melmi
I think your take is reductive. Gender isn't about stereotypes. I'm sure that for many trans people, part of their trans discovery was not feeling like a stereotypical member of their sex, but there's more to it than that. You can say that gender relates to a lot of things. Gender is ultimately an internal experience that means different things to different people, and isn't necessarily related to identifying or not identifying with any given stereotype.
Bioessentialism in turn reduces people to genitals, and sort of refuses to address intersex people because something something "outliers don't count". At best it says sure, you can dress up however you want, but it's super important that everyone know What You Really Are so they can put you in a box and appropriately segregate society.
People posting blobfish always makes me sad. Poor things don't actually look like that...
It's like it aliens took humans into space and our corpses got all bloated from the lack of pressure and then the aliens laugh at our corpses and assume that's what humans always look like...
I don't think "identifying with social stereotypes" is really an accurate representation of what being trans is.
Sure, there are some people who transition and identify as stereotypical members of their desired gender, but there are also people who transition and are gender nonconforming after their transition, but still identify as binary trans.
Identifying with social stereotypes also doesn't account for physical dysphoria, which is very real for a lot of trans folks. Some trans folks change little about their presentation when they transition but still want hormones and/or surgery.
I love how the recommendations for avoiding attacks like this include avoiding pirated content but ignores the fact that you have to go to a clearly hijacked site to download this, and then run an installer with the flimsy justification of getting a "special codec." This is not a sophisticated attack or something endemic to piracy, basic common sense would protect you from this. I can't believe people are still falling for this stuff.
I prefer to stick to uncontroversial works made by politically conscious creators, like H.P. Lovecraft!
But no, I get it. I like art made by people who are or weren't great. And that's before considering my participation in the vast system of capitalism which necessarily involves systemic evils far beyond what JKR personally is capable of.
It just hurts to have a person who is loudly transphobic like JKR, who uses all support of her IP as support of her views, and then all the majority of society has to say is "I love HP tho". It hurts especially when society is increasingly hostile towards trans people right now.
There's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And it's not like HL was handmade by JKR herself, there were plenty of people working on it who I'm sure aren't transphobic and whose livelihoods are connected to the franchise as a result, some of whom are probably trans themselves.
The "separate the art from the artist" argument just always rings a little hollow to me. I tend to be put off when people cling to a franchise that is owned by a person who profits off hateful rhetoric and contributing to an unsafe environment for us. It feels like continuing to enjoy her art continues to platform her hate and shows people that being transphobic not only isn't a deal breaker, it's acceptable and profitable.
Anyone can have shares of anything, so that's kind of moot. Even if suddenly Minecraft stopped making money, it would not affect Notch in the least. From what I can tell he might kind of like it, he seems to be kind of bitter about it. Though who knows what's legit and what's a grift at this point.
Art vs artist doesn't apply when the artist is making bank off their art.
A better example would be something like Notch and Minecraft. Notch made Minecraft, Notch sucks, but he sold it and makes no money off it anymore so who cares if he's the worst. JKR is a different story, and every new Harry Potter thing supports JKR.
I kinda of lean towards the idea of "private accounts" being a bad idea as a result, just because it creates a false sense of security. But I'm not in the target demographic so idk
The issue is that if you don't default to federation, it becomes essentially impossible for new instances to join the fediverse. A potential new instance would have to go around to every single existing instance and ask to be allowlisted, which is onerous for both the new instances and for the large server admins who would be getting tons of requests. It would also essentially kill small-scale selfhosting as a result.