Hey guys, coming out as trans...

Talk about things that are not making games here. But you should also make games!

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GemDoppler
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Hey guys, coming out as trans...

Post by GemDoppler »

Hello, long time OHR user. Since Operation OHR was still around.

I asked first, but I used to have a YT channel that I said some things on I regret, and anyway, the first is my coming out/apology video. Grew up in the bible belt homeschooled in the woods by parents who left thrusting out of sex ed. Never seen Wizard of Oz because witches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlnaK7kY0vs

The second one is gonna be my autobiography and soap box. Remember, feel free to ask questions, even personal ones. Here's the first vid in that series


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqGjsK9ETt4


If there's a way to embed those, please let me know.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Welcome back, and congratulations! :D

Are you currently working on any games?

(Also, as much fun as Wizard of Oz is, I recommend The Wiz even more. It's got both Witches AND amazing Motown Music)
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Post by GemDoppler »

Bob the Hamster wrote:Welcome back, and congratulations! :D

Are you currently working on any games?

(Also, as much fun as Wizard of Oz is, I recommend The Wiz even more. It's got both Witches AND amazing Motown Music)
Appreciate it. I have plans one day involving LSD and Dark Side of the Moon synched to my first viewing of Wizard of Oz. I do wanna see the Wiz, though, but I wanna see the original first
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Post by TMC »

Wow, what a way to return!
Would I know you by some nickname you used? Your appearance reminds me of ... Hunter from Zant, but you're actually slightly younger than me, so that's not right.

There are actually a LOT of people from the margins here (well, mostly on the Discord server), LGBT (including several trans), furries, ex-devout-Christian, not working, etc... . It's crazy how diverse internet communities can be. It's a great shame that so many people feel anxiety because they don't fit what society/parents appear to promote/value/expect as the norm. As I see it, those norms are hurtful illusions, the reality is society is no where near that homogenous -- you aren't alone.

That said, I don't know what to say about your videos, they're... uh, strangely enthralling yet uncomfortable or displeasing, but you certainly had courage to put that up.

It used to be possible to embed youtube vidoes (using the 'yt' bbcode tag and the video ID), but I just tried it and it doesn't work anymore...
Last edited by TMC on Wed Aug 28, 2019 2:46 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Mogri
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Post by Mogri »

I'm not sure that's true. It used to be possible in HTML, but YouTube no longer uses the old tags.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

I thought the yt tag used the whole video url, not just the ID...

[yt]naK7kY0vs[/yt]

Yep! That fixed it! :)

EDIT: looks like it reduces to just the ID after posting, but I started with your whole url
Last edited by Bob the Hamster on Thu Aug 29, 2019 9:43 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by TMC »

Mogri wrote:I'm not sure that's true. It used to be possible in HTML, but YouTube no longer uses the old tags.
No, if you click on share->embed on youtube you still get an embed code that uses iframes.

By comparing that embed code which what SS generates when you sue the yt tag I figured out the problem: SS is trimming the first letter of the ID! Adding an extra letter makes it work:

[yt]KlnaK7kY0vs[/yt]

Strangely, every time I edit this post, it trims another letter!
Last edited by TMC on Tue Sep 03, 2019 4:02 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Mogri »

TMC wrote:Strangely, every time I edit this post, it trims another letter!
This is fixed now.

Hmm... I'd forgotten ever implementing the YT tag. How about that?
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Post by TMC »

Yay.

Yeah, yt isn't listed alongside the other tags on the Post a Reply page.
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Re: Hey guys, coming out as trans...

Post by TheLordThyGod »

GemDoppler wrote:Hello, long time OHR user. Since Operation OHR was still around.

I asked first, but I used to have a YT channel that I said some things on I regret, and anyway, the first is my coming out/apology video. Grew up in the bible belt homeschooled in the woods by parents who left thrusting out of sex ed. Never seen Wizard of Oz because witches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlnaK7kY0vs

The second one is gonna be my autobiography and soap box. Remember, feel free to ask questions, even personal ones. Here's the first vid in that series


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqGjsK9ETt4


If there's a way to embed those, please let me know.
Watching your videos now. Just wanted to toss out there that I’m 35, from Alabama, bipolar, grew up super conservative Christian, worried a lot about damnation, went through an edge lord phase where I said and did terrible things, became an atheist through a very slow painful process, became a libertarian but then drifted leftward, got sketched out by attitudes within the atheism community, never got along inside most political groups right or left, and have never truly felt like I belonged anywhere despite being straight cis white male and pretty privileged. Hit me up if you ever want to talk through anything you’re experiencing, although I’ve never dealt with the LGBTQ aspect myself. Also... The Wizard Of Oz is great. Watch it for reals before combining it with Pink Floyd!
...spake The Lord Thy God.
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Post by Bird »

Best wishes to all the people who want a change, so that they can open their wings and leave the nest, if they'd like to.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

I have things to say on the subject that might be somewhat surprising. I don't like weighing in on discussions about this kind of thing because that almost definitely means causing stress, strife, and anger in others which in turn makes me feel stress about anticipating a backlash...which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't, but the anticipation always makes me feel sick regardless.

I myself have had quite serious identity struggles. Struggles with my species identity (spent two years literally convinced I was a cat rather than a human), with my gender identity and gender roles, frequently putting on a persona online because I know from experience that people don't like the real me underneath (though some of the personas I've chosen wound up being even more hated than me just being my genuine self openly).

I decided long ago that I would always go with objective biological fact over my feelings and impulses, even if it feels like I'm living in the wrong body most of the time. Facts don't care about my feelings, and the fact that I am neither female nor a mouse is just a cold reality I have to wake up to every day. Just another way for the world to be an altogether unpleasant place for me.

I always feel a little bit of a struggle and a twinge of guilt when I want to befriend someone I know is trans, not because I have any loss of sympathy but because I believe the truly compassionate thing to do isn't to try to dance around gendered language to find a compromise between my beliefs and their wishes, nor can I in good conscience use someone's preferred pronouns if these don't line up with their actual gender: An occasional cold, harsh slap of reality is unfortunately the only thing I feel is right, and I am so timid and afraid of social consequences or even just of hurting someone's feelings that I usually fail to do this...just going quiet and staying away, avoiding referring to the person in third person, avoiding any discussion of their or my own identity issues.

My own problems with my gender are probably not legitimate neurological gender dysphoria, but more likely a side-effect of things like autism and the perception of living in a world where women have always been treated better than men in all aspects of life (grass is greener type of situation, I see all the female privilege and selectively ignore the real drawbacks). Struggles with other delusions and identity issues give me a good frame of reference to sympathize with those having similar problems.

Recently I've thought over how much I've wished I could have been Natalie instead of Nathan, but remembered how naive and easily manipulated I was, all the near brushes I had with horrible toxic romantic relationships...and I acknowledge it was better for me to be a man even if I didn't like it, because if I'd been a girl I'd either be in a loveless marriage or a single mother from believing the lies of a man who wasn't genuine husband material. Almost like someone who is capable of seeing all possible futures was able to look at the types of decisions I'd generally make, and chose to put me where I'd come to the least harm from my impulses.

I also have to caution everyone considering getting surgical alterations to their bodies in an attempt to assume their desired gender: this leads to all sorts of medical complications and hasn't been shown to improve happiness or self-satisfaction with the new form in the long term. Just make absolutely sure you know what you're getting into first.

...

Nothing in the world has made me more happy in the past decade than the addition of the Natalie character to Hati's Bizarre Adventure. Seeing her externalized stirs up desires in me I didn't even know I could feel so strongly: Desires to be more of a traditional man, to be the larger stronger and more predatory mammal she desires. The idea that my generally weak, timid, somewhat effeminate "real self" was actually a sort of a persona I'd made to guard myself against what I really am underneath, just as the 4chan meme-spouting and viciously mocking Ronin Catholic persona was in reaction to getting so much disdain for my initial impressions when just trying to relate to my fellow nerds online for the first time.

...maybe the real me isn't as crazy as I'd always told myself he was. Maybe trying to live the expectations of my gender and grow some confidence and aggression are the right move for me.
Grew up in the bible belt homeschooled in the woods by parents who left thrusting out of sex ed.
My parents were Catholic so they didn't really leave out much of anything, but I was homeschooled in the woods too. They were sure to tell me very thoroughly how condoms can't be relied on, in addition to why we as Catholics aren't supposed to use them.

Among other things, I developed a "thing" for condom use in my adult entertainment (which I was also not supposed to get into, and didn't start seeing for the first time until I was almost 19).
Never seen Wizard of Oz because witches.
Yeah, sounds like your parents were a lot stricter than mine. Mine watched the movie (and Mary Poppins) with me and explained why Christians aren't supposed to play with magic and that there really isn't such thing as a good witch, and I later realized on my own that the way Glenda says that good witches are beautiful and only bad witches look ugly, I thought...that's exactly what an evil sorceress lucky enough to look hot would say to snub her less talented rivals in evil witchery.

I also wasn't allowed to watch or read Harry Potter. My mom always read fantasy literature before I did, so she deemed it unsuitable...not because of the magic per se, but because of the tendency of Harry to just be given a free pass to ignore the rules and get himself and his friends into danger.

Wasn't allowed to watch Gargoyles because in one episode, they tell a kid it's okay for him to hang out with them but he has to keep it a secret from his parents because his dad is a bigot. I think that's what happened?

Wasn't allowed to watch Beast Machines because the promotional music video was "Evolution Revolution" (turns out I wasn't missing out on much, was one of the worst Transformers series and a stain on the legacy of Beast Wars immediately before it - RUINED FOREVER as we Transformers fans say of everything)

Wasn't allowed to watch Cardcaptors or Yu-Gi-Oh ("summoning" and playing with cards = tarot = occult). My dad said his parents wouldn't even let him play with a standard deck of playing cards because they thought that was too close to reading the tarot, and so he was being a lot less strict than they were.

I wasn't allowed to play D&D, but not for the really obvious reasons. Basically my dad had a good train of thought: Divine intervention exists in this world. No fake gods are worth being worshiped even in a game, only the Christian God. Christian God has absolutely no limits so his saints would have total immunity to all spells and spell effects and infinite uses per day of all miracles. This would be completely unbalanced and take away any fun the game would have. Couldn't in good conscience play a pagan hero, couldn't in good conscience say the True God would play by usual clerical magic rules, couldn't in good conscience make the "realism" changes because there'd be no way to balance it.

His reasons for forbidding me specifically from it even more sternly than my siblings had to do with his good fatherly observatons of my struggles sorting fantasy from reality (for example, I once asked to build some snowmen in the yard and after putting hats on them asked why they weren't coming to life, and the later incident of me convincing myself that I was a cat) - that he didn't want me to start thinking D&D's rules have anything to do with how the real world worked, and he didn't want me as a storyteller to limit my fantasies by D&D's narrow interpretations of say, what an elf is or how wizards work magic. He said he'd seen other bright, creative people get a little bit too into D&D and start proscribing other fiction from deviating from its internal definitions.
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
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Post by cammySashimi »

Hey, sorry to necro this thread, and also make it like my first post since like who knows when. This thread was just making me a little sad, and I wanted to offer another perspective.

I used to be here under the name "Taco Bot," when I was like, 14-17 I guess? Dorky little teenager with a big mouth. I always really liked this community, the people here are all very kind and interesting, and it's the first community centered around game development I ever found. Sorta besides the point, but idk just wanted to preface this, haha.

So, I'm a trans woman, I've been out and on hormones for just a couple months shy of 2 years. Coming out and starting hormone therapy literally saved my life. This obviously isn't everyone's experience, but it has been mine.

I spent most of my teenage life feeling horribly depressed and wracked with what I later found out was gender dysphoria. Because I'm attracted to women, I convinced myself I was just some sort of pervert for a long time. I hated myself, I hated my body, I hated my personality. I spent a lot of time online behind constructed personas. I got myself into an abusive relationship that I'm still recovering from, and stayed with that person for far longer than I should have because at the time she was the only person I was out to and who "accepted" me.

Anyways, it's wild to look back on all that now. I'm in college working my way towards a degree in game design (1 more year, I got this!), I have an incredible group of supportive friends who I consider to be my second family, and I'm dating a really lovely lady who's also trans. It might be cliché but I'm honestly an entirely new person, and it feels like so much weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

So, congrats on coming out! It isn't easy at all but I think you'll find in time it helps you feel a lot better. <3

(also yes I am still making games, and actually pursuing independent study over the summer to work on making a game-creation tool of my own!)
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Post by TMC »

I don't think I need to say much except to say it's great to hear you've turned things around like that. Stay positive and at peace (don't self-deprecate) at the low times in life too; you've now seen just how much you can improve your lot and reinvent yourself.
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Post by Rue »

cammySashimi wrote:I used to be here under the name "Taco Bot," when I was like, 14-17 I guess? Dorky little teenager with a big mouth. I always really liked this community, the people here are all very kind and interesting, and it's the first community centered around game development I ever found. Sorta besides the point, but idk just wanted to preface this, haha.

I don't know if I'm justified in saying this in any way, but I want to let you know that I don't remember having any thoughts of you being a dorky teenager with a big mouth, at least in this community. I think everyone, to some degree looks at themselves in their past and can see the cringe. I'm 36 now and... oh man...

what have I done :gonk:
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