As long as you mean adults having the surgery at their own expense, I agree with everything you said.  It disgusts me but its none of my business, as long as I don't have to subsidize it.

I agree.  I have a problem with medical insurance paying for it because that means we subsidize it, and don’t get me started with Medicare and Medicaid.  Insurance won’t pay for purely cosmetic elective surgeries and I consider this that.  There is no physical, medical reason to have transition surgery and in fact it often makes you far worse off medically.

The idea that it is necessary for mental health is based on a deep misunderstanding of gender dysphoria.  People used to think (and I was one of them) that making the physical genitalia match what your mind wants to be would cure your unhappiness, and in a few cases maybe it does, but there is growing evidence that it more often does not.  Not the least of reasons why is the fact that a trans penis is NOT a penis and a trans vagina is NOT a vagina. They do not look, function, or smell like the real thing. 

The best you can hope for is a cosmetic somewhat approximation superficially.  For that you trade away your natural hormones (ovaries and testicles removed), your body’s natural ability to keep the area clean and functioning, and very often the ability to orgasm or feel anything sexually down there.  If you’re an adult and you are fully informed of these realities and can pay for it yourself, go for it!  I’ll have no part in helping you.

I did it.  I told my husband I wanted to buy $500 worth of that new Truth Social stock and he said, “Make it a thousand.”  Screw figuring out how to buy a stock myself.  I just emailed our investment guy and directed him to buy us $1000 of Trump’s new Truth Social stock and I told him, no, I don't care if it’s not a good investment. I just want to play!

HA!

They’d have to compromise the FAA.  It can’t be easy to corrupt a Federal agency.  Wait…

Wow.  The left can’t even handle the appearance of attempting to pretend to be presenting the other side.

I grew up middle class but my parents were a “mixed” marriage, class wise, so I’ve always been kind of unsure which were my real roots. My mother was the child of European working class immigrants who had settled in the North, and my father's family were professionals and landowners in the South.  They were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who thought they were a good match because both were devout Catholics (my father was a convert).

Actually they didn't have much in common beyond their religion, but both wanted to marry and have a family. That, they did quickly; I came along 10 months after the wedding, and was the first of 5. My mother was a smart woman, but she thought she was dumb, due to contrast with my Dad who was closer to brilliant. Mom loved old country peasant food; Dad liked steak and wine.  Mom liked polka, Dad liked classical music. Mom was outgoing and had lots of friends, Dad was introverted and a nerd, with few friends but the ones he had were close. (I take after him in that respect.)

So I grew up sensing what turned out to be a permanent tension between the backgrounds of these two people. Visiting mom’s relatives was always like a party, with much joking and belly laughs and free flowing beer. This small immigrant community formed a club, which was basically just a bar with an upstairs community room, and it was on a barstool at the age of five, I had my first taste of beer given to me by my grandfather.

Visiting my father’s relatives on the other hand, had the air of formality at all times. They were all college educated, stoic Protestants, with impeccable manners. They were just as loving as my mother's family, but it was under the surface, hidden below their reserved sophistication.

So I was a half-breed in these settings, never quite fitting in with either one.  What I see now is that both these sets of people were good, honest people, and hard workers. And despite my parents’ emotional distance from each other, they too had that work ethic in common, and dedicated themselves to providing the best life they could for their children.

But my father was a bit of a black sheep, having forsaken his family’s Protestantism to become a Papist, and then being a “mere” university professor earning an adequate but not more, salary for his family of seven. Likewise my mother, upon graduating high school and seeking to escape a lower working class future, had finagled a ride to Washington DC, took the Civil Service Exam, and ended up working for the Federal Government, a job she quit when they married. So they both had sort of rebelled against their backgrounds, and were regarded as somewhat outsiders by their respective families, although those families still accepted and loved them and were very accepting of us kids. Like I said, they were all good people.

But Mom never got over the fear of being on the edge of poverty.  The Great Depression, during her childhood, had hit her community hard, and I was influenced by this chronic sense of insecurity, like financial catastrophe was always just around the corner, not to mention the threat of nuclear war hanging over us Duck and Cover children.  Ironically, these fears are again coming to the forefront of my mind - gee, I wonder why?

I was, like Mom, just a “dumb” girl.  I was a weirdo at school, and didn’t fit in there either. There were some years I had not a single friend in my class.  I had two obsessions: 1.) Science, especially space travel, and 2.) Babies.  All I wanted was to get married and have babies.  And I wanted to be an astronaut or maybe a mad scientist in a laboratory.  I guess I was an amalgam of my parents' backgrounds.  All the women in mom's family just had babies, and focused on the home.  From Dad I got the brains and drive for some sort of nerdy career.  My whole life ended up being a tense standoff between these two halves of myself.

As a young adult I realized that astronaut was never going to happen. I was very nearsighted for one thing, and by that time I knew I didn’t have “the right stuff” anyway, so I settled for flying a little Cessna 152 instead. However, I ran out of money before I could complete my training.

Being just a dumb girl, I majored in worthless shit until a guy made fun of me for carrying around a calculator (one of the first portable scientific ones).  “Haha! She thinks she’s an engineer!” he said.  That pissed me off, but I’m grateful to him, because that smacked me upside the head and woke me up. Why can’t I be an engineer? I realized maybe I wasn’t actually stupid after all.  I went back for a BS in physics, but changed to engineering after discovering it had better starting salaries.

I was almost 27 before I got my first real engineering job and there I met my husband, also an engineer and also had taken flying lessons but couldn't finish because of being a poor college student.  He also claimed he wanted babies, except he phrased it differently: "Progeny to carry on the family name", or some such.  Yeah I'll help you with that.  It was a match made in heaven. Still is.

So our married life was a sequencing of me working full time, staying home with babies, working again, staying home again and homeschooling one of the kids, and finally now working part time as an independent contractor.  We both went back for flying lessons. Hubby got certified, got IR, ME, and we ended up owning three planes in succession of ever greater range. I had to quit flying shortly before the check ride because of medical problems and ended up not bothering with the medical certification after it got too complicated, as I could always fly with hubby anyway. We integrated GA into everything we did as a family.

Unfortunately we had to sell our last plane with a job change and mandatory move across the country, which resulted in a loss of mission, but we are both nearing 70 and had a long and happy flying life, so are refocusing on other things now.  Hubby is big in the RC community now, and restoring antique cars, and I'm just doing my contract business.

In early adolescence I hung around kids that we now call "hippies", or "freaks", but it was not their leftist ideology I embraced, just social and cultural trappings.  I had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn and I was already firmly innoculated against communism or any kind of economic collectivism.  Later, I met a man who introduced me to libertarianism. He became my best friend for life, he happened to be gay, so it was not in any way a romantic relationship. His libertarianism made complete sense with what I'd already started to figure out on my own, for one thing, like Jim, I was reading Heinlein. Then Ayn Rand. I'm now a right-leaning libertarian, not an absolute anarcho-libertarian. I believe in border control for example, and I disagree with the LA Libertarians that recently showed support for allowing illegals to own guns.  That's a hard NO.  On the practical front I support MAGA populism for the most part.

I suppose the biggest reason I could never be a leftist parasite is my original bifurcated roots: both of which believed in hard work. The immigrants started with nothing and had no choice but to work. They never expected free handouts and didn't get them, unlike the illegals pouring over our border right now. My father's family were successful because they too worked, and instilled responsibility and self sufficiency in their children. And I myself have been working since I was 12 years old when I started babysitting for the neighbors, I worked all through college mostly paying my way, and except for the times in my marriage that I was "just a housewife", continue working to this day.  I'm not going to stop until I'm forced to by old age inability.

Well if this is the “not a joke” thread, I’ve got one.

Hilarious holding a mirror up to the left.