy, which if plausible in some ways seems at least impractical in the case of domesticated animals. There are questions of the harm that might be caused by choosing to treat cats not as pets but as autonomy-rights-bearing “wild” animals, but those ethical vegans might rightly point out this doesn’t undo the cat’s rights and the practical questions should be handled separately.
    2. most vegans I know IRL just feed cats a non-vegan diet, acknowledging it is safer and more reasonable for their cat than trying to figure out a way to feed them a vegan diet. Good vegan cat food isn’t that common or easy to find as far as I know, and I assume it would be outrageously expensive.