Fun Times At The Intersection

I can never remember if a “trans man” started out as female or male
Follow the advertising rule: any adjective means “not”.
“trans man” = “not man” = biological woman.

Dammit.

. Fixed?

Barkeep, WTP’s next one on me if you please.

Furry, trans, neureodivergent, etc: I suspect that social media have played a significant role in the metastasizing of these maladies: In the past these people were largely isolated among large populations of normal people who acted as a partial corrective, but now with websites devoted to their particular defects, they can reinforce each others’ delusions and so spiral down into ever deeper realms of fantasy and dysfunction.

“There’s nothing wrong with me! Nothing at all! I’m perfect in every way!”
“I don’t need to change! You need to change!”

I suspect that social media have played a significant role in the metastasizing of these maladies.
I love that the Web allows me to “meet” and share stories and tips with people who share my more obscure interests, like slack-key guitar or old Avalon Hill war games. I try to bear in mind that there exist hundreds, nay thousands of these little communities just carrying on in obscurity and quietly adding to the amount of enjoyment in the Universe. It’s easy to forget when we have these freaks doing their little TikTok dances and demanding the rest of the world conform to their neuroses.
We are so very, very overdue for a visit from the copybook headings.

It never occurred to me that it would become an incubator for mental disorders I had never even heard of.
Yes…but see, this is the thing….just because you never heard of them didn’t mean that they weren’t out there. I had a co-worker back in the late 1990’s who, while a very smart…”smart” kid, was gullible as hell and believed in the great Lizard People conspiracy/conspiracies. Illuminati, etc. Now while such things are known and joked about today as kwazy-kwazy conspiracy stuff, back then virtually no one in normal society had ever heard such insanity. Yet I, while not entirely familiar with this specific brand of idiocy, was aware such things from my days in college, reading “underground” stuff, mostly stuff in the dustier corners of the music scene (‘zines before they were even called ‘zines…if anyone still knows of such). So one night out to dinner with some friends I begin to relate what special new crazy I was hearing from my (supposedly potential) protégé. Oh, well…the accusations that I was making this nonsense up myself were flying. It took me months to convince many of my friends that this was a real thing. Even my coworkers who knew the guy and knew I wasn’t making up that part of it had no idea that there were other such crazy BS people out there. It really wasn’t until after 9/11 happened and the related conspiracy stuff that came from that that the last few of my friends actually quasi-apologized to me for believing I made it all up. I bring this up (I think again here) only to emphasize that it is not social media that is causing this crap. Yes, it gave it a broader audience but only because it is much much easier to show actual proof of such lunacy directly to the otherwise sane people of the world (that group itself is not as large as even cynical I once believed). Seriously, if someone only told you about these videos or these people, would you believe they actually exist or would you laugh it all off as the one relating it taking the piss? Blaming social media for this idiocy is about as relevant as blaming violence on guns. It’s not the tool, it’s the individual.

What I strongly suspect is merely that the internet made it much easier for screwy people to find other screwballs, spend all their time talking only to each other in a cycle of positive reinforcement of those delusions.
All the dispersed village idiots discovered one another and a competition ensued.
And don’t forget that they make for a handy group of, shall we say, “less aware” individuals that can be manipulated fairly easily.

There is no god but Them, and They are Their prophet.
Call me Legion, for we are many.