Osias Jota

The @Dystopianya account is tweeting an entire cliched YA dystopian novel in bite-sized chunks. Read the rest

Anyone but Beyoncé: *Wins a Grammy*
Kanye: *Kill Bill sirens*

Oscar voter states that "I Can't Breathe" t-shirts worn by Selma cast were offensive:

bankuei:

Recently a random troll online asked me “what era do you think you’re living in?” when I posted about white violence and racism.

The fact that of all the evidence, of all the violent murders, that the one with the clearest, most undeniable evidence (oh but all of them are already past the point of reasonable burdens of proof, as well), of a man being choked to death, for supposedly selling cigarettes illegally, that people are anry and upset at what is clearly an extrajudicial murder, is “offensive” - on the cast of a movie that is all about white violence and extra judicial murders?

It is not just the murderers, it is the multitudes who will excuse and protect them - that is the danger. MLK wrote about the White Moderate who will stand by and protect the murderers, to tell everyone “wait, just a bit longer” while they are murdered in the streets.

That is the decade I live in, and the the decade we all live in, still.

Author: Osias Jota Source: Twitter Web Client

RT @apyus: Eu mato Eu mato Quem roubou meu pau de selfie Pra fazer auto-retrato #MarchinhasAtualizadas

Back in early 1990s, when I was still an un-defrocked technology guy, the corporation I worked for was aggressively courted by an East Coast technology company.  Among the many earthly delights they showed us during the pitching of the woo, was, at the time, a genuinely startling revelation about what kind of personal information was available on public and subscription databases, and how detailed and personal a profile of almost anyone could be built up by cross-referencing the right files (I remember our president was visibly discomfitted at the sight of how much detail on her personal life could be deduced from the available data pool and, upon reflection, I am not entirely sure that what we witnessed wasn't both of a dazzling display of cutting edge technology and a genteel threat leveled at our carefully-closeted boss because who knows what else we know about you?)

Since then, the situation has gotten ever so much worse at an exponential rate by search algorithms which have reached near-sentient sophistication and hundreds of millions of social media users' who have been suckered into (and have pressured their peers into) backing their personal lives up to the digital trough and dumping terabytes of shockingly personal stuff into the web.

So you can imagine what a hearty and refreshing laugh at Young Conor Friedersdorf's call for a New Birth of Internet Freedom, in which corporations neither bow to outside pressure nor use the tools with which the times have provided them to pry into your private life and use that knowledge to your detriment:

...

Meanwhile, I propose a new social norm. My strong suspicion is that we'd all be better off if Americans developed a broad aversion to people being fired for public missteps that have nothing to do with their jobs. That norm would do more good than bad even if you think some people deserve to be fired. Sure, I'd advise against taking flip photographs at a military cemetery. But whatever one thinks of that error in judgment, there's no reason it should cause a woman to lose her job helping developmentally disabled adults.

An insensitive Halloween costume may justify a dirty look or scolding or even shaming. It should not deprive someone of their livelihood! It's strange when you think about it, this notion of getting sacked as a general purpose punishment that an angry faction of the public demands of an at-first-reluctant employer. The target, the mob demands, should have to find a new job, or go on welfare, or move back in with their mom, or perhaps starve. It's not even clear what's meant to happen. Let's rethink this.

People should usually feel ashamed of themselves for thinking, "I should get that stranger fired." Companies should be left alone when one of their employees does something offensive while "off-duty." Since some Internet trolls will break that rule, here's another: Companies should expect to get more criticism for caving to the demands of trolls than for letting a briefly unpopular employee keep performing his or her duties, even amid an episode of obsessive public shaming. After all, these things always blow over, the attention span of the Internet being short, while losing one's job is, for many, a setback with consequences that last years. And have any of these firings achieved any social good? I defy anyone to produce hard evidence to that effect.

Here's what corporations should say in the future: "Sorry, we have a general policy against firing people based on social media campaigns. We're against digital mobs."

But note the one exception built into what I propose. Sometimes people do stupid things in the public eye that relate directly to their jobs. If, say, a DEA agent writes a Facebook post bragging about how many innocent black people he's going to lock up for drug trafficking next month, then it's obviously legitimate to demand his immediate termination. But generally speaking, Americans ought to be averse to the notion of companies policing the speech and thoughts of employees when they're not on the job. Instead, many are zealously demanding that companies police their workers more, as if failing to fire someone condones their bad behavior outside work. Few general standards work out best in every last circumstance. But the one I suggest would be better than what we've got.

Author: Osias Jota Source: Mobile Web (M2)

RT @ComoEuRealmente: - Vamo ver filme de samurai? - Vamo. http://t.co/EM7rBiWyBT

“

Look, I get it, let’s all share cultures and whatever, blah blah etc. The phenomenon of cultural appropriation, however, is not that simple.

Imagine that you have been born into a culture whose people have historically been oppressed and discouraged from expressing themselves and practicing their traditions. Example: I’m Indian; When my parents were kids in India, they started learning English from primary school onwards, which is great, but they were not allowed to speak their own language at school (in our case, Bangla). They were not allowed to wear clothes from their own culture, but had to dress up in ridiculous starched up British school kid uniforms; they didn’t learn any of their own history in school but had to learn about the ‘accomplishments’ of the British Empire; they were forced to study the Bible but received no education on the religions native to their own country. They were made fun of by the white and Anglo-Indian kids if they brought Bengali food for lunch. Basically, they were forced to conform to British standards and were discouraged from expressing and celebrating their own culture and heritage. They were taught that Indians were inferior and primitive compared to the Brits.

Now, imagine that after growing up like this, pieces of the culture you were once shamed for started showing up among those who had once oppressed you (and in many ways still do). Imagine that all those things you held dear while the outside world tried to make you believe they were stupid, embarrassing, unsophisticated—imagine that all of a sudden these things were taken up by your tormentors (read: white people). Think of my parents, who left everything in India and came to the US when they were just 22; think of my parents packing away all their old clothes and buying these ugly American clothes with the small amount of money they had. Imagine them, so far from home, and still packing white bread sandwiches to bring to work. Imagine them giving up everything they loved, everything that was life to them, and having to wear and eat and read bland American culture. Imagine my poor mom seeing Madonna wear a bindi, but still knowing she can’t wear one at work because she’s disrespected enough there anyway.

Imagine shutting away your own vibrant culture and then seeing it paraded about by those that taught you to let go of it in the first place.

But don’t be fooled into thinking your culture is finally being celebrated. It’s not. It’s been taken out of any context and stripped of any real meaning. The trappings of your culture and your people and your rich history are now just a trend. Imagine that it’s now “cool” for those who oppressed you (white people) to take part in parts of your culture you were once condemned for. That’s a slap in the fucking face. And you will still be condemned for your culture. It’s not cool if you do it. To them, your culture is just something to be tried on and worn for a day, without the burden of the heavy history behind it. And it’s not cool to wear it every day, so we still have to conform to white society. Imagine how much that hurts. Imagine seeing parts of the heritage you love and respect being thrown around flippantly, and imagine still not being able to express your own culture. That’s cultural appropriation and it fucking hurts.

”

- didactic procrastination  (via quirkytaiwan)

Gracias al telescopio Green Bank se ha descubierto que una enorme nube de hidrógeno se dirige a toda velocidad hacia la Vía Láctea, lo que provocará una colisión inevitable con nuestra galaxia desembocando en un impresionante estallido de estrellas.

Según informa Science News, citando los últimos datos recogidos por el telescopio, el objeto parece ser un cometa que recibe el nombre Nube de Smitch (Smith Cloud) y avanza a una impresionante velocidad de 828.000 kilómetros por hora. La nube contiene tanto hidrógeno que podría formar un millón de estrellas iguales que el sol.

Por suerte, se encuentra a 40.000 años luz y no será hasta dentro de 30 millones de años cuando llegue a la Vía Láctea generando un tremendo estallido de formación de estrellas, muchas de ellas tendrán una gran cantidad de masa que dejarán de existir rápidamente explotando como supernovas.

Los resultados de la observación de este objeto refuerzan la idea de que el espacio entre las galaxias no es vacío.

vía: RT

La entrada Una gigantesca nube de hidrógeno se dirige hacia nuestra galaxia aparece primero en El Chapuzas Informático.

Author: Osias Jota Source: Facebook

como a vida das pessoas pode ser arruinada da noite pro dia na internet buff.ly/1v03021 fb.me/75fyFPpnE

Author: Osias Jota Source: Facebook

Marvel Lego no netflix: nota 10, tem até aparição de Stan Lee!

Author: Osias Jota Source: Mobile Web (M2)

RT @cukeking: @petertoddbtc @HoboJerk one problem tech is unable to solve is convincing people that excel is not a database.

Cuando estudiaba BUP, allá por los principios de los noventa, el Aula de Cine de la Universidad de La Laguna organizó unas jornadas sobre ciencia ficción. Allí fui con un amigo a escuchar a Miquel Barceló. Menudo chasco. Nosotros, que éramos unos quinceañeros fans de Star Wars y Akira, encontramos a cuatro gatos hablando de cosas sesudas e indescifrables. De aquellas charlas me quedé con una idea que me resultó chocante. La ciencia ficción refleja el espíritu de una época. En aquellas jornadas se habló de cómo las películas de alienígenas invasores de cuerpos reflejaban el Zetigeist de la Guerra Fría y el miedo a la infiltración comunista. La ciencia ficción para mí era el uso de la imaginación para hablar de otros mundos. Y resulta que era una metáfora de nuestro tiempo. Fue muy desmitificador.

Hace un par de años, de paso por la biblioteca de Humanidades de la Universidad de La Laguna, eché un vistazo a la mesa de libros expurgados. Y me encontré Entre Ufólogos, Creyentes y Contactados: Una historia social de los OVNIS en España del antropólogo social Ignacio Cabria García. El libro ni siquiera tenía signatura. Estaba allí abandonando sin haber formado parte de los fondos de la biblioteca. Un síntoma, creo, de la absoluta pérdida de interés general por el tema. Pero a eso llegaremos al final.

Cabria cuenta cómo el fenómeno de los “platillos volantes” alcanzó popularidad a partir del avistamiento hecho en 1947 por Kenneth Arnold volando cerca del monte Rainier en el estado de Washington. Y cómo el tema de los invasores del espacio captó pronto la atención de Hollywood, con películas como “El enigma… de otro mundo” (1951), “Invasores de Marte” (1953) y “La guerra de los mundos” (1953). El tema reflejó primero el interés por la exploración del espacio. 10 años después del avistamiento de Arnold, la Unión Soviética lanzaba la sonda Sputnik 1. Una de las variantes del género gira en torno a la infiltración de los extraterrestres en Estados Unidos implantando un chip en los humanos para controlarlos a distancia o, como en el caso de “La invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos” (1956), sustituyendo a las personas por réplicas sin sentimientos. La metáfora de la infiltración comunista era evidente, con el eco del macarthismo de fondo y las películas de invasiones de marcianos hablando de extraterrestre colectivistas con mentalidad de colmena.

Tiempo después, en el contexto de la contracultura y la new age, el fenómeno de los OVNIs fue protagonizado por los “contactados”, personas que afirmaban haber tenido encuentros con los tripulantes de naves alienígenas. El acontecimiento había servido para recibir instrucciones de los seres de otro planeta para que transmitieran  un mensaje a la Humanidad a favor de la paz y una advertencia ante la inminente crisis ecológica. El fenómeno se convertía de nuevo en un reflejo de las inquietudes sociales del momento. Recordemos el informe Los límites del crecimiento de 1972. Y es que Carbria, aunque sólo lo revele al final del libro, trata de demostrar que los OVNIs no son un fenómeno surgido de la nada sino que fue el producto de una construcción social. Un detalle curioso que señala Cabria es cómo la descripción de las naves alienígenas fue cambiando a lo largo de los años. Si durante los primeros años de la carrera espacial las descripciones correspondían con el arquetipo del “platillo volante” y los ufólogos dedicaban largo tiempo a especular sobre las tecnologías de propulsión alienígenas, con el paso del tiempo los diseños descritos se iban estilizando hasta convertirse en “nubes” o “energía” cuando el fenómeno derivó hacia la espiritualidad new age. No por casualidad los relatos de los testigos fueron cambiando década tras década, ajustándose siempre al canon del momento.

El libro es de 1993 y señala el declive del fenómeno a finales de los años ochenta. Casualmente, cómo no, coincidiendo con el fin de la Guerra Fría. Cabria reconoce haber llegado al tema en su adolescencia y haber participado en excursiones al monte para observar el cielo. Luego fue integrante de grupos dedicados a la Ufología. Así que conoce bien el mundillo desde dentro. La suya es una mirada crítica desde la distancia con su dosis de autocrítica. Hace un recorrido por los arquetipos de grupos y personas. Señala la abundancia en aquel mundillo de personajes carismáticos que arrastraban a adolescentes y jóvenes con inquietudes para formar grupos ufológicos con nombres pretenciosos como “Centro de Investigaciones” o “Instituto de Estudios” que se derrumbaban tan pronto el personaje central desaparecía de la escena. Cabria cuenta cómo algunos de esos grupos lo formaban cuatro gatos, lo que no quitaba para que cada uno fuera director de departamento, sección o área. Incluso en ocasiones se trataban de grupos, unipersonales, lo que no era obstáculo para que el único miembro se presentara pomposamente como director o presidente. Cabria habla de cómo intervenía el afán de reconocimiento público de los “investigadores” y cómo en esos grupos el líder carismático aprovechaba la credulidad e inocencia de los más jóvenes. Habla del interés por los OVNIs como un “sarampión del período adolescente” (pág. 261), del que yo mismo confieso pasé las fiebres escuchando en la emisora local de la cadena SER a Paco Padrón.

Cabria habla del fenómeno como antropólogo equiparándolo a los antiguos mitos populares de brujas y demonios. Y creo que un tratamiento parecido debería darse a las teorías conspirativas que se han disparado desde el 11-S. Últimamente me genera menos enfado encontrarme a alguien que defiende que Al Qaeda o el Estado Islámico fueron creados por la CIA o alguien que sostiene que los atentados yihadistas de París del mes pasado fueron obra del Mossad. Ahora me dedico a prestar atención al contexto y la forma en la que persona lo dice. Porque hay patrones de conducta claros. Todos hablan con una enorme arrogancia y condescendencia, elaborando un discurso desde la idea que ellos están por encima de la masa de borregos que consumen medios de masas y de que han descifrado las claves ocultas de la realidad que los servicios secretos más poderosos manipularon. El discurso conspiranoico empodera a la persona y le hace sentirse único y especial. Como en el caso de los OVNIs, sospecho que tratar de buscar un orden oculto al mundo forma parte de un ritual de paso de la adolescencia. Abundan los blogs de diseño abigarrado, con fondo negro y una barra lateral llenas de enlaces, banners y widgets, donde el caos gráfico es un reflejo del orden mental del autor. “¡Vivimos en Matrix!“.

Las teorías de la conspiración reflejan los miedos colectivos de una sociedad que se encuentra de frente con el fenómeno del terrorismo indiscriminado contra medios de transporte y aglomeraciones de gente. La posibildiad de morir brutalmente en las calles de Occidente es real. Ante ese terror aleatorio de grupos yihadistas que le han declarado la guerra a Occidente, imaginar que todo es en realidad es el producto de una conspiración de los servicios secretos nos lleva a la promesa de que tarde o temprano se sabrá la verdad y volveremos a una era de paz y tranquilidad. Las teorías conspirativas en el fondo nos dicen que el terrorismo es una anomalía y que el orden real de las cosas es otro.

No es casualidad que Russia Today en español hable de OVNIs, que Cristina Fernández de Kirchner dijera que los atentados de París fueron la antesala de la muerte del fiscal Nisman o que una web francesa dirigida y financiada desde Oriente Medio como Voltairenet hable todo el tiempo de atentados de falsa bandera organizados por la CIA o el Mossad. Las teorías conspirativas son el fenómeno cultural de la Nueva Guerra Fría y una herramienta de propaganda.

(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time)

A few people have asked my opinion about “memcomputing”: a computing paradigm that’s being advertised, by its developers, as a way to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.  According to the paper Memcomputing NP-complete problems in polynomial time using polynomial resources and collective states, memcomputing “is based on the brain-like notion that one can process and store information within the same units (memprocessors) by means of their mutual interactions.”  The authors are explicit that, in their view, this idea allows the Subset Sum problem to be solved with polynomial resources, by exploring all 2ⁿ possible subsets in parallel, and that this refutes the Extended Church-Turing Thesis.  They’ve actually built ‘memcomputers’ that solve small instances of Subset Sum, and they hope to scale them up, though they mention hardware limitations that have made doing so difficult—more about that later.

A bunch of people (on Hacker News, Reddit, and elsewhere) tried to explain the problems with the Subset Sum claim when the above preprint was posted to the arXiv last year.  However, an overlapping set of authors has now simply repeated the claim, unmodified, in a feature article in this month’s Scientific American.  Unfortunately the SciAm article is behind a paywall, but here’s the relevant passage:

Memcomputing really shows advantages when applied to one of the most difficult types of problems we know of in computer science: calculating all the properties of a large series of integers. This is the kind of challenge a computer faces when trying to decipher complex codes. For instance, give the computer 100 integers and then ask it to find at least one subset that adds up to zero. The computer would have to check all possible subsets and then sum all numbers in each subset. It would plow through each possible combination, one by one, which is an exponentially huge increase in processing time. If checking 10 integers took one second, 100 integers would take 10²⁷ seconds—millions of trillions of years … [in contrast,] a memcomputer can calculate all subsets and sums in just one step, in true parallel fashion, because it does not have to shuttle them back and forth to a processor (or several processors) in a series of sequential steps. The single-step approach would take just a single second.

For those tuning in from home: in the Subset Sum problem, we’re given n integers a₁,…,a_n, and we want to know whether there exists a subset of them that sums to a target integer k.  (To avoid trivializing the problem, either k should be nonzero or else the subset should be required to be nonempty, a mistake in the passage quoted above.)

To solve Subset Sum in polynomial time, the basic idea of “memcomputing” is to generate waves at frequencies that encode the sums of all possible subsets of a_i‘s, and then measure the resulting signal to see if there’s a frequency there that corresponds to k.

Alas, there’s a clear scalability problem that seems to me to completely kill this proposal, as a practical way of solving NP-complete problems.  The problem is that the signal being measured is (in principle!) a sum of waves of exponentially many different frequencies.  By measuring this wave and taking a Fourier transform, one will not be able to make out the individual frequencies until one has monitored the signal for an exponential amount of time.  There are actually two issues here:

(1) Even if there were just a single frequency, measuring the frequency to exponential precision will take exponential time. This can be easily seen by contemplating even a moderately large n.  Thus, suppose n=1000.  Then we would need to measure a frequency to a precision of one part in ~2¹⁰⁰⁰. If the lowest frequency were (say) 1Hz, then we would be trying to distinguish frequencies that differ by far less than the Planck scale.  But distinguishing frequencies that close would require so much energy that one would exceed the Schwarzschild limit and create a black hole!  The alternative is to make the lowest frequency slower than the lifetime of the universe, causing an exponential blowup in the amount of time we need to run the experiment.

(2) Because there are exponentially many frequencies, the amplitude of each frequency will get attenuated by an exponential amount.  Again, suppose that n=1000, so that we’re talking about attenuation by a ~2^-1000 factor.  Then given any amount of input radiation that could be gathered in physical universe, the expected amount of amplitude on each frequency would correspond to a microscopically small fraction of 1 photon — so again, it would take exponential time for us to notice any radiation at all on the frequency that interests us (unless we used an insensitive test that was liable to confuse that frequency with many other nearby frequencies).

What do the authors have to say about these issues?  Here are the key passages from the above-mentioned paper:

all frequencies involved in the collective state (1) are dampened by the factor 2^-n.  In the case of the ideal machine, i.e., a noiseless machine, this would not represent an issue because no information is lost.  On the contrary, when noise is accounted for, the exponential factor represents the hardest limitation of the experimentally fabricated machine, which we reiterate is a technological limit for this particular realization of a memcomputing machine but not for all of them …

In conclusion we have demonstrated experimentally a deterministic memcomputing machine that is able to solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time (actually in one step) using only polynomial resources.  The actual machine we built clearly suffers from technological limitations due to unavoidable noise that impair [sic] the scalability.  This issue can, however, be overcome in other UMMs [universal memcomputing machines] using other ways to encode such information.

The trouble is that no other way to encode such information is ever mentioned.  And that’s not an accident: as explained above, when n becomes even moderately large, this is no longer a hardware issue; it’s a fundamental physics issue.

It’s important to realize that the idea of solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time using an analog device is far from new: computer scientists discussed such ideas extensively in the 1960s and 1970s.  Indeed, the whole point of my NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality paper was to survey the history of such attempts, and (hopefully!) to serve as a prophylactic against people making more such attempts without understanding the history.  For computer scientists ultimately came to realize that all proposals along these lines simply “smuggle the exponentiality” somewhere that isn’t being explicitly considered, exactly like all proposals for perpetual-motion machines smuggle the entropy increase somewhere that isn’t being explicitly considered.  The problem isn’t a practical one; it’s one of principle.  And I find it unfortunate that the recent memcomputing papers show no awareness of this story.

(Incidentally, quantum computing is interesting precisely because, out of all “post-Extended-Church-Turing” computing proposals, it’s the only one for which we can’t articulate a clear physical reason why it won’t scale, analogous to the reasons given above for memcomputing.  With quantum computing the tables are turned, with the skeptics forced to handwave about present-day practicalities, while the proponents wield the sharp steel of accepted physical law.  But as readers of this blog well know, quantum computing doesn’t seem to promise the polynomial-time solution of NP-complete problems, only of more specialized problems.)

With growing tensions in the Middle East, terrorism, American reassessments of overseas adventures, economic issues at home, and so much more, the media has decided this week’s most pressing issue is vaccinations.

In 2008, Barack Obama declared the science of vaccinations inconclusive.

On Friday, White House Press Secretary Josh Ernst said

“I’m not going stand up here and dispense medical advice,” Earnest said, according to the AP. “But I am going to suggest that the president’s view is that people should evaluate this for themselves, with a bias toward good science and toward the advice of our public health professionals, who are trained to offer us exactly this kind of advice.”

Chris Christie, the Republican Governor of New Jersey, echoed the White House Press Secretary’s position and the media promptly beat him up.

I did not know vaccinations were that controversial. I have friends who research vaccines to make sure the vaccines being given their children are not produced with an assist from aborted children, but otherwise I don’t know that I know anyone whose children are not vaccinated. Both of my children are vaccinated.

When I was little, moving to Dubai, I remember weekly trips to the Department of Public Health in Baton Rouge, LA to get rounds of shots for all sorts of stuff. Vaccinations save lives.

This is only a political issue because the press, having failed to paint the GOP as anti-women, wishes to now paint the GOP as anti-science. Before this month is out I suspect some reporter will ask Republican candidates if they believe in a global flood and a man named Noah (I do). They want to not just try to embarrass the GOP, but create a wedge issue from whole cloth.

The reality is most Americans get their vaccinations and their children get vaccinations. The reality is that some of the loudest voices against vaccinations are celebrities who lean to the left. In fact, the reality is that a growing number of upper income people have opted out of vaccinations and those people skew to the left.

But the media wants to make this about the GOP being anti-science. The whole issue is the media’s back door into further conversations about global warming.

But here’s the thing the media misses. The main reason there is a growing opt-out of vaccinations is because there is a growing distrust of government. People are convinced government screws everything up, including medicine. The real story is that the growing distrust of government is bipartisan, includes upper income Americans, and could potentially be fatal to many children.

The only cure for the distrust is to put government back into its proper spheres. But the media has no interest in telling that story.

The post Really? Vaccines? appeared first on RedState.

Author: Osias Jota Source: Mobile Web (M2)

RT @SciencePorn: http://t.co/iD9HNu3ICy

Every now and then I get confessions saying how they hate the stereotype of trans women knowing or dressing feminine since they were young, or did stereotypical girl things when they were a child.

So I’m putting this up.

On the left is me in high school. I was your average high school guy. That is how I normally dressed. My personality is exactly what you’d expect it to be. Guyish(?) and stuff. And growing up, I thought dolls and other girl things were lame (I was all about action figures and junk. Power Rangers was my favorite thing ever back then, and, for people who follow my personal blog, it’s still a thing I obsess over.)

On the right is me as I am now. (the photo is a bit old; god, I miss that apartment.) Now, clothes and fashion and other female stereotypical stuff are some of my favorite things, even though I hate dressing up and would so rather spend the day in a graphic tee, jeans, and sneakers. My personality has changed (for the better; I was a huge fucking asshole in high school.)

When I came out, everyone was surprised, because I did not appear to be even remotely feminine.

Now, I realize this also sort of embraces the stereotype that most trans women are feminine. Realize that this stereotype is also something I hate. Like any gender, there will be some that present masculine, some that present feminine, and some that present androgynous. I just happen to be part of the group of females that enjoys presenting feminine (when I don’t feel dysphoric, anyway.)

So, basically, what I’m saying is don’t feel invalidated as a trans woman if your life pre-transition wasn’t stereotypical! It’s totally normal. (: